Liberty

by Garrison Keillor

  13. THE CHAIRMAN AWAKENS

  Six a.m. on the Fourth of July and the Chairman of the day had gotten two phone calls already and had smoked one of his ten allotted smokes and was about to light the second. Todd, the governor’s flunky, had called from the capitol to say the governor might be a couple hours late and Lyle called to say he was having a nervous breakdown. A text message from Angelica: “Adoro a usted, senor. I am mighty loco for you.” Clint sat on the front steps, the smell of coffee and flowers in the air. He had made love to his indifferent wife the night before and he’d done a good job of it and made her cry out his name and say a vulgar word over and over that she seldom ever said and that was an accomplishment, and now he sat on his front steps, in his pajamas, cigarette and coffee in hand, studying the sky, a few high wisps of cloud to the north like patches of oatmeal in a blue bowl. He waited for the boom of the cannon, which should’ve gone off at six. Berge was the cannon man. Maybe he’d overslept.

  He hadn’t slept well at all. He worried about the Fourth and then thought about Angelica and about Kevin who was kissing her, holding her in his arms, unbuttoning her blouse, and Clint wanted to go get a shotgun and blow the man’s head off. Clean. A bloody stump of neck, the brains glittering on the sidewalk. The scalp lying in the street. It was the Spanish in him. Around midnight he turned to his old wife and snaked his foot over and touched hers, and she said, “What?” He said, “You’re very lovely, you know that?” She sighed a weary sigh (“Not that again . . .”), but he persevered, and stroked her hair, kissed her freckled shoulders and breasts, touched all the switches, it was like starting a car on a cold morning, and in the end she was on her hands and knees thrusting her bare rump at him and crying, “Do it! Do it!”—how refreshing to hear it from the matron of the church kitchen, she who was so caustic about pornography and wondered what anybody saw in it—sharp-tongued Irene of the Rhubarb Patch, crying out, “O Christ!” as he dashed steaming around third base toward home and the crowd rose to its feet, and in he came he came he came sailing into home and she whinnied with joy and he collapsed on her and they lay there exhaling for a few minutes. She got up out of bed, her great white haunches naked in the moonlight, and tiptoed into the bathroom and closed the door and peed quietly, musically, and then slipped back into bed.

  “It’s been a long time,” she murmured. She kissed him on the neck. “Put your arm around me,” she said. He did.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Thinking about you.”

  “Not about your girlfriend?”

  “No.” And he wasn’t. Not until she mentioned it. And then he remembered Angelica and her new lover and wondered what they might be up to tonight, imagined their clothing mingled on her bedroom floor.

  “Do you still love me?” He said that indeed he did.

  “Do you really? Are you sure?” Yes, he said, he really was. Though he wasn’t completely sure, now that she asked. But what could he say? Maybe. Let me think about it? And make her feel bad, and then she’d have you in counseling and you’d lose your Wednesday nights for a while and face a long, grim drive together to St. Cloud and back. No, making love was the right thing. Go on the offensive, secure the beachhead, and short-circuit those questions women drive you nuts with—Do you love me? Do you think we have a good marriage? Why don’t we spend more time together?

  So he took care of that, and she rolled over and started snoring and he lay awake, looking at the ceiling, thinking about his heart. He slept for a while until raccoons woke him up at 2 a.m., two big males rolling the garbage can down the driveway like patrons at a buffet, and he ran them off and then spotted Miss Simpson across the alley up in her bathroom, God help us, taking a shower, the window half open, her bare back quite visible in the mist, and he stood, pondering whether to warn her that her window was open and any yahoo could observe her, and then she turned toward the window to rinse her back, and he decided not to. We all have to take our chances in this life.

  Then after lusting after the flat chest of a math teacher, he listened to Party Line on WDUL and T.J. was yakking about spiders and how the average person eats thirteen spiders in a lifetime. More if you snore. They tiptoe along your lips in the night, attracted to drool, and if you snore, the intake will suck them in, and as you swallow them they empty their bowels which is that bitter taste you wake up with in the morning. Spider turds. A proven fact. That’s why men drink whiskey for breakfast, and also to kill off spider toxins that can trigger hormonal changes in men. The poisons a spider kills houseflies with may take the lead out of your pencil. “I maybe shouldn’t be saying this,” said a caller, “but I gotta wonder if homosexuality may not be caused by spiders.” T.J. pooh-poohed that but another caller said, “No, my brother-in-law had an infestation of spiders one spring and within weeks he was dating a man named Sean. A very nice man, don’t get me wrong, but nevertheless—”

  “I think that your brother-in-law probably always was gay and just didn’t know it,” said T.J. “That’s about what I’d expect a liberal like yourself to say,” said the caller and was about to say more and then T.J. cut to a commercial for asphalt delivered hot to your home.

  After that there was no sleep for Clint. He watched three and four o’clock click over on the digital clock radio, and he heard the voice of his old dad say, Look out. A beautiful summer day may turn out badly. Someone could drown. It happens. Clint drifted off to sleep and dreamed he heard women screaming, a child had been trampled by a horse. The team comes wheeling around the corner by the Sons of Knute temple and a child dashes in front of the beasts! He disappears under the mighty hooves. The mother screams and crawls into the mass of horseflesh as the teamster hauls on the reins and she emerges with a small bloody bundle, the face cruelly torn—a siren approaches . . .

  Clint sat up in bed, sweat trickling down his forehead, salt burning his eyes. It was 4:15 and the curtains stirred in the breeze and a sound like water trickling from a faucet. He got up to check. Pulled on his pants and a sweatshirt and went downstairs. Actually it was something flapping, like leaves against a window, or scissors cutting construction paper. He half-expected to find Kira, 10 years old, in the kitchen pasting together the walls of a little house in which tiny paper people—Mom, Dad, Chad, Tiff, Me—sat glued to a table eating food scrawled on round circles. No, it was a bird chirping on a branch outside the kitchen window. A low chirp of bird trepidation. “Not good,” it said. “Not good at all.” He stepped out into the dark yard, faint rays of light from beyond the lake. And there was a message from Angelica: “Darling, I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about you and worrying. I have a vision of you in agony. Is that true? I am sorry if I’m the cause of it. If you want to call me, please do.”

  He walked to the end of the yard and into Irene’s garden. Pole beans, tomatoes, the cucumber vines, peppers, radishes. A tribe of crows had taken lodging in a red oak tree behind the Lutheran church who were starting to murmur now, like old men stirring in their sleep. He thought he could hear Daddy’s voice and then Uncle Jack’s. Daddy was telling his Mexican paramour how much he loved her, and Jack was complaining—“Jeeze, Clinty. I was only fifty-four. What kind of deal is that? Got divorced from Dot and looked forward to a new life and, wham, liver cancer.

  Me. Mr. Eagle Scout. I never drank. Wasted years, Clinty. Wasted years. Damn it to hell, when I think of the hours I spent watching golf on TV. Jesus. Help me. I’m not done yet. I want to come back. Please. Pray for my return to earth. Being a crow is a lousy way to end up. Tell God I deserve better.”

  Jack sat in the tree muttering and Clint went back indoors.

  14. CONGRESS

  The kitchen smelled of citron. He turned on the coffeemaker. He made a list on an index card:1. STAGE

  2. TOILETS

  3. GOVERNOR

  4. WHEN CNN?

  5. FIRST AID (DEHYDRATION)

  6. FALCONER

  7. ART

  8. MORE FLAGS

  9. PERCH. (VISIT)
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  10.

  He took the card and a cup of coffee out on the porch and sat on the front steps waiting for the cannon to go off and was about to call up Berge when he heard Irene’s bare feet on the floor-boards behind him. She stood behind him, her knees grazing the back of his head. Little croakers in the grass and a redwing black-bird in the bushes.

  “That was rather lovely last night. And completely unexpected,” she said. “I guess we ought to have red wine more often.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What are you thinking?” She eased herself down on the step beside him, as if she expected a cogent answer. What was he thinking?—it would take the rest of his life to tell her.

  “I’m trying not to think.”

  “I can hear the wheels in your head going around.” She put a hand on his knee. “What’s the big news? Out with it.”

  “I’m thinking about running for Congress. I’m not going to do it but I’m thinking about it.”

  “Not such a bad idea,” she said. “After we’ve had an idiot for a president—who’s to say what’s crazy?”

  “I don’t know—there’s this guy—” A man in St. Cloud, a very well-connected man named Griswold, was pushing him to do it. The man had seen Clint give a speech at the Kiwanis in Little Falls and thought it was great. And the time was now.

  A week ago the Honorable John “Smilin’ Jack” S. Olson had sidled up to a man standing at a urinal in a men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and asked him to dance. “Let’s you and me and your puppy dog boogie,” he said, according to men at nearby urinals. Olson then cried, “Wheeeee!” and grabbed the man by the wrists and attempted to twirl him. He made lascivious thrusting movements with his pelvis. A bystander captured the scene on his cell phone. The congressman was arrested for lewd behavior. His office claimed he was suffering from a mood swing caused by the use of the steroid prednisone, and he flew to New Zealand on a fact-finding mission to the kiwi industry. A week later, after other urinal incidents had come to light, all involving an offer to dance, he tearfully resigned.

  Irene shook her head. “So you just came up with this since all that happened to Olson?”

  No, not really. Though the toilet dancing was what opened the door. Last year’s Fourth of July/Delivery Day had gotten a lot of press. All year, in the wake of the CNN exposure, Clint had been giving a speech, “Dare To Make A Difference,” which had gone over well at Kiwanis and Jaycee groups, and Griswold said, “That speech can take you to Congress, my friend. I kid you not.” He was a wiry little guy with a fixed grin and he grabbed both of Clint’s elbows and got up close to him and said, “Lack of experience is not the disability it once was. Voters want fresh faces. The fact that you are an auto mechanic and get grease on your hands is only to your advantage, being a Republican.”

  A right-wing nut named Georgia Brickhouse had already filed for the primary September 8, a fundamentalist dame who had gotten a command direct from the Lord to run. A loony.

  “So that’s what I’m thinking,” he said. Irene laughed. “You want to go to Washington, you go alone,” she said. “I’m a small-town girl. I have to have a garden.”

  Griswold was already talking about an ad campaign showing Clint in his coveralls next to a car: “I’ve been fixing things all my life and now it’s time to do an overhaul in Washington. . . .” Another showing Clint pointing with a clipboard, directing last year’s parade: “Big cities have canceled their Fourth of July parades but Lake Wobegon’s got bigger and better, thanks to a man who dared to dream—last year 57 million people saw it on CNN—and now you can send this heroic dreamer to work for you in Washington. . . .”

  But now he wasn’t sure. There was the Angelica business, a complication of a high order. Gossip about him playing footsie with a young woman would hurt him in this town, no doubt about it. In this town adultery was considered not only immoral but grotesque, like pouring whiskey on your cornflakes or having a spider tattooed on your face—Why? What was the point? REPUBLICAN HOPEFUL ADMITS “INDISCRETION”—TEARFUL BUNSEN: “I WAS WRONG.

  I GET IT NOW. PLEASE FORGIVE ME.” And now the governor was coming up from St. Paul for the Fourth and Griswold was pushing Clint to announce his candidacy, ask the governor for his blessing, get the show on the road. And Clarence was pushing him to take over the business so he and Arlene could go to Florida this winter.

  Too much going on.

  The Living Flag was scheduled for 11:30 so the sun would be high for an overhead photo with no shadows and the parade was at 2 o’clock and the Honor America Program at 3:30 but the governor was running late and there was no word from CNN so the schedule might need to be juggled and Father Wilmer the Living Flag chairman had turned things over to Constable Gary because Father was having an anxiety attack about riding in a convertible as Parade Grand Marshal though he’d known about it for weeks—Gary was half out of his mind, having been taken off one medication and put on another—and Lyle, ordinarily Mr. Reliable, had gotten dithery since his marriage was on the rocks and he was in charge of the stage show, meanwhile, Mr. Berge the parade chairman had fallen off the wagon and was liable to spend the day in bed.

  Todd suggested that the governor might like to make a speech after the parade. In olden days there had been a Fourth of July speech by a noted orator but the noted orators all died off, Gene McCarthy that old spellbinder had come in 1958, Clint remembered, and held the crowd in the palm of his hand, crying out against injustice and the exploitation of labor, and in 1963 his rival Hubert Humphrey stood on a haywagon in the middle of Main Street and raised his voice and five thousand people jammed in tight, on tiptoe, necks craning, to see the man, his shirtsleeves rolled up, big perspiration stains on his back and under his arms, but then those old champions who could stand up and belt out a speech died off and then one year the speaker didn’t show up—he got the date wrong—and nobody seemed to miss it, and that was the end of it.

  “It could be a short speech,” said Todd. “Ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “How about he gets up and gives a greeting?”

  “How long is a greeting?”

  “A hundred words or less.”

  “How about two hundred?”

  “Okay, how about just a grin and a wave?”

  Todd pretended to be offended. “You’re saying he can’t speak? This is the governor of Minnesota, not some yahoo.”

  “People don’t come to hear speeches anymore.”

  “Who says?”

  Clint had been dealing with Todd for two months. He liked to get in your face.

  15. DRESSING UP

  Viola Tors called to say that she’d heard that Clint was upset and hoped it wasn’t true. She was afraid they might draw too may people—80,000 would be a disaster. Maybe they needed to hire more security. She said Art had left for Montana yesterday. She had put him on the bus in St. Cloud with a dozen cheese Danish and a bottle of Jim Beam and he was happy. He was carrying a pistol in a leg holster but she wasn’t going to worry about that. Probably he passed out and would sleep right through to Billings. She had the keys to the motel, and she and four ladies from church were going to clean out two cabins, one for CNN and one for the governor, and Dorothy was whomping up a nice buffet of cold shrimp, smoked venison sausage, four kinds of pickles, a cheese platter, smoked whitefish, deluxe olives, and a selection of canned beverages. She was hoping Clint could assign someone to keep Mr. Berge under control. He wandered into the Chatterbox at 6:30 in the morning jabbering about chiggers. “I will speak to him,” said Clint.

  Berge went on drinking binges whenever he thought he was dying. Something—a heart palpitation, blurred vision, irregular bowel habits—convinced him that the end was near and he felt the inferno and he hit the bottle again. Berge was a student of his own bowel movements and he was happy to share his findings with you. Once, in the Sidetrack Tap, he stuck his head out of the men’s can and yelled to Wally, “Come here! I want you
to take a look at something!” Wally told him to flush the toilet.

  “Can you call CNN and make sure they’re coming?” she said.

  He reminded her that his term as Chairman was almost up. “I’m going to have fun for once. Leave the worries to the rest of you.”

  “I was afraid of that,” she said. She was sorry for any hurt feelings. She hadn’t meant it personally. “Please don’t leave us hanging,” she said. Her voice got soft and trembly. “We need you, Clint. We’re counting on you.”

  And then he went upstairs to get dressed. He had sent for the costume through a website called Muchacho Allegre in Las Cruces, white pants with gold buttons shaped like figure-8s down the pantlegs and slit at the cuffs, a white waist-jacket embroidered with vines and flowers, a silk shirt with pearl buttons and roses embroidered across the yoke. A broad-brimmed sombrero, made of felt, and a golden belt with a silver buckle, and a big yellow bow tie. And black sandals. He had never worn sandals before except in San Diego, during his Navy years, flip-flops for the beach. In Lake Wobegon, a man wore shoes or boots.