As Good As Gone

  She can’t tell whether Mrs. Teed’s head nod signifies skepticism or acceptance.

  “So,” Mrs. Teed says tentatively, “you came here with him?”

  “I live right next door to the Sideys,” Beverly adds quickly. “I’ve known those kids since they were toddlers.”

  Mrs. Teed nods as if, though she accepts everything Beverly says, she’s still curious about something. Finally, after a long moment during which both women stare at the speckled floor tiles, Mrs. Teed leans close to Beverly and whispers, “What I remember hearing is that after his wife died he went to France and killed the driver who ran over his wife. And then he had to go into hiding so he couldn’t be found and extradited.”

  “Oh, no, no! Nothing like that ever happened. As I said, he’s been working on a ranch for years. He’s just one of those men who’s not well suited for town living.”

  Although Beverly doesn’t think her correction of Mrs. Teed has been forceful enough to give offense, the woman stands abruptly. “I’d better get going,” Mrs. Teed says. “I’d sure appreciate if you give me a call and let me know how she’s doing.” She smiles politely down at Beverly. “Tomorrow’s early enough.”

  Of course it’s possible, Beverly thinks, that Mrs. Teed enjoyed believing that story about Calvin Sidey and didn’t much care whether it was true or false. And then Beverly Lodge has to come along and puncture one of Mrs. Teed’s cherished beliefs. Oh, well. Beverly can’t be responsible for preserving every cockamamie myth that people want to subscribe to.

  A nurse appears at the nurse’s station. Beverly rises and approaches the desk.

  “Ann Sidey?” Beverly says. “Can you tell me anything about her condition?”

  “In regards to Miss Sidey—you’re related to her how?”

  “I’m not a relative,” Beverly confesses. “I’m Ann’s next-­door neighbor.”

  The nurse, a young woman with lacquered straw-­blond hair, subjects Beverly to a long, impassive stare, a look that probably causes most people to mutter an apology and step back. Then the nurse quite deliberately looks down at the forms on the desk. “Dr. McKee will be out shortly.”

  Beverly knows Leo McKee. He’s the doctor who delivered the news to Beverly that Burt was dead. She can’t remember a word the doctor said on that occasion, but she can still recall that he had a mustard stain at the corner of his mouth, a faint smear of yellow for which Beverly was grateful. It provided her with a way to gain a little distance from shock and grief—what had the doctor been eating—potato salad? a frankfurter?—but perhaps that thinking was wrong. Perhaps only someone who has already taken a step back from grief can notice such a detail.

  “I’m just trying,” Beverly says with a smile, “to get some word on how she’s doing.”

  The nurse doesn’t look up. “Doctor prefers to speak to family members. Only family members.”

  Beverly is about to deliver one of her standard stern lectures on the importance of good manners and respect when Calvin comes around the corner. He could not have looked more drained if he had just donated half of his blood.

  Beverly rushes to his side. “How is she?”

  “Not bad. They’re taking her up to an operating room to set her arm. The doctor wanted to check her over for other injuries before sending her on.” He takes a deep breath, then exhales. “Let’s step outside,” Calvin says. “I want to breathe something other than hospital air.”

  To the nurse Calvin says, “You’ll come for me if I’m needed?”

  “Of course,” she replies.

  Calvin and Beverly stand under the portico where the ambulance usually parks to unload.

  “So it was just her arm?” she asks Calvin.

  “She’s got a helluva bump on her head and some scraped skin, but the arm’s the thing the doctor said was most serious.”

  “A compound fracture?”

  Calvin shakes his head and digs a flattened pack of Camels from the front pocket of his jeans. “The doctor said it looked like a fairly clean break. Both bones, though, so he’s not sure how well it will set.”

  He gets his cigarette lit and inhales.

  “What did she say about being chased?”

  “Not much. She’s backing off that story a bit. Could be she’s embarrassed.”

  “Backing off? How?”

  Calvin shrugs. “Says maybe she let her imagination run away with her. She might have heard something and got spooked.”

  “Oh, Calvin, that just doesn’t sound like her. Another teenaged girl perhaps, but not Ann.”

  “No? Well, you’d know better than I would.”

  Coming from the mouth of another man, that remark might be tinged with regret or self-­pity, even self-­accusation, but from Calvin Sidey it’s nothing more than a statement of fact.

  Beverly says, “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything . . . it’s probably not remotely connected to this business of someone chasing her, but over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a car—”

  “A Ford? A black Ford?”

  “I’m not very good on makes, but yes, black. Definitely black. Circling our block. Parked in the alley.”

  “I saw that car. A black Ford—’fifty-­one or ’fifty-­two. It was parked in the alley a few nights ago, and I thought Ann might be looking to sneak out and meet someone.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Ann either.”

  He walks a few steps away from the hospital doors, then stops and gazes up at the building. Is he counting lighted windows, trying to calculate the floor Ann is on? Or is he looking for the nighthawks whose whistles he can hear overhead? Beverly walks out to him and loops her arm in his.

  “I’m not saying I’m right,” she says.

  “But if someone was after her, why wouldn’t she say something?”

  “Maybe she was afraid no one would believe her, that they’d say she was being silly or worse. Hysterical. Girls have to contend with such things. Or maybe she’s trying to protect someone.”

  His laugh is quiet but hard-­edged. “Who would she be protecting?”

  Beverly takes a deep breath and draws herself closer to him. She can feel his heat through the damp cotton of his T-­shirt.

  “You,” she says.

  He doesn’t pull away, as she feared he might. “I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Maybe Ann thinks you need to be kept from yourself.”

  “She doesn’t know me that well.”

  “She shares your name. That could be enough to make her feel she knows you. Maybe you’ve been living like a hermit out on the prairie, but you’ve got a reputation that’s still living in this town. She might have heard talk.”

  Beverly holds her breath again, waiting for him to ask What talk? But the question doesn’t come, and in its absence she lets go a sigh and plunges ahead. “Can I confess something? That’s why I was willing to go with you to Brenda Cady’s house. Because I was afraid of what you might do. I wasn’t going along to help you so much as to get in your way, if it came to that.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “But I am trying to help, to help you understand. You can’t just act the way you do, not without knowing certain things.” She presses herself tighter to him, hoping to soften him with the softness of her body. In all her years of marriage, she probably never spoke to Burt the way she has just spoken to this man, of whom she knows little but his capacity for ferocity.

  Yet he doesn’t explode in anger. He speaks as softly, in fact, as he would if he were still in the hospital’s corridors. “It’s been a long time since anyone expected me to think or know much of anything. I’ve drawn wages for most of my years for simple doing.”

  “And do you think your son asked you to come here to do something?”

  “If need be.” He flicks away his cigarette, and together they watch its sparks pinwheel down the drive. “If need be.”

  “Have you called Bill?”

  This is the question that moves him to extricate his
arm from hers. “Not yet. I’ll wait until morning. At this hour a phone call wouldn’t do a damn thing but worry him. I wouldn’t want him racing home in the middle of the night.”

  Beverly thinks of that earlier conversation about Marjorie’s condition and about Calvin’s wife, a conversation that was, of course, about ignorance and knowledge.

  “Should you be the one to decide that?” she asks. Why does she persist in asking him questions that are sure to challenge and probably irritate him as well? Is she trying to drive this man away? The best she can do for an answer is this: If they are to have a future together—a future beyond this night—it can only be with full awareness of who the other is. Beverly has decided, without even knowing when or how, that she’ll live alone—without love, a man, a mate—if companionship requires her to clamp her jaw or bite back a single word.

  “Since I’m the one who made the decision,” Calvin says, “I guess I am.” He takes a couple steps toward the hospital, then stops and turns back to Beverly. “As long as we’re making confessions, I’ve got one of my own. My truck’s got damn near a full tank of gas. I wanted us to take your car, so I could get in your garage and put my hand on the hood. If it was hot, that would mean it had been driven recently.”

  “But it was cold?”

  “As cold as metal is likely to be in this weather.”

  “So as a result of your detective work, you concluded—what?”

  “Well, I already checked out your son’s car, so I knew he hadn’t been driving that one. And with your car cold, that meant he couldn’t have been the one chasing Ann.”

  “That was your only reason for ringing my doorbell?”

  “I needed someone to be there for Will. I was telling the truth on that score.”

  She steps close to him. “God damn you.” She folds her arms tightly to make certain she doesn’t give in to a temptation to strike him. “You say something like that? To me? About my son?”

  But as Calvin Sidey has said about himself, he has been away from civilization for a long time, so long in fact that he perhaps doesn’t know that there might be a reason other than the obvious one that will make a woman stand close to a man.

  Calvin reaches out and tenderly but determinedly pulls her close to him. He performs this action with one arm, as if, like his granddaughter, he has a partial disability. And because Beverly knows the incapacity is not in his arm but in his soul, she relents and allows herself to be held.

  TWENTY-­SIX

  Will wakes at three o’clock in the morning and knows instantly that Ann has not come home yet. He knows because he put a note on her bed: Wake me up when you get home, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Will is certain she will because she’ll believe he has news about their mother. In reality, he planned to sneak outside after Ann woke him. He’ll go out the front door, creep through Mrs. Lodge’s yard, and into the lilac bushes. From there he’ll be able to see if Stuart and the others are up on the garage—they’ll be silhouetted by the street lamp in the alley—and if he sees them, he’ll light his fuse.

  But the luminous hands of his Westclox say it’s 3:00 a.m., and Ann has not wakened him. Is she taking advantage of Dad and Mom being gone to stay out as late she likes? Wait—what’s that click-­clicking sound? Is it possible that Ann has come home but not yet gone to her room? Will throws off the sheet and heads for the source of the noise.

  By the time he enters the kitchen where the only light in the house shines, he knows what he heard. It’s the sound of a typewriter, and he’s heard it in the house plenty of times before. Mom types up papers for Dad’s business. This time however the herky-­jerky clacking of a typewriter’s keys comes from Adam Lodge, sitting at the kitchen table with his back to Will.

  Will speaks up in a voice close to a shout: “Where’s my grandpa?”

  Adam jerks around in his chair, knocking his cigarettes to the floor. “Jesus! Clear your throat or something—you scared the hell out of me.”

  “Is my grandpa here?”

  Adam pulls out a chair for Will. “Come on over. Have a seat.”

  Warily, reluctantly, Will follows Adam’s suggestion. In the warm house, the chair’s chrome tubes are cool on the backs of his legs.

  Adam moves his own chair closer to Will. Adam Lodge was once a schoolteacher, and Will knows that this is exactly the way teachers sit—leaning forward, their elbows on their knees—when they want to have a “special” talk and you’re supposed to be honest and they’ll be understanding. Will wraps his legs tighter around the chair and grips the seat cushion with both hands.

  “The first thing I want to say”—Adam pauses and clears his throat, just enough time for Will to think, So say it! —“ is that your sister’s okay. She’s in the hospital, but she’s okay.”

  “Ann . . . ?” This is why it’s wrong for Adam Lodge to be here; he doesn’t know what’s going on with the Sidey family—it’s Will’s mother who’s in the hospital, not his sister!

  “She broke her arm. I’m not sure how it happened. She fell. But it’s nothing serious, and she’ll probably be home tomorrow.”

  “A broken arm?”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? And I bet she’ll let you be the first one to sign her cast.”

  “I can sign . . . ?”

  “Her cast. You know, plaster . . . Haven’t you had any friends who broke an arm or a leg and had to wear a cast?”

  Will wasn’t there when it happened, but two summers ago Joel Bevan fell from a tree and broke his leg. That happened in early June, and he was still on crutches and in a cast when school started.

  Will didn’t write his name on Joel’s cast, and he didn’t care if he got to sign Ann’s or not. Another idea has occurred to him, and Will has all he can do not to jump up and run around the kitchen, so excited is he that his dilemma has suddenly been solved.

  Ann will have to wear a cast! Won’t that fat white hard sleeve have the same effect as a disfiguring scar—only temporary? Won’t she become, like Joel Bevan, an object of laughter? Won’t Stuart and Gary—won’t any boy—lose interest in seeing her without her clothes on now that she can’t be naked, not really?

  “How long are you going to be here?” Will asks Adam. He doesn’t mean to sound rude, but Will is so excited he momentarily forgets his manners.

  Adam sits up straight and looks carefully at Will as if he, Adam, has to recalibrate his judgment of the boy. “I’ll be here until your grandfather returns. Or until my mother comes to relieve me.”

  “I’m old enough to stay by myself. I have lots of times.”

  “Sure you are. Sure. But I have to obey my mom. She told me to stay here, and I’ll get in trouble if I leave, even if you gave me permission.”

  Will is fairly certain that Adam is humoring him, but that doesn’t matter. Some of the antipathy he felt for Adam Lodge begins to dry up. “I’m hungry,” he says finally. “Can I have something to eat?”

  Adam glances at the clock. “Why don’t you just go back to sleep? In a few hours, it’ll be time for breakfast.”

  “I’m pretty hungry right now.”

  Subjected to Adam’s prolonged stare, Will knows he’s supposed to give up and return to his room, but Will holds fast. Finally, Adam rises and goes to the counter. “What are you hungry for? How about a bowl of cereal?”

  Will shakes his head.

  “I don’t even know what you’ve got . . . Toast?”

  “No.”

  Adam opens the refrigerator. “How about some of this hot dish?”

  “I didn’t really like it that much.”

  He pulls out the produce bin. “You want an apple?”

  “Could I have a sandwich? My mom fixed a ham before she left, and she said we could have that for sandwiches.”

  “A ham sandwich . . . Yeah, okay. What do you want on it?”

  “Mustard.”

  “And where do you keep the bread?”

  Will points to the counter and the white metal bread box, it
s surface decorated with red bundles of wheat.

  “What the hell,” Adam mutters. “I might as well have one.”

  While Adam slices the ham and prepares the sandwiches, Will walks around to see what’s printed on the paper rolled in the typewriter. At the top of the page in capital letters are “Showdown at Red Rock” and the number 121. Below that is double-­spaced typescript with many words and phrases x-­ed out. Will reads:

  In the mirror behind the bar, Matt Sloane watched the black-­clad man across the room. That was Slade, the gunfighter hired by the cattlemen, and Matt knew that Slade not only had a reputation for being fast, fast on the draw, but that he often was the first to go for his gun. Matt had not ridden that far to let Slade get the drop on him. Even as he raised his whiskey to his lips, Matt kept his eye on Slade’s right hand, watching.

  Adam brings the unsliced sandwiches, one stacked on top of the other, to the table.

  “Like what you see?” he asks Will.

  At first Will thinks that Adam is referring to the sandwich, but of course he means the story. “Is there going to be a gunfight?” asks Will.

  Adam takes a large bite of sandwich, and when a strand of ham doesn’t quite fit into his mouth, he pokes it in with a fingertip. “You’ll have to buy the book to find out,” he says.

  “From you?”

  “From me? No, not from me. From the . . . Oh, never mind. Eat your sandwich.”

  Will should have said that he likes only mustard on his sandwich. Adam has slathered on so much butter that some of it squishes out between the slices of bread. He isn’t sure he’ll be able to take a single bite.

  He points to the typed page. “That’s what Shane said.”

  “What?”

  “In the movie. My dad and me went to it two summers ago. Shane said Wilson was fast, fast on the draw.”