Three times a week Lauren ties one end of a rope around the boy’s waist, the other around her own, and like two mountain climbers they make their way to the spring and back. It’s a three-mile round trip with Lauren hauling buckets of water, and the boy tugging as he runs ahead. They bathe from a bucket of spring water warmed on the stove. So intent is the boy on examining the flecks of pyrite that shimmer and shift that he tips headfirst into the bucket, comes out spitting like a cat. Lauren stops shaving her legs, then her armpits. She wears sunscreen instead of makeup, pulls her hair into a ball cap, longs for a manicure, a grocery store, air conditioning.
Five days in a row they see the same domestic goat roping up the trail, a Nubian goat with a golden coat and a bell around its neck. It climbs the stairs of the lookout, rattles along the catwalk, bleating at the windows. Lauren radios dispatch, and they ask the few residents along the river if anyone has lost a pet. No one claims the goat. When at last the goat wanders off, the boy says only goat for two days. How about some lunch, Jonah? Goat. Are you tired, Jonah? Goat. Finally, they go out looking for the goat. Lauren tethers it to a twenty-foot rope and it mows everything from balsamroot to cheatgrass to Canada thistle around the lookout’s perimeter. The boy feeds it snowberries from the palm of his hand.
In the evenings, the boy studies the road atlas, turning the pages, state after state, the way another child might study a picture book. Lauren takes his finger and traces their route from Texas to Idaho by way of Louisiana. She draws a little boat in the Gulf of Mexico. That night the boy begins tracing roadways in the atlas. He pencils over Interstate 80, from Cheyenne to Rock Springs, the road now a silver river on the map. He lies propped on his elbows, his hand curiously steady. His hair is fine and fair as a dandelion gone to seed, so unlike her husband’s, which is thick and dark. And yet they resemble each other in many ways—the boy’s dominant left hand, his cleft chin, the apples of his cheeks. Lauren reaches down and touches him on the head.
Other days are a fight. The boy resists eye contact and any recognition of Lauren’s presence, her voice. He empties a bag of rice on the floor, feeds their cache of chocolate bars to the goat. He has taken to collecting rocks—nothing special by her eye, but to the boy they are gems—and arranging them into winding paths across the floor. If, and when, Lauren disrupts his roadway of rocks, the boy beats his head against the floor. He will take any map she leaves within reach. He will refuse to eat for no discernible reason. She must keep one eye on the horizon, one eye on the boy. She comes back from the outhouse and finds him flying the fire shelter like a kite. It catches in an updraft, snags in a pine bough, glinting like a three-hundred-dollar Christmas ornament.
Then it’s July, bordering on hot after so many days of rain, the sun drawing slats of light across the concrete floor. Crickets sing, welcoming the heat. The boy sleeps red-faced and sweating, both arms above his head. Daniel arrives in a white Forest Service truck, a cloud of dust winding up the road. Lauren puts on deodorant and a clean shirt and helps him unload a roll of woven wire, a dozen lodgepole fence posts, and two bales of hay. “I figure I better get a pen built for that goat,” he says. “I don’t want to scare you, but I’ve seen what a wolf can do to a calf. Believe me, it ain’t pretty.”
He holds up a paper bag. “My wife made me bring these. I don’t know if Jonah needs clothes, but I tried to take out everything pink.”
Lauren says, “He does, thank you. And thank Carol for thinking of us.”
They walk to the east side of the lookout where the goat works a sunflower between its teeth, root and all. The sky is stained lavender and coral and soon it will be dusk. Daniel reaches into his pocket, hands her a piece of folded paper. “It’s from your mother,” he says. “If you need to go home, I can send up a replacement.”
Lauren reads the message once, then a second time. Her mother explains in perfect cursive that Keller is coming for the boy. Lauren looks across the valley and wonders if she didn’t have the boy, would Keller come for her? She remembers an afternoon they spent on South Padre Island when she and Keller were newlyweds. A surf fisherman had hooked a seagull by mistake. The more the gull fought, the more it became entangled in the line, and soon the flock had moved down the beach without it. Eventually, the fisherman cut his line. The gull lifted, flew a few feet, and crashed back into the water. It carried on like that until Lauren couldn’t watch anymore.
She asks Daniel, “Did you read this?”
He looks at his shoes. “We’ve all got our troubles.”
On the third of July, Lauren and the boy leave Long Tom Mountain for town. Lauren’s sister, Desiree, and brother-in-law, Ted, and their four children are visiting from Coeur d’Alene. They’re all camped in the backyard as Ted does something he calls grilling, but it smells a lot like burning. They’ve mowed a clearing in the grass, and the children have laid out a slat of plywood and an arsenal of illegal fireworks they picked up in Missoula. The two older boys light firecrackers in the chicken coop, cover their ears, and run.
Desiree is eight months pregnant. She has named her children after places she has never been: Branson, Lincoln, Trenton, and Madison. Lauren suggests Houston as a joke, and Desiree says it with different middle names: “Houston Lee? Houston Hope? Houston Marie?” No one says Keller’s name, but Ted puts an extra burger on the grill. The women share looks of anticipation, simultaneously turning when a car door slams.
After dinner the children scatter, playing a game of hide-and-seek. The yard backs up to a calm stretch of river, but to either side the property is littered with junk cars, tires, broken bee boxes, a shed, and the chicken coop. They are waiting for true dark, for fireworks to pop and explode over Old Dump Hill. Desiree props her swollen feet on a stump. Lauren’s mother brings out a transistor radio and tunes in the only station in town, and they listen to songs with “America” in the title. Ted struggles with the campfire, eventually dousing logs with lighter fluid and throwing in a match.
Desiree raises a hand to the flames, says, “Lordy, Ted. You trying to burn the place down?”
The boy darts across the yard in a red sweatshirt with RODEO PRINCESS spelled in rhinestone studs, a hand-me-down from Daniel’s daughter. Lauren knows he isn’t playing along so much as hiding from the other children, and she’s surprised when Madison, Desiree’s youngest, takes him by the hand. They crawl into an old drift boat, Lauren’s father’s boat, now overgrown with skeletonweed. Their small heads peek over the bow, and in that moment Lauren’s life carries the semblance of normalcy. A calm before the storm, she thinks. Before she loses Keller to the boy, and the boy to Keller.
No, she thinks, they were never mine in the first place.
Ted retrieves a beer from the cooler and hands it to Lauren. “So your mother tells us you’ve been working at a lookout tower. Long John—”
“Long Tom,” Lauren says. “It was named after a miner that drowned.”
Desiree shudders. “I think I drowned in a previous life. That’s why I’m scared of water. Ted doesn’t believe in past lives, do you, Ted?”
“It’s fire that scares me,” Ted says. “Burning to death.”
“Actually,” Lauren says, “the miner’s real name was Joe Lockland. They packed his body upriver and ordered a coffin from town, but when it arrived it was too short.”
“A child’s coffin?” Desiree says. “Oh, that’s the worst. Remember the time we caught all those baby moles and put them in a shoebox and they died in the night? Remember, Lauren? And Daddy held a funeral in the backyard. Oh, bless his heart.”
“No, not a child’s coffin. It’s just that Tom was too long.”
“Long Tom,” Ted says. He looks to Desiree. “Get it, honey?”
“I get it,” Desiree says. “Why wouldn’t I get it?”
Lauren makes slits of her eyes. It’s after nine o’clock and twilight lingers. She scans the yard, searching for the boy’s red sweatshirt. The children are hiding. It’s eerily quiet. She thinks it’s too late fo
r them to play so close to the river.
Ted says, “So what’d they do with the body?”
Lauren stands, both hands on her hips. “They cut the tendons under the dead man’s knees, bent his calves over his thighs, and nailed the coffin shut.”
Desiree gasps. Their mother says, “That’s a terrible story. Just awful.”
Lauren doesn’t see the boy anywhere. She walks into the yard. Trenton and Madison appear from behind a pile of tractor tires. Trenton holds Madison’s hands behind her back like a caught criminal. The other two boys wait for the game to begin again. Lauren nearly yells when she says, “Where’s Jonah?”
The children look at Lauren and then each other. Madison points. “He’s in the tires,” she says. “He won! Jonah won the game!”
The adults clap and cheer. The boy runs out from behind the tires, keeps running across the yard, and Lauren chases after him, pretending he’s too fast.
After everyone has gone to bed, Lauren turns on the television for any news about skimming vessels off the coast of Louisiana. It’s Day 73 of the Deepwater Horizon disaster: over 140 million gallons of crude oil along 423 miles of coastline. Cleanup workers in Louisiana have reported symptoms from exposure to oil chemicals. CNN loops images of ruined beaches. There’s a message drawn in the sand: Spill, baby, spill. Last week a charter-boat captain in Alabama put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Lauren begins to worry. Four days ago Hurricane Alex forced boats to port in the Gulf of Mexico. Four days ago Keller called Lauren’s mother, but nobody’s heard from him since. For the first time Lauren admits that leaving Keller wasn’t so much about leaving, but wanting him to acknowledge her absence, and now she feels like a child. She doesn’t know if Keller is traveling by car, or by plane and then by car. The closest airports—Idaho Falls and Missoula—are both three hours away. Her mother gets up for a glass of water and says what Lauren is thinking: “What if something happened?”
Lauren steals a pack of cigarettes from Ted’s coat pocket, smokes, pacing the dark garage. She raises the glowing ember to her father’s ghost, says, “Would you look at us now?” Then she does what she promised herself she wouldn’t do. She calls Keller.
His voice sounds small and far away. “Where are you?” she asks.
“Laurie?” A pause. He clears his throat. “I’m in New Orleans. Where are you?”
Lauren cups her hand around the phone and yells in a whisper: “I’m in Idaho at my goddamn mother’s with your son, which you know perfectly well.”
She can hear Keller breathing, wheezing. He discharges the inhaler, takes a deep breath. His asthma has worsened over the years and it’s easier to imagine him on the deck of a trawler clutching his chest than as a high school athlete setting pole-vault records. “Are you OK?” she says. “My mother said you were coming.”
“I said I would try, and I am. They’ve got us working fourteen-hour days. Someone has to pay the rent while you’re on vacation.”
“Vacation? Is that what you think this is?”
“No one told you to go to Idaho. I mean, really, what were you thinking?”
Keller’s voice fluctuates with his movements, and she imagines him stepping into his jeans. She wonders how many women have seen him do this. Sometimes he touches her in a familiar way, other times as if he’s trying to please another woman. Lauren doesn’t know if this other woman is a younger version of herself—the person he still believes her to be—or someone she’s never met.
“I drove to New Orleans, Keller.”
“I know. Margot said some crazed woman took off in my truck. You’re lucky she didn’t call the police and report it stolen.”
“Is that her name? Margot?”
“She’s Doug’s wife. Doug and I work together. I rent the guest bedroom.”
“Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“Come on, Laurie. Don’t do this.”
“I thought you were staying with your parents. Why would you lie to me? Why did that woman—Margot—look at me like I was the other woman?”
“Christ,” Keller says. “Is that what this is about?”
Lauren slumps against the counter. She doesn’t know what to believe.
“Hello? Laurie? When are you coming back?”
“I’m not coming back. Come get your son.”
Lauren hangs up the phone. Her mother appears at the end of the hallway. Lauren says, “He’s not coming.” She gathers the sleeping boy in her arms and carries him to the truck. Her mother follows in her housecoat and slippers, asking Lauren to leave Jonah.
“What if Keller comes for him?” she says. “What am I supposed to tell him?”
Lauren starts the engine. “Tell him he can come to me.”
“But Lauren,” her mother says, “this isn’t about you.”
By mid-July, temperatures in the Salmon River Canyon break one hundred. Beetle-infested trees turn new shades of red, ribbons of rust among the dense green. Noxious weeds carry their seeds easily on the wind. A Forest Service helicopter flies over Cache Bar drainage, dropping purple streamers in honor of two fallen firefighters. The lookout at Stormy Peak complains of yellow jackets; Lauren complains of horseflies. They talk, always, of weather. It’s the closest thing Lauren has had to a friendship in a long time.
For two days lightning storms ignite a series of spot fires, and for two days Lauren paces the windows with binoculars, glassing for phantom fires—sleeping fires that creep across the forest floor, waiting for a gust of wind or a snag of fuel. She stands at the Osborne Firefinder and looks through the vertical slot of the front sight, targets smoke in the cross hairs of the rear sight. Of the fires she reports, four still burn: the Spring Fire, the Bighorn Fire, and two smaller fires near the Corn Creek Boat Launch.
Lauren’s head aches; her hands tremble. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and she hasn’t looked in a mirror in two days. On the counter beside her a cup of coffee grows cold. She goes to the stove to heat more water, finds the kettle already near boil. These are the twenty-hour days Daniel has warned her about.
The boy goes to the door, as he has all day, and turns the locked handle. Lauren lowers the binoculars. “I know, buddy. We can’t go out just yet.” She tries to sit him down with the road atlas, only to find he’s penciled across all fifty states. She thumbs the pages quickly, like a flipbook, and sees an endless maze, a web of confusion.
That evening, Lauren straightens a wire clothes hanger and she and the boy roast marshmallows over the propane flame. Afterward, the boy lets the goat lick his sticky hands. They sit outside on a sleeping bag with the wind at their backs. Lauren has taken the four track pins from Keller’s letterman jacket and attached them to the boy’s sweatshirt, and the boy sits with his head bowed, examining the gold.
It’s a cool night made warmer by the sight of the Bighorn Fire. From this distance the two-hundred-foot flames make the ponderosa appear as small as matchsticks, the flames extinguishable with the pinch of a finger. Steep terrain and high winds have kept firefighters out of the Bighorn Crags, and there’s nothing to do but watch it burn.
In Lauren’s pocket is a message from her mother, already a week old: Keller says please come home. The paper has worn soft between her fingers. This is something she’s learned: nothing is safe, nothing is sacred. There is always another fire on another mountain. The boy closes his eyes. Wind shifts through the trees like the sound of cars passing, and it’s easy to believe she’s back in Galveston, she and Keller together with so much undone between them.
Lauren sleeps without dreams. And when she wakes, the boy is gone.
The sun is not yet over the ridge, the sky gritty with smoke. Lauren staggers to the edge of the bluff and peers into the rocky depths, hoping to see, and hoping not to see, the boy’s red sweatshirt. She finds the goat pen open, the goat gone. The outhouse is empty; the storage unit is locked. The front door to the lookout squeaks on its hinges. She turns over a cardboard box, searches under the
bed. She runs down the dirt road, cups her hands around her mouth, and yells the boy’s name in every direction.
Finally, she radios dispatch. “He’s gone,” she says. “I’ve lost him.”
Forty minutes later a Forest Service helicopter begins a search pattern around the lookout. Canyon winds surge up the draw and the helicopter tips, then rights itself again. Watching from the catwalk, her neck craned, Lauren feels on the verge of fainting. It is dangerous country, as steep as it is rugged, with nowhere to go but down. She thinks of Keller, of the boy’s mother, her own mother, and she leans over the railing and vomits.
Daniel arrives with the deputy sheriff, two officers, and two tracking dogs. The deputy explains that the dogs are trained to sniff out drugs and cadavers. Lauren holds her knees at the sound of cadavers. The officers let themselves into the lookout and begin organizing a search grid. A red Suburban full of search-and-rescue workers arrives, with a trailer of ATVs and medical equipment. Behind them: a caravan of volunteers in their own vehicles. One of the volunteers looks to be the same age as Lauren. Their eyes meet, and Lauren sees what the woman sees—tangle of blond hair, swollen eyes, quivering jaw. She says to Lauren, “Why don’t we go inside and talk, OK?”
Lauren tells her the boy is wearing a red sweatshirt, denim overalls, and a pair of white sneakers with heels that light up when he steps down. She tells her about the goat’s golden coloring, its bell. She spells Keller’s name, the boy’s mother’s name, and the name of the caseworker in Texas. She feels a pain in her ribs when she says, “We fell asleep outside.” The woman asks what time, and Lauren says, “After dinner, but before dark.” She tries to explain the boy’s behavior by showing the woman the road atlas. The woman nods and writes everything down. It looks so small on the page.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 12
