Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  And then there was the urgency with which Mother packed up and left the house for a few days—“Who are you going to see?” Barbara’d ask. “You meeting a boyfriend?” Mother snorted. Well, here was her snort: an old sporting gentleman named Raoul Olson. A postcard with the Foshay Tower on it and tiny handwriting: “Dear Rosebud”—that’s what he called her, Rosebud—“Youre a peach and thats for sure, kid, you deserve nothing but the best. Speaking of which didnt we have some laughs in Reno. Id say so. The motel was deluxe and so was the company in my opinion. We need not mention the clams. Never again. Those folks by the pool will not be the same since they got to see us two cavorting on the slide like a couple of kids, you could hear them thinking were do those two get off having all the fun and us sitting here like two prunes. And I sure do agree with you about the importance of ‘Naps.’ Two great minds are one on that particular subject. Nuff said.”

  She googled him and he popped right up.

  RAOUL OLSON (June 24, 1923–) was the beloved weatherman and star of the children’s show Yonny Yonson Of The Yungle on WCCO. Olson was born in Chaffee, North Dakota, and served in the Marines in World War II after which he worked for stations in California and Nevada before joining WCCO in 1958. He did the weather on radio and TV and also a 6 p.m. newscast for many years while getting into his trademark leopardskin long underwear to play Yonny, the “Scandihoovian Tarzan.” The show was extremely popular and a generation of Minnesota children grew up listening to Yonny sing Happy Birthday in fractured Swedish and tell jokes to his cow Helga and his dog Rasmus. For several years, Olson also appeared as the Duke of Podunk on Dance Party which was carried briefly on the ABC network. He retired as Yonny in 1994. He married June Davidson in 1948 (divorced, 1964) and they had two children, John and Carmen. His son died of leukemia in 1961, which inspired Raoul to create a show for kids and to name his character Yonny, which is Johnny in Scandinavian dialect.

  Yonny Yonson. She and her brothers watched him daily for years. The man who told jokes to his dog and honked a horn and showed Little Rascals cartoons and danced with a floor mop to “On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” and at the end of every show took two steps toward the camera and said, “You kids are driving me to drink!” and grabbed a bottle of Coco-Pop soda, his sponsor, and poured it over his head. And sometimes he did it upside down, while performing a handstand, one-handed.

  And now she could remember Mother watching him from the ktchen door and smiling.

  And she never said a word. “I used to know him.” Nothing like that.

  *

  Raoul Olson. Aldrich Avenue, Minneapolis. Barbara didn’t think anybody who meant that much to Mother should get the news by phone, so she got in the car and drove to Minneapolis to tell him. She needed a drive anyway. She took the back way, down through Holdingford and Avon to the Interstate and then instead of taking it she stayed on the back roads. Cold Spring, Watkins (“Birthplace of Eugene J. McCarthy”), Kimball, Dassel. She once dated a basketball player from Dassel who took her out to an abandoned farmplace and she sat on the front step of the house, which had collapsed into the cellar, and he sat on the front bumper of his old black Ford ragtop, guitar in hand, and sang her all the blues songs he knew, which were quite a few. Pankake was his name. He was a forward with a deadly jump shot from deep in the corner and scored twenty-six points for Dassel against Lake Wobegon and she, a cheerleader, had talked to him in the parking lot after the game and given him her phone number. She had gone over to the opposition. He told her he had lost interest in basketball after reading Moby-Dick. He had a nice voice. He packed up his guitar and drove her home. It was 1:30 a.m.

  Dassel was due west of the city on Highway 12, which suddenly became a big vacuum of a freeway sucking her in toward the towers of downtown and everybody driving as if they were on their way to shoot someone, enormous SUVs looming up in her rearview mirror, hanging on her bumper, then swerving around her though she was driving the speed limit—what’re you doing on my highway, lady? Move over!—and she got off on Lyndale and drove north and found his address, a little blue rambler, the front door open, music emanating from within. One of the big bands playing a ballad and a girl singer spooling out the words, about a lover gone, perhaps for good—she peered in through the screen. Dark inside and a big round mirror facing the door and there she was in the mirror, hand shading her eyes. The girl singer sang, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when—” She rang the bell. And a sleepy voice said, “Yeah?”

  “It’s Evelyn Peterson’s daughter. Barbara.”

  He rose from the sofa where he’d been sleeping and opened the door. He was a husky old coot in a ribbed undershirt, tufts of gray hair sprouting under it, black stubble on his face, black silk shorts, flip-flops, a dead cigar in his paw. “What’s going on?” he said. He looked alarmed. “Is she okay?”

  “Sorry to burst in like this. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “What’s wrong?” He opened the door. She wanted to tell him that Mother was okay. Waiting in the car in her beach dress, ready to fly off to Cancun and go snorkeling.

  “Mother died last night.”

  All the air just went out of him whoosh and his face went blank like he’d been shot in the back or hit with a telephone pole.

  “She died in her sleep reading a book. I found her this morning. She didn’t suffer or anything. She must’ve just slipped away in the night.”

  “I tried calling her just last night—”

  “I know. I listened to it on the answering machine.”

  He stepped out and shut the door. An elderly tabby cat looked out through the screen and made a faint scratchy meow.

  “Do you think she listened to it?”

  “You mean, before she died?” Well that’s a pretty stupid question, Barbara thought. He nodded. “Did she get my message?”

  “Yes, she did. It had been saved. She listened to it and then she saved it.” Lie, lie, lie.

  Big tears in his eyes. She put her arms around him and he clung to her and they sort of waltzed backward into the living room. The place was soaked in cigar smoke. Mother was death on secondary smoke. Couldn’t bear it. Had she ever set foot in this house? She must have. He turned off the record player. She noticed a recent photo of the two of them in a black frame, his arm around her. She was half a head taller and grinning as if she’d just won first prize in a three-legged race. He sat down on a hassock. The cat brushed against his bare leg and made a faint scratchy meow.

  “She went out for dinner last night with Margaret and Gladys and she was fine when they dropped her off and this morning I found her. She must’ve listened to your message and went to sleep and didn’t’ wake up.”

  He started to say something about Mother and then excused himself and slipped around the corner and blew his nose. A longtime bachelor from the looks of things. Boxes of stuff on the sofa, the glass-top coffee table, the carpet, open boxes of old clothes, magazines, gewgaws, rummage, as if he’d started to straighten up the joint and gotten disoriented. A hubcap for an ashtray and a Mona Lisa picture puzzle, half assembled. A picture of a wolf on a snowbank on a moonlit night hung on one wall and a wrestling poster on another—the Ayatollah Khomeanie vs. Jesse (The Body) Ventura, two gargantuans, one in a turban, one in a boa and pink glasses. And in small type: “refereed by Raoul Olson of Channel Four.” The TV was on, the sound off: a newscaster in a blue suit, the state capitol behind him …

  Raoul came back, two glasses in one hand, a bottle of Jim Beam in the other.

  “We found a letter with her last wishes and everything, and I guess she opted for cremation and a memorial service, not a church funeral, so we’re going to do that on Saturday. Down by the lake. I hope you will come.”

  “Yeah, she didn’t have much use for the church. She told me that. They were too narrow-minded for her. Oh God. What are we going to do?” He choked up for a moment. “I sure was in love with her—“He dug in his pocket for a hanky and blew his nose again.
He looked like he might’ve lifted weights at one time. A big chest and a headful of hair, newly dyed blue-black. A red splotch of broken veins on each cheek, a big nose with cavernous nostrils. He gestured with the whiskey bottle and Barbara shook her head and he poured some in a glass for himself and tossed it back and closed his eyes and shook his head hard and a long sound came out like quacking.

  “Sorry,” he said. He gave Barbara a long look and thanked her for driving down to tell him in person. He looked shaken. Queasy.

  “Your mother and I met in 1941. I came down from North Dakota and went into nurse’s training. I’d enlisted in the Marines and it turned out I had flat feet so they made me a medic and they sent six of us to Swedish Hospital and she was in my class. I was sitting on the front steps and she came walking up the walk and I went for her right away. She was tall and rangy and swung her arms and laughed and she had a way of looking you over so if she liked you, it really meant something. Oh God, she was the love of my life and I knew it. Wham. Just like that. This was back when there was a lot of dancing. Dances almost every night, and we went to every one. We were good enough that we entered contests. We jitterbugged like crazy and when we were out of breath, we sat in the corner and necked. I asked her to marry me and she wanted to but then she got sick and almost died. Infected boil. It was on her butt, she couldn’t sit down. I said, Let me have a look at it, but she went and squeezed it and got a terrible infection. I took care of her for the first three days. I gave her sponge baths. I held her in my arms when she was having hallucinations, out of her head jabbering about her dad and crying and yelling at somebody to rescue the horses. I was with her around the clock. And then I took her to the hospital and I went home and slept a few hours and when I woke up her parents were there and I had orders to ship out to Chicago and then to Guadalcanal. I tried to write to her but I couldn’t remember the name of her home town, Lake Wobegon. The letters kept coming back. I was in the Dutch East Indies when I heard she married somebody from home. God, I cried for three days. I met Bing Crosby when he did a USO tour in the Pacific and he got a touch of malaria. He introduced me to people and I got into radio in San Francisco. Actually, Oakland. I did a show called Bay Town Ballroom and played records and on weekends I emceed dances at the Alhambra and Aragon ballrooms and the Club Seville, and I married a lady bass player named June and I was doing well except I had a problem with the happy powder so June thought maybe I’d do better in Minneapolis, get me away from temptation, and we came out, and I got the TV job doing the weather and was earning good dough and we moved to Golden Valley and right then, when everything was good, my little boy got sick and died of leukemia. It happened so fast. It was like a load of rocks got dumped on me. I had a pity party for a few years. I got deep into the sauce and felt hopeless and nasty and June left and took our little girl, and that’s when I became Yonny Yonson on TV. It was a heartbreaker, seeing those kids, let me tell you. All the smiling kids and I thought, ‘Why couldn’t mine be here? Why did this happen to me?’ and one day I walked out on the bridge thinking I’d jump off it and end this nonsense, and I climbed over the rail and there was a string of barges going under that were full of wheat and soybeans and I thought how ridiculous to jump and break my neck on a pile of wheat and my body goes down to New Orleans and meanwhile I’ve ruined a whole load of wheat. So I crawled back over the rail and I went back to the TV studio and the secretary said, ‘There’s a lady in Lake Wobegon named Evelyn Peterson trying to track you down.’ We talked on the phone and then we met for drinks and it was like 1941 all over again. We were like two kids. Suddenly I had something to live for. I cleaned up my act and we started dating and every day was sunshine. We were talking about going to Europe. She’d never been there.” His voice broke. “I told her everything about what’d happened to me and how low I had fallen and she said she loved me.”

  8. QUILTERS

  Evelyn made annual trips to Las Vegas with Raoul with a couple years off on account of his 1996 heart bypass and subsequent argument over his cigar-smoking. He said he knew she hated cigars and she said no, she only hated cheap ones. He said, “Don’t baby me, I know you hate the smoke.” She said, “Some smoke I like.” He vowed he was going to give up smoking for her sake. She said, “Please don’t. Do it for yourself.” “There you go,” he said, “you want me to quit, you just don’t want to say so.” He said he would quit cigars before the next trip to Vegas, a month away, and when he couldn’t, he was so ashamed of himself—a guy with heart problems and he could not put nicotine aside even for the love of a good woman!—he headed out west to pull him self together and stopped in Bismarck to visit an old girlfriend but she wouldn’t see him, she had gained weight and was embarrassed, so he proceeded westward to Billings where his brother Marvin lived but he was gone, his wife said, hinting that she didn’t much care if he returned. “Where did he go?” asked Raoul. “You’d have to ask him,” she said. He went on to Bozeman to visit his buddy George Moses who had gotten him the job on TV, and George was up north fishing, said Lucile. So he drove off in search of George, chain-smoking stogies, and stopped in Butte late that night for a piece of banana cream pie, and had eaten half of it when two idiots came bursting in with guns drawn and cleaned out the till and then, even though it made no sense, took Raoul hostage. “Why?” he cried. “For insurance,” they said. “Insurance against what?” But they grabbed him and stuck a pistol barrel in his ribs and shoved him out the door—“Cut it out! There’s no need to get rough! I’m seventy years old!”—but that didn’t matter to them. And then they saw a cop car parked in front of the bank and they decided to swipe it. “Are you nuts?” he yelled. They shoved him in the backseat behind the steel grate and sped north on gravel roads, both of them snorting white powder and passing a bottle back and forth. In no time, there were flashing blue lights on their tail and a chopper overhead. “I told you this made no sense,” said Raoul. They blew past a roadblock at the Canadian border, and raced over a plowed field at 100 m.p.h., Raoul bouncing off the ceiling, and through a farmyard, sideswiped a chicken coop, bounced off a propane tank, and struck a half-empty granary and were thrown from the car into a pool of winter wheat. Like so many desperadoes, they were not wearing seat belts. All three were badly banged up, and Raoul suffered broken ribs and a cracked vertebra. He lay in the V.A. hospital in Seattle for almost a month and came back to Minneapolis in a back brace and feeling deflated, and sent her a Thank You card. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “I am a cigar smoker, and you are the love of my life.” And she brought him a box of Muriel Slims, and stood at his door smoking one herself, and said, “These are good! Mild and tasty and long-lasting, just like me!”

  Astonishing, Barbara thought. To look at Evelyn, most people’d never guess she had a Raoul in her life. She was a quilter. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, she and the six others in the Ladies Circle gathered in the Fellowship Room, cranking out quilts until she finally turned in her needles: she was 78 and her fingers hurt and besides, there was a quilt glut in town. “How can you?” said Florence. The Circle had been cutting and stitching since Jesus was in the third grade. The idle brain is the devil’s playground, said Flo. “Remember Mildred Anderson the cashier at the First State Bank who absconded to Buenos Aires with a pillowcase full of loot and is still there today for all we know? A perfectly nice woman, or so it appeared, but she never married and so she had time on her hands that she didn’t fill with hobbies (such as quilting), she just sat in her little bungalow and read books like you do, and that’s undoubtedly where she picked up the idea of improving her life at public expense. Quilting might have saved Mildred from plunging into a life of crime the way she did and the cloud of shame she brought on her family.” Mildred’s sister Myrtle was in the Circle, along with Helen, Lois, Arlene, Florence, Evelyn, and sometimes Muriel, and they had a merry old time, chortling about this and that and ragging on each other and savoring old gossip, chewing it over, ruminating, tearing it apart like scholars. That perfectly
nice girl with the bouncy blond hair who went away to college to study elementary ed and fell in with a crowd of poets and came home blanched and harrowed. So then she married a fellow she had known for all of thirty-six hours, a forest ranger, Doug, who turned out to be married already—and then, in smoking ruins, she moved to Texas and at last word was selling costume jewelry at carnivals and living in the backseat of a Honda Civic. She had aged thirty years in just seven. All from keeping bad company. The story of her fall was a favorite topic, along with the tippling of Clint Bunsen and his volatile marriage to Ilene, and the California success story of that tramp Debbie Detmer.

  *

  Debbie had broken her mother’s heart and driven her father into the stony depths of depression. It was as simple as that. Her poor dad was a broken vessel, sitting glued to the Golf Channel, his wife obsessively vacuuming, vacuuming, fixing daily lunches of lima bean soup and baloney sandwiches and grieving for the beautiful only child who had turned into something else, a werewolf perhaps. She had been Luther League state treasurer, Girls’ Nation vice president, winner of numerous music trophies (she played clarinet), Homecoming attendant, the list goes on and on, and one cold January day she walked away from her sophomore year at Concordia to head for San Francisco with her boyfriend Craig “trying to figure out where I’m going.” Nonsense. She was cold, that’s all; Fargo-Moorhead can be brutal in January. The wind sweeps down from Canada and the sky lowers and you get depressed and gain a hundred pounds and want to kill yourself. She had read Kierkegaard in philosophy class and it went to her head. Out in California she spent fifteen years bouncing from one man to another and writing jagged letters home saying that “I now realize that my entire life was a lie”—how can a girl say such a thing to her own parents? An only child? It’s not as if they had replacements.