Torn from After the Floods

    Pete slid the pickup into a diagonal space in front of Gopher's Barber Shop.  His first social event in Cold Beak, which occurred as he climbed out of the cab, was to knock a bag from Mattie's arms as she loaded her groceries into her car.  There was no glass to break, but a head of lettuce saw its chance to bound off under the car and settle in a puddle in one of the lesser, unnamed cavities.

            "Damn," Pete said.  "I'm sorry.  Let me help."

              Mattie, a spiffy woman in her early thirties, had moved to town to be independent after a belly-up marriage in Minneapolis.  You didn't offer to help Mattie.  You stood clear and kept your mouth shut.  Once, when it was Mattie's turn to be discussed, one of the boys in the barber shop suggested that signs should be posted at the edge of town to warn strangers about her. 

            "I'll handle it," she replied gruffly, wrestling with her bags, stooping for the lettuce, dropping her keys, shaking water off the lettuce, and in general giving Pete a demonstration in just how clumsy a doofus he had been.

            "Well, I'm sorry," he said.

            "Don't apologize.  My ex was a warehouse of apologies."

            "Sorry."

            "You're digging a hole, mister, and I have a fascinating life to live."

            With that as a parting pleasantry, Mattie backed onto Main Street and sped off.  I doubt if Pete was bothered.  I imagine him stepping onto the curb, checking his watch that didn't work, and taking a look around. 

        Across the street from Gopher's Barber Shop was the office of The Weekly Peep, our newspaper, although detractors had other names for it, other sounds a body can make.  Next to The Peep was Birdie's Bakery, with a closed sign in the window, and nearby were Homer's Hardware and Fred's Feed and Fertilizer.  Despite the fancy sound effects in the names, all of the buildings were small, no nonsense buildings of wood or vinyl siding.  A person lacking Pete's rural upbringing might have experienced a sinking of the spirit.

            Pete went into Gopher's B.S., as we called it, glanced at the clock on the wall, and asked if it would be a long wait, a reasonable enough question since Homer and Fred sat by the wall, both in jeans and sweatshirts, Fred's shirt an orange billboard for Fred's Feeds.

            "Long wait," was the reply, but that was from Gopher's parrot, who made frequent assertions from a cage by the window.

            "Nah," Gopher said, "don't listen to that bird.  The boys here just come in to chat like there's nothing better to do.  I run the town rumor mill here."

            "This is Gopher's answer to Fox News," Homer volunteered, and it is true that the barber shop was a theater in which fact and fable continually stage their high-school play. 

            Pete sat in the pruning chair, and Gopher flourished the barber's bib, tucked it snug around Pete's neck, and flipped on the electric clipper.

            "I'd like you to do it with the scissors," Pete said, "so's it'll be long on the sides.  Don't want white walls."

            "In Cold Beak we buzz it right down to the skin, so it'll last," Gopher said, stepping back to get a fuller look at this strange stranger.  "Show him that nice, modern haircut, Fred."

            Fred tugged off his feed cap, displaying bristles and a grin.  No doubt he confirmed Pete's commitment to the scissors.  Once Gopher began experimenting with the unfamiliar tool, Pete said that he had come to town to meet up with his older brother, Ole Swenson, and inquired about directions to his house.

            "Well," Gopher began, "when a stranger comes to town and don't even want a Cold Beak haircut . . ."

            "What sort of guy don't know his own brother's address?" Fred wanted to know.

            Of course they were just messing with him, and Homer rummaged in his jeans and produced a cell phone.

            "Ole?  Homer down at the B.S.  Guy here says he's your brother.  Won't let Gopher give him a real haircut . . .  Yeah, kinda funny looking . . .  Okay, talk to ya."

            So it was established that Pete was really Ole Swenson's brother, directions out to Ole's house were conveyed, and Pete went on his way once Gopher had snipped around with the scissors for a few minutes.

            "Must be odd, moving to a town that's half shut down," Homer said, reaching in his pocket for a pack of gum.

            "When is you sister going to get her bakery fired up again?"  Gopher asked.

            "She's gonna let Marge Swanson manage it.  Birdie's got bigger plans," Homer replied. "She's evolving."

            Fred and Homer talked for a time about getting back to work, and then, as the sun inched itself around to the west, the parrot dozed in his cage, and Gopher swept the floor, the conversation drifted to fishing.

*

            William Ferguson was the editor of The Weekly Peep, and I imagine him turning away from his paper shredder—he was forever shredding papers like a man with dark secrets—to see Pete leave the B.S., climb into his pickup, and lumber down Pothole Way, as Main Street had come to be called.  Ferguson kept an eye on things, as did most of the crows that lined the edge of his roof like surveillance cameras.  Two at the far end of the building were involved only with each other, and you almost thought they were talking.  

        Folks often wondered how bits of their private lives had become embalmed in The Peep.  An argument between friends, a distant cousin's health problems, a social blunder at a party, any such animal, dead and dissected, might gaze back at you with glazed eyes from the newspaper at the end of the week, sort of like taxidermy on a wall. 

            When Ferguson wasn't peering through the lettering on his window or shredding mysterious documents, he read big-city newspapers, not out of a thirst for knowledge but instead out of a melancholy dissatisfaction with his life in a town where all the men wear old jeans and talk mainly about fish they've caught.  To hear Ferguson, you'd think we had manure coming out our ears.  Maybe his yearning for the big city was only a decorative sort of yearning, one of those characteristics, like a mysterious past, that people fabricate and wear in order to be less ordinary.  In any case, it was flaunted like a reproach to the rest of us, so much so that Ferguson gave self-esteem a bad name.

            "In New York they have museums . . . with paintings," he might mutter to himself, or to Seth Hogan, his young assistant.

            "Yes," Seth might respond, "but we have Gopher's!"

            "God, I live where we have Gopher's." 

        Ferguson would look at you like you were a smudge, and Seth's attempts at good humor were water off Ferguson's styling gel, which he applied liberally.  His hair was Liberace meets Donald Trump, and on his desk, where another person might have kept a photo of a loved one, Ferguson kept a framed mirror.  A drawer contained cologne from Paris. I imagine his face being sucked into the mirror by supernatural forces, elongating as it goes like something drifting toward a black hole.  A mockingbird will attack its own reflection in a window, but mocking people usually go the other way, loving their reflections like that guy by the water in mythology.  Ferguson was his descendant.

*

            So Ferguson and his crows watched Pete head down Main Street that day.  Pete's brother, Ole, lived in a small house on the east side of town surrounded by a yard full of birds.  During the winter, owls had migrated down from Canada in search of rodents, but then the spring flood seemed to turn our town into a magnet for all kinds of birds.  Even mockingbirds had made their way up from Dixie to join the party.  Cold Beak had become an unofficial refuge for everything that flapped or chirped, and when Pete chugged to a stop at the house, a score of robins lifted off from Ole's front yard to join an even larger choir in the maple tree.

            Pete stood for a moment examining the neighborhood and listening to the kids play Marco Polo.  We have some small people in town, people born with genetic issues, and perhaps Pete noticed one of them in a yard.  Then Ole exploded from his front door, running as fast as a man of forty-two who likes his burgers and fries is likely to run.

            "Am I glad to see you!" Ole shouted as Pete examined the insect-splattered window and grill of his pickup.

            "Lot of bugs between there and here," Pete said.

            Ole eyed the old truck.  "Still?" he asked, panting from his brief sprint. "Looks to me like you got most of them."

            "Nah.  There's plenty left."

            "Forget the bugs," Ole said, delivering a brotherly punch to the arm.  "I signed the deal yesterday!  Couldn't wait on you dragging your tail along the county roads."  He pulled Pete by the arm toward a car parked in the driveway.  "Climb in, I'll show ya."

            Pete shoved a few candy wrappers and a Coke can onto the floor, as Ole explained that Pete could buy half of his restaurant for a dollar.

            "We'll be co-owners like we planned!" Ole affirmed, his round face glowing with optimism like a headlight.

            What had been a plan in Ole's mind had been to Pete merely the blowing of a little smoke into the phone, and it was probably hard for him to wrap his thoughts around being a restaurant owner that afternoon as Ole drove him through the dried mud that was Cold Beak.  As the car paused at an intersection, Pete contemplated an old Chevy abandoned on the sidewalk.  It was splattered up to the windows with mud and spackled on top by an industrious crew of birds.  An emaciated collie poked around by a porch.

            "If I owned half that dog," Pete declared, "I'd feed my half."

            "Yeah," Ole replied, "it's a shame.  A few businesses are gone, and some people have moved away.  But hey, that's why we're getting such a good deal!" 

            Pete watched his brother mop his forehead with a red bandana.  Ole had come out of the womb with a red bandana and a sweating face.  Or else he stole that bandana pretty quick afterwards.

            "It's been hard on the Iron Range, too," Pete said.  "The ground is running out of ore.  There are folks up there been eating crow soup, and that ain't just an expression." 

            If Pete had been talking to a stranger, he could have said more about life on the Iron Range.  The brothers' father had died of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos in the ore, and recently state health officials had concealed the resurgent number of victims of this disease in the mining community.  Ore meant more disease, and less ore meant poverty.

            As the car swung into the parking lot, Pete's spirits, already riding low in the water, sunk a bit more.  Ole's "good deal" was a deserted and dilapidated Kentucky Fried Chicken place out on the northwest edge of town.  An old wooden stork lay on its side by the door.

            "That thing arrive in the flood?" Pete asked, gesturing at the stork.

            "Nah," Ole said.  "But whatchya think of the building?"

            "Oh man . . .  I don't know if I'm up for it."

            They walked around and through the building, Ole pointing this way and nodding that way as he shared his newly acquired insights into architecture and decoration. 

            "I figure we put mirrors over those windows, or maybe some of those red felt pictures.  We could put a painting on the ceiling like that church in Italy.  It'll be a supper club with candles and everything.  I know a guy in the Cities who will sell me a suit of armor to put by the door and give the place a romantic atmosphere.  Whadya think?"

            "Do you," Pete asked, "know the first minnow-in-a-pond about running a restaurant?"

            "This here is a business opportunity wagging its tail and yapping at you to take it home.  I'm going to make this work come hell or high water, and that ain't just an expression around here.  Besides, we got Mattie on the team.  We can build a supper club, or sit on our butts and mope."

           Pete probably weighed the options and found moping to be the more attractive, but before he could respond, Homer's pickup clattered into the parking lot with Birdie perched on her cushioned throne in back.  Oscar, of course, was on a bench beside her.  Oscar, who had recently returned from Iraq with a bad leg, had known Birdie for years, and folks kept finding chances for him to shed light on whether he was courting her.  But Oscar didn't shed light.  He was the kind that gives off mostly fog.

            "See you got that stork you were talking about!" Homer exclaimed, heaving himself from the cab.  Homer was a big man, and once Ferguson was heard to say that he was strong as an ox and twice as smart.

            "Owner of the miniature golf place by Hibbing sold it cheap," Ole explained.  "Good as new, except for where kids splashed paint on her butt."

            "She'll look real good when you get her cleaned," Homer said.  "You gonna call this place The Stork Club then?"  Homer flopped his elephant trunk of an arm over the door as he talked.

            Ole said that he didn't want his club to be confused with a place in Paris, and that he'd probably call it The Phoenix in memory of his trip to Arizona.  Then introductions were made.  Homer and Pete said they'd met already, which Ole knew but had forgotten in all the excitement.  Homer kidded about Pete not wanting a real haircut.  Birdie pulled a tin of snoose from her jacket and offered it to Pete, who explained that he'd quit.

            "I don't have all afternoon to be the main attraction on a Mardi Gras float," Birdie said, "so I say we cut to the chase."  She liked to talk like big-city folks.

            "What chase would that be?" Ole asked.

            "I've been hearing about your restaurant plans, and I want to offer my services, my secret theatrical skills."  Birdie left the secret hanging like a cobweb, focusing those moon eyes down from her throne under that bed-spring hair.

            "My sister wants to be a stripper to lose weight." Homer explained.  "I told her that strippers have to dance, that it ain't just a matter of climbing out of those bib overalls, but she's determined."

            Then Birdie explained how the boys had an opportunity to be part of history because it wouldn't be the sort of strip club that exploits poor girls who can't find a decent job.  This would be a club that would help big people have pride while they trimmed themselves down. 

            The guys were quiet when she finished, and she sat there on her throne giving them the doe-eye.  Ole adjusted his feed cap and stared off at the clouds over the Mobile station, and Pete expected him to say how a cloud looked like this animal or that.  The power lines served as bleachers for the crows that gathered to watch and heckle.  Finally, Birdie went on to explain how she pictured it all.

            "The way I picture it all, we divide the club in two.  Folks don't want to eat their meat and potatoes with a big old fat girl yanking her clothes off and shaking her stuff right there." 

            Birdie paused, maybe to picture herself shaking her stuff, and then her laughter broke like surf on the shore of a late afternoon. 

            "They don't want their kids asking questions," she concluded.  "So the strip club is a separate room."

            Ole was back to dabbing his face with the bandana, and you could have heard a moth fart.  Finally Ole said how he didn't make business decisions right off the bat, and how he'd have to think on whether the town was ready for so much innovation.

            "Might as well surrender right now, boys" Homer said, climbing back into the truck.  "Arguing with Birdie is like arguing with boulders." 

            He turned out to be right about that.  Homer is a whole lot smarter than an ox.  The pickup careened out of the parking lot, causing Birdie to grab the arms of her throne and causing Oscar to grab Birdie. In the distance the orange and purple rags of a sunset draped themselves over a hill.  It would be a stretch to call anything in Minnesota a mountain, but the land does shrug its shoulders here and there.  The shrug out west of town is called Bestrom's Hill, and my friends and I used to hike there when we were kids, stopping to admire horses in a field where an abandoned barn sank back into the grass like an ancient frigate in a book.  I remember how the sun would let its golden hair down into those fields, making me think of that girl in the tower. 

            Anyway, that's the direction the pickup was headed when it flung Oscar and Birdie around on its way out of the parking lot.

To learn more about After the Floods, please visit www.losthillsbooks.com. The novel is available at barnes&noble.com.