“You must be dying here,” he said.
“He’s got you trapped here, doesn’t he?”
“Tell you what, whoever he is, he don’t deserve you.”
“If he knew what you were worth, he wouldn’t leave you alone at an empty building with a guy like me.”
“He ever kiss you?” he asked, and leaned toward her. She raised her hand as if to push him away, then rested her fingertips on his T-shirt. “Like that?”
The kissing went on for some time. She felt drunk. Blindly happy. She bunched his T-shirt in her hand, right there at his chest where she’d set her fingers. He made a laughing sound in his open mouth when she did that. Then he moved his own hand to beneath the hem of her T-shirt, and she pulled back.
“Oh, come on,” he said, leaning back in, pressing the shape of a smile against her mouth.
She pulled back again, then stood up.
“Oh, hell,” he said, getting to his feet. “You don’t play coy very good.” He took the last empty by the neck and swung it flashing in the daylight out into the dirt. “Been inside?”
“All the time.”
“Show me.”
She hesitated.
He took her arm and led her through the open doorway, into the shadow.
“I can’t.”
He stopped and looked back at her. “Are you serious?” His smile faded.
“Sorry,” she said. He dropped her arm.
“Sweetheart. You’ve been playing along all afternoon. Look at me and tell me you don’t want to stay in here with me a little while.”
She stared at the dirt.
“Tell you what,” he said. “My garage is the only viable business in this town for a hundred-mile radius. Any man here who isn’t sweeping you up under his arm and hauling you out to someplace just as pretty as you are, he’s a jackass, plain and simple.”
It embarrassed her for Gordon.
“Tell me you didn’t like that just now,” he said. “Tell me you weren’t thinking about it all morning.”
She said nothing.
“You owe me for two beers,” he said. He put out his hand. She gave him four dollars and he turned and stepped into the daylight.
She walked to the diner for the dinner shift. May was in the doorway looking out at the street. She stepped aside to let her daughter inside. “You stupid, stupid girl.”
Leigh took her apron from the peg on the back of the door and tied it behind her neck and around her waist. May came in and stood right behind Leigh and talked to her back.
“Gordon was here.”
Leigh said nothing.
“I asked him if he wanted sandwiches, if you were going to the factory later tonight. He wouldn’t even look at me Leigh.”
Leigh’s heart started racing. “What does that have to do with me?”
“Please.”
The paint was cracked and chipping away at the dusty chair rail that ran behind the ice bin. Leigh crossed her arms. “You know what? There are some things Gordon just can’t and won’t ever do.”
“You’ve got that right.”
She could hear her mother pulling produce out of the cooler.
“If there’s one thing you should’ve learned from John Walker,” May said, “it’s that you make big decisions the way you make small decisions. And I hope to god you didn’t just do what I think you did.”
“I’m not stupid,” Leigh said, her face hot. She turned around.
“No,” May said, handing Leigh the handwritten specials to put on the chalkboard. “You’re about half stupid. You ought to at least be smart enough to know that you’re not as pretty as men will say you are.”
“Oh, thanks a lot.”
“God, Leigh. It’s not personal.”
“I don’t want to live here forever you know.” She climbed up on the stool with the chalk and list in her fist.
“No one is saying you should.”
Leigh stared at the words of the lunch special without reading them.
“I wish you’d use the stepladder,” May said.
“I’m fine.”
“Erase that real good,” May said.
“I know.”
“Denver’s the same as here. Only bigger. You’d find a restaurant just like ours, twice as big with ten times as many customers and all the same grief.”
“I’m not going to college to wait tables.”
“Oh I see. College is going to open all the doors. Is that what?”
“Maybe I’ll go to California.”
“Now there’s an original idea.”
“Why are you so mean to me?”
“I’m not.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Scrub and peel and slice these carrots. Both bags.”
She was to meet Gordon outside the shop at seven-thirty that night, and waited until the light reflected on the empty water tower went from white to gold to rose to black, but he never came. He’d be checking into the North Star by now. She could picture it.
The road he’d follow north from the motel would slowly break up and give way to higher, empty, treeless desert pocked with stones, where he’d come to the house. It’d be peculiarly narrow and high, fashioned of rough-hewn logs with a sharp, pointed metal roof. The beads on the roof would be John’s, or his father’s, or grandfather’s: perfect, straight, clean. In a rough circle around the place, fine gravel, glacial till, fossilized bones of fishes. The windows of the place would always be dark. According to his father’s directions, he was to take the canned food and the wool blanket and books from the trunk, and bring it all to the door, and knock on it. Simple.
On every visit, he’d take the grocery bags and hurry them to the front door to get out of the wind. It would always give him the chills; it would always feel like upon knocking at that door, his life was changing. How must it have been that first time? That was the day he stepped out of her reach, forever. He’d knock, and get no response. It would be a steel-backed white door, the kind John admired for its simplicity and versatility. The kind he had put on the back of the shop two years previous, and Gordon would know instinctively that his father had bought two at once, and drove the other up north in the truck and installed it. Inside, behind that door in the little house, there’d be a red painted iron kettle on a pedestal-mounted woodstove that John would have fashioned himself. There’d be little blue checked curtains, stitched by Georgianna, over a single window. Firewood stacked neatly outside a little back door that John had bucked and split himself.
Gordon would knock again, listening. Nothing. He could have left, then. He’d driven up as he said he would. For months afterward, he must have returned to this moment. He might have turned away with no idea of what service he was refusing, and so never have been troubled by his conscience—only, perhaps, by nagging curiosity. He might have stepped casually from that doorstep through the wind to his father’s truck. There could have been cold beer and road trips, college, girls, rivers and mountains, books, art, music, little successes . . . all the things he’d see as if from a great distance in the months to come. There could have been all of those things.
You can say no, his father had told him.
Gordon would knock once more that first visit, and put his ear to the door. He’d touch the doorknob. Cold metal. He’d turn it, and the door would open.
“John? Is that you?” From deep inside the room on the other side of the door, the voice of a young man.
You wanted magic in the world, Leigh thought, but not like that. People didn’t live for a hundred and twenty years. Hundred and fifty. Or if they did, it wasn’t alone in the wide-open country, with no one to help them. Or if they were out there, they weren’t people that young men like Gordon were supposed to tie their lives to.
But of course none of the Walkers would have cal
led their lives, or this task, hard; she could imagine what John Walker would say of it, if she were able to ask him. He’d say that it’d never been a sacrifice, that it hadn’t trapped him in Lions, that he’d never even made a decision about it, that’s what real freedom was.
No choice in the matter, he’d say from his chair, looking up at her over the edge of a paperback in the orange lamplight. There’s nowhere else to go, anyway, Miss Ransom. Then he’d gesture around the old living room. Isn’t this paradise enough for you?
But these Walkers were a different breed.
Lions was no paradise, and she had taken no vow.
Before he left, Jorgensen sold his water rights outright and put the house up, though it would never sell. By the end of the summer, the once-creamy white porch where he and Dorrie raised their five children would be burnt with a broad shadow of brown dust and spray painted with glyphs and giant black letters so that if you saw it from a distance the old farmstead resembled a farmhouse no more than a ruined boxcar.
When Leigh saw it, she imagined slim young men and women in blue jeans and dark T-shirts sliding off the highway in neutral and sneaking out of their cars to circle every empty lot and print the beautiful old houses with code. She stood before the graffiti trying to decipher it, black grasshoppers knocking softly against her ankles. The unfamiliar characters could have been symbols for anything, but their jaggedness and backwardness—all the figures like people with their backs turned or with hands up in postures of defense—seemed to her messages of warning.
By this second week of August the West Wind motel was cleared out of beds and desks and sheets and towels, and Gordon had been gone another four days. Five.
Alan Ranger fired Levon, the manager at the garage, as well as his two employees, and brought them into the bar for beers and shots, afterward, where he offered them jobs in Denver. They took him at his word and left with their Burnsville girlfriends by week’s end. On her way to the diner later that weekend, Leigh stopped outside the old garage and looked up above the store at the window with the blue checked curtain where Levon Carrothers and his father, Alison, had lived as long as she could remember. For a while when she was a girl they even called it Carrothers’ Garage, then it got bought up, which was a help to them. There was a peeling, cracked yellow sticker on the window that read: Good Work Done Good. Inside, the garage was empty. The office was locked, but the sign was still turned to OPEN.
“The garage is really closed,” Leigh said when she walked into the diner for the breakfast shift.
“And took three men with it,” Boyd said, spooning sugar into his coffee. “Some nerve that guy had, being all chummy like that, right after he fires them.”
“He’s just doing his job,” May said, turning his eggs. She looked at Leigh. “Least he spent a little money in town. That was considerate.”
“More attentive than some people,” Leigh said.
“Really, Leigh. Maybe Gordon didn’t want to be around to see his father die. And to watch his mother lose her marbles. Or watch his girl take off with out-of-town management or some big dope from Burnsville.”
Boyd raised his eyebrows and looked at Leigh. “Jesus, girl. It wouldn’t kill you to spend a little time alone.”
She stepped behind the register and stooped as if she were looking for something in the shelves below and put her hands to her temples and shut her eyes.
“That guy was married, too,” Boyd said. “Just so you know. Or didn’t you mind?”
Leigh stood up and brushed off her shirt. “You have a lot of nerve. If I were you I’d talk a lot less.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means everything happening around here is your fault and everybody knows it.”
“Alright,” May said. “Enough.”
“Hope your stupid joke was worth it.”
“Enough, Leigh. Go.”
“Dock told me the joke from that night. It wasn’t even funny.”
“I hadn’t finished telling it!” Boyd’s eyes widened. “Wait. Dock was talking about this?”
“Enough!” May yelled.
“He told all of us,” Leigh said.
“All of who? When?”
May put her hands on Leigh’s shoulders and turned her toward the door. “Out.”
“I thought I was working.”
“Out.”
“I need the money.”
“Go.”
“Was Dock talking about me?” she heard Boyd say as she stepped out over the sidewalk, his voice high and thin.
Leigh stepped into the empty street. Only eight o’clock and already her forehead and temple ached from squinting in the blazing light. It’d started in the bathroom, slicing into the mirror from the window as she brushed her teeth. The heat had beaten the earth and the pavement and the rooftops of empty houses to a metallic sheen and reduced the horizon to the same thin white iridescence in every direction. Thirteen days, she said under her breath, over and over, with every step back home.
Poor girl, those remaining in town said, even as they packed.
Darkness of this place is sucking her in.
What a waste that’d be, they said.
She was always a good girl.
Smart girl.
Pretty girl.
Go get the world, they told her whenever they could—in the diner, on the street. It wants you.
She knew it did. She heard it calling. Everyday the world came into the Lucy Graves and announced itself, then slipped back out the glass door and down the highway, out of her reach. All her life, she had measured the goodness of the world by her happiness with it. Now it was teasing her. Toward everyone her age who came into the diner she felt a nauseating combination of admiration, fear, and resentment. She was bothered that others had what looked to her like a better life. Their easy smiles, their confidence. She hated everything she envied, and she envied everyone.
She thought to pierce her nose, one of those tiny silver studs. She’d lighten her hair. She’d get a tattoo, something feminine. A bracelet around her ankle. She’d become an environmentalist. Maybe she’d become a vegetarian. Each new idea presented itself as she poured coffee, refilled water, distributed ketchup and ranch dressing.
It was as though she and Gordon had been childhood friends on the top of a dizzying precipice, and now he was falling down one side of it, and she the other. At the top there’d been summer rain and moonlight, and the thrill of exploring each other’s bodies and making plans. There had been intoxicating, aerial views of the world, all of it laid out for them to enjoy. Now her own view was so foreshortened, the strangers around her brought up so close, she could neither see past them nor make out their faces.
Years from now, she’d remember with a nameless unease the way the hot days of that June, July, then August unspooled as she dished out pie and ice cream and fried sandwiches and coffee and Cokes to travelers speeding down the interstate on their adventures and stopping in the diner where she, a ghost in a ghost town, was stuck in place to serve them. She’d remember the whole town in a state of decay as Jorgensen moved away, Gordon still collecting junk from Marybeth and setting it out in the yard beneath the sun with the strange faith of a man scattering seeds across the hard ground. A film of dust settling over the old, red-painted stoop before the closed hardware store.
Years from now, she’d sit alone behind the sugar beet factory as a single magpie dove from right to left in a sharp and angry V above her head, realizing she’d spent her entire life either excited or depressed. Seeing that the last days of her last true summer were ravished by craving. She’d try to imagine a series of events, or gifts, or situations that would have satisfied her at seventeen and eighteen, and then later at twenty-five, thirty. Truth is, nothing would have. Not recognition from all the world that the family she might raise would be bright and worthwhile, not
a house in the hills, not the prairie with all the wild grass still in her, not the cold moon itself in her hands or all the metal-pointed stars at her command.
Gordon returned from the north country at midnight days before they were to leave for school, and woke the following morning in his room to the sound of Leigh’s voice. A distant buzz, the sheets over his bare legs. He understood she was speaking from far away. Downstairs. In the kitchen with Georgianna. Their white faces floating in the early morning light as they talked over toast and coffee. Their voices pulsed like a radio signal moving in and out of static.
“. . . like his father . . .”
“I know.”
“. . . to be alone.”
“But supposing . . .”
“. . . a little patience.”
“But supposing.”
A silence. The ringing of spoons against coffee cups.
“. . . John’s father, too . . .”
“. . . like a ceremony . . .”
“. . . like sleep . . .”
“More toast?”
A silence, the scrape of wooden chair legs across the floor, and he went back under, the women’s voices leading him on a filament of words like a path that loses itself in the dark.
In his dream his father handed him a dull and dented old copper cup—the kind you’d find in the junk shop—and told him to drink. Gordon took it for whiskey, and perhaps it was.
“What is it?” his father asked when Gordon had tasted it.
“Bitter,” he said, and let the taste of it stain his tongue and the back of his throat. “And good.”
When he woke again, his mother was beside him. Shadows circled her eyes like holes burned through white paper.
“You slept all day again,” she said.
“I did?”
“Leigh was here.”
“I know.”
“I have a can of soup heated on the stove,” she said. “Tomato rice. You need to eat.”
He sat up. “Did you have any?”
She put her hand to her stomach and shook her head.
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