The Doctor's Wife by Luis Jaramillo Page B

local burger chain. One year they began to build what they said were stables right next to our garden. After the concrete foundation was poured, an ugly building of buff colored steel rose quickly. Once completed, there were no horses to be seen. At five in the morning, metal doors banged open, starting a day full of the noises of a truck garage. My grandmother and grandfather filed a lawsuit. The land around the lake was zoned for agricultural use, so it wasn’t a clear-cut case, but the suit prevailed and the garage was torn down. Now there’s a frostiness between the two families. This frostiness does not diminish our fascination—actually the opposite.
    Once their ski boat is tied up, the Dussler boys stand giggling at the end of the dock.
    â€œHey mom,” Freddie yells. My brother and I poke our heads above water and watch.
    Pat is on the front porch watering her pansies.
    â€œHey mom,” Freddie says again.
    We tread water. What are they going to do?
    â€œHey mom,” Jimmy Joe says.
    She turns around. “What?” she asks into her bullhorn. The two big boys pull down their trunks and moon her, their laughs booming across the lake.

The Basement
    I’m downstairs with my brother in the basement, waiting for the rain to stop so that we can swim. We’ve found a rattrap. I pull the crossbar back, straining against the heavy-duty spring. My brother puts a pencil on the base of the trap and then I let loose the bar. The pencil snaps in two, sending shards flying. We immediately start to look for other things we can break.
    â€œWhat are you doing down there?” our grandmother calls.
    â€œNothing,” we shout up.
    Where can we find more pencils? I look around the basement. The canning room was meant for Mason jars, but is now mostly filled with toys for the beach, inner tubes, skis, buckets and shovels. On a cross beam near the door to the outside are two outboard motors, a battered army-green 10 horsepower, the other a 25 horsepower in a cream and mustard colored plastic case. Behind these are a series of cabinets crammed with other stuff—an extra badminton net, the badminton racquets, the birdies, mismatched croquet balls, a sail wrapped around itself. None of these things will fit in the trap. How badly would it hurt if we put a finger in the trap?
    â€œBoys! Come upstairs for lunch!” we are called.

Barrow, Alaska
    Bob is on a mail plane landing at the Barrow Airport. Barrow is the northernmost city on the continent, 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It’s February and the temperature hovers around negative twenty degrees. Bob lives in Fairbanks, but even there it is so cold in the winter that Bob’s German Shorthair Jed has burned his whiskers off by huddling too close to the wood burning stove.
    Bob has come to Barrow to sell insurance—life, property-home, car, boat, snowmobile—because Barrow is the closest town to Prudhoe Bay, the base for the oilfields of the North Slope. Despite all the oil money around, the Barrow Airport is a simple affair, one runway, a single low building. Bob takes a taxi to the hotel, in sight of the Chukchi Sea. The houses stand on stilts and are made of unpainted plywood. Whale bones share yards with broken down cars, new snowmobiles.
    He checks in to the King Eider Inn and calls his mother, as he has every day since his dad died.
    â€œHi, Mama,” he says.
    â€œDarling!” she replies.

Does Not Deserve A Response
    My brother and I play croquet early in the morning while we wait for the Rubatinos to wake up. How can they sleep so late? We’ve already been up for a couple of hours.
    The front lawn is uneven, sloping slightly toward the juniper hedge. Dark green spots alternate with straw-colored barrens. The Doctor’s Wife doesn’t think it’s worth installing a sprinkler system and she certainly doesn’t fertilize. Fertilizer runs straight into the lake and causes algae blooms. The