This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  “I’ve heard stories.”

  Swarthbeck smiled. “Lots of stories out there. I planted most of them.”

  Doreen had crept in close, peering at the mayor from around an end cap. He shot her a hard look, and she retreated.

  Wanda Perkins, however, only moved forward. “What about selling moonshine?”

  “Who, me?”

  “Again, stories. Did you?”

  “Moonshine’s illegal. You know that.”

  “So is harboring a protected species.”

  “There you go.”

  “I see.” She jotted some notes.

  “What kind of a story is this, anyway?” he asked.

  “Same as I told you before. I just want to talk about how the people in these small towns on the edge of the oil play are faring.”

  The mayor pulled his sunglasses from the top of his head and set them across his nose. He didn’t want Wanda Perkins looking into his eyes anymore. “Sounds like it’s about me. Or, you know, allegedly me.”

  Wanda Perkins glanced up. She smiled and closed her notebook, as if to say, look, no more questions.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  Swarthbeck broke into a wide grin. He liked this girl. He might have even told her so had Sam Kelvig not come through his own front door.

  “Sammy!” Swarthbeck stood, clamping a meaty hand onto Kelvig’s shoulder.

  “What’s up, John?”

  Swarthbeck pulled him closer. “Sam, I’d like you to meet—”

  Wanda Perkins stepped forward. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Mayor, I’d just as soon handle my own introduction.” She offered her right hand to Sam. “Wanda Perkins, New York Times.”

  “—Wanda Perkins, New York Times,” Swarthbeck repeated.

  Sam looked to the reporter, then to the mayor, then back again. He shook her hand. “Pleasure.”

  “She’s here—” Swarthbeck started.

  “Really, Mr. Mayor,” she said. “I’ll be by to talk to you later, OK?”

  “OK.” The mayor’s words came out half reply, half question. At once, Swarthbeck wondered where he’d lost control of this thing.

  “Leave me to Mr. Kelvig now,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “OK,” Sam said.

  “OK,” Swarthbeck said again. He looked at Grubbs, who looked at the floor.

  “OK,” the mayor said for the last time. He backed out the door, found the sidewalk, and tried to remember his bearings, and then he walked back the way he’d come.

  MAMA

  In recent years, Blanche Kelvig had given a lot of thought to the way she wanted to die, and the contemplations had achieved a critical mass in the past week or so. She’d come to the hard-won conclusion that timing (soon) and pain level (minimal) were more important than method. As to the latter: The safe money would have been on the pulmonary obstruction that had kept her tethered to an oxygen source for the past five years. That could be a long exit, though. Blanche had come to favor a stroke or a massive heart attack in her slumber. Whatever it took to do the job cleanly and without her active knowledge.

  She sat in her threadbare recliner in the living room of the house Herschel had built them, and she thought about this, even as her eyes followed the pacing of Henrik, who blotted out her preferred view of that sassy-mouthed TV judge from New York. Such an unexpected visit, and yet such a predictable rant from her elder son.

  “He’s up there on Telegraph Hill, like he’s the damn king of the county,” Henrik said. He came to a stop in front of the TV. She looked up at him, stone-faced and silent. Nothing she could say. Nothing she wanted to say. Not about this. Not anymore. Advancing age hadn’t been good for much—the wisdom overblown, the bodily breakdown undersold—but she figured she had at least earned some peace on this topic.

  Henrik dropped to his knees and moved toward Blanche. It disgusted her, this hard veer between defiance and wallowing, but she let him take her hands, his thumbs rubbing across the paper-thin skin on her knuckles. She shuddered.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so long in seeing you, Mama.”

  Blanche licked her chapped lips. Lord, come and get me. “It’s good to see you now,” she said. She drew in breath, as much as she could in her compromised state. When Henrik seemed pleased with that declaration, she exhaled, light-headed until the regulator on her tank filled her nostrils again.

  Henrik stood, and she gathered in her hands, intertwining the fingers.

  Herschel, Lord rest him, had told her it would come to this, or something like it. Their first child, delivered on the coldest day of winter, 1959, had come into the world sour. They’d had such high hopes, had bestowed the name of Herschel’s father on him, had imagined endless horizons for the boy and for the family they yet hoped to build. It wasn’t to be, not with Henrik. Herschel had been the one to peg Henrik’s erratic nature, saying it reminded him of Jhalmer, his father’s brother, who’d unraveled publicly for years before dying, drunken and without clothes, in a snowbank.

  It was Sam, arriving twenty-seven months after Henrik, who showed all the promise. He was eager to work the fields with his father, and earned good grades in school as well as praise from teachers, pastors, and neighbors in abundance. With Henrik, it was continual crisis management. He bit a girl in the first grade, and tore a chunk of flesh out of her arm. Skinned the neighbor’s cat at thirteen. A night in the drunk tank at sixteen. The Marines and dishonorable discharge at twenty-one. After that embarrassment, Herschel welcomed him back to the farm. What else could he do? That blew up as well, as they might have predicted had they been the kind of people who spoke their doubts aloud.

  “It’s not right, what Sam did to me.” Henrik was calling to her from the kitchen now, as he fixed himself a bologna sandwich and chugged her last can of Coca-Cola. “He pushed me out and nobody said anything.”

  “I’m not going to yell across this house with you,” Blanche said. The force of the words sapped her. She dropped her head back into the chair and waited for oxygenated relief.

  “I’m sorry, Mama.” Henrik came back into the living room and lowered himself into the chair opposite her. “Mind if I eat?”

  Blanche brushed her hand at him, and he tore into the sandwich.

  “The thing is—” he started, his words mushy.

  “Eat,” Blanche said softly. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  When Blanche’s husband passed on, she let the boys split the two hundred acres on the farm. Herschel wanted it that way. He wasn’t usually given over to sentimental pap, but in those last days, his voice gone and his body withering, he wrote a few notes to Blanche expressing hope that their boys would bond and keep carrying the family forward, together. Soon enough, though, the old patterns played out. Sam made a tidy haying venture of his acres, while Henrik went chasing some scheme—cattle, maybe? Real estate? Blanche couldn’t remember. Anyway, he ended up flat busted and owing everybody and his dog, and Sam rode in with some cash to bail him out, demanding Henrik’s land as security.

  Henrik licked mustard from his fingers. “As I was saying, the thing is, I shouldn’t be pushed out like this. Nobody says anything because Sam is so smart and so dedicated.” Blanche closed her eyes. She hated this singsong mockery. She’d always hated it. “Well, this is my legacy, too, Mama.”

  Blanche opened her eyes and found her son staring at her. “It is,” he said.

  “Nobody’s denying you anything that’s yours. Sam says you have a debt.” She closed her eyes again. Shut them tight. She knew as soon as the words slipped her lips that she’d chosen the wrong ones. It wasn’t her fight, and she had no fire for it, anyway.

  “Sam says, Sam says,” Henrik mocked.

  Henrik found his knees again in front of her.

  Lord, I’ve been faithful.
<
br />   He wrenched one of her hands free and held it between his own calloused fingers.

  I’ve never asked for much.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I’ve tried to do right.

  “But Sam is pushing me aside. He is. You have to see that.”

  Blanche Kelvig let her hand go limp, and her son held it still. She closed her eyes tight, trying to hold back what was coming. A fresh blast of oxygen pushed into her nose, and she let go of her breath, and then she sucked it back in.

  “This is my home, too, Mama.”

  Lord, hear my prayer.

  SAM

  For the second time in just a few hours, Sam stood in his particular spot atop Telegraph Hill and looked down on Grandview and the broad valley that cradled the town. He hadn’t planned on another visit today. The reporter—“Just call me Wanda,” she’d said—and the photographer had piled affably into the cab of his pickup for the ride up. Once there, and as Sam settled into his spiel, he grew more comfortable with the audience. Wanda didn’t seem intent on busting his balls the way she had with the mayor.

  “I’ve been coming up here before the third weekend in July since 1964,” he said. “That’s when my daddy started Jamboree, and that’s what he did. He came up here, scoped things out, made his plan, and then spent a few days pushing it through.”

  The reporter stepped forward, even with him. “Back then, what did things look like down there?”

  Sam chuckled. “I couldn’t rightly say, ma’am. I was three years old. But the town’s changed for sure. Maybe not fast enough for some, and maybe too fast for others, but it’s changed.”

  He traced Main Street with his eyes as he spoke, and he conjured a mental image of pieces moving in and out. Where the Country Basket was now, the old Egyptian Theater used to stand, giving Grandview kids their last hometown picture show in 1977—Star Wars, not a bad way to go out. Three spots down, in the main downtown district, Barry Bristow’s real estate office occupied the building that once housed the Grandview Gabber, quite possibly the most undistinguished newspaper in all of Montana. Across the street, the IGA wobbled on its last legs, headed for an August closure, a victim of the megagrocery stores moving into Sidney just twelve miles south.

  “So you’re the director of the Jamboree?” the reporter said.

  “Just Jamboree.” Sam smiled at her. “And yes.”

  “And on the town council?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And president of the school board?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She raised her head and returned the smile. “I guess I have just one question: How?”

  Sam laughed. “Lots of coffee.”

  “Seriously, though.”

  He doffed his ball cap and held it at his side as he raked the gathering perspiration on his head with his bandanna. Nobody had ever come out and asked him so bluntly, and he didn’t like not having a pat answer.

  “I guess,” he said, “my daddy instilled in me a love of where I’m from. He used to say, ‘Grandview ain’t known for anything worth knowing, except for what we know about ourselves.’ ”

  “That’s a little cryptic,” she said.

  “Not to me. His point was that we’re sitting out here on this edge of the state, pretty much all alone, and we get ourselves along just fine. Sidney is bigger, Billings is where nearly everybody goes to see a dentist or a specialty doctor, and Bozeman and Missoula seem to pull our kids away from us—those places, or the smell of oil—but we just keep on keeping on. So I figure it’s my duty to do what my daddy did, to be there for my town the way he was.”

  Sam glanced to his left and for the first time realized that the photographer was snapping shots as he spoke. He turned the other way, his back to the camera. “I’ve probably said enough.”

  “You were great,” Wanda said. She reached out and grasped his elbow, and Sam felt a silly fluttering through his chest and stomach.

  “I have just one more question,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “What worries you most about the future of Grandview?”

  She turned to face him after asking the question, and Sam suddenly felt a gravity that hadn’t been in the conversation before. He took his hat off again and held it in front of him, caressing the bill between his thumbs and forefingers.

  “We’re getting old,” he said. “The mayor, he’s been in office thirty-three years. I’m fifty-three. We had thirty-one graduates in May, but just twenty-one the year before. Most of those kids are gone, and they aren’t gonna be coming back, except maybe to visit for something like Jamboree. The lady who runs our museum, Myrtle Davis, she’s eighty-three. Who’s going to run this town? Some oil-stained rig jockey? I don’t see any of them interested in that.

  “Meanwhile, Sidney’s growing. They’d love to have our tax base. We’re probably going to need their water treatment capacity sooner or later. Are they just going to swallow us up? A lot of people think so. I can’t help but think we’d be losing more than we know if that happens.”

  He turned back to the view. The photographer’s camera fired off clicks.

  “Do you have kids, Sam?”

  “Two.”

  “What about them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why aren’t they following you the way you followed your father?”

  It was a hell of an audacious question, yet delivered so dispassionately that Sam didn’t take it in the hard way he might have had, say, Patricia dropped it at his feet. But then, he didn’t have any history with this Wanda Perkins person, and he and the missus had history enough to fill a dozen coal trains. What struck him even more is that he hadn’t considered it. The kids’ hard break with the place—Denise living there in Billings like she was born to it, Samuel just a whisper in their lives—had made it clear that they wouldn’t move the chains even before Sam had acknowledged his own limitations.

  “They have their own things going on,” he said.

  The sun had turned now, making its downward rappel toward the western horizon. It backlit the scene, casting the yonder badlands in alternating shadows and fresh splashes of color.

  “It’s a lovely town,” Wanda Perkins said. “Not what I expected.”

  Sam put his cap back on, mindful of the sun and of the tender skin under his fast-thinning hair.

  “Best place in the world,” he said.

  NORBY

  Norby hunkered down in his hotel room, with a meal from Denny’s in a Styrofoam box, his phone, and the fifty-six channels on the TV set. He felt better, though, perhaps as good as he’d felt all day. When the jet banked over the Yellowstone River and made the final approach into Billings, he’d looked down at the city and felt a stirring he hadn’t expected. Anticipation. Desire, even. He wouldn’t have imagined that.

  He couldn’t get over how much the place had changed, how vibrant it seemed relative to his memories and his biases. A funny place, Billings. It fueled an entire region, with a banking center, first-class health care, and the might of more than a hundred thousand souls, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone eager to love it. Billings was car lots and office towers and windblown buttes. If it’s mountains and lakes and liberalism you wanted—Norby smiled to remember how much he had desired all of those things—you’d do better to point your nose toward Missoula. And that’s what he’d done, the first westward unfurling of his ambition and discovery of self. It’s where he shed his given name, Samuel, and took his first steps toward becoming Norby, because he was finally allowed to be who he believed himself to be. After four years there, summa cum laude tucked into his pocket, he also knew his desires lay farther still from where he’d come.

  But today, as Norby piloted his rental car down the Rimrocks into town, he was forced to reconsider his long-held positions. In his absen
ce, Billings had grown into itself, with high-end bars and restaurants crowding corners once blighted by neglect; a new city library, linear and beautiful and modern; a parking lot where the beaten husk of the old library used to stand. He spun through town in wonder, cutting his way through leafy neighborhoods and business districts to a new hotel on the city’s southern edge, convenient to tomorrow’s interstate escape.

  Now, a few hours later, Norby finished the last of his pasta and dropped the to-go box into the trash can by the table. He stood, linked his hands above his head and stretched, a tingle moving through him from the small of his back and radiating toward his shoulder blades. He spread out perpendicular to the alignment of the queen bed, propping a pillow under his arm and taking in the industrial scent of the laundered linens. The display on his phone read 9:13. At home, his parents would be getting ready for bed, to take advantage of the last night of decent sleep before Sunday. He wanted to call and come clean to his mom, to tell her he was in Billings and that he wanted to come alone for his own reasons. Like most lies, the one about traveling by way of Bismarck had been spawned by expediency and expanded by necessity. He felt foolish, but his father would surely be there if he called now, and Norby didn’t want to get into it with him, so he wallowed in the frustration he’d stoked.

  He turned on the TV and rifled through the channels, settling on one of the ubiquitous police procedurals. He’d seen this one before; it was the brother, the seemingly normal one, who hid the bodies of those girls in the crawl space of the family home. The detectives always got at the truth of the matter, it seemed.

  A message flashed on his phone.

  Where u?

  Derek.

  Norby stared at the screen for the better part of a minute, caught between joy and revulsion. When would one name, five simple letters, stop holding sway over his emotions and self-regard?

  Out of town, he typed back.

  Shit.

  What?

  I came by.

  Why?

  The reply was long in coming, and too banal for the wait. I wanted to get my shirt. The one from Seattle. U know the one?