Black House js-2 Read online

  Coming out of the station’s side door as we arrive is a slender man dressed in pleated khaki Dockers, a tieless white shirt of Egyptian cotton buttoned all the way to the neck, and maroon braces (they are as slim as he is, those braces, and far too cool to be called suspenders; suspenders are vulgar things worn by such creatures as Chipper Maxton and Sonny Heartfield, down at the funeral home). This silver-haired fellow is also wearing a very sharp straw fedora, antique but beautifully kept. The maroon hatband matches his braces. Aviator-style sunglasses cover his eyes. He takes a position on the grass to the left of the door, beneath a battered speaker that is amping KDCU’s current broadcast: the local news. This will be followed by the Chicago farm report, which gives him ten minutes before he has to settle in behind the mike again.

  We watch in growing puzzlement as he produces a pack of American Spirit cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up with a gold lighter. Surely this elegant fellow in the braces, Dockers, and Bass Weejuns cannot be George Rathbun. In our minds we have already built up a picture of George, and it is one of a fellow very different from this. In our mind’s eye we see a guy with a huge belly hanging over the white belt of his checked pants (all those ballpark bratwursts), a brick-red complexion (all those ballpark beers, not to mention all that bellowing at the dastardly umps), and a squat, broad neck (perfect for housing those asbestos vocal cords). The George Rathbun of our imagination—and all of Coulee Country’s, it almost goes without saying—is a pop-eyed, broad-assed, wild-haired, leather-lunged, Rolaids-popping, Chevy-driving, Republican-voting heart attack waiting to happen, a churning urn of sports trivia, mad enthusiasms, crazy prejudices, and high cholesterol.

  This fellow is not that fellow. This fellow moves like a dancer. This fellow is iced tea on a hot day, cool as the king of spades.

  But say, that’s the joke of it, isn’t it? Uh-huh. The joke of the fat deejay with the skinny voice, only turned inside out. In a very real sense, George Rathbun does not exist at all. He is a hobby in action, a fiction in the flesh, and only one of the slim man’s multiple personalities. The people at KDCU know his real name and think they’re in on the joke (the punch line of course being George’s trademark line, the even-a-blind-man thing), but they don’t know the half of it. Nor is this a metaphorical statement. They know exactly one-third of it, because the man in the Dockers and the straw fedora is actually four people.

  In any case, George Rathbun has been the saving of KDCU, the last surviving AM station in a predatory FM market. For five mornings a week, week in and week out, he has been a drive-time bonanza. The U-Crew (as they call themselves) love him just about to death.

  Above him, the loudspeaker cackles on: “—still no leads, according to Chief Dale Gilbertson, who has called Herald reporter Wendell Green ‘an out-of-town fearmonger who is more interested in selling papers than in how we do things in French Landing.’

  “Meanwhile, in Arden, a house fire has taken the lives of an elderly farmer and his wife. Horst P. Lepplemier and his wife, Gertrude, both eighty-two . . .”

  “Horst P. Lepplemier,” says the slim man, drawing on his cigarette with what appears to be great enjoyment. “Try saying that one ten times fast, you moke.”

  Behind him and to his right, the door opens again, and although the smoker is still standing directly beneath the speaker, he hears the door perfectly well. The eyes behind the aviator shades have been dead his whole life, but his hearing is exquisite.

  The newcomer is pasty-faced and comes blinking into the morning sun like a baby mole that has just been turned out of its burrow by the blade of a passing plow. His head has been shaved except for the Mohawk strip up the center of his skull and the pigtail that starts just above the nape of his neck and hangs to his shoulder blades. The Mohawk has been dyed bright red; the ’tail is electric blue. Dangling from one earlobe is a lightning-bolt earring that looks suspiciously like the Nazi S.S. insignia. He is wearing a torn black T-shirt with a logo that reads SNIVELLING SHITS ’97: THE WE GET HARD FOR JESUS TOUR. In one hand this colorful fellow has a CD jewel box.

  “Hello, Morris,” says the slim man in the fedora, still without turning.

  Morris pulls in a little gasp, and in his surprise looks like the nice Jewish boy that he actually is. Morris Rosen is the U-Crew’s summer intern from the Oshkosh branch of UW. “Man, I love that unpaid grunt labor!” station manager Tom Wiggins has been heard to say, usually while rubbing his hands together fiendishly. Never has a checkbook been guarded so righteously as the Wigger guards the KDCU checkbook. He is like Smaug the Dragon reclining on his heaps of gold (not that there are heaps of anything in the ’DCU accounts; it bears repeating to say that, as an AM talker, the station is lucky just to be alive).

  Morris’s look of surprise—it might be fair to call it uneasy surprise—dissolves into a smile. “Wow, Mr. Leyden! Good grab! What a pair of ears!”

  Then he frowns. Even if Mr. Leyden—who’s standing directly beneath the outside honker, can’t forget that—heard someone come out, how in God’s name did he know which someone it was?

  “How’d you know it was me?” he asks.

  “Only two people around here smell like marijuana in the morning,” Henry Leyden says. “One of them follows his morning smoke with Scope; the other—that’s you, Morris—just lets her rip.”

  “Wow,” Morris says respectfully. “That is totally bitchrod.”

  “I am totally bitchrod,” Henry agrees. He speaks softly and thoughtfully. “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. In regard to your morning rendezvous with the undeniably tasty Thai stick, may I offer an Appalachian aphorism?”

  “Go, dude.” This is Morris’s first real discussion with Henry Leyden, who is every bit the head Morris has been told to expect. Every bit and more. It is no longer so hard to believe that he could have another identity . . . a secret identity, like Bruce Wayne. But still . . . this is just so pimp.

  “What we do in our childhood forms as a habit,” Henry says in the same soft, totally un–George Rathbun voice. “That is my advice to you, Morris.”

  “Yeah, totally,” Morris says. He has no clue what Mr. Leyden is talking about. But he slowly, shyly, extends the CD jewel box in his hand. For a moment, when Henry makes no move to take it, Morris feels crushed, all at once seven years old again and trying to wow his always-too-busy father with a picture he has spent all afternoon drawing in his room. Then he thinks, He’s blind, dickweed. He may be able to smell pot on your breath and he may have ears like a bat, but how’s he supposed to know you’re holding out a fucking CD?

  Hesitantly, a bit frightened by his own temerity, Morris takes Henry’s wrist. He feels the man start a little, but then Leyden allows his hand to be guided to the slender box.

  “Ah, a CD,” Henry says. “And what is it, pray tell?”

  “You gotta play the seventh track tonight on your show,” Morris says. “Please.”

  For the first time, Henry looks alarmed. He takes a drag on his cigarette, then drops it (without even looking—of course, ha ha) into the sand-filled plastic bucket by the door.

  “What show could you possibly mean?” he asks.

  Instead of answering directly, Morris makes a rapid little smacking noise with his lips, the sound of a small but voracious carnivore eating something tasty. And, to make things worse, he follows it with the Wisconsin Rat’s trademark line, as well known to the folks in Morris’s age group as George Rathbun’s hoarse “Even a blind man” cry is known to their elders: “Chew it up, eat it up, wash it down, it aaallll comes out the same place!”

  He doesn’t do it very well, but there’s no question who he’s doing: the one and only Wisconsin Rat, whose evening drive-time program on KWLA-FM is famous in Coulee Country (except the word we probably want is “infamous”). KWLA is the tiny college FM station in La Riviere, hardly more than a smudge on the wallpaper of Wisconsin radio, but the Rat’s audience is huge.

  And if anyone found out that the comfortable Brew Cre
w–rooting, Republican-voting, AM-broadcasting George Rathbun was also the Rat—who had once narrated a gleeful on-air evacuation of his bowels onto a Backstreet Boys CD—there could be trouble. Quite serious, possibly, resounding well beyond the tight-knit little radio community.

  “What in God’s name would ever make you think that I’m the Wisconsin Rat, Morris?” Henry asks. “I barely know who you’re talking about. Who put such a weird idea in your head?”

  “An informed source,” Morris says craftily.

  He won’t give Howie Soule up, not even if they pull out his fingernails with red-hot tongs. Besides, Howie only found out by accident: went into the station crapper one day after Henry left and discovered that Henry’s wallet had fallen out of his back pocket while he was sitting on the throne. You’d have thought a fellow whose other senses were so obviously tightwired would have sensed the absence, but probably Henry’s mind had been on other things—he was obviously a heavy dude who undoubtedly spent his days getting through some heavy thoughts. In any case, there was a KWLA I.D. card in Henry’s wallet (which Howie had thumbed through “in the spirit of friendly curiosity,” as he put it), and on the line marked NAME, someone had stamped a little inkpad drawing of a rat. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

  “I have never in my life so much as stepped through the door of KWLA,” Henry says, and this is the absolute truth. He makes the Wisconsin Rat tapes (among others) in his studio at home, then sends them in to the station from the downtown Mail Boxes Etc., where he rents under the name of Joe Strummer. The card with the rat stamped on it was more in the nature of an invitation from the KWLA staff than anything else, one he’s never taken up . . . but he kept the card.

  “Have you become anyone else’s informed source, Morris?”

  “Huh?”

  “Have you told anyone that you think I’m the Wisconsin Rat?”

  “No! Course not!” Which, as we all know, is what people always say. Luckily for Henry, in this case it happens to be true. So far, at least, but the day is still young.

  “And you won’t, will you? Because rumors have a way of taking root. Just like certain bad habits.” Henry mimes puffing, pulling in smoke.

  “I know how to keep my mouth shut,” Morris declares, with perhaps misplaced pride.

  “I hope so. Because if you bruited this about, I’d have to kill you.”

  Bruited, Morris thinks. Oh man, this guy is complete.

  “Kill me, yeah,” Morris says, laughing.

  “And eat you,” Henry says. He is not laughing; not even smiling.

  “Yeah, right.” Morris laughs again, but this time the laugh sounds strangely forced to his own ears. “Like you’re Hannibal Lecture.”

  “No, like I’m the Fisherman,” Henry says. He slowly turns his aviator sunglasses toward Morris. The sun reflects off them, for a moment turning them into rufous eyes of fire. Morris takes a step back without even realizing that he has done so. “Albert Fish liked to start with the ass, did you know that?”

  “N—”

  “Yes indeed. He claimed that a good piece of young ass was as sweet as a veal cutlet. His exact words. Written in a letter to the mother of one of his victims.”

  “Far out,” Morris says. His voice sounds faint to his own ears, the voice of a plump little pig denying entrance to the big bad wolf. “But I’m not exactly, like, worried that you’re the Fisherman.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Man, you’re blind, for one thing!”

  Henry says nothing, only stares at the now vastly uneasy Morris with his fiery glass eyes. And Morris thinks: But is he blind? He gets around pretty good for a blind guy . . . and the way he tabbed me as soon as I came out here, how weird was that?

  “I’ll keep quiet,” he says. “Honest to God.”

  “That’s all I want,” Henry says mildly. “Now that we’ve got that straight, what exactly have you brought me?” He holds up the CD—but not as if he’s looking at it, Morris observes with vast relief.

  “It’s, um, this Racine group. Dirtysperm? And they’ve got this cover of ‘Where Did Our Love Go’? The old Supremes thing? Only they do it at like a hundred and fifty beats a minute? It’s fuckin’ hilarious. I mean, it destroys the whole pop thing, man, blitzes it!”

  “Dirtysperm,” Henry says. “Didn’t they used to be Jane Wyatt’s Clit?”

  Morris looks at Henry with awe that could easily become love. “Dirtysperm’s lead guitarist, like, formed JWC, man. Then him and the bass guy had this political falling-out, something about Dean Kissinger and Henry Acheson, and Ucky Ducky—he’s the guitarist—went off to form Dirtysperm.”

  “ ‘Where Did Our Love Go’?” Henry muses, then hands the CD back. And, as if he sees the way Morris’s face falls: “I can’t be seen with something like that—use your head. Stick it in my locker.”

  Morris’s gloom disappears and he breaks into a sunny smile. “Yeah, okay! You got it, Mr. Leyden!”

  “And don’t let anyone see you doing it. Especially not Howie Soule. Howie’s a bit of a snoop. You’d do well not to emulate him.”

  “No way, baby!” Still smiling, delighted at how all this has gone, Morris reaches for the door handle.

  “And Morris?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Since you know my secret, perhaps you’d better call me Henry.”

  “Henry! Yeah!” Is this the best morning of the summer for Morris Rosen? You better believe it.

  “And something else.”

  “Yeah? Henry?” Morris dares imagine a day when they will progress to Hank and Morrie.

  “Keep your mouth shut about the Rat.”

  “I already told you—”

  “Yes, and I believe you. But temptation comes creeping, Morris; temptation comes creeping like a thief in the night, or like a killer in search of prey. If you give in to temptation, I’ll know. I’ll smell it on your skin like bad cologne. Do you believe me?”

  “Uh . . . yeah.” And he does. Later, when he has time to kick back and reflect, Morris will think what a ridiculous idea that is, but yes, at the time, he believes it. Believes him. It’s like being hypnotized.

  “Very good. Now off you go. I want Ace Hardware, Zaglat Chevy, and Mr. Tastee Ribs all cued up for the first seg.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Also, last night’s game—”

  “Wickman striking out the side in the eighth? That was pimp. Totally, like, un-Brewers.”

  “No, I think we want the Mark Loretta home run in the fifth. Loretta doesn’t hit many, and the fans like him. I can’t think why. Even a blind man can see he has no range, especially from deep in the hole. Go on, son. Put the CD in my locker, and if I see the Rat, I’ll give it to him. I’m sure he’ll give it a spin.”

  “The track—”

  “Seven, seven, rhymes with heaven. I won’t forget and neither will he. Go on, now.”

  Morris gives him a final grateful look and goes back inside. Henry Leyden, alias George Rathbun, alias the Wisconsin Rat, also alias Henry Shake (we’ll get to that one, but not now; the hour draweth late), lights another cigarette and drags deep. He won’t have time to finish it; the farm report is already in full flight (hog bellies up, wheat futures down, and the corn as high as an elephant’s eye), but he needs a couple of drags just now to steady himself. A long, long day stretches out ahead of him, ending with the Strawberry Fest Hop at Maxton Elder Care, that house of antiquarian horrors. God save him from the clutches of William “Chipper” Maxton, he has often thought. Given a choice between ending his days at MEC and burning his face off with a blowtorch, he would reach for the blowtorch every time. Later, if he’s not totally exhausted, perhaps his friend from up the road will come over and they can begin the long-promised reading of Bleak House. That would be a treat.

  How long, he wonders, can Morris Rosen hold on to his momentous secret? Well, Henry supposes he will find that out. He likes the Rat too much to give him up unless he absolutely has to; that much is an undeniab
le fact.

  “Dean Kissinger,” he murmurs. “Henry Acheson. Ucky Ducky. God save us.”

  He takes another drag on his cigarette, then drops it into the bucket of sand. It is time to go back inside, time to replay last night’s Mark Loretta home run, time to start taking more calls from the Coulee Country’s dedicated sports fans.

  And time for us to be off. Seven o’clock has rung from the Lutheran church steeple.

  In French Landing, things are getting into high gear. No one lies abed long in this part of the world, and we must speed along to the end of our tour. Things are going to start happening soon, and they may happen fast. Still, we have done well, and we have only one more stop to make before arriving at our final destination.

  We rise on the warm summer updrafts and hover for a moment by the KDCU tower (we are close enough to hear the tik-tik-tik of the beacon and the low, rather sinister hum of electricity), looking north and taking our bearings. Eight miles upriver is the town of Great Bluff, named for the limestone outcropping that rises there. The outcropping is reputed to be haunted, because in 1888 a chief of the Fox Indian tribe (Far Eyes was his name) assembled all his warriors, shamans, squaws, and children and told them to leap to their deaths, thereby escaping some hideous fate he had glimpsed in his dreams. Far Eyes’s followers, like Jim Jones’s, did as they were bidden.

  We won’t go that far upriver, however; we have enough ghosts to deal with right here in French Landing. Let us instead fly over Nailhouse Row once more (the Harleys are gone; Beezer St. Pierre has led the Thunder Five off to their day’s work at the brewery), over Queen Street and Maxton Elder Care (Burny’s down there, still looking out his window—ugh), to Bluff Street. This is almost the countryside again. Even now, in the twenty-first century, the towns in Coulee Country give up quickly to the woods and the fields.