Lions

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Gordon drove east as the moon set, hands trembling on the wheel as he shuddered in the cold truck. He’d rolled down the windows to let the cold in and keep himself awake. He drove as night dissolved around him. The sun came up and he entered Lions and knew all of it — what it smelled like, and what time the birds woke — as well as he knew his own body. It was early autumn, the grass and weeds an endless span of cool blonde parchment.

Before the summer, the world and all its forms seemed made for pleasure and consolation. His shadow printed on the street outside the diner. Rain against the window. A train of two hundred heavy, black, silent cars pushing west in slow motion. That world was lost to him now — and yet he’d never felt so awake.

So life was sweet only where it was also bitter. He would take it all, without condition, without reservation, and without wishing it were otherwise. Not because he was virtuous or good, but because he was tired, his hands were empty, and he had no energy in him to be otherwise. The world vibrated around him. There wasn’t much in it he felt was worth chasing.

The shop would be there, just ahead off the highway, beside his house, and in its way that was everything. His father had shown Gordon that in the undivided heart there lives a secret love bringing a man to silence beyond all thought, teaching him to repudiate and disavow all that is false in the world. Gordon would go back to the work.

There were no lights on in town. The diner wasn’t open yet. Boyd’s was dark. He pulled over in front of the empty hardware store and looked over the dusty junk in the store window. Chintzy vases and teacups and saucers with roses and lilies and forget-me-nots painted in ribbons around gilded rims. Board games — Connect Four, Donald the Donkey, and Lose All You Have, the colored boxes faded, the shrinkwrapped plastic brown with dust.

He drove the length of town, and down the side street where the backhoe service shop had been when he was a boy, and from there, along a dirt road. Dock and Annie’s place made him stop in his tracks. The east side blackened and a dark smoky stain rising up the face. The staves buckling. The windows broken and glass shards glittering in a pile of dark blue ashes. Emery.

With a lighter or a book of matches. Gordon could see it. Emery would have been alone in the living room. Annie in the kitchen shaking cubed beef and white flour in a plastic grocery bag. Dock would have been out back among the pigs, kicking them gently with his old, flat, brown boots away from the gate and holding the heavy bucket overhead.

He drove farther down the frontage road toward his house, parked the truck, and got out. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders against the cold. There was a light on in his house, and before the window at the kitchen sink, May Ransom was filling the teakettle. Upstairs, the fainter yellow window of his room, where his mother had slept all summer.

Dock was in the shop. Inside, behind the tiny side window, he and his family were gathered. There was a little table set up that Gordon recognized as an end table from his own home, and Annie was slicing something on her plate, and Emery had his head back, roaring. Gordon could see his huge, milk-white teeth through the glass. It was early breakfast time.

So they were living in the shop now.

Well, it was cold out, and getting colder — a family needed a warm place. And it was true that Dock needed whatever extra work he could get, and that Gordon had turned it all over to him. Gordon stood outside the shop looking in. His eyes burned. He was glad they had it. He knew they’d take care of it and use it well. He turned back toward the old blue truck. He’d keep driving this morning. He could come back down here and see his mother in a few days.