by L. L. Enger
“Nash. Why didn’t you stick with baseball?”
The lawyer’s eyes opened. They were watery as a child’s. “I didn’t have a curve, Gun. You remember.”
“That’s right.” Gun shrugged. “Well, you’ve got a beauty now.”
13
Gun drove out to the Devitz place after leaving Nash Sidney’s office, but Bowser wasn’t home. Gun knew where to find him.
Harrelson’s Scrub was an unhappy 360-acre piece of Ojibway County that had gone unlived on since the early 1950s. That was when Margie Harrelson, as Gun had heard it, had finally killed herself with the pure mean hard work of farming land meant to remain untilled. Margie left the land to the county when she died. Her son didn’t want it.
Gun slowed the old Ford and turned onto the township gravel that ran along the south border of the Scrub. Margie’s house was as dead as she was, having been taken back by rampant willows. Gun stopped the truck and stepped out.
It was colder than it should have been. A gray north wind blew moody clouds over the Scrub, clouds white and the color of dead ashes. The willows and a few malnourished oaks bent toward Gun in the wind, and
the brushy trees beneath them quivered. Gun’s hair, white mixed with what was left of blond, flattened against his forehead. There was no open space on the Scrub that he could see, no sign that this land had ever been cleared for the plow, and there was no sign of Bowser. Gun reached back behind the seat of the Ford and pulled out a shirt of nappy brown wool.
Walking was difficult in the Scrub, but the wind was cut. Gun pushed his way through brush and grass that reached to his waist, and ducked his head from branch slaps. Down at his feet something that felt like barbed wire caught and ripped at his ankle. Gun reached down through thick growth and pulled up a reaching bramble. There was blood on the spines. Gun considered a swear word, then heard through the tangle of woods and weeds the sound of bursting glass.
“Bowser,” Gun said, not too loud because the sound of glass had been very close.
“Present,” said Bowser’s voice. There was crunching in the brush and hard breathing, and then the Scrub parted and Bowser appeared. He was firm and fat, bearded and drunk. There was a mostly empty bottle in his left hand, bourbon, and a homemade slingshot in his right. “Happy day,” he said.
“You’re here.” Gun sighed. His ankle smarted and he could feel his Pony runner absorbing blood. Bowser waved his bottle in invitation and Gun went with him through the thicket.
Bowser had set up a dark green ice-fishing shack near an old stock pond in the middle of the Scrub. The pond was brown, even in May. Bowser slapped the side of the fish house with the slingshot. “Built this lady in ‘sixty-seven,” he said. “With the old man. He by-God knew how to put things together.” Bowser opened the plywood door and slammed it shut. “These many years and still as solid as earth. It’s my goddamned home now and I’m glad of it.”
“You still own the home place. Why aren’t you there?”
“I don’t own nothing.” Bowser leaned back with the bottle and swallowed with his eyes shut. “The old man thought Hedman was doing him a favor, leaving us half an acre and the house. Shit.”
Gun looked around at the Scrub. “Might be better than living out here.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Bowser.
“I just heard about your dad,” Gun said. “I’m sorry.”
Bowser’s eyes went to Gun’s wounded ankle. “Hurt yourself,” he said. He lifted the bottle toward Gun. “Medicine.”
“Thanks.” The bourbon was cheap and scraped a little on the way down, but the day was cool and Gun welcomed it. He sat down on an upturned five-gallon pail and looked at the ankle. The bramble had snagged him just above the shoe, drilled a neat hole in the flesh between the bone and forward tendon. The hole was deep and clean. He crossed the ankle over his good leg to keep it high, stop the bleeding.
Bowser had opened the fish house again and was sitting down in the narrow doorway. His big thighs were squeezed by the doorframe, and he leaned forward to give his shoulders room. Gun realized Bowser must have to enter the fish house sideways.
“Mr. Pedersen, say, have another and pass it on back.”
Gun tilted another mouthful of bourbon. There was a splash of liquor still left in the bottle. Gun tossed it to Bowser.
“Ummm,” said Bowser. He finished the bourbon and poked his little finger into the bottleneck. With strain he stood from the doorway and walked, the bottle swinging on his pinky, to a straight thin sapling not six feet tall. He slid the bottle neck down over the tip, and its weight bent the little tree south, with the wind. “For later,” he said.
Gun didn’t understand, and didn’t ask.
“So you’re here out of kindness?” Bowser said it without sarcasm. “You’re sorry about the old man, and maybe feeling bad after kicking my ass the other day?”
Gun smiled. Bowser had faults, but possessed the gift of truthful utterance. “Sorry about your dad, yes. Sorry he died without getting your land back from Lyle Hedman.”
“People don’t get things back from Lyle Hedman.”
“Could be you’ll be the first. You’ve heard about the change in plans? For the Loon Mall?”
“Sure.” Bowser didn’t seem interested. “He nailed my hind end, then he nailed yours. I felt bad, hearing about it.”
“Well. Old Lyle’s not going to need your place now.”
“You’re thinking I should take the money that skinny piece of dog shit gave my old man, go on over to the Hedman place and try and buy it all back.”
“You could give it a shot.” Gun reached for the Pony runner he’d taken off. “Worst thing Hedman can do is say no. Or jack up the price.”
Bowser put his chin down into his neck and snorted, raking his throat for phlegm. He found some and sent it out into the Scrub. Then he turned and went around the corner of the fish house.
When he came back he was carrying a green Cole-man cooler. It matched the paint on the fish house. Bowser opened the cooler and brought up a sealed bottle of bourbon. He peered through it at the sky for an instant before twisting off the cap and sampling.
“You know, Mr. Pedersen,” Bowser said, “I don’t think I want that land back.”
Gun finished tying on the Pony runner. He stood up. The ankle was stiff but held him upright.
“I think Hedman can keep it and use it or not use it, may he land with a bump in Hell,” Bowser said. He put the bottle down in the grass and withdrew the slingshot from his back pocket.
Gun waited. The swallows of bourbon were gone from his blood and the wind was stiff and chill.
“Because,” Bowser said, searching at his feet for a stone and finding one, “if that bastard puts up his goddamn mall, on your land or mine, no matter, you’re not going to see my great white butt anywhere within fifty miles of it. I’ll go north, or I’ll go west like my old man. But you won’t see me here.” Bowser had the stone fitted now and pointed the slingshot almost without looking. He pointed it at the bottle hanging at the tip of the swaying sapling. He pulled the stone almost all the way back to where the black whiskers began on his cheek, and then he let it go. It flew with a bulletlike trajectory, passed through the waistcoat of the dapper gentleman on the bourbon label and dropped pieces of bottle into the grass. The sapling sprang upward, pointing to heaven.
Bowser tossed the slingshot onto the cooler and looked at Gun.
“The bare-naked truth,” he said.
14
The drive home was cool and whippy with the windows down. Gun could see a mountain range of sea-colored clouds in the rearview mirror of the old F-l50. The clouds were diagonally split by a silver shaft where the mirror was cracked. During the hunting season of ’73, when the truck was only two years old, Gun’s 30-06 Springfield had rocked out of its back-window saddle on a bad pothole. It bounced forth unloaded, gave Gun a brief crack on the skull, and spun its smooth trigger guard into the mirror. Gun hadn’t fixed it since then, an
d had never again put a firearm into the rack. Now he slid them under the seat.
A mile west of Stony on old County 70 Gun shifted down and turned right on the lake road. He followed it through trees that leaned in to cover the sky: tall black-bruised birches, second generation pines from cones tromped on by waves of loggers, slender aspens brush-stroking in the light wind. Little rips and tears
of sky between leaves were blue and getting bluer, the color swelling with humidity the way Minnesota afternoons do before a night rain. Gun slowed the truck and smelled the air like a hound.
Home was left off the township road and three quarters of a mile down a double-rutted truck trail. Weeds exploded from between the ruts, giving the trail a wild look that Gun liked. Cars full of cotton-print tourists didn’t drive in to ask directions.
He had left the right rear burner of the gas stove on. The kitchen was warm and smelled like a winter evening, and mixed with the rising humidity, it was uncomfortable. Gun put out the flame and slid up all the windows that weren’t already open. Then he went to the bedroom to change.
When he reentered the kitchen to make lunch, he was wearing cutoff Levi’s white from use and a blue short-sleeve work shirt with the armpits ripped. A year ago Mazy had raided her father’s dresser and used the shirt to wax her 1968 MG. Gun, in turn, had raided the trash at six o’clock on a Tuesday morning to recover it before Gurney plowed in with his garbage truck. There were still bruises of pink paint dust on the shirt. Gun had saved it for its ripped armpits. They allowed him to swing a bat freely, or a shovel.
There was little food. Gun opened the dank cabinet under the sink and found some potatoes sending colorless shoots through the holes in the plastic sack. There was Dinty Moore beef stew in the cupboard, and several cans of ravioli. Gun opened the refrigerator and saw a lump of dark cheese in Saran Wrap, a carton of eggs, half a gallon of yellow buttermilk. He sat on the kitchen table in his shorts, holding the refrigerator open with an extended Pony runner.
He tapped the fridge door closed and lifted himself off the table, the backs of his legs sticking to the varnish. The air was thickening. He went to the door and stepped out, bending to feel the untrimmed foxtails that angled out from the foundation. They slipped squealing through his fingers. He ripped out a handful and tossed them up, and they drifted down in the direction of North Dakota. Rain tonight. Gun went back to the refrigerator and took out the carton of buttermilk and the eggs. He also broke from the freezer a block of ice cubes which he dropped with much snapping and splitting into a gallon jar of tea the color of sunsets. He put the tea by the door. Then he poured most of the buttermilk into a multi-buttoned Hamilton Beach blender, cracked in four of the eggs, and frothed it all using the button farthest to the right. He took the pitcher off the blender, retrieved the ice tea, and carried both out of the house and down the hill.
Gun’s stone boathouse was a project only a few days old. It would be a replacement for an earlier one, a husky slabwood structure he had built to defend his open Alumacraft from storms and Stony Lake breakers. Its performance had been perfect for a decade until this spring. A tight nor’easter had marshaled itself high over innocent farms in Ontario, taken a dip down and to the left over International Falls, and then, gaining speed, had suddenly dropped out of a dark cloud and come riding over Stony Lake like a chariot, blowing the tops of the waves into grapeshot spray. With his back to the heat of an April fireplace, Gun had stood at the window and watched. It took the wind and waves three minutes to put the boathouse asunder, and when the air was free of slabwood, he had gone out and yanked the dented Alumacraft up into the outfield grass.
Now there was nothing on the lakefront but a clean square hole. Gun had sandbagged a small dry area where the hole opened out onto the shore, and had spaded out and poured eighteen-inch footings. The
old boathouse hadn’t had the benefit of a solid anchor. This time he would build on rock. Not for himself— he wasn’t going to be here. Probably not for anybody. But it made him feel useful, defiant. And it was a good habit: finish what you start.
A hump of spray-cleaned lake stones lay on the grass next to the hole, stones that Gun had weeded from a walleye bed not a quarter mile out. Gun figured there were enough rocks for four feet of solid wall on three sides before he’d run out. Again he sniffed the air for wetness.
He went to the small shed, where bits of scrap slabwood waited for the chainsaw, and came back with a hundred pounds of cement dust in a bag over his shoulder. In his other hand was a large steel bucket containing a triangular trowel. He ripped open the string-stitched bag and poured about half the dust into a fifty-five-gallon drum between the footings, then added buckets of water from the lake and stirred and slapped at the gray mud until it was flabby and made noise like the quicksand in old Tarzan movies. As he moved the trowel over the footings, laying a base for the bottom tier of stones, Gun felt the first stiffening of the small east breeze.
She’s at home, waiting for me. It made Gun’s mouth sour to think of Geoff’s soft hands on her. Couldn’t be true. Was not true. He picked up one of the stones from the pile, hefted it to his shoulder, guessed its weight at twenty-five or thirty pounds, took three quick steps toward the water and heaved. The rock came down, thump, twenty yards out.
He had put down four layers of rock and forgotten his buttermilk and tea. He stood straight up between the growing walls, stripped away the soaked shirt and saw the pitcher and jar sweating to match his own skin. Careful not to disturb the newly bedded lakestone, he vaulted out of the hole and dispatched
more than half the buttermilk and egg mixture. It cooled and slightly sickened him, and he could feel his shoulder and neck muscles rock. He traded the pitcher for the gallon of tea, watery now. The cold jar balanced with a wholesome weight in Gun’s wide palm as he tilted it up. The sky was sinking down for an early night. Half the pile of rocks was still on the ground.
Back in the hole, Gun troweled thick mud between rocks and packed more rocks on top and beside, eyeing from the pile just the right stone to fit each circumstance. Mazy had helped him build the first boathouse when she was fifteen, reluctantly handing him nails to put between his teeth. Today she had not even been at the meeting where it was announced that her land would soon be dead and interred beneath cement and glass and tourists.
The rock pile disappeared a quarter of an hour before the cloudburst. It was enough time for Gun to take a mouthful of warm egg buttermilk, spit it away, swim once out to the walleye bed to rinse away the grit, and go inside to bed.
15
Tuesday came up light blue and warm, the blurring humidity washed out of the sky by what Gun estimated had been a two-inch downpour. The rain had muddied the walls and floor of Gun’s boathouse hole, but hadn’t damaged the mortar work. The gray cement had set up fast, and now held trails of silt and dirt between the rocks where the water had run. No more masonry for the present.
The grass and weeds soaked Gun’s tennis shoes as he walked to the infield. He kept the bat on his shoulder. He wanted it dry for contact. The pitching machine, tarped against the rain, had come through the storm honorably. With his free hand Gun undid the twine holding the tarp and pulled it into a heap behind the mound.
The machine undraped, wheels spinning, tripod legs quivering, a dozen baseballs counting down to blast-off, Gun waited patiently at home. On mornings this light he sometimes smote baseballs so far his eyes lost them in the general whiteness of the sky. More than thirty years ago he’d done the same thing in front of a major-league scout, who told him that frequent repetitions would earn him a substantial and enjoyable living. It turned out that way.
Now the machine ticked and trembled, and a ball was seized and spun toward home at big-league velocity. Gun swung and made slight contact, launching the ball nearly straight up. He counted a hang time of eight before the ball came down just back of the machine. The arm snapped again, and this time Gun sent a hard grass burner through the hole between third and short. It sent
up a thin cloud of spray that rainbowed briefly in the sunshine. Gun shook his head and twisted the bat in his hands. He jabbed his toe at the ground. Inhaled, kept his lungs full. The next pitch came in chest high, and the club end of the Hillerich and Bradsby met it hard, a fraction of an inch below center. The ball rose outward, lakebound. He tried to follow its course but the white morning air had sunspots. It was lost until the distant hock of belted water.
“I saw Jim Rice do that at Fenway once,” said Carol Long. She was standing in the weeds behind Gun and to the left. In the third-base dugout.
“Sweet heaven,” Gun said. “You’re early. Game doesn’t start till one.”
“I always come for batting practice.” Carol stepped out of the tall grass and into some that showed her ankles. She wore green spring walking shorts. “Go ahead,” she said. “Hit a few more.”
“I’ll hit later,” said Gun. The machine clicked and fired, and Gun held out the bat in an impromptu one-hand bunt. “Sometimes they get lost in the grass,” he explained.
“Or the lake,” said Carol.
Gun walked to the pitching machine and killed it
just before it kicked into another fling cycle. He turned to Carol, who was standing now in the region of the coach’s box. Her arms were crossed. Gun smiled. One season crossed arms had been a signal to steal. The next year it meant look out for the pickoff. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Should I be?”
She waved a legal-sized notebook. “I’m working on a story...”
“Ah, journalists.”
Carol uncrossed her arms now and started toward him. “I’ve lived in Stony nearly a month now and never seen the much-bespoken Gun Pedersen land,” she said. “Or not much of it.”
“You want to find out exactly what it is Hedman’s trying to trash.”
Carol had reached him at the pitching machine. There were a few thin leaves of pale wet grass sticking to her ankles, just above the sandals.