WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Slim sang a verse about the sailor named Tex who avoided premarital sex by thinking of Jesus and penile diseases and beating his meat below decks.

  “I bet you can’t do a verse about Elmer,” said Barney. Slim said that for ten dollars he would be glad to do Elmer too. “Ha,” said Barney, “you wouldn’t dare.”

  As they slowed down to go through Motley, Reverend Odom awoke and stumbled back to the toilet. It was hard to keep his balance, half-asleep, the bus careening from side to side. The toilet was a plywood closet, three feet square, that one of The Rankins had constructed, that sat over the left rear axle. The throne emptied through a large hole straight down onto the inside edge of the left rear tire, presumably so that the deposit would be dispersed. At least, that was the original idea.

  The Rankins were famous in the gospel world for their fascination with the colon. Each Rankin had a different secret for regularity, a pill, a potion, a salve, and each of them was glad to talk about it. Sometimes they suffered from the runs and other times they were locked up like Fort Knox, but The Rankins always tried to execute a good bowel movement before each and every performance. They could not sing their best without it. And after years of touring, when The Rankins finally could afford to stay in hotel rooms, they found that they couldn’t be sure of a good dump unless they were aboard a speeding bus. So, an hour before the show, the five Rankins would pile into the bus and drive back and forth, up and down the highway, for an hour if necessary, until they were done. No enema ever worked for them in the same way. You could run a hose up a Rankin and never get the results that a ride on the bus would give. But the bus had to be going fast. Right around eighty was where The Rankins got loosened up.

  The bus toilet had the opposite effect on the Shepherds. With the toilet seat placed over the rear wheel, a person was liable to get a volley of gravel from below, and the effect of getting a buttload of gravel was to clamp the boys up tight. Whenever a Shepherd disappeared into the john, some drivers liked to veer to the left and get that wheel onto the shoulder and hear the victim howl, but Red was not the sort who went in for jokes of the juvenile kind.

  He told Frank this—and told him about The Rankins and their lower-tract peculiarities—a half-hour later as the bus sat parked outside the Milaca hospital. It was one-thirty in the morning and Reverend Odom was inside, having a small twig removed from his member. He had been half-asleep as he stood peeing and when he was impaled, he woke up immediately, but he was dignified about it. “I am bleeding and I need to have a splinter removed,” he announced. “Kindly stop and find me a doctor. Either that or shoot me. It hurts.”

  By the time he got mended and had carefully eased himself back onto the bus, it was almost three-thirty. Two hours and twenty minutes to go two hundred miles. Red pulled out on the highway. “Hang on to your shorts,” he said.

  Frank had arranged seat cushions on the floor, back behind the luggage, for the old man to sleep on, and he covered him with an old quilt. “I will live, but barely,” Reverend Odom whispered. “I am only grateful that I don’t need to explain this to my wife.” And he closed his eyes and began to snore. Barney was asleep on the table. Slim poured himself a cup of whiskey. He tried to pour quietly but Elmer heard it and woke up. “Put the bottle away,” he said.

  Slim pointed out the safety aspect of drinking: how so many drunks escape injury in terrible crashes that kill sober men instantly.

  “I hate to think of what you’re going to sound like in the morning,” said Elmer.

  Slim bristled. He stood up and lurched back and hung on to the bunk and informed Elmer that, with the Shepherd Boys, musicianship was a lost cause. The way Wendell hammed it up, you couldn’t tell the difference between “Old Rugged Cross” and “Into a Tent Where a Gypsy Boy Lay,” it was all the same to him, and since Wendell sang almost everything in the key of F, Slim used the same fingering and the same licks on every song—it was like cutting two-by-fours at the sawmill. Well, Elmer said, if that was how he felt, there were plenty of sawmills up around Roseau where he could get a job.

  “That was not the remark of a true Christian,” Slim said. Then he toppled over on top of Rudy, who was sleeping on his back and who doubled up in pain.

  “Sing that verse about Elmer,” muttered Barney, who was awake now.

  Elmer got up and hauled Slim off Rudy, half-carried him up to the front, and planted him next to Frank in the seat behind Red. Red had the speedometer pinned at ninety-five, the needle wouldn’t go any farther. They could have been going a hundred-fifty for all Frank knew. Elmer sat down in the opposite seat. “Slow down,” he said. Red eased it down to ninety.

  “Listen to me,” Elmer said, draping an arm around Slim. “This is temporary. We’re going to make it back to where we were and even better. The best is yet to be, Slim. You’ll see.”

  Frank knew that the Shepherd Boys had once been, if not at the top, then headed that way. Their “He Gave Me a Crown” had been a big hit in 1942, and they toured nationally on The War Bonds Gospel Caravan, but then Rudy slugged a nosy reporter in St. Louis and Al was caught selling ration books and Wendell got involved with a woman in Seattle who turned out to be much younger than he imagined. They lost their record contract and went through a number of years subsisting on a WLT salary that Elmer felt the Lord intended to make them dependent on Him. Now he was optimistic again. If they could hold on at WLT for one more year, they’d have the money to bring out his new song, “My Mother’s Bible,” and it would be a hit and they’d enter a new phase of packed auditoriums and big money and a brand-new air-suspension bus with large bunks.

  He whispered this into Slim’s ear, patting him on the back, shaking him gently. “You have to have faith,” he said. “It’s about to get better. I know it. I can feel it coming.”

  Just then the bus hit a big dip and they all flew up in the air. Frank cracked his head hard on the ceiling. From in back came a muffled cry from Wendell, then a crash as he lumbered out of bed and was thrown against the toilet wall. Then, when Red braked, Wendell was flung forward and lost his balance and landed on Elmer and wound up head-first in the stairwell, where he lost his cookies. It took him a long time to lose them all. He lost most of them right away but then a few more cookies came up and then a few more and then another one.

  “This is the longest night of my life, I swear,” said Elmer.

  Then some more cookies.

  “Now you know how I feel when you sing ‘Give Me the Roses While I Live,’ ” said Slim.

  They flew on down the road. Red opened the front door and Elmer threw a bucket of water on the steps and that cleaned it out a little but not much. Rank odors filled the bus. Elmer helped Wendell back to bed.

  “We’re going to die tonight,” Slim muttered. Frank offered to heat up some milk for him, but Slim had lost his appetite for milk. His mind was on the crash ahead. He sat, stiff as a board, and stared ahead at the spot where they would meet their end. “You’ve been good to me for the most part,” he said to Elmer, though Elmer had gone. He asked Frank to put his guitar under the seat and wrap it in a quilt. Then he took off his suspenders and tied one end around his neck and the other around the leg of the table behind him. He didn’t want to be disfigured in a crash, he said, and this way his neck would be broken upon impact, and his family would have the comfort of knowing that he had died without prolonged suffering, and there would be reviewal. “When Coop Jackson was killed, it took them eight hours to put his head together, and they had to make one-half of his face out of latex rubber,” he informed Frank.

  “Shut up,” said Red. “You give me the creeps.”

  “It’s colder’n a well-digger’s ass in here,” said Slim.

  Red told him to shut up.

  “Okay,” said Barney. “Here’s ten dollars. Go on. Sing the one about Elmer.” So Slim reached down and unwrapped the guitar and tuned it back up and sang:There was an old bastard named Shepherd

  With a big hairy ass like a leopard,

&nb
sp; Where all of the fairies

  Liked to pick dingleberries

  And fry them up, salted and peppered.

  Ay-yi-yi-yi.

  “That didn’t rhyme with Elmer at all and I’m not paying,” said Barney. Slim reminded him that the verse was supposed to be about Elmer, that nothing had been promised as to rhymes. “You welsh on a bet, then go ahead, be a piker, I don’t care. I forgive you for it. I forgive everybody. I don’t want to go to my grave with any hard feelings toward anyone.” He began to play “Nearer My God to Thee.” Red turned on the radio, loud, to drown him out, and Slim put down the guitar, crawled under the table, and fell asleep. It was four in the morning.

  “Can you keep awake?” asked Frank. Red snorted. “Swipe me some smokes out of Wendell’s jacket. A pack of Luckies and two more Grain Belts and I’ll have us in Roseau in no time.”

  They were in a dense forest now and Frank thought, “What if a deer runs out on the road?” Daddy had once told him about a man from Mindren who hit a deer and the deer flew up and its four feet came through the windshield and it kicked the man to shreds with its sharp little hooves. One minute he was barrelling along, listening to the radio, on top of things, and the next a deer was kicking him to death. His last thought was probably, This is impossible , just as Daddy must have thought. Daddy was steaming along, his hand on the throttle, hollering at Jack and A.P., and next thing the horizon fell over and No. 9 slipped off the tracks and Daddy thought, This can’t be, and he was eaten alive by a blazing sun of pure pain.

  Frank’s head jerked—Red was reaching back and poking him. “Don’t fall asleep on me, buddy. We got a hundred miles to Roseau. What do you want to talk about for a hundred miles? You want to hear how I started out in music?”

  Red bounced in the seat to wake up. He slapped himself. He shook his head so hard his cheeks flapped. Plip plip plip plip plip.

  “I learned to play drums by milking cows. That’s the truth. I had ten cows to milk morning and evening and I learned a staggered five-teat rhythm, fast and steady, and kept varying it so my hands wouldn’t stiffen up—and then I’d pour the milk into the milk cans and sit and go rap-a-taptap on the empty pails, copying the rhythms of the threshers and the mower and the corn planter and the auger, the beat of the big steam-powered combines in the fall, what a blast, the thump and the clatter and bang, the big flywheel going whoopa-wocka-whoopa-wocka and the big blades answering shoop-shoop-shubidua-bop, and when I was eighteen, I heard King Oliver on the radio and that was all I needed, I packed my bag, said goodbye to the cows, and went and told my dad.

  “ ‘I’m going to Chicago to play in King Oliver’s band,’ I said.

  “ ‘I can’t allow you go, son,’ my dad said to me, and he stood in the kitchen door. ‘A man cannot make his way in the world playing music. You go out there and they’ll lift you up and carry you around and then they’ll drop you down so hard you’ll never get off the ground again. No, sir. It’s tempting, and I understand that, but I couldn’t let you go and still call myself a Christian. Before you go, you’ll have to knock me down.’

  “Well, sir, my dad was a big man without a bit of flab on him, with fists as hard as horse’s hooves, but I swung and hit him on the tip of his nose, and it drove the bone up into his brain and killed him. My dad lay dead in the doorway. He had felt no pain and he had died in a Christian moment and gone straight to heaven, but still it felt bad to kill my dad, and I thought to myself, ‘Now everything he said will come true, as punishment.’ But I went anyway. Might as well be punished for a musician as punished for a farmer. So I headed for Chicago but I wound up in Minneapolis, playing at a burlesque joint on Chicago Avenue called The Rapid Rose.”

  Frank lay down across the seat. Had he heard right? Was he riding on a bus driven by a man who had killed his father with one punch? A murderer at the wheel. Nevertheless, the moment his head touched the cushion he was gone. Then it was light. The bus sat outside a church. Reverend Odom was shaking him. “Showtime,” he said.

  CHAPTER 36

  Monday Morning

  Patsy Konopka heard about the Rise and Shine tour from Art Finn when she called him Monday morning, worried about Frank. The silence upstairs had kept her awake half the night. Four or five times, she had gone to the hole in the kitchen ceiling and listened for his snore, thinking he might have come home while she dozed. She had keen ears from living alone for years, and had always been able to pick up the sound of his breathing. Now, nothing.

  “They sent him up north with the Shepherds, poor kid,” said Art. “Running around in a broken-down bus with that bunch of lowlifes and they’re forecasting a blizzard for the weekend. Did you hear about Slim Graves?” No, she hadn’t, and she didn’t care to, it was Frank she wanted to hear about.

  Roy Jr. had heard about the blizzard forecast, too, and thought of the Rise and Shine Show, and called up the Norsk Nightingale, and said, “Jens, we may have that morning show opening up for you that you wanted, I’ll let you know next week.” The Nightingale was stunned with joy, thinking he meant the 8 a.m. slot, and called Elsie and Johnny and asked them to be his band. “We’re on our way, kiddoes!” he cried. “No more Jubilee!” He and Leo hadn’t spoken for years, though working together on the noontime show, since the time the Nightingale accused Leo of not chipping in his fair share for gas for a fishing trip to Morain. Elsie said, “Did you hear about Slim Graves?” She had heard that he had died on the highway and all of his family with him. The Nightingale thought, “Well, that 6:30 Sunrise Waffle spot wouldn’t be bad either.”

  Frank sounded exhausted on the radio from Roseau, Maria thought, hoarse and a little shrill, and when he talked about Home Salads and what a comfort they were to the Shepherd Boys when touring, there was a rasp in his voice like an old sideshow barker, but then he dedicated a song to her, “Traveling That Highway Home,” and she sat up in bed, charmed. What a sweet guy he was.

  Merle turned his head on the pillow next to her and muttered, “Hey, turn down the damn radio. Please.” He squeezed his eyes shut and rolled over, his back to her, taking most of the blanket with him. She lay, naked, looking up at the ceiling. It seemed to her the most fascinating coincidence that she was listening to one boyfriend on the radio and lying in bed with another. Merle had arrived Saturday. They had dinner. He slept on her couch. They walked around the city lakes on Sunday—Nokomis, Harriet, Calhoun, Lake of the Isles, Cedar—and went to the radio station Sunday evening. She had gotten them parts in a play by Vesta called “Edison and the Magic Lantern”—Vesta felt that only radio could dramatize the invention of motion pictures—and afterward the two of them walked home, and she said, kidding him, “How are your ducks doing?” in reference to his pair of blue undershorts with yellow ducks that she had washed for him Saturday night. He took this line to be encouraging, and she didn’t say otherwise, nor did she protest when he opened her blouse and covered her breasts with kisses. After all, she had invited him to stay. And here he was. It was nice. To think that such a dear old friend could be so intense in the dark, so urgent, and cry out, and do it again and again. It was nice. But she loved Frank. She knew that now. She said it softly to see if it were true. It was. Merle grunted.

  “Honey,” she said, “it’s six-thirty. I’ve got to get somewhere.” He grunted again. Oh Frank, she thought. Please don’t try to find out about this. Please just accept that I am yours. And then she heard a man singing on the radio, a voice like syrup in a glove, “Hello, lovey honey lamb, I’m a lover man, I am, love to find you half-asleep and put my johnny way in deep. O yes yes yes, lift your pretty little dress. O well well well, sure do love that fishy smell. O my my my, sure is nice, that sugar pie. Well, hey hey hey, here comes johnny, on his way.”

  Patsy had overslept and missed the Shepherd Boys broadcast that morning and not hearing Frank’s voice struck her as an acute deprivation. He had a beautiful voice and she had meant to tell him so, but you had to be careful, look at Reed Seymour. She told him once what a nice vo
ice he had and the boy went on the air and tried to be John Gielgud. All that tremulous fluting and whinnying and the shopgirl dips and quavers and the pale Anglican piety and the faint suggestion of pain and loss—while reading a dogfood commercial!—no, you had to be careful telling a young midwestern man that he spoke well. Boys in the Midwest grow up without a word of praise, their parents fearful that a compliment might make them vain, and by the age of nineteen, they are riding so low their boat may be swamped by one small wave. A compliment may go to a young man’s head and he may try to be as good as he thinks he is and from then on he won’t be able to talk worth beans. No, you had to be careful praising a young man.

  Patsy sat spooning her boiled egg out of the shell and thought that maybe she could write Frank into The Hills of Home as a young reporter from the Bigville Beacon come down from the big city to snoop around town—for what? he won’t say, and rumors abound. Buried bodies from gangland slayings? a discrepancy in the bank’s books?—and then Fritz and Frieda are sure they know why: oil. They begin quietly to buy up land and go deep in hock and accumulate a dozen small parcels around Happy Valley. Then Frank writes a front-page story about a strange bacterium in the drinking water that causes liver disease, and of course the value of real estate falls to nothing, Fritz and Frieda are ruined, and after all those years of drinking six glasses of water a day, their livers ache and their hands turn blotchy.