Cold (10 page)

With Noel it was more than obvious.
 
Particularly the night they had gone to a place called The Depot.
 
They were having Mexican night, burritos, enchiladas, refried beans, rice, salsa, Margaritas—fare intended to make you forget you were in the U. P. on a cold winter’s night.
 
Norman didn’t like Mexican food—thought it was always the same.
 
So while Warren and Noel ate, Norman drank tequila and beer.
 
Later they shot pool, and about midnight Warren went looking for Norman and found him asleep in the back hall, outside the men’s room.
 
He and Noel got Norman back to her apartment and into bed.
 
When Warren started to say good night, Noel got a couple of beers from the kitchen and turned on the television.
 
Raiders of The Lost Ark
was on and Noel loved Indiana Jones.
 
So they sat on the sofa, drinking beer, smoking Warren’s last joint and watching the movie.
 
That’s how it started—how she started it.
 
It really had to do with that movie.
 
She knew every scene, and during the last part, where all the Nazis get fried and melted by the thing in the ark, she was leaning against Warren.
 
She didn’t have to say anything; it was all in the way she pressed against his arm and leg.
  
He worked his hand up under her sweater, found a nipple, and she kind of sunk down on the sofa, sort of went all loose.
 
As soon as the movie was over they were pulling each other’s clothes off, very quietly.
 
After that night they couldn’t help it—they kept finding ways to get to each other.
 
Noel was the one who really wanted it, which was why Warren didn’t understand what happened to her after the baby.
 
It changed her, that was all.

•

The next time Liesl awoke it was because of pain.
 
There was a young nurse in the room.
 
She left and came back with the officer whose name was Del Something.
 
He’d taken his coat off; he wasn’t wearing a uniform, just a plaid flannel shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to expose the thermal shirt that stopped halfway down his forearms.
 
He must have weighed close to two hundred pounds.
 
His hair was short, going gray on the sides, brushed straight back from the high forehead.
 
His face seemed accustomed to dealing with people in pain, in trouble, or both; his expression was sincere, concerned, yet there remained some professional detachment.

“I just called over to my station out in Yellow Dog,” he said.
 
“You were with a young guy, mid-twenties, dark hair.”
 
He waited and when she didn’t speak he went on.
 
“Marquette Prison faxed us a mug shot.”
 
He unfolded a sheet of paper and held it up close to her face.
 
“That’s who you were in the woods with, a walkaway?”

Liesl was surprised to find that she couldn’t talk.
 
The pain was worse than before; it seemed distant, but approaching.
 
Or, perhaps, it was rising, like a tide.
 
It was concentrated in her lower back but ran up her spine to her neck.
 
Her intravenous solution had a timed drip for pain relief, but it was too soon, and when she pressed the button nothing happened.
 
She opened her mouth but she couldn’t speak.

Del leaned down to her and she closed her eyes and opened them.

“That’s a yes?
 
A young guy, mid-twenties, dark hair?”

She blinked again, slowly.

“Thought so,” he said, folding up the sheet of paper.
 
“He must have come to your house?
 
You live alone up on in the hills above the crossroads?
 
You must have been snowed in, so the two of you walked down to the Stop & Go.
 
I don’t understand what you were doing, but that seems to be where you were both headed.
 
Do you remember your fall?”

He waited, but she was becoming rigid with pain and she couldn't even blink.
 
The doctor had called it
discomfort;
it was one of their favorite words.
 
She kept thinking about the button pinned to her bed sheet and how long it would be before she could get another hit.

“I know this is hard,” he said.
 
“If he pushed you off the ledge, why would he then carry you almost out to the road?
 
Maybe you just fell?
 
And he thought he’d help, then he got tired—and then he realized that he had to just get away and not worry about you?
 
I don’t know.”

Del rubbed his cheek with one hand.
 
He hadn’t shaved in a day or so and his whiskers crackled.
 
For some reason Liesl thought it a pleasant sound and she tried to concentrate on it.
 
He was asking good questions now.
 
She wanted to talk to this man about Norman.
 
She wanted him to understand Norman—he wasn’t just a mug shot.
 
But the pain was overwhelming and with great effort she turned her head toward the monitor beside her bed.
 
The small yellow light went off and she pushed the button.
 
Closing her eyes, she felt herself falling away.
 

Now, the sensation of falling was slow, pleasant.

Dark and warm.

Not white.
 
Not cold.

Five

As Noel drove to the Deer Run Motel heavy snow fell through her headlight beams.
 
She thought of it as driving at warp speed.
 
The snowflakes—planets, meteorites and asteroids—streamed toward her Isuzu Trooper, then rose up along the windshield and hurtled back into the darkness, their moment of illumination fleeting and hypnotic.
 
They seemed to possess the infinity of the galaxies.

She hated driving to work in the dark, knowing that she was going to spend another night stuck in the motel office—she thought of it as her own version of doing time.
 
She used to blame Norman.
 
For leaving.
 
For being sent away to do time.
 
But it was her fault too—she knew that—because neither of them saw what Warren and her father were really about.
 
She had been working at Getz’s Auto Supply for several months, answering phones, keying inventory into the computer.
 
She’d gotten the job on her own and it was the kind of work that made her want to go to college so she could get a degree and a decent job—a job somewhere outside the U. P.
 
Every day the parts delivery drivers came into the office and always had a line for her.
 
Always something about her tits, about her ass, about what they could do for her.
 
It had been that way since she’d been in high school, boys and men making references to her body.
 
And those who didn’t say anything simply stared, averting their eyes just as she looked at them.
 
It was usually harmless, and throughout her teens there were always boys willing to do anything for her.
 
Girls usually hated her.

Norman was a couple years older and she vaguely remembered him from high school.
 
He was quiet so there wasn’t much to remember.
 
He didn’t seem to take notice of her at work, not like the other delivery drivers, which was why she found him interesting at first.
  
He’d come into the office, lean on the counter and when she’d hand him some paperwork she’d wait.
 
Some joke.
 
Some look.
 
Something that would give away that he noticed what the other guy’s noticed.
 
There was nothing, and finally she asked him if he was married.

He seemed baffled by the question.
 
“No.
 
Do I look married?”

“You sound like it’s a disease, something that might leave you, I don’t know,
disfigured.”
 
She laughed as she laid the paperwork on the counter—triplicate:
 
yellow for the customer, pink for the driver, white for the office.
 
“I just thought you might be married.
 
Don’t know why.”

He said nothing, picked up the white and yellow copies and went to the door.

“Pink,”
she said.
 
“Yours is pink.”

And he came back to the counter and handed her the white copy.
 
She’d never seen him smile before.
 
She didn’t trust guys who smiled all the time.
 
Or worse, grinned.
 
But he smiled at his own stupidity and she laughed again.

At first Norman was unlike any other boy she’d ever dated.
 
He didn’t talk about himself all the time.
 
He didn’t just want to have sex.
 
He was polite.
 
He talked about going to school downstate.
 
Within six months they had decided to get married and go to school together, at Central, Western, or maybe Michigan State.
 

Then Getz’s Auto Supply went out of business.
 
Noel found part-time work at Ron’s IGA, and Norman began doing jobs for her father.
 
He plowed the driveways and parking lots of her father’s rentals.
 
He did yard work; repaired windows, doors, sinks, bathtubs.
 
He hung Sheetrock.
 
He painted apartments when they were vacant.
 
Daddy seemed to like him—as much as Daddy liked anyone.
 
In the fall, he took Norman north to Big Pine, his turn-of-the-century hunting lodge overlooking Lake Superior.
 
Hunting parties consisting mostly of business executives flew in on private planes from Detroit, Chicago and the Twin Cities.
 
Daddy and several locals acted as guides; Norman was all around go-fer.
 
They were gone for weeks at a time.
 
Occasionally Noel would drive up and help out with the cooking and cleaning.
 
Norman seemed increasingly uncomfortable about the hunting parties at Big Pine.
 
Noel thought it had to do with his working for his fiancé’s father.
 
She liked that about him.

When his older brother Warren returned from San Diego, where he’d been in the Navy, everything changed.
 
Warren talked about himself all the time, which meant he usually talked about sex, and he wasn’t polite.
 
He had some kind of hold on Norman, some big brother thing; Noel saw it the first weekend Warren was back in North Eicher.
 
They partied day and night.
 
She thought that it might last a few days, but it went on and on, and soon she was talking to Norman about how manipulative his brother was, how she’d never seen Norman like this.
 
They were like Warren’s entourage; he couldn’t go out at night without bringing them along, buying rounds, providing the weed and, increasingly, offering pills or a vial of cocaine.

She thought of Norman and Warren as a variation on the same theme.
 
Warren was a few years older, maybe a couple of inches taller.
 
His hair was a lighter brown, straighter than Norman’s.
 
Both were lean and hard muscled.
 
Norman’s limbs were more compact; his forearm muscles shifted beneath his skin, raising beveled edges effortlessly.
 
Warren’s face was longer than Norman’s, the proportions spread out and somehow less coherent. You looked at his eyes.
 
You looked at his mouth.
 
One thing at a time.
 
With Norman you took the whole in at once and saw the eyebrows raised in relation to the mouth.
 
The first night she had slept with him she had cupped his face in her hands, feeling the ridges and hollows, the bones beneath the taut skin.

That winter Warren became an issue.
 
That’s how she thought of him at first—an issue that was coming between her and Norman.
 
It was like Warren was watching her all the time, waiting for her to do something.
 
The three of them would be driving somewhere, or in a bar or restaurant.
 
Finally—it was in The Green Flannel Tavern when they were doing shots and beers during a Red Wings game—she stared back at him, hoping her expression was asking
What the fuck do you think you’re doing?
 
Perhaps she thought that he might just back down.
 
But Warren simply grinned, and his eyes had something in them that Norman’s didn’t possess.
 
Something dead on, something that didn’t flinch.
 
So they stared at each other in the dim light of the bar as though it were some kind of a duel; Noel eventually gave up and went to the restroom.