Oh, said Landreaux, she hides it.
Nola doesn’t hide it, said Peter. You can see it everywhere. He gestured, jerky with anxiety, around the area—living, dining, kitchen. Both men dropped into their own thoughts. An itchy claustrophobic feeling had been gathering in Landreaux. This feeling was stirred up whenever he entered a house or building that was aggressively neat. He had already felt that here—life consumed by order. Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was the unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.
I can’t move anything, said Peter. She puts it back. She’s got a mental tape measure. She can tell when anything is changed in the slightest. Believe me, she knew we tipped the table over.
Landreaux nodded.
I’d like to . . . switch that off in her, said Peter.
Then felt disloyal. After all, Nola had moved into the Ravich house, fairly new, but also filled with things that his parents and grandparents had owned. Her meticulous care of these objects comforted him.
I mean if she could just let go sometimes, he added.
You’d like her to be happy again, said Landreaux.
Happy? Peter said the word because it was an odd, archaic word. She gets mad at Maggie, that’s the worst, but really, she’s done nothing but try. She’s a good mother. At first I tried to bring LaRose back to you guys. I thought what you did was all wrong, thought she would get better without him. Then I realized if I brought him back, that would kill her.
Landreaux thought of Emmaline wretchedly bent over in the sweat lodge.
Still, it’s LaRose, said Peter. His breath rasped. His heart sounded in his ears. He knew what he was going to say would make Nola cry in that shrill animal keening way she went out to the barn to do, after the kids were sleeping, hoping she could not be heard. It’s LaRose, said Peter. We have to think of him. We should share him. We should, you know, make things easier between us all.
Oh, said Landreaux.
As if the lid had lifted off his brain he blazed with shock and light. He couldn’t speak. Weakness assailed him and he put his head down on the table. Peter looked down on his parted hair, the long tail of it, the loose power of Landreaux’s folded arms. A sinuous contempt gripped him and he thought of the rapture he would feel for an hour, maybe two hours, after he brought down his ax on Landreaux’s head. Indeed, he’d named his woodpile for his friend, and the mental image was the cause of its growing size. If not for LaRose, he thought, if not for LaRose. Then the picture of the boy’s grief covered his thinking.
After Landreaux had left, Peter lay on the living room carpet, staring at the ceiling fan. Hands on his forehead, stomach whirling with the blades. He wasn’t a man to make friends, and it was hard, this thing with Landreaux. Peter was six foot two, powerful because he worked the farm, but weak, too, in the ankles, in the knees, in the wrists and neck. Wherever one part of his body met up with another part, it hurt. Still, it was his method to suck it up. High school coaches had taught him that. This was his family’s farm before the family died off, except for one now Floridian brother he’d bought out. Peter’s family were Russian-German immigrants, there long enough to have picked buffalo bones off the land.
When he is feeling well, Peter throws LaRose and Maggie in the air. Falling, they catch the smile on his cool, Slavic face. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight. He works those other jobs, plus the farm, yet there is so much left over. Nola, he met in Fargo. They both went to NDSU and it was a surprise they’d never run into each other in small-town Pluto—a raw little place with a few old buildings, a struggling grocery, some gift shops, a Cenex, and a new Bank of the West. Peter’s family had farmed outside of town and Nola’s mother, Marn, had lived there as a child—they sometimes visited the land she had leased out. Once things became too difficult after Billy Peace died, she had moved with the kids to Fargo. Made them go by their second names because of certain people.