Tales From The Loon Town Cafe

by Dennis Frahmann

  “Stick around past midnight and maybe you will,” winked Amanda.

  “And what is Amanda Manny doing here?” demanded the banker who had been standing quietly by the large French windows. The moonlight flooding across the frozen lake silhouetted Tesla Haligent in the window. “I thought we agreed that this was a business meeting. You already got Pearson here for no good reason.”

  I didn’t like his tone, even though I didn’t want anything more to do with American Seasons – Van Elkind kept pulling me in. He cleared his throat. “I hired Amanda as a personal consultant for when we get into the design phase. I trust Amanda’s sense of style,” Van Elkind said.

  “Just don’t let her put any white carpet into the hotel lobbies,” Frozen Bear joked. At the mention of carpets, Red instinctively took a guilty glance at his feet for any telltale signs of tracked-in mud. Everyone in town knew Amanda had redecorated the Trueheart entry using a plush white pile that was quickly destroyed by Red’s unwillingness to remove his waders after any fishing run. Haligent gave Van Elkind a look normally reserved for an irresponsible child.

  “Very well,” Haligent acceded. “I’m sure you haven’t gathered us in this unpleasant spot to look at carpet swatches. So why are we here?”

  Stephen walked in with a platter of deviled eggs, each garnished with a big spring of fresh parsley and a strip of pimento. The tray was wrapped in evergreen branches to form a small nest, and on one edge of the tray was small stuffed toy goose.

  “Let me guess. Six geese a laying,” I said to him. Stephen smiled weakly.

  “I didn’t think anyone would get it. I’m so happy.” Amanda clapped her hands.

  Van Elkind motioned Stephen to leave the tray of deviled eggs on the large coffee table and waved him on to leave. “The reason we’re here is because I felt it was time for us to assess progress in person. More importantly, there’s someone new I want you to meet. She’s getting dressed now, but when you meet her . . .”

  “They don’t need to wait, Henry,” said a tall, stately and quite robust woman at the top of the stairs. She walked down the stairs on her stiletto heels with a royal elegance suitable to twelve lords a leaping. “I am here, and ready to meet them.”

  In the cafe, Josh continued, “In Thread, Tony Masters woke up that Sunday morning in an ornery mood and ready to meet his maker. His wife Nancy had to go into the clinic to help stitch up some kid who had a hand snapped in a muskrat trap. When she left, she told Tony to meet her at church.

  “He was just sitting there when she left, drinking coffee from his favorite Mickey Mouse mug. They had bought it the year before when they took their only real vacation—a week at Walt Disney World. It had been such a relief to get away from the winter snow. It seemed another planet to be able to lie next to a pool beneath a hot sun, to jump in the water whenever you wanted, and to feel the heat beat into you. Tony had been real happy that week, but it didn’t last once he returned to Thread. He grew morose and withdrawn. When he would get home from the woodworking plant, he’d sit and stare at the fireplace, drinking beer, never saying a word. Nancy hated it when he got like that. The winter mood was starting again, and she knew she had four months ahead of her.

  “Nancy has no idea how long he sat there, drinking coffee from Mickey’s head. But the coffee pot was empty when he left, and he was a slow drinker. He never changed his clothes. When they found him, he was still wearing the oil-stained blue sweat pants he was so fond of and a white thermal-knit undershirt. He had on heavy woolen socks and his snowmobile boots and a plaid hunter’s cap with big furry earflaps. But he never bothered to find a coat before he jumped in his car that morning and started driving north on 17.

  “Up north in Timberton, the biker lawyers finished their Sunday brunch at the Penokee House. They left a really big tip for the waitress who was cute, young and chesty. No one could believe they were a brief of lawyers. They mounted their bikes, did a few checks and rode off in unison. South on 17.

  “Now how did it happen? It could have been an accident. The sun was awfully bright, but it was directly overhead, so no one was riding into the light. Besides, the road lies north and south.

  “On most days, you might blame the wind. It happened by Chissum’s clearing. The wind can pick up loose snow there and slam it across the road. But Sunday was calm.

  “No, Tony wanted to do it. As he came over the ridge heading toward Chissum’s clearing, he was at the highest point on the road where the continental divide sign is. He could have seen that pack of bikers even if they were miles away.

  “The motorcyclists must have looked like a rack of ten pins driving down the road toward him, and he wanted to be the bowling ball that would score the perfect strike. So he crossed over to the other alley.

  “Pow! They scattered like falling pins across the blacktop. He downed them all—and himself.

  “By the time the ambulances and police arrived, they had to station one man in the middle of the road to drive off the crows. So much blood and gore. It attracted the scavengers like a scene out of The Birds.”

  “Gentleman, and Amanda, it is my pleasure to introduce you to the newest executive member of the American Seasons team, Priscilla Jouer. Until yesterday, Priscilla was the director of new attraction development at Walt Disney Imagineering. Today she is one of us.”

  “I am pleased to meet all of you,” Priscilla said, extending her hand as she walked toward each of us in such an inviting manner that it took every bit of one’s will not to respond by picking up that extended hand and kissing the enormous rings on her fingers. A single look pulled each of us into her circle ensuring us it would be an incredible delight.

  Outside, we heard the howl of wild dogs. As I looked out across the snow-encrusted terrace, I could see the dark shapes of a pack racing across the white. The full moon shone down upon us all.

  “This is such a delightful change from the tedious sunshine of southern California and the muggy heat of Florida,” Priscilla’s hand moved broadly to encompass all of northern Wisconsin. “The challenge is to open this enjoyment up to millions.”

  Van Elkind broke in. “Priscilla led the team that designed most of the world pavilions at EPCOT. It’s quite an extraordinary place, captures the essence of the entire world in one small spot. There’s really no need to travel anywhere else, once you have been there. If she has succeeded so well there, I have the utmost confidence that she can recreate all four seasons of America here in Thread.”

  Frozen Bear stood up, walked over and extended his hand in greeting. “I’m sure Priscilla will prove to be an extraordinary addition to our little gang of five. Excuse me, with Wally and Amanda and you, our gang of eight.” He smiled slightly. “Priscilla, let me tell you what fascinates me about theme parks. You create a simulacrum of a real place and time. We visitors get immersed in a re-creation that is somehow more tantalizing and enjoyable than the reality. Perhaps because it has been simplified.

  “And what do we do? We walk around with cameras, or what’s worse, these new video cameras, whirling away, looking for the best shot, viewing this reflection of a reality through a distorting lens that crops it and miniaturizes it still further. When do we finally enjoy this world of ours? Months later, we sit in front of a photo album, listlessly paging through poorly composed snapshots that are a second-hand cousin of a fancifully interpreted and rebuilt reality. In the name of pleasure, we have removed ourselves from the real world.”

  Priscilla was looking out the window. “What is that?” she gasped. Her regal poise jittered in her fascination with the outside scene. A young red fox stood on the terrace, a bloodied white rabbit hanging from its jutting jaws. It looked into the light for a moment, transfixed by the wonder and then it bounded into the darkness of the green pines.

  “If only we could put that into an animatronic tableau in one of our winter restaurants,” Priscilla gushed. “Imagine the excitement, the sense of anticipation.”

  “It would make me sick,” said Amanda
.

  Frozen Bear walked toward the French doors that opened onto the terrace. He stood there quietly before the glass, the coldness of the night air outside pulling heat from his body even as he gazed out at the fleeting tracks of the fox. Already an eddy of wind was dancing powder snow across the tracks. He looked up and across the lawn toward the lake, toward the moon, toward where the wild dogs were disappearing. He said nothing, but his shoulders seemed to straighten.

  Priscilla pooh-poohed Amanda’s reaction. “We wouldn’t have any blood, of course. That would be distasteful. And just before the children thought it all was doom, we would let the rabbit wriggle loose from the fox’s mouth and bound away. The music in the background would swell, and everyone would be happy.”

  Stephen walked in. “Dinner is served.”

  The mood in the cafe should have been somber. After all, a man had committed suicide by killing others. For some reason, I could not erase my mental image of Josh and Tony Masters laughing in the basement of the Lutheran church just a few weeks earlier. What was it with Josh that he seemed to attract this macabre combination of levity and tragedy?

  I was tired of hearing about Tony going crazy. Soon it would be a new year, but all anyone could talk about was Tony ripping into the lawyers. And Josh had spent too much time in Los Angeles, repeating this tragedy with all the drama of a Hollywood screenwriter. “I think you’re making this all up.”

  Bromley was over it for another reason. “It won’t do much for the town’s reputation. That’s all I can say. Who’s going to want to vacation in a spot where they run you down like a mad dog? I don’t know what that Tony was thinking,” Bromley rambled on. The fiasco threatened his plan to convince Red to fund a new advertising campaign in the big city papers. Red Trueheart felt it would be better to hold off on the campaign. After all, he knew that soon enough he would be promoting a very different kind of destination story. In fact, both Red and Hank had been expecting me to help brainstorm some of the messaging that we could start now without giving away the long-term plan.

  Claire had her theories though. “It’s because of all of the sawdust he breathed in at the window plant. It clogged up his mind like autumn leaves in a gutter. That’s what my men told me. Tony was one of their experiments, just like me. Though they only come for him in the winter. Not like me. They check me every day when they fly over the hotel and just hover, pulling me up from my bed with a blue light. I go weightless and float right out the window and up into their ship. That’s when they put the needle in me. Right before dawn. Every day.” Claire grimaced and fell silent.

  We all fell silent for a moment, perhaps surprised by Claire’s unusual level of detail about her men. “So,” I said, “I hear some type of Hollywood producer’s in town buying Tony’s life story from his wife.”

  “I know,” smiled Josh, “I called him and gave him the idea. We’re going to do lunch. Could we do it here?”

  “Why did you go and do a god darn fool thing like that?” Bromley demanded. “The last thing this town needs is to have a movie made about poor Tony. It wouldn’t be good publicity. Not good at all”

  “But they might film it here, and they’d probably need to cast some of the local townspeople as extras,” Josh stuck a big chunk of a sticky bun into his mouth and chewed. Bromley perked up as he considered the possibilities. Josh smiled at him for a moment before a new distraction appeared.

  The Van Elkind holiday dinner was served in the enormous dining room where I had catered my first dinner. There was something strangely captivating about enormous wealth and power so casually enjoyed. In Manhattan, I had often interviewed the famous and the powerful. Both Patrice and I had been invited to the parties of the rich. But as a caterer on that night, which now seemed so long ago, I gained a new perspective on privilege. Instead of enjoying the hefty bouquet of a great cabernet, I was pouring it into bulbous stemware, counting up in my mind, the cost of each bottle, and the markup I was charging. As the total grew in my mind, I began to think what the thousands of dollars being spent on the wine could have bought. Once the mental cash register began totaling, it could not stop. The silver and china, hundreds of dollars per place setting. The hothouse flowers, flown in from Holland, even though Regina Rabinowicz grew beautiful roses right outside the camp’s front door. The expensive designer label dresses worn by Rita Van Elkind and her other guests. The jewelry—tens of thousands of dollars. Then to imagine the checkbook capabilities of each person in that room. We were into the millions of dollars.

  Yes, there was an intoxicating allure to the camp and its seemingly infinite riches. On slow nights at the cafe, when only a handful of modestly-dressed locals would be in, ordering the cheapest things on the menus, I would stand behind the bar, and let my mind wander through the many rooms I imagined at the camp. Tonight, back, but as a guest, I felt again one of the invited chosen, intended to provide some sparkle and intellectual mix to the evening.

  A beautiful pattern of Villeroy and Boche china was set on the white damask linens. A green silk runner traversed the table. In the center was a tall arrangement of white roses with just a small sprinkling of holly leaves and red berries. Simple crystal and elegant silver sparkled in the light of the many candles.

  “My compliments,” I said to Amanda. “You set a beautiful table.”

  “It’s okay, I guess. That stuck-up Stephen refused to listen to my ideas and insisted on doing it himself. I don’t know why they keep him. He has the easiest job in the world. The family’s hardly ever here, and he just does what he pleases.” She suddenly turned her attention toward Van Elkind. “Hank, don’t sit there. I want you here next to me.”

  “Where do I sit?” said Regina Rabinowicz. The portly woman walked in wearing a bright pink flannel robe and was clearly unexpected. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t dress up. But no one woke me. I didn’t even know there was a party going on. Hank, where’s my place? Hey, where’s my Rita? Too stuck up to be here with her mother over the holidays?”

  Van Elkind was patient. “Rita stayed in Chicago. She has social engagements there. Besides this is a business meeting, Mother Rabinowicz. Why doesn’t Stephen prepare a nice plate for you to enjoy in your room. I think Dallas is on tonight. I know how you love Dallas.”

  “It’s not on tonight,” scoffed Regina. She looked over at Amanda, taking a long look up and down that trim body. “Who’s this? The entertainment?”

  “This is Amanda Manny. She owns a local business. Where is Stephen?”

  “I’m right here sir,” Stephen walked in with a steaming tureen of soup. “It’s time for the consommé of three French hens.”

  Van Elkind was red-faced. “Just give that thing to Wally. Let him serve the soup. Stephen, take Mother Rabinowicz up to her room. She shouldn’t be down here with us. And where the hell is Kip?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. He’s your son.” Stephen gently held Regina’s arm and directed her toward the staircase. She whispered something in his ear, and he chuckled appreciatively. She looked back over her shoulder and winked at me. I looked around the room at my dinner companions, as I held the soup tureen in my hands. With a feeling of deja vu, I ladled out the soup.

  “Let’s sit,” Van Elkind commanded. “Enjoy.”

  “Hank,” Red began, looking around the room and toward where Regina has just left. “I think that your personal life is distracting you from our project.” He ended his gaze around the room by lingering on Amanda.

  “I’ve heard you have had an affair with every woman in town,” Van Elkind laughed, “and you’re concerned about my batty mother-in-law. That’s why we have Stephen here, to look after her.”

  “It’s not just the old woman,” Red groused. “It’s your son too. He’s nothing but trouble. Tell that asshole to keep away from my daughter.”

  Haligent tapped his fork against his water glass, “Gentleman, while this is all most interesting, let’s recall our purpose tonight. Henry has already given us two surprises, most ple
asant surprises to be sure, the wonderful additions of Miss Jouer and Mrs. Manny to our enterprises. Let’s get to the point of this rendezvous and hear what I hope is equally good news on the status of the land acquisition.”

  “It should be good,” said Frozen Bear, “Hank’s been a master at rumor mongering in town. Everyone seems to be hearing about the mining. Of course, Wally’s cafe has been most helpful in that regard, sort of like Grand Central for gossip.” I squirmed. Van Elkind ignored our interchange. “Please. Let’s enjoy the meal first.”

  Frozen Bear walked into the cafe, momentarily causing us all to forget about Tony Masters. “Who’s that good looking guy?” Josh whispered.

  “Hello, Wally,” Chip said to me. “What’s up?”

  “Talking about Tony,” I said, as though that was all anybody was doing in all of Wisconsin.

  He gave a look that suggested such talk of highway mayhem should be beneath me. “I’m here to meet Caleb Wheeler, who I believe you know. He mentioned you had once interviewed him for a magazine story back in Manhattan. When he shows up, don’t disturb us. We have some business to discuss.” At hearing the name of well-known financier Caleb Wheeler, Bromley’s ingrained dislike for Frozen Bear was overcome. He moved one stool closer, dragging his coffee cup along the counter.

  “Wheeler’s in Thread?” Bromley asked nonchalantly.

  “No, he’s not in town. I’m just waiting here in case the man should suddenly materialize in this spot from the ether. Could I have some coffee?” Frozen Bear spoke without looking at Bromley, directing his words toward Cynthia.

  Cynthia had been hovering nearby ever since Frozen Bear had walked in. She placed a cup on the counter and poured it to the brim. “Some cream, please?” he asked with a smile. She took the creamer that had been in front of Bromley and carefully placed it near his cup. Cynthia smiled brightly and walked back to the kitchen, casting a coquettish glance over her shoulder as she exited. Bromley frowned.

  Frozen Bear was becoming a more frequent diner, usually around the same time Cynthia arrived from her afternoon classes. Sometimes he’d order a late lunch, sometimes just a piece of pie and coffee. He almost always sat at the counter, and didn’t talk to me. But his eyes often fell on Cynthia, and she knew it, and they seemed to chat about more than the menu.