LaRose(19)

Her face was bright and hot. She flashed her pretty, good-luck, crookedy smile. Her teeth were small and pearly. He’d always said her smile blasted happiness into a room—and it was true that when she got excited she was infectious, as cool people are when they suddenly let go. They carry others by the force of surprise. Peter filled her glass and then motioned up the stairs. She rose exalted from the sleeping bag, tousled, barefooted. They climbed the stairs together, and in their bedroom locked the door. They made love with an urgency sweet at first. But as they twined deeper they jolted down into a mean-walled, sour place.

She seemed to be trying to choke him. Her thumbs were at the base of his throat, pressing. He swiped away her arms but her hands sneaked back as claws and clenched his ass. That hurt, but so what because she slammed him into her and he drove himself until he stopped thinking. She slid out from under his chest. He let her get on top of him but then remembered—she looked frail but she could slap like a motherf*cker. She knocked tears into his eyes. He caught her arms at the wrist, turned her over, forced her to kneel. When he started again, she said, Wait, you’re hurting me.

He let her go and she rolled out a foot, heel first. Tried to end things with a dirty kick, but missed. The next day there’d be a hot bruise on his thigh. Maybe he was too rough after that, except the whole time as she fought him she was coming, and coming, furiously mute, then weeping as he slowed down and finally left her.

I shouldn’t have done that, Peter whispered after a while. Are you okay? he asked when she didn’t answer. The black silence fizzed in the room. Aw, he said, okay, I’m sorry it got like that but not sorry because you were there, too, I felt it. I love you so much and maybe it could happen, we could have another baby, Nola, we haven’t talked about that and it wouldn’t replace Dusty and it wouldn’t replace LaRose and I love him too, it wouldn’t change what happened but a baby might make you feel, something, something that might help, even happy.

I’m cold, said Nola. I hate your guts.

He said nothing. After a while she dropped her head on his chest and soon her breath came, slow and even. He left her upstairs once she fell asleep. Downstairs, he pulled the covers tenderly up the throats of the sleeping children. Something made him look up. The rusty dog was on the porch watching through the sliding glass doors. To let the dog in was so simple—on this night of nights. He opened the door. The dog entered, quivering with attention. His rosy upright ears drooped slightly, but strained to undertake the meaning of his admittance.

You . . . said Peter. He couldn’t talk to this dog like a regular dog.

You aren’t a regular dog, are you. You must be hungry. We had chicken, but no bones for you.

He looked down at the dog, who sat expectantly, as if he were trained.

The bones splinter, said Peter to the dog, who cocked its head, an alarming gesture of understanding.

You could choke, said Peter.

The dog’s brown eyes were riveted on Peter’s hands as he pulled meat from the chicken carcass. When Peter put down the pan of scraps, the dog lunged forward moaning with joy and bolted the food in three heavy gulps. After, the dog went straight to the children. He stood over Maggie, then LaRose, utterly still, except that his nose worked, obtaining what would seem to us a supernatural knowledge of all the children had done, eaten, touched, in past weeks. Satisfied, tail beating the air, the dog toured restlessly all around the room and sniffed every object as though to memorize its essence. When he was finished with his inventory, the dog trod out a bed for himself at the children’s feet. It was made of all kinds of other dogs—a tawny head, delicate paws, a roan coat, dark patches where eyebrows would be on a person. Peter scratched its back. The dog beamed, then made a sound that conveyed great pleasure, an unusual clucking sound, and fell asleep, stinking gently in the luscious warmth. Peter adjusted the children’s sleeping bags again and turned away. Then, like a hungry man who has waited for his meal, he poured himself a glass of whiskey and sat down before the computer. It was almost midnight. He sat through midnight. For hours afterward he kept meandering about in cyberspace. A few digital clocks in France read 1900. Circuits in a few places faltered and flickered. There was no panic. At some point, he put his head down and must have passed out. Dawn was sad, calm, and brimming with debt.





The Passage




THE DAUGHTER OF Mink brooded on the endlessly shifting snow. I will make a fire myself, as the stinking chimookoman won’t let me near his fire at night. Then I can pick the lice from my dress and blanket. His lice will crawl on me again if he does the old stinking chimookoman thing he does. She saw herself lifting the knife from his belt and slipping it between his ribs.

The other one, the young one, was kind but had no power. He didn’t understand what the crafty old chimookoman was doing. Her struggles only seemed to give the drooling dog strength and he knew exactly how to pin her quickly, make her helpless.

The birds were silent. Snow was falling off the trees that day. She had scrubbed her body red with snow. She threw off everything and lay naked in the snow asking to be dead. She tried not to move, but the cold stabbed ice into her heart and she began to suffer intensely. A person from the other world came. The being was pale blue without definite form. It took care of her, dressed her, tied on her makazinan, blew the lice off, and wrapped her in a new blanket, saying, Call upon me when this happens and you shall live.