Free Pontoon by Garrison Keillor Page B

“you want me to quit, you just don’t want to say so.” He said he would quit cigars before the next trip to Vegas, a month away, and when he couldn’t, he was so ashamed of himself—a guy with heart problems and he could not put nicotine aside even for the love of a good woman!—he headed out west to pull him self together and stopped in Bismarck to visit an old girlfriend but she wouldn’t see him, she had gained weight and was embarrassed, so he proceeded westward to Billings where his brother Marvin lived but he was gone, his wife said, hinting that she didn’t much care if he returned. “Where did he go?” asked Raoul. “You’d have to ask him,” she said. He went on to Bozeman to visit his buddy George Moses who had gotten him the job on TV,and George was up north fishing, said Lucile. So he drove off in search of George, chain-smoking stogies, and stopped in Butte late that night for a piece of banana cream pie, and had eaten half of it when two idiots came bursting in with guns drawn and cleaned out the till and then, even though it made no sense, took Raoul hostage. “Why?” he cried. “For insurance,” they said. “Insurance against what?” But they grabbed him and stuck a pistol barrel in his ribs and shoved him out the door—“Cut it out! There’s no need to get rough! I’m seventy years old!”—but that didn’t matter to them. And then they saw a cop car parked in front of the bank and they decided to swipe it. “Are you nuts?” he yelled. They shoved him in the backseat behind the steel grate and sped north on gravel roads, both of them snorting white powder and passing a bottle back and forth. In no time, there were flashing blue lights on their tail and a chopper overhead. “I told you this made no sense,” said Raoul. They blew past a roadblock at the Canadian border, and raced over a plowed field at 100 m.p.h., Raoul bouncing off the ceiling, and through a farmyard, sideswiped a chicken coop, bounced off a propane tank, and struck a half-empty granary and were thrown from the car into a pool of winter wheat. Like so many desperadoes, they were not wearing seat belts. All three were badly banged up, and Raoul suffered broken ribs and a cracked vertebra. He lay in the V.A. hospital in Seattle for almost a month and came back to Minneapolis in a back brace and feeling deflated, and sent her a Thank You card. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “I am a cigar smoker, and you are the love of my life.” And she brought him a box of Muriel Slims, and stood at his door smoking one herself, and said, “These are good! Mild and tasty and long-lasting, just like me!”
    Astonishing , Barbara thought. To look at Evelyn, most people’dnever guess she had a Raoul in her life. She was a quilter. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, she and the six others in the Ladies Circle gathered in the Fellowship Room, cranking out quilts until she finally turned in her needles: she was 78 and her fingers hurt and besides, there was a quilt glut in town. “How can you?” said Florence. The Circle had been cutting and stitching since Jesus was in the third grade. The idle brain is the devil’s playground, said Flo. “Remember Mildred Anderson the cashier at the First State Bank who absconded to Buenos Aires with a pillowcase full of loot and is still there today for all we know? A perfectly nice woman, or so it appeared, but she never married and so she had time on her hands that she didn’t fill with hobbies (such as quilting), she just sat in her little bungalow and read books like you do, and that’s undoubtedly where she picked up the idea of improving her life at public expense. Quilting might have saved Mildred from plunging into a life of crime the way she did and the cloud of shame she brought on her family.” Mildred’s sister Myrtle was in the Circle, along with Helen, Lois, Arlene, Florence, Evelyn, and sometimes Muriel, and they had a merry old time, chortling about this and that