Lions

by Bonnie Nadzam

  “A month ago Leigh?”

  “Look, mom. He’s the one who left. He didn’t even say goodbye, or tell me he was going. As usual. The Walker MO. Don’t pretend to be surprised.”

  “Were you arguing?”

  The cars thinned out and the motels gave way to isolated farmsteads and corn stubble. A cheerful man in a denim cap was selling cherry cider and pumpkins and waved at them.

  “I’m not interrogating you, Leigh. What are you going to tell Georgie and Dock? Or Chuck?”

  “Chuck?”

  “We didn’t wait to call him. Do you understand Gordon’s been missing almost a month?”

  “He was gone almost that long a couple times this summer. Chuck didn’t want to talk to me then.”

  “He was in his truck this summer.”

  “And you’re sure it was his truck they found.”

  “Leigh.”

  “Because John took good care of that truck. It wouldn’t have just died. And Gordon wouldn’t have just left it.”

  “It was his truck, it did break down, and Gordon did leave it.”

  “You’re saying he just left the truck on the side of the road and disappeared into the wide open prairie.”

  “It looks like he must have unloaded everything first. Georgianna must have been asleep. She doesn’t even seem to know he came and left again. It’s a wonder none of us saw him. It must have been the middle of the night.”

  Leigh thought she knew which night. “The chair,” she said, and could see the whole living room turned into dorm room restored to living room. She never wanted to see it again. “Well, I don’t know where he is. I don’t see why I need to come home.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone.”

  “It wasn’t my job.”

  “Don’t you care about him?”

  “He left. Again. His choice. How was I supposed to know his truck broke down?”

  “OK,” May said, nodding, “I’ll give you that.”

  “He is not my responsibility.”

  May’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them from the corner of her eye with one middle finger, then again on the other side. Leigh turned away and looked out the window.

  The sky clouded over behind them and by the time they crossed the county line the clouds had caught up overhead. It was late afternoon on a Saturday and the street downtown was empty, a few scraggly native corn decorations hung on a front door. A lopsided pumpkin on the stoop of the diner, a plastic scarecrow in front of the bar. The diner was empty except for Georgianna, who they could see from the street was refilling the glass sugar canisters at a table by the window.

  “What am I supposed to tell her?” May asked her daughter. Something about seeing her old friend there, bent over in the lamplight, quickened her pulse. “That Gordon’s been missing a month and no one cared enough to tell her? That now her son is gone, too, and no one knows where? That you never even called?”

  “Mom.”

  “What were you doing all this time?”

  “I was in school.”

  “Where you were entitled to a little fun, to a normal experience.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You act like everything happening in the world is happening in the story of your life. Leigh Ransom’s precious life.”

  Leigh looked at her mother, uncomprehending. “If it’s not my life, whose is it?”

  May turned the engine off and climbed out of the truck. Boyd came out of the bar and waved at her. They met briefly in the street and May went into the diner. Leigh sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap. Her mother’s words hung in the air beside her, but she would not look at them.

  Inside Leigh carried two cups of coffee to the table where Georgianna sat. “Can I join you?”

  “Leigh,” Georgianna stood and spilled a good half cup of sugar down her dress and onto the floor. “It’s so nice to have you back.” Leigh hugged her, and held her breath in her nose. It smelled like the woman hadn’t showered in weeks.

  “Hi, Georgie,” Leigh said.

  She smiled and sat down. “Place isn’t the same.”

  “Pretty quiet.” Leigh sat.

  “Your mother’s still getting customers from the highway.”

  “I heard they’re going to widen it.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Are you going to stay here?”

  “Me?” Georgianna looked out the window, then turned back to Leigh and stroked the back of her hand. “Sweetheart, there’s nowhere to go.”

  “There’s a whole world out there, Georgie. You’re only in your fifties.”

  “Leigh thinks the world owes her something,” May said. Leigh was about to fire something back when Georgianna laughed softly.

  “Yes, well. She’ll get over that,” Georgianna said.

  May went behind the counter and washed her hands. She took four heads of cabbage from the walk-in and started chopping.

  “Georgie,” Leigh said. Georgianna set the sugar funnel on the table. “I don’t think Gordon liked school much.”

  Georgianna waved a hand. “I didn’t think he would.”

  Behind them, the chopping stopped.

  “Did you know he left? A few weeks ago? Left school?”

  More chopping.

  “Of course he did.”

  “Do you know where he is, though? They found his truck.”

  May stopped chopping.

  “Oh, he’s around,” Georgianna said.

  “Around?”

  She nodded, “Course he is.”

  Leigh had the same sense she had on the morning of John’s death. Then again on her birthday. For Georgianna, talking about her son was talking about her husband. And talking about either one of them was like talking about the quality of the air.

  “Georgie,” Leigh said, and caught her mother’s eye. Georgianna looked up again, and waited, her gaze fixed on Leigh’s. “I was just wondering if you might like a piece of pie?”

  “If there’s a lemon cream I’d love that.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I made it myself, and I know it’s good.” She winked.

  May whispered at Leigh behind the counter as she took down the lemon cream pie and cut into it. “How could you turn your back on him? Gordon was grieving.” The floor behind the counter was shining. May must have been scrubbing the place raw. The stainless steel, the floors, the stove, the grill.

  “I know that.”

  “Like hell you did. You and Boyd and Dock making up some dead man on the mesa. So full of bullshit you can’t smell it on your own nose.”

  “I didn’t believe any of that,” Leigh muttered. She bit the ragged cuticle on her forefinger with her teeth.

  “You what?”

  “I said I didn’t really believe any of that. Come on.” She shut her eyes. She could see the narrow house on the mesa lit up inside her eyelids like a film negative.

  “Keep your voice down. I have never seen such impatience. He lost his father, Leigh.”

  “You don’t know how hard he made it. He didn’t want me anymore.”

  “Didn’t want you anymore? What would that have to do with anything?” She raised both eyebrows. “Besides, you were his best friend. You should have seen him the day he saw you making out with that man from Denver. He had his head on the steering wheel out there for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, Leigh.”

  Leigh’s face flushed and her stomach turned. John’s binoculars. “You don’t know how hard it was,” she said dumbly. Gordon saw the man lead her into the factory. Did he see the man walk out two minutes later, alone?

  “And then there was your proposal to Dex Meredith. On the day of John’s service, no less.”

  “I never proposed to Dex Meredith.”

  “Yes, you did. You were drunk.”

&n
bsp; Leigh turned her back on May and looked out at the street. She put her hand on the counter and closed her eyes again. “You don’t know anything about it. You refuse to see.”

  May circled in front of Leigh and took her daughter’s chin with her thumb and forefinger. “Look at me.” May’s face was lined with wrinkles and spotted in new places—on her temple, on her cheek. Her eyes were a bloodshot, watery blue. The wraith of a long lost beauty looked out. “Your options aren’t as unlimited as you think they are.”

  Leigh twisted her face away. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

  The bells rang on the swinging glass door and Boyd stepped inside.

  “Bring that slice of pie to Georgie,” May said. “You’re going to have to have a more frank talk with her.”

  “I’m all done here,” Georgianna said. She stood up from the table where she’d been funneling sugar and looked across the diner at the three of them. “You know what John used to say about that mesa story? Boggs?” She smiled and crossed the room, stood beside them at the counter. They stared at her, not realizing she’d heard them. Leigh’s face was red with embarrassment.

  “He knew the story?” May asked.

  “Knew it! John said his grandfather made it up himself, just so he could get out of the shop for a few days at a time, keep everyone away and take a break.”

  “The heck you say, Georgie. Walkers lived to work,” Boyd said. “That was John Walker or I never knew the guy.”

  “But Lord could he be lazy!” Georgie said. “He could put his feet up and read three novels in a row with nothing but a can of beans, a can of sardines, and a can of peaches to interrupt him. And Gordon’s the same way.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how many paperbacks we have in that house. Hundreds, all of them silly. Full of cowboys and gold and stagecoach robberies.”

  “Westerns,” May said.

  “Westerns,” Georgianna repeated.

  “Georgie what are you telling us?” Boyd bumped Georgianna’s shoulder playfully with his own and grinned. “There was never any Boggs?”

  Georgianna gave them all a funny look. “What,” she said, “you don’t mean really? A real flesh and blood ghost up there? All these hundred and fifty years?” She shook her head and looked out at the street. “Now wouldn’t that be scary?”

  The Quonset hut was lit up and the windows in the shop hung in the dark.

  Dock opened the door. Annie stepped out from behind him.

  “Have you seen him?” Leigh asked before they could say hello. They both looked at her blankly. “Gordon.”

  “Is he back?” Dock asked.

  “Like two or three weeks ago he came back. A month maybe. I don’t know. They found his truck.”

  “Who found his truck?”

  “He hasn’t been here at all?”

  Emery was behind them, rocking on the workbench and listening to radio ministry. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and Leigh realized the radio wasn’t John’s radio.

  “Are you living here?” she looked from Annie to Dock and back again.

  “We had a house fire,” Dock said, raising his hand. “It’s temporary, it’s temporary. This place is Gordon’s. We know that. Georgie knows we’re here. Place is right and tight and it’s getting cold.”

  “Did Gordon see you here?”

  Dock put his hands up. “I haven’t seen him.”

  Annie pulled Leigh inside. “This is temporary,” she said. She put her arm around Leigh. “No shortage of empty houses around here for us to choose from. Tea? Hot cocoa? We have a hotplate.”

  Emery stumbled off the workbench and came to the doorway, his thumbs hooked together and elbows hyperextended. The blanket spilled around his ankles.

  “I should check the factory,” Leigh said. “Before it gets dark. I’m sure he’s camped out there being, you know, being Gordon.”

  “I don’t know,” Dock said. “Was he OK last time you saw him?”

  “He was,” she shrugged. “You know. Himself. Like the summer.”

  “Let me come with you. It’s already dark.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Leigh. You’ve got me worried.”

  Driving into town beside Dock, Leigh saw the beautiful old blue truck impounded behind chain-link with two dozen other cars and trucks in various states of rusted out disrepair. It was terrible, seeing it in a pile of junk like that, among all those discarded and unwanted vehicles. That was John and Gordon’s truck. Gordon loved that truck. And he couldn’t have driven north without it. Was he in a bar ditch somewhere? Hurt? Her hand went to the beauty mark behind her ear that he used to touch as he started tracing a line down her neck.

  “That’s his truck, alright,” Dock said. He took a phone out of his shirt pocket. “Why don’t we call Chuck before we do anything or go anywhere?” He pulled over. “You talked to him yet?”

  Leigh shook her head. He dialed and handed her the phone. She greeted Chuck and nodded and looked from the window to Dock and back again.

  “Well, have you talked to Georgie?” she asked. “And what does she say?”

  “Was there anything in the truck?” Dock whispered to Leigh to ask Chuck.

  “Was there anything in the truck?” She shook her head. She looked at Dock. “It was pulled over northbound on the county road between Alton’s and Jorgensen’s.”

  “No note?” Dock asked.

  “No note, nothing?” Leigh said into the phone. She shook her head. She waited. “Mr. Garcia you can’t auction that truck.”

  “Has anyone filed a missing persons report?” Dock asked.

  “No,” Leigh said. “Don’t do that. Not yet. He’ll be in the factory. Let me check. I’ll call you back.”

  “I’m so sorry, Leigh,” Dock said when she handed him the phone.

  “I’m not surprised he’s gone, but I don’t understand about the truck.”

  “Georgie says he’s fine.”

  “I know. But Chuck doesn’t trust her judgment.”

  “We’ll keep looking. We’ll check your factory in the daylight, OK? If he’s there, he’s not going out in this.”

  Outside, sleet came down slantwise in gleaming needles. Back at the Walkers’ shop she slipped away and crossed the yard. The sound of wind chimes Georgianna left hanging. The wind whistling through the tree in her own yard. She walked across the empty dirt road. She could see the light in the weld shop behind her and imagined that it was John Walker in there, with his wry smile, and that soon he’d be closing up and heading back to the house where he and Georgianna and Gordon would be having dinner.

  She gazed over the silent field and toward the colossal ruin of the factory, where she saw, in an upper window, a flare of brightness. The light bounced into the shabby lace of tea-colored hogweed, and disappeared. She held her breath, searching the dark amorphous field, then tore the whole way across it, under the chain-link in the old place, and over the glitter of glass from Alan Ranger’s beer bottles and through the door. It was pitch dark. She paused, breathing hard, looking for the stairs in the shadows, and ran to them. Up the narrow, ladder-like steps to the second story, but no, the light had been from higher still. The tower? Had he finished the steps up to the tower? She ran up one more level to the broken stairs and looked up into the darkness. Still broken. And no light. She spun around 360 degrees, twice, three times.

  She went to the far east window and called his name. Down the ladder and all around the second story, calling his name, swearing at him. No light. No sound but the weather outside the broken windows.

  Dock found her in a heap on the floor.

  “I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “He won’t answer.” She lifted her head and called him again. Dock held still and listened.

  “Come on, Leigh. It’s late.”

  “He’s here
somewhere.”

  “There’s no one here. It’s empty. It’s late.”

  “But I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “Up in a window. From the yard.”

  “You could not have possibly seen that far.”

  “I saw a light flash.”

  “Lightning.”

  She shook her head.

  “Listen. We’ll come back in the morning, in the daylight, and look through every single room. If he’s here, or was here, there’s no way he won’t have left some sign. Mud or something, right? We’ll come back in the morning. That’s just a couple hours.”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Dock took her under his arm and walked her to his truck. He turned on the heat and handed her a dry jacket to put over her shoulders.

  “Dock,” she said quietly. “Do you remember telling me and Gordon about Echo Station?”

  He glanced at her. “Sure. That old game.”

  “I did it. That same night. I snuck out of the house and I went out there and did it.”

  “Did you?”

  “And I’m afraid, Dock.”

  “Leigh,” he said softly. “That’s a children’s game.”

  At dawn a cold bracing wind sang over the brittle fields. The sky was the color of brushed aluminum. Dock and Leigh searched the factory and its grounds in the cold, but there were no tracks other than their own, and there was no one inside, nor any sign that anybody else had been. He was just here, she thought. He was just. Here.

  “Tell me again,” Dock said, pouring hot water into her teacup, “what you saw?” May was at the diner but Boyd stood behind them in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed. He locked eyes with Dock and shook his head.

  “Two flashes of a flashlight,” Leigh said. “Like a signal. It came out of a window and across the field.”

  He handed her a small glass of juice and two aspirin. “We have to call Chuck.”

  “OK.”

  “We don’t think that was Gordon you saw,” Boyd said from the doorway.

  Leigh turned around. “What do you think it was?”

  “We think you’re upset,” he said, nodding at his own statement.

  “I am upset.”