Lions

~ ~ ~

Before he left, Jorgensen sold his water rights outright and put the house up, though it would never sell. By the end of the summer, the once-creamy white porch where he and Dorrie raised their five children would be burnt with a broad shadow of brown dust and spray painted with glyphs and giant black letters so that if you saw it from a distance the old farmstead resembled a farmhouse no more than a ruined boxcar.

When Leigh saw it, she imagined slim young men and women in blue jeans and dark T-shirts sliding off the highway in neutral and sneaking out of their cars to circle every empty lot and print the beautiful old houses with code. She stood before the graffiti trying to decipher it, black grasshoppers knocking softly against her ankles. The unfamiliar characters could have been symbols for anything, but their jaggedness and backwardness — all the figures like people with their backs turned or with hands up in postures of defense — seemed to her messages of warning.

By this second week of August the West Wind motel was cleared out of beds and desks and sheets and towels, and Gordon had been gone another four days. Five.

Alan Ranger fired Levon, the manager at the garage, as well as his two employees, and brought them into the bar for beers and shots, afterward, where he offered them jobs in Denver. They took him at his word and left with their Burnsville girlfriends by week’s end. On her way to the diner later that weekend, Leigh stopped outside the old garage and looked up above the store at the window with the blue checked curtain where Levon Carrothers and his father, Alison, had lived as long as she could remember. For a while when she was a girl they even called it Carrothers’ Garage, then it got bought up, which was a help to them. There was a peeling, cracked yellow sticker on the window that read: Good Work Done Good. Inside, the garage was empty. The office was locked, but the sign was still turned to OPEN.

“The garage is really closed,” Leigh said when she walked into the diner for the breakfast shift.

“And took three men with it,” Boyd said, spooning sugar into his coffee. “Some nerve that guy had, being all chummy like that, right after he fires them.”

“He’s just doing his job,” May said, turning his eggs. She looked at Leigh. “Least he spent a little money in town. That was considerate.”

“More attentive than some people,” Leigh said.

“Really, Leigh. Maybe Gordon didn’t want to be around to see his father die. And to watch his mother lose her marbles. Or watch his girl take off with out-of-town management or some big dope from Burnsville.”

Boyd raised his eyebrows and looked at Leigh. “Jesus, girl. It wouldn’t kill you to spend a little time alone.”

She stepped behind the register and stooped as if she were looking for something in the shelves below and put her hands to her temples and shut her eyes.

“That guy was married, too,” Boyd said. “Just so you know. Or didn’t you mind?”

Leigh stood up and brushed off her shirt. “You have a lot of nerve. If I were you I’d talk a lot less.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means everything happening around here is your fault and everybody knows it.”

“Alright,” May said. “Enough.”

“Hope your stupid joke was worth it.”

“Enough, Leigh. Go.”

“Dock told me the joke from that night. It wasn’t even funny.”

“I hadn’t finished telling it!” Boyd’s eyes widened. “Wait. Dock was talking about this?”

“Enough!” May yelled.

“He told all of us,” Leigh said.

“All of who? When?”

May put her hands on Leigh’s shoulders and turned her toward the door. “Out.”

“I thought I was working.”

“Out.”

“I need the money.”

“Go.”

“Was Dock talking about me?” she heard Boyd say as she stepped out over the sidewalk, his voice high and thin.

Leigh stepped into the empty street. Only eight o’clock and already her forehead and temple ached from squinting in the blazing light. It’d started in the bathroom, slicing into the mirror from the window as she brushed her teeth. The heat had beaten the earth and the pavement and the rooftops of empty houses to a metallic sheen and reduced the horizon to the same thin white iridescence in every direction. Thirteen days, she said under her breath, over and over, with every step back home.

Poor girl, those remaining in town said, even as they packed.

Darkness of this place is sucking her in.

What a waste that’d be, they said.

She was always a good girl.

Smart girl.

Pretty girl.

Go get the world, they told her whenever they could — in the diner, on the street. It wants you.

She knew it did. She heard it calling. Everyday the world came into the Lucy Graves and announced itself, then slipped back out the glass door and down the highway, out of her reach. All her life, she had measured the goodness of the world by her happiness with it. Now it was teasing her. Toward everyone her age who came into the diner she felt a nauseating combination of admiration, fear, and resentment. She was bothered that others had what looked to her like a better life. Their easy smiles, their confidence. She hated everything she envied, and she envied everyone.

She thought to pierce her nose, one of those tiny silver studs. She’d lighten her hair. She’d get a tattoo, something feminine. A bracelet around her ankle. She’d become an environmentalist. Maybe she’d become a vegetarian. Each new idea presented itself as she poured coffee, refilled water, distributed ketchup and ranch dressing.

It was as though she and Gordon had been childhood friends on the top of a dizzying precipice, and now he was falling down one side of it, and she the other. At the top there’d been summer rain and moonlight, and the thrill of exploring each other’s bodies and making plans. There had been intoxicating, aerial views of the world, all of it laid out for them to enjoy. Now her own view was so foreshortened, the strangers around her brought up so close, she could neither see past them nor make out their faces.

Years from now, she’d remember with a nameless unease the way the hot days of that June, July, then August unspooled as she dished out pie and ice cream and fried sandwiches and coffee and Cokes to travelers speeding down the interstate on their adventures and stopping in the diner where she, a ghost in a ghost town, was stuck in place to serve them. She’d remember the whole town in a state of decay as Jorgensen moved away, Gordon still collecting junk from Marybeth and setting it out in the yard beneath the sun with the strange faith of a man scattering seeds across the hard ground. A film of dust settling over the old, red-painted stoop before the closed hardware store.

Years from now, she’d sit alone behind the sugar beet factory as a single magpie dove from right to left in a sharp and angry V above her head, realizing she’d spent her entire life either excited or depressed. Seeing that the last days of her last true summer were ravished by craving. She’d try to imagine a series of events, or gifts, or situations that would have satisfied her at seventeen and eighteen, and then later at twenty-five, thirty. Truth is, nothing would have. Not recognition from all the world that the family she might raise would be bright and worthwhile, not a house in the hills, not the prairie with all the wild grass still in her, not the cold moon itself in her hands or all the metal-pointed stars at her command.