Lions Read Free Page A

the joke sort of stood to reason. In over a hundred years—in spite of all rationale and opportunity as their neighbors fled drought, dust, influenza, auctioneers, grasshoppers, fire, boredom, and disappointment—the Walkers never left Lions. If there were other stragglers in town, it was because they didn’t have the means to leave, or weren’t staying permanently, but working various financial stratagems to land someplace better. Denver, say, or Boise. They liked to say to each other in Lions that those who had come to America and come west, as their families had, did so because they were risk takers and big dreamers. But what, they wondered, had been the Walkers’ dream? For what had they taken the risk of coming out here and then, against all reason, decided to stay? They might have thrived somewhere else, but were riveted to the plain, it seemed, couldn’t leave if they’d wanted to. If old Boggs was really up there, the Walkers were certainly the men to tend him.
    â€œNo one else would stick around to do it,” Boyd Hardy said. He stood behind the bar with arms folded in front of his chest, a bottle of Bud Light in one hand, leaning back against the counter.
    â€œTell you what,” Dock said, and pointed his beer bottle in Boyd’s direction. “If they weren’t the best men in the county I’d say you had it wrong.”
    â€œMaybe he just goes north to be alone,” May Ransom said from behind the bar, where she often ended up after closing her diner across the street. She refilled her own glass of boxed white wine.
    Boyd stared outside, not moving. “Seems to me there’s alone enough to be had right here in town.”
    When weeks later Chuck told them about the stranger’s stop at the Walkers’ that night—the shower, the cocoa, the buttered toast—everyone shot accusatory looks at Boyd, who by that time was a little hangdog, his thick silver mustache a little ragged, his own truck oiled up and ready to pack and leave Lions for good.
    â€œYou all saw him,” Boyd said.
    Yes, they’d all seen him.
    But that evening in the Walkers’ kitchen, the man had bent over the table with John and Georgianna and spooned scrambled eggs into his mouth, perfectly sound, perfectly human, if the Walkers and Chuck could be believed.
    They’d talked about the country, Chuck reported, and the stranger spoke like a stranger indeed, full of questions about what they grew in town, and for how long, and how it was that this little place tacked to the high plains had managed to survive.
    â€œDoes it look like it survived?” Georgianna asked, and smiled.
    According to Chuck, they talked snowmelt, irrigation, alfalfa, hog feed, and welding. The man had a cousin who was a metalworker, and who would have envied John’s setup to no end.
    â€œA metalworker,” John said, grinning and displaying his evenly gapped teeth.
    The man wiped his index finger across the plate to get all the yolk and licked it clean. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.” He set his hands in his lap. “Been hungry.”
    Georgianna was back up at the stove. She set two warm hard-boiled eggs on the counter beside her. “For your Sadie,” she said.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œAnd another couple for you coming up, no arguments.”
    â€œThank you so much.” He spread his long hands open on the kitchen table and stood.
    To the west the sky was slowly darkening to blue-black and the box elder branches were beginning to circle and twist in the increasing wind.
    â€œWarming up to rain,” John said, “but it won’t rain.” It had rained a week earlier, a thin and drizzly sputter that would turn out to be the last until mid-October when a cold and wet turn of weather would freeze into sheets of jagged glass across the plain.
    John and Georgianna stood beside each other inside the window, watching the man carry both eggs in one hand