Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1)

COMEBACK

L. L. Enger

Published by Pedersen Books

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text Copyright © 2016  Leif Enger and Lin Enger

All Rights Reserved

Preface to the 25
th
Anniversary Edition of
COMEBACK:

The Resurrection of Gun Pedersen

Long before the two of us wrote and published our own novels, we churned out a series of paperback mysteries, convinced it was preferable to write for a living than to work.  This was before we knew how much work it was to write. Or maybe we did know and simply wanted to put off that work for a few years, while in the meantime having some fun together and making what we were quite sure would be very big money.

              Here is how it happened:

              One day in the winter of 1986-87, while Lin was in graduate school, he happened on a piece in
Time
magazine about the so-called renaissance in crime writing.  What caught his attention was a photograph of Robert B. Parker, who peered cunningly from behind the wheel of a green convertible. Parker was a former English professor whose crime novels had sold so well that he’d quit his tenured position at an eastern university to give full attention to his writing career. Lin cut out the article and sent it along to Leif, who was working for Minnesota Public radio then, with a letter that said: “This could be us.  Interested?”

Leif wrote back: “I’m in.”

For our first book, which would be published in 1990 as
Comeback
(and
nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award the following spring), we huddled for a weekend in our parents’ basement, developing characters, charting a storyline, and piecing together a chapter-by-chapter plot.  We had already spent a few months reading mystery novels by the writers who appealed to us, including Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Lawrence Block, and we’d outlined a few of their books in order to understand the architecture of the genre: how much story information to include in a chapter; how much dramatic action; how long to withhold the answers to key plot questions. We had also agreed upon a protagonist, a six-foot six-inch former All-Star outfielder named Gun Pedersen (we’re both lifelong baseball fans) who has retired amidst scandal and now lives reclusively in Minnesota’s lake country—a part of the world we both knew, having grown up there. 

We parted ways that weekend with identical stacks of thirty notecards, each card bearing the essence of a single chapter. For example: “Pedersen fends off violent visit from enraged neighbor; encounter yields backstory regarding controversial lake-development project.” Our division of labor—in which one of us wrote chapters one through five while the other wrote six through ten, and so on till the end—would produce a full-length, publishable manuscript in a matter of months. That was the plan, anyway.

And we weren’t too far from right. After six months we did have a full-length manuscript.  The trouble was, it wasn’t publishable.  In fact it wasn’t until three years, multiple revisions, and two-dozen rejections later that Pocket Books finally tendered us a very modest offer.  It was a multiple book contract, though, which meant we had to get going fast on the next novel. 

Now, more than twenty-five years since
Comeback
appeared, and with all five titles in the series long out of print, we’ve decided it’s time to nudge our stoic, trouble-prone, larger-than-life hero out of the woods again. Both of us, on separate book tours, have been asked about the Pedersen novels, and in several cities readers have shown up with a pile of paperback mysteries for us to sign. The questions they ask are mostly the same: When are they going to be available again? And when are you guys going to write another one? 

Well, here they are—or here’s the first one, anyway. The other four will follow in turn. And yes, we do have a new book, sixth in the series. But Pedersen’s a wary old Viking, and we’ll let him make his entrance when he’s good and ready.

—Leif Enger, Lin Enger, June 2016

To Kathy and Robin.

For the long silent evenings.

Prologue

1980

On the evening of August 17 something over twenty
million people learned of Gun Pedersen’s sudden
retirement from baseball. John Chancellor told them
about it on the NBC
Nightly News,
a program not
known for its attention to sports figures. Mr. Chancel
lor did a fair and workmanlike job with the story. He
used a tone of sadness, respect for the fallen. He
applied a cool network gloss over the sordid parts.

“Major league baseball lost a hero today,” he began,
“when Gun Pedersen, the Detroit Tigers’ prized and
beleaguered left fielder, walked away from the
game.” Behind Mr. Chancellor’s left shoulder a pic
ture of Gun Pedersen appeared, the Topps baseball
card from his rookie year. The dark-billed cap with the baroque capital D shaded a young face with high
cheekbones and a serious set to the eyes.

“Just three days after attending the funeral of his wife, who was killed in the tragic crash of Flight 347 in Wisconsin, Pedersen told NBC this afternoon he’s played his last game.

“The season isn’t over, of course, but Pedersen
seemed headed for the kind of year most veterans his age can only wish for. He led his teammates in home
runs and batting average, and was voted the American
League’s starting All-Star left fielder for the twelfth time in seventeen seasons. For the past two weeks,
though, the normally quiet-mannered Pedersen has
been the focus of headlines for his actions
off
the
field.
Press reports of his relationship with film star
Susannah Duprey”—on screen now, the soundless
clip of a sleek, dark-haired woman mouthing words at
a thicket of microphones—”were followed by the
on-camera fistwork Pedersen performed on the reporter for
American Mirror,
a New York-based tab
loid program.” Another clip flashed on the screen, and
a man vast of width took two short blows, to the gut
and chin, then rolled sideways onto the hood of a
parked car.

The clip ended and John Chancellor was back.
“These events shocked a nation of baseball fans. Then
came the plane crash. Now it is over. Inside of one week, Gun Pedersen has buried his wife, his career,
and a little of the innocence and honor that have
always belonged to the national pastime.” Chancellor
paused, seemed to frown at a paper on his desk. He
looked up at the camera. “We asked Mr. Pedersen by telephone what he intends to do now. His answer, and
I quote: ‘I’m going north.’” A pause. “That’s the NBC
Nightly News.
This is John Chancellor. Good night.”

1990

Sometimes it seemed like he hadn’t gone far enough
north.

The first year, living in the log house he’d built for
Amanda as a summer place in the early sixties, he’d
been tempted to rip the phone out and toss it off the
dock into Stony Lake. This was northern Minnesota
and his number was unlisted, but people still got it:
guys calling up and saying, Get back to the game,
man—sorry about your wife, but let’s not quit baseball, not the important stuff. Others called to say, You’ve sinned, buddy, and you’re going to Hell in a
sled you’ve built yourself. One woman phoned from a
group called Females for Fidelity, saying she under
stood the pressures on professional athletes and was
willing to come give him personal support and conso
lation. He changed his number four times that first
year.

It got better after that. Gun put a new roof on the house, replaced some logs that boarded termites, and
made enough quiet trips into the little town of Stony

so that people nodded to him now and didn’t just
stare. Meanwhile the sportswriters found other sensa
tions and misfortunes to use up, and the phone rang
less and less often.

Gun drank coffee in the town bakery sometimes,
and the men from the grocery and the hardware store
and the bank who always seemed to be there were glad
to see him. He started getting phone calls from local
politicians. A state representative wanted his endorsement on a school sports bill; the mayor wanted to post
a Home of Gun Pedersen sign at the Stony city limit. He said no, of course; caution was habitual. Then the
Loon Country Attractions thing came up.

Loon Country was the idea of Stony’s only certifi
able rich man, Lyle Hedman of the Hedman Paper
Mill. It would be Minnesota’s answer to Disneyland, he said; a high-rise, high-tech island of prosperity in
the middle of unemployed northern Minnesota. An
amusement park. A convention center. The biggest
shopping mall for two hundred miles, any direction. It would sit right next to the big blue water, Stony Lake,
and fill the town with business and happiness. Lyle
Hedman said so to Gun, and wondered if Gun would
like a job putting his face on freeway billboards.
Gun said he wouldn’t, and then he learned that
when it counted, people could still remember the
bad stuff.

“You know, Gun, this could be a positive thing for
you,” Hedman said.

“Positive?”

“Well, yes.” Lyle coughed over the phone, and Gun
understood. “You had a bit of a rough outing your last
time in the public eye.”

“No thanks, Lyle.” Gun hung up.

Then the conservation group called. Save the Lake.
They were the ones who worried Loon Country
Attractions would send too much sewage and poison

into the water. Gun agreed with them. But they
remembered too.

“We think your help on this important issue could
be beneficial all around. It’ll give us a spokesman
people will recognize, and give you some very good
publicity,” the county commissioner said.

“I’m not looking for publicity,” Gun told him.

“No, no, but surely it wouldn’t hurt, not after . . .”

“Yes?”

“Not after what happened before. Seems to me
you’d want to put your name on something folks can
respect.”

Gun hung up again. He pulled tobacco and papers
from the pocket of his flannel shirt and rolled a smoke
at the kitchen table. He toyed with the wooden
matches, arranging them there in the shape of a
baseball diamond.

Redemption, he realized, might still be a chilly ways distant.