The Fugitives

by Christopher Sorrentino

  After a little while, the three men got up to go their separate ways, and after they’d parted, Nanabozho sidled up to the youngest of them, who wanted to be a great hunter, and struck up a conversation with him as they walked along the trail together. The young man, still full of enthusiasm for his own dream for himself, repeated his ambition and that of his friends. Nanabozho wondered why he’d bothered to stop, because men everywhere always want the same things, and he decided that he’d play a trick on them for wasting his time. When the time came for the two to part, Nanabozho said to the young man, “I live down here. Why don’t you and your friends come to visit me sometime? I’ll give each of you a gift.” The young man knew that he was speaking with Nanabozho, and that Nanabozho liked to play tricks, but he also knew that Nanabozho could be very generous, and he assumed, as men will, that no one could be more deserving of generosity than himself. So, as Nanabozho anticipated, he agreed.

  Nanabozho built a fire and then sat outside his wigwam waiting for the three men and thinking about the things they’d wished for. Eventually, the men arrived. They were tired, and they were hungry, but they asked Nanabozho for their gifts before anything else. “Eat first,” said Nanabozho. He was a very good host. When they had finished, they began again to ask for their gifts. “Sit and rest,” said Nanabozho. So they relaxed, but after a short while the youngest said, “Nanabozho, you said you’d give us gifts.” And Nanabozho responded, “So I did.” He looked at the youngest, and said, “I’m going to make you a great hunter. You’ll track and kill game day and night.” And the youngest answered, “That’s just what I wanted.” And Nanabozho said, “Good.” And then he said to the next man, “I’m going to give you great wealth. More than enough for yourself, enough to share with everyone along the lakeshore.” And the second man answered, “Thank you, Nanabozho, that’s exactly what I wanted.” And Nanabozho said, “Good.” And then to the third man, the proudest and most arrogant of them all, Nanabozho said, “I’m going to make you immortal. You’ll live forever, for as long as the earth is here.” And the third man said, “That’s exactly what I wanted. Thank you, Nanabozho.” And Nanabozho said, “Good.”

  Nanabozho wasn’t surprised that, having been promised their gifts, the three men were suddenly in a hurry to leave. “When will we receive our presents?” they asked. “Don’t worry,” Nanabozho reassured them. “They’ll come to you.” So the three men left, and after a while they came again to the place where they had to go their separate ways. The youngest man went into his wigwam. Inside, it was full of horseflies. And the youngest man began to swat at them, tracking them from one corner of the wigwam to another. He swatted at them day and night, but he never seemed to be able to get rid of all of them. And so that was Nanabozho’s gift to him. The second man came upon a canoe filled to the top with furs and tobacco and weapons and other goods, more than he could ever use. And he pushed the canoe into the lake, wading in after it and then climbing aboard. But once he was far from shore, the canoe began taking on water, because of his added weight, and pretty soon it sank to the bottom of the lake, carrying the second man with it. And that was Nanabozho’s gift to him. Now, the third man, the one who wanted to live forever, found that as he was walking along his legs began to feel heavier and heavier, and he felt more and more tired and sleepy, and finally he had to sit down just where he was. And once he’d sat down he turned completely into a giant rock, part of the landscape, something that would be there as long as the earth itself. And that was Nanabozho’s gift to the proudest and most arrogant of the three men.

  17

  THURSDAY, Salteau brought in a couple of things to pass around, a dance stick and a dream catcher. The objects passed from hand to hand, the adults handling them cursorily, with artificial reverence, and the children examining them with at least some genuine interest. One kid, around four, took the dance stick and, after looking at it for a moment with intense concentration, abruptly brought it down on the head of a smaller boy, probably his brother, causing the younger kid to cry.

  “I’ll scalp you!” the big boy said.

  “Ryan! No!” said his mother. She turned not to the smaller boy but to Salteau. “I am so sorry.”

  Salteau responded with an expansive gesture. “Anishinabe would have been better off if we’d taken a few scalps here and there.” He leaned in, addressing the adults in a stage whisper. “Present company excepted, of course.” Strained laughter. Everyone felt compelled to humor the Indian, except, I noticed, Kat, who sat across the library table from me.

  I was hungover enough that I’d gotten to the library a little late, even though I’d gone to the trouble of driving. Salteau hadn’t yet begun, but for the first time my primary reason for coming wasn’t to see him. I found Kat sitting off to one side of the room at one of the “big tables,” as I’d heard them called by the kids, and I pulled out a chair opposite her and sat in it. Today she had on a gray cashmere cardigan over a soft blue jersey blouse with a scoop neck. On a slender black cord around her throat she wore a small sterling silver pendant. She wore a man’s gold ring around her left thumb. She glanced at me from behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, smiled I think, then gestured with her chin in Salteau’s direction, turning in her chair slightly toward him, away from me, a gesture of dismissal, and knitting her fingers together. She sat like that, unknitting her fingers from time to time to shove her hair out of her face and behind her left ear with her right hand but otherwise giving Salteau her full attention. Her notebook, a long, narrow reporter’s tablet, lay unopened on the table, a pen resting on top of it.

  When Salteau had finished, she gathered up her things and left the building. I followed her outside, holding my coat in my hand.

  “So how’s the piece?”

  “God.” She hefted the notebook and wagged it, grimacing, an unreadable gesture.

  “Not coming. You need inspiration.”

  “I’m inspired to go back to the hotel and crawl into bed.”

  “You want company?”

  “Geezum. You’re something else, aren’t you? Or do you just think you are?”

  I shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

  “Good try. But I’m afraid I’m scheduled to have an argument with my husband around now.”

  She meant it as a joke, but I immediately thought of Dr. Heinz and wondered nonsensically for an instant if he was counseling Kat, too.

  “There’s always a husband lurking around somewhere.”

  “Sounds like a man who knows.”

  “I’ve tiptoed out the back way a couple of times.”

  “He’s back in Chicago.”

  “What’s he do? Another reporter?”

  “Food writer. For the Trib.”

  “A food writer in Chicago. Hmmm.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “That’s like being a yacht reporter in Kansas, isn’t it?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “Meat, meat, and more meat.”

  “What the heck is a ‘yacht reporter’?”

  “Come on, lunch?”

  “I told you, I can’t.”

  “Saving room for the mixed grill later?”

  She shook her head, smiling, and then savagely shoved her hair out of her face. “I’ve got to work. Here’s my lunch.” She lifted a bag of cookies halfway out of her purse.

  “Cookies?”

  “More ridicule, really?”

  “No, I’m a fan.”

  “Well, thank you. I’m honored.”

  “I was referring to the cookies.”

  “Geezum.” Hand up, across, hair, down.

  “There’s a lot of integrity there,” I continued. “Take Keebler, for example. Still running the show from a hollow tree in Middle Earth after like ten centuries? That takes honor. I’m sure the Chinese could bake those cookies a lot cheaper than those unionized dwarfs.”

  “Elves.”

  “I defer to your connoisseurship. You win.”

  “Oh, yeah? What do I win?”


  “Lunch.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Things were going so well. Come on. Coffee.”

  “Geezum. What’s the downside of all this persistence?”

  “Aggression, drunken rages, recklessly impulsive behavior, yelling. You know. The standard gamut. Come on, catch me on a good day.”

  “That’s outrageous.”

  BUT THREE HOURS later we were west of Bonny Haven, entangled on the backseat of her rental Impala in an empty parking lot at the head of a trail leading up and into the dunes. The lot had been cleared of snow haphazardly and half the spaces were buried under an enormous pile of it that the plow had pushed into the shape of a hill. I had one hand under her sweater cupped around her small breast. With the other I lightly gripped the back of her head while I kissed her. The engine was idling and the heater was going full blast.

  “I’m not usually in this position,” she said.

  “Well, me neither. It’s pretty roomy back here, though.”

  “I mean I don’t usually do this.”

  “Well, that’s different, I guess.”

  Not that there really had been any question of what we were going to do. We’d gotten into her car and, following my directions, she’d driven us up into Manitou, where we wound around lakes and farmland on meandering county highways. On 667 we were forced to back up when we came upon a tree that had fallen into the roadway, and that was how we’d come to make a right turn and follow the road to Noonanville, where we arrived at the bridge dividing Bonny Lake from Little Bonny Lake, both icily brilliant under the bluest of afternoon skies, and crossed it to head west toward the dunes, the highest of them, bright with snow and buff-colored patches of exposed sand, towering above the peninsula. I’d directed her to pull into the small lot on some forgotten pretext.

  “Shouldn’t we make sure the exhaust pipe isn’t blocked, or something?” she said.

  “We’re fine.”

  “It would be really messed up if we died of carbon monoxide poisoning out here.”

  “We’re not going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Making out in a car. I can’t remember the last time.”

  “In Italy secret lovers rendezvous in cars all the time. They put newspapers up in the windows.”

  “Why, I wonder?”

  “So people can’t see in, I guess.”

  “No, dummy. Why in cars.”

  “Probably they live with their parents.”

  “If you tell me that you still live with your mother I’m getting out now and walking back.”

  “I’m alone.”

  “Kids, though, you said. And they’re with who right now?”

  “Their mother.”

  “In Brooklyn. So what’s going on here? Do you have some sort of arrangement?”

  “Yeah, it’s called joint legal custody. It’s like those ads in the back of the TV Guide. I send money every month to buy them vaccinations, and pencils to use in their simple village schoolhouse, and every once in a while I get a personalized handwritten letter and a crayon drawing.”

  “Don’t get snippy.” She lightly punched my chest. “When did you split up?”

  “First time, about two years ago. Then again, six months ago.”

  “Tried for a do-over.”

  “I thought I’d made a mistake. There was someone else the first time.”

  “Your someone else.”

  “Yup. The marriage was already finished, though. I just did a really thorough job of killing it.”

  “You must have wanted it dead.”

  “I don’t know what the hell I wanted.”

  “Well, you’re here now. Thousand miles between you and everything.”

  “A thousand miles doesn’t hurt. Though it isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Hiding’s hiding. If that’s what you’re doing.”

  “Just fucking up in private, for a change.”

  She looked pensive for a moment and then balled up her fist again and knocked twice on my chest. “Come on. We should get going.”

  DESPITE MY WHEEDLING, Kat refused to have dinner with me. She said she wanted to get some work done before she headed back to Chicago. She gave me her e-mail address, but not her cell phone number. She accepted mine dispassionately. She assured me that she would return, but she did not assure me that she would return soon. I could feel the phases of her disengagement as she passed through them. When she dropped me off in front of my house, she leaned forward a little to peer at it through the windshield, nodded once, and said, “Nice place,” as if it would never occur to her to wonder what was inside. Meanwhile, I wanted to rifle through her purse, find out the height and weight listed on her driver’s license, what brand of breath mints she used. I suppose her response was the more normal one.

  Normalcy is the old antagonist of ardor. It takes a certain kind of reckless stupidity to deny its steady reassuring pull for the overwhelming magnetism of obsession. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that I was a fool for love.

  “The trouble with you is,” she liked to say, “you have no sense of discernment.”

  I should probably mention that my mother despised Loralynn Bonacum, and couldn’t figure out what it was about her that inspired my devoted passion. If you mention Loralynn to her today—and I never do, if I can avoid it—she’ll pull a face and say, “That rude little mouse.” She’s wrong about that one; Loralynn was an intelligent and opinionated girl who simply was uninterested in placating and reassuring adults with small talk. But my mother wasn’t wrong about me. I’ve always toppled for women who interest me, a habit that’s turned desultory flings into gruelingly inappropriate entanglements, their failure into emotional extravaganzas. I’ve never been one of those temperate people whose affairs are casual, their breakups friendly. It must be a kind of disciplined gift, the knack for conducting yourself that way, like being able to finish the acrostic in the Sunday paper. After about fifteen years of bizarre associations ranging from the pathetic (married girl at the temp job) to the hiply melodramatic (brooding, Bettie Page–worshiping Tisch dropout, draped with melancholy), I lucked out with Rae, a woman who’s healthy in every respect. Hearty appetites, big bones, strong thumbs. Keeps the checkbook balanced and yells in bed. If I concentrate on my years with her, about the worst I can come up with is that she was a little hard on the kids about their table manners. What, then, were my grounds for leaving? I was relieved to discover that New York law still required them. The State of New York insisted on uneuphemistic justification of one’s petition to raze a marriage, orotund phrases like Cruel and Inhuman Treatment, Abandonment, Adultery—they all fit. Of course, those weren’t my grounds, but Rae’s, although if I stood sideways and squinted, as it were, I could make them mine. Susannah, my secret sharer, heard all about them when she wasn’t complaining about her own spouse, who was less a husband than he was a kind of chaperone, a preemptive Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. He’d overplayed his hand in trying to whisk her away to Vermont, I thought, because as soon as he was ensconced among the rocks and trees and the business-suited imbeciles he was doomed to tow through the passages of The Cherry Orchard and Death of a Salesman, she jumped the fence. Those theater people are all puppeteers, I thought. They treat actors like puppets, and actors are devoted to emptying themselves, to being stuffed with a role like a big gesticulating hand. Then the puppeteers train their sights on the actual people in their lives—especially, I thought, the unsuccessful puppeteers, such as the husband, a man so unsuited to his profession that he wanted to be in bed by ten, like some avatar of family values. Susannah reported a little sadly that every night he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow; “He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow,” she said more than once, not admiringly, which strikes me as odd, perversely odd, odd enough to disbelieve, even, since Susannah, a tiny, doll-like woman whose stature accentuated, rather than diminished, the exaggerated curves of her breasts, her buttocks, her thighs, he
r hips, her calves, was the ultimate stuffable puppet; an unbroken erotic contour under a bale of yellow hair. He’d left his puppet unstuffed even while he told her what to do and not to do, how much to drink, how late to stay out, what to read, what to watch, what to wear, who were the good friends, who were the friends of suspect value. He was all for that book she was going to write, which seems like a lapse in his thinking, unless he was merely trying to situate her a rung or two beneath him, culturally. It wouldn’t surprise me. He was one of those Ivy-covered pseudo-WASPs, trying desperately to conceal the skinny kid whose immigrant grandparents had run a luncheonette. He’d left his puppet unstuffed while he filled her head with his protocols. I wanted to fill her head with my cock, and that’s what she wanted, too. Vermont! A bold move, badly played, I thought. She’d waited until he committed himself to his adventure in rustic academe, the undistinguished professor, then bailed and sent him up to live in his converted barn by himself, where he was to be tortured by the endless noise from a nearby granite quarry, hewing yuppie countertops from the seams of the planet. So much for nature. Anyway, those were her grounds. Everybody has grounds, hers were particularly good, I submit. “I feel like I’m running for my life,” she said, and I’ll bet she did. Ran from his self-improvement regimen, then ran from mine. And what were my grounds? My grounds were that, in Rae’s case, the self-improvement program never took. Rae brought the brain of an accountant to everything she did, and that efficient and industrious brain never changed one iota during the time I lived with her. Everything needed to add up, to balance. Ambiguity was a no-no. I’m sometimes pretty sure that she decided I was insane long before I upset the checkerboard and walked out. She was a wonderful woman—but it was Dr. Heinz who was absolutely perfect for her. One for me and one for you: that was Heinz and Rae on anything—M&Ms, grievances, orgasms, anything. Maybe Heinz killed the marriage, with his bookkeeper’s attitude. Maybe I can blame him, finally.