Lenore

The Jeep died in front of the opera house at ten after noon, and the opera house was open.

I sat with my hands on the wheel and listened to the engine tick. Two blocks of brick and limestone ran off in either direction, the cornices still wearing their dates, 1887 over the hardware store, 1902 over the bank, the bank's name laid in gold leaf on glass so clean the sky looked painted on. Empty sidewalks. No cars but mine. A green fiber box hummed at the curb, the newest thing for a hundred miles and the only thing on the street making a sound.

The opera house doors were propped open with a brick. Inside, the house lights were up.

I'd come in off 9 West with the needle laid flat on E and the sun nailed to the top of the sky, and the sign at the edge of town had said LENORA POP. 454, and I'd thought that was a hell of a lot of town for a place with every curtain drawn. Then the Jeep coughed twice and coasted the last fifty yards to this exact spot, easy, like somebody had waved it in.

Okay.

I climbed out.

The heat stood up off the pavement and leaned on me. Grain dust and hot tar, and under that a wind off the feedlots south of town carrying the thick sweet stink a man learns to stop smelling if he lives out here, which I did not. The elevator stood over everything, concrete gone white as a bone left out a hundred summers. Even at noon a thing that tall keeps a little puddle of shade at its feet. This one didn't. Nothing on Main did.

Noon had been going on a while here. I set that down where I wouldn't trip on it and went looking for coffee.

One other door stood open. A café, with a bell over the door, and the bell worked. Six red stools, two of them patched with electrical tape. A Folgers can full of spoons. Flypaper corkscrewing off the ceiling fan, black with the summer's dead. On the counter a wedge of cherry pie sweated under a plastic dome, and a fly had found its way in there with it and drowned in the glaze, glossy, wings spread, like it had gone down happy.

The woman behind the counter was already pouring.

"Train's late," she said.

"I'm not on the train."

"Nobody's on the train. That's what late means." She set the cup in front of a stool I hadn't sat on yet, so I sat on it. Sixty, maybe. Forearms like fence posts, a pencil stuck through her hair to hold it up. "Pie?"

"Pass."

"It's cherry."

"It's got a fly in it."

She looked at the dome a long time. "Huh," she said, and left it where it was.

The coffee was good. That was the worst part.

I asked about gas. She said the station closed Sundays. I said it was Tuesday. She said then she didn't know what to tell me, and wiped a clean spot on the counter until it was cleaner, and I understood that was all the help on offer.

"What's this place, anyway?"

"Lenora."

"Know that much."

"Named for a woman who wasn't named that." She said it like something she'd said ten thousand times and still liked saying. "Buffalo hunter's wife. Only woman on the Solomon west of Kirwin the winter of seventy-two. Fella opening the post office wanted to name it for her, asked around, somebody told him Lenora. Her name was Lenore. By the time anybody said so, it was printed."

"Nobody fixed it."

"Fix what? It's on the maps." She topped off my cup, which didn't need it. "She went down to Texas after her man in seventy-seven. Never came back. Never knew she had a town."

I looked out the window at the opera house, the doors propped, the light inside burning for nobody at the hottest part of the day.

I hit a doe outside Hannibal once, and she lay in the ditch with her back leg still running long after the rest of her had quit. The wrecker driver hooking up my front end never even looked over. Reflex, he said. The meat keeps a little of the schedule after management's gone home. Lenora had its lights up and a woman behind the counter waiting on a train, and it was doing all of it the way that leg ran. Faithfully. Right on time.

Something came up the back of my throat, round and hard as a jawbreaker. The same thing I'd said to that doe, down on one knee in the gravel. Easy, girl. Go on. You can quit now. Her leg ran right through it.

She was watching me. Pot in her hand.

"More?"

I looked at the fly in the pie, and at the light lying on the counter like a dropped dish towel. Then I slid the cup over to her.

"Yeah," I said.

When I was done I put a five under the cup. She didn't look at it. She nodded at a ledger by the register instead, green cloth cover, spine split down the middle.

"Folks sign the book."

I opened it. Pencil and fountain ink, page after page, hundreds of hands, the oldest gone brown as chewing tobacco. I didn't read the names. I knew better than to read the names.

I closed it. "I don't sign things."

"Suit yourself, Wade." She went back to wiping the clean spot. "You're here either way."

I hadn't told her my name.

Walking back, I stopped at the opera house doors, because a man would have to be dead himself not to.

Long room. Pressed tin ceiling. Rows of red plush gone bald at the armrests, and gold leaf on the proscenium curling off in strips like sunburn, and an upright piano center stage with its lid up and a page of music open on the rack, and dust hanging in the stage light, turning, slow, the whole room holding its breath for a cue a hundred years late and still coming. Best room I'd stood in all year.

Every seat empty.

I didn't go in.

The Jeep turned over on the first try, like it was embarrassed about earlier. The needle sat at three-quarters, which is not a number I had any fucking right to. I took 9 West out the far side of town and didn't look at anything until the sign.

Green. Rusted at the bolts. A bullet hole through the O.

LENORA

POP. 455

My hands got there first, white on the wheel. The rest of me took a mile to agree.

I kept my foot down. The road ran straight and hot at mountains I couldn't see yet, wheat stubble ticking past gold on both sides, the heat standing on the asphalt ahead like water that kept backing away from me, and behind me, I didn't need the mirror to know it, the train was still late.