Richard Ford - Rock Springs

“Things seem better now, though. Here, at least,” Sims said.

“Not really,” Cleo said. “What’s next? It’s anybody’s guess.”

“Maybe there’ll be work here.”

“I don’t ever want to touch another head professionally,” Cleo said. She looked down then, and Sims thought she might be ready to cry again. He didn’t want that, though he didn’t think he could blame her. She’d told him her whole life in ten minutes, and once the telling was finished the life itself seemed over, too. His was not that way. Not yet, anyway. Marge could get well. He could go back to work. Different and good things could happen to them. They were young. But that wasn’t Cleo’s lot in life. She had plenty to regret and cry about, and it wasn’t over yet, not by any means.

Cleo started wagging her head again slowly, and he knew she was about to start sobbing, maybe even cracking up completely, and he would be there alone with her for that. He thought of himself waiting outside a dingy emergency room inside which Cleo, someone he didn’t even know, lay strapped to a gurney, heavily sedated, while Marge, his own wife whom he loved, was asleep and dying and alone three floors up.

He could see Cleo’s red head begin to lower toward the tabletop. Suddenly Sims stood up, leaned across the table over the brandy bottle, took Cleo’s damp soft face in his hands. “Don’t cry now, Cleo,” he said. “Things’ll be all right. Things’re going to be a lot better. You’ll see. I’ll see to it myself.

“You will?” Cleo said and blinked at him. “How exactly will you do that?”

That night he slept with Cleo in Stan and Betty Krukow’s big king-sized bed upstairs. Cleo insisted on leaving the television tuned to a rock music channel, but without the sound. This made the room flash with light all night long and made Sims regret he was there. Once or twice he saw Cleo peeping over his shoulder at something going on in the fantasy world where the silent music came from, a world of smoky, dark streets and Halloween masks and doors opening onto violent surprises. This was an act of kindness, Sims thought, and there was no use letting anything bother him. This was not his life and wouldn’t ever be. None of it made any sense, but it didn’t make any difference, either. Months from then, if Marge lived, he’d tell her about it and they’d have a big laugh together. Cleo would be long gone. Maybe he and Marge would’ve moved, too, to another house or to another state.

Sometime before dawn, when the light was gray and the room was still except for Cleo’s breathing, Sims woke up starded out of a terrible dream. On the TV screen children were dancing and smiling around a man wearing a goat’s head and playing an electric guitar. But in his dream Sims had hanged himself from a tall pine-tree limb in a forest somewhere. He’d written letters explaining everything — he’d already seen them being opened by his friends. “When you read this,” the letter said, “I, Vic Sims, will already be dead.” Yet, even though he was dead and hanging from a new rope with birds perched on top of his head, Marge was somehow still alive and in her hospital room, smiling out of a sunny window, looking better than she had in weeks. She would survive. But it was too late for him. All was lost and ruined forever.

When he woke up later in the morning, the TV was off and Cleo was gone. The dog was not downstairs, and Stan and Betty’s other car was missing from the garage. Cleo had left the coffee pot on, but there was no note.

Sims couldn’t get out fast enough. He slipped out the back door and ran across the backyard — relieved not to see Cleo drive up in the Krukows’ van. Inside, he took a long shower, shaved and put on a clean suit. Then he drove straight out to the hospital, arriving an hour late with a bunch of flowers. Marge said she’d assumed he’d slept in and just unplugged the phone. She said he looked exhausted and that her illness was having bad effects on him, too. Marge cried then, and afterward said she felt better.

Marge stayed in the hospital another three weeks. At home, Sims stayed inside and saw Cleo mostly out the window — the way he’d seen her before the night he’d slept with her in the Krukows’ bed — walking the dog, hanging out laundry, driving into and out of the driveway with sacks of groceries. But Cleo had begun to seem different. She never called him, and on the times he couldn’t avoid seeing her outside she never acted as if he was anything more than her sister’s neighbor, which was a big relief. But she referred to Sims by his first name whenever she saw him. “Hello, Vic? she would say, across the fence, where she was walking the dog. She would smile a kind of mean, derisive smile Sims didn’t like, as if there was a joke attached to his name that he didn’t know about. “How’s Marge, Vic ?” she’d say other times, though he was certain Cleo had never seen Marge. Before, Cleo had seemed out-of-luck, vulnerable, vaguely alluring and desirable. A waif. Now she seem experienced and cynical, a woman who had ridden with Satan’s Diplomats and told about it. A hard woman, a woman who could cause you big trouble.

In two weeks, Sims noticed a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the Krukows’ driveway. It was a low, sleek thing with chrome parts and high handlebars, and after a few minutes Cleo and a big, nasty-looking biker came out, got on, and rode away with a terrible roar. The biker had on black leathers, earrings, and a bandanna over his head like a pirate. Cleo had on exactly the same clothes.

For a week, the biker hung out in the Krukows’ house. The bike had California plates that said LOSER, and once or twice Sims saw Cleo and the biker hanging clothes on the line in the back, smoking cigarettes and talking softly. The biker wore no shirt most of the time and drank beer, and kept on his pirate’s bandanna. His chest and arms were stringy and pale and hard-looking, with tattoos. Sims understood this was the friend of Cleo’s former husband, the one who’d tried to sacrifice her to Satan. He wondered what the two of them could have in common.

The Krukows came back two days before Marge was released from the hospital. The biker disappeared the same day, and the next morning Sims saw Stan carry Cleo’s bags and some boxes out to the car, drive away with Cleo, then in a little while come back alone. Sims never saw Cleo again, though he did see the biker in a gas station while he was on his way to the hospital to bring Marge home.

Marge stayed home in bed another three weeks, but as it turned out she didn’t have to take the horrible and prolonged treatments the doctor had predicted. She started getting better almost immediately and in a month was ready to go back to her job at the bar. The doctor said that sometimes people with strong dispositions just couldn’t be held down, and that Marge was lucky and would probably be fine and live a long life.

On the morning Marge was getting ready for her first day back at the bar, the phone rang in the kitchen and Sims answered it. It was almost nine and he was reading the paper while Marge was getting dressed.

“Vic,” a voice said, a man’s voice, a voice he didn’t know. There was a long pause then, during which it sounded like the receiver was being muffled and talking was going on.

“Yes,” Sims said. “Who is it?” It occurred to him that it was probably Marge’s boss calling from the bar, needling Sims about being a housewife or something like that. Marge’s boss, George, was a fat, good-natured Greek guy everybody liked. “Is this Big George?” Sims said. “I know what you’re going to tell me, George. You better watch your step out there.”

“Vic,” the voice said again. Sims somehow sensed it wasn’t George — though it could’ve been — and in the same instant he realized he had no earthly idea who it was or could be, but that it wasn’t good. And in the silence that followed his own name, the feeling of a vast outside world opened up in him, and scared him so that he stood up beside the wall phone and stared at his own phone number. 876-8076. This was somebody calling from far away.