I went out on the lecture circuit when I was going through an expensive divorce and loved it immediately—a bare stage, a microphone on a stand, a stool, a glass of water—and stayed on the circuit even after the bills were paid. It was beautiful. You go out for a week or two, one-nighters, performance at night, up at dawn to catch a plane to a hub city and another plane to the next town, a fresh motel room, a nap, a light lunch, and then off to the stage. I had once told a story on the radio about a boatload of Lutheran pastors that tipped over on Lake Wobegon and I worked this up—added an old aunt and a hot-air balloon and a boy on a parasail towed by a powerboat—and it became a nearly perfect ninety-minute performance piece that I trotted around about a hundred times. I had the whole thing by heart and it worked like a precision instrument, the laughs came right on time and they built toward big boffo laughs at the end and I could see men and women wheezing and leaning up against each other, weakened by merriment. The problem with a piece as good as that is: nothing you do afterward seems good enough. You go out on the road with your new piece, which is about aging, and your old fans come up afterward and say, “We saw you a couple years ago the time you told the story about the pontoon boat. My gosh, we laughed all the way home.” I worked up the piece into a full-blown novel, which got a good, thoughtful review in The New York Times. It is an honor to be read carefully, an honor one does not always deserve, and of course you can understand if the reviewer cannot resist the temptation to torpedo you—it’s the witty put-downs that are quoted and remembered, the tributes are mostly forgotten—but the reviewer of Pontoon said that Lake Wobegon stories were neither nostalgic nor gentle but contained sadness and dread, and to be taken seriously by another writer made me happy for days afterward.
My aunt Evelyn was an insomniac, so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to wonder about that. At any rate, she died in her little stucco house in Lake Wobegon, in her own bed, under a blue knit coverlet, reading a book about Utah, where she was planning to travel soon. She was eighty-two. She had gone out that evening with her buddies Gladys and Margaret to the Moonlite Bay supper club, where she enjoyed the deep-fried walleye and a slab of banana cream pie, along with a mai tai and a Pinot Grigio. Three old Lutheran ladies, sitting at a table by the window and laughing themselves silly over the chicken salad Margaret’s nephew brought to the Fourth of July picnic, which had been sitting in the rear window of his car for a few hours, and the waves of propulsive vomiting it caused. Men mostly. Big men so sick they couldn’t hide; they had to stand and empty their stomachs right there in plain view of their children. The ladies chortled over that and then they took up Gladys’s husband, Leon, who had discovered Viagra and now, after a ten-year layoff, was up for sex. Viagra gave him a hard-on like a ball-peen hammer. “Or in his case, like a Phillips screwdriver,” said Gladys and they all cackled. Scheduling was an issue. He preferred mornings.
“The other day I had bread in the oven and I told him I had to go check it—I was baking for the Bible school bake sale—he said, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go! I’m coming!’ Then he kept at it for another five minutes—I said, ‘Jesus, if you can’t come just say so.’ He got all mad then, said it was hard being married to someone who didn’t care for sex and who kept poking holes in his confidence.”
“Who’s poking holes?” cried Margaret and they all three gasped and wheezed—O God—O God I am going to die—don’t make me laugh like that, I swear I’m going to wet my pants. The busboy heard all this and was quite surprised. A good boy from a nice home. And then Evelyn said, “Tell him if he needs to hump something, you’ll thaw out a chicken.” And Margaret laughed so hard a whole noseful of something shot out. The busboy retreated to the scullery. The ladies wiped their eyes. Oh I swear I am never having dinner with you two again, you are a bad influence. A bad influence.
And they drove back to town in Margaret’s car and Evelyn got out at her house on McKinley Street and leaned on the car and said, “See you Wednesday.” There was a full moon and she stood and admired it and headed for the house. She stopped and pointed to her moon shadow on the walk and danced a couple steps as if to elude it and that was the last anyone saw of her. She was wearing a denim wraparound skirt and a white blouse embroidered with roses and a silky red vest and sandals, and she danced in the moonlight and went indoors to lie down and die.
Uncle Jack had died nineteen years before, leaving behind a basement and garage full of his accumulations, which had taken her months to disperse, and she didn’t want to burden Barbara with the same grim chore. Barbara lived three blocks away, up the street from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, alone since Lloyd drifted away to the Cities and Kyle went to college. “When I die,” Evelyn told her, “I want you to be able to sweep out the place, take the sheets off the bed and the clothes out of the closet, clean out the medicine chest, and hang out a For Sale sign. Two hours and you’ll be rid of me. I’m a pilgrim. I travel light.”
• • •
Barbara found Evelyn’s body, lying in bed, faceup, green eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, long tan arms at her sides, red lacquered nails, blue blanket up to her waist. Barbara is what you might call tightly wound, not the person you’d choose for the job of finding dead people. She shrieked, clutched at her mother’s hand, shrank back from the bed, knocked a lamp off the bedside table, yelped, and ran out of the room and into the kitchen, where she tried to collect herself. She breathed deeply, once, twice, again, again, and told herself to be calm. Nobody had murdered Mother. Then she looked around for a drink.
In recent years Barbara had developed a crème de cacao problem. She liked to pour it on her breakfast cereal; it put her in a gentler place. She climbed up on the step stool to look in Mother’s cupboards for liquor, and found a bottle of Kahlúa, unopened. She got out a jelly glass, filled it up to the third fish and drank it down, and went back in the bedroom. She opened the top drawer of the night stand and riffled through the clippings and postcards and aspirin packets and a poem on an index card—one of Mother’s poems. . . .
O no, it is only lent.
In the end we are left alone
When the last light is spent.
So live that you may say,
Lord, I have no regret.
Thank you for these sunny days
And for the last sunset.
Not a great poem, if you ask me, thought Barbara. Sorry, Mother.
Under it was an envelope labeled ARRANGEMENTS. She opened it. The letter was typed on thin blue paper with PAR AVION printed below and a French flag.
Dear Barbara,
In the event of my death I want you to make arrangements as follows: I wish my body to be laid out in the green beaded rhinestone dress that was a gift from my dear friend Raoul the week we spent in Branson, Missouri.—
Barbara stared at the name. Raoul. Who he? Mother had never mentioned a Raoul. There were none in town. A boyfriend. Mother had a boyfriend. Good God.
—I would like someone to be sure to let Andy Williams know that “the lady in the green beaded dress” died and that his kiss on the cheek was one of the true high points of my life. I wish to be cremated. I do not wish to be embalmed and stuck in the ground to rot. I wish my ashes to be placed in the green bowling ball that Raoul also gave me, which somebody can hollow out (I’m told), and then seal it up, and I would like the ball to be dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point where Jack and I used to fish for crappies back years ago when we were getting along. I do not wish any eulogy or public prayers said for me, none at all, thank you, and the only music I want is Andy Williams singing “Moon River,” which was “our song,” mine and Raoul’s, and I’m sorry to have kept all this a secret from you. I am so sorry that you never met him. He is an old dear friend who I reunited with about twelve years ago. We loved each other and we had some high old times. I realize that these are unusual wishes but you are a strong girl and I know you will respect them. I love you, dear. I always did and I do now, more than ever. Please forgive me.
Love,
Mother
Barbara pulled the sheet up over Mother’s face as she had seen people do in movies. She dialed Kyle’s number at his apartment in Minneapolis. He picked up on the third ring. He sounded distracted. Kyle was a sophomore at the University, studying engineering, and he studied all the time.
“It’s Mother, honey. I’m awfully sorry but I have bad news. Grandma died.”
“Omigod.” He let out a breath. “When did she die?”
“She died in her sleep. Last night. It must have been sudden. She was reading a book and she just died. I know it’s a shock. Me too. I just walked in and there she was. She must’ve had a heart attack.”
Barbara said that Grandma was not afraid of death, she looked it straight in the eye, and don’t you think she had such a good life because she knew life was short and that pushed her to do more than most people her age would dream of.
“When’s the funeral?” Kyle asked.
“Well, that’s what I called you about.” And she read him Mother’s letter. Word for word.
“That is so awesome,” he said. “Wow. A bowling ball!! You mean, like a real bowling ball?”
“I found it in her closet. It’s green. Like green marble. Expensive. It looks Italian.”
“And no eulogy, no prayers. Boy. She had a whole other life, didn’t she.”
“I am just a little worried about this Raoul. What if he shows up?”
“Of course he’ll show up. We’ll invite him. He was her boyfriend. He loved her.” Kyle sounded a little giddy. “God, Grandma! I always thought she had something else going on!”
“You think we should? Really? I don’t know what to do,” said Barbara.
“We’re going to do it just exactly the way she wanted it,” he said. “I’m going to do it myself.” He was all excited now, bouncing around and yipping about his parasail—the one he had built from a kit—he was going to fly that bowling ball out over Lake Wobegon and drop it in from a great height.
Kyle’s friend Duane Dober had an 18-foot speedboat with a 75-horsepower outboard. Duane wore pop-bottle glasses and lived in dread that a ray of sun might catch a lens and burn a hole into his brain and leave him a helpless cripple who makes ashtrays from beer cans, so he wore long-billed caps and stayed out of the sun as much as possible but he loved to race around in his boat with the prow up in the air and smoke dope and listen to the Steel Heads. When Kyle called and said, “I need you to tow my parasail so I can deposit my grandma’s ashes in the lake,” Duane said, “Hey. Count me in.”
• • •
The man from Waite Park Cremation Service arrived, shortly after noon. Barbara had polished off the Kahlúa. The phone rang and it was someone asking if she was satisfied with her current long-distance provider. “We’re thrilled,” she said. “Couldn’t be happier.” She didn’t call Aunt Flo to tell her Mother was dead. In fact she locked the doors and pulled the shades for fear Flo’d barge in and take over. She was a great one for grabbing hold of something you were doing and saying, “Here, let me do that,” and wresting it out of your hands—“That’s not how you do that”—a rake, a screwdriver, a mixer: the woman would not let you so much as whip cream with a Mixmaster even though you were sixty years old and had raised a child, nonetheless you were not to be trusted.
The man from the crematorium arrived in a plain old black delivery van, no name on the side. He was young, but of course everybody was nowadays. His name was Walt. He held a folded plastic bag under one arm.
“Where is your mother?” She pointed to the bedroom door. He had a fold-up gurney, a skinny thing the size of an ironing board. The phone rang just as he emerged from the bedroom with Evelyn zipped up in a plastic bag and wheeled her out the back door. The shock of seeing this—the house suddenly empty—she picked up the phone and it was Flo saying, “What is going on? What is that truck doing in the alley? Speak up!” and Barbara sobbed, “My mommy’s dead.”
Flo pulled up in front two minutes later, her hair in curlers, as the truck pulled away in back. She’d been at the Bon Marche Beauty Salon, having it blued. She was hopping mad. She took one look at Barbara and said, “You’re a souse, that’s what you are! You need to get a grip on yourself. Where is Evelyn?” She went into the bedroom and found Walt’s business card and came charging out and glared at Barbara and shook her fist. “Sending your mother to be burned up like she was garbage. Why didn’t you just chop her up with an axe and throw her in the incinerator? You ought to be shot.” And Flo called up the crematorium and left a long message on the machine, to get the hell back with her sister Evelyn’s body unless he wanted to be in court that evening. “Driving around preying on the grief-stricken who happen to be intoxicated, too—”
Barbara pulled out her mother’s letter and handed it to Flo. Flo read it and looked up, aghast.
“You should have burned this. If you had an ounce of common sense, you would’ve put a match to it and buried it in the garden. This is just outrageous. I ought to wring your neck.” And then Flo put her old wrinkled face in her hands and sobbed. “What has this family come to? We’ll never be able to hold our heads up in this town again. A bowling ball! People will think we are fools, no better than the Magendanzes. I wish I had dropped dead rather than know this. Why couldn’t God have taken me first?”
She looked up at Barbara, her old eyes full of tears. “Who is this Raoul?”
Out on the sidewalk three little girls were playing jump rope, two twirling and one in the middle jumping, and the two were chanting:
Little Joe ate some snow
He got a part in a movie show
Had a claw
On his paw
Ha ha ha he was Dracula.
Blood was dripping
Down his chin
How many crypts does he live in?
One, two, three, four, five . . .
Two hours after Barbara found Evelyn dead in bed, Debbie Detmer drove into town in a blue Ford van and pulled into her parents’ driveway and started unloading her bags, expensive ones, blue leather. She had come to town to get married on Saturday to Mr. Brent Greenwood, thirty-nine, of Sea Crest, California. The Detmers lived three blocks from Evelyn’s little bungalow but they hadn’t heard about her death yet. They had been out of the social whirl ever since January when Mr. Detmer slipped and banged his head. He was toweling off after his shower while watching the Today show on the tiny TV Betty gave him for Christmas and he stepped into his underpants and caught his big toe on the elastic band. He hopped a few times, reluctant to give up on it, and fell and concussed himself against the side of the tub, and it had made him forgetful. He started calling his wife “Mother” instead of Betty.
Debbie was lithe and lean, her hair red and spiky. She had flown in from California, where she had lived since dropping out of Concordia College. Fifteen years earlier, she had taken a philosophy course on Kierkegaard, who fired up her jets and convinced her that she was a pilgrim, and she headed for San Francisco. She first worked in a topless bar, a good Lutheran girl serving drinks to old men who ogled her spheres of existence. A month later, she hitchhiked north to Bolinas and a Christian ashram, clothing optional—Scripture said, “Think not what ye shall wear”—and she got into meridians. And then she became a veterinary aromatherapist at All Creatures Wellness Center, treating puppy dogs and kitty cats with eucalyptus and peppermint and chamomile, and earned buckets of money and met Brent. He was the only heterosexual male in her yoga class—or at least willing to give it a shot—and the wedding was all set for Saturday. The same day that Kyle and Barbara planned to fly Evelyn’s ashes in a bowling ball over Lake Wobegon and drop it into the water.
Debbie went all out for her wedding. She rented Wally’s pontoon boat, the Agnes D, and made a big banner, CELEBRATION OF COMMITMENT, to hang on it. She laid in crates of giant shrimp shish kebabs and wheels of imported cheese and fifty pounds of French pâté with peppercorn crust and cases of French champagne. She talked the Sons of Knute into lending her two of their giant duck decoys, 18-foot fiberglass numbers in which the hunter lay on his back inside the duck and pedaled the drive shaft that turned the propeller as he looked out through a periscope in the duck’s neck, scanning the skies for incoming ducks, and when they came in for a landing, the hunter sprang up and threw open a trapdoor in the tail of the duck and blasted away from there. The Ingqvist twins would pedal the ducks, following the pontoon boat, and strew flower blossoms out the ducks’ tails. And after the vows were said aboard the Agnes D, Debbie’s ex-boyfriend Craig would descend in his hot-air balloon and pick up Brent and Debbie and take them away—free! Drifting with the wind! Craig was her classmate who’d persuaded her to take the philosophy course and now he taught geometry in St. Paul and flew hot-air balloons.
• • •
It was going to be a beautiful wedding and then on Wednesday it all collapsed. Brent arrived in a bad mood, having dropped his cell phone in the urinal at the airport. He had left his favorite dark glasses on the plane and then the liquor store in St. Cloud didn’t have his brand of gin, Bombay, and as the limo drove him along Main Street, past the Mercantile and the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, he felt like a door was slamming shut and he was going to start living the wrong life. When he heard about Craig the ex and the hot-air balloon, he told Debbie, “That’s it. This is not me. Let’s not take this any further.” She called him an asshole and ordered him out of town.
“Whatever,” he said.
So the wedding was off.
Debbie left her parents with the champagne, the pâté, the cheese, the giant shish kebabs, and headed back to California. The Detmers, after a night of confusion and dismay, called up Pastor Ingqvist and donated the whole kit and caboodle to the Lutheran church, which—to him—felt like God working in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Lake Wobegon Lutheran was responsible for entertaining a group of twenty-four Lutheran pastors from Denmark on Saturday and he had just remembered it on Tuesday night, that he’d need to put together some sort of elegant lunch for Saturday, and here was the solution to his problem, dropped in his lap.
The Danes were on a two-week tour of the United States, having been sent over by the Danish church because they had signed a profession of doubt as to the divinity of Jesus—so they had been packed off on a junket to America for a cooling-off period.
Barbara had got wind of the Detmer nuptial cancellation but she knew nothing about the arrival of twenty-four Danes. She had located Raoul in Minneapolis and he was on his way, and then she had a sudden thought that maybe they should postpone the memorial until after dark. “We could just row her out at midnight and drop her over the gunwales,” she said to Kyle. “Why do we need to do it from a great height?”
He shook his head. He’d gone to a lot of trouble: Why back out now? Grandma had a flair for drama, she went in for shooting off rockets at midnight on Christmas Eve. You sang “Deck the Halls” and lit the fuses and a trail of sparks whooshed into the winter sky. Birthdays were big, large packages with bows and ribbons, stripey hats, horns blatting, and “Happy Birthday” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and the Minnesota Rouser, everybody marching around the table banging on pans and then the birthday boy and Grandma hooked little fingers and farted for good luck. Grandma was no wilting lily.
“The ladies in the Bon Marche are going to feast on this,” said Barbara. “They’ll be cackling for a week.”
“So let ’em cackle. Who cares?” he said.
Aunt Flo called to ask what time the service would begin. “It’s not a service,” said Barbara. “Mother didn’t want one, remember? Anyway, we hope to get going around eleven.” And then she said, “We’d love to see you and Al there.” Poor Flo was a changed woman. The news of Evelyn’s secret romance with Raoul had humbled her. The bossy quarrelsome Flo who relished a good sharp retort, the Flo who could bring you to tears—that battle-axe Flo had been replaced by a sweet Flo who dropped by on Friday with a basket of peanut-butter cookies. She handed it to Barbara, who said, “Come in.” “I can’t,” said Flo, and then she did. And once she got inside, she melted into tears. She sat on the couch and bawled and Barbara held her in her arms and after ten minutes, Flo got up and said, “Thank you,” and left.
Raoul arrived in town around 9 a.m. Dorothy saw the maroon Pontiac pull up in front of the Chatterbox and the old man in mirror shades climb out. He wore yellow plaid pants and lizard-green shoes and a sportcoat that looked as if it had been made from the skins of a thousand rainbow trout. It had a liquid glitter to it that caught the eye. Below it was a Hawaiian shirt, tails out. Pink hibiscus. Certainly festive. He took off the mirror shades and put on blue-tinted glasses. He was smoking a small cigar and carried a boom box that was quietly playing, an opera tenor singing love songs in Italian.
• • •
The bus carrying the Danish clergy rolled up in front of the Chatterbox Café at eleven a.m. and the door opened and up stepped a sandy-haired man in T-shirt and jeans. The T-shirt said “Lutherans: It could be worse.”
“I’m David Ingqvist,” he said. He climbed aboard the bus and said something to them in Danish that made them all laugh.
And then a parade of people came marching around the corner, led by a gaunt man in a Viking helmet with horns and wearing a cape and a silken sash with blue fringe, followed by a woman in a blue robe carrying a green bowling ball, a man in a sparkly sportcoat, a young man in red swim briefs and flip-flops carrying an enormous red parasail, a young woman playing Dvořák’s “Going Home” on the trombone, and an old coot waving a couple of sparklers. Plus a gaggle of others, most of them elderly, including an old lady in a purple pantsuit, wearing a jet-black wig and scratching her butt. They crossed Main Street and disappeared behind a brick building with manikins in the window.
The Danes came trooping off the bus, all twenty-four, and Pastor Ingqvist led them across the street and down the lake bank to the pontoon boat, the Agnes D, with a sign hanging from the rail, Celebration of Commitment. Two dozen bottles of Moët champagne sat in three big washtubs full of chipped ice, and smoke rose from the barbecue in the stern, where giant shrimp shish kebabs were grilling. Wheels of cheese and tubs of pâté and a basket of baguettes sat on a white cloth on a table along the port side.
“Lunch aboard ship!” he cried. “Frokost paa skibben.” Their eyes brightened. They moved slowly down the dock toward the boat.
“I am attending a memorial service for an old parishioner at noon,” he said, “so help yourselves, enjoy the champagne, take it easy, and I’ll be back and we’ll go for a cruise.”
The boat, he noted as the Danes trooped aboard, was riding rather low in the water, but there was no time to worry about that.
• • •
The Evelyn memorial troupe had gathered at the other end of the lake. The bowling ball was cradled in Barbara’s left arm, a chain attached to it. Raoul had the boom box in hand, and Aunt Flo and Uncle Al stood by, silent, dabbing at their eyes, Flo in dark glasses for possibly the first time in her entire life. Enormous wraparound goggles that made her look extraterrestrial. They stood together in tall grass at the edge of the rocky beach and looked across Lower Lake Wobegon toward Duane in his silver runabout, the motor idling, emitting blue smoke, his pop-bottle glasses shadowed by the great brim of his yachtman’s cap. Kyle adjusted the trapeze of the great parasail, which Mr. Hoppe, in his Viking outfit, and Wally of the Sidetrack were holding gingerly by the tips of the wing. Kyle had set the waterskis in the water. He wore a fluorescent green Velcro belt around which he would wind the chain that was fastened to the setscrew he had drilled into the bowling ball. He explained that he was making last-minute adjustments to guard against a sudden nosedive.
“Darling,” said Barbara, “Grandma would be horrified if you hurt yourself doing this, you know that. She didn’t specify that she be flown, honey.” He looked rather fragile in his red swim briefs, her pale slender dappled son with the light down on his arms and legs shining in the sun, sliding the aluminum trapeze assembly a few inches aft on the bracing struts. “Shouldn’t you be wearing a life jacket?”
“I’ll be harnessed in. Don’t worry about it.”
• • •
A quarter-mile away, the Danes were on their third glass of champagne, which was lovely with the Camembert and the Raclette and the lovely pâté. Half of them stood on the Agnes D and the others on the dock, studying the little town spread out on the slope, the high brick bell tower of the Catholic church, the lesser wood steeple of the Lutheran, the blue and brown and green roofs of houses. “Why is there so little color in America?” cried one. “Is there a fear of color?” “A fear of art and culture, if you ask me,” said another.
And then a mangy yellowish Labrador came walking along the shore. The dog stank to high heaven. You could almost see stink waves rising from his scraggly bur-infested fur. He was carrying a dead fish in his mouth and it appeared to have been dead for a long time. The head hung by a thread and then fell off as the dog strolled down to the dock and headed for the Danes.
The dog was deaf and practically blind. He had a lot on his mind, having been to the town dump and foraged there and found nothing, an old mattress, some rope, gunnysacks of junk from the garages of dead farmers. He had picked through it all and found nothing worthwhile. He was hungry. His name was Bruno and he was eighteen years old and a legend in the town. As a pup, he had caught a two-pound walleye while wading in the shallows and he had wrestled it to shore and hauled it to Inga, his owner. He carried the fish by its tail, four blocks to Inga’s front porch, set it down, and barked. She made a big fuss over him. His picture was in the paper. She cooked the fish for him and let him sleep on the couch. This imprinted him with his mission in life, to catch big fish. He had been wading in the shallows ever since and had not matched his early success. The only fish he brought home were ones who lay on the beach or floated on the water. Inga turned against him, and so did everyone else in town. “Get the hell out of here, Bruno!” people yelled whenever they saw him. He was rejected on every hand, like an old drunk, on account of his rank odor of rot and mildew and algae, but he persisted. Half his teeth were gone, his eyes were rheumy, his ears leaked pus, but the dog kept fishing, and now he made his way toward these interesting men who smelled fresh to him, who had never rejected him, hoping to find a pat on the head, a scratch on the belly.
The Danes smelled him right away and turned and stiffened. One of them shouted at the dog in Danish, which didn’t impress him. One of them waved a giant shish kebab at the dog but that only piqued his interest. As he approached the boat, the Danes on the dock, cornered, decided to go aboard, all of them, in a big rush, and to cast off the lines and start up the motor.
The boat almost sank under their weight. Water glittered on the deck and a few pastors cried out a warning and then one succeeded in starting the motor and revved it up and away went the Agnes D, its deck awash but making slow progress. The Danes crowded in tight in the middle, so as not to push the bow any lower or to bump into the barbecue in the stern, the red coals glowing under the giant shrimp shish kebabs. It looked like twenty-four men walking on water, carrying an awning and towing a barbecue.
• • •
At the lower end of the lake, Kyle had attached the bowling ball to himself, wrapping the chain around the green Velcro belt, and Duane had thrown the towrope out of the stern of the runabout and the show was about to start. For a moment, Barbara considered making a speech—Mother was a free-thinker, it’s as simple as that. There is no God, we are free agents, each one of us, and if you want to go around with a big knapsack of guilt on your back like a person in a cartoon, okay, but I choose to be free, just as my mother, in a lucid moment, wanted you to know that she is free. But she did not.
“Okay, Grandma,” said Kyle, “let’s get the show on the road.”
He waded gingerly into the water, on the sharp rocks, harnessed to the trapeze, the great parasail above him, and he staggered a couple times, pushing the skis ahead of him with his feet and then his knees until he was in water up to his thighs. He sat down and slipped his feet, first the left, then the right, into the foot holsters. Then Duane gunned the motor and the towrope went taut and Kyle rose up on the water and skied over the waves, his knees bent, the towbar lashed to the trapeze. The little crowd watched the slender figure in the red swim briefs go skimming across the water. As the boat made its turn, Kyle appeared to adjust the trapeze, the towbar clamped to it, as the bowling ball swung between his knees, and Barbara pulled out her camera. Raoul had a videocam out. “Here he comes!” said Raoul. But something was wrong—Kyle wasn’t lifting off the water. Mr. Hoppe waved his arm in a circle to tell Duane to pick up speed. “He must’ve adjusted the trapeze wrong,” said Barbara.
Then the speedboat swerved, and they saw why—two giant fiberglass ducks were racing across the water, strewing pink flower petals from their butts. There were people inside, pedaling, propelling them crookedly, slewing around.
The speedboat was racing due north when it swerved again. The Agnes D had just come into view from behind the point, its deck crowded with men in pale blue and green and violet shirts and pants, a trail of black smoke rising from the barbecue. The men on deck were singing lustily what sounded like a hymn to alcohol, their arms linked, the boat riding extremely low in the water—but that troubled them not at all, they were brothers united by champagne. Loping along the shore, plunging through bushes and tall weeds, came Bruno the fishing dog, stink waves rising, a dead fish in his mouth. The Agnes D’s prow was a couple inches above water and the engine was almost submerged. It gave off a sucking and sobbing sound. Duane cut sharply to the left to avoid the pontoon boat and at that moment Kyle lost his balance, the bowling ball between his legs swung to the right and he fell, still harnessed to the trapeze—Barbara cried out, “Jesus Christ”—the skis flew off him and he disappeared under the parasail, which came skimming over the waves with him in the harness, dragged at high speed underwater. They could see his pale body racing submerged through the water—“Stop! Stop!” Barbara cried—and then they saw his red swimsuit and the Velcro belt and the green bowling ball, all three, torn from his body by the sheer force of the water—and then the parasail lifted into the air, carrying Kyle aloft. He hung from the trapeze, entangled in the towrope, stark naked, his legs pedaling, fifty feet in the air, and that blind idiot Duane at the controls cranked the speedboat directly in front of the pontoon boat, whose drunken crew stopped singing now and clutched the rails as the Agnes D pitched violently left to right in the speedboat’s wake. The Danes would’ve hung on except for the barbecue tipping over—hundreds of red-hot coals came skittering across the deck like a manifestation from the book of Revelation and over the rails the pastors dove. Twenty-four manly forms belly-flopped in the water—only five feet deep, thankfully—as the boat righted itself and plowed ahead toward the shore. Duane steered around the ducks, who had split up, and, still planing at high speed, he roared past the mourners and the naked young man flew by, arms spread, harness around his waist, high in the air, a big pink bird.
It appeared to Barbara that something about flying had excited her son—yes indeed that was most certainly true. Yes, that was certainly true—Flo and Al were waving and shouting at Duane to stop, meanwhile Raoul in his distress had pressed the PLAY button and Andy Williams sang “Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday” as the naked young man flew in the clear blue sky and the parasail banked and now a hot-air balloon came drifting at low altitude over the tree line.
“Oh dear God,” said Barbara.
It was blue and green, silver and gold, a magnificent silken bag from which hung a golden wicker basket and the kerosene burner on a frame above it, a man in a white naval outfit and officer’s cap, his hand on the rope that pulled the switch that fired the burner, scanning the water below for the wedding couple he was to scoop up and carry away, descending, descending. The naked Kyle spotted the balloon as Duane made the turn and the parasail appeared to be on a collision course with the balloon—Kyle let out a high-pitched yelp, but Duane was busy steering around the pastors floundering in the water and the giant ducks paddling in circles and the crewless pontoon boat.
Suddenly, there came a monstrous roar and a mighty flame burst from the burner of the balloon, the pilot attempting to ascend, but alas he overshot with the throttle and the flame ignited the bag, burned a hole through the top of it, and the rigging caught on fire, all in a few seconds, as the naked young man flew on, towed by the crazed Duane, and the ropes parted. The basket and burner and pilot dropped into the water with a great ker-shroommm—big pieces of burning silk drifted in the air like fiery sails and the naked boy heading straight toward them threw his weight to the left and the parasail banked and missed the flaming silk by inches—a little burst of dark cloud appeared where he emptied his bowels—and flew on.
The two giant ducks came aground nearby. The Danes came straggling out of the water—one of them, stepping on a chain, fetched up the bowling ball and brought it to shore, where Raoul took it in his arms, weeping, Andy Williams still singing about the river and the huckleberry friends—and finally Duane saw his friend, naked, flying helpless, and he made a beeline for shore. He promptly caught the edge of the sandbar and ran aground, shearing the pin, and the towrope snapped, and the naked man glided overhead on his parasail. He glided over the mourners, a great shadow passing on the ground, and cleared the spruce trees behind them, and set down in the field beyond, where Mr. Hansen had his raspberry bushes. He yelped twice and then was silent.
Al turned to go to the rescue, but Barbara put a hand on his arm and said, “Let him be. Kyle likes to do things himself.” She looked out at the lake strewn with wreckage and dotted with survivors and thought that it was the most exciting day she had spent in years. She was exhilarated. Most memorial services she’d ever attended were quiet sodden affairs and Mother’s was nothing but gangbusters. Pastor Ingqvist was hauling these foreign men out of the water slopping and dripping and muttering things in their singsong guttural tongue and Duane waded to shore pulling his speedboat behind him saying that he wished people would watch where they were going for Chrissake and the Ingqvist twins climbed out of the giant duck decoys and explained that Debbie paid them $25 apiece to do it and what were they supposed to do with these ducks now? And the man in the white sailor suit towed his basket and burner up on the rocks and said that whoever had planned this wedding had done a pretty lousy job of it and he regretted ever having agreed to be in it. It would be the last favor he would ever do for anybody, that was for sure.
The chaos was marvelous, Barbara thought.
“Are you all right?” It was Pastor Ingqvist, his hand on her elbow.
“Never been better in my life,” said Barbara.