The bus dropped me at the ferry ramp and dieseled off into the night. I stood at the water’s edge in a light snow. The coach had been refreshingly plush, with reclining seats and a toilet and ashtrays on the armrests, this being back in the day when you could smoke. And smoke we did, and drink from goatskin wine sacks and smuggled flasks. Some guys in back from Waupun, where the prison is, got up a game of cards. After dark, a sense of enclosure and fatigue took over. The darkness outside turned the window into a mirror and I tried not to stare at my reflection.
At Hurley, the last passenger other than me—a girl in a white parka and boots to match—climbed off, and then it was just me and the driver riding the last miles to where the state ended at the lake. Bayview was decorated with all the schizophrenia of a tourist town off season, a lighted wreath on a lamppost in the square, lights along the eaves of the North Woods Motel, and a Santa clutching a Coke in the window of the Kroger.
Across the channel I made out the lights of the ferry moving against the black form of the island. This weekend would be the last of the runs for the season. Coast Guard cutters patrolled daily for ice. As the wind rattled the brittle rope against the flagpole, I stepped into the shelter of the doorway to the ticket kiosk and watched the lights grow larger, oscillating with the sweep of the radar gear.
The ferry arrived empty and I waited alone to board. I didn’t know the roper (they called him that because he handled the lines and herded the cars on), but he wouldn’t take my two dollars when I tried to give it to him. “You it?” he asked.
“I’m it.”
It was nuclear winter, utter cold, utter dark, moonless and overcast. Snowflakes rushed into the boat’s lanterns. Then the blacker presence of the island against the black of the water, as a covering of snow became visible on the ground and bare trees, then the harbor lights and, closer in, house lights came into view. Two figures sat huddled beneath the statue of the founder. The gate dropped and I stepped onto the island. Grey and Callie brushed the snow from their jeans and trudged down the hill, inking footprints behind them as they came.
Grey’s face was invisible in the fur-lined tunnel of his parka hood. Callie’s blaze-orange snowmobile hat sat cockeyed on her head. She wiped her nose with one of the wool socks she’d pulled on over her mittens.
“Hey,” they said.
The grimy smell of the shop hit me as I wrenched the screen door against the weight of the snow. I navigated in the dark to the stairs and called, “Hello?” I opened the kitchen door. Pop didn’t answer. I switched on the light and dropped my bag with a thud loud enough to be heard throughout the house. Still nothing. That’s when I noticed the curtains on the window over the sink, light blue, with ruffles on the bottom and pulled back with ties of matching fabric. On the table, a butter dish with a spotted ceramic cow reclining on the lid. In the bathroom, I opened an orange plastic box on the ledge beside the sink to find rows of spiked hair curlers rising out of their base like a toy missile silo.
“Pop,” I whispered at his door. Nothing. Walking into my room it was like I had been there only hours earlier. Nothing had changed. By that I mean nothing. The room was just as I had left it, drawers shut, the closet door ajar, even the dent on the blanket where my bag had last been before I lifted it to my shoulder remained.
On Thanksgiving morning, I woke to a racket in the kitchen and walked down the hall to find Trudy in an aqua housecoat, a Virginia Slim clamped in her teeth, crouched in front of the kitchen cabinets dragging pots out on the floor. She looked up not at all surprised to see me standing over her in my underwear.
“Hi, hon,” she said. “Looking for the double boiler. You didn’t run off with it, did you?”
“We don’t have one.”
“Shit—well, coffee’s on.”
“Where’s Pop?”
“He’ll be up shortly.”
“Bit late.”
“It’s a holiday, hon. Your father’s a hardworking man,” she said, somehow making it sound like that was my fault. “Here, come on.” She hoisted herself up and took a coffee cup off a wood rack we didn’t have when I left. “I’m not cooking this morning, so you’ll have to make do. I was going to make yam casserole, but without the double boiler, it’ll have to be Rice-A-Roni stuffing. What do you think about that?”
“Pop and I are going to the Reeds’,” I said.
“And we don’t want to show up without a dish to pass. How would that look?”
Like every year, I was thinking, but didn’t say so. I heard the toilet flush and Pop came down the hall, tugging at his pants. My first thought was that he looked like a cartoonist’s drawing of the father I remembered. The effects of the crash remained in his posture, which listed to the right to favor the side that took the most punishment. Yet at the same time he was bigger, not fat but thicker in the legs and arms. When he saw me he grunted, kind of, and nodded. His shoulders stiffened as I went toward him, so I settled for a pat on his good shoulder. “Hey, Pop, wie gehts?”
“You got here,” he said.
“Piece of cake,” I said. “Long as you know where to get off. I’m doing good at school, if you’re wondering. I mean not good, you wouldn’t say, but all right, an A, a B, and two Cs at midterm, which don’t count, so I can get them up by the end of term. I’m taking four classes. You can take four or five. Six, too, I think if you get a waiver, but who’d want to do that? I’m taking four because I got to work like you know and I figure there’s no harm in getting the lay of the land before I jump in with both feet.” I don’t know how long I went on like this before I realized that I was talking very fast and Pop just sat there smoking and staring at the table and nodding in this spasm-y kind of way, like he was trying to get a bug away from his face. “So what I’m saying is I think I’m doing fine, all things considered.”
“Well, that’s all very nice, isn’t it Ernst?” Trudy said.
He made a noncommittal gesture with his hand.
“You wouldn’t believe how much he’s worried,” she said.
I wouldn’t believe he worried, I wanted to say.
“We read they’re raising the prices,” he said.
We read? “They raise tuition pretty much every year. I was expecting it. Anyway, I got a job with Professor Dooley. I said so in my letter.”
Then Trudy started talking about the “gals at work.” She spends ten hours a day with the gals at work and as far as I can see can’t stand any of them, but without them and Dianne and her ex she’d have nothing to talk about.
I got up and went downstairs without saying I was leaving.
Trudy’s domestic impulses didn’t extend to the shop. Bikes were clustered in corners or lying on the floor rather than the usual ordered rows. Empty Pabst cans cluttered Pop’s workbench. His beanbag ashtray was full. There was a second ashtray I’d never seen before, a ceramic job with the name of a Vegas casino on it, also overflowing. The picture of him and my mother was gone from above his bench. Just the aluminum mount that held it remained, twisted at the end, as if someone had broken it off with a good amount of force.
I picked up the bikes lying on the floor and set them on their kickstands, emptied the ashtrays and beer cans into the trash, and before I knew it I had a broom in my hand. Rather than go back upstairs and watch Pop stare at Trudy as she droned on about the cost of a dye job in Duluth, I washed the counters and dusted the bikes, straightened the display racks and cleared the outdated paperwork from the order files. I noticed a stack of unopened mail, bills mostly from the looks of them. The money side of the business had never been my business and I would have caught hell if I opened them, so I left them propped against the metal file we kept our repair orders in.
When I was done straightening up I hauled the trash out. The temperature had dropped violently during the night. It was a brilliant and bitter sunny morning as I stood shivering next to the dumpster, staring across the water toward the mainland. On my way back to the door I noticed the light on in Grey’s hangar and headed over to see what he was up to.
A gust of wind blew the door out of my hand. I saw Grey and someone else bent over the worktable.
“Shut the door, asshole,” the other guy yelled. He raised his head and I recognized him as the man who’d given me his card before I left for school.
“It’s okay, Natch,” said Grey.
“What’s up?” I said.
“That’s for us to know and you never to find out,” Natch said, laughing in a nervous way so that I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. He ran his thumb along the mirror that lay on the table leaving a smudge between a few grains of powder. “This the guy?”
“Nothing,” Grey said.
Natch stood up from the table. He was wearing a sheepskin coat that made him look, with his leathery skin, like one of those nineteenth-century polar explorers. “Wait a minute here,” he said. “I’m having a conversation with my friend and here you come in and I’m wondering just what exactly is your problem.”
“I said it’s okay,” Grey said.
“I was talking to your friend here,” Natch said, staring at me and pointing at Grey with his thumb, “about expanding his base. That’s all.”
“His base?”
“His capital base and I ask him doesn’t he maybe know anybody else who could kick in some cash to finance an operation should the opportunity present itself and he says, ‘I don’t know. Maybe my friend—’”
“Tom,” Grey said.
“So I say, ‘Make sure your friend understands that you’re offering an opportunity, because otherwise he’ll think you’re a deadbeat until he sees the money coming in.’” Then Natch zipped up his jacket, shook his hair free of the collar, and left.
“What the hell?” I said to Grey once he’d gone. Grey tossed the rag he was holding onto the table with the same fatigue in his shoulders that I saw from Pop at the end of a day. I looked around the shop. In just the three months I’d been gone the walls and surfaces were all battered and scuffed and there was a layer of sawdust on the floor as deep as a December flurry. Whatever he’d managed to scrape up in the way of work, he’d been hard at it.
“Forget it,” he said.
“If you say so.”
The hull of a sixteen-foot sailing scow sat perched on the davits in front of him. “I had to throw on a patch,” Grey said, “Guess where it is.”
I walked up one end of the shining white hull and down the other, craning my neck to see if the light could catch an imperfection. “Here,” I said.
“Not even warm,” he said and patted a spot farther aft.
“Who’s this one for?”
“Thinking of keeping it myself.”
“You got the canoe.”
“A sail can take you farther than a paddle.”
“Little small for the lake, isn’t it? You could swamp it in a heavy chop.”
“Then I guess I’ll hope for fair weather,” he said.
I watched him move along the gunwale of the boat. He’d painted the rail black and was stripping away any paint that bled through the masking tape with a razor blade. “Want to give me a hand?” he said. “There’s another blade over there.”
Picking up a clean blade, I set about scraping drips of black from the white of the hull. I’d only gone a few inches before I looked up and saw Grey gaining on me. In the time it’d taken me to go a half foot, he’d finished his side and started on mine. I watched for a minute, trying to pick up on the flicking motion that worked for him, but it was no use. Somewhere in just a few months, he’d become a craftsman, and I had nothing in the way of skills to match him. “I should get back,” I said, “I didn’t tell Pop where I was going.”
As I washed my hands in the kitchen sink, Trudy came up behind me and said, “Let’s wear our church clothes, hon. We’re guests.”
It was at Thanksgiving dinner that year that I got the idea that something happens to people when they turn forty that makes them go permanently nuts. There was no other explanation for the way that Jack seemed to be falling deeper into his newspapers, or the way that Agnes in her increasing blindness had begun to see a happier world that didn’t exist or the way Ray grew more and more arrogant as his fortunes fell or the way Dolores’s bitterness had become so hard that you couldn’t have chipped it with an axe or the way that Trudy convinced Pop she was a sex symbol or the way that Pop had allowed his world be to be transformed by Trudy in my absence to an empire of his own virility. Or maybe it was the gløgg that stirred things up. Jack at the head of the table looked a mile away from down at our end, where Callie and Grey and Todd and I sat with our knees rammed under the card table, as he ladled the steaming liquid into cups to be passed around the table. We had to duck around the centerpiece that Todd built (a candle windmill) to talk to him. The centerpiece played “Turkey in the Straw” as it turned, which was pretty cool the first ten times.
“Oh, I had a little chicken and it wouldn’t lay an egg,” Agnes sang quietly.
The gløgg flowed freely into our cups except for Todd who couldn’t have any and Callie who said she didn’t want it. Dolores and Ray arrived late, after a detour through the marina bar. Ray wore a pumpkin-colored blazer over a black turtleneck. Dolores wore a brown dress with a corsage shaped like a cornucopia that was so big the spilling fruit reached her chin. Ray pulled her chair back and almost tripped over the rug in the process. She sank unsteadily into the seat, not even noticing her husband was about to topple over.
Agnes said, “We were just complimenting Trudy on her wonderful wild rice stuffing.”
“I make it with Rice-A-Roni,” Trudy said.
“Rice, eh? Puts a little ah-so in the festivities, don’t it now?” Ray said, though he passed on the stuffing entirely and shoveled half the bowl of mashed potatoes onto his plate. “Say, you know the one about the Chinaman and the working girl?”
“I’m not sure this is the time for that, Ray,” Dolores said.
“The recipe’s on the box,” Trudy said. “It’s nothing really.”
“I’m sure no one’s disputing that, dear,” said Dolores.
“What about the Chinaman?” asked the Toad.
“Nothing, honey,” Agnes said.
“Should get out the old chopsticks,” Ray said, nudging Pop and causing him to drop his fork into his mug of gløgg, prompting Todd to laugh so hard he blew milk through his nose and Agnes to ask, “Is someone at the door?”
“Actually, wild rice isn’t rice,” Callie said. “It’s a grass.”
“Grass, ick,” said Todd.
“Did you learn that from your Indians?” Ray asked.
“Callie’s got an internship though her school,” Jack said for my benefit.
Grey said, “She’s working with the Chippewa Action Program—”
“’Bout time they get to swindle us for a change, eh,” Ray said. “That’s what I tell her, ’Bout time they get to swindle us for a change, eh Cal?”
“’Bout time they scalp somebody,” Grey said, looking Ray’s way down the table.
“The first thing we learn,” Callie said, “is to avoid forming stereotypes.”
“Sometimes we forget how much the young have to teach us,” Dolores said, anxious to squash any conversation that would give attention to her daughter rather than herself. Her eyes scanned the table, looking for a target to zero in on. “Trudy,” she said, “where’s Dianne this holiday?”
“At her father’s,” Trudy said. Dolores knew this, and for a second I felt sorry for Trudy.
“Ah, yes, I should have thought.”
“Would all grass look like rice if you cooked it?” Todd asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” Grey said.
“It’s a fair question,” Jack said. “Ask Callie.”
“Ask me what?”
“Would it? Would all grass look like wild rice if you cooked it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“I guess they can’t teach you everything at college,” Dolores said.
I said, “I’ve got a professor back at school who says—”
“Ray read in the Weekly World News that Satan is a college professor at one of those liberal universities,” Dolores said.
The Toad asked, “What’s the Weekly World News?”
“It’s a tabloid,” Callie said.
“You used to write for them, didn’t you Dad?” Grey said. Jack chuckled.
“I’m sure the devil has better things to do with his time,” Agnes said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ray snarled and startled Agnes. Jack, too, looked up from his plate somewhat surprised and looked first at Agnes then down the table.
“Nothing,” Agnes said. “I only just meant the devil could think of more destructive ways on earth than posing as a teacher.”
“Or were you saying that I could find better things to do with my time?” Ray said, now looking at the table instead of at Agnes.
“What’s a tabloid?” Todd asked.
“I’m sure that’s not what she meant to say,” Jack piped in.
“It’s those papers by the checkout at the Kroger,” Callie said.
Then everyone is talking at once and nobody hears Jack tap his glass with his fork and then he’s saying, “Hey, hey,” until finally he shouts it and everybody stops yelling at each other and looks. “I think a toast is appropriate.”
“You want me to handle that, Dad?” Grey said.
“This is the day we count our blessings, and we are blessed to have Dolores and Ray join us for the first time”—we all lifted our glasses, except Agnes who lifted the gravy boat—“and to have Tom here to remind us of how much the joy of his return has made up for our sadness when he left us.”
“In other words,” Grey said, “how can we miss you if you don’t go away?”
They were still going at it when Callie and Grey and I ducked out and walked over to Friendly’s, which was hopping with refugees from other households around the island, many like us loosening ties and kicking out of pinched leather shoes. Greta waved from behind the bar and said something to Grey when she slid the two bottles of beer and a Coke across the bar that made him laugh.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“She said to tell you she knew they’d kick you out of college,” Grey said.
“See,” Callie said, “you could just stay here and no one would think anything of it.”
“Grey doesn’t need me around when he’s got Natch.”
“Shit, Tom,” Grey said.
Callie asked, “Who’s Natch?”
“She doesn’t know him?”
Callie and Grey looked at each other. “Why would she, man? He’s a customer.”
“Who is he?” Callie asked.
“He’s kind of a steer-er.”
“A steer?” Callie said. “Like a boy cow?”
“No, a steer-er. He steers business my way.”
“How about you?” I asked Callie. “You planning to stay here all your life?”
She looked at Grey and half laughed, “I like it here as well as anywhere else.”
A Mac Davis song came on the jukebox, “It’s Hard to be Humble,” and all the regulars sang along. The song is funny the first time you hear it.
“You could at least stay a couple of extra days,” she said. “Ellises are having a party on Sunday.”
“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking about going back tomorrow.”
“I have to go back in a day or two anyway, so what difference does it make? Trudy doesn’t want me around and Pop doesn’t need me this time of year.”
“Stay over at the Reeds’,” Callie said, but Grey interrupted.
“He says he has to go,” Grey said. “Right?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
Pop and Trudy took the news better. The next morning—after falling asleep to the sounds of polka music and laughter vibrating from his room—I’d asked Pop, “Feel like going for a ride?” thinking I could borrow somebody’s bike and we’d find enough dry pavement to make the effort worthwhile.
When I asked, Trudy looked up from her eggs, startled. My father noticed her movement out of the corner of his eye. He stared at me for a moment and shook his head and Trudy went back to eating.
“Anyway,” she said. “It’s snowing.”
“Never stopped us before,” I said, which was true.
“Well,” Trudy said, “I can’t be responsible for whatever foolishness went on here before me.”
Pop lifted his eyes from the table for the first time all morning, and I looked into them for some sign of regret, but I didn’t see it, only fatigue. “I guess I’ll get going then,” I said.
Trudy said, “Really, honey, already?”
Pop spoke, “You know when the bus comes?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “If I’m on the 11:15 ferry I’ll be able to catch it.”