Lions

~ ~ ~

When they lowered John Walker into the ground, Gordon took his mother’s hand. The chaplain from the Burnsville funeral home read a psalm and blessed the assembly, and gave thanks for the day. Slowly, one and two at a time, those in attendance turned away toward their cars. Georgianna and Gordon stood fixed at John’s side.

“Gordon,” Leigh said softly, and touched the back of his shirt, but he did not move or speak.

“Boy’s heart is broken,” Dock said, taking Leigh’s arm in his own. His own big blue eyes were red and full of tears. “His mama’s too. Give him time.”

They drove in a line to the Walkers’ yard, which smelled like grilled meat, beer, baked sage, and mosquito repellent. Leigh watched Georgianna turn from the kitchen sink when Gordon walked in barefoot in his blue jeans and take his face with both her hands. The screen door was propped open by an old red brick. May was setting up card tables, and Dock was grilling. It was a long, barrel-shaped grill John and Gordon had welded with expanded steel.

Together, Gordon and Georgianna stepped outside. Faces materialized out of the greenish gold light and looked at them, eyes bright in their heads, lips drawn. There was old Wade Till’s sad, equine head.

“Gas station,” the old man told Gordon. “You going to stay, you going to need to serve the people passing through on their way to somewhere else. Gas station. Coffee shop. Good quick hot food. What kind of food do people like,” he wanted to know, “and what kind of coffee? People your age,” the old man said. “What do they want?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Till. You’d have to ask them.”

“But we don’t have any!” another old man interjected, watery brown eyes, fine purple veins cracked beneath his pale cheeks. “You see the problem we’re up against?”

Emery Sterling’s wide smiling face. His laughter ringing through the solemn, hushed stands of two and three men and women holding paper plates of hamburger and macaroni and pork and beans, his laughter spiking around a murmur of macroeconomic and agribusiness and slow death and bullshit and what to do, how it is, nothing more to say. So many faces in the greenish, tea-colored afternoon, this garish light the preface to a storm that never came. Grainy faces peering out at Gordon as if from old photographs, stepping right out of the print, dead people closing in around him, their eyes stony, their mouths hard, thin lines, their faces so stern. Everyone old, everyone poor, everyone white.

And their hands. Ragged, blue-veined hands. Spotted hands. Hands reaching out to take Gordon’s, and touch his shoulder, and take his elbow, his forearm.

“Here,” one of them said, and led Gordon to the front yard. Across the dirt road, two ruts in the ground made by wagon wheels, made by a 1932 International truck, made again, perhaps, by a 1983 Chevy. The faint lines of dirt tracks disappearing in the distance like a road erasing itself in the weeds.

“I want you to take a look at that,” the old man said. “You see that?”

Gordon nodded.

“You know who comes next to a place like this? If anybody comes next?”

Gordon looked at his face floating in the heat.

“Recreationalists,” he said. “Or nobody. You a recreationalist?”

“No, sir.”

“You a birdwatcher? You think backpackers and birdwatchers need a welder?”

“Not likely, sir.”

“Think nobody needs a welder?”

“Sir?”

“Go to school.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Finance.”

“OK.”

“You got to think of the future.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Eventually you got to start making some money.”

“OK.”

The old man’s bright eyes narrowed and peered at him. “You think I’m wrong?”

The hand of an elderly woman led Gordon to a card table draped with a blue paper tablecloth and piled with sandwiches and warm foil trays of food. She showed Gordon where the plates were.

“You’re as skinny as a snake,” her face said. It wore pink lipstick. It had yellow teeth. “You fill up a plate.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s good. Put some chicken on there. Macaroni. Good.” She named all of it. Corn. Jell-O salad. Deviled egg. The paper plate was a flat, warm, shimmering blob. “Beans,” she said, “good. You like hot sauce?” She shook a thin pool of neon orange beside his macaroni.

The plate tipped rust-colored bean sauce on his light blue shirt. Little white macaroni bones in the grass. Voices around Gordon saying no incentive. Junk shop. Saying yoked.

Their faces saying sad man.

Saying north country.

High country.

Saying that boy? Gordon?

Pretty girl.

Cross to bear.

Goddammed shop.

Worthless ground.

Big promises.

Some garden.

Rats and weeds.

The busy whisper of rumor and wind shushed through the trees as the barometric pressure began to drop and the hair rose on everybody’s arms and necks. Georgianna stood across the yard looking pale, soft, vibrating at a low, even undetectable frequency. She wore her light green dress, the color of June Grass, her hair the color of the pewter sky behind her, as she floated from one neighbor to the next. Gracious. Empty. Invisible against the curtain of the green and gray world.

She was amazed by the number of people who had turned out, people from Greeley and Sterling, from as far west as Ault and Severance, everyone who knew John and respected him and had enlisted his work. Her old neighbors and friends stood around her, uncomfortable in the heat, imagining where they would go next, not only in the days ahead, but after the meal, and later that night. Next hour, next day, next city, next world. Apologizing in every other breath for her husband being gone, as if their continued existence somehow made them culpable for the death of one among them. But isn’t it written that God is close to the crushed in spirit? And so what is knowing God but having known and lost a tremendous love? And what is knowing a tremendous love but seeing it everywhere, in everything, at all times?

They ate and ate and ate in that terrible heat. They felt but did not speak of the man in the tower. They opened cans of Coke and 7-Up and Country Time lemonade and beer but they didn’t touch the water.

May set out a molded aspic of hard-boiled eggs and diced ham. They ate the glistening, savory jelly off Styrofoam plates. Dock mindlessly grilled three packages of hot dogs until there was nothing left but blackened husks. The clouds evaporated and a blinding white sun burned through a royal blue sky and the din of the creaking fields grew all around Gordon. That others could hear the sound, he was certain, for each old man and woman, when left for a moment alone on the scabby lawn beneath that searing daylight, would tip his head, and stare off into the distance where dust coiled like smoke above the weeds, right where his mother had fixed her own gaze, as if suddenly attuned to a low, pervasive hum.

“It’s just the sound of the highway,” Leigh said.

Gordon turned and searched her face. He looked down at the hand she’d placed on his forearm, and back up to her eyes.

“Poor son of a bitch,” Levon, who owned the garage, said, standing a few feet away. “Begging Georgianna’s pardon,” he said. Then Levon looked at Leigh, his mouth twisted up in a sorry, half smile. “Don’t hitch yourself to that wagon, sweetheart,” he said.

Gordon gently withdrew his arm and stepped away.

Levon shrugged. “What?” he said, his hands up, palms open, deflecting blame. “Apple don’t fall too far from the tree is all I’m saying.”

“They may be old and they may be ugly but they’re right about most of it,” Boyd told Leigh as she approached the cooler set up in the shade of the giant old cottonwood. “College is the only way out of this hole,” he said. “Go be a lawyer. Make a pot of money.”

“I am.”

“I have no doubt. You and el Gordo.”

“Pft.” She gave Boyd a look.

“You should follow him up there, Leigh. Maybe it’s a spell like in a fairy tale, and the Walkers have been waiting for a beautiful princess to rescue them from the terrible Boggs.” He waved his fingers in the air as he said the old pioneer’s name.

“I am not a princess.”

“Or maybe,” Boyd said, “maybe it isn’t Boggs at all he’s seeing. Maybe it’s a woman. A whole bunch of them.”

She rolled her eyes at him and stooped to open the cooler. “Women?”

“Haven’t you heard of that cemetery up north? Stretches in a long line across the grassland north of Horses?”

She stood with a green bottle of beer dripping melted ice through her fingers. Boyd eyed it, raised his eyebrows, and took the cap off for her with his key chain. “What cemetery?” she asked, and took a sip.

It was discovered, he said, when a group of students from her future college were surveying the grounds outside of town and found a series of faint stains in the dirt, each separated by about a mile, like a barely perceptible broken line down the middle of a wide dirt highway. Beneath each mark, the remains of a woman or a girl, all of them buried in dresses, striped robes, sheepskin blankets, and European boots, and hide slippers and beaded moccasins, even a pair of tennis shoes. Whatever the journey, whatever the trek, the women and children were always the slowest, so they were always the first killed by whoever pursued them from behind, and often as not, they were the only ones killed. Whatever the goal of travel — the next ridge, a hunt, a seam of gold — it always cost something. The so-called graveyard that these archaeology students found stretched some six hundred miles long, by exactly the width of a single woman or girl.

“They just buried them and moved on?”

“Gotta keep up,” Boyd said. “Stay with the head of the pack.”

“What shit.”

He raised his hand. “True story. Look it up in the library when you get to school.”

Leigh looked away. “So every woman was traveling the same path over all those years? Through Horses?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s wider than a single line of bodies. Maybe there’s girls and women buried everywhere.” With the toe of his boot he opened the cooler and nodded at it. She stooped and took out another for him. Across the Walkers’ backyard on the brittle yellow grass old women were hugging each other and men shaking hands, saying their goodbyes.

“You know we’re just messing with you, Leigh,” Boyd said. “Gordon’s a good man. You stick with him.”

“You and your shit stories,” she said, and took a long pull off her beer.

“That was good,” he said. “You timed that just right, the jibe and the drink. You’ll be real nice decoration in a bar when you grow up.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t you want to move into John and Georgie’s house? Or no, wait, maybe Gordon will build you a nice little Quonset hut, right off the Quonset hut.”

She closed her eyes a moment. “Leave me alone, Boyd.”

“Don’t believe it about John having saved a hundred thousand dollars, either. Walkers don’t have five bucks between them. Careful with the beer.”

“I’m fine.”

Faces of the old white men and women began to pull away, then the cars pulled away, U-turning slowly and heavily on the dirt and gravel road, heading back toward town and back toward the vast dried-up farms to the east and south.

May covered the leftover sandwiches and Leigh took down the card tables. Annie and Dock brought Emery into the house where he clutched a grape jelly sandwich that dribbled down his yellow Snoopy T-shirt and Georgianna put him in front of the television and found cartoons, unrecognizable cartoons of blocky uninteresting squares and triangles in a blank yard, and she and the Sterlings talked about taking over the shop.

Gordon went looking for Leigh in the kitchen, but found May. “Leigh went to the diner,” May told him.

“I thought it was closed.”

“She brought back the pitchers and plates.”

“By herself?”

May set her gloved hands down in the suds and looked at Gordon. “You got to forgive her, Gordon.”

“Forgive her for what?”

She paused, and picked up a casserole pan. “She’s not as smart or as pretty as she thinks she is.”

“Leigh?”

“She’s got just enough of each to make all the wrong decisions,” May said, then she turned up the old AM/FM radio with her damp and sudsy pinky finger.

On the narrow back road that cut through the darkening weeds, Gordon took his father’s truck into town and pulled up to the single lighted window of the Lucy Graves, closed for the day. Inside, Dex Meredith was holding Leigh in a half-slumped dance across the linoleum floor. The jukebox was lit up. There was an electric candle at one table. A white ceramic coffee mug. An open bottle of Boyd’s Four Roses. The light in the diner cast a perfect upside-down image of the bottle floating in space outside the truck windshield.

Gordon turned down the headlights, pulled around the corner, parked, and came into the diner quietly through the back.

Dex saw him immediately. “I told her to slow down.”

Leigh turned, disentangled herself.

Gordon looked at her. At Dex. “Let’s go home, Leigh.”

“I’m sorry man,” Dex said. His button-up shirt was pressed, his blond hair gelled into place. His shoulders were wide; he was a big guy, but Gordon was taller.

“She filled up a whole mug,” Dex said. “I tried to stop her. She’s really drunk. She’s really upset. About your dad I think.” He lowered his voice. “She saw that guy in the water tower. Did she tell you that?”

Gordon said nothing.

“She says she wants me to marry her,” Dex said.

“Is that what she said?”

Leigh giggled and put her hands over her face. Her makeup was smeared. Gordon put his arm around her and turned her toward the door. Dex grabbed Gordon’s wrist and Gordon jerked back but Dex had him. He dropped three wrinkled ten-dollar bills in Gordon’s hand.

“She was trying to buy from me.”

“Buy what?”

“I won’t sell to her. I won’t even give it to her, dude.”

Gordon took the money and put it in Leigh’s pocket.

“I didn’t touch her, man,” Dex said. “Everyone knows she’s yours. Not that I wouldn’t want to. No offense.”

Gordon said nothing.

“I’m sorry about the other day. I’m sorry about your dad. My dad liked him. Whatever people say.”

On the way to Gordon’s truck Leigh twisted out of his arm.

“I can walk fine,” she said, and tripped over an unlevel lip of sidewalk. Gordon gathered her up again and she let him. He opened the passenger door and buckled her in, and rolled down the window. She closed her eyes and leaned back. They drove out of town in silence. Once he pulled over for her to vomit. He walked her into the house and May stood and turned off the television.

“Oh Christ, Leigh,” she said. “Gordon, you OK?” She took Leigh on her arm and squeezed Gordon’s hand.

Next door Georgianna was awake, still dressed, sitting in John’s old chair, her hair down and all around her like a cobweb, an untouched shot glass full of whiskey on the table beside her. In the dim light, a faint line of hair across her upper lip.

“I keep looking for him,” she said. “I don’t understand where he’s gone.”

“Come on. Up to bed.”

“You know, don’t you? You know where to find him.”

“No, Ma.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“I’d take you with me. Straight to him.”

“Are you leaving again?”

“Maybe in a few days.”

“It’s hard to be here, isn’t it?”

When she was asleep in his bed, he went outside and across the lawn into the shop. He left the lights off and walked slowly around the room. He could barely lift a hand to touch the old radio dial. The old coffee machine. He sat down beside the TIG thinking he would never move again. Didn’t need to, didn’t want to. He sat still, breathing calmly, then went into the back room for an old wool blanket, and unrolled it on the concrete floor and set his head in his arms.

In the days ahead Gordon was attentive to his mother and polite with May and Boyd. He fixed the diner dishwasher and he drove south of Burnsville with Boyd where they helped butcher a steer and brought the meat home wrapped and labeled for the freezer at the Lucy Graves. He helped the Jorgensens pack and separate what they would bring to North Dakota from what they would sell or donate to the Goodwill in Burnsville, and he filled the bed of his truck six times and drove there and back to make the donations himself, for which he was rewarded with fried chicken and frosted white cake. He was twice as quiet as usual.

Like his father.

In all the ways.

Kid his age.

Leigh won’t put up with it long.

I think those two have busted up already.

Shame.

Better for her in the long run.

“You and Gordon have a lover’s quarrel?” May asked late one afternoon. She handed Leigh a spray bottle of bleach and water.

Leigh walked out from behind the counter toward the empty tables. “He’s not the same.”

Then May told her, as if Leigh didn’t know, that Gordon’s father had died. She looked at Leigh seriously, as if she were trying to communicate something gravely important, her pale blue eyes as steady as Leigh had ever seen them. “Leigh,” she said. “John Walker is gone.”

“I know,” Leigh said.

“Say it back to me.”

But Leigh wouldn’t say it. In the first place, why? How stupid and embarrassing. And in the second place, that wasn’t how they talked.

Gordon was particularly kind to Emery and Marybeth Sharpe, and Leigh noticed it was somewhat odd that she should pair Gordon with these two. Gordon and Emery in the Sterlings’ front yard, the only time Leigh ever saw Gordon play ball, Emery’s wild throw fast enough to knock the teeth out of your head. Marybeth coming into the diner with a crooked old finger pointed up and a faded postcard in her hand to show Gordon.

Another day, May put a scoop of ice cream in a dish for Gordon, and Leigh watched him carry it to Marybeth and squat down on the sidewalk beside her rocking chair. Gordon had come in and out of the diner without speaking to Leigh. Outside, he squinted in the sunlight and smiled up at Marybeth.

Leigh looked out across the street from behind the lunch counter as the two sat quiet on the sidewalk in the blasting heat. “What do you think those two talk about?” Boyd asked her, handing her his empty coffee cup for a refill.

Leigh shrugged. She took the mug and filled it from the half pot behind her.

Boyd nodded. “She’s an odd one.”

“So is he.”

“More and more,” he said.

“Do you get the sense he’s being so nice to everyone to make a point?”

“What point would that be?”

“Something about me.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Outside Marybeth touched Gordon’s arm with her palsied hand, and wrapped her fingers around it. The blue irises in her eyes seemed to be dissolving into their whites, and her hairline was every year receding farther back from her spotted pink forehead. “You never go to church on Sundays,” she said.

He laughed lightly. “Can’t say I do.”

“Your father never did.”

“No.”

“He traded all he had in this world for the three kingdoms.” She opened her trembling hand and counted off on her fingers. “The one, the two, and the three.”

Gordon looked up the street to a small tornado of dust. “Which three are those, Marybeth?”

In response she gripped his arm tighter. The ice cream was melting into a bright pink soup in the little white dish. “Gordon,” she said, “you are such a good boy.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“I do. There’s some of us that do.”

“OK.”

At dawn in his mother’s kitchen the following day he filled a paper grocery bag with canned goods, the labels bright and cheerful: ranchero beans; cling peaches in heavy syrup; chicken and dumpling soup; beans and canned spaghetti. He took a flat can of sardines, and a plastic-wrapped roll of paper towels, and a sack of red apples. From his closet he took a wool blanket, his old G.I. Joe sleeping bag. From his father’s bookshelf, he took a dozen old cowboy books, an illustrated copy of Aesop’s Fables, and a world atlas. When he stepped outside in his blue jeans, the sky was still a soft black. He started the truck and took the narrow county road up north.