“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Did you drive all the way from Pennsylvania?”
Behind the counter on the freezer was a copy of the same newspaper article, held up with a magnet for the highway clientele following the sign for the living ghost town. The woman was staring at it.
“What kind of people hang something like that on the wall?”
Boyd turned and looked at it. Mystery man in a ghost town, it read. Spirits trapped in the walls of the bar. Ghost of a ghost, it read: the last recorded instance of a man drowning himself in a well or water tower in Lions was in 1923. That man, gone nearly a century ago, fit the same description as the recent wanderer, it read. Many residents admitted to being spooked by the coincidence.
“He wasn’t a ghost of a ghost,” the woman said. “He was my brother.”
“I’m sorry,” May said, red-faced. “We’re so sorry.” The woman nodded, raised a hand at May. Her eyes shone with tears. May walked around to the woman’s side of the counter and took her arm. “Won’t you please sit, please?” But the woman did not want to sit.
“Ah,” Boyd said, and shook his head. He touched the scar on his face, and looked out across the street at the bar window, which was still cracked.
“That dog was all he had left. She was all he had left.”
“We didn’t know anything about him,” May said. “We’re so sorry.”
“What happened?” The woman looked from May to Boyd and back again, her eyes wide. “Do you know what happened?”
May folded her hands, her gaze fixed on a black shoe streak on the linoleum floor. For several minutes, no one spoke.
The woman put her face in her hands. May went behind the counter and called Chuck Garcia, watching as the woman slowly sat down cross-legged on the floor. It was Chuck’s wife, Emily, who lifted her up off the floor. The woman wanted her brother’s remains, she said, and the dog’s.
“We’re going to help you out,” Chuck said, “whatever you need.”
“I need a minute,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t plan to—”
“It’s alright,” Emily said. She had pulled on a pair of blue jeans under a night shirt, her feet in sandals. “Come on. We’ll take you home, get you some coffee.”
Chuck and Emily took the woman outside and she followed them in her minivan back toward the frontage road and the Garcias’ place. For several minutes Boyd and May sat side by side at the counter, not talking or moving.
“I feel sick,” May finally said.
“Me, too.”
“I think I want a beer.”
Outside they crossed the street. Something fluttering caught her vision, and she turned to face the junk shop. “Marybeth?” she called, and waved her hand in the dark. Boyd came up beside her.
“Baby Jesus,” he said. They glanced at each other, and rushed toward the rocking chair, where Marybeth Sharpe had expired in the afternoon heat earlier that day.
By lunchtime news of Marybeth’s death and the stranger’s visit had reached everyone remaining in town. Somehow Boyd seemed at the center of all of it, from early June to the night before.
“I heard one woman say you strangled her brother right here in the bar,” Dock told him.
Boyd shook his head.
“Another guy says you went out in the street, the two of you.”
Boyd nodded and folded the wipe cloth and hung it in his belt.
Dock laughed. “Most of them have the right of it though.”
“What’s that, Sterling? The story where I poured a beer on his head and forced him into jail for a night? The story where it’s my fault the dog died, and the man killed himself, and drove everyone away?”
Dock raised a hand. “Sorry, Boyd,” he said. “I meant no harm.” He finished and paid for his beer and drove back to the shop.
Annie was in the kitchen pounding a steak in the bunkroom next to a cookstove Dock had bought at the camping store in Burnsville. She was weepy and put her head against Dock’s chest.
“That poor old lady,” Annie said. “We shouldn’t have let her sit out there.”
“She was a sweetie pie,” Dock said. “And she was very old.”
“Somebody should have checked in on her,” Annie said. “I should have. You should have.”
“I know it,” he said, and stroked his wife’s pale hair, still shining, still golden. “But it’s OK how she went, too.”
Annie nodded. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Old lady loved that rocking chair.”
They both laughed, and Annie took Dock’s big fingers from her hair and kissed them.
Boyd called Chuck and asked him to remove the living ghost town signpost from the highway.
“That’ll be the end of the Lucy Graves,” Chuck said.
“We’ve had enough,” Boyd told him, and truth be told, Chuck was glad to hear it. You go into the Lucy Graves, he thought, and you want there to be more than a diner, and maybe there is more, but all you have to study it by is the ordinary inventory of the place: the white plastic ramekins of club crackers, packets of sugar, the smell of heavy-duty cleaner with which May scrubbed the stainless steel. Lions was the same way. Maybe sometimes you even entertained the possibility of some of its wilder stories—at night, in the bar, when everybody got to talking. Lamar Boggs, for Pete’s sake. But you should’ve known better. And when you thought back to the moments you wondered if it were true—Walker men tending a ghost up on the mesa—you should’ve felt pretty chastened. That’s the word Chuck’s grandfather would’ve used. People weren’t interested in the regular, workaday truth, but that kind of truth was the real miracle, he thought, and looked at the hands at the ends of his arms. He opened and closed them.
People in Burnsville would ask Chuck all through the fall, and even in the winter, and over the years to come, who that man was who drowned himself in the water tower in Lions.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he would respond, regardless of the taunts and jabs from men like Boyd, or the remote politeness of a woman questioning him as Georgianna did. He respected the privacy of the man, and of his sister, who had requested it of him. And that, Chuck figured, was fair. You didn’t always get—you almost never got—the whole story of every man, woman, or child who asked something of you in this world. What you got was the moment they stood before you. You’d have to take your chances, make your best judgment, and do whatever you were going to do. There was a sort of resolve you had to consult that went deeper than the facts of a man’s personal history. At least, he came to think so.
Over the coming week, Leigh knew—she almost knew—that something wasn’t right. But here was a man with golden brown eyes and a real smile. Something about him like a lighted window in the dark. Here were his friends—intelligent, wide-eyed, and full of good words. They expected nothing unreasonable of her beyond her company. They were easygoing, she thought, lighthearted. If she was sometimes vaguely aware of a soft, faraway drumbeat—a reminder or a decision to live her life in a different way—it would be there later just as well as now. Not yet, she felt in every step as she walked to class, as she planned the evening, or the next week, confident as she did so in the unfurling of her life in a clear and perfect direction toward the house and family and job that would at last fulfill the cumulative desires born of her impoverished life in Lions. Not yet. Not yet.
Tonight, here was a clear blue dusk, a cool evening in late September. Chairs set out in rings on a patio. Here were ten thousand small and pleasant reassuring whispers in the rustle of the trees. A string of colored lights was pinned in twenty neat parabolas up and down each side of the street from lamppost to lamppost, and here was a door that opened to the sidewalk, inside the ringing of silverware and human laughter and warmth, the small and perfect notes of rounded fingertips across piano keys, and this was how you ignored the very cl
ear and very peculiar sense that everything making you feel good was the wrong thing.
She moved with her new friends from the patio to a house, from the house to an apartment, from the apartment to a dorm room. They walked as if there’d been no world before they were born, and there’d be no world left when—in a thousand years, happy, old, and perfectly content—they passed away.
She told them about the strange and gaunt tableland north of Lions, where the air was always the breath of winter, and the dirt was white as chalk. They sat in circles on dorm room rugs and in chairs and on the ends of twin beds. Everyone had a bottled beer. Everyone wore a beautiful sweater. Everyone had something to say about what they’d read the night before. Everyone was bumping their knee against someone else’s, wetting their lips, smiling brightly.
For a minute or two, she had all their attention.
She told them about the wounded traveler who could walk barefoot and naked across a hundred miles of bone-breaking cold. And then all of John Walker’s visits out of town, and Gordon’s, and about Gordon’s vow, and how he’d thrown his life away for the sake of something he wouldn’t even talk about, not with anyone, not even with her. She hiccupped.
They stared at her. “Are you for real?” somebody said. He had dark shining hair and screwed up his face and raised an eyebrow.
“No no,” somebody said, “I stopped there on my way out. It’s true. It’s all true. There’s a sign on the side of the highway.”
“That is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard,” somebody else said.
Someone changed the music. Someone handed Leigh a fresh beer.
“If that’s true,” somebody said, “you should totally go back.” He flashed his eyes wide at everyone. “Ghost town.”
“Nobody lives there anymore,” Leigh said. “You can’t live out there. Doesn’t even have a grocery store. What are you supposed to eat? Bugs and dirt?”
Anyone still listening to her now was moving in close to bump a shoulder to hers, or to place a hand on her waist. They weren’t that interested.
“I’m not going back,” she said to no one. “I hate it there. Hate it.” She felt the slight vibration of a passing train beneath her chair. The muted roaring of blood in her ears.
On her way home she passed a bright pub that smelled like beer and onions. Aprons of light poured out across the sidewalk from open doorways. Every small beautiful thing—the masses of green leaves, the way the interior lights from a restaurant lit up a line of blue glass bottles in its front window—seemed to shut a door on her. Not for you, it said. Not for you.
She found a little dive in what had once been a bank with a giant vault; it was nearly empty and quiet. No music, no TV. Gordon would have liked it. John, too. Only the murmur of human conversation. The ringing of glassware. At the bar she asked for something strong. The bartender was a young guy with a rough beard and a pair of suspenders over a white undershirt. He poured her four inches of amber liquid in a glass.
“You don’t have your ID on you, do you?”
“Left it at home.”
“Thought so,” he nodded. “First one’s on me,” he said. “You look like your best friend just got hit by a train.”
Boyd and May sat alone in the empty diner, stirring coffee, empty pie plates beside them. May had turned the overhead lights off and the front door was propped open. It was twilight, last day of September, and the evenings were finally cool again. Across the street, the bar was closed, the cracked window still boarded.
“We could move the bar in here,” Boyd said, his elbows on the table and his head bent over the coffee cup. “Make it yours. Get a liquor license. Change the name of the place.”
“No more Lucy Graves?”
“I think we should change it all.”
“They’re just windows, Boyd. We can fix them.”
Boyd shrugged. His mustache had grown into an unkempt silver beard. “Maybe we ought to just go, too.”
May shook her head. “I don’t think I could get Georgie to leave, Boyd.”
“You really mean to take care of her.”
“I do.”
“What about Annie?”
“Annie’s got her hands full.”
“These could be our last good years together, Maybelline.”
“What, you want to be on vacation?” She was old enough to know better than to think of her life as dear just because it was hers. If where she had ended up was arbitrary, her partner just as much so, she loved and appreciated them no less for it. “I’m sorry,” she said, and opened her hands. “I’m staying here. At my age you make a choice and you do it. Chuck will keep circling through town. Burnsville is there if we need it. Georgie needs me. Twenty-six years I’ve known her, she half raised my only child, and no doubt Leigh would have been all bad instead of half bad without the Walkers’ help.”
“OK,” he whispered. He shook his head, staring into his mug.
She reached over and put a hand on his forearm. “Boyd. Come on.”
He looked up, his blue eyes shining. “That man walked all that way. Somehow made his way. It wasn’t until he got here—” He couldn’t finish. His eyes spilled over and he pressed them with a forefinger and thumb.
“Boyd.”
“You know something, May? I’ve wasted my life one night at a time, four beers in and trying to win people over. Some stupid joke. Some stupid story. Some stupid lie.”
“Come on now.”
May stood up and joined him on his side of the booth, and put her arm around him.
“I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.”
“Well,” she said, and nudged him, laughing softly.
“It’s like I’m standing right beside myself all the time.”
“Listen, Boyd. We were all responsible this summer. You didn’t mean any real harm.” She jostled him lightly. “Did you?”
He sniffed and sucked air in through his mouth and wiped his nose. “Seems like it started with me, doesn’t it?”
“That’s just people talking. Always been a place of big stories, hasn’t it? You’re only a man, Boyd. So you don’t always get it right. Did you ever meet someone who did?”
He was quiet a minute. “John Walker. Didn’t he? Didn’t you say you should have been so lucky? Have a man like he was?”
“I don’t know how perfect he was.” She sighed. “Pretty odd fellow and before the summer anyone else would have said the same.”
“I guess maybe they still do.”
“He left his wife and kid without much to go on, and by his own stubborn lights. Didn’t he?”
“I guess so.”
“And I’ll tell you something else. For years I’ve heard you repeat the same jokes and stories in that bar, night after night.”
“I know,” he said. “Even the good ones are old. I haven’t said anything new since I was fifteen.”
“What I was going to say is that I haven’t heard any of those stories in weeks. A month. You’ve been quiet.”
“Well, it’s been growing on me,” he said. “Being sorry.”
“OK. It’s a change. Right?”
He shrugged.
“Come on,” she nudged him. “Let’s make a plan. Is this our home? That’s Boyd’s Bar across the street, isn’t it? And this is the Lucy Graves.”
He shrugged. “What is that,” he said, “nostalgia?”
“God help me, I’m not that old and useless. I’m talking about today. Tonight. And our friends here.”
“No new restaurant and pub in Burnsville.”
She shook her head. “I have to stay.” She pulled him toward her and he put his forehead on her chest.
“We’ll stay,” he said into her shirt. “Shit.”
She put her hand over the top of his head. “Then let’s go into that bar of yours across the str
eet, and prop open that big old door, and open up a couple of cold beers, and turn on the radio. There’s a cool breeze.”
He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Deserve has nothing to do with what we get,” she said, and pulled him up. When they stood, May glanced out the window and grabbed Boyd’s upper arm.
“Now what in the hell,” he said.
It was a truck from a Burnsville towing company hauling the Walkers’ old blue Silverado through town.
“I have a feeling I better get Leigh.”
Leigh swung her duffel bag into the back of Boyd’s truck and climbed in the cab. May started the engine and pulled out of the dormitory parking lot. It was a picture-perfect day in mid-October and everyone was out. She crossed her arms, eyes red, and turned away from her mother. They’d been twenty minutes on the phone at dawn that morning, a call that was accusatory on May’s end, defensive on Leigh’s, and which had ended with an arranged meeting time on campus and without a goodbye.
They waited at a red light and Leigh watched a pack of students dressed in green and gold gear for a football game crossing the street before them, headed toward the shuttle that would take them to the stadium. All her life she was outside a window watching the rest of the world, for a few weeks it had seemed otherwise, and now she was back to where she’d always been. Outside trying to get in, and now dragged backward, back to Lions again. All of that again.
“I just want to make sure I have this timeline straight,” May said, both hands on the wheel as she accelerated on the city street widening into highway. Her gaze was straight ahead, her brow furrowed. The truck was smooth and quiet compared with Gordon’s. “He left two weeks ago?”
“It was like two or three weeks.”
“What day?”
“I don’t know.” She studied the line of cheap motels and derelict mom and pop gas stations. “Middle of the month.”
“Of September.”
“September, yes.”
Lions Page 17