Lions

by Bonnie Nadzam

  Early summer mornings in the shop were his favorite: green ribbons of prairie sandreed combing themselves through the short yellow wool of last year’s grass, blue fields of new wheat. At seven o’clock he’d haul up the corrugated metal door of the shop that opened to the road, introducing a new silence, deeper than when the door had been closed. Dust motes and gold-dusted moths. Smell of coffee. Above the sheet-metal roofing, looping whistles of orioles and shrikes in the blanched sunlight. Out back his father would turn on high plains radio news. A red Dodge Ram or a long forest green Oldsmobile with shining chrome hubcabs might float past as Gordon stood in the open door. From the Gas & Grocer he might hear voices calling, a car door closing. There was the smell of sheep manure from the farms farther east. Everything moved in slow motion in clear light. He knew the days couldn’t remain so. It was a sort of presentiment, a flash of knowledge in the midst of dread, the medium its very message: none of this will last.

  The morning after the stranger disappeared, Gordon’s father had gone north in his truck as he sometimes did for a few days at a time, and left him with two pieces of carbon steel pipe to look over. This wasn’t a real job, John had said, it was just an experiment—insurance against the future. He opened his large hand on the scrap pipe. “Likely more gas and oil pipe in the next few decades, and less irrigation pipe.”

  “Jorgensen didn’t plant any wheat,” Gordon said.

  John nodded. “There’ll be less and less wheat.”

  “What do you want me to do with this?” It was much larger pipe than he was accustomed to working with.

  His father had given him an odd instruction, but now Gordon had the shop door open and was doing as he’d been told. He set the pipe in the welding position, and began an imaginary weld, feeling how the electrode would need to move, how his sight lines would change continuously, how the weight distribution and position of his body would adjust themselves as he ran the bead. The line would be straight, but curved. This was difficult. Even without striking the arc, he kept losing his line. He could see why the dry run was important. He wasn’t used to welding pipe this large, and even scrap like this was probably as expensive as it was rare. He stood, brushed off his pants, and turned off the radio. He took a sip of coffee, and returned to the pipe. For a moment he closed his eyes, then held the torch without bracing his arm, and again, bracing his arm.

  “It’s the Karate Kid,” a voice said. Gordon felt his cheeks warm and turned around.

  It was Dex Meredith, a big, blond, three-sport athlete from Burnsville, on his way to some college in California. He was standing beside a short guy from school, a baseball player with reddish hair. Gordon thought his name was Ryan.

  “Don’t let us stop you.” Dex put up his hands.

  Gordon walked straight toward them, reached overhead for the shop door, and pulled it shut. He stood with his back against the door.

  “Sorry man,” Dex called out. “You looked like the Karate Kid.”

  Gordon said nothing.

  “He really did, didn’t he?” Dex said to his buddy.

  The other guy was still laughing.

  “Guy is just like his dad,” Dex said. Gordon could tell by his voice that they were walking away. “They even look the same.”

  “Got to respect him for one thing, though.”

  “Nope, him and Leigh haven’t done it yet. Something about a family curse: welding torch for a dick.”

  “Shit. I would have done her in, like, seventh grade.”

  “I know, I know.”

  For the next three days, Gordon sat in the shop with the power off, the coffeepot on, and a stack of paperbacks. He knew he was disrupting a sort of ceremony of his father’s—the paperbacks were to be read after work, after you’d washed your hands and eaten, and not before. But what was that rule but an arbitrary preference. After three nights, John Walker returned from the north in time for dinner.

  He sat with Gordon and Georgianna at the kitchen table eating pork chops from one of Dock’s hogs, sugary applesauce from a jar, and frozen peas cooked in butter. There was a little sunburn on John’s cheekbones and his lips were chapped. He looked across the table at Gordon and smiled.

  “The difficult thing with welding that pipe,” he said, “will be the tie-ins coming into and going off the tacks.”

  Gordon looked out the window.

  “In the morning,” John said, “we’ll turn up the grinder and I’ll show you what to do.”

  Georgianna glanced at her husband and shook her head.

  Gordon was aware of the sudden silence, and that his parents were waiting for him to say something, or look at them. He kept his gaze pointed out the window. “I was thinking maybe I need some time off from welding.”

  John looked down at his plate and cut his meat.

  He did not speak again at the table, and when he was done he walked outside. Over the next four days he and Gordon would speak little, working together not at all. Georgianna followed John outside and Gordon scraped the plates and washed them, watching his parents watching the magpies.

  There’s one about an old homesteader with hair the color of milk poured out around her waist and knees and rippling across the hard-packed dirt floor. It’s after this spirit that May Ransom named the diner on Jefferson Street. They say that Lucy Graves never leaves her house, its walls years ago regularly whitened with unslaked lime from the riverbed now dry and brown as stacked matches and surrounded by burnt gardens of splintered glass and broken farm machinery. You can find her old place north of the Gas & Grocer, back up the Monger Road and half a mile behind the coulee among the weeds.

  If you’re up there and pay attention—aching blue sky overhead, mute roar of eighteen wheelers on the highway behind you, minuscule flies swinging in loose knots over the tops of Queen Anne’s lace—continuity stops. All time reduces to one moment, this moment, all moments the same one, this one, and there she’ll be before you, plain as the hands at the ends of your arms.

  All day, every day, she crochets elaborate spiderwebbed doilies of her own hair, weaving in bird feathers, seeding grasses, the shoelace tails of field mice, and tiny braids of fur from the hides of dead cattle, dead deer, and dead rats. She’ll tell you about it, what brought all the settlers out and for a time trapped them on his huge, wide-open ground: misguided longing.

  They told us stories, she’ll tell you. And we believed them. Don’t believe them. Use your eyes. Use the five good senses God gave you. Use the six.

  She’ll tell you they were looking for paradise, for they’d been promised nothing less. It was a story they repeated to each other so often in their journey west that even as they laid eyes on the high desert, they believed it, still. All around them, at last, a spacious country—newly cleared—in which to live as God intended men and women to live, to manifest the living Word with every pass of the plow, to amass a little of the abundance the good Lord had assured them, and to show the rest of the world what such blessings and prosperity looked like.

  When it grew hot, however, and the rains stopped, the sun baked the ground. They scoured the greasewood plain and shallow rivers for as many creatures as they could find, kill, and eat. The men named their guns. The women who had lost their children named the birds and stones and missing trees, the folds of country rising up to the north into whipped peaks of dust and cracked rock.

  All the while she speaks, this Lucy Graves still believes it’s sometime in May 1870 and she’ll politely ask for passage back home. Going west, she’ll tell anyone who will listen, was a terrible mistake.

  “I could be that woman,” May Ransom would sometimes say to the groups of college girls passing through on their way back to the Front Range when they read the Lucy Graves story on the backs of their laminated menus. But they never asked where May was from, and they didn’t need further explanation. They could see the town they had stopped in, and they coul
d imagine living there.

  The diner was a square building of white painted cinderblock, yellow curtains, and a storm door. Tiny white Christmas lights all year, white vinyl flowers glued to a green vine stapled above the front windows. A pale red-lit CAFÉ sign hanging outside.

  Inside, May served fried chicken hearts, biscuits with thick yellow gravy, liver and onions, meat loaf, chicken fried steak, canned green beans, canned corn, homemade hash and mashed potatoes, coffee, juice, eggs, hotcakes, chocolate cake with lard icing, and sticky fruit and pudding pies. A thin spread of butter went on every sandwich, and she designed the most incongruous combinations for each: grape jelly on sliced ham; peanut butter, pickle chips, and bologna; coleslaw, cream cheese, and cucumber on grilled hamburger buns. Genius born of necessity, she said, since the Sysco truck came only once every four weeks—that was with even less frequency than the beer trucks brought Coors and High Life to Boyd’s bar.

  On this particular afternoon, Boyd sat on a swivel stool with a cold one he’d brought in from across the street, the ash-colored bruise dark on his face. The buttons on his shirt were buttoned wrong. May was behind the counter prepping for dinner, peppering chicken thighs laid out on two giant cookie sheets. Leigh was covering the tail end of the lunch shift and still had one woman finishing her sandwich. With every work shift, she had the increasing sense of inhabiting a reality in which she didn’t seem to fit; the very edges of the counter and tables, the laminate floor, the door swinging open and closed, even the weight of her own face—it all seemed to punctuate a sense that the world was not what it seemed, not what she was relying on it to be. It was less a feeling to investigate than one to dispense with. It was a symptom of being in Lions. So as she wiped down the empty tables, waiting on the last woman, she counted and recounted her tips and added them to the growing tally she was keeping in her head, alongside the number of days until she left. There was something reassuring in the counting, itself. And when she had her totals: $788, sixty-three days, she began to amass a mental list of all the things she would get in college, where at last she’d be in the world. Sundresses. Silver jewelry. A turquoise ring. A new bedspread on a big new comfortable bed. New makeup. Fall sweaters. Boots. A real haircut.

  Outside on the street, Marybeth Sharpe sat on the sidewalk in a rocking chair beside the front door of her junk store, the only such store in a string of them that was still open for business. John used to give Leigh and Gordon a dollar apiece to go inside and pick something out: a broken green dash lamp; a woman’s leather boot stitched with yellowed seed pearls. A loop of steel attached to an empty husk felted with something like mold—a rabbit’s foot, they determined, carried close inside someone’s pocket for the most scarce and ardently sought-after resource in the county: luck. Even now, since there’d been a big snow in April, a few misty-eyed old-timers had begun to talk hopefully again of shifting rain belts. By such lights, you might still find a remote, wild, unexplored land somewhere in America, and a race of lost men living there; you might still find a city of gold, or a mountain of salt.

  There was nothing remarkable about this last woman Leigh was waiting on in the diner. She must have seen the hand-painted sign for the Lucy Graves and come in off the highway, as everyone did, a constant if not thick stream of traffic from the westbound highway that kept Lions alive. She drove a silver Honda Civic, and wore white tennis shoes, blue jeans, a red T-shirt. Leigh seated her in a booth by the window. The woman ordered the lunch special, tuna melt on rye, and black coffee. She ate silently and efficiently, and set her white paper napkin folded beside her clean plate.

  “Have just a minute?” she asked, when Leigh set the check facedown on the gold-flecked Formica table.

  “What can I get you?”

  “You’re as wide open as a telephone booth.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Anyone could step right in and call up whatever they wanted.”

  The hair went up on the back of Leigh’s neck.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” the woman said.

  Leigh glanced back at Boyd and her mother. They were bent over the counter looking at something in the Burnsville newspaper.

  “Look,” the woman said. “You can close the space above your head like this.” She moved her small, thick hands over her own head as if she were smoothing down flower petals into a cap around the top of her skull. “Just like that. For safety.”

  “Safety?”

  “Don’t you have the sense,” the woman said, “that something wants to bargain with you?”

  Outside in the street the wind lifted the thin white hair off Marybeth Sharpe’s head as she rocked back and forth in her old wooden chair.

  “Can I get you some change?” Leigh asked.

  “Tell me you don’t feel it. Almost knocked me back a minute ago. What was in your head just now?”

  Leigh picked up the check and looked at it without comprehending it, and set it back down.

  “Isn’t there anyone that you love?” the woman asked.

  Without thinking, Leigh felt Gordon’s hand in hers. She felt, without naming, an old song in a haunted place, a flare of heat in her chest, a key that fitted a door.

  “Three seconds of your day,” the woman said, again gesturing with her hands around her head. “Close it up. Do it regular. Morning and night.” She took the check and began rooting around in her giant brown purse. She withdrew two five-dollar bills. “Something is already engaged.” She stood and smoothed her T-shirt over the folds of her belly. “Something’s in there with you already.”

  Leigh held the check and cash and watched the woman leave. Outside in the street the woman made a U-turn and headed back toward the frontage road. Marybeth Sharpe waved at the car from her rocking chair.

  Leigh set the woman’s dirty dish and cup in the bus tub, slipped the five-dollar bills into her pocket. She opened the register and closed it. Folded the woman’s check and dropped it in the trash.

  “What was all that about?” Boyd asked. May had corrected his buttons.

  Leigh wiped her hands on her apron. “Looking for a tall man in a pair of stolen coveralls.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “I told her he went north, that you chased him out of town with a hatchet. She asked if you were the one who killed the dog.”

  Boyd threw up his hands. Over breakfast alone he’d heard ten different versions of his own complicity in various crimes involving the stranger and his dog. “I didn’t kill the dog. I didn’t hang it, I didn’t burn it, and I didn’t run it over with my truck.”

  “Leigh,” May called from behind the counter where she was stooped with her head in the dishwasher. “Will you get Gordon or John and tell them I need someone to fix this thing again?”

  “I told you I would do it.”

  “Don’t you touch it Boyd Hardy.”

  He put his hands up, his beer bottle hooked between his thumb and forefinger. “Bring me another beer when you come back,” he told Leigh.

  May stood and looked at Boyd. “Did you give her a key to the bar?”

  “No?”

  “I thought I was done for the day,” Leigh said.

  “Go go go.” May waved her hand. “But tell John we need him over here.”

  “I’m taking some of these sandwiches.”

  When Leigh reached the shop, Dock and Emery Sterling were there with John, as they often were. Emery ran across the shop in his welding helmet to greet Leigh, then walked back to the workbench stiff legged with his long sunburnt arms uplifted and flexed, the way he almost always walked, as if he were playing a game: pretend I’m stuck in a human body that can only move like this. He was always smiling, his chin wet with his own spit, and flapping his hands like big pink birds. He was the same age as Gordon and Leigh, and though in all his life he had never spoken a word, Dock and his wife Annie insisted he had a language. When f
rom the bed he reached up to touch the ends of his mother’s bright hair, that was a word. When he threw back his white-blond head and looked up at the stars that Dock told him were his cousins, that too was a word.

  Emery loved the shop. He’d sit on the workbench and swing his legs in circles as he watched John show Dock how to weld the muffler bracket on Emery’s ATV, or how best to attach hog wire to the steel posts around the Sterlings’ lot, or how to prep steel pipe coral with phosphoric acid and water. For all of this instruction, Dock was given a small hourly wage because, John reasoned, Dock was doing most of the work himself. It wasn’t charity, but it wasn’t business, either. People would say John was out of his mind—he had a wife and son to support, for the love of God—and Dock, a huge man who lived modestly off his hogs and meager patch of alfalfa and whose wife had to watch their great big boy twenty-four hours a day, he, like everyone else, absolutely knew it, and was filled with equal parts wonder and gratitude. One, it seemed to him, never showed up without the other.

  Late this afternoon, Dock and John were bent over a couple dozen drill tips. Dock couldn’t find a drill for his no-till planter that he liked, or that fit, and wanted to make his own. That was a song John Walker loved to hear.

  “You want to get them as close to 60 Rockwell C as possible,” John was saying.

  “Expensive?”

  John shrugged. “Anything less,” he nodded at the window toward the board-hard ground, “you’ll be back in the shop halfway through the planting season looking for repairs or new drills.”