The Weatherman (46 page)

For Andrea Labore this river town just outside the Cities was as close as she would ever come to reclaiming the way of life she had known on the Iron Range. She could appreciate the same sights and sounds as her husband, could savor with him the redolence of the river. Never had she felt so contented.

It was a hot summer night two years back when she asked Rick to again ask her to marry him. The trial was over. Rick had left the station for the writer’s life. What he hadn’t planned on was the isolation. The monotony. Too much freedom and not enough discipline. He had money and time, a dangerous combination. It happened one of those dog days of summer in the dog days of his career, a day when Andrea stopped by his home in the sky. Only an hour earlier he had watched her deliver the ten o’clock news. Now they were sitting on the balcony, sipping wine and watching the lights of the city reflected in Lake Calhoun.

“And what became of the ring?” Andrea wanted to know.

“What ring is that?”

“The ring maybe I should have accepted.”

“It might have fallen into the river while I was sandbagging.”

“How far out in the river might it have fallen?” Rick laughed. “Damn near halfway across. Hell of a throw. Threw my elbow out of whack.”

Andrea laughed at his ability to joke at something that must have been so painful. She took off her shoes and let her toes play in the wrought iron that bordered the balcony. “If you were to get married,” she asked Rick, “and I’m not suggesting you do, where would you do it? Like, would there be a honeymoon?”

“Well, if I did get married, and I’m certainly not planning on it, I’d probably take the lucky woman to Hawaii. Take the plunge there.” “Why there?”

“Sentimental reasons.” Rick swallowed a large mouthful of wine and remembered back. “On my way to Fort Sam Houston, after I left the burn unit in Japan, we stopped over in Hawaii. One day the Navy took us over to Kauai, one of the less touristy islands. There was this point out on Hanalei, lush and beautiful. A lot of inlets and little peninsulas. I mean, you could hike right into a waterfall. Anyway, I remember all of these wounded soldiers sitting along this beautiful beach, wishing we never had to leave, more afraid of the society we were going home to than of the war we had just come from. And I thought, What a special place. I’d like to come back here someday for something really special.” He took another sip of wine. “So if I was going to get married, and I’m certainly not going to, that’s where I’d take her.”

Looking out on the water, Andrea Labore could see the blinking red warning light atop the
IDS
Tower and the ring of newsroom lights just below. “I always thought-I know this sounds silly and vain, but I always thought that my being on television would attract better men, make me more desirable to a better class of men. Isn’t that stupid? I think we all believed that going in. We’re like that
CBS
logo, only one open eye.” “And?”

“Assholes,” Andrea told him. “One asshole after another. Tall, handsome assholes. Rich assholes. Doctor assholes. Lawyer assholes. Political assholes. It’s been a real eye-opening experience.”

“The Weatherman calls me the Masked Asshole.”

“Yes, but, ironically, women don’t. I think men are more threatened by you than women … not just the mask but the war-hero status, the journalistic skills.”

“Flattery will only get you so far, Andrea.” He stood and leaned over the rail, watching the lights dancing in the water.

“Hey,” she said, “I know you too well to flatter you.”

“How well?”

“Well enough to know that you’re the man I want to marry.” She smiled just a little, just enough to fire up her great brown eyes.

“Is this a proposal?” Rick said, too breathlessly to disguise his feelings.

“Well,” she said, moving over to kiss him, “will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Will you ask me to marry you?”

“Okay, but if you say yes, you have to buy your own damn ring.” And they melted into each other’s arms.

That was two years ago. She was asleep, her face turned away from him. Rick stole out of the fourposter bed and slipped on a pair of gym shorts. Rick envied his wife. Fifteen minutes after her head hit the pillow Andrea was out like a rock. Not even a happy marriage brought him peaceful sleep. He looked out the open window, the trace of a valley breeze filtering through the screen. The wind felt good on the bare skin below his mask.

The June moon was at perigee, the closest it would ever come to the earth. Its reflection off the river flooded the St. Croix Valley with enough night light to read by. Perhaps somewhere out there tonight somebody was reading his novel. After the initial euphoria of being a published author wore off, Rick too often found himself yawning and shrugging his shoulders whenever an unpublished writer asked, “What’s it feel like?” They say that inside every newsman is a novelist struggling to be born, but inside this novelist was a newsman who wouldn’t die, wouldn’t even go to sleep.

On another hill in the same town sat a brilliant man in an iron cage, convicted, perhaps unjustly, of having killed seven times. Despite more than two years of trying, Rick couldn’t prove the Weatherman’s innocence. As with the Wakefield story, he waited for the dream that would tie together all of the clues and provide for him the dramatic answers. But the dream never came.

The author picked up the Weatherman’s photocopied diary and rested in an overstaffed antique chair beside the window. Moonlight fell across the pages, across the precise southern script learned by rote in another river town where during the sufferingly hot and humid summers a breeze off the water was as precious as a cool Yankee rain.

For instance this story I tell second hand because I wasn’t born yet. I heard different versions of the tragedy while growing up, but over the years I’ve been able to piece together a pretty good picture of what all happened that day. I had been conceived and I was fixing to crawl into the world in about a month when the roof literally fell in on us and left me and Momma to fend for ourselves.

My folks liked to fight. It didn’t take a whole lot to set them off. Just a Saturday afternoon taking the clan to the movies would pretty much do it. I had a brother and a sister, four and five years old, Momma was eight months pregnant with me, and Daddy he was pretty much fed up with the lot of us. We were supposed to go to the two o’clock matinee but the fighting and fussin’ pushed our arrival at the Saenger Theatre back to the four o’clock showing. They argued about the price. Most movies were twenty cents, but this was a Disney movie and Disney movies were a quarter. Daddy complained that meant a dollar just to get in the damn door. Once inside the movie house they argued about where to sit. Brother Alex and Sister being little all wanted to sit up front and stare at the screen with their mouths gaping. My Daddy who never quite got around to growing up liked to sit right up front too. Well, Momma wouldn’t have none of that … bad for the eyes, can’t see or hear a thing, and on and on. The fight ended as per usual. They went their separate ways. Daddy, Brother Alex and Sister took seats right up front, while Momma with me stuffed inside of her huffed and puffed all the way to the very last row against the back wall. The movie began. Don’t ask me what movie, I was told but I don’t recall, but it was a Disney movie.

It was unseasonably warm and blustery for early December. Hot winds were kicking up dust and debris. Christmas lighting already decorated Washington Street, that’s the main street through downtown Vicksburg. A charity football game was scheduled for that night and most of the town would have been there. Football and beauty pageants, that’s the South. Folks ran about town wrapping up their Saturday shopping because the stores closed at 6 P.M.

But that day the clocks never made it to 6 P.M. They froze at 5:35. Without a second of warning a tornado dropped out of thunderheads over the swamps of Louisiana, jumped the river like a Jack-in-the-box and tore into Vicksburg. It cut a diagonal line of death and destruction from the cotton compress on the Yazoo Canal to the National Military Park northeast of the city. And right in the middle of that fatal path was the Saenger Theatre packed with children and a smattering of parents.

When the twister had passed the only part of the theatre left intact was the little foyer and two rows of seats along the rear wall. Beyond that … the worst natural disaster in Vicksburg’s history. The giant beams snapped like toothpicks bringing down the roof and the walls. The silver screen crumbled like a piece of typing paper. In seconds the sky went from day to night. Rain swept over the ruins in torrents. Can’t be anything sadder than the wails of children in the dark crippled by something they didn’t see and can’t understand. Years later I would study the photographs. Truth be told, more people got out of that theatre alive than anybody who first looked at it could have imagined … but Daddy, Brother Alex and Sister weren’t counted among the living. My momma was rushed to the hospital in shock. I was born premature that night.

The streets of Vicksburg looked like the aftermath of Grant’s siege. But what took the Union general 47 days to accomplish took the tornado only 47 seconds. Christmas decorations hung helter skelter across mounds of rubble. Soldiers arrived and barricaded the intersections. 38 people were killed in that terrible storm that terrible day, too many for a small town. An especially high toll on children. Besides the Saenger Theatre the tornado also leveled the Happyland Nursery, killing young ones there.

After that, Momma took to drink. We moved in with Granddaddy Graham in the shotgun house above the tracks and that’s where I was raised.

Momma told me before the tornado we lived in a big ole house off Halls Ferry Road near the Confederate lines. She’d even drive me by there at times and point it out. It was a big white house with pillars and it sat on a hill and it had a manicured lawn that rolled down to the road and the prettiest little garden filled with the most brilliant azaleas I ever saw. Of course, I knew early on we had never lived there, but I never questioned her. I think that’s where Momma wanted to live.

Rick Beanblossom laid the Weatherman’s diary on his lap. Reading by moonlight was a strain on his eyes. He felt a headache coming on. Andrea rolled over, sound asleep, her eyes closed, her breathing even. He watched her sleep and thought of how much he loved her. He knew her now, knew the qualities behind the perfect face. Understood her quiet intelligence, her thirst to know more about life. He admired the way she had grown as a journalist, as a human being, admired the way she had forced him to grow.

The man in the mask leaned an elbow on the window-sill and in the sweet stillness of a summer night stared out across the valley. He could see the old courthouse on the hill with a bronze soldier a hundred years old standing guard. He could see the bluffs of Wisconsin so green and lush not even the night could darken their allure. And where the St. Croix River left town and headed for its rendezvous with the Mississippi Rick could just barely make out the pitched roof of a guard tower between the pines. Tomorrow he would pay the Confederate prisoner there another visit. He couldn’t help wondering if this visit would be his last. When the air turned cool, when the leaves dried up and fell to the ground, the Supreme Court of the land would decide the fate of the Weatherman.

Each inmate was allowed eighteen hours of visitation per month. The hours were from 1:30 to 9:00 P.M. At two o’clock Rick Beanblossom signed in. He surrendered his driver’s license and had his hand stamped. Within the prison walls the man in the mask had become a familiar sight. “He’s that writer married to Andrea Labore.” A guard ushered the most famous husband in Minnesota into the visitors’ lounge. Compared with the county jail the room was a coffeehouse. There was a “no contact” area where booths with Plexiglas separated visitor from inmate, but it was used only for disciplinary reasons, for the inmates who couldn’t keep their hands off their visitors. Most of the area resembled a comfortable depot lounge: vinyl chairs with wooden armrests, strung together in neat rows and watched over by a guard at a desk.

It was unusually busy for a weekday afternoon. The only empty row of chairs was in the back along the children’s section, where the kids played while Mommy visited Daddy. On this afternoon no children were present. Rick studied the fairy-tale characters painted on the wall as he waited for Dixon Bell.

The guards held the door for him as the Weatherman entered. Two guards escorted Stillwater’s only death row prisoner whenever he moved through the halls; at times it looked more like an honor guard than a security precaution.

Rick Beanblossom and Dixon Bell never shook hands. They were as awkward as they had been the first time they ever met. They kept their backs to the others in the room. The guards left them alone. News and weather took seats facing the wonderland over the play area. Fluffy white clouds were painted in a bright blue sky. The Queen was there, as was the White Rabbit. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Alice enjoyed tea with the Mad Hatter.

“How is Andrea?” asked Dixon Bell.

“She’s good. Puts a lot of work into the house. Hates

the long commute to the station. She sends her best to

you.” The Weatherman’s face almost turned into a smile.

“Send her my best, too.”

“Would you like for her to come and see you?”

“No. Tell her please don’t.” The silence was chilling. The Weatherman leaned forward. He nodded at the mural. “Humpty Dumpty looks like your Hubert Humphrey. What were those famous words of his, about human rights?’

“Dumpty’s or Humphrey’s?”

Dixon Bell laughed, relieving the tension.

“Humphrey’s.”

” ‘The time has arrived to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.’ ”

Dixon Bell leaned back in his chair. “Ain’t them pretty words.”

“That was at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 1948,” Rick said, educating the man on death row. “It was the first convention to be televised. After his speech the southern delegates walked off the convention floor in protest and stacked their party badges on a table in front of the TV cameras. After the cameras left, they picked up their badges and went back inside. No cameras were there to cover Humphrey’s famous speech. Television had come to politics.”