The Lives of Edie Pritchard

by Larry Watson

  ROY PARKS IN a driveway of sorts, two dirt tracks worn through sparse grass, and under a lone cottonwood, the only shade on this dusty edge of town.

  “You still want to wait in the car?” he asks Edie.

  “If it’s all the same to you.”

  “Can’t say I blame you.”

  The front porch of the tumbledown little house is missing boards, and a window screen has torn loose and curled upward. Masking tape covers a crack in a front window. A corner of the house is splintered, as if an animal has gnawed on it.

  Roy climbs out of the car and shuts the door quietly. The keys still dangle from the ignition. “Turn the radio on if you like,” he says. “The battery’s got plenty of juice.”

  “You’re sure this is the place?”

  Roy waves a hand in the direction of the gravel road running past the house. “You see any other possibilities?”

  Yet Roy seems reluctant to walk away from the car. Finally he says, “I’ll check around back first. Maybe I can get a look at the truck before the haggling starts.”

  He takes a few steps, then looks back. “Wish me luck.”

  “You don’t need it,” says Edie.

  That brings his smile back. “We all need it.”

  You’d think Roy Linderman had been the track star. Shoulders back, a bounce in his long stride—nothing like Dean’s loose-limbed slow, slouching walk.

  Edie turns on the radio and adjusts the dial until the static clears and a station comes in. CHAK—Moose Jaw! But in another moment, the song that seems to play once or twice every hour comes on, and Edie switches off the radio. My God, she thinks, even in Canada they can’t get enough of that boy jumping off a bridge. Overhead the cottonwood leaves applaud the silence.

  She opens the glove compartment and begins a desultory inspection of its contents. A flashlight. An unopened pack of Camels. Match books. A comb. Maps of Montana and North Dakota. When she lifts the maps, she jerks her hand back as if she’d been stung.

  Under the maps is a gun, a revolver with a wood handle and a blue-black barrel that gleams even in the dark glove box.

  Edie has seen guns before. She’s lived in Montana all her life. Not a highway sign or a rural mailbox is without its bullet holes. The gun racks in living rooms and rec rooms. The rifles and shotguns boys brought to school for hunting after the bell rang. The dead deer strapped to car roofs and hanging out the back of truck beds. In high school Edie dated a boy who said he had a pistol under the front seat of his car, though he never showed it to her. Her own father’s rifle and shotgun leaned in a corner of the front closet where everyone hung their coats, and when her father died, her uncle went directly to that closet to claim those guns as his own.

  And yet Edie has never touched a gun. She reaches into the glove compartment and takes hold of the revolver’s grip. So many curves in the wood and warm steel . . . the round barrel, the cylinder, the hoop of the trigger guard. The gun fits her hand as if it wants to be held . . . but after only a few seconds, Edie puts the revolver back and covers it again with the maps.

  She continues to go through the glove box. An opened roll of Life Savers. An owner’s manual for the Impala. The car’s registration. A parking ticket for the Gladstone street where Warren’s Furniture and Appliance is located. A folded manila envelope containing a few cartridges. A tin Band-Aid box, but when Edie opens it, she finds prophylactics. Roy, Roy . . .

  As gently as Roy closed the car door, Edie shuts the glove box. She flexes the fingers that gripped the handle of the revolver as if she needs to rid herself of the sensation of holding it. From her purse she takes out a stick of gum, unwraps it, and chews it vigorously, bringing a little saliva back to her mouth, which has gone suddenly dry.

  She hears a yowl and looks up to see two girls coming around that gnawed-on corner of the house. The girls are perhaps seven or eight, both wearing brightly colored bathing suits, pink and lime green, and one of the girls carries a tortoiseshell cat in the crook of her arm. The cat is not only meowing loudly but also pawing and kicking at the air in its struggle to escape. The girl simply tightens her hold around the animal’s neck. The other girl has a towel and a galvanized metal bucket, heavy with water.

  It’s plain they intend to wash the cat, and when the one girl puts the bucket down, they manage to sponge the cat’s fur with a little soapy water. But once they lower the cat toward the pail, it manages to get its paws on the ground and in an instant leaps free and bounds off.

  The girl who’d been holding the cat examines the scratches on her arm. A thread of blood trails down toward her wrist. “That little bastard,” she says.

  “He got you good,” her friend says.

  “That bastard.”

  Then they notice Edie and the long white car and, as if of one mind, they approach together.

  The little girl with the scratched arm says, “We’ll wash your car for you.”

  Edie has to laugh. “Cats and cars?”

  “For just a dollar,” her companion adds. Roy had mentioned the town’s unpaved streets, and the feet and ankles of these children are darkly powdered with dirt.

  “Sorry,” says Edie, shaking her head.

  “For fifty cents?”

  “It’s not my car.”

  The girl who carries the pail has a face so smeared with freckles it looks dirty. “Is it your husband’s?”

  “It’s not my husband’s.”

  “Is it your boyfriend’s?”

  Edie says no.

  The girls step back and examine the Chevy from front bumper to back, as if Edie’s relationship to the owner could best be determined by careful scrutiny of the car itself. The freckled girl smiles slyly and whispers something to her companion. The remark brings giggles from both of them.

  “Go ahead,” the scratched girl says. “Ask her.”

  “No. You.”

  The girl who carried the cat steps close to Edie’s open window. She balances on one leg to scrape at that leg with her bare foot. She looks past Edie and into the car’s interior. “Are you a whore?” she asks.

  Edie draws back. “What do you know about whores?”

  The girl nods toward her freckled friend. “Her brother said . . .”

  “Really? What did he say?”

  The freckled girl steps forward eagerly. “Are you? Are you?”

  Edie points toward the house. “Do either of you live here?”

  “Her grandpa does,” the girl with the scratched arm says.

  “What if I go tell your grandpa what you just said?”

  “He don’t care,” the freckled girl says.

  Edie makes a shooing motion with her hand. “You better go catch your cat before it gets run over.”

  “He ain’t our cat,” the girl with the scratches says, but both girls back away from the car. Just before they arrive at the corner of the house, the freckled girl turns back to Edie and gives her the finger. Then the children run off out of sight.

  Edie opens her purse again. The familiar, comforting smells of spearmint and cosmetic powder rise from the interior. She clicks open her compact and surveys her features. Whore? She isn’t even wearing any lipstick or mascara today. This summer she’d cut her dark hair so short it can’t be brushed or combed, just ruffled—and now when she runs her hand over her hair, it rises and falls as if she’s standing out in a breeze. Edie brings the mirror close to her face, and then she too raises a middle finger at that woman.

  ROY STARTLES HER when he leans in the open window on the driver’s side.

  “Scoot over here,” he says. “You’re the driver now.”

  “Did you—?”

  “I sure as hell did,” Roy says, wearing a conqueror’s smile. “Signed the papers, handed over the money, and put the keys in my pocket. The whole shebang. Now I’m going to buy you supper.”

  “Let’s just head back,” Edie says.

  “Not a chance. We’re celebrating with a steak dinner. Afterward you can go back to your sick husba
nd. I’ll bring the truck around and you follow me.”

  As Roy walks away, he knocks twice on the hood of the Chevy.

  THE HIGHWAY LEADING in and out of Bentrock runs right through the business district, past the pillars of the First National Bank, the wide plate-glass windows of Shipley’s Auto Supply, and the brass-handled doors of the Mon-Dak Hotel. And past both the Bison Café and Wolf’s Diner. But Roy Linderman doesn’t stop at either of those eateries. Instead he leads Edie to the Spur Supper Club and Lounge, better known to as the Spur, situated on a low bluff just outside town.

  The evening has a little sunset light left to offer, but none of it finds its way inside the Spur. The dark paneled walls, the carpet the color of dried blood, the candles in their red-glass jars—there’s barely enough light to glint in the glass eyes of the deer, antelope, and elk heads mounted on the walls.

  Roy’s sense of triumph hasn’t left him. He leans closer to Edie over their dinner table and says softly, “The hell of it is, the old man didn’t even want to haggle. I started him off with a number even lower than Les Moore said he might go for and, boom—he says yes, right off the bat. Hell, by this time I’m feeling a little sorry for him. I’m about ready to tell him I could go a little higher. But there’s no sense in me carrying on both sides of the negotiations. Then after we shake hands on the deal I say, ‘You mind if I ask why you’re selling the truck?’ No farm, the old fellow says, no need for a farm truck. Well, hell. You can’t argue with that logic.”

  From their table in a dark corner of the Spur, Edie has a view of the front door and the patrons trickling in. Saturday night. All the men and a few of the women head into the bar before returning to the restaurant space to sit down for supper. The women are in bright full-skirted dresses and high heels, the men in string ties, good boots, and Stetsons. There isn’t another woman dressed like Edie, in sandals, shorts, and a sleeveless blouse. But Roy’s short-sleeved white shirt? Good enough just about anywhere in this part of the world.

  “To tell you the truth,” Roy says, “he reminded me a little of Dad. For about a month after he sold the ranch, he looked like death itself. Drinking more than ever. Staring off at nothing. Then Mom sort of gave him a kick in the ass. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she told him. Get with it. This is your life now.”

  “Easy advice,” Edie says. “If you can follow it.”

  “Usually isn’t much choice in the matter, is there?”

  “I suppose not.”

  The waitress, a shy young woman with stooped shoulders, appears and takes their orders. A T-bone and hash browns for Roy, chopped sirloin and a baked potato for Edie. Roy holds his highball glass aloft and rattles the ice. “And could I get another one of these?” He points to Edie’s half-full glass of beer. “How about you, Edie? Another Budweiser?”

  “I’m okay.”

  As the waitress walks away, Roy says, “That’s something you wouldn’t have seen not too many years ago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A place like this hiring an Indian gal.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  Roy leans closer and when he speaks, even in his lowered voice, his breath causes the flame of the candle on their table to flicker. “They had a big scandal up here a while back,” he says. “A doctor or politician or somebody was raping Indian women. He’d been at it for years.”

  “My God. They finally caught him?”

  “Killed himself before it could come to a trial.”

  “My God.” An air-conditioning vent is nearby, and Edie is sitting right in the path of its cool breeze. She rubs her hands on her bare shoulders.

  “I have a jacket out in the trunk,” says Roy.

  “I’m all right.”

  “And then a few years ago, the local sheriff was shot and killed. I’m telling you, Edie, it’s the Wild West up here.”

  The waitress returns with Roy’s Jim Beam highball and places it on the starched white tablecloth. “Your salads will be right out,” she says.

  “No hurry,” Roy replies.

  Roy sits back in his chair, and for a long wordless moment, he gazes at Edie. From another corner of the restaurant comes a man’s booming laugh. Knives and forks scrape and clink against dinner plates. The smell of whiskey, of cigar smoke, of charred meat drifting through the shadows. Saturday night in Bentrock.

  “Anybody sees us here together,” Roy says, “they’d assume we’re a couple.”

  “But we’re not.”

  “We could have been, Edie. If you’d have let things go on a little further. We both wanted something more to happen, didn’t we? And after, then it would have been you and me for sure. I’m right about that, aren’t I?”

  “Stop, Roy. Please. Just stop.”

  The waitress brings their salads, and it looks as though a single head of lettuce has been sliced in half for each bowl. She places a carousel of salad dressings on the table.

  Neither Edie nor Roy lifts a fork. Edie again rubs her shoulders for warmth, and Roy lights a cigarette.

  “I can go get that jacket for you,” he offers again.

  “I’ll be all right.” Edie looks around the Spur. The dining room is filling up. Maybe they could have been a couple. After all, it hadn’t been Dean—her boyfriend—who showed up on the doorstep on that winter morning when she was home from high school—home alone, and in her pajamas. And she’d been angry with Dean, giving her strep. Roy didn’t care that she was sick and looked it. And she was curious about Roy. She’d heard what other girls had said about him . . . and he was Dean’s twin. What must that be like? But they’d stopped. She’d stopped. She was curious about Roy, but she loved Dean.

  There isn’t a table in the Spur now that doesn’t have at least one man and one woman seated at it. At one a man covers a woman’s hand with his own. At another a man strikes a match to light a woman’s cigarette. Yes, perhaps she and Roy could have been a couple, but that’s not the same as should have been.

  “You want to trade seats?” Roy asks.

  She shakes her head no.

  Roy takes another long drink from his Jim Beam and water. “Look, Edie. I’m sorry if what I said in the car earlier offended you. But, damn, since when can’t you tell a good-looking woman she looks good?”

  “My grandmother said if you say ‘I’m sorry, but . . .,’ you aren’t really sorry.”

  “Was that your grandmother Fitzgerald or Pritchard?”

  “Grandma Fitz.”

  “Wise woman.”

  “Was she? In the last year of her life, she told me if she’d been smart, she’d have moved to Sacramento when her son and his wife invited her to come live with them. Instead she said, ‘I have to stay in Montana, but for the life of me I can’t think what for.’”

  “I remember she used to roll her own smokes.”

  Edie laughs. “Even when her hands got bad, she could still roll her own.”

  “Would you like to live in Sacramento?”

  “Dean and I used to talk about moving. But we’re okay where we are. For now.”

  Roy leans forward again. This time he pushes the candle to the side as if he might need to climb across the table. “Here’s what I’d like to do. Take off with nothing but the clothes on my back, a few dollars in my pocket, and the car I’m driving. I’d leave Gladstone and go to, say, Great Falls. There I’d swap the car for another. Then I’d go to maybe Pocatello. Or Denver, even. Make another deal. See if I could add to my bankroll. Make enough to stay in the Brown Palace. You ever been there? Incredible hotel. Just beautiful. But that would be part of the plan—stay in a fancy hotel in every town. And then finally end up in California, driving a convertible alongside the ocean and with more money than I left with. I was reading this article the other day, about San Francisco and all the kids going there—hippies I guess they are—just to hang out. What do you think? You’d fit right in with your sandals. Maybe I’d grow a beard. Wear some of those love beads. Can you feature that?”

  Edie�
�s large green eyes gleam with something other than candlelight. “I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” she says. “Just to be there . . .”

  “We could do that,” Roy says eagerly. “We wouldn’t have to go west. East would work too. No reason why not—”

  “We?”

  “What do you say? We have two vehicles to get started. I’ve got a little money. We could buy you some clothes in . . . I don’t know. Fargo, maybe? Minneapolis?”

  Her face darkens as she sits back out of the reach of the candlelight. “We?”

  “We’ll leave here and head out on Highway Two. Straight across North Dakota. I know that road. We can make good time—”

  “Stop it.” Edie covers her ears with her hands. “Stop it-stop it-stop it!”

  “All right. All right,” Roy says. “Just having a little fun. You know me.” He takes a swallow of his whiskey. “I never know when to quit. Always taking a joke too far.”

  “Jesus Christ, Roy.”

  “And then for a minute there I thought . . .” Roy stubs out his cigarette. “Well. It doesn’t matter what I thought.”

  The waitress arrives with two platters of sizzling meat. The potatoes are on separate plates, and she isn’t sure who had the hash browns and who the baked potato.

  “We’ll straighten it out,” Roy says, waving the waitress away.

  He unfolds his napkin and tucks it inside his shirt collar. He does this with such a flourish it isn’t clear whether this action is also supposed to be a joke.

  “I hope I don’t embarrass you,” he says. “I’m so damn hungry, I might pick up this steak with my hands and start gnawing away.”