by Ron Hansen
Waiting tranquilly on a hillside of wildflowers, a red suitcase on rollers beside her, Natalie tilted her head back against a cattle fence so her face could catch the noontime sun as Pierre scrupulously examined the sleeves and cuffs of his Italian suit and cursed each time he picked a sticker or cocklebur from it. Wide Hereford cows were six feet away, their ears twitching tenacious flies, their mouths moving sideways as they chewed, their soft brown eyes watching him without curiosity. “Look at my clothings,” he said. “We are supposed to be on the happy vacation, but instead one is being addicted.”
“Afflicted.”
“Oui.”
“And last August?”
Pierre loomed gigantically over her but there was a littleness to him as he evaluated whether this were a trick question. Without certainty he answered, “Cap d’Antibes.”
“In Cap d’Antibes you stared at everyone’s breasts but mine.”
“Yours always had books over them.”
“In Saint Laurent you took those long walks. Alone.”
“How many times can you watch Shame?”
“Shane,” Natalie corrected.
“Cowboys,” he said, and made a gun of his hand. “Bang bang.”
“In Strasbourg . . .,” she said.
“. . . you are in the library all the times.”
She looked at him with sarcasm. “Perhaps I was researching the problem of male lust.”
Pierre was stumped. “What is this word loost?”
“Plein de désir sexuel.”
“Well, that is the difference between us. You research; I . . . fais des expériences?”
“Experiment.”
“C’est juste. I experiment.”
“And what does one do when the experiment is over?”
Each considered the other for a long time. In a city far away someone dropped a pin.
“Today is Wednesday,” Natalie said.
“Mercredi,” Pierre insisted.
“We have until Sunday to decide if we are to finally marry.”
“Make it Saturday!”
Natalie got up and confidently walked down the hillside with her red wheeled suitcase in tow.
And he yelled after her, “Noon!”
She did not go toward the still-disabled See America bus but toward the shade trees, houses, and water tower of a Nebraska farm town half a mile away.
Pierre forlornly looked at the loitering passengers and then at his fiancée, whose suitcase swerved on uneven ground and fell over. She righted it. Pierre shouted, “Super! C’est ce qu’on appelle une aventure?” (Great! Is this what you call an adventure?)
She didn’t turn.
He shouted, “On va rater le bus!” (We’re going to miss the bus!)
She called back, “On prendra le prochain!” (We’ll catch the next one!)
Walking after her with his valise, Pierre yelled, “C’est encore plus bête que de venir ici!” (That is even more stupid than coming here in the first place!)
6
Seldom, Nebraska. Population 395.
Natalie hauled her suitcase inside the Main Street Café in one of those Bus Stop entrances and she was surprised to notice a sudden silence settle on the diners there, to see farmers in their feed caps turn in their pink vinyl booths and stare, and truckers rotate on their pink and chrome counter stools, as if this were a What the hell? moment combined with a Lo and behold.
She was pretty enough that they’d have taken a gander anyway, but there was that hint of the exotic, too, like she hailed from east of Omaha and would brook no questioning about it. Owen Nelson was there, though, and Dick Tupper, naturally, and locals knew they’d appoint themselves as a welcoming party, full of interrogatories and a healthy concern for the lost lady’s welfare.
Natalie felt the café’s interest and with some embarrassment hauled her suitcase toward a booth where she oh so primly sat.
And then Pierre entered and the stares flew to him, the force of them tilting him a little off-balance. No one failed to notice he was holding a tasseled shoe in his hand. They did not consider it much of a weapon.
Carlo Bacon, the cook, called out from the kitchen, “Since when did Seldom become a travel destination?”
Pierre sought out Natalie and sat down across from her in the booth, setting his fancy and ruined Ferragamo loafer between them on the Formica. With fierce accusation, he said in English, “I have torned my favorite shoe.”
She ignored him.
Looking around the café above the hats of the still watching, he saw on the walls of whitewashed oak stuffed pheasants, an antlered rabbit, and old hanging heads of deer and moose that looked distraught and humorless. And next to the kitchen door was a locked gun case. His fears were confirmed. “Regarde,” he whispered.
She did. She was horrified.
The Wednesday installment of The Young and the Restless went to commercial, giving Iona Christiansen an opportunity to get two iced waters and two menus. She carried them to the booth. She was a beauty, a sultry blonde of twenty-three with a disappointed pout to her mouth and those overpowering attributes of the flesh that made men feel helpless, lovelorn, and pitifully adolescent. Pierre smiled oafishly at the waitress, just like so many before him, but Iona was immune to such appraisals and merely read the shoemaker’s name inside the loafer.
Pierre presumed there was a fixed price three-course meal, and said in his unpracticed English, “It is that one would like the prix fixe.”
“The prefix?” Iona asked. “Oh, it’s four oh two.”
Owen helpfully supplied the data that the area code changed to 308 a little farther west.
Pierre slightly turned in Owen’s direction and nodded his thanks.
“You want coffee?” Iona asked.
Pierre agreeably smiled. Iona glanced at Natalie, who put up two fingers. Pierre put up two fingers, too.
“Two then,” Iona said and strolled back to the coffeemaker.
Pierre hunkered forward and said in a hushed voice, “On va prendre racine ici.” (We’ll be stranded here.)
Natalie shrugged.
And in the booth north of them, Owen Nelson asked Dick Tupper, “Was that French?”
Dick lifted halfway from his seat, imitated a good stretch and yawn as he turned just so, and interestedly stared at them fuming silently in their booth. Returning to his seat, he told Owen, “Looks like they’re having a tiff.”
Owen tilted out of the booth to watch Iona deliver the coffee, carefully placing the saucers and cups on each side of the tasseled loafer. Sitting up again, he said, “I say the shoe’s involved.” A paper napkin was farmerishly stuffed under his green workshirt collar, and he patted his mouth with it. “You don’t know ’em, do ya?”
“Oh now, don’t go introducing yourself again.”
Owen got up. “That’s how I met Slim Pickens that one time.”
Owen Nelson was in his thirties and a salt-of-the-earth guy whose height and girth were sufficient to make him a third-string offensive tackle for the famous University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, though he never lorded that fact over the locals but was a friend to all and sundry. Owen inherited his dearly departed father’s gas station kitty-corner from the café, and townsfolk all thought the world of him, but he was frankly not much of a mechanic, so those who’d reached the age of reason generally just rented his hoist and tools.
Owen was friendliest with Dick Tupper, a purveyor of cattle whose ranch was three miles north of town and who was just lately wealthy, having sold off four hundred acres of sorghum and soybeans to an agriculture conglomerate. Dick was a fine-looking, hard-bodied, mustached man just past fifty, and the sole misery of his life was that a decade ago his perpetually unpleasant wife ran off to Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains with a wildlife manager named Calvin who wanted to be a fishing guide. Thenceforth Dick lived like a widower, still feeling married and faithful and carrying on like a chilly Lord Byron in spite of the divorce she’d gotten. But his fiftieth birthday was a jolt
to his system, and since then he’d been meeting flirtatious and lonesome husband-seekers in Internet chat groups and driving as far as Lincoln to share rack of lamb and I-and-Thou talk in the halo of glimmering candles. With that history as his guide, and in just a short glimpse, Dick was able to postulate that Natalie was unhappy with her hulking companion, and he too got up to introduce himself.
Pierre gloomily registered the two men’s genial approach and urgently told Natalie, “Ne fais pas de mouvements brusques.” (Don’t make any sudden moves.)
Owen stood aside to free his workshirt of the stained paper napkin and shyly told Dick, “You go.”
“Excuse me,” Dick told them. “We don’t mean to intrude upon your precious time here together, but we haven’t seen you in these parts and I was wondering if you had some problem on the road or you had people here or just where it is you hail from.”
Pierre and Natalie stared at him in silence. Eight, maybe nine seconds passed. The Young and the Restless was the only sound. And then Owen shouted, “Wants to know who you are!”
Dick nodded toward the gas station owner and said, “That’s Owen.” Extending his hand to Natalie, he said, “My name’s Dick Tupper.”
His hand was held out there for a moment before Natalie cautiously took it. “Natalie Clairvaux,” she said.
Dick turned to Il Penseroso for a handshake. “Pleased to meetcha.”
Pierre said with sarcasm, “Hi.”
“Didn’t catch your name.”
Pierre smiled at Dick and said, “Je vous déteste tous.” (I hate you all.)
Owen asked, “Was that French you were speaking?”
Pierre, suffering, held his face in his hands. “Mon Dieu.”
To Owen’s question, Natalie nodded uncertainly, as if they’d committed a crime.
Dick smiled at Natalie and said, “Pretty language.” And to Owen he said, “She could be a sister to that French actress we like.”
“Which?”
“Pretty brunette, bee-stung lips. She was in that sand dune motion picture. And Camille Claudel.”
“Oh yeah,” Owen said. “Isabelle Adjani.”
Dick smiled at Natalie. “Are you kin?”
She shook her head.
Owen invited himself to join the travelers by swiveling a chair around and straddling it at their booth. “Okay,” he told Dick. “We got an intricate situation here. They could be penniless and adrift and far from any kind of help, or they could be viticulturalists just traipsing hither and yon, scouring the vineyards of our fair Nebraska homeland.”
They all gave Owen the look he so often deserved, bless his heart.
Dick helped out by saying, “My friend wants to know if either of you are employed in the wine trade.”
Natalie answered, “Yes. He is.”
Owen lifted his eyes heavenward. “Owe ya one, Big Husker.”
“Well, this is real seldom for us here,” Dick said.
Everyone in the café groaned.
He ignored them. “Just how long did you plan to stay?”
Pierre sourly told him, “We have miss-ed our bus.”
“Owen, when’s the Greyhound due next?”
With a grin, he answered, “Way afterwards.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We are on the same page, my friend.”
Worriedly, Pierre whispered to Natalie, “Qu’est ce qui se passe?” (What’s happening?)
She shrugged.
Watching intently from the kitchen, Carlo Bacon—whose real name was Carl—thought it high time to insert himself into the plot, and he walked out into the dining room, wiping his hands on the “Kiss the Cook” apron he wore in hopes that Iona would one day take the hint. He’d been a high school classmate of the waitress, and he hankered for her in the worst way, but he was skinny as a clarinet and toad-eyed and shrewd, with a Dick Tracy mustache and dyed black hair that he slicked back with Wildroot, and whenever he was around Iona he was so jittery that people said he made coffee nervous.
“So they’re waylaid here?” he asked Owen, and Owen gave him a coded look. Carlo nodded, tilted toward Iona to confide, “I’ll go get your Grandma,” and then hurried outside to the three-story rooming house next door. But when he was hurtling up the front porch steps, he saw the paisley See America bus warily rolling into Seldom, all its windows filled with faces hunting the lost Europeans.
Wildly waving his arms, he jumped to the lawn and sprinted toward the tour bus, halting just in front of it. The brakes whined and a side door wheezed open as he went around to it. “Are you looking for a French couple?” Carlo asked.
With irritation the bus driver turned to his paying customers. “Were they French?”
Opinions were multiple.
“Had accents,” the bus driver told him.
“Well, they’ve decided to stay in our Arcadian greenery for a while. The Revels and all. So: mystery solved. Au revoir.”
Eyeing him with suspicion, the bus driver asked, “Do they know there’s no refund?”
“Oh, they’re real cavalier about that.”
A funk settled on the See America man as he shifted into reverse. “But they were just about to meet Little Miss Middle-of-Nowhere!”
Carlo ticked his head. “That’s why it was such a thorny decision.”
In the Main Street Café, Pierre heard a familiar noise of grinding gears and squeezed his face against the window to get a view south as he asked, “Est-ce que c’était notre auto-car?” (Was that our bus?)
“Vous le détestiez.” (You hated it.)
“Mais c’était avant que je ne sois venu ici.” (But that was before I came here.)
Dick heard their fractious tones and asked, “Excuse my being so personal, but you two married?”
And Pierre said, too fiercely, “Ha!”
Natalie scorched him with her eyes. “Ha?”
“Oui,” he said. “C’est très drôle.” (Yes. It’s very funny.)
She inched further away.
Carlo Bacon strolled back in and gave Owen a wink. “She’s coming.”
Owen confided to Pierre, “You’ll be staying with me.”
Pierre just stared at him.
With jealousy, Dick said, “I was the one first introduced myself.”
“And why would he want to hole up on a cattle ranch?” Owen asked. “Anyone could tell by just looking that these are cosmopolitan people.”
“So-called urbanites,” said Iona.
Elderly, tottery, but grandly elegant Mrs. Marvyl Christiansen entered the café. She was seventy-five and a widow and a former high school instructor in French language and culture to a majority in the café. She was still teachy, and Owen and Dick alertly jumped up like this was homeroom and a certain protocol was expected. Owen called, “We got company from France, Marvyl!”
She smiled and seated herself in a queenly way before softly gesturing that the men could sit again. And she said in a good accent and a higher voice than normal, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle. Bonjour, Monsieur.”
Natalie nodded. “Bonjour.”
“Comment allez-vous?”
Iona informed the others, “She’s asking them how they are.”
Natalie told Mrs. Christiansen, “Bien.”
Iona translated. “She said she’s just fine.” Iona observed Pierre observing her and failed to blush with embarrassment.
Mrs. Christiansen asked, “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
And Iona said, “She might could be asking them who they are.”
Natalie gave their names and Pierre scowled as if she were committing treachery.
Mrs. Christiansen asked, “Shall I tell them about The Revels?”
“That would be the primary option,” Dick said.
Mrs. Christiansen seemed to pause to construct sentences worthy of the Académie Française, but she was confused as to vocabulary and fell back onto phrases in her high school textbooks. She asked if that was Natalie’s spoon. She said her fat
her had a splendid tailor. She said poodles were good swimmers, and there was a danger of asphyxiation in a room full of shoes.
Natalie smiled pleasantly, but Pierre leaned toward her and whispered, “Ils sont tous fous.” (They’re all crazy.)
Closely watching the two, Dick had a hunch that his former teacher’s language skills had slackened some, and Mrs. Christiansen was lost in the Ardennes forest and seeking a post office on a Sunday when Dick interrupted to say, “I hate to interrupt, ma’am, but she does speak American English.”
Natalie nodded as she touched Mrs. Christiansen’s wrist. “But really, you were doing quite well.”
“Merci,” Mrs. Christiansen said. She gathered her thoughts into English and then instructed both visitors on their local custom, which was that each summer in Seldom there was a three-day festival in honor of its founder, a nineteenth-century trapper from Bordeaux whose name was Bernard LeBoeuf.
Carlo said, “It’s why Nebraska used to be called The Beef State.”
“Oh, foo,” Iona said. “Where’d you get that?”
“Common knowledge,” Carlo said. And then he got defensive and sullen for a while.
Mrs. Christiansen went on to say it was their habit to invite a visiting couple who strayed into town to be king and queen of The Revels.
Iona said of The Revels, “We have lots of parties. And fun stuff at the fairgrounds.”
Dick said, “Often the royalty are carefree and footloose retirees, such as Archie and Lynette Doolittle of Detroit.”
Owen grinned in reminiscence. “Claimed they were spending their children’s inheritance. Wore those ‘I’m With Stupid’ shirts. Real comical people.”
Mrs. Christiansen continued chidingly, “But they could not speak a lick of French.”
“Oh no,” Owen said, tee-heeing. “You put a shotgun to Archie’s head and he could not get out a merde.”
“Owen,” Mrs. Christiansen said, and when he faced her, she put three fingers to his lips. He hushed.
“Seldom’s founder was French,” she went on, “so it seems perfectly just and charming that you two should be our royalty.”