Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

He drove the length of town, and down the side street where the backhoe service shop had been when he was a boy, and from there, along a dirt road. Dock and Annie’s place made him stop in his tracks. The east side blackened and a dark smoky stain rising up the face. The staves buckling. The windows broken and glass shards glittering in a pile of dark blue ashes. Emery.

With a lighter or a book of matches. Gordon could see it. Emery would have been alone in the living room. Annie in the kitchen shaking cubed beef and white flour in a plastic grocery bag. Dock would have been out back among the pigs, kicking them gently with his old, flat, brown boots away from the gate and holding the heavy bucket overhead.

He drove farther down the frontage road toward his house, parked the truck, and got out. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders against the cold. There was a light on in his house, and before the window at the kitchen sink, May Ransom was filling the teakettle. Upstairs, the fainter yellow window of his room, where his mother had slept all summer.

Dock was in the shop. Inside, behind the tiny side window, he and his family were gathered. There was a little table set up that Gordon recognized as an end table from his own home, and Annie was slicing something on her plate, and Emery had his head back, roaring. Gordon could see his huge, milk-white teeth through the glass. It was early breakfast time.

So they were living in the shop now.

Well, it was cold out, and getting colder — a family needed a warm place. And it was true that Dock needed whatever extra work he could get, and that Gordon had turned it all over to him. Gordon stood outside the shop looking in. His eyes burned. He was glad they had it. He knew they’d take care of it and use it well. He turned back toward the old blue truck. He’d keep driving this morning. He could come back down here and see his mother in a few days.

“It’s punishment, this heat,” Dock said and took his seat at the counter. He was the first customer and the Lucy Graves was clean and quiet. May turned over a mug for him and filled it with black coffee. “That’s what Annie says. Still hitting ninety and coming up on October.”

“Annie ought to know better.” May extended a menu and he pointed at the blackboard breakfast special and she set the menu back on its stack. “It’s always been a desert.”

“And it’s cursed,” he said, nodding at her for emphasis.

“Oh, Dock, not you, too.”

“The sun wants to kill you, for one.”

“It’s a desert.” She turned on the griddle.

“It feels personal.”

“It isn’t personal. This is the country we live in.”

“How do you do that?”

“What, poach an egg? You put vinegar in the water, then you stir it fast when it gets hot.” She opened an egg with one hand and dropped it into the pot.

“What does that do? The vinegar?”

She shrugged. “It poaches the egg.” He watched her as she stirred and used a slotted metal spoon to gently lift the poached egg out of the water. She set it over some sliced ham on an English muffin. “You have any work?”

He rotated the plate before him and reached for the pepper. “Only because it’s John’s place. Once word gets out that the Walkers are gone, they’ll take their jobs to Sterling, or Greeley, or wherever else they go. There’s a place in Severance. They’ll drive out there.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

“It’s not about me,” he said. “I could be anyone. It’s about John and Gordon. How good they were. You think Gordon will come back?”

“I hope not.”

He nodded, chewing. “For my sake, I hope he doesn’t come back till we fix the house.”

“I imagine that shop is pretty right and tight,” May said.

“Tell the truth, I prefer it to the house we had.”

“I’m sure Annie doesn’t feel that way.”

“No,” Dock said. “It’s hard on her.” He shook his head. “God, this is good. What’s in that sauce?”

“Butter.”

When Boyd came in at the end of the day, he echoed Dock.

“Something wrong with this whole place.” He filled a glass of water for himself as May wiped down the tables one last time. “Probably always has been.” He opened the cooler and took out the sandwich she’d set aside for him. “We’ve been here eight years together. Leigh’s gone. Let’s get out.”

“And go where, Boyd?”

“Burnsville. Open a bigger place. Restaurant-pub combined.”

“You’re not half as imaginative as Leigh. Don’t you want to move to California? A little seaside town somewhere?”

“Well, give me some credit, Maybelline.” He unwrapped the sandwich, peeling open the bread to peek inside, and sat at the counter. “I guess I’ve moved around some.”

“I know it.”

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to read about this big swath from Nebraska through Colorado to New Mexico,” he said. “Trappers. Traders. Indians. Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese.”

“Yeah?”

“So much blood. Had this big gray book with orange lettering on the cover. Used to read through my fingers,” he said, “the stories were that gruesome.” He took a bite of the sandwich. “And I was a teenaged boy. I didn’t get squeamish easy.”

“Huh,” May said, and set out stacks of lunch meat to thaw for the next day.

“The scalping and hacking and butchering. The things they did with their—”

May put up her hand. “OK,” she said, “I get it.”

“And all of that for what?” He took a napkin from the dispenser. “My bar? Your diner? A Gas & Grocer?” He shook his head.

“How is Burnsville any different?”

He counted off the names of its business establishments. Taco Bell, Motel 6, Perkins, Ponderosa Grill, the good Italian place, the reservoir.

“Oh, Burnsville,” she said. “Oh, you shining city on a hill.” He grabbed her by the arm as she passed behind him and he spun her around and smacked her bottom. She laughed. “Oh, you beacon of hope for all the world.”

“You have a real attitude problem,” he said. “You know that?”

“Let’s get out of here. Been cooped up all day.” Just as she said so, a woman knocked on the locked door, shielded her eyes with her hand and peered in. They could hear her muted call of hello through the glass. There was a white minivan parked in front of the bar. May unlocked the diner door and the woman stepped back as she pushed it open.

“How can I find the man who owns that bar?” she asked. She was tall and gaunt and had long, dark hair that hung down to her waist, and circles around her eyes. May froze and her stomach went cold.

“You got him,” Boyd said, circling up behind May. “Need a cold one? Should be open. Just came over here to get a sandwich.”

“I’m the sister of the man who drowned in your water tower.” She reached into her coat pocket and took out a white sheet of paper. A copy of the newspaper story out of Greeley.

“Oh, dear God,” May said.

“When I saw about the dog,” she said, and her voice broke, “I knew.”

Inside the diner, she would not sit. Boyd instinctively went behind the lunch counter and crossed his arms. May turned on the orange overhead lights and took a stool.

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“Did you drive all the way from Pennsylvania?”

Behind the counter on the freezer was a copy of the same newspaper article, held up with a magnet for the highway clientele following the sign for the living ghost town. The woman was staring at it.

“What kind of people hang something like that on the wall?”

Boyd turned and looked at it. Mystery man in a ghost town, it read. Spirits trapped in the walls of the bar. Ghost of a ghost, it read: the last recorded instance of a man drowning himself in a well or water tower in Lions was in 1923. That man, gone nearly a century ago, fit the same description as the recent wanderer, it read. Many residents admitted to being spooked by the coincidence.