Lions Read Free Page B

across the grass to his dog. She wagged her tail as the man approached and took each egg, one at a time, into her mouth. Then the man stooped and spoke to her, scratched her ears. John put his hand on the small of his wife’s back.
    When the man returned to the house he thanked them again. “Feels good to give your traveling companion something good to eat.” Then he ate four more eggs—eight eggs in that single meal.
    â€œBeen out in the snow and weather much?” John asked him.
    â€œSome.”
    â€œYou have the things you need? Want a thermos? Got an extra in the shop.”
    â€œA warm hat,” Georgianna said.
    The man raised an open hand in their direction and shook his head. “Something I can do for you?”
    Outside in the wind and last light he helped John move a pile of corrugated steel scavenged from a demolished farmhouse and its outbuildings twenty miles north, in Horses. They both wore heavy gloves and sidestepped through the new weeds until the pile was in the pole barn. They put the scrap angle iron and rectangular tubing on racks. The dog circled the men and pounced on field mice and loosed a skein of red-winged blackbirds that lifted up over the house and settled again behind it. Back in the kitchen the men washed their hands in the sink and a cold blast of wind blew the curtains in. Georgianna reached across the stranger and closed the window with a long, freckled arm. “Looks like you found us just in time,” she said. “Why don’t you bring your dog in?”
    â€œIn the house?”
    â€œWe’ll set you up on the cot in the bunkroom for the night,” John said. “It’s nothing fancy but it’s got a stove. We have another room in the house but it’s Gordon’s.”
    â€œOur son,” Georgianna explained. “He’s out with his girl.”
    The man glanced at her, then John. Their open faces, their warm, comfortable home.
    â€œI think best,” he said, “if we keep moving.”
    Georgianna gave him two peanut butter sandwiches, a bag of dried apple rings, and a can of tuna fish for the dog, and put it all with his clean clothes in a plastic bag.
    He looked down at the coveralls.
    â€œYou keep them,” Georgianna said. “Might have a string of cool nights here. Those are sturdy.”
    John gave the man a ten-dollar bill. By full dark he was walking down the frontage road straight toward town.
    At the bar and in the diner, however, given what they learned later, they could hardly believe the man’s visit at the Walkers’ had been as civil as Chuck’s reports indicated it was.
    Over the following few weeks, reports of what happened next rushed in whispers like wind through the grass. Edie Jacks, who lived in the house behind the alley, said the man left his dog on a little brown square of withered grass right by Boyd’s bar, and opened the door. From her kitchen window where she stood watching, the light inside the bar narrowed to a ribbon and went out.

That evening, Gordon Walker and Leigh Ransom were out in John’s truck. Gordon turned north, then west on a narrow county road, and drove straight over a vacant field. The old, blue Silverado bounced and he and Leigh swayed in the cab, but the MIG welder and toolbox were fixed firmly in the bed. In the distance before them, the dark red form of the empty sugar beet factory was set on the ragged edge of town, backed up against what had once been the westernmost edge of fertile tallgrass prairie, then beet fields, and was at last cast aside as hard ribbed ground grown wild with weeds and bristling forbs not even sheep would graze on.
    Gordon and Leigh could hike to the factory on foot from their adjacent backyards, but they’d driven out to Burnsville this evening—the closest city, where their high school was—to buy butter burgers and french fries. In the back of the truck, in a cooler, they had a stash of canned beer