Arnie Vogel arrives in town, having inherited the local newspaper, THE INQUISITOR, from his grandmother. Weird stuff begins to happen.

Chapter One

Home on the Range

“A man travels the world over in search ofwhat he needs and returns home to find it.”
—George Moore


Jane, the flight attendant, was from County Cork and spoke fluent Gaelic. She taught Arnie how to say “You have nice jugs” and “I want to stick my tongue down your throat,” among other lewd expressions on the long flight from Shannon to Gander, Newfoundland, where they stopped to refuel and have an ice cream cone. Who knew watching somebody eat an ice cream cone could be so sexy?
Back in the air, she got busy serving lunch and he was left to his own devices. For a moment there, he’d thought he might get to join the Mile High Club. Arnie fell asleep reading an Ed McBain novel.
He awoke to an elevator-like sensation as the plane descended through the clouds, Lake Superior’s shoreline materializing below. The edge of Superior National Forest--a blend of white pine, spruce, balsam fur, aspen and birch—-appeared. Whitecaps lapped against the shore; tugboats bobbed on the waves, clustering around an ore carrier like piglets nursing their mother.
The plane landed and taxied to the Duluth International terminal. Arnie said goodbye to Jane and walked down the tunnel to the waiting area, where he was met with smiling Minnesota faces.
He found his seabag and waited in line for customs. These normally stoic characters smiled at him, too, and wished him a happy Thanksgiving, barely looking at his duffel.
Soon he found himself outside the terminal, hailing a cab. The cabbie was a Nigerian who barely spoke English. And he wasn’t smiling.
Arnie took the cab from the airport to the Greyhound bus station where he learned the next bus for East Embarrass wasn’t due to leave for six hours. Although his chances of catching a ride were along the lines of Jesse Ventura being chosen the next Dali Lama, he decided to hitchhike. He was dressed in a navy pea coat and a watch cap and he’d let his hair and beard grow long, so he guessed he must have looked like a carjacker to the drivers flooding by doing ten miles over the speed limit. Luckily, the weather was decent for late November, no more than fifty or so. Still he felt chilled, as he was used to the moderate Irish climate. Arnie must have walked a couple of miles, musing over the last time he’d been down this stretch of road.
After his high school graduation ceremony, his old man handed him a fifty dollar bill and said, “You’re on your own, boy.” Hadn’t even had a chance to hang up his cap and gown and the old man had to ruin it for him.
Later at the house, the old man had tried to explain himself. He lit a Lucky and offered Arnie one. Although he’d never smoked a cigarette in his life, Arnie took the cigarette and moved his face toward the old man’s lighter. “I suppose I owe you an explanation,” his old man said. “You see, when I graduated high school, I wanted to go to the University to study mechanical engineering. I was always tinkering with something, taking things apart and putting them back together. I had a real gift for it. You know what my dad said? He said he couldn’t afford to send me. The old fuck owned a thousand acres of prime timberland and he couldn’t afford to send me! Then he said, ‘Even if I could afford your schooling, I wouldn’t pay it. A man’s got to work for what he gets in life. I’d be doing you a real disservice by pampering you.’ That’s how I wound up working at the goddamn paper mill.”
Arnie took a drag on the cigarette, which led to a coughing jag. He felt dizzy and not just because of the Lucky. “Just because your father was cheap doesn’t
mean . . .”
His old man gave him one of his Clint Eastwood looks, which usually meant a jolt up alongside the head, but he just nodded and said, “That’s what I always told myself. But then you went and flunked Trigonometry. If I were to send you off to college, it would be like flushing good money down the crapper. But, to show you what a prince I am, I’m gonna let you enjoy your grandmother’s cooking for another week, think of it as a graduation present. At least you got that far. I was kind of surprised you made it actually.”
“What about Bernie?” Arnie said. “Her and me were talking about getting married.” This was a bald-faced lie; Bernie had even less faith in him than the old man. She’d turned him down flat, but he was a drowning man, grasping for twigs, empty ice cream containers, dog houses, anything that would float.
The old man ran his hands through his thinning hair. “That girl is like the son I never had. If you’re serious, the paper mill needs a sweeper.”
That did it. He’d rather starve than work at the goddamn paper mill. He left two days later, hitching a ride to Duluth with a buddy who worked on the ore boats. And he hadn’t been back since, not even for the old man’s version of a funeral.
Arnie finally caught a ride with a trucker on his way to International Falls. The cab smelled like a laundry hamper; the driver, a hairy beast named Fess Herbaugh, tipped the scales at a good three hundred pounds. He wore mutton-chop whiskers and smiled like a toothpaste ad, showing off square teeth as yellow as butter.
The cab rocked like a buckboard, the wheels drumming a rhythm on the cracks in the Tarmac. Above the tumult, his voice girlishly high, Fess asked Arnie where he was heading. Arnie told him East Embarrass and the trucker said, “Nice town.”
That was the extent of their conversation for the next couple of miles, and Arnie was left with his own thoughts. They passed Twig, Independence, and Canyon, little towns where Arnie remembered playing basketball. Point guard, couldn’t shoot a lick but knew how to distribute the ball. Bernie had been the manager. Her three-point shot was better than anyone’s on the team, but the coach wouldn’t let her play. “They got their own team,” he’d said.
They were nearing Central Lakes when Fess asked where he was coming from. “Been working on a ferry between Galway Bay and the Aran Islands,” Arnie said.
“I spent a summer on the ore boats once,” the trucker said. “Got so seasick I thought I’d die.”
All of a sudden you couldn’t shut the guy up. He went on to tell Arnie how he’d been married five times with a passel of kids. Never one to stay in the same place long. Then he went and sang a verse of that old Hank Snow song, I’ve Been Everywhere.
“I hope you’re not thinking of settling down in East Embarrass,” Fess said, his high voice cracking like Slim Pickins’ in Dr. Strangelove. “The mines are mostly closed you know.”
“Nope, family business,” Arnie said, and that was the end of the conversation until the trucker let him off at the junction between 53 and 169.
“Say hello to Mary T. at the R&P,” the trucker said. “Best looking woman this side of Vegas.”
“I’ll do that,” Arnie said, although he had no idea who the trucker was talking about. Arnie could hear him singing the second verse of I’ve Been Everywhere as he jammed the semi in gear and roared on down the highway. As the truck grew smaller, he noticed the lettering on the back door of the truck. It read “The Avenger.” Hmmph.
Arnie hoisted his seabag up on his shoulder and turned onto 169. Only fifteen miles to East Embarrass.
Farmers and miners are a bit less intimidated by hitchhikers, so it didn’t take too long before Arnie caught another ride, and in twenty minutes, he found himself standing across the street from the Finlander Motel. When he tried to cross the street, a little red Maserati breezed by doing a good sixty miles an hour, damn near knocking him down. The top was down and three teenager boys were yukking it up, playing some kind of rap music. When Arnie yelled at them, one of them flipped a lit cigarette at him. Arnie memorized the license plate number. He and the driver wearing the do-rag would meet up again, and when they did, it wouldn’t be pretty.
The motel clerk was playing solitaire when Arnie entered the manager’s office. A thatch of rust-colored hair, tangled and unkempt, a cigarette dangling from a corner of his lips.
“What can I do fer yeh, Mack?” the clerk said, his breath redolent of enough alcohol to make a man woozy.
“I’d like a room,” Arnie said, waving away the smell.
The clerk balanced the cigarette butt on a mayonnaise jar lid and rifled through a drawer. He set a registration pad on the counter. “Name and permanent address.”
“I don’t have a permanent address.”
The clerk fixed him with the palest blue eyes Arnie had ever seen. “Look, Mack. Put down watever de hell yuh want. We’re not de FBI, yuh know.”
“How about my grandmother’s newspaper? I just got in from Ireland and—“
”Ireland? Lads from Ireland gets a twenty percent discount.” The clerk reached his hand across the counter, his fingernails blackened, his palms calloused. “Name’s Donovan,” he said.
“Vogel,” Arnie said, giving the Mick a fish hand. If he got too chummy, the Mick would hit him up for a loan.
Arnie filled out the registration slip and pushed it back at the Mick. Damn strange coincidence meeting a Mick almost as soon as he touched down in America.
He paid the thirty bucks for the room, then walked a block down to Main Street. Turning to look over his shoulder at the motel, he saw the Mick watching him from the doorway. What a nut cake.
Rounding the corner onto Main Street, he stopped dead in his tracks. The place was different. The street was now a three-lane with trees lining the curbs. The street lights had been replaced with faux gas lights. The Bijou, where he and Bernie had gone on their first formal date, now had three screens rather than the one whose feature never seemed to change. There was a new bank, a flat, one-story rectangle with a drive-up window, where the old grade school used to be, just down the hill from the Catholic church. He remembered when they tore the school down and sold off the bricks as memorabilia for a buck apiece.
Richie Merten’s law office was above the old Rexall drugstore. Richie and Arnie had been boyhood friends not too long ago and here he was a lawyer already. Arnie knew Richie would rub it in, but he wanted to get this over with and get back to Galway City as soon as possible. He had a date with the stew he’d met on the plane.
The receptionist asked him if he had an appointment. He told her he didn’t but that he’d received a registered letter from Richie telling him that his grandmother had died and left him her newspaper in her will. The woman ran a lacquered finger down Richie’s appointment calendar, then said, “We have no openings, but I’ll see if he’ll see you during his coffee break.”
Arnie grabbed a copy of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED out of the magazine rack next to the couch and was reading an article about Barry Bonds and steroids when Richie popped out of his office, looking like a slightly older member of ‘Nsnyc, with moussed hair and a diamond in one ear. Richie looked straight at him where he was sitting on the couch, then asked the receptionist where Arnie Vogel was. When she nodded in his direction, he said, “My god, Arnie, you look like friggin’ Blackbeard.”
Not too far wrong. Once Arnie had gone to a Halloween party in Dublin, dressed as Edward Teach, candles in his beard and everything.
Richie took Arnie’s arm and they trotted down the stairs leading from Richie’s office and walked over to the Northstar Diner. When they got there, he did a double take. Bernie was waitressing. She’d put on a few pounds, but they were good pounds. Her face was fuller, more heart-shaped and she wore her wheat-colored hair in a bob instead of the ponytail she’d always sported as a girl. Arnie’s heart was pounding so hard he thought he might have a coronary.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. “Long time no see.”
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Richie said. “Got to see a man about a horse anyway.”
“Sooo, I like your beard,” she said.
“Couldn’t even grow one when I saw you last. How’re the kids?”
“Would you like to see them?”
“God no, they wouldn’t even know who I was.”
“Silly. Proud mamas carry pictures of their children, you know.”
She hauled her purse, a saddlebag with more compartments than the Titanic, out from beneath the counter. She rummaged around until she found her billfold.”
Two little towheaded boys and a pigtailed girl about ten or so with hair as black as Arnie’s. “What’re their names?” he asked.
“Mindy, Joseph, and Timmy. I suppose you’re wondering about Mindy?”
“I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
“Well she’s not. I don’t know if you heard, but my mother died. She was really sick for a long time and couldn’t work. The bank was going to repossess her house if I didn’t do something. Paul was the loan agent.”
“No, I hadn’t heard. This Paul person, do you . . .?”
“Not like us, but he’s a good person, and he’s the father of my children. There are different kinds of love.”
They were both silent for a moment, she because she must have realized the inappropriateness of what she’d said, he because he was afraid she’d hear the break in his voice if he said anything.
“So, how long are you going to be in town? We should get together. Talk about old times.”
He swallowed, a lump in his throat the size of a softball. “Just for a few days. Long enough to sell the newspaper.”
Was that disappointment in her eyes?
Before she could say anything, Richie came out of the restroom, and they took a window seat. Bernie brought them coffee and a pitcher of cream. “You come see me now, you hear?” she said, touching him on the forearm.
When she left, Richie said, “Think she’s still got the hots for you, bud.”
“Nah, she’s an old married lady. About the newspaper, how much is it worth?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of the syndicates would want it.” He stirred his coffee. “I hear your gram had offers over the years but would never sell.”
“Wanna handle it for me?”
Richie blew in his coffee, took a sip. “Ah, you’ll have to wait a bit. There’s a stipulation in the will.”
“What sort of stipulation?”
“Your grandmother wanted you to work at the paper for a year. She thought by that time you’d learn to love the place as much as she did. Besides, there’s a staff of about a dozen people who’d be out of work. That syndicate would buy the place to eliminate the competition.”
Arnie set his coffee cup down with a clatter. “There’s no way I’m gonna be able to handle a year.”
“I’ll take a look at the books and let you know how much you’re missing out on. Just tell Mrs. Owens you talked to me so she doesn’t chew me a new asshole when I ask to see them.”
“Mrs. Owens from junior high? She worked for my grandmother?”
“She helped your gram when she went back to school.” Richie took a notepad out of his coat pocket and scribbled a message to himself. “Your gram graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in mass communications. You’re lookin’ at one of the finest weeklies in Minnesota.”
Arnie drained his cup. “Why does everything have to be so complicated? What happens to the paper if I don’t make it?”
“Fluffy and Puffy would be very rich cats.”
“You’re kidding.”
Richie grinned at him.
“Asshole.”
#
A man on the street told Arnie THE INQUISITOR was located in the old post office building next to Olson’s Funeral Home.
THE INQUISITOR was frantic with activity, so Arnie had to wait at the counter until someone finally noticed him. “Can I help you, sir?” said a young girl with a safety pin in her eyebrow, her black hair tied in a square knot.
“Looking for Mrs. Owens,” he said. “I’m Arnie Vogel.”
She gave him a quick up and down with raccoon-like eyes. “Right. The prodigal grandson,” she said, still giving him the once-over. “You’re not what I expected.”
Mrs. Owens came out of the back room, a phone held to her ear. Blue hair, blue eye shadow, blue pillows for breasts. “I never saw them before, Sheriff,” she said. “There were six of them, all of them rather short. The one I gave the money to had sort of an accent.”
The girl grabbed her arm and led her to the counter. “It’s him,” she said. “He’s here.”
Mrs. Owens held her hand to her chest, dropped the phone on the counter, picked it up and said, “Have to call you back, Mort, Arnie’s home.”
She stood there, her hand still on her chest, beaming at him. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.” She pointed to a door in the counter. “Come on in here and let me give you a hug.”
It was like being mugged by a sumo wrestler. Gasping and wheezing, he followed her into her office, a little cubbyhole just off the reception area.
“What was that about on the phone?” he asked. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”
“Oh, that. It was nothing. My own darn fault. You’d think I’d know better by now. If something sounds too good to be true , it probably is. I was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee when a panel truck pulled up. Some redheaded men got out and started caulking the cracks in my driveway. ‘I wonder how those fellows knew I was planning on having my driveway sealed?’ I told myself. After ten minutes or so, one of them rang the doorbell. He said he’d just finished a job over at the Mortensons. He had some leftover supplies and wondered if I’d like him to do my driveway. He’d do it for two hundred dollars. Ordinarily a job this size he’d charge four.”
Arnie remembered the motel clerk and the tar under his fingernails. He seemed like the type who’d bilk old people out of their money.
“I didn’t know any Mortensons but there are so many new people in town lately that it could’ve been one of them. Usually, I’d never agree to any maintenance on the property without my husband’s approval, but he was in the hospital being monitored. Dr. Simmons had him on some experimental arthritis medication with some scary side effects. Two hundred dollars sounded like an awfully good price. So, like an idiot, I paid the man the money, having just cashed my check from the newspaper. I went to make myself a boiled egg and some toast. When I checked on the men ten minutes later, the truck was gone.”
“When was this?”
“Last week, before the first snow. I was hoping to get the job done before the ground froze.”
“Does the sheriff have any idea who it might be?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ve lost more playing Blackjack at Black Bear.” She took a scrapbook down from a shelf behind and above her desk. “Let me show you something,” she said. “Your grandmother kept these.”
Arnie sat in the visitor’s chair and opened the scrapbook. He’d been a compulsive shutterbug during his travels and had sent his gram pictures of all the places he’d been. The Norwegian fjords, Notre Dame Cathedral, The Brandenburg Gate.
“I was thinking you could work with Helmi. She’s quite an impressive girl, despite the Goth get-up. She majored in psych before she caught the journalism bug working on the college newspaper. I know you’ll be a good reporter. As I recall, you were quite the budding writer, even in seventh grade.”
Arnie didn’t tell her what Richie had told him. He still had hope there was a way he could contest the will. “That’s not my kind of bag, Mrs. O.,” he said.
She gave him that I’m-so-disappointed-in-you look that always made him feel like toe jam when he’d been in seventh grade. “How old are you now, hah? Thirty? Don’t you think it’s time you settled down?”
“Thirty is young,” he said, although he didn’t really feel that way at all.”
As they were talking, the phone rang. Apparently it was Richie because she said, “He said you could what?” then slammed the receiver down on its cradle. “Don’t even think about selling THE INQUISITOR,” she said. “Do you know what this place meant to your grandmother? When she started it, THE INQUISITOR was no more than a pathetic little advertising rag. It was bad enough you couldn’t make it home for her funeral.”
He reached for a Lucky. He hadn’t been quite this flustered since the time she’d caught him cheating on a spelling test. “Don’t you know what smoking does to you?” she scolded, slapping the cigarette out of his hand.
“Look,” he said, his skin burning like frostbite, “Richie told me about the people working here, and if you can come up with the financing, I’ll sell the newspaper to you.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “How old would you say I am?”
Older than dirt. Nanoseconds younger than the Big Bang. Had he said that out loud? Sometimes he did without realizing it. It had cost him several jobs.
His first impulse was always the witty rejoinder, even in seventh grade when he got caught throwing spitballs, he’d say, “Just practicing up for quail hunting season, Mrs. O.” And she’d never been able to keep from chuckling. Never worked in Trig class, though. Mr. Hanson, who had an ever-increasing bald spot on the back of his head, didn’t appreciate it when he said, “How are things at the monastery, Mr. H.?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Fifty-five?”
Mrs. Owens gave him a one-cornered smile. “I’ll be sixty-three on my next birthday. My husband has rheumatoid arthritis with serious complications. It won’t be long before he goes. We were planning on taking a cruise
before . . . We were counting on your taking over . . . after an apprentice period, of course.”
She sat there staring at him. He swore she never blinked. It was mesmerizing. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she said, “Why don’t we run this by the others, hah?”
The next thing he knew she’d called a meeting of the staff, introducing him to Candace Fox, the advertising manager–-“She has four kids, ranging from four to eighteen and her husband has been laid off at the taconite plant.”—-Diane Mullins, layout supervisor, whose old mother was in a wheelchair; Phil Graham, the business manager, who’d lost a leg in Vietnam; and the girl with the safety pin in her brow, Vilhelmiina “Helmi“ Escola, reporter, who evidently needed the money to pay for multiple piercings.
“Arnie’s thinking of selling the newspaper,” Mrs. Owens said. This announcement was met with a crescendo of groans to rival those in an Irish pub at closing time.
A puddle of sweat formed beneath his underarms. “W-we’ll keep everybody on,” he stammered. “I m-mean I won’t sell unless the new owners agree to keep the staff intact.”
This didn’t seem to make them happy. They looked like one of those sepia-tinted photos from the early twentieth century where no one ever smiled. He looked over at Mrs. Owens. She gave him a you-know-what-they-want expression. Minnesotans are notoriously sensitive about being rejected. Elite high school athletes who choose a college outside the state better never plan on working in the state when they graduate. An Amish shunning was a picnic in comparison.
Arnie broke down and told them about the stipulation in his grandmother’s will. A cheer went up that sounded like the same Irish pub on New Year’s Eve when the clock struck twelve.
#
After the traumatic confrontation with Mrs. Owens, Arnie went for a walk around town. As he passed the corner of Third and Church, he did a double take. A place called Harmonic Convergence stood where Janey’s Hardware had been. A sign read, “Yoga and Zen classes, weight and rowing machines available.” Father Ullrich must really love that place, he thought. Arnie had been a mass server for the old boy during his last years of elementary school, before it became the uncool thing to do. From there he’d gone agnostic when Bernie had explained Darwinism to him, social and biological.
Bernadine running a business, an Irish vagrant clerking at the Finlander, and now a Buddhist temple in the middle of downtown Double E. This was definitely not the East Embarrass he was used to.
He shook his head and continued on down the street. Beyond the town, up on the ridge, a grove of white pines towered over the basin below. Halfway down the hill, nestled in a thicket of scrub trees, he could see the old man’s pride and joy, a yellow monstrosity with a wrap-around porch he’d built with his own two hands. If he was going to stay, he’d need a place to live that was cheaper than thirty bucks a night. He’d take a look at the place later. It came with the job, Richie had said, but it also came with a lot of emotional baggage. Even before the graduation incident, there had been friction between the old man and him. Could’ve been because his mother had died in childbirth and the old man blamed him, but he didn’t think that was it. He’d just never been tough enough for the old bastard.
When Arnie was six years old he fell in a hole on Birch Lake while ice fishing. He was under for at least a couple minutes before his father fished him out. He remembered that horrible feeling for the rest of his life, his lungs bursting, and finally, unable to hold his breath any longer, giving up a second before his father snagged him by the hood and hauled him out of the ice, coughing water and throwing up the salami sandwiches he’d had for dinner. They were miles from where they’d parked the truck. Arnie had cried and his father had said, “Don’t be such a baby. If that’s the worst that ever happens to you, you’ll be lucky.”
Arnie got frostbite and had to have the tip of his index finger on his right hand removed. That’s probably why he hated school so much. His teachers were never satisfied with his penmanship. Ever since, he tried to hide his affliction and got angry when people asked him about it. It was only one of the many things he blamed the old man for.
Arnie sighed, hitched up his belt, and headed toward the Finlander. He’d give this newspaper gig a month. If it didn’t work out, he’d contest that will faster than you could say F. Lee Bailey.

STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS is a work in progress. Comments, good and bad, are welcome. See Amazon.com for a published novel, SOLDIER'S GAP, by Dave Schwinghammer.