Driftless. David Rhodes

      PROTECTING PAPERS

      GAIL SHOTWELL WORKED THE NIGHT SHIFT AT THE PLASTIC FACTORY in Grange and drove home in gray light. She made a piece of toast with peanut butter, ate half of it, partly undressed, slept three hours on the sofa in the living room, woke up, and ate the rest of the toast. She played a CD and felt pretty good then in a sleepy kind of way. She thought about eating another piece of toast, but before she could get a slice of bread into the toaster a loud knocking arrived on the front door.

      Gail had so few visitors that at first she did not recognize the explosive sound. Then she had no idea who it could be. There were only thirty or forty people living in Words at any one time, and she was on speaking terms with only a few of them. Lacking stores of general interest, the little village afforded few opportunities for strangers to get acquainted without going right up to each other, which no one would ever do. There was the Words Repair Shop, of course, with its heaps of old metal and claustrophobic room of crafts in back, but the owner was not someone she especially wanted to meet. Her nearest neighbors in the Victorian beyond the hedge, old Violet Brasso and her sister, Olivia, were fanatically religious by all reports, and Gail assumed they disapproved of her. They rarely left home for anything other than church.

      She opened the front door and on the other side of it stood her brother, Grahm. Behind him his wife, Cora, had her arms wrapped around a cardboard box as big as an orange crate. Because of the direction of the sun, both looked carved in granite.

      “We came last night,” said Grahm, “but you weren’t home.”

      “We waited until after eleven,” said Cora.

      “I worked last night. What’s in the box?” asked Gail.

      “These are copies of something very important,” said Cora in her usual manner of assuming everything in her life was very important. “We need you to keep them.” And she marched into the house, walked down the hall, and put the box on the kitchen table.

      “Grahm thinks you’re our best hope,” she said, appraising the kitchen with a scowl. A mound of Styrofoam take-out containers, mismatched ceramic and paper plates, cups, glasses, and plastic wrappers rose out of the sink and spilled onto both sides of the counter.

      “You guys want some coffee?” asked Gail as Grahm and Cora seated themselves at the table.

      “Look these papers over when you have time,” said Grahm. “Keep them in a safe place.”

      “They probably won’t mean anything to you and it’s not necessary they do,” added Cora. “We just need you to have them.”

      Gail started coffee and set three cups on the table. “Either you tell me what this is all about—right now—or take your old box home.”

      “You tell her,” said Grahm.

      “These are shipping records and report forms that prove American Milk is stealing from farmers, defrauding the government, and selling tainted product.”

      “Holy shit,” said Gail. “Where did you get them?”

      “I took them.”

      Cora talked for quite a while longer and Gail realized somewhere near the end of the narrative that she hadn’t been listening. The picture in her mind of her sister-in-law making off with papers from work had crowded out everything else. The coffeemaker groaned twice, grueling sounds of concentrated mechanical anguish ending in a gasp of caffeinated steam. As though in response, the CD player in the living room turned off.

      “Coffee?”

      “Sure,” said Cora.

      “No thanks,” said Grahm. He was currently feeling guilty about bringing his sister into the same awful business that had been destroying his relationship with Cora for the past six months. Gail gave him some anyway, and he drank it after pouring in enough milk to bring the liquid up to the rim of the cup.

      “You should get milk from us,” said Grahm. “This stuff from the store has been boiled to death.”

      “Yes, but they take all the fat out and I perform for people on a stage.”

      “Doesn’t seem to interfere with your drummer’s eating.”

      “Men don’t have to look good, especially behind a set of drums. Everyone notices women.”

      “Tell me about it,” said Cora, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Our society is shot through with double standards.”

      Gail frowned at her but didn’t say anything. As far as she was concerned Cora had directly benefited from those double standards. She lived on a farm inherited in the final act of a long drama of double standards, mostly written, directed, and acted out by Gail’s mother, who expressed her preference for boys in general and Grahm in particular with every embittered fiber of her being. The leather strap she kept hanging beside the stove might as well have had “Gail” embossed on it, so seldom was it used on anyone else.

      “What am I supposed to do with these papers?”

      “You won’t understand what they mean,” said Cora, burning her tongue and spilling several teaspoons of coffee on her sweatshirt. “Just keep them in a safe place.”

      “People get in trouble over these kinds of things,” said Gail. “You hear about it all the time.”

      “Oh, calm down and stop being so dramatic,” said Cora, who privately admired her sister-in-law’s talent for walking around un-surrendered in her underwear. She had a figure, for sure, but who didn’t before having two children? And she probably exercised, what with all the free time she had. Still, there was something intrinsically unwholesome about just wearing underwear, even clean underwear. “As long as we have these papers we have nothing to worry about,” she said. “There are laws that protect us from lawbreakers.”

      “By the way,” said Grahm in his getting-ready-to-leave voice, “what’s the matter with your lawn mower? It’s sitting out by the road.”

      “It won’t start.”

      “I’ll look at it on the way out.”

      After they left, Gail put the cardboard box in the closet and found her bass. She was feeling lucky and ready to try to learn the Barbara Jean song again.