Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  Oh no, Bishop Ringsak had plenty on his plate without baby-sitting twenty-four agnostic Danes, so he handed them off to Fred and said, “Don’t let them preach and keep them away from women. They can booze all they like. They will anyway. Just try to keep their names out of the paper.” The Danes sat in the bus and Fred stood outside the Chatterbox and looked around for any Lutheran-appearing persons who he could ask for directions to Pastor Ingqvist’s house. The bus had stopped at the church, which was locked, and he needed to know where to take the group for the lunch which, according to his itinerary was scheduled for 1 p.m.

  They were two hours early because the Danes had revolted against the scheduled tour of the hog operation in Melrose. They had gone to the turkey farm in Annandale and marched through the sheds, led by a laconic young man who stared at his shoes and mumbled, and the whole thing horrified them—it was a concentration camp for birds disfigured by genetic engineering, birds with enormous breasts like Hollywood porn stars, breasts like backpacks, breasts so huge that the birds couldn’t keep their balance and many fell and broke their ankles. And the invalid turkeys were not euthanized but sedated and put in hammocks and fed intravenously and brought to market weight in a comatose condition and then slaughtered and sold. The obscenity of it aroused the Danes to a high pitch and they sat on the bus ratcheting and snarkling about it in their skritchy language with the weird chuckling vowels and meanwhile Fred was urging them to please stick with the program, the hog people were expecting visitors. But no, they wouldn’t. “We have seen swine farms in our own country,” said Mattias. “There is no need to see more.” Some of them were afraid, he explained, of inhaling airborne genetic material that would enlarge their own breasts and make them freaks. They were serious.

  Fred knew they were looking forward to Los Angeles. There was a Lutheran surfer mission in Ventura, a Danish film star Virginia Madsen, who would throw a big pool party, Meryl Streep would come, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, the Danes whispered a long list of names. Minnesota was an obligatory stop, like you might visit your grandparents’ grave on your way to L. A. They were sick of Minnesota. So flat, so boring and the food—so bleecchhh. Fred had been with them for all of three hours and he had come to loathe them heartily. Their carefully trimmed hair and moustaches, their pastel clothing, their superciliousness, their smoking, their unLutheranness. He was the only one in ecclesiastical garb—the others looked like a gang of insurance men on holiday. They looked more French than Scandinavian. They had insisted on stopping for coffee in Sauk Center so the bus stopped—some kind of democracy was in force, and whatever authority Fred thought he had was gone—and they trooped into the coffee shop of the Main Street Hotel and inspected the menu and saw the word “Danish” and were amused and ordered those, which, of course, turned out to be inferior stuff, just like everything else in America. The pastries came on plates and the Danes poked at them with knives, as if conducting an autopsy, and sliced off tiny morsels and tasted them and wrinkled their noses and jabbered in a dismissive way and drank the coffee, which was inferior too. They asked about Sinclair Lewis, whose hometown it was, and asked Fred if he had read Main Street or Babbitt which, of course, he had not. They had. “It wasn’t assigned to you in school?” asked Mattias. “No,” said Fred. He was pissed. Where was the fellowship you expected of Lutherans? The humility? They were the Examining Committee from hell. A tall bald man with black horn-rimmed glasses asked, “How much philosophy did you read in seminary?” Quite a bit. “Did you read Play Dough?” “Who?” said Fred. The man peered at him over his glasses. “Greek philosophy?”

  None, actually. You don’t need Plato to minister to the sick and troubled. They’re not asking you to discuss the nature of Beauty; they need you to hold their hand as they die. What Fred disliked about the ministry, was the suck-ups who wanted to talk theology and show off by quoting Kierkegaard.

  “Is this the Danish delegation?” He turned around and there was a sandy-haired man in T-shirt and jeans. The T-shirt said “Lutherans: It could be worse.” He held a Jacques seed corn cap in one hand and an icecream cone in the other.

  “I’m David Ingqvist,” he said. He climbed aboard the bus and said something to them in Danish that made them all laugh.

  And then a parade of people came marching around the corner, led by a gaunt man in a Viking helmet with horns and wearing a cape and a silken sash with blue fringe, carrying a sword and a sort of torch made from a cheese grater. He marched with an airy hauteur, followed by a woman in a blue robe carrying a green bowling ball, a man in a sparkly sportcoat, a young man in red swim briefs and flip-flops carrying an enormous red parasail, a young woman playing Dvorak’s “Going Home” on the trombone, and an old coot waving a couple of sparklers. And a gaggle of others, most of them elderly. And an old lady in a purple pantsuit, wearing a jet-black wig and scratching her butt. They crossed Main Street and disappeared behind a brick building with manikins in the window.

  The Danes came trooping off the bus, all twenty-four, Fred counting them off, and Pastor Ingqvist led them across the street and down to the lake. “We’ve been looking forward to your coming,” he yelled back over his shoulder, and there indeed, tied to a long dock, was a pontoon boat, the Agnes D, with a sign hanging from the rail, Velkommen Danskere, and little Danish flags and Celebration of Commitment painted in green leafy lettering on a white muslin sheet stretched between two steel poles in the bow, left over from Debbie’s wedding. Two dozen bottles of Moët champagne sat in three big washtubs full of chipped ice and smoke rose from the barbecue in the stern where giant shrimp shish kebabs were grilling. Pastor had put them on the grill moments before, still frozen, a mistake perhaps, and so he took them off the grill, dropping a few on the deck, and had to wash them off in the lake, which had an oil slick from the motor, but he splashed them around vigorously and tossed them on the grill, leaving them in the Lord’s hands, and went to meet the bus. Wheels of cheese and tubs of pâté and a basket of baguettes sat on a white cloth on a table along the port side.

  “Lunch aboard ship!” he cried. “Frokost paa skibben.” Their eyes brightened. They moved slowly down the dock toward the boat.

  “I am attending a memorial service for an old parishioner at noon,” he said, “so help yourselves, enjoy the champagne, take it easy, and I’ll be back and we’ll go for a cruise.”

  He peeled the foil off a bottle, popped the cork which flew into the lake, poured, peeled, popped a few more—“Any nondrinkers?” he cried—the Danes laughed.

  The boat, Fred noted as the Danes trooped aboard, was riding rather low in the water. He thought he would remain on shore. They wouldn’t notice his absence, now that the champagne was uncorked and they were pouring a round in little plastic cups. He thought he would repair to a shady spot on the grass under a red oak tree and observe from a distance.

  23. PHYSICS

  The north end of Lake Wobegon is where the town lies, the swimming beach, Al’s Baits, the fancy summer people’s houses. The south end is smaller, rockier, weedier, less visited, and so nobody has ever removed the skeleton of the wing from Wilbur Scott’s plane, the one that he flew nonstop the length of the Mississippi River in 1952. He was a dairy farmer who was looking to do something remarkable in his life and the nonstop flight was going to be his big moment and then he crashed the plane when he fired a signal rocket over Bemidji and shot off one of his struts. They gave the wreckage to his wife and she dumped it by the lake, a violation of the dumping law, but she was a grieving widow so nobody bothered her about it. And it was the south end of the lake, after all.

  The Evelyn Memorial troupe stood a little north of the abandoned wing. The bowling ball was cradled in Barbara’s left arm, a chain attached to it. Muffy stood to her left, between her and Raoul, the boom box in hand, and Bennett and Roger to her right, and then Aunt Flo and Uncle Al, silent, dabbing at their eyes, trying to keep composed, Flo in dark glasses for possibly the first time in her entire life. Enormous wraparound
goggles that made her look extraterrestrial. The trombonist was her daughter Karleen who had offered to play “Beyond The Sunset.” They stood together in tall grass at the edge of the rocky beach and looking across Lower Lake Wobegon toward the Indian mounds and the marsh where the loon couple lived. Myrtle Krebsbach fussed about the low turnout. “I know fifty people who’d be here in a minute if they knew this was going on,” she said. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you shoulda told me, I’d’ve rounded them up.”

  “It’s perfectly okay,” said Barbara. “It’s not a contest.”

  “I would’ve thought the Bunsens’d be here, but some people think they’re too good to breathe the same air as the rest of us.”

  “They’re out of town, dear. They went to Houston to help out their son who broke his leg on the basement stairs.”

  “Well, it’s always something, isn’t it.” Myrtle was experiencing shooting pains in her left leg. “It feels like it’s on fire,” she said. “I may have to call Florian to get the shotgun and put me out of my misery. And he’d do it too.”

  Duane sat at the wheel of his silver runabout, the motor idling, emitting blue smoke, his pop-bottle glasses shadowed by the great brim of his yachtman’s cap, and Kyle adjusted the trapeze of the great parasail, which Mr. Hoppe, in his Viking outfit, and Wally of the Sidetrack were holding gingerly by the tips of the wing. Kyle had set the waterskis in the water. He wore a fluorescent green Velcro belt around which he would wind the chain that was fastened to the setscrew he had drilled into the bowling ball. He explained that he was making last-minute adjustments to guard against a sudden nosedive.

  “Darling,” said Barbara, “Grandma would be horrified if you hurt yourself doing this, you know that. She didn’t specify that she be flown, honey.” He looked rather fragile in his red swim-briefs, her pale slender dappled son with the light down on his arms and legs shining in the sun, sliding the aluminum trapeze assembly a few inches aft on the bracing struts. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a life jacket?”

  “I’ll be harnessed in. Don’t worry about it.”

  There were twenty-four of them there, including six ladies from the Ladies Circle who looked faintly horrified but had come out of true loyalty. And then Pastor Ingqvist arrived. He nodded at Barbara and she nodded back. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, as if about to launch into prayer.

  “Do either of you care to say anything?” she whispered to her brothers. Roger shook his head and looked away. Bennett nodded yes. “Would it be out of place for me to say a word?” said Raoul. Muffy put an arm around Barbara and whispered, “I love Grandma so much. She takes me for ice cream and we go swimming but I don’t swim because there are fish in the lake. And there are dogs. I don’t like dogs. I like some dogs. I swim in a pool. Wednesday and Saturday. I do the backstroke and the butterfly.”

  *

  A quarter-mile away, the Danes were on their second or third glass of champagne which they agreed was as good as any they had tasted. A little warm, perhaps, and the plastic glasses were not so charming, but it was lovely with the Camembert and the Raclette and the blue cheese and the lovely paté. Half of them stood on the Agnes D and the others on the dock, studying the little town spread out on the slope, the high brick bell tower of the Catholic church, the lesser wood steeple of the Lutheran, the blue and brown and green roofs of houses. “Why is there so little color in America?” cried one. “Is there a fear of color?” “A fear of art and culture, if you ask me,” said another.

  Fred sat under his tree, trying to shut out their jabbering and then the word “puritanisk” rang out, which he heard before on the bus. Several times. Puritanical. An obsession of theirs. Evidently they’d read The Scarlet Letter once and it summed up America for them, that and Death of a Salesman and “The Waste Land.” They probably thought Joe McCarthy was still in the US Senate. He wished he could piss in their champagne. What jerks. He vowed never to drink Carlsberg or purchase Lego toys. On the other hand, they were drinking steadily and that meant he might be able to shovel them on the bus and get back home early. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed his girlfriend Helen in the Cities to tell her. When he was in college, he borrowed his uncle’s pontoon boat on Lake Minnetonka and invited a girl he had a huge crush on to come for a sunset cruise and out on the lake he dove from the boat and surfaced with a huge erection, a ball-peen hammer between his legs, thinking, How am I going to climb aboard? And then he noticed oil leaking from the outboard. He unsnapped the cowling to adjust the oil flow and suddenly the engine started up with a roar and the pontoon went racing away with the steering cranked to port and it came around and charged him like a huge bull, and she was sobbing for somebody to please please stop this and he grabbed hold of the pontoon as it came by and hoisted himself aboard and got the boat straightened out and she clung to him, weeping, and there he was, naked, erect, and a grateful woman in his arms, and that was when the boat skewed into the swimming area and got tangled in the floats, and a powerful beam swung out from the beach and caught the two of them in its glare and ten minutes later the deputy had written him a ticket for public lewdness and that was when he decided to go into the ministry.

  A mangy yellowish Labrador came walking past him along the shore. The dog stank to high heaven. You could almost see stink waves rising from his scraggly burr-infested fur. He was carrying a dead fish in his mouth and it appeared to have been dead for a long time. The head hung by a thread and then fell off as the dog strolled down to the dock and headed for the Danes. Good for you, thought Fred. Go get ’em.

  A man standing at the upstairs window of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery saw the dog and whistled to him and the dog didn’t notice. The dog was deaf and practically blind. He had a lot on his mind, having been to the town dump and foraged there and found nothing, an old mattress, some rope, gunnysacks of junk from the garages of dead farmers. He had picked through it all and found nothing worthwhile. He was hungry. His name was Bruno and he was eighteen years old and a legend in the town. As a pup, he had caught a two-pound walleye while wading in the shallows and he had wrestled it to shore and hauled it to Inga, his owner. He carried the fish by its tail, four blocks to Inga’s front porch, set it down, and barked. She made a big fuss over him. His picture was in the paper. She cooked the fish for him and let him sleep on the couch. This imprinted him with his mission in life, to catch big fish. He had been wading in the shallows ever since and had not matched his early success. The only fish he brought home were ones who lay on the beach or floated on the water. Inga turned against him, and so did everyone else in town. “Get the hell out of here, Bruno!” people yelled whenever they saw him. He was rejected on every hand, like an old drunk, on account of his rank odor of rot and mildew and algae, but he persisted. Half his teeth were gone, his eyes were rheumy, his ears leaked pus, but the dog kept fishing, and now he made his way toward some men who smelled fresh to him, who had never rejected him, hoping to find a pat on the head, a scratch on the belly.

  The Danes smelled him right away and turned and stiffened. One of them shouted at the dog in Danish which didn’t impress him. One of them waved a giant shish kebab at the dog but that only piqued his interest. As he approached the boat, the Danes on the dock, cornered, decided to go aboard, all of them, in a big rush, and to cast off the lines and start up the motor.

  Fred was gratified to see the boat almost sink under the weight of twenty-four Danish pastors. Water glittered on the deck and a few pastors cried out a warning and then one succeeded in starting the motor and revved it up and away went the Agnes D, its deck awash but making slow progress, the Danes crowding in tight in the middle, so as not to push the bow any lower or to bump into the barbecue in the stern, the red coals glowing under the giant shrimp shish kebabs. Fred thought that this might make a good story for a sermon someday. It looked like twenty-four men walking on water, carrying an awning, and towing a barbecue. The sermon would be about pride and how we cannot make ourselves more buoyant simply by wishing it so. He go
t up and walked along the shore so as not to miss anything.

  “Who’s on the boat?” yelled the man in the window.

  “They know exactly what they’re doing,” yelled Fred. “They’re Danish, after all. They’re excellent sailors.”

  At the lower end of the lake, Pastor Ingqvist stood ready to say a prayer—either a Christian one or an all-purpose one addressed to the Spirit of Love and suitable for mixed audiences—or to bless the bowling ball or to lead them in the singing of “Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbaya,” but Barbara wasn’t looking his way. She was gesturing for her brother Bennett to step forward and face the group. Kyle had attached the bowling ball to himself, wrapping the chain around the green Velcro belt, and Duane had thrown the towrope out of the stern of the runabout and the show was about to start.

  “My mother was a woman of great kindness who knew how to pay attention,” said Bennett, reading from an index card in his hand and stopped, trying to decipher his own handwriting. Flies buzzed in the air and the water lapped gently on the stones. The motor rumbled. “She went through life tuned in to everything around her and I feel, as perhaps you do too, that she is still tuned in to us, but from another place, and perhaps at a deeper level.” (Oh get off it, thought Barbara.) “I’ll always remember Mother taking me downtown to line up for the Living Flag on the Fourth of July. There was a man up on the roof yelling and trying to get everyone organized into red stripes and white stripes—a stripe was about a hundred feet long, three people abreast wearing red or white hats—and Mother and I always wore blue hats so we could stand in the corner of the flag and hold the big sparklers that made the stars. And when the whole flag was formed and everyone was holding still for the picture, Mother said to me, ‘I can hear them breathing, can you?’ And I could.” He stopped again, and turned the card over. The other side was blank. He said, “I meant to finish writing this, and I forgot to and now I forget what the point of it was, but anyway it’s what I remember about Mother.” And then he stepped back into line and Raoul stepped forward and faced them. “I was a friend of Evelyn’s from our days in nurses’ training,” he said. “Nineteen forty-one. A big year in our country. I loved her then, and I was lucky enough to reunite with her late in our lives. So I knew her as a young woman and as a mature woman, and she was the same at 82 as she was at 21. She was the same lively and curious and fun-loving person that she always had been. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see a person clearly”—he looked around in a meaningful way—“and I found her delightful.” He looked at the green ball hanging from Kyle’s chest. “You were a delight, old girl,” he whispered. “There will never be another like you. Not for me.” He choked on these words and stepped back into line. For a second or two, Barbara considered making a speech of her own—Mother was a freethinker, it’s as simple as that. There is no God, we are free agents, each one of us, and if you want to go around with a big knapsack of rocks on your back like a person in a cartoon, okay, but I choose to be free, just as my mother, in a lucid moment, wanted you to know that she is free. But her left leg would not step forward. She leaned slightly but her foot wouldn’t move. She turned to Muffy and put her arms around her. “If I cry, don’t get scared, okay, baby?” Muffy nodded. She was looking straight ahead, standing straight as a soldier, her hands pressed together in prayer.