Esther Stories

by Peter Orner

  Talk about embarrassing Degardelles if he walked out of there looking like this. He thought of what Lance would say if he could see him now. You know the real miracle here, Frank, is that you haven’t gotten all that uglier. And it was then that he prayed, for the first time, without watching himself and laughing. Prayed that his brother, though he loved to inflict pain, had felt none. Frank prayed standing, still gripping the sink, still watching the siege in his face. Lance changing a tire too close to the road and the trucker, who maybe dozed for a split second or maybe didn’t see him, edged a sliver to the right and, without even nicking the Impala, ended Lance at seventeen. He prayed for Lance and the trucker who’d scooped him up and brought the bloody mass that was his brother to the emergency room. When the trucker heard that Lance was gone, he’d stormed out of the hospital and dumped his cargo into the parking lot, kicking and dragging boxes, ranting, How late, Mr. Haskins? How fucking late am I now, Mr. Keith Haskins? He went on for hours, whacking away at boxes and cursing Haskins. His mother always insisted that the trucker’s performance in the parking lot was grief over himself, over the potential loss of his job, his license, his reputation. She said she forgave him, but that didn’t mean she had to believe him. I’m sorry to say it, she said, but nobody gets that crazy over a stranger. But Frank had an idea then—and he was only twelve when all this happened—that his mother was a fool. And here was that trucker now staring out from his own bloated face, still furious, still shouting—on his way somewhere then, now going nowhere, still in the parking lot hysterical.

  Lemoyne kicked the door harder. Some other guys joined him. He heard Candice say, Maybe he knocked himself out like Frank Knipp did that time. What’s with the Franks? Maybe they should start pissing in the alley behind Daskell’s. And he heard Raymond shout: “You defrosting the tenderloin in there, Frank?” Somebody—it sounded like Cash Lorimer—asked why Candice didn’t just go and get the key, and Candice screamed, It bolts from the inside, dildo! Frank pinched the bulb of his oozing nose and tried to hold his breath. Raymond had once told him that there’s no real difference between faith and endurance. He talked about the waiting and the hoping after he got back from the Gulf, even though he’d confessed in a whisper to Frank that working the computer on the USS Saratoga was about as dangerous as dealing blackjack on the gambling boat in Bettendorf. “Even had women commanders in tight pants. Not like my Uncle Telly getting his ass cheeks shot off at Chu Lai.” He thought of Nancy’s fearless gobble-gobble. How there was always the chance she’d circle around to a point. So he continued to watch himself as the old familiar silence engulfed his ears and the racket they were making outside the door became low and faintly melodious, and then it got so soft he couldn’t hear it anymore, like the moment just after a song fades for good but somehow it’s still there. And even later, when their pounding drifted as far away as his brother, he recalled the shouts, their concern, their alarm, with fondness.

  County Road G

  HER NAME was Clare Warnoc and she was from Superior, Wisconsin, and she was out in the country on her way to visit her sister in Solan Springs. His name—it came out later—was Vern Troyer, of Vernon Troyer Trucking, Ashland, Wisconsin. The discovery happened roughly like this: Clare, whose vision had always been better than her sister’s (Clare told her bridge friends back in Superior that Evelyn wouldn’t have noticed the murdered man if he had dropped out of the sky and crashed into the hood of her Fairmont), was driving west on County Road G, past Score’s Bait, past the Norwood Golf and Driving Range, when, just before the north entrance to the Nekoosa Industrial Forest, she spotted, through a stand of bare poplars, a pair of blue-jeaned legs and booted feet hanging out of what even from that distance she could see was a bathtub. Clare said she saw the whole picture all at once like that. She said it was one of those rare times when your first view of something from a ways away is right on target. She pulled over, and a closer look verified it: a dead man in a discarded tub. Then Clare, who, unlike her sister Evelyn, had never waited out a shy moment in her life, immediately reached down into the thick green murk of a three-nights-ago rain and yanked up the man’s wrist. Dead and slimy as a trout in a plastic bag. After that Clare stood for a couple of moments and examined the dead man’s face before walking without hurry back to her car. When she arrived at Evelyn’s, Clare called the Douglas County sheriff, a man named Furf, a man with an aching back and sweaty feet, a man who at first didn’t believe her story.

  The circumstances of the murder were reported in the Duluth Herald-Tribune, the Superior Telegraph, and the local Spooner paper. The crime was categorized in the police report as domestic in nature. Vern Troyer was involved with someone else’s wife. Her name was Carrie Somskins. The husband was a hothead named Richard. They lived in Hayward, but Carrie had gone to high school with Troyer back in the late seventies. They’d gone to the junior prom together. In April 1988, Carrie and Troyer bumped into each other at the pumps at the Holiday Station in Iron River. They had both been struggling for a while. Carrie’s marriage had never been happy; Troyer was already divorced. It didn’t take a lot to rekindle the high school flames. One thing led to another, and before either of them could catch a breath, the thing was full-blown. Then came crazy talk of Carrie filing for divorce and them moving to the Twin Cities, starting over. They were never serious about it, but that didn’t keep them from talking their dreams. And writing them. One of Carrie’s kids, while raiding his mother’s purse for Tic Tacs, found a letter Troyer had written to Carrie. The boy was loyal to his father.

  No one has been able to explain why Richard Somskins stuffed Vern Troyer’s body in an abandoned bathtub only seventeen miles from his house, although more than a few people in Spooner and Hayward and Solan Springs speculated at the time that it had a lot to do with the contents of that letter, which was never found. Richard went mute after his arrest. Refused to say a word to his lawyers, the cops, anybody. That made the papers, too. The “dumbstruck killer” is what they called him in the Telegraph. In court, he just sat there slack-faced and refused to speak to the judge or even enter a plea. His lawyer tried to have him declared insane, but there was no law that said you were nuts if you didn’t talk. When Carrie brought the kids to the county jail in Ashland on the eve of his conviction, he smiled at each of them—including Carrie—but still refused to say even a single word.

  There’s this also. Four years after she discovered Vern Troyer’s body, on December 20, 1994, Clare Warnoc spent the last ten minutes of her conscious life talking to a nurse named Meryl Dudziak at Superior Memorial Hospital. Clare told Meryl something she had never told her bridge friends, or even Evelyn, who had passed on in ’92. She told Meryl about Vern Troyer’s face, how it was sticking out of the water so that she could see his eyes and nose. Vern Troyer’s face, purple and fat-cheeked, but kind-looking, too. She could see that for certain. And her instincts were right. People said at the time (and the local Spooner paper reported) that Vern Troyer was known for never being serious, and so, considered always dependable. Never got excited. He’d never turn you down is what a lot of people said. The man would laugh if you asked him to haul scrap at the last minute, laugh because you bothered to ask, as if it would be any trouble…Clare Warnoc told Meryl Dudziak that for a moment she mistook the corpse’s bloated face for her brother Jed’s. Jed, who was killed in the war, dead at twenty-five, fighting Mussolini in Africa. Jed with his stupid jokes and his wild, hairy, pinching fingers. Jed whom she hadn’t laid eyes on since 1943. Jed, who kissed her and swapped her on the head with his flimsy hat. Clare gripped Meryl’s thin wrist and told her that out on that road, in front of that tub, she thought she’d found her brother. I’ve never been a woman to fantasize or make up stories. You probably know that about me already, Meryl dear. But my heart got crushed out there on that road, because for a half a second I wanted to shake him and scream, All these years, Jeddy. All these years.

  At the Motel Rainbow

  SET BACK beyond the highway trees
, the ruins of the Motel Rainbow five miles west of Iron River, Wisconsin. In its day a perfectly respectable place to stop and sleep for the night, but now long abandoned. Since ’91, when the owners, Duane and Theresa Fjelstad, split up for good and the mortgage stopped getting paid. Neither of them wanted or could afford to run the place alone, and they couldn’t live together anymore. Fourteen years and poof, and few people even noticed the Rainbow was no longer, except for a couple of fishermen from Escanaba who’d made a ritual of staying there during the week they fished the Brule. The two of them had camped out in the parking lot the year they found their favorite motel closed. The state bank in Hayward has sat on the land ever since, waiting it out for some white-knight developer with plans for a minimart. Or better yet, for a casino-happy tribe with state authorization to construct a warehouse of slot machines like the one in Black River.

  But for now the place remains. One long, narrow, red brick building, with the old manager’s office in the middle painted yellow. A wooden sign with a rainbow out front. A broken neon NO VACANCY/VACANCY light under it. Out of one window hangs the remains of a curtain, twisted like a girl’s braid. And by the road a wind-mangled cardboard FOR SALE sign leaning crookedly out of the ground. The place is mostly boarded up, but somebody did a poor job of it and there are a few gaps, entry points. Local kids from Chetek High School climb through the exposed broken windows and smoke dope and drink in the old rooms. Although most of the rooms are empty now, there is one room—12C—that still has a ratty mattress and a broken television.

  Wade brought his own sheets from home. They didn’t fit—the mattress was a queen—but Sue wrapped herself up in them to avoid touching the mattress with her skin and laughed, saying he could at least have taken her to a place that wasn’t condemned. Then she kissed him and told him that she didn’t care, that she’d never care, and that she’d always remember this place like it was the new Ramada in Duluth. Wade was proud of himself, proud that he’d remembered to bring everything. (Sue always busted his balls because he forgot his wallet that time he took her to the Chinese place in Washburn.) Condoms, beer, blankets, sheets, tape player, flashlight, C batteries, double A’s, a magazine so that if Sue got bored he could read to her. They didn’t wait very long. They were both so excited, they went right ahead with it—Wade on top, and the two of them gripping each other’s shoulders as if the other was the seat in front on a crashing plane. It was over quicker than either of them had dreamed, especially Sue, but it was great, and actually different from everything else. And after, Sue squeezed her legs around him and nibbled his chin and told him she loved him a lot and how weird that was considering he was such a complete flake. Wade, who’d forgotten to turn on the music before they started, reached to the floor and found the Play button. The tape was a mix he’d made for the occasion, with Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” and mellow U2. It was around 9:45 and finally getting dark. This was a Tuesday in the middle of July. Tuesday night, the night Wade had scoped out, the night nobody ever went over to hang out at the Rainbow.

  Wade hadn’t thought of bringing a candle, so he stood up and tied the flashlight (using the rubber strap attachment) to a rusty fixture above the bed. The whole time he was fiddling, Sue kept leaping up and kissing his stomach, tugging at the little hairs above his belly button with her front teeth. When he had the light rigged up, he pushed it so that it circled, the beam exposing the room. One of the two big windows was boarded up, as was the door. The other big window was kicked out (that’s how they’d got in), and the small window above the door was also broken. That one probably by a rock, just for the hell of it; the hole in the glass was jagged, star-shaped. The TV was ancient, a big Zenith built into a large wooden case, a throwback to the time when TVs were more like furniture. The knobs were ripped off, and somebody had spray-painted SUCK across the screen. They were sixteen and they had their own room and the flashlight twirled above them. Wade held Sue’s elbows. They squinted at each other, both their expressions a combination of pride, fear, and embarrassment at the line they’d crossed, because now even just walking around the halls at school would be different. Everybody said it was no big deal, and everybody lied, and though they both knew there was no reason to look back at those virgin days, there was equally no point in not reveling in this moment. So they lingered in the fact of sex. The walking around school would come later. They would learn that swagger soon enough.

  “Are you going to tell Marcy?” Wade asked.

  Sue clucked her tongue. “You want me not to?” The flashlight above their heads stopped circling and now pointed straight down at them like a small spotlight.

  “I just wanted to know.”

  “No. Not for a while at least. She’s a total mouth.”

  Wade squeezed her elbows tighter. Giddiness kicked up his heartbeat. Everybody knowing. He didn’t say anything.

  “My stepdad thinks you’re a fuck-up and you probably won’t go to college,” Sue said.

  “Tell him next time I feel like mixing paint at Poplar Hardware for the rest of my life, I’ll give him a call.”

  “Okay,” Sue said, and kissed his ear. “I’ll tell him, peanut. And he’ll tell me he’s one-third owner of Poplar Hardware, a True Value subsidiary, and then he’ll say my little boyfriend’s afraid of real work.”

  “Tell him I’m going to college in California and then I’m going to drop out and just drive.”

  “Drive to Mexico, drive to Russia. Drive to damn Hawaii. You think you can drive everywhere and gas money’s going to flow out the glove compartment like a cash machine.”

  “You want to come with?”

  “To Hawaii, yes. And to Jamaica, maybe.” Sue paused and looked at him straight on. “Wade, this place doesn’t even have a toilet.”

  Wade undid the flashlight, and they both pulled on underwear and shoes and stepped out through the window. The temperature had dropped into the sixties, and Wade felt a little wind on his arms. The moon glowed behind the clouds; the night was pale and starless. Sue walked over to the pines and squatted. Wade pointed the light at her. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said, and he swung the light at the row of dead rooms and the yellow boarded-up manager’s office in the middle. Then he walked around the side to check on his car and to take a piss himself. The car was tucked into the trees where he’d left it. He rubbed his trunk. Also back there was an old swimming pool. As he pissed, Wade looked at the hole in the ground and the flimsy and trampled plastic fence that surrounded it. Old danger signs in the mud. He thought of people actually splashing around in that pool, and now look at it. An eyesore, dirty rainwater at the bottom. A couple of times Wade and his friends went to the empty pool to skateboard, that year he skateboarded. He touched his car again before walking back around front. Sue met him in the parking lot. “Next time let’s go real camping, or at least to a place with a real bathroom, like a Yogi Bear. My dad used to take us to a Yogi Bear. The one near Minong. God, did that place suck, but at least it had bathrooms. We could go to a camp-ground next time, Wade.”

  “I thought you liked this place—Watch!” Wade turned the flashlight on his own face and shook it hard, moved his head a little. His face blanched and eerie in the handmade strobe.

  “Cut it out.”

  “But you said before you liked this place. That you’d always remember it.”

  “I didn’t say I liked it, Wade. I said I’d remember it. I’ll remember that it was strange.”

  “But it’s ours,” he said, and he locked his arms around her hips and started walking backward across the gravel, pulling her with him. Sue was taller, so he walked on tiptoe and lodged his chin in the scoop of her shoulder as he steered them back to the room.

  Wade rerigged the flashlight, and they talked some more about Marcy. Sue said she screwed around with Kenny Heetz and Avy Thompson on the same night. She told him that Cindy Balter got another DUI. “They’re going to take her license away, and I say good. She deserves it. She’s already hit two deer this sum
mer.” And they talked about work—they were both lifeguards at Lake Hulbert Beach—and how it was so boring because there was never anybody to save.

  “I mean I’d save a dog,” Sue said.

  They’d both been sitting in the sun all day. That and the excitement of going ahead and doing what they’d been whispering about since April made them both fall asleep just after eleven.

  An hour later Wade woke up in the drainy low-battery light. Sue didn’t move when Wade stood up to flick off the flashlight. He nuzzled closer to her in the now darker but now somehow more familiar room. A shadowy little hideout, like the old fort behind Jay Nichols’s father’s place. That fort was really an old shed swallowed by weeds. He and Jay had painted LOYAL ORDER OF THE ODDFELLOWS #561 in black on the door. Wade had always loved abandoned places more than where people lived. Those collapsed barns along County B between Brule and Lake Nebagamon. The burned-out factories in Superior at the end of Tower Avenue, where the strip clubs are.

  Once in Ino, right off 53 heading to Washburn/Bayfield, Wade found a crumbling boarded-up house with a piano. It was just sitting there in the middle of the front room, balanced on supports, because someone had bothered to rip out the floorboards but they didn’t take the old piano. He’d stood there and doodled “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the corroding keys for a while, thinking about all the long-gone fingers that had once touched them. This abandoned motel room was like that house with the piano, a place you could have as yours while you were there, and not because you’d paid somebody for it. Just like those woods behind Jay Nichols’s father’s place, or even the lake—the real lake, Superior, not Hulbert—because it’s nobody’s and everybody’s. There for the taking if you’ve got the balls and can forget about money once in a while. So he’d taken this room—12C—and here they were. Jesus, Jay Nichols has been gone three years. His mother moved to South Carolina and took Jay with her. Better jobs down there. Or were better jobs. They’d missed whatever boom there was. The eighties are dead and buried, Wade’s father had said, even though there was still a year to go when they left in ’89. Wade’s father was suspicious of anyone who left northern Wisconsin. He said Jay’s mother had to be running from something, because this place is as good as any other place in the country, only colder sometimes…Christ, Wade thought, anybody else, like Avy Thompson, that chronic gloater, would have done it outside, on the beach at Anakoosh Point, or at the mouth of the Brule. But out there you risked a fisherman or an old woman waddling by in the morning and the whole moment ruined. Here they could sleep and wake up in the morning when they wanted. Sure, some of the hideousness of the place would shout at their morning eyes, but who would care? They’d done it. A Tuesday night melting into a summer Wednesday. Neither of them had to work till 12:30.