“You didn’t even check to make sure they were the ones. For all you know, I could have bought a pair just like them at Marshall Field’s.”
“They would never let a bum like you into Marshall Field’s.” She turned with a swish of her long, scented hair and walked away, her dress lifting on the breeze.
I watched until she’d grown small in the glare, then turned and headed back toward the Heights.
I was ten feet from a new life when he spoke to me out of the shadow of the squat pines at the end of the bridge.
“I’ll take the money.”
He’d probably come across in one of the cars during my meeting with the woman. I couldn’t see his face, but he thrust a gun at me from the shadows and it glowed in the streetlights as if the metal were hot.
“I give it to you, I’m dead,” I said.
His voice spat from the dark. “You were dead from the beginning.”
I sailed the envelope at him like a frisbee. It caught him in the chest. The gun muzzle flashed. I felt a punch in my belly. I spun and stumbled into the street in front of an MTC bus, which swerved, its horn blaring. I fled toward the dark, away from the streetlights.
The bus passed, and he came after me on foot, a black figure against the explosion of light from the bridge. I ran, making my way along the streets that topped the Heights. I cut into an alley, across another street, then into another alley.
Suddenly, inexplicably, my legs gave out. They just went limp. I sprawled in the gravel behind an old garage. A streetlamp not far away shed enough light that I could easily be seen. I managed to crawl into the shadow between two garbage cans, where I lay listening. I heard the slap of shoes hard and fast pass the alley entrance and keep going. Then everything got quiet.
My shirt was soaked with blood. My legs were useless. I’d hoped to make it to the river, but that wasn’t going to happen. The end was going to come in a bed of weeds in a nameless alley. Nothing I could do about that.
But about the man and the woman who’d killed Kid, there was still something I could do.
I pulled the pair of panties from my pocket, the pair she’d given Kid and whose twin I’d found that afternoon at Marshall Field’s and bought with money made by selling my own blood. I drew out my pen and notepad and wrote a brief explanation, hoping whoever found me would notify the police.
I was near the river, though I would never sit on its banks again. I closed my eyes. For a while, all I smelled was the garbage in the bins. Then I smelled the river. When I opened my eyes, there was Kid, grinning on the other side. Like he understood. Like he forgave me. I started toward him. The water, cold and black, crept up my legs. The current tugged at my body. In a few moments, it carried me away.
BLIND SIDED
by Ellen Hart
Uptown (Minneapolis)
I was born in the time of monsters. My earliest memories were of my mother crying because she was frightened for my father, who was off fighting Japan in the Pacific. The names Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin swirled around my young mind like menacing black crows.
I’ve always had a rather mixed relationship with the concepts of good and evil. I know the atom bomb was a horrible genie to release on the world, and yet if the U.S. hadn’t dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my father would surely have been killed. He flew a small plane that was slated to be part of the advance group sent to Japan to soften up their defenses just prior to our invasion. The invasion never happened. Instead, my father came home when I was six years old.
In our house, the bomb was considered miraculous. As a young child, I never thought of it with anything other than a kind of exhilarated wonder. I’d longed to have my dad come home to us, and the bomb made that possible. But after he’d been back awhile, I realized, much to my astonishment, that he was a stranger. I wasn’t even sure I liked him. A year later he was dead. The bomb saved him so he could be knifed in a bar fight and bleed out on a barroom floor. That’s when I was first introduced to the concept of serendipity—another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I’m not depressed—or crazy. At least, I tell myself I’m not, but I guess I’ll let you be the judge.
As I grew up, the atom bomb was like a piece of coal flickering blue in my mind, never letting me forget what it had given and what it had taken away. I came to the conclusion in college that people’s views of right and wrong tended to be both situational and generational. But that never really satisfied me, because although I wasn’t religious, I wanted to believe in absolutes. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Maybe that’s a flaw, but it’s who I am.
My name is Leo Anderson, a suitably Minnesota sort of name for a boringly Minnesota sort of guy. I’m sixty-six, part Irish, but mostly Norwegian, a retired school teacher, the divorced father of two. And I’m going blind. Every morning, I wake up and look around my tiny bedroom to see what’s been erased since the night before. It’s a terrifying thing, this going blind business, and I hate it. I also hate being alone, living in this damn drafty apartment after being married for nearly thirty-eight years. Fact is, when I came home and told my wife about my diagnosis, it seemed to open up a sinister trap door in my marriage, releasing an angry accumulation of rabid emotions I never knew existed. Apparently, I wasn’t a very good husband. That part didn’t really come as a shock. I won’t lie to you. It’s another one of my flaws.
When I first met my wife, I was instantly attracted. She was tall and slender, with long brown hair and intense gray eyes—eyes that seemed to hold a secret only I could decipher. I was twenty-seven and a determined romantic. Karen was handing out leaflets at a peace rally outside Northrup Auditorium. We started talking. I don’t know what got into me. I mean, I was usually pretty shy around women, but I asked her to have coffee with me when she was done. It all seemed so easy, so effortless, kind of like sledding down a snowy hill. By the time I got to the bottom and was able to stand on level ground, look squarely at what I’d done, it was two years later and we were married.
If Karen hadn’t been pregnant with our first child, I probably would have left her. But when my son came along, everything changed. Not with the marriage, but with me. I finally had a purpose in my life. I believe I truly fell in love for the first time. My daughter followed a couple of years later. The marriage was never good, but my kids made it bearable. I feel bad now for the way I handled things. Maybe I should have ended the marriage, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that to my children, and so ultimately I guess I made a mess of everything. For many years, my life revolved around teaching and family. But that’s all behind me now. After such a noisy life, I had no idea this much silence existed in the world—so much space between a question and an answer. My days of working with kids had become ancient history. Or so I thought.
The morning it all started, the clock on the nightstand beeped at the usual 6 a.m. I reached over and flipped off the alarm. It was late October, and the light didn’t hit my windows until closer to 7. The way the sun came in and moved around my apartment had become very important to me. I hated waking up in the dark. I figured I had the rest of my life for that.
After breakfast, I took my usual shower. Next to the mirror in the bathroom I’d taped up a page I’d torn from a dictionary. When I moved to this apartment on Columbus a few months ago, I’d been able to read the words while I brushed my teeth. Official. Officiate. Officious. Offish. But that morning, I had to squint at the page, bend very close, and even then I could just barely make out the words.
For the past few weeks, I’d spent part of each day moving around my apartment with my eyes closed. I was practicing, as I’d been taught. You can’t go blind in Minnesota without being offered a lot of help—it’s the way Minnesotans are.