Naked Prey

day.
    “I look like a troll,” she said, looking in the kitchen mirror. The house, suddenly silent, seemed cold and lonely and isolated from the world. “I’ve got to get a different coat, and my hair—ah, baby, I wonder if I can get into Harriet’s. What time is it?”
    While her mother called Harriet’s Mane Line, Letty went up the stairs and threw herself on her bed and closed her eyes. Closing her eyes was almost as good as television.
    When she’d been on TV, she’d felt normal. She was surprised by that. She could feel what the TV people wanted, and reflected it back at them: chin up, a little grim, a little tight, the .22 in the crook of her arm. But a smile now and then, too.
    She felt she could move them. She’d grown up with TV, and knew how it worked.
    Letty got up and closed the door. On the back of the door, she’d mounted a mirror that she’d found at the Goodwill store. She looked pretty tough, she thought, trying to turn so she could catch her own profile. She was weather-smudged from the wind and the ice, but she couldn’t help that. But maybe . . .
    She lay down again and closed her eyes. Maybe some lipstick. Just a little teeny hint of lipstick. She should definitely clean up her shoes. She’d seen a girl in a John Waynemovie, a spunky kid just a little older than herself, maybe, and that was the look she wanted. That was the attitude.
    Martha West ran up the stairs. “Dick’s here, he’s gonna take me,” she said. Dick was her on-and-off boyfriend; he’d heard about the press conference. “Are you okay? Harriet’s gonna give me a quick wash and set, and then Dick and me might go out after. You know, just for a while.”
    “I’ll be okay. I gotta get some traps out, for when the reporters come back tomorrow. And maybe clean up my room—one lady said they might want to look out my window, if they decide to do a reenactment.”
    “Okay. Maybe catch the kitchen, too, okay? And just run the vacuum around the living room. Spray some of the lemon Pledge around, okay?”
    “Okay. Don’t be too late. We gotta get up early tomorrow,” Letty said.
    “We’re just gonna go out for a few minutes, see what people are saying.”
    Martha ran back down the stairs, and Letty sat on the bed and pulled on her knee-high gum boots and got her coat and gloves: going to set some traps. Her mom yelled back up, “Don’t miss the six o’clock news. They said maybe five o’clock and for sure at six.”
    “Okay.”
    This was like paradise.
    Ten minutes later, visions of MTV still dancing in her head, she was out the door with her trap sack. She carried the .22, though she didn’t need it, and the machete in the green jungle sheath, which she did need. But who knew? Maybe the TV would come back, and the TV people liked the gun. She looked over her shoulder, and she trudged across the road and then into the frozen marsh on the north side, wishing them back.
    She spent an hour with the traps, the sun dropping out of sight as she worked. Back at the house, in the light of the single bulb in her room, she looked at herself in the mirror, again, and thought about the men who’d come in from St. Paul, Davenport and Del, and how they carried an air of the city with them. She’d told Davenport she might like to be a surgeon, or a hairdresser, or even a cop. Maybe she could do those jobs, but she no longer thought that was what she wanted.
    She liked the lights. She was going to be a reporter. A star.
    She went downstairs, got one of the two remaining Cokes, and saw the keys to the Jeep on the kitchen table. She had a hundred and twenty-seven dollars hidden in an old metal Thermos jug under her bed. Maybe just a piece of pie down at Wolf’s. After a day like this, she deserved it.
    T HE H OLY R OLLER church in Broderick had been converted into a rough-and-ready dormitory. Wooden screens divided the former prayer space into nine rooms, to provide privacy. Each cubicle contained a folding bed, a bureau, a night table, a fire extinguisher, and a curtain across the doorway, in the long tradition of the flophouse.
    A Christian electrician from Bemidji had laid some cable between the rooms, so each room had one electric outlet to power a lamp. Personal radios and televisions were forbidden, not for religious reasons but because the noise might annoy others. Most of the women had Walkman radios or CD players, for personal use, and most had small bookcases jammed with mystery novels and spiritual