Lions

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She stayed in Lions another week, as long as she could without having to drop classes or withdraw entirely. For those seven days she moved back into the house with her mother and now with Boyd, and walked each morning to the diner, always looking around her, conscious of being watched, ready in every moment to hear the sound of her name, to sense his presence behind her and to turn and be folded again into his arms. How he would smell. How warm he would be. How his hands would feel like her own hands.

The days were cool, the shadows long. From her room she could see straight across the field through the thinning yellow leaves to the factory. She walked through it by day and by night. Tents and canopies of cobwebs whitened every corner and along the broken ceilings. She picked through the piles of treasure the two of them had accumulated in their childhood and stashed here and there. She turned over a broken cottonwood drum.

“I’m going to fix this,” she said. The sound of her voice was small and flat in the huge open space. She set the broken drum down on the concrete floor. She trailed her fingers in the dust, along the bricks. It’d always seemed the place was crawling with life — moths, bats, mice, possums, swallows in their little clay and daub houses in the rafters. Now they were all quiet.

She called his name. She cursed him. She sat beneath their third-story lookout and drew her knees into her chest. He was a blur in her vision, a softening and brightening of the shadows until they resolved themselves into the fawn and powder blue of his old flannel shirt. He was there in her dreams on the far side of a long narrow room.

And yet for that week in Lions, it was she who felt like a ghost. May and Boyd, the Sterlings, Chuck, when he came around, even Georgie — they were cheerful and calm about their daily routines: a little hog feeding, a little welding, a little chicken frying, a little drinking, a little ticketing on the highway. They didn’t talk to her much, or look at her much. They ate May’s grilled cheese or meat loaf sandwiches and toasted each other in the bar, which had two new panes of glass on either side of a new door, painted a clean, smooth yellow. After dark the men would go outside and play horseshoes in the empty street by floodlight.

On the highway, someone put a ghost town sign back up, a bright one, blue and red and green — cheerful and ironic, this time, and meant only to attract customers. By day there was a steady stream of them, and May kept the old jukebox playing western tunes, for effect. “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Call of the Canyon” and “Red River Valley” and Leigh plugged her ears when she heard it. None of those songs was about this place. Who did they think they were kidding?

“I don’t like it,” Boyd said after breakfast on her last day in town, his arms and elbows propped up on the driver’s side window.

“I need to go see.”

“If you’re not back in six hours I’m sending Chuck after you.”

“Six hours? There’s no way he went that far. On foot?”

“I’m serious. I’ll assume Boggs has tied you up and is going to eat you and I’ll send Chuck after you.”

“Come on, Boyd.”

“I mean I’ll at least want the truck back. That’s a good truck.”

“OK, OK. I hear you.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

“Tell you what,” he said, his voice softening as he looked down the road. “There’s something those Walker men could see that no one else around here was ever able to see.”

She stared at him.

“Those were some good men.”

The words wanted to open a space in her chest that she didn’t want open. “That’s not how you used to talk,” she said, her sentence a blade.

“The more shame on me.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“Pity it took me so long.”

She followed the same county road north that she knew Gordon had taken time and again that summer, up through the stricken farm fields, past the old trailer and gas station where John used to bring them when they were kids, for salty tacos in greasy paper envelopes. She could imagine the feel of them in her hands, warm and waxy. Then twenty miles more, picking carefully along the unpaved county road as it narrowed and dipped and grassed over and washboarded down a plane. Then past the little homestead behind a broken shelterbelt of dead cottonwood and living buckthorn, the siding weathered to a silvery, lavender colored wood. How lonely it looked, and how beautiful.

She saw the great plates of stone uplifted in the distance that she knew Gordon had seen in summer. She drove through the same towers of granite. She saw snow — new snow, now — on the cracked ridge of the mountains to the west. She came to the North Star motel, but it was wrecked, a ruin, rotted away. On the beds through the window the blankets were water stained, the mattresses turned, everything seeded with mouse shit and torn into rags and loose fibers by their tiny claws and teeth. She drove four hours, five, darkness closing in above her, knowing Boyd would be counting the hours. She flashed her lights. She turned the radio up. She pulled over and looked around and called his name, but the wind carried it away. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. No trees. No shrubs. No birds. No telephone poles. No cabin. There was nowhere anyone or anything could hide.

It didn’t happen like this. You were young and someone or something out there was supposed to give you the space to learn and make amends, to make things right. It was a big country; it was big enough to make things right. That was its promise: everything could be made new, improved, made right.