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Hello, Greetings and… Happy New Year! Hope all had wonderful and satisfying holidays. I’m back.

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SIXTEEN

The heat in the house had been oppressive through the entire afternoon. Will had moved much of the “dorm room” upstairs, the foam mattress and his totes holding his clothing. It was not the best arrangement, but if he’d hoped to get any sleep in that kind of heat it offered the best solution. During the day, with every step up the staircase, it grew hotter by degrees.The condition of the second floor, however, made it a clear choice over the sitting room. With no interior walls and tearing out the plastic on two windows, one West and one East, the height of the opennings allowed for a decent through-breeze. The main drawback was that the second floor had no electricity. The only rooms in the house that were fully electrified were the kitchen and the attached bathroom. The rest of the first floor had not been touched. The second stories had all of the wiring pulled up through the floor—a situation Will had found impressive, though pointless, as waiting for the downstairs walls to be pulled down would have made it a lot easier—but no fixtures were in place. Once the power company had run its lines, Maartens had taken the house off of his generator.

Silly and as wasteful of good labor as it had been, Will had discovered a method in Maartens’s madness. Since the early days—hours even—of this project, the contractor had take this job to heart, taking his interest in its purpose and progress to a personal level that Will could only perceive of as odd, and bordering on disturbing. Since the completion of the kitchen and roof, Maartens further planning had ceased to be a process of suggestion and option to rejection and dismissal. Anything Will proposed was pointed out as wrong, primarily for reasons of it not being “historically accurate.” This had come pretty quickly, and for reasons Will found beyond ridiculous. It was how to do the windows. Will wanted a nine-pane format for the upper and lower sashes, and a crank-out style for the window over the kitchen sink. Maartens, at first, offered to debate.

“Well, the nine-pane is a sharper look, I’ll grant you that,” Maartens began his counter, “but, as most farmhouses go around here, you’d prefer a simple four-pane set-up. It is what was original to the house.”

“Yeah, but I’d still rather have the nine.”

Maartens nodded without really looking at him. “Sure, right. The crank out’s not such a good idea.”

Will had yet to play this game with Maartens, and didn’t catch what he was later to learn was a well-conceived method of diverting him from a suggestion he was unwilling to follow. “Why is that?”

“Nobody had ‘em. Not back then and sure as hell not out here. Wouldn’t really fit.”

“Not fit how?”

“Just not a good fit for the structure. It’s inconsistent.”

Will tried not to appear puzzled when he heard this. Nevertheless, he was. “Inconsistent?”

“Well, you’ve got a nice day, and the windows are up,” Maartens explained. “All up and letting the breeze blow through the house. All of ‘em but one.” He shook his head. “One is hanging out there like . . . like . . . it just doesn’t fit with how the rest of the structure is presented.”

“‘Like the structure is presented?” Will repeated. “What in fuck’s name does that mean?”

“It’s not how this house is meant to be.”

“It’s meant to keep the rain off your head and preventing hypothermic death.” Will sputtered. “It’s not a museum. It’s not a fucking shrine.”

“It is, Mister Holliday. It is and more.”

“It’s not ‘Mister Holliday’, it’s Will. I’m rehabilitating a broken down farmstead. I’m not restoring the past or preserving a slice of America for future generations. It’s a house, and I want a crank out window over the kitchen sink.”

Maartens looked at Will as if he were a petulant child. “But, you don’t. Deep down, you don’t.”

Will couldn’t come up with an answer to that. Be it surprise, exasperation or downright shock, he couldn’t spit out another word of argument. He ended the discussion by telling the man the windows were an issue too far down the road to fight about anyway. There were other, more pressing needs to be addressed, like a furnace and air conditioning. Whether he meant it or not wasn’t a thing he wanted consider any more at that time. It wasn’t until Maartens left for the day that Will remembered initial disagreement had originated with how many panes of glass there were going to be in each window.

That discussion, however, was in the far rear echelon of Will’s thoughts, even as the shreds of plastic that remained stapled to the frames flapped in a quickening and increasingly cooler westerly breeze. Distant thunder came with it. There was a storm coming. From the other direction he heard an answering rumble. The grand finale of the firework show in Maastricht. Will had briefly considered fleeing the heat of the house and take Wendy up on her invitation. He did not, in any way, want to consider it a flirtatious invite. As easy as it was to interpret it as such, as the afternoon wore on, he’d sat in the kitchen seating more fluid than he could replace from the tap, some domestic air conditioning became more and more tempting. If the waitress-cum-bartender was attempting to push past casual acquaintance, he was ready to decide it was a bridge he’d decide on how to cross if he ever came to it. The temptation was steadily moving toward inevitability when something rose up and slammed it to a halt.

This had not happened while standing at the holes he’d torn in the upstairs plastic, but while he been seated and sweltering at his cheap kitchen table. He’d been forcing himself to review his mother’s journals again. As the sky was growing dark, he’d had to turn on the only light he had available by which to read. A few moments later he’d at last come across what he’d spent so many hours looking for, what he’d been hoping to find—or at least believed he’d been hoping for: That first telling of things to come. That first sign of the mother he’d, for a lifetime, known as unpredictable, erratic, unknowable and often terrifying.

Now, upstairs and staring blankly out a hole in a room that belonged to her, he wondered if he’d found something he never should have been looking for in the first place. There was no fucking way he’d be sitting in a bar tonight. For any reason.

+   +   +

And, back at it.

As the most hectic time o’ year is upon us, I wish you all a wonderful batch o’ Holidays and hope they are happy, healthy and provide cause for no one to stich their head in the oven and wait for the darkness to fall. As it is, I’m outa town for a week and will be decidedly silent. As far as the book goes, a week or two attempting not to even think about it will by MY blessing. Things are going to happen fast from here on out, and I need a recharge. Sooo… Once again, I wish all a wonderful Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and whatever Holiday should fall that isn’t on my cultural radar. I’ve always found brevity a good approach, so I will say: Merry Hanna-Rama-Kwanz-Mas! Oh! And Happy New Year!

And Chap. 15 is wrapped up. I will be back in a day or two with a “pre Xmas update” on what to expect next. 

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By the time he was old enough to disregard any fantastical warnings, he’d lost all interest in the murky creek. Thinking of it just now, however, the faint scars left from his plunge through the brush came to brief but vivid life. Absently scratching a forearm, Will turned at the end of city owned “Muni”. His disappointment increased as he approached it. The “Muni” was backed up to the river, and the angled parking spaces in front of the building were full. So was the street, on both sides, extending a block in either direction, bumper to bumper. On the sidewalk near the front door stood a knot of half a dozen or so people, holding drinks and smoking. The parking lot at the other side of the bar was roped off with triangular plastic flags of red, white and blue. It was packed with people. Pillars of smoke rose from grills and there was a band blaring country music. The smell in the air was as good as the music was bad, and it added another knot to his empty stomach. But he wasn’t willing to dive into that mess and more than he was the noxious Wahpekute. Fuck… At the next corner, he turned left, back toward the center of town.

Will was at the stop sign by the bank, about to turn back onto Main when he noticed something that had escaped him on his first pass through town. The diner was open. He couldn’t tell if it was occupied, but the front door was propped wide open. He decided there was no choice between sweltering in his lovely kitchen with a grilled cheese and his mother’s journals and the possibility of a decent meal. He threw the truck into reverse, got lucky and found an open space in the bank’s parking lot.

The diner was indeed open, and Will found himself to be the only customer. Wendy was seated at the end of the counter, smoking a cigarette. She didn’t put it out when he walked in, and didn’t even make an attempt to hide it. She looked at him, exhaled a cloud, and said, “Great.”

“And a Happy Fourth to you as well,” Will answered. He took a seat a few places away from her, toward the middle. A safe distance, he figured, as her mood didn’t come off as welcoming. He pulled menu from the back of a condiment rack and she continued to smoke.

Without looking up from the menu, Will asked. “Still serving breakfast?”

Her sigh sounded more like a gasp and Will was pretty sure it propelled a lungful of smoke. He heard her stabbing at the ashtray and kept his eyes down.

“Breakfast served from open ‘til close,” he heard. “Three-hundred-sixty-four days a year, Christmas excepted. It’s on the front of that thing, if you’re of a notion to look for yourself.”

In spite of himself, Will did indeed flip the menu shut for a glance at the front of it. Sure enough: “Open 364 Days A Year! Christmas Excepted! Breakfast Available Open ‘Til Close!”

“You’re having breakfast, then?”

Will tucked the menu back in the rack without further examination. “I suppose.”

“The usual?”

Will took the chance of turning the waitress’s simmer to a boil and said, “Yes ma’am, I’d eat it three hundred sixty-four times a year, the exception being Christmas.” He risked a glance in her direction.

She didn’t even bother to glare at him. Instead she said, “Why’d you bother looking at a menu, then?” She didn’t write it down, just shouted his order to the back, then followed her words and disappeared into the kitchen.

Whatever guilt Will may have felt for adding inconvenience to Wendy’s bad holiday was offset by the growling in his gut. Any concern at all for the quality of her Independence Day was dampened by his musings over the river. His mother’s words had been a fresh and clear in his head as if she’d been riding in the truck right next to him. He’d yet to find anything in her journals that offered any hint of her illness, and her writings were now taking place around the time she was in high school. Will had done enough research in to believe something should have appeared by then, either in her head or in her actions. Nothing bizarre or outrageous, but at least a foreshadowing. Hormonal changes should have triggered something, but Will hadn’t read anything in that department other than complaints of tender breasts, cramps and an occasional complaint of “overflow.” There were no other red flags, no hint of early attempts at self-medication, no confessions of surging libido, no ramblings of grandiosity or religious fixation. She’d scribbled nothing of beer bashes or spiked punch bowls or backseat groping. At fifteen, she confessed to hating to church and going so far as to write “…confirmation is sooooooo boring and stupid.”

Other than funerals, Will had never spent a minute of his life in church, and his grandfather’s had been the first. “I didn’t go through childbirth just to bring another brainwashed Papist into this sorry world.” His grandparents had attempted to take him once, but his mother caught them going out the door. “If you drag my kid in front of a priest, you’re going to come home to a smoking basement.” She had screeched if from her bedroom window as they were going out to the car.

Will was perhaps three years old. It was one of his earliest, clearest memories, but by no means his first. He’d witnessed several confrontations and rages between his mother and grandmother by then. Included in that was his distress at seeing his grandmother in tears. To see his mother crying was something he’d accepted as a regular, normal occurance. Nan, on the other hand, seemed impervious to weeping. He was too young, however, to comprehend anything other than his mother’s objection, and hadn’t the capacity to interpret his grandparent’s wordless concession. It was years before he was able to piece together the cause of his grandmother’s meek surrender to his mother’s threat. They had been sneaking him out to be baptized.

“Like running water over your head is supposed to save you from Hell,” she told him when, years later, he brought the occasion up. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Billie, you’ve been in Hell since the day you were born.”

He wasn’t about to offer an argument to that.

Will’s father was a professed atheist.

On that thought, his afternoon breakfast was slid in front of him. Wendy placed it without a comment, then took her seat at the counter where she’d been smoking before Will entered. She sat in silence. After a few bites, enough to quell the demands of his belly, he said without looking up from his plate. “Feel free to smoke. It won’t bother me.”

“Can’t smoke with a customer present.”

Will made a show of looking about the empty diner, then said, “Think of me as an intruder. I can guarantee I won’t make a complaint.”

“I won’t want one for another half hour,” she answered. “If you perform your usual routine, you’ll be out of here by then.”

“I have a routine?”

“You’re out of here no more than twenty minutes after your plate lands in front of you.”

“Well, I guess today would be a bad time to change my ‘routine,’ then, wouldn’t it.”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m stuck here until four anyhow.”

Will worked through a few more bites. He wasn’t sure he liked having ‘a routine.’ “The front of the menu notwithstanding,” he said, “why are you open on the fourth of July?”

“I don’t decide when we’re open or not,” she answered. “It was busy during breakfast, like it always is. Haven’t seen anyone since noon, though… not until you showed up.”

“My apologies,” Will offered.

“No reason to. If you’re hungry, you’re hungry.” She rose from the end stool, went behind the counter and produced a rag. She started wiping the counter down, though it was obvious it didn’t need it. “I can’t complain. It’s one of the only days I make time-and-a-half.”

Will was ready to finish the rest of his meal in silence, when she added, “Then I have to work at the Muni at nine. If I’m acting ornery, that’s probably the reason.”

“No time-and-a-half?”

“I wish. When I get there, the only people around will be the drunks leftover from the patio shindig. They’ll either be too broke or too drunk to order anything and just hanging around until they think they’re fit to drive home. If they’re not too broke and don’t want to leave, they’ll be too drunk to serve and be assholes about it. By the time those people have cleared out, everybody who went to Maastricht for the fireworks will come pouring in, bound and determined to get into the same shape as the folks I’d just gotten rid of. It’s usually a rotten night all around.”

“Sorry I’ll miss it.” Will went to work on finishing his late breakfast before his twenty minutes were up.

Wendy refilled his coffee cup and asked, “Are you going to the fireworks?”

Will nodded his thanks for the refill with a mouthful of hashbrowns, swallowed and said, “Nope. I got my fill of Maastricht before I came here.”

“Why were you in Maastricht?”

“Townball tournament.”

“Oh, yeah…” she tossed the rag back under the counter. “I’d forgotten about that. My ‘ex’ used to play in that when Venlo had a team.” She reached into her apron, fished out a cigarette, sat back down at the end of the counter and lit it. “That can’t be over with already. It usually drags on until the fireworks start.”

Will couldn’t help but glance at the clock. He wasn’t sure of when he’d first walked in, but it hadn’t felt like a full twenty minutes. “I sat through half a game and realized I didn’t like baseball,” he said. He wasn’t about to bring the Sheriff into this conversation.

Wendy screwed up her face for a minute, then said. “The only reason you’ve ever said you went into the Muni was to watch baseball.”

Will shrugged. “Alright. I realized I didn’t like Maastricht.”

“Better than Venlo.”

“Matter of opinion.”

Looking directly at Will, she took a few drags from her cigarette, then said. “So, why don’t you come to the Muni at about ten o’clock? You can help me clear out the daytime losers and keep me company until the after-fireworks losers show up.”

Will wasn’t sure how to take that offer. He waited a minute, trying to appear as if what remained on his plate took priority. It gave him enough time to conjure a response. “I suppose I have a ‘routine’ there, as well?”

She paused for a drag on her cigarette, stubbed it out and said. “A beer, nursed for about an hour, a glass of water—sometimes you nurse that too, another beer, another hour, and a beeline for the door.”

Will pushed his empty plate away. “Gotta keep it below the legal limit.”

Wendy gave a chuckle that didn’t come across as very genuine. “That’d be a first around here.”

Will drained his coffee cup, put a twenty on the counter. “Keep the change,” he said. “And try and have a happy Fourth. Hope your night is as uneventful as your day.”

“Not likely,” she said.

As he headed for the door he heard, “It’s a roll through town and three miles in a direction hardly anybody drives,” she called. “Not much risk involved.”

Will paused before stepping out to the sidewalk. “Sure, but a risk nonetheless. See ya next time.”

Walking away he heard. “Getting a little buzzed up won’t do you any harm. It might even make people believe you’re less of an oddball.”

What follows is a brief but disjointed overview of fictitious Limburg Co., scratched out because I got caught up in a fit of digression while working on something else. It’ll be worked into this book during the first revision. 

In the late nineteenth century many rural areas in Minnesota welcomed the stabilizing of peace and “civilization” by strictly limited the sale of alcohol. When Limburg County had established itself, it became something of an outlaw territory. Surrounded by ultra-conservative Scandinavians, Lutheran temperance, and a deep suspicion of anything Catholic and continental, the Limburgers were everything their immigrant neighbors distrusted and despised. Unlike their Dutch countrymen to the north, the Limburg emigres were Catholic, not Calvinist. They held out against the Reformation as their Belgian kinsmen had. But the Dutch Limburgers hated the French and considered a Belgian as nothing more than a second-class Frenchman. They held any Dutchman living on the wrong side of the Maas river in the same contempt. Any Limburger would tell you that a Calvinist was a Huguenot to the core, and therefore French at heart. Those bastards from Amsterdam and the Hague were not to be trusted, and the only reason they were stuck with them was a common tongue. Limburgers identified with and were more politically aligned with their German neighbors. They were traditionally a difficult, stubborn and non-conformist breed. They carried it with them to the eastern plains of the United States.

Change here… Chapters are going to be shorter, like limited to a single incident or event. This change just dawned on me. No big change, really. Just shorter chapters. What’s come before will be chopped into similar blocks as those that follow from here on out, and will be done ruthlessly with the first edit. Cheers.

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Fifteen, part One

Will’s disappointment at what he found in Venlo was almost enough to send him back to the house. It was the heat and having his mother’s journals as his only diversion that kept him in town. Driving onto Mainstreet, almost relieved that Blom’s was closed for business on the holiday, he soon came to see that the entire population of Limburg County hadn’t occupied Maastricht. Venlo was busy in its own right, and swamped as well. This was another one of those things that Will had forgotten about, the anything but subtle competition between the County’s largest towns.

Maastricht was the county seat and had twice the population. Venlo was easily the more picturesque. Maastricht had national chain fast food, a place with edible pizza, a double screen movie theater and a Wal-Mart. Venlo’s businesses were “mom-and-pop”. Maastricht had gone strip mall. Venlo’s newest structures had been limited to the expansion of the trailer park after the feedlot shut down. Maastricht had Broadway, four lanes running north and south, and Central Ave., another four lanes east and west, intersecting at the middle of town. Maastricht had four stop lights. Venlo had not a one. Mainstreet, one word, not two, was the only street that could be considered a thoroughfare, which it actually wasn’t, due to the Wahpekute. Maastricht had the ballfields complex, a twelve lane bowling alley, a municipal nine-hole golf course. It also had a park, but it was nothing more than four square blocks of grass, trees, a pavilion, a dozen picnic tables and half as many permanent charcoal grills. Venlo, despite its meager number of residents, had two parks; “Central Park”, located on the west side of town and a block off the city square, resplendent with a bandshell/gazebo, and its own picnic tables and grills, abutting the single ballfield, a glorified sandlot with a backstop, benches for dugouts and a wobbly set of wooden bleachers. The other was “Waterside Park”, the wide strip of grass and benches at the end of town on the north bank of the Wahpekute, the place where Will had idled that first morning in Limburg County since becoming a property holder.

Both towns held Independence Day parades.

Will had no more than gotten past the first stop sign when he saw the town was clogged. Beneath the bunting festooning every streetlight—Venlo: ornate cast iron, Maastricht: “bentstraw” LED—were solid rows of parked vehicles. Will shut down the air conditioning and lowered the windows as he approached the fountain. Smoke was drifting across the intersection, carrying the aroma of roasting meat. He was suddenly famished. The fully loaded bratwurst lunch he’d been looking forward to at the ballgame was scrapped because of the Sheriff. As he idled past, he looked toward the park. More bunting, every grill seemed to be smoking, people everywhere. Though he couldn’t see the gazebo, he could hear music, occasionally drowned out by a string of exploding firecrackers.

Idling past the fountain, he could see the end of Mainstreet and the entry to the other park. Another crowd, glistening wet skin and swim suits. Dipping in the Wahpekute was an activity Will had never indulged in as a kid. It was forbidden.

Since his earliest memory, Will had been warned off the murky flowage that bordered the front yard of his grandparent’s residence. Being caught within five feet of it guaranteed a tongue lashing and the threat, if not the actuality, of a good spanking. Reasons for this prohibition became more elaborate, exponential to his understanding. For the first few years the concerns were solely focused on the possibility of drowning. As he grew older, the contamination associated with the turgid water became the chief cause of concern. By the time he could rove about the property unsupervised, drowning had ceased to be a threat. He could swim by the time he was eight years old, and warning him away from water had become useless. There was a swimming pool in his backyard in the Cities, for crying out loud, and he’d long learned it was deeper than the river, mucky riverbed notwithstanding. Asphyxial death was replaced by toxicity. Farm run-off, fertilizer and pesticides, while good for crops, it was poison for all other life forms. He began hearing stories of six legged frogs. and fish—the only types he knew of that lived in the Wahpekute River were carp and bullheads—found without eyes and malformed fins.

“One dip in that cesspool,” his mother had told him, “and you’ll start growing webs between your fingers and toes.” No one had mentioned the river had also served as a sewer for the house.

His arguments that he’d seen kids in Venlo swimming in the river were immediately qualified.

“Those brats have nothing to lose. They’re already contaminated, genetically,” his mother shot back. “They want to end up as circus freaks. It’s the only way they’ll be able to make a living once they leave this shitshow town.”

By the time Will was old enough to dismiss the mutation threat, cancer entered the picture. “There are so many carcinogens in that water, the tobacco companies are green with envy,” he heard. “Even your hair will start sprouting tumors. You want to die looking like something growing under a rotten log, be my guest.”

When he hit his teens, and had the capacity to ignore any threat at all, he’d lost all interest in the dirty stream.

If it made itself obvious over the last several weeks, this part of the book is becoming a grind. With the exception of the last post, most of what’s showed up in the last six weeks or so have be like pulling teeth. It’s not the fault of the story or the material produced (bloated, wordy, however you want to put it, it’s getting thinned out for the first overall edit, and I’ve always preferred to “trim down” rather than “bulk up.”)

This was a problem that existed right from the start. The middle, bridging between Will’s finding he’d inherited a wrecked homestead and the finishing third has always been foggy in my head, right from conception. I always knew what he’d start from, and knew where he was going to end up, but building a suitable bridge has ever been the hard part. It hasn’t been for lack of ideas, either, but having too many.

Sorting it out has been the toughest part of the job. The best solution, really, would be to go back to day one and start a good edit. That would take weeks, if not a couple of months. I’m not willing (but reeeeally ready) to take that route quite yet. I started out wanting to get a complete first draft out, beginning, middle and end. I’ve written half a dozen novels, have always done an edit at the middle or two third point. I’ve wound up scrapping all but two of ’em. This, and another that is half done, but so off the wall I don’t want to take a crack at finishing it yet. Mebbe next project.

I’ve scratched out a couple hundred words for the next entry, and am just going to grit my teeth and plow through for the next couple weeks… months and see how it goes.

I actually have the last quarter of this thing blocked out chapters that are still in chunks and scraps. About fifteen thousand more words should get me hooked up to that section, and a sprint to the finish is really very likely. We’ll see.

Thanks to all who’ve stuck with me this far.

Fourth of July and Will had made it a reason to get away from that house. The mid-afternoon sun was brutal, of course, but he was sitting under an awning at the Maastricht baseball field and there was a breeze, so it was bearable. Sitting in the last row of bleachers behind home plate with a beer in his hand, he believed baseball would be the perfect diversion. He’d watched several Independence Day “town ball” tournaments with his grandfather. The baseball was usually lousy, but the atmosphere had always been good. He couldn’t associate a single bad memory with any of those trips to the park, but at the end of the third inning when he noticed the large man in the white shirt, khaki pants and badged cowboy hat coming up the bleacher steps, he figured that streak was about to come to an end. He looked over his shoulder, through the chain link fence lining the top of the bleachers into the parking lot below. He wondered how much damage he would do to himself if he clambered up the fence and leapt off. The drop was about fifteen feet. Not Much.

“Mister Holliday, good afternoon.” Will turned back around. The Sheriff was a step below him, holding a full beer.

“Drinking in uniform, Sheriff?”

The large man chuckled, came up the last step and sat down beside him, not bothering to even ask Will if he wanted the company. “I figured you might be ready for a refill and thought I’d save you a few steps.’

Will glanced into his own cup. There was less than a mouthful in the bottom of it, warm and flat. No sense in being stupid. He set it under the bench and accepted the full one from the Sheriff. Instead of thanks, he said, “Up for re-election?”

If Goosens was offended, he didn’t show it. “Not for a couple more years, and if it were only that easy.”

Will allowed himself a smile. He raised the glass. “Thank you and happy Fourth.”

“And a happy Fourth to you, Mister Holliday.”

They both pretended to watch the field for a few minutes, and both made the appropriate noises of disgust when the home side went down one-two-three. As the teams traded places, Goosens asked, “Getting settled in? Adjusting to life out there? Any problems?”

Will stalled by taking a strong swallow from the cup, then answered, “No more problems than you’d expect from a house that’s been empty over twenty years.” He suppressed a belch and added, “It’s a very tranquil existence.”

“Getting along with the neighbors?”

If Goosens was fishing for a denunciation of Arn Mikkelson, he was getting skunked. “Neighbor,” Will unnecessarily corrected. “Haven’t had much of a chance to get to know him.”

He heard a “hmph”, from the Sheriff. It sounded like an expectant “hmph.” “I stopped by, once,” Will added for no reason. “He wasn’t home. His wife was. She gave me cookies.”

“Well, that sounds very nice.”

“It sure was. Lovely woman,” Will said. “Salt o’ the Earth.” If this was the type of conversation the man was after, then Will could slug it out, banality for banality. He wasn’t that lucky.

“That Dr. Lee seems very nice as well.”

Upon hearing that name, Will was ready to dump the remainder of his gifted beer into its donor’s lap. It was all he could do to not crush the plastic cup in his hands. He responded with a “hmph” of his own.

“Had a conversation with him the other day. We covered a lot of things.” Will pretended to focus on a short pop-up to right centerfield. The second baseman made a nice catch. “It was you that prompted me to call him.”

Will risked a glance at Goosens. He didn’t appreciate the way the man was smiling at him.

“It was not long after that day I first met you.”

Will allowed himself to nod once.

“Decided it couldn’t hurt, just to check out the county’s options. You suggested them, so I made the call and they put me through to Doctor Lee.”

Will turned back to the ballgame.

“Nice guy,” the Sheriff repeated. “Kind of hard to understand him at first, but after a minute I could figure out what he was saying. Real nice guy.”

“Yeah,” Will said, following the track of a foul line drive.

“I had no idea of how many counties they handle down there. Wow.”

Will drained his beer and dropped the cup between his feet.

“I brought the situation we have here in Limburg up to him.” Goosens slid back on the bench and rested his broad back against the fencing. Will wondered if it would be wrong to pray for the chain link to give way.

“When I heard how he handled the other counties, I inquired as to whether he would consider adding us to the mix.” The chuckle was there again, and Will could feel him shaking his head. “Seems they’ve got enough on their hands already. He told me he’d have an uprising if he told the staff they would be taking on another client.”

Will said nothing. Ground ball to third, five, three, two double play. The boys from both teams had yet to get a man past second base.

“I’ll tell you, though, Doctor Lee thinks highly of you.” Will began to fidget. “Couldn’t say enough good about you.”

In a spot between panic and fury, Will said, “Lee’s not the kind of guy to give someone a job and then carp about hiring a shithead. Probably some kind of Asian thing, not wanting to ‘lose face.’” He heard the chuckle again. Will didn’t care for the man’s giggling any more than he did for his stupid grin.

“Oh, no Mister Holliday, that’s far from the impression I got. I’ll bet half our conversations centered on your time at that office. He like very much how you did your job, got along with folks, how you handled families and some of the difficult situations that come with the job. The thing that seemed to impress him most, and tried to impress on me, I have to add, was the extent of your credentials. I’ve got to admit I was surprised to hear that you…”

Will was struggling to contain himself, feeling it best that he just let the Sheriff prattle on while he did his best to make it obvious he was ignoring him, but hearing “credentials” was impossible to ignore and a solid tug on his trigger. He turned on the lawman.

“The only ‘credentials’ I had that mattered to that job at all was a silly scrap of paper issued to me by ABDMI, and that didn’t come until I’d already been working there for ten years. It didn’t mean anything at all as far as doing the job except to satisfy the county administrators, and it sure didn’t mean shit to me. And, I will add, those credentials became null and void the second I checked out of there.”

Goosens pursed his lips. When it looked as if he was going to speak again, Will shook his head and held a hand up. “End of story. Whatever other ‘credentials’ he may have mentioned—which I’ve no doubt he did as it was a hobby of his to shove that up my ass—is a dead issue. Dead-fucking-issue.” He kept his hand up, bent his wrist and close all but his index finger, which he aimed at the Sheriff’s nose. “As far as I—or anybody else for that matter—am concerned, the only document I have in life that grants me any right or privilege to exercise a skill is a driver’s license.”

Goosens took it all with a sober expression. He raised his own hand, nudging Will’s finger away until it was aimed out over the parking lot. “Didn’t mean to offend or poke a hornet’s nest. Consider whatever it is you want dropped, as dropped, though I confess I’m not clear as to exactly what that might be.” Bullshit, thought Will. He knew exactly what Lee had spilled to the bumpkin cop, and had probably even warned him as to what kind of reaction to expect. “All that said,” the Sheriff went on, “Doctor asked me to convey to you his best wishes, and he would be delighted that you stop in for a visit next time you’re in Saint Paul.”

Will relaxed a bit and felt the scowl controlling his face loosen. “Thanks for that, Sheriff.” He turned his attention back to the ballfield.

“He also wanted me to pass along that he hopes you’re keeping busy in a way you find both productive and satisfying.”

In spite of himself, Will shook his head and laughed. Any question Goosens and Lee were in collusion was answered by that phrase. “Productive and satisfying,” was a stock phrase of Will’s former boss, and it’s meaning was that whatever you were doing wasn’t very productive and it was by no means satisfying his expectations. Goosens may not have grasped Lee’s message, but Will was certain that Lee made damn sure those were the exact words he’d been instructed to repeat. Warm and fuzzy as it sounded, “productive” meant “waste of time”, and “satisfying” translated to “pointless.” “Busy” was just a modifier, and no matter how it was included the sum of its meaning was: “Quit fucking around.”

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Sons of bitches, more like. He turned to Goosens. “Oh, I’m busy,” he said. “Busy like you wouldn’t believe. Mad busy, crazy busy. When I’m not busy, I get busy thinking up ways to get busy. That’s how busy I am.” He stood up. “And look at me, right now, what I’m doing. For shame, lolling about like this, watching baseball, drinking beer, when I should be back at the homestead busy with something. Thanks, again, for the beer.”

He edged past Goosens and trotted down the steps, leaving the Sheriff and the game behind him. He crossed the lot wondering what depths a man’s soul had to reach before attaining a level of depravity that would enable him to wantonly ruin a baseball game. He left the lot and made his way toward Central Avenue. His decision to take in the game had been last minute and he’d had to park several blocks away from the field. As he trotted across Limburg County’s busiest street, looking both ways through a gap in the holiday traffic, he almost ran into another representative of the Law. The deputy he’d nearly bumped into was the same guy he’d encountered at the vehicle wreck in the Spring.

“Deputy Poechman!” he gushed. “We meet again! A pleasure, to be sure!” The deputy looked both startled and confused. Will kept at it. “Just parted company with your boss. We enjoyed a nice little chinwag.” He raised a finger and applied to the side of his nose. Tapping, he said, “Between you, me and the fencepost, you might want to prepare yourself for a busy night.” He added a knowing nod and leaned in for a conspiratorial whisper. The deputy lurched back and Will didn’t miss the reflexive reach for the holster. Will offered a broad smile instead. “The Sheriff’s at the ballpark handing out free beer to the citizenry.” He left the man with a wink and marched off to his truck.

When he unlocked the door, he looked back toward Central. The deputy was no where in sight. The inside of the truck was a furnace. A hot ball of air rolled over him when he opened the door and he waited a moment before sliding behind the wheel. The seat was like lava. He started the truck in hopes that Venlo wasn’t such a one horse town that all had packed up and headed to Maastricht, and that the Muni would be open. He drove on to Central then headed West, a little sad at departing. He’d actually been looking forward to sticking around for the fireworks.

Longer than it needs to be, and longer than it will be the next time around… Won’t say any more for now.

+   +   +

Will rolled his eyes and said, “Inspiring. What’s that got to do with my present situation? Does this give him the right to plow under and plant any bare space in the neighborhood?”

“I’m getting there, Will.” Blom took his glasses off, wiped them and placed them on his forehead. “You’ve been to the house, right?”

“In a sense.”

“Your grandparents used to own it. Not the house, of course, but the property it’s on. It was the last piece of property the Rijsbergen’s sold. It sent your grand-uncle west with his new bride. From that point, your grandparents were finally the only residents of the house you’ve got now. It was the way they did things since your great-grandparents moved here.”

Will was aware of this. The room that became “his” had always been “Jupp’s”, his grandfather’s brother, Josef. Josef—“Jupp– lost a finger in the late thirties, and his grandfather went to Normandy because of it. Two year after the war, Jupp, his nine fingers and a grandaunt headed off to Oregon. He’d never met either of them. A couple of years later, his mother was born.

“The Mikkelson’s were immigrants, too. New ones. They left Norway about five minutes after the Germans invaded, came here from Sweden when the war was over, They got here a year after your grandad was discharged. Jupp was in his twenties, about to get married and was eager to sell and get out on his own. Could well have been your grandad wanted to change his scenery, but that’s not how it worked out. Anyway.

“Matts, Arn’s father, was living in Venlo with his wife and two kids, had been working as a farmhand. He bought the property from your grandfather, which gave Jupp enough to skedaddle.”

Will hadn’t heard any of this before, but it held no interest for him. “Fascinating, Bertie. Again, what’s that got to do with my having a shitbird for a neighbor?”

Blom made his little gesture again and went on. “Moving way ahead, the Mikkelson’s made it through that farm crisis in the eighties by the skin of their teeth, just as your grandparents and every other family farm that survived. In all honesty, most people ended up better off a few years by going under. Arn had two older brothers and a sister, and they left Limburg County the minute they could. Arn was all that was left, and he was barely out of grammar school. He was also the only kid in the family that was in love with the farming life. I don’t think the man is capable of doing anything else. About the time he turned eighteen, Matts was moving into his seventies and was all done with it. He retired and the only thing he left for Arn was the house and the grass around it.”

Will waited for more, and didn’t get it. “And . . . ?”

“If you think Arn’s an asshole, you should have met the old man.”

Blom and Will turned to look at Ouillette. “Matts retired and moved to Texas. The only way he could get to Texas was to sell off everything but the lot the house stood on, and I’m pretty sure Arn had to beg just to get that out of him. And he didn’t just sell the land, but all the machinery too. Arn didn’t have anything but the roof over his head.”

“Who bought the property around it,” Will asked.

“Same folks who bought up everything ten years before. Imperial Agriculture,” Ouillette answered. “And Arn ends up surrounded by dirt and crops he thought were going to be his, and he can’t farm it.”

Having an asshole for a father struck home with Will. He fought down a mild stirring of empathy and asked, “So he steals from the neighbor with a sob story for an excuse.”

Ouillette smiled. “Not that simple,” he said through his teeth. “And, no. He tried to buy the west lot from your grandmother.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He didn’t have the money, for one thing. He was nineteen years old, never had a job, and all the old man left him was the house. The minute they were gone, Arn was on his own. I don’t think he even had a savings account.” Ouillette fixed Will with a hard look. “The bank wouldn’t give him a loan, not even when he offered to put the house up for collateral, because he had no demonstrable means of paying it off. After all the previous foreclosures, they weren’t about to stir that pot again.”

Ouillette’s open antagonism was unsettling, but Will had pried out this much information and wasn’t about to leave until he had his answers. “So this pissed him off. Nan dies, and he decides he’s got every right to take the property out of some goofy notion it would have been his if his dad wasn’t a dick and fate weren’t so cruel.”

Ouillette answered with a smirk. “She wasn’t all that keen to sell it to him, either.”

“There we go,” Will said to the smirk.

“She didn’t want to sell because of you,” Ouillette said.

Will didn’t have a retort for that.

The smile was back, no less edgier than the smirk. “She did, however, let him ‘borrow’ it for a year. He put a crop in, using Imperial Ag’s equipment.” Ouillette shook his head. “You impress me as a fellow that appreciates irony. Tell me if this suits you. Arn’s first and only outside employment was working for the company his old man sold to. Better yet, some of the property he farmed for a paycheck used to be his family’s. He even made a little extra by storing some of their machinery in his outbuildings. Sort of funny, isn’t it?” Will didn’t laugh, though Ouillette paused long enough to give him the opportunity. With no chuckles forthcoming, Ouillette went on, “One season and an eighty-acre corn crop in, Arn gives your grandmother twenty per cent of his profit. She tried to refuse it, but he insisted. He made an offer to buy it again, too, saying he’d be happy with a contract for deed. He said they could keep it at twenty per cent a year or even go as far as to give her every penny he made off that eighty acres until it met her price.”

Will felt remaining silent would be taken as a tacit admission of some sort of guilt. He wasn’t sure of what guilt he bore, or whether there was any actual cause for it, but it was obvious Ouillette believed there was. If Ouillette believed it, he was certain the rest of the locals probably believed it as well—including Blom. “Sounds like a fair deal,” he said. That answer was as much honest belief as it was empathy quashing and guilt denial.

“As fair as fair could be, especially under the circumstances. More than fair, when you think about it. Imagine, losing all you thought you’d have someday, then working in for some faceless corporation. But, right next door you get a piece of it back. It yours, small as it is. Not enough to raise a family on, and it still meant you’d be sweating for a ‘letterhead’, but it’s yours, and it’s right outside your kitchen window.” Ouillette’s smile had softened, but his eyes had not.

Will didn’t want to satisfy the sense he was getting that Ouillette was waiting for something from him, so he gave him something right away. “Why didn’t she do it?”

“Mind if I answer with a quote?”

Will answered with a shrug.

Ouillette said, “Your grandmother’s answer was this, ‘I think that would work just fine, but I don’t want to do anything without asking Willem first.’”

Will just stood there, locked into place. It the resultant pause was an orchestration of Ouillette’s, it was inconsequential. He was truly rendered speechless. He could think of nothing to say. He turned to Blom, who was looking at him, on elbow on the counter, resting his cheek in a palm, expressionless. He turned back to Ouillette. “How . . . ?”

“I was having coffee with her in her kitchen when he made this proposal.”

Speechless again.

Ouillette’s smile had gone away. So had the hardness in his eyes, but the expression he wore was no less accusatory. “I don’t know if they ever talked about it again. She never said anything to me about it, anyway. There’s no way of knowing how far it might have gone anyhow. The end of the next February she was dead.”

Will swallowed, then said, “I never heard anything like that from her.”

“I guess she never brought it up. She always had a funny way of talking about you without ever really saying anything about you.” Ouillette gave a shrug of his own. “I sure as hell never heard anything more about it from Arn. I’ve known him most of my life and don’t think we’ve ever shared more than ten words between us.” He shrugged again. “Those would have been at her funeral.” He gave another shrug, turned, and disappeared down an aisle.

Will stared at the spot Ouillette had vacated until he thawed out enough to turn to Blom. The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows and said, “Complicated.”

All Will could do was nod. Mexico. Blasted on mescal and mota. “Yeah,” Will finally managed to say. “Yeah.” He couldn’t conjure anything else to say, so he tacked on a “thanks” and walked out of the store.

All my whining and agonizing of the last few weeks has proven a great big “all for naught.” The devious Arn Mikkelson and his lovely family have wormed their way back in. Couldn’t turn him loose after all. Another thing was, I had never conceived of Loren Ouillette as a point of conflict, and it just doesn’t fit. I can’t make it fit. I don’t want it to fit. So, the sharecropping landthief returns… and without as much background to this point to give those who’ve been following much to go on. Tough luck. It’ll get fixed in the first real edit, and I’m just going to carry on as is.

+   +   +

Chapter Thirteen

Will paused as he bounced out the back door. He took a couple of jogging strides across the end of the driveway, turned, and jogged backwards a few more strides. The roof was nearly complete, with about five sections of green steel to be placed toward the rear. It looked fantastic. Fuckin’ Maartens . . . At that thought, Will caught sight of the man. He gave the contractor a quick wave and half-jogged, half-walked up the drive to the county road.

The sky was a shattering blue, cloudless with a gradual darkening toward the West. At the crest of the driveway that horizon appeared a thousand miles away. The sun had scarcely cracked the horizon in the East, but the heat it promised was already evident on Will’s skin. Instead of swing left or right at the county road, he stopped. The field directly opposite the driveway was twice as deep as the Rijsbergen property, stretching away from the road for at least a mile. Soybeans, it appeared. They hadn’t matured to the point that they covered the entire field, and dark strips of soil stood out in contrast to the rows of bright green. The windbreak at the far end was, at this distance, just a strip of brighter green with the trunks of the Pin Oaks and Cottonwoods just dark highlights. He lifted his eyes to the clear, clean sky, a boundless dome of impenetrable azure. He tried to imagine this sky one hundred fifty years ago, over an ocean of unbroken prairie grass, four feet high and already burning to brown under the early summer sun, narrowing to an unbroken, three hundred and sixty degree razor thin division between blue and yellow, and had a better understanding of how many pioneer wives went insane. He started churning his legs, and broke left.

Sticking to the gravel shoulder, Will was setting an early pace as he almost cleared the west field. He coughed a couple of times and launched a gob at Arn Mikkelson’s illicit corn crop. It fell well short of the burgeoning plants, now unmistakably corn and just showing tassels. He tried working up another to deposit in the man’s driveway, but couldn’t bring up enough phlegm. Fucker.

Will had broken that first plateau and let his stride out. He was still waiting on his lungs but, per usual, they’d be their own stubborn selves and not relax for another mile and a half. Even at this point, he knew it was going to be a good day. Perhaps he’d push it to nine miles.

The running and golf were passions, but not born of an organic process of self-discovery, but by the value they had first and foremost as diversions, distractions. The golf was a result of mere locale. Will had grown up in a house that abutted a golf course. Escape was a matter of crossing a fence. The running was just an obvious means of getting away. The escape they provided would be forever qualified and quantified as that it came from an outside purpose, generated by an exterior purpose. One way or the other, and no matter how he looked at it, Mom got the credit.

Just passing the spot where he’d left the road in search of dead cattle, Will felt the expansion in his chest and the air coming in a rush. A few hundred yards more and he could stretch his legs and slip into the hypnosis that would carry him for as long he was willing to go. The mild euphoria, that “runner’s high”, had ever been an illusion in Will’s case. There was always something in his head, something he could not set aside.

“Run, Billie. Run, run, run. The thing is, Billie, and in case you didn’t hear, the world is round. Run, run, run, no matter how far, someday you’re going to find yourself right back where you started. There’s no getting away from that.”

+   +   +

And then there’s dear old Mom. Often hinted at, teasers laid out all over the place, and we are now moving to a spot where we’ll all get to know her. Hang on, folks.