“You're a good man, you know that?” Mr. Berge said wearily. “I mean that. You're a good man.” Clint smiled. You don't say thank you for a compliment from a drunk, he thought, you endure it. “No, it's true!” said Berge. “Look at you. Got a wunnerful fam'ly, a beertiful house, own your own gas stationâ”
“It's a car dealership. Not a gas station.”
“Car dealer, then, and you're the mayor of the town, and look at me, wouldja. Just look at me. I'm your same ageâwe're the sameâI'm seventy-two, you're about seventy, arentchaâ”
“Sixty-one.
“Like I say,
look
at us! What happened? I'll tell you what happened. It was the war. Guys who weren't there, they'll never know what it was like. I'll tell you what it was like: it was hell. You never forget a thing like that. I lost a buddy in France. We were there together and I turned to say something to this guy who asked me a question and I turned back and his head was blown off. You ever see a guy's head blown off? I tell you, if you had, you never forget it. There isn't a day goes by I don't see that like it was right now.”
It was so quiet, like a phone was about to ring or the door open and someone say, Hi, everybody, the jukebox wake up and hum and clunk, and Willie sing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” but nothing happened, just pure stupid silence until Wally unleaned off the back bar and walked up to the sink and ran himself a glass of water. “I remember when Johnny Paul, that spring heâ” Berge said,
“Everybody
remembers that, don't tell me about him. I was there, too. That's not the same.”
Johnny Paul worked for Mr. Ray Fredricksen. He was about sixty-six or so, the last of those old-time hired men who worked alongside you all year long and lived on the place in a little shack except for a week or two in February or March when they went off to cure their cabin fever, rode the bus to Duluth, spent a couple hundred bucks on old whores and whiskey, and walked along the shore yelling and singing, cursing you to hell, and drank themselves an inch and a half short of death, and came home carrying their head under their arm, and were nursed back to respectability to spend another eleven months in sobriety and good work, but one year that old man skipped his annual visit to Duluth, threw his system out of whack, and one April day fell off the tractor while plowing Mr. Fredricksen's eighty over by his sister Rose's and was killed pretty badly.
“He was a nice old guy,” said Clint. “If only he hadn't tried to straighten out, he'd still be here, I bet,” said Wally. Mr. Berge said, “I din't mean to insult'mâHere! let's drink to'm. To his memory and the memory of all of'm. To all m'buddies!” Clint stood up. “How'd you like to be chairman of Memorial Day?” he almost said, before he went home. On the way home, he thought, “Why should Memorial Day be so prim, like it was lady schoolteachers who went ashore at Normandy? Why not let Mr. Berge and his friends run it? It was their war.” But instead he fobbed off the chairmanship on Clifford Turnblad the next week, the first week of May.
That was after Lorraine's eyes were repainted by Clifford's cousin's boy, Mark, an art student, who tried to correct her walleyed look by making her slightly crosseyed. A few days later, arriving to open the store, Clifford's sister Miriam noticed certain dark shadows under Lorraine's house dress. She was too embarrassed to mention this, afraid it might be what in fact turned out to be exactly what it was, two large aureoles and a triangle of pubic hair. Every Boy Scout in Troop 12 had come for a look before Clifford finally caught on. “Poor old Lorraine, I'm so used to looking at her, I didn't even see how sexy she'd got,” he told Clint and Clarence Bunsen. Clint wanted to dump Memorial Day on him right then but felt inhibited with Clarence there. They were eating lunch and talking about Clifford's idea of planting pine trees along the alleys so that in fifteen years the town will look green year-round. Clifford also thinks a March festival would be an original idea, maybe a John Philip Sousa festival. Or we could paint a happy face on the water tower and nickname ourselves “The Town With a Smile.” There's no end to the ways a dying town like ours can lift itself up by its broken bootstraps, is Clifford's way of thinking. He said, “Look.” He showed them a drawing of Bunsen Motors and the Mercantile and the empty storefront between them where the paint store used to be: a new sign in front said “Tan My Hide.”
“A leather works?” asks Clarence. “The trappers are gone, Cliff. Years ago.” Clifford said, “It's a tanning parlor.”
“For who? I don't know anybody over the age of twenty who gets tan in the
summer.
We Lutherans are a pale people. We keep our clothes on. Even if we
did
have a tan, you'd never know it to look at us, because we don't undress, so there's no way we could ever show it off, so we don't bother. So why do it?”
“For a sense of well-being, Clarence. A sense of confidence. Confidence is what we need around here.” Another Clifford idea.
Mr. Coleman, who once owned the paint store, lacked confidence and good ideas, thinks Clifford, and either one could've saved him from the bad word of mouth the summer that twelve houses in town broke out in blisters, but most people say it was his sardonic way with his customers: he simply couldn't understand or tolerate their utter lack of information about paint, a subject he knew quite well. Paint ignorance made him shake his head and sigh. “Let me start at the beginning,” he would say in a dry amused voice. He soon cured people of coming in and asking him questions. The blisters made him furious. The people had not followed directions, so what could he do? He couldn't go paint the houses for them, could he? So why did they stop patronizing him? A direct descendant of the Coleman surveying team that misplaced the entire township in 1866, he brooded all that fall, a dark face peering out from between the bathroom tile displays, and after Christmas he opened, in addition to his paint line, a line of imported gift items that didn't sell either. He was filled with anger and frustration, which he tried to relieve through fishing, but an angry man can't catch fish, and after thirty or forty minutes of nothing, not even a nibble, Coleman would suddenly lash out at the water with his pole and throw things overboard. He had a prodigious temper. One hot August day, fishless, biteless for more than forty minutes, he unclamped his Johnson outboard, disconnected the gas line, hoisted it overhead, and heaved it in the drink, followed by the gas tank, one oar, a life vest, the minnow bucket, the second oar, and the pole itself. That cleared out his system for a few months, but in January he went out one night, fished all night in his little green fish house, Coleman's Fancy, and nobody heard him yelling and pounding on the ice and nobody saw him come back to his apartment over the paint store at 6:00 A.M. and get the dynamite, otherwise they would've offered him a bigger stick. He drove back out to the fish house in his Chrysler station wagon, carrying two small sticks, a waterproof fuse, and a big plastic bag to carry all the fish home in after he had stunned them. He prepared the charge, lit the fuse, dropped the dynamite down the hole in the ice, and then saw that he'd forgotten to tie on the lead sinker. The dynamite floated up and sat, a dark shape under the ice beneath his feet. He reached down the hole and tried to pull it out with his pole but only pushed it farther away, and then he heard a crack and suddenly he got a warm feeling in his pants. It wasn't ice crackingâit was lovely Patricia Peterson on shore in her dad Pete's duck blind, practicing her sharpshooting for the Tri-County Queen Contest, where, though she wasn't sure the rules allowed her to fire a shotgun for the talent segment, she figured if she shot well enough, they'd make an exceptionâbut Coleman panicked, thinking his time was up. He tore out the door and aimed himself toward shore, any shore, and eighty yards away a beautiful young woman, who had removed her unattractive glasses to see if she could sharpshoot instinctively at the beauty contest, pumped and aimed at the blurry lake and blasted both barrels at about the same moment his charge went off. It opened a broad hole of cold water into which the Chrysler plunged and sank like a green whale, and when Patty's dad came out and peeled Coleman off the ice, he was a changed man, placid, mute, almost spaniel-like. His anger was gone, and without it he had no reason to remain in retail sales. He locked up and left for Minneapolis, leaving on his paint-shop door a telephone number that turned out to be no longer in service at this time, which in a way people had known about him for a long time. It was hard, Clarence thought, to imagine that good ideas would have saved him.
Ideas! Clifford kept trying. At the City Council one Tuesday evening he stood up and talked festival. “This town needs a real event to put us on the map! Toast & Jelly Days is all well and good but it isn't going to do the job when it comes to bringing new people in.” Bob Bauser looked sick. His mother gave her heart and soul to Toast & Jelly Days for thirty-two years, died as a direct result of exhaustion from driving around town returning all the borrowed toasters. How could Clifford say these things? “We need something,” Clifford said. “Duluth has Lake Superior, Rochester's got the Mayo Clinic, St. Paul has the state capitol, Minneapolis has Dayton'sâwhat do we have?” People thought long and hard. Val stood up. “Maybe we could establish some kind of Bible camp. One that's open year-round, where people could come whenever they liked. People of all denominations. Have dormitories and of course there'd be recreational opportunities but mainly it'd be where you could come for a week or two and really dig deep into Scripture.”
Clifford was thinking along the lines of an all-night bingo casino and greyhound track, not a major-league Bible camp. “In a better world,” he said, “I'm sure that Bible study would be a wonderful tourist attraction, but meanwhileâ” “The Bible teaches us to believe in a better world,” said Val.
Clint smiled at them both. “You're both right, and I think we've heard some very interesting proposals here tonight that we can all think about and discuss and maybe bring in a consultant from the university, but right now, Cliff, I need to ask you to take on a big job that I think only you are the person with the imagination and the ability to do and that is to run Memorial Day this year. It's only a few weeks away and I know that you can come up with an excellent speaker, an excellent program, an excellent ...” Clifford sat down. He felt a need for oxygen to awaken him from this sad dream. Clint talked about the sewer project, using a crude chart showing flow rates and system capacity. After adjournment people filed out like sheep down a chute. The next morning the Chatterbox had to close up due to a yellowish fluid seeping from the front wall and onto the sidewalkâit smelled bad. Nobody knew where it came from so they waited for it to stop.
So much bad news, and none of it in the newspaper. Ella Anderson has emphysema and was seen by Myrtle wearing an oxygen tank on her back and a mask like a scuba diver, bending over her flower beds, and poking a stick down around the tulip bulbsâto do what? let air in the ground? Dr. DeHaven was ill, too, and went to St. Cloud to consult with specialists, and returned home in the same condition except more tired. “He is dying of a brain tumor the size of a fist,” Myrtle said calmly, a prognosis based on what had happened to her mother. Another sinkhole opened up on the football field, the third in the past year and the largest, almost fifty feet acrossâit sank three feet. “It's an isolated problem,” say Clint and Bud, which they said about the first two. Three sinkholes in one small town can't be sheer coincidence, can it? Is the entire municipality built atop a honeycomb of caves that now collapse one by one and our lives collapse with them? The soil is sandy; it isn't hard to imagine how underground rivers or somethingâpigs perhaps, the wild boars of Norwegian bachelor-farmer legend who got lost in vast caverns years ago and burrowed and fed on roots and grew immense and blind and vicious, digging like fiends through the soft ground every spring, zeroing in on the warmth of our homes and the smell of frying pork, grunting up through the soil against our basement floors, cracking the concrete, breathing their sour pig breath into our cellarsâsomething could make hundreds of channels through the soft earth and sandstone that a century of well-digging and drainage has made spongy with huge hollows where dry brittle columns bear the weight of overburden, Our Lady Church and the high school and all our most splendid edifices held up by slender filigrees of sand that one shock such as a semi on Main Street or a new sewer system could shake loose and the thin crust break, a mushroom-shaped dust cloud rise up and obliterate the town, and when the dust blows away, we see a gargantuan pit between Adams Hill and the shore, a half-mile long, full of bricks and wooden wreckage and cars.
But we won't see it. Other people will: the State Highway Patrol, the Red Cross, reporters from the
Pioneer Press.
We will be down deep in the pit, dying in that hot black hole lying crushed under Ralph's frozen-meat case and a Bunsen Motors gas pump trickling lead-free regular around our ears as we hear thumping in the sky overhead the Channel 4 and 5 and 9 and 11 news helicopters circling for a good angle and then a spot to land so they can cover the press conference with Sheriff Anton (Huffer) Hoffman. This old gasbag is from Millet, and he is secretly glad to see us gone. “There was nothing to be done,” he says, trying to look solemn, drilling for earwax, “they were all killed instantly. They didn't have a chance. I can't send in searchers until we can stabilize the wreckage. May take us weeks to recover the bodies. Worst thing of this type I ever saw.”
The reporters lean over the edge. “Anybody got a child's toy we can toss in there for a good picture? a little red wagon or a doll? something to humanize all that rubble? Naw, a baseball glove isn't gonna work. Looks like a cow flop. Something brighter. How about a dollhouse? Fantastic! A little wooden dollhouse perched atop the debris, undamaged, a child's fantasy survives while the real world collapses around itâSomebody run into St. Cloud and get a goddamn dollhouse!”