The Lives of Edie Pritchard

by Larry Watson

  “Bentrock.”

  He shakes his head sadly. “I hope you get a ride quick,” he says and points down to her ankle, bare above her shoe. “Or you’re going to freeze your tootsies.”

  Edie opens the passenger door. “I appreciate what you’ve done. Thank you.”

  He’s still shaking his head when she shuts the door and walks away.

  She takes a moment to scan the vehicles in the parking lot. Then she walks in the direction of Route 16, though at this hour traffic is so sparse it seems as if she might be heading toward a deserted highway. She stations herself on the gravel shoulder of the road, ready to raise her thumb at any approaching car or truck.

  Two cars go by before a black Corvair pulls over. The driver reaches across the seat to open the door for her. “Where you headed, ma’am?”

  “Bentrock?”

  “I can get you there,” he says. In an instant all the cautions of a woman’s lifetime coalesce into a single voice in Edie’s mind—Don’t get in a stranger’s car. But she climbs in anyway, believing that today it would be a greater mistake not to.

  But surely those warnings can’t have meant him. He looks as though he’s not much older than high school age. His hair is close-cropped and he’s spent a lot of time in the sun, yet his tan can’t hold back the pink of his smooth cheeks. He must have been traveling for a time because the car’s interior is warm and he’s wearing a T-shirt. He tells her he’s Bobby March, home on leave after completing his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. His voice is deep, and his Adam’s apple, which protrudes like the knob on a cupboard door, bobs up and down in his long neck when he speaks or swallows.

  “I figured army,” Edie says. “The haircut.”

  Bobby laughs and rubs his skull. “Ain’t so different from how it’s always been. Me and the sheep. Dad sheared the both of us.”

  “You grew up on a sheep ranch?”

  “Yes, ma’am. South of Hardin. And if my folks have their way, that’s where I’ll return.”

  “What if you have your way?”

  Bobby laughs ruefully. “I reckon not.”

  The rising sun is hitting Edie’s side of the Corvair, adding to the warmth of the interior. She slips her arms out of her coat but leaves it wrapped around her shoulders.

  “You must have got off to an early start,” Edie says. “You know I’m going to Bentrock. But you didn’t say where you’re headed.”

  “I went through basic with this fellow from Williston. Over across the border in North Dakota. Me and a couple other buddies, we’re all going to meet up at his place. Just hang out for a few days. Drink a few beers. Shoot the shit. Excuse my French.”

  “You don’t have to watch your language around me.” Edie says with a smile. “Do I remind me of your mother or something?”

  That question brings a laugh from Bobby March. “Ma’am, you sure as hell do not.”

  “Then maybe you could save the ‘ma’am’ for your mother as well.”

  “I know where you’re going,” he says to Edie. “But I don’t know why. Hitchhiking. No luggage or nothing. Out at the crack of dawn. Seems a little strange. A gal like you, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “My husband’s working up in Bentrock. With his brother. I thought I’d surprise him.”

  “And your husband will be okay with you thumbing a ride? Ain’t really the safest thing.”

  “Like I say,” Edie replies. “it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  THE SOUND OF the Volkswagen’s tires droning along the highway is almost in a musical key, and at some point Dean begins to hum along with a tune of his own.

  “Oh Jesus,” Roy says. “Don’t tell me.”

  “What?”

  “The humming? You’re turning into Pop.”

  They both laugh. “It helps me think,” says Dean.

  “And what do you need help thinking about today?”

  “When you move. Wherever you go, you think you’ll tell people you’re a twin?”

  “What the fuck kind of question is that? Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” Dean replies. “Why would you?”

  “Jesus, sometimes I wonder how that mind of yours works.”

  “You and me both.”

  AS SHE’S TWISTING in her seat, trying to get comfortable, Edie glances in the back seat. A sleeping bag is rolled up there. Next to it is a cardboard box with a few of its contents visible—boxes of Quaker Oats, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and cans of Campbell’s soup. Also on the seat is a sheepskin coat. On the floor is a rifle or a shotgun in its cloth scabbard.

  “Looks like you’ve brought plenty of supplies,” she says. “Everybody appreciates a visitor who brings his own groceries.”

  Bobby March says, “We’re planning on going camping.”

  “At this time of year? You be careful you don’t get buried under a foot of snow. It could still happen.”

  “I got a tent in the trunk.”

  “You don’t get enough of sleeping in a tent in the army?”

  He laughs. “I reckon not.”

  Edie likes this young man, this earnest young man with his good manners and his ruddy cheeks and his boxes of oatmeal. She wants to ask him if he has a girlfriend. But she’s afraid he might say, “Yes ma’am.” Then Edie would have to know that he’d rather spend his precious leave playing house with his friends than being with her.

  Instead Edie looks out at the monochrome landscape of early spring. She isn’t sure she’ll recognize in daylight that field where she saw the flash of Roy’s white shirt. But Roy will certainly know it. And will he point it out to Dean? Will he say: “That’s where Edie found me, broken and bleeding”?

  “What did you say he’s doing up there?” Bobby Marsh asks. “Your husband?”

  “He’s buying a truck. And then his brother will drive it back home.”

  “And you’ll ride home with him,” says Bobby.

  “That’s right,” Edie says. “I’ll ride home with him.”

  ROY SITS UP a little straighter. Is that the barn in the distance? Its boards are splintered and weathered to the color of the feathers, weeds, dirt, and stones of the surrounding world. It lies collapsed at the foot of a hill. Even in ruin it continues to lean northwest to southeast, the direction that the prevailing wind pushed, pushed, and pushed on the structure over the years.

  “Pull over, will you,” he says. “I have to take a leak.”

  “What are you? Four years old?” But Dean drives onto the narrow shoulder. Stones bounce into the wheel wells, and the car rolls to a stop. When Roy opens the door, the smell of sage enters the car. From nearby comes the burble and whistle of a meadowlark’s song.

  He climbs stiffly from the car and takes a few steps into the ditch, stopping finally amid the dry stalks of last summer’s knapweed and toadflax. His urine stream hisses and steams in the dirt.

  When he returns to the car, he doesn’t get in, not right away. He stands by the open door and lights a cigarette. He leans on the roof of the Volkswagen and surveys the miles of prairie that surround them in every direction.

  “You want to know what I think?” Roy says. “I think this whole fucking expedition is so you can prove something. To Edie, probably. Or maybe to me. And here’s the thing that just doesn’t figure.” Roy lowers himself to look into the car. “Edie doesn’t want you to do this. You know that, don’t you? She came and talked to me about it.”

  Dean says nothing. He grips the steering wheel and stares straight ahead as if he were not stopped on an empty stretch of road but speeding along a highway with one hairpin turn after another.

  “But you never talked any of this over with her, did you?” Roy asks. “You never asked her what she wants, did you?” He slumps into the car, but he sits with his back to his brother and with his legs sticking straight out toward the ditch.

  “I can’t do this,” says Roy. With the heel of his shoe, he gouges a line in the dirt of the road’s shoulder. “I
can’t. I’m sorry, brother. Those Bauers did a number on me. I’m not going up against them again. Fuck, I still haven’t got used to these false teeth.”

  “Call me a fucking coward,” he continues. “I don’t care. You want to do this, you’ll have to do it alone.” The Volkswagen’s heater keeps gasping out heat, but it can’t compete with the cool air coming in through Roy’s open door. “If you like,” he says, “I’ll get out here. You can go on ahead. I’ll hitch a ride back.”

  “What the hell was your plan for today, anyway?” asks Roy, turning now to look over his shoulder at his brother.

  “We’d scare them, I guess,” Dean says and points toward the dashboard. “Glove box.”

  Roy opens the glove box. Inside is the .38 revolver. “Oh fuck.” He lifts the gun out. “No. Don’t tell me.”

  Then as swiftly as he can with that bad leg, Roy clambers out of the car. He jogs into the ditch again and beyond, stumbling up the other side. He stops when he comes to a barbed wire fence. Then he winds up and throws the pistol as far as he can. “There,” he says, in a voice only he can hear. “Now we’ve both got one out there.”

  He walks slowly back to the Volkswagen and climbs in again. This time he closes the door.

  “I paid good money for that pistol,” Dean says.

  “I’ll reimburse you.”

  “I thought you were hard up for cash.”

  “We can work out a trade.”

  The Volkswagen’s transmission is balky, and it takes a couple tries for Dean to shift into gear. He checks the side and rearview mirrors. Nothing is approaching from either direction, yet Dean rolls down his window to look at the highway behind them. “I don’t believe,” he says to his brother, “you have anything I want.”

  Then he makes a U-turn in the middle of Route 16 and heads them back toward home.

  “THERE AREN’T BUT a few Volkswagens in this part of Montana,” Roy says, breaking the silence between them, as he’s done since they were boys just learning to speak, “and I bet you dollars to doughnuts yours is the only one with a gun in the glove box. Or was.”

  “Is that how you can tell who’s armed?” Dean asks. “The make of car?”

  “Go ahead. Try me.”

  Another mile passes before a car comes up fast and passes them. A dark green Cadillac. “That one?” asks Dean.

  “Oh for sure. Hell yeah.”

  A Ford station wagon goes by in the other lane. “Well?” Dean asks.

  Roy shakes his head. “Doubtful. Possible but doubtful.”

  Soon they’re laughing and pointing at every car that passes or approaches—an old Chevy pickup, yes; a new Dodge Charger, maybe . . . The Linderman brothers, who have often had to find their own fun in this world, are making up a private game to pass the time before they return home together.

  “That black Corvair?”

  “Nope,” Roy says confidently. “Unarmed.”

  So focused are they on the automobiles that they don’t notice the woman in that car. And if they did, they’d talk themselves out of it. Edie? How could it be? She’s back in Gladstone.

  BUT EDIE SEES them.

  Who else could it be in a red Volkswagen at that hour on Highway 16? Dean and Roy, and laughing over something only the two of them can share.

  Edie couldn’t feel more betrayed if she walked in on Dean with another woman. Laughing, they’re laughing, and in her mind she’s the object of their mirth.

  “Mr. March,” she says, “here’s what I want you to do—”

  “Bobby.”

  “Bobby. All right. There’s a truck stop and diner not far up the road. I want you to drop me off there—”

  “No, ma’am, I can—”

  “No, Bobby. That’s as far as I want to go. My plans have changed.”

  “If you say so, ma’am.” Bobby March hunches over the steering wheel and, like a horse with blinders, stares at nothing but the highway.

  “This place will be on your right,” Edie says.

  The Hi-Top Truck Stop and Diner comes into view. Bobby slows down as he turns into its parking lot. He drives up as close to the door as he can and stops the car.

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “As sure as I can be of anything. Thank you, Bobby. You came along at just the right time.”

  Edie opens the door, and Bobby says, “Wait—”

  But it’s too late, and as astonished as Bobby March seemed when Edie Linderman climbed into his car he seems equally astonished now that she’s gone, running toward the diner and out of his life forever.

  He steps down on the gas pedal so hard it takes an instant before the tires can gain traction on the gravel and send him on his way.

  THE STOUT WAITRESS is not working today. In her place behind the counter is a young woman who looks not much older than twelve.

  Edie stands by the cash register and waits. The girl comes over, wiping her hands on a dirty apron. “Yep?”

  Pointing to the Greyhound bus sticker on the back of the register, Edie says, “I want to buy a ticket.”

  The girl’s face is pocked with acne and her hands reddened from dishwater. She shakes her head no. “I’m not allowed to sell bus tickets. You got to talk to the agent.” Then she steps behind a curtain into a back room and calls out, “Mom!”

  A moment later a woman steps through the curtain. They have the same slope-shouldered build and chins that look sharp enough to poke holes in a newspaper.

  “Where you headed?” the woman asks Edie.

  “When’s the next bus leaving?”

  The woman glances over her shoulder at the clock next to a shelf of pies. “About three hours. Going west.”

  Edie opens her purse. She takes out a wallet, unclasps it, and pulls out every bill inside. “How far will this take me?” she asks.

  The woman takes the money and counts it. “On the westbound bus you say?”

  “If that’s the next one.”

  “Yep. West.” The woman looks down at the money again. “One way?”

  “One way.”

  “This’ll get you to Shelby for sure. Maybe Wolf Point.”

  “Fine,” Edie says. “Whichever.”

  “Shelby it is,” she says. She picks up the money but hands a ten-dollar bill back to Edie. “You’ll need something for when you get there.”

  Edie stuffs the bill back in her wallet. “Thank you.”

  “You traveling alone?”

  “You know it,” says Edie.

  “Be ready to jump out there when the bus pulls in,” the woman says. “That driver hardly slows down if he isn’t dropping off.”

  DEAN PARKS IN front of the Linderman trailer. Their mother is outside, slashing with a hoe at the barely thawed ground next to the front step.

  “Shit,” Roy says. “She’ll want to know why I’m not driving up in that Chrysler.”

  “You want to come over to our place? Play some cards?”

  “No, brother. You’ll be enough of a surprise for your wife. She doesn’t need to see both of us.”

  EDIE HAS BEEN on the bus less than an hour, and its easy bounce and sway are already transporting her toward sleep. Looping the strap around her wrist, she tucks her purse close to her side and away from the aisle, then closes her eyes.

  But in another moment she’s jarred back to consciousness. A large woman in a man’s wool overcoat is lurching up the aisle toward the front of the bus. She’s waving her arms and yelling, “Wait! Stop! We have to stop!”

  When she reaches the driver she bends down to tell him something. Edie can’t hear what the woman says, but the driver extends an arm in an attempt to calm her and move her back toward her seat. His effort is in vain however. She continues to hover near him and to plead her case.

  In another moment the bus slows, and the driver steers the vehicle to the side of the road. The vehicle leans, totters, and finally stops, half on the blacktop and half on the crumbling shoulder. The driver shuts off the engine and pulls on the emergency bra
ke.

  He stands and turns to face the bus passengers. “Folks, we have a little situation. This lady has forgotten her medication in her luggage and it’s medication she says she needs. So we’ll dig out her suitcase, get her pills, and we’ll be on our way again. Feel free to step out and stretch your legs.”

  Edie follows everyone else off the bus, but while they gather near the driver as he opens the luggage compartment, she walks behind the bus and stands by herself on the cracked, frost-heaved blacktop.

  It might not seem like much, this country. A few bare hills, each seeming to rise out of the shadow of the one behind it. Miles of empty prairie, and all of it, hill and plain, the color of paper left out in the sun. You might be out here alone someday with what you thought would be your life. And a gust of wind might blow your heart open like a screen door. And slam it just as fast.

  Two

  Edie Dunn

  1987

  Edie picks up the telephone and hears the breathy hiss peculiar to long-distance calls. For a moment she simply stares at the trapezoid of sunlight shining on the kitchen floor.

  A long-distance call. Daylight. Nothing good can come of those in combination.

  But it’s too late. Even if she hangs up the phone, bad news will only find another way to enter her house.

  She exhales and says hello.

  “Edie? Is that you?”

  The voice is familiar, but she still has to ask: “Who is this?”

  “It’s Roy. Roy Linderman.”

  “Roy . . .”

  “Jesus, you’re a tough gal to track down.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “You remember Jeannie Johnson? Jeannie Walbert now. She was secretary of our class, and she’s the one in charge of our reunions. She does a hell of a job keeping track of everyone. Damned if she didn’t have your address and phone number.”

  “I haven’t been hiding.”

  He laughs. “Okay, if you say so. You haven’t gone out of your way to keep in touch either.”

  “My life is here, Roy.” She closes her eyes and rests her forehead against the wall. “If it was so much trouble,” she says, “why did you bother tracking me down?”