Just North of Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page B

about the Italian Lady, made them a little nervous about a third look. That was rude, anyway, and too much like staring.
    She wore thin cotton dresses in pleasant and surprising colors and sensible black high-top sneaks: Old Mother Hubbard gone city chic.
    She had a scent, too. When she stood at the vegetable bins at the Wurst Haus Market or other places, she filled the place with a whiff of burning plant and dried herb. Add a zest of sweat, lemon rind and something else, maybe, and that was Cristobel. Cristobel Chiaravino. Always had to take two, three running starts at that name. Bluffton mouths had a time getting around that Italian stuff on the first go.
    She scared lots of people. Hell, she'd been in Bluffton a day, a night and another day and was a property owner – wham! – like that! “Not some rich person from a city, but one that comes in some foreign piece of busted crap car, gets it fixed, sells it, buys a house and what the hell?”
    “And that damn automobile never worked again!” everyone said.
    She knew people talked.
    “A woman looks like that, like she does,” one Son of Norway said to another at the Wagon Wheel Tap, “might find it useful wearing a little face stuff, maybe cut their hair up pretty. . .”
    “. . .take a bath now and again. . .” someone down the way added.
    “Oh, ya! She does all that and there she’ll go! Off being a weather girl up in the Cities.”
    That thought had aired at the Wagon Wheel during the 10 o'clock news out of the Twin Cities. Everyone paused a moment, looked up and agreed, yep, the Italian lady was as much a looker as “that skinny German up there.”
    “I seen Rock and Roll stars look like her,” Karl from the Wurst Haus said. He was rich. He probably had. By then Karl had finished his coffee and got the hell back to where he belonged: working, 10 P.M. or not! Was all he had to say on that anyway!
    So, over morning tea on her stoop, Cristobel watched Old Ken, shuffle down the hill. She said good morning.
    The Old Rattler said nothing. He didn't stop for much.
    She saw him everywhere. He sat, sometimes speaking to the empty side of his bench at Elysium Field. He sipped free beer at the Wheel, slurped free eggs or sucked grits every morning at the American House surrounded by others with companions, colleagues, chums.
    When she saw the old guy pinned by traffic in the middle of the intersection, Slaughterhouse and Commonwealth, she said, “I will fix that!” She said it aloud. “Good exercise,” she added to the thought she’d left in the air.
    That was the pity. After pity came magic.
    Memories of Creature came to her. Fixing death was a Thing, a Thing, perhaps, too large; too large, perhaps for anyone. Opening eyes was a lesser thing. Light wanted an eye to work. All she had do was encourage the flow, clear light’s path to the heart and soul.
    She walked, considering. Walking, she shook her head. No, no! Not something to enter lightly. Her hair whipped her face, side to side. On the street she very nearly growled her frustration at fully peopled sidewalks. A re-espousal of the Craft! What to do, Nonna? Weighing the matter, Cristobel walked one end of town to the other, walked morning to night, day by day.
    She saw Bunch in her walks; walking, she saw him everywhere.
    “You still here?” he called one morning from the roof of the Lutheran church on Morning Bluff.
    “Mm,” she said and walked on among dissolving soapstone monuments and goldenrod-lined, tea-smelling paths.
    “You ain’t gone?” he yelled to her across the street as she moved through a spray of mist picked up from the spill water at the dam.
    She may have heard. She never said back.
    “Ain’t you leaving tomorrow?” he yelled up under her skirt as she crossed the expanded metal roadway of Bunch’s bridge at Engine Warm, heading. . . Well, heading nowhere in particular.
    “I am not,” she said.
    She topped the rise on Morning Bluff one dawn and there was Bunch, heading