As Good As Gone

by Larry Watson

  Although Bill knew all along about the connection between Brenda and Lon, he was trying to demonstrate that he did not share the prejudices of his co-­workers and many of his fellow citizens. Most Indians are decent, hardworking people who deserve far better than they receive in this part of the world, and Bill long ago resolved to treat them fairly and respectfully, exactly the way he would behave toward white people and just how he would like to be treated.

  Besides, ever since that Christmas when Bill was ten, he and Lon have looked out for each other. On a cold, snowy Saturday just before the holiday, elementary school children were invited to the skating rink outside the high school for a gift giveaway from the Gladstone merchants. A big pile of wrapped presents sat on the ice, a sight that would have excited children at any time, but especially in the depth of the Depression, when a good many children faced the prospect of a holiday without any presents. It soon became clear, however, that these gifts would not simply be handed out. The children had to line up at the opposite end of the rink from the presents, and at a signal they were to race across the ice and grab whatever they could. Bill Sidey was not a big, fast, or athletic child, yet for some reason—perhaps the galoshes he wore gave him extra traction, perhaps he had a special sense of balance that before that day he had not discovered—he and another boy were the first ones to reach the pile. The other boy was Lonnie Black Pipe.

  For a brief moment, while the other children were slipping, sliding, falling, and shrieking across the ice, and while the businessmen who sponsored the event were laughing uproariously at the spectacle, Bill and Lonnie tried, by feeling the packages and guessing at the shapes, to find and grab the best gifts for themselves. Maybe because the boys had tied in their race across the ice, maybe because there were obviously more than enough gifts for the two of them, maybe because they felt united against the mockery of the adults—whatever the reason—Bill and Lonnie cooperated in their scavenging. “Don’t take that one,” Bill advised. “That’s a book.” In turn, Lonnie said, “That’s just a goddamn stick of candy.” Both boys eventually took small, wrapped discs, objects they couldn’t identify but whose compact heft made them seem possibly more valuable than the lighter, flimsier packages, the obvious mittens or pencils. Once they were off the ice, they eagerly unwrapped their presents and found that they had claimed hockey pucks. And in spite of Gladstone’s long, cold winters that kept ice in steady supply, no one in the community played hockey. Bill wasn’t even sure how he knew what the black disc was, but he shared his knowledge with Lonnie.

  Rather than reveal their disappointment to anyone, they made a joke of the incident, a joke that continued for years. Bill Sidey and Lonnie Black Pipe had no classes together in elementary or junior high school (and Lonnie, like most of the Indians with whom Bill went to school, dropped out before high school), but when they saw each other, on a playground or a city street, one of them would invariably ask the other, “How are you fixed for hockey pucks?” And that would be prelude to a conversation. What’s going on with you? Not much. How about you? They’d talk about local sports teams, or about some of the town’s fast cars and their owners. Lonnie would ask if a certain girl had a boyfriend, though Bill seldom had the answer.

  Later, in high school Bill had a morning newspaper route, delivering the Gladstone Gazette. He was trudging down Fourth Street on a gusty cold dark morning in late October, and he must have been half asleep as he walked because he didn’t notice the car pulling to the curb alongside him. “Hey,” the driver said, “if you’re on your way to buy some hockey pucks, I can give you a lift.” It was Lonnie, of course, and he was not up early but out late.

  Lonnie said, “Guess what? My old man kicked me out of the house.”

  “No shit?” Bill responded. “I can go that one better: My old man kicked himself out.”

  “At least you still got a bed to sleep in,” Lonnie said.

  Bill had considered inviting Lonnie to spend a night at the Sidey house, but he told himself that one night wouldn’t make a difference in Lonnie’s life. Besides, Lonnie said, “At least I can come and go as I please without putting up with anyone’s bullshit.”

  A couple years ago at the Florence County Fair, Bill and Will were walking toward the grandstand for the rodeo competition, when someone called out, “Hey, hockey pucks.”

  Bill turned around, knowing who it had to be, and there was Lonnie, sitting on a stool next to a horse trailer. Yet if not for the hockey puck reference, Bill might not have recognized his old friend. Lonnie had been a restless skinny kid, but was now a fat man, bloated and slow. A massive gut hung down between his spread legs, and even though Lonnie wore a big black hat with its brim pulled low, Bill could see the scars that had turned half of Lonnie’s face into a horror. He had heard that Lonnie had been in a serious auto accident and had to be pulled from the burning wreck. Lonnie’s left eye and the left side of his mouth were pulled down tight in a kind of grimace, and on that same side of his face the skin from his forehead down to his neck was reddish purple and looked like wrinkled cellophane. His nose had flattened to little more than a smear, and Bill wondered if Lonnie could breathe through it.

  “How’s it going, Lonnie?” Bill said, extending his hand. The hand that Bill shook had the same wrinkled cellophane quality as Lonnie’s face, but the grip was strong. Even sitting quietly on his stool, Lonnie Black Pipe’s bulk had the look of power in reserve.

  “I been better,” Lonnie said. “But I been worse too.”

  “I heard about the accident,” said Bill. “I’m sorry.”

  Lonnie shrugged. “The women ain’t scared away. That’s all I care about.” He pointed to Will. “This your boy?”

  Bill said, “Yes, this is Will.”

  “You ride, boy?” asked Lonnie.

  Will looked up to his father, and Bill said, “He’s a city boy. Bicycles and baseball.”

  Lonnie raised his thumb in the direction of the horse trailer. “My nephew’s roping today.”

  “Good luck to him,” said Bill. “We better get to our seats. Take it easy, Lon.”

  “Hell, I’ll take it any way I can get it.”

  And will that eviction notice now turn Lon Black Pipe out of a home? Bill’s best hope is that Brenda and her children, and anyone else sheltering under that roof, will simply leave. It’s just as likely, however, that she’ll ignore this letter too, and Bill will be a part of one more entanglement involving Lon Black Pipe and the law.

  So the prospect of being in Missoula when Brenda Cady makes her wheedling phone calls and whining excuses suits Bill fine. And really, she’s only a part of his desire to leave. The Kiwanis meetings about the Labor Day picnic, the pressure from that Billings developer who wants to partner up and build a four-­unit apartment building on Gladstone’s east side, the demands of the recently widowed Mrs. Glocklin who wants to sell her house but doesn’t want anyone “traipsing through her house just to gawk,” the fund drive to build lights for the high school football field, the church board’s struggle to decide if a new minister is needed—Bill won’t mind being free of these obligations and spending some time in a city where no one knows him or wants anything from him.

  GOD FORGIVE HER, BUT the pages of the Bibles in the pews of Olivet Lutheran Church always remind Marjorie Sidey of cigarettes and the month of May.

  Tully Heckman used to roll his own cigarettes, and he preferred pipe tobacco—she couldn’t remember the brand, but it was something expensive that smelled of licorice—to the tobaccos like Drum and Bull Durham that were made for cigarettes.

  On a Sunday morning in May, Tully picked Marjorie up after church, and they drove out to Willow Creek. It was the first hot day of spring, and their plan had been to spread a blanket under a tall cottonwood and make love to the applause of its leaves. But the creek had overrun its banks, and the ground was too muddy for them to walk close to the tree. Instead, they climbed into the back of the truck, and because Marjorie could not take a chance on wrinkling or
soiling the dress she wore that morning to church, she undressed completely before she lay down on the blanket Tully spread for her.

  If Marjorie had ever been naked outside before, she could not remember the occasion, nor could she recall a time when she had ever seen anyone completely unclothed in the open air, and since Tully kept his clothes on, she felt that day as though she was the only person who was free enough, bold enough, young and lovely enough, to walk the earth as naked as she came from the womb. Tully often brought along beer or a bottle of sweet wine when they were going to park somewhere and although on that day they had none, laughter kept bubbling out of Marjorie as if she were drunk. It felt so strange—so wonderful and sexy and strange—to be touched by the heat of the sun on her body where the sun had never shone before!

  But when she lay back on the truck bed the blanket’s wool was as itchy on her naked back as the truck’s bits of hay and straw would have been. Furthermore, the blanket was not cushion enough to keep the bed’s uneven boards from hurting her back. Tully rolled them over, and that was the first time she ever went on top—and her first orgasm, a sensation that was like an explosion occurring simultaneously in air, water, and fire—a gasp, a flood, a sudden suffusion of heat. She couldn’t help thinking that the cause was not only the new position but the hot sun on her back as well.

  After, they both wanted to smoke, and it was then they discovered that Tully had tobacco but no papers. Neither did they have tailor-­mades, as Tully called them. But in their search for a substitute of some kind, they came across Marjorie’s Bible lying in the front seat under her clothes. White leather with her name stamped in gold on the cover, the Bible had been a confirmation gift from her parents, but that day Tully Heckman showed her a new use for it. Its paper was of a size and weight just right for rolling cigarettes. “It don’t work with most books,” Tully said, “and not most Bibles either. Usually the paper just starts on fire. But this thin paper works fine, if you don’t mind takin’ in the word of the Lord with a mouthful of smoke.” Marjorie didn’t mind. It was one more occasion for laughter on a day when laughter was as abundant as sunshine.

  Those days seem to belong not only to another time—and not even her youth but someone else’s, someone Marjorie once heard talked about in whispers—but also to another place, a countryside so foreign to her present life that she finds it next to impossible to believe that she can actually climb into a car and drive to the spot on Willow Creek where a giant cottonwood tree’s branches hang out over the rushing water. Far away, it’s all so far away, until she picks up one of the Bibles from the racks in Olivet Lutheran Church.

  NINE

  On the day after Bill and Marjorie Sidey have left for Missoula, their garbage is strewn all over the alley behind their home, a discovery Beverly Lodge makes when she carries a sack of trash out to her own garbage cans.

  She isn’t sure what to do. Knock on the Sideys’ door and tell whoever answers about the mess? Should she pick up the garbage herself? She has to do something. Campbell’s soup cans, a Post Toasties box, watermelon rinds, apple cores, crumpled balls of tinfoil, and meat wrappers lie in the gravel and dust. Beverly can’t help it; she worries that somebody might think the trash is hers.

  After debating this dilemma for a moment, Beverly finally decides just to go back in the house for another paper bag. Before she can move, however, Calvin Sidey comes striding toward the tipped-­over can.

  Her first impulse is to run back to the house, afraid that he might consider her responsible. But before Beverly can retreat, Calvin has her fixed with his gaze as surely as if she’s been staked to her own lawn.

  And maybe he does think she’s to blame because he pointedly asks her, “What the hell is the meaning of that?”

  It’s all Beverly can do not to shout her innocence like a child. “It’s . . . I believe the Neaveses’ dog is to blame.”

  “Neaves?”

  Beverly points toward the light green house across the alley. The Neaveses have been her neighbors for over ten years, but she feels now as if she has betrayed them with nothing more than her raised index finger.

  She hastens to explain, to excuse the family she has just condemned. “They have a dog, an Irish setter, who’s always getting into garbage cans up and down the alley.”

  “You’ve seen this?”

  Beverly nods. “It’s something of a joke in the neighborhood. I think one year the dog was blamed for something trick-­or-­treaters did—”

  “Has anybody talked to them about keeping the dog tied up?”

  She shrugs helplessly. In Calvin Sidey’s presence, she feels reduced to tongue-­tied girlhood, a sensation that both flatters and humiliates her.

  “You’re sure it’s the dog? How come he hasn’t knocked over anyone else’s garbage?”

  “She. Her name is Queenie. I don’t know. Maybe she found what she was looking for right away.”

  Calvin Sidey walks toward the alley, leaving Beverly to wonder whether it’s her yammering or Queenie’s behavior that has him shaking his head in disgust. After a moment, she runs after him.

  “Mr. Sidey! If you wait a minute, I’ll go get a sack and help you clean this up.”

  Beverly Lodge is a tall woman, but when Calvin Sidey stops and pivots, he seems to look down at her from a height far greater than inches. “Who are you?” he asks.

  There’s no reason he should know who Beverly is, no reason at all, yet she feels diminished by his question. “I didn’t think you’d remember me. I’m your neighbor. Beverly Lodge? From next door?”

  “I don’t live here,” he says, bending to pick up the dented garbage can.

  Beverly takes pride in being able to bring if not a smile, then at least a measure of pleasantness from anybody, from those surly ranch boys who glower at her in the classroom to the grouchy attendant who pumps her gas to the dyspeptic checker at the Red Owl. And Beverly is not about to give up on Calvin Sidey. He’ll simply require a bit more . . . what is it? She won’t call it charm. She’s too artless, too straightforward, to think of herself as charming. And she certainly won’t win anyone over with her beauty. She’s always been gawky, long-­jawed, and toothy, though in her younger days she turned a few heads with her thick dark hair, slim hips, and long legs. Now, however, most of her hair has gone gray and those legs and hips just make her look bony and underfed. But Beverly has something—optimism, good cheer, a belief in human goodness—whatever it is, it burns bright enough in her to shine forth when she smiles. And when radiance and straight teeth are not enough Beverly still has persistence.

  She raises her voice slightly as if she’s trying to reach an inattentive student in the back row. “Maybe I should have said we used to be neighbors.” She increases the wattage of her smile and asks, “Do you remember Burt Lodge? Burt was my husband. When you used to live here.”

  Beverly isn’t sure how she can tell, but she knows he’s trying not to remember.

  “No,” he says, “I don’t recall. That was a long time ago.”

  “But I remember you.”

  Calvin Sidey subjects her to a moment of head-­to-­foot scrutiny, as though he’s trying to decide if she’s worth the effort. It isn’t easy, but Beverly holds her ground. She doesn’t fidget, she doesn’t speak, and she doesn’t take her hands from her hips. When Calvin Sidey finishes his inspection, his expression doesn’t reveal whether she’s passed or failed the test.

  “Do you need to see the teeth?” she asks. “They’re all mine.” She lifts each foot in turn, then says, “The hooves probably need to be reshod.”

  In the next instant, Beverly sees something she wouldn’t have thought possible: His face, as dark as saddle leather, takes on another shade—a blush of red.

  “Who owns the dog again?” he asks.

  “The Neaveses. In the green house. Let me go get that bag now.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I don’t mind helping. It could just as easily be my garbage that Queenie got into.”r />
  Calvin kicks a Kleenex box. “You didn’t make the mess,” he says, “and neither did I. So we’re not cleaning it up.” With that, he strides off toward the Neaveses’ home.

  Beverly considers staying right there in order to watch the fireworks, but she knows she has to return to her own home. She doesn’t have the time of day for her neighbors across the alley—not loud, vulgar Dalton Neaves nor his shrill, whiny wife June—yet they’ll still be living in that pea-­green house and she in hers long after Calvin Sidey has once again ridden off into the sunset.

  “I FIND IT HARD to believe anything out there can be that amusing.”

  Adam, Beverly’s son, has caught her staring out the kitchen window at exactly the scene she came inside to avoid. Calvin has brought both Mr. and Mrs. Neaves outside, and although Beverly doubts that her son could appreciate the little drama that’s playing in the alley, she doesn’t care. She’s simply happy she has someone with whom she can share the sight.

  “Look,” she says, making room for her son at her side.

  Adam pulls his bathrobe tight and steps to the window. Beverly isn’t surprised that he’s not dressed; she is surprised he’s out of bed. Adam has been living with her since the first of June, when the school year ended in Dickinson, North Dakota, where he was teaching high school English. He wasn’t offered a contract for the following year, and around that time, Adam and his wife decided to end their marriage. Beverly isn’t quite sure if, when those knots were untied, her son deliberately made for Gladstone and his childhood home or if he simply drifted back to his mother’s house.

  And what does it matter, finally? He’s here, and Beverly worries it might be for good. She shed a few tears when he went away to college, but having him back within these walls is sadder.