by Meghan Daum
“I don’t think they have Heineken.”
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“Leinenkugel,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of like urine,” he said. “With a note of Heineken.”
A gigantic woman with bleached blond, permed hair was leaning over the pool table, her two-sizes-too-small shorts riding up over the tops of her thighs. I noticed a small child clinging to her legs. Stevie Ray Vaughan was blasting through the speakers. Mason got up to get me a beer and came back with a Rolling Rock.
“Best in the house,” he said.
“So,” I said, “what building do you work in?”
“What building?” he said, perplexed.
“Where is your elevator?”
“On Highway 36.”
“Is it an office building?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just an elevator. A grain elevator.”
A grain elevator! He wasn’t an elevator operator as in a guy with epaulets and a hat. He worked with grain. He worked in an agricultural capacity, which put him in the neighborhood of farmer.
“Did you think I worked in a regular elevator?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Well, maybe.”
“And you still agreed to meet me?”
“I’m not sure what a grain elevator is,” I said.
“It stores the grain,” he said. “Farmers bring their crop in after they’ve harvested it, we put it in bins, sometimes dry it off if it’s wet, and then load it onto trains.”
“Why is it called an elevator?”
“Because an elevator lifts the grain up to the top of the bins,” he said. “Ours is about seven stories high.”
“So how do you spend most of your days there?” I asked.
“Most of the guys watch soap operas,” he said. “I leave as much as possible. It’s pretty slow except during harvest. The boss practices tai chi all day.”
“And feng shui?” I said, thinking of Faye.
“What’s that?” he asked.
In truth, I wasn’t exactly sure all of what feng shui entailed. We were silent for a moment. Mason guzzled the last of his beer and signaled the waitress for another.
“So do you live near here?” I asked.
“I have a cabin by the river,” he said.
“There’s a river nearby?”
“It’s about twenty-five miles from here,” he said. “The Flatwater. I’ve had a little A-frame for about ten years. Wait ’til you see it. You’ll love it.”
“You mean you live there all the time?” I asked.
“Pretty much.”
“So it must be, like, fully outfitted and every thing.”
“It has every thing I need,” he said.
“So it has heat and every thing?” I asked.
“I have a woodstove,” he said. “I have a really nice outhouse. You should see it.”
“An outhouse?”
“I’ve got it all fixed up,” he said.
“The cabin?”
“No, the outhouse,” he said. “It’s probably one of the nicest outhouses around here. I do abstract paintings. I put a really nice one in the outhouse. It’s a Kandinsky kind of thing.”
“So how do you, like, take a shower?” I asked.
“I bathe in the river,” he said.
The child of the gigantic woman suddenly started screaming. She picked him up in her giant arms, kissed his head, and lit a cigarette. I looked at Mason, who, again, was downing his last swig of beer.
“Are you making all this up?” I asked.
“No.”
“So where do you bathe in the winter?”
“There’s a truck stop on the way to the cabin,” he said. “Sometimes I use the showers there. Though the clientele is a little . . . iffy.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “So . . . you said you have three children.”
“Yup,” he said.
“Do you see them often?”
“All the time.”
“And how old are they?”
“Let’s see,” he said. “Sebastian is thirteen, Peter is nine, and Erin is, uh, four.”
“That’s quite an age range,” I said. “So you’re divorced?”
“Oh, well no.”
“What?” I yelped.
“Give me a break,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Of course I’m divorced. You think I’m some kind of scumbag?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, you must have not been divorced for long.”
“Ten years,” he said.
“But didn’t you say you had a four-year-old?” I asked, forgetting about the nine-year-old. This sort of math wasn’t my strength.
“She has a different mother,” he said.
“So you have two from your ex-wife and one from this other woman?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “actually, the first is from my ex-wife and the second one is from my ex-girlfriend, and the third kind of just, you know, happened.”
“Oh!”
Had this date been on one of those television shows where they follow the couple around and have pop-up cartoon bubbles saying things like “Nice tie” and “Guess his mother never taught him how to use a fork” this would have been the moment where a giant bubble, a bubble nearly the size of the screen, would pop up and say, simply:
“!*?#**!!!”
“Do you want another beer?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Mason got up to get me another beer. I wondered if I should just walk out and leave. If Elena had been on this date she would have shouted “Next!” and stridden right out of the bar. But Mason came back almost instantly. He plopped the beer on the table.
“So you’re probably wondering what I’m doing in Prairie City,” I said.
“Being glad you’re not in New York, I assume,” he said.
“I’m actually a television producer,” I said. “I’m doing a series for a New York morning show about the quality of life.”
The gigantic woman’s child started screaming again and this time she swatted him on the head.
“Well, they sure don’t have that in New York,” Mason said.
“Have you ever been there?” I asked.
“Why would I want to go there?”
“Because it’s great!” I said, sounding very much like Bonnie Crawley. “Great restaurants, amazing, smart people. It’s just, you know, my rent was going up to twenty-one hundred dollars a month.”
“Susannah took Sebastian there a couple years back,” he said. “I was worried the whole time. Susannah being my ex-wife.”
“And, uh, what does she do?” I asked.
“She’s a professor at the Center for Great Plains Studies at P.C. State College,” he said. “My ex-girlfriend’s a nurse.”
“And what does the third woman do?” I asked. “The other mother?”
“These days, your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “But Erin’s gonna grow up to be a professional outdoorswoman. I’m seeing to that.”
He paused and looked at me.
“I know it looks bad,” he continued. “But I love my kids. I see my kids all the time. I don’t regret anything that’s happened. As far as the kids go.”
“I don’t want kids,” I said.
“Then don’t have them,” Mason said.
I drank three Rolling Rocks. Mason drank nine Leinenkugels. He didn’t appear in the least bit affected by any of them. I asked him if he knew Sue, since everyone else in town seemed to. He said he didn’t and I felt a short breath of fresh air rush inside me, as if I were being let out of a crowded house and allowed to walk down the street. I thought about Samantha and her bad boys story. This guy seemed qualified. He wasn’t a cowboy, although he did say he’d owned a horse once, which he’d kept tied up in his yard on the edge of town when he was married to Susannah. I looked at his hands. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt. His skin looked as rough as tree bark.
“What are you doing on Thursday?”
Mason asked me.
“On Thursday?” I said. “I don’t know. Working.” I’d managed to e-mail my script but I’d avoided calling Joel to assemble a crew for the shoot. I’d spent the weekend running speaker wire from the office to the living room, using a staple gun to attach it to the bases of the walls and around door frames so the speakers could be placed on opposite sides of the room for maximum sonic effect. Then I’d painted the wire white so it wouldn’t look ugly on the walls.
“You should come out to the cabin,” Mason said. “It’s gonna be a full moon. We could spend the night out there. You’d love it.”
“Spend the night?” I asked, trying to sound as incredulous as possible while at the same time worrying about his feelings, which suddenly seemed entirely capable of being hurt. And because I couldn’t think of how to respond, because the only appropriate response to such an inappropriate suggestion was something hackneyed enough to sound like a joke, an aphorism in the vein of “You go, girl,” I said, “I’m not that kind of a girl.” (Lucinda Trout had, on one or two occasions in the past, been that kind of a girl. But neither occasion had involved cabins with outhouses.)
“I don’t mean it that way,” he said. “I’m sure!”
He said “sure” with the odd little drawl that crept up in a number of his words. I’d noticed that he’d pronounced “wash” like “warsh.” I warsh my clothes in the crick, he’d said.
“Then where would I sleep?” I asked.
“In the bed in the loft,” he said. “I’d sleep on the couch. Or outside in the teepee.”
“You have a teepee?”
“Of course,” he said. “The boys sleep in it all the time.”
I said I’d consider going to his cabin on Thursday but that I wouldn’t spend the night. Mason said that was fine but that I’d probably change my mind and want to spend the night when I saw how beautiful the river was. Outside in the parking lot, as I watched him climb into his pickup, which was littered with power tools, library books, and Neil Young cassettes, I noticed on the floor a container of Muppet Babies diaper wipes.
I’D RETURNED LEONARD’S CALL but I’d done it during business hours when I knew he wouldn’t be home and had purposefully screened the phone calls in the evenings when I knew he’d call me back. He’d left two messages saying the Bruce Willis movie was still playing but if I didn’t want to see it we could always see something else or skip the movie and just have dinner or, if I felt like it, go for a bike ride. In the meantime, Joel had left a message making sure I was aware of a party being thrown by the Peter Fonda county commissioner on Friday and asking me if I needed a ride. He didn’t mention the Up Early shoot. I’d already known about the Peter Fonda county commissioner’s party from Sue and had decided to skip it. I’d also decided that the best way to defuse the Joel situation was to actually do something with Leonard. By not doing something with Leonard, Joel might think I was saving myself for him. By doing something platonic and innocuous with Leonard, like going for a bike ride, I would establish a position of nonromantic bipartisanship and therefore encourage both of them to give up. For added protection against Leonard’s developing any interest in me, I wore shorts, which revealed the festering scabs on my legs.
Leonard said we could take a bike tour through his neighborhood and then he would cook dinner for me at his house. I didn’t have a bike, but he said I could use his daughter’s. Though she was just eleven she must have been quite a bit taller than I. Leonard had to adjust the seat and the handlebars. We ended up riding over to a huge public rose garden near the children’s zoo. Leonard had us park the bikes and wander along the paths. A young couple was getting pictures taken by a professional photographer. The woman wore what looked like a prom dress and the man wore a light colored three-piece suit with a pink bow tie. The photographer kept putting them in poses where the man was kneeling before the woman as if proposing marriage. In another shot, the woman held a rose in front of her face and cocked her head to the side. Leonard picked a rose and gave it to me, which I accidentally dropped on the way back to his house.
He made lasagna with Velveeta cheese for dinner. Apparently the kids, whom I had yet to lay eyes on, had already eaten at their mother’s house and were watching TV in the basement.
“Kyle and Danielle, come up here, please,” Leonard yelled. After several minutes, the kids emerged begrudgingly from the basement, the blare of a sitcom laugh track pouring through the open door. Kyle was tall and scrawny and zitty and wore a RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE T-shirt and several hemp bracelets around his wrist. Danielle looked like she was about thirty. She was at least five foot eight and had olive skin and some of the darkest, glossiest hair I’d ever seen. She wore bell-bottom jeans and a navel ring. She looked a bit like Cher in the 1970s.
“I want you to meet my friend Lucinda,” Leonard said.
The kids murmured something. Then Danielle said, “We’re out of pop.”
“Then drink water,” Leonard said. “And what is that on your stomach?”
“It’s a clip-on,” Danielle said.
“A clip-on navel ring?” I asked. “They have such a thing?”
“I got about five of them,” she said.
I wondered then if Leonard had invited me over to somehow get to know Danielle so I could be a positive influence on her. It seemed conceivable that Leonard was not interested in me romantically but instead saw me as an independent, professional young woman who might serve as a role model for his wayward daughter. I immediately warmed to him. He was a good father.
“Okay, you can go back downstairs now,” Leonard said. He got us more beers and suggested we sit outside on the deck so he could smoke.
“So when did you change your name to Running Feather?” I asked after at least a minute had passed in silence.
“About twenty-five years ago,” he said.
“When you were a kid?” I asked.
“I was twenty-five,” he said.
“Oh, right,” I said. “And had you always known your biological parents were named Running Feather? Did you have your adoption records opened up?”
“Oh, I never did that,” Leonard said, blowing smoke rings as he spoke. “I was never interested in finding my parents.”
“Oh!”
“My mom was probably your typical drunk Indian,” he said.
“But did you suddenly become more interested in Native culture?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said.
“Then why did you change your name?”
“I don’t know.” Leonard laughed. “I just wanted to be different somehow. I thought maybe it would impress women. I figured lots of people changed their names. Look at Cher.”
“And she’s part Cherokee, isn’t she?” I said.
“Is she?” asked Leonard.
I looked at my watch. Though it was just past 9:30, it suddenly seemed very late. I told Leonard I had to get going and he politely walked me through the house and outside to the Sunbird. “How’s the car?” he said.
“Great.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t buy that Saab,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“’Cause replacing a Saab part costs a lot more than replacing a part on most other cars,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, you wouldn’t know a guy named Mason Clay, would you?”
“Never heard of him,” Leonard said.
“I thought everyone knew everyone in this town.”
“We do,” he said. “So this guy sounds suspicious.”
I drove off and went several miles in the wrong direction. When I figured out where I was, I was seized with the urge to go home and drink wine while listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue album, so I stopped at the Hinky Dinky supermarket. I’d been to Hinky Dinky enough to know that there appeared to be an employee policy against visible body piercings. Almost every high school kid who worked there had a tiny Band-Aid on his or her eyebrow where there would normally be a ring. But it wasn’t until now that
I realized that every single adult who worked there—and this meant nearly every member of the night crew—had something wrong with them. One clerk, whom I’d seen before in passing, I now noticed was missing part of his ear. The woman working the express lane, punching the register with long, artificial pink finger nails, was a dwarf. When I went to the liquor area to pay for my $7.99 chardonnay, the clerk had a Band-Aid on her eyebrow and also a speech impediment. “I’m ganeed to thee thome I.D.,” she said. As I walked away she called after me, “Wah happen to your legths?”
Safely in the Sunbird, I felt tears come to my eyes. This was in violation of my no-crying policy and I bit my cheek until I got back to the apartment, where I listened to half of “All I Want” before turning off the stereo and trying to fall asleep before the inevitable thunder of Toby’s footsteps.
From: Faye Figaro
To: Lucinda Trout
Re: Were not paying you to do nothing
Lucnda, you better get your ass in geer. you’ve been there a month and not one segment have you filed. I gave you the number of the guy at KPCR. Call and get a crew together and shoot the fucking series itro piece. how busy can they be covering pta metings and hog auctions?
To: Joel Lipinsky
From: Lucinda Trout
Re: NY Up Early segment
Joel, I would very much like to proceed with the first New York Up Early segment, which revolves around the theme “Choices and Chances.” All this requires from you is a videographer, a sound man (or woman), and no more than an hour of shooting on my front porch, 2321 S. Sunnyvale Av, Prairie City. Please let me know ASAP when we can set this up.
And thank you for taking me to the movie the other night. Hello to Valdette!
The day after the bike ride with Leonard was the date to go to Mason’s cabin. He was picking me up at 4:00 in the afternoon, which seemed an odd time to start a date but perhaps would work to my advantage in that there would be less pressure to spend the night. I spent the day talking on the phone to Elena and Daphne. I told them I had met a guy who read Gary Snyder poetry and bathed in the river. I didn’t mention the kids or the grain elevator. I told them he wanted me to go to his cabin but that I wasn’t going to go until I knew him better. Daphne was all for it but said to wait until the fifth date to go the cabin. Elena said he sounded like the Unabomber and that I shouldn’t go anywhere near his cabin or even see him again. She said there must be an architect or a professor of Great Plains studies who would make a more suitable boyfriend. As for Joel, she said he sounded like a cross between Alvy Singer and Humbert Humbert and was an embarrassment to the Jewish people, mostly for living in the Midwest. She said I was in danger of becoming a hussy.
