Just North of Nowhere (52 page)

Vinnie took off the hat, wiped the sweat off his pate, flipped the light switch with his pen…

Nothing.

Juice cut at the breakers
, he figured.
That’s good. Maybe good. Esther, if she’d gone off – off on her own for a while – she’d trip the breakers. Yup. That’s a second thing. A probable second thing.

Behind the counter, everywhere he could see, everything was put away, cleaned and ready. When the place was in the rush, things flew or were dropped where a busy hand could reach and know where the damn thing was.

“Working hands shouldn't have to think!” Esther’d said that. Right there, other side of the Dutch door to the kitchen.

Where now she ain't!

What light there was in the kitchen squeaked through the back door window – curtained and closed—and through the four panes – shuttered and latched—above the sink. Vinnie slipped the Maglight from his belt loop. The beam rolled over knives, steels and holders, flippers, burger presses and whisks, glasses, cups, mixers, pots, pans, monkey dishes, saucers, pads, plates, brushes and bowls, stowed, and as noted, all of it clean, neat, empty, waiting. Nothing bubbled, nothing griddled.

Thing three: No sign of violence. The clean-up was Esther’s. It had her logic…

Just above Vinnie’s line of sight, for just a half-second, a thing flopped across the ceiling where the light wasn't. When he put the light there, there was nothing: wood lath under generations of white paint.
Shadows!
he thought. Those of course, of course there were those: hanging fluorescents, ceiling fan and chain.
Huh.
The fan was still. Vinnie’d never seen that. Winter, summer, whenever, the blades turned, always, stirring air and odor. Black dust streaked back from the leading edges of the blades.

What smell looks like,
he thought,
smell caught drifting
.

He cranked the beam wide and eased it across the room, area by area. He took in each spot, catalogued its contents like Daddy Sheriff taught him, surveying a scene. Nothing moved but shadows.

Thing Four: Nothing wrong here.

“Except the whole damn thing!” he said.

The exception to one damn thing popped into his head! He opened the refrigerator. A swirl of baking powdered stale warm air and the ghost of grub long gone breathed over him. No light, no cold. No food.

Food?

Thing Four updated: Where’s the food?

He shone the light out the back window: Trash cans were empty, upside downed, lids to the side, waiting. And nothing showing. She disposed of nothing.

“What? Did she eat it all…?”

Past the black bulk of the Viking stove, the doorway to the stairs to Esther's apartment stood open.

Thing Five: Stair door open?
Esther kept it shut, coming and going, liked keeping the restaurant out of where she lived. She’d said that, too.

The steps curved round in the tight place left for them at the back end of the building.

The place had been built when…? Turn of the old century. Some Olaf from the old country, built it by hand and eye and forgot till the last minute to put in the steps. Vinnie could hear him, see him: a slap on his forehead and “Uf-dah! Py yimminie, gotta have steps up, ain't?!”

The Swede’s tightly winding last minute steps creaked under Vinnie’s weight and the steps up closed around him.

Like snaking up a chimney for cripes’ sake.

Cop that he was, Vinnie felt like a burglar tip-toeing into Esther’s home, flashing light where he’d never been invited.

The top door was open, too. He entered a long narrow room. The roof sloped down one side leaving a short wall to run the length. On the other side, a wall went to the center peak of the roof. Beyond it was a room in deep shade. Vinnie's light flicked through the doorway: sink, stove, small fridge.

Unused,
he figured,
she eats from the menu below…

“Why not? Best grunts in town…” he was feeling hungry.

In the living room: an electric heater in the far corner. Near it, a sofa – a sleeper maybe – was backed against one wall, across from it, another.

Two sofas,
he thought,
didn’t see her for two sofa’s worth of entertaining…
A coffee table sat between the sofas, an unfinished jigsaw puzzle spread across the tabletop. He cocked his head to see: A beach. Palm tress.

Next to Vinnie, was a desk. He played the light over it: adding machine, telephone, papers piled neatly, bills to one side, receipts on the other, nooks and crannies with letters, notes, stamps, other bills, more receipts.

“Left in good order,” he said.

Kept in order, more likely
, he though.

Left.

“That’s it,” he said. Left. She’d said as much in the note.
Thing…
“What is it now…?”
Thing Five? Six? Whatever thing it is, the thing is Esther left.

Across the space were two doors. One: Bathroom. The usual stuff… He leaned in…

…something niggled, then jolted him.
Stuff’s all here.
Regular stuff AND the stuff you take: toothbrush—in the holder by the sink—paste, comb, all there. His light ran across the bottles, jars, pills, tubes…
All them things women use? They’re still here.

The other door: Bedroom.

On the far side of the room, the window was open. The curtains rolled in the morning breeze. On Esther's double bed—made neat, tight—the mattress showed a dent. “Huh.”
She sleeps to the right. Big bed and she stays to that one narrow spot…

On the table next to the bed, a picture. Vinnie shone the light on it: a young Esther and a man, a little older, a tall man with a big smile and a pocket full of pens.

That’s whatshisname. Martin? Wilmer? Him. The husband.
Came here with her then died right away! Remember him… Kind of remember him…
The picture and a little table lamp and that was it by the bed. Nothing else.
Huh. Light sleeper…

The windows on the far side of the room overlooked Commonwealth. The curtains still rolled and folded open, back and back on themselves. The porch roof sloped away below the sill. The morning crowd waited below.

Vinnie wanted to yell down to them:
Go on home. Go eat in your own damn kitchens. Go back to bed, for cripes's sake!

Then thing six – or whatever it was – hit him: The window was open, wide open.
Ain’t like her, go away, leave the window…
He looked toward the bluff. Nothing. Spring. Morning was here for real, now, the sun was up, the sky was blue.

The closet door was open. The light swept through: Nothing missing, nothing he could see, nothing obvious. In back: shoes, boxes of shoes, wrapped up closet-things and an empty place between. Esther had gotten up, pulled out a suitcase – or something – something that had sat, unused for…

Well, hell,
Vinnie thought,
Esther never went anywhere, not in my memory.
She hadn’t since he was a little shit when she came here with her – what the hell was his name? – husband, and he died and she took over to run the Eats. And made it into something! Cripes, no. She’d barely left town, since the last owner left. Someone name of Tim Something, or Something Tim, family of the old Swede who built the joint and forgot the stairs till the last minute. Not since Tim whatever then, not for a day, never had the place been shut. Not since Esther took it on. Huh.

Well, that it?
he wondered.
Esther go off by herself for a bit?
What'd they call it?
Sabbatical.

He stood at the window again. The milling in the street was the same. Day had advanced… He looked at his watch. …sixteen minutes. Sun shadows pulled across the street. The mob had grown, had come to a rolling boil.

Desperate,
he thought.

Truth was, Vinnie was a little that way, too. Hungry maybe. That or something. Something else.

Preliminary conclusion: ain’t a restaurant here any more. “Hell, the place is gone,” he said.

...then Eagle Feather Proud was running. His head cracked, a solid hit, and shoved him, as always, into day. The rock, hurled to kill, broke feather and head. As always, something like thunder threw him into the run. Something like lightning kicked his next step. The ones that followed were less of a surprise. The steps he'd taken were already as the stars in the sky but the beating heart of that morning took him into the living world and day was on. He was running. As always

Sometimes he'd run to the library. He’d watch the lady who dusted or starred at glass. She couldn't see Feather Proud. Now she saw little but dust and the glass pictures she touched with care. He peered over her shoulder. The pictures made no sense to him and it was too quiet in the big room filled with books where she sat so he never stayed long. But he liked to look at her. Her face made him smile.

Sometimes he ran by the White building. If she took time to look, the woman would wave. He almost never waved back. He’d liked the food she’d given him, “grunts” she called them, when he moved snow for her. A good trade, a good memory. He wanted to keep it. So many he could not.

Sometimes Feather found the loneliness of morning so beautiful, so beautiful all he could do was run and run until the memory of the People filled him and night took him, sudden, to wherever he went when the world slept.

Sometimes he wondered: “Am I a ghost dreaming I'm a man? If so, let me wake and discover what death is.” Sometimes he thought, “Am I a man, dreaming I'm a ghost? If so, that's enough! Wake up!” He didn't. He did neither, wake nor die. Another morning came and there he was, running up the river, running for help. And sometimes the mornings were so beautiful.

The Creature with the heart of a killer sat by the water. She sat upstream from where the bridge stepped across the river. She’d sat the night long. She looked at the sky and judged it was after full night. Morning and soon he’d be awake.

Across the Rolling River was the man who slept. The smell of his fire drifted across the stream. He snored. Breath and sound. The sound of his breath tickled her and her mouth crackled in a, what was it? Smile. She had no breath. She tried now to breathe like him. She rustled, crackled, creaked, stretched, layers of bark peeled from the branch of her spine and her bindings bit, then hurt. The hurt was like a knife, or as though a bullet had nicked the heart and lodged somewhere leaving her alive, in pain. Somewhere, some part of her that she couldn’t name, hurt.

Bullet?
A memory of bullets flooded her. Recall arose from the heart she carried and the pain it held cut at her. At first, she liked the hurt, drew deep breaths and let the cold calculation of it tear through her ribs. The rusted edges of old keys, curled tin, bent strap iron, all the metal she carried grated against the cracked leather, rotting rope, knotted cloth and thong that laced her up. She explored it all. She touched her chest near the heart, felt the places where the pain was. The pain eased, settled, then vanished.

Better.

Then she missed the pain.

Hurt told when something was wrong. That was why it was.

She was still mostly twig and stick, leaf-filled and mud-covered, bound in rope and rag. An empty hornet nest, harness traces, and a few metal bits that had tumbled downriver and gone to moldering rust in the dirt, all that became her, too. She was still becoming. She didn’t know what any of it was for before or now.

Her teeth were small shells from an ocean she'd never imagine. For years the shells had sat on a table by a window in a shack upstream, deep in the Driftless; they were mementoes of a day more than a century gone. A flood had taken cabin, table, shells, people, and recollections, left them on the Kiddorf banks. Now they were teeth and that was that of time and memory.

She was part grass too, pretty grass, grown in a narrow sunny place between trees in a flat spot near the river. It flourished, grew beyond the ability of the blades to remain vertical and the sward had lain down flowing green. A flood disengaged the whole island of turf and it rolled with the river until it landed on the Banks. Now, it flowed rich brown across her shoulders, brown, except for a streak of sun white. Her hair cascaded across her forehead and spilled down her back.

Her forehead! What it would be, if she’d been a person and her head hadn’t been an empty hornet’s nest and if she’d been the person in the snoring man’s thoughts.

She was nearly a person now. Now, she had the heart of the man who had come to undo her to nothing. The heart of the man had been given freely and he died. He loved her. That, at least: She had been loved and now she had the killer's heart wrapped in the leaves of her chest.

Sitting on the bank of the river from which she’d been combed, she remembered how the killer had reached out to her. She reached out now to the man who slept under the bridge. Her arm stretched into the red and rising light. She listened as the birds drew morning up the sky and as cold water whispered past her. She listened to that wonder of breath, wet night air entering the hot moist places of the man, flowing through, mixing with his blood. Air and night gave its substance to become him. They were part of that body, smells and tastes, the hardness and softness of him.

Her mud rag skin smoothed at the thought of him, the grasses of her hair softened, darkened, curled, then straightened, grew finer writhing past her cheek and shoulders. The nuts and birds egg shells of her eyes grew fluid and the hard old leathers that bound the soft and fragrant mosses, toadstools and big-head mushrooms of her chest grew tight, tighter. Then it all softened and they tingled when she touched them, her breasts. What they were, were breasts. She continued to touch them. As she did, the sprigs of her fingers paled and grew supple in pearly light, and her chest, her chest filled. Ah, she felt it fill not with air, but pain. Yes, pain. Love. Love. The warning.

The man across the little river dreamed in sleep. He dreamed of
her
. Of the witch woman, of course, the one she was becoming. Soon. She looked down at herself. Soon there would be little difference. Only inside would be difference. Inside, where the heart of the killer who had loved her still beat. And he would not; the man would not love, not her. Maybe he’d not love the Other, the witch woman, either. But her killer’s heart beat. It beat and hurt. Called
warning
. What would the man whose heart she carried have done?

The river was cold. Not like it had been. Winter was nearly done and another spring was draining snow from the deep high Driftless above the town. Cold when it joined the river, the water had warmed in the slow quiet above the dam. Feather Proud had no need for shoes. He forgot his shoes and they were gone. His skin yearned to feel the air. He forgot his clothes and his clothes were gone. He ran naked in the cool spring, splashing the warming icemelt stream as the last of night's stars drained into the old mouth of morning.

He passed under the bridge, ran by the smoking camp of the man, Bunch. He swept past the woman seated on the other side of the river. When she looked at him she raised bone-thin hands to her eyes.

She heard with spiderweb ears. Feet splashed as he dissolved into being. She saw his arrival through the mists and gently drifting smoke of the man’s fire. The runner arrived streaming.

He is no man
. She knew that much. He was naked and his flesh streamed steam like the river. He was no more alive than she, yet she saw him,
he is mist made whole
, she thought.
Oh!
she realized, he’s
as alive as I am and not one bit more.

He looked. She was not alive. Not a woman, no more than he was a man. But she was as alive as he was. She looked like the woman who lived in the old wooden house up by the river. The one with the lightening down her hair. There it was on this one: the lightening ran through her hair, down her cheek and neck, down her shoulders, across her back. She had hair of fine, fine strand.

She stood. She was naked to the morning. Her hand covered her breast. Her other hand covered the mother part between her legs.

She was beautiful.

To her, he was as beautiful as life.

He stopped to speak, but waited. Birds called. Morning was full of sound, the river, things alive, and things sleeping for the season or the things that were coming back to life. She rose, standing on feet of brambles, the fat brown grubs that were her toes felt the mud under her give, ooze, with her weight. She felt. She felt the warmer air of morning's light.

I am for the darkness
, she thought.
I'm of night and it's morning and I must find deep forest.

She didn't move. She felt warning. He warned her heart. She felt the warmth of the warning, the love, the sameness of him.

Feather Proud waited. Her tongue was a fish tail grown old. It served, grew more competent with each word. She said.

“I have the heart of a killer,” is what she said.

“Oh,” Feather Proud said. He breathed her. She smelled like the world, like a long winter flood, smelled like the forest. He wondered if he smelled, too. “I'm not here,” he said, “You don't have to speak to me.”

She stared at him even though he wasn't there. Even though morning mist rose around him and drifted up the pillars of his legs, his hard golden legs. Even though he ran with sweat and smelled like...

She sniffed the air. It hurt to do so, but she did it, she did it so she could smell this man who wasn't there. She enjoyed the pain because he smelled like sweat and smoke. He smelled like the man who slept under the bridge, dreaming.

Oh. Oh.
She was forgetting the man who slept. And the heart of the killer inside her beat stronger. The twigs and knots of her fingers quivered as when a breeze stirred the trees. She no longer wanted to cover herself.

And she didn't.

“But I wish you would speak to me,” he said as she dropped her arms to her sides, “even if I’m not here.” The world smiled. The sun, through the trees, fell into his eyes and hurt, it hurt him. He didn't mind the pain. Sometimes pain brought beauty. Like running.

“I have the heart...” he said – not wanting to say to her from where his heart had come. He knew he had to say it. He started again, “I have the heart of a small bird.”

She stared.

“I'm a warrior without people. I left them. I ran for help. I died running. I was killed by a rock to the back of my head.” He stopped talking. He looked at her. He looked at the deep blue sky, then, “No!” he said, looking back at her. “Not for help. It is in my heart to tell you I ran not for help but for myself. I ran for my life. I left my people and ran from battle. And yet I was killed.”

“I never lived,” she said.

“I think,” he said, “I never did, either.” He thought about it. About the seasons of running, about all the days he'd spent looking. About coffee and grunts. About pie and the empty road ahead, wondering where was the help, where was the place that would give rest. Not among the living was there any such place. “No. I didn't, either. I never lived,” he decided, “I haven’t even the heart of the smallest bird.”

“But I have the heart of a killer in me,” she said. “I could share that.” She stepped into the water. She felt the cold stream over the mud of her legs, through the severing branches of her calves. She felt.

Feather Proud watched her step through the stream. She was beautiful. Her skin was nut brown. She looked soft. Her hair looked as though it would be a tent for their faces, her eyes would be the night sky. He hoped they could touch.

They touched. She slipped into his arms, his arms slipped about her. He drew her rich-scented flesh toward his.

She wondered at the touch of his arms, felt the ripple of muscles as he gathered her to him. She was in wonder, too, at the hard and soft thing between his legs the which now rose against her lower grasses and slithered the dews that had formed there.

His chest pressed her breast. He felt the heart of her beating against him, in him. She drew sharp breath and they flowed together in the sun.

When he looked at her again, when she looked at him again, they were dying. They knew it. The woman who had never lived and the man who was not alive were dying.

“Everything I am will be what it was,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“It will.”

“Yes.”

“Except my heart,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. He had felt it beating.

“Where will that go?”

He took her up. She was as light as a feather. She had grown pale.

“Are you afraid,” he asked.

“I don't know what that is,” she said. “’Afraid’.”

“Nothing,” he said. “Afraid is nothing.”

He'd come alive for one more run. He'd take her away from here. He’d carry her upstream to the night, where she could rest in the headland of the Rolling River. He'd be alive that long and so would she. After all the time, it would be enough.

Eagle Feather Proud ran. He ran like the wind with beauty until he was gone, until they both were.