I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  I said, “I thought you were staying overnight at the City of Dreams.”

  “I ran into someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I saw Eli. He did not see me. And then the power went out.”

  “What happened?”

  “Security locked the doors so that none of the losers could run off with someone else’s chips or the casino’s loot. When the emergency’s generator kicked in and restored power, Eli was lying facedown on a busted blackjack table, and guards were shooing people away from the scattered chips. Most people were too busy gambling or cheering the restoration of light to pay much attention. He had apparently taken a tumble over the side of the Stairway to Heaven escalator. I smell a lawsuit.”

  The table went quiet. Django the spy jumped down from the top of the fridge onto the counter, sniffed at the stew, and sneezed. Patience suggested we talk about something a bit more cheerful and less scandalous. Something amusing.

  Mike said, “My mother was a clown.”

  Mercedes said that wasn’t a very nice thing to say about the woman who raised him.

  He said, “No, she really was a professional clown. She was a member of Clowns without Borders.”

  Bay said, “You‘re making this up.”

  “Called herself Dumpling the Hospital Clown. She loved visiting sick kids at the cancer hospital. Wore this big orange fright wig, a green bow tie, red foam nose, a frilled shirt with pom-poms for buttons, baggy blue pants, and these oversized polka-dot shoes. An Irish clown, for God’s sake. Who ever heard of such a thing? And, of course, she wasn’t even funny. She was terrifying to most people. She made horrifying balloon animals for kids. All her dogs looked like Cerberus; all her butterflies looked like sausage flowers. Whenever she wore her clown costume, she was in character, even when we were all home at supper. Dumpling didn’t speak. She honked her yes and no horns and she whistled her sentences.”

  Mercedes said, “That’s great and I’m putting it in a story.”

  “Put this in, then. She was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound narcoleptic with asthma and ulcerated lips, and she scared the shit out of those little kids. My brother Danny tried to feed her clown poison—blood sausage with freezer burn. He mixed it into her corned beef. When she tasted it, she whistled that she was going to kick his fat ass to Kingdom Come.”

  Patience said, “Well, that was fun.”

  Bay said he had packing to do.

  I said, “Where are we going?”

  Epilogue

  We flew to Phoenix and then to the Twin Cities and arrived at last in Sioux Falls the next morning, where we rented a Dodge Grand Caravan with my actual credit card. We drove three hours to Aberdeen and checked into the TownePlace Suites, the closest motel to Flaubert, still seventy miles away to the southwest. On our way, Django nestled between Bay’s shoulder and the headrest, and Patience read Elwood’s post about our rescue mission and the vicious and moronic public comments that followed, until we couldn’t stand it anymore. When Patience texted Elwood our congratulations, he responded with a note saying that Jory Teague, director of Refuge House, had been arrested along with several of his associates, that Helen Lozoraitis had resigned her position at the Crisis Center, and that the T-Shirt vendors on the strip had cleaned up their act and their grammar and now advertised PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA! DIRECT TO YOU IN 20 MINUTES OR FEWER!

  JULIE WADE CALLED BAY and told him that Kit had arrived in Memphis, found herself a studio apartment near Beale Street, and would start work for the Wade Detective Agency on Monday. Julie thanked Bay for filling her assistant’s position with such a bright young woman. Julie had driven down to see Layla and Blythe’s aunt Rita Davis in Monroe to deliver some of Layla’s effects. Ms. Davis asked if either of her nieces might have left a car behind. They had not. She held Layla’s microwave on her lap, stroked it like a pet, and rocked in her chair. She told Julie that her brother, the girls’ daddy, had been killed by his cat, Twinkie, an orange tabby, over in Carthage. Alton got up in the middle of the night to fetch a bottle of Dr Pepper from the fridge downstairs. To settle his stomach. Twinkie was lounging there on the top step, just where Alton set his slippered foot. Alton’s feet came out from under him. He went ass over teakettle and cracked the back of his head against the top tread, and that was all she wrote.

  For some reason, as I stared out the window from the backseat, stared at the green fields, the cattle ponds, and a distant farmhouse outside of Waubay, I remembered the Little Miss and Mr. Nevada Glitz Pageant and wondered how Mylie and Colt had fared. Patience read us an online account of the pageant that included brief bios of the celebrity-impersonating judges—a male Cher, a female Wayne Newton, and an anorexic Roy Orbison. Mylie won Miss Supreme Personality, which, the somewhat snarky reporter noted, she was not at all happy with. A bubbly eight-year-old bleached blonde from Butte, named Destiny, won Grand Supreme.

  In the morning I checked Django into Noah’s Ark Critter Center for an overnight stay and a kitty spa treatment: the posh wash and fluff dry, but hold the spritz of cologne and the pet-a-cure. When I left him with the attendant, he gave me one of those soundless kitty meows that just breaks your heart. I met the others for breakfast at Francie’s Bacon & Eggs, but I couldn’t eat.

  • • •

  FLAUBERT, SOUTH DAKOTA, consisted of five numbered, quarter-mile-long streets running east and west, and four named streets running north and south for the same distance: West, Church, Main, and East. On the south side, Main Street became County Road 221A, which connected the hamlet to State Road 20. The couple of dozen houses were built in a plain, vernacular style and most were painted thunderhead-gray. Mike said, “Kill me now!”

  Little Bob and Lorena lived at 11 Fourth Street in an austere side-gabled house. An unpainted railing, missing a few balusters, ran the length of the front porch. A satellite dish was attached with duct tape to a porch column. Someone had fastened a celebratory red balloon to the railing cap; someone had planted a bed of splashy pink tulips in the repurposed bathtub by the front steps, a someone who loved us all, a someone unvanquished by what I had, unfairly, seen as desolation.

  And then the screen door opened and Little Bob and Lorena, cradling Emma Grace on her arm, emerged from the darkness as we piled out of the Caravan. Little Bob was trim, just this side of gaunt, grizzled, balding, and smiling to beat the band. Lorena was compact, blonde, and unadorned. Her eyes were cornflower-blue, her cheeks dimpled, and her face freckled. She wore a V-neck floral print housedress and white sneakers. Patience couldn’t get her hands on that baby fast enough. Bay made the introductions, and we all went inside, where Lorena’s sister Ophelia was telling no one present that she could summon UFOs at will and that the aliens from the planet Aetheria were here to save us from ourselves.

  The main room of the house served as kitchen, living room, and dining room, was flanked by the two bedrooms and furnished with an oyster-gray bistro table and three Windsor dining chairs, a green upholstered sofa, and a somewhat exhausted Ultrasuede La-Z-Boy recliner by the potbellied woodstove. A mahogany bureau had been moved to a corner of the main room to make way for the baby’s crib.

  Out in the yard, the caterer, Dot Lutz, and her affable husband, Ernst, were preparing the food for Emma Grace’s coming out party. The folding tables and chairs were set up, the tables covered with paper tablecloths. The air was so still that the laminated paper plates and the napkins lay undisturbed.

  All thirty-six of the residents arrived and so did the Dischlers, a farm family of ten from nearby. Five of the guests, three men and two women, were easily identifiable as crystal meth addicts: baggy eyes, open facial sores, fractured teeth, periodically agitated, but in their particular cases, easily mollified.

  Lorena said, “Bless their hearts for coming. Life is all trial and tribulations for these suffering souls.” The two of us were sitting with Patience, who was nuzzling Emma Grace’s neck.

  Mike had set up a bar and was making vodka martinis for the guests. Lorena introdu
ced me to the eager young Methodist minister, Kyle Kline, who was here to baptize Emma Grace by water and the Spirit. Kyle said what a blessed day it was. The Lord had shone down His glory on Lorena and Little Bob. Lorena told me that the woman getting all the manful attention was Zandra Schine, the village philanderess. Her husband, Sonny, had gone off to work the oil fields in North Dakota. Lived with about a thousand other men in a modular housing settlement up there.

  I said, “The wives haven’t ridden her out of town?”

  “The wives are quietly grateful. If you didn’t notice, we haven’t exactly fielded the first-string here.”

  Ophelia came back outside dressed in a golden choir robe and a blue-and-gold-striped Egyptian headdress, looking like a lady of the pharaonic court of Akhenaten. Reverend Kline called for us to gather around the unheated bain-marie, which would serve as the baptismal font. Emma Grace was sprinkled, not immersed. Bay held her up for all of us to see and then handed her to Ophelia, who whispered into the baby’s ear. Bay then lit the candles on the baby cake with a snap of his fingers. We all cheered for Emma Grace Linkletter-Lettique.

  I sat next to Little Bob, who had hardly touched his food and who couldn’t take his eyes off Lorena and the baby. I asked him how it felt to be a daddy again. He said he was happy and he was sad.

  I said, “Why sad?”

  “I won’t see her grow up.”

  Lorena asked Little Bob to go inside and fetch a blanket for the baby. I became aware of the sudden change in the weather. It seemed to have dropped ten degrees in five minutes. A breeze from the southwest picked up and scattered some of the napkins, which I hurried to pick up and dispose of. I saw Mike and Zandra slip around the side of the house and head for East Street.

  Lorena handed the baby to her sister and went inside to see what was taking Little Bob so long. Ophelia dandled Emma Grace on her lap. Patience sat beside me and said the predicted nasty weather was on its way. Dot felt a headache coming on. When Patience tried to get the weather forecast, we realized for the first time that we did not have phone service in Flaubert.

  Reverend Kline said, “Tornado weather.”

  Ernst tied a knot in the green garbage bag and said, “There’s a mobile home park over by Glenham. Any tornado will probably head right for it.”

  The Dischlers were mumbling a collective prayer, heads bowed, hands folded. Dot said she didn’t see a funnel cloud, and weren’t we all getting riled up for no good reason? Little Bob came out to tell us the power was out. I asked Little Bob if he had a storm cellar.

  He said, “We got a ditch yonder.”

  The gathered clouds were billowing and brown, and then what had looked like a comma at the bottom of a cloud dropped to the earth as a funnel, and Patience said, “Goddamn it, Wylie, this is getting biblical.” And as if to prove her right, it began to hail, and we all took shelter in the house, which itself was rattling on its foundation, and it seemed as if the whole of the lowering sky, and not just the spinning funnel itself, was turning slowly counterclockwise, as if trying to twist the very earth loose from its purchase and lift it into the chaotic heavens. The rubber duck in the baby’s crib began to squeak, and we saw a cottonwood spiral up into the whirlwind. Reverend Kline shouted that we should all run to the church and get down into the cellar, but the church was three blocks away, and the tornado was considerably closer and bearing down on us.

  Bay said, “Get the baby, pile into the van, and we’ll drive to the church.”

  Little Bob turned in a circle, clapped his hands on his pockets. He said, “Where’s the baby at?” Lorena screamed. Patience, Bay, and I ran outside, where the rain and the hail had stopped. The baby’s carriage was being pushed along by the wind at a vigorous clip toward the ditch. When I caught up with it, I discovered that Emma Grace was not inside. The funnel was now a hundred yards away, and debris was swirling around and, for the most part, above us. And then I saw Ophelia, untethered in body and mind, walking resolutely toward the tornado. The funnel was now the solid brown of accumulated soil and as thick at the bottom as at the top. The wind thundered and whined. I turned and saw Ophelia holding Emma Grace, whose innocent heart was as light as a feather, saw Ophelia holding Emma Grace above her head as if offering a sacrifice to the cyclone Ammit, the Bone-Eater, the Swallower of the Dead, and Ophelia’s resplendent robe was torn from her naked body and born aloft into the maelstrom, and, just like that, the bludgeon that was the whirlwind stopped and spun in place before the woman and child, and then it quieted and diminished and became, at first, lank and ropy, and then ascended back into the matrix of clouds from which it had dropped.

  Bay reached Ophelia and took the baby from her arms. Lorena wrapped her sister in a blanket and took the baby from Bay, and then there was silence in Flaubert. And then we all went to church, Christians and nullifidians both, and we all sang praise to whatever force it was that had stilled the storm and saved the town, and the Reverend Kline spoke of Elijah taken up to heaven in a whirlwind and said how at times we need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. “When the whirlwind passes,” he said, “the wicked is no more.”

  The power was back on at Little Bob’s house thanks to his gasoline generator. Lorena put the baby to bed, and we all sedated ourselves with vodka and listened for news on the radio. The National Guard, we learned, was on its way to help with the search for survivors. The mobile home park in Glenham had been leveled. Bay said he’d been thinking about following Zandra’s husband to North Dakota, finding a private poker game, and getting himself some of that oil shale money. Mike walked in the door with a thousand-yard smile and dropped onto the love seat beside Bay and said, “What’s new?”

  I said, “Where have you been?”

  “Girding up my loins, I think they call it.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “Knocked it out of the park.”

  I said, “Now what?”

  Patience said we were all going home to Florida. She’d bought the tickets when she purchased the Dakota tickets. “Nothing in Everglades County could be as bad as what we’ve been through already.”

  Bay looked at Little Bob and said, “Why don’t you three—you four—come with us.”

  Little Bob said, “Home is where the baby is.”

  Bay said, “Where’s the nearest pediatrician?”

  Lorena said, “Dr. Gadbois over in Glenham, but he drinks a bit.”

  Ophelia said, “This baby will take care of us.”

  And I was reminded of Eric back in Battle Mountain. Not all there, but sweet as honey.

  Zandra kicked the door open, stepped inside, and leveled a pistol at Mike. I suppose I should have known no good would come of the carnal misalliance of Mike Lynch and Zandra Schine.

  Lorena said, “What the hell is going on?”

  Mike said, “The lady asked for a gratuity, and I politely declined.”

  Little Bob said, “Don’t shoot, you’ll wake the baby!”

  And Zandra said, “The beautiful baby,” and it was as if the vital flame in her face was extinguished, and she lowered her pistol and cried, and I knew then that Zandra had been denied a child in her own life, and that the emptiness that followed, and the grief that was its consequence, had driven Zandra into the greedy and plundering arms of goat-drunk men who were the unworthy but fortunate recipients of her aimless yearning and her aching hunger.

  Little Bob said, “Sit your glorious ass down, Zandra, and have a drink.”

  And on that day of Emma Grace’s baptism we all told stories late into the Dakota night so that we forgot all about moving on, and we sustained one another with laughter and sadness, and we thought that we understood, for the moment at least, the varieties of human experience, and on that night the legend was born of the woman of true voice, clothed in the sun, and the bright and lavish child, who together tamed the whirlwind and delivered us all to the Land of Vindication. And on that night, out on the porch, I drew Patience close and smelled the sweet clover scent of Emma Gr
ace on her neck and inhaled her own savory fragrance laced with those odorless but intoxicating pheromones, and we heard the stirring baby cry, and in the succeeding stillness I proposed to Patience once again. I said, “Marriage?” She said, “Family.” I smiled. Done!

  Acknowledgments

  As always, thanks to Jill Bialosky for finding the story in the manuscript. And to Dave Cole, artist, poet, copy editor, and face-saver. Thanks to Maria Rogers for her generous feedback and incisive reading of the manuscript. To John Bond, who taught me what I know about poker. To Django and Zoë, who hung out with me on the writing desk and sometimes on the writing paper, and who managed to insinuate themselves into the book. Thanks to Bill Clegg for his faith and enthusiasm, and to Richard McDonough, without whom none of my books would have happened. Thanks to my colleague and walking partner, Julie Marie Wade, who also has a role in the book. Thanks to Florida International University’s English Department and to my inspiring students. Thanks to Cindy, of course, and to Tristan. Thanks to my sweet family, Paula and Denis, Cyndi and Conrad, Mark and Lucy, Madelyn, Missy, Hiedi, Kristine and Roger, and my mom, Dot. And thanks to our extended family, Liz and Bruce, Kimberly and Jeremy, and Theo, my best pal, the boy who keeps me smiling, makes me happier than I may deserve to be, and who invented the Game of Pens.

  ALSO BY JOHN DUFRESNE

  No Regrets, Coyote

  Is Life Like This?

  Requiem, Mass.

  Johnny Too Bad

  The Lie That Tells a Truth

  Deep in the Shade of Paradise

  Love Warps the Mind a Little

  Louisiana Power & Light

  The Way That Water Enters Stone

  Copyright © 2016 by John Dufresne

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

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