The Big Law

His eyes were intense hazel, he had a cleft in his chin and all the ruddy skin on his body looked tight and hard as the skin stretched over his high Slavic cheekbones. He’d have a radioactive ingot of testosterone for a heart.

In contrast, the wife’s vivid features harked back to a pretelevision beauty that Tom associated with old black and white movies on big screens; when theaters were temples, not cineplexes, and filmmakers used close-ups of faces to carry whole scenes. Hers was heart shaped, with protruding expressive eyes and a classic profile that evoked the Spirit of Westward Expansion Pointing the Way on a WPA mural in a post office. Straight, tall and brave.

A poster wife for Keith, the tough guy cop.

Caren with a C.

Tom turned off the freeway and went south on Highway 95.

He came to the tiny collection of storefronts clustered around a frost-burned, desolate park. Afton, Minnesota. He checked the Hudson’s again. A secondary road paralleled the river and passed through stands of oaks that still clutched brown leaves. He located the house and trolled by.

Once he’d owned a garage full of tools and woodworking manuals. He knew a little about old houses. He’d always dreamed of getting one and fixing it up. But his ex-wife, who didn’t want to live in a cloud of Sheetrock dust, nixed the idea. So they lived cramped with two kids, a dog and a cat in a rambler in Woodbury until Shirley filed for divorce and took the kids to Texas last year. Woodbury was a first-tier bedroom community to St. Paul. Afton lay twenty minutes and several steep income brackets to the east and was, by comparison, country living.

The Angland house was roomy and old enough to have a stairway off the kitchen for the servants. It had bird’s-eye maple on the ground floor. And a mansard tin roof and a square turret topped by a delicate scrim of blackened metalwork.

The house sat on a big lot back from the road overlooking the water. Last summer, the peeling paint had been seaweed green. Now that paint was gone. The wood siding had been sanded, but only half the surface had been sealed with primer. It gave the structure a mangy, deranged aspect that was amplified by missing sections of gingerbread trim. A scaffold, fouled with frozen leaves, leaned, stranded, against a wall.

Work interrupted; that could signal a marriage on the rocks? And other homes on this road had put out wreaths, boughs, and strings of lights. The Angland house displayed no holiday garnish.

No one seemed to be home. No lights on. The windows winked, cold black rectangles, a hundred yards off the road, behind a screen of red oaks. As he drove past, he rolled down the window and inspected the cobbled drive next to a back door. Empty. Garage doors closed. Keith would drive an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria from the police motor pool.

He saw Caren in a sports utility or maybe a small truck.

In back, a patio hugged the bluff. A stairway descended to the water, the rails silhouetted against the iron and brown hedgehog of the Wisconsin river bluffs. The nearest neighbors were a quarter mile in either direction, separated by brittle regiments of standing corn.

A long gust of cold wind swirled up from the river and rattled the cornstalks. Closer in, curled oak leaves skittered down the cobblestone driveway like hollow scorpions.

There was no place for him to hide his rusty blue Rabbit near the house, so he drove on, turned and waited at a bend in the road.

Staking out the house was a long-shot gamble. People were naturally defensive at the threshold of their castle. Angland could be home, his car out of sight in the garage.

He needed Caren to go out, on an errand, to the grocery, to the bank. Then he would slide up and start a conversation to test her mood. If he saw the right signals, he would put his questions.

But right now it was just cold. Should have made a move ten years ago, when he still had the legs. Someplace warm.

His breath made a chalky cloud. Not a very big one. Was that really the size of a lungful of air?

A measure of his life.

Tom hugged himself and looked around suspiciously.

Other measures, the numbers, were never far away. He kept them at bay by staying busy, by keeping on the move. Now he was stationary, and he imagined them creeping out from the cornfield. A picket line of strident dollar signs circled him and banged on his car.

The rent.

Two augured-in VISA cards.

Sears, Dayton’s, and Target. His ex-wife had run them into the ground just before she filed for divorce. Tom had taken them on as part of the divorce agreement. Another price of freedom.

The big-hit child support.

The car loan for this piece of junk. Insurance.

All the numbers merged into one monthly figure that exceeded, by many hundreds of dollars, his salary.

His blackjack strategy having failed, he’d have to skip out on his rent.

Possibly he could move in with Ida Rain.

If he moved in with Ida he could pay down the credit cards. But Ida didn’t need a roommate. She didn’t appear to need anything. She was thirty-nine, never married, a confirmed femme solo and a very thorough lady. Other women at the paper bought whistles when one of their coworkers was attacked in the ramp where they parked. Ida bought a hefty, five-shot, 38 caliber Smith amp; Wesson Bodyguard model revolver with the recessed hammer and a two-inch barrel. She took a police course of instruction and learned how and where to shoot it: “Three shots, center mass.” In her thorough way, Ida had “taken him on” in every sense of the phrase, as a reclamation project. It was a problem. When her concern left her body, it was compassion and affection.

When it touched him, it became control.

Tom shivered.

Jesus, it was cold.

Thirty-four icy minutes later a set of low beams swung down the gloomy gravel road and a bronze-colored Blazer turned into the driveway. Hatless, coat unzipped in the hard wind, Caren Angland got out and walked stiffly to the back door. Tom watched lights switch on, marking her progress through the first floor.

Ten minutes later, the back door opened again and she stepped back out. Now she wore faded jeans and had exchanged the long coat for a green and black mountain parka.

She still wasn’t wearing a hat. She paused to test the lock on the door, then got in the Blazer.

He trailed her back through Afton, north up the highway that skirted the river and connected with I-94. Short of the interstate, she turned left up a gravel road that wound through a tract under construction where fields and rolling woodland were losing to tiny plots with huge new wood frame homes.

For the second time he saw a sign that advertised HANSEN’S CHRISTMAS TREES-CUT YOUR OWN TREES. Caren turned at the sign. Tom smiled. She was going to get the tree.

5

The access road curled into a miniature evergreen forest and ended in a rutted dirt lot. Caren parked the Blazer and got out. Tom remembered her face as bright, casting light. Now it was drawn, pale, a little puffy. She walked past Tom’s car to the shack where a sign explained that Hansen loaned you a small saw to cut your twenty-five-dollar tree. On a very cold afternoon, she was the only person in the field not wearing a hat or gloves.

Tom bypassed the shack and trailed her into the fir, spruce, and pine.

Two dozen people wandered through the trees. A third of the shoppers towed preschool children who looked like characters from the Sunday comics, bundled in floppy fleece Jester caps, scarves and mittens. Frosty captions of breath stuck to their faces. Families. Mom, pop and kids doing the ritual. In some cases it was just pop and the kids. There were several solitary men, so Tom didn’t stand out. Caren Angland was the only single woman.

The other people circled, fluffed gloved hands at the boughs, and debated. Not Caren. She walked directly to