Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tied and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat.
He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the men’s restroom, and came out wearing many of his purchases.
“Looking good, big fella,” said Mulligan.
“At least I’m warm,” said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligan’s invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, and rode in the passenger seat, in the front.
“So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel?” asked the chief of police. “Big guy like you. What’s your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside?”
Shadow’s heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. “I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting.”
“Does he pay well?”
“I’m family. He knows I’m not going to rip him off, and I’m learning a little about the trade on the way. Until I figure out what it is I really want to do.” It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy’s tits? asked a voice in his head.) Mike Ainsel didn’t have bad dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming.
He filled his shopping basket at Dave’s Finest Foods, doing what he thought of as a gas-station stop—milk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese, cookies. Just some food. He’d do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. “This is Mike Ainsel, he’s taken the empty apartment at the old Pilsen place. Up around the back,” he’d say. Shadow gave up trying to remember names. He just shook hands with people and smiled, sweating a little, uncomfortable in his insulated layers in the hot store.
Chad Mulligan drove Shadow across the street to Lakeside Realty. Missy Gunther, her hair freshly set and lacquered, did not need an introduction—she knew exactly who Mike Ainsel was. Why that nice Mr. Borson, his uncle Emerson, such a nice man, he’d been by, what, about six, eight weeks ago now, and rented the apartment up at the old Pilsen place, and wasn’t the view just to die for up there? Well, honey, just wait until the spring, and we’re so lucky, so many of the lakes in this part of the world go bright green from the algae in the summer, it would turn your stomach, but our lake, well, come fourth of July you could still practically drink it, and Mr. Borson had paid for a whole year’s lease in advance, and as for the Toyota 4Runner, she couldn’t believe that Chad Mulligan still remembered it, and yes, she’d be delighted to get rid of it. Tell the truth, she’d pretty much resigned herself to giving it to Hinzelmann as this year’s klunker and just taking the tax write-off, not that the car was a klunker, far from it, no, it was her son’s car before he went to school in Green Bay, and, well, he’d painted it purple one day and, ha-ha, she certainly hoped that Mike Ainsel liked purple, that was all she had to say, and if he didn’t she wouldn’t blame him…
Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of this litany. “Looks like they need me back at the office, good meeting you, Mike,” he said, and he moved Shadow’s shopping bags into the back of Missy Gunther’s station wagon.
Missy drove Shadow back to her place, where, in the drive, he saw an elderly SUV. The blown snow had bleached half of it to a blinding white, while the rest of it was painted the kind of drippy purple that someone would need to be very stoned, very often, to even begin to be able to find attractive.
Still, the car started up on the first try, and the heater worked, although it took almost ten minutes of running the engine with the heater on full before it even started to change the interior of the car from unbearably cold to merely chilly. While this was happening, Missy Gunther took Shadow into her kitchen—excuse the mess, but the little ones just leave their toys all over after Christmas and she just doesn’t have the heart, would he care for some leftover turkey dinner? Last year they did goose but this year it was a big old turkey, well, coffee then, won’t take a moment to brew a fresh pot—and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that he hadn’t.
There were, he was informed, while the coffee dripped and brewed, four other inhabitants of his apartment building—back when it was the Pilsen place the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats, now their apartment, that was the downstairs one and that was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr. Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel, heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest, although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. They’re in Key West for the winter, they’ll be back in April, he’ll meet them then. The thing about Lakeside is that it’s a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that’s Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she’s had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it.
Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world.
Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. “This is for you,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She handed him a buff envelope. “It’s kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don’t have to look at it now.”
He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that.
In ten minutes he was home.
He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him.
It contained a passport. Blue, laminated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunther’s precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores.
“I think I may like it here,” said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. “If it ever warms up.”