by Ron Hansen
Smirking, Carlo folded the note and tacked it up again, thinking, Welcome to my spider’s web.
The trucker faced Carlo. “Which door, you say?”
Opal told him, “Drink your coffee, buster.”
Natalie entered the café just as Iona had. She seemed distraught. Opal and Carlo looked at one another. The trucker turned in his booth.
Opal said, “We must be having a full moon tonight.” And to Natalie she said, “How’s your day been?”
“Very nice. Good. Excellent.” She hesitated.
Carlo and Opal stared at her. He folded and crimped his origami. Opal continued to iron. Carlo got the fold he wanted, put his hand flat over it, and pounded on his hand with his fist.
Natalie skittishly jumped. She asked, “This afternoon, has anybody been in?”
The trucker said, “I’m here.”
Natalie considered him, puzzled but polite. She crossed to the bulletin board and pinned on a note. All perused her. Carlo raised his eyebrows at Opal, who shook her head from side to side. Natalie spun around, as if paranoid, and they all averted their attention. She speedily exited.
Carlo wended his way to the bulletin board and hawkishly peeked at Natalie’s note.
The trucker opined, “Time was when a lady had a right to her privacy. Not no more apparently.”
Carlo read, “My room. Number four. Twelve o’clock.”
“One of them group things,” the trucker said.
Opal asked, “Would that be A.M. or P.M. do you think?”
And then handsome Dick Tupper appeared through the front door, giving everyone a pained smile.
Without enthusiasm, Opal asked, “So, Dick. What brings you here?”
“Wanted to look at the bulletin board.”
“I gotta get me one of them things,” the trucker said.
Dick pulled a handwritten note off the board and looked around as those with him in the café stared. Carlo went back to his origami. Dick asked, “That a peacock?”
“No, it’s paper,” Carlo said. “Folded many times.”
“Well. Have a nice evening, you all.” Walking out the door he stopped to peruse the area at his feet. “Cereal on the floor here.”
Opal shot the trucker a look. Sheepishly he commenced returning the Captain Crunch, one-by-one, to their little box. When he completed his clean-up, he held up the box, but when he shifted his feet, they heard a small crackle.
And then Pierre walked into the café in his tuxedo. He seemed stunned to see everyone peering at him expectantly.
“So,” the trucker from Sidney said. “You got a note?”
25
At Owen Nelson’s bachelor party that night, Pierre was both horrified and fascinated as he looked at the foods: Cheez Whiz, Slim Jims, Hostess Snowballs, beef jerky, caramel popcorn, Chex party mix, Vienna sausages in cans, boxed Ritz crackers with peanut butter pre-applied, Suzie Qs, malted milk balls, mashed potatoes and gravy, French bread pizzas, and, just for Monsieur Smith, escargots. Still in his tuxedo, he sniffed each food item, including the Cheez Whiz can, while Owen, in party clothes, tapped a keg of beer. Hearing trucks drive up, he smiled expectantly and one man after another walked in: Carlo Bacon, Dick Tupper in his finest cattleman’s clothes, the Reverend Dante Picarazzi of Saint Bernard’s Church over there on Third Street, Orville Tetlow of the highway crew, the huge doughnut lover named Biggy, the trucker fond of Captain Crunch, Bert Slaughterbeck, the winner of the demolition derby, Chester Hartley, who won the Kiss-a-Pig Contest, other Main Street Café habitués, and, strangely, the guys in the scuba gear Pierre first saw on the See America bus. Each yelled as he entered, “Go Big Red!”
Orville said, “Wow! You really lay out some table, Owen. Looks like you got the whole shebang here.”
Admiring his food, Owen said, “Well, maybe half a she-bang.”
And Dick said, “Probably closer to a kit and kaboodle.”
At Mrs. Christiansen’s shower for Natalie, Chopin’s piano music was playing as a variety of Seldom’s older women clunked their aluminum walkers along the hallway floor and handed wrapped presents to Natalie. She was flabbergasted by their generosity and she smiled as they said, “Good evening!” “What a pretty dress!” “Oh, I love showers!” “What’s that I smell cooking?” and so on. Natalie, with each gift, said, “Merci.” She said, “It is very nice being queen of The Revels.”
Owen hunched forward in his chair and his audience hunched forward on the sofa to hear him over the noise. “A guy scores tickets to a Nebraska football game. Full house as usual, third largest city in the state and so on. All the fans wearing red. Chills run up and down the guy’s spine. Tears well up in his eyes. But I digress. The guy notices that amid the hordes there are thirteen empty seats, all in one spot, with one fella sitting alone, smack dab in the middle. Well, he was too curious to let it go so he goes down to that row of seats just before kickoff and he asks the fella why they’re empty. The fella gets this forlorn look and explains that he and his wife—”
“From?” Carlo asked.
“Elgin,” Owen said.
“Up there by Neligh,” said the trucker from Sidney.
Owen continued, “They’d been coming to Cornhusker games since the days of Bob Devaney and they got to know all the other season ticket holders around them, got to be good friends with them, visited each other even when it wasn’t the fall, and so on. But then his wife up and died. What a tragedy it was. Choking back a sob, the fella caressed the seat next to him and says, ‘She used to sit right here.’ ‘I’m terribly sorry to hear that,’ the stranger says. ‘But that doesn’t explain why your friends aren’t here.’ And he tells the guy, ‘Oh. They’re all at the funeral.’”
Women hovered around Natalie as she sat on the yellow sofa and tore the wrapping off a box. She lifted the lid on the box and exclaimed, “Hair care products!” She faced the beautician, Ursula, and smiled. “Are they from you?”
“Big surprise, huh?”
“I like them very much.”
“Well, at least they’re not strands of barbed wire pounded onto a board.”
Onetta scowled. “Hey, hey, hey.”
At Owen’s, a raucous crew was hooting and yowling, shoving each other in various directions, taking off feed company caps and sailing them across the room. Carlo walked in from the kitchen with a paper plate of food that he was examining suspiciously. He asked Owen, “Are these really escargots, or did you just put cat food on some crackers?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Owen said. “We did kind of run short there.”
Carlo went ahead and ate one, and then shrugged as if he still couldn’t tell.
Pierre was standing in front of the television, watching with interest Owen’s tape of The Wild Bunch, when a guy held out a Falstaff to him. “Beer?”
Pierre shook his head.
The guy said, “It’s not just a breakfast drink, you know.” And then he flopped onto the sofa and belched volcanically. Pierre sidled away and was given a feed cap by the Reverend, who immediately shouted “I’m gonna mingle with the shlemiels!” Someone else gave Pierre an empty Husker stein, and yet another else dropped a nudie Kewpie doll inside.
The highway snowplow driver named Orville walked by, wearing a T-shirt that read, “Instant Idiot—Just Add Alcohol.” Shaking a can of beer and snapping it open, he spritzed foam over Pierre’s front.
“Oh, hey!” Orville said. “Sorry about that.”
“What are formal clothes for?” Pierre said.
“No, no. I have to even things now.” And Orville poured his beer over his own head.
Upstairs in Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house, Opal walked down the hallway, lifting off the glued-on tin door numbers with her fingernails and stacking them in her palm. When all the doors were numberless, she turned and admired her work, saying aloud, “No monkey business on my watch!”
On the first floor, Mrs. Christiansen, Iona, and Natalie were hostessing amidst the chaos of partying women, c
arrying bowls of food out to the dining room table where a buffet was arranged.
Peering into the kitchen, Natalie spied a few of the younger women spiking the bowl of punch with Southern Comfort. She said nothing about it.
Ursula walked in from the foyer, carrying a formidable boom box. She asked, “Mrs. Christiansen, is it okay if we put on some of our music?”
Mrs. Christiansen answered, “Of course, dear; whatever you like.”
She disappeared, and then some shrieking hard metal music shook the walls. Natalie, Mrs. Christiansen, and Iona all looked up with pain.
Opal grimly sidestepped down the stairs because of her hip and walked with gravity and purpose to the dining room. After a second there was a scream and the song was silenced. Opal left the dining room, humming.
26
Pierre looked at the clock. Eleven P.M. “The hour, it is correct?” he asked.
Dick nodded and got up. “I’ll sure hate missing the end of this symposium, but I gotta be goin’.”
The four-hundred-pound photographer, Biggy, toddled up to him, grinning, four golfballs in his mouth.
Wild applause from the others as Carlo yelled, “Four! He got four in there! I thought we had him with three!” As the priest used a butter knife to pry the golf balls out, the trucker from Sidney collected gambling debts.
Owen said, “I can top that; I can top that, gentlemen.” With a flourish he led the way back into his bedroom where he put his hand on one of the large brass balls topping a post of the bedstead. “I can get my hooter around this.”
Orville said, “Oh! Can not!”
Owen said, “Can too. And have.”
Carlo told Pierre in an aside, “Gets mighty lonely out here on the prairie.”
With great strain Orville weighed the gamble and said, “Can not,” as if for the first time.
“Can too,” Owen said. “Period; full-stop; damn it.”
Pierre was dumbfounded as he pointed to the brass ball, which seemed as big as a grapefruit. “That?” And he pointed to Owen’s mouth. “In there?”
Owen said, “Absolutely.”
“Ce n’est pas possible.” (It isn’t possible.)
“If you don’t think it’s so poss-ee-blah, put some money on it.”
Looking in his wallet, Pierre found it empty.
“Was that a moth that flew out?” the Reverend asked.
Pierre told Owen, “I have no moneys.”
Owen smirked. “Oh, that’s a real shame.”
Trying it out, Pierre widened his mouth but couldn’t get close to wrapping it around the bedstead ball. He straightened. “If the mouth does what you are saying, I will put the great name of Smith et Fils on the Château du Husker.”
The whole party reverently hushed. The two kids with scuba tanks on walked in and the silence was torn by their raspy breathing through the regulators.
Wide-eyed, Owen considered him. “Don’t toy with me, Pete.”
“We will see I have risk-ed nothing.”
Owen said, “Clear back, boys; don’t want any fingers or ears lost here.”
Pierre watched skeptically as Owen prowled a little and then attacked the brass ball like a python, his mouth gaping hugely. Wagers of many kinds were made, and the party crowd was shouting their discouragement or support. Pierre peered closer, fingering his lower teeth in empathy as Owen’s lower jaw seemed to unhinge.
And then Owen did it. Hooked to the thing like a sea bass, he gestured wildly for Pierre to get closer and verify his feat. Pierre cautiously approached, took off his feed cap, and peered underneath, seeing Owen’s mouth pursed around the bedpost stem. Carlo got on his hands and knees below Owen and pounded the floor three times like a wrestling referee acknowledging a pin.
The party crowd erupted into a huge roar. Seismographs in Lincoln jiggled and geologists scratched their heads.
Wagers were being paid off as Pierre fell back against a wall and sank to the floor, where he sat in defeat, shaking his head.
Owen sagged, his knees on the mattress, as the Reverend hovered near him like a cut-man in a boxer’s corner. The Reverend turned. “Uh, guys? I think he’s stuck.” Then the Reverend withdrew a little and viewed it from another angle before kvetching his shoulders and saying, “But on him it looks good.”
Soon, Pierre, Orville, Dick, and others were hauling the headboard through the clutter of the gas station’s office while Owen dragged along behind them, grunting with each shift. Such waltzing was not easy. Angling the head-board around a corner, they laboriously moved into the garage. Owen was whimpering with a persistence that no one could countermand.
Carlo neared with a hacksaw. Owen’s eyes widened and the volume of his whimpers picked up. Carlo said, “There’s no other way,” and laid the blade against Owen’s neck as if he were about to saw.
Owen produced a high, keening noise.
Carlo smirked as he laid the hacksaw blade to the brass ball’s stem and separated Owen from the headboard.
But the ball was still widely swelling Owen’s mouth. The Reverend considered him and asked the others, “Ever see Dizzy Gillespie play the trumpet?”
Soon five of them were in Dick’s Ram pick-up truck and speeding along late-night roads to the hospital. Dick was driving. Orville rode shotgun. He’d called it. Carlo and Pierre were with Owen in the truck’s load bed, Owen still pursing the grapefruit of the brass ball inside his swollen mouth. Carlo put a beret on the winemaker’s head while over and over again Owen smugly made one humming noise, which may have been “I’m rich!”
(Biggy had stayed behind at the party’s food table in order to “clean up.”)
Natalie would be waiting for Dick in half an hour, so he was flooring his truck headlong and lickety-split over hill and dale, and tossing those in the load bed from side to side with his racetrack cornering.
Worriedly pounding the window, Carlo yelled, “Tupper!” But just as soon as he did so, red lights were flashing on them, and they heard the hoop hoop of a siren. Owen covered his eyes with his hands in a see-no-evil way, and skinny Carlo slumped down, finishing what he’d been about to say: “Take it easy.”
They stopped, and a highway patrolman walked hesitantly up to the side of the truck, a hand on his pistol. Silence happened while he perused the scene. An inebriated Pierre saluted from under his feed cap brim.
The highway patrolman asked, “What’s going on here?”
Orville began giggling. Then Carlo. And then Pierre joined in.
“I guess I missed the punch line,” the highway patrolman said, and shone his flashlight into the truck’s interior.
In a failing effort at explanation, Carlo pointed to Owen’s improbably bulging cheeks, but Owen’s forlorn visage was such that Carlo howled with laughter. Owen looked at him with disbelief.
The officer flashed his light on the faces in the load bed. “I’ll say it again,” he said. “What is going on here?”
They were still laughing. Carlo adjusted the beret on Owen’s head to better the effect, and Owen gave him a wild look, as if homicide was a possibility when all this was over. And that only heightened the hilarity.
“Okay. That’s it,” the highway patrolman said. “I’m arresting you all for disorderly conduct, including the guy with the trumpet piece in his mouth.”
27
Handel’s Water Music was playing delicately on Ursula’s boom box and Natalie and Iona were glancing furtively at their watches as Mrs. Christiansen sat between old Nell and Onetta on the sofa and ever so gently turned the pages of her 1950 wedding album. “And that’s Albert,” Marvyl said. “He was our best man.”
Old Nell asked, “Was he the one we used to call Bill?”
And Mrs. Christiansen said, “No. You’re thinking of William. William’s the one we called Bill.”
“And who was he in the wedding?”
Mrs. Christiansen patiently said, “The husband.”
Iona whispered to Natalie, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a poop, bu
t seeing you and . . . Well, he’s such a beautiful person, and it’s made me realize how stupid and cautious I’ve been since I got back to Seldom. Worrying about what people would say. If you have a dream, you oughta go for it. Even if it seems you’re reaching too high.”
Natalie seemed inclined to concur, but then Mrs. Christiansen interrupted to say, “Why don’t we abridge the evening with a game of charades.”
Dick checked his watch as he hurried out of the highway patrol headquarters ahead of Owen, Pierre, Carlo, Orville, and the Reverend Picarazzi, who’d bailed them out. Owen’s mouth had been freed of its burden by the Emergency Medical Team and his right arm was slung over his tuxedoed bon ami’s shoulders as he gleefully negotiated their deal.
With shame and worry, Pierre said, “But you are not understanding, Owen! ‘Smith et Fils’ is a great name, handed down for generations—my father, my big-father . . .”
“Okay, how about a compromise then? ‘Smith et Fils’ on the front and the Husker scores on the back.”
Thinking of his meeting with Iona, Pierre said, “I have not the time for this.”
Owen slapped his defeated back. “Wealth, Pierre! Champagne evenings! Caviar nights! Pay channels on your TV set!”
Owen, Orville, and Carlo got into the Reverend’s old Volkswagen van and, too late, Carlo noticed who was missing. “Where’s Dick and Pierre?” he shouted.
“In Dick’s truck,” Dante Picarazzi said. “What’s the panic?”
Carlo whined, “I need to be there for her.”
“Who?” Owen asked.
Carlo merely slumped down in his seat, thinking desperately of his Iona: goddess, nymph, perfect, divine, and rare.
The Reverend turned the key in the Volkswagen’s ignition, but it just made a tut-tutting sound. He tried again, but no change. “Owen, we have a problem.”
“And me without a crowbar,” Owen said.
The Reverend considered the crew of patches in his van and said, “I just can’t shake the feeling that Charles Darwin had no idea what he was talking about.”