Wolf Hour

3 Dinkytown, September 2022

I open my eyes again. I’m back in the taxi, back inside my own head. Now of course I can’t know for certain whether I was really in the killer’s head, really thought his thoughts as he made his way down Nicollet Mall six years earlier. If he thought that thought, that he was going to die. What I do know is that he was on Nicollet Mall at the precise moment in time, that’s a black-and-white fact, recorded by a surveillance camera and by means of binary code translated into a digital recording which places the matter beyond all doubt.

I tell the driver to take me to Dinkytown.

The sun is rising as we cross the river and glide on into the low-rise settlement. This is a world apart from Jordan. Dinkytown is where the students live. The people with a future. The ones who will occupy the shiny bank buildings, the granite blocks of a city hall, the school staffrooms and the 350-dollar seats at the US Bank Stadium. When my cousin and I were old enough we often came here to drink beer in the dives. For me there was something bohemian and thrilling about Dinkytown. The smell of marijuana and testosterone, the sounds of youth, good music and boy-meets-girl, the sense of some — but not too much — danger. The place to swing through that little arc of freedom that exists between being young and being adult, and not wild enough to stop the straights landing securely on our feet, the way I did. Once my cousin’s girlfriend brought a friend along with her, and she and I sneaked out the bar and smoked a joint in one of the alleyways before having what was probably a pretty forgettable bout of sex but which I always remember anyway because of that — to me at least — exotic setting.

Now I hardly recognise the place. It looks like something in an exercise book in which the teacher has corrected all the grammatical mistakes and removed all the obscenities. We pass the place that was once a coffee bar and where the owner swore blind that Bob Dylan had made his very first appearance when he came down from Hibbing to study. Now some vast building is on its way up. I ask the driver if he thinks the purple facade is a tribute to the town’s other great musical son, Prince. The driver just chuckles and shakes his head.

‘But Al’s Breakfast is still here,’ I say and point to the door of that little warren of a place where — if the empty seat was down at the front — you had to press your way between the customers crowded at the bar and the sweaty wall.

‘The day they try to close Al’s there’s going to be riots here,’ the driver says and roars with laughter.

I tell him to stop at the bridge over the railroad line. I get out of the car and glance down at the tracks. The occasional goods train used to run on that line, and judging by the weeds growing between the rusty tracks traffic hasn’t increased much since then. I cross the road and head toward the corner where it still says Bernie’s Bar on the wall, try the handle of the locked door, cup my hands against the glass next to the poster advertising that the premises are for rent and peer inside. The bar is still there, but otherwise there isn’t a stick of furniture left.

Now I have to get inside the policeman’s head.

So I try to imagine how it might have been, what was said and done in here on that morning six years ago.