Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  *

  Fatherhood was what capsized him all right. He took Muffy in his arms like you’d hold an explosive device. He cried. She was a happy little girl, the sweetest little thing, and everytime he looked at her, he got pensive and forlorn. And then she turned fifteen and they got her in the Poor Clares Group Home, in Sauk Rapids. The Poor Clares accepted Muffy, though Lloyd and Barbara were Lutheran, because they fell in love with her. She was a beautiful loving happy person. So she never would write a scholarly book about Roman architecture, and so what? She was a peach. The Clares came for her and Barbara smiled and waved. “Bye-bye, baby,” she crooned, and when the black car pulled away, she went to the basement and bawled and bawled, but Lloyd couldn’t say good-bye, couldn’t speak, just went upstairs and closed the door. He took it hard. The week after she left, he set out to retile the upstairs bathroom. He’d never done one before but he thought, How hard could it be if my brother Lowell can do it? Lowell was thick as a brick. So Lloyd got busy and started putting in ceramic tile freehand and soon the horizontal tiles started to get diagonal. There was tile creep. Lowell had to be brought in to tear it apart and redo it. Lloyd cried over that. Had a brain-damaged daughter and he couldn’t set tile straight. It was too much for him.

  *

  A stray dog came to their door one day and he took her in and named her Louise. A collie mutt, taffy-colored. She soon established dominance and trained him to get up out of a chair and bring her things and play ball with her when she brought him a ball. She put her old head in his lap and he stroked her for hours. He’d sit on the steps and say, “Life is good, isn’t it? Three squares a day, good bed, birds to watch, and squirrels. Got it made, buddy.” She was his intermediary. He’d say to her, with Barbara nearby, “Ask Mommy if she’s going to fry up those fish for supper, willya.” When the dog disappeared, Lloyd drove all over town looking for her. One more blow.

  *

  Lloyd’s religion was meekness. He could outmeek anyone. He was never a problem to anybody, and that was the problem. He wore old clothes from Goodwill. He cut his own hair and cut it short, for humility. He was a meek scoutmaster. Boys made fun of his musty odor, his yellow teeth. He soaked up all the punishment he could get and asked for more. He took the boys winter camping, taught them to make birdhouses and tie square knots and sheepshanks and they tied his shoelaces together. The warehouse cut his pay, and that was fine by him. A ladder collapsed and Lloyd fell fifteen feet to the concrete floor, injured his right hip, and got right up and walked. Signed a waiver. Kept working. It broke her heart to see the man shame himself. He was in such pain. Walked the cartilage off the hip socket, kept going, bone on bone. Then they fired him, without a word of thanks for twenty-seven years of service, and hired cheap replacements for him and the other warehouse guys, and Lloyd, who’d always been dead set against unions, begged the company to hire him back for half his former pay. And was hurt when they wouldn’t. He was pleasant, uncomplaining, a perfectly wonderful Christian gentleman, except that there was no Lloyd there anymore. There was no sex, no conversation, no guff, no juice, no nothing, just meals and work and sleep and his chuckling. She put up a sign in the kitchen, “Thanks for not chuckling.” He didn’t get it. Lloyd took his troop camping up north. A boy lied and said Lloyd kissed him and Lloyd was drummed out of Scouts. Lloyd said, “Let it go.” He declined to fight the thing. She nagged him about it, not to let them get away with it. No reaction, nothing. She dropped a can of yellow paint out the bedroom window on him then, just to get a rise out of him, and he cleaned himself up without comment, and he went to stay at his sister’s. She told him not to come back. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you angry. I don’t know why.” That was true, he didn’t. He moved to Minneapolis and got a job at the ammo factory. He just sort of got smaller and smaller and then she divorced him. And then she read an article about wood ticks and the anti-libido toxin they release into your body. She read the article and wept. A good man and his life is blighted because his dad is a bully and he camps in the woods. Science! It tells you stuff too late.

  She looked down. Her shoes and socks were wet. She was standing in the lake. She had walked into the water up to her ankles and the wake of the water skis washed up and she yelled, “Go away, God! I don’t believe in you anymore, so get off my back.”

  The men in the boats didn’t move, the pontoon boat glided away, the water-ski boat came around again.

  “I never really believed in you but I tried to and that’s what screwed up my life but good! And Lloyd! Look what you did to him! You made him a sheep! And now I’m done with it!!! It’s over! I have talked to you for the last time! I am never going in that damn pasture again! Leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone!”

  Her fists clenched and she leaned into the breeze. “My mother didn’t believe in you, not one bit and we’re going to drop her in this lake and no prayers. Hear me? No prayers, no hymns!!!”

  A man in a silver fishing boat turned and looked her way.

  “One life and that’s it! When you’re dead, you’re dead. Burn her up, put the ashes in the water! That’s what Mother wants and that’s what we’re going to do!

  “I wasted half my life feeling bad about you and I’m not going to waste any more!”

  The man in the boat waved to her. She gave him the finger. “That’s it for me! I’m done with it!” And she picked up a rock and flung it hard and it skipped on the water—two, four, five, six, eight skips. The man in the boat shouted something.

  “Fish all you like! Waste your life! I’m not wasting mine!” And she turned and walked up the beach onto the grass and took off her sopping shoes and socks and walked home barefoot. She was prepared to repeat her blasphemy to anyone she met but she met nobody. As if the word had gone out, “The atheist is coming!”

  Her home had not been struck by lightning. The kitchen was not infested with frogs or drenched in blood. There was not a message on the answering machine saying that Kyle had been struck down dead. She poured herself a glass of vodka on ice and stood in her little screened porch and took a few deep breaths. Bees buzzed in the asters and marigolds and a toad squatted on the walk. A snake’s skin lay in the grass where a dog had chewed on it. The neighbor’s cat lapped water from a dish next door. The little percussive beats of its thirst. The swish of tires on the pavement and the whap of a screen door and the humming of the world, machinery and wind and lake and voices, a cloud of sound. Settle down, she thought. Don’t bust up your best china just because you’re an orphan. Listen and learn. Mother went to church the way some ladies go to basketball games, to be sociable, not because they care who wins, and that’s how Mother felt about the gospel of the Lord—it was for other people to agonize over. What she cared about was being with Gladys and Margaret and Florence and feeding the hungry and covering the chilly with warm quilts.

  So she stood and listened. She felt tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead, the thump of her pulse, the grains of sand under her bare soles. And then she opened the door and swung the glass and the vodka hung in the air in a lovely long liquid arc studded with ice cubes and fell and made a long dark line along the walk and over the toad. He was soaked in vodka. He stayed squatted, thinking the situation over.

  She turned and went back in the kitchen and poured the bottle of vodka out in the sink. Drunken excess wasn’t her line of work anymore. She was done with it. She’d been a damn drunk because she had God problems: you live a lie, you pay a price. Maybe you shoot somebody, or shoot yourself. Or maybe you take the long way and just get good and drunk, but no more, so she poured the stuff down the drain. Every bottle she could find, in a pure righteous heat. You don’t need God to get on the right road, you can do this yourself. A little wisdom now and then is enough for anybody, if your timing is right. Ninety-nine bottles of booze on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of booze, now it is plain they must go down the drain, ninety-eight bottles of booze. Jim Beam and Gilbey’s gin and Amaretto. It was off her now, she had done
her share for Seagram’s, let others take up the slack. Like Dr. Dave says on his radio show, “The same energy you put into making a bad habit, you can put into breaking it and making a good one. It takes determination to be a drunk, and it takes the same determination to be sober. One or the other. You choose. You have the strength to do it.” He’s on at noon, taking calls from people all over Minnesota. He has a PhD in psychology and he’s smart about all sorts of things. She wished she had called him when she found Mother’s body. Dr. Dave, I’m here with my mother who I just discovered dead in her bed and a note in the drawer that says “Cremation and put the ashes in a bowling ball”—what should I do? What should she do? She kept pouring. She had bought a case of liquor after she won the Sons of Knute Guess The Ice Melt contest. First prize, $150, for coming closest to guessing when the 1949 Pontiac junker would go through the spring ice. She had an expensive bottle of Armagnac and vintage port, plus the crème de cacao and Baileys Irish Cream and Kahlúa and Amaretto and the Powers Irish whiskey that Oliver liked, the Chardonnay in the fridge, the whole shitload went gurgling down the drain and the bottles clanked into two big shopping bags and she took them out to the garbage can by the garage and plopped them in. The Andersons across the alley were setting out picnic things in the backyard. Mr. Anderson was at the grill, putting slices of cheese on hamburgers. Sonya called over, “Come and join us.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t. Too much to do!” Sonya took a few steps toward her back fence and Barbara could feel condolences about to flutter her way, so she waved and wheeled back to the house. She shut the door and drew the curtain. Sonya’s older brother was one of the four graduating seniors who died on the Northern Pacific crossing fifteen miles south of town on graduation night, 1974. They’d gone swimming at a granite quarry, two boys and two girls, and then saw how late it was, and they raced for home to get ready for graduation, and were hit by the westbound train. Stewart and Karen and Kenny and Marianne. Two couples going steady. A week of wild grief in town, the Class of 1974 sent off numb with horror, the family of Karen consulted a lawyer about suing the family of Kenny the driver but nothing happened. The unspoken question was, “Well, were they doing it?” And you hoped they were, but Stewart was a devout kid and maybe there had been a rush to concupiscence—naked swimmers kissing and touching and maybe Stewart had cried out that he didn’t think it was right, and maybe it was the moral struggle with temptation that took up the time and made them late. And then Kenny drove them to their rendezvous with death. Pastor Tommerdahl suggested strongly that it had been God’s Will for the four that they join Him Upstairs and Mother was furious. She didn’t go to church for a year after that.

  Barbara stripped off her clothes and tossed them into the washer and was padding down the hall to the shower when the phone rang. She let it ring. Then she thought maybe it was the crematorium so she picked it up on the fourth ring. It was Bennett in New York. Shit.

  “Barbara, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “Can you wire me money to get out there? I don’t have it. I’ve got all these bills trying to get my music copied. I hate to ask but I really need you to help me out here. It’s going to cost me a thousand bucks to get on a plane tomorrow.”

  “Call Roger. Ask him. I don’t have it.”

  He sighed. “Barbara, you can get it from Mother’s account. Mother set up an automatic deposit for me. She sent me three hundred a month. You could get the bank to advance me four months. Please.”

  She stood naked in the middle of the kitchen, looking at the Andersons, heads bowed at their picnic table, thanking God for their cheeseburgers. She had just thrown a couple hundred bucks worth of booze down the drain and she wanted to stand in a hot shower and wash away her sins. “Bennett, I don’t know what day it is in New York, but here it’s Sunday. The bank is closed. Number two, Mother’s money is all locked up in her estate right now. I have to sell her house, her assets, pay her bills, total everything up, and divvy it according to the will, which I don’t even have. It takes months.”

  “Barbara, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need your help right now. Believe me.”

  “Bennett, you’re an adult. You’ve got a job. Go borrow the money yourself. Don’t ask me for it. I don’t have it.”

  He drew a long breath and told her he had been laid off from his job. Four months ago. He was subletting his apartment to a young couple and he was living with an old trombonist friend in East Orange, New Jersey. He was living on Ramen noodles and cheese from a Food Shelf. He was finally finishing up his opera, remember the opera? The Wright Brothers opera.

  “I thought you finished that ten years ago.”

  “It needed more work. I really think it’s ready now. Soon as I can, I’m going to get some friends in a studio and make a demo and send it around. These things take time.” He made it sound so perfectly reasonable. You doink around for twenty years in your sandbox, wetting the sand, making little castles with crenellated towers, laying out roads, and then people pay you for it.

  “Bennett, there is only so much time and that’s all the time there is. I can’t make more for you. You’re fifty-two years old and you’re calling up your sister and borrowing money because you have to write an opera?? Get over it!”

  “Don’t turn on me, Barbara. Mother was extremely supportive, you know—.” He was about to whine about his hard life and she whacked the receiver on the table three times and yelled, “There is no God, Bennett. So don’t expect one to bail you out. It isn’t happening!” And she hung up. She felt awful, thinking of him, poor bewildered man in the kitchen of a friend who probably was even sicker of him than she was, and maybe he was down to a pocketful of small bills, maybe a Happy Meal and a large vanilla shake, and then he’d have to take himself and his opera down to the Salvation Army and see what they could do for him.

  Well, let him do it then.

  Or maybe he’d walk out into East Orange and take a bus into Manhattan and walk around for a while looking at the Chrysler Building and Central Park and the Met and then screw up his courage and go into the subway and hang around until the exact right train came along and throw himself in front of it.

  It’s up to him, she thought. I can’t be his caretaker.

  She had exactly $87,450 to her name, plus her old car and the house, which she got in the divorce from Lloyd. She was 57 years old, eight years from retirement. She was bumping along on 25 hours a week during the school year, cooking in the cafeteria, delivering the Minneapolis paper three days a week, some baby-sitting for summer people, and she’d started painting plates again and was selling some of those to the This ‘N’ That shop in St. Cloud. It wasn’t an opera, just plates with sunrises on them and the motto “Live What You Love,” but people paid $21 apiece for them, which was more than Bennett could say.

  The phone rang again. Let it ring. No need for sympathy, thank you very much. She got in the shower and soaped herself up and stood under the hot spray and inhaled the steam. She would kick alcohol as a sign to Ronnie and Lloyd and Bennett and all the other losers that she was one of them no longer. And then it appeared, illuminated, in a little balloon over her head. A mantra. Love What You Live. Magic. It was like honey on the tongue. Love your life. Love yourself. Have some r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

  The phone was ringing. It rang and stopped and then started ringing again. She picked it up. “Barbara—” the voice of Mr. Smooth on his patio in Santa Barbara. “I just got your message.” A fountain burbled in the background, music played, a string section.

  She told him the story of Mother’s Death. It was a well-polished tale by now, Old Lady In Excellent Health Croaks. She gave him the complete version, including the letter.

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m astonished.” He didn’t sound astonished. He sounded like Mr. Smooth.

  “So we’re going to do things exactly as she wished. It’s Saturday afternoon.”

  “Saturday? I can’t get there Saturday, I’m sorry.”

  “Roger, this is your mother we’re talki
ng about. It’s not Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

  “I’m supposed to go in for hernia repair on Friday.”

  “Get yourself a jockstrap and come out.”

  He had an umbilical hernia. His belly button was the size of a golfball. It popped out when he and Gwen were—“Well, never mind,” he said. “We were jumping around a little.” They had been to Paris, at the George Sank hotel. He won the trip for breaking all previous sales records. They had such a fabulous time in Paris, he said, maybe someday they would sell their Santa Barbara house and move into an apartment so they could travel more now that the kids were grown up, they wanted to go to Costa Rica, Brazil, Vietnam, India—Barbara held the phone away from her ear, his voice sounded like a marble rolling over a linoleum floor. It sounded like someone stirring a pot of overcooked parsnips.

  When he stopped, she put the phone back to her ear and told him to call Bennett. “He hates me. I’ve offered to help. He keeps turning me down.”

  “Try again. He’s your brother. He’s in desperate need.”

  She said to him, “What if the Metropolitan Opera should decide to stage your brother’s opera next year, with Placido Domingo as Orville and Bryn Terfel as Wilbur and Renée Fleming as Lola the girl from Dayton, Ohio, who can’t choose between them—and what if it’s a huge success and Sixty Minutes does a long piece about the neglected genius who labored twenty years in obscurity to bring forth his masterpiece and lived on noodles and Velveeta and did his wealthy brother in California, the one with the big fake Spanish house and the Olympic swimming pool, lift a finger to help him? No, he did not. And then they cut to a shot of Roger, hands over his face, ducking and running crouched behind cars in the company parking lot, chased by the cameraman.”