THE GODDAM by Wylie R. Ledoux

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright © 2021, 2022 by Wylie R. Ledoux (the author)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for Robin Lane and Reggie Polsfuss

signs along the way

 

 

 

Prologue

 

August 2023

NO DOUBT, the beginning of the end was August 30, 2022. That’s what he’ll tell anyone who will listen.

That was the day the former President of the United States, Donald John Trump, on his own Truth Social network, asked the decidedly nonrhetorical question Why is everybody so mean?

Anyone who was paying attention knew that time had run out, one way or the other. Donald Trump would never go to prison. Up to his ears in federal lawsuits, state lawsuits, and purloined national security secrets that were to be earmarked for sale to highest bidder, he would weasel out of it by using a trick no one had ever tried before:

Crying like a child.

That’s it, he thought. America is over.

 

 

HE THINKS it must be the windshield wipers, swish swoosh swish swoosh, yet in a way it does like thousands of people chanting Hail Trump! Heil Hitler! and probably right this moment about fifteen hundred miles to his southeast, many thousands of red-blooded Americans are doing just that. Not good red-blooded Americans, ‘cause ain’t nothin’ good about these folks. But there are plenty of them out there, and now they’re in charge again, them and that horrific orange apparition, practically dead, ravaged by two bouts of COVID-19, drooling constantly on the bib he wears now to protect his expensive ties(!): He doesn’t look human anymore although he probably never really was. But now he has reemerged in the terminally battered American psyche as the creature from the Black Lagoon, the creature from Beyond the Grave, his very own florid Frankenstoopid Monster.

The whining complaining grating voice is about the only thing that hasn’t changed, except that much of what it says now is gibberish. Correction: it’s always been gibberish, but what was the proper term for gibberish made up of complete words? Word salad. That was the expression they’d been using to describe Frankenstoopid’s speech since he’d descended that infamous gilded escalator. But now the words were only partial words, pieces of words, mixed in with spit and drool and monosyllables. On first listen you would swear the thing was speaking some kind of clipped, guttural human language, certainly not English but maybe something Middle Eastern, until you listened more carefully and realized that it was English, or supposed to be. A patois that was fully understood only by the orange blob’s cult.

At that instant he notices two things: First, his windshield wipers don’t make any appreciable noise—somewhere he had known that, it was one of the nice things about finally owning a decent new car—and what he had actually been hearing was indeed many thousands of American voices chanting Hail Trump! Heil Hitler! from his shushed radio, which he's just turned up hoping to get a weather forecast. He is out on the Plains for real now, past the exit for St. James and Madelia, and experience has taught him how quickly the weather here can become a matter of life and death.

So. Meet the new boss.

You could describe Drumpf and his traitor tots in the most ludicrous, insulting terms imaginable, as comedians and talk show hosts had been doing for the better part of a decade. But there was nothing amusing about what was going on in America right now, today, a late August Tuesday in the year of our Lord 2023. He thought to himself: 9/11 had been on a Tuesday.

swish swoosh swish swoosh

An all-out coup had begun  in DC at dawn. Two hundred forty-three US Representatives and Senators were known to have been executed (all but three of the Democrats in Congress, the lucky three who couldn’t be located), and eight top Twitter executives were hanging from a scaffold in Times Square right now, paying their eternal penance to the disgraced ex-president whom they had once embarrassed. President Joe Biden was being flown to Australia in an Air Force fighter jet. Lucky VP Kamala Harris was on a state visit to India and Nepal, where if she had any sense, she would stay.

Twitler speaks!

Says (he pronounces it saze) they was in charge of everything! Well, heh—we showed them! Heheh!

(here Trump pauses to fluff his clown hair and blow his nose on his sleeve)

An’ then you look at a guy like the Mooch, the Anthony, the Scaramucci? Hee hee hee! Heee’l never work in THIS town again! Heh! Heh!

Standing ovation. You can hear the multitides chanting their new führer’s favorite word, looooser. Right now he has to think hard before he can put a face to the name… oh yeah. The Mooch. Skinny little lawyerly guy, expensive conservo suits, great Archie Bunker accent. Trump had given him the boot about a week after he was hired and the Mooch had been slipping a nice slow Sicilian knife into Trump’s spleen ever since. But these assholes who had overthrown the government didn’t know who Scaramucci was any more than they had known who Mike Pence was before Trump put a hit on him.

Behind Trump, blowing her bubblegum, was his fourth wife, 17-year-old Pawela Durak from Belarus. Besides the fact that she had some reasonably ostentatious breast implants (yuuuuge titties! as the führer liked to point out) and two full-arm sleeves to set them off, there was nothing especially eye-catching about Pawela Durak Trumpka. She looked like any semi-healthy high school girl from the kind of well-off school district that had a swimming pool.  (And a tattoo parlor.)

He chuckled to himself as someone with a working knowledge of several Slavic tongues; he’d minored in linguistics. “Durak,” in much of the Slavic world, meant ‘”fool.” And if there was any justice in this miserable world, “drumpf” meant “ho daddy” in German.

An’ az biffo ahrfahrd Jennul Dinny-widdy, ehhhh-McCain! Powell! And that Huh… that beech Hulluryyy! WUHhuh—locker up! Locker up! Dih, heheh.

This “heheh” at the end of sentences is new, and quite annoying.

The crowd takes up the old favorite chant, with a new twist: LOCK HER UP! DEATH TO NANCY! LOCK HER UP! DEATH TO NANCY!

He can see it in his head like a television he can’t turn off, the grubby little hands rising in mock modesty, “begging” the mob for quiet. Except that in truth he had gone out of his way to avoid Donald Trump on television or anywhere else, starting way back when Trump was legitimately the President of the United States, and he’d assumed that one day soon Trump would not be the President anymore. Which was correct, except for that whole business with “I won in a landslide, it was stolen from me!” and then the insurrection and the slain cops sprawled on the marble floors of the US Capitol and Officer Caroline Edwards slip-sliding on blood as she hurled herself back into the breach, Trump’s very own preprogrammed zombies lurching about the Capitol stewed to the gills on meth and booze and hatred.

The wipers continue their hypnotic dance. Patriots, he snorts. He had been in a good mood yesterday morning, the first official day of his retirement, even if he’d been up pretty late the previous night douching out the old place. Hell, the last thing he’d done was to put some actual lemon oil down on the hardwood floor in the living room. The demure young Hmong couple who had bought his house deserved that much; they’d given him his asking price and if hadn’t been just starting his retirement he might not have let them. He’d tried to tell them the neighborhood was not the best and neither were the schools (Mrs. was pregnant), but there was something that showed so eager and enthusiastic with these two kids that he was pretty sure they were going to find their way regardless, even if that was getting harder and harder to do. He’d picked a good time to hang it up.

He'd handed the keys over to the Xiongs at noon, smiled and shook hands, and tiptoed out to his car before the young couple could discover the champagne and bakery cookies he’d left in the kitchen.

He had reserved a nice suite at the Comfort Inn in Chanhassen, just a few miles from his just-departed house, and checked in early in the afternoon. Yes, the same Chanhassen where that great Minnesotan Prince had had his crazy studio called Paisley Park; once he’d heard that the studio was entirely purple and the size of a Walmart warehouse, but that was hard to believe even if you were talking about Prince. Later Willards at the bus barn had told him, “It’s white. Doesn’t stand out.”

“Like you,” he had cracked while Willards fake-body-slammed him.

Prince had, of course, been black, and also one his very favorite musicians. He couldn’t help but feel a certain relief that Prince Rogers Nelson hadn’t lived to see this day.

 Immediately he had done his usual motel routine of setting up a little bar on whatever slab of faux wood happened to be longest and setting up a few bottles of hooch. The last couple of years it seemed like he just didn’t have time to drink beer anymore, as much as he’d liked to; the truth was that it took awhile to get drunk on beer even if you were drinking Steel Reserve and it was 8.1 alcohol, nothing like that piss roughly 90 percent of American beer drinkers drank now (Bud Lite, Miller Lite, or Coors Lite)—he had a theory on that like he had a theory about everything, that it was because most people didn’t serve in the military anymore that they never got to experience the joys of that 3.2 beer they plied the soldiers and sailors and airmen with, especially overseas, the idea being that the poor enlisted grunts would keep throwing their money in the kitty but would always be chasing a buzz that would never arrive.

So the thing for him now, since the orange blob had been elected, was to have some serious liquor in tow when he had to get a room. Generally this would consist of fifths or liters of his three faves: bourbon, rye, scotch. Serious dark powerful man stuff. He laughed at the thought. Nothing had ever made him question his own masculinity, not that he was butch in any sense of the word. People at the bus barn “wondered” about him; it was a gay-friendly place (one of the owners was an out lesbian) and probably a third of the forty drivers were gay in one way or another. But the place had evolved, rather stupidly, into two camps: the gays and the straights. It was one of those things he’d never really given much thought to until now; since it was fairly obvious that he was going to have to make some sort of choice, he hung around with the queers. They talked about more interesting things anyway, and none of them liked Trump.

Once upon a time he would have immediately turned on the TV in the motel room just for some background noise, and more often than not would wind up watching some nature documentary or comedy special. But that had all ended with Trump. It became hard to turn on a TV without at some point being subjected to that awful metal-on-metal bandsaw whine that was Trump’s voice. Even if he didn’t happen to be looking at the screen and was spared the sight of the orange blob, that voice stayed with you like a hangover.

So now he would just sit in whatever chair was the easiest chair and stare at the wall (or out the window if there was anything to see) and drink. Eventually he would get drunk, and tired, and fall asleep, usually in the chair. Later he’d get up to take a leak, take another long pull from whichever bottle suited his fancy just then, and then collapse into troubled slumber. Such was the life of a drunk.

An hour later. The rain had never really turned into a storm and he had arrived at his “new” old farmhouse on the western edge of Chandler, Murray County, Minnesota, population 270. Well, 271 now. This could be the beginning of his life, but more likely the end.

Heh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

book one:

Luverne

 

September, 2024

"So I says to him, I says, I says, 'who's on the roster?' An' he says--"

The man sits bolt upright in bed, actually on a mattress, which is on a floor, in the living room of an old farmhouse in western Minnesota. And he is somewhat startled, this man in his middle sixties, to find that he has actually muttered these words aloud and woken himself from a fitful sleep as a result. The first real sleep he's had in three days. It's nighttime now but he's not sure what time of night; there's a bowl beside the mattress half-full of pungent vomit. Bile. He'd eaten nothing since God knows when. Unsteadily he drags himself off the mattress and into the kitchen and tries to pour himself a shot of vodka. But his hands are shaking too badly for him to pour even into a coffee cup, so finally he says fuck it and takes a swig from the bottle.

That settles things down a little. A lot, really.

He resists the temptation to take the bottle back to bed (mattress) with him. The dog is on the chair closest to the mattress, regarding him mournfully. "I'm okay," he says, but feels nothing but guilt. He used to run and play ball and tug-of-war with this frisky little mutt, now she's been laying in this chair for days watching him die. No fun for anyone, especially not a dog.

....................

years earlier

Woodbury, Minnesota isn't anyone's idea of paradise.

It's a suburb of the Twin Cities. More specifically, a suburb of St. Paul. It might as well be in Wisconsin, at least if you live in Minneapolis like he does.

But in the springtime he hardly knows where he lives because he's never at home. He drives a school bus morning, midday and afternoon, and when the afternoon route is done he scuttles off to work at the farmers' cooperative in Chaska. If it's raining and he can't be in the fields, the bus company always has a charter for him to drive instead, usually high school or middle school sporting events.

Saturdays are the same way: pumping fertilizer if the weather is good, driving charters if it isn't. And the co-op runs on Sundays too during the growing season. As a matter of fact he figures now that he hasn't had a day off in three weeks. As he's sitting here in the driver's seat of a school bus, parked on the street around the corner from a Kwik-Trip, wondering if the rain has let up enough to run in there and grab himself some breakfast or if he should stand under the big oak tree overhead and have another cigarette, or read his book, or just sit here staring blankly into space watching the rain fall, which is something he's gotten pretty good at these past couple of years.

He's thinking a lot about a guy called Crank who didn't come back to the co-op this season. Crank had died out in Las Vegas and it was almost a joke to ask what he died of, because Crank had beaten every kind of cancer there was, had bad diabetes that had to be treated with coumadin ("same as warfarin--rat poison," Crank had explained to him cheerfully), and had been shot full of holes in Vietnam and been stabbed at least once during his post-Army biker years. Crank was 74 when he died, still smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish. Crank would come by that rickety old place in Minneapolis with a sixpack in the off-season, just to shoot the shit and maybe escape the trailer he shared with a fat, unpleasant woman always referred to as "Mrs. Cranky."

There was a big sign tacked to the wall by the time clock at the co-op. It said

NO SMOKING IN THE TRUCKS, NO EXCEPTIONS EXCEPT FOR CRANK

CRANK CAN SMOKE IN THE TRUCKS

Every year they'd get these trusties from the local prison farm to do shit work around the co-op, mucking out tanks, unloading trucks, stacking chemicals. Once in awhile they'd get a winner, like this wiry little guy Matt who had come from one of the wealthiest families in St. Paul and got popped for selling cocaine. Matt worked so hard and was so easy to get along with that he got a full-time job with the co-op's main plant in St. Cloud when he got out of the joint. Casey, the boss at the Chaska facility, had gotten him the gig.

But most of the prison boys were losers, and it was pretty obvious how they'd landed on the wrong side of the law. All of them smoked, and every year someone would whine about the Crank Exception. "How come he gets to smoke in the trucks?"

"Because he's a Vietnam vet and you aren't," Casey would snarl. "He can also beat the living shit out of you, and so can I."

That didn't sound at all like an idle threat. There was never any further commentary.

So finally he gets out of the bus, soaking up the clammy spring dampness. Cold today, most of the trees still barren, that twitchy time of spring between the last of the snow melting and the ugly-assed storms. He lights a cigarette and makes a toast to Crank. The cigarette doesn't taste too good. He ought to quit one of these days, he's developed this cough and smokes are damned expensive. Hell, they cost more than booze; never thought he'd live to see that day.

He kicks half the cigarette down a sewer grate -- he hates litter -- and steps inside the warmth of the Kwik-Trip. It smells like roller dogs, not that that's a bad thing at all. He was up before dawn and hasn't had anything to eat yet.

There's actually quite a selection of hot food for as early as it is, not quite seven a.m. He's lived all over the country and is still in awe of how early Midwesterners get up in the morning. Scandinavians and Germans, cold-weather people, hard workers, folks who don't understand Jimmy Buffett although they can envision themselves living on a beach someday. Never happen for most of them. Buried in these tidy little cemetery plots behind the Lutheran and Catholic and Methodist churches, no one will ever know how hard they worked or even what they worked for. The cows got milked, the hay got baled, the buildings got built, the football games got watched. Swallowed by the ground, all of it.

Shut up, he says to himself. He sounds like one of these assholes at the bus barn, who go on ad infinitum about their many, many ailments and as if that wasn't enough they've got to hit you with it on Facebook too, sometimes he'd like to say "here's a gun, why don't you just end it right now?" But that's not a Christian thing to do, although his Christianity is yet another thing that hasn't fared too well these past few years, not since he split up with that little Methodist gal from Illinois. That was all on him; it was the drinking, although he told himself at the time that it wasn't and it was just that she was a tight-assed Methodist whose daddy had happened to be a drunk. Not even a bad drunk, a fella who ran a car dealership and waited till the close of business to take a drink, never cheated on his wife, never raised a hand to his kids. The kind of drunk I am, he thought quietly to himself, and then corrected: I'm not a drunk. I get everything done. I don't break the rules--

His girlfriend's father hadn't either, and yet they called him a drunk.

Life wasn't fair. Now there was a novel insight. He said the same things to the little kids on his bus, who seemed to have real trouble understanding it.

The high school girls he'd driven to Woodbury were at an intersectional swim meet. He had driven them there because the swim coach liked him, probably because he could keep up a conversation on long trips and he didn't ogle the young girls too terribly. What was it with girls these days, they were in full bloom in seventh grade. Not like when he'd been a kid, in any event. He figured it was better nutrition, or that they didn't need to do too much and led safer lives. Something. Swim meets weren't good for him; these girls were built too nicely, were too pretty and well-cared-for, and were wearing far too little to reasonably escape his notice. Better to stay with the bus, even if the coach had asked him why he didn't come on in and watch the meet. It was the chlorine, he told her, and in truth it did burn his eyes.

"It's like it's all sp'iled for me now, Dick--Teal Eye and the Teton and all. Don't know as I can ever go back, Dick. Goddam it! Goddam it!"

He had pushed the door clear open, and his feet shuffled and found the step and took him out. Summers followed him, forgetting to give him the bottle he held in his hand. A dog barked, townway, and another took it up and another until finally Boone's old blue-tick hound came loping from behind the cabin and stopped and pointed his nose at the sky and let loose with his deep bay. For awhile Summers could see Boone, weaving big and dark into the darkness, and then he couldn't see him any more, and he turned  and went back into the cabin. There was cold corn pone on the table, and cold poke greens and a ham butt and a pitcher of buttermilk. His woman had gone to bed, she tired so easy these days.

So that was it, A.B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic The Big Sky which he'd been reading for a little over a month now ("I don't read fast, but my comprehension is first-rate!" he used to explain to his professors at college). The end of this book really got to you in a way in which he wasn't quite accustomed; he'd inhaled his quarter-pound roller dog and a big order of cheesy garlic fries without really noticing that he was eating. It was like he'd had the wind knocked out of him. And that was why he read, to experience feelings that were outside his personal realm and for the most part always would be, even though if he was honest with himself, his life had been more interesting than most. He hadn't wasted it, not at all. People asked him why a computer engineer was driving a school bus or a fertilizer tanker for a living. "Because I want to," he'd say, honestly.

Still that didn't explain the heavy drinking, the smoking, the squalid house in a bad part of Minneapolis, and the fact that he hadn't gone on a date in twelve years and was now an old man. Sometimes he laughed when he thought about having sex. He'd been pretty good at it, right up until the very end, but these days he hardly thought about sex at all. If the most gorgeous woman in the world was to plop down naked in his lap, he doubted he could do much about it. Guys at the co-op assumed he was interested in porno like they were and would give him tips on cable channels to get or movies to watch. But he wasn't interested in porno either. He stumbled upon a couple of "nurses" giving a guy a blow job on the internet, and laughed out loud. Yeah, like that had ever happened in the history of the entire world.

September, 2024

He'd put his finger on what the thing was: The thing was that his sacred places had all been defiled.

Colorado, where like a lot of other young hippies he'd gone looking for his Rocky Mountain High and mostly found a lot of loose women--whom he had gladly availed himself of, wrapped up in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet with a twelve-pack of Coors and some local wacky weed. Well, you didn't want to go to Colorado so much these days because every time you turned around there was another wack job with an automatic weapon mowing folks down. Maybe it was the altitude. Or more likely, too many automatic weapons.

California had burned to the ground, as near as he could tell.

The Missouri Ozarks. He'd gone camping there many times as a kid. Then COVID-19 came around and the Missouri Ozarks turned out to be full of pinheads who thought vaccines contained a microchip that would enable Bill Gates (or the gubmint) to follow your every move. Never in his whole life had he held anything in particular against people who lacked his education, even though he had put himself through college and hadn't complained about the hardship. But pride in ignorance? That was something he had absolutely no use for.

Anti-vaxxers, QAnon adherents, and Nazis turned out to be overrepresented his beloved inland Northwest too. Reading A.B. Guthrie Jr. had reminded him of what he'd lost there, how he probably would never find himself driving the High Line along the Canadian border again...

"It's like it's all sp'iled for me now, Dick--Teal Eye and the Teton and all. Don't know as I can ever go back, Dick. Goddam it! Goddam it!" 

As long as swastika tattoos were popular in the northwestern US, he'd give the Canadians his business. Fuck it.

South Dakota: more pinheads. Hard to believe this state had given the world George McGovern, Crazy Horse, Stephanie Herseth, and Tom Brokaw.

Well, Kristi Noel too. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

His favorite part of Minnesota, the southwestern part near the South Dakota line, he'd always called "the center of the universe"--perhaps it was a certain kinship, however distant, to Native people who felt the same. But now the pinheads were beating up Mexicans (and Natives who reminded them of Mexicans) on a fairly regular basis. And you couldn't blame it all on visitors from South Dakota either, as much as he wished he could.

Texas, where he'd gone to chase tornadoes on a tour with some well-known meteorologists, had weekly beatings of Mexicans plus Nazis plus frequent mass shootings plus a prehistoric state government that still thought it was governing a separate nation, except when the proud Texas power grid melted down and they had to borrow electricity from one of those wussy states that weren't Texas.

On the other hand, he'd never been to Europe.

....................

He raised himself up on one elbow. It had been dark, seemingly forever, but now the sky was beginning to lighten. Crazy dreams had darted through his cranium like tropical fish, most vividly the torrid love affair he'd imagined with Myra who had been his prom date but nothing else, strangely she had also aged in the dream and now, instead of the medium Afro she'd had when they went to prom, wore her graying hair in cornrows with waist-length extensions.

The TV chattered. It was the animated movie "Soul" with those little blue creatures who were supposed to be human souls, cavorting around to a really impressive soundtrack that weaved between smooth jazz and techno. He wondered who would be up at this hour, watching this mass-produced art flick about a disaffected jazz pianist. Probably not his neighbor who worked at the grain elevator.

A foggy thought seeped into his tired brain: He had slept through most of the night! That was a first, at least since he'd tried to throw off the booze. He'd read up on the internet (Mayo Clinic, WebMD) and it was obvious that he couldn't just STOP like he had with cigarettes, although that had been no cakewalk either. But he hadn't realized how much worse his drinking had gotten since he'd retired and moved out here to rural Chandler, much closer to Sioux Falls than it was to Minneapolis. He'd go to the grocery/liquor outlet in Luverne and stock up on his favorite bourbon and beers, with the idea that "this will be enough to last me a whole month!" But it never was. He would be lucky if it lasted a week. It got to the point where the gal at the liquor checkout asked him, "Are you okay?" His hands, clutching the debit card, were trembling. It was eight o'clock in the morning.

No, he wasn't okay. Not anymore. He guessed that when he was working and the amount of booze that would "last a whole month!" actually did, he was flirting with alcoholism but probably wasn't quite there. Certainly he never drank at work or even within eight hours of his starting times (DOT regulations). But now he drank all the time. Morning, noon and night.

He had decided to wean himself from alcohol by taking one shot of vodka (he'd never liked vodka) only when he couldn't stand one more second without a drink.

The first 24 hours he required 18 shots to function. That was just over a fifth of vodka. And this was bare maintenance?

Any way you stacked it, he had sure been drinking a lot.

....................

years earlier

There was a stubborn streak of libertarian in him, and he wasn't sure how much he liked it.

To avoid collecting unemployment compensation like most of the other school bus drivers did during the summer, he would deliver new school buses (his employer was also a bus dealer) all over the north central states. This kept him from having to deal with the ridiculous conundrum faced by the other drivers, who would have to pretend they were "searching for work" and fill out forms to that effect, when it should have been fairly obvious that they planned to drive a bus again come fall. There had been more than a couple of instances when drivers would forget to apply for jobs that they were ridiculously unlikely to get, only to wind up serving burgers at McDonald's until September came. There was a way to play the game and most of the more senior drivers would share it with the newbies, but you had to be careful.

He told himself that delivering buses got you brownie points with your employer (which it did)--plus you got to see the world. Or at least one hell of a lot of bus barns.

The downside was that, more often than not, you had to work with Buck. Every business has someone who is way past 65 and who everyone dearly hopes will retire--someone who has definitely exceeded their shelf life. Where he worked, that someone was Buck.

A former Marine who carried himself like one, Buck was a "shop foreman" who didn't do much during the school year except sit in his office and play Solitaire on the computer (and make life miserable for Alonzo, a young Mexican with a family who was the real foreman). The guys in the shop liked Alonzo and hated Buck, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by Buck and was probably the main reason he wouldn't retire and get out of everyone's way. But Buck had been with the company since its founding. He wasn't going anywhere until he was good and ready to. Or until he dropped dead, which seemed more likely at this stage of the game.

The punchline was that Buck was in charge of the summer bus deliveries. And relished that fact. And could not be ignored.

He had been dealing with Buck for years, in his capacity as the more-or-less-manager-of-the-bus-delivery-drivers which meant absolutely nothing except that he'd been doing it longer and had a highly detailed map of the upper Midwest engraved in his brain. That put him at frequent odds with Buck, who hated that he never got asked any questions and was treated like an old fogey who carried around an attaché case and wore high-waisted Docker shorts, which is precisely what he was (the other drivers called it the "secret briefcase" and wondered aloud if it contained "the nuclear codes"--in reality it was nothing more than a couple of screwdrivers and dealer plates for the new buses).

So Dale, the big boss, asks if he will "accompany" Buck down to De Forest, Wisconsin, practically Madison, with some kind of customized T120 cab-forward bus (flat front, the kind he liked best) that is inexplicably going to the local public school district. Somewhere in Wisconsin, taxpayers are in the dark about exactly what they've just purchased here. But that's no matter, his job is just to deliver the custom bus in one piece.

And spend a very long day with Buck, who will be driving the chase vehicle that they will both take on the long trip home, a ratty Chrysler minivan with unreliable air conditioning.

It's still dark out and already in the mid-seventies. Oh, joy.

But this is precisely when Buck appears from the parking lot, carrying the Secret Briefcase. "Can you believe it," Buck harrumphs. "They actually have air conditioning in this goddam crate. And overhead luggage racks!"

Now he remembered, traveling as he did in a perpetual world of high school sports: De Forest had won the Wisconsin WIAA state football championship last fall. It had been some booster's idea to buy this bus for the winning coach. Amazing, how much money was swimming around just in high school sports. Real money.

They set out from Chaska as the first light seeps into the eastern sky, hoping to beat the rush hour traffic around the Twin Cities. As usual, there is already plenty of traffic and it's just a few minutes past five a.m. Once again he wonders why these people do it. New Yorkers straggle into work sometime between nine and eleven. No one really seems to care. But they sure do here.

They're into Wisconsin before the sun is really up. There's not a lot to see between the St. Croix River and Eau Claire (where, he remembers, there is a really excellent pizzeria called Johnny's on Golf Rd.), but then the land begins to get quite hilly, almost like Pennsylvania except for the dairy cows everywhere. This is, after all, America's Dairyland. What was hard to understand was that the states bordered each other, had been settled by pretty much the same northern peoples, and had large agricultural sectors. Yet Minnesota, by and large, hewed to a progressive governance that resembled that of Scandinavia -- whereas Wisconsin, the so-called "West Virginia of the North," had enough pinheads to push around whatever progressives remained (fewer and fewer, he imagined) with draconian legislation that was more like the Jim Crow South than the enlightened North.

South of Eau Claire, just before the Osseo exit off I-94, the engine quit. As in, totally shut off. All power lost. There was no smoke, no funny smells, no shaking or wobbling. It... just... shut... down.

He eased over to the shoulder, without benefit of turn signals (yes, those were MIA too) and could already see Buck gesturing pointlessly in the minivan. Yes indeedy, Buck, I always try to make a point of pulling off the road with no power, it's so much like those "what-ifs" they give you in the yearly training exercises.

It had been so quiet. Well, that was about to change.

"Why did you pull off? Why didn't you wait for the exit to pull off?" He had noticed before how much Buck resembled a chicken when he wasn't carrying the Secret Briefcase and got worked up and started flapping his arms.

"Bus lost power."

"Buses never lose power."

"Aw, no, Buck. I just switched off the ignition. To see what would happen, you know?"

"You can't just switch off the ignition. It's --"

Buck saw him grinning and realized that he was being shined.

"SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?" Buck sputtered.

You're the boss? "I s'pose we should call the shop. Fairly sure we can't deliver this bus. They're not going to want a custom bus that can't even make it a hundred miles."

"BUT IT'S TO BE DELIVERED THIS AFTERNOON!"

"But it's not cooperating... and I'm pretty certain we don't have an extra T120 with luggage racks and AC sitting around the yard, n'est-ce pas?"

"Nissy what?" Buck's eyes were beginning to bug like an insect's. Not a good sign.

"Never mind."

They hadn't eaten anything yet today and already the sun was climbing high. In all fairness, he had only himself to blame for that. Buck didn't like to stop to eat (some kind of nonsense about "saving the company money,") when Dale had said a million times that he wanted them to stop and eat and rest regularly on these long trips. You couldn't argue with Buck, it was like arguing with a rock. The only way to get Buck's attention was to get extremely pissed off and make a scene--or in the immortal words of Larry McMurtry, to "hit him over the head with a two-by-four."

Now his stomach was already gnawing at him and with this little glitch it didn't look like he'd be eating anytime soon. Buck was huffing and puffing over his flip phone, giving Dale the bad news and trying to come up with a plan.

The plan, such as it was, turned out to be to call Cummins Diesel (the engine manufacturer) in Eau Claire and dump the problem on them. Well, that was certainly encouraging. Neither of them had ever dealt with Cummins Diesel before. And no one at Cummins knew them from a hole in the ground.

Other than the fact that the guy who answered the phone at Cummins seemed to have real difficulty understanding what he was being called about or what he was being asked to do, at least he knew enough to get a school bus mechanic on the line. "Aw shit, betcha it's the DEF system sensor."

DEF, or diesel exhaust fluid, was a new cleaner-air additive that all diesel-burning commercial vehicles had to have to operate legally. The sensors--installed to recognize when the DEF system had been tampered with--were, by nearly all accounts, not quite ready for prime time. But he'd never heard of a vehicle completely shutting down, especially while hurtling down an interstate highway.

....................

Summer, 1986

It's said that you can meet almost anyone in New York City, and that had certainly proven true as far as he was concerned. He'd seen Yoko Ono, Bernadette Peters, Art Garfunkel (many times--he was hard to miss) and even Paul Simon, who he'd stood behind in the line at a delicatessen in Forest Hills. And then there was Molly Ringwald. He had actually met Molly Ringwald.

Molly, as she looked then

Right now she was on his big-screen TV, an indulgence he'd allowed himself because he loved to watch movies (and, truth be told, tornado videos). And he was finally seeing the movie she'd told him to avoid, called The Pickup Artist. The movie she was filming right across the street the night they'd met, at the Museum of Natural History where he had been working for several years stringing their antiquated computer odds and ends into something resembling a network and convincing management to trade in the IBM Selectrics for Wang word processors. He didn't make a lot of money compared to other computer engineers, but he loved working at the museum and walking past dinosaurs and dioramas on the way to his office every morning.

One summer evening he's leaving the office the way he usually does, through the loading dock entrance on the Columbus Avenue side of the museum. He's almost to the door when he hears a loud knocking. Strange, because it's way too late for deliveries. Oh well, probably some bum. It wouldn't be the first time he'd run into a bum and given them a couple of dollars and hoped they'd go away.

But it wasn't a bum. It was a cute redhead in a little cocktail dress. "Hi!" she enthused. "I'm working across the street doing a shoot but they locked the wrong door and I've got to go to the bathroom really really really bad! Can I use the bathroom here?"

"Sure," he said. "You're Molly Ringwald." (Doesn't everybody love to be told who they are?)

"Yeah!" she said. "I am!" (I was right!)

Before he could utter further idiocies, he unlocked the dock entrance and pointed Molly Ringwald the way to the ladies'. She trotted briskly down the hallway, taller than he had imagined her as being. Didn't movie stars at least have their own porta-potties? Things were apparently tough all over.

The thing he'd never been able to figure is why she stuck around for half an hour when she was done with her bathroom break. She asked him if he smoked (why, of course!) and bummed a cigarette.

It was a delightful half-hour, at least from his perspective. They talked and talked and smoked and smoked, sitting in plastic chairs on the edge of the loading dock with their legs dangling.

Molly had killer legs.

She seemed really curious about his life, which had been more midwestern, more poverty-stricken, and considerably more humdrum than hers. Actually he didn't want to do so much talking; he already knew his own story all too well, whereas he didn't know any movie stars and never had. But from the rush of events that evening, he could recall very little of what Molly Ringwald had said. She was from southern California. She had been acting pretty much all her life, having been discovered at age 10. Acting could be maddening, like right now when she had to sneak away from the set--Columbus Avenue, in this case--to have a fucking cigarette. (He said nothing about using the bathroom.) Oh, and by the way, the movie she was filming was really, really stupid. "As the title might suggest," she harrumphed through a cloud of smoke. "Don't see it!"

Gratuitous Molly Ringwald Smoking Picture

She said she was happy that she had met him, "and not only for the obvious reasons." She thanked him for the several cigarettes she had bummed--damn, this girl could smoke!--and accepted his offer to walk her to the museum gate.

It was silly to want to kiss her, but he wanted to, pretty badly. But of course he didn't. Molly smiled her famous radiant smile at him and disappeared up Columbus Avenue to where the barricades and klieg lights were set up for the shoot.

He caught a pleasant scent that drifted after her. At first he thought it was perfume, and then he realized that it was her deodorant. It smelled pretty yummy.

Carl’s Diner, Eau Claire, summer 2017

Because, ever since that balmy night in NYC when he'd met Molly Ringwald, he'd thought about her often. Usually at moments like this, when he was in a diner in Eau Claire (not Johnny's Pizza as he had wished, but more on that later) with a fuming Buck seated across from him--fuming because now he'd been forced to take time out to eat, or else sit there and watch somebody eat, "suit yourself." And now Buck's phone had rung and it was Larry, the salesman who handled northern Wisconsin for the bus company. Dale had informed Larry of their woes and of the fact that they were stuck in Eau Claire; maybe he could smooth-talk the client in De Forest? Larry would try. Larry would also drive down to Eau Claire from New Richmond, where he had met with another potential sale, and buy lunch for the guys (on the company!). Larry would be here momentarily, which made Buck's mood even more dour... if that was possible.

It was.

"Look here." He flapped the plastic menu at Buck to get him to look up from his laptop, where he was no doubt filling out a time report explaining to the nth detail why they were not currently on the road and why the bus would be delivered late (if at all). Dale would have taken them at their word, but that wasn't enough for Buck. Everything had to be documented in writing, including--according to company legend--an overlong bathroom break he had taken in Huron, South Dakota due to an adverse reaction to a slice of pepperoni pizza purchased at a gas station.

"Look here. The daily special is this nine-bean soup. Now that sounds mighty interesting. I think I may have to try some."

"No," Buck said flatly.

"No?" Was Buck going to tell him what to eat now?

"I have to ride in that van with you for another six hundred miles. I don't want to have to deal with your noxious emissions."

Now it was time for a Buck slap-down. Every now and then you just had to do it, remind the man that he may have been the boss of the mechanics back at the bus barn, but he was not and never had been the boss of you.

"Listen, pal," he began. And just then Larry arrived, grinning ear to ear.

"D'ja eat yet fellas, or are you waiting for my dragging ass?" Larry slapped his satchel on the seat next to Buck and looked around the room. "Anybody know what the lunch special is?"

"Nine-bean soup. With ground beef. I've gotta try some of that." He grinned devilishly across the table at Buck. Buck did not return the grin.

The waitress arrived as if on cue. She was cute and didn't even look tired. Must have just started her shift. "Did I hear someone mention the bean soup?"

"Yeah, I'll try some," he said. Larry raised his hand and added, "Mark me down for some too. Large if you've got it."

Buck didn't look healthy. He was an unnatural shade of purple. There was steam coming out of his ears. No, there really was. Actual fucking steam coming out of his ears.

 

September, 2024

He's propped up on one elbow on his mattress, trying to decide who it was who had inspired his "so I says to him, I says, I says, who's on the roster?" comment that had awoken him from his sleep last night. Complete with Brooklyn accent, or maybe it was New Jersey. To his Midwestern ear, all the New York metro accents sounded pretty much the same, although people who lived there would certainly argue that point--just like they were still arguing about whose pizza was better (even among the five boroughs!) when to everyone else in the world it was "New York pie" and uniformly excellent.

A lot of strange things had been going through his head. He had lived quite a long life by now, and very little of it had been boring. So it could be expected that things were going to run through your head when you practically didn't sleep or eat and were trying to rid yourself of a toxin you had depended on for most of your life.

Much of what he thought about had to do with work, like his pleasant travels with Buck or hanging out with Crank or even, by extension, his meeting Molly Ringwald at the Museum. He can't believe now, looking back, just how much of his life had been consumed by work. Since he was sixteen. Lots of overtime and weekends, and somewhere in there, although the work never stopped or even slowed, he had managed to get a master's degree in computer engineering. Everyone told him how much money he was going to make, and he supposed they might have been right, if he had really made an effort to do so. But by the time he finished that master's degree, he was pushing forty and running on empty. His marriage didn't survive. Some of his friendships didn't either. Maybe the thing to do would have been to make a quick fortune in a decade or so, working for some soul-crushing combine whose end product was misery for millions, and then he could enjoy himself in Antigua or somewhere being Jimmy Buffett. But it was easier when he got home from work to drink whiskey and stare at the wall and imagine himself climbing in the Cascades or wandering through the mist in Bellingham, Washington, looking for Mexican food while he waited for the magic mushrooms to wear off. And always, always class at seven on Monday morning. And women. And, mostly, work. Which is why he tended to hit it pretty hard whenever he had a break.

Fairhaven Park in Bellingham, where he'd gotten lost in the fog

He glanced up at the television. "Soul" had long since ended and then there had been some kind of political cartoon show on that he had barely noticed while he relived the trip with Buck -- or as much of it as he wanted to do in one session (there was plenty more). Now there was moody music, a gentle washing of sound. It was "Children of a Lesser God," that movie about a deaf girl that had won an Oscar. Meaning that the actress who played the deaf girl had won an Oscar. What was her name? Something like Marlene. He'd never seen the movie, so he'd watch it now. Like he had anything better to do. Well, drink maybe. Nah. No going back.

Jimmy Buffett reminds you that life is groovy

 

 

 

Surprising, how he missed the kids on the school bus. Some of them more than others, of course.

There was Deathlike Gillian, an angelic fifth grader with platinum hair and a radiant smile. He knew that Gillian was a little different when she excitedly announced one afternoon that she was going to the doctor.

"Um... you like going to the doctor? Why?" Personally, he could think of few things he hated more.

"'Cause I'll probably get a shot, and it'll hurt!" She was smiling like a kid who saw the present she'd always wanted under the Christmas tree.

"You LIKE pain?"

"YES!" Some of the other kids tittered. He thought of telling her about the sciatica he'd suffered for years before a gifted surgeon operated on him and fixed it for good. (He was still the only person he'd known who had had a completely successful back operation.) But he said only, "That's messed up."

"That's what my mom says!" Again, that angelic smile.

Another time she'd asked him if his parents were still alive.

"Nope. Dad died a few years ago. In his nineties. Mom died when I was still a kid."

"What did they die of?"

"Gillian, like I said, my dad was in his nineties. I figure he died of old age."

"But specifically, what caused his death? And also your mom, who obviously died young?"

Maybe this kid would grow up to be a pathologist. Or a coroner. Or a mortician. Somebody had to do those jobs, and he figured that an interest in death would probably help.

"Let's see... my dad died of congestive heart failure. I'm pretty sure my mom's death had something to do with the fact that she had cancer of the everything."

"Wow," Deathlike Gillian grinned. "That's really cool!"

"I don't know how 'cool' it was for them."

"Oh, you know what I mean. It wasn't like a car crash. Or a heroin overdose."

He laughed involuntarily, imagining his staunch Catholic parents dying of a heroin overdose.

Toward the end of the school year, he composed a little rap for Gillian, who had certainly made his school year more interesting:

Her name is Gillian, she is deathlike

She got run over with her own bike

Gillian loved her rap. So, for that matter, did her parents (mom was a microbiologist, dad an industrial engineer). For his part, he was glad that poor Gillian was not saddled with "normal" parents who wouldn't "get" her. Or, worse yet, pinheads. There were plenty of them around, along with their mean-assed, ignorant kids.

And today he also remembered Brady the Snitch. Brady had been his little special-needs buddy since kindergarten. Now of course there were always your retarded kids and your Down's syndrome kids and your severely autistic kids, and unfortunately also your young sociopaths (generally offspringus pinheadus, in the Linnean) who were already on their way to prison by middle school. But Brady was one of those children you saw more and more of these days, usually diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Asperger syndrome--which grouped them with the other special-needs kids, although with a few exceptions, they were what had been termed spoiled brats back in his day. Now he was no doctor or psychologist and he wasn't going to say anything, but Brady in his opinion definitely fell into that category.

Brady was picked on by the other kids, although in all fairness he probably deserved some of it. But he wasn't a bad kid. Just needy, and overpampered at home, and definitely not a real special-needs child.

How to deal with Brady on the bus? Now that was a tough call. Brady would do weird things like plopping down next to some kid he barely knew and staring at them with a strange grin on his face. That was Brady in a word: annoying. You wanted to get his attention away from the other kids, but not really, because if you had him come and sit in the front with you he'd do things like this:

BRADY: Hey, hey bus driver! Hey bus driver!

YOU: What?

BRADY: Hey bus driver!

YOU: What, Brady?

(15-second pause)

BRADY: Uh... I forgot.

So finally he'd gotten on Brady's case for always "forgetting." "Brady, don't start saying something until you know what you're going to say!" Simple, right? Wrong. Next day:

BRADY: Hey, hey bus driver! Hey bus driver!

YOU: What?

BRADY: Hey bus driver! D'you know what? There was this kid!

YOU: Okay. There was this kid. And?

BRADY: There was this kid, see, and he... and he...

YOU: And he what, Brady?

BRADY: He... he... I forgot.

By now everyone on the bus is cracking up. He'd been had. By an eight-year-old.

He wanted to turn the tables, and suddenly found himself singing:

"Here's the story of a boy named Brady... who was very, very annoying on the bus..."

Now the kids were laughing again, but not at him. And thanks to streaming video, most of them had seen "The Brady Bunch" and were familiar with its theme song.

And this was the origin of the infamous "Brady songs."

 The "Brady songs" did the trick for quite a while--years, in fact, until Brady reached middle school. Gently parodic, they made Brady out to be a bulletproof king of mischief-- the lord of Chaska, to say nothing of the kids on the bus. Not only would the other kids request a Brady song (or two, or three) for singalong on a nearly daily basis, Brady himself had his favorites, especially "The Brady Lunch":

Here's the story of a boy named Brady

who ate a hot dog and a hamburger for lunch

then he ate a footlong sub from Subway

and peanut butter crunch!

THEN he ate an entire sausage pizza

and washed it down with Hawaiian Punch

and the other kids looked at him with envy

'cause they all wanted Brady's lunch!

The Brady lunch (yum yum)

The Brady lunch (yum yum)

That's why they all wanted Brady's lunch!

{GROAN!!!}

Now Brady was the cock of the walk. Kids would come up to him, even at other schools during soccer matches, and ask if he was "THE Brady" or "the famous Brady" or "the Brady the songs are about." Brady would grin smugly and say, "That's me." And he seemed proud and happy to be famous, like most kids are.

But Brady had afterschool daycare with a woman named "Grandma Barb," who was something of an institution in Chaska. She was perhaps ninety years old, looked like a nose tackle for the Minnesota Vikings, and had supervised (or at least intimidated) several generations of young Chaskans. His own relationship with Grandma Barb as a bus driver had been somewhat strained, but so had everybody's. She would do things like complain to the bus company because he'd driven around the block from the opposite direction to avoid a concrete mixer in front of a construction site next door to Grandma Barb's. Stuff like this was par for the course and no one paid any attention to it.

Then came the "bullying incident."

No one who has spent time around children in any capacity during the twenty-first century can be unaware of the primacy of bullying. What once was defined as the sort of incidents most older Americans endured at one time or another, like being shoved into a locker, mocked loudly for their clothes or hairstyle, or even having their head dunked in a toilet, had by then become a vague and wooly nexus of anything negative whatsoever directed in a child's direction. You never really knew what someone meant anymore when they said a child had been bullied. It could be anything from bodily harm to the ever-so-popular-now taunts on social media to "he looked at me funny!". The long and short of it for school bus drivers was that it was a word all of them dreaded to hear.

And so it was for the Brady Bullying Incident. A second-grade girl who attended after-school daycare with Grandma Barb informed her that Brady was being bullied.

By his bus driver. "He makes up all these songs about Brady!"

Brady was summoned by Grandma Barb. "Is your bus driver making up mean songs about you, Brady?"

Brady was in seventh grade by then. Most kids that age no longer required after-school supervision, but Brady's mother felt that he did. There may have been a reason for that.

"Oh, yes," Brady. "He's been doing it for years, too. Since I was in kindergarten."

The end result was that he had to meet with management and actually type out the lyrics to all the Brady songs, and then management met with Brady and his mother (the official feeling was that none of the lyrics could be said to constitute "bullying") to ascertain if there were OTHER Brady songs that had not been accounted for.

There weren't.

He was asked to quit singing Brady songs on the bus. The other kids complained loudly, especially when he wouldn't let them sing the Brady songs without his leading with his PA microphone. Brady seemed to enjoy the fact that he had once been famous for the Brady songs, and now was famous (or infamous) for having disallowed the Brady songs and getting the bus driver in trouble.

Once, when Brady was getting off the bus, he caught Brady's eye.

"Thanks a lot," he said. "Pal."

Privately, or around his friends, he now referred to "Brady the Snitch."

******

 

September, 2024

It was now full daylight, or so they said. In the real world. Where he had once resided.

And he was still propped up on his elbow. He noted, dimly, that he was spending more and more time in the realm of consciousness. That was probably a good thing, whether it seemed like it or not, but without the vodka it was still painful. His doctor had told him he should probably enter a rehab center because someone having around twenty drinks a day could botch the withdrawal and wind up dead, but in truth he would have rather wound up dead than with a bunch of other drunks talking about being drunks like it was the most important goddamned thing since sliced bread, like they had cured cancer or something. They said it was a disease these days (alcoholism, not cancer) and maybe it was, but he was still old-school enough to feel like at some point he had fucked up. After all, he hadn't always been unable to control his drinking, but he was largely uninterested in how that sorry fact had come to be.

He found Marlee Matlin interesting, though, even if he thought her name was Marlene. This was curious, since one of the things he found rather funny -- although not in a way he'd care to discuss with a bunch of drunks, or anyone else for that matter -- was that he wasn't really interested at all in sex anymore. That gal he bought his liquor from in Luverne was certainly pretty and had an odd crooked smile that he found alluring, maybe even sexy in a kind of not-much-younger-than-him sort of way. He imagined kissing her. She even flirted with him, or he thought she did. Had a really nice ass in her tight jeans, and cleavage to spare. No ring, so it was theoretically possible that she might be available. But this most recent version of himself found that it couldn't even picture her with her clothes off, and had never bothered to learn her name. How lame was that?

Still, this Marlene chick in "Children of a Lesser God" was a sure-enough doozy. He found her attractive enough (in some weird way, her deafness and furious signing made her even more attractive) that he was not only getting something like a hard-on, he found himself yelling at the TV, coaching Marlene--Sarah, in the movie--not to fall for idiotic, self-absorbed William Hurt and his stupid interpretive dancing and his cable-knit sweaters (he had always had an innate distrust of men who wore cable-knit sweaters). In fact, he actually gave a shit about what happened to Sarah. It had been quite some time since he'd given a shit about much of anything, except his next drink.

Which reminded him: He'd watched the entire movie without any vodka, and he had hardly noticed. Too busy admiring Sarah's bodacious curves, erotic signing, and disgust with the Hurt character.

Who, in the end, got her anyway. Of course.

But he'd gotten a semi-hard-on and he'd watched a two-hour movie without thinking once about his next shot of vodka.

Life was good.

Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, before succumbing to the fervid wiles and cable-knit sweater of non-Oscar-winner William Hurt

 

He saw some memorable things whilst delivering buses. Sunset at a truck stop in North Dakota. Lake Superior hiding behind a Culver's restaurant in Wisconsin.

He was in the cab of a pickup with Dustin Arrowflot. They were going up to Dustin's dad's farm to see if they could "borrow" a fuel line hose for Dustin's spray rig. He was surprised that Dustin's dad actually had his own spray rig; this was a big-ticket item that your average farmer couldn't begin to afford, and the farm didn't appear overly prosperous. Actually it was a bit seedier than most. Small farmers in these parts were barely hanging on, as Con-Agra and Hormel and other huge corporations gobbled up more and more of the fertile farmland of southern Minnesota.

"Arrowflot," he said to Dustin. "Now there's an interesting name. Sounds just like that Russian airline."

"So I've been told." Dustin spit a wad of tobacco out the window. He was a small, wiry guy who in point of fact was probably strong enough to lift his spray rig and change the tire. Dustin was also a little bit difficult to get to know, and he'd known Dustin now for years. Dustin was not just a type-A personality. He was more of a type-AAA personality, driven beyond belief. During planting and harvest he would routinely work sixteen- and even eighteen-hour days. Boss man Casey would actually tell him to go the fuck home, or make him take days off (with pay).

"I guess you're Russian, huh?"

"Not a bit. One hundred percent Norwegian, like all these other dumb farmers around here. Seems my name used to be Arrowfoot, but the fucking illiterate Norskis couldn't spell it right."

"Arrowfoot? Sounds native."

"But it ain't. Pure Norski. God knows what it really is. Probably Kjeldson or something. I mean, have you talked to some of these fuckers? Dumber than dirt."

Now he thought of one farmer in particular who he visited on a regular basis with loads of liquid nitrogen fertilizer. Guy named, yes, Tollefson. The first year he'd worked at the co-op, Tollefson had instructed him to fill a 1000-gallon tank with 1200 gallons of fertilizer. This guy had been farming all his life.

"Uh, well, that's not gonna work, obviously. Where do you want me to put the overflow?"

"In that tank right there." Same tank.

Now he talked real, real slow to Tollefson's vacant, gap-toothed grin. "We've got two hundred gallons in the truck that's not gonna fit in that tank, unless you run some of it off first." He motioned to a cultivator with four small fertilizer tanks attached.

"Gettin' to that later. I just need it in the tank."

This was like talking to a dog. A rather dimwitted dog. "Then you're gonna have two hundred gallons on the ground. I guarantee it."

If he had been smarter, he would have called Casey while they were standing there and put him on the line. He already knew Casey's low opinion of Tollefson, who was on COD terms with the co-op. He could hear Casey now: "Listen, you dumb cracker, 1200 gallons of fertilizer won't fit in a thousand-gallon tank. But if you think it will, I'll just have my man there pump it all in and you can see where the rest of it goes, I don't give a flying fuck so long's you got the money."

"But it can only hold a thousand gallons." He was getting tired of this, and he was late for lunch an hour ago.

"Nah, it can hold more."

He could hear Casey in his ear as he growled, "Alright, done. I'll pump it. Put your dog away." The big German shepherd seemed to have no use for Tollefson and stiffened as Tollefson approached him. Suddenly the dog ran off. Tollefson cussed him roundly.

He had offloaded the long hose from the side of the truck and connected it to the spigot at the bottom of the enormous tank. He pressed a button on a small lawnmower engine mounted on a platform just behind the driver's door, and fertilizer began to whoosh into the tank at nearly fire hose velocity. He could throttle the engine down if need be--not an exact science with the valve half-rusted--but the valve was half-rusted because you hardly ever had to throttle down. The farmer would want 500 or 750 gallons in that thousand-gallon tank and the rest of it put into smaller field tanks or applicators. You'd firehose it into the big tank and then dole it at much lower velocity into the smaller units.

He was tempted to just open it at full throttle and laugh when the inevitable happened and the top blew off the tank. But ever the reliable employee, he left the throttle half-open and stifled a yawn (and a gurgle from his empty stomach) as slowly, ever so slowly, the tank began to fill.

Sure enough, in a few minutes here came Tollefson, red in the face. "What's the holdup here? I've got work to do."

"Well, I don't wanna blow the top off the tank."

"Goddam it, I told you it can hold twelve hundred. Let 'er rip."

He could not suppress a grin as he cranked the throttle to full-bore. It took about three minutes for the top to launch itself about ten feet into the air on a geyser of fertilizer.

Tollefson began literally jumping up and down. "Turn it off. TURN IT OFF!"

"Do which?" he said. He was quoting a daffy farm hand who he had once asked to bring him the toolbox from the truck. "Can't hear you." He cupped a hand to his ear as the fertilizer continued to erupt. A puddle of the liquefied nitrogen began to collect around his boots. He was a good thirty feet from the tank, trying hard not to laugh as he waited for Tollefson's head to explode. Shit was just blowing up today, any which way you stacked it.

He got back to the co-op an hour later. When he walked into the cramped little office, Casey, Crank and a couple of guys were standing around laughing. "Hey, look. If it ain't the lawn-killer! " More laughter.

"Lawn-killer? What the fuck?"

"Tollefson says you killed his lawn!" Crank was doubled over and red in the face, guffawing.

There had been a sad scruff of grass at the base of the tank, more like pubic hair than a lawn.

"You mean that ugly little weed patch under the tank? I figure I killed that, sure enough. You can call it property improvement and he can send me a check for a hundred bucks."

Now Casey, usually gruff and reserved, was laughing harder than he'd ever seen him laugh. "Oh, man," Casey choked out. "Bitch pay you. I fucking love it!"’

*****

Dustin Arrowflot was giggling at something. Dustin didn't giggle often. Knowing he was being regarded curiously, Dustin explained: "I was remembering Casey after you 'killed Tollefson's lawn.' 'Bitch pay you.' I tell ya, that was one of the funniest things I ever heard."

They were pulling into the decrepit Arrowflot farm. Dustin's dad had been on his own for quite a few years. Dustin's divorced mother owned an antique store in downtown Chaska that was more like a storage locker. She could usually be seen on the sidewalk outside the store, chain smoking. There was very obviously a lot of resentment felt by Dustin toward both of his parents. Whatever malevolent treatment he'd received had been channeled into his furious workaholism and his worries about doing enough for his three kids. Highly competent and intelligent, Dustin should have been a feather in the cap of any parent. Why he wasn't was anybody's guess.

"Dad, you got a fuel hose for the spray rig, dontcha? I need to borrow it. Until tomorrow or the next day, latest."

The old man, wearing bib overalls and spitting tobacco, was wild-haired and unkempt. He sure didn't look like the kind of farmer who had his own spray rig. However, the far wall of his machine shed looked like a Napa auto store. Maybe there was some pot growing on the back forty.

Dustin's father spat a wad of Red Man. "Can't spare it," he announced, talking to a disassembled tractor. "Nope."

"Dad!" Dustin said incredulously. "You're not spraying today and I got a hundred acres to finish at Hammersly's. Gimme a fuckin' break!"

"Dad" kicked at some dirt on the floor while continuing to meditate on the extremely interesting pile of tractor parts in front of him. "Nope," he said again. "No can do."

"Well, that's just great. Now I can go back and explain to Casey that I can't finish Hammersly's 'cause you won't loan me a goddamned hose for a day."

"Casey can go fuck himself," Dad grunted. "Got me on C.O.D. again."

"Oh, I know all about that. You owe him twelve thousand bucks, a year past due. We ain't running a charity, you know."

"I know. Which is why Casey can buy his own fucking fuel hose."

"It's like that, huh?" He felt awful for Dustin, who looked like he was about to cry. He felt awful that he'd witnessed this scene at all.

******

He had forgotten how he'd met Crank until just now.

It wasn't at the farmers' co-op. No, they'd met a year before that when Crank gave up his job as a school bus driver to work full time for Casey.

He'd only been driving a school bus for a year at that point and Crank's route through a poorer part of town was rumored to have some pretty tough customers. It was natural to assign it to an old Harley biker and combat veteran like Crank, who took no guff from anyone. Well, with Crank gone he was the guy who was going to get Crank's route because he had the least seniority.

So he was riding along with Crank to learn the route. They had just pulled out of the elementary school and the kids were already yelling at each other.

Crank grabbed the mic for his intercom and yelled, "SHUT UP, YA MISERABLE LITTLE BASTARDS!"

Suddenly the bus was silent, except for a few random giggles.

"Um, Crank.... language?" he whispered.

Crank just roared at the innocent neophyte. "I don't give a FUCK!"

More giggling.

He didn't see Crank for another year, when they were both at the co-op.

Ann one

September, 2024

It actually happened on the first day he was out and about again.

He wasn't even sure of the date. Two or three weeks had passed, so it might be September or they could be into October already. But that didn't matter. What did matter was that he was down to two shots of vodka a day, one in the morning, one at night. In effect, he was now sober.

He was twenty pounds lighter and his beard had grown in; he scarcely recognized the man in the mirror. Fact was, though, that he was nearly out of vodka and hadn't driven a car in weeks. He needed to go to Luverne, if for no other reason than to drive his car and get out of the house. And he'd decided to allow himself one shot of vodka a day for the rest of his life. One, never two and certainly never more than that. He'd beaten the demon by himself and without the help of any other drunks who wanted to prattle on about their glory days as drunks. Without priests or ministers or even self-help books, unless you counted WebMD. And Marlee Matlin. Truth was that he now felt like a million dollars, and was more convinced than ever that the world could go fuck itself.

God, he was hungry too. When was the last time he'd eaten anything worth counting as a meal? There was a good Mexican place in Luverne where they didn't do English very well, but that was okay, he'd learned pretty good Spanish talking to farm hands during his decade at the co-op.

Thirty miles to Luverne. He turned the car out of Chandler and took a right on tbe highway, heading south and roughly paralleling the path of the monster tornado that had hit the town in 1992. You could see few traces of the tornado today, even though it had destroyed the little downtown, but the older people still talked about it, after church or eating breakfast at the Chandler Cafe. He had missed the tornado. Where had he been in 1992? Oh yeah, living in Madison, Wisconsin and finishing his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin. A great party school, or so he had been told. Working and doing grad school didn't leave him much time to party.

Man, the land was big out here. It just went on forever in every direction, obstructed only by the occasional grain elevator or cell tower. He didn't figure it had changed much since the Lakota had chased bison in these parts, near the eastern edge of their range. People seemed to loathe or fear the Plains, but he didn't. While he was walled in by Minneapolis, as much as he loved that city, he often dreamed about the vast expanses that opened up just a little to the west. One day he would live out there.

And now he did. And he didn't have to work. He was sober, and he would never have to worry again about whether he'd had too much to drink to drive legally, or whether he was talking too much when he'd chat with neighbors who almost certainly knew he was a drunk, or lying to his doctor about his drinking. He had an okay house in an okay town and even a dog, one of no particular breed that had adopted him by simply showing up at his back door repeatedly and staring mournfully through the screen. Now all he needed was a woman. He laughed out loud. Good thing he had quit drinking for his own self, because he was definitely too old to woo anyone--except maybe a dog.

Wasn't that the stuff of life. He laughed again. Well, if it had all come to this, it could have come to a whole lot worse.

He caught himself hoping that that "saucy little number" (the strangest phrases ran through his head all the time now) would be holding down the fort at the liquor store.

The sliding door whooshed open and there she was in her requisite tight jeans showing off that marvelous ass no woman in her fifties had any right to. She had her mousy blonde-brown hair tied up in a knot on top of her head. He could smell her springlike scent from here.

"Well well well. Look what the cat dragged in." Really nice teeth, not perfectly straight but well cared for. Always a good sign.

"I thought," continued the Saucy Little Number, "that you had got off the stuff, or something."

"I did," he grinned. "Well, sorta."

She put her hands on her hips. A little bit of belly peeked out beneath the pink top she wore under her ubiquitous flannel shirt. "You don't 'well sorta.' You either do or you don't."

"Then I must explain," he said. It was eight in the morning and as usual no one was in the liquor store. "I went through the withdrawal. Freaking awful. Did it slow with the vodka that you teased me for buying because you know I don't drink it. But it got me through."

"You did this by yourself? You're crazy. You could've died. Anyone who drinks as much as you did shouldn't do withdrawal on their own. That 's what they have rehab for." Jesus Christ. Did she actually care about him?

"And yet," he harrumphed, "Here I am. Been up for three hours, drove thirty miles. I am stone cold sober."

"Well, congratulations. And I'm so glad you made it through. (!!!) Gonna join the Program?"

She meant A.A. "Nah," he said. "That's what I wanted to explain to you. I intend to have, for the rest of my life, exactly one drink a day. Vodka. Which you know I don't particularly like. If I ever catch myself taking two drinks, I'm done for good. But I guess you could say it's symbolic of a victory everyone says you can't win on your own. Which turns out to be, like so many things everybody says, utter bullshit, excuse my French."

She grinned up at him. Couldn't have been more than five-two, five-three. Hazel eyes, which were unusual and which he liked. "You'll let me recommend a decent vodka? 'Cause that stuff you were drinking is piss. Excuse my French." She winked. That was the green light that he didn't need to watch his language like a hawk, and that was good, because he had never been involved with an evangelical (involved?  Now where had that come from?) and he didn't intend to start now. There were a lot of them in these parts, the only growing religion on the Plains since the farm crisis in the eighties. It was bad enough when they were being judgmental on your drinking or cussing, but now they tended to be Trumpster pinheads or even QAnon adherents. That slightly scary thing about evangelicals had turned really scary.

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright 2021, 2022 by WRL (the author)

part two

....................

Ann two

Luverne as seen from the air

A maelstrom of things swam around in his mind as he looked down at this small woman with the pretty hazel eyes who was the only woman he'd had a real conversation with since he retired a year ago and moved to Chandler. He had already written off the prospect of romance of any sort since realizing that he was an aging drunk with thinning hair and not much of a future of any kind. Women didn't want that, and he didn't blame them for it.

The problem was that, in the back of his mind, he'd entertained fantasies of having some sort of fling with this lady, at least to the point where he looked forward to seeing her every time he went to the liquor store. But she was young (anyone who hadn't reached sixty seemed young to him now) and she was hot, and if she wasn't married she would certainly be attached. There weren't a lot of saucy little numbers in southwestern Minnesota, and the ones who did exist were either married insurance agents or running for city councilwoman on the Trump ticket. He certainly hadn't moved here to look for women, and even the idea of "looking for women" now struck him as funny.

He was surely doing something, though. He'd been in the store for ten minutes and hadn't managed to accomplish anything except to talk to--

"Hey, what's your name?"

"Ann Gerling," she smiled. "I was beginning to think you'd never ask--?"

Fucking moron. "Scott. Scott Featherston."

His name seemed odd, even to him. He didn't tell people his name generally, because generally they didn't care to learn it. Which was okay, most of the time.

"I don't know why I'm waiting," he went on. "Why don't I ask you out, before somebody else does?"

She laughed. "You've sized me up pretty well," she said. "Divorced. Not especially bitter about it. Open for suggestions."

Now he said something dumb. "You're a saucy little number."

Ann laughed again. She got the joke, which is what he had been hoping, stupid as it was. "'Saucy little number?' Is that the best you can do?"

"Wow, but you're pretty. I feel like a kid now." Don't tell her how much you'd like to kiss her too, idiot.

She cocked her head a little to one side. Scott really was a dinosaur. He was like your favorite school bus driver except for the heavy drinking. Well, former heavy drinking, she hoped. Ann figured she had probably been groped or propositioned by three-quarters of the men in Rock County, and a few of the women too. Hell, she was still getting hit on by guys in their twenties. And here was this kind of saintly-looking old fellow, surely hitting on her too, who she couldn't help but like. With his wire-rimmed glasses and wispy hair, he might have even been a hippie once.

"Scott, hey! Were you at Woodstock by any chance?"

Scott seemed startled by this totally-out-of-left-field question. He smiled a screwy smile and said, "Why do you ask?"

"I dunno. You just have that old hippie, Country Joe kind of vibe."

"Actually," Scott said, "I was at Woodstock. Not the festival per se, but where the festival had been. They called it Bethel, New York but I thought of it as White Lake, because that's where I lived the summer after the festival. Yeah. I ran away from home in Perryville, Missouri because I was pissed at my old man, because he hadn't let me go to the festival."

Now it was her turn to give him a screwy smile. "Really," Ann said.

This was so convoluted that it couldn't possibly be anything but true.

"Yeah. I was only thirteen the summer of the festival and obviously it was a long way away and my dad couldn't stand the acid rock I listened to anyway, so how did I figure this was gonna happen? Dad already hated hippies. Thankfully you didn't see too many around Perryville, Missouri. This was before the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and them."

And them. Once in awhile the damned Southeast Missouri still came out in his speech.

"I want to hear all about it," Ann said.

October, 2024

A few days later they're sitting at a table in the snug of the Green Lantern Pub in Hardwick, a crossroads on the Luverne half of the Chandler-to-Luverne run. He'd been in there once before, shortly after moving to Chandler, desperate just to hear human voices. No one had made any overtures or invited him to play pool, but no one was unfriendly either. It was Minnesota Nice without the self-consciousness you sensed around the Twin Cities. He had drunk a couple of beers and headed out, always afraid of getting a DUI although in point of fact he had never driven over the limit since he'd been in high school. He strongly believed that if you were a drunk, if you weren't a drunk-driving drunk at least you could make an argument that you weren't a total asshole. Plus, a DUI would end your school bus driver career in a flash. End it in infamy. People on the street would never believe that they could have trusted you with their children.

He feels strange, like he's about to cry, sitting across the table from Ann Gerling as she idly stirs her gin and tonic. He's on a date, no matter what kind of spin you want to put on it, he's on a date. And Ann is really so lovely in a very unpretentious way. He senses that telltale gut ache that tells him he's falling in love. It has been such a long time. This is so inconvenient, but when is love ever anything else?

"You keep putting off the Woodstock story," Ann is saying. "I never knew anyone who was at Woodstock. I really want to hear it."

"Well, number one, I'm not 'putting it off.' It's long and I don't want to keep you from talking. And number two, I wasn't at the festival. As I've said. So if you want to hear about Country Joe singing Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die, you've come to the wrong place."

"No," she said. "I want to hear about you. And don't worry about hearing me talk, you'll get plenty of chances to do that, and then you won't be able to shut me up." Scott caught that. Probably without meaning to, Ann was saying that she foresaw a future for them. He knew better than to flag the comment; instead he tucked it away in the file that said HAPPY THINGS TO THINK ABOUT.

"All right. You can hear it in installments, if you want. But here goes." He took a long swig from his Coke and began.

There was a lot of stuff going on at home, none of it good. I'd been hiding report cards from my father and he finally figured out that he hadn't seen my report card for about a year. Basically I wasn't going to school; I was hiding out in the woods with my friends, getting high. So I was failing everything. He got hold of those report cards and hit the roof. I lit out and went over to my friend Jeff's house; he was in a different school district and my dad didn't know he existed. Plus being at Jeff's solved a number of other problems. Jeff was like me, he lived with just his dad and his dad worked nights at a factory and had quit trying to keep up with Jeff and his two younger siblings. The other kids, a boy and a girl, were pretty strait-laced. It was Jeff who was the problem. Oh, and by extension me. I also had sort of a girlfriend who lived just down the road from Jeff and went to his school, not mine. We had decided that it was time for us to start seriously exploring each other.

And that's what we were doing when her dad busted into her room. He was a Ste. Genevieve County sheriff's deputee. To say that he didn't think much of me would be an understatement. So I had to high-tail it out of there in just my undershorts while this maniac was chasing me with a fire poker. Fortunately I'd been on the track team and the old big-gut sheriff couldn't begin to catch me. But I had to borrow clothes from Jeff, and he was about six inches shorter than me.

My dad was used to me taking off and staying overnight with various friends, so he went off to work and I loaded up a backpack with some of my clothes and some toiletries, stole a couple hundred bucks from dad, and lit out on the road. I got to St. Louis with my first ride, from a nice little old lady of all people. From there on in it was kind of hit and miss--I spent two horrible days and nights at a Fred Harvey rest area in Indiana, and figured that by now the cops had to be looking for me--but finally a guy picked me up and drove me to Matamoras, New York; it's right where New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet. Very mountainous. Now that would have been a great ride except that the guy figured I "owed him a return favor" and wanted a blow job. I had to jump out of the car at a stop sign.

I'd never had any idea where I was going when I left Perryville--it more or less depended on where the people who picked me up were going. I could have wound up in Valdez, Alaska for all I knew. But here in Matamoras I figured I couldn't be more than maybe fifty miles from where the Woodstock festival had been held, in these very same mountains ahout a hundred miles northwest of New York City. So I went, via a series of back alleys, to a nice little diner on a sidestreet. I asked the lady behind the counter if she knew how to get to Woodstock, she just laughed and told me I was a year too late but then she called a guy over who was a truck driver and knew exactly how to get there. He informed me that I was less than fifty miles from the site "as the crow flies" and even gave me a ride to Port Jervis, New York--just across the Delaware--where I could take Highway 42 North to a junction very close to where the festival was held.

I got a pretty good ride in a few minutes, maybe three-quarters of the way up to the intersection with the famed Highway 17B, where the trucker had told me I would be "a stone's throw" from the festival site.

"You know there ain't nothing for you to see there, son," he'd said. "Old Max Yasgur is probably running his cows out there again. Good man, quite a character. I guess he was gonna be a millionaire but things didn't pan out that way when they made it a free concert. But he didn't give a shit. 'S'long's the kids had a good time, that's all that matters,' he said. I probably wouldn't have been that generous."

It was like I was starting to feel a sort of magic and I wasn't even there yet. The countryside wasn't as dramatic as it was around Matamoras with the river gorges and all, just sort of rolling hills and sure enough, tons of dairy cows. But it was beginning to look like Woodstock. I knew I was only a few miles from where it had all happened. And I had just been talking to a guy who actually knew Max Yasgur!

"I'm not altogether sure what made you want to go there so badly," Ann said

Oh, there had been a little scene at home the year before when I'd threatened to run away because my dad wouldn't let me go to the festival. I was thirteen! I actually had this idea that he might take off from work and drive me clear to New York State to see a bunch of 'acid-rock bands.' All my favorites were there, all the groups my dad hated--Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Jimi Hendrix. I couldn't believe that they were all going to be in the same place at the same time. But they were! How could I miss it?

"Jesus, Scott. You were thirteen! What did you expect from your poor single dad?"

I was a little shit. No getting around that. Wouldn't go to school, took drugs all day, was always on the wrong side of the law. And this is rural Missouri we're talking about, and it was still the Sixties! My poor dad was one of these fellas who just wanted to get along, he'd been in The Big One and gotten wounded and was all against the war in Vietnam while everyone else thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. 'What these folks know about war, most of 'em,' he'd say, 'you could fit in a thimble.' For some reason there weren't a lot of World War II veterans around, and I knew that some of those guys had never come home. There was a big memorial in town and sometimes when we were out running errands my dad would stop there for a few minutes to pay his respects. War hung over our house. The fact that everyone else was so gung-ho about Vietnam and the kids wanted to go off to "fight the gooks" made it like a wound that wouldn't heal for my dad. I guess the point of all of this is that these were not happy times. Woodstock would be a happy time, I thought.

"If you don't mind my asking, how come you didn't have a mother?"

Go ahead and ask. They got married, a few months later Dad shipped off for Europe. He was at Normandy Beach and saw terrible things. He wasn't quite right when he got back home. You see, he never fit in around there, he was sort of a bookworm and liked reading and building things in the garage more than socializing. When he got back from the war my mom wanted more than anything to go out and do stuff and travel and see things. But dad wasn't up to that. He was just barely functioning. However he did manage to get mom pregnant with me! Now there's a case of your poor timing.

Mom took off when I was three and I can't even really picture her. On account of she'd run off, there were never pictures of her around the house. Anyway she wound up in Fort Smith, Arkansas and remarried, some fella who played the bass and claimed to have been in Elvis' band. Then she got cancer. She died when I was ten.

Ann's eyes were misting. She had rediscovered her drink, finished it, and signaled for another. "That," she said, "may be the saddest thing I ever heard." There was a catch in her voice and he sure hoped that she wasn't going to cry. That, for him, was certainly not the point of the story. It was supposed to be a happy story.

Sorry, Ann. I didn't mean to bum you out. It's just that there's no way to put a happy face on the Mom story.

Anyway, enough of that. Pretty soon along comes this hippie van. I don't mean one of those VW buses with psychedelic paint. It was a white step-van that was full of hippies. For some reason I'd had this dumb idea that once I was within a hundred miles of Woodstock I'd see nothing but hippies, but the fact that I hadn't seen a single hippie in Matamoras should have clued me in. And Max Yasgur had gone back to his cows when it was all over, and sure enough, here was plenty of 'em--just no hippies.

Until this van pulled up. "Get in," the bearded longhair driving said, "'cause we don't wanna get a ticket for picking up a Communist." Everybody laughed, me included. The van reeked of dope smoke, and a pretty girl stood up to make room for me on this sort of box thing she and another hippie were sitting on. Her shirt was this loose gauzy stuff and I got a total boob flash. Cool. Real hippies! We didn't have so many of them down in Perry County,

Ann giggled. Good, the few little flourishes he'd embellished the story with were doing the trick. He hadn't wanted to ruin an exciting night with the overall misery of his early years.

The guy sitting next to me introduced himself. His name was Al Casey. He had a white-boy Afro -- I always thought they were sorta disconcerting--and one day he was going to be famous as a roots guitarist and film composer. You may have heard of him. But he wasn't famous then.

Turns out that he and the guy driving, whose name was Bill, and one of the guys sitting behind us who I couldn't really see, were in a band together. The name of the band was Gear Happy, which I thought was a strange name for a hippie band, until I heard the hippie band practice. The music was as redneck as any I'd ever heard. Some stuff I could pick out, some Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, but most of the stuff was written by Casey. How did I know this? Because I wound up living with Gear Happy and their fairly large retinue of wonder women.

But that was later. Almost right away Bill gave me the moniker of Twang, because of the way I talked which I gathered they didn't hear much of up this way. "So, Twang," Bill said as he turned onto Highway 17B, "what you doing in lovely Sullivan County, anyway, so far away from home?"

I knew there was no way to say this without sounding dumb, but oh well. "I wanted to see where Woodstock was."

No sooner had I said those words than Bill wheeled the van into a gas station parking lot and started back down 17B the other way, the way we'd come. "Wal sheeit," Bill said, and I think he was having fun imitating my drawl, "you was a-a-a-a-lmost there, Twang!" Soon we were out in dairy country again. We went through a couple of little towns--Mongaup Valley and White Lake--and the girl next to me, who said her name was "Shasta Sunrise, but you can call me Sunrise for short"--asked me how old I was. "Fourteen," I said, and immediately regretted it.

"Far out," Shasta Sunrise said.

Actually no one seemed to care how old I was. I mean, let's face it, I didn't look like an adult. But my hair was getting long (which wasn't popular in Missouri, believe me), and a thousand miles on the road had made me look pretty scruffy, so really I fit right in.

After about twenty minutes in the van, Bill swung a hard right onto a country lane called Happy Avenue ("named after our band," he said with a wink) and we went careening over the countryside, alternately wooded and carpeted with alfalfa and some plant I didn't recognize -- might have been blueberries.

We went about a mile or so and then Bill took a left at the first crossroads we came to. After driving for another mile he suddenly skidded to a halt. "There," he said, pointing out the driver's window. I got halfway out of my seat and craned my neck to look. "That's it. Want I should pull over?"

I was looking out at a vast wasteland with a familiar bowl shape and some trees in the far distance. The ground had been turned with a disk but everywhere you looked you could see stuff embedded, sleeping bags mostly, sheets of colored plastic, styrofoam that might have been fragments of coolers. Actually, Ann, it looked like something terrible had happened there, like a nuclear holocaust. I mean it was just blasted-looking. But sure enough, this was the place. I recognized it from thousands of pictures and news broadcasts. I had made it!

"Um, Scott?" Ann said, keeping her voice as quiet as she could with the AC/DC playing on the juke. "Is that the end of the story? Something tells me there's more."

"Oh, hell yeah," he said. "We're just getting started. We haven't even got to the part where I lived with the hippies!"

"Can we finish another night? I'm really tired. Those three drinks sure got to me. Glad you're driving." There it was again: "Another night."

"Guess I'll always be able to drive from now on," he grinned, but Ann thought he sounded a little rueful. "There is that. I tried to never drive over the limit, and I don't think I did, but I had to be awfully goddamned careful."

She looked at him oddly, zipping up her coat. He wasn't sure what he saw in her eyes. But there was something there.

He turned out onto US 75 and started toward Luverne. The radio was on, softly. Ann seemed content, sitting beside him, humming along to Fleetwood Mac's "Over My Head."

But suddenly she grew agitated. "Turn off up here," she said. "Please." They had just whizzed by a crossroads sign. Farm lights twinkled in the distance. They were in the exact middle of Minnesota Nowhere.

"Which way?"

"I don't care. Just turn off."

 

Turn off up here! Please!

 

The drinks must have gone through her, he thought, and she probably had to pee. "I've got napkins in the console. Help yourself," he said, trying to be helpful. They skidded to the side of the road, County 181. Distantly there was the noise of a combine, bringing in the corn, but on the roadside here it was tall and yellow and rustled in the breeze.

Before he could notice another thing, Ann was in his arms. She kissed him as if she was starved for it; he felt his heart thump and hoped he wasn't about to have a heart attack. Her lips were soft and reminded him of Myra, this black girl he had taken to prom, another thing that had pissed off the people in Perryville circa 1974. But he wasn't in Missouri (Kansas) anymore. He was here on the wide-open prairie of western Minnesota and this very nice-looking woman who had come into his life from a run-down liquor store was kissing him for all she was worth.

"God damn," he said when they finally broke. "I'd sure forgotten what that felt like."

Ann was winded. "Turn around," she said. "Can we go back to your place? Turn around before I change my mind."

The sex was pretty good. Not earth-shattering, like Ann had made it out to be (although he was fairly sure she did actually come once), but pretty good all the same. His stuff still worked without undue effort. He was winded when it was all over, but that didn't matter so much when she was telling him what a great fuck he was.

His only regret was that he didn't really get a look at her body. She had kept her flannel shirt on ("it's cold in here, Scott!") and it was dark in the bedroom--she'd wanted it that way--and when they were done she'd gone into the little upstairs bath and gotten dressed. She was modest. And that, to Scott, was a complete turn-on, but there was no good way to tell her that.

She was still there in the morning. They had breakfast together. It was very pleasant. In a way, Scott didn't think he had ever been happier.

******

 

Several times that night he had awakened, unfamiliar with having a sleeping human form in bed next to him, and listened to Ann's gentle breathing and soaked in her intoxicating scent, which seemed like an herb garden drowsing in a gentle rain. He would close his eyes and dream vividly, and the last and most memorable of these dreams found him on a perilous mission of uncertain nature with, of all people, Foster Grant.

Yes, just like the sunglasses. Foster Grant was actually one of the kindergarteners who had taken his bus to school, maybe fifteen years ago now (which meant, of course, that these days Foster Grant was a full-grown man.) But Scott still thought of him as a little boy with straw hair and jug ears, wearing shorts out of season and missing several (baby) teeth. It didn't help that he was a transplant from Kentucky and talked like he was.

One day the bus, following a detour, had driven past an infamous local gin joint called the Red Rail.

"Ahh, the Rail!" Foster mused in his thick hillbilly slur, as if he was a local and had been driving past the place for fifty years. "Man, I'd like to jes' go on in there an' belly up to the bar and git me a Jack n' Coke!"

Scott had suppressed a guffaw. Oftentimes, between his advanced vocabulary and his thick drawl, the other kids had no idea what Foster was talking about. But Scott, being from Missouri, usually did--and it made him feel bad for the little guy, who was obviously having a rough go of it but was determined to make lemonade out of the lemons life had handed him.

After Christmas break, Foster had boarded the bus sporting a wicked grin. "What's up,. Foster?" Scott asked him. "Have a good Christmas?"

"Oh, yeah. Ya see, Papa came home one night, drunk as a skunk, and DWOOOOO! was ejected from the house!"

What did you say a kid like this?

"Uh, that's nice... I think," Scott offered.

"Aw, you bet. That sumbitch lit out for Kentucky, heh heh heh! Now me and Ma's gonna be runnin' things!"

"Ma" seemed a nice enough woman, overweight and overtattooed like most American women of her social stratum, but cheerful and friendly. She was usually working in her yard when he pulled up in the big yellow bus. She'd exchange a few pleasant words and wisecracks with Scott. He liked her big, brassy laugh. She was like a heavier version of Janis Joplin.

He'd often wondered what had become of young Foster Grant (who'd given him that name? Even Ulysses would have been a better choice). Right in the middle of his first grade year, Foster and his Ma had vanished. The school office said they'd gone back to Kentucky without really explaining why. Scott suspected a reunion with the beloved Pa and his drinking, not that Scott could much afford to feel smug on that score. But still, he wondered about the kid.

Now they were on a desperate mission in "China." Scott was in black special-ops duds and Foster wore a tan jumpsuit because he was a "paratrooper"--a six-year-old paratrooper, right. They were hiking along a jungle trail and Foster was going on about how they had to find face coverings because it was so obvious that they weren't Chinese (hard to argue that). Then the jungle trail, without warning, became a sort of Himalayan trail, or more like a route up one of the great icy peaks. There was a column of troops moving down the trail toward them--Foster motioned him toward a fantastic ice cave that he seemed to have been previously aware of. The idea was that they were supposed to lie here, silent and motionless, until the column passed by. Now in the dream, just like in real life, it occurred to Scott that if they had seen the soldiers moving down the mountain, the soldiers had likely seen them moving up. But he did his best to lie there on his stomach in the ice cave, hearing the ice crunching under the soldiers' boots as they moved closer.

And then they drew abreast of the cave, and with horror he saw that the leader of the soldiers was Brady the Snitch. Brady now looked to be in his teens. He was pumped up like Schwarzenegger and wore an animal skin over his upper body, like he was some kind of tough guy or had played too many video games. Brady the Snitch sensed they were there (or more likely, had seen them go in). He looked into the cave, and at that instant Scott hissed at Foster we've got to kill him. Now. And Foster said, "But what about all the others?" or Scott thought he'd said that, because that phrase was blaring in his head when he sat bolt upright in bed.

Ann stirred gently. "Mmmmm," she said, and he could almost make out her smile in the dim light from the bathroom door.

Goddam Brady the Snitch.

They really didn't leave it at anything. He dropped her at her little bungalow on the edge of Luverne. There was a carefully kept vintage Pontiac Firebird in the single garage.

"Nice ride," he commented. "You do the work on it?"

"No," Ann said. "That was my ex. He was quite the car guy. In and out of prison. Too bad, he had quite a few talents and could have made something of himself. But I got tired of the jail thing."

I knew it, Scott thought. Way too good to be true. Now the psycho ex-husband.

"He still in jail?" Scott wondered aloud, hoping he sounded nonchalant.

"Oh, probably. Last I heard he was up in Nova Scotia, running away from his creditors. Bad-check guy, not a mean bone in his body, but I don't suppose the Canadians are going to be amused by him any more than the cops around here. He just doesn't seem to get that it's not a good idea to pretend you're someone else and write checks for money you don't have. I mean, duh? And this guy has written a book for auto techs, he's probably the best guitar picker in ten counties, and he's basically just a sweetheart. There's just this one little problem." She grinned at him, letting him know that he need not to be concerned with her ex.

"Whew, I guess," he said.

Her little bungalow on the edge of Luverne

"You're not a jailbird too, are you, Scott? I mean anything I ought to know about?" She was still smiling, but he caught the seriousness in her voice. Perhaps he was being considered as a long-term prospect. He was, frankly, thrilled.

"I suppose I'll be arrested if I ever get pulled over in Wisconsin," Scott said truthfully. "Back when I was in grad school in Madison, I accumulated a bunch of parking tickets. Didn't pay a one of them. I mean, you know how perpetually broke grad students are. And the thing was, I was busting my ass not to park illegally. I'd drive around for half an hour, forty-five minutes south of campus, looking for a spot I could wedge my little Escort into because no way in hell I could afford on-campus parking. But it didn't matter, I'd always come back to find a ticket on my windshield. I started to think that the city cops were running some sort of scam with the university, making sure students got it through their heads that they couldn't park off-campus."

"You're probably right," Ann said. "People think they own the street in front of them, although of course they don't. Why are we talking about this?"

He wanted to say, "Because you asked me a question," but he read the look in her eyes and they kissed again. Like teenagers, he thought. Kissing Ann was even more fun than he had thought it would be. He loved the way she tasted in his mouth. He could get used to this for sure.

Ann climbed out. "See ya around the neighborhood?" she said, turning to walk to her door. That ass.

"Yeah," he answered. He didn't want to ruin the minute by being cloying, by making her write down her phone number for him, by looking like a puppy dog, eager to please. He was sixty-six years old. First date and he'd fucked her pretty good, considering he hadn't done anything of the sort in a decade or more. They liked to talk to each other. Things would take care of themselves, he was sure of that. He turned his RAV-4 around -- he loved its tight little turning radius -- and headed back toward the main drag, being careful not to gun the motor like the kid he felt like.

And he was right. Their date was Saturday night. Now, at 10 in the morning on Tuesday, his phone rang. His phone never rang.

"Hi," Ann said.

"Hey there." Scott tried to hide the glee that he felt to hear her voice again.

"Whatcha doing for lunch?"

"Probably eating sandwiches, trying not to watch Fox News and throw things at the TV."

"I've got a better idea. Can you get down here and have lunch with me in the caf?"

"Cafeteria? As in, employee?"

"Yeah. I take late lunch today, two o'clock. You might wanna grab a little snack first."

"Why don't I stop by Guadeloupe's and bring you some Mexican?"

"Wow, that sounds marvelous. Better than what I had in mind."

"What do you want me to bring you?"

"I could care less. I like all of it. Pick something out, I'll learn about mysterious old you."

"Mysterious old me?"

"See ya," she said, and hung up. He liked her style and her economy with words.

....................

The shabby employee cafeteria at Sunshine Foods in Luverne (subsidiary of Sunshine Liquor n' Bait, or maybe it was the other way around): this is where he first sees that there really is something special about Ann Gerling, besides the fact that she likes dowdy old him enough to sleep with him.

Because everybody loves her, apparently, and by some magic she possesses, even though she's easily the best-looking woman he sees in the store or the cafeteria, the other women seem to look up to her. The men, of course, just look at her. But respectfully.

This is not your ordinary small-town looker, he quickly comes to understand. And on a deeper level, he knows it's related to her quiet confidence, her lack of a need to broadcast, and her genuine kindness as much as it is to her casually unstudied sex appeal ("the kind of racy look most men like," he remembered, from a Dan Jenkins novel). He was no longer sure what being in love felt like; there had been a couple of girls in high school who he could have killed or died for, and he remembered that feeling well. His wife? That might have been what you called a grad-school marriage of convenience. She had been a physics major and he'd always liked brainy girls and he didn't have to explain himself to Robin. But pretty soon the marriage became inconvenient. He'd started drinking more and wanted more sex; she was a teetotaler and not exactly an erotic tigress. For a reason he couldn't even quite remember anymore, they'd gotten an amicable divorce. He was thirty-eight, she was twenty-nine.

A whole collection of stupid dates and unmemorable sex had eventually led him to Michelle. She was the same age as Robin, an undergrad majoring in communications and having trouble even with that vague and inconsequential syllabus, making B's and C's and working her lovely little butt off to make them. She was from a tiny town in the Illinois corn belt and, honestly, one of the least intelligent women he'd ever met. He often wondered how she'd managed to graduate from high school, much less why she'd decided in her late twenties to go to college, even less how she'd managed to get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison (turned out she was a legacy of sorts; her "drunken" father, as it happened, owned not only a car dealership but also a million acres of loamy Illinois and Indiana farmland. Selling some of it off at top dollar to Big Ag, he had left a "little gift" to the UW athletic department).

Michelle weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet, had classic Midwestern Nordic beauty, and could fuck the paint off a barn. He figured it had something to do with her stern Methodist upbringing; even though she never missed church on Sunday, not even in college two hundred miles from her hyper-devout mother, you got her clothes off and she turned into a terrorist. She had absolutely no inhibitions that he'd discovered. The fact that you couldn't really have a conversation with her didn't seem to matter that much, because she was a truly nice person. Their relationship went on, after they'd both graduated, and they moved to Minneapolis together. And he guessed that he was happy. And that Michelle was too, as far as that went.

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright 2021, 2022 by WRL (the author)

part three

....................

The Absent Years

1974 – 1984, State of Washington

He'd found out two decades earlier, back when he'd finished his undergraduate degree at Washington State University and then moved from little Pullman near the Idaho border clear over to Seattle, that he was not cut out for office work. It was not the actual work of a computer engineer that he couldn't stand; he was at Microsoft almost from its beginnings and worked on some truly revolutionary stuff that any engineer would be proud to own.

No, it wasn't the work. It was the office, and all that office work implied.

Yes, it meant he could live the high life in Seattle, which back then was a fairly cheap place to live and was wide open for a kid who made nearly six figures. He developed a taste for jazz clubs--there were quite a few of them in the city--and met (and sometimes bedded) all manner of gorgeous women, white, black, Asian, many of whom were far more cosmopolitan, and usually older, than he. It was a pretty good life for a young man, except for the office thing.

He knew how rats in overcrowded cages felt. You'd get yanked away from the good work you were doing to participate in a "group project," which, due to human nature and the perpetual jockeying for position to please "Bill," often accomplished nothing, which in turn made the usually easygoing "Bill" mad and the employees paranoid. He got a lot more, a lot more done working on his own, but often that wasn't possible.

Then there was office politics, a sad reality unavoidable in any office situation. Who had found a better way to please "Bill." Who knew where the best sushi in Seattle was (when he'd started, he'd had no idea what sushi was). Who would get the first blow job or overnighter from the new girl on the floor. Who could drink the most; he was surprised that white-collar workers bragged about that too. What douchebags Republicans were (there were apparently none in the office). Which band was best. Who worked the hardest. Whose work was most likely to impress "Bill." Et cetera.

And even if, in these early years at Microsoft, they accomplished quite a bit -- that was inarguable -- Scott often wondered how much more might have been accomplished without the perpetual bitching and sniping and bragging and water-cooler yak fests.

He wasn't cut out for office work.

After three miserable years at Microsoft -- although he loved Seattle itself, by far the coolest place he'd ever lived -- a friend in state government got him an "in" working as a park ranger at several state parks on the east side of the Cascade range. That involved moving to Wenatchee, a small city absolutely nothing like Seattle although it was only 150 miles away. This was the part of Washington where apples grew and rodeo ruled and practically no one had a college degree. It was beautiful, though, with snow-covered peaks crowding the western horizon, hot summers, and freezing winters. If you could handle the extremes of climate, you did have to admit that it was nice to live in a place where it wasn't raining all the time (Seattle, too, was surrounded by glorious mountain vistas -- which were visible for about ten days a year).

But he figured he was paying a penance of sorts for leaving Seattle and a very good job at a very promising company. Being a park ranger was lonely work, especially as the winter had been virtually snow-free and the snow pack in the mountains wasn't going to be sufficient to keep the fire risk down come summer. He spent much of the summer in a fire tower, just like the novelist Edward Abbey had done, except the solitude didn't inspire him to want to create great works of literature, or much of anything. He spent an inordinate amount of time just staring out of the tower at the mountains (of course this is what he was being paid to do; no one really did that, though, finding all manner of ways to pass the idle hours, from reading to knitting to watching baseball on miniature televisions from Japan).

And there was the education thing. Even though most of his fellow rangers had college degrees of one sort or another (everything from Eastern philosophy to, well, computer engineering), he missed talking to his educated peers. He spent little time with his fellow rangers. They were spread during the day over six vast counties doing all manner of things; it was the furthest gig imaginable from the water-cooler toxicity of an office. They rescued climbers from the slopes of nearby Mount Stuart and even Mount Adams, the dormant volcano down by Yakima; they directed traffic to special events; they befriended all the little kids who looked to them as heroes like they'd seen on TV, shooting at bad guys in the woods (although Scott was not one of the LEO rangers who carried a gun). And they filled out a whole lot of paperwork; this was, after all, a government job.

They even rescued climbers from Mount Adams!

 

But, to use a hackneyed phrase, Scott still hadn't found what he was looking for.

One late-summer day, after he'd spent an exhausting week in the Glacier Peak Wilderness helping to support firefighting crews, his cubicle mate Dierdre looked up from her computer in the tiny little office they shared in Monitor, a crossroads west of Wenatchee at the foot of the mighty Cascade Range. "What kind of engineer are you?" Dierdre asked. She herself was a wildlife biologist and very gung-ho about her job. She was also gorgeous. And happily married.

"Computer engineer."

"That's what I thought. Look at this ad." She swiveled out of Scott's way so he could see her computer screen.

It was the listserver for vacant state-government positions nationwide and Dierdre had brought up the "critical need" page. The listing read:

ENGINEER BSCE or BSEE needed to upgrade

and oversee large network at New York City cultural facility.

Relocation bonus. Recent graduates welcome.

Call 212-445-4547 for more information.

The Absent Years II

So he's on the train across Canada. The trip begins strangely enough, with Dierdre driving his Jeep north from Wenatchee because he won't be needing it anymore and so he's insisted upon giving it to her, his long-suffering but tolerant cubemate of these past three years, a woman who had found her niche working in the woods with wild animals. He had always admired Dierdre because she was from a poor family and had put herself through college (the mighty University of Washington, in her case) where many women as pretty as she was would've vanished in the endless abyss of taverns and trailer parks and drug habits that lurked just under the dusty skin of eastern Washington.

But maybe all wasn't as copacetic as it appeared. They had crossed the border at Northport, a place even more remote than the Cascade Mountain backwaters he'd grown used to. These were the foothills of the Rockies, and Scott had to marvel once again at how much variety they'd managed to cram into a small (by Western standards) state like Washington; you had the ocean, the rain forest, the Olympic range between the ocean and Puget Sound, Seattle and Everett and Bellingham where he'd gotten lost in the fog of magic mushrooms and, as it turned out, actual fog--and onward to the barren wastelands of the Columbia Basin, funky old Spokane like the gritty set of a western movie, and finally climbing up into the Rockies as you departed the little state for Canada as they'd just done. There was nothing, absolutely nothing around here except the brooding hills and ponderosa and lodgepole; on the American side of the border the FBI and tax authorities had been engaged more and more frequently in pitched gun battles with Nazi enclaves in these trackless woods, an unholy marriage between the Birchers who had been birthed here and Aryan Nations career criminals from the vast American penal system. They were dangerous mostly to law enforcement in the days before Trump; now, given license, they were dangerous to everybody.

It was nice to be in Canada, where most people weren't given to glorifying Nazis. Plus the Canadians kept their trains up. The Americans, to put it politely, did not.

But it was odd that Dierdre hadn't once mentioned her husband Bill, who she was so very happily married to and Scott had only met once, briefly, at a barbecue. The only impression Scott had had was of a tattooed, bearded biker type who could have been just about anybody in these parts. He was gruff and not overly friendly, like most bikers, and Scott was fairly sure he wouldn't recognize him should they pass in the street.

"So," Scott tried. "How's Bill these days?"

She suddenly stared directly at him, her large brown eyes loaded with lasers. "That miserable fucker? Hopefully, he's dead."

Scott was beyond shocked, for two reasons: one, he had never heard anything about Bill except how wonderful he was. And two, Dierdre never swore. Scott remembered how  startled he'd been when she'd come to work late one morning, waylaid by car trouble, and hissed "The Chevy Cruze isn't for shit. Don't ever buy one!" That had made such an impression that he had decided to give her his Jeep. After all, in some ways she was why he was moving to New York and a nice job at the Museum of Natural History. And Dierdre's car wasn't going to improve with age.

They got to Revelstoke late in the afternoon, where the Canadian National railway followed Canada Highway 1 through a series of forbidding mountain chasms. Glaciers glittered in the far distance; at this high latitude and altitude, the snow line wasn't far above the pitched roofs of the town.

The Canadian National train station is just inside Revelstoke as you drive in on One, the Trans-Canada Highway. Dierdre has already (being a scientist) figured out exactly where the train station is before they even get to town.

They pull up at the disembarking zone. "It's pretty here," she says.

"Kind of like Wenatchee on steroids," he deadpans. The mountains are obviously higher here, the trees taller, the streets cleaner. They might be in Switzerland, or at least what Scott imagines Switzerland looks like.

"Hmmm," Dierdre says, tapping idly on the steering wheel. Is he taking too long?

"You can have your Jeep back anytime," she continues.

"Nah, it's yours," Scott tells her. Her eyes are big, round, even startling. "Hey, be seeing you around, Dierdre. Thanks for being my cubemate. Thanks for--"

She suddenly brings her face up close to his. This has to be an invitation. He goes ahead and lets himself kiss her.

Things heat up quickly. She puts his hand on one of her voluminous breasts. She's wearing a sports bra and he can feel her nipple stiffen and stiffen. She puts her other hand on his crotch. He has risen nicely to the occasion, no surprise there. And he realizes, on another plane where we store all the hopelessly silly and deluded things we've thought in our lives, that he has always wanted this girl but didn't even allow himself to think about it. Bill. All for stupid-assed Bill. He had worked for three years with this gorgeous misused creature and wouldn't even allow himself to get his rocks off thinking about her in the privacy of his own shower.

"We should," she gasps, breaking away from him for a second, "get a motel room. Don't you think? I could say the Jeep broke down. Ha. Ha."

"Deer," he says, using an affectionate nickname he is careful not to be too free with (Bill!), "I have to get my train. If I don't, there'll be no museum job, and we'll get to explain to your beloved husband why we came all the way up here for nothing. Think he'll buy that?"

"No," Dierdre rasps, still winded, idly rubbing her thighs. "He'd shoot us both, is what he'd do. You're right. It's just a silly fantasy."

"But a fun one," Scott tells her, getting out of the Jeep. He comes around to the driver's-side window, which is open. "See you around," he says. She cranes her neck out the window and he kisses her once more, briefly. "No you won't, " she smiles. "You'll never see me again."

He contemplates the fact that she is almost certainly correct. Unless she gets rid of this goon she's married to, and survives to tell the tale. "I almost came in my pants," he tells her.

"Me too," she grins, and turns the Jeep around in the middle of the street, and is gone.

************

 

Ann three 

 October, 2024

"You know what I love about you?" Ann says.

He looks around the cafeteria where this drab collection of working people are scarfing down their lunches. He wonders how many of them have gone pinhead, or always were pinheads. Ann. What she loved about him.

"I could just sit here and listen to this all afternoon," he grinned. "Go ahead."

"Silly. I was going to say that you're a great storyteller. Could I hear a story? A short one that'll fit into lunchtime; I want to hear the rest of Woodstock with the hippies later."

"Do you want me to tuck you in too?" Now it was her turn to grin.

'That comes later. Story first." Again: File away under Happy Things To Think About.

"Okay." Scott realizes that he'd best get busy before lunch is over. Oh hell, his Mexican food is getting cold too. Damn this creature. Can't get anything done.

Back when I was delivering new school buses in the summertime, they used to send me up to Lake Superior a lot. Usually the Wisconsin part. Maple. Ashland. A pretty stiff drive from Minneapolis. And usually I'd be with a crew led by the fabulous Buck, about whom more later.

But this time, I was by myself. I was bringing up a new bus to Bayfield, where I'd actually never been, and taking their old beater back to Minneapolis as a trade-in.

So after an uneventful trip, I'd dropped the new bus off, and I decided to stop somewhere for a little snack. Bayfield is on that big peninsula that juts way out into Lake Superior and it's pretty wild. After awhile I see one of those little blue signs that says FOOD, but it's indicating that I have to turn off the highway into the forest. Oh well, whatever. The thing with these buses is you do have to be careful that you don't get yourself into a place that you can't get out of. So I'm watching the condition of this road pretty carefully, almost forgetting the food thing, when I have to cross a long narrow bridge onto a little island. In the lake. And on this little island is a blue ranch house with an unpretentious FOOD sign.

I park the bus--fortunately this place has a huge dirt parking lot--but it's early in the fall so the vacationers are gone. And already there's a bit of a chill in the air, or at least a bit of a chill coming off that great big lake.

So I walk on inside. A little bell goes ting-a-ling. Since this is basically a house I'm in, I've stepped into the living room and I'm waiting for someone to come out of the kitchen to my right, behind the counter and the cash register. But no one comes.

'Hell-LOOOOO!' I holler. Then I open and shut the door a couple of times so the bell keeps jingling. Nothing.

Now I'm getting a little concerned, because right in front of me is a liquor shelf. All this top-drawer stuff, Drambuie, Grand Marnier, Johnny Walker Black, Finlandia vodka, Jack Daniels Triple-Distilled. I could steal two hundred dollars' worth of liquor by just picking up any four bottles and walking out. Still no one, so I open and close the door again.

Now I am genuinely worried. Stupidly, I call out 'Hell-LOOOOO! Need service!'

At the other side of the living room 'store' is a screen door to the outside. Maybe they are outside in the garden; it's a nice enough day. But no. No one is outside. Time to check the restrooms.

No one in the men's. I knock loudly and shout before I enter the ladies'. Nothing.

At this point a smart guy would have called 911. But I didn't. I made myself open the broom closet.

Nothing, thank God.

Now all that was left was the rest of the house. It was behind a locked door on the far side of the counter. I knocked and knocked. Nothing.

Well, if this wasn't the strangest thing. Still, genius me doesn't call the police, probably because my stomach is growling and I really, really, really want that big bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos and maybe a microwave burrito to go with it. But my daddy taught me that stealing is wrong. So I left.

As I'm recrossing that narrow causeway-slash-bridge to the mainland, I see a middle-aged woman in a jogging outfit coming my way. Even before I reach her, she's giving a big smile and wave to the school bus. I'm used to that.

So I pull the bus up next to this friendly woman and open the door. 'Hi!' she says. 'Beautiful day!'

'Yeah. Uh... do you know who owns the store over there on the island?'

'Why, I do!' she says brightly.

'Well, um, I was just in there. You forgot to lock up when you left.'

'Oh, I never lock the store. I was only gone a few minutes!'

'Lady, I walk in the door and I'm looking at ten thousand dollars' worth of liquor. Then there's the hunting supplies. The automotive. With this bus, I could have cleaned you out in no time.'

'But you didn't!' she says in the same bright tone. 'Nobody steals from me, not up here!'

"Well, I didn't steal from you either. But I sure would've liked that bag of Doritos.'

'Why didn't you just take it?'

'Because that would be stealing."

'Well, aren't you something!" she says, in the same tone your grandmother would have used when you showed her a good report card.

'Listen, something else too. You scared the living shit out of me.'

'Now how did I do that?' And get this: she looked genuinely baffled!

'Leaving the store unlocked like that. I go in. Start calling out. No one there. What do you think I thought?'

'Well I don't know what you thought!' she said, but I think she did know.

'You're out here in the middle of nowhere. Something terrible could have happened to you.'

'Now that's silly. The neighbors see everyone who comes across the bridge! They knew I went jogging. Do you think they worried about a SCHOOL BUS?' She put her hands on her hips, like she had just said everything that needed to be said on that topic. But then she asked me, 'Where do you live?'

'Twin Cities,' I said.

'Hmmph. 'Twin Cities.' I can assure you that things like that don't happen around here!'

'Well, have a nice day,' I told her, as pleasantly as I could.

'You too," she said. "You could come back to the store. I'd give you the Doritos. Freebie.'

'And turn this thing around where?"

She laughed. I pulled the door shut and eased away.

He held his hands up to let Ann know that the story was over.

"Did it really happen that way?" Ann giggled. Her hazel eyes glinted in that way he'd grown to love, childlike and eager.

"Oh, you bet. Maybe a couple minor adjustments to the dialogue. It was quite a few years ago."

"You're a goddamned saint," Ann said. The lunch bell rang.

They rose from the table. "When can I tuck you in?" Scott said.

"How about tonight? You could come to my place."

"But how about Angie?" The dog. Named for the Stones song.

"Bring her along. She's a sweetie. Just like you."

*********

 

Now, as Scott himself might say, "This here's the funny part."

He's picked up his Viagra at the pharmacy in Luverne and popped one into his mouth on his way over to Ann's. He's never used the stuff, but the old geezers at the bus barn in Chaska swore by it, said it made you like a kid again. He could use a little of that right now. He thinks he did okay last time, all things considered, but tonight he really wants to close the deal. Wants to rock her socks off. Hey, a senior citizen is entitled to a little help.

So at the small bungalow at the edge of town, he knocked at her door, the sun getting low in the sky, Angie bouncing happily at his feet (she loves Ann--no surprise there).

Ann opened the door in a terrycloth bathrobe, her hair wet. "You're early!" she said, with mock indignation. "Hi, puppy! Welcome!"

They stepped inside. The place was very neat, carefully arranged with inexpensive furniture and some Ikea stuff. He thought he smelled a little bit of cigarette smoke, just a little bit. Ann ran a brush through her long butterscotch hair. "Early?" he said. "It's ten after!"

"Didn't they teach you about fashionably late when you were back East? What's fashionably late in New York? Like, half an hour, right?"

"This isn't New York, it's the upper Midwest. Or the Plains. Take your pick."

"Scott, aren't you going to let me bust your balls even a little bit? I had to close at the store. I'm the one who's late. Sorry I look like this."

"I'm not. Not at all. And you smell great."

"Best I'm gonna smell all day, so it might as well be while you're here. Look, I even got some treats for Angie!"

There was an old dog dish on the counter with a can of doggie beef stew next to it. "Can she?" Ann asked.

"Oh, sure, she ain't picky," Scott said. Something was beginning to happen in his BVDs. He badly wanted to see what was under that bathrobe. And it was starting to get dark.

He waited while she scooped out the stew for Angie, who bobbed excitedly at her feet, drooling just a little bit. And when she'd put the dish down and Angie began to wolf her food, Scott gathered Ann in his arms and set into her the way she had once set into him, on the shoulder of that county road, eons ago.

Last week.

"Let's go. See ya later, puppy," Ann told Angie, leading Scott by the hand into the bedroom.

It was still light enough to see in there, the light filtering through high-set windows that a lot of these sixties- and seventies-era bungalows had. Were there grizzlies around here back then, or what? Why did they put the windows so high up?

It was a hell of a thing to be wondering when she dropped the robe and he finally got a look at her body. It sent a shiver right through him. Her breasts were larger than he'd imagined, considerably larger, with small pink nipples that belied their size and a few pale stretch marks that to Scott meant only that Ann's breasts, like Ann herself, were genuine.

"Oh wow," Scott said. "Step back. I want to look at you."

She had a smartly trimmed little pubic thatch and that nice flat belly; she'd never had  kids. Ann did a little pirouette and he got a glimpse of that glorious, letter-perfect derrière. Excuse his French.

"Ta da!" Ann squealed. She was shy. She wasn't really enjoying the exhibition very much, but guys being guys, well, guys being guys. They needed it.

He sat on the edge of her bed, hurriedly removing his sneakers. Ann stood over him and let him suck her nipples and enjoy her surprising bounty with his hands. He half-stood to slide his pants down but she did it for him, and his cock leaped out of his BVDs, swollen and furious.

This was some bitchin' stuff. No wonder it was so popular.

"Oh goodness gracious," she said. "The beast has been unleashed!" And she tugged his shorts down and began to kiss it.

It wasn't exactly a "beast," not the way he saw it. Seven inches on a good day, although he could swear it was bigger now. Blue pill. He hadn't had a blow job in twelve or thirteen years. He was going to shoot pretty quickly, and he didn't want that. Not now.

"I wanna fuck you," he breathed. "Ann, I wanna fuck you so bad." He didn't say that unless he really meant it. When had the last time been? Michelle. Early on.

Ann stopped her ministrations and grinned up at him. "Okay," she said. "You mind me on top? I don't think I've ever rode a rocket like that."

"Hey, great!" Scott said. "I can play with those amazing titties."

She straddled him and slowly sank down. Wet, soaking wet. Oh goodness gracious.

Ann sighed a little while they found their rhythm and shook her damp hair. Scott felt his control return, and even some of his style. He could still do this.

"Now," Ann smiled down at him. "I want to hear about those hippies."

Scott and Ann Get It On, and a Woodstock Challenge

Courtesy Ann Gerling Home Security System, Luverne, MN -- Ed.

Ann: Oh yeeeaah. Yeah!

SCOTT: Pretty nice.

Ann: Pretty... oh it's pretty something all right. Oh yeah!

SCOTT: So, this story... wow. Don't know how to tell it. Got to put these in my mouth.

Ann: Oh!

(sounds of mutual pleasure for several minutes)

Ann: rrrr....they’re harder than you are. I swear!

SCOTT: I doubt that. Feel like I'm--

Ann: I'm what?

SCOTT: --gonna rupture something. Damn!

Ann: Really?

SCOTT: NO not REALLY really! Oh damn it. Oh damn it. Oww!

Ann: Are you close?

SCOTT: I'm surviving. Bedtime story?

Ann. Yes! I wanted. To. Hear about them. Hippies. Hippies!

SCOTT: Okay. Hippies.

So we're in this van and we've just been to Woodstock. And see, the thing is... the... um, thing, the thing is that, see, I hadn't really thought about--goddammit you're a beautiful woman, Ann--damn!--so I hadn't thought about what I was going to do AFTER I saw the Woodstock grounds, in a way it's like--it's like I didn't think I was actually going to get there? so the whole thing was, is, was getting there, you see?

Ann: Oh, I got there. Mmmmm?

SCOTT: Yeah! and the guy that's driving, NOT the guy who became famous later, this Bill guy asks me where I'm from and I tell him, I tell him Missouri? and he wants to know where I think I'm gonna stay tonight. Lord. Oh Lord. Oh Lord. Well I--never thought about that--been sleeping on roadsides, sleeping bag, or staying up all night--trying to avoid the cops, hard thing when you're hitchhiking.

Ann: The things I could tell you... about hard things. (giggles)

SCOTT: (laughs)

Ann: (laughs loudly)

SCOTT: --HEY incredible tits? you ought to be arrested. So he says, Bill says, you could stay with us! In White Lake! And then Al Casey who became famous, setting next to me, he says "Uh. Bill?" like "that's not a very good idea." And then Bill says, I kid you not! he says "What would Jesus do?" so when people started wearing those--those--bracelet things years later, I always thought of that moment! and Al says "how would I know what Jesus would do? I'm Jewish!" and Bill says, "Jesus was a Jew, you know," so Al tells him "yes I knew that, whaddaya think I am, retarded?" And Shasta Sunrise sitting on my one side says under her breath, "They're always going on like this, like a couple old maids!"

(loud laughter)

So as it turns--turns out, Al Casey really ain't the boss, it's Bill the bass player. See? And he's offered me a place to stay for the night. Well, needless to say... as I said, I hadn't given any thought to, to, whatever was going to happen next, guess I would've had to start back to Missouri, but what for? I just thought then, I'll live for...... whatever happens next. Y'know?

Ann: Tell you what I know. You're like my hero. You're... like the guy who rides, rides into town to save the day. I knew it when I saw you and I'm like 'but why, why does he, why does he drink so much? How can he be my hero if he dies?' And then you quit! Just like that! Nobody does what you did, Scott. When you came into the store that day and told me, I knew you were the one. And I know it!

SCOTT: It... sounds like you're proposing to me? Roll over.

Ann: Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes yes yes that's soooooooo good. No, not proposing.  Not at all! I mean, if you want to -- that's fine, that's fine, we'd be a fine married couple I'm sure. But that doesn't even matter! BECAUSE we're involved in something a lot bigger than that. I had to wait for you an awfully long time, but now it's gonna happen!

SCOTT: What's gonna happen? Man you're scaring me now!

Ann: I. Don't. Know! It's... the word. What's the word? Preordained. I've known it all my life. Well... since I was a little girl. But it's not about love. Or romance or, or that other good stuff. It's as big as the world, Scott. Bigger! Didn't you ever feel it?

SCOTT: I did have this dream. When, when I was getting sober? A dream that I was a prophet. And I had to proclaim the word. But see, I didn't know... I didn't know what 'the word' was... and I still don't...

Ann: That's it!

SCOTT: What's what?

Ann: That's it! The dream! They--they told you! They told you! That's it! That's it! That's it! COME WITH ME COME WITH ME COME WITH ME NOW!

SCOTT: Yeah baby...

[FADE]

There was laughter and a lot more sex that night. Ann and Scott happened to be a highly sexually compatible couple. Which was icing on the cake, because their adventure together, and the hard times they would share, had just begun. And now Ann had told Scott her vision, which only confirmed what Scott had already suspected: on some level Ann had been sent to him, but not in a goofy romantic sense--which he was already far too old to put any stock in anyway--but in the sense that the two of them were about to undergo some kind of travail together that had been set in motion long, long ago.

The fact they liked to fuck each other would certainly prove advantageous, because from now on Scott Featherston and Ann Gerling would be joined at the hip. -- Ed.

Scott and Angie left Luverne as the sun was about to rise. Soon Ann would have to go to work. They'd sat around the breakfast nook guzzling coffee; Ann hadn't gotten any sleep to speak of and out of a spirit of solidarity, Scott decided he'd stay up too. Until afternoon, at least--Ann was still considerably younger than he was, but Scott knew that she was getting a little too old to be going to work on an hour of sleep. So many stories to tell her; the times he'd gone practically a week without sleep because of important projects he was working on, his brain churning with unsolved equations and strings of code and something that tasted like battery acid burning in his gullet.

He looked over at Angie in the passenger seat, a smile on her doggie face and a gentle pant of contentment issuing forth. Angie was so many different breeds of dog that it was hard to tell that any breed was dominant. There was some terrier, sure. Probably golden retriever too. And border collie. She was a mess, but a beautiful mess, and she had seen him through some of the scariest moments of his life. He would stop at the cafe in Chandler and get her a breakfast sandwich.

He drove up the highway a little below the speed limit (the few cars there were were headed the other way, toward Luverne and work) and enjoyed the fall colors. For all that there weren't many trees in this part of the world, there were a few and they were showing off for all they were worth today, before the long and brutal winter of the northern plains set in.

And, even more than the really seriously fantastic sex they'd had--the best ever for him, and who would have expected that so late in life?--he thought about what Ann had confessed to him, what seemed to him as sort of a vision she'd had when she was little, and had carried with her like a secret gift, or maybe burden, ever since. And now he saw that in some very uncertain, tenuous, but unmistakable way, he had been pulled here to southwestern Minnesota all his life. He remembered when he was much younger, still a boy, coming out here for the first time and camping at Split Rock Creek State Park with his family, wandering the prairie vastness, watching the Indians fashion pipes out of the sacred pipestone that was everywhere hereabouts, the color of dried blood. He had given this place a name: The Center of the Universe. It felt that way to him, and it had always pulled at him. Telling the other drivers at the bus barn that he was going to retire to "Jasper or Pipestone, somewhere out there" and watching the blank stares of men and women who had been waiting all their lives to get away from the bitter Minnesota winters and relocate to the Carolinas or Arizona. He couldn't have explained it if he had tried; that "Center of the Universe" stuff wasn't going to fly with these old codgers, most of whom had barely finished high school. They thought he was strange enough anyway because he didn't follow sports and read books between routes. This only cemented his strangeness in their eyes.

And in truth he had never even thought about the events in his life that had conspired to pull him steadily north and west from Perryville, Missouri until he had reached Washington State and could go no further; but some unknown thing had reset his course, had informed him that he had gone too far north and west, and relocated him first to New York City and then to Madison, Wisconsin, which felt closer to his goal. And then to Minneapolis, which was very close.

And now to Chandler, in the Center of the Universe, where it was all going to happen. Whatever "it" was. This was certainly the place, and Ann was certainly supposed to be his partner.

He wondered: Did you just wait for "it," or were you supposed to do something to make "it" happen?

One thing and only one thing was certain: As Ann had said, "it" was going to be a whole lot bigger than romance or sex. Even great sex.

 
Art / Angel

The sun is setting, or it would be if you could see the sun, but today has been what pilots call "socked in," with low clouds and occasional drizzle. It's a good day for a fire, and one thing Scott really likes about his old farmhouse is that it has a working fireplace, which was cleaned by the previous owners just before he moved in. A nice warm fire is crackling away now, while he and Ann and Angie recline around the living room watching it get dark.

"I think you're up for a story now," Scott says.

Ann sips her Amaretto di Saronno (ordered specially from Sunshine Liquor n' Bait for herself) and leans back in her padded rocker. "I'm blissed," she says. "You first. You're better at it anyway."

Scott looks at her. She's wearing a little white dress that shows a lot of leg. Scott has never seen her in a dress before; she looks stunning. He'd asked her why she was all dressed up and she'd told him, "Just because."

Sure brightens this gray day, he thinks.

"Before you start," Ann says, "I don't suppose you've heard about the Mexican kids and the pickup truck from anyone?"

"Huh?" he says, genuinely perplexed.

"Well, it's a story. I'm in it. I guess you could say it's what I'm famous for around here. I'm surprised no one has told you yet, seeing as how we've been seen together numerous times so we're already considered a couple."

"Ann, I never talk to anyone but you. Used to talk to my neighbor over there a little bit, but he's a pinhead so he don't like me no more."

He don't like me no more. Ann grinned. There was the Missouri again. "Well, that would explain why you haven't heard the story yet. But you're gonna hear it tonight. Best if you hear it from me. Still, you go first while I get drunk and get my thoughts in order." She recrossed her legs and Scott found himself thinking a silly word: ladylike. Ann looked very ladylike. Scott could hardly believe his good fortune, to be having all these feelings from his youth that he'd thought were long dead, but turned out to have been merely buried under all the stupid bullshit of life.

And his good fortune to have blundered onto Ann, although now he was beginning to see that it wasn't a "blunder" at all. To say that he loved her would be a vast understatement. The other women he'd loved might as well have been boys.

He would tell her a short story, because he wanted badly to hear about the Mexican kids and the truck and why Ann was famous.

"Do you remember the other day when I told you I saw Art Garfunkel in the store?"

'The store' was Sunshine Foods. 'Your store' was Sunshine Liquor n' Bait.

"Yeah, and I told you you were full of shit, and that I had to go to work."

"I'm pretty sure it was Art. Art and I have a history, you see."

"Oh, so in addition to your being best pals with Molly Ringwald, you hung with Simon and Garfunkel? Of course you did!" There was a little dig there, but Scott pretended not to hear it.

"I only saw Paul Simon once. In a deli. I was behind him in line. He turned to look at me and said, 'Nice brisket, huh?'"

"But you and Artie were sure-enough friends, huh?"

"Not exactly." Scott leaned forward and grinned. "Artie thought I was stalking him."

Ann looked blank. "From the music I hear you listening to, I'm surprised you were even a fan." Scott's tastes ran to vintage San Francisco acid-rock and 1980s Minneapolis Scene, both the white and black variants.

"Never was a fan," Scott said. "When I saw him in the store the other day, he looked at me strangely and said, 'Don't I know you?'" And I said, "No, I'm not Pete Townshend. I get that a lot. See, I'm not even British."

"You look nothing like Pete Townshend!" Ann exclaimed. "Except that you're tall and gawky."

"'Gawky,' huh?"

"Just go on."

"And he makes this noise like 'hnhh hnhh hnhhh' and starts edging away from me real fast. It was Artie, all right. Hadn't seen him in years, and never outside New York City. Whaddya know. Right here in Luverne, in good old Sunshine Foods."

"Don't be so shocked. We ARE right by the interstate. I've seen Tim McGraw in the store, and Vince Gill. Both of 'em are real nice."

"They're country people, so no shocker there. But, I mean, this was New Yawk Awtie Gawfunkel!"

"Alright, so maybe it was Art Garfunkel. Tell me about the stalking." Ann poured another three fingers of Amaretto into her glass. Her hazel eyes were beginning to glaze, catching highlights from the fire.

So after moving to New York, I found myself living in the Queens neighborhood where Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon had grown up. And that's where I started running into Art Garfunkel on the street, usually in the little Israeli commercial district on Yellowstone Boulevard or in downtown Forest Hills on Continental Avenue.

Art and I noticed each other from the beginning, no doubt because we were always the tallest people around. I'd step into a deli to buy some prosciutto, there would be Art sampling the olives. I'd be browsing records at the nice little music store on Continental, and Art would just happen to wander in (he was a "homeboy made good" in Forest Hills, so people there always treated him with deferential respect--"Hey, Awtie!").

I think I had spotted Art Garfunkel a half dozen times when he probably began to worry a little bit about me. I could see it in his eyes. I thought of going up and introducing myself as a fan--but, I reasoned, that would only make things worse. And the truth of the matter was that in 25-odd years of listening to rock and roll, I owned only one Simon and Garfunkel record--the 45-rpm version of The Boxer.

That began a run of truly bad luck. I started crossing paths with Garfunkel in Manhattan too. First I saw him at a jazz concert at St. Peter's Church in the basement of the Citicorp building--St. Peter's was actually my church at the time. There was Garfunkel again, eating lunch at a Columbus Avenue bistro I frequented with my friends from the Museum, Lonnie and Pierre. And then there were the bookstores. Since Art Garfunkel shares my passion for books, I don't suppose it's any surprise that he also went to a lot of bookstores. But did he have to go to the ones I went to--and at the very same time? I'd be browsing literature on the Upper West Side or digging through science volumes on South Park, and there would be Art. By now I was making him visibly nervous.

It all came to a head one day in a bookstore just a couple of blocks from St. Peter's on the East Side. I hadn't been in there for long when I went around the end of an aisle and almost literally bumped into Art Garfunkel.

Art immediately fled the store.

And, strangely enough, I never saw Art Garfunkel again. Until last month.

End of story. Your turn, Ann Gerling, Esquire.

Alright, Mister Storyteller. That was a pretty good one, by the way! "Awtie."

About a year ago, just when the Trump Revolution was taking off, I was coming home from work. Biden had just fled to Australia and all those Demoratic congresspeople got murdered. Not good times. Not even way out here.

I was coming home from work and, being February, it was already starting to get dark at 3 PM. I'm going by the garden apartments on Warren Street and I see some kids playing and riding bikes in the middle of the street, so I start to slow way down--when all of a sudden, from the next intersection, here comes this pickup truck. The driver guns the motor. He's going to run down all these kids, kill them in cold blood!

I can't really tell you what happened in the next few seconds, because it was like a dream. Fortunately, there were several adult witnesses.

They say I jumped out of my car, ran screaming through the kids who now were desperately trying to flee, and stopped the truck with my bare hand. They say he was going about forty miles per hour and that the rear wheels of the truck rose up several feet off the ground. Since the witnesses were all Mexican and they get a lot of shit around here for their saints-n'-angels Catholicism, no one really took them seriously. But to the Mexican community here, I might as well be a real saint.

Scott, the Mexicans are telling the truth. I stopped that truck with my hand. God worked through me, no doubt about it. I felt a horrible pain that shot up my arm into my chest, but that was it -- never had to see a doctor, never even had a bruise. I keep telling the Mexicans that God did it, not me, and that I'm not a saint -- boy, that's a stretch, they should have been in my bedroom that first night you came over !-- but they'll bow to me and make the sign of the cross when they see me in the store or on the street. I guess it's true that I saved the lives of six or eight kids. But Scott, I never asked for any of this. It. Just. Happened. I'm not even very religious -- I go to one of the Lutheran churches on Christmas and Easter, that kind of thing.

Scott appeared stunned. "Oh my God," he said, very slowly.

There's more.

The guy driving the truck was the local leader of the MFA -- we call them the Mother Fucking Assholes, but their name is Minnesota for Aryans, although in the news they are "officially" called the Minnesota for Americans. They are a bunch of super-pinheads who think Trump is too liberal. They think all blacks, Mexicans and Natives ought to be rounded up and killed, and the sooner the better. Exactly like the Nazis. They don't care about killing women or even kids, they call everyone who isn't a pinhead "vermin." Last year, just before you moved here, they blew up that Baptist church on Ash Street that is predominantly black. The cops are afraid of 'em, and they say a few of the guys on the county sheriff's department have been seen at their rallies. In any event, nothing happened to Larry Watkins, the driver of the truck. He wasn't even arrested. They had him down to the station for a "talk," and then Chief Goff of the city police made a statement that "Mr. Watkins said it was almost dark and a woman, Ann Gerling, ran out in the street in front of him. He said he stood on his brakes to avoid hitting her." Nothing about the kids. Nothing about what the witnesses saw. If they'd have had a good forensics expert go over there, they would have seen that the only sign of braking would have been the six-inch skid from the FRONT tires where I stopped the truck. They knew something was wrong with Watkins' story. He's got a long rap sheet, as a matter of fact they talked to him after the Oklahoma City bombing when he was a teenager. And they certainly knew that only Mexicans live in those apartments where this Anglo lady, me, was suddenly moved to jump out of her car and "run out on the street," only to have her life spared by the dramatic braking prowess of "Mr. Watkins."

So there's my story, Scott. Sad but true.

The trees were showing off for all they were worth today (photo by Pat Rini Rohrer)

A Visit from the Chief

Scott is out in his yard on a Saturday morning late in November. There's already a couple of inches of snow on the ground, but today it's in the forties so he figures he'd better deal with a couple of home improvement projects that have to do with winterizing the old house.

He and his wheelbarrow are in the side yard, looking up at a shingle torn loose by a wind storm last summer, when a cruiser pulls up with LUVERNE POLICE on the door. Interesting. Must be lost. Nobody wants to be a cop anymore, it's probably some college kid trainee from another state.

But the man who climbs out is older, maybe younger than Scott but older than Ann, and has the resigned shuffle of a man who has been a cop too long.

"Howdy," he greets Scott. "You Scott Featherston?"

"Yessir," Scott says. Learning as a kid to be polite to police officers was one of the best lessons he'd ever absorbed. You ALWAYS gave cops the benefit of the doubt.

"I'm Ed Goff. Chief of police in Luverne. You and I need to have a little chat. Got a few minutes?"

At this point he could pull one of those radical bits college kids had always been fond of, like "No, I don't." Or, "Aren't you out of your jurisdiction?" or that all-time favorite of police officers everywhere: "Got a search warrant?" which was always, always answered with: "No, but I can be back here in ten minutes with one."

"Let's go inside," Scott says. "I've got some coffee on." Always invite them in. They might not come, but you've already lowered their suspicion level considerably.

"Alright," the chief says, waiting while Scott ditches the wheelbarrow.

In the kitchen, a happy Angie trots up to Chief Goff, who scratches her and calls her a good girl. Obviously a dog man. Good. "I take mine black," says the chief. Scott hands him a cup and pours some for himself. He takes it black too.

"First, I want to congratulate you for getting off the booze. That must have been a hell of a thing to do by yourself."

"You knew about that?"

"I know about everything that happens around here. I'm the police chief." Goff grinned hugely at him. Goff had seen too many Jesse Stone movies.

"You're the police chief in Luverne. We're thirty miles from Luverne."

"Son," he said to Scott, even though Scott was almost old enough to be his father, "not to riff on my fellow officers, but these small-town boys don't do nothing but domestics. I've got to keep tabs on shit. Even if it ain't necessarily Luverne shit. Which brings me to why I dropped by to say hello--it's about your girlfriend."

"Ann? Ann's as squeaky-clean as they come, Chief. It must be a mistake."

"Oh, not Annie," the chief said, a mild irritant to Scott. Ann hated being called Annie. "By the way, as far as that goes, let me congratulate you on something else. You done" (yes, he said 'done,' like he was in Perryville) "picked the prairie rose. Lord, boy, she is the sweetest thing between the Cities and Sioux. Known her all her life."

"She is that thing," Scott said. "And I should know. I've lived in the Cities."

"And New York. And Madison. And some town in Missouri. Shit, is there anywhere in this country you haven't lived?"

"How'd you know all that?"

"I'm the police chief, like I said. Also, should I call you Doctor Featherston, or don't you stand on ceremony?"

"I'm not a doctor."

"Ph.D in electrical engineering from the Wisconsin University there in Madison."

"Uh, I stopped at master's. And it was computer engineering."

The chief snickered. "S'okay. So what brought you way out here on the prairies with that degree, which I guess you kinda pissed away driving school bus over to Chaska? Not that there's anything wrong with being a school bus driver, you understand."

That was just a little bit hostile, Scott thought. "Retirement," he said. "Plus, of course, I had to pluck the prairie rose."

Now Goff chuckled; he seemed to be one of the rare cops who enjoyed witty repartee. "Good 'un," he told Scott. "Anyway, getting down to business. You've probably heard some rumors about Annie."

"She hates being called Annie," Scott said. "Just saying."

Goff shot him a look. "You know the rumors I'm talking about?"

"Probably. That she's some kind of superhero who stops speeding trucks with her bare hands?"

"Yeah. Those rumors. Well son, apparently those rumors are true. You see, I've been a cop for a long, long time. Gonna retire next year, seen enough. And you being an educated man and all, I don't s'pose you're one of these pinheads we've got hereabouts. Matter of fact, between me and you and it's a thing you don't tell people if you want to stay on my good side, I'm a Democrat. Always have been. I can't stand these pig fuckers. I had more regard for the goddam Mooslim terrorists I killed in Afghanistan."

"Thank you for your service," Scott says levelly.

"Yeah. Anyways we maybe got a plant in with the Motherfuckers--excuse me, the Master Race for Minnesota bunch. MFA. He's a fella that knows just a little too much about the bombing at the black church two years back. We been puttin' the screws to him, tellin' him that if he plays ball with us we might not charge him for being the mastermind of the black church bombing, which he ain't--but you get the drift. So he's been bringin' a flash drive to the meetings of the MFA where he's supposed to be the secretary or some goddam thing 'cause he can read past a fifth-grade level, unlike the rest of those pig fuckers. He's supposed to record their "minutes," which is a video of them talking shit that they like to whack off to when they get home. Well, he's been recording more than that. Listen to this here."

Chief Goff produces his personal phone and punches the screen.

"HELL YES that bitch stopped my truck with her hand," a whiny male voice says. "She ain't normal!"

Goff pushes the screen again.

"HELL YES that bitch stopped my truck with her hand. She ain't normal!"

"Of course, there's more," Scott says.

"Yeah, there's more, but I can't let you hear it 'cause it's a matter under investigation. But now I'm going to share something else with you, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't share it with Annie--Ann. We're gonna be reopening that case against Watkins on account of what's on this tape. That pig fucker had me snowed when he said he slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting Ann. I believed him over the six Mexicans who were willing to testify in court, even though only a couple of 'em are here legally, that they saw her stop the speeding pickup with her hand."

"Well, Chief. In all fairness to you, I'm not sure I would have believed that either."

"But here's the thing. There was always something special about Annie.... sorry, Ann. My daddy and her daddy worked at the foundry together, back when the foundry was still up and running and before the chicken plant came in. I was a couple years ahead of her in school so I didn't know her so well, but like every other guy there was a time when I had a crush on her. She was so damned pretty, so damned nice too."

"Still is," Scott said.

"Yeah. And I guess this will sound dumb, coming from an old cop... she was just... radiant. That's the word. When she smiled, it was like you could hear the angels sing. Sorry, that's dumb."

"Not dumb at all," Scott said. "Pretty spot-on, actually."

"Thankee. Well, it's just my way of saying that I really wasn't too surprised to find out the truth about the speeding truck, and also that you are one lucky son of a bitch. You know that, don't you?"

"I know it."

"Take good care of that little girl. She's the pride of Luverne. To that end, I want you to have this."

It was a black plastic case, very heavy. "What's in it," Scott asked, though he was pretty sure he knew.

"It's a Glock .9 mm. And some cartridges. You put this in a place where you can reach it quick, and if any of those pig fuckers come around here or around your old lady, put a slug in 'em. And none of us upstanding officers are gonna know a thing about it, you understand?"

"Thanks, Chief," Scott said, and put the heavy case on the table. He shook hands with Goff, who then departed through the kitchen door, giving Angie a scratch on the way out.

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright 2021, 2022 by WRL (the author)

part four

The Cross-Burning

Ann comes home from work on a Thursday night in mid-December, visibly upset.

"What?" Scott says, as he helps Ann with her bulky coat and Angie prances nervously around their feet, sensing something off in the way that dogs do.

"Merry Christmas," she says heatedly. "The Mother Fucking Assholes are burning a cross tomorrow in Hills."

Hills is in the very southwesternmost corner of Minnesota, near where the Minnesota border intersects those of Iowa and South Dakota, only fifteen miles from Luverne.

"Burning a cross," Scott says, but he senses that he should let Ann talk.

"Yep, just like the goddamned Klan, except it isn't the Klan, it's our very own poster boys for foreshortened gene pools."

"Jesus Christ," Scott says, not knowing what else to say, really.

Ann reaches into her purse and hands Scott a wadded-up, cheaply-printed handbill. The ink is smeared, but he reads:

CROSS BURNING FRIDAY NIGHT

HILLS MN

KEEP MINNESOTA WHITE!

KEEP MINNESOTA CHRISTIAN!

KEEP MINNESOTA STRAIT!

SPIKS, NIGGERS, JEWS, SAND NIGGERS & QUEERS MUST GO!

NOW!

MINNESOTA FOR WHITE PEOPLE!

CALL 877-7876 LUVERNE FOR INFO AND DIREX

SPONSERED BY MINNESOTA FOR ARYANS

LUVERNE CHAPTER

"Makes you proud to be an American, don't it?" Scott says.

"I ripped this down from the bulletin board in the break room. I don't know how many of the blacks or Mexicans at the store might have seen it, but they're all over town on the light poles and stuff. So I called the number on that old pay phone outside the post office. The guy who answered said "Heil Hitler!" And I said "Die, Nazi scum!" and hung up."

God, he loves this woman.

"I don't suppose anyone's talking about a counter-protest?" Scott says hopefully.

"Oh, sweetie, sometimes I can tell you haven't lived here long. This is the Mother Fucking Assholes! The Pig Fuckers! Even the cops are scared of them. They do these little parade thingies once in awhile around the courthouse, waving their AKs and ARs. They got tired of being denied permits so they started just showing up and daring the cops to stop them. The cops only stepped in after a Mexican gang from Sioux threatened to come over here and 'kill everybody on the Square.' That was right around the time that you, bless your heart, decided to have a nice, peaceful retirement in Chandler."

"Shit," Scott says. "I guess I should have stayed in the Cities and drank myself to death. But then I would never have met you."

"Or Angie," Ann says, trying a smile. Angie, knowing she is being talked about, barks happily.

...............…..

So, the night of the cross-burning, Scott and Ann head south on US 75 till they get to MN 270 and turn straight west. It's not a long drive. Ann, using her patented Gerling Grapevine™ , has determined that the burning is to be held at the Kuehn (Kühn in the German) farm just east of Hills, on 270. "Ernst Kuehn," Ann explains to Scott, "was a Nazi before it was cool to be a Nazi. He had a huge sign over his driveway with a Star of David with a slash through it that said NO JEWS. When we were little kids on field trips, they'd tell us to look straight ahead when we passed his farm or we'd have nightmares. So of course we started asking around amongst ourselves, "What does 'NO JEWS' mean? because they'd told us not to look so of course we had to. I mean, we were little kids. One day in class in like second grade this kid puts up his hand and asks what NO JEWS means. 'It means he doesn't like people like me!' one boy, Mo Hirsch, said when the teacher didn't answer. Well, that didn't exactly clarify things for us because there was nothing particularly objectionable about Mo, he was just a little snot like the rest of us.

"Anyway, I think it was in fifth grade when I'm out at recess and I see this bunch of kids clustered around Mo Hirsch. He's showing them this picture he got from somewhere, I think he'd torn it out of a library book, of all these skeletal corpses piled up. Hundreds, thousands of them. I almost threw up. 'Those are Jews, Gerling,' he told me. 'And when people like that scum sucker with the sign get together, this is what happens to Jews.'"

"That made an overwhelming impression on me, but it wasn't till a couple of years later than we learned about World War II and what the Nazis had done to the Jews. By then we had put two and two together about Kuehn, and by then some of our inquiries had led to references to 'that old Nazi south of town.' His daddy had been involved in something called the Bundt during the war, Nazi sympathizers, and the bars and stores in town wouldn't serve him. Be nice if no one served his son either, but I guess those days are gone."

"Yeah," Scott says thoughtfully. He had imagined that he was moving to a place where the sturdy Nordic farmers and the hardworking Mexicans and the smattering of blacks (one of the Minneapolis Sound bands he loved, Ipso Facto, played "prairie reggae" and hailed from Worthington, spitting distance from Luverne) all got along and shared the harsh climate, brothers and sisters of the tundra. Boy, had he been mistaken.

Ann had told him on one of their early dates that he really hadn't been too far off the beam. "It was a great place to grow up, I guess, especially when I hear the stories of people who didn't grow up around here. Not you so much, Scott, because you're just different--"

"Hey!"

"--you know what I mean. But, y'know, some of the kids who moved out here from the Cities. Or some of the Mexicans and Central Americans fleeing God knows what. I just rode my bike around town and played with my friends and went on dates in high school and was in the pep band and pom squad. I have definitely lived the most normal fucking American life, pure Ozzie n' Harriet."

"That might explain the well-adjusted part," Scott cracks.

Now as they ride toward the cross-burning, which they aren't about to watch from the Kuehn farm but instead from a little park Ann knows called "Coogan's Bluff" (yes, after the movie) where kids made out in their cars, showed off their hot rods, and otherwise acted like typical American kids anywhere. Scott looks over at Ann, the late sunlight giving her a little halo of hair where she'd tied it in a loose knot on top of her head. He says, "So it was great. It was all-American. It was fun. What happened?"

"Trump happened," Ann replies, staring straight ahead.

"I knew you were going to say that," Scott says.

"Yeah, Trump happened, and pretty soon Mexicans were spics and blacks were niggers and Jews were kikes and our handful of Muslims were sand niggers. In about three months, it had turned into a really hostile place. In about six months, we suddenly had the Mother Fucking Assholes in our midst. They were an offshoot of some group in Idaho that has gun battles with the feds every other week."

"I remember them. I lived out there. Well, not too far away. Once we drove through their 'territory' there in northeast Washington state, going to Canada. We were afraid to break down. The Aryan Nations."

"Yup. That's them." Ann says.

"You wonder how people with so few genes in their pool could ever get anything done."

"Instead of genes, they got guns. Oh, they've sure got a lot of those." Ann looks at him with a crooked wry smile that means she couldn't quite believe herself what she was saying. "Speaking of which, slow up, cowboy."

Hey, I know what we can do! Let's go to a cross-burning!

MN 270, looking west from US 75

Ahead cars lined up along both sides of the highway, including several sheriff's vehicles. On the north side of the road, where Ann said the farm entrance was, are several dozen overweight men carrying automatic weapons, some wearing swastika armbands. On the other side of the road are two news crew trucks that are being shakily guarded by the police, who are obviously completely outgunned. There is catcalling ("hoo hoo, nigger!") from the Nazi contingent. Traffic has slowed to a crawl.

One of the sheriffs spots Ann and gives her a big grin and wave, followed by a "wasn't my idea" helpless shrug. "Tommy Snodgress," Ann says. "He's some kind of relative of the actress."

"Carrie," Scott says stupidly, because he is too stunned to say anything else.

One of the fat men knocks on their windshield and seems to be trying to steer them into the farm driveway.

"Oh fuck no," Scott breathes. "Let's get out of here."

"I hope the cops are looking out for any 'people of color' who get caught up in this mess," Ann says.

But then they are clear and pass through the little hamlet of Hills. A series of right-angle turns and they are on a rutted gravel road leading up to Coogan's Bluff. There is a view to the north and east of the Kuehn place, where they can see the giant cross that has been erected. It is still light out and they are the only people at the park.

"First place I got laid," Ann says. "That's true of a lot of kids from Luverne."

"Who was the lucky guy?" Scott asks. From what he has been able to tell, Ann hasn't exactly been promiscuous.

"Randy Rasmussen. You've seen him a million times. The fat guy behind the deli with the loud voice who's always smiling."

"Him? I don't believe it."

"Hey, it wasn't bad. Not bad at all for a first time."

Why did he feel a slight twinge of jealousy? "Was this in high school?"

"Oh, no. I was an old maid, almost twenty. Randy took me out one night and gave me a dozen roses and bought me a nice dinner at the steakhouse and I thought, 'Ann, let's get this over with already.'"

"You're funny," Scott says, although really what she said moved him in a way.

"No funnier than you. When was your first time?"

"I was gonna get to that, but things keep happening to prevent it."

"Like?"

"Like sex."

"Oh, I see. Are we having too much sex? Because, you know, who wants that?"

She is grinning ear to ear. He doesn't think he actually needs to worry about their busy sex life; God knew there were enough other things to worry about.

"It was Shasta Sunrise."

"The hippie girl?"

"Yeah, her. I never got to the actual part of living with the hippies in White Lake. I guess I can wrap that up. I fucked Shasta Sunrise twenty-seven times and took a lot of LSD. And I met Leslie West."

"How was it?"

"He's a really good guitarist. He lived next door."

"No, dummy. Like l give a shit right now about Leslie West when I want to hear about Shasta Sunrise."

"Well, honey, I don't exactly know how to put this. It's not fair to judge other girls by you. I mean that with all sincerity. No, don't look at me like that. You're kinda in your own league."

"Okay, you get your extra Ann points. How was she?"

"Probably pretty good. She wasn't a novice, in any event, and I sure was. But we were so stoned all the time, I thought I was mostly imagining it."

"Then how do you know you weren't?"

"Because she was really loud when she came."

Ann laughs and laughs. Finally she gets out, "Louder than me?"

"No," Scott grins. "Nobody's louder than you."

*****

Even with the car windows opened just a crack--the temperature is in the low twenties--they can hear the roar when the cross is ignited. Ann snaps a few pictures with her iPhone that has the super-powerful camera.

"Guess this is our future, huh?" Scott mutters. Their previously silly mood has turned suddenly somber. Other cars have pulled in but it's not kids making out; it's other non-Aryans watching the cross burn. Several step out of their cars to photograph or shoot video of the ugly spectacle.

"We'd have to kill 'em all," Ann says. "Not sure how we would go about doing that, although I wouldn't mind giving it some thought."

"You're not much of a pacifist, are you?"

"Never said I was. Why, are you?"

"I kinda leaned in that direction," Scott tells her. "You know. Live and let live."

"Scott, you can't 'let live' with these." She gestures out the window. You can hear the cross-burning crowd chanting something. Scott is pretty sure they're chanting Heil Hitler! "They're animals. You should have seen that Watkins character, getting all pissy 'cause he hadn't murdered six Mexican children. Wish I could have used my 'magical powers' to take him out right then and there."

He glances over at Ann. It's dark in the car. He can see nothing but her outline. He can smell her, that delicate scent something like rosemary. "Hey," Ann says.

Ann usually says "Hey" before she says "I love you." But this time she says, "Do you mind if I start smoking again? I'm not doing too well with the quitting."

This is news to Scott. Well, almost news. He does think he smells cigarette smoke in her house sometimes, and there have been a couple of instances when they've kissed and Scott has almost said, "Did you have a cigarette?"

"I kinda thought you might be a part-time smoker," he says. "Like sometimes when you kiss me."

"Does it bother you? That I have a cigarette now and then?"

"No," Scott says honestly. "I was a pretty heavy smoker myself until about three years ago. Then I just up and quit."

"Was it hard?"

"I don't know, I was drunk. No. Really, I'll tell you the truth, Ann. I guess quitting was unpleasant, but compared to giving up booze? Didn't even rate."

"Well, I don't plan on giving up booze."

"What you do isn't drinking, honey."

"Deflection," she says. "From the issue. Which is my smoking."

"How long have you been trying to quit?"

"Since right before I met you. Ain't that the stuff of life."

"You mean since we got together?"

"No. Since you first walked into the Liquor n' Bait."

"Well, that's been... that's been..." He can't do math in his head.

"One year, eight months, twenty-seven days. Give or take a day."

"Holy shit." He had quickly figured out that Ann was tenacious by nature, but isn't prepared for this. Most people would have abandoned the effort long ago, him included. Like most smokers, Scott had tried to quit a thousand times by a thousand different methods, for as long as a couple weeks at a stretch. But for nearly two years running? It had to be torture.

"It goes in waves," Ann explains. "Like today, I had one cigarette. At work, of course. Yesterday I didn't have any. Some days I may have three or four. Or I'll go a week without smoking at all. Tell you the truth, it's been harder since we've been together. I didn't know what you'd do if you found out. But I never figured you for the judgmental type, so here it is. Ann wants to start smoking again and not hiding it from you. I admit I was weak. But life has gotten so crazy... it's not helping that I can't smoke. I wanted to talk to you about it. I wanted to be straight-up."

Scott is touched.

"Honey," she continues, "maybe we won't be here much longer. It'll be easier for me if I can smoke. We've got so much to do together, you and me."

"Do you know something I don't? Because sometimes... I don't think you're completely standard-issue."

"Oh, but I am. Except for that one day. Fortunately. If I wasn't just the girl next door, then why the hell couldn't I beat cigarettes?"

"Smoke," Scott says. "I love you. We'll be all right."

She leans over and kisses his cheek, fishing a pack of Big Chief Lights from her purse and quickly lighting up.

"God," she exhales. "That feels so... fucking... good..."

"Where have I heard that before?" he can't resist saying.

"Stop it," Ann giggles, punching his arm, exhaling luxuriantly again. "Hey," she says suddenly. "You won't start drinking, will you?"

"No," Scott promises. "Scott's honor. I can't go through the withdrawal again."

"You're stronger than me," she says.

"Yeah. I can stop cars dead in their tracks." He looks at Ann, but can see only a little cloud of smoke.

 

Matti Pekkanen

In late December, just after the cross burning, Ann and Scott make a mutual vow. At midnight on one freezing night in Chandler, Scott takes out his snifter of syrupy vodka from the freezer. He and Ann both down a shot and by doing this swear to be together until the end. To both of them this feels far more solemn than the vows they'd taken for their respective marriages, because there is no audience save Angie, who is asleep. This is between the two of them and God. They now consider themselves one; what the state thinks quit being important when the state started letting Nazis run loose.

With the vow being made, Ann more or less moves in with Scott. She keeps her house in Luverne because it's paid for and she likes it, and it's very convenient to Sunshine Liquor n' Bait, where she is the GM and must be ready to go in to spell for other, less dependable employees in the event of inclement weather--which is pretty much the status quo during winters on the northern plains. Scott tries to go with her when she's staying "in town". Their relationship is not one of bouts of clinginess alternating with "I need my time alone"; both have the feeling that their time is short, in any event, and they want to spend as much of it as they can together. Although they don't specifically talk about it, neither Ann nor Scott imagines that they will survive "it." America is too fucked up now, violence too common, and Ann already has a target on her back.

During a January thaw, Ann is staying in Chandler. Scott buys her a new SUV with four-wheel drive, not so much because she needs it but because Scott loves her and doesn't like to imagine her breaking down in her ratty Subaru and being menaced (or worse) by pinheads, who roam the countryside like rabid coyotes looking for brown-skinned people to "sport" with. Ann may not have brown skin, but she "insulted" their big boss "in public."

In the long winter nights, they continue to tell their stories to each other, in the glow of firelight in the living room or snuggled up in bed under several comforters. Ann thinks all of hers are "stupid," because she isn't well-traveled like Scott, never went to college, and "made a poor" of her life. It's a genuine wound that lies not far beneath her generally sunny personality. Scott knows that if he tells her how very special she really is, she'll just think he's biased because they are both so happy in their relationship together. There's no way to do it. She was very touched when he brought her the 4Runner, though. Actually cried a little bit.

One afternoon he comes home from doing some Christmas shopping (for Ann, really, although he did buy a box of expensive cigars to send Casey, still plugging away at the co-op in his seventies, being one of the many Americans whose vast knowledge base has been lost and as such really cannot be replaced). As he is hiding presents in the sunken boiler room off the garage that doubles as a cyclone cellar--one of those things you can't be without in these parts--he hears Ann's cheery alto voice. "Scott, you got a letter from someone in Finland! Seriously. They've got really pretty stamps."

"Matti!" he says, hurrying to finish with the presents and get inside. Ann hands him the envelope. There are a number of attractive stamps, all right, featuring reindeer and Christmas motifs and all bearing the name SUOMI--Finland in Finnish.

"Matti Pekkanen and I were friends in grad school. He's another engineer. While he was in Madison he met a nice Jewish girl named Hannah, married her, and took her back to Finland with him. Quite the character." Ann notes that Scott seems overjoyed to be receiving this communique.

"Read it to me?" Ann says. "Not if it's personal, of course."

"Nah," says Scott, and reads:

"Hei hei ja hyvää joulua"--that's hi and merry Christmas--"Look what the cat dragged in. You see I didn't forget my beautiful and extremely colloquial English. All the kids speak it here now all the time so I get plenty of practice. Plus of course Hannah's English is quite fluent (she hits me) but she's trying to learn Finnish. Good luck with that Hannah!

"I will exchange emails with you so that we may communicate more often, although you must admit we have very attractive postage stamps."

Ann giggles, that delightful babbling-brook giggle of hers.

"Now I shall as Americans say cut to the chase: Hannah and I are very concerned about you. 'Why?' you ask. It is the so-called Trump Revolution and the lawlessness we are hearing and reading about from Finland. We have heard that in areas in the south and west of the United States that the Trumpists have been targeting highly educated people like yourself. Is where you are in Minnesota considered the west? I know it isn't the south. Ha.

"So I would like to ask: Would you be interested in living in Finland? I may be able to quickly arrange this through the university in Oulu, where I have a formal affiliation.

"We see so many parallels between the descent of Germany into Nazism in the 1930s and what is happening in your country now. Trump is very much like Hitler, but you don't need me to tell you that. I can tell you that many of Hannah's relations did not survive that era. And we fear for you as an intellectual, even though I know you are laughing now because Matti called you an intellectual when all we did was drink beer and cut up (is that the right expression?).

"So please do consider my proposal and email me with your thoughts. And again, Merry Christmas from your friends in Suomi.

"Much love, 

"Matti and Hannah ([email protected])"

"That," said Scott, "is the most embarrassing fucking thing I've ever read."

"Of course, he's right," Ann said.

"Which is why it's so embarrassing."

"Scott, I think we can all agree that the 'America' we knew was over a long time ago. I could feel it when I began to realize, when Trump first came in, how many of the nice plain simple Americans who lived around me were actually fire-breathing Nazis once some orange-haired clown whispered in their ears that Mexicans are taking their jobs. I wouldn't mind getting some Mexicans to work for me, but they're all over at the goddamned chicken plant making twenty bucks an hour because white people don't wanna clean up chicken goop. Hell, I don't either, which is why I'm not making twenty bucks an hour. But somebody's got to make sure your chicken fingers are at the KwikTrip, or America has a goddamned meltdown. Tell me I'm wrong.

"And another thing while I'm raving: We were the 'Nation of Pioneers'. We were the "Country That Put Man On the Moon.' So when did we turn into such a bunch of candy-asses?"

One thing's for sure, Scott thought, rather loudly: This time I married the right woman.

A few days later, in Luverne for the weekend of New Years, he gets her mail from the box. There's a card from her sister Kristy, who lives in Mower County right over the Iowa line from Field of Dreams. It's addressed to ANN FEATHERSTON.

 

The Trailer-Burning

They drive to the eastern part of town, where Ann grew up near the foundry where her father worked, now the chicken-processing plant. Just past the plant, on the other side of the road, is the William Tell Trailer Park (the plastic lite-up sign with the archer and the apple clue you in), with its trash-spattered chain link fence separating it from Interstate 90.

"Wasn't here when I was growing up," Ann says, just to be saying something. "It was a parking lot for the foundry. Everybody worked at the foundry back then, pretty much."

There are several police vehicles on either side of the road with their four-ways on. Cops stand in the street conferring. Beyond the entrance to the park and the first grouping of house trailers, a thin gray smoke is rising. An officer is guarding the entrance and waves them past. They continue on until they're clear of the trailers and pull over to the side. Looking back, they can see the smoking rectangle that used to be the home of the Loupe family.

It was the first thing they saw on the local news feed this morning: LOCAL FAMILY BURNED OUT OF TRAILER HOME Arson Suspected.

Ann turned up the volume on Scott's TV; they had been picking up the house, listening to the Replacements, smooching and laughing and (in Ann's case) smoking. Strangely enough, Scott found that he kind of liked the scent of the cigarettes in the house. Sure it reminded him of Ann when she wasn't there, but it was more than that. He could almost imagine that it was him smoking. Sometimes he really missed it, but not enough to start again.

"in the pre-dawn fire... arson is suspected and a suspect is being sought..."

"Two guesses," Ann said. "William Tell Trailer Park and MFA."

"Huh?" The announcer was saying something about a hate crime.

"I knew this was gonna happen. They wanna keep the cross-burning fresh in everyone's mind. So they burned out some Mexicans."

"How do you know it was Mexicans?"

"Didn't you just hear him say 'hate crime'? Also, honey, nobody but Mexicans lives in trailers in this town. We used to have a code, but they amended it to let the 'guest workers' have a place to live near the chicken plant. As if they were going to have to leave once their 'job' was over, or something."

So now, roughly twelve hours after the fire was set, they're at the scene and have learned more about what is suspected. Police are seeking Archie Smithers and Troy Delaney, two of Watkins' lieutenants, who are well-known by the Hispanic community as the principals of the "Saturday Sports," wherein carloads of Nazis look for Hispanic people with road trouble (most of the migrants can't afford good automobiles), or youths wandering around by themselves, and beat them senseless, usually spray-painting a swastika on their victims. Apparently Smithers and Delaney were seen in the trailer park both before and after the fire was set--the fire, ignited with what were apparently Molotov cocktails, took only minutes to completely consume the trailer.

One mystery, and something that may possibly bode well for police, is who it was that called the Loupe family before Smithers and Delaney arrived and tipped them off that they would all be dead in minutes--mom, dad, an eleven-year old boy, and two little girls--if they didn't leave the trailer. "Don't stop to save anything, just leave," the male voice had said. "It's the MFA. Go. Go. Go!" And the breathless voice had hung up. Tomas Loupe, the father, never recalled having heard the voice before.

No doubt Watkins was going to be combing his ranks for the mystery caller. An APB had been issued for Smithers and Delaney, but the feds weren't on the case--Trump made it difficult for "his" federal agents to investigate crimes against any non-white people or known "democrats"--and Luverne was close to the borders of three other states. Police had managed to alert authorities at the airports in Sioux Falls and Minneapolis, which were effectively locked down. Most people in transportation security and local law enforcement, at least outside of the south and mountain West, did not recognize Trump's authority and would not do his bidding. Even if Trump had had plenty of sympathetic ears among that group of Americans, he had badly overplayed his hand by arranging the murder of nearly every Democratic senator and congressperson in what was now called, simply, "The Trump Revolution." In a symbolic total break with the American past, Trump, now wheezing from two bouts of COVID and 77 years old, insisted upon being called "Commander Trump." He lived in an underground bunker in Florida, was never seen in public, and communicated with his subjects via Twitter (management of which he had had executed by hanging in Times Square, in revenge for having been banned from the platform in 2020). Occasionally he would give a radio address, which everyone was required to listen to under "penalty of public execution."

As Ann liked to say, "These were not happy times."

Nobody had been executed in public in Minnesota for not listening to Trump's rambling, incoherent, hours-long addresses, in which he typically threatened other nations with his nuclear arsenal, made fun of Democratic officials now serving life terms in prison for having been Democrats, and called the long-dead Senator John McCain and General Colin Powell "losers!" And in point of fact, about the only people in Minnesota who did listen were members of the MFA and other Trump-worshipping Nazi cults.

Not so in nearby South Dakota, where "General" Kristi Noel (that was a hard one to figure, since she had never served in the military) ruled with an iron fist and liked to hold public executions, generally by her favored method--the firing squad.

Iowa had no functioning state government, many of the hard-core GOP leadership having been gunned down by Antifa partisans and Nazi gangs roaming the state in souped-up SUVs. There were no motel rooms to be had in Minnesota anywhere; all were taken by refugees from Iowa and South Dakota.

"Can you imagine?" Ann said. She and Scott were in bed, watching Scott's ceiling fan make lazy orbits at the slowest setting. It was wintertime, but Ann enjoyed the hum and the very slight breeze from the fan. It did move the cigarette smoke around.

"Imagine what, honey?"

"Little old Minnesota is the island of sanity these days. Nazis terrorizing Mexicans and blacks and Jews every day, but compared to our neighbors, we live in a liberal paradise. Jesus Christ, this country is fucked."

"I always thought Minnesota was an island of sanity too. One of the reasons I settled here. There was a time when we thought Scott Walker in Wisconsin was going to start rounding up his enemies. He's where Trumpism started, you know--this idea that some Americans are more equal than others and you don't have to administer laws you don't like, and you can make up laws you do like. Trump is a moron. He learned all that from somebody, and that somebody was Walker."

"What are we going to do, Scott?" Ann murmured as she lit another cigarette. "Really. What are we going to do? All this bullshit going on, and this--this--is the best part of my life! I don't mean my life before was bad 'cause it wasn't, not at all, but now I really really want to live! I want to have a life with you and me together! I wanna do stuff! I'd say I wanted to have a family but, y'know, it's too late for that." She chuckled, exhaling smoke.

"No worries. At least we don't have to sweat you getting pregnant right now."

Her chuckle became a full-throated laugh.

"Maybe we should go to Finland," Scott said. "Take Matti and Hannah up on their offer."

"You think?" Ann said, seriously.

"We should think about going," Scott told her. "What you said about having a life together... that reminded me."

"What would we do there? Isn't it super cold too?"

"One, I haven't got to that part yet. Two, probably not as bad as it gets here."

The fan hummed. Ann stubbed her cigarette out. They drifted into sleep.

Awhile later Scott awakens to use the bathroom. When he comes back to bed he can sense that Ann is awake. She's worried.

"Scott?"

"Yeah, baby?"

"Will you tell me a school bus story? 'Cause I love your school bus stories. They always cheer me up. Tell me a funny one."

Scott leans down and gives her a quick peck. "I can do that," he grins.

*****

"So there was this kid," Scott begins--

"And he, and he... he... I forgot!" Ann is remembering Brady the Snitch, of course. Laughing giddily, she sits up in bed and lights a smoke.

"No, not Brady this time. This is a story about Austin. Austin Edison. Another one of my 4K's. Terrible little shit."

"Terrible how?"

"Well, there was the time he tried to bring a gun to school. But that's a story for another time."

"You mean there's more? This is a four-year-old we're talking about?"

"Oh, yeah. He looked the part, dark hair, pale skin, black eyes with a glint in them. Like a little goblin.

"So one day I pick Austin up at his house. Instead of the usual mischievous grin and the aforementioned glint in his eye, he looks like he's about to cry. This is very odd. 'What's the matter, Austin?' I ask him, as soon as he's seated.

"My mom died," he tells me.

"Your mom died? Austin, that's terrible!" Like most mothers of 4-year-olds, his mom was a young woman, late twenties, early thirties. I had seen her the day before. She was the picture of health.

"Austin, what happened to your mom? Was she in a car crash or something?"

"No," he sniffles. "She had a brain aneurysm."

I'm not kidding, babe. That's exactly what he said. Four years old!

"Well, at least she went quick." I didn't know what to say to this poor little guy. "I don't think she felt any pain."

"That's what Daddy said," he sobs. "She's with the angels up in heaven now!"

"'I'm sure she is, Austin. I'm sure she is.' Hell, by now I am starting to sniffle a bit. What a horrible thing to happen to a little kid, to lose their mother!"

"Does this story have a sad ending?" Ann asks. "'Cause I don't know if I'm up to that right now."

"No. You asked for a funny one. So check this out: After I drop Austin at school, I go down the hall to the principal's office. 'I need to talk to you about Austin Edison,' I told Ms. Shirley. 'Oh no," she sighs. 'Has he been acting up on the bus too?'"

"He just told me his mother died."

"Oh my word. Died? Was she in an auto accident?"

"That's what I thought too. Austin said she died of a brain aneurysm. His words."

"Oh no. Oh my. That's terrible! I'm going to call the house and talk to dad; we should make an appointment to sit down. Austin's going to need some counseling. Would you mind staying while I call?"

"'Go right ahead,'" I said. "I'm pretty upset over this."

She dials the number. Even from where I'm sitting, I hear a female voice answer the phone. 'Uh, hello,' Ms. Shirley says awkwardly. 'This is the principal at Austin's school. I'm trying to find out a little more about what happened to Austin's mother?'"

"I'm sitting close enough to hear, 'This IS Austin's mother! What did he do now?'"

"'He said you were dead.'"

"'OH HE DID, DID HE? That little twerp! When he gets home he's gonna wish HE was dead!'"

"The principal puts her hand over the receiver and winks at me. 'I think you can go now, Scott,' she says. 'Thanks for coming in, too.' As I'm leaving I can hear Austin's poor distraught mother saying, 'And how exactly did he kill me off?'"

Ann has tears rolling down her face from laughing. She's stifling her laugh with a pillow so Scott can continue his story. He can see now how much she's enjoying it. This was the one to tell her tonight.

"The next morning I get to work and there's a note in my cubby. It says, 'SCOTT, SO SORRY ABOUT EVERYTHING WITH AUSTIN'S MOTHER. SHE'S GOING TO TALK TO HIM. WE ARE TALKING TO HIM TOO (SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST AND I) AND YOU MAY ALSO FEEL FREE TO TALK TO HIM ABOUT WHAT HE DID. BY THE WAY HE GOT THE 'BRAIN ANEURYSM' IDEA FROM HIS GREAT AUNT, WHO DIED OF A BRAIN ANEURYSM RECENTLY. AGAIN, SORRY. REGARDS, DEB SHIRLEY.'"

"That," Ann says, the tears streaming freely down her face, "may be the funniest goddamned thing I ever heard in my life!"

"See what you missed by not driving a school bus?" Scott says.

The Ticket

It's not as if Luverne is all abuzz about the trailer-burning and the displacement of the Loupe clan, who are now living in an undisclosed location under police protection. Poor Tomas Loupe can't even go to his job because the chicken plant is crawling with MFAs; Ann's Lutheran church in concert with some of the local mainstream (non-Nazi) churches is collecting money and food for the young family, which they then deliver to the city police, who in turn deliver it to the Loupes.

But this is all done sotto voce ; the trailer-burning accomplishes its goal, which is to make everyone in Luverne and Rock County in general, especially people of color and gays, live in fear of the MFA. It's a good bet that the likely perps, Smithers and Delaney, have sought refuge in South Dakota where the Noel regime will shelter them. It turns out that without a federal government to protect civil rights, civil rights are surprisingly few.

Scott senses that the world around him has changed fundamentally since the "Trump Revolution" shortly before he moved to Chandler, when after having most of the Democratic lawmakers in Washington murdered Trump came on TV to tell the American people not to worry, that this was still the America they had always loved, just "without all those communists and losers making all the rules." But like a majority of Americans, Scott hadn't had any particular problem with the "communists and losers." Because, for one, they weren't communists; and probably no one knew what Trump meant by "losers," except that they weren't him, Donald J. Trump, the biggest winner in the history of the world.

It also hadn't escaped Scott's notice that, unlike every other regime in American history, Trump had seized power by force, without any election at all, or even a pretend election. 

Nobody knew exactly where the military stood, except that they hadn't stopped Trump, which was not a good sign. And probably not a lot of people were enthused about Trump's threatening Denmark with nuclear weapons unless they (once again--obviously this was a festering wound) agreed to sell him Greenland, against the stated wishes of every single Greenlander.

There had been not-so-subtle shifts in many things American. Food was available in the stores, gasoline and diesel fuel were plentiful and not overly expensive, people went to church or synagogue or (very warily) mosque on weekends and to work during the week. But all of this felt like a façade, because one big thing was missing: security. If you were white and conservative and had a nice solid record of being a Trump supporter, you were okay (unless Antifa had a beef with you, then maybe not). But if you weren't white, and straight, and conservative, and "Christian," and English-speaking, and not overly opinionated, your life was cheap. And you could lose it at any time and without any warning at all.

A lot depended on where you were in the US as well. In Luverne, the local police seemed to be solidly anti-Trump, although they were outnumbered and outgunned by MFA. The sheriff's department had been corrupted and could not be trusted, especially by minorities. You went a few miles south, into Iowa, and there was no law at all except the law of the jungle. A few miles west, into South Dakota, and the Nazis ran the show. Trump had eviscerated all of the news organiztions that weren't already mouthpieces for him, so you couldn't believe anything you heard on the national news. Some local news stations, including the popular KLKL that was owned by a black family, did their best to report real news, although they were constantly harassed by the state Trump party and the MFA. News had filtered in that large areas of the East and West coasts were in the hands of Antifa and that Trumpists were being "hunted down like dogs"; everyone feared that a major military operation was imminent that would forever shut down those pockets of disobedience. Or maybe the major military operation would assassinate Trump and obliterate the Trumpists. But you couldn't really hope for that; they'd already let the Trumpists get away with far too much, and no one knew for sure how heavily the military had been infiltrated with the Nazi death cult.

As Ann liked to say, "These were not happy times."

As the Trump Party liked to say, "America for Americans." (Scott: "Whatever the fuck that means.")

One Tuesday morning at 8 AM, Esmeralda Loupe, as wary as a jungle cat, quickly swooshes into the door of Sunshine Liquor n' Bait as soon as Ann opens it from the inside. Ann has never met her, but recognizes her from the news. Ann knows that her English is not good, and greets her in Spanish: "Como estás, señora... Loupe?"

"Sí, sí," says Esmeralda Loupe, flattered at being spoken to in Spanish by an Anglo--something that hasn't happened to her in years.

Ann, having gotten A's in Spanish for three years in high school, and having kept up by listening to soap operas imported from Mexico  before Trump outlawed everything in languages that weren't English, continues their conversation in Spanish, sometimes helped along by a smiling Esmeralda Loupe.

translated from the Spanish:

ANN: It's so nice to meet you. Ann Featherston.

(they shake hands)

ESMERALDA: Nice to meet you too. Your Spanish is wonderful.

ANN: Thank you. And I am sorry about what happened to you. To your family.

ESMERALDA: There are some very bad people here. And some very good ones too, Madam.

ANN: I'm afraid that you are right. About the bad ones.

ESMERALDA: The good people are taking care of us. Church people, not the ones from the Trump churches.

ANN: I know. I go to one of the Lutheran churches.

ESMERALDA: My family thanks... you, all you "the Lutherans."

ANN: You're welcome. If we can help you... your family... please tell me.

ESMERALDA: Thank you, Ann. We are OK for now. But I do need tequila. And a lottery ticket!

ANN: Of course! Take your time.

[Ann waits on another customer while Esmeralda tries not to be noticed by the customer]

[Esmeralda emerges from a back aisle with a bottle of Cuervo Silver]

ESMERALDA: Just this. And the lottery ticket, of course.

ANN: Oh yes, the lottery ticket! Play the Powerball?

ESMERALDA: Yes, yes, 'Powerball'!

[ANN prints up a ticket. Then she presses it down on the counter with her right hand.]

ESMERALDA: What is it?

ANN: If you win, we have to feed it back into the machine to verify it. They need to be... need to be...

ESMERALDA: Flat.

ANN: Yes! That's the word. 'Plana '!

ESMERALDA: Your Spanish really is very, very good. Were you in Mexico?

ANN: I was in Missouri once. 

ESMERALDA laughs

ANN rings up her purchases

ESMERADA: Very nice to meet you, Ann.

ANN: And very nice to meet you, Esmeralda. I hope you win!

ESMERALDA: Oh, me too.

Esmeralda Loupe did win. The whole thing, including the Powerball. $75,000,000, before taxes.

 

 

Ann's Little Accident

There are four lottery winners from Sunshine Liquor n' Bait. Three are basically chump change, $500, $50, and $50. And then there is the "other one."

The "other one" was the one, Ann is now sure, that she sold to Esmeralda Loupe. She knows this for two reasons: first, Esmeralda has not come into the store and it's nearly a week since the drawing; and second, Ann said a special prayer over the ticket before she gave it to Esmeralda, for the first time daring to test what seems to be her direct link to the Almighty

Esmeralda Loupe won the grand prize, seventy-five million dollars. Biggest lottery win ever in southwestern Minnesota. And it's good for Sunshine Liquor n' Bait because they got $100,000 for selling the winning ticket, although whether Ann will see any of this money is doubtful. She's been working at Sunshine for nearly 25 years, 10 as a manager and five as GM. Ann had started at minimum wage, which in Minnesota 25 years ago was $4.95 per hour. Ann is now, after five years as General Manager, making the lordly sum of $18.75. Scott was making quite a bit more driving a school bus.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

But it has never occurred to Ann to complain. She has a pretty good house, she thinks (in all fairness, she doesn't forget that it was partially thanks to Jimmy, her ex--but then again, a lot of Jimmy's contribution had been money that wasn't his own so to hell with that). She probably should have gotten out of Luverne and gone to college in the Cities or something--God knows her grades had been good enough--but coulda, woulda, shoulda. She stayed around Luverne and married the first really good-looking guy who had shown an interest in her. When Ann looked in the mirror she didn't see an especially attractive woman staring back at her, and in point of fact her face would never have appeared on the cover of a fashion magazine. Her smile was a little crooked (although she liked her full lips), her teeth were crooked too even though she brushed three times a day and saw a dentist twice a year, and she had a few acne scars. Her hair was of no particular color, lost somewhere between brown and blonde. The hazel eyes were gorgeous, though--that was a sure-enough fact, and she had nicely shaped eyebrows to set them off and fairly long natural lashes too.

She also had a killer bod. Even she liked her body, for the most part.

But what set Ann apart from other women (she didn't know this) was what Ed Goff had clumsily termed her "radiance." The comfort Ann had with both her physical and mental self, the general gratitude she had for her lot in life, humble as it was, and her genuine like for most other people--all of that showed through and made her ten times lovelier than a photograph would suggest (Ann had never taken a very good picture and was a little self-conscious about being photographed).

There were more beautiful women in Luverne, but they all had bigger flaws than Ann did. They had too many fake body parts (boobs especially), or they were too heavily tattooed, or they wore too much makeup, or they were not nice people, or they were insanely conceited. Ann was none of that. Which was why, if you asked most people in Luverne to name the most beautiful woman in town, they would immediately think of Ann.

And when the stories went around about her so-called superpowers, no one was really surprised that Ann would be the one who possessed them.

So, when she slipped on the ice in the parking lot of Sunshine Foods and twisted her right knee to avoid going backwards and falling on her head, she lay there in horrible pain, unable to get up, but laughing inwardly at the fact that maybe this would help people to quit whispering about her being "immortal" or "bionic" or "Wonder Woman" or "Lady Terminator" or any of a dozen other things that were routinely said about her.

A Mexican she vaguely knew from the supermarket, Ernesto, got out of his car immediately to help her. "What happen, Miz Ann?" Ernesto said.

"My knee. It's gone. Slipped on the ice." Through the fog of pain, Ann struggled to get the words out.

Ernesto had already called the ambulance before she finished talking. "I stay here with you, Miz Ann," he said. "Ambulance on the way."

"Thank you, Ernesto," she said. "Gracias."

"De nada."

She called Scott from the emergency room while she was waiting for treatment, an ice pack resting on her knee. The call had the usual (and in this case, desired) effect--while she was still talking to Scott, they were suddenly ready to treat her.

Two hours, a knee brace, a steroid injection, and a prescription for oxycodone later ("does this stuff grow on trees around here?" Ann joked), Scott wheeled Ann out to her 4Runner, which he had collected from the Sunshine Foods parking lot--yes, she was going to need to be in a wheelchair until she could walk on her knee--and gingerly helped her into the back seat, where she could put her legs up.

"Well," Scott said, once they were homeward bound. "Good thing you fell on company property, huh?"

Ann laughed through her clinched teeth. "I thought about making them a deal, Scott. You give me a few days off work with full pay, and I won't sue your sorry assets."

"Sounds about right to me," Scott said. Ann worked too hard anyway, and this $18.75/hour business really stuck in Scott's craw. And since the Trump Revolution, desperate, fearful people had predictably turned to alcohol and drugs for relief. Liquor stores were a popular target for robbers. Ann was usually alone in the store when she was on duty, something that had always made Scott uncomfortable. The brightest smile and the most cheerful demeanor didn't mean much to someone who was skulled on crystal meth.

The Beginning of the End

The event that starts the snowball on its inexorable journey down the hill is a winning lottery ticket, in particular the winning lottery ticket of Esmeralda Loupe, an American citizen of Mexican birth who suddenly becomes the symbol of all that is despised in TrumpWorld.

Although she did everything in her power to avoid any publicity, phoning the state lottery field office in Worthington to request an appointment and filling out all the necessary paperwork behind closed doors, someone in the office leaks the information and suddenly it is all over the news. IMMIGRANT WINS POWERBALL PRIZE etcetera etcetera etcetera. The Loupe family has been living in a Methodist church basement in Lake Wilson, a few miles north of Chandler, far enough from Luverne that Esmeralda and Tomas Loupe are largely unknown, even among the Mexicans. But since the Loupes are in the country legally, the state revenue department knows who they are and where they live. Soon TV trucks are pulling up in front of the church and the Loupes are outed. "Human interest stories" about the "poor chicken factory workers who were burned out of their trailer"--making it sound like a natural fire--"win the Big One and are set for life!" Anyone looking at the video can see the fear in the Loupes' eyes. They are going to have to pull up stakes and run away fast, but run away where? They can't go to any of the neighboring states and they are unlikely to make it to safety on either coast, even with all the money in the world. They are now Target Number One of every Aryan nut job in the Formerly United States of Amerika.

They drive to the Lakota-controlled border crossing in central North Dakota, cross into Canada, and board a plane in Winnipeg for Mexico City, where they will plea to the Mexican government for refugee status.

****** 

 

Scott is in the hardware store in Luverne, picking up some things for the house in Chandler where Ann will begin her recuperation tomorrow at the expense of the Sunshine and Liggett Grocery Cooperative LLC in Sherburne, Minnesota. The store is blaring Trump TV, which is broadcast on the three channels that used to be Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network. There are no other national networks.

He hears a familiar voice and looks up to see Deathlike Gillian's father (speaking) and mother, wearing shackles and prison jumpsuits. The crawl reads COMMIE SCIENTISTS CONVICTED. Scott is trying to see what they've been convicted of (although being a Commie Scientist is enough in TrumpWorld) and it turns out that they were the alleged organizers of an anti-Trump rally in Chanhassen (at Prince's old Paisley Park Studios, of all places). Sentencing will be on February 1. Scott knows that Deathlike Gillian will probably never see her parents again.

 

****** 

 

What happens next spells the end of the uneasy coexistence among Nazi and non-Nazi whites in Minnesota.

While Scott is at the hardware store, Ann decides to venture outside on a strangely springlike January afternoon. She hates being disabled and has already, just three days after the accident, forsaken the wheelchair for a walker. And, Ann being Ann, has decided to take a walk around the block every day to build her strength. She sets out on the sidewalk slowly. When he gets home, Scott will be so proud of her.

She isn't really paying any attention to the rusty red pickup that chugs by her, until it stops and backs up suddenly and squeals to a halt.

The driver door slams shut and Ann recognizes the hideous, gap-toothed figure striding toward her. It's none other than the king of the Nazis, Larry Watkins.

"Well, well, well, if it ain't?" Watkins says, not supplying a noun. "Nice day for a walk, ain't it?"

"Go away," Ann says.

Watkins chuckles, and very suddenly kicks the walker out from under her. "Fuckin' commie whore slut," he spits. He spits literally. On Ann. Her knee screams in pain, and he kicks the knee brace. "Love them fuckin' spicks, don't ya, commie cunt? Love 'em more than you love your country, whore bitch?" Spittle is flying from the gap between his front teeth. For some reason Ann notices that he's had his hair done in delicate little ringlets, like he's Robert Plant. She is holding the walker up to protect herself when Watkins violently jerks it away and begins to flail at her with it.

"Commie bitch, commie cunt, I'll fuck you in the ass while your old man's watching," he sings merrily as he beats her with the walker.

Just then another car squeals to a halt. Ann, holding her hands up to protect her head, can't see who it is. If it's more Nazis and not the cops, she's done.

But it's not the cops and it's not MFA. It's a couple of freshmen from Mankato State University, a hundred miles to the east, heading back to Mankato after a weekend home in Rock County. 

Ann just hears, "Motherfucker. What the fuck? Get the fuck off that lady!" She can hear blows being thrown, curses, howls of pain, and suddenly the telltale belch of Watkins' old truck.

Ann is bleeding from her mouth, where a tooth is broken. Her skull, she fears, may be fractured too. And she's afraid she may never be able to walk on her right leg. "Jesus Christ, lady," one of the boys says. He looks like he's going to cry. "Jesus Christ, was that your ex or something?"

"Nah." Ann tries to smile through the excruciating pain. "That was our head Nazi. He thinks I'm Jewish."

****** 

Two hours and forty-five minutes later.

Ann is resting at the hospital with a concussion, multiple contusions, and torn ligaments in her knee where Watkins kicked it. She is under heavy sedation, and heavy police guard.

Scott cruises in her 4Runner to a street of crackerbox houses near the chicken plant, parks at the curb, and walks up to a salmon-colored bungalow. He knocks at the door. Apparently no one is home, so he goes around the corner of the garage to wait until someone is.

In about twenty minutes, a red pickup, its underside eaten up by too many Minnesota winters, turns up the driveway, coughs once, and is silent.

A man climbs out. He is alone. He is singing a song, something about wishin’ he was fishin’. His dirty hair is bizarrely worn in ringlets, a rather botched attempt at a perm. There is a purpling abrasion on one cheek, as if he had been struck there. He reaches the garage door, takes out a key, and unlocks it.

Scott steps around the corner of the garage, startling the man.

“You Watkins?” Scott says.

“Yeah, and who the fuck are you?”

The gun comes out of his pocket and he sees Watkins’ eyes widen.

“I’m Ann Gerling’s husband,” Scott says. “And you’ve made three mistakes.”

“Mister—” Watkins tries, backing up.

Scott pulls the trigger. The bullet strikes Watkins squarely in the forehead. Watkins’ eyes cross and some of his brains splatter against the still-closed garage door. He makes a strangled sound: “Gih!”

“One, you hurt my wife,” Scott says calmly as he approaches the slumped form, clinging to life by the thinnest of threads, its dimming pale eyes still crossed. He puts the gun in Watkins’ face and pulls the trigger again. Watkins’ crinkled face, and what’s left of his head, explode into goo.

“Two,” Scott says in the same dead-level voice, “you fucked with me.”

Now he stands astride the headless corpse of Larry Watkins and, aiming at the chest, pulls the trigger once more. The profusely bleeding form bucks once, and is still.

“Three,” Scott says. “Oh, I’m sorry, you don’t get a three. My bad.” Scott sticks the gun, quite hot now, back into his coat pocket.

A woman has come out onto the concrete porchlet of the house next door, a horrified look on her face. Scott waves her back inside and reaches for his phone.

He calls Ed Goff. “Hi, Chief, Scott Featherston,” he says. “Say, there’s some kind of shit laying in the driveway of 866 Leclerc. You may want to check on it.” And he clicks off.

The Siege at Chandler

The Larry Watkins killing is wrapped up quickly, at least as far as officialdom is concerned.

Twenty minutes after he checks in with Chief Goff, Scott's phone rings.

"Jesus Christ, Featherston. Jesus Christ! What did you-- what the hell--"

"That Glock is a nice gun. Three shots did all that."

"This isn't even a body! Oh, Jesus..." Scott thinks, but he's not sure, that he hears the chief retching.

"Sorry, Chief," Scott says. "But I know it's a felony to move a crime victim. So I left him where he was and called the police."

"I guess this isn't what I pictured you doing with the gun. Oh, Jesus Christ, Featherston!"

"He hurt Ann," Scott says simply. "Nobody hurts Ann."

"I know about Ann," says the chief. "Figured you'd be out for revenge."

"You figured right."

"What am I gonna do with this mess? Holy mother of fuck, look at this!"

"Why don't you roll it onto a tarp, take it out back, douse it with gasoline, and set fire to the son of a bitch? Save the taxpayers some money."

"You know," says the chief, and Scott thinks he can hear him smiling, "that's not a bad idea. I may do just that."

"Do I need to come down to the station?" Scott asks. "I am sorry for this, chief. Not for killing this motherfucking Nazi, but for complicating your life."

"You don't need to do shit," Goff tells him. "Let's just pretend you and I never had this conversation, and that I never gave you that gun, and we'll let it go at that. See you around the neighborhood. Give Ann a peck for me. And watch your back. Them pig fuckers are gonna be some pissed." The chief hangs up.

******

So Ann and Scott are at the house in Chandler, Ann bundled up on her little hospital cot, watching the popular anchor Trish Thieu (the "Voice of Resistance," as she is known locally) wrapping up the news on KLKL.

"Still no suspects," Trish Thieu says, "in the brutal" (she lifts her eyebrows) "murder of Minnesota for Aryans leader Larry Watkins."

"No suspects," Ann mutters. "Hmph. You'd think they'd suspect someone."

"I did it," Scott says. "Blew his fucking brains out, point-blank."

Ann's eyes widen. "Seriously?"

"Honey, you know I wouldn't kid about a thing like that. I went over there just after I left the hospital and waited for him to show up. When he did, I told him we had some unfinished business. Didn't wanna talk much. They're always talking too much in the movies, and then the bad guy gets the drop on them. No, I basically just walked up to him and wasted his ass."

Ann looks pale. Part of it, he knows, is her injuries; but it's more than that.

"I love you," Ann says. "I really do love you. But what are we going to do now, Scott? Do the police know?"

"Oh yeah, I called Ed from the scene and told him I did it. Ed basically said 'good job.'"

"So you're not in any trouble at all? For killing someone?

"Not with the law, at least not at this point. On the other hand, I imagine that the Pig Fuckers aren't too happy about it. And I'm sure they've figured out who's responsible."

That night he shows Ann their newly-purchased arsenal: Two AR-15 knockoffs, a twenty-gauge pump-action shotgun, a stun gun, and another Glock .9 mm exactly like the one Chief Goff gave to Scott. "We should be able to hold 'em awhile with these," Scott tells her. "Although not forever."

"It's been a long time since I shot a gun," Ann says. "A deer rifle. I did get a deer."

"Well, that counts," Scott tells her. "Starting tomorrow, we need to get to practicing. Even if we don't win out in the end, I figure we take a few of 'em with us. Right?"

"How about Finland?"

"I'm on that too. Meant to tell you but I got to buying all this ordnance. I'm waiting to hear back from Matti. I don't think he expected us to actually take him up on his offer, but I told him if he'll have us, we're there. Been working with Goff on a way to get us across the border into Canada, at least keep the wolves at bay till we can figure out what happens next. But I expect them at any time. The Pig Fuckers. We have to be ready."

The next morning, Ann, bundled up in her wheelchair, is watching Scott setting up a target behind the garage. It's your standard pistol-range human outline, pinned to some stacked-up hay bales. Suddenly Ann calls, "Honey, don't we have one of those little propane canisters in the garage? How full is it?"

"Maybe three-quarters," Scott says. "Why, do you want me to grill steaks?"

"No. I want you to move it outside the garage to the corner right here."

"Why?"

"Think about it."

In about ten seconds, Scott's face blooms into an enormous smile. "Honey, I always did like the way you think."

"Only in bed," she says.

He blows her a kiss and moves the propane cylinder out of the garage.

That's when Goff turns into the driveway in his private vehicle, a Jeep Rodeo. He climbs stiffly out of the car, along with a dark-skinned kid in a cop uniform who looks too young to be a cop.

"Officers," Scott says, putting a finger to the brim of his hat.

"Howdy, Scott, Ann. This here's Reynaldo Guttierez. They call him Ray."

"Welcome to hell," Ann says. "Police work, I mean."

"Yeah," Gutierrez says. "Ma'am.

At least the kid's got some manners, Scott thinks.

"Now here's the deal," the chief continues. "Ray here's just out of the academy over to Marshall. He's kind of a lunkhead (here Ray shoots the chief a smoldering look), but he's hell with a pistol. See, he grew up in the Cities. In the projects."

"That so?" Scott says, to Gutierrez.

"Uh huh. Uh, sir," he says, after Goff gives him a sidelong glance.

"And since I don't have dick for him to do in town right now, I figured you could put him up here for awhile. Figured you could use another dead eye in the house. Y'know, in case those pig fuckers was to show."

"I bought some more guns," Scott tells the chief. "AR's and a pump-action .20."

"Smart man. Say, saw you movin' that propane outside when we drove up. You ain't grillin' out, are you?"

"Nah," Scott says. "You know what they say. Match in the gas tank. Ann's idea."

The chief looks at Ann with something more than his usual lovesickness. “I like the way you think,” he tells her.

.............…..

 

The Featherstons are lying in bed looking up at the ceiling fan, which helps to muffle the sound of Gutierrez snoring loudly in the guest bedroom down the hall. Ann has her bad leg propped up on pillows.

 “Scott? What’s it like to kill someone? she asks.

"Honey, truthfully, I thought I would feel something. Something profound. But I didn't.

"What did you feel?"

"Really? I felt nothing. No. Actually, it's sick, but in a way I think I enjoyed it. I shot him three times. The first one would've done it."

"I'm afraid of killing somebody."

"You won't be when the time comes," he reassures her. Although he's not at all sure, and genuinely surprised how easy it was for him to take another man's life.

.............…..

Ray Gutierrez isn't much of a bother. He reads his dimestore novels, watches TV, cleans his service weapon (a Glock .9 mm!) and his pride and joy, a 30.06 sniper rifle he's had customized with a 24-hour scope. "This ain't police issue," he explains. "This was for in case I had to defend my family in the projects. You can drill a squirrel a mile away with this baby."

"Something tells me you're not going to have to draw upon that level of skill," Scott says with a grin. "Never saw a man as unprepared as Larry Watkins. You do what he did to any man's wife, you'd better be packing from then on."

"Word," Ray says, swabbing his sniper rifle.

.............…..

The next afternoon it's fifteen below zero. Just before two o' clock, the sun already low on the horizon, they see a Jeep Rodeo coming up the driveway. Scott goes out to meet Chief Goff. They see him climb into the Jeep. Now, except for Angie's gentle panting, it is dead quiet in the parlor except for the ticking of the old grandfather clock Scott bought at an antique mall in Worthington.

The sun sinks a little lower and suddenly a single beam illuminates Ann, sipping a little cup of Amaretto. Ray is usually fairly taciturn, but this golden apparition across the room from him begs to be admired.

"Man oh man," he says to Ann, "you are one beautiful woman."

"No," Ann says to him, giving him a level stare.

"Hey, I didn't mean nothing by it. When the sun hit you... ah, never mind."

Now Ann feels a little embarrassed that she's come down too hard on the kid. And her face is still markedly bruised; she has certainly looked more appealing. "Hey," she says in a softer tone of voice. "I'm old enough to be your grandmother."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't trying to ask you for a date. Just telling you how pretty you looked."

"Compliment accepted," Ann says.

.............…..

The motion sensor for the yard lights is tripped at 1:22 AM on a Tuesday evening in early February.

Ray is at the north-facing window that looks out over the driveway; he shouts the signal MAN! that indicates Scott is to quickly move to the north bedroom with his pistol and grab one of the heavy weapons Ray has on a rack inside the bedroom door. Ann, being disabled, is to bolt the master bedroom shut and arm herself with one of the AR’s. Any intruder is going to eat an awful lot of lead coming up the stairs, long before they get to the master bedroom at the south end of the upstairs hall.

A man is outside, all right, urinating against the door of Ann’s 4Runner. He is wearing an orange deer-hunting coat (genius! Scott thinks) and has his pants around his knees.

Gutierrez grabs the PA mic. “LEAVE THE PROPERTY. DO IT NOW.” Jesus Christ, he thinks, you could hear that in Luverne. His voice seems much louder in the dead hours of the night.

The man in blaze orange turns around and both Ray and Scott immediately recognize the fugitive Archie “Bunker” Smithers, his greasy black hair slicked back in a Fifties pompadour. He is now waving a not-very-impressive penis in their direction (he has to “wave” it with his thumb and forefinger). In his other hand he has, not a gun, but a 40-oz bottle of malt liquor.

“Bring the commie whore lady out,” he yells in his reedy voice. “We wanna fuck the commie whore lady!”

“Gimme the mic,” Scott says.

“YOU’RE AT THE WRONG HOUSE. THERE AREN’T ANY ‘COMMIE WHORE LADIES’ HERE.”

“Oh, you must be that skinny queer she says she’s married to, right? Dipshit college perfesser, right? The one that killed Larry, y’know. That motherfucker?” Smithers takes a long pull from his forty, still fiddling with his little dick.

“Attitude adjustment time,” Gutierrez says, quietly placing his 30.06 sharpshooter rifle in one of the ports they’ve installed.

The report from the rifle seems to carry forever. The malt liquor bottle vaporizes in Smithers’ hand, and he jumps back, visibly shocked.

“You shot me!” he says. “I’m bleeding!” Little glass cuts are visible on his face and arms. Smithers hurriedly pulls his pants up, and sure enough, a car with its lights extinguished moves up the driveway, its doors open, gunmen surely advancing behind the doors.

“Party time,” Scott says, and Ray quickly drops Smithers with a shot through the throat. Blood begins gushing out of the wound, Smithers trying pointlessly to stanch the flow. You can hear strangled screams.

Scott’s walkie-talkie buzzes with Ann’s voice. “Can you drop one near the propane tank?”

“Already done,” Scott says. “He’s bleeding out.”

“I see him now,” Ann says.

“He’s not gonna make it. We got a car coming up the driveway. Here we go. They’re shooting.”

“Back away from the windows,” Ann yells. “Get out of there!”

Everyone takes Ann seriously because she never speaks idly. Scott and Ray bolt from the room just in time to see an orange glow on the hallway wall before a blast wave knocks them halfway down the stairs. They can hear glass shattering behind them.

“Jesus Christ!” Gutierrez is yelling. “What the fuck was that?”

“I blew the propane tank,” Ann says calmly, through the little walkie-talkie speaker. “Looking at the monitor now. There were four of them in the car. I think they’re all dead. One of ‘em resting in pieces. The first guy you shot is still alive. Trying to crawl. He can’t do it.”

“I’ll finish him,” Scott says, striding toward the window with his trusty Glock. Below him is the struggling form of Archie Smithers, clawing at the snow, leaving a meter-wide slick of blood behind him, his blaze-orange coat bunched up around his upper body.

“You know,” he yells down at Smithers, “you Nazis are about the silliest bitches I ever saw.”

They hear the report.

“He’s dead,” Ann says. “Nice shot.”

There is silence for a long, long minute while they wait for something, anything, to happen.

“I think the party’s over,” Scott tells Ray as Scott emerges from the north bedroom, holstering his pistol. “You’d have thought they’d bring their A-team.”

“Dude,” Ray says, getting up carefully where he banged his knee on the stairs in the blast. “That was their A-team.”

Goodbye, 'Murka

The propane explosion had nearly demolished Scott's little one-car garage, but having a blown-up garage beat having Nazis in the neighborhood. Gutierrez went on to assure Scott and Ann that not only had they destroyed the Nazi leadership, they had pretty much destroyed the entire Luverne MFA--"They was always a lot smaller than they made themselves out to be. We counted six full-time members, and about a dozen wannabes who couldn't get dressed without help. Lessee... Scott, you took out Watkins. Definitely the boss. And we've got both the lieutenants who were on the lam, Smithers and Delaney. Then there's the other three who were in the car with 'em. Now we're gonna need a dentist to say for sure, but my guess is that it's three assholes named Larrabee, Tompkins, and Grainger. Because none of the wannabes were gonna be involved in something that might get their asses killed. And these boys here... well, they're pretty dead, ain't they?"

A crackling funeral pyre was burning with the remains of Scott's garage, the remains of all five of the MFA invaders, and two gallons of gasoline. Scott had, of course, contacted Chief Goff and filled him in on the developments in Chandler. Local law enforcement was in agreement (with the possible exception of a couple of county sheriffs whom the other cops didn't trust) that any MFA combatants would be "disappeared" to the extent that that was possible. The message to all Nazis who wanted to act on their beliefs was simple: If you screw up, no one will even know what happened to you. You will vanish without a trace.

Nothing would ever be heard of Watkins' five "boys" again. And that was the end of the Minnesota For Aryans, Luverne Chapter.

******

On Valentine's Day they're at the Green Lantern in Hardwick, the place where they had their first date in what seems now like another century, although Ann (the official timekeeper) says it has been four months and twelve days.

Every year on Valentine's Day the Green Lantern serves prime rib carved fresh from the local Angus cattle. Waiting for their orders to be brought, both Ann and Scott are aware that they're getting a lot of looks. They are famous as the dangerous anti-Nazi duo, and of course Ann is supposed to be supernatural. Although the local folk are largely sympathetic, there are some who aren't. He'd learned about that when Trump first became (an actual) president and he'd gotten into a heated argument about Trump at the bus barn. A lot of the drivers supported Trump. Scott at the time just thought he was an ignoramus who was too stupid to be president, and certainly back in the "old days" people had argued much the same thing about any number of presidential candidates, most recently George W. Bush.

But Trump had done something to poison the well, even before he was elected. Scott puzzled over it; Ann puzzled over it; Chief Goff puzzled over it. It was like you had mocked someone's God, or made fun of their handicapped mother. Trumpsters went completely crazy if you disparaged their orange Christ-figure. The day of the argument at the bus barn, Scott had finished his shift to find that someone had keyed his car. Later on that week, he found his mailbox stuffed with dog shit. It wasn't like before when you might hear someone say, "Bush is a dummy," and someone else would reply,"Oh, come on, we've had worse!" For some reason that neither Ann nor Scott nor the chief understood, disrespecting Trump to his followers had always been off-limits.

The prime rib came. Scott looked across the candlelit table at Ann. Usually the picture of vim and vigor, she looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes and she had been smoking more and less "perpetually horny!" as she liked to put it. There was a sadness to her that hadn't been there before. Scott thought it had to be the killing they'd done.

"What's the matter, honey?" he said.

"Oh, you know. Things."

Ann had never developed the bad habit of not verbalizing emotions, so Scott was quiet, cutting into his prime rib, letting her take another taste of her drink. She looked down at the table, looked back up, and said:

"I think we should go to Finland. I don't want to leave this country, but I don't think we can live here anymore."

Scott nodded, waiting for her to go on.

"I never wanted to kill anyone. I know it had to be done, but all I see in our future is more killing and more killing and more killing." She struggled to keep her voice down, struggled to keep the tears in her eyes from falling.

"Ann," he said, hoping to distract her at least a little, "how did you blow up that propane tank? Please tell me the truth. I don't know where you would have gotten a detonator. I was actually planning to shoot it and hope I could blow it at the right time."

"I did it with my mind," she said. The tears faded. The determined Ann he was more familiar with came back. "I knew I could do it. That's all. I knew I could do it, I thought about blowing it up, and it blew up. That's it."

Scott whistled, low and slow. "You're not standard issue," he said. "Are you, honey?"

"I don't know what I am," Ann said, honestly. "I guess I am a little different. But I don't understand it."

"I don't think you need to understand it. You must be one of those chosen ones."

She deflected his comment by saying, "I know things."

"Yeah. And that's not all. You do things. You gave that Mexican lady a winning PowerBall ticket, for instance."

"Uh huh. At least I think I did."

"How do you do that stuff?"

"I believe," she said, simply.

"Believe in what?"

"That I can do things."

"I thought you said you weren't that religious."

"I'm not. It's weird in church. I volunteer and do stuff. But the women in there think I want to steal their husbands because I'm single and the same age they are. And I guess I've taken fairly good care of myself."

Scott laughed appreciatively. "Oh yeah," he said.

"But I don't want to steal their dumb-ass husbands, who I could have married right out of high school if I'd wanted to! As IF! And whatever appeal they might have had was gone a hundred years ago! I go to church when I do go because... because..." She was having a hard time formulating what she wanted to say next. Scott waited, eating more of his prime rib. "It's good, honey," he mentioned, motioning at the thick slab swimming in au jus. She had not touched her food.

"Because I just want to say thank you!" she finally exploded.

Scott's understanding of his unofficial bride had just deepened enormously.

"I'm impressed with you, Ann Gerling," he said. "Besides loving you to pieces, and happy Valentine's Day as far as that goes. But I really am impressed with you as a human being. Not just as a 'saucy little number.'"

Ann laughed heartily, remembering Scott's boyish clumsiness in asking her for a date, which in truth had charmed her right out of her socks. But then her face grew serious again. "I'm Ann Featherston," she said. And she began to eat. She had forgotten how hungry she was.

******

An hour later. They have finished dinner--Ann ate everything and looked as if she was ready for more, amazing Scott once again at how much this little 120-pound woman could eat when she wanted to. Must have the world's most amazing middle-aged metabolism. Then again, he thought, this is Ann. She ain't standard issue.

Ann was on her fourth gin-and-tonic (few bars in southwestern Minnesota had her beloved Amaretto di Saronno). Scott noticed that she had been drinking a little more too, in addition to smoking about a pack a day now. Their life after the siege had been wearing on her, that was for sure. In truth, it had been wearing on him too; but he felt like he had dragged Ann into this mess and he needed to be strong for her.

It was past midnight. At Ann's suggestion, he ordered his nightly drink. Finlandia vodka.

Just after he'd taken his first sip of the rather excellent liquor--more expensive than the middle-tier stuff he drank at home--a large man in a checked jacket and a dozer cap blundered past their table on the way out the door. He was drunk and he was going to drive home. Scott hated people who did that. He never had, even in his worst days as a drunk.

Suddenly, just past their table, the man stopped and backed up a step. "They say," he began, and hiccuped, "they say you blew that sucker's brains out right on his front porch. A lady saw you do it." Suddenly he seemed to notice Ann for the first time. "Uh, ma'am," he muttered. Scott could suddenly smell fear. Fear of his wife.

"Is that what they say? Who is 'they'?"

"Oh, y'know, folks. Um hum. Say you just wasted that sucker!" The man was very drunk. "And y'know what else? They say the cops haven't done a goddamned thing about it! Huh!"

"Go figure," Scott said. He wished he had packed the Glock. He and Ann shouldn't be going around unarmed anymore. "Maybe he was someone who needed' killin', like they say."

"Or maybe....." Now the big man was having trouble verbalizing his thought. "Just maybe. You might know something about what happened to them missing boys? Y'know the ones I mean? The MFA boys?"

"Oh, I'm sure they're living fat and happy over there to Sioux or Aberdeen." Ann loved it when Scott would out-redneck the rednecks around here, this computer engineer that could turn on the rural Missouri whenever he needed to. "They's lots of people around here that don't like what they do."

"Yeah, uh huh. Yeah." The man scratched his stubbled and hiccuped again. Suddenly Scott noticed that Ann was staring holes in the man.

"Well, I'm going," he said. "Don't kill anybody when I'm not looking. Hear?"

"You shouldn't be driving," Ann said, in a dead-level voice.

"Because says you?" Then the drunk seemed to remember who he was talking to. "You ain't gonna kill me, are you? 'Cause they say--"

"Get the fuck out of here," Scott told him. Scott could see that the bartender had laid his pistol on the counter. He should say something that would make the guy throw a punch, then the bartender could waste him.

No. Too much violence, Scott. You're beginning to like the violence. This is no good.

"You heard me, beat it," Scott said again. The fat man saw the bartender lift the pistol off the counter, and stumbled out the door.

"Fucking asshole, excuse me, Ann. Wish you'd have given me a reason to drill that pinhead. You know who he is?"

"No idea. Never seen him before."

"He's Archie Smithers' father. From over to Lake Wilson. There's some kind of scuttlebutt that those MFA boys didn't disappear, they were, uh, disappeared. Some folks say you might be behind it. Most of us say, who gives a shit? We're better off without 'em. Now I'm not exactly a soul brother or anything, but what they did to that black church was beyond the pale. And what they did to you, Ann... Jesus Christ. Nobody that I know has a boner for what happened to Watkins. When we was kids he lit cats' tails on fire. Not even his family misses him."

"You hear all kinds of things, all right," Scott said evenly. "Me personally? I think Kristi Noel probably put 'em up in the governor's mansion, over there to Pierre."

"Wouldn't surprise me a bit," the bartender chuckles. "You folks have a safe trip home now. Ann, let hubby drive."

"Huh? Why?" Ann answered innocently, and collapsed in laughter.

His girl.

.............…..

On the way back to Chandler they see two sets of cop lights in the far distance. When they pull abreast they see that the police have surrounded a black Dodge Ram pickup so the driver can't attempt an escape. Scott notices that they are Minnesota State Patrol, an agency that has tried to stay neutral in the "warm civil war."

"Uh oh," Scott says. "He's in trouble." Cops are approaching the truck now, their hands on their guns. He can hear the bullhorn as they pass: GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE. KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM. LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND.

"It's the asshole in the bar," Ann says. "Smithers? Smithers."

"How do you know?" Scott says.

It occurs to Ann that, for no reason she can imagine, she recognizes the license plate.

"I know things," she says, trying to grin.

 

Goodbye, 'Murka II

The momentum to leave the Formerly United States gets a boost from yet another sudden visit from Chief Goff.

"Get in touch with your friend in Finland ASAP," the chief says. "You're both going to need to get out of here, sooner rather than later. Ever heard of the Defenders of the Alamo?"

"DOA?" Scott says. "Boy, that's catchy. Not exactly inspiring."

"Somebody clued them in to that. Maybe that's why they call themselves Alamoans now."

"Sounds like a shitty band at a tiki joint. Yeah, I've heard of them, Ed. Texas Nazis. They're like our Nazis, only bigger."

The chief laughed in spite of himself. Scott was in rare form this morning, and he hated to burst the balloon.

"Scott, I got some scuttlebutt from our trusted LEO network. They're sending about a hundred of their "soldiers" up here to "rectify the situation of hostile anti-Trump activity in the Sioux Falls sector." That's what their intercepted communique said. Translated? They're pissed about what happened to MFA and they intend to do something about it."

"Um, Chief? What exactly do you figure they'd 'do about it'?"

"You and Ann have great big targets on you, for starters. That's why you've got to get out of here now. I don't guess my future's looking too rosy either, since we can't really call on reinforcements, although I guess the coppers in Hardwick and Chandler might lend a hand. Maybe even all six of 'em."

"Chief--"

"Scott, now listen to me. I bought you and Ann tickets to Helsinki. You've got to get up to the airport in Winnipeg first. To that end, I've been in touch over our secure trusted LEO network with the guy who runs the Native border crossing in North Dakota. They call him Chief Broom. He's a bad motherfucker. The Nazis are scared of him and his Lakota warriors, they're like a trained military and they know how to fight. Anyway me and Chief Broom have been in touch a few times on people we need to move into Canada, most recently the Loupe family. He's got you covered. They'll let you and Ann across with your personal weapons, although you probably won't need 'em in Canada. I'd like you to throw those AR's in your car with all the ammo you can rustle up, just in case some smartass local Nazi wants to give you a hard time. Those pig fuckers share information too, and as I've said you ain't too popular with them right now. Then you just ditch that stuff when you get up there near the border crossing, or better yet, give it to the Indians. Yeah. They'll appreciate it, and it makes me look good."

"Damn. That comes up suddenly. When do we leave, Chief? I was hoping Ann would have more time to recuperate. She's getting around okay, but only with a walker."

"You need to leave sooner rather than later. Where is Ann?"

"She's inside."

"Get your toiletries and stuff together and get out of here. I don't know but some of those Alamo-fo's might be flying up to Sioux, although they was talking about having some kinda caravan up I-35, picking up supporters on their way up here."

"Boy, you don't miss much, do ya?"

"I'm the police chief. It's my job to know everything."

Chief Goff suddenly, clumsily, embraced Scott. "We've had all kinds of fun together, haven't we? I'm gonna miss you guys."

"Yeah. Miss you too. We'll ring you from Finland."

The chief pulled away, looking embarrassed. "And give Ann a peck for me, would ya? There goes our prairie rose."

"I will do that, Ed. I will do that."

The chief reached into his coat and produced a zip-locked plastic packet. "Two one-way tickets from Winnipeg to Helsinki. And some fake passports. You are Mr. and Mrs. Ned Grambling from Cedar Rapids, Iowa."

"What's the name of the missus?"

"Dierdre."

"Dierdre. Really?"

"Why, that your mother's name or something? I didn't get to choose the names."

"Nah, old girlfriend," Scott simplifies, remembering that suddenly torrid afternoon in chilly Revelstoke, British Columbia. He was going back to Canada now, with his wife "Dierdre." What a world.

The chief climbed stiffly into his Jeep. "With those babies," he tells Scott, meaning the fake passports, "you two will vanish without a trace. No one will have any idea what happened to you. Except me, of course."

"I want to say thanks," Scott tells him. "For the tickets. For the passports. For everything. I'll send you the money once we get settled in Finland."

"Nah. Call it a gift from the law enforcement community. You and Ann did all our dirty work for us."

"Yeah, okay," Scott said, looking at his feet.

"Yeah, okay," the chief said. He backed carefully down the driveway, turned out onto the county road, and was gone.

******

So Scott and Ann are northbound, having just crossed the Murray County (Chandler) line into Lyon County, bound for Lake Benton where they will pick up US 75, head to Moorhead, and then cross the Red River of the North into Fargo. It would be shorter to cut through South Dakota but no one in their right mind (except Trumpsters) goes to South Dakota anymore. It is controlled by roving bands of cowboy thugs called Noel's Nighthawks, who routinely murder people they suspect of insufficient fealty to Trump. Scott has heard that the roadsides are littered with corpses, some having been there so long that they are more like skeletons. When you cross the border into South Dakota, there are huge billboards with Trump's grinning idiot face that proclaim

WELCOME TO SOUTH DAKOTA

THIS IS COMMANDER TRUMP COUNTRY

GOD, GUNS AND GUTS

MADE AMERICA GREAT

IF YOU DON'T AGREE

TURN AROUND NOW!

He and Ann had taken a little road trip north and west a few weeks ago, before everything fell apart, over toward Pipestone and just beyond to where there was a little railway trestle on a gravel farm access road. And sure enough, there was one of those billboards, even on this little back-country lane.

"Well, I guess they let you know," Scott had said.

"Wish we could put up a sign too," Ann answered, musing in the prairie wind. "Welcome to Minnesota, Home of Commie Filth!"

They had talked about the Indians caught on South Dakota's vast reservation system. No one knew what had happened to them except that the US military had not moved against them; still, Trump had declared all Indian treaties and reservations "null and void" after the Revolution. He had no friends among the Indian tribes. There were also many non-Aryan Americans who would have liked to help the Indians in any number of ways, but all of them (Ann and Scott included) didn't care to travel to South Dakota and find out what happened next. Too many people had never returned.

North Dakota, much like Iowa, had no functioning government. Still, the Lakota tribe had kept an iron hold on the northern part of the state, along the Canadian border, and had let it be known that any Trumpsters found north of Interstate 94 would be summarily shot. Basically, once the Featherstons reached Fargo and turned north of 94 into Lakota country, they were safe. Chief Broom had put out word that "the Gramblings" were renowned Nazi killers and were to be given safest passage through Lakota territory.

They hadn't yet reached Lake Benton when Ann said, "I've never in my life felt this way."

He looked over at her. Tears were streaming down her face. Scott realized that tears were streaming down his face too. Scott checked on Angie in the back seat, but she was on a car ride so she was happy. He wondered how happy she'd be when they put her in the cargo hold of a jetliner.

"Leaving everything we've ever known behind," Ann sobbed suddenly. "Everything! And it's not like we're going to live in Europe for a year, we can never go back!"

"Probably not," Scott admitted. He was having almost as hard of a time as Ann, but he needed to keep his composure.

"No--definitely not! Even if they manage to get the Commander out of there some way, do you ever want to live again in a country that's full of fucking Nazis?"

"No," Scott said, swallowing a lump in his throat. "I don't."

"I don't know much about the Finns, but I do know they're not fucking Nazis so they have to be an improvement!"

"A lot of Americans aren't fucking Nazis," Scott gently reminded her.

This only made Ann cry harder. "And what are they going to do, Scott? They have no future. All those children! The kids you drove on your bus! What kind of world are they going to grow up in?"

"A world like Nazi Germany, although hopefully they won't kill all the Jews this time."

"Oh, that will be next, I'm sure. You heard Das Kommandant. He thinks Hitler was pretty cool."

"Yeah." It was like spiraling down a drain; there was no way to put a positive spin on what was happening in the Formerly United States; every day things got worse and it was hard to see any way that they'd get better.

He would just let Ann cry, and try not to cry himself, seeing Minnesota vanishing behind him in the rearview mirror. He would never see his beloved old house again. Ann would never see her little bungalow in Luverne again. Neither of them would ever see the country where they were born and raised again. It was a lot to digest in the space of one short winter's day.

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright 2021, 2022 by WRL (the author)

part five

Chief Broom

They ride in silence most of the way up to Fargo. The snowbound, gently rolling land, with its lack of trees, is trance-inducing if in its own way beautiful. Scott of course has been researching Finland for hours a day and knows it to be very heavily forested. Not like the land here at all -- for all that Finland, too, is quite level, with none of Norway's dramatic fjords and mountains or Iceland's hallucinatory moonscapes. What Finland reminds Scott most of is northern Wisconsin, the lake-studded "northwoods" so popular with vacationers from Chicago and the Twin Cities, where he for many years spent his summers delivering buses to dozens of little communities in the vast forests. He always found the northwoods strange, being really a creature of the prairies, and supposes he'll find Finland strange too. Besides which it's in Europe, and so its culture is thousands of years older than America's. But he tries to think of it as home. Because it's a near certainty that he will never live in the Formerly United States again, even if they were to reunite and play Sousa marches in the streets.

"It's like it's all sp'iled for me now, Dick -- Teal Eye and the Teton and all. Don't know as I can ever go back, Dick. Goddam it! Goddam it!" 

What had happened in his native land resembled nothing so much as a third-rate horror movie. As Ann liked to point out, it was like you woke up one day and these Nazi creatures started appearing, one here, one there, then a few more and a few more, and then, like mushrooms, they were popping up everywhere. And they had been your neighbors and your relatives and in some cases your good friends, and now this guy with orange hair and a bad spray tan had told them to get the niggers and get the spics and they all went "Yuh, okay boss!" and threw their pitchforks and AK's in the back of the old Chevy pickup and became a lynch mob.

If you'd asked him back at the bus barn in Chaska, even after he got into the Trump argument and found his car keyed, he would have told you that Americans were basically a decent people. Maybe five percent, at most ten percent, were raving assholes of one stripe or another. But they weren't really representative of Americans at large, who were a sturdy, resourceful, decent people.

That turned out not to be strictly true. It was true of maybe a very tiny majority or a very large minority, which was why the country was now so horribly fractured. The sad fact was that just about half of Americans had received a little bit of goading from the mango maniac at Mar-a-Lago, and turned out to be goose-stepping fascists. And as Ann had noted back in Luverne, and as anyone who had fought in World War II would have told you, the only way to deal with Nazis was to kill them all.

Having already fought one enormously bloody and costly civil war in their brief history, most Americans really weren't up for another one. Hence the "warm civil war" that seemed to be the most likely scenario for the Formerly United States for the next generation at least, if not the next hundred years. America's sacrosanct election apparatus had been thoroughly dismantled during Trump's time as a legitimate president, so that by the time Biden came in after the 1/6 insurrection (the precursor to the Trump Revolution and a date held sacred by Trumpists) there was too much damage done already and the then-GOP (now the POT, the Party Of Trump, yet another unfortunate right-wing acronym) worked at lightning speed to cause even more. By the time of the Trump Revolution, people of color had been all but disenfranchised anyway, and Trump had in the first week after the Revolution introduced a loyalty test for would-be voters. This would certainly be the law of the land for as long as anyone could imagine, because barring a massive cataclysm of violence that would include the military taking sides, the POT could not be removed from power. Yes, the "Commander" could wind up in a pine box any day now, but that wouldn't make much difference. The only thing non-Trumpists (or "non-Aryans," as they were known in places like Luverne) could hope for is that the next POT dictator would not possess Trump's toxic charisma and ability to get large masses of people to immediately and unquestioningly do his bidding.

******

They crossed the Red River at Moorhead and were surrounded by the bleak streets of Fargo, North Dakota. They had only gone a few blocks where they saw a semi-trailer where boxes of food were being disbursed to a long line of desperate-looking people.

"Army," Scott said. "Remember, there's no government here. People are getting hungry. Problem for the Commander, I'm thinking."

"It doesn't give a shit," Ann said, her voice hoarse from lack of use and too many cigarettes and being tilted so far backward in her seat with her bad leg up on the dashboard. Angie barked excitedly in the back, having noticed the throngs of people. There was nothing she liked more than meeting new people.

"And that's why it's going to be a problem," Scott went on. "What was it Bob Marley said? 'A hungry mob is an angry mob.' Ol' Bob knew the score."

"Trump must have sent the Army to feed these folks," Ann muses. "Seems like they do pretty much nothing these days."

"No. The Army did it on their own. Trump has never done a single goddamned good thing in his entire miserable life."

They turned north on the state highway that would take them beyond Fargo and toward the Canadian border. Almost immediately, on the outskirts of the city, there was a roadblock. Scott recognized the flag flapping in the stiff breeze; it was the flag of the Lakota Nation.

A heavily armed Indian, his braids wrapped in red felt, approached the car. Scott opened the window halfway. It was very cold.

"Business?" the Indian said.

"I'm supposed to say that I'm on my way to Maida to see the Wizard."

The Indian broke into a wide grin. "And just who is this Wizard?"

"They call him Chief Broom."

"Heh heh. You're our Nazi killers. Ned and Dierdre, from Ioway."

"That would be us."

"Pleasure to meet you," he said. "I'm Chuck. Have fun in -- Finland, was it?"

"Yessir."

"I was in Germany while I was in the Army. I 'sprechen die Deutsch.'" The huge grin again.

"Ya, ya," Scott said, agreeably. "And thank you for your service."

"Well, go on," Chuck said with a laugh. "Chief Broom looks forward to meeting you." And he waved them through the roadblock, where some of the other guards waved at them.

"This is really weird," Ann breathed. "You know, we kept up appearances pretty well in Luverne. You know what I mean. If you hadn't actually become involved with the MFA -- thank you, honey -- you'd probably never know anything was really wrong. But look at  this. Feeding people out of trucks. Indians controlling parts of the country again. This is crazy shit, Scott."

"You know, when I saw that orange motherfucker come down the escalator, I had a really bad feeling. It was like I knew."

"Honey, it was a lame way I tried to tell you, but you walked into the liquor store that morning and I immediately thought 'here he is. Here's the guy who saves the day.' Don't tell me how I knew that, but I did. Don't tell me how I stopped that car, but I did. Whatever we are, you are definitely one of us. We know things."

"I accept that now," Scott said. "Sometimes I wish I didn't 'know things.' And unlike you, sexy little wife of mine, I don't have any superpowers. You’re the one who saves the day."

"Oh, you don't know that," Ann laughed, lighting another cigarette. "Maybe you haven't needed them yet."

******

The border crossing between Maida, Lakota Nation and Windygates, Manitoba, Canada looks like this if you cross it in the brief summer--which they didn't. Chief Broom's headquarters is in the building on the left.

 

North Dakota Highway 1 goes on and on aimlessly northward, nothing to see but snowdrifts and dispirited cattle and tiny towns and the occasional pickup, usually flying the Lakota flag from the side. The Lakota, knowing very well who occupies the dark blue Honda Civic with the Minnesota plates, usually wave.

"I wonder what it's like for these farmers," Ann says. "Living under the Lakota."

"Can't be any worse than living under Trump, I don't suppose," Scott says. "Trump doesn't even know how to work, or with all his advantages he would have actually been a billionaire instead of just playing one on TV. Nah, he makes sure the Nazis get free rein, and most people are too terrified to stand up to them, and meanwhile there's no government to speak of because these low-level government people aren't getting paid. Everyone for themselves. That doesn't bother Trump one bit. I suppose he just plays golf, or pretends to diddle teenaged call girls, and makes sure that if anyone badmouths him in public they die a gruesome death."

"I'm getting psyched for Suomi," Ann says, blowing smoke through her nose.

"It's nice that they took us in so easily," Scott tells her. "I know we had an 'in,' but still."

"Part of me wishes we could've gone to Canada. Shit, if we'd gone to Manitoba or Saskatchewan, you tell me how that's different from Luverne. Except that the money looks weird and they say "eh?" all the time."

"And you've got to remember your 'tocque' in the winter, and all the signs are in French," Scott jokes along with her. "But, honey, you know why we can't go to Canada, right?"

"Something about those jug-eared halfwits from Texas."

"They've got a bounty on both of us. Hell, the lucky motherfucker who shoots us gets his cable porn paid up for a whole year."

"You know, Scott? After all this, I think I just might be ready for life in a quiet little country."

"Sometimes I am, too. Hey, baby, look there. Lots of people at that cafe." Scott slows down to investigate.

The temperature is hovering just above zero Fahrenheit, but he cracks the passenger window as they approach the crossroads diner. The hearty North Dakotans are standing around in the parking lot jabbering. Ann and Scott hear laughter. A couple of people wave at them; Scott honks in response. The people they see are all white, farmers from the look of them.

"They don't look too unhappy," Ann says.

"No. They don't."

"Guess life under the Lakota isn't that terrible."

"Well, we've already seen that they have a functioning army, and a functioning police force that I would assume answers to Chief Broom. Trump World has none of that. Nobody knows what the army wants or what they have planned, and a bunch of Nazis and drunken cowboys in pickup trucks isn't a police force, it's terrorism."

"Tell me about it," Ann says.

They have started seeing signs about the Canadian border approaching. Now, with a little white building in the distance, the sign says to stop at the gate ahead.

The building flies the flag of the Lakota Nation. Just past it, a similar little structure is adorned with the Canadian maple leaf.

A burly Indian with a crew cut comes out of the building as they pull up. "How," he says, as Scott opens the window.

Scott, embarrassed, doesn't know what to say. He has been taught that Indians find "how" offensive.

"I'm just messin' with ya, fella," he grins. "You must be our Nazi hunters. Dierdre and..."

"Ned," Scott says. God, he hates being "Ned."

"Now there's a name you don't hear much anymore. Ned. Umph. Well, y'all just pull over there by the pop machine. I wanna talk to you two for a bit."

Scott (NED! he scolds himself) does as he's told. The man waits for them in the doorway to the little building, rocking back and forth on his feet.

"Chief Broom," he says as the 'Gramblings' and Angie approach, holding out his big gnarled hand. 'Dierdre' goes slowly with her walker. "That the war injury?" the chief says to Ann with genuine concern in his voice. 'Dierdre' just nods.

"Just like in the movie. Wow," 'Dierdre' says as she shakes, her tiny hand being swallowed by the Chief's big mitt

. "I never thought I'd meet the actual Chief Broom."

"Yeah, now, that's a thing, ain't it?" the chief says, bending down to ruff a delighted Angie's fur. "They can't take that away from you." He looks up at 'Dierdre' and grins. 'Dierdre' grins back.

"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts," 'Ned' announces, motioning Chief Broom over toward the Civic and popping the trunk, where the AR's and several hundred rounds of ammunition are stashed. The chief's eyes widen and he breaks into an enormous, gap-toothed smile. "Top drawer!" he exclaims. "Da TOP." He examines one of the AR's appreciatively and sights down the barrel. "It ain't loaded, is it?"

"I'm a Boy Scout," 'Ned' grins. "'Course not."

"What you are," says the chief, "is a stone-cold killin'-ass motherfucker. Both of you. How many Orangies didja waste with this here?"

"Well, six," 'Ned' lies. Orangies! "Between this one and the other one." It's not really a lie. Strictly speaking, one Nazi was killed with Scott's Glock--still stuffed into his coat--one with Gutierrez's sniper rifle, and four with Ann's propane bomb. But close enough.

Chief Broom is chuckling. He opens the door, shut tight against the frigid day, and ushers them inside where there are two cheap cushioned chairs in front of a metal desk. He motions them toward the chairs. On the wall behind the desk are four portraits; Scott recognizes Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Dull Knife of the Northern Cheyenne, and a fourth with red braids like Willie Nelson's that Scott figures has to be the never-photographed Crazy Horse. "See, I grew up Little Horn, which ain't the hottest name for a boy. You get all this shit about "was you the little horn or the big horn at the Little Big Horn? Oh, that's right, you just told me you was the little horn." The chief guffaws so deep in his chest that he coughs. "Dierdre" and "Ned" wait for the coughing to subside.

"So you've seen the movies, you know that us Lakota boys have to go on the vision quest about the time we start wantin' to chase girls and such. That ain't no lie. You go out there in the boonies with some beef jerky and a bone whistle and wait till something happens. Usually three, four days, when you're walking around making sure you know where to find water 'cause they don't give you any. And like as not these days, the water makes you start puking 'cause it's got cow shit and whatnot in it, or pesticides, or God knows what. Well pretty soon in that kind of state, you get your vision and your name and you head for home, a man.

"I saw Chief Broom in my vision. Yeah, I'd seen the movie when I was seven or eight and we got it from the old video store that used to be in Pine Ridge. And I says, 'Chief Broom!' He just looked at me and shrugged. 'Chief Broom,' I says, 'Give me a vision! Tell me what to do to be a man! Tell me what kind of man I'll be!' And Chief Broom just shrugs again. Now I'm getting a little bit pissed off, 'cause I'm sicker 'n a dog. Chief Broom figgers it's time to cut to the chase, so he says, 'You will go forth.'

"I says, 'Go forth and do what?'' And he shrugs and says, 'That's for you to figure out.'" And that was it!

"So I get back to town and the elders and my daddy are all waiting for me. Bull Bear, the old wichasa wakan, our head medicine man, asks me what I saw in my vision.

"I saw Chief Broom," I said. "From the Cuckoo's Nest movie."

"And what did Chief Broom tell you?"

"He said to go forth."

"Go forth and do what?"

"He said I had to figure that part out for myself."

"Bull Bear turns to the others and says, 'He talked to an Indian, all right.' And everybody cracked up."

"And that's how you got your name?" 'Dierdre' ventures.

"That's how I got my name."

"Wish I could get a new name too," 'Ned' says. "'Cause I hate 'Ned'. It was the name of my great uncle or something."

"Alright, I'll give you an Indian name," Chief Broom says. "Scarecrow. 'Cause fella, you look like a goddamned scarecrow!" The chief grins and runs a hand through the stubble on his head.

"He's got a big dick," 'Dierdre' says, completely out of the blue, probably thinking to stick up for poor 'Ned.'

Now Chief Broom starts guffawing and coughing again. "Oh, I don't doubt that for a minute, honey bunch," he tells 'Dierdre.' "He landed a prairie rose like you, didn't he?"

'Dierdre' and 'Ned' look at each other.

On the way out, as they shake hands, Scott asks the chief about the Lakota stranded in South Dakota. "Everyone's worried about them," Scott says. "You never hear anything coming from over there. Apparently meth-head cowboys are running things."

"Aw, as long as Orange Boy has control of the news, you won't hear nothing either," Chief Broom says. "Our boys are fighting. We've retaken all of Paha Sapa--the Black Hills. Them Orangies ain't nothing but pussies. Lay down and cry if you shoot too close to 'em. We put the screws to one boy and he told us where they stockpile all their guns and ammo. Things ain't going too well for the Orangies. By this time next year, that's gonna be Injun territory again."

"I hope so. I hope Wakan Tanka is with you," 'Ned' says, sincerely.

"You seen too many movies, hoss," the chief says, but Scott can tell he is a little bit flattered.

******

An hour later -- Chief Broom really liked to talk and it must be awfully lonely at this faraway frontier outpost -- they trundle past the Canadian border agent, a fat blond man in an official uniform. They wave. The agent waves back. Chief Broom had told them, "Aw, Jeff knows all about you. You don't need to stop in there, just wave. I know you're probably in a hurry."

They really weren't in a hurry, having booked a motel room in Winnipeg to hopefully get a good night's sleep before their flight at 4 PM tomorrow afternoon. But as funny and as gracious as Chief Broom was, and no matter how grateful they were to him and Jeff for facilitating their border crossing, Scott and Ann were both dead tired and shell-shocked by the events of the past twelve hours.

Normally both would have been much more engaged with the voluble chief; Ann and Chief Broom saw the world through the same wary eyes, and Scott very much enjoyed mixing it up with folks who were as intelligent as he was and as witty as he wanted to be.

It was dark now. Before long they saw the dramatic skyline of Winnipeg in the distance, looking extra stark and sparkling in the frigid winter air. They found their motel in Oak Bluff, a suburb southwest of the city, gave each other a tired but very meaningful kiss, fed Angie, and collapsed in bed.

They saw the dramatic skyline of Winnipeg in the distance. (Photo by Justin Lagace)

 

Scott was up first in the morning (he could dispense with the tiresome 'Ned' now, unless they had to deal with the authorities). He activated the GPS on his phone, studied the map on the screen for a few minutes, and took off toward the city. He had for years wanted to visit Oh Donuts, the site of a "scandal" that Canadians called Donutgate -- in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had ordered many boxes of donuts for a cabinet meeting and picked them up in person, charming the employees of Oh Donuts but apparently few others -- who worried that he had spent taxpayer dollars on Unhealthy Expensive Designer Donuts instead of getting cheaper (and healthier?) donuts at the Tim Horton's chain of coffeeshops. (He had spent his own money, the PM pointed out, and Tim Horton's was actually owned by Americans, unlike the locally-owned Oh Donuts). Scandal, Canadian style! Scott laughed out loud every time he thought about it.

Ann thought the whole thing was silly, but she admitted that the donuts were the best she'd ever eaten.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Oh Donuts employee: Bad, bad boy!

(Photo by Winnipeg Free Press)

******

 

 

book two:

Oulu / Jarvi

Oulu

Snow is falling in Kerava, Finland. Falling gently, the way it rarely does in southwestern Minnesota, driven by howling winds off the Canadian steppes. A muted light comes through the window of the motel room, from a nearby streetlight and a sign across the road that says

APTEEKKI

which he knows means pharmacy. Which reminds him that he should be checked out as soon as possible by a doctor, because a few hours ago he was supposed to be dead. It's always a little unsettling to find out that you've died, but nobody knows exactly why you did.

But here he is, alive. And he feels just fine, if a little jet-lagged.

Dead.

Angie is at his feet, snoring gently. He looks over to the bed a few feet away, where Ann is breathing, silently and slowly, her rose-colored bra peeking out from under the blanket and an arm draped over the side of the bed, the way she likes to sleep. And the question once again disturbs him to the deepest level of his consciousness: Who is she?

Oh, of course, they joke about Ann being "not standard-issue" and such. But now it's gone too far. No one, no one brings people back from the dead.

No one, that is, but Ann.

The plane was landing in Helsinki by way of Rejkjavik (“honey, we’re officially in Europe!” he had told Ann, although it was already dark in Iceland and you couldn’t see much except lights). On approach, there had been some turbulence. Scott had felt light-headed, but he had never enjoyed flying and put it down to butterflies. It was snowing in Helsinki, the pilot had said, and Scott was probably nervous about the landing.

The next thing he knew, two women were above him, one standing and one kneeling. The one kneeling was Ann. The one standing was a blonde woman who spoke English with a heavy accent. His mouth felt a little ringy, like he had just been kissed rather violently. "I have a pulse," he heard Ann say. "There's a pulse!"

"His heart is beating," the tall blonde woman said. He felt something cold and realized that she had a stethoscope to his chest. A doctor. "Everyone stand back. Please stand back," the doctor shouted in a stern voice.

"What the hell," Scott said, trying to sit up. He hears Angie bark. She's still in her crate and has no idea what's going on.

"Please, sir, please," the doctor said. Ann told him, "I thought we lost you, honey."

"What happened?" Scott asked, reasonably enough.

"You need to have your heart checked," the doctor said. "As soon as you can. Tomorrow morning or sooner. Apparently, your heart stopped. Your wife's attempt at CPR was, obviously, successful."

"Good job, honey." Scott grinned at Ann, but it seemed that Ann was not in the mood for humor.

Because now, sooner rather than later, a weighty decision needs to be made about what to do next. Ann has to think from Scott's point of view as well as her own; she guesses that since Wakan Tanka has allowed her to revive Scott, he's not going to die within the next day or two when he should be able to see a doctor. And in a way it's not fair to the Pekkanens to get them all wound up in this tonight, when they will insist that Scott must be carted off to a hospital. By them, of course.

Maybe the best way to get Scott to quit worrying is to tell him the truth. And she's not going to have a long time to do it. Scott has been bundled into a wheelchair by the airline personnel, who insist that he remain in it until he leaves the airport. He's holding Angie's leash; Ann is struggling with Scott's backpack and her walker. The crate and her suitcase are on Scott's lap. No one expected to have an invalid on their hands upon arrival. Finally a man, Scottish from his accent, offers to carry the crate.

Matti and probably Hannah as well will be waiting in the arrival area. Time to get on it.

"Scott, I didn't do CPR on you," Ann says as she pushes the wheelchair up the ramp. "Idiot me doesn't really even know how to do it. So I called in another favor. I kissed you and said, 'don't die on me' a few times. Blew some air down your throat and said a prayer. Then the doctor lady came running over to help. That's it."

"That's 'it'?"

"That's it."

"Well, it worked." The Scottish man looks thunderstruck. He had missed the entire episode and has no idea what they're talking about.

"Don't be cute right now, Scott. Listen. Your friends are on the other side of the door. Other than 'hi how are you etctera hug hug,' let me do the talking. I've got this, okay?"

"Okay." He has always trusted Ann in any situation to do the right thing. Their relationship is based on that trust.

A stewardess pushes the door open for them into the waiting area. Scott spots Matti immediately, almost as tall as he himself is, with long ratty-looking red hair. He doesn't see Hannah--oh, there she is! She is a tiny woman, smaller even than Ann, with her dark hair braided and tied around her head in a style he has always thought of as Swedish. She wears wire-rimmed glasses and looks like an academic.

"Look who's here!" Matti calls loudly, in his accented English. "The professor himself, sporting a--wheelchair?"

Scott smiles and waves, stupidly. He thanks the Scotsman for the help and motions for Matti to take the crate. The Scotsman scurries away, looking over his shoulder worriedly ("but God bless him, he helped!" Ann thinks).

Ann says, "Hi, I'm Ann. Gerling. Unofficial wife. Wheelchair-pusher. Friend of dogs and the temporarily I hope disabled."

Both Matti and Hannah embrace Ann and do the European two-cheek kiss with her. Ann seems a little uncomfortable with that. She'll learn, Scott thinks. Angie does her up-and-down bounce and gets scratches.

"My God," Hannah says, holding Ann at arm's length. "Scott said you were gorgeous. But... wow." Ann does look spectacular. She's wearing a blue- and white-striped sweater (the colors of Finland--classy move) that shows off her bosom, and has her hair tied back with a powder-blue silk scarf. And a pair of clingy white slacks Scott had never seen before she put them on.

"You ain't bad yourself, honey," Ann says, smiling beautifully, although in truth Hannah is kind of mousy. Matti sees her beauty, and that's the important thing.

"Now tell us all about the wheelchair?" Matti says. "Provided, of course, that you don't mind?" That questioning lilt that works for Europeans, not for Americans and their always-confident plow-ahead bullshit. Scott isn't going to miss that at all.

"Honey?" he says, gesturing to Ann.

"Scott has a little problem with his equilibrium, which is why he hates to fly. He got sick on the landing and threw up. For some reason they thought he'd had a heart attack, probably because he turned kind of gray."

"You probably shouldn't drink on long flights," Matti tells Scott.

"I don't do that anymore," Scott says.

Matti's eyes widen. "You don't DRINK anymore?"

"Not hardly," he says. "Now and again, maybe one drink. Ann's here to make sure I'm good."

"He's good," Ann assures them.

"Well, if that isn't the craziest thing. We Finns, we drink a lot. Did you know that?"

"I certainly drank a lot with one fella from Finland in grad school, that's for sure," Scott reminds Matti. Hannah finds this very funny. Jews, Scott remembers, aren't known for their heavy drinking. He wonders how Hannah likes living in a country like Finland. He reminds himself to ask her, his fellow American.

He notices that Hannah has a little bit of a foreign accent now. She has been living in Finland for nearly thirty years, probably half of her life. Scott is glad that she isn't in America to hear Trump blather on about "yids fixing the stock market so they always win." By now, Scott realizes in horror, he has been listening to Trump blather for so long that it has just now occurred to him how idiotic it is to talk about "winning" the stock market. He never got past the "yids."

They round a corner and the airport entrance is at the end of a corridor. Scott sees a Finnair kiosk and tells Ann, "Time to ditch the wheelchair."

Scott gratefully climbs out of the chair. "Why, look," Matti says. "He walks!" And everybody laughs.

******

The Pekkanens live near the University of Oulu, where Matti is a network engineer for the physics department and Hannah lectures in Modern Hebrew language and literature. In the car they talk excitedly about their careers; Matti never went for a Ph.D just like Scott didn't ("My brain was full," Matti quips), but Hannah went on to finish the doctorate she had begun in Madison and is something of a celebrity lecturer. ("Matti always says that," Hannah mock-complains.) They find out that Hannah was born in Israel and lived there until she was ten years old. The Pekkanens, for their part, are very curious about 1) Ann, and 2) how Scott wound up as a commercial driver, of all things.

But it will have to wait until everyone has gotten some sleep. It's three in the morning now in Finland and it's been a slippery drive the few kilometers from the airport in Vantaa to the motel in Kerava. Oulu, as Scott knows, is a long long way to the north, "practically Lapland" as Matti says, and getting there tonight is out of the question. The snow is still coming down and there are tall snowbanks everywhere, suggesting that there is considerably more snow on the ground here than there was in Luverne or even Fargo. Of course, Scott reasons, Helsinki is on the Gulf of Finland. New York used to get crazy twenty-inch snowstorms with its maritime climate too. Whereas in Luverne you'd get a few inches here and a few inches there... but it would never melt, so that by winter's end you'd be pretty well buried.

These musings lead Scott to one of the silliest thoughts he's ever had, but at the moment he has it, it seems to him so profound that he almost says it out loud:

Finland sure does look like Finland.

Now what he means is something along the lines of, "Finland, even at night, looks kind of like I always imagined Finland would look." What he means is that the streetlights have tall curved lampposts that you don't see in the States, the cars are smaller, the buildings seem somehow more orderly and even the older buildings--some of which might be older than any in the US--have a certain clean modernity to them. He is obviously in Europe. He's never been to Europe before, but it is obvious that he is there now. The billboards and street signs are all in Finnish, for one thing.

The endless evergreens, which you can see when they pass through a town, remind him very much of the Seattle area. So that's a familiar thing, and the snow is certainly a familiar thing, but everything else...... sure does look like Finland.

As they pull into the circular drive of the motel, waiting for a young man with a snowblower to do another circuit of the driveway, Scott sees his first Finnish flag flying. White with a blue cross. A beautiful, beautiful flag. Tears form in his eyes and he cannot keep them from rolling down his cheeks. He and Ann are free. They are in a free country again.

He'd never forget his first Finnish flag. In the morning he could see it outside of their motel window, framed by birch branches. They were free again. (Photo by Dreamstime)

******

 

Doctor Saari

Once he might have been disinclined to do much about his brush with (apparently) actual death. He'd lived an interesting life. He had smoked heavily for years. He had drunk even more. There wasn't a lot to look forward to in his retirement, except more drinking and more pointless watching of Clint Eastwood movies and tornado videos. Trump and his followers had ruined the joy of being an American in the land of the free and the home of the brave; now they were the land of the stupid and the home of a government too chickenshit to do anything about it. There wasn't much to recommend life from the point of view of a 65-year-old alcoholic.

Ann changed everything.

Scott had started the process himself without even realizing it when he quit drinking. He still didn't really know why he had quit drinking. There was no real reason to. He didn't have to do a God-blessed thing he didn't want to do, now that he was retired. He'd paid cash for his old farmhouse. As long as he stayed sober enough to drive to the liquor store once a month, he didn't ever really need to be sober. Amazon delivered most of his favorite foods right to his door. He could buy fresh meat on his liquor runs if he was so inclined. He didn't need to set an example for anyone, except for his dog, who already expected him to sleep on the floor and puke among his several other talents.

If he died, no one would care, or probably even miss him.

In the midst of this miasma of self-pity, for some reason unknown even to him, he had "decided to quit drinking." Only God knew why. He certainly never had any desire to be involved in the Warm Civil War; he was so thoroughly disgusted with Trump and his drooling followers by the time he retired that he just prayed that they all dropped dead one day (and with COVID, a lot of them actually had) and other than that, he ignored the news and the gunfire it seemed he could always hear when he stepped outside and went on with the busy business of drinking himself to death. It wasn't too bad of a way to go. Even enjoyable sometimes, without work to worry about.

Ann changed everything.

It had been so innocent, really. Almost childish. She would smile that smile and show those slightly crooked but beautiful teeth of hers, or he would see her in profile ringing up his purchases, and just feel the need to kiss her. It was more of a human-need thing, he mused. Even though she was very nicely put together and he liked that, Scott had gone beyond thinking about sex. He didn't even masturbate anymore and doubted that he could. But he imagined in some of his lonely moments, when the TV was off and he wasn't listening to music and the gray light came through his parlor window and darkness was coming on, that it would be very nice to kiss Ann Gerling, to express some feeling that he couldn't express any other way. He was surprised how often he had that fantasy, and of course he had no idea what to do about it.

But he had asked her out, not knowing what else to do and scared to death that she would say no or, worse, laugh at him, and that would be it for his one very pleasant fantasy about life.

He couldn't tell you or anyone else how very much he loved this woman, and that was a secret he had to keep to himself. She was worth the fact that he couldn't really drink anymore, or do just exactly as he pleased, or even that he had had to kill someone in cold blood. She was worth all of that and more.

So he went to the doctor to find out why he'd been going down the long hallway with the bright light at the end, only to see a blonde Swedish physician and a very worried-looking Ann looming above him, and hearing his trusty dog bark in the far, far distance.

The doctor's name was Aliisa Saari. She had been recommended by Matti, and had been his personal physician at the university "until I started having trouble with my kidneys, which turned out to be cancer"--and now poor Matti had a whole team of doctors, although his cancer was currently in remission.

We're all sure getting old, Scott thought, filling out some paperwork to see Dr. Saari for the first time. Everyone was getting old or already dead. Ann, being a decade younger than the rest of his set, hadn't yet reached the perpetual-medical-woes threshold, but Scott wasn't going to lecture her about her smoking or the fact that now she was drinking a little more  than she should. Not many women had had to kill four people to stay alive and then flee to another country to escape being murdered in the so-called "Bastion of Freedom" of the Formerly United States of America -- a "Freedom" not understood, and not coveted, by anyone else on the globe. And yes, he loved Ann more than he could have explained to anyone, including Ann -- but he wasn't about to lecture her. About anything. He hadn't earned that right.

She is sitting next to him in the waiting room, reading the news on her phone. She has painted her nails blue and white. "You have beautiful hands," he tells her. Ann's hands are small, but very nicely formed. She still wears no rings at all. Her earrings are little silver studs. She wears a tiny necklace with a silver heart on it, but you've got to look hard to see it. Not much for jewelry. Scott kind of  likes that because it's so unusual. He wonders what would happen if he bought her jewelry as a gift. It certainly wouldn't be loud, look-at-me jewelry.

"Why thank you," she grins at him, and goes back to her article.

Dr. Saari comes out into the waiting room and calls his name. Scott knows it's her because her little nameplate says ALIISA SAARI MD.

"Nice to meet you, Doctor," Scott says, standing and shaking her slender hand. Matti has already told him about her excellent English -- her medical degree is from NYU. Aliisa Saari is a woman about Ann's height, compact and dark-haired, with the exotic almost-Asiatic eyes that some Finns have.

"Well, well, Scott Featherston. Yes. I was looking forward to meeting you as well." The only accent he hears in her English is a little touch of New York. "And this must be Ann, who saved your life. Am I right?"

"Doctor Saari," Ann says, extending her hand. The doctor reaches down, noticing Ann's walker.

"You're an interesting case, Mr. Featherston--"

"-- you can call me Scott."

''-- Scott. But before we get into that, I'd like to welcome both of you to Finland -- Suomi, as we call it in our rather unique language. I understand you've been through some terrible things in the States."

"Yes," Ann says simply. Scott nods, not having anything he cares to add.

"Heartbreaking, just heartbreaking what's going on there now. We don't understand it. We never thought something like this would happen to America."

"We didn't either," Scott tells her.

"You speak English extremely well," Ann says, wanting to change the grim subject. "I'd think you were American if I didn't know better."

"Thank you," the doctor says, fully smiling for the first time. She could be a dentist's model.

"I finished medical school at NYU in New York. Lived in the Big Apple for four years. Oh, I just loved it! All the restaurants! I could never get over the food, the food! I could have lived there forever, just eating!"

Scott wants to tell Dr. Saari that she doesn't look like someone who lives to eat -- she doesn't have a pound to spare -- but thinks better of it. He remembers a Finnish-language CD he studied that included cultural tips -- one is that Finns think Americans eat too much and that one never asks for seconds; "wait until your host offers them, although this may not happen and not offering seconds is not considered at all rude." He's been in Finland for 48 hours now and has yet to see anyone who is seriously overweight.

"Well, let's have a look at you then," the doctor says, motioning toward an examination room with an open door.

"Can Ann come too?" Scott asks. He knows how worried she is about him, and this might help things.

"Is she your wife?"

"Well, yes, in a way. We made a vow to be together. We were going to get married but we had too much notoriety and couldn't make it public."

"Close enough," Dr. Saari says, and Scott notices her face falling a little bit again. She feels a great deal of sympathy toward them and radiates it. Ann follows him into the examination room.

"You may disrobe," she tells Scott. "Leave you briefs on."

While he's doing this, Dr. Saari asks a strange question. "I called Finnair and asked who the doctor was who attended you on the flight. Her name is Sigrid Andersson. She's from Sweden. Lives closer to Helsinki than Stockholm, actually not terribly far from here. Anyway, she is puzzled as to what exactly you, Ann, did to revive Scott. She said it was more like mouth-to-mouth than CPR. She didn't see you do any compressions or anything like that."

"I guess that was it, then, mouth-to-mouth. I've seen people do it on TV."

"Yes, but they do the compressions first, then the mouth-to-mouth, then back to compressions. I don't see how you started his heart just by blowing air into his lungs."

"I don't either," Ann says, honestly.

"Hmmm, very odd," says Dr. Saari. 'I'm going to get an EKG done and some other tests. Let's listen to your heart, Scott."

"Sounds all right," the doctor continues after listening for awhile. "You do have a heart arrhythmia, Scott. It's not pronounced, but it's there. Could have been caused by your little episode on the plane."

"Well, that's something new, I guess. I know my doctor never mentioned it."

"I'd like to get your charts from the States. But you can give me an idea of your general health. Do you smoke?"

"Used to. A lot. Quit four years ago."

"Alcohol?"

He hears Ann chuckle. "I was a heavy drinker for much of my life. Gave it up around the time I started dating Ann, six months ago."

This brings the doctor up short. "You two have only been together for six months?" Dr. Saari has seen hundreds of couples. Scott and Ann give off the vibe of a couple who have been together for so long that they finish each other's sentences.

"Six months," Ann says. We've been through a lot, Scott Featherston and I. I can't even tell you, you wouldn't believe it."

"Matti says the two of you have seen a lot of violence. Some of it involved killing people. Terrorists."

"That is true," Scott tells her. "Between us, we've killed five people."

That brings Dr. Saari up short. "That's horrible," she says.

"We had no choice," Ann tells her. "It was them or us. I'm using this walker because one of them almost beat me to death."

The doctor arches her eyebrows at that. "I've never seen anything like the two of you. Things like this just don't happen in Finland." To be doing something, the doctor fiddles with a barrette that has pinned her hair back.

"That has a lot to do with our being here," Scott says. "We're refugees. People were coming from Texas, neo-Nazis, to kill both of us. We're worried about the chief of police in Ann's hometown. He was involved with us in killing the terrorists, he and one of his officers."

"Jesus Christ," Dr. Saari says. "Pardon my Finnish."

Scott and Ann both give the thoroughly shaken doctor the laugh she so desperately needs right now.

"Well," says the doctor, trying to continue in a lighter vein. "How's sex?"

"FANTASTIC!" Scott and Ann nearly shout, simultaneously.

"You two are just amazing," Doctor Saari tells them, shaking her head.

******

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright 2021, 2022 by WRL (the author)

part six

Ann four

They're sitting around the kitchen table in Ann and Scott's apartment. It's on Isokatu street, a few kilometers south and west of the university and the Pekkanen's nicely appointed flat just off the campus. Both of the Americans immediately experienced a little trouble getting accustomed to Finland; not because of the winter weather, certainly, and not because the March days are even shorter than they are in southwestern Minnesota. And not because people speak Finnish, because most people they encounter can get along just fine in English. Not because of the "European strangeness" of the place, which Scott and Ann are pretty sure isn't like "African strangeness" or "Asian strangeness," because this is, after all, Europe (or as some Americans rather pretentiously refer to it, "Motherland Europe"). No, it is because as Americans they have grown accustomed to a certain suspiciousness among people, a suspiciousness often bordering on hostility, that dates all the way back to 2016 when Trump became the Republican nominee for President. For nearly a decade, Americans have needed to tiptoe around their fellow citizens because you never know for sure who might be in "the other camp" (for Trumpsters this is more of a minor annoyance at most; for "libs," of course, divulging your political stance can be downright dangerous). As Ann likes to say, "I'm sure it was easier when the Confederates were mostly in the south, instead of all over the place."

Here in Finland they realize that they are heroes, which doesn't exactly help matters either.

 

First Home in Finland

 

Six months in their new country has not acclimated them to this fact. Sometimes they wish Matti had not told so many people that he was rescuing a couple of American refugees, sure-enough Nazi killers who had to flee their country ahead of a lynch mob. They've been on television, they've been on radio talk shows (the fact that the Finns can easily conduct all of their affairs in fairly fluent English, and expect their audience to also make the linguistic transition, is still astonishing to the Featherstons), and they've given lectures at Oulu University to rapt students who want to hear firsthand how America, the guiding light of democracies everywhere, sank into fascism. Their lectures at OU were so popular that now they have been asked to repeat the "performance" at other universities in Tampere, Rovaniemi, Kuopio and, yes, Helsinki.

So now they're sitting here in this perfectly nice apartment in Oulu's Vanhatulli district, furnished by Matti and Hannah and some of their university friends. In a way the neighborhood reminds Scott of Forest Hills, Queens, where he'd lived when he worked at the Museum and "stalked Art Garfunkel." All the buildings seem to be four stories tall, although for the most part they are newer than the ones in Queens. Other than the signs being in Finnish, it could be just about anywhere in any reasonably prosperous nation. It suits Ann and Scott just fine.

Now the Pekkanens are visiting for the weekly language lesson. "Yes, it's true, you can certainly get by in English here in Finland, but the people will love you if you try to speak their language." Scott has already had enough experience using his fledgling Finnish to know that what Hannah says is completely true. As a result, his Finnish is growing by leaps and bounds. Ann on the other hand was confident in her Spanish but is almost afraid to speak Finnish to anyone, with the result that Scott is much further along than she is. Part of it may be her getting used to the fact that she will never walk without a pronounced limp again, which has damaged her self-assurance. Ann had always seen herself as at least a fairly graceful and semi-athletic person, and it's been hard for her to accept that for the rest of her life she will look "disabled" (her word). And there's the crown on her left upper premolar where Watkins broke it in half beating her with the walker. It doesn't quite match the rest of her teeth, although Scott tells her (rightly) that no one's going to notice.

The limp, of course, is another thing.

Scott knows that life has been much more difficult for Ann since the siege than it's been for him. And part of the reason it's been easier for him is that he has Ann to rely on. He'd like to rely on her less, because he can see that she's struggling. An intensely private person, she had never felt much need for friends--everyone had always liked her anyway and she'd always been the most desirable girl in town--and it was nicer, if you had the quiet and almost withdrawn makeup that she had, to just close the door when you came home for work and read your books and do your crosswords and watch your Spanish-language soaps on TV (she loved the almost hysterical overacting and, as she put it, THE DRAMA!). She was happy, at least until Trump ruined everything. Life had been too busy when she'd been married to Jimmy and his many friends were always camped out in the house. Now things were quiet, and she liked it that way.

And then Trump. And then Scott. And then the siege.

And then Finland.

Now Ann was a semi-cripple. She couldn't walk for long distances without a walker. She had "these headaches," as she put it in her thoughts, and she didn't want to tell Scott because he'd worry, but she'd been wanting to quietly make her own appointment with Dr. Saari (whom she liked very much) and somehow do it without needing to lie to Scott. Ann was extremely grateful to the Finns for taking them in, and in point of fact she loved the country and loved living there. Scott missed America; she never did and never would. Every step she took was, to her, a painful reminder of a country that had utterly betrayed her, a country she had had to kill four people to escape with just the clothes on her back. She already felt like a Finn through and through, if she could only get a handle on their extremely odd language (a city was a "kaupunki," pronounced cow-punky!). It was so much easier to use English, and really no one seemed to mind at all. Especially not coming from "Finland's Nazi-Fighting Wonder Woman," as one Finnish daily had dubbed her. Ann, much more than Scott, was recognized everywhere she went and was regularly hugged and embraced by the not-overly-emotional Finns (which, of course, made her uncomfortable, but as a guest in their country she would accept their ways).

She had once heard some joke, or maybe it was an Internet meme, that fame came to people who wanted it least, and the people who wanted it most never got it. That was certainly true of her. But, as she had to many other things in life that didn't go her way, Ann resigned herself to it. She was always gracious to people who congratulated her and hugged her and told her how happy they were to have her in Finland.

These people, she felt, had saved her life.

Ann was in a boutique one day and saw an expensive cable-knit sweater, white with blue trim, that came down to just past her knees. She bought it and wore it everywhere. Soon she became associated with that sweater. Similar sweaters became very popular in Finland and were called "Angerlings." Ann would never get over the shock of seeing ads for "Angerling neuleet"-- Angerling sweaters.

It was cool being a hero, but it was also hard for Ann. She would have felt more at ease in her new role if she had been able to have the slinky walk guys used to say she had. But now she lurched along the streets, as she thought, "like a wino or something."

Scott, for his part -- he would have enjoyed being famous much more than Ann did --sucked it up and told her how much better she looked in a cable-knit sweater than William Hurt had.

 

******

 

Doctor Saari two

"You're probably not going to like what I'm going to say," Dr. Saari tells Ann as she is getting dressed.

"I have cancer," Ann says flatly. With all that has happened in the past year, she thinks, that would just about figure.

The doctor allows herself a rueful little chuckle. "No, Ann, you don't have cancer, although I really wish you'd stop smoking. No. You are the first person I've treated with PTSD."

"Post-traumatic...." Ann can't quite remember.

"Stress disorder," Dr. Saari fills in.

"Well, it's nice to know I have something," Ann shrugs. "I guess. 'Cause if this is the way I'm going to feel from now on, they can have it."

"I can't imagine what it was like, being in a wheelchair behind a bolted door with a gun in your lap while terrorists stormed your house. And then having to blow up that propane bomb."

"Not something I care to relive," Ann tells the doctor.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"The important thing is that you survived. I suppose that doesn't mean much to you right now. I've studied the literature and apparently the fact that they've survived doesn't mean a lot to many people with PTSD."

"Well, that's encouraging," Ann says.

"I'm sorry," the doctor says again. Ann has the crazy thought that Dr. Saari is making some kind of joke around her own surname. "I haven't treated anyone with this before. You don't see much of it in Finland."

"I think that's why Scott wanted to bring us to Finland," Ann points out.

"He's quite a guy, your fiancé. How did you meet him?"

Ann grins, lacing up one of the cute little combat boots she found to go with the denim skirt. Kind of a college-girl look, with an in-joke. "At the liquor store where I worked for twenty years. I was the manager by then. He was about the worst alcoholic I ever saw. Used to come in once a week when the store opened at eight in the morning and buy a half-gallon of bourbon and a case of high-alcohol tall boys. Minimum."

"Tall boys?" This means nothing to the doc.

"16-ounce beers. About this tall."

"Oh, I see," says Dr. Saari. "'Tall boys.' I like that!"

"So did he," Ann says. "So then I didn't see him for about six weeks. Naturally, given his age and the amount that he drank, I assumed that he had died. I knew he lived in Chandler, about 30 miles--um, let's say 50 kilometers?--away, so it's not like he ran around with our local rummies."

"Rum--eez?"

Ann has to continually remind herself that she's not in the US now. Part of the problem is the doc's American-inflected English, which is missing only things like an understanding of some very colloquial terms.

"Alcoholics. Then one day, here he comes, wearing a beard and about thirty pounds lighter. He told me he'd quit drinking. And he asked me out."

"Now that's a story.”

"I kinda thought he liked me. And I kinda thought I liked him, but I tried not to think too much about it. He's quite a bit older, of course, and I didn't want to date a guy who was going to kill himself drinking.”

"Understandable. But what started this wild ride the two of you took together? You both seem like such... such quiet, gentle people. Like Finns!"

Ann laughs loudly at that. The doctor, though thoroughly heterosexual herself, senses the electric appeal of this woman. That laugh would melt the hardest heart. But then Ann suddenly grows quiet, serious.

"I don't even know how to tell you this." 

"I'm a doctor. I can take it. And I want to help you with the PTSD, so please do tell me."

"I'm supposed to be supernatural. Or I have powers or something. And I'd like to laugh at that and say 'oh, people are so silly' or something, but it's true. I do have unusual powers. I don't worship the devil or anything; I'm Christian, well, about as Christian as most Finns. I believe in Jesus. I pray to Him."

Doctor Saari nods, but like a good doctor, says nothing, waiting for Ann to continue.

"The leader of our local Nazi militia tried to run over a bunch of Mexican kids with his pickup truck. He was going about... um.... 60 kilometers per hour? And I stopped that truck with my hand."

"You what?"

"I stopped the truck dead in its tracks. With my hand. Lots of people saw me do it. I prayed for God to help me and I stepped out in front of that truck and stopped it."

Doctor Saari doesn't know what to say to that. She is stunned. Ann doesn't seem at all like a teller of tall tales.

"There's more," Ann says.

"Okay, there's more," says the doctor.

"The Nazis burned this Mexican family out of their home. The lady of the house later came into my store to buy a lottery ticket. I sold her a ticket worth seventy-five million dollars."

"It could have been a coincidence?"

"But it wasn't, because I put my hand on the ticket before I sold it and asked God to help her family."

"Wow," says the doctor.

"And I didn't blow up that propane tank with a detonator, like I told you earlier. I blew it up with my thoughts. I didn't have a detonator. But I believed I could do it, and I did."

"Faith can move mountains," remembers the barely-religious Dr. Saari from somewhere far back in time.

"And one more thing. Scott was dead on that plane. He had no pulse and hadn't for several minutes. I just, ah, called in another favor, I guess you could say, and he started breathing again."

"Did Scott tell you what actually happened to him?" Doctor/patient confidentiality issue. 

"Yes. He says he had what should have been a fatal heart attack.”

"That is correct. And that's why both Dr. Andersson and I were very curious as to how you revived him."

"Well, now you know. And now you have some context to understand the 'wild ride,' as you so appropriately put it. Because the lead Nazi, this horrible scum sucker named Larry Watkins, the guy who tried to run over the Mexican kids, saw me on the street and nearly beat me to death. That's where all the injuries and poor circulation come from. He beat me with the walker I was using because I'd slipped on the ice and hurt my knee. So that leg isn't much good anymore, as you see. And it hurts like hell. All the time. Permanent reminder of my sins. Anyway... the same day that happened, Scott went to this Larry Watkins' house and literally blew his brains out, all over his garage door, with a Glock pistol the police chief had given him to protect us after the pickup truck and lottery incidents. I was so shocked when he told me. He always seemed like such a gentle spirit. I used to call him an old hippie, which he really kind of was."

"There is an expression in Finnish... let me think for a second about how to translate it to you. Okay. 'The most dangerous man in the world is a gentle man pushed too far.'"

"Perfect," Ann says. "And soooo Scott. He talks in his sleep about killing more Nazis. He's not like me at all that way. Sometimes I think I'm going to have to strap him down so he doesn't go back to the US and keep killing people. He's really angry."

"Anger can be healthy," the doctor tells her. "Yes, he's got some substantial medical issues, but they're the physical issues of an old man who has abused himself for too long. You're much younger and in pretty good physical heath, even with your injuries -- Ann, please stop smoking -- but you're tearing yourself up inside. In a way, that can be worse."

"I know," Ann sighs. "'Cause I'm not in a good place. Not Finland, Finland is an excellent place and I love it here! But in my head. Inside my own head. Hearing voices, being afraid of noises, and I've developed a fear of crossing streets. Yeah. Where did that come from?"

"Noise, risk. Noise and risk aren't good for people with PTSD."

"But I know it's stupid to be afraid to cross the street!"

"Ann. Knowing and feeling are two different things. You know that. Don't be so hard on yourself. Let's work on trying to help you. Tell me three things that you really, really like."

"Sex," Ann says, right away. "I always liked sex."

"You said you're quite fulfilled in that department."

"Oh, yeah. Scott's the best. There's only one problem."

"You can tell me. Everything you tell me is confidential, you know."

"It's my leg," she says, almost whispering. "I've got to be on my back. And we like to, you know, mix it up?"

Dr. Saari can't help but laugh a little to herself. This woman is so modest, and expects so little of life.

"Most women do. Like to mix it up, I mean. Your leg really hurts you, doesn't it? But you won't complain, because you're Ann Gerling."

"Something like that."

"I could get you some nice painkillers, but you'd have to promise me not to drink while you're taking them."

"I should stop drinking anyway. I like it a little too much now."

"That's the PTSD. But I want you to promise me too that you'll take the painkillers as directed. About an hour before sex would be perfect."

"Oh, like I know what's 'an hour before sex'? We just got together a few months ago. We're pretty spontaneous!"

"Ann, work with me here," the doctor pleads.

"I know, I know. It's just a relief to have another woman to talk to." Although Hannah is perfectly nice to her, Ann is intimidated by Hannah's status as a renowned academic and a world traveler. They haven't been able to form a bond. But Ann feels a connection to Doctor Saari.

As if reading her mind, the doc reaches for a prescription pad on the desk and writes furiously for a minute or so. "One hour, exactly one hour to the second! before sex," she quips, handing Ann the prescription. Ann laughs, looks at it for a second. Just Finnish medicalese, no illumination.

"And have this," Dr. Saari says, tearing another sheet from the Rx pad. "It's my cell number. Call me anytime you want to talk. I'd like to be your friend, Ann. I like you."

"I," Ann says, but she's so choked up that there's nothing to follow it with. She reaches across the desk and enfolds Dr. Saari's shoulders in a clumsy embrace. Then she sits back down.

"Thank you," Ann says.

"Kiitos," says the doctor. "Use that word. Finns love to hear it from foreigners. It'll open a thousand doors for you. Kiitos."

"I know it means thank you," Ann smiles.

"Start to learn more Finnish. You've been here for a while. That's the quickest way to a Finn's heart. We can be quite cold. We're not very emotional."

"I like that," Ann says. "If we wanted emotion, I suppose we could have gone to Italy."

Doctor Saari roars with laughter at that. "Oh, those Italians!" she sputters. "I spend holidays there sometimes. Lovely people, really, but everything there is 'WA-WA-WA-WA-WA!' The doctor waves her arms hysterically. "I couldn't live like that! Not for long."

"Me either," Ann says. "I got plenty of that from my Mexican soap operas."

"You speak Spanish?"

"Fluently," Ann says, and Dr. Saari can hear the pride in her voice. Most Americans are, of course, strictly English speakers. And often, unfortunately, quite proud of it. "Cómo estás, Doctor Saari? Me llamo Ann."

"Mucho gusto," says the doctor. "Me llamo Aliisa. Call me that, please. And it's not 'Alisa.' It's Al-ee-ee-sa. You say both the i's. When you see two vowels together in Finnish, you say them both."

"Wow, you speak Spanish!" Ann says excitedly.

"No, I don't. Not really. And you're not getting out of this. We're going to teach you to speak Finnish!"

"Okay, teacher," Ann says bashfully.

"Not 'teacher.' Opettaja. Say it with me. O-pet-tay-ya."

"O-pet-tay-ya," Ann tries.

"Beautiful! You've just learned the word for 'teacher.' I'm going to ask you next time we talk."

"Opettaja," Ann says, slowly.

"Nice pronunciation. Now try my name again."

"A-lee-ee-sa."

"Very good!" The doctor clasps her hands on the desk, officiously. "Okay. Now tell me the other two things you really like."

"Oh, yes. I quite forgot where we were. Sex. And, of course, then there's food."

"Food. One of my true loves. I think I told you how much I liked living in New York because of the food."

"And look at you!" Ann says. "You look like you don't eat!"

"Of course I don't eat. I live in Finland." The doctor looks so serious, hands folded on her desk, that it's several seconds before Ann realizes that she's making a joke. And then they both laugh together, loud and long. "As you've no doubt realized," Dr. Saari says, "we really don't 'do' food here. We eat, of course. But we don't eat. We go on holiday for that. Italy. France, although they are insufferable. Germany. Even, God help me, across on the ferry to Estonia where our cousins have learned how to do the food thing. But here we eat as if we're still foraging for food, like our ancestors did in North Asia."

"Is that why Finnish is such a strange language? Hannah told me all the other people in Scandinavia can pretty well understand each other."

"That's more or less true, maybe a simplification. But yes, Finnish comes from Asia. So does Estonian. And Hungarian, or so they tell me. I've never been there."

"Wow," Ann says. "So you're saying I'm going to lose weight here, and wind up looking fabulous like you."

Doctor Saari smiles at the compliment. "Finns eat too many carbs," she says. "Anyway, Ann, you're only five kilos over your ideal weight. We are, by the way, the same height. Exactly. How about that?"

"Well, I'm five foot two," Ann says.

"And so am I. Just over 157 centimeters."

"I got the weight thing. That's a little over ten pounds overweight. I'm doing a lot better with the metric system than I am with the language."

The doctor laughs. "That's because the metric system makes perfect sense. All right, Ann. What's the third thing?"

"This one's kind of weird," Ann says.

"Try me," says the doc.

"I like to give those speeches," Ann announces primly.

"Why is that weird? You're a celebrity, and a celebrity in your new country. Most people would like that very much."

"But I'm shy. Really shy."

"You don't come off that way."

"That's 'cause you're my first girlfriend since I was a kid. Um, my first friend that's a girl. A woman. Oh, fuck."

"It's okay, Ann, I understand you. Have you tended to have male friends?"

"No, I've tended to have no friends."

"I find that hard to believe. You are a genuinely nice person. And very attractive too."

"Oh sure, I've always had guys who wanted to fuck me. Excuse my Finnish."

More raucous mutual laughter. They can feel a tight bond forming between them. They find the same things funny, like close friends do.

"But Doctor--Aliisa? I kind of like being alone. Yeah, Scott and I spend a lot of time together, but he is very quiet. He's all about respect. That's why we're going to stick. No doubts there."

"You're very confident in yourself, Ann. I really like that about you. And it should help you with your public speaking,"

"I want to give more speeches. I hope I can help people that way. I've always liked helping people." Ann stands up and puts her jacket on.

"Well," says Doctor Saari. "This has been quite a session. Begin with a patient, end with a friend. Let me show you something we Finns do when we are friends with someone. Not acquaintances, heavens no! Friends." She embraces Ann tightly and kisses her gently on both cheeks. "Now you try."

Ann returns the little pecks.

"Perfect!" The doctor steps back. "But you only do that with friends, good friends! Remember that! Oh Ann, we'll make a Finn of you yet!"

 

******

 

The News from Home

On a Sunday afternoon, Aliisa Saari has come over for coffee. She and Ann and Scott are sitting in the living room drinking espresso and watching the English-language news on YLE TV (more news from America on this network too).

"So-called 'Commander' Donald Trump's stepped-up persecution of American dissidents has picked up pace in recent weeks with an expedited series of executions, many of them broadcast on state television. Yesterday Jennifer and Frank Donuhue, two scientists from Minnesota who led an anti-government protest in Minneapolis and were convicted of treason last year, were executed by firing squad on prime-time TV. Their last words were an identical statement that was bleeped out on state TV but reported to the BBC by witnesses: 'Fuck you, Donald Trump, and every single thing you stand for. We love you, Gillian.' Gillian is the Donohue's seventeen-year-old daughter, now living in an undisclosed location under an assumed name."

Scott reaches for the remote and clicks the TV off. "Gillian was one of the kids on my bus," he says, fighting the urge to cry. "One of my favorite kids ever."

"Wasn't she the one you called 'Deathlike Gillian'?" Ann asks.

"Yes, Deathlike Gillian," Scott answers, and tells Aliisa Saari the story. By the time he has finished, both Aliisa and Ann are fighting back tears.

"I hope she made it to another country," Aliisa says. "Sounds like she would have made a great physician. With a great understanding of pain.”

******

 

Ann's Famous Speech

Given on Saturday, November 8, 2025 at Alvar Aalto Auditorium

Polytechnic University of Helsinki, Espoo, Finland

 

The auditorium is at its full capacity of 1200 people, with about 800 others watching around campus on live monitors and perhaps a million more watching on television.

Ann Gerling is wearing a chic white just-above-knee-length dress and crystal blue earrings. Her long hair hangs loose with a blue bow to one side. She looks out at the enormous crowd and sees many women, and even some men, wearing the "Angerling" cable-knit sweater.

She begins in halting Finnish.

 

Hyvää paivää! Minä olen Ann Gerling Featherston.

A long, loud standing ovation. Ann begins to cry. A man runs from the side of the stage with a kerchief. Ann dabs at her eyes and waits for the applause to die down.

Näytätte kaikki niin kauniilta... olette kauniilta ihmisiä.

En tiedä kuinka kiitää teitä suomalaisia... itsestäni, miehestäni. Me... me täällä ollaan kotona.  

Another lengthy standing ovation. Ann fights to control her emotions.

Anteeksi, kauniilta ihmisiä. Minun suomeni on niin köyhä--

Encouraging shouts of "Ei, ei!" -- "No, no!"

Anteeksi, anteeksi. I must continue in English. I know you all speak it so well and it never fails to impress me. I can't imagine everyone in America speaking a second language. I always spoke good Spanish and many times I was glad I did. But people in America don't like to learn languages. I don't know why.

Ann pauses and looks out at the overflow crowd. Everyone is silent, listening raptly.

I guess that's an okay introduction, since I'm here to talk about America.

I myself am about as boring as Americans can get. I grew up in a small town in Minnesota. You probably know Minnesota, it is in the north and there are quite a few people whose families came from Finland. It reminded them of home. The weather is very much the same. In the north of Minnesota there are pine forests and lakes everywhere and it looks like Finland. Where I grew up is out on the prairies, the Great Plains. There aren't even trees to speak of. Minnesota is a big state.

(polite laughter)

So I went to grade school and high school in little Luverne, Minnesota. I never went to college, unlike most of you. I worked for twenty years in a liquor store. Pretty exciting, huh?

(more polite laughter, a few hand claps)

The only thing I ever remember about the Nazis in America was that this old guy south of town, a farmer, had tried to support the Germans in World War II. And then his son came along and held gatherings for the local Nazis and Klansmen on his farm. My husband and I watched one of the rallies from a distance. Scott, my wonderful husband. (she motions to Scott, sitting stage left. He stands and takes a brief bow, to much applause)

I'd never been to Europe before we came here. I'd never seen most of my own country. Just a boring small-town girl. But in a way that is my point--America used to be such a lovely place to live. You didn't necessarily have to go somewhere else to be happy. We had our problems like any country, but you always had this feeling that your neighbors had your back--"had your back," that's very colloquial. Do you know it? (general sounds of assent) They were your neighbors, they were people you could depend on. So it was nice, a nice place to grow up.

That might not have been true for many other Americans, though. Especially the blacks, and the Mexicans, and the Native Americans. We didn't have a whole lot of black people in Luverne, but we had many Mexicans and many Native people. The black people had a little church just a few blocks from the house I grew up in. The Nazis burned it down just after President Biden had to flee the country.

When I turned eighteen and could vote, I usually voted for Democrats. My daddy had been a Democrat. He worked in the foundry, the metalworks, we used to have in Luverne. It closed down during the farm crisis in the 1980s and a lot of people lost their jobs. It's a chicken processing plant now and many of the Mexicans work there.

After 9/11 I voted for George W. Bush. He was very widely hated in the US. People used to make fun of him for being stupid. Imagine that. (general laughter) But I always thought he was a good man. Still do.

So I'm not really what you'd call a liberal, I guess. Most of you are probably more liberal than I am, but I can't lecture because one, you took me in when I needed a friend, and two, you look at Finland and you look at America and I think you all can rest your case.

(loud laughter for a long interval. Ann is making a goofy expression with her hands upraised)

At the other universities where I've spoken... Oulu our home, Kuopio, Rovaniemi--I love it up there, Santa Claus all year round! -- (loud laughter) -- I know they wanted me to kind of dwell on what we went through, Scott and I, the people we had to kill, how our little corner of Minnesota turned into a nightmare because of a handful of people, the reason I'll always walk with a limp. But you probably know that story already, and if you don't you can just read the text of my other speeches on the websites of those other universities. I don't want to spend the rest of my life talking about killing people. I hope I never have to kill anyone ever again. When I was a girl growing up in Luverne, I never in my wildest nightmares thought I would have to take the life of another human being, not to mention four of them. Killing is a horrible thing. I hope none of you ever have to do it.

And I guess that's really what I wanted to say to Finland. You wonderful, wonderful people. Kauniilta ihmisiä--

(standing ovation, loud applause for several minutes. Ann dabs at her eyes again.)

Kiitos, kiitos, oh my, you people!

When somebody comes along and tells you they can solve all your problems and "make Finland great again," or something like that, don't grab at your heartstrings (she gestures like she's pulling something out of her heart) and forget how great you are right now, which doesn't mean you overlook your problems--I'm sure there are things wrong with Finland, though I haven't noticed any yet -- (loud laughter) -- just like there are things wrong with any country anywhere. But don't forget who you are. Don't forget the things that make this such a beautiful, wonderful, special place. Because when someone comes to tell you that they can "make" Finland great, they want to take all the great things about Finland from you, and give all those things to themselves. That's what I wanted to tell you.

You are all wonderful people and I love you all. Kiitos paljon.

Ann's legs have gone to sleep while giving the speech; they tend to do that now when she stands for any period due to poor circulation caused by her injuries. She grabs hold of her walker and stiffly walks to where Scott is standing and waiting for her. They leave the stage together. The standing ovation they receive goes on for over five minutes.

 

*Translation: Good day! I am Ann Gerling Featherston.

You all look so beautiful ... you are beautiful people.

I don't know how to thank you Finns ... for myself, my husband. We are at home here.

Excuse me, beautiful people. My Finnish is so bad--

Excuse me, excuse me. I must continue in English.

Kiitos paljon = thank you very much

******

 

"Traitor Refugees"

As "Commander" Trump' mental state continues to deteriorate and all the talk is about who (what?) will replace him (it?), he finally sees fit to "address my American people" ("whatever the hell that means," says Scott).

Since the "Commander" hasn't actually been seen or photographed in nearly a year, this is kind of a big deal for world television. Many networks, including FYE, are broadcasting the speech live.

The background lighting, with an American flag draped behind the desk, begins to dim. And suddenly there is Trump at the desk, his orange hair sticking straight up for six inches like a fright wig, heavy eye makeup beginning to melt, his sunken cheekbones giving testament to the fact that this is a dying man. But his "performance," as they say, is true to form.

This is not the transcript of the speech released by the White House, but this is what the "Commander" said:

Good evening, my... fellows. Turn that teleprompter off, goddammit!

Burger King Whoppers are better than Big Macs, and anybody who tells you different is a horrible, horrible person. Got that? I want all of those McDonald's closing their doors. You're selling an inferior product. You're lying to my American people! And your sign says you've sold many, many, many billions of your bad hamberders, so time to hang it up. Or else.

America is the greatest country, and I am its greatest leader. And that's why I am telling YOU, you millions of traitorous refugees who left our country for better countries, that we want our money back. From you! We want the money you stoled from us, the Social Security greenbacks, those printed at the Franklin Mint right here in God Bless America, and also in Denver. So effective immediately, we are freezing Social Security payments to anyone who doesn't have a US address, and also Puerto Rico and Guam and Iwo Jima who think they're part of our great, great country. And Greenland, who those horrible people in Norway finally sold us. Cheap!

"Jesus Christ," Aliisa says. "Excuse my Finnish." This has become an in-joke between the doctor and the Featherstons.

And if you want to still receive those Social Security checks and you are a terrible, horrible, traitorous person who left these beautiful United States, you will need to register in the town of your birth. Bring your driver's license and two other forms of photo ID. Not passports. We don't want your stinking passports! We want American IDs. Which, by the way, you'll need to buy more American beer. Because it's the best.

"There it is, he's lost it." Aliisa holds her head in her hands, pitying her friends for having had to live in a country run by such a drooling maniac, worshipped even by some Christians as the second coming of Christ. At least they're safe here now, she thinks to herself.

And in closing, let me say that don't remember to vote pee-oh-tee. That's right, vote for Peyote! Vote for the Party of Trump because we're the only party! I'm supposed to say that's a joke. But I wouldn't join another party, if I were you. You don't want to wind up on Saturday night TV. (that's when the prime-time executions are held--Ed.)

I'm closing now. Buy United States Savings Bonds. The ones with the picture of me, your favorite president. Stick it to John McCain, whose picture isn't on them! He was a horrible person. I never liked him.

(fade)

"Is he still going on about McCain?" Doctor Saari asks. "How long has he been dead now?"

"Seven years," says Scott. "But I can explain something to you, Doc: He'll never forgive John McCain because John McCain was two things Donald Trump will never be: A winner and a patriot."

******

 

Two weeks later Scott receives an envelope from the Finnish Embassy in Washington, DC. It informs Americans living in Finland that the United States Central Intelligence Agency is warning Americans not to return to the US to ensure that they get their Social Security payments, as several hundred people who have done this have "disappeared and are presumed dead."

"I smelled a trap," Scott tells Ann.

"So did I. No way I was going to let you go."

"There's just one little problem."

"I know, that's more or less what you were living on."

"Well, c'est la vie. I'm a permanent resident. I can get a job here."

"I'm making a good living, you know," Ann reminds him. She's proud of her speaking career.

"Yeah, but I'm sure you don't want to be traveling all the time to make it."

"Actually? I kind of enjoy it. Sweden was fascinating. I'd like to see the other Nordic countries too. And I'd like to go over to Estonia. I may be speaking there soon."

"I can't keep up with you!" Scott exclaims. "I've never lived with a celebrity!"

"Honey, I can't keep up with me either," Ann says ruefully.

Sometimes it is a little much for a small-town girl from Luverne, Minnesota.

 

THE GODDAM

The End of America, As They Lived It

Illustrated Edition

copyright 2021, 2022 by WRL (the author)

part seven

What Scott Learned

After spending a year in Finland (with one pleasant side trip to Sweden where Ann had a speaking engagement), Scott had some solid takes on Scandinavia and Scandinavians — although nothing you could base a graduate thesis on, and as he knew full well by 67 years of age, his hunches were not universally correct — even if his hunch about Ann Gerling, liquor store manager, had played out pretty well.

He and Ann had been married at a civil ceremony at the courthouse in Oulu on a strange, uncomfortably warm afternoon in March. Ann wore the little white minidress she had worn on one of her first forays to his place in Chandler — they were in Scandinavia now where people did things like that. He looked with admiration at his bride, who if anything had lost a little weight since he had first seen her in that dress. Matti of course was best man, Hannah the maid of honor, Aliisa the bridesmaid. A few of the Finns they had met, mostly through the Pekkanens, attended too, and afterwards they went out for drinks. Scott drank pop, which the Finns unaccountably called “limonadia” no matter what flavor it was.

Ann still had trouble with the language, even with Aliisa Saari's expert tutelage. On her trip to Sweden, Ann discovered that the other Scandinavians with their common Germanic languages sometimes jokingly called Finnish “Klingon” (Finns didn’t find that especially funny). Even though he’d never really spoken another language except for his street Spanish, Scott soaked up Finnish — Suomi — rather quickly, and now a year later he was conversant in most situations. But Ann, who spoke Spanish almost like a native, could find few Spanish speakers (although the handful she did find were delighted to find someone fluent to converse with, and an American at that!). She could do all the basic greetings in Finnish, but still had to rely largely on her English. And as in most European countries, most Finns spoke perfectly adequate English (“the young ones speak better English than American young people!” she enthused). But Scott could tell that her struggles with her new national language bothered her.

She did like Scandinavia and Scandinavians in general, though — “so polite!” she’d say, again and again. Scott did not think of Scandinavians as fantastically polite, but it also true that they weren’t pigs like so many Americans, especially since Trump had exacerbated all of the worst American tendencies like swinishness and know-nothingness. The very first encounter he had had with Finns, on the other hand, had been memorably positive: the Finnair personnel at the airport had insisted upon seating them in first class and letting them take Angie, in her crate, with them instead of putting her in the cargo hold. It was enough that the three of them were refugees, fleeing the violence in the Formerly United States.

His general impressions of the Scandinavian peoples: Icelanders were far, far away, out on a frozen rock in the middle of the North Atlantic, and most other Scandinavians weren’t unhappy about that. The Icelandic national dish, hakarl, was rotted shark meat; it was said that no one else on earth could get it down, although Icelanders seemed to love it. Icelanders still spoke Old Norse, or something very similar, and Scott remembered from college that this language was the mother of all Germanic tongues, English included. But it was ancient and archaic. That, too, didn’t bother the Icelanders. If they needed another word, they’d just swipe one from German or English and give it that strange Icelandic twist (the popular double-L ending in Icelandic was pronounced “sh,” for no reason anyone could explain). For all of that, Iceland was considered just as Scandinavian as the rest of Scandinavia, if a wee bit… rustic.

Next was Norway, the nation with the world’s highest standard of living thanks to North Sea oil. Norway and its inhabitants, like the land they lived in, were insular and rugged, fanatically clean and not exactly warm—which did not in turn help their standing with the other Scandinavian peoples, who already had a little resentment over the Norwegians’ overwhelming economic good fortune.

Denmark was something like Germany, with which it shared a border. The people were hardworking and industrious, although certainly endowed with a better sense of humor than their neighbors to the south. People in Copenhagen lived under a perpetual cloud of uncertainty due to “Commander” Trump’s continued threats to incinerate the city in nuclear fire. This all went back to the time when Trump had been an actual President of the United States and had wanted to “buy” Greenland from the Danes, ostensibly to build golf courses (Trump knew as much about Greenland as he knew about everything else, which is to say, nothing). When then-PM Mette Frederiksen had called this idea “insane,” a sentiment entirely shared by the 60,000-odd Greenlanders who had less than zero interest in becoming the 51^st state of a country run by a crazy man, it began Denmark’s descent in Trump’s fevered mind into something akin to a nation run by Chinese Communist Islamic Negroes. For over a year, not a month went by that Trump didn’t threaten to nuke Copenhagen if Denmark didn’t “straighten up” — whatever the hell that meant. Scott found it all too easy to understand the Danes’ fear of nuclear annihilation, having lived under the reign of the diseased “Commander.” The good thing that had happened to the Danes more recently was that Israel had taken up their case, threatening to nuke Mar-a-Lago if Trump nuked Copenhagen. Even Trump knew that this was not a bluff — the Israelis didn’t kid, and they had long, long memories when it came to other nations’ treatment of their Jews. The Danes, of course, were beyond reproach in that department, and the Israelis hadn’t forgotten.

Trump, predictably, launched into a weeks-long tirade about what would happen to real estate values in and around Palm Beach if the Israelis nuked Mar-a-Lago. He also floated the idea of expelling all of America’s Jews to tiny Denmark, but when it was explained to him — very patiently, no doubt — that he would become a pauper overnight if he kicked out all the Jews (not that that was necessarily true, but it was put in language Trump could understand), he got off his Jüdenrein kick and instead threatened to nuke Tel Aviv. The Israelis, predictably, laughed. They loved Trump for his entertainment value, if little else. He was the apotheosis of American braggadocio. No one had done more to solve the intractable problems of the Middle East, as Muslims throughout the Levant were now anxious to take cover under Israel’s nuclear umbrella.

Then there was neutral Sweden, blessed with scenery and magnificent cities and friendly people and ABBA and IKEA and some of the most beautiful women in the world. One of the premier tourist destinations in Europe, now far eclipsing France, Sweden had become everything France thought it was: a cosmopolitan and with-it place people wanted to see and be seen in. Rock stars lived there, foreign royalty kept estates there, and it was said that the Swedes of late had even discovered food (that famed Scandinavian stumbling block, and the one thing the French really could crow about). The big difference was that, if you were a foreigner and tried to essay a bit of Swedish on the street or in a café, the Swedes were bowled over and flattered and extremely encouraging (even though, again, their English was excellent). There was no better way to make friends everywhere you went in Sweden than by speaking just a few rudimentary phrases of Swedish.

The French responded to their declining popularity by continuing to put their hands over their ears and scream if a foreigner tried to speak French to them, with predictable results.

And then, of course, you had the Finns (and their honorary-Scandinavian kinfolk, the Estonians).

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the Finns was by using one of their own favorite words, “sisu.” It had no real equivalent in English. “Sisukas” (having sisu) was a big deal in Finland. It basically meant that you were the furthest thing in the world from a whiner. You were tough and resourceful, and perhaps more importantly, you didn’t make a big thing of it. Finns had a famous story that encapsulated the meaning of sisu: Jorma is driving along a country road with his Swedish friend Hans. Soon a blizzard blows in and they become lost… and then, naturally, the car breaks down. Eventually another car pulls up beside them. A man gets out and gestures to the engine. Jorma nods. The man removes his gloves in the frigid weather and starts fiddling with the engine. After a few minutes, he nods again for Jorma to turn the ignition. The car starts right up. The man waves, gets back into his own vehicle, and drives off into the storm.

“Who was that?” asks Hans, thunderstruck.

“Oh, that’s Tynne. I knew him a little in high school.”

Finns were not an overly talkative bunch except when they drank, which they did frequently. Some days Scott wished he hadn’t given up drinking (except for his daily shot, which no one but Ann knew about), but every time he thought about the withdrawal he’d agonized through, he reconsidered. They were embarked on a new life here in Finland. Resuming his struggle with the bottle, even if semi-socially-acceptable for a Finnish male retiree, would mean (to him, at least, and probably Ann too) that on some level he had given up on their new life. And that was unacceptable, even if Ann obviously felt more at home here than he did.

Because there was some part of him that was tied to America. He hadn't really ever stopped to think about what being "American" meant to him -- except that it meant being against Trump. And being against something wasn't the same as being in love with its opposite. Actually deep down, he thought America's government was rather stupid. This whole business with the electoral college, for example. That gerrymandering was permitted, was widespread, and by the time Trump became president, was preventing entire blocs of Americans from exercising their right to vote. That Americans were so loudmouthed, and thought their culture was superior to all others, and that any person worth knowing spoke English like a good American. And no "foreigner" should feel a similar pride in his or her own nation, since those nations were demonstrably inferior to the mighty United States of America. Scott was happy to leave all of that behind him, having never identified with it anyway.

He could at least avoid the "but why Trump?" question most Europeans had for Americans. Europeans (rightly) felt that Americans should have fought in the streets rather than surrender their storied democracy to such a pathetic gasbag. Even though Europeans had a rather checkered history themselves of "aux barricades" when their own freedoms had been threatened, they had always admired the United States as the nation that took. no. shit. from. anyone. ever. And that this nation had prostrated itself before an orange clown with no discernible gifts ("Hitler could at least speak!" they would exclaim with wonder, and these were Scandinavians, not Germans) was beyond their capacity to reason.

It was beyond Scott's capacity to reason as well, which is why he was grateful that as a certified Nazi-killer it was considered impolite to ask him such a question.

But deep down, he did feel bad at times about how he had fought against the Trump Revolution. He had fought it by cashing in his career and moving from Minneapolis to Chandler, figuring to just drink and watch movies and at some point die. He was done with everything, and certainly with Donald Trump, whose ravings he didn't think he could stand for one more second.

Ann, by her own admission, hadn't done much either. And it was true that all of non-Trumpist America, about 2/3 of the population by most reckonings, was exhausted by the time of the Revolution, which made it much easier for Trump to have America's Democratic representatives murdered en masse and with the military refusing to choose sides, simply waltz into the White House and announce himself "Commander for Life." There was no shock value; no one was really surprised at all. What was surprising, at least to Europeans, was that Americans had lost their capacity to care. Three years of fighting the COVID pandemic, which had left millions of Americans dead because of an idiotic (and, of course, Trump-fueled) refusal by Trumpists to be vaccinated or wear masks, and a post-Trump administration that didn't take the threat of Trumpism nearly seriously enough -- in practically any other country, even friendly liberal Canada, Trump would have hung for treason. In America, Trump continued to play golf and remind everyone that he intended to seize power again by any means necessary.

America had certainly been warned. And America had done nothing. And now, to most of the world's way of thinking, America was paying the price.

Of course, deep down or even not so deep down, the world was disappointed to lose one of its guiding lights. And Scott, and Ann, could not even begin to tell you how sorry and how heartbroken it made them, born-and-bred Americans through and through.

Female Action Figure

The next time Ann drives over to Aliisa Saari's house, Aliisa has a surprise for her.

"Ann, this is Ulla Fisk who I wanted you to meet. My American friend! Feel free to speak English!"

Ann shakes hands with a striking brunette, about her own age, whose curvy figure is nicely set off by an electric blue-and-black dress. That's right, Ann remembers, Ulla is a clothes designer. In the presence of such a "classy lady" in American parlance, Ann feels a little silly. She is dressed, well, like Ann... in mid-calf jeans, a turquoise cotton top, and a flannel shirt. Her "uniform."

They sit down in Aliisa's sunroom and are joined by her boyfriend Juha, a big, blond, good-looking guy who gives off the vibe of an athlete and is obviously quite a bit younger (and many times larger) than the diminutive doctor. Although few Finns were poor, even fewer were wealthy. Aliisa is obviously quite well off, though her sparkling ultra-modern cedar-and-glass koti, set in a birch grove against a pretty little pond where many birds gather, reflects quiet good taste more than money.

Ulla Fisk is of Swedish-Finnish extraction (the Swedes are Finland's largest ethnic minority; Swedish is recognized as an official language in Finland) and had emigrated to Finland shortly after Trump was elected president in 2016. Her paternal grandfather had been a Swedish Finn who hailed from Jyväskylä, and Ulla retained an exotic look that was more almond-eyed Finn than icy-blonde Swede. Ulla was quite gregarious and was soon taken by "shy little Ann," as she would later call her.

As they sit around the sunroom speaking English -- Ulla speaks fluent Finnish and fluent Swedish as well, Ann has discovered, another reminder that she needs to get on the stick with her Finnish learning -- Ann has given Ulla (and Juha) the short version of her life, the "just a thoroughly average small-town girl from Minnesota" story, and adding the "yes, it's true what you read, we had to kill some Nazi terrorists and run for our lives" that kept her from having to re-live the horrors of the Siege. Sometimes there are advantages to being famous; Ann doesn't particularly enjoy being recognized everywhere she goes, but it is nice that your average Finn can tell you how this woman from the prairies of America had wound up in Finland. Ann hated to think about their last days in the Formerly United States. She hoped one day to forget all about it, although she knew that was unlikely.

Ulla and Ann serve as a reminder to their Finnish hosts of what a huge country America was and how Americans could fit almost any description you could possibly come up with, being of all races and ethnicities and economic backgrounds. Ann and Ulla had never lived less than fifteen hundred miles from each other. Ulla had grown up in suburban New Jersey and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City; she was from a fairly well-off family and hadn't grown up with people whose fathers worked in factories and struggled to get by. After graduation from FIT Ulla had relocated to California and become very successful as a high-end clothing designer. She lived in a small town in the hills above Los Angeles and rubbed shoulders regularly with Hollywood celebrities. And although it wasn't strictly necessary for her to do so -- her wealth bought her a certain distance from the rabid Trumpsters who prowled the heartland and had almost cost Ann her life -- living in a country where there were millions of people who loved a madman that hated and threatened so many of their fellow citizens was too much for the idealistic and democratic-socialist Ulla (who shared Scott's hippie background and, unlike Scott, had actually seen the Grateful Dead several times). She decided not to wait around and see what happened next when Trump was elected, and had emigrated as the direct descendent of a Finn.

"You were smart," Ann tells Ulla. "Although Scott and I both had hope after Biden was elected. Can you believe that we thought that would put an end to the Trump era? Like anyone could have put that genie back into the bottle."

"You saw the worst of it," Ulla tells her. "Where I lived in southern California, people are still largely unaware of how bad it is elsewhere. Most of the Trumpsters were run off by Antifa, which is very powerful in California and is basically the citizens' militia. I think everything will be okay in California if the Army doesn't move against the people. They don't even have Trump TV in California; it's blocked and no one wants to watch it anyway, especially not the Saturday executions. Trump has been told that he can't cut off commerce to and from California because his beloved "real Americans" would starve if he did. Although they may starve anyway, since my friends say there is a lot of talk of secession. Of course the way everything else has been going in the Former United States, that would probably bring the Army in -- on Trump's side."

"Wow," Ann says. "You hear rumors about California and Seattle, and the East Coast being run by Antifa and that they've killed a lot of the Trumpsters. Needless to say, those of us who weren't "Aryans" in the heartland supported them, but there's no information flow. We didn't have anything but Trump TV and this little station run by a black family that no one could watch outside of, really, our county. And they had to change locations all the time to keep from being hunted down by our local Nazis, who were called the MFA. Those are the people that my husband and I killed, by the way. Every last one of them." There is audible pride in Ann's voice.

"You look like the nicest person in the world," the hulking Juha says. "I would never in a million years take you for a killer. I've seen you speak on TV. Seeing you give those very sad speeches, and how you were driven to kill, told me more than anything else about how horrible things must be in America."

"Actually, you yourself might have done okay," Ann tells Juha, looking him up and down, and everyone laughs.

Later on, after wine and snacks and as darkness begins to creep into the glass-walled expanse of Aliisa's lovely home, Ulla scoots closer to Ann on the teak-framed couch. "You may certainly feel free to say no to this," Ulla says, "but I'd be interested in taking you on in my fledgling company here. Same thing I did in Cali, high-end clothes. Scaled down a little in price because in Finland they don't have all these gazillionaires" (Aliisa and Juha laugh loudly at this) "but people do like nice clothing. You may have noticed that Finns tend to dress a little more sharply than Americans--"

"--and then there's me," Ann jibes, looking down and pointing at her Walmart ensemble.

"I'm sorry, I didn't want to offend you," Ulla says. "You're a national hero so you can dress any damned way you please. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of having a line of Ann Gerling Featherston clothes. I even had a name: the AGF Line."

"Really," Ann says, not sure she's "getting it."

"Ulla is quite the businesswoman," Juha says. "I have two daughters, ages 10 and 12. Believe me, dressing like Ann Featherston is all the rage with them. All the girls are doing it. Ulla can capitalize on that."

"Wow," Ann laughs. "What's next, an action figure?"

They can see that this is all a little much for her. Ulla tries to imagine if she'd been in the news almost from the moment she arrived in Finland, if she couldn't walk down any street anywhere without being recognized, if suddenly the burden of being the quintessence of everything a nation admired had fallen upon her before she could even speak the language. Ann didn't know that young girls were trying to ape her style, such as it was; the whole Angerling sweater thing had been hard enough to comprehend, as was the fact that women in Finland were not second-class citizens by any means. A "woman of action" like Ann was going to be admired, even if she couldn't speak Finnish and (secretly) was dealing with a bad case of PTSD that made her afraid to cross the street or ride on public transit. Sometimes Ann wished she could sit in the corner booth of the Green Lantern Inn in Hardwick, Minnesota, and rewind time to where she was just the "lady who runs the liquor store, you know, the cute one with the big smile and the killer bod" and nothing else. She had liked being that person. But those days were gone and they weren't coming back, and it was best not to dwell on them.

Ann looked around at the assembled people in Aliisa's living room and tried to put the thought of the Green Lantern Inn out of her mind. They had chuckled politely at her "action figure" remark, but it hadn't quite come off as she had intended it to. She had almost added "with a walker," and now was glad she hadn't.

"I think of Finland as my home now," Ann says, "and in some ways it's even growing familiar to me and that's wonderful. But in other ways, this Suomi is a strange place."

Raucous laughter. Aliisa Saari takes that as the signal to break open another bottle of Chablis.

Ann has always enjoyed making the stoic Finns laugh. Now, hopefully, they'll quit looking at her and find another subject. People are always looking at her now with some kind of wonder, like they'd found something in their back yard that glows in the dark.

 

 

The Return of Crank

Now in the growing light Scott can actually see the farmhouse, not just the sodium vapor haze of the yard light. It's early enough in the spring so that there's still a lot of snow mixed in with the mud, and in the shady side of the windbreaks it could still be winter.

He lights up a cigarette and stares toward the farmhouse, and then he sees the nose of the yellow bus poking around the farmhouse, disappear (backing up), and then appear again and swing onto the gravel access road heading toward him, its headlights bobbing up and down with each pothole.

But something's wrong. There's something hanging from the left rear side of the bus, and at first Scott is afraid that it's a kid pulling some stupid stunt.

As the bus draws closer, Scott can see that, actually, the bus is dragging along one of those semi-portable basketball hoops with a mobile platform. The basket is inside one of the bus windows and the rig is making a loud clanking noise. Scott can't believe it. Certainly the driver must have noticed something by now. He motions for the bus to stop.

The door opens and Scott sees that Crank is behind the wheel. "What the fuck, Featherston?" he says by way of greeting.

"Dude. You're dragging a basketball pole behind you. You must have hit it backing up in the farmyard."

"So who gives a flying fuck?" Crank barks.

"You're gonna have to write that up," insists Scott.

"Write what up?" Ann says. "You've got to ask Aliisa about that new BP medication. You're babbling like a crazy man lately." He realizes that they're making love in their sleep. Now as with many newlyweds this isn't at all unusual, but Ann is asking him now if Crank actually backed into a basketball hoop.

He does in fact dimly remember Crank telling a story like that once. And in his own perverse way, Crank has made sure from wherever he's at now that Scott tells this story while making love to his wife in a faraway land.

"Sometimes," Scott says, "I love my new life."

Ann giggles and punches him in the shoulder.

 

 

  

... and they bowed down

Scott comes home from his daily walk. As usual, he's gone to the library, where there is a cafeteria in the basement ("Kellari Kafé"). Scott likes to go there in the morning for an espresso and a pulla, the ubiquitous Finnish breakfast pastry, and to practice his Finnish with a few of the friendly, mostly-elderly people he's met who frequent the cafe as part of their own daily rituals. He is also scouting real estate, both through the little circulars you can find at kiosks and by talking to the locals; he and his wife both like living in central Oulu, but the fact is that Ann can't do what Scott is doing and just go walking around town. Everyone recognizes her and wants to hug her and talk in rapid-fire Finnish which she doesn't really understand -- sometimes she wishes she hadn't used so much Finnish in her famous Helsinki speech -- and it's difficult enough for her anyway because her bad leg starts to throb if she walks too far and she doesn't want to take too many of Aliisa's painkillers.

So they've been pricing houses out of town. They'd like to live in the woods a few miles north of the city where Aliisa's house is, for all that

it's a kind of exclusive area and is out of their price range. But Scott is learning more every day, and Ann is still doing speaking engagements and has started working with Ulla in her new business venture as well. They know it will only be a matter of time until the whole thing comes together.

When he opens the door he can hear the television blaring, which is a little unusual. It's the important-sounding, overloud diction of one of the male YLE English-language newscasters. Ann clicks the TV off when she notices that Scott has come in. "Baby, did you hear while you were out?" She seems a little flushed. Omigod, Scott thinks to himself for the ten thousandth time, what's he done now?

"What's It done now?" Scott says, removing his hat and jacket. He and Ann have taken to calling Trump "It."

"It declared that It is the second coming of Christ."

Scott can't say that he's surprised, and yet he is surprised.

"Let me guess," he says. "They went along with it."

Ann flips the TV back on. A fundamentalist preacher, easily recognizable by his carefully styled bouffant hairdo and expensive suit, is saying, "Oh yes, of course. Absolutely, of course! Most of us have been waiting for 'His' announcement for years. We knew it all along. 'He' is the Holy One, the Son of the Most High."

"Turn it off," Scott says. "I'm going to puke."

"I already puked for you," Ann tells him.

"So now we have a Formerly United States of America, ruled by Jesus Christ. Interesting."

"One of the American newscasters, I mean someone who actually works for Trump TV, asked It if It's going to want to be called Commander Trump or the Son o' God or what. That didn't go very well."

"What happened? What did It say?"

"It slapped her and stormed off."

"Well, nothing new there. But you've got to admit, it's a legitimate question."

"Yeah, especially when if you answer it wrong, you're going to wind up on Saturday Night TV."

Ann turned the television on again. It showed one of those megachurches common in the South, but increasingly seen in the North as well, with thousands of seats and banners and stages for bands. The largest banner, the one over the altar, was the scowling prissy mug of Donald Trump. People had bowed down and were worshipping it.

"It's the end," Ann said.

 

****** 

 

Jarvi

Ann and Scott are on their way to Rovaniemi, driving Ann's little Audi which she's had for a few weeks now and loves. Ann was in Rovaniemi, the "Capital of the North," once before on a speaking engagement. But this time it's about her nascent clothing business. Her friend Ulla has been concentrating on winter wear, especially the kind that would appeal to Europeans of some means who like to spend holidays in remote and not necessarily comfortable destinations -- the kind of people that Americans, who are no longer allowed to leave their country without special permission, used to call "adventure tourists." Rugged clothing with a "kind of Nordic look," as Ann says (which to Scott means cable-knit sweaters with reindeer or crossed-ski motifs, but this isn't what Ulla is designing at all). So Ann, the spokeswoman for "PohJoy" -- a riff on the Finnish "pohjoinen", or north, and the English "joy", is going to Rovaniemi to check out a possible retail space in the trendy Marttiini Store Old Factory. Scott has pulled up the picture on his phone. "Looks more like an old factory than a place to buy expensive winter clothes."

"Sometimes you realize that in some ways Europe, or at least this part of Europe,. is actually behind the US with the trends," Ann says, her scarf flapping in the breeze from her partially opened window. Northern Finland has, surprise!, a very pleasant, rather piney smell. "Remember when all the fancy restaurants in the States were opening in these industrial spaces? Where all the million-dollar chefs worked? That's Finland now. From what I hear, probably four-fifths of the people who shop at the Old Factory are tourists." 

The Marttiini Factory in Rovaniemi:

First Place in the Arctic to sell PohJoy Accessories

 

Ann does have ideas for clothes, and certainly her original look (or "non-look" as she calls it) has become trendy; women of all ages can now be seen wearing oversized flannel shirts, skimpy brightly-colored cotton tops hemmed right at the beltline, and tight mid-calf jeans --with the effect that Finnish women are beginning to look (to Scott's way of thinking) like a bunch of Dead Heads. And, of course, the ubiquitous "Angerling sweaters." Ann herself has retired this piece of sartorial history to the back of her clothes closet, even if it's probably worth a fortune.

Basically, the way PohJoy works is this: Ulla designs the clothes. Some are based on Ann's ideas. But Ann's job is really to be Ann. That is what sells the clothes.

He looks over at his wife. Pretty as ever. Ann will be turning sixty soon. Now there are a few strands of grey in her hair, and some lines at the corners of her eyes, that don't appear to bother her one bit. She is smiling more these days. "Hey," she says suddenly. "There's a sign for a lake. Let's go take a look, we have time."

The sign says JARVI, with an arrow pointing right. JARVI means, simply, "Lake." Even though she is still reluctant to speak it, Scott has noticed that Ann knows a lot more Finnish words than she used to.

Jarvi!

 

At the end of the semi-paved road they've turned off onto is a tiny little park, with a decrepit boat launch and a single picnic table looking out over the choppy water. The lake is silvery in color and small, but too big to be called a pond. Ann and Scott sit at the picnic table, together on the far side with the tabletop between them and the stiff breeze. It's chilly. But it's October, and they aren't far below the Arctic Circle. The sky is leaden and very Northern. Pohjoinen.

"You miss the States, don't you Scott?" Ann says, staring at the lake.

"Sometimes. But you know what A.B. Guthrie says..."

"What does A.B. Guthrie say?" Scott and Ann each have their own bookshelves, being interested in different kinds of books. Ann has her favorite three or four authors; Scott reads everything. Although he mentions this Guthrie fellow often.

"I guess it's all spoiled now. Luverne and Chandler and Nicolet Mall and Paisley Park and Minnesota, all of it. Don't know as I can ever go back, Ann. Goddam it! Goddam it!"

The quote makes Ann start to cry, which he hadn't intended, only wanting to weld Guthrie's powerful words to what he really felt about never being able to go home.

"I'm so sorry, baby," she says. Scott takes her into her arms and soaks in her smell that he has always loved. She's shivering.

"I just needed to get that out of my system, honey," Scott tells her. "My lovely, lovely little Ann. No. There's only one real regret I have. That's not being able to track down that orange motherfucker and blow his motherfucking brains out. For the country I loved. For the kids who'll never have a chance. For Deathlike Gillian and her parents. That's what I'll miss."

"We tried," Ann sniffles. "I guess we did. In our own way. We tried to muddle through. And we did everything we could. But it wasn't enough, was it?" She's still crying. Her bad leg is resting across his legs under the picnic table. Her nails are painted with little Finnish flags. His girl.

"Tämä on minun maani ja nämä ovat minun kansani," Ann says slowly, startling Scott with a phrase in perfect Finnish.

This is my country and these are my people.

"I'll just be wherever you are, Ann Gerling," he whispers in her ear. "I'd like that."

"Ann Featherston," she corrects him gently. There are tears on her cheeks but she has stopped crying.

There is a radiance, it seems, as Scott looks over the silvery waters of "Jarvi," a radiance that hadn't been there before. He looks at Ann and sees that the radiance comes from her. Ann smiles. He feels her little hand in his.

Scott realizes at last who she is, and who she has always been.

 

 

 

 

 4:48 PM 2/13/22