Accordion Crimes (57 page)

By his forty-eighth birthday Ivar owned a ranch in Montana, a beach house in Tahiti, but he looked very much the same, the long dusty ropes of hair hanging over the shoulders of his soiled linen jacket, his feet in black sneakers. He still picked up unclaimed deposit cans in his path, still took an interest in wrecked bikes. In a ragged Montana town too small to spit at he bought the contents of the Little Boy Blue Pawnshop, including an aged saddle stamped on the cantle with the maker’s name, A. D. Seitzler & Co., Silver City, New Mexico, ropes and shepherds’ crooks, a magazine rack with a carved bowlegged cowboy on the side, a beehive radio with speaker fabric in a honeycomb design, a basket of tarnished spoons and an old green accordion as misshapen as
though a horse had stepped on it. The promising items went to his research center for identification and evaluation (in this way he recovered a lost Remington painting of a cavalry charge, and the carved magazine rack turned out to be a desirable piece by the crabby and eccentric Thomas Molesworthy). The worn spoons were good for nothing but the silver smelter, and the accordion went to the dollar bargain table in his Old Glory warehouse, open twenty-four hours, day and night, a mecca for collectors who drove hundreds of miles to see what they could find in the bins of junk.

Elise Gasmann was only one of an extraordinary number of Old Glory inhabitants diagnosed with various cancers. The town’s fatigue rate was far above the national average; men slumped for long periods of time in front of their television sets, women lurched to their jobs, nodding off in the commuter vans. Alarmed health officials visited outlying farms, taking soil, water and air samples, testing the local corn and hogs. Someone thought of the limestone caves beneath the black soil. Many people had complained over the years of hearing a low-pitched hum coming from underground that in certain seasons deepened to a ceaseless grinding as if nonstop subterranean trains were rolling to hell, as members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church believed, or harsh winds were blowing through a resonating underground chamber, as the town historian conjectured. The state sent its geologist down and she in turn summoned teams of scientists who came with odd equipment and reported that indeed a low-level sound was coming from under the caves, a steady vibration of seventeen cycles per second, an accompanying harmonic of
seventy cycles per second, and pulsing overtones of much higher frequencies, of unknown cause; certainly it was scientifically intriguing. In addition, there were dangerously high levels of radon gas in the caves leaking into the basements of Old Glory. The town made a rush to sell, to move out. Houses begun were never finished, their skeleton frames casting scribbled shadows, the piles of brick and sand on the sites sprouting fireweed.

“That’s why we got them damn white pheasants. The radon.” Conrad Gasmann, sitting at the table in the old Gasmann farmhouse with his wife, Nancy, spit an unchewable piece of bacon rind onto his plate and tossed his head to throw back the grey curl that hung over his forehead. He had the long and bulbed nose of his father, Nils, ice-blue eyes set close enough together to give him a squirrelly look, and ears that lay close to his head. The farm had been deeded to both brothers, but Ivar, after requesting a day alone in the house, sold his share to Conrad who got rid of the land except for the four acres surrounding the house and kept on working for Rudy Henry at the gas company. (When his daughter, Vela, was small, he told her he had to work there because his name was Gasmann. Then, when they hired John Roop, he told her Roop was the name of a rare invisible gas that made birds fly.) With the house he inherited a photograph of dead Aunt Floretta in her Wild West regalia sitting on a stump in a flurry of aspen leaves, her white-blond braids descending from an enormous white cowboy hat, her gloved hand resting on a braided lariat, a little heel spur catching the light, and, in a holster on her right hip, a pearl-handled revolver supplied by the photographer.

“You know it makes me sick when you do that, spit your food out. Why do you do that?” said Nancy, breathing through her mouth, winding a curl around her index finger. “Listen at that wind. Supposed to gust to sixty, they said on the radio. Change the weather, sure enough.” She threw down the folded paper. “This’s the worst, a crossword puzzle that’s nothing but Asian rivers and golf players from the nineteen thirties.”

“Where’s Vela?”

“I don’t know, somewheres outside. I don’t know how she can stand that wind. Why?”

Conrad’s voice was as kittenish as it got. “Ah, I thought we might go up in the bedroom for a little while, lay down and take a nap.” His loose, soft stomach trembled beneath his knitted shirt.

“The day you want a nap. I know you, and you don’t want a nap any more than you want cancer.”

“Don’t get back on that subject again. I had about all the hearing about cancer I can stand. Come on, get in that bedroom.” He whacked her behind. She slapped back but followed him into the dim room (it was the room where his parents had slept, redecorated by Nancy with a sparkling textured ceiling and orange striped wallpaper), the sheets and covers still snarled from the night and smelling of their bodies, and the wind whistling shrilly at the window joints.

“Of course, right at the climax, that’s when our kid got her arms cut off,” Nancy whispered a year later to her sister.

With some of Vela’s insurance money they’d had insulation blown into the old house, a thousand dollars’ worth of the stuff, a two-thousand-dollar oil furnace installed, storm
windows upstairs, and it was still so cold in the bedroom in winter he could see his breath. Nancy had wanted to fix over the kitchen, a cramped hole with drain problems and curling linoleum, but Conrad said, better wait.

He scraped at the back window, got a look at the white corrugated fields. On the other side of the room the sun had melted the frost enough to show the spraddle of buildings and grain elevators along the road, the billboard hand-painted by the Lutheran Women’s Circle showing a three-year-old child’s face, golden curls and a single black tear on the cheek like a beauty mark—
ABORTION STILLS A BEATING HEART
—the Conoco station in the distance, the river, and on the other side, Ivar’s warehouse and parking lot. There was a ruffling lump of something on the macadam, right on the yellow line. A dead raven, must of got hit picking at carrion. Dick Cude’s blue pickup went by, swerved to hit the carcass, sending up a few feathers. He watched the truck, saw it slow at the diner, the Home Away.

Out of the blue he wanted a slab of cherry pie and a mug of perked coffee, not granola and instant in Nancy’s arty glass cups. For years he’d had his coffee and pie at Chippewa Willy’s Grill, but he could see there was a good crowd at the Home Away morning after morning.

He got mad all over again looking at the old silo as he drove past, thought for the thousandth time that he would get up there this summer and paint the damn thing out, the big peeling picture of Jesus with a snake in each hand standing in front of a house trailer. For that matter, pull the silo down. Empty for years. Snow crystals on the clumps of roadside grass like crusted salt. Past the signs
OLD GLORY BELIEVES IN GOD AND AMERICA
,
DO YOU
? and
THIS IS A
CHILD WATCH
COMMUNITY
.

He sat next to Dick Cude in the last empty place. Cude’s clothes smelled of some noxious washday detergent perfume. The restaurant was full, half the farmers in town in for the breakfast they couldn’t get at home, for the pleasure of ordering and getting two meaty pork chops and home fries and two over easy instead of a load of crap and whiny complaints. What the hell was wrong with Nancy that she couldn’t put a decent breakfast together? She knew he loved Spanish omelets, but how often did he get one? Father’s Day, and no other time. Breakfast in bed, a Spanish omelet, and a few other things. The rest of the time it was “cook it yourself.” Was it just Nancy?

“Dick, what d’you get for breakfast when you eat at home?”

The man lifted his red face, the granulated complexion as though sprinkled with hot sugar.

“Frozen waffles. We got a freezer full of frozen waffles. I can have frozen waffles with margarine and corn syrup and some kind of artificial cream comes in a tub. Could be worse, could be Jell-O. How you, Mrs. Rudinger? Guess I’ll have the special.”

“You sure? You know there’s turnip mash this morning, and not everybody likes turnip.” She gave the U.P.S. man a hard look, dropped her glance to the mound of turnip on his plate.

“Sure as snow I love turnip. Gimme some fried onions too.” A photograph of Mrs. Rudinger hung behind the cash register, showed her standing in front of a venetian blind holding a burning paper—the mortgage—in a pair of spaghetti tongs. Over the door the head of a six-point buck she had shot in 1986 waggled when someone came in.

“Comes with it. Liver, onions, turnip mash, two corn muffins and coffee. You want coffee?”

“I rather have milk. If I can get it.” He turned to Conrad, used his sympathetic voice.

“How’s your kid doing?”

“She’s coming along pretty good, I guess. Goes in to the therapist twice a week, got all this equipment in the house. She spends a lot of time listening to tapes, we got her a Walkman when she was in the hospital. Seems like she wants a new tape ever other day and it gets expensive.”

Two Guatemalan agricultural laborers got up, paid for their eggs and walked out. Mrs. Rudinger’s new waitress came past, refilling coffee cups.

“What is she,” said Dick Cude when she was out of earshot, “Chinese or Vietnamese or what?”

“I think she’s Korean,” said Conrad. “That’s what’s the matter, the country’s sinking under these people—chinks and spicks, and pakis and those aye-rabs from the Middle of the East. It’s not the same thing as when our grandparents come over; they were white, they had guts, a good work ethic, didn’t go around blowing up buildings. These are not white people. They’re swarthy, they’re mongrels. It’s simple—the country’s filled up, there’s not enough room, not enough jobs to go around.”

“Well, anyway,” said Dick Cude, “we got a lot of tapes at home. You know, from my sister after Russell—I could bring some of them over. It’s time to let somebody else enjoy them. What kind of music she like? I hope she don’t go for this here Nigro rap shit with the dirty lyrics. I won’t let it in the house.”

“Nah. What she likes—look, it sounds funny, but what she’s going for is Lawrence Welk, all that old cornball stuff. A lot of it is on tapes now. I don’t know what she sees in it, but she listens to it by the hour. That stuff was stale before I was born. That bubbly-bubbly champagne music. It’s just a damn joke. Nursing home music. But that’s what she likes. It’s cheerful, that’s why, I think. Nancy’s planning to take her
down to Disney World when she’s strong enough, hear that Disney World polka band, they got a terrific band, lot of accordions.”

“She’ll grow out of it. After what the kid’s been through, I guess she can listen to anything she wants. Tell you something about polka, this disc jockey in St. Paul a couple months ago said just offhand on the air that listeners could send in the names of their favorite polka bands, see? And in three days he got twenty-eight thousand postcards. Hey, we’re watching old movies the other night,
Arsenic and Old Lace,
it’s a special on Frank Capra movies. They said he used to play the squeezebox, showed a clip of him doing it. Jimmy Stewart, Joan Crawford, they all played. Hollywood’s favorite instrument. How about Myron Floren? I got some Myron Floren. He used to play with Lawrence Welk. How about Frankie Yankovic? ‘
Roll out the barrel
…’ How about Whoopee John Wilfahrt? That New Ulm stuff? There’s one of them old seventy-eights of that woman accordion, Violet, Viola Turpeinin? Finnish woman. Boy, could she play. Dead now, I suppose. Beautiful stuff, some of that old Scandahoovian music, but you don’t hear it much now except at them festivals, your good time there, but you don’t hear it in ordinary life like when I was a kid. My dad’s father could play it. He used to work with some Finns, there was a song they sang, something about a mailman. God damn, it was funny. We still got the old Hardanger fiddle, all cracked, a course. A course, that old-time music now, seems a lot of people is interested in it, you know, the Finns, the Swedes, the Croatians, all them, but you ask me, it’s like pumping blood into a corpse.” He wanted to say he knew something about accordions, damage and grief, but Conrad wouldn’t want to hear that.

“Well, it’s that sound that gets her, not no particular bunch a people. She says it makes her feel in a good mood. She told
the therapist that if she got any use back in her hands she wanted to learn to play the accordion.”

“Yeah? They think that’s gonna happen?”

“No.”

“Well. It’s a miracle she’s still alive. It’s a miracle they could sew them back on. I mean it. The paper said only the second one they done it on. Imagine sewing all them little blood vessels back together and joining the muscles? I don’t see how they done it. She’s a tough, tough little kid. Somebody up there’s looking out for her. I wish He could have looked out for Russell. I suppose she goes to one of them help groups, they got them for everything—Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, sexaholics, shoplifters. Seems like they got to have one for blind people and maimed people, don’t it?”

Conrad looked at the clock. He knew where the conversation was going, didn’t want to hear anything about blind Russell, dumped out of a bus in the desert. He had twelve minutes to get down to Old Glory Gas. He hoped Pitch was around to help load the tanks on the truck. Whatever, it beat listening to Dick Cude, the big red face bunching up as if he was going to cry any minute.