Excerpt from I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
I Cheerfully Refuse

HERE AT THE BEGINNING it must be said the End was on everyone's mind.

For example look at my friend Labrino who showed up one gusty spring night. It was moonless and cold, wind droning in the eaves, waves on Superior standing up high and ramming into the seawall. Lark and I lived two blocks off the water and you could feel those waves in the floorboards. Labrino had to bang on the door like a lunatic just to get my attention.

Still, it was good he knocked at all. There were times Labrino was so melancholy he couldn't bring himself to raise his knuckles, and then he might stand motionless on the back step until one of us noticed he was there. It was unnerving enough in the daytime, but once it happened when I couldn't sleep and was prowling the kitchen for leftovers. Three in the morning—just when you want to see a slumping hairy silhouette right outside your house. When the shock wore off I opened the door and told him not to do that anymore.

But this time he knocked, then came in shaking off his coat and settled murmuring into the breakfast nook. I knew Labrino because he owned a tavern on the edge of town, the Lantern, where the band I was in played most weekends. He was lonely and kind and occasionally rude by accident, but above all things he was a worried man. He said, "Now tell me what you make of this comet business."

He meant the Tashi Comet, named for the Tibetan astronomer who spotted an anomaly in the deep-space software. From its path so far, Mr. Tashi believed it would sweep past Earth in thirteen months. He predicted dazzling beauty visible for weeks. A sungrazer he called it, in an article headlined The Celestial Event of Our Time.

I admitted to Labrino that I was awfully excited. In fact I'd driven down to the Greenstone Fair and picked up a heavy old set of German binoculars with a tripod mount. Didn't even haggle but paid the asking price. I wanted to be ready.

Labrino said, "These comets never bring luck to a living soul, that's all I know."

"How could you know that? Besides, they don't have to bring luck. They just have to show up once in a while. Think where these comets have been! I've waited my whole life to see one."

He said, "You know what happened the last time Halley's went past?"

"Before my day."

"Oh, I've read about this," said Labrino. Whenever things seemed especially fearsome to him, his great bushy head came forward and his eyes acquired a prophetic glint. "Nineteen eighty-six terrible year. Right out of the gate that space shuttle blew up. Challenger. Took off from Florida, big crowd, a huge success for a minute or so—then pow, that rocket turns to a trail of white smoke. Everybody in the world watching on TV."

I told Labrino I was fairly sure Halley's Comet was not involved in the Challenger explosion.

He said, "You know what else happened? Russian nuclear meltdown. One day it's, 'Look, there's the comet!' Next day Chernobyl turns to poison soup. Kills the workers sent to clean it up. Kills everything for a thousand miles. Rivers, wolves, house cats, earthworms to a depth of nineteen inches. Swedish reindeer setting off the Geigers. I wouldn't be so anxious for this if I were you."

I couldn't really blame Labrino. The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow. If Lark were here she would prop him right up and he wouldn't even know it was happening. But she was late getting home from the shop, and I, like a moron, felt annoyed and impatient, also weirdly protective of a traveling space rock, so I said, "It still wasn't the comet's fault."

"I'm not claiming causation," said Labrino, his skin pinking. "I'm saying there are signs and wonders. The minute these comets appear in the heavens, all kinds of calamities start chugging away on Earth."

Excerpted from I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger © 2024 by Reuben Land Corporation. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.