Lions

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Story goes, when the man and his dog came down off the edge of the highway into town, they crossed the unpaved frontage road and stepped over the fallen fence posts toward a little white house — the Walkers’.

He stopped next to the frame of a rusted old tomato-red Bronco someone had dropped off for Gordon or John to clean up and repair, but had never returned to claim. A hundred feet from the house was the Walkers’ shop, its windows open to the narrow county road where the Gas & Grocer had stood sixty-one years, and next door to that, May and Leigh Ransom’s little place.

It was just barely twilight. The man stooped and scratched the dog behind the ears and spoke to her, looking out over what he could see of town. From the slight inclination of the plain, it must have appeared a shipwreck awash in grass — the old splintered homesteads half sunk in dirt, the small crush of lights in the distance from the diner and the bar where anyone still surviving had gathered together to ride out the coming night.

He circled around the Walkers’ weld shop — a combination pole barn and Quonset hut surrounded by neat piles of scrap metal and corrugated steel. It was filled with pretty fine machinery and tools for repairing broken farm equipment and assembling hog fencing. In various forms, the shop belonged to John Walker, his father, William, grandfather Charles, and another two Johns, before them, the first opening his doors primarily as a wheelwright in the nineteenth century right around the time Lions was founded. So did Gordon’s paternal grandfathers reach back in the history of the county as agricultural equipment innovators and repairmen. They had never been cowboys, they had never been hunters or trappers, they had never been traders or soldiers, and they had never been farmers — not even in the days when it seemed every man west of the 90th meridian was some combination of them all. They had long been the only metalworkers in the region, as far back as living memory went, and always with expertise far beyond the meager needs of the county.

John Walker in particular was a masterful and efficient welder, with skill in proportion to his oddness. If there was a wildfire in the foothills or in the mountains, he knew it first. If it was going to rain in a day’s time, he had already tacked down the tarps over the hay at Dock Sterling’s place, before Dock himself could see to it. His neighbors mistook for queer perspicacity what was in fact great attention, and what his wife called serious love.

The Walkers were strange like that, they said. Hard to figure.

But good guys. Reliable.

Heck. John’d do anything for you.

They’d all raise their glasses to that.

But no common sense, they agreed, and the men shook their heads. The women — heavy around the middle, slender gold crosses around their necks, and hair colored from boxes of dye they bought at the grocery store in Burnsville — all looked away, out the window to the empty street and storefronts that made up the single block of downtown. The mute television hanging over the bar flashed a commercial for car insurance.

As if the man had no interest in money, someone said.

They were all like that, someone said. All the Walkers.

For example, decades before it was common practice, Gordon’s great-grandfather fashioned a manner of swather out of scrap. It cut the grain and laid it on the ground in windrows, allowing it to dry before harvest. It was by this invention that Lions finally for a brief uncharacteristically rainy decade seemed to promise a little prosperity. This great-grandfather Charles never thought of patenting the swather, however, so never profited by it in any worldly sense. He’d bent over the metal with some design in mind, to help a neighbor who was a distant cousin on his wife’s side, and considered a more efficient harvest payment enough. Sons and daughters of those neighboring farmers whom he helped accumulate a little wealth soon moved on to Denver, Salt Lake, Phoenix, and San Diego, where their great-grandsons and — granddaughters now live in flat-faced stucco houses on smooth, curved streets that you will discover, if you are a careful student of cartography, loop into the interstates and highways in broad, swooping, endless circles.

If what this New World offered was boundless opportunity for material wealth — reward for ambition and grit — then it really was a mystery why any of the Walkers came to the continent in the first place. Of course there may have been some exchange of perishable goods for the rudimentary swather: a season’s worth of fresh eggs, or clay jars of alfalfa honey, or plums or cherries, which every few summers grew with an abundance the early farmers could neither predict nor control, and which were otherwise impossible to come by. Some things — carrots, potatoes, turnips — you could keep in ten-gallon buckets of cold sand in a dirt cellar straight through the winter, but fresh fruit was rare. Gordon’s grandmother, if left alone for an afternoon, might be discovered beneath the warty hackberry tree, her kitchen work and laundry left undone, indolently eating a lapful of plums, one after another, sticky pink juice running down her chin and neck and wrists and forearms, flyaway dark hair standing out in a frayed and sweaty halo around her face.

Look, she would say, I love these plums. And love is never idle.

The Walkers’ was the first house the man on the highway would have seen when he dipped down onto the frontage road at the exit to town. Perhaps it was only because of this that he felt welcomed by the small, tidy home and crossed the weeds and clipped grass to the back door.

Perhaps it was that simple.

Georgianna Walker was ready for him with a mug of hot black coffee. Her long, gray hair was parted in the middle and pinned up behind her ears in tin barrettes, her face scrubbed clean.

“All out of change,” the man said, putting his hands up.

“Please.” She extended the cup to the stranger, and when he took it, she ushered him inside and pulled out a kitchen chair. “You’re just in time for dinner. Scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and cocoa sound good?”

He checked her face and she nodded and smiled. He sat down. “Almost a warm spring night,” he said.

“We’re getting there. Couple weeks it’ll be hotter than we can stand.”

“That’s a good-looking dog,” John Walker said coming out of the living room, grinning, his finger holding the place in a paperback. “What’s its name?”

The man looked across the room at him. “That’s my Sadie.”

“Come a long way together?”

“All the way together.”

“Will she eat eggs?”

“We’d both eat eggs.”

John set the paperback open, facedown, on a shelf beside the pantry door.

“Good story?” the man asked.

John smiled. “Old cowboy book my dad used to read.” He picked it back up and turned the cover to show the visitor. It featured a man on horseback in a long yellow linen duster. The horse was black with a fiery red eye, and rearing on its back legs. In the distance, a snake behind a sage bush, and a woman in a turquoise dress pouring off her shoulders like water.

Both men laughed.

“I don’t know that one,” the man said.

John had a hundred more with covers just like it: a bearded man crouched in a mountain stream and panning for gold, an outlaw with a red bandanna tied over his face and a pistol in hand, creeping up from behind; a shoot-out in a dusty street; a magnificent cowboy on horseback draped in curtains of blue snow, long ribbons of the dark and wild mane of his dark and wild horse whipping sideways in a glacial wind.

Georgianna took out the eggs, milk, and bread, while John led the man upstairs to the shower and found him an old pair of coveralls carefully patched with scrap denim. Dressed in the borrowed clothes while the washing machine churned his dirty ones — Georgianna had given him no choice in the matter — the man sat back in his kitchen chair. Neither John nor Georgianna asked anything of him, not his name and not a story, nor did the man offer anything.

All of this Chuck relayed weeks later at the bar, and the report made the men and women shake their heads.

The Walkers, God.

“You didn’t ask him anything? Who he was? Where he was from?” Chuck inquired of John the evening after the stranger disappeared. He wrapped his fingers around the warm coffee mug and leaned forward in the kitchen chair. Georgianna set a thick slice of yellow pound cake before him.

John shrugged. “He needed a shower and a meal.”

Chuck smiled at his old neighbor and cut into the cake with his fork. “Well. At least you didn’t keep him.”

“He said he couldn’t stay.”

Couldn’t stay.

Can you imagine?

Bringing a man off the highway like that into your home?

With your wife and son?

He could’ve been sick.

He could’ve been on the run.

It’s a nice enough impulse but my God. You got to be more careful than that these days.

Could’ve been a thief, a drunk, or worse.

Could’ve been a foreigner.

He looked like a foreigner.

Anything could have happened.

They tsked, they looked at each other with faces of wonder. They never could understand John Walker or what seemed to be his lifetime of poor decision making. The backward code he seemed to live and work by — his entrepreneurial failure somehow as perpetual as it was absolute. It was as if each of the Walkers in his time was choosing again and again, every morning in his workshirt with his first cup of coffee, to fail. They worked for free, or seemed to; they forgot or neglected to bill their neighbors; they worked so many hours a day, but scarcely profited by it at all.

What other, secret work did these Walkers live on?

People wondered. People talked.

John Walker. Just look at the guy.

That long, lean frame, the patched workshirt, the steel-toed boots. And that look in his eye, as if he had seen right behind your face and into the inner workings of your brain and had decided, upon seeing everything there was to see about you, to say nothing. A nod of the head.

And Gordon. Did you ever see a more serious eighteen-year-old?

Works harder than three grown men put together.

Abnormal, tell you what.

Yeah but he’s got Leigh Ransom’s attention.

A knowing look, a groan.

In such a small town she seemed a great beauty, her hair long and brownish gold and tumbling over her shoulders and down her back the way the g and the h fell with bulky grace through the letters of her name.

Gordon must be hung like a bull, someone said.

Everyone laughed.

That girl is vain about her hair.

All women are vain about their hair.

And then there was John Walker’s regular disappearance out of town, presumably to tend remote customers up near Three Bells or Horses, customers who, if they really existed, were probably not paying him for his work, either.

Walkers used to run a farrier service out of their old trucks, someone remembered.

Yeah, but no one up north has horses anymore.

No one up there has anything anymore.

Nothing up there but an old gas station. Used to belong to that Indian guy with no teeth.

Gerald. But he wasn’t an Indian. He’d make you an RC with whiskey.

Sharp as a tack.

Whatever happened to him?

A shrug.

Well anyway, gone now. Nothing and no one up there.

See then? Walker’s visiting Boggs. Got to be.

More laughter.

So had they sometimes jokingly cast John Walker as the unlucky Good Samaritan of local legend in which a man and all of his sons and grandsons were bound through the generations to tend an immortal, wounded pioneer, one Lamar Boggs, purportedly left for dead by his nineteenth-century companions who were racing west like hell for leather after a better life. The first Walker in the region found him, nursed him, and set him up safe and sound in a tiny hut on the mesa. One you could still find if you drove north, and were really looking for it.

And truth be told, the joke sort of stood to reason. In over a hundred years — in spite of all rationale and opportunity as their neighbors fled drought, dust, influenza, auctioneers, grasshoppers, fire, boredom, and disappointment — the Walkers never left Lions. If there were other stragglers in town, it was because they didn’t have the means to leave, or weren’t staying permanently, but working various financial stratagems to land someplace better. Denver, say, or Boise. They liked to say to each other in Lions that those who had come to America and come west, as their families had, did so because they were risk takers and big dreamers. But what, they wondered, had been the Walkers’ dream? For what had they taken the risk of coming out here and then, against all reason, decided to stay? They might have thrived somewhere else, but were riveted to the plain, it seemed, couldn’t leave if they’d wanted to. If old Boggs was really up there, the Walkers were certainly the men to tend him.

“No one else would stick around to do it,” Boyd Hardy said. He stood behind the bar with arms folded in front of his chest, a bottle of Bud Light in one hand, leaning back against the counter.

“Tell you what,” Dock said, and pointed his beer bottle in Boyd’s direction. “If they weren’t the best men in the county I’d say you had it wrong.”

“Maybe he just goes north to be alone,” May Ransom said from behind the bar, where she often ended up after closing her diner across the street. She refilled her own glass of boxed white wine.

Boyd stared outside, not moving. “Seems to me there’s alone enough to be had right here in town.”

When weeks later Chuck told them about the stranger’s stop at the Walkers’ that night — the shower, the cocoa, the buttered toast — everyone shot accusatory looks at Boyd, who by that time was a little hangdog, his thick silver mustache a little ragged, his own truck oiled up and ready to pack and leave Lions for good.

“You all saw him,” Boyd said.

Yes, they’d all seen him.

But that evening in the Walkers’ kitchen, the man had bent over the table with John and Georgianna and spooned scrambled eggs into his mouth, perfectly sound, perfectly human, if the Walkers and Chuck could be believed.

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.