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Excerpt
The Stolen Pillbox
As soon as the Ford Touring Car crossed the St. Paul city limits on April 20,
1934 (`You Are Leaving St. Paul, Minn., Home of the Inlagd Sill Herring
Festival, Please Visit Us Again'), and passed into the great, square-upon-square
expanse of the surrounding farmland, Bena jotted down the odometer reading with
the golf pencil she kept in the ashtray: 5,434.
She did this cautiously, steering with her left hand. She wrote it on the cover
of Lectures on Surgical Pathology, the first in a stack of medical journals that
rested between her and Ted. She wanted to record the mileage, because it would
provide a way to appreciate the distance they were about to create between their
old existence and their new one. As the city receded in the rearview mirror, so,
she fervently believed, did their life up to that moment.
Ted glared at her scribblings. No doubt he wanted to scold her for defacing his
reading materials. But he held his tongue. Bena knew he considered himself
fortunate that his wife was an inquisitive woman, not bound by the usual female
fears and preoccupations, such as ringworm, rabies, cold cream, colic. Besides,
she imagined, it would be entertaining, when his interest in, say, `Synovial
Cysts of the Choroid Plexus' lagged, to try to break the code of numbers jotted
in the empty margins. A string of 22s, 23s, and 24s that he might attribute to
the daily high temperatures one week in March could actually be a tally of the
birds that visited the feeder outside their kitchen window. Bena was comforted
by numbers, and found a sense of assuredness and direction through her constant
accounting of them. While there existed numbers that were to her undeniably dark
(8, for example, because her brother drowned on the eighth day of August),
certain possessed the glow of fortune, like the number of her father's favorite
golf club (9-iron), the number of unloneliness (2), any number of her birthday
(7/13), the street number of her childhood house in St. Paul (45), and others
simply because they appeared round and portentous (33, 64, 89) and full of a
substance one might easily interpret as luck.
The odometer reading appeared a good omen to Bena, since the sum of the four
digits (5 + 4 + 3 + 4) was the number of her father's college football jersey, a
grass-stained crimson shirt that hung, still, in the basement next to his rifles
and his fishing rods. The patterns of his sweat had burned his body into the
fabric. The shirt was a relic to her, for it preserved the outlined shape of her
father when he was a happier man. As a vital boy growing up near Council Bluffs,
Iowa, Charles "Chickie" Duse had snapped the necks of chickens and even small,
lame calves with his bare hands-apt and brutal preparations for his future
career as president of the St. Paul Savings and Trust. Chickie was the one who
discovered his outwardly high-spirited wife dead of arsenic poisoning after the
birth of their second child, Bena Ingrid Duse (labor complications, the obituary
read), and had endured his son's drowning at the summer lake house he had
struggled to afford in order to prove, beyond a doubt, that he was no one's
farmhand.
As the landscape frayed into the dizzying warp and weft of ankle-high
cornstalks, their discouraged tendrils already a drab beige from the scarcity of
rain, Ted began reading aloud from a large maroon medical text, The Journal of
Immunology, alerting Bena to diseases relevant to their new home.
This was another aspect of herself she knew he appreciated: her fascination with
his work. He'd told her how he'd been struck by this on their first date,
sitting in a booth at Kaap's Soda Fountain in St. Paul, sipping on a malted
through a pair of white paper straws.
He'd talked to her about his passion for fishing, because women, as he told her
later, were frequently bored by medicine and bodies. To women in the past, he'd
talked about the heart. He'd described the way the blood was pushed and pumped,
he'd drawn diagrams on a paper napkin with his fountain pen. But these women
always looked at him differently when they knew he'd held a dead heart in his
hands; they'd gazed distastefully upon his fingers as if a bit of death were
still caught under the nails.
Fishing didn't interest Bena Duse. Neither did Ted's sister's wedding, his
cousin's new baby, his mother's recent commission to have a well-known landscape
painter sit in a rowboat half a mile offshore in Lake Michigan to do a portrait
of their summer property in Door County, Wisconsin.
Out of sheer desperation, then, he'd talked to her about the heart.
"Did you know," he'd inquired, seeming to detect the initial signs of intrigue
in this private girl who was smart around the mouth, "that a normal heart beats
seventy-two times a minute?"
She had raised a pale eyebrow. She was quite pretty, he later told her he'd
thought that day, pretty in a way that sneaks up on you.
"At this rate," he'd continued, `the heart contracts 4,320 times in an hour,
103,680 times in a day, 37,843,200 times in a year, and 2,649,024,000 times in
an average lifetime.' Or consider the common shrew, he added, whose heart beats
one thousand times a minute.
Bena had held out her wrist to him, and he, intuiting what she wanted, unhooked
her silver charm bracelet and placed the fingers of her other hand over that
bare place. He pressed his cold palm over her knuckles. She smiled at him when
she located the beating of her own pulse. They held hands and stared at the
second hand of the pink-lit clock over the cash register.
"Seventy-eight," she said.
"Seventy-seven."
"Well," she had replied, "you're the doctor."
"The causative agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Dermaceniroxenus
rickettsi, is transmitted and perpetuated by the tick Dermacentorivenustus," Ted
informed her now. "It is a minute intracellular organism found in cells lining
the intestinal canal of the tick, in the salivary glands, the ovaries, and in
the eggs, and in an infected animal."
"I thought Pueblo was in the plains." Bena jerked the steering wheel to avoid
what was once a rabbit, now stretched to the size of a welcome mat across the
asphalt. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the baby was still sleeping
soundly. He was. They had laid him in the top drawer of an old dresser, padded
with a wool hunting blanket folded in eighths. The blanket was dotted with deer
blood and gun oil. Bena had covered it with a clean kitchen apron, whose faint
recollections of roast beef and molasses seemed homey imperfections more
suitable for an infant.
Theodore Gaspar Jonssen, Jr., six pounds, two ounces, had been born six and a
half weeks earlier, on March 5. His birth was a bloody, prolonged affair, and
exquisitely painful, as Theodore Gaspar Jonssen, Jr., saw fit to enter the world
as one might enter a forbiddingly cold body of water, toes first. At the last
minute he made a wrenching somersault, pulled and prodded by the obstetrician's
thick gloved fingers. For a long moment he was silent. Bena had watched the
doctor's face harden as he slapped her gray baby with a flat rubber hand. Then
the baby coughed and rasped and breathed with his seaweed lungs, and the blood
rushed to color his skin, and the face of the doctor softened at the slender
thrill of new life.
"It's called the Front Range. Not Rockies, exactly, but nothing to turn your
nose up at." Ted pulled a map from the glove box and unfolded it in his lap.
"Pueblo is here, see," he said, his finger hovering over the map and punching it
whenever the Ford took a bump. "And the Range is here." His finger made a crater
in the paper where the mountains were supposed to be. Bena saw a small black dot
and the name of a town. Rye.
Ted pulled a paper clip off the cover of The Journal of Immunology and unfolded
it. He slid one end carefully under the white bandage that covered his head.
"Itch?"
He growled, seeking out the prickly stitches with the tip of the paper clip. As
a doctor (and one who had recently been forced to leave a job at a reputable
clinic), he was a predictably reluctant patient. Had he not been so reluctant,
the mastoid infection that had grown, hot and irritated, behind his right ear,
might not have required an operation to drain the abscess just as his wife was
experiencing the first vise-grip clenches of labor. He and Bena were
hospitalized at the same time, she on the fourth floor, he on the second. In the
violent delirium of her delivery room, Bena predicted to the nurse who sponged
her brow with a damp chamois that her husband would birth a child as well, just
as Zeus's skull had cleaved to release a fearsome daughter. While Bena's labors
yielded a clay-streaked and pleated baby boy, Ted produced nothing more
remarkable than a beakerful of brownish puss.
A car passed them going the other direction. Bena noticed a woman's head turn
back to look at them through the dust.
"Are the lights on?" Ted asked.
Bena fiddled with the dashboard. "I don't think so."
Of the next few cars that passed, two slowed and one honked its horn, flushing a
family of pheasants that clattered over the Ford, assaulting the car with a
quick rain of small stones and dirt. It wasn't until an empty farm truck nearly
drove off the road as the driver turned to catch a glimpse of their retreating
vehicle that Ted asked Bena to pull over.
He walked around the car, checking the tires, the lights, looking under the
carriage to see if they were dragging a rope or the meaty remains of a small
animal. Nothing.
Bena stepped out and stretched tentatively. She was still stitched and sore
herself from giving birth, but Ted had been offered the job in Pueblo contingent
on his arriving no later than May 1. Unfortunately, his infection had worsened
after the first operation and he had, just the past week, required a second. As
he was too dizzy and she was merely sore, Bena had agreed to do the driving.
She'd stacked a pair of couch pillows beneath her to cushion her torn parts from
the whimsies of the potted road. The trip promised to be even more excruciating
and slow, given that they had to pull over every two hours to let the baby feed.
But it would allow Bena to understand better the distance they were covering,
and their dubious good fortune. Instead of watching the quick-passing grim and
tawdry towns from the safety of the windows, she would be forced to stand in
their midst, to smell the smoke of failing industry and hear the woody, uneven
clopping of half-shod horses. She would be forced to appreciate, each time they
stopped, the fact that her husband's only job prospect hadn't been in Sibley,
Iowa, or Popejoy, or Latimer.
"Damned if I know." Ted folded his long legs back into the car.
They proceeded tentatively, Bena speeding up whenever a car approached. As they
whipped past a grain truck just outside of Mandelia, they struck a crow picking
at a pudding of hot innards on the road.
There was a snap of cartilage, of glass. The crow hung for a second, pressed
against the windshield by the car's momentum, then tumbled over the roof and
onto the road. Bena watched in the rearview mirror as it spun into the dry
irrigation ditch that hugged the highway.
"That's a fine omen," she said.
Bena caught her husband rolling his eyes. According to her, it would be a bad
day if there was a misprint on the front page of the St. Paul Dispatch, if the
milk had spoiled overnight, if a robin broke its neck against their bedroom
window, if she passed an amputee on the sidewalk before noon when the day was
still impressionable.
Little Ted started crying from his dresser drawer. He didn't so much cry at this
young age as cough, as if he were still part fish and clearing his lungs of
water.
Bena stiffened. Before the baby she'd been a slow girl, the world coming to her
through a watery layer of her own unsorted thinking. Now she'd turned wolfish,
her nose and ears alerted by the slightest noise or scent. Her mind, no longer
flabby and dreamy, was sinuous and lean and almost nervous. It made her life
simpler, though she could understand how it might eat at her, if she wasn't
careful to cultivate her own needs from time to time.
Ted reached over the seat and pulled Little Ted from the drawer. He thrust an
arm through the baby's bowed legs and tucked his head into the crook of his
elbow. Despite the fact that he was a doctor and no stranger to bodies, he had
been rather awkward and stymied around the baby. Ted watched him with fierce
interest and affection as he slept, but shied away from the crying, pissing,
waking calamity of him.
Bena stole quick looks at her husband and son together, the one with his bottom
wrapped in a white diaper, the other with his head wrapped in a white bandage.
And there the similarities ended. There was no evidence of her husband's dark
blue eyes that pushed out at the world, no evidence of his vivid, earnest,
greedy face. Her husband appeared far younger than his own son, a prunish little
wise man with a fish cough and pale, pale eyes that stared with a premature
discernment at the bleary world around him.
"Keep talking about bad luck and you'll bring it upon us." Ted jounced his arm
until the baby's crying stopped.
"Luck isn't something you court," Bena corrected. She reached out to touch her
baby's forearm, so soft it eluded perception by her more callused digits, her
thumbs, for example. She had a new favorite part of his body every few days. At
first it was the arch of his foot, then the back of his knee, his walnut ears.
She didn't feel capable of loving the entirety of him, so instead she loved him,
manageably, in pieces. "It's something you observe."
She saw Ted struggling to contain his irritation.
"So stop being so damned observant." He smiled and pinched her forearm. He felt
comfortable causing her pain if it seemed he was joking.
Ted returned to his medical texts while Bena stared ahead at the road, counting
the rows of fledgling cornstalks that passed the car at the same
thump-thump-thump pace of her pulse.
Dodge, Iowa, population 115. The second day.
The sign was the usual rural roadway variety-dull paint, metal post listing
backward, letters punctuated by bullet holes. Here someone had applied a curt
warning in hasty red slashes above the faded lettering.
Leave.
A spindly, more dispirited hand augmented the first command.
We all did.
Dodge was heralded further by a peaked water tower with a flapping tarpaper
roof; next to that stood a windmill, a lone Indian sentinel, its wooden wind
guide protruding like a feather from the back of its lazily spinning blades.
White powdery soil and dead grass and empty white sky came together at the
horizon to produce a disorienting vertical sweep of colorlessness that made the
parched clapboard buildings appear to be the last outpost of civilization.
They'd spent the previous night at a road motel in Rumford Wells. The baby had
slept in the top drawer of the dresser and Bena and Ted had fallen onto the
concave mattress, too tired to move, or so she'd thought. She was asleep when he
touched her hip and her new, slack belly. She was already so warm and dreamy
that she forgot she was a mother with a baby asleep in a motel sock drawer, she
forgot she was bone-angry with her husband for exiling them to the godforsaken
plains of Colorado (it wasn't his fault, she knew). The way he touched her was
unconscious and bodiless, and she touched him, half asleep, until they forgot
each other and became new people for the night, without resentments and
bitterness, with only a generous willingness to slip inside another person's
skin in a dark, borrowed room.
Past the windmill, Main Street started to pick up-an empty beauty salon called
The Chatterbox, where a woman in an apron smoked alone behind the screen door;
the Dodge Mercantile, with its chapped western facade and dusty windows yielding
gauzy views of canned goods; Dodge Grain and Feed, a building that sloped
heavily to one side like the face of a stroke victim. Farther down were a sturdy
yellow-brick bank, a Texaco station, a caf;aae with a faded round Coca-Cola
sign.
Ted pointed to a bare lot next to Ewing Lumber and Hardware. Bena parked beneath
a billboard of a woman in a black dress, hands on her hips, gazing with concern
at her unremarkable thighs. "Don't be skinny," the billboard insisted. "Take Dr.
Burt's For-A-Betta Diet Supplements and getta betta figure."
Bena considered her own figure, disguised inside the ample and forgiving shape
of her traveling dress. She had never been a skinny girl, always a firm,
efficient girl who filled out dresses and blouses just enough to show there was
a person inside. Her hide was taut over her muscles that were big for her sex,
muscles that came from summers sailing on Lake Susquetannah, hauling in sheets
and anchor lines, and swimming across black, icy coves in a striped bathing
costume that weighed ten pounds when wet.
She pulled the dress across her waist. Her skin was looser after the baby's
birth, loose on her arms, her back, her legs. This body belonged to another
woman, a woman with tight, low breasts and thighs that chafed and stretched in
the heat, a woman who had been cored, the pit of her expelled between her legs,
leaving a tired, cramping sag above her pubic bone. It didn't make her unhappy,
but it did make her curious. She'd spent hours in front of the mirror while
pregnant, watching the way her body groaned, her joints splayed, the way her
breasts grew warm and heavy; they felt like a pair of small sleeping squirrels
she'd chosen to smuggle, hidden inside her coat, into movie theaters,
restaurants.
She reached into the backseat and awakened Little Ted in the dresser drawer. She
unbuttoned her dress and freed a raw nipple from inside her brassiere, shading
his face from the white, high-up sun. Her son had already distinguished himself
as an insatiable creature, which made Bena immeasurably proud. Since his birth
she'd done little but sit in an armchair and lift him from one breast to the
other, then massage her nipples with a suet-and-ash salve as he slept. He was
still too young to see or talk or even smile, but she could put an ear against
Little Ted's spongy middle as he napped and listen to the raging, vital sounds
his stomach emitted as he battled his way back to hungriness.
"I'll explore our lunch options," Ted announced. His face had grown pallid,
perhaps from carsickness or dizziness. "Any requests?"
Bena watched in amazement as a dog galloped down the center of the street,
dragging a wooden doll. "Whatever looks good," she said, doubting that anything
could. The sky was oil-ringed where the sun sought to burn through. Because of
the drought that had persisted since the previous summer (no rain, no snow),
there were no plant roots to keep the world in place; the dirt sloughed steadily
away, making the wind gauzy and visible. The weather was unseasonably warm, the
April sun as glaring and tiresome as that of late June.
As the dog neared, she saw it wasn't a doll in its jaws. It was a prosthetic
arm. The hand vibrated a wooden greeting to her as it passed. Bena tracked the
dog's progress in the rearview mirror until it disappeared around the corner of
the Grain and Feed.
"Might want to keep the doors locked," Ted suggested, his brows close and dark.
He became unbearably handsome to her, gilded and ancient, when his chivalrous
impulses overtook him. Bena felt safe and reckless in a far-back, animal way, as
if they were badgers or bears or beavers, living uncomplicated, instinctual
lives. She ran a finger along his belt, trailed up his shirt placket, throat,
chin. Her finger landed on his lips and he obliged her by kissing it, then
pretending to bite it. He bent over her to take Little Ted's foot in his mouth.
He shook it wildly, the way the dog had shaken the prosthetic arm.
He kissed her breast, grazed his lips over her long nipple.
She swatted him on the shoulder. He squeezed her nipple between his thumb and
forefinger.
"Be right back." He flashed her the sheepish smile that she had learned in their
two and a half years of marriage to read as an apology in advance.
Bena watched her husband walk across the parking lot, a familiar anxiety
crimping the muscles of her forehead. He took a left on Main Street and was
blocked from view by a parked police car.
Ted's smile meant that, despite his promise to hurry, he would discover a
caf;aae with a booth away from the kitchen and out of the sun, just vacated.
He'd find a local paper left by the previous diner, its sections turned inside
out and gravy-spattered, and there would be a daily special (calf's liver and
onions, hot bacon-bean pie) that would sound far more appetizing than a ham
sandwich wrapped in brown paper to be eaten on the car hood. He would tuck into
the bacon-bean pie, accompanied by a tepid ginger beer, and skim stories about
the railroad layoff, the folding of the Sharecroppers' Credit Union, a boy's
disappearance. He'd hem and haw before ordering a slab of rhubarb cobbler and a
cup of coffee that the waitress would take special pains to refresh again and
again and again. He'd insist, "Wife's in the car, need to make this snappy," all
the while continuing small talk with the poor girl, asking her where she grew up
and how she got so pretty and making her so flustered that she'd forget his
dessert order and put him back another ten minutes.
Ted attributed his gregariousness to an overflowing bedside manner, but Bena
knew her husband was simply a flirt, a man who, while he loved her, also loved
to witness how the world came to adore him so easily. It was a quality she'd
found endearing, until she began to locate in his compulsive gregariousness a
strain of desperation. What made her most anxious was the constant suspicion
that what she gave him wasn't enough, that he had to look elsewhere to feel
loved thoroughly and properly.
He did, she knew, look elsewhere.
She'd seen him one afternoon on her way to meet a former sorority sister for
lunch. He was supposed to be at the hospital and she'd seen him through a
jeweler's window, fastening a garnet choker around a woman's neck. The woman
offered her collarbone to him with her chin high in the air, as if she were
spreading her legs. He stepped back to admire the necklace, the woman's neck and
breasts, waist and ankles, and then he touched the buttons on her coat in a way
that made Bena know for certain she was no salesgirl.
A week later, the necklace had appeared in a leather box for Bena's birthday.
She'd remained stoic and straight-necked as he lowered the necklace around her
from behind, his breath catching in her hair as he worked the cold clasp. Bena
stared at herself in the mirror and experienced a strange power. She could know
his most distressing truths and remain unbothered. That she'd caught him buying
a necklace for another woman was evidence of his weakness; to have caught him
selecting a piece of jewelry meant for her by the way it looked against another
woman's throat was the most pitiful form of compromise. Unlike many women who
might prefer not to know the illicit directions in which their husband's
affections wandered, Bena liked to know these truths about Ted, because it
allowed her to participate in his deceit as an equal partner.
She'd worn the necklace only once after that, to a medical dinner, at his
request. Flush against her skin, it made her look as though she'd had her throat
slit. She tossed the necklace down the toilet, but even then it continued to
plague her, wrapping itself like a parasite inside the pipes. When the plumber
removed the vile object, knotted with toilet paper and excrement, she offered it
to him in addition to paying his fee. He didn't thank her; he must have heard
the begging in her voice. He spat in the toilet, as he probably wanted to spit
on her, if he hadn't been so desperate for money or anything like money.
After the incident with the necklace, Bena tried to leave Ted. She drove up to
her father's summer house at Coeur du Lac and watched the winter land
noiselessly on the lake like the flocks of geese resting on their flight south
from Ontario. But by then it was too late. By then he'd burdened her with
another secret, one whose creation they shared equally, though Bena housed it.
She cried and drank bourbon and took icy swims at midnight beneath a pared moon,
hoping to coax it out of her. But the only secret she managed to coax from
between her pelvic bones was an unexpected discovery about herself. The truth
was that she'd come to see her husband's infidelities as a relief. She and Ted
had created a comfortable life inside of which they could hide from themselves
and each other. The distance he maintained from her in order to protect his
philandering meant that she could rightly be unknowable to him, and he to her.
Little Ted pulled away from her and started to cry. Bena stretched him across
the seat and unpinned him until his musty, earthy body was revealed. He appeared
so world-weary to her with his creased skin and skeptical old-man face;
innocence, evidently, was a state for which humans had to age in order to
achieve.
She reached into her tartan day bag for a diaper. She never went anywhere
without a cakey pile of white cloth and various talcs and solutions, the soft
and wet and powdery accoutrements of motherhood. The combination of baby and bag
made her heavy and slow-moving, and brought her to question the evolutionary
rationale to so many things, things that would prevent her from escaping
whatever primitive pursuer might engage her in a chase.
Bena cleaned the baby with diluted rubbing alcohol. The tiny polyp between his
legs still fascinated her because it represented the trickiness of her own body,
and its devious ability to create a being so different from itself. She didn't
understand how she could have made a man like that. It didn't seem possible that
she could make a man, when men were something she couldn't claim to know much
about.
She let her head fall back on the car seat. It was hot in the Ford with the
windows closed. She pressed her face into Little Ted's body. She felt her
affections shift from his elbow to his tiny, bowed nose. He smelled of sour milk
in his neck folds, and sweat and urine. She held him up so she could look into
his face and see the people there. He resembled her brother around the eyes, and
he had her father's lanky, oversized mouth. She thought she saw a bit of her
mother in him as well, at least what little she knew of her mother from pictures
of her as a girl growing up in Norway. In the time since Little Ted was born,
she'd spent hours memorizing the distance between his features, the length of
each finger, preparing herself to notice the minute her baby began to mutate
into a longer, more wily toddler. She kissed him on the forehead and watched as
his eyes swung wildly around their sockets, alternately humored and alarmed.
In spite of the crow that had struck the windshield, Bena had a good feeling
about their move to Pueblo. It was new there even if it was nowhere. She and Ted
could fix their tinny marriage in pleasant isolation and return to Minnesota in
a few years' time, exhaustively adoring of one another.
She awoke to the sound of retching, and a muffled thumping against the car
glass. Little Ted was as radiant as a hot-water bottle on her lap. She failed at
first to notice the woman rapping on the car window. Instead, she focused on the
white bandaged head crouched and vomiting, just visible in the alley between two
buildings.
Poor Ted, she thought. She prepared herself for the likelihood that they would
have to rent a hotel room in Dodge; he would be unable to ride in a car in this
condition.
Rap rap rap.
Bena looked up and was startled to find herself under the close scrutiny of a
woman in a beet-colored cloche. She signaled Bena to roll down her window. Black
gloves ended just above her wrists, unbuttoned and failing to hide the scars
there, burn marks and scratches.
"I wouldn't fall asleep with the windows up," the woman scolded.
"Especially with a little one like that." Her bobbed blond hair ended in an
upward point, leading the eyes of any observer directly to her very full, very
red lips. Her dress was a dotted-swiss chiffon. The full skirt rasped against
its crinoline as the wind swept by.
"My sister lost one of hers that way," the woman continued.
"Not that she didn't have a few to spare. Gone no more than a half-hour, buying
fabric to make her baby a summer suit." She shook her head and fumbled with her
beaded clutch, and extracted a faux-horn cigarette case that she opened with
some difficulty. Her mouth tightened. "Don't have a cigarette, do you?"
Bena, half asleep, reached into the glove box and fished a cigarette out from
between the maps. She'd been a smoker in college, back when she believed she
would be a newspaper reporter, working for The Minnesota Daily at the university
and smoking all night with the men to keep herself awake. She still smoked from
time to time, and hid cigarettes behind books and underneath sweaters, where her
disapproving husband wouldn't find them.
"It's a bit sorry," Bena apologized.
"Beggars can't be choosers." The woman put the flattened cigarette in her mouth.
She smelled of a man's spice soap and bacon. Her porous skin was dusted with a
thick layer of powder, and she'd drawn a beauty mark above her lip. The mark was
oblong with scalloped edges, and resembled the first stages of rot rather than
the ultimate testament to beauty.
"Well," the woman said, exhaling and surveying Dodge, Iowa, population 115.
"This town is one of the shabbiest I've ever laid eyes on."
"Not much in the way of tourist attractions."
"You a tourist?"
"We're on our way to Colorado, actually. To live."
"Ah. Colorado." The woman sounded as if she knew it well.
"Pueblo," Bena clarified. "My husband's going to be a doctor at a clinic there.
I've never been. In fact, I've never been to Colorado."
She'd never been to Colorado because she'd never wanted to go to Colorado. And
this was still true. They were driving to Colorado because they had to. The
Depression, she'd told her friends. No jobs. Take what you can get. Before, this
had applied to others, not to them. Since he'd started medical school, Ted had
been guaranteed a job by his uncle who ran a reputable private clinic in
Rochester.
The woman in the green coat came into the clinic six months after he'd
graduated. Because of a medical conference in Duluth, Ted was on duty alone that
day. The woman didn't have a name, the woman wasn't wearing anything under her
green coat, Ted reported at the clinic inquiry. (Later, explaining to Bena with
his hair brushed back from his face so that she could be assured he was being
truthful, Ted said the woman looked like a parrot-green coat, blue hat, blue
bruises on her legs, her breast.) She was hopped up and delirious, he said. She
wanted morphine to stop the pain of her bruises, and he refused. The woman said
that no one ever refused her. She was out of her head when she started shrieking
in the examination room, when she grabbed her green coat and ran, naked, through
the hallways with one cloth slipper and a bare foot, when she accused him of
touching her and hitting her after she denied him access to her withered body. A
pair of nurses restrained her and clucked as she spat on herself, clearly
embarrassed that poor, new Dr. Jonssen had to witness such a loose, afflicted
variety of female nature.
The next morning, Ted learned that the woman's father was the mayor of
Rochester, a beefy-minded man who had been trying to close the clinic for months
to accommodate his plans for a new highway to be named after him. Although the
woman had been in and out of Black Wing Sanitarium for years, Ted was asked to
resign his post in order to avoid unnecessary trouble. The woman with the green
coat was apparently a fixture around the clinic, one the other doctors readily
supplied with morphine to keep happy and quiet. That Ted had refused to abide by
the unspoken rules was viewed by his colleagues as an act of extreme hubris. His
uncle promised he'd help him relocate to another clinic, yet the false word had
spread, and Ted couldn't get another job, not in Minnesota, or Illinois, or
Wisconsin. While Bena believed her husband was not only innocent but also
ethically advanced, she couldn't help thinking that he had somehow deserved this
unjust banishment for all the just ways in which he could have had his roaming
hands slapped. It didn't occur to her until they were boxing up their apartment
that she, too, was moving to Colorado, that she, too, was being banished.
"Not much to Colorado, really," the woman told her. "Space. More space. Nothing
to be done with it, being it's all mountains or desert. Sort of like a rich
widow in her mansion. Thousands of rooms to rattle around in, but no use to make
of them." She said this in a nostalgic way, enjoying the image of so much
grandeur, no matter how vacant and dusty. Thousands of rooms.
"How about yourself?" Bena asked. "Are you on vacation?"
"Vacation!" The woman shot a quick, bitter laugh through her fine nose. It was
the only fine feature she possessed; the rest were thick and sprawling, as if
she'd been hit a few too many times. "We're on a business trip."
"You and your husband?"
She smiled. "Sure."
"What's he do, your husband?"
The woman stared off at the horizon to indicate, perhaps, that the answer to
this question was too dreary to be answered in all its particulars. "Finance."
"Banking?"
"Some."
"My father's the president of the St. Paul Savings and Trust. Perhaps your
husband knows of him."
"I'm sure he will, if he doesn't already," the woman replied. She tossed her
half-smoked cigarette to the dirt and ground it flat with the toe of a black
crocodile pump that wiggled on her foot. "So few of them left these days."
The woman watched nonplussed as the dog carrying the prosthetic arm reappeared
and circled the parking lot. She pulled a tube of lipstick from her clutch and
looked at the worn nub, weighing the color like a shopper at a cosmetics
counter. She searched for her reflection in the Ford's window and pressed the
lipstick so hard against her lips that it created a wave of flesh preceding its
travels.
"Well," she said, clicking her bag shut. "I thank you for the cigarette."
"And I thank you." Bena glanced down at her sleeping son.
"Need to do one good deed a day so that I can go to bed even." The woman started
to leave, but then turned back. "Say, you wouldn't have any aspirin, would you?
My husband's not feeling well." She made a great show of checking her watch,
which was, in fact, a gold bracelet. It was too tight and cut into the flesh of
her wrist.
Bena dislodged her purse from beneath the seat. She handed the woman a mother-
of-pearl pillbox. "Take however many you need."
The woman accepted the pillbox, giving it the briefest once-over.
"What's the little one's name?" She reached a hand into the car and rubbed
Little Ted's cheek with a gloved finger. It was obvious babies made her uneasy.
Bena figured she was grateful for the aspirin and felt she should show some
forced interest.
"Ted Junior. Little Ted for now."
"Well, they're lucky boys, the both of them. Say, reach out your hand." She held
her closed fist upside down. "Go on."
Bena offered her palm. The woman pressed something into it and folded Bena's
fingers into a fist.
"For good luck," she said.
Bena opened her hand. In it was a silver charm, a water tower with "Dodge"
stamped across its barrel middle. It was dust-caked and banged up, trampled
underfoot by all 115 townspeople.
"I found it while I was looking for the bank. I noticed you had a charm
bracelet, I thought you'd have better use for it than me." She swatted a fly
from Little Ted's forehead.
"Thanks," Bena said.
"I never wanted kids." The woman sounded wistful. "You?"
Bena squinted at her. It was an odd question to ask a woman with a baby.
"It's just never interested me much," the woman explained offhandedly. She
seemed impressed with herself and her distinctive, unmaterial brand of
femininity, as if instead of motherhood she'd just turned down a closetful of
new dresses or a house by the sea.
Without saying good-bye, she walked off across the parking lot. She raised a
hand over her head and let it spiral there, waving, or maybe catching a bit of
the breeze in her gloved palm. The crisp sound of her crinoline grew fainter and
fainter until it was the sound of the empty wind, whisking seedpods and gravel
around the vacant, unpaved streets of Dodge.
Bena fiddled with her bracelet, biting the water tower's ring closed. The charm
hung crookedly, between a silver herring Ted had bought her at the Inlagd Sill
festival in St. Paul and a fountain pen she'd received for winning the Lester B.
Hawks Prize for Daily Journalism in college. She often thought about detaching
the pen, because it seemed a fatuous memento to carry about, a quaint reminder
of the path she hadn't followed.
As the woman disappeared between two brick buildings, Bena was struck with a
yawning desolation above her ribs. Somewhere a church bell sounded twelve lazy
gongs. She looked at the expanse of white sky and white earth that stretched
away to nothing and made her dizzy. She remembered reading in the St. Paul
Dispatch about a man piloting a plane in the Antarctic on a sparkling clear day,
and how he flew directly into the side of a snowy mountain because everything
looked the same down there at noon, when there were no shadows to distinguish
mountain, plains, sky, water. So it was in Dodge. And probably in Pueblo.
Little Ted let out a few faint bird chirps. Bena unbuttoned her dress. His first
few sucks took the breath out of her, his powerful mouth working away at her
chapped skin.
She was about to surrender to a bout of tired sobs welling up from that hole
above her ribs, when the dog with the prosthetic arm lumbered in front of the
windshield. The arm still jiggled, but less enthusiastically this time. The dog
traced a slow circle around the parking lot before a second dog hopped into
view. This dog was missing one of its front legs. It chased after the dog with
the prosthetic arm. Every time it came close, the first dog would deftly pick up
the pace, leaving its pursuer lunging at nothing but a rising cloud of dust.
Bena started to laugh. She laughed until the crying from that desolate place
came up anyway. By the time she saw Ted ambling back with two paper bags, she
had forgotten her unhappiness and had even come to see this new white world as
capable of unexpected occurrences that were poetic and grotesque, pitiful and
funny, all at once.
Ted slid into the passenger seat, balancing a ceramic mug full of coffee. Bena
was relieved to note that his color had returned. Perhaps they wouldn't be
spending the night in Dodge.
"I smuggled it out," he said, handing her the mug. He noticed her red eyes and
running nose. "Is something wrong?"
Ted stared at her, mystified, until she pointed out the dogs. The three-legged
one had finally caught up to its tormentor, and they were playing tug-of-war
with the prosthetic arm, their back haunches strained and lowered, their nails
skitching through the gravel.
"Jesus," Ted said in amazement. He passed Bena a sandwich. "Ham."
She unwrapped the sandwich and checked under the wet corners of the bread for
ants or flies or God knew what. She heard a police siren. It grew and grew,
bloomed next to them and moved past, fading quickly.
"Sorry I was gone so long," Ted began.
Bena took a tentative bite of her sandwich. She rolled the rubbery, salty ham
around in her mouth before forcing it down with a swig of lukewarm coffee.
`There was a grease fire at the diner this morning. It took forever to get some
service."
Bena tossed the rest of the sandwich out the car window. It was instantly
descended on by a pair of crows. They knocked the crusts around, held the flaps
of ham in their beaks and shook them silly.
Ted unwrapped his sandwich and pulled a long, dark hair from between the bread.
He grimaced and held it out for the wind to take. He stared through the window
crossly and put a hand against his gauzy head. "Where's that aspirin?"
Bena reached for her purse. She paused. "I gave it to somebody."
Ted gazed doubtfully at the deserted streets.
"A woman. She was here with her husband. On a business trip."
"You gave her all of it?"
"She... Yes."
Annoyed, Ted changed the subject. He pulled a folded newspaper out of one of the
diner bags and pointed to an article on the front page. "This may explain our
strange reception on the roads this morning."
Bena propped the paper on the steering wheel. Her fingertips smudged the edges
and came away greasy with newsprint. "Barrow Injured in Culver Shoot-out," the
headline read.
Culver, Iowa, a small town of 200 residents, missed the chance to earn a
permanent place on the map yesterday when a deputy sheriff's bullet grazed the
head of bank robber Clyde Barrow, injuring but not killing the infamous road
gangster.
"He was bleeding over the right ear," testified Ryan McGivern, deputy sheriff
and vice president of the Culver VFD. Barrow and his accomplice Bonnie Parker
escaped in a stolen black Ford Touring Car belonging to Culver church warden
Gladys Lipsky. "They won't get far," Mrs. Lipsky insisted. "Not with God's will,
and not in that car."
Officials have advised travelers to remain on the lookout for a black Ford
Touring Car, driven by either a man with a head bandage or a woman with blond
hair. Last eyewitness reports indicate the couple to be headed south.
"Amazing we didn't get shot by some Johnny-do-good farmer," he said.
Bena turned to him, visions of that other white, bobbing head obscuring her
actual husband from view. The sirens had ceased. She saw a patrol car pull over
near the Coca-Cola sign, to expel a pair of policemen who pulled their pants up
by the belt and shook their heads.
"You weren't sick over there?"
Bewildered, Ted followed her eyes to the empty alley at the end of the parking
lot.
Bena turned and tucked Little Ted into his padded dresser drawer. She started
the Ford and skidded out of the parking lot.
"Bena, the way out of town is..."
"`I'm not looking for the way out of town."
She took a left into a driveway that led them around behind the Dodge
Apothecary, and pulled up beside a black Ford Touring Car just like their own.
Ted regarded her, astonished that his wife's superstitious decoding of the world
might on occasion yield a surprising knowledge.
Bena got out of the car and walked around the hood of the identical black Ford.
Her sweat-damp dress stuck to the upholstery as she slid behind the steering
wheel. She placed her hands where she imagined Bonnie had placed hers. She could
smell her man's soap.
In the glove box she found a Culver Baptist Choir songlist, with a note in the
margin: "Oil-Tea-Ginger-Cream." The silver lighter on the floor didn't work. A
blank postcard from Lola's Lunch in Dawsonville, Iowa, was imprinted with the
dirty texture of a shoe sole.
Bena looked at the odometer; it read 5,434, exactly the same as theirs when they
had left the St. Paul city limits in a wake of dust and exhaust.
There were no maps.
The gas tank was empty.
Bena stepped out of the car and eased herself onto the hood. Her dress was still
unbuttoned and the lace of her ivory slip was visible to anyone who cared to see
it. She kicked her shoes off and rested her feet on the warm chrome bumper. She
held the Lola's Lunch postcard over her eyes to shade them from the sun.
The parking lot was on the outskirts of town. From this vantage point she could
see over the low roof of a sinking garage, out to the endless sweep of dry
grasses and the single, unwavering strip of asphalt, a beaten gray vein of
pavement that seemed antiquated, like a relic from another century.
Ted's door slammed. He walked with his hands shoved in the pockets of his khakis
and rattling the change there. Rather than the horizon, he stared at the ground,
at his boots pulling clipped young afternoon shadows across the lot. He peered
inside the car, then opened the trunk.
She heard him whistle.
"This the lady to whom you gave our aspirin?"
He walked toward her carrying the broken stock of a rifle and a dirty brassiere.
Bena took the brassiere from between his fingers. It made her angry that he felt
he could wave a strange woman's brassiere about so cavalierly. One of the straps
was torn. She lifted it high, until the wind filled the cups. She let it go,
watched it tumble over the gravel.
"Aiding and abetting criminals. It's not like you, sweetheart." Ted stood in
front of her and placed both hands on her thighs. His hands were hot and
thick-skinned through her dress.
"You had a close call," he said, pushing up her dress and urging the straps of
her slip farther down her shoulders. It appeared that her brush with death or
fame made him want to see her naked. He rested his bandaged head against her
breasts; his wet breath filtered through the fabric. She put a hand on his neck
and found a little curl of hair peeping out from below the bandage that she
could wind around her finger.
Bena played with his lock of hair. The water-tower charm on her bracelet jangled
against the silver herring from the Inlagd Sill festival. She felt her heart
strain against the head of her husband to rush out into the dry, white horizon.
Considering the expanse of empty land, she imagined every person to be a vector
moving through space. Sometimes you intersected with one particular person and
he or she changed your path dramatically. Other times, you just hummed along on
what you assumed to be your own happy, straight line.
As Ted ran his hands over her body she noticed a faded sign painted on the brick
wall of the apothecary. `Tiny Ted's Famous Hand Cream,' it read. Below was
painted a child's hand emerging from a pond of water. Or sinking. A hand sinking
into water.
Bena shivered, even though she was sweating where her husband's hands pressed
against her. She didn't like the fact that "Tiny Ted" sounded so much like
"Little Ted," and that the address, 88 Main, was the exact date (8/8) of her
brother's death by drowning. She wanted to tell Ted, to show him this potential
omen, because sometimes, when he was patient enough, he could point out how her
interpretations were flawed. He'd point out to her that 8 + 8 = 16, which was
the number of her father's football jersey, for example, and she'd feel better
for a moment. But she couldn't help suspecting that for all the ways in which
she saw more than was there, for looking too closely, he added and subtracted
from the basic truth of things, and missed what was most important about the
predictions contained within the plain language of coincidence.
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