“I’m eating something now.”
“What?”
“A licorice rope.”
“Licorice isn’t food.”
She doesn’t ask me to come. I’m coming anyway. I can be there, Great West and the flight controllers willing, in under four hours. I’ll have to leave immediately.
“I’m pouring a glass of milk now.”
“Finish it. Milk is the ticket,” I say.
“I’ve finished it.”
Pinter comes out the back door onto the steps and stands with one arm around Margaret’s girlish waist. His face has lost its lecherous intensity, and he turns it away to grant me privacy. I tell Julie not to sit up for me, to sleep, and to pass the phone to Asif, which she does. The hum of expensive appliances tells me they’re in the kitchen, where they should be.
“Take her car keys.”
“I have them.”
“Bless you, Asif.” The gift of a rich, resourceful brother-in-law who wasn’t born in America. We owe him.
Pinter gives me a moment after I’m off the phone. Strange man, but intuitive when he wants to be. “Something’s come up, I can see,” he says. “You run now.” Margaret lowers her head against his shoulder.
“Family.”
“Don’t explain. We all have troubles. This business between us, perhaps we’ll work it out. I’ll be at GoalQuest. I need to travel more. You’re speaking there?”
“Short talk. To clear the air. Just between us, I’m leaving ISM. They’ve niched me and it’s not a niche I like. Plus, my lower extremities are numb. I’m sorry. It’s the same old whine.”
“Not really.”
“You couldn’t drive me back to my hotel so I can grab my luggage and my car?”
“I could, but we might not get there safely. Margaret?”
“Certainly. Just let me find my glasses.”
Pinter and I shake hands. His tiny thumb beats with a disconcertingly sharp pulse. I thank him for the meal, his understanding.
“Good topic,” he says. “We always enjoy ‘pursuit.’ ”
eight
i was a country boy once. I wore a cap. It promoted Polk Center Gouda, “World’s Finest Snack.” The girls in town were virgins but didn’t know it because they thought having their breasts touched was real sex. The girls were all blonds, except for the exchange students, who came from places like Italy and Egypt and stunned us with their fine manners and silky English. The boys were all blonds, too. Touring polka bands pulled in each summer and people paid two dollars to dance all night and drink keg beer that was mostly tasteless foam. The money went to the volunteer fire department. When we heard about murders in cities, we felt lucky. When we heard about Washington scandals, we felt justified. America was that country all around us, and we knew that we’d go there someday, but we could wait. We were proud of Polk Center. Its farmers fed the world. Our stop signs may have been riddled with bullet holes but our thoughtful drivers still respected them.
It wasn’t until the first time I flew, in a medevac helicopter to Minneapolis, that I realized how confined I’d been. I was sixteen. I’d had an accident. Every December, when the lakes froze over, kids piled into cars and hit the ice to race and spin three-sixties. I was driving. I had two passengers, other boys from town, whose fathers delivered propane for my father. I cranked on the wheel and we slammed against the doors. I cranked the wheel back and we hit the other doors. We laughed. We drank vodka. Our parents knew where we were. They’d pulled the same stunts when they were young. Tradition.
Then the hood of the car sloped up and we were sinking. Just like that—slipping backwards through the ice, the coins sliding out of our pockets across the seats. I watched the hood rise up and block the moon and I reached for the door and heaved but couldn’t budge it. The water against the windows was black and solid and some of it trickled through a heating vent and splashed me on the chin.
I woke up in the sky, on a stretcher, wearing a mask. The oxygen tasted bitter and dried my throat, and through a window I spotted the North Star. The uniformed man bending over me explained that both of my passengers had escaped the car but that I’d been in the lake for fifteen minutes, which normally would have been long enough to kill me. What had saved me, he said, was the freezing water, which sent my body into hibernation. He asked me if I felt lucky. I thought: Not yet.
They let me sit up as we hovered over the hospital. I could see all the Minneapolis skyscrapers, some of their floors lit up and others dark, as well as the antennas on their roofs that transmitted our radio stations and TV ball games. I could see the western horizon, where I’d come from, and a dogleg of snowy river crossed by bridges sparkling with late-night traffic. The landscape looked whole in a way it never had before; I could see how it fit together. My parents had lied. They’d taught me we lived in the best place in the world, but I could see now that the world was really one place and that comparing its parts did not make sense or gain our town any advantage over others.
Moments later, we landed. My stretcher jolted. As we waited for the helicopter’s blades to slow, the medic said I would be home in a few days, not understanding that this was not the comfort it would have been had I never left the ground. He wheeled me out onto the roof under the moon, which had risen some since I’d seen it from the car. I lifted the oxygen mask so I could speak and asked how long we’d been flying. Just thirty minutes. To reach a city I’d thought of as remote, halfway across the state, a foreign capital.
I told the man I was feeling lucky now.
