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  It had started again; the bad carnival ride that turned the big dump they lived into a fun house with distorted mirrors, eyes in the walls; the craziness getting ready to jump out of where it nested in the bathroom closet…

  Cassandra Bodine always tried to fight the crazy.

  Dutifully, she filled her bucket with hot water, grabbed the Comet cleanser, her scrub brush. She carried the bucket up the stairs and down the hall to the unused storage room past the master bedroom. Went in. The shades were pulled. A throw rug filled most of the floor space. She could hear the engine on Teddy’s ATV grinding in circles in the snow below the window as she rolled back the rug, kneeled, and began to scrub.

  Jimmy had put in a new floor.

  Didn’t matter. It was still there.

  An hour later Teddy was back in his room playing Doom instead of doing his homework. Cassie squatted naked in the tiled corner of the shower stall. The master bath was Jimmy’s one concession to fixing up the place. Didn’t help. She cringed under the stinging needles of hot water.

  She was boxed.

  The trap they had built for themselves was so cunningly designed that there was nobody she could really talk to. Except the one person who built the box. No other way to go. Because they were out there planning to hurt her son. Hurt them all.

  She stood up, turned off the shower, stepped from the stall, and took a fresh towel from the wall rack. She wiped the steam away from the broad vanity mirror and, seeing her compulsively trim body, got a flash of the loathing that drove the young girls to cut themselves.

  Her eyes traveled around the bathroom, every surface sparkling, the towels arranged just so. No matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t stop the crazy. It whispered to her now from its hiding place in the closet next to the sink, where it nestled, waiting, among the carefully folded towels and washcloths. Like church back when she tried that; like communion. An altar call. Her hand trembled as opened the closet door and snuck through the clean folded cotton until she felt the dirty crumple of tinfoil. She withdrew her hand and studied the way the foil winked dirty silver gray in the soft vanity mirror lights…

  …like a lump of anti-meteorite that had not fallen from the sky…

  That had blasted up from hell.

  Carefully she peeled back the foil, expecting a chunk of yellowish crystal the size of her thumbnail. Aw, man, musta lost track. Nothing left but a few pebbles, some dust. And there was only one place for her to get it now…and he never gives me enough……and it never came easy. Always the old undercurrent.

  Carefully, Cassie shook the residue of the crystal meth into her mouth, then probed the fissures in the wrinkled foil with her tongue, licking up every last speck.

  Not enough.

  Still, like a catechism, she recited the ground rules: Just never smoke the stuff.

  Nibble a little, to keep your weight down, to zoom through housework on jet afterburners. Smooth out the day.

  To turn down the volume on the loud goddamn world…

  Cassie swallowed the last dot of crystal, sat down at her vanity table, and tried to concentrate, putting on fresh eye shadow. Could tell by the way her fingers shook.

  Wasn’t going to be a real boost. Waiting. C’mon. Then…Almost. Just a small caress of pre-rush foreplay. Her perfect lover trying to do it from the inside. Then fizzle.

  Get more.

  The sensation clamoring now. Flushed, her face out of balance, with a streak of the makeup breaking down her cheek like a black crack, she jerked the towel around her. She paced down the hall, passed the sounds of cyber carnage on the other side of her son’s door, then went into the grim bedroom with its turgid blue wallpaper. Christ, the room where old Tommy and Adele made Jimmy. At least they got a new bed before…

  She sat on the bed and stared at the phone. Caught herself digging nervously at her cheek with her fingernails.

  Only one way to make it stop. And for that she needed more than Keith, her guardian angel. She needed her guardian devil.

  Jimmy wouldn’t like it. But then Jimmy just got knocked on his ass. She’d lost the last hope of the mini rush, so it was with faint nausea that she picked up the phone and called her brother. It was her brother, after all, who had taught her to keep an eye out for people who didn’t fit.

  Especially now.

  Chapter Five

  “Okay, Cassie; calm down,” Gator Bodine said as he patiently listened to her lament about how little Teddy had been mistreated at the hands of a girl with a red ponytail.

  “Hey, Cassie, get a grip. It’s just kids at school.”

  She didn’t hear. Just kept going. Now she was saying how Jimmy had been put on the sidewalk by the kid’s father. An older guy.

  Gator thinking: Jesus. Like father, like son. Serves them right. The fat spoiled faggots…

  “They made him bleed,” Cassie said.

  Aw, shit. When Cassie got to talking about bleeding, it could turn into a long night, and it was still morning. “They, huh?” Gator asked, putting some concern in his voice.

  “The girl’s dad, after he knocked Jimmy down, he looked smug, like he was happy he did it…like it was easy. The way he looked, the vibes he put out; remember how you said to Jimmy and me to keep an eye out for people who stick out, who don’t fit. Well, this is that kind of guy…”

  “Oh?” Gator became a bit more attentive. His sister lurched around on her own personal drugged-up roller coaster right now; hitting all the swoops from manic to paranoid. But she always did have eyes like a hawk. “What about the way he looked?”

  “The way he got on Jimmy, he looked trained.”

  “Trained like what?” Gator was now paying full attention.

  “I don’t know what, like he’s used to knocking people on their ass, that’s what. And he don’t look local. He was wearing one of Harry Griffin’s crew coats. Everybody says Griffin has some dark bullshit in his past. Maybe this guy is part of that. Point is, he don’t fit up here. Making laborer’s pay, paying the rent on a lakefront cabin, driving a brand-new green Tundra.”

  “Okay, okay; slow down, back up. Who is he? Where does he live?”

  “I heard him talking to Keith.”

  “Oh, great, Keith was there. Wonderful. What’d Keith do?” Cassie had paused to organize her thoughts. So Gator read between the lines and said, “Jimmy tried to get smart with the guy, right?”

  “He was upset seeing Teddy all bloody,” Cassie said.

  “C’mon, Jimmy bit off more than he could handle.” As usual. When she didn’t answer, Gator said, “Cassie, who wound up sitting in Keith’s car afterward?” Still no answer. “Never mind. So where does he live, again?”

  “It’s the old Hamre place, off County Twelve on the west side of the lake. Griffin bought it way back and fixed it up.”

  “Gotcha. I know the property. You got a name?”

  “Uh, his name is Phil. Phil Broker. Another thing. I called Madge Grolick at the school, and she said nobody’s ever seen the guy’s wife. He brings the kid, picks her up.”

  “You ask how long they been here?”

  “Transferred in January, right in the middle of the school year.” Having delivered the information, Cassie’s voice launched into her basic global plea. “Gator, I could use a little help here to make it stop, you know how hard I try…”

  Gator smiled, loving her palpable need vibrating in the cell phone. Damn. It was like…fan mail. “Jeez, Cassie, you gotta back off on that stuff. Don’t want to use too much, know what I mean.”

  “Please, Gator, What do I have to do, beg or…what?”

  Gator shut his eyes and listened to his sister’s voice, like she was right there with him, shrunk down and imprisoned in the oblong Motorola slab of cell phone plastic in his broad hand. Locked in and pleading to get out, his own private genie in a bottle, all mixed up in with the tiny jit-jit lights and chips and shit. Like she was under a spell. Yeah, he could see that. So he let the ambiguity dangle on the connection for several
delicious seconds, and then he said, “Okay, I’ll check this guy out, now you just calm down. It’ll be all right. You did good.” Then he paused, letting the stress compound on the other end of the connection. When the silence was closer to snapping, he soothed. “I’ll bring you something. But you gotta treat me right, understood.” Then he ended the call before she could blubber thanks. He set the cell phone aside. He leaned back against his workbench, arms thrust back for support.

  Gator stood five feet ten and a half inches in his stocking feet. He weighed 185. Once a month he went into town and had old Irv Preston run clippers over his scalp so his hair resembled a dark cap. Excess hair could get caught in moving parts.

  Get him out of the greasy work overalls into decent clothes, and he’d be handsome in a saturnine way. His blue eyes could have a devilish Gallic twinkle. Had métis in his blood; his people sprang from the nomadic mix of French and Cree out of Canada. A lifetime working with machinery had given him a taut, dense body. His hands were square and powerful, with at least one signature mashed fingernail in evidence.

  When he was in the Navy, a woman in a Pocatello, Idaho, barroom told him once he had a Steve McQueen look going for him, but darker, and he could see that—if McQueen packed more muscle, from a year lifting weights in Stillwater Prison after getting busted for transporting a kilo of cocaine with intent to sell.

  Gator Bodine looked around his shop. Years back he’d had dreams of crashing the mechanic elite; getting on a pit crew at NASCAR or the Indy. When that goal proved out of reach, he had to face the facts. The most he could hope for was a berth at an auto dealership with a benefits package. Or start his own shop. And that required capital. His first attempt at alternative financing had fizzled when the cops kicked in his door.

  He had tried real hard to learn from his mistakes. Brooding in jail, he’d realized he was sitting on a modest gold mine. All the antique tractors his dad had pack-ratted into the big junkyard behind the shop for forty years.

  His eyes traveled to the wall where he had a centerfold page taped up out of a slick color Minneapolis Moline coffee-table-type book: looked like a hot rod with the distinctive flared tinwork, the fender sloping over the big rear wheels, grill, and cab. It was a rare 1938 Moline Model UDLX. Painted in an orange they called Prairie Gold. Gold was right.

  Barnie Sheffeld, who displayed one of Gator’s restored tractors at his implement lot in Bemidji, told him a UDLX, restored to mint, would bring a hundred grand.

  The stripped-down tractor sitting in the shop under the picture on the wall didn’t look like much now. He had the rusted cowling and the gas tank pulled off. Had unbolted the front half, legged it up, and pried it away from the rear section. Took out the engine. The cam and crank. Had the back end up on blocks and bottle jacks and had spent the day pulling the clutch.

  But it was a vintage UDLX, and when he got done, it would look exactly like the one in the picture.

  As perfect as he could make it.

  Then he’d paint it the same color—Prairie Gold.

  Methodically, he shook some Boraxo into his hand and worked it into his hands and forearms. Scrubbing up to the coiled green-and-red alligator tattoo that ran the length of his left forearm. When he wiggled his fingers, the bunched muscles rippled and the tattoo moved.

  He shook his head and used a rag to worry the deeply ingrained grease from his thick fingers. As he cleaned his hands and arms in the work sink, he glanced out the window, at the sign planted in the yard in front of his shop. Next to a red 1919 Fordson with giant steel-treaded wheels.

  Bodine’s Old Iron.

  The corner of his lips tipped up slightly as he imagined an invisible hand coming down out of the restless gray sky and painting a letter Y at the end of the sign. Bodine’s Old Irony…

  Except for the dark perpetual four o’clock shadow that stubbled his cheeks and dimpled jaw, Gator Bodine resembled the garage bay in which he stood. On the outside, he was a compulsively tidy, meticulously organized man. The inside was more difficult to chart.

  He had always loved machines. Loved taking them apart, putting them together. Loved puzzling out how they worked. Could spend hours watching the moving parts.

  Sometimes he wished he could take people apart and put them back together. Be nice if he could see the moving parts behind their eyes. His own eyes. His sister’s…

  Thing about Cassie; she’d just keep working on a guy. It was like some wacko relentless religion with her; in the beginning God created pussy. He shook his head, took a fresh towel from the rack by the sink, dried his hands.

  She’d been just about the most perfect-looking women he had ever seen in his life. Until she opened her mouth.

  Until she fucking moved…

  …toward some man…

  Gator, make it stop.

  He shook his head. Gotta fight her battles for her. That turd she married sure wouldn’t. And besides, he needed Jimmy to make the plan work. And he needed Cassie to keep her mouth shut. And, who knows, maybe she’d actually spotted something out of line with this new guy.

  Due diligence dictated that he go see.

  He was Cassie’s twin, born eighteen minutes after her. He always joked, half serious, about that. He always thought he should have been first.

  Not born really, more like hatched.

  He had seen this show on the Discovery Channel about how baby alligators get born in a swamp, and the trick was not getting devoured by their daddy. By the time he was a junior in high school, he had no doubts that he was living in his own private Everglades set down in the middle of the glacial lake country of northwestern Minnesota. He had come to view his father as a reptile subspecies of the Bodine strain of jack-pine savage white trash. Mom was no help at all; hell, she was outa the same stagnant pool, the old man’s first cousin.

  So the main challenge for him and his sister right from the start was how to survive their parents.

  In fact his father, Irv Bodine, looked like an alligator. He was thick in the trunk and stubby in the arms and legs. He was glint-eyed, scaly, and always lying in wait with his long snout half submerged in a slop of cheap whiskey. And Mom never even put up a fight. She just went along until she was so leached out by the booze she resembled a shrieking caged swamp bird, bouncing off the walls.

  It came as no surprise to the neighbors, to the teachers, or to the sheriff when their branch of the Bodine family went all to hell. It happened in October, the night of a hard frost; with half the hay left to rot in the fields, with Irv’s machine tools sprouting orange whiskers of rust amid the cobwebs in his repair shop. A colony of rats had taken over the sprawling tractor junkyard behind the shop.

  Junior year in high school. Before he got the gator tat on his arm. Back when he was just Morgun, Morg for short.

  Morg came home from his after-school job at Luchta’s Garage in town, heard the feeder calves bellowing, starving in the barn, went in the house, and smelled more gas than usual. And not the gas in the coffee cans on the mud porch where Irv had tractor parts soaking. This was propane, in the kitchen. He went in and saw a bread pan full of raw meatloaf sitting on the kitchen table. His mom’s thick fingerprints still squished in the red mush. He saw the oven door open. And he saw the box of Blue Tip matches for lighting the pilot, just sitting there on top of the stove. Which was as far as his mother got with supper before she wandered into the living room and passed out drunk on the couch with raw hamburger smeared on her fingers.

  Then he heard the racket down the hall; Cassie screaming, the shower going. And he just knew. Knew before he kicked open the door—the old man still had enough bar whiskey prod going for him to corner Cassie in the shower again.

  But this time he’d gone too far. Usually when he got to drinking and started feeling up his daughter, he kept his clothes on. Not tonight. There, in the steam from the shower clouding the tiny bathroom, he saw the old man grappling with Cassie in this mist, saw he had his overalls down around his knees as he bent her dripping wet o
ver the sink.

  “Ain’t you slippery,” the old man was howling and giggling over and over. He was trying to hold her steady with one burly hand and aim his business with the other.

  There was the shower gushing, there was the smell of gas, mildew, mold, whiskey breath. And there was this single lightbulb over the cabinet above the sink. Just the bare bulb, no shade on it. This cheap little chain jiggling down from the commotion. The weird split image of them there in front of him and coming at him again from another direction in the mirror. In the raw light Morg saw the old man’s spit sprayed among the water droplets on Cassie’s squirming back muscles. Gas, water, the mirror, and these raised blisters dotted with tiny bubbles. Maybe it was seeing the tiny air bubbles popping in the spit that set him off.

  Set him off so he finally reached in through the years of this bullshit that had been going on since Cass started wearing a bra. He grabbed a fistful of his father’s greasy hair and slammed his head down on the hot water faucet. Irv collapsed into a fetal butt-mooning heap at their feet, out cold.

  She had turned and clung to him. And it was him in the mirror now with Cassie as she hugged him and cried, “Make it stop.”

  “I will.”

  He watched the shock drain from her eyes and get replaced by a hot mindless idle, like she had a runaway motor chugging deep in her guts that, once it got turned on, just kept going and going…maybe some jealousy mixed in there.

  Maybe a lot.

  And they were still holding on to each other past the point where she should be thinking about standing there naked. And Morg was caught up for a few seconds remembering the really interesting way they said it in the Bible, talking about the temptations of flesh and blood.

  Cleave.

  Sharp knives. Room-temperature raw meat out there on Mom’s lax fingers. Pictures like that coming to his head.

  And Cassie, eyes wide open; mouth open; her tongue moving in there arched up, this soft red question mark…like it had been the hot July afternoon last year, standing barefoot in the cowshit of the loafing shed behind the barn when she lured him into making her virginity stop…