by M. M. Mayle
“Don’t know how he managed to put up with her shenanigans for so long.”
“Colin Elliot has an amazing capacity for love and he never gives up on anybody, least of all himself.” Nate recites as though from a prepared statement and recognizes the recitation as the probable key remark he’ll make to the media. With a change of tense it could also do nicely as the main theme of a eulogy. He shivers in the heavy coat when Bill indicates the stringing of lines is finished and he can climb down.
“You were askin’ if Audrey’s return here brought out any marching bands and the answer’s no,” Bill says. “She was more in a position to be scorned than worshiped, and anyone havin’ any doings with her was from the bad element, if you know what I mean.”
“Uh . . . Do you know if she was pregnant when she got here?” Nate says after they circle back to Aurora’s side of the wreckage.
“Can’t say as I do, but she coulda been cuz her belly’s still swole some.” Bill probes it with a gloved finger, the same one he uses to examine the metal shards protruding into the passenger compartment and the gore atop her torso. When he finishes these investigations he says nothing at first, just covers the hideous sight with one of the blankets.
“Wouldn’t do for the mister to come to and find that staring him in the face . . . well, not staring.” Bill gives another one of his mirthless one-syllable laughs and Nate reminds himself the guy is not a medical examiner, he’s only an Army medic from a long-ago army.
“Too bad about her head,” Bill says as he repositions a couple of the lights. “She was always so purty on the outside. Did you find the head yet? Sometimes they’re shot quite a ways from the scene when they come off like that, so clean and quick. If it’s any consoling, she didn’t feel nothin’.” And don’t worry yourself about it, we’ll find the head come sunup. Not likely a wolverine’s drug it off—hasn’t been a wolverine in the Wolverine State in two hundred years.” He gives another semi-laugh, a sound that could become seriously annoying if Nate hadn’t caught on early that it was intended to distract, to keep despair at bay a little longer.
“If I’d knowed I woulda brung the dog to sniff out the head,” Bill goes on. “I don’t think you said the extent of her injuries . . . or that you hadn’t found the head when you said she was dead . . . back at the house there.”
Nate listens for anything beyond mild admonishment, anything resembling an accusation or a threat, and it’s not there. Nor is there anything in Bill’s expression to set off any alarms when he produces professional-grade foam earplugs from a pocket and hands two sets to Nate.
“Here, put these in your ears and a pair in the mister’s ears. “I’m startin’ on the tree now and there’ll be a lotta noise at close range. My saw’s prob’ly a little louder than that musical racket you folks are used to.” Bill plugs his own ears and displays the snaggletoothed grin again.
Nate quick inserts a set of earplugs rather than endure the laugh he knows is coming, then does his best not to look at the pink foam in the corner of Colin’s mouth when he plugs Colin’s ears as well.
Once the tree sections are cut away, they’re able to open the door on the driver’s side without using the acetylene torch.
“I don’t mind sayin’ that woulda worried me,” Bill says after they’ve removed their respective earplugs. “Usin’ the torch, I mean. I wasn’t lookin’ forward to usin’ the chainsaw either.”
The old guy’s in the lengthy process of explaining why those tools held inherent dangers in a field of spilled gasoline when siren sounds interrupt his talk. He lifts his head, cocks an ear in a northerly direction: “Them’ll be the emergency team from the hospital in Portage St. Mary,” he declares, “and just in time, I reckon.”
1987
FIVE
Afternoon, March 25, 1987
At his usual spot near the far end of the bar, Hoop Jakeway orders a shot and a beer with plans to nurse both for a half hour or so. He’s not about to get all worked up about what’s coming; on the other hand, he can’t skip over admitting this place has been his home-away-from-home for longer than he cares to count. Before the liquor commission stiffened up on the rules, he came here as a little kid, and with real family, not the stand-ins that surround him now.
Charcoal Pete cadges draft beers at his regular place at the bar, up front by the big window so he can see street activity if there is any. The used-up, rail-thin old Indian wears stiff new overalls of a size that fits him like a stovepipe fits a broom handle; to stand next to him and look down his pants on either side is to look at dirty floor. At one of the tables next to the window, Big Bill, the woodsman, plays a solemn game of cribbage with his former lumberjack partner, Einar, the Swedish import with the black hole behind his ear where an infected mastoid was once tapped.
Bill’s hefty sister, Dottie Belle, over from Newberry for a visit, hangs off a barstool on all sides while she tries to convince the bartender to bring down the special jar from on high. Whenever strangers visit Kings Tavern and she happens to be around, it’s become tradition for her to tell the story of the two pulp cutters who blew themselves to kingdom come after drinking up their paychecks one bad Friday.
The outsiders she works on today don’t look very convinced as she explains how the two drunks thought to place their empty wallets in the crotch of a distant tree before they sat down on a case of explosives and set it off. And then, right on cue, Clive, the bartender, produces the dusty Mason jar holding preserved man parts found in the selfsame tree after the dust and other body parts had settled.
One of the female strangers looks like she’s going to puke when the recognizable souvenirs jiggle around in the pickling solution, and one of the men with her looks away like most men do when they think they’ll appear queer to show any interest. They all laugh, though, and the regulars join in, including the ones at the back of the room that don’t necessarily know what’s funny.
Laughter’s the last thing Hoop thought would bring on one of his regular summings-up, those backward looks that keep him pointed in the right direction. But for some reason it does today, probably because today doesn’t have to be just about sadness. Won’t hurt any to remember the good parts even though there aren’t enough of them to cancel out the bad stuff that’s making him leave town.
He downs the shot, takes several swigs of beer, and drifts away on a powerful wave of remembering. He starts at the beginning, when Audrey Shantz stood out for being the only cheerleader who didn’t point and laugh when he carried the ball eighty yards in the wrong direction during the 1973 Bimmerman-Paradise football game. She didn’t call him Hula Hoop either, or laugh when mockers rhymed his name with “poop.”
He’s close to grinning when he recollects that she always gave him an extra helping of buckle whenever she volunteer waitressed at the annual Town of Paradise Wild Blueberry Festival, and that as a paid waitress at the lunch counter in Paradise, she always treated him the same as the white customers and never gave him a dirty look those times when he couldn’t afford to leave more than a quarter tip.
He chugs down the rest of the beer and harks back to the best part, the part where Audrey didn’t make fun of him like others did when a girl’s bike was his only way of getting around. And if she ever did catch on to why he was willing to pedal all the way from Bimmerman to Paradise three and four times a week, she didn’t scoff and sneer at him like most girls did if they thought he was sniffing at their skirts.
He signals for another shot and beer before he can be tempted to take a wallow on the dark side of those memories. Enough of that’s been done already—done nearly to death, starting on the day two years, four months, and exactly one week ago when it was found out that the rock star was still alive after they cut him from the wrecked truck and hauled him off to the hospital in Portage St. Mary.
That wasn’t terrible bad news at the time because those in the know were saying that Mr. Big Deal Colin Elliot was unresponsive—the polite word for brain-dead—and likely to remain so, which cou
ld’ve been seen as worse punishment than being entirely dead. But starting with six months or so ago, when trashy newspapers started rumoring that the rock star was coming back to life over there at his castle in England, and more recently, when respectable newspapers started saying that a song written by the rock star was entered in some kind of big competition, the old urgings fired up and had to be answered to.
Hoop opens his wallet and removes money for the bar tab without disturbing the newspaper clipping that’s stored in with his meager supply of banknotes. He’s read it a dozen times over by now and can recite by heart what it says about the award show they have every year out there in California—the televised show where they give out the ugly figurines called Icons to people like Colin Elliot who’s favored to win one this year. He can feel the power of the clipping without touching it or reading it again. And the slip of paper tucked in next to it, the one with Cliff Grant’s phone number written on it in large numerals—he doesn’t have to eyeball that again to know its worth, to recall the celebrity chaser who took the most pictures of Audrey and came through for him once before.
He makes this second shot last, sips at it as he estimates how much bother he’ll have to put up with in order to pay for past failures, and it looks like the long drive to California will be the greatest of the inconveniences. But all things considered, it’s not like he has a choice—not if he’s ever going to even the score.
Hoop takes the beer with him and strolls back to the shuffleboard where he plays one more game with Adrian, everyone’s honorary uncle and the best player in the U.P. Local lore has it that if you ever beat Ade, it’s only because he’s let you beat him; on your birthday for example, or at Christmas, or if it appeared you were having an especially bad day. Hoop now loses to Ade in three straight games, so it’s fair to say he’s not signaling that this might be a special occasion or a bad day.
He loiters by the pool tables to speculate about what kind of special treatment Ade and the others might have shown if he had let on how many of his days were bad after Audrey’s death. Had they known the true circumstances of her death and how those circumstances weighed on him, chances are they would have let him win all the games and bought drinks to boot. And if any of them knew his present circumstances, they’d probably contribute to his grubstake and furnish him with home-baked cakes and pies for the trip. On that basis he can see himself having a free ride for life once the whole world finds out what really happened in November of 1984.
When leave-taking can’t be put off any longer, he handles it the way he did with Ade, casual-like and careful not to say much beyond an all-purpose “See ya later” as he works his way along the bar and between the tables. The responses are similar, with some good-natured muttering about the weather and no one appearing to suspect he won’t be back tomorrow or any day after that.
Outside, the sidewalk is cobbled with clods of refrozen slush, gutters are piled waist high with old snow, and the sky looks like more will fall before the day is over. Unlike that memorable winter of ’84–85, when there seldom was enough snow to pee your name in, this winter of ’86–87 has been a record-breaker so far, with no signs of letting up even though official spring arrived last week.
His Jimmy is parked at the opposite end of Main Street by the IGA store. The truck’s front end is a little beat up and the rocker panels are dappled with rust, but both doors are the same color and it runs fairly good. The tires are bought new for the trip west; he walks all around the car, kicks each one in turn without knowing why.
He goes into the market for road food—bologna and a box of saltines—and because tomorrow is a special occasion, he includes a Hostess pie. Inside the store, he stays away from the doors to the back room where newly arrived goods are warehoused; they won’t expect him there at his part-time stock boy job till the start of next week, and by then he’ll be long gone.
On the outskirts of town, he gives a little nod as he passes the abattoir where he filled in during deer seasons and any other time they needed an extra hand. The pay was good, it bought him the new tires and the rebuilt engine in the twelve-year-old Jimmy, and it gave him a set of skills that can be used anywhere his mission takes him.
LEAVING BIMMERMAN pop. 425 PLEASE COME AGAIN
The sign looms up without tempting him to stop and change the numbering like he changed the population figure on the Paradise town sign when he found out Audrey was gone. His departure needn’t be recorded; his leaving has nowhere the same meaning as hers.
He’s on the lookout for the Baldwin Road and then the spur off it that dead-ends near the old railroad line. He hasn’t made one of his routine visits since the first of the year and now, even with the snow compacted and some blown off, regular landmarks still appear misshapen and foreign, and a few are still completely covered. He almost sails right by the spur because it hasn’t been plowed and never will be; the road hasn’t seen mail delivery in over ten years, so the county’s not going to waste money on snow removal.
He parks at the crossroads. From the rear of the truck where they’re wedged in next to an old Coleman cooler and a few other belongings, he takes a pair of snowshoes Big Bill made for him when he was a boy. A test of the footing shows he won’t need them today, the snow is tamped down enough to hold his weight. He takes the snowshoes with him anyway. It’s better to abandon them here in a place where they have history than mix them in with the meaningless junk he’ll be leaving behind at the boardinghouse.
About a quarter of a mile in he picks out the shape of a house in the distance. The objects around it are rusted car bodies and broken-down farm equipment, but with snow over them, they could be almost anything—prehistoric animals, downed spaceships. There’s no sign of the mailbox that once read “Floyd Jakeway and Family” in fluorescent-orange paint. That doesn’t matter because Floyd, his father, has been dead for fifteen years and the remaining family have been gone nearly as long, moved either to the reservation or scattered to parts unknown.
Hoop makes it onto the shelter of the sagging front porch where a divan has been picked nearly clean by nest-building birds and rodents. License plates from happier times are still tacked alongside the doorframe, where he leans the snowshoes.
Inside, he passes through a room papered with old newspapers and featureless other than for a set of antlers mounted over the door and a hole in the floor where the potbellied stove used to sit. In the kitchen, he sidesteps a battered washtub and kicks aside the broken crockery and rusted tin cans littering the space the zinc-topped work table used to fill.
The big old cast-iron stove is still here only because it’s too heavy to be dragged off by shirttail relatives, as the scavengers call themselves. The stove appears untouched since the last time he stopped by; the kettle is still on the back burner, the other burner covers are all in place, and so is the lid to the hot-water reservoir.
The quick once-over he gives this relic brings on another fit of remembering to rival the one that claimed him back there at the tavern. He can almost smell the thick soup his aunt made from potatoes she herself dug, and the stewed dandelion greens she always cooked together with a pig’s foot. He can almost see the old grandmother who knew to a stick of wood how to regulate oven heat so the molasses cookies came out crackled outside and chewy inside, and had the knack of making pie with home-canned applesauce when the whole fruits were withered and gone.
“That’s enough,” he says and moves on through the kitchen and into the attached shed, where he bends to the task of opening the trapdoor to the root cellar. The door’s warped a lot worse than it was when he last checked; he’s about to give up on opening it without a pry bar when a final yank frees it, along with a spray of splinters, grit, and the husks of dead bugs. He creaks down a rickety ladder into the shallow-dug cavern and, in the light from above, locates the one keepsake he’ll be taking with him.
He tests the bail on the five-gallon metal paint bucket before hefting its full weight and starts back up the ladder not
knowing if it will hold this extra load because the bucket was empty when first brought here. The third-from-the-top rung lets go just as he’s transferring the sealed bucket gentle-like onto the cracked linoleum floor of the shed; he suffers only a scraped shin and the already dented container is none the worse for wear.
Outside, on the porch, he sets the bucket down again—again with a gentle hand—so he can ceremoniously place the snowshoes on the skeleton of the old divan like it’s a funeral platform, and the past comes for him once more.
In the echoes of his mind he hears the tagline of a story the old uncle told whenever children grouped together on this porch. None of the children, including Hoop, ever much knew what the story was about other than for it offering the chance to shout out the tagline each of the many times it was repeated in a telling.
“A wig and a wag and a long leather bag!” Hoop whoops, giving notice—fittingly enough—to a small band of crows.
SIX
Morning, March 30, 1987
In an examination room done up to resemble a posh lounge, Colin Elliot is alone for the first time in forty-eight hours. He’s relaxed in a leather wing chair, uncaring of how long it might be before someone comes to collect him. He scans the room for reading material, spots only a few technical journals, so it’s twiddle his thumbs or rely on his own resources.
From an inside pocket of his suit coat he takes out a small photo wallet that’s a bit thicker than usual for containing an assortment of scribbled notes to himself. Some are on scrap paper, one is on a cocktail napkin, another is on a page torn from a flight magazine. The most significant of the lot is in the form of a newspaper cutting.
He unfolds the cutting to read for the tenth or twentieth time that he’s the only nominee who was not invited to perform his musical entry at the annual awards ceremony of the American Institute of Performing and Creative Artists scheduled to take place in Los Angeles on Monday, March 30, 1987. Today.