Downtown Owl

  “I really, really cannot coach volleyball,” Julia said. “I’m not coordinated.”

  “Oh. Oh! Okay, no problem. I just thought I’d ask.” Mr. Valentine looked at her for a few moments before his pupils returned to the ceiling. “Obviously, it would be appreciated if you thought about it, but—ultimately—volleyball doesn’t matter. We just want you to do all the things that you do, whatever those things may be. I’m sure you bring a lot to the table. Do you have any questions for me?”

  Julia had 140,000 questions. She asked only one.

  “What’s it like to live here?”

  This was not supposed to sound flip, but that’s how it came out. Julia always came across as cocky whenever she felt nervous.

  “It’s like living anywhere, I suppose.” Valentine unlocked his fingers and crossed his arms, glancing momentarily at Julia’s face. He then proceeded to stare at the mallard duck that was painted on his coffee cup, half filled with cherry Kool-Aid. “Owl’s population used to be around twelve hundred during the height of the 1970s, but now it’s more like eight hundred. Maybe eight fifty. I don’t know where all the people went. It’s a down town, Owl. We still have a decent grocery store, which is important, but—these days—it seems like a lot of folks will drive to Jamestown, or even all the way to Valley City, just to do their food shopping. Americans are crazy. There’s a hardware store, but I wonder how much longer that will last. We have a first-rate Chevrolet dealership. We have two gas stations. We have seven bars, although you can hardly count the Oasis Wheel. You probably don’t want to spend your nights at the Oasis Wheel, unless you’re not the kind of woman I think you are. Heh! And you’ve probably heard that the movie theater is going to close, and I’m afraid that’s true: It is closing. But the bowling alley is thriving. It’s probably the best bowling alley in the region. I honestly believe that.”

  By chance, Julia did enjoy bowling. However, when the most positive detail about your new home is that the bowling alley is thriving, you have to like bowling a lot in order to stave off depression. And—right now, in the middle of this conversation—Julia was more depressed than she had ever been in her entire twenty-three-year existence. As she sat in Walter Valentine’s office, she felt herself wanting to take a nap on the floor. But she (of course) did not do this; she just looked at him, nodding and half smiling. She could always sleep later, after she finished crying.

  “The thing that you have to realize about a place like Owl is that everyone is aware of all the same things. There’s a lot of shared knowledge,” Valentine said. He was now leaning forward in his chair, looking at Julia and casually pointing at her chest with both his index fingers. “Take this year’s senior class, for example. There are twenty-six kids in that class. Fifteen of them started kindergarten together. That means that a lot of those students have sat next to each other—in just about every single class—for thirteen straight years. They’ve shared every single experience. You said you grew up in Milwaukee, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “How big was your graduating class?”

  “Oh, man. I have no idea,” Julia said. “Around seven hundred, I think. It was a normal public school.”

  “Exactly. Normal. But your normal class was almost as big as our whole town. And the thing is, when those twenty-six seniors graduate, the majority will go to college, at least for two years. But almost all the farm kids—or at least all the farm boys—inevitably come back here when they’re done with school, and they start farming with their fathers. In other words, the same kids who spent thirteen years in class with each other start going to the same bars and they bowl together and they go to the same church and pretty much live an adult version of their high school life. You know, people always say that nothing changes in a small town, but—whenever they say that—they usually mean that nothing changes figuratively. The truth is that nothing changes literally: It’s always all the same people, doing all the same things.”

  Upon hearing this description, the one singular phrase that went through Julia’s head was “Jesus fucking Christ.” However, those were not the words that she spoke.

  “Wow,” she said. “That sounds kind of…unmodern.”

  “It is,” Valentine said. Then he chuckled. Then he re-interlocked his fingers behind his skull and refocused his gaze on the ceiling. “Except that it’s not. It’s actually not abnormal at all. Look: I came here as a math teacher twenty years ago, and I thought I would be bored out of my trousers. I had grown up in Minot and I went to college in Grand Forks, so I considered myself urban. I always imagined I’d end up in Minneapolis, or even maybe Chicago; I have a friend from college who lives just outside of Chicago, so I’ve eaten in restaurants in that area and I have an understanding of that life. But once I really settled in Owl, I never tried to leave. I mean…sure, sometimes you think, ‘Hey, maybe there’s something else out there.’ But there really isn’t. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn’t matter. You just live.”

  Julia could feel hydrochloric acid inside her tear ducts. There was an especially fuzzy tennis ball in her esophagus, and she wanted to be high.

  But she remained cool.

  Julia told Mr. Valentine she was extremely excited to be working at Owl High, and she thanked him for giving her the opportunity to start a career in teaching, which she claimed was her lifelong dream. “Everybody only has one first job,” he said in response. “No matter what you do in life, you’ll always remember your first job. So welcome aboard and good luck, although you won’t need it. You’ll be extremely popular here. And if you change your mind about that excellent volleyball opportunity, do not hesitate to call. Keep me in the loop. I’m always here, obviously.”

  Julia exited Valentine’s office and walked toward the school’s main entrance, faster and more violent with every step. She was virtually running when she got to the door and sprinted to her car, which was one of only three vehicles in the parking lot. Ten days from now, school would officially start. This building would be the totality of her life. She already hated it. The overtly idyllic nature of Owl seemed paradoxically menacing; it was like a Burmese tiger trap for apolitical strangers who needed uninteresting jobs. She didn’t know anyone and had no idea how she ever would. Her apartment was on the far side of town, which meant it was a three-minute drive. She passed two cars and two pickup trucks; all four drivers waved hello as she passed. The waving scared her. She soon arrived in her apartment, where she had no furniture (and no idea how to acquire any, as there were apparently no furniture stores within a thirty-mile radius). She cut open the cardboard box that held her cassettes and found a dubbed copy of Foreigner’s 4, which she robotically placed into a boom box sitting on the floor. She fast-forwarded to “Juke Box Hero” and pushed play; the emptiness of the room produced a slight echo behind Lou Gramm’s voice. Her apartment was like a bank vault with a refrigerator. Julia reached into the same cardboard box and found her copy of The Random House Thesaurus (College Edition), which contained drugs. The day before leaving Madison, Julia and her college roommates meticulously rolled four perfect joints and hid them in the thesaurus, operating under the assumption that buying pot would be impossible in small-town North Dakota (which was, in fact, the case). The plan was that Julia could smoke one joint after the first day of class, one on Thanksgiving (which she would have to spend alone), and one after the last day of school in May. The fourth was a spare that could be consumed when (and if) she needed to offset any major unforeseen emergency that might occur over the course of the school year.

  Julia sat on her sleeping bag and smoked three of them, all in a row. It was 2:45 p.m.

  AUGUST 28, 1983

  (Horace)

  His life revolved around coffee.

  It was central to his existence.

  He was that kind of person.

  It wasn’t even so much the taste, although he did consider coffee to be delicious; he mostly loved the process of drinking it. Every day at 3:00 p.m.
(except on Sundays), he drove three miles into town, sat on the third stool in Harley’s Café, and drank three cups of coffee, each cup with three tablespoons of sugar. This was not because Horace Jones had OCD or a superstitious obsession with the number three; it was just a coincidence. If you were to ask Horace which stool he sat in (or how many spoonfuls of sugar he placed in his coffee), he would have no idea. These were merely things he did. They were not things he considered.

  All of the men in Harley’s played poker dice to see who would pay for each round of coffee; the winner paid for everybody, which (curiously) was the goal. There were usually six players, so an entire round of coffee cost $1.50, plus tip. Horace won 16.6 percent of the time. He considered himself extremely unlucky. But winning or losing at poker dice was only a secondary issue, since the conversation at Harley’s was always worth the trip into town; stimulating conversation was something Horace could look forward to every single afternoon. These are the topics that were primarily discussed:

  1) How current meteorological conditions compared to whatever were supposed to be the average meteorological conditions (i.e., temperatures that were higher or lower than usual, rainfall amounts that seemed out of the ordinary, et cetera).

  2) The success (or lack thereof) of the local high school athletic teams, and particularly how contemporary teams would have fared against Owl teams from the late 1960s and early ’70s (the conclusion being “not very well”).

  3) Walter Mondale’s potential run for the presidency, an undeniably hopeless venture that only served to illustrate how the state of Minnesota had been destroyed by the same kind of naïve Democrats who crashed all those helicopters in the Iranian desert.

  4) The North Dakota State University football team, particularly the number of local North Dakota high school players the school was recruiting in comparison to the number of black, out-of-state, potentially criminal athletes who were already on the traveling roster.

  5) The implausibility of specific plotlines on the television show Dallas.

  6) Acquaintances who had recently died (or were in the process of dying, usually from cancer). This topic was increasing in regularity.

  7) Area events they all recalled from the 1950s, generally described as having happened in the relatively recent past.

  8) How the market price of hard red spring wheat ($3.51 per bushel) was barely a dollar more than its price during the Dirty Thirties. This made no goddamn sense to anyone.

  9) Gordon Kahl.

  10) Other people’s problems.

  “So…more problems with the Dog Lover.” This was Edgar Camaro speaking. Edgar was the youngest of the coffee drinkers; he was sixty-three. “That idiot kid is going to end up sleeping with Jesus. Did you hear what he said the other night?”

  “His statement about the rain?” asked Horace.

  “Yes,” replied Edgar. “The rain. Just imagine the goddamn scenario: The Dog Lover is tending bar on Saturday night—this is early in the night, maybe seven o’clock—and the idiot is already tight.”

  “Somebody needs to inform that kid that a good bartender never drinks before midnight,” interjected Bud Haugen, a man who had briefly owned a bar during the Korean conflict. “Christ. You’d think everybody would know that.”

  “Well, sure,” said Edgar. “You’d think someone would have given that idiot some sense, but I guess he only listens to that hound of his. Heh. But here we go: It starts to drizzle Saturday night, and a few of the guys in the bar—this is like Edmund and Kuch and Woo-Chuck and that whole crew of outlaws—they get up and start looking out the windows, because Lord knows we need the rain. And that idiot—that idiot Dog Lover—he turns down the jukebox and says, ‘Haven’t you farmers ever seen rain before?’ Can you believe that? In the middle of the worst drought in forty years, he tells a bunch of paying customers that they’re stupid for looking at the rain.”

  “I’m surprised Woo-Chuck didn’t snap his spine,” said eighty-eight-year-old Ollie Pinkerton, his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—Woo-Chuck is a nice kid and a hard worker. But let’s shoot straight: The man is a criminal.” This was true. “Woo-Chuck” was an abbreviation of “Woodchuck.” Bob (The Woodchuck) Hodgeman had served in Vietnam, which was something he never talked about. But everyone assumed he must have done (or at least seen) some crazy shit over there, because he drank in this awkward, exceedingly antisocial manner, and he drank all the time, and sometimes he punched his own friends for no reason and couldn’t explain why. People called him Woodchuck (or, more often, Woo-Chuck) because he used to stash Quaaludes in the upholstery of his Monte Carlo. This seemed like something a woodchuck would do. On balance, he was a good person.

  “Supposedly, that almost happened,” Edgar continued. “They say Woo-Chuck walked up to the Dog Lover with a really queer look on his face. Remember that night last Christmas, when Woo-Chuck got loaded and threw a pitchfork at his son-in-law? I guess he had those same crazy eyes. But that idiot Dog Lover—probably because he was already seventeen sheets to the wind—he had no fear whatsoever. He just stood there like a concrete shithouse. Words were exchanged. And then the Dog Lover threw everybody out of the bar. Everybody. He emptied the whole place, and it wasn’t even seven thirty. Locked all the doors. And then he just sat there, alone, swilling his own booze, listening to the Twins game on the radio. Have you ever heard of anything more asinine? If he’s not careful, that bar is gonna end up worse than the Oasis Wheel. Some people just can’t stand prosperity.”

  The Dog Lover’s real name was Chet. He had lived a dubious life: Chet’s father was (supposedly) one of the most successful bar owners in the Twin Cities; he (supposedly) co-owned five sports bars with Minnesota Vikings quarterback Tommy Kramer. Chet, however, was an irresponsible train wreck: DWIs, dope smoking, girl crazy, gun crazy, car crazy—all the usual interests of the prototypical meathead miscreant. Chet flunked out of St. Cloud State University, was readmitted a year later, and was bounced a second time for selling (fake) pot on campus. His father didn’t know what to do with him, and he certainly didn’t want Chet hanging around Minneapolis with no job and no prospects; if that happened, Chet was destined to get involved with cocaine or gambling or arson. Chet was a twenty-five-year-old dirtbag. Everybody knew this. As such, his father played the only card he could manufacture: He bought his son a life in a place where it was hard to find trouble. He bought his son a bar in a town where nothing happened, moved him into a four-plex apartment complex, and told him to stay away from Minneapolis until he “learned how the world worked.”

  That was almost a year ago. Over the subsequent eleven months, Chet had managed to alienate almost every citizen in town, seemingly on purpose. The first thing he did was change the name of the bar from Teddy’s (after the name of the previous owner) to Yoda’s (a reference completely lost on the overwhelming majority of his clientele). He had a dangerous propensity for hiring Owl High School students as waitresses, getting them drunk on the job, and openly chiding them for dressing too conservatively; this practice was finally stopped after he fed sixteen-year-old Ann Marie Pegseth so many clandestine wine coolers that she removed her blouse and worked an entire shift in her bra. Two days later, Ann Marie’s father threatened to destroy Chet’s Z28 Camaro with dynamite. Chet was a prick and a provocateur, constantly outdrinking his patrons and ridiculing the blandness of their conversation. He told Phil Anderson that his wife needed to eat more salad. He told Cindy Brewer that her voice reminded him of “a cuntier version of Joan Rivers.” One of his running shticks was insisting that he recognized Randy Pemberton’s girlfriend from Hustler magazine’s “Beaver Hunt” section. He charged way too much for booze (sometimes $2.50 a beer, even for Schmidt). But the one quality that truly drove the citizens of Owl bonkers—and particularly the old men who had coffee at Harley’s Café every day at 3:00 p.m.—was Chet’s intimacy with his dog. Chet had a black Labrador retriever, and he kept it inside his apartme
nt. He turned a hunting animal into a house pet. This was less reasonable than talking to a brick wall. He would bring his dog inside the bar, and the dog often sat in the front seat of his Camaro, a vehicle which supposedly cost sixteen thousand dollars.

  Just thinking about that dog made Horace furious. What kind of man treats his dog like a wife? You’d have to be mentally retarded. There were inside animals and there were outside animals, and any dog the size of a Labrador was absolutely, irrevocably, indisputably an outside animal. Oh, you might let a dog inside the pantry during a blizzard or a tornado, but kitchens are for humans. It was almost cruel: Dogs need to run.

  Dogs need to herd sheep and chase jackrabbits and retain the few grains of nobility that canines are born with. Only a fool couldn’t tell the difference between a man and a beast, and this made Chet a fool; it made him the Dog Lover, which was a deeper insult than that bartender could possibly realize.

  Horace wondered how long it had been since he’d set foot inside a tavern. Ten years? Probably ten years. He didn’t like them anymore. The bars had changed: These days, all the young men drank beer. When he was in his thirties, men drank OFC whiskey. Nobody knew what the letters “OFC” technically stood for, but they all assumed it meant Only For Cowboys. Norwegians and Polacks were beer drinkers, but no legitimate white man would go into a bar and slurp sixteen fluid ounces of wheat foam. Beer drinkers were embarrassing. Sometimes Horace felt embarrassed for the totality of culture, and for the role he had played in its creation. “That’s why all these modern men are soft,” he thought to himself as he looked into the brown-black remnants of his sugar-saturated coffee. “They’re all beer-gorged and lazy. They have no grit. They’re scared of whiskey. They’re scared of the world.”