After her shift one afternoon at the end of July, Leigh found Gordon in the shop. She stood in a doorway of glaring light. He was standing beside the workbench, his fingertips on an old iron vice. He looked up.
“Why’re you just standing there?” She crossed the shop and picked up his fingers. He had no lights, fans, or machines running. She wrapped his arms around her own waist and interlaced her fingers behind his neck. For a moment she rested her cheek against his chest, but when she looked up at him, his eyes were streaming tears. He smiled and drew his sleeve across his face. Nothing but the wind and light pouring in through the open door and the chinks in the piled metal and sifting through their loose hair. There was color in his cheeks, and his dark curls were an overgrown mess. He was there and not, Gordon, and not. She backed up to the workbench and sat on it.
“You look like your dad.”
“Do I?”
“Have you eaten at all in the past week?”
“I miss him.”
She took his hand. “Let me ask you a question, though, Gordon. OK?”
“Go ahead.”
“I don’t mean any offense by it at all.”
“OK.”
“Do you think he was happy?”
“My dad?”
“Yes, your dad. Do you think he was happy?”
They were both picturing John Walker, then. Skinny, bespectacled, standing outside of the shop, wind blowing white wisps of his hair. Aloof. His gaze pointed at something no one else could see. Light as the air around him.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” Gordon said. He was quiet a minute. Two. He took his hand from Leigh’s and sat up on the workbench alongside her and put his hand back on the old, red Wilton table vice. “I’ve been thinking that any wish, anything at all that a person might wish for,” he paused—his father had not been a man of wishes—“is like a branch being offered to a drowning man.” Show him anyone who lives for their home, he thought, for their family, or job, or for anything at all, and he’d show you a miserable person. A person who would hang on to that thing no matter how awful it was.
“That’s what I mean,” Leigh said. “A person needs a branch.”
Gordon blinked and wrapped his fingers around the cast steel of the vice.
She scooted closer to him, and reached her arm around his back and set her hand on his fingers. The metal vice was cool and solid. “I know what you’re thinking. I know you think you have to stay here. That you’re bound to this place. I understand more than you realize. Even if you’re not telling me everything.”
“You do?”
She nodded, and he moved his fingers over the top of her hand. “And Gordon. I think you should leave it behind.”
“Leave what behind?”
“All of it. Come with me to school. Like we planned. Like you promised. It’s the next thing to do.”
“The next thing to do.”
“Why when you say that does it sound like a stupid idea? Gordon. Come on. We can’t stay here. You can’t stay here.”
He just looked at her.
“I can’t go alone,” she said.
“Sure you could.”
It was as if he’d slapped her. “You would just send me off?” She pulled her hand back.
“I wouldn’t be sending you off.”
“Think about it,” she said. “You could turn over the shop to Dock long term. Think of what it’d mean to him and Emery.”
He was quiet a moment. “That’s true.”
“Say you will?”
“Ah, Leigh.”
“It’s supposed to be us,” she said. “Together out there.”
“I know it.”
“Come with me. We’ll make a clean break. We’ll start over.”
“I don’t need to start over.”
“Yes,” she said, “you do.”
He shook his head. “What about my mom? All my dad’s work. His life’s work, Leigh.”
She blinked. “Welding?”
He studied her. Welding, she’d said.
Sometime the winter before—a Sunday afternoon—he remembered exactly the moment in the shop, he was practicing with the plasma cutter on the thin aluminum of some of Jorgensen’s irrigation pipe that’d been damaged in the last season, and suddenly without any effort on his part he sensed something else about the work. He wasn’t welding; the welding was happening.
He was high on the experience for a week.
“Get your head out of the clouds,” his father finally said, handing him a set of pliers, but there was a light in his eye as he said it. The pliers were cold and heavy in Gordon’s hand. The rubber sleeves over its handles were a bright kingfisher blue. “Going to hurt yourself,” his father said, turning away. “Or both of us.”
So then it was just welding again. You marked up the plan. You cleaned the metal. You set your voltage and feed speed and did the job.
Still. He’d seen that look in his father’s eye. It was a look that said yes, and there’s more where that came from.
“Don’t you want something better?” Leigh asked.
He shrugged.
“Think of Emery and Dock. Think of Annie. Living people. Who could use the work while you’re away. If there even is any. Would you hoard it for yourself? That doesn’t sound like you. Or your dad.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Have you seen Dock’s alfalfa? Isn’t it strange not to see Jorgensen’s wheat ripening? Doesn’t any of this strike you as significant? Signs, Gordon.”
“Signs,” he said, without interest.
“It’s the responsible thing to do.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me you’ll try it for a month. One month.”
“What if instead I asked you to stay here?”
“I’d say you didn’t know what you were asking.” She crossed her arms. Just stay there? Like what, a year? Five? Ten? Doing what? Waiting for him?
There’s one about that kind of mistake, too. Today, where the old highway connects with the frontage road that takes you to the new highway, there’s a one-room schoolhouse that appears and disappears among the giant papery green docks and goosefoot-shaped leaves of lambsquarter. When it’s lit up, you can see the old brass bell tolling, though it makes no sound. When Leigh was a girl, she begged May to tell and retell the tale.
A woman from out east who had once been the schoolteacher, a twenty-six-year-old Honora Strong, was held responsible for the death of every single one of her nineteen young students, aged four to fifteen, frozen to death in a sudden, late-spring blizzard. Though she herself didn’t survive to be hanged or cast out for it, she was caught forever on the highway looking for them. Sometimes in a high wind, you can hear them crying, and her calling them by name.
She lived in a room adjacent to the schoolhouse, with a bedstead and a stove, and had sent her students home, hoping they’d be ahead of the storm, because she was expecting a lover. He went by Miller—David Wayne Miller—and he had been seeing her off and on for two years as he traversed the countryside, east to west and north to south. He was from Utah, though his family were Germans and Swedes out of South Dakota. He had small eyes the color of stone, dark hair raked with silver, and a barrel-shaped torso. Though he wasn’t a tall man, he called himself a big guy, which was accurate in the sense that he took up all the space in a room, left none for anyone else to talk, nor air for them to breathe. He had, somewhere, a wife and two children—and had, somewhere else, another wife, and another child. To all of his women he made promises he couldn’t keep, and left each one of them trapped in her hometown, waiting for him to make good.
Like so many of the westerners who broke the land and occupied positions of influence, May told Leigh—the sheets and yellow wool blanket pulled up to her chin, her small white fingers cur
led around the satin binding—David Wayne Miller was a sunny liar, a good storyteller, a hard worker, and an expert, cold-hearted son of a bitch. He came out of every shoot-out, every rotten horse trade, and every madam’s house smelling like a rose. For every crime he committed, for every life he ruined, there was a fabulous story to stand in for the truth.
“And you know what?” May asked her daughter. “People loved the stories. They wanted them. People say they want the truth but they don’t. They want a story.”
“I want a story.”
“I know you do.”
According to the historical record, David Wayne Miller was seen some five or six years after the death of Honora Strong and her students, in Deadwood, in a gunfight with a man who was no better than he was and who thus recognized a sick man when he saw one. Miller survived the fight, and, it is said, took up a stethoscope and paraded around the West as a traveling surgeon praised for his healing arts, and died rich, fat, and happy at an old age on a ranch in southeast Wyoming.
“Green River?” Leigh asked her mother from her narrow bed.
“Couldn’t say.”
“Rawlins?”
“Not telling.”
“But he’s dead? For sure?”
“There is no man more dead than this man.”
Nobody could guess where the schoolteacher had met him. Once Honora could see Miller wasn’t coming that frigid spring day, and the windows were half blocked with blue snow, then within an hour completely blocked and blackened, and there was no more wood in the box to burn, and it was hours before dawn, she confessed the entire matter in writing. In the days after, children were exhumed out of their empire of snow, their pointed faces blue, their eyelashes frosted with ice. The schoolteacher was likewise discovered, the confession stuffed in her frozen bosom.
A world of hurt. That, May Ransom told her daughter, is what comes of choosing the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then waiting for him, waiting for him. There are good and decent men in this world, she told her daughter, and there are men like he was: touched by darkness and, eventually, overcome by it.
When the old schoolhouse materializes out of nothing on the side of the road, it’s as clean and white as the day it was built, the bright bell shining in its square-shaped wooden tower, and passersby from behind the windshields of their Pontiacs and Hondas, driving from Chicago to LA or Omaha to Reno, have seen the poor woman right beside it in a long brown- and rose-colored dress, her thick, curling red hair blowing as if she, alone, were on fire in the midst of a terrible storm.
Such tales of children and their schoolteachers or bus drivers caught in sudden snowstorms on the plain are all too common; some still say that David Wayne Miller is behind the death of every one of them.
“Because every wrong man,” May told Leigh every time, while the girl watched the shadows of the cottonwood bend and lengthen on the wall behind her mother’s head, “is the same wrong man.”
First day of August. A light, circling wind blew the heat around the county like fever breath, lifting the dust from the fallow fields and wheeling around and dropping it again in a thin brown cloud over the surface of the town. Over the last couple weeks on her way to and from the diner Leigh watched the yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace cracking, splitting, and breaking into a powder that fell apart and slowly resolved itself into the pale dirt. “A coalescence,” John Walker had once told her, drawing his finger along the seam of a weld on the chicken coop.
In every direction mirages of false rivers and lakes, the scant trees hovering upside down in the buckled glare. If the world were any one thing it was light—refracted, diffused, reflected, and smashed and split apart by metal roofing and run-down cars, their once bright green and yellow and red paint now muted and spotted with rust, their windows broken, their plaintive faces lopsided on a cracked chassis or missing wheels. It was so much light you could scarcely see, and Leigh’s eyes were squinted all the time, and her head ached, and she longed for night. She imagined a house by the ocean. A house on a river. A house on a lake. Cool rooms and shady gardens and a green twilight. She imagined rainy nights. Tiered water fountains elaborate as wedding cakes.
When Gordon was home he was in the shop dressed in wool and sweating, repairing a broken johnny bar, cleaning the tools and machines, standing in the open shop door holding cold black coffee in the ceramic blue mug he’d always used, speckled like an egg, John’s solid brown mug still in its place beside the old radio.
When he was in the house he was heating up canned spaghetti or baked beans for himself and Georgianna, urging her to dress, sweeping the floors and washing sheets and towels. Or he was sitting in his father’s chair, rereading his old paperbacks, small and familiar in his hands, dried glue cracking at their seams, yellowed pages soft as felt.
Twice Leigh brought sandwiches from the Lucy Graves and they walked across the bony ground to the factory where they ate quietly, side by side, not touching, commenting on the heat, or the swallows nesting in mud huts along the rafters. The floor was dirty, the bricks were broken. Leigh couldn’t remember what had ever seemed magical in the old ruin. Most times she asked him, Gordon didn’t want to go.
One morning, Gordon in the shop and Leigh at the diner, the man from Denver whose family owned a string of tire and oil change shops across the state finally came out to make, he said, some kind of assessment of the garage, the town’s only open business other than the Gas & Grocer, diner, bar, and Marybeth’s. His name was Alan Ranger and his eyes were blue as enamel, his hair bright as dry ricks of hay, and he wore a blond Fu Manchu Leigh could not look at without imagining kissing his face. It surprised her, and made her own face hot.
“What are you doing in this town?” he asked when Leigh set down his club sandwich and french fries.
“Packing.”
“Good answer.” He looked at the sandwich doubtfully. “What are those?”
“Decorative toothpicks.”
“I didn’t order those.”
“Would you like me to remove them?”
“Please.”
“You want anything other than water?”
“You serve beer?”
“Across the street. Boyd’ll serve ’em to go.”
“Now that,” he said, “is what I call useful information.”
“She’s got a boyfriend,” May said, coming up behind Leigh with a tray propped on her hand.
“I do not.”
“Girl says she don’t,” Alan Ranger said, and popped a french fry into his mouth.
“Well,” May said, “she do.” She crossed the diner and set down three slices of pie and ice cream at a far table. He locked eyes with Leigh. “Whoever Mr. Nobody is he ought to know better than to leave her out alone among the wolves.”
May circled back to the range. “That,” she said, “I’ll give you. Leigh. Take this order over to Georgie.”
Leigh opened the box and peered in at the sliced ham with hot cherry jam and green beans. “She’s got a ton of food.”
“Take it or you’re fired.”
When Leigh left Georgianna’s kitchen, there he was, parked in front of the Walkers’ house. He drove a forest green pickup, his golden arm hanging out the window. He smiled, and she leaned in at the rolled-down window. There was a six-pack of cold brown bottles in the passenger seat.
“Your mama doesn’t like the competition,” he said. “Bet she used to be the prettiest one here.”
“Please.”
He nodded at the six-pack. “Know a good place to go have a cold beer?”
They walked out across the empty fields behind the Walker and Ransom houses to the factory. In the distance, west of the road, the ragged field, hard as tack and scabbed with weeds. Leigh crawled beneath the chain-link and Alan Ranger followed. She laughed at him.
“Why you laughing at me?”
; “You look funny,” she said, “grown man shimmying under a fence.”
“Well,” he brushed off the legs of his jeans. “I came in pursuit of a very particular thing.”
They sat in the sun with the warm bricks against their backs. He opened two of the bottles and raised his. Leigh raised her own.
“Born and raised?” he asked, scanning the horizon.
“Yep.”
“Ever been out?”
“Nope.”
“Your guy never took you out?”
“Not out of here.”
“What are you waiting on? Hell, girl. You won’t be this pretty forever. Want me to take you back to Denver with me?”
“Come on.”
“It’s cooler there.”
“Liar.”
“No, no” he said. “Nice restaurants. Nice neighborhoods. Nice little house, right? Big kitchen. Big bedroom. Buy you pretty dresses, take you to church on Sundays. Make a couple babies.”
She rolled her eyes but smiled.
“I’ll give you my number. You have a car?”
“I might have one I can use.”
“Come out to Denver.”
“I’d come out to Denver.”
“I’ll show you around, girl.”
“Yeah?”
“Hell, yeah. Ought to share yourself with the world. Instead of hiding away with this boyfriend you say you don’t have.”
She drank two beers and he drank four. They lined up the empties and tossed pebbles toward their round mouths. A stray brown and white barn cat with a milky white ghost eye watched Alan from a distance. She could see the sun glinting on the metal of the Quonset hut, and knew Gordon was in there welding. He had his head down working. It was what he did.
“He’s a fool,” Alan told her.
“Prettiest girl I’ve seen across this whole state,” he told her.
“You should move to California. That’s where a girl like you belongs,” he told her. “Long white dress on the beach. Hair piled up on your head like this?” He reached over and put his hands in her hair. She felt her heart beating.
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