Mad River

right?”
    “Sure. I always liked you,” Jimmy said.
    “It’s just that, you know . . . we’ve only done it a couple times, and you always seemed to like that other thing better.”
    “All men like the other thing better,” Jimmy said. “But you know, doing it, we just haven’t had a lot of time. There didn’t seem to be a good place, either.”
    “That’s the only way you can have kids, though,” she observed.
    He was silent for a while after that, and finally she asked, “Don’t you want to have kids?”
    He said, “Don’t know. Maybe.” After a while, he said, “Tell you one thing, if we ever have kids, we won’t treat them like we was. I mean, we’d be strict, but no hitting in the head, or anything like that.”
    Another long silence, then she said, “Did your old man do that?”
    Jimmy showed some teeth in a grin and said, “One time, when I was about ten years old, I was sitting in the dinner chair and I said, ‘I really hate these peas, they’re all runny,’ and he whacked me with his hand right on the side of the head, and I flew into the wall, I think, and it was like an hour later when I woke up on the floor. My goddamn head hurt for, like, two weeks. Dizzy, throwing up. When I got better, I thought about sneaking into his bedroom at night and killing the old sonofabitch. I’m glad I got to do that, finally. Got to do it before I die.”
    “We aren’t gonna die,” Becky said.
    Jimmy said, “Yeah, well,” and gestured at the TV, which was showing an aerial shot of a cluster of cop cars and army Humvees at an intersection, and a long line of cars stopped behind them.
    “We’re going to Australia,” Becky said, trying to show some confidence.
    •   •   •
    THEY WATCHED FOR A WHILE, clicking around channels, and Jimmy said, “That beer sure was good. That hit the spot.”
    She helped him get into the bathroom and get his pants down so he could pee, and caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, and when he’d finished, and zipped up, she asked, “You think I’m pretty?”
    “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever talked to,” he said. The truth was shining from his eyes, and she thought, it’d all been worth it, just to hear that.
    •   •   •
    LATER IN THE DAY, as the sun was going down, she made some Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, but Jimmy had trouble hanging on to the spoon, so she fed him, and then he went to sleep on the couch. He was sleeping soundly when she started to get sleepy herself, so she put a blanket on him, and wrapped herself in a couple more blankets and a couple of sheets, and went to sleep on the floor next to the couch.
    At two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy moaned, a long, low, blood-curdling moan that sounded right up next to death.

18
    VIRGIL GOT ONE of the last rooms at the Minnesota Valley Lodge, where it seemed that half the cops in Minnesota were camped out, many of whom he knew. Whatever else had happened with this rampage, it was good for the local motel and diner business, he thought.
    He ate with a couple of sheriffs and a couple of their deputies who’d come in on a mutual aid arrangement, talking about the state of the search, about the craziness of kids, about salaries and budgets and retirement plans, and one of the deputies wondered if there was any action in Bigham, and his boss said, “If you find any action, I’ll tell your wife.”
    “What’s the point in going out of town . . . ?”
    The sheriff said, “Doug, the fact is, if you found any action, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d know what to do with it. Virgil would know what to do with it. You wouldn’t know. You’d just call up your old lady and say, ‘Marge, I found some action. What should I do with it?’”
    Doug said, “Well. You got me there. Maybe I’ll just have another beer.”
    “Attaboy,” said the sheriff.
    •   •   •
    AFTER DINNER, Virgil walked downtown to The Bush, where a half dozen younger guys were shooting pool while a couple of wives or girlfriends watched, everybody armed with bottles of beer; and some older guys watched from the bar or sat elbows-on-the-bar and talked. Roseanne Bush was working as the bartender and, when she came down to him, asked, “What can I do you for?”
    “You got a Leinie’s?”
    “Does a chicken have lips?” He didn’t know the answer to that, but she went down to a cooler and brought back a bottle of Leinenkugel’s, and popped the top off for