Lions Read Free

his name and not a story, nor did the man offer anything.
    All of this Chuck relayed weeks later at the bar, and the report made the men and women shake their heads.
    The Walkers, God.
    â€œYou didn’t ask him anything? Who he was? Where he was from?” Chuck inquired of John the evening after the stranger disappeared. He wrapped his fingers around the warm coffee mug and leaned forward in the kitchen chair. Georgianna set a thick slice of yellow pound cake before him.
    John shrugged. “He needed a shower and a meal.”
    Chuck smiled at his old neighbor and cut into the cake with his fork. “Well. At least you didn’t keep him.”
    â€œHe said he couldn’t stay.”
    Couldn’t stay.
    Can you imagine?
    Bringing a man off the highway like that into your home?
    With your wife and son?
    He could’ve been sick.
    He could’ve been on the run.
    It’s a nice enough impulse but my God. You got to be more careful than that these days.
    Could’ve been a thief, a drunk, or worse.
    Could’ve been a foreigner.
    He looked like a foreigner.
    Anything could have happened.
    They tsked, they looked at each other with faces of wonder. They never could understand John Walker or what seemed to be his lifetime of poor decision making. The backward code he seemed to live and work by—his entrepreneurial failure somehow as perpetual as it was absolute. It was as if each of the Walkers in his time was choosing again and again, every morning in his workshirt with his first cup of coffee, to fail. They worked for free, or seemed to; they forgot or neglected to bill their neighbors; they worked so many hours a day, but scarcely profited by it at all.
    What other, secret work did these Walkers live on?
    People wondered. People talked.
    John Walker. Just look at the guy.
    That long, lean frame, the patched workshirt, the steel-toed boots. And that look in his eye, as if he had seen right behind your face and into the inner workings of your brain and had decided, upon seeing everything there was to see about you, to say nothing. A nod of the head.
    And Gordon. Did you ever see a more serious eighteen-year-old?
    Works harder than three grown men put together.
    Abnormal, tell you what.
    Yeah but he’s got Leigh Ransom’s attention.
    A knowing look, a groan.
    In such a small town she seemed a great beauty, her hair long and brownish gold and tumbling over her shoulders and down her back the way the g and the h fell with bulky grace through the letters of her name.
    Gordon must be hung like a bull, someone said.
    Everyone laughed.
    That girl is vain about her hair.
    All women are vain about their hair.
    And then there was John Walker’s regular disappearance out of town, presumably to tend remote customers up near Three Bells or Horses, customers who, if they really existed, were probably not paying him for his work, either.
    Walkers used to run a farrier service out of their old trucks, someone remembered.
    Yeah, but no one up north has horses anymore.
    No one up there has anything anymore.
    Nothing up there but an old gas station. Used to belong to that Indian guy with no teeth.
    Gerald. But he wasn’t an Indian. He’d make you an RC with whiskey.
    Sharp as a tack.
    Whatever happened to him?
    A shrug.
    Well anyway, gone now. Nothing and no one up there.
    See then? Walker’s visiting Boggs. Got to be.
    More laughter.
    So had they sometimes jokingly cast John Walker as the unlucky Good Samaritan of local legend in which a man and all of his sons and grandsons were bound through the generations to tend an immortal, wounded pioneer, one Lamar Boggs, purportedly left for dead by his nineteenth-century companions who were racing west like hell for leather after a better life. The first Walker in the region found him, nursed him, and set him up safe and sound in a tiny hut on the mesa. One you could still find if you drove north, and were really looking for it.
    And truth be told,