May Day (19 page)

“Come on, Tiger Pop. It’s time to fill our empty heads.”

Back in the kitchen, I washed my hands until the water ran clear and then cracked a Dr. Pepper, poured a couple fingers of vodka into it, and popped some homestyle butter popcorn in the microwave. I rarely drank pop, as it made me weird, but I thought I deserved a treat. Plus, I didn’t know how late I would be staying up tonight, and the caffeine would do me good. When I had my snacks ready to go, I invited Tiger Pop to watch TV with me. He was meditating on my bed, and I felt rude for addressing him directly. I flopped on the scratchy couch and grabbed the least-used remote in the county. When I saw I was only getting Fox, I put it down and sat back to watch an old episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Sometimes I really liked my life.

It was spring and
dark came around eight p.m. I didn’t know what time was appropriate to arrive at a masquerade, but ten seemed like a safe bet. Any earlier and I might be one of two or three awkward people in masks trying to make small talk.

Come nine-thirty, I couldn’t wait anymore. Fox’s Friday night lineup was stultifying, reinforcing what society had been teaching me since I was old enough to get my ears pierced: anyone worth their salt will be out on a Friday night meeting people and being exciting. Well, I could take a hint.

I changed into my now-standard spying outfit of black jeans, black turtleneck, and tennis shoes and headed out the door. Eagle Lake, the site of the party according to the invite, was approximately ten miles south of where I lived. If there wasn’t too much farm machinery, tourists pulling boats, or deer on the way, I’d make it in under fifteen minutes. I planned to drive straight to the public access boat landing about a mile from where the party was supposed to be. I would park my car there and walk so I wouldn’t be recognized by my vehicle when I arrived.

When I reached the divided highway, I took a left on Eagle Lake Road. I drove about two miles before the road changed from tar to gravel, and another three-quarters mile until I saw a yard light obscured by trees. It reminded me of Lartel’s house, except the mailbox was white and I could see peeks of a blue house through the white oaks. There were lights blazing and cars in the driveway.

I drove a little farther until I passed by an approach. I turned my car around and drove back to the public access. There were seven other cars parked there, which was a lot for 9:47 p.m. Plus, none of them had boat trailers hooked on. Looks like I wasn’t the only one who wanted to hang low, though I didn’t recognize any of the vehicles.

The blue house was a straight one-mile shot through the woods on the south side of the road. Given the number of cars in the access lot, I decided it would be best to wear my disguise from the word go, though I felt like a dork traipsing through the moonlit forest in a Harlequin mask. I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of me stuck in a bear trap, passed out from pain, found all in black and masked. I was so engrossed in this potential shame that I almost walked straight into a tall man, back to me, peeing.

“Sorry,” I said. It was the knee-jerk apology of someone who has accidentally walked into a bathroom stall they thought was empty.

He quickly shook, zipped, and turned to me. Everything below his eyes was covered in an elaborate feathered and sequined veil, but it didn’t disguise his dark beard and mustache. What I thought were black pants and a shirt turned out to be belly dancer trousers and a bikini top under a transparent blouse. It looked like something Barbara Eden would wear on
I Dream of Jeannie.

He looked away quickly. “Not a problem.” He jogged ahead and out of sight.

I looked around and behind me. I didn’t see any other hairy, peeing Bedouins, so I continued on. I was much more alert now, but the only sounds I heard were branches snapping under my tennis shoes and the breeze in the tops of the trees.

I was nearly out of the woods when a dark shape swooped at me like a pterodactyl. It knocked off my mask and scratched at my shoulder. I ducked, hands over my head, and waited for the next attack. I heard a heavy shape land on a nearby branch and risked a peek.

“Whoo whoo.”

Shit. An owl. The birds were turning on me, just like I knew they would. I scrabbled around on the forest floor until I felt my mask and hunch-walked toward the house. I tried to move completely unlike a mouse, but it’s hard to seem ominous when you’re crouching. When I got to the clearing, I fought the urge to stand up straight and run. If that owl was going to get me, he was going to work for it.

I heard subdued music coming from inside. I checked to make sure I still had my keys and some money in my pockets. If this was some kind of direct sales party, like Gina had said, I wanted to have some cash on hand so I would blend in.

I circled the house, but all the windows had shades covering them so I couldn’t see in. In the front lawn were those wooden ornaments that look like big ladies leaning over and exposing their butts, and an excited white poodle was tied to the lone oak tree in the lawn. My feet crunched on acorns as I walked to the door. It looked like the only way to go was in.

I reached for the doorknob and entered, confused by the dim light. From all the blazing lights in the yard, I had expected it to be much brighter inside. A firm hand grabbed my wrist right inside the door. “Invitation.”

I turned to the voice and saw a man in an exact replica of my outfit—black shirt, black pants, and tennis shoes, topped by a full-face Harlequin mask. He was thick-necked and large and had a faint vanilla odor about him that I couldn’t place. I pulled the invite out of my back pocket and handed it to him. He glanced briefly at it and returned it. “Which room do you want to go to?”

What kind of party was this? I couldn’t see anyone but this guy, and the music was no louder inside that it had been outside. I played with the idea of mumbling something, but I took a chance and revealed my newness. “This is my first time. What are my choices?”

His neck muscles relaxed a little, and he pulled a tiny white pot with a black and yellow cover out of his back pocket. He applied a generous slab of Carmex to his lips without lifting his mask, and then nodded toward the top of the stairs. “First-timer. We’re glad to have you. You want the Red Room, first door on your left at the top of the stairs. They’ll take care of you there.”

It was Battle Lake Police Chief Gary Wohnt dressed as my disguise doppelgänger. Was he doing off-duty security work? I nodded my head, not wanting to use my voice any more than necessary, and walked up the stairs. Something was not right about this. I had felt less anxiety walking into Lartel’s house. I heard a click behind me, and suddenly a disco strobe light began orbiting color off the walls on the bottom floor.

When I got to the top of the stairs, the music was slightly louder but still muffled. If memory served, the tune was the Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like.” I stood in front of the first door on my left at the top of the stairs. It was a very ordinary entrance, and next to it was a very ordinary table with a doily and a bowl of mixed nuts. I opened the door and walked in with feigned confidence.

No one was startled
to see me. On the contrary, it was me who acted like she had just walked onto a Broadway stage when she meant to go into her bathroom. It took me a good three minutes to register what I was seeing, due to the black light flickering in the center of
the room, the psychedelic free love posters, and the large quantity of smoke, most of it smelling too sweet to be from cigarettes. It looked for all the world like one of the basement parties I had attended when I was in college at the U of M, except for three important differences: everyone here was wearing masks, hardly anyone was wearing clothes, and most of the bodies I was getting a gander at were a good fifty years past their prime displaying age.

In fact, I couldn’t see a body that looked under seventy, though I hadn’t had any experience judging naked old people. I had always gauged them with their clothes on, and the sheer amount of loose skin and hair everywhere but their heads overwhelmed my senses. Most of the aged partiers were lounging and talking, and it looked like a group in the back was passing a bong. I heard the telltale gurgle from my post at the door, and I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Berns as she pulled up her mask to get a better hit.

I sensed a small pocket of hardcores to my left redefining what
it meant to bump uglies, but I wasn’t going to look too closely. I thought I could hear papery skin chafing. Over all this floated mild Ravi Shankar–esque tunes.

“Welcome to the Red Room.”

I turned to my right to see who had spoken. Frankly, I was hoping by the lack of reaction as I entered the room that I was invisible. This was scary. “Thank you,” I said to the little old man with the Batman mask, a green plastic lei around his neck his only other cover. I tried to keep my eyes on his, but I couldn’t help running a quick glance down to the genitals tucked under his paunch. He looked like I imagine Mickey Rooney would look naked about this time in his life, if I had ever imagined Mickey naked. Which I hadn’t.

“Are you here for the smoke, or could I interest you in a tall cool one?”

“A tall cool one would be great.” The smoke in the room had already made my mouth dry. I needed a minute to catch my breath, and it would be good to have something to focus on besides breasts and balls that hung at about the same latitude.

Batman grabbed my hand and led me to a chair by the window. This really was a large room. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the strange light, I saw that a wall had been knocked out, the little divider left at the top covered in stenciled grapes. I sat in the chair, and Batman called over his shoulder, “Arnie, she wants a tall cool one.”

Arnie appeared out of nowhere and stood in front of me, the picture of aged aloofness. He had a half-mask that allowed him to suck on the cigarette that he undersmoked, snitching and snatching at it like it was an annoyance. His pork-and-bean eyes glistening through the eyeholes stared at something far away. However, what really drew my attention was the large erection he held at about eye level, mere inches from my face. My mouth clamped shut in automatic safety mode, but I couldn’t help marveling at the unwrinkled length of it. The whole man’s body was a monument to extra skin with built-in pockets, and here was this immense, smooth penis stuck in the middle of it all like a banana on a Shar-Pei.

“Here’s your tall cool one,” he said in a bored voice. I swear if he had a watch on he would have looked at it.

I stared at his penis, and it stared back at me. The only thing I was blowing tonight was my cover.

The door to the Red Room suddenly slammed open, and I had to quell my latent high-school-bred urge to jump out the window. But it wasn’t the cops; it was Kennie Rogers. Her face was amazingly unmasked, which somehow made her seem the most naked in this room of geriatric bacchanalia. “Where’s that first-timer?” she trilled. “Come on out, don’t y’all hide from me!”

Her arrival took the wind out of Arnie’s sails, and now it was just me, him, and his sleepy snail by the window. How quickly the mighty do fall. I suppose he needed the extra blood to keep his heart going. I raised my hand.

“There you are! Come on now, come with Mama Kennie. You gotta tour all the rooms, darnit, before you get too comfortable in the ever-lovin’ Red Room. The rest of y’all go back to business. Free love is the best love!”

She grabbed my hand, and God knows I was thankful to be led out. I think I saw a tube of KY jelly as we passed a grouping of highbacked chairs in the center, but it could have been denture cream. Once in the bright light of the hallway, Kennie let go of my hand and turned to me. She had on her usual heaping helping of makeup, and her frosty hair was trained under a tiara. Her costume was identical to what she had been wearing in her strange beauty pageant just hours before, except that she no longer had the “Miss Battle Lake” banner. A bouquet of roses would not have looked out of place in the crook of her arm, but her expression was icy.

“Mira, Mira, Mira. Y’all just don’t give up, do you, honey chile?”

Shit! I thought my disguise was at least as good as anyone else’s. Under her imperious eye, I felt dirty and trapped after what I had just seen. The hallway closed in on me. I thought of running, but I could see Gary Wohnt, still masked, at the bottom of the stairs with his arms crossed bodyguard style. It must have been him watching Kennie at the high school earlier, though I couldn’t shake the feeling that it might have been Lartel. I wondered what current reasons Kennie had to spend time with either man.

Kennie pulled out a pocket mirror from some secret fold in her dress and clicked it open. She pushed her eyeliner around and puffed her hair. All the movement scared up a cloud of drugstore perfume. “I wondered where Jeff’s invitation had gone. It wasn’t found on the body, at least that’s what I heard. I didn’t see it when I came to the library yesterday, either.” She snapped the compact closed. “But that’s because y’all had it, isn’t it?”

I bet none of this would have happened if I had on a Wonder Woman mask. When in doubt, attack. “What the hell kind of party is this, Kennie?”

“This is the only kind of party, sweetie. What you think, we all just fish and crochet around here? A person’s gotta stay warm. Better yet, a person’s gotta make money.” Her tone was beguiling and her smile was sly.

“Money? But I wasn’t charged anything.”

“That’s because you stole your invitation, now isn’t it? Everyone else here paid fifty dollars, and does for every party they go to.” She made a grandiose wave with her arm to indicate the house and its horny
inhabitants.

“Fifty dollars? Isn’t this illegal?”

“Not if you’re over twenty-one, my dear, as all my clientele are, and then some. What the adults do once they get to my party is their own business, though we like to provide various forms of entertainment so no one gets bored. I’ll give y’all the tour.”

If I didn’t know better, I would have said she was proud of all this. She grabbed my hand in her meaty paw and dragged me to the door across the hall. The runner on the floor was a flowered Victorian rug in pale creams and yellows. I felt like I was in my grandma’s house, but on the dark side. Or at least the lubricated side. I wondered whose house this was during the day and if they just rented it out for the parties or if it was just a dedicated orgy site.

This door opened to a shadowed room lit by candles and thick with Nag Champa incense. In the center a belly dancer in her mid-sixties gyrated suggestively. At least she had clothes on, as did everyone else in the room. They were all wearing belly dancer outfits, and they were all trying to follow the lead of the woman in the center, to varying degrees of success. The hairy guy I had seen peeing in the woods was directly in front. He had lost his transparent blouse and now looked like a gorilla in a bikini top and puffy pants. He danced the jerky, off-balance ballet of the white male farmer, but his concentration was admirable. Kennie shut the door and pulled me to the next one.

This door thankfully opened to a well-lit room. Unfortunately, there was wall-to-wall nudity, all the clothes in a heap by the door like coats on a bed at a dinner party. The ten or so elderly, masked inhabitants were all holding a piece of wood and sharing paints. The instructor at the center of the room was illustrating a technique while she spoke, her dried-up breasts resting against her stomach. “The definitive characteristic of rosemaling is its ability to blend colors while still making them distinct . . .”

Kennie shut that door as well and led me to the stairs. “Y’all are gonna see our newest room. It’s the first time it’s been at a class of ’82 party, and it’s a big hit.” She glared at masked Gary Wohnt when we passed him. He stared at her with a cock to his head that I recognized.
He
had been the audience for Kennie’s beauty pageant at the high school.

I followed her into the kitchen, preparing for the worst. But then, based on what I had seen so far this evening, I had redefined the word
worst.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a homey kitchen with masked seniors playing bingo. A new game must have just started.

“B19!” the caller shouted. The twelve or so people at the card tables scoured their playing cards. Some of the players had as many as seven to look through. I heard a couple squeals of joy as people placed tokens on what must be B19. Then, to my horror, those same people took off an article of clothing and tossed it on a pile in the center. Strip bingo. Was this the gambling I had overheard Kennie mention to Gary Wohnt?

“The best part,” Kennie said into my ear, “is that the winner gets ten bucks and gets to put on someone else’s clothes.”

This was too much. In my world, old people come permanently clothed. You can’t undress them any more than you can remove their hair or teeth. I suppose, though, that pretty much everything comes off or out of an old person if you pull hard enough. Kennie grabbed my hand and pulled me back toward the stairs before I could finish my train of thought.

“That’s about all we have goin’ down this week, sweetcheeks. There’s a Nintendo room in the basement, and I think there’s a game of Twister goin’ on somewhere, but you seen the meat of it.”

I shook my head, unable to comprehend all of this in Otter Tail County, right under my nose. I probably passed these people in the grocery store. I wondered if I had gotten a contact high from all the smoke in the Red Room. “Why is everyone so old and naked?”

“Why shouldn’t they be, honey? Old people got a right to be naked, too. Besides, old is where the money’s at. You should see my business boom when the tourists start coming in. Whoo-eeee, it’s like greasin’ a pig! I’m an entrepreneur, doll, and this is where it’s at.” Kennie really did seem to be in her element here. Supreme cruise director—screw the shuffleboard and bring on the sex, drugs, and old folks.

“Why’d you give Jeff an invitation?”

Kennie’s shoulders slumped, and she sighed. “I don’t know, honey. I wanted him to see how successful I was, what I had made of myself. It doesn’t matter now, does it? Jeff is dead, and he never even knew what kind of party he was missing.”

Her eyes were sad, and I felt a connection to her for the first time. Maybe it was all the seasoned hormones floating through the house like pollen and bringing people together. But then I had a thought—the cutesy “CU there!” on the class of ’82 invitation, and the same annoying word abbreviation in my death threat: UR going to find the same trouble as Wilson. “Did you leave the note on my computer at the library, threatening me?”

She nodded her head dismissively. “I had hot flashes that day, honey chile. I don’t always think so clearly when I have hot flashes. No harm done, right? Just a little kitty fight.”

“What about the doll and the dead fish?”

She shook her head and smiled. “I don’t play with dolls, and the only dead fish I touch have tartar sauce on them.” She slapped her knee and laughed. “So you gonna stay, baby? You’re welcome to. Some of these old folk like fresh meat every now and again.” She winked.

I shuddered. “I don’t think it’s my crowd, Kennie. If you don’t mind, I’m going to make it an early night.” I turned and began to walk away. “Say,” I said, turning my head just enough so I could see her, “you see much of Chief Gary Wohnt around these days?”

To her credit, she did not look at the man at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m the mayor of a small town, hon. I see the police chief every day.”

I nodded my head. The door was held open for me as I walked out. “Thanks, Chief,” I said. I was going to visit the Senior Sunset. I had a very important question to ask my friend Curtis Poling.