H is for Hallock, Minnesota (or thereabouts)
Introduction to “H is for Hallock, Minnesota (or thereabouts)”
I thought about writing something pithy and cute here, like “hey, [writing this] was cheaper than therapy.” But there’s more here than that, I think.
First, hey, shout-out to John Milton. Woot-woot, John Milton!
Second, I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of ‘norms’; how our behaviors and beliefs are practiced daily, and passed on from generation to generation, unexamined, unquestioned, so that before long we cannot distinguish between the “is” (what we do) and the “ought” (what we should do).
And so this is about rage; rage that gets passed on, so that it seems normal, and how rage devolves into a pathological selfishness.
The writing of the story began with the section about driving in the snow, the driver no longer able to tell if he is actually moving or not, and then I wrote forward and backward from that. That’s a true bit, from my first time driving in a blinding blizzard in western Illinois. It’s the damndest feeling.
And northern Minnesota can be a damned lonely place.
There are of course the theological metaphors that I seem unable to escape; there’s longing for home and innocence and the realization that getting home doesn’t mean retracing our steps. That path is no longer available to us.
And of course, the names. Throughout these stories, there are names that I hope you will Google. And for one of them, knowing some Hebrew would be helpful...
So, anyway, as Michael Conrad used to say on Hill Street Blues, “let’s be careful out there.” There are people like this around.
* Reader’s note: Contains strong language and/or adult situations.
I need to say right up front, I didn’t plan to kill her. Swear to God.
Swear to God. I was ready to walk away, just let it be. Let her be. But she just had to say something, get the last word, y’know?
I shouldn’t’ve had the gun in the car. But I’d been making some night deliveries, and some of those neighborhoods aren’t exactly, y’know, high class?
And I shouldn’t’ve even gone to that bar. I mean, what was I thinking? I must’ve known she’d be there, y’know… where the hell else would she go with him? Where else in town would nobody care if they saw ‘em together?
So I opened the door. He saw me first, tried to pull her away into the back room before she could turn around and see me. He didn’t want any trouble. But yeah, typical, she didn’t go nowhere she didn’t want to go, and she didn’t like being pulled anywhere. She knew something was up. So she turned, and saw me in the doorway.
The music was up loud. If she’d just said what she said at like normal volume, y’know, I couldn’t’ve even heard her. But when she talked, she expected you to hear. So she yelled it. Just yelled it. Everybody in the goddamn bar heard it.
I don’t remember much after that; it was like somebody else was running my show. I went out to the car and got the gun and went back in. I had it up and pointing before I even got the door pushed open. He saw me first. I saw his hand go up, saw his mouth open. Couldn’t hear him. I saw that he didn’t try to step in front of her. Smarter than he looked. Honest, I felt nothing against him. Maybe pity.
She turned, with her mouth already open, ready to say something else clever. I’m a pretty good shot, and it’s a pretty good gun. I only had to fire once.
I tore out of the parking lot, got on US 75 and headed north. After you make that long curve out of town, it’s pretty much straight, and holding my Mustang at 90 was no problem. Except for the damn snow. It was snowing like a sonuvabitch.
I was still checking my mirrors, even past the river, past Stephen and Donaldson, past the 30 MPH signs at Kennedy; I didn’t stop checking the mirrors ‘til Hallock. Almost two in the morning, the only one that would’ve come after me was Sheriff Rogers, and they would’ve had to get him out of bed...and I could still outrun that old Chevy of his, even up. And this wasn’t even up; I had at least a 30 mile head start.
There’s nothing out here, and it’s worse at night, and it’s worse than that when it snows. Sometimes I caught sight of a telephone pole, or a train on a siding off to the left. But mostly just white nothin’. Me and a black Mustang ripping down a two-lane road on a white-out night. Felt like a goddamn country song.
In fact, I was messing with the CD player and almost missed the big S curve on the way to Hallock. That’d be a helluva thing; get killed rolling my car over with nobody chasing me. For some reason that was funny; I started to laugh, out there in the car in the snow all by myself.
Then that crosswalk in Hallock. God-damned Hallock. Nothing good has ever happened to me in Hallock.
I don’t know if they even saw me. Why the hell you gotta park across the street If you’re going to a bar during a snowstorm? Does that make sense? Like they couldn’t find a better parking spot in Hallock?
I did hit the brakes before I hit her. And I remember, I saw her get ripped right out of her boyfriend’s hand, before she went up and over my car.
I stopped and pulled over and got out; out of reflex, I guess...I mean, that’s what you do, right? Her boyfriend was young, jeez, probably not even old enough to be in that bar. And she was young, too. Man, she was messed up, like...she wasn’t laying the way a body’s supposed to lay, y’know? Like all wrong. The snowflakes were landing on her eyes and she wasn’t blinking.
Her boyfriend knelt down next to her, just started screaming. He looked up at me like I could do something.
I had to go. I had to go now. I started to turn away, but he reached out and grabbed the edge of my jacket. “Jesus, mister, Jesus, you gotta…”
He looked straight at me. There was enough streetlight here in town. He saw me. He coulda seen my license plate.
I pulled the gun out of my belt and put it to his forehead and fired.
I ran back to my car. I saw people outside of the bar. God-damned Hallock. I thought I’d better get off 75, maybe get lost on the side roads. I turned right down 175, looking for County 1 going north...I almost missed it when it went off left. It seemed like it was snowing even harder, like that was even possible.
I hoped the road kept going straight, ‘cause I couldn’t see nothin’.
I can’t really say when it happened; I couldn’t give you a time or a mile marker. But at some point, I realized that I hadn’t seen another car for a real long while. And I began to feel like I wasn’t moving. No, that’s not quite it; I was moving, somehow I felt it, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with how much I was pushing down the gas or turning the wheel.
It was like this; when I was 16, I drove for the first time on black ice. That’s when the road gets frozen over with a hard thin smooth ice, and you can’t tell because it’s see-through; the blacktop shows through. But when you’re on it, you can’t do nothin’ to control your car...you may as well be driving a bar of soap on the bottom of a bathtub. And I remember being 16, being on that road just outside of town, and putting on the brakes...and nothing happened. Nothing. I turned the wheel hard left, then hard right...nothing. My old man was sitting next to me, and he had his arms folded, no expression on his face, as we slid slowly into the ditch.
He let me have it after that, man. I still remember.
Anyway, that’s what it felt like now.
Through the windshield now, there was only white. There was kind of a distant white, that had some greys and shadows, and there was the close-up white, like the snowflakes my wipers kept pushing off the windshield. But I couldn’t see road, or roadsigns. No idea where the edge of the road was. No taillights of cars ahead, no headlights of cars coming, no lights in my mirror.
I pumped the gas, then lifted off it completely. No difference, not that I could tell. I turned the wheel a little bit left. No difference, not that I could tell. I jammed down hard on the brake. No difference, not that I could tell.
I might as well have been flying.
I thought about opening my door and putting my foot down, to see if I was actually moving or what, but then I thought that might be a stupid idea. So instead I rolled down the window for a second, and that for sure was a stupid idea. It was like a face full of needles, hard and bitter cold; but was it me moving forward, or a hard wind blowing?
I thought of my old man, and I lifted my hands off the wheel and folded my arms across my chest. 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute: I kept fighting back the urge to grab the wheel. I told myself it didn’t make a difference. And so I sat there in that driver’s seat, arms crossed, moving (or not) through that white nothing.
And then there was a light ahead. A flashing yellow light; no, not one, there were three. Didn’t look like cops...more like some sort of road work sign? And then my car was stopped; I knew somehow that I was stopped. But I hadn’t touched the brakes.
There was somebody rapping on my driver’s side window.
With one hand I felt for the gun in my belt. With the other, I rolled the window down, bracing for the wind, but there was none. It was still. Cold, yeah, but I could handle it, without that wind.
A man’s face was in my window; leathery like my old man’s, creased, with bushy dark eyebrows and a long nose. He sure looked like a road work guy; yellow reflective jacket, white hardhat with yellow reflective stripes on it.
“Road’s end, buddy. Put it over there.” He pointed toward some large rocks that were suddenly there in the gloom.
Without thinking, I rolled ahead and to the right; the car now felt like cars were supposed to feel...gas pedal, brakes, movement. I put it close to the rocks.
The man was at my window again, this time with a big clipboard. “Okay, buddy, a couple of formalities. Sign here at the bottom.” He stuck out a pen.
Again without thinking, I took the board and scribbled on the bottom and handed it back. I noticed that the palms of his hands were smooth, almost like a woman’s; the backs were rough and hairy.
“Okay, buddy, may as well get out. Looks like you got enough jacket there, y’should be okay.”
I pushed open the car door and stepped out.
“So...where is this?”
“Gonayden.” The man seemed to chuckle as he said it. “Well, that’s what they used to call it, anyway. Nobody really calls it anything anymore…” His gaze drifted off into the distance. “Deserted, you know.”
The name sounded...what, old German? Some kind of Scandinavian? Native American? Around here, could’ve been any of ‘em.
He was looking at the clipboard. “So, you’re Malick, eh?”
“Umm, yeah...how’d you know?” I knew he couldn’t have read my signature; even I can’t.
He looked up and chuckled again, and pointed the clipboard at me. “It’s all on the paperwork. C’mon, you gotta come with.” He turned away.
We began to walk, uphill. I noticed he had a walking stick, long and thick and gnarly on the end. Nice walking stick.
I looked around; other than the rocks and my car, there was nothing. “So, I don’t get it...the road just ends here? I’m pretty sure the map shows County 1 going on north.”
“Oh, no,” the man knocked some rocks off the path with his stick. “Don’cha know, you’ve been off of 1 for awhile now. You probably saw that, though, eh?”
I didn’t say anything.
We walked and walked. I didn’t see anything other than rocks and boulders and snow. No trees. No bushes or shrubs. Who knows what was under the snow? But there was nothing alive that I could see.
“Yah, used to have a gate, y’know? Fruit trees all over; best fruit in the whole state, they used to say. But that was a long time ago. Whatever was so special here is gone now. Once they’ve tasted…” He stopped, and looked at me. “Well, they say tastes change, I guess, eh?”
I wasn’t sure if that last part was a question or not.
“Sorry for all the talk. Not usually anybody else up here to talk to, y’know?” he said. And then he was quiet.
We were pretty high up; the snow had let up just enough that I could see valley all around us.
“So, you know my name...you got a name, mister?”
He pointed to a nameplate on his jacket. It said “B. Lyle.”
“Lyle. My first name’s Bartholomew, but I hate that. And I hate Bart, too. Sometimes they just call me Lyle. Doesn’t matter. Not like we’re gonna be spending a lot of time together.”
Yeah, I needed to ask what that meant. I felt the gun in my belt; still there.
I looked off in another direction. In the distance, down below, there was a string of what must have been streetlights, leading off towards the lights of a baseball field. Midway on the street was what sure looked like a movie marquee, and the red neon lights of a diner. It seemed to get clearer the longer I looked at it. “Walt’s,” the neon said.
But that wasn’t possible.
I looked harder, if that’s a thing. Next to the diner was a neon yellow sign of a bear. I knew what it would say underneath before I read it. “Yellow Bear Auto Repair.” That’s where I bought my first car, that red Ford that got left when that guy didn’t pay Old Man Sims for the transmission. I saved up months for that piece of crap.
“Hey...hey, Lyle, hey...” I was pointing out into the dark; I must’ve sounded like a crazy man. “I don’t know how, but I can see my hometown from here. The place I was born. But that…” I stopped; my head was starting to hurt. “That’s five hundred miles from here…”
He made a sound; I wasn’t sure if he was chuckling or hucking up something in his throat. “Yeah, from up here you can pretty much see wherever you want, y’know? For all the good it’ll do ya.” He turned away from me and began to walk back down.
I suddenly felt really tired, but I couldn’t stop looking. “God, I miss that place. It looks so beautiful.”
He didn’t stop or turn around. “It always does, from a distance.”
We walked back down near my car, near where the flashing road sign was.
“OK, here’s the deal,” he said, looking down at the clipboard. “The job isn’t hard. You stand here by the sign, keep people out. Only one entrance to watch. That’s it. Not rocket science.” He was looking at me with one of those smiles that isn’t really a smile, y’know? “And,” he pointed a finger at me; it looked pointier and rougher than it did before. “When your relief gets here, you’ll know it. It’ll show up here on the clipboard. But it’ll be...awhile.”
Alright, it was time to stop this. “Look, bro...I don’t need a job, y’know? In fact, once this snow stops or morning comes, I’m out.” I had my hand on my gun now; I know he saw it.
He didn’t seem impressed. “Snow never stops, morning never comes. You’re not too sharp, are you?”
I didn’t like that, but I let it pass. I’m a patient man.
“And besides, why me? Why’d you pick me?”
He snorted. “I think you know why. And besides, we never have to pick anyone. I think the boss calls it self-selection.”
He turned away from me, looking back up the hill, and held his arms out wide. “This was supposed to be the place, you know? The new project, the grand experiment, the big start-over. They said it was beautiful...I mean, hey, that kind of thing doesn’t mean much to me. I never saw it before it was spoiled. They didn’t build it for us. But there’s a lot of those folks who still try to come back, still think it means something. Like just seeing it would somehow change something inside them, make them all better. Like you can ever go back.”
He turned back around, looked me in the eyes. “You’ve seen it. You feel better?”
No, I sure as hell didn’t feel better. I didn’t feel anything at all.
He took a step towards me, like he was real curious now. “Would you go back, if you could? Even if somebody could make it like tonight had never happened?”
I started to say I didn’t know what he meant. But I did know.
I tried to remember what her eyes looked like, when we first met, before we got mean. And I tried to remember that kid’s eyes in the snow.
No, nothing. Nothing there.
No, even if I could erase all the things I’d done tonight, I still wouldn’t go back. I knew that. ‘Cause I knew that I would’ve just screwed it all up anyway, sooner or later...maybe somehow different, maybe just the same, but something like tonight would’ve happened for sure. Just a matter of time and opportunity.
I’ve known that for a long time. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him, though. Not him or anybody else.
He turned away, like I wasn’t interesting enough anymore. He laid down his stick, and took off his jacket and helmet. By now I figured it didn’t matter, so I pulled the gun from my belt, and squeezed off six shots from the clip, dead center into his back. I was maybe eight feet away.
Nothing happened.
Well, not nothing. I mean, I heard the shots, I felt the little kick of the gun. But, I mean, nothing happened to him.
I popped off four more, at the back of his head. Nothing.
He turned around. “Oh, now, it’s a bit late for all that, isn’t it?” He walked towards me, and took the gun out of my hand without me moving a muscle. He tossed it somewhere out into the darkness.
He was right in front of me now, like six inches away. He must’ve been standin’ on a damn rock or something, ‘cause he was suddenly a lot taller than me. And without the jacket or hardhat, he was...well, he was damned hairy, that’s for sure.
“What if I want to leave?” I looked up at him.
He stared down, straight into my eyes, and I suddenly felt all the cold right through my jacket. His eyes were old; like ancient old, but somehow I thought I’d seen them before. Y’know, familiar-like but you don’t know why?
“You’ve got someplace else to go?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
He held out the clipboard; I took it. He started to walk towards the rocks beyond my car. Just before he reached them, he turned around. Must’ve been something weird with the light...he didn’t look like he did before. Not so much like a man, more like a… well, it’s hard to explain...
But he smiled at me. “If you get bored, or you need to scare somebody off, there’s a little switch on that walking stick. Turns it into a flaming sword. Pretty slick.”
And then he walked past the rocks and disappeared.
I picked up his hardhat and reflective jacket and put them on; they fit perfectly. I picked up his walking stick.
I noticed the nameplate. His name was gone from it, and my name had appeared. It was spelled wrong a little, but I guess it didn’t matter that much. Who would see it out here?
It said Maalik.
