3
Ricky
Mother sits in the white wicker chair by the driftwood lamp, her legs crossed ladylike at the ankles, sipping her Salada iced tea, reading the Minneapolis Star, which she enjoys for its extensive coverage of heinous crime. Politics doesn’t interest her one whit, sports makes no sense whatsoever, she isn’t interested in the love lives of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor; but a good murder brightens Mother’s day considerably, she gets all giddy and chilly reading about it and mulling it over in her mind. The Lutheran minister who was telling his wife of thirty-one years that he couldn’t understand why people want to go to Europe when there are so many wonderful things to see right here in Minnesota and she blew off the back of his head with a Colt revolver. Blammo. Never shot a gun before in her life. Bull’s-eye. The St. Paul milkman who poisoned three old ladies on his route. They poured cream on their cornflakes and opened up the newspaper and ate their breakfast and fell face-first into the comics. He told the cops that he knew them well, they were lonely old ladies, and their great pleasure was reading Winnie Winkle and Bringing Up Father and L’il Iodine and Gasoline Alley. They looked forward to their cup of coffee and the funny pages every morning, and how fitting for a lonely old lady to fade away in a moment of pleasure. The Richfield man who wanted to move with his wife to Florida and decided to rob a liquor store, having read about attempted robberies and feeling that he could do it better, so he picked a big liquor store miles away and donned an eyemask and robbed the store at gunpoint at closing time, when the till was chock-full of cash, but the clerk happened to be an old high-school classmate and recognized him despite the mask, and the police pounded on his door as he was telling his wife the good news about Florida and called on him to surrender, and he emerged, holding a gun to the back of his wife’s head, demanding a ride to the Northwest Orient terminal at Wold-Chamberlain Field or he’d kill her, sure as shooting, and she turned and said, “You’ve done dumb things before, but this is the dumbest thing you did in your life, Joe,” and she dashed for cover, and the cops gunned him down in a fusillade of hot lead in his own front yard, the poor dope. He collapsed on the grass he had mowed all those years and his life ebbed away, he died looking at a birch sapling he had planted that spring which had died and he’d meant to dig it up and now he never would.
Tonight Mother is in a lighthearted mood because Aunt Doe is sick and can’t come up from Minneapolis to decorate Grandpa’s grave on his birthday.
“She called and said she has a bad case of the trots,” says Mother. “Poor thing.” Daddy breathes a long sigh of relief. Doe is a weeper, a sob sister of the first water, and Daddy cannot tolerate crying, he has to evacuate the room whenever it rears its head, one sniffle and he is up and out of his chair.
Doe is a skinny minnie with mouse-colored hair who tries so hard to be no trouble to anybody and stay out of everyone’s way and make no demands whatsoever on anyone, and if you ask her what she’d like to eat for lunch, or what she wants to do after lunch, she only whispers, “Whatever you have left over. Don’t fix anything special for me. A piece of bread is more than good enough. Whatever you have extra of. Water is fine. If you want to go someplace after lunch, I can just sit here and look out the window. I’m happy. It’s fine with me. Make it easy on yourself. I’m quite content to look at an old magazine and listen to the radio. I don’t need anybody to entertain me. You go do whatever you like and just pretend I’m not here.” Her visits place a huge weight on our household. The weight of meekness. Aunt Doe is sort of the Billy the Kid of meekness, a professional meeker, she has outmeeked the best of them, she can meek you to death.
Mother is the only cheery one in that family, come to think of it—the others are a bunch of damp rags. Brother Ed works for the railroad in Chicago, a mournful little man indeed, and brother Jim is a lost cause in Duluth, a collector of defeat, and then there’s Mother. “Why carry rocks in your pocket?” she says cheerfully. “What’s past is gone.” Emphasize the positive. Why dwell on the past? Smile and you get a smile back. Look for the silver lining. Tomorrow is a brand-new day. What’s done is done and you can’t look back, you have to look to tomorrow.
If she knew what I have under my shirt, she would tell me to throw it away, and then tomorrow she’d be her usual self, bygones forgotten, water under the bridge.
If Daddy knew what’s under my shirt, he’d tell Mother and have her deal with it.
If the big sister had her way, I’d be sent to an institution for the sex-crazed. A dark stone building surrounded by a ten-foot fence, with steel mesh over the windows, and the hallways smell of piss and boys lie strapped to bunkbeds with thick leather straps—a place like the place Grandpa died in, except for sex lunatics, and the cure is to dunk them in ice water and zap them with electricity and give them anti-sex drugs and if necessary slice off their wieners so for the rest of their lives they have to pee sitting down, like girls.
Tonight Mother is engrossed in the story of Ricky Guppy, 17, of Millet, eight miles away, who got in a loud argument with his mother yesterday, around 4:37 P.M., after she refused to give him ten dollars on the grounds he’d only fritter it away on pinball and cigarettes, as he had done in the past. Ricky had arrived home from Lake Wobegon High School, where he is enrolled in summer school to make up for two classes he flunked in the spring, and he yelled at her so loud that neighbors two doors away heard it. She was cooking him a hamburger for his supper, thinking he had to be to work at the HiDeHo Club in St. Cloud at seven-thirty. Actually, Ricky had been fired by the HiDeHo for tardiness and was intending to take his girlfriend Dede to see James Powers in Give It the Gun. The boy was enraged by her refusal to give him ten dollars and threw several china plates at the kitchen wall, busting them to smithereens, and cursed her and tried to kick her, causing the cast-iron skillet to slip from her hand and spatter her with hot grease and causing serious burns to her arms and legs. He then seized the skillet and flung it through a window, and swiped fifty-eight dollars from her purse and also her car keys and sped away in a two-tone green-and-brown 1955 Ford station wagon and picked up Dede who was awaiting him at her house in St. Rosa. Instead of tooling in to the Starlite Drive-In for the twin feature, the two of them headed west at a high rate of speed. An all-points bulletin has been issued. Ricky’s parents have urged him to turn himself in. Authorities in North and South Dakota are on the alert. The Civil Air Patrol sent out several flights in search of them. The FBI has been brought into the case. Kidnapping is a federal offense and so is transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes. The FBI searched Ricky’s room and found records by Elvis, Little Richard, and the Sh’Bops and also some pictures of rock-and-roll singers and a scrapbook with lyrics apparently written by young Guppy himself, which FBI agents characterized as “amateurish.” Mother can’t get over the fact that this took place eight miles away from our home and she is reading about it a day later in the Minneapolis paper.
“What is this country coming to when a boy kicks his mother because she won’t pay for his cigarettes?” wonders Mother.
“Wake up and smell the coffee,” says Daddy. “That’s where this country has been headed for a good long time now. Look around you. The disrespect for parents and authority. You see it everywhere. Lookit who this kid’s brother is. Go ahead. It’s right there in the paper.”
Ricky is the youngest brother of James Guppy, 22, better known as Jim Dandy, a singer in a local pop group called the Doo Dads. Another brother, Ray, 21, is an inmate at St. Cloud Reformatory, serving a sentence for robbing a gas station, and a third brother, Roger Guppy, 19, is a rookie pitcher with the Lake Wobegon Whippets.
“Quite a family,” says Daddy. “In no time, our town will be famous as the gangland capital of the North. A hotbed of robbery, rock and roll, and matricide.”
“Do you know these young men?” asks Mother, looking at me.
“Sort of.”
“Everybody knows them. I know them,” says Daddy. “James is the guy with the long hair and mustache who lounges around town in his white Chevy convertible and talks about how he’s going to hit it rich someday. A two-bit piker, if you ask me. I repossessed that car for nonpayment. Twice. Fancy new car and the guy doesn’t even have a regular job. Ding Schoenecker lets him do PA for the Whippets, and last year he was peddling Christmas wreaths and gewgaws and giving dance lessons, and whatnot. Lives in the basement of his uncle’s house. A place over near Bowlus, the backyard is full of junk cars. But the whole family is like that.”
I could say a word in the Doo Dads’ defense, but why ask for trouble? They are all from around our area and very popular not only here but in the Twin Cities. They are an excellent singing group. They appear every Friday night at the HiDeHo Club in St. Cloud. If I could, I’d go see them perform. I’ve heard their music over WDGY (Wonderful Weegee) played by a late-night DJ named Big Daddy Fats. I have a tabletop radio I take to bed under the covers to listen to his show. He is “four hundred pounds of rambling boy, built for comfort, not for speed,” who eats ten giant one-pound cheeseburgers during his “Midnight Jukebox Jamboree” (which actually starts at 10 P.M.) and he does a Cheeseburger Countdown and hollers, “Okay, all you duck butts and skinny minnies, time for Big Daddy to TIE ON THE OLD BURGER BAG! HOO-YA!” and a lion roars and bells ring and there is a mammoth munching sound and an elephantine belch and then Big Daddy announces the next tune with his mouth full. Somebody said they’d seen him riding on a flatbed truck in the Aquatennial Parade, stretched out on a rhinestone-encrusted divan like King Farouk, wearing shades, rings on his fingers, a gold jacket, pink shoes, and that he really was about four hundred pounds. Other kids said it was all a big hoax.
Toledo has now pounded the Miller hurlers for six runs in the eighth inning and Bob Motley is moaning and Daddy turns down the radio. He wouldn’t be surprised if Ricky is a raging psychopath and Dede winds up in a ditch with a bullet in her brain. Some men are like that, and if a girl won’t listen to her parents, what can anybody do? But that’s the trend of things nowadays. Kids listen to this music and, believe me, the lyrics are NOT about saving your money and planning your future, no, it’s all about grabbing what you want and to heck with everybody else. Go off and do whatever you please and never mind the consequences, and if somebody gets in your way, kick them and spatter hot grease on them.
Mother doesn’t see it that way. She thinks they’re two kids in love. It’s all a big misunderstanding, and if somebody could just sit Ricky down and talk some sense into him, the whole thing could be worked out. There’s no need for the FBI. Ricky only needs some good advice. Somebody like Art Linkletter or Arthur Godfrey. She’s worried that the two kids might be cut down in a fusillade of police bullets like that nice man in Richfield.
“Nice men don’t rob liquor stores,” says Daddy.
“He only wanted to give his wife a vacation.”
According to the Star, the Guppys’ neighbors described Ricky as “quiet and well behaved and always polite to grown-ups.”
“The neighbors obviously don’t know that kid from a bale of hay,” says Daddy.
I think Ricky and Dede should go to Canada and change their names and get married and forget about ever coming home.
Then Daddy looks at me, as if he heard that thought, and says, “You don’t hang around with kids like that, I hope.”
Of course I do. Quiet and well-behaved kids are who live in this town.
“Did you know him?” asks Mother.
“Not really. I saw him around. Some. He was in my gym class, I think.” He and I tried to sneak out of doing the rope climb because we were so bad at it. We kept going to the back of the line, pretending to tie our shoelaces, dawdling at the water fountain, killing time, but Mr. Foster was on to our tricks and made us climb.
“Did you notice anything odd about him?”
“He hated gym class.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t do very well on chin-ups.” Neither did I. Two chin-ups was all I could do. Ricky and I were peas in a pod. Both of us with skinny arms and legs, glasses. His were half-rim, mine steel-rim, but the same thing. He wrote poems too. Leonard saw some of his poems. Mr. Foster grabbed Ricky and me by the arms and said, “Come, girls,” and made us do the rope climb. The phys-ed class laughed their butts off. Two long ropes hung from the rafters, with knots for handholds. Mr. Foster showed us how as if we were morons—“You grab hold of the rope, pull yourself up, get a foothold. Pull up, foothold, pull up. It’s simple.” Ricky grabbed his rope and I grabbed mine. I remember seeing the goosebumps on his legs and the glitter of sweat on his brow. The class tittered when I hauled myself up, then Ricky went up, then we went up another knot and hung. Then Ricky dropped off, his shoes squeaked on the floor, and I clung to the rope for another few seconds, trying to muster the strength to go farther, but my feet lost their hold and swung free and I dangled there, turning slowly—the Great Tree Toad—See Him Cling to the Rope, Gentlemen! See Him Dangle & Spin! See His Toad Legs Flail & His Eyes Bulge! See the Sweat Pop from His Slimy Forehead—See His Lips Glisten with Spit! Hear Him Wheeze & Groan! And I dropped. “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Mr. Foster. Ricky and I resumed our place in the back of the class as Mr. Foster hauled out the wrestling mats for the next event, tumbling. The back of the class was where Ricky and I felt safe. We didn’t talk. We knew what we needed to know about each other.
“It’s the direction this country is going in nowadays.” Daddy again. “You’ve got fornicating music on The Ed Sullivan Show on the CBS Television Network, for crying out loud. You’ve got singers shaking their pelvic areas, lighting pianos on fire, jumping around like monkeys—it’s no wonder a kid attacks his own mother. This group, the Doo Dads—didn’t they get in hot water for some obscene song of theirs?”
He is referring to “Hot Rod Alley,” which Big Daddy Fats played on Wonderful Weegee—If you got a Ford, you’re on board; a Chevrolet, you’re okay; an Oldsmobile, you’re the deal; a Mercury, you’re in for free; a Pontiac, she’s on her back. With Jim Dandy the bass guy making sounds of rumbling mufflers and Earl the Girl doing the screeching tires. Some Baptist preacher got his picture in the newspaper by kneeling in prayer at the gate of the Weegee radio tower, holding a big sign: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. The preacher had hair as long as Jim Dandy’s and held a big white Bible up in the air and his eyes were squeezed shut and the agony on his face was like someone tied a knot in his lovestick. It was no skin off Big Daddy Fats’s nose, he played the Doo Dads every chance he got. His theme song was their song.
My baby took one look and she just—ran away!
Haven’t seen my buddies for a—year and a day!
I went to church and they—locked the door!
Even my mama doesn’t—love me no more! (Oww!)
I went to the doctor and he scratched his beard.
He gave me a test.
He said—“Man, you’re weird!”
Even my buddies, they all—disappeared.
HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE
I’M WEEEEEEEEEEEEEIRRRRD!
And then Daddy says, “I don’t understand how people can sit back and let these things happen. Well, I guess I better hit the sack,” and he’s gone. Poor Daddy. It’s a relief to see him go through the door. He has so little to say, really—how most people pay too much for stuff they could get cheaper, and the immorality of the Democratic Party and its communist wing in particular, and the decline of standards and the sheer waste and people expecting something for nothing in America nowadays, and the ridiculous things people do for status and prestige such as gad about Europe or go to museums full of modern art that chimpanzees could do better than or buy expensive stuff that isn’t nearly as good as what you’d pay half that for, and the dangers of infection, and the evil of rock-and-roll music. That is pretty much Daddy’s entire repertoire.
I loved it when he toddled up to bed and Mother and I stayed up late. For Daddy, ten-thirty was a moral boundary, the time when decent people put on their jammies and brush their teeth and gargle and crawl into bed, and the only reason for staying up later is to do things you wouldn’t do if decent people were awake to see you do them. But all Mother and I wanted to do was listen to the Trojan Troubadour and drink ginger ale and carry on civilized conversation.
“How about a game of Rook?” she said.
“How about Monopoly?”
The Troubadour came on at ten-fifteen right after Cedric Adams and the news—you heard a rippling melody on a piano and a soft, familiar voice say, “Top of the evening, everybody, it’s just your old Trojan Seed Corn Troubadour Tommy Thompson coming by for a neighborly visit—to sing some old favorites and also tell you about the amazing production records set by Trojan’s new Golden Victor, the talk of the seed-corn world for months now. But before we do—” and then he launches into a song.
Moonlight on the plains of Minnesota,
I sit here on the front porch feeling blue.
Tomorrow it’s a year since we parted, dear,
Still my mind keeps going back to you.
I rue the day when I walked away,
Playing the fool as cool as could be.
Moonlight on the plains of Minnesota.
How I wish that you were here with me.
I always beat Mother at Monopoly, because she prefers Baltic and Mediterranean (she likes the names) and the railroads and utilities and she passes up the red or yellow or green ones or Park Place and Boardwalk because they are too expensive. I scoop up everything I land on and if necessary I borrow from the bank, which she allowed in a game a few years ago when I had the mumps.
—Is that in the rules? she says.
—We’ve always played that way.
Mother does not borrow, it is not in her make-up to borrow. She sits tight and gets creamed. I race around the board, acquiring property, building hotels, winning, winning—it’s easy to see the importance of unlimited credit. I am very contented late at night when it’s just Mother and me. I pretend my ginger ale is gin and I tell her jokes out of Reader’s Digest and she says, “I don’t know how you do it, I can’t remember a joke for two minutes,” and she’s right, she can’t. You can tell her a joke twice in one night and she enjoys it as much the second time as the first.
—Did this Ricky Guppy have many friends at school?
—A few.
—What was he like?
—Quiet.
All is peaceful on Green Street. The televisions are quiet. The sprinkler whispers shh-shh-shh-shh in the backyard. A train whistle blows, faraway.
This may be the last summer for Monopoly. Next year I’ll be 15 and I’ll have a job, I’ll be going to parties.
On the other hand, who would invite me? Name one person. I can’t. The cool kids in my class—the Guntzel girls, the Jacobsons, the Petersons, the Bunsens, the Nilssons—do they want a tree toad lurking in the corner at their parties, licking his lips, blinking his eyes? No, surely not. I may be playing Monopoly with Mother for years to come.
—Tell me about when I was born, I say.
—I’ve told you all about that before. More than once.
—Tell me again.
And she does.
First, there is a certain settling of herself, and rustling, and tinkling of ice in the glass, and then she starts the story as she has always started it.
—It was February and they were forecasting a blizzard.
