3

GOD’S MISTAKE

Atheistic pronouncements are a rare phenomenon in Lake Wobegon, rare as earthquakes or waterspouts, though of course the Norwegian bachelor farmers maintain their unbelief and everyone else has had their doubts, especially in the month of March, but Clint’s outburst following Darlene’s unbosoming followed by Liz’s toilet seat story were talked about left and right, and when Lenny Olsson called up from Dallas, her mother, Ingrid, bent her ear with the news of strange events, and Lenny never got to talk about what she had called to say, which was that she’d decided to divorce Greg and quit her job in public health and drive north. She got her SUV lubed and the oil changed. She needed time to think things through.

Lenny’s birth name was Elaine, and she graduated from LWHS in 1992 and decided she wasn’t an Elaine but an Elena. She became a SPASM child (Simply Pray And Send Money) and enrolled in drama school in New York, but nobody from Minnesota ever did well in theater, theatricality goes against our nature, so she woke up, smelled the coffee, got into Athena College, tried philosophy, then took a biology course, which started her down the road to epidemiology, and, instead of sensational, she settled for smart. She was so smart and capable, you’d never imagine her life falling apart like it did, but Greg had gotten into the clutches of a folksinger whom Lenny hired to sing at his 50th birthday party, and she sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and suddenly he wanted to be in her circle and went on the road with her and Lenny had the locks changed and called a lawyer. When Ingrid regaled her with the news of town, Lenny said, “This sounds to me like a virus, a food-borne infection, like Mad Cow disease. People ate beef containing brain tissue infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and they suffered personality changes as a result. Is there something going on with unpasteurized dairy products?”

And half an hour later she called back and said, “I googled ‘inappropriate’ and ‘epidemic’ and got a magazine story about Icelandic folk dancers who dropped their pants during bandstand dances, and the answer was a rancid cheese called Landsman cheese. Unpasteurized. Ring a bell?”

It rang a big bell. Hilmar Bakken. No need for Google. You say the word “cheese” in Lake Wobegon and people say, “Hilmar.” He’s made a religion of it. Cheese made the way it used to be made when Pasteur was but a child at his mother’s unpasteurized breast.

Lenny is an epidemiologist, she knows her onions, and when Ingrid spread the word and said, “Lenny says it’s probably a food epidemic, maybe cheese,” it became authoritative. And people started to use the word “epidemic” rather than “This thing going on.”

There was no mention of the epidemic in the Herald Star that week nor news of large-scale farm sales to a billionaire in Nashville, though people were talking about it. The front-page story was GROWING SEASON WELL AHEAD OF LAST YEAR, SAYS COUNTY AG AGENT along with the school lunch menu and the town council minutes with several requests for zoning variances, and how to liven up your dinner table with colorful centerpieces made from egg cartons, and UNBEATEN WHIPPETS TROUNCE BARDS, 6-ZIP, about Ernie the old knuckleballer who had developed a screwball that bewildered everybody. He went into a corkscrew windup, ducked his head, turning slowly as if he forgot something and then lunged off-balance, and sidearm came the pitch and it rose and dropped and batters waved the wood helplessly, and the Whippets’ catcher, Dutch Pfleiderscheidt, used a catcher’s mitt the size of a fruit basket. Ernie was old and had back pain, and somehow his pain put extra backspin on the ball and made him invincible. He didn’t tell anyone, but a pregame cheese sandwich gave him feelings of invincibility and when you feel it, you’re halfway there.

Barbara Ann Bunsen heard about the epidemic and came home to check on her elderly parents, Clarence and Arlene. Her husband, Bill, didn’t come; he gets exhausted from dinner table conversation about people he doesn’t know, like coming into a class without having read the text. Clarence and Arlene pooh-poohed the epidemic idea, said, “It’s a whole lot of hoo-hah about nothing. Darlene worked herself into a state of collapse, and Pastor Liz had a glass of wine before church that morning and she gets high on a tablespoon, and your uncle Clint is impressed by books he doesn’t understand, so it’s all smoke and no fire.” Barbara Ann felt reassured and went jogging around the block, and the neighbor Florence who had never said more than “Hello” to her before stopped her and said, “I see you out here running and I understand that longevity is your goal and good for you, but what is the point of longevity if not to become a better person, and let me tell you, I look at your kids and I think you could spend less time in personal exercise and more time teaching them some basic principles such as respect for other people. You may be hot stuff in the city, but we have other standards here. I guess you look on your kids as God’s gift to creation, but other people see two little snots who are cruising for a bruising. A word to the wise. Have a nice day.” Barbara Ann was stunned. Arlene called her neighbor on the phone and said, “You can’t talk to my daughter that way,” and Florence had no idea what she was talking about. No idea.

One day, Cliff, the former owner of The Mercantile, came back from Minneapolis where he’d relocated after The Mercantile had been forced out of business by Amazon, and he sold the building to the county, which rehabbed it as senior citizen housing, 12 units, very nice if you like small rooms with very high ceilings. He told Irene, “I have to talk to you about something personal.” They’d been friends since grade school. She invited him over for lunch. He looked good. His hair, which he’d been shaping for years with hair spray, now looked fairly natural. He was using the same facial bronzer but not as heavily, and his moisturizer made him look years younger, maybe three or four.

“I have to confide in you,” he said. “You know I was very close to my mother.” Irene nodded. “She was my best buddy, I knew I could always count on her. After she died, I wore some of her clothes sometimes to make myself feel better. Not her girly clothes but her bathrobe and her pajamas. I suppose some might think it strange, but it’s nobody’s beeswax, is it. But I’m 78 years old, and I have a secret and I’d like someone in Lake Wobegon to know it. I want to tell it to you.”

“Of course,” she said.

He said, “I think I’m gay.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Congratulations.”

He said, “I’ve wondered about it for a long time, and I think I am. I like nice things. I like to dress up and go to shows. I love Barbra Streisand. I don’t have a boyfriend and don’t know if I want one, but anyway, I feel good about myself. Finally. And in Minneapolis, nobody calls me Goldilocks.”

She said, “Well, I’ve always loved you and I always will and you know that.” He said, “Yes, I know.” She asked him if he’d been eating cheese from Bakken’s farm, and he said no, he’d given up cheese years ago. “Good,” she said. “It carries a dangerous virus.”

Clint was reading up on atheism and appreciating the liberty that comes with dissent as compared to the burden of upholding orthodoxy. Nietzsche said, “Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man?” Brilliant. Delicious. I’m tired of being good, he thought. I’ve been lying on my back all my life looking up at Ford transmissions and coaching middle school basketball and grocery shopping for shut-ins. Let someone else do it, I did my share. Napoleon said, “The main use of religion is to keep the common people from murdering the rich.” So there was more to Napoleon than the hand stuck in the jacket. Deism offered people the luxury of self-righteousness while denying them the necessity of self-reliance. Look at the Women’s Circle, which enjoyed lectures on the plight of immigrant workers, African-American artists, Haitian children, Iraqi Christian women, endangered species, the lack of capable violin teachers on Indian reservations, but when it came to concrete action, never did the rubber hit the road. Look at Donnie Tollerud, who suffers from Winter Attitude Disorder and belongs to a Christian WAD group, and even so he finds it hard to get out of bed and then when spring comes, he finds social interaction difficult. He needs certain nutrients that are found in beer, and he wears a button that says, PLEASE UNDERSTAND I AM DOING MY BEST. People with his illness need to live in Florida, but there would not be a support system for him there to respect him and not judge or ridicule, so he limps along, and the Women’s Circle prays for him weekly, and what the young man needs is less sympathy and a good kick in the ass.

Back in early March, soon after the Men’s Fellowship incident, Clint had a near-death experience when he was out for a walk by the lake with his dog, Fred, and saw a money clip on the ice about 50 feet from shore, and he tiptoed out and picked it up—there were five one-dollar bills in it—and Fred whined and tried to turn back and now Clint could feel the ice was rather spongy here, he took two steps toward shore, and his feet sank into the ice, and the dog looked up at him and Clint could see he was envisioning Clint’s death, the loss of his meal ticket. Clint tried to stand lightly on the ice. His own death, happening before his eyes. He thought, What a nitwit. Your dog is a genius compared to you. He was wearing a heavy down jacket and if he went into the water it’d gain about a hundred pounds and he’d drown. He thought of crying for help, but in his state of levitation, the air he’d inhale might be enough to break the ice. It was Irene’s fault. He’d had an argument with her when he left the house. She said, “What’s with the jacket? It’s 42 degrees out.” But her contemptuous tone of voice obligated him to wear the damn jacket, which made her in a way responsible for his death, but of course after he died, she’d tell everybody, I told him, I tried to tell him. She’d be sad, but she was no martyr, she’d get over it. She’d sell his collection of Dan Brown first editions, his collection of every LP James Burton plays guitar on, sell the house, move to the high-rise in Fort Lauderdale where her sister Marlene lives, take up golf, find a guy who is happy to teach her to putt, stand behind her, arms around her, hands on her hands, and she’d tell him about the late Clint who died when he went through the ice and this Florida guy would laugh his big plaid ass off. Her infidelity pissed Clint off, and he strode across the ice and on his next-to-last stride he went through the ice, but the water was only two feet deep and he splashed to shore and walked home in a cold fury, but it was far enough to home that he got calmed down. He strode into the house and plopped down in the kitchen and said, “So? You miss me?” She said, “How come your pants are wet?” He said, “That dumb-ass dog ran out on the ice and I had to go out and get him. Thought I was going to go through the ice and drown, but I was lucky. What do you say we go upstairs and take a nap?” And he winked. “Oh, for mercy sake,” she said, “I just took a shower and got dressed, you mean I have to get undressed?” But she followed him upstairs, complaining softly, and he kissed her neck about 20 times and her bare shoulders and then descended slowly from there and they got into bed and then she didn’t complain any more. They were in bed for an hour or so of sweet adolescence, and then he went downstairs naked and poured two glasses of Pinot Noir and took them back up to bed, and they lay together and talked. She said, “I’ll never understand you.” “Good,” he said. She said, “Now that you’re an atheist, we’re having sex and drinking wine, and it’s not even 11 a.m. What comes next?”

“Let’s sell the house and move to Fort Lauderdale,” he said.

She smiled. “You mean it?” she said.

“I want to take up golf.” Actually, he wanted to find the guy who’d likely have married her and take him out fishing and throw him overboard in shark-infested waters with concrete blocks chained to his ankles.

He was pretty sure he’d met the guy. A yik-yakker in Marlene’s building who had a great deal to say about power boats, the Second Amendment, barbecue, politicians he hated, why he’d never been sick a day in his life, the hoax that is veganism, the tragic decline of rock ’n’ roll since the Kinks and the Who, and Irene and Marlene hung on his every word. Meanwhile the jerk’s wife lit into him as they walked to the elevator. Clint heard her say, “Why is it you have to be the biggest asshole every time we go visit people?” and the man cursed her. Later, Irene told Clint that the Fenwicks had invited them to their church Sunday morning. “You mean, Mr. Fenwick invited you,” he said. It was a relief now to think back to that night and realize the man was a churchgoer. Atheists have manners. They don’t imagine they have the Supreme Being in their back pocket.

That afternoon Roger Hedlund found Clint in the Chatterbox, eating cream of celery soup and a Jell-O salad, red and green and blue and orange and gold cubes piled together—it was like a stained-glass window—and reading a book called The Portable Nietzsche.”

“Neetchy,” Roger said. “That was Hitler’s favorite writer, wasn’t he?”

“Hitler’s favorite writer was Hitler,” said Clint. “What can I do for you?”

Roger had uncovered a big fact about Dick Dixon, the trucking tycoon, why he bought up all that farmland. It was because Johnny Rogers came from here.

“From here? You’re kidding. I never heard of him.”

“He’s from here. He was born Roger Johnson and the family lived in a little shotgun house on Taft, and the parents were at each other’s throats and the dad was a drunk and the boy grew up puny and timid. When he was 11, his parents sent the boy off to live with relatives, and didn’t get around to collecting him until he was 14. He had a stutter and was sent to a special school for the dim-witted, and one day he picked up a guitar and he got to where he could play in C or D or G, and suddenly he had friends and got invited to parties and girls looked at him with interest, and that was it. A cheap Sears Silvertone guitar. Dick Dixon owns it, and it’s going to go into a Johnny Rogers museum. Along with his boyhood bedroom.”

“Where’d that come from?” said Clint.

“The Rogelstad house. Formerly the Johnsons’. Dixon bought it and ripped out the upstairs bedroom. Johnson lived there until he enlisted in the Army and got stationed in Georgia and heard country music and, being as he was in the Quartermaster Corps and his job was to count sheets and towels, he had plenty of time on his hands to play guitar and write songs. So that’s his story.”

Clint said he had no recollection of Johnson whatsoever.

“That’s because you played sports and he sat in his room studying the Mel Bay Chord Book.”

“But what’s Dick Dixon’s interest in making a big monument to him?”

“Simple. He has way too much money. And it’s a tax dodge. And he wishes he could play guitar and sing and travel around in a bus. And Johnson’s dead.”

“What happened to him?”

“That’s a long story,” said Roger, and then Jack Bakkes, a man who goes for days without saying “Boo,” walked up and put a hand on Roger’s shoulder and said, “We’re onto public employees like you. You’ve been at the public feed trough for years and nobody cared, but people are wising up to you and your golden-parachute retirement plans and the under-the-table stuff and the disability gold mine. Story in the paper the other day about a cop in St. Paul, twisted his back reaching for a jelly doughnut and strained a ligament, and he found a friendly M.D. and now he’s pulling down 50 grand per year tax-free in disability, plus he got him a job as a security guard for 75 grand a year to sit at a desk and eyeball visitors, and on weekends he plays 18 holes of golf. But the free lunch is coming to an end, boyo, the people are going to rise up and take the sugar tit out of your mouth, not that I hold it against you personally, I don’t, we’ve been friends since we were kids, but we just plain can’t afford to put out the taxes the way we’re doing in order to support country-club pensions for people who spent years putting in a 20-hour week.”

Roger grabbed his elbow. “Get off the cheese, Jack, and come and talk to me a year from now and I’ll explain it to you.”