Frag Box (13 page)
“Herman, I’m not inclined to think there are a lot of cigar importers on the Iron Range.”
“Neither am I. I’m thinking it’s either a place where Charlie had a stash, or the address of his father, which could be the same thing. I’m going to go have a look.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, early.”
“I’m coming along.”
Northland
Before dawn the next day I picked up Anne Packard in front of her office and we headed north in my BMW. She was dressed in professional woman’s casual: slim-fitting khaki pants tucked into suede boots, a soft emerald green turtleneck sweater under a wool car coat, her usual thin, tailored leather gloves, and some tiny gold loop earrings. The earrings seemed to set off the gold flecks in her eyes, which I hadn’t noticed before. The lady had style. She also had coffee and pastry in a white paper bag and an appropriate look of cheerful determination.
For the first thirty miles of I-35, we met a steady stream of headlights from inbound commuters. After twenty miles or so, she said, “Good grief, is it always like this?”
“Scary, isn’t it? Apparently, life on your own little half acre up by Forest Lake or Scandia, with unleashed neighborhood dogs and strange snowmobiles in your yard and raccoons in your attic, is so wonderful that it’s worth getting up at five every damn morning to follow somebody else’s bumper for an hour or more. Personally, I don’t get it.”
“Sometimes it’s nice being a newspaper person,” she said, nodding. “It means you have to be aware of current trends, but you aren’t allowed to judge them.”
“I don’t think I’m wired that way.”
“No, you don’t seem to be. So what was your idea of the golden age?”
“The what?”
“You know, the time when everything was right with the world? The time we ought to go back to? Everybody has one.”
“Oh no, you don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know you reporter types. You’re trying to trick me into rhapsodizing about the good old days when cholesterol was good for us, nobody rigged elections, and a gallon of gas cost less than a small loaf of bread. Then you can give me some clever label, like ‘pre-postmodern reactionary obstructionist,’ and you won’t have to think about who I really am any more. Not on your life.”
She chuckled. “I usually try for something shorter than that.”
“Like ‘renaissance man,’ maybe?”
“I was thinking ‘curmudgeon.’”
“I’m not old enough to be a curmudgeon. How about post-renaissance man?”
“Have a doughnut. They’re the postmodern low-cholesterol kind.”
“Thank you, I will.”
We had the northbound lanes pretty much to ourselves, but I stayed at just barely above the speed limit, figuring that with that much traffic in the southbound lanes, the State Patrol would have a presence somewhere nearby. Fifty thousand people, all driving bumper-to-bumper and too fast were bound to need some guidance sooner or later.
Finally, around the town of North Branch, the traffic thinned out to nearly nothing and the dirty gray sky started to get backlit with something that passed for dawn. I poured some more coffee from my own Thermos, switched off the cruise control, and let the machine have its head a little, running a constant throttle rather than constant speed. The sprawling ’burbs fell away behind us, and we cruised into the land of black-green pine and cedar forests, with occasional tiny farms so poor, all they could raise were blisters and junked cars. The road behind us was empty. I increased my speed a bit more and settled into the rhythm of machine noise and passing landscape.
“Have you been up on the Iron Range a lot, Herman?”
“First time,” I said.
“You’re originally from…?”
“Iowa.”
“What did you do there?”
“Not much.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“What made you come to the Twin Cities?”
“That’s a long and not very interesting story.”
“This is a long trip. Did you have some trouble back there?”
“Nothing worth talking about.”
She laughed. “Wow, you don’t give much away, do you?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“Then why are you traveling with a newspaper person?”
“Because of Charlie Victor. I had this strange notion that he shouldn’t just die on a sidewalk in front of a pool hall and get ignored, as if he had never even existed. I thought his story ought to be told.”
“I can understand that. So tell me his story, then.”
So I did. I told her how he always bought a bond from me in the fall and I told her most of his in-country stories from the jungle. I did not, of course, tell her how his being abandoned in the tunnels reminded me of a dumb kid running scared in Detroit. But I told her quite a lot.
“What about the fragging business?”
“Ah, yes. How could I have left that out?” I told her.
***
It took Charlie seven weeks to walk out of the jungle, a lot of which was spent hiding and all of which was spent being lost. He didn’t know where his firebase was in the first place, so he didn’t try to go back there. But he remembered when they were being choppered into the ville that they had turned above a river and then gone fairly straight the rest of the way. He figured if he could find that river, he could follow it downstream until it joined with some others, maybe even the Mekong, and eventually led to civilization. There were a lot of patrol boats out around the Delta, he had heard. If nothing else, he ought to be able to get picked up by one of them. He knew which way his platoon had come into the LZ. He left in the opposite direction.
He took all the gear and ammunition that he could carry, but he only had food and water for about two days. Water was the biggest problem. He had canteens, but no safe place to fill them, and he wasn’t sure if he trusted his standard-issue purification tablets. He had heard about some kind of big tree that sent all the water from its branches down to its roots every day at sundown. You could hear it gushing inside the soft wood, the story went, and if you slashed open the bark, you could drink it.
Just before sundown on his third day, he made camp in a deep thicket of alien-looking trees in triple-canopy forest, and he slashed the bark of every different kind of tree he could see. He stayed awake all night long, listening, but he never heard any gushing and he never got a drink. The next morning, he saw that he had made so many slashes, he might as well have set up signs pointing to his camp. After that, he resigned himself to filling his canteens with paddy water or from puddles where he saw animals drinking.
He changed his attitude toward enemy patrols, as well. At first, he hid from them. Then he got to wondering if some of them might be just as careless and unmilitary as his own squad. So he followed a patrol during most of one day. When they settled down into a crude camp for the night, he snuck up and killed the sentry with his knife and took his food and water. He also took an AK-47 and a lot of ammunition. He figured if he had to get into a firefight, he didn’t want the VC to be able to distinguish the sound of his firing or his muzzle flashes from their own.
It was a good strategy. Two nights later, he tried the same thing again but accidentally awakened one of the sleeping grunts. He wound up killing the entire squad with a couple of grenades and the stolen assault rifle. Things were definitely looking up. He joked to himself that as long as the VC kept patrolling the jungle, he could live there indefinitely.
At some level, though, he knew that if he kept it up long enough, the VC would mount an operation to hunt him. He had no idea how long that might be, but he tried not to dally in the jungle, waiting for it.
He fell into a routine. He traveled at night, hunting enemy patrols whenever he was out of food and water. During the day, he hid and slept, usually as high as he could get in some very leafy tree. But he never slept more than a couple of hours at one time, constantly waking up and rebriefing himself on who he was and what he was doing. He told himself he was a panther in combat boots, silent, deadly, and remorseless. He told himself he was young, fast, strong, and invulnerable. He told himself he was a legend, that the VC were afraid of him. He told himself a lot of things to keep from facing how wretched and alone he felt.
Eventually, he found the river. By then, he had contracted malaria, dysentery, and every kind of bug bite and body parasite known to the rain forest, which was a lot. Weak from dehydration and hunger, he built a crude raft and simply let himself drift downstream. After three days on the water, he floated into a backwater of the Mekong, where a firefight was in progress between three US Navy “Pibber” patrol boats and a small fleet of armed sampans. The Navy won, and Charlie was picked up with the rest of the flotsam.
He spent three weeks in a hospital in Manila, mostly getting his intestines rehabilitated. When he had first walked into the jungle, he was six feet, two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ninety-five pounds. When he was picked up, he weighed a hundred and forty, and he never again seemed to be able to stand straight enough to be over six feet. The Army gave him new uniforms, corporal’s stripes, and a bronze star. Then they sent him back to his old platoon. Nobody in authority would talk to him about bringing court marshal charges against Lieutenant Rappolt.
Rappolt was still there, and Charlie might have been willing to forget about the whole abandonment episode, as happy as he was to be alive and not an FNG anymore. But the idiot leut kept harping on it. He told Charlie that he, by leaving him at the ville, had made him into a better soldier, had forced him to overcome his own inadequacies. He finally went so far as to tell Charlie he had made him into a man.
“Well, I sure do thank you for that, sir,” said Charlie, as he plunged his K-bar knife under Rappolt’s rib cage and up into his heart. “I probably couldn’t have done this, otherwise.”
Later that day he was burning his bloodstained fatigues in a honey pot when Bong, who was now also wearing corporal’s stripes, brought him a big wad of money.
“I figure this is yours now, man.”
“What is it?”
“The frag pot, baby. All of it. I was the official keeper. We been collecting on that asshole ever since you been gone and a long time before you even got here. Thanks, man. Anybody ever needed to die, it was that mufucker.”
And that was how Charlie learned how the system worked. After that, he became the regular keeper of the frag pot. And he signed up for two more tours of duty, always with the stipulation that he could stay with his old outfit. He didn’t quite understand why or how, but he felt as though he had inherited a duty to protect his squad mates from more Lieutenant Rappolts. And as luck would have it, there were several of them.
Iron Country
A hundred and sixty miles north of where we started, the interstate freeway that had been steadily easing eastward made a more abrupt turn that way, plunging down into the Lake Superior basin to head for Duluth. I split away from it on Minnesota 33, through the town of Cloquet, following a sign that said “Range Towns.”
What I expected to find there was not so certain. Charlie had said that he hated his father so many times that I had to believe it. But maybe hating him was not the same as not trusting him. The old man could still have been his banker. And in any case, the address on the cigar box did not get there by accident. He meant me to read it, of that I was sure. Time to find out if he also meant me to follow it.
North of Cloquet, the landscape turned open, rocky, and white. The lasting winter snow cover had already arrived, broken here and there by windswept outcroppings of black rock. The buildings got more run down and farther apart and the farmsteads disappeared altogether. We crossed the Saint Louis River and linked up with Trunk Highway 53, which headed straight north, four lanes with a wide center median, though it had lots of signs telling me it was not a freeway.
Anne had been napping under her coat, and now she poked her head out and looked around.
“Where are we?”
“Forty miles south of the town of Virginia. We’re all out of coffee, I’m afraid.”
“This is quite a road. It must have cost more to build than the total value of all the towns that it connects.”
“Maybe there was more to connect, back then. Now, neither the road nor the towns look like much.”
“No. And it takes fewer and fewer buildings to even qualify as a town.”
“Three,” I said. “I’ve been counting. Anything more than three, and it’s a town plus a suburb.”
“But there aren’t a lot of those.”
“No, there surely aren’t.”
To me, it felt like a good place to get away from, the kind of country that makes you appreciate a new set of rubber and a well-tuned engine. Because if your car ever died and left you to walk back to civilization, you could be in for one damned long trek across the windy steppes.
I put the pedal down a bit more and blasted past places with unlikely names like Zim and Cotton and Cherry. As we approached Eveleth, I could see a featureless pillbox called the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame perched on a hilltop, standing guard over an abandoned two-story motel with weeds and scrub trees growing out of its pavement. I took the exit off the non-freeway.
“Is this it?”
“No, this is Eveleth. Charlie claimed to have killed a man here once, in a VFW bar upstairs over an appliance store. I thought I would just go and see if there is such a place.”
“See if there’s such a place as a cafe, while you’re at it. Those politically correct doughnuts aren’t staying with me very well.”
“I’ll look for a sign that says ‘Bob Dylan ate here.’”
“Just look for a sign that says ‘Open.’ That’s as much as you’re likely to get on the Range.”
She was right. Eveleth wasn’t quite a ghost town yet, but the closed stores outnumbered the working ones by a big margin and the streets were almost empty of traffic. The only second-story bar we found was a BPOE, rather than a VFW, and it was over a union hall, not an appliance store. Both it and the hall looked closed. There was no sign of a Greyhound bus depot. Was that an indication, I wondered, of how close to reality Charlie’s stories came?
We found an open diner on Main Street, where we sat and looked at stuffed and mounted fish, old license plates, and display cases of antique carnival glass, while we ate “world-famous Taconite Burgers” and “authentic Cornish pasties.” They were surprisingly good. The pasties could be had “with or without,” and I had to be told that the commodity being referred to was rutabagas. I had mine without and did not regret the choice.
The waitress, a pretty, self-conscious girl who didn’t look to be more than nineteen, didn’t know where the bus used to stop, but she did know that the appliance store on Main Street used to have something else upstairs before they had a fire.
“That was back before I was born,” she said.
Things were looking up.
The cook, an aging black man who must have overheard our conversation, stuck his head out of the kitchen.
“The bus used to stop at the big front porch on the hotel, a block over east,” he said, pointing. “Not no more, though. The place ain’t even a hotel no more, got turned into a ’partment building, years back. There wasn’t nobody wanted to ride the bus no more, no how.”
“Did you come here on that bus?” said Anne. She took his picture.
“You’re a smart lady. Yeah, I come here on that bus. Got off at that hotel in nineteen and fifty-two. Lots of jobs down in the Cities then, but you had to come a long ways north before it wasn’t still the South, if you know what I mean.”
“We know, believe it or not,” I said. Anne gave me a look of surprise.
“Yeah? Anyway, so I come here and I been flipping them burgers ever since. Now I suppose you’ll be wanting to know where Bobby Zimmerman grew up before he got to be Mr. Hotshot Bobby Dylan and picked up some kind of accent ain’t nobody on the Range or anyplace else ever heard before.”
“Actually,” said Anne, “we couldn’t care less.”
“I was right; you’re some kind of smart lady.” He grinned broadly while she took one more picture of him.
***
I pulled back onto the highway and headed north again, checking my mirrors as I got back up to cruise speed. There was nobody behind us. Ten miles later, the road curved left to swing around the southwest corner of Virginia, which looked as if it might actually be a real city. I cruised up a big hill on its west side, ignoring the signs for skiing areas and mine tours, and took the exit for Highway 169, westbound. My next stop should have been Mountain Iron. If it was still there.
It was a diamond interchange, with a stop sign at the end of the ramp.
“Apparently we have to choose between new and old Highway 169,” said Anne. “On your map, I don’t see that distinction.”
“The new one looks like some more of the same wide, four-lane, non-freeways they have here. I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t even there when the address got written on the cigar box. I say we take the old road.”
“Spoken like a true investigative reporter.”
“Which I am not. That’s why I have one with me.” But I took the old road, all the same. We left the fringes of Virginia behind us very quickly and settled into a sedate fifty-five miles an hour on a narrow, two-lane highway that was built following the path of no resistance, making wide curves to avoid rock formations and gullies. Six miles out, it made a particularly sharp s-curve. A few dozen simple box-like buildings clustered around the road in crude rows, as if they had all fallen off the back ends of trucks that took the curve too fast. Since then, they had not been fixed up. I would have said they were all abandoned, except that some of them had smoke coming out of rusted tin chimneys.
“I think we have arrived at Mountain Iron,” I said.
“How can you tell?”
“It has a little bitty water tower and a post that used to hold up a stop sign. If that’s not civilization, I don’t know the stuff. We’re looking for Third Street.”
“This place doesn’t look as if it ever had three streets, and I mean back in its boom days.”
“You think they had boom days here?”
“Well, maybe an eventful afternoon now and then.” She had the tiny silver camera out again and was shooting as we drove.
The street signs were infrequent, to say the least, and were as badly rusted as the chimneys, but we found one that said Third and turned down a street that had exactly six tiny houses on it before it quit at a big pile of rocks and some stunted pine trees. I made a U-turn at the rock pile. Charlie’s father’s house, if that’s what it was, was the last one in the row.
It was maybe twenty-four by twenty feet, tops, with asbestos shingle siding in an indescribable color and a covered porch with empty flower boxes on the rails. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, but there were vehicle tracks in and out of the unshoveled driveway. Out in the back yard, half covered by snow, there were a couple of plastic lawn chairs and a barbeque made out of half a steel drum.
Next to the house was an ancient pickup, so rusted that its fenders wiggled in the light wind. It had tracks going to it, but not fresh ones. On the rear bumper were a couple of faded stickers that said “UNION WORKER AND PROUD OF IT” and “BAN IMPORTED STEEL.” I thought that was hilarious, considering that the truck was a Toyota.
“Chez Victor,” I said. “White tie optional.” I pulled up at the place where a curb might be buried, if there were any.
“You’re not going in the driveway?”
I shook my head. “That set of tracks is from some kind of vehicle with big tires and a lot of ground clearance. If I try to go in there, my undercarriage will bottom out on the snow and we could spend the rest of the day trying to shovel it out.”
“Do you have a shovel?”
“No.”
“Good call, Herman. Park in the street, every time.”
The snow turned out to be mid-calf height, and by the time we got to the front porch, my sixteen-fifty shoes were candidates for the trash bin. There was a doorbell button next to the door, but it was hanging away from the wall by its wires, so I pounded on the door instead. Then I shaded my eyes and peeked in through the tiny glass.
“Anything?”
“There’s a light on in there, but I can’t see anybody moving around.” I pounded again, waited twenty seconds, then tried a third time.
“Maybe he’s in the study, working on his rare book collection,” she said.
“Books are probably all rare in a town like this. I think more likely, he just doesn’t want to talk to anybody. A lot of old people turn into hermits. Let’s have a look at the back door.”
We slogged through more of the deep snow, past the pickup and around to a porch that was smaller than the front one and had no roof over it. The combination screen-storm door was swinging in the wind, its spring broken or disconnected. The door and jamb behind it had both been badly gouged by some kind of heavy tool. Again, I shaded my eyes and peered into the gloom.
“Well, he’s there,” I said.
“So, aren’t you going to knock?”
“Do you have your phone handy?”
“Of course. Why?”
“See if you can get us a local sheriff of some kind. I think Charlie’s father is sitting in a kitchen chair, with his head half on the table in front of him.”
“What do you mean, his head half on the table?”
“I mean somebody blew his brains out.”
“Oh. Oh, dear Jesus.” She fumbled in her purse, then began punching buttons. I squinted to see better through the dirty glass. The light was pretty poor, and the line of sight wasn’t the greatest, but I could definitely see an ace of spades in the dead man’s hand. It looked as if it had been stuck there after he had died, just for somebody like me to see.
