by Chuck Logan
He trailed her back through Afton, north up the highway that skirted the river and connected with I-94. Short of the interstate, she turned left up a gravel road that wound through a tract under construction where fields and rolling woodland were losing to tiny plots with huge new wood frame homes.
For the second time he saw a sign that advertised HANSEN’S CHRISTMAS TREES-CUT YOUR OWN TREES. Caren turned at the sign. Tom smiled. She was going to get the tree.
5
The access road curled into a miniature evergreen forest and ended in a rutted dirt lot. Caren parked the Blazer and got out. Tom remembered her face as bright, casting light. Now it was drawn, pale, a little puffy. She walked past Tom’s car to the shack where a sign explained that Hansen loaned you a small saw to cut your twenty-five-dollar tree. On a very cold afternoon, she was the only person in the field not wearing a hat or gloves.
Tom bypassed the shack and trailed her into the fir, spruce, and pine.
Two dozen people wandered through the trees. A third of the shoppers towed preschool children who looked like characters from the Sunday comics, bundled in floppy fleece Jester caps, scarves and mittens. Frosty captions of breath stuck to their faces. Families. Mom, pop and kids doing the ritual. In some cases it was just pop and the kids. There were several solitary men, so Tom didn’t stand out. Caren Angland was the only single woman.
The other people circled, fluffed gloved hands at the boughs, and debated. Not Caren. She walked directly to a tall, long-needled white pine.
Tom slid through a thicket of shorter spiky firs and paused to watch her stoop and begin to trim away the lowest branches, better to get at the trunk.
He browsed toward her, turned, inspected a tree. When their eyes met briefly through a tunnel of pine needles, he looked away. Awkward embarrassment. Caren’s eyes paused for a beat, assessing him for threat.
She saw a man of medium height, in his late thirties, early forties, who had once been good-looking behind his plastic horn-rims, but had stopped taking care of himself. His baggy tan parka came from the United Store. Wrinkles overwhelmed his corduroy suit. Galoshes, a purple wool knit cap with a Vikings logo and cheap leather gloves completed his ward-robe. The clothes wore him, and with his tousled straw hair, fleecy mustache and soft blue eyes he had the rumpled persona of a perpetual graduate student who’d have stains on his tie and who toiled slowly after obscurities in a too-fast world. English lit. perhaps.
Harmless. A Minnesota Normal.
Through the screen of pine, his eyes swung back and caught the corner of her glance. He smiled self-consciously.
“Can’t make up my mind. Every year I do this. And then somebody else gets the best trees.”
Polite, crisp, she replied, “It’s early. There’s still a good selection.”
He nodded. “Last few years I went with balsams. But now they strike me as cramped and uptight.”
“Scotch pine is a nice tree,” said Caren. “Problem is they drop their needles in three weeks.” Her saw made a pile of damp white dust as she efficiently cut through the base of the tree. Resin dripped in the minty air. A smell like turpen-tine.
Tom took a step closer and cast a sentence calculated to hook a raw nerve. “You seem to know what you want.”
The tree fell over. There was more room between them.
And for the first time she had a clear view of his face, and Tom saw she recognized him.
For a spilt second her eyes shot pain. Tom was encour aged, thankful that Christmas was a vulnerable time for troubled people.
But she recovered smoothly. “Now what?” she mused in a calm resigned voice. “Tom James, isn’t it?” She glanced around. “Are there more of you?”
“Just me.” He took off his gloves, pulled out his wallet and handed her his card. As she took it he saw that she had skinned her knuckle cutting down the tree. A bluish patch of torn skin the size of a dime stood out on her cold-chafed right hand. Blood started to well up. She ignored it, and a red trickle curled between her fingers and crept down her palm.
She studied him. “You’re not interested in house renova-tions today, are you?”
“I’m sorry to be asking you this, Mrs. Angland, but is the FBI investigating your husband?”
“Fishing, Mr. James?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Tom. And the FBI’s doing the fishing, wouldn’t you say?”
“I didn’t say.”
“So you’re not denying it?”
She sighed: “Have you considered getting a real job?” She bent to get a grip on her tree. Tom stepped forward.
“Let me help you,” he offered, reaching. They tugged at the branches, and he lurched. His shoe shot sideways on a patch of ice beneath the pine needles and he slipped. She thrust out both hands and gripped him above the elbows and steadied him.
“Careful, Tom,” she said tartly.
He nodded. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do.” He went in his pocket, took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the blood.
The small succor of concern seemed to affect her all out of proportion. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, her eyes darting. For a second Tom thought he saw an opening. A centipede of adrenaline scurried up his spine.
He glanced around. People and kids shuffled in and out of the trees. No one looked threatening. The Christmas trees stirred. The wind whipped up. For the first time in a long time he noticed the loud silence of the racing winter sky and was thrilled.
A drop of blood seeped between her fingers below the handkerchief and dotted the coarse green feathers of pine boughs at her feet.
Her contradictory energy struck him. So competent and hardy, so heedless. No hat. Bare-handed. But little stabs of dread.
Ten years ago he would have desired her. Ten years ago he thought anything would have been possible. Now, he quietly resented her. There had always been a net beneath her. She’d never known what it was like to be a paycheck away from disaster. She had never had to work for idiots.
She was attractive. She was connected. She was fair game in open season.
And she was good, and she was hiding something.
But his face remained full of patient, plodding sympathy and understanding. She kicked the Christmas tree, laughed, looked up at the clouds. But she kept her thoughts to herself.
Tom’s hands hovered, trying to time her mood swing and step in. Then she withdrew again. Businesslike, she took hold of her tree and dragged it toward the parking lot.
Tom called after her. “You can reach me anytime. All the numbers are on the card. Work, home, pager…”
She ignored him and plodded on, exertion showing in a flame of white breath.
Tom, shivering with cold and excitement, noticed the left sleeve of his jacket and removed his glove to touch a dot of her freezing blood.
6
Caren’s world was as shrill as the bottom of a pie tin. Road, traffic, sky-the colors ran together like water over metal.
She had been warned. Don’t go abruptly off the medication. Last night, numb after watching the news, she’d found herself staring at a documentary on the Discovery Channel about African lions hunting. Lionesses, really. She had watched them cull an impaired zebra from the herd and drag it down. She’d thought, aha-that striped pony quit taking her meds.
Therefore vulnerable. And the guilt made you slow. But it was being bad that made you stick out from the herd so the lion noticed you. Like a smell.
Tom James, the reporter, was an unlikely lion, but he’d been hunting and he’d noticed something. Keith had started to stink, and the jackals were gathering out there. She hadn’t expected them so soon.
She wasn’t ready. Talking to him at Hansen’s, Caren had thought: This is what a drunk feels like, trying to act sober, attempting to walk a straight line.
The drive home exhausted her.
Keith’s car was skewed, blocking the garage. She braked so hard she stalled the Blazer. Her breathing problems, which her doctor called anxiety
attacks, but she knew to be mortal fear, now formed a hard crust around her throat and chest. The pressure suggested apt images from old movies; gangsters from Chicago used to take you for a boat ride. Stick your feet in a washtub and mix it full of cement. Tell jokes while it hardened and then they’d heave you overboard.
Just grin it down. Your normal everyday, “Hi, honey, I’m home, how was your day?” smile. Just download a smile from the old smile server.
She forced herself out of the truck. The tree had to be dealt with. A habit of normalcy she refused to part with. As she untied the tree from the top of the Blazer she saw Keith’s shadow shimmer in the living room window. Her usually firm grasp went butterfingers. The eight-foot pine rolled to the cobbles. She left it where it fell. Last year at this time lights were strung on the eaves, around the windows.
Keith, smiling, had tossed strings of purple lights in the oaks. They’d walked on the road in the crunching snow and looked back and seen the trees float under the stars like Pi-cassos dashed out with a child’s sparkler.
This year there were no lights. The tree lay abandoned near the freeze-burned lawn, and it looked like the week after Christmas. The edges of Caren’s lips curved down, but she had to force a smile.
It turned out she didn’t because, when she entered the house, she heard Keith’s footsteps going down the stairs to the basement, then she heard the pop of the TV come on.
She spied a beer bottle cap and the torn carton of a microwave burrito dinner on the counter. The microwave door was ajar.
She scooped the mess and deposited it in the trash. Carefully, she closed the microwave. Touched up with a damp dishcloth. Clean up. Make nice. Hide his empty whiskey bottles in the recycling bin.
Denial and avoidance. Passive aggressive. Words you volleyed in counseling. Like throwing Ping-Pong balls against those hungry lions.
They wore the house like a Victorian straitjacket and always kept at least one room between them. On the inside, all the snaps and buckles were accurate. This was the second big house she had remodeled. She ran her hand along the purple wallpaper she’d chosen for the hallway, just to see if Keith would notice the morbid pattern.
Decor for The Addams Family.
Except there was no family, just Keith and Caren. Unless you counted Paulie Kagin. He was family. From Chicago.
Don’t worry, Keith had assured her. I’m using them.
Then it was, don’t worry, I won’t spend the money.
All of a sudden it had turned into killing people. Caren knew in detail what the news reports only hinted at.
She knew it all.
Now she had to do something about it.
First she had to stop taking the pills.
The pills had combed it smooth in the beginning. Let her live with it. Like floating.
Duty didn’t float. It thudded through room after empty room.
A wall of drawers rose in the hallway by the front door and she took an old wooden footlocker from one of them.
It looked like a pirate chest, and it had been dented and scarred when her mother passed it down to her when she was six, in Williston, North Dakota.
Just now it reminded her of Phil Broker, who’d become a sort of pirate.
She carried it into the living room and placed it on the floor, where the tree should go, in front of the broad bay windows. Through the side panel of the window she could see the tree, out in the cold, abandoned on the cobbles. The room was boxed by horrible Prussian blue wallpaper.
Gothic rockets in a turgid sea. She had taken her pills and papered the walls with signals of distress.
She sat down on the shiny hardwood planks, opened the trunk and removed a cardboard box. Inside, stacked with care, were tiny handmade Christmas tree decorations that fit in the palm of her hand.
The pills she had taken for the last six months had magically dried her tears. Now, in the absence of the antidepressants, the vast cloud of accumulated tears condensed in her head and began to drizzle. Hot wet streaks burned down her cheeks.
This is really crazy, Caren. Thoughts wouldn’t balance on her head. They fell off. A jumble of blocks.
With difficulty, she placed them in order. She. And her first husband. Made the decorations. Up north, on their first vacation. The year they were married. In a storm of sawdust, delicate designs had come from Phil’s rough hands like intricate charms. Hers incorporated beads, fabric and feathers.
Arts and crafts class.
Phil, the rustic, turned out diminutive stars, moons, suns, trees and animals on his band saw. She made angels. She selected one of the awkward angels and placed it on a wide plank called a king board. She had learned about king boards from Phil. In colonial times the best lumber went back to England, and it was illegal for a colonist to own a “king board.” The crafty Americans used the wide boards as flooring in their attics where the redcoats didn’t inspect.
Her angel, with its rosy cheeks and misshapen wings, was meant to hang and not to stand, so it toppled over on the king board.
The sound of a roaring crowd carried up the stairwell from the basement. Tapes of old college games. Keith, the Minnesota Gopher quarterback, was throwing touchdowns down in the dark. Keith would never find the time to make a tree decoration. But, unlike Phil, he could plan a Christmas party down to the last detail that the mayor of St. Paul would attend.
Not this year.
A telephone was the only other occupant of this hollow room, and it coiled on the floor like a plastic tapeworm. That phone weighed fourteen years of living. That’s how THE BIG LAW/33
long it had been since she’d left Phil Broker, to marry Keith Angland, who had once been Phil’s partner and then, his boss. She’d deserted Phil because he wasn’t going anywhere and sure-footed Keith was.
She stared at the phone and squeezed an angel in her right hand and made a wish that the phone would ring. That Phil would call. That he would come and give her some help.
He’d come if he really knew. But for now, because she had been vague, he wouldn’t trespass. She’d been vague because she kept hoping Keith would pull it out of the hat at the last minute. Do one of his famous scrambles.
But the federal building story changed all that.
She didn’t trust anyone Keith worked with. There was too much money involved. So it had to be Phil. He’d been off the job for two years. Independent now. And if she’d missed something, he would spot it. So she’d have to take what she had to Phil. And when the time came, let him-as they quaintly put it-drop the dime.
He was up there, alone with his baby, while his damn Amazon child bride was off playing St. Joan in Bosnia.
God. Edgy Phil with a kid. Round with paternity, padded with much laughter. She tried to imagine him smiling. She bet he’d gained weight.
She knew the baby was a girl-Caren flinched as her muscles curved in and stabbed her, in both breasts and in her belly. Her imagination ambushed her with a detailed blueprint of the flawed eggs lined up in her ovaries, racks of them, drawing lots to see who would take the Kamikaze trip down the red rapids this month.
Dammit. Leaving that message was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. Breaking the vows. Going outside her marriage. No, it was just the first step in the hardest thing.
It was going to get much harder.
Something had to be done about Keith.
She shut her eyes and prayed: Please call. Don’t make me do this alone.
7
Going west on U.S. 94, the automatic pilot grabbed the wheel. Tom resisted the first pull, steered straight. The next tug came at the southbound exit for U.S. 494. He beat that one, too. Ten minutes later, as the spire of the state capitol marked the horizon, the impulse snuggled up again. This time, seduction was fast and total; he drove past the downtown St. Paul exits and continued west on 94 until it branched and he took 35E south. The Rabbit knew the way.
Get off on County Road 42, turn west, and then it was eight miles to the Mystic Lake Casino.
Working through the turns, his pulse quickened: Eagan and Prior Lake-the crossroads. Casino to the left. Racetrack to the right. He turned left, passed the frost-rimmed rock-landscaped entrance to the “Wilds” golf course. A few miles later, the casino rose like a squashed modernist wigwam from a sea of parked cars.
He turned into the lot, left the rusting VW, squared his slumped shoulders and walked through the tinted glass doors.
Mystic Lake was roomy and clean, without the sweaty opium den feel of smaller casinos. Showroom bright, a cherry Acura gleamed on a dais. Win me. He inhaled the signature incense of cigarette smoke entwined with the loopy rush of calliope music spiraling off the slots.
With childlike faith, he let it all surround him like the pulsating heart of an immense plastic toy. It reminded Tom of his deceased mother’s living room in Bayport, Minnesota, in the shadow of Stillwater Prison, where his dad had worked as a guard. After Dad died, she’d draw the curtains and re-cline like a silent movie star on the couch in front of the TV, sucking on Winstons that protruded from a slim cigarette holder. Wheel of Fortune flickered on the screen. The volume was turned all the way up.
Mom died before Minnesota legalized gambling. Her one trip to Vegas with her chain-smoking girlfriends was her preview of heaven.
All he had was the two twenties he’d lifted from Barb Luct.
Start small. Play his way up to the blackjack tables. Hell, go to the nickel machines if he had to.
Just show me some magic.
When his stake was minimal, he always started on the same machine, an Atronic game scrolled with bright symbols of heraldry and knights in armor. A bank of them nested between quarter keno and across from a row of deuces wild poker. Camelot combined interactive video with the slam-bam spin of a slot. Three pay lines rotated icons on the drum.
Shields, castles, crenelated pennants, number sevens, battle-axes crossed on shields; the usual arcana of the one-armed bandit. But there were also progressive symbols; when an archery target appeared on one line the play moved to a new screen on which two knights squared off in an archery contest.
