Tales From The Loon Town Cafe

by Dennis Frahmann

  A month later I stood in the wreckage of the Thread tavern and began to take inventory of what I owned. The front room had space to seat forty-five easily, without any crowding. I wanted people to be comfortable, with room to spread out, able to get out of their seats to walk over to some other table to say hello. About ten or eleven tables seating four each could fit in the space and still provide that greeting room.

  If I kept the bar as a bar I could seat another ten people there. But I didn’t think too many people would come into my Loon Town Cafe just to have a drink. Maybe I should think of it more as a lunch counter—at least during the day, where individuals could have a quick meal. That meant maybe fifty, fifty-five people at the most, in a single seating.

  Now if I were really lucky, I could get through a single seating at breakfast, at maybe five dollars a person. That would be two hundred fifty a day. Plus another seating at lunch at maybe another five dollars a head. Another two fifty. Plus two seatings at dinner at ten dollars a person. That would soar the total up by a thousand. So my total possible take was fifteen hundred a day, times six days, since I planned to be closed on Mondays. This allowed for a potential gross of nine thousand a week. With fifty weeks in the year, giving myself a two-week sanity sabbatical each year to a big city, I could potentially gross $450,000 a year.

  “Dreaming?” asked a thin man, maybe a few years younger than me, as he walked through the opened door. From his dark, strong features, I suspected he was a member of the Lattigo tribe, whose reservation was about ten miles east of town.

  “Just calculating in my head what I might make on this place, once I get it fixed up.” I extended my hand “My name’s Walter Pearson.”

  “Mine’s Chip,” he said, ignoring my outstretched hand. He proceeded to walk into the center of the dusty room giving it a slow and complete, three-hundred-and-sixty degree inspection. “Chip Frozen Bear. Get a good year, you’ll clear twenty thousand, thirty thousand tops,” he drawled.

  “You think I could make that a month?” I asked amazed that he was so close in his calculations to mine.

  Chip snorted. “I was talking about a year. If you’re lucky. Remember you’re in Thread, not the Upper East Side.”

  “It’s not the Couer de Lattigeaux reservation either,” I retorted. “A lot of city folk drive through this town and need a good place to eat. If I give it to them, I’ll keep the place busy. I’m going to be very unhappy if I don’t gross at least twenty or thirty thousand a month.”

  “Sorry to hear that you’ll be so unhappy,” he drawled.

  I was pissed. “What is this? You waltz into my place, before it’s even opened, happy as hell to proceed to tell me my business? What do you know about running a restaurant?” What an arrogant ass.

  “Big white man speaks,” he mocked. “And by the way, you don’t need to call it the Couer de Lattigeaux reservation. We call it the Lattigo. Keep it simple. Just because the French trappers tried to change our names three hundred years ago doesn’t mean that we still have to put up with your cultural imperialism.

  “And I’ll give you some free advice. Get off your high horse and ask a few questions before jumping to conclusions. I know who you are, but it’s obvious that you don’t know who I am. Just like it’s clear to me you know nothing about running a restaurant.

  “You want the proof. Here goes. You were a writer in Manhattan. Your business experience is zip. I, on the other hand, have an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. I guess that gives us something in common, eh? We’re both ex-New Yorkers.

  “But, you see, while you were figuring out clever little stories to write about the latest way for the trendy to spend their money, I was back here with my people helping them get what belonged to them. I’m the business manager for the Lattigo nation. I guess I’m the person who keeps people like you from stomping all over us.”

  Who was stomping whom, I wondered? His impassioned fury gave Chip a Hollywood air of fascination. This Native American had almost black eyes, dark straight hair clipped close to his head. Just under six feet, thin and sinewy, he had a look that seemed almost French. There were those who believed the seventeenth-century French voyageurs did much more than portage as they made their way from the Great Lakes down the Lattigeaux river, before crossing over to the St. Croix. But as a child in Thread, I had long ago learned you never suggested to a Lattigo that he might carry European blood.

  “There’s a fundamental problem with your whole operation,“ Chip pointed out. “This place was a tavern. That means alcohol, and alcohol means high profits. But you’re planning to open it as a restaurant, and worse than that, a fancy restaurant. That translates to labor, lots of labor. Extra time in the kitchen. Food that has to be prepared in advance, food that if it doesn’t get ordered, ends up being thrown away. Waiters, busboys, lots of cash. And where does the profit come in a restaurant like that? In alcohol, of course. It’s like popcorn in a movie theater. You can’t make money on just the tickets. But you don’t have a liquor license, and you can’t get one. Ipso facto, you can’t make the big money. The county, no, let’s be honest, Big John Trueheart, doesn’t want anyone to sell liquor—except for his grocery store and his taverns. So if you apply for a liquor license, you’re going to get the same answer our reservation has gotten for the past ten years: this county has all the liquor licenses it’s allowed. Go away. Case dismissed.

  “Without liquor, you won’t get the customers and you won’t get the profits. You want to see the financial models. I have a PC back on the reservation. Yeah, we have computers. I’d be happy to run a few ‘what-if’s.”

  God, this guy was as annoying as he was handsome. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?” I replied. “You think I’d buy this place without making sure I could sell liquor. It’s one of the first things I asked Red.” Not quite true. It was one of the first things he told me after I signed the offer to buy.

  Chip laughed. “It doesn’t matter what Red says. His father’s the person who really owns it all. He’ll never let you sell alcohol.”

  Now I was the one to smirk. “You better go back for another MBA. I already have a liquor license. It came with the place.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Chip.

  I went behind the bar and pulled out a framed piece of paper. “Look at this,” I said. “This place has had a liquor license since the day it opened in 1922. It continued to have it every day it sat closed for the past ten years. And it has one now, a license that’s been signed over to me as the new owner of Thread Tavern, soon to be known as the Loon Town Cafe.”

  Chip’s movie-good-looks transformed. “What a lying son of a bitch! Three years. Three years, my people have been trying to open a bar in Lattigo so we wouldn’t have to throw money away in Thread. For three years, we’ve been told it’s impossible. And all that while, an unused license has just been sitting there, attached to a boarded up bar. Big John just didn’t want us to have it, even though we would have paid him a good profit for it. If the Truehearts think I’m gong to go into business with them after this, they’re in for a surprise. Let me get ahold of that fucking fat mayor.” The last sentence was barely audible. Chip Frozen Bear walked out

  Minutes later, Bromley Bastique waddled into the café. “What were you thinking about? Talking to Chip Frozen Bear that way? Are you trying to start another god darn Indian War?” Bromley was on the warpath himself. “The man’s gone berserk. I had to hustle Claire Moon out of my hotel before he tried to scalp her. He thinks this whole town is against him and his tribe. He’s beyond reason.”

  “It strikes me,” I said, trying to keep a calm voice, “that he has a reason to be angry. It sounds as though this town’s leaders have been lying to him for the past several years.”

  “Of course we have, but it’s been for their own best good. Everyone knows that liquor and Indians just don’t go together. We don’t want a bunch of god darn drunken braves going on a rampage through town. Th
at’d be lunacy.

  “Ever since that Chip Frozen Bear got back from his Ivy League school, it’s been nothing but trouble. Lawsuits left and right. Claiming the Lattigo have the right to fish any time they want, without regard to fishing season. They’ll destroy the fishing for the resorts. I hear they even want to open gambling casinos on the reservations. Claiming segregation just because we have two separate schools systems between Lattigo and Thread. We’re two separate towns. Why shouldn’t we have separate school systems?

  “Of course, Red ‘s got no one to blame but himself and that pretty wife of his, Barbara. She’s always putting on airs. She came back from Chicago ten years ago just ready to do good. She had this idea that Red and Big John should sponsor a scholarship so some poor little Indian kid could get off the reservation and go to a real school.

  “I don’t know how she managed to talk the two of them into it, but they finally agreed to underwrite one kid’s college education. Little Chief Chip won the competition. I’m sure Red and Big John had in their minds that the winner would go to a state school, like down to Madison. Nothing wrong with Madison, other than that it’s a cesspool of drug-smoking hippies. But given that, everyone knows it’s still a great school. People go there from all over the world. And if that Indian kid didn’t want to go to a public school, well there’s always Northland College in Ashland. Good little private school. Couldn’t complain about that.

  “But not our Chip Frozen Bear. He had to go East, all the way to Columbia University. Who would have thought he’d get in? And who would have thought the Truehearts would actually pony up and cover the tuition for a school that expensive. Of course, they only did it for the first year. Not even Red’s that dumb. But by then Chip had figured out other scholarship programs. He stayed in New York six years, got two degrees. Now he’s been back home three years causing problems.

  “You’d think if a person would finally get a fancy ticket out of a place like Lattigo, they’d cash it in and take the first train available” Bromley stopped his rampage to look at me, as though wondering what I had done with my ticket.

  I had to agree with Bromley that I would have expected anyone who squeezed their way out of the Lattigo reservation would fight to stay out. To reach Lattigo, you take County Road Z off Highway 17. The trek starts out pleasant enough, a narrow, curving macadam road beneath a canopy of beeches. But this picturesque road follows some ancient animal trail that wended its way between slight hills and marshy bogs, always skirting both the inclines and the depressions. During the logging days eighty years ago, this path had been bolstered in its marshier spots by laying rows of tree trunks side to side creating a corduroy road. In the years that followed, blacktop had simply been laid on top of this for a sturdier road. But as the winter freezes and spring thaws came and went, the old, half-petrified logs heave up, creating new bumps and dips that sorely test any car’s shock absorbers.

  Bad as the road to Lattigo is, it is in far better shape than Lattigo itself. Northern Wisconsin can be a beautiful spot. Hardwood forests march endlessly into the horizon, broken now and again by shimmering lakes of clear water refreshed by fast moving streams. The land, flattened by eons of ice age glaciers, has no sharp hills and valleys, but neither is it bored by the monotonous sameness of a Nebraskan plain. Far from any cities, the skies are completely free of smog; yet they are never pure blue, since moisture is always blowing in from Lake Superior, often resulting in giant cumulus clouds that create a skyscape far more romantic than the ground below. On other days, wispy cirrus clouds float by in an ever-changing menagerie of shapes.

  The forests are still lively with deer, raccoons, squirrels, beaver and even the occasional bear and wild lynx. The lakes are well stocked with fighting fish like the giant muskellunge and fine-tasting walleye and northern pike, as well as giant schools of perch and bluegills and sunfish.

  Then there are the occasional ecosystems best loved by biologists who know how to appreciate the hidden beauties of stunted flora. Bogs and marshes, whose rising and falling waters kill off new stands of pine trees to leave yellowing stretches of dead tree trunks.

  It was in such a bleak depression of land that the U.S. Government in the late nineteenth century assigned the Lattigo to do as best as they might. The Coeur de Lattigeaux River slows down tremendously as it goes through the Lattigo reservation, turning temporarily into a broad meandering. The slow moving wall of water gets lost in marshes and swamps before refinding strength as it makes a last rush through the Lattigeaux Gorge just before falling into Lake Superior.

  The ancestral Lattigo birch wigwams centuries earlier may have been healthier shelters than the shacks and shanties that now lined the dirt streets of Lattigo. Built on a slight swell in the swamplands, modern day Lattigo claimed running water, electricity and a sewer system; yet few of the homes actually had these features. The two hundred or so homes had been built in the Fifties with the help of the Federal government. And time had not been kind.

  Even though Lattigo was only a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Thread, I can’t remember ever traveling to Lattigo when I was in high school. The Thread Screaming Loons never played the Lattigo team. No Thread boy ever dated a Lattigo girl, or vice versa. It was as though we were two camps separated by swamps as impenetrable as the briars that surround fairy tale princesses.

  But Chip Frozen Bear was slashing through those thickets. Maybe, I should try to get his help in figuring out just how successful the Loon Town Cafe might be.

  Bromley was still in my empty cafe, and it was as though he read my mind. “That Chip is not to be trusted,” he mused.

  Red walked in, an aura of anger bristling around him. “Wally,” he shouted. “I fucking went out of my way to help you in every stinking way I can. And you repay me by stabbing me in the back. You got to learn something, kid. Business is business. You don’t share details.

  “My wife Barbara is going to be heartbroken when she hears how you have broken our trust and confidence in you. That damned Indian kid. If it wasn’t for me, he’d still be there on that reservation, with his god damn pretty boy looks, dancing a rain dance for whatever fucking lost-in-the-woods tourists makes the wrong turn down that swamp road. He wouldn’t be causing shit for every resort owner in Thread and the whole of Northern Wisconsin for that matter. He’s an instigator. That’s what he is. A fucking instigator.

  “And now we get another hometown boy back from New York City ready to bite the hand that’s feeds him. What is it with kids today?” Red’s face was matching his name by now.

  “I just want to run a cafe,” I said. “Do we really need to play cowboys and Indians?”

  A rather buxom woman was standing inside the door listening to our conversation. I had no idea know how long she had been lurking there. She wore an amused smile on her face. “Red,” she said, “when are you going to learn that you can’t control the lives of every single person in this county? If Chip wants to strut about as king of the Indian hill, why don’t you just let him? What damage can he do?

  “Hi,” she continued, holding out her hand and walking rapidly toward me. “I’m Thelma Schmidt, and I’m the most bored woman in Thread. So when I heard you had come home to reopen this old dump, I just thought to myself, how could I help. And it was clear to me. You’re going to need a cook. I could be that cook. And maybe life would be a little bit more interesting. For both of us.” And she laughed, a hearty laugh, that began deep in her stomach and rushed out to fill the room, echoing from side to side before it died down in a series of small chuckles.

  I remembered that laugh from my high school days. When the Thread Masquers managed to pull together a few would-be thespians and a few dollars to pay the royalties on some silly high school comedy from French’s, they were always guaranteed at least one resounding laugh at every joke, no matter how old. And that laugh would be like a spark among dried-out leaves in the fall, jumping from leaf to twig to branch, resulting in a bonfire of guffaws that threatened to engulf the
Thread High School auditorium in totally unwarranted hilarity. With that laugh, you were always guaranteed a hit. All thanks to Thelma.

  “And why should I hire you?” I asked smiling. “What are your credentials?”

  “Well Wally, I’m the person who taught your Ma to make her famous red velvet cake. Put that on your menu and you’re sure to draw in old Red here. What do you say Red?” and she was off on another laugh.

  “The truth is, Wally, that I’ve been cooking nearly fifty years, ever since I was eight, and if people eat it in Wisconsin, I know how to make it. Maybe I’ve never been a cook in a restaurant, but when I was younger and my Fred was still alive, I used to cook Sunday dinner for his entire family. There’d be thirty if there’d be one person at those dinners. And you know how those German dinners are. It’s not enough to have just one meat. You’d have to have roast beef, ham and a turkey. Three kinds of salads. Mashed potatoes and dressing. Vegetables, relish tray. Two or three pies. And if it wasn’t all on the table at the same time, all piping hot, then you just weren’t a good housewife.

  “If I was one thing, I was a good housewife to my Fred. And I figure if I could keep all those Bohunk relatives of mine happy every Sunday, then how much more difficult could it be to keep a bunch of tourists, used to simple city food. Give them the real stuff, plentiful and hot, made with good meat and fresh produce. They’d have to be happy.

  “Besides that, Wally, I’m just plain bored since Fred died. I need something different. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Thelma, you’re hired,” I said.

  One decision down. Maybe Thelma’s laughter and the need to still make another ten thousand decisions would keep me from dwelling on the memories that drove me home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My life as a restaurateur took a turn on its eleventh day. Years later, after the earthquake and with my advantage of hindsight, I could easily identify that the moment Danny Lahti walked into my cafe looking for a job was an instant that changed everything. So easy from the vantage point of time to recognize how that troubled teenage boy contained more than a little of myself, framed a person who wasn’t willing to stare back at himself in the mirror and accept life for what it was – in short, a cypher only he could solve.