You don’t need to be Perry Mason to connect these dots.
A few months later, Hank and Harry Truman had an abrupt falling-out--a fistfight that erupted at the Bookhouse when Harry confronted him about the “fumble.” Harry’s older brother Frank and Big Ed had to pull Harry off Hank or he might have pummeled him to death. Did Harry connect the dots himself? I think so. But neither Truman told their father, the sheriff, about it and the truth stayed buried inside the Bookhouse. Hank and Harry were no longer friends, and Hank’s slide to the dark side accelerated.
That summer Hank began making runs across the border working for Jean Renault, a postgraduate education in professional crime. His personal morality followed a similar downward trajectory: It wouldn’t be long before former teammate Big Ed Hurley had his own reasons for wanting to pummel Hank.
During senior year Big Ed and classmate Norma Lindstrom had become an item. Norma was head of the cheerleading squad and homecoming queen, a dazzling beauty from a modest family on the shabbier side of town--that is, where most everyone not named Packard or Horne lived. The Hurleys had been Packard sawmill employees for two generations--Ed’s uncle had lost two fingers there--and Ed’s brother Ernest followed in their footsteps, but Big Ed’s teenage obsession with cars, trucks and motorcycles indicated a different path lay in store for him. Norma’s father, Marty Lindstrom, had worked for the railroad for many years, before retiring to open an unassuming diner in the heart of Twin Peaks.
This diner, and its extraordinarily good coffee and pie, has become, I admit, something of an obsession for me. Included is a short history which can be found on the inside of their menus.9
After speaking with all the principals, I believe I’ve discovered why Big Ed and Norma, who were so obviously in love, never married. Again, I find Hank Jennings is responsible. Here’s how:
With American involvement in the Vietnam War at an all-time peak, Big Ed Hurley enlisted in the Army after graduation and headed out of town for basic training. Everyone assumed that Norma and Ed would marry first, but Big Ed--displaying a tendency to hesitate at crucial personal moments that never showed up on the football field--neglected to pop the question before embarking for Fort Dix. Norma hadn’t yet realized that reticence was as much a piece of Big Ed as his inability to articulate his reasons for it. Sweet-natured Norma, who’d stuttered as a child and suffered from low self-esteem, simply assumed she wasn’t good enough. That fall Big Ed left the States to begin a two-year hitch in the command HQ motor pool in Saigon.
With Big Ed out of the picture, Hank--who’d gone out with Norma briefly during junior year--began circling his prey. Hank’s own mother, Jolene, had been one of the original Double R waitresses, and he’d worked there himself all through high school--where Norma was now pulling shifts on the weekends while attending community college--so they’d known each other all their lives.
Hank approached her as a friend who shared her sorrow at the absence of Big Ed. That struck a chord with Norma. Like any good sociopath, Hank could simulate sincere emotions, without actually feeling them; with Norma, “empathy” and “sincerity” went a long way. Hank was also patient and armed with a surplus of dirty money, which he wasn’t shy about using to impress her. Norma grew to like the attention and by November they’d progressed from weekly lunches to occasional dinners, and then Norma invited Hank over to the house for Thanksgiving.
Norma claimed later that by then the daily letters she’d been getting from Big Ed by military post had stopped; she hadn’t heard a word from him for over six weeks. A period during which Big Ed later said he dropped her a line every day, addressed to the diner, and couldn’t figure out why his best girl wasn’t writing him back. It wasn’t in Big Ed’s nature to write his friends back home to check on Norma. Ed assumed the worst, that he wasn’t good enough and her affections had changed. I believe it’s because, at this point, you could add a felony charge of “tampering with the U.S. mail” to Hank’s criminal résumé.
Big Ed was supposed to come home for Christmas leave, but since he hadn’t heard from Norma he canceled the trip. He wrote one last letter asking for clarity, but Norma never got it, so while Ed spent the holiday drowning his sorrows in a Saigon PX, Norma was in the arms of Hank Jennings at the annual tree-lighting ceremony in the Twin Peaks town square. That night, as the townsfolk sang carols and a fresh sprinkling of snow dusted the square’s magnificent old 60-foot-tall Douglas fir, Hank slipped Norma a small present in a beautifully wrapped box. Inside was a big fat diamond engagement ring--no doubt stolen and fenced.
She said yes.
Norma’s Dear John letter reached Big Ed three weeks later. Big Ed thought long and hard about writing back, but was so brokenhearted and prone to self-doubt that his thoughts got all tangled up and, after a dozen false starts, decided he couldn’t express a word of what he actually wanted to say. So Ed hesitated, dithered and then declined to act at all. Not that, as we know, such a letter would have ever made it to Norma, but at least he could have truthfully said he’d written one.
Big Ed learned about their marriage after the fact, when a letter from Harry finally did make it to him--an intimate affair at the Chapel-in-the-Woods, attended by both families and not a single Bookhouse Boy--but by then it was too late. Hank took Norma by train to San Francisco for a swank honeymoon, then drove down the coast in a rented convertible to Los Angeles, where they saw the sights and attended a taping of The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson, who, as he did every year, had taken his show to the West Coast for a couple of weeks.
When they returned home, Norma threw herself into finishing her degree, with the intention of becoming a nurse--but life had other ideas. Her father, Marty, was diagnosed with heart disease, and her mom left the diner to care for him. Then Hank’s mother, Jolene, took ill--lung cancer--so Norma helped care for her while taking over management of the Double R. (Hank was by now spending most of his days “on the road,” working for Jean Renault.)
With her vitality and vision, Norma transformed a serviceable greasy spoon into a place worth a special trip out of your way. She revamped the menu and opened a small bakery next door to produce her mother’s pie recipes in greater numbers, selling them as a side business, and eventually by mail order. She also redesigned the waitress uniforms--the crisp, distinctive white-trimmed aqua dresses they still wear today--and slowly turned a taken-for-granted community hangout into a source of local pride.
(Let me reiterate that the food, and particularly the pies, at the Double R--and did I mention the coffee?--are truly something special.)10
Norma lost her dad in 1978. Her mom came back to work at the diner afterward, and Norma loved working side by side with her--especially with Hank’s long and frequent absences--but Ilsa never got over losing Marty. The prospect of grandchildren helped sustain her, but Ilsa’s health declined and she passed suddenly one night in her sleep in 1984. The whole town turned out for Ilsa’s funeral, but Hank didn’t make it--out of the country, and unreachable, on “business” again. At which point Norma realized there weren’t going to be any children either. They’d settled into a distant and loveless routine. Every time Norma thought of ending it, Hank would do something just kind or affectionate enough to keep her growing feelings that they were finished at bay.
Until three years later, when Andrew Packard was vaporized in his boathouse, and a few weeks later Hank pled guilty to hit-and-run.11
1 Confirmed. One of many volumes found there, all of which were cataloged by Agent Cooper in his notes. I’ve also confirmed that this one was typed on a vintage Underwood that permanently resides in the Bookhouse—TP
2 Verified with Interpol sources. I believe it’s also likely, the tone being consistent with what I’ve seen of his case notes, that Agent Cooper himself may have put together this untitled volume—TP
3 Thomas Eckhardt
4 I’ve been waiting for this subject to resurface. Sometimes patience is rewarded—TP
5 A curious statement from s
omeone who, as we know, MOST DEFINITELY HAD a younger brother—TP
6 It just occurred to me that the film Body Heat, which came out a few years before this, has a strikingly similar plot twist. Maybe she saw the movie? Still worth watching, btw—TP
7 Emil was the son of Doug Milford’s erstwhile UFO witness—TP
8 One Eyed Jacks figures prominently in an investigation conducted by Agent Cooper just after the Laura Palmer case—TP
9 Verified. Cooper must have really been into this place—TP
10 Yes, definitely Agent Cooper – TP
11 The first “chapter” of Cooper’s narrative ends here.
My first question is: Why did he write this? He obviously had become fascinated with, and fond of, the people and places of the town. Based on the date at the front, this was after the Laura Palmer case was closed but apparently before he left town. Cooper had some time on his hands, so he turned his investigative skills to clearing up a couple local mysteries, like a concert pianist practicing the scales to stay in form.
It’s only my opinion, but it also seems possible he did this as an act of friendship—as a way to tell his new friends hard truths about the losses or trouble in their lives without confronting them. I believe he may have then just left these pages in the Bookhouse in the hope that his friends Sheriff Truman and Big Ed Hurley—both Bookhouse Boys—might come across them. No way yet of knowing if they did—TP
*4* LOVE TRIANGLE
In addition to fostering interest in reading, the rules of the Bookhouse encouraged “journaling” in its members. A second “journal” from a local source, also found at the Bookhouse--in the Local Interest section, on the shelf right next to Cooper’s work--picks up Big Ed’s story from there.1
TOMMY HILL, circa 1987
MY PAL BIG ED HURLEY came back to Twin Peaks a few months after Saigon fell in 1975. I hooked up with him there once in fall of ’73 during shore leave. (I was a gunner’s mate on a PBR, patrolling the Saigon River delta. Talk about a flat-out shit suicidal detail, but that’s another story. Remind me to tell it to you sometime. And remind me, next time I see him, to kick the ass of the jerk-weed who talked me into that recruitment center in the first place, if I can ever remember who that was. Hank.)
After a bottle of 90 proof brain grenades loosened up his tongue, Big Ed confessed he was still carrying a Statue of Liberty–sized torch for Norma. Now I love the big dumb SOB like a brother, okay, but breathe a word about Norma and the dude goes into full-out mope mode like a twelve-year-old Girl Scout who lost her cookies. I grabbed him by the shoulders, told him to buck up and stop acting so beaucoup dinky-dow about his stale old stateside sob story. Nobody in our immediate vicinity—and by that I meant the closest two thousand miles—gave two shits. The statute of limitations had expired on that heartbreak and there was a surplus of local nookie in our current clique to help his “little-brain-housing unit” achieve a permanent state of amnesia vis-à-vis what’s-her-name. He came out of it, slightly, but the evening crashed for good, as I vaguely remember, with Big Ed getting goony-eyed over some Frankie Valli tearjerker that dropped on the jukebox—“That was our song,” he said, I kid you not—and that’s when I split the scene. A firefight up the Mekong on my PBR sounded good compared to this episode of Queen for a Day.
We exchanged a few letters over the next couple years. I punched my ticket home six months before Big Ed, courtesy of some VC shrapnel I absorbed with my gluteus maximus when some FNG (military slang for “fucking new guy”) lieutenant ordered us up the wrong fork of the river, thereby nearly introducing us all to the Beautiful Round-Eyed Woman who takes you to the Big Base Camp.
Back in Twin Peaks, next letter I get from him Big Ed tells me he was about to sign up for another hitch and go career Army—the action he saw in the HQ motor pool wasn’t exactly hot—when he learned that family obligations were calling him back home.
Ed had this sad sack younger brother Billy who’d been hurt at the mill—a stack of logs fell off a truck and crushed one of his legs. For the record, becoming the third generation of Hurley to get himself maimed on the job. They called it Hurley Luck. You know those safety signs they put up in the workplace? The one in the mill read: “___ number of days since a Hurley was injured.”
(My old man worked thirty-five years in the field for Packard, in way hairier circumstances, and never came down with a hangnail. And by the way, don’t ever call those guys “lumberjacks” or it’ll really piss ’em off. They’re loggers. Lots of Native people did that job. We built the skyscrapers in New York too, but it wasn’t ’cause we were “fearless Indians” either. Not enough white people were desperate enough to want those jobs.)
That injury crushed Billy’s spirit, too, what was left of it. Confined to a wheelchair, he went on disability, and started investing those checks in local water holes. Billy and his wife Susan had a young son named James, still in elementary school, and Susan pleaded with Ed that the boy needed his help and she needed him to read Billy the riot act. Well, Big Ed was up for that job and the Army lost a hell of a mechanic.
Many moons ago during the Depression, Big Ed and Billy’s parents had opened a roadside stand outside town selling eggs, fruits and vegetables from the family farm. (Best corn in the valley, by the way. Well worth the drive.) After WW2, when rationing ended and motorists hit the road again, Big Ed’s old man Ed added some gas pumps and lucked into owning a viable business. (For clarity: Big Ed had been born Ed Junior, but he came into the world as one enormous fucking baby so they started calling him Big Ed even when he was little, which wasn’t for long.)
Big Ed also came in with this weird gift for figuring out how shit worked. Five years old, his mom would come home to find out he’d field stripped the toaster or her vacuum cleaner. She whupped him so good that pretty soon he could put all that shit back together the right way, too. By the time Big Ed got to high school he could assemble a Volkswagen blindfolded and was working as chief mechanic at the garage his old man added to what by now folks were calling Ed’s Gas Farm. Me, I just called him the “engine whisperer.” And good thing he knew how mechanical stuff worked, ’cause when it came to the human heart, the poor bastard didn’t have a clue.
Big Ed didn’t tell a soul, even me, when he was coming home from ’Nam. Two weeks after the last chopper got out I walked into the Bookhouse and found him sitting there with a 16-ounce Olympia in one hand and a copy of Catch-22 in the other. (Big Ed’s one-line review of Joseph Heller’s masterpiece: “This guy was definitely in the Army.”) For a while Big Ed kept to himself at the Gas Farm, working his butt off, taking care of his nephew James, and spent what few spare hours he had at the Bookhouse, trying to get James interested in reading. He tried everything, man. Twain, Tarzan, hell, even Doc Savage. Good kid, James. Not a reader.
Our former teammate Frank Truman, who’d taken over from his old man as sheriff, tried to talk Big Ed into joining the force as a deputy. After pondering the decision for a month, he decided to stay on at the Gas Farm to help his old man, who had a bum wheel of his own, courtesy of, you guessed it, another Hurley mishap at the mill when he was a teenager. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody some good, as some old white guy said, so in his place Frank hired another of his high school teammates and fellow Bookhouse Boys, yours truly.
(Let me add here that, at the time, I still had some resentment toward Frank, since he was the one who first hung the “Tommy Hawk” nickname on me in junior high. Back then, white people still found condescending shit like that funny. You know, like F Troop or casting a Jewish guy from Brooklyn named Jeff Chandler as Cochise.)
At the time I was seriously considering moving to Alaska to work on a deep-sea fishing trawler—yes, I did need to have my head examined, and knew it, and courtesy of the VA, I booked an hour in the company of their on-duty shrink, to sort out some shall-we-say issues about Frank and my decision. Six minutes into my soul-searching monologue, the Doc shoots me a look and says: “Wait a second, you want to work
on a fishing boat in the Arctic? I’m from Alaska. Are you fucking nuts?” For that wake-up call let me just say, for the record, “Thanks a heap, Doc.” And so began my own career in local law enforcement.2
Although Norma knew he was back in town, Big Ed waited a year before going into the Double R for a cup of coffee. I was at the counter myself that day. The moment Big Ed saw Norma behind the register he went all pale and gulped in air—his chest swelled up like a water balloon—but Norma was hitched to Hank now, and Big Ed’s vocal cords shut right down. Norma’s heart probably skipped a beat when Big Ed walked through the door, too—life with that punk Hank was no bed of roses—but, as usual, she took her cue from Ed, and he didn’t give her one, so they smiled politely, and stood there mumbling small talk so tiny you couldn’t find it with a microscope. The sight was so pitiful I ordered a second piece of pie just to break it up.
That’s how it stayed. A creature of habit, Big Ed started and ended every day with a cup of joe at the Double R, and usually ate lunch there too. A blind man could see that Norma’s marriage to Hank was shakier than hell, and Big Ed had 20/20. He wasn’t going to do anything about it, but knowing it pumped enough fuel to keep the pilot light on that torch burning for years.
Then, one Saturday in late 1984, he ran into Nadine Gertz.
When Ed’s father passed in 1983, Big Ed took over the business. He put up this big new neon sign that he designed and built himself. Had a big glowing egg on it, a tribute to the family’s old farm stand, and a mallard that he said symbolized his father’s love for hunting—and he renamed the place Big Ed’s Gas Farm. His nephew James, who by this point was like a son to him, worked weekends pumping gas.