Liberty

by Garrison Keillor

Irene was studying him and asking him again what was wrong.

  “Oh,” he said. “This is my last year doing this, and I ought to have fun, but suddenly I start to think maybe we’ll have runaway horses, maybe the fireworks truck will blow up, maybe some yahoo in a burnoose’ll run a truck loaded with homemade explosives into the Living Flag and blow it to Kingdom Come.”

  “You’ve been worrying about all that for years.”

  “This time it could be for real.” He plopped down on the steps. “Last year we had—I donno—twenty thousand people. What if each of them came back and brought two other people. Sixty thousand. Maybe more. I’m short on toilets. Short on water. What if we get temperatures in the nineties and people start keeling over and we’re short on emergency personnel and people die in the street. It happens. Six years of running the show and I go out on a note of death. Criminal neglect. The county attorney decides that I should’ve done the math and had six gallons of drinkable water per attendee and one doctor per thousand, and in September I’m sitting in a courtroom listening to people talk about me like I was the Unabomber.”

  “I doubt that they can get a trial going that fast. Probably you’d have until March or April.”

  He looked down the hill to the Central Building on Main Street where Lyle Janske’s decoration committee was hanging bunting from the cornice and yes it looked to be old man Magendanz on the roof who suffers dizzy spells and also, Clint thinks, is taking Coumadin along with his usual dosage of bourbon but there he was waving his arms and yelling down at someone in the street. Clint looked away (LOCAL MAN, 75, DIES IN FALL, WAS HANGING FLAG FOR JULY 4 FESTIVITIES; DA ACCUSES SPONSORS OF

  “THOUGHTLESS DISREGARD”—VOWS TO BRING CHARGES.) and wished he were flying to Beijing with Angelica. They’d be coming around with drinks about now and warm cashews and she would have her hand in his lap.

  It was still bright out at eight o’clock. A boy walked down the sidewalk bouncing a basketball and you could hear his happiness in the rhythm of it. Out on the lake the soft buzz of a distant outboard. It felt good, the sun and the mist from the hose. “Got people pissed off at me from one end of town to the other. Feel like an old wounded buffalo in a blizzard and the wolves circling for a clear shot at my butt.”

  “The problem,” she said, “is that it’s hard to repeat success. As you ought to know by now.”

  “I feel hated,” he said. “Seriously. That’s why they shit-canned me.” “Nonsense,” she said.

  He followed her as she moved around to the side to water the irises and climbing roses. From uptown near the old depot came the clanging of the fire bell. The fire department was about to put a torch to the annual bonfire. Two old chicken coops had been trucked in and the remains of a one-room schoolhouse, piled on gasoline-soaked beams and a mountain of dry brush and debris. It was the firemen’s party and they were pissed at Clint so he didn’t attend. Probably Viola was there, assuring everybody that next year they could be in charge of fireworks again. Looking at his house, he thought, I might go to Washington and never return and nobody knows this except me. People are going to look at this house and say, Bunsen lived there. A man of mystery. Used to fix my car. Now he’s in Congress. Who knew?

  It was a new idea. It hit him seeing the idiot incumbent Jack S. Olson one night on the news. Verbose and pompous and a voice like a coffee grinder. I could beat this jerk. Why not?

  The Bunsen house was still known as the Huber house to older Wobegonians, having been owned by former Mist County sheriff Walt Huber who ran for Congress in 1958, a Democrat, and he lost after it was revealed he once vacationed in Paris with his wife Lavonne. She went off her rocker after he died (self-inflicted shotgun wound in the cranium, referred to publicly as a hunting accident) and kept calling the sheriff’s office to report a deadly snake in her basement and a deputy had to be dispatched to calm her down. And then, a year before she died, the snake got out and ate a neighbor’s dog, a miniature cocker spaniel, and choked on it and was shot. (The dog revived but suffered from anxiety attacks—the flushing of a toilet threw it into spasms of terror—and it was banished to the outdoors and subsequently run over by a gravel truck.) The snake was sixteen feet long and thirty-seven inches in circumference. Evidently it had fallen off a snake truck en route to a reptile garden and taken refuge in the basement, slipping in and out through a dryer vent. So Lavonne Huber was vindicated. People still thought she was crazy but for other reasons. When Clint and Irene bought the house they discovered snakeskin boots in a closet and copies of an agnostic magazine, Not So. She had sold the house to them for a song—“I always liked you,” she whispered to Clint, still a big flirt at 82.

  It was one of the few brick houses in Lake Wobegon—one of four, to be precise, and the only one owned by a Lutheran, the others being the Wilfred Kotzes, the Hugo Hattendorfs, and the Larry Lugers, all German Catholics.

  His mind collected odd facts such as that—Year That Babe Ruth Came To Town On Sorbitol Barnstorming Tour: 1934, and he walloped a home run against the Lake Wobegon Schroeders, a long ball that never was found. Smartest Graduate of L.W.H.S., probably Phil Johnson, who became a physicist and performed science experiments in the Ringling Brothers Circus. Most Beautiful Girl, probably Eunice Tollefson, who was Miss Sixth Congressional District of 1978 or perhaps Marnie Montaine, who changed her name from Barb Diener and went to Hollywood and was strangled in a movie called The Dark Under the Bed and then changed her name to something else and nobody ever heard a word about her again, she was swallowed by Hollywood. Year That Alhambra Ballroom Burned Down: 1955. Year that Sanctified Brethren (18 members) split into the Consecrated Sanctified Brethren (11 members) and the Faithful Remnant of Sanctified Brethren (5 members): 1947. (Two became Lutherans.)

  He cherished facts. Since he was a boy, he had pored over the World Almanac, soaking up information. For example, there are 100 billion more suns as big as this one in the Milky Way galaxy alone and here we sit, a dust speck in a galaxy which itself is only one of 100 billion galaxies, so far as we on the dust speck are aware. We, in turn, each contain 50 trillion cells, each of which has a coil of DNA that, uncoiled, would extend six feet long, so each of us consists of an invisible coil stretching 950 million miles, all the way to the sun and ten times beyond. Each of us is insignificant and each is vast and complicated, and this includes his wife, trudging barefooted in the grass, watering her flowers.

  The sun is ten thousand times the size of the earth and contains 99.8 percent of all the mass in our solar system (and Jupiter contains most of the rest) and it shines on rich and poor alike, on male and female, on Democrat and Republican. He was a Republican. Irene was a Democrat, bless her heart, a good liberal, tolerant to a fault except where her husband was concerned. A good woman. Mom was right about that. But Irene was hard to open your heart to. You could pour out your innermost thoughts and she’d likely say, “I don’t know where you come up with that stuff.” Which was true, she didn’t. And now he knew why: She was Norwegian, he was Spanish. He craved tenderness. Lake Wobegon women were brought up to be no-nonsense, and it wasn’t in them to put their head on a man’s shoulder, an arm around his waist, murmur “Muy bien, mi amor.” They were more likely to say, “Aren’t those the pants you wore yesterday? Why not put on clean clothes? I do your laundry, why not use it?”

  He sat on his front steps in the gathering twilight and imagined his other life, the one he could’ve had if he’d found out who he was back when he was young enough to do something about it—he’d have settled in the California hills, in the coastal village of San Margarita Maria, in a cottage covered with grape vines looking out at the big ocean waves thwamming against the rocks, and a big-hipped olive-skinned woman with dark hair hanging down her back sitting next to him, sharing a cold beer, a plate of salsa and chips, savoring the conversation of sighs and caresses that is preliminary to the ceremony of love. Love in Lake Wobegon was a complex maneuver, like organizing a softball game—you had to get a lot of pieces in place bef
ore it happened.

  He stood up. Time to crack down. He had to order more toilets and make sure the football field was ready for the arrival of the horses and wagons and check with the fireworks people. So he forgot about the Amnezine and tried to focus on the task at hand. He called the Betsy Ross people. How hard is it to be inert and let people throw you in the air? The lady said, “A Betsy has to undergo twenty hours of training. We have a backup Betsy but she’s in a production of Mary Poppins.”

  “How about you toss a Minuteman?”

  “Then it wouldn’t be a Betsy Ross Blanket Toss.”

  He had booked the Betsy through Asher Variety & Theatrical in the Lumber Exchange in Minneapolis, an agent named Murray who tried to sell him on a troupe of tumbling chickens—“They could wear star-spangled capes, no problem, I know somebody who can sew”—and a strongman who lifts cars—“You could put people in it in costume, light people”—and also Brazilian clog dancers. “I didn’t know there were clog dancers in Brazil,” said Clint. “On the coast there are some,” said Murray. Clint nixed the dancers and the chickens but he was delighted to get Wally the Human Pinwheel who could do cartwheels non-stop for up to a mile at a time. A great addition to any parade. And only $50.

  12. FREEDOM

  And there was a voice-mail message. Angelica said, “I am coming tomorrow, Bunny. I am sensing that you’re under a great deal of stress and I want to be there. And you need a Statue of Liberty. And then I’m going to California. I finally decided. Thanks for the encouragement. You’re right, I need to make a new life. I think about you a lot.”

  California was where he’d left his freedom behind: in San Diego. He was mustered out of the Navy, 23, good-looking, able to run up and down stairs two at a time and put away a 32-oz. porterhouse and baked potato and banana cream pie and go to sleep with no regrets. He had applied to St. Joseph School of Art in Santa Barbara to study wood sculpture. He had decided to move to California. That was the plan. And he was in California at the time so he could’ve just stayed (Duh) but he drove a thousand miles back to Minnesota to say good-bye to Mom and Dad and in no time they made him feel guilty and wretched for wanting to abandon them so he stayed in the frozen North and married the high school sweetheart who he’d tried to leave behind. People expected him to marry Irene so he did. As if he were in a play written by someone who didn’t like him. And then Daddy’s mechanic Bud lost a finger to a circular saw and Clint got sucked into the family business—became the mechanic because he had the brains—Clarence had the warmth, which is all a salesman needs, a grin and a backslap and peppermints for the kiddies, but a mechanic has to know his business—and now he was 60, the business was tanking, he was tired of the dipstick, the tire gauge, the battery tester, thinking he’d like to try dry goods, shirts, ties, and he finds out he’s a Spanish swan among the Norwegian geese.

  The Clint Bunsen Story, doggone it. He’d gone back to that wrong-way odyssey in his own mind, back to Durango, Colorado, sitting at the wheel of the red ’64 Mustang, a Navy vet, driving back home to Minnesota against his better judgment. Should’ve turned that puppy around, made the tires squeal on the Colorado asphalt. It’s a free country. He’d done well in the Navy. Gunnery mate. Fat and sassy. The chaplain saw him whittling little farmer and fisherman figures and asked him to carve a cross, and he did, and then a standing Christ, and then a Mother and Child. So he wanted to matriculate in art school in Santa Barbara. He should have hunkered down, unplugged the phone, let the mail go unopened. He loved California, the balmy climate, the surfers, the tall women playing volleyball on the beach. Why did he drive away from what he wanted? Daddy sent a postcard: “I am counting the days until you come back to us. Nothing has been right since you left.”

  And now the wrong turn was 37 years back down the road. He sat with the Old Regulars in the corner booth at the Chatterbox and a still, small voice said, “Gather those rosebuds, pal, and all the pleasures prove because the flower that smiles today will be dying tomorrow. Nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, boyo. Seize the day! Hit the road!” He no longer believed in the efficacy of hard work—all of his had only dug him in deeper and subjected him to a long list of deprivations. He’d worked a six-day week for years until Irene put a stop to it. The point is: Life is short, dang it. Daddy had gone down hard to colon cancer at the age of 60, still in the traces. It was on Clint’s mind as the cake was brought in with a conflagration of candles and his friends sang in their ancient ruined voices.

  Don’t die in Lake Wobegon, don’t do it, don’t do it. Don’t let them drop you down into this cold ground. Die under the palm trees, suddenly, with several sweet tall women in swimsuits sitting at your side, holding your hands.

  And then a second message from Angelica: “Bunny, did I mention that Kevin will be with me on the Fourth? Is that okay? Please don’t feel bad. You are one of the important people in my life and you always will be. I love you.”

  Turning 60 ought to make you mellow and warm and chuckly, but not him. He only felt panic. Sixty-five was on the horizon and then the short, sudden decline into dementia and death. Shuffling around the Good Shepherd Home in pee-stained pants, trying to remember the route to his room, trying to keep his sphincter clamped shut. Mourning for all the beautiful girls he knew who were beautiful no more and all the dances he’d passed up. Regretting his long life of indentured service to family and community. Then some tossing and turning and then the merciful descent of night and then they stuff you into the blue suit you used to wear to other people’s funerals and you lie in the funeral parlor smelling of roses and Windex and your kids come and blink back their tears—his darling Kira, now beyond his love and care, oh my God—and then one night a woman stands at your coffin and sobs her eyes out—but who is she? It’s too dim to tell. She weeps bitterly and then goes away and does not come to your funeral, your farce of a funeral, and people orating about his fidelity and goodness who never had a kind word for him in life and spinning heartwarming tales about things that never happened. And the short ride up the hill and you’re thinking, “Oh geeze. My last car ride. I remember that drive from San Diego to Lake Wobegon. Sixty-four Mustang. Sweet little car. Four on the floor. Nice pickup, handled well on the highway. I installed that speaker on the roof behind the driver’s seat. Beautiful sound. Loved that car.” And then the hearse stops and you think, “Well, here we are. That’s that. Good-bye highway.” And the pallbearers carry you jouncing over rough ground and set you on a brass frame and old Ingqvist reads a prayer and the survivors sing “Children of the Heavenly Father” without much conviction and your kids stand around snuffling and nobody throws herself on your coffin and cries out, “Oh Daddy, our darling Daddy, don’t leave us! We can’t bear it!” They all walk away except for some guys on the cemetery committee who discuss drainage problems and then the undertaker folds up the plastic grass and drives away and the gravediggers come and one of them says, “That sumbitch Clint Bunsen sold me a Ford Falcon years ago, man that was the shittiest car I ever had. What a jerk.” And the hum of the pulleys lowering you into the vault and a hard bump and the thud of the concrete lid. You lie there for a few minutes and say, “Okay, I’m ready now.” And God says, “For what?” “For the gardens of heaven. The place with no tears. Singing all the time. Where we’ll all be young and beautiful forever.” And God says, “Let me check on that and get back to you.” And there you lie for a hundred years waiting patiently in your nice blue suit, tie knotted, hands folded, and every so often you think, “Damn, I should’ve turned around in Durango.”

  That Standard Oil station in Durango: the petroleum-soaked red dirt around the twin pumps, the dark-eyed Indian kid with the leather necklace who pumped the gas, not a word out of him, and the old brick storefronts across the street and the Stock-men’s Bar, door open, Lefty Frizzell singing “That’s The Way Love Goes,” the dark mountains in the bright blue sky, and the payphone inside the garage where he dropped in the quarters and called Mom to tell her h
e was not coming home and he put the coins in before he got his story worked out in his own mind. He was going to say, “Guess what! I got this great job as a desk clerk at a hotel called The Inn of the Spanish Gardens and I promised I would start work on Monday.” Mom believed in keeping your promise. But the story wasn’t true and when she said, “Clinton! Where are you?” he decided not to lie. He said, “Colorado. But I was thinking maybe I’d come home for Christmas instead.” A pitiful thing to say. Asking your mom for permission to run away from home. Mom said, “But we haven’t laid eyes on you for almost a year, Clint. We want you right here, honey. Daddy needs you. He’s having heart pains. Irene misses you so much. She keeps asking about you. Honey, you have to come home. We’d just plain die if you didn’t.”

  So he continued north and then in Lincoln he stopped at the Cornhusker Hotel and woke up at 3 a.m. hearing fate tell him to turn around and go back to California, go back, go back, and he called home to tell them he had changed his mind and nobody was home. The phone rang and rang. No answering machines in those days where you could leave your message—“I ain’t coming. Forget about it”—and that would be that. For lack of voice-mail, he was doomed to go home and spend his life in Lake Wobegon. Simple as that. He got home and Daddy was worn out and needed a mechanic and the next day Clint started work.

  And nobody in Lake Wobegon cared about The Clint Bunsen Story, because here, you don’t entertain regrets. Everybody has them so don’t try to unravel the twisted cords of history, because there’s no end to it. Put it behind you and wake up with a smile and make this day the best it can be.

  He pulled out a cigarette, the last of his day’s ration, and stuck it in his mouth unlit. He felt light-headed, Don Clintonio, the old lover. His heart fluttered in an interesting way. Courage. The wolves were out to bring him down, and eventually they would. And his carcass would fertilize the grass and life would go on. That was what it was all about, the Committee dumping him—his townsmen were only fulfilling nature’s mission. Push the old guy out and let somebody new come in. Cull the herd, prune the roses. Throw the old lover off the balcony and make the bed for a new one. Oh well. At least he wouldn’t have to run the Fourth of July again. Safe at last. No more meetings where he said, “Let’s try to make this work, okay?” Nobody was going to put a clipboard in his cold, petrified fingers. He had lost twenty pounds and he would look good at the end and people would be a little surprised when he kicked the bucket. And tonight he intended to make love to his wife. He had bought a bottle of red wine for $25, a Tempranillo from Barcelona in the province of Tarragona, a pound of garlic olives, and a dozen jumbo shrimp and horseradish. He had heard that red wine and shellfish was definitely a help.