I folded the letter up, exactly as it had been found, and I put it beneath the salt can. I did this for a reason. I would never talk about this letter but instead let him wonder. Sometimes he’d look at me, I’d smile, and he’d think to himself salt or sugar? But he would never be sure.
I sat down in a chair. I put my legs in another chair, off the floor, and I waited for him to walk up the steps. When he did, I let him come.
Step by step. I let him listen to hear if I was inside.
I let him open the door. Only when we saw each other did I stop him.
“I just put the wax down,” I said. “You have to wait.”
He stood there looking at me over that long, shiny space. It rolled and gleamed like a fine lake between us. And it deepened.
I saw that he was about to take the first step, and I let him, but halfway into the room his eyes went dark. He was afraid of how deep this was going to become. So I did for Nector Kashpaw what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him.
I held it out there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in.
burn.A BRIDGE S a S (1973) It was the harsh spring that everybody thought would never end.
All the way down to Fargo on the jackrabbit bus Albertine gulped the rank, enclosed, passenger breath as though she could encompass the strangeness of so many other people by exchanging air them, by replacing her own scent with theirs. She didn’t close her eyes to nap even once during travel, because this was the first time she’d traveled anywhere alone. She was fifteen years old, and she was running away from home. When the sky deepened, casting bleak purple shadows along the snow ditches, she went even tenser than when she’d first walked up the ridged stairs of the vehicle.
She watched carefully as the dark covered all. The yard lights of farms, like warning beacons upon the sea or wide-flung constellations of stars, blinked on, deceptively close.
The bus came upon the city and the lights grew denser, reflecting up into the cloud cover, a transparent orange-pink that floated over the winking points of signs and low black buildings.
The streets looked slick, deep green, from the windows of the bus.
The driver made a small rasping sound into the microphone and announced theiTarrival at the Fargo terminal.
Stepping into the bus station, the crowd of people in the hitched, plastic seats looked to Albertine like one big knot, a linked and doubled chain of coats, scarves, black-and-gray Herbst shopping bags, broad pale cheeks and noses. She wasn’t sure what to do next. A chair was open. Beside it a standing ashtray bristled with butts, crushed soft-drink cups, flattened straws. Albertine sat down in the chair and stared at the clock. She frowned as though she were impatient for the next bus, but that was just a precaution. How long would they let her sit? This was as far as she had money to go. The compressed bundle of her jeans and underwear, tied in a thick sweater, felt reassuring as a baby against her stomach, and she clutched it close.
Lights of all colors, vaguely darkened and skewed in the thick glass doors, zipped up and down the sides of buildings. She glanced all around and back to the clock again. Minutes passed.
Slow fright took her as she sat in the chair; she would have to go out soon. How many hours did she have left? the clock said eight. She sat stiffly, counting the moments, waiting for something to tell her what to do.
Now that she was in the city, all the daydreams she’d had were useless.
She had not foreseen the blind crowd or the fierce activity of the lights outside the station. And then it seemed to her that she had been sitting in the chair too long. Panic tightened her throat.
Without considering, in an almost desperate shuffle, she took her bundle and entered the ladies’ room.
Fearing thieves, she took the bundle into the stall and held it awkwardly on her lap. Afterward, she washed her face, combed and redid the tin barrette that held her long hair off her forehead, then sat in the lobby She let her eyes close. Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed outward. Her body seemed to shrink and contract as in childish fever dreams when she lost all sense of the actual proportion of things and knew herself as bitterly small, She had come here for some reason, but couldn’t remember what that was.
As it happened, then, because she didn’t have anything particular in mind, the man seemed just what she needed when he appeared.
He needed her worse, but she didn’t know that. He stood for an instant against the doors, long enough for Albertine to notice that iL his cropped hair was black, his skin was pale brown, thick and rough.
He wore a dull green army jacket. She caught a good look at his profile, the blunt chin, big nose, harsh brow.
He was handsome, good-looking at least, and could have been an Indian.
He even could have been a Chippewa. He walked out into the street.
She started after him. Partly because she didn’t know what she was looking for, partly because he was a soldier like her father, and partly because he could have been an Indian, she followed.
It seemed to her that he had cleared a path of safety through the door into the street. But when she stepped outside he had disappeared.
She faltered, then told herself to keep walking toward the boldest lights.
Northern Pacific Avenue was the central thoroughfare of the dingy feel-good roll of Indian bars, western-wear stores, pawn shops, and Christian Revival Missions that Fargo was trying to eradicate. The strip had diminished under the town’s urban renewal project: asphalt plains and swooping concrete interchanges shouldered the remaining bars into an intricate huddle, Ah-nod ILMN= lit for action at this hour.
The giant cartoon outline of a cat, eyes fringed in — pink neon, winked and switched its glittering tail. Farther down the street a cowgirl tall as a building tossed her lariat in slow heart-shaped loops. Beneath her glowing heels men slouched, passing bags crimped back for bottlenecks.
The night was cold. Albertine stepped into the recessed door stoop of a small shop. Its window displayed secondhand toasters.
The other side of the street was livelier. She saw two Indian men, hair failing in cowlicks over their faces, dragging a limp, dazed woman between them. An alley swallowed them. Another woman in a tiger-skin skirt and long boots posed briefly in a doorway. A short round oriental man sprang out of nowhere, gesturing emphatically to someone who wasn’t there. He went up the stairs of a doorway labeled Rooms.
That was the doorway Albertine decided she would try for a place to sleep, when things quieted down. For now she was content to watch, shifting from foot to foot, arms crossed over her bundle.
Then she saw the soldier again.
He was walking quickly, duffel hoisted up his shoulder, along the opposite side of the street. Again she followed. Stepping from her doorway she walked parallel with him, bundle slung from her hand and bouncing off her legs. He must have been a little over six feet. She was tall herself and always conscious of the height of men. She stopped when he paused before a windowful of pearl button shirts buff Stetsons, and thick-nosed pawned pistols. He stayed there a long time, moving from one display to the next. He was never still. He smoked quickly, Littering, dragging hard and snapping the cigarette against his middle finger. He turned back and forth, constantly aware of who was passing or what was making what noise where.
He knew the girl had been following and watching.
He knew she was watching now. He had noticed her first in the bus station. Her straight brown hair and Indian eyes drew him, AWL even though she was too young. She was tall, strong, twice the size of most Vietnamese. It had been a long time since he’d seen any Indian women, even a breed. He had been a soldier, was now a veteran, had seen nine months of combat in the Annamese Cordillera before the NVA captured him somewhere near Pleiku.