Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood Page 8

  “No,” said Mom.

  Nothing was said for a half hour. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Wanna hear a joke?” I asked.

  “Fire away,” Dad said.

  “Puppa told it to me,” I said. “There’s this farmer and he has

  three daughters who are all trombone players . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Mom said.

  It was quiet again until we stopped for gas. At the filling station, Dad bought a pack of Camels. Back in the car, he started the engine and tore the cellophane off the package.

  Mom stared at him. “Apparently you can’t go a measly eight

  hours without smoking, can you?” she said.

  “Yes I can!” Dad shouted. He rolled down his window and threw

  the cigarettes into the snow. Then he floored the gas and popped the clutch. The snow tires squealed as the Studie lurched out onto the highway. It took a heavy foot to make a Studebaker peel rubber in cold weather.

  Nothing more was said, mile after mile. When we got to Dyer,

  Dad checked into the motel and carried the suitcases to our cabin.

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  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  Then he flopped on the bed and closed his eyes. Ten minutes went by, then twenty, then a half hour. Finally Mom was forced to speak.

  “Dave, we’d better go over and eat before they close,” she said.

  “Great,” Dad said, “let’s go.” Mom didn’t need nicotine, but she did need supper. Dad had starved her out.

  The Shootout in Dyer

  The Olive Branch was in an old stone building that had once been a bank. It had terrazzo floors and marble walls and was a perfect echo chamber; if you dropped a plate in that restaurant, it sounded like a train wreck. We ordered and sat back to wait for our spaghetti. Mom and Dad were talking rather stiffly, looking at the wine list, and wondering what Asti Spumante was. I slipped my cap pistol out of my jacket pocket and began to fiddle with it under the table.

  To this day I cannot understand how the pistol came to be

  loaded. Even at the age of ten I knew better than to bring a loaded gun indoors or to put my finger on the trigger until I was ready to shoot. But cap pistols are not built to the standards of Colt or Smith

  & Wesson. Somehow the hammer fell and the bang of the cap rever-berated around the restaurant.

  There were screams and instant hubbub. This was, after all, an

  Italian restaurant in the Chicago suburbs. There were about twenty other customers, and they all ran like rabbits. Some headed for the front door, some scuttled into the restrooms, others disappeared into the kitchen.

  The owner burst in from the bar, his hands over his head in sur-

  render, shouting, “Wotta hell, wotta hell?” Then he looked at us. As the only people still sitting down, we were either deaf or guilty. Dad reached under the table and pulled the pistol away from me. Wisps of smoke were still coming out of its barrel. He held it out to the owner, butt first. “Cap gun,” he said.

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  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  The owner laughed in relief and wagged a finger at me. “Badda

  boy,” he said. He bent down and whispered to Dad. Dad pulled out his wallet and handed over a ten-dollar bill.

  Hearing no more shots, the customers came back into the dining

  room. When they had returned to their tables, waiters walked in

  from the bar bearing pitchers of Schlitz. Soon everyone was smiling and laughing and drinking beer. Glasses were raised to us all around, and we returned the toasts with sips of our Cokes.

  “Schlitz on draft, good will to men,” Dad said, and then looked

  at me. “That ten bucks is coming out of your snow-shoveling

  money.” But I didn’t think he really meant it.

  Back at the motel, Dad took the cap pistol out of his pocket

  and tossed it into his suitcase. “I’ll keep it safe in here until we get home,” he said. “If that thing went off in the car I’d lose control altogether.”

  “And I’d wet my pants,” Mom said. She gave me a playful swat on

  the backside and turned down the sheets on my bed. Things were

  mending. I fell asleep reading about the Battle of Shiloh.

  The Viscount

  Dad was used to smoking a pipe before breakfast, but the next

  morning his Kaywoodie was still shut away in Mom’s purse and he

  wasn’t about to beg for it. In the diner where we had breakfast, he paused by the cigarette machine, dug into his pocket for a quarter, and then clenched his teeth and walked on.

  As we drove north through Gary I was fascinated by the colorful

  smoke boiling up from mills and factories: red, yellow, green,

  brown, orange. In Manitowoc the air sometimes smelled of roasting barley from Rahr Malting, but it was otherwise bland and invisible.

  On the south side of Chicago there was less smoke but people

  were really crowded together. We drove past miles of three-story 69

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  houses about twenty feet across, fronted with tiny lawns six feet on a side and separated by narrow alleys barely wide enough for a garbage can. As a kid with an acre of grass to mow, I wondered why the people who lived in those houses bothered with lawns at all. And how did they cut them? Did each block chip in on a lawnmower

  and pass it around from house to house? Or did they clip the grass with scissors?

  When we entered the Loop, I wished as always that we could stop

  and walk around like small-town people, looking in the show win-

  dows of the stores and rubbernecking at the tall buildings. I always begged Dad to stop, but he never did. “We can’t spare the time,” he would say. “We’d get lost,” Mom would say. “We’d get robbed!” Dad would say. When we drove through Chicago, we locked the car

  doors.

  So I was surprised when Dad turned onto Wabash Avenue and

  parked the Studie. “Where are you going?” Mom asked. “Never

  mind,” Dad said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  He crossed the street and entered a store. Over the door was a

  sign: Iwan Ries—Tobacconist Since 1857. “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  Mom said.

  I demanded to get out of the car. “My feet are asleep,” I said. “I just wanna stand on the sidewalk.”

  “I suppose,” Mom said, and rummaged in her purse. “Here, put

  this nickel in the parking meter, but don’t go any farther!”

  Finally, I had set foot in Chicago. I put the nickel in the meter and enjoyed the brisk whirring sounds it made as it digested the coin. It was a lot better than Manitowoc’s flimsy little parking meters. Then I stared at the Chicagoans passing by. There was a

  distinguished-looking man wearing a hat I recognized as a Homburg, and a woman with the longest legs I had ever seen, the seams of her nylons perfectly straight.

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  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  When Dad came back he was smoking a huge, curve-stemmed

  pipe. I scrambled into the backseat and Dad got behind the wheel, puffing away. He rolled down his window.

  “Everybody ready?” he asked, cheerily. Mom said nothing. Dad

  handed me the box the pipe had come in. Stamped on it were

  expensive-sounding words: Sasieni, Four Dot, London Made, Patent No. 150221/20, Viscount Lascelles. Cripes, I thought, this pipe is so ritzy it doesn’t have a crummy model number like a Kaywoodie, it has four names and a patent!

  Dad kept the big pipe going until we were well into Evanston.

  When it finally went out, he pulled over and used a shiny new pipe tool to loosen the dottle. He tapped the ashes into the street and carefully put the pipe in his shirt pocket.

  We ate an early supper in a burger joint in Milwaukee. When it

  got too dark to r
ead I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we were pulling out of Sheboygan. Soft music was playing on the radio and Dad was driving left-handed, his right arm around Mom and her

  head on his shoulder. Reflected in the windshield I could see the embers in his pipe, glowing red when he puffed. Christmas was

  merry again.

  The next morning Dad and I drove out to Halvor Halvorson’s

  farm where we had boarded our beagles. I worked up the nerve to

  ask Dad a personal question.

  “I thought you didn’t like curved pipes. How come you bought

  that one?”

  “I bought it,” he said, “because it was the most expensive pipe in the store. Sasieni is one of the best English makers, maybe the best.

  The Four Dot is their top of the line, and the Viscount Lascelles is about the biggest. Stupid thing to do—cost me almost a day’s pay.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand this,” Dad said, “but I bought that pipe to spite your mother. Now I wish I hadn’t. Last night I put 71

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  it on the mantelpiece in the dining room where I can see it, and whenever I get mad at her, I’ll look at that pipe and remember that I can be as big a fool as anybody.”

  That was my second glimpse of the grown-up mind in a couple

  of days. Adults were definitely more complicated than I thought.

  When we got home from Halvor’s, Mom set places at the dining

  room table and brought in the percolator and a plate of coffeecake just out of the oven.

  “Funniest thing,” she said, as she poured the coffee. “After you left to get the dogs this morning I unpacked my suitcase. You’ll never guess what I found!” And she handed Dad his pipe satchel.

  Dad didn’t say anything. He was looking at the Viscount.

  72

  l

  The Digging Out of Nip

  I t’s funny how you find out about life.

  You pick up a lot from your mother, your dad, and your wife, of

  course. It’s their job to teach you things. But it pays to keep your eyes and ears open all the time. You learn some of the most important lessons by accident. For example, I learned about the value of friendship from the digging out of Nip on New Year’s Eve 1953.

  When we moved to Manitowoc in 1950, our nearest neighbors

  were forests and fields, a ravine and creek, a dairy farm, and Tony.

  Tony, his wife, Mildred, a springer spaniel named Mickey, and

  Tony’s pack of beagles lived next door. Tony and Mildred were the epitome of neighbors: friends who would give you their shirts in a pinch, and iron them first.

  The matriarch of Tony’s beagle pack was a little bitch named

  Susie, and sometime in 1951 a marriage was arranged between Susie 73

  The Digging Out of Nip

  and our beagle, Rip. The pick of the litter was a pup I called Nip, my personal beagle. Nip inherited Rip’s pedigreed looks and singing voice, and Susie’s vast reserves of face-licking affection and rabbit savvy.

  Besides Susie and her beagle clan, Tony had another great asset: the only television set in the neighborhood. Back in 1953, only two channels “came in” around Manitowoc, one from Green Bay and the

  other from Milwaukee. The programs weren’t much, as I remember:

  mostly Hopalong Cassidy, Howdy Doody, and wrestling.

  Even as a kid I thought Howdy Doody was pretty stupid, and it didn’t take long to get tired of watching Hoppy chase the same villains around the same twenty acres of Southern California. But the wrestling was just what the doctor ordered, a mild sedative for people who had put in a long day.

  There were no flashy costumes or shaggy haircuts. The wrestlers

  were big, tough Italians and Irishmen who wore high-top sneakers, skimpy little black underpants, and tattoos with simple messages like “USMC” and “Mother.” Each match was a melodrama of good

  versus evil with plenty of slapstick thrown in, an irresistible combination, and Dad and I didn’t resist. On wrestling nights, we were regulars in Tony’s TV den.

  Tony and Dad would sprawl in easy chairs while Mickey and I

  lay on the rug. Tony would put out a big bowl of Kraft caramels, and we’d eat them by the dozens while glued to the screen. During commercials Tony would pick the cellophane from five or six caramels, squeeze them into a ball, and toss them to Mickey. Dogs’ teeth are not made for eating caramels; it takes a dog quite a while to dispatch even one, and Mickey could make a half dozen last a good five

  minutes, drooling and wagging his stub of a tail while he took savage bites. Some nights, Mickey’s struggles with the caramels were better than the wrestling.

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  The Digging Out of Nip

  It was on one of these wrestling nights that Tony suggested the

  final rabbit hunt of the year.

  “I want to get the beagles out one more time before it gets too

  damn cold,” Tony said to Dad. “Gotta work tomorrow morning, so

  how about tomorrow afternoon? It’s New Year’s Eve, but I’m not

  going anyplace.” As fifth-generation Methodists, our family never had plans for New Year’s Eve, and so the hunt was on.

  Saturday dawned cold and clear. By midmorning, a stiff north-

  west wind was shuffling the drifts of dry, fluffy snow in our yard.

  Dad muttered and scraped frost off the kitchen window to get a look at the thermometer. “Ten above,” he said, shaking his head. “Tony must be nuts.”

  I didn’t care how cold it was. After an hour of wheedling the

  night before, I’d convinced Dad to let Nip and me come along. We’d be serving only as observers; at eleven, I was too young to carry a gun, and Nip was still a half-grown pup with a high tenor voice. But we were finally going to go rabbit hunting with the grown-up men and the grown-up dogs! I was light-headed with impatience.

  Late that morning, mighty preparations began. Mom perked

  a pot of coffee and poured it into our fragile glass thermos. Dad rooted through dresser drawers in search of long johns and thick wool socks. He took his Lefever shotgun from the cabinet and put it in its case. His Bass Trailmaster boots got a coat of mink oil to keep out the snow.

  I put on long underwear, two pairs of socks, flannel-lined jeans, a wool shirt, my kid-sized army snorkel parka, five-buckle galoshes, and deerskin choppers with scratchy mittens inside. Dad snapped

  the leashes on Rip and Nip, and we plowed through the snow to

  Tony’s house.

  I don’t remember much about the ride to Tony’s number one

  rabbit cover, a hundred-acre woods near Millhome in the Town of

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  The Digging Out of Nip

  Schleswig. Dad and Tony rode in front, smoking and scraping ice

  off the inside of the windshield. Six beagles and I had the backseat to ourselves.

  But the excitement was thick as Tony’s car eased to a stop on a

  narrow road through the woods. I opened a back door, releasing a torrent of beagles. Dad and Tony loaded their guns with dark red Winchester shells, and we were off, the dogs fanning out before us.

  For an hour we trudged. An hour and a half. After two hours

  of briar patches, cattails, and alder runs without a sound from the beagles, the sun was near the horizon and Tony and Dad were beginning to run out of gas. “Pup, pup, pup, pup,” Tony called, leashing Rip, Susie, and three of Susie’s kids from an earlier litter.

  “The rabbits are holed up today, Dave,” Tony said, his voice

  muffled by a frost-whitened scarf he had knotted over his nose and mouth. “They’re smarter than we are. It’s just too cold.”

  “I think so,” Dad said, around the stem of his pipe. “Let’s head back to the car. The kid’s probably pretty cold, too.” Nip was content to follow me, so I didn’t put a leash on him.

  And then it happened. The k
id and the puppy hit a rabbit track.

  Nip circled frantically, his white-tipped tail drawing ovals in the air.

  “Ay-yarp, ay-yarp, ay-yarp,” he yodeled, as he took off down the hot scent trail.

  Nip disappeared into the darkening woods, his high-pitched

  voice slowly looping around and turning toward us. “By God, he’s driving it back to us, Dave,” Tony said excitedly. “His first rabbit, and he’s turned it!”

  I swelled with pride. Nip was a prodigy! Tony and Dad raised

  their shotguns to port arms. We narrowed our eyes and watched for the rabbit to lope into sight.

  But it didn’t. Nip’s yapping stopped. Minutes passed. No rabbit, no Nip.

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  The Digging Out of Nip

  “Well, he’s lost it or holed it,” Dad said. “Let’s put the first team on it.”

  Tony released the adult dogs. Surely two masters and three

  journeymen would shift that rabbit.

  “A-roop, A-roop,” bugled Rip as he hit the scent. “Karp, karp,

  karp,” hollered Susie. “Yipe, yipe, yipe, yipe,” caroled the journeymen. Off they ran in hot pursuit, but within minutes they, too, were silent.

  “It’s holed up for sure,” Tony said. “Let’s round ’em up and head for the barn.”

  About a hundred yards into the woods we found the beagles

  running back and forth in confusion. “Here’s where the rabbit went,”

  Dad said, pointing to a hole in the ground. “You can see his tracks leading right up to it. He’s earned his freedom.”

  Dad pulled out his compass and pointed out the way back to

  the car. The sun was half down, and long purple shadows were

  spreading across the snow as we walked. It was my job to keep track of Nip, but I was so cold I had stopped paying attention. Bringing up the rear, I idly counted the dogs. Rip, Susie, Max, Whitey, Lady—

  where was Nip? “Dad,” I yelled, “Nip isn’t here!”

  “Oh, great,” Dad said. “He picked a fine time to run off.” Dad

  started whistling. “Here, pup, pup, pup, pup,” Tony called.

  “Maybe he’s back at the hole,” Tony said. Back we went, but Nip

  wasn’t there. Cold and scared, I bent down by the hole to tuck my pant legs into my galoshes.

  “Ay-yarp, ay-yarp,” squealed Nip, but faintly, as if at a great