As Good As Gone (9781616206000) by Larry Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

He doesn’t remember his goddamn name. Thinks his son’s his father and his wife’s his baby sister.”
    â€œJesus.”
    â€œCan you imagine? Trying to call up a memory and get no answer? My God.”
    Calvin had heard such remarks before, and he never argued, much less suggested, that for some people life would never offer any peace as long as their memories were in working order.
    And now Calvin gives his memory a little test: How many times has he taken his leave of this town, each time believing it would be for good? The first when he was barely eighteen and just out of high school, and rather than join his father in the real estate business Calvin ran off and hired on with Brierly Marker’s Diamond B outfit. For the first few months he didn’t do much more than shovel shit and buck hay, but that was work preferable to selling off town lots so little cracker-­box houses could be built on them. Calvin had every expectation that he’d live the life of a ranch hand forever, but the war brought him back to Gladstone. He remembers well the day he walked through the door of the army recruiters—the office was down on Main Street where Woolworth’s is now. He brought Pauline back after the war, but you could as easily say she brought him back. If he didn’t have the responsibility of a wife, he would never have returned to the family business. And it was responsibility of a different kind that drove him away again. In his grief, his crazy-­drunk grief, he didn’t think he could be responsible for his own life, much less his children’s. He wasn’t the first man to walk away from his family and he wouldn’t be the last, but most men leave with a wife in the house to curse him or make excuses for him when he walks out the door.
    Well, hell, since he’s done such a piss-­poor job of going and staying gone, maybe he ought to give up and come back here for good. Get himself a little shack, down in Dogtown perhaps, and live out his years here. Buy his groceries in a supermarket. See a dentist about that tooth that’s been troubling him. Have the truck’s transmission fixed. Look for a new edition of Catullus in the library. Find a few other old mossbacks to play penny ante poker with. Sit down for Sunday dinner with Bill and Marjorie and their children. Die in a hospital.
    Calvin turns onto the street that ought to be more familiar to him than any other. How much has changed here? The trees are taller. The electric wires, the telephone wires. No more outhouses. No more stables or chicken coops. More fresh paint. More flower gardens. More fences. If he could fly above this street instead of drive down it, he’d see nothing but the leafy tops of trees, and there was a time when he could see all the way out to Sentry Butte from an upstairs window. Hell, maybe Calvin should be glad of all that’s changed. Fewer reminders this way.
    BEVERLY LODGE WATERED HER garden for two hours this morning, hoping that by the time she came out in the afternoon pulling weeds would be easier. It isn’t. She still has to dig the roots out with a pronged instrument. When she stands to give her aching back a break, she notices that her knees are as muddy as a child’s. She could bring out a towel to kneel on, the way Alice Westrum does, but Beverly figures it’s easier to launder her skin than a towel. For similar wash-­day reasons, when she works outside she wears one of Burt’s old T-­shirts so she won’t have to soak grass and dirt stains.
    While she is massaging the small of her back, a truck drives up the alley, leaving a dust cloud in its wake. Traffic in the alley has become a familiar sight. For weeks, someone in a black Ford has been circling the block, and sometimes he shortens his circuit by cutting through the alley, always driving too fast. She assumes the driver of the Ford is Ann Sidey’s boyfriend, though Beverly isn’t