Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  She went and fetched the blue loose-leaf binder of Mother’s letters. She had rounded up a few dozen and was keeping them to give to Kyle someday. That morning she’d found one from last December.

  Dec 9

  Dear Barbara,

  I am in Reno, beat, absolutely knackered, and am trying to make this hotel computer work. I wrote you one letter already and then hit shift for a new paragraph and the screen went blank. A thousand words of deathless prose, lost in a single stroke. Ah, progress.

  As I said in that letter, I left Tuesday all of a sudden when I realized that if I didn’t, I was going to get roped into baking forty dozen saffron buns for St. Lucia Day. I could feel the phone trembling—Sonya getting up the nerve to call me and pour out her troubles and how hard it is to get people to bake anymore—but I have baked my last bun and am done with it, so to make that clear, I vamoosed. I tried to call and your line was busy. I cleaned out the fridge, hauled away the deer bones that somebody’s dog hauled into the yard, locked the house, and put sunflower seeds in the feeder for the birds to gorge on. Did you know that chickadees eat their weight in sunflower seeds every few days—think of a truckdriver ordering the 200-pound cheeseburger,—but I don’t need to eat one more saffron bun, and that’s why I had to get out. Christmas depresses the daylights out of me. All that damn food. Gladys came home with a mouse tail hanging from her mouth the other day and she was moaning the next morning so on the odd chance she was poisoned, I took her to the vet in St. Cloud, the lesbian one, and there she was in her white lab coat and offering a Comprehensive Care Analysis for $150—I said, “But it’s only an old cat!” She winced at that. She listened to Gladys with a stethoscope for awhile and reported that Gladys has a heart murmur. She said that surgery is an option to consider. (Did you know about Medicat? It’s health insurance for cats.) I said, “Not on your life.” And I paid her twenty bucks and took Gladys out to Rollie Hochstetter’s who owed me one for the times I lied to his wife about his whereabouts when he was running around with the horse-faced lady. He was in the machine shed dinking around with one of his antique tractors and I set Gladys down and told him to shoot her. So he did. It took him a minute to get the gun and I patted her and told her that it was for her own good. Her hips are stiff and she whimpers when she sits and I can hear her wheezing at night and life for her just isn’t the feast it should be and I am not going to pay money to have her be a biology experiment. I said, “I’ll join you soon enough, but there’s one more dance in the old girl yet and so I’m off to Reno. And you are off to the Great Meadow in the Sky.” She didn’t believe a word of it, of course. She gave me a scathing look that I’ll remember to my dying day and Rollie set her up on a stump and I turned my head and he blew her little head off. And now here I am, in the Business Center of an enormous hotel, weeping for a dead cat. It’s a mistake to have a pet—they’re so dear and you get to know them too well and then they turn into a tragedy in which you are the betrayer. I can’t forget how she looked at me, her disdainful look, and today I saw that same exact look on the face of a fat old lady on her way to the slot machines. She glared at me just like Gladys did and I thought I saw whiskers on her. She said, “Where you been? I’ve been looking for you.” I said, “I don’t think I know you.” She said, “Oh, Pfffffft.” A cat hiss.

  By the way I stopped in Sauk Rapids and saw Muffy who is very very happy and has a blessed life and you should know that. She can’t read the newspaper or do math and I can’t ride a bicycle on a high wire, and life goes on.

  I love hotels, even ones with slot machines jangling everywhere and old fat ladies with jangly bracelets and music dripping from the ceilings and grinning Filipino bellmen who are your instant best friends. There is dancing here and men to dance with and that’s exactly what I want to do instead of sit in the church kitchen baking saffron buns and listening to people lament the dead. I want a gallant man to lead me out onto a dance floor with a prom ball sparkling and the band playing a rhumba and I want to do steps and turn and be turned, over and over again. But meanwhile I am missing my old accusatory cat. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t bring her over to your house. She is dead. I ain’t. Neither is Muffy. She saves all my postcards so I will write her another, soon as I say,

  Love, your Mother

  Drinking had gotten Barbara excused from kitchen duty: people were afraid she would drop glassware. It also got her out of teaching Vacation Bible school which was good. She had hated that for years, teaching innocent little kids about Noah’s Ark. The kids were doped up on chocolate, vibrating like hummingbirds, so they really didn’t pay attention, and the science was transparently weak—a gene pool of one male and one female means monstrous inbreeding—and then there is the issue of genocide. Judy Ingqvist said, “Yes, it’s a hard story for children. So don’t dwell on it.” So one year Barbara had God send snow and cold instead of rain and instead of an ark Moses built a fort and God gave him fire, which the wicked did not have and so they froze to death.

  Moses in the bulrushes, okay. A child destined to lead the uprising, raised by the very family who he will overthrow. Sweet. Or David and Goliath. An all-time favorite. Abraham and Isaac, on the other hand, this was madness. She told Judy Ingqvist, “A god who tells you to kill an innocent child is not a god to be worshipped.” Judy smelled liquor on her breath. She frowned and turned away and Barbara was not invited to planning meetings the next year.

  *

  The next morning, she was trimming the trumpet vines and then Kyle arrived. She wrapped him in a warm embrace that he tried to wiggle out of. “Mom, people are looking,” he said. Their little joke. He said he had spent the night in Mother’s house. He let himself in through her bedroom window and slept on her sofa. She had come to him in a dream and told him to live his life and go out in the world and travel and meet women.

  “Horse hockey,” said Barbara. He looked sleepy, unkempt, unclean, and she embraced him tighter. “People are gonna be thinking incest,” he said. She told him that he was her treasure in this world and she didn’t care who knew it. “You screw up though, and I’ll pound the crap out of you.”

  Roger’s boys Jon and Sammy were spoiled rotten in Santa Barbara, drifting along, writing dopy songs, working dead-end jobs, going through girlfriends like rats through crackers. They were almost thirty and they went around in those damn droopy shorts and untied shoes and backward baseball caps and wires coming out of their ears. They owned every expensive piece of junk there was and Roger kept buying them more. They had the attention span of a fruit fly. The thought of sitting down and reading a book was alien to them, like tinkering with a car or growing vegetables to eat. Why would you do that?

  She sat Kyle down in the kitchen and she poured him a glass of OJ over ice, got out the butter and eggs, tossed a big chunk of frozen hash browns in one frying pan and fried two eggs sunny-side up in another along with four strips of bacon. Kyle’s favorite breakfast. The kid ate like a wolverine and was slim as a snake. Go figure. He was so beautiful, the dark lashes, the curly hair, she had to make herself stop staring at him. He had Mother’s cheekbones and the priest’s eyes. He was movie material. She was not going to let him fall asleep and go drifting over the dam. God, it was hard being young today. Holy Mother of God—the distractions.

  But it was hard for Lloyd too. Lloyd, the ball-handling guard on the Leonard’s basketball team, the good boy with the big grin, the ready lover, and then after they married and he went to work for his old man in the machine shop, he got eaten up. Tried to win his daddy’s love by jumping higher and higher but there was no love to win. Lloyd was blamed for every setback. He should’ve walked out after a week, but Lloyd just got meeker and meeker. He made himself inoffensive. Kyle had that meekness in him and she didn’t want him to get eaten up like his dad. Lloyd worked nights in a factory in New Brighton where he ran a machine that dipped shell casings in an acid concoction that gave him ferocious headaches. He accepted this as his due in life. He came back to his apartment at
5 a.m. and took a fistful of Advil and a sleeping pill and slept, and then got up and watched TV and ate cold cereal. He accepted any overtime hours they threw his way. He had no life.

  So when Kyle told her, mouth full of egg and bacon, that his near-death experience on the highway had shown him the preciousness of life and he was dropping out of the U and reading Thoreau and searching for something meaningful to do with his life, she felt sick to her stomach. She drank her coffee, leaning on the counter, thinking, Don’t scream. Don’t yell. Don’t wave your arms, looking at Mr. Anderson mowing his lawn across the alley, back and forth, back and forth. “Get to the point,” she said quietly, not yelling, her arms at rest.

  He had totally abandoned the ashes-scattering idea. That just didn’t seem practical. Too much overhead. He wanted to make a documentary about Larry the Flying Elvis. To just sit him down and get him to say what he’d said in the ER, especially the part about Old Man Bush. But he needed $50,000 and he thought maybe Debbie Detmer would like to invest in him.

  “I always wanted to make movies,” he said, “and this is the perfect time. Like Grandma said, ‘if you don’t live life now, when are you going to live it?’ I want to get a digital camera, it’s great, it looks like film but you can shoot stuff for peanuts. I can do this. I really think I can. And if it doesn’t work out, fine, I’ll go back to the U next spring semester. But not in English, I’m done with that. Maybe history.”

  “Maybe you could make a documentary about somebody doinking around and wasting his time,” she said. “How about a good masturbation movie? The world could use one of those, I’m sure. A camera and a tube of Jergen’s and you’re in business.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Larry is fantastic. He’s got a story to tell. He shot his best friend. He did time in prison. He had a visit from Elvis. And that Bush family is a bunch of thugs and gangsters. I’m going to ask Debbie Detmer to be the producer.”

  “Oh for pity sakes—the woman puts Vap-O-Rub on cats!”

  “I met her once, five years ago, when I was mowing her parents’ lawn, and we talked—she knows Tom Cruise. And a lot of others. She went out to California with nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and she made a big career out there—.”

  “Sure. Running a scam on cat owners.”

  “She can open doors. That’s how it’s done. You can beat your head against the wall for years, or somebody opens a door and suddenly somebody wants to make a movie with me. What’s wrong with that?”

  About ten things, actually. Sucking up to the Detmers, for one, and going off half-cocked on a harebrained scheme instead of buckling down and finishing college and getting a degree. Some people spend their lives chasing hare-brained schemes. Why be one of them?

  “Why bolt from the barn when you are only two years away from finishing? One thing at a time. And we have a task at hand. Don’t forget. We’re scattering Grandma’s ashes on Saturday. You are scattering them. We are watching you scatter them. We can talk about it after that.”

  “I’m there,” he said. “I just want to go talk to Debbie Detmer about making a movie. It’d be cool.” And he put his plate and silverware in the sink and went off to take a shower.

  Be firm, Barbara thought. Don’t start making threats. Don’t weep. Be cool and firm. She wanted to put up a marker: DO NOT GO THIS WAY. It leads to a life of bad bounces, perpetual tardiness, invincible ignorance. She filled up a bucket with soapy water and got the sponge mop and washed the kitchen floor, just to steady herself. The kid had canceled fall registration. A done deal, so don’t bother talking about that. You can’t argue with what’s done. The goal was to get him back on track. He wants to change majors, quit English, take up History? Okay. History is fine. She’d never seen him crack a book of history, but never mind. She needed him to set a goal for himself and she would offer a clear reward for completion. She would sell Mother’s house and put her share of it in an account and the moment Kyle got his degree, the money would be his. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars. A young man could keep himself focused for two years, with a pot of thirty thousand dollars waiting for him. Couldn’t he?

  “Oh, by the way, somebody named Sarah called for you. She asked you to call her back. She said it was important.” Kyle looked stricken. “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “Was my girlfriend.”

  “Well, she was very upset. And she asked how to get up here.”

  Kyle shook his head. “No way,” he said.

  “Well, there are roads, you know. You can buy maps at gas stations. You look up Lake Wobegon under L in the list of towns and it says C-7 and there we are.”

  *

  Mr. Hansen called as they were sitting down to supper. “I wanted to express my condolences,” he said. Fine, she thought. Good. He said he had a quilt that Evelyn had made forty years ago and it was as good as new. Fine, she thought. Thank you very much. That’s what happens if you don’t ever use a quilt: it stays good as new.

  And then he got around to the point. “I’m on the county board, as you’re probably aware.” She was, Mr. Hansen had been there forever. “And we heard tell that you were planning to bury your mother in the lake and I just wanted you to know that there are ordinances about that. So if that’s your plan, you’d do well to speak to one of us. I hope you understand.” She thanked him for his concern. “I don’t want to tell you what you can’t do, but on the other hand, we don’t want to set a precedent, if you know what I mean.”

  He was one of the old guys who’d run the county for fifty years and whose passion was roads. They loved to drive around and inspect the roads and shoulders and ditches and bridges and then meet and discuss things and plan new projects. Roads were what government was all about in their book. They took a boyish fascination in the subject. Land use didn’t interest them, except they were against zoning, it was all about roads, grading roads and paving roads and repairing them in the spring, and God forbid you should spend money on the library or a public tennis court, or turn the old firebarn, with the sandstone around the door and the inscription A.D. 1892, into a museum—no need for that. No telling how much that could cost. You want money for that sort of thing, go have a bake sale. Roads on the other hand, you could never spend too much on. You need good roads.

  She called him back after supper. “The lake was actually our second choice. What Mother wanted was to be buried in a pothole in County Road F. She told me that two years ago. We were driving home from Holdingford and talking about funerals and the car hit a pothole and she said, ‘Bury me there where I’d do some good.’” Mr. Hansen laughed uneasily and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to dig a hole eight feet deep in a county road. “Oh no,” Barbara said. “She’s been cremated. She’d fit in a pothole very nicely.” He still didn’t think it was a good idea. “It would cause controversy,” he said, “and we’ve got enough on our plates without people coming to complain about that.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to do it in the lake,” she said.

  “You’ll need a permit first,” he said. “I hope we’re not talking about scattering ashes. I don’t think the fishermen would go for that.”

  “We’re going to put her inside a bowling ball,” she said. “We’ll drop it in and it’ll go straight to the bottom and stay there. Promise.”

  And the next day he brought over a county waste-disposal permit, signed and sealed. Permission granted to dispose of one (1) bowling ball in Lake Wobegon, containing ashes of decedent Evelyn Peterson and properly sealed in a watertight manner. He waived the permit fee of $35—“I always liked your mother,” he said. “She was an original, that’s for sure.” He asked if he could see the bowling ball. Barbara brought it out to him and he held it in his arms. “By God, you’ve got something here,” he said.

  17. BREAKING UP

  The wedding invitations were hand-delivered by Mr. Detmer’s nephew Chuck on Thursday morning. The bride had forgotten all about invitations. They had to be rushed through by Clint’s Print shop in S
t. Cloud, no time for raised lettering or creamy paper—it was a 3x5 brown card (brown was all they had in stock) with small lettering—you had to hold it up at a certain angle to make it out:

  Deborah Detmer and Brent Greenwood will publicly declare their love in poetry and song on Saturday the 11th of July on the waters of Lake Wobegon with a feast to follow in Pioneer Park, under the striped awning. Please be at the park by 2 p.m. to watch as events unfold and to share in our great good fortune as we celebrate our commitment to each other. No gifts, please. Casual dress.

  It was an odd invitation—what events? Athletic? Long speeches? The rejection of gifts—what sort of arrogant nonsense was that? And “declare their love?” Is this a wedding or some sort of performance? If you want to get married, and you don’t elope, you’re supposed to send out nice invitations to people you expect to come and who should bring a nice gift. It isn’t a cattle auction. And “great good fortune” is a phrase one should never use. It is begging for trouble.

  People felt bad for Mrs. Detmer that her only daughter hadn’t a clue how to put on a wedding and then word got around via the Chatterbox circuit that chefs in big white hats were flying in from San Francisco to whomp up a flaming gourmet dinner and that the Agnes D was involved and an Elvis impersonator and a nondenominational minister named Froggy who had played keyboard in a rock ‘n’ roll band. It was headline news along the lunch counter. They feasted on that all day. And reminisced about their own weddings and unreliable groomsmen who got into the schnapps and what weird pumpkin-colored dresses bridesmaids were required to wear long ago and the long-gone custom of tin cans tied to the bumper and cheese smeared on the door handles and bride-kidnapping and LeRoy the town constable suggested they kidnap Debbie and take her up north to come to her senses and Myrtle Krebsbach hollered, “And what would you do with her if the groom didn’t want to come get her?” Good question. Dorothy was one of the first to lay eyes on the groom. She described him as handsome in a bedraggled sort of way, unshaven, jeans and T-shirt and sneakers, and she took him for one of the summer people from across the lake, people with expensive boats they never use except to fish once a year with night crawlers flown in from Thailand and drink $100 bottles of scotch. Anyway, he’d come in and asked for cappuccino and she made him one from hot water and a packet of Folger’s powdered cappuccino and he dumped some sugar in and drank half and ate a yogurt. He smelled of cinnamon. He kept trying to dial somebody on a cell phone.