The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  Brant was not perturbed. He looked at Mrs. Grey and said, “He’s quite a boy. You must be proud of him.” And Earl realized that his answer was going to be edited out of the program and that they would edit in a “Yes, you’re probably right” he had uttered earlier. But Earl was a middle child and there was nothing he could do about it.

  WINTHROP THORPE TORTUGA

  n early June, in the seventh inning of the broadcast of a Twins day game, the team behind 2–0, Winthrop’s mailman, Kevin, knocked on the porch door and said, “If I’m not mistaken, your stockbroker has sent you a rather hefty check.” And there it was: $126,830, a heck of a profit on an investment of $450 three years before in that little gene-splicing outfit, and the Twins won 8–2, and the next Monday Winthrop took a leave of absence from his job at Wheaties the Breakfast of Champions to devote himself to his family.

  By mid-July, he had cleaned out the garage, rebuilt the engine of an old Dodge Dart for his son Dylan, paneled the basement, and installed a Ping-Pong table, and the Twins were in first place in the western division of the American League, three games ahead of Oakland. They swept a Saturday doubleheader from the A’s, Kirby going six for nine, and what a rich Sunday morning it made—the planets in Winthrop’s favor, his ducks all in a row, a sunny day, his windfall tucked away in an excellent mutual fund that was paying fourteen percent, the onions and green peppers diced for the breakfast omelets, the electric dicer working like a gem (those crafty Krauts), the Costa Rican coffee freshly dripped—“O Costa Rica!” he thought, standing in his blue pajamas. “Your dark beans are what drive Minneapolis to work in the morning! Without you we would all be in nursing homes, on respirators! Thank you, José!” He drank the coffee and dressed for church—a light-tan suit, a blue shirt, dark-blue tie with red dots. He would return home after church, awaken the sleeping household, make the omelets, and be a good father.

  The grass in the backyard was tramped flat from his daughter Janis’s birthday party Saturday night, a few long strands of red crepe paper wound through the hydrangea bushes. A lone beer bottle sat in the birdbath, left there perhaps by the same boy who, too shy to ask to come in and use the toilet, had vomited in the garage. Janis was sixteen. She was asleep upstairs with her boyfriend, Freddy—not his real name, which was Trent or Brent—a good boy, thought Winthrop. Freddy was quiet and polite to adults and he was crazy about Janis and made her cry out in pleasure late at night. The juggler who Winthrop hired for the party had arrived six hours late, ten p.m., full of apologies, upset that he had misread his calendar, and it took Winthrop fifteen minutes to quiet the kid down until, finally, he could do his act, standing on the back steps under the backyard light, the party guests strewn on the dark lawn. He did balls, clubs, and for his finale, he juggled a banana, a baseball, a banty rooster, and a brassiere, and Winthrop glanced over and saw Freddy’s hand deep into Janis’s shirt and thought, “How nice for her, to be with a boy as spirited as her daddy.”

  Winthrop and Dodie Tortuga had three children, Janis, and Dylan, nineteen, and Liz, who was twenty-three and in the Los Angeles area, and all of the family was going through a difficult period right now, everyone but the dad, he was a Twins fan on a roll. Janis was flunking her courses in school except for English, where her journals of sex with Freddy earned her B+’s, and Dylan went around in a black T-shirt with DEATH silk-screened on it and bit your head off if you spoke to him. Liz was unemployed and experiencing car accidents late at night. Dodie was struggling through an affair with her chiropractor, Dr. Haynes. Only Winthrop was taking care of business. What a good father. Who else in south Minneapolis would welcome Freddy under his roof and not say a word to Janis except to make sure she was protected against pregnancy—who else but him? His son cursed him and wandered lost through his days, shut up in a Walkman, but Winthrop was patient, he sympathized, he paid the bills. He sent Liz six hundred dollars every month and talked to her on the phone when she called at three or four a.m. oblivious to the time difference. Two or three mornings a week, he arose to find notes in his shaving kit, Hi love, I’m at Haynes’s tonight. Home in the morning. And when Dodie came home, Winthrop fixed her breakfast, a terrific omelet. She was always exhausted. “You’re my prince and he’s my slave,” she groaned—was that how a mother of three and a lifelong Congregationalist should talk? But Winthrop was kind and understanding. After all, he cared for her, she was his wife, and when your wife has an affair, don’t you want it to be a good one, a great experience for her?

  “Is Haynes still upset about what you told him about his feelings for you not being deep enough?” he asked her.

  “No, he faced up to it very well, and last night he was so emotional, so intimate in a way I’ve never seen him be before. He was crying and laughing.”

  “That’s good. Must have been very gratifying for you. I’d love to meet him, by the way.”

  It had bothered Winthrop for a while that Dodie’s nightgown was under Haynes’s pillow, but he learned how to protect his anger and now he was okay with it, and as he ambled out the front door this sunny morning and headed to church, he felt that his anger was well in hand. Nothing that his minister, Curtis Jon Ekerholm, had ever said about love and forgiveness was the slightest use to him. He went to church because it was a place to be alone and think. The peace that other people claimed to find through prayer, Winthrop found in random acts of cruelty to strangers. He was able to be a loving father and husband because he channeled all his anger into bigotry and meanness. That was how he kept his balance. He pushed into revolving doors ahead of spastics and when they stepped into the chamber behind him, he gave the glass a shove and whooshed through and heard their pitiful cries. He wrote hate letters. He let air out of the tires of cars with Sierra Club or Greenpeace bumper stickers—let the ecology jerks walk, he thought. He threw dog turds onto the lawns of upstanding people. He honked at senior citizens as they hobbled across the street at a red light and the geezers practically had heart attacks. He scratched swastikas on the lavatory wall at church, which so upset Pastor Ekerholm that he called a meeting of the congregation and stood up in anguish and cried, “This to me represents the utter failure often years of ministry here!” The good man wept and had to be hugged repeatedly, and out of this crisis came a big Holocaust Day observance, and a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. The next day, Winthrop phoned in a bomb threat to a home for indigent actors. It was how he kept afloat.

  On this morning, the church parking lot was almost empty. Summer doldrums. Fifteen worshippers in the pews, scattered, like a connect-the-dots picture, and Curtis J. in the pulpit, speaking on “The Need to Be Needed,” one of his more murmury sermons, and Winthrop took out a pen and wrote in the hymnal, “Your Fly’s Open, Dick Head.” He resolved that when he got home he would ask Dylan to play tennis with him. He would patiently draw the boy out in conversation. The boy could not bear levity or criticism, he would mutter, “There you go again,” or screech, “Stop putting me down!” It was like talking to a terrorist, Winthrop thought, his son was like a man crouched in a stairwell, holding a bomb. But Winthrop would try again. A very fine father.

  Liberals like Curt were kind and loving to strangers, at least theoretically, and full of warm feeling for abstract entities such as The Poor and The Oppressed and The Minority, but liberals are hard as nails on their loved ones, preaching at them and holding them to impossible standards, perpetually shocked and disappointed by the flawed humanity of their flesh and blood. Liberals love a crowd, from a distance, and they treat their families like shit. Look at Curtis Jon, murmuring now about the needy and the needed, the necessity of need—what a cold fish he was to his wife, Martha, never acknowledging her physical presence with even a slight glance or a touch. A sad fate, to be attached to a Good Man. A good man in the worst sense of the term.

  “Winthrop,” said the pastor at the door after the service. “We’ve got to get you on the Christian outreach committee. It needs new blood.”

  “I don’t have much
blood left over,” he said.

  He slipped a note into the pastor’s Ford Bronco, “We comin for you, mothuh,” and walked home, feeling top of the world. A championship breakfast, a couple sets of tennis, a heart-to-heart with the boy, and he’d be back on the porch for the Twins vs. Oakland, one-ten p.m. on WCCO with a cold Grain Belt and a plate of chicken wings. On his way to tennis, he should be sure to mail the letter he’d written to Dr. Jomo, a consultant to the Minneapolis School Board on the teaching of African-American culture: “Hey woolhead, you are about as African as I am but if you want to be ridiculous, go, be my guest, put a disc in your lip, put big wooden discs in both your lips, but go shake your spear on your own time, okay? Don’t ask us taxpayers to foot the bill.”

  Bigotry acted as a stimulant to minorities, Winthrop knew. It got them roused up, all righteous and happy. He once wrote a letter to the National Organization for Women that was printed in a fund-raising letter:

  “Dear ladies, I see you’ve got your tits in a wringer about so-called sexual harassment in the workplace—well, if it’s too hot in the office, why not try the kitchen? This country took a wrong turn when American women decided to farm out their babies to day care and go to work so they could live the yuppie life. Result: millions of workers we don’t need who file a lawsuit if you lay a hand on their shoulder, plus a generation of children with no moms, and society paying the price for years to come. Somebody ought to slap some sense into you broads.”

  He came home to find Janis slouched in the breakfast nook in her ragged pink bathrobe, her dirty feet propped up on the yellow wallpaper, puffing a cigarette and chatting away on the phone with someone who seemed to be in Sydney, Australia. He opened the back door to let air in. Freddy was upstairs taking a long shower. It continued as Winthrop broke the eggs and shaved the provolone and put a fire under the skillet and got the omelet going. Elapsed time on Freddy’s shower was now forty-three minutes.

  “You know what I feel like doing today?” he said when Janis got off the line from Australia.

  “How in the world would I know?” she said bitterly. “I hate it when people say, ‘Do you know what I feel like.’” She exhaled a torrent of smoke and scratched her legs. She looked pained. “I think there’s something wrong with my uterus,” she said.

  Winthrop said, “What I feel like doing today is going to the Mega Death Mall and doing a major job of shopping, get us some clothes, look at CDs, load up on stuff, take our mighty credit cards and shop till we drop. What do you say?”

  Her voice softened. “Okay. But I gotta get this IUD checked. I think it’s stuck in my tubes or something.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it, darling. We will find you the best gynecologist in town.”

  And then Dodie wandered down. She wore gray sweatpants and a yellow tank top. Winthrop was smooshing the eggs around, buttering the toast, dripping a fresh pot of coffee, setting the table. Freddy’s shower was now to the point where Winthrop wondered if the boy had collapsed from steam inhalation. Dodie kissed him on the ear and fixed herself a cup of tea. “No eggs for me, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve got to run out and buy a swimsuit. If Haynes calls, tell him our flight’s at four o’clock and he ought to be here by two-thirty.”

  It was none of Winthrop’s business, of course, where she went with Haynes, but he wondered about it through his solitary breakfast—Janis and Freddy had to meet someone at McDonald’s, Dylan was asleep—and to make himself feel better, he sat down and wrote some letters. He wrote to the gay coalition (“How exactly is society to blame for you boys giving each other an incurable disease? Am I missing something? Did you really expect us to run into the bedroom and pull your wieners out of your butts?”) and he wrote to a neighbor woman, an animal-rights activist (“I guess I can understand why a dog-faced bitch like you has a thing for animals—you can bribe them to like you and they never get bored—but when you start terrorizing scientists, trying to save the lives of bunnies so that people can die of cancer, then it’s time for someone to put strychnine in your tofu, Bubbles”), and he wrote to his congressman (“About the Disabled Act you voted for that requires the taxpayer to make the world flat for the handicapped—why not make public transit bed-accessible while we’re at it? Why should the bedridden be denied the right to public transportation? Why don’t buses have four-foot seats for lard butts like yourself?”).

  At two-forty-five, a shiny red Triumph pulled in alongside the Tortuga garage, fast, with a squeal of rubber, and a man in a seersucker suit jumped out, removed his driving gloves and mirror shades, saw Winthrop on the porch listening to the Twins, came up, and stuck out his hand—it was Haynes.

  “I’m Dodie’s chiropractor, been treating her for three years, trying to alleviate those terrible neck pains—”

  Winthrop said, “I know that you’re lovers and it’s okay. Relax. Have a beer.”

  Haynes took a seat on a wicker bench, his back to the sun. He was wiry and hairy. Chest hair, thick. Hairy hands, and hair on the back of his neck. “We didn’t get involved—you know, sexually involved—until just about two months ago. It was a sudden thing, surprising to both of us, and we went to my place in Aspen for the weekend—”

  Dodie had gone to Aspen? For a whole weekend? He hadn’t noticed.

  “—and I suppose we thought it was only the sexual fascination, and a weekend would satisfy that and we’d go back to our families, but then she walked into my place and saw my art standing around and we realized that we were both welders, art welders—”

  Dodie? Welding?

  “—so we’re thinking about getting divorces, and going to Mexico. We might open a workshop and gallery in Oaxahuacapocapetl and live there, in an adobe hut, in the village with the Pocapetl Indians.”

  The Twins were getting pummeled in the top of the third, Jack Morris was throwing high fastballs and the A’s were distributing them to various corners of the outfield and bleachers. “Dodie has told me so much about you,” Haynes said. “She said that you are the most wonderful husband she can imagine.”

  “Well, she’s only had one, so what would she know?” The bases were loaded, there were no outs, the score was 3–zip. Maybe this was the turning point of the season for the Twinkies. They had faded in July before.

  And then Dodie came downstairs, out of breath, naked, dripping wet from her shower, a towel tossed over her shoulder. “You’re late,” she told Haynes. “I clearly told you to be here at two-thirty.”

  “I got lost.” He shrugged.

  “I had no idea you welded, Dodie,” Winthrop said softly.

  She threw her head back and snorted. “You didn’t hear me? at night? the sparks flying up?”

  “I guess I thought you were—I don’t know—basting. Browning the meat. But you’re really thinking about moving to Mexico?”

  “Never mind that, I’m looking for my Tampax,” she said.

  “Maybe Janis borrowed it,” said Winthrop. “Want me to run out and get some?” He noticed she had a tattoo on her left hip that said All Night Long. He didn’t want to ask how long it had been there.

  “We can stop on the way to the airport,” she said, and ran up to get dressed.

  “Pardon me if this sounds dumb, but what is the way to the airport?” Haynes asked. Winthrop couldn’t believe that a grown man didn’t know where the airport was, but he got out an envelope and a pencil and drew a map. “I can barely find my way to the office,” said Haynes. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve wound up in St. Paul.”

  Winthrop drew in a route: Lake Street west to Hiawatha, south on Hiawatha past the VA Hospital and right at the light and look for the signs. “You wouldn’t take 35W?” asked Haynes. No, said Winthrop, 35W gets backed up at the Crosstown and you can sit there for fifteen or twenty minutes. “Hiawatha is your best bet,” he said.

  Dodie came down and gave him a big hug. “You’re a heckuva guy, Winny, that’s all I can say. This has got nothing to do with you, believe me. This is all about me. I was never cut out to
be a south Minneapolis mom. I tried. I went to church, I went to Twins games, I was active in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, but it doesn’t work for me. Too smug, babes, too earnest, too bor-ing. It’s all forehand, no backhand. I keep running into pathetic people trying to look hip by wearing French T-shirts and leaving New York magazine on their coffee table. I hate this life. I despise winter. I don’t much care for my kids. But you’re good with them, Winny. Take care, now. See you soon. Thank you for all your wonderful love.” And she gave him a peck on the lips and out the door they went and the Triumph roared away. Water dripped in the sink, and a cat meowed in the peonies, the neighbors’ cat, Timmy, who had diarrhea from all the spicy food they fed him.

  The Twins jumped into the lead on a Kirby Puckett triple in the sixth inning with two men aboard, then Kirb came home as the A’s bobbled an easy grounder to second. A three-run lead, and then in the seventh, the A’s got a two-out pinch-hit grand slam by a reserve second baseman batting .137. A lucky poke by a guy who’d be back in Paducah driving a bread truck next summer. A bummer.

  She shouldn’t be with that weasel, Winthrop thought. She should be here with her husband.

  He had met Dodie at the University. They were juniors. She was a poet. Her poems appeared in little magazines with names like Opus, Still Water, Whisker Cafe, and Portugal. She was so fair: fair-skinned with shining brown eyes and a long thin nose, and slightly bow-legged. After they made love for the first time, she wrote a poem—“Under a brown canvas tarp, / taking turns being on top so that each could see the stars, / we went as high as we could, like children / on the swings at night, Andromeda / between their bare feet. / And suddenly I saw the tiny house / where I have been living for years, my love, / and, my love, I don’t want to go back.” He considered it an honor to be immortalized as a lover, though they had not made love under the stars but in the Gopher Motor Lodge near campus, in a bed, not outdoors. The poem appeared in the next issue of Portugal, and he married her, and she never wrote another poem, which was a disappointment to him. He was in business administration and liked the idea of marrying a poet.