The Weatherman (39 page)

The governor came up behind her and took hold of her shoulders. “I may be turning into the very politician I came here to replace, but this politician is still in love with you. And you’re in love with me. Tell me you’re not.”

Andrea Labore remained silent.

He smiled a cocky smile at her lack of response. “You’re like a lot of women-the worse we get, the more you love us.” The governor grabbed the embroidered gold trim of the state flag and wrapped it around them both. “Let’s do it in the flag. I’ll be the Star of the North.”

Andrea struggled free of the flag, free of his arms. She walked over to a big brown sofa, equally uncomfortable. She rested on it, her face buried in her hands.

He was coming her way. “I just want to hold you,” he said, taking a seat beside her. Playing with her hair. Rubbing her leg. Kissing her cheek and neck.

Per Ellefson was good, and Andrea hated herself for enjoying it. But she’d come too far to slip back into the arms of the biggest mistake of her life. Another man was on her mind. She put a hand over his mouth. “Please stop it.”

Per Ellefson kissed her hand and slipped into his most seductive voice, his smooth I-get-what-I-want voice. He stroked her hair so hard it was almost an embrace. He placed his other hand over her breast. “I’ve always wanted to do it to you in your wedding dress. Will you call me on the day you get married?” The governor kissed her ear. “Remember the Christmas Eve we did it in the mansion? Santa Claus was never so good to me.”

Andrea stood to leave, but he forced her back to the sofa and laid his strong Nordic body across her slender figure. “You’ve been getting it somewhere, haven’t you?

Who is he?”

“Are you going to rape me now?” she mockingly asked him.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You fuckin’ women are all the same.” He threw her to the floor and stormed back to his desk, his seat of power.

She got to her knees, realizing at last what a cheap relationship it had been. “How many of us fuckin’ women have you had since you married?”

The governor laughed, a mean laugh. “Marriage makes women look so plain.” His back was to her as he got up and moved to the wall. “I know what turns you on.” He opened an oaken armoire. Inside was a television set. He turned it on, found
CNN
. “Go ahead, masturbate. I’ll watch during the commercials.”

Andrea got up off the floor. She brushed the wrinkles from her clothes, her back to him and the television set. “You’re sick,” she told him, walking out of the governor’s office for the last time. “I can’t believe the people of Minnesota would elect you to anything.”

“There was a day they wouldn’t have,” Per Ellefson yelled after her. “But like you said, the sun has set on that state.”

On what he took to be the last night of his life Rick Beanblossom drove Highway 95 north out of Stillwater. He followed the pines that followed the river, over the sheer cliffs and into the woods. At Arcola Trail he cut off the highway and drove down the blacktop until it came to an end. An old logging road parted the hills. The sky was black and filled with stars, but there appeared to be lightning in the north. Years had passed since he’d been down this dirt road. A few executive homes had been wedged into the hillsides, but the sylvan terrain remained largely unspoiled. A trio of deer leaped through the light beams. He kept an eye out for Chief Fallen Rock. Then the road dropped under the railroad tracks. Rick pulled over, parking the dusty Corvette among the trees.

Up the footpath and onto the tracks. Shale rock crunched under his feet. Empty beer cans lined the rails. The night was desolate and spooky. The temperature continued to fall. Pines and firs waited impatiently for the aspen, the birch, and the elms to spring their leaves. Every now and then a strange sound broke through the stillness, creating an eerie feeling in his bones, that feeling that follows everybody in a walk through the dark woods, the feeling he was being watched. Rick buttoned his Marine fatigue jacket up to his neck and continued walking the deserted railroad tracks. Then, upon seeing what he came for, those eerie feelings vanished. It was still there. The old Soo Line Bridge stretched across the valley.

In its day the trains barreled out of the Minnesota pines, roared across the half-mile of single track two hundred feet above the St. Croix River, and then disappeared into the rolling hills of Wisconsin. That’s what the Soo Line had built the bridge for, but over the years the five-span steel marvel got used for so much more. It was photographed and painted. It was ogled by boaters below and tramped across by adventurers above. All of the threatening signs in two states couldn’t keep people off the bridge. No cliff or ridge in the valley possessed its mystique, or its view.

The high-school kid with the low draft number had a going-away party on this rickety bridge. The trains were running then. The boys would stand between the rails atop the center span, beer in hand, and wait for the blinding light of the locomotive to pop out of the woods and bear down on them. Then they were off and running, trying to beat the train across the wide expanse, the engineer cursing them from his cab as they jumped to safety one railroad tie ahead of death. What fools! What fun! He made love to a girl that night on the forest floor. Then back up to the bridge he came to be with his buddies, their butts on the wooden planks, their arms draped precariously across the pipe railing, their feet dangling over the water. Just the guys. Drinking and talking into the night; talking of college and war, of girls, cars, and football. Drunkenly discussing the existence of God.

Kids still had parties here, but the trains didn’t run anymore. Rick Beanblossom stepped out onto the abandoned bridge and followed the rusted rails to the center span. He was as high as a man could get in the St. Croix Valley. No railing bordered the north side of the tracks. The railing along the narrow walkway on the south side was dangerously loose. It was not a bridge for the faint of heart. On a Wisconsin hilltop above him the blinking white lights of a transmitting antenna picked up news, weather, and sports from the Cities and relayed them to the farmland beyond. Beneath him the silhouette of an owl soared over the pernicious river and rested on a treetop. But for a stiff breeze down from the north, it was a silent night. Clear and cold. As quiet as quiet gets in the out-of-doors.

It wasn’t until he reached the heart of the bridge between the cliffs and turned his attention northward that Rick realized that it wasn’t lightning he had seen in the sky on his drive up. It was the aurora borealis. The northern lights. A sight rarely witnessed in the Cities. A forest fire in the sky. Flaming auroras arced the northern sky from horizon to zenith, luminous streamers of greens and blues and whites dancing over the polar ice caps. A rainbow ballet. Silent artillery. A prismatic firefight. Every now and then a dramatic burst of crimson or pink would send shivers up his spine. Brilliant beyond belief. The Weatherman had explained this awesome phenomenon one night on the news, something about solar flares on the sun and the magnetic poles of the earth. But faced with such spectacular fireworks, who needed an explanation?

The Marine sat down on the oily planks of the walkway and leaned his back against a railing pipe, his

tortured face to the towering light show in the north, his back to the south. There may have been better places to end his life, but few more poignant or spectacular.

Just stop it.

He heard Angel’s voice again. And this time he smiled to himself. But the man in the mask couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t make the hurt go away. His teeth were chattering so loud they seemed to echo through the valley’s stillness.

When he was a little boy he’d ride along with his father in the old Nash Rambler as they traversed the roads and highways of the valley. Signs along the way read:
WATCH
OUT
FOR
FALLEN
ROCK
. Fallen Rock was an Indian Chief, his father had told him. He went into the woods one day to find food for his cold and hungry people and never came back. The tribe was lost without their bold and noble leader, so they posted those signs along the road. The little boy kept his sweet face pressed to the glass, believing every word of it. On the last night of his life it was these precious childhood memories that came floating down the river and back into his mind.

Rick Beanblossom pulled the Navy Cross from his jacket pocket and held it before him. “Tac air! Cover! Cover!” Shaking, he draped the honor around his neck. A hypodermic needle came out of his pocket. He removed a chunk of styrofoam from the tip and held the milky poison up to the northern lights shimmering in the sky. Enough pure heroin to kill a platoon-but what a way to go. So what’s the last thought a man has before he leaves this world? He thinks of a woman he loved a long time ago. “I’m sorry, Angel.”

The master sergeant hummed the Marine Corps Hymn as he rolled his sleeves over his elbow, choking his veins. During the last stanza he stuck the needle into his arm and sent the boys into battle. It was the last needle Rick Beanblossom would ever pop into his skin. When the job was done, he tossed the needle over the edge and imagined it spinning through the frosty air before hitting the receding river below and sinking point-first into the clay bottom.

Suddenly he was freezing. This dying business was cold. The veteran of Vietnam, the veteran of a hundred battles fought in city newsrooms, curled into the fetal position and laid his masked head down on the cold, oily planks that ran along the rails. The cross around his neck slipped over the side. Dangled from the bridge. Swayed in the north wind. Reflected the crazy dance of the northern lights. He closed his eyes to the powwow in the sky. It got so quiet the only sound he could hear was the lullaby of the golden river on its way to Stillwater. Then the Marine dropped into a deep, deep sleep. And the valley temperature dropped right along with him.

All squads, effective immediately we’ll be going to a two-channel dispatch for the remainder of dog watch. All squads at two-fifteen,”

Captain Les Angelbeck sat behind the wheel of a state squad car and watched in tears as the last photographs were snapped and the dead body was placed on a stretcher and loaded into the back of the ME van. The overnight photographers from the TV stations flooded the vehicle with klieg lights as it pulled away with a full police escort, red lights flashing in the crispy night air. The old cop tried to remember the last time he had talked with him. It was on the phone. What was said? Who was telling his family? He blew cigarette smoke at the frost on the windshield and choked on a cough. This was difficult. The killing of a police officer in Minnesota was rare.

It was unseasonably cold. The sky was cloudless, but there appeared to be lightning off to the north. The wind down from Alberta was sharp and icy. The mercury dipped below the freezing point, chilling his heart. That the dying police captain had outlived the young and lively lieutenant from Florida who loved the state but hated the weather sent pangs of guilt rippling up his crumbling spine. He stared through the smoky windshield at the horde of angry black faces gathered at the intersection of Plymouth and James Avenue North.

“Squads, do we have an Able car for the Hennepin Bridge? Eastbound, above the island, report of a DK pedestrian in traffic.”

Lieutenant Donnell Redmond had just left the Fourth Precinct in North Minneapolis when he spotted him. He was wearing high-top athletic shoes so new and so white it looked like a pair of feet trotting down Plymouth Avenue. The North Side rapist? Redmond had a hunch. He pulled the unmarked squad to the curb. He was feeling good about himself. His testimony at the Weatherman’s trial was considered exemplary. There was talk of promotion.

This inner-city rapist never garnered the media coverage the white-ass rapist in Edina was able to generate, but he had police puzzled for a year. A young black man was preying on black women in their homes in the neighborhood around North High School. He came through open bedroom windows, unlocked back doors, and twice he barreled right through the front door. He was described as being of medium height and build with very dark skin. His trademark-he always wore new athletic shoes so white that’s all some of his victims could see while being assaulted. Cops called it the case of the horny sneakers.

Redmond was out of the car. “Yo, bro, hold up there.”

The suspect stopped and turned, both hands stuffed into a black baseball jacket that said sox, only the sox had been inked over. “Watcha want, man?”

Redmond flashed his badge. The suspect had dark skin and he was the right size. “Awful cold night for a stroll, ain’t it?”

“Just got offa work. Coin’ home. Why you harassin’ me?” The jive talk sounded scripted, probably learned by rote at gang meetings.

“What work you coming from and what home you going to?” Redmond was in his face now, his hands on his hips. The big lieutenant wanted nothing more than to get into his warm squad car, go home to his warm wife, and crawl into their warm bed. Past midnight now, it had been a long day. But at the very least he was going to get a positive ID out of this man with the costly new shoes.

“Squad ten-fifteen is requesting more help at Plymouth and Emerson. Who’s there now? Ten-four. We’ll call State Patrol.”

It was the difference between Minneapolis and St. Paul. In St. Paul blacks cheered and generally cooperated when police arrived on the scene. In Minneapolis blacks grew to riot proportions at the sight of flashing red lights. Les Angelbeck could never figure out how a river could put so much distance between two cities. The old police captain watched as the Minneapolis officers tried to get statements. Nobody was talking. Everybody was yelling. A large white-and-orange ambulance was parked outside the perimeter. Prostitutes worked the busy corner like flies, uninhibited by the weather or the law. It was that kind of neighborhood.

By New York or Los Angeles standards the area was probably respectable. But by Minneapolis standards North Minneapolis was as bad as it gets, a predominantly black, low-income, no-income, high-crime, drug-trafficking area squeezed between freeways leading out of town. Urban renewal had been there and gone, along with every other social experiment the government had to offer. It was once the proud domain of the postwar working stiff. Now whole blocks of new housing had been built in North Minneapolis to look like town homes, with colonial and Victorian facades and splashes of the popular midwestern Queen Anne style. Architecture comes to the poor. But in reality it was nothing but a plywood slum. The projects. Fresh paint on old problems.