He struck a pose in front of the mirror. It was a different look, that was for sure. Maybe too different. He put the sombrero back in the closet, and the jacket. The pants were tight, but oh well.
He put the jacket back on. Took it off. It’s okay to dress up but you don’t want people to think you’ve lost your marbles. He took off the shirt, put on a white T-shirt. That was better. Easy does it. And then he took off the T-shirt and put on the flowered one. What the hell. He pinned a button to one of the roses, it said LIBERTY.
Irene looked in the door and clicked her tongue. “Sort of goofy but I like it. Is this the new you?” She rolled her eyes. “Could be fun.”
His brother Clarence was loitering on the front porch when Clint came out the door to go downtown. “Didn’t know it was Halloween,” he said. Clint pointed at his Liberty button and Clarence grimaced. “Whatever you say. Not sure people are going to want Zorro to fix their mufflers, though.” Clarence was on a blood thinner and it affected his sense of humor.
Clint told him about the DNA test, done at a lab in Phoenix. “We are Hispanic. Norwegian no longer. We can give up eating lutefisk. We never need to listen to that stupid ‘Helsa dem der Hjemme’ anymore. Ja, hey. Guess what? We’re free, compadre. Is that a good deal or what?”
“Is this a joke?”
“I don’t know. But you and I are about fifty-eight percent Spanish. If that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. We are Hispanic Americans, brothers to the Jimenezes and the Garcias. We don’t need to go to Syttende Mai and wear those dumb knee pants. No more pickled herring. We can eat food that tastes like something. We can laugh, we can cry, we can dance—”
“Maybe you need to go to a doctor and have your brains looked at,” said Clarence.
“Let’s have him look at Art first and then Berge and Viola and I’ll wait my turn in line.”
Clarence blanched. “Somebody ought to lock Art up. For his own sake. He’s been a lunatic lately. Running around shooting squirrels. I found three squirrel corpses in our garden. Heads blown off. I think the guy is using a silencer.”
“Art took a bus to Montana,” said Clint.
“And what about you? People say you’re planning to leave town. I get asked about it every day.”
“People have big imaginations.”
“Well, I’m sorry you resigned. You’re leaving big shoes to fill. You did a great job.” He sat down in the big white lawn chair that had been Dad’s.
“Did I?”
“Of course you did.”
“Then why didn’t anybody ever say so?”
Clarence shrugged.
What Clint wanted to tell his brother was, Tell your wife not to count her chickens. So you want to retire. Fine. Go right ahead. God bless you. But the dinero is gone. Lost. Perdido. Don’t imagine I’m going to buy out your half at the ridiculous price you mentioned back in April. You’re dreaming. The net worth of Bunsen Motors is nowhere near that. You can get as mad as you like but I will not take out a mortgage so I can pay you a fortune for a dealership that is going to go belly-up in a few years, meanwhile you and Arlene are collecting seashells on Sanibel Island and I am busting my hump trying to raise the Titanic. Our faithful old customers are abandoning the big dealerships with the pennants and balloons and the free hot dogs so they can save a few hundred bucks.
They are cutting our throats. People we sit next to in church, the parents of our kids’ best friends. Maybe they know we’re Spanish, we’re not of their northern tribe.
Clarence looked away, embarrassed. “Not sure I should tell you, but people’ve been talking about you. Not sure you know that.” Well, I hope it was interesting. “Somebody said you’re having an affair with a young woman in St. Cloud.” This is true. “Does Irene know?” Irene knows everything, of course. “So what’s the story?” I’m in love with her and she’s found someone else. So it’s all over. “So you’re sure it’s over?” Pretty sure. I wish it weren’t but probably it is. I’ll find out more today. “Just don’t blow up your life so you can have sex with somebody. Okay?” Already had the sex, and it was wonderful of course, now I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life. Same as everybody else. “Have you spoken to David Ingqvist about this? I think you should.” He’s got enough on his mind without me adding to it.
Anyway. How’s the pyrotechnics?
16. EXPLOSIVES
Clarence brightened up. Fireworks was his big love, after Arlene. “It’s going to be spectacular. With eighty-five grand in the budget. We never had that kind of dough before. How’d you ever get money from the Department of Homeland Security?”
“Well, they wanted to give us a bomb disposal unit, which we didn’t need, so we asked for rockets instead. We saved them about fifty thousand dollars. They’re not called fireworks, by the way; they are ‘aerial diversion devices.’ A-D-D. Ten-inch diameter shells that go up fifteen hundred feet.”
“Yeah, but this hits the headlines and you and me are gonna be getting our pictures in the paper, coming out of the court-house holding hats over our faces.”
Clint stood up and adjusted his pants. “The war on terror is a real war and a big part of any war is morale. This is a war without a front line. We’re all in it and we all need morale builders lest we give up and just hunker down and wait for Islamic extremists to come in and blow up the water tower. People need to remain vigilant and vigilance is the hardest thing there is. To be on the lookout for strangers wanting to give you odd packages. Strange cars circling through town at night. Women with back-packs. Olive-skinned men who inquire about landing areas. We need people to be on the lookout. So we’re building community spirit so people will be watchful for suspicious activities.”
“Where did you learn to bullshit like this?”
“All I know is what I see on television,” he said.
Clarence pulled a diagram out of his pocket. “I ordered that Vesuvius Curtain from China. A hundred feet long. You set it up on a steel mesh and it spells out ‘Lake Wobegon’ in letters ten feet high, it’s a regular curtain of fire.” The Vesuvius Curtain would be hung between two pontoon boats that would race across the lake as the ADDs went up from the ballpark. Very deluxe. But the emphasis was going to be on rockets, four-footers that blast up in the air and burst in clusters two hundred feet across—silver, gold, blue, white, red—ten solid minutes of flaming thunder! And one rocket that would spell out CNN in flaming letters. They could set up a camera at the end of the dock at Art’s Baits & Night O’ Rest Motel. A panoramic view.
The fireworks used to be the province of the Volunteer Fire Department but they had proven unreliable. The Fourth of July was a big party for them, and two years ago the weight of the firemen on the firing raft changed the trajectory so that forty-five shells headed, one after the other, straight at the crowd on shore—like the British bombardment of Fort McHenry, and the firemen dove into the water and swam for shore as the crowd panicked and ran, bombs bursting in air and also skittering along the grass and blowing up at people’s heels as families fled for their lives. A year after, children still awoke screaming from bad dreams. The firemen blamed the mishap on a change of wind direction. “Bullshit,” said Clint. What was worse, one of the firemen, in his extreme humiliation, swam in the dark to shore and crept home and hid in the basement, and so the lake had to be dragged for his body and men with long poles walked the shore, lanterns in hand, and his weeping wife and children huddled in the Chatterbox Cafe at 3 a.m., missing their sweet daddy, who, when he resurrected himself around noon the next day and appeared in the flesh to Gary and LeRoy who’d gone to the home to inform the family that one of Daddy’s shoes had been found, was not greeted warmly as you might expect a dead man would be. They stuffed him in the backseat of the cruiser and yelled at him and took him down to the basement of the town hall and stuck him in the town’s only cell, an 8-X-5-X-8-foot cage next to the old coal furnace, and toted up the expense of the search, and made him sign a promissory note. You do not put people
to that sort of trouble unless you are actually drowned—personal humiliation is not a good enough reason.
So Clint proposed that the Committee hire a company called Aerial Display to do the fireworks last year. “I have the greatest respect for firemen,” he said at a Committee meeting attended by thirty firemen, “but there have been advances in pyrotechnics now that you can put a microchip in the payload, such as the Umbrella of Fire.” He showed a slide of the Umbrella of Fire. Spectacular.
Mr. Diener took it upon himself to defend the firemen. He said, “Well, maybe we had a bad year but one swallow doesn’t make a summer and I say, don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” The crowd cheered.
Clint said, “The point is: We can do better. Really light up the sky. There’s one called the Sky Writer. It’s a cluster of rockets, radio-controlled from a computer. You program the software, detonate the fuse, up it goes, and it writes up to forty-five characters across the sky—’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ or ‘O say does that star-spangled banner still wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave’ or whatever you want—all of it surrounded by a High Sky Fountain followed by three Aerial Cannon Volleys. They set it off once in Texas and people were so moved they burst into tears and went home and wrote out checks to the IRS for everything they’d cheated Uncle Sam out of for the past ten years.”
“How much does that cost?” said Viola Tors.
“It’s expensive. But not that expensive.”
“Well,” Diener said, “I don’t see the need for some newfangled gizmo with all that firepower, especially not with children around—your computer could be off by one decimal point, and we’d have death and destruction on a scale this town has never seen before, and a mass funeral, tiny white coffins on the gymnasium floor. Do whatever you think best. Maybe I’m in the minority here. So be it. But I just pray to God it doesn’t wind up in some horrible tragedy. Of course it’s a slap in the face to our firemen who, year after year after year, have given selflessly of themselves, with no pay, holding benefit dances and bake sales to pay for their equipment, in order to defend this town against fire and to provide emergency lifesaving services. All of you are getting older, and if the day comes, God forbid, you’re crossing Main Street and feel chest pains and you grab hold of a light pole and you fall down and lie there, your face on the cold concrete, hardly able to draw a breath, I hope to God someone is going to come running and administer CPR, one of the volunteer firemen who you are telling, ‘You’re good enough to save my life but you’re not good enough to set off fireworks in this town.’ But he will do his professional best to save your life so that you can see many more Fourth of Julys because that’s just the kind of people we are.”
And he rose majestically from the Committee table, tears glittering in his eyes, and brushed the strands of hair across his bald head and strode from the room to great applause and commotion. A great performance. And then the discussion dragged on. Some firemen left. And Diener returned with a long strand of toilet paper stuck to his shoe. It was about ten feet long. “You have toilet paper on your shoe,” said Viola, trying to be helpful. “Let’s take a vote and get this over,” he said. Father Wilmer knelt and removed the paper and Diener said, “Who put that there?” And Aerial Display was hired to do the show and the firemen were put on standby alert and the show was spectacular. It did what a fireworks show should do—it gives the vicarious pleasure of nearby destructive power and the crowd watches with joy and terror as the whamming and blamming get bigger and louder and the heavens are riven with flaming pods that burst into suns and the apocalypse is near and the earth shakes and the air is aflame and then one ultimate cataclysmic earth-shattering BOOMBOOMBOOM echoes in the cosmos and after it a sea of silence and everyone cheers from sheer relief and goes home, peaceful and satisfied, and all the anger is gone from them, and amity and harmony reign supreme for at least a day or two.
17. ANGELICA ARRIVES
The Bunsen brothers hiked toward Main Street and ran into Carl Krebsbach who was looking for Clint. “Lyle is fried,” he said.
Lyle was parked in a golf cart in front of Pop’s Barber Shop (“Ask him about Lano-Phyll hair stimulant for men”) and his eyes were closed. He’d put decal letters on the cart, gold with glitter, L-Y-L-E, and a bumper sticker, HONK IF YOU WANT TO SEE MY FINGER.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “Whoever you are. I need ten minutes to collect myself.” His head ached. He had chest pains. He had been on the run since midnight. The truck with the bleachers had wound up in Freeport the night before and he and Carl had to drive down there to deal with the driver who demanded a 10 percent delivery surcharge, but by 7 a.m. Lyle and his crew had set up the two sections of 12-row bleachers at the north end of Main Street, a reviewing stand—across the street, a hundred feet of curb was barricaded, with signs, RESERVED FOR CNN—IMPORTANT—NO PARKING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES—YES, THIS MEANS YOU, and then they’d gone to work on the stage for the big Honor America show.
The stage was a flatbed truck with wings for the sides and the roof and it had to be backed over the curb between two lightpoles and maneuvered into position next to a tree and then four hydraulic legs extended and placed on plywood sheets and one of the hydraulics was leaking.
“Don’t tell me everything,” said Clint. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.” And then Lyle noticed his fancy pants. “When does the rodeo start?” he said. “And which event are you? Sheep-roping?”
The high schoolers who were going to paint scenery had simply vanished so Lyle had hung four big painter’s dropcloths for a back curtain, which actually looked nice, with splotches of green and white and pale blue, and he laid a big square of red carpeting on the stage, which was splintery and rather disgusting. The last occupants of this stage were a Christian slash band from Detroit called The Castaway Demons who had, in Fergus Falls two nights ago, slaughtered a lamb on the stage and the planking stank of blood though the crew had soaped and sanded it and sprayed it with lacquer.
And there were no overhead lights. “It came without the truss,” said Carl. “The Castaway Demons evidently broke it when they swung from it. So there’s nothing to hang lights from.”
Lyle was not sure the stage was strong enough to hold the Happy Hoppers square dancers, sixteen hefty folks in matching bib overalls and red-checked shirts, if they got to stomping in rhythm, the load per square foot could bring the whole thing crashing down.
“Call Viola and ask her what to do,” Clint said. “I’m not really Chairman anymore. I’m only a figurehead.”
Lyle looked up and blinked. “Come on. Get serious.”
“I’m serious. I’m done trying to figure out this stuff.”
“You’re not done until it’s done.”
“Play it by ear,” said Clint.
Lyle shrugged. “I don’t get it—this is your parade and you’re just walking away from it? Just because that crazy Viola is on your tail. You going to let her and Diener scrub the floor with you? What kind of a deal is that? Tell ’em to take a leap.”
“Don’t get all unraveled,” said Clint. “Not worth it.”
Lyle made a face. “Anyway, we gotta get us some power cables long enough to run them out of the back door of the Mercantile. And where are the microphones?”
“Not my department,” said Clint. He put a friendly hand on his shoulder: “Your barn door’s open.”
“I don’t care,” said Lyle. “Been up all night trying to figure out this stage, and right now, I’d say, let’s burn it.”
His whole stage crew was beat. It had taken thirteen tries to get the roof up and now they weren’t sure the pins were placed properly. So Clint told Lyle to take it down and do it again. Obviously. You don’t want to spend all day thinking about it, imagining a thousand pounds of roof crashing down on the third-graders singing “This Is My Country”—so? Do it. The crew groaned. But they went back to work. That’s a leader’s job: tell people to do what they don
’t want to know they have to do, but they have to do it. They really do.
“We gotta brace that up where the hydraulic’s leaking,” said Carl. “It’s simple.”
“You’re crazy,” said Lyle. “First of all, you push that flatbed up over the curb, you’re liable to bust it and then the rental company takes us to the cleaners. Why not just put the stage down at the ballpark like we always used to?”
Clint pointed out that the ballpark was in use: The fireworks were set up there.
“It’s not that complicated,” said Carl. “Go get the John Deere and we’ll hook it up and I’ll show you.”
“You want to bust the stage, do it. We can torch the sucker later. I’m going to get some Pepto-Bismol.”
A horn honked and a truck rolled up with four brass cannons on a trailer—Civil War replicas—and a van full of Civil War troopers. No wonder the cannons hadn’t boomed that morning—Berge never told them when to arrive. Clint waved them toward the hill up behind the high school. His phone was ringing. Todd said the governor might make it by three. Irene said she’d heard Angelica might be coming and she hoped it wasn’t true. “Have a little respect,” she said. The head wrangler called to say the caravan of horse trailers was on its way. No problem. Angelica left a message: Where could she change into her costume?
Clint walked toward the café and lit a smoke. He had quit smoking three years ago but he resumed this spring, what with Angelica and the Fourth of July. He took a deep drag and he could feel eyes fixed on him. A Smoker. One of the last to hang on to the filthy habit. The look in those eyes said, Don’t you know the statistics? Yes, of course, but life isn’t about statistics, it’s about adventure. He was Hispanic and his people knew about these things. In Granada old grizzled men sat under the olive trees and enjoyed a smoke in the afternoon and a glass of tequila. The world isn’t a hospital. We are stronger than we think. Smoke irritates the lungs and we thrive on irritation, it stimulates the blood. He smoked his cigarette wishing one of those Boy Scouts would walk over and say, “You shouldn’t be doing that, Mr. Bunsen.” And he would say, “Well, I am a man who does things I shouldn’t and that’s why I’m happy. Maybe you’ll figure this out someday, kid. Sin boldly. Don’t let kindergarten ruin your life. Run in the halls.”
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