8

Ely, Minnesota

Still Thursday, 13 September

I carry Violet into the Ely Lakeside Hotel like I’m looking for some train tracks to tie her to. It reminds me how much you have to weigh to look like a bombshell.^[29]

Back in Ford I made her tell me everything she’d learned from those dipshits in the bar before I would start the engine—I was afraid she wouldn’t remember it all when she woke up. Telling me involved a lot of her putting her hand on my thigh for emphasis, and my having an erection that felt like part of the car.

The teenage girl who checks us into the hotel says “Looks like someone’s having fun.” I can only hope she’s referring to Violet being drunk, and not to my having access to her unconscious body.

I put Violet to bed, dressed, in one of the rooms, and go down to the hotel bar. It has a porch overlooking some lake. I get a Grain Star of my own and take it outside to look at the water. Beyond it, dark as a jungle, is the Boundary Waters.

Eventually the bartender comes out and leans against the railing next to me. Blond and thirty-five, with a sun-aged smile that I like. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she says.

I think about that. Cigarettes are so fucking awful for you that they make your urine carcinogenic and your brain unable to regulate how much oxygen it gets, and as a doctor I probably have a responsibility to say something along those lines. But I have no idea what. Preventative medicine’s hard to bill for, so the only research on how to change human behavior through communication gets done by the advertising industry.

“Only for your sake,” I end up saying, thinking I need to formulate something better. “Am I keeping you up?”

She lights and does the slow exhale. “Not yet.”

Nice.

I get along with bartenders. There are plenty of women to sleep with on a cruise ship—it’s called a cruise ship, for fuck’s sake—but if you’re into superficiality, bartenders are special. Not to belabor it, but they do spend most of their time being sociable behind a barrier.

I should go home with this woman and tell Violet about it in the morning. Better yet, take her to my room and project as much noise as possible through the wall. Kill any chance with Violet I might have.

Since Magdalena Niemerover’s death because of me eleven years ago, I’ve observed the following rule: if a woman gets so close to me that she cares what my birthday is, I never talk to her again. It keeps me from endangering anyone, and has other benefits as well, since half the time I don’t remember when Lionel Azimuth’s birthday is supposed to be. And the last thing anyone needs is to try to throw me a surprise party.

Violet and I haven’t reached that point yet. But my lies are piling up fast—commission, omission, whatever. If it’s not too late for us to have stranger sex now, it will be soon. And if I’m going to have sex with her on the premise that she actually knows something about me, I might as well go do it now, while she’s passed out.

I should end the possibility. I’m too weak to, though.

“I won’t take up much more of your time,” I say to the bartender. “My wife and I have to get going in the morning.”

If anything, the bartender looks relieved. Now we can have something even shallower than a sexual relationship.

“Where to?”

“We’re just tourists,” I say. Which, it occurs to me, is true. Here in civilization—even civilization with a view of not-civilization—Ford and its discontents seem a million miles off. “Anything we should see?”

“You planning on going canoeing?”

“Probably.”

A werewolf howl rips out of the Boundary Waters, full force from across the lake.

The bartender sees my face and laughs. “It’s just a loon,” she says, making me wonder how many of northern Minnesota’s mysteries are going to turn out to be just a loon. “Don’t get your hopes up.”