The Plague of Doves

The Way Things Are

THE MOMENT I passed Geraldine Milk in the narrow hallway of the tribal offices, I decided I had to marry her. As we swerved slightly sideways, nodding briefly, her breasts in a modest white blouse passed just under my line of sight. I was intensely aware of them and forced myself to keep my eyes level with hers, but still, I caught the delicate scent of her soap mixed with a harsh thread of female sweat. The hair at the back of my neck prickled, I stopped dead, swiveling like a puppet on strings, to watch her as she passed on down the hallway. Geraldine’s walk was elastic, womanly. But there was no come-hither in it. There was a leave-me-alone quality, in fact. Geraldine was thought aloof because she’d never married — her first boyfriend, Roman, the one off the passenger train, had been killed in a car wreck and she had not become attached since. I had my own pains in that department. We had that in common.

Of course, Geraldine knows all. She is a tribal enrollment specialist and has everyone’s secrets alphabetically filed. I must, in fact, call upon her expertise for many questions of blood that come my way. A few days later, I visited her office. I nodded as I entered the room and Geraldine glanced away.

“I’m Antone Coutts,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered.

Her eyes, black and upslanted in a pale, cool face, rested on me with an odd intensity, but no warmth. There was no sign of friendliness, although she made a gesture. Raised her eyebrows a fraction. That day, she was wearing a rose pink dress belted at the waist with a black tie. She wore sheer stockings and low black heels. She had on a gardenia perfume that left behind the suggestion of moist vegetation. A woman who smelled tropical, here in North Dakota. I watched her leave the office and Margaret Lesperance, who’d seen me rebuffed, said in a sympathetic tone, “Her old uncle is probably waiting outside for her.” At the time, I thought Margaret said it just to cover the awkward moment. It seemed obvious that Geraldine wanted nothing to do with me. But later on I found that her uncle really had been waiting for her, and of course, she intended to get to know me all along. Yes, she had tried to avoid me, but the reason was not, as I imagined, the way she viewed my past or thought about my family. She was cool because that was her way. She was a woman of reserve.

It took a long time before Geraldine would even talk to me, longer still before she’d sit down and drink a cup of coffee in my presence. At a conference in Bismarck she finally had dinner with me — I’d maneuvered into the hotel smorgasboard line right behind her and when she walked over to a table I stuck tight. We talked of general and familiar subjects, getting acquainted, but all the while I longed to say, “I’m going to marry you, Geraldine Milk, and you are going to marry me.”

Though impatient, I managed to keep my interest hidden. I heard the Milk girls had tempers, and I did not want to begin by sparking hers. After the conference, when we returned home, I boringly kept an appropriate distance, though sometimes I thought I’d die of all I didn’t dare say in her presence. My love of her uncle’s music helped — I often went to sit with him in the evenings. At other times I dropped by his house early in the mornings, made a pot of strong tea or took him out to breakfast. That was on the weekends. The first time Geraldine showed up at her uncle’s house and found me there, I faked an elaborate surprise. She was not fooled.

“Are you here for a haircut, Judge? I brought my trimming shears.” She drew a pair of scissors from her purse and snapped them in the air. I felt like telling her she could do anything she wanted to me. I am pretty sure she read this in my expression and took pity. She put the scissors down.

“Do you like to fish?” I asked her. Maybe it was an odd way to get to know a woman, but I was suffering.

“No,” she said.

“Would you like to go fishing anyway?”

“All right.”

So the next day we went out together in a cousin of mine’s fishing boat, a little aluminum outboard with a 45-horsepower motor. She had on rolled-up jeans, a starched plaid shirt. Her hair was a curled graceful shape that brushed her shoulders. She wore a deep red lipstick and no other makeup, and I thought that if she let me lean toward her in the boat I would hold her face, graze her lips with the side of my thumb, look into her eyes, and slowly kiss her. I was picturing just what I’d do, when she said, “Watch out,” sharply. We’d just missed a rock, which I knew was there, and she shook her head.

“You’ll hang us up, Judge.”

“I’m not a hanging judge.”

“You know that story?”

“Sure.”

I told her that the two older brothers of Cuthbert Peace, Henri and Lafayette, had long ago saved my grandfather’s life. We reached what looked like a good spot, cast our lines out, reeled them in, cast out and reeled in without talking. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. We knew where we were from. After a while, we began talking in a general way of exactly that. We talked of history, mused a little on the future. Our reservation as it stands now is bordered by three towns — Hoopdance, Argus, and Pluto. That last — being closest, but on the western boundary and so off the most traveled roads — has ended up not benefiting from the slight stability and even occasional prosperity brought to the reservation by light manufacturing. Since the government offers tax incentives for businesses to locate here, we’ve begun to switch our economic base away from farming, even as the towns surrounding us empty out and die. It’s a shame to see them go, but Geraldine and I agreed that we were not about to waste our sympathies. In the winter of our great starvation, when scores of our people were consumed by hunger, citizens of Argus sold their grain and raffled off a grand piano. More recently, when we traveled to Washington to fight a policy that would have terminated our relationship with the United States Government guaranteed by treaty, only one lawyer, from Pluto, stood up for us. That was my father. And in 1911, when a family was murdered savagely on a farm just to the west, a posse mob tore after a wandering bunch of our people. They chased down three men and a boy and hung them all, except Mooshum. The story Geraldine had just referred to. I told her that later on the vigilantes admitted that they probably were mistaken. She hadn’t known that.

“But it happened in the heat of things, one of them said, I think Wildstrand. In the heat of things!”

Geraldine said, “What doesn’t happen in the heat of things? Someone has seized the moment to act on their own biases. That’s it. Or history. Sometimes it is history.”

I caught a few small sunnies, and threw them back. Geraldine got a bite and her pole bent double.

“Bet you it’s a turtle.”

“Reel it in slow, let it swim to you. Coax it along.”

Geraldine, of course, knew how to catch a turtle better than I did. We didn’t have a net, so she was going to have to maneuver the creature alongside the boat. When she dragged it closer, I saw the bullet head and rounded humps and knew it was a giant snapper. I was surprised it hadn’t bitten the line and dived. Big as a car tire, it floated just beneath the water. I carefully stowed my fishing pole and tried to figure just how I would pull the monster out of the lake. I would rather have cut the turtle free than drag it in, not because I had sympathy for it, but because snappers bite with tremendous force. When I suggested we let it go, Geraldine gave me an excited look and said, “No, Clemence will make French turtle soup!” So I resigned myself, flexed my fingers, and hoped I’d keep them.

“Now, now! Reach over and grab onto him!”

Geraldine’s snapper swam alongside the boat and I leaned over, grabbed its shell, but failed to secure my grip. Twice I lost him, which exasperated Geraldine.

“Here, take this. I’ve caught lots of snappers before.”

She set the fishing rod in my hand and pulled it in by the tail, right over the side. It was the biggest snapper I’d ever seen, with olive green slime growing in patterns on its back and that strange, unreconstructed dinosaur beak. The neck was massive, slack, and the nose came to a delicate, creepy point.

“They go back over a million years unchanged,” I said. I planned to whack the turtle with the emergency oar if it attacked, but it lay there passively. Geraldine was staring hard at the shell, sitting stiffly with her hands folded in her lap. Her arrest became prolonged and her face went ash gray.

“Should I throw it back?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I kept talking.

“The one my cousin kept as a pet tried to lay eggs after two years alone in the tank. I guess the female can conserve sperm for quite a long time, if the need arises.”

I tried to stop myself, wondering how idiotic a man could be, but her silence rattled me.

“I know,” she said at last. “My brother-in-law studies reptiles.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, after we’d both sat for much too long looking at that turtle in the bottom of the boat.

“Don’t you see it?”

The turtle was becoming more responsive now. It opened its muddy eyes and poked its head out like a snake, then slowly stretched its jaws wide. The inside of its mouth was grotesque, ornately fleshy, and there was the low reek of turtle musk.

“We scared it,” I said, feebly, holding the paddle out. The thing moved toward it and struck, crunching down hard on the wood. I cried out, but Geraldine ignored me.

“Can’t you see? Take a good look,” she said again.

Now that its jaws were solidly clamped down on the paddle, I was less distracted. But I still couldn’t see until she traced the initials in air just over the turtle’s back. G R.

“Roman and I caught this turtle a long time ago, when it was small,” she said. “He carved our initials in its shell. I was mad. I said he was going to kill it anyway, so we might at least have soup.”

“So,” I said stupidly after a few moments, “you’ve been fishing here before.”

“So to speak.”

I damned Roman for dying and the turtle for living on; I damned the turtle for biting her hook; I damned it for letting itself be pulled over the side. With this sign from the past, my courtship might be delayed another ten years. By now, I knew how the Milk romantic streak could turn fatalistic.

She took my pocketknife and cut the line. Although I felt at this point I could have eaten the turtle raw, we lifted it (still gripping the paddle) over the side. I steadied the boat. Geraldine held one end of the paddle and the turtle floated at the other end, eyeing us in a weirdly doglike way, until Geraldine commanded, “Let go now.” It sank obediently and she sat frowning at the place it vanished. After some time, I started up the motor.

All is lost, I thought, definitely lost, more the luck. I wasn’t surprised, though. Losing women is a trait inherited by Coutts men.

That night, as I put together my bachelor dinner (cans of this, cans of that), I tried to counsel myself in persistence. I thought of my grandfather’s loves and hideous trials. He was part of the first, failed, town-site expedition, the youngest of a bunch of greedy fools, or venture capitalists, who nearly starved dead but eventually became some of the first people to profit financially from this part of the world. The lucky capture of a turtle had saved them way back then, a thought that cheered me now. I’d read his old journals. Some of his other books were piled deep in the other bedroom of my house, waiting for shelves. The living room walls were already stacked two volumes deep. Boxes of files and more books filled the basement. Although these books were valuable, I wasn’t fanatical about the way I handled them. Yes, they were very old, but they were meant to be read by a living human and I did them that honor. As I held one of my other favorites open with one hand and read, I slowly spooned up hot beef stew and baked beans. Finally, I found the passage I was looking for. The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger.

For dessert, as usual, fruit cocktail.

Town Fever

THEN AS EVER it did not pay well to teach, and the youth of St. Anthony did not sufficiently appreciate the writings of Marcus Aurelius to make Joseph J. Coutts’s vocation a labor of love. And besides, there was real love to think about. He felt that he should be traveling with more assurance in that golden realm as he was nearly twenty-six. But, tossing at night in the room he surely paid too much for in the home of Dorea Ann Swivel, widow, his prospects only gave him a galling headache. He had visited himself for a short time upon a woman named Louisa Bird — small, pretty, some four years older and unfortunately Presbyterian, but she certainly hadn’t kissed him and was stolen away during a sleigh ride by a young St. Paul minister with a set of fabulous whiskers. That theft erased any hesitancy on Joseph’s part, and now he could not get her out of his mind. So he burned, secretly enough, though sometimes as he walked through the chill early morning dark to light the stove in the former lumber mill office that served as a schoolhouse, he could almost feel the air scorch around him, and he wondered if the widow, for instance, understood the nature of his burden.

Shortly after Louisa flew to the arms of the minister, he realized that the widow did. One night, there was a rap on his door and Mrs. Swivel, who was large-hipped, plain, and shrewd, entered his cold little room. His bedstead did not seem sturdy enough to bear the weight of them both, and though the warmth and bread-dough fragrance of her body was sweet, he worried as he made his way toward bliss which one of them would pay for the bed if it collapsed. Their nights grew frequent and the bed more frail. He strapped the legs to the frame with strong rope and braced the base of the bed with river stones. She fed him better than her other boarders, which got their suspicions up. But real fear did not enter him until the first day of November, when she gave back half his rent and told him with a glint of tooth that she’d reduced it. So Joseph Coutts was ready to make a change in his life when he met up with Reginald Bull, who was looking for a man to join a town-site expedition heading for the plains.

Reginald was enough like his surname for that alone to stick. Bull was thick, wide-necked, powerful, but had the prettiest bashful brown eyes and a red bud of a mouth, which he was often teased for. As Bull laid it out, two land speculators, Odin Merrimack and Colonel LeVinne P. Poolcaugh, were getting up a party of men, which they would outfit at their own expense, and sending them out past the Dakota-Minnesota border to survey and establish claim by occupancy on several huge pieces of land that would most certainly become towns, perhaps cities, when the railroad reached that part of the world. The men would be paid in shares of land, said Bull, and there was already talk of millions in it; he’d heard that phrase. But they were not the only ones with town fever. Other outfits were making plans. They’d beat everyone by heading out in the dead of winter.

“I’ve seen men get richer out here,” said Joseph, “but I never have seen a man poor to begin with obtain much wealth, not yet.”

“It’s a going proposition,” Bull insisted. “And we’re outfitted with the best. Two ox teams and a cook. Not only that, but we’ve got the cleverest guides in this country, Henri and Lafayette Peace. They’ll get us through anything.”

At this, Joseph was impressed. Henri Peace was known by reputation, though he’d never heard of Lafayette. There was also a German named Emil Buckendorf and three of his brothers, all excellent ox-team drivers.

“Give me one night,” said Joseph. But when he thought of going back to his room and remembered the state of his bed legs, he changed his mind and agreed right there on the spot. That very afternoon, he visited his school district officer and put in his resignation; that night, he gave his landlady notice. He’d thought Dorea might be downcast to see him go, perhaps even angry, but when he explained his plan and told her of the interest he’d earn in the town-to-come, her face grew radiant, almost beautiful. The thought of so much money to be made just by camping out in a place made her so excited that she almost wanted to go herself. Alarmed, Joseph mentioned that they would be guided by bois brl or Metis French Indians, and her features shut tighter than a drumhead.

She left him alone that night and he was surprised at how much he missed her. Unable to sleep, he lighted a candle stub and paged through the Meditations until he found the one he needed, the one that told him no longer to wander at hazard or wait to read the books he was reserving for old age, but to throw away idle hopes (Louisa!) and come to his own aid, if he cared for himself and while it was in his power. He blew out his candle and put the book beneath his pillow. He had made the right decision, he was sure of it, and he tried not to think of Dorea Swivel’s plush embrace. But the night was cold, his blanket thin, and it was impossible not to long for the heat she generated or to wish his head was pillowed on the soft muscles of her upper arm. There would be more of this deprivation, he told himself; he’d best get used to it. For the next year, he would be hunkering down for warmth with hairy men who soon would stink. What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery. Joseph Coutts knew this, intellectually at least, already, and so that night he tried to discipline himself to put away all thoughts of Dorea’s two great secrets — a mesmerizing facility with bad words, which she would whisper in his ear, and a series of wild, quick movements that nearly made him faint with pleasure. He would not think of these things. No, he would not.

The Expedition

THE NEXT DAY, Bull came around with papers to sign and brought him over to Colonel Poolcaugh’s establishment, where his outfit garments were being sewed and where, also, two Icelandic women were completing an enormous blanket of thickly quilted wool batting made expressly for the nine men to sleep together underneath. Emil Buckendorf was there, dark-haired, with fanglike teeth and eyes so pale that there seemed to be a light burning in his skull. He was a quiet, efficient young man; he was helping the women sew and doing a nice job of it, too. The two guides were very much unlike each other. Lafayette was fine-made and superbly handsome, with a thin mustache, slick braids, and sly black eyes. Henri was sturdy as Bull, though shorter and with an air of captivating assurance. There was also the cook, English Bill, a man whose brown muttonchops flew straight out from his face and would soon droop to cover his neck. Joseph had developed a suspicion of grand whiskers, but he liked English Bill’s riveting energy as he dickered with and worried Colonel Poolcaugh. Bill was adamant about the necessity of provisioning the outfit well. He also insisted on bringing his dog, a stubby little brown and white short-haired terrier, and he made Joseph try on each garment. There were so many that Joseph was inclined to simply accept the pile, but when he put on the three woolen shirts and three woolen drawers, the three pair of stockings and moccasins over them, there were adjustments to be made. There was an overcoat of Kentucky jean to repair and his elkskin overshoes needed additional lacings as well. A grand-looking helmet made of lambskin came down over his shoulders with flaps to each side to draw over his nose and, last, there was a pair of fur mitts. When it was all on, Joseph was so hot he could hardly breathe, as it was a warm day for December. But, by the end of the month, when the party started out, the weather was already being called the worst and coldest in memory.

When he left Dorea Swivel, she gave him a picture of herself. He almost gave it back, thinking it unfair of him to accept it when he loved the heated bolster of her body but did not see a future with someone who didn’t know how to read and could write little more than her name, though she was good at adding and subtracting. But something made him keep the small locket photograph of her, so plain and steadfast, her broad face symmetrical beneath a severe middle part in her hair. It was as though he had an intimation that he was embarking on a journey that would bring him to the edge of his sanity, and that he’d need the solid weight of her gaze to pull him back.

The Great Drive

WITH FIVE YOKE of oxen and two sleds built for rough haul, the men started from St. Anthony. The only personal possessions Joseph brought were the locket and the book that contained the writings of Marcus Aurelius. One sled was loaded with corn and cob for the oxen and the other with provisions for the men, plus all of the tools that Bull, Emil Buckendorf, and Joseph Coutts would need to garden and live out a year. The other men were to be fetched back as soon as the prairie dried out in the spring, and at the same time those who stayed would be reprovisioned. Within two days, the road disappeared and Joseph, Henri, and Lafayette broke the trail with snowshoes before the oxen, who either foundered in the deep snow or cut their fetlocks on the burnt-over prairie where the wind had swept a vicious crust. By placing one step before another, they progressed about eight miles a day. At night, they raised their tent, built a good blaze, cut slough grass for bedding, piled it on the snow, then spread their buffalo coats and oilcloths over the grass and got into their huge communal bed fully clothed. The two guides took turns sleeping with their most important possession, a fiddle, which they kept in a velvet-lined case and kissed like a woman. Once they lowered the great woolen comforter over themselves, the men began to steam up under the batting, and they slept, though every time one rolled over so did the rest. The nights were lively that way, but not, at first, unbearable, thought Joseph. But this was only January and there wouldn’t be a chance for any of them to bathe before spring. He had never been an overly fastidious person, but the food that English Bill prepared sat heavy on the gut and one night the men grew so flatulent they almost blew the quilt off. Halfway through the concert, Henri Peace began to laugh and cried out in the dark, praising the men for playing so loudly on their own French fiddles. Joseph started laughing too, but Emil Buckendorf took offense.

“Gawiin ojidaa, ma frère,” said Henri, who spoke the French-Chippewa patois as well as either English or pure Chippewa, or Cree, “I am sorry to have insulted you. For you were playing the German bugle, were you not?”

Emil went silent and ground his teeth. Joseph could hear his molars and jaws working. But it was too cold to fight. No one wanted to get out from under the quilt.

When Joseph rose the next morning and looked out over the great white bowl of the universe, he saw the sun had two dogs at either side and was crowned by a burning crescent. It was a sight so immediate, so gorgeous, so grim, that tears started into his eyes as he stood transfixed.

“Oui, frère Joseph, weep now while you have the strength,” Henri said, handing him a tin cup of boiling hot tea, “we shall be hit hard by afternoon.” As with everything Henri said, this proved true.

They ran into heavy drifts on the unburned prairie and had to shovel all the way. Foot by foot, they made five miles. Henri and Lafayette found elk sign and went after the creatures, hoping to supplement English Bill’s cured hog. No sooner were they gone than the blizzard swept down and the men set about making camp, hauling wood, trying to raise the tent. But the wind drove the snow in horizontal sheets, slapped out their fire, sucked the tent into its nothingness, confused and battered them until they stumbled uncertainly this way and that. Henri returned and shouted for them to make the bed where they stood and get in quick. As they spread the buffalo coats and oilcloths the snow drifted into the fur but the men got in, Lafayette on one end and English Bill on the other end, as he always was on account of sleeping with his terrier. For a long time the men shook so hard that Henri called something out to Lafayette in Chippewa that Joseph was to recognize, later, when he understood them better, as a reference to a sacred method of divination in which spirits entered a special tent and caused it to tremble. The shaking ceased gradually. The men relaxed against one another and Joseph, held fast between two Buckendorfs, drifted off wondering if he might not waken but too tired to really care.

A little before dawn, Joseph did wake to the sound of men singing. Edging his face from the bed, he realized that the blanket was covered entirely by a great and glowing white drift. Steam rose from the cracked snow at the edges. The wind had ceased and a steep cold now gripped them. Henri and Lafayette had built up the fire and were drying themselves before it. Henri was playing a jig of stirring joy. Lafayette was beating a hand drum and jumping up and down, singing a song loud and wailing wild as the blizzard. The Buckendorfs cursed and screamed as they emerged, damp, into the horrible cold, but the music, which Henri told Joseph was meant to pluck up their spirits, had an effect. Something in the song, which Joseph began to repeat with the guides, worked on him. As he turned himself to each direction before the fire, and sang, a startling awareness came over him. The violence of the storm, the snapping and growling of the fire, the flame reflected on the dark faces of the guides and on Bull’s sweet features and in the strange white eyes of the Germans, struck him with indelible force. A sudden, fierce, black happiness boiled up in him. He laughed out loud and looked into Henri’s eyes, glittering over the roan body of violin, and saw how narrowly they had escaped. If the drift hadn’t covered them, they’d have iced up in this extremity of cold and frozen to death in their sleep, welded fast to one another by ice, a solid mass until spring allowed the weird human sandwich to loosen and rot.

Joseph didn’t get much chance to reflect on that prospect; for the next four days they plunged along and even drove themselves through a black night and over the next day, their usual consecrated Sunday of rest, across a poker-table-flat belt of prairie twenty-five miles wide, for fear of the wind in that unsheltered expanse. The guides used the North Star for direction, and the party stopped in confusion when ice fogs swept over them every few hours. When the oxen stopped, the Buckendorfs dropped off the sledges as though shot, and fell asleep in the snow. Emil beat his brothers awake, and the men and oxen staggered on. At one point, drowsing as he walked, words came to Joseph. Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power…. Having been spared the night of the blizzard, Joseph determined that it would not be for nothing if he was also spared now. It was true that his original purpose on this expedition had been to become a rich man, but now in the measureless night he understood it was more than that. He’d seen the blizzard sweep out of nothing and descend in fury upon them and then return to the nothingness it came from, so like all men. There was something powerful in store for him. He must be ready for it. He fell completely asleep walking and when he woke, one of the oxen was down. The men were coaxing it with wild blows to rise. The poor beast’s fetlocks had swollen big as teakettles and each step left a gush of blood in the snow. Joseph leapt toward the ox, hunched over the massive head, breathed his own breath into its foamy muzzle, and spoke in a calm clear voice until the animal groaned to its feet and labored on into the waste. It was the first one they killed for food.

This was a bad sign — to slaughter their oxen before they had even reached their destination. Henri looked a little grim. But that night as they roasted its withered heart and salted the charred flesh and ate, and as the little spotted terrier with the brown eyes worried a bone to one side of the fire, Lafayette played and the two guides sang again. Only this time it was a French chanson about a black-haired woman, and even the Buckendorfs, once they understood the refrain, roared it willingly and in good timbre until they turned in, still joking, as though drunk. The fresh meat and the French song did their work on the men and that night Joseph dreamed of Dorea for the first time. She’d put a new plank in his bedstead, she said as she drew him close. The other men also, from the looks of them at daylight, had been disturbed in their slumbers, for they began the next day hollow-eyed, downcast, subdued. Throughout the day Bull heaved cracking sighs and gazed too long at the horizon.

“Is she there?” said Henri at one point, gesturing at the line between the sky and the earth.

“Who? Where?” asked Bull.

“Ginimoshe! Is she there?”

But Bull could not be teased. He hadn’t the stiff pride of Emil Buckendorf. He spoke in a kind of innocence.

“If she were. If she only were there!”

The guides nodded in approval at his devotion. The other men went quiet out of respect and envy. Bull had nearly dropped out at the last minute for reason of having fallen in love. It was not just any love, he’d told Joseph, it was unbearable, it was heaven. She had been introduced to him by the guides, and was the housekeeper and general assistant to a local doctor who advertised “Surgeries with or without chloroform, the latter on bargain terms!” Joseph had in fact thought the doctor’s advertising card an excellent reason to become rich. He had also seen the girl Bull loved. She was a niece of the Peace brothers, daughter of their younger sister, a Metis Catholic whose family was very strict. Her skin was a dark cream. She was round and sweet as caramel, with brown-black hair and tiny cinnamon-colored freckles sprinkled across a sensible nose. Nice enough, a forthright look about her, but hard to see as the object of deathless passion. But then, thought Joseph, who was he to talk? He kept Dorea’s locket in the heart pocket of his innermost shirt and fished it out in secret.

Batner’s Powders

THEY REACHED THE area they wanted to claim one month after they’d started off with just six oxen left and an alarming lack of flour. English Bill had insisted three barrels be provided and yet just one had been loaded. He cursed Poolcaugh up and down and spat till he was livid over the flour and then the quality of the beans, which he insisted were shriveled and had been switched on him. By now, though, having eaten one meal more scorched and strange than the next, the men had understood that English Bill’s cooking was as big a challenge as the weather. Both were soon to get worse. The first blizzards had been nothing, and they were met at their destination by a four-day howler, which they survived only through the cleverness of their guides in choosing a camp, setting up their tent, and banking it with brush and snow so that it became quite snug by the end of the blow. With the flour nearly gone, they decided, after they emerged, to feed the oxen elm slash and keep the feed — rough corn and ground cob — to sustain themselves. They divided it up equally. Joseph filled his extra pair of socks with the stuff — hard as sand pebbles. There were still plenty of beans, but the men had now developed bowel trouble and ate their suppers with slow despair. By morning, beneath their suffocating quilt, they wanted to murder one another. In the beginning the men had coveted the warmest interior sleeping spots, but now they craved to sleep on either end, where at least they could gasp fresh air. They became so weak from the trots that Bull at last decided to break into the store of drug remedies he’d procured from his sweetheart’s employer.

One night, consulting written instructions from the doctor, he prepared a solution of Batner’s Powders for each of the men. Joseph took his ten drops like the others and crawled into bed. The effect upon them all was nothing short of magical. They slept like babes, dreamed lusciously, woke in the morning refreshed, pleasant, and actually did some surveying. Using a hand compass, a tape and chain, they completed the main lines, which would be filled in back in St. Paul. Joseph had dreamed a banquet so detailed that he thought for part of the morning he’d really eaten it. That night they boiled ox and hog meat with the last of the flour into a thick mush that Henri called booyeh. They ate as well as they could and eagerly accepted their treatment. Over the next weeks, the food dwindled. Lafayette killed a lynx and the guides replaced the broken strings of the fiddle with its entrails, but the rank meat sat hard in their scoured guts. At last they killed the final ox, and were glad the medicine helped also with hunger pains. Joseph noticed how loose his clothes were and how tightly his flesh now seemed strapped to his bones.

“We’re nothing but gristle,” he said one night to Lafayette, who grinned and took his laudanum. That night they all dreamed, fantastically, the same dream. Where they slept they saw lights twinkling on a great upraised wheel and giant cups, whirling in the dark, accompanied by an unearthly flow of music. Hundreds of people lived around them and walked, floated, emerged, and dove back into the shadows. There were towers and buildings and an array of lights that would rival the greatest cities in Europe. They all agreed, the next morning as they drank their tea and munched the hot corn- and cob-meal cakes they’d patted together for themselves with the last of the heated hog fat, that this was a great and wondrous sign. That day, too, Henri and Lafayette killed two buffalo calves and a cow. They hauled the carcasses to a brushy lean-to in the empty cattle enclosure, covered the meat with ice and snow, and stuck flags all around to keep away the wolves. That night they ate wonderfully, and all the next week there was clear weather. Believing that they now had food to last until the time when B. J. Bolt, the reprovisioner, was meant to appear, they worked with good cheer and roughed out a cabin of hewn log. They even set up a raised platform for their bed at one side and built a large fireplace. Soon, they meant to have a real door. Bull was using a ripsaw to work out a plank and casings for a door and even a window to let in a little light.

The Emissary

THE MOST DEVOUT among the men were Henri and Lafayette Peace, who wore, it was revealed once the men had stripped down to only two shirts during a warm February day, a crucifix each next to their skin. They had an interesting way of doing things, thought Joseph. For instance, to get the buffalo, they’d slipped in amid the small herd that had ventured near, wearing wolfskins draped over their heads and shoulders. As there were always wolves scouting the herds, the bulls stepped near the men and smelled their caps, which must have made them think that the guides were dead wolves. The buffalo turned away and lowered their great muzzles into the snow to forage for grass. Once close to the animal they’d chosen, one of the two brothers rose slightly and killed it, a single shot at close range, then instantly sank down. Keeping their gun locks dry under the wolfskin, the guides kept still until the animals, who shifted uneasily at the noise but never panicked, went back to stirring through the snow. Joseph was close enough to see that beneath the wolfskins both men made the papist sign of the cross, kissed their crucifixes, and in their stillness he could ascertain that they were giving thanks and praise to God. They loved their fiddle, and called her their sweetheart, their lover. But on Sundays she was the Virgin Mary to the bois brls; they played only sacred music. And no matter what the circumstances they always fished out their rosaries, first thing in the morning, and muttered as they moved their fingers along the beads.

English Bill had treated their religious practices with skepticism and even made a few jokes at their expense. He also thought it a good prank to hide the mirror Lafayette used every morning to conduct his scrupulous toilette. But one day a wolf surprised English Bill’s terrier at the edge of camp, snatched it up, and bounded away in one fluid leap. Lafayette happened to be near and in a motion just as lyrical as the wolf ’s he prepared and raised his gun and in one blast brought the wolf down, although it had attained a good distance. The terrier jumped from the wolf ’s jaws unscratched, sniffed the carcass, and ran back to camp, behaving as though nothing had happened. After that, English Bill could not do enough for the two guides. And as it turned out it was a good thing Lafayette had saved the dog’s life for, in turn, the bold little terrier was to save the men.

The weather stayed warm and then grew warmer, until the meat rotted and they were again reduced to beans. The meat had seemed to regulate the men’s bowels. Meat or laudanum. Again, they began the drug regimen. Alarmingly thin by now, they tried all methods of snaring game, but even the Peace brothers had no luck and one night Bull declared the unspoken and said that they were all bound to die. He was leaving the next day, he said, making a last desperate effort for his life. He was walking back to St. Anthony. Back to his love.

“You’ll not make it,” Joseph said. He’d grown fond of Bull, and he was grateful to him for bringing along the laudanum, which was all that kept them from dying in the snow with their pants around their ankles, he was sure. “Don’t go,” he begged. “Don’t let him,” he entreated Henri. But the guides only nodded and looked away. They understood that the doctor’s housekeeper was the only reason Bull was living yet. Like most men of large muscled stature, Bull had suffered the pangs of starvation more cruelly than the others. He had even gazed hungrily at English Bill’s dog and so, that night, English Bill and the guides were the only of the men who did not try to dissuade Bull from making his attempt.

The ice broke and by morning the river was outside the door of the cabin. By noon that day, as Bull got ready to leave, the water had entered. The men gave him half of the cornmeal they had left, and he took a butcher knife. All of the men shook hands before he walked off, and nobody expected to see him again. The melt was grave — not only had they built too close to the river, they now realized, but the prairie between them and St. Anthony would be swimming. There would be no crossing. Bull would die in the mud. There would be no B. J. Bolt with a wagonload of food. Perhaps an Indian pony could get through, said Joseph, but the guides said no and Henri calmly sliced apart the extra pair of moccasins he’d brought and stewed them up. Joseph added the lacings and tops of his elkhide overboots. They had sent Bull off with more than his share of the laudanum and the dose they took that night, as it was the last, inflicted them with melancholy.

When they woke the next day the water had risen to just below their platform bed, and they resolved with their remaining strength to build a higher temporary shelter on a rise behind the cabin. As they were slowly attempting to build, Joseph had a sudden bolt of fear that he’d left the Meditations within reach of the water and he ran back to the cabin to retrieve the book. He had his gun with him because he was keeping that dry. As he entered the cabin, he saw a watery slur of movement. In the light from the open door an otter popped his head up and regarded him with the curious and trusting gaze of a young child. Slowly, not taking his eyes off the creature, Joseph aimed and shot. The otter died in a bloody swirl and Joseph found, when he fished it out, that his eyes had filled with tears. In a moment he was weeping helplessly over the gleaming and sinuous body of the creature.

The book was safe. He put it in his coat. Embarrassed at himself, he took the otter to a dry place and skinned and dressed it out. He’d got hold of himself by the time he brought the meat to English Bill, but he was unnerved by the great emotion he’d felt. For he’d had the instant horror that he had committed a murder. And that conviction still filled him. The creature was an emissary of some sort. He’d known as they held that human stare. Joseph himself was part of all that was sustained and destroyed by a mysterious power. He had killed its messenger. And the otter wasn’t even edible. English Bill tried to roast the meat without parboiling it first, and the otter’s taste of rotting fish gagged the men. Not so the terrier, who had a feast.

The dog was so full that the next day she didn’t eat even one of thirty-six snow buntings that she found huddled in a pile, frozen dead and perfectly preserved. The Buckendorfs heaped the birds in their laps and with swift hands plucked them bare. Then the men put the birds on spits, roasted them, and ate, shivering with pleasure as they cracked and sucked the tiny bones. Joseph praised the dog, who flipped her ears up and seemed quite proud. Three times after that, the dog uncannily brought food. She dragged two great catfish, still gasping, off a piece of ice. She caught a squirrel and tried to pull a snapping turtle off a log by holding on to its tail. When Henri saw the turtle, he grinned and did not allow English Bill to touch it. He baited the turtle until it bit down on a stick, then sawed its head off. The head did not let go of the stick and the eyes continued to blink even after its body was chopped into a ravishing soup.

The Millions

SO THE MEN were comparatively fit when Bull crawled back into the camp — a ghost, a skeletal thing, a flailed creature with great pools of eyes and a gaping mouth. His beard had grown all over his face and his chest had sunk. His knees and elbows were grotesquely swollen, his muscles shriveled onto the bone. He had lost his boots and socks and his feet had frozen black. Sick with pity, Joseph put his arms around the wasted man and lowered him onto a buffalo skin. He held Bull like a baby and let a bit of the soup trickle down his throat. As soon as the soup hit Bull’s stomach, he straightened his legs out, kicked twice, and perished. Bull died looking up into the trees over them, just budding. Countless golden tassels winked in the sun, and the millions reflected in his baffled gaze.

Lafayette Peace

THE BUDS SOON opened and the trees were wearing a denser film of green one week later, when B. J. Bolt arrived on foot, looking not much better than had Bull. Over a month before, B. J. Bolt had started with four men, three pack ponies, plus their own mounts, only to run into the melt. From then on, there was nothing but half-frozen mush and icy slough. After an argument over whether to continue, the other men deserted B. J. and left him just one horse, who ran right off. B. J. had eaten what he could of the food but then — remarkably, given that he could have made it back to St. Cloud — he strapped the rest of the food onto himself and headed west. There were times he waded chest-deep through ice water, holding the food over his head. Other times he cracked through fragile ice. Somehow, he continued. But he had to eat in order to walk. So by the time he arrived at the camp and unbuckled his pack, there was nothing left but a dozen hard biscuits. The men divided them and that night, as he slowly let each crumb dissolve on his tongue, Joseph thought of the otter and of his saved book, which he knew by heart. One phrase whirled in his head: Wait for death with a cheerful mind.

If only there was something afterward. Bull hadn’t seemed to see anything in the branches and Marcus Aurelius had left that question up in the air.

“I envy your faith,” Joseph said to Henri. The Buckendorfs slept in a heap. The night was clear and the flames of the outdoor fire snapped high. The two guides took turns playing soft music, and Joseph thought that if only they were not near death this would be a very pleasant night.

“Me,” said Henri, putting down the fiddle and slowly stirring the fire with a stick, “I haven’t much faith. The saints love my brother here.”

Lafayette smiled, polishing his gun, and leaned over to breathe on the barrel. He had grown extremely beautiful and frail. Yet of them all he had remained most like himself in wit and action. His music had gained in depth. He alone seemed capable of effort.

“Do you believe we will die?” Joseph asked Lafayette, who continued to clean the gun with an absorption much like prayer. “Will you promise to bury me if I do?”

Lafayette suddenly leaned over, took the crucifix from around his neck, and with a tender gesture put it onto Joseph. The fire leapt in his extraordinary, sharp-bladed face. Three times he tapped Joseph on the chest and Joseph felt his heart leap, then Lafayette turned and walked off into the woods.

“Where is he going?” said Joseph, touching the cross at his throat. “What is he going to do?”

“We will have meat tomorrow,” said Henri. That was all.

The Buckendorfs’ eyes glowed with hunger like mystic stones and their yellow fangs had grown. There had been talk of eating Bull, and the guides had promised to kill anyone who tried. They were the ones who buried poor Bull and set a great pile of stones over his grave. They knelt with their rosaries and prayed to the Virgin Mary to rest his soul. Joseph had tried to help them, but had fallen down repeatedly. He was really asking Lafayette and Henri to do the same for him as for Bull. He was very tired now. Sitting beside Henri, he took the locket that held Dorea’s picture from his inner pocket and he opened it to show the guide. Before this, he’d always looked at her picture when he was alone, ashamed, perhaps, of the fact that she was plain and older. Ashamed, perhaps, that someone might think she was his mother.

Henri placed the fiddle with great care into its velvet nest, and stroked it before he shut the lid. Then he took the locket from Joseph’s hands, and looked into the face of Dorea for a very long time. At last he gave her back to Joseph.

“Such a pretty woman,” he said. “Très jolie. You will be happy. She will give you many children and keep you warm at night.”

This was the only untruth that Joseph heard Henri Peace to utter, for after that night in which Lafayette killed a crazed old female moose, and after the next week in which another outfit arrived with flour and they all stuffed themselves sick on pancakes and syrup then rolled in agony out in the woods, and after Joseph made his way back to St. Anthony more broke than he’d started out and with a deed for two hundred acres of worthless land in his pocket, he showed up at Dorea’s doorstep only to be met by a man who introduced himself as her new husband, to whom he wordlessly gave the locket.

The Saint

FOR A LONG time after the expedition, Joseph was sick, in a general way, and he gazed long at Lafayette’s crucifix nailed onto his wall. He wondered where English Bill, his dog, the Buckendorfs, and Lafayette and Henri Peace were now. Except for B. J. Bolt, who looked in on him sometimes, the only one whose whereabouts he was sure of was Bull. So after he recovered, Joseph went to visit the doctor’s housekeeper with the dark brown hair, sweet, coffee-milk skin, and freckled nose. She sat with him in the receiving parlor where the doctor’s patients waited. From behind the shut door they could hear the clack of instruments and some muffled yelps. Joseph told the doctor’s housekeeper all about Bull and how he had spoken of her looking at the horizon and how he had set off to walk across the dead swamp of the late winter prairie to be with her. She gazed at him with clear brown eyes and nodded when he had finished telling her about the turtle soup and how Bull had died looking up into the budding branches, with her name on his lips. The last part about the name was, he hoped, a pardonable embroidery. She did look sad, and a bit surprised. At last, she spoke.

“I was going to marry him, it’s a fact. I loved him, I think, but the truth is I cannot recall what he looked like. Our affection came on sudden and he was gone so fast. He hadn’t a picture of himself. But I do think I miss him and I am very sorry that he is dead.”

She was so lucid in her puzzlement and her speech was so calm that Joseph nearly asked her to marry him right then and there. He held his tongue out of respect for Bull, and went back to the room B. J. Bolt had insisted he be given out behind Poolcaugh’s establishment. There, he pondered, as he had many times, the mystery of his survival and the meaning of the otter. He took down the crucifix and touched it to his forehead. Alexander and Pompeium and Caius Caesar, after so completely destroying whole cities, and in battle cutting to pieces many ten thousands of cavalry and infantry, themselves too at last departed from life. Heraclitus, after so many speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled with water internally and died smeared all over with mud. And lice destroyed Democritas; and other lice killed Socrates. What means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out!

He put the book down. He pressed the cross into his forehead as if to absorb its meaning. He thought of Bull’s calm fiance. Again the otter looked at him, an innocent saint. And Bull’s fathomless eyes stared into the leaves.

“Well,” he said out loud, “I’m cured of town fever.”

He went out, bought a vested suit, and decided to become a lawyer.

The Wolf

HE WHO GOES to law holds a wolf by the ear, said Robert Burton. So there I was, here I am, the clichd mixed-blood with a wolf by the ear. One of my advantages in holding on to the wolf is that I grew up dividing my time between my mother’s family on the reservation, and the big house in Pluto. Thus, I know something about both sides of many cases I hear. My father built our house on land he had inherited from Joseph Coutts, whose own survey stones the railroad company tried to search out and steal when they came through, named, and platted out the town. That was some years after the town fever ordeal. Joseph Coutts was his own attorney, by then. In his first big case, he got back land for himself, therefore benefiting the Buckendorfs and any other of those original party members who cared to make a living near Pluto. Some did come back, drawn to where they’d lived the hardest, maybe, or where like Bull they had seen the truth of things flutter away in the pale leaves above them.

English Bill returned for a short time to open a saloon, but his terrier dog was thrown across the room in a poker dispute, shot right out of the air, and never did quite recover its vitality. Bill’s liquor was as remarkably bad as his food. I don’t know where he next tried his skill. As for the Buckendorfs, three of the four stayed on and were of course party to the lynching murder of the youngest Peace, whose older brothers had saved their lives.

After he got his land back, my grandfather was asked to move to Pluto and open a practice in what was thought of, after the mob had its way, as a town not quite fit to count itself part of the civilized new state of North Dakota. He did so, my father also went to law, and as they both married Chippewa women we became a family of lawyers who were also tribal members, an unusual combination at the time, but increasingly handy as tribal law and the complications of federal versus state jurisdiction were just beginning to become manifest.

As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace, I think how strange that lives were lost in its formation. It is the same with all desperate enterprises that involve boundaries we place upon the earth. By drawing a line and defending it, we seem to think we have mastered something. What? The earth swallows and absorbs even those who manage to form a country, a reservation. (Yet there is something to the love and knowledge of the land and its relationship to dreams — that’s what the old people had. That’s why as a tribe we exist to the present.) It is my job to maintain the sovereignty of tribal law on tribal land, but even as I do so, I think of my grandfather’s phrase for the land disease, town fever, and how he nearly died of greed, its main symptom.

I have tried to keep some things about my Pluto self a secret here — my long defeat in love, for instance, by a woman who demolished my house, a few (mostly pardonable) youthful escapades, and a verbal mistake that resulted in my lengthy term of work digging graves in the town cemetery — a place for which I still have fond regard. But in one of my first law cases, I defended the perpetrator of a crime that had taken place in Pluto. This crime had also resulted in Corwin Peace. John Wildstrand was the perpetrator; he was also Corwin’s father. He was tangled in with the rest of the family in complex ways as his grandfather had also fathered Mooshum’s wife — but enough. Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood.

I trace a number of interesting social configurations to the Wildstrand tendency to sexual excess, or “deathless romantic encounters,” as Geraldine’s niece, Evelina, puts it when listening to the histories laid out by Seraph Milk. But of course the entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions. We can’t seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true, and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to excite transgression.

At any rate, the entire story of the case, which became lurid in its endless aftermath and was snapped up and salivated over by the Fargo and even Minneapolis newspapers, began a chain of events that worked its way through cultic religion full of inner dramas and hypocrisies, and eventually ended up pretty well, considering that it may be said to have started years ago when Corwin’s uncle, Billy, decided to defend his sister’s honor with a jammed gun.

I represented John Wildstrand, Corwin’s father, after the law caught up with him on a Florida racetrack. That was years after the crime. It was a disastrous criminal case — frustrating because Wildstrand was a jack-in-the-box. He continually popped out of his seat during the proceedings and blurted out wildly incriminating blather — he could not control himself. I debated whether to plead insanity, or simply gag him, and ended up settling for what he seemed to wish for — a conviction. He’d always wanted, I saw later, some sort of containment or certainty that would prevent self-harm. Of course, in the interview process, he told me everything. He told me too much. He told me things about himself that I could not forget.

Wildstrand’s sinned-upon wife, Neve Harp, whom I still see now and then when I visit my mother in the Pluto Retirement Home, hates me for defending the man who so insulted their marriage. Neve is not a resident there, she goes around collecting interviews for her historical newsletter. Neve glares at me, and looks away before I can catch her eye, then she sneaks a look back. She cannot help herself either. It is as if she wonders what I know about her, through him; she intuits that I have an intimate level of information, and she both resents and is curious about my knowledge of her former husband’s life. In spite of everything, I don’t think Neve actually stopped loving John Wildstrand, and I understand that for many years she was the only person who visited him in prison.

Burton’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, believed it was only due to Justice that man can be a God to man and not a wolf. But what is the difference between the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man? In both cases, justice is prey to unknown dreams. And besides, there was a woman.

Come In

JOHN WILDSTRAND OPENED his front door wide and there was Billy Peace, his girlfriend Maggie’s little brother. The boy stood frail and skinny in the snow with a sad look on his face and a big gun in his hand. As president of the National Bank of Pluto, John Wildstrand had trained his employees to stay relaxed in such a situation. Small-town banks were vulnerable, and John had actually been held up twice. One of the robbers had even been a jumpy drug addict. He did not flinch now.

His voice loud and calm, Wildstrand greeted Billy Peace as though he didn’t see the gun. His wife, Neve, was reading in the living room.

“What can I do for you?” John Wildstrand continued.

“You may come with me, Mr. Wildstrand,” said Billy, leading slightly to the left with the barrel of the gun. Beyond him, at the curb, a low-slung Buick idled. Wildstrand could see no one else in it. Billy was just seventeen years old and Wildstrand wondered if, and then wished that, Billy had joined the army as Maggie had said he was going to do. She was just a year or two older or younger than her brother. She would never tell. Her age was just one of the dangerous things about her. From the living room Neve called, “Who is it?” and Billy whispered, “Say kids selling Easter Seals.”

“Kids selling Easter Seals,” John Wildstrand called back.

“What? Tell them we don’t want any,” Neve yelled.

“Say you’re going for a little walk,” said Billy.

“I’m going for a little walk!”

“In this snow? You’re crazy!” his wife cried.

“Put your coat on,” said Billy. “So she doesn’t see it’s still hanging on the rack. Then come with me. Shut the door.”

John Wildstrand went out into the snow and Billy pulled the door closed behind him. As Billy followed him down the walkway, presumably with the gun still out or slightly hidden, Wildstrand’s confusion turned to a prayerful wish that he might find Maggie hidden in the car. That this was some odd prank. Some way of her seeing him. The windows of his house sprayed a soft, golden light all the way down the landscaped twist of pavers. There was a band of utter darkness where a stone wall and close-grown arborvitae cast a shadow onto the boulevard. The car sat beyond in the wintry shimmer of a street lamp.

“Get in,” said Billy.

Wildstrand stumbled a bit in the icy snow and let himself into the passenger’s side. The backseat was empty, he saw. Billy held the gun just inside the sleeve of a large topcoat, and kept it pointed at the windshield as he rounded the front of the car and ducked quickly into the driver’s seat.

“I’m going to ease out of this light,” he said.

Billy kept his gun out and his mild eyes trained on Wildstrand as he put the car in Drive and rolled forward into the darkness beyond the street lamp’s glow.

“Time to talk.” He put the car in Park.

Billy was a nervous-looking boy with deep brown eyes and a thin face. Toast-brown hair flopped over one eye and bent into his collar. There were little wisps of down on his chin. He was artistic. This sort of action, Wildstrand knew, did not come naturally to Billy Peace, though he was descended of the famous guide Lafayette Peace, who’d also fought with Riel. He might have gotten slightly drunk to force himself to drive to the Wildstrand residence with a gun and ring the bell. And what if Neve had answered? Would Billy have pretended to be selling candy bars for some high school trip? Would he have tried something else? Did he have an alternate plan? John Wildstrand stared at the gaunt little face of Billy. The boy really didn’t seem likely to put a bullet in him. Wildstrand knew, also, that Billy’s success in getting him into the car had depended on some implicit collaboration on his own part.

“So,” Wildstrand repeated, using the patient voice he used with jumpy investors, “how can I help you?”

“I think ten thousand dollars should be just about right,” said Billy.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

Billy was silently expectant. Wildstrand shivered a little, then pulled his coat tight around him and felt like crying. He had cried a lot with Maggie. She had brought all of his tears up just beneath his skin. Sometimes they rushed out and sometimes they trickled in slow tracks down his cheeks, along his throat. She said there was no shame in it and cried along with him until their weeping slowed erotically and sent them careening through each other’s bodies. Crying with her was a comfortable, dark act, like being painlessly absolved in church. There was an element of forgiveness in her weeping with him, he felt, and sometimes he became sentimental and sad about what his grandfather had done to a member of her family, long ago.

John Wildstrand heard himself make a sound, an ah of doubt. There was something about the actual monetary figure that struck him as wretched and sorrowful.

“It’s just not enough,” he said.

Billy looked perplexed.

“Look, if she keeps the baby, and you know I want her to keep the baby, she’s going to need a house, a car. Maybe in Fargo, you know? And then there are clothes, and, what, swing sets, that sort of thing. I’ve never had a child, but they need certain equipment. Also, she needs a good doctor, hospital. That’s not enough for everything. It’s not a future.”

“Okay,” Billy said, after a while. “What do you suggest?”

“Besides,” Wildstrand went on, still thinking out loud, “the thing is, in for a penny in for a pound. This amount will be missed just as much as a larger amount will be missed. My wife sees our accounts. There needs to be an amount like, say, let me think. If it’s just under a hundred thousand, the papers will say nearly a hundred thousand anyway. If it’s a hundred thousand, they’ll say that. So it might as well be over fifty thousand. But not seventy because they’ll call that nearly a hundred.”

Billy Peace was quiet. “That’s just over fifty thousand,” he said finally.

Wildstrand nodded. “See? But that’s a doable thing. Only there must be a reason. A very good reason.”

“Well maybe,” said Billy, “you were going to start some kind of business?”

John Wildstrand looked at Billy in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s good, a business. Only then we’ll need to actually have the business, keep it going, make a paper trail and that will lead to more deception and the taxes…it all leads back to me. It gets too complicated. We need one catastrophic reason.”

“A tornado,” said Billy. “I mean in winter maybe not. A blizzard.”

“And where does the money come in?”

“The money gets lost in the blizzard?”

Wildstrand looked disappointed and Billy shrugged weakly.

“A cash payment?”

They both cast about for a time, mulling this over. Then Billy said, “Question.”

“Yes?”

“How come you don’t get divorced from your wife and marry Maggie? A while ago, she said you loved her and now it sounds to me like you still love her. So maybe I didn’t have to come here and threaten you with this.” He wagged the gun. “I’m not getting why you don’t leave your wife and go with Maggie, like run off together or something. You love her.”

“I do love her.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Look at me, Billy.” John Wildstrand put his hands out. “Do you think she’d stay with me just for me? Now be honest. Without the money. Without the job. Just me.”

Billy Peace shrugged. “You’re not so bad, man.”

“Yes, I am,” said Wildstrand. “I’m…a lot of years older than Maggie and I’m half-bald. If I had my hair, then maybe, or if I was either good-looking or athletic. But I’m a realist. I see what I am. The money helps. I’m not saying that’s the only reason Maggie cares for me, not at all. Maggie is a pure soul, but the money helps. I’m not losing one of my biggest assets — if I divorced Neve now I wouldn’t have a job. All gone. I took over from her father, who is, yes, old and in a nursing home. But perfectly lucid. Neve is a fifty-one percent shareholder. Besides, here’s the thing. Neve has done nothing wrong. She has never, to my knowledge, betrayed me with another man, nor has she neglected me within her own powers. It is not her fault. Until I really saw Maggie, you understand, one year ago, I was reasonably happy. Neve and I had sex for twenty minutes once a week and went to Florida on winter vacations; we gave dinner parties and stayed two weeks out of every summer at the lake. In the summer we had sex twice a week and I cooked our meals.”

Billy looked uncomfortable.

“Besides, we’re a small bank and we could get bought out. That would change my situation. I’d like to be with Maggie. I plan to be with Maggie. If she’ll have me.”

Now Wildstrand leaned questioningly toward Billy.

“What does your presence here mean, actually? Did she send you?”

“No.”

“What happened? She won’t talk to me, you know.”

“Well, she told me about her being pregnant. She was kind of upset and I thought you were ditching her. That’s what I thought. You know there’s always been just the two of us. Our mother froze in the woods when I was eleven. Maggie raised me in our grandparents’ house. I would die for her.”

“Of course,” said John Wildstrand. “Of course you would. Let that be our bond, Billy. Both of us would die for her. But here’s the thing. Only one of us…right now anyway, only one of us can provide for her.”

“What should we do?”

“Something has come to me,” said Wildstrand. “Now I’m going to propose an act that may startle you. It may seem bizarre, but give it a chance, Billy, because I think it will work. Hear me out? Say nothing until I’ve laid out a possible plan. Are you ready?”

Billy nodded.

“Say you kidnap my wife.”

Billy gave a strangled yelp.

“No, just listen. Tomorrow night you do the very same thing. As if tonight was just practice. You come to the door. Neve answers. You show her the gun and you come into the house! You have some strong rope. A pair of scissors. At gunpoint you order me to tie up Neve. Once she’s taken care of, you tie me up and say to me, in her hearing, that if I don’t deliver fifty thousand dollars in cash to you tomorrow you will not let her go. Otherwise you’ll kill her…you have to say that, I’m afraid. Then you bring her out to the car. Don’t let her see the license plates.”

“I don’t think so,” Billy said. “I think you’re describing a federal crime.”

“Well, yes,” said Wildstrand. “But is it really a crime if nothing happens? I mean you’ll be really, really nice to Neve. That’s a given. You’ll take her to a secure out-of-town location, like your house. Keep her blindfolded. Put her in the back bedroom where you keep the junk. Lay down a mattress there so she’s comfortable. It’ll just be for a day. I’ll drop off the money. We’ll time it. Then you’ll let her out somewhere on the other side of town. She may have a long walk. Be sure she brings shoes and a coat. You’ll drive back to wherever and turn in the car. I don’t think we should tell Maggie.”

“Maggie’s gone, anyway.”

Wildstrand’s heart lurched, he’d somehow known it. “Where?” he managed to ask.

“Her friend Bonnie took her to Bismarck, just to clear out her head. They’ll be back on Friday.”

“Oh, then, this is perfect,” said Wildstrand.

Billy looked at him with great, silent, dark eyes. His and Maggie’s eyes were very similar, thought Wildstrand — that impenetrable Indian darkness. They had some white blood and both were cream-skinned with heavy brown hair. Wildstrand felt extremely sorry for Billy. He was so frail, so young, and what would he do with Neve? She worked outside shoveling snow all winter and in summer she gardened, dug big holes, planted trees even. Billy kept shifting the gun from hand to hand, probably because his wrist was getting tired.

“By the way, where did that gun come from?” Wildstrand said.

“It belonged to my mother’s father.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course it is.”

“You don’t have ammunition for it, do you,” said Wildstrand. “But that’s good. We don’t want any accidents.”

The Gingerbread Boy

WHEN BILLY PEACE knocked on the door the next evening, John Wildstrand pretended to have fallen asleep. His heart beat wildly and his throat closed as the quiet transaction occurred in the entryway. Then Neve walked into the room with her arms out and her square little honest face blanched in shock. She made a gesture to her husband, asking for help, but Wildstrand was looking at Billy and trying not to give everything away by laughing. Billy wore a child’s knitted winter face mask of cinnamon brown with white piping around the mouth, nose, and eyes. His coat and his pants were a baked-looking brown. He looked like a scrawny gingerbread boy, except that he wore flowered gardening gloves, the sort that women used for heavy chores.

“Oh no, I’m going to throw up,” Neve moaned when Billy ordered John Wildstrand to tie up his wife.

“No, you’ll be okay,” said Wildstrand, “you’ll be okay.” Tears dripped down his face and onto her hands as he tried firmly but gently to do his job. His wife’s hands were so beautifully cared for, the nails lacquered with soft peach. Let nothing go wrong, he prayed.

“Look, he’s crying,” Neve said accusingly to Billy, before her husband tied a scarf between her teeth, knotting it hard behind her head. “Nnnnnn!”

“I’m sorry,” said Wildstrand.

“Now it’s your turn,” said Billy.

The two of them suddenly realized that Billy would have to put down the gun and subdue Wildstrand, and their eyes got very wide. They stared at each other.

“Sit down in that chair,” Billy said at last. “Take that rope and loop it around your legs, not around the chair legs,” and then he gave instructions for Wildstrand to do most of the work himself, even had him test the knots, all of which Wildstrand thought quite ingenious of Billy.

Once Wildstrand had secured himself to the chair and Billy had gagged him, Billy told Neve to get on her feet. But she refused. Even as anxiety coursed through him, Wildstrand felt obscurely proud of his wife. She rolled around on the floor, kicking like a dolphin until Billy Peace finally pounced on her and pressed the barrel of the gun to her temple. Straddling her, Billy untied the cloth gag in her mouth and rummaged in his pocket. He drew out a couple of pills.

“You leave me no choice,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you to dry-swallow these.”

“What are they?” asked Neve.

“Sleeping pills,” said Billy. Then he spoke to Wildstrand. “Leave the money in a garbage bag next to the Flickertail Club highway sign. No marked bills. No police. Or I’ll kill your wife. You’re being watched.”

Wildstrand was surprised that Neve took the pills, but then for some reason she always had been like that about taking pills, even asking the doctor to paint her throat when it was hardly pink — she’d always been a willing patient. Now she turned out to be a willing hostage, and Billy had no more trouble with her. He undid the rope on her legs and put a hobble on her ankle. She walked out dreamily, her coat draped over her shoulders, and John Wildstrand was left alone. It took him about half an hour of patient wiggling to release himself from the rope, which he left looped around the chair. Now what? He wanted desperately to call Maggie, to talk to her, hear the slow music of her voice. But for some hours, he sat on the couch with his head in his hands, replaying the whole scenario. Then he started thinking ahead. Tomorrow he would go in early. He would withdraw cash out of their joint accounts. Then he would take the cash and get in the car. He would drive out to the highway sign and make the drop. It would all be done before eleven A.M. and Billy Peace would free Neve west of town, where she could walk home or find a ride. There would be police. Investigation. Newspapers. But no insurance was involved. He’d have used all of their retirement money, but Neve still had the bank. It would all blow over.

Helpless

A BLIZZARD CAME up and Neve got lost and might have frozen to death had not a farmer pulled her from a ditch. Because Billy had actually scooped up her snowboots as they left, and her coat was a big long woolen one that ended past her knees, she suffered no frostbite. She ran a fever for six days, but she did not develop pneumonia. Wildstrand nursed her with care, waited on her hand and foot, took a leave from the bank. He was shocked by how the kidnapping had affected her. Over the next weeks she lost a great deal of weight and spoke irrationally. To the police she described her abductor as quite large, muscular, with hard hands, a big nose, and a deep voice. Her kidnapper was stunningly handsome, she said, a god! It was all so bizarre that Wildstrand almost felt like correcting her. Though he was delighted, on the one hand, that she had the description so wrong, her embroidery disturbed him. And when he brought her home she was so restless. In the evenings, she wanted to talk instead of watch television or read the magazines she subscribed to. She had questions.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you.”

“Do you really, really love me, I mean, would you have died for me if the attacker had made you make a choice — it’s her or you — say he said that. Would you have stepped forward?”

“I was tied to the chair,” said John Wildstrand.

“Metaphorically.”

“Of course, metaphorically. I would have.”

“I wonder.”

She began to look at him skeptically. Her eyes measured him. At night, now, she wanted lots of reassurance. She seduced him and scared him, saying things like, “Make me helpless.”

“He made me helpless,” she said one morning. “But he was kind. Very kind to me.”

Wildstrand took her to the doctor, who said it was hysteria and prescribed cold baths and enemas, which seemed only to make her worse. “Hold me, tighter, squeeze the breath out of me.” “Look at me. Don’t close your eyes.” “Don’t say something meaningless. I want the truth.” It was terrifying, how she’d opened up. What had Billy done?

Nothing, Billy insisted on the phone. Wildstrand was ashamed to be repelled by his wife’s awkward need — it was no different from his own need. If she’d been this way earlier on, he recognized that maybe he would have responded. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned to Maggie. Maybe he would have been amazed, grateful. But when Neve threw herself over him at night he felt despair, and she could sense his distance. She grew bony and let her hair go gray, long, out of control, beautiful. She was strange, she was sinking. She continually looked at him with the eyes of a drowning person.

Murdo Harp

JOHN WILDSTRAND WENT to visit his father-in-law in the retirement home which his money had endowed. The Pluto Nursing Home. This place did not depress him, though he could see the reasons why it might. Murdo Harp was resting on his single bed, on top of a yellow chenille coverlet. He’d pulled an afghan over himself, one that Neve had knitted, intricate rainbow stripes. He was listening to the radio.

“It’s me. It’s John.”

“Ah.”

Wildstrand took his father-in-law’s hand in his. The skin was dry and very soft, almost translucent. His face was thin, bloodless, almost saintly looking, even though Murdo Harp had been ruthless, a cutthroat banker, a survivor.

“I’m glad you’re here. It’s very peaceful and quiet, but I woke up at four A.M. before the rest of them this morning. I thought to myself, I hope someone will come. I want to go somewhere. And you came. It’s good to see you, John. Where are we going?”

John ignored the question, and the old man nodded.

“How’s my little girl?”

“She’s just fine.” No one had told Neve’s father, of course, what had happened. “She has a cold,” Wildstrand lied. “She’s staying in bed today. She’s probably curled up around her hot water bottle, sleeping.”

“The poor kid.”

Wildstrand resisted telling Neve’s father, as he always did, “I’ll take good care of her.” How wrong, and how ironic, would that be? The hand relaxed and Wildstrand realized that his father-in-law had fallen asleep. Still, he continued to sit beside the bed holding the old man’s slender and quite elegant hand. With someone this old a little wisdom might leak out into the room. There was, at least, a pleasant sensation of rest. To have given up. Nothing else was expected. The old man had done what he could do. Life was now the afghan and the radio. John Wildstrand sat there for a long time; it was a good place to consider things. The baby would be born in four months and Billy and Maggie were living in a sturdy little bungalow not far from Island Park. Billy was just about to start technical college classes. The last time Wildstrand had visited, Billy was just walking out the door. He shook hands but said nothing. He was wearing his old enfolding topcoat, a long, striped beatnik scarf, and soft, rumpled-looking boots.

As for Maggie, she was often alone. Wildstrand couldn’t get away much because of Neve. Maggie understood. She was radiant. Her hair was long, a lustrous brown. They went into her bedroom in the middle of the day and made love in the stark light. It was very solemn. He’d gone dizzy with the depth of it. When he lay against her, his perceptions had shifted and he saw the secret souls of the objects and plants in the room. Everything had consciousness and meaning. Maggie was measureless, but she was ordinary, too. He stepped out of time and into the nothingness of touch. Afterward, Wildstrand had driven back to Pluto and arrived just in time for dinner.

Leaving the old man, Wildstrand usually patted his arm or made some other vague gesture of apology. This time Wildstrand was still thinking of his time with Maggie, and he bent dreamily over Neve’s father. He kissed the dry forehead, stroked back the old man’s hair and thoughtlessly smiled. The old man jerked away suddenly and eyed Wildstrand like a mad hawk.

“You bastard!” he cried.

The Gesture

ONE DAY NEVE was sitting in her bathrobe at lunch, tapping a knife against the side of a boiled egg. Suddenly she said, “I know who he was. I saw him in a play. Shakespeare. The play had two sets of twins who don’t meet until the end.”

John Wildstrand’s guts went ice-cold and he phoned Billy as soon as he returned to the bank. Sure enough, Billy had been in the previous summer’s production put on by the town drama club. He’d been one of the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors. Wildstrand put the phone down and stared at it. Neve was at the town library at that very moment looking through archived town newspapers. This was how it happened all of a sudden that instead of taking college courses, Billy bolted and joined the army, after all. Wildstrand hadn’t thought that they would take him because he was underweight, but the army didn’t care. Now he was terrified that Maggie’s grief would affect the baby, for she was heartbroken and cried day and night when Billy was shipped off for basic training. She said that she couldn’t feel things anymore, and turned away from Wildstrand when he visited and would not let him touch her. After six weeks, Billy sent a photograph of himself in military gear. He didn’t look to have bulked up much. The helmet seemed to balance on his head, shadowing his unreadable eyes. His neck was still skinny and graceful. He looked about twelve years old.

One afternoon, Wildstrand drove home after having visited Maggie, and all the way down the highway the little face beneath the helmet was in his mind. When he entered his house he saw that Neve was working on another afghan. She raised her clear, blue eyes to his.

“I am leaving now,” said Wildstrand. He put the car keys on the coffee table. “You keep everything. I have clothes. I have shoes. I’ll make myself a sandwich and be going now.”

John Wildstrand walked into the kitchen and made the sandwich and wrapped it in waxed paper. He walked out into the living room and stood in the center of the carpet. Neve just looked at him. Light blazed white across her face. She raised her hand, swept it to the side, then dropped it. The gesture seemed to hang in the air, as if her arm left a trail. Wildstrand turned and walked out the door, across town, and started hitchhiking back to Maggie along the highway. There was only a slight wind and the temperature was about sixty-five degrees. The fields were full of standing water and ducks and geese swam in the ditches. All through the afternoon, as he walked along, the horizon appeared and disappeared. He didn’t take a ride until the sky darkened.

The Lions

SHORTLY AFTER JOHN Wildstrand moved into the house with Maggie, the baby boy was born. In those dazzling moments after the birth, he had a vision. The baby looked like Billy. Stage Billy, tall Billy with no ass to speak of, Billy with big feet, who looked like he could hardly lift a water canteen. Billy’s heart was pierced by thorns. Was there anyone more magnificent than Billy? John Wildstrand saw that Billy Peace was a kind of Christ figure, or a martyr like those in the New Testament. Only he was thrown to the lions in the cause of their happiness. Wildstrand had thought that, in his new life, Billy might grow in strength and valor and be exactly the person who Neve believed had abducted her. Now he saw that Billy already was that person and Neve had known. He also saw that Billy had told his sister about the kidnapping. All of this was depicted in the face of the tiny new infant. Wildstrand looked closer, and tried to see whether Billy would live or die. But before that picture came clear, the baby opened up its mouth and bawled. Wildstrand put the baby to Maggie’s breast and when it latched on, he tried to touch the baby’s hair. Maggie pushed away his hand with the same gesture that his wife had used to say good-bye, and he sank back into the hospital chair. He was dizzy with spent adrenaline. For a long time, he watched them from across the room.

The Garage

ONLY TWICE DID John Wildstrand visit Pluto. The first time, he brought a trailer and loaded into it all that Neve had not disposed of — she’d thrown a lot of things away. But physical objects had ceased to matter to Wildstrand. He was sleeping out in Maggie’s garage, by then, in a sleeping bag spread out on a little camp cot. He cuddled up next to the used car he’d bought. Maggie argued with him every day about going to the police, turning him in for the kidnapping.

“You’ll lose everything”—Wildstrand waved his arm—“this house. And Billy will go to jail. Would you like that? You’ll be out on the street. And what about little Corwin?”

Maggie had named the baby after her brother’s best buddy in boot camp. He was now in Korea, stationed close to the DMZ. Billy was in danger and wrote weekly letters about his visions. Apparently, he was being contacted by powerful spirits who saved him time after time, and who promised to direct his life.

“He’s never been religious,” Maggie wept, “in his whole life. Now look at this! Look at what you did!”

Wildstrand despaired. There was no getting away from Billy; he would always control the situation, no matter where he was. Billy, with his bristle-headed army cut and unknown eyes, with his army boots and rifle. Now that he was a soldier and visited by angels, there was no hope. Even if nothing happened to him. In the months after his son’s birth, Wildstrand had come to understand that he would never be forgiven for engineering the kidnap scheme, and he had lost Maggie’s love. She was icy-angry — she implied that he was just like his Indian-hating grandfather and now spent all day caring for the baby and cleaning the house. Every so often, she would thrust a shopping list at Wildstrand, or make him help with heavy lifting. Beyond that, she didn’t like him to get close to either her or the baby. He moved around the small house like a ghost, never knowing where to settle, never comfortable. He made a sorry den for himself in the basement, where he would go whenever it was too cold to sleep in the garage. Otherwise he stayed out there, listening to music, reading the newspaper. He’d found a job at the same insurance agency he’d always used, a low-level job assisting others in processing claims.

The Entryway

ONE DAY, A homeowner’s claim from his old address crossed his desk. Neve had filed a claim on everything that he had taken from the house, his own things, which she had pressured him to come and clear out. There were his expensive hand tools, each engraved with his name and an identification code, and records with their expensive record-playing equipment, even a brand-new television. Looking at the list, Wildstrand felt a glimmer of heat rise in his throat. His ears burned. He took his coat from the back of the office door, went back to the house that his and Neve’s retirement money had bought, and packed up everything he’d kept in the garage. He drove back to Pluto with a full car and parked in the driveway of his former house.

After a while, Neve came to the window. She looked at him as he got out of the car, and he looked at her, through the window, which was like the glass of a dim aquarium. When she vanished, he was not sure whether she would come to the door or be absorbed into the gloom. But she did open the door at last, and beckoned him inside. They stood in the entry, quite close. Her hair had gone from gray to silver-white. A pulse beat in her slender throat. Her arms were stick thin, but she seemed to generate an unusual light. Wildstrand could feel it, this odd radiance. It seemed to emanate from her translucent skin. It occurred to him that he would sink down at the feet of this beautiful, wronged woman and kiss the hem of the wide-skirted dress that she was wearing.

“You filed a claim on all my stuff. I’m bringing it back,” he said.

“No. I want the money. I need the money,” she told him.

“Why?”

“We’re sunk. They’re not going to buy the bank out. They’re opening a new one next to it.”

“What about your father’s accounts?”

“He’ll live to be a hundred,” said Neve. “John, he told me that you were seeing another woman all along.”

“I don’t know where he got that idea.”

Neve waited.

“All right. Yes.”

Her eyes filled with terrible tears and she began to shake. Before he knew it, Wildstrand was holding her. He shut the door. They made love in the entry, on the carpet where so many people paused, and then on the bench where visitors removed their boots and shoes. His remorse and shame was confusingly erotic. And her need for him was so powerful it seemed that they were going over a rushing waterfall together, falling in a barrel, and at the bottom Wildstrand cracked open and told her everything.

He had to, because of Billy Peace. On the entryway floor next to the boot rack, Wildstrand realized with utter instinctive certainty that Billy had helped himself to his wife’s body when she was tied up and utterly helpless, kidnapped, on the mattress beside the junked pots and cast-off clothing. Wildstrand clung to Neve with the blackness washing over him, and talked and talked.

“I know he violated you,” Wildstrand said, after he’d spilled everything else.

“Who? That boy? He was just a twerp,” said Neve. “He never touched me. I said all of that stuff out of desperation, to try and make you jealous. Why, I do not know.” She sat up and eyed him with calm assessment. “Possibly, I thought you loved me way deep down. I think I believed there was something in you.”

“There is, there is,” Wildstrand said to her, strangling on a surge of hope, touching her ankles as she got to her feet.

“When the snow was covering me, out in the ditch, I saw your face. Real as real. You bent over me and pulled me out. It wasn’t the farmer, it was you.”

“It was me,” said Wildstrand, lifting his arms. “I must have always loved you.”

She looked down at him for a long time, contemplating this amazing fact. Then she went upstairs and called the police.

A Shiver of Possibility

IN THE YEARS after he was caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced, Wildstrand was sometimes asked by friends he made behind bars, and other lawyers (of course, I asked him myself), what had caused him to admit what he had done. What caused him to tell Neve and, to boot, assume all responsibility? Sometimes he couldn’t think of a good reason. Other times, he said that he guessed that it would never end; he saw that he’d be kicked from one woman to the other until the end of time. But after he gave his answer, he always came back to that moment he had opened his door to Billy Peace, and thought of how, when he saw the boy standing in the shining porch light, in the snow, with the dull gun and the sad face, he felt a shiver of possibility, and said, “Come in.”