Wild Thing: A Novel (10 page)

Like I have a good answer to that either.

McQuillen says “I would appreciate it if you refrained. I have a telephone that I do sometimes answer. If you have other ludicrous questions, please hesitate to call me. If you find you can’t resist, I’ll try my best to answer them. In the meantime, I’ll walk you out. I can finish up with Mr. Arntz alone.”

“Dylan, the visiting doctor is leaving,” Dr. McQuillen says as he ushers me past the examining room.

“Bye, dude,” Dylan says with his jaw clenched.

“Take care of yourself, Dylan,” I say. To McQuillen, I say “How’s his urine?”

“Undefiled.”

We get to the waiting room and both stop.

Except for a lamp on the reception desk, all the lights are out.

Violet’s gone.

Ford, Minnesota

Slightly earlier on Thursday, 13 September
^*

Violet gets bored of hanging out in McQuillen’s waiting room, reading
Time
from six months ago and
Field & Stream
from who gives a shit. It’s not that she doesn’t sympathize with hunters: she understands people’s need to pretend the world’s still full of resource-intensive animals they can party-kill out of fucked-up rage, just like she understands people’s need to reenact the Civil War because they don’t like the way
that
turned out. The problem is that the two groups overlap so heavily.

Violet’s pretty sure she remembers seeing a bar a ways
down Rogers Avenue from Debbie’s Diner. McQuillen definitely mentioned one. And she’s pretty sure she can take a more direct route than Azimuth did driving here. Cut out some distance and avoid the restaurant at the same time. No reason not to walk.

She uses the yellowing prescription pad on the receptionist’s desk to write Azimuth a note, which she leaves under the car keys. Turns the desk lamp on and the room light off so he won’t miss it.

It’s gotten dark out, sliver moon over the lake but everything inland mostly blackness with occasional streetlights. The chill and the smell of woodsmoke remind her of Halloweens back in Lawrence. She can see her breath.

She figures it’s about fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Which—the Fahrenheit part—pisses her off. Violet will never be able to instinctively judge temperatures in Celsius. She wasn’t raised to. And being raised without the metric system is like being raised with a harness on your brain.

In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

Whereas in the American system, the answer to “How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?” is “Go fuck yourself,” because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.

Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, she
should calculate the temperature using cricket noises. Because the equation she knows for that—like most equations she knows—is in metric.

By cricket it’s ten degrees centigrade out. Which by conversion is fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

It gets her off the porch. Whatever’s out there is better than thinking about
this
bullshit.

Whatever’s out there is pretty damn eerie, though.

Past the three-blocks-long fancy district, the number of streetlights drops off sharply. Most of the houses don’t have lights on either, and a lot of the ones that do have papered-over windows for no reason Violet can guess. The small boats in some of the driveways are mummified in blue tarps and chains, with the chains spiked to cement blocks. Everything she passes has a “FOR SALE” sign on it.

For a while she can hear what sounds like a Tom Petty album playing somewhere ahead of her, but the source, when she reaches it, turns out to be the open front door of a house with all its lights off. Later, what seem at first to be red flares on the horizon resolve into the cigarette tips of a ring of people standing in the middle of the street, talking in murmurs.

No reason for them
not
to be in the middle of the street, Violet supposes. There aren’t sidewalks here, just loud gravel shoulders, and she has yet to see a car.

Still, she circles the smokers without alerting them, half expecting them to put their faces into the air and start sniffing for her.

The bar turns out to be four blocks past Debbie’s. It’s called Sherry’s—raising the possibility, Violet supposes, that if she goes inside, a woman named Sherry will come after her with an ax. Worth the risk.

Inside, it’s a deep, narrow space of dark wood and Christmas lights, with only four stools and two people: the bartender and, on the left-most stool, one customer.

Both are males in their early thirties or so, which in Portland would make them hipster man-boys, but here means they’re grown men in practical haircuts who look like they’ve been through some shit. The bartender in particular has the electrocuted expression Violet associates with people who have been through rehab. The guy on the stool has the sloping back and lowered shoulders of a bear. They’re both big, and neither of them is leering.

Violet likes the big guys. The little ones always want to resent-fuck her. It may explain why Dr. Lionel Azimuth, with the forearms and the laugh like a garbage disposal, makes her want to take her bra off.

Or maybe nothing explains that.

She takes the right-most stool. Says “Got any interesting beer?”

“All beer is at least mildly interesting,” the guy on the other stool says.

Violet couldn’t agree more. Beer is the perfect population-overshoot scenario: you put a bunch of organisms into an enclosed space with more carbohydrates than they’ve ever seen before, then watch as they kill themselves off with their own waste products, in this case carbon dioxide and alcohol. Then you drink it.

“You mean like a hefeweizen or something?” the bartender says.

“Maybe not a hefeweizen per se.”

“I was just using that as an example.” He pokes through the refrigerator under the bar. “Doesn’t look too good. If you’re not from around here, you might find Grain Star interesting.”

The guy on the stool raises his bottle. Cool retro label.

“Sounds good.”

“Grain Star it is,” the bartender says.

“But what makes you think I’m not from around here?”

Both men laugh. “Saw this place in the Michelin guide, huh?”

“Yeah,” Violet says. “It was under ‘Bars in Ford that are actually open.’ ”

The bartender spins two St. Pauli Girl coasters onto the bar and puts a pint glass on one and a bottle on the other.
^*
The bottle steams water vapor when he opens it. “I don’t have St. Pauli Girl either,” the bartender says. “The coasters were here when I bought the place. I’m still going through them.”

“Then we should use them up,” Violet says. “One more for the bartender, please.”

“Thank you, but I’m a Diet Coke guy, myself.” The bartender raises his glass to show her, and Violet and the guy on the left-most stool lean to clink it with their bottles. Violet’s liking this place more and more.

“Not bad,” she says after she’s swallowed. Not good, particularly, either. Grain Star is sweet, thin, and metallic, though she
supposes it’s unusual enough that you could form an attachment to it if you did something fun while you were drinking it.

Doesn’t seem too likely. Not unless Dr. Azimuth shows up and takes her to their hotel wanting to pull her hair from behind.

Violet didn’t just think that. She belches. Says “Fuck’s the matter with this place?”

The bartender and the guy on the stool trade glances. “There’s a couple good bars in Soudan you could check out,” the bartender says.

“I’m not talking about the bar,” Violet says. “The bar’s great. I’m talking about the town.”

“Oh, that,” the bartender says.

“Right. Ford,” the guy on the stool says.

“Yeah,” Violet says. “Ford.”

The guy on the stool says “Personally, I blame the mayor.”

“Most people do,” the bartender says.

“Why? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s something of a dickhead,” the guy on the stool says.

“Who hangs out with even bigger dickheads,” the bartender says.

“Who he makes look good by comparison.”

“He also inspires a lot of resentment.”

“Or so he likes to think.”

“What do you mean?” Violet says.

“We’re just fucking with you,” the guy on the stool says. He nods toward the bartender. “He’s the mayor.”

“And
he
owns the Speed Mart and the liquor store. Congratulations: you’ve just met the second- and third-biggest employers in Ford.”

“Nice to meet you. Who’s the first?”

“CFS. By a long shot.”

“Debbie employs more people than you or I do,” the guy on the stool says. “Unless by ‘employs’ you mean ‘pays them with money.’ ”

“Hey now,” the bartender says.

“You mean Debbie the psychopathic waitress?”

“You’ve met Debbie,” the guy on the stool says.

“Yeah. What’s her fucking problem?”

As he’s about to answer, the bartender says to Violet, “You wouldn’t happen to be an officer of the law, would you?”