Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

Outside on the street, Marybeth Sharpe sat on the sidewalk in a rocking chair beside the front door of her junk store, the only such store in a string of them that was still open for business. John used to give Leigh and Gordon a dollar apiece to go inside and pick something out: a broken green dash lamp; a woman’s leather boot stitched with yellowed seed pearls. A loop of steel attached to an empty husk felted with something like mold — a rabbit’s foot, they determined, carried close inside someone’s pocket for the most scarce and ardently sought-after resource in the county: luck. Even now, since there’d been a big snow in April, a few misty-eyed old-timers had begun to talk hopefully again of shifting rain belts. By such lights, you might still find a remote, wild, unexplored land somewhere in America, and a race of lost men living there; you might still find a city of gold, or a mountain of salt.

There was nothing remarkable about this last woman Leigh was waiting on in the diner. She must have seen the hand-painted sign for the Lucy Graves and come in off the highway, as everyone did, a constant if not thick stream of traffic from the westbound highway that kept Lions alive. She drove a silver Honda Civic, and wore white tennis shoes, blue jeans, a red T-shirt. Leigh seated her in a booth by the window. The woman ordered the lunch special, tuna melt on rye, and black coffee. She ate silently and efficiently, and set her white paper napkin folded beside her clean plate.

“Have just a minute?” she asked, when Leigh set the check facedown on the gold-flecked Formica table.

“What can I get you?”

“You’re as wide open as a telephone booth.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Anyone could step right in and call up whatever they wanted.”

The hair went up on the back of Leigh’s neck.

“You know what I’m talking about,” the woman said.

Leigh glanced back at Boyd and her mother. They were bent over the counter looking at something in the Burnsville newspaper.

“Look,” the woman said. “You can close the space above your head like this.” She moved her small, thick hands over her own head as if she were smoothing down flower petals into a cap around the top of her skull. “Just like that. For safety.”

“Safety?”

“Don’t you have the sense,” the woman said, “that something wants to bargain with you?”

Outside in the street the wind lifted the thin white hair off Marybeth Sharpe’s head as she rocked back and forth in her old wooden chair.

“Can I get you some change?” Leigh asked.

“Tell me you don’t feel it. Almost knocked me back a minute ago. What was in your head just now?”

Leigh picked up the check and looked at it without comprehending it, and set it back down.

“Isn’t there anyone that you love?” the woman asked.

Without thinking, Leigh felt Gordon’s hand in hers. She felt, without naming, an old song in a haunted place, a flare of heat in her chest, a key that fitted a door.

“Three seconds of your day,” the woman said, again gesturing with her hands around her head. “Close it up. Do it regular. Morning and night.” She took the check and began rooting around in her giant brown purse. She withdrew two five-dollar bills. “Something is already engaged.” She stood and smoothed her T-shirt over the folds of her belly. “Something’s in there with you already.”

Leigh held the check and cash and watched the woman leave. Outside in the street the woman made a U-turn and headed back toward the frontage road. Marybeth Sharpe waved at the car from her rocking chair.

Leigh set the woman’s dirty dish and cup in the bus tub, slipped the five-dollar bills into her pocket. She opened the register and closed it. Folded the woman’s check and dropped it in the trash.

“What was all that about?” Boyd asked. May had corrected his buttons.

Leigh wiped her hands on her apron. “Looking for a tall man in a pair of stolen coveralls.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I told her he went north, that you chased him out of town with a hatchet. She asked if you were the one who killed the dog.”

Boyd threw up his hands. Over breakfast alone he’d heard ten different versions of his own complicity in various crimes involving the stranger and his dog. “I didn’t kill the dog. I didn’t hang it, I didn’t burn it, and I didn’t run it over with my truck.”

“Leigh,” May called from behind the counter where she was stooped with her head in the dishwasher. “Will you get Gordon or John and tell them I need someone to fix this thing again?”

“I told you I would do it.”

“Don’t you touch it Boyd Hardy.”

He put his hands up, his beer bottle hooked between his thumb and forefinger. “Bring me another beer when you come back,” he told Leigh.

May stood and looked at Boyd. “Did you give her a key to the bar?”

“No?”

“I thought I was done for the day,” Leigh said.

“Go go go.” May waved her hand. “But tell John we need him over here.”

“I’m taking some of these sandwiches.”

When Leigh reached the shop, Dock and Emery Sterling were there with John, as they often were. Emery ran across the shop in his welding helmet to greet Leigh, then walked back to the workbench stiff legged with his long sunburnt arms uplifted and flexed, the way he almost always walked, as if he were playing a game: pretend I’m stuck in a human body that can only move like this. He was always smiling, his chin wet with his own spit, and flapping his hands like big pink birds. He was the same age as Gordon and Leigh, and though in all his life he had never spoken a word, Dock and his wife Annie insisted he had a language. When from the bed he reached up to touch the ends of his mother’s bright hair, that was a word. When he threw back his white-blond head and looked up at the stars that Dock told him were his cousins, that too was a word.

Emery loved the shop. He’d sit on the workbench and swing his legs in circles as he watched John show Dock how to weld the muffler bracket on Emery’s ATV, or how best to attach hog wire to the steel posts around the Sterlings’ lot, or how to prep steel pipe coral with phosphoric acid and water. For all of this instruction, Dock was given a small hourly wage because, John reasoned, Dock was doing most of the work himself. It wasn’t charity, but it wasn’t business, either. People would say John was out of his mind — he had a wife and son to support, for the love of God — and Dock, a huge man who lived modestly off his hogs and meager patch of alfalfa and whose wife had to watch their great big boy twenty-four hours a day, he, like everyone else, absolutely knew it, and was filled with equal parts wonder and gratitude. One, it seemed to him, never showed up without the other.

Late this afternoon, Dock and John were bent over a couple dozen drill tips. Dock couldn’t find a drill for his no-till planter that he liked, or that fit, and wanted to make his own. That was a song John Walker loved to hear.

“You want to get them as close to 60 Rockwell C as possible,” John was saying.

“Expensive?”

John shrugged. “Anything less,” he nodded at the window toward the board-hard ground, “you’ll be back in the shop halfway through the planting season looking for repairs or new drills.”

The men raised their hands in hello as Leigh propped herself on the workbench next to Emery. “Where’s Gordon?” she asked.

“In the house,” Dock said.

“Two ways to heat treat the forward face of each drill,” John said.

“Stick electrode,” Dock tried.

“That’s one,” John said. “Probably the one and only instance in the world in which you want to hear the steel crack after laying a bead. But there’s a second way.”