Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

High country.

Saying that boy? Gordon?

Pretty girl.

Cross to bear.

Goddammed shop.

Worthless ground.

Big promises.

Some garden.

Rats and weeds.

The busy whisper of rumor and wind shushed through the trees as the barometric pressure began to drop and the hair rose on everybody’s arms and necks. Georgianna stood across the yard looking pale, soft, vibrating at a low, even undetectable frequency. She wore her light green dress, the color of June Grass, her hair the color of the pewter sky behind her, as she floated from one neighbor to the next. Gracious. Empty. Invisible against the curtain of the green and gray world.

She was amazed by the number of people who had turned out, people from Greeley and Sterling, from as far west as Ault and Severance, everyone who knew John and respected him and had enlisted his work. Her old neighbors and friends stood around her, uncomfortable in the heat, imagining where they would go next, not only in the days ahead, but after the meal, and later that night. Next hour, next day, next city, next world. Apologizing in every other breath for her husband being gone, as if their continued existence somehow made them culpable for the death of one among them. But isn’t it written that God is close to the crushed in spirit? And so what is knowing God but having known and lost a tremendous love? And what is knowing a tremendous love but seeing it everywhere, in everything, at all times?

They ate and ate and ate in that terrible heat. They felt but did not speak of the man in the tower. They opened cans of Coke and 7-Up and Country Time lemonade and beer but they didn’t touch the water.

May set out a molded aspic of hard-boiled eggs and diced ham. They ate the glistening, savory jelly off Styrofoam plates. Dock mindlessly grilled three packages of hot dogs until there was nothing left but blackened husks. The clouds evaporated and a blinding white sun burned through a royal blue sky and the din of the creaking fields grew all around Gordon. That others could hear the sound, he was certain, for each old man and woman, when left for a moment alone on the scabby lawn beneath that searing daylight, would tip his head, and stare off into the distance where dust coiled like smoke above the weeds, right where his mother had fixed her own gaze, as if suddenly attuned to a low, pervasive hum.

“It’s just the sound of the highway,” Leigh said.

Gordon turned and searched her face. He looked down at the hand she’d placed on his forearm, and back up to her eyes.

“Poor son of a bitch,” Levon, who owned the garage, said, standing a few feet away. “Begging Georgianna’s pardon,” he said. Then Levon looked at Leigh, his mouth twisted up in a sorry, half smile. “Don’t hitch yourself to that wagon, sweetheart,” he said.

Gordon gently withdrew his arm and stepped away.

Levon shrugged. “What?” he said, his hands up, palms open, deflecting blame. “Apple don’t fall too far from the tree is all I’m saying.”

“They may be old and they may be ugly but they’re right about most of it,” Boyd told Leigh as she approached the cooler set up in the shade of the giant old cottonwood. “College is the only way out of this hole,” he said. “Go be a lawyer. Make a pot of money.”

“I am.”

“I have no doubt. You and el Gordo.”

“Pft.” She gave Boyd a look.

“You should follow him up there, Leigh. Maybe it’s a spell like in a fairy tale, and the Walkers have been waiting for a beautiful princess to rescue them from the terrible Boggs.” He waved his fingers in the air as he said the old pioneer’s name.

“I am not a princess.”

“Or maybe,” Boyd said, “maybe it isn’t Boggs at all he’s seeing. Maybe it’s a woman. A whole bunch of them.”

She rolled her eyes at him and stooped to open the cooler. “Women?”

“Haven’t you heard of that cemetery up north? Stretches in a long line across the grassland north of Horses?”

She stood with a green bottle of beer dripping melted ice through her fingers. Boyd eyed it, raised his eyebrows, and took the cap off for her with his key chain. “What cemetery?” she asked, and took a sip.

It was discovered, he said, when a group of students from her future college were surveying the grounds outside of town and found a series of faint stains in the dirt, each separated by about a mile, like a barely perceptible broken line down the middle of a wide dirt highway. Beneath each mark, the remains of a woman or a girl, all of them buried in dresses, striped robes, sheepskin blankets, and European boots, and hide slippers and beaded moccasins, even a pair of tennis shoes. Whatever the journey, whatever the trek, the women and children were always the slowest, so they were always the first killed by whoever pursued them from behind, and often as not, they were the only ones killed. Whatever the goal of travel — the next ridge, a hunt, a seam of gold — it always cost something. The so-called graveyard that these archaeology students found stretched some six hundred miles long, by exactly the width of a single woman or girl.

“They just buried them and moved on?”

“Gotta keep up,” Boyd said. “Stay with the head of the pack.”

“What shit.”

He raised his hand. “True story. Look it up in the library when you get to school.”

Leigh looked away. “So every woman was traveling the same path over all those years? Through Horses?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s wider than a single line of bodies. Maybe there’s girls and women buried everywhere.” With the toe of his boot he opened the cooler and nodded at it. She stooped and took out another for him. Across the Walkers’ backyard on the brittle yellow grass old women were hugging each other and men shaking hands, saying their goodbyes.

“You know we’re just messing with you, Leigh,” Boyd said. “Gordon’s a good man. You stick with him.”

“You and your shit stories,” she said, and took a long pull off her beer.

“That was good,” he said. “You timed that just right, the jibe and the drink. You’ll be real nice decoration in a bar when you grow up.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t you want to move into John and Georgie’s house? Or no, wait, maybe Gordon will build you a nice little Quonset hut, right off the Quonset hut.”

She closed her eyes a moment. “Leave me alone, Boyd.”

“Don’t believe it about John having saved a hundred thousand dollars, either. Walkers don’t have five bucks between them. Careful with the beer.”

“I’m fine.”

Faces of the old white men and women began to pull away, then the cars pulled away, U-turning slowly and heavily on the dirt and gravel road, heading back toward town and back toward the vast dried-up farms to the east and south.

May covered the leftover sandwiches and Leigh took down the card tables. Annie and Dock brought Emery into the house where he clutched a grape jelly sandwich that dribbled down his yellow Snoopy T-shirt and Georgianna put him in front of the television and found cartoons, unrecognizable cartoons of blocky uninteresting squares and triangles in a blank yard, and she and the Sterlings talked about taking over the shop.

Gordon went looking for Leigh in the kitchen, but found May. “Leigh went to the diner,” May told him.

“I thought it was closed.”

“She brought back the pitchers and plates.”

“By herself?”

May set her gloved hands down in the suds and looked at Gordon. “You got to forgive her, Gordon.”

“Forgive her for what?”

She paused, and picked up a casserole pan. “She’s not as smart or as pretty as she thinks she is.”

“Leigh?”