That excited him. She could tell by the way his eyes slid to the side and back. She had touched his hand in the transfer, too, working that old history up to the surface: You’ll come back to me some day.
She read “Pippi Finds a Spink” on the day care story rug, making two kids wet their pants laughing and a third one get to jumping and flapping his arms so much he had to take some medicine.
Afterwards, the girls mobbed her, tiny hands touching everywhere. The boys made elaborate plans for Mr. Nilsson, Pippi’s monkey, and her horse named Little Old Man. They went outside and filed through the bookmobile, confused at first by its vintage impression. They were each allowed to take out one book until next week.
“Now, excuse me,” Esofea announced, shooing them out, “but I have to leave right away! I have to go and take care of my prankle!”
“What’s your prankle?” the children cried as she pulled the lever and closed the door. She waved, tooted the horn as she pulled away. What was her prankle exactly?
She drove by Danny’s. Nobody home. The tanker gone. The fucker gone. No call. No explanation. No change from status quo. No make-up from the break-up this time.
Ok.
She used her cell phone to call the Superior Adventures outpost in Munising, which of course was closed due to the tragic loss of so-on and etcetera. It was odd, Heimo Kock being dead. Esofea hadn’t hated him as much as, for example, her Granny Tiina, or Danny Tervo, or Fritz Shunk, or a hundred other people had. Kock had been very attentive and almost kind to her, a fact she had always found a little creepy and confusing. She had avoided him at every opportunity.
She left a voice mail: “I hope youse guys all realize Danny Tervo paid that apple knocker to off Heimo cuz Danny got pushed outta da guide business, ya know?”
That would spread like a black fly hatch.
From there her course was a straight shot west across State 407 to the Blind Sucker Resort to check on Mummo Tiina. Yesterday was too quick, didn’t count. Probably Mummo needed groceries.
Highway 407 hugged the Lake Superior shoreline. It tunneled through a canopy of pines, with the white beach, the blue lake, and the puffy-clouded sky flickering like shiny postcards at the right-side edge of her vision. Now and then the view opened up. A big sailboat floated out there today, right where Esofea would put one if she were painting a picture. There were so many nice things she and Danny could be doing, the fucker.
Esofea opened the bookmobile’s flap door to catch lake air. Turning off the highway onto Blind Sucker Lane, she could hear Mummo Tiina’s shotgun booming.
Not the punt gun, thank God. Just her 12-gauge trap gun. So today was skeet-carp, Mummo Tiina’s new passion. She was too old to beat the bush for grouse anymore. She was making the carp jump down in the flooding, blowing them out of the air.
This sport took place from the end of the pier by the old boathouse, so Esofea couldn’t see it yet. The Blind Sucker Resort was set back on a sandy ridge with a deck and a gravel path that ran down to the flooding where a boardwalk stilted back and forth along an uncertain shoreline, the boathouse at its far western end. Today, the near end of the walk was thronged with Canada geese, brazenly shitting their little tootsie rolls everywhere. Esfoea gunned the bus at the hundred or so geese spilling out to clog the lane. They lifted into low flight, peeled away at savvy angles, skimmed down upon the turbid flooding.
She dreaded these weekly check-ins. She felt a little sadder and a little angrier each time—a little less in control. Things fall apart. Yeats wrote that. The center cannot hold. A fine and perky resort that once hosted Hemingway and Eisenhower could become a sinking scramble of dilapidating cabins, tended by two lazy swill-hounds and a hulking, menstruating twelve-year-old. The flooding, once a sand-bottomed paradise where lake and river water swirled together into a limpid amber, perfect for swimming, could clog and smell and, thanks to Uncle Rush, end up invaded by the monstrous, ballistic Asian carp. Tiina Maria Smithback, once the stunner of the northwoods, could become the massive and demented old Mummo Tiina, who was just this moment in boxer’s pose with her trap gun at the end of the pier screeching, “Pull!”
Thirty yards out in an aluminum Starcraft, poor Caroline, clad in a yellow raincoat, dipped the revving five-horse engine into the water and ducked. Within seconds, a great silver body exploded through the surface and went airborne, wriggling either in ecstasy or madness until Mummo Tiina blasted it into a thousand bloody pieces. Automatically she swiveled and shredded a second one too.
Caroline tilted the prop clear of the water and raised her head. Mummo Tiina had reloaded. “Pull!” the old woman screeched again. Appearing terrified and despondent, Esofea’s cousin recharged the flooding with prop vibrations and sank below the gunwale. This time Mummo Tiina fired into a spurting profusion of airborne carp, like a fountain erupting. Caroline had nowhere to go as chum rained down upon her.
Actually Yeats wrote centre, Esofea remembered. She didn’t care for Yeats, to tell the truth, actually, a whole lot more than she cared for Hemingway.
She went through Mummo Tiina’s kitchen in the red cabin and made a grocery list. On the way back to the lodge, she trespassed into the green cabin and found what she expected: Uncle Rush and Aunt Daryline, hungover, propped up in bed, smoking and staring at the television.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was looking for Caroline’s parents.”
“We got bad backs again today,” Rush told her.
“Real bad,” said Daryline. “Anyway it’s after Labor Day, and we haven’t had nobody since mid-August.”
“We’re closed,” Rush said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You goin’ store now, FiFi?” Rush wanted to know.
“Nope.”
“When den?”
“Never.”
She closed the door. Mummo Tiina was now in the dusty great room of the lodge, conversing with the game trophies and the historical rods and guns. Caroline had showered. “Anything you need, sweetheart? Or you want to come with me?”
The girl shrugged. For eleven years she was a pixie who had looked at Esofea with flushed cheeks and adoring eyes. But lately she was heavy, growing, bursting, moody. Esofea had begun to avoid her and feel guilty for it. At the moment, Caroline was stepping on dead wasps beneath the window.
“I can’t do it today,” Esofea said, “but how about next week we go through all the clothes you have. We get rid of what doesn’t fit anymore. Then we go to Target and restock. What do you say?”
Another shrug. More reason to feel guilty. A teenage girl, a shopping offer, and a shrug? Something wasn’t right.
“You are coming with me to Grand Marais today,” she told her cousin, patching it over with an action.
“Herman has a place in Grand Marais.” Mummo Tiina piped up with this announcement, as if speaking to the head of a bull moose her father Elmer “Bud” Smithback had shot in the 1940s. “But Herman likes a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and I don’t have one.”
No one knew who Herman was. Herman was new.
Sighing, Esofea moved behind her grandmother and squeezed her heavy shoulders. The old woman’s hair smelled like shotgun. Esofea reached for her rough and wrinkled hand, lifted it and kissed the back of it. “That’s from Herman, Mummo. He sent it along.”
Mummo Tiina pried off her ankle boots. “Turn on the TV,” she told someone.
With Caroline Smithback sullenly on board, Esofea drove the Luce County Bookmobile to Grand Marais and left it in the empty public lot across from Superior Shores Market. Along the way she and Caroline never got beyond “I don’t know” and “If you say so” and “Whatever.”
Knowing this terrain, Esofea grew impatient and took a shortcut. “Is someone bothering you? Touching you maybe, or talking to you in a certain way?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, who would I ask, then? Who would know the answer?”
“No one.”
“Nothing’s wrong?”
“I said.
“
Ok. Well, she tried. Esofea took a moment to shake off a heavy feeling and appreciate September in the harbor. The public boat slips had been relieved of gaudy cabin cruisers and fair-weather yachts. Those folks had trailered up and hauled back to Dearborn, St. Paul, and Chicago. A few of them would have hired sail-aways—like she and Danny had done since they were out of high school, a couple of adventurous lake rats navigating a rich man’s precious vessel through the Soo and down to Bay City or Cleveland or Milwaukee for the price of plane tickets back to Marquette—or, in spring, the other way around. Only last April they had conceived on a run north from Port Huron. Drinking, smoking, star-gazing, screwing, arguing—conceiving. Shit.
Esofea turned away from the lake.
“What are you reading these days?”
“Nothing.”
“Well you are in luck, my love. Come with me.”
Esofea steered the girl into the treasure chest of books behind the seats, feeling the heat and bulk of her body. Aunt Daryline, this girl’s mother, was the progenitor of the round and active hind-end that Caroline was trying to manage with every step. Uncle Rush was a long-legged, raven-haired, wide-shouldered man who was impressively handsome as long as he kept his mouth shut, completely. Caroline was all this in potential but burgeoning through her lineage into caricature, like an over-blown balloon, as if the food she ate was spiked with hormones, which it no doubt was. She looked more mature at twelve than Esofea had at sixteen. Essentially alone at the Blind Sucker with the phenomenon of her own body, with her dawning awareness of parental abandonment, the girl seemed numb with a fear that Esofea sensed but couldn’t resolve. Caroline jumped as Esofea touched her shoulder.
“Pippi Longstocking,” Esofea said, putting the book in her hand.
“You told me that before. Like a hundred times.”
“Well now it’s a hundred and one. Is that enough already?”
“I guess so.”
“Be careful,” Esofea warned her. “It’s very silly. It might make you laugh. And Pippi is very naughty, as well as very strong. She does whatever she wants, no matter what people think, and nobody messes with Pippi.”
The girl chewed her lip. She had a habit of picking at her shirt, pulling it away from her swelling body. She did that twice.
“If they try to mess with her … what does she do?”
“Ha!” said Esofea. “You’re trying to cheat. You wanna sit here and read it, while I get groceries for Mummo?”
A wondrous dream, a fantasy incarnate—Esofea found herself reciting Vargas Llosa as she drifted the aisles of the market—fiction completes us, mutilated beings burdened with the awful dichotomy of having only one life and the ability to desire a thousand.
Me in a nutshell, she thought.
Peanuts in aisle seven. Cheese in the dairy case. Mummo Tiina loved buttermilk and Triscuits. The old woman ate three oranges and drank one beer every day. Hot Pockets might be good: less could go wrong in the microwave. Caroline would probably like a bag of chips and a soda. A Blue Sky, though, with cane sugar. But where next? What next? Why?
That old feeling inhaled Esofea suddenly, that intermittent twister in her brain that sucked her up and away from the crumbling centre of the Blind Sucker, out of her unexamined past, into the spin of a future where nothing was clear, or right, or wrong—it just was, because, and she reacted with whatever, in the hope of knowing why. And yet, crazy as she was to fly away, some heavy thing kept her stuck right here in Luce County.
She drove these thoughts away with a glance at the headlines of the Marquette Miner, stacked by the door: Northwoods Legend Dead, Drifter Held.
Ok then. She picked up a variety box of granola bars, a liter of water, a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, and an extra large t-shirt with the secessionist motto “Yoopers for the State of Superior.” The hats were up front by the softener salt. She chose a brown-billed foam ball cap that said “I’d Rather Be U.P. North.” Of course you could not buy pants in a grocery store, not even in upper Michigan, and for footgear, a pair of size thirteen flip-flops was the best she could do. She bought a road map and one that showed the snowmobile trails. She picked up a two-liter Cherry Coke from the impulse cooler. After she dropped off groceries and Caroline at the Blind Sucker—the girl suddenly clinging, begging to play Chutes and Ladders—Esofea winged that sloshing howitzer back to the Helen Joy Newberry Hospital and presented it, with a whirl of skirt, to Timmy Shrigley, thinking that inside that room behind Timmy lay this curiosity Dog, stalled in his journey to the pain-black centre of his universe. Was that how you did it? You spiraled in and down, not out and up?
Part-time deputy Shrigley, having waited fifteen years for Esofea to validate the backwards “s” of his tattoo, accepted the Coke and wasted no time becoming full of himself. “I gotta tell you up front, Sofi, I am a married man. This can’t go no place.”
Esofea performed a heavy sigh. “Yeah. I understand. How is Annette?”
She didn’t listen to his fishing expedition of an answer. Six or so wife-related complaints later and with the words “what’re ya gonna do?” he put his auto magazine down and released the Coke from captivity. Its aroma bloomed out and clashed with antiseptic and floor wax. While he took a big chug from the bottle neck, Esofea snuck a look up and down the hallway, checking angles and distances. They were in the northeast corner, ground floor. The emergency exit was about thirty steps left, away from the nurses’ station. It could be done.
“You gotta stay here all night, Timmy?”
“They lock down at midnight. I’ll be back at six-thirty AM, get in a shift in before I gotta haul damn Annette up to her ma’s in Gwinn. So I guess around ten Sheriff Lodge or Deputy Muff Dive is going to cover.”
God help Annette, Esofea thought again while Timmy yukked. And may Deputy Muff Dive someday have the honor of serving your papers.
Esofea had brought along from her celery mansion the big chintz carpet bag that went with her Pippi look. Inside that, she carried the old canvas shoulder bag she used in high school, still scrawled with ballpoint and still smelling a bit like Canadian sticky nugs and Danny’s Kenzo fragrance. Inside that she had stashed the granola bars and the water and the Tylenol, the shirt, cap, and maps, all that—plus one of the two-way tracking pagers from the bookmobile.
“I feel so bad that I shot him,” Esofea said.
“Ice Melt ain’t so bad,” grubby Tim waxed philosophically, expanding on his make-believe reconquest of the cutest girl at Newberry High. “Trouble is, it’s embedded under his skin and took some shirt in there with it. Some wadding too. But he won’t die. Unless he gets infected, which he’s in the hospital, so … ya know.”
Esofea slid down the wall and sat on the floor. “Are you religious, Timmy?”
“Only when I need to be.”
“What would you do if you killed someone?”
He put the soda down and folded his arms. “On duty or off?”
“Either.”
“Innocent or guilty?”
“A life is a life in my book, and everybody’s both.”
“Both what?”
“Everybody’s both innocent and guilty.” She ran with it. “The only thing that’s wrong is putting yourself above the flow of things, thinking you know what’s right, and judging people, and believing that it’s your job to fix things. There’s no need for that. The karmic debt is always paid.”
“Uh-huh.” Timmy gripped the jug of Coke and told an obvious lie: “I know what you mean.”
She volleyed a Tervo at him: “When ego is lost, limit is lost.”
“Ok.” He slid a glance up Esofea’s long-stockinged legs. “Sure.”
“And truth is limitless. Truth doesn’t need anybody’s help.”
Timmy mashed his tobacco-stained lips in a seriousness of consideration normally reserved for scouting turkey blind positions or choosing musky bait—situations where he planned to score. Solemnly he told her, “No shit.”
“If I
killed someone,” Esofea went on, “I would kill myself to fix it.”
“Oh, come on now. You don’t mean that.”
“Sure I do. You know, pay the karmic debt up front, go on to the next life with a clean slate. I hope I’m a giraffe, Timmy, or a Madagascan pigmy, wouldn’t that be fun?”
The part-time deputy took an urgent slug from the jug and made himself cough. Esofea held back a smile. Here he was, a self-respecting northern white man, caught mind-humping a Madagascan pigmy. Timmy recovered to say, “You can stop being so damn psycho any time now.”
She sighed. She replayed the picture of Dog crawling away along the ditch as Sheriff Lodge pulled up. After a silent minute she said, “Timmy, that poor man just laid there until they carried him into the ambulance. So to my mind he’s dead.”
“Now, that’s not—”
“So now I need to die myself. That’s the way I read it.”
“What the—” Tim sputtered. Esofea explicated the varmint vibe: Would he get to nail her first, though? Before she died and turned pigmy? “What the hell are you reading anyway?” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She wrung her hands. She could make her distress as real as need be. Everything hurt so much anyway.
She stood and shouldered her carpet bag, like she was leaving. She looked at part-time deputy Shrigley and quoted the great philosifucker Danny Tervo: “We write our own book of life, Timmy. We are the truth.”
Now Tim stood up, his face abruptly flushed. “The guy is just passed out, Sofi.” He was reaching at her. He was begging her to believe.
Esofea shrugged away. “I never saw him move. So, well, I guess I’ll see you on the flip side. Hope you’re going to be a Madagascan pigmy too. They walk around naked, you know. They don’t care.”
The part-time deputy looked both ways down the short corridor. He jerked the door open.
“He’s alive, Sofi. Damn it. Go see for yourself.”
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