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1986
Under the Bluff
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ON A COOL summer Saturday, hard driving guitar strums echoed down from the bluffs and out over the water. River rats later said you could hear that racket all the way out to the party boats. Katie Andern was on her lunch break at Don’s Feed Supply and heading down to Wilson Park to watch the gulls bob along the river. A crowd had gathered at the corner of Portage and Main in the open lot next to the train depot. They all looked to be waiting for aliens to land.
“Somebody’s up on the Leap playing guitar,” John Risdahl said from behind a set of camouflage binoculars.
“Gimmie those,” his wife said. “Whoa, that’s the Van Buren kid.”
“The one who got expelled?”
“No the one who drowned on the Bonnie Saint, meathead. Yes, the girl. Go in, call the cops. She’s gonna chase away all my customers.”
“No way. Look at these people. She’s bringing them in.”
It would later be determined that the girl had loaded her AMC Pacer with a guitar, rental generator, a Marshall amp head, 4x12 speaker cabinet and hauled it all up to Maiden Leap.
Katie skipped backward from the crowd until she could make out the slight figure jamming away. Lucy was in full regalia: blue kilt, black turtleneck, engineer boots, and had shaved her Flock of Seagulls into a floppy Mohawk. Unlike the tame version of the original folk song (which she had earlier in the year recorded on a cassette and dropped in Katie’s locker), this electrified version was a monstrous, jangling, minor-chorded dirge loud enough to rock the plaster off the Gainsborough estate ceilings.
“OH, I—YI-YI-YI—I ACHE FOR YOU-U-U!”
Katie swooned and goose bumps climbed her arms. She beamed up at the girl. Her girl.
Lucy stopped playing, raised the body of the guitar to her face—as if to take a bite out of the pick-ups. A dodgy Scottish voice buzzed out, “I love you, Katie Andirons!”
Laughter echoed throughout the parking lot. The Risdahls looked to Katie. Then everyone else looked to Katie, incredulous, and she realized she only had an hour before it all got back to her parents. In a lurch, she whirled around and sprinted down Portage Avenue, past slow moving cars aimed for the lift bridge.
From downriver came a low, musical honk like the largest pipe of a calliope organ. The Wicasa Queen paddlewheel boat was egg-beating her way up the St. Croix. It hadn’t rained much that year and the water behind the old girl had stirred up all brown like Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Her tall, gold-crowned smokestacks, combined with the hiss of water falling from her paddles, filled Katie with dread. The Queen was right on schedule for her noon rendezvous with the lift bridge.
The bridge alarm, essentially a railroad crossing, began its insistent clanging, its red and white striped gates descending.
Do you hear me? I love you, Katie Andirons!
Katie’s legs pumped faster. How could any basketball player think Converse all-stars contained proper arch support? She grimaced as she raced down the footpath and onto the lift section. The bridge tender was busy waving at the captain of the Wicasa Queen and chatting into his CB radio. Cars honked behind her to gain his attention but all Katie could hear was her heaving breath and the steel grid ringing out beneath her rubber soles.
The Queen tooted again. The locks released and the lift climbed. The metal grid pushed up at Katie, nearly buckling her legs. She made it to the edge as cars on the other side began honking too. There was no time for debate, if she stayed on the lift, she would surely be in the biggest trouble of her life. Katie leapt and landed with a grunt on the Wisconsin side of the bridge. She ran the rest of its length for good measure as car doors slammed and drivers called after her. Once on solid ground, she glanced back. The lift was fully raised, temporarily separating “those laughing” from “those yet to laugh.” The Queen’s short, double toot to the bridge attendant sounded too much like mockery.
Katie called in sick for the rest of her shift and vowed not to leave the house for the entire summer. That promise lasted all of twenty-four hours when she had to go to church the next day. After services, vestibule chatter was “that crazy Van Buren girl” had been arrested for disturbing the peace. The police hadn’t been able to definitively pin the school fire on Lucy but this time she was caught red-handed. Literally. There was a spray-painted message halfway down the cliff face: L+K 2GETHER 4EVER. No one could figure out how to get close enough to scrub it off. Which begged the question, how did the culprit spray it on?
The Van Burens paid a hefty fine and the school board felt justified in having expelled Lucy for the fire in May. Lucy turned eighteen that August (same age as her brother when he died) and motored off in her escape pod, destination: Minneapolis.
“Poor Bridget Van Buren,” they’d all said.
Katie tried never to speak of it, denied anything ever happened between them. But the more she tried to erase, the more the town colored in. As did her schoolmates come fall. Seasons passed, snow fell, rain came, winds blew, and still the spray-painted message remained.
B L O G G I N G M Y S O J O U R N
One Woman’s Journey from Gay to Straight
Mornings consisted of classes in your “talent offering,” a skill that would glorify Christ’s name. I volunteered for choir and learned a great deal from the director, Charles, who’d been booted out of the Mormon Church for too intimately inspecting the vocal cords of one of the tenors. Charles also worked in accounting, racking up some major Jesus points.
In the afternoons, Charles and I sat together in the Prayer Circle gossiping before the fireworks began. He’d found something troubling in accounts receivable and whispered that one of the boy’s families had paid triple the rest of us. Math not being my strong suit, I asked what that meant. Then our group leader shushed us. Prayer Circle was payback time for the morning’s frivolity. We all came together to reveal our scars, palpable or internal—a genuine downhome country jamboree of wallowing and nailing yourself up alongside The Savior. And boy had the prayer circle seen it all. Until I took off my crocs.
The bottoms of my feet are striped with scars resembling two large hash tags: # #. When I was little, I used to tell kids in swimming pools it was an Apache skin tattoo, providing traction and signifying my future as a great sprinter. The girls in my band used to play Tic Tac Toe any time I passed out. They had tournaments.
See, in the 70s, some homes were still heated by a monster boiler in the basement, with a large two-by-three foot grid above it in a central part of the home’s main floor. My parents’ house had one (as did this B&B). Sometimes, on those 30 below days, the middle of the iron grate glowed dark red, while dry heat blasted up from its black depths.
I was three years old when I walked across hell’s ceiling. How long did I scream? Was I placed there or pushed? Is the scarred brain writing this blog post the result of haphazard pathways instantly seared into my synapses that day? Mom was so darn thankful it was just my feet. Because no man cares about those, right? Well, most don’t. As for the boilers, they’re long gone. Tiled over in Mom’s kitchen. And here, in the B&B’s parlor, there is a blonder patch of hardwood. But I never let her cover it with the oriental rugs. I want her to see it every day.
When I came out, they looked away. When I left home, they never tried to pull me back. I waded into a fire where all things burned true. I waited in that fire to be thrust, saved, ignored, loved. Forged into a runner of circles.
Posted by Liesl ~ 7:35 PM ~ 1 comment
Patrice commented:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth! — Isaiah 52:7