Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

“Didn’t want you anymore? What would that have to do with anything?” She raised both eyebrows. “Besides, you were his best friend. You should have seen him the day he saw you making out with that man from Denver. He had his head on the steering wheel out there for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, Leigh.”

Leigh’s face flushed and her stomach turned. John’s binoculars. “You don’t know how hard it was,” she said dumbly. Gordon saw the man lead her into the factory. Did he see the man walk out two minutes later, alone?

“And then there was your proposal to Dex Meredith. On the day of John’s service, no less.”

“I never proposed to Dex Meredith.”

“Yes, you did. You were drunk.”

Leigh turned her back on May and looked out at the street. She put her hand on the counter and closed her eyes again. “You don’t know anything about it. You refuse to see.”

May circled in front of Leigh and took her daughter’s chin with her thumb and forefinger. “Look at me.” May’s face was lined with wrinkles and spotted in new places — on her temple, on her cheek. Her eyes were a bloodshot, watery blue. The wraith of a long lost beauty looked out. “Your options aren’t as unlimited as you think they are.”

Leigh twisted her face away. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

The bells rang on the swinging glass door and Boyd stepped inside.

“Bring that slice of pie to Georgie,” May said. “You’re going to have to have a more frank talk with her.”

“I’m all done here,” Georgianna said. She stood up from the table where she’d been funneling sugar and looked across the diner at the three of them. “You know what John used to say about that mesa story? Boggs?” She smiled and crossed the room, stood beside them at the counter. They stared at her, not realizing she’d heard them. Leigh’s face was red with embarrassment.

“He knew the story?” May asked.

“Knew it! John said his grandfather made it up himself, just so he could get out of the shop for a few days at a time, keep everyone away and take a break.”

“The heck you say, Georgie. Walkers lived to work,” Boyd said. “That was John Walker or I never knew the guy.”

“But Lord could he be lazy!” Georgie said. “He could put his feet up and read three novels in a row with nothing but a can of beans, a can of sardines, and a can of peaches to interrupt him. And Gordon’s the same way.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how many paperbacks we have in that house. Hundreds, all of them silly. Full of cowboys and gold and stagecoach robberies.”

“Westerns,” May said.

“Westerns,” Georgianna repeated.

“Georgie what are you telling us?” Boyd bumped Georgianna’s shoulder playfully with his own and grinned. “There was never any Boggs?”

Georgianna gave them all a funny look. “What,” she said, “you don’t mean really? A real flesh and blood ghost up there? All these hundred and fifty years?” She shook her head and looked out at the street. “Now wouldn’t that be scary?”

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.