“What are you going to do?”
“We can’t afford to wait. The third truck could arrive at any moment and we’ll lose our chance.”
Josie kept staring at me.
“Go inside the bar,” I repeated slowly.
Josie gave it a beat and then scampered out of the Taurus. When she disappeared into Buckman’s I left the car and walked swiftly across the county blacktop to the terminal’s driveway and down the driveway to the gate. I was carrying my Abus padlock. It was unlocked. When I reached the gate, I slipped Mesabi Security’s padlock off of the chain and replaced it with my own. Careful not to accidentally close the shackle on Mesabi’s padlock, I returned to Josie’s Ford Taurus and set it gently on the driver’s-side floor. The entire process took less than ninety seconds, and as far as I could tell, no one saw me, yet I was sweating profusely. A moment later, I entered the roadhouse.
It was a polite bar despite the smell of stale beer rising from the warped wooden floor—the kind of place where a restless woman could come in alone, survey what was available, maybe even sample the merchandise, and leave without necessarily being tackled in the parking lot or followed home.
I found Josie sitting at a small table just inside the doorway with a man who seemed to be in his midtwenties. It was hard to tell because he was hunched over his beer and the bar’s lights had been dialed down to give patrons a sense of privacy. I let my fingers brush Josie’s shoulder as I walked past just to let her know I was there. She surprised me by reaching back and giving my hand a squeeze without once taking her eyes off the young man.
“How’s your mother?” she asked him. She asked the question softly with a concern in her voice that told me she had a natural and genuine sympathy for anyone who was in trouble.
I made my way to the end of the bar and found a stool. The Twins were on the coast playing the Angels, and the pregame show was on the flat-screen TV.
“What can I gitcha?” the bartender asked.
He didn’t pour Summit Ale, so I ordered a Sam Adams that he served in the bottle.
“You come in with Josie?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Love that girl. Always cheerful, always cheers the place up. She knows, no one else seems to know but she does, acting all miserable all the time, it ain’t gonna make the world a better place, is it?”
I couldn’t argue with that, I told him.
“How’s business?” I asked, just to be polite. I didn’t expect much of an answer. The bartender gave me one anyway.
“If it improved one hundred percent it would still be lousy,” he said. “Since the big shock, since the mill closed, it’s been deader than—I got my customers, my regulars, the truckers and loggers and guys from the mill, they still come in, but all they order is beer now.” He gestured at the bottle in front of me. “They buy a beer and nurse it all night long; taking no pleasure in drinking it, neither. The only reason they come in at all is because they can’t stand being cooped up in their homes no more, you know?”
It was terrible, according to the bartender. Tough times all through the region. An economy in free fall. Everywhere you looked, men and women out of work through no fault of their own. Corporations, some of them founded when his father was a boy, were folding like carnival tents. Banks failed. Retailers from national chains to the ma-and-pa shop on the corner were locking their doors and throwing away the key. Yet even though it was happening to everyone, he said it was hard not to take it personally. Especially in small towns like Krueger and Babbitt that had been built around one company or one industry, towns whose very existence had been decided on the whim of overpaid, overpampered executives who had never even seen the place.
That was only part of it, the bartender said. Because of the lack of jobs, people were abandoning the area’s small towns and cities. Which reduced their tax base. Which lowered their general funds. Which caused them to slash the services they could afford to provide the citizens who remained. Which encouraged more people to leave. Which lowered tax collections even more. Which put entire communities at risk.
“A city like Krueger,” said the bartender, “we’re one disaster away from bankruptcy, and not a big disaster, neither. A roof collapses on the municipal building, a sewer pump burns out, a water main breaks—that’s all it’d take.”