Lake Wobegon Days (54 page)

“Anything that ever happened to me is happening to other people,” says Clarence. “Somewhere in the world right now, a kid is looking at something and thinking, “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s the same thing that I looked at forty years ago, whatever it was.”

If that is true and our lives are being lived over and over by others, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

If that is true, somewhere a boy rides next to his father in a car, his eyes level with the top of the dashboard, and pulls back slightly on the window crank which lowers the wing flaps and makes the Ford rise toward the clouds. He tests this principle with his right hand out the window, feeling the lift. He sees that the clouds are following this car; so is the sun. The car is under his power and is the center of the world. The button on the glove compartment fires two machine guns mounted over the fenders. There is also a flame thrower. He can wipe out anybody he sees, such as older boys up ahead playing football in Potvin’s front yard who recently laughed at him. The plane zooms past them,
zoom!
, and silent guns fire and that whole gang falls dead, he doesn’t bother to look back, he knows.

Somewhere a boy eats his bran flakes and his dad says, “I had to get up in the night to get me a blanket. It was kinda chilly last night.”

“
Ja
,” says his mother, “I don’t know but what we might get another frost.”

“
Ja
, I remember it was ’57, wasn’t it, or ’58, we got a frost around now.”

“Maybe we oughta lay down straw around those strawberries.”

“
Ja
, you never can tell.”

He eats his bran flakes in silence, gritting his teeth. Why do they always talk about weather and say the same dumb things?

“What’s the matter witcha? Cat got your tongue?”

“Nothing.”

This boy is a good reader; his parents are proud of him. (“Whatcha reading there?”
“Nothing”
) He has now come to the end of the Flambeau Family Series, all twelve books, some of which he read twice, trying to hold off on
The Flambeaus and the Case of the Temple Emeralds
, but at last was forced to finish, and now faces a life with no further adventures. Emile and Eileen don’t talk about late frost; their Manhattan penthouse is well above the frost line; they talk about ideas, about books and music, and, yes, even sex, because they are intelligent and literate and treat their son, Tony, as a mature person. “Oh, Tony darling, while you’re up, would you fix me a martini?” Eileen called from the balcony. “Have it in a jiff, Eileen,” the young man replied. This sort of thing never happens in his house. “Oh, Tony darling, I just had the most wonderful idea! Let’s go to Paris, just the three of us—it’s so beautiful this time of year!” Beauty is a big thing to the Flambeaus’; they fill their lives with it, unlike his folks, whose lives are filled with dread—“
Ja
, you never can tell”: their slogan, they ought to have it chiseled on their tombstone: “You never can tell.”
Why can’t we be more like the Flambeaus?
We couldn’t be exactly like them, of course—Emile’s Nobel Prize in medicine, Eileen’s former career on the Broadway stage—but couldn’t we capture some of their grace and eat breakfast this fine May morning and talk of something other than frost?

Some where a boy has spread a map on the hood of the old green Ford and is studying it with the help of his old man. The boy is wearing
a white shirt and new tan corduroys; in the backseat are a suitcase and two heavy cardboard boxes, their tops folded shut. He’s going to take the back road to the blacktop and then straight south and pick up Highway 52 and go through St. Cloud, though the old man thinks he’d be better off heading east and then south on 10, or taking 52 to 152 and then South, either way avoiding St. Cloud, and just north of the Cities get on the Belt Line, avoiding the Cities, and swing east and south to 12 and then on to Chicago. “You go through the Cities, you can get hung up for hours,” his old man says. The boy listens, folds the map, walks around back of the house, and gives the woman who is weeding the radishes a little peck on the cheek. Shakes the man’s hand, gets in the car, backs out, waves, and is gone. He thinks he has avoided the Cities for much too long now, and he is going to drive straight through the center of them. His dad plans trips like he was crossing enemy lines, skirting the main forces, looking for gaps to break through into open country. Outside of town, on the back road, the boy guns the Ford down the hill past Hochstetters’ and up the long incline. Stones bang on the floorboard. The car leaps ahead at the crest and barrels toward Sunnyvale School, where two small boys sit in the shade on the west side. “Fifty-six Ford!” one yells. He is now ahead, four cars to two, on identification. The other boy waves at the Ford, which does not wave back, he is behind, two waves to three. As the Ford flies past trailing a cloud of dust, he stands and squeezes off an expert burst from his machine gun, hitting the gas tank, which blows up, enveloping the car in a ball of orange flame.

Somewhere a man gets into his Buick in a blizzard even though he can barely see across the yard to the barn and his wife and child are pleading with him to please not go to town. On the county road, crashing into drifts like ocean waves, he realizes how foolish this trip is but he plows four miles to the Sidetrack Tap, runs in and buys a carton of Pall Malls. “An emergency run, huh?” says Wally, the old kidder. “No,” he says, lying, “I was in town anyway so I thought I might as well stock up.” It’s quiet in town, but a mile south of there, the wind comes up and suddenly he can’t see anything. He is damp with sweat. He can’t see the ditches, can’t see the hood ornament. He drives slower, staring ahead for the slightest clues of road, until there
is none—no sky, no horizon, only dazzling white—so he opens his door and leans out and looks for tire tracks: hanging from the steering wheel, leaning way down, his face a couple feet from the ground, hoping that nobody is driving toward him and doing likewise. Then, as the car slips off the road, he realizes that the track he is following is the track of his own left front tire heading into the deep ditch. The car eases down into the snow, and he squeezes out the window and climbs up onto the road. He is not too far from his neighbor’s house. He can see it almost, and the woods. A massed army of corn stands in the snowy field. Visibility is not so bad as in the car, where his heavy breathing was fogging the glass. He’s about a quarter-mile from home. The cigarettes, however, must be sitting on Wally’s counter. They certainly aren’t in the car.
A pretty dumb trip.
Town was a long way to go in a blizzard for the pleasure of coming back home. He could have driven his car straight to the ditch and saved everyone the worry. But what a lucky man. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. He takes deep breaths and the cold air goes to his brain and makes him more sensible. He starts out on the short walk to the house where people love him and will be happy to see his face.