Godspeed

by Nickolas Butler

  If he hadn’t already been committed to that deadline, he sure as heck was now.

  Teddy held the door for Britney as they walked into the agent’s office, a small street-level space with brick walls and wide Doug fir flooring. As soon as Shelley Winterbottom saw the Smythes she held out a hand, as if to stop them perhaps, or warn them, and then, showily pantomimed zipping her lips shut. It appeared Winterbottom was in conversation with someone over the speakerphone.

  “Well, you’d be stupid to take that offer,” she said rather loudly, a cross look etched across her face. “My buyers are preapproved and can make a down payment as early as tomorrow morning. They’re a beautiful family with four young girls in the local school system.”

  “Yeah?” a man’s voice boomed out from the phone set. “Well, look here, Shell, ’cause I got another buyer who’ll pay fifty more than asking with a cash deposit tonight—”

  Winterbottom shot them both cold looks and yanked the receiver off its cradle. Teddy and Britney sat down heavily in two chairs opposite her. After some time, she said, “All right. Yeah, okay—just hang on, all right, Royce?”

  She sighed, pressed her thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose.

  “I hate to say I told you so,” she began, “but if we’d just made an offer on this house yesterday, or even four hours ago . . .”

  “What’s the matter?” Teddy said. “Where do we stand?”

  “Another offer. Came in simultaneous to yours. And the seller’s agent says this other party will go fifty more than asking—well, you heard.”

  “Wait a minute, what do you mean simultaneous to our offer? How’s that even possible? One of the offers must have come in first. I mean, why would they pay fifty more if their offer was first?”

  Winterbottom shrugged. “That’s what the seller’s agent is telling me. The question is, can you go another seventy-five grand higher?”

  “No!” Teddy said. “No. And that isn’t the question. The question is, who was first? The question is, what is right? We texted you immediately. Couldn’t been five minutes after you left. There’s gotta be time stamps on those emails. When’d you put in our offer?”

  Now it was Winterbottom’s turn to stare coldly at Teddy.

  “Let me call you right back, okay, Royce?” she said, hanging up the telephone and exhaling loudly. She then reached into a desk drawer and appeared to pop a piece of Nicorette into her mouth. “Mr. Smythe, what would you prefer I do? Impugn Royce Hollister’s integrity and destroy my relationship with him, and, in doing so, muddy your name, your wife’s, and, by the way, the good name of your construction business? Or, would you like me to call my friend Royce back and tell him we’re willing to go another seventy-five over asking—or, if you’re serious, a full hundred—and that you’ll get him a cashier’s check tonight, or at the very least, no later than tomorrow morning? Because, um, those are really your two choices here.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars?” Britney asked, her voice atremble. “But that’s . . .”

  How many times had Teddy lost? How many times had some customer belittled him, talked down to him, skipped a payment, or argued an invoice? How many times had some tenant in some shitty apartment talked to him like he was a servant? How many years had he struggled to keep food on the table, to buy new clothes for the girls, to occasionally splurge on Britney? Never, never before had he complained or even expected anything. And now, he could see that the house was lost, and he sighed deeply. Without turning to look at Britney he took her hand and could feel her body wracking with what he knew was a different sort of crying, a different kind of tears.

  Teddy knew his own limitations; knew he wasn’t as smart or clever as Cole, or as strong and relentless as Bart. And yet, surveying his future in this town, he knew that he would need Winterbottom. Knew he’d need her to sell houses they might build in the future. Knew he’d need Royce Hollister, too. Knew that these real estate agents had last names as recognizable as the area mountains or rivers dominating the local maps; heck, in a few cases, the creeks and basins carried their names. These were people he’d need as friendly business acquaintances for the next three or four decades. He was in no position to make an enemy here, let alone two of them.

  And so, he glanced down at his boots, rubbed at the stubble of his head, squeezed Britney’s hand, then slowly stood. He wanted very badly to pick up Winterbottom’s desk and, in one heroic moment of defiance, send that bulky furniture through the office’s expansive front window. That was what the heroes on his dream-board would have done. But instead, he offered Winterbottom a tightly apologetic smile, squeezed his wife’s shoulder, and just said quietly, “Let’s go.”

  Britney did not so much as look at the agent, nor did she say goodnight or waste time with any of the pleasantries Teddy was so accustomed to hearing her chirp out at people. She simply moved slowly toward the front door, leaving him there, beside their agent’s desk.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” Winterbottom said. “Look, sometimes things fall through. We wrote a good, clean offer. Sometimes . . . sometimes you just get bested. Especially in this market. Anyhow, we’ll be in touch.”

  “Right,” Teddy murmured. “Goodnight, then.”

  Out in the car, Britney came fully apart. Teddy hadn’t seen her so disappointed in many years, and he did his best to comfort her.

  “It wasn’t meant to be, I guess,” he said quietly, “and I’ll tell you something, Brit: That house was a money pit. It would’ve been a boondoggle, baby. We would’ve paid way too much to begin with. Who knows? We may’ve just dodged a real bullet.”

  “I want more,” she said at last. “I want us to build something. I don’t want to just keep renting. Our parents owned their houses. Why can’t we?”

  “We will,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “We will.”

  He dearly hoped that his words weren’t empty, that they could complete Gretchen’s house on time, that Gretchen was true to her word, and that he would have the stamina to finish the job, to stand there on Christmas morning and receive his award, like some kneeling knight waiting for the shoulder-kiss of a ceremonial sword. But the closer they moved toward that impossible goal, the more the whole deal felt like a cursed bargain; even this town had begun to feel like a mirage, an illusion of what once was possible in America, rather than what it was—a tony playground for the richest of the planet’s rich.

  21

  Gretchen’s father had bought the land for twenty-five thousand dollars in the days just after the Korean War. A corn-fed kid from Decorah, Iowa, he knew not a thing about the West. But when a friend from the Marines told him about a thousand-odd acres out in the mountains with good hunting, some hot springs, and a river running through it, the flatlander was charmed.

  Every summer they packed up the station wagon and lit out west. She’d stare out those wide rear windows at the vistas of, at first, nothing. Just fields and fields of near endless corn and then wheat, the land rising by degrees until finally, deep into Colorado, the Rockies suddenly thrust themselves up to the heavens as the air grew cool and dry. She remembered how slowly, how carefully, her father took those mountain roads even as cars honked and swerved around him, his forehead sweating with concentration.

  Back then, of course, there was no road to the hot springs. Her father would write a letter in March to an old rancher named Samuel Wilkins, and in April, his reply would arrive, promising to meet them beside the gravel county highway on the appointed day and hour in early June. He would meet their Conestoga of a station wagon, packed with dry goods and books, transferring it all to the several horses and pack mules he’d brought.

  Oh, the adventure! The uncertainty! To think: How much depended on those letters, and on a person’s word—that they would actually show up by the side of the road in an area that was otherwise total wilderness. Gretchen’s father would shake the rancher’s hand with a fif
ty-dollar bill neatly packaged in his palm. Then, when everything was secure, they would mount the horses and the rancher would lead them along the river and up into the clouds.

  The first time they visited the land, she was nine years old and had never ridden a horse before. She was delighted in every way, as if her parents had just presented her with the world itself, granting her every wish. She could hardly stop grinning at the old rancher as he lifted her up into the saddle that first time and adjusted her stirrups just so.

  “These are called reins,” Samuel explained, handing her two softened thick strips of leather, “though you ain’t gonna need ’em. Your horse here is called Lightning, but all his stormy days are behind him, I assure you. And you’re gonna ride right behind me, so he’ll know just where to go.”

  She beamed down at him. Nearly forty years later she could still draw a picture of his face. Every kind wrinkle, every little scar, every white hair. Every sweat stain on that battered old Stetson of his.

  “You afraid?” he asked, though he was fairly certain this little girl was nothing of the kind, that the only emotion overcoming her at that moment was extreme happiness—elation. That little smile seemed unbreakable. And so he found himself smiling, too; he liked this girl who was immediately unafraid of horses and willing to ride up into some of the most challenging terrain he’d ever seen. He’d never had a daughter and secretly always wanted one.

  “No, sir,” she said.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. “You’ll do fine.”

  They rode up into the mountains under a pouring sun along that narrow, sunbaked, dusty little trail. The journey took several hours, longer than normal, given how unaccustomed they were to the saddles and the elevation. Every hour or so, the rancher stopped to water the horses, though in truth he was more concerned about the family he happened to be shepherding.

  It was dusk when they arrived at the springs, as she remembered it, though she’d happily admit that first memory had been enshrouded by an almost mystical sentimentality. Certainly, it felt as if they had entered another reality—an enchanted mountain was how she thought of it, as the horses crossed the river at that ford and trotted up the slope toward the hot springs, where Samuel had already set up three canvas wall-tents: one for her, one for her parents, and a mess kitchen.

  How many nights had there been when she could not even bring herself to close her eyes, when the natural world was just too beautiful to say goodnight to? When she’d lain in her cot, listening to the coyotes yip, howl, and sing. When she’d watched the stars wheel and shimmer. When she’d read by the holy light of a Coleman lantern, while low and mysterious sounds emanated from her parents’ tent . . .

  And all those blissful days spent planning a more permanent structure. Not a house, no. The way her father described it, nothing more than a one-room log cabin with a south-facing porch where they could sit in rocking chairs and read. Perhaps a roughhewn table, too. A place to play cards on rainy days. Someday, her father laughed, maybe even an outhouse with a crescent moon carved through the door to let in the sunshine and starlight.

  Days spent panning for gold in the creek, collecting beautiful river stones, staring at mountain goats through binoculars, fishing in the river, or stalking deer. The mountains were said to hide lost hard-rock mines, and she imagined herself discovering some long-forgotten motherlode, or the macabre skeletons of doomed miners, their tattered clothing still clinging to white bone, pickaxes lying askew beside them.

  What she discovered in that wilderness, in all that space and silence, was herself. Time to read hundreds of books, anything she desired, from Rumi and Shakespeare to Charles Portis and Wallace Stegner. Candy books, too: Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. But there was also the time and space to learn and care for horses, to range freely, learning the names of the area flora and fauna. To know the constellations and to gaze at the formations of the clouds. In her later teenage years, to meet one of Samuel’s nephews, a young man named Loney Wilkins, and ride with him through the mountains, stopping to spread a blanket among the sage and learn each other’s bodies, from the first electric touches of their fingertips to the later wild swirling of tongues and then: one inevitable day, the frantic bucking of hips, the knots of lean legs, and this new forbidden language they seemed to have taught each other.

  It was not just herself she began to know and trust and gain confidence in, or the natural world. But her parents, too, her family, and her place in that family, an inheritance of shared history and ambition and love. As an only child, her little family of three moved easily, and there was no drama when it came to the dispersal of parental attention, for she received as much of it as she needed. Later, in college and law school, she would quietly observe that most of the world was not afforded this luxury, the time and space to ask your parents about their lives and their dreams, and to in turn receive their questions, without embarrassment or impatience, but with warmth, as if two great teachers were preparing her for the unseen path before her.

  They celebrated Gretchen’s seventeenth birthday there, in the log cabin her parents had built with the help of Samuel and Loney Wilkins the summer before. They roasted a lamb, cooked vegetables in aluminum “hobo” packets, drank beer kept cold in the river, and enjoyed an apple cobbler in a heavy Dutch oven set directly in the fire’s coals. She could think of nothing better, the faces of those she loved burnished by firelight and alcohol, her parents nuzzling each other discreetly, Samuel telling epic stories of his own childhood in these mountains, when there were still gunfighters and grizzly bears, when the land was so wild you could barely comprehend “settling” it. And in some small moment, stealing away to the shadows with Loney, though not so long as to openly disrespect the rancher, who she could sense by then knew about them, who, she knew, subscribed to an older code of honor, for he had once gently pulled her aside and said, “The world is harder for a woman, Gretchen. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The world wants to imagine you in certain ways, wants to see you just so. . . . Don’t make it easy for them.”

  “I don’t understand,” she had said, though she could guess he was talking about impropriety, about her dalliances with the nephew, most likely. Surely that was what he was circling around so cryptically.

  “You’re better than the rabble,” he said, then hesitated, turning his face away from her. “My god, you’re already a beautiful young woman.”

  After midnight, the rancher and his nephew laid down their bedrolls and slept near the campfire, and she stayed up all night long, with the precious knowledge that summer was even now slipping away from them, and wanting so much to wake the boy and slip into the hot springs and press her wet skin against his, glossy with starlight and steam, love and passion. But there was the thought of the rancher, and his sad, old blue eyes, and she knew damn well that he’d know if she took her lover’s hand to draw him away from the fire, and the disappointment that would cause the old man, who lived by the principles of some bygone time and morality, and that was why it wasn’t until the middle of the night, a few hours before sunrise, that she crept barefoot through the dust and gravel and stood as silent and still as a deer, listened to Samuel’s breathing, watched his eyelids not so much as twitch before she took her boy’s hand and led him to the springs and they did make love, too afraid to make even the slightest of sounds. The whole furtive liaison probably took less than five minutes, she would later reflect.

  When she woke in the morning and went outside the cabin to greet Samuel and Loney, the old man would not meet her eyes, and without ever being rude, exactly, he ordered his nephew to saddle up their horses, and they rode off down the valley and away. She knew the boy was oblivious about his uncle’s disappointment, just as she knew the old man’s heart was broken, because all that he had asked was for her to wait, and she couldn’t, and in her weakness, she’d showed him that she was less virtuous than he imagined, or, worse yet, like any other young person he’d ever met.


  The next summer, Samuel did not meet them with horses. It was Loney who aided them up the mountains, and Loney who appeared newly sullen and detached, at once older and somehow more childlike. Samuel Sampson Wilkins had passed on, having suffered a heart attack that spring. Something had changed in the nephew, too, Gretchen felt, and after they made love the first time that June, he confessed to being engaged to a young woman from town, a young woman who was pregnant with his child.

  Now she understood. Understood that Samuel had been telling her about the world, yes, but also about the fault in his nephew; telling her that his nephew was unworthy of her affection.

  The world darkened for her that summer. She was less open with her parents, less patient, and at times their days together in the mountains felt almost tedious. Instead of feeling as if she were home in this great range of peaks, she felt suffocated by their refuge, the springs’ very steam like a curtain drawn around her. She found no solace in her books either. For the first time in her life, she wanted the city, and told her parents so. Told them she would apply for college in New York City.

  It was also during those years—her late teens and early twenties—when her mother confessed that she had cancer. At the time, the news was so monumental, so life-altering, that Gretchen could hardly digest what she’d been told. But the evidence was clear. Her mother was more frail-looking, brittle, almost, and she was easily exhausted. Still, this wouldn’t keep her from their place in the mountains, even as her husband pleaded with her to stay in Iowa, where they were close to her doctors.

  “I won’t let this disease deprive me of what I love,” she declared. “I wouldn’t trade ten years in a hospital for a single summer out west.” Then she’d pointed a finger at Gretchen. “You mark those words, young woman. Don’t you dare mourn me before I’m gone. Don’t pity me. That is not how I want to be remembered.”