Cliff Chatsworth, Boxing Couch, Gibbon’s Gym

           Cliff Chatsworth waited for the street-car on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin.

It was early in the morning, still dark, and there wasn’t any activity on the street, with the exception of old-blind Arnie setting-up his newsstand across the street.

            Cliff was on his way to Gibbon’s Gym where he coached a few boxers; the Number Two car would take him down Franklin, past Little Earth then Augsburg College, before taking him across the river to Pig’s Eye.

There was a young-man helping Arnie, a fellow Cliff recognized from The Rose, as the fighters called it, in the basement of the Hamm’s Brewery.

Johnny Holiday was his name and Cliff thought that he had promising boxer, even though he looked more like a movie star, talked like an egg-head, and at this moment he was moving about like a drunk.

It was an early start to the day, probably just a late night for the boy, Cliff thought, but still, booze and boxing don’t mix, may as well be pouring whatever talent he might have into the gutter.

            The two seemed to be friends; Cliff couldn’t make out their conversation but they were laughing a good bit, and it appeared to him that they knew each other well, and Johnny Holiday was being of good-service, which he took as a sign of a well-formed character.

            Earlier, Cliff had come out of his apartment on the corner of the intersection, said good morning to Arnie and bought his paper before crossing the street to wait for his transportation.

That was when Johnny pulled-up in his convertible.

 Cliff folded the gray sheet tightly and began to look at the headlines on the front page, but the jovial antics of the two men across the street made it difficult for him to concentrate and he allowed his mind to wander…

It had been five days since the last gunfight in the city, and there had been no other murders to speak of during that time.

These last few violence-free days were the longest stretch that St. Anthony had experienced since January, when Karl Thorrson’s street-war with Colonel Forrester had begun…and which now appeared to be over, with the giant Thorrson having gotten the upper-hand. Or so it seemed, Cliff thought.

            Cliff had worked for the Colonel when he was younger, not directly, but he had met and spoken to the great-man a couple of times…never about business. At the age of sixteen he had accepted a post as a road agent, with the objective of stopping commerce along the Mississippi, Minnesota and Red Rivers, along the full length of the border Minnesota shared with the Lakota Confederacy; it was difficult and dangerous work, and it had often been brutal.

            After that Cliff had spent a dime in the Stillwater Penitentiary for Bank Robbery, a job he had done on the Colonel’s behalf, for which he never received any help, not even so much as a word of thanks for his service.

            Those were the breaks, he told himself while he did his time, it’s how the poor get along.

Cliff might have had a great life as a gangster, he certainly enjoyed it while it lasted. He might also have ended up in an early grave, like so many of the fellows who had lost their lives in the year of terror St. Anthony had just endured.

            Cliff tried to shake these thoughts from his head, and he knew as well as anything else that there is no escaping the past. He had learned to box in prison…coaching came natural; that’s what they told him down at the gym. He felt good about being on the straight path, he was student and teacher of the sweet-science, and by following it he had found his purpose, no regrets.

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Jean Francois, Old Man on Campus - The First Day

            Jean Francois sat on his front porch watching the rain fall from the shelter it provided.

            It had been a quiet day at Augsburg even with students beginning their return to campus. The late summer heat and the impending storm kept the sound of traffic on riverside muted.

            Jean had weeded his garden in the morning, afterward he swept the sidewalk; then he scrubbed his front steps. Now he sat on his porch at his home on campus, smoking his pipe and sipping brandy.

He was enjoying a quiet afternoon, just as he had always imagined when he was beginning his long career working for the Park Board.

Today, Jean had been hoping to spend the day watching a bevy of blonde-haired Lutheran’s returning to school or arriving on campus for the first time. He never grew tired of autumn’s annual peregrination, of the commencement activities with all the students dressed in their best, and the girls showing a little more leg every year…it was why he built his house in this location, across the street from the theatre arts building and the athletic field.

As Jean rocked in his chair to the sound of the rain, he stared at a patch of peeling paint on the bay-window that faced the morning sun. He kept a rigid maintenance schedule on his home, scraping and painting one side of the house every year, so that the cycle completed itself every four. He had not planned on beginning to paint the east side of the house until next spring, and now he felt a pit goring in his stomach as a sense of dismay began to encroach on his peace of mind.

Perhaps it was due to the excessive heat and rain we have endured over the summer, Jean thought, though in his heart he blamed himself for a job poorly done.

As he contemplated the disorder in front of him he watched a nice sedan pull up and come to a sudden stop across the street. He recognized Dr. Johnson behind the wheel. He was a professor of antiquities and a distinguished member of the faculty who had joined the college in the previous year.

Jean was glad to lay eyes on him because he had been instructed to monitor the professor’s comings and goings for his former employer, Ermes Batelier, the Commissioner of Parks, a very powerful man in the city.

When Dr. Johnson had first come to campus, he received a call from the Commissioner who had asked him to keep tabs on the man, and make regular reports of his activities, including the company he kept.

He told Jean that he would call from time to time with more explicit instructions for his surveillance, and Jean was happy to do it, even happier to see an extra ten dollars a week appear in his pension check for his troubles.

It wasn’t a bad life, he thought. As he watched the tall and slender, bird-like Dr. Johnson get out of his car and rush through the rain into the building where his offices were.

  Jean thought he looked disheveled, his clothes were already damp, if not from the rainfall, then he had soaked himself through with perspiration.

Jean had never seen the professor in such a state, though he nearly always radiated a sense of nervousness. He had spoken to him a couple of times and had concluded that the professor was the type of fellow who expected the worst, and as a result he was never satisfied with anything, because he believed that the worm was always about to turn against him.

Jean shook his head in judgement, that is an unpleasant man he thought. 

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King Hakon VII, of Norway - The First Day

            King Hakon, the seventh of his name, was alone in his council chamber.

He was busy examining maps of his holdings in Europe and America, the fine details their topography as they had been etched in bass relief and positioned on modular tables that he could configure at will.

The king ran his fingers lightly over their surfaces, brushing the contours of the arctic circle, from Norway to Greenland and Iceland, from the Canadian Rockies to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.

His holdings were vast, greater than any king in the history of the Scandinavian people, and he knew that if he wanted to keep them for his heirs, if he was to establish a dynasty that would endure, there was much work to do…and it fell to him to see it done.

Hakon’s people had been migrating into Alaska, which he had purchased from the Russians in exchange for military support for the Nicholas the Second, the last Romanoff Czar, in his war with the Bolsheviks.

The Norwegians and the Russians, the Vikings and the Rus, were natural allies, and together they had squeezed Finland and Sweden, securing stability and independence for themselves even while Hakon fomented an age of Norwegian ascendancy that was fueled by Alaskan Gold.

At the end of the Great War, with the help Hakon and Nicholas, the German Kaiser had taken possession of Canada; now Germans and Austrians, Poles and Czechs were flooding into Hudson Bay and settling the Canadian interior.

Seizing control of the Canadian provinces had been the Kaisers aim from the outset of the war in France, and at the end of it, when the English and French had finally sued for peace, the Kaiser demanded their holdings in the great northern frontier in exchange for a relative degree of autonomy in the government of their respective nations.

Hakon was not keen on these developments, but he had seen them coming for years, and he advocated policies that allowed his own people to push east into Canada, from Alaska to Winnipeg, across a vast landscape that had been largely ignored by Europeans.

Tall mountains, covered in glaciers, marked the border of his domain; but the Canadian interior was wide open and impossible to police or defend by ordinary means, and the Norwegians were eager to control as much of it as they could, before any conflict arose with Kaiser Wilhem the Second, who had seized the mantle of the Hapsburg monarchy, and now, though a Lutheran, was the titular head of the Holy Roman Empire, along with all of their vassal states, which now included Great Britan and France.

Today, Hakon had received word from Winnipeg concerning an old comrade of his from the war for independence he had waged against Seden in his youth. The message concerned his friend Bjorn Elmquist, who had been smuggled across the border of the United States, from Minnesota into Canada, and he was in desperate condition.

Bjorn had received a blow to the head with an axe…delivered by his wife. It should have killed him, but it didn’t…yet the attending physician wrote that it almost certainly would, given time; meanwhile his friend was paralyzed and had lost the ability to speak.

The message included the request that Hakon give his friend succor; the party making the request believed that Bjorn would recover, even though the physician indicated that the man would remain in a permanent vegetative state...at best.

Hakon believed that Bjorn’s associates, the Magnusson sisters and Karl Thorrson, whom he knew and considered to be degenerates, though dangerous people…were merely grifting; Thorrson had also fought in the wars, alongside Hakon and Bjorn, and had been a capable soldier, but he neither liked nor trusted him the giant-man.

Nevertheless, he wrote an order to the doctor, instructing him to provide for Bjorn in Winnipeg until his death from natural causes. Bjorn had sacrificed much for me during the war and he deserves to be taken care of, the King thought. If Thorrson is grifting, I will not begrudge him taking something for himself.

Hakon stared intently at the map of Minnesota and the border it shared with the Lakota Confederacy along the Minnesota and Red Rivers.

He stared so intently at the base relief he thought he could see his canal being dug between the two rivers, anticipating the trade that would be flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, into the great cities he intended to build throughout the tundra, it was then that it first occurred to him that the Magnusson sister’s might be of some use along the way. 

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Luke Ingelson, Muscle – The First Day

            Luke Ingelson sat behind the big desk in the office at the casino on Big Island.

It was not his desk; it belonged to his employer, Karl Thorrson, but he had stayed in the city for the day, so Luke was occupying it for the moment, and he was enjoying the feeling of being in charge, even though the night was slow.

            It was raining hard and the ferry driver wouldn’t leave the docks in Excelsior to bring new gamblers over to the park on account of it. Those who were already at the casino could not leave, which was good for business Luke thought, but not as good as new faces with full pockets and fresh hopes.

Thorrson’s main man, Ivan “The Wolf,” had just left the island. He took a small craft intending to shake things loose and force the ferry driver’s hand; business was business and a casino needed gamblers, and it wasn’t up to the boat driver to say how many could come across or when.

The Wolf had a reputation, he probably wouldn’t have to say a word to the man, with just one look from the silver haired menace the gears would turn and the traffic would begin to flow again.

The poor sap of a boat driver was nice enough, Luke thought, but he would probably get replaced in short order, and then…disappear…the Wolf didn’t tolerate a man who wouldn’t obey an order, and Karl Thorrson allowed him to manage personnel with little to no input from him.

Luke stared out the big-bay-windows into the dark-night and thought about the future; the war for St. Anthony was just about over, his boss had won, and he was still alive…along with his brother James.

They had risked a great deal for Karl Thorrson over the past few months; they had done their share of the dirty work, and now he was hoping they would be rewarded, they had dropped a lot of bodies and survived

Luke was hoping for more than cash, though cash was always welcome, he wanted positions of authority for him and his brother, he wanted to run one of the operations that Thorrson now controlled.

Maybe I‘m sitting on top of it right now, he thought, the Casino and the Amusement Park, and there was talk of a hotel at the port of Excelsior; there was more than enough to go around.

Luke considered taking one of the boss’s cigars from the box on his desk, he began to reach for it but then decided against it. The one-eyed giant he worked for was keenly observant, and he didn’t want to answer any questions about a missing stogie, no matter how much he wanted to light one of those fine cigars at that very moment.

He poured himself a whiskey instead, put his feet up on the desk and sipped slowly from the tumbler.

Luke and his brother James had gotten where they were by tenacity and loyalty, and by showing that they could keep their heads about them in a fight, he wasn’t going to risk what he had proven over a little temptation. He had made a place for himself on easy street…not that there wasn’t more work to do, he thought, but the war was over, and when they gathered all the pieces there would be plenty to distribute.

Just then the short band radio gave an alarm.

Through the static of the storm he heard the Ferry driver announce his departure from the docks. On a clear day the trip would only take about ten minutes; it would take longer with the storm.

Luke was glad when he heard his voice, not merely because it meant that the wheels of commerce would continue to turn, but he was also glad that The Wolf had not killed him on the spot. 

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James Ingelson, Muscle – The First Day

          James Ingelson pulled the long-black and armored sedan into a parking space in front of Franky’s tavern on Lake Street. He had collections to make and wanted to get them done before the weather broke for the worse.

He got out of the driver’s seat and took note of the number of girls who were already on the sidewalk trying to attract a patron. There was a steady flow of traffic on the strip at all times of day, cars pulling up at the curb to place orders for dope: cocaine, heroin or both…and other pharmaceutical grade chemicals if they should desire.

James knew the storm that was coming would be fierce because the air-pressure was bothering the broken drum in his cauliflowered ear, as it had been more days than not over the past few months.

Also, the heat was oppressive, but the humid air had begun to blow, and even though it was blowing hot, it was laced with cold streams, which told him that the storm-giants were on the march.

             James was not a small fellow, he stood six feet two inches, and at one time, before the Great War, he had been a ranked heavy-weight fighter, but that wasn’t why the tough guys on the street stepped out of his way when they saw him coming.

He and his brother Luke had been all up and down Lake Street, from Excelsior to the Marshall Avenue bridge for the past few months, earning a reputation among the local merchants, a reputation that put him and his brother on good standing with all the pimps and players on Lake; they were tough but fair, but it was his bosses reputation that preceded him, and the fear that it invoked, that caused the hooligans to step out of his way when they saw him coming, and James knew it.

His boss was the fearsome-giant, Karl Thorrson, who, in a very short time had wrested control of the city from one of its founders, a man every simply called the Colonel, though no-one knew how he had earned the rank. It was Karl Thorrson’s reputation that mattered more than anything else.

They were the new power, and after months of bloody gun work they had vanquished the old…or so James believed.

            He went into Franky’s and stepped up to the bar with a smile for a couple of hungry looking girls looking at him as if he might be able solve all their troubles for a day or two.

            James said “good morning” to them, and then, as if on cue they got up-off their stools, came over to him and started rubbing their perfumed bodies against him.

            There wasn’t much fabric between their skin and his, and he could feel every bit of them as they draped themselves around his broad shoulders, purring in his ear with their soft voices, expressing their marvel at how big his muscles were and blowing lightly on his neck.

            Just as one of them had begun to press her hand against the front of his trousers James heard some commotion from the back room before he saw Frankie coming out with an envelope in his hand and apologizing like a schoolboy for making James wait.

            He took the envelope and said, “No trouble Frankie. I’ll just take these two with me for the day, along with whatever they need to see them through…that’s all the tax I’ll charge you…this time.”

            Frankie looked at his girls while he struggled with a response; he didn’t believe he had the power to refuse. Even though it was not the way things were done, Frankie didn’t want to test it

            James had just been joking, he hadn’t meant for the guy to take him seriously, so he cracked a smile and slapped Frankie on the shoulder, though it occurred to him that he could have gotten away with it, and that was good to know, he thought.

The wheels had already begun to turn inside his head as he planned on taking advantage another time.

            “On second thought, ladies,” James said. “I’ll take a rain check.

“We’ll make it a double-date with me and my brother Luke.”

            “Yaa,” they chimed in unison, with a slight note of disappointment in their Swedish lilt. “When you come, around we will be waiting.”

            James took the envelope from Frankie and bid them all a good day, leaving the bar to continue his tour down Lake Street.

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Genevieve La Salle, Nurse – The First Day

           Genevieve La Salle enjoyed her morning walk down Douglass Avenue.

She kept a small apartment in a three-story brownstone across the street from Lowry Park, with its natural spring and gentle stream that filled seven small pools before diverting back underground and continuing along its aquifer where it emptied into the Jewett’s Lake at the bottom of the hill.

 Genevieve walked three-blocks east to the bottleneck where Lyndale and Hennepin Avenues merged, and traffic was always heavy, crossing the six lanes of traffic, in front of the Methodist church with its tall—slender steeple, and its cross that looked more like a rising star than a symbol of Christ.

She turned north for two curving blocks, past the Five Ten on Groveland, past Saint Mark’s Episcopal with the Basilica of Saint Mary clearly in view; there she crossed Fifteenth Street and wound her way through Jewett’s Park.

This is the route Genevieve took to work. It was not the most direct path to the hospital where she worked, but she enjoyed the stroll, even on a muggy morning like this one.

She could walked down fifteenth, along the southside of the park, but she preferred to go over the bridge that crossed a narrow stretch of the lake, where she would stop to feed the ducks and goldfish crumbs of crust that she had trimmed from her morning slice of toast.

            Genevieve had left her apartment that morning feeling well-composed and pretty; she walked slowly so as not to overheat.

Her spotless white and freshly starched uniform crinkled as she went. Her white shoes were quiet on the pavement, her long dark curls were tightly coifed under her nurses cap, and her cape was flowing in the breeze behind her.

Genevieve wore the accoutrements of her office with pride.

            She walked past the shuffleboard and tennis courts, there were some young men playing at their games; she liked to see them shirtless and sweating in the sun.

Genevieve was always on the lookout for one particular fellow, who looked to be her age, though perhaps a little younger…he was tall and handsome, and always wore the same shabby suit that looked like it needed some mending.

            She would often see him sitting on a bench reading the paper, or perhaps writing in a notebook and smoking, which she did not like. He was fit and handsome, and he had an air of mystery about him that she found alluring.

            He looked intelligent and thoughtful, so that Genevieve didn’t mind his cigarettes, or that from time to time she saw him sipping from a flask.

            On occasion they said good morning to one another. He was always polite, and she was always demure, but she did not see him today, which made her sullen.

            Genevieve had been thinking about him the night before, she had dreamt about him, and because of this she had been thinking of him all morning, wondering what it would be like to dance with him, sit down to dinner or walk arm in arm.

Now, she felt the emptiness of disappointment that comes…not from losing something that you once had, but from not getting something you expected to have.

            Genevieve was still thinking about him, and palpably missing him, when she checked into the nurse’s station at Abott on the east of the park; she felt a hollow in her guts.

            Maybe I’ll see him this afternoon, she thought to herself as she began her rounds; now she was feeling hopeful again.

If I do see him this afternoon, Genevieve determined, I will be bold and ask him his name.

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Marcus Lexington, Student at St. Thomas – The First Day

            Marcus Lexington was in his room at the University of St. Thomas. He was busying himself with the chore of unpacking, two weeks before the fall-semester was to begin, and today he was missing his friend, Johnny Holiday.

            He had been hoping that Johnny would return to classes this fall, but when he checked into the dormitory, he was notified that he would have a new roommate for the upcoming term.

            Johnny had been his roommate last year, but he also kept an apartment off campus, so it had been particularly nice for Marcus to have him as a roommate, because it meant that he nearly always had the entire place to himself…it was a small room after all, and Marcus liked the privacy, as well as the extra space Johnny’s absence had afforded him to spread out his studies.

            It was the desire to be alone that had him moving back to campus a week early.

Marcus’s parent’s house was only a couple of miles from campus, down Summitt Avenue and up on “the hill” near St. Paul’s Cathedral. It overlooked the State Capital and downtown Pig’s Eye with its port on the Mississippi River.

When Marcus was home, his mother and father were perpetually after him to be productive; if it was not them, then it was the servants who never let him be who seemed to never tire of echoing his parent’s sentiments.

Marcus was just finishing arranging his wardrobe in the small closet the dorm provided him; he was about to unpack his books, thinking he should be careful to confine them to his half of the room, when he heard voices outside his door in the Hallway.

It was the boys from the R.O.T.C., returning from their drills.

Johnny had been in the R.O.T.C. and Marcus wondered if any of them had heard anything about his return.

Marcus wasn’t the soldierly type...he wasn’t athletic at all.

His mother said he was too fragile to go out for sports, and he had always been the subject of ridicule from the boys on the football team, along with most of the other jocks he had gone to school with all-throughout his life….at least until last year, when he started college aand met Johnny.

At St. Thomas Marcus was able to make a place for himself helping the guys who struggled with academics: he tutored, he edited papers and helped them prepare for tests…if they asked.

More importantly, Johnny looked after him.

Johnny had gotten him a place on the rowing team, which was probably the greatest single favor any fellow had ever done for Marcus.

He was not as an oarsman; he did not have the physique for that.

Marcus was small and light which made him ideal as the coxswain; he called the cadence and steered the boat and he had led the team to a championship the previous year. It had been the proudest moment of his life, and now, he was worried about his friend.

Johnny had gotten into some trouble and had been asked to suspend his studies, but it had been Marcus’s understanding that he would Johnny would be allowed to return this term

The captain of the R.O.T.C., a fellow named Bivens, had filed a complaint against Johnny…for insubordination, one of his professor had filed a similar complaint…for disrespectful behavior.

Marcus figured that Bivens would know if Johnny was expected back, so he stepped out into the hall to see if he could strike up a conversation and put the question to one of them guys, if not to Bivens himself.

When he stepped out of his dorm-room door, he got the feeling they were actually glad to see him.

It gave Marcus a warm feeling, and he had Johnny to thank for that.

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