Juliet in August (19 page)

“Don't worry,” George says, “he's not going to get bucked off. Not a horseman like this one.”

Lee says, “I don't know, fifty miles might be far enough for this cowboy.” He waits for a response, hoping, but hope evaporates when George says, “You ride out, you have to ride back. How else do you get home? Now that you got food in the belly, good to go again. Let that Araby horse set his own pace and you'll be fine.”

Lee thanks Anna for the lunch and finds himself walking with George back to the churchyard, knowing that there's no other way, he'll have to saddle up and ride the remaining fifty miles like Ivan Dodge did, no matter how sore he is, no matter how much it hurts to climb back in the saddle. He can already feel the pain of the horse moving under him once again, the seams of his jeans rubbing once more against raw skin. He badly regrets his decision to ride any farther than Hank's pasture.

“You didn't bring no hat?” George asks.

“It was dark when I started,” Lee says.

George is wearing an old felt cowboy hat, battered and darkened around the band with years of sweat and grease. He takes it off, exposing a white forehead and thick gray hair, and hands it to Lee. “You better take this,” he says. “You've got enough sunburn on that face for one day.”

Lee doesn't really want to put George's dirty old hat on his head, but he takes it anyway because he knows George is right. He tries it on and it fits good enough to stay in place.

“I'll get it back to you,” Lee says.

“Never mind,” says George. “Time for a new one. You throw that one away when you get home.”

The horse lifts his head and whinnies when George and Lee enter the churchyard. Lee offers the horse another drink and then tacks him up, and when there's nothing else to do, he mounts once again. The saddle doesn't feel as bad as he thought it would.

“So where'd you get this horse, anyway?” George asks. “Lester never had no horse like this. Just those heavy horses, eh, good for work.”

Lee tells him how the horse wandered into his yard.

“Huh,” George says. “Well, no one claims him, I guess he'll be yours.”

“I don't think so,” Lee says. “Someone will come looking for him.”

“Tell you what,” George says. “You ride the whole hundred miles and I'll give you fifty bucks.”

George holds up his hand and Lee doesn't know what to do other than shake it.

“All right, then,” George says. “Straight south. That's the way the Perry cowboys went. Good flatland. Won't be as hard going as what you've come through. Maybe someone will put your picture in the paper, eh?”

“I hope not,” Lee says. He tips his hat to George, and once they've crossed the road he lets the horse move into a trot. He doesn't give the fifty dollars another thought, and he tries not to think of the distance between here and home.

It feels better than he imagined it would to be moving again.

Ed's Window

Willard is certain that Marian is watching him through the living room window of the house—the window that Willard will always think of as Ed's window. When they were building the house, Ed had gone to the drugstore and bought a magazine that featured an article on the latest in home design. This was completely out of character, but Willard later learned that Ed had marriage in mind and he wanted to build a house that would attract a woman. Although the house was essentially a prefab from the lumberyard in Swift Current, Ed had insisted they replace the standard living room window that came in the package with a larger window that he'd seen in the magazine.

There'd been no end of trouble with Ed's window. The lumberyard had to special-order and Ed went to town every day to see if it was in. He happened to be there when it arrived, broken. Because Ed had helped to unpack the crate, the insurance company tried to use that to renege on its responsibility. The disagreement escalated to include the shipper and its insurance company and the manufacturer. Ed's position was that he wouldn't pay a cent for a broken window, no matter whose fault it was. Eventually, there was a settlement, but when the second window arrived, this time intact, the carpenters broke it when they were installing it. Again, Ed held to his position, not one red cent, and the lumberyard was forced to order and pay for a third window. This one was installed without incident, but over the entire first year that Ed and Willard lived in the new house, Ed fought with the lumberyard because the window iced up on the inside in the winter, and when the ice melted in the spring, water leaked into the wall and the drywall got wet and disintegrated. Ed could probably have fixed the window and replastered the wall himself, but it was a matter of principle. And there was some urgency for Ed, because he had plans. The window had to be right before he went looking for his bride, who eventually turned out to be Marian.

To this day, Willard does not know how they met. He only knows that Ed went out all dressed up one day in January—a good month for a new start—and was gone for the better part of a week. Willard was left alone, not really worried because Ed had always done things without telling anyone. Ed said nothing when he got home about where he'd been, but Willard knew that Ed was just dying for him to ask, which was reason enough for Willard not to. Ed made several other forays out into the world that winter and spring, in between rounds of lodging complaints about the window, and in July—once the window was resealed and the wall plaster was sanded and painted—he showed up with Marian and introduced her as his wife. Willard said, “Pleased to meet you,” and he remembers that Marian said the same, only she sounded genuinely pleased, which was somehow surprising.

Willard looks up from his fence repairs to check for Marian in the window. He can't really see her. The house is too far away and too dark inside, but just the same, he knows she's there. Willard has a makeshift workbench set up on the tailgate of his truck. As he rips the blackened, damaged boards off the fence and measures up for new ones, he wonders where Ed got the idea that a window would tip the scale for a woman considering marriage to him. He tries to remember, when Ed first brought Marian home, whether she was as impressed by the window as Ed thought a woman should be. It's not as though the window looks out over a green meadow or a pretty little creek. Ed had insisted the window face out over the drive-in lot.

The next time Willard looks up, he sees Marian crossing the yard with a thermos. She's wearing sturdy shoes and a housedress, and she's pulled a John Deere cap on over her hair, which she has tied in a ponytail. Willard thinks she looks a little like the young girls in town with their caps and ponytails, only Marian's hair is mostly gray, and not some wild shade of red or even blue. He overheard a couple of girls in the grocery store one day, and they were buying Kool-Aid to put in their hair.

He stops work and lays his hammer on the truck's tailgate.

“You looked hard at it,” Marian says. “I thought you might want some iced tea.”

“I never turn down moisture,” he says.

“There are sandwiches in the fridge,” Marian says. “I imagine you'll want to have lunch inside, what with the heat. You can come in whenever you're ready.”

“Another half hour here ought to do it,” he says.

Marian sets the thermos down on the tailgate next to the hammer.

“I just heard on the radio that we might get rain later in the week.”

“Too late now,” Willard says. “Anyway, I'll believe that when it happens.” He looks to the west and there's not a cloud to be seen. He takes off his work gloves and unscrews the top on the thermos.

Marian turns to walk back to the house.

“Wait,” Willard says.

She stops and looks at him. The anticipation on her face tells him she thinks he might ask her something important.

“I was just wondering,” he says, “what you thought of Ed's window there, when he brought you to the house that first time.”

“Ed's window?”

“The picture window,” Willard says, nodding toward it. “Did you think, ‘Now there's a window right out of a magazine'?”

“I'm not sure what you're getting at,” Marian says.

“He didn't ever make mention of the window?”

“Not that I can recall.”

Marian looks puzzled. Willard doesn't know what else to say. He's sorry he mentioned the window, and Ed. He hasn't talked to Marian about Ed since they buried him, and even in that difficult time they didn't say much. Marian had asked him what hymn they should sing at the funeral, and Willard had said probably no hymn as Ed was an atheist, but maybe “Amazing Grace” would do. Ed would agree that people were wretched, and if you stretched it, “I was blind but now I see” might refer to Ed's political enlightenment.

Marian finally says, “Well, it was night, as I recall. And there were no curtains. I looked into the darkness and thought, ‘If I'm going to live here, the first thing I will do is make curtains for that window.'”

“Hah,” Willard says. “Did you tell Ed that?”

“I don't remember, but I did go out and buy material and of course he thought that was a waste of money. When I brought the fabric home he said, ‘You're not going to cover up that window?' ‘Oh yes, I am,' I said. No woman wants to stand in a window that big, for all the world to see, unless she's a you-know-what kind of woman.”

Willard feels himself flushing at this reference to a prostitute. He and Marian absolutely don't talk about things like that.

“But I had a different thought the first time I saw the window in daylight,” Marian says. “I looked out and saw the movie screen and the speakers lined up in the sand, and I thought, ‘If I had one of those speakers in the house I could sit in the window and watch movies every night.' Well, now I can do that, can't I, since we updated the sound system.”

That's true. There's a radio in the living room and sometimes, when Marian isn't helping Willard in the concession stand, she tunes it to the movie frequency and pulls a chair up to the window. When Willard sees the lights go out right after the movie starts, he knows Marian is settling in to watch. He's been curious over the years about which movies she selects. She doesn't like violence or the horror movies that the kids are so fond of, but she doesn't seem to like the romances, either. She likes musicals, and movies set in other countries, and once she starts watching a movie she commits herself to it. When the movie's over, she draws the curtains and turns the lights back on.

“Why all this interest in the window?” Marian asks.

Willard says, “Ed put that window in as a special drawing card when he was looking for a wife.”

Marian starts to laugh, right out loud, in a way that Willard has rarely seen. The only other time that comes to mind was when he put her up on Antoinette and took her for a camel ride around the drive-in lot. She'd laughed like a girl, so hard that Willard thought she might fall off. He figures she enjoyed the camel ride as much as anyone ever had, even young Lee Torgeson.

Marian walks back to the house laughing, and when she gets to the door she turns and waves at Willard. It's the oddest thing and throws him completely, so he waves back without knowing why they're waving at each other when neither of them is going anywhere.

He turns to the thermos and unscrews the top, and as he does, he hears ice cubes clinking against the glass liner of the thermos, and just the sound of ice cools him off a degree or two. He takes a swallow and feels the tart lemon taste, and thinks how lucky he is to have Marian looking after him, and then he puts the thermos down and quickly goes back to work.

It's the best thing about work, he thinks, how it keeps worry at bay.

Blue Pool

Norval has pretty much spent the morning staring at the walls of his office, and when lunch hour arrives he decides to go home and eat with Lila. On his way, he passes the swimming pool. There's Rachelle in her bikini, perched up on the high chair, protected from the sun by an orange umbrella. An orange cap is the only thing identifying her as a lifeguard, that and the fact that she's sitting in the chair.

For a hot day, the pool is quiet. Just a few young children in the shallow end and a half dozen rowdy ten-year-olds lining up to do cannonballs off the diving board. There are two adults swimming laps, one of them a woman with a giant plastic flower on the top of her bathing cap. Both swimmers are wearing goggles so he can't tell who they are. The absence of teenagers sprawled on the pool deck likely means they're all still asleep, as Rachelle would be if she didn't have this job. Norval would like to march over to the fence and give her a good talking-to about her disappearing act of the night before, but of course he can't; she's at work after all. At least she showed up for work.

She hasn't seen him yet. He stands behind one of the elm trees that line the sidewalk and watches her. She could still see him if she looked his way, but she's keeping her eye on the boys. Norval notices Vicki Dolson standing in the shade of the change building reading a book. So some of the children in the pool must be hers. He always feels terrible when he sees Vicki. He can well imagine the conversations she and Blaine have in bed at night about options and blame and where to turn next.

A small girl in a bikini gets out of the shallow end of the pool and runs to Vicki, who unfolds a towel and lays it out for her. The child lies down on her back, as though she's suntanning, even though Vicki has placed the towel in the shade. They look so ordinary, Vicki and the little girl, that Norval dares to hope maybe the Dolsons will be all right if Blaine can keep working construction.

The blue water looks inviting. Norval wonders if he should perhaps take up swimming for exercise in the summer. He's been told by his doctor to get on a regular exercise program, and Lila has certainly been after him about fitness. Once in a while he'll agree to walk with her around the town perimeter in the evening. Lila dresses in an exercise outfit and pumps her arms as she walks, and tries to get Norval to do the same. Normally an intense socializer, Lila is curt when they run into people they know, other couples in exercise wear. They exchange hellos without stopping, in recognition of the fact that they're all out for
earnest
walks, and doing something too important to be interrupted.