Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  And now the pilgrims came to the checkpoint, removed their shoes, their jackets, swept through the detectors, headed for the gate. Can’t hurt to get there early? Guess again. The concourse was an aviary of nervous excitation, passengers fluffing themselves up, strutting back and forth, yakking on those dangly cell phones. She could see Carl getting agitated, jiggling his leg, taking deep calming breaths that didn’t calm him at all. A man and a woman sat down near them. She was weeping. “Oh, for crying out loud,” he said. “Grow up.” She told him to go without her. “How long is this going to go on, Doreen?” Evidently she was afraid of flying, which infuriated him. She was a slight woman with reddish hair, a brown raincoat, a green scarf, and tears in her eyes. He told her that if she didn’t get on the plane, that was it, he was done with her, and he meant it.

  That was too much for Eloise.

  She swiveled around and glared at him and called him a name—a simple two-syllable word for a part of the lower digestive tract that all of us have, whether we use that word or not. He pretended not to hear her, so she said it louder. And then she jumped up and circled around the row of seats and the man jumped up and ran into the men’s room and stayed in there. Eloise stuck her head in the men’s room door and yelled, “I’m out here and I know who you are and you’re not going anywhere!”

  It was the old Eloise, back to good health.

  She came strutting back to her seat and grinned at Doreen, plopped down, and leaned in toward Carl and Margie. “Did I ever tell you about the time Fred came home from the poker game in Sartell at 3:00 A.M. with a cut over his left eye?”

  She had told them, but so what? There was time to kill.

  “We’d just broken up and when we were apart, of course, we got along just fine, so we decided to give it one more chance and then he went off to play poker with his old buddies. He comes back to my house around 3:00 A.M. with a big story about how he was winning and couldn’t leave. Well, Mr. Lundberg was waiting outside the house. You remember when the Lundbergs used to sleepwalk. After they went to that revival service in the tent up near Nashwauk. You didn’t know that was why? Well, it was. They stopped in because they were curious and the evangelist was a sweaty man waving a big black Bible and he had two big black dogs who came after the Lundbergs when they refused to kneel down and accept Jesus. They said, ‘We’re Lutheran,’ and the dogs chased them and they’d had dreams about it ever since and that was why they went sleepwalking in their pajamas. So here was Elmer Lundberg out sleepwalking when Fred came sneaking home at 3:00A.M. with a big gash over his eye, bleeding into a towel, and Elmer tried to grab him and Fred just about pissed his pants. He had invented a story about helping a man fix a flat tire and the jack handle hitting his forehead but seeing Elmer put the fear of God in him. He told me the whole truth. He’d been hit by a mirror that fell off the ceiling of a motel room where he’d gone with a girl named Amber who had a thing about older men. He hadn’t gone to play poker, he’d gone to poke Amber and there they were reclining in the Jacuzzi and looking at themselves in the mirror overhead. He opened a bottle of cheap champagne and the cork flew and bounced off the mirror and suddenly their reflections got bigger and bigger. The mirror cracked her on the shoulder and she bled and screamed and somebody hit the fire alarm and pretty soon there were six firemen in yellow phosphorescent jackets piling into the room and when they saw Amber they called for reinforcements.”

  “Well, looky looky,” said Irene under her breath, and then Mr. Keillor was there, smiling down at them from his great height, in black sweatpants and black sweatshirt (AMOR VINCIT OMNIA), his hair rather long and swirly, his eyebrows enormous. Get those puppies trimmed, she thought. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Good morning,” he said in his honeyed radio voice. “How’s everyone doing today?”

  “We’re flying back to face the resentment of our friends and neighbors,” said Irene, never one to mince words. “But that means nothing to you. You’re flying first class. You’re on the gravy train.”

  “They upgraded me because I’m platinum,” he said.

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” she said. “And poor Lyle here has Alzheimer’s. Think about that for one minute. He had such a good time flying over, he’s been looking forward to the return.” She motioned for him to hand over his boarding pass.

  “It’s not Alzheimer’s, actually I just hit my head on a low beam,” said Lyle.

  “Please,” said Mr. Keillor. “I need the legroom. I have work to do.”

  “I don’t doubt for a minute that you do. Let me see that notebook in your back pocket.” He took a step back and clapped his hand over the pocket. “You’ve been writing down what we say, haven’t you, you little sneak.”

  “I’m keeping a journal,” he murmured.

  “Heck you are. You’re writing it all down so you can put it in a book and make us look like idiots on parade. Am I right? Well, tell me, what gives you the right to do that? You’re a member of a group, whether you know it or not, and one of the rules when you’re in a group is that you don’t go around blabbing your mouth about what you saw and heard. That is just basic decency. About time you learned it.”

  He sighed. The woman was merciless. He closed his eyes. She reached over and pulled his boarding pass out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Lyle, who started to protest and then thought better of it. Mr. Keillor felt the boarding pass slip away and did not bother to open his eyes. He held out his hand and she put Lyle’s boarding pass in it and he picked up his briefcase and trudged toward the Jetway. He headed for 38F—a middle seat—and there in 38E was a woman who beamed to see him. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “Look at this, Wendell. It’s the man from the radio. I’ve listened to you since I was a child. Your stories take me home. Would you mind if I give you a big hug?” she said. He winced. She reached over and patted his shoulder. “Now you tell me if I’m talking too much,” she said. “You just say, ‘Stifle it, Mary Louise.’ Oh my God. I am so excited. Wendell, get the camera. Do you mind if we take a picture? Tell me—how long do you think you’ll keep on doing the show?”

  “Forever, I hope.”

  And as he said it, he knew that the End was near. A person always imagines there will be more, and then the steel doors clank shut. He closed his eyes. “I should let you be,” she said. “You probably hate this, being pestered by strangers. I can imagine how hard it is, meeting people you don’t know whatsoever and they know all about you from your books and stories. I mean, I know about the Sanctified Brethren and how you always were the last one chosen for the softball team, I know about your fear of water and how that girl laughed at you when you tried to kiss her and I know what kind of hand lotion you used when you masturbated. Jergen’s. Remember? You mentioned it somewhere. I’ve read everything you ever wrote, I know all that stuff. Your fear of damnation. Your ignorance of the names of plants. The time you spilled on the lap of your new seersucker suit. Your agonizing memory loss. Your self-consciousness about your thin wrists. The animosity of your ex-wife. It’s all there! You’ve shared yourself so generously with us fans and now we know you better than we know our own siblings! It’s true! I have no idea what my brother’s sexual fantasies are, and I know a lot about yours. Sometimes I feel like I’m your therapist! I really do! Honest! Your dream about falling off the cliff in the Faeroe Islands into a vast dark abyss—I think I could work with you on that. And your dream about standing onstage at a microphone and the audience like stone statues and nobody comes out from the wings to help you. Oh that was so telling! So evocative! I mean—if you want to sleep, okay, but if you want to talk, I really think we could work on some of these issues.”

  It is two and a half hours from Rome to Amsterdam and then an hour until their nine-hour flight to Minneapolis and Lyle was concerned that due to headwinds or engine malfuntion or whatever, they could easily lose an hour en route and land in Amsterdam too late for the flight to Minneapolis and have to explain their predicament to the Dutch who would put th
em up in a hostel fifteen miles away in a sleazy neighborhood full of drug addicts. “It’s the little things that kill a trip,” he told Margie. So she asked the gate agent if perhaps they could get on the earlier Rome-Amsterdam flight leaving in thirty minutes. The agent was a stocky woman in her midfifties and she looked at Margie as if she were a second-grader and not one of the bright second-graders. “That flight is full,” she said.

  “Maybe there are people on that flight who wouldn’t mind switching with us. Couldn’t you make an announcement on the PA and ask for volunteers?”

  “Sit!” the woman cried. “Enjoy the view! Talk among your friends. Tell each other stories. Sing if you like. We can find you a guitar. You can sit here in the gate area for a few hours and have a beautiful time. Enjoy!”

  Margie had put a Placidol in Carl’s apple juice and he was still a little twitchy, so she gave him another. He had brought a book to read and then on page thirteen there was a plane crash. He read it in the waiting area and it struck him as more than mere coincidence. Flight 1302—plane crash on page thirteen, second paragraph. Could God make this message any clearer? Panic began to flower in his chest, his pulse throbbed, his heart danced in his chest. Sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He remembered the senior class play, Our Town, with Cheryl as Emily Webb, and how overwhelming to see his girl marry George Gibbs and then die and go up the hill to the cemetery, and now he could see himself, holding a black umbrella, sitting next to her. He tried to settle down but heard a grinding sound and turned and saw a small albino child riding a coin-operated whale and Carl put two and two together and clearly he was the Jonah and if he boarded the flight, it would crash.

  The agents announced general boarding. He told Margie, “I can’t go. I’ll have to find a boat.” She told him to keep calm. “Take a drink of this liquid protein, see if it doesn’t make you feel better,” she said, and put it to his lips. She tilted the bottle up and he gulped it down. She had dissolved another Placidol in the drink and five minutes later he was quite manageable. She put him in a wheelchair and rolled him through the door and though he let out a little meep as he bumped over the threshold, she got him into seat 37A and herself into 37B and pulled out a pillow for him and a blue blanket that he held against the side of his head. It seemed to comfort him.

  “You’re just fine, honey, you did fine.”

  “Are we on the plane?”

  “This is the plane.”

  “This is.”

  “Yes, all of this is the plane.”

  “We’re going home,” he said. She nodded. “Would you like to come back to Rome?”

  He shook his head. “Then I’ll come back with Ramon.” She’d never known a Ramon, but it sounded intriguing. “Oh,” he said. He looked out the window at the ground crew moving the jet bridge back. “Do they need help?” he said. And then he closed his eyes and was gone.

  She had brought Mr. Keillor’s novel WLT to read on the plane, and opened it, and when she woke up, the plane still humming along, someone next to her was touching her. It was Lyle, his big black horn-rims slipped down on his nose. “I know we went to Rome,” he said, “but did we do what we went there to do?”

  “Yes. We put the picture on Gussie’s grave.”

  She pulled her camera out of her purse and scrolled down the display of pictures and punched one and handed the camera to Lyle. “See? We did it. It’s right there.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m only trying to get it straight in my own mind. I must be going crazy.”

  “We’ll take care of you, so don’t worry.”

  In Amsterdam, the flight to Minneapolis was delayed on account of engine problems, so the pilgrims reconnoitered in a little café. Margie was having serious buyer ‘s remorse about that apartment. She was astonished, thinking back on it, at her own impetuousness. Good God. It was a lovely apartment, but where was her common sense? She’d walked in, taken a quick look around, fallen in love with her own romantic fantasy, and shelled out a half million dollars in less time than she’d take to shop for a silk purse. Daddy used to say, “Only hard work will teach you the value of a dollar,” and he was right—money you get for free has no weight or value—and now she was one of those foolish heiresses she used to read about who’d burn through Grandpa’s hard-earned wealth in a typhoon of greed and wind up in a welfare hotel in lower Manhattan with needle tracks on their lovely forearms. Did she really need to own an apartment in Rome, Italy? Who was going to clean it? When was she going to live in it? She’d spent her entire windfall on it and had nothing left over for airfare or maintenance or taxes… . O God, the sheer idiocy of it.

  “What’s wrong?” said Eloise.

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  The vastness of the stupidity of it. Her husband needed her. He was struggling for life under a crushing debt, a man trying to carry a house on his back. And she had floated away in a silver balloon and danced on the dew-beaded buttercups and swanned around in her gossamer gown, adored by hummingbirds and katydids, and feasted on rainbow cake and sunrise tea, and opened her heart to the Milky Way, and whispered intimate thoughts to the wind, and now she was sitting with people who thought they knew her and O God they did not but they were about to know her much too well—she was twelve hours away from Lake Wobegon, and when she rode through the snowy fields and over the hill past the Farmer’s Union Grain Terminal and up Main Street past the Sons of Knute and the Chatterbox, the piper would be there, hand out, waiting to be paid.

  Services will be held Wednesday at 1 p.m. for Marjorie (Schoppenhorst) Krebsbach, 53, of Lake Wobegon, who died suddenly last Sunday of asphyxiation while taking Holy Communion at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where her last rites will take place.

  She was an English teacher at Lake Wobegon High School, from which she had matriculated in 1974. She had just returned from a trip to Rome with her husband Carl, who survives her, and a party of ten others, including author Gary Keillor, host of A Prairie Home Companion.

  She is also survived by her children, Carla (Mrs. Bradley) Hoffert of Santa Barbara, California, Carl Jr. of Seattle, Washington, and Cheryl of Minneapolis, her parents, Gottfried (Gus) and Lois Schoppenhorst of Tampa, Florida, and sister Linda of New York City.

  Reached at a beach house north of San Francisco where he is vacationing, Mr. Keillor expressed regret at Mrs. Krebsbach’s untimely demise but confessed that he was not surprised. Not at all. In the mellifluous baritone voice so familiar to millions, he said, “She tried to fly too high too fast. I may as well tell you the truth—you’ll find it out anyway. She glommed into a half million dollars from a dying man in Tulsa and flew to Rome, at my expense, and there she had an affair with a stranger she met in a coffee bar. She slept with him the day before her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and then she blew the half million on an apartment… .

  She stepped out of the café into the busy concourse. A flight to Moscow was announced and another to Seattle. She walked upstream into the mass of humanity and ducked into an alcove where three men sat on the carpeted floor, their laptops plugged in, tapping away, and she called Maria in Rome to ask her to please, please cancel the purchase. If there was a penalty, fine, Margie would pay it, but she had no use for the apartment, the idea was insane. The number rang and rang and then a woman answered in Italian.

  “Is Maria Gennaro there?”

  The woman said what sounded like a question.

  “Maria Gennaro.”

  “No,” the woman said.

  “Is she coming back?”

  There was something in Italian that sounded like a list, maybe a recipe.

  “Inglese?”

  The woman hung up.

  Margie dialed the number again. It rang and rang and then a click and a man’s voice, a recorded message in Italian.

  She called Paolo’s number. Six rings and then a click and a recorded message. The same man’s voice. She wrote down the words as she heard them, and called the number three more times to m
ake sure she got them, and she sat down at a coin-operated computer and fed the words into an Italian-English translation program and some of the words it recognized: Americano, andare casa. American, go home.

  In the café, the pilgrims were trying to come to grips with the true story of Gussie. Margie had told Eloise and she told the others. She was a little stunned still by the revelations, having given a big speech to the high school kids about the boy of nineteen who left these very halls and shipped over to Italy to fight for his country and died a heroic death, and why should they now hear otherwise? Father Wilmer said he thought the truth should be told, but he would be willing to leave it to a vote. Margie didn’t care one way or another. The vote was 11–1 for silence. “You get that?” Irene said to Mr. Keillor. She lowered her big head and gave him a long cold basilisk stare. He was writing as fast as he could in a little brown notebook. He didn’t look up. He said that he had not come all this way to hear a story that he now could not repeat. “I told you we shouldn’t bring him,” she said. Daryl said that by coming along on the trip, he was implying that he would abide by decisions of the group. “No such deal,” said Mr. Keillor.

  “You want to destroy this town, don’t you?” said Evelyn. “You’ve always wanted to. And now you have a story you can use to make young people cynical and want to leave town and before you know it, we’ll have grass growing in the streets.”

  “I was brought up to tell the truth,” he said.

  “Why start now?” said Irene. She tried to grab the little notebook out of his hands but he got it away, except for one page that she ripped out. She looked at it. “What does this mean, a long cold basilisk stare?”