Cold (26 page)

“I see,” Del said.

“Listen, that’s guaranteed not to happen if you send a bunch of state police out there.”
 
Again, Haas looked to the side quickly, then he leaned forward and placed both elbows on the table.

“Out where?”

Warren took a drink from his bottle of schnapps.

“So, you’ll lead me to them, in this weather?” Del asked.
 
“What’re you driving?”

“We go together.
 
My truck’s got four-wheel drive too, and I’m parked right across the street there in front of Jacques’ Diner.”

Del shook his head.
 
“If we go, I drive.”

Haas raised the bottle of schnapps to his mouth, but he didn’t take a drink.
 
He held the bottle against his bruised cheek, tenderly, trying to soothe the skin.
 
“You got that Land Cruiser out there.
 
Good four-wheel drive on those things.
 
Okay, you drive.”
 
Haas stood up.
 
He took Del’s coat from the back of the chair and held it out.
 
“Heavy.
 
Feels like it’s armed.”
 
He smiled.
 
“Guess that’s a pun.”

Del took the coat, got up and pulled it on.
 
He patted his left side.
 
“I don’t like holsters under winter coats.
 
Too bulky.
 
So when I bought this, I had a special holster-pocket sewn in here.”
 
He looked at Haas’ leather coat.
 
“That’s not the kind of coat you see much up north.
 
Has more of a city cut.”

Haas took a little step, as though he were modeling the knee-length garment at a fashion show.
 
He opened the coat, first right, then left.
 
“See, no holster pockets.
 
Just an ordinary coat with two arms.”
 
He turned up the collar and yanked open the door.

Outside, Woo-San backed away from the sudden light cast from the room.
 
He looked startled, embarrassed, and his lips moved though he didn’t say anything.

“Look at this,” Haas said.
 
“Listening at your door.
 
Hear anything interesting?”

“I not listening.
 
You—”
 
Woo-San turned toward Haas.
 
He was not a large man, but his shoulders beneath his coat were thick.
 
Something about him seemed forceful and beyond intimidation, as though he had been conditioned by being the outsider, the stranger.
 
“You been told not to come around here anymore.”

“Says who?”

“Pronovost say so.”

“This man’s the law,” Haas said.
 
“Register your complaint with him.”
 
He walked around Del’s Land Cruiser.
 

“He not suppose to be here,” Woo-San said.

“Well, he’s leaving,” Del said.
 
“And so am I.”

“You go?
 
You go together?”
 
Woo-San turned and walked back toward the motel office.

Del got in the Land Cruiser and opened the passenger door for Haas.
 
They drove through the downtown section of North Eicher.
 
Except for a couple of bars, nothing was open.

“All right, where are going?” Del asked.

“Take a right at this next corner.
 
We want to head up north.”

Part III

twelve

Liesl sat at her bench in the studio, her hands covered with clay.
 
“It feels good to have my skin caked again,” she said.

Darcy leaned on the stool across from her, eating ice cream, staring at the clay head between them.
 
When she was finished, she put the empty bowl on the worktable and said, “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s a work in progress.”

“The eyebrows, and that hat, they’re too big on one side.”

“It’s snow.
 
It’s blowing from his left.
 
We’ll call that north.
 
It’s like shadows in a painting.
 
When you look at a landscape, you can see that the artist is always aware of where the sun is.
 
When you sculpt a figure in a blizzard, you need to be aware of which direction the wind is from.”

Darcy reached out and ran one finger down the back of the head.
 
“It feels—
gross.”

“Sometimes I think the feel of clay saved my life after the accident.”
 
She had a brief, sharp recollection of when she and Harold had first met, before they were married.
 
She’d just started to do pottery and she had discovered how fascinating wet clay could be, how it could be spun, turned, molded, formed and reformed, and how when it dried hard it held firm the movement of that turning.

Darcy wiped her finger on her sweatshirt.
 
“Mom says that afterwards you were—distracted.”

“I was distracted, yes.”
 
She thought of Harold, young, thin, naked, covered with wet clay.
 
“I was distracted for a long time,” she said vaguely, “until I started working again.”

Darcy kept rubbing her finger on her sleeve.
 
“It feels—
dirty.”

“It is, and that’s part of the beauty of it.
 
This is just dirt.”

“A work ‘in progress.’”
 
Darcy leaned over the table, bringing her face up close to the bust.
 
“That’s what Nikki Koivu says—‘I’m a
work in progress!’
 
She’ll say it when we’re showering after gym class, or in the girls’ lav.
 
She’s got these incredible boobs already, and I know that she showed them to three boys for a dollar each, and she let Jimmy Hackett feel her up at the Delft in Marquette.”
 
Gently, she ran her finger over the cap that was tight to the clay skull.
 
“I think sex is overrated.”

“You do?”

“Sometimes dogs in the kennel get to each other when they’re not supposed to and I have to turn the hose on them, and even with the cold water they stay stuck together.”
 
She scratched her cheek, leaving a smudge of clay beneath her right eye.
 
“And once the Armstrong’s white lab and this mutt got turned around, butt to butt, while they were still stuck, and they just look at you with these stupid dog-grins.
 
God, it’s so disgusting.
 
Even puppies, male puppies, are always mounting my leg and going—”
 
Stepping away from the stool, Darcy thrust her hips rapidly.
 
She dropped her tongue out the side of her mouth and panted quickly, until she collapsed, face down, on the worktable.

“That’s pretty good,” Liesl said.

Sitting back on her stool, Darcy said, “That’s all there is to it, really.”

“You’re sure?”

“The male part, anyway.
 
Ah-ah-ah-ah-
ah-ahhhh.
 
Just like the dogs.”

“What about the female part?”

Darcy’s cheeks flushed slightly.
 
She said nothing; she didn’t have to.

The first summer Liesl and Harold lived here in the woods was extremely hot and humid for this far north.
 
They had bought the land together but had not yet built the house, so they were living in a small World War II Quonset hut they’d found in a salvage yard.
 
One night, after smoking some of the grass that they were growing in the woods, they stood naked in the clearing where the house would eventually be built and Liesl began smearing wet clay on Harold, starting at the top of his head, working down through his beard, his neck, his chest, arms, hips, legs.
 
He stood absolutely still, at her insistence.
 
She covered every part of him, and when she did his penis last, slowly, he became large and erect.

“Then there’s form,” Liesl said.

“Form?”

“Human form.”

“Oh, like Jason Knott’s arms.
 
He pumps iron every day.”

“Something like that, but it goes beyond the physical.
 
When you look at a certain boy, there’s just something special about his form.
 
And I’m not just talking about the size of his muscles.
 
It tells you all about him—and about you.”

“Form,” Darcy said slowly, as though she were trying to commit it to memory.
 
She patted the bust’s head.
 
“Is this anyone in particular?”

“No, I don’t think so.
 
Maybe it’s a composite.”

“A composite?”

“Parts may suggest a particular person, but you draw from several sources.”

“Uh-huh.”

Liesl studied the bust between them on the worktable.
 
She liked the texture of snow as it collected on wool and hair; and the forehead possessed the deep concentration that came with the sudden realization that he was lost.
 
She remembered Norman as they climbed through the hills toward the crossroads.
 
He had a plain honesty, but he also seemed driven in a way that both terrified and intrigued her.
 
Perhaps honesty and evil are so close together as to be indistinguishable.
 
What Norman did, leaving her in the snow, most people would call evil.
 
Liesl didn’t think so.
 
It was honest.
 
He walked away from her and realized he would only put himself in jeopardy if he tried to get her help.
 
Any animal would do the same, including a human.

She turned the bust slightly, to get a different perspective on the face.
 
The forehead, the eyes, the nose, the jaw all suggested an older man.
 
Like Del, but not specifically Del.
 
Someone who if lost in a blizzard doesn’t panic, because he’s been through it before.
 
That’s what she had going here:
 
a man struggling against a cold, brutal wind and blinding snow, a man honest enough to do whatever is necessary to survive.
 

•

After the soup, they were all tired, and Noel put Lorraine down for a nap.
 
When she came out into the Great Room, Norman was stacking more logs in the stone fireplace.
 
Noel sat on the couch facing the fireplace and pulled the Afghan over her legs.
 
Her face stung and she could see that Norman’s face was badly wind-burned too.
 
She watched his shoulders and hands as he set the logs on the andirons, then laid kindling and newspaper beneath the stack.
 
He was no longer a boy; prison had pared him down to something more essential.
 
His face, his shoulders, his hands were lean, strong, but somehow reduced.

When he had the fire lit, he sat on the couch and she draped part of the Afghan over his legs.
 
They watched the fire a moment; then he shifted so she could lean against him.
 
Carefully he put his arm around her.
 
They remained that way without speaking, watching the flames build in the fireplace.
 
Frequently the crackle and pop of the fire was accompanied by the creaking of the walls and roof as another gust of wind hit the lodge.

“What did you find out there?”

He didn’t answer.

“You don’t want to talk about it now.”

“I can’t,” he said.
 
“Not now.”
 

She watched the logs catch on fire.
 
“I love the way fire creeps along the wood.
 
And I always wonder why part of the flame is blue.
 
When I was a kid I thought I could stare into a fire forever,” she whispered.
 
“It’s like watching waves on the beach—no two licks of fire were the same.
 
Something soothing, almost like meditation happens and it seems to empty your mind.”

She raised her head off his shoulder and saw that Norman was asleep, his mouth opened slightly, his head turned away as it lay against the back of the couch.
 
Resting her cheek against his shoulder again, she closed her eyes.
 
They were both exhausted, much like they used to be during hunting season, when the work at the lodge was constant, intended to allow the members of the hunting party to relax.
 
Her father used to tell them
We’ll do everything—you just worry about bagging your trophy.
 
There were usually seven or eight men at the lodge at one time, and several other groups occupied the cabins down in the woods.
 
They all wore their expensive outdoor gear, didn’t shave, and after a few days they looked like born woodsmen.
 
Noel cooked; eggs and bacon or ham for breakfast, and at night meat:
 
Black Angus steaks Daddy had flown in from Chicago, duck, and venison.
 
She was the only female in the camp.
 
More than once she had to slap a wayward hand.