From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  He lay in bed, forgetting to put on his headphones so that he wouldn’t hear if his mother was crying. He didn’t care right now, anyway. But tonight he could hear her opening drawers and moving hangers in the closet. She wasn’t doing it loudly. If he’d been asleep he wouldn’t have heard it; it wouldn’t have woken him up. For just a moment he was afraid that she was leaving, too. Then he understood that she must be getting rid of his father’s clothes.

  He got up, put on his jeans, and went into her room. “What are you doing?” he said.

  She didn’t answer. She was piling his father’s clothes into storage boxes she kept under the bed. There were more clothes than Mike had expected, even though his father had taken things with him. There were still pants, shirts, sweaters, and shoes.

  “I want to think of him as dead,” Mike’s mother said.

  The clothes were blurry now. Mike kept his back to his mother until his vision cleared, by which time she was crying. When he turned around, she was holding his father’s blue shirt up to her face.

  EIGHT

  BY the second week of July, there had been no more news about Mike’s father, except that the district attorney had gotten an indictment against him, as Tom DeWitt had predicted. The search had intensified and was covering a bigger area. Though he might be in Canada by now, Mike’s mother had said, or Mexico. But Mike didn’t think so. His father wasn’t courageous enough to escape to another country.

  Mike and his mother began not to talk about the situation directly. The truth was that Mike and his mother didn’t talk much anymore, period. Carolyn started tutoring students in the evening, and Mike started working more hours at the Schofield ranch—six days a week and sometimes seven.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to be home more often,” his mother said to him early on a Saturday morning. The temperature had been in the upper nineties, and the kitchen was already hot, flies buzzing against the screen door.

  “What about you?” Mike said. “Look at how much you’re working.”

  “I’ve always been responsible for everything in this family. Maybe you just never noticed before.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “I’m sorry. But I’m not going to lie about it.” She shoved her chair back, getting up to make Mike more pancakes, though he hadn’t asked for them. “I’m tutoring people who want to improve their lives,” she said then. She mentioned an adult student named Jim Reynolds, and how enthusiastic he was about being back in school. “He doesn’t just sit there and expect me to do all the work.”

  Like Dad, Mike thought, noticing how, now that they didn’t talk about his father directly, his mother couldn’t let a sentence just be a sentence. Everything had to be an indirect reference to something his father had or hadn’t done—even before he’d gotten involved with Mary Hise. His father had screwed up in other ways; Mike knew that. More often than not he’d been difficult to be around. He hadn’t been successful at his job, and he hadn’t helped out much around the house, either, or with Mike, when Mike was young. His parents always had been unequal, Mike knew; they’d been like an unbalanced seesaw. His mother had been the one to keep his father up, keep him going. Without her, his father might have come crashing down. But what about his father’s side of things, Mike wondered. What would it feel like if your family didn’t have faith in you?

  He watched his mother eat. He could tell by looking at her that she wasn’t sleeping enough. The skin under her eyes was dark, and she looked exhausted first thing in the morning. She probably didn’t feel all that great, either. But he didn’t want to think about that. If he did, he’d feel sorry for her, which would be like giving in, somehow. Having it be just the two of them now made the tension between them more obvious. Neither one of them wanted to give in, on anything. They were alike, Mike thought, whereas Mike’s father had been a completely different kind of person from either of them—more emotional, less reliable. Mike’s father had been in the middle, between Mike and his mother, more than Mike had been in the middle, between his parents. Mike had never understood that before.

  “What are you thinking so hard about?” his mother said.

  “I don’t know. Nothing,” he told her. “The heat.”

  LATER in the day, at the Schofields’, Mike felt tired and slow. While standing in the shade with Lee-Ann, who was waiting for a new couch to be delivered, he drank two Cokes to wake himself up. Neil was nearby, showing Janna the baby rabbits.

  “She wants to play with them,” Lee-Ann said. “She doesn’t understand that they’re just babies.” The wind blew through her brown hair, redder now from the sun, Mike noticed, though her skin was still white. She was wearing a sleeveless dress so thin and light that he could see her slender legs through the fabric.

  They watched the furniture truck turn into the long gravel driveway. “There’s nothing wrong with our old couch,” Lee-Ann told Mike, “except that we’re sick of it. I know how spoiled we must sound to you.” It was the “our” and the “we” again that Mike hated.

  “It’s not like I live in a trailer,” he said. “You have the right to get new furniture if you want.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.” And Mike regretted having said anything.

  It was Neil who asked Mike if he’d help Lee-Ann rearrange furniture. “She’s always wanting to move things around,” he said. “It drives me crazy. So this time it’s your turn.” Before heading down the hill toward the barn, he kissed Lee-Ann, and Mike thought that Lee-Ann seemed shy, suddenly, knowing that Mike was watching.

  Inside, she put Janna down for her nap, then in the living room, with Mike’s help, tried every possible furniture combination. “That probably seemed silly to you,” she told him afterward.

  “Why do you keep worrying about what I think?” Mike said. “It’s like you think I’m judging you all the time.”

  “I care about what you think,” Lee-Ann said.

  She got him an iced tea, and they sat on the screened-in porch. Lee-Ann asked him how things were at home.

  “Okay,” he said. “Strange.”

  He saw the tractor far in the distance, with Louis Ivy on it; in front of the barn Neil and Ed were looking at the engine of Ed’s old Corvette. Watching them, Mike felt homesick for the way he used to feel about the Schofields, when he was younger, when he’d looked up to them and wanted to be like them. He was too old to have those kinds of feelings now. And his view of the Schofields had altered, first because of his father’s attitude toward Neil, then because of his own attraction to Lee-Ann.

  “We packed up my father’s stuff,” he told Lee-Ann now. “My mom went through the house and packed away everything that was his.”

  “Did that make her feel better?”

  “I’m not sure about better. Different, maybe.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “I guess,” Mike said. “I don’t know. We just did it.”

  “You’re so cool about it. You don’t have to be that way with me.”

  “I’m not being any way with you,” Mike said. He watched her lift her hair and hold it up from her neck. Her skin was damp from the heat. “You’re the one who’s not the same with me anymore,” he said quietly.

  She got up and stood with her back to him, looking down the hill toward the pond. “Too many things have changed,” she said.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “But don’t tell me I’m the one who should be different.” She didn’t speak or turn around, and he looked at her dress, the material thin enough for him to know almost exactly what she would look like without it.

  “You can change the way you act, you know, without changing the way you feel,” Lee-Ann said.

  “Why would you want to?”

  She turned to look at him. “Because,” she said. Then, “I don’t know. I think what you need is a friend.”

  “I have friends,” Mike said.

  They watched Neil and Ed get into the Corvette and drive it
out onto the highway.

  “Who besides Josh?” Lee-Ann said. Mike was glad that she didn’t mention Donetta.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you want a list?”

  “Just give me one name.”

  “Dave,” Mike said.

  “Dave who?”

  “You mean they have to have last names?”

  “Most real people do,” Lee-Ann told him.

  “You mean they have to be real?”

  She smiled a little. “Real is the minimum requirement. Anyway, when was the last time you talked to Josh?”

  “Three days ago,” Mike lied.

  “Really?”

  “Why would I lie about it?”

  “Well, that’s good then.” She stood next to the wicker rocker, the breeze stirring her dress. “Don’t you think I have a point, though?” she asked in that sweeter, more intimate voice. “Don’t you think that what I’m saying makes sense?”

  “It’s not about sense,” Mike said. “I don’t think about sense when I look at you.”

  Her face and neck flushed. She looked toward the inside of the house, as if she’d heard Janna wake. Then she looked at Mike flirtatiously, the way she used to. “What do you think about when you look at me?” she asked him, and Mike got up and reached for her. He felt the dampness of her dress and her cool hands on the back of his neck, and this time she didn’t move away from him. She moved closer, and he put his hands on her hips, then under the dress. But when he kissed her, finally, after imagining for a year what it would be like, he was sick and had to push her away and hurry inside, down the hall to the bathroom. He shut the door behind him and sat on the floor, sweaty and cold, too dizzy to stand up. He leaned his forehead against the cool, porcelain bathtub and listened to Lee-Ann’s footsteps coming down the hall.

  “Mike?” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m sick,” he said. “I have the flu.” Then he lay down on the tile floor, feeling worse about himself than he could ever remember.

  When he came out she led him into the kitchen. “Sit down,” she said, and placed a glass of 7-Up in front of him. “It’s good for your stomach.” She sat across from him, her elbows on the table. “That was my fault. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “No,” he told her. “I was just sick.”

  “Sick since when?” Lee-Ann said.

  “I don’t know. Yesterday.”

  “Thanks for sharing your germs with me.” When Mike didn’t even smile, she said, “Well, here’s my excuse. I missed your paying attention to me.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Do you think I’m too old to care about things like that?”

  “Like I think thirty is old?” Mike said.

  “Well, some people do. I bet your friends do.”

  “My friends are smarter than that.”

  Lee-Ann was watching him from across the table. “Things don’t always have to be physical,” she said. “You don’t always have to do something. You can be close to people without even moving. It can all take place in your head.”

  “That’s not the same kind of close,” Mike said.

  “It’s a good kind, though. Maybe it would be good for you.”

  “Like medicine.”

  “See?” Lee-Ann said. “You can’t really even picture it.” She poured him more 7-Up, her soft hair falling forward against her cheek. “Do you know what I worry about?” she said to him. “That when you’re my age you’ll look back and wonder what kind of person I must have been.”

  “No,” Mike said. “I’ll just know I was lucky.”

  He finished his drink and left the cool house for the hot afternoon outside. He was already replaying in his mind what had happened and trying to make it different, like maybe he did have the flu—though he felt all right now—or maybe he’d been afraid that Neil and Ed would drive up at that moment and see them together. Lee-Ann shouldn’t have taken that chance, he thought. She shouldn’t have made him that nervous. She shouldn’t have made him wait so long to begin with.

  MIKE worked alone after that. Neil and Ed returned, and Mike washed and waxed the Corvette, then cleaned out a dark, clammy corner of the barn, which reminded him, in a depressing way, of the cellar in his grandparents’ house—his father’s parents, who had died, one after the other, the year Mike was eleven. They’d lived in a one-story frame house on the eastern edge of town; Mike’s grandfather had had a small welding business. When Mike thought of their house, he thought of his father going down into the cellar for a box of old toys for Mike to play with. He remembered the ugly way his grandparents had talked to each other, and then the nice way they’d talked to Mike and Mike’s parents, as if that niceness were a kind of punishment for each other.

  Mike’s father had been the only person in the family to attend college. Glenn’s brother, Randall, who had enlisted and stayed in the army, was stationed in Germany. They weren’t close. Mike hardly knew him, and Mike’s mother had waited weeks before contacting him. “I don’t have anything to say about it,” Randall had said. “There was always something wrong with his personality.”

  “How helpful,” Mike’s mother had said afterward. “I’m sorry I called him.”

  IT was five o’clock by the time Mike finished. He needed to be home earlier than usual—Donetta had invited him to a family barbecue that night. Her grandmother was visiting from Pierre, along with the grandmother’s new boyfriend. Before Mike left the Schofields’, however, he went up to the house, where Lee-Ann was sitting on the front steps with Janna.

  “I’ve thought about what happened,” he said. “I understand it now.” In a lower voice he added, “Let’s go inside for a minute.”

  “You don’t have to prove it to me. I believe you.”

  “I’m not trying to prove anything.”

  She looked at him the way his mother did sometimes—as if she knew more about him than he did, and he said good-bye, turned around, and walked quickly down the hill to his motorcycle. He put on his helmet and rode out of the long driveway too fast, skidding on the gravel, and on the way home he planned how to act the next time he saw her—as if this day hadn’t happened. Then he would gradually start flirting with her again, so that before long they could get back to where they used to be with each other, back in May. Then he could kiss her for real. She’d be able to see, then, how much he’d always wanted to. But first he had to act as if it were no big deal. He thought about calling her as soon as he got home, pretending that he’d forgotten to tell Neil something so that she could see that his mind was already on other things. He just needed to think of a reason to call that would make sense.

  By the time he was back in Wheatley, though, on Edge Street, he was too tired to think about it any longer. He was tired of having to make things all right all the time, of having to act a certain way so that somebody would think of him a certain way, or so that he could fix something he screwed up. He wished he could just make a mistake once in a while, he thought, as he rode his motorcycle up the driveway and into the carport. Then he saw his father’s disorganized workbench and thought, If you let yourself make mistakes, how do you keep them small? How do you keep worse ones from happening?

  He took off his helmet and began to organize his father’s tools.

  NINE

  CORY Burris was cooking a pig in a hole in the Rushes’ backyard. He’d dug the pit early that morning, without asking for Mrs. Rush’s permission, and when Mike rode up the driveway, Mrs. Rush was standing out front near the juniper bushes, talking on her portable phone. Mike cut off his motorcycle engine in time to hear her say, “It’s not like he dug it with a spoon, Pastor Kelly. I could bury my mother in that hole.”

  She gestured for Mike to go into the house. The only person inside was Margo, in the kitchen, drinking a wine cooler as she made potato salad. “Donetta’s out back,” she said, drying her tears with a paper napkin. “I don’t know why there has to be this kind of trouble all the ti
me. I think people should try to be peaceful with each other.”

  Mike went through the living room and out the sliding glass door into the early-evening light. Donetta was sitting on a lawn chair next to her grandmother and her grandmother’s boyfriend, a short, elderly man with glasses.

  “Here’s my sweetheart,” Donetta said, when Mike appeared. She got up and kissed him. “This is Grandma Sharp and her friend, Wilbert Greenway.” Mike shook hands with Mr. Greenway and said hello to Donetta’s grandmother, whom he’d been warned about. “She’s not mentally ill exactly,” Donetta had told him, “but she can be mean enough to make you cry.”

  “We’ve heard all about you,” Donetta’s grandmother said. “We know everything, and Donetta said not to bring it up. But I don’t agree with that.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Donetta told her.

  “I believe in being straightforward,” her grandmother said.

  “You’re going to college in the fall?” Wilbert asked kindly.

  “South Dakota State,” Mike told him.

  “In the honors program,” Donetta said. “He gets better grades than I do.”

  Cory waved to Mike from the back of the yard, which was already in shadow, and Mike walked across the thick, green grass, watered daily in the summer unless it rained. That was Donetta’s job. “Personally I don’t care if it turns blue,” she’d told Mike more than once.

  Cory was standing guard over the pit, in which a pig, wrapped in heavy tinfoil, was buried in coals. “Isn’t this something?” he said. “I’ve wanted to do this for years.” Behind him was a cooler filled with Cokes and beer. He got a beer for Mike and opened one for himself.

  “She’s pissed off, though,” he told Mike, meaning his mother-in-law, Mike knew, whose name was not in Cory’s vocabulary. “I can’t blame her really—I did fuck up the lawn—but I hate how she makes Margo feel. She tries to come between us that way.” He looked across the lush lawn. “There’s a thing in the Bible about that,” he told Mike. “ ‘Let no man put asunder.’ It means you have to respect your in-laws.”