Ben Rogue sits alone in his habitual booth at an all-night diner, gazing through the window at the restless, neon street. It’s three-thirty in the morning and the sirens are singing a cappella on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, outside Borracho’s Café, known to locals as Cucaracho’s Café, as he smashes a namesake bug
At nineteen years old, Ben has a mind-out-of-body experience, as he and two college buddies drive down the Big Thompson Canyon from Estes Park to Loveland, beneath the big blue sky of the Colorado Rockies. (No Great Lakes humidity creating overcast here. They left that back in the Midwest.) The walls of the canyon
A beat-up station wagon with phony wood sides and avocado body pulls up loudly to the back of the gym. Three teenage Indian and one white boy hop in. “Is it okay to talk?” the short, stout woman behind the wheel asks as they pull out of town. “Yeah. He’s cool,”
“Eventually, all things merge into one; and a river runs through it.” -Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It Growing up on a mill pond in a small town in the days before computers certainly had its opportunities. That’s an understatement. Learning to swim off a dam with calm, deep water above and
Ben gets his first black eye when he’s 12 years old. It’s a good one. One for the books. It happens at the Caroline Ballroom in 1972, in the small Wisconsin farm-town where Ben grew up, as the wounded veterans are returning from the Vietnam War (which wasn’t considered a “legal” war because
It’s the beginning of autumn, and the air is freighted with the smell of cold weather coming. Early October in this small, central Wisconsin farm town is a feast for the senses. Sugar maples exploding with blazing shades of red. Leaves decomposing in the tall, wet grass. Blue skies with puffy, white clouds casting
The fish’s head slowly emerges, its steely, amber eyes rupture the river’s surface and glare into Ben’s eyes before it plunges, rolling back down into the dark, flashing a big yellow belly and boiling the water with its tail, waving buh-bye! Ben knows, at that moment, he has the biggest creature of his life
Ben stands in the middle of his family’s garage and travels back in time, unstuck, to the moment of his first recollection… He’s three years old, playing with sandbox toys stored for winter. They’re stowed in a big closet with sliding wooden doors that are too heavy for him to open by himself. But
