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Title Page

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Dedication

for Megan and Micah



held

You would love me because I should have strangled you

And because of my infamy;

And I should love you the more because I mangled you

And because you were no longer beautiful

To anyone but me

—The Love Song of Saint Sebastian, T. S. Eliot

How desolate lies the city that was once

Thronged with people.

The one-time queen of nations

Has become a widow.

Once a ruler of provinces,

She is now subject to others.

—The Lamentations of Jeremiah

PART ONE

1

They let it pass. The deer is so close they can see in its eyes the dawn light seeping gray over the rotten soffits and pooling there in the parking lot of Saint Steven’s Church.

By 1981 death is not interesting to the Southside of Minneapolis, but this sliver of life, wild and strange amid the parked cars, this is news. When whole families freeze to death in abandoned houses, stacked like cordwood to share what heat they have, no one is surprised. When cops shoot teenagers point-blank, people shrug. When social workers and bill collectors come to ply their trade among those who have neither society nor money anymore, they turn back thwarted and tired. Tired more than anything. If a bill collector happened to park across from the Institute of the Arts, thinking that there his car wouldn’t be broken into, and walked along Twenty-fourth Street or up Third Avenue, he could see something. He might look at the faces in the green smear of park, or clustered on what steps the crumbling apartments offered, and see something behind the studied neutrality of the Indians who moved into the neighborhood in the fifties and sixties. He might glimpse an awareness, an acknowledgment of the tide of misery that sweeps the neighborhood and bends for neither mood nor season. The collector might notice that despite what the weather, society and the government throw at the city transplants, they are determined to endure. But it is March and the streets are dirty with sand and salt and the veneer of frozen exhaust. After all, it is March and the bill collectors and door-to-door men have kids and pets, they have Edina and Maple Grove, White Bear Lake and Bloomington, strung like pearls around the withered heart of the city.

They do not see the interest the homeless men take in the deer as it strides wild and alert through the church parking lot. They do not see the men reach out but stop short of actually touching the deer.