Lions (12 page)

First day of August. A light, circling wind blew the heat around the county like fever breath, lifting the dust from the fallow fields and wheeling around and dropping it again in a thin brown cloud over the surface of the town. Over the last couple weeks on her way to and from the diner Leigh watched the yarrow and Queen Anne's lace cracking, splitting, and breaking into a powder that fell apart and slowly resolved itself into the pale dirt. “A coalescence,” John Walker had once told her, drawing his finger along the seam of a weld on the chicken coop.

In every direction mirages of false rivers and lakes, the scant trees hovering upside down in the buckled glare. If the world were any one thing it was light—refracted, diffused, reflected, and smashed and split apart by metal roofing and run-down cars, their once bright green and yellow and red paint now muted and spotted with rust, their windows broken, their plaintive faces lopsided on a cracked chassis or missing wheels. It was so much light you could scarcely see, and Leigh's eyes were squinted all the time, and her head ached, and she longed for night. She imagined a house by the ocean. A house on a river. A house on a lake. Cool rooms and shady gardens and a green twilight. She imagined rainy nights. Tiered water fountains elaborate as wedding cakes.

When Gordon was home he was in the shop dressed in wool and sweating, repairing a broken johnny bar, cleaning the tools and machines, standing in the open shop door holding cold black coffee in the ceramic blue mug he'd always used, speckled like an egg, John's solid brown mug still in its place beside the old radio.

When he was in the house he was heating up canned spaghetti or baked beans for himself and Georgianna, urging her to dress, sweeping the floors and washing sheets and towels. Or he was sitting in his father's chair, rereading his old paperbacks, small and familiar in his hands, dried glue cracking at their seams, yellowed pages soft as felt.

Twice Leigh brought sandwiches from the Lucy Graves and they walked across the bony ground to the factory where they ate quietly, side by side, not touching, commenting on the heat, or the swallows nesting in mud huts along the rafters. The floor was dirty, the bricks were broken. Leigh couldn't remember what had ever seemed magical in the old ruin. Most times she asked him, Gordon didn't want to go.

One morning, Gordon in the shop and Leigh at the diner, the man from Denver whose family owned a string of tire and oil change shops across the state finally came out to make, he said, some kind of assessment of the garage, the town's only open business other than the Gas & Grocer, diner, bar, and Marybeth's. His name was Alan Ranger and his eyes were blue as enamel, his hair bright as dry ricks of hay, and he wore a blond Fu Manchu Leigh could not look at without imagining kissing his face. It surprised her, and made her own face hot.

“What are you doing in this town?” he asked when Leigh set down his club sandwich and french fries.

“Packing.”

“Good answer.” He looked at the sandwich doubtfully. “What are those?”

“Decorative toothpicks.”

“I didn't order those.”

“Would you like me to remove them?”

“Please.”

“You want anything other than water?”

“You serve beer?”

“Across the street. Boyd'll serve 'em to go.”

“Now that,” he said, “is what I call useful information.”

“She's got a boyfriend,” May said, coming up behind Leigh with a tray propped on her hand.

“I do not.”

“Girl says she don't,” Alan Ranger said, and popped a french fry into his mouth.

“Well,” May said, “she
do.”
She crossed the diner and set down three slices of pie and ice cream at a far table. He locked eyes with Leigh. “Whoever Mr. Nobody is he ought to know better than to leave her out alone among the wolves.”

May circled back to the range. “That,” she said, “I'll give you. Leigh. Take this order over to Georgie.”

Leigh opened the box and peered in at the sliced ham with hot cherry jam and green beans. “She's got a ton of food.”

“Take it or you're fired.”

When Leigh left Georgianna's kitchen, there he was, parked in front of the Walkers' house. He drove a forest green pickup, his golden arm hanging out the window. He smiled, and she leaned in at the rolled-down window. There was a six-pack of cold brown bottles in the passenger seat.

“Your mama doesn't like the competition,” he said. “Bet she used to be the prettiest one here.”

“Please.”

He nodded at the six-pack. “Know a good place to go have a cold beer?”

They walked out across the empty fields behind the Walker and Ransom houses to the factory. In the distance, west of the road, the ragged field, hard as tack and scabbed with weeds. Leigh crawled beneath the chain-link and Alan Ranger followed. She laughed at him.

“Why you laughing at me?”

“You look funny,” she said, “grown man shimmying under a fence.”

“Well,” he brushed off the legs of his jeans. “I came in pursuit of a very particular thing.”

They sat in the sun with the warm bricks against their backs. He opened two of the bottles and raised his. Leigh raised her own.

“Born and raised?” he asked, scanning the horizon.

“Yep.”

“Ever been out?”

“Nope.”

“Your guy never took you out?”

“Not out of here.”

“What are you waiting on? Hell, girl. You won't be this pretty forever. Want me to take you back to Denver with me?”

“Come on.”

“It's cooler there.”

“Liar.”

“No, no” he said. “Nice restaurants. Nice neighborhoods. Nice little house, right? Big kitchen. Big bedroom. Buy you pretty dresses, take you to church on Sundays. Make a couple babies.”

She rolled her eyes but smiled.

“I'll give you my number. You have a car?”

“I might have one I can use.”

“Come out to Denver.”

“I'd come out to Denver.”

“I'll show you around, girl.”

“Yeah?”

“Hell, yeah. Ought to share yourself with the world. Instead of hiding away with this boyfriend you say you don't have.”

She drank two beers and he drank four. They lined up the empties and tossed pebbles toward their round mouths. A stray brown and white barn cat with a milky white ghost eye watched Alan from a distance. She could see the sun glinting on the metal of the Quonset hut, and knew Gordon was in there welding. He had his head down working. It was what he did.

“He's a fool,” Alan told her.

“Prettiest girl I've seen across this whole state,” he told her.

“You should move to California. That's where a girl like you belongs,” he told her. “Long white dress on the beach. Hair piled up on your head like this?” He reached over and put his hands in her hair. She felt her heart beating.

“You must be dying here,” he said.

“He's got you trapped here, doesn't he?”

“Tell you what, whoever he is, he don't deserve you.”

“If he knew what you were worth, he wouldn't leave you alone at an empty building with a guy like me.”

“He ever kiss you?” he asked, and leaned toward her. She raised her hand as if to push him away, then rested her fingertips on his T-shirt. “Like that?”

The kissing went on for some time. She felt drunk. Blindly happy. She bunched his T-shirt in her hand, right there at his chest where she'd set her fingers. He made a laughing sound in his open mouth when she did that. Then he moved his own hand to beneath the hem of her T-shirt, and she pulled back.

“Oh, come on,” he said, leaning back in, pressing the shape of a smile against her mouth.

She pulled back again, then stood up.

“Oh, hell,” he said, getting to his feet. “You don't play coy very good.” He took the last empty by the neck and swung it flashing in the daylight out into the dirt. “Been inside?”

“All the time.”

“Show me.”

She hesitated.

He took her arm and led her through the open doorway, into the shadow.

“I can't.”

He stopped and looked back at her. “Are you serious?” His smile faded.

“Sorry,” she said. He dropped her arm.

“Sweetheart. You've been playing along all afternoon. Look at me and tell me you don't want to stay in here with me a little while.”

She stared at the dirt.

“Tell you what,” he said. “My garage is the only viable business in this town for a hundred-mile radius. Any man here who isn't sweeping you up under his arm and hauling you out to someplace just as pretty as you are, he's a jackass, plain and simple.”

It embarrassed her for Gordon.

“Tell me you didn't like that just now,” he said. “Tell me you weren't thinking about it all morning.”

She said nothing.

“You owe me for two beers,” he said. He put out his hand. She gave him four dollars and he turned and stepped into the daylight.

She walked to the diner for the dinner shift. May was in the doorway looking out at the street. She stepped aside to let her daughter inside. “You stupid, stupid girl.”

Leigh took her apron from the peg on the back of the door and tied it behind her neck and around her waist. May came in and stood right behind Leigh and talked to her back.

“Gordon was here.”

Leigh said nothing.

“I asked him if he wanted sandwiches, if you were going to the factory later tonight. He wouldn't even look at me Leigh.”

Leigh's heart started racing. “What does that have to do with me?”

“Please.”

The paint was cracked and chipping away at the dusty chair rail that ran behind the ice bin. Leigh crossed her arms. “You know what? There are some things Gordon just can't and won't ever do.”

“You've got that right.”

She could hear her mother pulling produce out of the cooler.

“If there's one thing you should've learned from John Walker,” May said, “it's that you make big decisions the way you make small decisions. And I hope to god you didn't just do what I think you did.”

“I'm not stupid,” Leigh said, her face hot. She turned around.

“No,” May said, handing Leigh the handwritten specials to put on the chalkboard. “You're about half stupid. You ought to at least be smart enough to know that you're not as pretty as men will say you are.”

“Oh, thanks a lot.”

“God, Leigh. It's not personal.”

“I don't want to live here forever you know.” She climbed up on the stool with the chalk and list in her fist.

“No one is saying you should.”

Leigh stared at the words of the lunch special without reading them.

“I wish you'd use the stepladder,” May said.

“I'm fine.”

“Erase that real good,” May said.

“I know.”

“Denver's the same as here. Only bigger. You'd find a restaurant just like ours, twice as big with ten times as many customers and all the same grief.”

“I'm not going to college to wait tables.”

“Oh I see. College is going to open all the doors. Is that what?”

“Maybe I'll go to California.”

“Now there's an original idea.”

“Why are you so mean to me?”

“I'm not.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Scrub and peel and slice these carrots. Both bags.”

She was to meet Gordon outside the shop at seven-thirty that night, and waited until the light reflected on the empty water tower went from white to gold to rose to black, but he never came. He'd be checking into the North Star by now. She could picture it.

The road he'd follow north from the motel would slowly break up and give way to higher, empty, treeless desert pocked with stones, where he'd come to the house. It'd be peculiarly narrow and high, fashioned of rough-hewn logs with a sharp, pointed metal roof. The beads on the roof would be John's, or his father's, or grandfather's: perfect, straight, clean. In a rough circle around the place, fine gravel, glacial till, fossilized bones of fishes. The windows of the place would always be dark. According to his father's directions, he was to take the canned food and the wool blanket and books from the trunk, and bring it all to the door, and knock on it. Simple.

On every visit, he'd take the grocery bags and hurry them to the front door to get out of the wind. It would always give him the chills; it would always feel like upon knocking at that door, his life was changing. How must it have been that first time? That was the day he stepped out of her reach, forever. He'd knock, and get no response. It would be a steel-backed white door, the kind John admired for its simplicity and versatility. The kind he had put on the back of the shop two years previous, and Gordon would know instinctively that his father had bought two at once, and drove the other up north in the truck and installed it. Inside, behind that door in the little house, there'd be a red painted iron kettle on a pedestal-mounted woodstove that John would have fashioned himself. There'd be little blue checked curtains, stitched by Georgianna, over a single window. Firewood stacked neatly outside a little back door that John had bucked and split himself.

Gordon would knock again, listening. Nothing. He could have left, then. He'd driven up as he said he would. For months afterward, he must have returned to this moment. He might have turned away with no idea of what service he was refusing, and so never have been troubled by his conscience—only, perhaps, by nagging curiosity. He might have stepped casually from that doorstep through the wind to his father's truck. There could have been cold beer and road trips, college, girls, rivers and mountains, books, art, music, little successes . . . all the things he'd see as if from a great distance in the months to come. There could have been all of those things.