The Fool's Run

CHAPTER 21

I was working on the sandbar below St. Paul. I'd dragged the anchor halfway up the bar and buried it, and the boat swung placidly on its line as the towboats streamed by. It was hot, the first real heat of the coming summer. She crossed the levee, pushed through the willows, and walked out on the bar. She was wearing gym shoes, jeans, and a peek-a-boo blouse. She had a nice tan.

"Neat picture," she said when she came up. She said "pitcher."

"Thanks. How was Mexico?"

"All right. A lot of foreigners." She laughed and I smiled and she said, "Old joke."

"No kidding." I laid in a long vermilion horizon.

LuEllen did a critical pout, cocked her head, and nodded. "Not bad," she said.

"Thanks."

"Seen Maggie lately?"

"Not since I called you-not since Vegas. There's a mutual lack of interest."

"Still think we're safe?"

"I think so. We put ourselves outside the percentages. Have you been back to Duluth?"

"Snuck in and out a week after you called. Moved some money around, and went back." She wandered around, looked in the boat. "I saw that old man Anshiser croaked."

"Yeah. Maggie's running the place. A new guy took her job, Dillon's still number three." I dropped in some very liquid ultramarine and feathered it into the vermilion.

"I could never do that," she said. "Paint, I mean. Like you put in that hill, with purple. Who would think that a hill with green trees is purple? But it kind of is, isn't it?" She looked across the river at the hill.

"Yeah, it is."

"Have you thought about Dace at all?"

"You mean, do I feel guilty?"

"Yeah."

I stopped painting and looked at her. "Yes. I do. I thought I knew what we were getting into, and I didn't. And Dace paid. But there's nothing I can do about it. I could go after Maggie, I suppose. But I can't do that, either. And I like it here. I don't want to spend the rest of my life running from somebody, the cops, or the mob, or whoever."

She nodded. "That's where I got to, sitting on the beach. I kept thinking, Dace would want us to do this, or Dace would want us to do that. Then one day I figured, Dace doesn't want us to do anything. He's dead. It's like they turned out a TV. It's like thinking a TV show wants you to do something, after you've turned it off."

I went back to painting and she watched for another minute or two, then ran off down the sandbar, stopping to look at the flotsam. She was back in five minutes with a wasp-waisted seven-ounce Coke bottle.

"Must be twenty years old," she said.

"I don't want to break your heart, but you can still buy them like that."

"Oh yeah?" She looked at me suspiciously, but when I nodded, heaved it into the river. She had a good arm. The bottle hit and bobbed up, its neck sticking out of the water.

"Been stealing anything?" I asked.

"Nope. I'm too rich," she said. "But I'm thinking about it anyway."

"Playing the ponies?"

"A little."

"How about the nose candy?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Were you faithful to me down in Mexico?"

She snorted and threw a driftwood stick after the Coke bottle and watched them both float away. A tow jockey ran his harbor boat by, heading toward the coal dump downriver.

"Are you, you know, involved with anybody?" she asked.

"Nah."

"What are my chances of getting laid?"

"Pretty good, if you play your cards right," I said.

"Okay," she said. "All right."

She looked happy. She found a flat rock and tried to skip it side-armed out in the river. It skipped once and crashed.

The river itself was dark and black and snaky, the currents and crosscurrents bucking up along the bar. We spent most of the afternoon there, painting and talking and watching the clouds roll in, up from the south, over the Mississippi.