The Weatherman (26 page)

You talk about how for the past three years you felt first as if you didn’t amount to anything, and now finally you think you are, something. Well, Dixon to me your being on the football
etc.
and being put up for “King” isn’t worth too much. Well Dixon, I like a person for what they are more than what they do. I’ve gone out with all types of boys, just because I like them for themselves. Now I suppose you ask, why don’t I like you for yourself? I do, Dixon. But in a different way, not the way you like someone to go out with.

So Dixon, I’am not the loser, you are. You’ve lost out on alot of fun in High School. You tell me you’ve been “loyal” to me and have never gone out

with anyone else. That’s not loyalty, that’s being rediculous. There are many girls I know here in Vicksburg who have said they would like to go out with you. Why have you been so foolish as to pass up such chances? I don’t really think its because you love me, for you can learn to love many people in this world. I believe it must be because your afraid to. You’ve waited so long and if you wait much longer, it will almost be impossible for you.

Dixon, get a girl and have some fun. If you’d do that I know in just a short while you’d have to think twice to remember me as anything but a friend. Please take my advice and don’t think I don’t understand how you feel, but I’am sorry you don’t understand how I feel, that makes the answer NO!

Love Lisa Beauregard

So you think, what a dumb bitch! Okay, she was no literary genius, neither was I when I was eighteen. Now I suppose you ask, what did you do then?

Christ almighty, I was destroyed. I wasn’t sure I could make it out of the building. You know the part where I underlined love three times? Lisa underlined never three times. I went to my locker in a daze. I grabbed my letter jacket. I walked out of Vicksburg High School. I ran down the hill and across the football field, I leaped the stadium fences and I never went back.

I walked home trying my best not to cry. She was a Southern belle and I was white trash. Like a lot of boys down home I was foolish enough to believe those days were gone with the wind. It was a long walk where we lived down by the railroad tracks above the river. That walk home with that letter in my pocket was the first time I really put my finger on it.

When I was growing up in Mississippi I only wanted to be two things. I wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy and I wanted to be a weatherman. When I get mad, when I’m hurt, when my blood reaches the boiling point I am like the idiot savant. My mind locks onto the weather and only the weather. I gather in all relevant data and spit out a forecast faster than a computer. It is a gift, like the autistic who knows only math tables. When I was a boy it was this gift that let me win the Delta Science Fair every year with my weather projects. As I walked home that day with that letter in my pocket I took off my jacket because it was hot… 81°. The air was saturated … 69 percent humidity. A warm breeze was straight up from the Gulf … 12 mph. I smelled heavy rain coming … maybe ten, maybe twelve hours away. But, you see, nobody had to tell me these things. I knew them to be the facts. I was in love, I was hurting, and my mind was reading the weather.

I went straight to my neat little room in our unpainted house. I sat on the edge of my bed and I read that letter again. When I was done with it, I just sat there crying my eyes out like a little baby. I was going to walk back up to the Rexall Drug Store and buy some sleeping pills this time. Then I saw it flopped over the chest of drawers next to my bed.
FLY
ABOVE
THE
CLOUDS
.
JOIN
THE
AIR
FORCE
.

It was a poster I’d ripped off the wall when the recruiters were at our school. Had these jet fighters whipping through the clouds. We were in the middle of the Vietnam war then and they’d set up a recruiting office at the Old Warren County Court House up on the highest hill in town. It’s the same courthouse where some Yankee boys from Minnesota lowered the Confederate flag and raised the Union flag after the fall of Vicksburg. It was about two miles from our house and I think I ran the whole way. My legs were rubber as I climbed those long, steep stairs only to find a scribbled sign on the office door.

SORRY
.
CLOSED
EARLY
.
BACK
AT 8 A.M.

I’m pounding on the window … what do you mean closed early … there’s a war on! I held up my letter. But there was no one to see it.

I wasn’t quite fast enough for football scholarships, but the University of Mississippi offered me a scholastic scholarship in their physics department. And a professor from
LSU
came up to talk to me about my weather projects. He wanted me to go there. Before Lisa wrote that letter I’d pretty much decided I’d be going to Ole Miss and study science. Of course my secret goal was to be the star tight end on the football team and play in the Sugar Bowl and then get drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and win at last the love of Lisa Beauregard.

Next morning after the letter I’m sitting on the steps of the Old County Court House in the pouring rain looking out over the valley where the River of Death flows into the Father of Waters. I knew I was going away and never coming back. I was sitting there in the rain when the recruitment officer arrived.

It’s late now. The newsroom is dark and deserted. All quiet on the weather front. Time to lay down this pen and go home. There’s a blue moon out there tonight. A rare occurrence. It happens when two full moons occur in the same calendar month. The second of those moons is called a blue moon. No one really knows why. Some believe it’s the moon of love. Others believe it to be the moon of impending doom.

The snow was gone. Rain was breaking up the last sheets of ice on area lakes. Captain Les Angelbeck sat on the edge of the hospital bed, buttoning his shirt. The morning paper was on the pillow beside him. Through the spring drizzle he could see the white bubble roof of the Metrodome. The electronic billboard in front of the stadium kept flashing the date of the Twins’ home opener.

His fifth-floor room at the Hennepin County Medical Center was as bright and cheerful as the weather was gloomy. He suspected it was a room for women having babies. A green oxygen tank stood next to the bed. His walking cane was next to the door. The television hanging from the ceiling was going, but the sound was dead. Andrea Labore was mouthing the noon news. The front page of the Star Tribune flashed on the screen. Les Angelbeck ignored the TV and continued dressing until the Weatherman appeared. Then he picked up the remote and pushed the mute button.

“Dixon, I know this is Tornado Awareness Week, but what exactly is a mock tornado drill?”

“Well, Andrea, according to the National Weather Service that’s when a mock has actually been sighted.”

Les Angelbeck broke up laughing, but it was a laugh choked with phlegm. He grabbed hold of his aching side. He muted the sound again after Dixon Bell had given the forecast. He was slipping into his shoes when Donnell Redmond walked into the room, carrying a brown envelope.

“So how did your biopsy go?” asked the lieutenant.

“It was benign.”

“So you’re only dying of one thing instead of two?”

“At this point, yes.” Les Angelbeck swallowed the choke in his throat and smiled. “Donny, it was the damnedest thing I’ve ever heard of. They call it videoscope surgery. The doctor cut this small incision in my side and then he pushed in this long probe with a telescopic lens attached to this tiny video camera. Then my insides showed up on a television the doctor was watching. The whole operation was done on a television screen. Doctor never took his eyes off it. I had the procedure done yesterday and I’m going home today.”

Redmond looked up at Andrea Labore, her lips moving but no sound coming out. “Maybe they should put your insides on regular TV.”

“Maybe.” Les Angelbeck slipped gingerly into his suit coat. He draped a tie around his neck. “Did you check on her?”

“No change,” Redmond reported. “Her granddaddy is sitting down there beside her. They got her head locked into this big metal halo so she looks ike a dead angel. There’s tubes shoved up her nose and more tubes stuffed down her throat. Her jaw just hangs open, like those retards you see in those nuthouse movies. She has one eye open real spooky-like and she’s strapped into this electric bed that rolls back and forth so she don’t get bedsores. And that one eye just stays put as she rolls from side to side.”

“Everybody in the hospital refers to Officer Sumter in the past tense,” Angelbeck sadly noted.

“I pray she dies. Lord Jesus, forgive me for what I say, but I pray she dies. She’ll be at peace, and we can fry that sucker for what he did to her.”

“We have to catch the sucker first,” Angelbeck reminded him, tactfully forgetting the lieutenant’s testimony before the judiciary committee.

Donnell Redmond noticed the newspaper lying on the pillow. “Did you read it?”

“Yes, I read it.”

“Did our boy write it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Angelbeck. “There’s a few non sequi-turs, but the killer wrote it.” He picked up the morning copy of the Star Tribune, “What did you find out about it?”

“There were some lawyer hassles,” said Redmond, filling him in. “They finally handed it over late last night. At first look, it was written on paper from a reporter’s notebook. The editor told us newsrooms order them in bulk through a mail-order house. Used a Bic pen. Black. Medium point. Killer is probably right-handed and printed the letter using the left hand.”

Les Angelbeck unfolded the newspaper and once again read the letter on the front page.

FOR
EVERY
SEASON
THERE
IS A
WOMAN
. A
WOMAN
TO BE
BORN
AND
A
WOMAN
TO
DIE
.
AND
FOR
EVERY
MAN
A
SEASON
TO
KILL
AND
A
SEASON
TO
STOP
KILLING
. I
WILL
STOP
NOW
.

YOU
HAVE
NO
EVIDENCE
. NO
WITNESSES
. I
APPEAR
OUT
OF
THIN
AIR
. IF
YOU
WAIT
MUCH
LONGER
IT
WILL
ALMOST
BE
IMPOSSIBLE
FOR
YOU
. I
WILL
BE
ONE
OF
YOU
. I
WILL
PASS
YOU
ON
THE
STREET
.
SIT
NEXT
TO
YOU
AT
THE
BASEBALL
GAME
.

MINNESOTA
YOU
THOUGHT
YOU
WERE
SO
MUCH
BETTER
THAN
US.
NOW
YOU
ARE
JUST
LIKE
THE
REST
OF US.
DON’T
THINK
I
DON’T
UNDERSTAND
HOW
YOU
FEEL
,
BUT
I AM
SORRY
YOU
DON’T
UNDERSTAND
HOW
I
FEEL
. I
GUESS
THINGS
NEVER
HAPPEN
THAT
PLEASE
EVERYONE
ENVOLVED
,
BUT
I
DIDN’T
MEAN
TO
HURT
YOU
...
HONEST
.

The hard-to-retire captain tossed the paper onto the bed. “The poetry isn’t much better than the spelling. But in a way, maybe our killer is right. We finally got around to lowering our standards to the national level. What else did you find out?”

“We know it’s not a ghost. It bleeds and it has big feet.” Donnell Redmond rattled off the latest clues. “The blood we scraped from Sumter’s fingernails is O positive. It’s one of the most common blood types in America, but it’s something. The tracks found in the snow were made by a size-fourteen athletic shoe with ‘Alacrity’ carved in the heel. It was a cheap shoe made in Korea. The company went out of business years ago and the shoe was never on sale in the Midwest. It’s sticking to its ways. Attacked her the same time of the morning that I chased it through Como Park. It was the last day of winter. It was foggy.”

The noon news was over. Andrea Labore smiled goody-bye. Les Angelbeck picked up the remote control and killed the television. Andrea faded away. The old cop’s fat, shaky fingers worked a knot into his tie. “And what is that you’ve got there?”

Donnell Redmond had forgotten about the brown envelope in his hand. He shrugged his big shoulders. “Ain’t looked at it yet. Glenn Arkwright tossed it to me on his way out the door. Had to pick up his kids at day care or something.” Redmond pulled a computer printout from the envelope and examined it. “It’s more of that fingerprint mumbo jumbo,” he told Angelbeck. “Looks like
APIS
spit out two more names. One is a new print from
FBI
files and the other one is from those declassifieds the Air Force sent to us.”

“Tell me one of them is from Minnesota,” begged the captain.

“Dream on, Marlboro Man. West Covina, California, and Vicksburg, Mississippi.”

The Marlboro Man had a coughing spasm, his death rattle. He wiped his watery eyes. “Well, add them to the list, anyway.”

“Ain’t that funny,” said Redmond, studying the printout. “Unless I’m reading these numbers wrong, and I might well be, this man from Mississippi is rated higher than all the others.”