Also on the wall of this little boy who will soon be the Fisherman’s fourth victim (yes, there has already been a third, as we have seen), holding pride of place directly over his bed, is a travel poster showing a great dark castle at the end of a long and misty meadow. At the bottom of the poster, which he has Scotch-taped to the wall (his mom absolutely forbids pushpins), it says COME BACK TO THE AULD SOD in big green letters. Ty is considering taking the poster down long enough to cut this part off. He doesn’t like the poster because he has any interest in Ireland; to him the picture whispers of somewhere else, somewhere Entirely Else. It is like a photograph of some splendid mythical kingdom where there might be unicorns in the forests and dragons in the caves. Never mind Ireland; never mind Harry Potter, either. Hogwarts is fine enough for summer afternoons, but this is a castle in the Kingdom of Entirely Else. It’s the first thing Tyler Marshall sees in the morning, the last thing he sees at night, and that’s just the way he likes it.
He lies curled on his side in his underwear shorts, a human comma with tousled dark blond hair and a thumb that is close to his mouth, really just an inch or so away from being sucked. He is dreaming—we can see his eyeballs moving back and forth behind his closed lids. His lips move . . . he’s whispering something . . . Abbalah? Is he whispering his mother’s word? Surely not, but . . .
We lean closer to listen, but before we can hear anything, a circuit in Tyler’s jazzy red clock-radio goes hot, and all at once the voice of George Rathbun fills the room, calling Tyler hence from whatever dreams have been playing themselves out under that tousled thatch.
“Fans, you gotta listen to me now, how many times have I told you this? If you don’t know Henreid Brothers Furniture of French Landing and Centralia, then you don’t know furniture. That’s right, I’m talking Henreid Brothers, home of the Colonial Blowout. Living-room sets dining-room sets bedroom sets, famous names you know and trust like La-Z-Boy, Breton Woods and Moosehead, EVEN A BLIND MAN CAN SEE THAT HENREID BROTHERS MEANS QUALITY!”
Ty Marshall is laughing even before he’s got both eyes fully open. He loves George Rathbun; George is absolutely fly.
And now, without even changing gears from the commercial: “You guys are all ready for the Brewer Bash, ain’tcha? Sent me those postcards with your name, address, and el teléfono on ’em? Hope so, because the contest closed at midnight. If you missed out . . . so solly, Cholly!”
Ty closes his eyes again and mouths the same word over three times: Shit, shit, shit. He did forget to enter, and now he can only hope that his dad (who knows how forgetful his son can be) remembered and entered the contest for him.
“Grand prize?” George is saying. “ONLY the chance for you or the fav-o-rite young person of your acquaintance to be the Brew Crew’s batboy or batgirl for the entire Cincinnati series. ONLY the chance to win an aut-o-graphed Richie Sexson bat, the LUMBER that holds the LIGHTNING! Not to mention fifty free seats on the first-base side with me, George Rathbun, Coulee Country’s Traveling College of Baseball Knowledge. BUT WHY AM I TELLING YOU THIS? If you missed out, you’re too late. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly! Oh, I know why I brought it up—to make sure you tune in next Friday to see if I speak YOUR NAME over the radio!”
Ty groans. There are only two chances that George will speak his name over the radio: slim and none. Not that he cared so much about being a batboy, dressed in a baggy Brewers uni and running around in front of all those people at Miller Park, but to own Richie Sexson’s own bat, the lumber with the lightning . . . how boss would that’ve been?
Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early—it’s summer vacation, after all—and Tyler can’t seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It’s as if there’s some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.
What George Rathbun says next drives the remaining sleep-fog from Tyler’s brain—it’s like a dash of cold water. “Say there, Coulee, want to talk about the Fisherman?”
Tyler stops what he’s doing, an odd little chill running up his back and then down his arms. The Fisherman. Some crazy guy killing kids . . . and eating them? Well, he’s heard that rumor, mostly from the bigger kids down at the baseball field or at the French Landing Rec Center, but who would do something so gross? Cannibalism, ack!
George’s voice drops. “Now I’m going to tell you a little secret, so listen close to your Uncle George.” Tyler sits on his bed, holding his sneakers by the laces and listening closely to his Uncle George, as bidden. It seems odd to hear George Rathbun talking about a subject so . . . so unsporty, but Tyler trusts him. Didn’t George Rathbun predict that the Badgers would go to at least the Elite Eight two years ago, when everyone else said they’d get blown out in the first round of the Big Dance? Yeah, he did. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.
George’s voice drops further, to what is almost a confidential whisper. “The original Fisherman, boys and girls, Albert Fish, has been dead and gone for sixty-seven years, and s’far’s I know, he never got much west of New Jersey. Furthermore, he was probably a DAMYANKEE FAN! SO COOL IT, COULEE COUNTRY! JUST CAAAALM DOWN!”
Tyler relaxes, smiling, and starts putting on his sneakers. Calm down, you got that right. The day is new, and yeah, okay, his mom’s been a little on the Tinky Winky side lately, but she’ll pull out of it.
Let us leave on this optimistic note—make like an amoeba and split, as the redoubtable George Rathbun might say. And speaking of George, that ubiquitous voice of the Coulee Country morning, should we not seek him out? Not a bad idea. Let us do so immediately.
3
OUT TYLER’S WINDOW we go, away from Libertyville, flying southwest on a diagonal, not lingering now but really flapping those old wings, flying with a purpose. We’re headed toward the heliograph flash of early-morning sun on the Father of Waters, also toward the world’s largest six-pack. Between it and County Road Oo (we can call it Nailhouse Row if we want; we’re practically honorary citizens of French Landing now) is a radio tower, the warning beacon on top now invisible in the bright sunshine of this newborn July day. We smell grass and trees and warming earth, and as we draw closer to the tower, we also smell the yeasty, fecund aroma of beer.
Next to the radio tower, in the industrial park on the east side of Peninsula Drive, is a little cinder-block building with a parking lot just big enough for half a dozen cars and the Coulee patrol van, an aging Ford Econoline painted candy-apple pink. As the day winds down and afternoon wears into evening, the cylindrical shadows of the six-pack will fall first over the sign on the balding lawn facing the drive, then the building, then the parking lot. KDCU-AM, this sign reads, YOUR TALK VOICE IN COULEE COUNTRY. Spray-painted across it, in a pink that almost matches the patrol van, is a fervent declaration: TROY LUVS MARYANN! YES! Later on, Howie Soule, the U-Crew engineer, will clean this off (probably during the Rush Limbaugh show, which is satellite fed and totally automated), but for now it stays, telling us all we need to know about small-town luv in middle America. Looks like we found something nice after all.
Coming out of the station’s side door as we arrive is a slender man dressed in pleated khaki Dockers, a tieless white shirt of Egyptian cotton buttoned all the way to the neck, and maroon braces (they are as slim as he is, those braces, and far too cool to be called suspenders; suspenders are vulgar things worn by such creatures as Chipper Maxton and Sonny Heartfield, down at the funeral home). This silver-haired fellow is also wearing a very sharp straw fedora, antique but beautifully kept. The maroon hatband matches his braces. Aviator-style sunglasses cover his eyes. He takes a position on the grass to the left of the door, beneath a battered speaker that is amping KDCU’s current broadcast: the local news. This will be followed by the Chicago farm report, which gives him ten minutes before he has to settle in behind the mike again.