Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Berit was always trying to get Marian to wear dresses,” Jamie said. “It’s impossible.”

  Wallace didn’t say anything but covered his face with his hands.

  “Wallace?”

  “I need you to do something,” Wallace said, his voice hollow against his palms. “I need you to tell Marian when she comes home. I can’t do it.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “I lost the car.”

  “What do you mean lost it? Where?”

  “I lost it. I bet it in the card game last night.”

  Jamie couldn’t help himself. “Why?” he burst out. “Of all the things to bet!”

  Wallace sat up, swung his legs to the floor. His hands dangled between his knees. “I was winning—well, first I was losing.” Then he’d felt his luck turn, like wind knocking a weather vane. He’d won a small pot on three of a kind. Then he won again, kings, a bigger pot, and again, on a flush. Besides Lena and Spokane Fred, there’d been a stranger at the table, a red-haired fellow in a swank overcoat with a fur collar. The stranger had pulled out a bottle of Canadian whiskey—“The real stuff,” Wallace said—and poured a toast. A lightness had come into Wallace. “I wasn’t likely to win the next hand, but I knew I would. And I did. I knew I should lose a couple of times for form and get out of there, but I couldn’t even lose when I tried.” The chips, flocking around the table like wayward birds, had homed for him. “Then this stranger said, wasn’t I the uncle of the girl who delivered booze for Stanley? I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, you’re Wallace Graves, aren’t you? He knew Marian’s name.”

  Wallace paused. “He got under my skin. I started thinking about Marian, about how when you were little I only cared that you came home eventually and with all your limbs but now I’m supposed to worry about her reputation. I should have left. I knew my luck was gone.”

  But he’d stayed and lost, and lost, and lost. Spitefully, sullenly, determinedly. He lost all his chips, and several IOUs, and then he’d lost the gray Cadillac. The red-haired stranger in the fur-collared coat won it. The car was ancient now, the last remnant besides the house of the Great Winning Streak of 1913, kept running only by Marian’s devoted ministrations, and maybe that was why he’d allowed himself to bet it: out of vindictiveness, because the car was the loss Marian would feel most acutely. Bad luck, Wallace believed, was no more than a kind of gloomy mood that welled from an internal spring, and Marian—the way Lena had reminded him of her, the stranger’s unsettling mention—was the cause of his mood and therefore of his losing streak, too. “There’s no money for another,” he said. He wiped his nose with his cuff. “Will you tell her? I need to go to bed now, but you’ll tell her?”

  * * *

  —

  When Marian came home, Jamie dutifully told her about Wallace losing the car, absorbed her initial fury, stopped her from rousting their wretched uncle out of bed to be excoriated. She demanded why he wasn’t angry, and he said they couldn’t both rage. “So if I weren’t angry, you would be?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  It was true they’d always been like two adjacent locks in a canal, one opening into the other, pouring off excess feeling, seeking equilibrium, though she was usually the lock in danger of overflowing and he the one who absorbed excess, rose up as she sank down. People thought being twins made them the same, but it was balance, not sameness, she felt with him.

  That night in their cots on the sleeping porch, she asked, “Why do you think he gambles? We’d be fine for money if only he wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t think he means to,” came Jamie’s voice in the dark. “I don’t think he can help it.”

  “You wouldn’t think it’d be so hard to stop throwing your money away.”

  “I think he’s after the thrill.”

  “What thrill? He never wins.”

  “And if he quits he never will, either. I think he likes to hope.”

  “Hope shouldn’t be so expensive.”

  “You know he’s sorry.”

  Marian’s cot creaked as she turned over.

  “Yes,” she said. “He even cried a little when he finally stopped hiding from me. He kept saying he’d gotten into a tough spot. That’s all he’d say. He wouldn’t tell me who’d won the car, just said a stranger.”

  “Doesn’t matter, does it? Better not to know. Maybe you’ll see it around.”

  “Probably not, because no one but me would take the trouble to keep it running.”

  After a hesitation, Jamie said, “The car was Wallace’s, though. He owned it. He could bet it if he wanted to.”

  “But he bet it for nothing. For no good reason. He was just losing something for the sake of losing it.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day from her hiding spots in the cottage she collected most of her flying money, earned bottle by bottle, basket by basket, and went into town and bought a used Ford from a mechanic she knew. He was a customer of Stanley’s. His wife was a lush, and he gave her a good deal. People treated her differently now she knew their secrets.

  She informed Wallace that he could drive the Ford to the U, but if he was going out gambling or drinking he’d have to walk or find a ride or buy his own damn car. If he lied, they both knew she’d find out. And she told him she would only pay three dollars a week in room and board now. The rest would be his rent on her car.

  The sadness of the cottage, an emptied treasure box, outweighed the pleasure of the jaunty black Ford, her own wheeled and engined thing. On the bright side, her debt to Wallace seemed eased slightly, made bearable. She and Jamie might have been foisted on him, but Wallace had a way of acquiring burdens for himself, too. Without the twins around, he might have ruined himself long ago. Perhaps they had kept him just far enough from the precipice.

  The model airplanes hanging in the cottage had come to seem forlorn: the tender relics of a child’s fantasy. Flight, the reason for all her labor, was almost forgotten as she worked to make back what had been spent. The money was slow in returning. Mr. Stanley’s business had stagnated. The feds, desperate to make Prohibition something other than a dismal failure, were cracking down. Stanley was being edged out, he hinted, by Barclay Macqueen.

  Ever since the night of Barclay Macqueen, Marian had made her deliveries to Miss Dolly’s as swiftly as possible, never venturing beyond the kitchen.

  “What’re you so sore about?” Belle wanted to know when Marian refused to be dressed up again. “We only had a bit of fun. No one touched your pure self.”

  “I’m not sore,” Marian said. “I’ve got a lot of stops to make, that’s all.”

  She wasn’t sure what she was, but it was bigger than sore. When she thought about Barclay Macqueen, her skin tickled; her pulse accelerated; her guts felt pulled in different directions. At night on the sleeping porch, sometimes she thought about Caleb kissing her, pushing her shirt off her shoulders, but lately her mind had been veering away to Macqueen, how he’d pinned her against the wainscoting with his gaze, how he’d asked, Who are you?

  She took a second job, making deliveries for restaurants in the Ford. Berit’s son Sigge, who’d become a Prohi, came by the house once and warned her that Mr. Stanley was going to get raided. She tried to give him what money she had, but he brushed her off. “I’m not crooked,” Sigge said. “I just know you haven’t always had it easy.”

  The feds found only bread and cake at Stanley’s.

  * * *

  —

  A hot day in June. Caleb showed up when she was outside tinkering with the Ford’s engine. “I’m going for a swim,” he told her, leaning against the car. “You can come if you want.” He put on his most charming smile. “You can even give me a ride if you ask nice.”

  “Jamie will be home in an hour,” she said. “He’d want t
o come, too.”

  Caleb was looking at her the way he did before he named the price of a haircut. “I don’t feel like waiting an hour.”

  She thought about lying, saying she had to work, but she knew she would just sit around being regretful after he left, ashamed for not having dared. He was watching her, waiting. He took out a silver case full of hand-rolled cigarettes and lit one for each of them.

  “Fancy,” she said about the case.

  “I took a rich guy hunting,” he said. His eyes were still on her. He knew she was scared.

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  She drove them west out of town, turned south where the Bitterroot wound in tight bends through flatland. Caleb whistled as they rattled along. He took a flask from his pocket and offered it to her. The moonshine burned her throat. She winced, handed it back.

  “You need a haircut,” he said, reaching to touch her neck with one finger.

  “I’m fine for a while,” she said, tipping her head away.

  She parked among the trees, lemony sunlight in the branches. As they walked toward the water, Caleb said, “Is Jamie going on with school next year?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I haven’t seen him lately. I’m always gone.” Caleb had been spending more time in the mountains, sometimes alone, often as a hunting guide for men who paid him to find the game, to take the shot if they missed and pretend he hadn’t. Marian had bought him a good rifle, and he had paid her back even more quickly than promised. People talked about him, the seventeen-year-old kid who knew where the animals would be. They talked about the serene deadliness with which he shot. It helped his business, he’d admitted, that Wallace had always been after him about his grammar. He spoke well.

  “Then we should have waited,” Marian said. When Caleb didn’t reply, she asked, “Do you think Jamie’s soft for not hunting?”

  Caleb thought before he answered. “Last time we went fishing,” he said, “we met some kids who’d covered a dog with a blanket and were throwing stones at it. I had to stop Jamie from killing the kid who didn’t run fast enough. So, no, I don’t think he’s soft.”

  Marian remembered. The dog lived with them now, creeping after Jamie like a temple slave, watching him from beneath tables and beds. The boy had needed to go to the hospital. Jamie was lucky the kid’s father had a grimy past and no interest in involving the police. Otherwise Jamie might have been sent to the correctional school at Miles City.

  I think I was levitating, Jamie had said. I was so mad I could have killed that kid, and I wouldn’t have felt bad at all. I wanted to kill him.

  You taught him a lesson, Marian had said.

  No, I didn’t. Some people are rotten inside, and the rottenness will never go away.

  They came to the river’s edge, to a pool sheltered from the current. Caleb shed his clothes out in the open, but Marian went behind some trees. Privacy lay only in speed. Naked, she sprinted for the water, trying to cover herself with her hands. A whoop burst from her as she splashed in. Stones bruised her feet. She crouched, breathless from cold and anticipation, her teeth chattering. Caleb was standing in water up to his chest, his arms moving in broad arcs under the surface as though he were smoothing the sheets on a bed. He came toward her. He’d been holding the flask underwater and offered it to her now, dripping. She unscrewed the top, coughed from the cold moonshine.

  Caleb tipped his head back, submerging his long hair. His clavicle strained against his skin. “You know I went to see one of Miss Dolly’s girls. I saved up.”

  She tried to hide her urge to recoil. “Why would I know that?”

  “I thought they might have told you. Why are you mad?”

  “I’m not mad. Which girl?”

  “Belle.”

  Marian didn’t mean to make a face but did.

  “What?” Caleb said. “She’s the prettiest one.”

  “She’s just—” She wanted to say common, as though she were a snobbish character in a novel. But what authority did she have? Here she was naked in a river with a boy.

  “She’s just what?”

  “Nothing. Did you tell her you know me?”

  “Yeah. She asked if I was the one who cut your hair, and I said I was.”

  Marian was outraged. “Why did you tell her that?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  She didn’t know, exactly. She said, “I’d think you wouldn’t want to go to whores.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why. I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to drink, either.”

  “Don’t talk about my mother.”

  They stared fiercely at each other, chins in the water, lips purpling with cold.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  She saw him decide not to be angry. He turned sly, said, “Belle taught me things.”

  “What things?”

  “She said it was good to know how to make a girl happy, but if I want to be happy myself, I’m better off just going to see her. She said other girls will just worry about being proper and won’t be any fun.”

  “I’m not worried about being proper,” she said before she’d thought.

  He smiled his pocket-picking smile. “You want to make me happy?”

  “No.” Marian had no real word for the part of her that had come alive, was tugging at her attention. Twat, Miss Dolly’s girls said. Twitchet, they said. Peach, bits, clam. None of these seemed quite right. She said, “What things?”

  “You mean what did she teach me?”

  Marian nodded. He moved closer, backing her into shallower water. He leaned down and took one of her breasts into his mouth. The sensation was more strong than pleasant, the completion of a circuit. They were standing together, their torsos out of the water, him bending to his task. She felt his erection. She watched, fascinated, the place where her flesh disappeared into his mouth. He did not quite devour like the beast with Gilda, was gentler, deliberate. He was the one to pull away.

  “Did you like it?”

  “I don’t know.” She couldn’t admit she had.

  He kept moving toward her, and she kept moving away, so they traced a circle in the water. “Belle told me Barclay Macqueen liked you, and Desirée got jealous. Is that true?”

  “What if it is?”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Are you going to let him do things with you?”

  “I’ll probably never see him again.”

  “So you would let him.”

  The idea of Barclay Macqueen touching her seemed absurd, fantastical. “It’s a silly question.”

  “So you would.” They were standing still now. He looked serious, worried, like he was going to ask another question, but instead he said, “I don’t want you to be my girl or anything.”

  Was he telling the truth? “Good, because I don’t want to be your girl.”

  “Just fun, then,” he said. Underwater, his hand swam toward her, but she stepped away.

  “I’m cold,” she said and got out, feeling his eyes on her backside but not caring. She dressed without drying off, went back through the trees, drove away. She didn’t worry about leaving him alone so far from town. One place was as good as any other to Caleb.

  At night in the bath she studied her breasts, one now so much more experienced than the other, tiny red pinpricks visible around the nipple where his mouth had left a bruise.

  * * *

  —

  A July afternoon flaring and fading into evening. Marian knocked on the back door of a house near Pattee Canyon, up at the end of a long narrow track cut through forest. The house was handsome but not large, freshly painted green with white trim. It had no close neighbors. She had not made a delivery there before.

  Barclay Macqueen o
pened the door. She could only gape at him. He wore a white shirt and black waistcoat. One corner of his mouth turned up. He said, “Hello. Who are you?”

  She couldn’t read his tone, whether he thought he was asking her for the first time or whether he was alluding to Miss Dolly’s hallway. “I’m Marian Graves.”

  “So this time you have an answer.”

  He remembered. Of course he did.

  “I’ve got a delivery.”

  “Let me.” He took the basket from her. Four bottles of moon. He’d only ordered them so she would be sent to him, that much was clear. It was herself she’d delivered. “Come in and I’ll pay you.”

  “I’m fine to wait here.” Through the open door she saw a red-haired man sitting at a kitchen table, reading a newspaper. He glanced up, went back to reading. She had seen him before, around town.

  “Come in,” Barclay said again, amused. “Or I’ll complain to Stanley about his bottle man’s favoritism, paying visits to Dolly’s girls but not to me.”

  Confounded, she stood where she was.

  “This is Sadler,” Barclay said of the red-haired man. “He doesn’t bite. Are you sure you won’t come in? Don’t you want to see my house?”

  Sadler was watching her, smiling faintly, coolly. She said, “What’s so special about it?”

  “Only that it’s mine.”

  “Seems like it’d be a lot of work to see everything that’s yours.”

  “You’ve been listening to gossip. Fine, wait here.” He disappeared briefly, came back with the empty basket. Shutting the door on Sadler and his newspaper, he said, “I’ve been spending more time in Missoula, and I don’t like hotels, so I thought I should have a place.” He drew a gold cigarette case and lighter from his pocket, and sat on the edge of the porch, black shoes splayed in the grass. He patted the planks beside him. “Sit for a minute. Do you smoke?”