Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1) (3 page)

“Swing if you have to,” Gun said.

Bowser swung, a simple level cut that whistled
through the air neck high. Gun’s hand leaped almost
before he knew it, catching Bowser’s thick wrist
exactly where it joined thumb and pad, stopping the

blade, backing it up. Gun tightened his hold on
Bowser’s wrist and looked into his face. He saw that
while Bowser was facing him directly, the paths of his
eyes took him off to both sides, left and right. Gun
made a fist of his free hand and sent it swiftly to the
center, and Bowser fell like stockyard beef to the
grass.

Gun left him there and went inside. He made coffee
from a red can, boiling it severely on the stove. He had
a cup himself and then, still in his longjohns, took the
pot outside and set it with a mug next to the silent
Bowser.

The morning was still, and a white mist rose up
from the lake’s unrippled surface like smoke from a
cooling battlefield. Gun entered the frigid water with
out hesitating. He swam forty yards out and dove. The
cold ignited a brilliant explosion inside his brain, and
he could feel his skin tightening around his muscles
like a rubber wetsuit. It was the middle of May, and
the lake had been ice-free for only a few weeks.

Ten feet down, at the sandy bottom, Gun opened
his eyes. No walleyes here this morning, no streaks of
silver heading for deeper waters. Only refracted spears
of light entering from above, penetrating the green
haze, dissolving like crystals of salt. He looked around
but could not find any of the baseballs. He’d waited
too long. He kicked for the top.

When he came back in, the lawn and coffeepot were
empty, the mug swaying neatly by its handle on the
branch of a reaching fir.

2

Gun was on the last phase of his morning workout— push-ups on his fists against the hard kitchen floor—
when his second visitor of the day arrived. This time in a pinging, four-cylinder foreign job with squeaky
shocks.

As usual, Mazy shut off the engine and waited for
Gun to come outside. He took his sweet time, slowing
down the push-ups until they hurt.

Mazy had turned fifteen the week her mother died.
Fifteen and needing more from a father than he
thought he could give. He’d tried to explain to her that he was afraid, that a ballplayer gone from home seven
months a year never learned to be parent enough,
never had time, but she knew it all and said it didn’t
matter. She’d stay, she’d be good, she’d cook and do
her homework and keep it all together. Then the aunt in Wisconsin gave Gun what he thought was a better option. She opened those big farmhouse doors for the
poor motherless Mazy, and he shoved her right
through, insisting to the last that this was the responsi
ble thing to do. Mazy had ignored the practical, fluttering aunt and said to Gun as he left her, Don’t
call it responsible. Call it desertion.

Mazy was usually right. It was a troublesome thing.

Now she sat in her dented MG, half frowning at him
behind green aviator-style sunglasses. Her thick red-
blond hair was chopped off straight at the jawline and her full wide lips were the same shape as her mother’s
had been, only set harder. She wore a blue chambray
work shirt, collar open at the neck, sleeves rolled to
the elbows, and the sun was lighting up the silvery hair
on her forearms. It stood straight out from her tanned
skin, as though electrified.

“You’re even starting to look like a journalist,” Gun
said. “Here for an interview?”

His daughter looked off toward the water. Not a
single muscle moved in her face. “If I were here for an
interview, you wouldn’t be grinning down at me like
that.”

“Guess you’re right.”

“Burger’s got a few good stories about you. Sports-
writer’s nightmare, the way he tells it. ‘Forget the
crowbar and you’d never get his mouth open.’”

Gun laughed, but Mazy’s smile was humorless. And he couldn’t tell what her eyes were doing behind those
green glasses. “I’ll tell him hello for you,” she
said.

“You do that.”

Mazy was twenty-five, and Gun had seen little of
her since she turned eighteen. She had gone off to a
college in Oregon, then worked for a newspaper in Portland for a couple years before taking the
Tribune
job in Minneapolis. It was good to have her back in
the state, but the truth was, she didn’t come up to see
him very often. Not that he blamed her.

He leaned against the car and took a good lungful of

fresh air, tapped a little rhythm on the tight canvas top
of the convertible. When the clench in his chest had
loosened enough he said, “Come in for breakfast. I’ll
take my shower and then we can fry up some eggs and bacon. Got some of that good stuff from Harold at the
locker. How about it?”

“You know what I’m here about, Dad
...”

“Oh, come on.” He yanked opened her door and
offered a hand, held the other behind his back in a
gesture of mock courtesy. Groaning, she took hold of
his fingers. He pulled her to her feet. “That’s my girl.”

“God,” groaned Mazy.

Showering, he pictured his daughter moving about in the bright pine kitchen, cracking eggs and brewing
coffee, setting the table with Amanda’s old china. He
knew perfectly well why she was here. In fact he was
surprised she hadn’t come sooner.

Already six months had gone by since Gun had
signed his property over to Mazy—all four hundred
acres of it, including a quarter-mile of prime lake-
shore. At the time Loon Country had been little more
than a rumor. Still, the phone calls from Lyle Hedman
and Tig Larson, the county commissioner, made Gun
angry. He’d asked himself, What’s a clean, simple way
of staying out of things? What do you have to do to
make people leave you the hell alone, once and for all?
The answer came back. The best thing to do is, you
leave.

He told his daughter he wanted to beat the state’s
inheritance laws. If he should happen to die before his
time, she shouldn’t have to spend years in the purga
tory of probate courts. That’s what he told her.
Reluctantly, she agreed to go along with the idea. She
didn’t know about Loon Country yet, or not much.

Gun had his lawyer fix it all up. Mazy got the land

for a lot less than market value, and Gun financed the
sale himself. Nothing to it—except from the begin
ning he knew that sooner or later Mazy would figure
out what he was up to.

Now the time had come, and she had one more
thing to hold against him.

3

He walked barefoot into the kitchen, making wet
footprints on the linoleum. A wide skylight was cut
into the high vaulted ceiling, and beneath it his
daughter had breakfast going. Bacon sputtered on the
big round cast-iron griddle, and eggs sizzled in a
copper-bottomed pan. She didn’t say a word as he sat
down at the table.

She handed him a fully-loaded plate: oven-baked
hash browns, three eggs sunny-side up, four strips of
thick bacon from the Stony locker, a piece of toast. He
got up and went to the stove and poured two cups of coffee from the enamel pot.

They sat down. Mazy looked at him evenly from across the table, her lips turned up in a hard smile.
Gun took a large gulp of coffee and said, “I hear you’ve been in town for a while, working.”

Mazy nodded at him.

“And house-sitting for that new editor of the local
booster sheet.”

“The
Journal’s
not a booster sheet. Not anymore.
Have you bothered to take a look at it since Carol took over?”

Gun shook his head.

“And how do you know where I’m staying? Got
your buddy Jack spying on me?”

“Look. Honey. Wouldn’t it be a little strange if Jack talked to you and then saw me and didn’t tell me what he knew? The guy’s my friend. You’re my daughter.” He shrugged.

She took off her sunglasses and lay them beside her
plate. Her brown eyes were tired-looking, bloodshot,
and for the first time ever Gun noticed wrinkles in the
soft skin underneath.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“I am too. I should have told you.”

Mazy straightened up. A mean sparkle lit up her
eyes. “That’s right—and I would’ve talked you out of
it. Maybe you need a buffer between you and the cruel
world out there”—she flung her fingers toward the door—”but it doesn’t have to be me. And I don’t like
being lied to, either.”

“I didn’t lie to you, Mazy.”

“You just avoided telling me ninety-five percent of
the truth.”

Gun looked away, then down at his hands. He said,
“You can do whatever you want with the land. I’m not
asking you to protect it. You can keep it forever, or
you can sell out to Lyle for a million bucks and let him
build a giant waterslide on it. It’s up to you. I don’t
want anybody fighting my battles. All I want is to be
left alone. I want to find a place up north as quiet as
this place used to be. I want to live up there, and I want people to let me be.”

“So that you’re able to continue your penance,” Mazy said. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

Gun shook his head. “Nope.”

“Good. Because I’m sick and tired of your guilty
pride, or whatever it is that keeps you out here in the
woods.” She spit the words at him.

Gun lifted his eyes to his daughter’s face, flexed the
muscles of his jaw and leveled a finger at her. He
dropped his voice a register. “You know what you’d
be saying if I’d decided to stay here and use my
influence to try and kill this Loon Country thing? If I
did
get involved, you know what you’d say?”

“No, what would I say?”

“You’d be all over me for throwing my weight
around. You’d say I hadn’t changed after all. You’d come up with every argument under the sun to prove that Lyle Hedman’s project is good for the area, good
for the people around here. You’d make the guy out to
be some kind of philanthropist.” Gun laughed and
took a bite of toast with egg on it. “Tell me I’m
wrong,” he said, aiming his fork at her, chewing.

“Maybe I would,” said Mazy.

“You would.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, opened
her lips as if to speak, then clamped them shut again.
She shook her head and turned her attention to
breakfast.

When she was finished eating, she arranged her
silverware neatly on her plate—it was something
she’d done ever since Gun could remember—and put
her green sunglasses back on. “None of it makes the
least bit of difference,” she said. “You know that.”

“What do you mean?”

“To Mom,” said Mazy. “Or to me, for that matter.”

“Makes a difference to me, though.” He stood up
and quickly cleared the table, started filling the sink
with hot water. Mazy stayed where she was.

As he’d done thousands of times in the last ten
years, Gun forced a scene into his mind—it was a formalized nightmare now, one he used against him-

self: Amanda, home from
work and wrapped in a towel, is running her bathwa
ter. She hears the phone and picks it up, expecting
Gun’s voice, reassurance that the rumors are just
rumors. But it’s another man’s voice. He’s a reporter,
he says,
American Mirror.
He asks what she feels like,
sharing her star.

Two or three times in his career Gun had seen his
face on the tabloids. It had always been laughable
stuff: Gun Pedersen’s Magic Bat. It got him kidded in
the clubhouse, but all this about Susannah . . . He’d
never spoken to the woman again; it made him sick to
think of his own success and the endless goddamn
choices that had come with it.

That evening Amanda had boarded a flight for Minne
apolis, where the Tigers were playing the Twins. She
was coming, she told Gun—phoning him after the
reporter’s call—to straighten things out finally. But
she never arrived. Her plane went down in a farmer’s cornfield west of Eau Claire.

Now he shut off the water and pushed the sleeves of
his sweatshirt up past his elbows. He took a clean dishrag from the wooden peg above the sink and
submerged a handful of silverware in the suds. Mazy
got up from the table and went to the refrigerator,
where a stained white towel hung from the door
handle.

“People are saying all kinds of things,” Gun said.
“You’ve probably heard most of it already.”

“Probably.”

“How I’m ducking a fight, siding with the big-
money boys, selling out the environmentalists.” He
rinsed a fistful of silverware and set it carefully in the
drain rack.

“Well, the truth is you
could
have done something.
People around here would’ve listened to you. You’ve
been here awhile now, you’ve got money. If you had
wanted, you could’ve bought the Devitz land yourself
—like that committee of Tig’s asked you to. You
could have pulled it right out from under Lyle
Hedman’s feet. People know that. No land, no Loon
Country.”

“Jeremy needs every cent he can get out of that
swamp of his,” said Gun. “Lyle gave him top
dollar.”

“Jeremy would’ve let it go for half the price to save
this lake.”

“And then Lyle would have gone after someone
else’s land and people would’ve asked me to buy that
too.”

“Maybe.”

Out the window above the sink Gun watched a high
range of mountain-blue clouds advance from the west
and put a hard slate surface on the water. He was
nearly finished washing the dishes when Mazy spoke
again. “Are you going to the benefit tonight?”

“What’s that?”

“The Hedmans are throwing a dinner and dance,
proceeds to the paper-mill workers who’ve been laid
off.”

“Yeah? Pretty funny, considering Hedman laid
them off. Great P.R. stunt. The man of means who
cares about the little guy.”

“It was Geoff’s idea.”

“Good for Geoff. He must’ve inherited the old
man’s sense of humor.”

“Geoff has
...
changed,” said Mazy. Something
shifted in her voice.

“And Jack tells me you’ve been spending quite a little time with him this week.” Gun hadn’t meant to
bring it up but he couldn’t help it.

She turned and stared at him, hard. “I don’t think
that’s any of your concern.”

He lifted both hands out of the water and held

them, palms out, in front of his chest. “All right,
okay.”

She dried a plate, twisting her neck around like she
did when she was trying to relax. “What I was
wondering is, how about going with me tonight?
Somebody wants to meet you.”

“I’ve already met Geoff, remember?” Gun tried to
put a look on his face that said, All in good fun. “I’m
sure
he
does.”

Mazy sighed. “No. Carol Long. She’s getting back
into town tonight.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m driving north this
afternoon to look at some land. Won’t be back until late.”

“Fine, then.” She dropped her towel on the counter
and walked to the door. As she swung open the screen,
Gun spoke her name. She stopped on the threshold
and turned. Her face was inscrutable. He tried to
smile at her but couldn’t.

“Just tell me there’s nothing between you and
Geoff,” he said. “He’s not worth your time. Tell me
you’re only using him to get at the story.”

Mazy worked her hands into the tight front pockets
of her Levi’s. “I’m only using him to get at the
story,” she said, then she left and the door slammed behind her.

Standing at the sink, soapy wet hands hanging down
at his sides, Gun watched his daughter walk toward her car. The sway in her stride was the same as her
mother’s had been, and she held her head cocked a
little to the right, as if listening to a quiet voice. It was a habit of hers since she was a small girl and suffered
damage to her hearing from an ear infection.

She started her car now, turned it around, and
drove out of sight around the bend in Gun’s rutted
driveway. He realized his phone was ringing.