The Cops. John D. A Lithium-deprived Mind

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[Author's note – This chapter takes place nearly two years after EZ's death and three years since the "Is It Salty" episode. I did not have the emotional interest in spending time at The Woods. Herb, who owns hundreds of acres of land, including the acreage adjacent to ours sold a 5 acre lot directly across the road from our cabin. A house was immediately built there. Why Herb would choose to sell that particular plot, when he owns hundreds of acres in the area is an issue for conjecture and an opportunity to harbor resentment. He sold the lot to Steve Buscemi (the cook who tended the grill while Herb and Meg were in North Carolina 3 years ago). Steve Buscemi lives with Parkinson's Disease and a girlfriend who harbors two chihuahuas. She favors cut off jean shorts and bleach in her hair.]
March–

      The part about a heavy sharp rapping of a deputy sheriff’s flashlight and our cabin invaded by cop car floodlights comes later.

      I heard the growl of Steve Buscemi’s ATV 15 seconds after I got out of the car and stood in the road admiring blue sky and the sighing of wind through The Woods’ bare trees. (The driveway required minor shoveling before I could drive in. I was pleased, though slightly astonished, that he had so quickly witnessed and responded to my arrival. I am not a bitter man, but I hastily opened the back door of the car, grabbed a light load of stuff to carry to the cabin, muttering disgruntled resentments while staggering toward the cabin.

      I cowered in the cabin and watched Steve Buscemi approach the end of his driveway and turn east onto the road. He would surely stop for a chat, or drive into the clearing and stop and shut off his motor and beckon me out of hiding. No, he drove straight past dragging a 4-foot length of railroad rail on a chain behind his roaring blue ATV. By then I was out of the cabin and heading toward the inevitable reunion, Halfway to the road I looked up as he dragged past. He looked over, gave me a wave and continued.

      Hrummph!

      I arrived mid-afternoon. Sensational blue sky and a temperature at 43 degrees, I shoveled the driveway enough to get the car through and drove all the way to the usual parking spot on the high ground in the clearing. The circular snow-blown pathway Steve Buscemi had cleared for Caleb in late December was mostly open; on the level ground of the woods there is still 8-10 inches of snow. I hauled stuff to the cabin in shirtsleeves; the sun was warm enough to do anything outside without discomfort. The temperature inside the cabin, solely warmed by solar heat, was 62-degrees. Damn! What release, to be here after months of schoolwork and cinched-up pinched-up head-down life dictated by held hostage to winter and being closed up indoors. I replenished the stove wood supply and thought about making a fire. (Oh, Cabe, two things you could help with… one is always doable, the other is only doable as circumstances allow. I try and haul firewood in before departing and get it drying beside the stove. I also think about emptying the stove of ashes before I leave so when I come next time it’s ready to go. For many years it’s been only me coming here so I could only bitch at myself when, on a frigid January night I’d arrive and have to haul firewood into the cabin and haul ashes out of the cabin before I could get a fire going. So, since it was only me I didn't have to suffer recrimination from anybody else when I failed to be responsible. (Sort of like sitting in the opulent cloud of one’s own fart. So what?)

      Emptying the ashes usually can’t be done because the fire is still burning when we leave for home in those months of stove use. Only on those early afternoon days of spring, when the cabin is warmed by the sun and the fire is allowed to mostly go out during the day can we empty ashes for the next visit.

      This place has become yours too now. It’s not about gaining approval, or proving yourself to higher authorities. It’s all about … you’ve got the spirit of The Woods and you care deeply about all that it is. That makes me proud. I feel as though the next generation—Bumpa, me/Chuck/Mere, and now you, will continue the protective and passionate love of this place for every reason we’ve all come to cherish.

      After unloading and doing the preliminary settling-in duties I wandered into the yard. No hurry to do anything other than stand outside and smell The Woods and listen. I thought to take coffee on the bench in the sun. Then came the sound of ATVs approaching. Steve Buscemi’s blue ATV appeared through the trees from the east on the road, then another, a red ATV appeared 50 yards behind with a small dog trailing, baying like a beagle.

      It was a baying beagle, baying at Axel, who was swaying side-to-side and waving a handgun in the air. Steve Buscemi waved and plowed past dragging his railroad rail. Axel glanced over as he went past. He stopped abruptly, put the pistol on his lap, put the ATV into reverse, and backed into our driveway. Or, tried to back into our driveway. He missed the opening. He put it into forward, lurched ahead into the far ditch, put it into reverse, and (throwing up a spray of mud and gravel) penetrated our driveway all the way back to within 6 feet of my car, stopping abruptly and collapsing onto the ground, nonplussed.

      “You want a beer?” He held up his can of Old Milwaukee.” I thanked him and said no.

      “Hey, Axel!” I greeted him and prepared myself for an extended visit.

      The ATV is his father’s. He’d been over to Cloverdale and up through the woods at Markville. His new dog Fred wandered around the clearing baying intermittently at sticks in the snow. (Pepper died on November 29 almost a year and a half ago, “I came back to the truck after working 2 hours and she was dead on the seat. I cried like a baby. I had to shut her eyes and put her tongue back in her mouth and close her mouth before I shot her in the head to make sure she was dead.”)

      “Fred rides with me on the roads, sits up front on the luggage rack and likes it, mostly. But when we get on a trail he likes to get down and run through the underbrush. He walked for a mile and a half along the trail today, stalking squirrels and chasing rabbit scent.”

      (As I write at 8:05 p.m. there is a sudden commotion in the chicken wire that lines the outer wall 3 feet away. You know, we’ve heard it before sitting here and trying to beat one another up over Monopoly. A mouse of course, out on an evening tear, seeking to terrorize perfectly good men who are sitting inside fire stove warmth and doing nobody any harm.

      I made a fist and hit the wall hard with the front of the fist that cowboys use in western fistfights. Now my knuckles are throbbing. Though the chicken-wire shenanigans on the outside of the plywood are silent.

      I opened the back door to take a pee some minutes ago. Something very large made a show of a lot of noise 30 seconds into the peaceful pee. Indefinite direction of the sounds and complete darkness out there. I hate that. If I’m going to be assaulted by death, at least show me what’s bringing it my way.)

      Axel and I talked for a half-hour. He told me that he’s working for Schlemker Tyride out at the Outpost.

      I asked where that was.

      “Oh, you know, 8 miles east of Duxbury at the new convenience store.”

      “Where? At the junction toward Markville?” I asked.

      “Yeah, I drive heavy equipment and Fred sits beside me on the seat.”

      Steve Buscemi (who’d been driving past on his blue ATV every 10 minutes dragging the railroad rail on chain to dry out the road, and waving sheepishly on each pass) stopped at the entrance to our driveway and got off, shutting off the motor.

      “You want a beer?” Axel shouted at him.

      “Sure, you bet,” Steve Buscemi said.

      “You want a beer,” Axel asked me.

      “No thanks. Not right now.”

      Steve Buscemi took off his glove and shook my hand. He is missing an upper front tooth now, his hair is longer; Parkinson’s tremors are more undeniable. His girlfriend still lives with him, though her “14 by 70 wide” trailer house that they’re going to move to her father’s acreage along the road north is parked and leaning askew across the road from Joe’s park. (Just now I heard a female voice yelling outside, then lights on the road outside the window approaching from the east. More shouting, pissed-off shouting, and a car hurdled past as shouting continued out of, I presume, the passenger window. The car swerved turned into the driveway and disappeared. A car door thumped severely. Now it’s quiet again.

      Steve Buscemi and Axel stayed an hour. I began to fear eternity. Axel had a huge cooler bungee-corded to the rear rack of the ATV. He asked me a 6th time if I wanted a beer—“only got 20 left!” He fetched out his 2 pistols and helped us admire their bore and knockdown power. He produced a hand-loaded shell and told us all about how he’d almost been killed by a bear around midnight a couple of months ago, in tag alder underbrush. He couldn’t see the sights on the pistol because the flashlight was beside the pistol and all he could do was fire the pistol in the darkness toward the wide-open mouth of the wounded bear, then shoot it again while he was on his ass across a log as the huge she-bear circled around and he shot toward it again.

      “If Fred hadn’t been there, one of us wouldn’t have come out alive.”

      We talked, they drank Old Milwaukee, and I grew chilled as the clouds moved in. The wind increased and the afternoon grew old.

      They went to Steve Buscemi’s house to drink beer. I came inside, replaced the gas lamp mantles and refilled the Coleman lantern.

      I napped. The sun came back and the wind continued to speak life’s unanswered questions softly in the trees. I remembered what I’ve remembered every time I’ve come here, made the profound effort to break away at the cost of many other important things, “Just continue to do this!”

      I forget what the wind in the trees says. I lose sight of what’s important. I don’t remember how much I need rejuvenating solitude until I get here and am forced to quit caring about the relativity of nonsense back home.

      I slept briefly.

      I wanted to explore and investigate and “be here,” so the nap went away.

      Into the car. Down the road, marveling that the trailer house dangerously tipped wasn’t tipped over in Joe’s clearing north of the road by the ponds.

      Wonderful late afternoon sun slanting across the road. Head east at the Store. Road bad and rutted. Over the new bridge where we play Frisbee. River still frozen and nothing moving. Something suddenly went “clunk” up under the car though I hadn’t passed over anything clunky. Stop. Get out. Look under the car. Nothing there.

      Brakes have been noisy the past couple of months. I got an estimate from D&J for their repair. $265.00 … I’ve been waiting until warm weather to do the repairs myself and save $200.

      I got back into the car, backed up and plunged the brake pedal repeatedly. The sound diminished. (Though I am now dependent mostly on the emergency brake to stop.)

      The new store IS there at the end of the road where Markville is a right turn and Cloverton is a left. The new store is not what you’d expect to see north of the Twin Cities, west of Rhinelander, or anywhere other than at a remote desolation junction in east-central Minnesota where nobody is literate and everybody is insane with boredom.

      I approached with eagerness. I wanted to get a pouch of Top tobacco and order-up a backrub with Jasmine tea and rose peddle incense. I turned on the video camera when the commotion of signs came into view a quarter-mile away. Trouble was it wasn’t a multiplicity of signs but a tangled mess of plywood scraps by the side of the road with the words, “H   Cre k O   POST.”

      I’d slowed down for the experience, breathless for renewal and smart people negotiating an answer for my pleasure.

      “Restarant”

      “Cold Beer”

      “Gas”

      “Lotrey”

      “Clsoed Tuesday” (I attributed this misspelling to wind pushing letters around.)

      The lone gas pump was partially dismantled. A black dog pissed on it as I drove past headed back toward Duxbury. There was mud and debris, and it was Wednesday.

      I went into Duxbury store on my return.

      Meg welcomed me blandly. I noted how her face has turned white with fine feminine hair.

      “What’s up with the new store 8 miles east of here?”

      “He said he’s wanted to do that since he was 14,” Meg said. “But, their burgers …” her voice trailed off. “They aren’t like ours!”

      I wrote at the round table until 10:30 with a couple of onion pepper cheese brats stuck across the open wood stove maw. The tall can of Bush’s beans I opened too late to warm in the melted snow water was mostly cold but delicious to this craven carnivorous appetite.

      I awoke at 2:07 a.m. enormously annoyed at the sound of a car and it’s high-beam headlights bounding out of Steve Buscemi’s driveway. Harsh flickering lights ricocheted from the birch trees and strobed through and around the interior of the cabin. The intensity increased briefly as the car turned onto the road; I felt on-stage and quickly rehearsed a vaudeville routine I’d once been famous for in Chicago.

      The lights left the cabin and lit the roadside trees as the car aimed toward the county road. But too slowly. The car stopped at the driveway. A brighter blast of light flicked on and searched the kitchen windows, back through the living room windows where I had been sleeping, then stopped on the door. It widened and filled the entire cabin. Then I got fully pissed.

      I mean, it’s difficult to greet visitors here when the main greeter’s entrance is 10 feet from the bed and the greeter is sleepy and naked, except for brief underwear. It’s especially chagrining when my expected greeting will be performed for a spotlight and all along I’d been favoring solitude and quiet.

      A car door opened, then slammed shut. I muttered a string of “God,” and “Fuck-everybody,” sacrilege. A form like a finger puppet in a shadow box lunged and staggered through the snowy path toward my door. I heard the sound of a belt-clip police radio and knew it had to be Steve Buscemi, who carries a police radio because of his first-responder responsibilities.

      “RAP-RAP-RAP” was the sound of a heavy metal flashlight – you know, the heavily armored and indestructible sources of professional illumination law enforcement personnel use to blind motorist’s eyes and beat them up with, once they’re compliantly out of the vehicle and helplessly face down on pavement and resisting arrest by covering their heads against heavy professional flashlight blows.

      “Who is it?” I might have called out or, “What?” or “What’s going on?” I don’t remember.

      “Have you seen Trudi?”

      “Who the hell is Trudi?” I retorted blatantly as I got out of bed mostly naked and approached the glass-windowed door.

      “She lives with Steve Buscemi and took off on foot a couple of hours ago.”

      I stood at the door. The man said, “I’m deputy Farney Blight and I’m responding to a missing person call. I have dogs in the car.” (They were barking.)

      He saw my nakedness and respectfully averted his eyes toward the west.

      “I haven’t seen her, she’s not here. You want to come in and look around? I’m pretty sure she’s not in here because I’d know if she was here.”

      “No, I don’t want to, but what’s that building out there?” He shined his flashlight at Red’s Shed. “Is that a shithouse?”

      I told him it was and that I doubted Trudi would be there.

      He was suspicious.

      “There are tracks in the snow leading to it.”

      “That’s because I keep my sleeping bag and pillow there, away from mice in the main cabin when I’m not here.”

      “If you see Trudi, give us a call.” In the shadowy light he held out a business card. I told him I had no phone but assured him that I would hasten to Steve Buscemi’s house to put in a call to Pine County’s dispatch immediately should Trudi show up unexpectedly and need to shit in the sleeper.

      He turned and walked spread-armed for balance back along the path and got into his car where many dogs barked and fought in the back seat.

      I re-stoked the stove and went back to bed, festering about Trudi and where she could be and what could’ve lead to her rushing out into the dark winter night and away from her beloved harem of Chihuahuas.

Thursday—

      Ghost Plane awoke me at 6:30. It approached from the southwest, very low, barely above the trees, and sinking. I braced for the imminent sound of wings slicing off treetops and wings cracking off and pin-wheeling through the clearing and dousing fuel through the acreage and the fuselage of Ghost Plane exploding the cabin with flames. I anticipated a brief instant of the face of an apologetic pilot mouthing “Sorry,” through a cracked windshield before we were exploded in fiery death.

      I was disappointed.

      Having steeled myself for the event, I heard Ghost Plane pass overhead in the clouds but felt its coolness pass through the cabin and noticed the candles on the card table briefly flicker bright with flame. But it was still early.

      I got up around 8:15. Boiled water for coffee. Gray overcast and 30-degrees. Not exciting and I couldn’t find the will for action, especially woodcutting. So I filled the insulated coffee mug with boiling water and two Folger’s Coffee Singles (Cabe, I replenished the supply at Trig’s) and headed for Sandstone, hoping to discover something fresh and stimulating to do.

      The 12 miles of buckety, slam-around highway immediately west of Duxbury has been re paved and is now a joy to drive. I plugged in John Sandford’s Naked Prey on CD and cruised toward town. (A great fun mystery novel set in northwestern Minnesota with regular mentions of Bemidji) For every mile of splendidly re-smoothed roadway there is an equally vile section of highway we must pay for. That section is the last 3 miles outside of Sandstone. If I’d been driving a Buick I’d not been so annoyed. But, the Honda bucked and slammed my head into the ceiling until I slowed across the bridge and entered the uphill portion of life in “Sensible America.”

      The list in my pocket reminded me to get paper plates and plastic forks at the Fairway. I parked maturely in an empty grocery store parking slot, shut off the motor and looked over to my right (as normal citizens do when they notice movement of tight female jeans trying to liberate a toddler from the back car seat of a SUV. I got an ugly stare from the Mom.

      Over to Ace Hardware where I got 2 new mantles for the propane lights and another two new mantles for the Coleman. Men at the counter encouraged each other to go work for San Diego. One of them had just visited there and taken a tour of some battleship and was reporting that they were hiring tour guides.

      “Naw, too goddamn many people,” the old Ace guy said as I walked out.

      Back to the cabin. I picked out a John D. MacDonald (Murder For The Bride) and lay on the bed for a few minutes. An hour later my eyes asked me to shut them for a few minutes so I did.

      I awoke 30 minutes later and read some more until my eyes insisted that they needed more rest. I did.

      I awoke an hour later feeling horrible for being so lazy. My conscience lost the argument. I read and catnapped until 5:30.

      A walk to the river. Beaver has been working hard to take down all the birch trees surrounding the place. I panicked slightly then told myself to enjoy the change, a natural phenomenon of nature’s personality. Maybe we’d get a deeper pool to swim in, but mostly we’d get a chance to witness the miracle of dam building by God’s unknown natural mind. I took a few photos then headed back to the cabin. Light snow swirled and the road stayed dark wet.

      I read some more by the stove, then at 6:45 as the light began to fade I got up and decided on a walk east down the road toward the ponds.

      Exiting the driveway and turning toward the county road I noticed a darkness on the road far away at the brink of the road where it dips out of sight and meets the county road.

      Bear? I had the video camera along and turned it on to get a zoom-look at what might be up there.

      It took 30 seconds to finally see it move (opposed to a freak apparition of swamp gas or debris on the road, which wouldn’t move). It was a person, walking my direction. That’s all I could distinguish, a blob on two legs darkly against the middle-toned background.

      I cursed and told the camera that I wanted to be left alone out here to take a walk in the dying light of a woods road where a bear or a deer or five-hundred hissing and foaming-at-the-mouth wolves would be preferable to having to engage another human being.

      I walked on. I stopped by the side of a deer-crossing trail and considered taking it north to escape the impending interpersonal meeting.

      Naw.

      I walked on. The person turned off the road and walked north into the spot where the trailer house was parked, the same spot where we enter to walk along the boundary trail around our acreage. What the hell is going on out here! First a visit from the cops with spotlights and questions in the night and now somebody heading into the forest to the north of our property as darkness was falling and what the hell was going to happen to me in the night as I slept?

      Almost to the first pond I stopped to listen. I waited and watched.

      “SLAM!” I heard the trailer house door close. I stayed unmoving in the road, then saw the person come onto the road, walk a few feet and stop, facing me. I walked on, nonchalantly whistling a popular Mozart ditty. The person resumed walking toward me, appreciably disarmed by my Mozart music.

      The person stopped. I stopped beside the second pond and began to film with the video camera as though there was an impressive display of video interest in the frozen and bleak view. I shut off the camera and continued walking, changing my whistle to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

      Ah, it was Trudi, carrying a black leather purse and a six-pack of Cokes.

      “Howdy,” I said disarmingly.

      “Oh, hi,” she coughed.

      We approached and began the social dance of two people who are trying to figure out “what the hell, who the hell, and Christ, what do I say.”

      She was wearing the same pair of crotch-high cut-off jean shorts she wore that time in July when we met her. The was wearing a short but heavy leather jacket, unzipped and open to display a bright red low-cut knit top with breast cleavage stridently displayed. Her blonde hair—with deep dark roots—was still piled high and fountained out of her head. Her bangs hung stringy and sparse down to her eyes, and she had a narrow black tattoo like a narrow string across her forehead.

      “Steve Buscemi called the cops on me last night. I’m a smoker and I ran like hell. Everybody was lookin’ for me all over but I was like, I ran. The guy attacked me and I ran, so like, what’s the big fuckin’ deal. I’m a smoker but I ran because he fuckin’ attacked me. You should’a seen me. I was goddamn-fuckin’ fast. (coughing, spitting on the road.)

      “Is that where you hid out?” me motioning toward the trailer house.

      “Hell no! The cops came and fuckin’ looked for me there with dogs and everything.” (Coughing.)

      I ran though. I had bruises on my arm and everything. If the cops would’ a found me Steve Buscemi would be in jail I fuckin’ guarantee that, cause of the cops would’ a found me and they’da seen that, Steve Buscemi’d be in jail, guarantee it. He’s gonna call the cops on me cuz I ran from him? How stupid. Cuz he didn’t git to beat me up like he wanted to. Huh-uh. (coughing.) How stupid. Now I’m sober tonight so, huh-uh.” (Shaking her head.) Let ‘im bring it on tonight! As soon as he gets back (coughing, coughing) I’m leaving.”

      “Haven’t you been back since last night?”

      “I came home and took a shower while he was gone this afternoon. Soon as he pulled in the driveway I left. I don’t want to be alone with him. (Did she run out the back door and into the snowy woods?)

      “I don’t want to be fuckin’ alone with him … no way! He’s 6-foot, 220 pounds and he can kick my ass. That’s what I’m sayin’, he’s not gonna…” (cough-cough-coughing) stay there. But he called every friend I have and now they’re afraid for me to stay there. Now I don’t have any place to stay tonight. He called EVERY SINGLE PERSON I knew, had the cops call them. Now I’m off my medication. I gotta’ take that (coughing, hacking-cough). I’m bi-polar. I get goofy if I don’t take it.”

      “Lithium?”

      “Yeah. Lithium and Welbutrin. If I don’t take it—like last night I didn’t take it and I think that’s part of the reason I got ... stuff happened. I take it before I go to bed. I didn’t get a chance to because I had to jump out of the car, you know—(cough-wheeze). Stuff happenin’  he thought I was going to fuckin’ jump out of the car.”

      (Thus the sounds of screaming/shouting as the car drove past here last night.)

“He grabbed my arm and I said, ‘Let go or I’m jumping out,” cuz I know once he gets like that, my ass is grass and I’m jumping out. (prolonged period of hacking, coughing.)

      “He’s a really nice guy otherwise, he really is. But when he drinks he’s a puke. All I gotta’ do is wait a month, then they can move my trailer and I’ll be fuckin’ in there. Todd is hauling the fuckin’ gravel for the driveway at my Dad’s land.

      “I was at my girlfriend’s Don and Geri’s and I tole them if he fucks me tonight and the cops come we’ll see who’s goin’ to jail! It ain’t gonna’ be me, I’ll tell ya that much!”

      “Well, (backing away) stay safe.” I say.

      “Thanks. I love Steve Buscemi, that’s the sick part of it. All I can do is pray, I guess. God works in mysterious ways (laughing, coughing, wheezing) I guess. You know. He does! Sometimes not the way you want it to turn out but I tell you what…”

      “See you.”

      “Bye.”

11:10 p.m.

      Ghost plane flew over as I walked back to the cabin after the encounter with Trudi.

      It’s now late and I’ve been outside with the flashlight and video camera set to “Nightshot” trying to discover the genesis of the chewing sounds that aroused my hair and me from the chair. Two Lake Tomahawk wieners are beginning to heat across the open stove doorway. Steve Buscemi came home from “drinking at the town hall” two hours ago and I’ve not heard screaming or violence. The sheriff’s department has not been here yet. But it’s still early. The aluminum wire I wrapped around the stovepipe is holding, though the length of stovepipe should be replaced next visit. I’ll bring along the DeWALT to drill a new hole in the new length for the damper and new screw holes for sheet metal screws to hold it all together.

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