Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  Horace was wearing an Elmer Fudd hat, leather gloves, a wool scarf, a winter jacket, denim overalls, a sweater, a turtleneck, a flannel shirt, an undershirt, long johns, Red Wing work boots, and two pairs of socks. “It’s not so cold today,” he thought. “The TV said it would be colder.” He opened the door of his Apache, which was (of course) unlocked, because people in Owl don’t steal cars, even if they are empty and the keys are in the ignition. The Red Owl grocery store was one block from Harley’s Café, so Horace drove his truck sixty feet and diagonally parked on the opposite side of the street.

  He entered the store and reached into his pocket, pulling out the list he had written with a pencil three hours before. The fog on his glasses made it difficult to read, but he knew most of it by memory; he always bought all the same things. It was a list of the old-man food he needed to live, and it was as follows:

  Campbell’s tomato soup

  hamburger meat

  sausages (these were what he called hot dogs)

  candy

  Folgers crystals

  noodles (this was what he called Kraft Macaroni & Cheese)

  fake butter (this was what he called margarine)

  cookies

  potatoes

  Elf Krispies (this was what he called Rice Krispies)

  whole milk

  Wonder bread

  black licorice (this was not the same as candy, somehow)

  Horace had now been a food shopper for eleven years of his life, but he remained baffled by the layout of grocery stores. He knew they were designed to confuse people on purpose, and they were supposed to make him buy things he didn’t need on impulse. What a ludicrous business model. Who would buy something they didn’t need? Horace felt grocers made organizational errors. Why wasn’t the cereal aisle next to the milk? Why weren’t condoms in the same section as tampons? It didn’t matter to him that these weren’t necessarily things he needed; it was the principle. Didn’t anyone realize that certain products had relationships?

  Horace felt stupid pushing a shopping cart around the store. He felt like a woman, but it was the only way to get everything at once. How typical. The wheels rolled flawlessly, almost as if they were greased. There was no friction with the floor. When he turned the first corner, he almost collided with the Dog Lover. The Dog Lover was carrying a fifty-pound bag of dog food like it was a newborn baby. How typical.

  “Pardon me,” said Horace. “Didn’t see you there. Got ahead of myself. Sorry.”

  “Yeah,” said the Dog Lover. That was all he said.

  Horace had just been talking about the Dog Lover at the café. What a troll. Apparently, the Dog Lover had decided not to go home to Minneapolis over Christmas. Instead, he and four of his miscreant friends decided to have a party on Christmas Eve. What kind of outlaw wants to get liquored up on Christmas Eve? Horace could only imagine what kind of motley crew the Dog Lover must associate with in his holiday time. The party started inside the Dog Lover’s apartment, but they ran out of booze before 10:00. Somebody pissed in the hallway like an animal. Pissing in public. On Christmas! What were they thinking? They weren’t thinking. That was the problem. That’s always the problem. Around 11:10, they decided to open up Yoda’s and drink all night. Idiots! And—evidently—a few of those fools must have been rope smokers, too, because—evidently—they lit the Christmas tree on fire. While it was still in the bar. So just picture the scene: The Christmas tree is now a seven-foot fireball that’s standing three feet from the jukebox, and they’re all laughing like doper hyenas and cursing the sky and trying to douse the flames with Old Milwaukee, and the room gets smokier than a goddamn Ojibwa sweat lodge. They think this is radical. They think they’re protesters. But then the Dog Lover suddenly (or maybe finally) realizes he’s going to burn the whole tavern to the ground if he’s not careful, so he picks up the tree by the trunk and runs outside. That was how the Dog Lover celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ: By running around Main Street with a burning evergreen at 1:15 in the morning, screaming about how he was gonna joust with Santa Claus. What a tragic clown. He was dumber than his dog and five times as mean.

  Horace found all the products he needed in ten minutes, except for the licorice. (He consistently forgot the licorice.) As he rolled his cart of old-man food toward the checkout counter, he saw a teenager paying for a can of Rondo and a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. The boy wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, covering a T-shirt that depicted Kenny Rogers as the Gambler. He wasn’t wearing a jacket. His biceps looked like coils of copper wire, swaddled in pleather. He smiled at Horace while waiting for his change.

  “Son, you’re going to freeze to death,” said Horace. “You’re going to turn into the damn yeti.”

  “Lost my jacket,” said the kid.

  “You must be tough,” said Horace. “If I walked outside the way you’re dressed, they’d be digging me a grave. No jacket! You must be tough as nails.”

  “Naw. I’m not tough,” said the kid. “You’re probably tougher than me.”

  They laughed.

  “You shouldn’t smoke cigarettes,” said Horace. “Those bastards will kill you alive. I smoked for seventeen years. Never thought I’d quit. Thought I’d kill myself before quitting. Hardest thing I ever did, and the desire never leaves. I’d give you a five-dollar bill for a cigarette right now! You should stop while you’re still a young man.”

  “I know,” replied the kid. “But if I didn’t smoke, I’d freeze to death.”

  They laughed again and nodded goodbye. Horace pulled out his checkbook to pay for the old-man food. He thought, Now, that’s a helluva pleasant kid.

  The kid walked out of the Red Owl and barely noticed the cold. He ignited a cigarette and pulled open the door of his ’74 Barracuda. The engine was still running. He had already forgotten the entire conversation.

  NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1984

  (John Laidlaw)

  “No dystopia,” he thought when he looked out his living room window. “Still just a topia.”

  This was (kind of) true: No Thought Police were visible to the naked eye. All he could see was four inches of snow, a street, a sidewalk, an invisible barking dog, and seven empty cans of Old Milwaukee some kids had thrown at his mailbox the night before. It was ten thirty in the morning. It was much warmer than yesterday; it was nine degrees. John Laidlaw tightened the belt of his robe, opened the front door of his little green house, and stepped onto his porch to smoke a cigarette. The air was icy and jagged. It was like walking through a broken mirror.

  He lit his cancer stick and sucked it down. The smoke and the cold made him feel better, but he still didn’t feel good. There had been a time in his life when nicotine had made him feel great, but now it just stopped him from feeling awful. He was like everybody else. A sedan rolled by; Laidlaw halfheartedly waved at its driver. He recognized the person behind the wheel, but he could not recall the man’s name. “I should know that guy,” he thought. “I need to become a better member of this community.”

  John Laidlaw had regrets. He felt bad about his habit of never tipping any waitress he knew he’d never see again. He felt shame over the way he pretended to show concern whenever his wife got sick, fully aware that his only true anxiety was that her germs might infect him, too. John Laidlaw had many, many, many regrets. But—curiously, or perhaps predictably—this litany of regrets did not include the first time he slept with one of his students. That had made total sense at the time, and it still made sense to him now. Yes, she was sixteen, and—yes—adults aren’t supposed to have sex with sixteen-year-olds. Yes, yes. He knew this was the conventional wisdom. But—at the time—he had been an unmarried twenty-three-year-old, living in a western North Dakota ghost town that had yet to realize it was built above an oil field. What else was there to do? Had it been the 1940s, he probably would have married the girl. It was (arguably) the best relationship he ever had, at least for the first six weeks: Like all superlative relationships, it was nothing except sex
and secrecy. Her name was Jenny, and she was a cat. The girl had balls of lead. She would openly flirt with him in the middle of class, uninterested in the other students’ shock; months before they kissed, Laidlaw feared he had already fallen in love with her. He thought about her constantly, and especially when he smoked. Smoking made him amorous and solipsistic. Tobacco injected improbable thoughts into his brain. He started to believe Jenny was wearing jeans with the sole intent of making him suicidal. Laidlaw didn’t understand how to manage his lust; devoid of ideas, he assigned essay exams and searched her responses for hidden romantic subtext. Was he simply too stupid to realize she was making fun of him? He did not know. Perhaps. One night he got drunk in his living room and called her on the telephone; her mother answered, so he hung up and masturbated into a sock. He got drunk two nights later and called the house again. This time it was Jenny who picked up the receiver.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s John.”

  “John?”

  “John Laidlaw.”

  “Mr. Laidlaw?”

  “Yes. How are you doing, Jenny? No hot date tonight?”

  She vocalized her confusion by laughing uncomfortably.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. “Tell me how you are doing. How are you doing?”

  “Okay. I’m okay. Why are you calling me?”

  “Because you’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’m sorry.” She laughed again.

  “No, I like it. I like it when you drive me crazy. I want to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  “Right now? Like, tonight? Like, while it’s dark out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  That was how it started. Laidlaw was shocked by how easy it was. It was the first time he had ever told a woman to do something and she just did it. There was no negotiation; there were no compromises. He declared they were going to start sleeping together, and they did.

  He started to enjoy being a teacher.

  Over time, relations with Jenny did not work out. It was exhilarating throughout the second semester of her junior year (and even for most of the ensuing summer), but then things started to drag. She was too emotional. He realized he did not love her long before the conclusion of track season. However, what he did love was dating someone he wasn’t supposed to be dating. He loved making clandestine plans and concocting alibis; he loved the way all their covert meetings were hyper-intense and crazy physical, and he loved the fact that they always had something to talk about (when they would meet again, whom they’d have to deceive in order to make that happen, what cover story they would use if they were caught). Illegally dating a high school student was more challenging than designing football plays and often more rewarding. Laidlaw kept sleeping with Jenny throughout her senior year, months after his interest had evaporated. He was addicted to this life. That April, it was Jenny who actually broke it off. “I don’t make you crazy anymore,” she said, “and you talk to me like I’m a child.” This was true. They both cried, although Jenny cried more.

  “I must evolve,” decided Laidlaw. “I cannot be this kind of man for the rest of my life.” He stopped drinking at home. He decided to begin research for a nonfiction book about the space race, told from the perspective of the Soviets. That June, he started writing beautiful, semi-sincere letters to a woman he had sporadically dated during college. Her name was Sarah. She had majored in nursing. By the following summer, they were married. No one dreams of becoming the wife of an assistant football coach in Williston, North Dakota, but Sarah thought it would be better than being an unmarried nurse in Sisseton, South Dakota. They watched TV and played conservative games of Scrabble, and she could arrange the living room furniture however she desired. She loved (or at least really liked) John, and she liked (and sort of loved) rereading the letters he had mailed her during their summer of sexual seriousness. But Sarah knew something was wrong with him. She had always known this, even during college. His emotions were backward: Whenever he heard good news, he seemed to grimace; whenever something bad happened, it was almost as if his mood improved. When he got angry, he made jokes. Failure made him arrogant. He seemed depressed during intercourse. They eventually had a baby, and John repeatedly told Sarah how much he adored their son—yet whenever he was in the same room with the boy, John always looked bored. He could not relate to a child. For some reason, he always wanted to argue with it.

  “Great news,” a seemingly downcast John told his wife in 1977. “We are moving to Owl.”

  “Where?” said Sarah. They had talked about relocating in the past, but only casually.

  “Owl,” he said. “I have been named the new head football coach at Owl High School. It’s a smaller school than Williston, but they have a great football program. They won the Class B state championship five years ago. This, for all practical purposes, is my destination job. I have fulfilled my career dream. This is my dream. My dream has been fulfilled. This is my dream.”

  “It is?” asked Sarah. For as long as she had known him, John had never mentioned moving to Owl or having dreams.

  “It is,” he said. “It is my dream. I will finally be the head coach of the high school football team in Owl, North Dakota. You will finally be married to an authentic leader of men. You will not just be married to an offensive coordinator. I will be in control.”

  Technically, this was all accurate. But Laidlaw was lying completely. The reason John, Sarah, and four-year-old Lawrence Laidlaw were about to leave Williston was because a seventeen-year-old girl named Doris Stahl was—at that very moment—driving to Montana to abort the child he had planted in her gut, a detail everyone in Williston (except Sarah) seemed to suspect. The Williston High superintendent had made Laidlaw’s career options very clear; John selected option C, which was the only one that did not involve contacting a lawyer.

  For a second time, Laidlaw vowed to live a different kind of existence. Things would be different in Owl, if only because he assumed it would be impossible to sleep with teenagers in a town of eight hundred people without getting caught. He decided to become a normal human, and he assumed that transition would be easy. It wasn’t. Being a decent guy was no easier than being a terrible, secretive jackass. He didn’t feel less anxious or more content. He still had responsibilities and pressures. Most of the time, being a normal person was harder than the alternative. He preferred being the human he used to be. He started seducing Darcy Busch in the fall of 1980, typically during senior English; Darcy was the kind of short, cute, stocky girl who traditionally dominates gymnastics. He liked her handwriting and her perfume. Darcy was skeptical of John’s creepy, abstract advances, but she caved after Christmas break. Laidlaw knew how to wear people down; his livelihood as a football coach was built on that specific gift.

  One would think sexual impropriety would not be feasible in a town the size of Owl; everybody knows everything about everyone, all the time. His initial rendezvous with Darcy was communicated through a Byzantine series of codes; he left nothing to chance. His trickery failed absolutely. Almost immediately, he could sense that everyone in the school knew something was going on; the morning after he had seen Darcy pantsless for the first time, the whole community looked at him as though he were a vampire. They could see the blood on his fangs. But he also noticed something else: That recognition didn’t seem to matter. Nobody did anything. They knew about it, and they whispered about it, and they thought it was terrible. But that was as far as it went. People may have liked him less, but they treated him exactly the same. Compared to Williston, Owl was easy. In fact, he almost missed the rush of risking his future. To compensate, he started taking foolish chances: Darcy got pregnant. When she told him the news, he almost enjoyed the internal panic. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “I’ve finally done it. My
life is over.” But it wasn’t. Two weeks later, Darcy just disappeared. Her parents moved her to Fargo and never spoke of it again. It was so queer: A problem was there, and then it just wasn’t. And everybody knew this.

  Everybody.

  “Did you hear about Darcy Busch?” Sarah asked in bed one night. The question did not sound as pointed as it was.

  “I heard she got in trouble,” said Laidlaw.

  “Do you know who got her in trouble?” asked Sarah. She wasn’t stupid.

  “Of course I don’t,” said Laidlaw, feigning sleep, managing fear. “How would I know who got Darcy Busch pregnant? Who am I?”

  “They say she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” said Sarah. “I’ve heard that from several sources. Doesn’t it seem strange that this would happen to a girl without a boyfriend?”

  “Maybe she had a boyfriend nobody knows about,” said Laidlaw. “Maybe she got around. Maybe it was an immaculate conception and she’s going to give birth to the next Jesus. I have no idea what her story is.”

  “But you certainly must have heard rumors,” said Sarah. “I know she was in your class. They certainly must gossip about this around school.”

  “They probably do,” he said, “but hearsay doesn’t interest me.”

  Sarah refused to turn off the light. She kept waiting for her husband to become a different person from the one he actually was.

  “What kind of student was she, John?”

  “A good one. She always did her work.”

  Sarah kept waiting.

  The results were the same.