History of Wolves(72)

I took a step forward. “I’m not that sick.”

She shuffled away gracefully on her skating feet and stood with her back against a wall of tampons. “Don’t come near me, okay? Just take what you need and put it on the counter.”

At a loss, I grabbed the bottle of low-dose aspirin for $3.99 and put it in my basket. Then, on impulse, I added two Pixy Stix, a bag of tropical Skittles, and an Atomic Fireball. I set everything on the counter by the cash register, and Sarah motioned for me to back up while she came around, found a pair of green gardening gloves with the price tag still on, wedged her hand in one of them, and used that to ring everything up. It came to $5.39, and when I set one of my soiled tens on the counter—smeared with dirt and moss, folded at the corners—Sarah closed her eyes as if her worst fears were confirmed, as if visible disease clung to that bill in the form of actual mud, and she told me to take what I needed, she’d pay, whatever. Just go.

As I left, I saw the toddler in the back of the store had put a padded bra over his mouth like a bandit. He waved at me.


Once I was out on the street again, the real heat of the day slammed into me. I ambled up the hill toward the high school sucking one of my Maui Punch Pixy Stix, then down past the junior high working on the tropical Skittles. I went past city hall twice, three times, thinking somebody might stop and ask me why I was loitering on the steps. I sat for a minute on the curb where I saw an old lighter in the gutter, like it just wanted my fingers on it, and I lit the second of my Pixy Stix on fire. It burned slowly, smoking and dripping red goo on the sidewalk.

When nobody stopped me for arson or loitering, I stamped out the oozing straw and went to the hardware store. It occurred to me that I might see my dad there. He sometimes went in for nails and fishing line, but Mr. Ling, the owner, was alone, dozing with a Gophers cap over his eyes.

Next I went into the grocery store. It was empty except for Mr. Korhonen, who was reading the paper on the counter and didn’t look up. Strangely, the door didn’t make a sound when I entered or left—each time it caught a pocket of air and never quite closed. I poked my head in the diner, but Santa Anna, my old boss, was on vacation. She’d gone to the Laurel and Hardy Festival in Toronto and gotten her sister to fill in. “She’ll be back in a week or so,” the sister said, pushing long bangs from her eyes and pouring coffee for an old lady doing a crossword puzzle.

Down the road, I saw that the door to Unified Spirit was now open, and I went in, thinking I might see my mom at one of her many meetings. At the very least, I thought I might see Pastor Benson tending his rabbits in one of the cages in his office or the secretary folding Sunday bulletins in the multipurpose room in the back. But no one seemed to be there at all. The wooden pews in the sanctuary were set up in such a way that they blocked any reasonable route to the altar. I wound this way and that, moving through those maze-like pews, and in grim triumph arrived at the altar sucking on my Atomic Fireball. My mouth burned and, at the same time, felt finely and delicately needled through with shards of sugar.


By then, about twenty-four hours had passed since we’d left Duluth. By then, I later learned, Paul had an hour before he slipped into a coma, another four hours before cardiac arrest.


Dear God, I thought, when I got to the cross, though I knew it was a rinky-dink faith I possessed, of less use even than superstition. Dear God, please help Mom, Dad, Tameka, Abe, Jasper, Doctor, Quiet, and Paul to be not too bored and not too lonely. Not too. It was the only prayer I knew. As the heat from the atomic fireball filled my mouth—seeming to swell and lap at my tongue, seeming to enlarge the space inside me that could be burned—I thought of Patra, deliberately then, letting my mind return to her bit by bit. I thought about Patra with all that pancake in her mouth. I thought about Patra going to the hospital to give birth to Paul, of her hand tapping out the beat of her heart on my thigh, and when I thought of all that, I almost believed that by buying the aspirin and making no fuss, I had done something to please her. My eyes watered from the heat in my mouth. Relief came over me just that quick. I’d done exactly what Patra had asked, and no more, so it felt almost heroic then, valiant in its way, how little I’d accomplished.

I went up to the offering box on the altar and left the grubby tens with their folded black corners. At the last minute, I took off Patra’s headband and left that as well, as a second thought, knowing the ache had settled in too deeply to dissipate anytime soon.

Then I wound my way through the pews and started back.


Here’s how I remember the woods of my childhood. Every tree, even the pines planted in strict rows by the forest service years ago, seemed different: one with sap seeping out in blisters in the heat, another with a branch knocked down, leaving a gnomelike face in the wood. The woods were a kind of nursery for not thinking, for just seeing and walking along. I liked running my eyes over details, over twigs and pine needles, over roadkill with intestines like spilled baggage on the asphalt. There were certain things I knew about the woods, but always, too, there were things I was sure I’d never seen before in my life. A crow fighting with a snapping turtle over a fast-food bag on the shoulder, for instance. Or a carpenter ant, appearing from out of nowhere on my wrist, dragging a small green caterpillar up my arm like a prize.


Or this. Halfway back to the Gardner house, a car passed me by. Then a hundred feet ahead, it stopped and began to back up. By that time, the sun was much lower in the sky. A woman in a white sun visor was driving, craning her neck around, but it was the man in the passenger seat who rolled his window down and spoke to me. In the back of the car sat two little kids, a boy and a girl, staring out.