Tales From The Loon Town Cafe

by Dennis Frahmann

  But isn’t it always easy to look back and reflect on what you should have seen then? The trick is to see it in the moment and not be distracted by the warped reflections of the funhouse mirrors of life. To be fair, my life in Thread had more than its share of carnival moments and crazy midway barkers, twisting my mind with stories that made little sense, but were much beloved by those who told them.

  Danny Lahti walked in, looking both young and far too old. He asked a simple question. “Are you Mr. Pearson?” The boy looked to me, and there was something dangerously appealing in his voice that gave him an added dimension, as though the usual three were simply not enough to deal with all of the unhappiness that seemed trapped within him.

  It was too beautiful a July morning for dealing with that. Outside on the town square, a dozen cars were parked. Small groups of tourists were already strolling the square, stopping at the Little Papoose to pick up a few postcards, checking out the abandoned train station, peering at the peeling posters for Cabaret below the marquee of the Thread Theater.

  In the distance, revving motors sounded from the big powerboats that were already skimming the top of Big Sapphire Lake to tug along struggling young water skiers. The breeze was slight, still cool from the morning mists. A somnambulant air hung over the people making their morning rounds. Even here inside my Cafe, each sipper of their coffee cups seemed contented, satisfied with life, on vacation from trouble and fear.

  Danny’s mere presence made a lie of it all.

  But I get ahead of myself. A few days before I hired Danny, I had hired Cynthia as a waitress. It was at a point when I was still optimistic, believing in my calculations and not considering that the spreadsheets once proffered by Chip Frozen Bear might prove a more accurate predictor of the year ahead. I was feeling good. So far I had managed to avert tragedy. Loon Fest had come and gone. Business was so-so and yet two weeks in business it was already clear that Thelma and I weren’t enough to keep up with the flow. I occasionally had Thelma’s cousin Gerta in to help as needed, but I felt success would require more.

  Already the cafe had its traditions. Each morning, my faithful trio appeared: Bromley would waddle in; Claire would soon follow with some tale of visitors in the early morning; and then Mr. Packer, always wise, always dignified, even with his long beard and missing arm.

  Each had settled into his or her peculiar routine. Bromley would start with a black coffee, then decide he needed cream, and maybe a little sugar, maybe a lot of sugar. Then a caramel roll, better make that two. Might as well have a rasher of bacon. As long as he was making a special day of it, it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple of eggs, scrambled loose. Maybe put a little grated Colby cheese in those eggs. And, oh, by the way, could he have some butter to go with his caramel rolls? No, he always added, change that to margarine since he had to watch his health.

  Claire, on the other hand, liked a cup of tea with a little bit of lemon on the side, a toasted English muffin, with wild strawberry jam. Each morning I would tell her that I didn’t have wild strawberry jam and if I did, I would probably have to charge her $2 a serving for it. In that case, she would pleasantly reply, “Plain strawberry jam would be fine.” It was just that she liked to stay close to the wild, natural things that grew in the area. Her little men that only she could see had taught her that.

  Claire and Bromley would already be on their second cups when Mr. Packer would stroll in.

  “What’s new with the world?” Bromley would always shout out.

  “Great things,” Mr. Packer would reply, as he would ask for a cup of coffee, black. “I love coffee,” he would often say. Once he told me, “Learned to adore it in Paris, in a little cafe on the Left Bank after the war, World War I. There was a lady I went to see, a wonderful lady, a true lady. I wanted to befriend her, but I never really succeeded. Her children learned to love me, but she never did. So all I am left with is my coffee and memories. There are so many things I like to save, but those memories of her . . . they are one thing I would like to lose. Sometimes when I drink my coffee, I hope the steam might rise up through my mouth and my nose, seep into my brain to loosen those memories and let them float away. Never works. Still, I can try each day.”

  Then there was Henry van Elkind. More days than not, he would stroll in for lunch. There was a middle-age dissoluteness to his blonde, lankish look. His orders always conveyed a condescending sneer. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t eat lunch at that big house of his on the lake. It was as though he preferred to sit at my table, staring out my windows, surveying some kingdom that wasn’t even his. This sunny morning, my breakfast three were sitting at the bar, which was serving its planned double duty as a breakfast counter. Cynthia Trueheart walked in.

  “Mr. Pearson, I want a job,’ she said. She was so much more direct than Danny would be a few days later. But it was always easy for people to misjudge Cynthia. Her bubbly enthusiasm and her easy willingness to like almost anybody surrounded a sturdier spirit that often knew exactly what it wanted.

  “Isn’t that sweet?” said Bromley. “Now why would a beautiful young lady like you, with a father who will give you anything, want to work at this place? Don’t get me wrong, Wally. It’s a fine place. No doubt about that. Wouldn’t want to disparage it. But no high school sweetheart should spend her last summer before senior year catering to god darn old fools like us.” Bromley looked at me. “Sometimes, I think this girl is simple.”

  “You’re not old fools,” Cynthia said without a single sign that she found Bromley’s comment offensive. “I like being around you.”

  “And why is that?” asked Mr. Packer.

  Cynthia seemed stumped for a moment. Her reflective silence stretched on and on. Claire squirmed uneasily on her stool, looking at Mr. Packer. She opened her mouth about to say something. But some look was exchanged, and she remained quiet.

  “Because you like me, and I like being liked. I want to be around people who like me. Working here would be fun,” she ended.

  “You sound like Jack Manny, needing attention,” Bromley snorted.

  “That’s a mean thing to say,” she said, this time with hurt in her voice.

  “Who’s Jack Manny,” I asked.

  “You remember, Wally,” said Claire. “He was here when you were a kid. Always hanging around, wanting to be noticed. Finally got it, I guess. Like a bear gets noticed when it steps in a trap.” And thus begun one of those stories that seemed to keep me from recognizing what was going on around me.

  Mr. Packer smiled indulgently. “Jack Manny. Now there was an odd duck,” he noted. “He never quite felt at ease. Wherever he went, whomever he was with, he always lurked with that disquieting sense of not belonging. I guess that’s why he used the fifty grand his mother left him to buy Thread a new trash truck.”

  Bromley broke in, “That god darn truck was the start of his troubles. If he hadn’t bought the town a truck it didn’t need, Amanda would have paid him no attention. And his life would have been fine.”

  “But Amanda did pay him attention,” Mr. Packer replied. “Jack was like a hummingbird, always flying around trying to feed on the attention anyone would pay him. And he put such energy into it that he always needed more. Of course, that’s why he fell so for Amanda.”

  This story was starting to sound familiar. My mother had recounted it more than once on my visits home during my college days. Amanda came to Thread shortly after old lady Manny died, and just after Jack had donated the dump truck to the town. Jack was living in his mother’s house. Quite a nice place. Old Mrs. Manny knew how to save her pennies. Amanda was quick to tally Jack’s merits: that meticulously maintained five-bedroom house on the lake, the expensive donation of the new dump truck as well as the new basketball team uniforms. What could she do but fall in love? Mom always said Amanda trapped Jack into a quick marriage, but it seemed to me more that Jack’s foolish generosity had ensnared Amanda.

  Mr. Packer noted, “A lot of people find Amanda larger than life. When she
wants to be, she’s a vivacious one. She has a talent for dressing and makeup. In those days it made her look special, not cheap. So it didn’t take much before Jack had proposed and married. Jack fluttered through town in those months with the happiest countenance he ever had. He never asked a soul for their opinion on how he looked or what they thought of him.”

  Claire added, “But remember when Amanda’s kids appeared? And then she discovered Jack was broke, after he spent every last dime on the wedding and honeymoon. She was as shocked as a loose wire in the rain by those kids,” murmured Claire.

  “They were a surprise to all of us,” agreed Mr. Packer. “Amanda didn’t look a day over twenty-five, so no one expected her to have two attractive teenage kids, practically identical twins, except for their being a boy and a girl.”

  “When I first met them,” Claire broke in, “I thought they were both girls and that one just liked to wears jeans and t-shirts. If it hadn’t been for what happened later, I would still say they were two peas from the pod.”

  Now I remembered why I left Thread. Everyone knew everything about everyone. And they told the same stories over and over. Over the years, I had participated in enough phone calls with my mother and read enough of her many letters to know all the details that would follow: how Amanda finagled Jack to mortgage his house to fund her redecorating business; how everyone thought she slept with the banker to get the loan; how the townspeople always thought those two kids were a little strange, a little too close. This town was like a tar patch, trapping you for all eternity. And then making you hear about it, over and over. I was so glad my parents had left town, or everyone would know the full story of what had happened to me in Manhattan.

  “They’ve always seemed such nice kids,” Mr. Packer was on a roll. “Polite, hardworking, good students. Back then, Johnny had a lot of promise as a basketball player, and Francine was even more beautiful than her mother. She never would have needed a bit of makeup to look wonderful. Shame that only Amanda stayed in town.

  “They were always together, the two of them, inseparable, like lovers. Neither ever paid one bit of attention to Jack. For that matter, once Amanda found out that Jack’s only assets was the house, she didn’t pay him no attention either—except when she had figured out a new way to try to squeeze him for a few extra dollars.

  “He was a sad little thing to watch after that, even more desperate for the slightest bit of attention. Pitiful really to watch him in the corner of a restaurant or bar, trying to screw up the courage or the wisdom to say anything that would cause one of us to say something to him other than hello or goodbye.”

  Claire broke in excitedly, “One day he even had the gumption to say that he had been visited by men from outer space. Imagine, thinking he was visited by my men.” Claire was in a clear huff.

  Cynthia was becoming fidgety, looking away from this group of oddballs she professed to like so much. Finally, she burst out, “You’re all too mean. Francie and Johnny were good kids. And Jack Manny only wanted people to like him.”

  “They were good kids,” Mr. Packer agreed. He turned to me, “You know, Francie became a cheerleader. Brought a bunch of Chicago cheers with her to liven up the Screaming Loons. Not that it helped much. They still kept losing.

  “And Johnny was playing on the team. Only five foot nine and thin-boned, with that long blonde hair always falling in his eyes. His teammates didn’t like him much. But he was good. What a jumper. Haven’t had a jumper like that since. Several of the players were six feet plus, but that little Johnny could play rings around them. Fast on his feet, quick into the air, a good eye for aiming and quick at decisions.

  “It hurt Jack that he couldn’t claim Johnny as his son. After all, he was Amanda’s husband, so shouldn’t that make him the father of the best player on the team—on the team that was still playing in the uniforms he had bought? He thought so. But when he went into the hardware or grocery store, no one ever slapped him on the back and said, ‘What a game your kid played.’

  “Everything was fairly stable as the season wore on. The team was still losing, but Johnny was getting better and better. The other players were holding him back. They didn’t like being shown up by the newcomer. That Gunderson boy was the worst of the lot. And they didn’t like the fact that Johnny’s sister wouldn’t go out with any of them.

  “All this time Amanda carried on with her own world that didn’t seem to include much of Jack. Most days nobody even walked into that decorating shop of hers. Who in town had a need for anything she had to offer? Sometimes the banker checked in on her, worrying that if this business didn‘t take off, the total mortgage on that Manny lake house was going to have to come out of Jack’s bus driving salary. And being on the school board as he was, he knew that there wasn’t enough money in that lowly salary to pay for a house mortgage. But she found the money somehow.

  “It was about that time of the year when the lakes are frozen their thickest that folks began to notice that Francine was developing a little tummy, and not from her mother’s food. The girl was clearly pregnant. No one acknowledged it. Not a word was said about who the father might be or whether she would keep the baby.”

  “Well, we all had our thoughts of course,” Bromley noted. “There was the basketball captain, what was his name. He had taken quite a shine to her, always mooning about her. And she was a cheerleader, riding the bus with those boys on the away games. It takes two hours to get to Grosselier, you know. And Mrs. Limpit never was a very good chaperone. I bet you top dollar some pretty nasty things take place on those basketball busses. That’s my theory.” Cynthia turned a furious red at this notion. Didn’t Bromley remember that she too was a cheerleader?

  Mr. Packer simply ignored the interruptions. “Life went on that winter as it always does. Amanda kept her secret smile. Francie grew inch by inch. Johnny continued to nudge the Loons closer to victory but remained a loner. And Jack managed to put a happy face on it all.

  “The more the snow piled up along the roadsides as it was scraped there by the road graders, the more Jack managed to find something special in all of this. He had a wife and she was a beauty. No one could deny that. There were two great-looking kids in his house. He had a job that he was even getting kind of good at. His wife had a career and lots of rich friends. The school team was playing better than ever, thanks to his boy and no doubt to those smart uniforms he had purchased for the school. And every week, everybody in Thread had to acknowledge his generosity when they saw that gleaming dump truck at the end of their driveway gathering up their weekly debris.

  “By the time basketball season wore its weary way to end another year of complete losses, Jack had managed the impossible task of mentally levitating himself to the top of the world. The only sorcery that remained was convincing everyone else in town to acknowledge the good fortune of Jack Manny.

  “After thirty years of ferreting out every compliment and positive remark possible about his sorry life, this was no challenge for Jack. He became a braggart. One night, near the end of winter, he just got carried away with his euphoria. Over at the Northern Nights, across the Square. A bunch of guys were there heaving boiler makers, talking about the ice fishing, and how pretty soon the ice would be breaking up, and then there’d be the fish spawning season with the game wardens all out. No good fishing could happen then you know. It was just the usual guy stuff.

  “Jack decided to get into the conversation, although no one wanted to listen to him. There were only so many times anyone could say how great the uniforms looked, or how nice it was to have your trash picked up in such a shiny truck.

  “Maybe Jack realized that night that it was time for a new subject. So all the talk was of Amanda and her beautiful children. He wasn’t content just to tell the lies that Amanda wove; he had to embroider them into some even greater finery. It wasn’t long until Amanda was the greatest decorator there ever was, and that the Loons would have won every game that season if just one other kid in town had played as
well as his Johnny, and next year, the homecoming queen was bound to be Francie because there was never a more beautiful girl in Thread than his Francie, and was there ever anybody in the entire State of Wisconsin that had ever been more blessed in life than Jack Manny?

  “Sam was tending bar that night, and I bet to this day he wishes he had thrown Jack out after his fourth beer. Jack never could hold his liquor, and it was just the beer talking. But old Emil Urho, who certainly was always ready for another drink, was fed up with Jack’s braggadocio. Emil never did stop to think what his words could do. Just popped out with whatever bubbled up.

  “’Jack, you are one fucking lucky man,’ he started. The rest of the guys in the bar, sensing danger, stepped back a bit. ‘One lucky man, indeed. We’d all have to agree with that.

  “’Inherit a beautiful house and thousands of dollars, letting you fritter away the money on goddamn stupid asshole things like a trash truck, for god’s sake. Who the hell said this town needed a new trash truck? A fire engine, maybe, a cop car, yeah. But a trash truck!

  “’Well, we all love you for it anyway. And we’re so happy that it’s brought you such joy in your life.’ At this point, Sam tried to pull Emil away. But Emil’s nearly six foot four and a heavy man, after working in the woods all these years. He was on a verbal roll, and he wasn’t about to let Sam put a stop to it.

  “’All that money, and what do you have to show for it? A beautiful wife. She’s the only person in town who fell in love with that dumpster. You want to know why? Because she thought a man had to have millions to be stupid enough to waste some of it on giving a town a new dump truck.