Winter Loon(15)

“Just how many people you think drown out Bright Lake last winter, Wes?” Ruby asked. “She come up. It’s her.” She shooed me with a wrist flick. “I don’t need this bullshit from you. Go back outside and let us talk to the sheriff.”

What was worse than dead that they were hiding from me? “I want to stay and hear the sheriff out.”

“Maybe we want some privacy, you ever think of that?” Gip said. “Get. And close that door behind you.”

I stood on the curb and threw rocks into the street and tried not to think of my mother as a body. I thought instead about her smile, the way her little teeth up top jutted out, sometimes peeking out over her lips. I thought about her flowered halter tops that she made herself out of scrap fabrics she bought by the pound. I remembered watching her cut her own dark bangs in the mirror, careful to make the blunt line straight. I was about to be swallowed up by those memories when the sheriff came out. He put his hat on and hiked up his pants.

“Sheriff, you know anything at all about my dad?”

He looked back at the house, checking, it seemed to me, to see if Ruby or Gip had followed him to the door and were listening there. “I don’t think you have to worry about him anymore.”

“I’m not worrying, Sheriff. I want to know when he’s coming back, is all.”

I read something, a wariness on his face, around the squint in his eyes, the way he scratched the side of his head and glanced again at the house. I looked at the revolver on his belt.

“You’ll be alright here with your grandparents. You keep your head down. Don’t go looking for trouble.”



MY GRANDPARENTS LEFT SOON AFTER, headed for the funeral home. Ruby told me to stay put, that I’d only get in the way. Her overcoat was loose, and she seemed even smaller than usual. She followed Gip to the car like a scolded toddler, arms crossed, brows knit. Gip hunkered behind the wheel, rubbed his nose with his wristbone. They sat there, the two of them, not looking at each other or at me, long enough for me to guess they could stay like that forever, not starting the car, not coming back into the house, just staring over the dash at the nothingness of a dirt road. I retreated into the house.

The manila envelope was in the trash can, bent in half, stained by fresh coffee grounds poured in on top of it. There was a sticker on the outside printed with the word “Ballot.” My father. I pulled it out, careful not to brush any grounds onto the floor. What were they hiding from me? What trouble was he in now?

The car door slammed, and I heard Gip tell Ruby to get the checkbook, too. I tucked the envelope inside my jacket and pushed out the front door as she was coming in. “Forgot my pocketbook,” she said. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“Need some air,” I said. “Going for a walk.”

I skirted the side of the house to avoid conversation with Gip, then tramped back along the rails until I reached the abandoned spud house I’d found weeks before. It was a squat shack with wood steps leading down into the hole where root vegetables had once been cellared. I pushed the crooked door open.

The air inside was damp and wormy. Light came in through a chimney vent, enough to shed a column on the envelope. I undid the clasp and braced myself for the information I knew was there that would tell me all about my father. Instead I found photographs. Up until then, I hadn’t let myself imagine how cruel thawing out might be, what might have picked away at my mother or seeped into the open spots of her previously frozen self. But there she was. Her hair was broken off, but her silver hoops were still in her ears. Her skin was black blotched and dimpled, her mouth rigged open like she had one more thing to tell me. I shoved the pictures back in the envelope. The air in the spud cellar went from mineral earth to stinking corpse, and I stumbled out into the light, depositing myself on the old steps so that only my head was aboveground, unburied. Everything was springing to life around me, but those cold pictures I held in my hand told a different story. Lilac buds were popping out on branches, crocuses were poking up through the green-brown grass. Even bloated bodies bubbled to the surface in a thaw.

The sun went down, dinnertime passed, and I sat there, that envelope in my hand. This was what my father left me with. I wanted none of it. I considered packing up and leaving. I could go find him if he wouldn’t come for me. What if I headed west, to Montana, just as he headed east for me? If we passed each other going in opposite directions, what then? I had to go back to the only place I knew my father would look for me. And I kept those gruesome pictures. I could have left them in the spud cellar, thrown them in a barrel somewhere like my grandparents had done. But I couldn’t abandon her again, no matter how ugly she was, how dead. And I didn’t want her calling to me if I left her behind.

Gip and Ruby were glued to the evening news when I walked through the door. I figured I’d be in the soup for missing dinner, but they barely said a word. Instead, they were staring at images on the television of a Korean airliner, askew on what looked like a frozen lake. I sat down on the couch and listened with them as the reporter talked about how the Russians had fired on it and how that plane—tons of metal and people and paper and fuel—had made an emergency landing on an iced-over lake near Scandinavia. Two people were killed, over a hundred survived. Gip said it out loud, but I don’t think he even heard his own voice. It was more like our collective thoughts drifted out of him. “How you figure a big heavy plane like that doesn’t break through, but a skinny girl . . . ?”