Lions (7 page)

Chuck whistled and picked up his hat. “Go easy on us, May.”

May reached back and turned up the lights. “That's it, men,” she said. “Go home and get some sleep.”

It was by their happiness that the good people of Lions approximated their value in the eyes of the Lord and, if you asked them, they would tell you how happy they were. How blessed. On Sundays most of them drove to the Bible Church in Burnsville, so while Lions was small enough, and bare enough, Sunday mornings it was dead empty, and absolutely still. In early summer, as on this particular morning, if you went out walking over one of the weedy fields or even down the dusty road toward the highway, the plain would open for you, pretty as a prayer book. The last of the white stars faded and the day slowly absorbed the paper face of the moon, like a soft blue cloth soaking up a small white spill. Georgianna Walker woke alone, and moved through the rooms of the house, opening windows, then stepped outside toward the highway.

She was in her tennis shoes and nightgown when Chuck found her walking along the bar ditch. He pulled over slowly behind her, a good hundred yards behind, and hustled to catch up with her on foot. He didn't want to startle her.

“Mrs. Walker?” he called as he jogged, his keys jangling. It was a warm day already, the deep greens from snowmelt and early rain already drying out. She did not stop. She was carrying a white wooden cross. It struck him as odd. There were crosses like that stabbed into the front lawns of some of the houses across Lions, but he didn't remember ever having seen one at the Walkers' place. The Walkers weren't like that. “Mrs. Walker! Georgie!” She paused and looked back. Her pale eyes were radiantly blue. She smiled, and he fell into step beside her.

“Making me run, at this hour!”

“I'm sorry, Chuck. I didn't know you were there.”

“Good morning, Georgie. Are you in your nightgown?”

“Oh,” she said, with a little embarrassed laugh, “I figured everyone was in Burnsville.”

“Now didn't you say last night when we left you that you'd take good care of yourself?”

“I'm sure I did.”

“You shouldn't be alone on the side of the road like this.”

“Oh, Chuck I'm OK. And I'm hardly alone,” she said, and put her hand on his arm. It was worn and wrinkled and lined with veins. “But thank you.”

“What have you got there?”

She held it up. The cross was six inches wide and ten inches long. “We had it in the shop,” she said. “I don't know what on earth for, but now of course I'm glad we did.”

“What's it for?”

“For the dog, Chuck,” she said. “We meant to do it right away, but John got sick.”

He was quiet a moment. “Can I help you with it?”

“I'd appreciate the company and the help.”

They walked side by side until they came to the place where the grass had been overturned and the man had placed a small cairn of stones and gravel. Around them the long fingers of morning light played in the grass, fascinated with it, teasing and combing it in the wind. Georgianna sat down beside the pile of stones in her nightgown and set a hand over it.

“Poor creature,” she said.

An old pickup with a handmade wooden trailer sped past, rattling rusted metal.

“So loyal,” she said, “you know?” She looked up at him.

“Good dogs are that way.”

“We could have all up and left the town but if this dog thought that man was still here somewhere it would've waited forever.”

“It's a strange thing.”

“Beautiful thing.”

They kneeled over the little mound and just above it dug at the dirt and gravel with their fingers until they had five or six inches cleared out.

“Should've brought a spade.”

“Oh well,” he said, “now we have dirty hands from good work.”

She smiled. “That sounds like John.” She placed the cross upright and held it still while he filled in the dirt. Then she sat back down in the dirt and held out her hand, palm up. At first he didn't know what she was doing. Then he sat beside her and took her fingers.

Chuck could see she was crying, and his eyes filled with tears and he pulled his lips into his mouth.

“We are so sorry,” she finally said. “Forgive us. Amen.”

“Amen.”

A rig filled with sheep sped past and stank horribly. Instinctively Chuck held his breath in his nose for a few seconds after it passed. Georgianna brushed off her nightgown and stood, leaning on his hand to steady herself.

“Will you join me and Emily for supper later?”

“Thank you, Chuck, but no. I'll gladly take the ride home though.”

“Absolutely. Don't you move. You wait right here and I'll pull up the car.”

Every day was brighter and hotter than the day before. The air hung still around the empty blocks of Jefferson Street. Hot wind pulsed in the open windows. The highway rippled in dusty waves in the distance. After five days, still no Gordon. Chuck considered filing an official report but was swayed by Georgianna, who said she knew where Gordon was—just taking a break from the world, John used to do it regular—and that he was fine.

For some of the old-timers, disappearances like Gordon's were just part of living in such deceptively wide-open country. Any of them at the Evening Primrose nursing home could tell you about a handful of faces they'd known as children, and you don't see them for years, and then there they are again, those old faces at once bright and familiar and ravaged with age.

They'd show up at the bar, maybe.

Or they'd be right there at the nursing home in lawn chairs propped up on the grass with blankets over their laps.

Went off looking for something, some said to explain it, but came back.

Gone forever, others said. Joined that old procession of ghosts walking back and forth, back and forth, from the West Wind motel on the far edge of town and out across the howling wilderness, people and their dogs and mules and covered wagons and broke-down Chevrolets all rolling slowly over the chalk hills and through arroyos beneath a haze of sparkling dust.

It'd started in the hours before dawn one summer some four hundred years earlier when a tribe of men, women, and children left the Spanish colony in New Mexico where they'd toiled beneath the desert sun, and left in pursuit, it's said, of freedom. Imagine rows of squash cultivated in the midst of alien flowers blooming on cactus. Oxcarts lined up in rows. One sprawling, low-lying adobe fort and half a dozen shacks and outbuildings. Silent as a herd of cats, a band of families, natives and Spanish, French and Mexican, gathered at the edge of the outpost where patches of hard corn met the sand, and left. Quietly walking, no running, no horses, to the north and east. They crossed over a thousand miles, one step at a time, an entire people gone overnight, as if kidnapped. The Spanish, alongside the French, led by a blue-eyed, black-haired man who'd had his nose bitten off in a fight, sent out their own search expedition to find them. These missing people had been their property, it was said. On horseback they combed the plains from present-day Mexico up through Arizona and New Mexico, and ended up right around Lions, on the high plains in eastern Colorado, before all tracks ran out and the search party turned around empty-handed.

It was said by witnesses—men hauling furs and liquor across the Southwest on mules or in ox-drawn carts—that they vanished in broad daylight, and that their number increased all the time as new wanderers joined them.

Truckers have seen them.

One guy who runs I-80 from eastern Iowa to Reno will call it in twice a year. A thousand of them, he'll say, their hair blowing back, kids, mules, white men, red men, black men, yellow men, women of all shapes and sizes, baskets on their heads, packs on their backs. And you don't want them to look at you, he'll say. You don't know why but you don't.

Marybeth Sharpe once claimed to have walked among them for an hour one afternoon, from the old Dairy Queen to way out behind the northernmost edge of Jorgensen's hay fields where bluffs from the dry riverbed begin to rise up into the mesa.

They have no particular aims or goals, no ambition, neither hope nor regret. Over the years, they've pulled others into their circle. Children, men, women, lost or mistreated animals. Anyone out of place—anyone who notices when, say, a single white star aligns with a stone peak and a blue spruce. If you're attentive, you'll see it. If you miss it—the painted doorway, the odd gentleman, the woman who seems to be looking up at you from deep within a well—they'll disappear, and the gate will close again.

“Let me in,” Gordon would sometimes try, addressing, say, the evening star.

“Gordon, no.” Leigh would come up behind him, his face pointed out the broken window at the stripe of cottonwoods waving their hands in the twilight.

By the morning of Leigh's eighteenth birthday the red potted petunias outside the Lucy Graves had shriveled into black tissue paper, like spiders on stems, and the gulls and terns that used to inhabit the standing water of irrigated fields until mid-summer had already left for the landfill south of town.

Leigh watched the window for the Walkers' truck—he wouldn't forget today. Now he would come. By lunch when the volunteer firefighters led by Chuck Garcia passed the diner, it was already one hundred and three degrees. Chuck's lights were spinning, but no sirens.

“What's this?” May leaned out over the counter. “There a fire?”

“Anything moving that fast on a day like this is heading toward a water hole,” Boyd said, and as it turned out, he was right.

Leigh stepped into the street, and he and May followed. There were three customers in the booths, all strangers from the highway, and they stayed where they were.

Marybeth Sharpe stood up from her rocking chair in front of her store, and waved.

“What the heck's going on?” Boyd called to her.

“Search me,” she hollered. She was grinning, her wide hips jutting out from the top of a wide, long, dark skirt. Something was happening—it was like a holiday.

Still in her apron, Leigh went with Boyd in his truck. They passed the Evening Primrose where an ambulance had already stopped. Stricken faces of nurse aides and old folks hung like white ghosts in the heat. Boyd slowed and followed Chuck's vehicle.

Behind them, May hustled the last of her lunch patrons, turned the diner's “open” sign to “closed,” crossed the street, unlocked the side door to the bar, and sat in the cool dark to wait.

By the time Boyd and Leigh reached the source of the commotion, the first responders had already emptied out of the firetruck and begun the systematic process of opening the water tower. It took Chuck and his assistants very little time to figure out the trouble, because a similar thing had happened recently in Chicago, where a young man had been murdered and his body dumped in the water tower on top of an exclusive hotel. The Burnsville ambulances filled up with five sick children from the day care and eleven old men and women from the Evening Primrose before heading back toward the clinic. Diarrhea, vomiting, crippling stomach cramps—and knowing what'd caused it made everybody sicker. They found the tall stranger in the tank of the town's water tower—his lungs full, his abdomen bloated, his coat spread open like black wings—­floating just beneath the surface in his liquid tomb. Chuck and the men from Burnsville tried to keep the people of Lions back, but they all crowded around fifty feet from the tower, where Chuck had set up tape. Then, of course, they all turned away, hands over their mouths—even the grown men. Boyd held Leigh up on his arm and brought her back to the truck.

When they returned, Boyd joined May in the bar, which he decided not to open that night. He poured a whiskey, then sat beside her.

“Did you hear?” he asked her.

“You better tell me.”

He told her. She sat staring, her face propped on her hand, her hand over her mouth. “His face was all—” Boyd's voice roughened. “It was terrible, May. He was coming apart.”

“Did Leigh see?”

Boyd nodded.

“Ah, shit. Where is she now?”

“Waiting for Gordon somewhere, I'd say.”

Boyd and May sat with their elbows on the bar, their drinks between their hands.

“If that boy's gone another day we ought to have Chuck do something,” May said. “Send someone after him.”

“Georgianna doesn't seem worried.”

“I'm not sure she's got all her faculties about her. You should see her, Boyd.”

“I've seen all the seeing I can handle.” He emptied his glass and poured another.

“I knew it was bad,” she said. “And our fault.”

“Aw, come on, May,” he paused and looked at her over the rim of his glass. “We don't know why he did what he did.”

“Why are you drinking whiskey, then? In the middle of the day?”

When children in Burnsville told it, the stranger was still alive when they found him, and he choked out his last watery breath right there in front of the three men and one woman in coveralls who came from Burnsville to drain the tank. They said that days earlier, a man with a big silver mustache had led the people of Lions, who carried the stranger above their heads and down the street and dumped him in the water tower with their own hands. They said the stranger was hard to kill, that he fought for his life. They huddled together in the bathroom in the dark and looked into their own reflections to see the fear that was in his eyes when the cone-shaped lid was lowered down over him.

But in Lions, no one—not the children, not anyone—wanted to talk about it. And no one wanted the tank, which had been there since 1919, cleaned or refilled. The county coroner came out for the body, and Chuck put out a wire, and made that call to North Platte after all. There was no record of any missing man from the place or from any town nearby who fit the description and, in fact, no record of any missing man fitting that description in decades' worth of records.

“Not like we'd know if he'd been missing for years,” the representative from Nebraska told Chuck on the phone. “But you do sometimes hear a story like that.”

“What about before that?” Boyd asked Chuck later that week. “Like, you know, a hundred years back?”

May set her hand on Chuck's shoulder as she passed behind him with two cold beers on a tray. “Don't encourage him, Chuck.”

Chuck didn't think it was funny. He'd dropped the ball. He should have taken a photo. Wired out the details. Put all the information in the bank. He should not have visited the man in the night and brought him beer. He should not have booked him informally, or at all. The dog, the man, all the people sick, it was his fault, in a very real and legal sense. He wondered why everybody blamed Boyd instead of blaming him. It was a whole godforsaken county of ardent belief and powerful imagination; he couldn't always tell which they were guided by, or whether there was much difference between the two.

On the night they found the body in the water tower, Leigh stepped over the dull metal guardrail on the frontage road and over the same loose wire the man had crossed some few weeks before. She held her breath as she neared the Walkers' house. The old orange reading lamp was lit over John's chair. She half closed her eyes and looked at the living room window through a blur of eyelashes, then let herself in through the back door. Georgianna was alone in the kitchen in John's giant slippers and a long workshirt that came down past her knees.

“Oh,” she said, “come in, dear. Come in, oh you brought us pie.”

“Rhubarb,” Leigh said. She set the Styrofoam carrier on the counter. “From Edie's garden. But I only brought two slices.”

“You have Gordon's,” Georgianna whispered. “I won't tell him.”

“Is he back?”

Georgianna smiled at Leigh. “He'll be back. Don't worry. Would you like some tea?” Georgianna set the kettle in the sink to fill it. “That goes good with pie, right?”

“It's so hot out, though.”

She went on filling the kettle.

“Georgie, did you hear what happened?”

Georgianna turned the faucet off and faced Leigh. “It's terrible,” she said, opening her arms and folding Leigh in. “My poor husband. He's died.”

Leigh started, then relaxed in the woman's familiar hug.

“I keep looking for him.”

“Your shirt smells like him,” Leigh said. The same Lava soap Gordon used. The same deodorant. Almost the same sweat.

“I don't want to wash it.”

“You don't have to.”

They stood there in the kitchen, holding hands, sweating, swaying. The ceiling fan whirred overhead. Leigh could smell the sweet, cheap White Shoulders perfume from the Walgreens in Burnsville that Georgianna had worn as long as she could remember. The feel of Georgianna's hands, soft and old. All of it knit up into a memory Leigh would push out of her mind in the years ahead, a moment of communion in a kitchen as familiar as her own, with a woman as familiar as her own mother. Georgianna put her hands on Leigh's shoulders and surveyed her face. “What else do you want to eat? I have meat loaf, tuna casserole, a sheet of lasagna, macaroni and cheese, peas and corn, Jell-O.”

“Oh my God,” Leigh laughed. “Who brought you all this stuff?”

“Everybody.”

“We should call Boyd and Dock.”

“Bring 'em over. Bring the boy too.”

“Can I call them?”

“Call them up. We'll have a birthday party. You got to have something, right?”

So Dock and Annie and Emery came over in their truck and they all sat outside in the grass beneath the cottonwood and ate cold meat loaf and pan-fried lasagna and Jell-O.

“They have their own well, don't they?” Annie asked Leigh in a hushed voice as they were gathering up dishes and carrying the pans outside.

Leigh nodded.

“It's horrible,” Annie whispered, leaning in. “Dock's really spooked.”

Leigh nodded, eyes glazed.

But for Emery, whom Dock took to the shop to retrieve his helmet, they were all quiet as they ate. Annie poured them sticky, pink wine from a gallon bottle. The breeze was warm and Dock made a cheerful fire in a ring of stones. Emery roasted marshmallows, howling from inside the helmet at the flames and swinging the burning sugar around in bright red and yellow circles in the dark. The weedy yard was alive with firelight.

“Summertime,” Dock said.

“Emery and fire,” Annie said. She poured Leigh another plastic cup full of wine and refilled her own. “Who else wants more?” Annie raised the jug.

“That stuff is awful,” Dock said, and extended his empty cup. “Fill me up. Where's that boy of yours, Leigh?” He nudged her with his shoulder. “It's his best girl's birthday, for Pete's sake.”