Old Glory (4 page)

“Where’s everybody going?”

“
You
goin’ to the Fair, man. Hey, Butch—guy here don’t know where nobody’s goin’.”

“He’s goin’ right to the Fair,” Butch said from the driver’s seat.

“I just told him that. Hey, where you from? You ain’t a Norwegian, are you?”

“I’m from England.”

“England. Shit. Guy’s from
England
. Reason I asked if you was a Norwegian fella is because I’m a Norwegian myself. Got a Norwegian name. Olen. That’s Norwegian, Olen—ain’t that right?”

“Sounds right to me.”

“Hey, you talk just like one of them Norwegians. That kills me. Yeah, I come from those parts. From way back. Wanna beer?”

He passed me a can of cold Budweiser clad in a sheath of polystyrene foam.

“That’s
Bud-weiser
, that beer.” Remembering that he was talking to a foreigner, he carefully separated every syllable for me, and started shouting. “That’s a
German
name. Don’t come from Germany, though. Comes from the
Yew
-nighted States.”

We rolled forward in consort for a few feet, and stopped.

“I’m looking for the river,” I said.

Olen’s jellyfish face squinched up, then expanded again.

“
Lookin’
for the
river
.”

“The Mississippi.”

“The river’s back,” said Butch. “He just come over it.”

“The river’s back,” Olen said. “Ain’t no exits now, not till the Fairgrounds.”

“Shit,” I said.

“You gonna have a real good time at the Fair, man. They got all kinds of things there. They got freaks. You know what we all call the Fair? It’s the great Minnesota get-together.”

“That’s right,” Butch said. “The great Minnesota get-together.”

“I wanted to find the Mississippi.”

“
Mississippi?
That ain’t nothin’ much. Any road, you gone past it. It’s way back.”

With the sole exception of Olen’s ten-gallon affair, everyone in our crowd was wearing a plastic cap with a long shovel-brim. The caps gave the cavalcade a vaguely military air, as if we were off to sack a city. The fronts of the hats were decorated with insignia and slogans.
OH BOY! OH BEEF
! advertised a kind of cake that cows ate. Others peddled farm machinery, Holsum Bread, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, corn oil, cement and root beer. Under these corporation colors, the owners of the caps looked queerly like feudal retainers riding around wearing the arms of their barons. A few self-conscious individualists wore personalized caps announcing
I’M FROM THE BOONDOCKS
and
YOU CAN KISS MY
 … followed by a picture of an ass in a straw bonnet. Butch’s cap said
JOHN DEERE
; I took this for his own name, and only gradually noticed that several hundred men at the fair were also called John Deere, which turned out to be a famous brand of agricultural tractor.

The state fair sprawled across a hillside and a valley, and at first glance it did indeed look like a city under occupation by an army of rampaging Goths. I’d never seen so many enormous people assembled in one place. These farming families from Minnesota and Wisconsin were the descendants of hungry immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Their ancestors must have been lean and anxious men with the famines of Europe bitten into their faces. Generation by generation, their families had eaten themselves into Americans. Now they all had the same figure: same broad bottom, same Buddha belly, same neckless join between turkey-wattle chin and sperm-whale torso. The women had poured themselves into pink stretch-knit pant suits; the men swelled against every seam and button of their plaid shirts and Dacron slacks. Under the brims of their caps, their food projected from
their mouths. Foot-long hot dogs. Bratwurst sausages, dripping with hot grease. Hamburgers. Pizzas. Scoops of psychedelic ice cream. Wieners-dun-in-buns.

Stumbling, half-suffocated, through this abundance of food and flesh, I felt like a brittle matchstick man. Every time I tried to turn my head I found someone else’s hot dog, bloody with ketchup, sticking into my own mouth.

On either side of us, the voices of the freakshow barkers quacked through tinny loudspeakers.

“Ronny and Donny. The only living Siamese twins on exhibit in the world today. Now grown men, Ronny and Donny are joined at the breastbone and the abdomen, facing each other for every second of their lives.”

“We carry the most deadly and dangerous of any in the world. Don’t miss it. All alive!”

“Can you imagine being permanently fastened to another person for your entire life?”

“You see the deadly Monocle Cobra from Asia, the Chinese Cobra and the Black-Necked Spitting Cobra. All alive.”

“Ronny and Donny, the Siamese twins, are fascinating to see, interesting to visit, and completely unforgettable. The Siamese twins are alive, real and living.”

“You’ll see the giant, one-hundred-pound pythons. They’re alive, and they’re inside. Don’t miss it. Everything’s alive.”

“You will remember your visit with the Siamese twins for the rest of your life—”

Crushed between the bust of the woman behind and the immense behind of the man in front, I did not find it hard to imagine what it might be like to be Ronny or Donny. There was no chance of visiting with them, though. As the sluggish current of the crowd passed them by, I was carried with it, deep into the heart of the state fair.

I was going down fast. The air I was breathing wasn’t air: it was a compound of smells, of meat, sweat, popcorn, cooking fat and passed gas. Wriggling and butting my way out of the crowd, I found myself in the sudden blessed cool of a vaulted cathedral full of cows. They stood silently in their stalls with the resigned eyes of long-term patients. The straw with which the stadium was carpeted gave the whole place a ceremonious quiet. Grave men, whom I took for bulk buyers from the burger industry, padded from stall to stall. The cattle stared back at them with profound incuriosity. I wondered what they made of the smell of charred beef. Soon they’d be minced, ground up with cereal and soybeans, and turned into Whoppers and Kingburgers. For now,
though, the animals had a lugubrious dignity that put the people at the fair to shame. They were the real heroes of the day. Washed sleek as seals, they were the scions of the finest stock of Minnesota, aristocrats in their world. They looked temperamentally unsuited to the garish democracy of the fast-food business.

I was trying to make contact with some kind of pedigreed shorthorn whose face had reminded me of the late Zero Mostel when I noticed the man standing at the next stall along. He was wearing a stripy one-piece pajama suit which hung on him in loose folds. Once, perhaps, he too had had a Minnesotan figure, but he had shrunk inside his peculiar garment until his pajamas flapped like rags on a stick.

He also was attempting to strike up a relationship with a cow. He was dabbing at her ears with a liver-spotted hand as if he’d shortsightedly mistaken her for a dog.

“Lady … Lady … Lady …” he pleaded. The cow regarded him with ageless stupid skepticism. “Hey, Lady—”

He turned toward me. His cap said,
HAPPINESS IS BEING A GRANDPARENT
.

“Know about stock?”

“Nothing at all,” I said.

“Me neither. That’s you and me both. You and me both.” His twiggy fingers went dandling away in the fur of the cow’s neck. “You ain’t from around these parts.”

“No—I’m just passing through.”

“I could tell. You from the East? From New York? You from New York?”

“No, England.”

“England. Oh, yeah. England.” His tone was forgiving. He was letting me off the incriminating hook of coming from New York. “I was there once. In the days of wrath. I went all up Italy in the days of wrath.”

“In the war—”

“The days of wrath.” He looked at the cow and spoke to it in a cracked, erratically remembered parody of a British accent. “Wot yer! Yer bloomin’ bloody bloke!” He wheezed with pleasure at this performance. “We had English out there with us. Days of wrath. Yeah. I was there. You ever hear of Monte Cassino?” He made the place sound like a Chicago gang leader.

“Yes. My father was there.”

“I was there. Him and me both.” He gave his cow another friendly scratch. “Englishman, eh, what? What ho, old bloke!”

I couldn’t find more than a feeble snicker to answer him with, but my silence seemed to please him more than any words could have done. He left his cow, pulled excitedly at the folds of his pajamas, and launched himself into speech like a parachutist hurtling out of a plane.

“Know somethin’, old bloke? You come out here in the summer, huh? Hot enough, ain’t it? Hot enough to boil your brains. Boil your brains. That’s Labor Day for you. Up in Minnesota here, Labor Day she really means something, you better believe it. Last day of summer. Know what folks are at all over this state right now?”

He allowed himself a thunderous, dramatic pause. His dried crab-apple face was about six inches away from mine. His eyes were wet.

“Eating and drinking and pig roasts and partying! Every kind of partying you can think of! They got barbecues like you never seen … and pool parties … and euchre … Hell, every sonofabitch is having himself the finest goddamn time he can. And you know why, sir? The Minnesota Winter! Now, that is something else. That is really something else. You come here Thanksgiving, old bloke,
that’s
when you ought to be up here in Minnesota. Cold? I’m telling you. It’d freeze your nuts off. Freeze your nuts off. Snow? There’s whole cities underneath the snow there. Ain’t nothing that ain’t froze right over. You go out there in that air, that is
cold
, I’m telling you. Twenty below, thirty below—that ain’t
nothing
in Minnesota. Hell, we got it worse than the Eskimos here. And that’s why when folks in this state go partying on Labor Day, we put on the best goddamn show in the whole United States. You hear what I’m saying? I been to state fairs, and there ain’t none like the Minnesota State Fair, because there ain’t nobody who knows how to party like the Minnesota people do. And it’s all because of them goddamn freezing winters—”

This breathless oration was accompanied by a frantic series of clockwork nods and jerks. The brim of the old man’s cap wagged an independent emphasis at the end of each sentence. Happiness, it kept on announcing, was being a grandparent. The whole performance came to a sudden stop when a woman’s voice called, “
Hatfield!”
across the cattle stadium.

“
Hatfield!”
It was a blowtorch of a voice, and the old man was being roasted in it. He shrank even farther back inside his pajamas.

“Hatfield! I been looking all over!”

The man gestured, flutteringly, at me. I clearly was not much of an alibi.

“I had to leave Doug and Mo. They’re eating popcorn and wieners. You know Jo-Ann hates to have the kids left
any
place!” Hatfield’s
spouse was wearing Bermuda shorts. The varicose veins on her thighs were so intricately blue that they looked like the willow pattern on a Chinese plate.

“Beatrice … this gentleman is from England—”

I got a brief once-over from behind a pair of clip-on dark glasses. Beatrice could tell a rotten tomato when she saw one.

“Well,” she said. “Is. That. So.”

“Hello,” I said.

“We, uh, kind of got talking …” said Hatfield, but I could see that the words sounded improbable in his own ears. Talking was not an area of life for which Hatfield carried a license. He plucked at the knees of his pajamas. Beatrice studied the rows of cows in their stalls. “Cattle,” she said, identifying them as if they were a species hitherto unknown to her.

“Been nice talking to you,” said Hatfield sadly. I hoped that he was going to muster up one of his cracky tags of wartime-British, but he glanced across at Beatrice, thought better of it, and let the brim of his cap sink down over his face, forestalling further communication. He was led off, silent, rainbow pajamas flapping, to join his grandchildren in the wiener-and-popcorn corral.

I’d never been much good at being one of the crowd. Now, feeding myself back into the flow, I tried to settle in, to feel part of the blood being pumped through the fair. Be a corpuscle. Let go. We oozed down a long sickly tunnel of cotton candy, came up against some invisible obstruction, and were channeled into a mass of separate thread veins and arteries. The going was hot and smelly, the pace jerky, as if the whole coronary system were clogged and subject to frequent breakdown. All nerve ends and elbows, I kept on getting stuck.

I was shown a selection of snow blowers. A lady dog handler demonstrated the latest psychological technique for dissuading Ajax and Hercules from leaving piles of poopie on the rug. I found her frank, instructive, but a bit too academic for me. I nearly bought some vitamin pills. I looked at a display of swimming pools, custom-designed to suit my yard; I did my best to covet a threshing machine; I moved fairly swiftly through the extensive exhibit of chemicals that promised to enhance the nutrient values of my poor soil. I did pause, in mute assent, in front of a placard which asked me:
DO YOU SUFFER FROM THE LITTLE PAINS USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH ARTHRITIS
? The handsome orthopedic vibrator, on which I might have massaged all my little pains away, was both expensive and rather too large to carry on a small boat.
The demonstration model was being put to heavy use by a line of sweating agribusinessmen. I came upon a stack of illustrated encyclopedias. Their grained plastic bindings were a deep episcopal purple, the color of seriousness. Their salesman had been got up to look like everyone’s idea of a proper scholar. Close-cropped, in chunky tortoiseshell glasses, he was the only man in Minnesota who wore a necktie on Labor Day.

“If I may ask, sir, would you have children of school age?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. I like purely hypothetical questions, and have always found it a treat to be singled out by Gallup pollsters.

“Would they have ready access to encyclopedia sources in the home?”

“I very much doubt it.”

The salesman brightened up no end. I began to ferret through the volumes. They stank unpleasantly of a mixture of gasoline and lavender.