IV

Screw Carlsson. Screw him and the lily-white dragon-ship he rode in on.

Susan glared through the windshield of her ’69 Dodge Dart, hoping against hope that her seething rage could melt the snow and ice streaking the glass where the anemic defroster wouldn’t. The engine still worked fine but she needed a new heater to make it through another Maine winter without freezing to death, and the frame was rusting through. The state didn’t pay wildlife biologists squat. She was not having a good day.

Fucking racist. I’m an American. Natural-born US citizen, eligible to run for president. In a few more years. Got the birth certificate to prove it.

But he’d seen her face, seen her skin and eyes and cheekbones and pitiful excuse for a nose, and just about shouted “Gook!” out loud. And dropped his coffee mug with the shock that one of them had snuck into the whites-only country club of Sunrise County.

Naskeags like Rick Bouchard were honorary whites around here, by virtue of owning half the township. She didn’t care too much for him, either, but that was professional friction. They’d been at it more than once, tooth and nail, over the eagle-feather thing—endangered species and exemptions for “indigenous peoples.” Plus, he earned more as a game warden than she did with her PhD and title as a “Biologist.” Veteran’s preference and “Native American” status gave him three pay grades worth of leg up.

But at least he didn’t swagger into a coffee shop like it was his personal mead-hall. Blond and bearded and bulging-muscled and well over six feet tall, Nordic-handsome like a Barbie sex dream, that bastard Carlsson looked like he should be carrying a pole ax over one shoulder and a screaming Irish girl over the other.

I’m an American. Couple of generations back, you were the fucking Gook, people turning their backs on you and refusing to serve you in a bar and telling Swede jokes about big dumb shits that talked slow and couldn’t pronounce “W” or “J.” But changing your language is a hell of a lot easier than changing your skin color or the shape of your eyes and nose. How many generations before I get to be an American, you asshole?

She had that birth certificate. She had those degrees, one from Brandeis and two from Michigan, genuine article. Maybe some of the rest of her tales came out of thin air and wishful thinking, but those were solid facts she could roll up and use to whap the world across its nose. She might be a rootless street-rat with a missing father and dead mother, but she had those.

Maybe I should do a Bà Trieu number on him. She kicked some serious Chinese ass, back in the long-ago. Of course, then she lost and killed herself. Maybe not a great example.

Not that Mom ever told me about Vietnamese warrior princesses. Had to learn that on my own, in translation. She wanted a complete break with Vietnam. “All trash. Do not fill mind with trash. You American girl. You learn American history, find American heroes.” And we didn’t have any Vietnamese friends. Knew of two families from over there, long before the Boat People, they wouldn’t even talk to us. Probably because of Dad. Had some Chinese in the neighborhood, a few Japanese. Mom didn’t trust the Chinese, even though she worked for them. Because she worked for them.

Hated the Japanese. History lesson.

History lessons kept smacking her in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Like today.

I’m going to whap him with that PhD, if he takes one step out of line. “Mammal Rehab” my little brown ass. I know about those backwoods “rehab” operations. I’ve seen ones that look like Auschwitz on a bad day. Bastard dodged me on his qualifications. He’s got a bucket-load of shit headed toward the fan.

And if he refused to let her check out his site, that was grounds for pulling his license on the spot.

The Dodge wiggled its rear end, thinking about a ditch, and she snapped her attention back to the driving. Turn into the skid, back off on the gas, throw out the clutch, don’t you dare touch that brake. The Dart wiggled again on the greasy pavement, then straightened and drifted to a stop crosswise in the road. She muttered cusswords, American cusswords, under her breath, and sat for a minute until her hands stopped twitching.

She pulled out her cigarettes, shook out the next-to-last coffin nail—needed to get more—and pushed the cigarette-lighter button into the dashboard before she remembered that it didn’t work anymore. Then she fumbled for the Michigan League Zippo in her pocket, lit up, and dragged smoke into her lungs. She sat and stared through the added fog of the smoke at the white swirls of snow whipping across the road.

Weather service had said it was supposed to be clear today. Clear and sunny, high temps near thirty, bit of a wind. Sure as hell didn’t look like clear and sunny on her road. Maybe this was the Gook road, separate but un-equal facilities. Me against the world. As always.

Maybe there was a gene for driving on snow and ice, and ol’ Darwin had bred it out of the Southeast Asian gene pool. No evolutionary advantage in the jungles.

And almost-bald summer tires didn’t help a bit. She’d seen that three-quarter-ton GMC that Carlsson drove, sitting high on new studded snows at all four corners and Warn hubs on the front to lock in four-wheel-drive. Viking truck, Detroit’s version of a long-ship.

She eased the clutch and got traction, tires spinning but pushing the car around to the line of the road. Or what she thought was the line of the road, under fresh white untracked snow. Damn good thing all the other cars had vanished, as well as the pavement. Fall, winter, spring, you could sit down in the middle of Harborside Road and read a newspaper without getting interrupted by a car. Or truck.

Tourists wouldn’t show up until Memorial Day, headed south again around Labor Day. The other nine months of the year, moose and bears outnumbered people.

That was just the way she liked it. Moose and bears weren’t racists. Moose would stomp a white man just as fast as they’d stomp a Gook. Equal opportunity stompers.

Screw him.

She drove on, slow and cautious, the wipers streaking white across her windshield and stacking snow and ice at each end of their travel until she stared out through an arch-shaped porthole and the useless mirror showed a bank of drifted snow on her rear window. Lights passed her going the other way, dim glows of headlights under their coating of snow and ice, and she remembered to switch on her own headlights even though it was supposed to be afternoon, so that the other idiots could at least see what they were hitting.

Lights glowed in the gray snow on her right, not moving, and resolved into the signs at Tracy’s Truck Stop, last gas before forty miles of bad road and the bridge to Canada. She guessed at the driveway and pulled in without finding the culvert or the ditch under the snow instead. Relax for a few minutes, buy those smokes and maybe a six-pack.

She stowed her cigarette on the ashtray and left her car running, hoping the heater would take the hint and besides nobody would be out stealing cars in this weather and nobody but an idiot would steal a ten-year-old Dodge Dart in the first place. Gook insurance.

The wind bit her when she climbed out of the Dart, snow driving needles into her cheeks, and she ducked her chin into the top of the parka and pulled the hood tight. Damned expensive parka, a month’s salary, but sure as hell it earned its keep. She dodged into the blaze of light and warmth of the truck stop, smell of coffee and fried clams and cigarettes but the place looked empty. The clerk at the counter glared at her, didn’t want to be bothered with a customer. Probably thinking to close down early and head home herself.

Susan grabbed a carton of Camels, a six-pack of Bud, added a couple of cans of baked beans and a box of Cajun jerky, and headed for the checkout. American dinner. Or “suppah,” the natives would say.

The clerk was still glaring. Susan stacked her purchases on the counter, but the woman made no move to ring them up.

“I.D?”

Huh? Susan knew she didn’t look that young. Hadn’t been carded since undergrad days at Brandeis. She fumbled her license out of her wallet and laid it on the counter. The woman glanced at it without contaminating her fingers by picking it up. Gave a curt nod and started ringing up the merchandise.

And rang up the jerky twice.

“Excuse me, there’s only one package there.”

The woman glared at her and cleared the register, then punched each key with deliberation and obvious anger. Susan collected her license, handed over the exact total so she wouldn’t have to argue over the change, and glared back.

“You got some kind of problem with me, lady?”

“Yeah. You people killed my brother. Go the hell back where you belong.” The woman slammed the register drawer closed and started switching off the lights in the truck stop, turning her back on Susan.

What the fuck? Shock froze Susan so that she didn’t vault right over the counter to punch the woman’s own lights out. She stood there for a few seconds, blazing with rage and then freezing with terror, clenching her fists until the nails bit into her palms and then relaxing them, breathing deep and letting the shakes die down before she tried to pick up her stuff because if she didn’t, she’d try to brain the bitch with a can of beans.

But the woman probably had a gun hidden under the counter. People like that were fucking dangerous. And everyone in Maine had guns. Not like Waltham or D.C. or even Ann Arbor. Everyone in Maine had guns, and knew how to use them.

Everyone except me.

Well, fuck you very much. And she didn’t even say it out loud. Susan gathered up the stuff in shaking hands, no offer of a bag, and used her butt to knock the door open and head back into the biting wind and snow. Hope you freeze to death in a ditch, bitch.

She swiped snow and ice off her headlights and turn signals, cleared a patch of the rear window, all exercises in futility, and climbed into the old Dart. The heater was starting to work. Barely. She followed her own tire tracks back out onto the highway. Pulling out of the truck stop lot, she saw the lights coming back on inside the store. Subtle. It’s so nice to feel welcome in your town.

She should have sat for a minute, two minutes, calming down. She still felt the shakes, mixed fight-or-flight instinct pumping chemicals through her muscles and brain.

Hatred. That woman hated me, just from my face and my name on the license. I’ve stopped in there dozens of times and I’ve never seen her before. Must work a different shift. If I never see her again it’ll be too soon. Just like Carlsson. Bet that blond bastard has guns out the ass. Gun rack in the rear window of his truck, empty now, but damn sure he has something to fill it when he wants to play lynch mob in his KKK sheet.

Got to get a shotgun. Damned sure Bitch won’t protect me. That stupid hound would just mug a burglar for a tummy-rub. Lick him to death.

Living alone with a pushover dog, in a trailer ten miles from the nearest crossroads and half an hour from the nearest cop, and everyone in town knows where the damned Gook is staying. Fish and Wildlife has had that trailer parked back in the puckerbrush for twenty years now, that’s where the circuit-riders live when they’re in the field doing research. Walking around the woods with a bull’s-eye painted on my back.

Would any of the dealers even sell her a shotgun? In the Old South, white gun dealers wouldn’t sell to a black man, wouldn’t even let him in the shop no matter what color money he was carrying.

Okay, that’s just paranoid, seeing rednecks everywhere, like I’m walking around with black skin in Mississippi. Carlsson didn’t say anything racist, just dropped a mug of coffee and looked funny. That truck stop bitch didn’t look like the brightest penny in the till, either. When your brain has a hard time holding a single thought, you ain’t got much use for shades of gray. Everything turns black or white. I’m doing it, too. This weather is getting to me.

She concentrated on the driving. Should boycott the fucking truck stop, never buy gas or smokes there again. Not that they’d notice the loss. But the next gas pump was twenty miles in the wrong direction. How much pain was a principle worth to her? How many hours did that bitch work, and what schedule?

That was Mom’s way. When you’re small and brown and poor and powerless, it doesn’t pay to run head-on into problems. Slide sideways, go around, evade, kick ’em in the ass when they aren’t looking.

Just like she slid around the Dad question. From all she’d tell me about Dad, I might as well have been a virgin birth. But if confrontation and attitude are genetic, I must have gotten them from him. Damn sure Mom wouldn’t have confronted a mouse.

Trees loomed up through the murk, daytime turned to dusk gray and faint with blowing snow, and she watched for the so-called “schoolmarm” pine that warned of her fire-road turnoff. Schoolmarm. Sexist pig logger language, a white pine that forked into a crotch before it made a decent saw log, the old-time loggers said it looked like a young school teacher on her back in a hayloft with her legs up in the air. That’s what they thought about, after four months of winter out in their pigsty logging camps with the nearest woman fifty miles away. Animals.

There it was, what she called the slingshot tree. Tie a set of bungee cords to each fork and lob a rock clear out to the navy base. Fire Road 47B, home sweet slum-away-from-home. She slowed down some more and eased over the slight snowbank left by the county plow since morning. Right about now, Bitch would have picked up the distinctive noise of a car downshifting to turn in, it didn’t matter which car, she’d be wagging her tail and headed for the door. That dog was an absolute slut for attention. Probably a deprived puppyhood or something. Susan had picked her out at the Humane Society shelter in Naskeag Falls.

Susan eased her car to a stop on the ruts next to the white wall of the trailer, backed and turned to park headed out, and shut off the engine. No barking? By this point, Bitch would be bouncing around at the door, happy happy happy dog because she heard a person coming. Person meant ear ruffle and head tussle and mock growls and roll over on the back for a joyous squirming rub from chin to belly. A retarded mix of Brittany spaniel and God Only Knows, Bitch lived for people. Any people, friend or foe. Attention slut.

Susan tucked beans and jerky into the pockets of her parka, grabbed the cigarettes and beer with one hand, and climbed out, no shopping bag, had to keep one hand free for the trailer door. Still no sound from Bitch. Lights glowed through the windows—every window. She didn’t remember leaving them on. No other car sat in the dooryard, no tracks marked the fresh snow, so Rick Bouchard hadn’t stopped in to apologize for that bastard Carlsson.

She stomped up the steps and opened the door, braced against an explosion of black and white fur, and found silence. No dog. The door opened right between the so-called living room and miniscule kitchen of the trailer, so she turned to the kitchen and saw smears of red on the yellow vinyl floor and red letters on the avocado enamel of the refrigerator.

GOOK BITCH GO HOME.

She checked off details. Dripping letters, dripping period at the end. Smears of red, hand-print but looked like a glove, no loops and whorls of fingerprints or anything. Susan moved in a kind of no-space, emotions dead or never born, taking in details. Red like blood.

More red by the sink, puddle on the floor. Smears, thin smears in the sink, washing up. She knew she ought to feel scared, feel horror, at least feel curious, but instead she just turned and walked like some kind of ’50s B-movie zombie through the living room, red spots and splashes on the patterned cheapie carpet, almost blended in with the orange and brown and gold of the yarn. Bedroom. Dark pink lump in the middle of her bed, meat, something out of the butcher’s cooler at the supermarket, four legs, lamb-sized. Another note, more red smears on white hardboard, her map board, finger-sized letters.

WE CLEANED AND SKINNED YOUR DINNER FOR YOU.

Not lamb-sized, dog-sized. Bitch. Bitch wasn’t at the door because Bitch was here. Dead.

Susan turned and staggered through the living room and out the door to vomit into the snow.

o0o

“Dr. Tranh, do you have any enemies?”

Susan hugged herself, chilled inside the goose-down parka inside the front seat of the sheriff’s cruiser with engine idling and heater on full blast. Her teeth chattered. She stared out the windshield at her trailer, the DIF&W’s trailer, still seeing right through the walls to the mess inside. The sun was shining now, snow had lasted just long enough to wipe out any tracks. Maine weather had joined the conspiracy.

Enemies? Stupid question. She lit another cigarette. Apparently the deputy didn’t mind her smoking. Her hands shook.

“That wasn’t fucking friends in there.”

The cop shook his head, agreeing. He seemed like a nice guy, youngish, soft voice, sympathetic, twisted sideways to look at her straight on from as much of a polite distance as he could get while sharing the front seat of a Crown Victoria. None of that ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ Joe Friday hard-boiled gruffness. How the hell did he get a job as a cop? She pulled her thoughts together, dumped the street kid, and switched on the Doctor Tranh vocabulary, her face to a hostile world.

“No, I can’t give you a name.”

She took another drag on her cigarette, trying to pay attention to the hot harsh bite of the smoke rather than remembering . . . . “I had an argument with a guy named Dennis Carlsson this morning, over at the Coffee Pot in Winter Cove.”

The deputy shook his head again, this time disagreeing. “Carlsson doesn’t have much use for people, white, black, yellow, or green. But he wouldn’t hurt an animal. Saw him once, had to put down a deer hit by a truck out on the Federal Road, critter was hurt too bad to save. Tore Carlsson up.”

Testimonial. But then, Carlsson was a local. Native, Us versus Them, and she was one of Them. That Gook Bitch.

“A woman over at Tracy’s just called me a Gook. She said I killed her brother.”

The cop closed his eyes, shook his head a third time, body-language ambiguous on this one. He took a deep breath and let it out.

“That would be Dottie Whitcomb. Yeah, her twin Donnie was killed in ’Nam.”

His fingers toyed with the clipboard in his lap. “I’ll have a talk with her. Have a talk with her boss. Look, everyone knows Donnie got the brains for both of them. Dottie isn’t playing with a full deck. She loses that job, she’ll never find another. And she has two kids. You want, I’ll file a written complaint. But I’d wish you wouldn’t. And I can guarantee she’ll get an earful. Ol’ Dick Tracy is my uncle.”

Sunrise County looks out for its own, even the fucking retards. Besides, the woman couldn’t have done this. That blood looked too fresh.

Us versus Them. She didn’t need to add even a single drop to her Them-ness quotient. And if the woman actually was retarded, double-ringing the jerky might have been an honest mistake. “If you think that earful is going to work, I’ll let it drop.”

He nodded thanks. “Look, I’d like you to think hard about any enemies you’ve made, anyone at all with serious reason to hate or fear you.” He grimaced. “That scene inside, those words, they don’t make sense to me. Sunrise County doesn’t have much racial hate. Not that we’re saints, don’t get me wrong, but we just don’t have enough yellow or brown or black people around for most folks to even think about race at all. Usually takes contact and some kind of fear to build up a serious level of hate.”

Yeah, and the Naskeags count as honorary whites for this. ’Cause they’ve got Power.

She thought for a minute. “I’m running a study on bald eagles. There’s a new federal law, Endangered Species Act. Some people see that as Washington stomping in and throwing its weight around. I’ve had arguments with Rick Bouchard about Native Americans and eagle feathers. You know him, the game warden?”

She paused and the deputy nodded. “But that isn’t personal, you know? Not something I’ve done? I work for the state, not Washington. Really, all I do is wander around on Fish and Wildlife time, counting birds. I spend most days alone freezing in a blind out on some empty tidal flat or island, counting birds through the binoculars or spotting scope. I don’t know more than five or ten people in the entire county.”

He sighed. “You’re right, that doesn’t sound like hate or fear material.” Then he took another deep breath. “One question, I know it’s ugly as hell. I hope you won’t be too offended. But it might help us narrow down suspects. That note. Ethnic differences, and who’d be likely to know about them. The way they killed your dog. Do Vietnamese actually eat dog?”

Her stomach surged against the calming of her cigarette. Lucky she’d already puked everything she had. Twice. She sat for a minute, breathing carefully and fighting down the chills.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to Vietnam.”