Downtown Owl

  Eventually people stopped talking.

  And then people started shooting.

  As is so often the case in situations like these, no one knows who shot first. However, Gordon Kahl’s rifle definitely shot last; he blew the head off a U.S. marshal named Robert Cheshire from point-blank range (skull fragments landed twenty feet away). The shoot-out lasted only thirty seconds, but the sixty-three-year-old Kahl had murdered two marshals and forced all the others to flee on foot. Yorie had absorbed a near-fatal bullet in the abdomen (he was hemorrhaging and moaning for his mother), but he lived (and eventually went to prison for life). His father, now a loner, managed to slip out of North Dakota under the cover of night, traversing the desolate rural roads that cops never really understand. He was probably across the South Dakota state line by the time the FBI raided his empty home on Tuesday the fifteenth. The operatives were greeted by the Kahls’ dog, which they subsequently shot. “When human life is on the line, you don’t worry about a dog,” said FBI agent John Shimota.

  The Gordon Kahl incident was the most violent regional news event since the 1975 Leonard Peltier shootings on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It was all anyone in North Dakota could talk about; everything else on the local news seemed like meaningless filler (which it was, but now more than usual). The fact that Kahl was able to elude arrest for weeks after the murders made the story even more compelling: How could this elderly, diminutive man outwit an FBI manhunt? How was he able to outshoot U.S. marshals? Was he some sort of agricultural supervillain? People tried to forget that he was a hatemonger; fourth graders played “Gordon Kahl” during recess and reenacted the Medina standoff. When people would debate the shooting, they never said that Kahl was a hero; it was essential to preface any statement about the shooting with the phrase “Well, I don’t support what he did.” But 1983 was a good time to hate the government, especially if you were from North Dakota. Many, many farmers had been duped during the prosperity of the 1970s; every small farmer had been told that there was a worldwide food shortage and that they would all get rich by feeding the planet. Skyrocketing inflation artificially magnified the price of land, so everyone was suddenly a theoretical millionaire. There just wasn’t any cash. Through a credit system they could not understand, farmers were persuaded into purchasing new equipment they could not afford. Every year, they got better at crop production; every year, the yields for wheat and corn and beans surpassed bumper crops from years past. And then, seemingly from the moment Jimmy Carter issued a grain embargo against Russia, everything collapsed. It was rudimentary supply and demand: Grain prices fell through the floor. It did not matter how successful farmers were at growing food; suddenly, no one wanted to pay for it. Around 1981, everyone started to go bankrupt and no one seemed to understand why. They had been tricked by modernity. Gordon Kahl thought this was the work of ZOG, just as Henry Ford had indicated; almost everyone else assumed it was a combination of bad luck and worse government. Every weekend there was another foreclosure, which meant another wrecked family and (occasionally) another suicide by a middle-aged farmaholic who no longer had anything to do with his life. The government was stealing the way people lived. And now that same government was willing to exchange gunfire with a sixty-three-year-old man…for ten thousand dollars. People did not support what Gordon Kahl was, but they (kind of) supported what he did. And they wanted him to win. Which is probably why so many people convinced themselves that Gordon Kahl was still alive, even when he wasn’t.

  “That ornery sumbitch is still out there,” said Marvin Windows. This had always been his position. “He’ll shoot somebody else before he’s done. He’ll probably shoot ten more of those stupid bastards, assuming they’re still crazy enough to try and take him down.”

  “You’re the crazy one,” said Bud. It took guts to say this.

  “We’ll see,” said Marvin. “We’ll see.”

  The FBI allegedly killed Gordon Kahl in Arkansas on June 3. They burned him up. According to the government, there is nothing alleged about this claim, and most sane people (and certainly most dentists) agree. But it did seem curious that there was another shoot-out at the Arkansas residence where Kahl was finally caught, and that another law-enforcement agent (this time a sheriff) was killed, and that the home where Kahl was hiding was burned to the ground during the encounter, and that the charred corpse that was believed to be Gordon’s was mutilated (both legs and one hand were severed from the torso). None of those bizarre details indicated that Kahl was still at large; however, they also did not make the FBI seem any more sympathetic, which produced the same effect.

  “I don’t support what the man did,” Marvin Windows said, “but I know he’s not dead.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure he’s deader than a dinosaur,” said Edgar.

  “You guys talk like San Francisco hippies,” said Bud.

  Horace pushed his eyeglasses against the bridge of his slender nose and hoped the conversation would change; he was tired of talking about this person, dead or alive. Horace always paid his taxes and didn’t mind Jews, and he certainly didn’t think Gordon Kahl had the right to kill anyone, particularly since he had already been granted the opportunity to kill strangers within the context of a war. The Feds probably didn’t need to burn him alive or chop off his hand, but somebody had to take him down. Kahl wasn’t like that innocent Labrador those marshals shot in the neck. Kahl was like a dog that bites children: Who cares what his motives are? Why was this still an issue? Kahl didn’t represent anyone but himself.

  And if he was still alive? If Marvin was correct?

  Well, thought Horace, if he’s alive, he’s alive. But he didn’t say this aloud.

  NOVEMBER 21, 1983

  (Mitch)

  “Why do we get out of bed?” Mitch wondered. “Is there any feeling better than being in bed? What could possibly feel better than this? What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?” Every day, Mitch awoke to this line of reasoning: Every day, the first move he made outside his sheets immediately destroyed the only flawless part of his existence. He could still remember the spring of 1978, when he (along with over half of his fifth-grade classmates) contracted mononucleosis. It was the best month of his life.

  Peering out from beneath his electric blanket, Mitch looked toward his lone bedroom window. He slept in the basement. Outside, it was still semidark. Soon it would be pitch-black when he awoke and pitch-black when he returned from basketball practice. By mid-December, dusk would come before 4:00 p.m. and dawn wouldn’t break until after 9:00 in the morning. “How did pioneers spend their winters before the advent of electricity?” he wondered. “Did they just eat supper and go to bed? Did they essentially hibernate? What else was there to do?” Perhaps they sat around and talked about their lives. But what would they have talked about? Before electricity, nothing really happened. Every conversation would have been identical, unless somebody got cholera or was mauled by a badger.

  Unlike virtually every nonadult he knew, Mitch did not decorate his bedroom. He could not relate to people who did, which meant he could not relate to anyone. Zebra, for example: Zebra covered the walls of his bedroom with cut-out pictures of an (evidently) British band who were (evidently) called the Dead Leopards, alongside some buffoon named Billy Squier. They all wore tight, colorful pants. What did Zebra see in these people? He worshipped all the freaks he would hate in real life. Zebra was constantly buying magazines about musicians from the grocery store, always trying to decipher what their ponderous songs were about and whether these people were addicted to heroin. Whenever Zebra talked about the Dead Leopards, he referred to all the band members by their first names, almost as if they were casual acquaintances. It was embarrassing. Zebra was cool, but sometimes he was like a ten-year-old kid who still believed in Santa Claus. Lots of his classmates were like this. The guy who really blew
Mitch’s mind was Curtis-Fritz: That kid decorated his bedroom with Star Wars toys and Bo Derek posters. He had X-wing fighters hanging from the ceiling on fishing wire, and he had all his little Wookiees and stormtroopers posed on his bookshelves with their laser guns drawn—but then he added this glossy 36 x 24 photograph of Bo Derek running along the beach, undoubtedly hoping to mitigate the possibility of his parents suspecting that a seventeen-year-old who owns ten plastic tauntauns might be atypical. Society is so confused, Mitch thought. Everyone wanted to become the person they were already pretending to be.

  What Mitch wanted most was what he already had: a room. A room. He wanted a rectangular room with a bed in the middle, a dresser, a nightstand with a lamp, a desk, and (in theory) a phone and a thirteen-inch TV (neither of which he currently possessed, but Christmas was only a month away). Mitch wanted to live in a motel room. He wanted to sleep in a room that expressed nothing, because rooms were supposed to be meaningless. He did not want to give anyone the opportunity to glean anything about his personality via his sleeping quarters. Last summer, his mother gave him a poster of Viking quarterback Tommy Kramer. (It had been a free gift with the purchase of four radial tires.) Mitch liked Kramer, but he never hung the poster. He didn’t know the man. Did Tommy Kramer have a poster of Mitch in his living room? Of course he didn’t. They had no relationship. Mitch preferred staring at his off-white wall. He had a nice rapport with the wall.

  It was odd: While discussing the early pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Laidlaw had noted that its protagonist lived in an apartment called a flat. It was essentially a colorless, spartan space that expressed nothing about its inhabitant. This was supposed to be metaphoric and depressing (and all the girls in the class took notes when he mentioned its details), but Mitch saw no symbolism whatsoever. It was impossible to construct personality, and it always seemed ludicrous when somebody tried to do so by buying furniture or throwing shit upon the walls. That’s what restaurants tried to do. Did they really think they were fooling people? It was one of many things he did not understand about Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he was only. The remainder of his befuddlement was as follows:

  1) The book’s main character (Winston Smith) works in the Records Department for the government, and his vocation is rewriting documents and newspaper articles in order to make them correspond with the updated social condition. This actually seemed like a good job, not to mention an incredibly easy way to get paid. Mitch would not have complained about this.

  2) Though he always assumed this story was set in England, that wasn’t explicitly clear. There had also been some kind of major war, but he could not understand a) who fought in it and b) who won.

  3) In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, having sexual intercourse for mere pleasure was illegal. This was probably a good idea, all things considered. Everybody he knew who was having sex without justification seemed to have a defective life; it was all they ever thought about, and it seemed to dictate every decision they made about everything. Tina McAndrew’s life had been ruined by her desire to have sex with Laidlaw, and Laidlaw’s sexual obsession was proof that he was a bad person. Many of the laws in Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed practical. The world would be better off if everyone had to publicly validate why they were having sex with someone.

  4) Laidlaw spent an inordinate amount of time railing against “doublethink,” which he seemed to view as some brilliant commentary on the way modern real estate agents sell houses. It was supposed to be satire. But here again, Mitch did not see much detachment from common sense. One of Orwell’s examples was that if a war went on forever, it would just become the normal state of existence; as such, “war is peace.” Well, wasn’t that usually true? America was supposedly in a Cold War with Russia, but nothing ever happened; people weren’t even that worried about it. Just last night, NBC had aired a made-for-TV movie called The Day After. People had been talking about this for weeks. Father Steele told the entire Catholic congregation not to watch this movie because it would only make them worry about something God would never allow to happen. This made Mitch want to watch it even more, so he did. It was ridiculous. Basically, The Day After claimed that you could survive a nuclear holocaust by hiding in your basement, eating candy, and buying a horse. Nuclear war was so improbable that it could not even be properly imagined on television. There was no way the U.S.S.R. was going to bomb Kansas and there was no way America was going to bomb Siberia. And since everybody knew this, war was peace. Mitch could never tell which parts of this book were supposed to seem absurd.

  5) More than anything else, the point that Nineteen Eighty-Four kept ramming home was that Big Brother knew everything about everyone, and everyone just accepted this as part of being alive. No shit! How was this remotely different from reality? Everyone in Owl knew Laidlaw had impregnated Tina McAndrew. Everyone. Everyone knew they were having sex, and some people even knew where they were having sex. Everyone knew that Bull Calf Decker was afraid to shower without wearing his eyeglasses. Everyone knew that Vickie Vanderson once received cunnilingus in a Porta Potti. Everyone knew Naomi O’Reilly used to be a bulimic shoplifter. Everyone knew Marvin Windows had genital herpes and didn’t care when (or from whom) he got it. Mitch had no idea how he knew these things, but he knew them all; very often, he knew the stories without having ever met the people they were about. Everyone knew everything. So how was Nineteen Eighty-Four a dystopia? It seemed ordinary. What was so unusual about everyone knowing all the same things?

  Mitch lay on his side and squinted toward his alarm clock, which read 7:43. He heard his mother padding around upstairs, possibly making waffles or Malt-O-Meal. Now the clock read 7:44. His blankets were so warm; it was like being buried beneath a bear. His mattress was a cocoon made of bread. The world did not exist. He was inside a black hole. But then the clock read 7:45 and started saying bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk, and then he was not in space. He was in the world, and it existed. He turned off the alarm, emerged from beneath his bear, and lumbered toward the bathroom. Time to piss. There was nothing left to look forward to.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1983

  (Julia)

  Julia arrived at Yoda’s forty minutes later than usual; she had been correcting essay tests about the Underground Railroad while scrubbing her bathtub with Ajax. Naomi and Ted were already eradicating their second and third cocktails when she stomped into the building. Julia made her cursory hellos and jackknifed toward the bar. Vance Druid happened to be standing there, waiting for his first beer, playing with his car keys. Having spoken four times before, they nodded their heads in mutual salutation; Julia smiled warmly and Vance smirked, possibly by accident. It was the first encounter they’d ever had in which their combined blood-alcohol level was 0.00. This unexpected clarity was the catalyst for an important three-minute conversation, even though neither of them knew it at the time (or even in the future).

  What she said: “So…tell me…how do you spend your non-drinking hours? Are you a farmer, too? Everyone I meet is a farmer.”

  What she meant: I don’t know anything about you. You look like every other guy in town, you don’t talk very much, and you don’t seem to do anything except drink. But I suspect you are different. Somehow you seem unlike everyone else I’ve met in this community, even though there’s no tangible evidence that would suggest my theory is valid. This is my gamble. So here is an opportunity for you to describe yourself in a manner that will confirm my suspicion and possibly make me love you forever, mostly because I am searching for any reason to increase the likelihood of that possibility.

  What he said: “Yeah, I farm with my two brothers. It’s their operation, really. I’m basically just a hired hand. It’s not bad, though. It’s fine. I enjoy it.”

  What he meant: I was my father’s third son. When my father died, the ownership of the farm went to my oldest brother, because that’s how it always works. I own nothing in this world.

  What she said: “What kind of farm is it? Do you raise any animals???
?

  What she hoped to imply: I will talk to you about things that don’t interest me at all. Just be different from everyone else I’ve met in this town. It doesn’t matter how you’re different. I’m flexible.

  What he said: “We raise bison.”