The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten Read Free Page A

cliché jock, Dwayne went to a lot of rock shows and thought he was hip, but there was nothing on his iPod from the past fifteen years, just a lot of grungy alterna-junk from the ’90s. Oh well. Better than listening to the mooing and lowing of the other passengers getting on board and shuffling to their cramped coach seats, to travel in discomfort and misery and empty-headedness like the livestock they were.
    I put in the earbuds, scrolled through Dwayne’s playlists—they were named things like “Rockin Good” and “Brutal Jams” and “Break Shit”—until I found something that looked promising. I closed my eyes, listened to some classic rock band called Soundgarden sing about how they were feeling Minnesota, and began the journey into the rest of my life. Once we started taking off, I considered looking out the window to see the world drop away, shrinking until all the people bustling around the tarmac looked like ants, but I didn’t bother. That’s pretty much what people look like to me most of the time anyway: ants.

PHENOMENOMENON
    NARRATOR
    “I t was one of them unexplainable phenomenomenons,” Gunther said, swaying a little on his customary stool at the Backtrack Bar, while Ace the bartender ignored him. Gunther had forgotten his resolution to keep quiet about what he’d seen in the woods, which didn’t matter much, because no one paid any attention to him anyway, so he embellished. “Red eyes he had, and fangs as long as ice axes, and he tore that deer to pieces. Completely to pieces. Nothing left but red sludge, like cherry pudding.”
    “Never heard of cherry pudding,” Ace said, flipping channels on the TV, though one station full of fuzzy snow looked more or less like another to Gunther’s untrained eye.
    “It’s pudding,” Gunther told Ace, or maybe his beer, since that’s what he was looking at most intently. “But cherry-flavored. Maybe I should’ve said ‘blood pudding.’ Since there was so much blood?”
    “What’s this about blood?” The town’s head (and very nearly only) cop Harry Cusack eased onto the stool next to Gunther, who grunted a greeting. Harry was all right. He’d been known to lock Gunther up for drunk and disorderly, but he always let him go after he’d dried out, and true, he made you clean up your own puke if you let loose in the cell, but he’d give you a cup of coffee afterward to clear out the taste. “Don’t tell me you witnessed a crime, Gunther, because I can’t think of anyone in the world who’d be a worse witness than you, officially speaking.”
    “A blind deaf-mute, maybe,” Ace said. “With a felony conviction and a history of mental illness.” He paused. “Or that boy Clem who works over at the Half Good Grocery for Dolph, he’s dumber than a bag of hog snouts.”
    “But if you did see something,” Harry said, putting a companionable arm around Gunther’s shoulders, “I’d be pleased to hear about it. My daughter’s coming into town tonight to stay with me for a while, and if there’s a criminal element hanging around, I may as well clean it up before she gets here.”
    “No crime,” Gunther muttered. “Unless killing a deer with your bare hands is a crime.”
    “Maybe animal cruelty, depending. And killing animals is part of the homicidal triad, you know, indicative of a budding serial killer, right along with bedwetting and setting fires.”
    “You’d think with a name like ‘homicidal triad’ that actually committing homicide should be one of the three,” Ace said, to general lack of response. Some bartenders stood there, not paying any attention, as their regulars babbled on about this and that. Ace was pretty much the opposite.
    “So when and where and who was this?” Harry said, peeling the label off his bottle of Krepusky’s Red Ribbon Beer.
    Gunther marshaled all his mental powers and attempted recollection. He wasn’t a stupid man, not at all; he was just an extremely drunk man, and it was his grave