Walker was bringing this man home, to his family?
To his wife and son?
What was the matter with the man? Tend him out here, set him up in the stable, for God’s sake. He could be sick. He’d get every last one of them sick.
In the weeks to come, no one would come for him, no one would claim him.
How was it that he had simply appeared in the snow like that?
And wounded like that?
He could only have been alone and running from something. No one would just leave him.
If they had, they weren’t good people.
And who would’ve traveled among such men?
He’d bring them all bad luck.
He was a drunk, or a thief, or worse.
Likely he was being pursued. Now his pursuers would bear down on Lions, on their own homes.
Give him some water, give him some bandages, and set him on his way.
They couldn’t have exactly said why this man gave them the horrors, but he did. After several weeks, Walker would finally have been convinced to take the poor man out of town to protect his own family — and to protect Boggs himself. The young man would’ve still been recovering, still weak. They’d have gone together on horseback up country and built a small hut of timber and earth with a floor of hardpacked dirt. For all its ruggedness, remarkably straight.
In all the years to come the young man who lived there would remain unchanged. He’d wear the same mended shirt and blackened rabbit skin leggings he’d coveted as rugged and wild when he first left St. Louis. He wouldn’t mind the cold, or the heat. Walker would bring him cloth, needles, thread, coffee and sugar, blankets, some flints and steel, and small tools and promise to return after a week or two with more food. When he did return, with rabbits and sage hens, the young man ate everything before him and wanted only to know that Walker would come again.
There’s a radiance to the edges of each blade of grass up there on that mesa. A hardness to every line. Wind jerks the stains of clouds over the ground like apparitions in a magic lantern slide, and if you were to pass by, you might see a pair of white hands pressed against the glass of the hut’s single window and the white circle of a face looking out, waiting.
~ ~ ~
Leigh and Gordon left home in the old truck, their things packed on a small trailer and in the bed, blue tarps neatly cinched down over all of it.
“They’ll stop and ticket you if you don’t tie it down real well,” he said, circling the bed and checking each taut hitch.
There’s a photograph of them from their last night together in Lions that Georgianna kept pinned to her refrigerator for years. It’s evening in the photograph, late summer. Leigh is barefoot in a pair of Gordon’s jeans that she cut off into shorts, with a red bandana tied over her hair. She’s sitting on the stoop in front of the Walkers’ old white house, next to Georgianna, who’s in her long cotton yellow sundress and one of John’s old shirts, and has her arm around Leigh, face turned to her. Leigh has both fists beneath her chin, elbows propped on her brown knees. In the foreground, to the left, Gordon is carrying a box of her clothes. He’s looking past May, who took the photograph, as if there were someone or something just behind her. His expression is one of intelligence and calm. If you were holding the photograph in your hand, he’d be looking right over your shoulder.
In the truck, on the way, there was a weight and a tightness in the silence between them. They held hands briefly, twice, their interlaced fingers resting in the space between the driver and passenger side seats where even a season ago she would have been sitting. The first time Gordon disengaged his hand to turn the radio station, and the second time Leigh pulled hers away.
The truck scattered desert light as they sped over the highway. The grass thinned out as the plain beneath them rose. Pleated and wrinkled, the golden ground unrolled in an unmarked parchment around them. Outside the windshield, a tiny, empty grain elevator jackknifed against the sky, which was a perfect heartache blue. They’d rolled their windows down and the air outside was hot as smoke and the loose daylight and dust made their eyes fill with tears.
“I thought I’d feel freer.”
“We’re not even halfway there.”
She turned the radio off, then on again, and scanned. Country songs. Commercials. She turned it off. “Are there any radio stations up there?”
“Up where?”
“Where you go.”
“It’s not like I drive to the moon.”
“Why didn’t you ever take me?”
He gave her a look of surprise. “You’d want to go?”
“Not really.”
He said nothing.
“I didn’t think it would be like this,” she said. “This summer. This drive to college.”
“Me either.”
“I guess I have to forgive your shitty behavior.”
Gordon glanced at her a moment, then focused on the road before him. “Guess I have to forgive yours.”
Five miles outside of the city, when the traffic increased and the highway widened, Leigh made him stop at a Walmart, where she bought a blue and white polka-dot dress that flared out from her waist, and glitter for the backs of her wrists, and earrings of looped silver wire. She bought soap and lotion and a caddy for the shower, and new underwear and three T-shirts, new sheets, two towels and three scented candles. Gordon waited in the café, where he drank a cup of black coffee and made funny faces across his table to a child in the adjacent booth. When she was finished shopping, he waited for her outside while she changed in the bathroom.
“Very nice,” he said when she had lifted her bags in the cab of the truck and turned for him in her polka dots. “But I like you in your regular clothes.”
“Don’t be a party pooper,” she said. “Don’t you need anything?”
“I’m good.” They climbed in the truck and he pulled out of the parking lot back onto the road.
“Don’t you want anything?”
“I’m good.”
“Hungry?”
“Eh.”
“Let’s go somewhere good. I’ll buy.”
He lifted one of the foiled-wrapped sandwiches May had given them. “We have these.”
Leigh took them and one at a time threw them out the window.
“Hey,” he said. “I could get a ticket for that.”
“You and your tickets.”
“They’re perfectly good sandwiches.”
“This from the guy who eats cheese and tomato sandwiches from the gas station outside of Burnsville.”
“It’s food. It shouldn’t be wasted.”
She reached over and pinched the back of his upper arm. “Oh, lighten up a little.”
“You got to tell me how to do that.”
They glanced at each other and laughed. He took her hand.
Leigh found the city an almost unbelievable solace. They pulled into town by late afternoon along a narrow, busy street with long lawns of green and blue velvet and sprinklers and fountains and entire blocks of brick and painted houses and landscaped yards. All that hot summer in Lions and here were thick white beds of impatiens and window boxes of bright green geraniums. Huge canopies of imported oak trees and maple trees, alder and aspen and ash. There was no white glare, none of the human dust of home. There were pubs and cafés and restaurants and bars and farmers’ markets and grocery stores and co-ops and art galleries and somehow, in its design to address her every need, it placed her at the center of the world, in the middle of every room.
“Park somewhere,” she said.
“We have to unload this stuff.”
“Come on,” she took his arm. “No one’s going to take anything.”
He shook his head — no short cuts — and drove toward campus where they found her dormitory and he helped her unload everything into her room. Her roommate, a young woman from Pueblo, had not yet arrived. Gordon hauled in the few crates and boxes of Leigh’s things while she unpacked them in the room. He hung every picture straight, moved the dresser where she asked him to, turned the bed so her body would lie lengthwise against the windows, as it had at home.