Lions

~ ~ ~

Goodbyes didn’t come singly, or one at a time, and more often than not you were lucky if you even knew you were in the midst of one. May Ransom believed — and not only for the older folks’ sake — that if you had the opportunity, the ceremony of a farewell was worth it. So they said the free meal in the diner was for the Jorgensens, even though it was for everyone. Annie, Dock, and Emery came into the diner for pancakes, and to help prepare the food and decorations. Annie tied on an apron after she ate and came behind the counter to help cook. Fried chicken, country potatoes, butter beans and boiled spinach, and iced chocolate cake. Boyd was to roll a keg of Coors banquet beer over from across the street, brought in special order on the previous week’s truck delivery, and anyone left in town who wanted to send off themselves or the Jorgensens, oldest of old-timers, was welcome.

May was measuring and sifting cake flour, a fine white dust floating about her chest and arms.

“I don’t know how I let you talk me into living here in the first place,” Boyd said.

“It wasn’t talk,” May looked up. “If you recall.”

Annie laughed. Emery watched his mother’s mouth, then moved his own in silent imitation.

“Leigh, are you going to get Georgie?”

She nodded.

Dock took a giant waxed box of produce and set it on the counter by the deep stainless steel sink. “Annie went over there yesterday and she was still in bed.”

“The woman’s had a loss,” May said and lowered the beaters into the cake bowl. “They were married thirty-five years.”

“He was gone up north or working in that shop at least fifteen of those years,” Boyd said.

May shot him a look. “Don’t you get everybody started.”

He raised his hands. “I leave people to their own imaginations.”

“Like hell you do.”

May ran a stalk of celery under the faucet and shook it over the sink, the tiny beads of water lit up in the sun shining through the windows. Emery stared at it from the booth where he sat with his mother, then called out. With both hands he held up one of his green apple slices, transparent in the sunlight, and the door opened and in came Gordon with a bag of streamers and balloons, his skin scrubbed red with wind and sun, the bones in his face sharp and angular, dark circles around his eyes, and a radiance behind them. They all grew quiet. Emery jumped up and ran across the room and took Gordon’s hand, and the two young men hugged. Gordon reached into his pocket and took out a kazoo.

“God help us,” Boyd said.

He blew once on the kazoo and gave it to Emery, who cradled it and returned to the booth with his mother.

“Well,” Gordon said, looking at Leigh. His dark hair was tangled and starting to look shaggy. He came to the counter and set down the bag. “Not much of a party atmosphere in here.”

May crossed the diner, kissed Gordon’s cheek, and hugged him. “We’ve missed you.” Three honks from Emery on his kazoo.

“Where’d you get that stuff?” Leigh asked. Six honks.

“Burnsville.” Two honks.

“You’ve been in Burnsville?” Four honks.

Annie put her hand over the kazoo. “OK, Emery,” she said.

“I told your mom I’d go,” Gordon said. “And I told her I’d be here.”

“That’s a good man, Gordon,” Annie said. “Bring those balloons over here, will you? Blow one up for Emery.”

In the next two hours, Gordon blew up yellow and green balloons and scrubbed the kitchen and range behind the counter, and smiled and chatted with Annie and with Boyd about the heat and the Jorgensens’ emigration out of a country they’d lived in longer than anyone, after the Walkers, and he taste-tested the butter beans for May, but he did not look at Leigh again, and she thought his smiles seemed thin, and that there were lines around his eyes where there hadn’t been a month before.

Leigh gave her mother a look that Gordon saw.

“I’ll go get her, May,” he said, and turned toward the door.

“I’ll come too,” Leigh said.

“You don’t have to,” he said.

“I’ll come.”

“Gordon and Leigh,” May called out across the diner without looking up from the silverware she was rolling in paper napkins. “Go get Georgie.”

They climbed in the truck and from the diner to the frontage road did not speak.

“So you’ve been in Burnsville this whole time? A week?”

“No,” he said.

“Where then?”

“Up north.”

“Where do you stay?”

“I camp.”

“There’s no little house up there?”

“Actually,” he said, watching the road, “there sort of is.”

“People are mad at you for going.”

He slowed and looked sideways at her. “Are they?”

“Pretty mad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You missed my birthday.”

Gordon was quiet.

“Maybe you should quit going up there,” Leigh said.

“Maybe I should.”

“Unless it’s really important. Unless you’re like”—she made a strange gesture with her hands—“going to visit Boggs or something.”

He watched her hands settle in her lap.

“You’re not,” she said. “Are you?”

“Leigh,” he said.

“Why do you keep going?”

“If I told you I went up there just to be alone, would you believe me?”

“Why would you do that?”

He glanced at her.

“Well?”

He was quiet a few moments. “Would you believe me?”

“If you wanted me to.”

“OK, then. I go up there just to be alone.”

“Where your dad used to go?”

He kept his eyes on the road. “Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

So he told her about it. How it seemed despite the speed and wheels turning against the pavement as he drove, there was no movement at all. How big it all was. Insofar as Lions was a place of air and light and rock, he was not so much driving out of town as he was driving deeper into it, beneath it, say, or within it. It felt like a dropping down, not a driving away.

“It’s so quiet,” he told her, “so empty. Everything you thought was important disappears.” He held his fingertips lightly together, then burst them open, fingers spread wide. “Just like that.”

She looked at him skeptically. “Everything like what disappears?”

“All the plans. Making something of yourself.”

She looked out the window.

“Is that so crazy?” he asked.

She shrugged. She got that feeling of emptiness in the middle of Lions, every day, and you could have called it despair, or panic, or desperation to get out, but you couldn’t call it a good or wholesome thing. And you didn’t need to drive up north to find it.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Leigh.”

She kept her gaze pointed out the window. “You didn’t hurt my feelings.”

“Tell me what’s been happening around here.” He squeezed her hand, and the contact between them dissolved some of the tension. She moved closer to him in the front seat, yet not quite to where she’d used to sit, in the middle.

“You know about that man in the water tower?”

Gordon nodded.

“I saw him. I went with Boyd and he followed Chuck and the firetruck.”

“They shouldn’t have let you.”

“I didn’t want to mention it at the funeral. But I can’t get his face out of my head.”

“I’m sorry.” He reached across her shoulder and pulled her in close. Kissed the crown of her head.

She counted off the names of everyone she could remember who’d left, or was planning to leave. “And none of them even saw him.”

“Does my mom know about everyone going?”

“It’s sort of hard to tell,” she said, and he nodded. “Do you think she’ll stay?”

“Yes.”

That night she dreamt of a lion.

It was late in the day, and warm. Around her feet, little yellow cup-shaped flowers. Gordon just before her. The red factory bricks behind them flushed with rosy light, and the windows of their houses and John Walker’s truck in the driveway in the distance blinking with reflected gold.

She was digging for treasure while Gordon studied the horizon. Suddenly his face flattened. His gaze was fixed behind her and she turned slowly, filled with dread, until she saw it, too: a massive lion, fifty yards off, in the grass and weeds. Full mane. Each paw the size of her head. Eyes of fire. She could smell its gamey breath. The blood in her veins went hot and she froze.

It took her breath away. She couldn’t call out and she couldn’t move. The lion’s eyes looked at her the way all the eyes of all the birds and stray dogs and cats and wild creatures she’d ever seen had looked at her, as if with the same pair of eyes.

I didn’t think there were really lions here, she somehow finally communicated without speaking, and dropped her spade.

Then she understood that it hadn’t come for her. Perhaps it hadn’t even come at all. Perhaps it had been here all that time, for Gordon.

“It’s true,” Gordon said, as his face was slowly erased. “It follows me everywhere now.”