Torch (2 page)

They went to a Chinese restaurant. They could still eat. They read the astrology on the placemats and ordered green beans in garlic sauce and cold sesame noodles and then read the placemats again, out loud to each other. They were horses, both of them, thirty-eight years old. They were in perpetual motion, moved with electric fluidity, possessed unconquered spirits. They were impulsive and stubborn and lacked discretion. They were a perfect match.

Goldfish swam in a pond near their table. Ancient goldfish. Unsettlingly large goldfish. “Hello, goldfish,” she cooed, tilting toward them in her chair. They swam to the surface, opening their big mouths in perfect circles, making small popping noises.

“Are you hungry?” she asked them. “They’re hungry,” she said to Bruce, then looked searchingly around the restaurant, as if to see where they kept the goldfish food.

At a table nearby there was a birthday party, and Bruce and Teresa were compelled to join in for the birthday song. The woman whose birthday it was received a flaming custard, praised it loudly, then ate it with reserve.

Bruce held her hand across the table. “Now that I’m dying we’re dating again,” she said for a joke, though they didn’t laugh. Sorrow surged erotically through them as if they were breaking up. Her groin was a fist, then a swamp. “I want to make love with you,” she said, and he blinked his blue eyes, tearing up so much that he had to take his glasses off. They’d tapered off over the years. Once or twice a month, perhaps.

Their food arrived, great bowls of it, and they ate as if nothing were different. They were so hungry they couldn’t speak, so they listened to the conversation of the happy people at the birthday party table. The flaming custard lady insisted that she was a dragon, not a rabbit, despite what the placemat said. After a while they all rose and put their heavy coats on, strolling past Teresa and Bruce, admiring the goldfish in their pond.

“I had a goldfish once,” said a man who held the arm of the custard lady. “His name was Charlie.” And everyone laughed uproariously.

Later, after Bruce paid the bill, they crossed a footbridge over a pond where you could throw a penny.

They threw pennies.

On the drive home it hit them, and they wept. Driving was good because they didn’t have to look at each other. They said the word, but as if it were two words.
Can. Sir
. They had to say it slowly, dissected, or not at all. They vowed they would not tell the kids. How could they tell the kids?

“How could we not?” Teresa asked bitterly, after a while. She thought of how, when the kids were babies, she would take their entire hands into her mouth and pretend that she was going to eat them until they laughed. She remembered this precisely, viscerally, the way their fingers felt pressing onto her tongue, and she fell forward, over her knees, her head wedged under the dash, to sob.

Bruce slowed and then pulled over and stopped the truck. They
were out of Duluth now, off the freeway, on the road home. He hunched over her back, hugging her with his weight wherever he could.

She took several deep breaths to calm herself, wiped her face with her gloves, and looked up out the windshield at the snow packed hard on the shoulder of the road. She felt that home was impossibly far.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They drove in silence under the ice-clear black sky, passing turkey farms and dairy farms every few miles, or houses with lit-up sheds. When they crossed into Coltrap County, Bruce turned the radio on, and they heard Teresa’s own voice and it shocked them, although it was a Thursday night. She was interviewing a dowser from Blue River, a woman named Patty Peterson, the descendant of a long line of Petersons who’d witched wells.

Teresa heard herself say, “I’ve always wondered about the art—I suppose you could call it an art—or perhaps the
skill
of selecting a willow branch.” And then she switched the radio off immediately. She held her hands in a clenched knot on her lap. It was ten degrees below zero outside. The truck made a roaring sound, in need of a new muffler.

“Maybe it will go away as mysteriously as it came,” she said, turning to Bruce. His haggard face was beautiful to her in the soft light of the dashboard.

“That’s what we’re going to shoot for,” he said, reaching for her knee. She considered sliding over to sit close to him, straddling the clutch, but felt tied to her place near the dark window.

“Or I could die,” she said calmly, as if she’d come to peace with everything already. “I could very well die.”

“No, you couldn’t.”

“
Bruce.
”

“We’re all going to die,” he said softly. “Everyone’s going to die, but you’re not going to die
now
.”

She pressed her bare hand flat onto the window, making an imprint in the frost. “I didn’t think I’d die this way.”

“You have to stay positive, Ter. Let’s get the radiation started and then we’ll see. Just like the doctor said.”

“He said we’ll see about
chemo
. Whether I’ll be strong enough for
chemo
after I’m done with radiation, not about me being cured, Bruce. You never pay attention.” She felt irritated with him for the first time that day and her irritation was a relief, as if warm water were being gently poured over her feet.

“Okay, then,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, we’ll see. Right?”

She stared out the window.

“Right?” he asked again, but she didn’t answer.

They drove past a farm where several cows stood in the bright light of the open barn, their heads turned toward the dark of the woods beyond, as if they detected something there that no human could. A thrashing.

T
HE SOUND
of his mother’s voice filled Joshua with shame.

“This is
Modern Pioneers
!” she exclaimed from all four of the speakers in the dining room of the Midden Café and the one speaker back in the kitchen that was splattered with grease and soot and ketchup. Joshua listened to the one in the kitchen as he scrubbed pots with a ball of steel wool, his arms elbow-deep in scorching, soapy water. Hearing his mother’s voice made his head hurt, as if a dull yet pointed object were being pressed into his eardrums. Her radio voice was exactly like she was: insistent, resolute, amused, wanting to know. Wanting to know everything from everyone she interviewed. “So, how exactly, can you tell us, do you collect the honey from the bees?” she’d ask, dusky and smooth. Other times she held forth for the entire hour herself, discussing organic gardening and how to build your own cider press, quilting and the medicinal benefits of ginseng. Once, she’d played “Turkey in the Straw” on her dulcimer for all of northern Minnesota to hear and then read from a book about American folk music. Recently, she had announced how much money she’d spent on tampons in six months and then proceeded to describe other, less costly options: natural sponges and cotton pads that she’d sewn herself out of Joshua and Claire’s old shirts. She’d actually said that:
Joshua and Claire’s old shirts
. Claire was off to college by then, leaving Joshua alone to wallow in humiliation the first week of his senior year of high school.

Marcy pushed her way back into the kitchen through the swinging door, holding a stack of dirty plates with uneaten edges of food and wadded-up napkins. She set them on the counter where Joshua had just finished cleaning up and then reached into her apron for a cigarette. Joshua watched her, trying to appear not to, as he scraped off the dishes. She was in her late twenties, married, with two kids, short and big-breasted,
which made her look heavier than she was. Joshua spent a lot of his time at work trying to decide whether he thought she was pretty or not. He was seventeen, lanky and fair, quiet but not shy.

His mother was talking to a dowser named Patty Peterson. He could hear Teresa’s animated voice and then Patty’s quavering one. Marcy stood listening, untied her apron, and tied it again more tightly. “Next thing you know your mom will go down to Africa and teach us all about it. Maybe the way they go to the bathroom down there.”

“She would like to go to Africa,” Joshua said, dumb and steadfast and serious, refusing to acknowledge even the slightest joke about his mother. She
would
go to Africa, he knew. She’d go anywhere, she’d leap at the chance.

“They got an African over in Blue River now. Some adopted kid,” Vern said from the back door. He had it propped open with a bucket despite the cold. Marcy was the owner’s daughter; Vern, the night cook.

“Not African, Vern. Black,” said Marcy. “He’s from the Cities. That’s not Africa.” She adjusted the barrette that held her curly hair up at the back of her head. “Are you trying to freeze us all to death in here?”

Vern shut the door. “Maybe your mom will interview the African,” he said. “Tell us what he has to say for himself.”

“Be nice,” Marcy said. She went up on her tiptoes and pulled a stack of Styrofoam containers down from the top shelf, clenching her cigarette in her mouth. “Nothing against your mom, Josh,” she said. “She’s a super nice lady. An
interesting
lady. It takes all kinds.” With great care, she tapped the burning end of her cigarette on a plate, then she blew on it and put it back into her apron pocket and buzzed out the door.

Six years ago, when his mother had first started the show, Joshua hadn’t felt ashamed. He’d been proud, as if he had been hoisted up onto a platform and was glowing red-hot and lit up from within. He believed his mother was famous, that they all were—he and Claire and Bruce. Teresa had made them part of the show; his life, their lives, were the fodder. She made them eat raw garlic to protect against colds and heart disease, rub pennyroyal on their skin to keep the mosquitoes away, drink a tea of boiled jack-in-the-pulpit when they had a cough. They could not eat meat, or when they did they had to kill it themselves, which they did one winter when they’d butchered five roosters that as chicks they’d thought were hens. They shook jars of fresh cream until it congealed into lumps of butter. His mother got wool straight off a neighbor’s sheep and
carded it and spun it on a spinning wheel that Bruce had built for her. She saved broccoli leaves and collected dandelions and the inner layers of bark from certain trees and used these things to make dye for the yarn. It came out the most unlikely colors: red and purple and yellow, when you might have expected mudlike brown or green. And then their mother would tell everyone all about what the family did on the radio. Their successes and failures, discoveries and surprises. “We are all modern pioneers!” she’d say. Listeners would call in to ask her questions on the air, or would call her at home for advice. Slowly at first, and then overnight it seemed, Joshua didn’t want to be a modern pioneer anymore. He wanted to be precisely what everyone else was and nothing more. Claire had stopped wanting to be a modern pioneer well before that. She insisted on wearing makeup and got into raging fights with their mother and Bruce about why they could not have a TV, why they could not be normal. These were the same fights Joshua was having with them now.

“You’re going to have to clean the fryer too,” said Vern. “Don’t go trying to leave it for Angie.”

Joshua went back to scrubbing, turning the hot water on full blast. The steam felt good on his face, opening the pores. Pimples bloomed on the rosy part of his cheeks and the wide plain of his forehead. At night in bed he scratched them until they bled, and then he would get up and put hydrogen peroxide on them. He liked the feeling of the bubbles, eating everything away.

“You hear what I told you?” Vern said, when Joshua shut the water off.

“Yep.”

“What?”

“I said I did,” he said more harshly, turning his blue eyes to Vern: a gaunt old man with a paunch and a bulbous red nose. One arm had a tattoo of a hula dancer, the other a hooked anchor with a rope wound around it.

“Well, answer me, then. Show some respect for your elders.” Vern stood near the door in his apron and T-shirt, which were caked with smudges the color of barbeque sauce where he had wiped his hands. He opened the door again and tossed his cigarette butt into the darkness. Outside there was a concrete landing, glazed with ice, and an alley where Joshua’s truck and Vern’s van were parked along the back wall of Ed’s Feed.

Joshua lifted the sliding hood of the dishwasher, and the steam roiled out. He slid a clean rack of flatware out and began to sort the utensils into round white holders as he wiped each one quickly with a towel.

“Running behind tonight, ain’t you?”

“Nope.” On the radio he heard his mother laugh, and the well-witcher laughed too, and then they settled back into their discussion, serious as owls.

“Ain’t you?”

“I said no.”

“Maybe you’re gonna have to learn that when a man’s got a job, a man’s gotta show up on time, ain’t you?”

“Yep.”

“I seen you left the lasagna pan for Angie last night. Don’t go thinking that I don’t see. ’Cause I see. I see everything your shit for brains can think up about two weeks before you get to it. And I knowed you’re always thinking things. Trying to see what you can get away with. Ain’t you?”

“Nope.”

Vern watched Joshua, slightly bent from the waist, a cigarette smoking between his lips, as though he were trying to come up with something else to say, running down the list of things that pissed him off. Joshua had known Vern most of his life, without having known him at all. It wasn’t until they worked together at the café that he even knew that Vern’s name was Vern—Vern Milkkinen. Before that, he’d known him as the Chicken Man, the way most people in Midden did, because he spent his summers in the Dairy Queen parking lot selling baby chicks and eggs and an ever-changing assortment of homemade canned goods, soap, beeswax candles, and his special chokecherry jam. It had never occurred to Joshua to wonder what the Chicken Man—what Vern—did to occupy his time in the months that he wasn’t selling things until he walked into the kitchen at the café and saw Vern standing there, butcher knife in hand.

On that first day working together, Vern did not indicate that he remembered Joshua, seemingly unconscious of the fact that he’d actually watched him grow up, from four to seventeen, laying eyes on him during those fourteen summers at least once a week, first as a child, when Joshua would go with his mother to purchase things from the Chicken Man, and
then later when he was sent on his own. The DQ parking lot was the closest thing Midden had to a town square because it also shared its parking lot with the Kwik Mart and Gas, and Bonnie’s Burger Chalet. Every week he and the Chicken Man would exchange a nod or the slightest lift of the chin or hand. Once, when Joshua was ten, the Chicken Man asked him if he liked girls, if he had a girlfriend yet, if he’d ever kissed a girl, if he’d preferred brunettes or blonds.