May Day (3 page)

I wiped my eyes. “Sure, if you consider losing your job, getting flashed by an out-of-work guitarist with a penis like a microwaved legume, and finding your boyfriend cheating on you OK.”

“You caught Brad cheating on you, huh?”

“Yeah. The good part is he doesn’t know I know, so I technically get to break up with him.”

“He was a weasel anyhow.”

“I know.”

“Hmm. You want to hear my good news?”

“Will it make me feel like even more of a loser?”

“Probably.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I’m in love. You remember Rodney Johnson?”

I riffled through the list of Battle Lake names I knew from visiting Sunny so often, and I finally pulled up a picture of a short, dark-haired guy who was always smiling. “The guy who took a girl to her prom when he was thirty-one?”

“That was a few years ago. He’s changed. He’s a real sweetheart.”

I sighed and switched the phone from my right to my left ear. Sunny picked up boyfriends like old ladies picked up cats. “Well, good. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“I am happy. Gotta favor to ask, too.”

“Yeah?” I was at the window, and I made a fist, pressing the side of my hand into the frost edging the glass and then dotting five little toes over the top of it. A baby snow-foot.

“I’m moving to Alaska for a few months. I decided. It’s for sure. Rodney has a job lined up on a fishing boat, and we can make a thousand dollars a week.”

“When?” As far as I knew, she knew no one in Alaska and hadn’t lived anywhere but Battle Lake her whole twenty-eight years. She must really like this one.

“The first week of April. Here’s the favor. I need someone to house-sit when I leave.”

She paused, and I didn’t fill the empty air. Lord help me, if I had known what I was in store for, I would have screamed “No!” with my last breath.

“You can garden, you can hike, you can do all that stuff you used to like to do. C’mon, Mira. If it doesn’t work out, you can always leave. You’ve got nothing to lose.” Her voice was rushed but cocky. “You got to get back to the dirt, Mira.”

“I don’t know. Battle Lake is so small. What would I do there?”

“The library is hiring, and you can always waitress.” Sunny’s voice changed to a more serious tone. “I need you, Mira. I can’t bring Luna with, and nobody else will watch her.” Luna was the goofy-smart mixed breed Sunny had found at the side of the road a few years ago. “And I need someone to make sure the pipes don’t freeze. I think Rodney is the one, Mira. I don’t want to blow it.”

Sunny always thought whichever guy she was with was the one, but she very rarely asked for help. I looked around. Ricki Lake was making over spandex-clad large chicks on my TV, my stove was hissing out dry heat in my kitchen, I no longer had a job or a boyfriend, and I was sitting in my all-purpose room waiting for my life to start. Still, I hesitated. What sort of person just gets up and moves, and
to Battle Lake of all places? I cradled the phone in the crook of my shoulder and put my hand to the graffittied window just as a pigeon crashed into it. I jumped back. The bird fluttered to the roof across the street, dazed and confused.

I sighed. “If you need me, Sunny, I’ll be there.”

It only took a couple weeks to sever, or at least put on hold, my Minneapolis ties. Alison, Shannon, and Maruta from Perfume River had a going-away party for me, and I left with an armload of cockroach memorabilia and even a pair of penis earrings. There were a couple women in my grad classes who made me laugh, and I left messages on their answering machines saying I was withdrawing this semester. I did the same with Professor Bundy, the journalism teacher whose class I was haphazardly attending. He told me I had a real talent for writing and should be sure to come back. I considered calling the financial aid office at the U, but they were pathologically unhelpful, and I would have to repay my loan whether or not I was in class. I had a month-to-month lease that I ended with a phone call.

My books and my clothes I tossed into tall kitchen garbage bags with yellow cinch ties at the top and stuffed in my brown two-door 1985 Toyota Corolla’s trunk. I put the same type of bags, only more gently, around my plants to protect them from the cold and transported them to the back seat and floor. My cat, Tiger Pop, named after my second-favorite candy and his mottled, white-splashed fur, was brought down last and unwillingly. I set his litter box and water dish on the floor of the passenger seat, knowing full well he would be attached to my shoulder and howling the whole two-and-a-half-hour trip.

I looked around my first apartment for the last time. The living room that was also my dining room and bedroom looked beige and lonely. Even the blue, green, and yellow watercolor willow trees I had painted my first summer in the apartment didn’t add life. I realized they would be painted over within the month. My secondhand orange-flowered couch and mismatched chairs would be brought to the dump, my three pots, five bowls, and twelve plastic cups would be recycled or trashed, and all traces of my existence would vanish. Ten years in Minneapolis, and I had nothing but an English degree and a budding drinking problem to show for it. Now I knew how people ended up in small towns. Battle Lake, here I come.

Sunny’s doublewide was small
, a cozy nine hundred square feet. The front space was a permanently wallpapered living room with woodsy furniture, and behind it was the kitchen, with a white and brown speckled vinyl floor, particleboard cupboards, and green-topped counters. To the left was the master bedroom, with its own bath, and to the right was a spare bedroom, an office, and another bathroom. By the time I arrived, Sunny had moved all her personal stuff into the office, and she was waiting outside with Rodney, both of them playing with her beloved dog, Luna. After a too-quick exchange of information and hugs, they were out and I was in.

The first order of business was finding a job, and I took Sunny up on her suggestion to try the library. It was rare for a town this size to have its own stationary book collection, but a wealthy benefactor had provided the money to get it running, and city funds kept it going.
I slipped into an assistant librarian position pretty easily after I lied about my knowledge of the Dewey decimal system. I was working on my master’s in English, sort of, so they didn’t ask many questions. At just over minimum wage, they were happy to have a warm body. They probably wouldn’t have been so quick to hire me if they had known about the murder following just one step behind me, ready to pounce once everyone settled in.

I learned my job and settled into the town—hooked up with my one local friend, Gina, filled the fridge with fresh foods from Larry’s, and read a lot of books I’d been meaning to get to. Meanwhile, the snow melted, the gray receded, the air started to smell fresh like cucumbers, and the buds on the trees and seeds in the dirt trembled and hummed until they exploded in splashes of color so bright green they were almost yellow. Spring in Minnesota happens scary fast. When Sunny called to check up on Luna and me, I told her confidently that things were going to happen for me in Battle Lake. I could feel the buzz in the air like the hum of bees.

Once the head librarian, Lartel McManus, saw I had a knack for the library job, he flew to Mexico on a three-week vacation he said he had planned for months. Friday, May 1, was to be my first official day alone at the Battle Lake Public Library. May Day had always been one of my favorite holidays. When I was ten, my dad sneaked into my room and left a foam cup decorated with pastel ribbons and filled with waxy Tootsie Rolls and cherry-flavored Dubble Bubble gum. I pretended I was asleep until I heard his footsteps on the creaky stairs. The note read “Happy May Day! You know I love you.”

I wondered about the power of small gestures as I woke up without an alarm clock on May Day, and I actually whistled as I slipped out of bed. The night before, I had ceremoniously dumped out all the bottles of liquor in Sunny’s house, and I arose reborn. I decided to go to town early to open a savings account with my sixty dollars cash. Call me an optimist. The seven-minute ride to town was beautiful, with young morning fog webbing the low spots by the sloughs. The air had that waiting-for-the-school-bus smell, and through some cosmic wrinkle, I could actually tune in the good radio station out of Fargo. Sheryl Crow commiserated melodically with me as I pulled toward town.

There were short stretches of road where I couldn’t see any houses, just oak and sumac pressing against the air. It brought to mind the research I had just finished for the second part-time job I had landed as an on-call reporter for the
Battle Lake Recall
, the local newspaper. The library job alone didn’t pay enough to cover my student loan payments and buy gas and groceries, and besides, I needed to keep my English muscle in shape for when I went back to grad school.

For my first article, I wrote a retrospective piece for the Battle Lake Lady of the Lakes celebration, the first festival of the year. It marked the end of winter and the beginning of the farming season and involved an all-town garage sale, a parade, and a dance at Stub’s. The celebration wasn’t until Memorial Day, but the chamber of commerce wanted to get the word out so they could sign up people for the parade. On the surface, Battle Lake was your average Minnesota town with a population under a thousand—most of the residents were farmers or blue-collar workers, most radios were tuned to the country music station, everybody ate their lunch at the Turtle Stew Café, and the whole area bloated with tourists in search of the perfect fish every summer. My piece delved below the surface, however. It was a full-page article, complete with photos, on the official founding of Battle Lake on Halloween Eve 1881.

As I drove into town, I cracked my window and sucked in some fresh air, thinking how similar it may have smelled a hundred years ago. I stopped near the curb in front of First National Bank, which was tucked on a corner of Main Street. The Battle Lake Public Library, Lakes Area Dental, and a temporarily abandoned building that used to be Kathy’s Klassy Klothes occupied the other three corners. Laid out alongside each of these cornerstones were little knickknack and antique stores, a bakery, a couple hardware stores, a drugstore,
a post office, a church, and various service offices—chiropractor, accountant, Realtor. Standard small-town fare. I saw that the bank was still closed, so I pulled into the library parking lot.

The yellow brick structure was a relatively new addition to the town, built twenty years ago, when William T. Everts had bequeathed his entire estate to create it. The library’s inside smelled like slick magazine paper and recycled air, as it had every morning since I had started working there over a month ago. I walked past the rack of new arrivals, sniffing at
Deer Hunter’s Digest
,
Good Housekeeping
, and
Bow and Arrow World
. The irony, I thought, of magazines created for hunters. It was like having a stadium for agoraphobics.

I peeled off my favorite suede jacket on my way to the library’s front desk, the spring air of lilacs and green melting away from me. After a little fumbling in all of my pockets, I found a damp piece of cinnamon gum, hidden under a glow-in-the-dark fish from a twenty-five-cent machine, a crushed Jägermeister cap, and a tattered fortune cookie strip that said, “You enjoy the fun” above my guaranteed winning lottery numbers. I draped my coat on the back of the swivel chair behind the desk and chewed tentatively on the gravelly Trident.

I flicked my dark, disheveled hair over my shoulder, settled in the captain’s chair, and clicked on the front desk computer. I was now the mistress of this domain. I considered creating a new printing sign. The “NO COLOR PRINTING!!!!! BLACK AND WHITE 10¢ A PAGE!!!!” had way too many exclamation marks and seemed rude with all the caps. I made a mental note to get to that later. Pushing back from the desk with a little whirring sound that propelled me the fifteen feet to the front entrance, I flipped the sign to Open, unlocked the single glass door with my keys-on-a-spiral unit, grabbed the four books resting askew in the overnight dropoff bin and the newspapers off the ground, and scooted back.

For a small-town library, it was pretty well stocked. The new fiction section was kitty-corner from the front desk, next to the newspaper and magazine racks. On the other side of the reading carrels were the metal turning displays stuffed with paperback romance and mystery books, so popular with the tourists and the elderly. Twelve tall wooden bookshelves were filled with the more scholarly works: the Dickens, the Hemingway, the
I’m Not Crazy, I’m Angry: How to Cope with a Bad Temper
.

The reference section was tucked into a dark spot near the storage room. The children’s area, with its Lilliputian blue and yellow chairs, ratty stuffed animals, and big-lettered books, was parked in a cozy corner under the windows. This was my favorite spot, because of the sunlight and because the kids always got so excited about the books. It was comforting in my current situation—single, barely employed, and mildly superior with no one to appreciate it. You see, I now considered myself a cosmopolitan gal. It was easier to pretend that I was biding my time and finding my wings in a small town rather than to face that I had failed in the big city.

I finished the setup routine as Lartel had taught me—put away the books, make sure sufficient pencils are lined up on the counter, dust the tables—and then settled in behind the counter. The cheery chime of the door opening revved my heart up a little, I’m ashamed to say. Here I was, a city girl excited about dealing solo with my first library patron. I turned to see who the eager reader was but also reached for a magazine so we could both pretend I wasn’t snooping. The library can be like a doctor’s office. Patrons reveal deeply personal information about themselves by what they choose to read, and discretion is a must, especially in a small Minnesota town. The married mother of four who checks out
The
Joy of Sex
paces nervously, paging through the new fiction section until the gas station owner has left, himself shoving
Prozac Nation
between a book on fly-fishing lures and Chilton’s latest. I loved looking inside people’s windows, so to speak.

And speaking of love, it just so happened I was wondering if I was going to get any in this town I was tied to, at least for the summer. My only hope was the massive tourist population bringing in some dark-haired male who knew that the word “seen” couldn’t be used without a helping verb, as in “I seen the biggest buck in the woods today!” Maybe I was shooting too high.

I studied today’s first solo library patron out of the corner of my eye and corrected myself. Here was a stranger with brown hair that curled around his ears, late thirties, and I swear his green eyes reflected intelligence. I crossed my legs to keep a whistle from escaping between my thighs. If practice makes perfect, I’m pretty good at judging people, and I judged him to be worth further examination. Of course, desperation does lend a certain graciousness to my opinion.

“Good morning.” His voice was mellow, cheerful. “I need information on the history of Battle Lake. Where do you suggest I start?”

I smiled. It was serendipity, baby. I filled him in on the pieces I knew from my recent
Recall
article, focusing on the details that I thought would impress him. I explained that the village of Battle Lake was platted Halloween 1881 for Torger O. and Bertie O. Holdt. By 1885, there were 182 residents of the village, but newspaper references allude to unusual amounts of bad luck being visited on the inhabitants—mysterious plagues, crop rot, and intense weather were only the beginning. The first white settlers found Ojibwe burial mounds scattered in the region, forty-two near the lake’s inlet alone. Local legend had it that whoever took over the land that had once belonged to the Indians would be cursed.

Ninety-some years later, the settlers’ descendants, filled with church-supper-type guilt, used city funds to erect a twenty-three-foot fiberglass Indian warrior, complete with faux-leather beaded pants and brown moccasins molded onto him. They called him Chief Wenonga, after
the Ojibwe chief who originally named the town, and planted him in Halverson Park on the north side, where he forever looks northeasterly across the lake at his old battle site.

His statue looked exactly like one of those little plastic Indians that came with the cowboys in a bag of a hundred in the 1970s, but in full garish color. That, in fact, is when the Chief was built—1979. A fiberglass monstrosity popular with tourists and the trophy mentality of central Minnesota. I had splashed a photo of him—full headdress, six-pack abs on a half-naked body, tomahawk in one hand, other hand raised in a perpetual “How”—in my Lady of the Lakes article. The stereotyping killed me, but I had to admit as I snapped the photo that if I were a single, twenty-one-foot-tall fiberglass female, I’d be cutting my eyes at the Chief.

“Fergus Falls will have even more information,” I told the patron, wrapping up my story. “It’s the county seat. Or try the East Otter Tail Museum in Perham. We pretty much just carry brain candy.”

He smiled at me. I could tell by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners that my first estimate of his age had been correct—about a decade older than my soon-to-be twenty-nine, give or take a year. His teeth were strong and white, and I chose to ignore the fact that he was short, only a couple inches taller than my five foot six. He was also stocky, with a broad chest and ample arms extending from his white polo shirt. He had on the Teva-type sandals that suggest activity, and his khaki shorts revealed strong and evenly haired legs. I hate patchy leg hair on guys. You wonder what’s rubbing what. Around his waist he had tied a blue-checked flannel shirt.

I held out my hand. “My name is Mira James. Can I ask why you’re interested in the town’s history?”

He took my hand with his warm, hammy fist and shook it firmly. I’d lay money that he held it a little longer than necessary. “My name is Jeff Wilson, and I’m working for a company that wants to bring some business this way. I need to get the lay of the land, so to speak.”