October Fest

away. Anyhow, I’m going to earn a degree in Fashion Management. The college started an Elder School this fall, and they offer new online classes every four weeks. I could have my degree within a year.”

I leaned in closer to the screen and squinted to read the tiny black words. “You’re registered for one class, and it’s Human Sexuality. How does that connect to Fashion Management?”

“Only elective available this late in the game. Class starts Monday.”

I curled my lip doubtfully. “What could they possibly teach you that you don’t already know?”

She clicked again, and the syllabus popped up. “Looks like we’ll be discussing our genitalia, sexual scripts whatever the moon those are, something called fellatio”-she pronounced it with a hard “t,” no pun intended-“sexual positions…”

“Stop!” I had a lifetime membership in the club of girls who chose to believe Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical” was about the benefits of aerobic workouts. I liked having sex; I just didn’t like talking about it. “I get the picture.”

“Besides, it’ll be a great way to expand my horizons, get to know people on a new social landscape.”

“That’s not a social landscape, that’s a mattress with textbooks,” I said, and then caught myself. I believed in the power of education. Plus, I did not want to witness her in granny pants again. What better way to kickstart the old Mrs. Berns than by putting her in an environment where she could, nay, where she’d be required to talk about copulation and hang out with young people? She’d have her own religion started before midterm. “I think it’s wonderful. I’m proud of you.”

“Don’t patronize me,” she said. “And what chickenshit Johnny Leeson question do you have, anyhow?”

She jarred me back to the dilemma that had brought me. She’d already admitted to making him send the invitation, so I cut to the chase. “Why did Johnny let you talk him into the invitation? He’s usually much more sensible. What does he want?”

“Holy Mary, girl, do you want to audit the class? I’m sure they have diagrams.”

I blushed, my head spinning from her runaround. “So that’s it? He just wants to get in my pants?”

“Ah, no, he’s too nice a boy for that, dangit. You’ll have to go yourself to find out what it is he’s after.”

“A hint?”

“Look to the boy scouts.”

Rich words of wisdom from my love mentor, the woman who saw more action in her eighties than I’d seen in my entire thirty years on the planet. I squelched the urge to pinch her and instead gave her a hug.

____________________

My workday passed quickly but not particularly pleasantly as I ran through all the potential scenarios for the evening. I could bail, and Johnny would never want to see me again. I could go to the motel, and Johnny would never want to see me again. Or, he wasn’t who I thought he was at all and had some weird night of sex in mind. Or I did know him and he was going to ask for a commitment from me, some sort of official categorizing of our relationship. Agh. None of the options were good. I was so wound up when I closed the library and pulled into my driveway that even the sight of Luna bounding out to greet me didn’t cheer me up. Nor did the saucy disdain directed at me by calico cat, Tiger Pop.

“Hi, babies,” I said, climbing out of the car. The fall air was brisk but not frosty, saturated with the earthy smell of leaves turning and far off, someone burning wood. I clutched my jacket tighter, staring down the sloping, brown front lawn to the big red barn and fenced pasture that used to hold horses when Sunny lived here as a child. On the other side was the sparkling blue-gray of Whiskey Lake. This spot was idyllic, the house and outbuildings nestled amongst wild acres of golden-grassed prairie, rolling hills, and hardwood forests. Except for the smell of wood smoke, I could have been the only person in the universe. I dragged in a deep breath, momentarily refreshed.

Dog and cat followed me into the house where I rinsed out their water dishes and poured a fresh drink along with kibbles for the dog and pebble food for the kitty.

“How was your day? Were you good to each other?” Luna looked at me hopefully, like if she played her cards right I might make her as smart as a cat for a day. Tiger Pop ignored us both. I scratched them until one rolled over in ecstasy and the other purred against his will.

Animals sated, I cobbled together some vegetable soup to settle my sour stomach. I still hadn’t made up my mind whether or not I was going to the motel tonight, and the indecision was making me queasy.

Crap. Who was I kidding? I’d made up my mind the minute I’d received the invitation. If only I was one of those women for whom good sense won out over inquisitiveness. Or, let’s face it, for whom dead bodies didn’t pile up like unwashed clothes. It occurred to me, then, that I hadn’t seen a dead body since the State Fair. Maybe October would be my first corpse-free month since May, I thought hopefully. If I’d known I was less than twelve hours shy of ending that good luck streak in a most gruesome fashion, I wouldn’t have bothered shaving.

4

You’re stupid, you’re stupid, you’re stupid, I told myself as my Toyota hugged the corner into town, spraying gravel. When I was six years old, my mother took me to see a movie in St. Cloud, the closest town with a theater. I don’t remember where my dad was; probably my mom was trying to get us out of the house and away from him for a few hours. It was my first big screen experience: a remastered release of Bambi . The theater had also been updated, an old 1920s burlesque hall regilded, repainted, and recurtained to host modern film. I begged for seats in the balcony and was hypnotized when the theater went dark and the music came on, vibrating the chairs. Words appeared on the screen, followed by magical animation. We didn’t even own a television at the time, so this was heady stuff.

For a while. Then, I spotted a group of boys a few years older than me on the main floor below giggling and passing something between them. I slid away from my mother-poor thing probably needed her own break-and over to the edge of the balcony. I could see that what they were passing was shiny, catching the glint when the screen went bright. Was it a knife? A metal bottle for drinking out of, like my dad had? A decoder ring? I couldn’t quite make it out through the intricately patterned wrought iron barrier. Lucky thing there was a hole just big enough to squeeze my head through, if I wiggled and pushed. So I did, and to my great satisfaction, I saw that they were passing candy back and forth, a mother lode of U-No bars. I smiled-they’d snuck those in. I knew this because I’d begged my mom to buy me a Caravelle bar and I would have begged her to buy me a U-No bar instead if they’d sold them-and I kept smiling even as my horrified mother realized first that I was no longer seated next to her and second, that my head was wedged in the wrought iron tighter than Excalibur in the stone. It took two firefighters, a tub of Noxema, and a lot of elbow, neck, and ear grease to free me. I’m pretty sure no one in that theater has but a secondhand idea how Bambi ends because watching the dumb girl with the brown braids wrestle with a wrought iron balcony was a much more riveting show.

But I sure enough got to see what those boys were up to, and that made it fine that my ears were pink and raw for a week. You’d think curiosity of that magnitude, so powerful that it overrode common sense and maybe even the survival instinct, would have bred itself out of the gene pool by now, but I was evidence that it hadn’t. I was on my way to the Big Chief Motor Lodge smelling like sandalwood, wearing clean clothes, and maybe, just maybe, I’d applied a light coat of mascara and honey-flavored lip gloss.

I hadn’t yet explored the new motel. My home-away-from-home in cases of extreme mosquito invasions at the house was the Battle Lake Motel, a cute and clean log-cabin-sided destination across the street from the Big Chief. It wasn’t directly on the banks of the lake, but it was friendly, family-owned, and hospitable. The Big Chief, on the other hand, was going for the sprawling resort look with its bland exterior and massive parking lot.

I pulled into the crammed parking lot of the two-story motel, staying in my car for ten minutes, studying the cream-colored building. I could hear the oompa-whomp of polka music emanating from the football field at the other edge of town. Not With My Horse didn’t sound too bad from this distance. To my right was West Battle Lake and to