Chapter 3

The Lump

"I hate and I love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I know

not, but I feel it and I am in torment."

— Gaius Valerius Catullus

That night Ned dreamed of wild mustangs galloping through the Badlands, an Appaloosa stallion at their head. He heard pounding hooves, neighing mares, soprano whinnies from their foals.

In the onrushing dusk, the sky gleamed a striated orange, Ned choking on dust plumed up in the herd’s wake. The horses ran as though shadowed by wolves, and approaching the lip of a canyon, rather than pull up, they kept right on driving over the cliff, falling like animal crackers swept off a table by a mischievous five-year-old; all except for the red horse with wings, on whose back Ned rode. That flying dream again, with a new wrinkle.

Ned awoke with his palm braced against the cold floor. Peggy June had pushed him to the very edge, quite the apt metaphor, considering his luck with women.

He eased himself down, shuffled to the stove to perk some coffee, then crept back and kissed her on the top of her rounded shoulder. He ran his finger down to a spot below her nipple. Felt like a lump. He needed to find a way to tell her, without pissing her off too bad.

She opened her eyes. "Want some coffee?" he said. "Made it new." She yawned and stretched, jouncing her breasts. "Don’t do that," he said. "Gotta be at work on time today. Even Mrs. R. has only so much patience."

"Shit. She only wants you there for the company. The old bat belongs in an old folks home where she’d at least have some other ladies to talk to."

"You couldn’t get me in one of those places if I was paralyzed and on a stretcher."

"Wanna bet?"

"You’d leave me, wouldn’t you?"

"In the blink of an eye. I’d leave you if you weren’t paralyzed. I’m leaving you now as a matter of fact. Our relationship is one of those two-night stands."

"You can’t keep your hands off me and you know it."

"Gimme that little dick."

"That did it. I’m throwing you out in the street naked."

#

Before heading over to Blackbird Cove, Ned stopped at Yeager’s Grocery to make a call to his bookie. Bet the whole five hundred on the Rodents.

The rain had continued all night, turning the gravel side roads to muck. When it let up, Ned graded Mrs. R.’s driveway, then resumed work on the wallpapering job. Had the hang of it now; didn’t take half as long as he thought. Finished by noon, he said goodbye to the old Geisha girl, who forced a package of apple croissants on him.

From Mrs. Robideaux’s, he drove to the Chronicle office, where he took out another advertisement for odd jobs. From a phone at the Chronicle office, he called Mrs. Ledbetter, who’d hired him to seal her windows. They’d agreed he’d do the job the next day and he wondered if he could move it to this afternoon. He got the answering machine, hung up without leaving a message. What else to do? He supposed he could talk to the Wolframs, who were taking him to small claims court about the ceiling he’d replastered. Never should’ve taken that job in the first place. He’d told the Mrs. she needed a new roof, but she’d insisted. He’d have to waste a half a day in court explaining to the judge why he hadn’t patched the roof.

While standing there mulling things over, he got a call on his cell from one of the potential customers in whose mailbox he’d left his card. It took him an hour to do the estimate, about five hundred dollars too high according to the client. "Keep me in mind if you can’t beat it," Ned said, and left cursing the cheapskate under his breath. He charged ten dollars under what the other roofers got per shingle square.

Packing it in for the day, he bought a six pack at Yeager’s, then drove over to Shiner Point on the north side of the lake near the Hogback, where his older brother Henry had a resort, to get in a couple of hours of fishing. Actually, Uncle Stan’s will had left the launch and the resort to both Ned and Henry, along with money for Sonny’s college. The will stipulated that Henry pay Ned twenty-five percent of what he made from his charter business, but Ned had never seen a nickel.

By then the sun had climbed high in the sky, soaking up the puddles on the pier. Ned cast his line far out into the murky water and sat down on the edge, drinking beer, chain-smoking Pall Malls, and staring at the red and white bobber. Plunder Lake walleyes loved muddy water and sometimes the best place to hook them was in five or six feet of water in the harbor mouth, fishing with a leech for bait. Ned hoped to land a walleye that would beat Sonny’s 10-pound, 3-ouncer hanging on the wall at Snow’s.

Better’n a win in the exacta, Shiner Point never failed to cheer a guy up. Towering white pines sketched against the bluest sky in Christendom, the scent of white sweet clover mingling with swamp milkweed and yellow and white water lilies; migrating swans gliding across the lagoon; pileated woodpeckers tapping out their Morse Code.

But Ned couldn’t get Peggy June’s lump off of his mind. What a selfish pig he was. He’d thought telling her would freak her so bad she wouldn’t want to do the mattress mambo. He scolded himself for telling Peggy June about Mrs. R.’s safe and the Caterpillar. What a crack-brained idea that had been, and she’d taken him seriously!

A few minutes later, the first fish struck his line. A fucking hammerhandle. No self respecting Minnesota gourmand would bother with a Northern Pike, metallic tasting and bony as a porcupine. He threw the runt back, then spit on his lure for luck. But the combination of the sun beating down and his poor sleeping habits caused him to nod off.

The zing of the line and the suddenly taut monofilament cutting through his flesh roused him in time to see the whale of a walleye break the water, its iridescent scales glistening in the sunlight as it leaped high above the lily pads and hung there like the Goodyear blimp. Ned was thinking about how much the taxidermist would charge when the line snapped.

His shower of ex-rated language had barely begun when Henry’s launch came sputtering into the lagoon. The boat was listing to port from all the weight on that side, Henry’s live-in Alma and her daughter. Pretty sure Henry was doing the horizontal bop with both of ‘em. Alma was fifty-five or so and the fat redhead might be in her late thirties.

Henry tied the boat to the pier, settled with the half-dozen octogenarians he’d taken out onto the lake, then limped over to where Ned was fishing, while Alma and her daughter hauled the coolers over to where the campers and station wagons were parked.

"Catching anything, Sport?" he said. A fishing guide for twenty years, Henry certainly looked it: the skin fried off his ears and nose, goggles of white under his eyes, front teeth worn down from biting monofilament.

Their relationship hadn’t been the same since they were kids, when Ned had sucker punched Henry with a vicious uppercut.

"Not much more than a numb behind," Ned said.

"Better off fishing on the shallows above the reefs this time of year," Henry said.

"You oughta know," Ned said. "How much you gettin’ for those charters these days, two hundred and fifty for a half day?"

Henry shot him a disgusted look. "That’s a laugh. Lucky I’ve got any customers at all, what with the new harvest slot. Been reduced again from 16-20 inches to 16-18 with one allowable walleye over 30 inches."

"Things are rough all over, H. I’m thinking you ought to pay me something from all the good times, when you were pulling in five hundred a day, seven days a week, from May to mid October."

"See those two women over there," Henry said. "They don’t come cheap."

Alma and the daughter finished with the customers and waddled toward the pier. Ned felt a shiver of fear; he’d rather bare his butt on the Jerry Springer Show than talk to them.

Ned reeled in what was left of his line. "I’ll be expecting some sort of token payment in the mail, H. Say maybe a thousand. I don’t want to have to take you to court."

"Go ahead," Henry said. "You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip."

Ned hopped in his truck and peeled out of the yard, spitting sand on Henry’s dandelion strewn lawn, madder at himself than at Henry. Henry snorted walleye fishing like a godblessit coke addict and always had. Uncle Stan should’ve left the resort and the launch to him free and clear, and Ned knew it.

Slowing down to twenty or so as he followed the winding road around the lake, where if you weren’t careful, you could round a curve and come face to face with a fucking Peterbilt, Ned thought back to the time he’d almost cleaned Henry’s clock for good.

Shuffling along with their fishing poles bent over their shoulders, the two were on their way to the lake when Ned had stupidly mentioned the presidential election, or maybe it had been a novel he’d just read and Henry, who took a great deal of pride in never having read a book, had done his hare-lip impression of Ned doing an oral report on Dick and Jane.

Ned had argued with Loretta about quitting school and he wasn’t about to take this from a fucking retard. He knelt as if to tie a shoelace, then swung upward as hard as he could, his knuckles smacking the bottom of Henry’s chin with a painful thud. Then he followed through as he’d seen Sugar Ray Leonard do during the Olympics. Henry sank like a sack of shit, hitting his head on the pavement, so hard it actually bounced. Ned kept his dukes up because he figured Henry, who was a year older, would be up and at him like a wildcat on speed. But Henry didn’t get up and a pool of blood began to form on the sidewalk.

"Oh, my God," Ned said aloud. "I’ve gone and killed my brother like that Cain guy in the Bible. I’m gonna get the electric chair for this for sure."

He whipped his blue and white farmer’s hankie out of his back pocket. In Health class the teacher said you should apply a tourniquet if your patient bled, but the only place he could see to tie the cloth was around Henry’s neck. Instead he held the hankie to the wound and began to yell bloody murder. They were in the park about a block from the church. Oughta be some ladies in there sweeping out the place or something.

Henry groaned and his eyes blinked open. "You’re not dead," Ned said.

"Where am I?" Henry said. "And who the hell are you?"

Ned braked for the stop sign at the end of the lake road and began to giggle. He’d have to call Henry, tell him to forget about the token payment.

The cellular in his upper breast pocket trilled. Peggy June, wanting to know when he planned to case the construction site. For just the briefest of seconds, he didn’t know what to tell her. "You’re not one of those big talkers, are you, Clem?" she said.

"I don’t think I like your tone," he said. "What you need is good old-fashioned spanking."

"Make my day," she said.

"I’ll be there around three-thirty," he said and hung up.

#

Ned took Highway 55 to Rail City Road, turned left, cruised past Pamida’s, and parked in front of Rowdy’s Bar, where the boys from the paper mill usually hung out. Of the three bars in town, besides the Legion and the VFW, Rowdy’s was the fanciest, but it wasn’t what you’d call a Holiday Inn. Ned sat at the bar, chatting with hawk-nosed Jake Werner, who was originally from Wisconsin and displayed a Green Bay Packers pennant behind the bar. Jake thought the Gopher bet was stupid. "Drew Brees is gonna win the Heisman, and he owns the Gophers."

"We got the best defensive end in the Big Ten," Ned retorted. "He’ll put him on his ass. Gimme the phone, whydon’cha?"

Doc Benson’s receptionist answered on the first ring, and she put the old man on immediately. "Doctor Benson, this is Ned Tuttle."

"Hey, Ned. How can I help you?"

Funnier than Peewee Herman, Ned had actually looked forward to going to see Doc Benson as a kid. Corny jokes. Six years old and he’d say, "Married yet?" Or he’d hit him with a string of elephant jokes a first grader would find sidesplitting. Ned would get the giggles and whatever vile thing the doctor was doing to him wouldn’t hurt a bit.

"There’s this girl I know. Woman actually, and she’s got this lump . . . I’d like her to see you for a---what do you call it?"

"A biopsy."

"That’s it."

"Who we talking about here, Ned?"

"Peggy June Shippe."

"That’s a strong-willed woman. You’ll have your hands full getting her to come in. Try to use a little bit of subtlety. Make her think it’s her idea."

"How the heck’m I gonna do that?"

"You’ll think of something."

#

Ned drove to the worst of Plunder’s three bars, the Fishing Hole, also known as the Bloody Bucket. Most of the time he avoided the place because of all the fights, but today he wanted to provoke somebody. He ordered a Pabst, lit a Pall Mall and stood there measuring the sophisticated clientele: Howie Schmidtgap and his friend Jamie Zwald, playing pool. They belonged to what had been euphemistically referred to as a gang, the Plunder Lake Crips, a bunch of wannabes who played loud rap music and cruised Main Street in their muscle cars equipped with glass pack mufflers, daring the local gendarmes to do something about it.

Ambling by on his way to the can, Ned bumped Howie’s arm, ruining a straight-in shot on the eight ball. "What the fuck do you think you’re doing?" Howie said.

"You talking to me?" Ned said, doing a bad Robert De Niro impression.

"Yeah, you spoiled my shot."

"So, what do you want me to do about it?"

"Say ‘excuse me.’"

"Shit. That’s just not gonna happen."

Howie looked worried. Ned moved in closer, so close he could smell the taco the kid had for dinner. "Go ahead, take the first swing. I don’t want to have to tell your mother I snapped her baby’s spine without giving him a fighting chance."

"Nah," Howie said. "Forget about it. You’re old and I don’t want to get in any trouble."

Ned shoved him. Jamie laughed, Howie turning a shade of baby-blanket pink. The kid wasn’t going to fight, so Ned swung at him, a looping roundhouse, trying to miss so bad he left himself open. When he stumbled, Howie fell on him. They rolled around on the floor, and Ned came up on top. Not one to miss an opportunity to snipe from the sidelines, Jamie ran up and kicked Ned in the head, then in the chest. Ned grabbed the Nike and pulled up, dropping Jamie on his ass up against the juke box, causing that ripping sound rap DJs liked so much.

Meanwhile, Howie’s dandelion haircut, the barbed-wire tattoo encircling his neck, and the metal dangling from every orifice began to provoke; Ned latched onto Howie’s throat and squeezed. Just as the boy’s eyes began to bulge, his tongue taking on the look of a grape popsicle, Jamie cracked Ned over the head with a chair. The bartender, a Bemidji State nose tackle on academic suspension, hooked the two punks by their T-shirts and hurled them out into the street before they could cause any more trouble.

The bump on the head, the split lip, and the shiner were more than Ned had counted on, but he felt a lot better. If Peggy June was anything like Loretta, she’d drag him to see Doc, and when they got there, Doc could shanghai her or something."

#

Ned showed up at Purgatory Pier, just as Peggy June was bagging "Teenage Baby Sitters Fourteen" for a pizza-faced kid who looked like he’d just filled his pants when Ned opened the door and the chimes went off.

She shooed the boy out the door and locked up.

"Scared the crap out of that poor boy," Peggy June said, getting into the shotgun side of the truck. She looked twenty years younger, dressed in a black leather jacket with a silk kerchief covering her hair, splotches of red sprouting on her pocket-gopher cheeks.

"Serves the little pervert right." He shifted over to her side, gave her a bear hug. "You sure are looking good today. You’re a regular chameleon girl, aren’t you? I could just take a big bite out of those cute apple cheeks."

She pushed him off, and slapped him smartly with her kerchief. Stung like a Holstein’s urine soaked tail. "Try to stay focused, Clem. We got us a bulldozer to steal."

He tried to look hurt.

"What happened to your face?" she said. "You look worse than usual."

"Ran into a door," he said.

"You oughta get that looked at," she said, lighting up a Salem.

Ned started the truck, drove down Main, then turned north onto 55, just after the dismissal bell rang at the high school. A school bus cut him off, and for the next half mile, they had to endure the kids in the back seat making faces and lolling their tongues out at them.

"What you don’t see when you haven’t got a gun," Peggy June said, making a grotesque face of her own.

Ned slumped down in the seat, almost parallel with the top of the steering wheel. "I feel lower than Rabbit Angstrom must have felt after his baby died."

"Who’s Rabbit Angstrom?"

"He’s a character in this book I read. Loretta gave it to me to read when she started college. By John Updork or Upchuck, something like that. About this ex-basketball player whose wife accidentally drowned their baby in the bathtub. Almost quit reading it. Couldn’t stand all the self pity."

"I think we were supposed to read that for Freshman English," she said. "Made me want to slit my wrists."

"And I thought it was only me. Never cared much for basketball players."

The bus turned onto a side street, and as they were passing the water tower on the outskirts of town, Peg said, "Come on, what’s bugging yah? You get another letter from the old lady?"

Ned was sweating. She hadn’t responded to the black eye like he thought she would.

"Got some bad news from Doc Benson is all."

They came to the outskirts of Plunder Lake, the sign reading 2,443, and downshifted in anticipation for what passed for a hill in Minnesota.

"Sooo, how sick are we?"

Out in the country, they passed a stretch where the pines, seemed to go on forever, with deer crossing signs every quarter mile or so. They rumbled past hardwoods growing around a slough, the leaves beginning to turn a breathtaking scarlet and gold, but instead of reveling in the colors, Ned could only think about how fast the summer had turned to fall. Before he knew it, it would be winter.

"I don’t want to bother you with my problems."

She scooted over, nudged his arm with a goose-down breast. "Come on, tell Mama." The woman radiated heat. If he had her around this winter, he could throw out his pot-bellied stove.

He tried to look as if she were working on one his molars with a pair of pliers. "All right then. Went to see Doc Benson for my yearly physical; you’re supposed to get one every year when you turn forty, you know. Wants to do a biopsy." She gave him that I-know-you-broke-Grandma’s-valuable-crystal look his mother had often given him.

She squinted at him like Hannibal Lector, just before he bit off the guard’s nose. "Gee, what a coincidence. I don’t know why I hang with you. You’re such a dumb shit." She folded her arms under her breasts and looked out the window at the deadfall and the expanse of green and didn’t say a word for the twenty minutes it took to reach the construction site.

They sat in his truck, watching the surveyors take their measurements. Work came to a dead stop and the crew, their yellow hardhats tilted at rakish angles, rested on the floor of a flatbed truck, smoking cigarettes and swapping stories about their old ladies and their girlfriends. Like a retired athlete, Ned missed the camaraderie.

Baby idled next to the slag heap, a big yellow D7R Cat, twenty-two feet long; eight feet to the top of the rollover protector above the cab. 230-hsp of muscle with differential steering engine, weighing in at fourteen tons. Baby was a woman he loved almost as much Loretta. Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she wasn’t hitting on all cylinders. Not looking too good either. Rust blotches on her once bright-yellow coat; the bolts on her blade in need of tightening. He’d tended to Baby’s every booboo, even gave her a bath when she’d been cavorting in the mud puddles too long, and now some ham-fisted dozer jockey was neglecting her.

"Doesn’t that make you sick?" he said.

"Not as sick as you talking to Doc Benson about my lump," Peggy snapped.

"What, you mean you’ve got one, too?"

"Don’t think I noticed you feeling around on my tits?"

"Thought you was asleep."

"Why can’t you keep your fucking banana nose out of my business?" She crossed her arms and turned her back to him.

"Okay then, from now on I will."

The hell he would; if he had to, he’d throw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Knock her out if he had to, but she was going to see Doc Benson.

Couldn’t worry about that now, though, not with the other woman so close at hand. Where would he put Baby if he did steal her? He could sell her to somebody who’d take proper care of her and he’d solve his Loretta dilemma at the same time, but it would all take time.

"You should get that biopsy done," he said. "They got this new procedure where they zap it with radioactive pellets or something."

He thought he saw a hint of a smile. "Did you get in that fight for me?" she said.

The surveyors folded their instruments and the hardhats got down off the bed of the truck and headed for their vehicles. The site was closing down for the night.

"Nah, I get in lots of fights," he said, starting the truck. "It’s a fact of life with a drinking man."

They drove north on Highway 55, instead of south towards Plunder Lake. He had an idea about where to hide Baby. He switched on the radio and turned to the Country station from Duluth. Johnny Cash was singing "I Got Stripes".

"I hope that’s not an omen," he said. When the song was over, a news announcer came on talking about Governor Ventura’s new sales tax proposals, one of them a surcharge on funerals.

"That steroid-crazed fool," she said. "Funerals are expensive enough the way it is."

Ned turned onto a dirt road, and the Gohl farm, abandoned for what seemed like ten years now, loomed in front of them. When the heirs rented out the land, Ned had attended the auction, and it seemed like he remembered one of the sheds being big enough to hold one of those self-propelled combines.

"Spookville," Peggy June said.

He parked his truck near what had once been the yard light, and inspected the place. The farm house, a one and half story frame with the windows blown, was barely visible behind a thicket of brush. The front door hung on one hinge, and the steps leading to the entrance had long since crumbled. Ned would swear he heard children’s laughter. Blue as a eunuch guarding a harem, for some reason.

North of the house, a barn with a swaybacked roof threatened to collapse. A Surge milking machine advertisement leaned against one of the cobwebbed windows, and a rusted elevator led to an opening in the hayloft. To the west, a windbreak of evergreens stood sentinel to this ghost of a farmstead.

He shook off the melancholy mood, put his arm around Peggy June’s shoulder. She leaned into him, and they trudged through the mud to a machine shed adjoining a crumbling corn crib, where he grasped the sliding partition and pushed. It slid along the railings like the French doors on an Edina colonial. An odor of vaporized gasoline and chicken shit struck him as he felt in the pocket of his flannel shirt and came out with a little slip of paper where he’d jotted Baby’s measurements. He’d need a little over eight feet of clearance. Looked like it might be a tight fit. Need a Yale lock to keep kids out; the hasps looked good, though. He’d cover the windows with burlap, maybe get a plastic cover for Baby, in case the roof leaked.

#

That night, Ned returned to the construction site alone.

He parked the truck down the road a quarter mile and walked back. He aimed his binoculars at the watchman’s shack, caught sight of the flare of a cigarette, adjusted the lenses for a close-up. Ben Davenport. Three days growth of beard. A kisser like a catfish, what with the nose hairs and everything. At least sixty when Ned worked with him as a boy, absent-minded then. Ned was surprised to see the man remembered to wear pants. Maybe this wasn’t such a crack-brained idea after all.