As Good As Gone

by Larry Watson

  But instead of putting the car into gear, he pushed in the cigarette lighter, and Ann allowed herself to breathe for a moment. He was spent now and relaxed.

  The lighter popped out, and just as it did, she thought, That’s funny; he never uses the car lighter. He always clanks open that heavy chrome Zippo.

  And as quick as that thought, he was on her, bringing the red-­hot lighter so close to her face she could feel its heat and count the glowing coils.

  “Did you hear what I said? Did you? You belong to me! Do I have to put a goddamn brand on you?”

  Ann thrust her hand up between the lighter and her face, and she remembered thinking, too clearly and too calmly, that her palm would be seared but perhaps the lighter would cool itself sufficiently on her hand’s flesh that when he pressed it to her face it would not be hot enough to burn her as badly.

  But he pulled the lighter away and put it back in its socket on the dashboard, leaving Ann to wonder how a chill could course through her a second after that intense heat. He arranged himself behind the steering wheel once again, and now he did put the car into gear. He lay his arm across the top of the seat, and Ann flinched, but only so he could look back while he backed up. While he was turned toward the rear window, he spoke placidly to Ann.

  “You’ll come around. I know you will. You’re just not ready yet. But you will be.”

  Ann wasn’t sure if he smiled when he said these words, but every time he spoke them or some abbreviated version of them over the coming weeks—when he passed her in the hall, when he drove past her and her friends on the corner outside Finley’s Drugstore, when he saw her at the river, at the movie theater, at the Rim Rock Cafe—“Are you ready now?”—he smiled, and sometimes he winked too or put his finger to his forehead as if he were tipping his hat. Are you? Are you ready?

  If readiness is kin to fear, desperation, and resignation, Ann supposes she’s ready now. She peeks out the corner of her window. He’s still there all right, just the front bumper and part of the Ford’s hood nosing out from behind the Lodge’s garage where he’s parked. Ann listens hard, trying to hear the engine under the higher notes of chirping crickets, whistling nighthawks, and hissing lawn sprinklers. Yes, there it is—that steady rumble.

  Ann takes a look around her room, and the affection she feels for all its odd and mismatched parts—the rocking chair with the missing dowel, the bookcase that she painted with the same white paint her father used in the hallway, the worn gray carpet, the sagging bed—makes it seem as though she’s gazing at them for the last time. Good-­bye to the photograph of Grace Kelly she clipped from Life magazine, good-­bye to the newspaper headline taped to her mirror announcing that the Gladstone boys came in second in the Class B high school basketball tournament, good-­bye to the record player with its snug little stack of 45s, good-­bye to the cane with the kewpie doll attached that she won at the Shrine circus, good-­bye to the floral print bedspread that she bought for herself with her Penney’s discount—farewell, farewell! Good-­bye, good-­bye!

  She closes the bedroom door tightly, something she never does if she’s planning to return soon, and begins slowly to descend the stairs, careful to step to the sides to make as little noise as possible.

  Just as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, a voice says, “Going somewhere?”

  Startled, she clutches the banister and barely suppresses the impulse to turn and run back up. In the next instant, she realizes that the voice came from her grandfather, sitting in the rocking chair. Nothing but moonlight and light from the street lamp illuminates the room.

  “I was . . . it’s so hot upstairs. I thought I’d sit down here. Just for a while.”

  Her grandfather stands. “You’re welcome to this chair. There’s a little air coming through the window.” Her mother’s lace curtains flutter uncertainly into the room.

  She crosses the room and sits down, and as soon as she does, it’s not coolness that comes to her but warmth. In its cane webbing, the rocking chair holds a remnant of heat from her grandfather’s body, and though the chair’s wood is unyielding, she still feels enfolded. She knows her grandfather is not about to take her in his arms and hold her tight in a protecting embrace, but for the moment, the rocking chair’s cage is comfort enough.

  “You want the television on?” he asks. “I’m not in the habit of the thing, but I’ll switch it on, if you like.”

  “No, that’s all right.” Only then does she realize that her grandfather has been sitting in the dark with nothing—no book or magazine, no radio or television—but what Ann guesses are his dark thoughts.

  “Feel any breeze?”

  “It’s nice.”

  “Tomorrow a working day for you?”

  “I don’t have to go in until eleven.”

  Her grandfather nods as if this is a fact he’s forgotten. “No one’s going to hold it against you if you decide to excuse yourself from supper at the neighbor’s tomorrow night.”

  “That’s okay. I want to go.”

  Calvin Sidey glances over his shoulder toward the back of the house, and Ann’s heart seizes with the thought that perhaps he has heard something.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about that car out there in the alley, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Same car that’s driven past the house a few times.”

  Ann shakes her head.

  “There’s not someone in that car you were planning to go out and meet?”

  She feels her face flush and hot tears spring to her eyes. “No.” She knows he doesn’t believe her, and if he asks her one more question, she might not be able to help herself; she’ll tell him who’s driving that car and what he’s doing out there.

  But he doesn’t say anything. He stands near the window and stares down at her. Ann doesn’t know where the feeling comes from, but she senses that Monte is no longer waiting out in the alley. This will not be the night she’ll leave her home.

  “You know,” her grandfather says, “when you were coming down those stairs I looked up and damned if I didn’t think I saw your grandmother.”

  “Me? Do I look that much like her? I wish I could have known her. In Dad’s photo albums, she looks so . . . nice.” Pauline Sidey looks more than nice; she looks beautiful, but since Ann’s grandfather has compared her in appearance to her grandmother, it would be immodest for Ann to make that connection.

  He gazes at her for a long moment. “You’re considerable taller,” he says, and with that he steps away from her and the open window and walks from the room.

  He goes into the kitchen, and Ann hears the sound of a chair being scraped away from the table and then the scratch of a match as her grandfather lights one of his hand-­rolled cigarettes. Although she can’t feel any cool air coming in, she remains by the window. She feels something better than a breeze. She feels safe.

  THIRTEEN

  Beverly wishes she’d never invited the Sideys for dinner.

  The meal went all right—even skinny-­as-­a-­stick Will asked for seconds, and when she cleared the dishes, she could damn near have put them right back in the cupboard, so thoroughly had all the diners cleaned their plates.

  But what’s supposed to happen next? They’ve finished their dessert (instead of rhubarb pie, pineapple upside-­down cake with whipped cream), and now they’re just sitting around the dining room table wearing their own personal shade of miserable.

  No doubt the heat is a big part of the problem. The thermometer on the front porch topped a hundred that afternoon, and even making allowances for the fact that the house faces west and so is bound to be hotter, there’s no getting around it—this has to be the summer’s hottest day so far.

  To make matters worse, Beverly changed the menu from the steak and baked potatoes she’d planned, but instead of going with something like cold chicken and potato salad, something she could have prepared the evening before (when she made the cake), and had sitting in the refrigerator, she decided to fix roast bee
f, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn on the cob. She had chosen this meal for the timing—she could serve everyone at once, and if she would have gone with steaks, she could have prepared no more than two at a time. But roast beef meant she had to turn on the oven, and the corn and mashed potatoes added two burners, and almost two hours after the completion of the meal the kitchen still radiated heat.

  But she had managed to put all the food out at once, though now she wishes she could excuse the guests so they could all run off to the somewhere else they plainly wanted to be.

  Only Adam seems to be enjoying himself and that’s because he can’t get enough of Ann Sidey and her teenaged beauty. In fact, the way he stared at her throughout the meal, and now tries to charm her with tales about what Gladstone High was like during his student years, makes Beverly wonder if something other than a budget cut was behind Adam’s not being offered a teaching contract.

  Ann doesn’t seem particularly comfortable with adoration. Her posture is probably an attempt at prim good manners, but she looks as though she has a touch of indigestion.

  “And is Mr. Reed still there?” Adam asks her. “Teaching history?”

  Ann nods. “He teaches sophomore English too.”

  “My God! I would have guessed he was in his seventies when I had him. So that must mean he’s—what?—pushing ninety?”

  Ann’s laughter is merely polite and doesn’t match Adam’s in volume or duration.

  “That face of his,” Adam says. “It always reminded me of a bloodstained sock. Is it still a mystery how it got that way?”

  “Someone said it was from being gassed in the First World War,” Ann suggests tentatively.

  Adam’s laugh is skeptical. “Gas doesn’t do that to your skin. It attacks your lungs.”

  Calvin Sidey has been sitting as straight and silent as his granddaughter, but now he clears his throat and speaks up, a little too loudly. “If you’re talking about mustard gas, it sure as hell could burn your skin. Burn and blister. And I’ll tell you something else about it: Those gas masks couldn’t do a damn thing to keep it out.”

  Adam throws a jokey little salute in Calvin Sidey’s direction. “I stand corrected.”

  Because she feels older folks have to stick together, Beverly puts in her two cents’ worth. “And in the case of Henry Reed, he looks like that because he pulled a pot of boiling water over on himself when he was a boy.”

  “Huh,” Adam says. “I wonder why we never heard that.”

  “Maybe,” Beverly says, “it’s not something he cared to advertise.”

  “Or he figured it was nobody’s business,” Calvin says.

  And then another silence descends, this one more uncomfortable than any brought on by the heat or full stomachs.

  After another moment, Ann speaks again, brightly and looking around the table as if she feels it’s her duty to get the conversation started again.

  “Darlene Holton’s cousin is one of those college kids who’s going down south this summer to help the Negroes vote and—”

  “Where’s he from?” interrupted Adam. “Not around here.”

  “She,” Ann corrects him without looking at him. “She’s from Minneapolis. Anyway. Some of us were talking and we’re thinking maybe we should do something like that here. Only for the Indians. We could help—”

  “Which Indians?” asks Calvin.

  “Which?”

  “The reservation Indians? The town Indians? The Indians who don’t look like Indians?”

  Ann’s smile fades, and she looks at her grandfather as though she’s not exactly sure who this man is.

  “Because,” Calvin continues, “the reservation Indians are pretty well taken care of by the government—”

  Adam interrupts again, this time to ask, “Can a reservation Indian vote? Legally, I mean?”

  “They can,” Calvin says. “They’ve got to travel a hell of a ways to do it, but they can. Most, I’m guessing, don’t bother.”

  Ann begins to ask a question, “Why should—” but her grandfather cuts her off again, his voice rising as though he’s addressing a room larger than Beverly’s kitchen.

  “Your town Indians, the sober ones, a good many of them have learned to make do. And the Indians who don’t look like Indians? Well, good luck getting them to step forward and say who they are.”

  Beverly feels sorry for Ann, who is still sitting up as straight as ever, but the color that’s risen to her cheeks says that she is probably now confused, angry, and humiliated. Beverly reaches out her hand toward Ann, pats the table, and says, “I think it’s good that you and your friends want to do something.”

  For a long time Ann stares at the tabletop. When she finally speaks, in a tone as formal as if she were addressing strangers, she looks to both Beverly and Calvin, as if she’s not quite sure whose permission is required. “Some friends of mine are going to the Legion baseball game tonight. May I go with them, please? I’ll still clean up.”

  Beverly guesses that the young woman is simply concocting an excuse to get away from these adults and their pettiness and condescension. And Beverly doesn’t blame her a bit. “I appreciate the offer, honey, but I’m not doing anything but stacking the dishes. I won’t do another blessed thing to heat up this room, and that includes running hot water. Maybe I’ll set the alarm for four a.m. and wash dishes then.”

  “I have no objection,” Calvin says.

  Ann stands, and in a display of manners Beverly has never seen before, Adam gets up too, his face wearing an expression of obvious disappointment.

  Ann says to Will, “Would you like to come along?”

  Will has been sitting quietly, so bored he’s been concentrating on fitting the edge of his dessert plate between the tines of his fork. He almost jumps out of his chair at his sister’s proposal. “To the game? With you? Is anybody else going?”

  “Kitty and Janice.” She must understand her brother’s dilemma because she smiles and adds, “But you wouldn’t have to sit with us.”

  The boy looks to his grandfather for permission.

  “If your sister will have you, it’s all right with me.”

  They’re almost out the door when Ann turns back. “If Dad or Mom calls—”

  Calvin waves them on their way. “If there’s any news, I’ll track you down.”

  As soon as they’re gone, Beverly’s son excuses himself as well. “I’m going downstairs,” Adam says, “to see if I can’t pound out a few more pages.” He takes his coffee with him, but he also stops off at the refrigerator and takes out a bottle of Schlitz. Beverly cringes, knowing that Calvin has seen the beer. Certainly a summer day like this one calls for a cold beer, but knowing Calvin Sidey’s history with drink, she never offered any.

  The basement door closes behind her son. “Adam’s writing a book,” Beverly explains. “He has a little office set up down there, and I have to say he’s been pretty diligent about putting in the hours.”

  “What’s his book about?”

  “He hasn’t shown me any of it, but from what I understand, it’s a western.”

  “That something he knows a good deal about, is it?”

  “Gladstone born and bred—does that qualify?”

  “About as much as the rest of the scribblers filling up the racks at the drugstore. What the hell. No reason he shouldn’t get in on it.”

  “How about you? Are you still doing ranch work?”

  “When I can find someone willing to hire me. That’s not as regular as it used to be.”

  “You could always come back to town.” It’s an innocuous remark, yet Beverly winces to herself after making it. Will he think she’s trying to trap him into saying something about the circumstances of his leaving?

  He flicks a crumb from the table. “I’ve been away too long. I’m afraid I’m not much suited for civilized society anymore.”

  If you ever were, Beverly says to herself and shivers inwardly again. “So—your daughter-­in-­law’s surgery is scheduled
for tomorrow?”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “I imagine Marjorie’s eager to have done with it.”

  “I’m sure she is.” With the edge of his thumb, Calvin wipes sweat from above his eyebrow.

  “Sorry about the heat,” Beverly says.

  “So you’re responsible.”

  Even when he says something like this, something that could be a joke, Beverly feels as though she’s being reprimanded. “I just meant . . . I couldn’t come up with a damn thing to offer any relief. I considered hauling all the food outside, but it’s no cooler out there. In here we don’t have to contend with the mosquitoes and the flies.” Just as she says this, she notices a fly twitching in the shade of Adam’s plate. She reaches over and nudges the plate, sending the fly into sideways flight. With a laugh, she adds, “Mosquitoes anyway!”

  Earlier, the room’s silence was that of relative strangers forced into close company, but now it seems to come from a man and woman alone together, and one of them is staring so hard at the other that Beverly feels herself flush with the attention. The sensation reminds her, simultaneously and paradoxically, of a schoolgirl blush and a middle-­aged hot flash. She would have thought both were behind her by now. Well, this heat can do strange things.

  “If you’re really looking to beat the heat,” Calvin says, “I’ve got the answer.”

  “Anything short of sticking my head in a bucket of ice water,” she replies, “I’m game.”

  THE BASEMENT OF THE Sidey home is at least twenty degrees cooler than her kitchen, and once Beverly gets past the smell of mildew and the fact that somewhere in the room a cricket is chirping—she hates crickets—she has to admit, she feels more comfortable than she has in days. But she’d never spend a night in her own basement, and it has linoleum floors, paneled walls, and an acoustic ceiling. This is nothing but concrete, studs, joists, and discarded furniture and trunks from the rooms upstairs.

  “This is where your son put you up?”