Downtown Owl

  Cubby Candy saw no connection between his actions and the rest of society. He would do things that were so incomprehensible that they often couldn’t be defined as bad, even though that was the only viable option. Once, when he was a sophomore, he was sitting quietly in biology, waiting for Mr. Rickarski to correct a quiz; Candy suddenly stood up, picked up his desk, and threw it through a plate-glass window. He claimed it was because the sun was in his eyes. Candy’s threshold for pain was beyond comprehension. Once, when he was trying to show Tina McAndrew that he had a crush on her, he burned his left biceps with the cigarette lighter from his Barracuda. When Tina freaked out, he said, “No no no, you don’t understand.” He burned himself again. When she freaked out even more, he did it a third time. He gave himself eleven circular scars in the span of fifteen minutes, and he never seemed to care. He felt nothing and cared about nothing, except possibly his car. Which is why it’s (probably) no surprise that Cubby Candy was the greatest teenage street fighter in all of south-central North Dakota.

  “You’ve never even hung out with Candy,” said Curtis-Fritz. “I have. I used to go to street dances with him in the summer, because he always had booze. I’ve seen him obliterate fuckers. He’d fight two, three, four guys at once. He loves it. He turns into this subhuman animal. He doesn’t care what happens. If he ever got Grendel on the ground, he would kick him to death. I’m serious. He would kick Grendel until he was dead.”

  “But that would never happen,” said Drug Man. “That’s what I keep telling you. I’m sure Candy would start screaming and do his whole werewolf routine, and he’d foam at the mouth and lose his shit. And then Grendel would punch him—once—in the face. And then Cubby Candy would be a headless werewolf. It would be like when Larry Holmes pounded Tex Cobb.”

  This specific discussion—this hypothetical fistfight between Chris “Grendel” Sellers and Cubby Candy—was the single most polarizing debate in the universe of Owl High School. For people like Drug Man and Curtis-Fritz and Mitch and Zebra and every other male between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, this was Roe v. Wade. Sure, Cubby was insane. Sure, his career fighting record was something like 79–0–1 (the lone tie coming when he attacked a cop in eighth grade). But what would happen if he fought Grendel, the greatest titan any of them had ever known? Who would win? It was a question that defied clarity. Granted, Grendel had never been in a fight in his adult life, and—granted—Grendel and Candy had no dispute with each other (they probably had not even spoken in five years). But the notion of such an epic conflict was eternally intoxicating. It seemed to represent everything. It was the one subject everyone could always talk about.

  “I still think the central issue is reach,” said Ainge. “Grendel is six foot seven, but he has the wingspan of a guy who’s seven foot six. I think he’d hit Candy five times before Candy could get close enough to shoot the leg.”

  “What are you saying?” said Curtis-Fritz. “Reach? What difference would that possibly make? Candy would just hit him over the head with a bottle. He’s done that to tons of guys.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Zebra said. “Grendel’s stupid. He can’t read. He can’t count. For all we know, he probably thinks wood comes from cows. If you told him that cow bones were made of wood, he probably wouldn’t question it. But Candy is smart, kind of. I know he gets shitty grades, but he’s kind of smart. Like, we were talking about Ozzy records one night, and he had some very interesting ideas about the lyrics off Diary of a Madman. So if there was ever a point where strategy became involved, Candy would have a major edge.”

  “There isn’t going to be any goddamn strategy,” said Drug Man. “It’s a fight. They would be fighting. They would not be discussing Ozzy Osbourne. Grendel would be tearing Candy’s arms off and crushing his bones into powder. Grendel would be eating Candy’s stupid yellow car.”

  “No,” said Curtis-Fritz. “No way that happens. No way. Besides, no one could ever punch Candy any harder than his dad did all the time.”

  “Mitch, will you intercede here?”

  This was Mitch’s deepest source of personal pride: For reasons that had never been clearly defined, he was universally viewed as the intellectual authority on who would win an imaginary fight between Grendel and Candy. It might have been because Mitch had spent more time thinking about this theoretical conflict than anyone else, or it might have been because he just seemed like the kind of person who would spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about an event that had never happened. But regardless of how this assumption came to be, Mitch loved that it was believed it to be true. He loved that this was an issue everyone had an opinion about, but—somehow—his opinion counted more. Whenever people discussed the Grendel vs. Candy Hypothetical, he never had to interject himself into the conversation; he always knew someone else would eventually ask him what he thought.

  “As I have often noted in the past,” began Mitch, “context is everything. If you locked Grendel and Candy in a room and said, ‘Okay, start fighting,’ I’m sure Candy would win. Locking him in a room would be more than enough motivation to make him go wolfshit, because he wants to die. If you locked up Candy in his kitchen and said, ‘Okay, start fighting,’ he would beat the shit out of the oven. That’s just who he is. He’s like Gordon Kahl. But we have to assume this fight would be happening for a reason. Something would have to be at stake, and it would have to be something that Grendel was extremely emotional about, because he doesn’t have the capacity to get pissed off intellectually. So if this fight did happen, it would have to be because Grendel went insane. And if Grendel was insane, I don’t see how anyone could stop him. Candy could hit him with a bottle. Candy could hit him in the chest with a sledgehammer. It wouldn’t matter. Grendel would always win.”

  “I disagree,” said Curtis-Fritz.

  “This conversation is over,” said Drug Man. “Vanna has spoken.”

  Ainge made a U-turn in front of the abandoned lumberyard, and the Oldsmobile retraced the Main Street pavement for the twenty-first time that afternoon. Steve Miller’s “Swingtown” came on the radio.

  “Vanna, I am serious about this,” said Weezie. “Flood Right 64. I’m always open in the flat. Always. Tell the other quarterbacks I told you this. They will trust you.”

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1983

  (Julia)

  It was extraordinary to be this new kind of person.

  It was exhausting. It was a little embarrassing. And sometimes it was the opposite of embarrassing, even though no such word exists. Julia had never met a person who was remotely similar to the person she had suddenly become; had she seen such a character in a film, it would have made the movie implausible.

  Oh, she had certainly known attractive girls in her life. Her freshman-year roommate at Wisconsin: That girl should have been illegal. She looked like a Spanish runway model on anabolic steroids. One of the Mormon teachers from her co-op in Chicago: That woman was joyless, but her skeleton was faultless. In truth, beautiful women were not as rare as poets from the Romantic period seemed to indicate. They were everywhere. They were almost as common as ugly girls. In fact, for the first twenty-three years of her life, Julia had never been considered the prettiest or the least attractive member among any random collection of her female friends; for some reason, she always ranked third. Julia had also known lots of popular girls in life (some who had deserved the attention and some who had not). Charisma is an undeniable thing; some people are just naturally dynamic, regardless of what they say or how they behave. You want to be around these people, even if you don’t know why. Similarly, she had occasionally encountered women who were more desirable than logic would suggest; she assumed this amorphous quality was what people meant when they used the word sensual. Her sister had that quality. Obsessive, bookish guys were always falling in love with her older sister, even though she was oddly shaped and smelled like a hippie. Her sister never had to make men want her, and that was an attribute Julia had always envied.

  But not anymo
re.

  Not here. All of those preexisting, archaic perceptions of beauty and charm were no longer relevant to Julia’s day-today life. She had been wrong about everything. As it turned out, and much to her surprise, Julia Rabia was the most attractive, most charismatic, most enchanting woman in North America.

  Every day was the same: Wake up hungover. Go to work. Sleepwalk for eight hours: Tell kids that Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean; pretend to care that Angie Dickinson was born in Kulm; grade a few multiple-choice tests about slavery. Return home to an empty apartment. Nap. Eat Chunky soup. Take shower. Put on Guess? jeans. Put on a sweatshirt. Leave the door unlocked at 8:30 and drive the Honda seven blocks. Park diagonally on the street. Enter the bar. And then—from the moment she sat down until the moment she drunkenly climbed back into her car—be aggressively (but politely) pursued by virtually every unmarried man in town.

  It was beyond her comprehension, but she got used to it.

  Most nights began in a corner booth with Naomi and Ted (usually at Yoda’s, Mick’s Tavern, or the Owl VFW). Ted was Naomi’s boyfriend, although they were both married to other people and had no physical relationship; they just seemed to enjoy calling each other “my boyfriend” and “my girlfriend.” It was hard for Julia to understand the nature of this relationship, or how they were able to sustain their respective marriages. She never asked. Ted was eight years younger than Naomi and referred to himself as an underemployed farmer; he had a beard, drank Schmidt, and continually grinned. That was the sum of his persona. His primary role in Julia’s life was to provide biographical information on the suitors who were simultaneously pursuing her. This was more complicated than it might sound, simply because everyone had two names. If you met ten people, you had to remember twenty. As of the evening of September 26, these were the ones Julia could consistently recall:

  Derrick Decker. He was “Bull Calf.” They called him Bull Calf because he once pulled his groin during a junior high football game and, while lying in agony on the trainer’s table in the coach’s office, he moaned like a baby bull.

  Leonard McCloud. He was sometimes called “Koombah,” because as a sixth grader his haircut reminded people of an older, long-graduated student named Keith Koomersbach.

  Greg Blixer. He was called “Disco Ball.” His skull was a globe of bone.

  Brian Pintar. He was known as “the Drelf,” which was an abbreviation for “the Drunken Elf.” Brian Pintar was five foot four and a part-time alcoholic.

  Kurt Flaw. He was called “Ass Jam,” because someone once noticed that he ran the 220-yard dash with an awkward, upright posture, almost as if a wooden stick had been jammed into his rectum. This was not intended as criticism.

  Kelly Flaw. This was Kurt’s younger brother. He was “Baby Ass Jam.”

  Tyler Smykowski. He was called “Buck Buck,” because he spent the summer of 1976 listening to Bill Cosby comedy albums in his basement and repeating the skits verbatim.

  Phil Buzkol. This person actually had three nicknames, but he was customarily called “McGarrett.” This was because he once tried to pay for a single can of Coca-Cola with a $50 bill he’d received as a confirmation gift, an unusually large denomination of currency that made the cashier think of Hawaii Five-0, a TV program whose main character was named Steve McGarrett. He was also called “Busload” (because that vaguely sounded like “Buzkol”), and he was occasionally referred to as “Vanderslut,” because there was a rumor he had received fellatio from a promiscuous girl named Vickie Vanderson in 1975 (this, incidentally, was not true).

  Steve Brown. He was officially nicknamed “Little Stevie Horse ’n’ Phone,” but most people referred to him as “Horse ’n’ Phone” (or even just “Horse,” but only by his closest friends). The origin of all this was unknown; it was the name his father had always called him, and now the father was deceased.

  Chuck Voight. He was called “B.K.,” an abbreviation for “Brother Killer.” This was because he once threatened to stab his older brother with an ice pick during an ill-fated attempt at installing an air conditioner.

  These nicknames fascinated Julia; their inexplicable specificity was confounding. During her formative years in Milwaukee, nicknames had always been obvious and derivative: A left-handed person might be called “Lefty,” or a big-boned girl would be labeled “Moose.” Milwaukee slang was also less adhesive; if you put peroxide in your hair, you might get called “Blondie” for one summer (or maybe even for half a school year), but that kind of moniker was never permanent. This was not the case in Owl. In Owl, nicknames were spawned by random, unmetaphoric events that offered no meaningful reflection on the individual. Yet these nicknames would last decades. A man like Bull Calf might be called “Bull Calf” until he reached retirement (or at least until he married and became a father). Julia noticed that a few of Ted’s peers referred to him as “Kleptosaur.” One night she asked him why; it was because he got caught shoplifting a plastic dinosaur as a third grader. Ted did not find this name problematic. “It could be worse,” he said. “I could have been stealing rubbers.”

  Julia’s nights were not all identical, but they were more similar than different. She would sit next to Naomi, who sat across from Ted. The three of them would start the evening discussing the teachers Naomi did not like (this was almost all of them), the students Naomi felt should be thrown out of school (this was an ever-changing roster, although it always included Cubby Candy), and the fact that all of them were making less than fifteen thousand dollars a year, which was less than they deserved but more than they needed. As the night wore on, a revolving door of nicknamed men would take turns occupying the booth’s remaining seat, each one trying to make casual, dynamic conversation with a semi-intoxicated twenty-three-year-old Our State instructor. Often, this meant a discussion about grain prices. Every male contestant would buy the entire table a round of drinks (Ted occasionally declined, only because he feared men would lose respect for him if he never paid for his own booze). If the initial table talk went smoothly, the contestant would buy them all a second round of cocktails; if those beverages made the bachelor confident, he would ask Julia to play a game of pool. She agreed to this offer 51 percent of the time. And if the billiard game was playful, and if the man convinced Julia to let him buy her one more drink, and if he was likewise drunk (or at least unsober), the curiously nicknamed man would inevitably ask Julia to see a movie in Jamestown. And Julia always said no.

  She had to.

  That was one of the first things Naomi explained to her.

  In Owl, people did not date; if you went on one date, you were dating. If you went on two dates, it was an exclusive relationship. If you went on three dates, it was a serious relationship and there was potential for marriage. You could hang out with members of the opposite sex whenever you wanted, and you could get drunk with them in public, and you could even find yourself having clandestine sex with one of them, possibly on multiple occasions. But you couldn’t make plans. Going on a proper, recognized date was different; when someone asked you on a date, they were actively asking if you’d be interested in a committed relationship. When all those curiously nicknamed men asked Julia to see movies, they were really asking if she might consider sharing her life. Because—if a shared life was the life you wanted, and you wanted to share such a life without leaving Owl—there were no other options. If Julia didn’t like you, no one could ever say, “Well, there’s a lot of other fish in the sea.” There was one fish, and it lived in a lake with no tributaries, and all the competing villagers read Field & Stream with extreme prejudice. The arrival of an unattached female teacher was a romantic race against time. And no matter how much she enjoyed her insular celebrity (and regardless of how nicely these desperate, lonely men seemed to treat her), Julia knew that was perverse. She thought about it all the time.

  In fact, she was actively thinking those specific thoughts when she re-noticed a person she’d noticed several times before.

  Julia, Naomi, and Ted
were sitting inside Mick’s. It was Tuesday. It was almost midnight. They were all different levels of drunk. Naomi was smoking Ted’s cigarettes. Julia had played four games of pool. And there was a man sitting at the bar and everyone was talking to him, but he was barely talking to anyone. It was impossible to tell if he was completely intoxicated or mostly sober. He was wearing a blue denim jacket, a white denim shirt, and blue denim jeans; it was as if he were wearing the world’s most comfortable tuxedo. His teeth were unusually large and uncommonly white. He looked sad, or possibly angry, or theoretically bored.

  “Ted,” said Julia. “Who is that?” She gingerly pointed at the man in denim. “I’ve seen him here before.”

  “Vance Druid,” said Ted.

  “What do people call him?” she asked.

  “Vance Druid,” said Ted.

  “Really. Why doesn’t he get a nickname?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Ted. “I guess he just doesn’t need one. He’s famous.”

  “Famous? For what? For wearing denim?”

  “Well, not famous,” said Ted. “He’s just…you know, he’s a different kind of person.”

  Oddly (and inevitably), that was precisely the quality Julia had noticed about this denim-clad man on the previous occasions she had watched him drink Old Milwaukee: Everyone treated him differently, and for no comprehensible reason. They did seem to behave as if he was a celebrity. He only paid for his drinks when he felt like it. He didn’t look at people during conversations, almost like he was a mafia boss. Whenever some random drunkard told a joke that made Vance laugh, the joker would be visibly pleased with himself; somehow, making this man laugh was viewed as a cultural victory. Vance Druid possessed an abstract surplus of interpersonal leverage. Everyone liked him, even when he didn’t like them back.