This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  “Gabe?”

  The Bowman boy turned to her, and his face betrayed a forgotten detail.

  “You’re not at Fort Peck?” she said. “Where’s Omar?”

  Gabe slumped, and then he told, and then Doreen made intimate acquaintance with silent terror.

  Doreen closed the store and drove to Sam Kelvig’s house, and her heart quivered when she didn’t see his pickup out front. He’d called that morning to ask her to please mind the store just one more day, and of course she had said yes. In deference to his pain, she had stifled her own request, that Sam might try to find a way to reach Omar on that older-man-to-younger-man level she couldn’t scale no matter how much she tried. It could wait, she’d figured.

  And now . . .

  Patricia met her at the door, red-eyed and apologetic. No, she said, she didn’t know where Sam had gone. “We’ve had some sadness here,” Patricia told her, and Doreen had pursed her lips, at once not wanting to intrude but also figuring, lady, there’s trouble enough for everyone.

  “Thank you just the same,” Doreen had said to Patricia’s “Is there anything I can do?” Doreen knew the direction the kids had gone and the destination, and she knew she wouldn’t close the gap by standing on the Kelvigs’ porch and explaining the inexplicable.

  Badlands and beet fields and a ribbon of river mark the path to Glendive, where Interstate 94 comes shooting through on its barren east-west run. Doreen was a few miles into it, anxiety and adrenaline rising as she pushed the car to eighty-five and then ninety, frantically doing the math of how long it would take her to cover two hundred-some miles.

  In the passenger seat, her cell phone lit up, an unrecognized number with a 406 area code, and she reached for it.

  “Yes?”

  “Doreen Smothers?”

  Here came the sinking. “Yes.”

  “Sergeant Wexler, Billings Police Department.”

  She guided the car to the shoulder, the entirety of her given to trembles, as if on a blood-sugar crash.

  “Yes?” she said again.

  “I have your boy here. He wants to talk to you, and then I’m going to need to talk to you a bit more, OK?”

  “What’s happened?”

  “We’re still figuring it all out, ma’am. Somebody’s hurt bad, and your son is involved, and we’re still trying to sort it out. Here he is, OK?”

  “OK.” Doreen looked south to the sunbaked sloping prairie, and she wondered how you brace yourself for the vagaries of violence when your son—your child who would never willingly hurt anyone—is involved.

  “Mom?” came Omar’s voice, the first time Doreen had heard his little-boy lilt in years.

  She straightened her legs and pushed her back into the bucket seat, and she said, “What did you do?”

  The spill came in sniffles and chokes and hysterics, and Doreen became convinced in frantic increments that the dreams she’d harbored on his behalf were fracturing, one by one.

  SAM

  Sam stood next to his son atop Telegraph Hill, and by rote he made his customary post-Jamboree scan of the town, a little bit of theatrical closure he allowed himself every year. It had never looked like this before. And then, at once, he thought that assessment too simple. Does anything ever look the same?

  “Swarthbeck blowing up his own building was the most normal thing that happened,” he said. The incredulity stretched his voice into thinness that came across as exasperation. Sam knew better. He was on the damn verge of melting down, all the time now.

  “Never a dull moment, right?” Samuel said, nudging him. Sam didn’t acknowledge that, and didn’t say anything else. Samuel cleared his throat and settled back on his heels.

  “I’m going to be back, Dad,” he said. “I’m going to be back soon. And we’re going to do better from now on. All of us. OK?”

  Sam swallowed what was moving up in his gullet, and he blinked. Reset. Focus. Stand and deliver.

  “And your mother?”

  “You talk to her. I’m not ferrying messages between the two of you, OK? I’m not going to do it. But I think that’s her intent, yeah.”

  “Intent.” Sam rolled the word around on his tongue before expelling it. He took off his cap and swept it across his brow. The hottest part of the day was upon them, and it choked out the breathable air.

  “Dad, it’s going to be OK.”

  “Is it?” Sam took a hard look at his son, but the resolve wasn’t there. He glanced away with a brief shake of his head, letting Samuel know he didn’t need, or want, an answer that he knew was yet to play out.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and he spread his stance, and he found a spot on the horizon that would help him hold these things in abeyance. He worked the inside of his lip with his teeth, gnawing off small bits of skin from the inside. His eyes blinked, a faltering sentry against his welling grief.

  His son moved closer, almost imperceptibly, and then, in an instant, fully there, and Samuel slipped a hand across the older man’s shoulders, and Sam leaned into the warmth of his child and waited and hoped for the despair to pass, as all things surely must.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Where to start? The beginning, I suppose.

  This is my fifth novel with the folks at Lake Union Publishing, and I never fail to be amazed at their intelligence, their love of the books they take on, and their endless dedication to getting those books into the hands of readers who will also love them. Thanks to my former editor, Terry Goodman, who staved off retirement long enough for one more acquisition from me; my new editor, Jodi Warshaw, and her unerring eye and good cheer; and the entire team that shows such incredible dedication to their authors. My developmental editor, Charlotte Herscher, is simply the best, and this marks three novels with her. I hope there are many more to come.

  Mollie Glick, my agent, and the folks at Foundry Literary + Media do great work. I’m fortunate, indeed, to have landed with them.

  Jim Thomsen, as ever, is a steadfast friend and a reliable arbiter of quality. His well-considered notes when this book was in manuscript form made it leagues better. Thank you, bud.

  Other friends supply encouragement and engage me in conversations that help shape my work in ways profound and subtle. My thanks to Elisa Lorello, Gwen Florio, LynDee Walker, Cass Sullivan, Ed Kemmick, Lynn Lunsford, Craig Huisenga, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Rolfsness, Jill Rupert, Jill Munson, and others I’m sure I’m forgetting. These creative alliances buoy me in ways I couldn’t begin to quantify.

  Finally, I offer thanks to my family. I was fortunate enough to be born into a clan that values intellectual curiosity above all else, and that has served me well at every turn in my life. I had the great fortune of marrying into a family that has lived in the places where this story resides, and if not for those folks taking me in and making me one of their own, I might never have found the thread. There, my gratitude lands most heavily on Angie Buckley, my ex-wife. The marriage is over, but the love and the regard will carry me through the remainder of my days.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2014 Casey Page

  Craig Lancaster is the bestselling author of the novels 600 Hours of Edward, The Summer Son, Edward Adrift, and The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter, as well as the short-story collection Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure. His work has been recognized by the Montana Book Award, the High Plains Book Awards, the Utah Book Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He lives in Billings, Montana, and is a freelance editor and graphic designer, as well as a fiction writer.

  For more information, visit www.craig-lancaster.com.

 

 

 
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