by Joe Wilkins
She called Maddy and left a message, told her there was lasagna in the fridge, ice cream and a pan of brownies in the freezer, that she’d be home late so not to wait up. She left a message with Dave Coles, too, inviting him to the presentations on Friday and asking him what he knew about a new student of hers, a Rowdy Burns.
With Miss Kanta gone for the day, Gillian slipped around the front desk and peeked in Kent’s office. His tie was loose, and a tin of mints lay unhinged and empty atop his desk. The two sets of parents sat there almost knee to knee, still arguing. She caught his eye, but Kent shook his head, mouthed, Ten minutes. She grinned, mouthed back, Meet you there.
A short while later she pulled up to the old brick false-front of the Grand and parked her Prius next to two mud-splattered flatbeds. The freezing snow bit at her face, her neck, the tender place on her wrists where her gloves didn’t quite meet the sleeves of her coat. She wobbled on her heels in the gravel and the wind but got her purse situated and the car door closed and stepped up onto the old boardwalk. She put her shoulder to the heavy wooden door. It had been years since she’d been to the Grand—some teachers’ night out when she’d first started at Colter, she thought—but when the door swung open, it all looked just like she’d expected. Nothing in the entire place tracked the passage of the past ten, twenty, even thirty years. Not the bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling on dust-furzed cords, the round-bellied woodstove, the low bookshelf of Westerns and romances, the mismatched folding chairs, or the pool table with a long, dry rip in the green felt. The bar itself—cherrywood, intricately inlaid and filigreed, with a heavy lead-glass mirror reflecting all the clear and amber bottles—harked back even further, to the mythologized years before barbed wire, to saloons and cattle barons and cattle drives, a time when the land and the law were what you made them.
Gillian strode across the raw boards of the floor and took a stool right in front of the mirror, right in the middle of the bar. The two men already there, the pickup drivers, were either laconic or cowed. They stared down the necks of their beer bottles as if they might discover something they didn’t know in the sudsy depths, then tipped the bottles slowly to their lips. The bartender—one of those bony, hard-living women who looked sixty-five but was likely thirty-eight, all squint and sunburn and cigarette—fumbled a bit with Gillian’s cocktail, but in the end delivered something that resembled a vodka tonic. Gillian ventured a sip—her first drink in six days, since last Thursday—and it was fizzy and sharp, the rim salted like she’d asked. On the far side of the bar, nearer the two men, a blow-up sheep was stuffed behind a two-gallon jar of pickled eggs. On the other side, above the pool table, hung a massive elk-head mount with a cigarette stuck in its dead, velvet lips. She almost laughed out loud, almost choked on her drink. It was too much. Like some ridiculous country-music video.
Kent threw open the door, stamped his feet.
—Jesus, I thought I’d never get out of there. I need something stiff. Barkeep, get me a Jack and Coke! Make it a double!
Had she ever actually heard someone use the word barkeep? Or say Make it a double? He’s performing, she thought. She didn’t mind.
Now Kent draped his booster jacket over an empty stool and got out his wallet, set a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, tapped it with his finger as he again addressed the bartender.
—Let me know when we’ve drunk that up. I’ve got another one spends just the same.
Gillian laughed and shook her head, and Kent grinned in turn.
—I’m surprised to see you so rambunctious, she told him.
—Meetings like that will make anyone a little rambunctious. Jesus. You’d think their boys were playing for the Denver Broncos and not the Colter Cougars. Anyway, here we are, cheers.
They clinked glasses, drank. Gillian licked at the salt on her lips, ran her hand across the dark polished wood of the bar top. This was nice. It was.
—You know, I’m really enjoying my time with the enrichment kids.
Kent, assuming sarcasm, apologized and said that just as soon as the school board approved it, they would advertise for a full-time special-ed teacher.
Gillian laughed, touched his shoulder. No, really, she meant it. He was right. She had no idea how much she’d missed the classroom the past few years. It was good to be reminded of why she’d started doing this in the first place.
—You might want to try it, she said. If nothing else, it’s a little less time stuck in meetings.
—Well, when you put it that way. Here’s to less time stuck in meetings!
They clinked glasses again and drank. With their second drink, they ordered steaks and moved to a table in the back. In ones and twos men filtered in. A group of women came in and scooted some tables together. They ordered wine coolers and fried appetizers and loaded the jukebox up with pop country songs. Miss Kanta, the school secretary, was right in the middle of them. She winked at Gillian. Gillian waved back. She knew she’d hear about this tomorrow, but that was fine. She could handle it.
Kent leaned in and told her his ex-wife had offered to sell him back their old house, which seemed both hilarious and sad, though what was perhaps more hilarious and sad was that he was seriously thinking of taking her up on the offer. Gillian commiserated, then told him Maddy had maybe finally hit her rebellious phase, that she’d been hanging out with this college friend of hers till all hours of the night. Kent laughed. This was the 4.0 girl they were talking about? Right. Rebellious. She studied too hard as it was. Kent’s youngest daughter was still in Portland, he said, still trying to break into the theater scene, which he admired—her persistence and tenacity. His oldest had gone back to school for a master’s degree in engineering at Washington State. And his middle daughter and her husband were expecting their first any day now. He wasn’t sure he was quite ready to be a grandpa, but he’d already bought tickets to Denver for the holidays.
—Oh! Here we go, he said as their steaks were placed before them. Now, I solemnly swear to you, Gillian Houlton, there is nothing in all of Billings, even Seattle and San Francisco, that matches Prime Rib Wednesday at the Grand in Colter, Montana—I mean, look at this!
Gillian inspected what had been set before her: a massive steak, a foil-wrapped baked potato, a bowl of shredded lettuce slathered in ranch dressing. She picked up her fork and the gleaming, black-handled steak knife.
—Well, I’ll give it a shot.
In the months after Kevin’s death she’d slept with a succession of men. She found the first few of them just days after she’d fled to Billings, in bars downtown, late at night. The last couple in hard joints on the south side of Montana Avenue, where she had begun ending up after the other, more respectable bars closed for the night. Not a one of the men was someone she would’ve wanted to spend time with in the clean light of day. She wouldn’t even bring them in the house until she’d paid the sitter, a girl down the block, and sent her home. So what was it about? She wasn’t sure until Maddy, seven, wearing pink, long-sleeved pajamas, woke her one noon asking for cereal, asking who that was beside her. Gillian rolled over to find in her bed a hatchet-faced, ponytailed man with cigarette burns studding his upturned arms. That’s when she knew. It was about oblivion, the swirling pain we embrace hoping to eclipse the greater, harder pain of loss.
Things hadn’t always been perfect with Kevin. They’d struggled those first years in eastern Montana. But as Maddy grew out of her colic and as they were reminded again and again that the place they’d made their home didn’t have much room for people like them—liberal, college-educated, not particularly interested in high-school sports or religion—they turned, as they had often done while living here and there across the country, ever more toward each other. They both still went to work, of course, while Elner looked after Maddy, but when they came home, they stayed home. They gathered wild asparagus along the river in the spring. They broke more than an acre of ground out back of the house for a garden, where they grew tomatoes and peppers and sweet corn. In the
fall they picked chokecherries. The cellar brimmed with mason jars of chunky, basil-studded tomato sauce and smooth, tart chokecherry syrup. Kevin taught her to hunt, and between the two of them the freezer filled with white-wrapped packages of elk chops and deer sausage. He built a sandbox for Maddy and hung a board swing in the cottonwood. He took his daughter’s hand as they splashed through the river gathering purple and mother-of-pearl mussel shells. Gillian painted the study a sage green, the front room terra-cotta. She wired speakers through the house so that wherever they were they could listen to Dylan, Charley Pride, Joni Mitchell. Of an evening, they ate simply and well—deer sausage and greens over grits with sliced tomatoes—and watched for blue herons and golden eagles rising from the river.
But that life was behind her now. That was the damnable part of it. When her daughter woke her that morning, Gillian hadn’t sworn any oaths or made any promises. She’d gotten out of bed, lifted Maddy into her arms, locked herself in the bathroom, and waited for the man to leave. Sitting there on the edge of the tub, holding Maddy, she understood—clearly, starkly—that this wasn’t the way to honor her grief. And that’s when the real pain came. She had cried in the beginning, of course, but now, months on, the sobs brought her to her knees. He was gone, gone, gone.
The pain then was a dull saw working up through her, slicing tendons, splitting ribs, until the dry air hissed all through her. She’d get home from work, put Maddy to bed, and then give herself over to jags of ragged crying. She came to depend on it, to define herself by it—I grieve, she told herself. That’s what I do and who I am.
For years there was no one, even when more reasonable suitors came along. Kent Leslie was one, and there were others—good, kind, sometimes even half-handsome men who could have loved her, whom she most likely, given time, could have found a way to love in return. But for a long time it was easy to say no. Easy as could be. She would turn forty-nine this year, and her knees hurt her after she ran, her hips were a little wider than she’d like them to be, but Kevin would always be thirty-seven, always sandy-haired and broad-shouldered, always slyer, kinder, quicker—as good as he ever was. And whenever she was with him in her mind—remembering Key West or Texas or a summer evening on the porch, the meadowlarks calling up and down the Musselshell—whenever she closed her eyes and let that staggering, welcome grief come washing over her once again, she, too, felt like her best, fiercest, most beautiful self.
She woke in the dark to the soft green light of an alarm clock, a slow drip somewhere echoing in the pipes. Kent, huge and warm, snored lightly beside her. She got up, slowly, carefully, so as not to wake him, and went into his kitchen. Found a glass and filled it from the tap. Out the window wind-drift snow swirled through a streetlight, though not much of it had stuck. A frozen rime here and there in the gravel, in the dead grass of the yard. She wanted to let whatever feelings might rise in her simply rise. So far—no shame, no regret. Some tenderness. And, if not happiness, at least a kind of contentment, a bit of warmth.
She rooted in her purse and found her phone. She’d left two voice mails for Maddy, both from the Grand. She’d texted as well when they got back to Kent’s little rental house. She saw a new voice mail and was hoping—but it was Dave Coles. Couldn’t Maddy reach out just this once? The old loneliness gusted through her. All these years without Kevin, raising her daughter alone. Why did she always have to be the one making sure, taking care, keeping them safe and together? Maddy was too old for it to still have to be this way.
The oven clock read 4:52 a.m. She could probably grab another forty minutes of sleep—but no. She’d drive home now to be there for Maddy, to make eggs and toast and orange juice, to touch base. She’d leave a note for Kent—see if maybe he wanted to have dinner at her place tomorrow. But for now, despite her annoyance with Maddy, she needed to get home.
All that day at school Gillian was distracted. When she had told Maddy about Kent, her daughter had smiled and said she was fine with it, was really happy for her. But then the girl ate only a bite of toast and a couple of forkfuls of scrambled eggs before rushing out. After the front door banged shut and Maddy’s car turned over, in the silence that followed, Gillian studied the table she’d set—scrambled eggs with chives, buttered sourdough, orange juice, coffee, a bowl of just-washed grapes—and felt tired. The thinnest edge of anger knifed its way in. Lately she had to reach so far just to catch the most precarious hold of Maddy.
She also didn’t want to think about the implications of the message from Dave Coles. Halting, cryptic, it had played in her head as she finished breakfast alone, as she drove to work, as she sat through the morning meeting about the possibility, due to state budget cuts, of moving to a four-day school week. He had found out some things about this kid, this Rowdy Burns, but he thought he should tell her in person. That’s what Dave had said. I ought to tell you in person.
Now the fluorescent lights of the enrichment room whirred and snapped. Gillian straightened up from where she’d been bent over helping a group of kids work on graphs for the bug project and massaged the ache in her lower back. She had felt a headache coming on too. Then Rowdy caught her eye. He had scooted his chair out of the circle and was toying with something, holding it up to his eye and then zooming it out and back in. She asked him to put it away, which he did, or tried to. But he fumbled, and the object struck the linoleum with a tinny sound and rolled beneath the table. Annoyed, Gillian retrieved it. Some kind of medallion, silver, warm, a little sticky from the boy’s hand—roughly the size of an old dollar coin. As the image on the medallion clarified and Gillian recognized first the outline of a wolf and then the crosshairs, she felt she might be sick.
The nausea crested and faded and in its place rose rage, flapping through her as if on black wings. That son of a bitch. Kent had known all about this boy. There was no way he couldn’t have. The medallion in her fist, she turned and left the room. Each square of linoleum seemed to float in the dusty light, and yet her every step was hard and sure.
At the front office Miss Kanta spun her chair toward Gillian and grinned, no doubt ready to make some comment about the previous evening at the Grand, but Gillian strode past her and threw open the door to Kent’s office, where he sat in the midst of a phone call.
—That boy, she said. The one who can’t talk. You know something, don’t you?
For a moment Kent’s mouth hung half open, unmoving. Then he apologized to whoever was on the phone and asked Miss Kanta to get the door.
The interstate unrolled in a blur of concrete and cold, blue-white light. She’d stopped once, for wine at Albertsons, and sat now at her kitchen table, hands like quaking birds, and poured a glass. It wasn’t the boy’s fault. She was trying, at least, to remember that Rowdy had done nothing wrong. It was rural poverty, it was lack of education, it was fundamentalist religion and reactionary politics, it was the mountains themselves—and the family, the uncle, that Wendell Newman.
She remembered him from the few months she’d had him in seventh-grade earth science, before she’d left Delphia for good. Or anyway, she remembered the boy he had been—quiet, polite, often reading or daydreaming. A memory of a newspaper picture flashed behind her eyes then, replacing this earlier, kinder vision—a lean, sharp, messy-haired boy wearing a T-shirt and patch-kneed jeans and staring out past the camera, out into the mountains.
It was the second anniversary of Kevin’s death—his murder—that she was remembering. She had just picked up the Billings Gazette, like she did every morning, and there on the front page was Wendell Newman, wind-tousled and lonely, the story all about how they’d never found his father’s remains. For half a moment she had felt a kind of sympathy, a certain kinship. Here was another child, like Maddy, without a father. His mother was a widow as well. But then she read on, in astonishment, as the article mentioned Kevin just once, saying only that he’d been killed, and the airy door in her heart slammed shut. All these years on, she could still hear it, like an actual physical happening: that w
hoosh and rattling bang. It didn’t fucking matter that Wendell Newman had lost a father. It was already in him. She could tell even from the picture, from the mountain light on the line of his jaw, from the way he jammed his hands into his pockets.
She had known it then. She knew it now.
Wendell Newman was the heir of it all. He was even still living in that same godforsaken trailer. He’d made his choice. He was in league with Betts, was part of the same sick cycle, was poisoning Rowdy as he’d been poisoned himself—filling the poor boy with all kinds of racist, sexist, ultraconservative junk. Violent, truly murderous shit. He had to be stopped.
She drained her glass and refilled it. And Kent had known just where Rowdy was staying but had kept it from her. Had sat there behind his desk and nodded—just like he did with all those idiotic, irate parents—and said he’d done it for her, that he was thinking of her, that he hadn’t wanted to upset her. Bullshit. She’d held up the medallion to him and told him about the connection with Betts. This was the seal of Betts’s group of crazies, she said, and Wendell Newman must have given it to Rowdy. Tavin was only the beginning. There would be more trouble for all of them up ahead.
