They came quickly when she called, the sheriff and his deputy. One took notes. “We’ll put it on the radio.” The sheriff nodded. “An APB.” They took off hats and scratched heads in unison. It almost made her laugh. “We’ll let the Militias know. They have people everywhere.”
Overcome by their bulk, blank stares, close to hysteria, she breathed from the diaphragm to maintain self-control. The big one, the sheriff, squinted through the windows of the studio, kicked open the latched door, gun drawn.
She heard him laugh. Was he looking at her painting?
The deputy stared at her. His puffy eyes reminded her of those on a goldfish she had once swallowed in a drinking bout. “Any strangers?”
“No. Why?”
“No reason. Just checking. There’ve been incidents. Some serious.” He squinted. “There’s a lot of craziness hereabouts.”
“Is there something else?” she asked. “What incidents?”
He puckered his lips and shook his head. “Just checking.” He moved, a thought occurring. “What kind of firearm do you keep handy?”
The sheriff came out of the shack. “It’s not a place a man in his right mind would want to be. At least not by himself. But there’s an old mattress in there, been used not so long ago.” He held up a limp condom. “Your husband know anybody but you?”
She turned away.
“No offence. Just checking. You the painter? Or is he the culprit?”
She narrowed her eyes.
He grinned. “We remember your husband. He was stationed up here, when there used to be somewhere up here to get stationed. He had a few friends. Some of those people who live in the woods and only come out at night. They have more power now hereabouts than they did then.”
They stood by the squad car, talking in low voices, smirking, sharing a joke, the sheriff’s hard, creased face icy with gallows humor. The deputy pointed to her, one index finger cocked like a gun. The sheriff tipped his hat and hitched up his pants. “We’ll check on you now,” he called across the yard. “You’re a ways from people. You let us know if he shows up.”
She didn’t know what to do, where to look. Once they left, she stood in the windswept yard, near a small patch of garden where something was trying to grow. She walked over to the stalk and tugged.
She couldn’t drive: The broken car, covered with its plastic tarp, was parked near the house, looming like a prehistoric worship stone.
“It’s all a fraud,” she said, startling herself. She would leave the painting where it was. That part of her life was over. Even the passionate rhythms of sex, insatiable physical desire, had grown oppressive. Out here, McGaw had turned into something she wanted to push away quick.
“Goodbye then,” she said aloud. She packed a bag. Sadness overwhelmed her. She would find her way back to Fargo and start from square one. Or head for Tulsa. Or the Southwest, where she knew a guy who could get her work, if she arranged for an unblemished ID, as a border guard. She was at the kitchen table, writing McGaw a note, when he rushed into the house.
“I was after her. I found her!” His eyes were bright, feverish. “She spoke to me. She had a lot to say!” He staggered about the room, limping, favoring his right ankle. “Something happened to my ankle. I didn’t bruise it, it didn’t get twisted, it just started hurting!”
She clutched the end of the table, its cold metal fluting.
“She was that close,” he said, holding his hands a foot apart. “Then she disappeared. Let’s use that old sailboat down the beach.” He tore at a loaf of bread, a block of cheese. “You know that glow? It’s not a candle, a flashlight. It’s some kind of bacteria, like Day-Glo paint. Under her skin!” He gulped down milk. “I came to get you. I need help.”
“No. I’m going back.”
“Going back?” He folded his arms. A primitive mask of rage engraved itself on his features. It brought to mind the man who’d beat her. The one she’d killed. “You’re staying. If you’re not here when I get back, I swear I’ll find you.” He tilted against the door. “I could kill you, you know that?”
She felt her fists clench. “Yeah? You and who else?” She felt tears come.
“Your marvelous genius,” he said. “Why don’t we go pay your genius a visit?”
“You must be crazy,” she said. She forced her fingers to relax. “You must be out of your mind. What’s wrong with you? Are you using?”
“Oh, come off it,” he said, waving a hand in dismissal. He smiled. Ingratiating. “It’s just a way of talking. Anyway, I’ve heard you say it—that time in Fargo they had the music so loud? ‘I wish I had a gun,’ you said. ‘I’d blow their heads off.’”
“That was nothing like what you just did.” Her head felt foggy.
“Come here,” he said. He motioned to her, using a gesture she always associated with intimacy. “Let’s make up.” He motioned again, the gesture even more intimate. “Ava, your daughter; she’s a succubus. I need you there. We’ve got to hurry to the boat. We can save her. You can see her again.”
“No.” She chose her words carefully. “I’ll wait here. I won’t go anywhere.”
He stared at her, hard, then walked away. The women, she thought. It’s always a woman, alone with the men, when they go off their rockers. She waited a few minutes, breathing herself down, repeating a mantra, a form of the serenity prayer.
She took to the road with her duffel bag. After a few miles of chill in the woods, the road turned back close to the lake and a lonesome café. With its exposed siding and faded sign cracked down the middle, it served as a bus depot. The locals—unemployed lumberjacks, miners, Militia members—gathered to drink coffee. Two weathered faces stared through the plate-glass window, filmy with dust.
A bus was due. She waited outside in her black hoodie. The air was heavy; clouds gathered over the lake. Across the road the sheriff stood by his patrol car, his arms folded. He tipped his hat. A car taxied past, the driver rubbernecking her, but finally the gray bulk of the bus edged into the shell-covered lot. The driver, gaunt, fossil-like, opened the door. She hesitated, then climbed into an odor of ash and perspiration. She pulled a face mask from the pocket of her hoodie and put it on, just to be safe.
The sheriff caught her eyes before the bus rattled south. She turned from the tinted window, from his icy smile and the lake behind him. Before she did, she noticed a sailboat on the lake with a lantern swinging from its bow in the dusk. It was far out, almost at the horizon, heading for open water.
The Hummingbird
Mika’s husband, cop gofer by day and wannabe Marauder by night, had long ago convinced her that her Indian blood was something to live down, not celebrate, and now she accepted that the locked room adjacent to the kitchen where he kept his sacred totem (his phrase) was taboo. She understood that she had disappointed him, that she was no longer the woman he had married, the woman who had crooned songs from her childhood as she kept the house clean. Even so, she could not finger the crime that had convinced him to take each card in turn—the credit card, the department store card, the gasoline card—and snip it into a dozen pieces, clench a fist full of plastic, and toss the bits into the bin.
“There!” he said, glaring.
“You spend more than I do,” she said, breath difficult to locate, as though he had punched her in the belly. In fact, it had been more than a week since he’d beat her, which had to be a good thing, but her head turned dizzy and she wondered if she might be having a stroke. Things between them had not been so bad this week, but the contents of her purse, strewn over the kitchen table; the metal clasps of her coin purse, poking a hole in the plastic wrapper of a loaf of bread; her checkbook, flung open on the dull linoleum floor; and a tampon in the butter dish all told a different story.
“What have you done?” she asked. She bent down to pick up the checkbook, but he stepped in front of her and slipped it into a back pocket of his camouflage pants.
“We will not spend money,” he said. “We must scrimp. I’ve been assigned a mission.” He took the green lampshade off the kitchen lamp and the unshielded bulb forced her to squint. He sat her down to interrogate. “We will pay off debt. We will not keep money in banks. We will buy gold and silver. When there is no money, we will do without. Your daughter will not be spoiled.”
