by Larry Watson
The older woman stops in the bathroom doorway and looks at the girl.
“My cat!” Jennifer says as she frantically scans the room. “You left the door open! Where’s my cat?”
The woman stares at Jennifer without comprehension.
“There was a cat,” Jennifer says, her words tumbling over each other like pebbles loosed on a mountainside. “A cat, a cat, a black-and-white cat. And he was in this room and the door, if the door was open, he’d go out. Did you see him go out?”
The woman shakes her head no, but it’s by no means clear that she has understood.
Jennifer falls to her knees and looks under the bed. She gets up and looks behind the dresser, the chair, the curtains. She pushes past the woman and looks in the bathroom, in the tub, behind the toilet. “My God,” she says. “My God, my God. Mickey!”
She runs out the door and half sobs half shouts, “Here Mickey, here Mickey! Please, please, Mickey!”
Once again she drops to her hands and knees, this time to look under their Volkswagen. There’s no cat there, but Jennifer crawls over to the only other car in the lot, a rusting Ford Galaxie. Mickey is not under that vehicle either.
Behind the Rimrock is a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, and Jennifer walks around its perimeter, heedless of the way her bare legs are being scratched. As she walks she says again and again in a voice barely above a whisper, “Mickey, Mickey—please, Mickey.”
When Jennifer returns to the room, the door is closed, the maid having moved on to another unit. Jennifer steps inside and asks loudly, “Mickey? Are you here?”
The beds are made, the coverlets pulled so tight and smooth that if a cat had jumped on either bed, its paw prints would show. The wastebasket has been emptied. Clean towels hang in the bathroom. The bowls of cat food and fresh water are full.
Jennifer backs out of the room, pulling the door closed as she goes. But she has not even gotten out of the parking lot when she returns. She unlocks the door and leaves it open a few inches, just wide enough for a cat to push its way inside.
ROY PULLS INTO the covered carport, but he makes no move to get out of his car. Inside the trailer are the three people he’s loved deeper and longer than any others, yet he remains here, thirty feet away. The Celica’s engine throbs insistently. It would be so easy to put the car in reverse and drive away from his town, his job, his marriage, from every duty and obligation in his life. But some hooks can’t be shaken.
JENNIFER MAKES HER way slowly down the block where she recently walked. It’s a route an animal might follow if it were following its owner’s scent. Every few steps she stops and looks carefully into the yards. She calls softly, “Here kitty-kitty-kitty. Here Mickey. Good kitty.”
She stops in the middle of a block and turns a slow circle, looking in every direction of the compass. The tears smearing her cheeks are tears of hopelessness.
MRS. LINDERMAN STIFFLY pushes herself up from the sofa. “Excuse me,” she says. Dean has fallen asleep in his chair, and Edie has not spoken a word since he closed his eyes. “I hear a car out there.”
She steps outside and marches over to the passenger side of the car with its idling engine. She bends down and leans her head through the open window.
She says in a whisper, “You think I don’t know what’s what? You think I don’t know what you been plotting ever since your brother brought her through the door all them years ago? And now you got her here for you, not for him. And you’re sitting out here because you got what you wanted and it scares the hell out of you.”
Roy Linderman doesn’t say anything, but the face he turns to his mother is that of a haunted man.
“Now,” his mother says, “instead of sitting out here like a coward, you’ll take me for a little ride and we’ll let the two of them have their moments alone. And when we come back you’ll do what you can to help your brother live out his days in peace. And not one word, not one goddamn word, to him or that woman about what’s in that scheming black heart of yours.”
Mrs. Linderman opens the car door and climbs awkwardly into the low seat. She slams the door behind her. “Once your brother is dead and buried,” she says, “you can do what you want to get your way. But not before. You hear me? Now drive. And I don’t give a good goddamn where.”
DEAN LINDERMAN HAS slept through his mother’s departure, but when Edie rises to investigate the sound of a car driving away his eyes open.
“Edie?”
She turns toward his voice. “I think your mother went somewhere with Roy.”
A shudder starts at his head, shakes his shoulders and torso, and runs right down to his feet. “I get so damn cold,” he says. “My thermostat must be screwed up or something.”
“Can I get you a blanket?”
“I better get back in bed.” He tries to sit upright in the recliner, but his weight doesn’t seem sufficient to move the lower part of the chair back to the floor. Then he tries to climb out over one side of the chair.
Edie rushes over to him. “Dean, wait. Let me—”
His strength gives out, and he collapses back into the chair.
“Here,” Edie says, extending her hands, “I’ll help you.”
Dean reaches out but then stops and withdraws his hands. “What happened, Edie?”
The question seems to confuse her, and she steps back uncertainly, as if she’s suddenly been called upon to explain everything the years can do—death, divorce, cancer, love, the death of love, departures, returns . . .
“Your wrist,” Dean says.
“It’s nothing,” Edie says.
“What happened?” he asks.
“I slipped. I fell. You remember how clumsy I was.”
“No,” says Dean. “No, I don’t remember that.”
She smiles and lifts her shoulders helplessly.
Is it that they were once in love and lovers are forever attuned to the other’s lies or that Dean is dying and he guesses at truths that others must let pass? He asks her, “Did your husband do that to you?”
Because he’s dying does she decide it’s all right to nod?
“Oh, Edie, Edie.”
Now he’s able to sit up in the recliner and get his feet on the floor. He reaches out for her again, and Edie steps inside his outstretched arm.
GARY DUNN CARRIES in his wallet two photographs, one of his wife and one of his daughter. The picture of Edie is from five years ago at the Granite Valley Merchants’ Association Christmas Ball. The association hired a professional photographer for the evening to take pictures of couples upon their arrival. Gary asked for a second photograph, this one of Edie alone. In that holiday photograph Edie is unsmiling, and she looks uncomfortable in the clinging, low-cut green-velvet dress that Gary purchased for her.
The photograph of Jennifer was taken two years ago for her school yearbook, before her prettiness overcame her adolescent awkwardness—the too-large nose, the overly made-up unfocused eyes, the hairstyle she hadn’t yet learned to make her own, the expression that’s closer to grimace than grin.
But at every stop Gary makes on his drive from Granite Valley to Gladstone, he makes it a point to take out the photos and ask gas station attendants and waitresses if they’ve seen these pretty women.
“They went on ahead of me,” Gary explains at the Mobil station in Butler, Montana. “We’re on the family vacation. I’m wondering how far out in front they are.”
“Uh-huh,” says the young man who takes Gary’s money.
“Have you seen them?” Gary asks. “They’d have come through yesterday or earlier today.”
“Nope.”
At the Steel Wheel Truck Stop and Diner just outside Duncan, Gary shows the photos to the waitress, a gray-faced woman as skinny as the pencil tucked behind her ear. She barely glances at the photos before saying, “Haven’t seen ’em.”
But a pair of highway construction workers sitting only one stool away perk up at the sight of the photos. The one closest to Gary, an older man tanned as
dark as saddle leather, says, “Let me see those.”
Gary doesn’t hand over the pictures, but he holds them both out for inspection.
The younger worker, who wears a dirt- and oil-stained Seattle Mariners cap, reaches out and puts his index finger right on the image of Edie as if he were probing ripe fruit. “This the wife?” he asks.
“God damn,” the older man says. He looks up at Gary. “She’s out on the road ahead of you?”
Gary says, “That’s right.”
“If I was you,” the older man says, “I’d keep her on a shorter rope.”
Gary puts both photographs back in his shirt pocket and signals for the waitress to bring the check.
“SHALL I PULL back the covers?” Edie asks. It’s apparent Dean’s been lying on top of the bedspread.
“Please,” he answers. He climbs under the sheet gingerly. “Sorry,” he says, “to be such a party pooper.”
“Shh.”
He shivers once more but then relaxes with the sheet and blanket pulled up to his chin. He closes his eyes and says, “But that’s the way it always was, wasn’t it? We’d go to a party or something, and you wanted to stay and I wanted to go home.”
“Just rest now.”
“Now I’m going and you’re staying . . .”
Edie starts to back away from the bed, but he reaches out with surprising speed and grabs her uninjured arm. “Wait, please. I need to say something to you.”
She shakes her head. “No. There’s nothing you have to say to me.”
“Edie. I never thought I’d see you again, much less have a chance to say any of this.”
Edie shakes her head. “We don’t have to say a thing to each other. Not anymore.”
But she doesn’t walk away.
“You know what I lay here thinking about when I can’t sleep?” Dean says. “Which is a hell of a lot of the time. I fall asleep easy enough but I just can’t stay asleep. Something hurts or . . . or I just wake up. Maybe it’s the medicine. Or maybe it’s because I’m scared. And it’s my mind telling me, ‘Come back, come back—it’s not time, not yet.’ Anyway. I lay here and what I end up thinking about is all the times we didn’t fuck. Is that all right to say? Is that too crude?”
Edie gives a little shake of her head.
“No? Okay then. And I know it was me. It was all me. What the hell was the matter with me? I had a sexy wife—why wouldn’t I fuck her every chance I got? Why wouldn’t I, Edie? Why? I ask myself that over and over and over, and goddamned if I can figure out an answer. Other than that you were married to a fool. And the hell of it is then I could and I didn’t, and now I can’t and I’d give anything, anything, even what I got left of my life, if I could fuck you again.”
He releases her arm now and with both hands makes a sweeping gesture that takes in the lower half of his body. “Hell, I can’t even get a hard-on anymore. Not since the operation.”
She hasn’t seen this man in decades. The bond between them was dissolved by a court decree. And when they were husband and wife, Dean would never have spoken so intimately. If he had . . . But that’s a thought as hopeless as Dean’s condition. Edie understands that the nearness of death has a power to induce forgiveness that not even love can match. And she and Dean did love each other. She never doubted that, and she hopes he didn’t either.
She says, “I’m another man’s wife, Dean.”
He looks at her for a long moment with eyes that glisten darkly as only the eyes of the dying do. Then he points to her swollen right wrist. “Wife to a man who did that? Are there marks I’m not seeing?”
Edie shakes her head no.
“I’ll kill him for you. What the hell do I have to lose? He can’t be doing that to you.”
Edie’s smile is the smile that indulges a child. But now it is her eyes that glisten. “Oh, you’ll kill him, will you?”
“Say the word. Gun or knife. Or poison.”
“Or bomb?” she says with a laugh.
“Or bomb. What the hell.” Now Dean is laughing too.
Then Edie steps back but only a foot or two. While Dean watches her, she reaches behind herself, her hands sliding up inside her red T-shirt. She unhooks her brassiere and then moves closer to the bed again.
“Give me your hand,” she says.
He raises his arm, and Edie takes his hand and guides it up inside her shirt and presses it to her breast.
Dean closes his eyes. “Jesus. Jesus H. Christ. The back seat of Tom Dove’s old DeSoto. After a basketball game. Must have been twenty below that night. Jesus, Edie.”
She leans harder into his hand. “What year?”
“Nineteen fifty-six?”
She smiles and slides slowly, gently away from his touch. “Fifty-seven,” she says. She fastens her brassiere.
His eyes open. “A good year. A very good year.”
“We had a few. More than a few.”
He just nods but that motion alone seems to exhaust him.
“You rest now.” She smooths the bedcover.
“Are you coming back?”
“I’ll be back,” she says.
WHEN MRS. LINDERMAN returns she finds Edie sitting on the end of the couch with her arms crossed for warmth as if her thermostat is broken too.
“Roy’s waiting for you,” Mrs. Linderman says and nods toward the door.
He’s leaning against his car and wearing a little groove in the gravel with the toe of his shoe.
“How long does he have?” Edie asks.
“On TV,” Roy says, “the doctors are always telling their patients, three months, six months. A year. In real life they don’t like to say. I tried to get it out of the doctor in Billings, but the best I got was, ‘It’s hard to say.’ I kind of lost my temper. ‘Hard to say?’ I said to him, ‘You son of a bitch, try watching it happen.’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I have, Mr. Linderman. More times than you can imagine.’ Put me in my place.” Roy reaches for his cigarettes but then leaves the pack in his pocket. “Mom told me she expects to find him dead every time she opens the bedroom door. But then the next day she says she thinks he’ll beat this thing. So . . . You’re welcome to take a guess. I’m a little too close to assess the situation.”
“It hurt my heart to see him.”
“Of course there’s the whole will-to-live thing,” says Roy. “I hear that talked about a lot. The will to live.”
“As far as I can tell,” Edie says, “we don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. One way or the other.”
IT’S NOT AS high or as long as the hill leading in and out of Granite Valley, but this bluff, where Gary Dunn has pulled off the highway and gotten out of his car, affords a view of the whole of Gladstone, from its newer houses on the northwest bench to its shacks south of the railroad tracks. Gary walks to the edge where the sandstone has eroded over the years, leaving deep grooves carved in the rock face. He crouches, picks up a stone the size of a lemon, and tosses it underhanded over the rim.
Then Gary steps back, and with a finger in the air he traces a pattern in the city’s streets. “Got you,” he says, and then he gets back into his car.
ROY STOPS AT a red light at the corner of Cheyenne and Third Street. “I suppose,” he says, “Dean wanted to know all about how being Mrs. Dunn has worked out for you.”
“Not really. He didn’t ask me much about my life at all.” She looks at Roy. “Come to think of it, you haven’t either.”
“Hey, just seeing you is enough for us.”
Edie says nothing.
When they pull into the motel parking lot, Jennifer is sitting on a curbstone in front of the Volkswagen. Behind her the door to room 106 is still open a few inches.
At the sight of her mother, Jennifer’s tears begin again. “Mickey. He got out . . .”
“Oh, honey.” Edie puts her arms around her daughter, but Jennifer looks over her mother’s shoulder at the man getting out of the Toyota.
Edie releases Jennifer and asks, “Did
you look—”
“Everywhere, Mom. I’ve been up and down the block, and I’ve called him and called him. What if he tries to go back home?”
Roy Linderman ambles over, and Edie says, “Jennifer, this is Mr. Linderman. Mr. Roy Linderman.”
Roy holds out his hand. “I thought for a minute I’d traveled back in time,” he says. “You look like your mom back when we were in school together.”
Jennifer shakes his hand and says, “Pleased to meet you.” But then she turns to look at her mother as if she needs to check any such resemblance for herself.
“I bet,” says Roy, “you’ll be the homecoming queen just like your mom.”
“Except I wasn’t,” Edie says and steers Jennifer toward the motel room. “Let’s look in the room again.”
Once inside, Jennifer leans against the dresser while her mother gets down on her hands and knees and lifts the spread on one of the beds.
“You can get your things together,” Edie says while looking into the dark space under the bed. “We’re staying at the Lindermans’ tonight.”
“No, Mom, no! If Mickey comes back, he’ll come back here.”
Edie gets up from the floor. She lifts her suitcase onto the bed, opens it, and rearranges the clothes inside. Then she goes into the bathroom and packs her toiletries in a small pink plastic bag.
Jennifer hasn’t moved from her position by the dresser.
When the suitcase is closed and latched, Edie says, “You need to pack up too, Jen.”
She lifts the suitcase from the bed and carries it outside where Roy is waiting. He takes the suitcase from her and puts it in the trunk of the Toyota.
Edie looks back at the open door of the motel room. Her daughter is standing there, her face streaked with tears. Meanwhile Roy waits with his hand on the trunk’s open lid.
Moral fatigue suddenly settles on Edie like a weight. She’s been back in Gladstone for less than a day, and she’s already caught between competing demands—and one involves a Linderman.
And there’s her car . . . She wishes she could climb in, start the engine, and head off in a new direction, one that would lead to neither of the towns that have a claim on her. Yet she doubts that such a place—call it the City of No Obligations—exists, or that she could find her way there.