The Daily Novel

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

People in and about Bernadotte had started to become suspicious about all these meetings, but Alan, a couple of weeks earlier, had stepped up.

Many of the leading citizens of Bernadotte are holding meetings at the First State Bank of Bernadotte, with the purpose of forming a “Civic and Community Committee.” These types of committees are commonplace in many cities. Their purpose is to install a sense of pride among citizens and to promote cooperation amongst the merchants in these towns, to the benefit of all. Surely, this committee will be successful.

At that time a thought occurred to me: It was good that nobody came in to buy the newspaper as quickly as Maggie had come to buy my restaurant. The new man might have had a little more journalistic integrity.

Roosevelt won the election, as you know. It was all in Time Magazine; he won forty-six states.

. . . Now I’m going back to Washington—to do what they call balance the budget and fulfill the first promise of the campaign, and after a week or so with the budget, I’m going to get some sleep, and, because I can really sleep on a boat, I’m going on a boat to the Caribbean, and I’m going to lie in the sun and sleep, and perhaps catch a fish on the side. I’ll get back to Washington toward Christmastime. While Congress is getting ready to convene, I’ll be using the joyous Christmas season to prepare gifts for the new Congress.”

I didn’t go to the final meeting with Al and Harland and the Bernadotte investors. I had nothing to contribute. I could see people gathered around the bank. I saw the Hudson. An hour and a half later, people emerged, most laughing. They headed for Denny’s Tavern. Al came over later, took out his flask, and gave me a drink. The whiskey was of a better quality. This showed confidence, I thought, just like the Lucky Strikes. It was his confidence, not mine.

“Sorry,” he said. “I heard the sale didn’t go through. Another couple of years and this restaurant will be one of the top ones in the state. You’re on Highway Two, for heaven’s sake. When times get better, people will be driving through here by the hundreds. People like to eat. People like to drink. People will drive and travel more, because the price of fuel will start to go down.

“Bernie’s going to be president of this new corporation, but you know that. Bernie’s a bastard, I admit, but he knows dollars and cents and chemistry. That minister, Holmquist, was confirmed as our corporate chaplain. You have to have a corporate meeting every year. It’s required by law. Before the meeting starts, it’s traditional to have a blessing of some sort. You have to pay the chaplain for the blessing. Likely, he won’t need the money. He’ll probably donate it some charitable cause.

“Still, I’m the major stockholder, and the CEO.  If Bernie gets out of line, he’ll be gone. I put $30 into the pool in your name. It’s the least I could do. You’ll be fine, Johnny. You got thirty shares. They’re being printed up right now in Grand Forks. You’ll get them in three weeks. You got a safe?”

“No.”

“Well, put those shares somewhere a person can’t steal them. They’ll be worth more than gold a year from now. I’ll be back in maybe six weeks. I’ll bring some really good whiskey. Then, I’m off to France, with my family, right after the operation at the Mayo Clinic. The Mormons can’t find us in France.

And Johnny, if you see anyone come into this town dressed in all black, let everyone know. That person would be a Mormon spy.

“Now, I don’t mean Catholic priests. They have a white collar. White is the symbol of purity, though I don’t much care for Catholics.”

You hook your hopes and dreams on one of those North Dakota stars and then the rope breaks. What do you do? You make bacon and eggs and you flip hamburgers. You dream at night about what might have been. You try to put your creditors off. Toward the end of November, the weather got cooler, much cooler. I slept inside, with heavier blankets. My promising dreams turned to nightmares.

“We should put our trust in God,” Melvin Neyers said, drinking coffee. Maybe he was right. Trust in God is really a lot better than trust in bankers.

“Roosevelt really did whip the shit out of Landon.”

“I got my political opinions, Johnny, but I don’t let them get in the way of my Christian obligation, which is to love your neighbor as yourself, doesn’t matter if he’s Democrat or Republican, doesn’t matter if he’s Zachary Klukas or some other asshole.

“You have to put your trust in God.”

I wanted to cry, cry about places and people where I’d placed my trust, trust they didn’t deserve. I wanted to cry about people who deserved my trust, but didn’t get it.

“Melvin, with all you’ve gone through, how can you be such an optimist?”

“I don’t know. I try hard, Johnny.”

Melvin didn’t stay long, since nobody came in to play dice.

Do you put you trust in God? I guess you do. You got no other choice. It’s obvious that you can’t put your trust in your fellow man. There’s a Judas on every street corner.

What do we know about anything? We know wheat doesn’t grow if there’s no rain. We know that people will lie and cheat and do anything to make a few bucks. We know that cold weather can freeze you and hot weather can bake you to death. People tell you things while you’re cooking steaks or hamburgers for them.

Someone would bitch about such-and-such who just sold them something-or-other and charged them at least a dollar more than they should have been charged.

“I’m sure he never greased the bearings.”

Such-and-such would be in two days later.

“I can’t believe that son-of-a-bitch is disparaging me all around this community. That motor was in excellent condition. I could have gotten twice what he paid me for it. I just took pity on him because of his family situation and all.”

“Well, she said she hardly knew him. She expected me to believe that. Oh, she knew him, entirely too well.”

“I spend all day cooking and washing clothes and changing diapers. He gets home at midnight, says he had to work late. It doesn’t show up on his paycheck.”

“She wants to have a chain around my neck. I spend a nickel for a beer and she’ll yell at me for three days.”

You nod politely. I could have been a Dear Abby back then, with all of the things I heard. Dear Abby hadn’t been invented yet, in 1936. Abby probably hadn’t been born then. Bartenders went through the same thing, probably had it worse, since people bitch more after a few drinks.

Respectable magazines didn’t broach all of these subjects, especially women’s magazines. They’d talk about etiquette, where the napkin is placed next to the plate, in which order you lay out the silverware. What sort of wine should you serve with what sort of meal. These magazines obviously weren’t owned by the Mormons.

“You believe a third of what you hear and half of what you see.” I can still picture Doc Gilles when he said that. He had white hair and a white moustache, a low voice.

Doc was an optimist, about believing what you hear or see. The percentages should be much less.

I heard from Pastor Holmquist the next day about the meeting.

“It was something, Johnny. Al opened up a briefcase. It was full of $100 bills. He shut it and then took out another case. He opened it and took out a Tommy gun. My God, I thought, he’s going to shoot us. He handed the thing to Bernie. ‘I’m taking this thing with me,’ he said. Bernie was a little nervous when he held it. Al said he was going to Salt Lake City first. He’d pick up Ezekiel’s wife and his two kids and head north.

“Harland said, ‘It’s a hard and winding road that we have to follow.’

“Ezekiel would be waiting. They’d torch his building. They’d pour his formula all around the building and light a match.  Pretty clever, Johnny. All the records about this high-octane stuff would be gone, and it would take days for the Mormons to determine whether Ezekiel had died. From there it would be on to Vermont.

“He would pick up a friend in Iowa. That way, there’d be two of them. They would get a different vehicle, so the Mormons couldn’t track them. Al trusts Ezekiel, he says, but a lot of people trust a lot of people, and they could be wrong. Al’s friend will have a gun and cover his back. You can’t be too careful. They’ll get to Ezekiel’s house and make the exchange. ‘Here’s your money.’ ‘Here’s the formula.’ Ezekiel couldn’t trick anyone, since Al had a Tommy gun and his friend had a 44 Magnum.

“Al will bring the formula here, since Bernie is the president of our corporation. Al will bring his trailer, leave it here. Harland will come, and one of his associates. Al will take off, head east, because he fears for his life. He’ll go to France after his son’s operation, of course.”

“I know that. Al talked to me after the meeting, when Harland was still in the bank signing papers and that sort of thing.”

“If, for some reason, the formula doesn’t work, well, we know where Ezekiel lives. We wouldn’t do anything to him ourselves, you understand. Real Christians don’t do these things. Just a hint to Joshua, however, and Ezekiel will be history. We could make an anonymous phone call. Ezekiel has to know these things. He’s smart, and he won’t double-cross us. I’m certain of that. Plus he has a thousand shares. I don’t think it can fail, Johnny.

“We take the trailer first to the regional manager of Standard Oil, based out of St. Paul, Minnesota. If they’re not interested, they can go to hell. We got four other oil companies we can go to. Worse comes to worse, we can start making this stuff and selling it ourselves. We’d make more money that way, but it would be a lot of work.

“’I don’t know if I feel comfortable taking all of your money to Ezekiel,’ says Al. ‘Would some of you want to go with me? You’d just have to agree to take cyanide with you. There’s just a very small chance that we could get caught by the Mormons.

“’It could only happen if someone in this meeting is a Mormon or if they’re married to a Mormon, or if they have friends who are Mormons, and if they can’t keep a secret.’

“’Nobody in this county is a Mormon,’ Bernie said.

“’Well, you can’t be too careful. People are not always what they seem to be.

‘’’The Mormons know how to make people talk. They pull out fingernails. They chop off fingers, all in God’s name. They will castrate a man, and laugh while he’s screaming. That’s what this cyanide is for. They’ll ask for names and places. Under torture, people give up information. Cyanide is the only solution, or this entire town, and my family will be in danger.
“’I’ve got one more stop to make,’ he says. ‘There’s a druggist in Red Lodge, Wyoming. I promised him about this delivery. He’s a Mormon. If I don’t make my delivery, he’ll be on the phone to Joshua. Plus, I don’t break my promises, but I really don’t want to go to Red Lodge.’

“I didn’t want to go with Al, Johnny. Neither did Bernie. We didn’t trust Sweeney to go.

“Al says, ‘If you don’t hear from me in six weeks, it means I’m dead. Hide your stock certificates. You likely won’t have to do that. Our plan is perfect,’ he said. ‘I could get struck by lightning, I suppose, but that’s unlikely. I’ll come right here from Vermont. Of course, I’ll stop and see my wife and kids on the way. ‘

“You got to respect a man like that, Johnny, a man who puts his family first.”

“Al told the group at the bank more than that, quite a bit more. He had given his wife strict instructions. If he wasn’t back in six weeks, she was to send all the details to Bernie, as in details about where to find the trailer with secret additive in it, about where the key was hidden, about all those contacts with the oil company executives.

“There wouldn’t be nearly as much money in the venture if he was killed, but with a real sample of the additive, chemists could put two and two together. Al also left the name of our state representative and our two senators. There’d be a congressional investigation. The whole country would know, and the country would put those Mormons in their place, as they deserved to be. ‘Would you make sure my family is taken care of?’ Al asked.

“’As God is my witness,’ I said.

“Al’s a man of his word.

“If Al is killed, we can still survive. I hope they let me do a funeral homily for him, if it comes to that. I’m 99 percent sure that won’t be necessary. Al is a very able man, and he has this all planned out to the last detail.”

The pastor then described how they’d go about contacting the oil companies, what they’d say. They’d demonstrate the additive, and say, “Look at this with your own eyes.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have the formula there, but you’d have a sample of the catalyst. They’d get a sample, the oil people; it would probably take them five years to analyze it.

“’You got a week,’ we’d say, ‘or we’ll bring it to your competitors.’ They’d take notice. If none of the oil companies took us up on our offer, and simply scratched their heads, we still would have recourse.

“We’d go right to the United States government, through our local officials. You wouldn’t get a on hundred-to-one return on your investment, if we did that. Maybe thirty-to-one.”

Still that was a pretty good investment, by anyone’s standard.

“I’ll pray,” Pastor Holmquist said, “that Al comes out of this all right. It’s not only the money. He’s a gentleman, Al.

“Do you know what he asked me before he left?”

“No.”
“He said, ‘I know, whatever happens, my wife will be taken care of. You promised me, Pastor. I got your promise and I got a good attorney. I still fear about my son. If I don’t come back, and my wife sends the letter, would you take my son to the Mayo Clinic? I ask you this because you’re a man of God.’

“I promised. So help me, God, I’ll keep that promise.” Then he went into the details, the details about the meeting, which I, unfortunately, was not a part of.

Pastor Holmquist said, “I’m putting in $1150, on behalf of our church. Sweeney $30, who would have thought?  We didn’t think Sweeney could afford a pack of cigarettes. Carl Lundgren put in $4,600. Alan Herschman put in $100 total, Gabe Murphy, $420. Bernie put in $5800. Zach Klukas, $125. You add that to Al’s $9,200 investment. It’s enough for the payment and associated fees.

“Al showed us all the papers, and stock certificates. ‘Keep these secret,’ he said. ‘You know how these Mormons are.’

“That Al is quite a gentleman. He said $30 of his contribution is in your name. We signed some documents. Al said we should be prepared. This will hit the newspapers sooner or later.

“But he looked scared, Johnny, Al did. You know those Mormons. I would be scared, too.”

I was scared, and I never gambled any money—not for lack of trying, though.

We never saw Al again. Sweeney was upset after two weeks. “When’s he coming?”

“Sweeney,” I said, “Al told the investors it would be at least six weeks before he came back, maybe longer. It’s not a short jaunt to Salt Lake City and to Vermont and then back to North Dakota. And then you could have car trouble.”

“That’s true. I have car trouble every other day.” Some speculated, after three weeks, about how the Mormons might have murdered Al, dumped his body in some remote location in Utah, a location that could never be found.

Bernie called the city clerk in Red Lodge, to find out who the pharmacist was there. He didn’t get an answer. The phone rang and rang.

On December 28th a man in a suit asked for me around town. He was an FBI agent, looking into fraud. He described the whole process, pouring pails of water into the gas tank, a scoop of something from a trailer, the shaking of the car.

“Yes, yes,” I said, “there was a man who came through here doing exactly that.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“I did.”

“What story did he tell you?”

“He said he was delivering fuel to various Mormon missionaries. He said that the Mormons had figured out how to make gasoline out of water. They’d force us to convert, or they wouldn’t sell us fuel. He said the Mormons were out to take over the world. He said we had to stop them. His name was Al. He’s Lutheran.”

“Did you give him any money?”

“No.”

“Did anybody else give him money in this town?”

“Don’t know, really. I didn’t actually see anybody else give him money.”

“You might be a lucky town.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a swindle. They’re doing it all over the west. North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico.”

“Al was from Bismarck,” I said.

“Did he have a sick mother?”

“No, he had a son with a congenital hip defect, and he had a daughter just entering first grade.”

“Oh, that’s good,” said the FBI agent.

“How could Al get to all these states? He’d come by here twice a month at least.”

“There were a lot of people involved in this, maybe sixty or seventy.”

“So, you’re saying that the Mormons aren’t going to take over the gasoline supply in the United States?”

“No, they’re not.”

“Well then, who is?”

“Well, Rockefeller is pretty much in charge now, and probably will be for a long time.”

“But, you can make gasoline from water. I saw it. The Mormons have the formula.”

“This con is going on in Utah, too, maybe a different group. There, they blame it on the Jews. This type of fraud started in Kentucky a few years back. They blamed it on the Pope.”

“You can’t make gasoline from water? I saw it done.”

“You just thought you did.”

“Well, there’s a professor in Kansas you could call.”

“Beranek? He’s long gone, had an office in back of a clothing store, up two flights. He designed this swindle. That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Bernatelli.

“What was Al’s last name?”

I realized I had never bothered to ask. “You know,” I said, “You might want to talk to our banker. He pretty much knows about everything that happens in this town, knows where all the bodies are buried.”

“Bodies?”

“That’s just a figure of speech. Nobody in this town kills anybody else. We let the cold and the heat kill us.”

The agent walked to the door. He hesitated and turned around. “Let me guess,” the FBI agent added. “I’ll bet this Al liked Tabasco sauce and had a flask of whiskey that he carried with him. I’ll bet Joshua stopped in town, one time, dressed in black, all black. Did you see anyone who would fit that description?”

I didn’t answer.

“Your banker know anything about counterfeit bills?”

About four hours later, I looked up from the stove, and Bernie was standing in front of me. “Say, Johnny, I’ve been doing some re-figuring. I miscalculated George and Maggie’s net worth, by quite a bit, actually. I just rode out to their farm and told them they could have the mortgage, and I gave them a damn good interest rate.”

“That’s great. I really want to sell this place.”

“That means you can still invest if you want to. I’ll sell you some of my shares. You’re the guy who first met Al, after all. You got the ball rolling.”

“Well, I’ve been doing some re-figuring myself. I don’t think I really want to buy any shares.”

I know vengeance is the Lord’s domain, but those were some of the most satisfying words I’ve ever said. They rank right up there with “I do,” which I uttered many years later, in front of a minister, as I looked into the eyes of Helen.

An abandoned car was found in Montana a month later. It was a Hudson, had the serial number filed off, and there were no license plates. The gas tank had been modified. You could fill it from the back seat. There was a separate tank mounted underneath the car, and a spigot that allowed a person to empty that tank.
A similar vehicle, a Studebaker, was found abandoned in west Nebraska the following spring.

Pastor Holmquist resigned from the church in late January, 1937, and left town quickly. I heard he ended up somewhere in Wyoming. A month later, I sold my restaurant to Maggie for $1950. She’s shrewd. She negotiated.

I got a part-time job at the post office and later, at our feed mill, when it began to rain again, in ’37. The Liberty Trio became a quartet when they found a piano player. I rented rooms above the café that Millie owned, but I didn’t need to sleep out on the porch all that often in the summer, and I didn’t need to sleep by the oven in the winter. Duane moved east in 1938.

Then, of course, there was the war. After the war I moved, first to Bismarck. I couldn’t find a wife on my own; that was apparent. Duane found a wife in short order. His wife had an older sister. The older sister had a friend. I married Helen and swore I’d take her to Yellowstone Park someday, but babies and finances got in the way. We moved to Minneapolis. We bought a restaurant eventually, but Hollywood stars don’t come. Mostly, it’s working men and women.

I can’t help it. I still visit Bernadotte every other year. I go to the cemetery. I stop at the café. Millie gives me and my wife a free meal. I give her a $5 tip. She’s doing all right. She’s on Highway Two, for heaven’s sake.

Zach had a stroke in ’37, blamed it on the Jews. He had another one in ’38, blamed it on the Negroes.

He died after his heart attack in 1940. If he could’ve said a word from his coffin, he would have probably said, “Those goddam Italians killed me, and I know it.”

How is it we never learn about life, about what people will do to other people? We never learn these things, even though we read Time Magazine and the Bible. I sometimes think that the only ones who know anything about human nature are those who want to part us from our money.

Still, most of us were poor and desperate back then, and we’d reach for hope in any form. Bernie, the bastard, didn’t have that excuse. I don’t say anything bad to my kids about the Mormons or the Jews or the Catholics. I never say a bad word about colored people or Italians. They can’t be any worse than we were in 1936, that God-forsaken year.

They don’t have depressions anymore. We get recessions now. You never hear Cole Porter songs these days. I still dream, but I don’t dream about Mary Ellen. I haven’t in years.

People bitch about this and that in my restaurant. Coffee costs more now, but I still don’t make any money off it.

Bernie survived the loss of his money in 1936, but people throughout town knew what he had done and laughed at him behind his back, and later, after the bad times ended, to his face, worse than they had ever laughed at Sweeney.

The WPA rest stop is still there, in pretty good condition. The creek is filled and flows with promise, looks beautiful. The area isn’t called “The Royal Valley” anymore. For a while it was “Fool’s Valley,” but that never caught on with people around North Dakota. They all knew, desperate as times were back in 1936, that they would have jumped just as eagerly into those same dark waters.

THE END