Eleanor (2 page)

Outside, Mr. Blake had everyone run once around the track as a warm up. Eleanor was last. David had not brought gym clothes and so was excused. He sat on the bleachers with Mr. Blake's clipboard in the sunshine and Eleanor smiled for him, though no one could see it.

They split up into two co-ed soccer teams and played a game. Mr. Blake stayed in the center with his whistle, blowing frequent fouls and raising yellow cards like a World Cup referee.

It was a dumb game. No one was good at soccer. The boys wanted to play football or basketball or be let out to the stables for rodeo training, and the girls just didn't want to be there at all. Mr. Blake was from Nicaragua where soccer was king. He taught Spanish and sports and made the kids learn the offside rule the first day of class.

Eleanor found it easy to melt away from the game and find a calm corner near the weaker goal to wait out the hour. When a ball would accidentally find its way to her, she trotted to it with grace and deftly passed it to a teammate. Mr. Blake had taken her aside once and asked her where she learned to play.

“Nowhere,” she said. “I saw it on TV once.”

“No kidding,” he said. “If we ever get a team going, you're on it.”

The next time a ball came to her, she flubbed the kick and sent the ball sailing over the fence into the parking lot.

After sports, only some of the girls showered. Penelope did, using it as another opportunity to display her deathly frame. Barbara did as well, showing off her voluptuous chest and cleaning off any perspiration before re-coating herself in perfumes. Eleanor never sweated enough to need a shower but wouldn't have showered if she did. She was an aggressively private person.

Mr. Blake was still sweaty for their Spanish class but carried on with the kind of new teacher enthusiasm Mr. Graham had jettisoned before Mr. Blake was born.

David was waiting in the classroom with Mr. Blake before the others arrived, sitting in a seat that had been empty all year.

“That's my seat,” said Russell Liddle to David. “That's where I sit.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said David standing up. David was several inches taller than the freckled boy challenging him for the seat. “Mr. Blake said it was available.”

“Not today,” Russell said, loud enough for his friends to hear.

David took another empty seat. There were many.

The lesson was robust and mostly in Spanish. No one was very good at the language, and there was always grumbling about its usefulness. With patience, Mr. Blake would listen to the complaints and try to explain the value of a broad education, then smile, shrug, and finish the lesson anyway.

When the bell rang to end the day, the seats emptied before the sound had died. Eleanor waited for everyone to go. She watched David get up and follow the others through the door and out into the sunny afternoon. Only when he was gone, when she heard his footsteps cross the threshold out of the building did she sigh, gather her books, and leave.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he school was tucked away from Highway 26, the only paved artery in or out of the town leading to other places. There was a bus Eleanor could take home but, unlike many of her classmates, she could walk home and preferred to. Many she knew, like Barbara Pennon and Robby Guide, lived nearly twenty miles away on secluded ranches in the tree cut hills. Eleanor could walk the two miles to her home faster than they could be driven in one of the town's three aging school buses.

Crossing Highway 26, Eleanor saw the usual speed trap at the town limits. Trucks and tourists slowed to admire the aggressively rustic wooden façades of a town grabbing at tourist dollars. Jamesford billed itself as the Cowboy Playground. For decades, in a hundred outdoors magazines, the chamber of commerce advertised the area's scenic wonders, spectacular fishing, abundant hunting, and authentic western experience. It had worked somewhat. Jamesford became a modest destination of its own and not just a rest stop along a lonely stretch of wild highway between Yellowstone and Cheyenne. Rich city people eager for a true western experience filled the county's eight dude ranches every summer to pay luxury prices for boiled beans, a wool blanket in a wooden shack, and the right to be woken up at dawn by a steel triangle.

Eleanor crossed the highway and made her way between two motels and a sportsman shop that promised every trout fishing device known to man. She noted the many out-of-state license plates and the smell of over-sweet barbecue from the Buffalo Cafe.

Beyond the highway, behind the façades, just a block away, Jamesford immediately transformed into just another rural Wyoming town where there were more aluminum trailer homes than actual wooden houses. Eleanor walked parallel to the highway behind the line of wood-veneered shops and hotels to avoid the traffic, and snaked her way to the bank.

The bank occupied a prime corner in town near the better artist galleries. In anticipation of the coming boom, Jamesford had attracted a certain artist class who embraced the wilderness and nature but scorned the locals. There was always an uneasy truce between the “actual residents” and the “transplants” or “hicks and civilized” depending upon which side you talked to. Many of the artists had lived in Jamesford longer than Eleanor and some of the “hicks” had just arrived last year when Chevron sank a test well up Pony Creek Canyon.

Eleanor waited outside until the lobby was empty and then pushed her way through the glass doors. There were two tellers on duty, a man and a woman. She knew them both. Of the two, she disliked the girl less, and so approached her window.

“Hello, Miss Eleanor,” the woman said. She was in her late thirties and wore too much eyeshadow. She had a belly, but she kept it hidden below the counter, and smacked gum when her manager forgot to order her to spit it out.

“I just want to know if we got our deposit,” Eleanor said.

“Speak up, honey,” the teller said. “I can't hear you. Don't talk to the floor. I'm right here.”

Eleanor knew the teller had heard her even though Eleanor had spoken low and to her feet. Eleanor had never made a different request of anyone in this bank. Always she came to see if the deposit was made. Did the bank people suddenly expect her to start a mortgage or exchange Italian money? They knew her name, recognized her on sight, and yet they somehow always forgot why she came in.

It was a mild cruelty, insignificant and automatic—a small, unnecessary meanness typical of the species.

Eleanor turned her face up, careful to keep her hair draped over her eyes.

“Did our deposit come in?” she said loudly.

“I'll just check,” the teller said, popping her gum behind a broad insincere grin.

Eleanor passed a credit card through the window, pre-
empting an unnecessary request to see it. The teller glanced at it and then typed her account number into her computer by memory.

The male teller, a boy barely out of high school, spun circles in his chair. The manager was out.

“Well, looks like it cleared this morning,” Eleanor's teller said. “Eighteen hundred ninety-two dollars,” she said.

“Thanks,” mumbled Eleanor and turned away.

“See you next month,” called the teller.

The groceries could wait, but Tabitha needed her pills. Eleanor traced her path back behind the businesses where fewer people would notice her and entered the drugstore through the back door.

She drew in smells and split the scents into threat and non-threat without thinking. She noticed the changes in the shelves. The vitamins had been restocked. The candy aisle had been rearranged for the season's first orange and black Halloween treats. Too early. They always celebrated too early.

A tourist with an accent—California or southern Oregon—looked at post cards and described them to a man with a similar accent trying on no-label cowboy hats in a mirror.

“There's the traditional jackalope,” she said. “Do you think she'd like that?”

“This is every bit as good as the Stetson in the other shop. What do you think?” replied the man.

“You don't look good in black,” she said. “How about this guy holding this huge fish?”

Eleanor passed the toys and paused only for a second to look at coats. The drugstore had some clothes. They were cheaper than anywhere else in town except the Goodwill. Eleanor would go there for a new coat. She was bigger now than last year.

She stepped behind an excited tourist in line at the pharmacy counter who was anxious to buy a snake bite kit before he began a four-day trek in the mountains.

“We don't have one,” said the pharmacist. “There's just no call for them.”

“I need one,” explained the man. “I had a dream I was snake-bit. I need one.”

“You know, I don't even know if they exist. I know the hospital has anti-venom but I can't honestly remember anyone ever needing it.”

“Well then, give me a first aid kit,” he said.

“Aisle five, next to the bug spray.”

Eleanor stepped up and slid the credit card and insurance ID across the counter.

“I need my mom's pills,” she said softly.

The pharmacist scooped up the cards and looked into a computer screen Eleanor couldn't see. She watched his hands and saw he typed her mother's name, misspelling Anders, hitting the “w” for the “e.” She stopped herself from pointing it out and waited instead for the computer to error.

“Got them right here,” he said after the correction. He disappeared behind a curtain.

The front door chimed and across the store Eleanor heard familiar voices. Alexi Kerr and Barbara Pennon burst in talking and laughing. Barbara had missed the bus. Alexi's family had money. She had her own car. She was probably giving Barbara a ride home.

“I don't remember him at all,” Eleanor heard Alexi say.

“I do,” said Barbara. “Just an ugly kid back then. He's filled out a lot.”

“Something new to look at, I guess,” said Alexi.

“And play with,” giggled Barbara.

Eleanor went cold.

They ordered diet sodas from the counter and sat down at the small luncheonette table by the window. The drugstore tried to be all things to all people, a trait that had kept it open for half a century and now threatened its death in the wake of tourist-centric specialty shops along main street.

“Here you go, Miss Anders,” said the pharmacist. He'd cut his hair this week and his dye was fading at the roots. His eyes were warm and caring, which always made Eleanor suspicious.

“How's Tabitha doing?” he asked.

“Better,” she lied, then corrected herself. “She says she's getting better.”

“Does she need a laxative? That's the most common side effect.”

“I don't know.”

“You should buy some just in case. It can be very painful.”

“Aren't the blue ones for pain?”

“Yes, but this is a different kind of pain than the cancer. More of a chronic uncomfortableness.”

Eleanor glanced at the receipt. Half their monthly budget in one bag of five bottles. “We probably have some,” she said. If Tabitha needed them, she'd come back for them, but Eleanor wouldn't spend money just because someone wanted to sell her something.

“Wait a minute,” the pharmacist said and disappeared behind the curtain. Eleanor looked in the bag and counted the four orange plastic bottles and one glass elixir with a name she didn't even try to pronounce.

Barbara and Alexi were leaving. Their conversation had turned to “the handsome Mr. Blake,” as Alexi had called him.

“He's all foreign,” said Barbara. “What's attractive about that?”

“It's just something new to look at.”

“He's married, I think.”

“So?” said Alexi, and the two giggled and left.

The pharmacist returned with a handful of cardboard envelopes.

“These are trial size,” he said. “You can have them. Make sure you read the instructions before your mother takes them.”

“No, I couldn't,” said Eleanor.

“They were free to me. Take them. Don't be proud.”

She should have just taken them. Now she was “proud.”

“Thanks,” she said meekly.

He dropped the samples into her bag, and Eleanor left the store through the back door.

Outside, a group of riders from one of the ranches walked their horses through town toward the bars where hitching posts were not only part of the decoration, but a required accessory. They talked boisterously and tipped their hats to Eleanor who instinctively ducked as if they were throwing rocks.

From far south, Eleanor smelled diesel fuel from Cowboy Bob's Truck Stop, the biggest single structure in town besides the school. Technically, it was outside of town. Some city ordinance or town regulation kept it away for the betterment of the cowboy town ambiance. It hadn't hurt the business. In fact, it had helped it by guaranteeing that it would be the first gas pump northbound travelers would encounter. The other local gas stations cursed it daily and, like the drugstore, sold trinkets, souvenirs, and greasy food to make up for the losses, all of which the Cowboy Bob did and did better. At least that's what Eleanor had gathered from countless overheard conversations.

In the off-season, after the snow fell and only snowmobilers were interested in booking rooms, Cowboy Bob's Truck Stop became the only nightlife in all of Jamesford. Everything else closed down sharp at nine o'clock and on Sundays did not open at all. With only the hardcore bars to compete with, Cowboy Bob, open twenty-four hours a day, outside the city limits, picked up a sketchy reputation and the lion share of Jamesford's winter after-hours spending.

A stray tabby and her late litter of kittens watched Eleanor from beneath a car across the street. One of the kittens had lost an eye. She paused and bent down to see which one. The mother hissed, the kittens retreated. A dusty pickup passed between them.

Eleanor made a sound and the cats came forward, curious and calm. Eleanor crossed the street and met the litter on the sidewalk. The little ones mewed as the mother rubbed her chin on Eleanor's hand. Eleanor mewed back, a perfect mimic of a contented cat, feline and inhuman.

She scratched the mother and felt welts underlying her matted fur. She pinched one and the cat hissed and jumped away. Eleanor examined the bloody steel pellet she'd pulled from the animals back.

She collected the injured kitten. It mewed and complained and wriggled. Mother watched closely but didn't take action. It was the half-black one, she saw, the brave one. It had been shot by a BB gun or an air rifle. The wound was bad and festering. It would likely die.

She put it down and straightened herself. The cats scattered. Hurriedly, the mother led her offspring under a rusted tractor and around the house. Suddenly, Eleanor became aware of a figure in a house watching her through curtains behind a cracked, facing window. She crossed to the other side of the street and saw a nine-year-old boy watching her with uncertain eyes.

Half a mile away, Eleanor relaxed. The houses thinned and the air was scented with grass, pine, and barns. They were different smells, not better, just different than the town's. The faces that watched her now were horses' and foxes' and birds'. They were not as threatening as people, but they were not her friends. She'd had precious few of those, one in fact, and she thought she'd lost him.

Quiet and alone, a shadow in the bright Wyoming sun, Eleanor made her way through the deserted mid-afternoon roads to her mother's house as she did every day. But this day, behind her curtain of hair, she chanced a smile.