Gift of Exile, Chapter 21
The knock was a quick, perfunctory one. The door was already being pushed ajar as Ennis pulled it open and the woman on the other side stumbled after it into the kitchen. They were both surprised for a moment, and then the woman smiled. "Thought I heard somebody walkin around up here - I told David I'd check up on you. "Well then, ma'am," he answered, "I guess you're Maggie."
"Maggie Sorbel, that's right. David's old school buddy, real estate partner in the Beach House" - she made a sweeping, humorously exaggerated gesture indicating the room - "and the best waitress at Grandma's Saloon, if I do say so.... And I know you're Ennis. It's good to see you wide-awake finally, you’ve been a very quiet house guest so far."
She had long reddish-brown hair that rippled and crinkled rather than curled and a broad, artless smile, but those were the on!y things that were beautiful about her. Everything else, from her oval face to her narrow feet, was too long and slender, and her grayish-green eyes were too small and deepset for beauty. But they were alert and full of humor, and Ennis knew they were inspecting him and missing little.
He’d been curious about this woman, whom David had mentioned often and warmly enough to make him wonder if those few electric moments during their horseback outings were somehow his imagination. But David had spoken of her the same way that the men Ennis worked with spoke of childhood buddies or brothers they were especially close to. Between phone calls, Ennis had tried to imagine having a woman as a buddy but had failed entirely.
He knew that David and Maggie had been friends since David’s college days and were now technically real estate partners since they both owned a share of the house. "Maggie got a lot of insurance money when her husband was killed - the other driver had a bad driving record and a family that wanted to make it all go away," David had told him. "She just stuck it in the bank - typical of Maggie - and when she said she was tired of renting, I suggested we pool our resources and go look into foreclosed houses. Good thing too, knowing Maggie -- sooner or later she’d have spent it on a train trip to Nome or shares in a stainless-steel mine."
"Maggie, right. David mentioned you." After a moment he added, "sorry about - the last few days, didn’t expect that ta happen."
"t’s okay." The greenish eyes gave him a flickering up-and-down look. "We were just a little worried it might be something… you know, serious." Before Ennis could wonder what she was saying, she started back out the door to the stairway. "Can’t stay, I got a teakettle just startin to boil, c’mon down and have some tea," she threw over her shoulder; adding "you’ll wanna use this indoor stairway a lot during the winter" as they went down.
Maggie's part of the house, though larger than David's, had none of the spacious tidiness of the upstairs. The walls were covered with framed prints, posters, and things that Ennis had never seen hung on a wall. What looked like two faded tapestries with faded garlands of flowers against a beige background were old scatter rugs, cleaned and carefully hung facing each other, and clusters of antique jewelry hung from brackets on either side of an antique mirror. High up on one wall was a narrow shelf holding old ceramic pitchers, small bottles in glowing jewel colors, piles of artificial fruit and a painted ceramic head of a dusky-skinned woman with a flower in her hair. On another wall were groupings of small framed prints of richly colored flowers and of exotic birds with long sweeping tails. One set of wind chimes, near a window whose frame was bordered by a string of tiny Christmas lights, was formed of thin slabs of frosted glass; glass stars of various sizes and colors dangled from another on the deck outside. And every surface, other than the low-slung, puffy sofa and chairs, was covered and piled high with boxes, laundry baskets and piles of books and magazines. If David hadn't told him that he and Maggie had lived in the house for about four years, Ennis might have assumed she was still in the process of moving in.
She unceremoniously shoved a pile of papers, unopened mail and magazines into one corner of the kitchen table, and poured the boiling water into a covered pot. Immediately, a strong fragrance of tea and peppermint filled the air. Ennis had been accustomed to drinking instant powdered ice tea in warm weather since Junior and Jennie were babies, but his only experience with hot tea was the occasional stir-fry dinners that Alma Junior had made. He’d never liked the faintly metallic undertaste that he detected in it; but the mint flavor in the cup Maggie gave him wasn’t offensive. He glanced at the wall clock and noted that it was already past ten o'clock. Unaccustomed to sudden changes, his mind briefly stopped on the short road of his first day in these strange surroundings and looked back in surprise at the landmarks and curves in the road it had already passed.
Seated across from him, she took a steaming sip from her own cup, then leaned back and fixed him with a look suggesting a quick survey of a major, long-term project. "Been upstairs to see your room, I guess. Pretty small I know, but you'll have lots of privacy, great view, you prob’ly noticed that, and you've got a fireplace. Very nice to have in the winter, 'specially with us being right on the lake like we are." "It's big enough. I don't have much," he answered, "an I just now moved in. But I don't know if I'll be here in the winter."
She ignored this last statement, but it was only his first discovery that everyone here had a determined assumption that he was in Duluth for good. "And you'd lived all your life in Wyoming till just this month...." There was a sincerely impressed shading in her voice. "Duluth must be pretty strange to you." She glanced toward the open curtains and the view of the Lake beyond the deck. "Have you been outside?" "Yeah," he answered, "it's - different."
She laughed a little, but he was still aware of being scrutinized. "So - you planning to stay long? Through the summer?" It seemed odd to him that David hadn't already told her, but "got a return ticket for late August, but 'm not really sure."
"Oh..." she put the cup down and looked at him with frank inquisitiveness. "So there's -someone, back in Wyoming?"
" ’Sright." He was unexpectedly enjoying himself a little. "A pickup truck and two horses."
With one elbow on the table, she tilted her head to rest in one hand and looked at him with studied casualness. "Doctor D mentioned you'd been divorced awhile back - so there's no one back home you miss?"
Now the conversation had headed through unlit side streets where he couldn't be sure who was lurking in the doorways. "No'm," he answered, quite wary now. "Got two daughters, one of em married, the other 'n about grown, and they've both moved away." He had the odd impression that she'd been asking a silent question and that he'd just answered it. "Why do you keep calling David Doctor? Did he go to medical school or somethin’?"
"I know you two talked a lot on the phone, but he didn’t get around to the worst road trip we ever took, not that I blame him," she laughed a little, and he let out a long breath. The conversation had moved back onto a well-traveled main street. "It was back in college days, one of those hit-the-road things students do. David, Nathan and I and the girl Nathan was seeing that week --- we were roommates, that’s how David and I met - we decided to take a weekend trip to Jacksonville to see a concert. Drove down on Friday, and after the show we parked in a K-Mart parking lot and got a little sleep, didn’t start back till mid-morning on Saturday. We stopped for lunch at this short-order place in some little town near Americus, no chain restaurants for us. And the food did taste good, and there was plenty of it, and we were all lucky that David was the only one who didn’t eat the potato salad. By the time we got to Macon, he was having to stop the car about every 15 minutes for somebody to throw up and he finally knocked on his parents’ door and told them we’d have to spend the night.
"Poor David musta wished once or twice he had eaten the potato salad. His mom was never the best person in a crisis, ‘you drove all the way to Jacksonville for a concert?’ that was all we heard from her, not that the rest of us cared just then. But David spent that whole night cleaning up after the rest of us, bringing us Cokes, they call it ‘Co-Cola’ down South. He even did a big pile of stinky laundry.
"It was one of those things you kind of laugh about later but wouldn’t ever wanta relive. But ‘Doctor D’ fits him another way, you’ll find out if you stay here long enough. He really needs to - well, take care of people, fix what ails them."
David’s anxiety about leaving him alone for the day suddenly seemed to make more sense. "Last night ‘n’ yesterday, y’know, when I couldn’t wake up - he was in checkin up on me a lot, wasn’t he."
"Something like every ten minutes, till I decided to spend the night an’ told him to get some sleep. He wouldn’ta gone to work today at all, except there were two people out. When you own a business, the buck pretty much stops at you."
The curtains and door at the end of the room were open to let in the morning sun and air, and Ennis glanced at the deck, a little larger than the one upstairs. Close to the horizon of the Lake, a little further out now that the morning mists had dissolved, was something that looked like the flat bottom of a butter dish with a small box at one end. Following his puzzled look, Maggie put down her empty teacup. "A boat’s on the way in! You haven’t seen the bridge in action yet, have you?"
"Bridge?" He’d been standing on the beach long enough for David to have returned to the house and started breakfast, but had been so mesmerized by the Lake and the shock of his new surroundings that he hadn’t noticed anything else. But for the second time in less than an hour he got up hastily and followed her, this time out the back door to the smaller platform below the deck steps. As they sat in two weatherbeaten deck chairs, watching the shape on the horizon getting bigger, he now noticed the buildings of the city just across the narrow bay to the left, the larger ones jostling each other for space along the shoreline, and a thick sprinkling of rooftops on what looked like a steep, tree-covered bluff beyond them. The bridge, only a few blocks in the same direction, looked to him like a giant C-clamp made of a latticework of metal scaffolding. "The Aerial Bridge, also called the Lift Bridge -- you’ll get to know it real well," she told him. "It’s the only way to Duluth from here - the only way to anywhere for that matter unless you’ve got a plane or a boat."
Ennis considered that for a second. "So we’re on an island."
"Yes, but it’s not a natural one. Park Point is on a sandspit, goes out 7 miles, and there’s another sandspit from the Wisconsin side that almost touches it but not quite. They dredged out an opening a long time ago so ships could go into the harbor, and they all have to go under that bridge."
The ship was close enough now that it didn’t resemble a butter dish, but it also didn’t look anything like the pictures of ships Ennis had ever seen. Over a thousand feet long, longer than the height of a 90-story office building, most of it seemed to consist of a wide, tongue-shaped platform that looked large enough to hold a small neighborhood. As it got even closer, he could see more of the three-story, boxlike structure at the stern; its stairways and smokestacks topped with the long, windowed penthouse-like bridge. It looked to his eyes like an immense floating warehouse.
"Strange lookin ship," he commented.
"That’s the Belle River, it’s easy to spot -- you won’t see many that big. They carry coal mostly, sometimes iron ore."
As the ship slid into the lane formed by two piers, he wondered how it would get under the Aerial Bridge, whose lower roadway looked far too close to the water for even a much smaller boat to pass under it. A second later, he jumped as the approaching ship called out with a trumpeting blast of its horn.
On their regular weekend visits since the divorce, Junior and Jenny had often brought homework with them and on one occasion he’d been intrigued by a drawing in one of Jenny’s schoolbooks: an animal that looked like a shaggy elephant with short hind legs and dramatically long, curling tusks. "That’s a mammoth," she’d said. "Miz Jelkes says they found some mammoth bones right here in Wyoming near Worland. Our Sunday School teacher says they all disappeared during Noah’s flood." Ennis hadn’t commented on that but he’d felt a distinct prickling sensation on his arms and the back of his neck as the hairs stood on end. The ship now seemed to him less like a warehouse than some lumbering primordial creature announcing its progress to anything that might be in its way.
He was even more startled to hear an answering blast from the bridge, followed by a shrill electric bell and the unmistakable sound of pulleys and sturdy chains. Seconds later, the entire lower part of the bridge, roadway and all, moved up like a long flat elevator, reaching the top just as the ship sailed under it with only a few feet to spare. It then disappeared to the left out of his sight, on its way to docking at the furthest inland seaport in the world.
"Well… that ain’t somethin’ you see every day, huh?" He knew some remark was expected, and she seemed satisfied with it. "Not every day most places. But you’ll get used to it here. I still love to watch those really big ships come in, but you’ll get to where you don’t always hear the bridge goin up and down." As she spoke, the roadway was lowering with the same clattering and creaking of chains, and the bridge became a rather unremarkable-looking span again.
"Yeah," he said, "guess you would be use to it, your bein from around here."
"I’m from Minnesota all right, but not from around here." Without getting up, she stretched lazily for a moment as if she were just getting out of bed. Sitting opposite, Ennis stole several sidelong looks at what looked to him like the random collection of clothes she was wearing: a narrowly pleated skirt that Jenny could have told him was called a "broomstick" skirt, long wool-and-velvet jacket worn open over a leotard and dark leggings over battered slip-on shoes. It reminded him vaguely of the group of hippies that he and Jack had met briefly on one of their trips together, but he also noticed an odd-looking necklace that he hadn’t seen before: a silver crescent shape on a thin leather cord.
"I’m a farm girl - well, really just a farm town girl, from Madelia, that’s way southwest of here. Our big claim to fame is that part of the Jesse James gang was captured there. You know, the bank robbers, but these were three brothers name o’ Younger. They were tryin to get out of the state with a posse after them and they met my great-grandfather on the road, he was just a kid then, asked him for some food. Oscar Sorbel, that was his name. The kid figured they were the bank robbers everybody was looking for and blew the whistle on em - so I’m descended from a famous stool pigeon."
"Ma’am, you don’t ---"
"Maggie."
"Uh, Maggie, well, you don’t seem like no farm girl I ever met."
"Not now. One time I just assumed I would be - husband, kids, helpin’ out with church suppers in the church basement, the whole bit. But Duluth’s like most cities - a lot of people here couldn’t really stay where they came from, or go back to it… Guess if it hadn’t been for the Vietnam war, I could’ve got -- just sorta folded into that life."
"Thought David said your husband was killed in an accident?"
"Oh, that was in Georgia. A long time later. . . But you have kids, right? Doctor D told me about meeting your daughters at the wedding - so they’ve both moved this past year?"
Unskilled though he was at conversation, Ennis was able to recognize the change of subject. Knowing that that this apparently outgoing and self-assured woman had closely guarded memories just like he did put him slightly more at ease. "S'right. Alma Junior, she's the older one, she and her husband moved to Amarillo. An' Jenny decided she wanted ta see a little more of the world - she moved to Denver."
"Yeah, I know - David told me he'd passed along some of the stuff I learned living in Atlanta."
He was a little surprised. "That came from you? Well, it did help."
"Oh yeah, I lived in a midtown neighborhood in Atlanta for a couple of years. I… had a roommate who worked for an escort service - that's what they called it - so she was out and around in the middle of the night. I was still a country girl from Madelia, but I learned a lot from her fast, she knew how to spot bad neighborhoods. Had to."
"So why aren’t you back in... Madelia?"
"Just never did fit in from the beginning. I was the youngest of four girls and my parents were sure as anything they’d get a boy that last time. They were so bummed out they didn’t even name me for two weeks - women having babies stayed that long in the hospital that long back then, and the day before my parents were gonna take me home the head nurse came to see them. Said they had to name me to get the birth certificate. And it was all downhill after that." Her tone was casual, even flippant but he still heard the loneliness in it and something in him understood.
"Ah, don’t get me wrong," she added, and he wondered what she’d seen in his face. "They loved me anyway, bein an outsider doesn’t mean nobody cares about you. But being loved ‘anyway’ - well, I’ve never met anybody who thought that’d be good enough for them…. You go through anything like that?"
He was more cautious now that she’d crossed over the invisible boundaries he’d drawn years ago. "Well, my wife, my former wife an me, we aren’t on real good terms. Though we’ve been speakin since the wedding. An my girls, well, I never seen as much of em as I should but we’re good."
"But there’s things you’ve kept to yourself? And you’ve wondered how it’d be if they knew. Right?"
He realized that he’d fallen into his old habit of looking down and away, and with an effort he gave her a direct look and managed to keep his voice firm. "Maggie, we met just now an you’re gettin into things I got no reason to talk with you about."
She wasn’t as offended as he would have expected. "I know, I know. Startin’ on my whole life story an tryin to drag yours out of ya the first day. It’s just that Doctor D has been my best friend for years, and he’s been through some hard times. Been alone a lot longer than he should’ve. I’m just bein a bit overprotective."
Ennis was as curious now as he’d been uneasy a moment before; but she pushed back her chair and stood up, with an air of ending the conversation. "It's getting' close to noon - I'd better go pick up the mail. Sometimes I forget until late enough in the afternoon we don’t get it till the next day. You want to go?"
He hesitated, remembering David promising to drive him around the area that evening and also wanting to be left alone for awhile. "You don't get mail delivered here?"
"Usually we do, but some doofus ran over our mailbox last winter, knocked that sucker flat, and no diggin' post holes in the winter. David bought one about a month ago, but we haven't got around to puttin' it up so I got a postoffice box in the meantime."
"That shouldn't be hard ta do - where is it?"
She gave him the glance of a random hostess whose guest had just offered to do the dishes. "Well, it's your first day here..."
"Wouldn't mind doin' it. I intent ta earn my keep."
"If you want...." She led him to a combination garage and storage shed at the side of the house. "It isn't this neat all year, gets pretty cluttered up by fall but we clear it out for the winter so we can keep the cars in here." The mailbox, in a long, unwieldy cardboard box that was still sealed, leaned up against the wall close to the door. "Need me to bring anything?"
He glanced around the dimly-lit room. "Just a bag a cement if you don’t have it, and a bag a sand. You got a screwdriver? Wrench?"
"Everything’s over there." She pointed to two old plastic toolboxes on a worktable against the wall, and he noticed a shovel and a narrower long-handled spade as well. "Got a post ta put it on?"
"Post, okay. Where’d I look for that?"
"Same place you got the mailbox, hardware store I guess. An’ they’ll have some stick-on numbers too."
She nodded. "Cement, sand, post, numbers. Right. I’ll be back in about an hour, gotta few more errands to do."
He leaned against the door of the shed for a few minutes after she left, feeling the kind of hollow vibration people often experience after the sudden cessation of loud noise. He’d expected to meet this woman right away but he had a sense that she’d made him stand and had taken a slow, appraising walk around him, inspecting up and down -- and he wasn’t sure what she was looking for. The dense, grainy smells of oil, old wood, rust and gasoline in the garage were reassuring in their way and in a few moments the ground felt solid again.
Taking the shovel and spade with him, he walked out to the curb and was surprised at the difference between the front of the house and the back. Although the Lake was visible in spots between houses, the view up and down the street was of a city neighborhood, with houses close enough together to that without curtains and shades, neighbors could easily observe each others’ private lives from well-placed windows. The houses, shaded by an expansive line of mature trees, were all the same style as David’s and Maggie’s: large and comfortable-looking but plain in design.
It wasn’t difficult to find the location of the old box. He immediately started digging a hole around the lump of concrete that was slightly sunk in the ground, and was hauling it out onto the curb when Maggie returned. She left again immediately, however, on discovering that she’d forgotten both the sand and the house numbers. "Write everything down if Maggie’s running an errand," David advised him later. "Don’t count on her remembering." But she was more than willing to work with him on the project, pouring sand and water into the cement mixture alternately while he stirred it, and holding the post and mailbox in place while he re-filled the hole and smoothed the mixture on the surface. On an impulse, he took a thick nail he’d found in the garage and scratched the inscription "edm 1985" onto the mud-thick base.
David returned earlier than either of them expected, carrying a wide, flat pizza box. He and Ennis stood and watched, the aromas of fresh bread and melted cheese rising around their noses, and watched as Maggie peeled off the backing on the house numbers and pressed them onto both sides of the mailbox.
www.washakiemuseum.com/colby.htm
For details about the mammoth discoveries at Worland, check out
For pictures of the Belle River, the Aerial Bridge and the actor who serves as a general model for David's physical type and appearance, go to http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,3507.msg311962.html#msg311962 or to http://ennisjack.com/index.php?topic=11698.msg662228#msg662228
Index to previous chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html