Lions (14 page)

“Sure, Dock.”

“And I'll call on you.”

* * *

That night in the factory Gordon told Leigh about the morning with Dock, and that he'd get his things together. He was leaning against the brick wall and she took her place in his arms, her head against his chest, and took his hand in hers.

“Aren't you happy?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered, but was surprised not to feel anything as she said it. It used to be that her words created the feeling they described. Now she sensed the gap between the two, and wondered if it'd always been there. She wasn't sure what she felt. “And you?”

He was quiet a full minute. “Happy.” He bumped his tennis shoe against hers.

Tonight he was a mile farther behind that line he'd never let her cross, had never crossed for her. When she closed her eyes, she couldn't picture his face. Something else had claimed him. She thought maybe they could still outrun it.

Before coming West the Walkers were camped briefly in a northeast Atlantic state, in a small town with verdant rolling hills, clear lakes, moss-covered barns, and hardwood trees with wide, flat-leafed blades that grew big as wet green hands. There, each man at his turn sweated before a rock slab hearth, shaping and twisting red-hot steel with a four-pound hammer on a heavy cast anvil. Some thousands of years before that, they were watchmen gathered high on a windswept moor beneath a spray of stars, sitting late into the night around a fire hemmed in by a ring of stones. Long after the women and most of the men had gone to sleep, and the constellations had tilted above them, and all the nocturnal creatures and insects clicking and whirring in the brush had fallen silent, their bellies filled with blood and feather and bone, these old Walkers stared into the flames as minerals began to shine and liquify in the rock, and they knew just what to do. It was a discovery they would not have made had they not been sentinels of a kind, and each Walker in his time relayed the message to his son: the metalwork should ever afterward remind them of this duty. And so in the midst of the hundreds of wars that followed, and during years upon years as migrants among the hungry and hopeless, they would have learned that compassion is fearless and unthinking, or it's not compassion.

Lamar Boggs was only a young man, they say, when his companions left him for dead. He was just starting out in the world, visiting his older brother who had been trading out West for a decade. There were many like him, eager for their chance at adventure and fortune. His party was a small group of neighbors and distant cousins, all of them hoping to find some measure of freedom they felt unavailable in their hometowns. They were doing as their own forefathers had done: helping themselves. It was a virtue. They traveled hundreds of miles together, became as brothers. Traded shoes and knives, boiled coffee, gutted antelope and sliced the meat thin enough to dry smoke on sticks around their campfires. Among them were a few young women, one of them an Elizabeth with strawberry blonde hair who cast Boggs long looks and smiled shyly. Once, he helped her into the wagon, taking her hand and the back of her arm. She smelled, he thought, like butterscotch. He'd had it once. No matter where he was in the group, a dozen miles ahead, or beside the wagon, or five miles behind, he knew exactly where he was in relation to her.

He would not be able to recall what happened late one afternoon that left him on his back, his vision dark, and the men he'd been riding with circling around him in the increasing snow, looking down, talking it over, their coats pulled tight to their throats. He looked up at them and felt the ground moving beneath him. It was as if a giant wheel had been set ­turning—everyone had set it turning, he had set it turning—and now it would have to spin itself out. The weather was bad, the fort seventeen miles farther on, and now—certainly he had been shot—there was reason to believe there were enemies afoot. Boggs knew there was none among them with room on their horses, and there was no room in the wagon. That his own horse must be down, too, or they would've strapped him to it. Surely they would have strapped him to it. One by one in the snow the men turned away. Perhaps they thought he was already dead. He could not speak or move in protest. He listened instead for the sound of the young woman's protest, but it did not come. He knew he was bleeding into the snow. Many men and women as undeserving of the fate had bled into this same ground, he knew. He had not thought he'd be one of them. As his grandfather had once told him in his parlor in St. Louis, every empire has its price.

As everyone understood it, and as John Walker had himself once confirmed, the first Walker came West just after the Civil War. He was a quiet, dark-eyed man, as all the Walkers were, and knew almost nothing of hunting, especially not in this region. He was a metalworker and a wheelwright and had done only a little bird shooting for sport: doves, sage grouse, pheasant. The land would've been sparsely populated back then, and cold on the day in question. Nevertheless, he'd decide to head out across the plain looking for someone to trade with for meat. He had a wife and a son, and it would be their first winter there, and there were hundreds of pounds of red meat, he'd heard, in a single kill of moose or elk. Someone would trade him.

Say he turned off a narrow track that wound over a lace of fresh white snow along a river. This is just past the BLM road, ten, fifteen miles north, near Horses. You take the road off the highway about twelve miles, then east for three miles. Then north again.
Way
up there. That's where he'd have been.

There would've been tracks of other carts. There wouldn't have been any threats other than failing light and increasing cold. By this particular night in this particular winter, the country would have long been broken.

This Walker would not have been worried, as he traveled, and what he'd find is the kind of thing you find exactly when you are not worried, when you are relaxed and warm enough to believe that no real harm can come to you. Behind the clouds, the sun—or possibly the moon—was high over the rim of the plain. There, in the vast white page before him, he'd see a small heap that at first sight could have been an animal—possum or even polecat, some poor creature to eviscerate and fry up and eat.

Suddenly he'd rush in, racing over the frozen ground with his open coat flapping like wings. There was Boggs, bleeding in the snow, a red slush around him. He would not have been able to speak.

Walker would've dragged him home on his sled—a sick and dying man instead of meat for his family—and as he pulled the sled through a stand of homesteads, the people of Lions would've looked out at them both. Boggs would've been filthy, his hair dark and shaggy, rings around his eyes, and dressed as if from a different era. A horrible stench. Those passing by outside would've put their hands over their mouths and turned away.

Walker was bringing this man home, to his family?

To his wife and son?

What was the matter with the man? Tend him out here, set him up in the stable, for God's sake. He could be sick. He'd get every last one of them sick.

In the weeks to come, no one would come for him, no one would claim him.

How was it that he had simply appeared in the snow like that?

And wounded like that?

He could only have been alone and running from something. No one would just leave him.

If they had, they weren't good people.

And who would've traveled among such men?

He'd bring them all bad luck.

He was a drunk, or a thief, or worse.

Likely he was being pursued. Now his pursuers would bear down on Lions, on their own homes.

Give him some water, give him some bandages, and set him on his way.

They couldn't have exactly said why this man gave them the horrors, but he did. After several weeks, Walker would finally have been convinced to take the poor man out of town to protect his own family—and to protect Boggs himself. The young man would've still been recovering, still weak. They'd have gone together on horseback up country and built a small hut of timber and earth with a floor of hardpacked dirt. For all its ruggedness, remarkably straight.

In all the years to come the young man who lived there would remain unchanged. He'd wear the same mended shirt and blackened rabbit skin leggings he'd coveted as rugged and wild when he first left St. Louis. He wouldn't mind the cold, or the heat. Walker would bring him cloth, needles, thread, coffee and sugar, blankets, some flints and steel, and small tools and promise to return after a week or two with more food. When he did return, with rabbits and sage hens, the young man ate everything before him and wanted only to know that Walker would come again.

There's a radiance to the edges of each blade of grass up there on that mesa. A hardness to every line. Wind jerks the stains of clouds over the ground like apparitions in a magic lantern slide, and if you were to pass by, you might see a pair of white hands pressed against the glass of the hut's single window and the white circle of a face looking out, waiting.

Leigh and Gordon left home in the old truck, their things packed on a small trailer and in the bed, blue tarps neatly cinched down over all of it.

“They'll stop and ticket you if you don't tie it down real well,” he said, circling the bed and checking each taut hitch.

There's a photograph of them from their last night together in Lions that Georgianna kept pinned to her refrigerator for years. It's evening in the photograph, late summer. Leigh is barefoot in a pair of Gordon's jeans that she cut off into shorts, with a red bandana tied over her hair. She's sitting on the stoop in front of the Walkers' old white house, next to Georgianna, who's in her long cotton yellow sundress and one of John's old shirts, and has her arm around Leigh, face turned to her. Leigh has both fists beneath her chin, elbows propped on her brown knees. In the foreground, to the left, Gordon is carrying a box of her clothes. He's looking past May, who took the photograph, as if there were someone or something just behind her. His expression is one of intelligence and calm. If you were holding the photograph in your hand, he'd be looking right over your shoulder.

In the truck, on the way, there was a weight and a tightness in the silence between them. They held hands briefly, twice, their interlaced fingers resting in the space between the driver and passenger side seats where even a season ago she would have been sitting. The first time Gordon disengaged his hand to turn the radio station, and the second time Leigh pulled hers away.

The truck scattered desert light as they sped over the highway. The grass thinned out as the plain beneath them rose. Pleated and wrinkled, the golden ground unrolled in an unmarked parchment around them. Outside the windshield, a tiny, empty grain elevator jackknifed against the sky, which was a perfect heartache blue. They'd rolled their windows down and the air outside was hot as smoke and the loose daylight and dust made their eyes fill with tears.

“I thought I'd feel freer.”

“We're not even halfway there.”

She turned the radio off, then on again, and scanned. Country songs. Commercials. She turned it off. “Are there any radio stations up there?”

“Up where?”

“Where you go.”

“It's not like I drive to the moon.”

“Why didn't you ever take me?”

He gave her a look of surprise. “You'd want to go?”

“Not really.”

He said nothing.

“I didn't think it would be like this,” she said. “This summer. This drive to college.”

“Me either.”

“I guess I have to forgive your shitty behavior.”

Gordon glanced at her a moment, then focused on the road before him. “Guess I have to forgive yours.”

Five miles outside of the city, when the traffic increased and the highway widened, Leigh made him stop at a Walmart, where she bought a blue and white polka-dot dress that flared out from her waist, and glitter for the backs of her wrists, and earrings of looped silver wire. She bought soap and lotion and a caddy for the shower, and new underwear and three T-shirts, new sheets, two towels and three scented candles. Gordon waited in the café, where he drank a cup of black coffee and made funny faces across his table to a child in the adjacent booth. When she was finished shopping, he waited for her outside while she changed in the bathroom.

“Very nice,” he said when she had lifted her bags in the cab of the truck and turned for him in her polka dots. “But I like you in your regular clothes.”

“Don't be a party pooper,” she said. “Don't you need anything?”

“I'm good.” They climbed in the truck and he pulled out of the parking lot back onto the road.

“Don't you want anything?”

“I'm good.”

“Hungry?”

“Eh.”

“Let's go somewhere good. I'll buy.”

He lifted one of the foiled-wrapped sandwiches May had given them. “We have these.”

Leigh took them and one at a time threw them out the window.

“Hey,” he said. “I could get a ticket for that.”

“You and your tickets.”

“They're perfectly good sandwiches.”

“This from the guy who eats cheese and tomato sandwiches from the gas station outside of Burnsville.”

“It's food. It shouldn't be wasted.”

She reached over and pinched the back of his upper arm. “Oh, lighten up a little.”

“You got to tell me how to do that.”

They glanced at each other and laughed. He took her hand.

Leigh found the city an almost unbelievable solace. They pulled into town by late afternoon along a narrow, busy street with long lawns of green and blue velvet and sprinklers and fountains and entire blocks of brick and painted houses and landscaped yards. All that hot summer in Lions and here were thick white beds of impatiens and window boxes of bright green geraniums. Huge canopies of imported oak trees and maple trees, alder and aspen and ash. There was no white glare, none of the human dust of home. There were pubs and cafés and restaurants and bars and farmers' markets and grocery stores and co-ops and art galleries and somehow, in its design to address her every need, it placed her at the center of the world, in the middle of every room.

“Park somewhere,” she said.

“We have to unload this stuff.”

“Come on,” she took his arm. “No one's going to take anything.”

He shook his head—no short cuts—and drove toward campus where they found her dormitory and he helped her unload everything into her room. Her roommate, a young woman from Pueblo, had not yet arrived. Gordon hauled in the few crates and boxes of Leigh's things while she unpacked them in the room. He hung every picture straight, moved the dresser where she asked him to, turned the bed so her body would lie lengthwise against the windows, as it had at home.

“Your turn?” she asked, collapsing in a dorm-issued armchair.

“You don't have to help.”

“Meet me somewhere then. I'm going to walk through town.”

Outside, the sun lowered and the shadows lengthened and the beauty of the day deepened. She went everywhere, stepped inside every store. Touched dresses, smelled perfurmed oils, smiled broadly at the young women working behind the registers. Here it finally was. People smiled back at her. Young men said hello. Somewhere in her mind was Lions—hollow, bare, too bright to see, each building and familiar house and barn obliterated behind a burst of blinding sun. The very name of the place an echo on empty plain.

A couple hours, one fizzy lemon drink, a pair of sandals and two silk scarves later she found Gordon in his room. It was on the opposite side of campus from her own—oddly far away after living a hundred feet apart from him all her life—in a small, brick building of four floors. Nothing like the massive tower she'd been assigned to. His roommate, an Emerson Perez, had at the last minute arranged to live off campus and left Gordon without any company. This meant he had two narrow rooms to himself; in one, a long, metal-framed twin bed, where he slept, and in the other, John's old armchair he'd unloaded and set up as if it were the Walkers' old living room. Next to it, the Naugahyde chair that had come in the dorm room. He hung a spider plant in a pot that Leigh had made as a girl, and given to John on Father's Day, over which she recalled Georgianna and May exchanging a wink and, on May's part, a deep laugh. Also on this side of the room Gordon unfolded the brown, orange, and mustard-colored afghan that Georgianna had crocheted herself and which had been on the couch at home. He set up John's books in half a dozen neat stacks beside his chair, the binoculars from the shop alongside the books.

Leigh stepped into his room and saw all of it.

He sat in the old chair with his hands spread open on its arms and smiled at her across the dimly lit room.

“What do you think?”

“I—don't know what to say.”

“Don't look like that,” he said. “Who else's stuff could I have brought? Come on, Leigh. I don't have all the tip money saved that you have, for new stuff.”

“I guess.”

“Mom told me to bring whatever I needed.”

“No,” she said. “I know.”

“Sit down.”

“It's still light. There's live music downtown. I have to go to the grocery store.”

“Can't we just sit here together in the quiet for a little? Half an hour?”

So she sat in the dorm chair beside John Walker's chair and Gordon poured them each a shot of whiskey. She looked across the soccer field outside Gordon's building at a handful of young men passing a ball and running up and down the field. On the far side, a trio of girls in bright T-shirts walked arm in arm in arm toward a street packed with bicycles and cars. Tricked-out pickup trucks paraded in endless loops. All the lawns were thick and soft.

After they finished their whiskeys she convinced Gordon to drive her to the overbright, overstuffed grocery, but afterward he insisted on going back to his dorm.

“You just want to sit in your room?”

He shrugged. “Tired, I guess.”

“Everything you could possibly want or need is here, Gordon.”

“Need for what?”