Lions

~ ~ ~

There’s one about an old homesteader with hair the color of milk poured out around her waist and knees and rippling across the hard-packed dirt floor. It’s after this spirit that May Ransom named the diner on Jefferson Street. They say that Lucy Graves never leaves her house, its walls years ago regularly whitened with unslaked lime from the riverbed now dry and brown as stacked matches and surrounded by burnt gardens of splintered glass and broken farm machinery. You can find her old place north of the Gas & Grocer, back up the Monger Road and half a mile behind the coulee among the weeds.

If you’re up there and pay attention — aching blue sky overhead, mute roar of eighteen wheelers on the highway behind you, minuscule flies swinging in loose knots over the tops of Queen Anne’s lace — continuity stops. All time reduces to one moment, this moment, all moments the same one, this one, and there she’ll be before you, plain as the hands at the ends of your arms.

All day, every day, she crochets elaborate spiderwebbed doilies of her own hair, weaving in bird feathers, seeding grasses, the shoelace tails of field mice, and tiny braids of fur from the hides of dead cattle, dead deer, and dead rats. She’ll tell you about it, what brought all the settlers out and for a time trapped them on his huge, wide-open ground: misguided longing.

They told us stories, she’ll tell you. And we believed them. Don’t believe them. Use your eyes. Use the five good senses God gave you. Use the six.

She’ll tell you they were looking for paradise, for they’d been promised nothing less. It was a story they repeated to each other so often in their journey west that even as they laid eyes on the high desert, they believed it, still. All around them, at last, a spacious country — newly cleared — in which to live as God intended men and women to live, to manifest the living Word with every pass of the plow, to amass a little of the abundance the good Lord had assured them, and to show the rest of the world what such blessings and prosperity looked like.

When it grew hot, however, and the rains stopped, the sun baked the ground. They scoured the greasewood plain and shallow rivers for as many creatures as they could find, kill, and eat. The men named their guns. The women who had lost their children named the birds and stones and missing trees, the folds of country rising up to the north into whipped peaks of dust and cracked rock.

All the while she speaks, this Lucy Graves still believes it’s sometime in May 1870 and she’ll politely ask for passage back home. Going west, she’ll tell anyone who will listen, was a terrible mistake.

“I could be that woman,” May Ransom would sometimes say to the groups of college girls passing through on their way back to the Front Range when they read the Lucy Graves story on the backs of their laminated menus. But they never asked where May was from, and they didn’t need further explanation. They could see the town they had stopped in, and they could imagine living there.

The diner was a square building of white painted cinderblock, yellow curtains, and a storm door. Tiny white Christmas lights all year, white vinyl flowers glued to a green vine stapled above the front windows. A pale red-lit CAFÉ sign hanging outside.

Inside, May served fried chicken hearts, biscuits with thick yellow gravy, liver and onions, meat loaf, chicken fried steak, canned green beans, canned corn, homemade hash and mashed potatoes, coffee, juice, eggs, hotcakes, chocolate cake with lard icing, and sticky fruit and pudding pies. A thin spread of butter went on every sandwich, and she designed the most incongruous combinations for each: grape jelly on sliced ham; peanut butter, pickle chips, and bologna; coleslaw, cream cheese, and cucumber on grilled hamburger buns. Genius born of necessity, she said, since the Sysco truck came only once every four weeks — that was with even less frequency than the beer trucks brought Coors and High Life to Boyd’s bar.

On this particular afternoon, Boyd sat on a swivel stool with a cold one he’d brought in from across the street, the ash-colored bruise dark on his face. The buttons on his shirt were buttoned wrong. May was behind the counter prepping for dinner, peppering chicken thighs laid out on two giant cookie sheets. Leigh was covering the tail end of the lunch shift and still had one woman finishing her sandwich. With every work shift, she had the increasing sense of inhabiting a reality in which she didn’t seem to fit; the very edges of the counter and tables, the laminate floor, the door swinging open and closed, even the weight of her own face — it all seemed to punctuate a sense that the world was not what it seemed, not what she was relying on it to be. It was less a feeling to investigate than one to dispense with. It was a symptom of being in Lions. So as she wiped down the empty tables, waiting on the last woman, she counted and recounted her tips and added them to the growing tally she was keeping in her head, alongside the number of days until she left. There was something reassuring in the counting, itself. And when she had her totals: $788, sixty-three days, she began to amass a mental list of all the things she would get in college, where at last she’d be in the world. Sundresses. Silver jewelry. A turquoise ring. A new bedspread on a big new comfortable bed. New makeup. Fall sweaters. Boots. A real haircut.

Outside on the street, Marybeth Sharpe sat on the sidewalk in a rocking chair beside the front door of her junk store, the only such store in a string of them that was still open for business. John used to give Leigh and Gordon a dollar apiece to go inside and pick something out: a broken green dash lamp; a woman’s leather boot stitched with yellowed seed pearls. A loop of steel attached to an empty husk felted with something like mold — a rabbit’s foot, they determined, carried close inside someone’s pocket for the most scarce and ardently sought-after resource in the county: luck. Even now, since there’d been a big snow in April, a few misty-eyed old-timers had begun to talk hopefully again of shifting rain belts. By such lights, you might still find a remote, wild, unexplored land somewhere in America, and a race of lost men living there; you might still find a city of gold, or a mountain of salt.

There was nothing remarkable about this last woman Leigh was waiting on in the diner. She must have seen the hand-painted sign for the Lucy Graves and come in off the highway, as everyone did, a constant if not thick stream of traffic from the westbound highway that kept Lions alive. She drove a silver Honda Civic, and wore white tennis shoes, blue jeans, a red T-shirt. Leigh seated her in a booth by the window. The woman ordered the lunch special, tuna melt on rye, and black coffee. She ate silently and efficiently, and set her white paper napkin folded beside her clean plate.

“Have just a minute?” she asked, when Leigh set the check facedown on the gold-flecked Formica table.

“What can I get you?”

“You’re as wide open as a telephone booth.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Anyone could step right in and call up whatever they wanted.”

The hair went up on the back of Leigh’s neck.

“You know what I’m talking about,” the woman said.

Leigh glanced back at Boyd and her mother. They were bent over the counter looking at something in the Burnsville newspaper.

“Look,” the woman said. “You can close the space above your head like this.” She moved her small, thick hands over her own head as if she were smoothing down flower petals into a cap around the top of her skull. “Just like that. For safety.”

“Safety?”

“Don’t you have the sense,” the woman said, “that something wants to bargain with you?”

Outside in the street the wind lifted the thin white hair off Marybeth Sharpe’s head as she rocked back and forth in her old wooden chair.

“Can I get you some change?” Leigh asked.

“Tell me you don’t feel it. Almost knocked me back a minute ago. What was in your head just now?”

Leigh picked up the check and looked at it without comprehending it, and set it back down.

“Isn’t there anyone that you love?” the woman asked.

Without thinking, Leigh felt Gordon’s hand in hers. She felt, without naming, an old song in a haunted place, a flare of heat in her chest, a key that fitted a door.

“Three seconds of your day,” the woman said, again gesturing with her hands around her head. “Close it up. Do it regular. Morning and night.” She took the check and began rooting around in her giant brown purse. She withdrew two five-dollar bills. “Something is already engaged.” She stood and smoothed her T-shirt over the folds of her belly. “Something’s in there with you already.”

Leigh held the check and cash and watched the woman leave. Outside in the street the woman made a U-turn and headed back toward the frontage road. Marybeth Sharpe waved at the car from her rocking chair.

Leigh set the woman’s dirty dish and cup in the bus tub, slipped the five-dollar bills into her pocket. She opened the register and closed it. Folded the woman’s check and dropped it in the trash.

“What was all that about?” Boyd asked. May had corrected his buttons.

Leigh wiped her hands on her apron. “Looking for a tall man in a pair of stolen coveralls.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I told her he went north, that you chased him out of town with a hatchet. She asked if you were the one who killed the dog.”

Boyd threw up his hands. Over breakfast alone he’d heard ten different versions of his own complicity in various crimes involving the stranger and his dog. “I didn’t kill the dog. I didn’t hang it, I didn’t burn it, and I didn’t run it over with my truck.”

“Leigh,” May called from behind the counter where she was stooped with her head in the dishwasher. “Will you get Gordon or John and tell them I need someone to fix this thing again?”

“I told you I would do it.”

“Don’t you touch it Boyd Hardy.”

He put his hands up, his beer bottle hooked between his thumb and forefinger. “Bring me another beer when you come back,” he told Leigh.

May stood and looked at Boyd. “Did you give her a key to the bar?”

“No?”

“I thought I was done for the day,” Leigh said.

“Go go go.” May waved her hand. “But tell John we need him over here.”

“I’m taking some of these sandwiches.”

When Leigh reached the shop, Dock and Emery Sterling were there with John, as they often were. Emery ran across the shop in his welding helmet to greet Leigh, then walked back to the workbench stiff legged with his long sunburnt arms uplifted and flexed, the way he almost always walked, as if he were playing a game: pretend I’m stuck in a human body that can only move like this. He was always smiling, his chin wet with his own spit, and flapping his hands like big pink birds. He was the same age as Gordon and Leigh, and though in all his life he had never spoken a word, Dock and his wife Annie insisted he had a language. When from the bed he reached up to touch the ends of his mother’s bright hair, that was a word. When he threw back his white-blond head and looked up at the stars that Dock told him were his cousins, that too was a word.

Emery loved the shop. He’d sit on the workbench and swing his legs in circles as he watched John show Dock how to weld the muffler bracket on Emery’s ATV, or how best to attach hog wire to the steel posts around the Sterlings’ lot, or how to prep steel pipe coral with phosphoric acid and water. For all of this instruction, Dock was given a small hourly wage because, John reasoned, Dock was doing most of the work himself. It wasn’t charity, but it wasn’t business, either. People would say John was out of his mind — he had a wife and son to support, for the love of God — and Dock, a huge man who lived modestly off his hogs and meager patch of alfalfa and whose wife had to watch their great big boy twenty-four hours a day, he, like everyone else, absolutely knew it, and was filled with equal parts wonder and gratitude. One, it seemed to him, never showed up without the other.

Late this afternoon, Dock and John were bent over a couple dozen drill tips. Dock couldn’t find a drill for his no-till planter that he liked, or that fit, and wanted to make his own. That was a song John Walker loved to hear.

“You want to get them as close to 60 Rockwell C as possible,” John was saying.

“Expensive?”

John shrugged. “Anything less,” he nodded at the window toward the board-hard ground, “you’ll be back in the shop halfway through the planting season looking for repairs or new drills.”

The men raised their hands in hello as Leigh propped herself on the workbench next to Emery. “Where’s Gordon?” she asked.

“In the house,” Dock said.

“Two ways to heat treat the forward face of each drill,” John said.

“Stick electrode,” Dock tried.

“That’s one,” John said. “Probably the one and only instance in the world in which you want to hear the steel crack after laying a bead. But there’s a second way.”

“Hang on a second,” Dock called to Leigh. “You want to see this.”

Leigh kept her distance, but stayed in the shop to watch. John turned on the torch, lowered his helmet, and began to heat the steel. Dock lowered the shield on Emery’s helmet, then lowered his own.

“Torch it till it’s up to temperature,” John said over the quiet roar of the torch. Emery was transfixed. The metal glowed bright red, then pale gold, then white. John turned off the torch and waited until it cooled to purple, and turned to the steel drum of water beside him.

“The faster the quench,” he said, his voice deep and faraway inside his helmet as he held up the red-hot metal in the channel locks, “the harder the material.” He plunged the part into the horse tank and disappeared behind a wall of steam.

Dock lifted his helmet and grinned at Leigh. “Tell you what,” he said. “This old man’s a wizard.”

“I know it,” Leigh said.

John lifted the hood on his helmet and waved at Leigh.

“I’m stealing Gordon now,” she said.

“I know it, my truck too. Know what that’s going to cost you?”

She crossed the smooth concrete floor and kissed John Walker on the cheek. He put his arm around her and pulled her close in a half hug.

“Bring him back,” John said. “And tell him he’s got work out here.”

She met Gordon outside the shop beside the truck and they climbed in. The late afternoon sun picked out golden threads in the weeds around the gravel drive as he backed up and hit the frontage road.

“What were you doing inside?” she asked him.

“Watching a ball game.”

“You were not.”

“I was.”

“What kind of ball?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Bring something to eat?”

“Got us a couple beers and sandwiches.”

He touched her face. “You look good.”

“You look good.”

“Sixty-three days,” she said.

“Not that you’re counting.”

“If I had two thousand dollars saved, I’d leave tomorrow.”

“When you’re there you’ll wish you were here.”

“Never.”

“You watch.” He reached over and interlaced his fingers with hers.

She rolled her eyes, and told him about the woman in the Lucy Graves. He slowed the truck and looked at her.

“Who was she?” he asked.

“Never seen her before. She had South Dakota plates. It’s creeping me out. Do you ever feel like that? What she said? Like something’s bargaining with you?”

“What,” he said. “Like the devil?” He set his gaze back to the road and smiled.

Leigh scooted to the middle of the truck. “These things come in threes, you know.”

“What things?”

She held out her forefinger. “One,” she said, and pointed out the window as they passed the ground where the man had buried his dog earlier in the week. She glanced at him, then lifted her second finger. “Two, the woman at the Lucy Graves. So, what’s the third thing going to be?”

“The lady today doesn’t count.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re the only one who knew. Besides me.”

She agreed that something in the texture of it felt different.

“And if you’re not sure there’s a second thing,” he said, “then you can’t really call the first thing the first thing.”

“I guess not.”

“So no things coming in threes,” he said. “Come back to planet Earth. Blue pickup truck.” He pointed out the window beside her, and before them, the weeds and grass a pale yellow green, lavender green, and silver and lettuce and willow green, and Prussian blue and forget-me-not-blue and rose pink and gold.

“The thing is,” she began, and looked at him.

“Go on,” he said, “get it out.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like a tightness right here.” She lifted her fingers to her chest and throat. “Anxiousness. Like there’s something important I’m ignoring. But I can’t place it.”

Gordon stared straight ahead, not responding.

“Let’s drive out to the buttes,” he finally said. She studied him.

“Why weren’t you welding today?”

“There have to be a hundred kinds of birds out there now.”

“It’s a long drive,” she said, and put her arm across his neck and shoulders.

“Good. Scoot over.”

It was one of a string of perfect nights, like beads threaded on a brilliant necklace that isn’t yours to keep. They sat in the cab of the truck, his back against the driver’s side door, her back against his chest, his arms around her. They kept the passenger side window down, and spoke little.

“Let’s just sit here forever in the dark like this,” he said, and tightened his grip around her waist. Outside the truck the wind shushed through the grass and lengthening weeds.

“No morning?”

“No morning.”

“No evening? No factory? No school?”

“No. No nothing,” he said. “Just this.”

The evening slowly drifted west and shadows crept across the cool grass. Night bled into the trees. By the time they drove back around toward the outskirts of town, it was midnight. The yellow square of the Walkers’ kitchen window was hovering before them.

“Were you supposed to bring the truck back earlier or something?” She thought Gordon was in trouble. The stars themselves could set their clocks by the daily routines of John and Georgianna Walker. If John was up measuring coffee in his white shirt and blue jeans, it was 5 AM and the sun was just cracking the eastern sky with a long and even white line of light. If Georgianna was rinsing greens in the sink, it was 7 PM and silver white moths were on the wing. If the downstairs lights were on at this hour, something was wrong.

Gordon dropped Leigh off first, at her house a couple hundred feet away, then circled back around, parked the truck, and went through the kitchen into the house where he found his father on the floor breathing heavily, his bare feet on top of two end pillows. His brow was furrowed. Georgianna was in her flowered nightgown on her knees beside him, her long gray hair all around her. She looked up at Gordon, her eyes streaming tears. John shifted his glance to his son. Gordon squatted beside his parents, his heart beating fast and high in his chest. Tree shadows cast by the waning moon spread black veins across the faded wallpaper roses.