Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf
For three Elizabeths:
Sorel, Whitney, and Chaney
PART ONE
? 1 ?
In the end Jack Burdette came back to Holt after all. None of us expected it anymore. He had been gone for eight years and no one in Holt had heard anything about him in that time. The police themselves had stopped looking for him. They had traced his movements to California, but after he had entered Los Angeles they had lost him and finally they had given it up. Thus in the fall of 1985, so far as anyone in Holt knew, Burdette was still there. He was still in California and we had almost forgotten him.
Then late on a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of November he appeared in Holt once more.
He was driving a red Cadillac now. It was not a new car; he had bought it soon after he left town when he still had money to spend. Nevertheless it was still flashy, the kind of automobile you might expect a Denver pimp or a just-made oil millionaire in Casper, Wyoming, would drive. There was all that red paint—the color of a raw bruise, say, or the vivid smear of a woman’s lipstick on a Saturday night—and all of it was shining, gleaming under the sun, looking as though he had spent an entire day polishing it for our benefit.
He drove this car, this affront and outrage to the entire town if we had known in the beginning who was driving it, drove it through Holt on Highway 34 and then turned around at the city limits and came back and drove north up Main Street past the water tower and the bank and the post office and the Holt Theater, and finally parked it on Main Street in the middle of town and didn’t get out. Instead, for the rest of that afternoon and on into the evening, he sat there as if he were waiting for something: waiting and smoking cigarettes and spitting out through the rolled-down side window onto the pavement and only now and then shifting in the front seat to relieve the pressure of the steering wheel against his gut. I suppose he thought someone in town would say something to him. But no one did. Not at first. They did not even seem to recognize him. For at least an hour his former townsmen merely passed along in front of him, shopping, going in and out of the stores on Saturday afternoon as usual, without once stopping to speak or even to pause very long to look at the Cadillac to see who owned it.
Eventually someone did think to call the sheriff, though. This was Ralph Bird, who owns the Men’s Store.
About four-thirty that afternoon Ralph Bird looked out through the front display window of the Men’s Store and noticed the red Cadillac across the street in front of the tavern. He did not think much about it at first. Pheasant season had begun and there were strange vehicles in town anyway. Thirty minutes later, though, when he looked across the street a second time he saw that the car was still there, with the man he had seen earlier still sitting alone in the front seat, and that bothered him. He began to study the car. There was nothing familiar about it. But after a minute or two he believed he detected something recognizable about the man inside. He turned and called to his wife at the back of the store.
“Hey,” he said. “Come out here a minute.”
“What do you want?”
“Come out here.”
Hannah Bird came out from the storeroom where she’d been working among the ranks of wooden shelves. She was a tall thin woman with hair dyed a dark shade of red. She stood in the doorway brushing the hair out of her eyes. “What do you want?” she said. “I’m trying to get these shoe boxes put away.”
“Look at this,” Bird said.
“At what?”
“This car. See that guy inside?”
She walked to the front of the store. “I see him.”
“What do you think about him?”
“I don’t think anything about him.”