As Good As Gone

by Larry Watson

  When Gary and Stuart amble into the yard, Will wishes he would have stayed inside and read his Joe DiMaggio book, Lucky to be a Yankee.

  Neither Stuart nor Gary have any thoughts about today’s Little League games. “Hey,” Stuart says, “did you see what we rigged up.”

  “See where?” Will jams the tennis ball into the pocket of his glove and turns the glove over on the grass so Stuart and Gary can’t see that he’s been playing with a tennis ball.

  “Come on,” says Stuart, nodding in the direction of the alley.

  Will follows them, but they don’t go far. Stuart stops behind the Sideys’ garage.

  “Well, what do you think?” Stuart asks.

  “About what?”

  Stuart smiles slyly at Gary. “See? I told you he wouldn’t notice a fucking thing.”

  “What?” Will says impatiently.

  Gary walks over to the steel rack holding the Sideys’ two garbage cans. He just stands next to the rack, but when Will continues to look on uncomprehendingly, Gary grabs one of the rack’s steel rails and shakes it hard, rattling the cans. Only then does Will realize that the rack isn’t in its usual position. It hasn’t been moved far, but now it stands closer to the oak tree whose branches shade the roof of the garage. For a couple years now, Will’s father has said that he means to cut down a few of the tree’s branches since they scrape the roof of the garage.

  “Okay,” Will says, still mystified.

  Stuart climbs onto the rack and then steps onto a garbage can, clanging and denting a lid in the process. From there he jumps up and grabs an oak branch—unreachable from where the cans originally stood—pulls himself up, and then scoots himself along the limb until he can drop down onto the garage roof. To Will and Gary standing below he smiles widely and gives a thumbs-­up sign. Then he scrambles down by the same route, and when he lands in the alley’s dirt and gravel he looks about surreptitiously to make sure that no one but his friends have observed his climbing routine.

  “If you wanted to get up on our garage,” says Will, “why didn’t you just tell me and I could’ve got our ladder for you.”

  Stuart grabs Will in a loose headlock and pretends he’s about to throw an uppercut at his captive’s head. “Hey, numb nuts—we don’t want to advertise what we’re doin’.”

  Once Stuart releases him, Will shakes his head to free himself of the stink from Stuart’s sweaty armpit, darkly furred where Will’s are still as bare as a doll’s.

  “My folks are gone,” Will says. “Nobody cares if you climb up on the garage.”

  “They would if they knew what we were doing up there,” Gary says.

  “We moved the garbage cans last night and climbed up there about eleven,” Stuart says. “Gary figured out that there’s your sister’s bedroom”—he points toward the second story of the Sidey home—“so we was watching for her to undress.”

  “But we couldn’t see anything,” Gary adds. “What you got to do is get in her room and open her curtains. We could see the shadow of her moving around in there—”

  “So if the curtains was open,” Stuart says, “we could see everything.”

  “Especially with these.” Gary walks over to his bicycle and removes the binoculars looped over the handlebar. “My dad’s. He got ’em in the war. Took ’em off a dead German.”

  Every addition to their basic plan is another weight on Will’s heart.

  “Now here’s all you gotta do,” Stuart says. “You’re gonna go in there and open her fuckin’ curtains.”

  At last—Will sees a flaw in their strategy! “She’ll just close them. She always does.”

  “Yeah, we thought of that. So you can’t just open them—you got to break ’em open. You know, like so they won’t close. Get it?” Stuart is practically rubbing his hands together in diabolical glee, so pleased is he with how well they’ve worked out all the details of their plan.

  “Break her curtains?”

  Gary has the binoculars to his eyes, and he is systematically scanning the overcast sky as if he’s watching for enemy aircraft. “You could maybe cut the cord,” he says. “Or jam something inside the curtain rod.”

  “You know, the part that goes over the window,” Stuart says.

  “I’m not sure we have that kind,” Will weakly offers.

  “Well, whichever.” Stuart’s voice and expression both harden. “No matter what kind you got you just make sure they’re open and stay open.”

  “And figure out for sure when she’s going to be home, so we can all get up there.”

  “We?” Will asks. “Are you talking about just the two of you?”

  “What the hell,” says Stuart. “You can join us.”

  Gary swings the binoculars down and around until they’re trained on Will. “Unless you don’t want to.”

  Will steps back, worried that from that distance the binoculars’ powers might magnify the tiniest trace of a frown, the smallest downturn of his lips—anything that might reveal the loathing he feels for his friends and their scheme.

  “He probably don’t need to,” says Stuart. “He sees her all the goddamn time, I bet.”

  Will can do nothing but meekly shake his head. He’s afraid to tell them he doesn’t want to spy on his sister because they might think he doesn’t have a boy’s normal interests. Why not, they would surely, incredulously ask. And Will doesn’t know what he’d tell them.

  Doesn’t he know his sister is pretty? More than pretty, beautiful perhaps? Doesn’t he know she has a good figure? Isn’t he curious about what girls look like—you know, their tits and down there? Yes. For sure, yes, he wants to see a girl without her clothes on, but.

  But what?

  When his grandfather told Will that cowboys spend more time building fences than roping calves, something in Will shrank and withered, and he’s afraid that something like that might happen when he sees a naked woman for the first time. What if Will looked at Ann and didn’t feel what a boy is supposed to feel because she was his sister? And what if he does feel it—she’s his sister!

  These thoughts and more swirl in Will’s mind, and he becomes angry and angrier still because he shouldn’t have to explain himself for not wanting to spy on his sister.

  The thunder that’s been grumbling in the distance all morning suddenly booms almost overhead. A few heavy drops of rain splat into the alley’s dust. If only a bolt of lightning would have struck the tree and the garage when Stuart and Gary were up there, Will’s problems would be solved.

  “Hey, what was your grandpa up to last night?” asks Gary.

  “My grandpa?”

  “He came out of your house last night to have a smoke, and we wondered if maybe he was going to do some window peeking himself.”

  Will’s heart catches on Stuart’s words.

  “Yeah, he walked over toward Mrs. Lodge’s, but all he did was stare at the house.”

  ANN STOPPED BRINGING HER lunch to work on the day when she found herself sharing space in Penney’s break room with Mrs. Bishop and Ethel Cutter, Mrs. Bishop’s friend. Throughout the lunch break, the two women huddled together and whispered quietly, all the while glancing furtively in Ann’s direction. Since then, Ann either skips lunch altogether or goes next door to the counter at Finley’s Drugstore.

  Today she has just ordered her usual, a tuna fish salad sandwich and a glass of milk, when a man sits down one stool away from her. Just like in the song, she sees by his outfit that he is a cowboy. A real one. His boots have riding heels, and the brim of his hat has that slope that comes from it being tugged down to keep it on tight or to shield his face from the sun and the wind. There’s dirt caked on his boots and sweat stains on his hat.

  Ann hates cowboys. Oh, not this young man specifically. When he leans toward her and asks if she’s going to be using the ashtray, she sees that his eyes, squinty and weather-­wrinkled, have a sad, shy look. And her favorable impression of him continues when he simply lights his cigarette and turns back to his coffee, al
lowing her to eat her sandwich in peace. She even feels a little sorry for him; if he’s sitting at Finley’s lunch counter in the middle of the day, that probably means he’s out of work.

  But Ann wishes she lived someplace where cowboys, whether on horses, in trucks, or on lunch counter stools, aren’t the region’s most important people. And again, that doesn’t apply to this—or any other—specific cowboy. A young man who works on the Hilltop ranch is certainly not a more respected member of the community than Dr. Clay, and no cowpoke has as much influence as the lawyers who work across the street in the offices of Hart, Bergin, and Kraus. Yet if it were the only way they could keep their cowboys, the citizens of Montana would cast all the doctors, lawyers, druggists, teachers, and real estate agents—especially the real estate agents—out of the state. Of that Ann is certain.

  What do cowboys even stand for? They’re a rowdy, restless bunch who make the world a better place for no one but the boss they work for. Schools or museums or art or music—none of these will ever be valued very highly in a region that has the cowboy as its patron saint. Ann knows that this attitude means her grandfather as well. But she hasn’t seen much from him that exempts him from her judgment. Besides, she suspects that after all these years he thinks of himself as a cowboy more than a Sidey.

  This is why Ann intends to leave Gladstone as soon as she graduates—if not before—and she’s determined to head east, not west to Bozeman and Montana State or Missoula and the U, where her dad hopes she’ll go.

  Ann’s friend Jane Folger visited her older sister in Grand Forks, North Dakota, last spring where her sister was a junior at the university, and Jane came back to Gladstone not only determined to attend the University of North Dakota but to take Ann with her. They would pledge the same sorority (Sigma Nu, to which Jane’s sister also belonged) and share a room in the sorority house. The campus, Jane said, was like nothing in Montana. Enormous trees shaded the sidewalks, and ivy crawled up the bricks of the buildings. Jane told Ann about the concerts and plays they would attend, the tea parties and formal dances they would be invited to, and Ann found Jane’s enthusiasm so compelling that Ann might very well apply to the University of North Dakota too.

  Kitty McGregor hops onto the stool next to Ann.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” Kitty says, spinning back and forth in half circles.

  “But I thought you didn’t come within a mile of the place on your day off,” Ann says. Kitty works at Finley’s, and she complains often about how men stand at the magazine rack paging through Cavalier and Stag and then practically lick their chops when they look over at her behind the register.

  “I’m delivering party invitations,” Kitty says. “And I have to do this in person, so it stays a secret.” She leans toward Ann and whispers, “Gwen’s having a party tonight. Her parents are out of town, and Gwen’s home alone.”

  Gwen’s parents trust her to stay home without supervision, yet Ann’s father insisted on having Grandfather Sidey there with Ann and Will. And now Gwen is demonstrating that her parents’ faith in her is wrong.

  “I don’t know,” Ann says. On the other side of the counter the waitress, Mrs. Tawny, who has been working at Finley’s soda fountain for as long as anyone can remember, frowns in their direction and pokes at her hairnet where a few coils of steel-­gray hair have sprung loose. Mrs. Tawny probably resents Kitty and Ann because their jobs are easier and higher paying than hers.

  Kitty raises her voice back to its normal level. “He’s not going to be there, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Kitty, like everyone else in their circle, knows only that Ann no longer has a boyfriend; she has no idea what precipitated the breakup.

  “How do you know?”

  “Joan said. He left town with her brother, Rick, and a couple other guys. They were driving up to Kalispell to bring back a car Rick’s buying from his cousin.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Joan said they left yesterday when Rick got off work.” Kitty shakes a finger in Ann’s face. “You’re going to this party. I mean it. I’ll drive. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to the Corral and eat first.” The Corral is a new drive-­in on the east side of town. The log fence enclosing the parking lot gives the place its theme and its name.

  “All right,” Ann says, and then by tugging closed her own blouse tries to signal to Kitty that the top two buttons of her blouse are open and that her brassiere is visible through the gap.

  Kitty waves away Ann’s concern. “Maybe somebody else will notice!” With her eyes and a subtle nod of her head, she indicates the cowboy seated behind her. Kitty mouths the words He’s cute.

  Throughout the elementary school years, Kitty was always one of the smallest girls in her class. In the past year, however, she has acquired a woman’s full body, all the more obvious because she’s still barely five feet tall. If it’s true that Finley’s customers leer at her, Kitty probably welcomes it.

  “Seven o’clock,” Kitty says as she spins off her stool.

  Kitty’s departure is so abrupt, Ann is left staring at the cowboy. Yes, she supposes he does qualify as cute, even if she isn’t interested in him. At least not as a boyfriend.

  What if she hired this out-­of-­work cowboy to be her escort, her protector? He needn’t come any closer than he is right now, but that would be near enough to discourage anyone who might want to bother her. Wouldn’t he be perfect for such a role? Aren’t cowboys supposed to be both gallant and tough, quick to pull out a lady’s chair and quick with their fists? Ann allows herself a peek at the width of the young man’s shoulders and the bands of muscles twining up and down his forearms. Yes, he would no doubt be capable of defending her. But though a cowboy is willing to work for low wages, he still expects to be paid, and Ann is fairly certain what payment he would expect from her. She’ll just have to continue to take care of herself—don’t Montanans believe in that as well?

  TWENTY-­THREE

  Everyone has been waiting for the dry spell to break, and when it finally does Beverly Lodge is probably the only person in town over the age of twelve who’s not pleased about it. But the downpour catches her out in the open, blocks from home and without a raincoat, umbrella, or even a hat. Within minutes she’s soaked to the skin, and she has to bend over her bag of groceries so the paper won’t get wet and tear from the weight of two cans of cream of mushroom soup, a cantaloupe, a box of Post Toasties, and a box of Cheer.

  It’s the Cheer that put her in this situation. She went downstairs that morning to wash clothes, and only when the washer was already filling did she realize she was out of detergent. Adam wasn’t home; he had risen early and driven out of town in order to do “research” for his novel. He was going to look for a site where an Indian battle was supposed to have taken place. And he had taken her car because his was almost out of gas. Yes, yes, she could have driven Adam’s car and hoped there was enough fuel to reach the Mobil station, but then she would have been not only paying for his gas but also getting the gas for him. She’s willing to do the former; she draws the line at the latter.

  Yet Beverly didn’t have to walk to the store. The laundry could have waited. Or she could have borrowed detergent from a neighbor. But she was angry at her son for taking her car and—why not admit it?—she was angry at Calvin. She had cooked for him the day before, dressed up for him, accompanied him on his expedition to Brenda Cady’s, and then once they returned to their neighborhood, he went off to his house without a word to her. He might have thanked her or talked to her about what had happened during the day—to say nothing of the night before—or he might have asked to see her later in the evening. Instead, she got nothing but his back as he walked away.

  So it had been anger at those two men that sent her out of her home on a day when the skies looked dark enough to keep most people indoors, but by the time she returned from the store, she was mostly angry at herself. She—not Calvin or Adam—was the one she had punished with her impulsive behavior. And now to make
matters worse, she has to slow her gait—every time she takes too long a stride her drenched canvas shoes threaten to slip from her feet. Oh well, she can’t get any wetter.

  She’s still berating herself when she turns up her walkway and sees Calvin standing under the shelter of her front porch, smoking a cigarette and squinting through the rain at her as she approaches.

  With the hand that’s been holding the bottom of the grocery bag, Beverly, in a little gesture of vanity, pulls her wet hair from her face. But without her hand’s support, the bag tears open, and its contents tumble at her feet. The soup cans roll down the sidewalk, and Beverly runs to retrieve them. One can makes it almost to the street, and by the time she catches up to it and makes it back to her porch steps, the spilled detergent—a corner of the Cheer box has split open—has had time to bubble up a little puddle of suds. She picks up the box carefully so more powder doesn’t spill out, kicks what’s left of the grocery bag toward the window well, and looks around for her cantaloupe.

  Calvin has picked it up from where it rolled into the grass, and he holds it out to her.

  “Could you hold on to it for a moment?” she says. “As you can see, I’m a little short of hands.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he announces solemnly. “I’d like a word with you, if I may.”

  “Help me get these inside, and I’ll listen to more than one word, if you like.”

  In the kitchen, Beverly dumps everything on the cupboard and then shakes rain from her hands and hair. “I’ll tell you what. If you should ever find yourself waiting for me in the rain again, why don’t you search somewhere other than my porch. If you would’ve headed out in your truck to find me, maybe I might have been spared dragging home looking like a drenched dog.”

  She turns around, and there’s Calvin, staring at her as if he has never seen her or her species before. And perhaps he hasn’t. Her wet slacks cling to her as if they’ve been painted on, and her white blouse has turned transparent. He can see not only the lace pattern of her brassiere but the pale pink of her flesh. She starts to pull the fabric away from her skin so it isn’t quite so revealing, but he steps forward and brushes her hand away just to replace it with his own, though his hand pushes the cloth against her once again. In his attempts to put his lips to her neck, he has to fight through a tangle of wet hair.