As Good As Gone

by Larry Watson

  Some lawn mowers need gas and oil, and Will isn’t sure he can come up with the right mixture, so instead of checking for gas in the Lodges’ garage, he’ll get the can from his family’s garage, where his father has already mixed them.

  Will is just exiting the yard when a voice stops him. “Hey, you quitting on me?”

  Adam Lodge is standing on the back patio. He’s smoking and holding a Budweiser beer bottle at his side, his index finger looped around the bottle’s neck.

  “The mower quit,” Will says.

  “There? With only that little patch left?”

  Will nods. “It’s out of gas, I’m pretty sure.”

  “I filled it up before I started.” Adam drops his cigarette and crushes it out with his foot. “That’s usually enough to do the front and back.”

  Will doesn’t know what to say. Is Adam Lodge saying Will lied about the mower stopping? “I went kind of slow,” Will replies.

  “The deal was two dollars for the whole backyard. Not most of the yard.”

  Will wants to explain that he wasn’t quitting, that he was only going for gasoline, but Adam Lodge has turned to the side in order to take a long swallow of beer, and Will thinks he should wait until Adam finishes drinking. But when Adam brings the bottle down it’s apparent that he’s no longer paying attention to Will. He’s focused on something next door.

  Ann has come out the back door and is walking toward Will, and with a startling swiftness, Adam Lodge leaps over the row of scrubby spirea bushes lining the patio and then he too is heading toward the part of the lawn where Will is standing.

  But, of course, it’s not Will that Adam wants to get close to. “Hello there,” Adam says to Ann.

  Ann ignores him and asks Will, “Do you know where Grandpa is?” She has walked home from work on this hot day, and sweat has glued strands of hair to her temples and colored half-­moons under her pink blouse’s arms and scoop neck.

  “Your brother here is trying to wriggle out of a job,” says Adam. “Maybe you can tell him how important it is to finish what he starts.”

  Ann acts as though she hasn’t even heard what Adam said. “There’s a casserole on the counter. Are we supposed to have that for supper?” she asks Will.

  “Maybe you’d like to finish the job? What do you say?” Adam asks her. “I’ll pay you what I was going to pay him for the whole yard.” Adam runs his fingers lazily up and down his side, tilting his head as if he expects his ribs to make music like the keys of a xylophone.

  Ann glances at Adam only fleetingly. “I’m finished with work for the day.” Turning back to Will, she says, “Do you know if Grandpa wants me to heat that up?”

  When his father corrects Will’s behavior or appearance, he often includes a reference to the family as part of the scolding. “You’re a Sidey. Act like one.” Will usually does as he’s told, but he’s never understood what his last name has to do with whether his shirt is tucked in or out. He still doesn’t know what “Sidey” means to most people, but he realizes that Ann must have an understanding of ancestry that Will lacks. She is standing straight and tall, and her haughty expression seems to have as its purpose informing Adam Lodge that she—that they, she and Will—are Sideys and that Adam Lodge would be well advised to remember that.

  And perhaps Adam knows now that he’ll get nowhere with Ann by criticizing her brother. “Why don’t we all just say the hell with work for the day? Let’s forget about the lawn.”

  Only now is Will able to explain why he quit mowing, and he offers his explanation not to Adam Lodge but to Ann. “I wasn’t quitting! It ran out of gas, and I was going to fill it up from our can!”

  Ann moves closer to Will. “My brother’s a good worker. He doesn’t shirk,” she says coldly to Adam Lodge.

  “Okay, okay,” Adam says, leaning back and laughing. “I’m sorry I said anything. Can’t we forget about work?” He holds up his beer bottle. “Can I get you a beer?”

  “I’m seventeen,” snaps Ann. “I don’t drink.”

  Adam Lodge looks Ann over from head to foot as though he has to reassess her in light of her statement about her age. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  Ann turns back to Will. “How much was he going to pay you?”

  “Two dollars.”

  She steps to the side so she can see around Adam Lodge and gauge how much grass remains to be cut. “You owe my brother one dollar and eighty cents.”

  Will looks up at his sister with something very close to awe. Where did she find the anger and the courage to speak to Adam Lodge this way?

  “Whoa!” Adam holds up a halting hand. “What’s this—you two ganging up on me? Who are you—the business manager?”

  Ann brings Will back into the argument. “Did you mow all the rest of the yard?”

  Will nods. “Almost all of it.”

  Ann slides closer to her brother. Will can smell her now, the floral scent of her perfume mingling with her sweat.

  “Jesus, you two. I was just joking around and—oh boy, here comes the cavalry.”

  Will glances over his shoulder in time to see his grandfather and Beverly Lodge climbing out of the truck, and his grandfather obviously sees them because he immediately heads their way, his strides so long and rapid that Beverly Lodge has to break into a jog to keep up. Is Will’s grandfather’s haste occasioned by nothing more than the way the three of them are arrayed, Will and Ann squared off against the bare-­chested Adam Lodge?

  “What’s going on here?” Calvin Sidey demands.

  Ann is the first to speak. “He hired Will to mow his lawn, and now he won’t pay.”

  Adam Lodge rolls his eyes. “That’s not exactly . . . I was just trying to teach the kid a lesson about doing the job right. And now I’ve got the whole damn Sidey clan on my back.”

  “You, Adam, were lecturing someone on work habits?” Beverly Lodge says. “I’m trying not to laugh.”

  Ann must have believed that Will no longer needs her help now that Grandpa and Mrs. Lodge are on the scene. She walks off toward the house with her arms folded as though the day has suddenly turned cold.

  And with Ann absent, Adam Lodge has no choice but to return to the issue underfoot. “You say you have gasoline?” he asks Will.

  “In the garage.”

  With an exaggerated courtesy, Adam asks Will’s grandfather, “May I use some of your gas? Please?”

  “If you replace what you borrow.”

  “Show me the way,” Adam says to Will.

  “And Adam,” Beverly Lodge says, “pay the boy what you owe him.”

  When Will notices that Adam is not right behind him, Will turns around and sees Adam still standing in the spot where he watched Ann walk away. Now, however, his head is thrown back and he is staring into the cloudless blue as if he’s waiting for the sky above to betray him just as the grass below has.

  TWENTY-­ONE

  After Bill Sidey has told Will about the nun who sneaks off every night to find out whether the Red Sox have won or lost, and after Bill has described to Ann how the University of Montana is beautifully snugged up against the side of a mountain and he has suggested again what a wonderful place it would be for her to study, and after he has assured both his children that their mother’s operation went well and that she’s a little weak but resting comfortably, after ten minutes of those evasions and awkward half-­truths, Bill asks to speak to his father.

  When Bill hears his father’s familiar raspy voice, a voice that always sounds as though it’s about to scratch itself into little more than a whisper, Bill suddenly discovers that he’s lost his own voice.

  “Hello?” his father says again. “Bill? You still there? Hello?”

  Bill clears his throat and that’s enough to get started. “Hello, Dad. Are Ann and Will still there?”

  “Not right here. Nearby. Did you want to talk to one of them again?”

  “No, no. I just wanted to make sure they weren’t close enough to be in on this part of the con
versation.”

  “They’re out of earshot,” Calvin says.

  “What I told the kids about Marjorie’s condition? It wasn’t exactly true.” He pauses to make certain he still has full possession of his voice. “She’s not doing well, Dad.”

  The accident that claimed Bill’s mother’s life occurred in the afternoon in France, but Pauline’s French family took hours to adjust to the fact of her death and to figure out how they could notify her husband. That phone call didn’t ring in the Sidey residence until well after midnight, and after the news came, Calvin Sidey stayed up alone with his grief throughout the next night. When Bill and his sister woke, they found their father in the kitchen with a coffee cup and a full ashtray in front of him. The whiskey glass wasn’t present then, but it would be in nights to come.

  Their father told Bill and Jeanette to sit down. On the table there was also a sheet of paper that their father unfolded and glanced down at before he began to speak to his children.

  “Your mother won’t be returning to us,” Calvin said. “She was struck by a car in her native village and killed.”

  The news was so stunning—would it have been any less so had it not been delivered in the language that a stranger might have used?—that neither Bill nor his sister could think of a thing to say. The silence soon compounded itself, and when it became unbearable, Jeanette, weeping, scraped back her chair and lurched from the room.

  Ordinarily, Bill would have followed his sister—he relied on her example in most unfamiliar situations—but there was his father, motionless, staring unblinking at the floor.

  But after moments passed—moments and nothing else, not words or touch or even a look—his father stood up and walked away, taking with him the sheet of paper, which he balled up and deposited in the garbage.

  Bill fished the crumpled paper out of the trash, believing not only that he might read additional information about his mother but also that he might be able to discover a mistake—France was so far away, so different in language, customs, values—wasn’t it possible that an accident there wasn’t what an accident was here, that dead didn’t mean dead.

  Written in his father’s hand the note read: Your mother won’t be returning to us. She was struck by a car in her native village and killed. Their father had read to Bill and Jeanette the news about their mother . . .

  And that Bill could not forgive. When their father left them—abandoned them—Bill felt as though that act was the natural conclusion to a process that began with his father not immediately sharing with his children the news of their mother’s death, deciding instead to write a script from which he could read. For years, Bill kept that crumpled piece of paper in a dresser drawer, holding on to it for the day when he would hurl it in his father’s face.

  Yet now, as Bill buckles pronouncing that simple, bland sentence regarding his wife’s condition—“She’s not doing well, Dad”—he feels he understands his father as never before. How much easier it would be to read those words than to build them out of thought and then bid them make that precipitous, dreadful drop from brain to tongue.

  “Not doing well how?” Bill’s father asks.

  “Well, it’s tough getting a straight answer out of them. They said the operation was a success, but she just hasn’t come around.”

  “Hasn’t come around. What does that mean?”

  In their Montana home, where Bill is now, Carole and Milo have installed a pale green carpet sculpted with a pattern resembling ocean waves, and though Missoula is almost as far from any sea as any point on the continent, when Bill stares down at the rug he feels something like the pull of undertow. “She’s out,” he says. “Unconscious. She never came around after the surgery.”

  “So what are they doing for her?”

  “Doing? Not much. Giving her IVs. Watching her. The doctor keeps saying he expects her to wake up any minute.”

  “You’re there—what do you think?”

  On most days, Bill has the knowledge or the instinct to move safely, correctly, productively through the hours. In his business, he can calculate accurately and fairly the needs of Gladstone’s citizens or of people new to the area. He can talk companionably with other businessmen, and together they can anticipate what’s needed to sustain the town and its traditions. All the duties of fatherhood suit him, and none of the small ways his children might irritate him are anything compared to the overwhelming joy they bring him. He counts himself among the luckiest men on the planet because he climbs into bed every night to lie beside the woman he loves and desires more than any other on the planet. And yet, on the margins of his life are shadows, hints of a darkness that could, without warning, blot out the light that shines on most of his days. This uneasiness—this dread—Bill has always supposed originated in his childhood when first his mother and then his father left him, and forever after he felt that at any time life might offer up something that he has neither the skill, courage, nor character to handle. Things could get out of hand is how this fear insinuates itself into his thoughts. His father is a man about whom it has been said took matters into his own hands. Bill has always known what that is a reference to. Calvin Sidey is supposed to have killed a man who insulted Bill’s mother, and though Bill doesn’t believe it himself it’s enough that many others do. And since Bill is a man aware of his own limitations, it stands to reason that when things get out of hand, as they are almost certain to, in a manner great or small, it will help, won’t it, to have nearby someone who can take matters into his own hands?

  Bill understands how contradictory this longing is. Being abandoned by his father has created most of the anxiety in Bill’s life, yet at exactly when he feels most anxious, he wants his father’s reassurance.

  “I’m afraid she’s going to die, Dad, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” his father says. “You go sit by her bedside and you stay there. Stay even if they try to drag you away.”

  Although his father hasn’t commanded him to do anything different from what Bill would have done on his own, he follows the order as if someone has just shown him the single narrow path to salvation. It’s for the comfort of my soul I asked him back, Bill realizes, mine, not his.

  CALVIN HANGS UP THE phone gently. He didn’t mean to speak so gruffly to his son, but God damn it, he wants Bill to understand—you might not have another chance.

  When Pauline left Gladstone, she and Calvin were barely on speaking terms, so angry was he over her decision to return to France. They hadn’t quarreled over the matter, not exactly, but he’d said, repeatedly, You don’t have to go. And Pauline would reply, I do, Cal-­veen. I do. She seldom stopped smiling, his wife, and in their first years together Calvin thought that smile was simply to help her get through the moments when something in the language or the culture bewildered her. And that was true enough. But over time Calvin also came to understand that there could be as much steel in a smile as in a tightly clamped jaw. Pauline Sidey was not a stubborn woman, except in the matters she was stubborn about, and then she was as set on her track as a locomotive. She gave up much to match her life to his in Montana—her religion, her language, her family, her farm girl ways—but she wasn’t about to forgo this trip just because her husband sulked about the house like a child who’s been denied a toy.

  On their last night together, Pauline took off her nightgown in bed. That was something he often asked her to do, but she had a shyness that usually got in the way. Isn’t it enough, she would say, that we . . . that you can touch? No, he’d say, it isn’t enough. I want to see. So Calvin knew. He knew what it meant that she was naked in bed. His back was turned to her, and she pressed herself against him. She reached inside his pajamas, something else she was generally reluctant to do. But he wouldn’t turn toward her. We have to get an early start tomorrow, he said, if you want to catch that train.

  Put her on the train he did, without an embrace. And when the train carrying his wife on the first leg of her journ
ey back to her homeland pulled out of the station, his heart thudded so hard in his chest it was all he could do to draw a breath. If he left right at that moment, he wondered, and if he drove like hell could he beat the train to its first stop? Could he be there when it pulled into the station? He could climb aboard and go from car to car until he found her. Of course he didn’t do that. He drove like hell, but straight to the Pitchfork Saloon, the only bar open that early in the morning. By the time the train made its first stop, Calvin Sidey was drunk.

  How many times over the years did Calvin ask himself, could he have come right out and forbidden her to go? Would she have obeyed? Most wives back then believed they had no choice but to follow their husbands’ command. Wasn’t it part of the vows? But Calvin wanted Pauline to stay because it was her decision. Hell, he should have chained her to the bathtub.

  Then as now, Calvin would have given anything to have what his son has. His wife lying in bed, home or hospital, asleep or comatose, it wouldn’t matter, as long as she was alive, and he could hold her warm hand, whether she knew it or not.

  TWENTY-­TWO

  Will has skipped Little League. His team was scheduled to play the Heidt Paint and Glass Bengals, and Dickie Mahlberg pitches for the Bengals. No one throws harder than Dickie, and he’s wild. Just last week he beaned Owen Cullen, and Owen’s parents took their son to the emergency room that night when Owen fainted at the supper table. Owen only had a concussion, but that was enough for Will. He’s always nervous up at the plate anyway, and he sure isn’t going to take any chances by standing in against Dickie Mahlberg and his fastball. Instead, Will goes out to the backyard and bounces a tennis ball off the back porch, pretending that he’s pitching for his team and he’s striking out more batters than Dickie.

  The day is cloudy, and Will wonders if it might rain, in which case Little League would be canceled anyway. But it never rains, not this summer. He winds up and fires another strike—pock—the ball hits the cement and comes bounding back at him, and he fields it cleanly.