A Rivet Runs Through It
An April Fools literary parody
Happy April Fools Day! And happy 50th anniversary (in a few months) to Norman Maclean’s classic Montana novella A River Runs Through It. The combination makes me recall one of my favorite literary endeavors.
In 2001, the Montana Committee for the Humanities inaugurated the Happy Tales Contest, in which you rewrite a classic work of literature with a happier ending. I reimagined the end of the book (not the movie! the book) as follows.
When I finished talking to my father, he asked, “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Finally, I said, “April Fools!”
He almost reached the door and then turned back for reassurance. “Are you sure that today is April first?” I repeated, “April Fools!”
After that, from time to time my father would have me reaffirm my April Fool’s wit. Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had played him for a complete and total idiot.
For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. “Are you sure you have told me everything you know about practical jokes?” he asked. I said, “Everything.” “It’s not much, is it?” “No,” I replied, “but you can fool completely without complete understanding.” “That I have known and preached,” my father said.
Once my father came back with another question. “Do you think I could have helped getting fooled?” Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer. “Do you think there’s a booger hanging off your nose?”
After a long time, without falling for it, he came with something he must have wanted to say from the first. “Do you think you’re flying low?” he asked, and I felt the implication. I snuck a glance at my zipper.
“Made ya look!”
So this was the last he and I ever said to each other about Paul’s alleged death.
The wit, though, it still continues. Exploding cigars, hand buzzers, squirting buttons. My father and I recite to each other passages from classic Monty Python skits. “Nudge, nudge!” he tells me. “Say no mo’, say no mo’!” He stands in the pulpit with an arrow through his head. He orders X-rated catalogs in the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. “Message from Uranus,” he titled one of his homilies, “‘Surrounded by Klingons.’” His glasses spring fake eyeballs; his trousers conceal a horn. Once, my father gave me a series of wedgies that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I had felt closer to than any man I have ever known. To this day he’s got nails and tacks and the like strewn across every chair in the house; you try to sit your ass down somewhere, and a rivet runs through it.
He hides dead fish in my bedsheets.
Eventually all shenanigans merge into one, and a joke runs through it. The joke was crafted by the world’s great flood (“Noah!” God giggled. “April fools!”), and it runs over rocks from the basement of the Archie Bray Ceramic Arts Center. On some of the rocks are timeless gag-rubber-snakes. Under the rocks are turds, and some of the turds are theirs. My father has told the Archie Bray students that I work at a tobacconist that has Prince Albert in a can, and they are forever calling to confirm.
I am haunted by potters.