“He told me about tipping over privies,” said John.
Mr. Lindberg chuckled. “Torben Saetre. He used to get very apprehensive whenever Byron was around. Your dad used to drive a car that when you flicked a switch under the dashboard and revved up the engine, a flame six feet long blew out the tailpipe. We’d cruise around town and just amaze people.
“I remember your dad playing a joke on a guy on the football team named Finsen who was quite taken with himself and drove a red roadster, which he parked in front of school. Everybody was duly impressed, and one day your dad snuck out and threaded a wire loop into the upholstery in the driver’s seat and ran the wire out the back. A couple nights later Finsen was parked by the train depot with his girlfriend, and your dad and I crept up from behind with a battery and waited until it got very quiet in the car and then the girl said something like, No, or Don’t do that, and your dad touched that wire to the battery and it sent a thousand volts through the seat and poor old Finsen flew out the door like a pigeon out of the coop, and when he stopped, he discovered he had soiled his pants. Your dad and I took off running and we spent the summer working on threshing crews in North Dakota. It was a great summer. I heard that Finsen died young. Apoplexy, I believe.”
Bill handed him the paper bag and said, “Well, we won’t keep you, Mr. Lindberg. We came over with Dad’s clothes.” Mr. Lindberg set it on the table. He leaned back and smiled and shook his head. “The last privy we tipped was out at Mr. Starr’s lake home. The editor of the paper. He knew we were laying for him out in the dark and he took a lantern and a shotgun down the path to the outhouse and he yelled at us that it was loaded and he wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Well, that just made it more interesting. He had to go pretty bad and he went in and sat down and we crept forward through the weeds and when we heard him doing his business we rushed up and pushed it over onto the door. The gun went off and the lantern busted and the privy caught fire and there was only one way out for Mr. Starr—out the hole he was sitting on—and he came leaking out and he tried to avoid going into the pit and he almost succeeded. He stood there moaning and it was the sorriest thing you ever saw. We never tipped a privy after that. We didn’t have the heart to.”
“Mr. Lindberg,” said John, “I’d like to go down and see my father.” His heart was pounding as he said it. He half hoped the old man would say no, but Mr. Lindberg pointed him to the door to the basement. “Right down there,” he said. “I haven’t started on him yet, he’s just the way he arrived.”
John descended the stairs, into a cold cellar with a sour chemical smell. A refrigerator hummed in the corner. Two large tubs stood against one wall, and a row of cabinets against the other, and in the middle was a table, and there, covered by an old rubber sheet, lay the body. He stood beside it for a moment, and then pulled the sheet back.
His father lay curled on his side, knees drawn up, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open as if sucking wind, the hands clenched. John touched a hand and it was cool. He put his hand on top of his father’s head and smoothed his hair. He could not remember ever touching his father like that. Showing affection did not come easily to members of this family. The body seemed restless, straining—he stroked the head, and he put his other hand on his father’s cool, dry hand. Norwegians were not a people given to kissing and hugging. Even direct eye contact could be uncomfortable. John had once seen his brother Henry stand back-to-back with their father and converse. A whole life spent maintaining distance.
The only time John ever heard his father talk about love, as such, was in describing a horse that Uncle Svend gave him when he was seventeen.The horse was named Beauty and he rode her bareback every day after chores. He hated school, he was shy, he wasn’t in the clique of town kids who ran things, but he had that horse. “I loved that horse. She made you feel like the Prince of Paris,” his father said.
One morning his father went into the barn and Beauty was moaning and sweating, rearing up, and he saw that the old icebox that held the oats was open. She’d worked the latch open and eaten half the oats and she was foundering on it. “A horse can’t vomit,” his father explained, “so the oats were fermenting in her gut and she was bloating, which cut off her circulation, and there’s a place in the middle of the hoof, if it doesn’t get blood, it gets so painful the horse can’t walk, but you have to keep the horse walking, you can’t let her lie down, because that makes it worse.”
He walked her up and down all day, but then he fell asleep for a few hours and when he woke up, she was lying on the ground and he couldn’t get her up. She was in agony. He called the vet and the vet was out on a call, so he had to get a gun and put her away himself. He wouldn’t say more, but John could imagine him crying, putting his arms around her neck, then putting the muzzle of the gun to her beautiful forehead and thinking about how much he loved her and the gun going off and the boy, numb in shock, reaching for the shovel, digging the pit beside her, rolling her in.
John bent down and kissed his father’s hand. He whispered, “Goodbye, Dad. I love you,” and his eyes filled with tears. He pulled the sheet back over, and climbed the stairs, turning the light off behind him.
Bill and Mr. Lindberg sat in silence at the table.
“I’m going to take my brother down to the Sidetrack Tap and buy him a beer,” said John. “Mr. Lindberg? How about you?”
The old man shook his head. “I’ve got work to do,” he said. “I put it off long enough.”
• • •
Bill and John walked around the side of the house, past the hearse, and Bill said, “Why’d you do that?”
“I wanted to see him before he gets all made up, that’s all.”
“What did he look like?”
“He looked very much like our father.”
They walked down Cleveland to McKinley and turned toward downtown. The Christmas lights still hung over Main Street.
The Sidetrack was dim and smoky. A twangy song played on the jukebox, a deep mournful voice, a man sorry for his misdeeds while still persisting in them. A few patrons sat staring up at the TV like a row of rock bass on the dock, the reflection playing on their faces. Wally stood, one foot up on a beer case to ease the pain in his back. Three Norwegian bachelor farmers sat in the bachelor booth, beside the door to the men’s can, their grizzled old faces and ropy necks lit by a match flaring up. They had a bottle of Four Roses and a bucket of ice and three glasses and were looking up at Mr. Berge, who stood, one hand on the door to the men’s can, serenading them. His face was flushed, his eyes shone, as he sang:
The shepherd lay in the cool green grass,
His faithful dog lay by his ass,
His faithful sheep licked at his balls
Through a well-worn hole in his overalls.
A magpie sat in a nearby limb,
And spread its wings and shrieked at him.
The dog he barked, and the sheep she bit,
And the man he yelled, and the magpie shit.
John and Bill perched at the end of the bar near the door. Wally said, “That’s why Evelyn refuses to tend bar, she got tired of the smutty jokes.” He pulled two glasses of beer and filled two shot glasses with rye whiskey and reached across the bar and shook their hands. “Your dad was one of the finest individuals I ever met,” he said. “I knew him since we were in the fifth grade together. It’s hard to believe he’s gone. I don’t know what this town is going to do without him.” Bill put down a five and Wally waved it away. John saw a sign above the bar: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep—like my grandfather—not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car.”
“I wish the funeral were tomorrow,” said Bill. “It’s depressing hanging around here.”
“I noticed,” said John.
“Look out,” said Bill. “Harley’s coming over this way. Speaking of depressing.”
John felt the big hand on his shoulder
, and turned, and Harley sat down next to him, unshaven, wisps of gray hair poking out from under his orange cap, and he pulled out a hanky and honked. He and John’s father used to duck hunt together.
“How’s everything?” said John. Harley rubbed the back of his head gingerly.
“Slipped on the ice getting into my pickup the other night and banged my head. Don’t know if it’s a concussion or what. Slid under the truck and lay there and my sheepskin coat froze to the ice and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was able to wiggle out of the coat I’d be a dead man right now. Me and your dad together. Two funerals in one week.”
Having survived this close call, Harley said, he felt Lady Luck calling to him, and drove to the Mille Lacs Indian casino, and won several hundred dollars at blackjack, when an elderly lady in an orange pantsuit and a brown wig dropped her purse and like a true gentleman he bent down to fetch it and collect the stuff that dropped out of it, and when he came up, all his chips were gone and so was the lady. The dealer said, “I thought she was your wife.” Harley tore out to the parking lot and saw a white Caddie pull out, a lady at the wheel, and he chased her and made her pull over and then it turned out to be a different lady. Not the thief.
She had called the sheriff on her car phone meanwhile. It took Harley three hours to clear things up, sitting in the sheriff’s office, being talked to like a teenager.
“Let me buy you a drink,” said John.
Harley ordered a double bourbon on the rocks.
“Yeah,” he said, “I thought that’d be my lucky day because it was on that very same day in 1957 the St. Paul Saints invited me to come to their camp in Florida and try out. They had scouted me when I pitched for the Whippets in the State Men’s Tournament. The scout was a little guy named Ricky with a big cigar. I was working for the rendering plant picking up downed cattle, so baseball looked good to me, but Hazel about went nuts. She was my first wife. Scary woman. She told me that anybody could see I didn’t have the stuff for pro ball, even she could see it. I rode the dog down to Florida and hitchhiked twenty-five miles to the ballpark and got suited up and went out and warmed up and a coach waved me over to the mound to throw. There was a batter at the plate and the coach said, ‘Don’t mind him, he’s only there to give you the strike zone.’ Well, they forgot to tell the batter that, and he swung and hit a line drive that bounced off my forehead, and when I came to, I was in a hospital bed. They said I owed a hundred fifteen dollars for the X-rays and whatnot. I had to shinny out of there, not a dime on me, and hitchhike back to Minnesota, and it was raining to beat the band, and who wants to pick up a wet hitchhiker? Worst time of my life. I slept under bridges. I stole tomatoes out of people’s gardens.”
John put down a fiver and signaled for Wally to refill Harley’s glass.
“You wouldn’t mind if I had a beer too, would you?” Harley said. He took a swig of whiskey and chased it with a long swallow of beer.
“Anyway, I got home and Hazel was fit to be tied. She called me a sapsucker, said she rued the day she met me. There I was with these ferocious headaches and only whiskey seemed to relieve the pain, beer didn’t do the trick. I drank and she called me names and one night she came at me with a pistol and said, ‘I’ll bet you think I wouldn’t dare,’ and I said, ‘I’m not thinking anything,’ and she said, ‘That’s your problem,’ and she shot me. I woke up three days later in General Hospital. They decided to leave the bullet in. I pretty much recovered except I can’t remember songs. Nothing. You could play me ‘Happy Birthday to You’ and I wouldn’t remember ever having heard it. I was a big Buddy Holly fan, and now I hear ‘Peggy Sue’ and I can tell it’s music but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Otherwise, I was normal, except for the headaches, and sometimes I’d have a seizure and they would have to hold my tongue down. Otherwise, I was okay.”
John signaled to Wally, and Wally poured Harley another shot of bourbon and a glass of beer.
“Yeah, they put me on muscle relaxants for a while, until I figured out it was those pills that gave me an overwhelming urge to drive toward bright lights. I’d see headlights approach and have to pull over to the shoulder so as not to drive head-on into someone. Once I picked up a hitchhiker and asked him to drive and he did and I dozed off and when I woke up the car was on a parking ramp in St. Paul and my billfold was missing. But that’s another story. Johnny, can I borrow ten dollars from you until Wednesday?”
John pulled out his billfold and gave Harley a twenty. “Thanks,” Harley said. He turned to Bill and said, “It was a pleasure meeting you. I was a good friend of your dad’s. He was a fine gentleman.” He tossed down his drink and stood up, thanked John and Bill again, and when they departed a few minutes later, he had changed the twenty for two rolls of dimes and was engaged in cribbage with Mr. Berge at the end of the bar and seemed to be winning.
• • •
Everyone was in bed when they got home; the house was dark. Bill tiptoed up the stairs, and John picked up the kitchen phone and called his apartment. He sat on the counter and looked out the window at the backyard, lit by a streetlamp in the alley, a cone of light on the snow, the garbage cans crowned with snow. The phone rang six times in New York and then his voice said, “Hi. It’s John. At the sound of the beep, leave a message, and don’t forget to smile.” And a beep. “Kyle?” he said. “Kyle, if you’re there, pick up. Just want to say hi. It’s me. John.” But she was gone, evidently. He could see her naked sitting up in bed beside him but she was gone, all gone.
10.
TRUCKSTOP
I did this story at the Seattle Opera House on a bill with the guitarist Chet Atkins, the first of many shows we did together. He was an elegant man, a better storyteller than I, a musician who never had a bad night, and I flew out to be his opening act, or thought I would be, and then he insisted on putting me on in the second half. I was going to tell jokes and he said, “No, tell a story, that’s what they’re going to want you to do.” And this one about Florian Krebsbach was the one he suggested. Chet liked to pace backstage, noodling on a small guitar, and not be interrupted, and in the vast darkness of the opera house stage, he walked back and forth playing stream-of-consciousness guitar, and I sat on a stool and managed to remember most of “Truckstop.”
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Florian and Myrtle Krebsbach left for Minneapolis on Tuesday, a long haul for them. They’re no spring chickens, and it was cold and raining, and he hates to drive anyway. His eyesight is poor and his ’66 Chev only has 47,000 miles on her, just like new, and he’s proud of how well he has cared for it. Myrtle had to go down for a checkup. She doesn’t go to Dr. DeHaven or the doctors in Saint Cloud, because she’s had checkups from them recently and they say she is just fine. So she doesn’t trust them. She is pretty sure she might have cancer. She reads “Questions and Answers on Cancer” in the paper and has seen symptoms there that sound familiar, so when she found a lump on the back of her head last week and noticed blood on her toothbrush, she called a clinic in Minneapolis, made an appointment, and off they went. He put on his good carcoat and a clean Pioneer Seed Corn cap, Myrtle wore a red dress so she would be safe in Minneapolis traffic. He got on Interstate 94 in Avon and headed south at forty miles an hour, hugging the right side, her clutching her purse, peering out of her thick glasses, semis blasting past them, both of them upset and scared, her about brain tumors, him about semis. Normally she narrates a car trip, reading billboards, pointing out interesting sights, but not now. When they got beyond the range of the Rise ’N Shine show, just as Bea and Bob were coming to the “Swap ’N Shop” feature, a show they’ve heard every morning for thirty years, they felt awful, and Florian said, “If it was up to me, I’d just as soon turn around and go home.”
It was the wrong thing to say, with her in the mood she was in, and she was expecting him to say it and had worked up a speech in her mind in case he did. “Well, of course. I’m sure you would rather turn arou
nd. You don’t care. You don’t care one tiny bit, and you never have, so I’m not surprised that you don’t now. You don’t care if I live or die. You’d probably just as soon I died right now. That’d make you happy, wouldn’t it? You’d just clap your hands if I died. Then you’d be free of me, wouldn’t you—then you’d be free to go off and do your dirty business, wouldn’t you.”
Florian, with his ’66 Chev with 47,003 miles on it, wouldn’t strike most people as a candidate for playboyhood, but it made sense to her—forty-eight years of marriage and she had finally figured him out, the rascal. She wept. She blew her nose.
He said, “I would too care if you died.”
She said, “Oh yeah, how much? You tell me.”
Florian isn’t good at theoretical questions. After a couple minutes she said, “Well, I guess that answers my question. The answer is, you don’t care a bit.”
It was his idea to stop at the truckstop, he thought coffee would calm him down, and they sat and drank a couple cups apiece, and then the pie looked good so they had some, banana cream and lemon meringue, and more coffee. They sat by the window, not a word between them, watching the rain fall on the gas pumps. They stood up and went and got in the car, then he decided to use the men’s room. While he was gone, she went to the ladies’ room. And while she was gone, he got in behind the wheel, started up, checked the side mirror, and headed out on the freeway. Who knows how this sort of thing happens, he just didn’t notice, his mind was on other things, and Florian is a man who thinks slowly so he won’t have to go back and think it over again. He was still thinking about how much he’d miss her if she was gone, how awful he’d feel, how empty the house would be with him lying alone in bed at night, and all those times when you want to turn to someone and say, “You won’t believe what happened to me,” or “Did you read this story in the newspaper about the elk in Oregon?” or “Boy, Johnny Carson is looking old, ain’t he? And Ed, too,” and she wouldn’t be there for him to point this out to—and he turned to tell her how much he’d miss her and she wasn’t there. The seat was empty. You could have knocked him over with a stick.
The Keillor Reader Page 11