Accordion Crimes (12 page)

“What are you doing, burning them up?” For a moment longer the woman did not move, and then she slapped her own face with the greasy spatula, seized the boiling kettle and
poured it over the hot metal of the stove. A hissing cloud of steam enveloped her, she was tearing at the stove lid with one hand and pouring boiling water with the other. Clarissa’s daughter Jen shrieked, “Pernilla, you fool stepmother!” and Loats cursed and sprang at her, wrenching the kettle from her seared hand.

Gerti came over in the evening carrying a lemon extract cake. “I wouldn’t go crazy if I was you,” she whispered to the sweating woman, “not even for the nice room. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. What’s the point?”

Pernilla was all right the next day, her burned hands wrapped in greasy bandage.

After the Wall Street explosion in 1920 and the high feeling against immigrants, the three Germans and their families drew into themselves, never went into Prank, taking the long road instead to Kringel where Germans outnumbered Irish. On a Sunday Beutle sometimes got out the two-row Hohner and played a line or ‘two of some song or another, but the music of the three Germans was finished.

Prank touched the borders of their farms. There was a feeling, in the dry years after the war, as after a summer storm that fails to cool or refresh the air, of continuing sullen humidity and irritating heat, of another, more powerful storm building below the horizon. The old world was dead and gone, replaced by a feverish anxiety for something, anything, new. New roads were going in everywhere, and an army expedition came through, driving coast to coast to show the country how bad the roads were, how something had to be done. John O’Cleary converted the old schoolhouse at the crossroads into
a gasoline station, selling Fisk tires and Mobiloil and Standard Oil gasoline, “guaranteed to test the best—no kerosene oil or other injurious substance.”

Karl Messermacher came down from Chicago, wearing plus fours and driving an automobile. He brought magazines and papers:
True Confessions, Reader’s Digest,
the funny papers, with Tillie the Toiler and the Katzenjammer Kids, which Beutle stuffed into the stove as a mockery of Germans. Karl laughed about the way they’d pulled him out of the telegraph office five years earlier.

“By god, the company give me an office and a promotion and a telephone because of that. I’d probably still be down in Prank banging the key—or hanged—if not for Jack Cary. I hear
he
got a lungful of mustard gas and is down at his mother’s place coughing his guts out. I’ll stop by and thank the son-of-a-bitch before I go back.” Karl’s voice was mocking. He showed off his argyle sweater, talked about the color movie he’d seen,
The Toll of the Sea,
passed around a packet of the new invention, potato chips, invited his female cousins out behind the barn to smoke Murad cigarettes, showing them crazy dance steps, cavorting and twisting until he slipped on duck turd and stained the knee of his white flannel trousers.

Before he slipped, his cousin Lulu said, “Karl, you look like an American college man.”

“Call me Charlie,” he said. “I changed my name—Charlie Sharp. That’s me. Listen,” he said. “I’m no German. I was born right here in Ioway. Listen,” he said, “there was seven copycats sitting on a fence. One jumped off. How many was left?”

“Six?” said Lulu.

“Girlie,” said Karl, shaking his head and laughing, “you are a hick from the sticks, girlie. Come on, I’ll take you girlies to the show.”

They walked into the Palace after the movie had started, on the screen an automobile factory and in front of it an enormous black kettle. Into one side of the kettle danced clots of immigrants in old-country costumes, singing in foreign tongues and kicking their legs, and out the other side marched a row of Americans in suits, whistling “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“This movie stinks,” whispered Charlie Sharp. “Come on, we’ll get some hot dogs and something that will curl your hair.”

Beutle said he’d gone far beyond dropping the hyphen and Karl countered by laughing, saying that accordion music was old-country junk.

Messermacher was enraged by the cigarettes. “If God wanted humans to smoke them things he would of put a chimney in the top of your head. A man smokes a pipe or a cigar.” He pronounced the potato chips not fit to feed hogs.

The three old Germans and their wives stayed close to home, but the children and grandchildren went into Prank. The malevolent, sniffing nose of public hatred was scenting new dangers—Reds, Jews, Catholics, other foreigners, not just Germans. When a klezmer band arrived in town in a rackety De Soto, the sheriff told them to keep traveling, no Jew agitators wanted in Prank and he didn’t care what kind of music they played on their dirty accordions, Prank had had enough of accordions, get out, and the same for any goddamn gypsies with their swift and pilfering fingers, the only kind of music Prank wanted to hear was “The Old Rugged Cross” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” although his daughter sang “I’m in Love Again” and accompanied herself on the ukulele.

No one yelled “beer, brats and bellies” when Percy Claude and his second, obviously pregnant wife, Greenie, the seventeen-year-old
daughter of Messermacher, came into the drugstore. Two of Messermacher’s other girls married Americans from Minneapolis, both streetcar conductors, and moved to the city. Another daughter, Ribbons, got work as a hired girl for the limestone mine manager’s wife and quit after a year to marry the new express agent, became Mrs. Flanahan, bridging the Irish ditch. Loats’s sons Felix and Edgar bought a Ford model T truck and started a feed store business. Felix (children believed he had been named for the cartoon cat) was crazy for driving after years of walking along the side of the hot roads and getting the dust blown in his face by American youths speeding past. He wouldn’t be passed, would veer and block any other driver who tried it. Both married American girls and no German was spoken in their houses.

(Twenty years later, in 1944, hunting in a field that had once been part of his father’s farm, Felix saw a balloon drifting across the Little Runt and ran toward it. There was something suspended from the ropes. He reached up as it glided smoothly down and grasped the Japanese bomb. After the funeral—a complete right hand, a mangled leg and an ear—government men came to the family and swore them to silence to prevent panic and public fear.)

Beutle argued with Percy Claude and refused to get a tractor, still held out against the radio. Messermacher, who had the most money, ordered indoor plumbing from Kringel and burned his outhouse in a pillar of smoking stench, then surprised all of them in the autumn of 1924 by selling the farm and moving to Coma, Texas, to grow cotton. In Coma, one side of the town was German and the other populated with Czechs from Bohemia. Messermacher changed the family name to Sharp, following Karl’s example, for Charlie Sharp found life easier than had Karl Messermacher.

Packing up for the move to Texas, one of the daughters came upon the green accordion.

“What to do with this? It’s that old accordion
Vati
got from Uncle Beutle. It still plays OK.” She squeezed out chords, played the first line of “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”

“Oh, put it in the brown trunk. If Willy gives up the ukulele, maybe—or maybe one of the grandkids will take it up.” The mother dropped it into the bottom of the trunk and on top of it came a sewing basket, the coffee grinder, a worn buffalo robe, a set of wool carders.

Beutle cursed Messermacher for a traitor, leaving the good land they had found together and made into fine farms.

In the spring of 1929 Loats was the first to die, a complication of his rupture, and was buried in his bald-cypress box. The farm was subdivided among his five surviving children and his grandchildren who sold it off in lots and parcels. Small houses and garages dotted the great fields. A month later word came from Texas that Messermacher had dropped dead at his mailbox, the new Sears catalog open on his breast at the pages showing a selection of women’s hair nets. To Beutle, his old friend and neighbor, he left Radio stock valued at two thousand dollars and going up like a rocket.

Charlie Sharp had gotten the old man into the market. Beutle, excited by his windfall and the idea of a quick fortune through the big bull market, got through to Charlie on the feed store telephone and asked his advice. Should he put money into more stocks? Which ones?

“Radio Corporation of America. What
Vati
had. Radio’s going to the top. General Motors, Montgomery Ward, the
market’s the thing, a sure thing. Uncle Hans, everybody in America can be rich. It was a little stormy last winter, the market, but she’s steady and climbing again. The country is rock solid.” His voice lowered deeply. “I’m telling you something. I’m worth a quarter of a million now, Uncle Hans. I started out buying a little Studebaker stock, but now I’m really doing good. Not bad, anyway, for an Ioway farm boy, hey?” He gave Beutle a quick spiel about buying on margin and offered to act as Hans’s broker.

Beutle, dazzled by the proof, after thirty-odd years of experience to the contrary, that in America prosperity was for the taking after all, put a mortgage on the farm and, through Charlie, bought a hundred shares of Radio at 120½. “If you’d bought last week, Uncle Hans, you’d of got it at ninety-four! It’s going up fast. There’s no limit. The sky is the limit.”

Under the thrall of Radio stock and his swelling fortune, Beutle gave in and bought an expensive Freed-Eiseman Neutrodyne five-tube receiver with a Prest-O-Lite ninety-amp battery, two forty-five-volt batteries, an earphone plug, an antenna set, vacuum tubes and a round loudspeaker that leaned against the wall like an abandoned discus and blasted out
The A & P Gypsy Hour.
Percy Claude said, “If you got electric out here, you could skip all them batteries and get a plug-in. You could of got a Crossley Pup for ten dollars, what you spend for all this, fifty? Sixty?”

With his fortune sure, Beutle began to worry about fate. “All three the same age, all three the same life, now Loats and Messermacher die, they are gone, like that, one, two, and I am three, I am next. I will go soon. The same age, all sixty-four, and they’re in
dem Grab.
” For the first time since boyhood he felt a slackening of desire. Gerti leaned into the potato barrel
presenting her rump and singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” and he thought of his tombstone.

But he was still sitting down to dinner, still lighting his pipe, still waking up in the morning, so he knew he had truly outlived them, the other two Germans, and the only thing he had done differently in life, the activity that had clearly preserved his vigor and strength, was good honest lust. It would keep him alive and interested until the age of one hundred.

“Jesus Christ, I told them!”

Yet his fires were cooling, and this was real and dangerous. He forced himself to grapple with Gerti once a day, but the effort left him wringing wet and depressed. He spoke sharply, commanded his sons as though they were still children—he knew they were waiting for him to join Loats and Messermacher, especially was Percy Claude watching his father with wolf’s eyes. An answer came to Beutle out of the radio.

He was devoted to KFKB, Kansas First, Kansas Best, out of Topeka, when he could get it, listened to
Concertina Roundup, The Happy Hillbillies, Cowboy Carl and His Little Guitar,
a few times picked up the
WLS Barn Dance
out in Chicago, but usually got only the Cedar Rapids station with
Coon Sanders’ Nighthawks.
He didn’t much care for the hot jazz fox trots, said “Muskrat Ramble” was more like Mess Pants Scramble. Sometimes he’d get out the Hohner—the little green accordion would have been better, maybe—and play along with the musicians on
Concertina Roundup
though they were usually a bunch of wacky Swedes making sounds like corks pulled out of bottles, like pissing cows. (Only once did he hear a virtuoso playing Bach’s Prelude no.
I
in C on a superb Wheatstone concertina, but so many listeners complained that the experiment was never repeated.) He listened to Dr. Squam’s crackling, nasal voice.

“
Friends, this here’s Dr. Squam, talking plain talk to you again. Now I want to say a few words to the men out there, so if there’s ladies listening, you might just as well go upstairs and get at that mending you put off, for this is men’s business. But before you go, take a double spoonful of my number fifty-five tonic treatment and number fifty-nine, for there may be a big change in your life coming soon.

“
Now, men, when a man reaches a certain age, and you know what I mean, you men who are suffering, he begins to lose interest, his spirit droops, certain glands begin to wither and all the spring goes out of his step. If this sounds like someone you know, pay close attention. Until now there was no hope for such a man, even if he was in good health and otherwise strong and able. But now there is a chance. Dr. Squam has developed a four-phase compound operation that rejuvenates depleted sex organs by directing a new blood supply to the affected area—giving a real kick to the old starter. Listen to what this Texas oilman has to say.
”

A slow drawl came out of the rayon speaker fabric, then the announcer’s voice, in subdued excitement:

“
If you want to know more about how this miraculous procedure can once more give YOU the energy and drive of a boy of eighteen, write to Dr. Squam at this address
…”

Beutle knew he’d sell some of the stock Messermacher had left him, he’d have the operation on Messermacher’s nickel. “Turn over in his grave laughing if he knew. And the hell with writing Squam. Claude! Percy Claude, come on in here, I want you to take me to the station.”