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 25th 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. Chancellor 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 picture 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 tabloid 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 understood the pressures on professional athletes and was willing to come give him personal support and consolation. 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 sensations 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 wer
e 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 certifiable 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.

  1

  Gun Pedersen stood in the shadow of a white pine, sixty feet six inches from his home-built pitching machine. He waited in longjohns and red tennis shoes, the long blond Hillerich and Bradsby resting lightly on his bare shoulder. The metal arm of the machine inched upward, ticking. Gun lifted the bat, tensed the muscles of his back and arms, narrowed his eyes. He relaxed his fingers on the smooth handle. The arm reached horizontal in its rising motion. Gun wiggled the tip of the bat. The arm snapped forward and the ball came straight and fast, waist high. He took a quick short stride and swung hard. His eyes held the ball until contact and he felt the clean wooden pop. The line drive took off low and whined with the full thrust of Gun’s swing. The ball was still rising when it hit the trunk of a pine tree in what would have been deep left field in a ball park.

  “Robbed,” Gun said.

  Tapping the flat white stone he used for home plate

  with the fat end of his narrow-handled bat, he rolled his shoulders in a shrug. He never granted himself his morning swim until he’d hit three baseballs into Stony Lake, which lay 380 feet due east, never felt completely ready for a day until he’d taken his swings. Some guys, of course, had to have their juice, and Gun granted them that. But Gun had his tonic too, and knew it. Every morning as he loaded the pitching machine, in his mind he loaded each ball with something he wanted to forget: Hedman’s mall project, his daughter Mazy’s anger (which she had every reason to hang on to), the mistakes from his old life that people liked to remind him of. Then he watched these freighted balls come floating toward him, and jacked each one to kingdom come and gone.

  He did a deep knee bend, straightened up slowly— all six feet, six inches of him—and rested the bat once more on his shoulder. Again the metal arm ticked upward. In his peripheral vision he saw his World Series ring glinting in the new sun. He wiggled his bat. From behind him came the sound of a vehicle coming up the pitted gravel driveway: a creaky, loose-jointed truck, cylinders missing badly. Gun sighed. That would be Bowser. The metal arm snapped and Gun strode into the ball, releasing his level, whipping swing. Again the pop of wood on leather, again the rising line drive. Only this time the ball found its way through the sky full of pines, reached its highest point of flight well over the lake, and finally dropped, putting a circular scar in the water’s perfect mirror of the sky.

  “There.” He leaned the bat against the nearest tree and turned to look at the fat man spilling out the driver’s side of a Chevy spotted with rust holes the size of dinner plates. Gun shook his head and started toward him, moving with the easy grace of a large man

  whose heart and lungs are more than big enough to handle his size.

  “Gun Pedersen, Gawd damnit, you owe me!” Bowser Devitz was the son of old Jeremy Devitz, and Gun understood his complaint. It was the Devitz property, a hundred sixty acres of low trees and marsh, that Hedman had bought for his mall project.

  “Gun Pedersen—”

  “Yeah, Bowser.” Gun raised a calming hand.

  Bowser marched right up to Gun and stood glaring at him, his face swollen and red, his breath coming hard through his nose. He was forty or thereabouts, an unemployed three-hundred-pounder who had grown up dense but happy in his dad’s muskrat swamp. School was his hell, and he’d quit at sixteen with the old man’s blessing, and then at eighteen his card got drawn and he pulled up his traps and went to Vietnam. It was worse than school. He came home confused in 1971 and resided in the marsh with his dad.

  “What’s the problem?” Gun said.

  Bowser raised a pudgy fist, then dropped it. His thick eyebrows came together in the middle. “You’re in your skivs,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to kick a guy who’s in his skivs.”

  “Just finished my swings and now I’m going for a swim.” Gun motioned toward the water. “A few baseballs out there to retrieve. I don’t suppose this can wait.”

  “You don’t suppose right,” Bowser said. He stood with his big hands curling and uncurling at his sides, apparently uncertain what to say next.

  “Okay,” Gun said.

  Bowser’s hands curled into fists and stayed there. “We always liked you, Mr. Pedersen, me and the old man. He used to say you were like us. A guy who wanted to be left alone.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Not a big shot, even with all your money.” Bowser took a step forward. Gun felt tired and cold and wished he had his pants on.

  “So I take it kind of hard that you turn on us that way. And the old man, he takes it even harder.”

  “I didn’t turn on you, Bowser. Your dad could’ve held on to that land.”

  “Could’ve held on to it, like hell. Hedman wanted our piece like you wouldn’t believe. The old man, he’s getting real slow now. You know.” Gun didn’t know, but he’d heard. Jeremy Devitz had sold out so his only son would have some money after he died, which would probably be soon. He wanted to protect Bowser. Might as well have shot him.

  “Bowser, you’re welcome to stay and talk this over. If that’s to your liking, then let’s go in the house and do it over coffee. Otherwise, I think you should go on home.”

  Gun noticed for the first time that Bowser’s eyes looked in two different directions; at the moment, south and southwest.

  “I went to see Hedman, see, and he tol’ me you’re the one I oughta be mad at. He said after he tried buying your land here, you tol’ him to go and talk to my dad.”

  “Not true,” said Gun.

  “And he said that committee of Tig’s—Save the Lake or whatever the hell they call it—he said last month they went and asked you to help buy my dad’s property. Save it. All they wanted was a lousy loan, but you said no. If you’da done that, Loon Country woulda been history and maybe you and me coulda worked out some deal so I wouldn’t have to move.”r />
  “Maybe,” said Gun. He felt fatigued, too tired to be explaining himself to Bowser Devitz. Or anyone else.

  “Fella who’d turn nasty like that to his neighbors

  oughta have his ass kicked,” Bowser went on. “I’m here to kick yours.”

  “Come in or go home, Bowser.” Gun started past him toward the house.

  It took a while to get there. As Gun brushed past him, Bowser turned and funneled his full three hundred pounds into one fist, aimed low. It connected with the pad of unprepared muscle covering Gun’s kidney. It pushed the breath from him and made his legs forget to stand. Gun went to his knees.

  “Not so damn tough now, are you, Pedersen?” Bowser stood off to Gun’s right, living proof of the strength of fat men. “What happened? Gone soft since you quit ball? Only folks you can push around now’s a sick old man.”

  Gun brought air into his body, experimentally, letting it fill his lungs. His kidneys quivered. He felt sorry for Bowser, but it wouldn’t do to let this go on.

  “I gotta tell you, Pedersen. The old man this morning, he got up early and made a big batch of oatmeal.” Bowser was waiting for Gun to get back on his feet. He still looked mad. “A great big batch of oatmeal, and I said to him, Geez, Pop, it’s just you and me, we’re never gonna eat all that.”

  Gun got up. There were green stains on the knees of his longjohns.

  “And Pop says, he’s laughing now, he says, It ain’t for us, boy, it’s for Roxie, she loves it. Roxie! Damn, Pedersen, Roxie was this old sow we raised for ham back before I went over the pond. Pop sold her for butchering while I was over there. I remember the letter.” Bowser’s big fists came up as he talked; they shook slightly in front of his chest.

  Gun’s legs were steadier now and his kidneys felt altered but still whole. He said, “Things are that bad.”