LITMIR.BIZ

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night they placed third and took home fifty bucks each with the kitty and sidebets. Standing outside in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette, he asked where she usually played and when she said the Casbah, he laughed and made some comment about the high-class part of town. She slowly looked up at the neon-lit stripper winding her leg around a pole that graced the doorway above the Flame. He chuckled again. Said he might drop by the Casbah and shoot a few. Keep in practice for next month’s tourney. But now he had to get home to the wife and kids.

      Cash didn’t think any more about him until he showed up at the Casbah a couple weeks later, cue case in hand. He became a regular there and they became partners at the Flame tournaments. The pool, the beer, the winning—one thing led to another. Right back to Cash’s apartment, in fact, where Cash had asked, “What about your wife and kids?” and Jim had answered, “Don’t worry about it.” So she didn’t.

      She had a lifetime of not worrying about it.

      Tonight his breath moved her neckline hairs, goose bumps popped up along her arms. She shook him off, bent over the table and made a five-ball run. She missed her last pocket call. The guy she was playing hooted, “I knew I’d beat you, girl. Your lucky streak is at an end.”

      He ran his last four balls but couldn’t sink the 8-ball in the side pocket. Cash missed her shot.

      He missed his.

      Only Carl and Ole saw the slight shrug of Cash’s shoulder to Jim, a shrug asking, “What you want me to do?”

      Jim wrapped his arm around her waist and nuzzled her neck again. She brushed him off and bent over the table, shot the 8-ball straight into her pocket, followed immediately by the cue ball.

      “Buy me a Hamm’s, girl, “her opponent crowed. “Rack ’em up.”

      Cash broke down her cue instead, went to the bar and bought her opponent a Hamm’s. She finished her Bud.

      Jim wrapped his arm around her. She tapped Carl and Ole on the shoulder as they walked out. “Drinking free again, huh?” said Carl.

      “Look,” said Ole, pointing at the TV with his bottle. “More of our boys are dead.”

      Jim and Cash stopped to look at the grainy black and white images of Hueys landing in rice paddies. The newscaster finished up with the Viet Nam body count for the day and then images switched to the local news. Cash couldn’t hear the announcer as a loud whoop surrounded the pool table. By the time the noise died down, the newscaster was heading into the nightly weather.

      Cash leaned into Jim to get him moving back out the door. The night had cooled down. Crickets chirped. Frogs down by the Red River, which ran through town just a few blocks over, were calling to other frogs.

      Cash and Jim walked the two blocks to her apartment over the Maytag Appliance store. A makeshift set of wooden stairs crisscrossed the alley side of the building up to the second story. The wooden door opened into a grimy kitchen. A stove plate rested on a cracked linoleum counter. Dirty dishes filled the sink. Moths and mosquitoes batted against the screens of the open windows.

      Cash pulled open the round-top refrigerator and grabbed two longneck Budweisers from the top shelf. She pushed the door shut with her hip and walked into the living room that served double purpose as her bedroom. Dust-covered jeans were thrown over the back of a wooden chair.

      She sat on the end of the bed and took a drink before kicking off her shoes into the corner of the room. Another drink before she stood up, unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, leaving them in a heap at the end of the bed. She walked around to the other end of the bed and sat cross-legged, pillow across her lap, back against the metal headboard, before taking another drink.

      Jim undressed down to his white underwear and crawled into bed between the rumpled sheets. He put an arm around her waist and tried to pull her down to him. She said, “Lemmee finish this.”

      After the last drink, she set the bottle on the floor and lay full length into him.

      Fifteen minutes later, she pulled her tangled hair out from under his back, pushed against his chest and brought herself to a seated position. “Time for you to leave, Farmer Jim.” She lit a cigarette. “Your wife and kids are waiting.”

      Jim groaned and covered his head with a pillow. Cash pulled the pillow off and said, “Come on, get up. I gotta work early.” She went into the kitchen and pulled out another Bud. She took a long drink as she walked back to the bedroom. Half the beer was gone when she set it on the worn end table. She crawled into bed, pulling the covers off Jim and wrapping them around herself. She faced away from him, “Go on now. Lock the door on your way out.” She finished her cigarette, swallowed the last of her beer and was out cold.

      Jim rolled to a sitting position on the edge of the mattress, pulling his socks and jeans on. He fumbled in the dark for his shoes. As he buttoned his shirt, he leaned over Cash and kissed her forehead. She swatted, without waking, as if a mosquito had landed and she was brushing it off.

      He clicked the lock before pulling the door shut behind him.

       Moorhead, the Minnesota side of the Red River

      Cash got up the next morning, a Friday, and walked to the Casbah and retrieved her Ranchero. She drove across the bridge to Moorhead before turning north into farm country on the Minnesota side of the river. Both small cities—Fargo and Moorhead—are married to the Red River which meanders beyond the Canadian border. As Cash drove, the sun came up, warming the morning air, causing mist to rise from the trees lining the river.

      Folks, Cash included, didn’t think anything of putting on a hundred miles in a day’s worth of driving. Everything here was just around the corner. But just around the corner could be thirty miles or more. If a stranger stopped and asked where the Wang farm was, chances are the answer would be similar: just a bit up the road—meaning five or ten miles.

      Farmers got up at 4:30 to eat breakfast before driving in to the Fargo Implement shop to buy tractor parts when the shop opened at 7:30 am. They drove back to the farm, replaced the parts and spent until sundown in the field. Without cleaning up, many would drive the three or four or ten miles into the nearest town for a beer before heading home to shower up, eat the wife’s home-cooked meal, go to bed and start the day over again the next morning at 4:30.

      This time of the morning was Cash’s favorite time to drive. The only other folks out were farmers and farm laborers like herself. She lifted four fingers off the steering wheel in a courtesy wave as she passed them.

      She loved the vast expanse of farmland in either direction. Fields of wheat or oats stood waiting to be combined. Potatoes still in the ground. Hay fields plowed under, straight black furrows from one end of a field to another, the Red River tree line a green snake heading north. The leaves giving just a hint of fall colors.

      She remembered someone telling her that the river was used to send furs north to Hudson Bay in Canada in the early 1800s. Once the area was open for homesteading, the plains on either side of the river filled with Scandanavian immigrants, felling trees and marveling at the rich topsoil. Some became the richest farmers in America, usually the ones who hired on folks like Cash. Others struggled, barely making ends meet with the harsh winters, springtime floods and short growing season.

      The Red River Valley—or just the Valley as folks born and raised there called it—wasn’t even a valley. Cash had learned in seventh-grade social studies class that the Valley really was an old glacial lakebed. All of this land was flat because some giant glacier had shaved it flat while moving north. And every year it flooded.

      This year hadn’t been too bad. Every spring the winter runoff of melted snow and ice from tributaries that fed the river would fill to overflowing. In the worst flood years, for as far as the eye could see in either direction, there would be a lake of muddy floodwater. Cash had spent many a spring helping sandbag the riverbank in Fargo or nearby farms in a fight with the rising waters. In those years, the Valley reverted to its original lake

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