Lions

~ ~ ~

Inside the bar it was dark and sticky and smelled of yeast and cigarette smoke. To the front were two pane windows on either side of a heavy, insulated wooden door, thick with a hundred layers of finish, grease, and weather, with a great big dirty brass handle. The walls were covered with framed photographs of the past fifty years, long before the bar was Boyd’s. Bird hunters in camouflage and neon orange stooped in the brown grass beside their liver-colored bird dogs; football players in shining helmets from the days before Lions’ schools were closed; soldiers; rodeo queens; parade floats; 4-H winners with their blue-ribboned hogs and gooseberry preserves. A ratty old wooden sign — Boyd only kept it up because it was funny, he said — painted with the words “No dogs and No Indians.” Above the bar, the skin from a three-foot-long rattler that they said someone had killed with his bare hands had been glued to poster board and framed, but it was crumbling behind the glass. The floor was poured concrete and the walls were painted red, white, blue, and gold. Beer colors, Boyd had said.

The man from the highway went up to the bar and ordered one.

It was Boyd himself, turned outward on his stool and stroking his thick silver mustache, who pointed at the coveralls when the stranger sat down at the bar that night. He’d been in the middle of a joke about taxes, immigrants, and an old Mexican woman. Harmless given the company, he kidded, everyone was white in Lions except Chuck Garcia, whom he liked to call Carlos, but whose name was Chuck. Not Charles, not Carlos. And Chuck wasn’t even in the house at the time.

He nodded at the coveralls on the odd-looking stranger. “Case in point,” Boyd said. “Those are Walker’s.” Any mustard-colored, pin-hole-burned, and fastidiously patched coveralls in the county were John’s or Gordon’s.

May had already closed up the diner across the street and was helping out behind the bar, mostly — as usual — to keep an eye on how much Boyd took down himself. So it was she who handed the man the drink he’d asked for before she walked out to the tables to gather empties.

The man ignored Boyd’s comment and drank the foam off the beer. Boyd leaned on the bar, right next to him. The man set the glass down and straightened.

Yes, they were Walker’s coveralls. John was the kind of man who would help out a passerby. Many of the men and women in the bar that night had depended on him for such, in various ways, over the years. One of them, Haley Netterson, had even lived in the bunkhouse attached to the Quonset hut for nearly a year. John and Gordon had welded together the pedestal-mounted woodstove in there just to keep her through the cold weather, and hauled in a truckload of wood from the mountains they’d bucked up and split themselves. Stacked it right outside the little, steel-backed door, beside the twin bed, so she wouldn’t have to walk into the snow or smack of cold morning air to get it. Georgianna put a red painted iron kettle on the stove, and little blue-checked curtains over a single window.

“Probably gave you a handout for your beer, too,” Boyd said to the man, glancing around for encouragement. “Am I right?”

May whipped at him with a damp rag. “Shut your mouth.”

“Communal glass of beer,” someone said.

“Guess where the old Mexican lady put it.”

A few laughs.

The stranger sat still, his long face pointed at the spotted mirror and rows of colored glass bottles, his arms hanging at his sides, his fingers twitching at the ends of his hands.

Not exactly a natural way to sit at a bar, they said later.

Nothing natural about that man.

Felt something funny the moment he walked in.

Boyd picked up the man’s beer and took a drink, or pretended to take a drink. “Just as easily call it mine,” he said.

“Alright Boyd,” May said. “Enough.”

The man looked down at his lap and Boyd moved to pour the beer over the man’s head. Of course Boyd never would have done it. He was in high form. Maybe he’d had one too many, but it was only meant to punctuate his joke, this feint, and everyone pretty much believed that. He could be a bully and an ass, he could be moody and sullen one minute and the life of the town the next, but Boyd Hardy wasn’t mean. Besides, it was his bar. No reasonable man wanted trouble in his own bar.

Just giving the poor old son of a bitch a hard time, he’d say later whenever it came up. But at that point, Boyd had not yet finished his joke, and the anticipation of the small audience was too much. They were all three or four glasses in, and there was no place else to go that night but home, and home wasn’t a place anybody in Lions wanted to be.

Say Boyd tipped the man’s glass this way and that, sloshing it just a little too close to one of the man’s shoulders. Perhaps the man stood and in one smooth, easy motion knocked Boyd Hardy off his stool, which sailed through the air and cracked the window beside the front door, a crack like a river that slowly spread imperceptibly in fine tributaries in the days and weeks ahead.

Or perhaps it was that the gesture — the beer held for a moment over the man’s head — so alarmed May that she got hold of Boyd’s arm first. The pint glass dropped and shattered on the concrete floor. Falling off his stool, Boyd jerked away from May, who fell back on her tailbone and bit her tongue. Dock Sterling said that even from where he was sitting, and even knowing what he knew about Boyd and May, it looked like Boyd had struck her.

Boyd wouldn’t have dared. No one would hit May. She had been a real beauty in her day and had learned to use it to her advantage, so that even at fifty she had some considerable leverage over the men in town, though most of them remembered her in her twenties, too, and the memory alone would’ve been enough to make them behave. However else her life had disappointed her, as she sometimes intimated it had, in Lions she always had a sharp tongue and the upper hand.

The way one woman in the bar told it, May stood up with blood on her chin and watched as the stranger rose. In a moment the stool he’d been sitting on and Boyd too were on the other side of the room, the pane window beside the door cracked. The woman couldn’t say who had thrown what.

Levon, from the garage, said the man stood and tried to leave after knocking both Boyd and May to the ground, and that it was Boyd who threw the stool, hitting the stranger behind the knee and accounting for the limp others said they saw as he dragged a leg behind him the following morning.

In any case, the tall man from the highway was on his feet, the bar was in some general confusion, Boyd was swearing and bleeding from a small cut along his hairline, and Chuck pulled up to the bar in his police car, believing his work for the night was over. When Chuck took the man with him, the man called into the bar something about a dog out back, which was taken to be an insult directed at Boyd.

In the morning there was a bruise on Boyd’s cheekbone like a smudge of soot that for a full month seemed neither to change nor to fade. This was a sign, some people said.

“He’s going to come back and burn the place down,” Dock suggested, his big pink cheeks flushed and baby blue eyes deadly serious.

Boyd dismissed this with a wave of his hand.

“You watch,” Dock said. “He’ll burn us out.”

“Like hell,” Boyd said, touching his cheek, neither believing nor disbelieving.

After all, it was true. You had to read the signs. It was how you survived, wasn’t it?

A stand of tall grass, broken.

A misplaced dish.

An oddness in the room.

That this stranger in Lions had been unnecessarily violent and hence had sealed his own fate seemed defensible. But whenever anyone said so, there was a palpable unease, a quiet moment afterward when everyone at the bar raised their glasses to their lips.

He went willingly to the Lions jail — two rooms off the back of Chuck’s local office — and once inside and seated, with what Chuck called dead eyes and a dead face, the man said his name was John Doe. He had no form of identification. He admitted he may have caused some trouble in the bar. Chuck looked down at the paperwork in front of him and set down his pen. The memory of this eerie exchange kept him awake for a string of nights in mid-July when heat lightning fanned out in the distance beyond his yard and the lamplight burned yellow on the cardboard boxes his wife had begun packing with sheets, towels, teacups, books, and all the domestic odds and ends they’d accumulated in their twenty-seven years in the house.

In his office that night Chuck searched the man, found his newly cleaned clothes, the apple rings and peanut butter sandwiches, found the ten-dollar bill, and found a photograph of a narrow house stamped with the address of a photography store, Nel’s Camera, in North Platte, Nebraska. Had he walked the whole way from Nebraska?

The man considered a moment and shifted in his chair.

“Didn’t anyone give you a ride?” Chuck asked.

“Wasn’t looking for one.”

“What were you looking for?”

But the man did not, or could not, say.

“Tell me I don’t need to make any calls to North Platte,” Chuck said, but even before it was out he was sorry he said it. Beside him, the man put trembling fingers to his forehead and looked down at the floor. It was the look and gesture of a man who had lost everything. Chuck had seen it before. Now he turned away. He’d inquire with the guys in North Platte privately, later in the week. None of this had to be official. It’d been a confusing scene in the bar, Boyd had come out bleeding but no real harm done. They’d get it all sorted out in the morning.

He showed the man into the cell with a single cot and toilet. “Warm and dry, anyway. Might rain.”

“It won’t rain.”

The man went in without another word, stepped through the doorway and stopped with his back to Chuck, so that Chuck had to lock the door on him like that.

At midnight, Chuck woke beside his wife in a cold sweat. He started and cried out.

“What is it?” she said, setting her hand on his chest.

He relaxed into his pillow. “Something chasing me.”

“Ohh,” she said, in the tender way she sometimes soothed him, as if he were a child.

He patted the back of her hand with his fingertips and rose.

“Where are you going?”

“Ssh,” he said softly. “Go back to sleep.”

He dressed in the dark and took two cold cans of beer and two pieces of fried chicken wrapped in foil and found the man awake in his cell, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall.

“Howdy.” He stepped inside. “No sleep?”

“Not much.”

Chuck handed him the beers, one at a time, and the man set them on the floor at his knee.

“You never got to drink yours is what I heard.”

“Thanks.”

“Keep you till morning.”

The man said nothing.

“Hungry?” Chuck held out the foil-wrapped chicken.

“Nah,” the man said, but he took it.

“Cold?”

“I’m alright.”

“Well we’ll see you in a few hours then. We’ll get Boyd in here and get it sorted out. Get you on your way.”

“Have you seen my dog? Did someone get her?”

“Your dog?”

“I told the people in the bar.”

Chuck drove around for over an hour. The man was still awake when Chuck returned at three o’clock to say he hadn’t seen her. The man stared at the floor. He never touched the chicken or the beer.

Later that summer, Chuck remembered that he’d found drawings among the man’s things.

“Drawings?” May raised an eyebrow and poured him another short glass of whiskey.

“Like with a pencil,” he explained, setting his hat on the counter. “A woman with long hair. A dog.”

“Were they any good?”

“No.”

Afterward everybody assumed the man had buried the drawings with his dog, because they didn’t find any on him when he turned up again.

When Chuck let the man go in the morning, he spent an hour walking around town, up and down Jefferson Street and in the narrow alley that connected the back lots of the empty stores. His shoulders were hunched inside his long, black coat, which he wore despite the growing heat. He looked even more alarming in daylight than he had in the dim bar — his skin damp with sweat, his dark hair in jagged overgrown slashes across his bony face. He returned twice to the parking lot behind the bar. He cupped his giant hands and called out a name, turning around in a full circle. He whistled up and down Jefferson Street once, then twice, indifferent to the stares from the diner.

In the night, when the man had been locked up, his dog had instinctively returned to the highway to find him. Eventually the man found her there, and he stooped on the side of the highway over the black and white fur.

Probably mistaken for a polecat, people said, black and white like that.

The man sat hunched beside the dog the rest of the morning, his head in one hand, the other on the animal’s neck. John brought him a shovel. The man buried her that afternoon, and disappeared.

A huge dry storm rotated overhead that evening, howling like loose trains and beating the naked plain back to life. When the sun rose the next day, little flowers on long curling stems rose up and opened, spreading like pink smoke over the grass.