I climbed up on a stool and leaned forward and started to tell him that I was trying to figure out why the heck I was in the Guard and what I was supposed to accomplish.
“Mmmmhmm,” he said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And then, in a split second, before I could move a muscle, he grabbed me by the neck and hauled me across the bar and had me flat on my back on the pop cooler and was holding a blender to the side of my head.
I’ll never forget the cold animal anger in his green eyes as he stared down at me, unblinking, for the three longest seconds of my life. Then he helped me to my feet and offered me a drink.
“Sorry about losing control like that,” he said. “I guess I got angry because I see in you so much of myself. I get fed up with waiting around, too. It’s the hardest part of being in the Guard. And it’s twice as hard in the ING. You want to know why?”
I did.
“Because we’re not even supposed to exist.”
He put a big ice cube in his mouth and ate it like a cherry. “You see, Soviet spy satellites in low orbit are reading Indiana right now like a children’s book, and we have to make sure they see us as a bunch of civilians in one-bedroom apartments who happen to like golf a lot. You see, at peak strength, mobilized, the Indiana National Guard numbers fourteen million men. It’s the biggest secret army in the free world. And one of the best equipped. We’re one ace the President’s got that they don’t know about—maybe the only one. Get in my car, Dan.”
The Colonel’s beige Buick Electra was moored in a secret parking space under an aluminum roof beside the kitchen. Aluminum confuses the heck out of radar, he explained, and beige is the hardest color to remember afterward. The car shone. A good wax job, he pointed out, prevents a person or persons from leaving messages in the dust. When he turned the ignition key, the car sprang alive, antennas rose, the radio came on, the seats themselves hummed with power, ready to go forward or back at a finger’s touch. “Always fasten your seat belt,” he said. “It’s one thing they’d never expect us to do.” We cruised west into the warehouse district, and he pointed out long, low aluminum ING buildings where the hardware was kept. “We have more than four thousand forklifts, fifty-two hundred portable biffies, eighteen bulk-milk trucks, and four thousand rider mowers,” he said. Those were the figures I wrote down. There were more than six hundred infrared cluster-type thrusters with uplink/downlink/intercept capability. “Only two thousand fifty of those puppies in the whole U.S.,” he said. “So, you see, we’re sitting on top of one of the larger secrets in the defense community. Our job: keep it that way. It’s tough to sit tight, no buts about it, but when we get the word to go, I want the other side to find out about us all of a sudden. Bang, we’re there. INDIANA GUARD HITS BEACHES, TAKES TOWNS AND MOUNTAINS, SWARMS THROUGH HANOI. I don’t want the enemy general to be studying us for three years and getting a Ph.D. The big secret of the ING is that we could take ninety percent casualties with no effect on our capability. I don’t want him to know why. When the time comes, I want to be able to get in there, search, destroy, interdict, capture the flag, and bring the boys home for Christmas.”
“Count me in,” I said softly as the big car nosed homeward. “I want a piece of it.”
“Just don’t forget who you are,” the Colonel said. “Look relaxed, but don’t be relaxed. Smile, but don’t make a point of it. Drink vodka. Lots of ice. Lemon, not lime. Not too many peanuts. Always turn the conversation to the other person. Pace yourself. Always take the end urinal in the men’s room. Sunday morning, take a side pew. Don’t wash dishes; always dry. Remember: you’re a killer, a professional killer. Your stereo has a sharp needle you could poke a man in the eye with. You know how to take an ordinary putter and beat somebody senseless. With your skill, even an ordinary golf ball is lethal. Killers are what we are. And by the way, always choose Thousand Island.”
He pulled up in front of the Alhambra. Music drifted out from behind the closed windows, shadowy figures moved behind the drawn shades. “So for now, trooper, your orders are to stay low: play good golf, drink cold beer, and make love to beautiful women. And let’s just hope the Russians aren’t doing the same.”
He came around to open the door for me, but I was ready for him, and when he tried to kick me I got him by the ankle and flipped him up on the roof of the Buick and pounded him twice, hard, in the pancreas. “Good,” he said. “Darn good.”
His lecture changed my way of thinking, and for the remaining two months of Guard training I tried to act as normal as humanly possible. It wasn’t easy. A guy looks down at his typewriter knowing it can be switched over instantly to invisible ink simply by typing “Hoosier” (a word that even Russians fluent in English would not be familiar with), and he finds it hard to relax and have a cool time. (I kept my typewriter set on invisible most of the time in case I forgot the password.) We had to remember to always use electric golf carts on the course, for fast response in case of a Code Green alert. The signal would be two longs and a short, either on a horn or a saxophone. In case telephone communications should become unreliable, the alert would come by radio—either on “The Don Davis Show” on K-Wayne or on my own “Dan the Man Show,” on the Gentle Giant 101 (2:00—6:00 P.M.)—either “Mellow Yellow” by Donovan or “Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell. The song would be played and then the word “Skeezix.”
Being an information officer meant that I knew a great deal, and having a popular radio show meant that I was in a position to sway minds, and so, in the event of enemy capture, I was prepared to take cyanide. On the golf course, I kept it hidden in a fake ball (I always used my dad’s Top-Flites, but one ball, which could be pried open to reveal the deadly white pill wound with string in the core, was marked “Top Flight”—a discrepancy a Russian would never notice), and in the radio station I kept the cyanide in a tiny slit cut in the foam rubber around the microphone. All I had to do was lean forward and bite. It wasn’t easy playing music knowing that death was always two inches from my lips, but I did it. And then one day the war was over. I was out of the Guard and in Congress.
All of us knew that if the President had pursued an all-out strategy to win the war and had unleashed the ING against the Vietcong, the outcome would have been very different, but we were never allowed to go. We never blamed the President for it—his hands were tied by the press and the protesters—but the tragedy is that we never got the chance to get over there and get the job done.
Twenty years later, millions of Indiana National Guardsmen suffer from postwar regret, waking up in the middle of the night with an urge to go out in the rain and hunker down in the mud, to hold a gun and use a walkie-talkie, and for a while I felt bad like that, too, and made a point of playing golf in extremely hot weather and not drinking enough liquids, deliberately pushing myself toward the edge. It was on a real scorcher of a day, playing the Gary Country Club, that I met Colonel Mills for the last time. He was dressed in regulation green and yellow, blasting out of a sand trap and up a steep hill to a small green sloping to the back and surrounded with boulders and accordion wire. He made a perfect shot and turned and saw me and we exchanged the traditional National Guard wink. (Russians do not wink and therefore would fail to comprehend this signal.)
“How’s civilian life treating you?” he asked. I told him how I felt and he stood there and gave me a dressing-down that I’ll always be grateful for.
“You should be proud, soldier,” he said. “You served honorably. You never went AWOL. You didn’t go to Canada. You didn’t burn the flag. You never embezzled money while on duty, never aimed a loaded gun at a crowd of innocent bystanders, never looted a town in a disaster area (though there were plenty of opportunities), never raped a helpless woman. No prosecutor ever returned an indictment against you. Accept the rewards of a grateful nation.” And he turned on his heel and went straight up and over the hill and I never saw him again. About three years after that, I actually did go to Canada for a weekend. It was my first time, a fact-finding trip. It was okay, but based on what I saw I was
glad that I hadn’t gone there previously.
HOW THE SAVINGS AND LOANS WERE SAVED
THE PRESIDENT WAS playing badminton in Aspen the day vast hordes of barbaric Huns invaded Chicago, and a reporter whose aunt lives in Evanston shouted to him as he headed for the clubhouse, “The Huns are wreaking carnage in Chicago, Mr. President! Any comment?”
Mr. Bush, though caught off guard by news of the invasion, said, “We’re following that whole Hun situation very closely, and right now it looks encouraging, but I’m hoping we can get back to you in a few hours with something more definite. ” The President appeared concerned but relaxed and definitely chins up and in charge.
As he spoke, the good citizens of Chicago were fortifying the Loop and organizing scalding-oil brigades, but their caldrons never got hot enough, and soon the hordes broke through, miles of them—wave after wave of squat, flat-nosed horsemen on their ugly steeds galumphing through the streets, waving their hairy fists, rolling their little red eyes under their long black eyebrow, grunting and blatting and howling, bellowing at women in a coarse, unintelligible tongue that sounded like irate geese.
Over the next three days, as additional hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Hloths, Wendells, and Vandals swarmed into the Windy City with relentless, locustlike ferocity and burned churches and performing-arts centers and historic restorations, and dragged away monks, virgins, associate professors, and postal employees to be sold into slavery, and seized great stores of treasures and heirlooms and sacred vessels, and tore down libraries and devastated three-star restaurants and traded away the Cubs and Bears, Mr. Bush was said to be conferring with John Sununu, meeting with the Cabinet, weighing his options, on the verge of taking some kind of dramatic action. To those close to him he appeared burdened but still strong, upbeat but not glib, and then in came Robert Teeter with a poll that showed that seventy percent of the American people thought the President was doing an excellent job with the barbarians. Mr. Bush was seen as confident and in charge but not beleaguered or vulnerable or damp under the arms, the way Jimmy Carter was. Most Americans admired the way George Bush played down the story and wasn’t weakened or distracted by it. They felt that he was doing exactly the right thing, and they viewed Chicago as a place where a lot of pretty rough stuff goes on most of the time anyway.
So the President didn’t make an address to the nation on television but simply issued a statement that barbarianism is a long-term problem and must be met with patience and wisdom, and the answer is education, and everything that can be done is being done and will continue to be done. It called for bipartisanship. That evening, a White House croquet tournament went on as planned. The President appeared calm but interested.
The barbarians made their squalid camps in the streets and took over the savings-and-loan offices. (“Savings and loan” sounds the same as the Hun word chfnxnln, which means “henhouse.”) They broke out all the windows and covered them with sheepskins, they squatted in the offices around campfires built from teak and mahogany desks and armoires, eating half-cooked collie haunches and platters of cat brains and drinking gallons of after-shave. Their leader, Mogul the Vile, son of Generic, squatted down beside a speakerphone on the thirty-eighth floor of American National and called the White House and babbled and screeched for more than twenty minutes. His English was horrendous. He seemed to be demanding a ransom of three chests of gold and silver, six thousand silk garments, miscellaneous mirrors and skins and beads, three thousand pounds of oregano, and a hundred and sixty-six billion dollars in cash.
The President, who did not speak to him personally, pondered the outrageous demand. He appeared quiet but wakeful, thoughtful but not grumpy. On the one hand, a major American city was in the hands of rapacious brutes, but, on the other hand, exit polling at shopping malls showed that people thought he was handling it OK. So he flew to Kennebunkport for a week of tennis and fishing. He appeared relaxed but hearty, animated but restrained.
A few days later, the Hun sacking of Chicago was old news. It had already happened. Mr. Bush, in striking a note of determination right at the beginning and then refusing to be stampeded into action, had outflanked the entire story and avoided any loss of public support. The press covered the pillaging up north, but most of the press was in Washington, not Chicago, and what could you say about Huns that everybody didn’t already know? Huns perspire heavily; they despise agriculture and don’t eat vegetables, only meat and gravy and desserts, and they drink bad sweet wine; their clothes are ill-fitting and covered with lint; they smell bad and their hair is limp and dull, and they’re ugly as a mud fence: short, flat-faced, thick-lipped, illiterate, grunty people with heavy brows, hairy backs, and no necks. And their relationship with the press is very, very poor. Everyone knew that a long time ago. On the other hand, collie haunches can be very tasty if you braise them with plenty of garlic over a trash fire, and some reporters who tried collie wrote long Sunday pieces about Hun lifestyles that concluded they were barbaric, heck yes, but thrilling and possessed of a drop-dead visceral authenticity.
The President decided not to interfere with the takeover attempts in the savings-and-loan industry and to pay the hundred and sixty-six billion dollars, not as a ransom of any type but as ordinary government support, plain and simple, absolutely nothing irregular about it, and the Huns and the Vandals rode away, carrying their treasure with them, and the Goths sailed away up Lake Michigan. Gothic boats are hard to handle, though, being built of stone with great high arches that make them tippy, and they all sank in Lake Michigan in a light breeze, carrying half the loot to the bottom, but not before the President’s chopper landed in Grant Park. A serious-faced George Bush stood at the water’s edge, hair blowing from the backwash of the rotor, and announced that the barbarians had left. He said that the savings-and-loan industry was sounder than at any time in its history. He announced that he was deeply moved by the heroism of the people of Chicago and reiterated his opposition to barbarianism of any kind whatsoever.
2
THE LAKE
LETTERS FROM JACK
JACK’S AUTO REPAIR WAS THE FIRST SPONSOR of “A Prairie Home J Companion.” Jack always thought it could become a good show, but his advice was ignored. “The show had great guests, and all it needed was an Ed Sullivan or a Ted Mack to say ‘Here’s Wanda Wonderful’ and get out of the way, but instead they hired a humorist (that’s a man who does comedy in slow motion) who stood there and talked, while the talent sat backstage and played cribbage and read the want ads,” he wrote. “But that’s all water under the bridge now that you retired. Congratulations on the job you did all those years. You certainly earned the chance to quit. ” That letter and the following were written on old Jack’s Auto Repair letterheads, the ones with the slogan “Friendly, Reliable, Clean” and the old JUniper 2014 number.
April 1980
Dear Sir:
I read with interest that your radio show will be beamed by satellite to a number of radio stations around the U.S. I’ve advertised on the show for six years, and would have done better writing my phone number on barroom walls, so hope we won’t be paying extra to be ignored in distant states, no matter how big a thrill this is for you. People won’t drive a thousand miles for an oil change and you know it. And your public-radio audience is a pain in the wazoo. Before they buy a dollar’s worth of gas, they have to know your feelings about Central America and make sure that the kid who mans the pumps is earning minimum wage. So don’t tell me what a great opportunity this is.
December 1980
Dear Sirs:
Thanks for the May listenership data. The copy you sent is faint, as if typed with lemon juice, but not so faint as the impact of your show, I’m afraid. This creation has burst upon the scene like coffee spilled on the carpet. People look away out of politeness. My opinion is that you need an emcee. Do you remember Danny Olsen who you went to high school with? Everyone said he was fun to be with, but I guess he didn’t know the Right People, because he’d have won
that host job hands down if they held auditions, which obviously they didn’t dare do. Here in the Midwest, having a real good time is considered okay provided you don’t let it happen again. People think if they let go, they might fall off. Your show sure proves that pretty well, not that I hold this against you personally. I am aware of your religious beliefs which hold most types of entertainment to be immoral. But couldn’t you just compromise those beliefs a little bit and go to hell?
June 1981
Whomever Is In Charge Down There:
I tuned in your show out east with interest. (Or is it “back” east? I say “out” west so maybe so, but I suppose it’s all a matter of how you look at it.) Anyway, the audience sounded unduly excited, far more than the material warranted. It was the sort of heat I recall from when the Saxophone Pals swung into “Ring Dem Bells” at the old Night Light Club on the Beltline. I used to go there on Saturday nights when the small-town virtues you celebrate were driving me nuts, and as soon as I sat down and ordered a Bombardier and saw the Pals swaying back and forth onstage playing fornicating music in their white tuxes, why, Lutheranism’d leave me like a bad dream. So it’s odd to hear Eastern sophisticates whoop it up for a guy who talks slow. My Uncle Emmett has some unfinished sentences that go back to the Hoover Administration, but he never claimed to be a humorist. I guess it just goes to show that when it comes to entertainment it’s hard to tell. In my day, we went for flash and pizzazz, but one of these days, a guy who hums to himself and spits in the dirt will be the big phenomenon. If so, congratulations. I take nothing away from you, because frankly there isn’t that much. Cordially,
April 1982
To Whomever Is In Charge Down There:
Believe me, I could do without the “News from Lake Wobegon” in its present epic form, but if forced to hear it, I’d prefer to hear it without all the sighing and wheezing and chuffing on the part of the announcer. I don’t know if his problem is a deviated septum or nasal growths or what, but if he can’t learn to breathe more quietly, then he ought to make anonymous phone calls like all the rest of them. Radio is intimate enough without him putting his nose right in our faces. I hope the country doesn’t take this show as an indication of who we are in Minnesota. If so, somebody ought to pull the plug on his bathtub. It’s sad that a person with ambition and a powerful disregard for the facts can go a long way in the world, whereas the more conscientious slog along in the same old rut. As the poet said, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” On the other hand, you don’t have much passionate intensity either. What’s the problem? Cordially,
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