History of Wolves(34)

“I know.”

“I thought we might get some walleye up in Goose Neck tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“The out-of-towners will be taking over soon.”

“I know.”

“Superior sure is pretty in a storm, though. Have you seen that?”

Never.


They picked me up at ten the next morning. I’d thought a long time about what to bring the night before, had laid out my second pair of jeans and rooted through my mom’s thrift-store bag for something besides an old T-shirt to sleep in. I found a baby-blue slip my mom had collected for scraps, and though it was musty and wrinkled and too big in the chest, I thought it might pass for pajamas. I’d also packed my toothbrush and comb, and right before bed—pumping well water in the dark—I tried shaving with my dad’s razor. The hair on my legs was fine and long, and the first stripe that was gone felt magical beneath my fingertips, a track of shorn skin like silk ribbon from ankle to thigh. I’d finished most of the first leg before I realized there was blood from a cut I hadn’t seen or felt in the dark. I could tell it was blood from the greasy way it slid between my fingertips, and how it smelled. I was too disheartened to do the second leg. Instead, shivering, I washed my hair with the last of the shampoo and a little bit of lemon dish soap. I rinsed caked mud from the soles of my tennis shoes and set them near the outhouse to dry. Peed in that plywood hole, closed the door on the flies. I squeezed out the wet rope of hair that hung on my chest.

When I slipped into the backseat of the blue Honda the next morning, Paul was asleep in his car seat. As Leo did a threepoint turn, Patra twisted around and whispered from the front, “Good morning!” She handed me a bran muffin, still warm, crumbling as I peeled open its waxed paper cup. “Mmm. You smell good,” she added.

My mouth was already full of muffin. The moist crumbs filled up every bit of space between my teeth and tongue, every empty place available.

Patra grinned. “Good, eat up. Leo never likes to stop. He’ll drive straight through anything. Tornadoes, floods. Breakfast and lunch.”

“I stop! When we get there. Just say where ‘there’ is, in advance, and I’ll stop.”

“Then ‘there’ is lunch. ‘There’ is sometime before two o’clock.”

“That’s when there is, then. It’s agreed.”


Once we got to the highway, all the familiar points disappeared within minutes. I saw the lake in flashes between the trees, blue gray showing through cracks of green. In Loose River, we drove past the high school just when the sun broke over the tallest roadside trees, turning every surface into a flat knife of light. Stop signs and windows flared as we drove past them. Leo and Patra both wore dark sunglasses, but I just squinted, feeling dizzy and excited. Then we were on the interstate, going seventy, and Leo and Patra were talking quietly about something I couldn’t quite hear. I wanted to roll down the window, feel the speed on my face, but I held back.

Late morning, Paul woke up sluggishly stretching. I gave him one of Patra’s bran muffins, which he held between his knees but didn’t eat. His eyes were slowly unpinking. “Are we there?” he asked. “Hmm mmm,” I said. Outside, the pine forest was unstitching, opening into aspen groves and grassy farms dotted with hay bales. We played a halfhearted game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. We played I Spy with My Little Eye. At one point I said, “I spy a purple water tower,” so Paul craned his neck to look out his window. His pale, sleepy face had a sunken look. “I don’t see it,” he complained, setting his forehead against the window. “Let’s do mental I Spy.”

“Okay.”

He closed his eyes and spied his own purple water tower. He spied his own iron-ore train and Mars. After that, there was a long, indecipherable silence—while Patra fiddled with a car vent, while Leo drove through a brief rain shower—and somewhere just past the last farm it occurred to me that Paul had dozed off again. I couldn’t blame him. The car was warm and rumbling. Quietly, I ate Paul’s muffin and watched the pine come back, rising up along the roadside in a long corridor of green.

We hit construction outside Duluth. After an hour of sitting in traffic and dust, windows up, Leo pulled off the highway for lunch. “See?” he said to Patra. “I stop.” We ate at Denny’s, where I opened the huge glossy menu and ordered—after long deliberation—soup. I was nervous about chewing, about cutting up my food with a fork and a knife. Leo sat with Patra on one side of the booth, and I sat with Paul on the other. Patra guffawed when my French onion soup arrived in a bread bowl as big as my head. Warily, I prodded the thick boat of cheese that floated atop the brown broth. All around the restaurant, there were other families like ours, booths with two parents on one side and two kids on the other. Paul gulped down his glass of milk, so Patra ordered a second, shaking her head, laughing at me as I struggled with my soup.

“Want a bite?” I asked, when she finally reached out and plucked the string of cheese that webbed from my bowl to my mouth.

She wrinkled up her nose, bringing the freckles together into a brown smudge. “Who could manage to eat that without looking like a—a baby bird or something?”

“A baby bird?”

She smiled. “Sucking up worms.”

Leo was a more focused eater, tucking his BLT into his mouth in careful sections. But once he was finished, he turned to me, wiping his moustache with a folded napkin, and within three minutes had asked me more questions than Patra had in three months. I let my soup cool as he spoke. I licked the salty spoon, but did not attempt another bite of the cheese. It suddenly seemed too treacherous.