Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  The parasail folded into an eight-foot case. He could travel the country, offering his services. Find a powerboat to tow him and he’d be in business. Collect the ashes, mix in the glitter, maybe hire a bagpiper to play “Amazing Grace”—and earn good money by giving people something they can’t find elsewhere.

  He drove north toward Lake Wobegon taking the scenic route up the river through Anoka. Just beyond Anoka, he changed his mind about the ash-scattering business. He was starting to think bookstore. Books about aviation and astronomy and also science fiction. Cosmic Books. He was also thinking about starting a cleaning service. Mom’d like that.

  He needed to talk to Duane about Saturday. The guy was known to forget things. And he needed to take the parasail on a test run. On the radio, they said a seventy-eight-year-old Minneapolis man had withdrawn thirty-five thousand dollars from his bank to give to an FBI man who needed it to catch an embezzler. But the FBI man wasn’t with the FBI. He switched over to music. It sounded like Mozart or Haydn. He liked it. Very symmetrical and one thing developed gracefully into another. No wonder they say Mozart stimulates brain development. He makes you believe in a fundamentally orderly world and isn’t that the beginning of intelligence—a faith in order? There is no intelligence without order—

  When he woke up, a few seconds later, he was hanging upside down by his seat belt and shoulder harness and the horn was stuck. He smelled grass and cow manure and something burning. He remembered the van turning over and rolling but not how it happened. He hung there, hands gripping the wheel. There was shouting nearby and someone kneeling in the grass and then a woman’s face in the window, drawn and tense.

  “Are you all right?” Her long black hair hung down. She looked so much like Becky Thorsen from high school.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “We better get you out,” she said. “Can you move your legs?”

  And then a man in blue coveralls appeared on the other side. He wrestled the door open and crawled in and took hold of Kyle and the girl snapped the seat belt open and Kyle dropped into the man’s arms. They boosted him out and carried him forty or fifty feet away and lay him in tall grass as a fire truck came screaming up and two burly guys in gray T-shirts and jeans scrambled down the ditch with fire extinguishers in hand and shot the engine compartment full of foam.

  He raised his head. “Don’t move,” the girl said. So he put it down. And then the cops got there, asked him who he was, shone a light in his eyes, checked his license. And then an ambulance.

  “I’m okay. Really,” he said. But they had their job to do. They slid the backboard under him and hoisted him up on the gurney and bucked it up the slope and slid him in the back door and off they went. He moved his right toe and then his left, his right hand, his left hand. He was okay. Thank you, Jesus. And now he had a cover for quitting school. A near-death experience. He swerved to avoid a smaller car and took the van into the ditch, narrowly missing a power pole. Had he hit it, he’d be a deadster. Two bowling balls, Grandma in one, Kyle in the other. As he lay there in the grass, waiting for help to arrive, he thought to himself, I want to dedicate my life to serving others. He didn’t know just how yet, but it wouldn’t be scattering ashes.

  Mom would go for that. He couldn’t wait to tell her.

  He was wheeled into the ER of the St. Cloud Hospital and there was a man in a gold lamé suit and black wig and an enormous belt, throwing up into a blue plastic bag, heaving his insides out, sicker than a dog. He sat in a blue plastic chair in the hall and the ambulance crew wheeled Kyle right up next to him and went off to save somebody else. Kyle lay and listened to the man retching and then he said, “Are you almost done? If not, I’m going to move.”

  The man said he was done. He rinsed his mouth with 7Up and stretched and said he felt better.

  He had gotten hammered last night and then this morning he had taken a motion-sickness drug, forgetting that he’d just taken an antianxiety drug and the three things didn’t get along. “I was heading for Little Falls, thirty minutes late for a gig, and the Highway Patrol pulled me over for doing eighty in a fifty-five and I got out of the car and threw up and that’s where we are. So I guess the Elks are not going to get Elvis today. Big Al is going to kill me. By the way, my name is Larry Levitz. I’ve been doing Elvis for thirty-two years. I was a parachuter in the service, then I got into this.” He shrugged and closed his eyes. “And now I’m off to a wedding in Lake Wobegon.”

  *

  “Lake Wobegon?” Larry told Kyle all about the Detmer event, the hot-air balloon, the pontoon boat, and Elvis descending from the sky with a torch and singing “Burning Love”—and Kyle told Larry about the scattering of Grandma’s ashes. “She must’ve been some old lady. Mine died when I was twenty. Man, it busted me up something bad. I was real close to my grandma after I had this accident after I got out of the service. I was out hunting grouse with my best friend Patrick. About two in the afternoon we stopped to have a few beers and then went back to hunting and we were walking through the woods and I tripped on a tree and the gun went off and there he was with his head half blown off. God. I have a hard time talking about it even now. Forty years later and it’s like it was yesterday. Man, that sure turns a guy’s life around.”

  “I guess it changed Patrick’s life, too,” said Kyle.

  “He was my best friend. Suddenly there he is in the dirt with his brains blown out. Hair and blood and I just could not handle it. I said to myself, Larry, you do not want to be here. This is not a good thing at all. I took off running like a crazy person. That was a bad move. Looking back, that’s something I wish I could’ve changed.”

  Running away from an accidental homicide did seem to Kyle like a bad mistake, on top of mixing alcohol with hunting, and walking around with a loaded shotgun and the safety not on.

  *

  “I ran a couple of miles and made it to the highway and I hitchhiked all the way to Texas. I got a couple of little rides and then a trucker took me all the way to Houston.”

  “Where did you shoot him?”

  “Mississippi. Ten Mile, Mississippi,” he said, looking at Kyle as if he should’ve known that. “Just up the road from Tupelo. Elvis’s hometown. My dad grew up with Elvis. They were in Sunday school class together and helped each other memorize verses. I used to guide Elvis tours in Tupelo. Drove around in a big old bus and took ’em around to churches he sang at and the fairgrounds and all that. Took ’em to Elvis’s hideout, this deep cave where he had his visions and the angel came with the silver shields. Man, that was the best job I ever had. Until this one.”

  “What happened in Texas?”

  Larry thought for a moment, as if trying to get the whole thing straight in his own mind. “I had a buddy in Houston and I dialed his phone number but I got a couple of digits turned around in my mind so I was running out of quarters at the pay phone and there was a liquor store across the street and I still had the rifle and a couple of shells. And I was hopped up on pills and stuff the trucker gave me. Anyways, I headed for that liquor store to get me a roll of quarters and just as I stepped into the street, a cop car rolls up with a black car right behind it and the cop says over the loudspeaker for me to step back onto the sidewalk, which I did, and then this woman yells, ‘He’s got a gun,’ which was true, and suddenly guys are on top of me, six beefy guys in suits, and it turns out that President Bush, the old one, is in the black car behind the cop car, and these Secret Service guys throw me in a black SUV and off we go at high speed screeching into an underground garage and they hustle me into a padded elevator and it goes down like about five levels and we go down a hallway and into a room and they throw me in a chair and they are asking me a thousand questions, one after the other, and other guys come in with big manila folders of stuff about me, my high school record, my dad’s Army records, a ton of stuff, book reports I gave, a letter to my grandma thanking her for the $25.00 she gave me for my birthday, and I’m thinking, This is the end of you, Larry. You c
an kiss this life goodbye.”

  He stopped and looked around. “You see a Coke machine around here? I sure could use a Dr. Pepper right now.”

  “How did you know it was President Bush in the car?” said Kyle. He wasn’t sure how much he believed the story. He thought maybe 50 percent, maybe less. But which 50 percent?

  “He was in the back seat, sitting next to an A-rab with a cloak over his head and he looked meaner than hell. He said, Shoot the sumbitch. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. He was wanting to snuff me out on the backstreets of Houston. He climbs out of the car, real slow-like, and walks over to me, Old Man Bush, and he looks down at me on the sidewalk, arms pinned behind me, and he says something in a foreign language that’s all crackly like he’s eating dry toast. And I don’t say anything. He’s asking me a question in Egyptian or something, and I shake my head, and Bush says, ‘Get him out of here.’ And they took me away. Truth, man.—Hey, go get me a Dr. Pepper. My throat is all dry.”

  Kyle climbed down off the gurney. The pop machine was two floors up according to the ER receptionist. She was a pretty girl, brunette, with black horn-rims, who looked like she deserved better in life than to supervise this vale of tears.

  “If it jams, you may have to hit it right below the coin return,” she said. The pop machine worked fine, though, and the can of Dr. Pepper came bumbling down the chute and as it did, Kyle realized he had left his jacket in ER. He hustled down two flights of stairs and there was Larry, just where he’d left him, except he’d taken off the wig and glasses and was talking on his cell phone.

  “I’m in the hospital,” said Larry. “I had an attack of some kind. Got all woozy. They’re saying it was not a stroke but they’re still doing tests. I don’t know where the hospital is. I’ll find out and get back to you.”

  The Secret Service kept him for a week, flew him back to Mississippi, and he spent two years in prison for reckless disregard for human life and that’s where Elvis came to visit him. The King had been dead for six years. He came at midnight and stood in Larry’s cell, wearing pink slacks and a fancy white shirt and a black sportcoat and shades, very slim and his hair swept back. He brought Larry a sandwich in a white paper sack.

  “What kind?” asked Kyle.

  “Peanut butter and bananas and mayonnaise.”

  “You got that out of a book,” said Kyle.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” said Larry. “Most people don’t. I don’t care. It used to matter to me but it doesn’t anymore. Elvis said people wouldn’t believe me and he was absolutely right. He told me what to do with my life. He said to me, ‘I want you to jump out of airplanes and sing.’ He was standing as close to me as I am to you right now. He knew about Patrick and he knew it wasn’t my fault. He knew the name of the trucker and he knew about George Bush and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter, none of it. Evil is riding high but God is moving on the waters.’ He sang me a song to prove it was him and he gave me a Dr. Pepper. I’ve been drinking that ever since.” Larry took a long swig of Dr. Pepper. “That sure restores a person. Bless your heart, I want to sing at your grandma’s funeral. I’ll do it for free. I can sing ‘Moon River’ for you.”

  Kyle said he didn’t know if that was a good idea or not.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Larry. “It’ll be my pleasure.”

  Larry sang a few lines of “Moon River” and actually he was good. He didn’t make you forget Tony Bennett but he could carry a tune.

  “What line of work you in?” he asked.

  “I’m in school. Sophomore. Going to be a junior in the fall.”

  Larry said that he had always regretted his lack of education but there was not much to be done about it now. He was bringing joy to people and that was all that one man could do.

  15. THE GROOM SHOWS UP

  Brent flew the red-eye from L.A. to Minneapolis-St. Paul on Tuesday arriving at dawn and caught a limo service to St. Cloud where Debbie was supposed to meet him at the bus depot but she took the wrong road, and headed north instead of south and was almost an hour late. He was pacing outside in his navy blue linen suit and sandals, trying to get his cell phone to work. He had dropped it in the urinal in the bus depot and taken off his shoe to fish it out with but it was badly pee-soaked and meanwhile a V.I.P. was calling so Brent picked it up in a hanky which muffled his voice so the man couldn’t understand him and hung up and in all the turmoil Brent had lost his dark glasses. He threw his suitcase into the back of the van and got in the passenger side and looked straight ahead, livid. “I am really pissed,” he said, in case she didn’t notice.

  “In more ways than one,” she said, and knew right away it was the wrong thing to say at that moment. “I am so sorry. You’re angry and you have a right to be. I’m so stupid when it comes to directions.”

  He said he was not angry at her, he was angry at himself for being here. “I do not want to be here, believe me.” They stopped to get him a bottle of gin and the liquor store didn’t have his brand, Bombay. He said to skip it. In Bowlus, he changed his mind. He wanted gin. So they stopped at the liquor store there which only carried a no-frills gin called Calcutta, made in Toronto. Eight bucks a quart. “Cheaper than antifreeze,” said the clerk. He bought it, and vermouth, and three bottles of Pinot Noir. Clearly he was settling in for a siege.

  “My parents don’t drink much,” she said. He said he had assumed as much.

  “My dad has diabetes. We just found out. They’re as sweet as can be. I hope you like them.” That last sentence buzzed in the air. A fatal wish. She knew it the moment she said it. He would loathe them and they would try so hard and be desperately polite and he would loathe them all the more for trying. Brent could be rude when he wanted. And sometimes without knowing it. He was in a cutthroat line of work, shared-time luxury jets were the new thing. Competition was ferocious. The Russians were getting into the market, MiG-15s had been converted to passenger jets, they’d fly you cross-country in seventy minutes. Brent had come a long way from Berkeley and Sartre. He was a Republican now, or as he put it, “a nihilist in golf pants.” He made fun of the Sacred Spirit people mercilessly and God knows they were an easy target with their dinging and whanging and milling, their simple theology—children, trees, music, good; war, injustice, pollution, bad—but she loved them and they made her feel whole. They were nontoxic. How many people can you say that about?

  He was slumped in the front seat, dozing, as the car came over the rise and there were the grain silos like an ancient temple and the lake and then the highway dipped into the town, and she slowed to twenty and he woke up.

  “Where are we now?”

  “We’re in Lake Wobegon, Brent. This is where I’m from.”

  He looked and said nothing. They cruised slowly along Main Street, past the Mercantile and the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, all the highlights of her bicycle years. There on the corner was the old phone booth. She wanted to tell him about it. Some old mayor had insisted on the town buying one. (What sort of town had no phone booth?) So in it went and nobody ever used it. Why would you? Especially after drunks started using it as a toilet. But one day Clarence Bunsen was passing by and the phone rang. An odd high-pitched ring. He had never heard it ring before. He picked it up and a man asked for Maureen. “She’s not here,” said Clarence. “When is she expected?” He said he didn’t know. “Oh,” said the man and hung up, disappointed. So it became a saying. Whenever people complained, you might say, “Tell it to Maureen.”

  This used to strike her as funny, but now that she thought about telling it to Brent it seemed dopy. So she didn’t. She drove down to the lake and parked under a red oak tree and snuggled up next to him. “We’re going to be married out there,” she said.

  “But by your friend, right? So it’s not exactly a wedding.”

  “To me it’s like a wedding. What’s the difference?”

  “You and I agreed that we didn’t need some big legal whoop-de-do. This is
our commitment to each other, right? It’s just between you and me.”

  So he was already planning to leave her. Oh God. How stupid she was. The man had played along with the thing, consented to be here and say his lines and act the part, and now he was making it clear that it was nonbinding. He was thinking beyond Saturday, wondering who the next babe might be.

  “But you would marry me if it came down to that, wouldn’t you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘if it came down to that’?”

  “If I asked you to.”

  He looked out to the lake and he brushed his hair back and finally he said, “We don’t have that sort of proprietary relationship.”

  “But we’re going to be true to each other, aren’t we?”

  “Of course.” He said this in an odd tone of voice, the clink of a counterfeit coin on the counter. “Let’s head for home, okay? It’s been a day to remember. We’re starting a new print ad campaign.” He pulled a paper from his pocket and read: “The aura of authority is an indispensible element of leadership, and nothing says authority like a private jet waiting for you at the airport—to go where you want to go, when you’re ready.” He put the paper away. “This is going to be big, I tell you. Let’s go. I need a drink.”

  She backed the car up and drove around behind Ralph’s and onto Main Street and up the hill toward her parents’ house and she thought, This is never going to work. How did you get yourself into this mess? You don’t need this. Cut this bozo loose. And then she thought, Maybe he just needs a good night’s sleep. Everybody has a bad day now and then. Give him a chance.