I read the first ten pages or so, which had a flat, meandering western tone. The description was good—the landscape wide and open, foreboding and peaceful at the same time, and so far the most animated character in the story. Angeline, half Mexican, half not, makes her appearance right before a tornado hits. Her faded floral dress and long black hair blow straight out sideways; her face is inscrutable, but edging toward happy at all the destruction. Somehow, in the tornado, her house is destroyed and Roy, her abusive husband twice her age, is beheaded by a flying piece of tin roofing. Angeline rents a room at our hero, Dan’s, mother’s house. Angeline keeps working at the diner, as she did before the tornado. Dan develops an obsession with her, although she’s five years his senior and he’s still dating his high-school sweetheart, Shirla.
I flipped through reading a page here and a page there. Dan goes to war (what war?) and returns decorated and jaded. I suppose it was Vietnam, but my flipping through the manuscript made the whole thing unclear. Some unspeakable tragedy has happened in Dan’s absence. Shirla is now fat, married to Dan’s high-school buddy with the clubfoot (how had I missed him?) and Angeline has taken to living with some crazy Indian twenty miles from the nearest town.
I turned to the last few pages. It’s a confrontation between Angeline and Dan. Dan is holding a wrench, so I suppose he’s there to fix something. The blades of windmill push light then shadow through the open window, giving Angeline a flickering, noir aspect.
“What happened to Bobby Whitefoot?” Dan asks, accusingly.
“He’s dead. Drowned.”
“I don’t think so, Angeline. I think you’ve been running too long.”
“What do you think happened, Dan?”
“You know what I think.”
“I do,” says Angeline. She knots her hair into a bun and goes over the sink. She begins washing the dishes and Dan watches her slim arms dipping in and out of the suds. It’s hot and her dress is clinging to the backs of her thighs. Finally, Angeline is done with the dishes. She turns and Dan is gripping his wrench, white-knuckled. She says, “I’ll bet you want to know just what happened on the bridge that night, that night at Bear Creek.”
And Dan says, “I think it’s time you told someone.”
And I hoped Angeline would because I wanted to know what had happened at Bear Creek, even though I’d missed every reference to it. I thought the big tragedy (referred to on and off) had been Shirla’s impressive weight gain.
So Angeline dries her hands on her apron. (Here Travis had a note saying “apron? or just on her skirt.”)
“You’d been gone about a year then, Dan. No one came to the diner anymore and Old Abner really didn’t have a choice. He had to let me go. That’s how I ended up with Bobby Whitefoot.”
“Now Katherine, that’s not nice.”
I turned quickly, dropping the manuscript. Pages fluttered all around me. “Fuck you, Travis,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Well, fuck you too,” he said, laughing. “I don’t have my pages numbered.”
“I’m sorry I dropped it,” I said.
“How about reading it?” he smiled.
“No. No, I’m really not sorry about that.” I thought for a minute. “I should be.”
“Yes, you should,” said Travis. He was on the floor trying to preserve the order of his manuscript, which luckily had fanned out and could be set back in order in a few stacks with a only a handful of rogue pages.
“I’ll go get the food on,” I said.
“All right.” Travis stood up. “I’ll light a fire.”
“Travis,” I said. I fixed his collar, which really didn’t need fixing. “What happened to Bobby Whitefoot?”
“I can’t tell you that. Can I?”
“She killed him, didn’t she? Angeline did.”
“You’ll have to wait until the book’s finished.”
“What happened at Bear Creek?”
“Darling…”
“Come on, Travis. You can tell me.”
“It’s a story, Katherine. I make this stuff up.”
“What happens to Dan?”
“Did you like it?”
“Angeline?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I found it fascinating. Now answer the question. What happens to Dan?”
“To tell you truth, I don’t know yet. But I have a hunch nothing good comes of his love for Angeline. A woman like that is trouble and that’s just the way it has to be.”
“Reader expectation?” I asked.
“Life,” he replied.
Arthur was home by eight. He swung the door open happily. He was carrying a bunch of flowers that I knew he’d picked out himself—sunflowers, teddy-bear chrysanthemums, starburst lilies, and a huge pink English rose.
“Katherine!” he said. Kevin was jumping all over him and I had to rescue the flowers. “Why didn’t you answer the phone? I’ve been calling since five.”
“We have to get caller ID,” I said. “I thought anyone who was that persistent had to be Boris.”
“I wanted you to come into town and meet the band. We went out for a few drinks.”
“Did you bring me something?”
“A twenty-dollar bottle of red wine.”
“Well, I’m happy for you. And I hope this turns into something both fun and lucrative. And the flowers are gorgeous.” I smiled.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ve had a headache this afternoon, but it’s gone now.”
Arthur put the bottle of wine on the counter. He took off his jacket and I could see the fold lines on his new shirt. There was even a pin poking out of the collar tab.
“Where’d you get the shirt?”
“Levinsky’s. Sleeves are a bit short, but it was only twelve dollars.”
“I am happy, and happy for you. Open that bottle and I’ll perk right up.”
Arthur pulled out the cork and got the glasses down from the cabinet. “Where’s Travis?”
“Travis,” I said, “hitchhiked into Portland and is taking the Greyhound back to Texas.”
“Really? Why?”
“We had a bit of a misunderstanding,” I said.
“What happened?”
“He was getting a little too interested in me and I thought it was better if he headed home. Arthur, nothing happened, but if he’d stayed here, it would have been rather awkward.” I found the cigarettes in Arthur’s jacket pocket and lit one. “We left on good terms. No one’s angry at anyone and he said to keep in touch. I even helped him out with the bus ticket.”
“Wow,” said Arthur.
“Did you like Travis?”
“Travis is a trip. He’s so, I don’t know, cowboy.”
“Yes.”
“But hey,” said Arthur, shaking me by the shoulders, “it’s just the two of us. What a novelty.”
“What a treat.”
Arthur sat down to learn a couple of tunes, because he had a practice the next day and a wedding the day after that. The wedding was in Boston and the payment was a thousand dollars, to be split among four musicians. “And they play in town at Brian Boru’s on Thursdays and usually somewhere else during the week. We have at least one gig every weekend into March. Even some Christmas parties. One New Year’s Eve thing in town, where we’re making double.”
“Timely,” I said. “We’ll be rich.”
“I needed something, after what happened to Intravenous…”
“What happened to Intravenous?”
“Park stopped showing up for practice,” Arthur said. “You knew that. I told you when you were in Mexico.”
“You did?” I said.