Walking with Angels

Walking with Angels

by Bob Lane

  Melvin Wayne Plough no longer is my name.  When I attained my majority, I directed a court to change it to Mason Scott.  That's the name under which I later taught English literature, and the name I used to author all my published novels.  It’s the name I carried when I saved Zoover's life.  Twice..
  Zoover's name, until this moment, has never been published, anywhere.  Zoover isn't his birth name.  No matter.
  We met while seated on stools at opposite ends of a lunch counter in the otherwise empty cafe of the YMCA Hotel in Minot, North Dakota.  Zoover was watching the cook, Bill, prepping ground beef for the evening's trade.  Bill patted the beef into balls.  He plunked them, thwack! between sheets of waxed paper.  He smashed them flat with the bottom of a No. 10 can of diced tomatoes.  Plunk!  Plunk!  Plunk!  
  Zoover seemed fascinated by the ritual. He looked over at me.  "I don't know if that sight is making me hungry," he declared.  "Or if it's putting me off my feed."  Nevertheless, a few minutes later we both were devouring 'burgers and crisp french fries.
  Zoover and I were residents of the YMCA Hotel. The hotel catered to single men in need of short-term, low-cost housing in a socially safe setting.  Most moved on after a few months.  Unlike some of its counterparts in the larger cities, the hotel was the enterprise of a small-town Christian organization.  Its board of directors reflected the norms of the upper Midwest, chronicled so well by Sinclair Lewis in his novel, "Main Street."  (In fact, it was only recently that Lewis' perceptive books were permitted anywhere in this town.  I had found a worn copy on a little-noticed bookshelf in the hotel's sitting room.)  
  I suggested Zoover join me for a drink at the American Legion Hall, a social organization for ex-servicemen.  It served its members low-priced meals and drinks.   A Latin band currently was headlined there.  The Legion club was an oasis in the heart of Lawrence Welksville.  And being non-profit, it was the only place besides the nearby Air Force missile base where you could get a drink on Sundays.  It had become a second home for me.
  Zoover and I were becoming at ease with each other.  I had no hesitancy telling him over beers that I had come here not long ago to get over a lustful but loveless marriage of brief term.  My ex-wife had kept on with her studies at the University of Wisconsin.  I dropped out of my classes there to accept the offer of an uncle to come to work at his stock-sales firm in Minot.  It was easy work for me, mostly typing.  It put cash in my pocket at the weekend and kept me off the streets. 
  In the weeks to come, Zoover talked about his failed love of a woman in Casper, Wyoming  There he had labored at his first real job as a newspaper reporter.  But there he also learned painfully that his Boy Scout values of being brave, clean and reverent had no values in heart of the western oil fields.  He was overcome and overwhelmed by the town’s rugged if colorful culture.  Toward the end, Zoover told me, he had tried to feel satisfaction at the sight of a Natrona County sheriff's deputy leading his ex-love from a courtoom to a prison term for kiting checks.  But instead he was left with no feeling at all, for her, or his job, or the unforgiving if state of Wyoming.  He said he was moving through life one step at a time.  Never was he certain he would be able to, take another step, or see another day.  Each sunrise was a triumph of will, with little hope of .seeing another.
  When the chill North Dakota autumn weather permitted, Zoover had taken to walking after work from the bottomland of downtown Minot up its south hill to the community cemetery.  There he walked between the graves, reading headstones, watching the sun slipping down across the western horizon.  He'd walk home in the dark, silent, alone.
One time, he told me, he sat atop of grave marker. Not far away, a tiny casket, obviously that of a child, was being lowered into a small, brown hole in the North Dakota loam. Long after the young couple  had left the cemetery, Zoover sat rooted to his granite perch. The sun set.  Still Zoover stayed.  Stars appeared, one by one until the vast prairie night was filled with their light.  It seemed hours since Zoover had smoked his last cigarette, he told me.  A cold wind slipped through the valley and up the hill. 
  Zoover noticed one star "when it winked out."  Then another, and another, until after awhile he saw only one star left in the sky.  "And I knew, I absolutely knew," Zoover told me, "that when that lone star left the sky, there would be no god, no life beyond this one here in the cold, no reason to endure."  Zoover willed the star to stay.  It did.  He asked another to come back, and it did, then another and another until the night sky blazed once more.  And Zoover trudged back to his hotel room.
  Zoover began frequenting Minot's blue-collar taverns.  He remembered being in a bar near the railroad tracks when the crew of a Great Northern freight train came in.  "They shut down the line because of the severe snowstorm," one man explained.  "Too dangerous for a train to be out on the prairie!"  The men drank a quick beer, then went to a back room and returned with shotguns.  They had a work car in a shed beside the tracks, they said, and were going duck hunting in the ditches beside the rails.  A North Dakota winter was too rough for trains, but not for duck hunters!
Another bar, on the edge of town, had a mirrored wall behind the bar almost covered with paintings of Yule scenes, created with colored soaps.  Zoover learned that itinerant artists still traveled a circuit, trading seasonal art for meals, drinks and a warm place to sleep.
  It was in one of those bars that Zoover learned that this was Welk country.  Not television’s Lawrence Welk and his Bubble Machine--he  was referred to here as "the kid."  But Lawrence Welk's father had played through the taverns and night clubs all over this region as a young bandsman  He was the one North Dakotan barflies remembered.
There was one friendly face on the Daily News staff.  He was the senior reporter, an Air Corps veteran of World War II.  His B-17 had been shot down during the ill-fated first Scheinfert raid.  He parachuted to safety while still over Germany, and sat out the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.  
  The ordeal wasn't unbearable, the veteran explained to Zoover.  The stalag guards were mostly middle-aged and elderly soldiers.  When they had plenty of food, "we all ate well.  When they went hungry, so did we."  The ex-flyer said he was impressed by the high quality of German-manufactured equipment, from uniforms to mess gear to weapons.  "They had expected it to last," he figured.  It mostly did, until V.E. Day
Zoover said he got unruly one night in an uptown tavern.  The bartender tossed him out.  Zoover returned the next afternoon after work.  He apologized to the bartender.  Zoover said he wouldn't be back to bother the customers.  The bartender shook his hand and gave him a glass of beer.  After that, Zoover limited himself to two glasses of beer on any one day.
  He broke his rule one night when the newspaper's managing editor directed him to attend a staff party at someone's home--Zoover didn't remember what the celebration was for.  He drank until he blacked out, Zoover said.  He remembers fumbling for his key at the front door of the Y afterward, while fighting off two would-be muggers.  Next Monday morning at work, the M.E. wouldn't speak to him.  Zoover has no idea what he did that pissed so many people off.  But Zoover wasn't invited to any more social events, by any of the staff.
  Zoover made a few aquaintances outside of taverns.  One afternoon, in his despair, he approached a Methodist church, hoping to find solace in the environs he had known as a child in western New York State.  The door was locked.  He tried again at a Baptist church, same result.  Even at the imposing,gothic Catholic cathedral downtown, Zoover was met by barred doors.  Where was this Christian charity and welcoming, he wondered.  
  Zoover had better luck that Sunday.  He went back to the Methodist church, sat in the front row and sang loudly, if poorly.  He was invited to Sunday dinner by a young couple.  He returned to the church, and their home, in the weeks afterward.  The young man was active in the Minot chamber of commerce.  He asked Zoover if he could illustrate a travel guide.  Zoover did, and was paid a few bucks, maybe $25.
  Zoover suspected his days at the Daily News were numbered one morning after he had finished making up the afternoon sports pages.  The editor-in-chief, passing his desk on his way out of the composing room, asked him casually, "Who are you betting on in the World Series?"  "Who's playing?" Zoover replied.  "Ha-ha," the editor said.  Then he stopped.  Looked at Zoover.  And spun on his heel and raced back to the composing room.  A moment later, he loudly called Zoover back to look at the metal type that Zoover had just prepared for the day’s sports page.  "Why the hell did you leave out the opening of the World Series?!"  Zoover told the editor he thought baseball was played in the spring, and fall was the time for football.  Zoover was a mustang, a self-taught journalist who'd risen through the ranks of his profession on his own merits.   
  "I guess they must teach you about baseball in college," he said. 
  He introduced himself to a woman who operated a small photo studio.  "She was the ugliest woman I'd ever seen," Zoover told me.  But they got along.  She began teaching him to hand-color black-and-white photographs.  But color photography was coming in, and hand-coloring was a doomed craft.  After a few weeks, he dropped the lessons.
  One night Zoover dined in a family-run restaurant on the east side of Minot.   When Zoover went to pay his check, the waitress told him it was taken care of.  Whenever Horseshit Olsen walked in, she said, it was understood that he was picking up all the tabs.  With a large part of Zoover's paycheck going back to cover a few economic mistakes back in Casper, he found it expedient to take at least one supper at week at the place.  
  Horseshit joined him one evening at his table to introduce himself.  Zoover commented upon his generosity.  First, Horseshit explained about his name.  Horseshit's initials were H.S., the man told Zoover.  When he joined the Army in 1938--"to eat, and have a dry bunk at night"--his buddies gave him the nickname that followed him into and out of World War II.  
 Horseshit was due to get out of the Army in 1941.  But late that year the Department of the Army put all discharges put on hold.  Within months, the U.S. was at war.  All enlistments were for "the duration of the war, and six months." 
Pvt. Olson served in the South Pacific.  He became a scout, assigned to Marine Corps units preparing for island invasions   He often was among the first ashore, slipping into the jungles from rubber rafts, to learn what surprises the occupying Japanese troops might have awaiting the invasions.  Horseshit complained to his Army commanding officer that he wasn't even a Marine.  "They ask for you, he was told.  And you're the best.  You survive."  
  Horseshit said that after a time amid the islands, he came to believe that anyone who hoped to live through the war would be among its next casualties.  Along with a few other scouts, he felt that he had to be broke when he climbed into the rafts to slip ashore.  So on the troopships en route to the landings, Horseshit played poker.  Because he didn't fear losing--in fact, he welcomed it-- he took risks that unfortunately, in his mind, won him big pots.  When he could, Horseshit sent the money home to his mother.  Any cash he had on him, he'd toss over this side before he debarked.  “Skipping silver dollars across the waves,” Horseshit remembered.
   Horseshit survived the war.  He came back to Minot to learn he was a wealthy man.  The money his mother had saved for him made him nervous.  Believing he had to get rid of the savings, he spent the money on war-surplus construction equipment--just in time to jump into the post-war housing boom.  Horseshit bid low on jobs, hoping to go broke, and found he had more work than he could accommodate.  He hired war veterans to run his equipment, paying them top dollar.  They were willing to work hard and long to earn it, and the jobs and the money kept coming.  Horseshit began buying land and turning it into housing and industrial yards.  And the money rolled in, faster than he could spend it.
  The year Zoover came to Minot, all of North Dakota underwent a legendary winter.  On that Thanksgiving evening, as Zoover walked home from a movie, it began to snow.  Next morning, he walked to work under a clear, starlit sky but in an inch of snow.  The temperature was 10 degrees below zero.  Until the following March, Zoover said, that was the warmest it ever got.  And it never snowed again until spring.  In January, he could still see the footprints he had made on his way home Thanksgiving evening.  "It was like living at the bottom of a giant ice cube," Zoover told me.
  Zoover worked at the wire desk in the city room.  That winter one of his tasks was to periodically put on his coat and gloves, go outside to the newspaper’s parking lot and turn on the engine of every car there--doors had been left unlocked and keys left in the ignition so that he could.  When all were running, Zoover went to the first car and turned off the engine, and all the rest.  In cold that sometimes reached 40 below, this kept the engine oil warm and thin enough so that the cars could be started at the end of the day.  Zoover didn't have a car of his own, so he enjoyed the chance to play with these. 
  Like many railroad junction towns, Minot had besides a daily newspaper, a radio station.  They had separate ownership but appeared to compliment each other.  The radio station couldn't afford a link to national news services.  Instead, at 5 o'clock each evening, the disk jockey would say, "Now let's see what's in the pages of the Minot Daily News."  And he'd rattle the pages of that afternoon's edition, and begin to recite the headlines  If anything seemed to merit it, he'd read the entire article
  The station came on the air early--farmers were in their barns by 5 a.m., and liked to listen to the livestock-market reports, and any other broadcast chat to break the prairie loneliness.  The station went off the air at night at five minutes after 11, following the recorded playing of the Star Spangled Banner. 
  One night Zoover had not switched his radio off right away.  At 11:15, the program came right back on.  A deep-voiced announcer welcomed his audience to another late-night broadcast.  A variety of popular and classical music was just ahead, he said, "but first, let's look at the weather."  And the broadcast continued through the dark night.  .Zoover told me about the unexpected radio show. 
   We'd kept the radio on when were up late talking, to listen to the mix of music and the soothing voice of the announcer.  "He sounds familiar," Zoover said.  "I think I've heard him before."  It was only a few days later I was awake one early morning, hammering away at my Royal portable and next season's best-seller novel (I'd wish!) when I heard our announcer thank his audience for listening.  He signed off with the playing of Kate Smith's rendition of  "God Bless America."  It was 4:45 a.m. After fifteen minutes of silence, the regularly scheduled radio program came back on the air.
  We were at breakfast the next Saturday morning when one of the residents came into the cafeteria.  I knew who it was before I looked up--there was an odor about him that was beyond the description of body odor.  It was borne by a young man bedecked with a plaid Paul Bunyon cap, its earflaps tied up atop the crown.  He was dressed in coveralls, several suits of coveralls.  Earlier, Bill had explained to me that the man,  David, who lived upstairs, worked at the railroad freight yards, in an unheated warehouse.  His work uniform was coveralls.  As the weather chilled, he added another set of coveralls, then another.  By this time of year, amid these sub-zero temperatures, the man looked as plump as the Pillsbury Doughboy.  By springtime, Bill said, as the weather warms, David will begin shedding his outer layers.  We didn’t wait until then.  Zoover and I pushed our plates away.  We carried our coffees to the far end of the counter. 
  Bill greeted the warehouseman.  He remarked about the weather.  David said it seemed to be warming up, nearing 10 degrees below.  They exchanged more small-talk.  Zoover's head snapped toward the sound.  "It's him!" Zoover whispered.  "It's him!"  "Who?" I replied. "It's him!  The mystery announcer!  Listen to that voice!"  Sure enough, as he gave Bill his breakfast order, I heard the deep, smooth tones of our nighttime disk jockey.
  When David left the cafe, Zoover followed him up the stairs to the third floor.  As he was unlocking his door, Zoover confronted him.  "Haven't I been listening to you all night?"  he asked the startled man.  "Are—are you from the g-government?" David stuttered.  "I can explain . . . " 
  “Hey, relax!  We are fans," Zoover told him.  "What's this about the government?"  David opened the door and motioned Zoover to come inside.   There atop a bureau sat the reels of a Roberts tape recorder.  Next to it was an electronic device, radio tubes jutting from a metal base.  Wires led from the bureau around a bed's headboard to the lone window, where Zoover could see they snaked upward toward the roof.
  "I thought you might be from the FCC" David said.  "The Federal Communications Bureau.  So far, nobody seems to have told them about me."  David slumped onto the bed.  He motioned me into a hardback chair.  "I work at the rail yards," he said.  "All night.  And at 11, Minot's only radio station goes off the air.  My portable radio isn't strong enough to pull in signals from Duluth or Fargo.  So I made my own radio station."  His wires led to a coat-hanger broadcast antenna up on the YMCA's roof.
  Each afternoon, before he goes to work, David said, he cuts a new tape of music, weather and news, all in the style of a regular radio disk jockey's program.  A timer turns on the recorder and his "two-tube oscillator" broadcaster, sharply at 11:15.  By then, he said, the Minot station's engineer has shut things down and gone home.  And David has a radio program to keep him company through his long shift at the warehouse.
  We talked more with David the next weekend.  Zoover invited him to join us at the Legion Club, inquiring without tact if he had any other clothes, and if he ever got out of his coveralls.  "I'm just off work now," he said.  "I do clean up for the weekend!"  We agreed to meet at the club for supper.  David did indeed clean up.  He wore sneakers, jeans and a flannel shirt.  He had a woolen jacket and a different ear-flaps cap.  At what had become our regular table near the bandstand, David’s rich voice entranced the Betty, the singer.  She asked him to introduce the next set of music.  Despite his shyness, David seemed right at home at the microphone. 
  We learned that David had been born and reared on a small prairie farm in a nearby county.  His father was stern but fair in expecting David to follow him into making his livelihood off he land.  But David’s mother was an unhappy farm wife who constantly found fault with the weather, the land, their house, her husband—and David.  As soon as he was legally able, David fled to Minot and the warehouse job.  He went home when custom dictated he should. But David said the visits upset him.  He retreated into his work and his radio broadcasts to put them out of his mind.
  David joined us at the club as weekend regulars.  Zoover and I took him to a men’s clothing store.  He soon blossomed in a dark sports jacket, flannel slacks and shined shoes.  Zoover showed  him how to tie a necktie.  David trimmed his week-old beard into a natty mustache.  He began getting regular haircuts.  His band announcements began to include a bit of patter with the Ray and other bandsmen,.  He would add the history of some of the musical numbers.  Bartenders and some of the customers greeted him by name.
  It was toward  Christmas time that David began coming to the club early.  I learned that he was hanging out to chat when he could with Diane, one of the waitresses.  The two seemed of an age.  Unlike David, Diane grew up in a Midwestern metropolis.  She liked shows  and nightlife.  When her father’s railroad job brought her family to Minot, Diane found solace in the American Legion Hall.  One Sunday,  Diane took David home to meet her family.  His newfound popularity at the club, and stories of his midnight radio show, won him their admiration.  David returned the favor by inviting Diane to her family’s farm for Christmas dinner.  At the club, the two of them became embroiled in plans for the Legion’s New  Year’s Eve celebraton.
  Christmas Day came, and went.  We didn’t see David at the club.  Diane seemed to be avoiding our bandstand table.  Zoover finally asked her if she’d seen David and she snapped, “David who?”
  At the hotel, Bill said David still came in for meals, but he remained in his coveralls cocoon all weekend.  Customers once again were timing their breakfasts for after he’d come and gone.  One evening, Bill said David had come in for breakfast that morning.  In an emotional outpouring, David told Bill what had happened at his Christmas dinner.  Diane’s urban family apparently had never been one to say grace before meals.  When she began eating as soon as her plate was filled, the family went suddenly silent. She realized her mistake.  While David’s father recited the blessing, Diane, fascinated, kept her head up and her eyes open. That didn’t sit well with David’s mother, whose own eyes apparentlyhad been open enough to notice.
  During the meal, Diane answered questions about herself, her schooling. her parents, her father’s work and finally about her family’s religion.  More to the point, the lack of it.  The mother turned on David.  Where did they meet?  When did they see each other?  What did they do?  Diane worked on Sundays?  When did she go to church?  Was David going to church, or was he becoming as sinful, as well?  The meal ended in silence.  David could not bring himself to look at Diane.
  As she drove them back to Minot in her father’s car, neither spoke.  She dropped him off at the Y Hotel without a word.  From that night, David’s radio was silent.
  It was evident that despite his graveyard epiphany,  Zoover remained deeply depressed.  The downturn of David’s life seemed to deepen his attitude. I commented that I had never seen him smile.  "What's there to smile about?" he responded.  "You're born, you try to live right, you fail to measure up, and you die.  No big deal."
  One night at the club, I asked, "If I can make you smile, will you buy me dinner?"  And I began telling jokes, kid jokes, barroom jokes, racial jokes, marriage jokes.  For most of them, Zoover anticipated the punch line, and said it aloud before I did.  His sad scowl persisted.
  I began the one about "this couple, see, were having another baby.  They'd already had so many that the husband knew the routine by heart.  But he despaired at the cost of one more hospitalization. 'They charge you for everything,' the beleaguered husband declared, waving a receipt from his wife's last hospital visit. 'Look at this--$300 for a shave.  A shave!  Why the hell do you need a shave when you're having a baby?'  His wife explained that they wanted her lower body free of hair to avoid harboring any bacteria that might infect the emerging infant.  'Hell,' the husband said.  'I can shave you myself!  And we'll save $300 right there!'   
 So he had her perch on the kitchen table, skirts up, and he lathered the target area with his shaving brush.  Wielding his razor, he began removing hair after hair.  Almost finished, he hesitated, then turned his mouth as far as he could to one side of his face and said, 'Honey, go like this . . .'”
  And Zoover smiled.  Zoover chuckled.  Zoover laughed out loud.  He laughed as we finished our beer.  He laughed through our supper.  Months later, I could set him laughing aloud by twisting my face to one side.  I suspect he's laughing still.
  I think that joke may just have saved Zoover's life.
I believed I saved his life again later that week.  
We were walking to an after-hours bottle club on the west side of town.  Zoover was lamenting his "Boy Scout upbringing" and how it had failed him when it mattered, a common theme of his ramblings.   "So quit," I suggested.  "Quit what?"  "Quit being a Boy Scout.  Be somebody else."  Zoover looked thoughtful, and perplexed.  "How the hell do I do that?"  he asked.  I replied, "Change your clothes.  Change your style.  Change your name."  
  I told him Mason Scott wasn't my real name.  I had been named after my grandfather, a rigid and unloving man who had become a central figure in my upbringing early in my life.  When I turned 18, I legally changed it to Mason Scott.  Besides shedding an unwanted daily reminder of who my surviving family expected me to emulate, "Melvin Wayne Plough" didn't appeal to me as a byline for a beginning novelist.  "By Mason Scott" seemed easier for a reader to remember.  More modern.  Classier.
  Zoover said, "I've already got an easy-to-remember byline."  "Then change your name for when you're off work," I replied. He asked, "To what?"  "Hell, I don't know. To Harry Ass Truman.  To Superman.  To Zoover."  "Zoover? What the hell is a zoover?"  "You're a zoover," I said, dancing away from his quick punch.  "From now on, you're Zoover!" 
  And Zoover he became.
  The name stuck.  At the Amercan Legion, the band, the bartenders, the waitresses, all suddenly saw him as Zoover, and suddenly it fit.  He was a new man, quick to smile, eager to meet new people.   We often shared a table next to the bandstand.  Zoover must have been a damn good newsman, because he collected stories the way a dog collected fleas.  During the band's breaks, Zoover soon learned how each of the musicians had come to be part of the band.  Ray, the leader, who played trumpet, was a Latino from Corpus Christi, on the Gulf of Mexico.  Rob, the bass player, tall and blond, was from Louisiana, where he had been an undertaker>  One night the band played his town.  When it moved on, he moved with it, leaving behind a family business and a mystified wife.  There was another trumpeter, Nick, and a piano player, and the leader's wife, Betty, their singer. 
   The band was the house band at the Brown Bear Hotel Lounge in Duluth.  To let in a little fresh air, the band shared an occasional small-stage circuit with other groups.  After their current gig in Minot, they had expected to return to Duluth.  But their agent telephoned Ray to say that the Brown Bear manager had extended the contract of the current group because of it's unexpected popularity.  Our Latin band couldn't go home just yet.  It was the Legion Club's good fortune, and the band's misfortune.  They were frozen solid in the deep-freeze center of the continent.
  One Sunday afternoon, a day when the band didn't play, we were invited to join them in the leader's hotel room.  The trumpet player was slumped on the sofa, tootling soft notes through his chrome mouthpiece.  The singer was writing letters on a table.  The bass player stood at the window, looking at the freezing sunshine outside.  Ray talked for a long time on the telephone.  Scotty uncapped beers and passed them around.  Suddenly Ray slammed down the receiver.  "I've been talking to my father," he exclaimed.  "He just came back from playing golf!  It's 80 degrees in Corpus Christi!"  He slumped to the floor, leaned his back against the wall.  After awhile, he unpacked his trumpet and began playing blues, long, sharp notes that penetrated one’s soul.  No one spoke.  I think I saw tears in Zoover’s eyes.  Outside, the sky had turned dark before Zoover and I went back to the Y for supper.
  One night Zoover walked into the club with a black instrument case under his arm.  He didn't mention it as he set on the table.   It remained there for about a half-hour, until the band took its next break.  "What is that? “ Nick asked as he sat down,  “And what are you going to do with it?"  Zoover opened the black lid to reveal a shining, golden trombone.  "It's mine," he said.  "I just bought it in a hock shop.  I'm going to learn to play it.  So I can join your band!" 
  Ray exchanged a glance with his wife. "A grand idea, Zoover,” he said, to Nick’s dismay.   “And Nicky can teach you how to play it!"  Betty added, "We'll have to get him a tuxedo."  The bass player added, "We'll have to do something about his hair." 
  Zoover was ecstatic.  "How long do you think it'll take me to learn?" he asked, beaming.  Nick lifted the trombone out of the case, pulled the mouthpiece out of its sleeve and handed it to Zoover.  Dropping the trombone back in the case, he told Zoover, "Practice on that for two years.  And maybe when you've developed a lip"--slam!  went the lid--"maybe you'll be ready for lessons!"   The general laughter seemed more kind than cruel.
  If Zoover was daunted by his harsh lesson, he didn't show it.  He lugged that trombone everywhere.  He did blow on the trombone mouthpiece by the hour, until it seemed his lips would bleed.  And sometimes the halls of the YMCA Hotel would groan with the sound of Zoover's trombone
  One mid-week evening, the band welcomed Zoover to the club.  Before he could sit down at what had become the regulars' table near the bandstand, the leader called him over.  "Bring your trombone up here," he said.  "Tonight is your big debut!"  Zoover scaled the steps as if he'd been doing it all his life.  He took his place where the leader pointed.  "You're not to make a sound," the trumpeter whispered to him.  "Pretend you're playing.  Keep the beat.  And when it's time for your solo, step out and play. But don't make a sound!"  If Zoover was disappointed, he didn't show it.  When the next set began, he simply began moving the slide in and out, puffing his cheeks.  He was in the band!  And that was good enough for Zoover.
  The real test came when the leader nodded to him,  He stepped around the trumpeter to the front of the stage.  His cheeks puffed.  His slide slid.  And behind his back, the trumpeter played into a mute, drawing his changed notes out to the rhythm of Zoover's trombone.  After only a few notes, another nod from the leader told Zoover it was time to step out of the spotlight.  Our table led a small ripple of applause.  Zoover was humble in acknowledging the praise.
At the break, Zoover learned that this had been an audition.  Sunday afternoon, the band was to play at the officer's club at the Air Force missile base north of town.  With Zoover in the band, he'd get free drinks; the band would get an extra $12.50 for having him in it.  They'd keep the money.  He could have the drinks.  
  Zoover played with the band at the officer's club a half-dozen times.  His pantamine never was detected.  But one afternoon, during Zoover's "solo," the trumpeter thought it would be cute to let Zoover stand on his own.  The trumpet was silent.  So was the trombone.  Suddenly the audience seemed to catch on, and so did the club manager.  Panicking, Zoover began to play.  And play.  Brrrrraaaatttt!  Brrrooom!  And the musicians all but fell off the bandstand, laughing.  But that was the end of Zoover's musical career.
  And so the long, cold winter whiled away.
  Zoover made it through the holidays, but as the trees began to show buds in the spring, he was called into the editor's office and given two weeks' notice.  He was not surprised, nor regretful.  With accrued vacation pay and a little bit of savings, he had enough cash so that he didn't immediately have to seek work elsewhere.   Besides, he was entitled to unemployment compensation.  The rate was $35 a week.   It was time for a break.  
  The State of North Dakota had other ideas.  Their unemployment code required Zoover to take any job available, an officious clerk explained.  And there always were dishwashing jobs, for $1 an hour. He handed Zoover a list of available restaurants.  However, because of his brief North Dakota residency, Zoover was not entitled to North Dakota unemployment compensation.  He would have to apply back in Wyoming, his last state of residency.  A phone call told Zoover that Wyoming, with its higher cost-of-living, awarded $45 a week unemployment pay.  A conundrum:  $45 a week for not working, $40 for busting his ass pearl-diving.  Even an unemployed newsman could figure that one out!
  I also got laid off.  Since my divorce back in Wisconsin, I had dropped out of school to work in my uncle's stock-broker office in Minot.  Uncle Jack knew he was in trouble with the Securities Exchange Commission for some creative sales work, so he cut the family cords to me, to save me from the SEC clutches.  Like Zoover, I didn't feel like rushing back into a sweatshop.  I had learned of a two-bedroom apartment for rent, on the third floor of a dance studio not far from downtown.  Pooling our cash, we could afford it. There we could work at our writing careers, fulltime.  No interruptions.  We moved in the next afternoon. 
  Our plan was to use our writing talents--back at the University of Wisconsin, I was studying under Robert Penn Warren--and make our fortune before a 9-to-5 captured us once more.   But first, intending to make a very quick buck, we took bar-room jokes and rewrote them into page-length yarns, building up to the last-line punchline.  Within a month we had papered the walls and ceiling of the attic apartment with rejectionsships, beginning with those from Esquire (at the top of the pay scale at 6 cents a word) through Playboy and Penthouse, to Adam, a sleezy rag that offered only 3 cents.  But not even Adam would buy our work/
  In the meantime, Zoover and I each pounded our portable typewriters, at work on legitimate efforts at literature.  To my knowledge, none was finished.
  With the snow off the prairies, the band was breaking up.  They had wearied of ever getting back to the Brown Bear.  They were taking a sabbatical, the leader said, to refresh themselves in some real sunshine back near the Gulf.  Ray was  looking forward to playing golf with his father.  Rob thought he might work for awhile at his old funeral parlor.  But Ray and Betty were driving back to Duluth to settle some business there—I believe they still owned a house in the city.  Zoover and I were invited along.  I wanted to look in at the university in Madison, Wisconsin, to see about resuming my education .  I had been n touch with Professor Warren; he said I might get a teaching scholarship.  Zoover said  Madison had a good daily newspaper;  he’d like to test the water there.
  On the band’s last night at the club, the atmosphere was somber.  The customers, I think, were looking forward to the next band coming in—some outfit with two accordians, the bartender said.  So far as the customers were concerned, the Latinos might as well already be gone.  Zoover got to play one more silent set with the crew.  When it was over, he put his trombone away and pushed the case over to Nick.  “Find it a good home,” he said.  “I’ll never find a better band to join than this one.”
  The couple went out of their way to drop us off in Madison, before backtracking north to Duluth.  If anything of note happened on the trip over, I don’t remember it.  Once in Madison, Zoover and I found a bar near the newspaper and had a beer.  Then, while he chatted with some pressmen who were taking a mid-shift break, I left and went over to the university.  It was past dinnertime when I returned.  Zoover was still in the bar.  Time flew, he said, and he’d neglected to get over to the city room to check out job opportunities.  But a pressman said he thought the paper was hiring.   
  I called for a cab, and we drove through wooded suburbs to my mother’s home.  It was dark when we arrived, bits of snow lingering at the bases of the sentinel trees.  We were greeted through the slit of a partially opened door by the muzzle of a .380-caliber pistol.  When my mother recognized  my  voice, the weapon disappeared and we were welcomed in.   She explained that earlier that month, four prisoners had escaped from the state prison near by and had terrorized some neighborhoods before they were rounded up.  But the brief reign of terror had left many isolated residents, well, terrified.
  Next morning, I informed Zoover that I was returning to the university.  My ex-wife was still there and said in answer to my telephoned call that she would join me for lunch.  Zoover suggested that he would be a third wheel, and would hitchhike back to Minot.  We split up.   I learned when we were both back in Minot that his trip hadn’t gone quite so smoothly as he had anticipated.
  Zoover simply had had no idea how to get out of Wisconsin.  Instead of accepting my offer of a sharing a cab  ride closer to the city, he began hitchhiking right at the junction of my mother’s gravel driveway and the county road.  First off, he discovered, locals were still  goosey about those escaped convicts.  When he finally did get a ride, it went only a few miles, and left him off in an even more remote site.  A truckload of timber cutters picked him up, then dropped him off at dusk as they turned off the highway for their camp.  Zoover didn’t know if wild wolves still roamed the Wisconsin forests, but he heard packs of canines of some sort howling in the woods.  A state trooper finally stopped and gave him a lift to the police station in the next town.  There Zoover loaded his pockets with candy bars from a vending machine and smiled as the friendly desk sergeant locked him in a cell for the night.  The station was quiet, and Zoover, no stranger to jails because of his years as a police beat news reporter, slept warm, and well. 
  In the morning a U.S. Border Patrol car picked up Zoover at the restaurant where he had been guided by the desk sergeant and took him to a corner near a truck stop.  “Don’t be offended if we check you out  again  along the this border route,” the patrolman said.  “That’s how we find our illegals.”  Zoover leapfrogged with truckers all the way back to Minot.  I rode Greyhound.  Winter was in full flight when we returned.
  Our landlord, Vic, lived with his wife in a second-floor apartment.  He had converted the first floor into a dance studio after teaching dance for several years at a popular Arthur Murray studio.  "Arthur Murray . . . will teach you dancing . . . in a hurry," went the radio jingle.  Vic was getting in on the craze.
  Zoover and I were welcome to hang out in the studio during lessons.   I don't remember anything being taught but the Cha-Cha-Cha.  A half-dozen women--and a few men--were on hand five nights a week to teach the bergers and farmers of the region the joys of rocking around a polished floor arm-in-arm with someone decades younger.  The dance instructors were a joy to watch, and a delight to get to know.
  Vic was a Marine veteran of World War II.  He had used his G.I. Bill education benefit to take flying lessons.  He earned a commercial license and bought a four-seater, single-engine. high-wing plane.  In it he would fly three dance instructors each Wednesday evening \across the North Dakota prairie to remote communities.  There they gave dance lessons in Grange Halls or church basements or school gymnasiums..
  The previous summer, Vic had buzzed a local airfield, scaring hell out of the control-tower operators.  The FAA suspended his commercial license until, for penance,  he performed a proscribed series of routine flight maneuvers.  Vic often invited Zoover to fly with him on these boring afternoons.  One afternoon, Vic was performing "Lazy-Eights," a maneuver in which Vic deliberately nosed the aircraft up until it was almost stalling, llosing the lift of its wings.  Just before the stall, a loud and raccous warning buzzer sounded.  Hearing it, Vic would slip the aircraft off to one side, using the force of gravity to create speed and airlif.  Zoover said the sound of a buzzer afterward always caused his stomach to painfully knot, anticipating the sudden drop.  But he kept going back.
  Vic also performed "dead-stick landings."  These involved slowing the engine speed down to idle, turning the nose down into a glide, then looking quickly for a safe place to land.  Because the flat fields of harvested wheat were still in stubble, this was no great trick.  Vic would spiral the plane down to a few yards above the surface, gun the engine and climb back to altitude, where he would repeat the maneuver. 
  Zoover enjoyed flying with Vic. Even from low altitudes, he could see for miles, with only an occasional farmhouse and windbreak to disturb the flat plain.  After a rain, Zoover could see wide pools of standing water, because there was not enough slope to allow it to drain away.  In fact, Zoover told me, the Mouse River (also known as the Souris) flowed in both directions through Minot, depending upon where it had last rained.  He maintained he watched the same orange crate flowing under a downtown bridge a half-dozen times, in both directions.
  One afternoon, Vic and Zoover were enjoying the spring sunshine, alternating lazy-eighths with dead-stock landings.  Vic rolled out of a spiral a few yards above the soil.  As he straightened his course, he found he was rapidly overtaking a tractor that had begun plowing the winter stubble.  Vic shoved in the throttle more quickly than he should have and the engine stalled. Vic slipped the gliding plane into a nearby gully.  Vic steered it one way and another with one hand while he slipped switches with the other.   The engine started in time for Vic to lift the aircraft above an approaching bridge.  And they resumed doing the FAA's required homework.
  Vic and his wife decided the dance studio needed a social lounge.  A set of stairs by the front door led to the basement.  There they imagined a lounge styled as a tropical beach, with bamboo benches and waving palm fronds.  They hired me and Zoover to build it.  We did, in about a week's time.  Zoover painted murals on the walls that, to North Dakotans, resembled a more friendly South Pacific than that Horseshit Olson had endured.  Indirect lighting, a wet bar and piped-in Hawaiian music led directly to more contracts for extended dance lessons, and who can imagine what else.
  Encouraged by this enterprise, Vic's wife decided to open a gymnasium for women.  It would have exercise bars on the walls, like a ballet studio.  Thin mattresses lined part of the floor, for yoga.  A treadmill, lifting weights, a juice bar were aimed at returning the hefty North Dakota housewives to their pre-marital form.  What a crock, Zoover said.  He refused to have anything to do with the project.  Women working out?  Never happen!
  Zoover was more enthused about another of Vic's projects.  A wartime buddy who had fought professionally and successfully for a few years wanted to make a comeback in the ring.  Vic agreed to be his manager.  He turned most of the training over to Zoover.  Now, Zoover  knew as much about training a boxer as he did about reworking jokes for Playboy.  But as a newsman, he knew how to raise public interest in the boxer.  Each morning, scores of commuters drove their cars into the city along a road that adjoined the city zoo.  Between the zoo and the highway was a long, wide stretch of mowed grass.  Three mornings a week, Zoover, looking athletic in a blue sweatsuit, a white towel around his neck and a whistle in his mouth, led a phalanx of Vic's dancers in leotards and headbands through a routine of exercises on the grass.  Some days even the boxer showed up.   
  A sandwich-board sign beside the highway told the commuters of the boxer's aspirations, and promised a ring battle some time late in summer.  Motorists honked.  They rolled down windows and offered suggestions, none worthy and few moral.   Police cruisers came by, looked the gyrating crew over, moved on.
  Toward the end of month, Vic announced the fight was off, the boxer had lost interest, and that was the end of that.
  The Minot City Zoo became one of Zoover's favorite hangouts.  He told me that in the 1930s, Edward R. Murrow, en route from his North  Dakota Highline hometown of Velva to the Big City and radio news-reporting history, had camped overnight beneath bushes behind the bear cage.  The bears and the bushes were still there.
  Not far from the zoo was a coin-operated laundry.  Zoover and I would take our washing there, with a pocketful of change.  We would sit there into the wee hours, playing cards.  We were careful to time our washings so that we had reasonable reason to be there--Minot police were hell on anyone they perceived as vagrants.  We always made certain to have enough dimes on hand to keep the dryer moving.
  Across the street from the laundry was an all-night bakery. The place was popular with crews from the nearby railroad yard.  We could buy doughnuts or bagels there. But our favorite was the pizza it served, on takeout.  If we had no laundry, we might take a pizza to a picnic table at the zoo.  We were there with a couple of dancers and a couple of pizzas and sodas.  We built a bonfire in one of the firepits.  A police patrol car rolled up.  A rookie cop herded Zoover and I into his back seat and took us across town to the station.  The charges, the officer told his sergeant, were vagrancy, trespassing on zoo property and operating a fire.  After a long silence, the sergeant told the cops, "Take them back where you found them.  The zoo is open to the public around the clock.  The fire was in an approved firepit.  And these guys have  been here before.  They claim they’re writers—unsuccesssful novelists, ain’t that what you told me?” he asked, looking at me. “Yeah, right, whatever.  Not vagrants.  Yet.”   
   When we got back, the girls were gone.  The fire was out.  And our pizza was cold.
  We were getting really  low on our cash and thinking about having to focus on finding some kind of paying jobs  when Bill introduced us to a new arrival at the Y hotel.  If he told us his name, I’ve forgotten it.  We almost immediately began calling him, “Preacher.”  Preacher was short, of a weight that led observers to think of him as round.  He was of middle age, and balding.  He smiled easily, readily offering his hand to shake.  With his story-mining knack, Zoover soon learned Preacher’s. 
  Preacher had been raised without religion, he said.  His parents never identified with a church, nor attended one.  Preacher had never been inside one.  One sunny Sunday morning in Denver, while walking in a brick-homed neighborhood east of downtown,  Preacher passed a small church.  Its front doors were open to the summer day. Preacher heard a choir singing.  Until that moment, Preacher’s only exposure to choral singing had been via radio, or the movies.  He decided to investigate.
  The pews were packed. Preacher walked to the front row.  Parishioners slid over to make room.  He sat.  The choir had finished.  The minister was beginning his homily.  Preacher listened to his words with only half an ear.  Preacher’s attention was focused on the angel he saw sitting in a chair behind the minister.  The angel nodded a greeting to Preacher.  Preacher nodded back.  “So it’s all true,” Preacher said to himself, “Everything my parents said about churches is hogwash is true!”
  Preacher returned to that church every Sunday for the rest of the summer.  He learned to stand when the congregation stood.  He learned to sing what the congregation sang.  The angel seemed to be pleased to see him each Sunday.  After a few Sundays, the minister would nod a greeting to Preacher, as well.
  One autumn day, Preacher followed the congregation down the aisle to the front steps, he stopped at the door to say goodbye to the minister.  “And tell the angel goodbye, as well,” Preacher said, adding, “if you don’t mind.”  “Angel?” the minister replied?  “What angel?”  “The one who sits behind you,” Preacher told him.  “Every Sunday!”  And he continued down the steps.
  The following Sunday, Preacher noted the minister occasionally looked over his shoulder.  The angel waved a hand at the minister.  The minister didn’t seem to notice.  He faltered during his sermon when he realized Preacher continued to look behind the pulpit, smiling and nodding.  Once, Preacher waved.
  After the service, the minister stopped Preacher as he approached the front door.  “What were you looking at?” he asked.  “Behind me?  Was there someone behind me?”  “Only the angel,” Preacher said.  “I thought you were looking at him.  He waved at you.”
  The following Sunday one of the ushers was waiting when Preacher came up the steps.  “Sir,” he said.  “I think it would be best if you were to find another church today.  And for every Sunday after that.”  He explained that his presence in the front row was unsettling the minister.  “I could sit somewhere else,” Preacher suggested.   “No, the church elders feel it would be best if you simply never came back,” the usher said.  Preacher was devastated.  “Well,” he pleaded, “could I at least say goodbye to the angel? He seems to expect me to be here each week.”  The usher put a hand on Preacher’s shoulder and turned him around.  “There is no angel here,” he said sharply.  “There are no such things as angels!”  Preachers walked down the steps and away.
  Preacher didn’t look for angels in other churches.  He found that some days, an angel—seldom the same one—would walk with him.  And not always on Sunday mornings.  Once an angel sat across from him in a tavern, shaking his head.  Preacher hadn’t had a drink, since.
  He would be pleased to introduce ussome time, Preacher said.  “Just walk with me.  Come walk with an angel.”
It was perhaps a week later, Zoover had emptied his wallet onto the café counter, sorting and counting its contents.  I sat down beside him.  Waving to bill for two coffees, I asked him what he was finding.
  “Wyoming Unemployment turned me down,” Zoover said.  “They claim I’m North Dakota’s problem.  North Dakota says I’m Wyoming’s.  Scotty, we need cash.  Otherwise, it’s back to the 9-to-5.  And in this town, that means pearl-diving.”
  “Are you really looking for work?” I said.  “We could go back to Madison.  I think we both have prospects there.”
  “Not yet,” Zoover replied.  “What I think we ought to do is—are you ready?—I think the time is right for you and I to take a walk with an angel!”
  It seemed a long time, but probably was only a microburst of time before I shared Zoover’s vision.  This was the Bible Belt.  This was Elmer Gantry country.  Summer was on its way and good weather for tent cities.  “Come walk with an angel!”  Preacher had the right idea. A money-making idea.  A gen-u-wine money tree!
When Bill began turning out lights, Zoover swept up the paper napkins we had been scribbling on.  “I’ll type out our plan tonight,” he said.  “We’ll fine-tune it tomorrow and begin some research.  If it still looks good, we’ll take Preacher to lunch.  Scotty, I think we’re on our way.  We’re about to walk with the angels!”
  The plan was straight forward:  Zoover, with his newspaper experience, would be the advance man.  He’d design the posters and press packets.  He’d go into towns along our missionary route, checking out halls or vacant lots and tents, meeting disk jockeys and church leaders, diffusing any local opposition to our approaching competition.  With his long experience with police and sheriffs, Zoover would drop by the courthouses to insure we weren’t walking into any baited legal traps. I would handle the logistics, following up on Zoover’s leads, handling bookings and ordering posters and tickets and arranging for local volunteers and paid help.  All Preacher had to do, we said, was get out of the car a mile or so out of town, changeo ut of his business suit into sackcloth and sandles, and stroll into town accompanied by the local press and clergy.  And his angel, of course.  And then on to the prayer meeting, and hallelujah, buckets of bucks!
We talked about this for weeks, poring over maps, writing to Chambers of Commerce for leads, to city halls for lists of regulations.  We were dumping pocketsful of quarters into telephone booths. And buying breakfasts and suppers not only for Zoover and me, but for Preacher.  Once he got a glimmer of what lay ahead, we couldn’t get out of his sight.  Our cash reserves were shrinking rapidly.
  I had a loose-leaf notebook of maps, reference lists, telephone numbers and mailing addresses.  I felt I knew every two-bit evangelist in every Midwestern state.  Zoover almost set his typewriter ribbon on fire, pounding out drafts of press notices and radio speeches for Preacher.   By Memorial Day weekend, Zoover and I were ready to begin. 
  We called a supper conference with Preacher to go over next Tuesday’s launch.  Zoover would take Greyhound to go ahead to rent the first hall and set up the press.  I would rent a car and drive Preacher to outside the first town—I can’t remember now which one.  “Car?” asked Preacher?  “What car?”  “The car we intend to buy after the first night’s take,” I explained.  “How do you think we’re going to get to these towns?  Walk?”  I forced a laugh.
Preacher was silent for a few long moments.  “Angels don’t ride in cars,” he said.  And he walked away.  Next morning, he checked out.  We never saw him again.
  Before the end of the week, Zoover received a letter from a colleague he had worked with in Casper.  He was now writing for a newspaper in Billings, Montana.  They were looking for a features writer and would entertain Zoover’s application.  If Zoover got the job, the friend would drive over to Minot and take him back to Billings for the new job.  He wouldn’t need cash—he could stay with the friend and his wife until he got a couple of paychecks.
  By the end of the month, Zoover was packing.  I had a Greyhound bus ticket to Madison.  I never saw Zoover again, either.

END