Free Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke

and the tourists stopped by sometimes to look at those long-dead faces and think about the town back then. Then, it must have already seemed terrible, and complete, and the future was only a storeroom with nothing except winter in it, and no one had the key.
    Who would have imagined tourists then? The Swan Motel? Me?
    But those loggers bought tobacco from a German on Main Street, and they ate big meals of bloody beef and boiled potatoes at the restaurant beside the tobacco shop, flirting with their waitresses—the German’s daughters, thick-ankled, with Lutheran blue eyes, who scuttled like mice between the kitchen, the garbage, and those meals.
    And the money those men spent fed the town just enough to nudge it forward from year to year like a big ship of prisoners and their wives cruising a very short coast for a long, long time. It was no different than the way the tourists slipped a little something into the town’s red shoe now as they passed through.
    Some of the bricks had crumbled. Many of the buildings were empty. The Star Hotel had once been famous on the western edge of the state for its chandeliers and its Star Lounge piano bar. Peanut shells and sawdust on the wide-planked oak floors, scuffed by heels. But now the Star Hotel was a warehouse for a furniture store owned by a corporation in another town. Even the Palace had been gone so long no one mentioned it anymore. Just a ball of glitter turning above the dance floor like a strange, mechanical planet in the past.
    Now, Main Street smelled vaguely, maybe pleasantly, of decay.
    Not death, just an attic full of purple evening gowns, crinoline, silk suits shut up in a trunk for a century or so.
    Mothballs, and a shoebox of dried carnations.
    But no one was sad about that. The elegance of the red brick buildings along Main Street had been replaced easily and overnight by the neon and glass of the new buildings along Eighth Street. McDonald’s. Howard Johnson’s. A & W. Eighth Street had been nothing but cow pasture until 1972. Now there were dumpsters full of maggoty meat and cow-white styrofoam parked beside our cars while we ate our burgers in a hurry.
    Still, those buildings would never be as familiar to us as the ones on Main Street, no matter how long they stood along Eighth Street. Those new buildings were only squares of glass full of air, fluorescent light, and bright plastic spoons. Those buildings had the look of temporary shelters, stuck like afterthoughts into what seemed still to be a pasture. The smell of manure, hen feathers, and horsehair snagged in a breeze that passed between the golden arches every afternoon.
    I stepped harder on the gas to make it through the yellow light, and a cool wind knocked at my ear and pushed into my mouth when I sped up. In that wind, I tasted sterling. Like biting down on a coin.
     
    In the parking lot of the Swan Motel, I saw his silver Thunderbird, still there. I pulled in next to it on purpose with the rusty white Duster Rick’s father had sold us a few years before for three hundred dollars. It was a reliable car, and it was mine, but it ran nervous and high. Sometimes at a stoplight I felt that if I failed to keep my foot hard and heavy on the brake, the car might fly.
    Millie wasn’t in the office when I arrived. Instead: RECEPTIONIST WILL BE RIGHT BACK .
    I put my purse under the counter and listened at the bathroom door. Millie wasn’t in the bathroom. So I walked back out to the parking lot, squinted and looked around, didn’t see her, and then I walked around the office to the back of the Swan Motel where Millie stood in moss-green grass, smoking a cigarette and staring, concerned or bored, into Suspicious River.
    The blackness of that water and the way Millie stared into it reminded me of the Magic 8 Ball every child owned when I was a child.
Reply hazy, try again
always rose to the inky surface.
    Because Millie’s dark hair frizzed in damp weather, it seemed to expand until Millie appeared small