When they returned, Boyd joined May in the bar, which he decided not to open that night. He poured a whiskey, then sat beside her.
“Did you hear?” he asked her.
“You better tell me.”
He told her. She sat staring, her face propped on her hand, her hand over her mouth. “His face was all—” Boyd’s voice roughened. “It was terrible, May. He was coming apart.”
“Did Leigh see?”
Boyd nodded.
“Ah, shit. Where is she now?”
“Waiting for Gordon somewhere, I’d say.”
Boyd and May sat with their elbows on the bar, their drinks between their hands.
“If that boy’s gone another day we ought to have Chuck do something,” May said. “Send someone after him.”
“Georgianna doesn’t seem worried.”
“I’m not sure she’s got all her faculties about her. You should see her, Boyd.”
“I’ve seen all the seeing I can handle.” He emptied his glass and poured another.
“I knew it was bad,” she said. “And our fault.”
“Aw, come on, May,” he paused and looked at her over the rim of his glass. “We don’t know why he did what he did.”
“Why are you drinking whiskey, then? In the middle of the day?”
When children in Burnsville told it, the stranger was still alive when they found him, and he choked out his last watery breath right there in front of the three men and one woman in coveralls who came from Burnsville to drain the tank. They said that days earlier, a man with a big silver mustache had led the people of Lions, who carried the stranger above their heads and down the street and dumped him in the water tower with their own hands. They said the stranger was hard to kill, that he fought for his life. They huddled together in the bathroom in the dark and looked into their own reflections to see the fear that was in his eyes when the cone-shaped lid was lowered down over him.
But in Lions, no one—not the children, not anyone—wanted to talk about it. And no one wanted the tank, which had been there since 1919, cleaned or refilled. The county coroner came out for the body, and Chuck put out a wire, and made that call to North Platte after all. There was no record of any missing man from the place or from any town nearby who fit the description and, in fact, no record of any missing man fitting that description in decades’ worth of records.
“Not like we’d know if he’d been missing for years,” the representative from Nebraska told Chuck on the phone. “But you do sometimes hear a story like that.”
“What about before that?” Boyd asked Chuck later that week. “Like, you know, a hundred years back?”
May set her hand on Chuck’s shoulder as she passed behind him with two cold beers on a tray. “Don’t encourage him, Chuck.”
Chuck didn’t think it was funny. He’d dropped the ball. He should have taken a photo. Wired out the details. Put all the information in the bank. He should not have visited the man in the night and brought him beer. He should not have booked him informally, or at all. The dog, the man, all the people sick, it was his fault, in a very real and legal sense. He wondered why everybody blamed Boyd instead of blaming him. It was a whole godforsaken county of ardent belief and powerful imagination; he couldn’t always tell which they were guided by, or whether there was much difference between the two.
On the night they found the body in the water tower, Leigh stepped over the dull metal guardrail on the frontage road and over the same loose wire the man had crossed some few weeks before. She held her breath as she neared the Walkers’ house. The old orange reading lamp was lit over John’s chair. She half closed her eyes and looked at the living room window through a blur of eyelashes, then let herself in through the back door. Georgianna was alone in the kitchen in John’s giant slippers and a long workshirt that came down past her knees.
“Oh,” she said, “come in, dear. Come in, oh you brought us pie.”
“Rhubarb,” Leigh said. She set the Styrofoam carrier on the counter. “From Edie’s garden. But I only brought two slices.”
“You have Gordon’s,” Georgianna whispered. “I won’t tell him.”
“Is he back?”
Georgianna smiled at Leigh. “He’ll be back. Don’t worry. Would you like some tea?” Georgianna set the kettle in the sink to fill it. “That goes good with pie, right?”
“It’s so hot out, though.”
She went on filling the kettle.
“Georgie, did you hear what happened?”
Georgianna turned the faucet off and faced Leigh. “It’s terrible,” she said, opening her arms and folding Leigh in. “My poor husband. He’s died.”
Leigh started, then relaxed in the woman’s familiar hug.
“I keep looking for him.”
“Your shirt smells like him,” Leigh said. The same Lava soap Gordon used. The same deodorant. Almost the same sweat.
“I don’t want to wash it.”
“You don’t have to.”
They stood there in the kitchen, holding hands, sweating, swaying. The ceiling fan whirred overhead. Leigh could smell the sweet, cheap White Shoulders perfume from the Walgreens in Burnsville that Georgianna had worn as long as she could remember. The feel of Georgianna’s hands, soft and old. All of it knit up into a memory Leigh would push out of her mind in the years ahead, a moment of communion in a kitchen as familiar as her own, with a woman as familiar as her own mother. Georgianna put her hands on Leigh’s shoulders and surveyed her face. “What else do you want to eat? I have meat loaf, tuna casserole, a sheet of lasagna, macaroni and cheese, peas and corn, Jell-O.”
“Oh my God,” Leigh laughed. “Who brought you all this stuff?”
“Everybody.”
“We should call Boyd and Dock.”
“Bring ’em over. Bring the boy too.”
“Can I call them?”
“Call them up. We’ll have a birthday party. You got to have something, right?”
So Dock and Annie and Emery came over in their truck and they all sat outside in the grass beneath the cottonwood and ate cold meat loaf and pan-fried lasagna and Jell-O.
“They have their own well, don’t they?” Annie asked Leigh in a hushed voice as they were gathering up dishes and carrying the pans outside.
Leigh nodded.
“It’s horrible,” Annie whispered, leaning in. “Dock’s really spooked.”
Leigh nodded, eyes glazed.
But for Emery, whom Dock took to the shop to retrieve his helmet, they were all quiet as they ate. Annie poured them sticky, pink wine from a gallon bottle. The breeze was warm and Dock made a cheerful fire in a ring of stones. Emery roasted marshmallows, howling from inside the helmet at the flames and swinging the burning sugar around in bright red and yellow circles in the dark. The weedy yard was alive with firelight.
“Summertime,” Dock said.
“Emery and fire,” Annie said. She poured Leigh another plastic cup full of wine and refilled her own. “Who else wants more?” Annie raised the jug.
“That stuff is awful,” Dock said, and extended his empty cup. “Fill me up. Where’s that boy of yours, Leigh?” He nudged her with his shoulder. “It’s his best girl’s birthday, for Pete’s sake.”
“He’s fine,” Georgianna said. “He’s camping.” She shook her head, smiling. “Lions, population a hundred seventeen. Too crowded for the Walker boys.”
Dock caught Leigh’s eye, and she glanced back at him with a look of fear. At least, that’s what he told everyone in town.
If Gordon was going up there to see someone, they said, he would’ve told her.
If he didn’t tell Leigh, he wouldn’t tell anyone.
“Well, happy birthday, anyway,” Annie said, and they raised their plastic cups.
“Happy birthday, precious daughter.” Georgianna smil
ed wide. “Three pieces of advice for our new adult,” she said.
Dock took a sip of the sweet wine, then tipped his head back, consulting the stars. “Here’s one I learned from John.” He glanced at Georgianna. “Four words you need to ask yourself every day: what if I’m wrong?”
They’d heard John say it before.
“Oh yes,” Annie said. “That’s a good one. My turn?” She touched her fingers to her chest and Leigh nodded. “Advice for our new adult. Here you go.” She looked into her cup, then turned to Leigh. “Never have more than two drinks?”
Dock laughed. “Is that a question?”
“Two?” Leigh said. “This is my second already!”
“Cut her off, people,” Dock said.
“Georgie, your turn.” Annie nudged her.
“Oh, dear,” Georgianna said. “This was my idea, wasn’t it?”
They waited. She scanned the horizon with a faint smile on her closed lips, then settled her gaze on Leigh. “Don’t go anywhere,” she finally said.
“Don’t go anywhere?” Leigh smiled, not understanding. She wasn’t going to die, if that’s what Georgie meant.
“Stay with us.”
“Aw, come on,” Dock said, “that’s not fair.” He shook an index finger at Leigh. “Don’t you listen to that.”
“Gordon won’t go,” Georgianna said. “Not now.”
They all looked at each other.
“So you ought to stay with us,” Georgianna said.
Stay in Lions? It was unthinkable. It was not only bare, but cursed, the whole county comprised of no more than searing light and eddying dust. Nothing but wind and white sun. It seemed even you weren’t there. It seemed you were standing nowhere, on nothing. No ground. And there was no future in Lions. No matter how many stories you heard about years gone by, no matter how many plans you had stocked up for the future, you were confined to a never-ending present.
Dock flashed his eyes at Leigh. Emery plunged his stick through the heart of another marshmallow and torched it, spinning fire in spirals in the darkness behind them.
“What if,” Georgianna said, and blinked at Leigh, “what if you just stayed?”
Leigh shook her head. No one could stay sane and remain in this place of stillness, emptiness, and unbearable light.
Georgianna shrugged and smiled. “My advice,” she said.
Of all its haunts, one of the scariest place in Lions was Echo Station, named after a children’s game featuring an abandoned gas station on the far west end of town where giant weeds had cracked up the concrete and spread the broken pieces apart like a clay dish shattered against the hard ground.
It hadn’t been a large gas station, just a single bay wide enough to pull in and lift a single car, and a small, glass-cased room with a register and cooler, and a toilet behind a small door. The glass had long since been broken, and there’d been nothing in the place in recent days but a single piece of bent rebar pointing like a bony finger right at the doorway, where you’d stand looking in. The gas station had been built on the same site as an old sod stagecoach station of a hundred years before, which had later been chosen as the spot for Lions’ railroad station. There’d been tremendous hope that the railroad would be directed through Lions. It would have enlivened the town and brought all kinds of people and quality products and services everyone missed from back east. Burnsville, however, was chosen instead. So even when the gas station was new, it was felt sharply as a place of disappointment. Add to this that the gas station didn’t last a single year—a town the size of Lions didn’t need two, and the Gas & Grocer had bread and canned food and fresh milk. Given the chance, the people of Lions might have excised it from their maps of town. It was a symbol of regret, of bad decisions, of misplaced hope.
After its owners left for Denver, the station was looted and for years stood empty and open to the elements. It ate all the sleet and rain and sun and wind, and seemed when you passed by to want to suck you in, as well. First, children in the backseats of their parents’ cars took to holding their breath when they passed it. Then they began visiting the place on foot, in twos and threes, the way people in a larger city might go to have their palms read, or fortunes told.
You were supposed to stand before the empty gas station alone—your friends had to wait a good hundred feet off—then close your eyes, make three counterclockwise circles, count backward from twelve, and open your eyes. Immediately in the space before you, the dust and light would take the form of either a past or future self who had some kind of directive. This could be a single word, an image, a feeling, or the name of a distant city. It might be the shape of something, like a key or an apple or a door that you would have to look for in your life as a sign by which to get your bearings. But as you stood there before the whirling dust at Echo Station, you wouldn’t be able to tell if you were being guided by a self who was young and full of wishes, or old and full of wisdom—so the sign could lead you to a life either of peace and abundance or of poverty and bitter sorrow. Once you put your faith in Echo Station, however, and closed your eyes and turned three circles, it was too late. Your fate was sealed, the direction fixed.
It was a game that had almost passed out of knowledge by the time Leigh and Gordon were kids in Lions, and it was Dock who told them about it. They were at the diner eating ice cream and pie one summer night, and Annie had just taken Emery to the bathroom. Boyd was new in town that summer and up at the counter talking to May, who kept smoothing her hair and smiling.
“We wanted a ghost story,” Gordon said when Dock told him and Leigh about the game. “That’s not a ghost.”
“I don’t know,” Dock said. “Scary enough for me. I wouldn’t play it, that’s for sure.”
“Really?” Leigh asked. She licked her spoon. “You never did?”
“Nope,” Dock said. “Never have, never will. Grown-ups know better than to go looking into the abyss. Besides. Don’t I already know how my life turned out?”
“Scaredy-cat,” Leigh said.
“You bet I am.”
“Let’s do it, Gordon,” Leigh said.
Gordon put his napkin on his empty plate. “No,” he said slowly. “I think I’m with Dock.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t get it, anyway,” he said. “You won’t even know if you’ll get rich and happy or sad and poor. You’ll just know that you’ve made it stick.”
“That’s right, Gordon,” Dock said, and pointed at him. “Don’t even play that game.”
Gordon crossed his arms and smiled and repeated it to Leigh. “Don’t even play it.”
That night Leigh walked alone through town in her nightgown and tennis shoes, and stood among weeds almost shoulder high, and closed her eyes, and made three circles in the dark. On her way home, smiling, she stooped in the middle of the road and drew a heart in the dust with her finger.
Gordon woke at home in his room in early evening, sunlight leaping like copper-colored flames among the tree leaves outside. Smell of toast and coffee from the kitchen below. The clatter of cookware. He couldn’t have said what day it was, or how long he’d slept, but when he sat up straight his mind felt sharp. Outside the window, a shimmer of dandelion floss. The dry fields creaked. He could hear them.
Down the hall and stairwell, the wall clock, the framed wedding stills of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, even a very blurry, grim image of his great-great-grandparents in white ballooning clothes that looked as though they’d been fashioned from boat sails, and each of the smooth wooden steps, the flowers and stripes of the wallpaper—it was all looking out at him.
“Grief wakes you up,” his father had once said, talking of the loss of his own father. “You might not want it to, but it does.”
Now there was nowhere to hide. That Gordon had ever taken comfort from such things. From moonlight on the sidewalk. From win
d in the trees. From familiar silverware, or clothbound covers of old books, or the faces and gestures of those he loved. The longer he looked at these things in the days to come, the more familiar and simultaneously puzzling they seemed. He put his hand to his head and went down the steps while all around him, the nail heads and floorboards announced that they were no longer simply what they appeared to be, though they were quite clearly nothing but nail heads and floorboards.
Downstairs, the front door was open. Outside the air was still hot from the day and smelled of the Sterlings’ small hog lot. Only late June and the clump grasses were already blond. Bindweed and vetch curled and spread themselves in a purple tangle over the ground. A warm wind bent the line of young alders John had planted, and sheets and thin, white tea towels billowed and leapt on Georgianna’s clothesline like long parallelograms of pale blue light.
Georgianna was sitting in John’s old chair with one small, heavy glass of whiskey beside her. His reading lamp cast a circle of yellow around her in the dim room, but her face was chalky. She was not reading but looking into the middle distance, like a woman under a spell.
John’s routine after work always went like this: washing his face and scrubbing his hands with Lava soap, then coming down for supper, and performing a little ceremony Gordon watched with great interest as a boy. In the cabinet just over the silverware drawer, where Georgianna kept measuring cups, an old red and black cardboard check box filled with rubber bands and paper clips, and an old, smooth, bent horseshoe, there were two heavy shot glasses, with one teardrop of air inside the bottom of each. Sometimes, Gordon would go into the kitchen and take them out of the cabinet and weigh them in his hand. Cool and heavy, like magnifying glasses. His father would fill them each up to the top with whiskey, and drink one standing there by the sink, all in one motion.
The second small glass he would carry to his chair, lamp, and bookshelf, which were situated beside the woodstove but facing the window, out toward the frontage road, as if he were on watch at the end of each day. When Gordon realized, as a boy, that this was what his father’s habit brought to mind, he was both worried and curious about the adversaries his father seemed to await every single evening of their lives.
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