LITMIR.BIZ

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who stayed in town. They roomed above the bars in makeshift hotels, where bar owners cashed the checks for room and drinks. Cash looked at the man lying facedown in the cornfield. He had probably roomed in town, although some of the richer farmers actually had bunkhouses for the late-season field workers.

      She walked back to Wheaton’s car with him. He had his hand on the door handle but she could tell he still had more to say to her.

      He took his hat off and ran his hand over his buzz cut. He put his hat back on and raised an eyebrow. “What brought you out this way this morning? Thought you were working this week for old man Swenson?”

      Cash shrugged. “You know how it is. Sometimes I just get a feeling and I follow it. I got up early and heard it on the news so I drove out this way as fast as I could. When I passed Standard Oil in town” —she pointed with her lips to the east—“and looked over this way, I saw your cruiser and thought I’d come by and see what you were doing. You know.” She shrugged again, her eyes asking if he understood. “Now I see you were probably wanting me to come this way anyways,” she said. They both chuckled. It had happened many times before when Wheaton had thought about Cash and she had shown up moments later. Or the other way around.

      “The thought did cross my mind,” he said. “Listen, I’m done here for the day. I imagine that if you pulled your truck up there in the Oye’s driveway, up there by the migrant shacks, no one would bother you. Maybe stay around here for awhile and see what you think. Those guys are headed up towards Red Lake. They won’t be back for awhile.”

      “You don’t want to go up there yourself?”

      “Can’t. Just like my badge doesn’t do me any good over there on the North Dakota side,” Wheaton said, pointing across the river, “us county law folks don’t have any jurisdiction on Red Lake. Made it a law in ‘53. Red Lake’s the only reservation in the state we can’t go on anymore. I’m gonna drive into town and tell the county doc to come pick up this guy. Take him into the hospital and see if he can tell us anything else. You take it easy, Cash.”

      He got into his car and made a U-turn on the gravel road, the stones rattling against each other. Cash watched the cloud of road dust billow behind him as he drove away. When the dust settled, she walked slowly back towards where the body lay. There wasn’t much blood to see, just the flattened stubble like a cow or deer had lain down in the field. She squatted down and put her hand where the man’s beating heart had been and felt the sadness from the earth crawl up her arm.

      Chilled, with a shiver running up her left side, Cash stood and walked back to her Ranchero. She got in, slid the heat switch over to let warm air blow out the vents and then drove about 800 feet to the old driveway that led into the abandoned Oye’s farmstead. Memory is what told her where the driveway was as grass had grown up and over the gravel. Two strips of shorter grass indicated where cars and farm equipment had entered the farmstead years ago. The family had moved out to Montana. County gossip said that old man Oye had bought a ranch and had a thousand head of cattle.

      Cash remembered back to when she was a child. Old man Oye would stop by to visit her mom, coming back from hunting trips out to Montana. Never any game in his truck but a pocketful of silver dollars that he would toss and spin in the air and hand out to whichever kids—white, Indian or Mexican—happened to be standing around waiting to be entertained. Older now, Cash figured the Montana trips were more about gambling than hunting.

      When she was warm enough, she got out and climbed into the back of her truck. She pulled an old quilt out from under a couple of two-by-fours, rolled up her jean jacket and laid down on her back, hands folded under her head. The sun was bright and she shut her eyes. She put her hand over her eyes. Red sunlight filtered first through her fingers and then through the skin of her eyelids.

      She could hear crickets and frogs down by the river. The leaves of the cottonwood trees lining the river bank created music in the wind that stilled her. Soon she was lost in time, her body floating up and out of the truck bed and following the trail of a soul gone northeast to say good-bye to loved ones. She saw a gravel road with a stand, almost like a food stand where one would sell berries, but this one had a basket of pinecones on it. Birchbark baskets were filled with pinecones. Children, five or six of them, crowded ’round the stand. The oldest was barely a teen. The youngest held on to the teen’s scrawny hip. She looked around to memorize the place in her mind, searching for landmarks—the stand, the pine trees, a hunting trail heading north a bit down the road.

      Was this the road where the children had come from? It ran east to west.

      Just then Cash heard the dry crackle of leaves and smelled a faint odor of decay. It brought her back to her own body, lying in the truck bed of her Ranchero.

      A 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

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