One of the pleasures of fiction is the opportunity that novels, short stories, and epic poems give us to escape from our own everyday world into an alien world of gods and heroes (as in the Iliad) or knights and wizards (Tennyson’s Idylls), English villagers (in Hardy’s Wessex), or Mississippi rednecks and redskins (of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County).  A large part of Tolkien’s popularity derives from his success in sustaining the fiction of the parallel world of Middle Earth.  In a smaller, quieter way, more reminiscent of Hardy than of Faulkner or Tolkien, Anthony Bukoski has sustained the fiction of an equally fantastic place, the fictional city of Superior, Wisconsin, a derelict railhead at the head of Lake Superior.

In most of his stories, Bukoski has only hinted at the urban glamour of central Superior—the endless succession of bars on Tower Avenue and the mysteries of Globe News, and he never so much as peers into the stately homes of bankers and physicians.  Bukoski’s village is the Polish section of the East End: the massive (though abandoned) ore docks and grain elevator; the Warsaw Tavern and the Polish Club.  Bukoski laid the foundation for this imaginary world in his earlier collections, Children of Strangers and Polonaise, where the premise must have strained some readers’ imaginations.  Can there really be a place this depressing, and, if there is, can the inhabitants actually find some reason to love it?  On the face of it, despite Bukoski’s obvious ability to conjure the scene, the answer would seem to be doubly “no.”  As wonderful as the stories have been—filled with the naive optimism of weeds sprouting up in the cracked pavement of an abandoned gas station—many readers might have been justified in concluding that no such place as Superior could have ever existed.

By the time I reached the end of Time Between Trains, however, I had begun to suspect that Mr. Bukoski, purportedly a native of Superior, was pulling a fast one.  There may, indeed, be such a ghost town, and Bukoski is its spiritual mayor.  In the last story of the volume, “President of the Past,” Rick Mrozek, who must be approximately Bukoski’s age, reflects on the thankless task he has undertaken as president of the moribund Polish Club.  Rick is the son of Buck Mrozek, composer of the famous “East End Polka” and hero of “Closing Time” (also included in this volume).  The club, in its heroic early days, sent handsomely dressed old-world Poles to march in parades down Tower Avenue.  Their polka dancing was so frantic that they had literally shaken their first premises to pieces, but their new building, into which they moved in 1963, is dying of old age.  The monthly meetings are scantily attended; there are no new members, and the club is $20,000 in debt.  Some enterprising businessmen want to buy the building and turn it into an “interactive sports bar.”

Well, what difference can such depressing details mean to the patrons of internet lounges and sports bars in post-American America?  For Rick Mrozek and his creator, they are everything.  Rick is the memory of a community that once revered Tadeusz Kosciusko and venerated the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.  Superior’s pinnacle of happiness was the summer spent in Douglas County by Calvin Coolidge, who fished the Brule River and set up an office in Superior.  Buck’s mother played the violin for Coolidge at the president’s summer White House.  

Of this Polish America in Superior, little survives, and only Buck seems to care about preserving the memory:

Now I think of the club and of my family as I whisper prayers.  I don’t want to let the club go to a German and a Finn, because the few active members who remain know our ancestors met during these very summer and winter hours as we do, read the same opening prayer at meetings, and followed the same order of business . . . How can we let this go?  How can I myself let the club go?  Almost everything is in storage.  Yet in the faded map of Poland on the wall, and in the stale air of the Polish Club, I still have a place to come to where I can cherish my heritage.

Like Buck Mrozek, Anthony Bukoski is truly “president of the past, calling the ghosts to order,” and the other stories in this collection (two of which were published first in this magazine) chronicle the dreary but rich lives of Vietnam vets, grain-mill workers, and waiters, the priest who falls in love with Ewa Zukowski, the Jewish rail inspector who finds new life with a Polish widow, old Mrs. Pilsudski who is ridiculed for her incontinence but finds peace and forgiveness in imitating “Christ’s holy work on earth.”

When Anthony Bukoski was growing up in the (even then already dying) East End, I was spending an idyllic childhood on the other side of town, in the fields and woods of Billings Park that stretched all the way out to the shore of Lake Superior.  For me, the place exists largely as a memory, but Memory is the mother of the Muses, and, in staying home (except for hitches in Vietnam and graduate school), Bukoski has rebuilt his native city, brick by sooty-and-crumbling brick, and gilded the ruins with a wise and compassionate understanding of his fellow man.  If Samuel Johnson was right when he said that every man’s life is worth a biography, then every community of men is worth a chronicler, and the mythical East End of Superior has found its Homer.

 

[Time Between Trains, by Anthony Bukoski (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press) 188 pp., $22.50]