I give him a long look. ‘Was that your line when you were One-Night Bob, picking up all the girls?’
Bob gives a loud laugh. ‘One-Night Bob was a pig. But he had integrity, and he never used the word “love”. That’s something only the new Bob has earned the right to say.’
The door to the workshop opens and a young man wearing a blue apron comes in, pulls off his latex gloves and says hello. His name is Alan, he’s the new owner of the store, and from our correspondence I know that when he graduated from his taxidermist studies in Iowa he was one of only three students. But he’s optimistic about the future of the business, he thinks the customers are on the way back. We’ve arranged for him to show me how Mike Lunde made his mask, and he takes us into the workshop, where a deer’s head is mounted on a stand. Alan explains that the process wouldn’t be very different if a human head were involved. I take notes as he demonstrates how you begin by cutting a Y-shape in the back of the head with a sharp knife.
‘You always cut from inside the skin out, so you don’t cut off the hair. Then...’ He holds up an ordinary, flat screwdriver which he says you insert under the skin and then push along, and little by little the skin comes loose from the cranium.
I can see that Bob is thinking about Mike.
Alan explains how he cuts across the earhole, folds the skin up over the head, then moves to the mouth, separating the gums from the skin and folding it back again. He then presses his index finger into the eye socket from the outside, and the thumb from the inside while cutting with the sharp knife, careful not to leave any disfiguring marks visible from the outside.
Bob leaves the room, and I excuse myself and follow him, leaving my notes behind.
We stand in the street outside.
‘There are times when I wish I was still a smoker,’ says Bob, stamping his feet on the sidewalk. The air is cold and sharp today, like the start of the Minnesota winters I’ve heard about but never experienced personally.
‘What’s on your mind?’ I ask.
‘I’m wondering what it is that makes a person want to kill, when killing and causing suffering to others can no longer bring your loved ones back to you.’
‘You wonder because you don’t understand?’
‘No. I wonder because I’m made that same way too. When Frankie died I wished someone had killed her. Because that way I would have had someone I could take my revenge on.’
‘You think that would have eased your pain?’
‘Yes. A bit. Why are we made that way? Why fight for what’s already been lost?’
‘Hm. The teachings of evolution maybe? If we just swallow our losses and allow the powers of evil free rein, the same thing will just happen over and over again. So we fight for a future in which we might, just possibly, get another chance.’
‘That’s very naive.’
‘Naive, or optimistic. At least better than apathy and quiet resignation.’
‘So your book is going to be a defence of violent revenge?’
I shake my head. ‘I just want to tell a story about how good people can become monsters. For a little while back there, Mike was probably the most famous serial killer in the whole of the United States. Then there was another school shooting, or someone taking revenge on their old workplace, some news item with more victims than there were here, and Mike gets forgotten. And, strangely enough, that can make for a better and more general story.’
‘What do you mean?’
On the other side of the street I see an old lady who’s just bought something from a cart I noticed particularly because it advertises Ambassador Hot Dogs, which I used to dream about as a boy when counting the months and weeks until my next trip to Minnesota.
She’s bought two hot dogs.
‘Jack London, as I’m sure you know, was an author as well as a journalist,’ I say. ‘He said that fiction is truer than fact. And that the best thing you could do with the facts was to make them look like fiction.’
‘And that’s what you intend to do?’
I shrug, and watch as the old lady bends to a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk with his back to the wall of a building. She gives him one of the hot dogs, straightens up, they exchange a few words, she laughs at something and then walks on.
‘I’m going to try, at least,’ I say. ‘It’s probably the only thing that gives any meaning.’