“I’ll jot it on my shirt cuff,” Owen said, and hunkered next to Pierre, his elbows on his knees. “This is what I’ve been missing. The give and take. The badinage. The happy workshop atmosphere where strong opinions are meted out, not in a spirit of jealousy, but in a transparent desire to improve the final product.”
Pierre was at a loss.
Owen was brimming with a notion, but was holding on and tamping it down for fear it would burst out as an abject plea. But finally he could resist no more and said with the quietness of the sober-minded, “The fact is, we could go halvesies on it.”
“Have-sees?”
Owen stood and silently paced, his hand to his chin, prowling and ruminating, then turned and sat against the dining room sideboard with Husker dishware in it. He waved a hand at his surroundings. “House I grew up in. The gas station? My dad’s. And here I am, in my thirties, big-boned, no wife or kids, just a fool of a Husker fan with a job any child could do and one great big impossible dream. You can make that dream come true, mon frère.” Owen’s head hung. “Hell, I feel like I’m proposing here. Am I coming on too strong?”
Pierre answered weakly, “We are hardly even friends.”
Owen punched his left palm with his fist. “I knew it! I always rush! I’m such an idiot!” With frustration and shame, he stomped his shoes alternately, shaking the house. Owen faced him bleakly. “So where do we go from here?”
In the gas station office a frail female voice trilled, “Yoo hoo!”
Owen shot up and walked towards it. “Aunt Opal?” he called.
When Owen opened the office door, Pierre heard the elderly woman say in a faint giggle, as if it were risqué, “We’d like to rent Gigi for tonight.”
“Well, I aim to please,” Owen said.
Pierre tipped a final inch of wine into his plastic cup and sipped it as the transaction was completed. And then Owen closed the privacy door behind him again, no doubt wondering if their friendship had been chilled by the cold demands of business. But Pierre held up a bottle in the shape of a hula dancer and waggled its empty hips. “We have finished the one-point loss to Kansas State.”
Owen lifted up another bottle from the floor, read its back label, and woefully announced, “Miami.”
“Encore!” Pierre said, and held out his plastic wine cup.
The kitchen screen door creaked open and Dick Tupper made a grand entrance, his mustache waxed, his manner lacquered, costumed as he was in the scarlet satin cloak, soutane, and biretta of Cardinal de Richelieu. He held out a frock coat, tights, patent leather pumps, and a Louis XIV powdered white wig as he said, “I got your getup here, Pierre.”
9
And so The Revels were royally begun at the fairgrounds that evening, the citizens of Seldom milling about like Les Misérables in the costumes of French chambermaids, urchins, revolutionaries, streetwalkers, and Parisian apaches, with one lone Mahatma Gandhi unsure of his history.
Mademoiselle Clairvaux wore a powdered white turban of a wig and an ornate Marie Antoinette dress whose architecture pinched her waist like an hourglass and made her still-youthful chest resemble melons riding on a shelf. She was given the job of cutting the ribbon at the weedy entrance to the carnival rides, and of announcing onstage what image a horrible mime was trying to convey: “Here he is trapped inside a box. See? He is feeling the many sides with his hands.” “And now a wind is blowing him. We see it is very strong. Oh, he’s lost his hat.”
And then Pierre was forced to go up on stage in his silly leotards, crushed velvet pantaloons, and wig of a thousand ringlets, acting the part of the Sun King and shouting out the faulty French on a scroll that intended to detail how Bernard LeBoeuf chanced upon the area while trapping mink and thought he’d seldom encountered such pretty country. Owen shot a cannon into a cornfield as soon as Pierre concluded, and the wildly applauding Seldomites heaved their bonnets rouges high into the air, shouted a mysterious phrase they seemed to think was French, and then immediately commenced their Kiss-a-Pig Contest. (Won again by Chester Hartley, an old bachelor who raised barrows and gilts on a farm just east of Three Pillows.)
As king of The Revels Pierre was called upon to fire the starter’s pistol that initiated the demolition derby, and he watched in stunned wonder as twelve cars peeled out in reverse, swerving to crash tail-first into each other, their trunk lids flying up and nodding, their mufflers and chassis scouring the earth, their wadded fenders floundering uselessly, until only Bert Slaughterbeck’s new Buick was still running and he squirmed out the driver’s side window and held his arms high in victory before he looked at his wrecked and steaming car somewhat quizzically, as if the consequences of the competition were something he had not completely thought through.
Meanwhile Natalie threw the switch that electrified the carnival’s lighting, which was yellow in order to discourage a hundred varieties of whining insect, and she delivered queenly waves to the shrieking children on rides that were called the Zipper, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Upsy-Daisy, the Scared Rabbit. She was then permitted to go back to Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house, where she changed into a white sundress and affectionately sniffed her yellow King’s Ransom rose as she watched with interest the video of Gigi with Marvyl and Owen’s Aunt Opal.
A house north and across the street, Dick joined Owen and Pierre for chicken wings and Falstaff beer and their viewing of Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Ben Johnson, and Owen’s friend Slim Pickens in a Western called One-Eyed Jacks. The Sun King had shed his wig, Cardinal Richelieu his scarlet biretta, and Owen found the good manners to hide the bulge of his codpiece with his untucked peasant shirt, but otherwise the three were still in their hose and regalia, which gave their viewing of the Western a certain incongruity. Pierre slumped on the sofa with jet lag, but he had never seen the movie and found himself riveted. Owen was less so. He asked, “You sure you wouldn’t rather catch Hobson’s Choice? Or Witness for the Prosecution? I’m in a Charles Laughton mood tonight.”
No one answered him.
“Ruggles of Red Gap then,” Owen said. “Winsome comedy where Laughton is delightful as an English butler won in a poker game.”
Still no answer.
“Elvis then. Harum Scarum? The Trouble with Girls?”
On the screen, an outlaw played by Ben Johnson taunted the outlaw played by Marlon Brando in a saloon poker game, saying, “How about some of your cash there, Romeo?”
Owen finished a chicken wing and tossed it into a rapidly filling Husker wastebasket. Still unsatisfied, he got another, defeated it with just a few chews, and grinned with red barbeque sauce on his lips. “Hey, this chicken tastes just like frog,” he joked.
Cardinal Richelieu cautioned, “Are you remembering your houseguest?”
Owen was shocked at his own rudeness. “No insult intended, Pete.”