I am a driver for Brigadier Alan G. Parker who is, like me, a civilized fellow with no heroic urges whatsoever. He lives in a Palazzo and his office is the size of a basketball court, high ceilings, drapes, gilded plasterwork and he sits at an enormous desk and thinks about psychological warfare, mostly about how to avoid it. My job is to defend his Jeep, procure whiskey, and keep an eye out for any newspaper reporters or Generals in the vicinity. He lives very well and so do I, and I felt guilty about that but I got over it. I am a lucky guy. I was sent here to kill people and have not done it yet. Our boys are in bloody fighting around Cassino, north of here, but my Brigadier doesn’t go to the Front and so neither do I. Call me a slacker and a foot-dragger, but I am not the only one. The army is full of studious bureaucrats with fruit salad for brains who busy themselves with great matters and study maps and file enormous reports and it’s a good way to keep warm and out of harm’s way. Intelligence is the place for a slacker: these guys stay so secret they don’t know where they are themselves. The Germans have their Goebbels and we have ours and meanwhile life and death go on. Men I bunked with aboard the Richards are on the front line where you kill the enemy or make him run or he does something similar to you. A brutal business. A buddy of mine came back from the front wounded. He’d tripped and sprained his ankle. “I got a kraut,” he said. “He was sitting under a tree talking on a telephone and I walked up behind him and he turned and I shot him in the face.” I asked him why he didn’t take the man prisoner.” Why would I do that?” The day after I landed at Anzio, a lieutenant stuck his face in my tent and hollered, “On the line! Pronto!” and I did not pick up my rifle and go. I am a coward. I could’ve been court-martialled for insubordination but it was overlooked. I ambled toward the rear and busied myself counting trucks as they came by and writing the numbers down on a piece of paper. I am nothing but a coward. A pacifist in uniform. A mouse hiding in the corn. At any moment I could feel German talons in my shoulders and go flying through the air, but I will do what I can to avoid it. I am a coward. They name football teams for killers, the Lions, the Bears, the Warriors, except in Minnesota where we’re the Gophers, and that’s what I am, a terrified rodent, hoping to survive.
A sleetstorm outside and olive leaves blowing around, and I go around on foot to reconnoiter and witness the suffering of soldiers trying to fix tents that got blown down, men freezing, cursing, and I ignore them and return to the Palazzo and my snug little room and the fine Armagnac in the Brigadier’s larder. A little glass of it gives a taste of nobility, which there is none of in war whatsoever. Last week three men died, run over by their own trucks, stumbling drunk through the night, and every day somebody misreads the coordinates and American shells fall on American foxholes. More than you will ever know have died from diarrhea. They list them as “battlerelated” but really it was diarrhea. Many purple hearts were men shitting themselves to death. Dying shitless.
You ask if I still believe in God, no, I do not and now I think I never did. Nor do I think Americans are any better than Germans. What I do believe in is the beauty and dignity of the individual and I find dignity in cowardice.
And now I must think of something to write to the folks.
Dear Lille Bror,
Well I found myself an Italian girlfriend as you suggested I do but I don’t know if I will get to make time with her since all the Generals are rushing to get to Rome and have their pictures taken parading down the Via Appia, they don’t care about the Germans so long as they get their big mugs in the paper looking rugged and battle-scarred. I hope that General Kendall of the 88th runs over a land mine and gets aerated sky-high, it would serve him right. His boys are known to shoot at anybody for any reason whatsoever.
Her name is Maria Gennaro and she was a ballet dancer, tall and dark-haired, strong legs and a big rump. She danced in Paris and Venice and signed up for the anti-fascist under ground whereupon she slipped in the bathtub and that was the end of dancing. Now she’s attached to us as a translator. She promises to take me to St. Peter’s and show me when to kneel and when to stand. She knows four languages well and parts of some others. Mainly she helps us keep the partisans from executing the fascists they find. War brings out the worst in people if they aren’t supervised closely. And in the midst of murder and piggishness, I met this lovely and sensible woman. I took her to lunch which meant I had to go AWOL which is easy to do, you just pretend to be lost, and if the MPs accost you, you say, “I can’t find my unit.” We went to a hotel for lunch and the food was good and we talked about morale. She said, “Morale is the ability to believe something that you know isn’t true, namely immortality. The Polacks were sent to attack Cassino and their morale was fabulous and so they got annihilated. They were confident they would walk over the Germans and as a result they took the worst losses. We Italians don’t believe in morale. We love life too much.” She considers me dashing, if you can imagine. She wants to know about cowboys so I tell her some things. I’ve known her three weeks and she has said about a hundred times, “You are so handsome!” I guess she thinks I am handsome. So at lunch I was thinking we could get a hotel room but how would I know if she wanted to or not. I am new to this, you know. She touched my arm when we left the café and said thank you, if that is some sort of signal. She said to me, “When we get to Rome, I could find you an apartment with a garden.” She seemed to imply that she would be there, too. I kissed her good-bye on the cheek and she didn’t slap me, so I’ve got that going for me. She is twenty-eight. I gave her a carton of Chesterfields for the nuns. She lives in a con vent near Anzio though I don’t believe she’s taken the vows herself. I worry about her with all these sex-starved Yanks around. I gave her a.45 pistol and a smoke flare. It may take more than a bullet to stop these guys.
Well, I must go now and win the war.
Your brother,
Gussie
The next morning, she called Norbert and he asked her if she meant it when she said she’d go to Rome for him. “Yes, I told you I would and I will.” “My lawyer thinks I am crazy to send $150,000 to someone I never even met,” he said. “But it’s Mother’s money, not mine. And she died in the peace of knowing I would keep my word to her. She knew that her boy’s grave would be properly marked.” And Norbert started to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’d think a man could talk about this and not blubber, wouldn’t you. I mean it was sixty years ago. Jesus.” He gave his nose a honk. “He was just a great kid. A great great kid. He got all the bad luck, I got all the good.” He told her he had once performed in the circus, shooting a lighted cigarette out of the mouth of a lady acrobat as she swung on a trapeze and him with his back to her, aiming the rifle over his shoulder, a small rearview mirror attached to his glassses, and later in the show he was wrapped in chains, wrists handcuffed, ankles strapped, and thrown in a tank full of piranhas that went into a feeding frenzy when he dropped in. And then it came out that the rifle shot blanks and the lighted cigarette had a small explosive device in the tip and there were no piranhas, just ordinary minnows and the frothy water was caused by the carbonated crystals in his pants. “A mob was waiting in the dark as we took down the tent that Sunday night, and I had to be smuggled out in a crate marked DANGEROUS SNAKES with two big pythons who were busy swallowing rats. When you escape lynching, everything that happens afterward is a Bonus. I’ve had a good life. No regrets. Just this one. I never fixed up my brother’s grave. I’m counting on you, kid.”
FENDING OFF THE MOB
Mr. Keillor went off on a long lecture tour of the West and Eloise was unable to reach him for two weeks, so all the commotion he’d aroused fell on Margie. Eloise had other projects on her plate now—a community concert series, a bike trail around the lake, a plan to consolidate Lake Wobegon schools with the Millet schools, the making of a Lake Wobegon web site, a plan to turn the old depot into a historical museum—every week some brilliant new idea burst forth to occupy her for a few days and then dwindled into the shadows as she got caught up i
n something new. The trip to Rome was now in Eloise’s rearview mirror. Her last word on the subject was that it might make a good story on CNN if Margie would organize a parade to kick it off. A parade in March? No way, said Margie. Too cold. Eloise was telling all Rome applicants to call Margie. The day after Thanatopsis she got sixty-seven calls—thank God for voice mail—one message after another: “Margie, it’s Ronnie, Ronnie Schaefer. How’re you doing? Listen, I heard that you’re planning this trip to Rome in April and Lonnie and I talked about it and we’d like to come with if you still have openings. Give me a call, would you?” One after another. And fifty-six the next day. People walked up to her in the middle of Sunday morning Mass as the choir sang an irritating song called “I’ve Got the Joy Joy Joy Joy Down in My Heart”—Carl wanted to go to the Contemporary service now, it began an hour later. She stood there clapping along because if you didn’t clap and smile people thought you were an atheist or had PMS, so she clapped unhappily, and people thrust notes in her hands, saying Put us down for Rome. Marlene & Ken and There are ten Luegers on the list for Rome, not eight as Jon told you on Wednesday. Ten (10). Please call if you have any questions.
There would’ve been more calls except that people in Lake Wobegon knew Mr. Keillor’s penchant for making up things and so his offer of a Free Ride to Rome was not given as much credence as if, say, Gary Eichten, popular WLT newscaster and host of Eichten at the Mike, had said it. Nonetheless, Margie got tired of telling people that Mr. Keillor was very busy and to hold your horses and not get your hopes up. Darlene asked her six times in two days, “When will I hear about Rome?” and Margie told her that there was a strict quota on non-Catholics traveling to Rome and they were required to carry a rosary. Not required that they actually use it, just have it in their possession.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Darlene.
Margie skipped lunch at the Chatterbox for three days. She drove to Little Falls to do her grocery shopping. She turned the phone off and pulled the shades.
Judy Ingqvist called to say that she and David couldn’t come since the trip to Rome fell the week before Palm Sunday—D-Day was March 25—so that wouldn’t work for them.
“I’m sorry,” said Margie. But she wasn’t sorry at all. David Ingqvist was a pill. Anytime you tried to make pleasant conversation with him, he had to tell you how horrified he was by George W. Bush. Margie was a Democrat, so was Carl, but enough is enough. Obama was in office, so let’s move on. But it wasn’t W who got the pastor’s goat so much as his brother Michael. Four years younger, an All-American tackle at Concordia—or he would’ve been, but he got nailed for steroids and dropped out, turned to pro wrestling as the Messenger of Death, doing nasty pile drivers and spinal twists, then came to Jesus by parachuting into a Billy Graham rally at Daytona Speedway that made the front page of the New York Times. Went to Wheaton and took over a tiny geriatric church in Denver and grew it from 75 members to 14,000 in three years by communicating to people that God Is Not an Angry God, He Is a Happy God. You couldn’t mention Michael to David, nor even mention Colorado. He would get silent and leave the room.
Marilyn said that she and Daryl would love to come. Or she would love to, and he was agreeable. “He doesn’t want to do anything with me anymore. I don’t know why. He’ll go to a basketball game with anybody who wants to go but if I want to do something, he finds some excuse not to.”
Eloise called to ask if it would be okay to bring Fred.
“Absolutely not.”
“Please. I’m afraid he’s going to leave me.”
“No. Too much drama.”
“He quit drinking. Honest. He went to Hazelden after that nonsense in Sauk Centre and he’s dry now. But I think he went into treatment just to get away from me and meet some needy young woman and I believe he’s met her.”
“The rule is Spouses Only. Fred is not a spouse. He’s a louse.”
Eloise started to cry. “He’s all I have in this world. Hazelden was so good for him and then he met her and now she’s convinced him that he needs to go on his life journey with her. How can he do that to me? How can he throw me over after all I’ve done for him?”
The next day, as Margie was getting home from school, Eloise drove up. She was a mess. Bloated, red-eyed from crying, her long hair tangled up in back, her linen pants a mass of wrinkles. Margie offered her coffee. Eloise asked for vodka. No ice.
“I was the one who got him into AA, for God’s sake. Ten years he and I were together. Every Saturday night I made supper for him. I listened to his troubles. He has a genetic intolerance of winter and a compulsive fireplace obsession. He poured out his heart to me. I went to bed with him. I held him until he went to sleep. That time he went crazy at the Fireman’s Cookout in St. Cloud with a fire hose between his legs and he shot water at people and knocked them down, I was the one who got him out of jail and into couples counseling. We discovered there are three kinds of relationships—conflict-avoidance, validating, and volatile—and that ours was number three. That took six weeks and cost me $800. Then one very cold night he fell off the wagon and went to Sauk Centre and pissed on a policeman. I rescued him again. Shoveled him into Hazelden for six weeks and paid half the freight and now he goes off with this tootsie who stands up in AA and tells a long story about what brought her there and he feels sorry for her and now he’s sleeping with her. It absolutely breaks my heart.” And Eloise fell into Margie’s arms and it sort of broke Margie’s heart too. As bossy as Eloise was, nonetheless she had propped that man up and treated him with tender kindness and then he dropped her like a used Kleenex and took up with someone twenty-one years younger.
“I must be some kind of horrible person. That he couldn’t wait to get away from me.”
“You’re not a horrible person. He is.”
“I must be. People hate me.”
“Nobody hates you.”
“Yes, they do. I am just a bad person. I’m loud and controlling and I do nothing but make people miserable. My kids tell me that all the time. And they’re right.”
Eloise said she wished she could kill herself. She finished the vodka. “Don’t go getting into trouble now,” Margie said, and two minutes later, Eloise backed out of the driveway across the front lawn and destroyed two small spruces and a rosebush. Margie called Father Wilmer. “Eloise is in need of some help. I wonder if you could go over and talk to her.”
“About what?”
“Fred dumped her. You know about Fred.”
“I do,” Father said, with a sigh.
“Now she’s gone to pieces and gotten drunk and she’s driving around like a crazy person. Somebody needs to tell her to quit being mayor and move to Minneapolis where she can find a man who will be decent to her.”
He murmured something about how much good Eloise does and maybe we should all rally around her and give her more support. “She doesn’t need support. Support won’t cut it. She needs intervention. Speak to her, Father. That’s your job.”
Father said he would pray for her. Certainly. He would pray for her daily. “Is the trip to Rome on?” he said.
“If Eloise hangs herself with a coat hanger, the trip to Rome is not on.”
He said he would head over now and talk to her.
It was crazy, all the excitement about Mr. Keillor sending them to Rome and Margie having to deal with them all—visions of a 747 full of moochers and freeloaders, the loungers and widerides, the Sidetrack crowd, the investors in lottery tickets, and her the Shepherd of the Lurchers & Losers, trying to move them on and off buses and through crowded sites in a foreign city—great God, the thought of it. How to kill this ASAP?
ATTENZIONE
Thank you for your interest in our trip to Rome and thanks to Mr. Keillor for his generosity. All expenses paid! The opportunity of a lifetime! If you wish to participate, be advised that you must first (1) pass a test in basic Italian, (2) make a declaration of faith (dichiarazione di fede), (3) name the Seven Deadly Sins (Sette Peccati Capitali) an
d check off which ones apply to you and supply details. And remember—Rome is the seat of the Roman Catholic Church and all visitors to the Eternal City, both Catholic and non-, must carry rosaries on their person at all times. Rules regarding adultery are very strict and if you have commited such a sin in the past ten (10) years, you should let us know ASAP. Thank you (Grazie). Additional information (in Italian only) from http://www.portaleimmigrazione.it or http://www.poliziadistato.it/pds/ps/immigrazione/soggiorno.htm.
She wrote up the notice and then decided not to send it out. Most people would recognize it as a fake, but some, blinded by greed, would not, and she did not care to hear their confessions. She wrote up another:
Dear Rome-bound Traveler,
This is to inform you that two persons in our party are allergic to meat and alcohol and as a result, the entire trip must be meat- and alcohol-free. No consumption of meat or alcohol will be tolerated. Thank you for your understanding.
That might do the trick. The thought of teetotaling vegetarianism would pretty well kill off interest, she thought. But why not deal with the problem at its source—she got the Great Benefactor’s address and sent him a note:
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