Which-bang-she did before he did, point-blank. Knocked him over into the racks of Skoal and Red Man chewing tobacco and beef jerky. Jolene didn’t see any blood but she remembered distinctly the gritty scuffed silver soles and the metal taps on the heels of his cowboy boots as the big slug knocked him for a flip.
“I killed him,” she explained to Earl who came running in as she was cleaning out the cash register.
“No, you didn’t, he’s still moving,” said Earl who took the pistol and sent her out to the car. And she could still remember how big and cold that night was, with the gas station lit up like a big candy machine under all those stars and how lonely those two last shots sounded, muffled behind the glass. She vowed she’d never go back to North Dakota, ever.
“I didn’t kill him,” she said.
“You didn’t kill him,” Earl said.
Jolene had hugged herself and shivered. “God, it’s cold.”
“Absolute zero,” Earl said. “At least it is for that guy back there.” Jolene had stared at him. And Earl had grinned. “The temperature at which everything stops-minus 273.15 degrees Centigrade. I got straight A’s in physics, remember.”
And they talked about it as they turned off the Interstate and drove a jigsaw down back roads north of Bismarck to Theodore Roosevelt State Park where they ate bologna sandwiches on the shore of Lake Sakakawea and counted out $135.74, which was what that clerk’s number amounted to when it came up.
They’d talked about God and if he were there and always watching, and would he hold it against them, and about karma coming around on them, which was different than God, but still definitely payback.
They’d finished their sandwiches and both agreed. They’d take their chances with God and karma over witnesses any day.
Chapter Nineteen
Allen, almost jaunty, swung a black satchel bag in his left hand. It was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, and he was on the kind of professional errand that surgeons never perform. Certainly not these days.
He was making a house call.
The bunched clouds threatened rain and the air was the color of damp cardboard. But the day was easy on his eyes. Every needle in every soggy spruce tree punched up bright as miniature green neon.
Allen crossed the Timberry Trails Hospital staff parking lot and walked toward his car, thumbed his remote, and heard the door open with a snug chirp. It was a light-paperwork morning and he had offered to sit with Hank Sommer while Jolene went into St. Paul for her first office meeting with Milton Dane so they could restart their bumpy relationship and get Hank into a full-care nursing home.
Seat belt. Ignition. He tapped the CD console as he steered his three-year-old Saab out of the lot into the tangle of midmorning traffic. He hummed and moved his shoulders experimentally along with the earthy cross- rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mombazo.
He could learn to loosen up.
Yes, he could.
Toward the end of his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic, Allen had a recurrent fantasy that he would go into the hospital one day, walk across the red line, and never return. The red line was a literal line painted across the corridor that marked the boundary between the germ-infested world of the patients and the blue, sterile, controlled world of surgery.
In this fantasy his life would be one long procedure, and when it was over he would have operated on everyone who’d ever lived.
Allen saves the world. The End.
Now he was amending his fantasy.
Allen saves Allen.
He identified his problem and appreciated the irony. In surgery he space-walked on a tether of pure clinical knowledge. He manipulated precision instruments to fix the broken parts of the people who lay motionless under his hands. But when he took off the blue clothing and stepped back across the red line he returned to earth and was warped by G’s. By the time he reached the sidewalk he was a fallen medical astronaut. He and the patients had traded places. On the street, he was the one anesthetized. Numb to the world.
Since Hank’s accident he was obsessed with learning how to leave his work brain in the OR and just go out and live. And he was on his way to take his daily dose of the risky treatment he had prescribed for himself.
In a few minutes he’d cleared the traffic lights and was streaking down a secondary road between fields of standing corn. Beyond the corn, the tree lines hovered in a damp Impressionist mist. The chlorophyl dipstick was way down, the carotene was up, and the leaf change was in full glory.
Then he rounded a turn and his pastoral vision disappeared as the Timberry development blob munched its way through the woods, vomiting out rib cages of blond timber and farting out concrete cul-de-sacs.
He had joined the Timberry Medical Group to escape this very congestion. He only had to park his car once a day. He could walk from the clinic to the hospital, and to the health club. Some docs he knew had to commute all over the whole Minneapolis/St. Paul metro to three of four different hospitals a day.
Allen veered and accelerated past a queue of cars lined up for a left turn. Too many people were moving in. On his right, bulldozers scuttled like maggots on the remains of the forest and the fields. Lowball Mexican carpenter crews banged away, roughing in more new homes.
He disdained traffic. They should have a two-tiered road system, he mused-one for busy professionals and another for the patients to play bumper cars.
Hank Sommer’s house sat back from the road on a bluff over the St. Croix River behind a screen of two- hundred-year-old white pines. From the road it looked like a small lake cabin, but as Allen wound down the serpentine driveway between the thick tree trunks the house revealed itself stage by stage in levels that cascaded down the bluff.
Hidden, subtle; quirks that Hank appreciated and Allen did not.
The weather-streaked cedar-plank walls and the rough shake roof were silver-dark, as were the thickets of frost-tortured ferns and hosta that clogged the walks of liver-colored cobbles. Canadian hemlock and Japanese yew grew in the shade like prickly green shadows. That was Hank for you, drawn to shadow as the better part of light.
Allen would cut it all down. Let in some light. Put in a tennis court.
Earl Garf’s boxy green Chevy van sat like a guard dog in the turnaround in front of the garage. Allen parked behind the van, got out, and noted a bubbling of rust along the driver’s side of the van’s rocker panels. He was expected, so Earl would stay in the basement, out of sight until summoned to drive Jolene into town. But he’d make enough noise to intrude, to let Allen know he wasn’t far away. That had been the daily drill every time he’d checked in on Hank since they’d foolishly brought him home.
Allen mounted the simple brick porch and pressed the bell.
Jolene opened the door and Allen sniffed. The secondhand smoke of Hank’s Camel straights still lingered inside the house.
Seeing her, he wanted to take her all at once, like medicine. Like tonic. But he controlled himself and disguised his disappointment at the way she had renounced makeup and shorn her long hair. He was used to the suffering look that bleached the faces of families of terminal patients. But he didn’t like seeing it on her.
This morning, fresh from the shower, she wore gray sweatpants and a blue, armless T-shirt. It was very warm in the house so she was barefooted.
“Hello, Allen,” she said, very friendly.
“How’re you doing, Jo.” His eyes flew to the firm white magnets of her bare upper arms. Veered away.
She merely nodded, letting the weary smile play across her lips as she took his coat. He kicked off his shoes as she hung his coat in the hall closet, and as she turned back to him he was minutely aware of the entire volume of her body, the air it displaced and the smooth way it moved. She was all surface, image.
It occurred to him that he could only visualize the interior of anesthetized draped bodies on an operating table. He could not see past the surface of moving bodies. This insight bothered him slightly.
