History of Wolves(20)

7


THE HUSBAND WAS SCHEDULED TO COME JUST BEFORE MEMORIAL DAY. His return coincided with the unofficial start of the season. Walleye fishermen had been trickling in for weeks, but ahead of the long weekend they began arriving in caravans. They drove up from the Cities with their campers and boat hitches, their pickup beds overflowing with tackle under tarps. They set up in campgrounds and rented cabins around the biggest lakes—most out-of-towners back then were still renters and weekenders. Some were summer regulars, many had read about Loose River in a glossy fishing guide, and they all tried to get a bait-shop clerk to slip up and reveal secret local spots for walleye. All of them were optimistically but predictably dressed in T-shirts and fleece vests, in elaborately pocketed cargo pants. All of them were squinting when they slid from their trucks in town to buy gas, to stock up on beer and bug spray. Pretending to know each other, because maybe they’d fried muskie together once, last Fourth of July. Pretending to know us.

“Got the spot this year?” they’d ask J. D. in the hardware store, or Katerina the Communist when they were paying up at the gas station.

Katerina would simply shrug and smile. “Do I look like a fisherman?” she’d ask, batting her heavy-lidded eyes. She did—she wore gray coveralls and a camouflage cap—but no one ever wanted to say so. J. D. would sell them venison jerky and out-of-date maps, making broad ambiguous circles in unlikely places with a ballpoint pen. Tipping his cap, crossing his arms.

“Well, thanks. Thank you—is it Jay?”

The out-of-towners had a thing about calling everybody by name, preserving some ritualized belief in small-town hospitality. They called Mr. Korhonen the grocer—who wore an ironed plaid shirt every day of his life—Ed. They called Santa Anna at the diner Annie, Anne, sweetheart.

“If it isn’t Jim’s girl,” they said to me, “all grown up!” Approaching me at the bank when I was depositing bills in the checking account I’d opened up, or waving at me when I came down the road with my backpack. Complete strangers said this to me, people I’d met maybe twice or three times—years ago, when I was a little kid—back when my dad had occasionally picked up summer work as a guide. As if they weren’t interchangeable to me, like geese, like birds with their reliably duplicate markings. I marveled that I could seem so particular and durable to them. So distinct.


We took our final exams the week before Memorial Day, all the school windows propped open with rulers. The occasional dragonfly died against the pane. May was such a dissociative time. Everyone had that underwater look in their eyes, especially teachers. It was so hard to care—if anyone ever cared to begin with—about the law of cosines told the twentieth time. About the sum of the area of the square of the hypotenuse. Even the debate kids were in a frisky state, giving up cosines for poetry and mix tapes, for arguing over the secret meaning of Oasis lyrics. Lily’s desk, by then—by the end of exam week—was empty. Last I’d seen her, Monday afternoon, she’d been handing Ms. Lundgren a pink slip from the principal. Ms. Lundgren had frowned when she read the note, and Lily left without waiting for her response, tugging her long black hair out from her jacket collar, pulling it up and over her head, letting it slither down her hood. The rest of the week she was gone.


Friday afternoon, I wrote the essay portion of my Life Science exam in less than twenty minutes: three paragraphs on the cellular basis for reproduction. Then I scratched my name on the cover, slipped my blue book into the pile on Ms. Lundgren’s desk, and took off into the blissfully mild afternoon. I stopped on the way out of town to buy licorice and cigarettes, and I smoked two in a row—strolling through milkweed along the highway, watching bees and monarchs rise—and then, on impulse, I chucked the pack into the bed of a red pickup as it passed. As I did, three pelicans floated overhead like a reward for good behavior. Go, go, I thought at them, exhilarated. They flapped their enormous wings in unison, disappeared over trees.

From four to six that day, I sat with Paul on the warm wood of the Gardners’ deck, watching ducks arrive in droves, watching geese skid into the lake and snake black necks beneath the surface. I pointed them out to Paul as they came, though in my heart I kept hoping for more pelicans. Or for something even rarer to arrive, like a falcon. I gnawed my licorice as Paul got busy stacking piles of stones. He shuffled around on his sweatpants knees, arranging strips of bark into lanes. He was changing his city from a medieval village into the modern capital of Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon.

“Most likely place becept Mars to have life,” he explained.

“How do you know?”

“In the Goldilocks zone.”

“The what?”

“Not too hot, not too cold.”

“Ah, I see.” I nibbled a twist of licorice. Then I remembered: “But no one lives in the City, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

He nodded without looking up. “Hasn’t been discovered yet.”

On the deck, he’d pulled apart all the geometrically intersecting walls and roads, all the towers and moats, and made what looked like a random assortment of leaves and stones—what the wind might have left, or a big rain. He kept picking up a certain pocked maple leaf and setting it down somewhere else, perfecting a design only he could see.

Which is why when Patra returned an hour later from errands in town, she walked right over Europa’s capital. Paul howled for exactly one second—”Mooom!”—then laid on his back in the ruins of his city and refused to speak.