The houseboat, p.1
The Houseboat, page 1
Advance Praise for The Houseboat
“The Houseboat is a worthy addition to the canon of country noir. Bahr’s novel is eerie, dark, and disturbing in the best possible way.”
—Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women
“The Houseboat is a new noir classic. I loved it.”
—Tod Goldberg, author of The Low Desert
“The Houseboat is as taut and chilling as it is vivid and self-assured. Bahr delivers a gritty, page-turning debut not to be missed.”
—Jonathan Evison, author of Legends of the North Cascades
“Dane Bahr has written a classic mystery that propels his readers through the avenues, back roads, and waterways of a small town on a dire mission to sort through gossip and find the truth. A subtle and smartly paced psychological page-turner with characters you love for their flaws.”
—Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star
“With scenes as propulsive as any found in True Detective and dialogue that could hold its own against the novels of Cormac McCarthy or Donald Ray Pollock, Dane Bahr’s debut, The Houseboat, is truly a thing of beauty! Enticing the reader from the get-go, with a clear, clever, and ultimately haunting writing style, Bahr delivers on every page.”
—Urban Waite, author of Sometimes the Wolf
“With echoes as far-reaching as Raymond Chandler and James Salter, Bahr’s work stands uniquely on its own.”
—Jarret Middleton, author of Darkansas
“The Houseboat will unsettle you, scare you, and break your heart. It’s grimly authentic, bleak and beautiful. Its people wear the faces we see in our mirrors, and the ones we glimpse in our most terrifying dreams. It’s a distinctly American gothic mystery—perfect reading for the Lovecraftian times we are living in.”
—Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses
“It’d be easy to mistake Rigby Sellers—the drifter at the center of Dane Bahr’s The Houseboat—as an invention of Cormac McCarthy or William Gay, but it’d also be a mistake. Bahr has created a literary miscreant all his own, and for all the fright Rigby conjures—and there’s plenty of it—he’s as much a foil for the supposedly civilized small Iowa town he haunts as he is a spectacle unto himself. This book is as eerie and dark as a Mississippi river slough, and just as rank. You don’t want to miss it.”
—Peter Geye, author of Northernmost
“Dane Bahr has an unteachable knack to make the natural world a character. And once the book’s ecosystems spring to vibrant life, there is a hell of a page-turner floating on top.”
—Joshua Mohr, author of Model Citizen
“The Houseboat is an unruly, scarred and dusk-haunted book. In Bahr’s stunning, transcendent descent into the old guilt of our collective humanity, something utterly unique awakens.”
—Shann Ray, author of Atomic Theory 7
“The Houseboat is a little bit Eudora Welty, a splash of Edgar Allan Poe, and a whole lot of originality. Dane Bahr levels a landscapist’s eye on 1960 Iowa and a gothic one on the human currents circulating in its cornfields, woods, and waterways. It’s a wonderful juxtaposition of the bucolic and the horrifying.”
—Glen Chamberlain, author of Conjugations of the Verb To Be
THE HOUSEBOAT
A NOVEL
DANE BAHR
COUNTERPOINT
Berkeley, California
For JB
. . . this desolation out here called forth all that was evil in human nature.
—O. E. RØLVAAG
THE HOUSEBOAT
TABLE OF CONTENT
PROLOGUE
PART I: MINNEAPOLIS 1960
WITNESS #1
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
WITNESS #2
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
WITNESS #3
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
PART II: OSCAR 1959
WITNESS #4
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
WITNESS #5
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
WITNESS #6
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
WITNESS #7
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
PART III: OSCAR 1960
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
PART IV: OSCAR 1960
CHAPTER 43
WITNESS #8
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
WITNESS #9
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
During the late summer of dry years in that valley of Iowa, when the rains were unreliable, the elm trees and bur oaks hardened and grayed with the dust of passing trucks on the county roads. All the green of the Allamakee Valley was dulled by that dust and a wilted look to everything appeared and the horses and the cows, dusted in their pastures, moved like ash blowing in a small wind. The little grass near the roads was short and brittle and the weeds rooted in the dry ground turned a dark green and pushed out along the dry earth. The leaves on the trees grew crisp and rattled on their branches. Ants scuttled in thin processions, dark rivulets on the tallow land, and grasshoppers clicked on their inadequate wings and ratcheted their long legs together in the narrow fields of bluestem. Tall clouds grew in the distance each afternoon, hopeful, but dropped their rains over another country, and the tractors crossing their fields drove the dust into the air. The evenings were golden and the settling dust gilded the sky. And the mornings were heralded with dew but the white sun quickly burned that away, and the river would slip through the lowest stones of the bed like a whisper. The bullfrogs huddled in their drying places and cried out wildly into the hot nights. The hardened prints of animals in the dry mud showed where the river had been, and the blanched logs of floods past told where it was going.
There was a saying among these people: A dry year will scare you to death, and a wet year will kill you.
In the wet years when the pale blue of the sky darkened and the big clouds, heavy with rain, came from the south and did not skirt the valley, the country changed. The air grew muggy. The dry county roads became cratered, slowly at first as the new rains came gently, and the coming rain gave a sweet smell. Mothers would come from their houses and call in their children and the men working their fields would pause, hooking their thumbs in their denim overalls or stoving their hands into the hip pockets, and face the darkening sky and sniff at the air.
The first rains cleaned the thin film of dust from the trucks and soon there was no dust at all. The county roads became gullied and sloppy with red mud and the trucks forded the slop. The men huddled with their arms crossed in the open bays of their barns and muttered crossly once in a while as the rain pounded down. During particularly wet years a group might gather at someone’s place and in the barn they would set up picnic tables and hold a kind of impromptu social as a talisman to the rain. The women would bring pies and the children would chase each other through the barn, someone might bring a fiddle or a guitar, and a few might even dance, but you could see in the hard faces of the men the worry they carried like religion, and their eyes could not lie. The women would steal careful glances toward their men, sharing their worries, as they served the pies to the children, talismans themselves.
Two days of hard rain and the townspeople would watch the river turn brown as the water climbed its banks. Three days and the mayor would close the smaller bridges on the outskirts of town and the townspeople would begin to sandbag the south end. Four days of hard rain and the river became a butcher. It would rip at the banks as it swelled and cleave the edges of cropland like a knife to brisket. The rain fell and the river would feed. There was nothing it wouldn’t take: trapping pigs and cows and gnawing on timber girders until the bridges collapsed on themselves. Days of that and no ease. Dawn would come but only because the world still turned. But the east would not pale like their prayers had asked for. A dawn rising like dusk, and no sun and no relent, and the children would not run to play in it like they first did, and as the day became dusk the sky would darken and night would fall quickly and still the rain came and the river butchering.
PART I
MINNEAPOLIS 1960
WITNESS #1
That was a strange time. Seems every fifty years or so yeh hear bout them kind a things happenin. Yeh can try to rationalize it, divvy er out. Put the blame wherever it makes yeh feel better bout it all. But it ain’t the truth. All these things happenin now. I remember hearin bout Sheriff Fielding’s cousin, Eli, down in Willow, that’s jest north a Davenport, all em years ago when he was the newly lected sheriff, all em missin people and how it all turned out. That story makes yer skin crawl. Yeh know I ’m goin to change what I said earlier bout it bein ever fifty years. Maybe it used to be ever fifty years but it’s happenin more now it seems. The world’s changin.
Here’s a little somethin I told my sisternlaw. Twenty years ago, maybe twenty-five, she chewed me out bout my drinkin, said, Don’t yeh want to live to see a hundern? Ain’t yeh wantin to see them grandkids git married? Ain’t yeh wantin to be a great grandaddy? I told er, if the lord cares fer me to see that age he’ll let me. I told er a hundern ain’t up to me. That’s the way I feel anyway. The damn direction this world is goin, I’d consider myself lucky not to have to live through it.
1
The nine o’clock sun burned above the eastern horizon, churning a smoke on the surface of the Mississippi River. From his office window, Edward Ness, a handsome and almost tall man around thirty-five years old, watched the laminar bands of sunlight fall frayed through the avenues of downtown Minneapolis. The city sounds swelling up the buildings. Car horns. Vendors. A jet muffled overhead. Ness took his coffee at his desk and blew the steam from it. He had his polished shoes propped in an opened bottom drawer. This morning he wore a gray suit with the jacket hung on the back of the chair. His black tie was clipped to his shirt. He was clean-shaven and his blond hair was neatly in place.
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples with one hand, attempting to work out the hangover. Then, giving up, he lifted a bottle of rye from under his feet, along with a bottle of aspirin, and unscrewed the top and poured a finger’s worth into his coffee. The coffee was too hot to swallow down the pills so he just chewed the aspirin. He sat a moment with his eyes closed. Tapped the headline of the morning paper with his finger. Blew on the coffee. Then the phone rang.
This is Ness.
Mr Ness. This is Deputy Clinton down here in Oscar.
Oscar?
Yes sir.
Why have I heard that? Where the hell’s Oscar?
Iowa, sir.
Iowa.
That’s right.
This have something to do with that grave robbery?
No sir, Clinton said. I don’t believe so. That was down in Cedar Rapids.
I see. Well. Ness leaned back and closed his eyes again. What can I do for you, Deputy?
Yeh get the mornin paper up there? The Tribune I think it is?
Looking at it right now, Ness said. He leaned forward in his chair and looked at the picture on the front page. The photo of a campground and the town’s name in the caption. Ah, Oscar, he said. I see. Looks like you’ve got something going on down there.
I ain’t got the foggiest what we got goin on down here, Clinton said. No one does.
You get in touch with the chief?
He’s the one who recommended you.
Lucky me.
When can yeh get here?
How do you mean?
Chief said you were free.
He did, did he? Ness closed his eyes and rubbed them. How’s the chief know about Oscar, Iowa?
He and the sheriff down here go way back, Clinton said. Fishing buddies and all that. Chief called us. A bit of a favor, I suppose.
You don’t have anyone there? No one in . . . where’s the next biggest town?
Des Moines.
Yeah, Des Moines. No one there?
No one as good anyway. Or so the sheriff and the chief say. Chief said it’d be good for yeh, whatever that means?
Did he? I see. Well, we all need salvation, don’t we, Deputy?
Pardon?
Nothing. How long’s the drive?
Three, four hours, if there ain’t any traffic.
Ness leaned back in his chair again and looked out the window.
Don’t you have any detectives kicking around down there in Oscar?
No sir, he said. Like I said, none any good anyway.
I see. Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning. He was about to hang up when he suddenly spoke into the phone. Deputy? You there?
Sir?
Let me ask you one more thing.
All right.
You got any good, quiet hotels in that town of yours?
2
Seven years gone and every night the same dream: Ness is walking through a bright field with grass reaching his waist. It is windy and the grass is blowing. In the distance, wearing the same clothes he last saw them in, his wife and son are standing on a slight rise facing him. The hill is barren, only dirt, and as Ness comes closer he can see his wife’s hands are bleeding. His son is holding his mother’s hand so his hand is bloody too. Every night in the same dream he starts to run toward them. The grass, however, begins to have a current and holds him in place. He’s close enough to see that his wife has a bullet hole over her heart. His son’s shirt is stained in the same fashion. He hollers at them and at this point, every night in the same dream, a thunderclap and his wife and son disappear.
And every night he comes awake from dark to dark, his shirt all full of sweat, his breath trying to catch up, and he goes to his kitchen where he keeps a calendar, and in the stale darkness marks an X over the day, and he doesn’t know if he marks it for the dreams or to prove that he’s still here.
Seven years since he lost them. What the policeman told him, via a witness, was that her purse had gotten snagged on her shoulder as the man tried to take it. He panicked and shot her. Out of horror of what he’d just committed, almost as an impulse, he shot the boy too. A petty crime turned worse. They found the purse on the sidewalk two blocks away. Her wallet was gone, the photos of her family in their thin plastic sheaths remained.
Ness was only twenty-eight at the time. His wife twenty-six. Their son, who was afraid of thunderstorms but liked the rain, was four. Ness thought about that often. Thought: Seven years ago Peter was still a baby, and seven years before that he wasn’t even real.
Ness had never been a drinker before that point. Been drunk maybe once or twice. Got sick off cherry wine one summer night after graduation and that stopped it before it became a habit. In fact, he never lost control back then. Linn, his late wife, used to joke that he wouldn’t do anything if a little fun was involved.
Seven years. What he couldn’t fathom was that the world still turned. People still went to work and paid bills and cooked supper and made love. The earth still swung around the sun and he on it.
He had sold the old house in the north end of the city because some memories are like torture. He had arranged for movers but did not remember arranging it. Perhaps it was him, perhaps some secretary within the bureau. It seemed great swathes of time passed without a single recollection. He sat at his desk most mornings, still drunk, not saying a word until one morning someone said the wrong word, and he lost his temper and tumbled into a rage. He was put on leave, the captain and another agent having to nearly carry him down to the street where a cab waited to take him home.
Take some time, the captain said.
He said, Take a shower.
Get your head right, he said.
That was six years ago, the first anniversary of their deaths.
He was reckless in the months to follow. Crashed his car one afternoon into a field of cows, killing several Holsteins. Fist fights in bars he was now banned from. When he was reinstated he nearly beat a man to death during a suspected breaking and entering. The perpetrator, Ness later heard, was now confined to a wheelchair and had to eat his supper through a straw.
Not sober, but the drinking after that incident lessened to a degree. He found God for a time and then lost him again. Church, it seemed, was held too early. And one night with hands clasped, on his knees, he simply ran out of things to say. If there was a God, Ness thought, he’d heard this all before, and night after night the only thing Ness wanted couldn’t be returned, so, rising from his knees, the only other thing he wanted was a drink and that was just down the street. And like religion, he swore he’d be better about it. And he was. He drank, but was reasonable. Not with the frequency or the amount, but in his demeanor, his temper. It was his secret that he would keep to himself.
For seven years the smallest darkness brought the terrible image of Linn and Peter. He had seen them lying on the ground. They were each covered in a cloth. She under a size for adults, the boy a tiny one. That such a coroner’s tarp could be so small seemed the greater tragedy.
