4

LENNY

Lenny arrived the next Monday in her red SUV with Texas plates and pulled up in front of the post office, and Mr. Bauser at the mail counter looked out through the bars and saw the tall woman in khaki shorts and red T-shirt and nothing clicked, no name, no address, though he’d coached her 4-H softball team 30 years before, so he resumed eating his chili and chips. Since his heart attack in December, he’s been eating light and staying calm. The Benadryl helps. He got it for his German shepherd, Chief Bender, but Chief died of a hemorrhage last fall and now the postmaster is dosing himself, and it keeps him on an even keel. He used to get incensed at people who ask him what day it is, ignoring the calendar on the wall. Now he just tells them it’s Monday.

Lenny was about to cross the street and then saw the ancient man pushing his walker past the Chatterbox. He stopped and glanced her way. She remembered Senator K. Thorvaldson, of course, the oldest man in town, now 99 and often unaware of who is who, but he has five very clear memories, each of which he is delighted to talk about at length—the annual ice-cutting on the lake when blocks of ice were stored on beds of sawdust in limestone caves and used for refrigeration over the summer, the appearance of Charles A. Lindbergh in January 1936, forced to land his plane on a day so cold that when you spit on the ground, it sounded like you dropped a handful of dimes, and Babe Ruth’s barnstorming tour with the Sorbitol All-Stars in 1938 and Babe driving his Cadillac town car that when he revved the engine and revved it again a flame six feet long blasted out the tailpipe, and the tornado of 1942 that blew a barn a quarter-mile with two small children inside who walked away unscratched, and the correct way to cure concrete, which they used to do and don’t anymore. Lenny remembered that each of these reminiscences could take up to 15 minutes and sometimes lead to another and a third. The full set of five could go for three hours. She turned away to hide her face and looked at the front window of Bob’s Barbershop and watched Mr. Thorvaldson’s reflection as he waited for her to show interest and finally he continued on his way. Bob was not the barber anymore, Bill was. She remembered that Bob left town in 2009 after the infestation of ferocious black flies that ate holes in window screens. People dozed off in their porches and woke up to find their hair had been chewed down to the roots. Bill arrived in 2011 and kept Bob’s sign because it was beautiful gold lettering and why pay money to be Bill, “Bob” was good enough.

Lenny crossed the street quickly and walked into the Chatterbox, which was empty at 2 p.m. on a Monday, and looked at the jukebox and saw songs she remembered from back when she waitressed there, “Third-Rate Romance (Low-Rent Rendezvous)” and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” by Hank Williams and John Prine’s “Paradise.” She sat down at the counter, where Cathy didn’t recognize her. Cathy is the daughter of Darlene, the old waitress who quit her job after she threw the food at Daryl Tollerud.

“Hi,” said Cathy.

“I’d love a coffee,” Lenny said. “I’ve been on the road since yesterday morning. Left Dallas and wasn’t tired, so I drove all night. Let me tell you, there are some weird people on the radio at two and three in the morning talking about left-wing conspiracies, but they do keep a person awake. I heard a healing prayer service coming through Missouri, and you could phone in your prayer request and your credit card number and he promised to heal you. I never heard prayer like that before. I grew up Lutheran, when we prayed it was pretty dry.” “Okay,” said Cathy. She didn’t pick up on the invitation to converse. Lenny said, “Does Dorothy still own this place? I remember she used to serve the best waffles in the morning. And steak and eggs with hash browns. I never could make hash browns up to my husband’s standards. So I guess I should blame her for the divorce.” No answer from Cathy. But when Dorothy came out of the kitchen and looked around, she trotted right over, and Lenny stood up and they hugged. “Lenny, Lenny, Lenny, bright as a penny,” said Dorothy. “I was afraid I’d never lay eyes on you again. How’s everything in Dallas?”

“Horrible,” she said. “A nightmare. That’s why I’m here.”

She’d come north while her lawyer started the divorce wheels in motion. She’d married Greg thinking he was someone he wasn’t, and he tried to be who she thought he was and it fell apart, as deceptions tend to do, and he took up with Sandy the folksinger, so Lenny came home to start planning her next chapter. Her cousin Debbie Detmer wanted her to come out to California, where she had a lucrative practice in veterinary aromatherapy and was active in a movement called Radiantism, which holds that You find God by not looking for Her and letting Her find you. Lenny was tempted to go. She was 45, her son was an actor working as a waiter and her daughter was trying to find herself as a Texas progressive, and meanwhile Lenny was curious about the outbreaks of nuttiness in town among people who’d been bottled up tight for years and now their corks were popping.

“We’ve been needing someone like you to figure it out,” Dorothy said. “Clint turned atheist, Darlene tried to be a stripper, and the Lutheran pastor had an adventure with a toilet seat. We need a detective to get on the case.”

That afternoon Lenny spoke to Mr. Sjostrom, the old geography teacher, who had buttonholed Clint Bunsen and told him that liberals in state government, financed by the Chinese, were sending death panels into rural areas, looking for people carrying Bibles and marking them for future harvest when they will be tranquilized and fitted with brain drives wired to follow commands from Beijing. He said that whole counties of North Dakota have been repopulated by humanoids who walk and talk like Americans but who are prepared, when the directive comes down, to seize the oil wells and the cattle ranches and turn the churches into union halls. He leaned in close: “Look around and see who uses soy sauce,” he said. “That’s the giveaway. Mindaltering chemicals. It’s so obvious that nobody notices.”

When Lenny spoke with him, he said his diet was whatever Dorothy served at the Chatterbox. Except for a bucket of homemade cheese he bought from Hilmar Bakken that reminded him of the cheese his grandma made. Lenny made note of it.

She spoke to Dorothy, who’d had her own incident while waiting on Clarence and Arlene at Sunday brunch and throwing a couple napkins down on the table and yelling, “I get so friggin’ sick of working my fingers to the bone to keep this dump open. One of these days, I’m going to burn the place down for the insurance and let people drive 15 miles to a Burger King and live on their greaseburgers and frozen fries and watery shakes and you won’t have me to kick around any longer. I’m history. Going to find me a little motor home and get lost in America.” She didn’t remember it, but when asked about cheese, she reached into the cooler and pulled out pounds of it, she called it Portuguese cheese, her cousin Hilmar made it, and she sold it as a favor to him. “He’s been making it since Jesus was in the second grade, and yes, I have eaten some myself, when I’ve felt depressed.”

“What sort of cheese?”

“Portuguese cheese. It’s got reindeer milk in it. He keeps two of them and they have babies in the spring and he milks them through the summer and fall. It reminds a lot of people of the cheese their grandmothers made. It has a real zip to it.”

So Lenny decided to go see Hilmar. “His farm is three miles south of town. You can’t miss it,” said Dorothy. “Big sign, ‘You Are Not Welcome.’ He means it so drive slow and be ready to hit reverse. He’s taken a shot at me a couple times after I’d bought a new car, but his eyes are so bad that his aim is poor.”

Lenny was, of course, aware of Hilmar, having grown up here. He was spooky, with his rampant white hair and rancid smell and raggedy clothes. A living example of why men need women: for basic maintenance. Like most Norwegian bachelor farmers, he was a contrarian. If you said the sky was blue, he’d look for a cloud. She knew all about the tribe. The NBFs are descended from Norwegian villagers who came to America to escape from respectability and maintain the tradition of public drunkenness, dirty songs, and blowing their noses by hand onto the ground, one nostril at a time. They use handkerchiefs to mop the brow, not to blow the nose. (Why would you rub snot on your forehead?) You plug a nostril with a finger and with one mighty snort empty the other nostril onto the ground, which makes city slickers feel faint. Thus you clear nasal passages and achieve exclusivity at the same time. The bachelors sit on the bench by the Sidetrack Tap like old snapping turtles in the sun, foreigners in our midst, who’ve never been parents, never been required to set a good example, so they don’t bother. They are pessimistic anarchists, so nothing dismays them. They come to church twice a year to satisfy their deceased mothers, sit in back and don’t recite the Creed or the prayers and doze through the sermon. And sometimes they go outdoors and blow their noses. Moral disapproval is not a factor in their lives, so people don’t bother.

Hilmar was the youngest of seven, lived at home with his mother, Irmgaard, was a decent left fielder, sang in a barbershop quartet called The Hay Makers, bathed in the stock tank, and then in 1985 when his mother died, it tipped him over the edge. He stayed home for two years, half his teeth fell out, he put up KEEP OUT signs. The Bakken farm is 60 acres, a dozen Holsteins, a flock of chickens, two reindeer, plus a pack of wild mutts. He preserved the farmhouse exactly as his mother had left it, and he moved a mobile home onto the property for himself. He kept to himself, became cranky and ill-mannered, put up the angry signs along his driveway, but Wobegonians feel a proprietary affection for the NBFs: they are malcontents but they are ours, our crazy uncles, and who will take their place when they are gone? Nobody. They’ll be gone, like the buffalo.

The next day, Lenny drove out to visit Hilmar, bringing a quart of Everclear 190-proof grain alcohol as a gift. She’d heard the gossip about the Nashville man buying land for a trucker park and she drove into the Tingvold farm next to Mr. Bakken’s and it was abandoned, the back door open and the kitchen bare. And then she heard the blast of a shotgun. She drove next door to Hilmar’s with the big sign, YOU ARE NOT WELCOME. And another sign by the mailbox: YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER ME. Fifty feet farther, NO KIDDING. Along the driveway, a series of signs:

DOWN WITH BUREAUCRATS! FREE THE PEOPLE!

FOR GUN CONTROL, I USE BOTH HANDS

EVERY MAN HAS THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG

YOUR LIFE IS NOT MY FAULT

Beyond the windbreak, a little white farmhouse, a few wrecked cars in the yard and an old green mobile home with Brotherhood of Liberty painted on the side. As she pulled in, barking dogs came dashing from all directions and jumped up on the car, two on the hood, fangs bared, snarling deep in their throats, and then a man shouted, “Haul up!” and they slunk back into the bushes from whence they’d come. The man approached, shotgun cradled in arm, an old gaunt man with ball-bearing eyes, black coveralls. She rolled down her window.

“You’re not from here,” he said.

“I used to be. Lenny Olsson. Married a Huston but I’m back to Olsson now.”

“Ollie and Ingrid’s girl.”

“Right.”

“What brings you out here?”

“I heard about your cheese, and I’d like to buy a box.”

“Who told you I sell cheese?”

“Dorothy at the Chatterbox.”

“Fifteen bucks. I only take cash.”

“You got change for a twenty?”

“I might.”

He walked toward the farmhouse, and she followed him. She noticed the two reindeer in a corral adjoining the chicken coop, shedding clumps of winter fur. He opened the farmhouse door, and she followed him in. She expected it to be junky, but it was orderly and neat, a sofa with antimacassars on the arms, a rocker, an old radio, a crank telephone on the wall. The cheese was in the kitchen. The counters were clean. The refrigerator appeared to be from the early ’50s, a Frigidaire. He smelled okay to Lenny. Dorothy said he only bathed for Midsummer’s Day and Christmas Eve, but she was wrong.

“I was sorry to hear about your mother’s passing,” she said.

“She died upstairs. Thirty-five years ago. I took care of her to the end. People in town thought I should’ve put her in a nursing home. I would’ve shot her before I did that and then shot myself. You want to see the upstairs? It’s just like it was.”

She said, “Oh, that’s okay.” She was afraid she might go upstairs and find a corpse on the bed. “Some other time,” she said.

The cheese was in a wooden box the size of a child’s shoe-box. It was grayish, under a transparent film.

“Why do they call it Portuguese cheese?”

“A misunderstanding,” he said. “It’s Norwegian cheese but it’s called that from French portagers. They loved it because it keeps the mosquitoes off you. They had mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. You could die from the bites.”

“Oh really—?”

“Really,” he said. “You eat a spoonful every day, and you’ll never need mosquito spray. The portagers were scared of mosquitoes, that they might carry disease, so to them the cheese was worth more than money. It was the portager cheese that enabled the French to come inland. Otherwise they would’ve kept to the coast, and the Vikings would’ve taken over. The English were no match on the open seas. They were a nation of shopkeepers. The Vikings were the warriors. But the French had the cheese.”

“That isn’t the history they taught us in school,” she said.

“Exactly my point. Schools are run by the government, and they teach you what they want you to know. Goddamn government is a gang of collectivists who send the USDA and the milk inspectors in to regulate every tiny detail of life along with the liquor laws and zoning regulations and the weed control people and drug laws, to where it gets so that a man can’t breathe, can’t turn around without there’s somebody there saying which foot to put in front of the other. Young kids grow up nowadays with no idea of freedom. None. They’re like cattle in the chute. People who stand up for their rights, we’re a dying breed. Big corporations, big government, it’s all the same psychology, and it’s meant for poultry, it isn’t meant for me or you. Anyway, that’s how I see it, and when you’re on my land, then you can see it that way too.”

He smiled slightly. She handed him a twenty. He opened up a tackle box and rummaged around in it for dollar bills. “I sold milk for years to the Avon Creamery and thought nothing of it, and then I heard on the Liberty Network news that pasteurization is a European rule meant to soften the soft palate for the pronunciation of French vowels and there is evidence that pasteurized milk is connected to a lower sperm count and the physical timidity of young men, and I asked about it and right away they got suspicious and sent out inspectors and found that I was milking the reindeer too, and they read me the riot act and threatened to take me to court, so I switched to making cheese, which my mother had done, and I still had her recipes and her wooden cheese forms. And it sells darned well. Gammelost. Old Cheese. Pasteurized cheese has no flavor, like everything else these days.”

“What’s in the cheese?” she said, and the moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. He smiled. He looked at the door. The visit was over. “Give my best to your folks,” he said.

Lenny took the cheese back to her parents’ house, and her mom took one sniff and said, “You’ve been out to Hilmar’s.” She said, “I don’t get what people see in that cheese. They say it reminds them of their grandmother’s. An outhouse reminds me of my grandmother, but you don’t see us build a two-seater out back, do you? No.” Lenny wrapped a slab of cheese in plastic and sent it to a laboratory in St. Paul, and Mr. Bauser took the package and said, “Technically you’re not supposed to ship cheese by U.S. mail, but I’ll make an exception this one time.”

Meanwhile, the outbreaks continued. Bill the barber went on a tirade against the U.S. Senate, and why should states like North and South Dakota, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming have as many senators as New York or California, they ought to be run by the Bureau of Land Management, all while he was cutting gashes in Ernie’s hair for emphasis. It wasn’t the conversation you want from a barber but Ernie was brought up not to interrupt so he didn’t.

Clarence saw Tom Hanks on a TV in the Bunsen showroom and had a fit about celebrities and their big social causes like global warming or endangered species or pollution by plastics, and he yelled at Hanks on the screen: “You’re an actor. So be an actor. Who cares what you think about saving the rainforest? Go live in the rainforest if you think it’s so great. Grow your own food. Build a tree house. Make friends with the crocodiles and learn their language. I don’t give a rip. So you feel guilty about owning three houses and having a gazillion dollars. Give it away if you feel bad, but spare me the righteousness.” Clint didn’t say a word, but he noticed the cheese dip on the hospitality table and sent it over to the Sidetrack Tap, and Clarence calmed down. Clint stopped at the Sidetrack on his way home, and Wally was talking about his grandpa who as a young man had bred a three-legged chicken that appeared in Look magazine, which impressed his girlfriend, Valerie, though the chicken was unable to walk and had to live suspended in a sling. His grandpa then designed artificial wings to attach to the chicken to enable it to enjoy independence, and he was close to success, having experimented with a man-sized pair of wings made from turkey feathers and attached to a harness. He had flown from a barn roof and the wings worked pretty well, and meanwhile he was struggling with the ethical question—Did the chicken truly wish to fly or was it happier in its sling, and what right did he have to decide this for the bird?—but he put on his wings and climbed to the top of the windmill, which was turning slowly in the wind, and he was drumming up his courage to jump when he heard a motor and looked up, and a biplane with cloth wings piloted by a man in a brown leather helmet and a long white scarf was landing in his pasture. Valerie, who was waiting to see grandpa fly, ran out to meet the man with the white scarf, and he offered to take her up for a ride and she said yes. Grandpa did not jump. He threw the wings off, and he climbed down and walked to town and went into the tavern and broke his promise to his mother and had a glass of whiskey and it was the cure for everything. He was surrounded by friends who got friendlier and friendlier and some women too, and there was music and cribbage and a buffet of snacks, and he was completely happy and that’s how Wally’s family got into the bar business. “What we learned from that is that you can go ahead and dream, but if your dream doesn’t come true, consider yourself lucky, something better is on the way. Flying is okay, but friendship is what it’s all about.” Wally had finished all the cheese and was licking his fingers.

That evening, big black thunderheads moved in from the west, sheets of rain swept across town, the sky exploded into light, bolts of electricity ripped into the earth, thunder slapped against the houses, six inches of rain fell in two hours, rain poured down the gutters and out the spouts. For the storm lovers in town, it was blissful. Maybe they secretly wished they could bust loose themselves and a big storm was theater for them, an imitation of life as it could be. Storms can be dangerous and most people seek cover, but if you stick your head out the door, you’ll see spectators here and there who are enjoying the storm and cheering it on. A sign blew loose from the old Mercantile building and went clattering down Main Street, a 4-by-6 sheet metal sign that said, QUALITY TAILORING ON-SITE, INQUIRE WITHIN, which hadn’t been true since 1948, but the sign was saved for the hand-lettering and as history. The wind said To hell with history and sent it flying, and it bounced off the Sidetrack Tap and what if a patron had wandered out the door and been decapitated by QUALITY TAILORING? It didn’t happen, but it was worth consideration. Barbara Ann Bunsen sat in her BMW with her three teenagers who moments before were engaging in heavy eye-rolling sarcasm about fat people in dumpy clothes walking by, but now they were terrified and they whimpered, “Let’s go inside, please. Please let’s go inside.” And she got to be the tower of strength and say, “Don’t worry. It’s only a storm.” Dispensing false reassurance to your terrified children who will soon go back to mocking Myrtle’s horrible black wig and purple blouse. But this town looks good in a bad storm, it’s when you see why the town was formed in the first place. Shelter in the storm. The prairie was prime for cultivation but there are no hills to hide behind. People gathered together in towns to feel less vulnerable and they were determined to stay put and get along with their neighbors, no matter what. Strange to see a cheese product eat away at the foundation of civilization, but that is exactly what was happening. Cheese caused a social ferment that drove people apart.