The Driftless Area (4 page)

“Then there were some trees in the way, and I could see where you would come out, but you never did.”

She began coiling the rope and Pierre looked at the stake, which was a length of rebar with a red epoxy coating.

“Have you done this before?” he said.

“No. But I’ve thought about how I would.”

Then she put the rope over her shoulder and took the mallet and knocked the stake through the ice and into the water.

“Come on,” she said.

They made their way to the shore, giving wide berth to the wandering slick of watery ice. She said her name
was Stella Rosmarin and she lived in a house on the bluff. They crossed the narrow beach and came to stone steps that rose east to west across the rock wall. Pierre sat down to remove the drenched skates and replace them with the boots that were in the same condition. He told her his name. Then they went up.

It was a yellow two-story house in a clearing set back a hundred yards from the edge of the land. Sashes of frost were in the windows and evergreen trees stood all around with their dark branches separated by the weight of snow.

They went into the house where it was warm and Stella put her hood back and took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair in the kitchen. Pierre had imagined that she would be beautiful—reflexively, as he did when hearing women’s voices on the radio—but he was not prepared for how beautiful she was.

Slender, in a white thermal shirt and deep green corduroys. Curved hips, narrow waist. Brilliant shoulders, delicate yet purposeful, like wings. Strong arms—as he knew. Long and graceful neck. Thick dark hair down her back. Full serious mouth. Dark eyes. Some hurt or concern in the eyes that he could not trace.

He stood looking at her with the water from his wool coat dripping around his feet.

“You need to get out of those things,” he said.

“I can change over to the bar,” he said. “But I would take a ride there if you could.”

“I don’t have a car,” she said.

“Do you have a clothes dryer?”

She showed him the back room where the washer and dryer were. He closed the door and got undressed and put his coat and clothes in the dryer. A big green towel was in a wicker basket and he dried off with it.

Then she handed a white bathrobe around the door and he put it on and tied the cord and put the green towel around his neck like a millionaire taking it easy at the health club.

The robe was thick and soft and smelled like the inside of an orange peel. It occurred to him that she had worn it, and now he was wearing it, and so it was like touching her, once removed.

They drank tea and whiskey at the kitchen table as his clothes rolled around in the dryer and his boots steamed in the oven.

“I think I saved your life, Pierre,” she said.

“I think you did too.”

“You should never skate alone.”

On the table there was a bonsai tree in a terra-cotta tray with pebbles and moss and tiny branches that bent to the side as if blown by the wind.

“And now I owe you a great favor,” said Pierre, “that only I can do.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Doesn’t it? In stories, anyway.”

“And what would that be?”

“You wouldn’t know till the time comes,” said Pierre.

“A messenger arrives.
Your horse is waiting
. You know.
The hour is upon us.”

“Do you ride horses?”

“No. But you’d be able to all of a sudden. You’d find that you could. Or not, and you would fall off.”

“Maybe you have hypothermia,” she said.

“What are the symptoms?”

“Confusion, I know.”

“Actually I feel pretty good.”

“So do I.”

“Do you live here all the time?” he said.

“Yes.”

“It seems quiet.”

“This place was left to me,” she said. “I came from Wisconsin two summers ago. I needed somewhere to stay, and there was no one here, so it seemed to make sense.”

“Why did you need somewhere to stay?”

“Oh, it’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you someday.”

“How do you get around without a car?”

“I don’t, very much,” she said. “I have a bicycle.”

“Not much good this time of year.”

“No, that’s true. They deliver my groceries, and the
mailman comes, and the meterman, though he doesn’t come that often, compared to the mailman.”

“It sounds kind of lonely.”

“It is, but I haven’t minded so much. I guess you could say I’ve been waiting.”

“For what?”

She bent her head to blow steam from the tea as she held the cup in both hands.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You, maybe. To pull you out of the lake.”

The dryer completed its cycle, and Pierre got dressed, said goodbye to Stella, and left the house. Her driveway wound down through the trees to the Lake Road, where he turned south and headed for the Jack of Diamonds. It was dark. His clothes were dry, and though his boots had seemed dry enough in the kitchen of Stella’s house, they were wet and cold now, and he stamped his feet on the pavement to keep them warm.

I’ll have to go back and see her again, he thought.

FOUR

T
HE
J
ACK
of Diamonds was a low building of dark dovetailed timbers and square yellow windows set against the bank of the forest. Pierre went around to the side, through the kitchen, and down to the basement, where he had a locker with dry socks and sneakers. He put them on and went upstairs.

Chris Garner and Larry Rudd were sitting at the bar. They came in three or four times a week to drink beer and talk of obscure subjects and everyday items, such as rotary weed trimmers or garbage disposals, that were more dangerous than commonly understood. They were in their fifties and had been teammates on a basketball team that almost went to the state tournament many years ago. Now Rudd owned two vacuum cleaner stores and Garner sold shoes.

Pierre rearranged the liquor bottles as they talked. He grouped them by color, which other bartenders
found unprofessional, because blue gins would end up next to blue vodkas, for example, but so be it.

“Oh, we watched it,” said Rudd. “The wife and me, in the comfort of our home. Watched the whole movie. But if that’s supposed to be sexy, I don’t know, I must be missing something.”

“Because of the masks,” said Garner.

“Yeah. You couldn’t tell who anybody was.”

“But that’s the idea, though, isn’t it. The anonymity.

That it would tend to make it more exciting.”

“Not knowing what somebody looks like?” said Rudd. “What exciting about that?”

“Well, it depends on the mask, I guess. If it was like the Lone Ranger wore you would have a pretty good idea of the overall appearance.”

“Nah, these were over their whole faces. They were supposed to be—I don’t know what. Cats. Spirits of the past. Birds. I believe there were birds. Lords and ladies.”

“Frightening things,” suggested Garner. “At, like, a ball or something.”

“Well, again, that may have been the intention. But to me it was very implausible.”

“Maybe it’s different for young people,” said Garner. “Pierre, get in on this.”

“What’s the question?” said Pierre.

“Would you sleep with some woman if you didn’t know who it was because she was wearing a mask?”

“That’s what you’re asking.”

“Rudd seen a movie about that.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you might.”

“It’s possible.”

“Pierre, you dog.”

“You guys about ready?”

Pierre drew two beers, poured off the foam, topped the glasses up, and set them on the bar.

“A face is kind of a mask anyway, when you think about it,” he said.

Rudd took a drink and set the glass down. “You should never ask Pierre anything.”

“You don’t make your face,” said Pierre. “It’s given to you. You might think it represents your true self, but why would it? Half the time you make an expression and think, Oh, this is my whatever expression, and nobody even knows what you’re thinking.”

“That’s true,” said Garner. “I have no idea what my face looks like to the outside world.”

“That’s just as well,” said Rudd. “So anyway, we get done watching this sex movie with all the masks, and I go out to the kitchen, and there’s some water standing in the sink. So what do I do? I run the garbage disposal, right, as that’s the only way to get rid of the water. And this is my problem with them: that you can’t just pull some simple plug but you have to fire up
the equivalent of an outboard motor to get the fucking water out of the sink—when what should come shooting out but this huge shard of blue glass. I was lucky it didn’t kill me.”

Pierre gave last call at the end of the night, and everyone but Chris Garner went home. The shoe salesman lived alone and was often the last to leave. He sat at a table near the bar with a Rusty Nail he’d been working on for some time. Pierre carted kegs up to the walk in cooler and then went behind the bar, where he stood counting money and putting it in the cash box.

“Do you believe in fate, Chris?” he said.

“Fate.”

“Yeah. That things happen for a reason.”

“Sometimes. Like if your car won’t start, and you left the lights on, that’s probably why.”

“That’s not fate.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“Fate is more like you leaving your lights on in order that the car won’t start.”

“Who would do that?”

“Nobody, on purpose. But if you were meant to.”

“Then no. I would have to say I don’t believe it. You must, however, or you wouldn’t raise the question.”

“I’m not sure.”

“You should ask Rudd. He would know.”

“Yeah?”

“Or if he didn’t, he would make something up.”

Terry Benton, owner of the Jack of Diamonds, came in at half past midnight. His story was one of those you read about from time to time. He had made a lot of money designing computer networks in Oregon and retired nine years ago at the age of forty four to return to the Midwest and start a supper club. His idea had been to re-create an earlier Jack of Diamonds, which had been in Eden Center and which he remembered from his childhood.

“Any trouble tonight?” he said.

“Nope,” said Pierre.

“How’d we do?”

“Better than last Sunday.”

“Last Sunday wasn’t bad.”

“Yeah, so . . . better than that.”

Terry laid his camel hair coat along the bar, sat down, and turned toward the room. He had a deceptive build—wide of frame but not very deep, as if he had been flattened by a cartoon steamroller. “Do you like the chairs?”

“I guess so,” said Pierre. “What about them?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure about the red vinyl anymore.”

“What would you get, wood?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Can’t hardly go wrong with wood,” said Pierre.

“The red might be too busy.”

“I fell in the lake today.”

“Did you?”

“I was skating.”

“You wouldn’t catch me on that lake.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you fall in. What’s wrong with Garner?”

Pierre shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

Terry walked out among the tables, swinging his arms and clapping his hands. “Let’s be going home, Chris.”

“All right, all right,” said Garner. He stood and put on his overcoat. He adjusted the lapels and shook his head and walked with Terry to the door.

“You could use some new shoes,” he said. “Why don’t you stop in one of these times?”

“Maybe I will. But tell me something. What’s your opinion of the chairs?”

“They seem fine to me, Terry.”

Terry had a lot invested in the place. He’d outfitted the kitchen with Ramhold-Bailer appliances, hired the chef Keith Lyon away from the Chanticleer in Austin, Minnesota, and commissioned an artist to paint murals on the walls. In the style of Grant Wood, the murals
portrayed the surrounding countryside as a nearsighted dream in which everything was smoother and greener and more discrete than in life. The bar itself was cherrywood and stable as stone.

Terry had wanted the restaurant to be suave, for that is how he remembered the original, but he also wanted it to be popular, and he seemed flexible as to how this might be achieved.

You could see this in his reaction to the incident of the sink and the sign. Late one night about a year before, a man who had been shut off from drinking anymore went into the men’s room and tore the sink off the wall. He was banned for life but that was not the end of it. A couple of days later a homemade sign appeared in the ditch along the Lake Road leading to the Jack of Diamonds. It was black paint on white plywood, and what it said was:

T
WO MILES TO THE

STINKING GREASE PIT

Well, there was no question who had put up the sign. It was obviously the man who had wrecked the sink and flooded the men’s room. And at their weekly meeting most of the employees agreed that the thing to do was to pull up the sign and throw it away.

But Terry said, “Let’s think about this.”

He said, “We are not afraid of this accusation. It is laughable. The Jack happens to have Keith Lyon, probably the best chef in the Driftless Area.”

Terry was always trying to get people to call the Jack of Diamonds “the Jack,” as he thought it sounded hipper and more inviting.

“And don’t say anything, Keith, because you know I’m right. That lamb thing you make, whatever it is, on the open fire, and they wrote it up in the magazine—”

Keith sat at the bar drinking white wine. He could be brutal when things went wrong in the kitchen but was kind of quiet and bemused otherwise. “Lamb à la Primitive,” he said.

“Right. So I ask you. Grease pit? Are you kidding me? And might it not be the cooler thing if we did not respond? If we did not deign to respond.”

“I think it’s an insult,” said the waitress, Charlotte Blonde.

Despite her name Charlotte was a brunette. She had begun waiting tables to pay tuition at the community college in Desmond City but she got pregnant by a teaching assistant and tuition went up, and now she had a infant daughter and a full-time job.

“And it could add to our cult status,” Terry Benton said. “What sort of place would ignore such a sign as if it didn’t exist? A cool place, I would think. A place that is very confident of its own value.”

“As to the sign, I don’t care one way or the other,” said Keith Lyon. “I’m not sure we have cult status, but the sign is not an issue to me, because that’s not how I get here anyway.”

“Well, okay,” said Terry. “If we don’t have cult status, this might give us one.”

And that is why the plywood sign painted with the bitterness of the banned customer still stands on the Lens Lake Road in Shale. It has been changed, though. Now it says:

T
WO MILES TO THE

J
ACK OF DIAMONDS

The judge presiding over the charges against Pierre seemed young and lost in the robe of justice. It was black and slick like a poncho in the rain, and he kept pushing the sleeves up so they would not interfere with his hands.

He was one of those judges who make it a point to know as little as possible about the cases before them. He would state the facts all wrong and rely on the lawyers to set him straight and in general seemed to resent having to deal with so many instances of societal breakdown.

But he was a judge, Pierre thought, and must have aspired to become one, so what had he been expecting?
Naturally, the people in court had problems. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in court.

The lawyers responded to the young judge’s habitual confusion with deference bordering on sarcasm, laying it on with phrases like “should it please the Court” and “if Your Honor might be directed to the document at his perusal,” until you would think that nothing productive ever got done here at all, or, if it did, it was because it had been worked out in advance, as in Pierre’s case.

“I have what I take to be a plea agreement,” said the judge. “But I will tell you right now that I am neither bound—nor, for that matter, inclined—to accept it.”

Pierre’s lawyer leaned toward him, bringing along a fog of cologne like the gift shop of a failing hospital. The reflection of the neon lights curved in his large glasses. “Don’t worry. He’s got to say that. It’s just for the people in the cheap seats.”

“Being inebriated, the defendant broke up a party,” said the judge. “He does not dispute this. He does not express remorse. This is a hostile act disguised as carelessness, and this court doesn’t go for that kind of thing. Moreover, if Accelerated Rehabilitation is for exceptional cases—and we agree that it is, so I guess it must be—then—”

“Your Honor, if I might interject,” said Pierre’s lawyer. “My client did not break up a party. The party, to the best of my knowledge—uh, continued for several
hours. And he has plenty of remorse. If he has not expressed it to this point, it is due to the simple fact that no one has asked him or offered a forum in which he might do so.”

The judge seized the papers on his desk, looking at one, tossing it aside, looking at another, squinting and scowling. “Where’s the bill of particulars?”

“Now, he went
into
a party.”

Still shuffling papers, the judge said, as if to himself, “He went into a party. Well, I hate to tell you, but that is not illegal.”

“He walked into a house where a party was under way,” said the prosecutor. “By virtue of leaving their door unlocked, as one well might while hosting a party, the law-abiding owners of the house became subject to an unwanted incursion which the defendant refused to forego except in his own sweet time.”

“Is this true, Pierre?”

“More or less,” said Pierre, “but I did leave.”

“Was there no violence? What am I thinking of? Was there another case like this one?”

“Let me read to you,” the prosecutor continued. “I quote here the police report. ‘Asked for why he would not go, subject states he needs a little time and demands they let him do his coin trick or he will not leave.’ ”

“‘For why he would not go. . . .’” said the judge.

“Your Honor, if I might footnote that,” said Pierre’s attorney.

“No, I don’t think you might,” said the judge. “A coin trick? Is that really why we’re here? Am I given to understand we are talking about a coin trick?”

“It’s in the affidavit,” said the prosecutor. “But I would argue that what he actually did in the house is not pertinent. Only a card trick, perhaps that’s so. But does this mean that anyone who breaks into a house will be armored against prosecution provided he insists on performing some—”

“Well now, wait, is it a card trick or a coin trick?” said the judge.

“I’m sorry, you’re right; it is a coin trick.”

“And would the defendant like to demonstrate this trick for the court?”

“No, Your Honor,” said Pierre.

“And, you know, that’s probably wise.”

The judge found the paper he was looking for, flattened it with the edge of his hand, and signed it.

“I will take the plea,” he said. “You know I don’t want to, yet by my signature I so order.”

Accelerated Rehabilitation had a scientific sound, as if Pierre would rehabilitate faster and faster in an elliptical path until evaporating in a blue flash of pure mental health.