by Larry Watson
In spite of the cold, Gary’s overcoat was open, he was gloveless, and smoking a cigarette. “Want to sell me a house?” Gary said with a smile as Bill approached. “Or buy mine?”
Bill was oddly breathless, but he doubted it could be from merely running across the street. His nervousness about talking to Gary must have caused the condition.
“I’m wondering,” Bill said, “if you’d have a little time for me. Maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee?”
Gary leaned back from Bill as if he’d just proposed something distasteful.
“Just a little friendly chat,” Bill said, smiling awkwardly.
“What the hell. Sure. Maybe I’ll even let you make it something stronger than coffee.” Gary looked up and down the street. “But not today. Rosie’s picking me up. She has the car today. She had to take the kid to the doctor.”
A sick child. Here was a subject, with its accompanying worry and tension, that all fathers could relate to. Bill felt as though he’d discovered a way to talk to Gary. “Is it Jimmy?” Bill asked. “Or the baby?”
Gary shrugged. “She took the both of them in. But it’s Jimmy who’s sick. Or Rosie thinks he is. Nothing but a goddamn cold, if you ask me.”
“Well. Women. They worry.”
Gary continued to look up the street. “Huh? Oh yeah. No shit. One of them so much as sneezes, Rosie’s ready to call the doctor.” He glanced at his watch. “Where the hell is she?”
And just like that, she appeared, coming around the corner in their big brown Oldsmobile. She pulled into the diagonal parking place near Bill and Gary, and before he walked over to the car, Gary gave Bill a big grin, as if he believed that his impatience had been sufficient to make his wife materialize.
Rose opened the driver’s-side door and started to get out, but Gary, with a brutally swift hand gesture, signaled for Rose to stay in the car and slide across the front seat. The baby must have been lying there, because Rose hesitated and fussed with a bundle. Jimmy wasn’t visible, but he could have been lying across the backseat. If he were sick, that would make sense. Rose must not have moved fast enough for Gary’s liking, and he shoved her with such force her head jerked to the side. But she finally moved to where her husband wanted her, and as Gary turned around in order to back the Oldsmobile into the street, Rose looked right at Bill and gave him a tiny, tentative wave. On this day of low, leaden skies, Rose Graber was wearing sunglasses.
And in an instant Bill knew that Gary beat his wife. From time to time Bill heard men make remarks about having to “slap the wife around to keep her in line,” and Bill knew that some of those men were serious. He also knew that some of them were nothing but tough talkers. But Gary, Bill was suddenly sure, did more than talk. That was why Reverend Ingvaldsen, that coward, wanted Bill to “counsel” Gary, to help him control his temper and to teach him that there were other ways, better ways, to handle a disagreement with his wife than to punch her.
What Reverend Ingvaldsen should have done with that gathering of men in the church office was to say, Gary Graber is beating his wife and tonight we’re going to his house to teach him a lesson. Then the Lutheran Members of the Mission should have dragged Gary out into the street and pummeled the hell out of him, stopping only when they could be sure that Gary got the message: Lay a hand on your wife again and you’ll get this and worse.
Bill couldn’t recall anything about Rose’s father, but he thought maybe he was the man who should be dealing with Gary. If Calvin were Rose’s father, Calvin would have taken the matter into his own hands.
But marriage counseling and vigilante justice don’t work together well. Even if Gary could be forcibly persuaded and threatened not to strike Rose, their relationship would almost certainly suffer. A marriage can’t be held together by blood fear. And sooner or later Gary would take his anger and humiliation out on his wife.
Abruptly Gary stopped the Olds in the middle of the street. He rolled his window down, leaned his head out the window, and called out to Bill, “Hey, what the hell was it you wanted to talk about anyway?”
Bill could not bring himself to answer. He turned and walked away from Gary Graber, his wife, and their problems. A freshening of snow, as fine and dry as salt, had fallen the night before, and with a gust of wind, the snow swirled down the street like a cloud of summer insects. Bill wondered if, in walking away, he was acting according to a lesson his father had inadvertently taught him.
But he’s not walking away now. He’s driving away from Missoula and toward Gladstone as fast as he can. When he told Marjorie about Ann’s injury, he hoped that she would urge him to go back to Gladstone right away. That was what Bill wanted to do, but he couldn’t leave Marjorie without her consent or encouragement. He needn’t have worried. Marjorie was, first and foremost, a mother, and nothing, not even her own health and well-being, could supplant her concern for her children and their welfare.
And if it turns out to be true that someone has been chasing Ann, if someone has been out to harm her, Bill will track him down and make sure he never does it again. No matter what kind of persuasion is necessary, Bill will make sure it never happens again. Maybe he’s his father’s son both in his willingness to walk away and in his willingness to rush toward. He keeps the speedometer’s needle pegged at eighty-five.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Her grandfather is gone. The crying, whimpering little boy is silent. The rhomboid of sunlight on the wall is larger and lower. The heat lamp has been turned off. Ann doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep, but she’s afraid it’s been too long and she’s too late.
She climbs out of bed, and almost loses her balance, which she blames on the heavy plaster cast encircling her arm from her knuckles almost to her shoulder.
Where could her clothes be? The only possibility seems to be one of the tall lockers across the room between an empty bed and a cart stacked with sheets and blankets. Although the lockers look exactly like those in the locker room at school—painted white, however, rather than gray—they have no locks, for which Ann is grateful. In the second locker she opens, she finds her clothes.
She looks around the ward. All the beds are empty but the one occupied by the boy who fell from the truck and he seems to be asleep. No one is there to watch her shrug off her hospital gown right out in the open. And privacy is not Ann’s only problem. She has to find a way to dress herself with one arm, a process made doubly difficult because she must also fit her clothes over the bulky cast and with her arm bent at an unmoving right angle.
She dispenses with her brassiere. There’s no way she’d be able to hook that. As it is, the sleeveless blouse she wore the night before buttons up the back, but Ann simply puts it on backward and fortunately she can manage all but the top two buttons. Her skirt she can zip up but not button. Close enough. She came in with only one shoe, and since that’s gone, she walks out of the ward barefoot.
Ann hurries down the hall, feeling all the while like a criminal escaping from jail. She shares the elevator down to the first floor with a candy striper who looks familiar to Ann. Is she also a Gladstone High student? The girl takes in Ann at a glance—the bare feet, the clothes slightly askew, the bright white cast—and Ann instinctively brings a hand up to her hair, trying to pull her fingers through the tangle. She wishes she could say something to account for her appearance and why she’s no longer in a hospital bed where she belongs, but she can’t think of a thing. But the candy striper doesn’t say anything either, and when the elevator doors open, she goes her own away, hurrying off with a stack of manila envelopes.
Never in her life has Ann Sidey called a boy, but now that’s exactly what she must do.
On the wall just inside the hospital’s main entrance is a pay telephone, but Ann doesn’t have a dime. She uses the directory, however, to look up the Hiatts’ number.
At the end of a corridor of offices is a waiting room, and there’s a telephone. The phone rings and rings but no one answers. Ann can only pray that that m
eans Monte and his mother aren’t home and so are out of danger. No, that’s not all she can do. She can’t take any chances. She must go there, she must.
Last spring in Mr. Lynam’s English class Ann Sidey learned, along with a host of other literary terms, the meaning of irony, and the lesson stuck with her well enough for her to know that her present situation qualifies. In fact, the hospital door has barely clicked shut behind her when Mr. Lynam’s words come to her: “The actual contrasted with the expected.” Last night she fell and lost her shoe and broke her arm rushing to get away from Monte. Now she’s hurrying toward him, her arm in a cast, her bare feet blistering from the heat of Gladstone’s sidewalks. The boy whom Ann feared and frequently felt she needed protection from she now must warn. Ann gave her grandfather a name only, but she knew he would soon match it with an address, and she has to get there before he does. She doesn’t want to be responsible for what might happen to either her grandfather or the boy whose name she surrendered. Oh yes, Mr. Lynam would love to learn how well his lesson took!
As she hurries through town, Ann stays off the hot sidewalks when she can and walks on the grass, but even then some lawns are so sunbaked and dry that they offer little relief to her bare feet. The grass might be cooler underfoot, but it can also be as sharp as stubble. Inside her blouse, she feels rivulets of sweat running down her bare torso, and she has to stop occasionally to wait for her heart rate to slow. The harder and faster it beats the more her injured arm throbs, and sometimes she has to walk with the heavy cast held head high just to relieve the tightness and pressure. Now she understands why people with injured arms wear slings; the cast is heavy, and her arm aches with the strain of holding it close to her side. Occasionally, she has to reach across with her other arm for support. The bump on her head seems to be swelling in the hot sun, and it feels as though a band is tightening around her skull.
These physical discomforts, however, she can bear. Of far greater concern is what she might say when she finally confronts Monte. How can she convey the urgency of her message? How can she prevent him from misconstruing what her presence means? The mere fact that she has come to his home he will regard as a victory—he has said all along that she will eventually return to him. If she tells him that she’s there to warn him, he’ll want to know where the danger is supposed to be coming from, and when she says, “My grandfather,” he’ll only laugh. What if Ann says, “He’ll kill you”? Would those words make an impression? Or would they only feed his bravado? An old man—I’d like to see him try. Maybe Ann shouldn’t even attempt to talk to him. Maybe she should just hide near his home—the way he’s been lurking around hers—and if her grandfather appears, only then would she reveal herself and step between them.
She crosses Pioneer Avenue, the street where the older residential districts give way to newer, larger homes. The houses flatten and spread out, and there are no trees that rise above sapling height. Nothing to shelter her from the noonday sun. Oh, this is a fool’s errand! Why does she even believe he’ll be home? Why is she so sure her grandfather is coming—or has come—this way? Monte’s house is less than four blocks away now, and she still can’t answer her own questions. Nevertheless, she doesn’t slow her steps to give herself time to answer.
CALVIN SIDEY IS IN unknown territory. He’s driving slowly through the curving streets of Western Meadows, block after block of so-called ranch houses, though Calvin can remember when the only dwellings around here were literal ranch houses and there weren’t many and they weren’t much. “Meadows,” hell. These were rimrock hills and alkali flats and no good for planting or grazing. Maybe someone, a Russian immigrant Calvin seems to recall, tried running sheep in this area. And he hadn’t any success either.
So Calvin is willing to tip his hat to the developer who turned this into prime residential properties. Whoever it was, he must have made a bundle. And then, probably as his own little private joke, he named the streets after precious gems. Calvin has passed or driven down Emerald Lane, Amethyst Circle, Ruby Boulevard, and Diamond Way. Well, maybe Calvin’s son sold some properties out here. Calvin can only hope that’s been the case.
And is it the fact of Calvin’s mission that makes him wonder what on any other day he wouldn’t question at all? Is the world better by even the smallest measure for there being houses here rather than sagebrush and scoria? Humans, of course, must have their shelter, and this valley is not so different from the one where Calvin makes his home. But time and weather will have their way, and the day will come when the houses will be gone, and the patient coyotes will return to rule this land. Time, the less he has of it, the more he respects its power and authority, qualities he’s not willing to concede to any human.
Finally, after all his searching for street names and numbers, it’s a car in a driveway that tells Calvin Sidey he’s at the right address. It’s a Ford all right, and probably a Tudor and a ’fifty-one or ’fifty-two—Calvin has never been real good at identifying cars by age and model. But there’s no question that the color is right. It’s black, a spotless, gleaming black, and the reason for its shine is immediately apparent. The car has just been washed, and its caretaker is finishing up the job now, rubbing down the car’s snout with a chamois. The car has been backed into the driveway, and when Calvin parks his truck, he makes sure it blocks the Ford’s path.
Calvin climbs out of the truck and starts up the driveway. The ascent isn’t steep, but water has run down the entire cement slope and into the gutter, where a few soap suds still bubble. The kid has his bucket out there and a garden hose, its nozzle releasing a little trickle of water down the driveway.
The driveway runs up to a garage, which is attached to a house somewhat smaller than most in this part of Gladstone. Half brick and half stained redwood, the dwelling looks like a new construction, like many of the houses in this neighborhood.
Calvin is almost at the car before Monte Hiatt notices that someone is there; he must have seen Calvin’s reflection in the chrome of the bumper. He doesn’t startle at Calvin’s presence. He simply stands and turns to face him.
“Yeah? What’re you selling?”
He’s a good-looking kid, Calvin has to admit. Wide dark eyes, dark complexion, thick lips that look as though they want to pout or curl into a sneer. And wavy black hair. His looks remind Calvin of a young cowboy he rode with many years ago. Billy McGinn, with the Slash Nine. Billy was Irish on his father’s side and Crow on his mother’s. A good kid, Billy, and a hardworking hand, right up to the day when he tried to ride one of Harry Carpenter’s horses straight down a ravine and got the horse’s leg broke in the bargain. Before he had to face Harry’s wrath, Billy ran off, never to be heard from again. But Billy had a compact, muscular build and this kid is tall and rangy, built more along Calvin’s lines. Billy McGinn. Jesus, it’s been twenty years if it’s been a day, but Calvin can still remember Billy and his name, whereas Calvin can’t recall this young fellow’s name. And Calvin’s been looking at it for the better part of an hour. Soon after Ann gave it to her grandfather, he wrote it down, and then he matched the name to an address, and he got directions to the address from a gas station attendant. But now the name has slipped away. He can’t take out the paper and read it, not right in front of the kid. Pieces of paper, is this what his life is coming to? An address on a letter to tell him where Brenda Cady lives, a name scrawled on note paper to tell him who’s been scaring the hell out of his granddaughter, another address to tell him where the kid lives. God damn it. For the rest of his years, will he need a crib note to tell him where he’s going or whom he’s facing?
The hell with it. Calvin doesn’t need to remember a name to do what he came here to do.
“This is more in the way of a delivery,” says Calvin. “I’m delivering a message.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Perhaps it’s her preoccupation with what might happen in the future that makes Ann Sidey oblivious to the present. Twice before in recent days a car has pulled alongsid
e her, once to harm and once to help, and now it’s happening again. By the time she startles into awareness, however, a door has already flung open to her and a voice commands her to get inside.
By way of argument, Ann helplessly, silently, points in the direction in which she’s been walking.
“I know where you’re headed,” he says. “But you’re getting into this vehicle and coming with me.”
There are so many questions Ann wants to ask of the driver, but she says nothing and climbs obediently into her grandfather’s truck.
BEVERLY CAN’T SIT STILL. She keeps walking back and forth from one window to another, first to her living room to see if Calvin’s truck is parked at the curb in front of the Sidey house, then to the kitchen to check the alley in case he drove up that way. When the telephone rings, she runs to it, certain the voice on the other end will stop her wondering.
“Well, is there a police car next door yet?” a woman asks.
The voice is familiar, but the remark itself is so unnerving that Beverly can’t concentrate on the identity of the person on the other end of the line. How could she know I was watching the street? “Who is this? What is this about?”
“It’s Mary, Mary Betts. Maybe you should go look out your window and see if a police car is parked in front of Sideys’.”
Mary Betts and Beverly Lodge are the same age and attended Gladstone schools together. In fact, Mary and her husband, a lawyer like Burt, once lived on Fourth Street and only recently bought a house in the new Western Meadows subdivision. Since the move, Beverly and Mary, friends who once saw and spoke to each other almost daily, now only exchange words on chance meetings at the grocery store.
“Are you looking?” Mary asks.
“I’m looking, Mary,” Beverly lies. “What am I supposed to see?”
“If the police aren’t paying your neighbor a visit yet, I expect they will before the day is out.”
