Tag: novel

Chapter Thirteen, Aaaalmost done.

Long, but falling back into place, and it’ll make things a lot more clear and, come the first edit, cut what’s preceded it waaaay down. I’ll clarify next time around.

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Will didn’t waste any time in the parking lot. He parked close to the door. Blom was dealing with a few customers at the register. He saw Will the moment he came through the door and his expression didn’t send a message of warm welcome. Ouillette and his nephew were restacking a pallet of lawn fertilizer near the entrance. There was a small forklift parked near them. There were several torn bags of the fertilizer and the floor was covered in tiny pellets. Ouillette was muttering a mantra of “pallet dolly, Jared, pallet dolly” as Will walked past them.

 

The customers left the counter. Will glanced around, so no imminent transactions in the immediate area, and asked. “What the fuck is with that joker next door to me?”

Blom closed his eyes, tipped his had back and released a long exhale.

“I met him at the end of his driveway, just wanting to talk to him, and he just blew right away from me.”

Blom neither opened his eyes or straightened his head. “You were waiting at the end of his driveway first thing this morning?”

“No,” Will answered. “I was out for a run and just happened to be near the end of his drive when he was heading out. I tried to flag him down. He looked me in the eye and took off.”

“Do you often stop for strangers running down the road?” Blom was looking at him now.

“No,” Will answered again. “Can’t say I’ve ever encountered anybody in that way.”

“Would you advise people to stop for people attempting to flag them down?”

Will rolled his eyes. “Depends on the circumstances.”

“Other than your running down the road, was there anything about your ‘circumstances’ that would indicate to Arn he should stop? For example, you were bleeding, or had an obvious injury? Do you carry and empty gas can when running? Were you being chased?”

“I was just trying to wave him down for a brief chat.”

“I believe you already had an idea of how willing Arn Mikkelson would be regarding a chat.”

“I did,” said Will. “So, I sent that asshole a letter last week.”

Blom responded by staying quiet.

“Do you want to know what he did with it?”

“Have I a choice?”

“Fucker sent it back,” Will told him. “With ‘return to sender’ scribbled all over it.”

Blom made a gesture, particular to Blom, that Will was finally able to interpret as what Blom passed for a shrug.

“How am I supposed to resolve this if the jerk won’t talk to me or even answer a letter?”

Blom threw up his hands. “I suggested you just might want to let this thing pass for a bit. Ignore it and maybe he wouldn’t pull this sort of thing again. Maybe he just wasn’t aware of you’re being there until he had the damn thing planted, and now he knows better.”

“Well, obviously, I can’t do that,” Will argued. “At the very least, the jerk-off should have the balls to give me an explanation. If he can’t at least meet me halfway, I might just hire somebody to plough the whole thing under.”

“As I told you before, Will, it’s very complicated.”

Will huffed, crossed his arms, and stepped aside as a customer to approached the counter. When the man left, throwing a backward glance at Will, he stepped back up to Blom. “Do you sell tractors?, Plows? Disc harrows?”

“Loren,” Blom suddenly called out, “you want to pitch in here?”

Ouillette stopped sweeping only long enough to say, “It’s really none of my business.”

“Well, you didn’t keep to your own business when it came to making supporting statements disparaging the banker, and now you can chime in when it comes to solving a problem rather than adding to one. You know more about this than anyone else in the county.” Before saying anything, he pointed a finger at his nephew. “Touch that forklift and you’ll be taking the rest of the week off.”

Jared made as if to protest.

“And you’ll have to ask me if you can come back to work before I’ll let you out of the house. We’ve talked about this more than once.”

A hot flash of anger crossed the boy’s face. His body tensed and, to Will’s shock, he moved his hand towards the knife dangling from his belt.

“That hand moves another inch,” Ouillette snapped, “that thing will sit in the safe a year. And you might never work another day here. Do you understand?”

The boy immediately sagged, like air leaked out of him. “I’m sorry.”

Will could see tears forming in the boy’s eyes. “I’m sorry Uncle Loren.” Jared faced the counter. “I’m sorry, Mister Blom.”

“Apology accepted, Jared. Now, you just listen to your uncle, and everything’s fine.” Blom leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “When you get the rest of this mess cleaned up, you can go out and sweep the loading dock and the sidewalks before it gets to hot to be outside. If the rest of the morning goes well, and if it’s not too busy, I think you and I should go out for lunch. Let your uncle run this show for an hour or so.” Will was sure he wasn’t mistaken when he thought he saw a little extra moisture in Blom’s eyes as well.

The young man brightened in an instant, and began vigorously sweeping the remainder of the mess on the floor. Ouillette gave Blom another “look,” then said to Will, “Mikkelson plants on that lot because he’s convinced it’s supposed to be his.”

However intriguing the exchange of a moment ague may have been, the curiosity it triggered in Will vanished. “How so?” he demanded.

Ouillette smirked. “It’s complicated.”

“Goddamn it…”

Ouillette’s smirk hardened. He looked past Will toward Blom and said. “Did my bit.”

He winked at Will, went to the little forklift and drove away.

Blom didn’t bother to wait for another question. “Arn’s a farmer, Willem.”

“So.”

“Not just a farmer, but a farmer.” Blom nodded toward Will in a way that suggested Will’s questions had been magically cleared. They had not.

“I repeat,” Will said. “So?”

Blom heaved another sigh, shook his head for the dozenth time. “Age wise, there can’t be more than two or three years between you and Mikkleson.” His elbows were back on the counter. “In all the years, and all the times you were at your grandparents, had you ever spent one minute with Arn Mikkelson?”

Will had not. In all the years he’d visited Venlo, he’d never spent a minute with another kid. There was no other family in the state, no cousins, no weddings, no social events that would have brought him into any kind of social contact with any locals. Most of any time he’d spent away from the house had been with his grandfather. It’d never been suggested to him to run across the field and play with the kid next door. He didn’t know there was a kid next door. It was what he’d been conditioned to. He didn’t have any friends at home, either. He shook his head.

“Did you even know Arn existed?”

“No.”

“No fault of your grandparents,” Blom told him. “You could have gone over there every day and never caught sight of him. Since that boy could walk he was either on a tractor or in the machine shed. He was the youngest of four kids, and youngest by ten years at least, kind of a surprise baby, I’d guess you’d say.”

Will didn’t give a rat’s ass about Mikkelson birth order. “Perhaps, due to his unique position in the family, he resorted to stealing in order to get the attention he was desperate for.”

Blom ignored the comment. “The kid used to skip school to work at home. He never joined a club, he never played a sport, he never picked up a hobby. He was turning fields, planting crops, running a combine, spraying pesticide and fertilizer, all by the time he was ten years old. He could fix any piece of equipment on the place by the time he was ten.

“If there wasn’t anything for him to do at home, he’d find someplace else. A neighbor got laid up for something, Arn would handle things until the fellow was back on his feet. Family emergency, Arn would hold the fort until the problem was sorted out. Come Fall, when all the other boys were all fired up for hunting season, Arn was half crazy with harvest fever. His family would get their own crop in and Arn would be off helping everybody else in the county until every last field was down.”

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.”

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So am I, honest. This’ll be wrapped up in a day or two.

 

 

Chapter Thirteen, Part Two.

Jeezers, this was a grind. First Mikkelson is in, just as I’d always meant hm to be. Then he’s out, just as I believed was necessary to move things along, and then I put him back, because he’s effing integral. Damn me. Anyhoo, the following is the aftermath, the hangover, if you will, of flopping along through this “plotline tug-o-war.” If you want me to be honest, over half of what I’ve put down here just plain– in my head– sucks, and sucks awful. There are tidbits that are worth saving, but right now I just flat out hate it. Rough draft. Rough draft. Rough draft. I hope it works better for you than it does for me.

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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.”

Of all the things that had come out of her mouth, the negative, the fatalistic, the snide, that was a comment that he could not discard. Not with a lifetime of practice and diligence, there were phrases, observations and revelations born of a poisoned philosophy that nevertheless rang true and he could not dismiss them. They hit the target and struck deep, buried in the bone, held fast with barbs.

“Mommies give you life, Billie. Life! They give you flowers, sunrises, puppies. They give you love, Billie. And all they want back is love. You know what else they give? They give you death. And with all the love in the world, all the love mommies can give, it goes away. She dies. That love dies with her. You die. Everything you knew and ever had, a mommy’s love, and the love you had for her. Gone. All because of Mommy.”

Will hit four miles and the shackles were off. He left the gravel shoulder and eased himself onto the asphalt. Gravity shifted ninety degrees, its force no longer driving his feet into the ground, but propelling them forward. The earth beneath him was no longer a binding force, but a springboard. The balls of his feet touched it like a fleeting kiss, a faint whisper, its constraints a dim, indistinct memory. It was going to be one of those days,

The sun had fully risen and Will felt the full force of it on his back. There was a breeze from the West, and he was running straight into it. Wind in the face cooled you off, wind at your back heated you up. He was hot already. With a well practiced move, he removed his shirt, balled it up, and drifted further to the center of the road until he could toss it to the eastbound shoulder. He’d grab it one the way back.

“If you could be anybody in the world, would you still be you?”

It had rained the entire day before. Will had managed another hour of procrastination before he opened the hope chest. Mom’s box of scorpions, she’d once told him when he’d asked what she kept in it, open it and you’ll get stung. He was maybe seven years old when he first became aware of it, how it was the first thing she went to whenever they arrived at the farm. It was only a year or so later that he made the connection between her spending hours scribbling in a blank journal or a wirebound notebook and the mysterious wooden box in her bedroom. It was only a few months after that he was able to understand the role it played in the irregular, impromptu dashes back to Venlo. He learned to watch for a handful of new notebooks. He was soon able to use them as a calendar, estimate time she spent hunched over them, at the kitchen table, the chaise by the pool, crouched on the bathroom floor, writing in a deliberate, thoughtful manner or scratching in a frantic scrawl. When the books were full, It was time to go.

Working out how long it took to fill a notebook or a journal was a trickier thing. Will had to consider whether she was manic, down in a hole of paralytic depression, or somewhere in between. That took some time, but he eventually doped it out.

Will approached a bridge. He’d learned from an odometer mission in his truck, calculating distance and what landmarks were nearby in setting up the mileage for his runs. This bridge, which would have come in handy that morning he was tracking down dead cattle, was just short of four miles from the end of his driveway. It marked the edge of the county, crossing the Wahpekute. Another three miles would bring him to the South Dakota border.

Will’s temptation was fleeting. To the border and back would put him close to fifteen miles. He hadn’t run anything more than a half marathon since college. The sun on his back tempered his desire to make it something of a record day. It was going to hit ninety degrees, possibly higher. The humidity was cranking up as well. Will crossed the bridge, crossed the road and back over the bridge. Nine would do. His head wasn’t in the right way to push himself.

The contents of the chest went back to his mother’s mid-middle school days. Nothing there, no hints of what was to come. It was all pubescent girl; worries about school, friends, arguments with Nan, budding breasts and their foretelling of future anxieties over menses and boys. But, it was calming. Will was surprised at the relief that came with line after line of even, tidy cursive, rolling on and on into pages and books centered on a too-tall, gangly and awkward girl with bumps swelling under her shirt. It became so routine and repetitive that he began riffling through pages without a glance at a single phrase.

It carried him through about a quarter of the contents of the chest. No hints. No tells, no foreshadowing. He went no further that day. The rain had finally relented and when the sun came out he couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. He hit some golf balls. The corn in the field had grown a foot, so he could no longer see the dots they made in the turned soil. However, he found the occasional sound of his projectiles tearing through leaves more satisfying, and even looked forward to the plants growing higher, increasing the potential destructive power each shot would have. The effect this exercise had in diffusing whatever anxiety he’d felt over prying into his mother’s past was unexpected. The initial fear he’d had over discovering some dark secret, some emotional trauma tied to her childhood as an explanation for her madness wasn’t there. All he’d read revealed nothing more than little girl’s normal excitement and trepidation at growing into a young woman. That was what he’d expected and was something he’d had drilled into his head for nearly half of his life. Having it re-affirmed brought little relief.

Instead, he found old, irrational fears stirring. What if there was nothing in that box before he was born that indicated trouble? What if her musings revealed nothing more than the irrationality and recklessness of adolescence? What if she didn’t go nuts until after he was born, and the cause of her madness was inseparable from his coming into being?

Will came upon his shirt. His pace was too high, driven by the wheels cranking in his head. It was a mistake. Running like this with all that in his head. Not burning that box the first day he was here. Opening that box. Reading what he’d read so far. Reading any more of it. Reading it, knowing he could never read it all, because the last notebooks had been torn to pieces, thrown into the pool, only to be carried away as “evidence…” That final question would never be answered… It was a mistake. Coming here.

Clutching his shirt, Will came upon the edge of the Mikkelson property. He’d have taken little notice, he was talking himself he needed to keep his pace until he’d reached his driveway, and only then could he allow himself to decelerate to a walk, but he saw Arn Mikkelson’s beat-up one-ton-dually moving onto the county road. Here was a chance to face the man.

Will kicked up his pace, trying to find the strength for an all out sprint. He could see a clear silhouette of Mikkelson’s head, back lit by the low sun in the east. It was turned, looking west, in his direction. There was no traffic coming at him and there was no way he couldn’t see Will coming at him. The head turned and the truck eased forward, turning into the eastbound lane. Will raised his shirt over his head and waived it. He would have shouted and screeched as well, but his legs weren’t getting enough air as it was. Surprised, as his legs had lost all feeling and his chest was burning, Will was actually closing on him.

Impossibly, Will’s rubber legs responded to his demands for even more acceleration. Will could actually make out Mikkelson’s face, first in the side mirror and then, as the truck straightened out on the pavement, his eyes, staring straight back at him in the rear view. Will was perhaps fifteen feet from the tailgate when he heard a sudden roar. The four rear tires of the truck blurred and emitted a rising screech as they spun on the asphalt. The vehicle leapt away from him, and Mikkelson’s eyes were lost in the fog of blue, reeking tire smoke.

Will came to a jolting halt in a half-dozen, flat-footed steps. He bent, grabbing his knees and coughing. Still squeezing his patellas, he tried to turn his body to escaped the noxious haze of Mikkelson’s scorched rubber.

“Fucking…” Will wheezed, “dirty . . . asshole . . .” He repeated it several times, still bent over in the middle of the road. When he’d regained the energy to stand erect, the tire smoke had dissipated, and he could inhale without hacking. He forced his mouth to close but continued to greedily suck in air, solely through his nostrils. I was a few minutes before he tried to move.

Will’s legs were shaking, wobbly like he’d actually done those fifteen miles. Never before had he finished a run with a “kick” such as that. He vowed never to do it again. Even to escape flames, he would never do it again. He made it to the end of the drive before he could consciously feel his legs again. At the end of the drive, he reflexively opened his brand new mailbox, even though he knew the mailman wouldn’t be by for at least four more hours. He slammed the empty box shut and began his walk to the house. The gravel driveway looked about five miles long, and the vehicles of Maartens’ roofing crew looked like Matchbox cars.

I’m going to the house, he told himself. I’m going to stretch. I’m going to shower. I’m going to eat a yogurt and a banana. I’m going to get dressed. He stopped less than halfway down the drive, seeing a stone about the size of a chicken’s egg. He stooped to pick it up, marveling at how he wobbled as he rose back to standing. He looked at the stone, rolled it in his palm, then threw it, toward the county road, and in the directions Mikkelson’s truck had been going. And then I’m going to seen Bertie Blom, and become the greatest pain in the ass he’ll have ever known in his lifetime.

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Yeah. There ya have it. And such a long wait for it, too! It’ll be a LOT more coherent after the next go ’round. Fear not, what’s coming next time is a LOT more lucid. ‘ Til then.