Lions

~ ~ ~

The Quonset hut was lit up and the windows in the shop hung in the dark.

Dock opened the door. Annie stepped out from behind him.

“Have you seen him?” Leigh asked before they could say hello. They both looked at her blankly. “Gordon.”

“Is he back?” Dock asked.

“Like two or three weeks ago he came back. A month maybe. I don’t know. They found his truck.”

“Who found his truck?”

“He hasn’t been here at all?”

Emery was behind them, rocking on the workbench and listening to radio ministry. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and Leigh realized the radio wasn’t John’s radio.

“Are you living here?” she looked from Annie to Dock and back again.

“We had a house fire,” Dock said, raising his hand. “It’s temporary, it’s temporary. This place is Gordon’s. We know that. Georgie knows we’re here. Place is right and tight and it’s getting cold.”

“Did Gordon see you here?”

Dock put his hands up. “I haven’t seen him.”

Annie pulled Leigh inside. “This is temporary,” she said. She put her arm around Leigh. “No shortage of empty houses around here for us to choose from. Tea? Hot cocoa? We have a hotplate.”

Emery stumbled off the workbench and came to the doorway, his thumbs hooked together and elbows hyperextended. The blanket spilled around his ankles.

“I should check the factory,” Leigh said. “Before it gets dark. I’m sure he’s camped out there being, you know, being Gordon.”

“I don’t know,” Dock said. “Was he OK last time you saw him?”

“He was,” she shrugged. “You know. Himself. Like the summer.”

“Let me come with you. It’s already dark.”

“It’s OK.”

“Leigh. You’ve got me worried.”

Driving into town beside Dock, Leigh saw the beautiful old blue truck impounded behind chain-link with two dozen other cars and trucks in various states of rusted out disrepair. It was terrible, seeing it in a pile of junk like that, among all those discarded and unwanted vehicles. That was John and Gordon’s truck. Gordon loved that truck. And he couldn’t have driven north without it. Was he in a bar ditch somewhere? Hurt? Her hand went to the beauty mark behind her ear that he used to touch as he started tracing a line down her neck.

“That’s his truck, alright,” Dock said. He took a phone out of his shirt pocket. “Why don’t we call Chuck before we do anything or go anywhere?” He pulled over. “You talked to him yet?”

Leigh shook her head. He dialed and handed her the phone. She greeted Chuck and nodded and looked from the window to Dock and back again.

“Well, have you talked to Georgie?” she asked. “And what does she say?”

“Was there anything in the truck?” Dock whispered to Leigh to ask Chuck.

“Was there anything in the truck?” She shook her head. She looked at Dock. “It was pulled over northbound on the county road between Alton’s and Jorgensen’s.”

“No note?” Dock asked.

“No note, nothing?” Leigh said into the phone. She shook her head. She waited. “Mr. Garcia you can’t auction that truck.”

“Has anyone filed a missing persons report?” Dock asked.

“No,” Leigh said. “Don’t do that. Not yet. He’ll be in the factory. Let me check. I’ll call you back.”

“I’m so sorry, Leigh,” Dock said when she handed him the phone.

“I’m not surprised he’s gone, but I don’t understand about the truck.”

“Georgie says he’s fine.”

“I know. But Chuck doesn’t trust her judgment.”

“We’ll keep looking. We’ll check your factory in the daylight, OK? If he’s there, he’s not going out in this.”

Outside, sleet came down slantwise in gleaming needles. Back at the Walkers’ shop she slipped away and crossed the yard. The sound of wind chimes Georgianna left hanging. The wind whistling through the tree in her own yard. She walked across the empty dirt road. She could see the light in the weld shop behind her and imagined that it was John Walker in there, with his wry smile, and that soon he’d be closing up and heading back to the house where he and Georgianna and Gordon would be having dinner.

She gazed over the silent field and toward the colossal ruin of the factory, where she saw, in an upper window, a flare of brightness. The light bounced into the shabby lace of tea-colored hogweed, and disappeared. She held her breath, searching the dark amorphous field, then tore the whole way across it, under the chain-link in the old place, and over the glitter of glass from Alan Ranger’s beer bottles and through the door. It was pitch dark. She paused, breathing hard, looking for the stairs in the shadows, and ran to them. Up the narrow, ladder-like steps to the second story, but no, the light had been from higher still. The tower? Had he finished the steps up to the tower? She ran up one more level to the broken stairs and looked up into the darkness. Still broken. And no light. She spun around 360 degrees, twice, three times.

She went to the far east window and called his name. Down the ladder and all around the second story, calling his name, swearing at him. No light. No sound but the weather outside the broken windows.

Dock found her in a heap on the floor.

“I saw him.”

“Where?”

“He won’t answer.” She lifted her head and called him again. Dock held still and listened.

“Come on, Leigh. It’s late.”

“He’s here somewhere.”

“There’s no one here. It’s empty. It’s late.”

“But I saw him.”

“Where?”

“Up in a window. From the yard.”

“You could not have possibly seen that far.”

“I saw a light flash.”

“Lightning.”

She shook her head.

“Listen. We’ll come back in the morning, in the daylight, and look through every single room. If he’s here, or was here, there’s no way he won’t have left some sign. Mud or something, right? We’ll come back in the morning. That’s just a couple hours.”

“Promise?”

“Of course I do.”

Dock took her under his arm and walked her to his truck. He turned on the heat and handed her a dry jacket to put over her shoulders.

“Dock,” she said quietly. “Do you remember telling me and Gordon about Echo Station?”

He glanced at her. “Sure. That old game.”

“I did it. That same night. I snuck out of the house and I went out there and did it.”

“Did you?”

“And I’m afraid, Dock.”

“Leigh,” he said softly. “That’s a children’s game.”

At dawn a cold bracing wind sang over the brittle fields. The sky was the color of brushed aluminum. Dock and Leigh searched the factory and its grounds in the cold, but there were no tracks other than their own, and there was no one inside, nor any sign that anybody else had been. He was just here, she thought. He was just. Here.

“Tell me again,” Dock said, pouring hot water into her teacup, “what you saw?” May was at the diner but Boyd stood behind them in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed. He locked eyes with Dock and shook his head.

“Two flashes of a flashlight,” Leigh said. “Like a signal. It came out of a window and across the field.”

He handed her a small glass of juice and two aspirin. “We have to call Chuck.”

“OK.”

“We don’t think that was Gordon you saw,” Boyd said from the doorway.

Leigh turned around. “What do you think it was?”

“We think you’re upset,” he said, nodding at his own statement.

“I am upset.”

“Wherever he is,” Dock said, “seems like he wants a little space right now.”

“When did you see him last, Leigh?” Boyd looked at her hard. “What was the last thing you talked about?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. Boyd shook his head. Heat rose in her face. “What? Why are you shaking your head at me?”

“Alright,” Dock said. “Let’s get Annie and Emery and go have some real breakfast. Chuck can meet us at the diner.”

“I don’t want to go to the diner.”

“Leigh,” Boyd said, “this is like work. It’s something we have to do. OK?”

Was she supposed to have followed him up north to see what it was all about? Then move in with him in his dorm? And now what? Chase him? Hunt him down across the plains? Move in with Georgianna in case he should show up with his dead father, for tea? Move back in with May or into the empty factory, waiting for someone who didn’t want any of the things of this world? Who didn’t seem even to belong to it?