As Good As Gone (9781616206000) (15 page)

SEVENTEEN

No matter what the condition of your family member or friend, you are not allowed to stay beyond visiting hours at Missoula's Good Samaritan Hospital. Bill Sidey, however, has found a way to work around this regulation. The surgical waiting room, where he and Carole spent so many hours earlier, is empty at night, and this is where Bill is hiding out, although he's not sure why he's here. If there's any change in Marjorie's condition, the call will go to Carole and Milo's home. But Bill has the hopeful, irrational belief that if Marjorie wakes up, he'll somehow know it, or she'll know that he's nearby and . . . and what? Call out for him? Oh, none of it makes any sense. But Bill feels as though he's doing
something
by sitting here, rather than doing nothing at Carole and Milo's.

Shortly after ten o'clock, an elderly nun enters the room. The room is dark but for one small lamp on the table next to the overstuffed chair where Bill is sitting, and when the nun notices him, Bill stands and says, “I'm sorry. I was just—”

“Oh, pssht,” she says, waving him back down. “Sit. I'm not the night watchman.”

Bill guesses she must be at least eighty, her large-­jawed masculine face creased with wrinkles that, in the dim light, seem carved by shadows.

“If I turn on the television, will I disturb you?” Her accent is faintly Germanic.

“Not at all.” He drops back into his chair.

She switches on the set, fiddles with the rabbit ears to sharpen the picture, and sits down one chair away from Bill. “I sneak in here every night for the sports. Just to see what the Red Sox have done.”

“I'm afraid,” Bill says, “I've lost track of the standings. How are they doing?”

She shrugs. “Not well. It will be the Yankees again. As usual.”

Bill crushed out a cigarette just a few minutes before the nun walked in, but since he feels that he shouldn't light up in front of her, he suddenly craves another.

“Are you a baseball fan?” she asks.

“Halfhearted. Not like when I was a boy. Then I could name every team's lineup. The Tigers were my team, and Charlie Gehringer was my favorite player.”

“The Mechanical Man,” the nun says with a smile.

The sports announcer appears on the screen, and they both watch until the baseball scores are concluded. Both the Red Sox and the Twins, the team that Bill tries to follow, have lost. The nun rises stiffly and goes back to the television. “Or should I leave it on?” she asks Bill.

“You can turn it off,” he answers.

They both watch the picture dwindle to a tiny silver dot, and once that too is pinched into darkness, the nun speaks.

“Your wife? Am I remembering right?”

“My wife,” Bill said. “That's correct.”

“She is not doing well?” Bill wonders if it's nothing more than his late-­night presence that allows the nun to guess this truth, or if there is something in his face, his voice, his posture, that reveals how worried he is.

“She's in a coma.”

“A coma. My. I hadn't heard we had a patient in such a condition.”

“They won't use the word, but that's what it is. A coma.” Bill's remark sounds as though it could have come from his sister-­in-­law's mouth.

“This is an excellent hospital,” the nun says. “Everything will be done for your wife that can be. You mustn't lose hope.”

This is very similar to the counsel Bill gave Carole in this very room. Now that he is in the presence of a person of faith he finally feels free to express his own pessimism. He wishes she could talk him out of his despair.

“I'm a hopeful man, Sister. But it can be a struggle.”

“Prayer helps us in that,” she says. “But when that doesn't seem quite enough, it doesn't hurt to remind oneself that strong young women such as your wife generally don't die before their time.”

But when they do, Bill thinks but doesn't say, they do it in places like this. Instead, he says, “I've never prayed so much in my life as I have today.”

She nods in approval. “Do you have children?”

“A boy and a girl.”

“They must be worried about their mother. Your strength will be necessary to help them.”

Is this why he has not yet informed Ann and Will about their mother's condition—so he won't have to be strong for them?

“They're such good kids.” As he says this, Bill feels his eyes sting as they do when tears are close. “I wish there was a way to make life easier for them.”

The nun nods knowingly again. “For the good, life is sometimes harder.”

The nun is moving toward the door, but Bill doesn't want her to go, not yet. He finds her company quietly comforting—this old woman spends her days and nights amid illness, calamity, and heartache, yet she seems unperturbed in the presence of it all. A heart attack or a gallbladder surgery is as commonplace to her as a Red Sox loss. Bill gropes desperately for another reason to make her stay. “Before you go, Sister”—is he entitled to refer to her this way, or is this a term reserved for Catholics?—“can I get your opinion on another matter?”

She inclines her head slightly as if to say, of course.

“If a person . . . if someone has a bad deed in his past, something he did long ago, does that automatically mean his soul is in jeopardy?” Then, to make sure there's no misunderstanding, Bill adds, “
His
soul. His. I'm not talking about my wife. She's a good woman. I'm worried about her fate in this life, not the next.”

The nun looks down at her hands and taps her fingertips together, but she doesn't say anything. “And it's not me either,” he further adds.

The nun nods. “This is a good man we're talking about?”

“More or less. But as I said, with something bad in his past.”

“The bad deed is—?”

Bill doesn't answer right away, and the nun raises her hand. “You don't have to say. He has or has not repented for what he did?”

The nun has misunderstood Bill's hesitation. It's not that he's reluctant to speak of his father's deed but that suddenly Bill is unsure himself what he's been referring to—murder or abandonment? A crime that requires God's forgiveness or a son's?

It doesn't matter. Either way, Bill can speak with confidence of his father's attitude. “Has not.”

“Repentance is necessary. He's not a Catholic?”

“No. And I'm not either. I'm a Lutheran.” Bill has never asked, but he doubts that his father has any religious convictions.

She shakes her head as if to say that this confession is of no consequence. “But you should speak to your minister about this matter.”

“I have a pretty good idea what he'd say. I just thought I'd get your opinion.”

The nun raises her hands helplessly. “We can still pray for them . . .” She says this as though she knows prayer can do no more for an unrepentant soul than Bill believes it can for a wife who will not wake up.

EIGHTEEN

Beverly has a recipe for a hot dish that everyone seems to like. She browns ground beef and chopped onion in her big cast-­iron skillet, pours in tomato soup and canned corn, dumps the mixture into a deep Pyrex dish, spreads mashed potatoes over the top, and then bakes it at 350 degrees. That morning, before the day got too hot, she doubled the ingredients and fixed two casseroles, one for her and Adam and the other for the Sideys.

The dish is cooling on her cupboard and it's almost midday, yet Beverly is still waiting for the right moment to carry it next door. Will Sidey pedaled off around eleven o'clock with a baseball glove looped on his handlebars, and he won't return until mid­afternoon. Ann will soon walk down Fourth Street for her afternoon shift at Penney's, and then after she departs Beverly will knock on the Sideys' door with the reasonable expectation that Calvin will be alone in the house.

The casserole is not the only preparation she has made. Last night when Calvin led her down to his basement lair Beverly wasn't sure what might happen, but today she's ready. She shaved her legs and under her arms, and she searched through her underwear drawer for a bra whose once-­white straps didn't look gray and a pair of underpants where the tendrils of elastic hadn't sprung loose. She put on a sleeveless floral-­print dress that she'd worn in the classroom on the warmest days of spring and fall, and for the first time she pulled the stopper on the bottle of Prince Matchabelli perfume that Adam gave her the previous Christmas. She dabbed a little scent on her wrists and between her breasts, in imitation of a woman she once read about in a novel. After all this primping, she looked at herself in the mirror and laughed: To think she was going through all this for an old man who probably hadn't been with a woman for so long the last thing he cared about was how she smelled! With a washcloth she scrubbed between her breasts until the scent was gone.

Beverly watches Ann Sidey walk past the house, then picks up the casserole and heads out the door.

After there's no answer to her second knock, Beverly opens the screen door and steps into the Sidey kitchen. “Hello! Anyone home?” She sets the warm dish on the counter. “It's your neighbor!” Her hearing isn't what it once was, and she has to cock her head to the side to listen for a response that might be coming from another corner of the house, the basement perhaps. She has just stepped toward the dining room when someone bangs on the screen door.

Beverly, startled, turns quickly and sees a dark form filling the frame. It's a wide-­bodied, big-­hatted man with his fist raised. He must have seen her at the same time, and the sight of her keeps him from striking the door again.

Yes, he sees her all right, but he misidentifies her because he shouts, “You tell that goddamn husband of yours he sends another fucking letter like this he's going to be sorry!”

Because the light is coming from behind the man and she's looking at him through the screen, Beverly thinks, but can't be sure, that he's an Indian. His rage, however, she recognizes immediately. Burt dealt with more than a few men like this one—deadbeats and abusive husbands, for example—and they sometimes came to the house—drunk, usually—to demand that he stop threatening garnishment or an injunction against them. Beverly quells the impulse to explain, My husband's dead, and instead stammers, “I'm not—”

But before she can finish, he pulls open the door and hurls a crumpled ball of paper in Beverly's direction, which falls to the floor. She flinches nonetheless. She immediately wants to retrieve the paper—perhaps it can solve the mystery of this confrontation—yet she knows not to take her eyes from this man.

Yes, she's right—he is an Indian. But neither his race nor his size is his most distinctive feature. One side of his face is hideously scarred—both his eye and mouth twist downward and his skin shines as if it's wet. His nose is flattened against his cheek.

“He's going to kick
her
out of her house?” he shouts. “He's the one who'll be out of a house! I'll burn this fucker to the ground!”

As he backs out, he tries to slam the screen door, but its spring prevents it from slamming. He settles for a kick that makes the door jump and rattle in its frame. Then he's gone, and the rectangle that he darkened is once again flooded with the sunlight of high noon.

Beverly's hands are trembling, and her legs feel as though they might give out.

While she's watching the door, another voice startles her, and for the second time inside of a minute, her heart lurches with fear. When she turns, she sees Calvin Sidey.

“What's going on here?” he says. “I heard someone shouting.”

“A man . . . he . . . I think he was looking for Bill.”

“Who was it? What did he want?”

“He said . . .” She isn't sure why, but she doesn't want to repeat what the man said about burning the house down. As frightening as that was, Calvin Sidey's likely reaction to the threat is even more terrifying to imagine. “Apparently he was angry about getting that letter.” She points to the ball of paper on the floor.

Calvin bends over stiffly and scoops it up. He spreads it open, reads it, and then walks hurriedly to the door. “Did you see him leave?” he asks Beverly. “Was he on foot?” He opens the screen door and looks down the driveway.

“I think I heard a car. I'm not sure.”

“He came inside?”

She nods.

“With your permission?”

She shakes her head.

“Did he lay his hands on you?”

“No, no, he wasn't after me.”

He looks carefully at her, as though he believes she might not have answered his last question truthfully. “You're sure?”

She nods again. “I'm all right.” But now Beverly fears that she has gone too far the other way and is minimizing the threat the man posed. “He said he'd burn the house down,” she whispers.

Calvin's eyes flare at her remark, and she quickly adds. “Just big talk, I'm sure.”

But Calvin is already on the move. He crosses the room, opens a cupboard drawer, and brings out a set of keys. “Let's go.”

Not until they're out of the house and heading for Calvin's truck does she ask, “Where are we going?”

He still has the paper in his hand, and he waves it in the air. “This is an eviction notice. And we're going to the address on the notice.”

He unlocks his truck and gets in, then reaches across and unlocks the passenger door. Beverly pulls it open and the hinges groan. She climbs into a cab that smells of tobacco and motor oil. She tries to settle into her seat but finds she has to move toward the middle to keep from being poked in the backside by a broken spring. “I'm not sure why you need me on this expedition.”

Calvin rams the truck into gear and backs up fast into the alley. When he brakes, gravel pings against the garbage cans. “You're going to tell me how to get to that address,” he says, pointing to the letter on the dashboard. “And when we get there, you can tell me if I've got the right man before I have words with him. Now, which way?”

The address is on the south side of town, and Beverly directs him to drive straight down Third Street. She composes herself slightly. “When you say ‘have words'—is that what you had with the Neaveses? Words?”

“This will be a bit more forceful.”

“You threatened to kill their dog. What could be more forceful than that?”

He turns and looks directly at her. “Someone came barging into my son's house. You know that can't be allowed. It
can't
.”

“Maybe we should notify the police.”

“Maybe.” He has to work the shift lever hard before he finds the right gear and the truck bucks into motion.

“Or the sheriff. Isn't the sheriff supposed to handle eviction notices?”

“Who's the sheriff now?”

“Neal Garner. He's in his second term, I believe.”

“Is he any relation to Louie Garner?”

“It's his son. Did you know Louie?”

Third is not a through street, but Calvin Sidey doesn't slow down at any intersection. “Louie was sheriff years ago. Not that he was much good at the job.”

And if he were better at it, Beverly wonders, would he have arrested you for murder? “Louie served a couple terms as mayor too. A lot of people believe he was good for this town.”

“Do they.”

“I always thought he was a decent man.”

Beverly isn't sure why she's defending Louie Garner. She was never impressed with his intelligence or his leadership, but perhaps she wants to let Calvin know that since he left this town he has forfeited his right to criticize the people who stayed.

“Louie died of a heart attack winter before last,” Beverly says. “He was shoveling snow and he dropped dead in front of his own house.”

“You don't say. Do I just keep going straight here?”

They're in Gladstone's business district now, six square blocks of stores and office buildings, and while they're stopped at a red light, a friend of Beverly's, Lois Parvin, exits Woolworth's and crosses the street in front of them. Lois's mouth opens as if she's going to speak and her hand starts to rise, but then she looks away and hurries across the intersection. What happened? Did Lois take in that battered, rusted, coughing old truck, then catch a glimpse of Calvin Sidey behind the wheel, and conclude that the woman in the sundress sitting closer to the driver than the passenger door couldn't possibly be Beverly Lodge? As for Beverly, she feels she should do something—lower her head, put her hand over her face—anything to keep from being recognized should Lois turn around and look again. But that feeling passes in an instant. Why should she cover her face in the town she has lived in almost all her life? She doesn't care who sees her cruising around in Calvin's truck! Beverly sits up straighter and even considers pulling her dress off her shoulders to give Lois, or anyone else—there's Jack McCumber coming out of the Rim Rock Cafe and Janet Burwell is digging into her purse before she enters Powers Department Store and Otto Heinrich is climbing into his big Oldsmobile—an eyeful if they glance in her direction.

But then the light turns green, and as they continue their tour through the center of town, Beverly begins to question that brief surge of boldness. Was it nothing more than a determination not to feel ashamed, or is she actually proud that Calvin Sidey finally returned to Gladstone and chose her to ride beside him?

She immediately chides herself for even that brief flirtation with pride. Anyone who sees her might wonder who Beverly is riding with, but they're unlikely to see anything scandalous in the sight. After all, there aren't that many people in Gladstone who would recognize Calvin Sidey. He's just another old man in a truck, a stranger in town.

SILENTLY CALVIN CURSES HIS
son. Why did Bill leave town with this matter of the eviction left unresolved? He knows who his tenants are, and he must know who has this capacity for trouble. For that matter, what the hell is he doing renting a place to a single woman? And while he's at it, Calvin lavishes a few of these unspoken curses on his daughter-­in-­law as well; if she weren't intent on indulging herself with this so-­called special operation—and in a city hundreds of miles away—Bill wouldn't have felt he had to accompany her. Finally, however, Calvin spends his most damning oaths on himself. He didn't have to say yes to his son's request, but once Calvin did, he was the worst kind of goddamn fool if he let himself believe that the job wouldn't ask any more of him than to sit in a rocking chair for a few days.

And now he's brought this woman in on this. Calvin didn't need her to accompany him, not really. He has the letter and the address; he could have found his way there eventually. Is he trying to repay her somehow for getting into bed with him?
In gratitude for fucking me, I'd like to invite you on this expedition to track down a deadbeat.
What woman wouldn't be flattered by that invitation?

But here she is, at his side. Is she the first woman inside this truck? Is that possible? If she thinks there's any danger in this venture, she sure as hell isn't showing any fear. She's sitting up as if on alert, his keen-­eyed sentinel. Business, just plain business, he supposes this might be called, and among the many entanglements he's tried to keep his life free of, business is high on the list. Jesus, how he resented the time he had to spend on contracts, on negotiations, on procuring buyers and sellers and then, once the deal was done and hands were shaken all around, on extricating himself from them. Sell a man a house and he thought your friendship should be thrown in as part of the bargain.

Now, in front of the Farm and Ranch National Bank, are the men who conduct as much of a town's business on its sidewalks and in its saloons as in its offices. By God, that could be the same group Calvin drove past on his way into Gladstone! Calvin complained to his grandson about the labor involved in the cowboy life, but he'd rather spend a day sinking fence posts than waste an hour yakking outside the bank.

He has to hand it to his son, however. Bill seems to understand that success in commerce has as much to do with those conversations on the street as in drawing up a contract. As much? Hell,
more
. Sidey Real Estate is in the right hands, that's for sure, which is one more reason, God damn it, why Bill should be here handling an eviction that has his signature on it.

Calvin turns to Beverly. “Did he have a weapon?”

“Did he what? No. None that I could see, anyway. Unless you count his face. Which would likely scare more people than a shotgun.”

“So there's no doubt: You'll know him again if you see him.”

“That's not the problem. The problem is forgetting him now that I've seen him.”

“I can take you back home,” says Calvin. “I'll find the address on my own. And from what you say, I'll recognize him.”