Black House (Page 13)

We have been honored, but the honor is unbearable. The speaking bee circles back to the window and passes into another world, and, following his lead, we move on, out the window, into the sun, and into the upper air.

Smells of shit and urine at Maxton Elder Care; the fragile, slick feel of slippage at the off-kilter house north of Highway 35; the sound of the flies and the sight of the blood at the former Ed’s Eats. Ag! Yuck! Is there no place here in French Landing, we may ask, where there is something nice under the skin? Where what we see is what we get, so to speak?

The short answer: no. French Landing should be marked with big road signs at every point of ingress: WARNING! SLIPPAGE IN PROGRESS! PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

The magic at work here is Fishermagic. It has rendered "nice" at least temporarily obsolete. But we can go someplace nice-er, and if we can we probably should, because we need a break. We may not be able to escape slippage, but we can at least visit where no one shits the bed or bleeds on the floor (at least not yet).

So the bee goes its way and we go ours; ours takes us southwest, over more woods exhaling their fragrance of life and oxygen — there is no air like this air, at least not in this world — and then back to the works of man again.

This section of town is called Libertyville, so named by the French Landing Town Council in 1976. You won’t believe this, but big-bellied Ed Gilbertson, the Hot Dog King himself, was a member of that bicentennial band of town fathers; those were strange days, pretty mama, strange days indeed. Not as strange as these, however; in French Landing, these are the Fisherdays, the slippery slippage days.

The streets of Libertyville have names that adults find colorful and children find painful. Some of the latter have been known to call this area of town Faggotyville. Let us descend now, down through the sweet morning air (it’s warming up already; this will be a Strawberry Fest kind of day for sure). We cruise silently over Camelot Street, past the intersection of Camelot and Avalon, and travel on down Avalon to Maid Marian Way. From Maid Marian we progress to — is it any surprise? — Robin Hood Lane.

Here, at No. 16, a sweet little Cape Cod honey of a home that looks just right for The Decent Hardworking Family On Its Way Up, we find a kitchen window open. There is the smell of coffee and toast, a wonderful combined odor that denies slippage (if only we did not know better; if only we had not seen the dog at work, eating a foot out of a sneaker as a child might eat the hot dog right out of its bun), and we follow the aroma in. It’s nice to be invisible, isn’t it? To watch in our godlike silence. If only what our godlike eyes saw was just a little less goddamn upsetting! But that is by the way. We’re in it now, for better or for worse, and we had better get on about our business. Daylight’s a-wasting, as they say in this part of the world.

Here in the kitchen of No. 16 is Fred Marshall, whose picture currently graces the Salesman of the Month easel in the showroom of French County Farm Equipment. Fred has also been named Employee of the Year three years out of the last four (two years ago Ted Goltz gave the award to Otto Eisman, just to break the monotony), and when he is on the job no one radiates more charm, personality, or all around niceness. You wanted nice? Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Fred Marshall!

Only now his confident smile is not in evidence, and his hair, always carefully combed on the job, hasn’t yet seen the brush. He’s wearing Nike shorts and a tee with cutoff sleeves instead of his usual pressed khakis and sport shirt. On the counter is the Marshall copy of the La Riviere Herald, open to an inside page.

Fred has his share of problems just lately — or, rather, his wife, Judy, has problems, and what’s hers is his, so said the minister when he joined them in holy wedlock — and what he’s reading isn’t making him feel any better. Far from it. It’s a sidebar to the lead story on the front page, and of course the author is everyone’s favorite muckraker, Wendell "FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE" Green.

The sidebar is your basic recap of the first two murders (Gruesome and Gruesomer is how Fred thinks of them), and as he reads, Fred bends first his left leg up behind him and then his right, stretching those all-important thigh muscles and preparing for his morning run. What could be more antislippage than a morning run? What could be nicer? What could possibly spoil such a lovely start to such a beautiful Wisconsin day?

Well, how about this:

Johnny Irkenham’s dreams were simple enough, according to his grief-stricken father. [Grief-stricken father, Fred thinks, stretching and imagining his son asleep upstairs. Dear God, save me from ever being a grief-stricken father. Not knowing, of course, how soon he must assume this role.] "Johnny wanted to be an astronaut," George Irkenham said, a smile briefly lighting his exhausted face. "When he wasn’t putting out fires for the French Landing F.D. or fighting crime with the Justice League of America, that is."

These innocent dreams ended in a nightmare we cannot imagine. [But I’m sure you’ll try, Fred thinks, now beginning his toe raises.] Earlier this week, his dismembered body was discovered by Spencer Hovdahl of Centralia. Hovdahl, a First Farmer State Bank loan officer, was inspecting an abandoned French Landing farm owned by John Ellison, who lives in a neighboring county, with an eye to initiating repossession proceedings. "I didn’t want to be there in the first place," Hovdahl told this reporter. "If there’s anything I hate, it’s the repo stuff. [Knowing Spence Hovdahl as he does, Fred very much doubts if "stuff " was the word he used.] I wanted to be there even less after I went into the henhouse. It’s all rickety and falling down, and I would have stayed out except for the sound of the bees. I thought there might be a hive in there. Bees are an interest of mine, and I was curious. God help me, I was curious. I hope I’ll never be curious again."