Lake Wobegon Days (34 page)

“I figure if you know so much, maybe I’ll learn something from you. Tell me some more, Merle. What else are you an expert in?”

This works pretty good. Roxanne pats his hand and tells him not to get upset. She says to have fun. He tries to hold her hand but she needs it to light another cigarette.

“Who gives a shit if you bartended at the Moonlite Bay or not?” says Merle. “I know I don’t. Do you?” he asks the girls.

Roxanne turns to Mr. Berge. “Was that near here?” she says. He tells her a little about Moonlite Bay. The tables, the candles, the long bar, the band—“It was the most gorgeous place you ever seen,” he says, but then he thinks that maybe, being from St. Cloud, she’s seen a lot of clubs like that, so he mentions that John Dillinger once hung out there. A good story. It works! She says, “I saw a movie about Dillinger with Warren Oates, I think.”

(Who’s Warren Oates? Is he her boyfriend?) Mr. Berge goes with Dillinger. “
Ja
,” he says, keeping an eye on Merle who is trying to distract Suzie, “Dillinger and his gang come up from Chicago for a rest. They figured nobody up here knew him. But we knew. Ha! We spotted him the minute he walked in.”

“I was pretty young at the time. Just a kid.” He mentions this so Dillinger won’t date him.

“He was a decent guy. He bought a beer and left a dollar tip. One of the other bartenders was going to call the sheriff but I says to him, I says, ‘Hey, he didn’t do anything to you. Leave him be.’ That’s my philosophy. Nobody gives me trouble, I don’t give them trouble. I remember he sat at this table facing the door and he unbuttoned his jacket and I seen he had a bulge in his pants.”

Merle thinks that’s the funniest thing he ever heard in his life. He repeats it three times. He laughs his head off; he pounds on the bar.

“I meant his gun, dammit!”

Roxanne pats his hand again and tells him not to get angry. “Let’s just have fun,” she says. This time he holds her hand. She says he’s sweet. He leans forward and kisses her on the cheek. She laughs and says his whiskers tickle. He kisses her again. She turns and says to Suzie, “Well? What do you say?”

His heart is pounding, he is so much in love. His hands tremble. He excuses himself to go to the bathroom. There, he takes a leak and then, seeing his poor old self in the mirror, he washes his hands and his face. He spits out his tobacco and rinses his mouth. He doesn’t have a comb on him, but he wets down his hair and does the best he can with his hands. When he comes out, they’re gone.

He runs outside. A car’s taillights are way down Main Street, they flare up as it brakes and turns onto the county road. He looks that way a long time, thinking they might turn around and come back.

Inside, Merle takes one look at him and says, “What happened to you? You fall in?”

“Where did they go?”

“Back to St. Cloud. They had to get to work in the morning.”

“Oh? Where do they work?” If he knew that, he could give them a call.

“I didn’t ask.” Merle pays up with Wally, and while he’s waiting for change, Mr. Berge wants to ask him more about the girls, like what kind of car was it? Did he get their last names? Where in St. Cloud do they live? What
type
of work do they do? But of course Merle wouldn’t tell him even if he did know which he probably doesn’t, and why give Merle one more laugh tonight. —Time to go home and see the Mrs.—But first, a whiskey for the road.

Tasting the whiskey, he feels as bad as he’s felt all day. They were so beautiful. Why wouldn’t they dance? All he wanted was to have some fun. Couldn’t he have fun too?

But then as he thinks about it, he starts to feel better. If they came in once, they’ll come in again. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but sometime. When they do, he’ll be watching for them. He’s going to wear a clean shirt tomorrow and get his hair cut. He’s going to bring a gift he can give them if they come back. Too bad it’s September and the roses are dead. But tomorrow afternoon, he’ll cut two African violets from Mrs. Berge’s plant and come down to the Sidetrack early.

A big storm blew in on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, that nobody saw coming, not even Bud who knows weather like my father knows the Great Northern and calls the storms as they roll in from the Coast. This one caught Bud leaning toward autumn.

Freezing rain fell in the morning, turning to heavy snow, and by suppertime we had thirteen inches on the ground and more coming, falling sideways in front of a stiff west wind, and you couldn’t see the house across the street. Wally closed the Sidetrack at five o’clock. It’s illegal to sell alcohol in town when you can’t see across the street, and when Clarence closed up Bunsen Motors across the street and turned off the blue Ford Motor sign, Wally couldn’t see anything over there, so he called it a day even though Mr. Berge had Mr. Lundberg on the run at cribbage and was closing in for the kill and was furious, of course. He yanked his overcoat off the hook and jammed his arms into it and glared out the window at the snow, waiting for a good sharp remark to come to mind. “Well,” he says, “I think I’ll go home.”

Clarence walked five blocks home which he had been doing for a few weeks since he read an article about the heart, which his daughter Barbara Ann sent him along with a picture of a bicycle clipped from the Sears catalog. She and her husband were due for Thanksgiving dinner, and from the looks of things, they wouldn’t make it.
Nuts!
Clarence liked it when she lectured him about his health, which she did now with every visit—“Daddy,” she said in that sweet tone that led right into the legumes. Legumes, garlic, hard breathing, whole grain cereals, and no cigars and no red meat, plus whatever she had read about recently, maybe the benefits of eating raw cotton or the dangers of chewing on lead pencils. He argued with her only to stimulate further class discussion. “Your grandfather lived to be eighty-four and he lived on cigar butts, fried chicken skin, and as much Rock ’n Rye whiskey as he could sneak downstairs for without arousing Grandma’s suspicions. He kept the bottle in the cellar in his tool chest. The last three years, after he went blind, it was pretty hard for him to explain why he needed a hammer and nails.”
Daddy.

He had been looking forward to her Thanksgiving health homily (maybe a tip on eating raw yams or some new data on cranberry sauce and how the pancreas feels about it). She made him feel like a well-loved man. That she would think a small-town Ford dealer could become Mahatma Gandhi. To most people, Clarence was Clarence, always would be. When he thought of her great faith that he might switch to grass and berries and grow young and run marathons, her
fond hope of his longevity, he was moved to tears. As he was by her improbable gifts: walking shorts,
kim chee
, Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass.
As he was by Arlene’s choice of lilac wallpaper for their bedroom: amazing woman. His daughter Donna sent him Whitman’s Chocolate Cherries and thought lilac was ridiculous.

Over his old brown overcoat, like a shawl, Clarence wore a red wool serape that had hung in his office closet since he wore it to work in a blizzard the March before. It was a gift from Don Eduardo, Eddie Bunsen, his cousin, a postal supervisor at the Minneapolis post office until he retired to a village in the mountains of Michoacan. Clarence sent him a Christmas card every year.
Feliz Navidad.
Don Eduardo and Donna Marie live in a two-room hut overgrown with flowering manzanita, the Airstream they took to Mexico now serving as a chicken coop. He sent Clarence pictures of beautiful brown people, fabulous landscapes that breathed flowers and rain, and the red serape—when Clarence wore it, he felt like he was back in the Thespian Club as the
generale
in “A Message for Garcia.” He thought of those brown faces with high cheekbones and grave handsome expressions, people at rest before the camera, with nothing to fear at all. That was their handsomeness—courage. Calm courage. Not having to impress anybody. Peace.

Beating his way home, the serape to cover his face, he could smell the animal whose hair this was and his own stale cigar breath. He thought, I got to quit smoking, I’m losing my sense of smell, usually I only smell myself. The snow smelled clean, but like a hospital. For the third or fourth time that day, he thought,
I am dying.

The thought came to him, struggling home:
you don’t have to be very smart to be an adult. Most people are working on half-throttle.
Take this storm, for example. Depressing to see autumn snap shut—what a fine November, then suddenly the fuse blows and she’s all over, no warning. But to see Wally in the front door saying, “I just wonder if the kids are going to make it up from the Cities tonight”—no, not if they have a brain in their head, they’re not going to try to make it anywhere. A foot of snow with a good wind behind it can make you a person in a news story if you’re not careful. Couldn’t he see? This was a blizzard.

And the phone lines to the Cities were busy all evening. He tried
twice and Elizabeth at the exchange said, “I got you on the list, Clarence. I’ll ring you. You’re still tenth.”

“What’s taking them so long?”

“Oh, you know.”

People at this end were calling the people at that end, and the other end didn’t know any more than they did—he tried a third time, and there was Art Diener on the party line with his son-in-law in St. Paul, saying, “How does it look down there?” “Looks pretty bad.” “So what do you think?” “Hard to say.” “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.” “I think that’s all we can do.” “Well, let us know.” “Okay.” It’s in critical situations such as this that the telephone is supposed to be such an advance in communications, but what’s there to say? “What’s it doing down there?” “Snowing.” “Yeah, same here.”

“You’d think these people weren’t
from
here!” Clarence said to Arlene. “You’d think they never
saw
winter before!”
^*

Hjalmar and Virginia Ingqvist’s oldest, Mrs. Keith (Christine) St. Clair, called them from Los Angeles at noon (ten a.m., P.S.T.) to say, “I can’t believe it! I’m so excited! We’ll be there in just a few hours! I can’t wait! No, there’s nothing wrong. Why? No, I just called to say hi. Good-bye,” and then she and her orthodontist husband and the three children flew to Minnesota in three hours. Amazing. You leave California, have two glasses of champagne and eat lunch, and the next thing you know you’re back in the old North Star State. Except they weren’t. They were in Sioux Falls, S.D. Traffic at Minneapolis-St. Paul was backed up with only one runway open. A few hours later, they were still in Sioux Falls, on their sixth cup of vending-machine coffee apiece, and the children were sick of Space Invaders and were draped on their parents and aiming sharp kicks at each other. A few
hours after that, they were in Minnesota (though, from the look of the airline terminal, it could’ve been anywhere in America), and a few hours after
that
they left the airport on a bus heading for downtown Minneapolis. An hour later, they were almost downtown. Up in the air it was the twentieth century but in the blizzard on the ground it was the Middle Ages. Peasants trudged along the road, their heads down, or struggled to free their oxcarts from the mire, lacking only oxen to do it. Their sheer bulk in the heavy clothing made the people look like beasts. A bearded man got on the bus. He was immense. His feet were like clubfeet in two moon boots, and his giant leather paws hung at his side. In the dimness, his fur cap appeared to be his own matted hair, on a head shaped like a gorilla’s. His breath and spit were frozen on his hairy face. He smelled of wet fur. Christine turned away. He looked as if he had emerged from a cave where he had spent the Ages since Bronze eating half-cooked mastodon and grunting to his women. Christine was cold. She wore a thin London Fog raincoat over her pink shirt and blue jeans. Her feet were wet, in brown loafers. “Put your arm around me,” she told Keith. He grunted and put his arm around her. “If I had known it was going to be like this—” she said.

In 1887, her great-grandfather Sveeggen, a boy of twelve, was lost in a blizzard between the barn and the house where he’d gone to do chores. His family had gone to town; he was the oldest of six children. He looked out the barn door into the wind and was sure he saw a ghostly mass of house and black roof ahead so he plunged into the blizzard and was blinded by white light and everything disappeared, house and barn behind him—he counted twenty, thirty, forty, fifty steps, trying to walk straight into the wind, then turned left, took thirty steps. Then right. And turned back, and knew he was lost and would die—and then the house caught fire. He saw the dull orange glow and walked toward it and stood by the back steps as flames shot out the roof and it all collapsed—he was cold on one side, burning hot on the other—and got his bearings straight and ran into the blizzard and ran smack into the side of the barn, where he spent the night, lying next to the cow, Tina, holding his broken nose. It was the great experience of his life, which he never forgot.
“Hvor er Gud Fader mild, vi alle var fordervet i synd.”
(“How kind is God the Father, we were all lost in sin.”) Having lost his life, he entered the new one with a sweet disposition. He planted trees, raised cattle, married, and had seven children, and seldom spoke a harsh word. His nose was never
set. He pitched ten tons of hay the day he was married; in their wedding picture, he sits, smiling, his eyes bright beside his ruined beak, a man who took a hard wallop and now everything is easy for him.

To Dede, washing pots and pans in the back of the Chatterbox, the snow came as quite a thrill. It had been so long since she had seen snow, she had almost forgotten about it. Tiny white crystalline flakes falling through the air, billions of them, which when you take some in your hand and study them, no two are the same. You can’t study them long because they melt in your hand, but no two are the same, that’s what they say. But who said this? Who would do a study of billions of snowflakes to prove no repetition? She scraped at the crusted noodles on the bottom of the big aluminum bake pan and looked out the little window fogged with grease at the faint white yard. One more year that Merle wouldn’t get that ’52 Chevy pickup running. Too late now. It would be a deadster through April when he’d talk about it again. When the Chevy was newer, they went to movies in it at the Cloud-Nine drive-in near St. Cloud and necked in a half-hearted way. Merle didn’t seem to understand that a man is supposed to lead the way, not sit there and wait for lightning to strike. A man should be passionate, make mistakes if he has to, get out of line. She could keep him in line but he never got out. He parked the pickup behind the Cafe when they were still going together. It needed a new carburetor, which somehow he never got around to. “That’s a good old truck, she’s got a lot of miles left in her,” he had been saying for six years now. Meanwhile, he married a skinny girl with bad skin from Bowlus, whose name Dede couldn’t remember, and had two kids. Dede guessed that What’s-her-name didn’t cook, judging by how often they ate out, about four times a week, and the kids ate like pigs and ran around with snot running down their faces. No two people are exactly alike, was what her mother said, but Merle and his family seemed common as dirt to her. They lived in a trailer by his dad’s chickenhouse, surrounded by trash and filth. It took a good snowfall to make that place look decent.