by Steve Hely
At this point I slipped my eyes around the table, not quite sure that this was really happening. Is this guy for serious? But they all kept staring at Tom.
“Three days later, they finally dug through. Jack was dead. But they found next to him a count pad and a broken-down pencil. Jack musta known he was finished, and while he was trapped, he wrote a note to his wife, now widow. Started out Know that I love you. And there was a message to the kids, too, and some of that. But then the writing trailed off, it grew all scratchy, hard to make out. What Jack had written about was the smell of washed linen. Paragraphs and paragraphs about it.
“The miners, they figured old Jack had kept it together to say a word to his wife and kids but then the gas got to him. Driven crazy down there, writing in the dark, his mind had just caught hold of something at the end. But Bill told me that the widow couldn’t believe that. She read that note over and over, trying to find something in it, thinking it must be a message, a cry out from just at heaven’s door, I guess. The widow, she started to wash her linens, twice, three times a week. And every time she did, she’d grab neighbors, and tell ’em, ‘I think I’m getting at it. I think I know what Jack was trying to tell me.’ One week she’d say, ‘He was trying to tell me life’s like clean linen.’ Next week she’d say, ‘I finally understand it now, he was asking me to forgive him, it was a message about how we all need to be washed clean before God.’ And the neighbors, they’d just smile and nod and agree. ’Cause what else can you do?”
Tom Buckley finished his story, and took a big sip of beer.
“That was old Bill’s story anyway. Here’s to him.”
What? What the hell was that? I expected everybody to frantically make excuses and leave. ’Cause, seriously, what a fucking downer! We’re all just trying to drink some beers!
Tom Buckley turned to me, and said, “How about you, Pete? You know any lonesome stories?”
Now, if I’d taken a minute to think about it, I could have come up with something terrific, with earthy blue-collar touches.
But Tom Buckley’s eyes made me jumpy. Stupidly, I started with the first thing I thought of. And once I was launched I was committed.
“This one time my mom took me shopping at the mall, I was maybe five or so. I was completely bored, of course. I’d just seen Empire, so I was pretending I was Luke Skywalker, and I’d crawl around under the racks of dresses and pretend I was with Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah. Which was awesome. It was dark and crazy under there. But then suddenly it seemed like a lot of time had passed, and I didn’t know where my mom was, and I looked out, and I couldn’t see her, and I freaked out.”
I drank more beer, which everyone interpreted as a dramatic pause rather than a conclusion.
“Then what happened?”
“Oh, she was just over arguing with the returns lady. She heard me crying and came over.”
Awkward shuffling could be felt around the table. Tom Buckley gracefully ended it by slapping me on the back and announcing, “Being a kid can be lonesome!”
But I knew what I’d done wrong. I’d profaned the evening. These people treated stories like sacraments. They looked sorry for me that I didn’t.
Marianne spoke up. “I had a boyfriend who used to work for the Forest Service. We broke up—long story, different story. Anyway, one time he told me this. The Forest Service used to hire college kids in the summer, to hike out to towers way far out in the woods to watch for forest fires, one guy to a tower. They’d pack up three weeks of food, supplies, and stuff and hike out there. And they’d just sit, with a radio, and call in to the station if they saw anything—lightning strikes, brush fires starting up, whatever. Three weeks later, replacements would hike out to start the new shift, and they’d hike back. Anyways, obviously this job attracted sort of weird guys, loners, philosophers, poets, guys getting over women.
“So, Mike—my boyfriend—told me guys would bring out just libraries of books, chessboards, crossword puzzles, whatever, because they were gonna be sitting, alone, for three weeks. Guys would bring just stacks of paperbacks, like ten Nick Boyle books. But one summer this guy came in, weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, little pale guy from the East Coast somewhere. And Mike was helping him set up and he asked him what he was bringing with him. And all he was bringing was a copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. And Mike looked at it, saw how thick it was, and said dude, this book isn’t gonna last you more than two days. You’re gonna go nuts out there. And the guy looked back at him, dead serious, and said, ‘This book could last forever.’ So anyway, Mike figures it’s not his problem to keep this guy entertained, wishes him luck, sends him off.
“But that was the summer they had those freak snowstorms up in the mountains, ’cause of that volcano in Indonesia or whatever. Most of these watchtower guys, they hear about what’s coming over the radio, and they get out of there when the snow first starts falling. And by the second day, the Forest Service is radioing everybody in the towers and telling them you better get back here stat. But this kid, the pale kid, his radio’s out. And he doesn’t get the message. On the third day, it’s just a blizzard, and they decide they better go out and get him, but they make it about four miles before the snow is just too bad. They turn back, and they figure he’s just gonna have to wait it out.
“So it snows for a week, and this is in June, so nobody was ready for it. Then the snows melt, and there’s floods, and that washes everything out, and it’s July before they can even get a rescue party together to go out and relieve this poor kid that’s been stuck in a watchtower in a blizzard.
“Mike was one of the guys that went out there. He’s worried sick about him, and they hike as fast as they can, but it still takes a day and a half to get to the tower. The whole way they’re wondering how this kid made it. So they get to the tower, they climb up the ladder, and they find the kid. He froze to death. Mike used to have nightmares about it, because by then the flies had got to the body. And the weird thing was, they had a little hut in the tower, so that would have been some shelter at least. But the kid was outside. He was outside, on the deck. And Mike told me the kid died just sitting Indian style, outside. And he was slumped over his copy of Leaves of Grass.”
For a while nobody said anything. I certainly didn’t, because, fuck. That was a story, all right.
Then Tom Buckley said, “The disdain and calm of martyrs.” Ethan nodded.
I skipped Leaves of Grass in high school but I’ll make a confident guess that’s what he was quoting.
After that the drinking continued. Even a few jokes. Tom Buckley told a story about helping John Cheever find an alley to pee in in Iowa City. But I certainly didn’t say anything. I was feeling a vague but palpable kind of pretty bad. We closed out the place.
In the stories in Prairiegrass Review, the characters’ epiphanies are muted and subtle. I don’t know if that’s an official rule for publication or just an informal agreement, but that’s how it is. You don’t spell it out. The Prairiegrass Review version of my trip to Montana would end with me lying on my bed at the Super 8, watching a rebroadcast of an especially uneventful Colorado Avalanche game, eating Funions because I’d resolved to give Funions another try.
But Pamela McLaughlin spells everything out: why people do stuff, what they’re thinking about, and so on. It may be worse, artistically, but it’s what people prefer, so that’s what I’ll go with here:
As I lay on my bed at the Super 8 watching a rebroadcast of an especially uneventful Colorado Avalanche game, reconfirming that Funions are terrible, I thought about Marianne’s story. Ethan, Marianne, Tom Buckley, all of them—they were living up here in this shit hole, damn near pulling their hair out, driving around in trucks with duct tape on the windows, telling each other these awful stories they’d accumulated, because of one idea. Because they believed that getting a story right, telling it right, holding it, was a holy duty. They seemed to believe that getting a story right could save the world somehow. Or at least make you
a better person. And to fail to tell a story honestly was sacrilege.
The story I’d put down, whatever it was, wasn’t honest. It was a fraud. For the first time, I wondered if that was a kind of crime.
16
Dad didn’t know much about Vietnamese food. Brats, sauerkraut, and Chicago dogs, heavy on the chili, were more his style. If you couldn’t order it at Bo Merrick’s Sports Bar and Grill on West Addison, it wasn’t worth eating. We were the only family I knew that glazed their Thanksgiving turkey with Miller Genuine Draft.
But as I grew older, Dad decided that maybe I ought to know something about the culture that I came from. He took out the Yellow Pages and found a restaurant called Pho 54 up in Evanston. “Authentic Vietnamese Cuisine.” So one Sunday, the three of us set off for what would prove to be a very memorable brunch.
The waiter sat us down in friendly but garbled English, no doubt wondering what this awkward little black-haired girl was doing with the big guy in the Bears jacket and the lady with the permed blonde hair. Some kind of kid exchange program maybe.
Opening the menu, Dad immediately looked daunted. I hadn’t seen him so confused since our doctor gave him a pamphlet on menstruation.
“Spring rolls, those sound good, as an appetizer,” Mom suggested, as usual trying to be helpful. Dad ordered those confidently—at least they had an English name.
The waiter dutifully brought over four little logs wrapped in rice paper, set them down, and wandered off. He trusted us to know what to do. Big mistake.
Mom figured the best course was to plow ahead smiling. So she cut the roll into slices, like a butcher carving up a salami, and arranged them neatly about her plate.
“Look Dennis, cucumber!” she said, offering some much-needed encouragement.
Dad, however, didn’t want to be fooled. He knew perfectly well that, Vietnamese or not, nobody eats paper.
So his picked up a spring roll and unwrapped it, like peeling a banana. He dumped out the contents on his plate. A messy pile of shrimp, cucumber, and lemongrass sat in front of him.
“Boy they sure don’t give you much, do they?” he said, obviously disappointed.
Mom practically gasped in horror, and looked around to make sure no one had heard.
“Dennis!” She leaned in close and whispered. “They do the best they can.”
—excerpt from The Luckiest Polack in Chicago by Ellen Krapowski (Copyright © 2006 Doubleday, reprinted with permission)
My emotional rope was already frayed on the day an episode of Oprah made me cry. Now, I know a writer talking about Oprah is like a sinner talking about God, but bear with me here.
The flying schedule that took me from Billings back to Boston was one of these awful stop-in-Phoenix combinations, such that I landed at Logan in purple predawn, before Dunkin’ Donuts had even opened. When I turned my phone back on I had a message from Jon Sturges.
“Pete, Jonny Sturg here. Listen. You might get a call from the US Attorney’s Office. They got these bureaucrats over there who are hounding us, completely trumped up; this is why I’m thinking of moving the whole thing to one of those islands. Anyway, just play it cool. I’m sure it’ll blow over. But—um, they took a look at some of the computers and they do have your name, so—whatevs, I’m sure it’ll blow over.”
So I had to file that away in the “Things That Might Become a Huge Nuisance Later” section of my brain.
Back at the apartment, Hobart wasn’t in his room. In the kitchen I found a pot of untended instant mashed potatoes. It appeared they’d been left for several days, because hovering above them were several unidentifiable exotic varieties of fly. I crawled into bed in my pants.
When I woke up, around two-thirty in the afternoon, I found solace in my Panasonic 54-inch flat-screen TV.
I’d spent a decent chunk of my advance on it. The Tornado Ashes Club hadn’t afforded me a house, but a 54-inch flat-screen was a fine substitute.
I went to one of the HD channels, showing aerial footage of British Columbia, and flipped through the mail that had accumulated.
There was a note from Polly. “Pete,” it said, and I could hear it delivered in the newly nasal tones she’d acquired since leaving me. “I saw your book at our [our! That bitch] local bookstore the other day. I was so proud! Always knew you had it in you. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet—this wedding stuff is nuts—but I’m looking forward to it. And I’m so glad you’re coming to the wedding. It’ll be so nice to see you again. Best, [!] Polly.”
What a despicable she-monster she was. It was all the worse because I admired the craftiness of it—the mock-kind note, the gentle tone, the reminder of the wedding. It was a counterintuitive strike worthy of Sun Tzu. It was an attempt to reverse my victory, to pretend to be proud (PROUD!) of me so that at her wedding my precocious success as a famous novelist would seem to bolster her grandeur rather than outshine it.
It shook me, in any case, and I’m embarrassed to admit here that I took my vengeance out on the pizza guy, tipping him less than a dollar, although I tried to make it up a few weeks later when not only did I overtip but I ordered some breadsticks I didn’t even want.
All of my problems could’ve been solved, or at least temporarily removed, by a round of daytime drinking with Derek. But he’d gotten back together with his Mount Holyoke girl, the one who’d taken pity on him when he came down from his tree those years ago. So he couldn’t be rallied.
So alone I ate, and clicked around on the HD TV.
On a TV like that, almost everything is engrossing. On MSNBC, Olbermann looms Godlike, leaning forward into your living room with a definitive pose. On the Spanish-language talk shows you can see the details of the flimsy sets, the lines where they stopped painting or bent back the boards. On Hotrageous Celebrity Couples on E!, Angelina’s image covers the screen and dominates the room like an Easter Island head. I’d gotten good speakers, too, so on the bass-fishing show you could hear the echoing thwack of desperate fins against the steel deck of the boat.
I stopped clicking to make a study of the face of an Asian woman, midthirties maybe, whose makeup artists had counted on a blurrier resolution than my Panasonic provided. As a result there were pockets of her forehead much shinier than others. Stopping to analyze, I realized I was watching Oprah.
Turning the sound down, I made a game of trying to decide why this Asian woman was there. She wasn’t quite thin enough to be an expert on dieting. She was too young and unharried to give marriage advice. She appeared too cheery to be offering warnings about child molesters or why boys are lagging behind in school. But Oprah—on whom a much more balanced makeup effort had been exerted—listened with one of her serious faces. A psychologist of friendship maybe? I surrendered and turned the sound back up.
“… how about at school, did the kids treat you any differently?” Oprah was asking.
“Well, when I was really young, kids were just curious. Because my eyes were different, they’d ask me if I could see everything, or if it was like I was always squinting. ‘Can you see up here?’ Yup. I can,” said the Asian woman.
The audience laughed at this. I laughed, too, because I remembered John Whitbeck giving a similar eye exam to Chris Pai in second grade, the results of which were considered to be a baffling but decisive scientific rejection of our understanding of how eyes worked.
“But most kids just treated me like everyone else. And I was just like everyone else—birthday parties, school, I was a huge Cubs fan, I had a crush on Kirk Cameron …”
The audience laughed again.
“Now just like everyone else, you had a bully, all kids have bullies,” Oprah said. She looked to the audience. “Raise your hand anybody here that didn’t have a bully.” The camera didn’t catch this, but Oprah said “You few were probably the ones doing the bullying!” Everyone laughed again, and Oprah turned to her guest. “You tell a great story about a bully in the book.”
“That’s right, Mitchell was his name.”
“Mitchell, that can be a bully name,” Oprah said. Very astutely observed! I agreed with laughter as did the audience. There were certain bully names, and Mitchell was definitely one. Why did people condemn their child like that?
“Mitchell used to call me names and chase me home from school, and I complained about it to my dad. Now, my dad, of course, classic Chicagoan, he tells the story to his buddies at the bar. Big guys, factory workers. And they form a plan. So one day after school, Mitchell follows me home, calling me names and throwing twigs at me. Just as I’m running up to the door, my dad comes out. And I’m crying, and Mitchell’s standing there trying to look innocent.” The Asian woman did a funny impression of Mitchell trying to look innocent.
“My dad says, ‘So, you like to bother girls, huh?’ And Mitchell shakes his head. Then my dad says, ‘Well, my friends and I, we like to bother bullies. Why don’t you meet my friends?’ And out the door of our house come about a dozen of the biggest, toughest, meanest-looking Chicago guys you’ve ever seen. And Mitchell takes one look at them and starts crying.”
The audience enjoyed this very much. They laughed loudly, and so did I. Some of the audience started applauding. I did not, because I was alone and it seemed inappropriate.
“That was the last day he ever bothered me!”
Oprah held on to the Asian woman’s knee, by way of “let’s-hold-it-right-there.”
“When we get back, we’re going to meet Ellen’s dad!” Oprah said these last three words in a chant that got the audience riled up as the commercials came on.
I didn’t even change the channel. Maybe if I had—if I’d just thought to check back on British Columbia—everything might’ve played out differently.
“We’re back with Ellen Krapowski, a Hmong—am I pronouncing that right?”
Ellen nodded.
“A Hmong-American who at age three”—Oprah pronouncing all this in her solid from-the-lungs voice—“was adopted by Bill and Denise Krapowski right here in Illinois. She’s written a memoir about that experience called The Luckiest Polack in Chicago. Now Ellen, you’ve written that your dad was your greatest inspiration growing up.”