“You the guy with that huge estate on the other side of Big Sapphire Lake?” I asked.
“My wife owns it. It’s about the only big place left in this god-forsaken crap heap. She sends her mother up here for the summer, and I get dragged up for too many weekends. They still live in the Thirties. They have to ‘summer.’ Hell, I’d summer too if it were Cape Cod or the Hamptons. But here!”
“Don’t come then.”
“Easy for you to say. Besides, I have my plans for this place. Just wait and see. You got here just in time. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll see that we’re kind of like partners.”
“Mr. Van Elkind,” Cynthia shouted as she bounced back into the cafe. “We didn’t know you were up for the weekend. Daddy would love to see you again. You and Mrs.Van Elkind should come over.” She turned to me. “They have the most beautiful place, and the roses in the yard are fantastic. They’re in full bloom right now. Mrs. Rabinowicz is a wonder with them, isn’t she, Mr. Van Elkind.”
“A wonder, yeah, that is exactly how I would describe my mother-in-law.”
“Hey gang, how about some Leinies?” shouted the headless loon as she waddled in. Claire had removed the mascot’s head, and her small-featured face encircled with gray hair beamed. “Did you see me lead the parade, Hank?”
“It’s Henry. Henry Van Elkind.”
“Oh, you’ll always be Hank to me. Hey, Bromley, Mr. Packer,” she shouted out the door, “come in and sit down. I’m going to buy you lunch at this fine new establishment. Wally, send over three fish fries to the corner table.”
“Fish fries,” said Henry Van Elkind with a raised eyebrow. “Maybe this place isn’t as Manhattan as it looks.”
“Then how about a toasted baguette with Wisconsin sharp cheddar and applewood smoked bacon?” I countered.
“Sounds good. I’ll give it a try.”
Cynthia gave me a wink and formed an A-OK sign with left hand. “The Loon Town Cafe is officially in business,” she said.
For some reason, I immediately wanted to be back in Manhattan.
.
chapter two
My new life began several months earlier with a wintry return to Thread. On the bobsledder’s chute of a road from Timberton, the high white banks of snow gleamed a bright yellow in the skittering catch of my rental car headlights. I had decided to return to Thread and open a cafe. Who cared if it was the middle of February? Time was wasting.
The car swerved on an unexpected patch of darkly gleaming ice. I turned back into the spin to control the car. I had been gone too long. Winter roads seemed a stranger.
The hilly road meandered from Timberton to Thread, crossing the continental divide that separates the Great Lakes basin from that of the Mississippi River valley. It all fell within the great snow belt that winds from near Syracuse across the continent to Duluth. Along this geographic arc, each city, each hamlet, on the south shore of a Great Lake shares heavy and frequent snows.
But in Thread the snow belt is at its worst. Wintry northern winds rush from Canada, fleetly skip across Lake Superior with warmer unfrozen waters beneath its ice. As the air warms, it holds more water according to the unbending laws of physics. It sucks moisture from the lake until the very wind becomes a water-soaked sponge ready to be squeezed dry at the slightest change in pressure.
The wet winds head inland across northern Wisconsin. The remnants of the old, worn-down Porcupine and Penokee Mountains slightly push the air level up, compressing the air sponge and cooling the winds. In the rush of condensing air, the water vapor quickly turns into snowflakes that drop. And drop.
After flights from New York to Milwaukee to Timberton, I listened as the guy at the rental car counter told me that the snow count had already raced past two-hundred-inches. Over sixteen feet of snow. And it was only February. Luckily undergrowth prevented drifting in the woods and kept the compressed snow to a man’s waist. Still, there were no sidewalks to be found on the scattered outskirts of Thread. The residents always gave up on shoveling by Thanksgiving.
I was home, but I didn’t know why. Perhaps the horror of that New York mugging had done more damage than I had thought. It was as though that taste of unconsciousness loosened some memory of smells that lingered in my mind at the slightest encouragement: Freshly fried fish. Evergreen boughs. Mixed with laughter and a little bit of cheap perfume.
It was that damned cafe in Thread. I couldn’t avoid thinking about it, and I needed an escape.
I would be sitting in Tom’s, a small, unpleasant coffee shop near Columbia University, having a quick coffee and powdered sugar donut for breakfast before heading to the office. The memory of the smell of fresh coffee mixed with falling snow would infect my mind.
I would sit down to a business lunch at the Russian Tea Room, ready to interview a celebrity, and instead of blintzes, caviar and sour cream, I would flash to the odor of fried fish.
Dinner with some challenging new companion would begin at an arty cafe near the theater district, in a room rich with wood and fine linens. The lady at the next table would laugh at her date’s joke, twist her head ever so slightly, and what would I smell? Not Chanel or Opium, but rather the fragrance of an over-used bottle of Evening In Paris.
And I’d be back in Thread again.
Why reminisce about such a small and inconsequential resort town? Didn’t I have everything I ever wanted? Just the week before three people in one night at one party—three people I had never met before in my life knew my name and had read my latest cover story in Inside Manhattan. My rent-controlled apartment was a deal. And I had friends, lots of friends. Maybe there was one friend gone missing for good, but wasn’t I churlish to want more?
I did, and I didn’t know why. But here I was, in the middle of February, in a two-year-old rented Ford with a bad heater, skidding down Highway 17, rushing into the city limits of Thread.
Technically speaking, Thread doesn’t have city limits. In political terms, Thread doesn’t exist. Some map companies don’t even bother to plot its location on their drawings. Legally, Thread is nothing It’s just part of a township called Sisu, a subdivision within Penokee County found in northern Wisconsin. So, it’s not a city, not a village, not a county. It just is.
Locals call Bromley the mayor of Thread, but he is really the chairman of Sisu township. Whatever, it was Bromley that I was on my way to see.
My fixation was simple. I would open a cafe. All my adult life, I enjoyed cooking and eating. My friends considered me quite a fine chef. Lording over my own small empire was appealing. Thread deserved a place with food worth eating—in my kind of cafe, a place that celebrated the fresh ingredients of Wisconsin, a location where friends and neighbors could gather, a menu which took the best of the German and northern European heritage that was Wisconsin and combined it with contemporary tastes.
Admittedly I had never worked in a restaurant except as a waiter. That didn’t seem a significant hurdle. Not knowing the first thing about cooking in quantity, or managing a business was less important than that I would be my own boss. Free of the rat race and memories of Manhattan best forgotten.
So here I was racing down a snow channel to meet a man I once vowed never to see again. “Wally, my boy,” Bromley boomed as I entered the hotel lobby where he dwelled. “So it’s back to your roots. Never really expected to see you enter this town again, now that your parents are moved away. Big city lights got you down?”
Five minutes and I was already annoyed. “I’m thinking of relocating. Buying a business here. Returning home.”
“Home. Now that’s an odd word coming out of your mouth in regards to Thread. Always thought you hated this darn place. Be that as it may. Let’s get to the business at hand. What kind of establishment you thinking of buying? Got the money to do anything with? I hear you’ve always been a bit spend happy back in the Big Apple.”
That was the problem with Thread. Everyone always seemed to know everything about other people’s lives. Or so the
y thought. I had actually been quite thrifty.
A massive Cadillac, an amber pink 1960 model with fins just beginning to recede back toward the trunk, pulled up in front of the hotel. It was loaded with power gadgets for everything: windows, locks, mirrors, seats. A twenty-five-year-old miracle of engineering. Out stepped the real power in town, Big John’s son Red Trueheart. Red was fond of vintage cars. He had seventeen of them.
Red stood outside the hotel and motioned me to come out. He was a tall man, a broad man, with unnaturally vibrant red hair. But it was Red’s genuine color.
“A god damn surprise when Bromley gave me a call. You know I never expected to see you back in town,” he said.
“So I’ve heard. I’m getting bit tired of everyone telling me how I hated this town,” I replied.
“You know you detested the place,” Red laughed good-naturedly. “But times change. People too, I guess. Not that I’ve ever really seen that. To me, people pretty much stay the same. Always ready to screw you. I try to give everyone a fair deal, but it’s tough. No one’s honest anymore. Always looking out for themselves. But if you’re a businessman, you gotta expect it. Goes with the trail. Know what I mean?
“Of course, you know what I mean. You’re a smart one if you’re thinking of buying into Thread. Things are ready to boom. This town’s a gold mine, just waiting to be discovered.” He patted his car affectionately. I noticed ice fishing gear in the back seat.
Bromley perked up at Red’s words. “What do you mean by that? What kind of a boom?”
Red waved him off, “Never you mind. Such a god damn nosy man, our mayor is. Will get him into trouble one of these days.” Red looked me in the eye. “So you’re looking to buy something, eh, Wally? You’ve come to the right place. If it’s for sale in Thread, I’m the man who can sell it. Bromley was right if he told you that.”
Red’s praise of Bromley didn’t mean much. Even the smallest school kid in Thread would have told you that Red Trueheart was the real man to see. But everything he had came from his father, Big John Trueheart.
During the Depression, Big John ran the only store in Thread, a combination grocery, dry goods and hardware store that caused most everyone in town to fall into Big John’s debt just to scrape by. Big John was always most accommodating, willing to write up their orders and put it on account. “Just pay when you can,” was his motto. Eventually, as the bad years rolled along, the day when you could pay became the day when you had to pay. And if the out-of-work lumberjacks and mine diggers couldn’t come up with the cash, then Big John was always willing to take out the mortgage on their house, or accept the back forty acres on their useless farms. By the times the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which prompted a new rush of interest locally for iron and copper, Big John owned half the township that surrounded Thread.
Even that day in the thirties when Capone stopped at the Thread Tavern and Big John served him his beer, a priest might have debated which of the two had more reason to confess? Was it the notorious gangster known throughout the country as an outright robber? Or was it the unknown northwoods entrepreneur who slowly bilked his day-to-day customers of their most important possessions?
That was fifty years ago. Now Big John was retired and growing senile, confined to his oversized house on the lake. Red tried to keep his spirit alive in the various businesses he ran: the Piggly Wiggly grocery store, the hardware store, the Quaking Birch Lodge on Big Sapphire Lake and the dozens of rental houses in which half the townsfolk lived. But he didn’t really have the old timer’s cutthroat spirit.
Red dragged me into the long-boarded-up Thread Tavern. “Always a great bar,” he said. “You know Al Capone once drank a beer here.”
“So I’ve been told.” I was going to play it cool and keep my answers short. This was a professional negotiation.
“Lots of history in these old walls. Dad owned this first you know, even before the general store. They used to play a lot of serious poker in here, back in the days when the lumber mills were going strong. Not like up in Timberton where there were eighty-five bars on Silver Street with eighty of them cat houses. You should’ve seen some of those old places: Swede House, Ole’s Place, Wolf Saloon. Only the old Penokee House is left. That was the best place. Or, so Dad said. Oh, it was wild enough. Dad won the store in a poker game at the Penokee House bar. They dealt him a royal flush. You ever see something like that? They accused him of cheating. But it was an honest game.
“The guy who lost never really missed it. The family still vacations over on Big Sapphire. The girl married some Boston snot named Van Elkind. City sophisticate, know what I mean. My wife thinks they’re hot shit. Me, not so much.
“So what do you think of this space?” Now he was quiet, chewing on a toothpick.
What could I say? The building didn’t look like much. Some dismal winter light was sneaking through the boards that covered the front windows. Had anyone been in this place in the last decade? Cobwebs and dust everywhere. But beneath the dirt, there were lines, nice lines. The interior was spacious with large windows. It could be bright and inviting. The bar itself, which ran the entire back length of the room, was a beautiful piece of carpentry from the early Thirties. You could see the influence of art deco movies in a rural, handcrafted way.
“There’s an apartment upstairs where you could live. Not much, but you can see the lakes. So, let me show you the kitchen,” Red said. “My father never served anything but fish fries here. Neither did I. But the first owners used it as a full cafe.”
“That was nearly sixty years ago,” I pointed out.
Red gave me a look that implied I was an idiot. “Everything’s still here. What more could you want?”
Maybe clean floors, tables with all of their legs, a refrigerator that would pass a health department inspection, a dishwasher of any type, and, of course, customers. A few pieces of china might come in handy as well. But I didn’t say anything. I was playing it cool.
Red just chewed on that toothpick. “A perfect kitchen. Just as we left it when we closed down the place ten years ago. That was right before your pa and ma moved out of Thread. Well, what do you say? You want it?”
The kitchen was large, with a huge picture window at the rear that overlooked a small yard separating the rear of the restaurant from the alley. I could turn that space into more parking, I thought, then stopped myself. I wasn’t in Manhattan any more. There was plenty of parking on the town square. Instead, this could be my herb and vegetable garden. And in the winter, I could build a snowman every other day while wondering where all the tourists were. I laughed lightly to myself. Both Bromley and Red exchanged looks.
I walked to the back of the kitchen and surveyed my potential domain. The snow clouds had fled south and the flakes had stopped—at least for a while. The sky was a bright and clear blue. Each snow crystal on the ground shimmered with its own diamond brightness. There was barely a track on the snow, just the tiniest of swishes from a field mouse that might have raced across the snow earlier, keeping its eye out for a swirling hawk above. I wanted this place.
“Lot of space to keep your trash back there,” noted Red helpfully.
There were no trees in the little yard. The other stores on this side of the Square were less deep than the cafe, so no structure blocked the sun. Plenty of light for a garden. I could picture it now: the steady progression through the spring, summer and fall. First, there would be the tiniest of sprouts from the green onions, the radishes and the leaf lettuce. They would be small, ever so green, flirting with the first signs of spring.
As the days grew longer, and the dusky evenings brought forth long shadows to snake across the yard and through the alley, the tendrils of the green beans and peas would shoot up. The frothy tops of carrots, the broader leaves of red beets, the first wandering vines of cucumbers from their planted hill would sway in the light winds of the evening.
If I planned now, in a few years, that same midsummer light would shine upon the last ferny spikes
of asparagus gone to seed, its lace-like filigree tipped with red berries. And off to the side could be the strong red shoots of rhubarb with its broad green-red leaves that were so poisonous.
Then as the summer days began to shorten, the rain clouds would come more frequently in late summer thunderstorms, and the sweet corn would grow, if one were lucky, knee high by the fourth of July. The first potato plants could be pulled and the ground searched for the tiny red nuggets of new potatoes that were best when drowned in sweet creamery butter. The green orbs of heirloom tomatoes would swell each day, gaining a deeper and deeper blush, waiting for the fresh basil in the herb garden to catch up.
Eventually the first hints of winter chill would force their way back into the daylight. The silk on the corn, now as high as me, would be golden. The tomato plants, while withering, would spill red fruit across the ground. The cabbages would grow large. The fight would be on to keep the broccoli from being eaten by the worms. Snaking wildly among the potatoes and corn patches would be golden pumpkins and squash.
A season of eating. All in one back yard. Not just in my mind, but real and touchable, doable. I wanted it.
Bromley was pontificating. “Just put one of those big hinged garbage containers back there, and you’d only have to contract for Jack Manny’s trash truck to come by once a week. Once every ten days at first. You’re not going to be that busy. Course it ain’t really Manny’s truck anymore. Well, I guess technically it never was, seeing as how he gave it to the city and all that . . .”
“Red,” I said, interrupting Bromley. “I’ll take the place. Let’s talk money.”
Red smiled. He named his price. It was ten percent more than what Bromley had told me the place was going for. I could do better than this. We hemmed and we hawed. I knew exactly how much I was willing to pay for the place.
So Red wanted ten percent more. What’s ten percent when you have dreams? I bought it anyway, and wondered how I would ever find enough money from my limited savings to make the changes that were so essential.
Tales From The Loon Town Cafe Page 3