As Good As Gone

Will walks across his yard, taking it slow in order to give himself time to think up a reason he has to stay close to home today. It’s not his parents who don’t want Will going to the river but Will himself, although he’s sure his mother and father would forbid him from going if they had any knowledge of what went on there.

  For one thing, it’s a dangerous place. The river’s currents twist like snakes, and a channel where the slow water was no higher than your waist last week might now be up to your neck and trying hard to pull you under. Just a few years ago a friend of Ann’s drowned, and she had been wading out to a sandbar where her father was waiting for her.

  Will and his friends have taken to hanging around the edges of the beer parties the town’s teenagers hold on the river’s sandbars and in the cottonwood groves. As the parties have grown wilder, he and his friends have ventured closer, hoping to steal beers or cigarettes. On a few occasions, Stuart has even flirted with the high school girls, using at first his freckled innocence to amuse them and then catching them off guard with requests for everything from cigarettes to peeks down their swimsuits. Most of the time, however, Will and his friends remain on the fringe and watch, which is both exciting and frustrating.

  Just a few weeks ago, the river’s level dropped sufficiently to create a new sandbar south of town, a location perfect for parties since it not only allowed cars to drive across a shallow channel, but it also afforded a perfect view of the road by which the sheriff might approach. Will, Stuart, and Glen found their own grandstand, a newly carved bank where they could sit among the cottonwoods and look down at the teenagers as they splashed their way out to the sandbar. Two bluffs upriver, Blackfeet were supposed to have cornered a group of settlers a hundred years ago, some of whom tried to escape by leaping into the river. Will had just been imagining what it was like, to have to choose between drowning and being scalped, when Glen punched his arm.

  “Lookit, lookit!”

  Wading through water that didn’t quite come to their knees were three girls in bathing suits. The sun glinting and reflecting off the water showed all three girls to their best advantage, but the girl in the lead—taller than the other two and statuesque in a white bathing suit—looked regal as she crossed the water.

  “Jesus Christ, Sidey,” Stuart said, “is that your fucking sister?”

  Will’s first impulse was to deny it, not only because he didn’t want Stuart and Glen looking at Ann that way but also because he didn’t immediately recognize his sister—not with her hair bunched up on top of her head like that, not with that gait—the way she lifted her knees reminded him of a prancing horse caught in slow motion. And not in that swimsuit—did Mom and Dad know how she looked in it?

  “That’s her all right,” Glen said. “And the one with the fat ass is Janice Grand, and I’m pretty sure the other one is Kitty McGregor.” Glen pulled himself closer to the edge of the bank as though he needed those few extra inches to be sure of his identification. “Yeah. That’s her. My brother said Ronnie Dillard finger-­fucked Janice Grand.”

  “Shit, Sidey,” Stuart said, “where’s your sister been hiding herself?”

  “She’s working at Penney’s this summer.”

  Stuart clapped Will on the top of the head. “Numb nuts. I mean why ain’t she ever around when I come over? Like just coming out of the shower or something?”

  “You ever spy on her when she’s in the can?” Glen asked.

  “Hey, hey, where’s her room?” Stuart said. “Is she on the first floor?”

  Will shook his head. “She’s upstairs.”

  “We ought to rig up something so we can spy on her,” Stuart said.

  “Fix her curtains maybe, so they don’t close all the way,” Glen suggested.

  “Or Sidey can call us when she’s taking a bath and we can peek through the keyhole.”

  “You guys. She’s my sister . . .”

  “And how did an ugly little fucker like you get a sister who looks like that?” Stuart asked.

  Glen said, “Her hair looks sort of reddish. Is her pussy hairs that color?”

  “Who cares? I’d just like to stick my face in her snatch.”

  Though vaguely troubling, most of this Will understood only dimly. Stuart and Glen both had older brothers, and as a result, Will’s friends were far better educated in sexual matters than Will. He acted as though he knew what they were talking about, but most of the time he felt as if he had been absent or asleep when all this essential information was given out. He was determined not to ask, however. He hadn’t understood long division at first either, and now arithmetic was one of his best subjects.

  On that day at the river, he didn’t quite get what Stuart meant, but he was reasonably certain the reference was not to Ann’s breasts—and at that moment they were the part of his sister’s anatomy he couldn’t stop staring at. They looked like—he couldn’t think of any other comparison—a movie star’s!

  Will reaches the back door, and he still hasn’t thought up an excuse not to accompany his friends to the river. He enters the kitchen where his mother is shaking scouring powder into the sink.

  “Your friends were here,” she says. “I told them you were out in the alley. Did they find you?”

  Will wishes he could arrange something with his mother whereby, unless he tells her otherwise, she will not tell his friends where he is.

  “Yeah. We’re going fishing, I guess.”

  “Your father said you were going to play baseball.”

  “We don’t have enough guys.”

  “You can’t just play catch?”

  “All day? No.”

  “I was just asking. I don’t know what your rules are.”

  Even though his mother does not look up from her scrubbing, Will can tell his response wounds her. As the time for her operation draws closer, she’s quicker to register both irritation and pain.

  “We’re going to Willow Creek,” Will volunteers.

  “Well, I hope you catch lots of fish.”

  Will is almost out of the kitchen when he turns to ask, “Is Ann working today?” He tries to make it sound as though his question is simply an afterthought.

  “Until five thirty. Why?”

  “I just wanted to ask her about something.”

  “Anything I can answer for you?”

  “It isn’t that important.”

  He climbs the stairs to his room, closes the door behind him, and goes into his closet where the can of Schlitz is hidden inside a shoe box and under layers of green plastic army men. He transfers the beer to his tackle box, but before he leaves the house, Will checks the bathroom door. Just as he thought: The house has been remodeled over the years, and the lock is no longer the type that has a keyhole.

  SIX

  The day that Calvin Sidey knew would eventually come has finally arrived: When he drives into Gladstone, there are more places and faces unfamiliar to him than familiar. That Chevrolet dealership with its snapping banner and rows of sun-­glinting windshields occupies the space where a feedlot used to be. Joe Tidwell had a little saw mill right where Meissner Appliances is now perched. C. C. Hurley used to have his blacksmith shop there. And that office building over there occupies a space that used to be a vacant lot, and it was where the Haskells would stretch out the hides of the coyotes they killed. By God, the youngest Haskell boy—what the hell was his name?—had a nose for sniffing out coyote dens. That gathering of young people in front of the Range Rider Cafe—would they be the grandchildren or the great-­grandchildren of men and women Calvin Sidey used to know? Chances are just as good that they all have last names unfamiliar to him. And that quartet of men standing in the shade of the Farm and Ranch National Bank, all of them in shirtsleeves and ties and two of them with pearl-­gray Stetsons and two with straw fedoras? These are probably Gladstone’s current shakers and makers, and Calvin doesn’t recognize a single one of them, nor any other man, woman, or child on the sidewalk. There was a time when anyone he drove past would likely rai
se a hand in greeting.

  Not only did he once know every street, store front, and building, he could feel as though he had something to do with this town becoming what it was. Hell, they’re practically the same age. He sold the lot that the Nash Finch is built on. He helped Clarence Beall swing the financing for that apartment complex on the corner of Third and Front. Calvin Sidey helped get the bridge built that now connects Gladstone’s north and south sides. And maybe there’s still a family or two living in a house that Sam Dellum’s construction company built in partnership with Sidey Real Estate. Calvin gave the Olivet Lutheran Church’s board of directors a good price on a lot when they wanted to expand and add on a Sunday school wing. He was on the school board when Oscar Kershaw was hired as superintendent. And Calvin was still on the board when that high school history teacher was fired after having an affair with the school secretary. He can still remember the year—1927—because the teacher’s name was Lindberg, the name that was on every American’s lips that year. Although the teacher spelled his name without the h, he still believed he might be a cousin to Charles, and when it was announced that the famous aviator would visit Boise, the teacher went there in hopes of introducing himself to the most famous man in the world. It was while Phil Lindberg was in Idaho that the secretary confessed their affair to another teacher, and by the time Lindberg returned to Gladstone, the school board had already convened, and the teacher was out of a job. In the years since, Calvin has sometimes wondered why he didn’t defend the teacher’s right to fuck whom he pleased.

  Now it almost feels to Calvin Sidey as though he navigates the streets of Gladstone not by sight but by memory, since he recognizes so little but remembers so much. Just last week he was picking up supplies in the general store in Gable, and as the storekeeper, Henry Foss, brought items down from the shelves, he asked Calvin, “Have you run into old Ben Murrow lately?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Well, Ben’s gone senile. He doesn’t remember his goddamn name. Thinks his son’s his father and his wife’s his baby sister.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Can you imagine? Trying to call up a memory and get no answer? My God.”

  Calvin had heard such remarks before, and he never argued, much less suggested, that for some people life would never offer any peace as long as their memories were in working order.

  And now Calvin gives his memory a little test: How many times has he taken his leave of this town, each time believing it would be for good? The first when he was barely eighteen and just out of high school, and rather than join his father in the real estate business Calvin ran off and hired on with Brierly Marker’s Diamond B outfit. For the first few months he didn’t do much more than shovel shit and buck hay, but that was work preferable to selling off town lots so little cracker-­box houses could be built on them. Calvin had every expectation that he’d live the life of a ranch hand forever, but the war brought him back to Gladstone. He remembers well the day he walked through the door of the army recruiters—the office was down on Main Street where Woolworth’s is now. He brought Pauline back after the war, but you could as easily say she brought him back. If he didn’t have the responsibility of a wife, he would never have returned to the family business. And it was responsibility of a different kind that drove him away again. In his grief, his crazy-­drunk grief, he didn’t think he could be responsible for his own life, much less his children’s. He wasn’t the first man to walk away from his family and he wouldn’t be the last, but most men leave with a wife in the house to curse him or make excuses for him when he walks out the door.

  Well, hell, since he’s done such a piss-­poor job of going and staying gone, maybe he ought to give up and come back here for good. Get himself a little shack, down in Dogtown perhaps, and live out his years here. Buy his groceries in a supermarket. See a dentist about that tooth that’s been troubling him. Have the truck’s transmission fixed. Look for a new edition of Catullus in the library. Find a few other old mossbacks to play penny ante poker with. Sit down for Sunday dinner with Bill and Marjorie and their children. Die in a hospital.

  Calvin turns onto the street that ought to be more familiar to him than any other. How much has changed here? The trees are taller. The electric wires, the telephone wires. No more outhouses. No more stables or chicken coops. More fresh paint. More flower gardens. More fences. If he could fly above this street instead of drive down it, he’d see nothing but the leafy tops of trees, and there was a time when he could see all the way out to Sentry Butte from an upstairs window. Hell, maybe Calvin should be glad of all that’s changed. Fewer reminders this way.

  BEVERLY LODGE WATERED HER garden for two hours this morning, hoping that by the time she came out in the afternoon pulling weeds would be easier. It isn’t. She still has to dig the roots out with a pronged instrument. When she stands to give her aching back a break, she notices that her knees are as muddy as a child’s. She could bring out a towel to kneel on, the way Alice Westrum does, but Beverly figures it’s easier to launder her skin than a towel. For similar wash-­day reasons, when she works outside she wears one of Burt’s old T-­shirts so she won’t have to soak grass and dirt stains.

  While she is massaging the small of her back, a truck drives up the alley, leaving a dust cloud in its wake. Traffic in the alley has become a familiar sight. For weeks, someone in a black Ford has been circling the block, and sometimes he shortens his circuit by cutting through the alley, always driving too fast. She assumes the driver of the Ford is Ann Sidey’s boyfriend, though Beverly isn’t sure how she arrived at that conclusion; she can’t recall ever seeing Ann in the car. The truck parks by the Sidey garage.

  It’s no teenager who steps out of the truck but an older man. He’s tall, and his posture brings him up even taller; there’s not a trace of slouch or slump in his back or shoulders. He’s dressed in boots, faded Levi’s, a western shirt, and a battered, sweat-­stained cowboy hat. He needs a haircut; his white hair curls and tufts over his collar and behind his ears.

  Beverly watches while he lifts an old leather suitcase from the back of the truck. He begins to walk toward the Sidey home, and something in his stride—rapid, purposeful—makes Beverly feel for an instant that the Sideys should be warned, that on this hot, dry Saturday afternoon a man who portends danger to the family is coming their way. Then she sees his face, and she almost laughs out loud in relief and embarrassment.

  Yes, his expression is stern and maybe even a little menacing—he has a large jaw and a wide mouth and both seem locked tight with determination. Even with his hat pulled low he squints against the light and that puts even more wrinkles in his leathery skin. But the truth is, Beverly Lodge knows him: Calvin Sidey, father to Bill, grandfather to Ann and Will, and who once lived in that very house.

  Like Bill Sidey, Beverly lives on the same block on which she grew up, although, unlike Bill, not in the same house. Beverly’s parents lived at the bottom of Fourth Street’s hill in a small frame house that is currently painted a mustardy yellow so ghastly that Beverly often goes out of her way so she doesn’t have to drive past it. She certainly grew up with the awareness that her family—her three older sisters, their mother, and postal-­clerk father—were on the lower end of Fourth Street, both literally and figuratively. And one of the families living at the top of the block was the Sideys, able to afford a house of stone rather than sticks because the senior Mr. Sidey—did Beverly ever know his name or had he been only initials, G. W., to her as to everyone in Gladstone?—bought land cheaply when he came to Montana.

  The Sideys had a son, Calvin, and two daughters, Wilma and another who died in infancy. Calvin was at least ten years older than Beverly, but her aunt Doris was Calvin’s age, and for many years of their youth Doris had a desperate crush on Calvin, though Beverly now has trouble reconciling these twin facts with the image of her aunt, crippled with a stroke in a Seattle old people’s home, and this fierce old man walking across the grass.

  From her aunt?
??s descriptions of Calvin back then, Beverly was not surprised that her aunt, or any female, was in love with him. He was a top-­notch student and athlete, the broad-­shouldered, blue-­eyed handsome boy who was always chosen as captain or president. He wore lightly his mantle as son of a rich man, his aloofness excused as shyness. Then, when he graduated from high school, rather than go away to college or begin the gradual but inevitable process of taking over his father’s real estate business, Calvin Sidey left Gladstone and hired on as a ranch hand.

  The cowboy life Calvin signed on for was rawhide rough, yet many young people regarded him with even more envy than before. As they saw it, they were buckling themselves into stultifying jobs that would constrict them all their lives, while Calvin was galloping free across the prairie. When war broke out in Europe, Calvin was one of the first to enlist, and after the war, Calvin came home with ribbons on his chest and a beautiful French wife at his side.

  Soon, however, Calvin was no longer the embodiment of a free, rebellious life; he moved into his parents’ home, and he began to sell real estate with his father.

  And that was the Calvin Sidey whom Beverly knew best from her own memory, simply one more of Gladstone’s businessmen, preoccupied with making deals during the week and cutting grass and scolding his children on the weekend. His wife was another story. Gladstone had its share of residents who had come from another country—Beverly’s own grandmother had emigrated from Germany as a teenager—but none who spoke with a French accent or who possessed Pauline Sidey’s exotic beauty. Beverly remembers her as a cheerful if somewhat bewildered woman who seemed more comfortable in the company of the town’s children than with other housewives.

  Then, sometime in the 1930s, Pauline returned to France to visit her own family. She hadn’t been home since she and Calvin were married, and though another war seemed imminent and more people were leaving Europe than visiting, Pauline’s mother was ill, and Pauline worried that she might not see her mother again. Her father had already died during her absence. So she traveled to France for what was to be a visit of no more than a week, the longest period of time she could bear to be away from her husband and children, Bill and Jeanette. Yet back in the village in which she was born, Pauline Sidey was killed in an automobile accident, dead before her dying mother. It was one of those ironies about which people talked for years.