loud as she could because she had a phantomdream where she saw it all happening again, even though she hadn’t seen it the first time. He could remember being nine and waking up at night after the screaming had stopped, hearing his father talking in the next room in a soft consoling voice, calming his wife back into sleep. And when Quinn was thirteen, his father told him, sitting in an ice hut in the middle of Traverse Bay, that sometimes while he soothed her it was everything he could do to keep himself from breaking out laughing, because he thought that if he hadn’t lost his hand and given up the idea of a farm, he’d have gone crazy in no time at all, and his wife would’ve left him as a failure, and his whole life and Quinn’s too would’ve been nothing but a misery from then on out.
In November, Quinn had begun running the deer tag stations on the county roads between East Jordan and Mancelona, and working nights in the D.N.R. Scout, sitting alert in the trees with the door open to the frozen air, waiting to see a seal beam snap on in the five breaks or in the old white pine slashes, and hear a poacher’s .22 crack in the cold, and start idling toward where the noise was, lights out. He liked that, the high-density sensation of solo work at night. It made you feel out of time and out of real space and located closer to yourself, as if located was the illusion, the thing he’d missed since he’d come back, the ultimate good luck.
Rae hadn’t liked things from the beginning. Quinn had bought a mobile home in Traverse City and moved it up onto a finished basement at the top of the bay where the birches and the alder woods plugged the wind. She hadn’t liked the trailer and hadn’t liked where it sat at the edge of a cutover orchard, too near the timber for light to stay in the trailer all day. She didn’t like Michigan. She told him it was too glacial and ground down and too bleak and uncharming to be a place where people lived. She said she liked the West, liked the mountains, liked looking up and down at things instead of across at them. She didn’t like theflathead bars and the no-menu cafés he took her to in Mancelona and Torch Lake and down in Traverse, wherever he was working. Sometimes in the bar light he’d see a face he knew, somebody from school, somebody he might talk to but didn’t get around to talking to somehow, and it made Rae mad. And late at night they’d go home in the Scout and she’d be mad.
He began to come home mornings in the first December they were in the trailer and find Rae out of the bed, see her through the window, standing in her yellow parka at the farthest verge of the orchard where it swelled up into the alders, looking down at the trailer and at him when he drove up as if it was a sight that kept appearing to her in a dream, but that she couldn’t believe really existed in her life and had to go out and stand in the clear cold and verify for herself every day. In a little while she would come inside where he was cooking eggs, standing at the stove in his undershirt and suspenders with all the lights on and the heat up in the kitchen and the grease thick in the air.
Once she said to him: “I never thought I’d live in a trailer in the woods with a game warden. You know that? It wasn’t what I had in mind for myself when I was twelve.”
He stooped and stared out the cold kitchen window at the fog running off the snow crust, swarming back through the bare white birch trunks into the denser timber. He liked the plain, compacted loneliness, the low almost pleasing pain of knowing nothing of any consequence was going bad for once. “I never thought I’d fly helicopters and pour shit on Chinamen either, but I did.”
“You
wanted
that, though, didn’t you?” she said.
“Sure.” He watched the eggs casually where they broke up in the grease, turning pale.
“Do you have bad dreams about that now?”
“No, I never do.” He thumbed down the heat and let the
In November, Quinn had begun running the deer tag stations on the county roads between East Jordan and Mancelona, and working nights in the D.N.R. Scout, sitting alert in the trees with the door open to the frozen air, waiting to see a seal beam snap on in the five breaks or in the old white pine slashes, and hear a poacher’s .22 crack in the cold, and start idling toward where the noise was, lights out. He liked that, the high-density sensation of solo work at night. It made you feel out of time and out of real space and located closer to yourself, as if located was the illusion, the thing he’d missed since he’d come back, the ultimate good luck.
Rae hadn’t liked things from the beginning. Quinn had bought a mobile home in Traverse City and moved it up onto a finished basement at the top of the bay where the birches and the alder woods plugged the wind. She hadn’t liked the trailer and hadn’t liked where it sat at the edge of a cutover orchard, too near the timber for light to stay in the trailer all day. She didn’t like Michigan. She told him it was too glacial and ground down and too bleak and uncharming to be a place where people lived. She said she liked the West, liked the mountains, liked looking up and down at things instead of across at them. She didn’t like theflathead bars and the no-menu cafés he took her to in Mancelona and Torch Lake and down in Traverse, wherever he was working. Sometimes in the bar light he’d see a face he knew, somebody from school, somebody he might talk to but didn’t get around to talking to somehow, and it made Rae mad. And late at night they’d go home in the Scout and she’d be mad.
He began to come home mornings in the first December they were in the trailer and find Rae out of the bed, see her through the window, standing in her yellow parka at the farthest verge of the orchard where it swelled up into the alders, looking down at the trailer and at him when he drove up as if it was a sight that kept appearing to her in a dream, but that she couldn’t believe really existed in her life and had to go out and stand in the clear cold and verify for herself every day. In a little while she would come inside where he was cooking eggs, standing at the stove in his undershirt and suspenders with all the lights on and the heat up in the kitchen and the grease thick in the air.
Once she said to him: “I never thought I’d live in a trailer in the woods with a game warden. You know that? It wasn’t what I had in mind for myself when I was twelve.”
He stooped and stared out the cold kitchen window at the fog running off the snow crust, swarming back through the bare white birch trunks into the denser timber. He liked the plain, compacted loneliness, the low almost pleasing pain of knowing nothing of any consequence was going bad for once. “I never thought I’d fly helicopters and pour shit on Chinamen either, but I did.”
“You
wanted
that, though, didn’t you?” she said.
“Sure.” He watched the eggs casually where they broke up in the grease, turning pale.
“Do you have bad dreams about that now?”
“No, I never do.” He thumbed down the heat and let the
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