Lions (18 page)

The Quonset hut was lit up and the windows in the shop hung in the dark.

Dock opened the door. Annie stepped out from behind him.

“Have you seen him?” Leigh asked before they could say hello. They both looked at her blankly. “Gordon.”

“Is he back?” Dock asked.

“Like two or three weeks ago he came back. A month maybe. I don't know. They found his truck.”

“Who found his truck?”

“He hasn't been here at all?”

Emery was behind them, rocking on the workbench and listening to radio ministry. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and Leigh realized the radio wasn't John's radio.

“Are you living here?” she looked from Annie to Dock and back again.

“We had a house fire,” Dock said, raising his hand. “It's temporary, it's temporary. This place is Gordon's. We know that. Georgie knows we're here. Place is right and tight and it's getting cold.”

“Did Gordon see you here?”

Dock put his hands up. “I haven't seen him.”

Annie pulled Leigh inside. “This is temporary,” she said. She put her arm around Leigh. “No shortage of empty houses around here for us to choose from. Tea? Hot cocoa? We have a hotplate.”

Emery stumbled off the workbench and came to the doorway, his thumbs hooked together and elbows hyperextended. The blanket spilled around his ankles.

“I should check the factory,” Leigh said. “Before it gets dark. I'm sure he's camped out there being, you know, being Gordon.”

“I don't know,” Dock said. “Was he OK last time you saw him?”

“He was,” she shrugged. “You know. Himself. Like the summer.”

“Let me come with you. It's already dark.”

“It's OK.”

“Leigh. You've got me worried.”

Driving into town beside Dock, Leigh saw the beautiful old blue truck impounded behind chain-link with two dozen other cars and trucks in various states of rusted out disrepair. It was terrible, seeing it in a pile of junk like that, among all those discarded and unwanted vehicles. That was John and Gordon's truck. Gordon loved that truck. And he couldn't have driven north without it. Was he in a bar ditch somewhere? Hurt? Her hand went to the beauty mark behind her ear that he used to touch as he started tracing a line down her neck.

“That's his truck, alright,” Dock said. He took a phone out of his shirt pocket. “Why don't we call Chuck before we do anything or go anywhere?” He pulled over. “You talked to him yet?”

Leigh shook her head. He dialed and handed her the phone. She greeted Chuck and nodded and looked from the window to Dock and back again.

“Well, have you talked to Georgie?” she asked. “And what does she say?”

“Was there anything in the truck?” Dock whispered to Leigh to ask Chuck.

“Was there anything in the truck?” She shook her head. She looked at Dock. “It was pulled over northbound on the county road between Alton's and Jorgensen's.”

“No note?” Dock asked.

“No note, nothing?” Leigh said into the phone. She shook her head. She waited. “Mr. Garcia you can't auction that truck.”

“Has anyone filed a missing persons report?” Dock asked.

“No,” Leigh said. “Don't do that. Not yet. He'll be in the factory. Let me check. I'll call you back.”

“I'm so sorry, Leigh,” Dock said when she handed him the phone.

“I'm not surprised he's gone, but I don't understand about the truck.”

“Georgie says he's fine.”

“I know. But Chuck doesn't trust her judgment.”

“We'll keep looking. We'll check your factory in the daylight, OK? If he's there, he's not going out in this.”

Outside, sleet came down slantwise in gleaming needles. Back at the Walkers' shop she slipped away and crossed the yard. The sound of wind chimes Georgianna left hanging. The wind whistling through the tree in her own yard. She walked across the empty dirt road. She could see the light in the weld shop behind her and imagined that it was John Walker in there, with his wry smile, and that soon he'd be closing up and heading back to the house where he and Georgianna and Gordon would be having dinner.

She gazed over the silent field and toward the colossal ruin of the factory, where she saw, in an upper window, a flare of brightness. The light bounced into the shabby lace of tea-colored hogweed, and disappeared. She held her breath, searching the dark amorphous field, then tore the whole way across it, under the chain-link in the old place, and over the glitter of glass from Alan Ranger's beer bottles and through the door. It was pitch dark. She paused, breathing hard, looking for the stairs in the shadows, and ran to them. Up the narrow, ladder-like steps to the second story, but no, the light had been from higher still. The tower? Had he finished the steps up to the tower? She ran up one more level to the broken stairs and looked up into the darkness. Still broken. And no light. She spun around 360 degrees, twice, three times.

She went to the far east window and called his name. Down the ladder and all around the second story, calling his name, swearing at him. No light. No sound but the weather outside the broken windows.

Dock found her in a heap on the floor.

“I saw him.”

“Where?”

“He won't answer.” She lifted her head and called him again. Dock held still and listened.

“Come on, Leigh. It's late.”

“He's here somewhere.”

“There's no one here. It's empty. It's late.”

“But I saw him.”

“Where?”

“Up in a window. From the yard.”

“You could not have possibly seen that far.”

“I saw a light flash.”

“Lightning.”

She shook her head.

“Listen. We'll come back in the morning, in the daylight, and look through every single room. If he's here, or was here, there's no way he won't have left some sign. Mud or something, right? We'll come back in the morning. That's just a couple hours.”

“Promise?”

“Of course I do.”

Dock took her under his arm and walked her to his truck. He turned on the heat and handed her a dry jacket to put over her shoulders.

“Dock,” she said quietly. “Do you remember telling me and Gordon about Echo Station?”

He glanced at her. “Sure. That old game.”

“I did it. That same night. I snuck out of the house and I went out there and did it.”

“Did you?”

“And I'm afraid, Dock.”

“Leigh,” he said softly. “That's a children's game.”

At dawn a cold bracing wind sang over the brittle fields. The sky was the color of brushed aluminum. Dock and Leigh searched the factory and its grounds in the cold, but there were no tracks other than their own, and there was no one inside, nor any sign that anybody else had been. He was just here, she thought. He was just. Here.

“Tell me again,” Dock said, pouring hot water into her teacup, “what you saw?” May was at the diner but Boyd stood behind them in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed. He locked eyes with Dock and shook his head.

“Two flashes of a flashlight,” Leigh said. “Like a signal. It came out of a window and across the field.”

He handed her a small glass of juice and two aspirin. “We have to call Chuck.”

“OK.”

“We don't think that was Gordon you saw,” Boyd said from the doorway.

Leigh turned around. “What do you think it was?”

“We think you're upset,” he said, nodding at his own statement.

“I am upset.”

“Wherever he is,” Dock said, “seems like he wants a little space right now.”

“When did you see him last, Leigh?” Boyd looked at her hard. “What was the last thing you talked about?”

“I don't remember,” she said. Boyd shook his head. Heat rose in her face. “What? Why are you shaking your head at me?”

“Alright,” Dock said. “Let's get Annie and Emery and go have some real breakfast. Chuck can meet us at the diner.”

“I don't want to go to the diner.”

“Leigh,” Boyd said, “this is like work. It's something we have to do. OK?”

Was she supposed to have followed him up north to see what it was all about? Then move in with him in his dorm? And now what? Chase him? Hunt him down across the plains? Move in with Georgianna in case he should show up with his dead father, for tea? Move back in with May or into the empty factory, waiting for someone who didn't want any of the things of this world? Who didn't seem even to belong to it?

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.