ALT EXAMPLE - EBOOK - THE HUNTER'S WIFE - Flipbook - Página 15
wake it in her palm. For the newt there was no line at all, no fence, no River Styx, only an
area between living and dying, like a snowfield between two lakes: a place where dreams
and wakefulness met, where death was only a possibility and visions rose shimmering to
the stars like smoke. All that was needed was a hand, the heat of a palm, the touch of
fingers.
That February the sun shone during the days and ice formed at night—slick sheets glazing
the wheat fields, the roofs and roads. One day he dropped her off at the library, the chains
on the tires rattling as he pulled away, heading back up the Missouri toward Fort Benton.
Around noon Marlin Spokes, a snowplough driver the hunter knew from grade school, slid
off the Sun River Bridge in his plough and dropped forty feet into the river. He was dead
before they could get him out of the truck. She was reading in the library, a block away, and
heard the plough crash into the riverbed like a thousand dropped girders. When she got to
the bridge, sprinting in her jeans and T-shirt, men were already in the water—a telephone
man from Helena, a jeweler, a butcher in his apron, all of them had scrambled down the
banks and were wading in the rapids, prying the door open. The men lifted Marlin from the
cab, stumbling as they carried him. Steam rose from their shoulders and from the crushed
hood of the plough. She careened down the snow-covered slope and splashed to them. Her
hand on the jeweler's arm, her leg against the butcher's leg, she reached for Marlin's ankle.
When her finger touched Marlin's body, her eyes rolled back and a single vision leaped to
her: Marlin Spokes pedaling a bicycle, a child's seat mounted over the rear tire with a
helmeted boy—Marlin's own son—strapped into it. Spangles of light drifted over the riders
as they rolled down a lane beneath giant, sprawling maples. The boy reached for Marlin's
hair with one small fist. In the glass of a storefront window their reflection flashed past.
Fallen leaves turned over in their wake. This quiet vision—like a ribbon of rich silk—ran
out slowly and fluidly, with great power, and she shook beneath it. It was she who pedaled
the bike. The boy's fingers pulled through her hair.
The men who were touching her or touching Marlin saw what she saw, felt what she felt. At
first they spoke of it only in their basements, at night, but Great Falls was not a big town,
and this was not something one could keep locked in a basement. Soon they discussed it
everywhere—in the supermarket, at the gasoline pumps. People who didn't know Marlin
Spokes or his son or the hunter's wife or any of the men in the river that morning soon
spoke of the event like experts. "All you had to do was touch her," a barber said, "and you
saw it too." "The most beautiful lane you've ever dreamed," a deli owner raved. "You didn't
just pedal his son around," movie ushers whispered, "you loved him."
He could have heard anywhere. In the cabin he built up the fire, flipped idly through a
stack of her books. He couldn't understand them—one of them wasn't even in English.
After dinner she took the plates to the sink.
"You read Spanish now?" he asked.
Her hands in the sink stilled. "It's Portuguese," she said. "I understand only a little."
He turned his fork in his hands. "Were you there when Marlin Spokes was killed?"
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