Lions

by Bonnie Nadzam

  “Wherever he is,” Dock said, “seems like he wants a little space right now.”

  “When did you see him last, Leigh?” Boyd looked at her hard. “What was the last thing you talked about?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. Boyd shook his head. Heat rose in her face. “What? Why are you shaking your head at me?”

  “Alright,” Dock said. “Let’s get Annie and Emery and go have some real breakfast. Chuck can meet us at the diner.”

  “I don’t want to go to the diner.”

  “Leigh,” Boyd said, “this is like work. It’s something we have to do. OK?”

  Was she supposed to have followed him up north to see what it was all about? Then move in with him in his dorm? And now what? Chase him? Hunt him down across the plains? Move in with Georgianna in case he should show up with his dead father, for tea? Move back in with May or into the empty factory, waiting for someone who didn’t want any of the things of this world? Who didn’t seem even to belong to it?

  She stayed in Lions another week, as long as she could without having to drop classes or withdraw entirely. For those seven days she moved back into the house with her mother and now with Boyd, and walked each morning to the diner, always looking around her, conscious of being watched, ready in every moment to hear the sound of her name, to sense his presence behind her and to turn and be folded again into his arms. How he would smell. How warm he would be. How his hands would feel like her own hands.

  The days were cool, the shadows long. From her room she could see straight across the field through the thinning yellow leaves to the factory. She walked through it by day and by night. Tents and canopies of cobwebs whitened every corner and along the broken ceilings. She picked through the piles of treasure the two of them had accumulated in their childhood and stashed here and there. She turned over a broken cottonwood drum.

  “I’m going to fix this,” she said. The sound of her voice was small and flat in the huge open space. She set the broken drum down on the concrete floor. She trailed her fingers in the dust, along the bricks. It’d always seemed the place was crawling with life—moths, bats, mice, possums, swallows in their little clay and daub houses in the rafters. Now they were all quiet.

  She called his name. She cursed him. She sat beneath their third-story lookout and drew her knees into her chest. He was a blur in her vision, a softening and brightening of the shadows until they resolved themselves into the fawn and powder blue of his old flannel shirt. He was there in her dreams on the far side of a long narrow room.

  And yet for that week in Lions, it was she who felt like a ghost. May and Boyd, the Sterlings, Chuck, when he came around, even Georgie—they were cheerful and calm about their daily routines: a little hog feeding, a little welding, a little chicken frying, a little drinking, a little ticketing on the highway. They didn’t talk to her much, or look at her much. They ate May’s grilled cheese or meat loaf sandwiches and toasted each other in the bar, which had two new panes of glass on either side of a new door, painted a clean, smooth yellow. After dark the men would go outside and play horseshoes in the empty street by floodlight.

  On the highway, someone put a ghost town sign back up, a bright one, blue and red and green—cheerful and ironic, this time, and meant only to attract customers. By day there was a steady stream of them, and May kept the old jukebox playing western tunes, for effect. “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Call of the Canyon” and “Red River Valley” and Leigh plugged her ears when she heard it. None of those songs was about this place. Who did they think they were kidding?

  “I don’t like it,” Boyd said after breakfast on her last day in town, his arms and elbows propped up on the driver’s side window.

  “I need to go see.”

  “If you’re not back in six hours I’m sending Chuck after you.”

  “Six hours? There’s no way he went that far. On foot?”

  “I’m serious. I’ll assume Boggs has tied you up and is going to eat you and I’ll send Chuck after you.”

  “Come on, Boyd.”

  “I mean I’ll at least want the truck back. That’s a good truck.”

  “OK, OK. I hear you.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, his voice softening as he looked down the road. “There’s something those Walker men could see that no one else around here was ever able to see.”

  She stared at him.

  “Those were some good men.”

  The words wanted to open a space in her chest that she didn’t want open. “That’s not how you used to talk,” she said, her sentence a blade.

  “The more shame on me.”

  “You sound like my mom.”

  “Pity it took me so long.”

  She followed the same county road north that she knew Gordon had taken time and again that summer, up through the stricken farm fields, past the old trailer and gas station where John used to bring them when they were kids, for salty tacos in greasy paper envelopes. She could imagine the feel of them in her hands, warm and waxy. Then twenty miles more, picking carefully along the unpaved county road as it narrowed and dipped and grassed over and washboarded down a plane. Then past the little homestead behind a broken shelterbelt of dead cottonwood and living buckthorn, the siding weathered to a silvery, lavender colored wood. How lonely it looked, and how beautiful.

  She saw the great plates of stone uplifted in the distance that she knew Gordon had seen in summer. She drove through the same towers of granite. She saw snow—new snow, now—on the cracked ridge of the mountains to the west. She came to the North Star motel, but it was wrecked, a ruin, rotted away. On the beds through the window the blankets were water stained, the mattresses turned, everything seeded with mouse shit and torn into rags and loose fibers by their tiny claws and teeth. She drove four hours, five, darkness closing in above her, knowing Boyd would be counting the hours. She flashed her lights. She turned the radio up. She pulled over and looked around and called his name, but the wind carried it away. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. No trees. No shrubs. No birds. No telephone poles. No cabin. There was nowhere anyone or anything could hide.

  It didn’t happen like this. You were young and someone or something out there was supposed to give you the space to learn and make amends, to make things right. It was a big country; it was big enough to make things right. That was its promise: everything could be made new, improved, made right.

  On a frigid morning in mid-December, Boyd rose in the dark and left May sleeping beside him. He made coffee in the kitchen and stood before the sliding glass doors that opened to May’s gardens, chicken coop, and the endless weedy fields behind. In the distance the sugar beet factory took shape as the sky behind it brightened from navy to gray. He took another sip of his coffee, then cinched the belt on his robe and stepped outside. It was cold. The air smelled like snow, the sky banked up with thick clouds. He squinted across the fields.

  Back inside he took several cans of soup, beans, and vegetables from May’s pantry and set them in a paper bag. He opened the refrigerator and took out a small jar of golden jam, from the gooseberry bushes on the side of the house. It was precious fare. Coffee grounds, into a plastic baggie and into the paper bag. A mug. He opened the freezer. May’s chocolate bars. One of those, into the bag. He paused, thinking. Beans, sardines, and peaches. He found the first two, but no peaches. He slipped his feet into his old, rubber-soled slippers, and walked outside.

  He crossed the yard to the Walkers’, his bones aching in the cold, and left the bag outside behind the shop, just beside the curve of a rusted fender skirt from a 1969 Buick Electra. When he was back in the warm kitchen, he took out a skillet and six eggs, leftovers from the pot roast two nights before, and fried it all up in a beautiful mess. By the time May came into the kitchen in her own ro
be, he’d set the table, poured the orange juice, and made a fresh pot of coffee. He pulled out her chair, and kissed her on the cheek as she sat down, sleepy-headed and smiling. Two mornings later, the paper bag was gone.

  They didn’t hear from Leigh that Christmas or New Year’s. May cried over it with Georgie, their fingers interlaced on Georgie’s kitchen table.

  “Our kids,” May said.

  “I know it.”

  The winter passed without sight of either Gordon or Leigh, and those who remained in Lions fell into a regular pattern of visiting, of eating, of maintaining the tidiness of their homes and of Jefferson Street, empty as it was.

  Boyd repeated his routine with canned goods once every ten or fifteen days through February, and then in spring and summer, taking pleasure in making new selections at the grocery store in Burnsville. Bristling sardines. Block of sharp cheddar. Bag of green apples. Once the following autumn when Boyd went to check the supply, it looked like it’d been a good month since anyone had come; the last paper bag had dissolved in rain so that the canned food labels were bleached, and some of them had crumbled and slipped off. He thought that was discourteous, leaving it all out unlabeled like that. So he began leaving the canned food and anything else they had to share in the factory itself, in an old metal dairy crate, out of the weather. Though it sometimes took several weeks, even months, eventually everything they set out was taken.

  Most everyone assumed Gordon had died. He would not have left his mother, he would not have left the shop. But Georgianna claimed to see him regularly, and she spoke freely of their meetings. Whether in snow or rain or heat, all of those who remained—Dock or Annie Sterling, or May or Boyd, or two of them together—took turns bringing her mashed potatoes and meat loaf and applesauce and pie. They took turns paying her electrical and water bills, and eventually purchasing the goods that Boyd would take out Sunday evenings, passing through the only remaining hay in the county to the line where the cultivated fields met the wild weeds and litter of the factory. He circled around the back of the old building and slipped under the fence where Gordon and Leigh used to, until he got tired of that and Dock went out with a pair of wire cutters to make a passage through the chain-link.

  Within a few years Georgianna herself passed away in her sleep and was laid to rest beside John Walker, and when Boyd got sick and needed to be closer to a hospital, the lights went out in Lions. Dock helped May nail boards over the windows of the Lucy Graves and the bar, and she drove Boyd to Laramie the same day, never to return, herself. That left only the Sterlings. Eventually, Dock’s hair was as white as whorled milkweed floating in the dark, early mornings, as he tended his hogs. Annie’s older brother in Kansas sent money, sometimes, Dock sold his hogs, and they got by. Almost no one came to the shop anymore but once or twice a year—someone from Burnsville who knew Dock was reliable, or someone from up by Horses who needed a small job done, a trailer fixed, a hog kennel repaired. Occasionally he was given a project he didn’t know how to execute, but he’d talk through the work-up out loud with Gordon or with John, and figure it out. He kept the shop clean and kept all the Walkers’ beautiful machines in running order, and he kept everything where it was—never moved or touched the Walkers’ coffee cups from their place on the workbench. Dock was very clear that it was he who was the visitor—the guest in that workshop, and then in the house itself, when Georgianna passed and left it to the Sterlings. He refused to sell any of the equipment, though God knew they could’ve used the income.

  By then it was Annie who had taken over from Boyd the task of the canned food, blankets, and five-gallon water drums, though the boys, as she called them, often helped her drive out the latter on their ATVs. It was the kind of job Emery liked.

  She went in all weathers, in Dock’s big sheepskin coat in late fall or winter, or in summer, her nightgown sighing against her blue veined legs as she crossed the summer grass, or across the iron gray furze in February and March. In slippers she climbed the metal staircase to the first landing and left there, right by the old awl, a can of cling peaches. A can of beans. Occasionally a new warm blanket, a little firewood, a note: Thinking of you here. Beautiful sunrise yesterday morning. Supposed to be a big snow. Happy Easter. We love you.

  These days, everyone’s gone. If you were to take an unmarked county road off of the highway and drive north an hour, if you could find the place, distinguishable by its high rusted water tower and abandoned sugar beet factory, you could stand in the middle of Jefferson Street and hear each note from each barn swallow floating through the air like a globe of silver. In the silence between, blood singing in your ears.

  For ten years, then fifteen and seventeen, Leigh didn’t go back. She finished college, dated, tried on different jobs, met her husband, married, had two children—did all the things everyone does. When she heard from May over the phone, May said nothing about the Walkers. In everything her mother asked—How were the kids? How was work?—Leigh heard: I’m not going to bring it up; you bring it up. But Leigh would never, and she always had to pour a glass of white wine afterward.

  “What is it?” her husband would say, jostling her arm a little, sitting down close beside her. She’d never told him much about Gordon, and had told him very little about Lions, a place of impoverishment and uneducated people—a life they both agreed she’d been lucky to escape.

  “Nothing,” she would say. “I don’t get along with my mother.”

  Sometimes now, grocery shopping, or filing a bill, or scrubbing the bathtub, she looks up, her breath caught high in her lungs. She’s forgetting something. She’s forgotten something. She races in her mind over the list of things she’d set out to do that day, racing through the list again and again in loops until she is calmed not by the reassurance that she hasn’t missed anything on it, but by the list itself. They are half as good as desire, these lists, and keep her twice as busy.

  She spends a good deal of her time grocery shopping. A beautiful grocery store three-quarters of a mile down the road from the house she shares with this husband, who came from a little upper-middle-class money, and her children, who are bright and precocious. A clean living room with tiled floors and yellow painted walls and windows full of light. Granite countertops in the kitchen, a big, rustic wooden table for family meals, and the children’s crafts and games. A garden out back with red tomatoes, flowers, and lawn. Green lawn. Soft as the hair on a baby’s head and you could lie down in it—the kind of pasture everyone at home had dreamt of, had counted on, had every year hoped would emerge from the ground in Lions. And now here it was, green grass, all over her yard.

  On occasion, the housecleaning gets away from her, and she finds over the surfaces of all of her furniture a dusty residue like a living membrane, and she hesitates to sweep it away, though in the end she always sweeps it away, her eyes fixed out the window on the street at some passing car or neighbor with a stroller.

  In dreams a stiff wind, like a whisper, comes in through a crack under the door, and she wakes troubled and sets her hand on her husband’s thick arm and asks no one in particular: am I awake? Terrified that the wind is real, and will keep coming, will break between all the boards and strip the house away, tumble down the smooth creamy walls and come up beneath the kitchen and front hall floor, their ochre tiles suddenly loosed like rotted teeth, rending open the walls so that her children, now old enough not to need or want her, will walk out into the huge empty field she hoped they’d never see, the wind coming and coming until what is at the heart of her home stands exposed for her to face. And the horror of it will be that it is not—as her mother had once told her—personal. There will be nothing in the wind that cares whether she has chosen the wrong life.

  Because the truth is, her husband could be the most considerate lover, the steadiest caretaker, and he wouldn’t be as real to her as the shadows of leaves printed by cold moonlight on her white belly and thighs, which seem as they tremble to arra
nge themselves in cipher spelled out across her flesh.

  A message from some place or time far away.

  And how unfair it was—hadn’t Gordon been the one to leave her? She had done nothing wrong. She had very carefully and by much hard work created a life in which she possessed everything she liked, and kept out everything to which she had an aversion. Was there something wrong with that? She had only wanted good company in a pleasant environment. How had that been wrong? She had surrounded herself with people who made her feel good, excised those who didn’t, and left everyone else in relative peace. She had been practical and decent and good—had she not?—and had made a family that was likewise practical and decent and good.

  “If you follow your heart,” John Walker had once told her from his reading chair, “everything lines up perfectly. Like crystals in a dish.”

  In remembering it, something misgives her, something knocks softly at her sternum telling her she’s gotten something terribly wrong. That somehow she’s missed some very small but very important thing. She goes out into the yard or playroom to look at the faces of her children—one girl, one boy—beautiful towheaded extensions of herself, fresh-faced proof of her goodness. It’s a consolation she knows is running out; they don’t even look up at her anymore when she enters the room.

  So must every woman like her keep a secret place. An empty space perhaps unbeknownst even to her, and that grows in proportion with everything she’s ignored until it hollows her out completely. She tries to fill the space with messages and signs that she sometimes catches herself collecting, as if her real life were going to take place somewhere else, some other time—later—once she’s assembled all these messages and signs into a clear map, a clear set of directions. This couldn’t be her life. Not yet.

  Eventually, walking home from the movies with her family on a busy street lined with buildings and stores as bright as toys, she pulls her hand away from her tall, sturdy husband, and drops her arms. She ignores the child pulling at the back of her sleeve.