All Your Pretty Dreams Read online

  All Your Pretty Dreams

  Title Page

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  all

  your

  pretty

  dreams

  Lise McClendon

  Published by

  Thalia Press

  Publishing at

  Smashwords

  © 2012, Lise McClendon

  This is a work of fiction. All rights reserved.

  First published in the United States by Thalia Press

  ISBN: 9781301705108

  ThaliaPress.com

  Also by Lise McClendon

  Jump Cut(written as Rory Tate)

  Blackbird Fly

  The Dorie Lennox Mysteries

  One O’clock Jump

  Sweet and Lowdown

  The Alix Thorssen Mysteries

  The Bluejay Shaman

  Painted Truth

  Nordic Nights

  Blue Wolf

  www.lisemcclendon.com

  Dedicated to

  John Haddaway McClendon and James Stewart McClendon

  brothers who grew up in Minnesota

  and to

  Susan Ashford Tucker

  who took me into the wilds and taught me about polka mass

  Part One

  Press and Draw

  One would be in less danger

  From the wiles of a stranger

  If one’s own kin and kith

  Were more fun to be with.

  Ogden Nash

  Chapter 1

  One thing was clear to Jonny Knobel that summer. When your life goes down the toilet, it was good to be needed. Even if the people who need you make you crazy.

  “Three days, that’s it. Rehearsal tomorrow night and again Saturday.” His father glowered across the kitchen table, shoulders hunched, hands wrapped around a chipped mug of black coffee. “You been practicing?”

  Blocks of watery sunlight caught the faded wallpaper, making the red sprigs look like ketchup splatters. The kitchen table was littered with mail, paper napkins, dried rose petals. Ah, home. A glob of syrup on the table glowed in the hazy morning sun, making Jonny dizzy. Strange to sit around the kitchen table with them again, solo. He could only imagine how surreal polka mass was going to be, his first gig with the old accordion— and the family band— in nearly ten years.

  “A little, sure.” You betcha.

  “How much is a little?” his father demanded, lids half-closed. Ozzie’s chestnut-gray hair was combed back with pomade like Elvis. He had the muscular arms of a drummer. His chest was broad; dark circles ringed his eyes. But even his most menacing look wasn’t very frightening. A consequence of his wife yelling at him in the garden, no doubt. Jonny heard the squabble early that morning. Ozzie hated not being in charge of his time even though he was a disaster at time management.

  “More than me, I bet,” Wendy said, waving her fork around. “Which is zero since school let out.”

  His little sister was wearing more eyeliner than he remembered— and lipstick. But she was seventeen, almost out of high school. She played her trumpet in marching band and jazz band, in addition to gigs with the Red Vine, Minnesota’s own Notable Knobels, now in its sixth decade.

  “Great.” Ozzie pushed away his coffee. “Nobody gives a shit.”

  His mother, Margaret, set down her cup with a clunk. “Oswald. Language.”

  “So Artie wouldn’t come. You’d think just this once,” Ozzie muttered. Jonny looked out the window at the rose bushes arching over the fence. Why his older brother should be forced to play his trumpet in the family band when Wendy was available made no sense. Bad enough one brother was suffocated into the fold.

  Wendy sighed. “It’s only polka mass, Daddy. Father Teddy says it doesn’t matter if we’re good or not. It’s church.”

  Ozzie’s jaw dropped. “Everybody will be there.”

  “Just the Catholics,” Margaret said. “And the Germans. But Stumpy will be there. We don’t want to make him cringe. You must have been practicing, Jonny.”

  Stumpy’s poor health was the reason he’d been summoned home. Arvid Stumpf, three-hundred-pound accordionist, had a heart attack two weeks before. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, given his girth and love of his wife’s baking. He was on the mend, dieting and taking it easy, swinging nothing bigger than a twinkie. Doctor’s orders.

  Jonny eyed his pancake. “This thing called my job takes up my time.”

  Not quite true. He had picked up the old squeeze box. The accordion— its chords and rhythms, the hypnotic movement of pushing in the air and drawing it back out again— had come back to him like a recurrent nightmare: spring-loaded and terrifying. Something about learning before puberty, Artie explained. Jonny was hard-wired to it. A frightening concept.

  He had left the accordion behind, gladly. As a baby he crawled on stage while his grandfather played. From the time he cut teeth he listened in on sessions with his father’s friends. Maybe something you learn so early, something you did so much as a child, never leaves you. You can push it down, learn new music, look the other way. But maybe you’re stuck with it. Like your family.

  “What’s new with Cuppie?” Wendy blurted. “Is it kaputsky?”

  Leave it to baby sister to cut to the quick. She never liked Cuppie. This was his first visit back since the split. Everybody had tiptoed around the subject at dinner last night. Nobody asked how he was coping. They just welcomed him back into the family fold like he was fifteen with pimples, a little scared of him and his emotions but determined that he get absolutely no chance to be himself.

  His mother put on her bright face. “I’ve found you a teacher. Somebody your grandmother knows. Just to brush up again. He’s French Canadian but speaks very good English.”

  “He’s at the nursing home with grandpa,” Wendy said. “He’s ancient.”

  “Your appointment is at one o’clock. But before that your father needs you to get up on the roof of the motel and look at the shingles near the chimney flue.”

  Jonny stared at his plate. He would get through this. He knew his parents would be like this, arranging his life. How could he blame them? He was hiding out from reality in his sad little room.

  Outside birds were chattering in the trees. A breeze blew the white curtains with a puff. An instant of calm passed over him, as if the lake, the maple trees, the apple orchards and cornfields of his youth had blossomed inside him for one peaceful second. Something clicked inside his head, a fuzzy memory of who he’d been. Was this why he was here? Starting over, getting it right this time?

  What had he wanted out of life? The unmapped path his life had taken seemed like a black mark on his record. Where was his ambition? What chance was there he’d find it in Red Vine, Minnesota?

  Around the table his parents discussed whether Ozzie was safe on the roof with his trick knee, who had borrowed the ladder, would insurance pay for roof repairs of the Rainy Days Motor Inn. The motel next door was their livelihood. Ozzie bought it for a song thirty years before and proudly claimed to have spent next to nothing on
it. Jonny had painted it, patched the roof, washed windows, set gutters. Not that you could tell anyone had so much as swung a paintbrush in that direction for years. The place was held together with baling wire and duct tape. Artie had also done forced labor, probably why he went into law, as far from pulling toilets as possible.

  “The Bee Wild-ers are really fun,” Wendy was saying, her eyes twinkling. “You’ll like them, Jonny.”

  “Who?”

  “The college kids. At the motel. Bee Wild, get it? They’re doing some study about wild bees— not honeybees like Mr. Grissom’s. To, like, figure out if they can be seduced into having hot sex with our apple trees and blueberries.”

  “Wendy!” With her watery blue eyes and wispy gray-blonde hair, Margaret always seemed to be thinking about something else while she talked to you. She was known to forget what she was talking about mid-sentence. But her voice did carry, sometimes tricking you into better behavior.

  “They don’t call it the birds and the bees for nothing,” Wendy said, smirking.

  “Stay away from those older people.”

  “They’re, like, twenty. And I clean their toilets.”

  “Just get in and get out. No lollygagging.”

  Wendy wiggled her eyebrows. “Who are these students?” Jonny asked.

  “They’re from Chicago or somewhere,” his mother said.

  “University of Illinois,” Wendy said. “Urbana. Lots of fun things on campus. I looked at their website.” Also it was far from home. Jonny remembered that age, when the world was your oyster if you could just break out of the shell.

  “Out of state. Not a chance,” Ozzie said.

  “We’ll see.” Wendy stood up. Jesus, she’d filled out. She was wearing her red Tastee Freez uniform, hemmed to barely cover her ass. The top pulled tight across her breasts, displaying her summer tan among other things. She flipped back her long blond hair and spun on her white tennis shoes. “Maybe I’ll get a scholarship.”

  Ozzie watched her prance through the swinging door, his blue eyes clouded with defeat. “And maybe I’ll win the lottery.”

  Jonny perched on the peak of the rotting shingles of the motel and examined the gap near the furnace flue. The Rainy Days Motor Inn sat molding into the peaty soil on the south end of town, a block from the state highway. Would you call it homey, cozy, serviceable? More like shabby. Beyond it clapboard farmhouses nestled in maple and ash trees with gooseberry bushes and lilacs along fencerows. Farther out, apple orchards stretched away, orderly and tidy, into the thick woods that turned flame and gold in the autumn. Now they were shades of green— deep pine, soft leaf, thick emerald masses.

  The roof was shedding gravelly specks like dandruff, one of many projects Ozzie had put off. A little more glue, a bit of flashing, and the leak would be good to go.

  The smell of warm tar scented the air. The view was fine: rolling hills, ripe and green, to the east, cow pastures and wheat there, woods to the west past the town, with a hint of the lake to the north. The sparkle of the water reminded him of his uncle’s red canoe, diving contests, the sailboat with the polka dot sail his grandfather built him and Artie. Mosquitoes the size of small aircraft. Hiking the woods to find the perfect Christmas tree.

  He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Was he getting sentimental about the place? It had brought him Cuppie St. John: nothing to get misty about. The only problem with that was he couldn’t decide if he was happy now that she was out of his life. On a mental health spectrum, with the black-dog-of-Minnesota-winter depression at one end, to skipping through daisies at the other, he was in the mud, wearing galoshes. Stuck.

  The summer sun broke through the clouds. The spring, rainy and gray as usual, had dragged him into this quagmire. Now June was nearly over and he’d been summoned home. The architects he worked for told him to get lost, recharge the batteries.

  The sound of crunching gravel pulled him back to the present. A car door slammed. A woman’s voice from below startled him with its sharpness. “Thank God. Not that freaking raccoon again.”

  Her face was shadowed by a pith helmet wrapped in white netting. She paused, tucking gloves into her leather belt. She wore cargo pants with grass stains on the knees and a safari jacket. Where were the elephants? He stifled a laugh. She disappeared and the door slammed. Jonny swore as he caught a shingle and cut his finger.

  College students. He knew the type, the hot-shit college kid, bored out of her gourd in Backwater, Minnesota, looking down her nose at the hicks she was forced to endure. The type surfaced in Minneapolis too, transplants from LA and New York, none too happy about their transfers and eager to decry Endless Cold and Lack of Culture.

  At least he knew where he stood: unwaged fix-it man, pledged to squelch the twin rebellion of rot and rust. Squeeze box slave. Great. Weeks with stuck-up rich kids. This stretch was starting to make prison look like a health spa.

  He put an old rubber band around his finger to squelch the bleeding then finished the patching. Halfway down the ladder another voice stopped him.

  “Jonny-boy!”

  Lenny Rhodes wore his uniform: faded black t-shirt with ‘Rage Against the Machine’ barely legible, dirty jeans, and ancient Converse high-tops. He made a tidy income as a computer fixer for everyone over 50— that is to say the entire county. He called Jonny a punk for not letting him know he was back in Red Vine, or ‘come to ground’ as if he was a gangster on the run.

  Jonny felt an unexpected rush of gladness at the sight of his only friend from high school who still lived in Red Vine. “You’re still here, you bastard. When are you moving to the Cities?”

  They walked into Margaret’s rose garden. Lenny grinned, his curly blond hair falling into his eyes. “Can’t now. I’m getting the keys to the kingdom. Running for mayor. Mayor— me! Can you believe it?”

  Lenny had spearheaded a drive to move the town dump away from a stream that fed into the lake. Citizens had taken up sides, those who didn’t want to pay for anything even if it meant poisonous water and a fish kill, and those who wanted to save the lake and their town. Lenny was on the lake’s side. He’d been recruited by the town’s newspaper editor, lover of a good election fight, to run against Norm Norman, mayor for twenty-two years and counting.

  “You’ll like my slogan. Born in the USA. So, of course, I’m calling myself ‘Thunder’ Rhodes.” Lenny squinted. “You don’t think the Boss will mind, do you?”

  “I think he’d be honored.”

  “You hear his new album?”

  Jonny hadn’t listened to Bruce Springsteen in years. Cuppie controlled all the music and she didn’t like rock and roll, preferring bluegrass, banjoes, and mary-janes with big bows. What else did he give up for her, he wondered, listening to Lenny rattle on about rock and roll. He’d been in a coma for eight long years but he was awake now. Free. It took coming back here, to the place they’d met, to realize he was really free of her.

  He stood a little taller. There, that was the first step.

  “Come to the Owl tonight. We can talk strategy.”

  It sounded great. Away from the parents, their carping, Wendy’s drama, the motel slowly being eaten by termites and neglect. He glanced up at the peeling white paint. Old gutters lay twisted in a heap. The green doors were faded and cracked, numbers missing on rooms 2 and 5. He couldn’t believe his father had somehow conned a major university into booking students there. They can’t have known what a shit-hole the Rainy Days was.

  His mother squawked in the house. Baloney sandwiches were ready.

  “The squeeze box calls.”

  The recreation room of the Spoon River Retirement Home was painted egg-yolk yellow to compensate for the rain, snow, and mist that often hung over the town. Now at mid-summer the chalky blue waters of the lake stretched out beyond the grass, with sun breaks setting the scene with dazzling clarity. Red Vine could be bucolic and calm, even pretty. It was a good thing to remember.

  Jonny looked around for a man with an accordi
on. On one side of the room three ladies hunched over cards. Two men sat staring at a television set. Neither had a lick of hair, and the Canadian had been described as having a full head of white hair.

  He headed back to the front desk. His grandfather was down the opposite wing, for Alzheimer’s patients. He should go see him, even though the old man hadn’t known him for years. Right after the lesson.

  Room 612 was at the far end of the corridor. Jonny retraced his steps past the recreation room, past the hallway that led to the dining room. The accordion strapped to his back felt like dead weight, a burden of responsibility. But if he perfected the polka his father would be happy— proud of him. Man, what a thought. How much he still wanted to please his father— or at least have his father acknowledge his skill, his commitment, to respect him— made him slow his steps.

  The problem wasn’t his father. It was polka. Not that he didn’t like the form in general. It was happy music. The oompah made people want to get up and dance. It made them smile. It spoke to them; it was part of who they were. Yet it didn’t speak to Jonny. Even after all these years. To feel polka deep inside the way he felt rock and roll, was that too much to ask? At sixteen he tried to play Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ album on the accordion. He could still play those tunes. But the sound of rebellion and the road sounded so much better on the guitar.

  When he’d played with the family band in high school, Ozzie on drums and Artie on trumpet, it had been fun up to a point. Artie was a kick, going off on jazzy riffs like Miles Davis. That made Ozzie so mad he would clack his drumsticks together to get him to stop, right in the middle of a song. When Artie left for college there was the expectation he would come back in summers for polka mass and party gigs, but he never did. Ozzie found a high school kid who played until he got Wendy on the horn. Stumpy took Jonny’s place on accordion when he left for college. With Stumpy in the band there was no need to step up. Until now.