Read an Excerpt
Jerry Egge looked up from tying the laces of his high-top sneakers,
then sat back hard on the front step of his house, a stabbing pain wrenching
his gut. There, scrawled in four-foot-high, blood-red lettering on the
newly-painted water tower across the way, were the words, "Fuck You, Egge."
Damn kids. Why couldn't they be satisfied with overpasses, stop signs and
bathroom stalls? He swore some of them saw their high school principal as a
two hundred pound, balding lab rat. He could hear them now, bragging over
Cokes and hamburgers at Andy's Diner: How much can the pinhead take before
he locks the door to his private washroom and slashes his wrists on his
sharpened Wayne Newton belt buckle?
Jerry thought about going back to bed and burying his head under the covers.
Instead, he stood, inhaled deeply, and let it out, his breath visible in the
early morning air. What a job. A coal miner had a greater sense of ease. He
rolled his neck, hearing it crick once, twice, then trotted on down the
steps, tiptoed around the stacks of lumber on his front walk, and set off
for the woods on the outskirts of Soldier, where every day he ran a little
deeper into the pines. Maybe this would be the day he'd keep on going, run
right into Fertile and catch a bus to Chicago. He could get a job selling
textbooks or something.
He shuffled along, dodging the refuse left behind when the tons of snow had
melted. Dead leaves, dormant sod. It was that depressing time of year, when
the green tint of the lawns reminded him of bile and the melting snow looked
like dirty laundry.
Through the early morning haze, he could see a group of runners approaching
at a rapid rate, blue uniforms bouncing up and down, the flap, flap, flap of
their sneakers arriving before he could make out their faces. The Commando
track team, out for a morning workout. As the lead runners passed, some of
them snickered. For a moment, he thought they'd seen the graffiti on the
water tower, but from this vantage point, the tower was blocked by the
trees. It must just be him. Stoop-shouldered, gangly, long legs with a short
torso-he looked weird enough in his principal's coat and tie. In sweats and
a Minnesota Gopher baseball cap, he must look like a damn cartoon.
Jerry plodded on down Wheat Field Lane, ignoring the good mornings of the
trailing runners, chewing over what he'd do to the kid who'd painted that
obscenity on the tower.
He slowed somewhat as he approached Veteran's Park, where the statue of
Colonel Colvill, leader of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg, held court,
waving his sabre menacingly. Colvill and his infantry troops had saved the
Union's butt on the second day of the battle, filling in the breach when
General Sickles disobeyed orders and attacked rather than hold his position.
Eighty-three percent fatality rate. At least they'd died repelling foreign
invaders. What Jerry wouldn't give to have been there among the 262 men
staring death in the face in a bayonet charge against Longstreet's 1600
Alabamans. Jerry was so absorbed he could hear a volley of the
muzzle-loaders the troops had used at Gettysburg. No, just hammering coming
from the holy roller church at the end of Wheat Field Lane.
Jerry saluted. There seemed to be a hint of a smile on the Colonel's
greenish-bronze face. Never noticed that before.
He pounded on, panting, feeling as though he were running in place. Glancing
to his left, he noticed flashing lights, one of those rental signs in front
of Audette's Monuments. Plan ahead! Special discount for you and your
spouse.
Grave stones. Jerry had a donor card in his wallet. What would the doctors
do with the rest of him after they'd mined his organs? Cremation? Sue would
flush him down the bowl. They weren't exactly a poster couple for nuptial
bliss. If he stayed with her, it wouldn't be long before the knives came out
of the drawer.
Last night he'd talked to Sue for the first time about divorce.
"Do you know what sort of man your lover is?" he'd said. "How can you expect
me to hand over my paycheck every two weeks when you're sleeping with him?"
"Say you love me," she said. She always knew how to burst his bubble.
As he approached the holy roller church, the hammering and the crying noise
nails make when yanked from wood caused his teeth to clench. Twenty or
thirty men were roofing the church, which, until a couple of months ago, had
resided in Fertile and had blocked traffic for hours as it made its way, on
a flatbed truck, to Soldier. Over, under, and through the hammering, he
could hear music: "Shall We Gather at the River?"
Jerry'd heard that attendance was down at Immaculate Conception. Father
Mischke's polka masses couldn't compete with the unbridled abandon a
parishioner could experience in the holy roller church. Since the
fundamentalists had arrived, their Sunday morning service-and Sunday evening
and Wednesday evening-made such a racket that the neighbors had petitioned
Sheriff Kline to invoke the noise ordinance.
Some of the men stopped hammering and looked down at him running past. He
waved. None of them waved back.
Jerry tramped over the bridge crossing Plum Creek, a tributary of the
north-flowing Red River. Only a block or so and he'd be clear of houses and
headed into the country. He could already smell the manure in the outlying
fields.
He scooped up some slush, formed an iceball, and whipped it at a signpost,
trying to visualize the homely face of Sue's lover. He missed badly. He
slapped the snow off his hands, wiped his hands on his pant legs, and ran
on.
The houses disappeared and he was in the woods, which, for some reason, made
him feel disoriented. When he came to a fork in the trail, he was unsure of
which of the two paths to take. He chose the one on the right. Back in town,
a train whistle blasted the air. A morning freight, clattering along over
the trestle crossing Plum Creek. The engineer, frustrated jazzman that he
was, played variations on the usual jarring toot. A long, a languid short,
followed by a blare of grand proportion. Sounded like Nooo, don't gooowww to
Jerry.
But he kept on going, needed to sweat the poison out of his system. He came
to a stretch where the path wound slightly downhill through a canopy of
trees, his feet making an echoing sound as he galloped along. A gust of wind
whistled in the pines, roiled last autumn's fallen leaves, and swiped his
Minnesota Gopher hat. It blew into the woods and snagged on a tree branch;
then, just as he was about to grab it, an updraft took it and tossed it
higher into the trees, out of reach. He finally managed to retrieve it with
the aid of a fallen branch, tightened the one-size-fits-all band in the
back, and got moving again.
Off in the woods somewhere, he could hear shouting, laughter. Damn, must be
those splatballers, oddballs acting out some sort of mercenary fantasy with
paint-pellet guns. Just another form of vandalism in his mind.
Turn around now, sprint back to your house, and lock all the doors, he told
himself. Why did he feel so uneasy this morning? He'd set a goal,
though-principals were good at setting goals-and if he didn't beat
yesterday's distance, he'd be nagging himself all day.
His side was beginning to ache. He'd run up to that bare oak in the
distance, well beyond yesterday's mark, then call it a day. The bare oak
shimmered like a fairy-tale tree, the kind that would reach out and grab the
hapless hero on his way by. Perhaps he'd stumbled into a parallel universe.
No flying monkeys, though. He chuckled and pushed on toward the dead oak.
Jerry reached the lifeless oak. He was making a wide turn to go back the way
he'd come, running out of the path, tripping over sticks and sliding on
leaves, when he thought he heard a noise. He stopped. The noise stopped.
Probably only one of those splatballers.
But why did he feel as he always did before he had to give a speech to the
assembly in the school gymnasium? His knees were rubbery, and he suddenly
felt as though he were in the cross hairs of a rifle scope. And a little
voice was telling him to run. Run while you still can.
Maybe singing would help. "Shall we gather at the river," he warbled, then
stopped and listened. Was it the wind? He started moving again. "Yes, we'll
gather at the river. The beautiful, the beautiful river." He stopped again,
listening so hard he could hear his heart beat. "Gather...with the
saints...at the river...that flows by the throne of God."
There was more, but that's all he knew. It seemed that if he could remember
another verse he could ward off evil.
This time he was sure someone was running toward him. It sounded like a wild
boar crashing through the underbrush.
He fled, sore feet and aching side forgotten. But he kept slipping and
sliding on the wet leaves and patchy snow, as if he were in one of those
dreams where a monster was chasing him and his feet were encased in cement.
Behind him, somebody was wheezing and puffing. And closing. Jerry hit a dry
patch and picked up speed, his legs stretching, pounding. He was pulling
ahead; he had to be.
Suddenly, something hit him from behind. He tumbled headlong and rolled, got
a glimpse of a bear of a man with thick, curly, black hair brandishing a
baseball bat above his head. "What do you think you're doing, you son of a
bi-"
And then someone was knocking, and there was pain, excruciating pain, and it
was raining-sticky, saplike rain-and someone was hammering, like one of
those jackhammers you hear early in the morning when you've had trouble
sleeping and it's the middle of August with the dew point in the 70s, and
there was a sound, like the grunting in a pornographic film, and he saw
colors-red, blue, green, yellow, swirling in a vortex, and the hammering
sound changed to a buzzing.
The hammering, grunting, and buzzing stopped. All was peaceful. The only
sound was the chirping of the birds.
Jerry rose up above his body, looking down on a man spraying something on
his back and legs with a can of paint.
Then the man kicked him in the face, and his body flopped over onto its
back.
Loading...