In 1970 he looked younger than his years. Rather than the age he actually was, twenty, he looked thirteen and acne-free. The mustache he would try to grow over and over again always came in weedy, the individual hairs sparse, and he would end up mowing the patch of near nothing down with a borrowed Remington electric shaver. There was no reason to buy one of his own.
He was routinely mistaken for David McCallum, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Illya Kuryakin. “You look like,” a postal clerk began.
“I know, I know,” he replied.
The doctor during his school physical gave a Looney Tunes snap to the rubber glove and said, “You know who you look like, don’t you?”
He answered, “Yes, I know,” and the doctor told him to bear down. He would look young forever.
This was months before he knew that he would have to change his identity, that he would no longer be able to walk around looking like a fictional secret agent, an actor from a television series. He was a bomber, a young bomber who would eventually have to go underground.
There came a point when I was dreaming the story. Multitasking, I had been working on “Security in the Heartland,” which was the working title, off and on for two years. Like others I had written, this short story was coming to me in brain-dumped pieces and half-assed research. I googled Duluth, Minnesota, and other Great Lakes port cities. The Department of Homeland Security. And my girlfriend Gabby – named Gabrielle at birth and nicknamed Gabby as a child, the moniker fit her well – had spent much of her childhood in Duluth, her tribe from northern Minnesota, and she had attended UMD, so from her I gained much of my sense of the upper Midwest.
Call it Gabby’s Pillow Book Travelogue. Park Point, the Aerial Bridge, Canal Park, Superior Street, Lester River, the Congdon estate, Enger Tower, Skyline Drive, Highway 61, the North Shore. It was a spoken-word travelogue in bed, or as she rushed around the kitchen preparing breakfast while making her lunch, too – I thought I was lucky, working at home – and it continued out on our pad-of-concrete patio in the cool evening, the New Mexico landscape darkening at twilight.
“There was an awful potholed street that ran near the harbor, whatever you want to call it, bay, harbor,” she said. “There was a company on this street that ground wood to a pulp and had mounds of it, outside. And there were the piles of coal. There was another place that assembled and quick froze pizzas and dinners. I had a boyfriend who worked there, not too long though. His coworkers were from a group home in West Duluth, mental disorders, emotional disorders. Tommy was feeling a little disordered himself after a while.” Gabby. Don’t be too ready to buy into the generalization about Native Americans being taciturn.
When she was seven years old, she saw President John F. Kennedy motor through Duluth’s downtown in his bubbletop limousine. She said it was dusk, after dinner, and there was a light on him inside the car. He looked like someone facing the setting sun.
When he was thirteen, he watched President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade pass by on Superior Street in Duluth, Minnesota. It was two months before the president would be killed by one man, two men, maybe more. The young president waved and smiled from his black limousine, the protective bubbletop in place, an interior light on, Kennedy medicinally tanned, the leader of the free world.
He was dead in November, before Thanksgiving. Nearly five years later it would be Martin Luther King, Jr.’s turn, followed by Bobby’s at the Ambassador in L.A. “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there,” the young candidate said. The bomber came of age in the Decade of Assassination. He learned that violence was a political option. He thought he knew what the 1970s would bring.
The pieces of the story came like this, funneled elements of a collage, but I was having trouble handling the flow. You’ve worked this way before, I told myself. You’ll see it and it will all click into place.
What no one would ever understand was how simple it had been, to leave a bomb in a public space. The campus Science Building, built in 1919, with its granite-floored hallways and mysterious funhouse stairwells, the walls painted a glossy institutional beige, the echo of voices and footfalls after faculty and students had disappeared around a corner: he could have been a teaching assistant, a messenger from Administration.
The bomber was already on the road to Gallup, New Mexico, when the bomb went off. He did not build it. He placed it. He planted it, hidden in the open in a student’s green canvas rucksack, beneath a table on the third floor of the Science Building in the research lab leased by Gopher State Munitions. He thought of history, driving on the interstate, working his way southwest. He thought of the assassination attempt by Hitler’s generals, an attempt that failed, ending with piano wire and meat hooks. He thought of this, going underground, down the interstate to New Mexico.
I woke to a chill in the house, only sixty-three degrees inside, and somewhere well below that outside. Winter was coming on. I had a big mug of French roast on my desk and a candle lit – I was giving aromatherapy a try, a green tea and peppermint scent – and I was forcing myself to write. Gabby was showering and then would dress, already packed for a three-day conference in Phoenix. I could smell her patchoulied body, hear her move in the next room. It had been two days since we’d last made love.
The pieces of “Security in the Heartland” were all mixed up in my brain. Scenes needed to be surgically stitched together by a world-renowned word doctor and I was feeling like a mediocre plebe in a nineteenth century school of quackery.
Any writer can tell you that self-editing is a killer in the early stages. But the early stages were long gone and I was stuck on a character named Wayne Potter, recently laid off from an indie bookstore in a Duluth strip mall that had been upended financially by the usual big box suspects. Wayne was out of work and I found him a new job as port security officer. I would gaze at the flame of the green tea and peppermint candle and practically hypnotize myself. I got Wayne the job, but he kept on pulling Barney Fife-esque fubars. If he kept this up, I would have to jettison him. Then where would I be?
Something struck me about this idea of port security officers, about all of this money I assumed was flowing from Homeland Security into the Great Lakes port cities. Places with names like Duluth, Superior, Sault Sainte Marie, Ashtabula, Erie, Buffalo. What did these ports have to show for it? Was there really a lot of money? What was being protected – mounds of pulp wood? Coal? Taconite pellets? Who was doing the protecting? The recently laid off, paid just over minimum wage? Those were some of the questions that initially excited me about “Security in the Heartland,” but then the more I looked into it, nothing was going on. It could have just been the Wayne Potter Effect. Wayne did have a sit-com mind of his own.
Gabby came in before leaving for Phoenix and gave me a kiss goodbye. I wanted to take her back to bed, have us fuck each other silly to wipe out the mess in my sorry brain. I wanted to go to Phoenix with her and sit in her room in the hotel tower, be her kept man. Or her cabana boy at poolside. But I remained at home, intent on writing myself out of this self-created puzzle box hell.
He watched with interest when Sara Jane Olson was arrested years later in his old stomping grounds of Minnesota. She had been a doctor’s wife, active in the community. But her years of exemplary behavior apparently did not wash away what she’d done in California in 1975. He was shocked and unnerved, this was twenty-five, thirty years later, when she was convicted and sent to prison.
He wanted to talk about it with someone, but Chloe, Leon and Kim, his transformational handlers in New Mexico, his Ancient Ones, he called them, they had disappeared. Sara Jane had been arrested and his Ancient Ones had been absorbed back into the plains of San Agustin.
Wayne Potter was relegated to the dry pages of my workbook, never to develop beyond what he had become on those few too many lined pages. Now there was a new hire, a man in his mid-fifties with a secret.
Thirty-five years ago, this man had been someone completely different. There were the obvious then-and-now choices to be made, life in 1970 and life now in the new millennium: college, work, Vietnam, Iraq, Nixon, Bush, communism, fundamentalism – Christian and Islamic – married, single, Massachusetts and the rest of the country, red state, blue state, technological advances. Of course, he was someone completely different. I was only interested in those differences as far as they affected what he had really been. In 1970 he had been a member of an organization similar to the Symbionese Liberation Army. He had been a radical and a bomber. He went underground in 1970, at twenty, and reappeared with a new name and a new identity after 2000. Jim Stoikjovich. We never learn his birth name. It doesn’t matter.
Jim Stoikjovich first noticed it with the sweep of his headlights, pulling into the alley of his block in Superior’s North End. On the back of Engstrom’s garage was a pillowy wedge of graffiti, four feet tall and taking up the entire width of the garage. It wasn’t a pop-stylized name like he would see on a boxcar passing through town, the spray paint applied in a Minneapolis or Chicago rail yard. It was more like a cloud. A cartoon cumulus cloud, white with sky blue shading and a thick outline of black, with its mirror image directly beneath. It was five in the morning and Engstrom would be pissed.
Stoikjovich crept up the alley in his ten-year-old Ford pickup. The graffiti artist hadn’t hit any of the other garages.
Since he wouldn’t be able to sleep for two or three more hours, and crashing at that point, he scrambled three eggs with diced Canadian bacon, eating a pink slice of the meat still cold from the refrigerator while the eggs bubbled yellow, dully shining. He found he was getting used to it, although he had never worked a graveyard shift before. But it was nothing. He was just surprised he never fell asleep on the job.
Just after Thanksgiving he had begun work as a security officer on the Duluth side of the harbor, patrolling the docks and warehouses for – for what Stoikjovich didn’t even like to admit. The security officer position was part of an initiative connected with Homeland Security – he had recently been laid off – and, though the pay was only a couple of dollars over minimum wage, he took the job when it was offered. He took the job gladly, his accepting it connected more with the work ethic he had developed over his fifty-five years and, more pointedly, to Stoikjovich Security rather than to Homeland Security. He worked the night patrol, cruising lanes of inverted cones of taconite pellets and coal and pulpwood.
Jim ate in the dark at his window after turning off the kitchen light. The sunrise was coming on, the winter sky pearl gray. He watched for Engstrom, who would be leaving for work shortly. And there he was, trudging through his backyard, stocking cap pulled over his head, bundled up into a too tight Packer jacket against the February cold, breath pluming from his nose and mouth. It would be five, eight minutes tops for Engstrom to back out of his garage, notice the spray paint effect, then rumble back into his house to call the police.
There he was. Stoikjovich checked the clock on his stove. Four minutes. Impressive. He finished his eggs, put his coat and boots back on, and walked down the alley to Engstrom’s place.
The Stoikjovich name came from something called Polk’s Duluth City Directory 1951 which I discovered in a desert flea market for a buck and thought pure gold. A slew of Zimmermans were listed in the book as well. Relatives, I supposed, of Bob Dylan. I thought of mailing the directory to him, care of Columbia Records, and enjoyed imagining him, in his mid-sixties now and on the road somewhere in the world, opening it and looking up his grandmother’s name and familiar street address, imagining who he had been so long ago, a kid from Hibbing visiting Duluth.
A week later, garages began to go up in flames throughout the city’s neighborhoods. Each was random and no one could make sense of any of it.
Sipping a Tecate that night while a Dylan CD played, I looked for the name that I wanted in Polk’s Duluth City Directory 1951. “Blind Willie McTell” played once and the lyrics caught my ear, arrows in doorposts and condemnation of all the land, then I played it again, and again after that. I had just found Stoikjovich in the directory. The words got their hooks into me. I wrote down Stoikjovich in my notebook, then sketched an arrow-shaped cloud.
Stoikjovich rolled over to NPR at three in the afternoon, somnolent after a restless six hours, and reached out to tap the radio alarm clock’s snooze bar. His fingertips landed on the plastic, but didn’t press down. Groggy, he couldn’t immediately tell if what he was hearing was what was being reported over the air, or if some dream residue was leaking into the half-light of his bedroom, into his partial wakefulness.
“The government sank fourteen hundred barrels in Lake Superior in…under cover of night…encased in cement, some with benzene, PCBs now leaking into the lake…”
He rose up; an elbow dug into his two pillows, and wiped the sleep from his eyes, listening.
“Four barrels have been raised for testing…Raising all fourteen hundred barrels could cost in excess of thirteen million dollars.”
Instead of going back to sleep, Stoikjovich had turned the radio off and lain back down, thinking, as he had for more than a year, that he really should wake up to something other than the news: rock and roll oldies, hip hop, Mozart, Grieg, anything would be preferable to this report of barrels at the bottom of Lake Superior, or of how many had died in Iraq in the last twenty-four hours.
We had the local news from Albuquerque on the television. A suspicious object had been discovered in a downtown parking ramp. Gabby and I were making dinner together and I was rinsing fresh cilantro at the sink.
“Turn that off so I can hear this,” Gabby said.
I turned the water off. We saw the blurred image of a white man taken from the parking ramp’s security camera. The pretty Latina talking head said police were looking for a Caucasian male, five foot six to five foot ten.
Gabby laughed. “That could be you.”
That was funny. My first thought had been, I’m glad I don’t go into downtown Albuquerque everyday. But I said to Gabby, “I’m glad you don’t go into downtown Albuquerque everyday.”
The arrow – a graffiti arrow, not a cartoon cumulus cloud – grew weekly, then nightly, garage by garage, and the fires continued to spread indiscriminately. Once, after his shift, he drove along Duluth’s Skyline Drive and looked out over the Twin Ports of Duluth-Superior, an indigo birthday cake fallen in on itself, the garage fires skewed, guttering candles.
A second suspicious object was found in the same parking ramp just before Christmas. The police said that if the suspicious object had been activated, bystanders within fifty feet of it would have been severely injured. The news showed the same blurred image picked up by the security camera. It captured the blur, but couldn’t seem to do much more than that.
“How come they don’t catch this guy? His picture is right there,” I said.
We both leaned towards the television screen, looking closer, then looked at each other and laughed. The image just got muddier. Gabby shrugged. “Would you recognize any of our neighbors if their picture was put up like that?” And she answered for me. “I don’t think so.”
The white man in the video frame, a pixelated haze, a superhero’s arch-villain in the midst of committing a crime at hyperspeed, the description that Gabby said could be a description of me. A puzzle piece clicked.
Early one morning, at home and in bed, he fell asleep so fast and so hard it was like being cold-cocked, knocked down and out. Sometime before daybreak his eyes opened to a golden light, tongues of shadow shimmying across his bedroom ceiling, the hootchie-coo of flame. Stoikjovich heard a siren’s wail and clambered half awake from his bed with the thought that his garage had been set on fire.
His bare feet hitting the cold pine floor woke him further, the chill of the air triggering the need to make water. When he returned from the bathroom, the surrounding walls were now shadowed and plain. He looked out his bedroom window and there was nothing. His garage was not on fire. Stoikjovich could only see the night sky over the city, the silhouetted roofs of the neighborhood, the pen-and-ink scratches of the bare, uppermost limbs of the trees, the phosphorescence of corner streetlights. His garage was not burning down. It was a black and quiet night, the calm broken only by one distant siren.
The third suspicious object was identified for the public as a pipe bomb, but even it didn’t have an opportunity to blow up. It had been “rendered safe.” The man in the security camera video became “a person of interest,” a failed bomber, and everyone wanted to keep it that way. But the official terminology struck me as soft and very nearly forgiving. “Come in and talk with us, Blur Man, for coffee and churros,” it seemed to suggest. “We’d like to get know you. Yes, we would.”
They were bean-bagged against a mound of taconite and looked like stoned aliens, but were really just three leathery men of indeterminate age, puffed in their skin, bleary-eyed, with that touch of silver on the lower halves of their faces. Lit up by Stoikjovich’s flashlight, the spray can was dropped to the ground along with the bag, blown away then by a sudden gust of wind off Saint Louis Bay.
Gabby read the newspaper article to me. Blur Man was arrested without incident while sitting in a high school gym watching a JV basketball game in which his son was the star forward for the home team. Outside of the gymnasium it was a cold, crisp Saturday night. He sat in the bleachers with a neighbor, the man who finally turned him in before anyone could die.
Blur Man had recently been laid off, middle management with a utility company that had tired of his antics. He had rage issues and refused treatment. Apolitical, no philosophy, just a deep down anger that bubbled like something toxic from the brown fields of America. The substance – the anger in his otherwise hollowed out core – hit the atmosphere and presented as a relatively sophisticated pipe bomb, or two or three.
Stoikjovich looked up and down the alley, all along the battered fencing, the old and new garage doors, the wheeled black plastic residential dumpsters, the waves of crusted snow, dirty flakes whirling like southwestern dust devils, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. They had left no footprints.
The arrow graffiti coiled in and found its home on his garage. It reminded him of the ancient pictographs he had seen in the cliff dwellings of the American Southwest. The arrow reminded him of where he had been, who he had been. The coiling was a journey finished or not yet complete; he could not remember which it was. The message on Stoikjovich’s garage to be read hundreds of years later was that his journey was not finished. Someone was urging him to keep on moving.
People come and go; they make their mark however large or small. People disappeared from Casa Grande, from Mesa Verde, from all the cliff dwelling cities. Where did they go? Stoikjovich packed up and was gone in the middle of the night.
Two more garages caught fire that night.
Who knows for sure? One day, the streets could be empty, commerce an old paper receipt with a credit card number, xxxxxxxxxxxx7005, blown out of a storefront, and the houses all abandoned, all of them, from the modest to the grand.
Jeff Esterholm’s short stories have appeared in The Dirty Napkin, 34thParallel, Wisconsin Academy Review, Acorn Whistle, Nerve Cowboy, and Thema. In the last several years he has been selected as a finalist in New Letters and Hunger Mountain fiction competitions. He is on academic staff at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.