Lions

by Bonnie Nadzam

  “I guess you’ve got some of that right.”

  “You’re not going to class,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I looked for you today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, stupid.”

  Outside in the hallway, the door opened again and the music flared to life.

  “Gordon. Listen. It’s ‘Red River Valley.’ What are the chances? Someone else is a throwback, too.” She suddenly felt bright, felt the broad sun of home across her face and shoulders and she reached for his hand. “Come on, it’s a sign. Let’s dance.”

  “I don’t want to dance.”

  “Come on, it’s a sign!”

  “Stop.”

  “Dance with me.”

  He pulled his hand away. “Leigh,” he said sharply. “Please.”

  She sat and they were still, not talking, for a full minute.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not being the best kind of man right now.” He set his hands flat on his knees. “I’m not the best man right now.”

  “You don’t have to say it twice.”

  “Please be patient.”

  “You already said.”

  He shook his head. “You go off so quickly,” he said softly. He looked up at her. “You went off so quickly.”

  She blushed and turned away. A moment later she put her hand on the side of his face, and brought her lips to his.

  He pulled his face away.

  Leigh crossed her arms and leaned back. “Something’s wrong with you.”

  “Is it.”

  “I think you need help.”

  He said nothing.

  “Like a counselor.”

  Nothing.

  “I mean, for one, your parents.” She waited.

  He nodded once.

  “And losing the shop. Moving away from home.”

  “I’m not losing the shop.”

  “OK.”

  “And I’ll go back.”

  “Gordon.”

  They both pictured Lions then. The pigweed, foxtail, purslane, and countless unstoppable weeds in a spiny brown hide stretching from their front doors to the ditch on the side of the dusty road. All the stock barns collapsed in the weeds, rusted coils of pasture fences unspooled across the dirt. Jefferson Street, empty. Jorgensen’s place, empty—the two-story white house that had always been lit up.

  “Then won’t you talk to someone?”

  “You mean a psychologist.”

  “It comes with the tuition.”

  She watched him. He must have been imagining what he’d say to such a person. That he’d discovered or been given a new job in life, one he neither wanted nor didn’t want, but which he was compelled to perform.

  “And if you don’t do it,” this doctor would ask, “what happens?”

  “I was born to do it.”

  “And you recently lost your father?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The doctor would nod at that. Jot something down. Interesting, he might think.

  To ignore this task his father gave him on his deathbed, Gordon would explain to the counselor, would be to live a lie. To do it, however, would be to turn his back on everyone and everything he once thought was his life.

  “A very pleasant life,” Gordon would explain. “That was supposed to include Leigh. And clean and simple rooms in a clean and simple house in a clean and simple town.”

  “That doesn’t sound so indulgent.”

  “I didn’t say I’d be turning my back on indulgence. I’d be turning my back on a certain kind of life. A very good kind of life.”

  “Does she know about this—job—of yours?”

  “She knew my father.”

  “But you haven’t spoken of it?”

  “Not explicitly.”

  “Why not?”

  “She might think I was crazy.”

  “She thought your father was?”

  “A lot of people did.”

  “Do you think,” the doctor would ask slowly, “that I think you’re crazy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does thinking so change your feelings about this—task, as you call it?”

  “No.”

  Then Gordon would describe the hut where the wounded man lived, the alternative to the pleasant, airy, sunny home he might have shared with Leigh.

  “It’s a way to feel close to your father?”

  “I guess.”

  And this doctor would nod, and refer to his notes, and respond in kind with a prescription.

  In Gordon’s dorm room, Leigh sat forward in the extra chair and closed her eyes, then suddenly stood up. Somewhere in the distance the sound of a crackling motorcycle rose in the late summer sky.

  “Stay here with me,” he said.

  “I need some air.”

  “I know we’ve been having a hard time,” he said. “Leigh, look at me.”

  “You won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s all falling apart,” he said.

  “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

  He shook his head. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I mean what is this?” She gestured at his chair, the afghan. The room he’d created.

  “I thought we could get a fresh start again out here,” he said.

  She looked around his room in disbelief. “You did?”

  “I’m talking about you and me. I thought it could be like it was at home again. That we could start over from how it was, before.”

  “No, Gordon. That would be like starting over from a negative number. Do you understand? I don’t want things to be like they were at home.”

  “You don’t.”

  “For God’s sakes no. Why did I come here?” She flung her hand at the shade he’d pulled down over one window and knocked it sideways. As it swung slowly still, it dawned on her. “You only came to try to lure me back.”

  He shook his head. “No, Leigh.”

  “That’s exactly what this is. You were never going to stay.”

  “Listen.”

  “You were going to lure me back.” She said it this time quietly, as if to herself.

  Gordon fixed his eyes on the line where the wall met the carpet.

  “I am not going back in any way, shape, or form.”

  “I just need a little time there. Six months. A year.”

  “I don’t want to be there and I don’t want things to be like they were there and I don’t want to be any place like it. Not for a day and definitely not for a year.”

  “OK, Leigh.”

  “I’m not going to be like your mother.”

  “OK.”

  “Good.” Her breath was shallow and her heart raced high in her chest. “I’m going now.”

  “OK.”

  She went from his dorm into town to meet her roommate and a few other new friends at a café where you could sometimes convince them to sell you a glass of beer. There was a quartet of young men from the college playing from the Great American Songbook, and she and her friends took up the ragged love seat and armchairs in a circle around a gas fireplace. The evening was just cool enough for it. Someone, somehow, procured a bottle of wine, and they filled their empty coffee cups and chatted and listened to the music. But even in his absence Gordon managed to ruin the night. When the wine was gone and the young men were packing up their instruments, she crossed campus. It was well after midnight, and quiet, just the sound now and then of a lone car on the main strip and the sprinklers ticking over the blue lawns and early autumn flowers. She followed the sidewalk toward Gordon’s dorm.

  The door to his building was locked, and her own ID card didn’t work. She pressed her forehead a moment against the metal door, then
straightened and walked over the damp grass to his window. It was on the first floor, but a good ten feet from the ground. She scanned the immaculate grass for something to throw at it. A piece of gravel. Nothing. She sat with her back against the brick building, facing the lawn, her head and arms in a pile on her knees. When the first birds called out from the line of tall, narrow poplars and the illuminated sky in the east began blanking out the stars, she raised her hands and spread her fingers and carefully, as the woman at the Lucy Graves had done, closed the dark empty space above her head like the ­petals of a flower.

  Around dawn someone opened the door to Gordon’s building from the inside, and she went in. She could see his door open from the end of the hall as she approached. He’s in the bathroom, he thought. I’ll take him to breakfast. We’ll go somewhere pleasant. She told herself how it would be with each step of her feet until she stood before the empty room. He was gone, and he’d taken everything with him.

  Gordon drove east as the moon set, hands trembling on the wheel as he shuddered in the cold truck. He’d rolled down the windows to let the cold in and keep himself awake. He drove as night dissolved around him. The sun came up and he entered Lions and knew all of it—what it smelled like, and what time the birds woke—as well as he knew his own body. It was early autumn, the grass and weeds an endless span of cool blonde parchment.

  Before the summer, the world and all its forms seemed made for pleasure and consolation. His shadow printed on the street outside the diner. Rain against the window. A train of two hundred heavy, black, silent cars pushing west in slow motion. That world was lost to him now—and yet he’d never felt so awake.

  So life was sweet only where it was also bitter. He would take it all, without condition, without reservation, and without wishing it were otherwise. Not because he was virtuous or good, but because he was tired, his hands were empty, and he had no energy in him to be otherwise. The world vibrated around him. There wasn’t much in it he felt was worth chasing.

  The shop would be there, just ahead off the highway, beside his house, and in its way that was everything. His father had shown Gordon that in the undivided heart there lives a secret love bringing a man to silence beyond all thought, teaching him to repudiate and disavow all that is false in the world. Gordon would go back to the work.

  There were no lights on in town. The diner wasn’t open yet. Boyd’s was dark. He pulled over in front of the empty hardware store and looked over the dusty junk in the store window. Chintzy vases and teacups and saucers with roses and lilies and forget-me-nots painted in ribbons around gilded rims. Board games—Connect Four, Donald the Donkey, and Lose All You Have, the colored boxes faded, the shrinkwrapped plastic brown with dust.

  He drove the length of town, and down the side street where the backhoe service shop had been when he was a boy, and from there, along a dirt road. Dock and Annie’s place made him stop in his tracks. The east side blackened and a dark smoky stain rising up the face. The staves buckling. The windows broken and glass shards glittering in a pile of dark blue ashes. Emery.

  With a lighter or a book of matches. Gordon could see it. Emery would have been alone in the living room. Annie in the kitchen shaking cubed beef and white flour in a plastic grocery bag. Dock would have been out back among the pigs, kicking them gently with his old, flat, brown boots away from the gate and holding the heavy bucket overhead.

  He drove farther down the frontage road toward his house, parked the truck, and got out. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders against the cold. There was a light on in his house, and before the window at the kitchen sink, May Ransom was filling the teakettle. Upstairs, the fainter yellow window of his room, where his mother had slept all summer.

  Dock was in the shop. Inside, behind the tiny side window, he and his family were gathered. There was a little table set up that Gordon recognized as an end table from his own home, and Annie was slicing something on her plate, and Emery had his head back, roaring. Gordon could see his huge, milk-white teeth through the glass. It was early breakfast time.

  So they were living in the shop now.

  Well, it was cold out, and getting colder—a family needed a warm place. And it was true that Dock needed whatever extra work he could get, and that Gordon had turned it all over to him. Gordon stood outside the shop looking in. His eyes burned. He was glad they had it. He knew they’d take care of it and use it well. He turned back toward the old blue truck. He’d keep driving this morning. He could come back down here and see his mother in a few days.

  “It’s punishment, this heat,” Dock said and took his seat at the counter. He was the first customer and the Lucy Graves was clean and quiet. May turned over a mug for him and filled it with black coffee. “That’s what Annie says. Still hitting ninety and coming up on October.”

  “Annie ought to know better.” May extended a menu and he pointed at the blackboard breakfast special and she set the menu back on its stack. “It’s always been a desert.”

  “And it’s cursed,” he said, nodding at her for emphasis.

  “Oh, Dock, not you, too.”

  “The sun wants to kill you, for one.”

  “It’s a desert.” She turned on the griddle.

  “It feels personal.”

  “It isn’t personal. This is the country we live in.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “What, poach an egg? You put vinegar in the water, then you stir it fast when it gets hot.” She opened an egg with one hand and dropped it into the pot.

  “What does that do? The vinegar?”

  She shrugged. “It poaches the egg.” He watched her as she stirred and used a slotted metal spoon to gently lift the poached egg out of the water. She set it over some sliced ham on an English muffin. “You have any work?”

  He rotated the plate before him and reached for the pepper. “Only because it’s John’s place. Once word gets out that the Walkers are gone, they’ll take their jobs to Sterling, or Greeley, or wherever else they go. There’s a place in Severance. They’ll drive out there.”

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

  “It’s not about me,” he said. “I could be anyone. It’s about John and Gordon. How good they were. You think Gordon will come back?”

  “I hope not.”

  He nodded, chewing. “For my sake, I hope he doesn’t come back till we fix the house.”

  “I imagine that shop is pretty right and tight,” May said.

  “Tell the truth, I prefer it to the house we had.”

  “I’m sure Annie doesn’t feel that way.”

  “No,” Dock said. “It’s hard on her.” He shook his head. “God, this is good. What’s in that sauce?”

  “Butter.”

  When Boyd came in at the end of the day, he echoed Dock.

  “Something wrong with this whole place.” He filled a glass of water for himself as May wiped down the tables one last time. “Probably always has been.” He opened the cooler and took out the sandwich she’d set aside for him. “We’ve been here eight years together. Leigh’s gone. Let’s get out.”

  “And go where, Boyd?”

  “Burnsville. Open a bigger place. Restaurant-pub combined.”

  “You’re not half as imaginative as Leigh. Don’t you want to move to California? A little seaside town somewhere?”

  “Well, give me some credit, Maybelline.” He unwrapped the sandwich, peeling open the bread to peek inside, and sat at the counter. “I guess I’ve moved around some.”

  “I know it.”

  “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to read about this big swath from Nebraska through Colorado to New Mexico,” he said. “Trappers. Traders. Indians. Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So much blood. Had this big gray book with orange lettering on the cover. Used to
read through my fingers,” he said, “the stories were that gruesome.” He took a bite of the sandwich. “And I was a teenaged boy. I didn’t get squeamish easy.”

  “Huh,” May said, and set out stacks of lunch meat to thaw for the next day.

  “The scalping and hacking and butchering. The things they did with their—”

  May put up her hand. “OK,” she said, “I get it.”

  “And all of that for what?” He took a napkin from the dispenser. “My bar? Your diner? A Gas & Grocer?” He shook his head.

  “How is Burnsville any different?”

  He counted off the names of its business establishments. Taco Bell, Motel 6, Perkins, Ponderosa Grill, the good Italian place, the reservoir.

  “Oh, Burnsville,” she said. “Oh, you shining city on a hill.” He grabbed her by the arm as she passed behind him and he spun her around and smacked her bottom. She laughed. “Oh, you beacon of hope for all the world.”

  “You have a real attitude problem,” he said. “You know that?”

  “Let’s get out of here. Been cooped up all day.” Just as she said so, a woman knocked on the locked door, shielded her eyes with her hand and peered in. They could hear her muted call of hello through the glass. There was a white minivan parked in front of the bar. May unlocked the diner door and the woman stepped back as she pushed it open.

  “How can I find the man who owns that bar?” she asked. She was tall and gaunt and had long, dark hair that hung down to her waist, and circles around her eyes. May froze and her stomach went cold.

  “You got him,” Boyd said, circling up behind May. “Need a cold one? Should be open. Just came over here to get a sandwich.”

  “I’m the sister of the man who drowned in your water tower.” She reached into her coat pocket and took out a white sheet of paper. A copy of the newspaper story out of Greeley.

  “Oh, dear God,” May said.

  “When I saw about the dog,” she said, and her voice broke, “I knew.”

  Inside the diner, she would not sit. Boyd instinctively went behind the lunch counter and crossed his arms. May turned on the orange overhead lights and took a stool.