The Moon Pinnace
Page 15
Welcome to
WINOTA
El. 1560
Pop. 325ø1
Someone had crossed out the zero and added a one—a new father, come out to make the sign accurate?
His father wrote in the paper that when Johnny Hearne grew up he wanted to run a weed burner on the C.&N.W. Railroad. When his mother read it to him he was mortified, and couldn’t remember having said such a thing.
Once his mother came and got into his bed and hid behind him under the covers. She said it was a game and if his father came looking he was to say she wasn’t there. His father did come, open the door and ask if he’d seen his mother, and he obediently lied. But he lied to his father, and he knew it wasn’t a game. He’d pondered why she’d made him lie to his father, and kept that happening in the limbo of the unexplained, where it still was.
In the summer evenings they would drive through the neighborhood of mansions and kept grounds, eating ice-cream cones, just to see the beautiful houses.
His mother and father knew a man in St. Paul, a wrestler, who strangled a burglar to death and was considered a coward because he killed the burglar out of fear when he already had him in his power. A lesson.
He got his Red Cross Beginner’s Button at Loup Qui Parle Lake, from which the Loup Qui Parle River came and ran through town. Wolf who talks. He did the dog paddle from his father to his mother.
Sunfish fins could stick you. Punkinseeds, bluegills, crappies. When cleaned there were just two little pieces of yellowy meat. His father fried up a mess of them in an iron frying pan that was so heavy he couldn’t lift it by the handle, even with both hands. No fish, ever after, had tasted so good.
A maid named Isabel let him get in bed with her and swim anywhere he wanted over her body, smooth slippery ivory. It was her belly he liked best. There was a sense of wrong about it, but vague. He never told anyone.
He would gag when they made him try to eat another carrot or lima bean, which made them angry, as if he’d just pretended to gag. He had to sit, in kindergarten, on his own bowel movement, which was, after a while, cool and plastic. Someone must have smelled it but no one said anything. He was too old for that, but he hadn’t wanted to ask to go to the toilet. You paid for such reticence. When it happened again his father was very angry. When it happened again his mother didn’t tell his father. Another lie between them.
His mother sat on a chair and jumped herself up and down in ecstasy, chanting, “Hoover’s going to win, folks! Hoover’s going to win, folks! Hoover’s going to win, folks!”
They rode horses along the river, under the trees, his stirrups shortened to their last buckle holes. His father said, “Don’t hold on to the saddle horn; that’s for rope work.” If he did grab the saddle horn, which looked so stable, he became unstable—another lesson in the theme of paradox.
A meadowlark stood on a fence post, black V on yellow breast, and sang a six-noted, falling, happy-wistful song he remembered with absolute clarity. There were no meadowlarks in Leah, New Hampshire; he’d never seen or heard one there, so this must be his first sweet pang of recognition.
He started his engine, the pulse, the intermediary thrust that had brought him all this way, and with a momentary loss of breath, as in a thank-you-ma’am in the road in his father’s Chevrolet sixteen years ago, rode on into the town past shortened fields, bungalows, farmhouses now street houses, into the trees and onto the main street where soon enough the Park Hotel, dreamily the same but smaller, let a grid of other streets and destinations set itself softly down over what was here and now. The Loup Qui Parle Diner was exactly where it used to be but not as shiny. He didn’t remember the Chrysler-Dodge dealership next door, but somewhere nearby had been a gas pump that his father cranked and the gas swirled up into a glass bottle marked with gallons. The Winota Herald was down the street and seemed very small. How could he, his mother and father and the lonely maid, Isabel, have all fit into that narrow upper floor?
He would eat at the diner, but first he rode down Main Street and turned at the street whose name he’d forgotten—Slayton Street—which led him past the Town Hall and the public library to the grammar school. The school was smaller, the playground tiny, the metal kidpropelled merry-go-round built for midgets. He didn’t expect to recognize people, and didn’t, at least not yet. The slope down to the river was less of a slope, and yet the town seemed concentrated, distilled, purified. The elms on the residential streets were lush tunnels, cool overhead. Some trees were a kind of massive poplar unfamiliar to his later knowledge. There was a care and neatness in the maintenance of cars, lawns, streets and houses he hadn’t expected.
Impressed, feeling the erosion of an unexpected superiority, he rode back to the Loup Qui Parle Diner, leaned his oily machine on its iron leg, went inside and sat at the counter. Yes, the tables at the front, the booths at the ends, the chromed fittings. He had come here with his father for what his father called Wimpy hamburgers—that strange, strawish, sharp, easy taste. Ketchup and benign grease, a little bad for you in an appetizing way, hooky from greens and boiled things that grew in the mouth.
A waitress in a pink uniform with white, nurselike lapels and cuffs had been sitting at a table with another waitress and a young man, and now she came around the counter to see what he wanted. She was chunky in a blond, athletic-looking way, the kind of girl who would play a tough game of field hockey. Her pretty round face seemed so especially pleased, so wide open with extraordinary pleasure he thought for a second she must know him, or that for some reason this occasion was far out of the ordinary.
“Hi!” she said, her white teeth and crinkly blue eyes zeroing in on him. “What can I get for you?” She presented him with a glass of water and stood back, her smile moderating just enough to partly cover her teeth.
He was unable to crank bis face into an answering expression, or at least to smile with anything like her voltage. “A hamburger and a small Coke,” he said, his voice sounding strange until with a cavernous flutter his ears popped open.
“Anything on your hamburger? Onions, relish, green peppers, lettuce, tomato?”
“A little raw onion,” he said.
“Oh-oh! Your girl won’t like that!”
“My girl?”
“Your breath! Of course you could take a Sen-Sen!” She laughed lightly, companionably, nothing in it but good nature.
“My girl’s about fifteen hundred miles from here,” he said.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said, a shadow of sympathy on her brow.
“Where is she now?”
“In New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire! Did you ride your motorcycle all the way from New Hampshire?” She wrote his order on a pad, tore off the page and put it on a spike at the window to the kitchen, tapping a bell with her palm. This was done in what seemed one expert motion, and she was back. “How long did it take to ride all that way?” As he thought about this she turned to get him his small Coke from the machine.
“Four and a half days,” he said, finally having figured it out.
“Four and a half days! Did you stop over at night? Of course you must have. I’ve never in my life met anyone from New Hampshire! What’s it like there?”
A simple question, he thought, searching ledges, cellar holes and hillshadowed mills for a simple answer. “It’s all hills and mountains,” he said. “Mostly woods.”
“And pretty little towns with village greens?”
“Some. It depends on the angle you’re looking from.”
She went a little blank at that, but brightened again. “What town are you from?”
“Leah.”
“And what brings you…” she began, but the other waitress called her.
“Gracie? Why don’t you two join us?” The other waitress was slender and dark, with glasses and a long neck that gave her a rather courtly or scholarly look. No other customers were in the diner and she and the young man leaned casually over their coffee.
Gracie blushed
, her pale skin washed with rose. “Would you like to meet my friends?”
“Sure,” he said. The bell pinged and his hamburger appeared on the shelf. Gracie went to get it. “I’ll be right with you,” he said, and went to the men’s room, knowing where it was without thinking. At five he’d had to urinate in the toilet bowl, but now he had the choice of two urinals. He washed some of the road grime from his face and hands, thinking what a mysterious welcome this was, this friendly curiosity that seemed entirely motiveless. Perhaps it was totally innocent, Minnesota and his half-memories, half-fantasies of the sky-blue land identical. Strange, because his real memories were not idyllic. His father could grow angry, a tornadic storm could blow down trees and even houses, children could fight, but it was always his father, and his native state, where, after anger, came justice and fair skies. There was another constant, he now remembered: his father was always welcomed. Always the people grinned their welcome to him and made the sounds and gestures of pleasure.
Gracie had been about to ask him what brought him to Winota, which gave him an interesting sort of Faustian choice he didn’t yet want to make. In a way he had no particular desire for company and would be happy enough to look around Winota through a nice romantic fuzz of nostalgia before moving on, still an observer. If he lied, saying for example that he had relatives in North Dakota…what was its capital? Bismarck…whatever happened in the present would be tinged irreversibly with inconsequence, whether or not he might later change his mind. But if he told them the truth he would immediately be a special case, intimate with them in a way he could foresee being overinvolved and cloying, the power of his secret lost. In adventure the hero, the picaresque wanderer with a dark yet somehow noble past, comes drifting into town as a heroic catalyst to ordinary lives, his secret his power, his exit lonely. The trouble was that he had been resisting adventure, fading away from it toward a quest he wasn’t ready to define.
At the table they made their introductions while he ate his hamburger. The other waitress was Loretta, the young man, Miles. In Loretta’s attitude toward Gracie he detected something of the matchmaker and chaperone—a fond, protective look, a touch on Gracie’s strong forearm. Miles was tall, sandy-colored and rather pleasantly vague about things. In his unbothered cheerfulness he resembled a dog who depended more upon his nose than his eyes, the scent dim but pleasant.
In their clear midwestern voices, no modulation for hesitancy or embarrassment, they would tell their stories and have his. Miles was twenty-three. During the war he had been in the Navy, Stateside, for three years and four months, and was now going to the University of Minnesota, off and on, not able to decide what he wanted to major in. Gracie and Loretta had gone to school together all their lives. Gracie’s father couldn’t stand Miles, which seemed irrelevant because she wasn’t going with Miles. Loretta’s mother and father were separated and her father lived in Mankato. She and Gracie were both nineteen, Gracie two months and five days older than Loretta. Gracie, three days each week, was doing an internship in physical therapy at St. Luke’s Hospital. Loretta had no intention of going to college. Miles had a ’39 Mercury convertible, the black one out there. Loretta’s last name was Pachek, and she was a “Boheemie,” which didn’t seem a term of belittlement; her grandparents had come from Bohemia, which was now part of Czechoslovakia. Gracie’s last name was Lundgren—a name his mother had used: Estelle Lundgren, whom his father had “played around” with. “Playing around” had seemed an odd thing for grown people to do. He saw them playing catch, or throwing stones at tin cans, now here, now there. He wondered if he might, if he really wanted to, ask Gracie if she was related to an Estelle Lundgren, but let it go.
Their desire to give him information about their lives seemed smoothly normal to them. Perhaps he’d been infected by Leah’s self-consciousness—superiority combined with self-doubt. Did you blab everything? And who would be interested in all those details? These people seemed to believe that everything about themselves, large and small, must be fascinating to a stranger—a kind of innocent vanity as American as all get-out; he felt as if he had been in exile for a long, long time.
Gracie’s sister, Irma, who was really a knockout, had to get married in February to Gus Rasmussen, and she was barely eighteen, which hadn’t improved her father’s temper. Loretta had a ’41 Ford coupe, the dark green one out there. Miles and Loretta were more or less engaged, but she wasn’t sure; for one thing, Miles’s father was a lawyer and his mother was kind of snooty, to be honest, and Loretta’s father worked in the furniture factory in Mankato and her mother was a hairdresser—sort of the wrong side of the tracks to the high and mighty. Loretta’s mother had a boyfriend, an old farmer with gray hair. Gracie thought they were kind of cute together. Gracie had a heart murmur, though it wasn’t serious; Loretta was allergic to chigger bites and her father was sort of an alcoholic. Gracie had a little dog named Jo-Jo, part whippet. She and Jimmy Webber went steady for a while this spring, but had stopped now. Gracie’s father didn’t like Jimmy, either. He had a hardware store and she simply would not work there. Winota Hardware, down toward the grain elevator.
When two salesmen from the Chrysler-Dodge dealership came in, Loretta went to wait on them while Miles got up to put a nickel in the jukebox: “Heartaches,” the sweet whistler and the running, swooping melody that had been part of the background for a year now, even in Leah.
“So, John,” Gracie said, “what brings you to Winota? Are you visiting, or just passing through?”
Oh, well. As usual, he didn’t feel up to lying, but his voice was a little constricted as he said, “Actually this is my hometown. I was born at St. Luke’s.”
“What?” She was ecstatic. “Loretta! Miles!”
So he told them what he knew. When he’d left, so many years ago, Miles had been seven, Loretta and Gracie three, so they marveled and wondered but had no memories of him or of his family.
“And you don’t know where your father is?” Gracie said. “That’s terrible!” She squeezed his hand with both of hers, broad warm hands with light golden fuzz on them, and he found himself answering precise questions, giving the sort of information he thought, or had thought until their sympathy charged him with nervous emotion, irrelevant or even vaguely degrading. It was as if he were answering the questions on a form, and as the categories were completed he began to see how comprehensive was the emerging definition of John Hearne, white male, English-Irish-Welsh, etc., twenty-one, nominally Protestant, single, five foot ten, 155, hair light brown, eyes green, light smoker, infantry veteran, college student, only child of broken marriage…They would have their facts, and even as he reserved the vaguer aspirations of his uniqueness, his talents, the indefinable difference between statistics and potential, their expressions of concern, superficial or not, cut through his judgmental reserve to touch the quick.
Loretta kept looking at him as if she were about to nod her head, agreeing with herself that her first impression of him had been correct. Then she looked at Gracie. Lord, that familiar surmise. He looked at Gracie with Loretta’s idea in mind—marital, genetic, theoretical. A pretty face, symmetrical and clear in the universally admired way, her corn-silk hair Scandinavian clean. With her sturdy shoulders and good strong back he and Gracie could produce plenty of happy, strapping towheads to continue the work of the world. Anyway, it was flattering that Loretta thought so.
“So you’re going to stay in Winota for a while?” Loretta asked.
“A day or two,” he said.
“You can bunk in with me if you want,” Miles said. “I’ve got a spare couch.”
It was explained that Miles had his own apartment over his family’s three-car garage. So that was settled. The weenie roast at the reservoir was Loretta’s idea. Miles would bring his guitar. Jack and Laura were called and would meet them there. Potato salad from the German grocery on Third Street. Some beer, which the boys would have to get. Tasks and schedules were briskly arranged; it was already nearly five.
Miles, instead of going to his apartment, did an unexpectedly formal thing; he took John into the main house and introduced him to his parents, who were having drinks on a shaded patio.
“I remember your father well,” Miles’s father said. “Everybody liked him. He was a clean man.”
Miles’s mother agreed. “Yes, Syl Heame was a clean man.”
John had never heard that expression, and its strangeness, its impossible simplicity, even though tested by eye for the sincere or the patronizing mode, was a puzzle. He couldn’t ask them what, exactly, they meant by it, so he let that hygienic comment slide into the limbo of the unexplained.
Miles’s apartment, a large room with a bathroom and kitchenette, was airy and modern, with a sliding glass door onto the balcony of the outside stairway. John took a shower and changed into clean but wrinkled chinos, thinking that now he, like his father, was a clean man, though not a compulsively clean man, or a man who wouldn’t talk dirty, or whatever they’d meant.
Miles had turned on the radio, and Dinah Shore sang, “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed,” the volume low. “Help yourself to anything you want,” Miles said. “Have a drink.” He opened the cabinet doors of a compact bar that even had its own little refrigerator.
“Loretta sure took a shine to you, arranging a date with Gracie.” He shook his head, as if this were very odd, poured himself a few gurgles of Southern Comfort, added an ice cube and took it with him into the bathroom.
John examined the bottles, those glittering Sirens who promised everything and delivered sogginess. Still, he had an extra edge of brittleness, so he poured himself some Hennessy and sat back on the couch in the laving of the radio’s constant celebration of love. On Miles’s walls were tennis rackets and casting rods, sporting prints of pheasant and quail, a mounted bass thick as a thigh. On his bureau was a color photograph of Loretta, smiling and pert-breasted in a frilly white dress, her eyes large through rimless glasses.