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Welcome to Coulee Country
Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where
clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the
height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the
Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few
years into both a new century and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a
blind man has a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now,
the hour is just past six a.m., and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a
fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future
and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes,
making blind men of us all.
Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with molten highlights.
Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railroad running
between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo,
known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortable-looking little town extending
uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be
holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and
sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a
mile away.
Moving toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks, the
backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidson motorcycles tilted on
their kickstands. These unprepossessing little houses were built, early in the century
recently vanished, for the metal pourers, mold makers, and crate men employed by the
Pederson Nail factory. On the grounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain
about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as
possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during the fifties,
finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have
been replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys'
owners, wild-haired, bushy-bearded, swag-bellied men sporting earrings, black leather
jackets, and less than the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this
assumption. Like most assumptions, this one embodies an uneasy half-truth.
The current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five
soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized.
They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the
south and one block east of the Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see "the
world's largest six-pack," storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland
Old-Time Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another on the
Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were
undergraduates majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception was a resident in surgery
at the UI-UC university hospital.) They get an ironic pleasure from being called the
Thunder Five: the name strikes them as sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is
"the Hegelian Scum." These gentlemen form an interesting crew, and we will make
their acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the hand-painted posters
taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple of abandoned
buildings. The posters say: fisherman, you better pray to your stinking god we don't catch
you first! remember amy!
From Nailhouse Row, Chase Street runs steeply uphill between listing buildings with worn,
unpainted facades the color of fog: the old Nelson Hotel, where a few impoverished
residents lie sleeping, a blank-faced tavern, a tired shoe store displaying Red Wing
workboots behind its filmy picture window, a few other dim buildings that bear no
indication of their function and seem oddly dreamlike and vaporous. These structures have
the air of failed resurrections, of having been rescued from the dark westward territory
although they were still dead. In a way, that is precisely what happened to them. An ocher
horizontal stripe, ten feet above the sidewalk on the facade of the Nelson Hotel and two
feet from the rising ground on the opposed, ashen faces of the last two buildings,
represents the high-water mark left behind by the flood of 1965, when the Mississippi
rolled over its banks, drowned the railroad tracks and Nailhouse Row, and mounted nearly
to the top of Chase Street.
Where Chase rises above the flood line and levels out, it widens and undergoes a
transformation into the main street of French Landing, the town beneath us. The Agincourt
Theater, the Taproom Bar and Grille, the First Farmer State Bank, the Samuel Stutz
Photography Studio (which does a steady business in graduation photos, wedding pictures,
and children's portraits) and shops, not the ghostly relics of shops, line its blunt
sidewalks: Benton's Rexall drugstore, Reliable Hardware, Saturday Night Video, Regal
Clothing, Schmitt's Allsorts Emporium, stores selling electronic equipment, magazines and
greeting cards, toys, and athletic clothing featuring the logos of the Brewers, the Twins,
the Packers, the Vikings, and the University of Wisconsin. After a few blocks, the name of
the street changes to Lyall Road, and the buildings separate and shrink into one-story
wooden structures fronted with signs advertising insurance offices and travel agencies;
after that, the street becomes a highway that glides eastward past a 7-Eleven, the
Reinhold T. Grauerhammer VFW Hall, a big farm-implement dealership known locally as
Goltz's, and into a landscape of flat, unbroken fields. If we rise another hundred feet
into the immaculate air and scan what lies beneath and ahead, we see kettle moraines,
coulees, blunted hills furry with pines, loam-rich valleys invisible from ground level
until you have come upon them, meandering rivers, miles-long patchwork fields, and little
towns-one of them, Centralia, no more than a scattering of buildings around the
intersection of two narrow highways, 35 and 93.
Directly below us, French Landing looks as though it had been evacuated in the middle of
the night. No one moves along the sidewalks or bends to insert a key into one of the locks
of the shop fronts along Chase Street. The angled spaces before the shops are empty of the
cars and pickup trucks that will begin to appear, first by ones and twos, then in a
mannerly little stream, an hour or two later. No lights burn behind the windows in the
commercial buildings or the unpretentious houses lining the surrounding streets. A block
north of Chase on Sumner Street, four matching red-brick buildings of two stories each
house, in west-east order, the French Landing Public Library; the offices of Patrick J.
Skarda, M.D., the local general practitioner, and Bell and Holland, a two-man law firm now
run by Garland Bell and Julius Holland, the sons of its founders; the Heartfield and Son
Funderal Home, now owned by a vast, funereal empire centered in St. Louis; and the French
Landing Post Office.
Separated from these by a wide driveway into a good-sized parking lot at the rear, the
building at the end of the block, where Sumner intersects with Third Street, is also of
red brick and two stories high but longer than its immediate neighbors. Unpainted iron
bars block the rear second-floor windows, and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot
are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letters flpd on their sides. The
presence of police cars and barred windows seem incongruous in this rural fastness-what
sort of crime can happen here? Nothing serious, surely; surely nothing worse than a little
shoplifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar fight.
As if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of small-town life, a red van with
the words la riviere herald on its side panels drifts slowly down Third Street, pausing at
nearly all of the mailbox stands for its driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper,
wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the
van turns onto Sumner, where the buildings have mail slots instead of boxes, the route man
simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors. Blue parcels thwack against the doors
of the police station, the funeral home, and the office buildings. The post office does
not get a paper.
Excerpted from BLACK HOUSE © Copyright 2001 by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Reprinted with permisison by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.
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