Pontoon (10 page)

Barbara got to know a lovely man, a priest. Kyle came along
afterward and Lloyd accepted him, asked no questions.
Oh God
, she thought,
I am just about to start bawling. Why go over the past?
Much too painful. Think about the future
.

Now she had Oliver whose passion was slow to mount but once lit he got more and more excited, his great bulk trembling, and he held her close and moaned and whispered, and finally rose to engage, a great bull walrus in heat crouching behind her in the dark, his shirttails on her buns, exerting heroically, thrusting with unabashed vigor, delirious, almost out of his mind until in full passion he removed his shirt and his great belly slapped her butt
whap whap whap whap
he got panting and wheezing so she was afraid his heart would burst and he would topple onto her dead or dying, but no, he only rolled over exhausted and let her climb up and ride him while he rested, and then he was ready to go again. And when he spent, it was with a long low cry out of an ancient warrior throat, a primeval cry that made her almost weep that she could give so much pleasure to another. And then suddenly he was shy again, covering himself, slipping into the big shirt, the elephantine pants, the placid moon face. He was Lutheran, like her, brought up modest. Nowadays young girls acted as lewd as possible. Tiny tank tops, short shorts, their pretty little boobs pushed up, their cracks on display for boys to ponder. Wenching around in swimsuits made of three tiny triangles and a few feet of fishing line. A wonder they aren’t all pregnant by the age of fifteen.
Don’t go for the charmers, girls. Pick the smart oddball, the shy
but steady one grateful for your attention. Go for loyalty
.

A boat buzzed past on the lake, towing a tall blond girl on water skis, followed by a pontoon boat with a big family standing as if riding a float in a parade and they were the winning team. She
counted six fishing boats anchored at this end of the lake, each with two men, bow man and stern man, poles in hand. Catholics, probably. They got church out of the way on Saturday. In and out. Up, down, say you’re sorry, pay your fine, out in time. Lloyd was Catholic. Her dad was far from devout but he got upset when she brought Lloyd home, and angry when she married him, but Lloyd switched right over to Lutheran and trotted along, it made no never mind to him. He was a churchgoer, period. Because if you weren’t, it raised questions and made problems, so he went along. Clip clop, clip clop. Blessed are the meek for they shall stay out of trouble.

Fatherhood was what capsized him all right. He took Muffy in his arms like you’d hold an explosive device. He cried. She was a happy little girl, the sweetest little thing, and everytime he looked at her, he got pensive and forlorn. And then she turned fifteen and they got her in the Poor Clares Group Home, in Sauk Rapids. The Poor Clares accepted Muffy, though Lloyd and Barbara were Lutheran, because they fell in love with her. She was a beautiful loving happy person. So she never would write a scholarly book about Roman architecture, and so what? She was a peach. The Clares came for her and Barbara smiled and waved. “Bye-bye, baby,” she crooned, and when the black car pulled away, she went to the basement and bawled and bawled, but Lloyd couldn’t say good-bye, couldn’t speak, just went upstairs and closed the door. He took it hard. The week after she left, he set out to retile the upstairs bathroom. He’d never done one before but he thought,
How hard could it be if my brother Lowell can do it?
Lowell was thick as a brick. So Lloyd got busy and started putting in ceramic tile freehand and soon the horizontal tiles started to get diagonal.
There was tile creep. Lowell had to be brought in to tear it apart and redo it. Lloyd cried over that. Had a brain-damaged daughter and he couldn’t set tile straight. It was too much for him.

A stray dog came to their door one day and he took her in and named her Louise. A collie mutt, taffy-colored. She soon established dominance and trained him to get up out of a chair and bring her things and play ball with her when she brought him a ball. She put her old head in his lap and he stroked her for hours. He’d sit on the steps and say, “Life is good, isn’t it? Three squares a day, good bed, birds to watch, and squirrels. Got it made, buddy.” She was his intermediary. He’d say to her, with Barbara nearby, “Ask Mommy if she’s going to fry up those fish for supper, willya.” When the dog disappeared, Lloyd drove all over town looking for her. One more blow.

Lloyd’s religion was meekness. He could outmeek anyone. He was never a problem to anybody, and that was the problem. He wore old clothes from Goodwill. He cut his own hair and cut it short, for humility. He was a meek scoutmaster. Boys made fun of his musty odor, his yellow teeth. He soaked up all the punishment he could get and asked for more. He took the boys winter camping, taught them to make birdhouses and tie square knots and sheepshanks and they tied his shoelaces together. The warehouse cut his pay, and that was fine by him. A ladder collapsed and Lloyd fell fifteen feet to the concrete floor, injured his right hip, and got right up and walked. Signed a waiver. Kept working. It broke her heart to see the man shame himself. He was in such pain. Walked the cartilage off the hip socket, kept going, bone on bone. Then they fired him, without a word of thanks for twenty-seven
years of service, and hired cheap replacements for him and the other warehouse guys, and Lloyd, who’d always been dead set against unions, begged the company to hire him back for half his former pay. And was hurt when they wouldn’t. He was pleasant, uncomplaining, a perfectly wonderful Christian gentleman, except that there was no Lloyd there anymore. There was no sex, no conversation, no guff, no juice, no nothing, just meals and work and sleep and his chuckling. She put up a sign in the kitchen, “Thanks for not chuckling.” He didn’t get it. Lloyd took his troop camping up north. A boy lied and said Lloyd kissed him and Lloyd was drummed out of Scouts. Lloyd said, “Let it go.” He declined to fight the thing. She nagged him about it, not to let them get away with it. No reaction, nothing. She dropped a can of yellow paint out the bedroom window on him then, just to get a rise out of him, and he cleaned himself up without comment, and he went to stay at his sister’s. She told him not to come back. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you angry. I don’t know why.” That was true, he didn’t. He moved to Minneapolis and got a job at the ammo factory. He just sort of got smaller and smaller and then she divorced him. And then she read an article about wood ticks and the anti-libido toxin they release into your body. She read the article and wept. A good man and his life is blighted because his dad is a bully and he camps in the woods. Science! It tells you stuff too late.

She looked down. Her shoes and socks were wet. She was standing in the lake. She had walked into the water up to her ankles and the wake of the water skis washed up and she yelled, “Go away, God! I don’t believe in you
anymore
, so get off my back.”

The men in the boats didn’t move, the pontoon boat glided away, the water-ski boat came around again.

“I never really believed in you but I tried to and that’s what
screwed up my life but good
! And Lloyd! Look what you did to him! You made him a sheep! And now I’m done with it!!! It’s over! I have talked to you for the
last time
! I am never going in that damn pasture again! Leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone!”

Her fists clenched and she leaned into the breeze. “My mother didn’t believe in you,
not one bit
and we’re going to drop her in this lake and no prayers. Hear me?
No prayers, no hymns!!!
”

A man in a silver fishing boat turned and looked her way.

“One life and that’s it! When you’re dead, you’re dead. Burn her up, put the ashes in the water!
That’s what Mother wants and
that’s what we’re going to do!

“
I wasted half my life feeling bad about you and I’m not going to
waste any more!
”

The man in the boat waved to her. She gave him the finger. “That’s it for me! I’m done with it!” And she picked up a rock and flung it hard and it skipped on the water—two, four, five, six, eight skips. The man in the boat shouted something.

“Fish all you like! Waste your life! I’m not wasting mine!” And she turned and walked up the beach onto the grass and took off her sopping shoes and socks and walked home barefoot. She was prepared to repeat her blasphemy to anyone she met but she met nobody. As if the word had gone out, “The atheist is coming!”

Her home had not been struck by lightning. The kitchen was not infested with frogs or drenched in blood. There was not a message on the answering machine saying that Kyle had been struck down dead. She poured herself a glass of vodka on ice and stood in her little screened porch and took a few deep breaths. Bees buzzed in the asters and marigolds and a toad squatted on
the walk. A snake’s skin lay in the grass where a dog had chewed on it. The neighbor’s cat lapped water from a dish next door. The little percussive beats of its thirst. The swish of tires on the pavement and the
whap
of a screen door and the humming of the world, machinery and wind and lake and voices, a cloud of sound.
Settle down
, she thought.
Don’t bust up your best china just because
you’re an orphan. Listen and learn
. Mother went to church the way some ladies go to basketball games, to be sociable, not because they care who wins, and that’s how Mother felt about the gospel of the Lord—it was for other people to agonize over. What she cared about was being with Gladys and Margaret and Florence and feeding the hungry and covering the chilly with warm quilts.

So she stood and listened. She felt tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead, the thump of her pulse, the grains of sand under her bare soles. And then she opened the door and swung the glass and the vodka hung in the air in a lovely long liquid arc studded with ice cubes and fell and made a long dark line along the walk and over the toad. He was soaked in vodka. He stayed squatted, thinking the situation over.

She turned and went back in the kitchen and poured the bottle of vodka out in the sink. Drunken excess wasn’t her line of work anymore. She was done with it. She’d been a damn drunk because she had God problems: you live a lie, you pay a price. Maybe you shoot somebody, or shoot yourself. Or maybe you take the long way and just get good and drunk, but no more, so she poured the stuff down the drain. Every bottle she could find, in a pure righteous heat. You don’t need God to get on the right road, you can do this yourself. A little wisdom now and then is enough for anybody, if your timing is right.
Ninety-nine bottles of booze on the 
wall, ninety-nine bottles of booze, now it is plain they must go down
the drain, ninety-eight bottles of booze
. Jim Beam and Gilbey’s gin and Amaretto. It was off her now, she had done her share for Seagram’s, let others take up the slack. Like Dr. Dave says on his radio show, “The same energy you put into making a bad habit, you can put into breaking it and making a good one. It takes determination to be a drunk, and it takes the same determination to be sober. One or the other. You choose. You have the strength to do it.” He’s on at noon, taking calls from people all over Minnesota. He has a PhD in psychology and he’s smart about all sorts of things. She wished she had called him when she found Mother’s body.
Dr. Dave, I’m here with my mother who I just discovered dead
in her bed and a note in the drawer that says “Cremation and put the
ashes in a bowling ball”—what should I do?
What should she do? She kept pouring. She had bought a case of liquor after she won the Sons of Knute Guess The Ice Melt contest. First prize, $150, for coming closest to guessing when the 1949 Pontiac junker would go through the spring ice. She had an expensive bottle of Armagnac and vintage port, plus the crème de cacao and Baileys Irish Cream and Kahlúa and Amaretto and the Powers Irish whiskey that Oliver liked, the Chardonnay in the fridge, the whole shitload went gurgling down the drain and the bottles clanked into two big shopping bags and she took them out to the garbage can by the garage and plopped them in. The Andersons across the alley were setting out picnic things in the backyard. Mr. Anderson was at the grill, putting slices of cheese on hamburgers. Sonya called over, “Come and join us.”

“Thanks, but I can’t. Too much to do!” Sonya took a few steps toward her back fence and Barbara could feel condolences about to flutter her way, so she waved and wheeled back to the house.
She shut the door and drew the curtain. Sonya’s older brother was one of the four graduating seniors who died on the Northern Pacific crossing fifteen miles south of town on graduation night, 1974. They’d gone swimming at a granite quarry, two boys and two girls, and then saw how late it was, and they raced for home to get ready for graduation, and were hit by the westbound train. Stewart and Karen and Kenny and Marianne. Two couples going steady. A week of wild grief in town, the Class of 1974 sent off numb with horror, the family of Karen consulted a lawyer about suing the family of Kenny the driver but nothing happened. The unspoken question was, “Well, were they
doing
it?” And you hoped they were, but Stewart was a devout kid and maybe there had been a rush to concupiscence—naked swimmers kissing and touching and maybe Stewart had cried out that he didn’t think it was right, and maybe it was the moral struggle with temptation that took up the time and made them late. And then Kenny drove them to their rendezvous with death. Pastor Tommerdahl suggested strongly that it had been God’s Will for the four that they join Him Upstairs and Mother was furious. She didn’t go to church for a year after that.

Barbara stripped off her clothes and tossed them into the washer and was padding down the hall to the shower when the phone rang. She let it ring. Then she thought maybe it was the crematorium so she picked it up on the fourth ring. It was Bennett in New York.
Shit
.