She begged Arnold to move but he would not listen. He liked the quiet, dark woods, and coming home to his wife and child in his cozy cabin. It felt safe and nice to him. He was not hearing a thing she said. Trinie let her dark hair grow long and it fell below her waist. She started to stage small acts of defiance. She cooked meat only halfway through for dinner sometimes, at least the meat she served to her husband, and she taught her child new and unusual curses to say to his father, as if he were the parrot of a salty old fisherman.
Arnold shook his head and laughed when he told me that last part, and there was a forgiving glint in his eye. It probably took her forever to get him going, I thought. He would have let her keep torturing him till the end. Pete got up to get me another drink. I was getting good and drunk. I realized I had forgotten to eat but I was not hungry anymore. Arnold said something to me about how his house was nicer than any old hotel, and if I wanted I could come out and stay with the two of them. Off in the corner there was another crack of one head against another, and then somebody started yelling. Pete came back and handed me a drink, then put his hand around my neck and rubbed the muscles there until they were warm. It had been a while since someone had touched me like that and I was enjoying it a little bit. Arnold watched Pete rubbing me for a minute. His face did not change at all. Then he motioned for me to move in closer to him, and I did, and Pete’s hand dropped away.
“The last straw—for Trinie, not for me, I would have let her stay forever no matter what she did to me, I mean she’s my wife and the mother of my son, come on—was the blizzard of ... was it ’83? Could it have been that long?” Arnold paused and scratched his chin, and did some thinking. In the corner a man lost another game of pool and threw his cue on the table. I realized everyone around me was drunk, too. It was getting late. The families had packed up their kids and left by then, and the only other woman left was the bartender.
“I think it was ’83,” said Pete. He slipped his hand around my waist. “You sure you want to stay in that hotel tonight?” he said in my ear. I did not answer him.
The blizzard came and it was a whiteout for days. There was no work to be found so Arnold and Trinie were trapped in the house with little Pete. It was cold and they were running out of wood so they used it sparingly. No one wanted to go outside in that weather and chop. And that one extra person around all the time made the house feel even smaller to Trinie. Plus Arnold was bored. He went through a few fifths of whiskey a day. They started yelling and fighting and no one could hear her scream. “She kept screaming,” said Arnold. “Hoping someone would come and save her or pull her out of there, and the more she screamed the more she realized she was in the middle of nowhere. Then she got it in her head that if no one could hear her scream, no one would hear me scream. She decided to test that little theory of hers out.”
Next to me Pete nodded twice, and left his head down.
Trinie went after Arnold with an ax one morning. He woke up just as she lowered it and he rolled off to the side and onto the floor. The ax went through the bed. Pete saw the whole thing.
“I don’t remember much but I remember that,” said Pete.
“After that we sent her back to Colorado to stay with her parents. They were ready to have her back, as long as I stayed away.” Arnold started laughing. “And believe me, at the time I thought: you can keep her.”
A fight started in the corner by the pool table. Men tumbled over each other like children and then they were both shoved outside and the whole bar emptied to watch them. We all carried our drinks with us. I slipped a little bit on a patch of ice and Pete caught me. The snow was falling lighter and the sky was finally dark. There were grunts and punches and people casually stared. No one wanted it to get too crazy, but no one wanted it to stop either. It was a snowstorm, there wasn’t much else to do but drink and fight. There was blood on the snow and one man finally passed out. We all shuffled back in the bar.
“I saw that she was right, of course, but by then it was too late,” said Arnold.
“We got a new house down the road from here,” said Pete. “Right in the middle of it all.”
“I have to go home,” I said.
“We’ll walk you back to your room,” said Arnold.
“It is okay,” I said. “I am fine.”
“We can’t have you slipping and falling in the snow,” said Arnold. “Come on, Pete, give her a hand.” Pete put his hand under my elbow. We made our way back toward my room. My eyes were closing down on my face. Arnold was saying something to me; I could hear him through my eyes.
“You sure you have to leave tomorrow?” he said. “It’d be nice to see your face around longer.”
“You sure are pretty,” said Pete.
I did not want to hurt their feelings. They had been so nice to me. And they had spent all that money on my drinks. I felt bad for them, too, that Trinie had left them alone in the woods. Arnold put his hand around my other elbow. They were both treating me like I could not walk at all, but I knew that I could.
“I can walk,” I said. I tried to shrug them off but they would not let me go. “I am fine,” I said. We were almost to my door and I just wanted to get under the covers and go to sleep by myself.