Downtown Owl

  Julia wanted to move to Rugby.

  OCTOBER 26, 1983

  (Horace)

  “I think Jeannette is trying to poison me,” Edgar Camaro said. This was a surprising thing for anyone to say, even if that anyone was Edgar. The old men rarely spoke about their spouses over coffee; this was mostly out of respect for Horace’s dead wife and Marvin’s two dead wives. Today would be an exception. “Last night she made her knephla soup, and I swear it tasted like Treflon. Even the dumplings! I’m certain I could taste Treflon. She must think I’m a ragweed.” Treflon is an herbicide used to kill weeds like foxtail and kochia; it is (theoretically) as safe as table salt, and you often see farmers eating their lunchtime sandwiches with hands that are stained yellow from the chemical’s application.

  “A little Treflon won’t hurt you,” said Marvin. “It’ll just make your piss glow in the dark. Saves money on the electric.”

  Farmers die from cancer.

  “If that soup is poison, you should bring the whole pot over to my house,” Gary Mauch remarked. “I will eat the whole goddamn kettle in one sitting. In fact, tell Jeannette to throw some strychnine in with the milk. If your wife is really trying to kill you, I’m envious. I’d rather sleep with Jesus than spend another night hearing war stories from the Crusades.”

  Everyone chuckled. Everyone knew what Gary was referring to. Gary’s wife, Vernetta, was currently embroiled in an intense religious standoff, and it was the only thing she had talked about for the past two weeks. He had no choice but to listen. Three months ago, the bishop in Fargo assigned a new Catholic priest to the Owl parish; his name was Father Steele. This sort of transformation happens to every small-town Catholic church every half decade—the diocese never wants any priest or congregation to become too comfortable. In this instance, the change had been especially welcome: The previous padre had been Father Brickashaw, one of the most intimidating rural clergymen of the late-twentieth century. For six years, Father Brickashaw ruled the Catholics of Owl like Attila the Hun, except this warlord a) didn’t care about Mongolia and b) despised Vatican II. He once punched an altar boy in the chest for ringing a bell incorrectly (which, to be fair, did improve the overall quality of pre-Mass bell ringings by an unbelievable degree). His homilies were rhetorical interrogations of society as a whole, and his vocal style employed the soft-loud-soft pattern that would eventually be perfected by rock bands such as the Pixies. His most famous sermon focused on a college football game he happened to watch before the Saturday-evening Mass; Nebraska had defeated Oklahoma, prompting Cornhusker running back Mike Rozier to hold up his right index finger at the game’s conclusion. “I see this very often in the world of sport,” Father Brickashaw began timidly. “I see a young man who feels good. I see a young man who feels special, and he wants to tell this to the world. He has won this big football game, you see, and this makes him ‘number one.’ The world tells him this. He wants to find a television camera and hold up his finger and proclaim that he is number one. We all want to do this. We all want to show other people how proud we are about all the wonderful things we have done. We all want to be number one. But there is one problem with this desire: YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE! YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE! ONLY GOD IS NUMBER ONE! YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE. YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE. THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE NUMBER ONE, AND IT IS NOT A MAN CARRYING A LEATHER BALL. IT IS NOT A BUSINESSMAN, IT IS NOT JOHN WAYNE, IT IS NOT THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. IT IS JESUS CHRIST. IT IS JESUS CHRIST, WHO WAS NAILED TO A TREE TO SAVE YOU FROM SIN. HE CHOSE TO DIE FOR THE SAKE OF THE ENTIRE WORLD. HE IS THE ONE. BUT YOU? YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE! YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE! YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE!”

  He paused to wipe the sweat from his balding skull. The earth did not rotate.

  “You are not number one,” Brickashaw finally continued, audible only because of his microphone. “And yet that is how you continue to live.”

  Not surprisingly, there was a degree of unspoken relief among Owl parishioners when Father Steele suddenly arrived that summer, mostly because he did not seem interested in reminding everyone they were (probably) going to hell. On the contrary, Father Steele was a young, fat, affable, nebulously feminine individual who—in stark contrast to his predecessor—did not assume all women were the intellectual equivalent of cows. He delivered short, nonconfrontational homilies about the sanctity of fidelity and the symbolic value of herding sheep. He especially enjoyed organizing the housewives of the congregation into religiously themed activities they could pursue throughout the week. One of these endeavors was an ad hoc quilting collective, which worked out brilliantly. The other was a weekly Bible-study group, and that ignited the Crusades.

  Traditionally, Roman Catholics are not big Bible scholars. Catholics focus on the Gospels; the rest of the Bible is what Protestants arbitrarily memorize for no obvious reason. But Father Steele wanted to change this. He told the ladies of Owl that there was merit in reading and discussing less familiar passages of the Bible (even the Jewish parts), because this would allow them to place their everyday life into a religious context. His perspectives seemed fresh. As such, five of these middle-aged women agreed to meet with Father Steele every Wednesday morning in the basement of the church rectory to debate the Word of God. That was September. By October, Vernetta Mauch hated Melba Hereford the way Nixon hated JFK.

  The feelings were mutual.

  Melba Hereford had always been a polarizing figure, which is something that cannot be said about most fifty-four-year-old housewives with an interest in ceramics. She was born on a farmstead two miles north of town and had remained there her entire life; it was a personal detail she loved to tell anyone, regardless of how much (or how little) they cared. “I am Owl,” she was wont to say unironically. Melba was a workaholic, a born leader, and a better-than-average house painter. Her father was Irish and her mother Italian; even when exhausted, she was mildly attractive. She didn’t take naps and rarely gossiped. She was involved with every civic organization in town, even breaking the gender barrier of the (previously) all-male volunteer fire department. Had her residence been inside the city limits, she almost certainly would have run for mayor. And all of this was somewhat bizarre, because Melba Hereford felt life in Owl was mildly absurd and totally unfulfilling. She hated what the simplicity of her rural existence implied to East Coast strangers she would never meet, and she felt her life had been a minor waste. This was her darkest insecurity, and she never told it to anyone. Instead, she just worked harder. In 1946, Melba ran for Miss North Dakota, inexplicably assuming she was virtually guaranteed to win the title (along with the one-hundred-dollar academic scholarship that came with it). She placed fourth. When her rival was crowned, all the other girls swarmed around the weeping winner, passively delivering congratulatory hugs. Not Melba. Melba walked straight over to the program’s host, pointed two fingers in his face, and stoically said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” This sentiment didn’t make much sense, particularly since the host had not been involved with the voting. But this is what she told him, and she never stopped saying it. It became her mantra. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She would say this to anyone, and she always believed it. She told people they didn’t know what they were talking about during school board meetings, and she told people they didn’t know what they were talking about at funerals. She said it during wine-fueled political arguments, and she said it during casual conversations about the best way to hang a birdhouse. She said it to people she agreed with, sometimes while actively agreeing with their fundamental point. She once said it during sex. (Melba Hereford’s husband lived an existence of perpetual despair.) “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Whenever she said this, she was correct 50 percent of the time. And that, obviously, is what made Melba Hereford so polarizing: No one else in Owl was remotely like her. No one was as disagreeable, no one was as self-assured, and no one was so deeply committed to a life that was imperfect. She was a nag, but she always hauled the water.

&nbs
p; Melba was the reason why Gary Mauch wanted to consume poison soup.

  Vernetta Mauch didn’t want a Bible-study group. She wanted therapy. She needed it. For the previous seventeen years, she had lived her five-foot-two existence in a four-bedroom house with three empty bedrooms, sharing her declining years with a man who only liked to talk three hours a day, and only with other men, and only in a café she wasn’t inside of. Vernetta wanted other people to understand her life; she felt her life was tremendously interesting, and she wanted other people to know this. Prior to the creation of this Wednesday-morning Bible-study group, having such dialogue was impossible. (It seemed rude and egocentric to talk about oneself in normal conversation.) But now—suddenly—that process was easy. In a way, it was almost the point of the entire exercise! Moreover, it seemed obvious (at least to Vernetta) that God wanted her to talk about these things. He must have. Because why else would he have made the entire Bible about her life?

  There was not a single anecdote from either testament that Vernetta could not connect to specific dramatic events in her own personal history, or even to semidramatic events from the previous Friday. The story of Samson and Delilah was exactly like what happened to her brother-in-law, a promising collegiate wrestler who had a terrible relationship with a Korean girl (this was a fourteen-minute anecdote). The story of Cain and Abel was exactly like a situation that happened to Vernetta and her baby sister ten Christmases ago, except they both behaved more like Abel and there really wasn’t a Cain figure, unless you count the UPS man (this was a twenty-six-minute story, told in two parts). Vernetta closely related to the plight of Job, mostly due to an ill-fated attempt at growing strawberries. There was no theological train that Vernetta could not derail. By the third week, Melba Hereford could no longer contain her annoyance.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melba interjected when Vernetta tried to use Christ’s damning of a fig tree as a means to criticize her husband’s insistence on buying a new lawn tractor. “Buying a lawn mower has nothing to do with the Son of God. You’re ruining the Bible for everyone.”

  “I’m talking about my life,” said Vernetta. “My goodness, Melba. How can you say I don’t know what I’m talking about when I’m talking about my own life?”

  “Because if you actually knew what you were talking about, you wouldn’t be talking about it here,” Melba said. She then turned to Father Steele and pointed two fingers in the general direction of his chubby, cherry face. “I want to make a new rule: From now on, no one can talk about their own life during Bible study.”

  Father Steele did not know how to respond to this demand. However, he did know that he was very afraid of Melba Hereford, and he was very glad his overwhelming sexual confusion had led him away from a life where he might have married such a person. “That would be rather unorthodox,” the priest said softly. “I mean, the idea behind having these discussions is to understand how the Word of God can be part of our everyday world. I’m really not sure if this is a good idea, Melba. I’m not sure if placing a ban on all expressions of human discovery would be an effective way to pursue divinity.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Melba said.

  “When we agreed to form this committee three weeks ago, you described it as ‘Bible study.’ To me, that means we should be studying the Bible. I am very interested in the Bible. I am not interested in listening to jibber jabber.”

  “My life is not jibber jabber!”

  “I think we should vote on it,” said Melba, already tearing an 81⁄2x 11–inch piece of paper into five pieces. “We will use a secret ballot, so as not to hurt anyone’s tender feelings. Mark down an X if you want a ban on people talking about themselves, and mark an O if you want to continue perverting God’s autobiography.”

  The voting process was predictably efficient. Father Steele collected the ballots and counted them carefully, unwillingly supporting the election by allowing its very existence. The swing vote was June Cash, the pragmatic wife of a dairy farmer; June didn’t like Melba, but not as much as she disliked self-indulgence. The final tally was 3–2. As a result, Owl now had the only Bible-study group in America where it was forbidden to tell any story less than two thousand years old. This is why Vernetta Mauch hated Melba Hereford: Through sheer force of personality, Melba invalidated her entire life. And this public invalidation had been—pretty much without exception—the only thing Vernetta had talked about since the votes were counted. Over the last two weeks, there had never been a conversation in the Mauch household that did not devolve into a one-sided, singularly repetitive declaration of the fatwa against Melba Hereford.

  This made Gary want to eat Treflon.

  “I can’t take it,” he said. “I just cannot take it. It’s like I’m living with the goddamn Ayatollah. From the start of supper until the end of Carson, all she does is rant about how Melba Hereford is a witch who needs to be thrown into the river. I keep telling Vernetta to just quit the goddamn Bible group if it causes her so much suffering, but she refuses. She thinks that’s what Melba wants. As if Melba cares about anyone who isn’t named Melba! The crazy old biddy. That goes for both of them. I don’t know which biddy is loonier. I’d really like to know if my wife is crazier than Melba.”

  “If it’s a horse apiece,” said Marvin, “who gives a damn?”

  “No shit,” said Gary.

  Horace smiled and blew his nose. Marvin Windows knew what he was talking about.

  “So what are our thoughts on Grenada?” asked Horace. “Do you have an opinion on our situation, Marvin?”

  “Do I have an opinion on what?”

  “On Grenada,” said Horace. “We invaded the island of Grenada yesterday.”

  “Where the Sam Hill is Grenada?”

  “East of Central America,” said Horace. “They only have twelve hundred men in their entire military. The war is already over. Reagan just made the announcement. We won.”

  “Why did we invade Grenada?” asked Marvin.

  “We had to rescue some American medical students,” said Horace.

  “There was a Marxist coup,” said Gary. “The Marxists are against medical students.”

  “Huh,” said Marvin. “Well, I don’t have any opinion on the matter. I didn’t see the newspaper.”

  OCTOBER 29, 1983

  (Mitch)

  People often recall their childhood school bus smelling like vomit, but this is a misremembered cliché. In reality, the smell people recall is vomit cleanser. This misremembrance is the second-most interesting fact about school buses. The first-most interesting fact is that school buses vibrate. Anytime a yellow busload of children exceeds forty miles per hour, the seats and windows vibrate in place like an air hockey table; it always feels like the vehicle is on the cusp of molecular disintegration. Mitch imagined this happening as he looked out his window at the darkening horizon and the prewinter sky. Bodies would fly everywhere, peppering the highway with blood and bone and fragments of clothing. It would be violent, but he would survive.

  His bus was rolling toward Wishek, a Germanic community where the Owl Lobos were about to close out the ’83 football campaign against the WHS Badgers. This was a big deal for two reasons. The first was that playing well in Wishek was always important, because Wishek High was populated by an inordinate number of attractive, disarmingly voluptuous girls; this had been the case for decades and was known throughout the region. The mothers of Wishek had hot-blooded bloodlines. The second reason was purely mathematic: The Lobos currently had a record of 4–4, so tonight’s game would dictate the symbolic value of the entire season, along with the civic worth of every person on the roster. If the Owls won, they would finish the year as a winning team; everyone in town would be mildly satisfied and deeply relieved. A record of five wins and four losses was acceptable to all. However, if they lost, they would become the first Owl team in two decades to end the year below .500. Going 4–5 would be a disaster; in theory, Mr. Laidlaw could even l
ose his job. This struck Mitch as strangely arbitrary, but it probably made sense: Everything needed a cutoff. Tonight he would be fighting to save the job of a man he despised.

  The season had gone precisely as Mitch had anticipated, which meant the season had been completely undramatic. The Owls had won the three games in which they were plainly the better team, they had lost the three games in which they were generally outclassed, and they had split the two contests that were genuine toss-ups. The squad never found a legitimate quarterback. Mitch had played sparingly, but consistently; Laidlaw often inserted him into ballgames whenever the team was floundering, almost as a way to publicly express his dismay with the other players. Mitch’s lone highlight had been against the Napoleon Imperials in early October: After not playing a down throughout the first three quarters, he entered the game with the Lobos trailing 14–0. Laidlaw kept calling Flood Right 64; as promised, Weezie was open in the flat every time. Mitch threw ten desperate passes and completed six of them, including the only touchdown of his entire career. (The toss had even spiraled, partially.) Owl still lost the game, but everyone told Mitch he had played wonderfully and slapped his helmet with enthusiasm. “I bet you’ll start next week,” Weezie told him after the game. “You are the quarterback of the future.” For most of the weekend, Mitch believed that. He spent Saturday afternoon throwing a football through a Firestone tire his father had hung from a tree. He spent Sunday afternoon watching Tommy Kramer take downfield gambles while looking foxy and hungover. Mitch could not sleep, and he did not want to. Things in his life were (possibly) about to change (completely). And they did, but not in the way he had hoped. When Mitch arrived at practice the following Monday, he immediately noticed something: Laidlaw liked him less. “Completing a few passes doesn’t make you Johnny Unitas,” he barked at Mitch during calisthenics, apropos of absolutely nothing. “I’ve seen a million kids heave a touchdown pass after the cows were already in the corn. That’s not what I need to see, Vanna. I need to see leadership, Vanna. Be a leader. For once in your life, be a leader. Do you even understand what that means?” Mitch did not. In fact, he had no clue what that was supposed to mean in any context that wasn’t theoretical. By Wednesday it was clear that Mitch was not the quarterback of the future, or even the present. The Lobos faced Cando High School on Friday, and Mitch didn’t play at all. He spent most of the next three days pretending not to care about this, except when he was alone in his bedroom. Bedrooms are good places for crying.