Love Medicine: List 3

All the way down to Fargo on the Jackrabbit bus, Albertine gulped the rank, enclosed, passenger breath as though she could encompass the strangeness of so many other people by exchanging air with them, by replacing her own scent with theirs.

Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed outward.

But when she stepped outside, he had disappeared. She faltered, then told herself to keep walking toward the boldest lights.

Northern Pacific Avenue was the central thoroughfare of the dingy feel-good roll of Indian bars, western-wear stores, pawnshops, and Christian Revival Missions that Fargo was trying to eradicate.

Farther down the street a cowgirl tall as a building tossed her lariat in slow heart-shaped loops.

She stopped when he paused before a window full of pearl-button shirts, buff Stetsons, and thick-nosed pawned pistols.

Then he interlapped the knives so they made a bridge between the glass lips, a bridge of knives suspended in air.
Albertine looked at the precarious, linked edges.

The clerk was a mound of flesh tapering into a small thick skull.

She was poised, half turned from what she might see when the door opened.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof.”

She gave off a fetid traveler’s warmth...

I thought of the word repose, because the car wasn’t simply stopped, parked, or whatever. That car reposed, calm and gleaming, a FOR SALE sign in its left front window.

Still in her belly and tensed in its fluids coiled the child of their union, the child we were waiting for, the child whose name we were making a strenuous and lengthy search for in a cramped and littered bar at the very edge of that Dakota town.

Greased with lard once, he squirmed into a six-foot-thick prison wall and vanished. Some thought he had stuck there, immured forever, and that he would bring luck, like the bones of slaves sealed in the wall of China.

As a place to spend a nine-month sentence in, Dot wasn’t much. Her body was inhospitable.

Her skin was loose, sallow, and draped like upholstery fabric over her short, boardlike bones.

There were two scales, you see, on the way to the cement plant, and if a driver got past the state-run scale early, before the state officials were there, the company would pay for whatever he got away with. But it was not illicit gravel that tipped the wedge past the red mark on the balance.

He was so big that he had to hunker one shoulder beneath the lintel and back his belly in, pushing the doorframe wider with his long, soft hands.

“S’very, very nice,” he said, scrutinizing the tiny, even stitches.

Sometimes I grabbed drivers out of their trucks and talked loudly and quickly and inconsequentially as a madwoman.

Heads swaying, clasped hands swinging between them like hooked trunks, they moved through the kitchen feeding casually from boxes and bags on the counters, like ponderous animals alone in a forest.

Pedestrians swiveled to catch a glimpse of us—a mountain tearing by balanced on a toy, and clinging to the sheer northwest face, a scrawny half-breed howling something that Dopplered across the bridge and faded out, finally, in the parking lot of Saint Adalbert’s Hospital.

In the waiting room we settled on chairs molded of orange plastic. The spike legs splayed beneath Gerry’s mass but managed to support him the four hours we waited.

He looked bewildered and silly and a little addled with what he had seen.

It was eight months before she saw him again, for he’d met the local constabulary on the way.

When she cried, she screwed her face into fierce baby wrinkles and would not be placated...

He receives visitors in a room where no touching is allowed, where the voice is carried by phone, glances meet through sheets of Plexiglas, and no children will ever be engendered.

Full blast, a satisfying loud music poured from it, adding to the din.

It was harder now to see the road. The night had grown darker or the shaking had obscured his vision.

She walked soundlessly along the tiles, down the stairs, through another corridor, and back around the chapel into a small sitting room impossibly cluttered with afghans and pillows.

To get to the portico of the back entryway, she had to pass through the dark chapel.

She walked by without genuflecting or making the sign of the cross, then made herself stop and go back.

The calm of the orange glow reproached her.

There was no mistake—dun flanks, flag tail, curled legs, and lolling head.

The smell hit her—the same frightening smell that had been on the man—some death musk that deer give off, acrid and burning and final.