Jeri
called my room shortly before eight and said she was just shutting things down
at the café. About a half hour later, just as I was starting to nod off, I
heard a car horn in the parking lot outside my door. I pulled on my coat and
boots and went out to find Jeri sitting behind the wheel of a huge black pickup
truck that was badly in need of a new muffler. She was drinking a can of
Budweiser and blasting Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story” from the
tape deck.
“I’d
offer you a beer, but this was the last one in the refrigerator at work,” she
said. “I’m sure it belongs to the morning cook, and I’m probably gonna catch
hell for taking it.” She offered me the can. “Here, you finish it. I’m not a
big Budweiser fan.”
I
accepted the beer from her and took a swallow. The can was so cold in my hands
that I had to prop it between my legs. “Where are we headed?” I asked. “And
couldn’t we have just walked over there?”
“You can
walk anywhere in this town,” Jeri said, “but you don’t. We don’t. We drive.
You’ll notice it if you haven’t already; you’ll seldom see anyone walking, and
if you do spy someone on foot the odds are pretty good they’re either on their
way to or from their cars. That’s why a dinky little town like this has three
car washes. This truck, by the way, belongs to my grandmother’s husband, Roy,
who you should be warned is something of a character. He’s something more than
a character, actually. Roy is, umm….” She drummed on the steering wheel with
her thumbs and searched for the right word or words. “Let’s just say Roy is
kind of a whack job. And my grandmother adores him. I think I mentioned this is
the third go round for her, but she and Roy have been together for almost ten
years now, and my grandma says this one is the last one.”
The
grandmother lived in a block of squat 1950s-era ramblers and ramshackle
bungalows just at the edge of town and separated from the river by railroad
tracks. A lot of the homes in the neighborhood had Christmas displays that
veered well over the line into overkill –streamers of multi-colored lights
along the edges of roofs and wound around trees and bushes, elaborate manger
scenes often mingled with plastic reindeer and snowmen and giant inflatable
Santa Clauses. With much of the snow evaporating and the usual thick fog moving
in off the river, these displays didn’t look festive so much as sort of
desperate and forlorn.
Jeri
pulled up in front of one of the only houses on the block that didn’t feature
some sort of Christmas display.
The
grandmother was in the kitchen, playing Solitaire on a scarred Formica table
and watching a television that was on top of the refrigerator.
She rose from her chair to give Jeri a hug, and greeted me warmly when we were
introduced. Her name was Tina, and she was a skinny woman wearing Levis and a
faded Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt. As we took off our coats, she immediately
fetched beers from the refrigerator and announced that we were going to play a
game of Rummy.
I’d
never played the game, but before I was seated at the table Jeri’s grandmother
was already dealing the cards. As she dealt, she and Jeri kept interrupting
each other trying to explain to me the rules of the game. I got the hang of it
pretty quickly, but Tina was unbeatable. She won the first two games before I
could finish my first beer.
“How’s
Louie?” Jeri said at one point.
“Louie’s
sleeping,” Tina answered without looking up from her cards. “Which means that
Louie’s just fine. He was hell on wheels all night.”
I knew
that Jeri and Louie lived with Tina and her husband, Roy, but I had no idea
where Jeri’s parents were. For some reason, even though the subject was never
that I recall broached in our earlier conversations, I understood that they
were out of the picture.
“Where’s
Roy?” Jeri asked as Tina dealt out the cards for the third game.
“Be here
any minute,” Tina said. “He should just be getting off work.”
Jeri
turned to me and said, “Roy works at the meat packing plant. He mucks around
with hamburger patties all day.”
“He
makes twelve dollars an hour,” Tina said. “Which is damn good money in this
town.”
“In this
town,” Jeri said.
You
could tell that Tina had been beautiful as a young woman; she still was
beautiful, in fact, one of those older women who continued to possess a fierce
vanity, spent time every morning applying her makeup, and had regular
appointments at a hair salon downtown. She had the same quick conversational
style as her granddaughter, and it was obvious there was genuine mutual
affection between the two of them. There was no apparent strain, and
they yakked and laughed easily together like old friends.
I was
holding my own in the third game when Roy came in the back door, stomping his
big rubber boots in the entryway and yodeling in a croaky baritone. He was a
large man, wearing dirty, sand-colored coveralls and a stocking cap that was precariously
perched on the crown of his head. He appeared to be oblivious to my presence at
the table as he shed his boots and coveralls.
“Mother,”
he said. “Remind me again why I let those bastards talk me into working double
shifts every time some numb-nuts calls in sick.”
Tina
laid down three eights and said, “It’s called time-and-a-half, Roy, honey.
That’s our mad money.”
Roy
headed straight to the refrigerator for a beer, glanced over his shoulder, and
settled in at the table with beers for everyone. After he had distributed the
drinks, he offered me his big hand.
“And you
are?” he said.
I told
him my name and he asked if I was a friend of Jerilynne’s.
“We just
met,” I said.
“She’s already bringing you home to meet the family?” he said. “Must be
serious.”
“He’s
Charlie Stensrud’s grandson,” Tina said. “Come from Chicago to make the
arrangements.”
“What
arrangements would those be?” Roy asked.
“No
arrangements, really,” I said. “My grandfather is being cremated and I’m just
trying to sort out the…I don’t know, estate, I guess.”
“Where’s
your old man?” Roy said.
“He’s in
the Middle East. Working.”
Roy just
nodded. He was already settled in next to Tina and was studying her cards over
her shoulder. She pinched him just under his ribcage and said, “I suppose
you’re hungry.”
“I could
eat something,” Roy said. She handed over her cards to him, got up from the
table, and went over to the refrigerator.
“I’m
afraid it’s slim pickings, honey,” Tina said. “You must have taken the last of
the turkey to work. Remind me that I need to get to the grocery store
tomorrow.” She pulled a bag of tater tots from the freezer, poured it onto a
cookie sheet, and set the oven to preheat. As she waited for the oven to warm
up she opened a can of soup, dumped it in a large bowl, and put it in the
microwave oven. After she punched in the time on the microwave and shoved the
tater tots in the oven, she turned and winked at me. “We’re not what you’d call
fancy folks,” she said.
“Speak
for yourself,” Jeri said. “And while you’re up, grandma, why don’t you get your
boxes of pictures. David’s never been to Bryton before, and he doesn’t know
diddly about his grandfather. You should show him the photos of the Christmas
village and some of Charlie’s other stuff.”
Tina disappeared
into another room and returned a moment later with two shoeboxes, which she
plopped on the table.
“Put the
cards away,” she said. “Roy can tend to his dinner and we’ll take a trip down
memory lane. Your dad didn’t have any photos of Charlie’s crazy rooftop?”
“I’d
never heard of it,” I said. “I remember seeing a couple photos of my
grandfather that my dad had around, pictures of the two of them when dad was a
boy, but that was it. We avoided the subject of my grandfather around our
house. I only learned about the mini-golf course a couple days ago when I was poking around the
apartment and found the plans.”
“Well,
Charlie was a doozy,” Tina said.
“He was
a three-dollar bill,” Roy said. “But he was a good egg, and a first-rate
character.”
“Shut
the hell up, Roy,” Tina said.
“I’m
saying I liked Charlie,” Roy said. He shrugged and got up to fetch his
soup from the microwave while his wife started fishing around in the boxes of
photos. She pulled out a handful and sifted through them on the kitchen table.
They were mostly old, rectangular or serrated-edged black-and-white snapshots.
Tina shoved some across the table to me.
“There’s
Charlie’s Christmas village,” she said.
I picked
up a picture of a little candy-striped hut, surrounded by frocked Christmas
trees decorated with glass bulbs and fake icicles. There was a crudely
hand-painted sign that read, “Santa’s Workshop –North Pole.” A path was
shoveled to the door of the hut through what appeared to be real snow. There
was another photo of what I presumed to be my grandfather in a sort of shabby
Santa Claus suit with a little girl on his lap. He was sitting in a big
upholstered chair that was covered with velvet. On each side of the chair there
were piles of wrapped packages, and beside one of these piles was a miniature
tree hung with dozens of candy canes.
"Folks
came and brought their kids for a few years,” Tina said, “but then Hangstrum’s,
the department store that used to be downtown, hired a Santa as well, and
Charlie's deal sort of petered out."
Jeri
had excused herself to take a shower and change clothes, and Roy had settled
back in at the table with his tater tots and soup. “People in this town have
always been divided about Charlie,” he said. “There were some who wouldn't set
foot in his place.”
“It was
also out of the way,” Tina said. “Charlie did it whenever he felt like it and
didn’t advertise, and there were all those stairs to climb.”
“The
thing was, though, was that Charlie just did it for the hell of it,” Roy said.
“It was just another of his wacky ideas. I don't think he ever came close to breaking even on a single thing he did on that rooftop. It was his own little playground.”
“We
don’t have a park or a town square in Bryton,” Tina said, “and after Charlie
bought the building he always had this idea that he was going to turn that
rooftop of his into a sort of community park. He tried to get the local summer
theater company to stage plays up there, but that never worked out. For a time
he used to show old movies like Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin up there
on Saturday evenings in the summer, and he'd usually get a small group of
people to show up. That was right before he went to the Wisconsin Dells for
vacation and got the idea for his little golf course.”
Tina
handed me another small stack of photos, all of them of the miniature golf
course in various permutations.
“That
was his biggest thing by far,” she said. “The kids in town have never had much
to do, and when Charlie opened the golf course it was a big deal for quite a
few years. We’d never seen anything like that around here. He had lights up
there so you could play after dark, and on Friday nights the kids would be
lined up on those stairs waiting to golf. They’d come in from the little towns
out in the country. My first husband and I used to take Jeri’s mother down
there on Saturday afternoons. Charlie took such good care of the place, and he
was always adding little things to make it more interesting or challenging.”
“Was
Santo around by this time?” I asked.
“Yeah,
he was around even during the Christmas village thing,” Roy said. “He mostly
worked in the bar, but he also helped Charlie with all his projects. They were
sidekicks.”
“And my
father and grandmother were still in the picture during all this?” I said.
Tina dug
through one of the boxes and pulled out a photo of a small, thin woman with
cat-eye glasses, smiling and leaning over a putter. “That’s your grandmother,
Faye,” she said. “Your father would have probably been just entering high
school at this time. The golf course opened a year or two before Faye was
killed.”
“I'm
pretty sure my father thought she committed suicide,” I said. “And I know he
blamed my grandfather.”
“Faye
was a battleaxe,” Roy said. “She would have been a mess with or without Charlie.”
“Oh,
Jesus, Roy.” Tina handed me another photo of my grandmother. In this one she
was standing around a punch bowl at some sort of party. She looked surprisingly
older than in the photo from the golf course. “I knew your grandmother from the
time we were girls,” Tina said. “It’s a small town, and we ran around together
growing up. Faye was a handful, but she came from a lousy family, so I always
felt sorry for her. Her father was a mean drunk, so it made sense to me that
she would be attracted to Charlie, who was so gentle. When they first got
married he had a decent job at the packing plant, but then out of the blue
--this was when your father was still a boy-- he got the notion that he wanted
to cut hair. He went over to Dubuque to a barber school, and then came back and
opened his shop in the back of the bar. After that it was just one big, crazy
idea after another. Plenty of other people besides your dad blamed Charlie for
Faye’s death, and some also thought she committed suicide --her car went off
the road and rolled down into the river-- but she had a serious drinking
problem and was in pretty terrible shape by that point. I know she had problems
with Charlie, but I never thought her death was anything but an accident.”
“Your
father had a chip on his shoulder from the get-go,” Roy said. “He was a smart
kid and a mama’s boy, and I think he was embarrassed of the old man. I can tell
you, though, that when Charlie sold the house after your grandmother died --he
was already living in the place downtown by then-- he gave your dad every
penny of that money. When your dad went off and joined the Army he already had
a nice chunk of change squirreled away in the bank.”
We spent
some more time looking through the photos –I saw lots of pictures of Jerilynne
when she was a little girl, and Jerilynne in high school —and then Tina put
them back in the boxes, replaced the lids, and carried them away again. I
thought about asking if I could have one or two of the photos of my
grandfather’s rooftop, and maybe one of the shots of my grandmother, but I
didn’t.
“That’s
probably more than you needed to know,” Roy said, as he fetched another round
of beers from the refrigerator.
“No,” I
said. “Not at all. It’s pretty mind boggling, but it’s great. I’m thrilled to
have seen the pictures, and I’m glad to have the information. It helps to fill
in a lot of the blanks, and there have always been a lot of blanks in my
family.”
Tina had
returned to the kitchen and was clearing Roy’s plates. “Everybody’s family has
a lot of blanks,” she said. “Sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.”
Jerilynne
reemerged just after Roy had started to shuffle the cards for another game of
Rummy.
“Deal me
in,” she said, and then put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Did you get what
you came for?”
“I did,”
I said.
We sat
around for another hour or two, drinking beer and playing cards. They were
comfortable people to be around. All of them laughed easily, and I felt right
at home. By the time we called it a night it was after midnight and I was
starting to feel pretty drunk.
As Jeri
and I pulled on our shoes and coats to leave, Tina took Jeri’s face in her hands
and said, “You sure you’re ok to drive, honey?”
“I had
two beers,” Jeri said. “I’m fine. I think David here might be another story.”
Tina
then gave me a big hug and said, “Thanks so much for coming. I’m awful sorry
about your grandfather. Let us know if there’s anything you need.”
Jeri
drove me back across town to the motel, and we parked outside for a few minutes
chatting.
“It was
great to meet you,” she told me. “Strange men don’t show up in this town every
day. And by strange I mean nothing but unfamiliar.”
She
leaned across the truck seat to hug me, and we had a sort of fumbling, awkward
moment. She pulled herself out of it with grace. “I’d come in,” she said, “but
we’d both end up feeling stupid about it. You know where to find me.”
I stood
in the parking lot and watched her pull away. I had to admit that, as right as
I knew she was, I was nonetheless sorry to see her go. The fog that seemed to
be omnipresent in that town had blown off, revealing a huge, bright moon and a
sky full of stars. I noticed that the little gas and convenience store across
the street was still open and walked over to pick up a six-pack of beer.
