Lions

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If you’ve ever really loved anyone, you know there’s a ghost in everything. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. It looks out at you from the stillness of a rail-backed chair. From the old 1952 Massey-Harris Pony tractor out front, its once shining red metal now a rust-splotched pink, headlights broken off. No eyes.

Picture high plains in late spring. Green rows of winter wheat combed across the flat, wide-open ground. The derelict sugar beet factory, its thousands of red bricks fenced in by chain-link clotted with Russian thistle. Farther down the two-lane highway, the moon rising like an egg over the hollow grain elevator, rusted at its seams. To the north and west, the sparsely populated town. Golden rectangles of a few lit windows floating above the plain.

They called it Lions, a name meant to stand in for disappointment with the wild invention and unreasonable hope by which it had been first imagined, then sought and spuriously claimed. There were never any lions. In fact there is nothing more to the place now than a hard rind of shimmering dirt and grass. The wind scours it constantly, scrubbing the sage and sweeping out all the deserted buildings and weathered homes, clearing out those that aren’t already bare. Flat as hell’s basement and empty as the boundless sky above it. The horizon makes as clean and slight a curve as if lathed by a master craftsman. Nothing is hidden.

And yet.

It’s said that in naming the place after a dream from which they refused to awaken, the people of Lions put a curse upon themselves as much as on the town itself — one that finally ripened the summer a man and his dog came walking into town along the bar ditch from God knew where, his dark clothes blowing like robes in the wind.

He must have been from up north, people said.

Circled around on foot over the buttes, then hit the highway and came in as if he were from the east.

Didn’t want anyone to know where he was from, they said. Or what he was doing.

They say that later that night, when Chuck Garcia, the county sheriff, asked him who he was, this man could give no answer. No name, no ID, and a shrug of his shoulders. They say he was gaunt, his face oddly shadowed, and that even though by the gray in his hair and the stoop of his shoulders they guessed him to be fifty, fifty-five years old, he had not a line in his face, nor any light in his eyes, which were black as seeds.

They say that just after this man stopped at the Walkers’, John Walker practically keeled over dead where he stood, and Georgianna, his beloved wife of thirty-five years, all but evaporated from the kitchen at the back of the house, so distant and unearthly did she seem to become. They say that Gordon, their son, left alone to pick up the pieces and carry on his father’s work, was doomed.

Leigh Ransom, who was seventeen when what seemed like the perfect summer began, had known something like this was coming. Close as she was to the Walkers, she of course knew the details of John Walker’s own father suddenly dying, years ago, and could have predicted something similar would happen to John himself. There were patterns to things, especially in places like Lions. Especially when you were talking about the Walkers. So when she saw the silent ambulance lights from her bedroom that night, she knew whom they’d come for. She knew what was beginning to unfold. She could picture it all: the faded periwinkles on Georgianna’s cotton nightgown as John woke beside her in a nauseated sweat; the runny moonlight in their bedroom, shadows of the framed window printed slantwise across the old hardwood floor; John Walker’s hand, cold and damp, suddenly clenching the top of Georgianna’s thigh beneath the sheets; his swaying — he missed a step, then another — and their dance together down the narrow staircase to the front door, where he fell on the tile in his T-shirt and underwear, his blue jeans draped over her arm.

And if anybody had asked her that night, Leigh could have described everything that would happen to Gordon in the days ahead, as a result. How in the Burnsville clinic the next morning, the nurse would fold her hands at her wide belly, the toes of her white tennis shoes pointed outward, her hair cut in a smooth iron gray helmet, her blue eyes dull and bloodshot. Outside the windows, a violet green swallow piping in one of the landscaped trees. Inside, computers and medical devices clicking, hushed voices drifting and gathering around the triage station. Rubber-bottomed safety shoes squeaking on the polished floor.

Gordon would stand in the clinic hallway holding a white paper takeout bag from the diner in Lions as the floor tilted and the door to his father’s room contracted into a small rectangle as if suddenly drawn some immeasurable distance away.

“You’ll want to say your good-byes,” the nurse would tell him and Georgianna in an even voice. “I am so sorry. He’s not likely to regain consciousness.”

But when Gordon was alone with him later that hour, that’s exactly what his father would do, making a low hum in the back of his throat, clearing it to speak, as he opened his eyes. He’d speak slowly, interrupted with long periods of silence, between cycles of the ventilator. Clear fluid in the IV bag shimmering in the gray light. The electrocardiography machine beeping at regular intervals.

“Write this down,” John Walker would say, reciting the instructions by heart as Gordon took notes on the back of a Gas & Grocer receipt in his wallet, then describing the task he was asking his son to perform. Afterward he would pause, looking out the window from his bed at the silver poplar. “You can say no, Gordon. But this has been my life’s work. And one way or another, it will be yours.”

Here was a master of his craft who built a first-class weld servicing facility, who spent ten hours of every workday in his shop, whom Leigh had heard people say could outweld even the Hobart and Lincoln Electric sales engineers working the region, who was famous in eastern Colorado for his skill and precision, but who was calling his life’s work this odd errand out of town to deliver canned food, blankets, candles, batteries, and firewood to somebody up north.

“Don’t speed,” he’d tell Gordon. “Don’t look for shortcuts. If you find you’ve made a wrong turn, go back to the place where you went astray and start again from there. Remember when you’re up there that I ran the same errand myself for thirty-five years, and was never the worse for it. Whatever you might hear to the contrary.”

And Gordon would know what his father meant — what people sometimes said of John Walker, of the Walker men before him, and what they would come to say of Gordon. He’d know what his father’s request would do to his life, the one he thought he’d have, the one he was on the edge of taking up in his hands that summer, the one with her. They were going to leave. But as Gordon stood there in the hospital room looking down at his father, neither the rumors, his plans, nor the cost of ignoring them would matter.

And so from that first night and all through the summer as Leigh walked from her mother’s diner to her bedroom to the empty factory to the Walkers’ house and back again, the sun broiling her neck and the top of her head, waiting for Gordon to reappear after an absence of a week or three nights or five, she tried to understand how these Walkers, who lived so small, and had seemed so good, ended up at the heart of a story like this one.