deeper chill than even the one she had felt earlier caused her to sit up and put her jean jacket back on. She climbed out of the truck bed and reached into the open window for the pack of Marlboros sitting on the dash. She’d have to get another pack at Mickey’s bar before driving back into Fargo. She lit the cigarette again with the left-handed move of the matchbook. It would be a few more hours before sunset, but this bend of the river seemed darker somehow and colder. She shivered.
Cash took a long drag on her cigarette. She tried to remember the first time she had experienced leaving her body. In one foster home she’d been forced to sit for hours on a chair as punishment for one infraction or another. One day in the middle of a daydream, she floated out of her body and into the yard where her foster mother was hanging men’s work jeans on the line. Freaked out, she thudded back into her body on the chair, wondering what the heck had just happened.
That evening when the foster mother ordered her off the chair and sent her out to bring in the laundry, Cash’s heart jumped when she saw the clothesline hung with men’s work jeans. She quickly swiped clothespins and jeans, threw them in the basket and hurried indoors.
One day at the Bookmobile, she read about a yogi who meditated and traveled out of his body. For the next six months, she checked out every book she could on meditation and practiced meditating when she was forced to sit on the chair. She got in a lot of practice.
She decided to talk to Wheaton about her experiences. He was someone she trusted to not think she was too weird. He had looked at her over his coffee cup and said, “Yeah. I’ve heard some Indians can do that kinda stuff as well as India Indians. Just don’t go floating off and not come back.”
After a couple more sips of coffee he had looked at her and said, “You have dreams too, I s’pose.”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Don’t let them scare you. Just remember them. Someday you’ll know why you have them.”
Neither had ever talked about it again.
Half-finished with the cigarette, she climbed into the truck. Pushed in the clutch, shifted into reverse and backed out of the grassed-over driveway.
Farm work didn’t know weekends. Laborers could get Sunday morning off to go to church, but it was Saturday and she was late for work. Svenson had five grown sons to help him out even if Cash never showed, but Cash was a woman of her word.
When she pulled into his farm driveway, Svenson’s wife appeared at the farmhouse screen door, waved and hollered, “They’re over at the old homestead, just drive on over,” before letting the screen door slam behind her. Cash turned around and headed north another couple of miles to the old homestead. That was where Svenson’s relatives from Norway had originally settled when the government was giving out 160 free acres to new immigrants. As each immigrant son came of age, they got married and started their own new homestead.
Cash pulled into the field crossing, parked and stood by her pickup waiting for the old man to come the length of the stubble wheat field. He was driving a Massey Ferguson tractor, pulling a plow behind it. The chug of the tractor’s engine got louder as he approached and silence filled the air when he shut it off at the end of the furrow. He climbed down. Cash could tell just from the way he moved that his arthritic knee was acting up.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said.
Svenson wiped his brow with a red hankerchief he pulled from his back pocket. “If you can finish plowing this forty, I can run the wife into town. She wants to pick up some fixin’s for the church dinner on Sunday.”
“Yep,” said Cash, already climbing up on the tractor. Sven must have gotten to the field at sunup because he was more than half done. Cash plowed till about five, then drove the tractor and plow over to the field she knew Sven would plow next. She walked across the dirt furrows, climbed into her Ranchero and headed back to Fargo.
She took a quick bath and changed into clean clothes. She grabbed the thin quilt off her bed and a box of .22 shells from the top dresser drawer. Down at the Ranchero, she checked to make sure her .22 rifle was still behind the seat before heading back on the road. One of the things she had learned from all her out-of-body meditation practice was that sometimes she really did see things. Another thing she had learned over the years was the only person she could trust was herself and so more often than not she chose to follow her quirky intuitions.
She drove north through Halstad, stopped in another smaller town to buy some cigarettes. She used the restroom of the town bar and continued north, cutting cross-country on gravel roads.
At some county junction, there was a township so small she missed the name as she entered the village. It was dark. She cruised the main street, the only street, trying to decide between two bars, one on the south end of town, one on the north. The north-end one looked a little more rundown, probably a little more welcoming to a dark-haired female pool player. She pulled headfirst into a parking spot close to the one streetlight on the block. Reached into the glove box and pulled out a hairbrush, which she pulled through her hair before braiding it down the middle of her back. Never knew what kind of trouble one could run into in these small-town bars in northern Minnesota. One braid was less of a handful to grab than a whole head of hair.
Cash reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out her cue stick in its leather case. She hesitated a moment, then took the cue out of the case. She knew that white farm folks tended to not like anything too Indian up here in northern Minnesota and she didn’t want to risk damage to the one possession, next to the .22, she was attached to.
The place smelled like every other bar in the state. She scanned the place as she walked in. Noted the couple nuzzling in the back booth. The jukebox against the east wall. The mandatory town drunk on the end barstool, well into his nightly stupor. A couple of young farmer dudes shooting pool. They looked up at her, took in the cue stick and smirked at each other.
“Hey, baby, women’s lib doesn’t reach this far north,” the one in a checkered shirt hollered. His buddy, still wearing his manure-crusted work shoes, laughed and swigged a drink of his beer. “Wowee, we got a girlee here thinks she can shoot.”
Cash walked up to the bar and ordered two Buds. The bartender asked to see her ID, which she pulled from the back pocket of her jeans. Cash looked him defiantly in the eyes as he scanned the ID. “You don’t look a day over twelve, kid,” is what he said, inspecting the front, back and edges of the ID. But he served her the beers. Cash walked over to the pool table, past two women sitting in another booth. Must be wives or girlfriends of the farmer boys. Cash put her beers on the ledge that lined the wall and her quarters up on the pool table. She perched on a red leather barstool to wait her turn. The guy with the crappy shoes wasn’t half bad.
Checkered Shirt couldn’t bank for shit. She figured she would have to let them each win at least once, play for beers initially, then switch to cash in about an hour. She had been driving for hours it seemed, much of it on gravel roads that had covered her truck in a fine layer of dust. It was dark, and she would have to sleep in her Ranchero. Thank god, she was in the woods, the real woods, the pinewoods of northern Minnesota. Easy to hide a truck and a woman sleeping in it.
Checkered Shirt lost when he called the wrong pocket for the 8-ball.
Cash walked over to the table and slid her quarters in. The clunk of dropping balls was music to her ears. She put the rack on the table, flush with the green cushion, squatted and used two balls to a hand to fill the rack. Positioned the balls just so. Stripe. Two solids. 8-ball between two stripes. Two solids, a stripe, a solid. Stripe, solid, stripe, solid, stripe completed
