Northern Lights

by Tim O'Brien

  Perry shrugged. “We did. We built a hundred fires.”

  The second man giggled and flung a silver disc at the maze of pins.

  The first man shook his head. Perry guessed he was a farmer out of business. “Don’t know how you coulda got lost in the first place,” the man was saying. “But I sure would’ve built me a big fire, first thing.”

  “We did that.”

  “A big fire.”

  “Well, next time you can get lost,” Perry said.

  The man kept shaking his head. “Not me. I never once been lost.” Suddenly he slammed his hand on the counter. The shaker fell. Salt spilled into the man’s lap. The pinball-playing man laughed a high-pitched, shrieking laugh that was almost womanly. “I’da never got myself lost all that time. I’ll tell you that. But if I did, just if I did and I didn’t, I’da built me a big fire, lots of smoke. Then I would have found me a bunch of boulders and spelled out SOS in the snow with ’em, and then, then I would’ve set fire on a big tree or something, got a big tree burnin’ at night so the planes could see it real easy. I woulda been out of there in no time flat, all right. Bill! Didn’t I tell you that’s exactly what I’da done? So. Anyhow. Shoot. So where’s the other guy?”

  “My brother.” Perry sighed. “He’s out there in a shed. I told you that once already. He’s okay. They’ll get him out fast.”

  “Sick, huh?”

  Perry nodded.

  The man shook his head. “Stupid,” he finally said.

  Perry nodded again. “Pretty dumb.”

  “Stupid, that’s what.”

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about me doing it again.”

  The man swiveled off his stool. “Won’t be lookin’ for you again, neither.” He licked his hand clean of salt, then put it out for Perry to shake. “You don’t play bowlin’ pinball, do you?”

  “No,” Perry said.

  “Well. Okay then. Keep your pecker up.”

  “I will.”

  The man marched out of the store and his friend Bill followed him with a giggle and grin. Perry heard them drive away in the pickup.

  He sat at the counter and waited. At last the woman brought him another beer and a fresh glass. Perry found two five-dollar bills in his pocket. They were stuck together, and he peeled them apart and put one on the counter. He was depressed and still hungry. He bought a candy bar, brought it outside and sat on the steps to eat it. Snow melted off the roof. Now and then a car passed by, speeding north or south, spraying water off into the ditches. A wave of the old melancholia passed through him and he got up and went inside and called Grace again. There was no answer. Outside, he retrieved his skis and wiped them off and stacked them in a dry spot by the garage. He was depressed. There ought to have been crowds. The highway should have been jammed with well-wishers. He took up the branch that he had used as a pole, gripped it hard and flung it across the highway and into the woods. A clod of wet snow slid off the roof. Inside again, he had another beer. He watched the clock on the wall: a Hamms beer clock with a canoe floating in twilight blue waters, the moon just up and shining, the lake water twinkling, the forest green behind it, the hands of the clock saying it was almost noon. He went to the phone and tried Grace again. He let it ring twice then hung up. He was restless. He went to the electric bowling game and slid a dime into the slot. The lights flashed and the pins came down. A clown’s face lit up. Lucky, he thought. He sent a metal disc whizzing up the polished alley. Four pins shot out of sight. The clown’s face lit in a frown. The disc bounced back, and again he sent it flashing towards the gleaming pins, and they all shot out of sight, all but one, and the clown frowned at him. Lucky, plain stupid lucky this time. He fired the disc again, and it bounced back, and he fired it again, again, and the lights flashed and buzzers shrieked, and the clown’s face lit in alternating smiles and frowns and tears and grins, randomly, and he kept shooting the disc up the alley until the game went silent.

  Both hands on the wheel, the patrolman drove carefully. He chewed gum and wore sunglasses and he searched the road with the mechanical rhythm of radar.

  They drove through Schroeder and Taconite Harbor. It was a fine, slow drive.

  Perry was mildly and pleasurably drunk.

  Heat poured out of ducts below the dash. The police radio now and then buzzed.

  Perry felt fine. He was smiling and watching the scenery and feeling the heat and creeping alcohol.

  He watched the road bend towards him. The forest grew right to the shoulders.

  Inside the car, air-light dust drifted in waves, warm gentle currents. The sun was just to the west. The car hummed along at a steady even pace, and the patrolman was blind behind his sunglasses, and Perry felt fine.

  A blue Chevy swept by, heading in the opposite direction. The patrolman let up slightly on the accelerator, watched the car in his rear view mirror: “Sixty-five miles an hour,” he said.

  “What?” Perry half turned.

  “Sixty-five, sixty-seven miles an hour.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  They continued south.

  The woods finally opened and Perry saw the silver water tower of Sawmill Landing.

  They turned on to Route 18. They passed the drive-in theater, the Dairy Queen, Franz’s tavern, a meadow high with snow. They crossed Apple Street and turned into Mainstreet, the library, the first houses, the stone foundation of the town’s first bank. It was a bright busy Saturday. They passed the farm extension office and Perry looked at it with the dull disinterest of a tourist. The venetian blinds were partly closed, but he saw the outline of his desk and the filing cabinets. The town was a jumble of artifacts. The patrolman slowed to twenty-five miles an hour, and the car glided unseen to the far side of town. Snow lay in great melting heaps along the streets. Listlessly, the road twisted along the lake shore. The patrolman smiled under his sunglasses and said it was a nice little town. Perry nodded and watched the trees go by.

  Grace was waiting on the porch. She took his arm and he bent and let her kiss him, then he kissed her cheek. He saw her hair and a fast image of her eyes.

  The patrolman stood holding his skis. His eyes were far away behind his sunglasses. Perry took the skis and the officer touched his cap and said so long and walked with long strides to his car and drove away. At the end of the lane he honked twice.

  They went inside. The place was dark. The carpets were soft. They stood in the kitchen. Grace made coffee and together they listened to it percolate and bubble and drain down. Then he grinned with a genuine relief and embarrassment. “Harvey’s all right,” he finally said. “They’ve got him in a hospital down in Duluth. Took him out by helicopter. I guess we can drive down to visit him tomorrow.”

  They drank coffee standing up. Perry leaned against the counter. The kitchen curtains were drawn. He grinned and looked up and Grace looked away. “Well. There’s nothing I can say. I … Harvey’s okay and I’m okay.”

  “What about you, Paul?” She was whispering.

  “I’m okay.” He saw her completely. “I’m fine, really. It’s dumb, isn’t it?”

  She opened the curtains. “I better make something. You must be famished.”

  “I’m really … Okay, eggs or something. I’m fine. I tried calling you. I called quite a few times.”

  “I was out shopping.”

  “Oh.”

  Then they went to the living room. Perry sat with her on the sofa. After a while she took his hand. “I don’t want to explain it all now,” he said.

  “That’s fine. That’s fine now.”

  “I want to rest.”

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know you do.”

  Blood Moon

  That spring, Harvey took a fancy to gin. In the evenings, sitting by the fire or on the porch, they drank gin fizzes or gin and tonic. All through April, they drank gin. Harvey bought a crate of limes and filled a cabinet with expensive gin, and Addie would mix the drinks in half-gallon jugs and they would all sit and drink and plan f
or summer.

  Harvey wanted to leave Minnesota. And he wanted everyone to leave with him. For a while he talked about Boston, then he talked about Key West, then about Seattle but eventually he settled on Nassau and stuck with it, reasoning and cajoling and orating with his special flair and whimsy. The more gin he drank, the more persuasive and beguiling he became. He talked in broad colorful images. Illusive pictures: blue water, warm skies, fans spinning slowly on lofty hotel ceilings. Deep-sea fishing, golf and tennis, fine tans and good health and shining teeth and lovely women and adventure.

  He did not talk about the long days of being lost. The same way he never talked about the war, or how he lost his eye, or other bad things. He would not talk about it. “Yes, we’ll go to Nassau,” he would say instead. “Where it’s warm. By God, we’ll have us a lovely time, won’t we? Buy a sailboat and sail the islands, see the sights, sleep at night on the beaches. Doesn’t it sound great?”

  “What about typhoons?”

  “By Gawd!” he would grin. “I hope so! We’ll hold tight under the weather. Just think about it, will you? Buy us a house with an open courtyard and colored bricks and palm trees, and we’ll chip in for an air conditioner, and we’ll drink rum out of big kegs, through straws and we’ll swim, and we’ll go to native dances, and we’ll fish the sea dry. We’ll do it, we will.”

  “At least,” said Addie, “you can’t very well get yourself lost on an island.”

  Harvey would shrug. “No imagination.”

  “How about a holiday out to California?” said Grace.

  “Too easy.”

  “Such a scout,” cooed Addie.

  “I thought I was a pirate?”

  “No,” she grinned. “Now you’re a great frontier scout.” She laughed. “Like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, you know. Never get lost, always on track, a real woodsman. A scout.”

  “What about California?” Grace said. “Whatever you can do in Nassau you can do there, and it’s closer and not so expensive and we can come back.”

  “Exactly!” Harvey crowed. “Come back, come back. The idea is to go and not come back. Just go.”

  “To Nassau!” cried Addie, hoisting high her glass. “Friends forever.”

  “You might stop teasing. I’m serious about it.”

  “Actually,” Addie said, “I understand that Nassau is positively crawling with creeps now. You know? Real creeps. Crooks and gamblers and politicians and students and people who never bathe.”

  “We’ll drive them out.”

  “Hooray,” Addie said. “Hooray!” she shouted. “Hooray for Nassau and Harvey and a bloodbath!”

  Like history, he thought. He thought.

  Or histories. Mawkishly the same, as repetitive as a church rhyme.

  A job, though. A preacher, perhaps. Like the old man. Return to Damascus Lutheran, filled with new religion, sparkling ice insight seen on the road to Damascus Lutheran, delayed and detoured by years of mawkish melancholy. Wear the old man’s vestments. Put on the garb in the attic, and be a man. And preach neither salvation nor love, preach only endurance to be ended by the end.

  He was getting fat again.

  A kind of mushy, nervous atrophy that settled in like a disease, and he could see it in round numbers on the bathroom scale. Sleeping, eating, television and Harvey’s expensive gin.

  He was defenseless.

  He had until the end of June to phase out his county operations, but the deadline only added to the sleepy edginess. So he took his time. Cleaned out the files, working slowly and systematically, preparing stacks of paper work which he tied into neat bundles to be either burned or stored in boxes for shipment to Duluth. Without planning or forethought, he was going through a motion that would sooner or later make its own decision. On one productive Thursday afternoon he stacked four years’ worth of futile farm loan applications, carried them to the incinerator and burned them up without regret. It even made sense.

  A job, he thought. Preacher, guide, confidant, teller of winter tales, saved from the deep forest.

  Near the middle of May, he bought new glasses. For more than three months he had gone squinting under the illusion that he no longer needed them, and while there were no ill effects, Grace kept pestering until one sunny day he mistook the ditch for his own driveway. Next day he got the glasses. They were fancy wire-rims. “You look older,” Grace said. “Like a professor.”

  “A preacher?”

  “No,” she said. “Like a teacher. They make you look wise.”

  “I am wise,” he said.

  “Tell me something wise, then. Explain everything to me.”

  “You want a child,” he said wisely.

  “Yes?”

  “You want love and a warm home and a child. You want serenity. You want a loving husband,” he said.

  “Yes!”

  “Patience, then,” he said wisely.

  And she had patience. It was as though nothing had changed or ever would change, and partly she was right. In the winter, in the blizzard, there had been no sudden revelation, and things were the same, no epiphany or sudden shining of light to awaken and comfort and make happy, and things were the same, the old man was still down there alive in his grave, frozen and not dead, and in the house the cold was always there, except for patience and Grace and the pond, which were the same, everything the same. Harvey was quiet. Like twin oxen struggling in different directions against the same old yoke, they could not talk, for there was only the long history: the town, the place, the forest and religion, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance.

  The days of waiting were quiet. Grace attended him with love, and they drank gin on the porch and listened to Harvey’s dreams and Addie’s teasing, and they were a comfortable waiting band, knowing it would change, but knowing they would not see the change, but rather the effects.

  The new glasses sometimes gave him headaches, even dizzy spells. At night the glasses would seem to emit their own special rays, millions of dots of hard white light, and he would be suddenly back in the forest, looking into the cold sky and seeing the universe with such horrible and chaotic brilliance that he got sick. On Memorial Day, there was a parade. Harvey decided to participate.

  “You’re being a dumb scout,” Addie teased, but it did no good. Grace ironed his army greens and they drove together into town. Harvey held a fifth of gin in his lap. “What this town needs for its parade is a genuine war hero,” he kept saying. Perry parked in front of the bank and Harvey dashed up the street to where the parade was forming. The sky was dark and it was going to rain. Perry and Grace and Addie had coffee in the Confectionery. They sat in a booth and watched the clouds mass. Perry ordered cream pie.

  “Positively fat”; Addie said. “I won’t go to the badlands with any fat man, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  “All the better, then.”

  “Such a day. It’s depressing. Look, there’s Jud. Look at him.”

  Jud Harmor was standing all alone in the middle of the street. His straw hat was in place and his hands were on his hips. Alternately, he was scanning the gray sky and the parade route.

  “Poor Jud.”

  “Jud’s all right. Poor Harvey, you mean. Where does he get these obstinate ideas about parades?”

  “He’s a character, all right. He does look dashing in his uniform, though,” Grace said.

  “Positively silly.”

  “Addie.”

  “I must stop teasing.” She frowned at Perry. “But really! That pie. You’re becoming a can of Crisco, really.”

  They drank coffee until noon. Then they heard the drums booming and they went out to the street.

  Clouds were rolling and massing and the air was cold. Grace sent Perry to the car for a jacket. It was a dreary, nothing kind of day. Perry wished he were sleeping.

  The parade started at the northern end of Mainstreet and went south, ending at the cemetery for the commemorative services. Half the
town lined the street to watch the other half march. Addie stood with her arms folded, smiling. She wore a skirt and a T-shirt. A few drops of rain fell as the drums took up the cadence, and Perry stood between Grace and Addie. Addie grabbed his hand like a child. “Here, look. Here they come,” she said.

  The high-school band led the parade. Perry recognized some of the kids. Grace recognized all of them, and she waved and called out their names. Even with the clouds and chill, most of the town was there. There was respect and polite applause and civic pride.

  The Lake County VFW commander rode by in a new Chevy. He waved and Grace waved back.

  Then a troop of World War II veterans. Lars Nielson and many others. They wore their old uniforms, olive drab and khaki and navy white and flier brown and blue. Many of the coats were open at the belly. Two of them held rifles over their shoulders. A third carried the flag.

  Then the junior high band.

  Then the American Legion float.

  Then the DFL and Republican county chairmen, riding in separate cars, both waving.

  Then the Korean War veterans, then the Girl Scouts.

  Then Harvey. Marching alone in his uniform, following the troop of green Girl Scouts.

  The Girl Scouts carried a large banner and sang campfire songs. Harvey was behind them chanting “A-left. A-left. A-left, right, left.” He marched erect, the only veteran of Vietnam. He did not seem much different from all the others, except that he fit his uniform and he was alone.

  Addie shouted and gave him wild applause. Harvey went by without looking. “Such a scout,” she cried. “Now that. That is what I call a frontier scout.”

  Jud Harmor finished the parade. He, too, marched alone. He carried a sword in his right hand. On his chest dangled a single faded battle ribbon. He wore instead of his straw hat a World War I doughboy’s helmet.

  “Good Lord,” Perry said.

  “We haven’t heard the last of him,” Addie said.

  Grace took Perry’s hand. He was holding the hands of two women.

  “Let’s get a drink somewhere,” he said. “Where’s Harvey?” Then he saw him coming back up the street.