Willard shrugs.
“I hope she doesn’t have that stomach flu. Len had it, he said it was killer.”
“Yeah, but short. She’s just wiped out.”
“Did Finn come by about the stove? He was supposed to show up around ten.”
“Nope.” Willard slides his arm into his jacket.
“Did he call?”
“Nope. I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re the best. Hey,” he says, turning from the door, “the fries are for the guy shooting pool.”
Nora raises the metal basket and shakes off the hot grease, then dumps the fries into a hotel pan lined with paper towels. She puts out ketchup and a napkin dispenser. “Fries,” she calls toward the back of the bar.
She’ll have to try and reach Finn again. Jesus. That’s twice he hasn’t showed. It’s bad enough not to come when you say you will, but it’s plain disrespectful to not even call.
A tall boy straddles a stool and leans his pool cue against the bar. “Did you know the table is crooked back there?” He shakes salt and then pepper over the basket.
“There’s nothing wrong with my table, it’s the floor that’s crooked.” How’s she supposed to handle a rush on burgers when half the grill won’t heat?
“They’re adjustable, you know. All you have to do is screw them up or down from the legs.”
Seriously, she’s not in the mood. He looks like a college kid, with pale hair that falls in an
I could care less
sort of way. “You can? My God, you’re a regular genius.” She leans in with a tone of voice honed glass-sharp over the years. “I can’t imagine how I ever got by before you set yourself on that stool.”
“Schooner.” Nora clamps the phone between her ear and shoulder. “He’s not here, Bev. I know, hon, try the 22.”
“Excuse me.”
It’s the kid again, flush cheeked and looking sheepish. “Excuse me, but could I please have some mustard?”
Nora sets a fresh squeeze bottle on the bar.
“Thanks,” he says, and then, “I’m sorry.” His words come out in a near-whisper.
She wasn’t expecting an apology. With the kids, it’s mostly know-it-all attitude.
“Forget it.” She puts a little sweetness in her voice, but now the boy won’t meet her eye. Nora watches him in the mirror, his chin propped in one hand while his long arm moves like a crane, lifting and dropping to the basket for fries. “That table’s been trouble for years,” she offers. Still, he won’t look up at her.
Nora opens the longboy to check her stock, jotting a quick list on an order pad. In the back room, she makes up a mixed case. Finn’s the one she’d like to have words with. She really is trying to watch herself. She knows how people can react so differently. Some are like frying pans where everything slides off, some are like mirrors—back at you in a flash, but some are like water—touch them anywhere and you’re in.
The boy is halfway through the basket already. Nora sets the case of beer on the floor behind the bar. “If you want to try and fix the table, I’ll take care of your tab. I don’t have a level, but you can eyeball it with a water pitcher. The footing slips back, though. It won’t last long.”
“Really?” the boy lifts his head.
“I’m Nora Truneau.” She extends her hand.
The boy wipes his fingers across a napkin, takes her hand and gives a bow with his head. “Deets.”
“Well, Deets, welcome to the Schooner.”
There’s the sound of footsteps down the back stair, then a crack of blue dusk and a shot of icy air. Nora pours a Manhattan, double cherries, and places it in front of Rose’s stool, where she lands like a bird on a limb, her hair dark and wiry with streaks of white, her bony shoulders settling in.
“How are things?” Nora asks.
Rose just nods and looks at her with those large, brown, everstartling eyes. They dominate her face, but it’s not just their size. It’s the way they contrast with the rest of her body—small, rickety, almost brittle—but then those big eyes, always liquid and swimming, like two dark dams barely holding.
“Rose, this is Deets.”
“Pleased.” Rose nods, lifting her hand in front of her mouth.
“Did you lose your bridge again?” Nora asks, shoving the warm bottles to the back of the cooler, feeling the sliver of protectiveness that has worked its way under her skin in the years since Rose became her tenant.
“It’s not lost,” Rose says, skimming her lowball in its wet spot on the bar as if it were circling in its own private skating rink. “It’s somewhere up there.” She lifts her chin toward the ceiling.
How she can keep track of anything, Nora doesn’t know. Not that her place is messy, it’s just full. She has all of Buck’s stuff still around—his accordion on the chair, his guitars and drum, even his shaving brush on the shelf in the bathroom.
The beer-after-work folks are starting to drift in, and Nora’s glad to be picking up the pace. She turns the news on over the bar, catching bits of it as she works. A train derailed near Ashland, groundwater toxic waste, Native American treaty rights, then clips of the lake in a year-ago storm, the waves crashing over the shipping channel walls. “You ready for another?” she calls to Deets, who is on his knees in back, examining the pool table.
Rose reaches up and bats at a shamrock, setting it spinning in the TV light. “He’ll never get that leg to stick.”
Nora shrugs. “Yeah, I know.”
“Do you remember that Irish commercial with all the green fields? That’s what these make me think of. What was it for?”
“Soap. Irish Spring.” Nora knocks a cigarette from her pack, and a lighter appears in front of her. “Thanks,” she says to Deets, who seems fully recovered.
“Wouldn’t spring in Ireland smell like sheep shit?” he says.
Nora lets out a smoke-choked laugh.
“Aye, lassie.” He feigns a thick brogue and leans toward Rose. “Ya smell as ripe as my field boots, ya do.”
It’s Nora’s big laugh this time, coming right from the gut. “What do they have now, comedy majors at the college?”
That one gets a cackle out of Rose.
“I don’t know. I’ve been out for ages.”
Nora is a bit surprised. She’s usually on the money with people’s age. “What are you doing still in town?”
“I’m not. I just moved here. I came for the lake.” He flashes her a knowing smile.
“The lake?” Nora wets a rag in the sink. “You moved here for the lake?”
“I’ve always wanted to live here. My uncle has a cabin on the Canadian border. I used to spend half the summer up there. You know, hunting for agates, scouting for boats. Oh man, the night sky on that beach. The black sea of stars. That’s what my uncle calls it. It felt more like home than my real home.”
“That lake’s an ass-cracker,” Rose says into her lowball.
“I can’t explain it, but I’ve always known I’d live here. I might learn to dive and try timber retrieval. There’s wood on the bottom from the logging days.”
“Old-growth trees.” Rose sips her drink. “I saw it on TV. Rich people want the wood for building, and people who make instruments, too. I wonder how an old-growth piano would sound.”
“My real dream is to work on a freighter. But I have to find out what it takes to do it.”
“I can tell you what it takes to work the ships.” Nora points to the pool table. “Either balls bigger than those, or else a very small brain. Don’t you know people die out there? You’ve got half an hour in that water if you’re lucky.”
“I’m a good swimmer.”
“It’s not about swimming. It’s about hypothermia. Why not live somewhere warm, like California? I’ve got a sister out there, and it’s all palm trees and sunshine. When I talked to her this morning she was drinking coffee on her patio. Really.” Nora wipes the bar. “If I were your age I’d turn tail and head west.”
“I recall your tail turning plenty at his age.” Rose stubs out her cigarette.
“Don’t you believe a word she says.”
“How about that infamous night down at Tony’s?”
“All right. Fine. You two can reminisce. I’ve got work to do.”
Nora gathers empties from the floor, stopping to chat with Ed and his crew, who are occupying the long table in front, then cleaning the mess left by Jimmy D., who can’t drink a bottle of beer without peeling off the label bit by bit and rolling the paper into little balls. She sets the empties on the bar. She likes to get to them early on, before the beery film dries inside.
“Schooner.” Nora has the phone on her shoulder while she scrubs a pair of glasses on the brushes.
“Listen, don’t get mad, okay? I know we’re supposed to come down on Friday, but it looks like it’s not going to work out.”
Nora dunks the glasses into the rinse tub, then sets them on the drying rack.
“Mom?”
“Janelle, I already did the shopping. And I promised Nikki a trip to the bowling alley.”
“Yeah, she told me about it. Do they have special times that are kid-appropriate?”
“It’s bowling. There aren’t any special times, except during leagues.” The silence on the other end of the line is loud. “Is there a problem with bowling?”
“It’s just not going to work, Mom. We’ve got a lot going on. It’ll be better for everyone if we make it another time.”
“Well, that depends how you define
everyone.
” Nora puts two more glasses on the brushes. She had a feeling this was going to happen again. “Where’s my Bun? Does she like her purple rabbit?”
“Nikki loves everything that comes from you, Mom.”
“Put her on.”
“She’s away on a playdate. I already told her the weekend is cancelled. You could come here. I’m not the only one with a car.”
Nora stops scrubbing. “I work Saturday night,” she says in a measured tone. “I always work on Saturday night.” She places the glasses on the rack and takes on another pair of dirties. Again, there’s nothing but silence on the line. Nora keeps her eyes on the brushes as she works.
“Look, I’m busy,” she says finally. “I really can’t talk now.”
“I can hear you washing glasses. You can’t be that busy.”
Nora looks blankly around the bar, catches Rose giving her a sympathetic look. The water sloshes in the stainless steel sink. There’s the sound of quarters being pumped into the cigarette machine, then the rod being pulled and the metallic thwack back, followed by a soft thud.
1622
Grey Rabbit struggles to get to the surface, where patches of light undulate and swaths of color twirl in icy clouds. The pressure in her chest is a frozen boulder. She works her arms to push herself upward, kicking her legs with all her strength, but it’s slow, slow, the water’s thick as wind and she has to fight to move through it. Her chest feels like it will burst apart. She is nearly there. She kicks and flails, at last propelling herself up and free.
But no, there is no relief. And there, above her, the taunting surface, twirling and swaying clear and ice blue, and then a child splashes in. The girl’s face wavers, growing huge and then small. Her eyes closed, her mouth a blue pucker. Grey Rabbit beats at the water like a frantic bird, trying to rise up and reach the child with her arms, but there is pressure against them, something holding her down, no, pulling, now lifting her upward, nearer and nearer to the sloshing light. Her face breaks the surface, and she gasps for air, mouths the dry brown emptiness around her. The child. She sees the tawny brown roof of her wigwam, then Bullhead’s broad back, turning away.
She’s no longer underwater; her spirit is in her body. The sky through the smoke hole is purple. Her stomach tightens. Food. They need food. Bullhead is making a soft clicking noise with her mouth. “There’s fresh snow,” she says. “The tracking will be good. Night Cloud will take Standing Bird along.” She stirs the fire and disappears out the door flap.
The girl’s round face, her lips a blue pucker. The image propels Grey Rabbit upright. Across the fire, her sons lay curled and sleeping. From outside come the sounds of Bullhead laying wood. Her words were neither reproachful nor angry, though Grey Rabbit sensed something between them meant for her. She drops her head as shame moves through her, quick as fire in dry grass. She should have been up and tending to her work, but instead she has let all the weight fall on Bullhead.
At the log on the slope above their camp, Grey Rabbit loosens her clothing and squats, her sleep-warmed skin meeting the cold air. The smell of wood smoke lifts through the trees. Around her, the pines hold dots of snow in their bark, and everything is purple and newly rounded—the wigwam like an overturned bowl, the spruce boughs splayed like thick dark hands. Below, mist rises from Gichigami, veiled and shifting, growing thicker with the light. Soon the water will be entirely hidden, transformed into a vast land of cloud.
Grey Rabbit pushes snow over the hole her urine carved, feels the new sharpness of her hip bones and a slight dizziness as she stands.
Slowly she descends, apart, watching, her sons sitting near the fire, Night Cloud returning from the direction of the river. His path leaves a dark line in the snow.