Ring Game by Pete Hautman Read Free Book Online Page A

cells!”
    That was Polly’s cue. Rupe’s knees were shaking so hard they could see it from the back of the hall. Polly jumped up and wrapped her arms around him. She helped him to his chair. As he sat down, she pulled the thread loose from his back pocket and let it fall to the stage. Polly turned to the enraptured audience.
    “Why is this man crying?” she asked quietly, layering a measure of anger over her voice. The faces in the audience underwent a communal cringe, as though they had been found guilty. Polly darted her eyes from one anchor point to another, as though accusing each individual Pilgrim, though in fact she was looking at no one in particular. “I’ll tell you why he’s crying,” she said. “He is crying because he knows that there is one person in this room who does not believe.” Long pause. “One person who does not wish to see the future.” She put a hand on Rupe’s shaking shoulder. “This man, this good and generous man is crying because he knows that despite everything he has done, one of you will die!” She shot out a finger, pointing at Bruce Williston. He gasped and squeezed his wife’s hand so hard she let out a yelp. Polly stepped to the lip of the stage, holding him with her accusatory finger, then releasing him, scanning the audience with her long pink nail, searching for betrayal like a dowser with a witching wand, finally letting her arm fall to her side and turning her back to the audience. She smiled at Rupe, who continued to produce a river of tears. It was amazing how that man could cry.
    Polly raised her hands above her head, then spun around, breasts thrust out, chin up, lips pouted, legs apart.
    She said, “Look at me.” She did a pirouette, all the way around, inviting them to see her as a woman. “How old am I?” she asked. “Come on, don’t be shy. Talk to me. How old am I?”
    Greta Hoffman, who knew the routine, raised her hand.
    “Twenty-five,” she said.
    “Why, thank you,” said Polly, bestowing the full luminosity of her smile on the elderly woman. “Any other guesses?”
    One of the newcomers, the grad student-type, called out, “Thirty-six.”
    With tremendous effort, Polly forced her smile to widen. “Oh dear,” she said. “Okay, one more.” She pointed at Bruce Williston. “What do you think?”
    Williston licked his lips. “Twenty-six?” he asked. Like most of the Pilgrims in the room, the Willistons had seen this act before. They knew what to say.
    Polly laughed. “Much better. Thank you.”
    Greta, who loved to play this game, asked, “How old are you?”
    Polly said, “I am sixty-one years old.”
    The Pilgrims began to clap. Polly beamed, drinking in the applause. She forgot about Hyatt Hilton. She forgot about the thread on Rupe’s ass. She even forgot, for the moment, her true age.

6
Let other people have their problems.
    —Crow’s rules
    “W HAT’S WRONG WITH AXEL ?” Crow asked.
    “Ax? Nothing wrong with him a two-by-four upside the head wouldn’t cure.”
    “He’s hardly said a word to me all afternoon. Keeps giving me that evil eye.”
    Joe Crow and Sam O’Gara were sitting on Sam’s small porch, looking down the hill through the trees toward the dock, where Axel Speeter was cleaning the three walleyes he’d landed that afternoon. Sam’s hounds, Chester and Festus, were sleeping at the foot of the steps, emitting occasional snorts and grumbles, occasionally joined by a hollow, bonking sound from a nearby birch tree from which Sam had suspended about twenty steel hubcaps by wires. Every time the breeze picked up, the hubcaps clanked against one another. Sam called them his wind chimes.
    “Yeah, well he’s got a bone up his butt, and he thinks you put ’er there, son.” Sam fished a Pall Mall from the pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. The sun was sinking into the treetops, but it was still warm, in the eighties. The heat never seemed to bother Sam. He wore flannel all summer long.
    “Me? What did I do? I