Let Him Go: A Novel (9 page)

Weboy shakes his head. Not a chance. I could be the best damn direction-giver in the world and you still wouldn’t find it. You’d be out there on Four Bridges Road and notice that not only do you not see four bridges, you don’t see a single one. And Ditch Trail is so named because that’s exactly where it ends—in a damn ditch. And you wouldn’t want to take County K, even if it gets you there, because it’d take you twice as long. No, you make your way back here at four o’clock and you can follow me.

The sun finds a gap in the clouds and a way around the water tower, and light momentarily enters Bill Weboy’s living room and shines on the faces of the aging man and woman on the couch. Light and shadow make them look as timeworn, riven, and hard as the bluffs hovering over this town. But in another moment the clouds shift again, the sharp light vanishes in favor of a general shadow, and a softness returns to Margaret Blackledge’s features. Thank you, she says. We’ll come back. We’ll follow you.

B
ACK IN THE
H
UDSON
, G
EORGE SAYS
, I’
VE GOT NO USE FOR
that man.

I told you, George. We need him.

What the hell for? Now we know Donnie’s people are here. We could ask around and see if we can get directions to the place.

Be sensible. We don’t know our way around this part of the world. We could crisscross the prairie for days and not find them.

George says nothing but shakes his head slowly. He turns the key in the ignition and, though the engine catches immediately, he keeps turning and lets the gnashing and growling of steel and grinding gears make an argument for him.

Find me a drugstore, Margaret says. If we’re going to be guests of the Weboys for supper, I need a few supplies.

Before he drives away, George Blackledge casts a long look back at Bill Weboy’s house. The skies have shifted once again, and a flash of sunlight turns all the house’s windows into mirrors. It’s impossible to determine whether that’s a man staring out from the kitchen or just a cloud shape reflected in the glass.

.
   
.
   
.

Margaret Blackledge paces back and forth in front of the cosmetic counter of Shaw’s Rexall, Gladstone’s Finest Pharmacy and Sundries, as if its display of creams, powders, lipsticks, and rouges is a puzzlement placed before her to test her knowledge of womanhood and self. A mirror on the counter invites customers to renew their commitment to illusion. This section of the store is redolent with perfume, floral, sweet, and pungent as the air can be only where it is closed in with walls and roof.

A clerk, an older woman as thin as an axe handle and with a similar curve to her spine, spots Margaret’s quandary and hurries over to help.

Meanwhile, in the back part of the store, George wanders among the belts and trusses, the hot-water bottles and the enema bags, the shelves of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Kaopectate, Bromo-Seltzer, Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, of Cloverine and Rosebud salves. He seems not in the least mystified by this array but moves among the products as if he were there simply to total up the indignities that can be visited upon a human body.

After she has made her purchases, Margaret retrieves her husband and they walk back out onto the streets of Gladstone.

My goodness, she says. I guess it’s been a while since I shopped for such things. I think I gave the clerk fits. What shade are you looking for? she asked me. Red, I just want red. But which red? she wanted to know. Margaret holds up her small bag as though it contained something foul. Maybe I should just gnaw my lips and pinch my cheeks and bring up a little color that way.

You don’t need the help, George says. Never did.

Well, I guess I fooled you into thinking so.

On their way to the car they walk past a man who slows down and scrutinizes the Blackledges carefully as they pass. The man wears a rust-colored suede coat, polished hand-stitched boots, and a white Stetson. He has a moustache waxed and trimmed to arrows that point in opposite directions. Once they are twenty yards beyond him, Margaret wonders aloud, What was troubling Mr. Fancy Hat?

He spotted us for strangers, George replies. He’d like to know what our business is in Gladstone. I couldn’t count how many times someone would call or come into the office to let me know there was a stranger in town.

But that was Dalton. In a city this size?

Stop me if I’ve told you this little tale before. I don’t want to turn into one of those old men who can’t go anywhere in his talk but where he’s already been. After the armistice had been signed, our company had weeks in London waiting for room on a ship to take us home. I went out for a walk one day and I wasn’t wearing my uniform. I never opened my mouth or did a damn thing that showed me for a Yank. At least I didn’t think so. But damned if those English folk didn’t take me for a stranger right away. I knew the look even then. And that was London. A million people probably. A town full of strangers, you might say. Yet when they saw me, they knew. I wasn’t one of them.

Let’s head back out to the campsite, Margaret suggests. Where we won’t have anybody staring holes in us.

George and Margaret Blackledge continue down the sidewalk, making their way past stores and businesses
whose windows mirror a sky that has less luster than glass. With sidelong glances the Blackledges check their own reflections, watching themselves as another might for any sign that says they do not belong here.

W
ITH SO MUCH UNKNOWN IN THIS LIFE
,
HOW LITTLE IT
takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar. And how powerful is the lure of the familiar. Propelled by something close to instinct, George and Margaret head back to their campsite to wait out the hours until they are led to their grandson.

On the way out of Gladstone, George asks Margaret, Maybe we should look into checking in to a hotel or motel?

Now? When we’re looking at the possibility that we might be heading home soon? With Jimmy?

The knuckles of both hands gripping the steering wheel are chapped, cracked, and have bled a little, something that happens to George every year when the cold weather comes. They’ll be like this until spring, spotted, flecked, and lined with blood that dries black and looks like dots and dashes of Morse code. He wears gloves when he works outside and he uses Bag Balm—Margaret has said, Soften up those hands, mister, if you want to put them on me—but no amount of protection or emollient can keep his hands from drying out like an animal’s hide staked in the sun. George takes a hand from the wheel as if to keep it from her sight.

Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? he asks. You haven’t seen the boy or talked to his mother.

Ahead of myself . . . what a strange sight that would be.

This is something you do, Margaret. Count a thing as done because you want it so.

And what do you think gets something done, George? Doubt? Worry? Hesitation? For God’s sake, you don’t get across the river standing on the bank wondering if you can do it. You get wet.

And not just your feet, I take it?

In response Margaret stares out the windshield, giving her husband nothing but her profile to contemplate. Into her sixth decade she still has only one chin, a matter of pride to her, no matter that it trembles. Her neck is long, though its tendons often look as taut as the ropes that held their tent stakes. Yes, a regal profile. Yes, a woman willing to plunge into any water, no matter how icy or swift, if she has a reason to get to the other side.

.
   
.
   
.

It’s a rare Montana day. The wind that died last night has not resurrected, not yet, and George can follow the tire tracks that the Hudson pressed into the dirt earlier. He drives down the hill with caution, though the first trip has shown him that the car has sufficient clearance to make it without damage.

Here we are, George says, turning off the ignition. Home again. He pulls on the hand brake, though they’re parked on level ground.

The car faces west, where the clouds have thinned enough to allow brief patches of pale blue to blink through. If this sky clears, George says, this will be a damn cold night.

He rubs his shoulder as if that’s where the memory of last night’s stony, sullen sleep resides.

Margaret ignores this. She’s up on her knees and turned around to rummage through a box in the backseat. How about an apple? she asks. Or some of these carrots?

You’re just trying to keep me regular, says George. The apples are mealy, and there wasn’t much to those carrots when they were fresh. As far as I’m concerned you can throw them both out for the coyotes and the mule deer. But if there’s any coffee left in the thermos . . .

You know there is, Margaret replies. It’s right there on the seat next to you. Help yourself.

George picks up the thermos, shakes it gently to confirm that, yes, there’s coffee, but he makes no effort to pour any. He says, I’m thinking what I should have done is find a phone booth and give Jack Nevelsen a call. See what he might know about Bill Weboy.

Margaret turns back around, munching on a carrot. What makes you think there’s anything to know?

Just a feeling.

Well, he had you pegged. Public official indeed.

I’m sure Donnie’s told him about us.

Poisoned the well, is more like it, says Margaret. And how would Sheriff Nevelsen have any information on Mr. Weboy?

George shrugs. A sheriff hears things.

And files them away.

Not something you can help doing.

So there they are. There they stay.

Memory cleans itself out sooner or later, says George.

Margaret rolls down her window and tosses out the
stub of carrot. Mr. Weboy has said he’ll help us. That’s good enough for me.

And I trust him about as far as I can throw him.

Of course we know you’re a suspicious man.

George touches his finger to his hat brim. Guilty as charged, ma’am.

Margaret squirms in place like an impatient child. I can’t sit here all day twiddling my thumbs. Let’s go for a stroll. Breathe a little fresh air.

You’re the boss, George says, opening his car door.

.
   
.
   
.

With the rocky foothills and striated bluffs behind them, they walk west, across a sandy landscape whose only undulation is a long, subtle slope toward a silty creek. The tall cottonwoods near the water rustle even without the wind, and the lint from those trees snags in the sagebrush and gathers in the pebbly seams where, in another season, water runs.

George’s long strides keep moving him ahead, and his wife has to scurry to keep up. Slow down, Stretch, says Margaret. I said a stroll, not a race.

He waits and she comes alongside him and hooks her arm in his. Did you lock the car? she asks.

You saw me do it not three minutes ago.

I thought so. But then I wasn’t sure whether I remembered the act or the thought.

Yes, I’m all too familiar with that feeling.

I tell you, Mr. Blackledge, this growing old tosses up a new surprise every day.

To that he says nothing. It’s an observation he’s made himself too many times already. What’s the use?

Gesturing vaguely toward Gladstone, Margaret says, My God. What would make anyone settle in such dismal, godforsaken country?

Exactly what some would say about Dalton. And more people live here.

But Dalton makes sense, she says. You stop short of the Badlands. But here? You just get across and then stop?

Assuming folks are moving east to west.

Well, certainly.

As I recall that was the argument your father made. About how Dalton was settled, that is.

He was right about a few things.

You won’t get any argument from me.

Now, my mother, she didn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot—

—with the instructions printed on the heel. So it’s the day to quote Warren Mann, is it?

He never said it within her hearing, she says quickly.

You don’t have to defend the man to me, Margaret. I thought the world of your father.

They walk silently for another hundred yards. The clouds have once again thickened and filled in the blue patches with gray and the hillside grass has lost its gold and turned tawny.

At dinner tonight, Margaret says, they might offer some sort of liquor.

They might.

If they do, I’d appreciate if you’d pass on the offer.

George Blackledge glances quickly down at his wife. The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless
empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong—who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

Margaret says, It’s not that I think you can’t hold your liquor. It’s just that—damnit, I don’t know. I’d like to create a certain impression, I guess.

Sort of like the preacher coming for supper?

Yes, she says. Exactly. I know you’re poking fun at me but that’s exactly what I want. After this evening’s over I’ll pour you a drink myself. Hell, I’ll have one too.