“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.
“He wasn’t a ghost of a ghost,” the woman said. “He was my brother.”
“I’m sorry,” May said, red-faced. “We’re so sorry.” The woman nodded, raised a hand at May. Her eyes shone with tears. May walked around to the woman’s side of the counter and took her arm. “Won’t you please sit, please?” But the woman did not want to sit.
“Ah,” Boyd said, and shook his head. He touched the scar on his face, and looked out across the street at the bar window, which was still cracked.
“That dog was all he had left. She was all he had left.”
“We didn’t know anything about him,” May said. “We’re so sorry.”
“What happened?” The woman looked from May to Boyd and back again, her eyes wide. “Do you know what happened?”
May folded her hands, her gaze fixed on a black shoe streak on the linoleum floor. For several minutes, no one spoke.
The woman put her face in her hands. May went behind the counter and called Chuck Garcia, watching as the woman slowly sat down cross-legged on the floor. It was Chuck’s wife, Emily, who lifted her up off the floor. The woman wanted her brother’s remains, she said, and the dog’s.
“We’re going to help you out,” Chuck said, “whatever you need.”
“I need a minute,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t plan to—”
“It’s alright,” Emily said. She had pulled on a pair of blue jeans under a night shirt, her feet in sandals. “Come on. We’ll take you home, get you some coffee.”
Chuck and Emily took the woman outside and she followed them in her minivan back toward the frontage road and the Garcias’ place. For several minutes Boyd and May sat side by side at the counter, not talking or moving.
“I feel sick,” May finally said.
“Me, too.”
“I think I want a beer.”
Outside they crossed the street. Something fluttering caught her vision, and she turned to face the junk shop. “Marybeth?” she called, and waved her hand in the dark. Boyd came up beside her.
“Baby Jesus,” he said. They glanced at each other, and rushed toward the rocking chair, where Marybeth Sharpe had expired in the afternoon heat earlier that day.
By lunchtime news of Marybeth’s death and the stranger’s visit had reached everyone remaining in town. Somehow Boyd seemed at the center of all of it, from early June to the night before.
“I heard one woman say you strangled her brother right here in the bar,” Dock told him.
Boyd shook his head.
“Another guy says you went out in the street, the two of you.”
Boyd nodded and folded the wipe cloth and hung it in his belt.
Dock laughed. “Most of them have the right of it though.”
“What’s that, Sterling? The story where I poured a beer on his head and forced him into jail for a night? The story where it’s my fault the dog died, and the man killed himself, and drove everyone away?”
Dock raised a hand. “Sorry, Boyd,” he said. “I meant no harm.” He finished and paid for his beer and drove back to the shop.
Annie was in the kitchen pounding a steak in the bunkroom next to a cookstove Dock had bought at the camping store in Burnsville. She was weepy and put her head against Dock’s chest.
“That poor old lady,” Annie said. “We shouldn’t have let her sit out there.”
“She was a sweetie pie,” Dock said. “And she was very old.”
“Somebody should have checked in on her,” Annie said. “I should have. You should have.”
“I know it,” he said, and stroked his wife’s pale hair, still shining, still golden. “But it’s OK how she went, too.”
Annie nodded. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Old lady loved that rocking chair.”
They both laughed, and Annie took Dock’s big fingers from her hair and kissed them.
Boyd called Chuck and asked him to remove the living ghost town signpost from the highway.
“That’ll be the end of the Lucy Graves,” Chuck said.
“We’ve had enough,” Boyd told him, and truth be told, Chuck was glad to hear it. You go into the Lucy Graves, he thought, and you want there to be more than a diner, and maybe there is more, but all you have to study it by is the ordinary inventory of the place: the white plastic ramekins of club crackers, packets of sugar, the smell of heavy-duty cleaner with which May scrubbed the stainless steel. Lions was the same way. Maybe sometimes you even entertained the possibility of some of its wilder stories — at night, in the bar, when everybody got to talking. Lamar Boggs, for Pete’s sake. But you should’ve known better. And when you thought back to the moments you wondered if it were true — Walker men tending a ghost up on the mesa — you should’ve felt pretty chastened. That’s the word Chuck’s grandfather would’ve used. People weren’t interested in the regular, workaday truth, but that kind of truth was the real miracle, he thought, and looked at the hands at the ends of his arms. He opened and closed them.