Yesno adjusts his jacket. He always wears one, even in the height of summer. He’s never said why, but John knows it’s because he’s trying to cloak the twist and hump in his spine. “I wondered if you’d recognize me, you know. I’m a little balder these days.” Yesno touches the smoothness of his scalp. “Crop failure.”
“You’re more aerodynamic. That’s all.”
Yesno reaches for the duffel. “Well. Off we go. Let me help you with that.”
John swats away his hand. “Not on your life.”
They maze through traffic until they come to a white Expedition. Yesno rattles out the keys and chirps the fob. The trunk of the Expedition opens with a hydraulic wheeze and John hefts the duffel inside.
But before he can close the door, a deep-throated voice behind him seizes his attention: “Thirty minutes until the next train leaves. You’ll be on it.”
Someone else says, “I’m sorry! I’ll go. I’m going.”
Two men approach. One of them has a mane of blond hair and the weird snake-like face of someone who has had too much cosmetic surgery. He is slabbed with muscle and wears too-tight black jeans and a silk shirt unbuttoned halfway down the chest. His fingers shine with rings, and his right hand is so big, it seems to fit entirely around the neck of the man he drags alongside him—and then hurls to the pavement.
The fallen man’s palms skid and rash over red. He curls them into his chest and rolls on his side and whimpers. His hair is long, his shirt appears chewed along the collar, and whiskers dirty his cheeks.
“Who’s this asshole?” John says and Yesno says, “That’s Mickey Golden. The competition.”
“What do you mean?” John says.
“Let’s go,” Yesno says and tugs at John’s sleeve and hurries for the driver’s-side door. “Come on.” And then, as he climbs into the cab, he calls out, “John!”
“In a second.”
“You’ve only been home five minutes. Please let’s try to stay away from trouble.” With that, Yesno closes the door.
Golden reaches into his back pocket, flips open his wallet, counts out five twenties, and flutters them to the blacktop. “You know what’ll happen if you come back.” He speaks with something coiled like barbed wire in his voice, a Texas accent.
The fallen man does not look up but feebly chases down the money on his hands and knees before it blows away.
Golden swivels his head toward John and scans him up and down. “Hell are you looking at, GI Joe?”
John says nothing but keeps his eyes steady on Golden until the big man breaks away and stalks toward a jacked-up club-cab Chevy that advertises Black Dog Energy along its bed. He cranks the ignition and crushes the accelerator and roars out of the parking lot.
Only then does John climb inside the Expedition. Yesno gives him a nervous, sad smile and says, “Let’s get you home, Johnny.”
“Actually, if we have the time?”
“Yes?”
“I was hoping we could stop someplace first.”
3
* * *
Stacie didn’t notice how old the house was until she moved out. Now, whenever she visits her parents, she feels at once cozy with familiarity—and sad. The kitchen has the same blighted color scheme as the hobby farm itself: browns, oranges, yellows. A permanent November. The wallpaper is patterned with moose and peeling at the seams. Decorative plates sit on a shelf and display a fly-fisherman casting, wolves howling at the moon, a deer leaping over a log. There is a fridge as yellow as a smoker’s tooth and a dishwasher that rattles and clanks. Besides the microwave, not much has been updated since 1980.
Just off the side of the kitchen is a round table, and here they all sit. Her father, Oliver Toal, wears a buffalo-plaid shirt. His hair is gray and thinning, his face freshly shaved but deeply wrinkled. He is a man who, like this home and business, has seen better times. Next to him is his wife, Betsy. She wears a Yellowstone T-shirt and pale blue jeans, and her hair is a silver acorn cap. And finally there is Stacie herself, with her straw-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wears her deputy’s uniform and sits neatly in her chair. She ironed every wrinkle from it this morning, but she still picks at her sleeves and smooths the fabric on her thighs. Six months into the job and she still doesn’t feel like it fits right.
They’re praying over their lunch of fried walleye sandwiches and wild rice soaked in gravy and speckled with cranberries. Their voices are monotone as they quickly recite words said a thousand times. “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and let this food to us be blessed. Amen.”
They dig in, biting into the sandwiches, forking up the rice. Oliver says, “So when do you need to be at work?”
“Not for another hour and a half,” she says. “I’ve got time.”
Oliver touches Betsy’s shoulder and says, “How about it, Mother?” and she smiles and wipes her mouth and reaches below the table and pulls out a gift wrapped in the Sunday funnies.
“Well, well. What’s this?” Stacie says, and her mother says, “Oh, you already know, but pretend you’re surprised anyway.”
She picks off the tape and nudges open the paper to reveal her diploma from Mankato State, framed in red maple and topped with glass.
“Sorry it took so long,” her father says, “but I think it turned out pretty okay.”
Stacie always smiles—it’s a reflex of hers, no matter the situation—but it’s honest happiness that makes her beam now as she hugs the frame to her chest and says, “This is so special.”
“Your father made it in his shop.”
“Thank you so, so much, Daddy.” She leans over and kisses his cheek and he says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He blows on his coffee and tests its temperature with this finger and says, “You know I’m proud of you. But I still say it’s funny for a girl to be a cop.”
“It’s been a half a year,” Stacie says. “Maybe we can stop talking about this?”
“She’s not a girl, Oliver.”
“Well, she’s my girl.”
“And,” Stacie says, “I actually prefer the term peacekeeper to cop.”
“Peacemaker,” Oliver mutters into his mug. “No peace to be had in this town.”
Her mother raps his knuckles with her spoon. “That’s why it’s important for her to be doing what she’s doing, you nincompoop.”
Stacie sets the diploma beside her juice and traces its frame with her finger. “That’s the maple from that tree in back? Where I used to swing?”
“You bet it is.”
“Well, I’m going to hang this in my living room. I know the perfect place for it.”
Oliver says, “Still don’t know why you can’t just live here.”
“Daddy. Stop.”
“Stay in your old room. Would save you a wheelbarrow of money.”
“Oliver. Hush. Independence is a good thing.”
“I’m only a few miles away.”
“I’m just worried about you is all,” Oliver says, and Betsy says, “He’s just worried about you is all.”
“I keep hearing these stories.” He stirs up his rice, making a mess of it. His hands are huge, thick with calluses and cracked with lines, one knuckle scabbed over and one fingernail bruised black. “Women getting harassed. Or worse. This town’s changed, and not for the better. You know what I read in the paper the other day? A mother of five vanished when she went out jogging. She was —”
“We already discussed this, Daddy.”
He waves his hand in the air and says, “Bah.”
“Oliver. Hurry.” Betsy flaps her hand at the television. “Don’t forget the news.”
“We don’t need to watch that. Stacie’s here. Let’s just have a nice conversation.”
“I want to see it,” Betsy says and then turns to Stacie. “The Olsens are going to be on the news. You know the Olsens. From church?”
Oliver continues stirring his rice, so Betsy finally gets up herself and clicks on the countertop TV, an old box with a bad picture. The screen
lightens; it’s tuned to the NBC affiliate. After the grain prices, a reporter appears on location in Northfall. He wears a suit that doesn’t fit properly and stands in the shadow of a haul truck. He’s dwarfed by one of its massive tires, his head barely reaching the rim. “A millionaire a day. That’s the slogan on the street here in northern Minnesota, where a tiny town has become a hub for big business.” The camera goes wide to take in the strip mine behind him, a silver core of omnimetal that is steadily being carved out of a hillside. “I talked to one of the latest winners, Will Olsen, a middle-school math teacher who recently sold the mineral rights to his land.”
“There he is,” Betsy says and claps her hands, “that old so-and-so.”
Will Olsen wears a cream-colored leather jacket and snakeskin boots and his hair is a freshly dyed black. He grins into the camera as the reporter puts a hand around his shoulders. “Until recently, the Olsens were unaware that their forty acres of land carried any omnimetal. But in addition to a large vein that bored into a marsh on the property, they also have a small lake hiding what turned out to be a sizable deposit.”
Will takes the reporter through a gauche mansion. Gold columns in the entry. Marble in the bathroom. Quartz counters and tiger-maple cabinets and stainless-steel appliances in the kitchen. “We just tore the old place down, built right over the top.” A fountain on the back deck features a stone cupid peeing water.
The camera cuts to Will standing next to his wife, who wears a glittery blouse and diamond earrings and has her hair sprayed up in a helmet.
“So what’s next?” the reporter asks and stabs the mic into their faces.
“Well, Gloria here’s always wanted to go to Italy. So I suppose we’ll go to Italy. Food’s supposed to be real good.”
In the next shot, the reporter sits in the passenger seat of a Mercedes convertible. Behind the wheel, Will chomps a fat cigar and smashes the accelerator and—
The screen goes dark. Oliver has snapped off the power.
“I was watching that,” Betsy says. “What’s the matter with you?”
Oliver won’t look at her. He stands up with his plate and takes it to the kitchen and sets it on the counter. He moves with the squinty stiffness of a man who’s worked outside his whole life. “Lost my appetite.” He pulls his deerstalker cap off a hook and fits it on his head and opens the door and lets in the sun. “Going for a walk.”
The door shudders the house when it closes. And Betsy stares after him a moment before shaking her head and saying, “Well, I think it’s exciting. When ordinary folks have something exciting like this happen to them, I’m honestly tickled to bits. The metal all around us . . . it’s like a genie in a bottle. People’s wishes are coming true.”
“I take it he’s not enjoying the new job at Dick’s Sporting Goods?”
“No,” Betsy says. “No, he is not.” She picks up her coffee and sets it down again. “He can’t sleep at night. When he’s home, he spends all his time in his shop, building that birchbark canoe. All the business has shifted to the Gunflint, he says. Nobody wants to come to this part of the Arrowhead to fish anymore, he says. But of course that’s not entirely true.”
“All these rich businessmen?” Stacie says. “They love to fish.”
“Exactly. But the big dummy does a Google search for every client request. If they’ve got any connection to mining, any at all, he flat refuses them. You know your father.” And here Betsy picks up the framed diploma and studies it fondly. “He wishes you were still six years old and in pigtails and that this town was still nothing but loons and lakes. He doesn’t like change.”
4
* * *
Victoria’s husband knocks at the bathroom door and asks if everything is okay.
“Yes,” she says over the noise of the shower. “Just give me another second.”
She can’t quite hear his response, but it has something to do with using up all the hot water. She isn’t sure how much time has passed since she curled up in a ball on the bottom of the tub—maybe ten minutes or maybe an hour—but she has been there so long that her legs have gone to sleep, and she has to brace herself against the ledge to slowly rise. She pushes her face beneath the spray and opens her mouth and swishes and spits out the bile that sours her tongue.
She swipes the towel across the mirror and studies the face she no longer recognizes. Wrinkled and spotted and hollowed. Long white hair weeding down her neck and bony shoulders. People used to guess she was ten, even twenty years younger than she was. Not anymore. The math has reversed since they moved to Northfall, and she has never felt or looked older.
Another knock at the bathroom door. “Hey, hon? You’re going to be late if you don’t hurry it up.”
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “It’s not like the work can start without me.” The air is so thick with steam that it feels like she’s swallowing clouds and she thinks maybe if she stayed in here long enough and ignored the knocking, she would eventually become something vaporous herself—and simply float away.
In the kitchen Wade scrapes out the pan and offers her a plate of scrambled eggs with onion, green pepper, and cheese sprinkled over the top.
“Thanks, but nothing for me,” she says and goes to the cupboard and pulls down a thermos and fills it with coffee from the carafe.
He tries again, following her, brushing his palm along her back. “Most important meal of the day.”
“I’m sorry,” she says and blows the steam off the coffee before taking a sip that instantly makes her chest burn with acid. “But I can’t seem to keep anything down.”
“Maybe you’re pregnant?” he says.
She has to pull the coffee away from her mouth to laugh at the thought of it. After all those years of trying, early in their marriage, for her to end up a mother at sixty-two. “Can you imagine?” she says.
Wade sets the plate on the counter and draws her into a hug.
“What are your plans today?” she says and he says, “I thought I’d fiddle around in the garden, catch up on the Times, check out that new burrito place, maybe start a torrid affair with one of the neighbors.”
She and Wade have been married over forty years, thirty of which they both spent teaching at the University of Nebraska. He was an adjunct lecturer and she a full professor. He taught freshman bio, the same curriculum semester after semester; she was a tenured faculty member in the physics department and applied for million-dollar grants to fund her lab’s research. Wade never really cared about teaching. He would rather have been fishing or biking or cooking, hosting dinner parties, playing golf. But Victoria lived to work. Her job defined her, consumed her.
For as long as they have been together, Wade has talked about their retirement plans—and though she has read the travel guides and scrolled through the websites he sent her, she can never really imagine not working. They would leave Lincoln, buy a house in coastal Oregon, and when they weren’t eating Dungeness crabs or peeking into tide pools or puttering around in their boat, they would travel. That was what Wade wanted, to visit Iceland, Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, South Africa, India. There were so many places he wanted to see—and Minnesota wasn’t one of them.
But then the sky fell. She read the news about the fungal infection in the Pacific Northwest. She saw the footage of the electrical phantom in Bangladesh. There were rumors of a flying woman in Los Angeles, spiked tentacles rising out of drains in Mexico City, a bear the size of a school bus in Siberia. And in northern Minnesota, metal rained from the sky. Metal that might prove to be the greatest energy source in the world. When the men in black suits showed up at Victoria’s lab and offered her what they called the opportunity of a lifetime, she really believed that’s what it was. Truly groundbreaking work. She would author the rules of this strange new world. She came to Northfall with the understanding she was serving a higher purpose, unlocking the secrets of science and bettering humanity.
Just as Wade had dutifully followed her to Lincoln, he followed her here. T
o Northfall. To this housing development built on a golf course so new, the joints in the sod are still visible. They had always lived in older homes that Wade refurbished. He didn’t know what to do with himself in this neocolonial with wall speakers and fake hardwood floors and a master bath with a Jacuzzi and a bidet. Just for a few years, she promised him. Then she would retire. A life’s work realized. And then they could go anywhere.
Now his smile fades and he says, “You were awake a lot of last night.”
“I’m sorry if I kept you up.”
“I can hear you, you know. In the bathroom. Even with the door closed and the shower on, I can hear you crying.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “I’m worried about you.”
He touches her face and she rubs his knuckles, which are starting to marble with arthritis, and says, “I’ve got to go.”
“When we moved here, I’d never seen you so excited. You were as giddy as a schoolgirl. But now . . .”
“Hopefully I’ll be back around five.”
She screws the top onto the thermos and fetches her purse and heads for the garage and he says, “Victoria?”
She opens the door and pauses, half in and half out of the shadows.
“What are you doing over there?”
She tightens her mouth. “You know I can’t tell you.”
“The work . . . it’s making you sick?” He is trim except for a bit of a belly poking against his golf shirt. His salt-and-pepper mustache matches his full head of hair. And while she feels paler by the day, he is tanned from all his time outside. He wears tortoiseshell glasses and he takes them off now as if to see her better. “Are you wearing protective gear? What are you exposing yourself to?”
Not for the first time, she considers telling him everything. She would feel so much cleaner and lighter then. But a siren wails in the distance and she takes a deep breath and says, “You know there’s a good chance we’re being recorded right now.”
The Ninth Metal Page 3
