Bonnie Nadzam: Lions

All of this Chuck relayed weeks later at the bar, and the report made the men and women shake their heads.

The Walkers, God.

“You didn’t ask him anything? Who he was? Where he was from?” Chuck inquired of John the evening after the stranger disappeared. He wrapped his fingers around the warm coffee mug and leaned forward in the kitchen chair. Georgianna set a thick slice of yellow pound cake before him.

John shrugged. “He needed a shower and a meal.”

Chuck smiled at his old neighbor and cut into the cake with his fork. “Well. At least you didn’t keep him.”

“He said he couldn’t stay.”

Couldn’t stay.

Can you imagine?

Bringing a man off the highway like that into your home?

With your wife and son?

He could’ve been sick.

He could’ve been on the run.

It’s a nice enough impulse but my God. You got to be more careful than that these days.

Could’ve been a thief, a drunk, or worse.

Could’ve been a foreigner.

He looked like a foreigner.

Anything could have happened.

They tsked, they looked at each other with faces of wonder. They never could understand John Walker or what seemed to be his lifetime of poor decision making. The backward code he seemed to live and work by — his entrepreneurial failure somehow as perpetual as it was absolute. It was as if each of the Walkers in his time was choosing again and again, every morning in his workshirt with his first cup of coffee, to fail. They worked for free, or seemed to; they forgot or neglected to bill their neighbors; they worked so many hours a day, but scarcely profited by it at all.

What other, secret work did these Walkers live on?

People wondered. People talked.

John Walker. Just look at the guy.

That long, lean frame, the patched workshirt, the steel-toed boots. And that look in his eye, as if he had seen right behind your face and into the inner workings of your brain and had decided, upon seeing everything there was to see about you, to say nothing. A nod of the head.

And Gordon. Did you ever see a more serious eighteen-year-old?

Works harder than three grown men put together.

Abnormal, tell you what.

Yeah but he’s got Leigh Ransom’s attention.

A knowing look, a groan.

In such a small town she seemed a great beauty, her hair long and brownish gold and tumbling over her shoulders and down her back the way the g and the h fell with bulky grace through the letters of her name.

Gordon must be hung like a bull, someone said.

Everyone laughed.

That girl is vain about her hair.

All women are vain about their hair.

And then there was John Walker’s regular disappearance out of town, presumably to tend remote customers up near Three Bells or Horses, customers who, if they really existed, were probably not paying him for his work, either.

Walkers used to run a farrier service out of their old trucks, someone remembered.

Yeah, but no one up north has horses anymore.

No one up there has anything anymore.

Nothing up there but an old gas station. Used to belong to that Indian guy with no teeth.

Gerald. But he wasn’t an Indian. He’d make you an RC with whiskey.

Sharp as a tack.

Whatever happened to him?

A shrug.

Well anyway, gone now. Nothing and no one up there.

See then? Walker’s visiting Boggs. Got to be.

More laughter.

So had they sometimes jokingly cast John Walker as the unlucky Good Samaritan of local legend in which a man and all of his sons and grandsons were bound through the generations to tend an immortal, wounded pioneer, one Lamar Boggs, purportedly left for dead by his nineteenth-century companions who were racing west like hell for leather after a better life. The first Walker in the region found him, nursed him, and set him up safe and sound in a tiny hut on the mesa. One you could still find if you drove north, and were really looking for it.

And truth be told, the joke sort of stood to reason. In over a hundred years — in spite of all rationale and opportunity as their neighbors fled drought, dust, influenza, auctioneers, grasshoppers, fire, boredom, and disappointment — the Walkers never left Lions. If there were other stragglers in town, it was because they didn’t have the means to leave, or weren’t staying permanently, but working various financial stratagems to land someplace better. Denver, say, or Boise. They liked to say to each other in Lions that those who had come to America and come west, as their families had, did so because they were risk takers and big dreamers. But what, they wondered, had been the Walkers’ dream? For what had they taken the risk of coming out here and then, against all reason, decided to stay? They might have thrived somewhere else, but were riveted to the plain, it seemed, couldn’t leave if they’d wanted to. If old Boggs was really up there, the Walkers were certainly the men to tend him.

“No one else would stick around to do it,” Boyd Hardy said. He stood behind the bar with arms folded in front of his chest, a bottle of Bud Light in one hand, leaning back against the counter.

“Tell you what,” Dock said, and pointed his beer bottle in Boyd’s direction. “If they weren’t the best men in the county I’d say you had it wrong.”

“Maybe he just goes north to be alone,” May Ransom said from behind the bar, where she often ended up after closing her diner across the street. She refilled her own glass of boxed white wine.

Boyd stared outside, not moving. “Seems to me there’s alone enough to be had right here in town.”

When weeks later Chuck told them about the stranger’s stop at the Walkers’ that night — the shower, the cocoa, the buttered toast — everyone shot accusatory looks at Boyd, who by that time was a little hangdog, his thick silver mustache a little ragged, his own truck oiled up and ready to pack and leave Lions for good.

“You all saw him,” Boyd said.

Yes, they’d all seen him.

But that evening in the Walkers’ kitchen, the man had bent over the table with John and Georgianna and spooned scrambled eggs into his mouth, perfectly sound, perfectly human, if the Walkers and Chuck could be believed.

They’d talked about the country, Chuck reported, and the stranger spoke like a stranger indeed, full of questions about what they grew in town, and for how long, and how it was that this little place tacked to the high plains had managed to survive.

“Does it look like it survived?” Georgianna asked, and smiled.

According to Chuck, they talked snowmelt, irrigation, alfalfa, hog feed, and welding. The man had a cousin who was a metalworker, and who would have envied John’s setup to no end.

“A metalworker,” John said, grinning and displaying his evenly gapped teeth.

The man wiped his index finger across the plate to get all the yolk and licked it clean. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.” He set his hands in his lap. “Been hungry.”

Georgianna was back up at the stove. She set two warm hard-boiled eggs on the counter beside her. “For your Sadie,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“And another couple for you coming up, no arguments.”

“Thank you so much.” He spread his long hands open on the kitchen table and stood.

To the west the sky was slowly darkening to blue-black and the box elder branches were beginning to circle and twist in the increasing wind.

“Warming up to rain,” John said, “but it won’t rain.” It had rained a week earlier, a thin and drizzly sputter that would turn out to be the last until mid-October when a cold and wet turn of weather would freeze into sheets of jagged glass across the plain.

John and Georgianna stood beside each other inside the window, watching the man carry both eggs in one hand across the grass to his dog. She wagged her tail as the man approached and took each egg, one at a time, into her mouth. Then the man stooped and spoke to her, scratched her ears. John put his hand on the small of his wife’s back.