Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  Walt came through the back door with a fold-up gurney, a skinny thing the size of an ironing board, and his helper, Cliff, who looked to be about eighteen. What must it be like to be so young and employed to carry the dead out of their bedrooms? She held out a hand to Cliff and kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that.” The choir had stopped singing so she put on Robert Preston singing “Ya Got Trouble” and then noticed that her pants were unzipped. She took off that record and put on a choir singing something dark and slow. And then the phone rang. It rang just as Walt and Cliff emerged from the bedroom with Mother zipped up in a plastic bag and wheeled her out the back door. The shock of seeing this—the house suddenly empty—she picked up the phone and it was Flo saying, “What is going on? What is that truck doing in the alley? Speak up!” and Barbara sobbed, “My mommy’s dead.”

  Flo pulled up in front two minutes later, her hair in curlers, as the truck pulled away in back. She’d been at the Bon Marche Beauty Salon, having it blued. She was hopping mad. She took one look at Barbara and said, “You’re a souse, that’s what you are! You need to get a grip on yourself, young lady. Where is Evelyn?” And then she grabbed onto a chair for support. “Oh dear God, she went to the doctor two weeks ago. She was fine.” She choked and went in the bedroom and found Walt’s business card and came charging out and glared at Barbara and shook her fist. “Sending your mother to be burned up like she was garbage. Why didn’t you just chop her up with an axe and throw her in the incinerator? This is treachery. You ought to be shot.” And Flo called up the crematorium and left a long message on the machine, to get the hell back with her sister Evelyn’s body unless he wanted to be in court that evening. She, Flo, had a nephew in the legal profession who would, by God, make your life pretty damn miserable unless you bring that body back here this instant. Driving around preying on the grief-stricken who happen to be intoxicated too—

  Barbara had never heard her swear before. Flo was a good Lutheran, but she tore into Walt like a dog on a bone. And then Barbara pulled out Mother’s letter and handed it to Flo. Flo read it and sat down. Barbara took the phone. “Disregard the previous message, we’re a little upset here,” she said into the answering machine. “We’ll work it out.” Flo looked up, aghast.

  “You should have burned this. If you had an ounce of common sense, you would’ve put a match to it and buried it in the garden. This is just outrageous. I ought to wring your neck.” And then Flo put her old wrinkled face in her hands and sobbed. “What has this family come to? We’ll never be able to hold our heads up in this town again. A bowling ball! People will think we are fools, no better than the Magendanzes. I wish I had dropped dead rather than know this. Why couldn’t God have taken me first?”

  She looked up at Barbara, her old eyes full of tears. “Who is this Raoul?”

  “He is a flamenco dancer. He taught her to samba,” said Barbara. “He took her to a casino where she won fifty-thousand dollars at blackjack and offered to buy him a drink and they wound up flying to Missouri. Mother had a whole secret life and I’ll show you her confession if you like. She was an atheist and a Democrat and she thought you were a stuffed shirt with a cob up your butt. Those were her exact words, that you had a cob up your butt.”

  She wasn’t sure why she said these terrible lies, but she found it satisfying. Flo shuddered as if stabbed with a fork. “That can’t be true,” she whispered. All the starch was out of her now. Serves you right, thought Barbara.

  “Drive me home, please,” said Aunt Flo. Her voice was faint. She held up her car keys. “I’m in no shape to drive.”

  Barbara drove Aunt Flo home—slowly, focusing on the street, making sure not to drive across a lawn and into a flower bed—and led her inside and helped her into bed. She seemed very old and frail, not the mover and shaker of yore. “This would have killed my mother,” she said faintly. “This would have done her in. I do believe that we are in the Last Days and that the world is coming to an end. I never thought so before but I do now. My own little sister—I tell you, Satan is at work among us. Pray for me.” And then she grabbed Barbara by the arms, hard, and pulled her down close. “Quit your boozing,” she said. “Stop it now. Shape up. For your mother’s sake. For Kyle.”

  “Mother was never judgmental about other people having a good time,” Barbara said, all cool and collected. “Mother liked to imbibe now and then herself. And she went dancing. With Raoul. Mother adored him. He made her happy in her last years. She found a happiness that you and all the people like you will never know. You spent your whole damn life bossing other people around and barging in and taking mixing bowls out of people’s hands. Mother found love. I’m proud of her. And I’m going to scatter her ashes exactly as she wished, and I don’t care if you come or not.”

  She strode out of Aunt Flo’s bedroom and closed the door with a bang and was on her way to the front door and then stopped in the living room and felt bad for having said all of that. What a terrible thing to do. So she turned and marched back to the bedroom door and opened it. Flo was sobbing, her face in the pillow, her white hair a big tangle. “I’m sorry for saying what I said,” said Barbara, and closed the door. She was a bad person, very bad, but she had her reasons.

  Out on the sidewalk three little girls were playing jump rope, two twirling and one in the middle jumping, and the two were chanting:

  Little Joe ate some snow

  He got a part in a movie show

  Had a claw

  On his paw

  Ha ha ha he was Dracula.

  Blood was dripping

  Down his chin

  How many crypts does he live in?

  One, two, three, four, five …

  And the jumper kept hopping as the two girls twirled faster and faster up to twenty-three and finally caught her. Oh the misery that we have brought them into, she thought. They will lose their mothers and then what will become of them, poor lambies? And she thought of poor Muffy and that old sadness came over her and she was momentarily drenched in thirty-one-year-old grief. Oh dear God, I have got to join a group or something. They had groups for everything now. Stress Management and Men Coming To Terms With Their Bodies and AA and a new group she’d read about that helps you deal with your issues with people who happen to be dead now. Mediums of Mercy. And another, MOCK, Mothers of Challenged Kids. It meets, as they all do, on a Tuesday night in a church basement—not in Lake Wobegon, God knows, but somewhere, Minneapolis, you could sit in a circle with other moms and cry for your lambie, your babykins, your pookster, your Little Miss Muffin.

  6. THE SARAH PROBLEM

  When Kyle hung up the phone, having just promised to drop his grandma’s ashes in a bowling ball from a parasail, his friend Sarah was standing behind him, slipping her arms around Kyle’s waist. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You must have been really really close to her. I remember when my grandma died. I was sixteen and it really tore me to pieces. She died in Tampa and I rode a bus all night and all day to get down there and my parents got really mad at me but I couldn’t help it, I had to be there. Her name was Hermione. She collected seashells. She played the piano.”

  Kyle unclasped her arms from his waist and headed for the kitchen. She followed, reminiscing about the death of her grandma. Sarah was like that. Anything that happened to you reminded her of something in her own life, however remote the connection. If he had mentioned Raoul, she would’ve remembered a Raoul, or maybe a Ramon, or a Newell, or maybe the Sun God Ra, and she could yak about it for as long as you’d let her. You were never at a loss for conversation with Sarah. She could talk for both of you. That was the nice part about having sex with her—she mostly shut up and you had a little peace and quiet.

  He poured himself a cup of cold coffee and put it in the microwave and lit a cigarette. She hated cigarette smoke. It made her sick. He blew a little her way.

  “That is just so incredibly sad,” she was saying. “Have you ever thought about what it would be l
ike to die? I mean, actually? I just can’t even comprehend it. It must be terrible.” She was trying to put her arms around him again and he slid between a chair and the refrigerator to block her and then crouched down and pretended to look for something in a low cupboard.

  “Was she alone when she died?”

  He nodded. “I think that she was ready to die,” he said. “I think she was actually looking forward to it. People come to that point where they’ve lived long enough and everything around them starts to seem weird and they go, like, Okay, I’m done now, get me out of here.”

  It was bullshit, but he liked to b.s. her, it kept her off balance.

  Kyle wasn’t set on Sarah. Not at all. They had hooked up at a Super Bowl party, in somebody’s apartment. She was cleaning up during halftime and he pitched in and washed dishes and when he said, “God, football is boring,” it endeared him to her, and the dishwashing too, and the bridge to couplehood appeared. She invited him home and they snuggled together and did stuff that felt good and the bridge to couplehood was crossed. It was a convenience, it saved time looking for a date, and then they moved in together to save on rent. An economy move. He was happy trying out the idea of couplehood so long as she didn’t take it as the first step to the Big M, which of course she did. Probing questions: “How do you feel about me?” she would murmur over the cornflakes. “Tell me the truth.” Or “Where do you think we’ll be two years from now?” Or “What do you think is the best age to start a family?”

  “Well,” he said, “unless you adopt, you have to start them at zero and let them grow up from there.”

  Big looping hypotheticals to which he could only shrug and make up an answer.

  Still, it was better than the panicky groping in high school, in some parents’ basement, the girl scared and yet egging you on, saying no no and yes yes at the same time and wanting to be violated and also to keep her innocence, pulling, pushing, pleading, protesting. Sarah was all for it. She said, “I want you.” She still did. Pulled him into bed and got the show on the road.

  “When is the funeral?” said Sarah. “Not a funeral. A memorial service. And it’s on Saturday.” He had to test his parasail. The shroud lines needed refitting. Last time he flew, it tended to drift sideways. And he wanted to paint eyes on it. He built it from a kit with money Grandma gave him a year ago to go to Europe. “Go see the world while you’re young,” she said. “I always kicked myself that I didn’t. Got married at nineteen and had a baby at twenty and that was it, the doors closed. No reason for you to make the same mistake. I didn’t even see New York City until I was seventy-two years old. What a comment!” They were driving back to Lake Wobegon from Fisher’s Supper Club in Avon where she’d taken him for the deep-fried walleye. She’d had a whiskey sour and a glass of champagne. She was feeling gay. She handed him the check. “Do what you want but don’t use it to pay your bills, for heaven’s sake. Have some fun.”

  Sarah was opposed to the parasail, afraid he’d crash to his death. So many stories about homemade aircraft crashing. Famous people, rich, accomplished, going up in the air in some flimsy contraption and a gust of wind comes up and they spiral down and splatter on the rocks. “Think about me,” she said. “Think how I’d feel.” He’d taken it up on a test flight over Lake Minnetonka in June and it was glorious, the best cheap thrill he could imagine, better than a roller coaster.

  *

  His friend Duane Dober had an 18-foot speedboat with a 75-horsepower outboard. Duane wore pop-bottle glasses and lived in dread that a ray of sun might catch a lens and burn a hole into his brain and leave him a helpless cripple who makes ashtrays from beer cans so he wore long-billed caps and stayed out of the sun as much as possible but he loved to race around in his boat with the prow up in the air and smoke dope and listen to the Steel Heads. When Kyle called and said, “I need you to tow my parasail so I can deposit my grandma’s ashes in the lake,” Duane saw it as a chance to thumb his nose at the fishing community. They gave him a hard time about his wake. Well, he’d show them. He imagined he might race around at top speed towing Kyle and rock the fishing boats in his wake and they’d yell and shake their fists and then a cloud of ashes would descend on them. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  Kyle remembered what convinced him to buy the parasail—it was a letter from Grandma, along with a check for $500—her beautiful handwriting on little sheets of pale blue paper—

  Dear Kyle

  I’m in Columbus GA, attracted here by the name “Chattahoochie” on my road map, which is the river between GA and AL, but you probably knew that. Anyway, it is spring and so delicious I’m stopping here and not going on to FL after all. The town is just a riot of flowers and sweetness, magnolias and the like. The B&B was full up but they gave me a little shotgun cottage across the street, tucked into a bower of jasmine and honeysuckle and I don’t know what all, the air is like spun sugar. I have a little porch, a sitting room, bedroom and bath, and a tiny kitchen, plus a clock radio, a few books, soap and towels, a box of cheese straws and am happy as can be. Also a kerosene lamp in the bedroom, a real one, and last night I woke up and got a whiff of kerosene and it made me teary-eyed thinking about Aunt Josephine and her kitchen at night, her washing dishes in hot soapy water, me drying, and the lamp lit. I will tell you about her someday. She was a saint.

  This is a street of old frame cottages with lawns of silvery grass, where I know nobody and nobody knows me, which suits me just fine, kiddo. I am a pilgrim and it’s good to be on the move so we don’t get attached to possessions and place. I am also a romantic and we need to travel so we don’t get too disillusioned by people. I am thinking of the school board’s move to require the pledge of allegiance, but don’t get me started.

  I am also trying to escape from your mother’s birthday, darling. Nothing makes you feel old like when your kids get old. That’s the killer.

  Deprivation is exciting, don’t you think. It’s one reason to travel, to strip down to essentials. I always pitied poor Flo her vast salt-and-pepper shaker collection which began when she inherited a couple hundred of the damn things from Aunt Ruth who simply adored figurines that dispensed seasoning. So Flo became a prisoner of the collection, expanded it, tended it, bought glass display cases for it, gave an interview to the paper about it, and now she is worried about vandals so she hardly dares leave the house for a day to go to Minneapolis. There is nothing in my house that I would grieve over if someone smashed it.

  (Flo has never been able to throw away keys. Did you know that? She has hundreds of them, some rusted and going back fifty years. The houses they would have unlocked were never locked in the first place and the cars they started are in junkyards but she keeps them all. If you ask her, she’ll deny it, but I’ve seen the box in her basement.

  I am going to sit out on the porch and inhale flowers for a while. So little time, dear, but what there is is sweet. I hope you are getting some sweetness in your busy life and that you feel at home in this world. Lonely men tend to sink—into liquor, or homicide, religion—you name it. Don’t sink, boy. Fly. That’s an old lady’s advice. Fly.

  Love to you, dear,

  Yr Grandma

  P.S. Here’s some money I saved by not going to Florida. Spend it on something you always wanted.

  7. FINDING RAOUL

  Barbara found a poem Mother wrote on the back of a recipe for ginger cake—

  Go away and leave me now.

  Leave me to my tears,

  The long thoughts and the furrowed brow

  The griefs of my long years,

  And I will paint my face and blush

  And turn down the light

  And wait here in a holy hush—

  He’s coming—here—tonight.

  And that reminded her to call Raoul in Minneapolis. She found his return address on letters stashed in a Scotch shortbread tin in Mother’s closet. Raoul Olson, Aldrich Avenue, Minneapolis. There was a snapshot of him on a beach, grinning, flexing his biceps, an old man in
crimson swim trunks, old flesh on his bones, a big head of hair dyed black black black. Mother’s boyfriend. She had suspected his existence. Oh yes, many times.

  There was the poem Mother wrote and recited for the Sweethearts’ Dinner at church one Valentine’s Day, and got choked up on the lines—

  Long ago and faraway,

  You and me, a sunny day—

  Long ago, another time,

  When I loved you and you were mine.

  Well, you knew darned well it wasn’t a poem about Jack Peterson.

  And then there was the call from Mr. Becker at the bank. “I shouldn’t say this but I’m worried about your mother,” he said. “She’s been spending a lot of money lately in Las Vegas and Reno and San Francisco and hither and yon, and it’s her money, and I’m not saying she’s overdrawn, she’s not, not even close, but I just wonder what is going on here.”