MUSCLE MEMORY
Emily surveys the basement. A plastic Christmas tree whose base once collected presents that evolved from Play-Doh to Polly Pocket to make-up sets. A single hanging light bulb revealing boxes and plastic buckets stacked to the ceiling joists. Tools hanging from hooks. Camping supplies sitting on shelves. Pipes running to an old water softener system that should have been replaced years ago.
But Emily’s stepfather was too busy prepping for an apocalypse that never came.
What came instead was a heart attack, a clump of plaque lodged in Edgar “Eddie” Wagner’s widow maker artery. Five years retired from the Eau Claire County Sheriff’s department. Squandering his pension on MREs, non-perishable food, night-vision goggles, and anything else that might be needed for Armageddon.
In the month since Eddie’s death, Jesus hasn’t returned, the dollar is still stable, the Doomsday Clock hasn’t struck midnight, and the coronavirus is under control. In the month since his death, a survival bunker has transformed back into nothing more than a messy basement. Emily’s stepfather haunts this place now. He’s in the expired noodles, the stacks of MREs, the bin of medical supplies, the rows of neon-orange dish soap bottles sitting on shelves.
The baggie of cocaine, wrapped tightly in a torn Minnesota Vikings t-shirt.
“Great,” Emily mutters, testing the white powder with a finger. She saw cocaine at frat parties, but never tried it because she’d been terrified that her stepfather would somehow find out. Now she’s angrily staring at enough to start a small drug empire. What the hell was Eddie going to do? Sell it after the supervirus passed through? Help people temporarily forget that Jesus left them behind? Dole it out like a doctor to ease the pain of radiation poisoning?
Jan comes down the stairs slowly, awkwardly favoring her right hip. Emily tosses the coke in an open Ace Hardware bin packed with bags of sugar and salt. This isn’t a stress her mother needs to deal with.
“Fire pit’s ready to go,” Pam announces proudly.
Emily points to the rotten dresser sitting next to the washing machine. “That’s first.”
“Oh. Well, Eddie liked to keep spare blankets in there. Maybe keep it …”
“Ma, that was a test. And you failed.” Emily takes Pam’s soft arm and leads her back to the basement stairs. “I’m in town for one week. One. You want me to help you clear out this basement, then you gotta let me do it. Go back upstairs. Keep searching for guns.”
Eddie hid guns all over the house. In the past week, as Pam finally began the laborious process of reclaiming the place from years of neglect, she’s found seven guns hidden in pantries, behind appliances, underneath the treadmill.
Jan sighs and walks back up the stairs. Emily immediately feels guilty.
Everything wooden goes into the fire pit. Tables. Dressers. TV stands. And the coke, since Emily has no idea how else to dispose of it.
Junk goes into the big green dumpster parked in the driveway.
Tools—a chainsaw, an ice drill, about a hundred fishing lures with frilly feathers, way too many wrenches and screwdrivers, a bench grinder, boxes of nails—go in the rummage pile.
Unopened cleaning supplies go to the “donation” section.
The hundreds of pounds of expired food? Who the hell knows.
***
Emily takes a lunch break at noon. She sits with Jan beside the fire pit where the flames are greedily consuming an old TV stand. They’re eating smoked brisket from the freezer. It’s the last brisket Eddie ever smoked, and damn could he smoke. Emily mentions this, intending it to come out as a sort of eulogy since Eddie didn’t want a funeral, but it comes out wrong because his home-cooking is one of the only good memories she has of him.
“What about when he taught you how to shoot a gun?” Pam asks. She hugs herself tight, shifting closer to the fire. “I remember you and him out here for hours.”
“Yeah, but he stopped the moment he retired,” Emily says. Over by the garage where Eddie kept his fishing boat, they’d buried a gun and body armor in a waterproof box. Five feet from the garage door. He’d told her it was their little secret. She can feel frustration welling up in her chest. It had always seemed like a good memory, but now it feels tainted. An early warning sign of his budding paranoia. “He never left the house for five years, Ma.”
“He had his own things going on, you know. He had demons. Iraq …”
“He spent all his savings—your savings—prepping for the end of the world.” Emily wants her mother to be mad with her. Mad about the waste and the mess that they have to clean up now.
“Do you think you’ll vote before you leave?” Jan can so fluidly change the subject, good for those frequent moments when Eddie would rant about whatever laws needed extra-judicious updating to make short work of criminals. Those memories at the dinner table were bad enough; they’re blacker now that Emily found the cocaine. Eddie was a hypocrite.
“I’m not voting.”
“Jeffrey Blake is running for mayor. Remember him? He was on the City Council when you were a kid.”
Emily remembers him, all right. Handsome, notorious for hanging out at the bars where blue-collar frac sand miners went. Emily remembers fantasizing about him during her high school years. Boys her age were so hideous compared to him.
“I love his family,” Pam says with a smile, as if they’re relatives. “They’re like the Kennedys, don’t you think? Our own little political dynasty. Maybe he could be governor some day.”
“I’ll think about him—it. I’ll think about it.” Embarrassed, she gets up and trudges through the crisp, fallen leaves to the front of the house. There are black garbage bags full of paint cans sitting by the door. Emily hefts them one by one into the back of her mother’s Jeep. She hops in and pulls out of the driveway, turning south to head toward the dump.
She sees the blue Nissan Altima parked at the shooting range next door, but doesn’t give it a second look.
***
They eat dinner together in the living room with the TV blaring some random sequel of Friday the 13th. Pam loves horror movies. Emily tolerates them. A cheesy political ad for Jeffrey Blake pops up between two grocery ads reminding anyone with half a brain that tomorrow is Halloween and candy is on sale. Eau Claire takes Halloween very seriously, stretching out festivities for an entire week, culminating in a big festival downtown.
“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Blake says with a smile, revealing teeth that studiously avoided candy. He looks a little older, a little wiser, a little more handsome than Emily remembers. “Nothing surprises me. Eau Claire: I’m ready to be your mayor.”
Emily and her mother reminisce about trick-or-treating, when they used to canvas the wealthiest suburb to guarantee the best loot. They open two bottles of wine. Pam sprawls on the couch and Emily takes Eddie’s comfy old recliner. They drink and talk about how to fix up the house with Eddie’s life insurance policy and laugh about all of Pam’s weird neighbors over the years. Then they cry.
***
The next morning, hung over, Emily returns to the basement. She makes her way through a trio of Rubbermaid containers. In one container is all of Emily’s old schoolwork, going back to the days when “Mommy” was “Momy” and “Daddy” didn’t exist. In the second container are survival blankets, wrapped in plastic. In the third container are old hand-made costumes. A dozen outfits of characters from fairy tales and fantasy stories that Pam wore to her work’s Halloween parties. Red Riding Hood. Peter Pan. Cinderella. The Mad Hatter. Sexy Zorro.
Emily makes her way into the workroom, which is squeezed into the southwest corner, partially hidden by a sewer pipe and a cluttered workbench. She’s neglected this area so far because Eddie had always forbidden her from entering. Hanging over the long workbench are handcuffs. Body armor and gas masks sit on a shelf next to red boxes of bullets. Wooden panels run along two walls. Emily remembers, before Eddie joined the family, this was where her mother stored the beach stuff and yard games. She remembers, as a child, this room had seemed bigger.
She knocks on the wooden panels running along the wall. They’re hollow. Her finger pokes at one edge, digging under the plywood and worrying it a bit until she can reach in and feel an opening. She takes a crowbar and rips the panels away.
More guns. Bleach. Cans of mace. A solar charger. Boxes of old baseball cards. Silver coins stacked like gambling chips. Pictures of the family. Commendations from the county.
And most bizarre of all: documents, preserved in plastic sheathing, yellowed with age. Emily picks them up. Her eyes have to fight to comprehend the medieval-style font of the text. But when she does, her limbs tingle in horror.
Although much of what you read in this may be funny or frivolous, remember the real purpose: we are drawing nearer to a revolutionary war.
The great white Aryan race must be advanced and protected at all costs.
Separation, then extermination.
There’s more. A caricature of a Black man. An article railing against immigrants. Lessons on what to wear, how to behave in public. Accept that you may go to prison, and then you’re free. White separatism is a holy quest. P.O. boxes for where bulk copies of “propaganda” (put in quotes as if it’s a joke) can be sent.
It’s a newsletter. A freaking white supremacist newsletter.
“Holy shit. So you hid cocaine and you secretly hated Black people,” Emily mutters. She tosses the newsletter on the workbench, angry all over again at her mother for marrying Eddie.
She collects the coins, sorts the boxes of ammo, tosses the family pictures into the container with all her old schoolwork, lays out a pair of semi-automatic handguns on the workbench. Her hands mechanically remove each magazine and slide back the chamber, ejecting a bullet, muscle memory even after so many years since Eddie’s last lesson.
No matter how hard she works, how much she cleans, she can’t get the newsletter out of her head. She can see the hateful words forming in her mind’s eye, formatted in the same Old English font with the fancy, hard-to-read f’s. She should burn it. Knowing that hateful material is gone from this world would bring at least a temporary joy.
She grabs the pages and notices something she’d missed: there, on the top of the plastic sheathing, written in black marker …
Seized by Sandford and Yates, Mission Hall raid, 2016.
What the hell? Was the Sheriff’s Department evidence locker just open all the time? Does every cop have stashes of drugs and “memorabilia?” Well, to hell with them. She stuffs the pages into her purse and leaves the house, getting into her mother’s Jeep.
In her blind rage, she doesn’t even notice the Blue Nissan Altima parked at the shooting range.
***
“Dead?”
The City Hall receptionist dressed as Little Bo Peep sitting behind the counter gives Emily a suspicious look. “Is there a reason you want to talk to these two specific officers?”
Emily’s hand goes to her purse, securing the rolled-up newsletter. “What happened to them?”
“Yates, I think, was suicide. Sandford’s house burned down. It was in the news.”
“I don’t live in town anymore. Can I … look at their police reports?”
Little Bo Peep raises her eyebrows, sending the unmistakable message that such a question is odd. She doesn’t have a twangy Northwoods accent, the pretty cousin of the dialect made famous by Fargo. She probably moved to Eau Claire for college and decided to stay.
“Well, was the fire accidental?”
“The fire was ruled accidental, I remember that. Hello, Councilman Cohen.”
The councilman, dressed as Thor, smiles at her on his way to the marble staircase that leads to the second floor.
“Were either of the officers racists?” Emily asks.
Bo Peep’s eyes go wide. “Racists? I have no idea. What kind of question is that? Hello, Councilman Blake. Very scary!”
Emily turns to get a glance at her former secret crush. But Jeffrey Blake’s face is obscured by a somewhat frightening wolf mask. He pretends his fingers are claws, wiggling them at Bo Peep before following Thor upstairs.
“What about Yates?” she presses. “Was his suicide, like, pretty cut and dry?”
“Cut and dry?” Bo Peep leans forward. Blonde curls from her wig fall across her forehead. “Wait, are you one of the student journalists from the university?”
“No. Yes.”
She raises an eyebrow.
Emily gives up. “Just go back to your curds.”
Bo Peep calls out after her. “That was Little Miss Muffet!”
***
Emily and Pam eat a late lunch together in the living room. Pam’s put on a classic—the original Child’s Play—and Emily has made mac ‘n cheese with grilled chicken. Good leftover food and a good movie diversion. Emily knows her ma is hurting. She wonders if it would hurt less if Emily told her about the cocaine, about the newsletter. Who was Eddie, in Pam’s mind? A partner. A companion for a woman scarred by a shitty first marriage, raising a daughter who could be a bit of a brat, working in an office building where no one respected the administrative assistant.
So let her have this moment. She looks content, sitting on the couch now, watching the demonic doll chase after terrified kids.
The mood changes when Emily leans back in the recliner to digest and turns the chair in just the right way so that they hear a click come from somewhere inside the chair. Together, they flip the recliner. A handgun falls out, lands on the floor; the safety is off. Red you’re dead, Eddie drilled into her head. Emily flips on the safety, disassembling it on the coffee table.
Pam begins crying. “It could have killed you. You could have died.”
“Ma.” Emily hugs her. “Ma. Let’s go to the big downtown Halloween party tonight. Get our minds off all this. How about that?”
Pam sniffs in through her nose. “We don’t have costumes.”
“We have tons,” Emily says. She hurries downstairs, grabbing two random costumes from the storage bin, then returns to the living room and holds them up. “Red Riding Hood or Sexy Zorro?”
“Sexy Zorro,” Pam says immediately.
Emily goes into the bathroom and tries on the red cloak, tying it under one button of her blouse. It’s goofy, but not nearly as goofy as the Sexy Zorro costume. Her cell rings. It’s a local 715 number. “Gimme a minute, Ma!” she calls down the hall. “Hello?”
“Why are you asking about dead police officers, kiddo?”
Emily hurries out the front door, into the cool afternoon. Only Eddie’s old partner, Garret Ross, had the nerve to give Emily a patronizing nickname. “How—”
“Little Bo Peep can’t keep her mouth shut. Listen. I don’t know why you’re asking around, but you need to stop. Sandford and Yates are off-limits in City Hall.”
Seized by Sandford and Yates, Mission Hall raid, 2016.
Wind sends dry leaves tumbling across the yard. Emily shivers in the warm sunlight. “Why?”
“Not sure. All I know is anyone who’s asked about them over the years has been thrown on desk duty or worse.”
“Did Eddie ever ask about it?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know, exactly. He was always real cagey, wouldn’t explain anything. Didn’t make a lot of sense. Tried to convince me to break into the evidence locker and pull some old things. Started happening right after Taylor committed suicide.”
Emily’s head spins. “What did he want?”
“Info from the Mission Hall raid. Used to be a Freemason temple where the logging barons hung out. Got converted into a bar and a place to rent for parties.”
“Why did the county sheriff’s department raid it?”
“Expired license. Sheriff didn’t like the Blake family, wanted to piss them off a bit. They didn’t find anything.”
The Blake family. “I have to go.”
“Emily. Be careful.”
She hangs up and sits on the patio bench, first clearing away the crispy fallen leaves. She uses her phone to look up the history of Mission Hall. Bought in 1975 by Jackson Blake, father of one Jeffrey Blake. But what was the racist newsletter doing there, and why didn’t Eddie tell his partner about it? She pulls the newsletter from her purse, ignoring the temper tantrum about black people, the ode to Hitler, until she finds the listing of P.O. boxes. One of them stands out like a sore thumb:
- Eau Claire, WI.
***
She arrives at the Post Office exactly 10 minutes before they close. P.O. boxes are sectioned off to one side of the customer area, protected by a metal gate that’s been prematurely pulled down halfway. The USPS office is sleek, with clean counters and lots of kiosks full of dark blue postal supplies.
Emily steps up to the counter, where a man dressed as an old-school Dracula—right down to the black widow’s peak—gives her an appraisal. “Red Riding Hood?”
“Right,” she says. “Listen, I’m wondering how to get a hold of someone who owns a P.O. box.”
“You send them a letter.”
“2988. Who owns P.O. box 2988?”
Dracula shakes his head. “I don’t know, and I sure as hell can’t give you that information.”
“Goddamn it.” Emily slaps her palm on the counter and leaves, her red cloak flowing behind her like a superhero cape. She gets back into the Jeep.
Mission Hall raid, 2016.
One more idea. One more and then she’ll let this go.
She drives to the center of the city, taking Graham Avenue along the Chippewa River. Outside the bars and restaurants are monsters and superheroes and creatures and ghosts. The festivities have begun.
Emily parks at the old building named Mission Hall. It definitely looks like a Masonic temple, right down to the dusty gray columns flanking the front door. Emily goes around back, where an empty little lot butts up against the riverbank. It’s quiet back here, with the temple sandwiched between a pair of two-story office buildings. No one around, and only the distant laughter of Halloween celebrants.
The back door is made of glass, just like the front. It’s a “members’ entrance,” according to faded frosted lettering. It opens into a dimly lit pub, where a handful of middle-aged men who have no interest in Halloween are sitting under the soft glow of lights with red Budweiser lampshades. There’s a jukebox, a pool table, and a pair of shifty older men who’ve stopped playing darts to get a good look at Red Riding Hood.
“Excuse me,” she says to the bartender. “I was wondering if you had any pamphlets about joining the Freemasons.”
The bartender gives her an incredulous look. “Seriously?”
“I’m a history buff.”
He points to a dark corner of the bar, where pictures are protected behind glass. “There’s a bunch of old historical junk.”
Emily walks over, her eyes wandering across the pictures, skimming text of news articles and pamphlets from the 1970’s and 80’s. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Wait.
An election notice. 1984. The re-election of Ronald Reagan. Come to Mission Hall to volunteer. Or …
Send a letter to Jackson Blake. P.O. Box 2988.
***
Emily turns onto the winding driveway of her ma’s property, hitting a pothole hard enough for the Jeep’s chassis to make a terrible thunking noise. A blue Nissan Altima is parked next to the house. Someone is looking through the shades.
Not her ma.
“Shit,” she whispers, turning off the headlamps. She takes the car about halfway up the driveway, then turns onto the grass about ten feet past the garage.
She should call the police. The thought cycles through her mind even as she’s unlocking the garage door, grabbing a gardening trowel, digging into the earth five feet from the door. But she thinks she knows who’s inside. And she thinks her stepdad’s paranoia might have been legitimate.
The box isn’t buried deep. Emily rips it open with shaky hands, grabbing the body armor, pulling off her shirt, putting on the body armor, putting her shirt back on, loading a magazine into the Beretta 92X, her fingers smoothly gripping the forged aluminum alloy to chamber a round, flipping up the safety. It’s all muscle memory, the way Eddie taught her.
She creeps to the house, using the darkness as cover, stepping carefully around the dry leaves. The curtains are drawn; through them, she can see the TV on. She enters through the back, pointing her gun into the living room.
The big, bad wolf is waiting for her. Pressing a knife to Pam’s throat.
“Sweetie,” Pam whispers.
Emily keeps the gun level, holding it with both hands to hide her fear. “Councilman Blake.”
The wolf uses Pam’s body as a shield so he can remove his mask. “Nothing bad needs to happen tonight. Just give me the newsletter.”
“Which one?” Emily asks. In the fog of terror, she can’t think straight.
“The one they took from Mission Hall!” Jeffrey Blake shouts. Emily’s mother flinches.
“I should have left the guns where they were,” Pam whimpers. “Em, there was a gun right by the front door. I could have grabbed it before he even got inside.”
“All I want is the newsletter, Emily. Don’t be stupid.”
“You keep that P.O. box, don’t you?” Emily asks. “It’s not just your dad’s legacy. You’re part of that hate group, too.”
“The sheriff had no business raiding my father’s building for an expired liquor license! He just hated our family!”
Emily points the gun away from them both and pulls the trigger. The gun goes off with a thundering crack, leaving a hole in the drywall right next to Pam’s clock. “Put down the knife and get away from her!”
Blake presses the knife tip against Pam’s neck hard enough to draw blood. “I’ve been waiting five years to get that newsletter back. I’m not leaving without it. I can’t leave without it.”
Emily thinks she could pull the trigger. If her mother wasn’t so close to him, she could take a clear shot. Even now, her finger sits gently on the trigger. Sweat makes her grip slippery. She can’t take a shot. She can’t risk it.
She sets the gun on the carpet, next to a mud stain caused by walking up and down the basement stairs and out to the dumpster. “The newsletter’s in the basement. I can go down there …”
Blake shakes his head violently. Strands of black hair detach from his careful comb-over. “No, I’m coming with you.”
Before Emily can even object, he’s grabbed an empty bottle of wine from the coffee table. He swings it across the back of Pam’s head. Emily watches her mother’s eyelids flutter, her body landing gracelessly onto the couch.
Emily utters a string of curses as she leads him down the basement stairs. He keeps the knife tip pressed into her back. “They tried to extort me. Yates and Sandford. But your dad was the one who held onto the evidence.”
“You didn’t know that until you killed them, did you?”
“I wasn’t surprised,” he says. “They were smart assholes. Haven’t you seen my campaign ads? Nothing surprises me. Especially not in this shit town.”
They reach the bottom of the stairs. “Where is it?” Blake hisses into her ear.
“In the workroom,” she answers mechanically. “Next to the chop saw and about a hundred silver dollars.” She flips on the light. The darkness is extinguished by the single bulb hanging in the center of the basement, illuminating the neat rows of rummage stuff sitting on the shelves. She sees this place in an entirely new light now. It’s not just an emergency bunker.
It’s a fallback plan.
The next two seconds happen in slow-motion. Emily, suddenly leaping up, swinging her hand at the lightbulb, closing her eyes the moment she knows she’s going to connect, hearing the pop of the bulb and Blake’s curse from right behind her, feeling the broken glass slice into her fingers as everything goes black.
Blake’s hand reaches out; he’s lucky and manages to grab hold of her shirt. She feels the knife stab into her torso, but the body armor does its job. Emily kicks away from him and then she’s backing up to the Christmas tree, moving behind it so Blake continues to follow the sound of her shuffling feet. He mistakes the black shape for her and lunges at the tree. Emily dodges around the sewer pipe, sidling into the workroom, grabbing one of Eddie’s handguns from the workbench. She blindly loads a magazine, chambering a round even as she hears the Christmas tree fall over, her eyes adjusted enough now to see a shadow trudging through the darkness.
She aims, points her gun, and fires.
In the flash of light, she sees a look of surprise on Jeffrey Blake’s face.
***
Ken Brosky is a columnist for Suspense Magazine and has also been published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and The Portland Review.
