“Henry, are you going to be all right?”
“Yes,” Henry says, but to Jack he doesn’t seem entirely sure.
“No Rat tonight,” Jack tells him firmly.
“No.”
“Ditto the Shake, the Shook, the Sheik.”
Henry’s lips lift in a small smile. “Not even a George Rathbun promo for French Landing Chevrolet, where price is king and you never pay a dime of interest for the first six months with approved credit. Straight to bed.”
“Me too,” Jack says.
But an hour after lying down and putting out the lamp on his bedside table, Jack is still unable to sleep. Faces and voices revolve in his mind like crazy clock hands. Or a carousel on a deserted midway.
Tansy Freneau: Bring out the monster who killed my pretty baby.
Beezer St. Pierre: We’ll have to see how it shakes out, won’t we?
George Potter: That shit gets in and waits. My theory is that it never goes away, not really.
Speedy, a voice from the distant past on the sort of telephone that was science fiction when Jack first met him: Hidey-ho, Travelin’ Jack . . . as one coppiceman to another, son, I think you ought to visit Chief Gilbertson’s private bathroom. Right now.
As one coppiceman to another, right.
And most of all, over and over again, Judy Marshall: You don’t just say, I’m lost and I don’t know how to get back—you keep on going . . .
Yes, but keep on going where? Where?
At last he gets up and goes out onto the porch with his pillow under his arm. The night is warm; in Norway Valley, where the fog was thin to begin with, the last remnants have now disappeared, blown away by a soft east wind. Jack hesitates, then goes on down the steps, naked except for his underwear. The porch is no good to him, though. It’s where he found that hellish box with the sugar-packet stamps.
He walks past his truck, past the bird hotel, and into the north field. Above him are a billion stars. Crickets hum softly in the grass. His fleeing path through the hay and timothy has disappeared, or maybe now he’s entering the field in a different place.
A little way in, he lies down on his back, puts the pillow under his head, and looks up at the stars. Just for a little while, he thinks. Just until all those ghost voices empty out of my head. Just for a little while.
Thinking this, he begins to drowse.
Thinking this, he goes over.
Above his head, the pattern of the stars changes. He sees the new constellations form. What is that one, where the Big Dipper was a moment before? Is it the Sacred Opopanax? Perhaps it is. He hears a low, plea-sant creaking sound and knows it’s the windmill he saw when he flipped just this morning, a thousand years ago. He doesn’t need to look at it to be sure, any more than he needs to look at where his house was and see that it has once more become a barn.
Creak . . . creak . . . creak: vast wooden vanes turning in that same east wind. Only now the wind is infinitely sweeter, infinitely purer. Jack touches the waistband of his underpants and feels some rough weave. No Jockey shorts in this world. His pillow has changed, too. Foam has become goosedown, but it’s still comfortable. More comfortable than ever, in truth. Sweet under his head.
“I’ll catch him, Speedy,” Jack Sawyer whispers up at the new shapes in the new stars. “At least I’ll try.”
He sleeps.
When he awakens, it’s early morning. The breeze is gone. In the direction from which it came, there’s a bright orange line on the horizon—the sun is on its way. He’s stiff and his ass hurts and he’s damp with dew, but he’s rested. The steady, rhythmic creaking is gone, but that doesn’t surprise him. He knew from the moment he opened his eyes that he’s in Wisconsin again. And he knows something else: he can go back. Any time he wants. The real Coulee Country, the deep Coulee Country, is just a wish and a motion away. This fills him with joy and dread in equal parts.
Jack gets up and barefoots back to the house with his pillow under his arm. He guesses it’s about five in the morning. Another three hours’ sleep will make him ready for anything. On the porch steps, he touches the cotton of his Jockey shorts. Although his skin is damp, the shorts are almost dry. Of course they are. For most of the hours he spent sleeping rough (as he spent so many nights that autumn when he was twelve), they weren’t on him at all. They were somewhere else.
“In the Land of Opopanax,” Jack says, and goes inside. Three minutes later he’s asleep again, in his own bed. When he wakes at eight, with the sensible sun streaming in through his window, he could almost believe that his latest journey was a dream.
But in his heart, he knows better.
18
REMEMBER THOSE news vans that drove into the parking lot behind the police station? And Wendell Green’s contribution to the excitement, before Officer Hrabowski’s giant flashlight knocked him into the Land of Nod? Once the crews inside the vans took in the seeming inevitability of a riot, we can be sure they rose to the occasion, for the next morning their footage of the wild night dominates television screens across the state. By nine o’clock, people in Racine and Milwaukee, people in Madison and Delafield, and people who live so far north in the state that they need satellite dishes to get any television at all are looking up from their pancakes, their bowls of Special K, their fried eggs, and their buttered English muffins to watch a small, nervous-looking policeman finishing off a large, florid reporter’s budding career as a demagogue by clocking him with a blunt instrument. And we may also be sure of one other matter: that nowhere is this footage watched as widely and compulsively as in French Landing and the neighboring communities of Centralia and Arden.
Thinking about several matters at once, Jack Sawyer watches it all on a little portable TV placed on his kitchen counter. He hopes that Dale Gilbertson will not revoke Arnold Hrabowski’s suspension, although he strongly suspects that the Mad Hungarian will soon be back in uniform. Dale only thinks he wants him off the force for good: he is too softhearted to listen to Arnie’s pleas—and after last night, even a blind man can see that Arnie is going to plead—without relenting. Jack also hopes that the awful Wendell Green will get fired or move away in disgrace. Reporters are not supposed to thrust themselves into their stories, and here is good old loudmouth Wendell, baying for blood like a werewolf. However, Jack has the depressing feeling that Wendell Green will talk his way out of his present difficulties (that is, lie his way out of them) and go on being a powerful nuisance. And Jack is pondering Andy Railsback’s description of the creepy old man trying the doorknobs on the third floor of the Nelson Hotel.
There he was, the Fisherman, given form at last. An old man in a blue robe and one slipper striped black and yellow, like a bumblebee. Andy Railsback had wondered if this unpleasant-looking old party had wandered away from the Maxton Elder Care Facility. That was an interesting notion, Jack thought. If “Chummy” Burnside is the man who planted the photographs in George Potter’s room, Maxton’s would be a perfect hidey-hole for him.
Wendell Green is watching the news on the Sony in his hotel room. He cannot take his eyes off the screen, although what he sees there afflicts him with a mixture of feelings—anger, shame, and humiliation—that makes his stomach boil. The knot on his head throbs, and every time he witnesses that poor excuse for a cop sneaking up behind him with his flashlight raised, he pushes his fingers into the thick, curly hair at the back of his head and gently palpates it. The damn thing feels about the size of a ripe tomato and just as ready to burst. He’s lucky not to have a concussion. That pipsqueak could have killed him!
Okay, maybe he went a little bit over the edge, maybe he took a tiny step across a professional boundary; he never claimed to be perfect. The local news guys, they piss him off, all that guff about Jack Sawyer. Who is the top guy covering the Fisherman story? Who has been all over it from day one, telling the citizens what they need to know? Who’s been putting himself on the line, day after crummy goddamn day? Who gave the guy his name? Not those blow-dried airheads Bucky and Stacey, those wanna-be news reporters and local anchors who smile into the camera to show off their capped teeth, that’s for sure. Wendell Green is a legend around here, a star, the closest thing to a giant of journalism ever to come out of western Wisconsin. Even over in Madison, the name Wendell Green stands for . . . well, unquestioned excellence. And if the name Wendell Green is like the gold standard now, just wait until he rides the Fisherman’s blood-spattered shoulders all the way to a Pulitzer Prize.