As Good As Gone

  The running water reminds Will that he has to pee. He shuts off the faucets, unzips his jeans, and steps to the toilet. He’s next to the window, and he glances in the direction of the Neaveses’ and the yard where Queenie is chained. How would his grandfather do it? Will can no more imagine himself doing such a thing than he can imagine Stuart Kinder beaten and bloodied at Will’s feet.

  CALVIN LIFTS THE NAPKIN from the plate of date bars. They look appetizing enough, but he’s never much cared for dates, figs, raisins, or currants. For that matter, he seldom eats sweets or baked goods. After dinner on Saturday night, Marjorie brought a chocolate cake to the table and asked him how big a piece he’d like. He demurred, and Bill said, “Come on, Dad. You used to have a sweet tooth, didn’t you? How long has it been since you’ve had some pastry?”

  Calvin knew exactly how long it had been. Two summers ago, he and Shorty Oak, who was neither short nor sturdy, took on the job of painting the barn and a few outbuildings at Ed Vernon’s place. It had been hot, tedious work, and when the job was finally done, and Calvin and Shorty were cleaning their brushes, folding up the drop cloths, and putting away the ladders, Shorty said, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going into town to get us a reward.” Calvin didn’t need any reward, though he would have appreciated help with the cleanup.

  Shorty returned with a six-­pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a cherry pie, purchased from Harley’s Bakery, a shop where Calvin occasionally bought his bread.

  Calvin refused Shorty’s offer of a beer.

  “What’s the matter? Not your brand? Hell, after all these days of working in the heat, I’d drink it warm and flat if that was all I could get.”

  “I don’t drink, Shorty. I thought you knew that.”

  “Not even beer?”

  “Not today.”

  “Maybe tomorrow then, hey?”

  “Ask me tomorrow.”

  “Well, hell,” Shorty said, “you ain’t got nothing against pie, do you?”

  So Shorty got out his jackknife and cut into the pie, lifting out big, dripping wedges, and the two men sat on the lift gate of Shorty’s truck and ate pie right out of the tin. In between bites, Shorty drained a Pabst and opened another. When he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he smeared a streak of red across his face that looked like blood. Calvin couldn’t see his own face, but he imagined he didn’t look much different. Pie filling dripped from his fingers. And though Calvin didn’t think of himself as particularly delicate or refined, he wondered when he had become a man willing to eat pie with his fingers from the back of a truck. What was left of his slice of pie he let drop into the dust.

  “God damn,” said Shorty. “I’d of eaten that.”

  As Calvin walked away, he called over his shoulder, “Tell Ed he can mail my check to me.”

  Calvin places the napkin carefully back over the date bars.

  He hears the toilet flush upstairs, and for a minute—for less than a minute, for seconds—Calvin imagines what life would be like at his place shared with a ten-­ —eleven-­ —year-­old boy . . . To hear a child’s soft chuffy breathing as he sleeps at night. To wake in the morning and move slowly and quietly so he doesn’t disturb the boy. And why are his first thoughts of a sleeping child? To allow himself to contemplate for a little while the sweeter thoughts of a child living with him before he lets in the reality of the nagging, restless commotion that a boy’s presence would inevitably mean? My God, what would Bill say if Calvin told him that he’d decided to take Will off to live in his little tin box on the prairie and to teach the boy the cowboy life? Bill would bust a gasket and Calvin couldn’t blame him. Calvin barely knows his grandson, and he surely doesn’t know what kind of life he wants for the boy beyond knowing that it isn’t Calvin’s own. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone, much less his own grandson.

  The reality is, of course, that the boy could probably educate the man. How much Calvin doesn’t understand of contemporary life. Rockets fired into space and cars taking their shapes from those same rockets. Crowds of Negroes marching and loudly insisting on their rights, as if that kind of demand ever did any good. Men and women—like his own daughter-­in-­law—whining and wanting a pill or a procedure so they don’t have to put up with any discomfort or unpleasantness. And television, television, television everywhere —so every family lives like their home is a damn movie theater. No, Calvin Sidey might know how to bridle a horse that fights the bit, but little Will doubtless comprehends this world better than his grandfather ever will.

  TWELVE

  Ann wonders if she should give up and go out to him.

  He drives through their alley almost every night, sometimes several times, but tonight he’s just parked there, not even bothering to idle the engine for a quick getaway. She first noticed the car around midnight, and now it’s after one. Will he stay there all night?

  That Monte might do just that is not however what makes her consider walking out of the house and getting in his car. What she really fears is that he might come in. Like every other family up and down the block, the Sideys leave their doors unlocked night and day, and during the summer, her father insists that the inner doors be kept open so the cooler air can flow through the screens. Not that any of the house’s locks or latches could prevent or discourage anyone who wants to force his way in. Nor could anyone in the house stop him.

  She remembers when, shortly after he and Ann began to date, they were together with friends in Pioneer Park. In the park on that same day the local Kiwanis club was hosting a cookout and picnic to raise money for the eye operation that the Methodist minister’s son needed. Ann’s father was grilling the hamburgers and hot dogs, and he wore an apron as he served the children and their parents lining up for food. When he saw Ann and her friends sitting on a picnic table fifty yards away, he smiled and twirled his spatula and tongs in the air like a pair of Fourth of July sparklers.

  “That your old man?” Monte asked Ann.

  There were many fathers gathered near hers, but Ann simply nodded in assent.

  “He’s a cook?” Monte asked.

  “No, he’s just helping . . . Oh, never mind.” She felt he was being deliberately thickheaded about her father. Monte knew Mr. Sidey had his own real estate company, didn’t he?

  “Must be good eating at your house. Your old man being a professional cook and all.”

  “And what does your father do?” It was a cruel thing to ask because Monte’s father and mother were divorced, and his father lived in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was a dentist. But Monte had annoyed her with those remarks about her father, and sometimes Ann couldn’t stop her tongue in time.

  “You know damn good and well what he does. He looks in people’s mouths. All damn day long.”

  “Then I guess there’s no cavities in your family if your dad’s a dentist.”

  Instead of answering her silly question, he looked long and hard at Mr. Sidey. Finally, he said, “He ain’t much, is he.”

  She already regretted saying something about Monte’s father, so she didn’t offer a defense of her father but simply shrugged and said, “He’s pretty much like all the other fathers.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I mean.”

  So if Monte decided to get out of his car and march into the house after her, her parents would probably be no more deterrent than the flimsy screen door. Would he hurt them? Ann believes he might. Just as she believes that if he knew now that an old man was the only adult in the house he would certainly come crashing through the door.

  But if she walks out of the house of her own volition, if she simply walks out and wordlessly climbs into his car, then no one will get hurt.

  No one but her? Isn’t that what she really means? But perhaps that isn’t a certainty. Maybe if she doesn’t resist him he’ll revert to that gentler being he had been in the beginning.

  She knows now that he had been following a schedule: Wait two weeks before putting his arm around her in the back row of the Rialto; three weeks befo
re asking for a kiss good-­night; four weeks before suggesting that she sit close to him as they drove up and down Gladstone’s Main Avenue; two full months before he drove her to the top of cemetery hill after the high school’s Winterfest Dance and parked with the rest of the herd of lightless, window-­fogged cars and attempted to make out with her. Which she allowed because at every one of those other steps he had been courtly and tender, as if not only would he stop if she seemed the least bit hesitant but he would also be embarrassed and ashamed. And it gave Ann a special pleasure that his solicitous, gentlemanly behavior was completely at odds with how others saw him. To them, he was a hood, a hell-­raiser, one of the dangerous crowd that hung out in the lot behind Scanlon’s Truck and Auto Body Repair, smoking, looking for someone to buy them beer, shoving and punching each other in the arm in preparation for the fights they would get into if any of the ranch boys, the good student athletes, or the Indians from the nearby reservation looked at them crossways. The report she had been given when he first came to town—that he was cute and nice—had been modified considerably, yet to Ann he kept both those qualities.

  And Ann liked that he was something to her that he was to no one else. When anyone said anything in the least disparaging about him (like Janice: “He lives in the nice part of town; why does he have to be such a hood!”), Ann wouldn’t argue; she simply smiled to herself and thought, You don’t know him like I do. Perhaps it was true that in her thinking of him as her secret love (had she really gone around humming the Doris Day song?—yes, she supposed she had) she had failed to see some of what others saw.

  Nevertheless, her months with him had gone so well she was content to lean into his arms that night on cemetery hill and count their kisses—twenty-­seven during that session. And oh my, what a good kisser he was! He didn’t scrape his teeth against hers like Donnie Gustafson. He didn’t drool like Jim Tetzloff. His lips weren’t tight and cracked like Morris Moer’s.

  The next time there were forty-­two kisses. She knew exactly because she made coded entries on her calendar. Supplementing the kisses were the compliments and the gifts: a necklace with a pearl pendant, stationery, a box of Russell Stover chocolates, Shalimar perfume. He had been not only patient but thoughtful and kind.

  And Ann had been naïve enough to believe that he was as satisfied with their relationship as she was. He gave her no indication that he was anything but content, though he never said much one way or another. She must have believed that he, like so many other Montanans, thought that if he spent too many words on any subject he’d end up impoverished in some way, in debt to his listeners.

  The weather turned warm, and they parked near Willow Creek. The waters had recently thawed, and with their newfound speed, they made a sound that caused Ann to think someone was coming toward them, splashing his way across the stream from the other side. She kept looking out, and perhaps that distraction on her part was what set him off.

  She had been with boys before who had put their hands where they shouldn’t, but she never needed to discourage them more than twice—twisting away or pushing their hand away had always been enough. And usually the embarrassment of rejection ended the matter right there. Only Morris Moers tried a pleading negotiation. “Please,” he said, “if you’ll just let me put my hand there, I won’t try anything else. And I won’t even move my hand.”

  But that night by Willow Creek was different. He came at her as if there were no possibility he could be deterred. Soon Ann was the one tempted to bargain: Please, if I let you put your hand there, will you stop?

  Four kisses in—she could not believe she had still been counting—he grabbed her breast. He did not try, as some boys had, to slide his hand there surreptitiously; he simply grabbed. And squeezed. And when she pushed his hand away, he shoved it in her crotch so hard it hurt. Thank God she had been wearing slacks! She got hold of his wrist and managed to twist him out from between her legs. But he just moved back to her breast, this time forcing his way inside her blouse and popping off a button in the process. When she got him out of there, he dove down again below her waist. He was still following a schedule!

  Everything he rammed and pushed at her—tongue, fingers, knees—came with such force that if she weren’t braced for the onslaught he might tear right through her flesh. “Don’t,” she said, “don’t. Don’t! I mean it!” But even to her own ears her voice sounded weak, with no more power to affect him than the splashing water had on the creek stones.

  Just as she was resigning herself—I’m going to be raped—and she was trying to find a place in her mind that would be far away from the moment she was trapped in, he stopped. He shoved her shoulders and said, “Ah, this is bullshit!”

  He got out of the car, slamming the door behind him, and walked toward the creek. Ann considered jumping out of the car herself, running away as fast as she could. She still wasn’t sure why she hadn’t. Because she was so relieved not to have him pawing and poking her that she felt safer than she should have? Because she felt it was better to see him and know where he was than to turn her back on him as she would have to if she ran?

  The moon was not quite full, but from its station behind them, high in the eastern sky, it cast enough light for her to watch him.

  He stopped less than thirty feet away, near the creek’s rushing water, its rippled surface glinting in the moonlight. He was . . . was he going to urinate in the stream?

  And then she knew, knew without doubt, though what she saw she had never seen before. He was playing with himself—that was the phrase she had heard others use, but she had to wonder—what could play possibly have to do with this life or death night?

  He was dressed, as he almost always was, in dark colors, tight jeans and a long-­sleeved denim shirt, so when he turned it was his face, his hands, his cock—jutting from his jeans—that caught the moonlight, each inch of flesh the color of pale stone.

  But he was not made of stone. He began to walk toward the car, his steps slow compared to the speed with which his hand pumped up and down on himself. Ann believed he was looking right at her, but she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps there was too little light available to allow him to see inside the car. And it occurred to her that maybe she should lie down or crouch under the dashboard—anyplace where he couldn’t see her, and she couldn’t see him. She didn’t want to watch, but she was afraid that if she turned away, he’d become further enraged, that he was trying to prove something to her, that he was performing for her—whatever it was, he would not take it well if she covered her eyes. So she didn’t look away, and just at that moment when she would have thought there was nothing else pale or white out there to catch the moonlight, there was more. He stopped, spread his legs as if he were bracing himself, and bared his teeth—a mouthful of gray pebbles—and then something—a string? a plume?—arced out of him, his hand, his cock, white as milk or smoke.

  They both shuddered. He zipped himself back up, walked to the driver’s side, and got into the car.

  Ann wedged herself as tightly as she could into the space between the seat and the passenger door. Monte took a fresh pack of Pall Malls from the overhead visor and proceeded to tap the bottom of the pack hard on the dashboard. In the confines of the car, the cigarette pack made a sound like the slap of a rolled-­up magazine, and Ann flinched at every whap. His window was open, and he craned his head out in order to look up into the night sky. Was he trying to determine whether the moon or stars beamed down sufficient light for her to see what he had done?

  He pulled his head back in. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me, do you?”

  “I thought I did.”

  He shook his head. “Did you hear what happened out at Del-­Ray Lanes?”

  “I heard something.” What she heard was that he got into a fight with Ron Engen, a senior football player, in the parking lot outside the bowling alley. In the most detailed version that came Ann’s way, he knocked Ron to the blacktop and then kicked him in the head. Rhonda Sikorski was sure
she saw one of Ron Engen’s teeth fly out and bounce under his own car.

  “Did you hear what that was about? No? Well, the sonofabitch said something about you, and believe me when I say you don’t want to know what it was.”

  Ann had known Ron Engen since elementary school, and it was hard for her to believe that that red-­haired serious boy could say anything that would give offense. It was even harder to believe he could be knocked down—he was tall and had a tree’s thick sturdiness about him.

  Monte tore open the cellophane, slit the foil with his thumbnail, and tapped out a cigarette. With his lips he pulled it from the pack but then took it out again, unlit. “When he was shooting his big mouth off, he didn’t know you belong to me.”

  Ron Engen had sat across from her in Miss Shepard’s sixth grade class, and he used to tease her by pulling on his fingers and making the knuckles pop, knowing she hated the sound.

  “Would you take me home now? Please.”

  “You want to go home? Yeah, I bet you do.” He put the cigarette between his lips again and spoke around it. “You know what else you don’t know anything about? You don’t know shit about what a man needs.”

  She was tempted to say, but you’re not a man; you’re a boy. However, she didn’t want to do or say anything that might antagonize him. Besides, he had started the car now, and maybe if she kept quiet he’d drive back to town. Even if he wouldn’t take her home, once he was in Gladstone she could jump out of the car at an intersection.