Rough Country

not shocked. For me, you know, if they don’t got that thang, it doesn’t make any sense. But I found out that Zoe liked women, it seemed perfectly normal.”
    Sig and Virgil had overlapped at the University of Minnesota, and, they thought, might have even had a common acquaintance, a woman who was methodically working her way through every art form known to mankind. Having demonstrated little ability in painting, sculpture, ceramics, architecture, botanical drawing, music, and dance—she’d played the classical guitar, badly, and the dance instructor had suggested that her true métier might involve a pole—she’d moved on to creative writing, where Virgil thought he’d met her.
    “Can’t remember a single thing she wrote, though,” he said.
    “I can remember one piece of art,” Sig said. “She had a boyfriend who hunted, and she did an engraving of a skinned rabbit. Scared the shit out of everybody who saw it.”
    “Maybe it was good, then? If it had that effect?”
    “No . . . it didn’t look like a skinned rabbit, but you could tell it was, you know, an animal that something bad happened to,” Signy said. “But it looked like a mutant. A mutant that had been beaten with a hammer or something . . . But you know, maybe you’re right. I can’t think of any other art that I remember that well, for that long. Maybe it was good. But she quit, anyway.”
     
     
     
    THE DUCK INN was a fake log cabin with a neon duck sign with flapping red-blue-green wings and a gravel parking lot planted with sickly pines. Going in the door, they met Jud Windrow, coming out.
    “Hey, Virgil,” Windrow said, taking a long look at Signy. “You going up to the Wild Goose tonight?”
    “Probably have to pass. I have a forensics conference tonight,” Virgil said. “The case, you know.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m heading over there now. We had a meeting out at their trailer-home, and Wendy’s gonna sign up.”
    “You fix the drummer thing?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah, I think. Berni told us about talking to you this afternoon. She was pretty upset.”
    “People are dead,” Virgil said.
    “I hear you, brother.” Windrow looked Sig over again and said to Virgil, “Don’t do anything Willie wouldn’t.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind, partner,” Virgil said.
    Windrow laughed: “Yeah, partner. Well: better get my young ass over there.”

    SIG WAS MILDLY INSULTED by the exchange and, when they got inside, asked, “What was that about?”
    Virgil told her about Windrow, and she said, “He was pretty . . . presumptuous.”
    Virgil leaned across the table and said, “You don’t know how good-looking you are. The guys in this place have their tongues hanging out. That’s what he was reacting to.”
    She said, “Well . . .”
    They got on famously. She ate a burnt steak with mashed potatoes and drank two-thirds of a bottle of Santa Barbara Pinot Grigio and told him the joke about the minister checking in at the motel (“I certainly hope the pornography channel in my room is disabled”—“No, it’s just regular pornography, you sick fuck”) and he told her about how his aunt Laurie on his mother’s side ran away with a minister, and how his father tormented his mother for a week by suggesting he might preach on the topic.
    An hour and a half slipped away, and when they finished, she insisted on a walk through the downtown, so she could show him around. They looked in at a couple of bars, and she said hello to a couple of people, and a half-hour later, back at the truck, she asked, “Have you got your cell phone?”
    “Sure—you need to make a call?”
    “No. But this time, leave it in the truck, huh?”
    “Yes!” He took the cell phone out of his pocket and put it in the cup holder. “You are a woman of great practicality.”
    “Damn right,” she said.

    BACK AT HER HOUSE, she popped a Norah Jones album in her Wave CD/radio and went off to the bathroom, and when she came back out Virgil put a hand on her hip and said, “Dance,” and they danced around the room to “Come Away with Me,” “One Flight Down,” and “The Nearness of You,” and she said, “Oh, God, Virgil,” and licked his earlobe, and he pushed her against a handy wall. . . .
    Headlights swept through the front windows, the automatic yard light came on, and Virgil moaned, “No!”
    Sig pushed free and went to the window and peered out through a curtain and said, “It’s Zoe. She knew you were coming over. We’ll tell her