Crazy Like A Dog

CRAZY LIKE A DOG

Scott Riddle

Copyright Scott Riddle 2014

Smashwords Edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Crazy Like

A Dog

CHAPTER ONE

I awoke with good balance and prowled about my apartment in the gray half-light. Down Humboldt Avenue the rain-blackened limbs of the elms arched over the street and vanished in a tangle of bright green leaves. Touching the glass I felt the icy cold in my fingers and cursed softly as I stepped back from the windows, quietly sipping from a mug of the strongest coffee in all south Minneapolis.

Outside I stood and looked up into the drizzle. It was a good day to shoot muskrats. To set traps in the rain and wander the north woods, to eat smoked bacon and make love under the covers. People said I was a fool for oiling my traps, but it never made much difference to the muskrats.

No one else was out on Lowry Hill. I thought about going by the lakes, even a gray lake surrounded by houses was better than the freeway, but only stood a few moments in the cold drizzle before getting in my car. The neighborhood was full of elm trees and bloated Victorians shouldered one against the other. Lately people had taken to painting them up so the area looked better than it actually was. Across the park, Kenwood was filled with urns and porticoes, but Lowry Hill had never grown too fancy.

My dreams were like the day, gray and cold. I lived alone and at any moment of the week could tell exactly what I would be doing. I was getting desperate and knew I ought to have goals beyond shaving most days and trying not to get so drunk I fell down. Lately, I’d taken to following cars driven by pretty girls and bar hopping till the final cries of last call.

My engine started with the touch of a rumble. It was an old Ford, with rust spreading out from the wheel wells and a long tear across the back seat that was stitched with fishing line and covered in duct tape. But the engine was tuned to a charm, and the head gasket, fuel pump, wheel bearings and inevitable problems with alignment had all been repaired in a swamp south of town.

The dream of unwavering devotion had fallen upon hard times. What had once seemed so obvious and clear was not so clear any more. The women did not want to be touched. They had taken upon themselves to be in charge of their own lives. They said whatever they wanted, they did whatever they pleased. They might exchange bold glances over beers on a Friday night, but it was only a smirk, never a flash of heart.

At Hennepin and Franklin I flipped on the wipers and dove into the cut.

The freeways were jammed. Other drivers beeped their horns, raced their engines and shivered in their summer clothes. Some jerk from Wayzata played cutoff coming out of the tunnel but I waited till he split off for Bloomington and jockeyed my way across three lanes for the loop around downtown. Order returned after the rest of the poor suckers headed for St. Paul and I was carried along by the current of the traffic and the splashing of our tires. Passing the stadium we rose up in tight formation.

I hardly went out anymore. We were locked in a battle of wills, played for higher and higher stakes until no human values were left. The women I met were filled with such condescension I found it easier to go home alone than put up with their disdain. There was a red-haired girl who still smiled at me when we passed in the halls at work, if she was close she would pinch me in the arm. I liked her but it would never work out. She knew it too, that’s what the pinch was for.

The heat came on as I crossed the river. To the left the skyscrapers of downtown stood like gray ghosts in the rain and downstream a thick mist hung over the banks where the river headed south.

It hadn’t been such a bad winter. I heard that over and over again. From the middle of January people chatted each other up, bundled in double layers of scarves and mittens, not to protect themselves from the cold so much as how they felt about it, smiling courageously even as the bleary numbness overswept their faces. By February only the foolish went out more than they had to and the timid retreated to their beds in a human version of hibernation. Others scoffed at the very idea of cold and ran around all winter hatless, with barely a jacket and slightly intoxicated. These people were mostly Lutherans, for whom faith overcame good sense at the first opportunity.

I knew winter, too, from the first hard ciders until the last cinders were washed from the streets, crisp fall afternoons that degenerated into months of bitter northland cold, with glaring cloudless days that never got above zero followed by nights that froze batteries until my only resolve was to get home from Konig’s before closing. Like the winter, I was frozen and just thawing out.

I rolled off the freeway at Exit 22b. Sometimes I forgot to get off and drove on for miles.

Half a mile into the industrial flats I followed a long line of cars over the potholes into what was once a rambling rail yard. One remaining spur still handled the occasional freight, but the old factories were now high-tech and squeaky clean, joined by skyways and tunnels to tech labs, development buildings and marketing offices. Almost a thousand people worked in Roseville, there was room enough to get lost, which is what I liked about it.

At the door security guards rolled dice for their coffee, and inside middle staffers wore golf hats and Bermuda shorts. One woman practiced her chipping down the hall and a gray-haired supervisor I knew to be a grandmother showed off a pair of white bucks and said her feet hadn’t grown since she was fourteen. Even Ed Bromley sat behind his desk in sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt.

We were celebrating the end of winter, the end of six months spent largely indoors and the beginning of six months out. The occasional murmur swept the room but nothing got out of hand. Emotions ran neither too high nor too low. It was all very controlled and well mannered, very Minnesotan. By nine o’clock a half dozen engineers in fishing waders were leaning over their filing cabinets debating the perfect lure for northern pike.

For the survivors there were two approaches to a Minnesota winter. You could take each day as a new challenge, rushing outside to start the car fifteen minutes early and relishing the fierce beauty of air so cold that if you breathed too deeply you became cold from the inside out. The diehard Scandinavians held on to that magic all day, while the cowards stayed inside and swore bitterly, though by the end of March even my coworkers had a great unfurling as they stretched their muscles and rumbled with a befuddled laughter. It was spring now, hibernation was over. We were like animals rousing from a deep winter sleep, uncertain of our whereabouts and awfully hungry.

I was not a coward. I came from a long line of stalkers, trappers and hunters for whom winter was clarity. Rather than fight the cold and the forces of nature, I did whatever the winter allowed. When the leaves were gone, tracks could be followed in the snow and your own scent lingered not so long in the air. With luck you could get off a clean shot. Even my father, frozen to his chair in South St. Paul, still got a spark in his eyes at the thought of a cold day hunting in the north woods.

Daniel Lassen called at ten o’clock.

This is it, Vaurien, he shouted in his sawdust voice. Springtime, Mayday, all that other shit.

What about Adrienne? I told him about the report for her I had sitting on my desk. A sharp laugh barked over the phone.

Forget it, Daniel said. She doesn’t care, not today.

All I have to do is hand it to her.

He laughed again, a deep-barreled north country laugh so I didn’t know what to believe.

The jig is up, he cracked. Don’t tell her I called you. He named a roadhouse out on County Road C and a place to go play ball and hung up.

I phoned Sonny to tell him where he could meet us and at ten-thirty picked up my twenty pages of design specs for a pair of robotic arms and wound my way out of the converted factory and across the skyway into carpeted orange silence.

Managers lived here, among quality partitions with oak corners, where the world seemed so efficient and orderly I almost believed in it.

Adrienne Gjerde was a different story. She worked among us Red River brawlers until a series of layoffs last summer bumped her up to a title and a cubicle large enough for a small conference table. It did wonders for her posture but cost her some spunk. Small boned and slender, the perpetual spark in her eye had been dulled by her own authority. Hints became instructions, suggestions became deadlines, she constantly reminded us of procedures and took care to always know more than she needed. In the before times we were mostly friends, now we were mostly professionals.

Today she was asleep. She lay face down on her desk, head crooked to the left, salted hair fanning out behind her. I silently pulled up a chair and slid the report to within an inch of her nose.

First of May, I said quietly.

She blinked and shook herself awake.

I knew it would be you, Michael, she muttered, slightly annoyed.

Adrienne Gjerde was on the rocky edge of thirty-eight and today she looked it. She narrowed her dark eyes and studied the report, then flicked it into her in-basket. That wasn’t what we were talking about today.

People make sacrifices, I said.

Adrienne straightened in her chair. She had no reason to be ashamed, she hadn’t lost her pride.

I’m not sorry for him, she said sharply. I’m glad it ended the way it did.

You threw him out.

Adrienne twitched at the corners of her mouth.

You don’t know the details, Michael. He was crazy, always full of promises, saying he would change and then ending up at his goddamn garage. He’s not like you think.

I shrugged and looked around her office, checking out that all the books, charts and tech manuals were in their proper places. Adrienne was very efficient.

You did what you had to do, I said. Sonny always kept his own place. Toward the end he hadn’t been around enough to kick out. Still, I had to admit that his casual ways belied a great stubbornness.

Don’t make fucking excuses for him, Michael. Why couldn’t he listen to a little advice? Why is he pissing his life away? Why are men doing this, Michael? Why? Tell me.

Suddenly we were talking about all men, even Russell.

We do as we do, I said. Over the winter I considered standing upright to be a civic virtue, and even when levelheaded I was hardly the picture of ambition. That isn’t so much, is it?

On a rainy Friday night last summer I found myself in the backseat with a twenty-five-year-old woman in a parking lot on the south shore of Lake Calhoun. We woke up the next morning in her bed in St. Louis Park and spent most of the next several days together. But then she called it off. Women were always calling it off. This one was from Brainerd and said I was too close to home. I always thought I should take the time to figure that out, the meaning of too close to home, but I never did. That was about typical of my stories.

I guess we don’t do as we do, I said.

Love had become a chance affair. Power, money, your future, we were playing against such demands all innocence was lost. The smallest gesture could get you in trouble and asking a girl to the movies was a criminal act. It was survival by denial. I was ready, but not very willing.

The careful hunter, said Adrienne. Always on the prowl, never going in for the kill. You remind me of Daniel.

Hardly. Daniel still got his.

Been seeing anyone?

She made it sound like she was changing the subject.

No, I said. The women I meet, their time is too important. I talk to them and they walk away. They say they have better things to do with their lives.

Over the winter an unfeeling numbness pervaded my bones, as if I was starving yet had lost all memory of nourishment.

Like the horse that died just when it learned to live without eating, smiled Adrienne. Maybe you only need someone to lead you to pasture.

No, thank you. I’d spent the winter closing every bar from Edina to Plymouth and run out of patience to go places I didn’t belong or learn rules I didn’t understand.

Adrienne rested her chin on her knuckles, slowly shaking her head.

Michael Vaurien, you are listening to the wind.

She was right about that. Sometimes I sat on a bench above Lake of the Isles where I could feel the wind sweep down from the north country or in from the prairie.

Now Adrienne dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

You guys taking the afternoon off?

Yeah, Bryn Mawr Fields. It was tradition to get drunk outside.

She nodded and lay back down for another nap. She knew she would get it. Nobody with any sense tried to do business in Minnesota on the first of May.

When I returned to my department, moose calls and loud guffaws swept over the field of programmers and engineers, along with the slamming of drawers and doors. We were breaking camp. The goal was to travel light and stay drunk. I pulled the wastebasket close to my desk and pushed a year’s worth of status sheets, guidelines and tech specs, all the things unnecessary for a summer in Minnesota, into the trash.

Adrienne was right, of course. I was too cautious for my own good. It’d been years since my last real romance, the kind that lasted more than a couple nights, though not all the in-between time had been blank. Beyond the girl in the back seat, in the spring a year ago a woman in her late forties seduced me in an afternoon. But her pleading eyes, all her maturity and understanding, turned ugly in a moment and I never saw her again. There’d been others over the years, mostly flings, mostly forgettable. But I was getting older and romances were harder to find. They didn’t just happen anymore. Over the winter I made a few passes and dialed endless numbers on black winter nights, and on the bad days I still looked for the red-haired girl in the hallways.

Our lives were going by. We lived in a world of brief encounters, of chance affairs and one-night stands. As men, we had lost our self-respect. Years ago I could remember a moment when everyone thought a new wave of freedom would bring peace and compassion. That was a ruse. It was a quest for power. Now a woman might take you to bed but she wouldn’t hold your hand walking down the street. They had conquered the world but at a shattering cost, leaving behind dreams that could never be satisfied. The whole story was inexplicably sad.

At a quarter to twelve I tore the last dirty sheet off my blotter and with a curt nod and wave to Ed Bromley headed for the door. I was clean now, without responsibilities. Mine was the joy of the unfettered and I would do no serious work for months.

Outside, the rain came on in a fine, light mist and I zipped up my jacket. People streamed out of the buildings by the dozens. In a few hours every single one of them would be drunk.

I headed to the middle of the far lot and waited by Daniel’s car. He walked out the door of his building and came down the sidewalk like a major on his parade grounds. Daniel Lassen was a big man, tall and thick-chested, proud and certain of himself. At one time he had a beard and looked like a woodsman, but then he shaved it off and looked spanky and innocent until his chipped and weatherworn skin hardened and toughened so that at twenty-seven he looked thirty-five.

Daniel stopped on the other side of the car and gazed out over the parking lot.

Did you see Adrienne? he called across the roof. What are my chances?

Not so good. We mostly talked about Sonny.

In the silence of his car, he turned on the wipers and watched the double sweep of the arms before turning them off.

This is it, he said slowly. Change of season, everybody’s got their hopes up. He hit me in the arm. You’re not ready. You still think it’s last year. He banged on the dashboard with his hand. We will never have another last year.

He banged on the dashboard again in memory of his last crazy girlfriend before breaking into a hoarse laughter.

You know I’ve been fucking Adrienne Gjerde?

No, I said. I didn’t know that.

Daniel occasionally ran away with the truth. Most people thought he wasn’t worth the powder to blow him up, others of us saw him as a great man, a cross between a lumberjack and a riverboat gambler who kowtowed to no one.

He scratched his chin and turned on the wipers a second time.

I wonder how this is going to work out, he grinned. But that’s the difference between you and me, Vaurien. You care, I just deal with whatever comes down. What the hell can you do? Make assumptions, take a chance. He unlatched the glove compartment and slipped a pack of rubbers into his pocket. Then he flipped me a second pack.

Never say no, he said.

Lunch was the usual affair, a crowded bar full of smoke and tables of engineers. We ordered brats and sauerkraut and tried to listen to the inside jokes of people whose names I didn’t know and never cared to learn. I always found eating with another group like dinner at someone else’s relations, but even Daniel had his obligations and it was important to make an appearance. At two o’clock he caught my eye and we left, waving our goodbyes to people who had no intention of leaving the security of their barstools and the dark insides.

It was cold with a wind but there were already people with beer cans sitting on the picnic tables at Bryn Mawr Fields. A few I knew from the company, but most were strangers, off huddled around the grills or playing makeshift games on the Fields.

Adrienne had changed into jeans and a blue spring jacket and sat leaning against