“Can you drive me home?” he said. “I wouldn’t ask, but my regular flophouse has come in for some renovations.”
That did it. Earnest Chief Underwood, so very astute and devoted to her job, cackled at the joke, a mouth-wide-open, mirthful reaction that made the mayor want to get at her funny bone again sometime.
Swarthbeck marveled at how different the ride up the hill to the farmhouse looked just a few hours later. Where once the coming of night had been painted in hues of deep blue, he now found the emerging day soaked in a spotty gray, like a newspaper page that had been thoroughly creased into ink smudges.
He asked the chief to pull over at the lookout so he could get out and take a quick glance at town. He was cutting into the scant time he had available, but he wanted a distant view on things.
The blemish was obvious. From above, they could look right down into the crater bordered by three walls, a big black puncture wound to the town.
“It’s gonna be an eyesore,” he said.
The chief nodded. Swarthbeck set to equivocating. “But most of the action will be downtown.” He traced a line along Main Street with his index finger. “You ready for this, Adair?”
She nodded again. “All set.”
“Let’s get to it, then, I guess.”
They piled into the cruiser and made short, silent work of the remaining distance. As the chief pulled off the road onto Swarthbeck’s property, he flashed on a conversation he’d had with Joe LaMer during her first week on the job. LaMer, the kind of macho-but-pliable type the mayor preferred for social interaction, hadn’t been much impressed with the council’s choice of new chief, and Swarthbeck had inferred that the deputy’s objections matched those the mayor himself had voiced initially. Swarthbeck had made an informal approach, a how’s-it-going gesture over beers at the Double Musky.
“She’s good, John,” LaMer had said. “Resolute.”
The mayor hadn’t forgotten the word; it wasn’t the kind a guy like Joe LaMer would ordinarily deploy. Swarthbeck had seen hints of that quality in her in subsequent weeks, none so remarkable as the foregoing few hours.
The chief pulled the cruiser in behind Swarthbeck’s truck. “Here you go.”
He offered a handshake, and she met it with a worthy grip. “Thanks for the help, Adair. And damn good work tonight.”
“Sleep well,” she said.
He saluted and then clambered out, closing the door behind him. The chief backed the cruiser up and wheeled it left, almost to the barn, and then was on her way back to the county road.
Swarthbeck pushed out his arms and gave them a quarter turn, stretching the muscles. He took in a prodigious breath, the freshness of a new day sweeping into his system. Sleep, nothing. He had calls to make. Bad timing for a still explosion, he thought. That had to have been what happened. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d checked the pressure, lulled as he was by the steady production. Now he had a mess on his hands.
Dead center in his view, the rising sun sprayed the eastern horizon in pink and orange. Maybe he was getting soft in his advancing age, but he tended to see something bigger in each fresh spin of the planet, and he needed his thoughts aligned there now. If he were to pile up his yesterdays and tomorrows, the future would be the shorter stack. God, yes, he had memories of sunrise. He recalled a similar morning—he couldn’t have been more than four or five years old, if that—when he’d taken hold of his mother’s gingham skirt as she brought him out of that tenement in Billings to watch the sun come up, the light brushing her alabaster face.
Swarthbeck went inside. Much awaited his attention, and he couldn’t dawdle in days he’d already spent. It’s like Sam Kelvig told him after Martha left, when Swarthbeck was damn near inconsolable: the only way to bury the past is to build tomorrow on top of it.
PATRICIA
It couldn’t be anyone else crossing the street, arms spread wide as if to welcome her back from a long trip. She’d have known Raleigh’s round Charlie Brown face, his bulbous nose, and John Lennon glasses anywhere. The black, frenzied hair gave him away, too, spinning outward from his head like that of a whipsawed pencil troll. He was an unmistakable guy, and Patricia’s only wish was that he didn’t have to see her this way after her workout—wet hair, no makeup, sweat pooling in places she didn’t want to contemplate. She nearly choked on a laugh as Denise’s word sprang into her head. Swussy, her daughter had called it. Sweaty pussy. God, why did she think of that now? She teetered on the edge of hysteria. Would Raleigh like to talk about that word?
“As I live and breathe,” he said, taking her hand. “I thought I wouldn’t see you until the supper.”
She gave a curtsy. “Here I am.”
“Here you are.” He released her hand and stepped back, as if to take her in. “What have you been doing?”
She nodded at the building behind them. “Gym. Staving off old-ladyhood.”
“And doing a mighty fine job of it.” Raleigh punctuated it with a wolf whistle, and she gave it the laugh it deserved. Some things never changed. The banter, easy and mildly suggestive, had never been a problem for them. There had even been times when they had walked it to the brink of having to make some hard choices. Patricia knew she cared a bit too much about how she looked when Raleigh was around, and she could think of a dozen hugs that lingered a bit too long, or a hundred times when she’d constructed an alternative reality in her head where they belonged to each other. She hadn’t worked out to her satisfaction whether that was out of bounds or just what any woman married thirty-some years might conjure to keep her romantic synapses firing.
“I thought you were staying in Glendive,” she said.
Raleigh pivoted from foot to foot. “Funny thing,” he said. “You remember Tommy Barron?”
“Vaguely.”
“He lived next door to us when I was a kid. I remembered he owns the Lazy Z, so I called him up and snagged a room.”
“Disinfect the sheets,” she said.
Raleigh laughed and took her elbow between his thumb and forefinger, and Patricia felt herself go a bit weak.
“Have you had breakfast?” he asked.
“No, not before working out. Are you kidding me?” She puffed out her cheeks and lifted her arms to demonstrate bloat.
“Your workout’s done, so you must. With me.”
Yes, please, she wished. “No, I can’t. There’s so much to do.”
“A cup of coffee, then.”
“No, I shouldn’t.”
“One cup.” He took off his glasses and made his eyes sufficiently pathetic, and that did what little doing was required.
“OK. One cup.”
Patricia gripped her coffee cup with both hands. The willingness to talk with Raleigh was always in her; it was just that finding the right place to start could prove so nettlesome. His mind, the way he brought such crafted, powerful language to yearnings she thought were hers alone, was an endless source of fascination, so much that she had to tamp down the compulsion to do nothing but ask questions about the books she had read into a tattered state.
Today, though, she had a more topical subject in mind.
“The mayor’s office blew up last night,” she said before she took her first sip.
“What? Like . . .” Raleigh threw both hands into the air and flared his fingers.
“Yep.”
“Was anybody hurt?”
“No, thank God.”
“What happened?”
“Sam thinks the still got plugged.”
Raleigh removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “So the theory is that our rum-running mayor had a distillery in his office and caused an explosion?”
“I guess so.”
Raleigh’s mouth, hanging open after the incredulity of his question, flapped a couple of times before he found more words. “How in the hell did we come fro
m this place?”
Patricia shrugged and then downed more coffee.
“And why are you still here?” he added, making it sound like a lament.
Patricia grimaced, something she hoped he didn’t see or that she sufficiently covered with the cup at her mouth. Raleigh, of course, would have no idea how that query could wound her by feeding into questions she’d been asking herself for a while now. He had it easy. He’d gotten out, been to places she had seen only on TV, made a name for himself. He couldn’t really hold regrets about Grandview, not the way she could. When she allowed herself to think of them, in those moments when she wasn’t preoccupied by the day-to-day of being a wife and a mother and an auxiliary member, she had her own lamentations. Why was life stacked in such a way that she’d had to make binding decisions—where to live, whom to marry, whether to subjugate her own aspirations to those of Sam—before she had any way of knowing what she wanted? It seemed a cruel stroke that a willingness to wrestle with those questions came only after youth had been expended.
She would not answer his question. She could not.
“I think Squalid Love is your best book yet,” she said.
The server swung by and went to top off Raleigh’s cup. He pressed a finger against the mug, about a half inch from the top. “Leave me some doctoring room, OK?”
The woman—girl, really; she couldn’t be much more than eighteen, nineteen, Patricia figured—giggled and then complied with the request, leaving them to their conversation.
Raleigh dropped in the cream and sugar and twirled the spoon through the muddied coffee as he looked back at Patricia. “The place has changed,” he said. “All these new stores and hotels swamping the fields I used to wander into with my BB gun.”
Patricia met his smile with her own. “It doesn’t seem so sudden if you’re here every day,” she said, and then she wondered if he’d hear a slight in that, so she made haste with an addition. “You got the better deal.”
A fresh approach by the server jerked Patricia’s head up, but the young woman had another target.
“You’re Raleigh Ridgeley. I wasn’t sure—I mean, you look bigger, I mean taller, than in your photo, but that’s dumb because the photo is small,” she said. “What I mean is, you’re Raleigh Ridgeley.”
“Guilty,” he said, and Patricia noted that as if on cue the server flushed a hearty pink.
The young woman kept going now, zeroed in on Raleigh and oblivious to Patricia. “I had to read West of My Heart in college,” she said. “Listen to me—had to. It sounds like I didn’t want to. I did. I knew you were from around here. Anyway, I loved it. Do you mind if I sit down?” The sentences tumbled out a half beat too fast, collapsing into each other.
Raleigh gestured to the chair opposite him. “Please.” Patricia scooted her own chair over to make room.
The server folded herself into the seat and put the coffeepot on the table in front of her. Patricia watched as Raleigh smiled at the girl, and she wondered how often he had to deal with impositions such as this.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Skyler Fitch.”
“Pleased to meet you.” He extended a hand over the table, and she giggled again as she met his grip. “So you had to read it in college. Where was this?”
“Minot State.”
“When did you graduate?”
She placed her hands on her legs below the table and shrugged her shoulders. Nervous, Patricia noted. Nervous and pleased.
“I haven’t graduated yet. I mean, I’ve dropped out. Not permanently, I have plans. I mean, I’m not going to work here forever. I don’t want you to think I’m dumb or something.”
“Of course not,” he said.
“It’s just that my husband is making bank in the oil fields, and we’ve been saving up for a house and, I don’t know. I just thought I’d help us out, you know?”
“Sure.”
“I wish I had my book here! I’d get you to sign it.” She made a pouty face, and now Patricia wanted to throttle her. “I mean, wow, Raleigh Ridgeley.”
Raleigh leaned forward, giving himself room to retrieve his wallet from his back pocket. He extracted two business cards and passed them across the table.
“How about I send you signed copies of all of the books?” he said.
“Would you do that?”
“Absolutely. Just write your mailing address and your email address on one of those cards, and I’ll get the books out to you. I have some things to do for the next few days, but I’ll send you a note when they go out.” She made to hand the second card back to him, but he waved her off. “It’s for you. Write to me anytime. I love hearing from people who love books.”
She grabbed the ballpoint pen from her blouse and scratched out the information, then handed the card back to him. Raleigh made a show out of tucking it back into his wallet, and Patricia almost choked on a chortle. The server cast her a look.
“Skyler! Pick up!” came a call from the kitchen.
“Oh, crap,” she said, standing and straightening her skirt. “My boss. I gotta go.”
“Thanks for saying hello,” Raleigh said.
“Bye, Skyler,” Patricia tossed in. And then, when the young woman was gone, she gave him a devilish look and said, “Such a tough life you have,” and they both cracked up.
Patricia stayed as long as she could, until there was no margin left between where she sat and the obligations that awaited, and then she offered her regrets and her reasons: Samuel, Denise and the grandkids, Maris Westfall and her damned old pies. And Sam. Always, Sam.
Raleigh walked her to the car. She demurred, but he insisted, and she was glad of that.
He hung off the door as she started the engine.
“I’m serious,” he said.
“About what?”
“Why are you still here?”
She smiled. Damn him for pressing it. She rummaged through her purse, giving herself cover while a reason she could use swam for the surface. “It’s just—”
Raleigh ducked into the cab, and he kissed her. The move was quick, but the kiss lingered. She closed her eyes and she let him do it, and then she pulled back, as if stung. He retracted.
“I’m sorry,” he said, a contention that didn’t match the look on his face. She knew that look, long though it had been since she’d seen it.
She was breathing heavily, as though her air were being consumed by the fire burning her up.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I know.”
“See you later, Raleigh.”
She closed the door and gunned the car to life, and he stood there, ambition in his eyes, and she wondered why he had to look at her like that.
OMAR
The boy fixated on the strip of white skin between Sam Kelvig’s slipping belt line and the tail of his shirt. The upper crease of Sam’s ass peeked above the leather belt, and Lord help him, Omar Smothers couldn’t help but stare. Old men and their plumbers’ cracks. Is that what he had to look forward to in some distant tomorrow?
Sam continued rummaging through the small storage shed adjacent to the town hall, which itself was just a Quonset hut painted in simple white and well insulated for the angry seasons of the northern plains. Omar rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then idly picked at the line of acne standing sentry on his right jaw while he waited for instructions.
“The damn things are in here somewhere,” came Sam’s muffled declaration.
“What are you looking for, Mr. Kelvig?”
“Sam. The damn pylons.”
It was always this way between them: Mr. Kelvig asking him to ditch the formality, and Omar being mindful of what his mother was forever telling him, that he needed to respect how wonderful the Kelvigs had been to them, with the job and the friendship and the support of Omar’s aspirations. It had bee
n Sam who paid for Omar to go to that basketball camp in Las Vegas two years ago, and Omar now received a bucketful of mail nearly every day from college coaches who wanted him to come play for them. That doesn’t just happen for everybody, his mother was always saying, and while Omar had his own talent to credit, he shouldn’t discount Mr. Kelvig’s role in things.
Omar got it. He did. There weren’t many men in town who’d do what Sam Kelvig had done, who’d embrace a single mother and her bastard son and treat them like his own. He appreciated it. He just wondered sometimes why he wasn’t allowed to feel embarrassed when Mr. Kelvig’s voice would sail out from the stands, louder than everyone else’s, scolding him (“Damnit, Omar, you’ve got to grab that ball with both hands!”), or when Mr. Kelvig singled him out for a chat after church on Sundays or insisted on buying him a malted at Pete’s when Omar just wanted to be with his friends. Or why he had to be up at this ungodly eight a.m. to help Mr. Kelvig. Omar yawned. Why? Because his mom had said so. End of discussion.
“Isn’t that them right there?” he asked.
Sam looked back at him, annoyed. “Where?”
“Just let me . . .” Omar slipped his slender frame between Sam and the shed’s door frame. The pent-up mustiness hit him at once, flavored with hints of stale gasoline and parched soil. He reached for the top shelf in the far back, a simple task at his height of six foot eight, and he plucked the stacked pylons with his oversized hands.
“Hot damn, Omar,” Sam said. “I’d have never seen them up there in the dark. You got X-ray eyes?”
“No, sir.”
“All right, come out of there. Let me get the rest of the stuff and we’ll get busy.”
Omar stepped out the way he’d gone in and went back to waiting, making patterns in the dirt with his feet.
Sam whistled a tune while he gathered the signs that would direct traffic around downtown, some spray paint, and some boundary ribbon.
“You’re going to be a big star at the U, Omar,” he said between whistle blasts.
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