Lake Wobegon Days (40 page)

She was a good car. Lyle bought her in 1978, six years old but in terrific shape thanks to Virginia Ingqvist’s fear of driving after she totaled a previous Chevy, even Lyle’s brother-in-law Carl Krebsbach, a shrewd man about cars, agreed that Lyle got a heck of a good deal. Lyle just didn’t have the knack of starting her up on cold mornings. His tendency was to get angry and flood the carburetor. Of course he
had jumper cables, like everybody else, but that required a live car to start his deadster, most likely Carl’s next door, and Lyle cringed at the thought of asking. Carl’s Chevy pickup roared to life every morning; Lyle heard it as he shaved, and sometimes he nicked himself. It made a sound like “nonagenarian-rn-rn-rn.” Carl gunned it a few times—in a boastful way, Lyle thought, like a lion roaring after intercourse. And then Carl would come over, let himself into the kitchen, pour a cup of coffee, and offer to start Lyle’s. Or he said, “Where’s your keys?” and just went out and did it. “Don’t bother, I don’t need the car today,” Lyle said, “I feel like walking,” but Carl believed a car should be started in cold weather whether you drove it or not.

Sometimes Carl poked his head in the garage as Lyle stood at the side of his dead pal. Carl opened the hood and fiddled with the carburetor, and said, “Here, let me try it,” and the car picked up its head and started. Maddening. An impossible problem, you’re resigned to it, and then a cheerful guy reaches over casually with one hand and solves it. Lyle is the science teacher at the high school, he can explain cold, but he can’t accept it, having grown up in Torrance, California. He’s lived in Minnesota since 1971, a transplant that didn’t take. Even now, when December rolls around and the first blizzard rolls in from Montana as regular as the North Coast Limited, he looks out the window and wonders, “What’s going on here? What’s the matter?” And when it’s thirty below, he feels that something is definitely wrong. Then cool Carl shows up in his immense parka and insulated rubber boots and a big grin on his face and says, “It’s a cold one. Boy, I think we mighta set a record.”

Carl has the golden touch. Once Carl caught a walleye off Art’s Point that raced toward the boat and leaped almost into Carl’s arms. Landed in the boat, and later when Carl cleaned him he found an Indian-head penny, a high school ring (class of 1954, which was Carl’s class), and a piece of tinfoil off a bottle of pink champagne
that Carl himself had drunk.
Late one night in 1955, trying to get over the girl he had given his ring to who had told him to get lost. She took the ring off her necklace and threw it in the lake. “There. Go get it,” she said. Carl was heartbroken. He returned to the spot with his champagne, got drunk, couldn’t remember what he had done with the foil. Now he knew. Both had come back to him by way of a tremendous fish as
a sign that his life would be happy. He kept the ring and the penny and threw the foil back in the lake, for more good luck. “I’ve got the ring right here if you want to see it,” he told Lyle. It fit him perfectly. Lyle was amazed. “And the fish?” he asked. “In the freezer,” Carl said. He looked straight at Lyle: “Now that’s what I call fishing.”

Once a deer walked up behind Carl as he stood in the woods the first Saturday of deer-hunting season, waiting for a deer. (“You know that road about a hundred yards beyond Winkler’s? Little dirt road heads west off the gravel? Well, you go beyond that and to your right you’ll see a road goes east, just a couple ruts in the weeds. You follow that into the woods and it comes to a foundation where this guy is supposed to have lived with a Chippewa woman who was a faith healer. She could talk it right out of people, TB, cancer, heal broken bones, anything, but he was jealous and he killed her and he set fire to the house and burned himself up. You can’t miss the foundation, there’s an old rusted-out woodstove sitting in the middle of it—you go beyond that and there’s a path goes between two chestnut trees and up the hill. You can see the water tower from the hill. You head in the opposite direction and you come down into a ravine. It’s an old creek bed. That’s where I was.”) He was waiting for his deer when he felt a cold nose touch his hand. He did the standing broad jump, bounced off a birch tree, turned around and saw the deer. A doe, a big one. His first thought was that she had escaped from the Pet-the-Tame-Deer Park on Highway 10, and his second was that his three cousins from Minneapolis were near by who he left because he was nervous being around them the way they carried their rifles. Eugene had a way of gesturing with his that gave Carl the willies: “I’ll go this way and you head up
there
” and jabbed the thing and the muzzle was looking straight at Carl’s gut. Carl knocked it away and grabbed Eugene’s jacket and called him an idiot. Eugene’s brothers, Dave and Nick, thought Carl was being harsh. Carl walked away from them. Now he thought he didn’t want to be near anything that moved, with the cousins around God knows where, and especially not a deer. He walked away, she followed. He turned and clapped, but evidently she’d been trained to come when someone clapped. He ran a little ways down the ravine and up the bank to the edge of a meadow, she had no trouble keeping up. He lay down in the tall grass, hoping she’d get
bored and go away, but she stood and looked down at him with her big brown eyes.
Git! Go on! Shoo! Haw!
He was afraid she’d step on him and break his arm. That’d be a good one: “How’d you break your arm, Carl?” “Deer stepped on it.” “Oh, where were you?” “In the woods, deer hunting.” The deer nuzzled his pockets. He gave her half of a Salted Nut Roll. He said, “Look, it’s not supposed to be this way.” He felt like he was in a Walt Disney cartoon. She stood over him, drooling Nut Roll, her front legs straddling his leg, looking down at him. (“Her face was as close as yours is to mine, and I’ve seen deer before but not like this one, her eyes looked almost human. And then I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to but I had to. So I got up and did it before I changed my mind.”)

“You didn’t,” Lyle said.

“Of course I did. She didn’t have anything going for her, nothing. No fear. She wouldn’t run. She was just as trapped as if she was hitched to a tree. If she walked up to my cousins, they’d shoot her of course but they’d hit her in the rear end, and
then
she’d run, and she’d crawl off in the bushes and die for the rest of the day. I shot her in the back of the head and she dropped like a stone, she didn’t even twitch. I cleaned her and carried her to the truck. I gave her to the Dieners. I couldn’t see eating her myself. And I never went hunting with those jerks again.”

This seemed brutal to Lyle, but also possibly heroic. The sureness of it.
He knew what he had to do and he got up and did it before he changed his mind.
But also brutal. He asked Carl how it felt, what were his feelings at the time. Carl said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Lyle asked his sister Margaret one day if she was ever worried that Carl might go over the edge. Lyle had read about guys who suddenly went crazy with a shotgun, which he didn’t mention to her, not wanting to alarm her, but he thought Carl was possibly the type.

She said, “He went over the edge when he met me.”

One fine day in 1957 they went to see
Dracula
at the Alhambra, which she had seen before, and right when the French doors were open in the young woman’s boudoir, the curtains blowing in, the mist rolling up from the moors, the bat flew in, and suddenly Dracula was bending over the bed—right then she leaned over and kissed Carl on the neck.

She had thought of Carl as a calm fellow until then. In fact, it was one of her few remaining doubts about him as a husband, that he might be too calm. Other faults she had improved. He smoked so much at first he smelled like burnt toast, and his hair oil was
10W
-30, and she changed all that and also helped him learn to eat food and converse at the same time, quite a trick for a boy from a big family whose only sound at dinner was rhythmic chewing and swallowing. It was hard getting him to say much, though, and she wondered if he might be a little on the dull side, a man with nerves of wood, until she kissed him on the neck and found out that he had deep reserves of nervous energy. In one second, he distributed the box of popcorn over six rows of seats.

To Lyle, winter was frightening. He woke up cold in the morning. Somehow he and Janice didn’t make enough heat together, and then there was the slab of ice on the window that got thicker every day. It was too cold to get out the ladder and put on the storm window, and besides Carl might see him and come over and do it right. As he pulled on his pants (the floor was cold, too), he thought about the plumbing. They kept a trickle dripping out of each faucet at night to prevent frozen pipes, but you never could tell. A good pipe freeze could run a guy a few hundred bucks for new plumbing. Stumbling downstairs, he thought he caught the smell of dead car in the air. He cranked the thermostat up to eighty, and down below the old furnace creaked and throbbed in its bowels and shook like a dog shitting a peach pit. One day it too would die and what would he do then? He was in debt for ten other things already, including his wife’s orthodontist, a mealy-mouthed guy she met at a Catholic Action meeting who talked her into getting braces (they were cold, too). He owned money on the Chev (deceased). It’d be a cold day in hell before the bank would give him more, a schoolteacher with four kids and a wife with braces and a chickenfeed salary.

In November, everything starts to go downhill, and you can’t stop it, it’s going to slide as far as it’s going to slide. Lyle’s philosophy of winter. Nature out of control. What scared him sometimes was the thought that others might be affected even more than he—Carl? Maybe not. Maybe an older gent, living alone, “a very quiet nice man” the dumb neighbors would tell police when it was all over, the sudden sniper attack from an upstairs window, the quiet old psychopath picking
off children with his .22 as they trudged home in the twilight. A man did that once, maybe North Dakota. He was innocent on grounds of being wacko. There were a number of little houses in town whose windows were dark. Who lived there and what was going through their minds? In the olden days, minds snapped in winter like twigs and the authorities sent wagons out to the small towns and farms to round up cases for the asylum, so what was—And then he heard the kitchen door open. Big boots and a jingle of keys. “Hey!” he yelled. The door slammed. By the time he got to the kitchen, he heard his car start up. Carl revved it a couple times.

“That’s hard on the carburetor,” Lyle thought. He went upstairs to take a shower so he wouldn’t have to thank him.

January, olden days.
Jim and I were in the woods by the lake, talking about bears, and I was so scared, I had to pee. I unzipped my pants and took it out—he said, “Don’t! It’ll freeze! In midair!” just as I made the golden arc, and for one split second, I imagined it freezing and got so scared, I almost crapped. Even now, I sit up straight at the memory.

“Watch out for icicles,” my mother said, but she didn’t mean
that
icicle, she meant the fifty- and hundred-pounders that hung from the eaves, that came to a wicked sharp point. “One of those falls down, it could go right through your head.” A huge one hung over the back door, and I thought about it when I put my boots on and stood with my hand on the knob. A boy on his way to school! A good boy! Being careful to slam the door shut behind him, he loosens the giant icicle and its point, sharp as an ice pick, slams all the way through his skull and down into his heart, the huge butt of the missile splitting his head like a tomato. “He didn’t stand a chance,” the sheriff said, standing over the small, still form, one white hand still clutching a bookbag that contained the dead boy’s assignments, which were posthumously awarded gold stars.

I left the house fast, escaping that death, but other deaths waited for me. Icicles in the trees: you couldn’t watch out for them
and
watch out for holes and bear traps. Holes in the ice on the river: you couldn’t see them under the snow, but one misstep and suddenly you’d be in
freezing water under the ice, no way to come up for air. Holes in the ice on the lake: we fished in them with a dropline, but what if a giant snapper yanked on the line and pulled you through? It was a small hole, and all your flesh would come off.

Older children told stories about pump handles and kids who put their tongues on them. You put your tongue on a pump handle when it’s so bitterly cold, the spit freezes, you’re stuck there. Then either they pull you away, ripping your tongue off, or else pitch a tent over you and wait for spring and hope for the best. It scared us little kids, the thought that one day during recess we might forget and put our tongue on the handle—who knows how these things happen? Maybe an older kid would make us do it. Maybe we would just forget—one moment of carelessness, and
glurrp
, you’re stuck, and the teacher has to grab your head and,
rrrrrrip
, there’s your little red tongue hanging from the handle. When you’re little you believe that evil can somehow reach out and suck you in, so maybe you’d be lured toward that pump—maybe it would speak, “Hey kid, c’mere. Stick out your tongue,” and put you in a trance.