History of Wolves(71)

I knew she kept a couple of dusty boxes of Band-Aids on the shelf, perhaps a bottle or two of Tylenol as well, but I skipped LIQUOR AND GAS that hot Monday morning, dreading Katerina’s bustle and chewed nails, her greasy pity, which somehow infected me with her bad looks, which always made me feel as fetid and sweaty as she was.

The next thing I passed was the stop sign, which locals only occasionally obeyed, followed by the three bars and the three churches. On Monday morning, all six buildings were closed—the bars on one side of the road, the churches on the other. There were overturned empties on the grass next to Our Lady’s wooden crucifix, Sunday bulletins blown into a paper mesh against the chain-link fence at the Hare and Fox. All Are Welcome in God’s House, they said, again and again.

Then came the ice rink, with its shell-like hulk, its aluminum siding and flat asphalt roof. It was the biggest building in town by far. Weekdays in the summer, it was packed with figure skaters and hockey players competing for ice time. When I passed the rink, I saw that the Zamboni had chased them all outdoors. They hobbled around the parking lot in their skate guards, the boys hoping to be the target of the girls’ vitriol, the girls, in turn, hoping to be the target of chucked ice shavings.

Past the rink were the downtown shops with their old-timey facades in crumbling brick, their storefronts built during the timber boom last century. Bank, bait and tackle, hardware. Grandmas and veterans were already ordering their lunches at the diner, their white-bread sandwiches and wild rice soup. From the sun-bleached side of the building, the three painted walleye reared above a street lamp and waved. Closer to the river were the charred remains of the old timber mill, now so overgrown with summer trees and weeds you could hardly see it. Farther down Main, near the interstate, was the strip mall Pine Alley. After that, Whitewood was 21 miles east. In another 120 miles, Duluth. Then the lift bridge, the anchored tall ships, Lake Superior itself. I thought of it briefly, as I walked past the Pine Alley shops, as I fingered the four dirty tens in my pocket. It was almost longing I felt: Superior, with its 31,000 square miles of water and its thirty-nine-degree temperature year-round—with its sunken SS Edmund Fitzgerald and its piles of spilled taconite and its unrecovered bodies preserved facedown in silt in orange life jackets.

The drugstore was in the strip mall. I pushed the door and went in.

The air-conditioning sent a fast shudder up and down my skin. All the items on the shelves—the indecipherable bottles of vitamins, the cough syrups—were cold to the touch. I must have been extremely sweaty when I came in the door because after a minute or two my fingers were a splotchy white, and I had to wiggle them to draw blood back. In the back of the store, a sunburnt dad in flip-flops and bathing trunks was trying to pry the handle of a broom from a toddler’s mouth.

He nodded at me, holding the baby’s hand up in the air as if it were a prop.

“Do you need something in particular?” a girl’s voice asked. I looked up and saw it was Sarah the Ice Skater. She was wearing a green smock and nibbling a red straw from the Frostie’s next door.

I was too surprised to respond. Wasn’t it summer? Didn’t that mean Sarah had all day every day to work on her triples? Weren’t the Olympics just a year away?

Then I remembered that Sarah’s double axel had dried up last spring during Upper Great Lakes. Every time she went up in the air, people said, she had the determined terror of a suicide. She’d looked like she was throwing herself off a ledge.

“You need something special?” Sarah asked, approaching me, teething her straw. The baby in the back of the store was going GA-GA-GA.

“No.”

As I scanned the bottles in the Wellness & Nutrition aisle, I felt the distance between us close. There was a medication called Human Health that claimed to close your pores. There was a multivitamin called IGGY that you squeezed into your nose with an eyedropper. I didn’t see any Tylenol, but low-dose aspirin, I read, was for thinning the blood—as well as for preventing fever, stroke, pregnancy loss, pain, and possibly (promising studies showed) cancer.

Sarah asked, “Is it your time of the month?”

“No.”

“You hungover?”

“No.”

She watched me read the back of a clattery bottle of multivitamins. “You anemic?” She sucked again from her straw, never taking her eyes off me. “Are you, like, malnourished or something?”

“I’ve got a headache. A—” I searched for the word. “A migraine.”

“Did you fall?” She lowered her voice. “Did somebody hit you?”

“I mean, a stomachache. Or a fever, possibly?”

She took a step back. “A fever? You better call Dr. Lord.”

“You mean Lorn?”

“There’s a d on the end of it, I’m pretty sure.”

I was about to take issue with this point when the baby in the back of the store let out a wail. Something about that sound made me step forward and touch Sarah’s wrist, briefly. “It might be a high fever. Is there something here for very high fevers?”

Though I’d barely touched her, I swear I could see Sarah’s arm twitch. She narrowed her dark eyes. “Oh, God. You’re contagious sick, aren’t you? I’ve got a late-night shift! I’ve got to work late. Stay away from me, don’t get too close. I’m serious.”