The north end of Lake Wobegon is where the town lies, the swimming beach, Al’s Baits, the fancy summer people’s houses. The south end is smaller, rockier, weedier, less visited, and so nobody has ever removed the skeleton of the wing from Wilbur Scott’s plane, the one that he flew nonstop the length of the Mississippi River in 1952. He was a dairy farmer who was looking to do something remarkable in his life and the nonstop flight was going to be his big moment and then he crashed the plane when he fired a signal rocket over Bemidji and shot off one of his struts. They gave the wreckage to his wife and she dumped it by the lake, a violation of the dumping law, but she was a grieving widow so nobody bothered her about it. And it was the south end of the lake, after all.
The Evelyn Memorial troupe stood a little north of the abandoned wing. The bowling ball was cradled in Barbara’s left arm, a chain attached to it. Muffy stood to her left, between her and Raoul, the boom box in hand, and Bennett and Roger to her right, and then Aunt Flo and Uncle Al, silent, dabbing at their eyes, trying to keep composed, Flo in dark glasses for possibly the first time in her entire life. Enormous wraparound goggles that made her look extraterrestrial. The trombonist was her daughter Karleen who had offered to play “Beyond The Sunset.” They stood together in tall grass at the edge of the rocky beach and looking across Lower Lake Wobegon toward the Indian mounds and the marsh where the loon couple lived. Myrtle Krebsbach fussed about the low turnout. “I know fifty people who’d be here in a minute if they knew this was going on,” she said. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you shoulda told me, I’d’ve rounded them up.”
“It’s perfectly okay,” said Barbara. “It’s not a contest.”
“I would’ve thought the Bunsens’d be here, but some people think they’re too good to breathe the same air as the rest of us.”
“They’re out of town, dear. They went to Houston to help out their son who broke his leg on the basement stairs.”
“Well, it’s always something, isn’t it.” Myrtle was experiencing shooting pains in her left leg. “It feels like it’s on fire,” she said. “I may have to call Florian to get the shotgun and put me out of my misery. And he’d do it too.”
Duane sat at the wheel of his silver runabout, the motor idling, emitting blue smoke, his pop-bottle glasses shadowed by the great brim of his yachtman’s cap, and 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.”
There were twenty-four of them there, including six ladies from the Ladies Circle who looked faintly horrified but had come out of true loyalty. And then Pastor Ingqvist arrived. He nodded at Barbara and she nodded back. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, as if about to launch into prayer.
“Do either of you care to say anything?” she whispered to her brothers. Roger shook his head and looked away. Bennett nodded yes. “Would it be out of place for me to say a word?” said Raoul. Muffy put an arm around Barbara and whispered, “I love Grandma so much. She takes me for ice cream and we go swimming but I don’t swim because there are fish in the lake. And there are dogs. I don’t like dogs. I like some dogs. I swim in a pool. Wednesday and Saturday. I do the backstroke and the butterfly.”
*
A quarter-mile away, the Danes were on their second or third glass of champagne which they agreed was as good as any they had tasted. A little warm, perhaps, and the plastic glasses were not so charming, but it was lovely with the Camembert and the Raclette and the blue cheese and the lovely paté. 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.
Fred sat under his tree, trying to shut out their jabbering and then the word “puritanisk” rang out, which he heard before on the bus. Several times. Puritanical. An obsession of theirs. Evidently they’d read The Scarlet Letter once and it summed up America for them, that and Death of a Salesman and “The Waste Land.” They probably thought Joe McCarthy was still in the US Senate. He wished he could piss in their champagne. What jerks. He vowed never to drink Carlsberg or purchase Lego toys. On the other hand, they were drinking steadily and that meant he might be able to shovel them on the bus and get back home early. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed his girlfriend Helen in the Cities to tell her. When he was in college, he borrowed his uncle’s pontoon boat on Lake Minnetonka and invited a girl he had a huge crush on to come for a sunset cruise and out on the lake he dove from the boat and surfaced with a huge erection, a ball-peen hammer between his legs, thinking, How am I going to climb aboard? And then he noticed oil leaking from the outboard. He unsnapped the cowling to adjust the oil flow and suddenly the engine started up with a roar and the pontoon went racing away with the steering cranked to port and it came around and charged him like a huge bull, and she was sobbing for somebody to please please stop this and he grabbed hold of the pontoon as it came by and hoisted himself aboard and got the boat straightened out and she clung to him, weeping, and there he was, naked, erect, and a grateful woman in his arms, and that was when the boat skewed into the swimming area and got tangled in the floats, and a powerful beam swung out from the beach and caught the two of them in its glare and ten minutes later the deputy had written him a ticket for public lewdness and that was when he decided to go into the ministry.
A mangy yellowish Labrador came walking past him along the shore. The dog stank to high heaven. You could almost see stink waves rising from his scraggly burr-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. Good for you, thought Fred. Go get ’em.
A man standing at the upstairs window of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery saw the dog and whistled to him and the dog didn’t notice. 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 some 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.
Fred was gratified to see the boat almost sink under the weight of twenty-four Danish pastors. 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 crowding 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. Fred thought that this might make a good story for a sermon someday. It looked like twenty-four men walking on water, carrying an awning, and towing a barbecue. The sermon would be about pride and how we cannot make ourselves more buoyant simply by wishing it so. He got up and walked along the shore so as not to miss anything.
“Who’s on the boat?” yelled the man in the window.
“They know exactly what they’re doing,” yelled Fred. “They’re Danish, after all. They’re excellent sailors.”
At the lower end of the lake, Pastor Ingqvist stood ready to say a prayer—either a Christian one or an all-purpose one addressed to the Spirit of Love and suitable for mixed audiences—or to bless the bowling ball or to lead them in the singing of “Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbaya,” but Barbara wasn’t looking his way. She was gesturing for her brother Bennett to step forward and face the group. 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.
“My mother was a woman of great kindness who knew how to pay attention,” said Bennett, reading from an index card in his hand and stopped, trying to decipher his own handwriting. Flies buzzed in the air and the water lapped gently on the stones. The motor rumbled. “She went through life tuned in to everything around her and I feel, as perhaps you do too, that she is still tuned in to us, but from another place, and perhaps at a deeper level.” (Oh get off it, thought Barbara.) “I’ll always remember Mother taking me downtown to line up for the Living Flag on the Fourth of July. There was a man up on the roof yelling and trying to get everyone organized into red stripes and white stripes—a stripe was about a hundred feet long, three people abreast wearing red or white hats—and Mother and I always wore blue hats so we could stand in the corner of the flag and hold the big sparklers that made the stars. And when the whole flag was formed and everyone was holding still for the picture, Mother said to me, ‘I can hear them breathing, can you?’ And I could.” He stopped again, and turned the card over. The other side was blank. He said, “I meant to finish writing this, and I forgot to and now I forget what the point of it was, but anyway it’s what I remember about Mother.” And then he stepped back into line and Raoul stepped forward and faced them. “I was a friend of Evelyn’s from our days in nurses’ training,” he said. “Nineteen forty-one. A big year in our country. I loved her then, and I was lucky enough to reunite with her late in our lives. So I knew her as a young woman and as a mature woman, and she was the same at 82 as she was at 21. She was the same lively and curious and fun-loving person that she always had been. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see a person clearly”—he looked around in a meaningful way—“and I found her delightful.” He looked at the green ball hanging from Kyle’s chest. “You were a delight, old girl,” he whispered. “There will never be another like you. Not for me.” He choked on these words and stepped back into line. For a second or two, Barbara considered making a speech of her own—Mother was a freethinker, 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 rocks 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 her left leg would not step forward. She leaned slightly but her foot wouldn’t move. She turned to Muffy and put her arms around her. “If I cry, don’t get scared, okay, baby?” Muffy nodded. She was looking straight ahead, standing straight as a soldier, her hands pressed together in prayer.
“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, and 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 and Roger said, “Mother would have loved this.” 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—he 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 Roger.
And then the speedboat swerved, and they saw why—two giant fiberglass ducks were racing across the water, strewing pink flower petals from their butts—Was the Detmer wedding now on again? 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, champagne can do that to you. Loping along the shore, plunging through bushes and tall weeds, came the young theologian Fred, followed by Bruno the fishing dog; stink waves rising, a dead fish in his mouth, he was wheezing. 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 para-sail 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, clutching Muffy—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. Oh God have mercy. Oh Jesus have mercy. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” said Muffy. Kyle hung from the trapeze, entangled in the towrope, stark naked, his legs pedalling, fifty feet in the air, and that blind idiot Duane at the controls with his eyes on the pontoon boat and its drunken crew and the ducks who had turned and headed north. The gap was narrowing and he cranked the speedboat directly in front of the pontoon boat whose 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 four 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.
It appeared to Barbara that something about flying had excited her son—yes indeed that was most certainly true. Yes, that was certainly true—the Ladies Circle ladies were studying the stones at their feet as if on a field trip. Pastor Ingqvist was deep in thought. Phrases of old sermons ran through his head—our earthly journey—incorruptible from the corruptible—dust from whence we have come—the Lord’s mercy is measureless. And then he saw the naked young man fly by, arms spread, harness around his waist, high in the air, a large pink bird. Oh Absalom, my Absalom—
“Oh Jesus God, have mercy,” said Barbara, and Muffy said, “on us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Mr. Hoppe and Roger were waving and shouting at Duane to stop. Raoul in his distress at seeing the bowling ball containing Evelyn sink below the waves 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 startling, as if a barn had come floating into view. “You hired a balloon too?” said Raoul. “Why didn’t we have him drop Evelyn off?”
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 men floundering in the water and the giant ducks paddling in circles and the crewless pontoon boat. He had more than enough to contend with!
“God have mercy, Jesus have mercy,” cried Barbara. “Jesus have mercy,” said Muffy, her hands pressed together, her eyes shut tight.
Fred the theologian had now joined the group of mourners. Mr. Hoppe smelled the dog and picked up a stone and pegged it at him and hit him in the hindquarters. “Beat it!” he yelled. Fred was thrilled by the sight of the Danes floundering in the water, trying to escape from the 18-foot fiberglass ducks, which seemed to be pursuing one after another of them. He was delighted. It spoke to his heart. They had slandered America and gotten drunk on champagne and fled from an old dog and now they were paying the piper.
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, burnt a hole through the tip 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-shroom-mm—big pieces of burning silk drifted in the air like fiery sails and the naked boy heading straight toward them and a fiery death—“Oh God, no,” cried Barbara—and Kyle flying onward 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. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God be praised.
Roger was in the water now up to his knees, yelling at Duane to stop, goddamn it, stop the boat!! The two giant ducks came aground nearby grinding up on the rocks. The Danes were 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 Wiliams still singing about the river and the huckleberry friends—and finally Roger got Duane’s attention. The blind fool looked up and behind him, where any pilot pulling a parasail should have been focused all along, and 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 lifted the stern slightly, then snapped, and the naked man glided overhead on his parasail. Oh God have mercy. God forgive us. 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.
Bennett turned to go to the rescue, and 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 Swanson 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 agreeing to be in it. It would be the last favor he would ever do for anybody, that was for sure.
“Debbie went back to California,” said Pastor Ingqvist. “The wedding got cancelled.”
“Why isn’t she here? Why didn’t she tell me? Why couldn’t there have been a little warning?” He was distraught. “Look at me,” he said. “I’m all wet, the balloon is ruined, probably the burner too.”
Pastor shrugged. People forget. Especially in summer. Happens all the time.
The chaos was marvelous, Barbara thought. Her arm was around Muffy who didn’t get scared when the pontoon tipped or when the balloon caught on fire: her eyes were still closed. “It’s okay, baby. Everybody’s okay. The dog is gone.” Muffy said, “I like some dogs but not that dog.” She gripped Barbara’s hand. The Danes sloshed around, the giant ducks bumped against the rocky shoreline, Duane stood in the water with his boat and bitched that his eyes hurt and asked Roger to help lift it out of the water for him, the balloonist stamped his foot (Goddamn!), the ladies of the Circle huddled like buffalo in a snowstorm, Myrtle jabbering at them about how Catholics don’t go in for cremation for this very reason goddammit, Raoul was trying to repair the plaster cap that held the ashes in the bowling ball which had jarred loose when it landed in the drink. He knelt with the ball in his arms, tamping down the ashes. “I’ve got you, my darling,” he said. “You’re all right now.”
And the others—Paul and Bennett, Ruby, Harold, Bud, Mr. and Mrs. Berge—standing in place, calm, looking as if a balloon-parasail-pontoon-decoy disaster was what they had been expecting all along and now it was over and they were waiting to see what might come next.
“Are you all right?” It was Pastor Ingqvist, his hand on her elbow. “Never been better in my life,” said Barbara.