“Don’t run like that,” Daddy said, “you could trip and fall and land on something sharp and tear your insides open. People have died from infections they got from puncturing an intestine with a tree root or something.” I clung to his side and Daryl walked past, whistling.
Thanks to Miss Schauendienst’s appreciation of my superior math skill, I was in danger of getting my head broken. The Magendanzes were rangy boys with big hands with red bruised knuckles. They liked to lay for a boy during recess and leap out at him and whale on him fast and hard. They did this to Donnie Krebsbach and depantsed him and painted his testicles with iodine. They beat up Richard Paulson because he spilled a few drops of milk on Daryl’s shoes. They beat kids up out of sheer meanness. They were bad. They came from a bad home, where the parents sleep off their hangovers on Sunday morning and have beer for breakfast and the television is always on and there are no books. They were always being reported to Miss Lewis or Miss Schauendienst and made to sit in the cloakroom, which they didn’t mind at all, they snuck down to the furnace room and smoked cigarettes there. They smoked from fourth grade on and they drank beer. They had a hangout in the woods where they and their cohorts did things. And every so often they gave me that look that meant they were thinking about beating me up, I was high on their beat-up list.
Leonard, who was supposed to be my friend, told the Magendanzes that I knew the secret of the deadly sleeper hold made famous on Saturday Night Wrestling by Vern Gagne, which involves getting a leg scissors around Mad Dog Vachon’s neck and giving a couple tight squeezes and sending the heinous Mad Dog off to sleepyland.
Leonard told me he thought it would make them leave me alone, but in his devious way he was trying to get me slaughtered. I knew the mind of Leonard, and it was as cruel as theirs.
You would think the Magendanzes could see that I didn’t know beans about the sleeper hold, but suddenly they got chummy with me and invited me to sit near them in the lunchroom, which I knew was a ruse to lull me into complacency. I knew they would be laying for me, crouching in the limb of a tree like cougars, waiting for me to come galumphing along, the expert on sleeper holds, and leap on me with furious force and pound the snot out of me.
And then, one day at lunch, I told Daryl a booger joke and a bright grin appeared on his ugly mug and he asked if I knew any more. Of course I did.
I wrote a whole list of Booger Books, and though he and David didn’t read books, they got a big kick out of my list (Little House in the Big Booger, Ten Thousand Boogers Under the Sea, How Green Was My Booger, Anne of Green Boogers, and so forth), and for each title I wrote a little booger tale. Fifty words was all it took and to the Magendanzes you were a genius.
Up until then, my literary endeavors had been of an elevated nature. Poems for dear Miss Schauendienst, who got all dewy-eyed from reading and read them aloud to the class as an example of what wonderful things a young person could do in this world—O maple tree with leaves so bright, / You whisper to us through the night. / How lightly do your golden boughs / Brush against our little house. And then, thanks to Magendanzdom, I learned the benefits of taking the low road. Charlotte’s Booger. The Secret Booger. The Little Booger That Could.
I could go high or go low, either way: O garden set in perfect rows, / Clean of bug and weed. / Thy sweet corn and thy tomatoes / Are good reward indeed. Or, Mr. Halvorson bent down to get his fallen toupee, which lay on the floor like a cat run over by a truck, and as he bent, a tuba blasted in his pants and the air turned blue and chartreuse. Nearby plants collapsed and died. Papers curled up and turned brown. The clock stopped. Two secretaries fell down in a faint as the cloud passed through. Firemen had to spray the school with milk of magnesia before they could bring in oxygen for the wounded. I was safe from the Magendanzes because they got a big kick out of my work. “Write another one,” they said. So I did. I could write as fast as they could read.
There was an epic about Coach Detwiler’s cigar smoldering in the teachers’ lounge and the school burning down and Miss Lewis’s dress burning off and her icy tits, three of them, with hard blue nipples. And meanwhile, for Miss Schauendienst, I hewed to the ideal. Rich green, bespecked with dew, / So beautiful it lies / Around our house on summer day, / In the sprinkler’s gentle spray, / Surrounding us with coolness too, / Beneath the baking skies. “You have such a way with words,” she said. “You will go far as a writer, I’m sure.” She posted the poem on the corkboard, under a sign: EVERYBODY READ THIS!! Daryl Magendanz did. He told me I had written better stuff than that.
The summer before eighth grade, I found a skinny blue book in the library called Improve Your Short-Story Writing in Thirty Days by a man named Will Crispin, a noted international authority on writers and writing. He was a studious man with big black glasses and holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. I read Mr. Crispin with great interest and was intrigued by his “rock in the pond” theory of story-writing. The main character’s life is all hunky-dory, the ducks lined up in a row, the house tidied up, the dog fed, the crumbs swept off the table, the savings account earning compound interest, the vacation trip to the Rockies all planned, and then the other shoe drops. Suddenly, it’s a whole new ballgame.
“The art of the short story,” said Mr. Crispin, “is to create a character who is believable and intelligent and good—a character whom the reader himself would welcome into his home—and then to poke that character hard with a sharp stick. This is the art of fiction in a nutshell. To have a story, you must have a truly admirable hero seeking to do good and you must have an immense bird with a sharp beak. You cannot make a story out of a nice guy and a canary.”
I liked Mr. Crispin’s emphasis on action and I tried to carry out his principles in a whole slew of stories I wrote that summer and fall, but unfortunately I was up against Miss Lewis, who was unnerved by action and preferred stories about admirable people period, no birds whatsoever. Rosemary Dahl wrote a story about a girl who sees the sun setting over the Pacific and is moved by this sight to dedicate her life to caring for the sick. That was a Miss Lewis type of story. It won the Writing Achievement Award in The Literary Leaf, and Rosemary stood up at the spring recognition assembly, and a gold medal was hung round her scrawny neck. I preferred the Crispin approach. A man is arranging paint cans in his garage, the whites and the grays and the pale blues and greens, when a masked gunman bursts in, yelling, “Grab some sky!” and snatches the man’s billfold and car keys and drives away, and in the car is a love letter to the man’s girlfriend, and as the gunman races away the man realizes that he has no further interest in her, not really. The doorbell rings and Mrs. Anderson opens the door to a tiny girl on crutches who says, “I used to play Becky on The Storm of Life, remember? Now I’m in need of an operation.” The child has no eyes. There are holes for eyes but no eyeballs. And the child is holding a small pistol. The Brethren gather around the bread and the wine on Sunday morning and Uncle Al prays, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus,” and Jesus walks in and says, “What do you want?” They all fall face-down on the carpet weeping and exclaiming, and Jesus says, “What’s going on? Why did you call me for no reason? I’m busy, you know.”
A perfect example of the “rock in the pond” was Mother’s story of the Lake Wobegon tornado of 1938. A peaceful Sunday in August, and the town was jam-packed with people on hand to attend a ballgame—Wally (Old Hard Hands) Bunsen’s swansong as a Whippet—and many of the fans brought a picnic lunch and were eating on the lakeshore. A boatload of fishermen motored across the water. Mother and Grandpa and Ed and Doe were out for a Sunday stroll. Four fishermen in that boat putt-putt-putting along and one of them waved to her, a curly-headed man in a white undershirt. He shouted something she could not hear. Then she recognized him as Harold Ingqvist, who worked at the bank, and who she had danced with once at her girlfriend Dotty’s wedding to Warren Bronson.
In some versions of the story she had a premonition that death was on his heels, and in other versions she did not.
/> In either case, a good time was being had by all, and then the sky began to turn dark and soon a black serpentine cloud could be seen on the western horizon, snaking its way across the country-side, slashing and thrashing, making a jagged circuit just south of town, turning this way and that, rising and falling, whacking the farms of the righteous and leaving the wicked to prosper. People dashed for their cars. Others ran to seek shelter in the Sons of Knute temple, but it was locked. It looked as if it would skip off to the east of town and then it came roaring toward them and the four of them hugged the ground. Miracles occurred left and right. Trees on the shore were knocked flat but the picnickers were not harmed. The scoreboard at the ballpark was carried away, lifted up, and smashed to earth, but the bleachers weren’t touched. Blades of grass were impaled in a vanity mirror in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Hansen and could not be withdrawn. A teapot and cups and saucers were carried two miles on their teakwood tray and set down unscratched in a field of oats. A mother and infant were sucked out a kitchen window and deposited unharmed in the limb of a maple tree. Kernels of seed corn were embedded in the Ingebretsons’ linoleum kitchen floor, and though the family spongemopped with a herbicide year after year, the corn always came up in the spring.
Mother told about the teacups and the grass in the mirror and the seed corn in the linoleum and the Stegers, who loved the Lord and lost their barn and the cattle, and meanwhile their wicked infidel neighbor escaped unscratched and celebrated his good luck by getting roaring drunk.
“We can’t always understand why God does what He does, we have to take it as a test of our faith and accept that it is done for good,” Mother said, sticking up for God as always.
All four of the fishermen were drowned, their boat was ripped to splinters. A black dog in the boat survived but the four men were doomed, including Harold Ingqvist, 22, who waved to the young woman in the white dress on shore and who, had he survived, would’ve married her, and I would’ve been Lutheran and better-looking, broader across the shoulders.
So I wrote a story for The Literary Leaf, incorporating the Crispin approach.
The Flaming Heart
Alfred L’Etoile and Jean du Nord, stars of stage and screen, toured the Midwest one sweltering summer in a hit play called The Flaming Heart and this particular Sunday found them in Willmar for a matinee performance. Their adopted son Roy stood in the wings and watched the curtain go up for Act One and decided to go for a walk. It was a typical Midwestern farming community. He walked to the edge of town and then along the railroad tracks and was so engrossed looking for snakes he didn’t notice the sky turning dark until he heard a sound like a train coming and looked up and saw a dark cloud like an evil snake hooking into town and ripping houses to pieces. He tried to run to cover but tripped on the ties and suddenly was picked up screaming and kicking and carried bodily through the air for several miles. It was terrifying. The loud roar and a lot of junk flying past and several cows and a cat that clawed at him and a 1948 Chevy, its horn honking. He also noticed a Waring blender and a case of soda pop and various farm implements. He fell to earth on freshly plowed ground and stood up, unharmed. He was on a farm where a family of Sanctified Brethren was just emerging from their storm cellar.
“Where am I?” he asked.
The woman put her arms around Roy. “Praise the Lord,” she said. There wasn’t a bruise on him, his expensive New York jacket and trousers were still clean and pressed, the trousers creased, only a little debris in the cuffs. They knelt and gave thanks to the Almighty for this safe deliverance in the storm. He was rather stunned from his experience.
“The Lord has sent you to us in a miracle. It is His Will that you’re here,” they said. He was about to tell them about his actor parents and then their dog spoke up and said, “Stay.” He said it as clear as day: “Stay.” So Roy did. His New York jacket was hung in a closet and he was given Brethren clothes. His parents never came looking for him, they were too busy with the tour and interviews and a new motion picture and all. So he became a Sanctified Brethren boy but in his heart he knew that someday he would return to New York and resume his true identity.
The big sister found an early draft of “The Flaming Heart” and sneered at me for how dumb it was. She read a line aloud before I could grab it away from her—“ ‘The old brown dog lay asleep in the emerald light of afternoon like an old pair of pants somebody dropped on the grass.’ What?” she shrieked, like it was the worst sentence she had ever seen in her entire life. She couldn’t get over it. For days afterward, she’d say, “Lovely emerald light we’re having today, isn’t it? By the way, is that a dog or a pair of pants?”
I didn’t care. I polished up “The Flaming Heart” and then got a second big inspiration Sunday morning during Breaking of Bread, when I felt something on my leg, and I came home and wrote:
Bad News
A man named Albert Fornay sits in the First Methodist Church of Johnville, a small Midwestern farming community indistinguishable from most such towns, on Sunday morning and listens to small children play “Climb, Climb Up Sunshine Mountain” on the rims of water glasses and suddenly he gets a very creepy feeling. Something is definitely crawling up his leg. It feels like a spider. He tries to press on it and crush it but the wily arachnid sneaks up to a place he doesn’t dare press on while others may be watching. By the time the musical selection is over and he can get to the men’s room and pull his pants down, the spider has bitten him twice and given him an incurable blood disease. “How can this happen to me?” he thinks. He is taken home and put in bed and given six or seven medicines, but to no avail, he’s dying, when his dog walks in and says, “I could help you but I can’t forget the way you’ve treated me all these years.” “What do you mean?” he said. “I mean the two times you kicked me,” the dog replied. “Oh,” he said. He was sorry but it came too late. Mr. Fornay’s wife and daughters prayed for a miracle, but in his heart, he knew that the answer was no.
When I submitted “The Flaming Heart” and “Bad News” to The Literary Leaf, Miss Lewis wrote at the top of the page, “Talking animals??? That’s for children!” End of comment. Nothing about the terrific sense of drama or the excellent writing style. Just her prejudice about animals. If you ever allowed a dog to open its mouth and say three words, she couldn’t stand it.
She rejected everything of mine except “O maple tree with leaves so bright,” although my stuff was far better than Mary Jo Samuelson’s “Threnody d’Autumnale,” which rhymed autumn with river bottom and leafy beauty with call of duty, or Leonard’s “Planet XLN14,” in which people of the Galaxy Dendron under the leadership of El-Phar and Lord Grodna fought off a phalanx of robots that went bedebedebededumdum, which Leonard insisted was code for something. Or his sister Laura’s pitiful “Homage to a Lady” (She is there at her desk every morning, wearing a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye, encouraging me even on the darkest day, saying “You can do it, Laura! Try!” and instilling in me the ideals of hard work, promptness, courtesy, and neatness that she herself so beautifully exemplifies) and of course the lady is Miss Lewis herself. It was sickening.
Miss Lewis is a battle-ax of a woman with eyes like feed pellets and an aroma of disinfectant about her, as if she washed her hair in toilet-bowl cleanser. She is offended by any sudden sounds or movements, so if you drop a pencil she’ll turn and give you her death glare—and if there is whispering or laughter (except at her own puny jokes) she goes berserk. It’s strict decorum at all times with Miss Lewis. Obedience and intelligence are, to her, one and the same. She took a long prim look at my poem, “Rich green, bespecked with dew,” and shook her head. She said, “Surely you meant to say ’so beautifully it lies,’ not ’so beautiful.’ This adverb describes the manner in which it lies. It lies beautifully.” So I changed it to beautifully, though that was wrong and practically destroyed the effect I was going for, and then she thought it should be “how beautifully,” so I changed it again. Then she didn’t see how the grass could su
rround the house with coolness. Wasn’t it the air that was cool? And it couldn’t be any cooler around the house than it was next door, or down the block, could it?
I stood by her desk, smelling her prickly heat, her lozenge breath, and her toilet-bowl hair, as she systematically dismembered the poem and handed it back, a mutilated corpse, and said, “That’s much better, don’t you think? Do you see how it’s clearer now?” I said not a word. There was no point in arguing. Miss Lewis was deaf to argument. If she decided that grass doesn’t cool off a house, then that was how it was, and the grass would simply have to stop doing it and also stop being beautiful. If you bothered to correct the old biddy, she would be mightily irked and give you the hairy eyeball and sigh about the triviality of the matter, though of course it wasn’t at all trivial when she heated up the grass. So I nodded and took my poem with her angry scratches on it and said, “Thank you,” and whispered witch and resumed my seat and scribbled her a poem of her own.
There is an old teacher named Lewis
Who tries to teach grammar to us
Which the poor lady can’t
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Page 7