Maggie began to fuss aimlessly as they passed down into the old red brick city of Nishnabotna and the great stacks of the Matheson Works rose to port. She had done well so far, considering that Desiree was not there to subject her to the continual stream of cooing, nose kissing, toy jiggling, and peekabooing that normally filled Maggie’s senses every waking moment. Clyde’s demeanor was, to put it mildly, more reserved, to the point where Maggie could have been forgiven for supposing that her father had tripped and fallen in the driveway and the truck had been coasting driverless toward the river ever since.
When Clyde had first seen the way Desiree played with the baby, he had been humbled that she possessed such talents so lacking in himself. He had been even more humbled when Desiree had mentioned to him—offhandedly, and not in a way intended to inspire guilt—that all of this was not playing but “stimulation,” that each silly game was not improvised but planned to foster one important part of the infant’s brain or another. Desiree’s playing all came with footnotes. Clyde could only suppose that if he were to raise Maggie by himself, the girl would grow up to be a lopsided mouth-breather who walked into closed doors.
“Konrad Lukas and Sons” had been painted on the brick wall of their destination sometime around the turn of the century. Below, where it had probably said “Abbatoir” or “Slaughterhouse,” the words “Specialty Meats and Custom Slaughtering” had been painted in much more recently.
The cooler would require both of his hands, so he took the radical measure of unsnapping his daughter from the baby carrier/car seat module and transferring her to the reversible backpack/frontpack baby carrier module. He slung her onto his back, tossed the tire chain off the cooler, and carried that box of odds and ends around to the front of the building.
Outside the butcher’s was the largest collection of university-related vehicles Clyde had ever seen in Nishnabotna. Mixed in were a few cars that clearly didn’t belong: a new Cadillac and a Volvo station wagon whose license plates marked them as being from other counties in Iowa, an hour or two distant. The car closest to the entrance was a big Chevy Caprice sedan, a model typically used for cop cars; but this one was navy-blue and bore no special equipment or insignia except for a yellowed cardboard sign on the dashboard reading Clergy and bearing a Star of David. This car had Illinois plates.
He came around the corner of the building onto the brick sidewalk, separated from the brick street by a stone curb at least two feet high. A dark-suited, bearded fellow wearing a black fedora was just emerging from the front door of Lukas Meats, carrying a large leather satchel. He threw the satchel into the trunk of the Caprice, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove away.
Clyde was startled by some of the people standing in the front room of Lukas Meats on this Saturday morning. The men wore the same Kmart Blue Light Special clothing that all the other grad students wore, but the women were swaddled in yards and yards of dark fabric, some with only the ovals of their faces showing, some peering out through horizontal gun slits. For the most part families had come in their entirety, the men doing the driving, disbursement of money, and control of larger children while the women carried infants and told the butchers what they wanted. Meat was flying out of the place by the boxload. No one bought less than ten pounds, and the average order was probably more like twenty. Two butchers were at work handing over the meat, and one clerk was ringing up the sales.
One of the men would have been conspicuous even on the streets of his own home village, wherever that might have been. Something had happened to him, something hard for Clyde to put his finger on, but clearly awful. His complexion hadn’t been good to begin with—lots of acne scars—but his face bore a disfiguring pattern of heavy scar tissue. His lips and nose looked okay, but the sides of his cheeks had been burned and healed haphazardly. He had a truncated ear on one side, and the hairline on that side of his head was badly deranged, his curly black hair fading in and out crazily over substrata of lumpy, marbled red skin. The damage continued beneath the collar of his shirt and at least as far as his left hand, which was missing three fingers. The index finger was still there, and the thumb was present in a stunted, mangled, and crudely patched form. The man was gaunt and surprisingly tall, probably almost as tall as Clyde, who was six feet three. He was with a considerably younger woman whose plump, attractive face was encircled by a large silk scarf that dangled down her back, covering her hair.