Lions (2 page)

They'd talked about the country, Chuck reported, and the stranger spoke like a stranger indeed, full of questions about what they grew in town, and for how long, and how it was that this little place tacked to the high plains had managed to survive.

“Does it look like it survived?” Georgianna asked, and smiled.

According to Chuck, they talked snowmelt, irrigation, alfalfa, hog feed, and welding. The man had a cousin who was a metalworker, and who would have envied John's setup to no end.

“A metalworker,” John said, grinning and displaying his evenly gapped teeth.

The man wiped his index finger across the plate to get all the yolk and licked it clean. “Beg your pardon, ma'am.” He set his hands in his lap. “Been hungry.”

Georgianna was back up at the stove. She set two warm hard-boiled eggs on the counter beside her. “For your Sadie,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“And another couple for you coming up, no arguments.”

“Thank you so much.” He spread his long hands open on the kitchen table and stood.

To the west the sky was slowly darkening to blue-black and the box elder branches were beginning to circle and twist in the increasing wind.

“Warming up to rain,” John said, “but it won't rain.” It had rained a week earlier, a thin and drizzly sputter that would turn out to be the last until mid-October when a cold and wet turn of weather would freeze into sheets of jagged glass across the plain.

John and Georgianna stood beside each other inside the window, watching the man carry both eggs in one hand across the grass to his dog. She wagged her tail as the man approached and took each egg, one at a time, into her mouth. Then the man stooped and spoke to her, scratched her ears. John put his hand on the small of his wife's back.

When the man returned to the house he thanked them again. “Feels good to give your traveling companion something good to eat.” Then he ate four more eggs—eight eggs in that single meal.

“Been out in the snow and weather much?” John asked him.

“Some.”

“You have the things you need? Want a thermos? Got an extra in the shop.”

“A warm hat,” Georgianna said.

The man raised an open hand in their direction and shook his head. “Something I can do for you?”

Outside in the wind and last light he helped John move a pile of corrugated steel scavenged from a demolished farmhouse and its outbuildings twenty miles north, in Horses. They both wore heavy gloves and sidestepped through the new weeds until the pile was in the pole barn. They put the scrap angle iron and rectangular tubing on racks. The dog circled the men and pounced on field mice and loosed a skein of red-winged blackbirds that lifted up over the house and settled again behind it. Back in the kitchen the men washed their hands in the sink and a cold blast of wind blew the curtains in. Georgianna reached across the stranger and closed the window with a long, freckled arm. “Looks like you found us just in time,” she said. “Why don't you bring your dog in?”

“In the house?”

“We'll set you up on the cot in the bunkroom for the night,” John said. “It's nothing fancy but it's got a stove. We have another room in the house but it's Gordon's.”

“Our son,” Georgianna explained. “He's out with his girl.”

The man glanced at her, then John. Their open faces, their warm, comfortable home.

“I think best,” he said, “if we keep moving.”

Georgianna gave him two peanut butter sandwiches, a bag of dried apple rings, and a can of tuna fish for the dog, and put it all with his clean clothes in a plastic bag.

He looked down at the coveralls.

“You keep them,” Georgianna said. “Might have a string of cool nights here. Those are sturdy.”

John gave the man a ten-dollar bill. By full dark he was walking down the frontage road straight toward town.

At the bar and in the diner, however, given what they learned later, they could hardly believe the man's visit at the Walkers' had been as civil as Chuck's reports indicated it was.

Over the following few weeks, reports of what happened next rushed in whispers like wind through the grass. Edie Jacks, who lived in the house behind the alley, said the man left his dog on a little brown square of withered grass right by Boyd's bar, and opened the door. From her kitchen window where she stood watching, the light inside the bar narrowed to a ribbon and went out.

That evening, Gordon Walker and Leigh Ransom were out in John's truck. Gordon turned north, then west on a narrow county road, and drove straight over a vacant field. The old, blue Silverado bounced and he and Leigh swayed in the cab, but the MIG welder and toolbox were fixed firmly in the bed. In the distance before them, the dark red form of the empty sugar beet factory was set on the ragged edge of town, backed up against what had once been the westernmost edge of fertile tallgrass prairie, then beet fields, and was at last cast aside as hard ribbed ground grown wild with weeds and bristling forbs not even sheep would graze on.

Gordon and Leigh could hike to the factory on foot from their adjacent backyards, but they'd driven out to Burnsville this evening—the closest city, where their high school was—to buy butter burgers and french fries. In the back of the truck, in a cooler, they had a stash of canned beer from Boyd's bar. Leigh ate the last of the fries with her bare feet braced against the passenger door, her head in Gordon's lap so she could see the birds and bats darting above. She reached up with every other fry and popped it into Gordon's mouth as he drove. With each one, she listed something they would have in the fall, in college, that they did not and could not have in Lions.

“People our age,” she said.

He glanced down at her. “I only have eyes for you.”

“Movie theater.”

“Overrated.”

“Real restaurants.”

“Overpriced.”

“Beautiful houses. Museums. Schools. Kayaking. Hiking. Snow on the mountains.”

Gordon tossed his hand, dismissing all of it. “Admit it. You love it here. Nowhere else will ever compare.”

She pinched him. “Stop. I know you want to go.”

He ran his fingertips along her jaw and rested his hand on her shoulder. “I do,” he said. “Of course I do.” He slowed the truck to a stop, turned off the engine, pulled her up, and kissed the sides of her face.

To get inside the factory they went not over the razor wire, but beneath a curled lip of chain-link that as children they'd disguised by tacking it back down with a railroad spike in a hole that took all day to pick out, the pale dirt so hard and dry it was no more fertile than moon rock. They say in its first years of being tilled there were nearly a hundred kinds of wheat growing in the county, and fifty kinds of oats, and flowering fields of green and white alfalfa of such prodigious harvests that at the World's Fair grand prizes for both comb and strained alfalfa honey went to Lions. They say the nights were uniformly cool and the days were full of sunshine, that there was no such thing as mud or dust, only loamy black soil the consistency of dense chocolate cake, and root vegetables as big as your head. Some of the old-timers, however, might snort and tell you such stories don't amount to much more than how a sense of loss can lead a person to imagine an overabundant past. If for a short time the story people told themselves about the place involved bushels of grain, melons big as wagon wheels, and ten-pound sugar beets, so much the worse for the ground that yielded them. Where once there had been wild onions and yams, buffalo, antelope, bears, and streams of fish, Lions' earliest residents envisioned cattle, wheat, hog feed, expansive homes. When the former were decimated, the place became inhospitable, the sun hostile, the dirt shallow and as fine and dry as chaff. Their mistake was not in failing to see how difficult it would be to turn the place into a garden, but in failing to see that it had already been one when they arrived.

Sometimes when Leigh stepped inside the dim and rosy light of the empty factory, she felt something touch the back of her shoulder as if to warn her away. She was conscious of whispers and shadows moving across the wall, pricked by a nagging feeling not so much of alarm, or of fear, but of naked longing. The kind of feeling you get when you see the taillights of a single car disappearing over the curved ridge of earth in the last light of day. Wasn't it pulling something of yourself along with it? There was a powerful spirit in the factory, she tried to tell Gordon. Something unsettled, a darkness that felt alive despite its stillness. He asked her to point to it. She slapped at him.

What had been the second-story floor had begun to buckle and crack, so that sun and moonlight splintered at odd angles in strange, bright patterns overhead. It was old flatiron construction, with massive beams of riveted steel. Broken slatted boards were nailed and rotting over long, narrow arched windows. On more than one occasion the feeling the place gave Leigh raised the hair on her forearms and scared her outside. Once Gordon not only laughed at her, he planted his feet, threw his head back, and asked whatever was there if it wouldn't show its face. Come out of hiding.

“It will kill you,” she whispered from the doorway.

“If it's so important,” he said, “ignoring it will kill you.”

Only one man's story from the factory survived from the days before it finally shut down, if you could trust Marybeth Sharpe, now ninety-three years old and still living above her junk shop next to the bar. The man was from Rushville, Nebraska, or maybe it was Valentine or Alliance, Marybeth couldn't quite recall, but some small town up there where she had cousins on her father's side. The factory and fields employed scores of men and women to crawl on hands and knees from April to November thinning and blocking the rows to make space for big beets, to maximize teaspoons of sugar per vegetable—it was crippling work—but the Rushville man was lucky. He was neither a Mexican nor a German-Russian immigrant, so his job was inside.

The factory was the same maze of pipes, diffusion cells, flumes, and tanks you'd find in there today, but all the steel now rust-bitten and corroded was at that time a bright blue metal. Rushville's job was on the first floor of the north side, where great agitators blended sugar beet juice with lime. He was to produce the lime rock in a massive coke oven. Around him in stacks of red brick and twists of metal were narrow metal staircases and fires, hot water, towers of steam. The decaying beet mash in the plumbing stank like hellrot, and where it landed outside of the plumbing it slicked every walking surface with slime. On a day when the graining screens malfunctioned, which was common enough, Rushville was on shift. He shut off the steam and began disassembling the heating drum, but when he unfastened the bolts, gallons of scalding water poured out over him from above.

You can imagine the screams of steam, the screams from the man, the terror in the hearts of his fellow workers, who would have been torn between helping and shielding themselves. Outside in the fields, the men and women stopped crawling over the bony soil and listened. The sun roared down on them.

In most versions of the story, Rushville did not die. Years after the accident, after he had healed from the immediate burns and skin grew over him in a sheen of pink plasticky flesh, his face unrecognizable, his hands missing most of their fingers, his wife birthed a baby girl.

It was the bundle of these last few details that haunted Gordon and Leigh, the white ovals of their faces uplifted in the dusty junk shop as Marybeth described the strange little family and the long, low, dilapidated potato barn they inhabited. Thinking of the transformation of that man, of all the mornings he woke without a face anyone would recognize as human, missing pieces of his hands, his arms immobilized by hardening scar tissue. Imagine him, this man, making love to his wife. What mettle or faith must have been required of her? And not just required of her, but of him, and of their daughter, too, who never left them, and, it was said, was buried beside them?

“Staying power,” Marybeth Sharpe said, her twisted-up hair already white as bone. “This was a good man,” she said. “You understand? And a very good woman.” She pointed her eyes and nose at each of them, one after another. “OK. Get out. That's all you need to know.”

Sometimes in the factory with nothing better to do, as tonight, Leigh remembered Rushville in a ceremony of her own design, in order to ward off such tragedy. It was not so much an act of faith as part of a bargain: in exchange for the time the ceremony took from her life was a promise that things would go well for her, that all the rumors of abundance and health and wealth and progress would be bestowed upon her. Good fortune would come to her precisely because she had taken the time to perform this liturgy, one that would keep her safe and happy because she'd written it that way.

In the factory, she kept blindfolds. A fistful of bruised weeds—thistle and toadflax and knapweed—for fragrance. Tonight, the light was changing outside the window from blue to black. The wind was picking up. A nightjar purred in the dead box elder tree, clenched like a bony hand against the evening sky. All these things had their place.

Leigh and Gordon sat crosslegged on the concrete in the dust, knee to knee to knee to knee, and tied torn scraps of threadbare pillowcases around their eyes, knotting them at the backs of their heads. Gordon reached up first, and touched Leigh's cheekbone. She returned a touch in the same place on his own face: right cheekbone. Their hands floated in the darkening room from one body part to another. A single white-throated swift darted above them and swooped out into the blue square of light. She touched his chin. He touched her chin, then opened his hand on the crown of her head. Crown of his head. Bottom of her feet, left then right, until they touched each other everywhere Marybeth had told them the man had been burned. They touched each other purposefully and lightly, with a brush of fingers as soft as fescue when you're stretched out in the summer grass, and the day is as long as a season, the season as long as a year.

When they finished and removed their blindfolds, her eyes were misty. Gordon laughed at her.

“I just like to touch that place on your throat.” He stood and pulled her up.

“You have to put your heart into it, Gordon. Or something bad will happen to you.”

Gordon knocked on her head. She snatched his fist and bit his knuckles.

“So superstitious,” he said.

“You really want to risk being wrong?”

“Now you're getting religious on me.”

“I am not.” She set a gold can of beer in his hand and opened one of her own. They stood looking out the third-story window. He put his nose in her hair.

“I wish we had some better beer,” she said. “Tell you what, when we drive out of here I'm never having another one of these. Ever.”

“What will you have? Let me guess. Champagne, three times a day. And big boats of ice cream.”

“Yes. We'll go out.”

“Sure.”

“We'll bring our books and drink coffee.”

“What'll we read?”

“Everything.”

“That's a lot of homework.”

“I'll read half of everything, and you read the other half.”

He pulled her in closer.

“Do you think other people have it like this?” she asked.

“What other people?”

“The people in Burnsville,” she said. “Like Katie and Cody. Do you think they have it like this?”

“There are no people in Burnsville.”

“But you've seen them!”

“I don't see them now.” He turned her around to face him and she set her beer down on the rotted windowsill and interlaced her fingers behind his back. In their intimacy there was a line they had not yet crossed, and while Gordon always stopped himself short, saying they belonged to each other, and they didn't have to hurry, she always had the sense that he meant something else: that although she was his, he was not entirely hers. He was reserved for something else, just out of her reach.