Winter Loon(20)

Kathryn would sometimes stop by when I got off work, a cold six-pack under the front seat of her car. I got plenty of ribbing from the guys about her. “Lucky motherfucker,” Drew said. They’d follow me out of the barn like a pack of curs. Lester would throw his arm around my shoulder like we were old buddies. “Hey there, Money,” he’d say to Kathryn. “How about the three of us drive around, get in some trouble together. You must have a friend for old Lester.”

Kathryn would be polite, but I could see in her narrowed eyes that she didn’t like the way he looked at her or talked to her. “Party of two,” she’d say, or something like that, to let Lester know she wasn’t about to double date with him.

Bull was the one who would pull Lester back. “Come on, big mouth. Take a hint. That girl and hers aren’t interested in you.” And Lester would come back with something directed at me, about how our peckers compared, if that was what she was after, or how neither one of us was worth a damn, so it couldn’t be that.

I’d throw my bike into the trunk of her car and go park with her on some back road, under some tree. It didn’t matter where.

Everything about Kathryn I wanted and resented. She was full in every way. Her hair, her belly, the gas tank in her daddy’s car. She had big ideas in her full head about going away to an eastern college, of traveling to places I’d never even known to dream about. “You’re so small town,” she’d say when I confessed my ignorance, as if she was something else entirely in puny Loma. We had moved quickly from kissing to groping in the spring. That summer, we moved from the front to the back seat. Then came the day she started undoing the button on my fly. “I’m Catholic,” she said, unzipping, forcing her way down my underwear. I wallowed in the sin of her hand and tongue, probed her with longing fingers, blamed her for making me want more of her, when in truth I knew I didn’t care about her the way I should. Then there was that mouthwatering giggle of hers—I’d heard a sound like that before, coming from women my father called lizards, from behind a locked door when I’d been shut out.



WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS old, my father took me away from my mother. We were living in Wisconsin at the time in a tiny white house behind an antique doll and train shop. Every wall in every room was papered with the same pink flowers bunched in the same bouquets. It had one bedroom my parents shared, a bathroom, and one room with appliances, a table and chairs, and a foldout couch where I slept.

The woman who’d lived there before us made beads for necklaces out of rose petals. They were marble size and still had a chalky rose scent, suitable for an old lady or a casket lining. I’d collected a handful that had gotten stuck in the cracks of the couch and kicked behind radiators. I was rolling one on the kitchen table, watching it wobble between my open palms, when my dad told my mom he was leaving for the summer.

She picked up a pair of underwear off the floor, mine, held them up, and scowled at me. I knew the face was for my father. “Who leaves a wife and kid and goes to work for a carnival?”

“I can’t find anything here.”

“Can’t or won’t?” She threw the underwear at my feet. I slid them against the wall with my heel.

“You promised me. You said we’d move to California. Live by the ocean. I’m still here in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, Moss. Working at a bar. I’m a barmaid.” She stormed over to me and grabbed the underwear again, this time throwing them into the bedroom. “Goddamn it, Wes.”

He stood up, my big father, and went to the front window. He pushed back the frilly curtain with the coffee mug he held in his machine-worn hands. The gray mist of a rainy day seemed to pass through him into the room.

“What do you want me to do?” he said to the outside. Then he turned to my mother. “You say you want to leave, but you always have an excuse. Let’s make this time for real. You save a little, I’ll save a little, and we’ll get out of here next summer. Find a place out in Oregon maybe, or Washington. You’d like it out there, Wes,” he said. “Salmon big as goats.”

“Stop giving him ideas. How am I supposed to take care of him by myself? Just leave him? I can’t do that every night.”

He cocked his head and stared her down.

The bead clattered across the table between my hands like a duckling crossing a road. I scooped it up, then launched it again, in time with their quarrel.

She slammed her hand down between my palms and cupped the bead. “Stop it with the beads, will you?” She chucked it at my forehead and it bounced to the floor.

I pocketed the bead and leaned back in the chair.

He dropped the curtain and sat down across from me, sizing me up like I was the fish. He could keep me or throw me back.

“I’ll take him.”

The night before we left, I slept in the sag between them. In the morning, I gave my mother the handful of rose petal beads, which she held to her nose as we pulled away.



WE HOOKED UP WITH HIS crew in Sheridan, a cowboy town at the base of the Bighorn Mountains, snarling peaks that gnashed out of the ground. It was a man by the name of Topeka who’d helped my father get on the crew and who my father had greeted with a wide-open bear hug the day we joined up. “This guy here,” Topeka had said, grabbing my father’s shoulder when he introduced me. Topeka right away told my father about a mutual friend named Paul who got his arm ripped off in some gruesome accident on a ride called the Zipper.