They said, Your mother’s beautiful.
Nola smiled a wan, bewildered smile.
Before he’d spoken, LaRose had made sure Maggie was shut in her room. This was so awkward for him always to be caught between the two — he had confided in Josette. She had told him it was awkward. She told him that for one thing, Maggie had some kind of grief disorder, probably, that made her act out. It’s us who should adopt her, said Snow. We love her, but she’s hard. Also there were communication problems at her house. Josette said it was very common at her age, the mother-daughter thing. She and Snow and their mom were lucky because Emmaline had given birth young and also she was kind of a ding like the two of them and not trying to be so goody-goody and above them. Whatever works, do it, Josette said, but I feel sorry for you because it is awkward.
Maggie slipped into his room that night. She had been lying in her room — cooling off after another hot, hot shower. She had started to cry, alone. It was okay alone. But she still cut off the crying as quickly as she could, to toughen herself. She was a wolf, a wounded wolf. She’d sink her teeth in those boys’ throats. Her thoughts returned to how the animals were drawn to LaRose. She would trust her paw to his boy hand.
Move over, she whispered, and popped under his quilt.
Her hot feet on his shins.
I gotta ask you something. Her nose was still plugged by the unwilled crying. Her face was swollen. But his skin cooled the soles of her feet.
Please, LaRose. Don’t laugh. I’m gonna ask you something serious.
Okay.
What would you do if boys jumped me, if they touched me and stuff, all over, in a bad way.
I would make them die, said LaRose.
Do you think you could?
I would figure it out.
Could a saint kill for love?
Saints have superpowers, said LaRose.
Do you think you’re a saint?
No.
I think you are, said Maggie.
She rolled over, stared at the crack of dim light underneath the door. It was a cool night. The warmth of him suffused the bed. The itchy, dirty, cooty-fingered film on her skin dispersed. The roiling craziness her mother caused with her chewing habits dissipated. Everything bad was drawn into the gentle magnetism of the bedsheets. She began to drift.
LaRose stroked the ends of her hair on the pillow beside him.
I am a broken animal, she whispered.
IT WAS GOING to snow, first snow of the season, Romeo could smell it. He could always smell that gritty freshness before it happened, before the weatherpeople turned the snow to drama on his television. He plunged outside, across the lumps of torn earth, and took the road to town. Sure enough, as he rollingly walked, flakes began and he had the impression, maybe it was the drug he’d taken, that he was all of a sudden stuck. He was in a globe, frozen on a tiny treadmill in a little scene of a man walking to the Dead Custer, forever, through falling bits of white paper or maybe some snowlike chemical that would sift down over and over as a child turned his world upside down in its hands. He liked this idea so well that he had to remind himself it wasn’t true. The motionless motion was so transfixing, and his thoughts — his thoughts were centered.
Landreaux happened to drive through this tableau, oblivious as always, but the snow swirled in his wake and got Romeo’s thoughts back on his old favorite, revenge. Landreaux believed he was outside of Romeo’s reach and interest. But no, he wasn’t. Landreaux was so full of himself, so high on himself that even now he did not remember those old days of theirs. Far back when they were young boys hardly older than LaRose. That’s how far back and deep it went, invisible most times like a splinter to the bone. Then surfacing or piercing Romeo from the inside like those terrible fake pills the old vultures had tricked down him.
Bits of snow melted in Romeo’s filmy hair. It was just a fluke, maybe, but he’d got himself put on to a substitute maintenance list at the hospital. Be still my heart! So many prescription bottles, so little time. Because his habits had already become invisible to the ambulance crew, he overheard a sentence that he’d copied out on scratch paper. Never touched the carotid. He’d palmed a box of colored tacks and fixed the paper to the wall. Working out connections. It would be the first of many clues to what had really happened on the day Landreaux killed Dusty.
Lennie Briscoe, the weary hound, and Romeo, his weasel sidekick, would assemble the truth.
In the clarity of thinking that he enjoyed after Landreaux’s car passed, Romeo thought about how people with information spoke quietly, in code. He was learning to decipher what they said. Sometimes he had to make an educated guess. But he knew they were possessed of crucial knowledge.
To get the truth, I must become truth. Or at least appear truth-worthy, he decided.
Therefore, Romeo cleaned himself up. He applied for a real full-time at the hospital. Slim chance. And the paperwork always made him sweat. But there, at the hospital, he thought maybe he could be important again. The other people on maintenance were respected community members. Some of them even drove the ambulance, and all of them were trusted. Sterling Chance really was, for instance, sterling. As head of maintenance, he listened to Romeo answer interview questions with a calm and perceptive gaze.
Self-contained, thought Romeo. He admired Sterling Chance. For the first time since, well, since Mrs. Peace was his teacher, Romeo truly wanted something other than reliable pathways to oblivion. He wanted this job. Not just a measly part-time intermittent job, but a full-time job. True, his motives were sketchy. Drugs and vengeance. But why quibble with a budding work ethic? There was no question that this job would make his old drug sources look pathetic. Never again would he have to suffer the indignation of crisscrossing side effects. And information? If he did get information on this job, it would be information he would keep until he really needed it — sad information. But information so rare and shocking that maybe, perhaps, you could use it to blackmail a person for life. Which was a satisfying thought when you’d previously failed to kill that person.
FIGHTING OFF, OUTWITTING, burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog traveled. They wore out their snowshoes. The girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and stuffed them inside with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out.
The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, only lifting his head, eyes shut, to sip water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark.
He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him.
All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl winding her hand in a strip of blanket to grip the handle of the ax, then heating its edge red hot. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. Every so often, silence, then the mad cacophony again. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog, or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Very much surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum.