Pontoon (4 page)

T
hey were married for forty-four years. Of course, it didn’t escape notice among the vigilant ladies of the Bon Marche Beauty Salon when Jack and Evelyn went their separate ways or that after he died she planted him between his mother and his grandparents under a solo gravestone, a skinny slab of polished granite with
JOHN L
.
PETERSON
1921–1986 carved in it. All around the Lake Wobegon cemetery, you saw double stones, the husband down below, waiting, his wife’s name beside his, her death date blank, but she had no intention of landing next to him. Nor would she inscribe the stone “Beloved Husband and Father” or “Asleep in Jesus” or “
Takk for Alt
” (Thanks for Everything). She sat in church for his funeral, listening to him eulogized and hymns sung over him about eternal rest, like layers of whipped cream on a burnt sausage, and put him in the ground and went home and had a cup of coffee.

She and Jack split up in 1981 when he fell in love with a teen porn star named Candy Disch whom he saw in
Teacher’s Pet
in a private booth at the adult-video shop in the Mall of Minnesota. It was his first visit there. A lifelong urge since adolescence, suddenly
realized at age 60. When Candy strolled on screen in her teeny skirt and striped stockings to beg Mr. Baggins to please please give her a passing grade in algebra and he scowled over his wire-rim glasses and she unbuttoned her blouse and let her perky breasts poke free, Jack melted like butter on a hot waffle. She had a playful way about her that he was missing in his life. She was the girl he should have known when he was 17, come around forty-three years late. He wrote away to Candy c/o Violet Video on San Fernando Boulevard, Los Angeles, and Candy sent him a picture postcard of herself and a handwritten note (“Jack, I’m so glad you liked the movie, it really means a lot, please call me”) and he got her on the phone and talked to her for $2.29 a minute. She thrilled him. He knew the meter was running but he had a big crush, which he felt was reciprocated, though she was vague about when they might meet, but he collected photos of the little honey bowling, shooting pool and sunbathing. Jack’s brother Pete and his sister LaVonne couldn’t comprehend this. How could a World War II vet, a member of the Lutheran church, the father of three, be consumed by passion for a frizzy-haired blonde in a red velvet jumpsuit unzipped to the navel who pursed her pouty lips and whispered, “Oh baby, give it to me, give it to me”? They refused to speak to him or look at him again. They forbade their families to speak to him.

Evelyn felt bad at first. She wept and took his hand and laid it on her breast—“Why would you be fascinated by pictures when you could have a real woman?” she cried. He turned away, flushed, embarrassed.

She had no wish to humiliate him. There was not much cruelty in her. As for fascination, who can explain it? Some men take
up golf, some chase girls, some drink Hi-Lex. So she helped Jack ease into a new life as a bachelor.

“He’s always felt hemmed in. He married too young. We all did, back then. He hated the Navy and he should’ve had a few years of freedom but he had to come back here and earn a living and raise kids. All he wants is to do things his own way in his own time. So why shouldn’t he live as he pleases? He’s sixty, for heaven’s sake,” said Evelyn.

She had been paying the Visa bill including large payments to Violet Adult Services for Candy’s phone time and finally she told Jack that they had to settle up. She borrowed the money to buy out his share of the house and he bought a fishing shack on Lake Winnesissebigosh, ten miles north, and installed a propane heater, stuffed the cracks with strips of pink foam covered with silver duct tape. He had a fridge full of beer and plenty of videotapes. He hauled a blue velour Barcalounger out there and a water bed. It was all friendly. She didn’t call him names or yell or cry. She simply trundled him out to his fishing shack and kissed him goodbye. She told Florence about an article in
Lutheran Digest
about menopausal males having hormonal surges that cause phantom romances. A great big husky old farmer from Sioux Falls sold off his hogs and flew to Malibu and stood along the coastal highway with a sign saying, “Angel, I love you,” referring to Angel Marquez, star of
Bolero
. It was a hormonal surge. They shot him up with estrogen and he quieted right down. She had mentioned this to Jack and he hit the ceiling. So he would have to go. His choice.

“I got tired of being supervised by my wife,” he explained to his friends at the Sidetrack Tap. “Somebody always telling you to
take your feet off the coffee table. It’s a lousy way to live. Our ancestors in Norway knew they had a bad deal. The land was worthless for farming and the old man treated them like slaves and the pastor was yelling and shaking his fist every Sunday, and they put two and two together and got on the boat and came to America. And when they got to Minnesota, they saw they had exchanged one bad deal for another, and they didn’t agonize over it, they headed for California to look for gold, but the gold was gone, so they sold shovels to people who were looking for gold, and I got about twenty relatives out there who are multimillionaires and if I wanted to I could call ’em up and ask ’em for money and they’d give it to me and you know something, I ain’t going to do it, because that ain’t my way. I don’t need their help or yours or anybody’s and I don’t need you or anybody telling me what to do either.”

So he sat in his shack, in a welter of junk and wrappers, his TV set shining on him, commercials in which powerful pickup trucks ran up steep mountain slopes and skinny models slunk through clouds of fog and golden beer foamed over life’s big frosty glass. He lay like a pig in a pen, and dozed and awoke and peed in the sink and lay down and watched a little more. He drank all the whiskey he wanted whenever he wanted and didn’t care who knew it. He called it his antifreeze. He snored to his heart’s content, got up in the middle of the night to fry up a steak and have a slug of whiskey, slept until noon, it was all good.

Barbara told him once that a quart of whiskey a day was too much and he said, “Lot of small-minded people in this town, just envious of anyone who knows how to have a good time. Don’t be one of them. And I’m beyond a quart anyway. Quart and a half.” He sighed a long sigh. His skin was gray, mottled, as if he were
rotting from the inside out and about to burst. His breath would’ve knocked a buzzard off a garbage truck. “Your mother never begrudged me a good time, I’ll say that for her.” And then he started to weep. “Do you think she’ll ever take me back?” he said.

No, that was never an option. Mother was living her own life, traveling off to California, Florida, St. Louis….

Barbara visited Daddy every month or so. He liked being denned up at the lake. He went shambling through the woods, collecting blueberries and chokecherries, wild plums, even sarsaparilla berries, dandelion greens, nuts, wild mushrooms, ransacking the nearby dump for usables. He told Barbara that he found roasted chipmunks quite delectable. He grew a beard. He became
prophetic. He was libertarian by nature and he predicted the imminent crash of the government and an era of anarchy during which people would flock to the woods and have to learn to survive, as he had. He was quite proud of living alone, though Mother still did his laundry and ironed his shirts nicely and they spent Thanksgivings and Christmases together and when he landed in jail for drunk driving, she bailed him out. He was a mess but he was family nonetheless. She took hot meals out to him, tried to interest him in AA, and offered up his name in prayer on Sunday mornings. Once for her birthday he bought her a mink coat from a man named Shorty who was running a Fire Sale off a flatbed truck at an exit on the Interstate. A silver mink with scorch marks on the back and it reeked of smoke. And it was July. Mother returned the coat and said, “You’re going to need this out at the cabin.”

He said, “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

Of course people gossiped about their separation but Mother rose above it. She was a duchess. She was circumspect and unburdened herself to nobody but her childhood friend Gladys and sometimes her daughter and she did her weeping in private. In public she offered a resolute smile and plenty of small talk. She avoided scrutiny by attaching herself firmly to Lake Wobegon Lutheran church. She took over the Altar Guild after the sainted Mrs. Dalbo succumbed to arthritis, arranged the flowers every Sunday, arranged lunches for funerals and senior suppers, stood ready to step in and manage anything that needed managing. She was responsible for bringing in Ernie and Irma Lundeen and their Performing Gospel Birds, a troupe of parakeets and doves and canaries, a macaw, an owl, and a crow, who enacted scenes from
Scripture in their bird-sized costumes and picked out hymns on xylophones and wound up the show with the Blessing of the Birds—the congregation, heads bowed, heard the beating of wings as the Gospel Birds dropped mustard seeds on each person, seeds grown in the Holy Land. Some people thought the show was trashy and beneath them, but after the Birds left, people talked about it for weeks. A remarkable evening. She took on the wedding of a lapsed Catholic about to ship out to Vietnam and in a hurry to marry his girlfriend, an unbeliever, and Evelyn got them hitched and served champagne on the church lawn and tossed rice at them and paid for the motel. She chaperoned Luther Leaguers on convention trips, camped with her Girl Scouts, taught Sunday school, sponsored a Vietnamese family of four, baked for bake sales, edited the Ladies Circle cookbook, sewed for the Christmas pageant, and did the Reformation Sunday scholarship fundraising dinner fifteen years in a row. And then she buried Jack.

Jack died of a heart attack on a bitter January afternoon in front of the Sidetrack Tap. He was a little drunk and arguing with Mr. Hoppe about the authenticity of the Kensington Runestone. Hoppe insisted the stone was inscribed by Viking explorers in the fourteenth century and left in a meadow in western Minnesota, and Jack said the stone was a well-known fake, carved by a farmer with time on his hands. Anybody with an IQ of a potted plant would know that. They’d had this argument for thirty-seven years and the venom had not dissipated, but only distilled. The argument was the vehicle for Jack’s anger about old age, bad luck, communism, marriage, Lutherans, the fluoridation of water. It put him in a fury, plus which he’d been thrown out of the bar that morning for yelling at someone he thought was Norbert and who
was not. Wally gave him the heave-ho and a few minutes later Barbara saw him fumbling with his keys, trying to open the trunk of a car that wasn’t his, and she offered to buy him lunch. Jack was gaunt, unshaven, his hair matted, his face loose, skin sagging, his teeth punky, his glasses missing a lens. He’d been in the leg trap a long time. They traipsed into the Chatterbox Café and sat at the counter and she ordered chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for each of them. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.