I.
Floyd Gunnison is five-foot-ten, a hundred and sixty some pounds of Fritos and Mountain Dew. He has a winsome face—younger looking than his thirty-one years, notwithstanding a missing right incisor and a scar from mustache through that gap and curling toward the jawline. “Got that,” when asked, “by a bowstring. Still killed the buck for it, so… not all bad luck.”
He uses that term a lot, as he grew up in Luck, Wisconsin. Now he lives in Siren, seventeen miles north, and works at a sports bar. Almost lost the job last week after tumbling, again, with a platter full of beer—this time drenching the feather-brushed felt of one of the pool tables. He hadn’t been drinking on the job, and rarely in his countless trips to the hospital had alcohol factored into a mishap.
“Just accident-prone, I guess. But only with myself—haven’t dropped a baby yet!” Floyd thinks that’s a decent line on a second date.
“How many babies are we talking about?” she’d say, sometimes with a raised eyebrow, sometimes stroking her bottom lip.
Third dates or fourth tend not to happen. Hard to track his patterns: he’d have a rash from, say, poison oak and assure everyone it’s not contagious (because it’s not); or he’d take a clunk on the head from a bad throw to first base and act rather loopy for a week. Not his fault, but…
And the rumors were real about the time he discharged a double barrel birdshot a la Dick Cheney, if fortunately missing his buddy’s face. To Floyd’s credit, he thereafter sold his guns, settling with the more deliberate bow and quiver.
Of course, he didn’t have to hunt at all. Or fish—especially after that excruciating incident where he was trying to unhook a trophy largemouth bass and ended up catching his own tongue in the process.
“How in the Sam Hell,” a customer asked, admiring the taxidermy mounted on the wall, “did that happen?”
Floyd shrugged as if he hadn’t explained this a hundred times. “Was trying to get a good look at how rooted the spoon was in its gill.”
“Nah,”
said the waitress, “you were stealing a smooch, so proud of that catch!”
“And the fish wasn’t offerin’
consent,” guessed the customer.
“No,” deadpanned Floyd. “No kiss was in the works, but a lot of thrashing to get outta the boat, and I musta been gob smacked. Had to hold that twenty-pound monster to my face all the way to shore, and then—well, you don’t wanna know.”
“Managed to keep your tongue intact, though,” teased the waitress.
“Barely.”
Trips to various clinics included three stomach bluffs before an actual appendectomy. Half a hundred bee stings when he pushed an armful of raked leaves into a compost heap. Lockjaw after sleeping wrong.
When insurance still covered the costs, he’d occasionally have a psych exam to ‘leave no stone uncovered’ why he was so unlucky in the banana peel department. It just didn’t make sense that Floyd could cover his bets at a poker party, even come out the evening’s winner, then dislocate his shoulder in a reasonable celebration.
His parents had no clue. Sure, Floyd tumbled down the stairs a few times—who hasn’t? Suffered about four bouts of mononucleosis, it seemed. Ready box of band-aids for an active boy. “Flesh wounds” his father chuckled in a Monty Python accent.
But then again, they died in a rollover en route to dropping off Floyd for his freshman year at UW Eau Claire. The plastic lid on his McDonald’s shake wasn’t on tight, and from the back seat Floyd shrieked an ‘oh shit!’ when it spilled all over the floor, causing heads to turn and… only one survivor.
He didn’t drive for a couple years after that—nearly unheard of for an able-bodied adult in northwest Wisconsin.
Today is Siren’s annual waterskipping tournament out on Crooked Lake, where 40 yards of open water has been carved out of the ice and snowmobiles from four counties prove they can cross it. The revving is relentless, the squeals of acceleration higher as the day grows long and the starting line tightens toward the water. Floyd ‘Son of a Gun’ has been entered in by a buddy who twisted his arm—literally, as an arm wrestle bet Floyd lost. Waterskippers are required to wear life jackets and professional scuba divers are at hand (mostly to tether sunk snowmobiles to the backhoe that lifts them out of the water). The water is only ten-to-fifteen feet deep where they stage it, and no one has ever been harmed, excepting some egos.
One of the women Floyd dated a few years ago sees him from the behind the spectator cordon. He’s being coached, evidently, by someone who’s willing to lend him his machine. “You don’t gotta do this, Floyd,” she calls out, knowing the crowd will titter and egg him on.
Floyd pretends he doesn’t hear yet tilts his helmet eventually, managing a discernable wink through the visor. “Yeah, I don’t. But hey.”
He has a little down time and decides to lay on the cushion long enough for four straddlers. The high pressure weather system has kept the sky cloudless and baby blue, mesmerizing. He doesn’t want to fall asleep, so he thinks about what put the hooks in him about this town.
Siren. Like an ambulance howl. Almost twenty years ago it had been obliterated by a tornado, and while Floyd was only eleven then, his dad drove him up from Luck to lend whatever hand they could. Summer then, of course, so he wouldn’t see waterskippers until some years later, as the lure of this town grew. Actually smaller in population than Luck, which, at a thousand people, didn’t have enough happening. Yet rough and tumble Siren spoke somehow to his soul.
The MC’s megaphone has been spewing info steadily to the crowd, but jostles him now: “Son of a Gun, you’re on deck.”
[t.b.c., part II.]
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2021)
