From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  “They do,” Carolyn said.

  “We don’t,” Mike said.

  “So he went home with her,” Carolyn said then.

  Tom looked from Mike to her. “Sorry,” he said. “Yes. He followed her home.”

  “In what?” Carolyn asked.

  “What kind of car did I say he had?”

  “You didn’t,” Mike said.

  “Oh. I thought I had. Well, it doesn’t matter. It was barely running, and he used it as an excuse to stay with her for a few days. He told her that he was in trouble but couldn’t say what kind. He said that he’d left his wife, and that he had a thirteen-year-old son.” Tom paused there. He put his hand on the arm of Mike’s chair. “He told her that you had leukemia.”

  Mike could feel, even without looking at her, how shocked his mother was.

  “You mean that this made-up son did,” Mike said. “If my father said it to begin with. You’re only hearing it from her.”

  “I don’t think she was making it up,” Tom said. “It made too much of an impression on her. She’d had a sick child once, too.”

  “You don’t know if that’s true, either.”

  “We do,” Tom told him. “We looked into it.”

  “What happened to her child?” Carolyn asked.

  “He died.”

  The moon had come up, turning the grass and patio a milky color. Mike, his head hurting, wished that he were by himself, so that he could think about this without anybody watching him. He needed to think more clearly than he could now.

  “There’s not much else to tell,” Tom said. “Glenn wanted to be driven as far away as she would take him. She said she’d drive him to Topeka, where her mother lived. They started out, then had the car trouble. They took back roads, ending up in Oklahoma, and she let him off at a bus station. She gave him money in exchange for the dog. She liked the dog. Then she drove up to Topeka for a visit. After that she drove straight home. No one stopped her, even though there was an all-points bulletin out.”

  “Did you tell her what Glenn did?” Carolyn asked.

  “She said there must be more to it. That we needed to hear his side.”

  “Don’t you ever think that?” Mike said. “Haven’t you wondered about it even once?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I think I know his side.” He took a drink of his coffee and set the cup on the table. “I think he meant to leave town with Mary, and that she didn’t want to go.”

  “But you might be wrong,” Mike said.

  “Because he thought Mary still loved him,” Carolyn said emotionally. “Because Mary hadn’t quit yet.”

  “No,” Tom said. “Because that’s what he wanted to think.”

  Mike heard his mother exhale, or sigh. Her shoulders dropped as she leaned back in her chair.

  “Do you remember my saying that Mary Hise had a boyfriend?” Tom asked.

  “No,” Carolyn said.

  That was information Tom had given Mike the day they went to Mary Hise’s apartment. Mike sat nervously and quietly, afraid that DeWitt would tell his mother that.

  “We just found him in Idaho,” Tom said. “He used to stop by Glenn’s office when Mary was first working there. Glenn would tell her to stay away from him. Mary and the boyfriend fought a lot, apparently. Even Mary’s neighbor said that. She said that the fights were pretty bad. You don’t remember Glenn saying anything about him?”

  “No,” Carolyn said.

  “He was here in May,” Tom said. “He was sixty miles away the afternoon she was killed, but he and Mary had a date that night. The night she died. We just learned that. That was probably what the dress was for.”

  “That’s a sad detail,” Carolyn said.

  “It is,” Tom said, looking at Mike. “It makes you realize the things she’ll never have. Children. A wedding and so forth. The boyfriend said he wanted to marry her.”

  “He was near Wheatley the same day she was killed?” Mike said, hopeful in spite of himself. He was thinking that it was too big a coincidence not to matter. His father used to say that about mystery movies, that you could figure out who did it as soon as you saw a coincidence.

  “We just learned that,” Tom said a second time.

  “And they fought a lot, right?” Mike said. “What about that? Dad might have been trying to protect her from him.”

  “Is that something your father would have done?”

  Mike knew, then, that he’d let himself be tricked again.

  “Yes,” his mother said. “That would be just like him.”

  “Some men feel that very strongly,” Tom said. “They exaggerate the harm somebody else could do. They underestimate the harm they themselves could do. They see themselves as heroes.”

  “How do you know how he sees himself?” Mike said.

  “How do you think he saw himself that afternoon?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know. I just said that you can never know.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  “I don’t,” Tom said. “I’m not a mind reader.”

  “Then don’t ask me to be one,” Mike said.

  His mother stood up, suddenly, her chair scraping the concrete. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing changes the fact that he killed her.”

  The conversation was over, and no one spoke. After a minute Tom stood up as well. “One thing I feel bad about,” he said. “I’m always bringing bad news.”

  “You can’t help that,” Carolyn said. “You’re just keeping us informed.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be.”

  “No,” Carolyn told him. “I’d rather know than not know.” She didn’t consult or even glance at Mike.

  Tom reached in his pocket for his car keys. “I’m heading up to my cabin tonight,” he said. “I thought I’d stay there for a few days. I could use some time off.” He looked down at Mike. “Do you like to fish?” he asked.

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Well, you’d like it there, anyway. I’d bet on that.”

  Then he was gone. Mike didn’t have enough energy to move, let alone go inside and find aspirin or go upstairs to lie down. And his mother was looking at him seriously, worriedly.

  “That was a terrible thing for your father to say,” she told him. “About the illness.”

  “It was just a story,” Mike said. “We don’t even know if he said it.”

  “I think he did. Couldn’t you see that it bothered Tom to tell us?”

  “You’re not smart about him,” Mike told her. “You don’t see what he’s up to.”

  “He wants to find your father,” she said sternly. “I don’t hold that against him.”

  “You don’t hold anything against him,” Mike said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Mike hesitated. “He wants us to see Dad the way that he does,” he said then. “He thinks that we might know things.”

  “Like what? What could we possibly know?”

  “Anything. He probably isn’t sure what.”

  “You read too much into him,” Carolyn said. “You’re giving him intentions that he doesn’t have.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I listen to what he says, the same way you do.” She stood there for a moment, watching Mike. Then, to his relief, she went into the house.

  Mike blew out the candles and sat in the darkness, tired, hurting, and feeling ashamed, as if he’d invented his father’s lie himself. It seemed to him that he was connected now to the death of somebody else, somebody he didn’t even know—Wylene Moseley’s child.

  He heard a car pull up then and dreaded that it was DeWitt again, up to something else. But it was Josh, carrying a backpack, who walked up the driveway.

  “Can I stay here tonight?” he asked Mike. He dropped his pack and slumped into a chair. “Duane King’s been sending my mother flowers and shit. I said, ‘You take him to court and t
hen forgive him a week later? Are you crazy?’ ” In the house, a few minutes later, he said to Mike’s mother, “Could you call her sometime and see if she’s okay?” Then he went outside alone and sat in the grass under the crab-apple tree.

  “Give him a little time out there,” Carolyn said to Mike, who would have anyway, who knew Josh better than anyone did. He took two aspirin and watched his mother clean off the counters and the stove and sweep the floor. Finally he got out a Coke and took it out to Josh in the yard.

  “Hey,” Josh said. Mike sat under the tree with him. After a while Josh said, “I was so pissed at my mom that I felt like hitting her myself. How’s that for fucked?”

  “But you didn’t do it,” Mike said.

  “I wanted to, though.”

  “Wanting doesn’t count.”

  Josh drank his Coke as he and Mike watched old Clyde Pate, next door, come out to his back porch and sit down heavily on his porch swing. His wife had died the year before; Mike and his parents had gone to the funeral and brought food over afterward. “I feel so sorry for him,” Mike’s mother had said. “I feel sorry for anyone that alone.”

  Now Mike’s mother was coming outside, crossing the lawn, bringing Mike and Josh each a bowl of ice cream. “I used to do this when you two were small,” she said. “You probably don’t remember.”

  “I do,” Josh said.

  She surprised Mike by sitting with them in the grass. She started talking about how soon it would be fall, and how they would be in college, leading their own independent lives. She told them about her own freshman year—how hard it was to leave home, yet what a relief it was to be away. “Some girls called their parents every night,” she said. “I called once a week because I thought I should. I don’t know what I thought would happen if I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you wait for them to call you?” Josh asked.

  She seemed never to have thought of that. “Who knows?” she said. “Who knows why you do anything at that age?”

  She picked up their empty bowls and crossed the yard to the kitchen—her old self again, Mike thought, though his mind was not on her but on his father. As the sky grew overcast and the night windy, he told Josh about Wylene Moseley, and about how his father had said he was sick. “Well, not me, exactly,” Mike said. “This imaginary kid he made up, who was thirteen.”

  “Well, you were thirteen once,” Josh said.

  Mike’s mother opened the back door and called to Josh. “Your mother’s on the phone,” she said. “Mr. King isn’t there. She said to tell you that.”

  Josh went inside. Mike could see him standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding the receiver. Then Josh hung up and didn’t come back out. Mike picked up his backpack and went inside. Upstairs, in the guest room, Josh was sitting alone in the dark.

  “What’s going on?” Mike said.

  “Just more of the same shit. My mother thinks people are really sorry when they say they are. That’s so fucking dense.”

  “Does she want you to come home?”

  “I said I’d come by in the morning, before I left for Sheridan.” He got up to look out the window. His mother’s house was not far away; Mike could see the roof of it in the winter, when the trees were bare. “I wonder where old Glenn is right now,” Josh said. “Like right at this instant.”

  “Some motel somewhere.”

  “Or somebody’s house,” Josh said. “Some other woman who believes his bullshit.” He opened his backpack. “Can I smoke in here?”

  Mike closed the door, got a window fan from the closet, and took one of Josh’s cigarettes for himself.

  “You shouldn’t smoke with your illness,” Josh said. “Plus, you’re only thirteen.”

  “On the other hand, I already have cancer.”

  They laughed. After a while Mike went downstairs to smuggle a bottle of Jack Daniels out of the liquor cabinet. His mother was occupied with the news on television, though later she stopped outside the guest room on her way to bed.

  “Don’t stay up all night,” she told them through the closed door.

  “We won’t,” they said.

  Mike sat on the bed, listening to Josh talk about Sheridan, Wyoming, and the Big Horn Mountains. “I backpacked up there one weekend,” he told Mike. “I didn’t want to come down. I thought, fuck everything.”

  “Fuck Pam,” Mike said.

  “Definitely fuck Pam.”

  Over the whir of the fan Mike could hear the wind rising again outside.

  “The duplex we live in is at the edge of town,” Josh said. “It’s near the foot of the mountains. I can look out my window and see deer in the field behind us.”

  “I’m surprised they come so close.”

  “They have less to be afraid of there. You can’t hunt that close to town.”

  “Still,” Mike said.

  Josh lit another cigarette. He was on the floor, leaning back against the closet. “Our duplex is kind of shabby,” he told Mike. “The walls are thin. You can hear every sound.”

  “Like your dad with women?”

  “No,” Josh said. “Like him talking in his sleep. My mother’s name and that.”

  “He hasn’t met anybody else?”

  “He has,” Josh said, “but nobody he likes much. Nobody he wants to fuck, anyway.” He tapped his cigarette ash into his hand. “I don’t think he’s trying very hard.”

  A tree branch brushed against the house. From where Mike was sitting he could see the brightness of the moon behind a veil of clouds. “The weather’s changing,” he said. “Maybe it won’t be so hot tomorrow.”

  “Maybe not,” Josh said. Mike handed him the Jack Daniels, and he shook his head. “I’m not feeling it. I only get drunk when I’m trying not to.” He put out his cigarette and got a book out of his backpack: Sheep, by Archer Gilfillan.

  “What’s that about?” Mike asked. “I mean, what about sheep?”

  “He herded them,” Josh said. “That’s what he did for eighteen years.”

  It was after midnight. Mike returned the bottle to the liquor cabinet, made sure the front and back doors were locked, and went up to his room. In bed, too drunk to think clearly about either his father or Tom DeWitt, he thought about Pam—how she’d looked that night at the lake, and how she’d sounded in the backseat of Josh’s car. Mike could probably fuck her if he wanted to. She wouldn’t tell anyone. She wouldn’t want to hurt Donetta. She’d do it because she liked Mike; they liked each other. They’d fuck and then they’d probably stop being friends. But not because she wouldn’t have liked it.

  He fell asleep, then woke from a bad dream. He’d been in an ambulance, too sick to move or talk. It had seemed so real that Mike got out of bed now just to prove to himself that he could. It was raining outside, and he looked across the street at the Hylers’ run-down house. It was haunted-looking in the rain. It was a depressing thing to see. It probably wasn’t fixable even anymore. It took Mike three hours to fall back asleep.

  THIRTEEN

  SCHOOL, suddenly, was only three weeks away. It had crept up on Mike, despite his mother’s reminders. He’d stopped thinking about the future. His life had changed too much.

  “I think I should stay home this fall,” he said to his mother in the kitchen, early Sunday morning. “I’ll work at the Schofields’ and go to school next semester.”

  “Absolutely not,” his mother said. “There’s nothing worse than standing in one place, or going backwards.”

  “I couldn’t go backwards if I tried.”

  But she refused to talk to him about it further. She left for church, and he went upstairs and stood in the doorway to the guest room, which had become a depository for items he would take to school, things his mother had been buying that Mike hadn’t thought of even: a phone machine, a clock radio, a throw rug, a desk lamp. He’d been watching those things accumulate without feeling as if they were his. He closed the door now, so that he could walk down the hall without having to see them.

 
By the time his mother returned from church, he was down in the basement, cleaning the storm windows with vinegar and water. The temperature had dropped down to fifty during the night, the first sign of autumn. Cleaning and putting up the storm windows had been Mike’s job since he was fourteen—his father had only supervised.

  His mother came halfway down the rough basement steps in her dress and high heels. She sat down and watched him.

  “You’ll get dirty sitting there,” he said.

  “This dress is washable. Don’t you want company?”

  No, he thought. “Sure. Whatever.”

  “My students use that word,” she told him. “I don’t know where they get it from.”

  “Everybody says it.”

  “People your age, maybe,” she said, no longer looking at Mike but at the boxes of his father’s belongings, stacked in the right-hand corner of the basement. “I don’t think this will come as a surprise,” she told Mike. “But I want you to know. I’ve talked to a lawyer about divorcing your father.”

  Mike stopped working. “When?” he said.

  “As soon as possible.”

  “I mean, when did you talk to a lawyer?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  Mike looked at the storm windows he hadn’t washed yet—that probably wouldn’t get washed, he thought, if it weren’t for him. “Why do I have to learn about things after they happen?” he said. “Why can’t you just tell me at the time?”

  “Nothing’s happened yet. And what should I do, ask your opinion? What kind of parent would I be if I put you in that position?”

  “I’d just like to know what’s going on,” Mike said. “You don’t have to get so pissed off.”

  “Don’t use that phrase with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you should show more respect. Who do you think is taking care of you?”

  “Nobody’s making you do it.”

  “Who would be if I weren’t?” his mother said.

  “Me,” Mike said. “I do it anyway.” He put down his rag and walked past her up the steps. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” he shouted. He went out the kitchen door, slamming it behind him.

  Outside, without his jacket or helmet, he got on his motorcycle and rode through town to Route 8, then out past the Schofield ranch in the direction of Badlands National Park. It was the only place he could think of to go, the only place that was far enough away and uninhabited enough to suit him. It was uninhabited by people, anyway. And it didn’t cheer him up to know that he would be leaving Wheatley in three weeks. Leaving didn’t seem as if it would fix what was wrong.