Still, when I actually got there, when I could smell the smoke and see the lamps burning, I felt shy suddenly. I couldn’t just burst in and announce that I’d come to rescue her, could I? And I could hardly pretend I just happened to be in the neighborhood… plus, that was Bud in there, and he was as purely nasty as a rattlesnake with a hand clamped round the back of its head. There was no way he was going to like this, no matter how you looked at it.
So what I did was pull the canoe up on the bank about a hundred yards from the cabin, the scrape of the gravel masked by the snow, and creep up on the place, as stealthy as a big man can be — I didn’t want to alert Bud’s dog and blow the whole thing. But that was just it, I realized, tiptoeing through the snow like an ice statue come to life — what thing would I blow? I didn’t have a plan. Not even a clue.
In the end, I did the obvious: snuck up to the window and peered in. I couldn’t see much at first, the window all smeared with grime, but I gingerly rubbed the pane with the wet heel of my mitten, and things came into focus. The stove in the corner was going, a mouth of flame with the door flung open wide for the fireplace effect. Next to the stove was a table with a bottle of wine on it and two glasses, one of them half full, and I saw the dog then — a malamute-looking thing — asleep underneath it. There was some homemade furniture — a sort of couch with an old single mattress thrown over it, a couple of crude chairs of bent aspen with the bark still on it. Four or five white plastic buckets of water were lined up against the wall, which was festooned with the usual backcountry junk: snowshoes, traps, hides, the mangy stuffed head of a caribou Bud must have picked up at a fire sale someplace. But I didn’t see Bud. Or Jordy. And then I realized they must be in the back room — the bedroom — and that made me feel strange, choked up in the pit of my throat as if somebody was trying to strangle me.
It was snowing pretty steadily, six inches on the ground at least, and it muffled my footsteps as I worked my way around the cabin to the back window. The night was absolute, the sky so close it was breathing for me, in and out, in and out, and the snow held everything in the grip of silence. A candle was burning in the back window — I could tell it was a candle from the way the light wavered even before I got there — and I heard the music then, violins all playing in unison, the sort of thing I wouldn’t have expected from a lowlife like Bud, and voices, a low, intimate murmur of voices. That almost stopped me right there, that whispery blur of Jordy’s voice and the deeper resonance of Bud’s, and for a moment everything hung in the balance. A part of me wanted to back away from that window, creep back to the canoe, and forget all about it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d seen her first — I’d squeezed her hand and given her the corsage and admired the hand-lettered nametag — and it wasn’t right. The murmur of those voices rose up in my head like a scream, and there was nothing more to think about.
My shoulder hit the back door just above the latch and blew the thing off the hinges like it was a toy, and there I was, breathing hard and white to the eyebrows. I saw them in the bed together and heard this little birdlike cry from Jordy and a curse from Bud, and then the dog came hurtling in from the front room as if he’d been launched from a cannon. (And I should say here that I like dogs and that I’ve never lifted a finger to hurt any dog I’ve ever owned, but I had to put this one down. I didn’t have any choice.) I caught him as he left the floor and slammed him into the wall behind me till he collapsed in a heap. Jordy was screaming now, actually screaming, and you would have thought that I was the bad guy, but I tried to calm her, her arms bare and the comforter pulled up over her breasts and Bud’s plastic feet set there like slippers on the floor, telling her a mile a minute that I’d protect her, it was all right, and I’d see that Bud was prosecuted to the fullest extent, the fullest extent, but then Bud was fumbling under the mattress for something like the snake he was, and I took hold of his puny slip of a wrist with the blue-black snubnose.22 in it and just squeezed till his other hand came up and I caught that one and squeezed it too.
Jordy made a bolt for the other room and I could see she was naked, and I knew right then he must have raped her because there was no way she’d ever consent to anything with a slime like that, not Jordy, not my Jordy, and the thought of what Bud had done to her made me angry. The gun was on the floor now and I kicked it under the bed and let go of Bud’s wrists and shut up his stream of curses and vile foul language with a quick stab to the bridge of his nose, and it was almost like a reflex. He went limp under the force of that blow and I was upset, I admit it, I was furious over what he’d done to that girl, and it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to reach out and put a little pressure on his throat till the raw-looking stumps of his legs lay still on the blanket.
That was when I became aware of the music again, the violins swelling up and out of a black plastic boombox on the shelf till they filled the room and the wind blew through the doorway and the splintered door groaned on its broken latch. Jordy, I was thinking, Jordy needs me, needs me to get her out of this, and I went into the front room to tell her about the snow and how it was coming down out of season and what that meant. She was crouched in the corner across from the stove and her face was wet and she was shivering. Her sweater was clutched up around her neck, and she’d got one leg of her jeans on, but the other leg was bare, sculpted bare and white all the way from her little painted toenails to the curve of her thigh and beyond. It was a hard moment. And I tried to explain to her, I did. “Look outside,” I said. “Look out there into the night. You see that?”
She lifted her chin then and looked, out beyond the doorway to the back room, beyond Bud on his bed and the dog on the floor and into the gaping hole where the door had been. And there it was, coming down like the end of everything, snow, and there was only one name for it now. I tried to tell her that. Because we weren’t going anywhere.
(1994)
She Wasn’t Soft
She wasn’t tender, she wasn’t soft, she wasn’t sweetly yielding or coquettish, and she was nobody’s little woman and never would be. That had been her mother’s role, and look at the sad sack of neuroses and alcoholic dysfunction she’d become. And her father. He’d been the pasha of the living room, the sultan of the kitchen, and the emperor of the bedroom, and what had it got him? A stab in the chest, a tender liver, and two feet that might as well have been stumps. Paula Turk wasn’t born for that sort of life, with its domestic melodrama and greedy sucking babies — no, she was destined for something richer and more complex, something that would define and elevate her, something great. She wanted to compete and she wanted to win — always, shining before her like some numinous icon was the glittering image of triumph. And whenever she flagged, whenever a sniffle or the flu ate at her reserves and she hit the wall in the numbing waters of the Pacific or the devilish winds at the top of San Marcos Pass, she pushed herself through it, drove herself with an internal whip that accepted no excuses and made no allowances for the limitations of the flesh. She was twenty-eight years old, and she was going to conquer the world.