Lions

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One night, two, then three nights and still no Gordon. Outside the Lucy Graves the earth shimmered. New crab apples baked on their branches and fell like stones. A yellow dish of lawn circled the base of each tree. At night in the distance, across the road and a flat pan of dirt so hard it glittered, heat lightning flared. By day it was ninety-nine, then a hundred, then a hundred and six degrees. Ragged cowbirds perched on the rusting spools of fence wire. The house windows and metal gutters blazed. It was still only June.

Leigh ran her fingers through her hair. Drank a Coke at the empty lunch counter, looking out across the empty street. Pressed the cold, sweating glass to her cheek, then inside her skirt, against her thigh. Across the street a stiff, hot wind moved the fingers of a dead cottonwood against a sky so blue it made the backs of her eyeballs ache.

She couldn’t bear a whole summer of this. So hot, so bored. So angry she could feel her heart beating in her forehead.

She turned restlessly on the stool toward the kitchen and saw John on the pale, empty moonscape. She turned the other way, toward the street, and saw Gordon walking up behind him.

The sun was too bright. Her stomach hurt. Summer was terrible. Lions was terrible. Her whole life she’d hated it, and Gordon loved it. She knew he did. He was the worst. And she knew exactly where he was, she could see it all. Eventually he’d tell her, too, because he told her everything. Right in line with John’s directions, Gordon would’ve started the old Silverado, left the clinic right after John finished talking, and followed an unpaved county road that cut exactly north between the Altons’ field to the west and the Jorgensens’ to the east.

Leigh knew the road. They’d been on it together. It was so seldom used that for miles at a time it narrowed into a single lane, disappeared in the weeds altogether, and appeared again like a faint line of chalk drawn through the BLM land littered with white primroses, prickly pear, and cow shit. Gordon would follow it all the way up. He’d drive until the roadsides were crusted with dirty ice, and woofs of snow blew off the tops of the mountains in the distance. It was an arid, rocky country, with naked gray bluffs of stone and small fists of sage and scrappy trees like upended bits of frayed twine. When the road passed between two uplifted planes of granite, he’d slow the truck, look back, then accelerate and speed through.

For hours, no matter how far he’d drive, the horizon would appear no closer, and look no different, unless for a moment it was marked by the dots of ragged horses out to pasture. A scarf of smoke rising in the vacant blue. An abandoned kitchen range, its siding chewed to a rustwork of lace. As he checked the road ahead, the rearview, then the side mirror, shifting his gaze in a triangle of points, he’d see a shadow racing around, just ahead of his vision, like an intuition that’s there, and gone. Daylight receding beyond the ridge to the west as he sped north, and from the east a band of darkness slowly closing over him like a lid.

“It’s not just you facing this thing,” John would’ve told him. “It’s you and everyone who came before you.”

Eventually in the years to come, after two trips north herself searching for him, or for Boggs, whomever she might find first, Leigh would come to understand it all.

How fast the landscape changes when you pass Horses up there, then Three Bells. How the wind sings and moans like an old song you can neither place nor stand to hear. How Gordon wouldn’t have been able to get the picture of his father in a hospital bed out of his mind. How all he’d have thought about was how good life had been, and how it was supposed to have gone.

He’d stay at the North Star that night, a motel planted in the middle of nowhere with an American flag, the whole place pinned to the dirt by a metal pole topped with a neon-green star that rocked in the wind. Inside the motel, the carpet a filthy off-white, smeared with greasy stains. Coffee burnt in its glass globe on a little brown Formica counter beside a basket of bruised, red apples. He’d call out a hello, but nobody would come. He’d ring the rusted silver bell on the desk. Still, no one would come. In truth he’d be afraid of who might respond. There’d be no other cars in the lot of sloping, cracked asphalt. All of the room keys — nine of them — would be hanging on red plastic diamonds behind the desk. He’d take number three because it was Leigh’s lucky number, and go back out and around to the room. One soft gray tennis shoe at a time, he’d decide right then to leave cash and strip the bed himself in the morning.

Despite the strangeness and sadness of the circumstances, he’d make a civilized time of it in that motel room — Gordon was like that — arranging his things, settling in. Double bed with a heavy green blanket and two windows that looked out over a flat field of blanched dirt and pale grass whipped by the wind into matted blond whorls. The wind would be huge outside but the room warm and the bed firm and comfortable. He’d fall asleep as soon as he crawled in, and dream the dreams of stones. Morning, and everything it would entail, could wait.