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RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border Now: an early Fridayin mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new millennium, their ard courses so hidden that a blindwhat lies ahead than you or I Right here and now, the hour is just past six A M , and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellohite ball advancing as ever for the first ti in its wake the steadily accu blind men of us all
Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with lints froton Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the co uphill and eastward beneath us At thisits breath The motionless air around us carries such reine a round a mile away
Moving toward the sun, we glide away fro tracks, the backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidsonlittle houses were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers, mold makers, and crate rounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as possible (Pederson Nail, which had sufferedthe fifties, finally bled to death in 1963 ) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have been replaced by aThe uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys' owners, wild-haired, bushy-bearded, swag-bellied s, black leather jackets, and less than the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption Like most assumptions, this one embodies an uneasy half-truth
The current residents of Nailhouse Rohom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the Mississippi If we look to our right, we can see "the world's largest six-pack," storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland Old-Tier labels The men who live on Nailhouse Row n campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were undergraduates lish or philosophy (The exception was a resident in surgery at the UI-UC university hospital ) They get an ironic pleasure fro called the Thunder Five: the name strikes theelian Scu crew, and ill make their acquaintance later on For noe have time only to note the hand-painted posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two las The posters say: FISHERMAN, YOU BETTER PRAY TO YOUR STINKING GOD WE DON'T CATCH YOU FIRST! REMEMBER AMY!
From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings orn, unpainted facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where a few i, a blank-faced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing workboots behind its fils that bear no indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous These structures have the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued froh they were still dead In a way, that is precisely what happened to them An ocher horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two feet froround on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings, represents the high-water mark left behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly to the top of Chase Street
Where Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a transfor, the town beneath us The Agincourt Theater, the Taproom Bar & Grille, the First Farraphy Studio (which does a steady business in graduation photos, wedding pictures, and children's portraits) and shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt sidewalks: Benton's Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal Clothing, Sch electronic equip cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins, the Packers, the Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin After a few blocks, the nas separate and shrink into one-story wooden structures fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies; after that, the street becolides eastward past a 7-Eleven, the Reinhold T Grauerha farm-implement dealership known locally as Goltz's, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields If we rise another hundred feet into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines, coulees, blunted hills furry with pines, loaround level until you have co patchwork fields, and little towns ¡ª one of thes around the intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93
Directly below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in thethe sidewalks or bends to insert a key into one of the locks of the shop fronts along Chase Street The angled spaces before the shops are ein to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a hts burn behind the s in the co the surrounding streets A block north of Chase on Sus of two stories each house, in west-east order, the French Landing Public Library; the offices of Patrick J Skarda, M D , the local general practitioner, and Bell & Holland, a two-man law firm now run by Garland Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield & Son Funeral Home, noned by a vast, funereal e Post Office
Separated fro lot at the rear, the building at the end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third Street, is also of red brick and two stories high but longer than its ihbors Unpainted iron bars block the rear second-floor s, and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letters FLPD on their sides The presence of police cars and barred s seeruous in this rural fastness ¡ª what sort of cri worse than a little shoplifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar fight
As if in testiularity of small-town life, a red van with the words LA RIVIERE HERALD on its side panels drifts slowly down Third Street, pausing at nearly all of the mailbox stands for its driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into graythe sas have mail slots instead of boxes, the route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors Blue parcels thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral hoet a paper
What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs s of the police station The door opens A tall, dark-haired
young man in a pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers steps outside The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest glea, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the rolled newspaper He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far enough to suggest that he is trying to read the headlines through the plastic Evidently this technique does not work all that well Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way ait a little distance away frolance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces smartly, and steps back into the station We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by Officer Dulac, go inside behind him
A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets ofdown to a se, the other upward to an interrogation roo rows of cells, none presently occupied So at a level that see
Bobby Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels, the ready rooainst the wall to our right, beside them a beat-up wooden table on which sit neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of the discordant noise From the nearby studio of KDCU-AM, Your Talk Voice in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly rabid George Rathbun has settled into Badger Barrage, his popular e sounds too loud for the occasion no uy is just flat-out noisy ¡ª that's part of his appeal
Set in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a dark pebble-glass hich has been painted DALE GILBERTSON, CHIEF OF POLICE Dale will not be in for another half hour or so
Two les to each other in the corner to our left, and from the one that faces us, Toe but without his appearance of having been struck glea tweezed between two fingers of Bobby Dulac's right hand
"All right," Lund says "Okay The latest installment "
"You thoughtus another social call? Here I don't want to read the da "
Not deigning to look at the newspaper, Bobby sends the new day's issue of the La Riviere Herald sailing in a flat, fast arc across ten feet of wooden floor with an athletic snap of his wrist, spins rightward, takes a long stride, and positions himself in front of the wooden table a lares at the two naing on the wall behind the table He is not pleased, Bobby Dulac; he looks as though he h the sheer force of his anger
Fat and happy in the KDCU studio, George Rathbun yells, "Caller, giet your prescription fixed! Are we talking about the saame here? Caller ¡ª "
"Maybe Wendell got some sense and decided to lay off," Tom Lund says
"Wendell," Bobby says Because Lund can see only the sleek, dark back of his head, the little sneering thing he does with his lip wastes motion, but he does it anyway
"Caller, let me ask you this one question, and in all sincerity, I want you to be honest with ame?"
"I didn't know Wendell was a big buddy of yours," Bobby says "I didn't know you ever got as far south as La Riviere Here I was thinking your idea of a big night out was a pitcher of beer and trying to break one hundred at the Arden Bowl-A-Dro out with newspaper reporters in college towns Probably get down and dirty with the Wisconsin Rat, too, that guy on KWLA Do you pick up a lot of punk babes that way?"
The caller says heon account of he had to pick up his kid after a special counseling session at Mount Hebron, but he sure saw everything after that
"Did I say Wendell Green was a friend of mine?" asks Tom Lund Over Bobby's left shoulder he can see the first of the naaze helplessly focuses on it "It's just, I uy didn't seem so bad Actually, I kind of liked hi sorry for him He wanted to do an intervieith Hollywood, and Hollywood turned him down flat "
Well, naturally he saw the extra innings, the hapless caller says, that's how he knows Pokey Reese was safe
"And as for the Wisconsin Rat, I wouldn't know him if I saw him, and I think that so-called music he plays sounds like the worst bunch of crap I ever heard in et a radio show in the first place? On the college station? What does that tell you about our wonderful UW¨CLa Riviere, Bobby? What does it say about our whole society? Oh, I forgot, you like that shit "