Population 485 (18 page)

It’s tempting to wear backwardness like a chrome-plated crown of thorns. The first time I went to New York City (well, the second time, but the first time was in my uncle Stanley’s eighteen-wheeler, by gum), an agent representing a prodigious literary firm quite kindly treated me to lunch at a desperately happening restaurant on West Fifty-sixth Street. I had the wood-roasted sea bass. The bill cleared three figures, easy. There was this part of me, the part whose Billy Bob’s Texas—World’s Largest Honky-Tonk jacket was hanging in coat check amongst the minks, that wanted to say, Well, dang, down to the Legion Hall, five bucks will get you all the smelt you can eat. My gullet countered by reporting that this particular filet of sea bass—brushed with an herb vinaigrette and arriving in repose on a mattress of blanched spinach—was a trip to the Louvre, and furthermore, the honey-lemon custard that followed was composed using eggs evidently cracked by cherubs and whisked by angels. I fixed my internal hick with a severe glare and dispatched a memo reminding him that smelt is essentially deep-fried bait, and he should cut it out with the disingenuous yokelism.

We are not just a bunch of jolly Norwegians bowling,
yah hey
. Right up the road, there is a graffito spray-painted on the bricks of an old garage and partially obscured by weeds: Fuck the System! I had to grin. What you have here is evidence that a few of our young folk are reading something other than the
Chetek Alert
. At certain speaking engagements I say we are twenty years behind schedule here “…but that’s the way we like it.” We’re not, of course. These days, all the little gray satellite dishes keep everyone smack in the present. The sepia tones of place are outshone by the flashing image of whatever you wish. Cultural anomaly becomes de rigueur. The local boys cruise up and down Main Street as you might expect, in their pickups with their gun racks and hot rod decals and their lips slugged with chew, but they are wearing skater pants, suckling Mountain Dew, and booming hip-hop out the windows. Loafing around the Gas-N-Go, they affect gangsta poses. The temptation is to round up these bad boys and provide them a taste of the genuine Compton, but insight and understanding can rarely be forced. Last year the county judge sentenced a nineteen-year-old New Auburn man convicted of thieving money from his grandparents to read and deliver a report on Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
. Can’t hurt, I guess, but tearful epiphanies are a long shot and in any case rarely possess staying power.

In 1975, the New Auburn Centennial Committee produced a commemorative album. It contains a number of historical (that is to say
old
) photos of townspeople, and sometimes I study those photos and try to draw contemporary parallels, try to figure out where or how I might have fit in. Or tougher still, try to bring these characters into the present. I find it impossible to put any of these faces in a minivan, or imagine the fellow running the cream separator slouched in a recliner with a bag of chips and the remote. Why do the faces in old photos look so out of time? So
historical
? Not the clothes, or the haircuts—the
faces
. The eyes, the noses, the ears, the components are standard, but the countenance as a whole seems dated. Perhaps it has something to do with the ongoing recession of innocence as a general concept. At this point, the historical evidence accumulated on behalf of the perpetuity of change is overwhelming. The point is not to fight it, but to negotiate it. I don’t wanna die before I grow old, but I do hope I can keep the By-God-in-
my
-day grousing to a minimum. The two most ludicrous words in the English language are
I wish
.

There is no television in my house. It is my contention that cable and little gray satellite dishes have contributed more to the intellectual torpor of the nation than groundwater contamination, smog, and Twinkies combined. I make this assertion, and yet harbor the hope that Oprah might have me on to talk about the book. And two or three of my friends will report that I tend to visit a lot on Sundays and Monday nights during football season. And I rarely get decent sleep in motels, because I click back and forth through the basic cable channels like a junkie scrounging a thirty-two-room apartment for loose change. The lowest common denominator is indefatigable and frequently delicious.

Having done my grumping, it seems to me that the globalization of human experience via everything from satellite feeds to online kipper boutiques is good news to the extent that even the most reclusive among us receive daily updates on the complications of the human condition. There was a time when ignorance—and the prejudice it fostered—could be grossly excused as a result of cultural or geographical isolation. Nowadays, ignorance must be willfully tended, like a stumpy mushroom under a bucket. Light is hitting more and more of the earth. Trouble thrives, but more and more humans share a general sense of life as it is on this spinning rock, and that is due, in part, to war correspondents in Kabul,
The Food Network
, and lesbian chat rooms.

The trouble is—and this is not a complaint, but a report—the world has our attention in a million ways it never did before, and we find it tougher and tougher to focus our loyalties. Tougher to know how to belong, or to
want
to belong. Individual freedom is essential to the human spirit, and a theoretical individualism makes for cool Nike (or Army, for that matter!) commercials, but sometimes you have to team up. To fight a fire, for instance. I love—the word is not too strong—the idea of neighbors coming together to put out fires, and I am thrilled to be a part of that effort when I am called. It feels good. It feels right. It feels like I belong. Sometimes you find yourself looking for little commonalities. Go Packers.

What you hope for, I think, is to reconcile the dichotomies and negotiate a position of comfort. This is mostly a passive process. Which is not to infer limp acquiescence. In a town founded by a successful author who set up his own sawmill but didn’t write his own book, I make a living writing, but some of my credibility is maintained by the fact that my helmet is hanging on the wall over at the fire hall right now, and while no one on the department has any idea what goes on at these poetry readings, or what I could possibly get from watching an eighty-nine-year-old man dancing
Ulysses and the Sirens
in a headdress and gold lamé g-string, they do know that when there is smoke in the sky, I will pull hose and roll.

Exclude issues of culinary excellence, and there is no question I am more comfortable attending the smelt feed at the Legion Hall than I am choosing from six forks on the five-star mezzanine. I love cycling through the line with my neighbors, loading my plastic foam plate with smelt and cole slaw and beans. There’s buttered bread, a cooler of Kool-Aid, and a couple coffee percolators. If you want a beer, you give your money to the lady at the card table. She makes change for your fiver with singles drawn from a tin box and you grab a can from the tub. We sit at folding tables under pictures of departed local veterans and a framed version of the Preamble to the Constitution. The smelt are flat and lightly breaded, about the size of a pocket comb. The tails are on. Some people strip the bones out. Me, I eat the bones. Calcium, I figure. If you like, the members of the Fish and Game Club put shrimp sauce out. Shrimp sauce being IGA ketchup and Silver Springs horseradish mixed in a bowl. You spear the smelt with a plastic fork, swab it through the sauce, and fork it in. Repeat until full, or a little beyond, which is the way around here. Whatever table you land at, you’re going to know someone. Conversation runs to weather and catch-up. Last year I sat next to the school shop teacher. He married a girl up the road from our farm. He wants to know what my brothers are up to. Making wood and hauling logs, I tell him. He says he’s going to build a house in town, might get my brother John to dig the basement with his big backhoe. We get back in line for seconds.

Last time I was in the Legion Hall, it was to perform. A seed-corn representative hosting a customer-appreciation luncheon hired me to read some of my work for a group of local farmers. That was daunting. I stood there with my essays in my hands, looked at their red faces and thick fingers, and remembered the old “football builds character” speech my high school football coach used to deliver on parents’ night. I was always embarrassed for him, knowing half his audience had been up and grinding since five
A.M
., milking cows, bucking hay bales, lugging feed, wondering if the bank might cut them some slack. Football? Standing inside a manure spreader chipping frozen cow manure off the beater bars when it’s ten below, that builds character. So I led off my reading with the thing about learning to write by cleaning calf pens. That eased things quite a bit. Physical labor is not in and of itself virtuous, but when you can carry your work around on 8 1/2-by-11 sheets of paper, you stand before a group like this with your metaphorical hat in your pink-palmed hands.

There are those who say he chokes up on it a little more than he should, but Ross Johnson’s hand is formed to grab a hammer handle. If you get up early, you can catch him at the Gas-N-Go most mornings, with his van and his crew, the coffee drinkers getting their fix before the ride to the latest project, a house, a pole shed, a cow barn. Ross has been building things for forty years now, and last summer he donated his time to help the fire department put up rain shelters down at the softball field. Most of the time, his head was three steps ahead of his troops. It’s an art, keeping a work crew busy. The overbearing ramrod triggers their resentment; an indecisive ramrod loses their respect. Ross kept us all busy, and was quick up the ladder with his own hammer when necessary.

Like most of us around here, Ross takes off work for deer hunting, and last year he shot a legendary local buck. Twenty-six points. A monster. He made the television news and all the local papers. He was pretty low-key about the whole thing, but if you wanted to sum up our local ethos, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Ross, quoted in the
Eau Claire Leader-Telegram
. “I got a new pickup last week, shot that buck, and yesterday the Packers won…so it was a pretty good weekend.”

What we like, we like. We are happy when we are happy. We identify with some people, not others. That guy the Beagle and I wrassled out on the logging trail, I hope I never see him again, but I sure am glad we have history. We’re on the same team, he and I, even if we don’t play well together, and even if he’ll never remember me through the whiskey haze he wore that night. Ross Johnson found satisfaction in the Packers, a truck, and a deer. The things that bring you joy tell you a lot about who you are. The reading is not always definitive.

I am in a motel. Running the basic cable. This video comes on. “Home,” by Sheryl Crow. Everything is shot in black and white, that lustrous black and white with the silvery spray-paint sheen. Sheryl is singing at a demolition derby. The possibilities of heaven expand. The derby cars are jouncy and sprung, tagged with ads for pressure washers and muffler shops. The drivers careen with earnest idiocy. Heads bobbling, radiators fuming, they smack each other tremendously, in stark contrast to the wistful adagio of the music. The camera cuts from the cars to the grandstand, dwelling on faces. Every face is different, but they share the patina of hard living. Wrinkles and wind scour. Pale brows and burnt napes. A woman’s skin, jerked and cured by a lifetime of cigarettes. A thin-nosed child with bad teeth. A stiff-backed man with guarded eyes. A girl, maybe out of high school, pregnant and beaming, the old lady she will become already evident in her uncomplicated face. The boyfriend’s hand, meaty and tan, cupping her belly. This is a powerful human study. Every countenance is proof of a common verity. Proof of how station, time, and circumstance shape our visage. Every day I see these faces.

Sheryl, of course, is beautiful. She is exempt from our verity. She is standing amid the sheet metal and the dust and the hardscrabble rednecks and she is singing her soft, sad song, and—in a juxtaposition perhaps confirming the existence of God—she is wearing leather knee-boots and an abbreviated nightie. Between her hemline and her boot tops there is such an equine stretch of thigh as to imply a lifetime of mystery and wonder. The song is ending. Cut to Sheryl standing atop a hay bale—O ineffable image!—at the lip of the mud boggers’ racing pit. A beastly four-wheel-drive slams into the slurry. It screams through the frame, lifting a vast, chocolaty curtain of ooze, which obscures, then breaks (in delicious slow motion) over Sheryl, legs a tad astraddle, head tipped back, arms held wide.

Awards should be arranged.

Behind her, my people rise to their feet and cheer.

Gawping at the TV, I make a noise. Sounds a little like a walrus.

D
EATH

I
CAN TURN YOU INTO A CORPSE.
I can look at you and know exactly what you would look like dead. It is a disquieting ability, one I must frequently suppress. I will be seated across a table from someone, they can be talking, eating, laughing, and I will see them stiff on the floor, skin drained, mouth gapped, teeth dry, eyes staring. For fourteen years now I’ve had occasion to observe the recently deceased in a variety of presentations, and as a result, I have developed the ability—similar, in a macabre way, to those computer programs used to create age progression in pictures of missing children—to look at the living and see them dead. Frankly, it is a talent I could do without.

The dead and their faces have never haunted me. I can conjure them up, but they never come unbidden. There has been only one exception, from a call I made back in the early days. I recall a hot summer afternoon, and I remember Jacques and myself banging out the door even as the page was still transmitting, the dispatcher saying only that a state trooper had been struck by a vehicle on the interstate. We knew it wouldn’t be good. At interstate speeds, a car-versus-pedestrian strike is apocalyptic. Jacques drove, and I trembled in the passenger seat, all the while constructing a vision of some burly trooper lying twisted and silent in the ditch weeds. When we rounded the sweeping curve, I saw a blanket-draped lump on the concrete. Someone waved me in, and I ran to the lump. As I bent to the blanket, the first thing I saw was a hand extended from beneath the cloth, the white fingers set in a curl, the palm cupped. I remember a fleeting impression, something about that hand being not quite right, and when I stripped back the blanket, there, like a rumpled child, was a tiny uniformed woman, her face framed in a thick splash of long blond hair. The hand…it was too small. I was ready for the violence, prepared to view a blunt, wide-shouldered busted-up man; I was unprepared for beauty, for the color and abundance of that hair, for those delicately drawn fingers. We tried, but there was nothing to be done. The damage was overwhelming. I recall listening overlong for a heartbeat, then looking at Jacques. We quietly replaced the blanket and stood down until we were cleared to transport the body.