Lions (13 page)

You can say no, his father had told him.

Gordon would knock once more that first visit, and put his ear to the door. He'd touch the doorknob. Cold metal. He'd turn it, and the door would open.

“John? Is that you?” From deep inside the room on the other side of the door, the voice of a young man.

You wanted magic in the world, Leigh thought, but not like that. People didn't live for a hundred and twenty years. Hundred and fifty. Or if they did, it wasn't alone in the wide-open country, with no one to help them. Or if they were out there, they weren't people that young men like Gordon were supposed to tie their lives to.

But of course none of the Walkers would have called their lives, or this task, hard; she could imagine what John Walker would say of it, if she were able to ask him. He'd say that it'd never been a sacrifice, that it hadn't trapped him in Lions, that he'd never even made a decision about it, that's what real freedom was.

No choice in the matter, he'd say from his chair, looking up at her over the edge of a paperback in the orange lamplight. There's nowhere else to go, anyway, Miss Ransom. Then he'd gesture around the old living room. Isn't this paradise enough for you?

But these Walkers were a different breed.

Lions was no paradise, and she had taken no vow.

Before he left, Jorgensen sold his water rights outright and put the house up, though it would never sell. By the end of the summer, the once-creamy white porch where he and Dorrie raised their five children would be burnt with a broad shadow of brown dust and spray painted with glyphs and giant black letters so that if you saw it from a distance the old farmstead resembled a farmhouse no more than a ruined boxcar.

When Leigh saw it, she imagined slim young men and women in blue jeans and dark T-shirts sliding off the highway in neutral and sneaking out of their cars to circle every empty lot and print the beautiful old houses with code. She stood before the graffiti trying to decipher it, black grasshoppers knocking softly against her ankles. The unfamiliar characters could have been symbols for anything, but their jaggedness and ­backwardness—all the figures like people with their backs turned or with hands up in postures of defense—seemed to her messages of warning.

By this second week of August the West Wind motel was cleared out of beds and desks and sheets and towels, and Gordon had been gone another four days. Five.

Alan Ranger fired Levon, the manager at the garage, as well as his two employees, and brought them into the bar for beers and shots, afterward, where he offered them jobs in Denver. They took him at his word and left with their Burnsville girlfriends by week's end. On her way to the diner later that weekend, Leigh stopped outside the old garage and looked up above the store at the window with the blue checked curtain where Levon Carrothers and his father, Alison, had lived as long as she could remember. For a while when she was a girl they even called it Carrothers' Garage, then it got bought up, which was a help to them. There was a peeling, cracked yellow sticker on the window that read: Good Work Done Good. Inside, the garage was empty. The office was locked, but the sign was still turned to
OPEN
.

“The garage is really closed,” Leigh said when she walked into the diner for the breakfast shift.

“And took three men with it,” Boyd said, spooning sugar into his coffee. “Some nerve that guy had, being all chummy like that, right after he fires them.”

“He's just doing his job,” May said, turning his eggs. She looked at Leigh. “Least he spent a little money in town. That was considerate.”

“More attentive than some people,” Leigh said.

“Really, Leigh. Maybe Gordon didn't want to be around to see his father die. And to watch his mother lose her marbles. Or watch his girl take off with out-of-town management or some big dope from Burnsville.”

Boyd raised his eyebrows and looked at Leigh. “Jesus, girl. It wouldn't kill you to spend a little time alone.”

She stepped behind the register and stooped as if she were looking for something in the shelves below and put her hands to her temples and shut her eyes.

“That guy was married, too,” Boyd said. “Just so you know. Or didn't you mind?”

Leigh stood up and brushed off her shirt. “You have a lot of nerve. If I were you I'd talk a lot less.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means everything happening around here is your fault and everybody knows it.”

“Alright,” May said. “Enough.”

“Hope your stupid joke was worth it.”

“Enough, Leigh. Go.”

“Dock told me the joke from that night. It wasn't even funny.”

“I hadn't finished telling it!” Boyd's eyes widened. “Wait. Dock was talking about this?”

“Enough!” May yelled.

“He told all of us,” Leigh said.

“All of who? When?”

May put her hands on Leigh's shoulders and turned her toward the door. “Out.”

“I thought I was working.”

“Out.”

“I need the money.”

“Go.”

“Was Dock talking about me?” she heard Boyd say as she stepped out over the sidewalk, his voice high and thin.

Leigh stepped into the empty street. Only eight o'clock and already her forehead and temple ached from squinting in the blazing light. It'd started in the bathroom, slicing into the mirror from the window as she brushed her teeth. The heat had beaten the earth and the pavement and the rooftops of empty houses to a metallic sheen and reduced the horizon to the same thin white iridescence in every direction. Thirteen days, she said under her breath, over and over, with every step back home.

Poor girl, those remaining in town said, even as they packed.

Darkness of this place is sucking her in.

What a waste that'd be, they said.

She was always a good girl.

Smart girl.

Pretty girl.

Go get the world, they told her whenever they could—in the diner, on the street. It wants you.

She knew it did. She heard it calling. Everyday the world came into the Lucy Graves and announced itself, then slipped back out the glass door and down the highway, out of her reach. All her life, she had measured the goodness of the world by her happiness with it. Now it was teasing her. Toward everyone her age who came into the diner she felt a nauseating combination of admiration, fear, and resentment. She was bothered that others had what looked to her like a better life. Their easy smiles, their confidence. She hated everything she envied, and she envied everyone.

She thought to pierce her nose, one of those tiny silver studs. She'd lighten her hair. She'd get a tattoo, something feminine. A bracelet around her ankle. She'd become an environmentalist. Maybe she'd become a vegetarian. Each new idea presented itself as she poured coffee, refilled water, distributed ketchup and ranch dressing.

It was as though she and Gordon had been childhood friends on the top of a dizzying precipice, and now he was falling down one side of it, and she the other. At the top there'd been summer rain and moonlight, and the thrill of exploring each other's bodies and making plans. There had been intoxicating, aerial views of the world, all of it laid out for them to enjoy. Now her own view was so foreshortened, the strangers around her brought up so close, she could neither see past them nor make out their faces.

Years from now, she'd remember with a nameless unease the way the hot days of that June, July, then August unspooled as she dished out pie and ice cream and fried sandwiches and coffee and Cokes to travelers speeding down the interstate on their adventures and stopping in the diner where she, a ghost in a ghost town, was stuck in place to serve them. She'd remember the whole town in a state of decay as Jorgensen moved away, Gordon still collecting junk from Marybeth and setting it out in the yard beneath the sun with the strange faith of a man scattering seeds across the hard ground. A film of dust settling over the old, red-painted stoop before the closed hardware store.

Years from now, she'd sit alone behind the sugar beet factory as a single magpie dove from right to left in a sharp and angry V above her head, realizing she'd spent her entire life either excited or depressed. Seeing that the last days of her last true summer were ravished by craving. She'd try to imagine a series of events, or gifts, or situations that would have satisfied her at seventeen and eighteen, and then later at twenty-five, thirty. Truth is, nothing would have. Not recognition from all the world that the family she might raise would be bright and worthwhile, not a house in the hills, not the prairie with all the wild grass still in her, not the cold moon itself in her hands or all the metal-pointed stars at her command.

Gordon returned from the north country at midnight days before they were to leave for school, and woke the following morning in his room to the sound of Leigh's voice. A distant buzz, the sheets over his bare legs. He understood she was speaking from far away. Downstairs. In the kitchen with Georgianna. Their white faces floating in the early morning light as they talked over toast and coffee. Their voices pulsed like a radio signal moving in and out of static.

“. . . like his father . . .”

“I know.”

“. . . to be alone.”

“But supposing . . .”

“. . . a little patience.”

“But supposing.”

A silence. The ringing of spoons against coffee cups.

“. . . John's father, too . . .”

“. . . like a ceremony . . .”

“. . . like sleep . . .”

“More toast?”

A silence, the scrape of wooden chair legs across the floor, and he went back under, the women's voices leading him on a filament of words like a path that loses itself in the dark.

In his dream his father handed him a dull and dented old copper cup—the kind you'd find in the junk shop—and told him to drink. Gordon took it for whiskey, and perhaps it was.

“What is it?” his father asked when Gordon had tasted it.

“Bitter,” he said, and let the taste of it stain his tongue and the back of his throat. “And good.”

When he woke again, his mother was beside him. Shadows circled her eyes like holes burned through white paper.

“You slept all day again,” she said.

“I did?”

“Leigh was here.”

“I know.”

“I have a can of soup heated on the stove,” she said. “Tomato rice. You need to eat.”

He sat up. “Did you have any?”

She put her hand to her stomach and shook her head.

“Sick?”

“And a headache.”

“You look skinny.”

“So do you.”

“You need to eat.”

She drew her lips into her mouth and nodded. “It's hard to be here in the house, isn't it?”

He nodded. “Shop, too.”

“He worked so hard, Gordon.”

“I know.”

“Too hard.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“No one appreciated it.”

“Sure they did, Ma.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes.”

“People say things about him.”

“No they don't.”

“They say he wasn't good to us.”

“You know that isn't true.”

“They say he should have moved us somewhere better.”

“Did Leigh tell you that?”

“She wants the world, Gordon.”

“I know it,” he said. “It wants her back.”

“Have you asked her to stay?”

“I don't think she can.”

“I always thought she'd be able to.”

He rose and left the room. He brought up two mugs of the warm, reddish-orange soup, and two slices of buttered sandwich bread. Two old metal spoons. He carried it up on the tray his father had used for Georgianna on Mother's Day and her birthday, a golden brown wicker tray with woven handles of dried willow.

They sat in the quiet and ate their bread. The moonlight cast a slant, pale blue window frame across the scratched wooden floor. It was past midnight. No birds. No sound at all. Georgianna sat with her hands around the mug in her lap. Her hair seemed no longer steel and iron but silver and white. She used to clip up the sides, but now it hung all around her. It was so long. He'd never realized it was so long.

“I can't sleep in that bed, Gordon.”

“It's OK.”

“I've been sleeping here,” she said. “In yours.”

“I know.” He took her hand and pulled her from the chair and she curled up beside him. “It's OK.”

“Sometimes I think I'm having a heart attack, too,” she whispered.

He shut his eyes and held his breath high up in his chest. “Me, too.”

When he was sure she'd fallen asleep, Gordon stood and crossed the yard to the shop where he stretched out on the floor, lengthwise beside the workbench.

Dock and Emery were there just after dawn, ready to work and knocking on the door. Gordon rose stiffly, rubbed his eyes, and opened the side door. He reached out to shake Dock's hand, and Dock pulled him in for a hug.

“Where you been boy?”

Gordon smiled and hugged back. Emery stepped up for his turn, nearly crushing Gordon's rib cage with his wiry arms.

“Sorry to barge in on you,” Dock said. “Emery's been chomping at the bit to get in here.”

“I'm sure, I'm sorry.”

“You been out on the road some.”

Gordon nodded. They were almost of a height, but Dock was twice as wide.

“You holding up?” Dock let go, and surveyed his face. “Eating?”

“Some.”

“Sleeping?”

“Some.”

“Want me to pick up a customer or two you have out of town?”

“Nah,” he said.

Dock nodded. “OK. Look, no pressure, Gordon, but Annie and I talked all this through with your mother.”

“I know.”

“If you want to stay, you should stay. But if I were you I'd follow that girl. She knows where she's headed, and she's not bad-looking company.”

Gordon laughed and touched his forehead. Emery laughed and touched his forehead.

There were two unfinished projects on the floor out back: a spray rig and double tilt utility trailer.

“So tell me what's happening in the shop these days.” Dock stepped inside. “But consider yourself warned,” he said, as Emery overtook him and pulled on his welding helmet. “This boy is full of beans. I mean he ate three cans of pinto beans last night.” Dock mimicked a man eating beans out of a can, circling an imaginary spoon in his fist from can to mouth. “Safety hazard. Keep him away from the torches.”

“Ha,” Gordon said. “Thanks for the tip.” Emery laughed again and drew back his lips to show them his teeth, like a wild animal. They stood in the cool space, the smell of burnt minerals and cleaning fluid sharp in their nostrils.

Dock told Gordon that other than a few passes on scrap metal with stick electrode, and the couple of minor projects he had watched John do and assisted with, he hadn't done much more. Gordon told him it had to be five hundred more than a few passes, and that Dock had learned more than he realized while working on the single engine stand.

“It's still in working order, isn't it?”

“It's pretty solid,” Dock admitted, his cheeks red.

“That was all you. I saw every piece of it. I was right back there,” Gordon said, and together they said, “working on the disc cultivator.” It'd come in rusted pieces like a bolt's worth of moth-eaten reddish brown fabric—a never-ending project to restore.

They stood beside each other looking out of the shop toward the Gas & Grocer.

“So how long do we have you, young Walker?”

“A few days,” Gordon said. “If I go.”

“Don't get started on me,” he said. “You're going.”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“Whatever you need to be here for, you can do a little less often.”

“I guess that's right.”

“What am I supposed to do all day every day if you don't go? Isn't enough work for two men.”

“You've got me there,” Gordon said. “I know you're up for the work.”

“We all love your mother, Gordon. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“She won't be alone. Heck, May talked about hiring her on, just to get her out of the house a couple times a week. She'll need the help when Leigh's gone.”

“I hadn't thought of that.”

“Be good for her,” he said. “Coffee?”

“We'd better.”

Gordon filled the machine with water and scooped the grounds into the filter.

“You know, Gord,” Dock said. “It'd mean the world to us to have a little steady work aside from alfalfa and hogs.”

“I know it.”

“Alfalfa's not great. Everything else is glutted. Wheat's too cheap.”

“It's OK, Dock.” He wanted Dock to stop talking.

“I know you think you have responsibilities around here.” He nodded out the window toward the horizon, and held up a hand. “Hear me out. Try it for a year. It's only a few hours away. You can come back whenever you need to. Or if I get stuck. You've got a good truck right?”

They laughed at that. That truck had had four transmissions in its five-hundred-thousand-mile life.

“Would give us a year to save a little from whatever work comes through here to get Annie and Emery back to her family in Kansas.”

“You'd go?” Gordon looked stricken.

“Here you were thinking you had to hold the town together like your father did, but the town's disappeared on you,” Dock said. “You're free.” He extended a hand, and Gordon gave him his own, and they shook. Dock's face broke open in a smile of relief. “Boy howdy,” he said, “am I ever going to have Leigh Ransom on my good side. Guess who's getting free peach pie for the next couple days before she leaves?”

Gordon handed Dock a coffee mug, and they looked outside. The morning was yellow and sere. Horseflies glinted over the browning turf and thick, needled weeds.

“Not much left to it, is there?” Dock said. All they could see from where they stood was the closed Gas & Grocer, one broken window and its lawn already overgrown with thistle. “Maybe it'll get a second wind.”

“What'd you bring?” Gordon asked, looking at the trailer hitched to Dock's rig.

Outside Dock had some rusted-out lattice and a broken axle on a tractor trailer—parts for a refurbished ATV for Emery.

“New used.”

Dock nodded. “You got it.”

“You know what Dad would've said.”

“‘That's a good man.'”

They both laughed.

“Be expensive to do?” Dock asked.

“Only if you charge yourself. You'll be the one doing it.” Both of these sentences were John Walker's, verbatim, and Dock wanted to laugh but Gordon was serious. “Whatever you can't find in the scrap metal pile we'll have to purchase, and then there's the cost of the electricity.”

“That'll be it?”

Gordon nodded.

“How do we start?”

“Prep and clean up. That'll take a full day.”

“Like your father.”

“Yes, sir. What do we need from the back?”

“Metal.” He grinned sheepishly.

“But what kind?”

“You're not going to tell me.”

“You start. Any ideas you have.”

“Can we reinforce the ramps with angle iron?”

“We could.”

“But,” Dock considered, watching Gordon's face, “rectangular tubing is stronger. Do the job right.”

Gordon nodded. “What else?”

“We'll need enough plate for fenders.”

“Quarter inch?”

Dock stooped down and felt the ramp hangars. “Quarter inch here,” he said. “Eighth inch for the fenders.”

“Let's go check the scrap,” Gordon said. “See what we've got.”

The pile was out back in a circle of blinding sun. A sheet of metal so rusted it looked like copper-colored eyelet; sections of cemetery gate; curled edges of warped, corrugated steel; a bicycle wheel; six bicycle frames and four spools of wire and railroad spikes, chain-link, two bulldozer buckets, hubcaps, trash bins, iron piping, steel piping. The pile was twelve feet wide and organized by metal and by function but still half as many feet high. Bright, upright stacks of sheet metal like mirrors flashed in the daylight and they held their forearms up against their eyes.

“He never threw anything away,” Gordon said.

Dock nodded at the pile. “Think we can use that?” He picked up a sheet of low carbon steel and miller moths lifted from beneath its shadow and batted softly against their faces and shirts.

“Perfect. How are you with a torch?” Gordon asked.

Dock unraveled the loops of gas hose and turned on the acetylene, then the oxygen. He checked the pressure, tapped the regulators with his index finger, and Gordon pointed to the wall. Dock retrieved two face shields and began again. He cracked open the valve on the torch, spark-lit the acetylene, and black smoke woofed up between the two men. He slowly cracked the oxygen to make the flame cleaner and shorter, and the smoke disappeared. The torch had its own distinctive roar. As he adjusted the oxygen down several blue points of flame jetted from the torch nozzle. When they were tight against the nozzle, the torch was ready to cut.

“Now let's turn it off,” Gordon said, “and clean up some rust. You need to grind that area smooth and remove the paint from the area where we'll have to weld. First job is always to prepare the joint—no rust, no paint, no dirt.”

“God help me, I know. But when we
do
start welding?” Dock returned to the torch and stepped toward the machine.

Gordon nodded. “Go ahead. Show me. Check your connections.”

“Check.”

Dock showed him: socks pulled up beneath his pants, which came down over the tops of his boots. Sleeves rolled down. Helmet on, hood lifted for the time being. He pointed to the lifted shop door. Ventilation. Dock pointed to the ground beneath his feet. Dry. He turned and showed Gordon his back pocket: work-duty gloves, ready to go.

“God,” Gordon laughed. “Where was I when you learned the routine?”

“School,” Dock smiled. “He put me through the wringer. Once I poured water over a couple spot welds on a broken johnny bar and I thought he was going to punch me in the gut.”

“You poured water on them? Mid-project?”

Dock winced. “Alright, alright. I know.”

“OK, next. What's your material?”

“Gordon. You remind me so much of your dad.”

“OK.”

“Don't feel bad about going. It's the only choice,” he said. “And you know I'll need you. There'll be a long line of customers with money in their hands, right?”