COMET TAIL

With an experimental flourish, Charlene tried everything: codeine/wine; Valium/mysterious little green pill that seemed too small to do much, like one of her grandmother’s saccharin tablets. Then there were the tight little bennies she took in the Vacation Court Hotel up near Houghton, one of those old strip hotels with a neon sign H20 BED/CABLE TV. The oar boats, long and cold, waiting—the Myron, the Keweenaw, the Pewabic—with hulls flaking rust. Vacation Court was home to lumberjack types, to men with grizzly chins and temperaments hewn between Duluth and the Soo Locks. The hotel bathroom was mildewed and dank, with stalactites of golden stain drooping from the tub spouts. She was copping from a kid named Earl, gaunt and wasted with a slight hump in his back and standard self-carved letters on his knuckles: JESUCHRIST. Through his toothy grin he insisted she was going to fucking love the pills, indeed, for certain, and that she’d never thank him enough for the high she was about to receive, holding out the glimmering bag between two tight fingers as inducement to pay up. And how could she fail? Not because she knew the stuff was any good, or trusted his words, but because the beautiful little comet bag defied her to say no. She had that last-ditch look, the skin tight around her jawbone, some of her teeth missing. She was at the end of a certain line and he was going to help her get to the end of another. So when he was gone and relinquished of his charge, and she was ingesting the pills, there was no one to bear witness when she gasped for air, spoke the word oh, thinking as she did so, consciously, I’m passing out, way, way out, I’m going down, down, I’m sinking, I’m exploring space, I’m going interstellar, I’m going under, I’m slipping away. She died before the witness of God, if there is a God, and the view of the harbor from the window—limp steely waves upon which an ore boat made good speed to the center of Superior. The sky had a hard, unyielding edge, a bright blue tinged around the edges, toward Canada, with a veil of white haze. In a few hours the cleaning lady would discover her body, an arm tossed back like a flamenco dancer, pale and bright against the beige bedspread, her mouth open in one last sigh, as if her breath were there, hovering, shapeless and formidable around some last utterance.

KALKASKA INTERLUDE

A waitress wearing the light green singlet uniform with the ruffled skirt and the little name tag that says LIBBY, reciting “How can I help you” by rote now, a small smile that hooks more on the right than the left, and the hip-cock, too, with the pad posed. It’s a flapjack place, mainly older folks, with the mint toothpick dispenser near the register; the large windows out front open to the vantage of the old state road. She’s taking a smoke back behind the green Dumpster on a clear day, exhaling with pursed lips the fine stream. She feels on these breaks a certain exhilaration, a lifting sensation that belies the hours of tedium and hard work behind and in front of her life. She draws the smoke and feels the sun on her cheeks and the sensation, momentary but strong, of being rooted in this time and place. She will take Monday off and go north, driving hellfire for fire to Houghton to get to John before he goes off to captain the ore boat Pewabic. He’ll be gone for at least a month as the boat works its way up the St. Lawrence Seaway, down the coast through the Panama, and then back up to deposit a load of copper ore at a Mexican foundry.