Lions

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Over the coming week, Leigh knew — she almost knew — that something wasn’t right. But here was a man with golden brown eyes and a real smile. Something about him like a lighted window in the dark. Here were his friends — intelligent, wide-eyed, and full of good words. They expected nothing unreasonable of her beyond her company. They were easygoing, she thought, lighthearted. If she was sometimes vaguely aware of a soft, faraway drumbeat — a reminder or a decision to live her life in a different way — it would be there later just as well as now. Not yet, she felt in every step as she walked to class, as she planned the evening, or the next week, confident as she did so in the unfurling of her life in a clear and perfect direction toward the house and family and job that would at last fulfill the cumulative desires born of her impoverished life in Lions. Not yet. Not yet.

Tonight, here was a clear blue dusk, a cool evening in late September. Chairs set out in rings on a patio. Here were ten thousand small and pleasant reassuring whispers in the rustle of the trees. A string of colored lights was pinned in twenty neat parabolas up and down each side of the street from lamppost to lamppost, and here was a door that opened to the sidewalk, inside the ringing of silverware and human laughter and warmth, the small and perfect notes of rounded fingertips across piano keys, and this was how you ignored the very clear and very peculiar sense that everything making you feel good was the wrong thing.

She moved with her new friends from the patio to a house, from the house to an apartment, from the apartment to a dorm room. They walked as if there’d been no world before they were born, and there’d be no world left when — in a thousand years, happy, old, and perfectly content — they passed away.

She told them about the strange and gaunt tableland north of Lions, where the air was always the breath of winter, and the dirt was white as chalk. They sat in circles on dorm room rugs and in chairs and on the ends of twin beds. Everyone had a bottled beer. Everyone wore a beautiful sweater. Everyone had something to say about what they’d read the night before. Everyone was bumping their knee against someone else’s, wetting their lips, smiling brightly.

For a minute or two, she had all their attention.

She told them about the wounded traveler who could walk barefoot and naked across a hundred miles of bone-breaking cold. And then all of John Walker’s visits out of town, and Gordon’s, and about Gordon’s vow, and how he’d thrown his life away for the sake of something he wouldn’t even talk about, not with anyone, not even with her. She hiccupped.

They stared at her. “Are you for real?” somebody said. He had dark shining hair and screwed up his face and raised an eyebrow.

“No no,” somebody said, “I stopped there on my way out. It’s true. It’s all true. There’s a sign on the side of the highway.”

“That is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard,” somebody else said.

Someone changed the music. Someone handed Leigh a fresh beer.

“If that’s true,” somebody said, “you should totally go back.” He flashed his eyes wide at everyone. “Ghost town.”

“Nobody lives there anymore,” Leigh said. “You can’t live out there. Doesn’t even have a grocery store. What are you supposed to eat? Bugs and dirt?”

Anyone still listening to her now was moving in close to bump a shoulder to hers, or to place a hand on her waist. They weren’t that interested.

“I’m not going back,” she said to no one. “I hate it there. Hate it.” She felt the slight vibration of a passing train beneath her chair. The muted roaring of blood in her ears.

On her way home she passed a bright pub that smelled like beer and onions. Aprons of light poured out across the sidewalk from open doorways. Every small beautiful thing — the masses of green leaves, the way the interior lights from a restaurant lit up a line of blue glass bottles in its front window — seemed to shut a door on her. Not for you, it said. Not for you.

She found a little dive in what had once been a bank with a giant vault; it was nearly empty and quiet. No music, no TV. Gordon would have liked it. John, too. Only the murmur of human conversation. The ringing of glassware. At the bar she asked for something strong. The bartender was a young guy with a rough beard and a pair of suspenders over a white undershirt. He poured her four inches of amber liquid in a glass.

“You don’t have your ID on you, do you?”

“Left it at home.”

“Thought so,” he nodded. “First one’s on me,” he said. “You look like your best friend just got hit by a train.”