She landed a glistening perch, and while it flopped, cast again—and immediately got another bite. “Fish convention. Here we go. And another.”
“I’ll smoke them over an alderwood fire,” I said, and my mouth flooded with saliva.
“Do it now,” she said, and I rowed us back.
We built the fire near the back door and sat on the stoop to eat them out of the pan, hot and oily. We wiped the oil up with bread. Julia stood, pan dangling from her hand. She smiled, and the line of her back, the crumb of bread at the corner of her mouth, struck deep. I caught her free hand and pulled her back down, kissed that slippery mouth, felt her breathing quicken under my hands. We were the only people for miles. I slid her shirt over her head and her pants down around her ankles, and when she came she tore out a handful of daisies with the grass and her cry was fierce as a hawk’s.
She lay in my arms and smiled her slow, creamy smile. “More. But this time in bed.”
This time it was slow, slow as the fall of night in northern latitudes, as the unfurling of a leaf in spring. My north, my springtime.
We drowsed for a while, sun streaming through the southern windows onto the rugs below the sleeping gallery. I stroked her long, tanned fingers. She pulled the quilt up around her shoulders. “I can’t get used to the fact that seeing sunshine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hot. Does it ever get hot here?”
“It gets warm in July and August, but not hot, and not humid.”
“Not like Atlanta.” She settled more comfortably against my shoulder. “You were telling me how it was when you arrived in the U.S. Duluth.”
I buried my face in her hair. Cloudberries and frying fish. “Well, for one thing, before I came to Atlanta, I didn’t know what humidity was. I’d read about it, and Christie Horley told me how awful it had been in New Orleans when she’d been there the year before, but verbal information isn’t the same as somatic. You have to feel it on your skin, touch it, smell it, run your fingers lightly through the sweat that never evaporates to understand.” I felt her nod against my shoulder. “So I got to Atlanta and took a cab for Duluth in August. The cab had no air-conditioning and the air was thick and sweet, like peach juice. I knew I wasn’t in Norway anymore. I was alone in an exotic foreign country at the start of a fine adventure. Anyway, the cab driver couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying half the time. Even though I’d told him I was Norwegian, he insisted that I was German—then wanted to know if I knew his son, Dan, who was in the army in Germany, in Mew-nick. I told him I was very sorry but that I didn’t know his son, and would he please head north on I-85 here, instead of south? His driving worried me.”
Eighty miles an hour without seat belts, windows open to scoop up the viscous air, him steering with one finger and leaning back to talk to me about his son in Munich, careless of the fact that the other drivers hurtling along the interstate seemed as oblivious as he of the rules designed to keep people alive on the road.
“The apartment complex was called Northwoods Lake Court. It was brand-new, frame units built around a lake. I don’t know how many buildings because they were all hidden by trees, but according to the manager there was only me, at the northeast end, and one family due to move in the next day at the extreme south end. The rest wouldn’t fill up for a month or so. The lake had fountains. The only luggage I had was two suitcases. I’d intended to take another cab into Duluth and buy necessities—bedding, kitchen things, lamps, because it was one of those apartments with no overheads—but the place was so beautiful I just wandered around until it was dark.”
I couldn’t begin to describe to Julia the wonder of that place: swamp oak and bluebirds, swallows and bullfrogs, white oak and birch, my own private playground for a month.
“My apartment was built on a slope so that although the front door was at ground level, the only possible access to any of the windows would be via ladder. And the apartment complex was empty. Besides, this wasn’t real life. This was the start of a grand adventure, like sleeping on the beach in Mauritius. All I had in my two suitcases were clothes, an old flashlight my father had had as a boy and had given me when I was seven, and a few books. That night I slept naked on the bedroom carpet, flashlight by my head and screened windows open to the sound of the fountains below and the chirring of tree frogs.” I had felt perfectly safe, cradled by air so soft it was tangible.
“I fell asleep early; it must have been about ten o’clock but it seemed a lot later because of my six-hour jet lag. I don’t know what time it was when I woke but all of a sudden I was lying there, staring at this strange ceiling, lit by sodium light slatted by the window blinds, listening to the fountain. I was absolutely still, rigid, and I knew something was wrong. My heart ratcheted like an asymmetric crank. I listened hard, but all I could hear was the creaking chorus of tree frogs, the scratch of crickets across the velvet night, and the endless fountain. But I knew I had to keep still, there was this little voice in my primitive hindbrain whispering, Don’t move, don’t move, so I tried to look around the bedroom without turning my head but all I could see was shadow the colour of lead and those strips of yellow light. I was sweating, slick with it, and my heart felt like a vast, runaway engine, but I tried to think.”
I could still remember the faintest metal touch of the flashlight against the middle finger of my right hand, the sudden itching of the carpet as I sweated, the way a car changed gear in the distance, the voice in my crocodile brain saying, Don’t move, don’t move, and the restless red turbine in my chest beginning to whine and overheat.
“And then a man’s voice said, ‘Don’t move, I have a gun.’”
“Jesus!” She sat up.
“It was an unremarkable sort of voice, very quiet and steady, but I couldn’t see him. The voice was so ordinary and the whole thing so surreal I thought that maybe he wasn’t there at all, that maybe it was a dream, but then there was a faint, oiled clicking from the shadow, and I knew it wasn’t a dream, my breath started to come in great gusts, and the muscles in my arms and legs coiled so tight and ready my bones hurt. Then he stepped forward, and suddenly in the slatted light there was a gun, ugly, clumsy looking. He kept coming forward and the light inched along a bare forearm, a white-shirted shoulder, up a lightly muscled neck to a reddish gold moustache.” I closed my eyes. “I can see it now, like a series of photographs. And that’s when it happened. It was as though this veneer fell away, as though I stepped aside from a mask, and it felt as though my heart slipped its bearings and hurtled loose. I came off the carpet without thinking, without even blinking, holding the flashlight—and it must have weighed three pounds—like a piece of kindling. It was so light in my hands. I surged off that carpet, muscles whipping like hawsers, swinging that flashlight up and out, and I was so sure. It was so easy. I swung up and out, unstoppable. He started to blink—that’s how fast everything was moving for me, I even noticed that the whites around his eyes looked bluish in the light—he started to blink but then three pounds of bright steel travelling at brutal speed caught him under the chin. His head snapped back and he fell. His body made a sort of lolloping thump on the carpet, like a big sack of potatoes.”
I opened my eyes. It was odd to see the bedroom loft, the seter, the cool sunshine. I could remember the sweat on my skin, the blood roaring in my ears; humming with a sense of power; feeling huge and pure and fierce and filled with a wild, hot joy at being alive.
“I was still holding the flashlight. I flicked it on. It worked. The gun was in his hand, his left hand, but it wouldn’t do him any good. He was staring at the ceiling, head bent sideways—the expression on his face was odd, a kind of gentle amusement. All of a sudden I couldn’t get my breath. There was a dead man in my bedroom. My first night in a strange country and there was a dead man in my bedroom. I’d killed him, and I didn’t even know his name. I remember staring at the flashlight, at the light streaming through my fingers, making them blood red. I turned the flashlight off. He disappeared. I turned it back on again. He reappeared. This time he seemed a long way off. ‘This is my apartment,’ I told him. ‘You had no right.’ The light shining on the carpet began to wobble. I was shaking. My breath came in little pants. There was a strange noise coming from the living room. Ringing. The phone. I walked across the carpet of the bedroom, the tiny hall, the rug in the living room.”