a little restaurant called the 50s Cafe for hamburgers, french fries, chocolate shakes. We ate silently. Then all of a sudden, my mother put down the hamburger. She laid it on her plate and said, No.
Still chewing, I stared at her. The slight droop of her eyelid gave her a critical air.
Is there something wrong with that burger, Mom?
She gazed past me, transfixed by a thought. The knife crease shot up between her eyebrows.
It’s something Daddy told me. A story about a wiindigoo. Lark’s trying to eat us, Joe. I won’t let him, she said. I will be the one to stop him.
Her determination terrified me. She picked up her food and deliberately, slowly, began to eat. She didn’t stop until she’d finished all of it, which also frightened me. This was the first time since the attack she ate all the food on her plate. Then we went back to the room, got ready for bed. My mother took a pill and fell asleep at once. I stared at the feeble soundproofing insulation tiles on the ceiling. If I watched them closely enough, I could feel my own heart wind down. My chest opened and my stomach stopped grinding. I counted out, slowly and evenly, 78 random holes in the tile just over my head, and 81 in the next. If my mother went after Lark, he’d kill her. I knew this. I counted the holes again and again.
On the day we left Fargo, I woke early. My mother was up, in the bathroom making brushing and washing sounds. I listened to the shower water rattle down. The hotel curtains were so heavy I didn’t know that it was pouring outside too. One of those rare August rains that tamp down the dust flares on the roads had just begun. A rain that washes the whitened dust-coated leaves. A rain that fills the cracks in the earth and revives the brown grasses. That grows the corn by a foot and makes a second cutting of hay possible. A gentle rain that lasts for days. There was a chill in the air that persisted all the way home. My mother drove with the windshield wipers going. The coziest of sounds to a boy drowsing in the backseat. My father stayed alert beside my mother, covered with a quilt. From time to time I’d open my eyes, just to see them. He had his hand across the seat, resting on her leg above the knee. Occasionally she took one hand off the wheel, reached down, and rested her hand on top of his.
During this ride of peace, so like my earliest memories of going places with my parents, it came to me what I must do. A thought descended into me as I lay beneath my own soft old quilt. I pushed it out. The thought fell back. Three times I pushed it out, each time harder. I hummed to myself. I tried to talk, but my mother put her finger to her lips and pointed at my father, who was asleep. The thought came again, more insistent, and this time I let it in and reviewed it. I thought this idea through to its conclusion. I stood back from my thought. I watched myself think.
The end of thinking occurred.
When we got home, Clemence had fixed the chili. Puffy had delivered all of the groceries that we had picked out. Everything we needed was stowed in the cupboards and the refrigerator. I saw my box of potato chips right away, sitting on the counter. I thought of the cans of tomatoes I had used as weapons. Clemence had probably opened them and added them to the chili. Every day since the grocer, I wished I had brained Lark. I imagined myself killing him over and over. But since I hadn’t, I was going to visit Father Travis first thing in the morning. I decided I would join his Saturday morning catechism class. I thought he would let me do that. I also hoped that if I made myself useful afterward up at the church, he might notice how the gophers had been driven from the tunnels by the rain and now were fattening on the new grass. They needed to be dealt with. I hoped that Father Travis might teach me how to shoot gophers, so that I could get some practice.
I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch when it came to being a Catholic. Priests and nuns have been here since