LaRose(24)

Oh, said Landreaux.

As if the lid had lifted off his brain he blazed with shock and light. He couldn’t speak. Weakness assailed him and he put his head down on the table. Peter looked down on his parted hair, the long tail of it, the loose power of Landreaux’s folded arms. A sinuous contempt gripped him and he thought of the rapture he would feel for an hour, maybe two hours, after he brought down his ax on Landreaux’s head. Indeed, he’d named his woodpile for his friend, and the mental image was the cause of its growing size. If not for LaRose, he thought, if not for LaRose. Then the picture of the boy’s grief covered his thinking.

After Landreaux had left, Peter lay on the living room carpet, staring at the ceiling fan. Hands on his forehead, stomach whirling with the blades. He wasn’t a man to make friends, and it was hard, this thing with Landreaux. Peter was six foot two, powerful because he worked the farm, but weak, too, in the ankles, in the knees, in the wrists and neck. Wherever one part of his body met up with another part, it hurt. Still, it was his method to suck it up. High school coaches had taught him that. This was his family’s farm before the family died off, except for one now Floridian brother he’d bought out. Peter’s family were Russian-German immigrants, there long enough to have picked buffalo bones off the land.

When he is feeling well, Peter throws LaRose and Maggie in the air. Falling, they catch the smile on his cool, Slavic face. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight. He works those other jobs, plus the farm, yet there is so much left over. Nola, he met in Fargo. They both went to NDSU and it was a surprise they’d never run into each other in small-town Pluto—a raw little place with a few old buildings, a struggling grocery, some gift shops, a Cenex, and a new Bank of the West. Peter’s family had farmed outside of town and Nola’s mother, Marn, had lived there as a child—they sometimes visited the land she had leased out. Once things became too difficult after Billy Peace died, she had moved with the kids to Fargo. Made them go by their second names because of certain people.

From the beginning, Peter was crazy about Nola. She was tensile and finely made. Her hair was dirty blond, though she bleached it brighter. It turned brownish in the winter if she let it go, exactly his shade. Her face was cheerleader-cute and dainty, but her eyes were slant and calculating. She was elusive, sliding away into her thoughts. No matter how much energy he expended he couldn’t catch her. He couldn’t even find her when she was right in front of him. Sometimes her merciless dark eyes gave nothing back. Her face shut. She was a blank wall, fresh painted. He groped to find a secret hinge. It sprung sometimes in bed and she was alive to him with radiant warmth, her face rosy and gentle, her eyes merry with affection. That was real, wasn’t it? He couldn’t tell anymore.

How would he give her the news? The plan that he and Landreaux had agreed upon. Sharing the upbringing of LaRose—a casual arrangement month by month that the men would set up, it being too loaded otherwise. He would tell her carefully. He would tell her in the barn. Then Nola could react however. Peter had become adept at maintaining an inner equilibrium during the screaming, shouting, foul shouting, rage, sorrow, misery, fury, whimper-weeping, fear, frothing, foaming, singing, praying, and then the ordinary harrowing peace that followed.

Sometimes now in the ordinary peace they made love. It wasn’t mean like the first time. He was not forgiven, but he was accepted. As an *, maybe, but one who would not hurt her again. Okay, slug me, he had told her every time she was on top. No thanks, she always said, it will make us even. Their love was quiet, maybe tender, maybe odd or maybe fake. She hummed while she sucked his cock. But now she hummed actual tunes. The next day he’d remember the melody as sly and mocking, though he couldn’t name the words. Her glow of sweet responsive warmth sank into him like radiation. Sometimes it strengthened him. Sometimes he felt it poisoning his bones.

After he and Landreaux spoke of raising LaRose together, it was as if she knew. Nola came to Peter deliciously needy. Afterward, she nestled against him, pushing him around to get comfortable. No way he was going to tell her then. Maybe in the morning, he thought. After Maggie went to school.

You dove, he said. He stroked her shoulder all one way, like feathers.

A mean dove. Who will peck out your heart, she said.

That would hurt.

I can’t help myself. Will you stay with me, she said, suddenly, if I go crazy?

There was desolation in her voice, so he tried to joke.

Well, you already are crazy.

He felt tears on his chest. Oh, he’d gone too far.

In a good way. I love your crazy!

How come you’re not crazy?

I am, inside.

No, you’re not. You’re not crazy. How can you not go crazy? We lost him. How can you not go crazy? Don’t you f*cking care?

Her voice rose sharper, louder.

You don’t f*cking care! You cold bitch, you Nazi. You don’t care!

Hey, he said, holding her. Both of us can’t go crazy. At the same time, anyway. Let’s take turns.

She went silent, then abruptly laughed.

Bitch. Nazi.

She laughed harder. Her laughing slipped a bolt in Peter, and then they were both laughing in a sick way, both unhinged again with the same first anguish, both weeping into each other’s hair, snot dripping in the sheets.

You’re still my dove, he said, later on. I’ll never stop loving you.

But she terrified him, freezing his love, and he could hear the death of certainty in what he said. The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.