The Battle for Amberg

By William Wresch

In this introduction to the Jessica Thorpe Series, Jessica tends bar in a fading Wisconsin town. It is January. The usual misfits arrive from Wisconsin’s cities, up for a week or two as they work out their problems. One man is different. A failed politician, he is in town to rebuild his career. All he needs is the local militia and Jessica’s help. His cause? Struggling local loggers. Jessica wants to help the loggers too. And that puts Jessica right in the middle as the militia takes over her tiny town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Wresch
• Release date: Oct 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005907068

William Wresch

I have three sets of books here. The first is an alternative history of the US, envisioning how things might have gone had the French prevailed in the French and Indian War. That series comes from some personal experiences. I have canoed sections of the Fox, and driven along its banks. I have followed the voyageur route from the Sault to Quebec and traveled from Green Bay to New Orleans by car and by boat. My wife and I have spent many happy days on Mackinac Island and in Door County. The Jessica Thorpe series is very different. It takes place in the tiny town of Amberg, Wisconsin, a place where I used to live. I wanted to describe that town and its troubles. Initially the novel involved a militia take over of the town, and it was called "Two Angry Men." But both men were predictable and boring. I had decided to have the story narrated by the town bartender - Jessica - and I soon realized she was the most interesting character in the book. She became the lead in the Jessica Thorpe series. I restarted the series with a fight over a proposed water plant with Jessica balancing environmental rights and business rights. I put Jessica right in the middle of a real problem we are experiencing here in Wisconsin (and most other places). How badly does a tiny town need jobs? How much environmental damage should we accept? The third series changes the lead character. Catherine Johnson solves mysteries. She also travels. It took her to many places I have been. The last several books take place in Russia. I admit I have no idea what is motivating the current madness there. Catherine looks, she tries to help, she struggles. What else can any of us do?

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The Battle for Amberg

A Jessica Thorpe Novel

By William Wresch

Copyright 2018 William Wresch

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In this introduction to the Jessica Thorpe Series, Jessica tends bar in a fading Wisconsin town. It is January. The usual misfits arrive from Wisconsin’s cities, up for a week or two as they work out their failings. One man is different. A failed politician, he is in town to rebuild his career. All he needs is the local militia and Jessica’s help. His cause? Struggling local loggers. Jessica wants to help the loggers too. And that puts Jessica right in the middle as the militia takes over her tiny town.

Chapter 1

Early Arrivals

They both arrived early. We get a few of such men every year, but usually not until the second or third week of January. Over the years I have gotten a general sense for the process. It may have been building for some time, but Christmas sees a peak. Maybe it was a shouting match; maybe it involved punches. Usually it is the wife or girlfriend on the other end. Sometimes it is one of the kids. Maybe the cops get involved, but usually not. Things quiet for a few days while everyone sobers up, and maybe New Year’s Eve even involves a few laughs. Then there is New Year’s Day with all the football games and drunks lying semi-comatose in front of the TV.

But the anger is still there. Maybe it happens at work and HR gets involved. Another woman to yell at. Another call to security. Maybe he goes back to the shop floor with everyone keeping their distance. Maybe he takes his tools and heads out to the parking lot. Hours pass. Days pass. At some point he packs a bag and heads north on 41. We get him up here in the middle of nowhere.

Why? He remembers us from deer season. Maybe it was this year, maybe it was half a dozen years ago, but he remembers nine days of men and beer and being outdoors. From the Friday before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after, he was with friends, he had a rifle, he had long periods of quiet when he sat in a tree stand or lay behind a blind, or walked with others in a line across a field, driving deer toward others with guns.

When there was noise, it was loud. Shouts as men played cards and drank beer. Shouts across a barroom as men told bad jokes and drank beer. Shouts in the woods as men pulled their kill across the ground to waiting cars and trucks. Loud men, lots of beer, lots of space. At least that’s how they remembered it.

So now with their world coming apart, they talked to the brother or cousin or friend who had a cabin in the woods, got the keys, and drove north, back to the cabin they remembered, back to the woods, back to this little town they recalled from deer season.

But January isn’t November in northern Wisconsin. It is far colder, the sun sets far earlier, and that cabin is far emptier. They spend a day setting up basic living conditions: a little food for the twenty year old fridge, lots of blankets for the camp beds, wood for the fire and propane for the furnace, and case after case of Budweiser.

A day goes by, maybe three. They’ve got their quiet, and their space, and their beer. But it’s dark at four thirty, the TV reception is terrible and football season is mostly over anyway. Somewhere through the second or third case of beer they remember there was a bar in town. It was loud. Men shouted at each and told jokes and shot pool for beers. And it was warmer there than in the cabin.

So that’s when we see them. The second or third week of January. They sit at the bar. Plenty of stools. They order a beer. If they’re from Chicago they make me keep count and they pay at the end. If they’re from Milwaukee they put a ten on the bar and let me take what I need. They’ll have me make a pizza in the toaster oven we have on the back counter. Maybe they’ll have a shot or two – whiskey if they are from Chicago, brandy if they are from Milwaukee. But mostly they drink beer – whatever is on tap.

At some point they will hit on me. It’s pretty pathetic. It’s like they think they have to, but they can barely remember the moves. I can end it easily enough. I just stand and look at them. Eye to eye. Do you really want me? They can maintain eye contact for a second or two, and then they shrink back into themselves. The beer gets real interesting, or the TV. They get smaller in some way. Their posture slips, their chest shrinks. I think if I stood staring any longer they would break down completely. But I turn away and find a part of the bar that needs wiping, or a customer who needs a refill. And that ends that. They never try a second time, no matter how many beers they have had.

I will see them again two or three times a week. Beer, pizza, brandy. This goes on for a month, maybe two. By March they are gone. The cabin was too cold, too empty, the woods too gray, too empty. The bar too quiet, too empty. They wanted time to be alone. They got it. By March they are back on 41 headed south. Back to some job, back to some arrangement with whatever family or friends they have left. Maybe they are less angry. Maybe they are somewhat chastened. Maybe. All I know is they never come back for another January in the woods.

That was the pattern I knew from eight years behind the bar. Then the pattern was broken. Two men came early.

The first – Zeke – came January second. Nobody comes up that early. It takes longer than that just to shake off the hangover, much less pack, find someone with a cabin, get the keys, and get up here. But there he was. Midafternoon. Looking for a beer.

I was mostly cleaning, sometimes pouring another glass of white wine to my only customers – the Kaminski twins. I would refill their glasses one time only (after all, they were ladies) while they played cribbage and described the various sins of the world as had been explained to them that morning on Fox News. Our comments to each other never went beyond the weather – yes it was cold, going to be colder tomorrow. That was our truce conversation after twenty years of nastiness, me being trailer trash and them being old maids. They never left a tip, they never had more than two glasses of wine, and they left me alone while I cleaned, this day being especially bad since it included three days of serious drunkenness. I used to think men could never hit the toilet. Now I knew women couldn’t either. I mopped, threw in toilet bowl cleaner, and backed out to let it all dry.

That’s when he walked in. My first reaction? I almost called 911. Part of it was size. He was well over six feet and probably went two fifty. And he had this look. He didn’t have a beard or mustache or any of that biker stuff, in fact his hair was short – almost military. But somewhere in the last week he had lost his comb and his razer. But it was his eyes that scared me. He stared. He stared at me, at the Kaminskis, at the bar, even at the cleaning supplies I had left outside the johns. I thought of the terminator movie where he is cataloging what he sees, before he shoots it all. I’m looking first at the eyes, then the hands, then the waist to see if he is armed. Is he here to kill us, rob us, rape us? What? I have a sawed-off behind the bar, but it has been sitting there so long I expect the hammers are rusted in place. But I start sliding in that direction.

Then he sits down. Beer please. And he puts a ten on the bar. Okay, he is from Milwaukee, and maybe he won’t kill us. I get a glass and put it under the tap. We have two – Miller Lite and Budweiser. I’m thinking lite beer might get my throat ripped out. I get him a twelve ounce glass of Bud, and try to keep my hands steady enough to not spill it all over the bar. I put it in front of him and dare to look directly at him while I take his ten. He looks back, but he is not looking at me, he is looking through me. It almost hurts, like he is pushing two lasers through me. I turn to go back to my register and glance in the bar mirror. Is he pulling out a gun? No. He drinks the beer straight down and stands. I come back with his nine in change. He puts a single on the bar, says thanks, and is gone.

I put both hands on the bar to steady myself, focus on my breathing, and wonder, what the hell was that? For the first few minutes I wonder if he will charge back in, gun blazing. But I see an F150 drive north out of town, and I know he is gone.

Was that Rachel’s boy? Elsie asks. Rachel who? is my first thought.

No, Rachel had girls. Mona replies. That got them started about all the Rachels that once lived here and who they married and where they moved to, when they, like everyone else with any sense moved away. They kept it up while they finished their cribbage game and their wine. Then they were out the door. No tip, of course.

I waited until they were gone, and then I got out the shotgun. The lever worked smoothly so I broke it open to see if it was still loaded. Yes, both barrels. Twelve gauge buck shot. It would do a lot of damage if fired. And the hammers? I didn’t pull them back, but I did check for rust. It might be dusty from sitting behind the bar, but it looked like everything still worked. I put it back and slid a bar towel over it.

Eight years I have worked here. Clark showed me where the gun was my first day on the job. We had taken it out, looked at it, checked it, and then put it back. I hadn’t touched it since. That day I did.

Zeke was back two days later. That’s when I found out his name was Zeke. Not that we had an extended conversation. It was like, Hi, I’m Jessica. I’m Zeke. This time he came in later in the afternoon, put a twenty on the bar, and had a pizza along with several beers. Up here you can usually get a conversation going if you mention the Packers, and I asked him if he had seen the last game. No. So much for that approach. There were several other guys at the bar, all locals having a beer before they went home to wives, kids, and the usual, so I wandered around getting them more beer, talking the usual nonsense about the weather and the price of pulp wood. I would check on Zeke from time to time to see if the pizza had been cooked okay, if he wanted another beer, et cetera, but his only response was It’s fine. Over the course of the hour he was in the bar, he only spoke two other words: It’s licensed. I was looking at the large automatic sitting on his right hip. And that was that.

Was he connected to one of the people in town? One of the Rachels? None of the men at the bar seemed to know him, and the Kaminski twins hadn’t seemed to make any progress on his pedigree. As for Zeke, he had given me his name, and that was all I was going to get for one night. An hour after he walked in, he left me a dollar on the bar, got in his F150, and headed north out of town.

Angry man number two showed up Saturday afternoon. He was easily a week ahead of the norm for these guys, and he was different in one other way – he was slick. This happens once in a while. Some weasel that has borrowed all the cash he can get and sold all the crap the gullible will buy, comes up here, usually with process servers on his tail. These guys are dangerous. They smile while they knife you. I knew before he ordered his first drink he would be asking for credit.

James was his name, But you can call me Jimmy. Slick Jimmy was pushing fifty and it had not been an easy push. He was maybe five eleven, but he had to be carrying over two fifty, lots of it hanging over his belt. His face was jowly, his hair thin, and his eyes never stopped moving. He was monitoring the whole bar. I asked Jimmy what he wanted, and of course it was Jim Beam – a double, neat, and of course when I brought it to him there was no cash on the bar.

That will be six fifty, I said.

I would like to run a tab. He smiled, knowing in advance I would agree. Who could disagree with Jimmy?

Sure. Just give me a credit card and I will start the tab. Oops, I think I see a smile slipping.

Oh, let’s just keep this on a cash basis.

Sure. That will be six fifty. His eyes never left my face as he reached under his fat ass for his wallet. Did he think I would change my mind? Eventually the wallet came out and he unfolded a twenty. Then he proved he was an absolute sleaze. Rather than reach over the bar to hand me the bill, he kept his hand just inches from his shoulder and made me reach over to get the twenty. As I reached, he made a point of staring at every inch of me. Twenty years younger I might have been embarrassed. But two husbands and two kids later, after eight years serving beer to drunk men, I just looked him in the eye and slowly took his money. Talking as quietly as I could, but knowing he could still hear me, I said, Yes, I’ve got tits, and they’re all mine.

He acted like he could not hear me. I got his change and moved on to other customers. I assumed that was Jimmy’s last drink. He could no more afford six fifty for a drink than I could. And I was right. He nursed that drink for two hours while he worked the room. It was all handshakes, Packers are going to the playoffs again, right? and Have you ever seen it this cold before? All that global warming nonsense is a complete crock. He left at ten knowing the name of every man in the place, and no doubt already knowing who he could touch for a loan.

And my tip? He left behind a quarter and a note. Written on the edge of a cocktail napkin he had written I know we will be good friends. What an ass.

So that was the first week with these two. They were early, which to me meant they had gotten into even more trouble than the usual bunch. One was armed, and one was slick. I assumed both were dangerous. Wrong. Even at thirty eight, I still had lots to learn.

Chapter 2

A useta town

To better understand what happened, it helps to understand this town. For starters, if you get into a conversation with any of the geezers here in town, it only takes two sentences before you get to useta. Things like We useta have the largest hotel north of Milwaukee. Or We useta have the largest granite cutting shed in the world. Give them half an hour, and they will give you a local history that is mostly accurate, all of it describing what useta be here.

All of that was before my time. But if you want the short version, the town has basically collapsed three times. The first time was the most dramatic. The town is surrounded by granite outcroppings and there was a time when people used granite in building. So a guy named Bill Amberg came to town, started a quarry west of town, and then built a cutting shed next to the tracks you can see across from this bar. Was it the biggest shed in the world? How would anyone know? Do you see people taking measurements of sheds? But it was big, and it and the quarry attracted hundreds of men in the early 1900s (yes, the town is that old). Moving the blocks required rail lines, so there was also a lot of railroad men in town, so I have no doubt about there being a large hotel for all of them. You also hear stories of monster brawls between the two groups, boys being boys. So that’s the town for a few years. Then some guy invents a new way to build buildings, and granite is no longer important. OK, these things happen, but then the local boys make things worse. They go on strike. Who knows any more what they wanted – money, shorter hours, safer conditions? A hundred years later it hardly matters. Old Bill Amberg watches this go on for a few days and then says, OK, good bye. He clears out his office, gets on a train, and goes off to start another business somewhere else. Some claim Canada, some claim California. Who cares? A month goes by and people realize he ain’t coming back, and the business is really closed. Most people just move away (folks from here are good at that), but a few folks decide they have a plan to make the world great again. They hold a vote to rename the town from Pike to Amberg. Surely with a town named after him, Bill will come back and all will be good. To show you just how pathetic the whole thing is, they pick a day to celebrate the name change and send out an invite to Bill. Surely he will attend. Nope. He never responds to the invite, and they never hear from him again. You would think they would eventually get around to changing the name back to Pike, but they don’t. Don’t ask me why. Eventually the hotel and cutting shed burn down. The quarry is still west of town if you want to see it. Just a hole filled with water now.

The second collapse comes about twenty years later. There was all pine forest around here, so much it took decades to clear. But eventually they had cut it all. So now what? Why not sell the land to farmers. They say the sales pitch began with If it will grow trees, it will grow corn. They also say the companies brought farmers up to see the land in the winter when the snow covered all the stumps. That’s probably true. Anyway, during the 1920s lots of farmers moved up here, spent their lives blowing up stumps and planting crops only to find that the land was poor and the growing season was short. They got some crops in, but they were barely hanging on when 1930 rolled along with the Great Depression. That ended farming up here. If you drive around you can see some one room schools that were used by the farmers, but the land was all taken for back taxes. What did the county do with the land? They planted trees. Look at all the county forest as you drive around. Pretty ironic, don’t you think? Families worked themselves half to death to take forest land and make it farm land, and here we are back to trees.

The third collapse is going on now. Paper mills were built in Green Bay and Appleton, and it turns out the jack pines and poplars planted on that old farm land work pretty well for creating paper pulp. So the local boys would turn sixteen or eighteen, buy a chain saw, and cut pulpwood for a living. It’s not an easy living. I went out with my first husband a few times to help trim the wood he cut. If you go in the summer, the mosquitoes are grateful for the feast, and if you go out in the winter, you spend all day tripping over stumps and roots you can’t see under the snow. And of course you still go out in the summer and the winter because you want to eat.

But now some of the mills are closing, and even the ones still open are using more recycled paper. Depending on how many beers they have had, some men will blame the Chinese, others will quote the price of paper in Finland and tell you that is the problem. But mostly we know the problem is electrons. All the newspapers up here have closed, as has the local post office. Who uses paper when you can use electrons? Electrons are faster and cheaper – and cool. There are still men out in the woods cutting pulp wood, but probably half as many as there were just ten years ago.

So there you have it – a useta town. We are down to maybe a hundred people in a dozen or so homes, a block-long Main Street -- and that is only occupied on one side. What’s left is this bar, a small restaurant that changes hands every year or two, a tiny grocery store that is mostly just open in the summer and during deer season, and a post office building they closed two years ago. Welcome to Amberg. It useta be more.

What do people do now? Some men still work in the woods. Women mostly work retail or restaurant jobs in Wausaukee. Old people collect social security and visit their doctors. The young either go off to college or join the army. And the young never come back.

None of this excuses what happened that winter. It wasn’t right, and can’t be made right. But in a useta town, sometimes people useta have better sense.

Chapter 3

Slick gets it started

Call me Jimmy came in every other night the first week, and every night the second week. This is not usual. The norm for these guys is once every three or four days. Maybe it takes that long for them to get themselves under control. Maybe they just get bored. Those cabins are meant for a week or two in November. They aren’t insulated well, and it’s not like they have a lot of stuff in them. So what do these guys do? They drink, they stare at a TV screen full of ghosts, they microwave pizzas for themselves, and go through bag after bag of chips. I have seen these guys load up at the local store. It isn’t pretty. They also take their guns out. You can hear them blasting away at rocks or trees or tin cans. They fire fast, and they fire a lot. I don’t want to think about what images are in their heads as they shoot. But you can hear them out in the woods, and you know they are firing off a lot of ammo. Eventually that stops, not because their mood improves, but because they discover how much refills will cost them. The gun store in Wausaukee is not cheap. And these guys are not rich. Half the time they are up here because they got laid off or fired. Living from unemployment check to unemployment check does not leave a lot for ammo or pizza or beer.

So I was surprised to see Slick so often. I was also unhappy about it. He sat his fat ass on a stool, ordered his six fifty Jim Beam, and stared at me like I was a Christmas present he wanted to unwrap. I could live with that. You work in a bar you get that all the time. What I couldn’t live with was his smile. It was the smile of a snake. You knew that would be the smile you saw as he tore out your throat with his teeth. It got so as I got ready for work I went through my closet looking for the baggiest sweatshirt I had and the biggest flannel shirt. I didn’t want him looking at me. By the second week I got so I took the sawed off with me out to my car after I closed, just in case he was around. The gun would be no problem with the cops. I went to high school with those boys. If they saw me I knew they would check my load and then promise to cruise by