Pissing Wisemen

On the greatest day of her life, having just completed her first double axel precisely on the beats of the song Fame blaring from onshore loudspeakers, Ginny Hellrung planted the toe of her right skate into the scored, thick ice of Gillespie Lake, abruptly stopping her closing spin. She raised her arms in triumph and bowed, her hands chapped from wind chill, gracefully half-curved, frozen fingers artistically pointed, breath bursting from her mouth into the gelid air.

Her parents might have voted for First Communion being in their daughter’s Greatest Day, but who hadn’t experienced FC? Like most parents, they fretted over other, traditional firsts: sex, cigarettes and alcohol. Ginny sensed this and perversely left them in the dark, personal lifewise. In the light, she felt ruminantly sinful. In truth, she was innocent in deed—not like most adolescents.

The competition was the finale of the annual Gillespie Winter Carnival, sponsored by the Masons, Subway, and Kravanya Funeral Home. It was ten above zero, New Year’s Day; the weak mid-afternoon sun shone at a low angle from an intensely blue sky, over a frozen, snow-covered landscape. The organizing committee, chaired by Ginny’s grandfather, Glenn Miller, was ecstatic: “real” winter had returned for the first time in a decade. A banner on the field house proudly proclaimed, “Global Warming? Not here!”

Ginny’s cheeks were poppy red, from heavy stage makeup and the cold. Her lungs burned from asthma and frigid air, but this didn’t stop her from skating in each direction, silently mouthing, I love you. The cheering crowd stamped their feet along the bank of the lake and called out their bravos, the exhaled breaths in the icy air looking like gun smoke. Her uncle Fred Miller, an opera buff, called, “Brava!”

Her beaming father, George Hellrung, his faux sable hat adding a foot in length to his short body, moved along the shore, hastily snapping photos with a digital camera. Her proud, portly mother Delilah, wearing a full-length white down coat that resembled an immense, quilted teepee, waved a bouquet of long-stemmed roses.

Fred started the shower of floral bouquets, and soon red rose petal confetti was strewn along the ice. Little girl skaters in reindeer costumes, from the Peewee Ice Dancer’s Club of Jerseyville, scooped up the blossoms, which looked like fallen, frozen cardinals against the frost and ice.

“Ladies und gents: Virginia Hellrung, duh Ice Queen!” the announcer, her second cousin, Hans Dieter Wilson, barked with a German accent over the P. A. “Vay to go, Gin-Gin! Enjoy your free, once a week für a month, Subway six inch sandwich, courtesy of Ssssssubway uff Gillespie!”

Hans Dieter and his wife Starr ate all their meals out. He was known to approach strangers in restaurants, buying them coffee or a drink then saying, “So, vat you tink now? Are all Chermans bad?”

A third of the audience was composed of Ginny’s relatives.

She was myopic—she wouldn’t wear her Coke bottle-thick eyeglasses while performing—but she was able to distinguish cheerleading Hellrungs from politely clapping Wilsons and nodding Millers.

Hellrungs were huggers. If you were in the checkout line at the I.G.A and an adult Hellrung came toward you, you could hold your ground or run for it. Hellrungs held mass Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter feasts, with endless tearful toasts to love and bloodlines. All Hellrung bathrooms featured a framed homily hanging over the toilets:

“Live each precious day as if it were your last;

Love each special person as if you will never see them again.”

Ginny’s cousin, Julie Jr., a parodist, had mock business cards made up which read:

“Have sex each precious day as if it were your last;

Screw each special girl, and hope you will never see them again.”

Speaking of toilets: Hellrung men—their wives nicknamed them “the Pissing Wise Men,” homage to an infamous Christmas decoration in Staunton—enjoyed the bonding ritual of peeing together in the woods. Hellrung women flocked to restrooms in groups. Ginny remembered sitting in a stall when she was two, her proud mother holding the stall door open and showing the relatives that her daughter was already potty trained.

Wilson and Miller bodily functions were alluded to in medical emergencies only. Elders of those clans kept alive the Germanic ritual of using two washcloths per family member, one cloth “für duh body,” the second “für duh private parts.”

Carlene Griffis, the second-place winner of the competition, smiled sweetly and waved to the crowd, the men cheering lustily for her. Carlene was well endowed and her endowment seemed ready to pop out of her low-cut costume. She kissed Ginny on the cheek and whispered, “You won, Virginia, or should I say, ‘Virgin’, because your father is high school principal, your grandpa put up the money for the carnival, and because I hit some rough ice and fell on my Hamel Camel—you bitch.”

“Why, Carlene,” Ginny exclaimed, “you home schooled, Jesus freak, bleached blond boy toy.”

“At least I have an ass,” Carlene said, “and don’t you bad-mouth my lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

High school kids stepped onto the ice and gave Ginny high- and low-fives as she skated a victory lap. Little girls chased after the Ice Queen, slipping and sliding, falling to the ice then gamely rising and charging forward once again.

Wild Bill Whelan, dressed only in a ragged checked sport coat over a sweatshirt and wearing a cowboy hat, stepped out onto the ice. He was helped by his ten-year-old daughter Mikey—he was legally blind—and clumsily slid on his shoe soles, turning backwards at the end of each slide then scurrying to pick up speed and start the next short run, tiny Mikey gamely following behind him. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his lower lip.

“Hey, Wild Bill,” Ginny called, “hey, Michaelene talking machine!”

“Awesome, man,” Wild Bill said as Ginny glided by.

“Thanks,” Ginny called as she circled him. “Remember, Mikey, I’m taking you ta St. Louis for the after-Christmas sale at Famous Barr. I love you guys!”

“No dresses!” Mikey said.

“How does Ginny look,” Ginny heard Wild Bill say.

“Like a Christmas angel,” Mikey told him.

“I bet, man.”

Wild Bill was MacoupinCounty’s ‘character’. He had an IQ of 148 and he could fix anything mechanical. He returned home from Vietnam in the 70s but never talked about the war. He left for Asia an outgoing guy who was months short of completing a PhD in engineering, a victim of a low lottery number, and he returned partially blind from a hand grenade blast, a muttering shadow of himself, unable to hold a job. After his wife died of thyroid cancer, Bill took to hitchhiking around the county, always dressed in his sport coat no matter what the weather, and the cafes and bakeries in the area gave him leftovers. Church ladies collected girls’ clothes for Mikey.

In the the warming hut, Ginny cold-creamed and cleaned her face then changed into jeans and a flannel shirt and thermal boots, tucking her gold medal inside the shirt. She put on her waist-length down coat and mittens and stuffed her limp hair into a red Santa hat. She looked in the mirror, the Ice Queen become plain Ginny, the girl with bad posture, no bosom, and the worst hair in high school. Now that she had graduated, she would have the worst hair at junior college—so she assumed.

She had recently decided to accept herself. You, her father told her, are beautiful on the inside, where it counts. Where what counts, she wondered. She tried imagining having breasts like Carlene’s, what walking and balancing big breasts felt like. She smelled corn dogs and hot chocolate. She stuffed her costume and skates in a shopping bag and walked outside to the midway.

Boys awaited the Ice Queen. Terrence Sago, a young soldier home on leave from Iraq, asked for her autograph, offering her hot cider and cotton candy. Terrence tried to kiss her, but she turned at the last second and felt open lips on her cheek. He said he was going back to Iraq; he might be killed, how about it? All this hot male energy warmed her; it was wondrous to behold.

The sun disappeared behind the bare trees, its last feeble rays splayed off frozen hardwood tree trunks and branches through the filter of spruce and fir trees, oddly green in the brown landscape. A pair of bluebirds perched on a wooden fence and caught the last light of the day. Cars whined to life, their frozen drivers warming the vehicles for their families.

Ginny climbed into the family Sentra and ground the starter then turned on the windshield wipers to scrape away the frost rime. She shoved her mittened hands into her jacket pockets and shivered.

There was a foreign object in the left pocket. She pulled a mitten off and fished it out. It was a folded note. “Pretty Ice Queen” was printed on the outside fold in pencil, in the midst of a beautifully drawn snowflake. She unfolded the note and read:

“Pretty Ice Queen, I love you. Meet me by the Pissing Wise Men. Seven tonight.”

The Pissing Wise Men was a Christmas shrine in Staunton’s town square. Years ago, an anonymous donor purchased a presentational Christmas crèche fashioned of wrought iron. Volunteers decorated the iron with looping strings of tiny blinking lights. The one-dimensional, wrought iron wise men, standing upright behind Baby Jesus and a kneeling Mary and Joseph, were braced by curved iron supports attached at front waists and arcing to the ground. The flow of blinking lights along the supports made it seem as if the gentlemen were urinating at the feet of the Christ Child. Every Hellrung male had his picture taken standing beside the Pissing Wise Men.

“Yo, Ice Queen!” a deep male voice shouted through the window, giving Ginny a start, causing her to hit the car horn with force. It was Terrence, the army boy. He leaned forward, his lips almost touching the glass. “I will be seein you,” he mouthed. He sauntered off behind the car.

Ginny began to sweat; she felt her forehead pimple factory pumping oil. The car was still cold; whether it was her heavy coat, or the heat of passion, she could not say. She could say, with Aristotelian certitude—she had read the Poetics in English this year—that she was going to take an action: She was going to drive to Staunton, for a meeting by the Pissing Wise Men.

Wondering where her parents were, she left the Sentra’s engine running and got out of the car. She heard voices coming from the far end of the parking lot. A group of men huddled amidst the fir trees, backs turned, steam rising in front of them. Hellrung men were peeing in the gloaming. Ginny sneaked through the trees, working her way toward her relatives.

“Mein gott, you see that Carlene Griffis?” Her great-uncle, Davis Hellrung, was flipping his male member, waiting for action. “Gott ist gut, oh yah.”

“‘Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, which feed among the lilies,’” cousin Julie Jr. quoted. “Song of Solomon, Chapter Four, Verse five.”

“My Ginny has admirers,” George said, unzipping his chinos. “I didn’t realize skating was so sexy, fellows.”

“Count your blessings, Georgie-boy,” Great-Uncle Davis said. “Plain girls make duh best vifes. I vas wit Carlene, I vould keep her unter lock und key.”

“You was with Carlene,” Julie Jr. said, “the sheriff’d put you under lock and key.”

“Come on, come on, Old Faithful,” Davis said to his penis. “Damn prostrate. Vat about dat new sheriff, Brawer, first non-Miller sheriff in a hunnert-fifty years.”

“He better not enforce the ‘no public urination’ law,” someone said.

“He’d have to identify our dicks in court,” Julie Jr. opined.

The men guffawed. Ginny walked into their midst. They didn’t recognize her at first; she was dressed like one of the boys.

“You are missin the pissin,” George said to the newcomer.

Ginny unzipped her jeans, pulled them and her underwear down and squatted above the snow.

“Vat you doin?” Great-Uncle Davis exclaimed. “Takin a dump iss not permitted.”

“Hey, guys.” Ginny pulled off her wool cap and shook her hair loose, as frantic men stuffed organs into their pants.

“Female!” Randy Hellrung shouted.

“Ginny?” her horrified father said. “What the heck.”

“Just bein a Hellrung, Daddy,” Ginny said, “Don’t mind me, guys, plain-lookin girls aren’t sensitive.”

All the Hellrungs, except her father, ran for their cars, some of them slipping and falling onto the snow in their haste to get away, Great-Uncle Davis protesting that he hadn’t yet peed and he might explode.

“Gin-Gin,” George said, his back turned toward her, “pull up your pants.”

“I am peein, Daddy. Tell me again how I’m beautiful on the inside. Aunt Suz says that to call men pigs is an insult to clean, intelligent pigs.”

“I’m sorry,” George said.

“Now I know how you really feel about me.”

Ginny pulled up her underpants and pants and bolted for the car, her father trailing after her, trying to talk his way out of the situation. Great-Uncle Davis, the female intruder now gone, returned to the woods, thanking Gott and all the saints, and peed freely.

Delilah was waiting for George and Ginny in the car. George told his daughter she could drive, and he climbed into the back seat. He leaned forward, patted her on the shoulder and said, “Home, James.”

“Yes, I look like a boy,” Ginny said. “Call me James from now on.”

“Ginny, I said I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Delilah said.

“Sorry for bein born,” Ginny replied, “sorry I’m not stupid and boobed up like Carlene, sorry for every fuckin thing. And don’t anybody say, Language.”

George told his wife about the pissing male Hellrungs and Ginny’s protest piss; Delilah countered with vivid descriptions of what she would do to the genitals of her daughter’s offenders, and why hadn’t George defended Ginny’s honor?

Ginny was in the driver’s seat, literally and figuratively. She needed the car to drive to Staunton, and her parents, no doubt feeling guilty, more or less had to relent, dangerous roads or no: so she reasoned.

“I am goin ta Carol Webb’s house,” Ginny said. “I will be home by eleven, the latest. I’ll drop you guys off.”

“I don’t know, Ginny,” George said. “There are all those drunks out tonight.”

“But you and I can be alone for awhile,” Delilah said, looking over her shoulder at her husband. Ginny groaned. Her parents were always doing it.

“Well,” George said, “I guess you can take the car and go alone. The roads are plowed at least and . . .”

Please don’t say it, Ginny prayed silently.

Her parents chimed in unison, “We trust you.”

That settles it, Ginny thought—for she had been lying to her parents about all sorts of things since last September—I am going to hell.

 

At 6:55 that night, the town of Staunton—its light poles decked out in plastic green wreathes and Styrofoam bells, the storefront windows all country festive with cardboard candy canes and Santas and sprayed fake snow—looked deserted. There was silence, save for frozen branches of trees rattling like bones in the north breeze.

Most people were toasty inside their decorated houses, contentedly watching the Rose Bowl. A Happy New Year banner hung across Route 4. Fernhaber’s Florist had a “Gone fishin’” sign on its door. Only the two Casey’s gas stations and a Quickie Mart were open. The roofs of the houses and the yards and trees were still ablaze with Christmas lights in the shapes of Santa Clauses in sleighs and elves and plastic crèches.

The new sheriff, Chris Brawer, his shaved head reflecting the light, drove up in a patrol car. He stopped at the curb and spoke into a microphone then waited for a reply. A shivering couple and their bundled-up baby were admiring the town square. The husband posed with the baby for a picture with the Pissing Wise Men.

Ginny stood under the awning of Fernhaber’s, across Route 4 from the square, and waited. She hummed Christmas carols.

The couple with the baby departed the square at 6:59, leaving the Pissing Wise Men to do their business in peace. Sheriff Brawer joined the few people passing the time inside the convenience store.

Church bells chimed seven times. Ginny crossed the street and approached the display. She used to beg to come to this park every Yuletide when she was little. “Pissing Wise Men, Pissing Wise Men,” she would cry, and her parents couldn’t help but laugh.

A muffled series of noises came from the south, across the square: Run-run-run-run-run of feet, then, slide; step, step, step; run-run-run-run-run, long slide. She saw Wild Bill Whelan and Mikey emerging from behind the town hall. They walked slowly on the clear spots of the sidewalk, glided on the glaze of the ice-covered parts, with Mikey murmuring instructions.

“Hey, guys,” Ginny said.

“The Pissin Wise Men,” Mikey said, pointing.

“Yes. They’re so funny. Why don’t you go say hello ta them, Mikey?”

Mikey skipped over to the nativity scene and squatted to look at the Baby Jesus. She hummed Away in a Manger. Wild Bill took jumping steps, as if he were playing hopscotch.

“I got your note,” Ginny said, smiling.

“What note, man?”

“You slipped it into my coat pocket at the Winter Carnival.”

Wild Bill shrugged. “Not me, man.”

Ginny quickly looked in all directions to see if Terrence Sago, the soldier on leave from Iraq, might be lurking in the shadows, waiting for Wild Bill and his daughter to walk away so he could approach her.

No one.

“What’d did the note say, man?”

“Ta meet by the Pissing Wise Men at seven,” Ginny said. “The writer said . . .”

“Said what?”

“He loves me. There is a lovely snowflake drawing with the note.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Drawin of a snowflake, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Michaelene talking machine,” Wild Bill called.

“Yes, Daddy?” Mikey was still focused on Baby Jesus.

“Come here please, darlin.”

Mikey stood and slowly came to them, biting her frozen lower lip and clapping her gloved hands together. A carload of teenagers drove slowly through downtown. “Wild Bill rocks,” one of them called out the window. “Wild Bill’s nuts!”

“Ignoramuses!” Mikey gave the teenagers the finger.

“Mikey,” Wild Bill said, “Ginny come here tonight ’cause somebody wrote her a note, said meet them here. Note has a snowflake on it. We got a snowstorm taped all over the refrigerator. Truth, girlfriend.”

“I wrote it, Ginny,” Mikey said. “I put it in your pocket. Are you mad?”

“No, I’m not,” Ginny said. “But why?”

“I heard the Ice Queen say she loved us today,” Mikey said. “She waved to us. And said ‘I love you’ back.”

“Mikey, man,” Wild Bill said, “when a celebrity says ‘I love you’ to the audience, that’s pretend, hon.”

“I wasn’t pretending,” Ginny said.

“When you two broke up, you broke me too,” Mikey said.

“Ginny and me didn’t break up, darlin,” Wild Bill said. “We separated for awhile, ta think about things.”

“I’m not thinkin about anything,” Ginny said. “You said you were too old for me, you needed ta figure things out.”

“You agreed.”

“Bill, people were going ta start noticin me sneakin in and out of your house. Mom and Dad were going to figure out I wasn’t stayin over with girlfriends like I said I was. Even though I sleep on the couch and we aren’t—you-know-what yet.”

“Havin sex?” Mikey said.

“Jesus, Mikey.” Wild Bill took her by the shoulders. “Just because you know things don’t mean you have to say ’em out loud. Go play with Baby Jesus.”

Mikey walked to the crèche and began singing again.

“I agreed to let you figure things out,” Ginny said. “I have things figured out. I love you and Mikey, and I want to be Mikey’s mother, and go to school and work in day care. When I said ‘I love you’ to you and Mikey this afternoon, that wasn’t show business, like the other ‘I love you’s.’”

“How was I to know that, man,” Wild Bill said. “All them young guys askin fer yer autograph.”

“You were wrong, Bill.”

“Well. What we got here is quantum indeterminacy,” Wild Bill said.

“Quantum what?”

“Physics, man. You and me are in a box, see, like Schrodinger’s cat”—

“What?”

“There is this box, man, humor me, and we—our love—is in it so no one can see but us.”

“Your house is the box?”

“Well, sort of. If we don’t open the box, no one ever sees us. We can love in secret, go our separate ways, or open the box and let ’er rip.”

“That’s it exactly,” Ginny said.

She stared at the Christmas lights along the street and visualized her parents watching a video of It’s a Wonderful Life on the TV in the living room; the wood burning stove overheating the place; the Christmas stockings hung from the mantle; the Douglas fir drowning in tinsel, the giant plastic Star of Bethlehem mounted on a pole above the barn roof; the ornaments, many commemorating odd events, like the time her mom broke her pubic bone giving birth to her, and her dad bought a little toy model of a backbone and hips, and attached a laminated card which read, “The things we do for our children!” and hung it by a bit of green ribbon on their first Christmas tree, and the ornament continued to come out for display every season; the sheep and cows and horses huddled in their stalls; the snow-covered pasture spiky with corn stubble; her bedroom, its walls and ceiling covered with tiny luminous replicas of stars, and a pink, spangled ice skating outfit, retired from active competition as of this afternoon, lying smoothed-out across her blue down quilt.

She recalled seeing Bill and Mikey at the Labor Day picnic in Wilsonville and hugging Mikey for the first time and, at the tender age of eighteen, knowing she wanted to adopt the little girl. She read The Pickwick Papers aloud to Wild Bill, him saying what a great guy that Sam Weller was, and her realizing that Bill and the fictional, good-hearted Sam were alike, and the next Saturday, knowing Mikey was staying in St. Louis with her grandparents, she drove to Bill’s house and asked him to drive to Macoupin Creek with her, and she had kissed him.

She thought of the Mid-County High School Homecoming football game in October, when Barry Chapman had asked her to the Harvest Dance, and she accepted so her parents wouldn’t worry about her being normal. But Barry was revealed to be a pot smoker, and George had asked his daughter to reconsider, and she agreed. Though, had he known Barry was a smoke screen and Ginny was actually seeing a fifty-five-year-old man who also smoked pot, her father might have considered Barry the lesser of two evils. On Homecoming night she lay in bed all evening so her mother would think she was mourning, normal teenage stuff, when in fact it was a bluff.

A belching, rusted blue station wagon roared down Route 4, braked at the stop sign, then wheeled around the corner and pulled up to the curb.

“Great,” Ginny said. “Here comes Uncle Fred’s beater, and there is Delilah in the front seat.”

Across the street, Sheriff Brawer came out of the gas station and watched. The car pulled to the curb, and Delilah rolled down her window.

“Good to see you, Ginny,” Uncle Fred said.

“Thanks for the tea roses today, Freddie.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re my witness, Unc,” Ginny said, “in case Momma’s goin ta kill me.”

“You don’t need ta wait, Freddie,” Delilah said, getting out of the car. “I will ride back with Virginia. Thanks, hon.”

“Don’t kill Ginny,” Fred said to his sister.

“I won’t.”

“Yer carburetor is screwed up, man,” Wild Bill said to Fred. “Bring ’er my place in Benld and I will fix ’er. No charge.”

“I’ll do that,” Fred said. “Thanks, Billy.”

Fred drove off. Delilah put on a stern face, which was hard for her. “Good evenin, Mr. Whelan,” she said.

“Hey, Mrs. H.,” Wild Bill said back.

“Hello, Michaelene, darlin. I hope you two will excuse us, I need to talk with my daughter.”

Delilah walked Ginny to the water hydrant. She waved across at Sheriff Brawer, who got in his patrol car and drove off.

“I called the Webbs’,” Delilah said, “and Carol was sleepin in the barn, keepin watch over a sick horse, and Ginny Hellrung, well, where was she?”

“Sorry, Momma.”

“So then yer dad borrowed the neighbors’ car and drove around ta see if yer frozen, bloodied body was layin in a ditch somewhere, probably we should alert Kravanya Funeral Home ta receive your corpse, and I called the sheriff, and he saw you and called me back, and I called Fred, and he had to leave his gay guy party and drive all the way out ta our place and pick me up and bring me all the way here, and we nearly slid inta three cars on Route 4, and I am sick from exhaust fumes and my brother’s six cigarettes he smoked from our place ta here, and what you got to say for yerself?” Delilah leaned forward, hands on knees and took some deep breaths.

Wild Bill and Mikey began walking hand-in-hand past the Pissing Wise Men and heading toward Route 4. Ginny cleared her throat, making way for a new voice—new to her mother—decisive, matter-of-fact, devoid of the vestiges of girlhood.

“Stop!”

“Stop what?” Delilah said.

“Not you, Mom. Wild Bill, how will we ‘let ’er rip’ if you walk back into the box?”

“He lives in a box?” Delilah said.

“Stop!” Ginny called.

Wild Bill and Mikey stopped.

Delilah must have read something into the second “stop”; a look came over her face, perhaps recognition, that everything was different, no warning, no grace period, and her daughter’s eyes were . . .

“Dream eyes, my lord God, you got dream eyes,” Delilah said. “Where is he—the object of the dream eyes?” She looked Wild Bill—really looked at him. He waved to her. Mikey curtsied. “Oh. My. God.”

“He isn’t a bit wild,” Mikey said. “That’s the ignorant county’s perception. I am going to be Mikey’s mother. And before you say ‘oh my god’ again, Mamma, remember you got pregnant with me when you were eighteen, and good news, I am not pregnant, we haven’t even done it yet, Bill’s call not mine, and we’ve been tagether since September. I love Bill, and I am sorry for sneakin around without tellin you. Momma, you can accept it, or you can drive home in the car, and I will hitchhike to Benld with my new family. Say somethin.”

“Y’all’ll live in a cardboard box?”

“He has a house. A teesny house.”

The outside speakers at the gas station played It Came Upon A Midnight Clear. Wild Bill took Mikey by the arms and waltzed with her.

“We were worried you didn’t like boys,” Delilah said.

“I don’t. Boys are shallow. Remember last summer,” Ginny said, “when I told you I felt I was becoming a woman, and I’d let you know when I knew it for sure. Well, I know it. I am going to raise Mikey. Bill isn’t crazy. He is a genius who needs carin for, and I am the—the woman ta do it.”

A half-tailed, splotch-furred, gray feral cat came running across the square, stopping to vigorously clean itself by the park benches.

“God, please-please-please do not let that cat come by me,” Delilah said. “We got Glory the housecat and all the barn cats.”

The feral cat made a beeline for Delilah and rubbed up against her legs.

“Mom?”

“Does he have indoor plumbin, Gin-Gin?”

“Outhouse, like we used to have. He pees off his back steps,” Ginny said, “just like a Hellrung.”

The cat lay on its back, legs splayed open, inviting Delilah to pet its tummy.

“Be sure and tell your father the peein part first,” Delilah said. “Let’s drive them home before we all freeze ta death.”

Ginny, Delilah and the cat walked to the corner and joined Wild Bill and Mikey.

“Hey, Grandma,” Mikey said to Delilah.

“I am too young ta be a grandma,” Delilah said. “Let’s get in the Sentra. Not you.” This was said to the cat. “Wild—Mr. Whelan, you got hot chocolate at yer place?”

“Yep, Ovaltine,” Wild Bill said. “I will fire up the hot plate.”

“Would you accept a indoor john and a stove as wedding presents?”

“If it makes you happy, man.”

A Lincoln Town Car with Iowa license plates pulled up. The driver, an elderly gentleman, spotted them and braked abruptly, causing a mound of Christmas presents to topple in the back seat. An angry old woman sat on the passenger side. The gentleman rolled down his window.

“Beg pardon,” the man said. “We just pulled off Interstate 55—”

“My husband is lost and he is pig-headed,” his wife said sharply.

Her husband looked at her like he’d love to throw her out of the car. “We were drivin south, lookin for the Carlinville exit,” he said. “Our son lives out that way.”

“Man, you gone way past the Carlinville exit,” Wild Bill said.

“I told you so,” the lady said.

“This is Staunton, man,” Wild Bill said. “Go back to the highway, drive north ’bout twenty miles.” He stuck his hand inside the window. “Bill Whelan. Merry Christmas. My daughter Mikey, my fiancé Ginny, my future mother-in-law Delilah. And her cat. What’s its name?”

“Schrodinger,” Ginny said.

“Oh my lord,” Delilah said.

Which is how George and Delilah Hellrung came to have a cat named Schrodinger Ohmylord, the kind of name that elite, international competition cats might have if they weren’t partially nude and their tails weren’t chewed off.

The old man shook Wild Bill’s hand and thanked him and wished him a Merry Christmas back. The couple said they would get out and stretch their legs a little, then drive back to Carlinville. They pulled on their coats, slowly climbed out and shivered, and gazed with interest upon the crèche.

Delilah and old and new family and Schrodinger Ohmylord piled into the Sentra and drove off.

“See the cute, twinkly Baby Jesus,” the old woman said. “It is an interpretive display I guess you would call it—not as nice as our living crèche at church, though.”

“You looked more like Cleopatra than the Virgin Mary back in the day,” her husband said.

“And you made a handsome Joseph, dearheart, in your bathrobe and turban, oh my goodness, forty years ago.”

“Good heavens,” her husband said, “I believe them wise men are takin a whiz.”

 

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