As Good As Gone (9781616206000) Read Free Page A

followed through on his vow had nothing to do with a lack of courage or resolve and everything to do with the fact that he left most of his right leg on an island in the South Pacific.
    Bill never knew for certain if the mention of his father’s name had anything to do with extricating him and his friends from their difficult situation. The Slash Nine was a huge outfit, and Bill’s father was just one more hired hand, exactly what he had been since the day he left Bill and his sister when they were children. But Bill had invoked the Sidey name, and because he did, he has often wondered, did he save himself, or was it the father who saved the son? For that matter, back at his father’s trailer, was the son asking the father for help, or was the son trying to help the father?
    THE SUN HAS SET, and darkness is leaping forth from inside the grove of cottonwoods and the thickets of sagebrush, snowberry, and chokecherry. Nighthawks are swooping invisibly overhead, their presence revealed only by their
peenk, peenk
calls. The river itself still shines, its surface somehow able to find light that has all but vanished from the sky. Bill reels in his line again, this time for good. He hooks his lure through a rod guide and begins the long walk back to his car.
    Why doesn’t his father make his home in a spot like this? Near fresh water, shade, and shelter from the wind. With heavier woods right over there, with a supply of blown-­down and deadfall trees and limbs that would offer winter fuel. This is a site that Bill would choose, and solitude aplenty if that’s what a man wants. But this is just one more useless observation about the difference between him and his father.
    IF HE KEEPS DRIVING, he can pull into his driveway in no more than ten minutes. Nevertheless, Bill decides to pull off the road on top of one of the bluffs that overhang the city of Gladstone. He climbs out of the car and walks closer to the edge of the butte, accidentally kicking an empty beer can. He’s sure there are more in the vicinity.
    He lights a cigarette. From this height Bill can see the confluences—the Elk River, Willow Creek, the Northern Pacific railroad line, and mile after mile of rolling grassland—that led to the formation of a community down there in the first place, and in the middle of the panorama is the city itself with its glowing, winking lights. He has a perfect view of the lights that, this year, spangle the night sky over Gladstone for the second time inside of three weeks. The exploding rockets, star bursts, and fountains leave a much different impression when a man looks down rather than up at them. You’d think they’d look puny with the vastness of the night sky as backdrop, but the opposite is true. It’s all the land surrounding this exhibition that makes it seem small and a little sad. Perhaps this is why no other spectators are parked up here tonight.
    The display won’t last long. Gladstone celebrated its seventy-­fifth anniversary on June 16, and last winter the Rotary Club voted in favor of an unequal division of the annual budget for fireworks: seventy percent for the town’s birthday and thirty percent for today, July 4, 1963.
    There—that probably represents the grand finale. The cottony booms that reach him after those flashes are the loudest so far, and nothing else has reached as high, glowed as brightly, or lingered as long as those red, white, and blue sparks. His wife and son and daughter are down there someplace, perhaps close enough to smell the black powder and trace the pattern of smoke in the aftermath of each explosion, and though Bill knows he belongs with them, he still cannot make himself move. The car’s cooling engine ticks impatiently, the stars recapture the night sky, but Bill remains on the top of the hill. As soon as he returns home, he’ll have to tell his family that Calvin is coming for a visit.

THREE
    In order to see to the back