All Your Pretty Dreams by Lise McClendon Page A

had no idea what time it was.
    The Owl was common ground
for singles of all stripes, a place where husbands could get away
from wives, where there was always someone to talk to or stare at
you while you got drunk. Ten small tables inside gouged, dirty
walls, a dusty wood floor, a single, ancient lavatory, a bandstand
that held three assuming none of them were drummers. A long bar
along one side, with a mirrored back-bar with its silver half-gone.
The back-bar was the pride of Red Vine, transported up the
Mississippi River on a steamboat in the 1870s from New Orleans and
passed from bar to bar in the county. Dark and sticky from decades
of smoke and liquor, its carved trim and decorative posts draped
with faded streamers from New Years gone by. The Owl hadn’t allowed
smoking for over a year now but the smell of it was deep in the
woodwork and paneling, in the furniture, in the bar, and especially
in Walter.
    In black apron and green
golf shirt, Walter Leclerc wiped the bar obsessively. The white
towel, a new one each morning and evening, was a fixture in his
left hand, just down from the tattoo of the dancing girl. Thin with
a hooked nose, nicotine-stained teeth, and a shock of gray hair,
he’d managed to stay single into his fifties. He’d been wiped out
in a hurricane down in Mobile or Mississippi or somewhere.
(Everywhere that far south was the same to a Minnesotan.) His
insurance money being as green as anybody’s, after five or six
years of careful scrutiny proved him to be no skirt-chaser or
confidence man, he was allowed to become part of the town— a rather
important part.
    “ What the hell?” Lenny
stood by the table, glaring down at the sketch paper. “Is that your
grandma’s corn crib or my grandpa’s?”
    “ Can’t have it. Unless you
trap raccoons.”
    Lenny pulled up a chair.
“Was it the polka mass that tipped you over or did you eat some
funny mushrooms out on the farm?”
    “ Didn’t see you at mass.”
Jonny flipped over the page. Where would you put the toilet, the
kitchen sink, the bed? Was there room for a partition?
    “ Well, it was a bit early.
And I had to wash my hair. And— how was Little Toot?”
    “ We survived.”
    “ No wrath of God? Sweet.”
Lenny took a long drink from his beer and started describing the
plans for the fundraiser on Friday night. A groundwater expert from
the Department of Natural Resources would discuss landfill runoff.
Fifty people might come, more if the food was free. Lenny was
looking for a sponsor; without one Kool-aid and Ritz crackers would
do. With the Notable Knobels playing, well, the sky was the limit,
attendance-wise.
    “ About that, Len.” Jonny
set down his sketch pad.
    “ You can’t back out on me
now.”
    “ I was just thinking. What
if it’s just me? My sister—“
    “ Gotcha. Ix-nay on the umpet-tray .”
    “ And my dad is friends
with Norm.”
    A black look transformed
Lenny’s face as if it occurred to him that people he knew might
vote for someone else. That it was a race , and there was a possibility,
slim though it was, that somebody else— namely a dumb-ass named
Norm— could actually win.
    “ Is the party here then?”
Jonny asked. He had never seen more than twenty-five people in the
Owl at one time.
    “ I gotta get another beer.
Walter!” Lenny headed for the bar, then turned back. “It’s at the
landfill. That’s the point, man.”
    Great, a concert at the
dump. How appropriate. The accordion was the Rodney Dangerfield of
the music world. Well, what did he expect from a hometown homer who
lived in his parents’ garage? He liked Lenny, always had. But if he
thought a concert at the dump was going to be fun, well.
    Jonny went back to his
sketch pad, trying to work like he once did, organically, without
thinking too hard. He scribbled, absorbed in his task. The bar was
silent. Even Walter had stopped wiping the bar. In front of the
table stood Cuppie, wearing a pink sweater, her hands folded in
front of her, head