Lions (11 page)

July Fourth weekend someone put a sign up on the highway at the westbound Lions exit that said
living ghost town
stenciled in white paint on a piece of black painted plywood. There was a longer line than usual of college students and families and truckers all heading west pulled off the highway and stopped at May's for sandwiches, french fries, ice cream sundaes. Easily twice the regular business the Lucy Graves had seen in years. Every one of the customers, it seemed, had come into town looking for an imaginary city. A haunted hotel. Cowboys and horses. A gold mine. A saloon.

May rolled her eyes at it but was pleased by the traffic. Boyd had to go twice to Burnsville to get more sandwich bread, cold cuts, ground beef, and instant spuds. They came in off the highway from Omaha, Lincoln, Cheyenne, Kansas City, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines. The diner was a lark. A live museum. What was this place, they wondered, stepping out of their cars on the deserted, preternaturally quiet main street in town. Marybeth Sharpe waved at them all from her rocking chair. They rooted around in her musty, shadowy store and bought crystal doorknobs and rusting metal plate advertisements for Angel soap and John Deere tractors and they bought tarnished hunting knives in sheaths of needlepointed roses and rotted leather, and spoons of solid silver. After they left, Marybeth walked crookedly into the diner, grinning wide, and laid a dollar bill down in front of each customer, as a gift.

A journalist from Greeley came in early one day. Outside, the hot, white sky hung low. The diner was crowded, and the journalist took a seat at the lunch counter. She had smart, smooth, dark hair, wore sandals with hiking soles, and kept a slim, silver computer in a satchel over one shoulder.

When Leigh greeted her, the woman asked if she knew anything about the man who'd come into town and been drowned in the water tower.

“Nobody drowned him,” Leigh said. “He drowned himself.”

“Are you sure?”

Leigh shrugged.

“Did any of you have contact with him?”

“Coffee?” Leigh asked.

“Sure.”

Leigh poured the woman a cup and handed her a laminated menu. “Where are you from?”

“Greeley.”

“You're writing a story?”

“Don't you think it's curious? The man drowned in the water supply? It used to happen in the early 1900s. But there's been no record of such a death in this state for almost a century. What do you make of that?”

Leigh shrugged. “What do you?”

“It happened in Lions in 1923. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“It was a single man. A wanderer.”

“Really.” Leigh considered. “In a long coat?”

“A duster.”

“What's that?”

“Old-fashioned version of a long coat.”

“Did he have a dog?”

“A dog?”

“This guy had a dog. Did anyone tell you about the dog?” As Leigh told the story, the woman drew her hand to her mouth and shook her head.

“Can you show me?”

“There's a white cross on the highway.”

The woman made a note.

“Did you hear about the broken window over there?” Leigh asked.

“He was here in town?”

“No one told you about what happened in the bar?”

Annie Sterling spent an afternoon with Emery and Gordon in Marybeth's shop looking through old, flaking, yellow newspapers that came apart in her hands, but found nothing that went as far back as 1923, and they could find no evidence of any other water tower drowning. Emery found an old curry comb he ran back and forth over the short grass. Gordon found a foot-long cast-iron mermaid on a stand that, if planted outside, would appear as though she were drifting at sea atop of a swath of high grass, hands interlaced behind her head. The ends of her fins were thin and ragged with rust, but the elliptical metal scales of her fish tail were immaculately, symmetrically fused. It looked to Gordon like each one had been individually molded. He shook his head in wonder and appreciation at what one of his grandfathers had no doubt made. The mermaid's lips were parted, and her breasts pointed through the loose ends of her hair.

“Modeled after one of your grandmothers,” Georgianna said, surveying the mermaid's face, then touching the bridge of its nose. “Anna. Or Ruth.”

“I think it's older than that, Mom.”

“Louise, then. Or Sarah.”

Gordon set her in the front yard, suspended among eight-inch-high foxtails as if she were floating on her back among them. Totally unaware, everyone said, of a mermaid's link to floods, storms, shipwrecks, and drownings, to spirits who would trap a man in a place he ought to know to flee.

Boy doesn't even realize he's drowning, they said.

Somebody ought to tell him.

Dock called the Greeley journalist who said she'd found the story of the drowned wanderer in a collection of bound public planning documents in a local library. She said she'd send copies along but never did.

“Too busy,” Dock said.

“It's because there's no such document,” May said.

“This is the newspaper,” Dock said. “She can't just make shit up.”

Somehow, the echo of this narrow, dark-clothed man coming to town and drowning in the tower felt real to them. So many of them had seen the man who'd recently drowned. You could dismiss stories like these when they hadn't touched you. This one had touched them.

They tried to imagine it, so many decades ago, same heat, same dust, same spirit of flight out of town, same longing and despair, and a tall, thin man in a dark coat coming to usher in the rest of the bad news. It gave one the sense of a long timeline of history folding up like a neat accordion of typewritten paper into a single carefully layered moment. It gave one the sense of a mirror hung somehow, somewhere in the empty space of Jefferson Street—the way heat could double and distort the inventory of the town, make the air in the distance shine and buckle and reflect little houses hung upside down in the vacant blue.

After her shift one afternoon at the end of July, Leigh found Gordon in the shop. She stood in a doorway of glaring light. He was standing beside the workbench, his fingertips on an old iron vice. He looked up.

“Why're you just standing there?” She crossed the shop and picked up his fingers. He had no lights, fans, or machines running. She wrapped his arms around her own waist and interlaced her fingers behind his neck. For a moment she rested her cheek against his chest, but when she looked up at him, his eyes were streaming tears. He smiled and drew his sleeve across his face. Nothing but the wind and light pouring in through the open door and the chinks in the piled metal and sifting through their loose hair. There was color in his cheeks, and his dark curls were an overgrown mess. He was there and not, Gordon, and not. She backed up to the workbench and sat on it.

“You look like your dad.”

“Do I?”

“Have you eaten at all in the past week?”

“I miss him.”

She took his hand. “Let me ask you a question, though, Gordon. OK?”

“Go ahead.”

“I don't mean any offense by it at all.”

“OK.”

“Do you think he was happy?”

“My dad?”

“Yes, your dad. Do you think he was happy?”

They were both picturing John Walker, then. Skinny, bespectacled, standing outside of the shop, wind blowing white wisps of his hair. Aloof. His gaze pointed at something no one else could see. Light as the air around him.

“I've been thinking about that a lot,” Gordon said. He was quiet a minute. Two. He took his hand from Leigh's and sat up on the workbench alongside her and put his hand back on the old, red Wilton table vice. “I've been thinking that any wish, anything at all that a person might wish for,” he paused—his father had not been a man of wishes—“is like a branch being offered to a drowning man.” Show him anyone who lives for their home, he thought, for their family, or job, or for anything at all, and he'd show you a miserable person. A person who would hang on to that thing no matter how awful it was.

“That's what I mean,” Leigh said. “A person needs a branch.”

Gordon blinked and wrapped his fingers around the cast steel of the vice.

She scooted closer to him, and reached her arm around his back and set her hand on his fingers. The metal vice was cool and solid. “I know what you're thinking. I know you think you have to stay here. That you're bound to this place. I understand more than you realize. Even if you're not telling me everything.”

“You do?”

She nodded, and he moved his fingers over the top of her hand. “And Gordon. I think you should leave it behind.”

“Leave what behind?”

“All of it. Come with me to school. Like we planned. Like you promised. It's the next thing to do.”

“The next thing to do.”

“Why when you say that does it sound like a stupid idea? Gordon. Come on. We can't stay here. You can't stay here.”

He just looked at her.

“I can't go alone,” she said.

“Sure you could.”

It was as if he'd slapped her. “You would just send me off?” She pulled her hand back.

“I wouldn't be sending you off.”

“Think about it,” she said. “You could turn over the shop to Dock long term. Think of what it'd mean to him and Emery.”

He was quiet a moment. “That's true.”

“Say you will?”

“Ah, Leigh.”

“It's supposed to be us,” she said. “Together out there.”

“I know it.”

“Come with me. We'll make a clean break. We'll start over.”

“I don't need to start over.”

“Yes,” she said, “you do.”

He shook his head. “What about my mom? All my dad's work. His life's work, Leigh.”

She blinked. “Welding?”

He studied her. Welding, she'd said.

Sometime the winter before—a Sunday afternoon—he remembered exactly the moment in the shop, he was practicing with the plasma cutter on the thin aluminum of some of Jorgensen's irrigation pipe that'd been damaged in the last season, and suddenly without any effort on his part he sensed something else about the work. He wasn't welding; the welding was happening.

He was high on the experience for a week.

“Get your head out of the clouds,” his father finally said, handing him a set of pliers, but there was a light in his eye as he said it. The pliers were cold and heavy in Gordon's hand. The rubber sleeves over its handles were a bright kingfisher blue. “Going to hurt yourself,” his father said, turning away. “Or both of us.”

So then it was just welding again. You marked up the plan. You cleaned the metal. You set your voltage and feed speed and did the job.

Still. He'd seen that look in his father's eye. It was a look that said yes, and there's more where that came from.

“Don't you want something better?” Leigh asked.

He shrugged.

“Think of Emery and Dock. Think of Annie. Living people. Who could use the work while you're away. If there even is any. Would you hoard it for yourself? That doesn't sound like you. Or your dad.”

“I guess that's true.”

“Have you seen Dock's alfalfa? Isn't it strange not to see Jorgensen's wheat ripening? Doesn't any of this strike you as significant? Signs, Gordon.”

“Signs,” he said, without interest.

“It's the responsible thing to do.”

“I don't know.”

“Tell me you'll try it for a month. One month.”

“What if instead I asked you to stay here?”

“I'd say you didn't know what you were asking.” She crossed her arms. Just stay there? Like what, a year? Five? Ten? Doing what? Waiting for him?

There's one about that kind of mistake, too. Today, where the old highway connects with the frontage road that takes you to the new highway, there's a one-room schoolhouse that appears and disappears among the giant papery green docks and goosefoot-shaped leaves of lambsquarter. When it's lit up, you can see the old brass bell tolling, though it makes no sound. When Leigh was a girl, she begged May to tell and retell the tale.

A woman from out east who had once been the schoolteacher, a twenty-six-year-old Honora Strong, was held responsible for the death of every single one of her nineteen young students, aged four to fifteen, frozen to death in a sudden, late-spring blizzard. Though she herself didn't survive to be hanged or cast out for it, she was caught forever on the highway looking for them. Sometimes in a high wind, you can hear them crying, and her calling them by name.

She lived in a room adjacent to the schoolhouse, with a bedstead and a stove, and had sent her students home, hoping they'd be ahead of the storm, because she was expecting a lover. He went by Miller—David Wayne Miller—and he had been seeing her off and on for two years as he traversed the countryside, east to west and north to south. He was from Utah, though his family were Germans and Swedes out of South Dakota. He had small eyes the color of stone, dark hair raked with silver, and a barrel-shaped torso. Though he wasn't a tall man, he called himself a big guy, which was accurate in the sense that he took up all the space in a room, left none for anyone else to talk, nor air for them to breathe. He had, somewhere, a wife and two children—and had, somewhere else, another wife, and another child. To all of his women he made promises he couldn't keep, and left each one of them trapped in her hometown, waiting for him to make good.

Like so many of the westerners who broke the land and occupied positions of influence, May told Leigh—the sheets and yellow wool blanket pulled up to her chin, her small white fingers curled around the satin binding—David Wayne Miller was a sunny liar, a good storyteller, a hard worker, and an expert, cold-hearted son of a bitch. He came out of every shoot-out, every rotten horse trade, and every madam's house smelling like a rose. For every crime he committed, for every life he ruined, there was a fabulous story to stand in for the truth.

“And you know what?” May asked her daughter. “People loved the stories. They wanted them. People say they want the truth but they don't. They want a story.”

“I want a story.”

“I know you do.”

According to the historical record, David Wayne Miller was seen some five or six years after the death of Honora Strong and her students, in Deadwood, in a gunfight with a man who was no better than he was and who thus recognized a sick man when he saw one. Miller survived the fight, and, it is said, took up a stethoscope and paraded around the West as a traveling surgeon praised for his healing arts, and died rich, fat, and happy at an old age on a ranch in southeast Wyoming.

“Green River?” Leigh asked her mother from her narrow bed.

“Couldn't say.”

“Rawlins?”

“Not telling.”

“But he's dead? For sure?”

“There is no man more dead than this man.”

Nobody could guess where the schoolteacher had met him. Once Honora could see Miller wasn't coming that frigid spring day, and the windows were half blocked with blue snow, then within an hour completely blocked and blackened, and there was no more wood in the box to burn, and it was hours before dawn, she confessed the entire matter in writing. In the days after, children were exhumed out of their empire of snow, their pointed faces blue, their eyelashes frosted with ice. The schoolteacher was likewise discovered, the confession stuffed in her frozen bosom.

A world of hurt. That, May Ransom told her daughter, is what comes of choosing the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then waiting for him, waiting for him. There are good and decent men in this world, she told her daughter, and there are men like he was: touched by darkness and, eventually, overcome by it.

When the old schoolhouse materializes out of nothing on the side of the road, it's as clean and white as the day it was built, the bright bell shining in its square-shaped wooden tower, and passersby from behind the windshields of their Pontiacs and Hondas, driving from Chicago to LA or Omaha to Reno, have seen the poor woman right beside it in a long brown- and rose-colored dress, her thick, curling red hair blowing as if she, alone, were on fire in the midst of a terrible storm.

Such tales of children and their schoolteachers or bus drivers caught in sudden snowstorms on the plain are all too common; some still say that David Wayne Miller is behind the death of every one of them.

“Because every wrong man,” May told Leigh every time, while the girl watched the shadows of the cottonwood bend and lengthen on the wall behind her mother's head, “is the same wrong man.”