As Good As Gone

by Larry Watson

  “My neighbor?” Beverly has a clutch of fear, a thought she immediately banishes as preposterous—that Ann Sidey lied about the circumstances of her accident and is in trouble far more serious than Beverly and Calvin had been led to believe.

  “Calvin? Isn’t that his name? The elder Sidey? Hasn’t he come back to town?”

  “Temporarily. He’s watching the house and kids while Bill and Marjorie are in Missoula.”

  “Well, his stay might not be all that temporary. He might be spending thirty days in one of our local facilities.”

  “Mary, will you please tell me what you’re talking about?”

  “All right, but I have to tell you—I didn’t see all of this myself. I had to confer with Nell Sleigh. She was out in her yard, and she saw and heard everything. You know who lives across the street from us, don’t you? That divorced woman who came here from Wyoming? She and her teenaged son—”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Beverly has no idea who those people are, but she wants Mary to get on with the story.

  “Nell says the boy is polite enough, but he’s never so much as said hello to me. And judging from the way he drives and the way he’s out half the night—”

  “Mary . . .”

  “Anyway. He was out in the driveway today washing his car. I swear, I’ve never seen him do a lick of work around the place—they hire somebody to mow and shovel the driveway—but he spends hours working on that car—”

  “What kind? What kind of car does he drive?”

  Mary sighs in exasperation. “Bev, you know I can’t tell a Ford from a Chevy. It’s black, that’s all I know. It’s black and it’s loud. I don’t know how many times I’ve been awakened at two or three o’clock in the morning—”

  “He was in the driveway?”

  “Washing his car. That’s right. And Calvin Sidey came driving up the street. He got out of his truck and Nell said pretty soon the two of them are having words. Something about the boy staying away from Ann Sidey. And apparently a few profanities were exchanged at this time, but of course Nell couldn’t bring herself to report what those might be.”

  “You say you didn’t hear or see any of this?”

  “I saw some of it. Right about this time is probably when I looked out. I suppose I heard yelling or something. I peeked out the front window and saw the young man slap Mr. Sidey’s hand away—I don’t know what it is, but teenagers can’t stand to be pointed at. I remember my Bonnie would just have a fit if I so much as wagged a finger in her direction. Nell says Mr. Sidey said to the boy, ‘You don’t need to know who I am. Just make sure you stay away from her or you’ll wish you never heard the Sidey name.’ Or did that maybe happen before? Anyway. After this exchange, Mr. Sidey turned and walked away. I guess he’d said what he wanted to say. And to his back the boy made what I assume is some kind of curse in sign language. Do you know what that means, by the way? I see the kids holding up that one finger, and I assume it’s something dirty but really, I have no idea.”

  “It’s obscene, Mary. That’s all I know. What happened next?”

  “Obscene—well, I know that. It still strikes me as a little like sticking your tongue out at somebody. Anyway. It must not have been sufficiently satisfying, because what he did next was a good deal worse. He picked up the hose he’d been using to wash his precious car, twisted the nozzle, and sprayed that old man while he walked to his truck.”

  Beverly winces in anticipation of what is to come. She has seen Calvin’s anger in action and knows how sudden and terrifying it can be, as if lightning might flash and then unleash a torrent of ice instead of rain.

  “At first I wondered if he had missed Mr. Sidey,” Mary continues, “because he just kept walking toward his truck. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t cover up, even when that kid got up a little closer and adjusted the spray so the stream was blasting Mr. Sidey right in the back. Nell said the boy was laughing through all of this, but I didn’t hear that.

  “Mr. Sidey climbed into the truck, and I thought, well, that’s the end of that. I was about to turn away, and you have to believe me—I was going to call you then and there to see if you knew how the Sidey girl was involved in all this.

  “Then Mr. Sidey got back out of his vehicle, and I think I probably let out a little moan. I thought, Oh, don’t do it; don’t make it worse. You lost—just drive away, even if it means going off with your tail tucked between your legs.

  “But then I saw that he had something in his hand, and for the first time, I was tempted to do more than just watch the proceedings. He brought a hunting knife out of the truck with him, and even though it was still in its sheath, I thought maybe I should holler over at them or something. I mean, a garden hose is one thing but a knife? And like everybody else in town I heard those stories years ago about what Calvin Sidey was supposed to have done to a man who made some kind of remark about his wife. So I was wondering if someone—if I—should call the police. But while I was trying to make up my mind things started happening, and they happened so quickly . . .”

  Beverly reaches out and when her hand touches wood, she pulls a chair toward her and sits down heavily. She performs all those actions blindly because she has closed her eyes. She’s able to see all too clearly Calvin with a knife in his hand; what she wishes to blot from view is this room where he took her in his arms—there in front of her humming refrigerator, her cold stove, her unyielding countertop.

  “Then I breathed a little easier for a moment, because Mr. Sidey didn’t seem to be going toward the boy. He was heading for the lawn, but that boy just wouldn’t leave well enough alone—he kept spraying the old man. Then that old man picked up a loop of the hose and crimped it—you know how you do, to shut off the flow? And that left the boy holding a nozzle that wasn’t doing any more than dripping. But then Mr. Sidey threw the sheath off the knife and began to cut through the hose.

  “Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe I have a knife in my house sharp enough to work through a garden hose without sawing away at it for a while, but that old man sliced it like it was string. And then while water was bubbling out of one end, he grabbed the other end and started hauling on it. I suppose he might have reeled that boy in like a fish if the boy hadn’t let go of the hose. And that wasn’t such a good idea. Old Mr. Sidey started twirling that length of hose overhead like . . . like I don’t know what. A lariat maybe? No, a whip is what I mean. Because that’s exactly how he used it. He started whipping that boy with the cut-­off garden hose! If he would’ve been using the end with the nozzle he could’ve put out an eye or done some other serious damage. As it is, I’m sure he raised a few welts. The boy just cowered and tried to cover up. Nell said she’s sure it’s the first whipping that boy’s ever got, spoiled as he is. Not that he deserved a beating like that—”

  “You said police before, Mary. Did the police come there? To the boy’s house?” Beverly opens her eyes. Her kitchen is still her kitchen—the dishes stacked in the drainer, the towel hung on the refrigerator door’s handle.

  “Wait—he wasn’t done. After your neighbor was finished with the shorter length of hose he tossed that aside and went over and picked up the other end, still bubbling water, and he brought that over to the boy’s car. He opened the door and stuck the hose inside—can you imagine? Then he pointed his finger again, and I could tell he was probably saying something to the boy, but neither Nell nor I could make out a word.”

  “The police, Mary?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure. But I just assume . . . I mean, wouldn’t you? Somebody gets a whipping like that, don’t the police get involved?”

  Beverly knows, of course, that it was never Mary Betts’s intention to torment her with this phone call. Mary simply had a story to tell—perhaps the most exciting one of her life. She had been witness to an event as dramatic as Gladstone is likely to host for quite some time, an incident that will be talked about in bars, cafes, kitchens, and offices all over town. It will be another Calvin Sid
ey tale. And Mary will have special status for the rest of her life because she was there; she saw it with her own two eyes. No, Mary didn’t want to torture Beverly with this phone call. Beverly certainly won’t hold a grudge against an old friend who didn’t know—who couldn’t know—that Beverly is in love with the old man who figures so prominently in the narrative. After all, Beverly only realized it herself when Mary was barely halfway into her story.

  “I’m sorry, Mary, but I’ll have to hang up. You have me stretching the phone cord all over the kitchen trying to see if there’s a police car outside.”

  “If they show up, you have to call me.”

  “Oh, I will, Mary. I will.”

  In truth, Beverly doubts that she’ll ever speak to Mary Betts again.

  AS THEY RIDE BACK into town Ann keeps waiting for her grandfather to say something. But he doesn’t explain how he knew she left the hospital, and he doesn’t ask her what she hoped to accomplish once she got to where she was going. He says nothing about how his clothes came to be wet. And he makes no reference to the hunting knife that lies between them on the seat.

  Ann picks up the knife, though she fails in her efforts to take it out of its sheath. Because of the gauze and plaster encircling her hand, she can’t grip the leather sleeve tightly enough to work the snap with her other trembling hand.

  Without taking his eyes from the street in front of them, her grandfather reaches across and takes the knife from her hand. “What do you need with that?”

  “I wanted to look at the blade,” Ann answers. “I wanted to see if there was blood on it.”

  He tucks the knife under his seat. “Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “I know where you went. When you left the hospital.”

  “Do you.”

  “When I told you his name, I thought—”

  “If he comes near you again, you tell me. That’s all you need to know.”

  “What did you—?”

  “Promise me. If he comes within so much as a hundred yards, you let me know.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll take that as a promise.” He turns the truck onto Fourth Street. “What the hell were you ever doing in the company of somebody like that?”

  Ann says nothing. If anyone can understand silence, surely her grandfather can.

  Not until the truck is in the garage, its darkness startling after the glare of the midday sun, does anyone speak again. “Well,” her grandfather says after turning off the ignition, “I reckon it’s a good thing no one ever asked your grandmother that question.”

  TWENTY-­NINE

  “Oh!” Beverly can’t help it—she cries out when she sees a tired, bedraggled Ann limping barefoot across the lawn toward the Sidey back door. That lovely, lovely girl with her arm encased in a chunk of plaster, her hair matted and tangled, and her eyes downcast—she looks as though she’s lost twenty pounds and put on twenty years since she was home last. The mother in Beverly wants to run out and put her arms around the girl. But Beverly stays by her kitchen window, waiting and watching for Calvin to follow his granddaughter.

  Minutes pass before he appears, and then he too walks toward the house, but slowly, hesitantly, and he keeps looking back toward the garage. Beverly watches him until he passes from sight. She turns away from the window and goes into the living room, determined not to call or go over. He’ll need a few minutes to get Ann settled, and then she’ll allow him an opportunity to call her or come over on his own. Her resolve lasts for less than three minutes, and then she jumps up from her chair.

  Beverly bursts through the Sideys’ back door and immediately begins to search for him in room after room. When she can’t find him, she has to decide between the basement and the upper floor. Ann is probably upstairs, but Beverly runs toward the basement steps. A light is on at the bottom of the stairs, and she grabs the handrail and goes down as quickly as she dares.

  It hardly seems possible that all the emotion that has sprung up in Beverly Lodge, sprung up and swirled around in her until she feels it not as emotion alone but as physical sensation, as if she’s ready at every moment to be touched and something in her is yearning and rushing out to meet that touch, that all this change in her began when she first descended these steps.

  She sees his bare legs first, pale, thatched with dark hair. He must know it’s her because he doesn’t startle or cover up at her approach. She steps down onto the concrete and finds him standing next to a chest of drawers. He brings a pair of Levi’s out of an open drawer and steps into them.

  “I didn’t hear your knock,” he says.

  “I didn’t knock. Or ring the bell.”

  “You must be here on a matter of some urgency then.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Beverly can’t see clearly into the shadows where Calvin’s discarded clothes lie, but she has no doubt why he’s taken them off. A teenager soaked them with a garden hose.

  “I heard about what happened with that boy.”

  He jams the hem of his T-­shirt into the waistband of his jeans. “News always did travel fast in this town.”

  “That doesn’t worry you?” Beverly asks. “That the police will be involved?”

  “It’s hard for most folks to reconcile themselves to a beating. Instead of letting it go, they say they’re going to call the sheriff. Or the police. They’re going to press charges, they say.” He cinches his belt tight. “But they seldom do.”

  “Is this something you’ve had experience with?”

  “Anyone lives to my age they’re bound to see and hear a few things.”

  “So you’re not worried.”

  He scrapes a handful of coins from the top of the dresser and puts them into his front pocket. Into his back pocket he wedges a wallet. “I’m not worried.”

  “So what my friend told me is true. You beat up a boy.”

  They’re not far from the bed where they lay naked together, yet the gaze he turns on her now is as blank as the bulb burning overhead.

  “If he’d been the one left standing, someone would’ve said to him, ‘So you beat up an old man.’ I didn’t go over there with the intention that it would come to blows. That was his call.”

  “But you were ready?”

  If he shrugs again, Beverly believes she’ll begin to beat on him herself. So before he can offer another response that will frustrate or anger her, she rushes to ask another question. “Did that incident have to do with Ann? With what happened to her last night? I assume it did.”

  “She didn’t want to talk much about it.”

  Beverly has a sudden memory of Ann’s presence at Beverly’s table, stretching forth her plate to receive a helping of roast beef, the plate at the end of a long, graceful, tanned arm. Yes, Beverly might well want to punish anyone who would cause harm to that girl. She would want to, but she wouldn’t.

  “But what did she say?” Beverly asks. “Did he hurt her in some way?”

  “She didn’t come right out and say.”

  “Then what—how do you know—?”

  “I made a guess. And once I got a look at him I didn’t see a goddamn thing that made me think I guessed wrong.”

  “A guess? Did you ever consider—”

  From the top drawer of the dresser Calvin lifts out a pistol, an automatic she believes, an ominous oily dark steel rectangle. Next he brings out a smaller rectangle, and this he jams into the gun’s handle.

  “Oh, no,” Beverly says. “No, no. Please. What are you doing with that?”

  He jerks back on the pistol’s action, making a clacking sound that in the basement’s smothered quiet is loud enough to make Beverly flinch. Calvin tucks it into the waistband of his jeans.

  “I have to go,” he says, and tries to step past her.

  Beverly grabs his wrist, and though it’s done impulsively, something in her mind pulls her back and reminds her that she’s clinging to a man with a gun. It might have been a comical observation were she not trembling with fear.
Her feelings for him have carried her so far from what has been her life that she might as well have descended into this basement to be entombed.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she says. “You’ve beaten him, you said so yourself.”

  He hasn’t shaken off her hand, but neither did he stop when she took hold of his arm. She fears he might simply drag her along until the weakness of her grip causes her to drop away.

  He stops and faces her. “The boy? That’s done. I guarantee you, he won’t bother Ann again. No, I’m making another call on Brenda Cady.”

  She points to the gun. “With that?”

  “The matter has grown more serious.”

  Beverly once pressed her hand on the bare flesh of his abdomen where the gun’s barrel is now making its own impression. Perhaps because she touched him there before, she can grab the gun. And do what with it? Run, run as fast and as far as she can and hope that even if he catches her he might be too exhausted to proceed with his mission? Or perhaps she can get a hold of his belt and haul him over to the bed. And if she can work that buckle . . . Oh, this is the thinking of a desperate woman! Beverly knows she has neither the physical charms nor the seductive powers to make him tarry, much less stop. She cannot, she has to admit, make him choose her.

  “Don’t,” she pleads. “Please don’t. Whatever your reason, set it aside. Please. If you go after someone with a gun, you could be the one who gets hurt. Or gets in trouble, bad trouble. Please. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Calvin looks steadily down at her, at this version of her he has never seen before, tear-­streaked and begging like a child.

  “All right,” he finally says. “You come along, and after you see what I have to show you, maybe you’ll feel different.”

  He leads her out of the house and across the back yard, and though with her long legs Beverly has always been able to match anyone’s walking stride, she has trouble keeping up with Calvin in his march across the grass.

  He enters the garage, and it takes a moment for her eyes to make the switch from the sun-­blasted yard to the dark rafters and splintered studs of the garage.