Storm Front

turned in the drive and nearly ran over a towheaded kid, maybe eight, dressed in a Cub Scout shirt and neckerchief, headed out on his rattletrap bicycle. He stopped, rolled down the car window, and said, “Sorry.”
    “Scared me,” the kid said.
    “Are you Sam?”
    “Who’s askin’?”
    “I’m a cop, I need to talk to your mom.”
    “Sam I am,” Sam said. “Ma walked down to the crick for a swim. There’s a path out past the barn.”
    “You going to a den meeting?”
    “Yup. Up to the Wilsons’.”
    “Take care,” Virgil said.
    The kid nodded and took off. Virgil drove down the drive, parked, then walked back out to the end of it, peeked around the edge of the cornfield that came almost to the driveway, and saw the kid pedaling away.
    Virgil walked back to the house, pounded on the door, got no response. Thought about going in for a quick look around, decided it was too risky. He walked out to the barn, and past it—a red chicken was pecking gravel around the barn door, and stopped to look at him cockeyed—and saw the trail headed off toward the hill behind the house. What the hell.
    The walk took ten minutes, past a sweet corn patch, already showing a little browning silk, and through a pasture dotted with dried cow pies, back to a line of cottonwoods that marked the path of the creek across Ma’s property. He followed the path to the edge of the water, which was not more than ten feet wide, and probably not more than knee-deep at the deepest point. Not a promising swimming spot. The path went north, toward the hill, and two minutes later, he found an old, partly broken-down dam, and Ma splashing around in a pretty little swimming hole behind it.
    Her back was toward him, the water up to her neck, when he came up and called, “How you doing, Ma?”
    She whirled in the water, saw him, and said, “Well, goddamnit, Virgil, why didn’t you call me and tell me you were coming out? You scared the heck out of me.”
    “Excuse me. I just needed to talk to you about where you stashed old Jones.”
    “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
    “Of course you do. Last night you went up to the hospital, dressed in a dirndl, with your hair up, and gave him some bolt cutters,” Virgil said. “We got a witness. Probably picked him up after he cut himself loose . . . but that’s water under the bridge. What I need to know is, where did you stash him?”
    “I did not do any of that,” Ma said. “I promise you. Cross my heart.” She paddled a few feet closer, into shallower water, then stood up and said, “I cross my heart,” again, and made the cross. Virgil tried not to goggle, because he was a trained professional. She said, “Why don’t you come in here, and we can talk? It’s too damn hot to be sitting up on some creek bank in the sun.”
    “I’m in the shade.”
    “Oh, so what?”
    Virgil thought about it for a second, then said, “The last time I went skinny-dipping with a woman, somebody tried to shoot me.”
    “Virgil . . .”
    “That water’s probably so polluted with fertilizer and other crap that you’ll grow another breast . . . not that you need one.”
    “That’s pure water that you could drink,” she said. “It comes out of a spring at the bottom of that hill, and there’s not a drop of fertilizer that goes into it before it gets here. And—it’s really cool. It’s perfect.”
    She dropped onto her back and did a scissors kick into deeper water.
    “Oh, all right,” he said, taking off his hat.
    So Virgil jumped in the water, which must have been thirty degrees cooler than the air temperature. The change nearly stopped his heart, and caused his testicles to retract up as far as his liver, but after a couple of minutes, felt delicious.
    “I don’t know why you think I’m a criminal,” Ma said, as she floated around the pool on her back, doing a little finger paddle to keep herself moving. The water glistened on her breasts and belly, and it was better, Virgil thought, than seeing a fifty-seven-inch musky in the water. Or, at least, really, really close to that.
    “I’ll tell you, Ma, I don’t see you so much as a criminal, as a woman trying to make her way in the world, without as many tools as other women might have.”
    “I’ve got a couple tools,” she said. “I studied agronomy at South Central.”
    “Really? I didn’t know that. I studied ecological science at the U up in St. Paul.”
    “Really.”
    So they