History of Wolves(70)

It came to me near Bemidji. We’d slowed for some teenagers crossing the road at a light, girls in huge puffy coats. How strange it must have been to move to a frigid place like this for the first time in middle age, to arrive from California in winter. But to him it must have seemed so forgiving at first. All the teenagers—all the girls—clomping through town in boots, in heavy wool sweaters and jackets. Everything up till then wouldn’t count. All those pictures wouldn’t count. It’s not what you think but what you do that matters. I waited for Whitewood to appear over the next ridge, and the next, and then a new thought came to me. It came all at once: those pictures had been giftwrapped, purposely left below the sink for someone to find. To find and find out. That he’d wanted it to happen. It started to snow. Before we reached Whitewood, snow was blanketing the road. It happened so fast it was startling. Blacktop, yellow lines, median—all gone within minutes. I felt the disconnected parts of my brain snap piece by piece into place as fresh wet flakes flashed down outside. As the bus fishtailed and everybody gasped. As the wheels found traction and we barreled on.





21


NO, I DIDN’T THINK TO CALL 911. I admitted this on the stand. It did not occur to me to use the cell phone, or to go to my parents’ house, or to take the bike into town. I didn’t think about how it would have been faster to flag someone down on the road or go to the information booth at the National Forest Campground. I said: I didn’t really have a plan. I said: I don’t really know what I was thinking. When I told Patra I’d get the Tylenol that morning, I testified, I just put on my shoes and opened the door.

What I didn’t say on the stand was that when I looked back at her from the doorway, Patra had been mouthing something. It had been strange to see, like she was yelling without sound. Like her whole face was contorting around each word. Going: THANKYOU. Going: HELPUS. HELPUSPLEASE. Did she think I would understand? I remember closing the door very gently, listening for the latch. Did she think I would do for her what she couldn’t do herself? Having come this far, having accumulated everything that mattered to her at all through a series of little, irrevocable choices? I remember squinting into the hot morning, letting go of the knob. I remember lifting the rock in the woods, finding the money in its damp roll, taking off at a sprint. High summer sun hit from directly above. No breeze. No birds or clouds. Two tall walls of green rose up on either side of the highway.

I don’t remember getting tired, but I do remember my chest starting to burn, and just as it did, a helicopter swooped directly overhead. It was one of those forest service copters, fitted with tanks and buckets, painted bright red. It churned the highest branches of the trees, and I stopped for a moment in the middle of the highway to look up at it. Was there afire? I remember wondering. But only briefly, because the roar of the copter skimmed away all thoughts. Its wind whipped the loose strands of my hair and rippled like a spook through my T-shirt. By the time it was gone, I was walking along. My heart was still thudding, but some of the urgency had drained from my limbs. It was so much easier being outdoors again. In the woods, in the sun. I felt a little lighter as my T-shirt settled back over my sweaty skin. I felt chilled.


Let me be clear about something. The woods of my childhood are not the same woods I see today. When I was small, another name for Still Lake was Swamp Lake, because during dry years cattails ate up the shore and the lily pads were so thick they looked like solid ground. In wet years, the lake flooded its banks and we could almost dock the canoes at the cabin steps. Now, the association of homeowners has widened the channel between Still and Mill lakes, ensuring unvarying water levels year in, year out. There are twelve summer homes around the perimeter—not log houses so much as minichalets—with skylights and multiple decks and moored pontoon boats on beaches. In summer, it’s a suburb. Most of the lakeshore pines have been cut down for sunbathers and flower beds. The water is crowded with little kids horsing around, with teenagers in black inner tubes bouncing behind bowriders. Dads in cabin cruisers skulk inlets and bays, hoping for some hoary walleye.

Sometimes, when I sit with my mother outside the rehabbed cabin on what’s left of our lot, I try to remember how the woods looked to me when I was younger. I know better than to be wistful. It was never magical to me: I was never so young, nor so proprietary, as to see it like that. Year by year, the woods just kept unfurling and blooming and drying up, and its constant flux implied meanings half revealed, half withheld—mysteries, yes, but mysteries made rote by change itself, the woods covering and recovering its tracks. When I was eight or nine, I used to go down to the shore and fill coffee cans with toads the size of dimes. I called these Zoos. My mother would want me to pray before I went to sleep, and so I said the same prayer every night: Dear God, please help Mom, Dad, Tameka, Abe, Doctor, Jasper, Quiet, and all the animals in all the Zoos to be not too bored and not too lonely. “Not too” was my mantra. I wanted very badly to keep the toads. I liked their many faces—their highly structural eyes, especially—but I worried about what I was keeping them from. After a few nights of swelling guilt, I would empty out the coffee cans in a speckled alder bush, and as the toads popped away on their tiny legs, I felt the power of the woods very keenly. I felt the way it chastised and corrected me, the way it always seemed to say: See?


Here’s what I passed that day as I walked into town. First, the familiar spray-painted sign propped on the roadside, the one that promised LIQUOR AND GAS. For years Katerina the Communist ran that old place, selling bait and beer at a discount, vodka and gasoline at a premium. Katerina was fifty my whole life, a second-generation Czech from Iowa with the same hooded eyes as my toads. She sold my dad’s blow-down wood in twined bundles and my mother’s handmade lures reconfigured as earrings. As I got older, it dawned on me that she pitied us. Once, she gave me a pair of Adidas tennis shoes that had belonged to her niece. Saying, “Goddammit, Linda” when I wouldn’t take them at first. Saying, “A high schooler does not wear hiking boots to school, period. Okay? Okay?” For years those were my very best shoes. I was wearing them that day.