Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  “It’s okay, Mom. Call up the mortuary. Not Lindberg. I don’t think he does cremations. Call one in St. Cloud. Look in the Yellow Pages. I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Do you need me to find Raoul?”

  “No, I’ll find him myself. Soon as I hang up.”

  “Promise? You can’t leave Raoul out.” Kyle laughed. Raoul. She had visions of a dance instructor in a storefront studio, Raoul’s House of Samba, a lounge lizard in black slacks and flamenco shirt, his specialty: mature women, unattached. Twenty dollars a dance, no extra charge for the squeeze.

  3. OBITUARY

  Evelyn Frances Powell. Born March 14, 1923, in her grandma Crandall’s bedroom in Anoka. Fourth child of Frank and Susan. Ruby, Frank Jr., Florence, Evelyn. Her dad farmed 140 acres near Holding-ford. She grew up gardening and feeding chickens and then the farm went under. Her dad bought a tractor to replace his team of horses and the tractor sparked and the barn caught fire and the hay in the loft went up like a torch and the cows perished and that was the end of them. The bank took over and they moved to Lake Wobegon. Uncle Ev owned a machine shop there. Her dad felt “liberated” by the farm failure and pursued his true calling, which was invention. He invented a double-flange rotary valve trombone, a hawser spindle for a capstan whelp, and though his patents found no takers, he was a happy man, a fount of innovation. “Work,” he told Evelyn. “That’s the secret of happiness.” He had a lathe, a drill press, a forge, all he needed. He invented a bifurcated grommet for an oarlock, and a two-way spring-forced sprocket. He invented the two-bit drill chuck, the semi-rigid rear-mounted eyelet, the twin-turret baffle effector. The sheepshank fish hook. Although nothing he made had immediate applicability, he went to his work-bench every day with a song in his heart. Evelyn took after him.

  In 1938, he went through a bad episode, hallucinations and restlessness and vocal outbursts (he shouted things like “Clear the decks!” and “Get ’em off me!”) and Florence and Evelyn moved in with their maternal grandparents on Cedar Avenue in south Minneapolis.

  When she got to Minneapolis, she took the name Eve for a few years and got a taste of stardom at Roosevelt High School. Eve played center on the 1937–38 Rosies basketball team who went to State, and she recited “The Raven” in speech tournaments, dressed in a long white gown, long wild brown hair, barefoot, and according to her sister, she was mesmerizing.

  Eve had a future in Hollywood. Many people thought so. She was a natural. Like Garbo. She shone. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. At the 1939 Minnesota State Fair, she was sculpted in butter. She recited “Invictus” on WCCO’s “Stairway to Stardom” broadcast at the Aquatennial, and Randolph Scott, who was Grand Marshal of the Torchlight Parade that year, told her she was the genuine article and she should come to Hollywood and he would get her a screen test at RKO, but nobody encouraged her. In any decent fairy tale, someone would have offered her a ride out west and dropped her on Sunset Boulevard with her cardboard suitcase, squinting into the setting sun, and she would’ve caught the eye of Jack Warner, driving by in his yellow roadster, and he’d stop and offer her a small part in Babes Ahoy. But instead she clerked at Dayton’s and then went to nursing school. Three months later she got a boil on her butt that popped, which, in those pre-antibiotic days, almost killed her. She lay in General Hospital for two weeks with a 104 degree fever and came home to Lake Wobegon to recuperate.

  The brush with death derailed her, and she sat discouraged in her mother’s dim parlor, reading pious novels about goodness rewarded, and listened to the moaning that passed for conversation in that house, and that was when Jack Peterson walked into her life. He was the nephew of the next-door neighbor. Simple as that. He came over and shoveled the walk. He was a dark Norwegian in Navy whites, due to report for duty in thirty days, and in a burst of patriotism in the wake of Pearl Harbor, she married him.

  She felt sorry for him, said Florence. He was all torn up inside about the futility of war and he believed he was going to die. He was sure that Hitler would be marching down State Street in Chicago by Labor Day and the Japs would invade Los Angeles. The Wehrmacht would blitzkrieg west across the Plains, just as they had rolled over the Poles and the French, the Luftwaffe leaving cities in smoking ruins. America was full of Germans—New Ulm, New Munich—look around you—and they formed a fifth column of spies and saboteurs. The end of the world was at hand, there was no God, how could there be? He was soaked in defeat, death was waiting for him in some stinking jungle. He wept on her hand. She fixed him a chocolate malted and he said it probably was his last. There was a Last Visit to the old high school, and a Last Ice Fishing Trip, and a Last Movie. They sat in the back row. He clung to her and she allowed him to slip his trembling hand up inside her shirt. She just wanted to bring some sunshine into a sailor’s life. But some town girls saw what happened and they told and back in those days necking was sex and sex led to marriage—No U-turns Permitted—and the next day he threw himself at her feet and said she was the only ray of hope in his life, and she felt obliged to go ahead and do it. February 7, 1942, at 11:30 in the morning. The two of them and the wooden-faced minister and his cross-eyed wife and Mother and Florence. Jack looked whipped. Evelyn wore a lovely shimmery green dress that had been Mother’s. The couple drove away in Jack’s rattletrap Model A, and Mother and Florence burst into tears the moment the car disappeared around the corner. They cried their eyes out.

  “He’s not good enough for her,” said Mother. “So why did we let her go?” They were blinded by the uniform, said Flo. The starched cap and the gold braid. Evelyn was sacrificed for the war effort, as if she was scrap metal.

  Mr. and Mrs. Peterson drove toward the Wisconsin Dells and he was half-asleep and ran the car off the road and onto a frozen pond in River Falls and they skidded to a halt and the right front tire sank in a hole in the ice. Jack tried to lift the right front end and couldn’t and he flopped down on the ice, sobbing, “Nothing I do ever turns out right.” They spent the night with an old bachelor farmer named Wilf who towed the car out with a team of horses. Evelyn lay on a filthy couch, her husband on the floor, and considered having the marriage annulled. But what if he died in the service? She’d feel horrible. He was going off to fight for his country in three days and she would make those days the best days of his young life. She imagined his ship would be torpedoed. She would stand by his bier in the cemetery as the bugler played “Taps” and the honor guard saluted and she would grieve for him. That was what Jack expected, and she did too. But he was sent to Los Angeles, taught Morse code, and assigned to a spotter’s station at the end of the pier in Ventura where he watched for Japanese planes that never came, his finger on the telegraph key. Three years of staring at the horizon. She wrote to him every Sunday, though he seldom wrote back, cheerful letters about Minneapolis and Vocational High, where she trained as an auto mechanic and her friends there, Ina and Margaret and Grace and Ruby and Marian and Elsie, and the family they had bonded with on Oakland Avenue, the streetcar rides to Excelsior Amusement Park, the picnics in Annandale and Medicine Lake. The gas coupons they pooled to drive to the North Shore in Ina’s car, the sing-alongs, the gaiety of it all, and then he came home. He walked in the door and said, “I made it.” And he had. There he was. And she was married to him.

  4. SEPARATION

  They were married for forty-four years. Of course, it didn’t escape notice among the vigilant ladies of the Bon Marche Beauty Salon when Jack and Evelyn went their separate ways or that after he died she planted him between his mother and his grandparents under a solo gravestone, a skinny slab of polished granite with JOHN L. PETERSON 1921–1986 carved in it. All around the Lake Wobegon cemetery, you saw double stones, the husband down below, waiting, his wife’s name beside his, her death date blank, but she had no intention of landing next to him. Nor would she inscribe the stone “Beloved Husband and Father” or “Asleep in Jesus” or “Takk for Alt” (Thanks for Everything). She sat in church for his funeral, listening to him eulogized and hymn
s sung over him about eternal rest, like layers of whipped cream on a burnt sausage, and put him in the ground and went home and had a cup of coffee.

  She and Jack split up in 1981 when he fell in love with a teen porn star named Candy Disch whom he saw in Teacher’s Pet in a private booth at the adult-video shop in the Mall of Minnesota. It was his first visit there. A lifelong urge since adolescence, suddenly realized at age 60. When Candy strolled on screen in her teeny skirt and striped stockings to beg Mr. Baggins to please please give her a passing grade in algebra and he scowled over his wire-rim glasses and she unbuttoned her blouse and let her perky breasts poke free, Jack melted like butter on a hot waffle. She had a playful way about her that he was missing in his life. She was the girl he should have known when he was 17, come around forty-three years late. He wrote away to Candy c/o Violet Video on San Fernando Boulevard, Los Angeles, and Candy sent him a picture postcard of herself and a handwritten note (“Jack, I’m so glad you liked the movie, it really means a lot, please call me”) and he got her on the phone and talked to her for $2.29 a minute. She thrilled him. He knew the meter was running but he had a big crush, which he felt was reciprocated, though she was vague about when they might meet, but he collected photos of the little honey bowling, shooting pool and sunbathing. Jack’s brother Pete and his sister LaVonne couldn’t comprehend this. How could a World War II vet, a member of the Lutheran church, the father of three, be consumed by passion for a frizzy-haired blonde in a red velvet jumpsuit unzipped to the navel who pursed her pouty lips and whispered, “Oh baby, give it to me, give it to me”? They refused to speak to him or look at him again. They forbade their families to speak to him.

  Evelyn felt bad at first. She wept and took his hand and laid it on her breast—“Why would you be fascinated by pictures when you could have a real woman?” she cried. He turned away, flushed, embarrassed.

  She had no wish to humiliate him. There was not much cruelty in her. As for fascination, who can explain it? Some men take up golf, some chase girls, some drink Hi-Lex. So she helped Jack ease into a new life as a bachelor.

  “He’s always felt hemmed in. He married too young. We all did, back then. He hated the Navy and he should’ve had a few years of freedom but he had to come back here and earn a living and raise kids. All he wants is to do things his own way in his own time. So why shouldn’t he live as he pleases? He’s sixty, for heaven’s sake,” said Evelyn.

  She had been paying the Visa bill including large payments to Violet Adult Services for Candy’s phone time and finally she told Jack that they had to settle up. She borrowed the money to buy out his share of the house and he bought a fishing shack on Lake Winnesissebigosh, ten miles north, and installed a propane heater, stuffed the cracks with strips of pink foam covered with silver duct tape. He had a fridge full of beer and plenty of videotapes. He hauled a blue velour Barcalounger out there and a water bed. It was all friendly. She didn’t call him names or yell or cry. She simply trundled him out to his fishing shack and kissed him goodbye. She told Florence about an article in Lutheran Digest about menopausal males having hormonal surges that cause phantom romances. A great big husky old farmer from Sioux Falls sold off his hogs and flew to Malibu and stood along the coastal highway with a sign saying, “Angel, I love you,” referring to Angel Marquez, star of Bolero. It was a hormonal surge. They shot him up with estrogen and he quieted right down. She had mentioned this to Jack and he hit the ceiling. So he would have to go. His choice.

  *

  “I got tired of being supervised by my wife,” he explained to his friends at the Sidetrack Tap. “Somebody always telling you to take your feet off the coffee table. It’s a lousy way to live. Our ancestors in Norway knew they had a bad deal. The land was worthless for farming and the old man treated them like slaves and the pastor was yelling and shaking his fist every Sunday, and they put two and two together and got on the boat and came to America. And when they got to Minnesota, they saw they had exchanged one bad deal for another, and they didn’t agonize over it, they headed for California to look for gold, but the gold was gone, so they sold shovels to people who were looking for gold, and I got about twenty relatives out there who are multimillionaires and if I wanted to I could call ’em up and ask ’em for money and they’d give it to me and you know something, I ain’t going to do it, because that ain’t my way. I don’t need their help or yours or anybody’s and I don’t need you or anybody telling me what to do either.”

  So he sat in his shack, in a welter of junk and wrappers, his TV set shining on him, commercials in which powerful pickup trucks ran up steep mountain slopes and skinny models slunk through clouds of fog and golden beer foamed over life’s big frosty glass. He lay like a pig in a pen, and dozed and awoke and peed in the sink and lay down and watched a little more. He drank all the whiskey he wanted whenever he wanted and didn’t care who knew it. He called it his antifreeze. He snored to his heart’s content, got up in the middle of the night to fry up a steak and have a slug of whiskey, slept until noon, it was all good.

  Barbara told him once that a quart of whiskey a day was too much and he said, “Lot of small-minded people in this town, just envious of anyone who knows how to have a good time. Don’t be one of them. And I’m beyond a quart anyway. Quart and a half.” He sighed a long sigh. His skin was gray, mottled, as if he were rotting from the inside out and about to burst. His breath would’ve knocked a buzzard off a garbage truck. “Your mother never begrudged me a good time, I’ll say that for her.” And then he started to weep. “Do you think she’ll ever take me back?” he said.

  No, that was never an option. Mother was living her own life, traveling off to California, Florida, St. Louis….

  Dear Barbara,

  It cost me $215 round trip to St. Louis and Mamie was happy to lay eyes on me so the week was well worth it and thanks for mowing my lawn. It looks great!!! I’ve been thinking about our talk. I know that things are strained between you and Daddy after the way he tore into you about Lloyd—no excuse for that at all—and believe me I am on your side, but you really must avoid acrimony as much as possible. Daddy never really grew up and we could talk about WHY NOT until the cows come home but it’s simply a fact that must be lived with. He is and always will be 14 years old and it behooves the rest of us to accept that and not agitate ourselves over it.

  Trust me when I say he means NO HARM to anyone. The man has no malevolence in him at all, he simply feels very urgent about his own needs and desires and doesn’t stop to think about how this might affect others. His interests are few in number and rather simple and don’t bear going into in great detail except that he has developed a vast fantasy life to compensate for the straitened circumstances of his own. I found this rather OVERWHELMING when I discovered it accidentally and now I have given up those feelings of hurt and dismay (pointless, really) and simply accept that he is who he is. And meanwhile I choose to EMBRACE the meat and marrow of life, and open my eyes to the wonders around me. I have a certain wanderlust that must be satisfied and that is why I love going to St. Louis and Reno and Miami and other places I’ve been off to lately.

  Life is so dear, dear heart. Live it with gallantry.

  Daddy and I came to a parting of the ways. I handed down an ultimatum and he couldn’t meet it and so we parted. I simply put him out to where he could be happy and I went about my business and that is that. And once I was shut of the worry and guilt and dismay I seemed to get back some of the old curiosity and verve I remembered from girlhood and I found kindred souls to have fun with and enjoy life and meet it with anticipation and wonder. That is what we cannot cannot cannot ever give up is that ESPRIT. That is what I admire in Bennett even though he is so lost in life, he keeps that venturing spirit. People are too easily squashed by their burdens and become dull and obedient and censorious of the esprit in others—O I could name names but I will not—and it behooves the spirited to keep dancing.

  KEEP DANCING, dear.

  Love love love from your
mother

  Barbara visited Daddy every month or so. He liked being denned up at the lake. He went shambling through the woods, collecting blueberries and chokecherries, wild plums, even sarsaparilla berries, dandelion greens, nuts, wild mushrooms, ransacking the nearby dump for usables. He told Barbara that he found roasted chipmunks quite delectable. He grew a beard. He became prophetic. He was libertarian by nature and he predicted the imminent crash of the government and an era of anarchy during which people would flock to the woods and have to learn to survive, as he had. He was quite proud of living alone, though Mother still did his laundry and ironed his shirts nicely and they spent Thanksgivings and Christmases together and when he landed in jail for drunk driving, she bailed him out. He was a mess but he was family nonetheless. She took hot meals out to him, tried to interest him in AA, and offered up his name in prayer on Sunday mornings. Once for her birthday he bought her a mink coat from a man named Shorty who was running a Fire Sale off a flatbed truck at an exit on the Interstate. A silver mink with scorch marks on the back and it reeked of smoke. And it was July. Mother returned the coat and said, “You’re going to need this out at the cabin.”