chests to confuse the ravenous Celestial Dog and as they filled the gaping mouths with rice.
After he’d quit drinking, the jack-in-the-box joke was that the nightmare liked to hide in the sweet itch weeds where sex tangled up with love.
So for ten years he’d played hide-and-seek with women. Then he’d met Linda and, with ten years sober as a hedge, he’d wanted to believe he was past it and he’d pleased her with the joy of being free. But the joke was just being patient for the right moment to shove down the visceral plunger and he could feel her insides swell all around him and he was dreaming wide awake that he was back in the gut pile and he’d just told her that he loved her and he’d meant it and the
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joke convulsed with slippery hungry glee: What do you suppose she had for supper? The hydraulics of sex dried up on the spot.
She’d suggested therapy and she’d wanted to work it out, but he knew she’d never get the joke because outside the womb the only time most men got inside another human being was making love.
So Harry lit a cigarette to chase the loathing in his mouth and laughed because Linda the feminist thought women should be in combat. And a voice in the back of his mind that sounded like Randall cautioned him. You’re too old, too soft, to play out a hand of blackjack with Jesse Deucette.
The phone rang just before dawn and the Reverend Donald Karson of Stanley, Minnesota, sounded like he’d been up all night.
“Bud gave me your number,” said Karson. “He feels a duty to come to…Chris’s funeral. That’s not a good idea, Harry.”
“When’s the service?” Harry asked calmly as a vision of Jesse floated across the burial plots and stood next to an open grave.
“Tuesday, eleven A.M.”
“It’ll be all right,” said Harry. “Bud will be checked safe and sound into a chemical-dependency ward. I will attend the funeral.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Karson.
22
So how serious are you, man—St. Paul serious or Detroit serious? At dawn, Harry in his sweatsuit, put his Nikes to the Sunday quiet streets of St. Paul.
The snow crunched and the fresh air seared his breath and he remembered how he’d come north to St. Paul, where it was clean, to put the first half of his life to sleep. Almost a Canadian town. Hell, back then, he’d cross the river to
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Windsor, Canada, and sit in a well-tended park where things were tidy and under control and dream of a better life.
He headed up Wabasha Street toward the Capitol and came to the Maston Building and slowed to a walk and read the bronze plaque next to the doorway: Maston Foundation. Richard Stanley Maston, Director.
Two rampant griffins stood vigil over the entrance. Griffins are guardians. Bud said that. The first day they met.
Well, he’d be one fucked Griffin if he laid down for this one.
He let it percolate at the edge of his thoughts—Jesse, Emery, Becky hiding in the woods—as he ran up the hill and crossed over the empty moat of the freeway and the Capitol loomed, iced with frost, with a team of gold horses prancing over the door.
He stopped at a marble bench and a granite pedestal where the statue of Stanley Houghton Walker Maston posed in weathered bronze with birdshit for epaulets. The old robber baron extended one green hand, flicking a spitball in perpetuity at the back of his blood enemy, another statue across the way. Floyd B. Olson, Minnesota’s Red governor during the Depression.
Well, Richard, you have your karma to work out and I have mine.
He ran eight-minute miles down Summit Avenue to the river and pushed it on the way back until the nicotine stitches burst in his lungs and the old screws that thrived on pain started turning and he had to keep going to shake the flat out of his ass from all the years stuck at a desk. In front of his apartment, he coughed up a decade’s worth of caution and hawked it into the snow, then he went upstairs and showered.
Time to call Bud in the hospital. He worked through the switchboard, found the ward and was told that Bud was being carted around for tests.
With energy shooting from his fingers, Harry cleaned his apartment, laid out clothing, studied a map of Minnesota, and 136 / CHUCK LOGAN
traced the road north. He checked the balance in his savings account.
Ravenous, he got in his car and drove east down the Interstate, crossed the St. Croix River, and pulled off in Hudson, Wisconsin, into an empty landscape of cement and brand names. Perkins.
Country Kitchen. Amoco. Anywhere USA. He went into the Perkins and ordered eggs, sausage, pancakes. Poured on the syrup. A man in the next booth was reading the St. Paul paper. Harry glanced at the front page and grinned.
A grainy AP photo showed corpses in the Third World mud and the headline story in the final Sunday edition was the murder of three American clergymen in El Salvador. The shooting in northern Minnesota was stripped in a small headline at the bottom of the page. Most of the story had been kicked inside.
For diversion, he wandered down the shopping mall and went to a movie and took a tub of popcorn into the dark to watch a block-buster thriller about a cop taking on a gang of terrorists. Someone was killed in the first three minutes and people kept dying in orgies of automatic gunfire and lots of explosions served up supernovas of flying glass and bodies were dropping, coming apart, impaled, burned,
