So lovely, so lovely. All the rigmarole of marriage dispensed with. Just two creatures lying intertwined, breathing, him spooned behind her, his arms clasped around her middle, kissing her shoulders. After she left the motel, he lay awake in the tumultuous sheets smelling of her and thought that maybe he wasn’t a Lutheran after all. No guilt. None. She had opened a door and he walked in. It didn’t seem like a Lutheran thing to do. Lutherans were bred for monogamy, it was programmed into them. But maybe the whole God thing was just a big hoax and people needed to believe in it because it made them feel more important than they actually are. Much more dramatic, committing adultery and risking hellfire and everything. Whereas all he was was just an old dude who after a circumspect middle age suddenly got entwined with a young woman. An ancient cliché. A goat-footed hairy-legged brute chasing maidens through the forest. Whoopee. Mr. Brains-In-His-Pants. A character unwelcome in any decent American home, and yet a man no different from the others. A little naked furtive guy dithering in the mishmash, scared, your id throbbing. You see a smiling face across a crowded room. The piano plays and there are drinks. She touches your hand. Hello. You rise when the rooster crows and roll around in the sack and blow your wad and then she goes home. A joyful time is had by all. Thank you, very much.
10. THE CHAIRMAN SINGS
They looked down their noses at the old auto mechanic, the old grease monkey, like they looked down on plumbers or farmers, though it was pure stupidity on their part. They didn’t know a damn thing about cars. Diener and Val Tollefson and all of them. Take a look at a repair manual now. It’s all about computers. You don’t take things apart and clean the armature or put new bearings in—you pull the whole component and replace it. The old Ford V8 engine, any teenage boy could fiddle with it, but it’s a whole new ball game now. You’ve got ten miles of wires and sensors running your butt heater, your climate control, your A/C, your airbag, the GPS, the cruise control, and you’ve got to be able to read the service manual which is written in its own language, not English.
Nuts to them. He was done with them now. Clintonio and his old Duotone guitar, mi amor, mi bella dama, he would sing you a canción dulce—about moonlit nights—luz de las noches del luna—el aroma de los pinos—he once was Norwegian but now he was free. He sat in his porch and strummed a C chord and sang
He was only an auto mechanic with grease on his face
and hands
But while he worked in the pit he longed for a great
romance.
As he lubricated the Universal Joint with his big grease gun,
He could hear her crying out, “Oh yes yes my darling one,
Now darling pick up that gun and thrill me again,
You are the best ever, my love, you are a perfect ten.”
His songs were not the sort people around here would appreciate. They preferred the smooth old ballads or inspirational folk-rock about morning dew and dreams come true me and you, and his were more in the Spanish style—
Love me, my lady, for soon I must die.
Perhaps this evening death will come by
And call my name and open his cold steel gate.
Come, let us eat the best oranges now and not wait.
Let us make love this very afternoon.
I hear the creaking of wagon wheels. He will be here soon.
Nobody knew he wrote songs except Irene who had found some written on bank deposit slips and she made no comment—odd, for her—but she was occupied with her garden, nursing her prize tomatoes toward the annual sweepstakes at the Mist County Fair in August. She was worrying about Kira in California whose roommate was a six-foot hairy-legged lesbian in hiking boots—was Kira safe?
Sometimes he sang in the basement, next to the old monster furnace and sometimes in the car. He’d drive south past the Farmer’s Union grain elevator and Art’s Baits & Night O’ Rest Motel and sing—
Oh these tedious summer days, going in circles,
going nowhere—
How I long to kiss you, dark lady, and touch your hair
And nibble your sweet lips and your tender breasts
And escape these suspicious streets and meaningless
contests.
All his troubles seemed to vanish when he picked up a guitar and sang, especially if he sang about his troubles.
I walk down the street and I can feel them stare.
I hear them whisper, “He has a girlfriend somewhere”
And I want to tell them, “Yes, there is one for whom I
yearn
And when I go away with her, I don’t expect ever to return.”
As a Norwegian he hadn’t sung—what would people think?—but now that he wasn’t anymore, he could sing in high, tender tones without fear and he hoped someone would overhear him and think, “Clint in love! What’s the deal there? And does this mean my car won’t be ready on Friday?”
I am a prisoner, he thought. I am married to a waspish tomato grower who has been sort of pissed off at me for years. I am a Hispanic American who labored for years under the burden of Norwegianness and now I am reconsidering the whole deal. Sixty years old: last chance to have a life.
Years have passed and I still miss my daddy coming home. I’m older than him now and I am waiting all alone, Thinking of a girl I love and what my life could have been. How did I wind up in this army of disappointed men?
One nice thing about songs—Irene couldn’t interrupt him and say, “What do you mean, you’re ‘waiting all alone’? Hello? I’m here.” She was relentless, a corrector, a finisher of sentences. He’d say, “Well, if you ask me—” and pause and she filled in the blank. He pointed this out to her once and she said, “Oh, it’s all my fault, isn’t it. It’s all about me. I ruined your life. I’m a terrible person.” And got in the car and didn’t come back until almost midnight. It was a Rasmussen trait, a dogged devotion to your own point of view. Before he married her, he should’ve paid more attention to heredity. Every apple comes from a tree. Look around, it’s not far away. Tiffany inherited Irene’s relentlessness—pushing, pushing, pushing. When she was 17 she pushed him to buy her a car and she beat him up over it for two months, every day some new argument, single-minded, a little teenage Stalinist. Kira was more like him, easygoing, take it as it comes and let go when it’s done. The day-by-day plan. Do your best and then give it a rest. But now his laid-backness had turned around and bit him in the butt—had he pissed his life away, one pointless day after another, and now he was winding up the backstretch and did he have anything to show for it? A few friends, a dogged marriage, a tenuous perch in hometown society—the thing that really distinguished him was the fact that Angelica was in love with him. Or was sort of in love with him. That he had enough spark left in him to make a young woman cry out for him? That he was still Alive. Was it not?
11. THE CHAIRMAN BROODS
It was 8 p.m. on Fourth of July Eve. A Sabbath calm lay over the town though the Chairman’s phone was hot. Mr. Hoppe called to report overhearing three Norwegian bachelor farmers talk about driving in the parade with a truckload of pig manure. “They’ve been talking about that for years,” said Clint. The Betsy Ross people had canceled, a big blow—she’d been a hit last year. The Leaping Lutherans Parachute Team had canceled out for tomorrow—mechanical problems with the jump plane—and the Busy Biffy people had delivered 100 portable toilets instead of 150 and would that be okay?—and Art of Art’s Baits & Night O’ Rest Motel had changed his mind about letting the motel be used as a Hospitality Suite unless the Committee posted a bond guaranteeing that no card-carrying liberals would be welcomed there. The high school choir director Miss Falconer called to ask if he had received her letter, hand-delivered yesterday. Yes, he had. “And what do you think?” He thought it would give him a heart attack to have forty high school kids singing on the roof of the Central Building as the parade passed below. “How about thirty?” Miss Falconer was desperate to get her choir on TV. “I understand,” he said. “Let me see
what I can do.” And Mr. Diener called to say he was holding firm in his resolve to have six men impersonate dead soldiers on the American Legion float (“Our Men Make The Ultimate Sacrifice While Self-Appointed Critics Slam The War Effort: Whose Side Are You On?”).
Clint said, “Couldn’t we please keep politics out of the parade” and Diener said, “It’s not politics, it’s patriotism.”
“Do we need to have bloody corpses?”
“Men died for our freedoms,” said Diener. “Let’s not forget that. It wasn’t teachers and trial lawyers who got the job done.”
He’d known Diener since third grade when his nickname was Diener the Wiener because he had lice and brown liquid was painted on his shaved head and he had suffered God knows what blow to his self-esteem and had been a jerk ever since.
On the other hand, his fund-raising ability was well known. He had a knack that most decent people do not, for confronting a man and asking him face-to-face to donate an astonishing sum of money. He was a terrier. He’d soft-soap you and tell you how wonderful your family was and then come in for the kill and ask for a leadership donation of five thousand dollars. You blanched at this figure, your eyes twitched, your arm jerked. Five thousand dollars is a lot of money. You were hoping to get by with a hundred bucks but the man was looking you in the eye, no joke. You wanted to say, “Roger, let me think about it, right now my house is on fire and my children are gone”—but the man will not be put off. He wants a check. If you don’t give him one now, he will come back tomorrow. The man is not to be denied. He is facing you down.
The Fourth was paid for with a few big contributions from the Farmers Co-op, Mist County Power & Light, the Boosters Club, plus the Liberty Lottery in February, $10 for a chance at a brand-new Ford from Bunsen Motors, which raked in the dough from neighboring towns. Last year, almost ten thousand tickets were sold, a hundred grand, two-thirds of it pure profit. But Mr. Diener’s sheepdog doggedness was crucial to the effort.
If he wanted dead bodies, he was going to have dead bodies.
Clint walked out the front door of his stucco house on McKinley Street and down the steps, his gray shirt loose on him and his gray pants hitched up with a belt: He’d lost twenty pounds since that night at the Gardens of Avon Motel. He hadn’t seen Angelica since then. She’d gone to California for a few weeks, sent him a letter (“What a perfect night! How can one repeat perfection? I adore adore adore you.”) and they had chatted online. The night in Avon inspired him to go on the No White Food & Eat Only When You’re Hungry Diet. He hoped there would be another night in Avon but he didn’t want to beg. His plan tonight was to soak in a hot bath, take two Amnezine, hit the sack by 9:30, and arise bright and early at 5 a.m. to take command of his final Fourth of July and bring it home in triumph. He’d saved two tablets from the twenty Dr. DeHaven prescribed in February. DeHaven had done a U-turn on pharmaceuticals since he put himself on Felicitate and nowadays you ran into more and more residents of Lake Wobegon who seemed mellower, more laid-back, even semivacant, who used to be cranky and waspish and ready to bite your head off and now they smiled and told you to have a nice day and follow your star. Amnezine was a beautiful drug that induced short-term amnesia and he had used it for some painful meetings of the Fourth of July Committee back in April when Mr. Diener was being a pain in the neck. He’d come home bruised from the hostilities, take a pill, wipe the slate clean.
He saw his wife Irene barefoot in green walking shorts and white blouse watering the hydrangeas in front. They dropped from their wad of blossoms, beads of water on the leaves. Her black hair streaked with gray pulled back with a French comb. The sound of water flowing out of the hose made him think he’d better go pee. He had already peed twice since supper, a thin trickle each time, and still gallons were left in the tank. DeHaven had put him on a pill called DynaFlo to shrink the prostate and give him a stream like a thoroughbred’s but unfortunately among its side effects, listed on the bottle, was diminution of libido. Clint saw that and took himself off DynaFlo promptly—his libido was small enough as it was—and his stream dwindled to a trickle, sometimes a drip. But he thought he might make love to Irene tonight, if she didn’t stay up too late. It had been several weeks. Maybe five. Or six. A long time. The woman surely was entitled to some amorous attention. Assuming that’s what she wanted. Hard to tell. Lake Wobegon women didn’t go in for seduction, considering it beneath them. Flirtation was immature and any sort of playfulness between men and women was dangerous: You could get a Reputation. So a professional chill prevailed. Irene had been sort of sweet before the wedding and very amorous afterward because she wanted a baby but as soon as she had three of them, a full clutch, she bared her teeth when he came near. Maybe a primitive form of birth control. Snapping and snarling about the garage, the lawn, the basement, the minister’s sermon last Sunday, low water pressure, the president’s foreign policy. Once he overheard her telling her sister on the phone how uncommunicative he was, so he wrote her a note—”The reason I don’t talk is that you wouldn’t like what I have to say.” And then tore it up. But now Irene had a Latin lover. A macho man. He would have plenty to tell her. But not quite yet.
The forecast for the Fourth was for a high of 78 and for the sun to shine. He announced this to Irene. “At least you have a good day for it,” said Irene.
“What do you mean, ‘at least’?”
She grinned. She despised the Fourth, always had. A day of banging as if someone took a pipe wrench and beat on the radiators for the sheer delight of it. Her brother Irv used to compete in the pie-eating contest back before they changed the rules to disqualify contestants who vomited. Irv was able to eat and throw up more or less simultaneously. The memory of it was still vivid to her. A day of male hooting and woofing and girlish squeals and the booming of brass bands, mobs of people moving slowly, dazed by sunlight, weeping children—not so much difference between a big civic festival and, say, the evacuation of a city about to be bombed. Not that she could see.
“Pretty good summer so far,” he said.
“Oh?”
“You don’t think so?”
“Could use more rain.”
“Well, that is for sure, but it rains now and your mosquito population is going to go through the roof. So it all balances out.”
“I guess.”
Irene wasn’t easy to talk to. She worried all the time about the kids. He’d given up worrying, what good did it do? Their eldest, Tiffany, was in Atlanta, perishing in the heat, where she’d gone to be with her boyfriend who tattooed IDs on the groins of dogs and cats, and then he left her for a country singer named Misty Rivers on whose left tit he had tattooed a rose, leaving Tiffany with a pillowful of tears and a year-long lease on a mildewy apartment. Irene sent her money every week. Sometimes Tiff talked about coming back home “to get her life together.” A boomerang child. Their son, Chad, was employed in St. Cloud, a 30-year-old delivery boy, and was indulging his obsession with a video game called Unbalanced in which you burst into college classrooms and gun people down. Six loans to Chad had disappeared, like aircraft lost at sea. And Kira, the youngest, was in Monterey, California, managing Papa Bob’s Lobster Pot restaurant. She was Clint’s darling, his sweetie, his Baby Bumps, his Bumpster. Twenty-two and gone, gone, gone. It was for her that Clint carried a cell phone in his pocket, in case she should fall among bad companions and need him to tell her what to do.
A blue-green hummingbird hovered, blurred, by a honey-suckle vine. A contrail hung in the sky, a jet on the Detroit- Beijing run. She asked how everything was going. He said everything was fine. He had been lying to her without much success for a long time but he wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Nothing,” he said. “Well, something is,” she said.
He was devastated, sort of, was what was wrong. His heart was torn to shreds by an e-mail Angelica sent him on Wednesday which he read a couple dozen times:
My darling,
I thought you sho
uld know that I am dating a man I met at a meet-up in Minneapolis called People of Spirit which is people curious about psychic phenomena, mysticism, prophecy, etc. He is a sweet man and I think he could be a good partner so we are exploring that and we plan to head for California in a week or two to attend the Oxnard Institute. Is this weird that I’m telling you this? Well, you said you wanted to know everything so now you know. I love you but you are (1) married, (2) a lot older, (3) not interested in having kids and (4) not a spiritual person and I really really need that dimension in my life. That’s the truth. The truth shall make you free. I’d like to see the Fourth of July one more time and be Miss Liberty again and if you want to meet Kevin, he’ll be with me then. He was a radiologist and then his wife died and he dropped everything and became a surfer bum until he found a source of light in the poetry of Dumi. More later.
As ever,
Angelica
“As ever”? He and Angelica had been lovers. He was counting on a return engagement. She was the most amazing lover he’d ever known—a select group, to be sure, but nevertheless—she was a shot of adrenaline, a big updraft, and when he suggested dinner, a drive in the country, a visit to Avon, she (psychic that she was) parried, said, “Not so fast.” Said she needed time to think, and then she didn’t answer his e-mails, and now this.
And now her long, luxurious body and searching lips, her strong swimmer’s arms and shoulders, her delicate breasts with the delicious nipples, her bush and cleft, were the domain of another. And Clint was supposed to say that he understood and wished her well, and in fact it made him crazy. He thought of driving to St. Cloud and challenging the guy. Bump chests with him. Or maybe wire some explosives to his ignition. Easily done.
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