David Schwinghammer's Blog, page 18

Redshirts

John Scalzi served as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He wrote this novel while he was president. He also worked in some capacity on STARGATE UNIVERSE, a show I’ve never seen. He makes it clear in his acknowledgements that THE CHRONICLES OF THE INTREPID is not based on STARGATE UNIVERSE.

Although I liked Frank Herbert’s DUNE series, Isaac Asimov’s stories, and, of course, Ray Bradbury and J.R.R. Tolkein‘s HOBBIT, I’m not a big fan of science fiction or fantasy.

I almost quit reading this one. Apparently it’s supposed to be a satire of the space opera genre, but the only similarity I could find that was fair play was that the walk-ons on those shows are the first to die on away team or during an attack on the ship. You don’t kill off Spock, the captain, Bones or Scotty.

When Andrew Dahl and his fellow new crew members report to the Intrepid, they are perplexed by the tendency of their superiors to hide every time the captain or the science officer appears in their work area. They soon learn that they’re being tipped off by Jenkins, who’s hiding in the walls of the ships where supply carts deliver supplies to various departments. Jenkins has a theory that the new crew members die because this is really a TV show projected into space from another century. Scalzi doesn’t provide any science to justify such a scenario. The closest I could come (not in this book) was the strange theory that we’re holograms; our real selves live on the edge of a black hole. When the characters go back in time, Scalzi uses a previous episode of THE CHRONICLES OF THE INTREPID where the crew flew towards a black hole to time travel. If it works on the show, it should work for Dahl and his compatriots.

Andrew Dahl realizes eventually that he’s now the protagonist of the show. He should’ve been killed or maimed several times, but he always survives. One would think that the ending would feature Dahl. Think again, it’s about one of the other minor characters. Dahl is involved in virtually every plot point in the book. One would think . . . Scalzi also commits another one of my pet peeves as a reader. He adds a rather long acknowledgement where he thanks every one connected with the book except his mother. Apparently it takes a village to write bad science fiction, and he thinks he’s just written WAR AND PEACE.

Almost forgot the Joe Hill blurb. Hill is Stephen King’s son. He actually said, “REDSHIRTS is ruin-your-underwear funny.” The only funny scene I remember is when Maia Duvall, another new crew member, says she owes Dahl a blow job. Dahl thinks she’s serious, but she’s speaking metaphorically about owing him a favor. A really big favor would proceed up the metaphorical sexual ladder. I’m trying not to use the “f” word. I did chuckle at that, but it was one of the only times while reading this book that I was amused or entertained. Skip it.

The Transcriptionist

THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST is one weird novel. I’m still not sure what it was about.

Lena, the main character, works at the RECORD, the biggest and most respected newspaper in New York. I guess THE TIMES wouldn’t give Amy Roland permission to use their name, but “the Grey Lady” is mentioned and that’s THE TIMES. Anyway, Lena is the last of the transcriptionists; she takes calls from reporters who need her to type their interviews for them, and e-mail her finished copy back to them and also return the tape of the transcription. The problem is she’s becoming claustrophobic, working on the 17th floor all by herself, just her and a pigeon on the window outside the room, that she talks to occasionally. She has an admirer of sorts, Russell, one of the reporters who calls her Carol. She doesn’t immediately correct him.

Then she meets Arlene Lebow, a blind woman, on the subway; they make a connection, but the next day she reads about the blind woman being eaten by a lion at the zoo. Apparently she swam the moat to commit suicide. This event really depresses Lena. Then the blind woman’s body disappears and Lena sets out to find her.

Lena also has a buddy named Kov who spends all day piecing together tattered versions of a ancient obituaries. He’s not who he seems to be.

Lena is looking for a way to escape her prison on the 17th floor, and she finds it when she clashes with the paper’s star reporter, a foreign correspondent, who sends her an interview about Iraq, then tries to kill it minutes later. Let it suffice to say that Lena doesn’t kill it. It appears in the paper the next day.

Not everybody can get an obituary printed in THE RECORD, at least one written by a reporter, not the normal obituary writer. And that’s Lena’s final gesture at THE RECORD. Guess who it’s for.

CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I read an article that claimed people who buy CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY barely get beyond twenty pages. I can see why that might be the case. This is one hard read; it took me over a month to read it.

For one thing, Piketty has a favorite formula that he repeats constantly. I don’t have a font that will reproduce it exactly, but basically he’s saying that “the capital/income ratio is equal in the long run to the savings rate divided by the growth rate.” The closest I can get is B = s/g. If the growth rate averages around two percent (Piketty predicts 1.5 for the rest of the 21st century, large fortunes (like the Wall family’s) can average as much as six percent interest each year. They’re worth about 148 billion. Do the math.
Like the aristocrats before the French Revolution (Piketty is a French economist) they don’t have to work, and they can live on the interest. Piketty says this money should be spent on education and the infrastructure rather than just sitting there collecting interest on investments.

Another scary thought is that some countries, like Norway, have federal investment funds with capital on the order of six hundred billion dollars (because of the North Sea oil profits). If they can earn six percent for thirty years, they can start buying up other countries’ wealth in the form of corporations, buildings, raw materials, etc.

Piketty does mention an unfamiliar name he sort of blames for the trickle down philosophy. Simon Kuznets claimed that capital and labor would eventually grow closer together if given enough time. That did happen between the first World War and after the second World War. Piketty calls these wars and the Great Depression “shocks to the system”. Since Reagan and Thatcher started the conservative revolution, capital has been gaining momentum where the lower fifty percent owns virtually nothing.

Okay, we’re expecting Piketty to mention certain economic conditions like the national debt in America and Britain and the EU’s recent financial problems. Remember, he’s French, so he talks about France quite a bit. Turns out they’re pretty darn flush, but have a currency in common without a government. Piketty wants a European Parliament; I guess they have one but it’s kind of a sham. A Parliament could distribute funds and equitable taxes.

Piketty has three solutions to the national debt: Inflation, a tax on capital, and austerity. He says the worst one is austerity. Germany likes this one. Inflation paid off the enormous European debt after World War II, but it can get out of control as it did in Germany after WWI and Black Friday. He much prefers a tax on capital, as much as ten percent on the really rich. He says he’s more interested in transparency than the tax. Too many rich people are hiding their money in tax havens, and there’s a kind of economic war going on in Europe where the smaller countries like Ireland charge much lower corporate taxes. Piketty wants to know who’s got what, and he means everything: money, stocks, real estate etc. This way we could come up with a global plan to deter bubbles, recessions, and depressions.

We’ve been hearing about the Federal Reserve Board lately, mainly because of political campaigns, where libertarians insist it’s more of an evil than a help. Piketty says most rich countries have something similar, if only to deter inflation. We oldies aren’t happy because we aren’t getting any interest on our savings accounts and Certificates of deposit. But they do much more than that. Piketty says it’s impossible to return to the gold standard as it would require yearly discoveries of gold and silver. The reserve board makes loans to banks for one thing, at a very low interest these days, and (this isn’t in the book), but the reserve board takes control of failing banks and makes sure depositors get their money back.

Piketty repeats himself a lot; I think he could’ve written this book in fifty pages, but it’s still in the top ten on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list, which won’t have been the case with a long article. As I’ve said his main recommendation is a tax on capital. Under our present political conditions in America that’s just not going to happen, but he said there is hope. Who ever thought they’d get a tax on financial transactions? Unfortunately we don’t have one in America, but we pay it when we import products from Europe.

Alpha Female, original short story

A lonely accountant bites off more than he can chew when he falls for a bowling partner.

Alpha Female

"Beer Frame, Blonigen," Adams said. "Got enough to cover it?"

"I don’t plan to lose," I said with false bravado.

I’d met Jack Adams, a tall bozo with Buddy Holly glasses, a few hours earlier; I was the newest member of the mixed bowling team.

Adams pushed his specs back on his nose. "I know one person who won’t have to pay. I’ve been bowling with Samantha ever since she came to Eau Claire, and she’s never had to buy a round."

"I’ve never seen a woman throw a hook like that," I said.

"If you want, I can pick you up Sunday and we can practice."

Adams was an assistant supermarket manager, apparently just as socially inept as I was.

I’d joined the bowling league for something to do. My accounting job at Eau Claire Machine wasn’t exactly what you’d call a chick magnet. "What’s Samantha like?" I asked.

Adams moved closer and hunched down so’s we were on the same level. "Kinda bossy," he said. "She’s always on me to improve my game, and I carry a 175 average."

The woman on the next lane dropped her ball behind her and everyone on her team began to razz her. "What does Samantha do for a living?" I said.

Adams took off his glasses, blew on them, wiped them off with a tissue. "She’s an elementary principal. Want me to line you up? She’s not married."

Samantha was certainly cute enough, with frosted blond hair combed down over eyes the color of a Wisconsin lake. She had the highest backswing I’d ever seen and was a left-hander to boot. She threw a hook that hung on the rim, then darted toward the pocket just as the ball arrived at the pins. This time she’d miscalculated a hair and the ball went in the channel.

Channel not gutter. "A gutter is a place dairy cows go poop," she said when I’d thrown one earlier, referring to it as such.

She stamped her foot and showed her dimples, then picked up nine pins on her next toss. The temperature at Don Carter Lanes went down a good ten degrees when she missed that spare.

I got my only strike of the night. Adams, Linda and Nora, two teachers who worked with Samantha, all marked as well, and Samantha had to pay. Linda and Nora went wild, giving each other the high-five, howling like coyotes, until Samantha gave them a look I hadn’t seen since The Godfather. She didn’t have enough money and I volunteered to loan it to her. That’s how I came to ask her out the first time.

Samantha showed up at my apartment the next morning, me still in my plaid bathrobe with my hair all mussed. She was wearing a blue jogging outfit and a red sweatband. I thought she was the cutest thing I’d seen since our spaniel had pups back home on the farm.

"I can’t stand to owe anybody money," she said.

I took the five dollars and put it in my Bulldog cookie jar where I kept all my loose change. "Would you like to come in?" I said. "I’ve got coffee brewing."

She sat on my ratty couch with the stuffing coming out of the cushions. The Benedetto twins in the apartment next door were banging on the wall again–-they play living room hockey whenever their mom goes to the corner grocery–-so I had to strain to hear what she said.

She said she only drank decaf; she had to watch her nerves, considering what she did for a living.

"Heard you were a principal; I’ll bet that’s an interesting job."

She stood, noticed the newspaper on the coffee table. She folded the paper over and began to read the front page. I couldn’t believe she was as old as Adams had said; she looked no more than nineteen to me.

"The job gets to be a hassle at times, but it’s better than teaching. I was a high school English teacher; the last straw was when the administration wouldn’t let me teach CATCHER IN THE RYE."

"I read that for freshman humanities. Don’t remember much about it, though. Holden Caulfield, he had pimples and used the "f" word a lot, right?"

She folded over a corner of the newspaper, picked up this scissor I had lying on the coffee table and cut something out without so much as a by-your-leave.

"I hope you don’t mind," she said. "I don’t get this paper and it has a pretty good crossword puzzle in it. What were you saying? Oh, yes, CATCHER IN THE RYE. They made you read it, right? I think a student should have some say-so in what she reads, don’t you? Don’t get me started, though; I’ll talk your ear off."

I gave her my last Dr. Pepper, decaffeinated of course. "No, this is very interesting. You’re so easy to talk to. I don’t mean to be forward or anything, but would you like to go out sometime. I haven’t met many people . . ."

She set the soda down and crossed her legs. "Isn’t Eau Claire the pits? Sure, I’d love to. Is tonight too soon? I’ve been wanting to see Fried Green Tomatoes."

A chick flick. Oh well, you couldn’t have everything.

I actually liked Fried Green Tomatoes, although I couldn’t figure out if the lady who ran the restaurant was a lesbian or not. Samantha, who’d read the book, assured me that she was.

The next evening, after she’d scoped out my cupboards and found them bare, she made us lasagna, the best I’d ever had. We saw each other every night for the next week.

There were warning signs galore. On Thursday I suggested we stay home and watch Cheers and she said, "I refuse to let you vegetate in front of the TV; you’ll help me with Meals on Wheels."

"Aren’t you happy you listened to me?" she said, when old Mrs. Swenson, a woman in a wheelchair, made us take a carrot cake she’d baked. "They’re all such darlings."

I couldn’t tell her those poor people gave me the willies.

That night she gave me a book to read. It was entitled LESS THAN ZERO. "It’s for our reading group. You’re coming with me. I’m going to make sure you get rid of that TV. I wouldn’t have one in my apartment. You’ll thank me for it later."

That book was the strangest I’d ever read; it was about bisexual, teenage druggies.

During the book discussion, I got involved in a heated argument with this blue-haired barracuda. I argued that the characters in LESS THAN ZERO were not representative of our nation’s young people, that most of them probably didn’t have sex until they were married. "The media has distorted reality," I said. "Are you denying the existence of the drug culture?" Blue Hair said. "No, but I think they slant those polls they’re always taking," I said.

"I was so proud of you," Samantha said, later that night after we’d had sex for the first time.

"I really hated that book," I said. "It made me feel bad."

"Poor baby. Mama will make you feel better."

I had been worried that she didn’t have any breasts because she always wore baggy clothes; I had also been apprehensive about our sexual compatibility; she didn’t exactly light my jets when we necked. Let it suffice to say that my worries were assuaged, although she did like to be on top and she did provide a running commentary about what I needed to do to turn her on.

A few days later she asked me if I planned to work for Eau Claire Machine all my life. I told her I’d always wanted to open my own accounting firm, but that I needed to pass my CPA test first. She made me start studying and set a date to take the test.

The next week the weather turned cold and she took me pheasant hunting. I’d never been hunting before; to be truthful I was afraid of guns; she bagged a couple of roosters. When I fired the gun, it kicked so hard I damn near lost control of my bowels. She thought that was awfully funny. In November we went deer hunting; she shot a twelve-point buck that she gutted herself.

One Saturday morning she brought me roses, two dozen; I was so flustered I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t even have a vase to put them in. Finally, I washed out a couple of old jelly jars from the back of my frig.

We were engaged to be married a week later. She asked me, and it was as big a surprise to me as the flowers had been.

"I don’t know what to say," I said. We were shopping for Christmas presents at the time, something else I’d never done the day after Thanksgiving with wall-to-wall people.

"Don’t you love me?" she said. I couldn’t believe she was asking me to marry her in the middle of the Target toy section with hundreds of people rubbernecking on our conversation.

Those blue eyes were getting all misty-looking and I thought she might actually start to cry. If she had, I would have surrendered immediately. "It’s just that I thought we might wait until I passed my CPA test and got settled in my new business."

She stalked out of the store and left me to find my own way back. I walked home; I needed to have a real heart-to-heart with myself anyway.

You’ll never find anybody better than Samantha, I told myself. She’s not only the best-looking girl you’ve ever gone with, but she’ll also most likely become the first female president of the United States.

But she’s so damn domineering, I argued. Now I know why all those guys develop impotency. Run for it, while you still have a chance.

When I got home, I had blisters on my feet from walking in my street shoes, but I called Samantha and told her I’d be the happiest man in the world if she’d marry me.

She sniffed, Kenny G. playing his clarinet on her radio in the background. "I think we’ve been seeing too much of each other," she said. "You’re tired of me and you don’t really love me or you never would have hesitated like you did."

I wasn’t tired of her; just a little afraid of her, but I didn’t dare tell her that. There really should be a class in high school to prepare a guy for situations like this.

The Benedetto twins came over after she hung up, and we played penny-ante poker. Ten years old and they were already drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. They took a $1.75 off of me; it just wasn’t my day.

All that week I sent flowers and candy, and on Saturday, she forgave me and we agreed to get married on Valentine’s Day. She had some news. She’d been offered a job in Minneapolis and she’d accepted.

I could not believe she’d taken a new job without checking with her fiance first. Dump her, dump her, dump her a little voice said. But I didn’t want to go through another week like I’d just experienced, so I didn’t dump her.

Valentine’s Day drew closer and closer; I began to develop dandruff and a rash; I had difficulty breathing. I thought it was tuberculosis, so I went to a doctor who told me there was nothing wrong with me physically, that I was most likely having an anxiety attack.

Around the end of January, we were having dinner at her apartment, a two bedroom that she paid $450 a month for–-I paid $150 for mine–-when she suddenly got up, took out this needle and gave herself an injection. A frickin’ drug addict, too, the little voice screamed. That’s it, I’m outtahere!

"Diabetes is such a nuisance," she said. "It took me forever to get used to giving myself a shot." I didn’t know if I’d ever get used to seeing her give herself one. I needed to have another heart-to-heart with myself. The woman was giving me a nervous breakdown.

February 5 was my thirtieth birthday and Samantha threw me a little party at the Legion Club. All of the teachers at her school were there and she’d ordered a cake that looked like the Tower of Babel. The whole soiree must have cost us a fortune. And this pretty little brunette named Althea, who taught first grade at Samantha’s school, started giving me the eye. She had to know I belonged to Samantha–-and when Samantha was preoccupied, Althea swooped in for the kill. Now that I had an actual girlfriend, I was God’s gift to women.

When the party was over, that control freak Samantha had to hang around and supervise cleanup, which gave me and Althea time to go out to her car for a quickie. Subconsciously I had emancipated myself. When I confessed to Samantha about Althea, it would be over between us.

The next day at my apartment, after I’d told her what a cad I was, she said, "I don’t think I can forgive you for this, Donald. I haven’t even looked at another man since we started dating."

That was something else she did that irritated me; no matter how many times I told her I preferred to be called Don, she persisted in using that name I associated with a mushmouthed duck. "I don’t blame you," I said. "I don’t know what came over me. What is that perfume she wears?"

She left and I was so relieved that I went down to the corner liquor store and bought a bottle of Scotch. I was three sheets to the wind when she called.

"I think I know what’s going on with you," she said. "It’s called the New Cow syndrome. Men need more than one mate. Just look at the animal world; there’s one bull and a herd of cows; there’s one rooster and a chickenbarn full of hens. I understand, I really do."

I was as good as shackled to a whipping post.

She put preparations for the wedding into high gear, renting the Legion hall for the reception, ordering the flowers and the invitations, picking out patterns for our china and silverware, announcing the banns in the church, and ordering tickets to the Virgin Islands for our honeymoon, informing me that her mother was divorced and we had to foot the bill for the wedding.

One day we both took the day off to visit her new school in Minneapolis; she was also going to shop for some items for her trousseau, and we were going to try to catch a play at the Guthrie if we could get tickets.

I remember it was foggy that day and that we were passing one of those junkyards with a mound of bald tires; I was about to mention that I hadn’t seen a place with those stacks of tires lately and that I’d heard they shredded them and used them to fill potholes, when she brought up the subject of a name change. The car radio was playing an oldies tune, "I’m Your Puppet," an awful omen. She said, "I’ve always felt that when I got married I’d keep my name and Schell-Blonigen just doesn’t sound right. How do you feel about changing your name to Schell?"

She’d brought this hamper full of vegetables and fruit along–-one of her dictums was, "five vegetables and fruit per day to keep the doctor away." I choked on a banana when she mentioned the name change.

Samantha managed to slam me on the back and maintain control of her Maverick at the same time, despite the turbulence raised by a semi which chose this time to blow by doing ninety.

When I recovered, I said, "If it was only me . . . I have to think about what my parents would say about this. My older brother can’t have any kids; our name will die out if I agree to this."

My brother Nick, who still lives on the family farm, has nine children, five of whom are boys. I was surprised she didn’t sniff out the lie.

"How about you keep your name and I keep mine? That’s agreeable to me. We could call the boys Blonigen and the girls Schell."

She hunched over the steering wheel, increased the speed, caught up with the semi, giving him a honk on the way by. "You’re missing the point, Donald. For thousands of years the woman has given up her name. Why can’t you stand up and show you’re a real man? This is important to me and you’ve always said you hated your last name."

I couldn’t recall saying that. It was my first name I hated.

"But I’ll have to change all my credit cards and my driver’s license."

She gave me a quizzical look. "Think about what you’re saying, Donald. Why should I have to change my cards?"

We went by a billboard advertising Virginia slims. It said, "You’ve come a long way, Baby!" The fates were conspiring against me.

When I broached the name change at the office during a coffee break, Bill Koontz, the other accountant at Eau Claire Machine was adamantly against it.

"If my wife had suggested something like that," he said, "I never would have married her. I can’t let you do this. If one guy does it, the rest of us will be expected to follow suit, and before you know it, they’ll have us all wearing bikini underwear." Bill was a roly-poly sort of guy, bald with hair growing out of his ears. His wife, Patricia, had brought him dinner once when he and I were working late. They looked so much alike I was convinced they’d been separated at birth and were carrying on an incestuous relationship.

"If you let her get away with this, she’ll get rid of your truck, confiscate your season tickets to the Brewers, and move her mother in with you. And when she gets sick of bullying you, she’ll run off with some lounge lizard and all your money."

"I don’t know," I said. "I rather like the sound of Don Schell."

"Nuts grow in shells," Bill said.

When I woke up the morning of February 14, my left arm and right leg were paralyzed. I decided I had to make a break for it, whether she sued me for breach of promise or not. My arm and leg loosened up when I made the decision. When I changed my mind, I developed a severe stomach cramp. I threw up; I threw up again; then I got the dry heaves. I couldn’t go through with it. The symptoms let up when I decided to go downstairs and tell my landlady there’d been an emergency in the family, that my father had had a heart attack and I was the only one who could run the farm. She could keep all my furniture if she’d let me out of my lease. I threw some clothes in a suitcase and put the rest in a garbage bag and I was out of there like a shot. I drove all day and wound up in Rapid City, South Dakota, where I took a job working for H&R Block.

A few years later, still unmarried, loneliness having drawn me to the Mall of America, I saw her again. I would have run, but I didn’t recognize her. She knew me though, and miracle of all miracles, she wasn’t mad at me. "You haven’t changed a bit," she said. "I was sure you’d at least have the decency to get a few gray hairs. This is my daughter, Donna. She’ll be four years old in September." I immediately began to count backwards. No, it couldn’t be.

Samantha was a good twenty pounds heavier and had let her hair go brown, which is why I didn’t recognize her at first.

"I’m not teaching anymore," she said. "Armand and I agreed that I should stay home with Donna. Children need their mother."

"Armand?" I said.

"I met him at a diversity workshop; it was love at first sight. He’s an executive for Cargill and Company, the big grain outfit. We live in Edina."

What a coincidence. I’d applied for a job at Cargill once and was turned down. She was telling me she was as rich as Midas, that she hadn’t run the poor beggar to the poor house, that I was a big ninny.

I had an eerie sense of deja vu until I realized that Dan Fogelberg had written a song similar to this once; "Auld Lang Syne."

"How are things with you?" she said. I was taking a closer look at Donna. She had my pug nose, my upraised eyebrows, even my Elvis sneer; And her name was Donna! Could Samantha have been saving that little tidbit to spring on me after we were married?

"I’m still a wage slave," I said. "I never did get around to taking my CPA test. Look, Sam, I want to apologize for what–-"

She put her arms around the little girl and hugged her up against her thighs. "Oh that. I will admit that I hated you at the time, but you really did do me a favor, didn’t you?" She turned around, with the little girl in tow, and disappeared into the crowd. Donna was looking back at me as if she should know me but couldn’t quite place me.

I felt as though I’d been post-mauled, the humane method my dad had used to dispatch a steer before butchering. I did several aimless turns of the immediate area, looking in the window of a woman’s apparel store, a topless mannequin looking back at me. The sounds of the Camp Snoopy Roller Coaster were pounding in my head. I gawked at a fat man and his skinny wife, ordered a hot dog I didn’t eat.

And then I went to B. Dalton’s and picked up a study guide for the CPA test. Maybe I’d take another whack at the thing; I already had a set of study materials some place, in one of the many unopened boxes I’d collected moving around so much, but I didn’t have the energy to look for them. Maybe I’d take a class in ballroom dancing, too; I’d always been light on my feet, and maybe I’d volunteer to tutor math at one of the locals schools—-I’d always been good with kids; I still got Christmas cards from the Benedetto twins, who were at the Lake Geneva Home for Wayward Boys.

Prodigy With Hooves (short story)

My dad pulled our ‘54 Chevy up to the ticket booth and asked for two adults and four children’s tickets, not counting Paul and Tony in the trunk. The attendants only checked the trunks of teenagers, not suspecting a family man of skullduggery, but everybody we knew always snuck in a couple of older kids. Fifty cents was a lot of money in those days, especially for poor farmers who weren’t that far from The Great Depression. Mom and Pop took us to the Outdoor every Friday night. It was double feature night; “The Monster from the Black Lagoon” and “Invaders from Mars” were showing. My parents never ever considered whether horror movies were appropriate for my cute little brother Johnny Cake, aged four; me, Donny, aged six; and pigtailed Polly and angelic Bonnie, ages seven and eight, all prone to horrific nightmares.
My mom popped a couple of grocery bags full of corn, and we brought along our own Kool-Aid, so we never got to go to the concession stand, where they sold malted milks and French fries and Mild Duds and Baby Ruth candy bars and other good stuff I really wanted bad. We got to go in there to use the bathrooms, but we never bought anything. I saved my allowance for a couple of weeks, just so’s I could buy something from one of the pretty high school girls who served the customers and ran the cash registers, but my brothers and sisters were thieves and every time I cracked open my piggy bank, the money was gone. It didn’t do any good to tell my mother; she just told me I had to learn to hide it better. She didn’t really believe any of her children would steal from a little kid. But my brother Paul was seriously deranged. He would sneak across the river where the Mueller girls lived and peak in the windows. When he would return, early in the morning, he would tell us what he had seen. “Nekked women with boobies and everything,” he said. We knew he was lying, but how long would it be before he did something worse than peek into windows? He was a prime candidate for Red Wing, where they sent the reform school kids. My dad used to threaten to send us there when we were bad, which was like every day.
Anyway, my dad let the big kids out of the trunk with the people from the nearby cars blocking the view of Herman Workman, the clueless security cop. When it was hot we sat on the hood of the car and watched the show; you could still hear the speakers from there but not as well as actually being in the car. The previews, the shorts, and the advertisements took almost as long as the actual movie. My favorite was Abbott and Costello. Abbott was always pushing Costello around. I wanted to punch him.
Fifteen minutes later, the first feature started. “Invaders From Mars” was about these aliens who landed in this swamp where nobody could find their ship, and they would sneak out at night and inject their protoplasm, whatever that is, into unsuspecting ordinary people, right in the neck. I was already having nightmares and I hadn’t even seen “The Monster from the Black Lagoon,” which Tony said was even scarier. He’d already seen it twice. Not that I would see much of the monster anyway. “Hide your eyes!” mom would say, when the slimy green creature would limp out of the lagoon with mayhem on his mind. Usually he’d do something terrible to a curvaceous blonde. Blond women seemed to be especially unlucky in the movie world. Insurance salesmen, ministers, teachers, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, all fell prey to the invaders from Mars. Who could you trust if you couldn’t trust your grandmother? Dad fell asleep, tired from working two jobs. He worked at Lundy packing, butchering steers, when he wasn’t farming. He slept through all of the blood-curdling screams coming from his family on the hood of the car.
#
The night we saw the “Invaders from Mars” was September 1st; I would start first grade on Tuesday, September 5th, the day after Labor Day at St. Joseph Elementary School in Rich Prairie, Minnesota, and I didn’t want to go. Mom took me to see my teacher, Sister Larian, and she looked awfully suspicious to me, kind of like the people who had alien protoplasm shot into their necks in that movie. She had furry eyebrows and greenish-yellow eyes, and she wore a headdress my mom called a wimple. You’d think she’d get a rash on her neck wearing that starchy, stiff-looking contraption. If I didn’t go to first grade, I’d wind up in the gutter or working as a ditchdigger, my grandpa said. So I went, but I still didn’t like the idea, and I spent a lot of time in the library for throwing tantrums, Sister Larian’s term for my crying fits. She assigned me a “best friend” named Richie who called me a girl for crying. I hit him in the eye with a roll of nickels. Paul had seen the gangsters on the late movie use them and he told me, “If you ever have any problems on the playground, use these and they’ll never bother you again.” That’s probably how we got the reputation for being no goods. In Rich Prairie if your old brother was rotten, so were you. Once when we were playing Cowboys and Indians--Polly was always an Indian because of her pigtails--Paul got carried away in his role as Chief Thunderthud and lifted Polly‘s scalp. Thankfully, he’d used a scissors. He carried a hunting knife wherever he went, and a scissors wasn‘t really his style at all. Pop beat the snot out of him for that one. Poor Polly, she barely set foot in school before somebody would say, “Polly want a cracker?” She begged mom to let her change her name.
I got sent to see the principal for punching Richie in the eye.
Sister Gervais asked me why I did that, and when I told her, she said, “Oh that’s a terrible insult. I would have hit him, too.” She gave me a sucker and told me to use diplomacy next time. I said I would, although I had no idea what she meant. I loved Sister Gervais, but I never told her about the roll of nickels.
My mother must’ve felt sorry for me because once she came to get me right around noon, but she couldn’t find me; I was hiding in the bus garage. I’d been there since recess. Lou Muehlbauer, the multipurpose janitor- groundskeeper-bus driver, never locked the door, and the kids all knew it. I usually came out when it was time for my bus. I could tell when the kids ran out the front door pushing and shoving and yelling, “Free, free at last!”
Sister Larian really hated me and not just for throwing tantrums. Whenever anybody did something wrong, she would look down at me and say, “You did it, didn’t you?” The problem was that I would turn scarlet red whenever she got angry. I didn’t want that alien inside her to go berserk and kill all of us poor little children.
Sister tried to teach us how to read. I found this excruciatingly boring since I’d been reading comic books ever since I was two or three. Sister taught us with these books about Dick and Jane and their cat Puff and their dog Spot. “See Dick run. See Spot run. See Dick and Jane run.” They were so dull, I began to develop a drool. If I’d written those books, I would have added a little bit of conflict. “See Spot foam at the mouth. See Spot bite Dick. See Dick foam at the mouth and bite Jane.”
Then there was religion class. Sister Larian taught us about the Garden of Eden and how Eve had tempted Adam into eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and because of this, Eve had to go through the pain of childbirth and they both had to work hard for their bread. What I thought was really unfair was that God blamed the snake for everything, and he had to crawl around on his belly from then on. Every couple of weeks Father Murphy would show up to teach us religion instead of Sister Larian. He told us a bunch of hockey stories from when he played for Hill-Murray down in the Cities; he said he wasn’t much of a skater, and he really couldn’t shoot the puck, but the coach put him in the game as a goon to rough up the other team’s best player. He said he spent more time in the penalty box than on the ice. Father Murphy never mentioned God or religion. Once in a while he’d forget himself and light up a cigar. Sister had to tell him not to do that anymore.
When report cards came out I got a bunch of checks in deportment, whatever that was. Mom said it had to do with behavior. I also got a “C” in reading, which I thought was terribly unfair since I was the best reader in the class. I just didn’t like to read what Sister wanted us to read was all.
She was definitely an alien all right and she had to go. Paul had told me about a student teacher he had who quit right in the middle of the day, and he and his buddies tore up the classroom until Sister Gervais realized what had happened and put down the rebellion. I set my mind to make Sister Larian quit.
Since my brother Paul was the evilest person I knew, I went to him for advice. “You need some other rotten apples in your class,” he said. “When we ran that student teacher off, I corrupted everybody else and we started shooting spitballs and squirting each other with water guns. We even put a thumb tack on her chair and she sat on it. I swear she jumped so high she hit the ceiling; I thought I’d bust a gut laughing, but I think it was the stink bomb that did it.”
I tried to talk Richie into being my partner in crime, but he said I must have gotten that idea from my brother Paul, who his parents said would wind up in Stillwater one of these days. Stillwater was the state pen. There was one other possibility, Jane Schwartz, who talked to this imaginary person all the time, but I was more afraid of her than I was of Sister Larian. I would have to go it alone. The next day I peed on the floor. It didn’t phase Sister one little bit. She called the janitor, he threw some sawdust on the floor, swept it up and we were back to normal in a matter of minutes. She was an alien all right.
Next I passed around a note that said that Sister Larian was pregnant with Father Murphy’s child. That ought to get rid of her. Would you believe it; Jane Schwartz, of all people, during a lucid moment, ratted me out, and I had to apologize to Sister Larian and to Father Murphy. And they called my mother in to discuss my juvenile delinquency problem.
We got there around seven that night, and Father was just finishing his coffee after dinner. We sat by this roaring fireplace with these huge logs radiating heat, him in his recliner and us in these two armchairs across from him. He lit a cigar and said, “What do you have to say for yourself, Donald?”
“I’m sorry I got you involved, Father,” I said. “I did it because I hate Sister Larian.”
“What you did is slander,” he said. “If people believed that I’d have relations with a nun, my vocation would be over. Or worse yet, the Bishop could transfer me to Wisconsin.” He winked at my mom. She didn’t get it, but I was laughing inside. Father Murphy was another good egg. Maybe he would help me get rid of Sister Larian. Then I told him about my suspicions that Sister was one of those aliens who’d gotten the protoplasm injection in the back of the neck.
Father choked on his coffee and couldn’t stop laughing until he noticed the shocked expression on my mother’s face.
“I can almost guarantee that Sister Larian is not an alien,” he said. “Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent sure I am. I can’t let you off scot-free, Donald. If we let all of our first graders disrespect the nuns, this place would be a jungle. Worse yet, no one would be willing to make donations to the church.” He winked at my mom again, but she was a hopeless case.
“I can help Mr. Muehlbauer rake the leaves,” I said.
“As punishment.” I loved raking leaves. Once you got them all raked into a pile you could jump off the truck into the pile, then you got to light them on fire afterwards. The smell of burning leaves was almost as good as the smell of the gasoline we used to light them.
“And you’ll copy a page out of the catechism,” Father said.
“But Sister hasn’t taught us how to print,” I said.
My mother gave me one of her Evil-Queen-from-Snow-White looks. I’d been writing almost as long as I’d been reading comic books. But she didn’t rat me out like that traitor Schwartz. “He’ll copy a page out of the catechism if I have to teach him myself,” she said.
Then Father brought out the Bible and made me swear on it that I’d never do anything like that again, and for good measure, he made me swear I would do everything in my power to be a model student.
Curses, foiled again.
#
Luck was with me, or so I thought. One day Sister Gervais was sitting in the back of the room observing our class when she caught me reading a Superman comic book. She also noticed I’d been doodling on my tablet, in longhand. She took me up to the second floor between the seventh and eighth grade classrooms, where she had her office, and we had another “discussion.”
“You’ll be excused from your classes for the next couple of days. I’m going to give you a battery of tests to determine your proper placement.”
Battery? Placement? It didn’t sound good. Was she thinking of sending me to Red Wing instead of that pervert Paul?
But it was just a bunch of multiple choice questions on reading, vocabulary and social studies, which I knew a lot about from watching the news with my Grandpa. I was so high in reading, at the twelfth grade level, that I thought about protesting the “C” Sister Larian had given me on my report card, but I figured I better shut up for once and see where this was headed.
“You must’ve been very bored,?” Sister Gervais said.
I hung my head trying to look humble, a very hard thing for me to do. My brothers call me “Einstein” because I know all the answers on the quiz shows on television.
“You’re intelligent enough to handle at least fifth grade work, but we don’t want to stunt your growth socially, so we’ll be moving you up to second grade. At least they’re studying longhand and arithmetic.” My grandpa had taught me all the arithmetic I needed when we took our produce to the farmer’s market. I had to know how to make change. The town ladies always made a big fuss over me, and I got to keep some of the change to buy comic books.
“Sister Norman will be your new teacher.”
Sister Norman was about six feet two in those funny grandma’s shoes they wear, very skinny with a moustache. I hated her on sight, and she gave me reason to the first week I was in second grade.
Kids on the first bus who got to school early had to go to daily mass. The first and second graders sat in the front pews. One day I was the only one in the first row, and I just could not follow the mumbo jumbo going on up at the altar. I started day dreaming and before I knew it, I was sliding up and down on the armrest. I had no idea I was even in church.
Sister Norman had been watching what I was doing. Looking back on it, I’m surprised she didn’t grab me by the hair, drag me outside, and burn me at the stake, but for some reason she waited until mass was over and Father Murphy and the big boy servers were gone. Then she slapped the snot out of me, right in front of God and everybody. “What you did was a sacrilege,” she said. “I’ll teach you to profane the house of God.” My ears were ringing by the time she was done and I had to sit in the library the rest of the day. I told on her, but it only got me another beating from Grandpa who thought the nuns could do no wrong. I didn’t speak to him for a week.
#
Meanwhile my sisters had started noticing boys, one boy especially. He was a big boy, a very big boy, who shaved and everything. He was first year teacher, Mr. Quade, who taught grades three and four in public school. There was no public school in Rich Prairie; as a result, there were two sets of third and fourth grade classrooms at St. Joseph’s, something you would never see today. We couldn’t afford the book rent so the girls had to go to public school. Polly, “the inky baby,” who was born two months early, weighing two pounds dripping wet, had to stay in the incubator at the hospital for a week before she could come home. She was shorter than all of the other kids in her class with a pixie cut, but she was almost as smart as me, although she never got to skip a class like I did, and I never let her forget it, let me tell you. Anyway, she wrote all over her notebooks things like, “I love Mr. Quade,” and “Polly and Jim,” Mr. Quade’s first name. She even wrote, “Mr. and Mrs. James Quade,” on the back. These days Quade would have been investigated for child abuse. When Paul saw this, he threatened to tell everyone in Rich Prairie, including Mr. Quade, and blackmailed her into doing his chores for a week. It was his job to throw down silage, a pretty tough job for a little girl. I should tell you this before I forget. Paul never did get sent to Red Wing, but he did grow up to be an insurance agent and a lifelong conservative Republican. I would‘ve preferred he go to Red Wing. It would have been less embarrassing. Tony, on the other hand, has the kind of job every kid would give his eye teeth for, stunt man in Hollywood. Polly is a pediatrician, ironically never married, and angelic Bonny, the mother of five, is a manager at a supermarket in Des Moines. Johnny stayed on the farm, but he raises Angus steers instead of milk cows.
Polly’s crush must’ve been catching because I fell in love, too. Her name was Carol Tomlinson and her mom had put her hair up in sausage curls. I thought she was Marilyn Monroe. When Valentine’s Day rolled around, I gave her a valentine. It’s not what you think. I didn’t go to the store and buy a special valentine for Carol. Our mothers bought them for us, and we had to give everybody in the class one, but I did pick out a special one for Carol. But I came down with pneumonia (we had no heat upstairs where we all slept, only an oil burner in the living room) the day we handed out valentines, so I missed my chance. I felt so bad about not giving her a valentine that when I got back to school after a week’s absence, I left the crumpled valentine on her desk. Now she knew. We spent the rest of the year having staring contests. I never spoke to her, not even once. I never even said hello. Actually I’m rather surprised she had anything to do with me, me being a first grader in actuality, but if my school pictures are any indication, I was a pretty cool looking cat, if I do say so myself. Rather like a junior version of Tyrone Power.
#
Sister Gervais took me out of class when the others were studying reading. She felt guilty about not moving me up to the fifth grade where I belonged, and she gave me books to read like TOM SAWYER, and HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Those hellions reminded me of Paul. She also gave me this book entitled THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER about these two boys who could have been twins. The pauper was the prince’s whipping boy. That meant that whenever the prince did something wrong, like call his sister ugly names, the pauper had to take his beating. What a novel idea. I could go for that. When I got rich and famous, Paul and Tony could be my whipping boys.
Sister Gervais was a lonely old lady under that black uniform with the wimple and the big rosary hanging from her neck. She told me she was originally from South St. Paul, where they had the stock yards. “I was almost as smart as you are,” she said, “I wanted to be a lawyer, but my mother died when I was only twelve, and my dad couldn’t take care of all of us children by himself, so he sent me to the convent. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if my mother would have lived.” There were tears in her eyes. I got a little misty myself.
Sister Norman still thought I was the devil, and she really resented the fact that I got so much special attention from Sister Gervais. One day she called me Mr. Smartaleck for disagreeing with her definition of a republic. I called her a beanpole, and she hit me in the mouth so hard that she cut my lip. This time I told my dad, and he came to school loaded for bear. We met with Sister Gervais, Sister Norman, and Father Murphy in Sister Gervais’s office. “If you ever touch my boy again, I can’t guarantee I won’t do something violent,” he said.
She was apologetic, said she’d lost her head. No second grader had ever called her a name. Unfortunately nobody had told Dad that I’d called her a beanpole, and I got another beating when I got home, this time with the belt.
Sister Gervais and I had another heart to heart about the Sister Norman incident. “A lot of homely girls go into the convent,” she said. “Then there are those who think they have a guaranteed spot in heaven if they join. Sister Norman is both of those.” We laughed laconically.
She then had me write a story about the incident. Therapy she said it was, so it wouldn’t fester and make me bitter toward the church. I was already bitter toward the church, but I didn’t tell her that. After the therapy essay, which ran to five thousand words, not counting the drawings, I got in the habit of writing every day, even at home. Before I knew it, I was writing full length novels. The first one was entitled “The Monsters from the Black Lagoon,” and it was about this boy who went to a Catholic elementary school in a small Minnesota school who had to deal with these nuns who were possessed by aliens. In order to be fair I put in a few good nuns like Sister G. who tried to save the boy from these horrible zombie-like creatures. “Perhaps you want to keep this somewhere where Sister Norman and Sister Larian won’t see it,” Sister G. said after reading it. “And you might want to use pseudonyms for the ladies.” Sister Gervais and I were working through this vocabulary book, but we hadn’t gotten to that word yet. “Isn’t that a lie?” I said. She said that this was poetic license. Lying was okay when it was in the service of great literature.
Meanwhile I was having trouble on the playground. I was now the glass geek, and I got beat up regularly, roll of nickels or no roll of nickels, hoodlum brother or no hoodlum brother. I was also pretty lousy at sports. You can be smart if you’re good at sports, but if you get picked last for every game, behind even the German kid with the club foot, you get the stuffing beat out of you, and they hit you where it doesn’t show. Father Murphy noticed I wasn’t feeling too good and started teaching me how to box.
He must’ve been lonely, too, because he started showing up for my “enrichment” sessions with Sister Gervais. I learned my multiplication tables in one afternoon. I learned long division in two hours. I memorized “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” after reading it once. Sister Gervais said she thought I had an eidetic memory. They both began to look for a better school for me. “Perhaps the brothers at Cretin High School in St. Paul,” Sister suggested or “St. John’s Prep near St. Cloud.” It was a lot closer. Eventually I went to St. John’s for high school. Father Murphy got the money from the vocation fund for poor kids who wanted to be priests.
We didn’t just talk about books during my enrichment sessions. The other kids were starting to prepare for their first confession and first communion and neither Father nor Sister trusted that devil Sister Norman to teach me. I felt like Jesus among the wise men at the temple. When we talked about three persons in one God, I looked at them askance. Then there was the virgin birth. “The protestant kids say Jesus had a brother named James,” I said. “How come Jesus was God and James got the short end of the stick?” I asked.
“Ah, James was like John the Baptist,” Father said. “John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus and James was one of the apostles; however, the Catholic church does not teach that James was Jesus’s brother.”
“That must have been pretty tough if James really was Jesus’s brother, especially if he was an older brother, taking orders from a snotty kid. And what about poor Judas Iscariot?” I said. “Why should he spend eternity in hell when it was preordained that he would give Jesus up to the Romans? Somebody had to do it?”
“If he’s in hell, and we don’t know for sure that he is,” Father said, “It’s because he hung himself. Everyone has a chance to repent. That’s why we have the sacrament of confession.”
I told them I’d read a chapter out of Tony’s biology book from high school, and it said that man evolved from the apes. “We sort of look like monkeys, and we have fingers like they do, and they kind of laugh like we do. I think that’s probably the way it happened.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Murphy said. “The church now teaches that God the Father set evolution in motion.”
“I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” I said. “And I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny when I was three. I don’t think I believe in this Jesus person either.”
“People were tortured and put to death during the Middle Ages for denying that Jesus was God.”
“Another reason not to believe,” I said.
Both of them looked like they were in the presence of a boy with horns and hooves, but neither “The Exorcist” or “Rosemary’s Baby” had been released yet, so I was safe for the moment.
To give them credit, neither of them went over the deep end and called in the Jesuits. They just tried harder, and since I liked them both so much, I pretended to be influenced. I went to my first confession and took my first communion and was a practicing Catholic until the Ecumenical Council destroyed my faith for good. I figured that if the Latin mass was good enough for two thousand years, why change?
I must’ve had an influence on Father Murphy, because, after he retired from the priesthood, he married his high school sweetheart. Sister Gervaise and I stayed in touch and sent each other Christmas cards (There are some religious traditions that I find charming; I also like the music and still attend high mass occasionally just to hear the choir sing) until the day she died. I went to her funeral. Sister Larian and Sister Norman were there. They were dressed in civilian clothes and looked like little old ladies just back from the beauty parlor; they even wore flowered dresses. Gone were Sister Larian’s furry eyebrows and yellowish-green eyes. Gone was Sister Norman’s mustache. Both of them pretended not to remember me. “You know, you have so many students through the years,” Sister Norman said. “You can’t possibly remember them all.” They’d denied me the pleasure of bragging about being a physics professor at the University of Minnesota despite their efforts to brand me as a no good. But I think they knew very well who I was. Sisters aren’t supposed to lie.

If you enjoyed "Prodigy with Hooves," Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP,is available on Amazon.com.

Shotgun Lovesongs

SHOTGUN LOVESONGS is about friendship in small town Little Wing, Wisconsin.

Four men, Hank, Lee, Kip, and Ronnie have known each other since elementary school. Hank, a farmer, is the only one who stayed. Kip is a stock broker in Chicago; Ronnie was a rodeo rider, until he got hurt during a bar fight; Lee is a world-renowned singer who thinks he’s still in love with Hank’s wife, Beth. A minor character observes that any of the boys could have married Beth as she was really the fifth friend in the group.

Kip decides to upgrade the town mill, which has seen better days; there’s water in the basement along with rats. His vision is a kind of general store with satellite businesses, but he goes overboard, spending too much money with not that much revenue. Kip gets married to a girl named Felicia, but he neglects to invite Ronnie, who’s kind of slow since he hurt his head. Lee goes ballistic, and Kip compounds the sin by inviting the paparazzi; they won’t leave Lee alone. Their friendship seems to be over.

The town of Little Wig will be recognizable to most rural Midwesterners. There’s one of those feed mills about ten miles away from where I live; the town won’t tear it down, despite the fact that there’s nothing in there. You will see one or two in just about every little town in southern Minnesota as that’s prime farm land with soil called “gumbo“. Before the dairy herds expanded, farmers would store their crops in these mills and ship them via the railroad.

Unfortunately Nickolas Butler runs out of gas toward the end. He includes a flashback right before the climax, something you don’t see too often. Lee also tells Hank something about Beth that no guy would ever tell his best friend. Butler must imagine that the reader will understand since Lee’s six month marriage to an actress has gone belly up, and he’s not all there. But still . . . Then there’s the pickled egg interlude. Hank hasn’t been speaking to Lee, and Lee imagines this goofy stunt will bring them closer together, but it sounds more like a fraternity prank than something two grown men would do. There’s just no suspension of disbelief. Pickled eggs are also common to small town bars, at least they once were. I’ve never seen anybody eat one. The impression is that they’ve been in the jar longer than the bar has been open.

Butler does have a facility with description. The guys climb to the top of the mill to watch the sunset, and Lee, the musician, can actually hear the colors, something Kip, the stock broker, can’t understand.

This book is kind of sad in that childhood friends drift away when they marry or move away. These guys (and the gal) are unusual in that they hang together, for the most part, despite the occasional squabble.

The Casebook

CASEBOOK is a rather strange book written by a former finalist for the Pen/Faulkner award. It’s a somewhat novelistic account of Miles Adler-Hart’s mother’s divorce and affair with a man named Eli. Miles is writing the book with his best pal, Hector.

We hear from Hector in the occasional footnote. Hector claims in one of them that he’s really the fat kid, and Miles is the spider-legged 98-pounder.

Eli is a liar, which would be apparent to anyone but a woman longing for what she once had, a regular family. This is strange because Irene’s ex-husband seems to be around more than the typical divorced husband, and they appear to be friends. Miles and Hector hire a detective to ferret the guy out. This is also hard to believe because he’s willing to do it for nothing. He later says he thought Irene’s friend was Miles’s mother, and she’s kind of hot.

Irene doesn’t seem to be the type to fall for this guy’s line; she a professor of mathematics for one thing. Her husband is a Hollywood lawyer; yet she needs to sell their former house and rent a newer, smaller one. She makes on the order of $90,000 a year and one would think her husband would kick in enough to pay for the house. I don’t remember her turning him down.

Hector is also a budding cartoonist and he and Miles concoct a comic book, based on the Irene/Eli affair. They’re a likable twosome; they join the gay rights group at school, and Miles sells soup to enhance his allowance. The school lunch is apparently deplorable. Somebody squeals on him and he has to give up on that scheme, but he and Hector soon acquire another one, finding homes for unwanted pets for a fee. Again they’re found out and they’re forced to give the money to an Animal Rights group, one of Eli’s favorite obsessions.

There’s some humor in the book; Miles feigns contempt for his younger twin sisters he calls Boop One and Boop Two. Even his mom has a nickname, Mims; she has a bunch of friends who’re hard to keep straight; one of them, Marge, another mathematician, marries Phillip, Hector’s dad.

I guess you could call this a coming of age novel as Miles has a girlfriend, Ella, that he worships on a pedestal, never really imagining she’d return his affection. There’s another girl, Maude, who is obviously smitten with him, but she’s just not the girl of his dreams.

If there’s a theme, it’s people are both good and bad; even Eli loves animals and seems to genuinely care about Irene, although he can’t seem to part with his wife or stop lying. About the nicest person in the book, is Ben Orion, the P.I., who does what he does because he sees Miles and Hector as human beings, not just goofy kids.

The Case of the One-eyed Border (short story)

My ma she had to take in a boarder when my dad died a year ago. She doesn’t have what you’d call a good-paying job, only about eight dollars an hour. She works at the drugstore here in our little town on the Upper Peninsula where it gets so damn cold you can spit, and I swear it’s true: you can see the gob freeze before it hits the ground. Everybody knows my ma. She’s like an eccentric aunt to most everybody cause she’s got candy on her all the time, that Christmas candy; I guess they call it hard candy, which I hate cause it hurts my teeth.



The boarder, Pete Lebeau is his name, had lived with us for a year before the events in this story transpired, and he had to be the coolest looking guy that ever hit town 'cause he always had this three day’s growth of whiskers, although I guess he must have shaved sometime cause if he hadn’t he’d have had a beard, and he wore this eye patch which made him look like a pirate. As I said, he’d been living upstairs on the third floor of our big old Victorian for a year, and he was working at the packing plant. He had supper with us every night, smelling like soap all the time 'cause they made the men take showers before they left at the plant. Never said much other than "yup" and "nope" and "all right" when ma tried to get him to talk. I think she liked him 'cause she was always giving him extra gravy just like in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, a book by Mr. Charles Dickens Mrs. Willembring made us read. The guy chewed with his mouth open, which grossed me out a bit, but he had the biggest mitts I’ve ever seen. One time I tried to put my hand next to his at the supper table on a night we were having ribs and sauerkraut. We usually have those on Thursdays and I swear his mitts were three times bigger than mine; he gave me that serial killer look when he seen me do that



I suppose you’re wondering why I’m writing this since there are very few teenagers who bother writing anything these days what with television and the movies and rock music and everything. Well, it’s all Mrs. Willembring’s fault. The guys all call her the walleye because of her protruding eyes and puckered lips, and they sit in the back and throw beebees at each other which I don’t do cause I get A’s in that class. Anyway, she showed us this book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about this detective who was addicted to heroin with a friend named Watson who was telling the story. Sherlock kept saying “That’s elementary, my dear Watson,” when he’d solved an especially difficult case. Suddenly that old saying, “No shit, Sherlock,” made a lot more sense. So I thought I’d try it, especially since I had my very own mystery to impart.



Only my Watson is a girl. I have this one special girl named Dolly, last name Payne, which is really appropriate let me tell you, who lives with her mom and little sister Bootsie in this run down shack on the edge of town. I guess you’d call it a tar paper shack since it’s falling down and everything. Dolly says they’re on relief. She’s not too embarrassed about it cause lots of people are on relief in this town which has lost most of its industry, and her being on relief certainly doesn’t bother me, her best friend. I kind of think she’s better off in a way, if you know what I mean. She appreciates things more when she gets them. She’s the oldest of only two kids, so her mom, who’s divorced, gets her whatever she needs. Anyhow, we’re best friends 'cause we both like weird things like astrology and the "X-files" and UFOs and now Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She wears bicycle shorts and work boots which make her look like that Russian skater I saw once on TV who had these skinny little legs and these big old skates and then she won and cried like she was gonna flood out the arena. Dolly is named after Dolly Parton. I suppose you’ve already guessed she hates that name so I call her different things depending on the mood I’m in. Right now I’m calling her horny cause of her hair style. She has long blond hair but she has these ringlets that fall down on each side of her forehead which look like horns.



Back to Pete Lebeau. One day we were studying chemistry at my house, or I should say we were supposed to be studying chemistry because I couldn’t think of nothing else except what Dolly had said to me a few days before. She said she was a virgin so far and that when she was ready she was going to go to bed with me 'cause in case something went wrong, and she’d heard that it sometimes did, she wanted the baby to be nice. Sure, it would probably have a big nose. Did I tell you her nickname for me is the Snoz? My name is really Montgomery after Field Marshal Montgomery. No, I’m lying to you. You shouldn’t believe everything I tell you actually. My name is Zeb not much of an improvement, short for Zebulon, as in Zebulon Pike. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I’m not very good at chemistry and Dolly is a straight A student. I guess I’m not good at science 'cause they don’t have any stories in science, just formulas and stuff.



Maybe if they’d let us blow something up. I like it on days we can make stink bombs but otherwise not. I did like a movie our teacher showed with this scientist Carl Sagan cause he made it interesting with that billions and billions and billions of stars thing that he did. I saw Johnny Carson do an impression of him once that had Dolly and me on the floor laughing our guts out which brings me back to Pete.



Dolly and me are studying chemistry or I should say she is and she catches me looking down her dress, and son a bitch, you should excuse my language, does she ever get mad. “If I want you to see my tits, I’ll show ‘em to you,” she says and I say “I’m sorry” and she says “Don’t let it happen again.” That was when the sheriff came to take Pete in for questioning. A little girl, Francis Witucki from the trailer court, a third grader whose mom works at the American Family Insurance office, another divorcee, had been snatched and the neighbors said there had been a suspicious looking van in the neighborhood. Pete drives this rusted out white van and since he’s such a loner he was a likely suspect. I found out later that Pete was on the sexual predator list which I didn’t know there even was one of those things. Dolly gets it in her head to search Pete’s room, and I tell her that my ma had told me when Pete moved in that if I ever snooped in that man’s room, she was going to cut off my tookis, whatever the hell that means, but I can guess. Dolly pushed me down and was up on the third floor looking though Pete’s drawers before I could even get up. “Damn, how can this guy live this way?” she says.



“What’s wrong with it?” I say.



“No pictures, just a crappy bureau and a lumpy bed, not even a shower in the bathroom.” Personally, I felt she had a lot of room to talk considering where she lived. “I don’t know what else a guy needs,” I said. “I plan on living spare myself when I grow up. I’m gonna get me a little cabin in the woods away from everybody.”



“Kind of like the Unabomber, huh?” she says. That was when I jumped her and started tickling her. I jump her a lot, which is an easy way to get a feel, but she hasn’t caught on yet, although you’d think she would know since I can’t exactly control myself, if you know what I mean. She hit me over the head with this book Old Pete had laying under his bed, something called THE BLUEJACKETS MANUAL. Dolly said that was a Navy kind of thing. She went back to searching his drawers, holding up a pack of condoms which I desperately wanted since I was afraid to ask the druggist, Mr. Archambault, for some cause he’d tell my mother sure as Pluto is a pitiful excuse for a planet. Before we could straighten up the room, Pete came home and caught us in his room, which was kind of a good thing cause it forced him to say more than yup and nope and all right. What he said was, “What you kids want?” That’s four whole words, and Dolly, who is really quick on the uptake, said, “You’ve got bugs and Mrs. Brown sent us up here to exterminate the bastards.” Would you believe Old Pete started laughing and pretty soon all three of us were cracking up. Dolly made a break for it when Pete hung his coat and hat up on a hook behind the door, and I was right on her tail, you should excuse the expression. We ran all the way to the pond which is a good three football fields away from my house before we stopped to get our breaths.



“He was laughing. He can’t be such a bad guy if he has a sense of humor,” I said.



“I wasn’t about to take any chances,” she said. “If you want to go back so’s he can cut you up into tiny little pieces and feed you to your mother’s fishes, be my guest.”



“Okay, answer this then,” I said. “If he kidnapped Francis, what the hell did he do with her. You saw his room.”



“You’re so stupid, Snoz. His room would be the first place the cops would look. He probably raped her in the van, cut her throat, and buried her in the woods. Nobody’d ever find her up here in the Upper Peninsula. We got more woods than Russia and they’ve got a lot of woods let me tell you. I should know. I read all three parts of the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. They made those prisoners cut down trees without axes.”



The woman was a reading fool. She kept these little round cards with the title and the author of the books you’ve read the elementary teachers used to string around the room in their reading competitions. According to Dolly she read a hundred and nine books last year, and I think she was probably telling the truth because she was always telling me about them. “Let’s go look at the van. Maybe there’s some blood,” I said.



“The man is a butcher, numbnuts,” she said.



“Yeah, but a forensic scientist can tell the difference between hog’s blood and a little girl’s.”



“Sure did Marcia and Chris a lot of good, didn’t it?” she said, referring to the OJ trial. “Ma should be home by now. If Pete’s a kidnapper, we’ve got to save her.” When we got back, ma and Pete were standing in front of our house and Ma was saying, “I don’t think you took that girl, Pete, but you know how it is in this town. He said he understood. He’d be all right. He’d rent a room at the Lakawanna Motel--that’s the sound a train makes if you didn’t know--until he could find another place. “You come back and see me when this blows over, Pete,” Ma said. “You were never late with your rent and you always kept the place clean. I feel terrible about this.”



A week later little Tammy Widenbach, Father Mallory’s housekeeper’s daughter, went to the Piggly Wiggly to get a quart of milk and never came back. They found her body in a dumpster behind the Chicken Lickin. Some of the customers said they saw her talking to a man driving a white van, and Pete had showed up for work the next day with scratches on his face. This time they arrested him. Dolly felt bad about running away the time he’d laughed about her exterminator lie. She insisted there was no way he was guilty, so we went to see him in jail. We got in to see him cause Dolly’s second cousin Willard is a deputy sheriff and cause Pete didn’t have any relatives. I was the closet thing he had to one. “What happened to your eye?” Dolly asked. This was something I’d been trying to get him to tell me for a whole year now. I’d also hounded him to show me how to kill the cows at the packing plant, but he’d always looked at me like I had a third eye in the middle of my forehead.



“The war,” Pete said.



“Did yah get shot in the eye?” I asked. “Bayonet,” Pete saw.



“Eew,” Dolly went.



“Can I see it?” I said. When Pete lifted his patch, the thing looked just like an asshole, I swear. Not that I’ve seen that many assholes. Dolly thought she was going to throw up, so she went to the bathroom quick before she would do it right there in the little room with the partition down the middle, and the plexiglass separating the prisoner from the visitors.



When she came back, she asked, “How’d you get the scratch?”



“I fell on the ice,” Pete said, another new record for him. Five words that time.



“That doesn’t sound like much of an alibi,” I said. He shrugged.



“Which war was that?” Dolly asked, which I thought was a pretty stupid question, considering the only war of note we’d been in was Vietnam. “D’yah kill anybody?” I asked.



“Which time?” he said.



“In the war. Whatya think I meant?” I said. “Thought you meant that little girl,” he said, another new record.



“Nah, you didn’t do that,” Dolly said. “A killer would have drawn and quartered us when he caught us in his room, like they used to do to robbers during the middle ages. That’s what they did to that William Wallace guy that Braveheart was about. So, what’re you doing on that sexual predators list?” she asked. “You don’t look like a rapist to me.”



“What does a rapist look like?” he asked.



“Not like you,” she said.



I wondered what she could have been thinking. If anybody looked like a rapist it was Pete, what with that eye patch, the three-day growth of beard, and the King Kong hands.



“You sure are a nosey little thing, pretty though,” Pete said. She blushed. I’d never seen her blush before. “You’re too young to hear about it,” he said. “Weren’t any little girl though.”



“You just better tell me right now, Pete LeBeau,” she said, “or I won’t come see you anymore.”



“Oh, in that case,” he laughed and smiled the biggest smile ever. It lit up his face and made him look almost human. You could tell he already loved her almost as much as I did, if that’s possible. “I didn’t even know I was still on that list,” Pete said. “You’d think there’d be some kind of statute of limitations or something if a prostitute says you raped her. Sometimes the jury believes the woman and you go on the sexual predators list, but that’s a far cry from kidnapping little girls.” Old Pete had strung so many words together that time he’d probably used up his quota.



Sheriff Russell found some skin under little Tammy Wiedenbach’s fingernails and sent it to the BCA lab in Lansing just as some of the men began gathering under the window of the jail, talking about taking Pete out and stringing him up if he didn’t tell where Francis was, something that hadn’t happened on the Upper Peninsula since 1911. But before they could do anything, the lab results came back and Sheriff Russell made a public announcement saying that the blood under Tammy’s nails did not match Pete’s blood type, and the lynch mob should leave Pete the fuck alone, his words not mine, since I’d never use the “f” word in polite company. My mom would kill me. But Pete got kicked out of the Lakawanna anyway, and the sheriff had to let him sleep in a cell at the jail since he couldn’t find any other place to live and since the sheriff wouldn’t let him leave town. When the packing company fired Pete, the sheriff went to talk to Mr. Thornton, the manager of the plant. I hear he chewed him out about everyone being innocent until proven guilty, but the manager wouldn’t hire Pete back.



Both of the girls who’d been taken were third graders and Dolly’s little sister, Bootsie, was in that class. Guess who’s got to watch her every place she goes? Dolly said there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between Dolly and Bootsie who had to wear all of Dolly’s hand-me-downs some of which were way too big for her. Bootsie had her hair cut like a boy’s, to save money I guess. She had big old owl’s eyes that never blinked. “The milkman’s child,” Dolly always called her.



The first night after Pete had been cleared because his blood didn’t match, Dolly and me had to take Bootsie to a skating party. Bootsie wanted to know if we two ever played kissie face. Dolly told her to shut up or she’d wash her face in the snow. “I’ll tell ma on you,” Bootsie said. “She always gets two eggs for breakfast, and I only get one.”



“Who washes all the dishes?” Dolly said.



I decided right then and there I was never gonna have any kids. When Bootsie got her skates on, they were too big, and she had to wear several pair of wool socks to get them to fit. Dolly said, “We’re gonna have to find that killer ourselves. I got a couple ideas.”



“Dennis Kornblat,” I said.



“How’d you know?” she said.



Dennis Kornblat had been the third grade teacher for twenty years, still unmarried, living with his mother. He sang “Nearer My God to Thee” on his way to work every day. All the third grade boys could impersonate Old Cornhole. When I’d been in his class, one time he’d been reading us this story “The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow” and the boys were all laughing so hard the snot was flying out of their noses cause Old Cornhole could’ve been that Ichabod Crane guy’s twin brother. Cornhole got pissed and called in Principal Woodlace who gave Gus Trimble, the principal instigator according to Cornhole, thirty whacks with the Board of Education. The Czechs, Poles, Bohemians, and Canucks who lived on the Upper Peninsula held no truck with misbehaving children. They laughed when other places did away with corporal punishment. They insisted on it. I remember the boys started counting when Woodpecker got to the tenth whack under their breaths, but you could still hear it. We all loved to see people suffer, providing it was somebody else of course. Gus blamed me for that, and I got beat up on the playground. Gus had a good twenty pounds on me.



“I seen Cornhole checking out the gay magazines at the drugstore,” I told Dolly.



“Didn’t neither,’ she said.



“Did so,” I said.



“You just wanna get even with him for that time you got spanked in front of the whole class,” she said.



“No, I never,” I said. “That was Gus Trimble.



“That’s right,” she said. “You got beat up for laughin’ while Woodpecker laid into Gus.”



“I’m not so sure Cornhole did it,” I said. “He likes boys.”



The other big story on the Upper Peninsula was the pending sale of the packing plant to a consortium of Koreans. There was a lot of racist talk going around about that since many of the men in town had been in the Korean War. Others said that Korean owners were better than no owners. Pete got a job digging graves, and my mother made me take him hot dish at the jail cause she was feeling guilty about kicking him out of the house. Bud Gault at the Gault Used Car Lot repossessed his van. I couldn’t see any reason why Bud would want the van if it belonged to a killer of little girls. Probably thought he could sell it out of town.



Dolly and I went to the Sadie Hawkins dance that Friday night. The school gym was all decorated with hay bales, and the kids had to come dressed as Hillbillies. Kind of tough in thirty below zero weather. We sat out all the dances talking until they played “Wipe Out.” Dolly always made a fool of herself on the dance floor, but I didn’t mind cause she was flopping all over the place in all the right places, if you know what I mean. When “Wipe Out” was over, we sat and talked about the kidnapping. No children had disappeared in the last week or so, probably cause the mothers were freaking out and had somebody watching their kids at all times. “I’m thinking we ought to find out who else owns a white van,” Dolly said.



“Don’t you think the police have already thought of that,” I said. What, do you think, they’re stupid?”



“Yeah,” she said, “They hired my second cousin Willard as a deputy, didn’t they?”



“The DMV can probably find out who else drives a white van in the area pretty easily,” I said. “Why don’t you ask Willard if they’ve done that?”



“I’ve got another idea,” she said. “I think the murderer knows those girls very well. He knows where they’ll be at all hours of the day, and he’s somebody like Dennis Kornblat, who we’d never suspect.”



“But everybody suspects Cornhole,” I said.



“Willard says the sheriff says Dennis has an alibi. He was playing bingo the night Francis Witucki disappeared, and practicing with the church choir when Tammy got taken.”



“Alibi smalibi,” I said. “I think we ought to follow him. I’ll bet even Ted Bundy had an alibi. I read someplace that your killers always have a good alibi cause they know they’re gonna need one.”



“I need to dance with Henry,” she said. Henry was her real boyfriend. Girls on the Upper Peninsula don’t go out with boys in their own grade, and Henry was a senior and the leading scorer on the Hadley Hawks hockey team. Dolly and Henry had had a fight, and I was here to make him jealous.



“I wouldn’t do this to you, Snoz, but I need Henry to help me get the team to follow those third grade girls everywhere they go. I checked and there are only thirteen girls in that class, minus two, of course, and we’re watching Bootsie, so that only leaves ten. When he tries to take another girl, we’re gonna be there right on top of him, and you and I are gonna get our pictures in the Detroit newspaper and maybe be on “The Today Show.”



She was given to these wild flights of the imagination. You had to love her though; she had such a cute little overbite, which became exaggerated when she was stressed. Sometimes I called her Buggs, but she hated that one even worse than Dolly, so I had to be awfully displeased with her before I’d use it.



Nothing happened for a good week, and you know how teenagers are. It was actually pretty impressive that Dolly got those hockey players to follow those little girls around from the time they got up in the morning, slogged through the snow to Tom Harmon Elementary School, their little backpacks slung over their shoulders, until they were safely tucked away in their featherbeds. But then, horny and gluttonous teenagers that they were, they began to be lured away to the fast food hangouts where their girlfriends were flipping burgers, or else they just plain lost interest. Since they didn’t have the largest attention spans in the first place, being hockey players, most of them had taken at least one puck in the head, the murderer must have seen the red and black letter jackets following little girls all over town, and he was biding his time.



Sometimes I underestimate people. Just because Pete never said much, I’d always thought he was kind of stupid. But, au contraire, Pete had been doing a little investigating of his own. One thing Dolly and I hadn’t thought of was that there were five girls in Bootsie’s third grade class who were Baptists, and both Tammy and Francis had belonged to that church. Pete picked up on this right away since he went to the Baptist church on Sundays. I had no idea Pete even believed in God, what with his swarthy Mephistophelean, that’s the devil for the uninitiated, kisser. Our town had four churches: Catholic, Lutheran, Assembly of God, and Baptist. Pretty damn many considering it’s such a small burg. Only Pete didn’t tell me and Dolly anything about the five Baptist girls, and when the hockey players stopped watching, Pete was still on the job. You’d think that someone would have reported Pete stalking those girls, but Pete must have been able to stay in the shadows cause nobody ever did until the night Bootsie got snatched.



This is how the whole thing went down. Nothing had happened for a good two months, except that the packing plant closed when the Koreans decided not to buy and real estate signs started popping up like dandelions in springtime, but most everyone else seemed to forget about the murder and the kidnapping. You know how people are; they want to get back to normal. And the sheriff was saying that the kidnapper had been a transient, probably because he didn’t have any clues and didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about finding the culprit. Dolly’s mom had kept Bootsie at home pretty much, and the poor little thing had cabin fever, complaining so much that finally Mrs. Payne agreed that it was okay for her to go sledding with the other third graders at Crazyhorse Hill, providing Dolly went along to watch her. Dolly bitched and moaned, and finally, cause misery loves company, she made me sharpen the runners on Bootsie’s Red Ryder Flyer and come along as assistant chaperone.



We were standing at the top of the hill drinking hot chocolate, watching Bootsie and her friends go up and down the hill twenty or thirty times. I remember telling Dolly about my horoscope that morning, which said I was going to go into a profession that embraced danger. Of course, she got smart about it and suggested that could mean I was going to be a Crash Test dummy. She also told me that she’s slept with her boyfriend and I felt almost suicidal. That was when Bootsie’s sled went over the road and into the trees. I remember being impressed by Pete, who was driving up and down, doing one bang up job plowing the road in front of the hill. He’d taken that job to supplement his grave digging income obviously. I remember he had a load of stove wood in the back of his truck which was awfully peculiar. The wood kept falling off the bed of the truck. Anyway, Bootsie’s Red Ryder Flyer went over the road and into the woods and shortly thereafter, a plumbing van came driving out of the little road that leads into the woods. The van turned right and drove on past the road which leads to the top of the sledding hill. That was when Pete in the truck with the snowplow attachment came rocketing out of nowhere. He was zigzagging left and right cause he was doing about fifty mph on the ice, and he runs that van right off the road, pulls this guy out of the truck and starts whaling on him like the hockey team does when they get into a brawl with the Ypsilanti Malamutes. Bootsie jumps out of the van, and she starts kicking the guy who’s down in the snow and bleeding. Dolly and me are doing our level best to slide down the hill, which isn’t too easy considering we ain’t got any boots on or anything. Boots are uncool you know. That’s when Willard shows up with the squad car and makes Pete stop hitting the guy. He lets Bootsie kick him a few more times. When we get down there, we realize it’s Manley Graham, the Baptist minister, and he’s swearing up and down he was just taking Bootsie to the top of the hill. Nobody believes him, and Willard takes him off to jail. We take Bootsie home, and Mrs. Payne lays into Bootsie with a willow switch cause she’s been told never to take a ride from strangers. “Weren’t no stranger, Ma,” she said. “It was only Manley Graham.” Bootsie is raising all kinds of hell, not so much cause she’s getting switched but cause she’s wanting to go with us to the jail to find out what’s happening. When we get to the jail, Pete tells us how he’d suspected Manley Graham all along. It seems Graham was the chaplain at the VFW, and every time he’d give one of his invocations at an armistice day event or whatever, Pete would get the creeps, just an eerie feeling he had about the man, like there was something wrong with the way he preached. “He said the angel Gabriel threw Adam out of Paradise for one thing,” Pete said. “A minister ought to know that was Michael that done that.” The man was becoming a regular blathermouth, and I wasn’t so sure it was an improvement. Seems like Pete was born a Baptist in Alabama and had always gone to church when he was a boy, although he’d lapsed some these days.



Willard says he’s gonna go out and check out Graham’s farm. Maybe he can find the body of the first girl. Dolly starts raising hell about going along. The sheriff is away in Lansing at some law enforcement convention, so Willard, who can never say no to Dolly, says it’s okay. He doesn’t think anything can happen since they’ve got the killer locked up in the jail in the basement. Dolly calls her ma and tells her she’s needed at the sheriff’s office, that she’ll be home in a couple of hours. The woman actually believes her.



Graham lives on a horse farm way out in the middle of the toolies. He’s got a mailbox with a silhouette of a horse on it. Two gray horses with black legs, I guess you’d call them roans, are nibbling grass through the snow. You’d think they’d be in the barn this late at night. In the next pen, there’s a goat. He’s just staring at us with his yellow eyes. He gives me the creeps. There’s a snowman with a red knit cap, coal eyes, and a carrot nose in Graham’s yard. Off to the left of the house, is a swingset and beyond that is an old building mostly burned down. Behind the house is a little brick structure. The house is made of logs. There are no power lines leading to the house. Damn! A brick shithouse, that’s what the brick thing was. As Willard is opening the front door with a set of keys he got off Graham, a dog attacks. A frickin’ Doberman pinscher. Willard blows him away with his Saturday Night Special. Dolly kicks Willard in the shins. She says the dog was only doing what he’d been trained to do. When we get inside we find a whole lot of photographic equipment, a cash of porno magazines and letters from all over the country. The basement door is locked, and none of the keys fit, so Willard and Pete break it down. Graham has a little jail down there, and we find Francis Witucki playing with her Barbie dolls.



It’s been a year since all this happened. Turns out Graham never was a real minister. Shows how gullible people are. My life is the pits. Would you believe my mother met Dennis Kornblat at a church supper, and they’re actually going out. I gave Dolly the silent treatment once all the commotion settled down. Then she told me that she’d been lying about going to bed with Henry just to see how I’d react. What’s a guy supposed to believe? I’m happy for Pete though. He’d done such a good job running down Graham when nobody else seemed to have a clue, including me and Dolly, that the sheriff had to give him a job as deputy or lose the next election.



I think I’m gonna be a detective when I grow up or else I’ll deal cards in the new casino that’s opening just outside of town.



A full-length novel by Dave Schwinghammer, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Amazon.com, new or used.

The Skin Collector

Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series has been a favorite of mine since the BONE COLLECTOR. And now he’s back with another collector, this time the SKIN COLLECTOR, seemingly about a tattoo artist who poisons people.

When Deaver includes a seemingly innocuous scene about the Watchmaker‘s funeral, you should pay particular attention. Lincoln sends his worthy enemy flowers, but of course he doesn’t trust him, so he sends Ron Pulaski to see who shows up. The Watchmaker’s lawyer does, and he files a harassment complaint. This plot thread then disappears, so you should smell a rat.

The main plot involves a tattooist named Billy Haven who seems to be sending Lincoln and crew a message. His first victim’s stomach is etched with the words “the second”. There’s no evidence of rape or any other motive involved. When Lincoln discovers a book with a chapter on the Bone Collector, mentioning Lincoln himself, he naturally assumes he’s dealing with a serial killer. Like John Sanford, Deaver gives us occasional glimpses of Haven’s machinations; hence we know his name. He also hints at what’s to come.

This is a masterful book in respect to what Lincoln, Sachs and the others can do with trace evidence. For instance they find bits of marble which lead them to a hospital addition, just in time to foil another murder. But the killer gets away and kills again, and we are given several other numbers for Lincoln to figure out.

We also learn lots of arcane information about the art of tattooing and what it means to various people who get them, thanks to two “experts” Lincoln brings in to discuss what’s going on. This guy is good, they say; he does things in minutes that would take others at least an hour.

Meanwhile the killer tattooist makes several attempts on the lives of the team, Rhyme and Sachs included. We know this won’t work, but Lon Sellitto does take a hit. There's also a sub plot involving Sachs' foster daughter Pam that also means more than it seems at first.

Okay, my gripe with this book is that it’s overcooked. Nothing is as it seems. All of a sudden we get one of Deaver’s patented wild twists, and we’ve got an entirely different plot, and then it changes again. At the end Lincoln is reveling in some new trace evidence he’s found, involving the last of the twists. In other words, what we have here is a cliffhanger. I personally despise cliffhangers; if this wasn’t the Rhyme series, I wouldn’t read the next book.

It's Not Easy Being Green (short story)

An old man chewing an unlit cigar was waiting in one of the red vinyl lounge chairs to get his hair cut. He shifted the cigar from one side of his plum-colored mouth to the other as he perused the Kenosha Journal, then peered past the paper to check the progress of Hank Trutwin’s Mohawk haircut. He made a sour face, as if he’d just realized the cigar he was chewing tasted like rat turds, which it must have if Hank was any judge. The old man pulled his fedora down over his eyes to block out what he was seeing in the barber chair, grumbling something unintelligible to himself.

"What’s that you say, Vic?" Willie, the barber, said, smiling mischievously.

"Said my old man would’ve beat me black and blue if I’d come home lookin’ like that."

"Stick around, Vic. We ain’t half finished yet. Wants a dye job, too." Willie flexed his bicep and the hula dancer on his forearm did a little wiggle, something that had made Hank laugh when he’d been six or so.

"Gonna dye it blond like that Madonna girl I suppose," the old man said.

"Green," the barber said, "like Kermit the Frog." He winked at the old codger when he thought Hank wasn’t paying attention.

"What’s got into you, boy?" the codger said.

Just then a peal of thunder jolted the small building and seconds later the lights dimmed. Rain began to bead against the window facing Main Street.

"Somethin’ different," Hank said, not wanting to get into a soliloquy about how he was tired of being called a geek.

"Thought you was one of the good ones," Willie said. "Your dad says you were on the A honor roll last semester."

"I was," Hank said. "That’s just it." Hank had not only been on the A honor roll last semester; he’d had all A’s on his report card ever since first grade.

"Tired of being called the teacher’s pet," Willie said, pushing Hank’s head down in the sink. "I can understand that. Nobody likes a pinhead."

He didn’t know the half of it. The other kids called Hank "T.P." for short. Fourteen years old and he’d never had a date. Even his best friend Belinda wouldn’t go out with him, and they’d been best buddies since kindergarten. Said she had her reputation to protect among the Freaks.

The old man struck a wooden match on the soul of his slipper and lit the soggy cigar, the smell of burning rope sucking the air out of Hank’s lungs. It had to be at least eighty degrees; and yet the old duffer was wearing a tweed sports coat over a flannel shirt, buttoned at the throat, and pleated woolen pants. Slippers instead of shoes. And he thought Hank was weird!

When the dye job was done, Willie slapped stinging, pungent witch hazel on Hank’s bald spot and handed him the mirror. "How’s that?" Willie said.

Even green hair couldn’t change the doe eyes and thick lashes, or toughen the full lips and rosy cheeks that made Hank look even younger than his fourteen years. The haircut was a dismal failure, but he wasn’t about to admit it with the old duffer sitting there in the vinyl red chair, acting like he’d never watched a Chicago Bulls basketball game. Dennis Rodman didn’t stop at green. He had his hair colored all the colors in the rainbow, plus some. Green was all Hank could afford.

"That’ll be thirty bucks," the barber said.

Hank felt as though he’d just been punched in the stomach. He didn’t have enough money. Willie had said the dye job would be ten dollars, and haircuts were usually nine. He must have charged extra for the Mohawk.

"All I’ve got is twenty," Hank said.

Willie squinted at Hank, his receding red hair kinking up in the humid weather. "Mohawks don’t come cheap, son. You can work it off, sweep up after the customers."

"But I’ve got to go to school," Hank said.

Willie chuckled, clapped Hank on the back, then lowered the chair with a clunk. "Just giving you the razzberries, Hank. If you wanna get your hair dyed green, you’re gonna have to learn how to take it. Your dad can pay me when he comes in next week. The man is as regular as a morning dump."

The old duffer slapped his knee and the cigar popped out of his mouth and rolled over under the chair where it was soiled with hair the barber hadn’t had time to sweep up yet. The old duffer looked shocked. Served him right. The whole family was a laughing stock it seemed. Henry handed over the twenty and scuffed through the clippings out into the street, the chimes jingling as he shut the door.

Standing under the awning next to the candy-cane barber pole waiting for the rain to let up, Hank cogitated over his newest problem. He was pretty sure his old man would never pay the extra ten dollars for the Mohawk and the dye job and that was all the money Hank had from his grandmother’s birthday present. "Do something foolish with the money," she’d scrawled inside the card. Well, he guessed he’d done that all right.

If Hank could be more like his hero Jack Kerouac, Belinda just might have her eyes opened to the stud he really was. He’d been reading On the Road by Kerouac, and unlike the jocks, who all wanted to be like Mike, Hank wanted to act like Jack. The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved . . . the ones who never yawn . . . but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars was how Kerouac had put it. Hank’d racked his brain for a way to become such a person, but he hadn’t been able to think of anything other than the haircut to show his true self.

When the rain let up some, Hank stepped out from beneath the awning. He was about to cross the street when he was blinded with the yellow glare of headlights on bright, and a massive Oldsmobile bumped up against the curb, barely missing him, splashing him with mud and water. The Oldsmobile stopped at a light, and a jumbo-sized dude in a purple and yellow Hawaiian shirt shifted over on the passenger side and rolled down his window spitting vitriol. "Fuckin’ faggot. Get off the goddamned street," he bawled, then stomped on the accelerator, burning rubber when the light changed to green.

Must be that road rage Hank had been hearing so much about. Hank took out his blue felt pen and jotted down the man’s license number in his notebook, as he had innumerable times during his days on the safety patrol when some fool had ignored the flags.

Back at school, Hank sat in the office waiting to turn in his permission slip. Bennie Cade, a senior wrestler, plopped down next to him, draping his beefy arm around Hank’s shoulder. "You look like personified green snot, shrimp. You’re gonna need protection. Gimme all your money and I’ll keep the other jocks away from you."

"That’s extortion, Bennie," Hank said. "I can’t pay you."

"The name’s Mr. Cade to you, shrimp."

There was a knock on the counter. Mrs. Bonner, the secretary. "Leave that boy alone, you big lummox," she said. "If I see you bothering him again, I’ll squeeze your head like a zit."

Bennie flinched like Bluto up against Popeye gobbling a can spinach. "You’ve got me wrong, Mrs. Bonner. Just counseling the boy is all."

Mrs. Bonner snorted. "If that’s true , I’m the Queen of Sheba."

Bennie snuck Hank a wait-till-next-time look and got up to leave.

Hank went to the counter, handed over his permission slip. "Nice haircut," Mrs. Bonner said, giving her gum a good workout. "I can’t get my boys to do anything with their hair," she said. "When they were babies I set it in curls and everything. They were the cutest things, looked like little cherubs. Everybody thought they were girls. These days they go for those awful buzz cuts."

Back in class, Mr. Abbott, Hank’s bearded social studies teacher scratched his chin, peeked at Hank out of the corner of his eye when Hank gave him his late pass. These days you could show up in class naked and the teachers would never let on they noticed. Hank figured it had something to do with the self-esteem mandate his homeroom teacher was always yapping about.

"Love your hair," Belinda said as Hank took his seat toward the rear. Lately, he hadn’t been paying much attention in class, and the back of the room was where the kids sat who never did their homework. These days Belinda sported nose rings in both nostrils and black, witch-like hair streaked with fire-engine red. And he was pretty sure she was doing drugs. Hank had been trying to score some marijuana for the last week, but no one would take him up on it. "What are you, a narc?" was the usual response. Maybe now they’d take him seriously.

Hank put his head down and tried to go to sleep as two other boys were doing, but he couldn’t do it. Never took naps during the day, and despite himself, he became absorbed in Mr. Abbott’s lecture. It was about Guatemala.

Mr. Abbott had assumed his lecture mode, sitting on a stool, dreamily staring out the window, seemingly talking to himself. "Guatemala is a beautiful country, third largest republic in Central America," he said. "There are volcanic mountains and lakes and jungles. Pristine little villages in those mountains with villagers descended from the Mayans. You can find evidence of Mayan civilization in Pet’en, the jungle area. And the animals! You’ve never seen such animals. Besides domesticated animals, one might find deer, monkeys, and peccaries, which resemble pigs. Also jaguars, which are important in Mayan mythology, tapirs, and pumas. The official language is Spanish, but twenty different Indian dialects are spoken. Despite the beauty, malnutrition is a national problem. The rural population lives in mud huts."

Belinda yawned, blurted: "What’s this got to do with us, Mr. A.?"

Mr. Abbott sputtered, turned an unhealthy shade of yellowish-orange, couldn’t seem to rouse himself from his lecture stupor.

Before he really knew what he was saying, Hank followed up on Belinda’s comment. "Yeah, how are we gonna use this when we get out of school?"

At that point the bell rang, and like a herd of suicidal lemmings, the thirty or so teenagers pushed and shoved their way out the narrow door, tramping several unfortunates in the process.

"I’d like to see you for a moment if I may, Hank," Mr. Abbott said, as Hank, whose manners hadn’t deserted him, waited for the crowd to thin.

Mr. Abbott scowled down at him, scratched his chin. "I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your last test, Hank. You’re one of the smartest students I’ve ever had and suddenly you’re not applying yourself. And that comment about Guatemala . . . I mean, you know better than that. Come with me. I want to show you something."

"Sorry, Mr. A. Woman problems. You know how it is."

Mr. Abbott raised one eyebrow, stuffed his papers and books into a battered mahogany briefcase, and Hank followed him to his office--no more than a closet, the furniture a desk, two hardbacked chairs and a telephone. The walls were painted battleship gray and there was a jungle print on the wall above the desk.

"I think I know what’s bothering you, Hank," Mr. Abbott said, pointing to one of the hardbacked chairs.

Hank sat on the edge, nibbling on what was left of his fingernails.

"It’s hard to be a straight arrow," Mr. Abbott said. "I should know, I was class valedictorian. I wouldn’t have been, however, if Brother Harold hadn’t taken a paddle to me. He practically killed me when I smarted off to him one day."

"There’s something to be said for corporal punishment I guess," Hank said.

Mr. Abbott chuckled, then lit his pipe with his flame-thrower of a lighter. He sat on the edge of his desk, rubbing his eyes. Bluish-black bags were beginning to form under them. The man obviously needed sleep.

"Belinda’s question was really a very important one, Hank. I’m sorry we ran out of time. What does Guatemala have to do with you do you suppose, Hank?"

"I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything, Mr. Abbott."

"I spent a year in Guatemala after I graduated college, working for the Peace Corps. If you’d been there with me, you’d know what Guatemala has to do with you."

"What did you do there, Mr. Abbott?"

"At first we built latrines, but then the villagers began to pester us about stoves. You see, the women cook over open fires. And, you know, that’s not good in a mud hut. Because of carbon monocide. Emphysema is a leading cause of death among women."

Mr. Abbott reached in a drawer, tossed a colorful pamphlet in Hank’s lap. It was a brochure for something called Global Volunteer Resources.

Mr. Abbott drew on his pipe and exhaled. The smoke had kind of a rum smell to it. He pointed the pipe stem at Hank. "I think you might be interested in that. It’s a summer program where you work on the cooperative farms in the rain forest."

Hank flipped through the small pamphlet, not really paying any attention to what he was looking at. "I don’t know what gave you the idea . . . What’s it like in Guatemala anyway?"

"Idyllic. No phones. No transportation, outside of mules and horses. Everybody’s poor. Most were proud to own a portable radio. I don’t know why I left. When I finally did, the whole town came out to say goodbye. We built those stoves for less than $50 a piece. What do you pay for a shirt these days, Hank?"

"Something like that."

"And you don’t appreciate it either, do you? We took pictures of the villagers before we left. They got dressed in their best clothes, combed their hair. The people said they’d pray for us every day of their lives. I’ve never felt so exhilerated."

"Kind of like when you dish out food at the Salvation Army, huh? My mom made me do that a few years ago."

"Multiply that feeling by a hundred," Mr. Abbott said, knocking the pipe out in an ashtray.

"I heard they had guerilla fighters down there in Guatemala," Hank said.

"You heard right, but don’t go looking for an excuse not to do this, Hank, cause you’ll find one if you do. Those guerillas are poor, just like the people you’ll be helping. They just want social justice is all."

"Why’d you come back, Mr. A.?"

"No guts, I guess. And there was a girl I was going with at the time who wasn’t too happy with the year I wasted, as she put it. She wasn’t about to put up with any extension."

"You’re single, right?"

"Yeah, by the time I got back, she’d found her medical student."

"Ever see her again?"

"Oh, sure, during reunions. She hasn’t changed a bit."

"You were hoping she’d put on weight, right?"

"You’re psychic, boy. What’s that book you’ve got there?"

"Jack Kerouac. On the Road. Heard of it?"

"Heard of it? I practically wrote it. Neil Cassidy. Mexican jungles. What do you think turned me on to Guatemala in the first place?"

"Jeez, I’d forgotten that part."

"You gotta go out there and experience life if you expect a girl like Belinda to notice you, Hank. Like Kerouac says, ‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.’"

"Wow! What a coincidence. That’s my favorite quote in the whole world. You know what, Mr. A.? I think I might be interested in this Global Volunteer Resources. Green hair certainly isn’t doing much for me. How long does it take for hair dye to wear off?"

"Looks permanent to me. You know you look like one of those little troll dolls, don’t you?"

"That bad, huh?"

When Hank was gone, Mr. Abbott yawned, stretched, looked at his watch. Ten minutes till his next class. Some kind of bullshit about that girl who threw him over for a medical student. It took an accomplished liar to salvage them these days.