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Part
One: Welcome to Coulee Country
Right
here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present,
where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two
hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western
edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border.
Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century
and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man
has a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here
and now, the hour is just past six a.m., and the sun stands low in the
cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as
ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the
steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind
men of us all.
Below,
the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with molten highlights.
Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad
running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses
along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the
comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath
us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be holding its
breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and
sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out
of the ground a mile away.
Moving
toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks,
the backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidson
motorcycles tilted on their kickstands. These unprepossessing little houses
were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers,
mold makers, and crate men employed by the Pederson Nail factory. On the
grounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain about the flaws
in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as
possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during
the fifties, finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest
that the factory hands have been replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly
ferocious appearance of the Harleys' owners, wild-haired, bushy-bearded,
swag-bellied men sporting earrings, black leather jackets, and less than
the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption. Like
most assumptions, this one embodies an uneasy half-truth.
The
current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the
Thunder Five soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot
so easily be categorized. They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing
Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the
Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see "the world's largest
six-pack," storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland Old-Time
Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another on the
Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one
were undergraduates majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception
was a resident in surgery at the UI-UC university hospital.) They get
an ironic pleasure from being called the Thunder Five: the name strikes
them as sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is "the Hegelian
Scum." These gentlemen form an interesting crew, and we will make their
acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the hand-painted
posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple
of abandoned buildings. The posters say: fisherman, you better pray to
your stinking god we don't catch you first! remember amy!
From
Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings
with worn, unpainted facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where
a few impoverished residents lie sleeping, a blank-faced tavern, a tired
shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind its filmy picture window,
a few other dim buildings that bear no indication of their function and
seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous. These structures have the air of failed
resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward territory
although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened
to them. An ocher horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the
facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet from the rising ground on the
opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the high-water
mark left behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over
its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted
nearly to the top of Chase Street.
Where
Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes
a transformation into the main street of French Landing, the town beneath
us. The Agincourt Theater, the Taproom Bar & Grille, the First Farmer
State Bank, the Samuel Stutz Photography Studio (which does a steady business
in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and children's portraits) and
shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt sidewalks: Benton's
Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal Clothing,
Schmitt's Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electronic equipment, magazines
and greeting cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of
the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, the Vikings, and the University of
Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of the street changes to Lyall
Road, and the buildings separate and shrink into one-story wooden structures
fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies;
after that, the street becomes a highway that glides eastward past a 7-Eleven,
the Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farm-implement dealership
known locally as Goltz's, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields.
If we rise another hundred feet into the immaculate air and scan what
lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, coulees, blunted hills
furry with pines, loam-rich valleys invisible from ground level until
you have come upon them, meandering rivers, miles-long patchwork fields,
and little towns-one of them, Centralia, no more than a scattering of
buildings around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93.
Directly
below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the
middle of the night. No one moves along the sidewalks or bends to insert
a key into one of the locks of the shop fronts along Chase Street. The
angled spaces before the shops are empty of the cars and pickup trucks
that will begin to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a mannerly
little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn behind the windows
in the commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding
streets. A block north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching red-brick
buildings of two stories each house, in west-east order, the French Landing
Public Library; the offices of Patrick J. Skarda, M.D., the local general
practitioner, and Bell & Holland, a two-man law firm now run by Garland
Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield & Son
Funeral Home, now owned by a vast, funereal empire centered in St. Louis;
and the French Landing Post Office.
Separated
from these by a wide driveway into a good-sized parking lot at the rear,
the building at the end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third
Street, is also of red brick and two stories high but longer than its
immediate neighbors. Unpainted iron bars block the rear second-floor windows,
and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light
bars across their tops and the letters flpd on their sides. The presence
of police cars and barred windows seems incongruous in this rural fastness-what
sort of crime can happen here? Nothing serious, surely; surely nothing
worse than a little shoplifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar
fight.
As
if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of small-town life,
a red van with the words la riviere herald on its side panels drifts slowly
down Third Street, pausing at nearly all of the mailbox stands for its
driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic
bag, into gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the van turns
onto Sumner, where the buildings have mail slots instead of boxes, the
route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors. Blue parcels
thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral home, and
the office buildings. The post office does not get a paper.
What
do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of
the police station. The door opens. A tall, dark-haired young man in a
pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers
steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest
gleam in the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the
9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself.
He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the
rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished
shoe, bending over just far enough to suggest that he is trying to read
the headlines through the plastic. Evidently this technique does not work
all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks
up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks
up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little distance away from
his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces
smartly, and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have
been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by
Officer Dulac, go inside behind him.
A
gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little
on it to two sets of metal stairs, one going down to a small locker room,
shower stalls, and a firing range, the other upward to an interrogation
room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied. Somewhere
near, a radio talk show is playing at a level that seems too loud for
a peaceful morning.
Bobby
Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels,
the ready room he has just left. A rank of filing cabinets stands against
the wall to our right, beside them a beat-up wooden table on which sit
neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of
the discordant noise. From the nearby studio of KDCU-AM, Your Talk Voice
in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly rabid George Rathbun has settled
into Badger Barrage, his popular morning broadcast. Good old George sounds
too loud for the occasion no matter how low you dial the volume; the guy
is just flat-out noisy-that's part of his appeal.
Set
in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a
dark pebble-glass window on which has been painted dale gilbertson, chief
of police. Dale will not be in for another half hour or so.
Two
metal desks sit at right angles to each other in the corner to our left,
and from the one that faces us, Tom Lund, a fair-haired officer of roughly
his partner's age but without his appearance of having been struck gleaming
from the mint five minutes before, regards the bag tweezed between two
fingers of Bobby Dulac's right hand.
"All
right," Lund says. "Okay. The latest installment."
"You
thought maybe the Thunder Five was paying us another social call? Here.
I don't want to read the damn thing."
Not
deigning to look at the newspaper, Bobby sends the new day's issue of
the La Riviere Herald sailing in a flat, fast arc across ten feet of wooden
floor with an athletic snap of his wrist, spins rightward, takes a long
stride, and positions himself in front of the wooden table a moment before
Tom Lund fields his throw. Bobby glares at the two names and various details
scrawled on the long chalkboard hanging on the wall behind the table.
He is not pleased, Bobby Dulac; he looks as though he might burst out
of his uniform through the sheer force of his anger.
Fat
and happy in the KDCU studio, George Rathbun yells, "Caller, gimme a break,
willya, and get your prescription fixed! Are we talking about the same
game here? Caller-"
"Maybe
Wendell got some sense and decided to lay off," Tom Lund says.
"Wendell,"
Bobby says. Because Lund can see only the sleek, dark back of his head,
the little sneering thing he does with his lip wastes motion, but he does
it anyway.
"Caller,
let me ask you this one question, and in all sincerity, I want you to
be honest with me. Did you actually see last night's game?"
"I
didn't know Wendell was a big buddy of yours," Bobby says. "I didn't know
you ever got as far south as La Riviere. Here I was thinking your idea
of a big night out was a pitcher of beer and trying to break one hundred
at the Arden Bowl-A-Drome, and now I find out you hang out with newspaper
reporters in college towns. Probably get down and dirty with the Wisconsin
Rat, too, that guy on KWLA. Do you pick up a lot of punk babes that way?"
The
caller says he missed the first inning on account of he had to pick up
his kid after a special counseling session at Mount Hebron, but he sure
saw everything after that.
"Did
I say Wendell Green was a friend of mine?" asks Tom Lund. Over Bobby's
left shoulder he can see the first of the names on the chalkboard. His
gaze helplessly focuses on it. "It's just, I met him after the Kinderling
case, and the guy didn't seem so bad. Actually, I kind of liked him. Actually,
I wound up feeling sorry for him. He wanted to do an interview with Hollywood,
and Hollywood turned him down flat."
Well,
naturally he saw the extra innings, the hapless caller says, that's how
he knows Pokey Reese was safe.
"And
as for the Wisconsin Rat, I wouldn't know him if I saw him, and I think
that so-called music he plays sounds like the worst bunch of crap I ever
heard in my life. How did that scrawny pasty-face creep get a radio show
in the first place? On the college station? What does that tell you about
our wonderful UW-La Riviere, Bobby? What does it say about our whole society?
Oh, I forgot, you like that shit."
"No,
I like 311 and Korn, and you're so out of it you can't tell the difference
between Jonathan Davis and Dee Dee Ramone, but forget about that, all
right?" Slowly, Bobby Dulac turns around and smiles at his partner. "Stop
stalling." His smile is none too pleasant.
"I'm
stalling?" Tom Lund widens his eyes in a parody of wounded innocence.
"Gee, was it me who fired the paper across the room? No, I guess not."
Excerpted
from Black House by Stephen King, Peter Straub. Copyright 2001
by Stephen King Peter Straub. Excerpted by permission of Random House,
a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
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