Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  “Of what?”

  “Stuff about their marriage. Their life. He told me a lot. And none of it is any of my business, and here I am living with them—it’s just weird. And so sad. Now I just want to take the kids back to their house, leave them there, and disappear.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Kevin had started shutting off and releasing the water in a steady rhythm, and the girls began to sidle back toward the sprinkler.

  “How much did you know?” I asked.

  “Not much. Just guesses. She was so kind, but—I dunno. On edge. There was always—something. Tense, maybe. Like a deer ready to bolt.”

  I sighed. “I had everything wrong. Paul’s a really good man. I thought he was some kind of tyrant—all these weird rules, the way he needed to tell me every little thing to do. He was just doing the best he could. It was an awful situation. I was an idiot.”

  “Hey, don’t misjudge yourself the same way. You’re doing great things with those kids.” She lifted her thin chin toward the children. Kevin had let the girls start to trust the rhythm and they were now leaping across the sprinkler during the shut-offs. “Look at them. Even when their mom was alive, I don’t think I ever saw them play together like that. I think Kevin’s learning how to be a kid. You’re making things better, you know.”

  I didn’t, but she was kind to say so. And it was a nice idea to return to late that night, after I took the children back to their father, waved good-bye, and then couldn’t stop thinking about them the rest of the evening. Working on my list of what to take to the cabin in the morning didn’t distract me. Leo calling and asking for a ride up to the ranch didn’t distract me. Instead I just kept replaying the conversation with Paul, circling around again and again to examine it and pick at it like a caged bird given a ball of yarn. The ramifications of what I now knew—on what the children’s real needs were, on what I could or should or should not say or do—were larger and more complex than I could sort out, and worrying at the yarn was only making me feel more tangled in it. But finally, alone in the dark, as I curled under the quilts that night, the picture came back: I saw Kevin, spraying the girls in mid-leap one last time. I saw the girls shrieking and laughing and wiping water out of their eyes, then grabbing the sprinkler and turning it on him so that he jumped up and started to run as well. I saw three children, laughing in the sun, and the shining drops falling around them.

  19

  How was your trip?” Tuah asked when I got out of the car beside the cabin Saturday morning.

  “Fine. Did you set that up, too?”

  “Set what up?”

  I squinted at her, then lifted the back hatch of the Pinto. It was possible, I supposed, that she hadn’t been involved. I handed her a stack of mail, folded in the current week’s newspaper.

  “Leo. I gave him a ride to the ranch.”

  “So that’s what took you so long. Why didn’t he drive himself?”

  That was the right answer. “He lent a guy his car. It worked out fine. I just thought you might have been meddling.”

  “I didn’t meddle last time.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “And I trust he didn’t try to steal your virtue?” She played the straight man perfectly, reading a postcard with some sort of beach picture on the back, not looking at me, giving no hint of a smile.

  “Ha, ha.” I hoisted a bag of groceries onto my hip. “Maybe tomorrow. He asked me to go to some Fourth of July cookout at the ranch before I go back to town.”

  “That sounds nice.” She shoved the mail into one of the grocery bags and picked it up, then got another. She started inside, then turned her head back to say over her shoulder, “You talked to your dad?”

  “What? No. Why?”

  “That card was from him. You didn’t look through the mail?”

  “No. What’s it say?”

  “He’s coming.”

  She disappeared into the darkness through the door. It took me a moment to fully register what she was saying but less to realize what unwelcome news it was. I crumpled the top of another bag in my fist and followed her.

  “What? When?”

  “A couple of weeks.” She set her bags on the table.

  “Well, what’s he going to do?” I said. “I’m busy with the kids. He knows we can’t just hang out, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “So he’ll just sit around up here with you?”

  “I can come up with some chores for him. But I’ve got things he can do in town, too, where he can see you some.”

  What was I doing? Trying to argue with the universe about why he shouldn’t come? I set down my own bags, then glanced at Mac, who thumped his tail once in acknowledgment of my slight attention without looking away from the food. He probably already knew which bag held the bacon.

  Tuah reached inside the first bag, set the mail on the table, then followed it with two cartons of strawberries, a block of cheese, and a bunch of bananas.

  “Have you told him about the baby?” she asked.

  “No.” I hadn’t called since confirming my safe arrival weeks ago.

  “Have you called the doctor?”

  Tuah had left a name and number on a pad of paper beside the phone in the Leadville kitchen. I’d seen it but had observed a perimeter around it as if it were nettles or poison oak.

  “No.”

  “Have you told anybody?”

  “Mindy.” I rolled my shoulders. “It was kind of an accident.” I looked out the open door at my car, the hatch still gaping open. “And Leo. That was an accident, too.”

  She folded the bag flat. “And it looks like you survived.”

  “I guess.”

  “I think a few more accidents like that won’t kill you, either.”

  “So you want me to march up to strangers and tell them I’m pregnant?”

  “Nope. But it doesn’t have to be a secret, either. And you need to get to the doctor and make your plans. Besides—pretty soon folks’ll start wondering anyway, and then they’ll just gossip about it.” She pulled the next bag closer to herself, then reached inside. “I’ll give you a tip. When you live in a small town, tell your own secrets. People have to think they can talk to you about anything. Then they won’t talk about you.”

  I felt cords tighten around me. Plans and a future. When you live in a small town. Well, I didn’t live in a small town. I was here only temporarily. Given my typical wardrobe, I’d be gone before anything really showed. In the two weeks since I’d seen her last, what had put the idea into her head that I would live here? And even if I did, I doubted her advice about preventing gossip was right. I’d sat at the Powder Keg last weekend with a table full of gossips. And those stories about Benencia could only have been started by people talking to each other behind her back.

  “I’ve been in the car for a long time,” I said. “I’m gonna go for a walk.”

  “Take Mac with you,” Tuah said. “And some water.” She held up a package of Oreos. “Good thinking on these, by the way.”

  *

  I walked wherever Mac led. He ranged back and forth into the trees, snuffing at elk droppings or cow pies or dead things I didn’t want to imagine, stopping to investigate some new scent, then loping ahead, tail waving, checking over his shoulder from time to time to see whether I was having as much fun as he was.

  I needed to take lessons from the dog. Yes, my father was coming, but why did that matter? I would tell him about the baby when I was good and ready, without regard for when he scheduled his visit. Or never tell him at all. When had he ever noticed me cutting my hair or getting new clothes? Surely unbuttoned jeans and loose T-shirts would get me through his visit without him suspecting anything. And as for my inference that Tuah had some hidden agenda to keep me here—that’s all it was. Inference. Even if she had stood there in her canvas pants and ordered me to get a job at JC Penney and marry a miner and stay in Leadville forever, she had no power over me. I wasn’t being forced into anything by anyb
ody. I’d overreacted. Maybe it was hormones. Calm down.

  We climbed toward timberline along a cow path, sat side by side at a rock outcrop where I could look back down over Hat Creek and watch cloud shadows drift over it, and then Mac led the way back to the house. Like him, I smelled the cabin before I saw it, but only barely, just as I rounded a landmark boulder that diverted the trail and blocked the house’s rear from view. He’d probably been able to smell it the whole time.

  Take Mac with you. The refrain had been the same my whole life. Take Rex with you, Tuah had said when I was small. She never joined in my parents’ lectures and scoldings about needing to tell them where I was going, but it was probably her doing that the dog would inevitably appear somewhere nearby after I’d slipped away.

  She had a dog that stayed with her no matter what.

  I missed a step, scuffing my foot against a rock. My memory, Leo’s story, Benencia’s loss.

  Well ahead of me now, Mac jumped onto the porch and disappeared. He still had his head in the water bowl when I rounded the side of the house and stepped onto the porch.

  “Nice walk?” Tuah said as I came through the open door. She sat at the table, a cup of coffee at her elbow, reading the newspaper, glasses perched halfway down her nose. Two dishpans of water—one soapy, one just murky—sat at the other end of the table. The groceries had all been put away.

  “Yeah. Sorry—I should’ve stayed and helped with the groceries. And you should’ve waited on the dishes. I would’ve done them.”

  “There weren’t many. Groceries or dishes. You can dump the water.”

  I poured the contents of the soapy water into the rinse water, nested the full pan into the empty one, then went outside and tossed the water into the bushes set back from the trail. After rinsing the pans at the pump, I came back inside and got a towel to dry them.

  “You know, I wonder,” I said as I wiped. “With Benencia, did you have a dog that went with her, too?”

  Tuah looked up over the rim of her glasses. A faint smile.

  “Yes.” She set the newspaper down and took her glasses off. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just—for as long as I can remember, if I was going farther than the privy, you’ve always said, ‘Take Mac’ or ‘Take Rex.’”

  “You remember Rex?”

  “Of course. I cried for days when I heard he’d died.”

  “He was a good dog. He had a big job, keeping you out of trouble.”

  I tucked the dishpans into their spot below the shelves.

  “I wondered about Benencia getting lost,” I said. I pulled a chair out and sat facing her. “Whether there was a dog. If there was, and he was anything like Mac or Rex, I don’t know how she could’ve stayed lost.”

  She’d started nodding before I finished. “You’re right,” she said. “We did have a dog. Gus. Just a good ranch dog. Common sense dog. He seemed to know Bennie needed extra help, and he never let her out of his sight. But your father—” She shook her head. “Your father was a handful. Gus felt like he needed to watch out for him, too. If he had to choose, he’d follow Benencia, but you could see he didn’t like it. He’d hang back and try to watch both of them as long as he could, but the minute Bennie disappeared, he’d go straight after her.”

  “She did that a lot?”

  Tuah smiled and nodded. “Like you.”

  “So how did she get lost?”

  She gave a long, deep sigh. “Gus died.”

  “He did? When?”

  “A few days before. I don’t think Benencia understood. I’ve always wondered if she went looking for him.”

  “He just—died? You mean, old age or something?”

  “No. He was old, all right, but no. He was shot.”

  “What?”

  “Shot. By a hunter. It was fall—things like that happened every year. Ranchers would have cows getting shot—they still do, in fact. Folks had to be extra careful walking around up here.”

  “But a dog?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “People don’t think. They’re looking for deer, thinking about deer, something moves just out of sight, and they shoot. Besides—he was a big dog.”

  “Dad remembers a dog big enough to ride.”

  “That’d be Gus, all right. Such a good dog. I’m surprised he remembers. He was pretty young.”

  “Oh, he remembers a lot.”

  She glanced at the newspaper, then looked back at me. “But he never said anything about Gus being shot?”

  It seemed like I wouldn’t have just lost track of him mentioning something like that. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Huh. Maybe he didn’t know.” She looked down at the glasses she still held by one earpiece, which she rolled between her thumb and forefinger so that they tapped a couple of times against the table. She looked back up at me. “You’ve heard the stories, then.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I felt as if I’d been caught spying.

  “Who told you?” she went on. “One of the children?”

  “Ah—”

  “Because that’s how I first heard. I was at the school, telling about Hat Creek, and when they found out I lived up here I could see their eyes get big as dishes. A little girl said, ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I thought they were talking about bears or the dark or being alone, but then they started to tell me about the ghost.”

  “How awful.”

  She set down the glasses and reached for the coffee, took a sip, then set the cup back down. “It’s all right. I grew up in Arizona hearing about a railroad ghost. After that,” she gestured vaguely down the mountain with her thumb, “with the children and the story, I wondered whether that railroad ghost had a widow walking around town with us.”

  I could hear the faint drone of a plane passing by, high overhead. The question that had been nagging me since I first learned Benencia’s story wouldn’t let go.

  “Have you ever thought,” I started. “I mean, about what happened to Benencia, have you ever thought about it being—something else? I just—it’s the stories. Could a part of them be true? Could somebody have done something to her?”

  “No.” The firmness and finality of her answer surprised me. I waited for elaboration that didn’t come.

  “You sound sure.”

  “I am. The stories don’t mean anything. I know how they work. There has to be something evil, something tragic to make it a story. People make up whatever they want.”

  “But still—nobody really knows what happened. And stories get started somewhere. You said yourself you’re only guessing.”

  Tuah leaned forward on her elbows. “How far did you walk today?”

  “I dunno. A couple of miles.”

  “And all your years here, all your walks, how many miles?”

  “I—have no idea.”

  “Have you ever just run into somebody? Said howdy?”

  “No.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “This town is all there ever was up here. There’s these houses, then nothing. A handful of ranches. All we had was each other. I knew these people. Can you understand that? Living up here—it makes you family. Bennie was their child as much as she was ours. No one had secrets here, or secrets that lasted very long. We knew the truth about each other and hung on together anyway. Every soul in this town helped look for her. Some got sick trying. Women fed us and did our wash and took care of Roberto when I couldn’t do any of it.”

  She made a sweeping gesture toward the open door. “And that’s all there ever was. It was one of us—someone that was part of this whole big family—or she got lost.”

  She took the coffee mug in one hand and stood, looking down at me.

  “She got lost,” Tuah said.

  20

  Any idea what this is?”

  I held up a small bolt I’d just found near the paint bucket. It was afternoon now, warm and still, and we were painting the porch. We’d said nothing further about Benencia, and I was glad to be busy.

&n
bsp; The wide plank siding was finished, deep yellow, as rich as butter. The porch posts and trim, streaked with whatever gray remained after scraping, would be white. But first we had to paint the underside of the porch roof, for which she’d chosen a robin’s-egg blue. She’d finished the worst part of the job—scraping and caulking—before I came, so together now we stood on chairs and craned our necks backward, pulling the color of the sky through the roof and spreading it across the boards. Mac lay dreaming and twitching below us.

  Tuah squinted. “Is it part of the bucket?”

  “No, it’s too big.”

  “Huh. Just toss it in the jar.”

  In Leadville it was on the utility room windowsill; here it was on the shelves by the stove. The magpie jar, she called it: a mason jar of collected odds and ends—buttons, screws, clips, rings, lids, springs. “If you don’t know what it is, where it goes, or what it’s for, it goes in the jar,” Tuah would say.

  “Okay.”

  “Oh!” she said as I started inside. “There was a letter for you. It’s on the table. Probably under the paper.”

  “For me? Who from?” Instinctive fear pushed a picture of Carlo into my head, but that was impossible. And a letter? No way. I don’t think I ever saw him write anything longer than a phone number. No one knew where I was, and beyond him—allowing, of course, for the supernatural power that would advise him about the baby in the first place—I couldn’t imagine anyone who would go to extraordinary efforts to find me.

  “I don’t know. It’s your letter.”

  I went inside, dropped the bolt in the jar, and after a moment’s rummaging with the newspaper, found the envelope. It was from the Florida Institute of Technology, with a logo showing a Florida map with tiny star along the Atlantic coast. My name and the Leadville address were typewritten on the front. Why and how would someone there find me here, when I’d never so much as heard of them? I tore it open. The letter inside was on university letterhead, typewritten, and nearly filled the page. I glanced down to the signature—Cora, with the flourish at the end of the a resolved into a heart, and below it, Cora de la Cruz, Student Advisement. Good God. Cora had been my advisor at UCLA, the one who had taken me on as some sort of special case and hounded me to go to grad school until she moved away. What had it been—six months ago? Quite the display of dedication.