They all grew quiet. Everything was heavy. Their beer glasses. The boots at the ends of their feet. Their own hands.
“You know what I think it is with Gordon,” Boyd said, picking up Dock’s empty. Boyd grabbed a clean pint glass and pulled another and set it in front of Dock. “Come on,” he said. “You’re all thinking the same thing.”
“Oh, shit,” Chuck said. He drained his own beer and set the glass on the inside of the bar. “There’s no Boggs any more than there’s a Lucy Graves.”
“Listen,” Boyd said. “Everyone chose that first Walker to get the dead guy out of town and take care of it. And then his son, and his son’s son, and his son’s son’s son.”
May handed Chuck a new beer. “Last one for me, Maybelline,” he said.
“He was an Indian,” Dock said. “Right?”
Chuck shook his head. “You guys are always seeing Indians where there are none, and never see the ones who actually live around here.”
“Name like Boggs?” Boyd ignored Chuck. “He was a trader. He was visiting the territory, and got trampled, or shot. Supposed to have a tombstone somewhere out here. Homesteaders’ cemetery maybe. Have you ever seen it?” he asked Chuck.
“Not me.”
“You’re all idiots,” May said. “This is the real world, hello.” She knocked on the bar. “There is no Boggs, and Gordon is off grieving somewhere.”
Boyd ignored her. He rubbed his mustache. “So the Walkers picked up the sick guy. Or the dead guy, whatever. Forced to tend him what, five generations? Bring him firewood, blankets, canned food. Maybe, hey,” he raised his glass, “couple beers now and then. And starting this week, it’s Gordon’s turn.”
“It’s why they never leave,” Dock said.
“And they could have. I’ve heard John has a hundred thousand dollars saved that he never spent.”
“Not true,” Chuck said. “Me and Emily just bought Georgie’s groceries. He didn’t leave her a thousand dollars. Where would he get the money? No one paid him for his work.”
“People only owe us what we imagine they’ll give us,” Dock said. There was a silence. “My father used to say that.”
Boyd pulled another beer for himself. “And what happens,” he went on, “if the Walkers stop? If no one takes care of the guy?”
Chuck pointed his beer at Boyd. “Maybe the task falls to you, Boyd.”
“Hell, I’m not taking care of any dead guy. Someone holds the town together by keeping the demon out, it’s not going to be me.”
“Anyway, poor Georgie. Somebody’s going to have to look after her.”
Chuck looked at Dock. “You got to make Gordon go,” he said. “He’ll be wanting to stay. He’ll feel like he has to.”
“Oh, he’ll go,” Boyd said. “He won’t let that girl head off into the world without him.”
“Gordon will never leave,” Jorgensen said, staring at the label on his beer bottle. They all looked down the bar at the old man. “It’s an interesting story,” he said, “for a town like this. In times such as these.”
“What, Boggs?”
Jorgensen raised the bottle and drank, then set his empty on the bar. “But the next man I hear associating that kind of garbage with John Walker and his family, I’m going to break his nose.”
Boyd’s face grew hot. “Beg your pardon, Mr. Jorgensen.”
“Heck,” Jorgensen said, “don’t beg mine.”
May went down to where the old man was sitting and took the empty bottle. “You want another one?”
He raised his hand. “Not for me.”
“We see you didn’t plant any wheat,” she said. The men watched her. “I heard Mrs. Jorgensen wants to go.”
The old man nodded.
“What are you going to do?”
“Know how Dorrie and I have managed fifty-one years of marriage?”
“How’s that?” May asked. Everyone was listening.
“Two words: Yes, dear.”
The men laughed.
“Minot, I heard. Is Dewayne there?”
“He and Lisa have an extra room.”
“Well, Mr. Jorgensen,” Chuck said. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“Well.” The old man stood, his blue eyes rimmed with red, and looked at each of them in turn. “I can make more leasing my water rights than I can growing wheat,” he said. “There’s just too damn much surplus. And too little water. Tell me, how do you figure that?”
Dock made a sound of affirmation.
Jorgensen shook his head. “Here’s another riddle for you,” he said. “How long can a man believe he lives in a country that doesn’t actually exist, standing in the middle of one that does?”
“Oh, come on now,” May said. “Is it as bad as that?”
“Seventy-one years at least. And I’ve known older men and women than that around here. Seventy-one years telling myself it’s farm country. Or that it’s this or that kind of country.” He shook his head again. “When you finally wake up,” he said, “it’s too late. You’re an old man.” He opened his hands, trembling before him.
“Where would you have gone?” Dock asked him.
“Might have just adapted to what’s actually here. That would’ve been the most sensible thing.”
“Surprised to hear you say that,” Chuck said.
The old man grinned. “Doesn’t sound very interesting, does it?”
“Well, come on,” Boyd said. “A man wants to make something of himself.”
“The endless becoming,” the old man said to that. “You become a farmer. You become a businessman. You become a Christian. You become a Democrat. You become a Republican. To hell with it all.” They were all quiet a moment, then Jorgensen raised his hand in farewell. “Well, anyway,” he said, and pushed out through the door. His old Ford pickup was in the street. They watched it pull away.
“God,” Boyd said, “people work themselves to death around here.”
“Perhaps you all didn’t know it,” May said, “isolated out here as you are, but the point is no longer to work hard. It’s to survive the longest, and the most comfortably.”
Chuck whistled and picked up his hat. “Go easy on us, May.”
May reached back and turned up the lights. “That’s it, men,” she said. “Go home and get some sleep.”
It was by their happiness that the good people of Lions approximated their value in the eyes of the Lord and, if you asked them, they would tell you how happy they were. How blessed. On Sundays most of them drove to the Bible Church in Burnsville, so while Lions was small enough, and bare enough, Sunday mornings it was dead empty, and absolutely still. In early summer, as on this particular morning, if you went out walking over one of the weedy fields or even down the dusty road toward the highway, the plain would open for you, pretty as a prayer book. The last of the white stars faded and the day slowly absorbed the paper face of the moon, like a soft blue cloth soaking up a small white spill. Georgianna Walker woke alone, and moved through the rooms of the house, opening windows, then stepped outside toward the highway.
She was in her tennis shoes and nightgown when Chuck found her walking along the bar ditch. He pulled over slowly behind her, a good hundred yards behind, and hustled to catch up with her on foot. He didn’t want to startle her.
“Mrs. Walker?” he called as he jogged, his keys jangling. It was a warm day already, the deep greens from snowmelt and early rain already drying out. She did not stop. She was carrying a white wooden cross. It struck him as odd. There were crosses like that stabbed into the front lawns of some of the houses across Lions, but he didn’t remember ever having seen one at the Walkers’ place. The Walkers weren’t like that. “Mrs. Walker! Georgie!” She paused and looked back. Her pale eyes were radiantly blue. She smiled, and he fell into step beside her.
“Making me run, at
this hour!”
“I’m sorry, Chuck. I didn’t know you were there.”
“Good morning, Georgie. Are you in your nightgown?”
“Oh,” she said, with a little embarrassed laugh, “I figured everyone was in Burnsville.”
“Now didn’t you say last night when we left you that you’d take good care of yourself?”
“I’m sure I did.”
“You shouldn’t be alone on the side of the road like this.”
“Oh, Chuck I’m OK. And I’m hardly alone,” she said, and put her hand on his arm. It was worn and wrinkled and lined with veins. “But thank you.”
“What have you got there?”
She held it up. The cross was six inches wide and ten inches long. “We had it in the shop,” she said. “I don’t know what on earth for, but now of course I’m glad we did.”
“What’s it for?”
“For the dog, Chuck,” she said. “We meant to do it right away, but John got sick.”
He was quiet a moment. “Can I help you with it?”
“I’d appreciate the company and the help.”
They walked side by side until they came to the place where the grass had been overturned and the man had placed a small cairn of stones and gravel. Around them the long fingers of morning light played in the grass, fascinated with it, teasing and combing it in the wind. Georgianna sat down beside the pile of stones in her nightgown and set a hand over it.
“Poor creature,” she said.
An old pickup with a handmade wooden trailer sped past, rattling rusted metal.
“So loyal,” she said, “you know?” She looked up at him.
“Good dogs are that way.”
“We could have all up and left the town but if this dog thought that man was still here somewhere it would’ve waited forever.”
“It’s a strange thing.”
“Beautiful thing.”
They kneeled over the little mound and just above it dug at the dirt and gravel with their fingers until they had five or six inches cleared out.
“Should’ve brought a spade.”
“Oh well,” he said, “now we have dirty hands from good work.”
She smiled. “That sounds like John.” She placed the cross upright and held it still while he filled in the dirt. Then she sat back down in the dirt and held out her hand, palm up. At first he didn’t know what she was doing. Then he sat beside her and took her fingers.
Chuck could see she was crying, and his eyes filled with tears and he pulled his lips into his mouth.
“We are so sorry,” she finally said. “Forgive us. Amen.”
“Amen.”
A rig filled with sheep sped past and stank horribly. Instinctively Chuck held his breath in his nose for a few seconds after it passed. Georgianna brushed off her nightgown and stood, leaning on his hand to steady herself.
“Will you join me and Emily for supper later?”
“Thank you, Chuck, but no. I’ll gladly take the ride home though.”
“Absolutely. Don’t you move. You wait right here and I’ll pull up the car.”
Every day was brighter and hotter than the day before. The air hung still around the empty blocks of Jefferson Street. Hot wind pulsed in the open windows. The highway rippled in dusty waves in the distance. After five days, still no Gordon. Chuck considered filing an official report but was swayed by Georgianna, who said she knew where Gordon was—just taking a break from the world, John used to do it regular—and that he was fine.
For some of the old-timers, disappearances like Gordon’s were just part of living in such deceptively wide-open country. Any of them at the Evening Primrose nursing home could tell you about a handful of faces they’d known as children, and you don’t see them for years, and then there they are again, those old faces at once bright and familiar and ravaged with age.
They’d show up at the bar, maybe.
Or they’d be right there at the nursing home in lawn chairs propped up on the grass with blankets over their laps.
Went off looking for something, some said to explain it, but came back.
Gone forever, others said. Joined that old procession of ghosts walking back and forth, back and forth, from the West Wind motel on the far edge of town and out across the howling wilderness, people and their dogs and mules and covered wagons and broke-down Chevrolets all rolling slowly over the chalk hills and through arroyos beneath a haze of sparkling dust.
It’d started in the hours before dawn one summer some four hundred years earlier when a tribe of men, women, and children left the Spanish colony in New Mexico where they’d toiled beneath the desert sun, and left in pursuit, it’s said, of freedom. Imagine rows of squash cultivated in the midst of alien flowers blooming on cactus. Oxcarts lined up in rows. One sprawling, low-lying adobe fort and half a dozen shacks and outbuildings. Silent as a herd of cats, a band of families, natives and Spanish, French and Mexican, gathered at the edge of the outpost where patches of hard corn met the sand, and left. Quietly walking, no running, no horses, to the north and east. They crossed over a thousand miles, one step at a time, an entire people gone overnight, as if kidnapped. The Spanish, alongside the French, led by a blue-eyed, black-haired man who’d had his nose bitten off in a fight, sent out their own search expedition to find them. These missing people had been their property, it was said. On horseback they combed the plains from present-day Mexico up through Arizona and New Mexico, and ended up right around Lions, on the high plains in eastern Colorado, before all tracks ran out and the search party turned around empty-handed.
It was said by witnesses—men hauling furs and liquor across the Southwest on mules or in ox-drawn carts—that they vanished in broad daylight, and that their number increased all the time as new wanderers joined them.
Truckers have seen them.
One guy who runs I-80 from eastern Iowa to Reno will call it in twice a year. A thousand of them, he’ll say, their hair blowing back, kids, mules, white men, red men, black men, yellow men, women of all shapes and sizes, baskets on their heads, packs on their backs. And you don’t want them to look at you, he’ll say. You don’t know why but you don’t.
Marybeth Sharpe once claimed to have walked among them for an hour one afternoon, from the old Dairy Queen to way out behind the northernmost edge of Jorgensen’s hay fields where bluffs from the dry riverbed begin to rise up into the mesa.
They have no particular aims or goals, no ambition, neither hope nor regret. Over the years, they’ve pulled others into their circle. Children, men, women, lost or mistreated animals. Anyone out of place—anyone who notices when, say, a single white star aligns with a stone peak and a blue spruce. If you’re attentive, you’ll see it. If you miss it—the painted doorway, the odd gentleman, the woman who seems to be looking up at you from deep within a well—they’ll disappear, and the gate will close again.
“Let me in,” Gordon would sometimes try, addressing, say, the evening star.
“Gordon, no.” Leigh would come up behind him, his face pointed out the broken window at the stripe of cottonwoods waving their hands in the twilight.
By the morning of Leigh’s eighteenth birthday the red potted petunias outside the Lucy Graves had shriveled into black tissue paper, like spiders on stems, and the gulls and terns that used to inhabit the standing water of irrigated fields until mid-summer had already left for the landfill south of town.
Leigh watched the window for the Walkers’ truck—he wouldn’t forget today. Now he would come. By lunch when the volunteer firefighters led by Chuck Garcia passed the diner, it was already one hundred and three degrees. Chuck’s lights were spinning, but no sirens.
“What’s this?” May leaned out over the counter. “There a fire?”
“Anything moving that fast on a day like this is heading toward a water hole,” Boyd said, and as
it turned out, he was right.
Leigh stepped into the street, and he and May followed. There were three customers in the booths, all strangers from the highway, and they stayed where they were.
Marybeth Sharpe stood up from her rocking chair in front of her store, and waved.
“What the heck’s going on?” Boyd called to her.
“Search me,” she hollered. She was grinning, her wide hips jutting out from the top of a wide, long, dark skirt. Something was happening—it was like a holiday.
Still in her apron, Leigh went with Boyd in his truck. They passed the Evening Primrose where an ambulance had already stopped. Stricken faces of nurse aides and old folks hung like white ghosts in the heat. Boyd slowed and followed Chuck’s vehicle.
Behind them, May hustled the last of her lunch patrons, turned the diner’s “open” sign to “closed,” crossed the street, unlocked the side door to the bar, and sat in the cool dark to wait.
By the time Boyd and Leigh reached the source of the commotion, the first responders had already emptied out of the firetruck and begun the systematic process of opening the water tower. It took Chuck and his assistants very little time to figure out the trouble, because a similar thing had happened recently in Chicago, where a young man had been murdered and his body dumped in the water tower on top of an exclusive hotel. The Burnsville ambulances filled up with five sick children from the day care and eleven old men and women from the Evening Primrose before heading back toward the clinic. Diarrhea, vomiting, crippling stomach cramps—and knowing what’d caused it made everybody sicker. They found the tall stranger in the tank of the town’s water tower—his lungs full, his abdomen bloated, his coat spread open like black wings—floating just beneath the surface in his liquid tomb. Chuck and the men from Burnsville tried to keep the people of Lions back, but they all crowded around fifty feet from the tower, where Chuck had set up tape. Then, of course, they all turned away, hands over their mouths—even the grown men. Boyd held Leigh up on his arm and brought her back to the truck.
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