“If you’re still here when we get back, I won’t have to kill him.” And then I leave.
I race to town. I go over seventy in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone. I’d bet my life the girl wouldn’t do anything stupid, but then again, I can’t get the image out of my mind: the cabin swarmed by cops waiting for me when I return.
I pass a couple outfitters on the way to Grand Marais. I always try to mix it up. I can’t say I’ve been to the same place twice. Last thing I need is for someone to recognize me.
But right now, food isn’t the only thing on my mind.
I know a guy who specializes in fake IDs, manufactured identities, the works. I find a payphone outside the hardware store and dig a couple of quarters from my pocket. I pray to God I’m not making a mistake. It doesn’t take three minutes or whatever they claim on TV to trace a call. The damn operators can do that the second the line connects. Soon as I dial the number. All it takes is for Dan to tell the cops he got a call from me and by tomorrow, they’re clustered around Hardware Sam looking for me.
It comes down to options. Try our best to survive the rest of the winter—and then what? Then we’re screwed. If we’re still alive come spring, there’ll be nowhere to hide.
And so I drop in the quarters and dial the number.
*
When I come back, she’s running down the snow-covered steps to whisk the damn cat from my hands.
She’s yelling about how she wouldn’t have left. She’s cursing me for threatening the cat. “How the hell would I know?” I ask. I take the paper bags of canned food from the backseat of the truck. There must be a dozen bags, each one piled high with ten or fifteen cans of food. This is it, I tell myself. The last trip to town. Until the passports are ready, we’ll get by on condensed soup and baked beans and stewed tomatoes. That and whatever I pull out of the frozen lake.
She grabs me by the arm and forces me to look at her. Her grip is firm. “I wouldn’t have left,” she says again.
I duck away and say to her, “I wasn’t about to take any chances.” I head up the stairs, leaving the cat and her alone outside.
She convinces me to let the cat stay inside. It gets colder every day. He won’t survive all winter.
“No way,” I say.
But she insists. “He stays.” Just like that.
Something is changing.
*
I tell her about working with my uncle when I was a kid. It’s with reluctance that I talk at all. But there’s only so much silence a person can take.
I started working for my mother’s brother when I was fourteen. This beer-bellied bum who taught me how to do all his handyman services so that, at the end of the day, I could do all the work and he could take home 90 percent of the pay.
No one in my family went to college. No one. Maybe some distant cousin or something, I say, but no one I know. Everyone is blue collar. Most people work in Gary’s steel industry. I grew up in a world where I, as a white boy, was a minority and where nearly a quarter of the population lived below the poverty line.
“The difference between you and me,” I tell her, “is that I grew up with nothing. I didn’t hope for more. I knew I wouldn’t get it.”
“But you must have dreamed of becoming something?”
“I dreamed of maintaining the status quo. Of not stooping any lower than I already was. But then I did.”
My uncle, Louis, taught me to fix leaky faucets and install hot-water heaters. How to paint bedrooms and fish a toothbrush out of a toilet. How to edge a lawn, fix a garage door and change the lock on someone’s house after they’d kicked out their ex. Louis charged a flat twenty dollars an hour. At the end of the day, he sent me home with about thirty dollars to my name. I knew I was getting ripped off. By the time I was sixteen I was working on my own. But the work was unstable. I needed something I could depend on. Unemployment in Gary is high.
She asks me how often I visit my mother. I stiffen at the mention of her and am quiet.
“You’re worried about her,” she says.
“I can’t help her when I’m here.”
And then it hits her.
“The money,” she says. “The five grand—”
I sigh. I tell her that it was for her. She won’t take her medicine anymore, not unless I force her to. She says that she forgets. But the reality is that she doesn’t want to deal with the side effects. I tell her that I would go to her home in Gary every Sunday. Organize the medicine into a pill dispenser, take her grocery shopping, clean the house. But she needed more. She needed someone who could take care of her all the time, not just on Sundays.