Pontoon (5 page)

“I got no home,” he said. “Got no family. Used to but not anymore. Family is pretty overrated in my book. I am on my way to a place that I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it when I get there. Maybe the stars. Or the woods. Maybe just North Dakota. I am the Hard Luck Kid. Old and beat down and used up. That’s me. Ever show you my scar?” He started to lift his shirt and she made him stop. “But I never held out the tin cup, kid. Say what you will, I never held out the tin cup. But hey, who cares? Nobody. Nobody gives a rip if you live or die. You die and they shove you down in the ground and go about their business and it’s like you never existed. That’s the long and the short of it. Between a man and a dog, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference and you can quote me on that. People think they’re so high and mighty. Ha. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. That’s in the Bible, you can look it up. Everybody in this town looks down on Jack Peterson, well, let ‘em. My own wife looked down on me for forty years so I’m well used to it. Her and her books and her good manners and her la-di-da lady friends. I fought for this country. I wore the uniform. I was in California but I saw men go off to the Pacific and come back in bags. It could’ve been me. It wasn’t but it could’ve been. So don’t look down on me. Goddamn Norbert
stole my auger and now he’s trying to avoid me. What kind of a deal is that? Goddamn V. A. won’t fix my teeth. Went to church to ask for twenty bucks to tide me over and they’re like, ‘Oh Jack, we’d love to but we gotta check with Pastor Ingqvist and he’s out on a call, could you come back at four o’clock?’ The hell. I’m not stupid. They got the money right there in an envelope in the drawer. I’ve seen it. They don’t gotta get permission.

“I was born in this town, grew up here, all my buddies were from here. Married your mother, 1942, went off to war. Treat you like a hero and then you come back, forget it. You work hard, raise your kids, do your best, and you get old and they throw you away like they never knew you. I could write a book about this town that’d burn the eyes right out of your skull. I know these people. There’s not a one of them better than me, not one. The Lutherans are the worst and the Catholics run ‘em a close second. Myself, I am a card-carrying atheist. Proud of it. Could I borrow fifty bucks until next week? I get my check next week. I gotta go to the V.A. and have them look at my head.”

So she forked over the money, paid for lunch, patted his shoulder, and as he headed off to his death, he stopped in the doorway and faced the diners in the booths along the wall, and yelled, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, assholes!”

He walked back to the Sidetrack Tap and there was Mr. Hoppe who smelled of Lilac Vegetal cologne spritzed on liberally. “You smell like you’re hoping to get lucky, Hoppe,” said Jack, “but let me tell you: as long as it’s light out, no woman is going to come within ten feet of you. And after dark, one of them might shoot you if she had a gun.” Mr. Hoppe had had a major drinking bout the day before, which he had lost, so he was feeling unsteady, but
he drew himself up to full height and said, “Jack, I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.” When he wasn’t dead drunk, Mr. Hoppe could be rather aristocratic. “You,” he said, “are a piece of trash.” They stood there insulting each other for a few minutes and then got onto the topic of Viking history. Hoppe said it was a crime that the Viking explorers were never given credit while that stumblebum Columbus had a holiday of his own. Jack said, “Well, America is named for Eric the Red. Isn’t that enough for you?” Hoppe said it wasn’t. And he brought up the runestone. They were standing at the curb in front of the bar, and Jack was hanging onto the town’s lone parking meter (erected in 1956 as an experiment, soldered shut in 1972), and he yelled at Hoppe, “It’s no wonder you never made anything of yourself. You got shit for brains.” And he turned, clutched at his chest, and fell to the ground, dead, his old grizzled mug flat on the ice and snow. “To hell with you,” said Hoppe and then thought better of it. He shook Jack’s shoulders. “Get up, you old booger,” he said. And then he smelled death. It was Bruno, the old mutt, making his rounds of garbage cans. The dog sniffed at Jack’s feet, then his crotch, and his face, and then licked Jack’s lips. That was too much for Hoppe. He fled into the bar and had Wally call the constables Gary and LeRoy. And then the sheriff came, and the coroner, and a motley crowd of townsfolk, many of whom had seen Jack only minutes before and were struck by the irony: there he had been and now he was no more. It was a wonderful commotion, one that the deceased would have enjoyed. They took photographs of him lying there, and then packed him up and took him away. Somebody went to tell Evelyn but she was in St. Louis. At last, the only mourner left was the dog who sniffed around at Jack’s death site and scratched at the ice, and then lay down on it and took a nap.
A week after that, Wally put the Sidetrack up for sale. He told Evelyn, “I never planned to spend my life in a tavern putting mothballs in the urinal and pouring shots of bourbon and listening to a bunch of drunks talk about the good times. I got into this as a favor to my brother-in-law. I was going to run it for him until he got better, but he died. And here I am.”

They were married all those years and all Evelyn would say about him was that he was who he was and never pretended to be anything else and in the end he lived how he wanted to live and it’s pointless to try to change people. He liked being alone. He liked working on cars. He was employed by Rudeen’s Chevy-Buick in Little Falls until the drinking got to him. He preferred a job in a town where he didn’t live, which cut down on conversation. He’d slipped into marriage, and it didn’t suit him, fell in love with an imaginary friend, took up the bachelor life, drank freely, went fishing, got to talk to his loving daughter at the end. And he died in an instant. It all worked out.

T
he man from Waite Park Cremation Service arrived, shortly after noon. Barbara had finished off the Kahlúa. The phone rang and it was someone asking if she was satisfied with her current long-distance provider. “We’re thrilled,” she said. “Couldn’t be happier.” She didn’t call Aunt Flo to tell her Mother was dead. In fact she locked the doors and pulled the shades for fear Flo’d barge in and take over. She was a great one for grabbing hold of something you were doing and saying, “Here, let me do that” and wresting it out of your hands—“That’s not how you do that”—a rake, a screwdriver, a mixer—the woman would not let you so much as
whip cream with
a Mixmaster
even though you were sixty years old and had raised a child, nonetheless
you were not to be trusted
. She pushed Uncle Al around like he was a lawn mower. Don’t put that toothpaste there. It goes here in the green cup. Don’t hang your shirt there, that’s for towels. Why are you driving so fast? Do you want to kill us? Just because the sign says 45 miles an hour doesn’t mean you
have to
drive 45 miles an hour
! She kept a critical eye on his outfits, his grooming and hygiene, and knew everybody he spoke to on the phone and where he was every minute of the day and why—lucky
for her he hadn’t gone berserk and stabbed her, the old biddy. Barbara fell asleep on the sofa and awoke at three and in the meantime three persons had called Mother and left messages on her answering machine, which seemed unspeakably sad. Aunt Flo saying: “Just called to see how you’re doing. You seemed so quiet the other day. Call me if you want a ride to quilting.” And a man offering to clean the chimney and warning of the dangers of carbon monoxide. And the man who had called last night. “Hey, Precious. You sleeping in today? Give a call. I’m around. I see there’s a fish fry in Avon. I could drive up in the RV and meet you there.” And a chuckle. “Call me on the cell.” His voice was low and seductive with a little tinge of the South. Could he be black?

She picked up the phone and called Oliver at Liberty Gas & Lube and he answered right away but he was with a customer so, okay, she said she’d call him right back. “Are you okay?” he said. Sure, she was okay. “You don’t sound okay.” “I’m okay,” she said. She didn’t mention that she had found her mother dead in bed. She didn’t want to get into that and make him feel obligated when he was busy with customers. “Talk to you later,” she said. The moment she hung up, she got teary-eyed again.
What in hell are you doing?
she thought.
You’ve lived in this town all your life. Call up somebody and tell them to
come over here. You’re in grief. They’ll come and be with you. If you can’t
call your pastor, call the cops, call Father Wilmer at Our Lady of Perpetual
Responsibility, call Sister Arvonne for crying out loud
—Sister Arvonne, now there was a good idea. A pistol of a woman in her black skirt and black jacket, her starched blouse, her sensible shoes. Sister Arvonne would drop everything and come in a minute, make some phone calls, draw up a list, turn this into a project. One, two, three, four—don’t cry—that’s for later—first things first.

She was blinded by tears and her left leg was asleep but she went
careening into the kitchen to find the phone book and look up Sister’s number at the Catholic school. The phone book wasn’t in the junk drawer and it wasn’t next to the phone. She looked in the drawer under the junk drawer and found clippings clipped together and some old color snapshots of family picnics and a letter—a copy of a letter Mother had written to her from Alaska. Except she couldn’t remember getting it.

The man from the crematorium arrived in a plain old black delivery van, no name on the side. He was young, but of course everybody was nowadays. His name was Walt. He held a folded plastic bag under one arm. “We’ve found it better not to advertise who we are,” he explained. “Some folks are still sort of weirded out by the idea of cremation, so our customers prefer anonymity.”

But how could you hide the fact of cremation? she thought—people come and there’s a little jar on a pedestal.

She explained about the rhinestone dress and he smiled. “You don’t want that,” he said. “A lot of charred rocks mixed up with your mother.” And then she suddenly could visualize Mother being consigned to the flames—rising up, mouth open in a silent scream, arms reaching out, in agony, a true Christian martyr in the flames.

“Where is your mother?” She pointed to the bedroom door. He went in there. Suddenly she wasn’t sure if this was the right thing. O God. What to do? She picked up the phone but who to call? Aunt Flo was three blocks away but that would be a horror show. She’d get mad and tell you what a harebrained thing this is and how typical of you, Barbara. Pastor Ingqvist—you were supposed to call your pastor, weren’t you? Yes, you were. But what was he going to add to the situation? Read a prayer off an index card. Talk about the corruptible becoming the incorruptible. And she didn’t know his feelings about cremation. Probably negative. He’d come in and murmur his stuff and the upshot would be that Mother would lie waxen and cold in a $3000 coffin and Barbara would feel the whips of remorse for the rest of her life. And she
knew what Pastor Ingqvist’d say about Andy Williams singing “Moon River.” Not much doubt there.

Walt emerged from the bedroom holding up a diamond necklace. “You’ll want this,” he said. Barbara had never seen it before. He went to bring in the gurney and Barbara poured herself a little vodka and OJ.

She could imagine Oliver on his stool in the cashier’s cage at Liberty, behind the candy bars, turning his great bulk to take the credit card from a customer, swiping it, shoving the slip under the glass to be signed, offering the ballpoint. He had been shot twice on duty. “Only flesh wounds,” he said, chuckling. He weighed, she guessed, almost four hundred pounds and he was the sweetest man you ever met. When people stared at them at Perkins when they had breakfast after a night together, she wished she had a pamphlet she could hand out: “This man whom you stare at, who, to you, is a freak and an abuser of food, is also the kindest and cheeriest man in Minnesota. And, yes, a wonderful lover. Attend to your own shortcomings, and give this man the respect he deserves. Thank you.” Oh, what a lovely amorous man. He loved to nuzzle and whisper and stroke her leg. He was a great fat man and in no hurry to get to the acrobatics. He could kiss and murmur and nestle for an hour or two before he got urgent and excited and started undressing her, which other men got to in forty-five seconds. No foreplay for them, just get you naked and in they go and a minute later it’s over. The fat man was languid and tender. And then, bless his heart, when she was naked and the fat man looked at her, he imagined he saw a slender lovely girl before he turned the lights out and began to slip out of his clothes.

Walt came through the back door with a fold-up gurney, a skinny thing the size of an ironing board, and his helper, Cliff, who looked to be about eighteen. What must it be like to be so
young and employed to carry the dead out of their bedrooms? She held out a hand to Cliff and kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that.” The choir had stopped singing so she put on Robert Preston singing “Ya Got Trouble” and then noticed that her pants were unzipped. She took off that record and put on a choir singing something dark and slow. And then the phone rang. It rang just as Walt and Cliff emerged from the bedroom with Mother zipped up in a plastic bag and wheeled her out the back door. The shock of seeing this—the house suddenly empty—she picked up the phone and it was Flo saying, “What is going on? What is that truck doing in the alley? Speak up!” and Barbara sobbed, “My mommy’s dead.”

Flo pulled up in front two minutes later, her hair in curlers, as the truck pulled away in back. She’d been at the Bon Marche Beauty Salon, having it blued. She was hopping mad. She took one look at Barbara and said, “You’re a souse, that’s what you are! You need to get a grip on yourself, young lady. Where is Evelyn?” And then she grabbed onto a chair for support. “Oh dear God, she went to the doctor two weeks ago. She was fine.” She choked and went in the bedroom and found Walt’s business card and came charging out and glared at Barbara and shook her fist. “Sending your mother to be burned up like she was garbage. Why didn’t you just chop her up with an axe and throw her in the incinerator? This is treachery. You ought to be shot.” And Flo called up the crematorium and left a long message on the machine, to get the hell back with her sister Evelyn’s body unless he wanted to be in court that evening. She, Flo, had a nephew in the legal profession who would, by God, make your life pretty damn miserable unless you bring that body back here this instant. Driving around preying on the grief-stricken who happen to be intoxicated too—

Barbara had never heard her swear before. Flo was a good Lutheran, but she tore into Walt like a dog on a bone. And then Barbara pulled out Mother’s letter and handed it to Flo. Flo read it and sat down. Barbara took the phone. “Disregard the previous message, we’re a little upset here,” she said into the answering machine. “We’ll work it out.” Flo looked up, aghast.

“You should have burned this. If you had an ounce of common sense, you would’ve put a match to it and buried it in the garden. This is just outrageous. I ought to wring your neck.” And then Flo put her old wrinkled face in her hands and sobbed. “What has this family come to? We’ll never be able to hold our heads up in this town again. A bowling ball! People will think we are fools, no better than the Magendanzes. I wish I had dropped dead rather than know this. Why couldn’t God have taken me first?”

She looked up at Barbara, her old eyes full of tears. “Who is this Raoul?”

“He is a flamenco dancer. He taught her to samba,” said Barbara. “He took her to a casino where she won fifty-thousand dollars at blackjack and offered to buy him a drink and they wound up flying to Missouri. Mother had a whole secret life and I’ll show you her confession if you like. She was an atheist and a Democrat and she thought you were a stuffed shirt with a cob up your butt. Those were her exact words, that you had a cob up your butt.”