Pontoon (12 page)

K
yle moved out of the apartment on Monday right after Sarah left for work. He stuffed all of his things into a suitcase and three big boxes and put them in the van he borrowed and drove away, leaving a note for Sarah on the kitchen counter.

He would call up Burger King later and tell them he had quit. A bad thing to do, but he had to do it. And he would have to cancel his registration for fall semester at the U. It had all come crashing down on him Sunday, in the wake of Grandma’s death. She was trapped in a life she didn’t believe in and he was not going to go down that path. Live with a woman under false pretenses, work at a crummy job frying up animal parts, take courses he didn’t give a rat’s ass about. “Don’t wait. Liberate,” as Richie D. sang in
Liberty 4 U 2
, “You get on that track, don’t be surprised if you never come back.”

He had awoken at 2 a. m., Sarah sleeping by his side, with a great idea for a new line of work.

The parasail folded into an eight-foot case. He could travel the country, offering his services. Find a powerboat to tow him and he’d be in business. Collect the ashes, mix in the glitter, maybe
hire a bagpiper to play “Amazing Grace”—and earn good money by giving people something they can’t find elsewhere.

He drove north toward Lake Wobegon taking the scenic route up the river through Anoka. Just beyond Anoka, he changed his mind about the ash-scattering business. He was starting to think bookstore. Books about aviation and astronomy and also science fiction.
Cosmic Books
. He was also thinking about starting a cleaning service. Mom’d like that.

He needed to talk to Duane about Saturday. The guy was known to forget things. And he needed to take the parasail on a test run. On the radio, they said a seventy-eight-year-old Minneapolis man had withdrawn thirty-five thousand dollars from his bank to give to an FBI man who needed it to catch an embezzler. But the FBI man wasn’t with the FBI. He switched over to music. It sounded like Mozart or Haydn. He liked it. Very symmetrical and one thing developed gracefully into another. No wonder they say Mozart stimulates brain development. He makes you believe in a fundamentally orderly world and isn’t that the beginning of intelligence—a faith in order? There is no intelligence without order—

When he woke up, a few seconds later, he was hanging upside down by his seat belt and shoulder harness and the horn was stuck. He smelled grass and cow manure and something burning. He remembered the van turning over and rolling but not how it happened. He hung there, hands gripping the wheel. There was shouting nearby and someone kneeling in the grass and then a woman’s face in the window, drawn and tense.

“Are you all right?” Her long black hair hung down. She looked so much like Becky Thorsen from high school.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“We better get you out,” she said. “Can you move your legs?”

And then a man in blue coveralls appeared on the other side. He wrestled the door open and crawled in and took hold of Kyle and the girl snapped the seat belt open and Kyle dropped into the man’s arms. They boosted him out and carried him forty or fifty feet away and lay him in tall grass as a fire truck came screaming up and two burly guys in gray T-shirts and jeans scrambled down the ditch with fire extinguishers in hand and shot the engine compartment full of foam.

He raised his head. “Don’t move,” the girl said. So he put it down. And then the cops got there, asked him who he was, shone a light in his eyes, checked his license. And then an ambulance.

“I’m okay. Really,” he said. But they had their job to do. They slid the backboard under him and hoisted him up on the gurney and bucked it up the slope and slid him in the back door and off they went. He moved his right toe and then his left, his right hand, his left hand. He was okay.
Thank you, Jesus
. And now he had a cover for quitting school. A near-death experience. He swerved to avoid a smaller car and took the van into the ditch, narrowly missing a power pole. Had he hit it, he’d be a deadster. Two bowling balls, Grandma in one, Kyle in the other. As he lay there in the grass, waiting for help to arrive, he thought to himself,
I want to dedicate my life to serving others
. He didn’t know just how yet, but it wouldn’t be scattering ashes.

Mom would go for that. He couldn’t wait to tell her.

He was wheeled into the ER of the St. Cloud Hospital and there was a man in a gold lamé suit and black wig and an enormous belt, throwing up into a blue plastic bag, heaving his insides out, sicker than a dog. He sat in a blue plastic chair in the hall and
the ambulance crew wheeled Kyle right up next to him and went off to save somebody else. Kyle lay and listened to the man retching and then he said, “Are you almost done? If not, I’m going to move.”

The man said he was done. He rinsed his mouth with 7Up and stretched and said he felt better.

He had gotten hammered last night and then this morning he had taken a motion-sickness drug, forgetting that he’d just taken an antianxiety drug and the three things didn’t get along. “I was heading for Little Falls, thirty minutes late for a gig, and the Highway Patrol pulled me over for doing eighty in a fifty-five and I got out of the car and threw up and that’s where we are. So I guess the Elks are not going to get Elvis today. Big Al is going to kill me. By the way, my name is Larry Levitz. I’ve been doing Elvis for thirty-two years. I was a parachuter in the service, then I got into this.” He shrugged and closed his eyes. “And now I’m off to a wedding in Lake Wobegon.”

“Lake Wobegon?” Larry told Kyle all about the Detmer event, the hot-air balloon, the pontoon boat, and Elvis descending from the sky with a torch and singing “Burning Love”—and Kyle told Larry about the scattering of Grandma’s ashes. “She must’ve been some old lady. Mine died when I was twenty. Man, it busted me up something bad. I was real close to my grandma after I had this accident after I got out of the service. I was out hunting grouse with my best friend Patrick. About two in the afternoon we stopped to have a few beers and then went back to hunting and we were walking through the woods and I tripped on a tree and the gun went off and there he was with his head half blown off. God. I have a hard time talking about it even now. Forty years
later and it’s like it was yesterday. Man, that sure turns a guy’s life around.”

“I guess it changed Patrick’s life, too,” said Kyle.

“He was my best friend. Suddenly there he is in the dirt with his brains blown out. Hair and blood and I just could not handle it. I said to myself, Larry, you do not want to be here. This is not a good thing at all. I took off running like a crazy person. That was a bad move. Looking back, that’s something I wish I could’ve changed.”

Running away from an accidental homicide did seem to Kyle like a bad mistake, on top of mixing alcohol with hunting, and walking around with a loaded shotgun and the safety not on.

“I ran a couple of miles and made it to the highway and I hitchhiked all the way to Texas. I got a couple of little rides and then a trucker took me all the way to Houston.”

“Where did you shoot him?”

“Mississippi. Ten Mile, Mississippi,” he said, looking at Kyle as if he should’ve known that. “Just up the road from Tupelo. Elvis’s hometown. My dad grew up with Elvis. They were in Sunday school class together and helped each other memorize verses. I used to guide Elvis tours in Tupelo. Drove around in a big old bus and took ’em around to churches he sang at and the fairgrounds and all that. Took ’em to Elvis’s hideout, this deep cave where he had his visions and the angel came with the silver shields. Man, that was the best job I ever had. Until this one.”

“What happened in Texas?”

Larry thought for a moment, as if trying to get the whole thing straight in his own mind. “I had a buddy in Houston and I dialed his phone number but I got a couple of digits turned around in
my mind so I was running out of quarters at the pay phone and there was a liquor store across the street and I still had the rifle and a couple of shells. And I was hopped up on pills and stuff the trucker gave me. Anyways, I headed for that liquor store to get me a roll of quarters and just as I stepped into the street, a cop car rolls up with a black car right behind it and the cop says over the loudspeaker for me to step back onto the sidewalk, which I did, and then this woman yells, ‘He’s got a gun,’ which was true, and suddenly guys are on top of me, six beefy guys in suits, and it turns out that President Bush, the old one, is in the black car behind the cop car, and these Secret Service guys throw me in a black SUV and off we go at high speed screeching into an underground garage and they hustle me into a padded elevator and it goes
down
like about five levels and we go down a hallway and into a room and they throw me in a chair and they are asking me a thousand questions, one after the other, and other guys come in with big manila folders of stuff about me, my high school record, my dad’s Army records, a ton of stuff, book reports I gave, a letter to my grandma thanking her for the $25.00 she gave me for my birthday, and I’m thinking,
This is the end of you, Larry. You can
kiss this life goodbye
.”

He stopped and looked around. “You see a Coke machine around here? I sure could use a Dr. Pepper right now.”

“How did you know it was President Bush in the car?” said Kyle. He wasn’t sure how much he believed the story. He thought maybe 50 percent, maybe less. But which 50 percent?

“He was in the back seat, sitting next to an A-rab with a cloak over his head and he looked meaner than hell. He said, Shoot the sumbitch. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. He was wanting to snuff me out on the backstreets of Houston. He climbs out of
the car, real slow-like, and walks over to me, Old Man Bush, and he looks down at me on the sidewalk, arms pinned behind me, and he says something in a foreign language that’s all crackly like he’s eating dry toast. And I don’t say anything. He’s asking me a question in Egyptian or something, and I shake my head, and Bush says, ‘Get him out of here.’ And they took me away. Truth, man.—Hey, go get me a Dr. Pepper. My throat is all dry.”

Kyle climbed down off the gurney. The pop machine was two floors up according to the ER receptionist. She was a pretty girl, brunette, with black horn-rims, who looked like she deserved better in life than to supervise this vale of tears.

“If it jams, you may have to hit it right below the coin return,” she said. The pop machine worked fine, though, and the can of Dr. Pepper came bumbling down the chute and as it did, Kyle realized he had left his jacket in ER. He hustled down two flights of stairs and there was Larry, just where he’d left him, except he’d taken off the wig and glasses and was talking on his cell phone.

“I’m in the hospital,” said Larry. “I had an attack of some kind. Got all woozy. They’re saying it was not a stroke but they’re still doing tests. I don’t know where the hospital is. I’ll find out and get back to you.”

The Secret Service kept him for a week, flew him back to Mississippi, and he spent two years in prison for reckless disregard for human life and that’s where Elvis came to visit him. The King had been dead for six years. He came at midnight and stood in Larry’s cell, wearing pink slacks and a fancy white shirt and a black sportcoat and shades, very slim and his hair swept back. He brought Larry a sandwich in a white paper sack.