The Law of Miracles

Destroying Herman Yoder

122 Destroying Herman Yoder 0 In the gun store I couldn’t make up my mind. There was all that smug menace to choose from. I hefted revolvers and breech loaders, practiced executing the world with Mausers and Glocks. The store owner—his name was Ronnie—was very patient, answering my questions, overlooking my ignorance . In the end it was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 Special I settled on, swayed I suppose by the associations—fedoras , rain-slick alleys, platinum blondes and gut-shot punks. I have always been a classicist at heart, as even the Academy of American Poets recognized. According to The Review of Wound Ballistics, the Glaser Safety Slug (one of which I have just discharged into a pumpkin to the right of Herman Yoder’s head) has a pre-fragmented core of compressed number twelve shot. It uses an eighty grain bullet rated at +P velocity, a design that causes the slug to expend its energy into the target, without excessive penetration and the danger of collateral injury. I say all this to Herman Yoder, standing there in his living room, even that part about the +P velocity, smiling calmly the way madmen do in the movies. It was not easy finding him. Yoder is a common surname in Iowa. Drive through the environs of the Amana colonies and you will see it painted sloppily on every other mailbox. I had to thumb though a dozen phone books, call this or that Yoder and impersonate lost high-school buddies, confused delivery men, until finally I located his house in a cornfield outside Wellman, just down the road from a wooden church on the National Historic Register, a mere eighteen miles from the high school he’d attended, twenty-two from the farm Grace Albrecht had grown up on. “What kind of name is that anyway?” I say now, coming back from the pumpkin and plopping myself down in this sad Castro convertible. I keep the gun leveled at him. “Yoder,” he says, as if that explained something. “Not Yoder,” I say; and then like a punch line: “Herman. What kind of dick-ass name is that?” The Review of Wound Ballistics. Don’t you love it? The Castro convertible isn’t the only sad thing here. The whole house is sad in my considered opinion. A suburban rambler , circa 1970, an out-of-place eyesore with its pseudo-modernist horizontals, low-pitched roof, the nonsense of a lawn abutting cornfield on three sides. There’s a little windmill in the front yard. Maybe five feet tall. And in the backyard a splitlog yard swing. Very rustic. Somewhere, acres away, a harvester is running. Rolled up in my back pocket I’ve got my well-thumbed copy of Action Comics #187. HeasksforthesecondtimewhoIam,andforthesecondtime I tell him. I am Ichabod Sick, I say, which is more or less true. “What kind of name is that?” he has the nerve to say and I smile, make a checkmark in the air to show I appreciate the bravado. “Sick,” I say and cock the Special. “That’s what kind of name.” Twenty years ago it had been a choice between Ichabod and Orlando, dactyl or amphibrach. I took a poll of friends and enemies. Orlando, it was felt, had a certain flair which, in my warmer moments toward myself, appealed—thick, HarlequinRomance hair, a chemise open at the throat, maybe a casement destroying herman yoder 123 124 THE LAW OF MIRACLES window dusted with Tuscan moonlight. Or so I described it years later to an interviewer from The American Poetry Review. But Ichabod had a doggy tenacity that I thought would stick by me when the going got tough. When I handed the official papers in, the Cambridge District Court secretary had grimaced. “Sid Vicious,” she’d said. This was 1981. “Johnny Rotten. Is that the idea?” Herman Yoder, on the other hand, looks like a Nashville reject. A blonde-streaked mullet that’s already getting on my nerves, a ripped “Achy-Breaky” T-shirt, blue jeans. I caught him barefooted and about to shave, which gives him a particularly vulnerable air. It’s a pleasure to find him so easy to hate. I tell him to sit on his hands. To put his hands under his thighs and keep them there. This was something my high school chess coach taught the chess team to do. “Think...