Blaze of Glory

The young doctor scribbled the prescription; he had a beard and his pen scraped loudly in the small room where Dolores Johnson waited with her husband, Herb. Herb sat in his undershorts on the examining table. Clearly he could put his clothes back on now, Dolores observed; under the fluorescent light he looked white and sagging and chilly. Oddly she thought of “Caves of Mystery” (or was it “Mystery Caves”) in South Dakota, a tourist attraction where she and Herb had stopped on their honeymoon more than forty years ago—the pale, humped, stalagmites in cold, harshly lit stone rooms. “Digoxin, Herb,” the doctor said, ripping the prescription sheet from its pad and spinning on his chair toward Herb. “I see you’ve taken it before, right?”

Herb glanced at Dolores, then turned away to reach for his pants.

Dr. Field paused on his rolling chair. He wore blue jeans and tennis shoes, had a rumpled look straight out of those evening medical dramas on television. Herb’s regular doctor had retired, and while Dolores tried hard to be charitable toward the young these days, she was fairly certain Dr. Field did not measure up. His gaze skipped from Herb to his chart. “How old are you again, Herb?”

“Seventy-one,” Herb muttered, zipping, then reaching for his shirt.

“I presume you’ve had a good sex life?”

Herb paused with one arm in his shirt, one arm out. Dolores looked quickly away, toward the wall, to the bright red-and-yellow poster of the human heart—its valves and ventricles, its chambers and arteries; the artist had added little road signs such as “Free Direction” and “One Way” and “Detour—Under Repair.”

“You could say that,” Herb answered gruffly. Clothes rustled.

Dolores glanced back to find Herb angrily misbuttoning his shirt.

The doctor continued. “What I mean, Herb, is that the side effects—including impotency—are why some men don’t like digoxin.”

Herb refused to look at him as he fumbled with shirt buttons.

There was silence in the room. “Does that include you, Herb?” the doctor asked. He glanced at his wristwatch again. “Have you had problems getting an erection?”

Herb muttered something, jerked at his shirt, and began to redo the buttons.

The doctor turned to Dolores, who blushed scarlet and shook her head no. Herb looked up to glare at her this time.

“That tells me that you probably didn’t complete the last prescription,” the doctor said, “which is why you’re having arrhythmias again, Herb.”

Herb reached past the doctor for his socks and shoes.

The doctor drummed his fingers once. “Think of it this way, Herb,” he said, standing, holding out the prescription, speaking in that overly familiar, first-name, too-loud manner which someone, somewhere was teaching young doctors nowadays. “You’ve got two choices: either your pecker or your ticker.”

Dolores, holding the prescription (she had been the one to reach for it), stood in the hallway while Herb finished dressing. She was looking for the young doctor, intent on giving him a piece of her mind, but he was already in another examining room greeting someone loudly.

Dolores refocused herself, a skill that Herb did not have. “Are you all right in there?”

“I can still dress myself,” Herb growled behind the door.

There was some rustling, the clink of a belt buckle. Then silence for a long time. She thought of the heart poster; she guessed he was looking at it. Then shoes clunked and then Herb opened the door. He was fully dressed now, in his red Pendleton wool shirt and his town pants, a leather belt tucking up his girth; there he was a man with pale blue eyes and a full head of platinum hair, someone she would still choose.

His eyes lightened briefly at her look, then lowered their gaze to her hands. To the prescription. He reached for it. “I’ve still got some pills left,” he said with false brusqueness. “I’ll get this refilled next week sometime.”

“The doctor was right: you haven’t been taking them.”

Herb shrugged. For a long moment they held the little square of paper between them. In his blue pupils she saw a flicker, the tiniest gray shadow of fear. She let go.

And on Monday she let go of her job.

Gave notice.

Retired.

For twenty-seven years Dolores had been head clerk at the local electric co-op, but a recent Reader’s Digest article titled “The Golden Age of Travel” and now a flare-up of Herb’s arrhythmia convinced her it was time to go. “Retired” was a word she had always reserved for really old people—shuffleboard players, canasta types, corn-kernel bingo enthusiasts—yet Dolores herself, a straight, trim woman with lightly tinted brown hair was indisputably sixty-four, and Herb already seventy-one. As well, Herb had a brother in southern California, and Dolores a sister in Florida, both of whose children they had seen grow up only in Christmas snapshots. That plus the discounts for AARP members—as high as 20 percent—all were highlighted in the same article, which ended: “What are you waiting for?”

The days surrounding her departure from the office (she still couldn’t call it “retirement”) buzzed with energy. The reception, the stream of cards and letters, the solicitations to join Garden Club and Women Aglow (both of which she put off for now), the calls from her sister—it was almost too much. Even Herb seemed livelier, though he still muttered about the young doctor with the beard.

On the first Monday of her new life Dolores laid out the old Rand McNally on the kitchen table. It was important to be decisive. To make plans. She turned first to the United States map and slowly penciled a route toward California, then across to Texas. Herb said nothing.

As she worked Herb paced back and forth behind her, rattling the nutcracker and bowl, comparing window thermometer readings. Finally he said, testily, “Those maps are twenty years old. The roads have changed completely. You can’t plan a trip with old maps.”

Dolores got up and drove downtown. She brought home a bright, hefty twenty-dollar road atlas. Herb, as it turned out, was substantially correct about new roads, but his smugness served to soften his resolve on another, coincidental matter. “There’s an ad in the paper,” Dolores said, holding up a new Herald. “Clean used 18-foot Winnebago, one owner,” she read.

A week later, thanks to Dolores’s co-op profit-sharing check, the motor home was theirs. The Winnebago was part of an estate sale; the son and executor, a man balding already in his forties, came by with the keys. “At least my folks had one good trip,” he said gravely. He held the keys out to Herb.

“Was there a spare set?” Herb asked.

The following four weeks Herb spent servicing, fine-tuning the motor home. Tires, battery, thermostat, brake lines—he left no mechanical part unworried. He insisted they sleep in it at least once before they left, which they did. The bedroom was cramped, with a low ceiling, but the mattress passable. “It feels like camping. Without the tent,” Herb said. Luckily deer season came along and sent him to the woods, which allowed Dolores to finish packing the motor home.

Finally, on November 12, they left Lake Center at 6:45 in the morning with the temperature at 19 degrees and 11,041 miles on the odometer. Herb sat strapped in the rider’s seat, exhausted from hunting, his cheeks windburned, his eyes open wide. He waved to Lake Center cars he recognized, which included nearly all of them; several drivers tooted their horns in a salute. “People honked their horns when the Titanic left Southampton, too,” Herb joked.

“Yes dear,” Dolores murmured; she concentrated on her driving.

They passed the lake itself, the community college, and, finally, the city limits sign. A thrill shivered through Dolores and she leaned forward in the seat. Ahead on the open road the day was November gray, and Herb drifted off to sleep almost immediately. Dolores examined everything that passed: a wooly cluster of damp and steaming cattle; a green checkerboard Christmas tree plantation; a single arched curl of snow that drooped from the power line; a gleaming crow along the shoulder picking at a dead deer. She drove, mile after mile, with a slowly increasing assurance, rising excitement, something akin to joy. At the Minnesota–South Dakota border the skies lightened and the sun suddenly blossomed in a brilliant, frosty corona. “Look!” she cried out to Herb, “look!”

Herb jerked awake and flung up an imaginary rifle. “Where?” he shouted.

After Herb was fully awake he began to worry about home. About the furnace. About the water pipes. About the bird feeder. He was certain the Bartlett boy would not put out thistle seed and suet; that all the birds that whistled and chirped in his yard would go across the street to Walter Anderson’s feeder.

“They’ve been coming for years to our yard,” Dolores said. “And Joey Bartlett is an A student.”

“As don’t mean what they used to,” Herb said.

With Dolores driving they rolled on. Herb took a turn at the wheel that afternoon, but Dolores found it hard to relax; his driving had become less certain the last year, and today the motor home tended to ride the center line. What if? But she did not let herself think pessimistic thoughts. Rather, she consulted the map and calculated miles, hours, and driving time so that her shift would take them through Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the first major city on their route.

“Say,” Herb said, swinging his gaze to a billboard. “Mystery Caverns. Didn’t we visit those on our honeymoon?”

The billboard was faded but still stood straightly.

“Yes, we did,” she said.

Herb squinted. “Closed for the winter,” he read. Then he turned to look at her. “Too bad.” She smiled, touched his arm.

Dolores kept the motor home rolling south and west. Herb was a retired highway engineer, and he provided state-by-state analyses of the road conditions: the seams in the asphalt, the pothole ratio per mile, the general layout of curves and overpasses. Dolores drove.

Through Nebraska, so large it ought to have been divided into two states, East Nebraska and West Nebraska.

Through Colorado and the bright, sharp eastern edge of the Rockies.

Through Utah, which had surprising natural beauty (Dolores had always thought it a desert state).

Through Nevada and its pale purple mineral hills, its bright casino oases.

Through frightening Donner Pass, and down into California.

They stayed a short week with Herb’s brother in San Bernadino in an overly developed tract with identical ramblers and rock and cacti lawns. Barry was an aerospace engineer, or so they had been told via Muffy’s Christmas letter every year. In truth Barry was swing-shift foreman at a tool-and-die plant that did occasional work for Boeing. This was let slip by Muffy, who talked incessantly, as if someone switched her on in the morning and left her on all day. That, plus their two Schnauzers which nipped at Herb’s ankles whenever he passed, kept Herb and Dolores in their motor home for longer and longer periods each day. To Dolores, Barry and Herb appeared to be from two different families—two different countries, even. The brothers spent their afternoons playing gin rummy, slapping down their cards, venturing conversational gambits such as, “How you can stand those winters in Minnesota is beyond me.”

“Me, I couldn’t take not having a lawn. A real lawn, with grass.”

A full week sooner than planned, Herb and Dolores were back on the road. “Well, that’s over with,” Herb said, even as they were waving good-bye to Barry and Muffy. Dolores felt her eyes well up, but refocused herself to find their way out the maze of cul-de-sacs and curving streets.

An hour later, heading east on Interstate 10 toward Palm Springs, they were as talkative as two escaped parakeets.

Only once did Herb look over his shoulder and mutter, “Aerospace engineer.”

“Help me with the map, dear.”

Heading to Arizona and beyond, they took secondary highways and stopped at every tourist trap. Dolores bought small turquoise jewelry items and salt and pepper shakers; Herb a silver belt buckle and an agate string tie. They turned in wherever they wished for an afternoon nap, and slept easily as 18-wheelers rumbled past. One day they covered only eighty-two miles. Often they did not know, even by midday, where they would park their RV that evening, where they would sleep that night. Arriving after dark on the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and following notes taken from an uncertain AARP 800-operator, Dolores finally saw the sign for Fresh Aire RV Park. She checked her jottings; it was supposed to be Bel Aire or perhaps Mel’s Aire, but Fresh Aire, set well off the highway and ringed by a hedge and tall wooden fence, looked quiet, orderly, and private. The man at the check-in booth, an older, very tanned fellow, was not wearing a shirt, which Dolores thought slightly odd, but then again this was not Minnesota. “You folks down here for some sunshine?” he said cheerfully.

“Yes, I guess we are,” she said pleasantly. After getting a site map, she rolled the motor home inside the gate, found their spot, and parked.

In the morning Herb was first to awaken and crack the shade.

Dolores dozed.

“We’re dead,” Herb said.

“What’s that?” she mumbled. There was a long silence, during which she probably fell back asleep.

“We crashed the motor home somewhere and we’re dead.”

Dolores sat up with a start; she peered out the window. A regular RV park, yes, with rows of campers and some nice trees and central commons area with showers and small grocery store, people here and there chatting and walking their dogs, nothing out of the ordinary. Except that the people were naked.

Naked.

Buck naked. Jay naked. AARP naked. A whole campground of white-haired naked people.

“I kept looking for wings,” Herb would say later—but at the moment he and Dolores both shrank lower in the window.

“Welcome, neighbor!” a round-bellied man from next door called out to them.

Herb narrowed the shade. “Good morning,” he croaked.

The man’s wife appeared, a sturdy, very tanned woman wearing only reading glasses on a neck chain. Herb swallowed; his Adam’s apple squeaked. “Heard you come in late,” the woman said pleasantly, “coffee’s on over here.” With that the two of them began to set up folding chairs and a table no more than ten feet away. Their RV plates read Indiana.

“We might sleep a little longer,” Dolores managed to say.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the woman added cheerfully, and settled into a sunny chair.

Herb and Dolores retreated to the center of the motor home. They stared at each other. “What are we going to do?” Dolores whispered.

Herb stroked his jaw. Looked out once again. They did nothing at all for several minutes. Every once in a while one of them would peek out the window again to make sure they weren’t dreaming. Or dead.

It was Herb, finally, who took charge. He looked straight at Dolores. “Honey,” he said, “I believe we’re in Rome.”

The first cup of coffee was a bit tricky, but the couple from Indiana, Ray and Arlene Davis, were the nicest, most normal folks one could hope to meet. The four of them sat in a half-circle of lawn chairs facing into the sunlight.

“Freshen that up for you?” Ray said to Herb, bringing around the thermos.

“Sure,” Herb said; he sneaked a glance at Dolores.

“Just a splash,” Dolores murmured, keeping her eyes on the cup as Ray stood before her and poured. She noticed that the Davises had draped bath towels over their lawn chairs before sitting down; she wished she had thought of that. After an hour, the plastic webbing of her own chair felt like a waffle iron across her bare butt, yet she decided against getting up and moving around. Shifting about she managed to sit there naked in the southern sunlight with complete strangers and talk about children and relatives and the open road and car accidents they had witnessed and interesting wildlife they had seen until Arlene began to lay out four paper plates for lunch.

“Let me help,” Dolores said, hopping up. She had forgotten she was naked but the lawn chair had not: it stuck to her. It hung on her.

Herb laughed and kept laughing.

“Let me get that!” Ray Davis said gallantly, and hopped up to peel off the chair.

“Why thank you, Ray,” Dolores said. She was certain she was blushing on unknown areas of her body, but she also threw an evil eye at Herb, whose smile faded.

“Now how can I help?” Dolores said, pressing quickly ahead, assisting Arlene with the picnic table, bringing pickles and fruit from their own refrigerator. In the fish-eye mirror of their Winnebago she caught sight of herself, a white, round woman with a red plaid butt. Well, red plaid her butt might be but round she was not. In fact she was in better trim than Arlene Davis or most any other woman she had seen so far at Fresh Aire—and she was certain that Herb and Ray Davis, too, were aware of that fact. She ignored the mirror and went right to the picnic table and stood there in full daylight and made egg salad sandwiches.

By midday both Herb and Dolores had loosened up enough to stroll, by themselves, into the commons area. Rubber thongs slapped on the shuffleboard court, and horseshoes clanged on steel posts. “I used to throw some good iron,” Herb said, and made a ringer on his first toss. The matter of Herb’s afternoon nap never came up; there was nude swimming in the little pool, nude cribbage in the shade, and nude potluck supper.

That evening, back at their little Winnebago, Herb opened the door. Heat washed over them.

“Whoa!” Herb said, leaning away from the blast. “We forgot to open the windows.”

“But it’s a dry heat,” Dolores said dutifully.

They went inside nonetheless and sat down heavily and with simultaneous sighs. Herb mopped his forehead. Sweat trickled on both of them. They stared at each other. “Too hot for pajamas tonight,” Herb said.

Dolores found two towels and they mopped themselves. Afterward they sat there in silence again. Dolores looked down at herself. “Odd,” she said, glancing about the motor home. “All day, I’ve paraded around naked.”

Herb watched her.

“But now that I’m here, inside, I feel like I ought to have clothes on.”

Herb’s eyes moved down over her body.

“Do you know what I mean?” she asked.

Herb swallowed. “Come over here.”

She let her eyes move over his body. His shoulders carried pink epaulets of sunburn.

“Here,” he said, pointing to their mattress.

She smiled.

“And don’t be slow about it,” he added, his voice suddenly throaty.

Dolores sat there a few seconds longer, living in, inhabiting the large, shimmering space of this moment.

Later Dolores worried that the motor home’s clever little pullout bed would not hold up; that it was not designed for large-framed midwesterners; that the entire vehicle might turn over. She thought of a bumper sticker she had seen: “If this RV’s rockin’, don’t bother knockin’.” She held on and they did things that night that they had never done—things that were likely illegal in Minnesota—but she was not about to complain, not that whole long, hot southwestern night.

In the morning they slept very late. It was 11:30 before Dolores awoke. The window shades were gray, which meant an overcast day; a shiver of disappointment rippled through Dolores, that, or perhaps the chill of sunburn. She felt flushed and slightly achy, but got up, found warm clothes, and made coffee. She left the shades drawn as she fixed herself; made up her hair, her face. She wondered what the Davises did on a cool cloudy day; if they would seem like the same people.

Herb woke up at the gurgle of the percolator. He rolled over and let the shade rattle up. There was silence for a long awhile.

“What is it?” Dolores said, holding a hand mirror to her face. Behind her she saw him staring out their window. She turned, followed his gaze. The space where the Davises’ RV had sat was empty. A blank empty space. All that remained was a smudged, dusty oil ring on a bed of crushed gravel.

They left Fresh Aire in the early afternoon. Both were silent. Herb went to sleep just after they entered the freeway. Dolores drove north to Albuquerque, then east again toward the Texas panhandle. A cold, east wind buffeted the Winnebago and she had to fight the wheel all the way. Tumbleweeds bounded and once a scrawny coyote darted right across in front of her; she did not brake. Later in the day, the wind swung round to the northwest, which allowed her to relax a bit. Herb stirred and put on some coffee. They slept that night behind a gas station called Cactus Pete’s, in Tucumcari.

In the morning her hands were stiff and ached terribly, so Herb took the wheel. The freeway to Amarillo was straight and empty. “Why don’t you go back and have a snooze?” Herb said.

“You’re sure?” she asked. The bed was still warm and she fell asleep almost instantly.

Some time later she awoke to silence. They were parked. She imagined they were at a rest stop or a filling station, but a semi-trailer blasted past just outside the tin walls. She scrambled upright and went up front. Herb sat at the wheel, staring ahead. He was ashen and sweaty; his forehead glistened.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

He waved her off. “Not sure,” he whispered. “I think maybe I have to lie down.” She held her hand to his forehead: damp and clammy. She slid two fingers to his neck and felt his heartbeat; it surged and fell, surged and fell and surged like an engine racing.

“Here,” she said, getting his pills, getting water.

He took them without complaint.

She helped him back to the bunk. “Just lie there,” she said. “I’m going to drive on to . . .” She realized she did not know where they were.

“Amarillo” Herb said. “It’s about thirty miles. I thought I could make it.”

Dolores pushed the Winnebago to the limit, eighty miles an hour, and followed the blue, universal hospital signs to St. Anthony’s. The emergency attendants were black men wearing white latex gloves and light blue jumpsuits and they knew what to do. Within a minute Herb was hooked up to oxygen and a monitor. It soon beeped fairly steadily; his sweatiness subsided.

Soon enough a doctor, a sturdy middle-aged black woman, came and listened to his heart with a stethoscope. She looked away, that faraway gaze that all doctors got when they listened, when they moved that cold steel button across the skin.

“Have you had any heart trouble before?” she asked at last, yanking the stethoscope from her ears. The doctor had a deep drawl.

“Yes he has,” Dolores said. She gave a brief history of Herb’s condition, his arrhythmia.

The doctor nodded once or twice. “Or maybe it’s just too hot down here for a Minnesotan,” she said, adjusting his blankets.

Herb managed a grin.

“I’m going to prescribe some pills to steady your heartbeat,” she said, “and we’re going to keep you overnight for observation. See how you’re looking tomorrow, okay?”

Dolores slept that night on a cot in Herb’s room. Twice she was awakened by a helicopter’s whop-whop-whop low overhead as it settled onto the brightly lit roof of the hospital. In the morning Herb, pale but lively, ate a full breakfast, and soon the doctor came by on rounds; Herb liked her, and joked that she should consider coming up to Minnesota to practice there.

“Lord save me from snow and ice!” she said. After a lengthy listen to Herb’s heart, she consulted with Dolores—and then Herb was free to go.

An attendant wheeled Herb out the door and made sure they were safely in the motor home, where Dolores took the driver’s seat. Once they were buckled in, she turned to him.

“Florida is not all that far,” Herb ventured. He was very pale.

“Next trip, I believe,” Dolores said, and started the engine.

With Herb navigating, she drove the Winnebago out of Amarillo, then east on Interstate 40 to big I-35 north. There she balled the jack (as Herb would say) up through Wichita, Kansas City, and beyond, stopping only for gas, snacks, and the occasional catnap. Herb’s color returned as the landscape paled. They saw snow in northern Kansas, a light skift on the fields that gradually deepened, whitened, as they reached Iowa’s southern border; however, the roads remained clear, the sun shone, and the whiteness was reassuring. Herb’s improved complexion was not an illusion, and, gradually, Dolores began to slow their pace a bit. They stopped a full hour for lunch. They even took a short detour to the Amana Colonies, where Herb’s appetite reclaimed itself in a large plate of German sauerkraut and potatoes. But Dolores watched him closely, and kept her eye on the weather, the road conditions.

They arrived safely back in Lake Center, Minnesota, 5,893 miles behind them, on January third at 3:32 PM. The temperature on the bank clock read two below zero. There was more snow here, tall banks cut squarely by the plow, and their street looked narrower, their house so small under winter’s heavy quilt. At the curb, she switched off the engine and let out a long breath.

“Well,” Herb said, stepping down from the motor home, flexing his legs, “that’s over with.” It was supposed to be a joke.

Dolores stared at him. An enormous tiredness fell down her bones, a heavy curtain dropping, and she felt a burning in her eyes.

“You’d better check on the furnace and your bird feeder,” she said. As the door closed behind him, she remained there, behind the wheel, fingers clenched on its big hoop.

For the next week Herb rested on the couch and took his pills at noon. Dolores laid them out alongside his plate, had a water glass ready. From the side of her vision she watched him, made sure he swallowed. Afterward Dolores kept up a cheerful chatter while Herb ate his lunch with his head down.

In the second week home Herb’s pulse was just fine and he was back to form. “There are less birds every year,” he said, coming from the feeder. Dolores suggested he clean up the garage after November’s deer season; that he drive his deer hide downtown and exchange it for gloves—or donate it for Deer Habitat Improvement—one or the other. The hide had hung there, draped over a rafter, gray and stiff, day after day since early November. She also realized that they had this conversation about deer hides every January.

Upon his return, which seemed altogether too quick, Herb was indignant. “Two dollars!” he said, letting his coat drop in the hallway, “now for a pair of gloves they want the hide plus two dollars.”

“But you got rid of the hide, yes?”

“No,” Herb said. “I’m not about to give it away.”

Dolores slapped her magazine rather sharply onto the coffee table. She went to the kitchen and began to wipe down the sink that was already shiny; she looked out the kitchen window to the white yard. To the motor home.

Herb stared out the back window to his bird feeder. “The purple finches should have been here by now. They probably aren’t coming this year.”

Dolores joined a club. Garden Club, she imagined, was about gardening, which she enjoyed. For her first visit she bought along a Canadian magazine that had a most interesting article about cold climate roses.

But the group of women gardeners, whose average age was at least eighty, was dressed in scarves and good sweaters and were intent on cookies—plate after plate of them—along with strong black coffee. Then came sing-along songs on the player piano, the ancient scrolls for which included Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” with his lines about “darkies pining all day . . .” The women sang loudly and by heart; Dolores mouthed the chorus.

Finally came the centerpiece of this meeting: initiation of a new member. There was considerable disagreement about the process.

“Well I remember my initiation,” one of the oldest members said.

“That was forty years ago.”

“Thirty-five. I remember: Eisenhower was president. I still have that button somewhere, ‘I Like Ike.’”

“I voted for Stephenson, myself.”

Dolores glanced at the clock. Finally things proceeded. Giggling, giddy from black coffee and sugar, the white-haired ladies blindfolded Dolores for the first test, which consisted of reaching into a paper bag, removing a piece of fruit, and identifying it by shape alone.

Dolores purposely mistook a grapefruit for an orange, but honestly mistook an avocado for a large lemon. The game was actually more difficult than she imagined. When, groping, she removed a banana, all the old ladies laughed hysterically.

After the fruit test, which she “barely passed,” her final task was to tell a secret.

“A secret?” Dolores said.

The ladies of the club nodded as one. Their eyes brightened.

“A secret.” Dolores was buying time.

The ladies waited, smiling.

“An old secret or a new one?”

“Your choice.”

Deciding with the bookkeeper’s part of her mind that a new secret was less costly than an old one, Dolores grasped onto the first thing—something away from Lake Center, it had to be, she decided on the fly—that came to mind. “On our trip, down in Arizona, near Las Cruces, late at night Herb and I pulled into this overnight RV campground.”

“And?”

“Well, as it turns out—and we didn’t know this—it was a nudist colony.”

There was silence.

Emma opened her eyes fully. “So did you stay?”

“Oh dear, no,” Dolores said, and faked a laugh.

“A nudist colony!” the women murmured. “What’s the world coming to?”

On her way home (now a full-fledged member of the Garden Club), Dolores felt sad and false. The Pontiac was a nice car, but she longed for the motor home—for the big steering wheel in her hands; for the feel of her own little kitchen and living room tagging along no matter where she drove; for the curtained, cramped bedroom that held the day’s heat—sunlight above, engine warmth below. For the sound, hour after hour, of the road unreeling behind.

She pulled into her own driveway. The motor home sat there, its windows frosted over, like a tin igloo. She remained in the Pontiac long minutes with the engine idling, staring. She looked down, to her hands on the wheel; finally she switched off the engine.

Inside the house, Herb was napping on the couch, on his back, his hands folded across his chest. From the light of the TV he looked blue. Quickly Dolores crossed the living room and changed channels. Herb snorted and woke up.

“How was your club?” he mumbled.

“Stupid,” she said, turning away.

“That’s good,” he murmured, and let his eyes drift shut again.

In the kitchen she rattled her pan sharply as she began to peel potatoes, then rattled it again. She wanted to make noise. A lot of noise. She wanted to wake Herb up—wake up everybody and everything.

This house.

The Garden Club.

This whole damn town.

Potato peelings flew from her knife like mayflies hatching; they stuck to the sides of the sink, to her wrists, to the toaster. Wake them all up, shake their houses like an earthquake, a tornado, chase them outside—into the cold—naked!

“Ow!” She bit her lip and held her finger as blood oozed. She heard herself breathing—short shallows breaths—as she ran cold water on the little flap of skin. She had to sit down. Later, after drying the cut with a paper towel, she rummaged for a Band-Aid, then made herself sit down again. All the sweets and coffee—that’s what made her so edgy. She forced herself to remain seated. To get a grip.

Herb continued to doze, once again on his back, once again snoring loudly. She sat there, watching him. When was, she wondered, the last time they had made love?

Of course she knew the answer: it was at Fresh Aire RV park in New Mexico.

Then came a darker thought.

Was that the last time? Was that part of their lives over?

She stared out the window. Herb sat up with a start.

“What is it?” Dolores said quickly.

“I must have been dreaming,” Herb said. He stared at the blank TV, then at her.

“About what?” She went over and stood beside him.

“I don’t know,” Herb said. His voice sounded far away.

Later, during supper, he said suddenly, “I remember.”

“Remember what?” Dolores said abstractedly. She was the silent one this evening.

“My dream.”

She looked up at him.

“It was about finches. The feeder, the whole yard was purple with them.”

Dolores began to weep.

A early-January thaw saved her. What little snow there was settled and hardened, making for good walking, which she did for at least an hour every day. More importantly, cars came and went easily on the lake that, from an earlier cold snap, still wore thirty inches of ice; and Herb decided to put out his spear house.

Dolores was most happy to help him load the little shack onto his trailer. She had long held the opinion that ice houses saved many a midwestern marriage: the husband was out of the house all day; when he came home he was sufficiently tired as to doze in his recliner through the evening (though Dolores had never understood how one could be exhausted from sitting and staring for six hours through a square, green hole in the ice); and the meals of fresh pike were always a treat (though more so in the earlier part of winter than later, when they became too much of a good thing).

Herb was reenergized. He got up early, ate a good breakfast, was off by nine o’clock. “Off to the office,” he said every morning, holding up his battered box full of pike decoys as if it were a briefcase. He always chuckled at that joke.

She did not worry about him driving. On the lake there were no stoplights, no center lines.

When Herb came home with his first fish, a fine, shiny, seven-pound pike, Dolores made it a special occasion. She baked the fish whole, along with potatoes and carrots, and invited to dinner the Rybecks, a slightly younger couple who worked at the college; Herb brought out the trip slides of California, Arizona, New Mexico. Bill Rybeck drifted off during the second tray of photos; his wife, Helen, kept nudging him, though she, too, began to cant in her chair. Dolores realized that the Rybecks had worked eight hours that day; that they had to get up in the morning and do it again. That it was nearly midnight.

Later, in bed, Dolores snuggled against Herb. From the coffee, from the entertaining, she was not sleepy at all. Herb let his arm fall across her chest. After awhile, she put her hand over his, moved it to the fuller part of her breast.

“Well!” Herb said, feeling her nipple stiffen under his fingers.

She made a small humming sound.

They fooled around for a long time. An hour. More. With Herb, nothing happened; she was breathing hard with desire.

“Sonofabitch,” he said, and sat up.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “We can just snuggle.”

He swore again, flung his pillow across the room, and left to the living room couch where he slept that night.

After he had gone Dolores lay there huddled in the dark. She kept seeing the pillow, flying, like some heavy, white, wingless bird.

In the morning Herb was already gone to his fish house before Dolores awoke. She had heard him up and around, but thought it was a bathroom call. A bread sack and the luncheon meat pak and the mayo jar sat open on the counter; the empty coffee pot was still warm.

Mid-morning she thought of visiting him on the lake, but decided against it. Women did not do that. She had not been in his spear house since the first winter of their marriage. At dusk, 5:00 PM, he came home with another fish. “Here,” he said, holding it out to her before she could speak.

“Well! Good luck or good aim?” she said brightly. She took the fish. It smelled and flopped once.

“Not as big as the last one,” Herb said, stowing his gear.

“But still a keeper.”

Herb nodded.

“Like you,” she added, staring straight at him.

Herb looked at her, then lowered his gaze and took back the pike. “Hand me my knife,” he said gruffly, “I’ll take it in the garage and gut it.”

That night Herb slept with her in the big bed, but there was no snuggling. He seemed to make it a point to drift off immediately. She lay a long time listening to his snoring. In the morning he was up before her, though she saw him off to his fish house.

“Do you have enough lunch? Enough coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Your pills?” she said softly.

“Sure,” he said, turning away.

After he was gone she noticed that the bottle of Lanoxin was still there. But some other things were missing.

A thick Christmas candle that had sat on the bookcase. One of her dining room chairs.

At suppertime Herb clumped onto the garage steps.

“Where is my good chair?” Dolores said first thing. “From the dining room?” She had practiced. She kept her voice even, nonaccusatory.

“The one in my fish house gives me backaches,” Herb said.

“They’re our good kitchen chairs.”

“What are we saving them for?” he said sharply, matching her stare, her tone of voice. “Tell me that.”

Dolores turned away.

And the next day, at noon, when she went to turn on the portable radio to catch the news, there was no radio.

She swore, words she had never used. Words she did not know she knew. Then she walked downtown and bought a radio, a small General Electric nearly identical to the one missing from the kitchen counter. She put it in the same spot, behind the toaster and the coffee pot. That night, when Herb came home, she was friendly enough. Supper moved along. During it Dolores said, “Isn’t there a high school hockey game tonight?”

“I don’t think so,” Herb said, his eyes flickering her way.

“Why don’t I check the radio?” She rose and reached behind the toaster and turned the radio on high volume. She took some time, rolling the dial, the various stations blurting out parts of songs and commercials in ear-rending squawks. “I guess not,” she said finally and turned off the radio. They finished supper in silence.

This went on.

The silence.

The things going missing from the house.

Smaller and smaller things: a towel, her eggbeater, some odds and ends of dishes, nail clippers. She stopped mentioning them, directly or on the sly; it always made for a long, tense evening. And every morning, Herb was up early and gone.

Dolores began to take longer walks. The light was better now, the end-of-January sun as bright as an egg yolk suspended in white vinegar, and she walked two hours every day. Her usual route was uptown. She did not stop at the cafés for coffee and gossip like other retirees, but went beyond, to the community college, where she stopped in the library and browsed for an hour. Afterward she had a hot chocolate at the student union, then headed back, this time a different, even longer route. She took the curving No. 29, or Lake Road.

Far out on the ice were little villages of ice houses clustered tightly above the sandbars. These were the walleye fishermen whose cars and snowmobiles migrated to the lake about the same time every day in the late afternoon. Walleyes were a schooling fish and their fishermen a sociable group. They drove a common, plowed road to the sandbar; they were not above painting their houses in bright stripes, adding small picture windows or planting cast-off Christmas trees by the door for an amusing, yard-like effect. Walleye fishermen did not mind daylight or loud radios or drop-in guests or close quarters as long as everyone was having some luck and no one was having too much of it.

The spear houses stood at least one hundred paces from each other—it was an understood distance—and closer to shore along the reedbeds. They stretched down the lake as regular and solitary as the footsteps of a passing wolf. As a class, spear houses were smaller, darker, more pointed—tall enough for a man to stand up in occasionally to stretch his legs. Owners of spear houses came and went on separate paths from the landing. Some arrived and departed at intermittent hours, guessing, playing the odds; others, like Herb, waited all day, every day, for a big northern pike to drift in from the weedbeds in search of perch and take a closer look at the bright wooden decoy fish hung in the hole.

Decoys were the only bright spots in spear house decor. Dolores had spent one interminable afternoon in Herb’s spear house during the first winter of their marriage. Herb’s decoys were variously red and white, yellow and white, silvery, green and yellow, all carved a hand’s length long with a lead belly and shiny tin fins. She wondered if his decoys were still bright. Her memories of the spear house were mainly of darkness broken only by the luminescent ice and the green water, a hot dim space sealed against daylight even a ray of which could frighten off the pike. When a big fish was taken, it was spirited home in a gunny sack, or strapped on a sled and overlaid with gear lest someone see the catch and move right next door.

Today Dolores had her binoculars. She sighted them on Herb’s house. A thin dark smudge wafted from the stovepipe. He had a portable kerosene heater; wood heat was too hot, too cold, too up-and-down, he had told her more than once. She kept her binoculars trained on the house for several minutes, until her eyes began to water and her lashes freeze inside the rubber cups. She believed that by concentrating her vision on his hut she could will Herb to get up, step outside, look around—at the sky, at the weather, at something. That he would emerge into daylight not knowing the sudden nature of his restlessness.

She wished, in passing fancy, that he had a telephone in his house; there were portable phones nowadays, the cellular kind, and she could call him. They could talk. They could say all the things that went unsaid in their living room during the evenings, in their bedroom at night. Maybe that’s what they needed, a cell phone.

But Herb did not come out. Nothing, no one moved. On the flat, bright, curving lake the tiny houses were dark squares on irregular porcelain. Dolores secured her binoculars, wiped her watering eyes, and walked home.

That night she cried herself to sleep. Herb did not snore. She knew he was awake.

Mid-morning the next day (Herb had left at sunup), as Dolores made the bed and put away linen, she halted. From the closet there was a pillow missing. And the spare woolen blanket as well.

She went to the kitchen where she sat staring out the window at the bird feeder. She watched English sparrows and nuthatches and blue jays come and go. Then, abruptly, she rose and dressed for her walk. She chose only a light jacket and hat, and set out.

A half hour later she paused, puffing, on the road overlooking the lake. Their car, along with several others, sat at the landing. Herb was conservative that way (for which she was grateful); it had been unseasonably warm of late, and there was no reason to take chances driving on the ice.

Her eyes followed the narrow ice path that branched off to his house. Setting her jaw, Dolores walked down to the landing and set out upon the ice. As the shore receded behind, Dolores was surprised at the distance to his fish house. The great white space of the lake was tricky; perspective faded; it was difficult to see well. She kept her eyes downward, on the path, the frozen boot marks. Herb’s boots.

Her own boots crunched one after the other. Slowly Herb’s house grew until she could read his name on its side; see the dark flower of kerosene smoke on its roof; see the narrow, shiny door hinges and padlock clasp. Fifty paces away, the door swung open a crack.

Dolores held up a hand.

The door went shut.

Then, suddenly, it opened again, wider this time, and remained ajar. Herb’s pale, squinting face leaned out.

“Hello!” she called and marched right up to his house.

His eyes widened. “Well!” he said, confused, blinking against the sunlight like a groundhog in March.

“May I come in?”

“Well, sure,” he said. He stood up and something bumped and clattered. “Just let me make some room here.” The door closed and she could hear him in there, for a full minute, rustling and shifting things.

“Ready,” Herb said, swinging open the door full wide.

Dolores ducked her head and eased inside. Herb closed the door behind her. At first she could see only a green square, about a yard wide, framed in white. Slowly the frame deepened, paled, to smooth walls of ice enclosing open water; the water moved, almost imperceptibly, as if breathing. Down several feet on a plumb-straight line hung a battered red-and-white decoy.

They were silent.

Herb reached upward and cranked something. She squinted. Her eggbeater. Or what was left of it. One side, one beater had been removed, and the decoy line secured, in a complex knot, to the remaining beater; now as the line wound itself, the decoy below began, slowly, to move; to turn in a slow circle.

“Pretty slick, eh?” Herb said.

“I guess so!” Dolores said evenly, reminding herself that eggbeaters were not expensive.

They were silent as they watched the little fish follow itself, its phosphorescent image, in continuous, exact circle.

“How did you figure that out?” she inquired, squinting up at the eggbeater.

“In the fish house there’s plenty of time to think.”

She saw him glance her way, then look back down the hole.

At length she said, “Have you seen anything today?”

Herb shook his head sideways. “Slow,” he said. “Very slow.”

Dolores stared down the hole. The arm-deep sides of ice were buffed smooth by the far-off, slow breathing of the lake, the swell and sink of its water, and the translucent rectangle was shot full of tiny, trapped bubbles of air.

“So it’s nice to have a visitor,” Herb said.

Dolores looked to him, then back down the hole. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” he said.

She smiled.

“Hungry?” he said.

“Maybe a little.”

“It’s never too soon for lunch in the fish house,” he said.

And so they ate. Herb divided up his sandwich, shared his coffee; they passed a cup back and forth. As they dined, Dolores paused to hang up her coat, to look around the house. The missing pillow was secured at head level in the corner, the blanket folded neatly nearby.

“Sometimes I lean back and take a snooze,” Herb said. The red Christmas candle, burned down halfway, sat anchored in the other corner. “It takes away the kerosene smell,” Herb offered. By the stove was the small frying pan, along with a bottle of cooking oil and salt and pepper. “Sometimes I get tired of bologna sandwiches, so I jig up perch, clean them and fry them.”

“I thought bologna was your favorite.” She had been making him bologna sandwiches for hunting and fishing for forty years.

“Well, it’s okay,” he began

She laughed. She laughed for a long time.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

They sat there several minutes watching bits of plankton drift through the water. A school of minnows angled past.

“Is it hot in here or is it me?” she said.

“My stove runs to the warm side. Plus it’s a nice day outside.”

Dolores took off her sweater.

“I might join you,” Herb said. He took off his wool shirt, sat there in his white underwear top. He leaned down and made some adjustment to the stove, which only seemed to heighten the heat (she thought of their motor home after that day in New Mexico).

“You got a warm day plus two people in the house,” Herb said, mopping his shining brow. “It makes a difference.”

Dolores checked her watch.

“But there’s plenty of room,” Herb added quickly. “You don’t have to go.”

A yellow-and-green striped perch drifted through the hole.

“Not a good sign,” Herb said. “If there was a big pike around, that perch wouldn’t be here.” He leaned back and relaxed. Shadows played under his chin and cheekbones.

She reached up and turned the eggbeater handle. The heat, gathered near the ceiling, made her squint and lower her face. Back in her chair she unbuttoned the top part of her blouse.

“It is hot,” Herb said.

She fanned herself.

“That damn stove,” Herb said. He fiddled with its thermostat again, then raised his arms and peeled off his underwear top. He leaned back over the hole to take in its chilled air. “I should go back to a wood burner.”

Dolores mopped her brow. “Do you mind?” she said, unbuttoning her blouse all the way.

“Some days I’m down to only my undershorts,” Herb said, chuckling.

Dolores shrugged out of her blouse. Sat there in only her bra. Herb looked at her. In the soft light of the water, the ice, they smiled shyly at one another. Herb’s arms were still strong, his shoulders square. A bead of sweat ran down between Dolores’s breasts.

“I don’t know what to make of that damned stove,” Herb said, looking down, fumbling with it again.

“The heat feels good, actually,” Dolores said, fanning herself. “It’s healthy to sweat once in a while. We should build ourselves a sauna someday.”

Herb stared down the hole again and worked the decoy. “It wouldn’t take that much,” he said. “A sauna. It’d make a nice project.”

“Once a week a good hot sauna,” Dolores said.

“Like the Finns,” Herb added.

“When it’s twenty below outside we could throw off our clothes and bake like a couple of potatoes.”

After a while Herb slowly looked up at her. “You don’t look like a potato,” he said. His gaze fell to her cleavage, her breasts.

She was silent a moment. “Neither do you.”

He turned his gaze back to the water.

The stove continued to whisper its heat.

“Geez,” Herb said, “I’m going to have to get out of these pants.”

Dolores stood up at the same time. Leaning on each other, laughing, she, too, removed her slacks. The floor was cold so they kept their boots on.

“Now we’re talking,” Herb said.

And they did talk, at first haltingly, then with more ease, about things that had gone unsaid for too long.

Herb told of the quiet and the darkness of the fish house, how it allowed him to think about things; how his mind drifted to the past and their lives together; how sometimes it was so quiet that he could hear his own heart beat, and then he wondered, really, just how much time he had left in this world; that if life were a football game, he was probably in the two-minute warning.

Dolores told about feeling lost at home; of having nowhere to go, no office, real or otherwise. Her voice broke at the end.

Herb put his arm around her. She leaned into him for a long while. He was sweaty and slick, a clean, woody odor. They sat there staring down the hole—then looked at each other and suddenly they were kissing.

And more.

Herb pulled at her bra and Dolores took it off all the way. Herb pulled her closer; he nuzzled, kissed her chest. His underwear began to tent up.

“Holy cow!” he murmured, looking down at himself.

Breathing hard, Dolores tugged down his underwear bottoms. With her free arm she flung down the blanket but there was no room to lay down. And no time. They lurched to their feet and pulled each other tight and the little house began to creak and rock with sounds certain to scare away all fish within a city block.

At the end they both cried out—and, on four momentarily week knees, they sagged against the far wall of the little house.

Which tipped.

“My God!” Herb cried in alarm and joy—and they rode the house down together. Decoys clattered, fishing gear flew. The little kerosene stove tipped as well, along with its reservoir of fuel. Suddenly flames licked and crept just inches from bare skin.

“Fire! We gotta get out!” Herb shouted.

With a chair (her good one) he smashed away the thin plywood, broke open the side. Daylight burst upon them like an unending flash bulb, and seconds later they were standing on the ice naked but for their boots.

“Snow! Kick some snow on it!” Herb shouted.

The crusted snow refused to budge in any useful quantity, and huddling against each other, they were forced back from the heat.

“Your house, your decoys! Our clothes!” Dolores cried, as the fire grew.

Herb was silent. He put his arm around her and squinted at the blaze. “Let it go. I’ll make new ones, we’ll get new clothes. Are you all right?”

Dolores checked herself. But for a few scratches she was, and, surprisingly, she was hardly even chilly. Neither of them were. At first Dolores thought they might be in shock.

“Body heat,” Herb said. He managed a shy grin, then looked toward the landing. “But we better make tracks before we do get cold.”

So they headed quickly across the ice to the shore. The sun was shining.

Dolores kept looking to the road, to the landing. No activity, no cars arriving or leaving. So far, so good. Once or twice they looked behind at the narrow column of smoke, at their blaze of glory. The fish house was soon reduced to its bony framework and, even as they watched, caved inward in a shower of sparks and leveled itself with the ice.

“I needed a new fish house,” Herb said. “I’ve been thinking of a better design.”

“Hurry up, now,” Dolores said, eyes on the landing again. “It would be just our luck—”

And, say no more, a pickup pulled down to the landing.

“Elmer Olson,” Herb said.

“You go first,” Dolores said, falling in behind Herb.

“He’s eighty-four years old, got cataracts, and can’t see worth a darn,” Herb said.

“You better hope,” Dolores said.

As they neared the shore, Elmer was on his way out to his own fish house, pulling a little black sled with lunch and spear on a path that took him a few paces parallel to Herb’s and Dolores’ trail.

As they drew even Herb held up his hand in greeting.

Elmer waved once and drew to a stop.

“For God’s sakes keep walking,” Dolores whispered, staying to the far side of Herb.

“Any luck today?” Elmer asked. He smiled across the few paces of ice—then suddenly squinted, blinked his rheumy eyes, and looked closer.

“Slow,” Herb said. “Real slow.”

Elmer’s mouth drifted open.

“But then again it’s been slow all winter,” Herb added.

“Yes, yes it has been,” Elmer murmured.

“Well, good luck to you,” Herb said, moving on.

Elmer shook his head as if to clear it, mumbled something to himself, and continued onward to his house. Once Dolores glanced over her shoulder and saw the old man standing motionless on the ice as if thinking about something.

But by then they had gained the shore. Their car started as it ought, and, more than a little cold but huddling close together under the car’s emergency woolen blanket that all true Minnesotans carried, Herb drove them fast away from the landing, toward home, hot chocolate, and a hot bath. Neither of them looked back.