Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1)

by L. L. Enger

  “Things have been bad for years now. But the sale,

  Pedersen, that finished it. Pop blinks his eyes and another ten years is gone. He thinks I’m a high school kid. He thinks Ma’s just gone into town.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Gun said cautiously.

  “Bastard!” said Bowser. His lead blow was a right hand square with Gun’s breastbone. It filled Gun’s lungs with quicksand and he stepped back, twice. Bowser plowed ahead with a windmill left at the solar plexus, but Gun twisted his torso and the blow skipped off. There was a time, Gun realized, when even that first, kidney-burning punch would never have landed; some animal nerve would have warned him, some movement in the air, and his body would have acted without him. Now that nerve seemed dormant, his defensive reflex tired. And Bowser was just winding up.

  “Too old for this, are you, Pedersen?” Bowser said. He moved in with another roundhouse. Gun ducked this one and Bowser slipped on the dewy grass, thumping down butt first next to a dismembered old lawn mower Gun had been trying to fix. Bowser struggled up with the ease of a land-bound hippo, his gut plunging. “So you’re a ducker,” he said. “Shouldn’t surprise me. You ducked Loon Country, sure as hell.” Bowser moved more carefully now, planting his feet, waving his fists like an old-time boxer. Gun stood with his arms slightly bent in front of him. He told himself to block those fists. No more, and certainly no less. Couldn’t blame Bowser for feeling this way, after all. It was just too bad he was so damn strong. Block the fists, Gun told himself, and when the boy’s tired he’ll go on home.

  Fist number one came almost too quick. A left jab, and Gun’s right palm barely deflected it in time to save his nose. Come on, Gun thought. You did this enough on the ball field. Bowser threw another jab, and again Gun slapped it away. Another jab missed

  Gun’s chin by half a foot. Bowser was panting harder now, frustrated that his energy wasn’t landing anywhere. A rag of dark hair had flipped down into his eyes and he pushed it back with his knuckles. Gun told him, “You can still quit.”

  That brought Bowser’s fists in again. Gun fouled off the jabs like a pair of bad pitches and let a right fly past his head, carrying Bowser behind it. He saw Bowser slip again, land in a full-faced sprawl this time and lay quiet. He saw Bowser’s eyes wishing for some kind of weapon, and he saw them light on the pieces of the old lawn mower a few feet ahead. One piece was a blade.

  “Don’t do that, Bowser,” Gun said, but the big man had already wiggled forward and grabbed the blade. It was a heavy steel rotor that would lay a twenty-four-inch swath when properly sharp, and Bowser’s grip on it as he got to his feet turned his whole hand white and then crimson-striped as the edge bit in. He walked toward Gun with the blade drawn back and a mustache of mud under his nose.

  “You don’t want to do that, Bowser.”

  Bowser shook his head. A dime-size chunk of mud slid down his chin. “Don’t want to. But I’m going to.”

  Gun said, “Your dad’ll be missing you, Bowser.” Bowser stood with his feet widespread, his weight bending his legs slightly inward at the knees. Gun walked straight at him until they stood a scant yard from each other. Bowser’s eyes were red and watery. Blood ran from his fingers where he gripped the blade. It ran down his upraised forearm and dripped from his elbow.

  “Swing if you have to,” Gun said.

  Bowser swung, a simple level cut that whistled through the air neck high. Gun’s hand leaped almost before he knew it, catching Bowser’s thick wrist exactly where it joined thumb and pad, stopping the

  blade, backing it up. Gun tightened his hold on Bowser’s wrist and looked into his face. He saw that while Bowser was facing him directly, the paths of his eyes took him off to both sides, left and right. Gun made a fist of his free hand and sent it swiftly to the center, and Bowser fell like stockyard beef to the grass.

  Gun left him there and went inside. He made coffee from a red can, boiling it severely on the stove. He had a cup himself and then, still in his longjohns, took the pot outside and set it with a mug next to the silent Bowser.

  The morning was still, and a white mist rose up from the lake’s unrippled surface like smoke from a cooling battlefield. Gun entered the frigid water without hesitating. He swam forty yards out and dove. The cold ignited a brilliant explosion inside his brain, and he could feel his skin tightening around his muscles like a rubber wetsuit. It was the middle of May, and the lake had been ice-free for only a few weeks.

  Ten feet down, at the sandy bottom, Gun opened his eyes. No walleyes here this morning, no streaks of silver heading for deeper waters. Only refracted spears of light entering from above, penetrating the green haze, dissolving like crystals of salt. He looked around but could not find any of the baseballs. He’d waited too long. He kicked for the top.

  When he came back in, the lawn and coffeepot were empty, the mug swaying neatly by its handle on the branch of a reaching fir.

  2

  Gun was on the last phase of his morning workout— push-ups on his fists against the hard kitchen floor— when his second visitor of the day arrived. This time in a pinging, four-cylinder foreign job with squeaky shocks.

  As usual, Mazy shut off the engine and waited for Gun to come outside. He took his sweet time, slowing down the push-ups until they hurt.

  Mazy had turned fifteen the week her mother died. Fifteen and needing more from a father than he thought he could give. He’d tried to explain to her that he was afraid, that a ballplayer gone from home seven months a year never learned to be parent enough, never had time, but she knew it all and said it didn’t matter. She’d stay, she’d be good, she’d cook and do her homework and keep it all together. Then the aunt in Wisconsin gave Gun what he thought was a better option. She opened those big farmhouse doors for the poor motherless Mazy, and he shoved her right through, insisting to the last that this was the responsible thing to do. Mazy had ignored the practical, fluttering aunt and said to Gun as he left her, Don’t call it responsible. Call it desertion.

  Mazy was usually right. It was a troublesome thing.

  Now she sat in her dented MG, half frowning at him behind green aviator-style sunglasses. Her thick red-blond hair was chopped off straight at the jawline and her full wide lips were the same shape as her mother’s had been, only set harder. She wore a blue chambray work shirt, collar open at the neck, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and the sun was lighting up the silvery hair on her forearms. It stood straight out from her tanned skin, as though electrified.

  “You’re even starting to look like a journalist,” Gun said. “Here for an interview?”

  His daughter looked off toward the water. Not a single muscle moved in her face. “If I were here for an interview, you wouldn’t be grinning down at me like that.”

  “Guess you’re right.”

  “Burger’s got a few good stories about you. Sports-writer’s nightmare, the way he tells it. ‘Forget the crowbar and you’d never get his mouth open.’”

  Gun laughed, but Mazy’s smile was humorless. And he couldn’t tell what her eyes were doing behind those green glasses. “I’ll tell him hello for you,” she said.

  “You do that.”

  Mazy was twenty-five, and Gun had seen little of her since she turned eighteen. She had gone off to a college in Oregon, then worked for a newspaper in Portland for a couple years before taking the Tribune job in Minneapolis. It was good to have her back in the state, but the truth was, she didn’t come up to see him very often. Not that he blamed her.

  He leaned against the car and took a good lungful of

  fresh air, tapped a little rhythm on the tight canvas top of the convertible. When the clench in his chest had loosened enough he said, “Come in for breakfast. I’ll take my shower and then we can fry up some eggs and bacon. Got some of that good stuff from Harold at the locker. How about it?”

  “You know what I’m here about, Dad ...”

  “Oh, come on.” He yanked opened her door and offered a hand, held the other behind
his back in a gesture of mock courtesy. Groaning, she took hold of his fingers. He pulled her to her feet. “That’s my girl.”

  “God,” groaned Mazy.

  Showering, he pictured his daughter moving about in the bright pine kitchen, cracking eggs and brewing coffee, setting the table with Amanda’s old china. He knew perfectly well why she was here. In fact he was surprised she hadn’t come sooner.

  Already six months had gone by since Gun had signed his property over to Mazy—all four hundred acres of it, including a quarter-mile of prime lake-shore. At the time Loon Country had been little more than a rumor. Still, the phone calls from Lyle Hedman and Tig Larson, the county commissioner, made Gun angry. He’d asked himself, What’s a clean, simple way of staying out of things? What do you have to do to make people leave you the hell alone, once and for all? The answer came back. The best thing to do is, you leave.

  He told his daughter he wanted to beat the state’s inheritance laws. If he should happen to die before his time, she shouldn’t have to spend years in the purgatory of probate courts. That’s what he told her. Reluctantly, she agreed to go along with the idea. She didn’t know about Loon Country yet, or not much.

  Gun had his lawyer fix it all up. Mazy got the land

  for a lot less than market value, and Gun financed the sale himself. Nothing to it—except from the beginning he knew that sooner or later Mazy would figure out what he was up to.

  Now the time had come, and she had one more thing to hold against him.

  3

  He walked barefoot into the kitchen, making wet footprints on the linoleum. A wide skylight was cut into the high vaulted ceiling, and beneath it his daughter had breakfast going. Bacon sputtered on the big round cast-iron griddle, and eggs sizzled in a copper-bottomed pan. She didn’t say a word as he sat down at the table.

  She handed him a fully-loaded plate: oven-baked hash browns, three eggs sunny-side up, four strips of thick bacon from the Stony locker, a piece of toast. He got up and went to the stove and poured two cups of coffee from the enamel pot.

  They sat down. Mazy looked at him evenly from across the table, her lips turned up in a hard smile. Gun took a large gulp of coffee and said, “I hear you’ve been in town for a while, working.”

  Mazy nodded at him.

  “And house-sitting for that new editor of the local booster sheet.”

  “The Journal’s not a booster sheet. Not anymore. Have you bothered to take a look at it since Carol took over?”

  Gun shook his head.

  “And how do you know where I’m staying? Got your buddy Jack spying on me?”

  “Look. Honey. Wouldn’t it be a little strange if Jack talked to you and then saw me and didn’t tell me what he knew? The guy’s my friend. You’re my daughter.” He shrugged.

  She took off her sunglasses and lay them beside her plate. Her brown eyes were tired-looking, bloodshot, and for the first time ever Gun noticed wrinkles in the soft skin underneath.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too. I should have told you.”

  Mazy straightened up. A mean sparkle lit up her eyes. “That’s right—and I would’ve talked you out of it. Maybe you need a buffer between you and the cruel world out there”—she flung her fingers toward the door—”but it doesn’t have to be me. And I don’t like being lied to, either.”

  “I didn’t lie to you, Mazy.”

  “You just avoided telling me ninety-five percent of the truth.”

  Gun looked away, then down at his hands. He said, “You can do whatever you want with the land. I’m not asking you to protect it. You can keep it forever, or you can sell out to Lyle for a million bucks and let him build a giant waterslide on it. It’s up to you. I don’t want anybody fighting my battles. All I want is to be left alone. I want to find a place up north as quiet as this place used to be. I want to live up there, and I want people to let me be.”

  “So that you’re able to continue your penance,” Mazy said. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  Gun shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Good. Because I’m sick and tired of your guilty pride, or whatever it is that keeps you out here in the woods.” She spit the words at him.

  Gun lifted his eyes to his daughter’s face, flexed the muscles of his jaw and leveled a finger at her. He dropped his voice a register. “You know what you’d be saying if I’d decided to stay here and use my influence to try and kill this Loon Country thing? If I did get involved, you know what you’d say?”

  “No, what would I say?”

  “You’d be all over me for throwing my weight around. You’d say I hadn’t changed after all. You’d come up with every argument under the sun to prove that Lyle Hedman’s project is good for the area, good for the people around here. You’d make the guy out to be some kind of philanthropist.” Gun laughed and took a bite of toast with egg on it. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he said, aiming his fork at her, chewing.

  “Maybe I would,” said Mazy.

  “You would.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, opened her lips as if to speak, then clamped them shut again. She shook her head and turned her attention to breakfast.

  When she was finished eating, she arranged her silverware neatly on her plate—it was something she’d done ever since Gun could remember—and put her green sunglasses back on. “None of it makes the least bit of difference,” she said. “You know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To Mom,” said Mazy. “Or to me, for that matter.”

  “Makes a difference to me, though.” He stood up and quickly cleared the table, started filling the sink with hot water. Mazy stayed where she was.

  As he’d done thousands of times in the last ten years, Gun forced a scene into his mind—it was a formalized nightmare now, one he used against him-

  self: Amanda, home from work and wrapped in a towel, is running her bathwater. She hears the phone and picks it up, expecting Gun’s voice, reassurance that the rumors are just rumors. But it’s another man’s voice. He’s a reporter, he says, American Mirror. He asks what she feels like, sharing her star.

  Two or three times in his career Gun had seen his face on the tabloids. It had always been laughable stuff: Gun Pedersen’s Magic Bat. It got him kidded in the clubhouse, but all this about Susannah . . . He’d never spoken to the woman again; it made him sick to think of his own success and the endless goddamn choices that had come with it.

  That evening Amanda had boarded a flight for Minneapolis, where the Tigers were playing the Twins. She was coming, she told Gun—phoning him after the reporter’s call—to straighten things out finally. But she never arrived. Her plane went down in a farmer’s cornfield west of Eau Claire.

  Now he shut off the water and pushed the sleeves of his sweatshirt up past his elbows. He took a clean dishrag from the wooden peg above the sink and submerged a handful of silverware in the suds. Mazy got up from the table and went to the refrigerator, where a stained white towel hung from the door handle.

  “People are saying all kinds of things,” Gun said. “You’ve probably heard most of it already.”

  “Probably.”

  “How I’m ducking a fight, siding with the big-money boys, selling out the environmentalists.” He rinsed a fistful of silverware and set it carefully in the drain rack.

  “Well, the truth is you could have done something. People around here would’ve listened to you. You’ve been here awhile now, you’ve got money. If you had wanted, you could’ve bought the Devitz land yourself —like that committee of Tig’s asked you to. You could have pulled it right out from under Lyle Hedman’s feet. People know that. No land, no Loon Country.”

  “Jeremy needs every cent he can get out of that swamp of his,” said Gun. “Lyle gave him top dollar.”

  “Jeremy would’ve let it go for half the price to save this lake.”

  “And then Lyle would have gone after someone else’s land and p
eople would’ve asked me to buy that too.”

  “Maybe.”

  Out the window above the sink Gun watched a high range of mountain-blue clouds advance from the west and put a hard slate surface on the water. He was nearly finished washing the dishes when Mazy spoke again. “Are you going to the benefit tonight?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Hedmans are throwing a dinner and dance, proceeds to the paper-mill workers who’ve been laid off.”

  “Yeah? Pretty funny, considering Hedman laid them off. Great P.R. stunt. The man of means who cares about the little guy.”

  “It was Geoff’s idea.”

  “Good for Geoff. He must’ve inherited the old man’s sense of humor.”

  “Geoff has ... changed,” said Mazy. Something shifted in her voice.

  “And Jack tells me you’ve been spending quite a little time with him this week.” Gun hadn’t meant to bring it up but he couldn’t help it.

  She turned and stared at him, hard. “I don’t think that’s any of your concern.”

  He lifted both hands out of the water and held

  them, palms out, in front of his chest. “All right, okay.”

  She dried a plate, twisting her neck around like she did when she was trying to relax. “What I was wondering is, how about going with me tonight? Somebody wants to meet you.”

  “I’ve already met Geoff, remember?” Gun tried to put a look on his face that said, All in good fun. “I’m sure he does.”

  Mazy sighed. “No. Carol Long. She’s getting back into town tonight.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m driving north this afternoon to look at some land. Won’t be back until late.”

  “Fine, then.” She dropped her towel on the counter and walked to the door. As she swung open the screen, Gun spoke her name. She stopped on the threshold and turned. Her face was inscrutable. He tried to smile at her but couldn’t.

  “Just tell me there’s nothing between you and Geoff,” he said. “He’s not worth your time. Tell me you’re only using him to get at the story.”