I’ll tell you all my secretsBut I lie about my pastSo send me off to bed for evermore—TOM WAITS,
“TANGO TILL THEY’RE SORE”
A whole life in darkness, surrounded by filth, that was what Shadow dreamed, his first night in Lakeside. A child’s life, long ago and far away, in a land across the ocean, in the lands where the sun rose. But this life contained no sunrises, only dimness by day and blindness by night.
Nobody spoke to him. He heard human voices, from outside, but he could understand human speech no better than he understood the howling of the owls or the yelps of dogs. He
remembered, or thought he remembered, one night, half a lifetime ago, when one of the big people had entered, quietly, and had not cuffed him or fed him, but had picked him up to her breast and embraced him. She smelled good. She had made crooning noises. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear.
She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut, fastening the door behind her.
He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he remembered the sweetness of a cabbage-heart, the tart taste of plums, the crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roasted fish.
And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the space between the two
bonfires, where the man waited for him.
And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a cheer went up from the crowd and the child from the darkness began to laugh and laugh with them, in delight and in freedom.
And then the blade came down.
Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the ice collect under the nail, then melt to water.
He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but misery and darkness.
He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town center, walk across the bridge across the northern end of the lake, if he had the geography of the town right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his promise to himself that he would buy a warm winter coat, opened the apartment door and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity. The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded by an expanse of white.
He wondered how cold it was. The cold snap had come, that was for sure. It could not be much above zero, and it would not be a pleasant walk, but he was certain he could make it into town without too much trouble. What did Hinzelmann say last night—a ten-minute walk? And Shadow was a big man. He would walk briskly and keep himself warm.
He set off south, heading for the bridge.
Soon he began to cough, a dry, thin cough, as the bitterly cold air touched his lungs. Soon his ears and face and lips hurt, and then his feet hurt. He thrust his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets, clenched his fingers together trying to find some warmth. He found himself remembering Low Key Lyesmith’s tall tales of the Minnesota winters—particularly the one about a hunter treed by a bear during a hard freeze who took out his dick and pissed an arching yellow stream of steaming urine that was already frozen hard before it hit the ground, then slid down the rock-hard frozen-piss-pole to freedom. A wry smile at the memory and another dry, painful cough.
Step after step after step. He glanced back. The apartment building was not as far away as he had expected.
This walk, he decided, was a mistake. But he was already three or four minutes from the apartment, and the bridge over the lake was in sight. It made as much sense to press on as to go home (and then what? Call a taxi on the dead phone? Wait for spring? He had no food in the apartment, he reminded himself).
He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus 10?
Minus 20? Minus 40, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada.
He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand-and footwarmers he had taken from the men in the black train. He wished he had them now.
Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed to be no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.
The occasional cars that roared past him seemed unreal: spaceships, little freeze-dried packages of metal and glass, inhabited by people dressed more warmly than he was. An old song his mother had loved, “Winter Wonderland,” began to run through his head, and he hummed it through closed lips, kept pace to it as he walked.
He had lost all sensation in his feet. He looked down at his black leather shoes, at the thin cotton socks, and began, seriously, to worry about frostbite.
This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-big-time territory. His clothes might as well have been netting or lace: the wind blew through him, froze his bones and the marrow in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity.
Keep walking, he told himself. Keep walking. I can stop and drink a pail of air when I get home.
A Beatles song started in his head, and he adjusted his pace to match it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he realized that he was humming “Help!”
He was almost at the bridge now. Then he had to walk across it, and he would still be another
ten minutes from the stores on the west of the lake—maybe a little more…
A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragon’s breath that surrounded the car. “Everything okay here?” said a cop inside.
Shadow’s first, automatic instinct was to say Yup, everything’s just fine and jim-dandy thank you, officer, nothing’s happening here. Move on. Nothing to see. But it was too late for that, and he started to say, “I think I’m freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walk”—he was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had come out was “F-f-freezing,” and a chattering noise, and he said, “So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry.”
The cop pulled open the back door of the car, and said, “You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay?” Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the driver’s seat.
Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time he’d been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign.
The cop put the car in drive and moved off. “You know, that was,” he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, “if you’ll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do.
You didn’t hear any of the weather advisories? It’s minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the wind chill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure when you’re down at minus thirty, wind chill’s the least of your worries.”
“Thanks,” said Shadow. “Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful.”
“Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her bird feeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. She’s in intensive care now. It was on the radio this morning. You’re new in town.” It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already.
“I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I’d buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasn’t expecting this cold.”
“Yeah,” said the cop. “It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. I’m Chad Mulligan. I’m the chief of police here in Lakeside.”
“Mike Ainsel.”
“Hi, Mike. Feeling any better?”
“A little, yes.”
“So where would you like me to take you first?”
Shadow put his hands down to the hot air stream, painful on his fingers, then he pulled them away. Let it happen in its own time. “Can you just drop me off in the town center?”
“Wouldn’t hear of it. Long as you don’t need me to drive a getaway car for your bank robbery
I’ll happily take you wherever you need to go. Think of it as the town welcome wagon.”
“Where would you suggest we start?”
“You only moved in last night.”
“That’s right.”
“You eaten breakfast yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, that seems like a heck of a good starting place to me,” said Mulligan.
They were over the bridge now, and entering the northwest side of the town. “This is Main Street,” said Mulligan, “and this,” he said, crossing Main Street and turning right, “is the town square.”
Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was a colorless place, beautiful in a skeletal way, the band shell empty, the fountain turned off for the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow.
“…and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is Mabel’s.”
He got out of the car, opened the rear door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.
The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.
A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.
“Hello, Chad,” she said. “You’ll want a hot chocolate while you’re thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.
“No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me too well,” he said to Shadow.
“What’ll it be, pal?”
“Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I’m happy to have the whipped cream on the top.”
“That’s good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”
“Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door markedPOINTERS. It was next to a door markedSETTERS.
“You’re the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh yes,”
she said, happily, “I know just who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”
“Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What’s good?”
“Everything’s good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the furthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My specialty.”
Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s real good.”
“They’re a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over.”
“Yoopie?”
“Upper Peninsula. UP. Yoopie. Where the Yoopers come from. It’s the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast.”
The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said,
“are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties?”
“It’s good,” said Shadow. It was, too—a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry.
“They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay.
So, you need a car?” With his parka off, he was revealed as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than a cop.
Shadow nodded, mouth full.
“Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz’s selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point they’d probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don’t care about ugly, it’s got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the men’s room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasn’t in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila’s.”
The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling.
“Stick-to-your-ribs food,” as his mother would have said. “Sticks to your sides.”
“So,” said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot chocolate foam from around his lips. “I figure we stop off next at Henning’s Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Dave’s Finest Food, so you can fill your larder, then I’ll drop you up by Lakeside Realty.
If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they’ll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. It’s an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn’t painted it purple it’d be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you’ll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me.”
“This is very good of you,” said Shadow. “But shouldn’t you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”
Mabel chuckled. “We all tell him that,” she said.
Mulligan shrugged. “It’s a good town,” he said, simply. “Not much trouble. You’ll always get someone speeding within city limits—which is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages.
Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse—and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. And I learned when I was on the force in Green Bay, I’d rather attend a bank robbery than a domestic in a big city. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when someone’s locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year there’s a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case we’ve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun,
shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back.MY JUVENILE DELINQUENT IS SCREWING YOUR HONOR STUDENT. You remember, Mabel?”
She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did.
“What did you do?” asked Shadow.
“I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dan’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset.”
Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot
Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot