Bring on the manager, now, in a short-sleeved, drip-dry summer shirt, the kind so thinly materialed that a few of the pubic-like hairs on his chest are poking through the loose weave. 'I got your name on my list, lady,' he says.
Biggie wedels. 'Huh?' she says.
'Got your name on this list,' says the manager. 'Your check's no good here. Better empty that cart ...'
'Of course my check's good here,' Biggie tells him. 'Come on. You're keeping all these people waiting.' But they don't mind waiting in line now; something ugly is being revealed. Perhaps the staring housewife and her husband are somehow feeling vindicated. That shapeless lady is probably thinking, maybe my ass is running down my legs, but my checks are good.
'Please empty your cart, Mrs Trumper,' the manager says. 'You're welcome to shop here - with cash.'
'Well, then, cash my check,' says Biggie, who never grasps things right off.
'Now, look, lady,' says the manager, encouraged; he feels the line of shoppers is on his side. Colm pours the Cheerios on the floor. 'Have you got the cash to pay for that cereal?' the manager asks Biggie.
And Biggie says, 'Now look, you, yourself ... I've got a good check ...' But the manager elbows himself up next to her and starts emptying her cart. When he separates Colm from the Cheerios, the child starts to howl, and Biggie - a good two inches taller than the manager - grabs the bossy bastard by his short-sleeved, drip-dry summer shirt, probably tugging the crispy hairs on his chest. Biggie shoves him hard against the counter, shovels Colm out of the cart and mounts him side saddle on her good high hip; with one hand free, she takes back the Cheerios.
'Last time I shop in this dump,' she says, and snatches her checkbook away from the check-out girl.
'Now get out of here,' the manager whispers, but he's addressing himself to Colm, not Biggie.
Who speaks: 'Get out of my way, then ...' which the manager tries to do, pressing himself against the counter while Biggie squeezes past him, grinding her hip against him. You'd rarely see the person who could fit with Biggie in one of those skinny aisles.
And she holds her dignity very well, out the hissing, electric doors - swaggering through the parking lot, a wake of Cheerios behind her. If she's thinking at all, it goes like this: If I were on my old skis, I would execute a tight kick-turn in that aisle. My edges, I keep sharp. Through his drip-dry shirt, one outside edge would cut that nasty fucker's nipples off.
But all she does is inform Bogus of her opinion about the root of the money problem: 'It's your father, the prick ...'
... and I can't help but agree when we're all home together, Colm groveling in the Cheerios. The light down the hall in our bedroom crackles, blinks and goes out. Biggie doesn't seem to notice that it's the only light that's gone out; the others have stayed on. 'They've shut us off!' she cries. 'Oh, my God, Bogus, you'd think they'd wait until morning, wouldn't you?'
'It's probably just the bulb, Big,' I tell her. 'Or that damn fuse.' And in my bumbling fashion I try to wrestle with her for a moment to make her happy, but it's then that she seems to notice the mess poor Colm and the Cheerios are in. She shoves me off and I'm left to investigate the nightly basement alone.
Down the damp stone stairs, remembering I must spring the trap so that mouse won't be guillotined. And calling up again to Biggie, 'A smart mouse we got, Big. He's sprung it again without getting caught.'
But this time I notice he's actually sprung it himself - sneaked in and snatched the cheese without leaving his soft little head behind. It makes me sweat to think of him taking such chances. I whisper to the musty basement. 'Look here, Mouse, I'm here to help you. Be patient; let me spring the trap. Don't take such a risk, you've got everything to lose.'
'What?' says Biggie from upstairs.
'Nothing, Big,' I call up. 'I was just swearing at that damn mouse! He's done it again! He got away!'
For a long time, then, I huddle by the fuse box, long after the fuse is replaced and Biggie has shouted down to me that I've got it, that the light's on again. I can hear the electric meter clicking through the outside wall. I think I hear the mouse, his little heart beating. He's thinking, God, what are the great awful trappers up to now? So I whisper into the darkness, 'Don't be frightened. I'm on your side.' After which the mouse's heartbeat seems to stop. I'm on the verge of crying out, frightened almost the way I'm frightened when I think Colm's breathing has stopped in his sleep.
Biggie shouts, 'What are you doing down there, Bogus?'
'Oh nothing, Big.'
'What a long time to be doing nothing,' Biggie says.
And I catch myself thinking. What a long time indeed! With nothing you could ever call real hardship or suffering. In fact, it's been quite a light pain, and sometimes fun. It's just the nightly things - all little - that seem not to have amounted to something very big, or finally serious, so much as they have simply turned my life around to attending almost solely to them. A constant, if petty, irritation.
'Bogus!' Biggie shouts. 'What are you doing?'
'Nothing, Big!' I call up again, meaning it this time. Or seeing, a little more clearly, what it is like to be doing nothing.
'You must be doing something!' Biggie hollers.
'No, Big,' I call up. 'I'm really doing nothing at all. Honest!' Bogus Trumper isn't lying now.
'Liar!' Biggie shouts. 'You're playing with that damn mouse!'
Mouse? I think. Are you still here? I hope you haven't gone upstairs, thinking it was your big chance. Because you're better off in the basement, Risky Mouse. There's nothing petty down here.
That's it! What I object to is that my upstairs life is so cluttered with little things - errors of judgment, but never crimes. I don't face anything very severe; I don't live with anything that's as basic to avoid or as final to lose to as that mousetrap.
'Bogus!' Biggie screams; I hear her flounce in bed.
'I've got it!' I call up. 'I'm coming now!'
'The mouse?' says Biggie.
'The mouse?'
'You've got the mouse?'
'No, Jesus, not the mouse,' I say.
'Well, Jesus, what then?' says Biggie. 'What have you got that's taken you all this time?'
'Nothing, Big,' I say. 'I've got nothing, really ...'
... and so another night puts Trumper at his window for the witching hour, which seems to lure old Fitch, the lawn-watcher, out of his bed for his brief front-porch constitutionals. Perhaps he's bothered by another Iowa fall; all that ominous dying going on.
But this night Mr Fitch doesn't get up. Gently pushing his ear to the war-built screen, Trumper hears a sudden dry rush of leaves, and in the yellowing streetlight sees a small scattering of dead autumnal rubble flicker upward in the wind around Fitch's house. Mr Fitch has died in his sleep! His soul momentarily rebels, once more raking over his lawn!
Bogus wonders if he should ring up the Fitches just to see who answers.
'Mr Fitch just died,' Trumper says aloud. But Biggie has learned to sleep through his voice at night. Poor Fitch, thinks Bogus, genuinely moved. When asked, Fitch had said he used to work for the Bureau of Statistics. Now have you at last become one, Mr Fitch?
Trumper tries to imagine some excitement in Fitch's long career in the Bureau of Statistics. Poised over the microphone, he thinks that the bureau would want him to be brief and objective. Vowing to limit himself only to the most vital statistics, he flips the record switch and begins:
'Fred "Bogus" Trumper: born 2 March 1942, Rockingham-by-the-Sea Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; delivered by his father, Dr Edmund Trumper, a urologist and substitute obstetrician.
'Fred "Bogus" Trumper was graduated from Exeter Academy, 1960; Vice-President of Der Unterschied (the school's German-language film society); Poetry Editor for the Pudendum (the school's underground literary magazine); he lettered in track (pole-vaulter) and in wrestling (a problem with his concentration span: he would be beating his opponent, and well ahead on points, when he would find himself inexplicably pinned
). Trumper's grades and College Board scores? Undistinguished.
'He attended the University of Pittsburgh on an athletic scholarship (for wrestling); his potential was considered "vast", but he must learn to conquer his regrettable concentration span. His scholarship was revoked at the end of the academic year when he left Pittsburgh. His wrestling performance? Undistinguished.
'He attended the University of New Hampshire. Major? Undeclared. He left at the end of the academic year.
'He attended the University of Vienna, Austria. Field of concentration? German. Span of concentration? Well, he met Merrill Overturf.
'He reattended the University of New Hampshire and was graduated with a B.A. in German. His aptitude for foreign languages was referred to as "vast".
'He was accepted at the State University of Iowa, in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature. He was granted full academic credit for a research-absence, in Austria, January through September 1964. He was to discover and prove that the dialect ballads and folk tales of Salzburgerland and the Tyrol were descendants, via an early North Germanic tribal movement, of Old Low Norse. He found no such thing to be true. He made further contact with Merrill Overturf, however, and in a village in the Austrian Alps called Kaprun, he met and impregnated a member of the US ski-team. Her name was Sue "Biggie" Kunft, of East Gunnery, Vermont.
'He returned to America and presented this large pregnant athlete to his father at Great Boar's Head; father fond of referring to Sue "Biggie" Kunft as "that great blonde German ship"; father unrelenting, even when told that Biggie's father was a German Vermonter.
'Fred "Bogus" Trumper was cut off by his father, "until such a time as responsibility toward the future is demonstrable".
'Married in East Gunnery, Vermont, September 1964. Sue "Biggie" Kunft was forced to split her mother's (and her mother's mother's) wedding gown with a razor and insert a flap of suitable material, expandable, to conceal some months of gestation. Biggie's father was only upset that a skiing career was wasted. Biggie's mother thought that girls shouldn't ski anyway, but she was upset about the dress.
'Trumper returned to the State University of Iowa with an acceptable M.A. thesis on the connection between the dialect ballads and folk tales of Salzburgerland and the Tyrol with Old Low Norse. He received permission to return to Austria to follow up this interesting information. He did so, after the shocking birth of his first child (he was treated at the State University of Iowa hospital in March of 1965 for a fainting spell, following the first look at his gory, swaddled son. "It's a boy!" the nurse, fresh and dripping from the delivery room, informed him. "Will it live?" asked Trumper, sliding gelatinous to the floor).
'He actually returned to Austria to relive his romance with his wife and to find his old friend Merrill Overturf. Failing both, he returned to Iowa and announced that he had disproved his M.A. thesis and would select a new topic for his Ph.D. He thus began the translation of Akthelt and Gunnel from Old Low Norse. He has been doing this for almost four years ...
'He still seeks reconciliation with his father's income. He still wonders if his child will live. And he considers the advisability of being married to a former professional athlete who can do more sit-ups than he can. He is, for example, afraid to wrestle her, for fear that he will be handily beating her and suddenly find himself inexplicably pinned. And when he told her that he used to be a pole-vaulter, she told him she had tried that once too. He is afraid to ask for comparative heights ...
... at which point, dramatically, the tape whips to an end, whirs and frays off the empty spool, tzikity tzikity tzikity tzat!
'Bogus?' Biggie groans from the bedroom.
'Nothing, Big.'
He lets the sleep come back to her, and then quietly replays his recorded statistics. He finds them lacking in objectivity, brevity, honesty and sense, and he realizes that Mr Fitch and the Bureau of Statistics will reject all information concerning this fraudulent Trumper, and make no entry of his name. Looking out his window at Fitch's dark house, he recalls that Fitch is dead. Strangely relieved, he goes to bed. But in the morning, with Colm bouncing on his chest, he turns his head on the pillow and squints out his bedroom window. Seeing the ghostly vision of Fitch at work on his lawn, Trumper lets his child bounce on the floor.
'My God, Bogus,' Biggie says, stooping down to the wailing child.
'Mr Fitch died last night,' Bogus tells her.
Looking blandly out the window, Biggie says, 'Well, he looks better this morning.' So it's morning, Trumper decides, trying to wake up; he watches Biggie lie back down on the bed with Colm.
And if Biggie isn't at the hospital, he thinks, then it's Saturday. And if it's Saturday, then I sell football pennants, pins, buttons and cowbells. And if Iowa loses again, I'll change to a school with a winning team ...
There is a sudden thrashing and general upheaval of child and wife on the bed beside him; Biggie is getting up again. He turns to nuzzle her breast before she can go, but it's her elbow.
He opens his eyes. Nothing is as it seems. How could there be a God? He tries to remember the last time he thought there was one. In Europe? Surely God gets to travel more than that. It wasn't in Europe, anyway; at least there was no God in Europe when Biggie was with me.
Then he remembers Merrill Overturf. That was the last time God was around, he thinks. Therefore, believing in God went wherever Merrill went.
11
Notre Dame 52, Iowa 10
GOD MAY BE dead, for all I know, but Our Lady's Eleven seemed to have some twelfth and ominous player on the field, making things fall their way. I could sense some Holy Power believing in them, even before the game. I sold two Notre Dame Pennants to every Iowa one - a sure sign that some faith was abroad in the land. Or else some pessimism, a defensiveness on the part of the home town rooters; fearing the worst, they were not going to be further humiliated by being seen with an Iowa pennant. They filed empty-handed into the stadium, a subtle green tie here and green socks there: if Iowa lost, they could always claim to be Irish, and there would be no Hawkeye button or cowbell to incriminate them.
Oh yes, you could tell by the concession sales: The Fighting Irish - Mary's Team, the Pontiff's Maulers - had something special going for them.
But I missed the game; I was spared that pain. I had a disaster of my own.
With my awkward plywood board (a weak hasp holds an easel stand behind it, but the whole thing is too unsteady to resist the wind), I am hawking my wares by the end-zone gate. And since only students and last-minute ticket-buyers get end-zone seats, it is not the concession stand available to the upper-crust of pennant, button and cowbell buyers.
I am selling my sixth Notre Dame pennant when I see little Lydia Kindle, swaying along with an utter Glork of a boyfriend. I swear the fierce wind died for a second, heavy with the scent of her hair! And I stop my insane clamoring with a cowbell; I cease chanting, 'Pennants! Buttons! Cowbells! Satisfying stadium cushions! Rain hats! Say it for Iowa or Notre Dame!'
I watch Lydia flutter along; her boyfriend scuffs beside her; the wind buffets her against him, and they're laughing. It would be more than I could stand if she should see me blue-cold and huddled by my garish showboard, hawking junk in loutish English, without a lilting trace of Old Low Norse on my tongue.
I dart behind my showboard, crouched with my back against the thing; the wind performs alarming unbalancing feats. Just in case, I unpin my hideous Hawkeye Enterprise button, No. 501, and cram it, with my yellow change apron, into the side-pouch of my parka. Then I lurk quietly behind the board. As her Glork announces, 'Hey, whattaya know, Lid? Nobody watching the old board here. Have a button.' And I hear her giggle.
But Glork doesn't quite have the knack for removing a pin from the cloth strips that swaddle the board, and he must be anxious to do his deed and run, for I can feel him tugging and wrenching so hard that I have to hug the easel stand to keep the whole apparatus from falling. Then I hear one of the cloth strips rip, and out the corner of my eye I
see a string of Iowa buttons flap in the wind. Yes, the wind, or the combination of the wind and Lydia Kindle's boyfriend's last hard yank: I feel my balance lost, my dignity in motion. The showboard is falling.
'Look out!' cries my bright-voiced Lydia. 'It's coming over on you!' But the Glork doesn't quite step back in time, not before he's trapped by the descending, seven-foot rectangle of what he suspects is only light plywood. He puts up a casual hand to catch it; he doesn't know I'm riding it down on him, like a 180-pound raft. And when it pins him to the cement, he lets out a terrible yell; the board, I feel, is splitting along my spine; I can feel him weakly scratching through the wood under me. But paying him no mind, I simply look up to Lydia.
'Klegwoerum,' I tell her. 'Vroognaven okthelm abthur, awf?'
She gawks while the board struggles under me. I change my language and garble German up to her: 'Wie gehts dir heute? Hoffentlich gut.'
A muffled grunt under the board. I sit up slowly, with a lofty air about me, and say a little over seriously, as if rudely awakened, 'What's going on here, Lydia?'
Immediately defensive, she says, 'The board fell over.' As if I didn't know. I stand up, and the Glork scuttles out from under my fallen wares looking like a little crushed crab.
'What in hell are you doing there?' I ask him, just to put him on the defensive.
'Suffering shit!' he cries. 'I was just taking one mucking pin!'
Fatherly, almost, I take Lydia's arm, pronouncing over the kneeling Glork, 'Watch your language, kid ...'
'What?' he hoots. 'Is this your board?'
'Mr Trumper runs my language lab,' Lydia tells him icily - as if this makes impossible any connection I might have with these cheap wares.
But the Glork isn't convinced. He straightens up, visibly in pain, and says, 'Well, what were you doing behind this damn board?'
'Why ... the vender ...' I say, 'the vender had to leave it here a moment. Passing by, I offered to watch it for him while he was gone.' And attempting to divert this conversation from scrutiny, I point out to the Glork that this vender would surely be upset at the condition of his board. Didn't the Glork think he should make amends?