Lions (15 page)

It seemed to Leigh over the course of the next two days, then three, that Gordon was being perversely obstinate, and she began to feel a vague distaste—an involuntary aversion—to everything in him that reminded her of John Walker or of home: his old shirts, the smell of Lava soap, the slow, careful, almost stupid look on his face when he was introduced to someone, or considering something new before him. The silence when others greeted him cheerfully, asked him how he liked it here, asked him how he was.

“Don't you think about how people might see you?”

“No.”

“You should.”

“Why? How do I look?”

It wasn't as though he were ignoring the physical world. He heard and saw things that escaped Leigh's attention—a long insect snapping its matchstick legs on the screen of a house they passed; a hawk above the soccer field diminished to a pinprick circling in the blue overhead; a whistling that came from a little yellow bird in the tree branches above them, which for Leigh had dissolved into the music of the restaurant speakers. He seemed sharper and older than he'd been in springtime, like a seasoned instrument both highly strung and perfectly tuned. But the effect of all this was disturbing. He was so quiet, and now so thin, and seemed to look not past the people and lights around him, but through them. He looked at Leigh as if he were not quite sure what she was. If the words between them had once been their map to the city on a hill—to the life they were going to make together here, and then later, when they'd graduated—Gordon was erasing each word, one at a time, as if his very existence described a vacancy.

In the next few days he accompanied Leigh around campus and through town, but whenever they met someone, or Leigh struck up a conversation—with a coffee barista, with the hostess at a restaurant where they had lunch—he seemed to retreat within himself. Everything he saw—girls in new blue jeans and bright T-shirts and jackets, the colored front windows of food co-ops and bistros and dress shops—seemed to feed the inclination. Every sentence he spoke terminated in a certain soft and low intonation meant to end the conversation. He'd cross his arms over his chest and look away, only just managing to avoid overt impoliteness. People noticed. They speak solely to her—they seemed not even to see him.

If on the next evening, and the evening after that, anyone had looked in the direction of his room from the athletic field, they would have seen his silhouette sitting behind closed curtains. Outside they laughed and slammed car doors. There was music on the green. It was a radio or it was a concert or it was a small student band. A little farther in the distance, behind a line of trees, it was a crowded bar with swings instead of bar stools. They were on their way to somewhere they could dance, knowing what the day was worth and how much they had to spend and digging in their pockets for every last penny while he sat inside in his chair. Sunlight galloped past his window. The moon rose. The stars marched overhead.

Every afternoon of the first week of classes Leigh found him there, in his room. She began to notice none of his things had moved on his desk—his toothbrush, his backpack, his calculus book—from the day before.

Three weeks into classes, she found him in John's old chair finishing a Western that was falling apart in his hands, and already on his second whiskey, which, like his father, he took slowly. His unmade bed. His unchanged clothes.

“It's like you're not even here, Gordon.”

“I'm right here.”

“It's like you're not even trying.”

“Leigh,” he said. “Please. Be patient with me.”

“You shouldn't be doing this,” she said, and gestured around them. “It's no help.”

“I should be going out.”

“Yes.”

“Making plans.”

“Yes.”

“Having fun.”

“Yes.”

Her face was flushed and she stood and looked out the window. The girls were gone and the soccer players were gone. The grassy field was a soft navy blue.

“I'm not exactly feeling like myself,” he said. “I guess it's not what you had in mind.”

She took a breath and turned back to him. “What are you reading?”

He held it up. “Dad read it to me once when I was sick. It took me forever to find it.” It was held together by a rubber band. The red-eyed horse rearing, the man in the duster, the coiled snake, the beautiful woman wrapped in turquoise ruffles. He closed the book and set it aside.

“Are you even leaving your room? Are you sick?”

“I'm fine.”

“How was class today?”

He shrugged.

“Gordon.” His eyes were glassy, and his teeth looked large—or like there were more of them than she'd remembered. Out in the hall a door opened, and the sound of music on a stereo swelled and faded as the same door slammed shut. “There's a city out there. Restaurants. Museums. A great big library. Two of them. Trees. Beautiful houses. Good people. Books to read. Good teachers. Kind people. Have you seen any of this? No. You don't want to see any of it.”

“I guess you've got some of that right.”

“You're not going to class,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“I looked for you today.”

“Why?”

“Because, stupid.”

Outside in the hallway, the door opened again and the music flared to life.

“Gordon. Listen. It's ‘Red River Valley.' What are the chances? Someone else is a throwback, too.” She suddenly felt bright, felt the broad sun of home across her face and shoulders and she reached for his hand. “Come on, it's a sign. Let's dance.”

“I don't want to dance.”

“Come on, it's a sign!”

“Stop.”

“Dance with me.”

He pulled his hand away. “Leigh,” he said sharply. “Please.”

She sat and they were still, not talking, for a full minute.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm not being the best kind of man right now.” He set his hands flat on his knees. “I'm not the best man right now.”

“You don't have to say it twice.”

“Please be patient.”

“You already said.”

He shook his head. “You go off so quickly,” he said softly. He looked up at her. “You went off so quickly.”

She blushed and turned away. A moment later she put her hand on the side of his face, and brought her lips to his.

He pulled his face away.

Leigh crossed her arms and leaned back. “Something's wrong with you.”

“Is it.”

“I think you need help.”

He said nothing.

“Like a counselor.”

Nothing.

“I mean, for one, your parents.” She waited.

He nodded once.

“And losing the shop. Moving away from home.”

“I'm not losing the shop.”

“OK.”

“And I'll go back.”

“Gordon.”

They both pictured Lions then. The pigweed, foxtail, purslane, and countless unstoppable weeds in a spiny brown hide stretching from their front doors to the ditch on the side of the dusty road. All the stock barns collapsed in the weeds, rusted coils of pasture fences unspooled across the dirt. Jefferson Street, empty. Jorgensen's place, empty—the two-story white house that had always been lit up.

“Then won't you talk to someone?”

“You mean a psychologist.”

“It comes with the tuition.”

She watched him. He must have been imagining what he'd say to such a person. That he'd discovered or been given a new job in life, one he neither wanted nor didn't want, but which he was compelled to perform.

“And if you don't do it,” this doctor would ask, “what happens?”

“I was born to do it.”

“And you recently lost your father?”

“Yes, sir.”

The doctor would nod at that. Jot something down. Interesting, he might think.

To ignore this task his father gave him on his deathbed, Gordon would explain to the counselor, would be to live a lie. To do it, however, would be to turn his back on everyone and everything he once thought was his life.

“A very pleasant life,” Gordon would explain. “That was supposed to include Leigh. And clean and simple rooms in a clean and simple house in a clean and simple town.”

“That doesn't sound so indulgent.”

“I didn't say I'd be turning my back on indulgence. I'd be turning my back on a certain kind of life. A very good kind of life.”

“Does she know about this—job—of yours?”

“She knew my father.”

“But you haven't spoken of it?”

“Not explicitly.”

“Why not?”

“She might think I was crazy.”

“She thought your father was?”

“A lot of people did.”

“Do you think,” the doctor would ask slowly, “that
I
think you're crazy?”

“Yes.”

“Does thinking so change your feelings about this—task, as you call it?”

“No.”

Then Gordon would describe the hut where the wounded man lived, the alternative to the pleasant, airy, sunny home he might have shared with Leigh.

“It's a way to feel close to your father?”

“I guess.”

And this doctor would nod, and refer to his notes, and respond in kind with a prescription.

In Gordon's dorm room, Leigh sat forward in the extra chair and closed her eyes, then suddenly stood up. Somewhere in the distance the sound of a crackling motorcycle rose in the late summer sky.

“Stay here with me,” he said.

“I need some air.”

“I know we've been having a hard time,” he said. “Leigh, look at me.”

“You won't tell me what's going on.”

“It's all falling apart,” he said.

“That's it? That's all you have to say?”

He shook his head. “What do you want me to say?”

“I mean what is this?” She gestured at his chair, the afghan. The room he'd created.

“I thought we could get a fresh start again out here,” he said.

She looked around his room in disbelief. “You did?”

“I'm talking about you and me. I thought it could be like it was at home again. That we could start over from how it was, before.”

“No, Gordon. That would be like starting over from a negative number. Do you understand? I don't want things to be like they were at home.”

“You don't.”

“For God's sakes no. Why did I come here?” She flung her hand at the shade he'd pulled down over one window and knocked it sideways. As it swung slowly still, it dawned on her. “You only came to try to lure me back.”

He shook his head. “No, Leigh.”

“That's exactly what this is. You were never going to stay.”

“Listen.”

“You were going to lure me back.” She said it this time quietly, as if to herself.

Gordon fixed his eyes on the line where the wall met the carpet.

“I am not going back in any way, shape, or form.”

“I just need a little time there. Six months. A year.”

“I don't want to be there and I don't want things to be like they were there and I don't want to be any place like it. Not for a day and definitely not for a year.”

“OK, Leigh.”

“I'm not going to be like your mother.”

“OK.”

“Good.” Her breath was shallow and her heart raced high in her chest. “I'm going now.”

“OK.”

She went from his dorm into town to meet her roommate and a few other new friends at a café where you could sometimes convince them to sell you a glass of beer. There was a quartet of young men from the college playing from the Great American Songbook, and she and her friends took up the ragged love seat and armchairs in a circle around a gas fireplace. The evening was just cool enough for it. Someone, somehow, procured a bottle of wine, and they filled their empty coffee cups and chatted and listened to the music. But even in his absence Gordon managed to ruin the night. When the wine was gone and the young men were packing up their instruments, she crossed campus. It was well after midnight, and quiet, just the sound now and then of a lone car on the main strip and the sprinklers ticking over the blue lawns and early autumn flowers. She followed the sidewalk toward Gordon's dorm.

The door to his building was locked, and her own ID card didn't work. She pressed her forehead a moment against the metal door, then straightened and walked over the damp grass to his window. It was on the first floor, but a good ten feet from the ground. She scanned the immaculate grass for something to throw at it. A piece of gravel. Nothing. She sat with her back against the brick building, facing the lawn, her head and arms in a pile on her knees. When the first birds called out from the line of tall, narrow poplars and the illuminated sky in the east began blanking out the stars, she raised her hands and spread her fingers and carefully, as the woman at the Lucy Graves had done, closed the dark empty space above her head like the ­petals of a flower.

Around dawn someone opened the door to Gordon's building from the inside, and she went in. She could see his door open from the end of the hall as she approached. He's in the bathroom, he thought. I'll take him to breakfast. We'll go somewhere pleasant. She told herself how it would be with each step of her feet until she stood before the empty room. He was gone, and he'd taken everything with him.

Gordon drove east as the moon set, hands trembling on the wheel as he shuddered in the cold truck. He'd rolled down the windows to let the cold in and keep himself awake. He drove as night dissolved around him. The sun came up and he entered Lions and knew all of it—what it smelled like, and what time the birds woke—as well as he knew his own body. It was early autumn, the grass and weeds an endless span of cool blonde parchment.

Before the summer, the world and all its forms seemed made for pleasure and consolation. His shadow printed on the street outside the diner. Rain against the window. A train of two hundred heavy, black, silent cars pushing west in slow motion. That world was lost to him now—and yet he'd never felt so awake.

So life was sweet only where it was also bitter. He would take it all, without condition, without reservation, and without wishing it were otherwise. Not because he was virtuous or good, but because he was tired, his hands were empty, and he had no energy in him to be otherwise. The world vibrated around him. There wasn't much in it he felt was worth chasing.

The shop would be there, just ahead off the highway, beside his house, and in its way that was everything. His father had shown Gordon that in the undivided heart there lives a secret love bringing a man to silence beyond all thought, teaching him to repudiate and disavow all that is false in the world. Gordon would go back to the work.

There were no lights on in town. The diner wasn't open yet. Boyd's was dark. He pulled over in front of the empty hardware store and looked over the dusty junk in the store window. Chintzy vases and teacups and saucers with roses and lilies and forget-me-nots painted in ribbons around gilded rims. Board games—Connect Four, Donald the Donkey, and Lose All You Have, the colored boxes faded, the shrinkwrapped plastic brown with dust.

He drove the length of town, and down the side street where the backhoe service shop had been when he was a boy, and from there, along a dirt road. Dock and Annie's place made him stop in his tracks. The east side blackened and a dark smoky stain rising up the face. The staves buckling. The windows broken and glass shards glittering in a pile of dark blue ashes. Emery.

With a lighter or a book of matches. Gordon could see it. Emery would have been alone in the living room. Annie in the kitchen shaking cubed beef and white flour in a plastic grocery bag. Dock would have been out back among the pigs, kicking them gently with his old, flat, brown boots away from the gate and holding the heavy bucket overhead.

He drove farther down the frontage road toward his house, parked the truck, and got out. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders against the cold. There was a light on in his house, and before the window at the kitchen sink, May Ransom was filling the teakettle. Upstairs, the fainter yellow window of his room, where his mother had slept all summer.

Dock was in the shop. Inside, behind the tiny side window, he and his family were gathered. There was a little table set up that Gordon recognized as an end table from his own home, and Annie was slicing something on her plate, and Emery had his head back, roaring. Gordon could see his huge, milk-white teeth through the glass. It was early breakfast time.

So they were living in the shop now.

Well, it was cold out, and getting colder—a family needed a warm place. And it was true that Dock needed whatever extra work he could get, and that Gordon had turned it all over to him. Gordon stood outside the shop looking in. His eyes burned. He was glad they had it. He knew they'd take care of it and use it well. He turned back toward the old blue truck. He'd keep driving this morning. He could come back down here and see his mother in a few days.