All right. But I’ll let you practice driving if you want to.
They went home then. Guthrie took them out to eat lunch at the Holt Café on Main Street though they weren’t very hungry. In the afternoon they disappeared into the hayloft. After a couple of hours, when they hadn’t returned to the house or made any noise, Guthrie went to the barn to see what they were doing. He climbed the ladder and found them sitting on hay bales, looking out the loft window toward town.
What’s going on? he said.
Nothing.
Are you all right?
What will happen to him now? Ike said.
You mean Elko?
Yes.
Well. After a while he won’t be there. It’ll just be bones that’s left. I think you’ve seen that before, haven’t you? Why don’t you come back to the house now.
I don’t want to, Bobby said. You can.
I don’t want to either, Ike said.
Pretty soon though, Guthrie said. Okay?
In the evening they ate supper at the kitchen table and afterward the boys watched tv while their father read. Then it was nighttime. The boys lay in bed together upstairs in the old sleeping porch, with one of the windows opened slightly to the quiet air, and once in the night while their father slept they were quite certain that out in the big pasture northwest of the house they could hear dogs fighting and howling. They got up and looked out the windows. There wasn’t anything to see though. There were just the familiar high white stars and the dark trees and space.
Maggie Jones.
In the night, while they were dancing slow, she said, Do you want to come over afterward?
Do you think I should?
I think so.
Then maybe I better.
They’d been dancing and drinking for two hours in the Legion on the highway in Holt, and sitting between dances with some of the other teachers from the high school at a table in the side room with a view of the band and the dance floor through the big sliding doors that were pushed back for Saturday night.
Ike and Bobby were in Denver with their mother for the weekend, and Guthrie had come in by himself about ten o’clock. The Legion was already smoky and loud when he’d come down the stairs and paid the cover to the woman sitting on a stool at the doorway and gone past her toward the crowd standing at the bar. The band was on a break, and people were standing close together in front of the bar, talking and ordering more drinks. He bought a beer and moved over to the edge of the dance floor, surveying the tables and booths along the wall. That was when he’d noticed some of the teachers sitting at a table over to the left in the other room, and that Maggie Jones was among them. When she saw him and waved him over, he raised his glass to her and walked across the empty dance floor. Care to join us? she said.
Doesn’t look like you have any chairs left.
There’ll be one in a minute.
He looked around. There must have been a hundred people crowded into the booths and tables and standing around the dance floor and massed in front of the bar, all drinking and talking, telling stories, with every now and then somebody shouting in laughter or hollering, a big loud smoky racket of a place. He looked down toward the teachers’ table. Maggie Jones looked very good. She had on black jeans and a black blouse; the drawstring of her blouse was loosened considerably, affording a good view of her, and she wore hoop earrings fashioned from silver. In the dim light of the Legion her dark eyes were as black as coal. After a while, when nobody left a chair free, she stood up and leaned beside him against the wall. I thought you might just decide to come tonight, she said.
I’m here, he said.
The band came back and stepped onto the riser and took up their instruments. As they made warm-up riffs and runs, Maggie said, You better ask me to dance.
You’d be taking a hell of a risk, Guthrie said.
I know what I’m asking. I’ve seen you dance before.
I can’t imagine where that would’ve been.
Here.