The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove (21 page)

When I reach him I see his right shoulder bleeding profusely. Over by the blue Dodge Louise is sitting on the ground with her smoking pistol.

Louise, my darling! My Belle Starr!

But Balaclava is beginning to recover and he’s trying to reach out for his weapon. I’m going to have to give him another shot. I raise my gun, but as I do this I hear another noise, an incredible banshee shrieking, and Emily Brontë whooshes past me with her crowbar raised. She rears back and conks Balaclava’s head hard—and there is a sound like a punted football. But the beast is still moaning and reaching out, so Emily raises the bar and lets him have it again—right on his coconut. This time he remains still. She gives him still another whack just for good measure.

A few days ago I had read in Louise’s new Brontë book, some of the last lines of poetry that Emily Brontë had written just before she died. I know this is an absurd time to think of this—but I am Cyril and, like Popeye, I yam what I am. I am remembering Emily’s last lines: “No coward soul is mine, / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere . . .” Emily Brontë had once single-handedly beat the living snot out of a dog handler who had mistreated her animals. I mean, she smacked him around good.

Louise! Emily! My God! The tiger ladies! I am saved. Emily picks up Balaclava’s formidable weapon and levels it on him. Louise has staggered over to join us. We are all ringing him now and pointing our weapons down at his bloody carcass—the fearsome Three Furies, a silhouetted triad of senior fury in the rising morning light. If Balaclava awakens and makes another move, he will end up like a Wisconsin swiss cheese dipped in salsa.

It’s over. The citizens of Viroqua are gathering warily on the sidewalk to look at this spectacle in wonder. There we are—three white-haired senior citizens with gats in our hands, circling a bleeding body.
No one
has ever seen anything like this before. It must look like a Weegee photograph. No one ventures too close. None of the citizens have the faintest idea what this incredible scene of victory means.

A siren is advancing from the distance through the streets of Viroqua. It is the sheriff. He leaves his red lights blinking when he arrives and his siren on. He hustles out of his cruiser and runs toward us, his brimmed hat tilted forward, his weapon out, his badge glinting. He stoops to check Balaclava’s pulse, looks at the wounds in his shoulder and on his head, then stands again to look at the three of us, one at a time, carefully. He lowers his head to his cell phone to call an ambulance, then turns again to us.

“Well, you nailed him pretty good,” he says. “You can all put your weapons away now.”

“These ladies,” I babble at the sheriff, pointing at Louise and Emily. “They
drilled
him!”

“He doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere,” the sheriff agrees.

So it is over. Louise brings the monster down with one shot, and fearless, fearsome Emily finishes him off by creaming him with three ferocious blows to his head, while I stand around with my mouth open. This brute—who’d left me out for dead in a blizzard, who’d clubbed me with a pistol, threatened Louise, insulted Emily, stalked us and threatened us, and tried to steal my money—he’s down there bleeding, out cold on the pavement in Viroqua, Wisconsin, dispatched by two elder maidens. I take their hands, both of them—they are weeping with relief, and I join their blubbering. We put our white heads together.

We can hear the approaching ambulance siren. The sheriff stoops again to check Balaclava’s head; he looks at the harsh wound in his right shoulder, but slips handcuffs on him—just in case. Then the emergency vehicle arrives and the monster is given a quick bandage and loaded onto a stretcher, tied down, and hauled away mumbling, his shackled hands jammed beneath him. “I’ll be along in a minute,” the sheriff instructs the ambulance crew.

He turns to look at the three of us again, one at a time. His small moustache twitches over his upper lip. He shakes his head in wonder. “My God!” he says. “You old folks play rough.”

C
HAPTER
26

Cyril

I
do it: I get the money from under my mattress. It has stayed warm in the wool socks. I pay someone to drive me to La Crosse to a travel agent, and lay out serious bucks for two roundtrip first-class airline seats on a passage from Madison to Chicago to Paris, plus wheelchair service and a classy rental car out of Paris. We will be as comfortable as we can be. It doesn’t matter that I have no idea what I am doing. I
do
it. And I pay the agent in cash.

It’s amazing, the powerful effect a little money can have on you. You sweat as you peel out those bills into other hands, but it is all very exciting, very satisfying. There’s a bit of swing in my hobble as I leave the travel office and go to my ride back to the home.

I surprise Louise with the tickets on her birthday. Usually I’m the one who is timorous about our frolics, but now I am the one who has gone all the way, and Louise is the one who gets a little shaky. She is dazzled by the gift. “But aren’t we too old for such a trip?” she wonders. “All that money, Cyril! What if one of us gets sick overseas?”

“Then they will have to tend to us,” I say. “What are embassies for? We pay taxes for them. They can have us cremated and sent home in urns. To hell with atrophy! Let’s go! At our age, we must move until we cannot move.”

We arrange a leave of absence from the home. I don’t think they’ve ever done such a thing before. Another first. The staff is unnerved by our plans, never expecting to see us again.

But we have become local legends and made the home famous. The Brontë sisters have become notables, and their bookstore flourishes too, almost a landmark. More eastern reporters travel in from far-flung places to interview all of us and take our pictures. Tourism is up. I remark to one camera about the irony of how we are being honored for the one violent act of our lives—but not for our decades of quiet living. The broadcasters cut this section out.

When we appear on the national newscasts we look so old and tired. Such a strange couple we are—beautiful Louise, and me, with a lopsided head and strawberry nose. People must think we are a couple of cuckoos. Well, so. But Louise and Cyril are going to escape all this folderol! We are going to France! And when we come home we will be nobodies again. There will be other somebodies. But we will have each other.

Louise and I brave the whole plane trip, the chaotic, preoccupied airports, the shuttles, limousines, and cabs through to Chicago. Our hired wheelchairs get us to the gates, and we endure the soporific seven-hour-long flight, the French car rental, the European traffic circles out of de Gaulle, the salty honking of French drivers.

Brave, incredible Louise is driver and I am navigator. She takes us right into Paris perfectly to our very good hotel in the Marais district. She leaves our car with the parking attendant. Louise! Doing this as if she’s been doing it all her life.

The hotel is fairly new and immediately presents us with modern electronic challenges. It takes me a long time to figure out that I have to put our card key into a slot to make the electricity and lights go on. I never do figure out the trendy light system, no matter how many buttons I push. And we also find that the French just
go
to the bathroom, there is no door on it, just an opaque glass wall between the toilet and living area. It is enough to freeze my bowels. But we learn, us old folks, and we get it done.
Vive la France!

Coming back to the hotel about ten o’clock after a late dinner one evening I am struck that there are almost no older people on the streets. Young people own the nights, couples, singles, gender-disguised or straight, all seeming to be on the prowl. We are the only white-haired people there, and we are not on the prowl. We toddle along.

We take our time in the great city, just stroll and gaze for a few days, nursing our jet lag, Louise using her flawless French to order drinks and meals for us, Louise remembering her visits to Paris as a young woman, when there were no Burger Kings, not a McDonald’s or a Starbucks, no people walking about with vacant eyes, speaking into cell phones. “They were all existentialists then,” she tells me. “They didn’t look at you then either. In Paris one must go within. The city is still here, I can feel it, as it always will be.” And so we take to the elegant side streets that she remembers, buy our
glacés
(the most memorable, a dip of black currant for Louise and a
poire
for me), and afternoon aperitifs in the smaller cafés and shops. I remember a light lunch of perfect shaved smoked salmon and goat cheese salad that will stay in my memory the brief rest of my life. We discover couscous and Indian food and Italian beyond spaghetti and meatballs. I even eat snails, and love them.

Then, by God—and each other—after four glowing days in the City of Light, we get in the rental car and Louise takes the wheel again to drive us all the way out into the countryside to begin our journeying, to Lyon, Nice, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Pau, Aix-en-Provence, Puivert, Marseille, Poitiers, and other rare towns large and small, even a dip down into Spain for a brief two days in Barcelona.

In Barcelona I have a moment which tests my aging to the limit: Louise and I are strolling on Las Ramblas, enjoying the shops and open stalls, performers, cafés, mimes, jugglers, and “living statues.” Barcelona seems to be a rambunctious, venerable city. Its energy and history are palpable, and young people work at extending the traditions. On these bright days it is like an exotic circus. Louise and I walk as much as we can, then rest on benches, or take slow refreshment in one of the tapas bars.

I am swinging along on my canes past an open flower stall when a street clown, who has been entertaining a tourist crowd, picks up on my weary-looking shuffle as I pass. I glare at him and this prompts him—he begins to follow close at my heels to imitate and mock my staggering gait. Louise has gone ahead to look at some clothing stalls and sees none of this. The clown staggers at my heels and sings a sauntering Spanish song, mimicking my weary steps.

I’ll just keep walking,
I think.
I’m a stranger here—a guest in this 2,000-year-old, deeply cultured city. I’ll ignore this presumptuous fool and maybe he will just go away.

But he does not go away, keeps tagging along behind and imitating my shuffling gait as I grind along on my canes. He is a clown and perhaps is expected to make fun of everyone, even old men. They snicker nervously as they make way for us.

I do not like being the joke. I feel something damp on the nape of my neck, and turn to see that the fool is dabbing me with shaving cream from a can. Finally he places his silly orange hat on my head from behind to see what I will do as I dotter along.

When he does this, I am so angry and humiliated, I want to turn around and drop the son of a bitch with one of my canes. It is impossible, of course. And even if I do turn on him, he will only skitter away from my fumbling, and make more fun of me. People would think I was a nasty old man.

So I am a “good sport”! It is one of my hardest moments—that I have come to this—to be the stooge. But I waggle my head and arms, pretending to stumble a bit on purpose to look even more like a geezer under the clown’s ridiculous hat, becoming the fool myself for the crowd.

At last he lets off, takes his hat back and goes off to mock someone else.

So to escape the clown, I became the clown. My red nose and one floppy ear. My cantilevered walk. The clown’s silly hat on my head. Oh, some people loved it, and laughed.

I don’t tell Louise about this incident until evening when we are in our hotel room. And I don’t tell all—the feeling of vulnerability we are sometimes compelled to feel as elders. It is no time to talk of such things.

Still, Louise is livid—so angry that she weeps. She holds me. We have grown old, but nothing in our lives prepares us for indignities. No choice. We will rest and go on. We hold each other some more. It is but one bad moment.

We drive back up to southern France and into the countryside, the two of us, just taking our good time, staying in very nice hotels with concierges who fuss over us. Louise orders our wonderful meals, buys our patés, soft cheeses and baguettes for our midday meals. And yes, wine for lunch. You bet! Just a small glass.

We travel to Louise’s old home area in Surmont—and find it all sadly changed. No trace of her family, no artifacts, no warm nostalgia to cling to, no familiar ghosts nor hints of the past. Her old family house, which the current tenants—after some persuasion and the passage of a few euros—kindly allow us to look in, is completely changed and redone. Only a few phantom memories for Louise: A corner where she sat and read books as a child, another nook that seems familiar, perhaps an original chandelier. I hold her hand as she shuffles through her old home remodeled beyond recognition with new paneling, plastic moldings, three television sets. I know she is very sad that her early French story has been so completely obscured. I expect her to weep, but delicate Louise is made of whipcord.

We move on, and as we travel, I conjure up in my head the many brief and famous lives that have made up the history of France—too many names to name, so many lives to remember. I only occasionally press a few of these on Louise.

But as we drive I read aloud to her from the ceaselessly cheerful guidebooks. Some days we don’t go very far at all before we have to stop in a town, take a hotel room, and proceed to an afternoon nap like sensible old folks. After our rest, we rise to stroll in these ancient out-of-the-way places, shopping store windows, then choosing a restaurant for the evening. We eat miraculous regional meals, sip marvelous wines.

At last we return to Paris for our final two weeks. We walk and talk in the great city until we are compelled to rest in cafés. It has been many decades since Louise has been in Paris. Of course it is not the Paris she remembers from her visits as a child. But my Louise—she looks so exquisite and perfectly in place under these trees, she
belongs
in these venerable streets—almost as if she had never left to spend her life near Soldiers Grove.