Another Place You've Never Been Read online

  ebook ISBN 9781619028517

  Copyright © 2016 Rebecca Kauffman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kauffman, Rebecca, author.

  Title: Another place you’ve never been: a novel / Rebecca Kauffman.

  Description: Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016020217

  Subjects: LCSH: Women—Fiction. | Fate and fatalism—Fiction. | Buffalo (N.Y.)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.A82325 A56 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020217

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates

  SOFT SKULL an imprint of Counterpoint

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my Mama, Daddy, and Sis,

  with all my love.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: A Thousand Voices

  Me or the Mouse

  Real Gold

  Forty-Dollar Cab

  The Splash Zone

  Southtowns

  The Richest Hill on Earth

  Cash for Gold

  Citrine

  Something Else

  The Snowy Tree Cricket

  The USS Croaker

  The Coin

  Callahan’s

  Tall Tales

  The Caller

  The Call

  Cruising Altitude

  Red Moon

  White Morning Light

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  A THOUSAND VOICES

  The North Dakota plain was as flat and yellow as a cornmeal pancake, dotted with small gleaming ranch homes and dusty vehicles. The reservation was too quiet and too hot. It was August.

  Two brothers went to a swimming hole. The Older Brother rode their bicycle, and the Younger Brother balanced on the handlebars. The swimming hole was several miles from their home, a single-wide periwinkle trailer that sat at the easternmost border of Sunflower Gates motor home park. The brothers rode past the sprawling wheat mill and processing plant that overlooked Sunflower Gates, and into town. Past the St. Francis mission, the IGA, Twin Bear liquor store, the tire place on Thief River Road, and their cousin Sonny’s home, where his girlfriend sipped an orange soda and waved to them from the porch. They rode past fields of wheat and hay and sugar beets. When they reached the swimming hole, they took all of their clothing off and hung it in the branches of a white willow tree. Their bodies were sun-browned, their hair gleaming like black liquid gold.

  The Younger Brother sang loudly, and beautifully.

  The water was warm and thin and dark. The brothers somersaulted and grabbed at frogs in the shallow end. They dove into the deep end from a bouncing piece of oak that jutted out from a small, groaning wooden platform. They tossed handfuls of pond muck at one another. The Older Brother noticed a school of midsized bluegills, and he left the water to retrieve the long-handled net they had brought for this purpose. When he returned to the pond, he didn’t see the Younger Brother.

  The Older Brother walked along the edge of the pond, through crisp reeds and tall cattails whose fluffy innards oozed from their pods. He gazed out across the far side of the pond to see if his brother had perhaps gotten out and dried off. He watched the surface of the water for bubbles or a series of circles that would indicate his brother’s whereabouts. He had always worried about the Younger Brother, who was reckless and unafraid.

  He called the Younger Brother’s name.

  Finally, the Younger Brother burst from the water’s surface at the far end of the pond, the deep end, and he was gasping. He swam frantically and with poor form to the edge of the pond, where he scrambled out. The Older Brother ran to him. The Younger Brother sat and coughed and coughed. The Older Brother sat with him.

  The Younger Brother examined his feet and ankles, which were speckled with tiny spots of red. He said, “Don’t go back in the water.”

  The Older Brother said, “What’s down there?” He was very afraid.

  “Barbed wire.” The Younger Brother rose and said, “Let’s go home.”

  The Younger Brother said he’d like to ride the bicycle home, reminding the Older Brother that it was his turn, and insisting that he was fine. Before mounting the bicycle, the Younger Brother ran his T-shirt over his feet and ankles, which were still bleeding slowly but steadily, and appeared a bit swollen. The Older Brother climbed onto the handlebars of the bike.

  They hadn’t yet reached town when the front wheel of the bike took a sharp turn, waggling first, then nosing directly into the ground, and the Older Brother stumbled headfirst onto the shoulder of the dirt road. The Older Brother leapt to his feet and went to his Younger Brother, who now lay quietly at the side of the road with the bicycle still between his legs. The Older Brother shook the Younger Brother’s shoulder and said his name over and over, but the Younger Brother was cold and dead.

  The men of the community drained the pond the next day, and where the Younger Brother had been tangled beneath the surface, they found not barbed wire, but a nest of venomous water moccasin snakes. This breed was thought to live exclusively in the Southeast—never before had a sighting been reported north of the state of Virginia. Perplexed and aggrieved, the men used shovels and hoes to chop the snakes to pieces, the bloody black parts wriggling in the dry grass long after their heads had been removed.

  The Older Brother lived to be elderly, and when he died, he was buried next to the Younger Brother in Grandfather Tree Cemetery, beneath the white willows. On the day of his burial, after the crowd had dispersed, several astonished onlookers reported a sighting of the Younger Brother at his grave. And although he was recognizable for his strong features and resemblance to the Older Brother, the Younger Brother had grown huge, aged, and transformed to a Two-Spirit in the Underworld, witnesses claimed; for now he had the appearance of a female.

  The Two-Spirit quickly disappeared into the high grass of the wheat fields that day, but over time, reports from various locations corroborated this sighting. Elders collected these accounts and shared them with one another in attempts to identify his/her patterns and purpose. The Two-Spirit appeared as a female to some and a male to others, and it was not clear whether this was the result of any actual sort of transformation, or if it was simply a difference in the perception of the observer. It seemed that oftentimes, but not always, the Two-Spirit appeared to those for whom Death was near, and they believed that the Two-Spirit had healing powers, but did not always choose to use them. They said that people feared the Two-Spirit, although no one knew of any violence he/she had committed. He/she often traveled alongside water, they noted, and they speculated that perhaps he/she passed to and from the Underworld by way of the sea.

  Many years later, young Ojibwa children ask the elders about the strange dry pit carved from the North Dakota plain, out beyond the wheat and hay and sugar beet fields, where there are still
remains of the diving board platform at the east end, splintered oak with stray rusted nails. Within the pit, there can be found a half-buried shoe, some fishing line, a flat, floppy basketball yellowed by the sun.

  The elders tell them the story of the brothers. Unlike the stories they’re accustomed to being told, the children don’t know what to make of this one. Oftentimes, they will go home and ask their parents to retell the story. Then the children will retell the story to one another. They feel something different in each retelling. They are learning that sometimes it takes a thousand voices to tell one story.

  ME OR THE MOUSE

  Marty was going on for the fifth time that day about how they’d have to cool it with the hard liquor once his daughter arrived. She was only ten years old but she wasn’t some clueless idiot, he said, and he didn’t want her reporting back to her mother that he was boozing and crashing all summer long. Besides, he was really hurting for cash, he continued, come to think of it, April hadn’t paid for a thing in months. Not a single Q-tip. Not one slice of cheese.

  “OK, chief,” April said. She was working an emery board over her thumbnail. Her little white Tupperware basket full of manicure supplies sat on the coffee table in front of her. She finished with the file and ran her fingers through the white basket, the small glass bottles of polish clicking against one another like dice. She settled on navy with silver glitter and smacked the bottle against her palm before starting to apply it.

  “Love that shade, babe,” Marty said from the La-Z-Boy. He pulled hard and noisy on his cigarette before exhaling, using his lips to direct it at a sharp angle toward the open window. Marty had soft, thick lips and nice eyes, but teeth that were splayed out like they’d been hit hard from the inside. April was out of his league, looks-wise, but Marty was a real decent guy. He gave her a hard time about money sometimes, but he was never serious.

  The armrests of his La-Z-Boy were worn to strings, exposing bulges of mustard-colored stuffing, which he pinched absently. He wore a camouflage baseball cap over knotty shoulder-length hair.

  “Did you remember to get them air freshener things?” he said.

  April nodded toward the plastic bag at the foot of the couch.

  “Did you get different flavors?”

  “Mm-hm.” She didn’t look up from her nails.

  “Babe?” he said.

  “Yes, I got friggin’ vanilla, ocean mist, mountain something or other.”

  Marty was so annoying lately. Ever since it had been decided that his daughter would spend the summer with him, he’d been on his high horse about getting the place clean, sobering up, smoking out the window, color-coded trash bins. He’d spent the last month trying to convince April that this would be good for the two of them too; getting their act together a little bit, healthier lifestyle, looking after a kid, et cetera. Not likely, April thought. She wasn’t much for recycling, et cetera.

  April finished her nails and went to the kitchen. She tossed two burritos wrapped in foil onto a baking sheet and turned on the oven. She stared at her reflection in the toaster while the oven ticked and hummed like it was changing gears. She ran her fingers tight through her bangs to check the status of her roots. She bleached her hair every three weeks to keep it white-blond, and blow-dried it upside down every morning, then made it even bigger with mousse and a wide-tooth comb. Even with all that volume, it fell past her shoulder blades. She had a great head of hair, people said so all the time. She hadn’t had it short since the first grade.

  She brushed some cigarette ash from her thighs. She was wearing denim capris and a denim snap-up shirt. She was also wearing her white vinyl high heels and they were sexy as hell, even with the bright green grass scuffs that crisscrossed the sides. She couldn’t believe the footwear most women her age wore out in public. It was no wonder married men were always after her.

  She took Marty his burrito and a Budweiser. “The last supper, huh,” he said, thumbing the hot foil, “before it’s hotdogs and apple juice for two months.”

  April looked at him wearily through half eyes. “We’ll see,” she said.

  “We’re gonna get on fine,” Marty said brightly. He lifted his burrito up with both hands, spilling some of the contents onto his lap. “Mouse is a good kid.”

  “How do you know what kind of kid she is? You haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Lay off, would you? Sound like my ex.” He made a talking puppet with his hand and spoke in his falsetto. “Mah, mah, mah, mah, mah.”

  “What time does she get in?”

  Marty picked a bean off his crotch and tossed it into his mouth. “Four-oh-eight. You gonna come along for the pickup?”

  “You know I hate airports, Marty. And Traverse City. Can’t stand the way those people drive.”

  Marty sighed and peered out the window. It was a quiet, purple dusk. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m gonna go see if I can get any bites.”

  He went to the kitchen and returned with the last two beers still dangling from their plastic netting. He loosened one of them and gave it to April. In his other hand he held a little tin of black soil that was teeming with night crawlers. He had three or four of these tins, which he kept in the produce drawer of the refrigerator.

  Monk Pond was a swampy, stinking thing that stretched a half mile or so across. Ownership was technically shared by the two or three dozen houses and trailers that surrounded it, but Marty was one of only two residents who actually had a boat and spent any time on the water. The other was an old nut named Forrest who walked around the pond once each day. If you were unlucky enough to be out in your yard when he passed, he’d invite himself on over and talk your ear off about the second amendment, or his part-time job at the antique mall. Forrest was personally into some weird stuff; old Barbie collectibles, torture devices from movie sets, real human baby parts in jars of formaldehyde.

  Marty’s little aqua-blue rowboat was littered with duct tape patches, and its scratched-up oars were different lengths. The boat’s interior was splintery and stained with fish blood and who knew what else. April wouldn’t set foot in the thing.

  She stood at the window and watched him drag the boat from the backyard into the water by a thin gray rope, then he rowed out a short ways. He lit a cigarette and laid back in the boat, a single hand balancing the fishing pole across his chest. Marty claimed to have caught a forty-pound tiger muskie several years ago, up on Lake Superior. Said he took it to a taxidermist and everything, but then wasn’t able to get it across the border, back into the states. Something about customs regulations. He’d returned it to the taxidermist for safekeeping, promised he’d be back for it. His passport had since expired, and he hadn’t bothered to go retrieve the thing. April was skeptical about the whole story; no photographs, no witnesses.

  The moon was like a see-through communion wafer against the dark blue sky. Dragonflies skirted through the reeds, and a turtle’s head appeared at the water’s surface, then quickly dipped beneath. Yellow lights twinkled across the pond. April watched Marty ease himself lower in the boat until all she could see of him was the gende pulsing column of cigarette smoke against the black water.

  The Mouse walked in through the kitchen screen door and it banged like a shot behind her. She was bigger than April had expected a ten-year-old would be. She was a smug-looking thing with dark, wild hair and one arched eyebrow. She looked nothing like Marty. April wondered if that was a sure thing.

  April was sitting on the kitchen counter with a magazine across her lap. She stubbed out her cigarette.

  “Hola,” said the Mouse.

  April slid off the counter. “Is that all you have?”

  The Mouse was wearing a ratty pink backpack over one shoulder and she tapped a little silver pocketbook against her thigh.

  “No, Marty’s got my suitcase. My mom said I don’t have to call him Dad unless I want to.”

  April shrugged. “Well, my name’s April but you can call me whatever you want. So long as it’s not a b-word or a c-w
ord.” The Mouse stared at her. “Anyway,” April said, “you want me to call you Mouse like your dad does?”

  “Whatever,” the Mouse said. “Or Tracy. I don’t care. I really do not care.”

  The Mouse stood on her tiptoes to investigate the wooden duck that rested on the fireplace mantel. She grabbed it by the bill, with her fist. “This is heavy,” she said. The duck was missing one of its black marble eyeballs, and the Mouse dug a little bit at the remaining one with her fingertips.

  April made sandwiches for the three of them. The Mouse wolfed down her peanut butter and jelly and asked why the milk tasted like water.

  “It’s skim,” April said.

  “Oh, I’m used to 2 percent.”

  “Next time,” Marty said.

  “Skim is better if you want to keep your figure,” April said.

  Marty was nervous, chewing fast and making bad jokes and asking the Mouse a lot of questions. He had a crack in the corner of his lip and it twinkled with fresh blood. The Mouse didn’t like school, had never skied, and she didn’t have a boyfriend, gross. She told them about the solar eclipse she and her classmates had watched out in the schoolyard several months earlier—she seemed to think that was a really big deal. She wanted to be on TV when she grew up.

  “By the way, is your TV in color?” she asked.

  Marty shook his head. “Why, is yours?”

  “No,” the Mouse said. “I just thought maybe you would have one. Shelly’s got a color TV.”

  She got up from the table and opened the cupboard beneath the TV. She pulled out a stack of hunting magazines and a doorknob and a deck of playing cards with a silhouetted man in a cowboy hat on the box and the back of each card.

  “Hey, Marty,” she said. “Why was six afraid of seven?”

  April had heard this one from some guy at a bar. “Because seven ate nine,” she cut in.

  The Mouse scowled at her.

  Marty laughed. “You know any more?”

  “Maybe,” the Mouse said, with a measure of coolness. She pointed out the window. “Are them geese?”