heart. He had the grave dug, the pistol loaded, the blanket he intended to wrap the corpse in ready. He whistled for the dog and called “Chinook!” He heard the dog bark and saw, from the high ridge, the dog emerge from a marshy island a quarter of a mile downstream. “C’mon, Chinook,” Danny called, and the dog ran the bank upstream fifty yards, then dove into the current, crossing to a sandbar in the middle, shook himself dry, then dove again, swimming upstream fifty more yards before coming to the base of the high banks. He shook himself dry again and bounded up the steep hill without slowing. At the top of the high banks he leapt into Danny’s embrace. This prodigious bit of cross-country swimming and sprinting and climbing, regardless of the crookedness of his leg, proved the dog well able for his habitat. It convinced Danny that he should not kill him, not now, not ever, unless he was truly pained or endangered by his handicap.
And when his father heard, he had approved. “Surely,” he had said, “we must tolerate some imperfections in the ones we love.”
Two years later the dog’s “imperfection” hadn’t held him back a bit.
Danny sat on the bank and shook the thermos. There was maybe a cup of his father’s ashes left in it. He wondered whatto do. The river had its share of him, working its way now, Danny reckoned, downstream to Scottville and Ludington and out into the big lake and maybe to the mouth of the Chicago River and into the Mississippi and through the middle ground of America into the Gulf of Mexico, to the larger amalgam of oceans that held the continents afloat on the globe.
He poured the remnant into the silver cap of the thermos. He dipped the thermos into the current and poured the cold water into the capful of ashes. With his knife he mixed the water and the ashes into a kind of gray paste, like thick oatmeal, and then he ate it with a spoon.
Bloodsport
M OST TIMES the remembrance was triggered by color—that primary red of valentines or Coca-Cola ads—the color of her toenails, girlish and perfectly polished. He remembered her body, tiny and lifeless and sickeningly still as she lay opened and autopsied on the prep-room table. He could still bring to mind, these many years since, the curl of the knot in the viscera bag the pathologist had tied, with all of her examined organs inside, and the raw edge of the exit wound in her right leg and the horrible precision of the hole in her breast where the man who murdered her put the muzzle of the gun.
And he remembered the dull inventory of detail, the hollow in her mother’s voice the morning she called him at the funeral home.
“Elena’s been shot, Martin. Up in Baldwin. She’s at the Lake County Morgue. Go and get her, Martin. Bring her home.”
ELENA HAD been only fifteen when her father died—the darkly beautiful daughter of a darkly beautiful mother and a man who’d had cancer. He was laid out in an 18-gauge metal casket. The funeral was huge. Martin could remember standing between them, Elena and her widowed mother, when they’d come to see the dead man’s body. He figured he was ten years older than the daughter, ten years younger than the mother. He had asked, as he’d been trained to ask, if everything was “satisfactory.” It was the failure of words that always amazed him.
“He got so thin.”
“Yes.”
“At least he’s not suffering anymore.”
“No.”
“Thank you, Martin.”
“Yes.”
And he remembered how Elena, after trying to be brave for her mother, after standing and staring at the lid of the casket as if she could tough it out, as if she could look but not see, had let her gaze fall on the face of her dead father and cried, in one great expiration of pain, “Oh Daddy! Please, no,” and nearly doubled over at the middle, holding her tummy, and how her knees buckled and how he grabbed her before she fell to the floor. And how she had pressed her sobs into his shirt and