15

WILDFLOWERS

The next day, a serenely beautiful summer day, the smell of new-mown hay in the air, and coconut suntan cream and bug spray, people on the beach, many of them not from here, you can tell because they show no tan line. They wear skinny swimsuits made of less cotton than in an aspirin bottle. People from around here are polar people, we don’t tan, we burn. Duane Bunsen came home once with a model named Cherise who had a deep tan though it was only April. She was remarkable. Skinny, with a pouty mouth and breasts the size of ginger-snaps. Her favorite word was “cool.” She said it hundreds of times. She wore earbuds all day and carried a phone around, usually with somebody on the other end, not talking, just being. She brought a sun lamp and lay under it from time to time to keep her color. She had no need of language at all, only light. She was a plant, an exotic fern.

Nobody back in my day ever lay in the sun to get tanned, except some girls. Men worked in the sun and lay in the shade. And we didn’t bother with air conditioners because if you worked in the sun long enough, the shade felt so good you didn’t need frigidity. You work in the sun, even a little breeze is a pleasure. I have nothing against tanning and air-conditioning, I am only pointing out facts. As my mother liked to say, “Life has its ups and downs, so just make the best of it.” We were designed to live in this world as it is, not the world as we wish it were. Air-conditioning is for invalids, a form of life support. As for winter, you simply need to know how to dress. Don’t get me started.

When Roger Hedlund along with Clint Bunsen set out to battle the Keep America Truckin’ Museum and Motorway, he hired a St. Paul lawyer to scout out some roadblocks to throw in its way, whereupon Dick Dixon sent a truckload of Harvard Law grads to grind them to pieces and spit them out. The local lawyer was a Concordia Law grad who believed in polite negotiation between gentlemen, not pouring boiling oil on your opponents and strewing their bodies on open fields for buzzards to snack on their testicles. Cooperation was Bob’s goal, not evisceration. He had represented one husband in a divorce case, and the wife wound up with the mansion and both cars and Bob’s client wound up with a pup tent and a three-speed bicycle. When it came to battle, he had no sword, only a wooden spatula.

Bob wrote the Dixon legal team a polite request for more information, and they responded with so many lawsuits against Clint and Roger, they had to buy a new file cabinet to store them in—tortious negligence, bilateral bifurcation, systematic pesterance, deleterious declarations, defamatory fraud, false pretenses, privation of assets, felonious failure of consideration, tainted tangibility, malicious mercantile cruelty, casual capriciousness, bequeathing in bad faith, breach of equity, evidentiary preponderance, and a $100 million lawsuit for impeding development. But as it turned out, their vast learning and acumen did not carry the day. As it turned out, Hilmar’s band of wild dogs had the last word, and the lawyerly briefs stayed in the file cabinet.

Clint asked Pastor Liz to intervene with Hilmar, and she said, “You’re the big atheist, I think you should talk to him,” but Clint said no, Hilmar had a soft spot for her, so she drove out past the YOU ARE NOT WELCOME sign. Hilmar was in his machine shed with a couple of young barn cats that he was castrating, and he said, “Here. Hold him.” And Liz did, and Hilmar passed a little chloroform under the cat’s nose and put him out and reached back between the hind legs and sterilized the razor in a candle and snipped the sac and dabbed it with alcohol and Liz felt suddenly light-headed but remained standing.

“You get too many cats and they get competitive and forget what they’re here for, which is to be good mousers. Females are better at that, and males are pretty worthless. All they do is sniff around the females. Same as with people. Anyways, I’m preparing to move on. Don’t tell anybody, but I got my eye on a place out west. I never been beyond Fargo, and I think it’s time I saw some of the world while I can still navigate. You know why? Because I don’t want to die here. I truly don’t. I don’t want to die, I want to disappear. I see myself going to a city I’ve never been in before, where I don’t know a soul, and throwing away my billfold and my car keys and getting a room in a hotel and dying there in my sleep, and let that be the end of it. My mother said, ‘Hilmar, don’t you dare put me in the cemetery.’ She wanted to rise up in a cloud of smoke, so that’s what I did for her. I wrapped her in a quilt and I put her in her old chicken house and collapsed it around her and cut the heads off of the last four chickens and laid them with her, and I dumped a truckload of charcoal on it and about 40 gallons of kerosene, and at the stroke of midnight I tossed a torch on her and up she went and it burned for two days, and what was left I plowed into the ground and next year planted tomatoes and squash. She was 85. I’m 76. Time to think about making an exit. Don’t wait too long, that’s my advice.” He reached for the next cat, applied the chloroform, held the razor to the flame, snipped the sac, and dabbed the antiseptic. “I had a pretty good life. People left me alone, I appreciate that. Now they’re crowding in on me, and I understand, they can’t help it. So it’s time to go.”

Liz came home from Hilmar’s farm and parked in the church lot and saw Lenny walking toward her in a bright green pantsuit that Liz had donated to the school rummage sale. They stopped and talked. Lenny said she was leaving soon for Colorado— she’d identified the virus, the rest was up to Alice. Greg had been dumped by his folksinger, Sandy, who’d found herself a singing partner named Gene, and the next day Greg called Lenny and said he missed her and she told him he should get a dog with her color hair. He cried on the phone, which she’d never heard him do, on a phone or in person, but he didn’t have the knack of crying, his was whiny and whimpering. She wished him well but was afraid he might come to Minnesota so she had to hustle.

The pantsuit looked joyful on her. Whenever Liz wore it, she felt like a walking pea pod. To see another woman look good in clothes that made her feel weird seemed like a possible sermon topic. But the next week she drove into St. Cloud with another load of used clothing. She was in a mood to lighten her possessions and move on.

She drove into the parking lot of the Crossroads shopping center and hauled the load over to a Goodwill donation dumpster and heaved her stuff in and heard the clink of car keys inside and climbed up to look into the dumpster and fell in and landed on her load. It was a deep dumpster and the lid closed on her and latched so she couldn’t open it. She knocked on the lid but nobody came. And then a little girl named Kelly did. She asked Kelly to find a grownup to open the dumpster, and Kelly was afraid and Liz had to persuade her that she, Liz, was not a bad person. She told Kelly that she was a church minister and Kelly was not reassured. Liz sang, “This Little Light of Mine.” She recited “Baa-baa Black Sheep.” The child said, “Goodbye.” Liz said, “Please. I won’t hurt you. I promise. Please tell a grownup.” And she sang “Ave Maria” in a loud clear voice, and a man opened the lid.

“I fell in,” she explained. He helped her out and asked if she was okay. There was an intimation in his voice that she might’ve been drinking or on drugs or having an episode. It did not help matters when she explained about the car keys and he got a stick and poked around in the dumpster and didn’t see them and then she said, “Oh, they’re in my pocket.”

She went back to her car and thought, “This’d be a wonderful story that you’d tell at your 10th wedding anniversary dinner, the story of how you met. You fell into a dumpster and he helped you out and you fell in love. But without the love affair, it’s just a story about stupidity. Meaningless.” Like the toilet seat story, she shuddered to recall. Had her parishioners truly forgiven her for that? She feared not. Dignity is high on the Lutherans’ list of virtues. She drove home, and when she saw the “Woebegone” water tower, it dawned on her that an unmarried woman minister in a town this small was thereby committing herself to a bachelor life. A Lutheran bachelor minister. There were no available men her age in town. If she signs up for another two years, it’ll turn into 10. She’ll be 45. A middle-aged Lutheran minister is not a hot romantic prospect. She’d do better as a waitress.

In June, Dick Dixon himself flew to Lake Wobegon, traveling by helicopter from the Minneapolis airport. The chopper landed on the Pfleiderscheidt pasture, where a six-man video crew would shoot Mr. Dixon announcing the park and motorway, but what the pilot thought was the Pfleiderscheidts’ was actually Hilmar Bakken’s pasture and a pack of wild dogs came tearing out, slavering for human flesh, and unfortunately Mr. Dixon had halfway lowered himself out the cabin door. He was slower climbing up than coming down, being a weighty man, and two dogs got his pants in their jaws and tore the seat off and some meat along with it before the chopper could rise. Hilmar came tearing out the barn, and fired two shots that nicked the rotor shaft, snapping a steering cable, so that the chopper spun rather rapidly counterclockwise in the air, and by the time the pilot wrestled it under control, Mr. Dixon was not the commanding presence he had been 10 minutes before. The chopper managed to land in town at the ballpark, the only open space visible, about 50 feet behind second base, in the top half of the fourth inning, still slowly spinning, and Mr. Dixon emerged bottomless and confused and bleeding badly, and a thousand Whippet fans whooped and yelled, thinking it was a joke. He staggered, half crawled, to the infield and began to say how proud he was to be here in honor of a great man, and the Whippets trainer Jimmy Milton came out and tended to his wounds and made a catcher’s chest protector into a butt protector, there being no pants Mr. Dixon’s size (48), and a catcher’s mask for his manhood. He limped out of the park to a standing ovation and found himself in downtown Lake Wobegon, dazed and disoriented, and walked down the middle of Main Street, attracting a good deal of attention, especially when the butt protector fell off. That was the picture that appeared on the wire services, under the headline “Public Rebuttal.” Wally took him into the Sidetrack Tap and poured him a Wendy’s stout, and the tycoon launched into what sounded like a campaign speech in which he pledged to make America great before his staff found him and led him away.

Mr. Dixon stayed around for a couple days and went to work on Hilmar, who refused to talk to him but talked to a Dixon lawyer who visited him with a grocery bag full of bundles of hundreds. Hilmar said no, but he weakened as the offer climbed past two million to three and then five, a high price for 60 acres of piss-poor pasture. “What about the house?” he said. “What happens to that?” They promised to make it a sacred site in the park, surrounded by a secure fence. “People’d try to get into it,” he grumbled. They promised him No Admission, or Paid Admission, or Select Admission, whatever he wished. He asked for a week to think it over.

The Hoerschgens sold their farm for two and a half million, and they came and thanked Hilmar for driving the price so high. Ardis threw her arms around him and said she and Arlen were on their way to their son Dennis’s place in Camino de la Costa, California, where he’d found a fine house for them overlooking the sea and a beach with sea lions, and she played Hilmar a video on her phone of the waves rolling in, the flagstone terrace and pool, the pink stucco house, the cliff beyond. “We owe it all to you,” she said. Hilmar said, “You don’t owe me nothing. What’re they doing with your house?” Ardis said, “We’re taking some clothes and some pictures and the good china and that’s it. Leaving in an hour. Done with it. Arlen needs a heart valve repair. Dennis has a surgeon lined up in San Diego.”

They honked and she waved as they drove away, and within minutes a demolition crew came and tore down the Hoerschgen house and barn and outbuildings. Hilmar was milking that afternoon when a Holstein switched him in the face with its tail, which had fresh fecal matter on it, and he slugged her in the forehead and knocked her out and she fell over on him and it took him a while to squirm out from under. He heard derisive mooing as he slid out. He finished milking, but he sensed that the herd had turned against him. He walked down the narrow path between the rows of rumps, and tails lifted and cows excreted with surprising accuracy and some tried to kick him. He could hear them that night, discussing things among themselves, conspiring against him, and in the morning it felt for certain like they were laying for him, waiting to catch him and butt him up against a wall and lean him to death. It took all the pleasure right out of dairy farming. The two reindeer, Dasher and Dancer, were following him too closely, poking him with their horns, treading on his heels, and he detected an attitude of resentment. He had never felt threatened by livestock before, but something was up in the farmyard, he could hear it in their bellowing. They knew he was selling the place and not taking them along, and they meant to stop him. That evening, the reindeer jumped the fence and left for parts unknown. He didn’t wait around for further developments. He called the packing plant, and they sent over two trucks to haul the herd off to slaughter. He stood by the ramp as the cows were loaded up and he explained it to them. “You crossed a line when you crapped on me. I don’t take shit from cows. So you’re going to be stunned with a high-voltage shock, your throats cut, you’ll be skinned and butchered. Have a nice trip.” The trucks disappeared over the hill and he felt exhilarated. Free, for the first time in his life. His dogs sat in the dirt, confused at the disappearance of the cows, and he took mercy on them. He fed them 16-ounce filet mignons with crushed sleeping pills inside. They feasted and fell asleep, and he cut their throats and laid their bodies in his mother’s little house and stacked logs and old lumber around them and threw in a torch and it went up in a funeral pyre worthy of Viking warriors, a blaze that could be seen in town. The firetruck came racing out but he waved them away. The dogs died happy, and nobody would ever touch his mother’s things. He called the Dixon lawyer, and he brought the money, a bag of rolls of hundreds and a certified check. Hilmar signed the bill of sale, the deed, and climbed into his pickup. “Anything from the trailer?” the lawyer said. Hilmar shook his head, got in the truck, drove out past the YOUR LIFE IS NOT MY FAULT sign and didn’t look back.