Dinosaur Café: A Semblance of Monstrous Prairie Creatures

By Ron Vossler

hese five stories will leave the reader stunned by unforgettable characters, who are, by turns, superstitious, stubborn, comic, and, even, grotesque.

The setting of these stories: a Macondo-like small town, where miracles, and would-be miracles, can and do happen in a backwater of history, which is actually the battle zone of the human heart, in
conflict with itself.

From the title piece, in which a shadowy artist, on the ceiling of a small town cafe, creates murals of a startling and paradoxical richness; to the plaintive monologue of an elderly farm-woman, standing in the way of the plow that threatens the graves of babies she has sworn to protect; to the marvelous powers of an overworked
faith-healer: these stories---shaped from the lore, superstitions, and history of the Dakota Germans---reveal the intense inner world of an unknown ethnic group, working out its destiny on the immensities of the American prairie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504915366

Ron Vossler

Ron Vossler is an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota, a Fulbright scholar, and the author of eight popular books, and five national and international award-winning documentary films about the Dakota Germans, a unique cultural minority. This is his second book of fiction.

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© 2015 Ron Vossler. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/12/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1535-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1536-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908827

Cover by Andrea Trenbeath

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

DINOSAUR CAFE

FRIEDA THE BALE QUEEN

(and the Lost Jehus of Gnadenthal County)

SACRIFICE

MONOLOGUE OF VIOLA, WATCHING OVER HER PRAIRIE BABIES

THE FINAL INCARNATION OF GOTTLIEBINA SCHMETTERLING, HEALER

If at least there were granted me time enough to complete my work…I would therein describe men, even should that give them the semblance of monstrous creatures, as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space…

Marcel Proust,

Remembrance of Things Past

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

These five stories were written a long time ago, and on another continent, Asia. At the time, teaching at an American school in Lahore, Pakistan, I grew homesick for the small prairie towns and farms of my Dakota childhood.

Central Dakota was a distinct place–its homogenous population the highest concentration in the world of Black Sea Germans, an immigrant minority to which I belonged–and it deserved, I thought, its own distinct, and richly imagined literature. Any writer, any prairie Aeschylus willing to embark upon the task–I designated myself–might create, from the verities of the yearning, ethnic heart, from all the pathos and sorrow and triumphs to which our rural flesh was heir, enough dramatic stories to rival those of a Greek tragedian.

So I began. Thirty five years ago now. Early each morning before teaching, at my teak-wood desk, I worked on these five stories. I took heart, living in Lahore, which was Kipling’s City, where the renowned British author, especially in Plain Tales from the Hills, wrote his finest short stories; and those early mornings, I felt overseen by his spirit. I was married then, with a baby son, and our home stood adjacent to a canal, where, I was told, Hindu holy men once stood upside down for hours, heads immersed in buckets of mud, breathing suspended. Such tales reinforced the spell cast upon me by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the famed South American novelist, and Bruno Schultz, the Polish fabulist, and the reader may note, in these stories, at least some of their magical realism.

Those early mornings, fueled by Balzacian quantities of sweet Chai, served on a tray by my faithful servant, Bahed-Masih, I wrote against the background roar of an ancient air-conditioner, a familiar sound, like that of an old John Deere B tractor I once drove, that helped evoke details in what I then called my prairie stories.

Those were joyous mornings; and often, my son, just a toddler then, already able to speak in distinct Urdu phrases, played with magnetic alphabet blocks at my feet. While I wrote, if the writing went well–oh creature of vanity I was then!–I imagined reviewers proclaiming my fiction: With one great leap, the Dakota German writer Ron Vossler has vaulted onto the same stage as William Faulkner, Gunter Grass, and Garcia-Marquez.

Soon, those idyllic days were shattered by the political upheavals of the time, and after Islamic radicals agitated mobs, which attacked American institutions in Lahore, we went, for a time, into hiding. Not much later, our son grew deathly ill. What I remember of that time is a kaleidoscope of blurred, nightmarish moments, which precipitated our hasty return to America.

Exulting in my son’s regained health, I not only lost track of these stories, but I also sloughed my grandiose ideas about carving out a new Dakota literary landscape. That was, alas, achieved by other writers, notably Larry Woiwode and Louise Erdrich, whose shelf of books mined the mother lode of prairie life better than I ever could have.

Flash-forward thirty five years. In a box I was throwing out, five tattered, manila folders, stuffed with sweat-blotted pages catch my eye. It’s the five prairie stories that, with my son at my feet, and in the full flush of youthful ambition, I worked on so assiduously. Which I offer here to interested readers for what they are: a native son’s first, and only, unsteady attempts to create fiction, fashioned from the materials of his yearning prairie heart.

DINOSAUR CAFE

(Wherein the reader learns the origin of the marvelous dinosaur murals that graced the Magpie Café; their first victim; their secret meaning, as deciphered by Maggie, the octogenarian proprietor of said establishment, who also quelled the insurrection of barn-talkers, cured her nearsightedness with a special vat of Knoephla soup, and performed numerous other heroic deeds of the heart; as well as brief glimpses into the daily lives of the people of Weltschmerz, North Dakota, population 666.)

Everyone gazed upward, as if hypnotized; even Maggie, the cafe owner was entranced. Hovering above them, perched on a pair of high stilts fashioned from a series of cast-off two by four boards scavenged from the city dump, the itinerant painter with the large moustache seemed like their own prairie God, hard at work. They watched as directly above, from the chaos of rain-stained ceiling tiles and sagging, mismatched stamped-tin wall partitions, he shaped a proliferating lushness of color–their own in-door Garden of Eden.

He’d arrived the day before in the town of Weltschmerz, North Dakota, satchel bulging with paint brushes, his boots kicking up dust as he traversed the graveled main street like a storm trooper on a mission. He pushed his way into The Magpie Cafe, a long, narrow building squeezed between Red’s Fresh Meat Store, and Stan’s You Save Money Here Or Else Grocery, then ordered from the chalk board menu the most expensive meal.

Glancing with disapproval at the dingy ceiling, the stranger, ensconced in a booth, looked up at intervals from his food, which he ate with an uncommon relish, like a starving prisoner of war on the lam. He smacked his lips loudly, devouring several helpings of Maggie’s dessert special, which was home-made kuchen pie, and by the time he’d finished, his moustache glistened with glazing, like a paintbrush ready for action.

Maggie, the diminutive owner who stood well under five feet, could only stare up at the stranger as he approached the cash register. He looked as tall as a huge cottonwood that stood beside the outdoor bathroom in her backyard. She watched him lick the glazing from the ends of his walrus moustache. She listened to his loud voice, as he proclaimed, in an accent thicker than anyone else’s in town, that he had no money, as he quickly added, Aber, perhaps we will make a deal?

Maggie stared at Maler as he picked his way carefully through the English that he did know. She listened as he explained that in exchange for the meal he’d just completed, with all subsequent meals, and for as long as it would take–if Maggie would also prowide the paint, and a small stipend for beer–then he, Albrecht Maler, who’d copied the finest paintings in the finest museums in all of Europa, and repaired Byzantine ikons in the Hagia Sophia cathedral of Constantinople, and whose brush stroke was as soft as Cezanne’s and as hard-edged as Picasso’s, would paint the ceiling and walls of The Magpie Cafe.

Though she’d never heard of Cezanne or Picasso, Maggie, who had the tenacity of a bulldog, couldn’t pass up the opportunity. After more than four decades in business, she had grown tired of the dim interior; of the rain-stained, sagging ceiling that verged on collapse, and particularly of that paint-peeling scene that violated the back wall of the cafe, several black and white birds, or what were supposed to be magpies, a bird she’d never even seen.

When Maggie first began her business some decades earlier, she had hired Jim Klud, the dyslexic town sign painter to paint Maggie’s Cafe in large black letters across the front window. That’s not quite what he’d done; he’d inadvertently inserted a p instead of a second g into the sign–an oversight which Maggie didn’t begrudge him because, as she soon discovered, the town was full of prideful perfectionists, who daily on their way to the post office poked their noses into her café to point out the spelling mistake; then, drawn inside by a deep-seated desire to correct, ran into like-minded neighbors, besser-wissers, and know-it-alls like themselves, and, catching a scent of Maggie’s coffee or of her special mini-meals concocted from various discarded organ meats, like cow tongues, they’d sit together, discussing the various ways that such misspellings doomed the overeducated younger generation to a lifetime of failure. With her business thus increased, Maggie never complained, until one day, an abashed Klud, while paying at the cash register for a chicken gizzard breakfast special, offered to make things right with you for my mistake.

Klud was a portly fellow with a far-away look in his eye from too much close painting of advertising signs, and he’d also lost his perspective in understanding other people’s intentions. He’d grown unable to read facial expressions of any kind, so that after he’d announced to Maggie his intentions to make amends, and she assumed that Klud was complimenting her about the gizzard breakfast, he felt certain she’d agreed to the changes he suggested.

That afternoon Klud entered the café during a business lull; the café was empty; Maggie was lost in her own thoughts, amid a billowing blizzard of flour, as she busily rolled out dough in the kitchen. On the rear wall he quickly executed a painting, to keep the proportions of the universe of the café in balance, he told himself; and large enough so it was the first thing customers saw upon entering: several fugitive magpies, beaks agape, wings whirling, frantically, it seemed, propelling themselves above a bleak lunar landscape. If there was a magpie anywhere else in the whole state, that was news to Maggie, and as much as she grew to hate that artwork, she allowed the magpies to stay, for in their grotesque overstatement, they seemed to draw customers their direction, to gawk in repulsion, and, while they were doing that, catching a whiff of Maggie’s delectable pastries, order a cup of coffee or another piece of pie.

Over the years, she deigned not to notice as nervous adolescents who generally occupied the booth right below the magpies, chipped away fragments of the pigment, leaving those birds looking more like the half-plucked chicken carcasses Maggie bought from Grandma Fetzer to supplement her lunchtime specials, than a tranquil country scene designed to aid digestion.

Maggie never did tell Klud what she thought of the magpies. She also did not complain about the fact that her café, due to his error, became known forever by the wrong name, The Magpie Café, because in a tiny town like Weltschmerz she could not afford to alienate her customer base.

She didn’t talk