As Good As Gone (9781616206000) (18 page)

TWENTY-­ONE

After Bill Sidey has told Will about the nun who sneaks off every night to find out whether the Red Sox have won or lost, and after Bill has described to Ann how the University of Montana is beautifully snugged up against the side of a mountain and he has suggested again what a wonderful place it would be for her to study, and after he has assured both his children that their mother's operation went well and that she's a little weak but resting comfortably, after ten minutes of those evasions and awkward half-­truths, Bill asks to speak to his father.

When Bill hears his father's familiar raspy voice, a voice that always sounds as though it's about to scratch itself into little more than a whisper, Bill suddenly discovers that he's lost his own voice.

“Hello?” his father says again. “Bill? You still there? Hello?”

Bill clears his throat and that's enough to get started. “Hello, Dad. Are Ann and Will still there?”

“Not right here. Nearby. Did you want to talk to one of them again?”

“No, no. I just wanted to make sure they weren't close enough to be in on this part of the conversation.”

“They're out of earshot,” Calvin says.

“What I told the kids about Marjorie's condition? It wasn't exactly true.” He pauses to make certain he still has full possession of his voice. “She's not doing well, Dad.”

The accident that claimed Bill's mother's life occurred in the afternoon in France, but Pauline's French family took hours to adjust to the fact of her death and to figure out how they could notify her husband. That phone call didn't ring in the Sidey residence until well after midnight, and after the news came, Calvin Sidey stayed up alone with his grief throughout the next night. When Bill and his sister woke, they found their father in the kitchen with a coffee cup and a full ashtray in front of him. The whiskey glass wasn't present then, but it would be in nights to come.

Their father told Bill and Jeanette to sit down. On the table there was also a sheet of paper that their father unfolded and glanced down at before he began to speak to his children.

“Your mother won't be returning to us,” Calvin said. “She was struck by a car in her native village and killed.”

The news was so stunning—would it have been any less so had it not been delivered in the language that a stranger might have used?—that neither Bill nor his sister could think of a thing to say. The silence soon compounded itself, and when it became unbearable, Jeanette, weeping, scraped back her chair and lurched from the room.

Ordinarily, Bill would have followed his sister—he relied on her example in most unfamiliar situations—but there was his father, motionless, staring unblinking at the floor.

But after moments passed—moments and nothing else, not words or touch or even a look—his father stood up and walked away, taking with him the sheet of paper, which he balled up and deposited in the garbage.

Bill fished the crumpled paper out of the trash, believing not only that he might read additional information about his mother but also that he might be able to discover a mistake—France was so far away, so different in language, customs, values—wasn't it possible that an accident there wasn't what an accident was here, that dead didn't mean dead.

Written in his father's hand the note read:
Your mother won't be returning to us. She was struck by a car in her native village and killed.
Their father had read to Bill and Jeanette the news about their mother . . .

And that Bill could not forgive. When their father left them—abandoned them—Bill felt as though that act was the natural conclusion to a process that began with his father not immediately sharing with his children the news of their mother's death, deciding instead to write a script from which he could read. For years, Bill kept that crumpled piece of paper in a dresser drawer, holding on to it for the day when he would hurl it in his father's face.

Yet now, as Bill buckles pronouncing that simple, bland sentence regarding his wife's condition—“She's not doing well, Dad”—he feels he understands his father as never before. How much easier it would be to read those words than to build them out of thought and then bid them make that precipitous, dreadful drop from brain to tongue.

“Not doing well
how
?” Bill's father asks.

“Well, it's tough getting a straight answer out of them. They said the operation was a success, but she just hasn't come around.”

“Hasn't come around. What does that mean?”

In their Montana home, where Bill is now, Carole and Milo have installed a pale green carpet sculpted with a pattern resembling ocean waves, and though Missoula is almost as far from any sea as any point on the continent, when Bill stares down at the rug he feels something like the pull of undertow. “She's out,” he says. “Unconscious. She never came around after the surgery.”

“So what are they doing for her?”

“Doing? Not much. Giving her IVs. Watching her. The doctor keeps saying he expects her to wake up any minute.”

“You're there—what do you think?”

On most days, Bill has the knowledge or the instinct to move safely, correctly, productively through the hours. In his business, he can calculate accurately and fairly the needs of Gladstone's citizens or of people new to the area. He can talk companionably with other businessmen, and together they can anticipate what's needed to sustain the town and its traditions. All the duties of fatherhood suit him, and none of the small ways his children might irritate him are anything compared to the overwhelming joy they bring him. He counts himself among the luckiest men on the planet because he climbs into bed every night to lie beside the woman he loves and desires more than any other on the planet. And yet, on the margins of his life are shadows, hints of a darkness that could, without warning, blot out the light that shines on most of his days. This uneasiness—this dread—Bill has always supposed originated in his childhood when first his mother and then his father left him, and forever after he felt that at any time life might offer up something that he has neither the skill, courage, nor character to handle.
Things could get out of hand
is how this fear insinuates itself into his thoughts. His father is a man about whom it has been said
took matters into his own hands
. Bill has always known what that is a reference to. Calvin Sidey is supposed to have killed a man who insulted Bill's mother, and though Bill doesn't believe it himself it's enough that many others do. And since Bill is a man aware of his own limitations, it stands to reason that when things get out of hand, as they are almost certain to, in a manner great or small, it will help, won't it, to have nearby someone who can take matters into his own hands?

Bill understands how contradictory this longing is. Being abandoned by his father has created most of the anxiety in Bill's life, yet at exactly when he feels most anxious, he wants his father's reassurance.

“I'm afraid she's going to die, Dad, and I don't know what to do.”

“I'll tell you what to do,” his father says. “You go sit by her bedside and you stay there. Stay even if they try to drag you away.”

Although his father hasn't commanded him to do anything different from what Bill would have done on his own, he follows the order as if someone has just shown him the single narrow path to salvation. It's for the comfort of my soul I asked him back, Bill realizes, mine, not his.

CALVIN HANGS UP THE
phone gently. He didn't mean to speak so gruffly to his son, but God damn it, he wants Bill to understand—
you might not have another chance.

When Pauline left Gladstone, she and Calvin were barely on speaking terms, so angry was he over her decision to return to France. They hadn't quarreled over the matter, not exactly, but he'd said, repeatedly, You don't have to go. And Pauline would reply, I do, Cal-­veen. I do. She seldom stopped smiling, his wife, and in their first years together Calvin thought that smile was simply to help her get through the moments when something in the language or the culture bewildered her. And that was true enough. But over time Calvin also came to understand that there could be as much steel in a smile as in a tightly clamped jaw. Pauline Sidey was not a stubborn woman, except in the matters she was stubborn about, and then she was as set on her track as a locomotive. She gave up much to match her life to his in Montana—her religion, her language, her family, her farm girl ways—but she wasn't about to forgo this trip just because her husband sulked about the house like a child who's been denied a toy.

On their last night together, Pauline took off her nightgown in bed. That was something he often asked her to do, but she had a shyness that usually got in the way. Isn't it enough, she would say, that we . . . that you can touch? No, he'd say, it isn't enough. I want to
see
. So Calvin knew. He knew what it meant that she was naked in bed. His back was turned to her, and she pressed herself against him. She reached inside his pajamas, something else she was generally reluctant to do. But he wouldn't turn toward her. We have to get an early start tomorrow, he said, if you want to catch that train.

Put her on the train he did, without an embrace. And when the train carrying his wife on the first leg of her journey back to her homeland pulled out of the station, his heart thudded so hard in his chest it was all he could do to draw a breath. If he left right at that moment, he wondered, and if he drove like hell could he beat the train to its first stop? Could he be there when it pulled into the station? He could climb aboard and go from car to car until he found her. Of course he didn't do that. He drove like hell, but straight to the Pitchfork Saloon, the only bar open that early in the morning. By the time the train made its first stop, Calvin Sidey was drunk.

How many times over the years did Calvin ask himself, could he have come right out and forbidden her to go? Would she have obeyed? Most wives back then believed they had no choice but to follow their husbands' command. Wasn't it part of the vows? But Calvin wanted Pauline to stay because it was her decision. Hell, he should have chained her to the bathtub.

Then as now, Calvin would have given anything to have what his son has. His wife lying in bed, home or hospital, asleep or comatose, it wouldn't matter, as long as she was alive, and he could hold her warm hand, whether she knew it or not.

TWENTY-­TWO

Will has skipped Little League. His team was scheduled to play the Heidt Paint and Glass Bengals, and Dickie Mahlberg pitches for the Bengals. No one throws harder than Dickie, and he's wild. Just last week he beaned Owen Cullen, and Owen's parents took their son to the emergency room that night when Owen fainted at the supper table. Owen only had a concussion, but that was enough for Will. He's always nervous up at the plate anyway, and he sure isn't going to take any chances by standing in against Dickie Mahlberg and his fastball. Instead, Will goes out to the backyard and bounces a tennis ball off the back porch, pretending that he's pitching for his team and he's striking out more batters than Dickie.

The day is cloudy, and Will wonders if it might rain, in which case Little League would be canceled anyway. But it never rains, not this summer. He winds up and fires another strike—
pock—
the ball hits the cement and comes bounding back at him, and he fields it cleanly.

When Gary and Stuart amble into the yard, Will wishes he would have stayed inside and read his Joe DiMaggio book,
Lucky to be a Yankee.

Neither Stuart nor Gary have any thoughts about today's Little League games. “Hey,” Stuart says, “did you see what we rigged up.”

“See where?” Will jams the tennis ball into the pocket of his glove and turns the glove over on the grass so Stuart and Gary can't see that he's been playing with a tennis ball.

“Come on,” says Stuart, nodding in the direction of the alley.

Will follows them, but they don't go far. Stuart stops behind the Sideys' garage.

“Well, what do you think?” Stuart asks.

“About what?”

Stuart smiles slyly at Gary. “See? I told you he wouldn't notice a fucking thing.”

“What?” Will says impatiently.

Gary walks over to the steel rack holding the Sideys' two garbage cans. He just stands next to the rack, but when Will continues to look on uncomprehendingly, Gary grabs one of the rack's steel rails and shakes it hard, rattling the cans. Only then does Will realize that the rack isn't in its usual position. It hasn't been moved far, but now it stands closer to the oak tree whose branches shade the roof of the garage. For a couple years now, Will's father has said that he means to cut down a few of the tree's branches since they scrape the roof of the garage.

“Okay,” Will says, still mystified.

Stuart climbs onto the rack and then steps onto a garbage can, clanging and denting a lid in the process. From there he jumps up and grabs an oak branch—unreachable from where the cans originally stood—pulls himself up, and then scoots himself along the limb until he can drop down onto the garage roof. To Will and Gary standing below he smiles widely and gives a thumbs-­up sign. Then he scrambles down by the same route, and when he lands in the alley's dirt and gravel he looks about surreptitiously to make sure that no one but his friends have observed his climbing routine.

“If you wanted to get up on our garage,” says Will, “why didn't you just tell me and I could've got our ladder for you.”

Stuart grabs Will in a loose headlock and pretends he's about to throw an uppercut at his captive's head. “Hey, numb nuts—we don't want to advertise what we're doin'.”

Once Stuart releases him, Will shakes his head to free himself of the stink from Stuart's sweaty armpit, darkly furred where Will's are still as bare as a doll's.

“My folks are gone,” Will says. “Nobody cares if you climb up on the garage.”

“They would if they knew what we were doing up there,” Gary says.

“We moved the garbage cans last night and climbed up there about eleven,” Stuart says. “Gary figured out that there's your sister's bedroom”—he points toward the second story of the Sidey home—“so we was watching for her to undress.”

“But we couldn't see anything,” Gary adds. “What you got to do is get in her room and open her curtains. We could see the shadow of her moving around in there—”

“So if the curtains was open,” Stuart says, “we could see
everything
.”

“Especially with these.” Gary walks over to his bicycle and removes the binoculars looped over the handlebar. “My dad's. He got 'em in the war. Took 'em off a dead German.”

Every addition to their basic plan is another weight on Will's heart.

“Now here's all you gotta do,” Stuart says. “You're gonna go in there and open her fuckin' curtains.”

At last—Will sees a flaw in their strategy! “She'll just close them. She always does.”

“Yeah, we thought of that. So you can't just open them—you got to
break
'em open. You know, like so they won't close. Get it?” Stuart is practically rubbing his hands together in diabolical glee, so pleased is he with how well they've worked out all the details of their plan.

“Break her curtains?”

Gary has the binoculars to his eyes, and he is systematically scanning the overcast sky as if he's watching for enemy aircraft. “You could maybe cut the cord,” he says. “Or jam something inside the curtain rod.”

“You know, the part that goes over the window,” Stuart says.

“I'm not sure we have that kind,” Will weakly offers.

“Well, whichever.” Stuart's voice and expression both harden. “No matter what kind you got you just make sure they're open and stay open.”

“And figure out for sure when she's going to be home, so we can all get up there.”

“We?” Will asks. “Are you talking about just the two of you?”

“What the hell,” says Stuart. “You can join us.”

Gary swings the binoculars down and around until they're trained on Will. “Unless you don't want to.”

Will steps back, worried that from that distance the binoculars' powers might magnify the tiniest trace of a frown, the smallest downturn of his lips—anything that might reveal the loathing he feels for his friends and their scheme.

“He probably don't need to,” says Stuart. “He sees her all the goddamn time, I bet.”

Will can do nothing but meekly shake his head. He's afraid to tell them he doesn't want to spy on his sister because they might think he doesn't have a boy's normal interests. Why not, they would surely, incredulously ask. And Will doesn't know what he'd tell them.

Doesn't he know his sister is pretty? More than pretty, beautiful perhaps? Doesn't he know she has a good figure? Isn't he curious about what girls look like—you know, their tits and down there? Yes. For sure, yes, he wants to see a girl without her clothes on, but.

But what?

When his grandfather told Will that cowboys spend more time building fences than roping calves, something in Will shrank and withered, and he's afraid that something like that might happen when he sees a naked woman for the first time. What if Will looked at Ann and didn't feel what a boy is supposed to feel because she was his sister? And what if he does feel it—she's his sister!

These thoughts and more swirl in Will's mind, and he becomes angry and angrier still because he shouldn't have to explain himself for not wanting to spy on his sister.

The thunder that's been grumbling in the distance all morning suddenly booms almost overhead. A few heavy drops of rain splat into the alley's dust. If only a bolt of lightning would have struck the tree and the garage when Stuart and Gary were up there, Will's problems would be solved.

“Hey, what was your grandpa up to last night?” asks Gary.

“My grandpa?”

“He came out of your house last night to have a smoke, and we wondered if maybe he was going to do some window peeking himself.”

Will's heart catches on Stuart's words.

“Yeah, he walked over toward Mrs. Lodge's, but all he did was stare at the house.”

ANN STOPPED BRINGING HER
lunch to work on the day when she found herself sharing space in Penney's break room with Mrs. Bishop and Ethel Cutter, Mrs. Bishop's friend. Throughout the lunch break, the two women huddled together and whispered quietly, all the while glancing furtively in Ann's direction. Since then, Ann either skips lunch altogether or goes next door to the counter at Finley's Drugstore.

Today she has just ordered her usual, a tuna fish salad sandwich and a glass of milk, when a man sits down one stool away from her. Just like in the song, she sees by his outfit that he is a cowboy. A real one. His boots have riding heels, and the brim of his hat has that slope that comes from it being tugged down to keep it on tight or to shield his face from the sun and the wind. There's dirt caked on his boots and sweat stains on his hat.

Ann hates cowboys. Oh, not this young man specifically. When he leans toward her and asks if she's going to be using the ashtray, she sees that his eyes, squinty and weather-­wrinkled, have a sad, shy look. And her favorable impression of him continues when he simply lights his cigarette and turns back to his coffee, allowing her to eat her sandwich in peace. She even feels a little sorry for him; if he's sitting at Finley's lunch counter in the middle of the day, that probably means he's out of work.

But Ann wishes she lived someplace where cowboys, whether on horses, in trucks, or on lunch counter stools, aren't the region's most important people. And again, that doesn't apply to this—or any other—specific cowboy. A young man who works on the Hilltop ranch is certainly not a more respected member of the community than Dr. Clay, and no cowpoke has as much influence as the lawyers who work across the street in the offices of Hart, Bergin, and Kraus. Yet if it were the only way they could keep their cowboys, the citizens of Montana would cast all the doctors, lawyers, druggists, teachers, and real estate agents—especially the real estate agents—out of the state. Of that Ann is certain.

What do cowboys even stand for? They're a rowdy, restless bunch who make the world a better place for no one but the boss they work for. Schools or museums or art or music—none of these will ever be valued very highly in a region that has the cowboy as its patron saint. Ann knows that this attitude means her grandfather as well. But she hasn't seen much from him that exempts him from her judgment. Besides, she suspects that after all these years he thinks of himself as a cowboy more than a Sidey.

This is why Ann intends to leave Gladstone as soon as she graduates—if not before—and she's determined to head east, not west to Bozeman and Montana State or Missoula and the U, where her dad hopes she'll go.

Ann's friend Jane Folger visited her older sister in Grand Forks, North Dakota, last spring where her sister was a junior at the university, and Jane came back to Gladstone not only determined to attend the University of North Dakota but to take Ann with her. They would pledge the same sorority (Sigma Nu, to which Jane's sister also belonged) and share a room in the sorority house. The campus, Jane said, was like nothing in Montana. Enormous trees shaded the sidewalks, and ivy crawled up the bricks of the buildings. Jane told Ann about the concerts and plays they would attend, the tea parties and formal dances they would be invited to, and Ann found Jane's enthusiasm so compelling that Ann might very well apply to the University of North Dakota too.

Kitty McGregor hops onto the stool next to Ann.

“Thought I'd find you here,” Kitty says, spinning back and forth in half circles.

“But I thought you didn't come within a mile of the place on your day off,” Ann says. Kitty works at Finley's, and she complains often about how men stand at the magazine rack paging through
Cavalier
and
Stag
and then practically lick their chops when they look over at her behind the register.

“I'm delivering party invitations,” Kitty says. “And I have to do this in person, so it stays a secret.” She leans toward Ann and whispers, “Gwen's having a party tonight. Her parents are out of town, and Gwen's home alone.”

Gwen's parents trust her to stay home without supervision, yet Ann's father insisted on having Grandfather Sidey there with Ann and Will. And now Gwen is demonstrating that her parents' faith in her is wrong.

“I don't know,” Ann says. On the other side of the counter the waitress, Mrs. Tawny, who has been working at Finley's soda fountain for as long as anyone can remember, frowns in their direction and pokes at her hairnet where a few coils of steel-­gray hair have sprung loose. Mrs. Tawny probably resents Kitty and Ann because their jobs are easier and higher paying than hers.

Kitty raises her voice back to its normal level. “He's not going to be there, if that's what you're worried about.” Kitty, like everyone else in their circle, knows only that Ann no longer has a boyfriend; she has no idea what precipitated the breakup.

“How do you know?”

“Joan said. He left town with her brother, Rick, and a couple other guys. They were driving up to Kalispell to bring back a car Rick's buying from his cousin.”

“You're sure?”

“Joan said they left yesterday when Rick got off work.” Kitty shakes a finger in Ann's face. “You're going to this party. I mean it. I'll drive. I'll pick you up and we'll go to the Corral and eat first.” The Corral is a new drive-­in on the east side of town. The log fence enclosing the parking lot gives the place its theme and its name.

“All right,” Ann says, and then by tugging closed her own blouse tries to signal to Kitty that the top two buttons of her blouse are open and that her brassiere is visible through the gap.

Kitty waves away Ann's concern. “Maybe somebody else will notice!” With her eyes and a subtle nod of her head, she indicates the cowboy seated behind her. Kitty mouths the words
He's cute.

Throughout the elementary school years, Kitty was always one of the smallest girls in her class. In the past year, however, she has acquired a woman's full body, all the more obvious because she's still barely five feet tall. If it's true that Finley's customers leer at her, Kitty probably welcomes it.