Free Pontoon by Garrison Keillor Page A

in my class. I was sitting on the front steps and she came walking up the walk and Iwent for her right away. She was tall and rangy and swung her arms and laughed and she had a way of looking you over so if she liked you, it really meant something. Oh God, she was the love of my life and I knew it. Wham. Just like that. This was back when there was a lot of dancing. Dances almost every night, and we went to every one. We were good enough that we entered contests. We jitterbugged like crazy and when we were out of breath, we sat in the corner and necked. I asked her to marry me and she wanted to but then she got sick and almost died. Infected boil. It was on her butt, she couldn’t sit down. I said, Let me have a look at it, but she went and squeezed it and got a terrible infection. I took care of her for the first three days. I gave her sponge baths. I held her in my arms when she was having hallucinations, out of her head jabbering about her dad and crying and yelling at somebody to rescue the horses. I was with her around the clock. And then I took her to the hospital and I went home and slept a few hours and when I woke up her parents were there and I had orders to ship out to Chicago and then to Guadalcanal. I tried to write to her but I couldn’t remember the name of her home town, Lake Wobegon. The letters kept coming back. I was in the Dutch East Indies when I heard she married somebody from home. God, I cried for three days. I met Bing Crosby when he did a USO tour in the Pacific and he got a touch of malaria. He introduced me to people and I got into radio in San Francisco. Actually, Oakland. I did a show called Bay Town Ballroom and played records and on weekends I emceed dances at the Alhambra and Aragon ballrooms and the Club Seville, and I married a lady bass player named June and I was doing well except I had a problem with the happy powder so June thought maybe I’d do better in Minneapolis, get me away from temptation, and we came out, and I got the TV job doingthe weather and was earning good dough and we moved to Golden Valley and right then, when everything was good, my little boy got sick and died of leukemia. It happened so fast. It was like a load of rocks got dumped on me. I had a pity party for a few years. I got deep into the sauce and felt hopeless and nasty and June left and took our little girl, and that’s when I became Yonny Yonson on TV. It was a heartbreaker, seeing those kids, let me tell you. All the smiling kids and I thought, ‘Why couldn’t mine be here? Why did this happen to me?’ and one day I walked out on the bridge thinking I’d jump off it and end this nonsense, and I climbed over the rail and there was a string of barges going under that were full of wheat and soybeans and I thought how ridiculous to jump and break my neck on a pile of wheat and my body goes down to New Orleans and meanwhile I’ve ruined a whole load of wheat. So I crawled back over the rail and I went back to the TV studio and the secretary said, ‘There’s a lady in Lake Wobegon named Evelyn Peterson trying to track you down.’ We talked on the phone and then we met for drinks and it was like 1941 all over again. We were like two kids. Suddenly I had something to live for. I cleaned up my act and we started dating and every day was sunshine. We were talking about going to Europe. She’d never been there.” His voice broke. “I told her everything about what’d happened to me and how low I had fallen and she said she loved me.”

8. QUILTERS
    E velyn made annual trips to Las Vegas with Raoul with a couple years off on account of his 1996 heart bypass and subsequent argument over his cigar-smoking. He said he knew she hated cigars and she said no, she only hated cheap ones. He said, “Don’t baby me, I know you hate the smoke.” She said, “Some smoke I like.” He vowed he was going to give up smoking for her sake. She said, “Please don’t. Do it for yourself.” “There you go,” he said,