The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  “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—to you I offer 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—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. 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. “Becoming a dog would never have been my choice, but now that I am one, I can see that 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.”

  They spent two sunny days at the Sheraton, during which Zeus worked to seduce Diane and she treated him like a husband. She laughed at him, not at his witty stories but at his ardor. The lines that had worked for him in the past (“Sex is a token of a deeper friendship, an affirmation of mutual humanity, an extension of conversation”) made her roll her eyes and snort. She lay on a blue wicker lounge beside the pool—her caramel skin set off by two red bands of bikini, her perfect breasts, her long, tan legs with a pale golden fuzz. Her slender hands held a book, The Concrete Shoes of Motherhood, and she read it as he spoke to her.

  “Let’s take a shower. They have a sauna. Let me give you a backrub. Let’s lie down and take a nap,” he said.

  “Cheese it,” she said. “I’m not interested. Beat it.”

  He lost eighteen pounds. He ran ten miles every morning and swam in the afternoon. He shaved off the mustache. She refused to look at him, but, being a god, he could read her thoughts. She was curious about this sea change in her husband, his new regimen, his amazing discipline. She hiked over the dry brown hills and he walked behind and sang songs to her:

  Lady, your shining skin will slide on mine,

  And rise to the temple of Aphrodite,

  Where you will live forever, no more

  Lutheran but venerated by mortals. This I pledge.

  She pretended not to hear, sweeping the horizon with her binoculars, looking for rare seabirds. Zeus thought, I should have been a swan. Definitely a swan. The dog trotted along, his hernia cured by love. She had named him Sweetness. “You go ahead and use my body as long as you like,” he said to Zeus. “You’re doing wonders for it. I never looked so good until you became me. No kidding. But when it comes to lyrics, you’re no Cole Porter, pal.”

  VI. THE GREAT LOVER TRIES AGAIN

  She wouldn’t let him touch her until they got on the plane back to America and they had eaten the lasagna and watched the movie and were almost over Newfoundland. The FASTEN SEAT BELTS signs flashed on and the pilot announced th
at they would be passing through a turbulent period and suddenly the plane bucked and shuddered in the boiling clouds, and Diane reached over and grabbed him as the plane tipped and plunged and rattled, and people shrieked and children cried. “If this is our time to die, then I want you to know that they were good years, they really were,” Diane said, kissing him. “I love you, Wes. I’m crazy about you.” Her kisses were hot and excited, and soon she was grabbing him and groping under his sport coat, digging her sharp tongue into the corners of his mouth and writhing in his arms and groaning and saying his name, but Zeus was unable to respond somehow. He tried thinking of smokestacks, pistols, pedestals, pole vaults, peninsulas, but nothing worked. Her hands reached for his zipper but he fought her off. “Not here, people are watching,” he muttered, and then the plane hit the concrete at Kennedy and bounced and touched down and rolled to a stop, and Diane shuddered and said, “I can’t wait to get you home, big boy.”

  In the terminal, Zeus felt so weak, he could not carry their bags through customs. They fetched the dog, who emerged from the baggage room dopey and confused and out of sorts. He bit Zeus on the hand. Zeus limped to the curb and collapsed into the backseat of a van driven by a burly man named Paul, who, Zeus gathered, was his brother. Paul and Diane sat in front, Zeus and the dog in back. “Wes is pretty jet-lagged,” Diane said, but the man yammered on and on about some football team that Zeus gathered he was supposedly interested in. “Hope you had a great time,” said Paul. Yes, they said, they had. “Always wanted to go over there myself,” he said. “But things come up. You know.” He talked for many miles about what he had done instead of going to Greece: re-sodding, finishing the attic, adding on a bedroom, taking the kids to Yellowstone.

  Do we have kids? Zeus wondered. “Four,” said the dog, beaming. “Great kids. I can’t wait for you to meet them, mister.” Then he dropped his chin on the seat and groaned. “The littlest guy is murder on animals. One look at me, he’ll have me in a headlock until my eyeballs pop.” He groaned again. “I forgot about Mojo. Our black Lab.” His big brown eyes filled with tears. “I’ve come home in disgrace to die like a dog,” he said. “I feed Mojo for ten years and now he’s going to go for my throat. It’s too hard.” The god told him to buck up, but the dog was gloomy all the way home.

  VII. THE HUSBAND DISAPPEARS

  When Paul pulled up to the double garage behind the green frame house and Diane climbed out, the dog squeezed out the door behind her and tore off down the street and across a playground and disappeared. “Sweetness!” she screeched. Paul and Zeus cruised the streets for half an hour searching for the mutt, Zeus with gathering apprehension, even panic. Without Wes to resume being Wes, he now realized, he couldn’t get out of Wes and back into Zeus. There was, however, no way to explain this to Paul.

  “You seem a little—I don’t know—distant,” said Paul.

  “Just tired,” said Zeus.

  They circled the blocks, peering into the bushes, whistling for the dog, calling his name, and then Paul went home for a warm jacket (he said, but Zeus guessed he was tired and would find some reason not to come back). The god strode across yards, through hedges, crying, “Sweetness! Sweetness!” The yards were cluttered with machines, which he threw aside. Sweetness!

  The dog was huddled by an incinerator behind the school. He had coached boys’ hockey here for ten years. “I’m so ashamed,” he wept.

  The god held him tightly in his arms.

  “To be a dog in a foreign place is one thing, but to come home and have to crawl around your own neighborhood—” He was a small dog, but he sobbed like a man—deep, convulsive sobs.

  Zeus was about to say, “Oh, it’s not all that bad,” and then he felt a feathery hand on his shoulder. Actually, a wing. It was Victor, Hera’s lawyer, in a blue pin-striped suit and two transparent wings like a locust’s.

  VIII. THE LOVER’S FEET HELD TO THE FIRE

  Zeus tried to turn him into a kumquat, but the lawyer only chuckled. “Heh, heh, heh. Don’t waste my time. You wanna know how come you feel a little limp? Lemme tell ya. Hera is extremely upset, Mr. Z. Frankly, I don’t know if godhood is something you’re ever going to experience again. It wouldn’t surprise me that much if you spent the rest of recorded time as a frozen meatball.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She wants what’s right. Justice. She wants half your power. No more, no less.”

  “Divide power? Impossible. It wouldn’t be power if I gave it up.”

  “Okay. Then see how you like these potatoes.” And Victor snatched up the dog, and his wings buzzed as he zoomed up and over the pleasant rooftops of Odense.

  “Wait!” the god cried. “Forty-five percent!” But his voice was thin and whispery. On the way home, he swayed, his knees caved in, he had to hang on to a mailbox.

  IX. TRAPPED

  For three days, Zeus was flat on his back, stunned by monogamy: what a cruel fate for a great man! The dog Mojo barked and barked at him, and Diane waited on him hand and foot, bringing him bad food and despicable wine; wretched little children hung around, onlookers at the site of a disaster, children who he had to pretend were his own. They clung to him on the couch, fighting over the choice locations, whining, weeping, pounding each other. They stank of sugar and yet he had to embrace them. He could not get their names straight. The god swung down his legs and sat up on the couch and raised his voice: “I am trapped here, a divine being fallen from a very high estate indeed—you have no idea—and what I see around me I do not want.”

  Everybody felt lousy, except Diane. “It’s only jet lag!” she cried, bringing in a tray of cold, greasy, repulsive food, which he could see from her smile was considered a real treat here. He ate a nugget of cheese and gagged.

  “You’ll feel better tomorrow,” she said.

  From outside came a burst of fierce barks and a brief dogfight and then yelping, and Diane tore out the door and returned a moment later with her husband, wounded, weeping, in her arms. “Oh, Sweetness, Sweetness,” she murmured, kissing him on the snout, “we’ll make it up to you somehow.”

  Later, Penny, the youngest, asked Zeus if Greece was as dirty as they said. She asked if he and Mom had had a big fight. She asked why he felt trapped. She wanted to hear all the bad news.

  “I felt crazy the moment we landed in America. The air is full of piercing voices, thousands of perfectly normal, handsome, tall people talk-talk-talk-talk-talking away like chickadees, and I can hear each one of them all the time, and they make me insane. You’re used to this, I’m not. What do you people have against silence? Your country is so beautiful, and it is in the grip of invincible stupidity. Your politicians are habitual liars and toadies, and the writers are arrogant hacks,” he said. “The country is inflamed with debt and swollen with blight and trash and sworn to flaming idiocy, and there is no civility left except among drunks and cabdrivers.”

  “How can you say that, Dad?”

  “Because I’m omniscient.”

  “You are?”

  “I know everything. It’s a fact.” She looked at him with a level gaze, not smirking, not pouting, an intelligent child. The only one prepared to understand him.

  “Do my homework,” she whispered. So he did. He whipped off dozens of geometry exercises, algebra, trigonometry, in a flash. He identified the nations of Africa, the law of averages, the use of the dative. “You are so smart,” she said.

  X. THE WIFE COURTS THE LOVER WHILE THE HUSBAND WATCHES

  Diane packed the kids off to bed. “Now,” she said, “where’s that guy I rode home with on the plane?”

  How could she understand? Passion isn’t an arrangement, it’s an accident, and Zeus was worn out. Nonetheless, he allowed himself to be undressed and helped into bed, and then Diane slowly undressed, letting her white silk slip slide to the floor, unhooking her garter belt and stripping the nylons slowly from her magnificent golden legs, un
snapping the brassiere and tossing it over her right shoulder, and stepping out of her silver panties. Then, naked, she stood a moment for his admiration, and turned and went into the bathroom.

  “Relax, she’ll be in there fifteen minutes if I know Diane,” said the dog, sitting in the doorway. “She likes to do her nails before making love, I don’t know why. Anyway, let me give you a few pointers about making love to her. She comes out of the gate pretty fast and gets excited and you think you’re onto the straightaway stretch, but you’re not—she slows down at that point, and she doesn’t mount you until you’re practically clawing at the walls.”

  “She mounts me?” asked Zeus.

  “Yes,” the dog said. “She’s always on top.”

  When Diane emerged from the bathroom, she found Zeus in the living room, fully dressed, trying to make a long-distance call to Greece. She wanted him to see a therapist, but Zeus knew he was going back to Olympus. He just had to talk Hera down a little.

  XI. LAST CHANCE

  The next morning, Zeus drove to the church, with Penny snuggled at his side. The town lay in a river valley, the avenues of homes extending up and over the hills like branches laden with fruit. The church stood on a hill, a redbrick hangar with a weathervane for a steeple, a sanctuary done up with fake beams and mosaics, and a plump secretary named Tammy with piano legs. She cornered him, hugged him, and fawned like a house afire. “Oh, Pastor Wes, we missed you so much! I’ve been reading your sermons over and over—they’re so spirit-filled! We’ve got to publish them in a book!” she squealed.

  “Go home,” said Zeus. “Put your head under cold water.” He escaped from the sanctuary into the study and slammed the door. The dog sat in the big leather chair behind the long desk. He cleared his throat. “I’d be glad to help with the sermon for tomorrow,” he said. “I think your topic has got to be change—the life-affirming nature of change—how it teaches us not to confuse being with having . . . the Christian’s willingness to accept and nurture change. . . . I’ll work up an outline for you.”