This Given Sky (2 page)

Grady

Steve landed a summer job as a laborer for the city road crew.

And because of a new Equal Employment Opportunity Act, so did Thel, where she became the first “girl” to shovel and jackhammer Shelby’s streets. Then she’d spend an hour or so after dinner working in her dad’s closed store before the posse picked her up to cruise through velvet summer nights, get stoned, listen to Bruce Springsteen, and talk about escaping from their Montana hometown to someplace cool like New Jersey.

Second day on their city job, Thel and Steve worked a patch crew with thirty-something Warren. As the official adult, Warren drove the truck while they swept potholes, painted them with black oil, shoveled in blacktop, shaped a patch for the truck to roll over and pack down.

Thel was tossing a shovelful of crumbly blacktop mix into a hole when Warren rubbed his groin against her bent-over blue-jeaned buttocks. She whirled and smacked him in the chest with the flat blade of her shovel.

Warren plopped ass-down on the road.

Steve said: “You got two of us.”

Warren sat there for a dozen heartbeats. Got up.

Said nothing with his mouth.

Come five o’clock, the dozen members of the city crew walked out of the shop/office to go home in their cars and pickups racked with rifles.

Saw Jake and Thel’s
official hook up
Nick leaning against the hood of her family car. Nick wore the white shirt and tie from his summer job at the last pharmacy in Shelby. Jake was still in work boots, black T-shirt and blue jeans covered in grime from his dawn to mid-afternoon of lifting steel rails before he got the lunchtime note Steve dropped off at the train depot.

Jake and Nick weren’t smiling.

Everyone saw everybody and they all knew what was what.

Two days later, the street foreman found a reason to send Warren down the line. He signed on at the slaughterhouse east of town, lasted there only until the leaves on the trees turned golden and russet and brown, so not long after Jake, Steve, and Thel left for college, he was gone from Shelby, too; nobody knew where and nobody cared.

After a lifetime of navigating the infinite fog of total annihilation, Jake breezed through Air Force ROTC’s explicit
do
s and
don’t
s enforced by blue-uniformed mentors with their authority ranked by visible insignia. He took classes they approved, surprised himself by excelling in physics.

Home from the university for Christmas his junior year, Jake sat on a stool beside Steve in Shelby’s “younger crowd” bar while they waited for Thel, said: “Apparently I have a knack for grasping
how
the universe works.”

“Now if only you knew
why
,” said Steve.

They laughed.

Jake said: “You and Thel hang out?”

Steve took a pull off his beer. Stared into the bar mirror.

Answered: “Sure, but she’s back here weekends to help her dad.”

“So . . . she got somebody? I mean . . .”

“Some guy in the high tech program comes ’round when she says so.”

Jake drank from his beer bottle.

Looked at the wall clock above the bar mirror.

Said: “Do you think she’s going to show up?”

Steve said: “Where else is she going to go?”

The hospital.

Where doctors discovered that living in Libby near a mine and mills that produced asbestos-contaminated vermiculite two decades before had corroded her collapsed father’s lungs. They stabilized him. Next day, Jake and Steve helped her bring him home, then drove to Havre to get her stuff. Everyone talked about how her dropping out of college to care for her father and run the auto parts store with him was “a temporary deal.”

Jake went back to his university in Missoula.

Steve went back to school in Havre. Dropped out two weeks later.

“Figure I don’t want to make kids color inside the lines so their schools can win more tax bucks,” he told Jake. “The city crew street foreman is retiring and giving me his job ’cause I’m not afraid of computers,
plus
I know their broke-ass street equipment. As hard as I fought to stay alive in Shelby, figure it makes no sense to start over somewhere else.”

Jake came back to Shelby on university breaks. They all hung out. He didn’t have a chance to come home and see them after he graduated the next year and shipped out to earn his Air Force pilot wings.

Grady

Shelby surrounded Thel and her father with the kindness that redeems small towns. People shopped at their auto parts store whenever they could. Rides appeared when her dad needed to go to the hospital or even down to big city specialists eighty-seven miles away in Great Falls while Thel minded the store. A gentle and true Christian manager at the four-county electric co-op walked into the auto parts store with a part-time data management job for Thel that he could have parceled out among the co-op’s staff.

She and her father held on to the store for three years until nationally franchised stores UPS’d parts to Shelby cheaper than Thel could buy them wholesale. By then, her dad could barely cough his way through a day of work. They sold their inventory for enough money to clear the back rent on the store and the house, where her dad “took to bed.”

A gray-haired legal secretary who’d never gotten her wish to date that sick man came over one night and worked magic to put as much of their debt as she could solely in his name and neither she nor Thel discussed why.

The co-op took her on full time.

“Now you’ve got health insurance for at least you,” said the manager when he drove over to the house to pay his respects to her father and give Thel the good news. “Plus you start qualifying for our pension plan.”

She said
thanks
. Walked him to his car. Watched him drive away. Walked around the outside of this house they’d paid enough rent for to buy. Went to the alley with its garbage cans beside an ash tree. Threw up. Went in the house, gave dad his medicine. Monday morning, went to work at the co-op in new grocery store pantyhose and a neighbor’s hand-me-down dress.

Steve stayed in her landscape.

Being street boss for the city crew meant Steve was out there—rain, snow, heat, blue hard hat, work shirts, jeans and boots, fixing roads, broken water pipes, clogged sewers, never asking a worker to do what he wouldn’t.

Thel’d see him and wave; hear his laughter above the rumble of machinery and smile. His mom “up and found a real guy,” moved out of town. His sister Jenny fled, too, married a much older man with two kids she adored and sometimes managed to give smiles.

Steve rented an apartment in a former motel. Bartended three nights a week at the Tap Room, the bar owned by the best friend of the boxer/pilot. A lot of those nights, Thel’d get a call from Steve at the bar, asking her to pick up dinner he’d ordered from some café. Most of those meals he’d insist on sharing while she sat at the bar nursing a Diet Coke because: “If I start drinking, I’ll like it too much.” Each month, they made a ritual of mailing checks for their student loans. Thel’s check was often light, and more than once, Steve slipped dollars from the tip jar into her jacket “cause you practically work here.” She always tried to say
no
, always needed the cash, knew the Tap Room customers hadn’t been that generous, never embarrassed Steve by calling him on his lie.

Grady

We all need the space to be who we pretend we are.

They never talked about it, but Thel knew women who’d followed Steve home from the Tap Room. One banker’s wife fucked him for two months to get back at her husband. For a while, Thel’d spot Steve’s battered Chevy parked up on Knob Hill outside a trailer of a wild-haired woman nearly twice their age who looked like an Italian movie star and had rolled into town, a job at the library, and a reputation for turning down married big shots from Main Street. One Thursday morning, she squirted charcoal lighter fluid all through the trailer, lit a match and drove away from the blaze of where she’d been. Call it arson or call it art, the sheriff never hunted her and she stayed gone. Steve said nothing about her and Thel never asked, just like he never asked about the men—many married—who came sniffing around her. She told them all
no
long after the tech guy from Havre got tired of the three-hour round trip drive and she got tired of seeing him arrive.

Steve and Thel told each other about phone calls or postcards they got from Jake at various Air Force bases. Thel thought only she kept track of who Jake reached out to the most.

Until one night as they dipped his French fries into ketchup at the bar, Steve told her: “Feels like he’s trying to keep it even.”

“Uh . . . yeah.” She waved a French fry like it was nothing. “That’s like him. Hell, that’s us, right? Who we are. All . . . even.”

“Damn!” said Steve. “All this time I thought we were all odd.”

They laughed and dropped all talk about the score.

Her father died two days before her twenty-sixth birthday, October, 1990. The newspapers reported stories about the end of the Cold War.

Steve stood beside her as they lowered the cheapest coffin she could buy into the frozen ground of the cemetery.

The co-op gave her three days off and because Melinda Jacobson was retiring, Thel knew that, along with debts and the lease on her father’s house, she was inheriting Melinda’s assistant manager job.

“Heck,” said their kindly boss, “as sharp as Thel is, she’ll be running the place before she’s forty.”

November, 1990. The first Texan named Bush was President. Five weeks after the earth swallowed Thel’s fate of being a daughter.

Thel’d worked late the night before, something not often done in her Montana town that respected the clock. She needed to give her staff face-saving time to catch up to what she’d done while they were home with their families, so decided to come in after lunch instead of at nine
A.M
.

The habit of medicating a coughing man woke her before dawn. She lay there listening to silent darkness. Slowed her breathing. Couldn’t make it stop.
Get up or you’ll stay under the covers forever!
She pressed her bare feet on the thin-carpeted floor. Made coffee. Showered, brushed her teeth with mint toothpaste, made her bed, laid out the bra and panties, the blouse, sweater, and slacks she’d wear, wondered what the boss would say when she told him she was through with pantyhose. She was naked. Staring at her work clothes laid out like a corpse on her childhood bed.

Get out of here!
She threw on a blue terrycloth robe, jammed her feet into tattered moccasins, ran outside. The screen door banged behind her. Thel stumbled around to the alley. Ended up standing by the ash tree and the garbage cans, the west wind whipping her shoulder-length hair. One hand combed the brown strands off her empty eyes and the other held the robe closed. Inside her skull echoed
what the hell, what the hell
.

Folks the mayor wouldn’t name had complained about the garbage collectors doing a bad job. The mayor called the city crew’s boss, who bucked it down to street foreman Steve, who wouldn’t chew out the garbage men until after he’d checked out
what
was
what
. After lining out work for his guys at the eight
A.M
. shape-up, he climbed into a white city pickup and, as he often did when inspecting his town, checked out Thel’s block.

The white pickup crawled down the alley past Thel’s house where everything looked normal. Steve dropped his gaze to the side mirror.

Saw Thel’s blue-robed figure.

Saw her reflection shrink in his mirrors.

Steve hit the brakes. Slapped the gearshift into reverse, whined backwards down the alley, bailed out and marched to where she stood brushing her brown hair off her face and holding her blue robe closed. He felt like he’d stepped off the edge of the world. Saw her eyes fill with him and she said nothing—
nothing
—as he cupped her face in his rough hands and kissed her, his heart thundering and
oh yes
it was
that kiss
in the sun and the wind and the cold November morning.

He pulled back. Held her face.