Jack’s drinking partner that warm summer night was Old Coach Young. As a much younger man, he had been the head football coach at Duluth High. The last football coach the school had. The kids had loved him, sober or drunk. But the old high school had been closed in the economic downturn of the 1970s. The big red-brick building halfway up the hill was still standing, but it stood empty. Lifeless. Nobody wanted it torn down, but nobody knew what to do with it. Nobody had known what to do with the football coach, either. With shrinking enrollments and closing schools, there were few teaching positions available on the Iron Range. For years the man simply drifted from shit job to shit job, until one day Coach Young became Old Coach Young. He was on disability now, and enough of his former players were still around town to loan him a dollar or two, or to buy him a beer. Besides, the coach knew everybody in town. On both sides of the law. For reporter Jack Start, new again in his old hometown, his high school football coach was a great source.
The television set flickering above them was tuned to KDUL-TV. Home of the Minnesota Twins. “Get this, Coach,” said Jack Start, hoisting his first beer in twenty-four hours, “that cheerleader I interviewed, Miss Grand Tetons…she has an identical twin.”
“Whoa! Do you mean to say there’s four of those puppies?”
Jack Start spit laughter across the bar. Wiped his mouth. “I said identical.”
The Twins were playing the Red Sox. The sound of the announcers could barely be heard above the buzz of the bar.
“I remember their mother was a real looker,” the old coach said in his deep, gravel voice. His gray-white hair was combed straight back, revealing the severe redness of his face. He carried the thick arms of an ex-athlete, and the overlapping belly of a lush. “A real looker,” he repeated.
Jack Start nodded his head in agreement. “You know, I always wondered back then if you guys really looked…I mean, you teachers.”
The coach laughed. “Kid, there was a lot more than looking going on back then.”
“Really? Someday you and I are going to have to have a long, long talk, Coach.”
It was a little past 9 p.m. They were waiting for the baseball game to end so that the local news could begin. It was the top of the sixth inning. The Twins were down one run to the Red Sox. Jack Start and his old coach ordered two more beers. And that’s when it happened. It wasn’t fast or flashy, it was just alien. Unexpected.
With a Red Sox batter at the plate, the TV signal went fuzzy. Then it faded away. Nothing but snow and static. When the picture cleared again, some guy was sitting at a desk talking into the camera. It looked like public-access cable, or like a cheap video taped in an old house. The strange man smiled, a truly engaging smile, and said,
He was a fairly handsome man, in a slovenly sort of way. A heavyset guy who had a round, happy face, with thin brown hair on a receding hairline. There was something mischievous in his smile, but nothing malicious. A benign comedian. He was wearing a blue work shirt. The kind of guy who would fit right in at Grandma’s Saloon. The messy desk he was seated behind looked as if it were located in a spare bedroom, or maybe a room in the basement. The background was cheap wood paneling, the kind installed to hide the holes in the wall. An old Hamm’s Beer sign could be seen over his shoulder. In other words, it could have been in any one of a thousand homes in Duluth. In fact, the whole scene was no frills, no airs, North Shore Minnesota.
