Pontoon (15 page)

She sat Kyle down in the kitchen and she poured him a glass of OJ over ice, got out the butter and eggs, tossed a big chunk of frozen hash browns in one frying pan and fried two eggs sunny-side up in another along with four strips of bacon. Kyle’s favorite breakfast. The kid ate like a wolverine and was slim as a snake. Go
figure. He was so beautiful, the dark lashes, the curly hair, she had to make herself stop staring at him. He had Mother’s cheekbones and the priest’s eyes. He was movie material. She was not going to let him fall asleep and go drifting over the dam. God, it was hard being young today. Holy Mother of God—the distractions.

But it was hard for Lloyd too. Lloyd, the ball-handling guard on the Leonard’s basketball team, the good boy with the big grin, the ready lover, and then after they married and he went to work for his old man in the machine shop, he got eaten up. Tried to win his daddy’s love by jumping higher and higher but there was no love to win. Lloyd was blamed for every setback. He should’ve walked out after a week, but Lloyd just got meeker and meeker. He made himself inoffensive. Kyle had that meekness in him and she didn’t want him to get eaten up like his dad. Lloyd worked nights in a factory in New Brighton where he ran a machine that dipped shell casings in an acid concoction that gave him ferocious headaches. He accepted this as his due in life. He came back to his apartment at 5 a.m. and took a fistful of Advil and a sleeping pill and slept, and then got up and watched TV and ate cold cereal. He accepted any overtime hours they threw his way. He had no life.

So when Kyle told her, mouth full of egg and bacon, that his near-death experience on the highway had shown him the preciousness of life and he was dropping out of the U and reading Thoreau and searching for something meaningful to do with his life, she felt sick to her stomach. She drank her coffee, leaning on the counter, thinking,
Don’t scream. Don’t yell. Don’t wave your
arms
, looking at Mr. Anderson mowing his lawn across the alley, back and forth, back and forth. “Get to the point,” she said quietly, not yelling, her arms at rest.

He had totally abandoned the ashes-scattering idea. That just
didn’t seem practical. Too much overhead. He wanted to make a documentary about Larry the Flying Elvis. To just sit him down and get him to say what he’d said in the ER, especially the part about Old Man Bush. But he needed $50,000 and he thought maybe Debbie Detmer would like to invest in him.

“I always wanted to make movies,” he said, “and this is the perfect time. Like Grandma said, ‘if you don’t live life now, when are you going to live it?’ I want to get a digital camera, it’s great, it looks like film but you can shoot stuff for peanuts. I can do this. I really think I can. And if it doesn’t work out, fine, I’ll go back to the U next spring semester. But not in English, I’m done with that. Maybe history.”

“Maybe you could make a documentary about somebody doinking around and wasting his time,” she said. “How about a good masturbation movie? The world could use one of those, I’m sure. A camera and a tube of Jergen’s and you’re in business.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Larry is fantastic. He’s got a story to tell. He shot his best friend. He did time in prison. He had a visit from Elvis. And that Bush family is a bunch of thugs and gangsters. I’m going to ask Debbie Detmer to be the producer.”

“Oh for pity sakes—the woman puts Vap-O-Rub on cats!”

“I met her once, five years ago, when I was mowing her parents’ lawn, and we talked—she knows Tom Cruise. And a lot of others. She went out to California with nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and she made a big career out there—.”

“Sure. Running a scam on cat owners.”

“She can open doors. That’s how it’s done. You can beat your head against the wall for years, or somebody opens a door and suddenly somebody wants to make a movie with me. What’s wrong with that?”

About ten things, actually. Sucking up to the Detmers, for one, and
going off half-cocked on a harebrained scheme instead of buckling down and finishing college and getting a degree. Some people spend their lives chasing hare-brained schemes. Why be one of them?

“Why bolt from the barn when you are only two years away from finishing? One thing at a time. And we have a task at hand. Don’t forget. We’re scattering Grandma’s ashes on Saturday.
You
are scattering them. We are watching
you
scatter them. We can talk about it after that.”

“I’m there,” he said. “I just want to go talk to Debbie Detmer about making a movie. It’d be cool.” And he put his plate and silverware in the sink and went off to take a shower.

Be firm
, Barbara thought.
Don’t start making threats. Don’t weep
.
Be cool and firm
. She wanted to put up a marker:
DO NOT GO THIS WAY
. It leads to a life of bad bounces, perpetual tardiness, invincible ignorance. She filled up a bucket with soapy water and got the sponge mop and washed the kitchen floor, just to steady herself. The kid had canceled fall registration. A done deal, so don’t bother talking about that.
You
can’t argue with what’s done
. The goal was to get him back on track. He wants to change majors, quit English, take up History? Okay. History is fine. She’d never seen him crack a book of history, but never mind. She needed him to set a goal for himself and she would offer a clear reward for completion. She would sell Mother’s house and put her share of it in an account and the moment Kyle got his degree, the money would be his. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars. A young man could keep himself focused for two years, with a pot of thirty thousand dollars waiting for him. Couldn’t he?

“Oh, by the way, somebody named Sarah called for you. She asked you to call her back. She said it was important.” Kyle looked stricken. “Is she your girlfriend?”

“Was my girlfriend.”

“Well, she was very upset. And she asked how to get up here.”

Kyle shook his head. “No way,” he said.

“Well, there are roads, you know. You can buy maps at gas stations. You look up Lake Wobegon under L in the list of towns and it says C-7 and there we are.”

Mr. Hansen called as they were sitting down to supper. “I wanted to express my condolences,” he said.
Fine
, she thought.
Good.
He said he had a quilt that Evelyn had made forty years ago and it was as good as new.
Fine
, she thought.
Thank you very much. That’s
what happens if you don’t ever use a quilt: it stays good as new
.

And then he got around to the point. “I’m on the county board, as you’re probably aware.” She was, Mr. Hansen had been there forever. “And we heard tell that you were planning to bury your mother in the lake and I just wanted you to know that there are ordinances about that. So if that’s your plan, you’d do well to speak to one of us. I hope you understand.” She thanked him for his concern. “I don’t want to tell you what you can’t do, but on the other hand, we don’t want to set a precedent, if you know what I mean.”

He was one of the old guys who’d run the county for fifty years and whose passion was roads. They loved to drive around and inspect the roads and shoulders and ditches and bridges and then meet and discuss things and plan new projects. Roads were what government was all about in their book. They took a boyish fascination in the subject. Land use didn’t interest them, except they were against zoning, it was all about roads, grading roads and paving roads and repairing them in the spring, and God forbid you should spend money on the library or a public tennis court,
or turn the old firebarn, with the sandstone around the door and the inscription
A.D.
1892, into a museum—no need for that. No telling how much that could cost. You want money for that sort of thing, go have a bake sale. Roads on the other hand, you could never spend too much on. You need good roads.

She called him back after supper. “The lake was actually our second choice. What Mother wanted was to be buried in a pothole in County Road F. She told me that two years ago. We were driving home from Holdingford and talking about funerals and the car hit a pothole and she said, ‘Bury me there where I’d do some good.’” Mr. Hansen laughed uneasily and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to dig a hole eight feet deep in a county road. “Oh no,” Barbara said. “She’s been cremated. She’d fit in a pothole very nicely.” He still didn’t think it was a good idea. “It would cause controversy,” he said, “and we’ve got enough on our plates without people coming to complain about that.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to do it in the lake,” she said.

“You’ll need a permit first,” he said. “I hope we’re not talking about scattering ashes. I don’t think the fishermen would go for that.”

“We’re going to put her inside a bowling ball,” she said. “We’ll drop it in and it’ll go straight to the bottom and stay there. Promise.”

And the next day he brought over a county waste-disposal permit, signed and sealed. Permission granted to dispose of one (1) bowling ball in Lake Wobegon, containing ashes of decedent Evelyn Peterson and properly sealed in a watertight manner. He waived the permit fee of $35—“I always liked your mother,” he said. “She was an original, that’s for sure.” He asked if he could see the bowling ball. Barbara brought it out to him and he held it in his arms. “By God, you’ve got something here,” he said.

T
he wedding invitations were hand-delivered by Mr. Detmer’s nephew Chuck on Thursday morning. The bride had forgotten all about invitations. They had to be rushed through by Clint’s Print shop in St. Cloud, no time for raised lettering or creamy paper—it was a 3x5 brown card (brown was all they had in stock) with small lettering—you had to hold it up at a certain angle to make it out:

It was an odd invitation—what events? Athletic? Long speeches? The rejection of gifts—what sort of arrogant nonsense was that? And “declare their love?” Is this a wedding or some sort of performance? If you want to get married, and you don’t elope,
you’re supposed to send out nice invitations to people you expect to come and who should bring a nice gift. It isn’t a cattle auction. And “great good fortune” is a phrase one should never use. It is begging for trouble.

People felt bad for Mrs. Detmer that her only daughter hadn’t a clue how to put on a wedding and then word got around via the Chatterbox circuit that chefs in big white hats were flying in from San Francisco to whomp up a flaming gourmet dinner and that the
Agnes D
was involved and an Elvis impersonator and a nondenominational minister named Froggy who had played keyboard in a rock ‘n’ roll band. It was headline news along the lunch counter. They feasted on that all day. And reminisced about their own weddings and unreliable groomsmen who got into the schnapps and what weird pumpkin-colored dresses bridesmaids were required to wear long ago and the long-gone custom of tin cans tied to the bumper and cheese smeared on the door handles and bride-kidnapping and LeRoy the town constable suggested they kidnap Debbie and take her up north to come to her senses and Myrtle Krebsbach hollered, “And what would you do with her if the groom didn’t want to come get her?” Good question. Dorothy was one of the first to lay eyes on the groom. She described him as handsome in a bedraggled sort of way, unshaven, jeans and T-shirt and sneakers, and she took him for one of the summer people from across the lake, people with expensive boats they never use except to fish once a year with night crawlers flown in from Thailand and drink $100 bottles of scotch. Anyway, he’d come in and asked for cappuccino and she made him one from hot water and a packet of Folger’s powdered cappuccino and he dumped some sugar in and drank half and ate a yogurt. He smelled of cinnamon. He kept trying to dial somebody on a cell phone.

“We don’t have good coverage here,” she told him, “but if you go up the hill behind the school it helps.”

He kept dialing as if he fully expected to get lucky. She passed him a copy of the
Star Tribune
and he glanced at the stock listings. She said, “Congratulations on your wedding” and he gave her the strangest look. Like he was embarrassed that she knew. “You got yourself a real nice girl,” she said. “How did you meet?” He said they were neighbors in Santa Cruz, California. “Well, whose house are you going to live in?” she said, kidding him. But he wasn’t going to be kidded.

“We’re going to build a new one,” he said. “I think we are. It’s up to her. It’s her money.” He gave a wave of his hand, as if the whole business were up in the air at this point. And he plunked a ten on the counter and got up and walked away.

“You forgot your change,” she said.

“That’s for you,” he said and out the door he went. Dorothy gave the tip to Darlene who had the day off and who could use the money. “To make up for all you cheapskates,” she said.

“Pretty well stuck on himself, like so many these days” said Rollie, and heads nodded. Myrtle had spoken to Mrs. Detmer who said that Mr. Greenwood was a wonderful young man and doing very well in the aviation business.

“Well, she would have to say that at this point, wouldn’t she,” said LeRoy.

“I don’t know about the real nice girl part though,” said Gary. “You could get some argument on that.”

Dorothy said she believed in letting bygones be bygones and each to his own and live and let live. “There is too much backbiting and malicious gossip in a small town and that is the truth and everybody knows it,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt people to be a
little more forgiving and tolerant. That was how Evelyn was. She used to say, ‘There’s a lot of human nature in everybody.’”

At the mention of the deceased, the patrons got quiet for a minute or two. LeRoy said that Evelyn was the salt of the earth and a good soul and she’d done a lot of little unsung favors for kids who might’ve been headed down the wrong path and she set them right and not by preaching at them but by offering them a kind heart and a friendly ear. “Including me,” he said.

LeRoy was from Rapid City. He worked for the post office there. One day he saw a package in the mail that he thought contained money and he took it home in his lunch bucket. It wasn’t money, it was a heating pad. The postal inspectors arrived five minutes later and he got three years in prison for a heating pad. People had heard this story before—LeRoy told it once in Men’s Bible Study—and now he got choked up as he told it again. Evelyn heard about him and campaigned to get him out of prison and then got him to Lake Wobegon and wangled the constable job.

“She was a bulldog,” he said.

“Well, that was right,” said Gary. “And once she got rid of that idiot Jack she was able to live her own life and get a little happiness.”

“What do you mean, happiness?” said Dorothy.

“Well, I think you know what I mean,” he said.

“Raoul?” she said. He nodded.

“Who was he?” He shrugged. “Her boyfriend,” he said.

“How do you know?” Dorothy said and the moment she said it, she held up the palm of her hand. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know,” she said.

Thursday morning, Pastor Ingqvist called Barbara to say that some of Evelyn’s friends at church wanted to hold a little service
in her memory, nothing big, not a memorial service, just a few friends gathering to remember her, and of course nobody wanted to offend Barbara—it would be a small private thing, really—“It’s Florence, isn’t it,” said Barbara. He said that a number of people had suggested it. “It’s Florence. She just can’t stand not to have her way. I don’t care. They can do whatever they like. I just wish they’d remember her as she was, but I’m not going to be there, so I don’t care.”

So that afternoon, fifty members gathered in the basement around the piano and sang a few songs for their old pal—“When The Roll is Called Up Yonder” and “Let The Rest of the World Go By” and “I’ll Be Seeing You”—and Pastor Ingqvist, feeling a little sheepish, gave a talk about Evelyn and what a blessing she was, his eye on the stairs, waiting for Barbara to appear and read him the riot act. He was talking about what a blithe spirit Evelyn was and what joy she carried with her every day and more and more as she got older, when LaVonne appeared at the side door and motioned to him, and then motioned again with some urgency. “God bless her memory and all she meant to this church,” he said, and walked to the back of the room—“Somebody to see you,” said LaVonne and rolled her eyes to indicate
Nut Case
and right behind her was a man in black leather pants and an enormous black leather jacket with a dozen zippers and a lot of silver doodads. His hair was gray and he had fashioned a ponytail out of what remained of it and it hung down on his back. His face looked like an old pumpkin after a couple of hard frosts, and he took off his dark glasses and said, “This where the wedding is taking place?” His voice sounded like rough gravel in a cement mixer. “No,” said Pastor Ingqvist. “I think you want to talk to Debbie Detmer.”

“That’s the one. So she ain’t getting married in the church?” He squinted at Pastor Ingqvist who shook his head. He explained that Debbie was making her own wedding arrangements. The man handed him a business card:
AL GARBER, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, PREMIER ENTERTAINMENT. “YOU’VE GOT A PAL WHEN YOU CALL AL
.” He said, “If I can ever be of use, I’m in and out of this area all the time—” And then the piano struck up “Blessed Assurance” and he perked up his ears as the friends of Evelyn raised their poor quavery voices—
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, O what a foretaste
of glory divine, heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of his
spirit, washed in his blood
—and the man closed his eyes and rocked back and forth with the music, his ponytail swinging back and forth—and he looked at Pastor Ingqvist and said, “My mother—” and then he couldn’t speak.
Perfect submission, all is at rest, I
in my Savior am happy and blest. Watching and waiting, looking
above. Filled with his goodness, lost in his love
. Tears rolled down his old pumpkin face and he gave Pastor Ingqvist a terrible brown grin, his teeth like a rotted log, and he exhaled a blast of beer and whiskey and cigarettes, and he said, “Is it okay if I join you?”

“Of course,” said Pastor Ingqvist. Jesus didn’t say to check sinners for firearms, though for a moment he did flash on the shooting in Pennsylvania at the Amish school, a troubled loner with voices in his head steps into the midst of Christians and starts shouting and suddenly you’re in the news,
Six Slain In Minnesota
Church
—he followed Leather Man, thinking
Hold on just a moment.
Not so eager, sir
—all the ladies looking up as Leather Man walked down the aisle to the front, black leather swishing, zippers flashing, and he listened to the last chorus—
This is my story, this 
is my song. Praising my Savior all the day long
—and when the hymn ended, and it was all silent, he punched the air and said: “
Yeah
.”

The Lutherans looked at the man in black, gave him their standard welcoming look—here, evidently, was one of Evelyn’s more interesting friends, come to tell about the difference she made in his life. He walked out in front of the pews and stood and chuckled. “My heart is full,” he said. “Though I sure as hell am surprised.”

A few ladies laughed nervously and he bowed his head sheepishly and said he hadn’t set foot in a church in forty years, and he pulled out a filthy hanky and gave his nose a liquid honk and said that his mother used to sing that hymn and it tore him up to hear it again. He had drifted far from his Christian upbringing and was in the entertainment business now and living the road life estranged from his kids ever since his wife left him—and for good reasons, too—and he didn’t know if he’d ever see them again, but somehow the hymn gave him hope. Out of the blue, these old lines—
born of his Spirit, washed in his blood
—Oh yes, you wouldn’t know it to look at him but once he was just like you: followed the Christian path, and then got lured into show business and suddenly he was managing Muddy Waters, and then Joan Rivers, and Dinah Shore. The Beach Boys. Cliff Richards. Wonderful people and they paid him lavishly and he snorted it all up his nose. He was moving in the big leagues, Vegas, New York, Hollywood—he had Earl (Fatha) Hines, The McGuire Sisters, Joyce Brothers, The Mothers of Invention, the Boston Pops—then Alan Alda, Bob Barker, Chevy Chase, Doris Day, Gladys Knight, Dawn Upshaw, Sonny Rollins—Pastor Ingqvist was edging forward to thank the man for coming and nudge him
toward the door but he was on a roll—“I tasted of every evil drug and liquor, every pill, every hallucinogen known to
man
—you name it, I did it twice—I had girlfriends left and right and all the desires of the
flesh
—I was a slave to them. I thought I was
free
! But I was utterly
bound
by my own cravings for pleasure—I needed more and more—it wasn’t
enough
to have everything I wanted—I craved more and more—and I signed up The Eagles, the Orioles, the Ravens, Flanders and Swann, Ethan Hawke, Rita Dove, Russell Crowe, Steve Martin, Jay Leno, Marty Robbins, the Byrds, Dan Quayle—”

“I think it would be best if you left now,” the pastor said quietly, taking Leather Man’s great jacket by the elbow. The Lutherans perked up—their pastor was bouncing somebody out of church! He was telling a sinner to get the hell out! Bravo! He should’ve done this years ago, with some others. They could name names.

“What’s the matter? What did I say?”

“This is a memorial for somebody you didn’t know,” said Pastor Ingqvist. “We’re not interested in your life story. Not here. Thank you.” He took Leather Man’s arm in both hands and tried to steer him toward the door. A couple of men stood up, Clarence and Clint and Clint’s brother-in-law George, and Leather Man eyeballed them. “Where I come from, it’s not considered Christian to refuse a man who’s witnessing for the Lord, but maybe here it’s different. Okay. But don’t be surprised if Elvis pays a visit to you,” he said. And Leather Man struck a karate pose. He scowled with his pumpkin face and furrowed his big eyebrows and bared his brown teeth. “You are gonna be all shook up.” And he shook his cheeks
brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr
and let out a whoop and
shook off the pastor’s hands and stalked out the door. They heard the roar of a motorcycle and it revved up a few times and then it raced away. Myrtle Krebsbach jumped up and said, “Let’s not get down in the dumps! Let’s sing!” Old Lutheran men looked down at their shoes—they’d have preferred to bend over and spread their cheeks to singing with Myrtle—but she was already warbling “Let me call you Sweetheart.” “Louder!” she cried, her old eyes glittering.