The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  “How long you had ’em?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “You gotta have ’em a minimum of one month before you can have ’em iced,” he said. “It’s policy.” He drove away.

  Norman was relieved. He opened three cans of tuna to celebrate and then, bang, he had an idea for the novel.

  The man in the novel would live alone, except with cats, and Bernardine would be the name of his favorite cat, an orange Persian. The man is devoted to these cats and gives them a beautiful life without fear or hunger or loneliness or discomfort of any kind. It’s cat heaven. Big fans cool the cats in summer, and in winter they nest under down comforters. He is the cats’ God, the Provider of All Good Things, who stands high above cat society and sees and knows all and bestows perfect harmony on those cats who obey and adore him. All goes well until one night, Bernardine speaks up and accuses him of making their lives empty and barren. “But you have everything you could possibly want!” He cries.

  “How would you know?” she says.

  “You do nothing but lie here and purr.”

  She tells him that purring is a language unto itself. Cats use it to express not only content but also depression, doubt, boredom, and the misery of stomach gas.

  “You’re not happy?” He asks, in tears.

  “You’re a sick man,” she tells him. “You bring your sickness into our lives, we eat it with our breakfast. Everything you do, you do for yourself. You’re sick.”

  “No! Not true!” He cries.

  She accuses him of ruining their lives. So He kills her and stuffs her body into the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. The next day, another cat looks up from the water dish and says, “You bumped off Bernardine last night, didn’t you?” He denies it. The cat laughs. “You think we’re stupid?” she says. “You think we don’t notice that you’re weird?” So He kills that cat and stuffs her in next to Bernardine. The next day, another cat walks into the bathroom while He’s shaving and says, “Nazi creep. Murderer.” He kills that cat. Now three cats are left. He lies awake at night, waiting for one of them to mouth off, but none of them says a word. Days go by. He can’t sleep, can’t eat. Finally, He turns on the cats and screams, “Go ahead! Say it! You hate me! Don’t you! You think I don’t know? I know! Go ahead! Get it off your chests!” And the neighbors hear him ranting and call the cops and He is hauled away to the loony bin. The man from the Humane Society comes to round up the cats. He chases them around the house and captures two of them, and the third hides behind the refrigerator. As he moves the refrigerator away from the wall, the freezer door comes open, and as he bends down to grab the cat he feels something cold on his neck. Something cold with sharp claws that rake the side of his head, digging deep into his brain.

  Kimberley called. She and Trevor had gone to South Dakota for a biker rally and wound up in Montana and now she was in Minneapolis. She had quit her job at Oak Ridge. She was pregnant. Trevor was looking for a job. She was sorry about the trouble she had caused. All she wanted now was to settle down and have her baby and love her husband and do good things with her life.

  “Husband?” asked Norman. Yes, said Kimberley, we decided to get married in Spearfish, so we did.

  “Daddy,” she said, “you’ve done so much for me, I could never ask another thing, but I really do need to borrow some money. We’re broke. We owe two thousand dollars in rent and Trevor probably isn’t going to be getting his first check for another month or so. I need to borrow three thousand from you. Maybe thirty-five hundred.”

  He wired her four thousand and wired two thousand to Mama, then he wrote three funny stories. One was about people who haul great big pieces of luggage onto an airliner and try to stuff them into the overhead compartments, and another was about bad haircuts and how barbers are descended from the barbarians who pillaged the coasts of Europe, and the third one was about the seven types of farts: slow leaks, barkers, whizzers, bangers, boomers, butt burners, and death farts. He got warmed up on the baggage and barber stuff and when he got to the gaseous explosions he was in full stride, the old master, easy and elegant as he had not been for months. The baggage one should fetch eight hundred dollars, the barber one about the same, and the fart one—well, including syndication, musical, and dramatic rights, it was sure to get five thousand at least, maybe much more, and it had rescued his mother and bailed out his daughter, and what good can a man do greater than that?

  ZEUS THE LUTHERAN

  I. Hera, Fed Up with His Philandering, Hires a Lawyer

  eus the Father of Heaven, the Father of the Seasons, the Fates, and the Muses, the father of Athena and Apollo and Artemis and Dionysus, plus the father of Hephaestus by Hera, his wife, and of Eros by his daughter Aphrodite, was a guy who didn’t take no for an answer. Armed with his thunderbolts, he did exactly as he pleased and followed every amorous impulse of his heart, coupling with nymphs or gods or mortal women as he desired, sometimes changing himself into a swan or a horse or snake or taking the form of a mortal so as to avoid detection. Once, he became a chicken to make it more of a challenge.

  His wife Hera was furious and hired a lawyer, Alan, to talk some sense into him. The day before, she had heard that Zeus was involved with a minor deity named Janice, shacked up with her on the island of Patmos, riding around on a Vespa with her clinging to him like a monkey.

  “Tail him,” she said. “Track down the bastard and nail him to the wall and put the bimbo on a plane to Peru.” Hera threw her great bulk into a chair and glared blackly out the temple window. “One of these days, I’ll catch him when he has set his thunderbolts aside and I will trap him! And then—” she laughed, ho ho ho ho ho. “Then we will have the Mother of Heaven. The patriarchy will be put on the shelf once and for all. With Athena, the goddess of wisdom, on my right hand, and Artemis, the goddess of the moon, on my left, I will civilize this universe, this bloody hellhole that men have made. Find Zeus when he is in the throes of desire and we will overthrow him and change the world, Alan.”

  Alan picked up his briefcase. “Whatever you say. You’re the client,” he said, and got on a boat to Patmos.

  When Alan spotted Zeus, sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe by the harbor, there was no bimbo, only the ageless gentleman himself in a blue T-shirt and white shorts, fragrant with juniper, the Father of Heaven nursing a glass of nectar on the rocks and picking at a spinach salad. Alan introduced himself and sat down. He didn’t ask, “How are you?” because he knew the answer: GREAT, ALL-POWERFUL.

  “I realize you’re omniscient, but let me come right to the point and say what’s on my mind,” he said. “Enough with the mounting and coupling. Keep it in your pants. What are you trying to prove? You’re a god, for Pete’s sake. Be a little divine for a change. Knock it off with the fornication, okay? Otherwise, Hera means business, and we’re not talking divorce, mister. You should be so lucky. Hera intends to take over the world. She’s serious.”

  “You like magic? You want to see a magic trick?” said Zeus. And right there at the table he turned the young lawyer into a pitcher of vinaigrette dressing and his briefcase into a pine nut and he poured him over the spinach salad and then Zeus waved the waiter over and said, “The spinach is wilted, pal. Take it away, and feed it to the pigs. And bring me a beautiful young woman, passionate but compliant, with small, ripe breasts.”

  That was his usual way of dealing with opposition: senseless violence followed by easy sex.

  Hera was swimming laps in the pool at her summer house when she got the tragic news from Victor, Alan’s partner. “Alan is gone, eaten by pigs,” said Victor. “We found his shoes. They were full of salad dressing.” She was hardly surprised; Alan was her six hundredth lawyer in fourteen centuries. Zeus was rough on lawyers. She climbed out of the water, her great alabaster rump rising like Antarctica, and wrapped herself in a vast white towel. “Some god!” she said. “Omniscient except when it comes to himself.”

  She had always been puzzled by Zeus’ lust for mortal women—
what did he see in them? they were so shallow, weak, insipid, childish—and once she asked him straight out: Why fool around with lightweights when you’ve got me, a real woman? He told her, “The spirit of love is the cosmic teacher who brings gods and mortals together, lighting the path of beauty, which is both mortal and godly, from each generation to the next. One makes love as a gift and a sacrament so that people in years to come can enjoy music and poetry and feel passion at the sight of flowers.”

  She said, “You’re not that drunk—don’t be that stupid.”

  Now she vowed to redouble her efforts against him, put Victor on the case. But the next day she was in Thebes, being adored, which she loved, and what with all the flower-strewing and calf-roasting, Hera was out of the loop when a beautiful American woman, Diane, sailed into the harbor at Patmos aboard the S.S. Bethel with her husband, Pastor Wes.

  II. Bored, He Falls for an American

  Wes and Diane were on the second leg of a two-week cruise that the grateful congregation of Zion Lutheran Church in Odense, Pennsylvania, had given them in gratitude for Wes’s ten years of ministry. Zeus, who was drinking coffee in the same sidewalk cafe with the passionate, compliant woman and was becoming bored with her breasts, which now seemed to him slightly too small and perhaps a touch overripe, saw Diane standing at the rail high overhead as the Bethel tied up. The strawberry-blonde hair and great tan against the blue Mediterranean sky, the healthy American good looks made his heart go boom and he felt the old, familiar itch in the groin—except sharper. He arose. She stood, leaning over the rail, wearing a bright-red windbreaker and blue jeans that showed off her fabulous thighs, and she seemed to be furious at the chubby man in the yellow pants who was laying his big arm on her shoulder, her hubby of sixteen years. She turned, and the arm fell off her. “Please, Diane,” he said, and she looked away, up the mountain toward the monastery and the village of white houses.

  Zeus paid the check and headed for the gangplank.

  The night before, over a standing rib roast and a 1949 Bordeaux that cost enough to feed fifty Ugandan children for a week, Wes and Diane had talked about their good life back in Odense, their four wonderful children, their luck, their kind fellow Lutherans, and had somehow got onto the subject of divine grace, which led into a discussion of pretentious Lutheran clergy Diane had known, and Wes had to sit and hear her ridicule close friends of his—make fun of their immense reserve, their dopey clothes, their tremendous lack of sex appeal, which led to a bitter argument about their marriage. They leaned across the baklava, quietly yelling things like “How can you say that?” and “I always knew you felt that way!” until diners nearby were studying the ceiling for hairline cracks. In the morning, Diane announced that she wanted a separation. Now Wes gestured at the blue sea, the fishing boats, the mountain, the handsome Greek man in white shorts below who was smiling up at them—“This is the dream trip of a lifetime,” he said. “We came all this way to Greece to be miserable? We could have done that at home! This is nuts. To go on a vacation trip so you can break up? Give me a break. Why are you so hostile?” And in that moment, as he stood, arms out, palms up, begging for an answer, the god entered his body.

  III. In the Heat of Passion, He Converts to Lutheranism

  It took three convulsive seconds for Zeus to become Wes, and to the fifty-year-old minister, it felt exactly like a fatal heart attack, the painful tightening in the chest—Oh, shit! he thought. Death. And he had quit smoking three years before! All that self-denial and for what? He was going to fall down dead anyway. Tears filled his eyes. Then Zeus took over, and the soul of Wes dropped into an old dog named Spiros, who lived on the docks and suffered from a bad hernia. Arf, said Wes, and felt a pain in his crotch. He groaned and leaned down and licked his balls, a strange sensation for a Lutheran.

  The transformation shook Zeus up, too. He felt suddenly nauseous and clutched at the rail and nearly vomited; in the last hour, Wes had consumed a shovelful of bacon and fried eggs and many cups of dreadful coffee. The god was filled with disgust, but he touched the woman’s porcelain wrist.

  “What?” she said.

  The god coughed. He tried to focus Wes’s watery blue eyes; there was some sort of plastic disc in them. “O Lady whose beauty lights the darkening western skies, your white face flashes when I close my eyes,” he said in a rumbly voice.

  She stared at him. “What did you say?”

  The god swallowed. He wanted to talk beautifully, but English sounded raspy and dull to him, an inferior language; it tasted like a cheap cigar.

  “A face of such reflection as if carved in stone, and such beauty as only in great paintings shone. O Lady of light, fly no higher, but come into my bed and know eternal fire.”

  “Where’d you get that? Off a calendar? Is this supposed to be a joke or what?” she said. She told him to be real.

  All in all, Zeus thought, I would rather be a swan. The dumb mustache, the poofy hair around the bald spot on top, the heavy brass medallion with a fish on it, the sunken chest and wobbly gut and big lunkers of blubber on his hips, the balloon butt, the weak arms and shaky legs, and the poor brain—corroded, stuffed with useless, sad, remorseful thoughts. It was hard for Zeus to keep his mind on love with the brain of Wes thinking of such dumb things to say to her—“I’m sorry you’re angry. Let’s try to have a nice day together and see the town and write some postcards. Buy some presents for the kids, take some pictures, have lunch, and forget about last night.”—Zeus didn’t want to write postcards, he wanted to take her below and peel off her clothes and make love so that the Bethel rocked in her berth.

  Just below, the dog sat on his haunches, a professional theologian covered with filthy, matted fur, and the remains of his breakfast lying before him, the chewed-up hindquarters of a rat, and the rest of the rat in his belly.

  “Look. That sweet little dog on the dock,” said Diane, who loved dogs.

  Zeus cleared his throat. “When you open your thighs, the soft clanging of bells is heard across the valley, O daughter of Harrisburg. Come, glorious woman, and let us waken the day with the music of your clamorous thighs.”

  “Grow up,” she said, and headed down the gangplank, smiling at the dog.

  The god’s innards rumbled, and a bubble of gas shifted in his belly, a fart as big as a child. He clamped his bowels around it and held it in; he followed her down to the dock, saying: “Dear, dear Lady, O Light of my soul—the cheerful face of amiable passion in a cold, dry place. To you I offer a thousand tears and lies, an earnest heart longing for the paradise that awaits us in a bed not far away, I trust. Look at me, Lady, or else I turn to dust.” His best effort so far. But the language was so flat, and the voice of Wes so pompous.

  “I could swear this dog is human,” she cried taking its head in her hands, stroking under its chin, scratching its tattered ears.

  “Thank you, Diane,” said the dog. “I don’t know how I became schizophrenic, but I do know I’ve never loved you more.” This came from his mouth as a whine, and then he felt a terrible twinge in the hernia and moaned. The woman knelt and cradled his head in her arms. She crooned, “Oh, honey, precious, baby, sweetness, Mama gonna be so good to you, little darling.” She had never said this to him before. He felt small and cozy in her arms.

  IV. The Great Lover Tries and Falls Short

  The dog, the woman, and the god rode a bus three miles over the mountain to the Sheraton St. John Hotel, the woman holding the dog’s head on her lap. She was thinking about the future: she’d leave Wes, take the kids, move to Philadelphia, and go to Bryn Mawr College and study women’s studies—the simple glories of the disciplined intellectual life! what a tonic after years of slouching around in a lousy marriage. The god vowed to go without food until she surrendered to him. The dog felt no pain, but he hoped to find a cigarette lying on the floor somewhere, even a cigarette butt, and figure out how to light it.

  The hotel room had twin beds, hard as benches, and looked out on a village of white stucco
houses with small gardens of tomato plants and beans, where chickens strolled among the vines. Brown goats roamed across the brown hills, their bells clanging softly. Diane undressed in the bathroom, and slid into bed sideways, and lay facing the wall. Zeus sat on the edge of her bed and lightly traced with his finger the neckline of her white negligee. She shrugged. The dog lay at her feet, listening. Zeus held her shoulder strap between his thumb and index finger. It was bewildering, trying to steer his passion through the narrow, twisting mind of Wes. All he wanted was to make love enthusiastically for hours, but dismal Lutheran thoughts sprang up: Go to sleep. Stop making a fool of yourself. You’re a grown man. Settle down. Don’t be ridiculous. Who do you think you are?

  He wished he could change to somebody trim and taut, an athlete, but he could feel the cold, wiggly flesh glued on him and he knew that Hera had caught him in the naked moment of metamorphosis and with a well-aimed curse had locked him tight inside the flabby body, this clown sack. A god of grandeur and gallantry living in a dump, wearing a mask of pork. He could hear his fellow gods hooting and cackling up on Olympus. (The Father of Heaven! Turned Down, Given the Heave-Ho! By a Housewife!)

  Zeus pulled in his gut and spoke. “Lady, your quiet demeanor mocks the turmoil in my chest, the rage, the foam, the wind blasting love’s light ships aground. Surely you see this, Lady, unless you are the cruelest of your race. Surely you hear my heart pound with mounting waves upon your long, passive shore. Miles from your coast, you sit in a placid town, feeling faint reverberations from beneath the floor. It is your lover the sea, who can never rest until you come to him.”

  “I don’t know who you’re trying to impress, me or yourself,” she said. Soon she was snoring.

  V. The Husband (the Dog) Takes the Long View

  “This is not such a bad deal,” said the dog. “For me, this could turn out to be a very positive experience in terms of making an emotional breakthrough in my life, bursting the psychological bonds of pastorhood and Lutheranness, becoming a fully functioning, loving, sensitive, caring human being. Becoming a dog would never have been my choice, but now that I am one, I can see that, as a man, my sense of self always was tied up with power and, in some sense, with being an oppressor, being dominant. In the course of following my maleness, as my culture taught me to think of maleness, I got separated from my beingness, my creaturehood. It is so liberating to see things from down here at floor level. You learn a lot about man’s relentlessness.”