Instead, Miss America asks, Is this how it will go? Her voice shrill and shaky, a bird’s song. Will this be just one horrible event after another after another after another—until we’re all dead?

 

 “No,” Director Denial says. Brushing cat hair off her sleeve, she says, “Just some of us.”

 

 And Miss America says she doesn’t mean just here, in the Museum of Us. She means life. Is the whole world just people eating up other people? People attacking and destroying each other?

 

 And Director Denial says, “I know what you meant.”

 

 The Earl of Slander writes that down in his notepad. The rest of us, nodding.

 

 The Mythology of Us.

 

 Still holding the soup, looking at her own reflection in the grease on top, the Baroness Frostbite says, “I used to work in a restaurant, in the mountains.” She dips a spoon into the bowl and brings it steaming toward Miss America’s face.

 

 “Eat,” the Baroness says. “And I’ll tell you how I lost my lips . . .”

 

  

 

 Absolution

 

 A Poem About the Baroness Frostbite

 

 “Even if God won’t forgive us,” says the Baroness Frostbite, “we can still forgive Him.”

 

 We should show ourselves to be bigger than God.

 

 

 The Baroness onstage, she tells most people, “Gum disease,”

 

 when they look too long at what’s left

 

 of her face.

 

 Her lips are only the ragged edge of her skin,

 

 greased red with lipstick.

 

 Her teeth, inside:

 

 the yellow ghost of every cup of coffee,

 

 and every cigarette in her middle-aged life.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

 

 The shifting, falling color of snow flurries.

 

 No two of the tiny blue shadows the same shape or size.

 

 The rest of her is goosedowned, quilted and insulated,

 

 her hair tucked under a knitted hat,

 

 but never again

 

 warm enough.

 

 

 Standing center stage, the Baroness Frostbite says, “We should forgive God . . .”

 

 For making us too short. Fat. Poor.

 

 We should forgive God our baldness.

 

 Our cystic fibrosis. Our juvenile leukemia.

 

 We should forgive God’s indifference, His leaving us behind:

 

 Us, God’s forgotten Science Fair project, left to grow mold.

 

 God’s goldfish, ignored until we’re forced to eat our own shit off the bottom.

 

 

 Her hands inside mittens, the Baroness points to her face, saying, “People . . .”

 

 They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful.

 

 Because now she looks so—bad.

 

 People, they need some sense of justice. A balancing act.

 

 They assume cancer, her own fault, something she deserved.

 

 A disaster she made happen herself.

 

 

 So she tells them, “Floss. For God’s sake, floss before bed every night.”

 

 And every night the Baroness, she forgives other people.

 

 She forgives herself.

 

 And she forgives God for those disasters that just seem to

 

 happen.

 

  

 

 Hot Potting

 

 A Story by the Baroness Frostbite

 

 “Come February nights,” Miss Leroy used to say, “and every drunk driver was a blessing.”

 

 Every couple looking for a second honeymoon to patch up their marriage. People falling asleep at the steering wheel. Anybody who pulled off the highway for a drink, they were somebody Miss Leroy could maybe talk into renting a room. It was half her business, talking. To keep people buying another next drink, and another, until they had to stay.

 

 Sometimes, sure, you’re trapped. Other times, Miss Leroy would say, you just sit down for what turns out to be the rest of your life.

 

 Rooms there at the Lodge, most people, they expect better. The iron bed frames teeter, the rails and footboards worn where they notch together. The nuts and bolts, loose. Upstairs, every mattress is lumpy as foothills, and the pillows are flat. The sheets are clean, but the well water up here, it’s hard. You wash anything in this water, and the fabric feels sandpaper-rough with minerals and smells of sulfur.

 

 The final insult is, you have to share a bathroom down the hall. Most folks don’t travel with a bathrobe, and this means getting dressed just to take a leak. In the morning, you wake up to a stinking sulfur bath in a white-cold cast-iron claw-foot tub.

 

 It’s a pleasure for her to herd these February strangers toward the cliff. First, she shuts off the music. A full hour before she even starts talking, she turns down the volume, a notch every ten minutes, until Glen Campbell is gone. After traffic turns to nothing going by on the road outside, she turns down the heat. One by one, she pulls the string that snaps off each neon beer sign in the window. If there’s been a fire in the fireplace, Miss Leroy will let it burn out.

 

 All this time, she’s herding, asking what plans these people have. February on the White River, there’s less than nothing to do. Snowshoe, maybe. Cross-country ski, if you bring your own. Miss Leroy lets some guest bring up the idea. Everybody gets around to this same suggestion.

 

 And if they don’t, then she brings up the notion of hot potting.

 

 Her stations of the cross. She walks her audience through the road map of her story. First she shows herself, how she looked most of her life ago, twenty years old and out of college for the summer, car camping up the White River, begging for a summer job, what back then was the dream job: tending bar here at the Lodge.

 

 It’s hard to imagine Miss Leroy skinny. Her skinny with white teeth, before her gums started to pull back. Before the way they look now, the brown root of each tooth exposed, the way carrots will crowd each other out of the ground if you plant the seed too close together. It’s hard to imagine her voting Democrat. Even liking other people. Miss Leroy without the dark shadow of hair across her top lip. It’s hard to imagine college boys waiting an hour in line to fuck her.

 

 It makes her seem honest, saying something funny and sad like that, about herself.

 

 It makes people listen.

 

 If you hugged her now, Miss Leroy says, all you’d feel is the pointy wire of her bra.

 

 Hot potting, she says, is, you get a gang of kids together and hike up the fault side of the White River. You pack in your own beer and whiskey and find a hot-springs pool. Most pools stand between 150 and 200 degrees, year-round. Up at this elevation, water boils at 198 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in winter, at the bottom of a deep icy pit, the side of snowdrifts sloping into them, these pools are hot enough to boil you alive.

 

 No, the danger wasn’t bears, not here. You wouldn’t see wolves or coyote or bobcat. Downriver, yes, just one click away on your odometer, just one radio song down the highway, the motels had to chain their garbage cans shut. Down there, the snow was busy with paw prints. The night was noisy with packs howling at the moon. But here, the snow was smooth. Even the full moon was quiet.

 

 Upriver from the Lodge, all you had to worry about was being scalded to death. City kids, dropped out of college, some stay around a couple years. Some way, they pass down the okay about which pools are safe and where to find them. Where not to walk, there’s only a thin crust of calcium or limestone sinter that looks like bedrock but will drop you through to deep-fry in a hidden thermal vent.

 

 The scare stories, they pass along also. A hundred years back, a Mrs. Lester Bannock, here visiting from Crystal Falls, Pennsylvania, she stopped to wipe the steam from her smoked glasses. The breeze shifted, blowing hot steam in her eyes. One wrong step, and she was off the path. Another wrong step, and she lost her balance, landing backward, sitting in water scalding hot. Trying to stand, she pitched forward, landing facedown in the water. Screaming, she was hauled out by strangers.

 

 The sheriff who raced her into town, he requisitioned every drop of olive oil from the kitchen at the Lodge. Coated in oil and wrapped in clean sheets, she died in a hospital, still screaming, three days later.

 

 Recent as three summers ago, a kid from Pinson City, Wyoming, he parked his pickup truck and out jumped his German shepherd. The dog splashed dead center, jumping into a pool, and yelped itself to death mid–dog paddle. The tourists chewing their knuckles, they told the kid, don’t, but he dove in.

 

 He surfaced just once, his eyes boiled white and staring. Rolling around blind. No one could touch him long enough to grab hold, and then he was gone.

 

 The rest of that year, they dipped him out with nets, the way you’d clean leaves and dead bugs out of a swimming pool. The way you’d skim the fat off a pot of stew.

 

 At the Lodge bar, Miss Leroy would pause to let people see this a moment in their heads. The bits of him left all summer skittering around in the hot water, a batch of fritters spitting to a light brown.

 

 Miss Leroy would smoke her cigarette.

 

 Then, like this is something she’s just remembered, she’d say, “Olson Read.” And she’d laugh. Like this is something she doesn’t think about part of every minute, every hour she’s awake, Miss Leroy will say, “You should’ve met Olson Read.”

 

 Big, fat, virtuous, sin-free Olson Read.

 

 Olson was a cook at the Lodge, fat and pale white, his lips too big, blown up with blood and squirming red as sushi against the sticky-rice-white skin of his face. He watched those hot pools. The way he’d kneel beside them all day, watching it, the bubbling brown froth, hot as acid.

 

 One wrong step. One quick slide down the wrong side of a snowdrift, and just hot water would do to you what Olson did to food.

 

 Poached salmon. Stewed chicken and dumplings. Hard-boiled eggs.

 

 In the Lodge kitchen, Olson used to sing hymns so loud you could hear them in the dining room. Olson, huge in his flapping white apron, the ties knotted and cutting into his thick, deep waist, he sat in the bar, reading his Bible in the almost-dark. The beer-and-smoke smell of the dark-red carpet. If he joined your table in the staff break room, Olson bowed his head to his chest and said a rambling blessing over his baloney sandwich.

 

 His favorite verb was “fellowship.”

 

 A night when Olson walked into the pantry and found Miss Leroy kissing a bellhop, just some liberal-arts dropout from NYU, Olson Read told them kissing was the devil’s first step to fornication. With his rubbery red lips, Olson told everyone he was saving himself for marriage, but the truth was, he couldn’t give himself away.

 

 To Olson, the White River was his Garden of Eden, the proof his God did beautiful work.

 

 Olson watched the hot springs, the geysers and steaming mud pots, the way every Christian loves the idea of hell. The way every Eden had to have its snake. He watched the scalding water steam and spit, the same way he’d peek through the order window and watch the waitresses in the dining room.

 

 On his day off, he’d carry his Bible through the woods, through the clouds and fog of sulfur. He’d be singing “Amazing Grace” or “Nearer My God to Thee,” but only the fifth or sixth verses, the parts so strange and unknown you might think he made them up. Walking on the sinter, the thin crust of calcium that forms the way ice sets up on water, Olson would step off the boardwalk and kneel at the deep edge of a spitting, stinking pool. Kneeling there, he’d pray out loud for Miss Leroy and the bellhop. He’d pray to his Lord, our God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. He’d pray for the immortal soul of each busboy by name. He’d inventory the sins of each hotel maid out loud. Olson’s voice rising with the steam, he prayed for Nola, who pinned up the hem of her skirt too high and committed the act of oral sex with any hotel guest willing to cut loose a twenty-dollar bill. The tourist families standing back, safe on the boardwalk behind him, Olson begged mercy for the dining-room waiters, Evan and Leo, who assaulted each other with lewd acts of sodomy every night in the men’s dorm. Olson wept and shouted about Dewey and Buddy, who breathed glue from a brown paper bag while they washed the dishes.

 

 There at the gates of his hell, Olson yelled opinions into the trees and sky. Making his report to God, Olson walked out after the dinner shift and shouted your sins at the stars so bright they bled together in the night. He begged for God’s mercy on your behalf.

 

 No, nobody very much liked Olson Read. Nobody any age likes a tattletale.

 

 They’d all heard the stories about the woman wrapped in olive oil. The kid cooked to soup with his dog. And Olson especially would listen, his eyes bright as candy. This was proof of everything he held dear. The truth of this. Proof you can’t hide what you’ve done from God. You can’t fix it. We’d be awake and alive in Hell, but hurting so bad we’d wish we could die. We’d spend all eternity suffering, someplace no one in the world would trade us to be.

 

 Here, it would be, Miss Leroy would stop talking. She’d light a new cigarette. She’d draw you another beer.

 

 Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

 

 Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.