SCHNECKS by Mark Wisniewski
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned; my last confession was – good Christ, I have no clue, maybe a year ago – no, I might have been here just before last Easter, though I couldn’t swear to that on a Bible. But here’s one true thing, Father: I feel nervous right now. And to be honest I always feel nervous after fair-time, not necessarily on account of my own sins, at least not mortal ones, but still I’m always nervous after fair-time, which gets me to thinking, so this year I figured I’d try confession with you.
Which fair? The State’s Fair. The one we just had in West Allis. To which I’m sure you went.
You’re not pronouncing it correctly, Father. You said State when instead it’s State’s. As in the fair that belongs to the state, as in Wisconsin, so why would you say only State? Anyways I’m sure you’ve been there at least once in your past –
Never? Well, you should go. Next year you should go certainly. It’s a wonderful time, especially for the younger set, and see maybe one reason I’m nervous now is, well, somehow the teens we employ at the fair don’t like me so much after we take down our tent for the year, and I have to admit this bothers me.
Pardon?
We have a wiener tent there, Father. For selling foot-longs.
Foot-long wieners, Father. We – my husband and I – have a tent to sell them right there, on the State’s Fair’s premises. Yes, and like I say, we sell foot-longs, which are delicious, especially with your dark mustard. And Father we also sell beer, which we have a license for – not always perfectly up to date but we always have one – and we slow-cook barbecue sauce so we can offer for another twenty cents barbecue foot-longs, and of course with foot-longs you’ll want chips so we can sell you enough of those to cover the rest of the paper plate we give free, or you can have navy beans for another fifteen to thirty cents, if I have patience to make beans ahead of time. Now and then I’ll too manage to boil kapusta, which we’ve sold for as little as a dime extra depending, and from us you can also get genuine vanilla ice cream in those cute plastic cups, though I personally never eat ice cream – or for that matter sour cream – three-four hours before to after kapusta since this disturbs my gastric. So you see, altogether we’re in the business of making people happy.
And most people we deal with are. But, like I say, not always the teens employed by us. You’d think these kids would grin to work in our tent; in fact, during the winter, for instance at Christmastime, they beg me to hire them, and if I say yes they – initially – thank and sometimes even hug me, knowing our workers are known to make good money for sixteen-and-mature-fifteen-year-olds. Also our workers often laugh and put in overtime, so they walk off with plenty of cash, Father, which brings me to one of the things that might be making me nervous, which is the night a number of our schnecks went missing.
Schnecks, Father. You know, the rectangles with white frosting – long johns, some call them? Which most people naturally love? In fact, I can sell your foot-long, and I can sell your beer, but your schneck will sell itself and then some. Eat one schneck and you’ll right away want another and never think twice about paying again. So you enjoy a second schneck? Who doesn’t deserve two at least?
The point is my brother Gary fries schnecks at his bakery, and maybe you don’t think schneck when you first order a foot-long, but we’ve found that, out of our State’s Fair tent, schnecks do extremely well, especially early in your cooler days and again just before closing. People like schnecks so much we can, without blinking, move four dozen in an hour, so we stock them in our back room, which here I’ll admit is just a curtained-off section of our tent.
And see my brother Gary is normally fine with donating to us these schnecks, but see this might be what makes me nervous: Gary wants to write our schnecks off as business losses so he need not report to the IRS as much profit, so he can save taxes every April. To which my husband Yashu says, Taxes? Are you nuts, Gary? Who pays taxes? This is my husband I’m talking about so I should watch myself; on the other hand, I am in confession, and this is my Yashu: he always says Taxes, meaning, Who really pays them?
I realize that, Father. But need we give so much unto Caesar? Anyways, Gary has said to my husband Yashu that he, Gary, pays taxes, and my husband Yashu sort of yells at him, maybe a bit tipsy from beer Yashu yells: You just make the schnecks and we’ll sell them like they never existed, and we take only cash so who could know the difference? But Gary still says he wants to write off. He’s a stickler like that, Gary. So I say to Gary, on the side this is, away from Yashu – and Father, remember now, this is me talking to my blood brother – and with all that considered, I say: Listen, Gary, we can work this out, maybe slide some of our State’s Fair cash flow your way – you know, pay you a few cents per schneck even though you’re my brother and you normally just plain give. But again Gary says no. He says if we paid him even just pennies per schneck, he’d have to report rather than deduct, which would mean more federal than ever – and state! – so I say to him: Gary, no one pays all their taxes, so why you? Plus I also remind him we give him bonuses by letting him take as many broken foot-longs as he wants at the end of any State’s Fair day, so you’d think he’d drive schnecks to us at the fair whistling Dixie, but what I just said brings up another thing that bothers me – boy I’ll tell you, Father, this whole wiener and schneck business really does keep me awake at night.
It is stressful, Father. And on top of what I’ve just told you is this whole business of childhood labor laws. My understanding recently from what my husband Yashu heard from a well-read neighbor of ours is that under sixteen is too young for any job, which to me sounds like more of this garbage you always hear. I agree that when it comes to a shy, extremely thin, starved young girl in a crowded clothes factory stitching her fingers to a rusty old Singer in Czechoslovakia, this is obviously something we need laws passed to stop, but we’re not talking about Czechoslovakia, or even Russia here; we’re talking a State’s Fair. In fact, we’re talking the Wisconsin State’s Fair, a family event wholesome people have enjoyed for decades, probably since John Hancock and those drew up the states. Not to mention I’ve told all my nieces who work in our tent, and I always will tell them: Young ladies, there’s a way to deal with men. There’s a way to give men what they need without you yourself getting in trouble. It might not be exactly what some men want, but still they’ll walk away from you happy, possibly even in love with you, and they sure as heck won’t later call you a floozy or a whore or any of these types of names. I mean, Jesus Christ, Father, you don’t want the rabbit dead, though on the other hand I understand there are pressures on a maturing girl nowadays; there are societal pressures and the pressures of her own bodily and romantic needs; these are all understandable, which is why a young lady should, at some point in her life, under the correct circumstances, give a guy something. But for God’s sake, I say to the girls working for me, don’t get pregnant! So with men do only what you have to. And of course remember, after you’re done, to wash your hands. This is the advice I give, Father, and if these fifteen-year-old girls weren’t working at our tent to hear it, they might never hear it, and then where would they be? Certainly a maturing girl’s parents rarely talk about such things, Father. You and I both know that. It takes an aunt, or an aunt-like person, and often it also takes a situation like a State’s Fair concessions tent – you know, where sure there’s long hours but also a certain amount of laughter in the air, on top of plenty of extended family working toward a common goal.
What, Father? What’s the common goal? Profit, I suppose. And, Father, I hear myself say the word profit in this church of yours and already I feel evil. But, if you could tell me, what is so wrong about profit? It’s the heart of the American system, or so I was taught in school time and again, and America, from what I still many times hear on even cable news, has always been an extremely God-orientated country. In fact, at the fair I always try, time allowing, to read the words In God We Trust on every dollar we take in – I agree trust isn’t as strong a word as love, but once you start printing money you don’t go changing it or you’ll find yourself dealing with counterfeits. Which is another thing that stresses me but not in the sense of it being a sin I might have committed – more like one maybe committed against me.
But, yes, to get back to the point, we try to stock as many schnecks as possible, Father, and we sell them without prejudice, and we also sell the, watchamacallit . . . near-beer, which might be at the heart of what most bothers me today. Discount near-beer, this is; my husband Yashu knows a German who brings kegs of it in cheap from almost to Iowa, and I mean very cheap – I have no idea how, after his gasoline and oil, he affords to sell it to us as low as he does, but we don’t ask, and what this near-beer does is allow us to sell to minors. To be perfectly honest with you, Father, there is a tiny bit of alcohol in this near-beer, but our inspector, who tends to be very tough on us, tells us it’s legal for minors as far as he’s concerned, and I don’t think my husband Yashu is bribing him to be less concerned than otherwise, though I can’t say this for sure, since Yashu is always walking out from that curtained-off stockroom and snatching twenties from the register used by the kids who sell for us. That’s yet another thing that stresses me: that Yashu keeps snatching any bill larger than a ten and walking it back into our stockroom; I guess he doesn’t trust our workers, but what kind of message does this send to these kids?
I tell him the message it sends is that as soon as they get a chance, they should pocket and keep any twenties they take in, since he figures they’ll do it anyway. I mean, Father, when you don’t trust your own provider, won’t that lead to trouble down the pike? Who will you finally trust? No one? And what is Yashu doing with all that cash? Burying it in the backyard, he tells me, but that too stresses me since what happens if he passes on, leaving me clueless about just where to dig? Not to mention how do I know our cash is really under that sod – and not lost from him investing in stocks in the market?
Anyways, yes, the inspector says the amount of alcohol in our near-beer is fine for minors to drink, though I’d say don’t let a toddler have it instead of soda since who can say these alcohol percentages are always correct – you get the gallons from near the bottom of the vat, which these gallons driven to us by the German probably are, and who knows how much as far as these percentages go. But what bugs me most about our near-beer, Father, is what my husband tells my nieces and nephews and such who work our front lines, and that is to charge underage teens at least an extra twenty-five cents per cup for this beer, and to hand cups of it over the counter to these underage teens as if you’re dealing on the sly, looking both ways just before you hand over, as if you’re watching out for police. This, of course, gets these underage customers all excited about drinking what they think is true beer but isn’t. And Father, I’m telling you these underage customers then tell their underage friends like wildfire, and soon we have dozens of pimpled faces “sneaking up” to our tent, paying us extra for beer that’s dregs if it has any kick to it at all, then rushing off like they’re getting away with murder. Not far from our tent you’ll see some of these teens giggling and carrying on as if they’re drunk when in fact they aren’t, which is fine I suppose, but there’s something about this whole business of deceiving them that bothers me when I finally lay my head on the pillow. Maybe it’s the irony of how Yashu and I use these kids’ desire to drink illegally to get money from them legally. Or maybe it’s that I actually do, in my heart of hearts, fear that the near-beer we sell has more wham than we and our inspector and the German believe.
But back to the missing schnecks. Though they have slightly to do with the near-beer. Come to think of it, they too have to do with the childhood labor laws I’m still not sure exist – and of course if those laws do exist, there’s the question of whether breaking a law is always a sin. Anyways, when it comes to our near-beer, one of my young nieces was the best of any of our workers at selling it – a real smiler, she – and my husband and I were all for her sales tactics, until roughly six months after one year’s fair, when she left Wisconsin for Canada unmarried. Maybe I shouldn’t confess to you what might be one of her biggest sins, but maybe she already confessed it in this very booth – not to mention if my family members could confess big sins for me, I wouldn’t mind in the least.
Anyways, this smiling niece of mine, whose name I won’t mention – though for this discussion only, let’s call her Joan – she started out as one of our barkers, which we would use back then. You know, you hardly see barkers around in these days of neon signs, but back then we’d use them, this niece of mine Joan one. What worked best, Father, was when our barkers yelled, “Foot-long hotdogs, barbie-CUE, ice-cold lemonade; Mom, we got Pop on ice; wienie, wienie, wienie!”
I think it’s cute too! And our barkers would shout it smiling and, Father, I’m telling you, it worked: Yashu was on the backyard late every night burying handfuls of twenties.
But I’m getting away here from possible sins. This-here Joanie, as I might have said, was my niece, and she ran off to Canada after the one summer she worked at our fair tent, and that was the same summer the man with the monkey walked around the fair. Much was said about this man months later, but that August everyone was just excited about him: by gosh he had a monkey, which, as you know, you don’t see many of in Wisconsin except for at the zoo, where, back then, you paid to see that Samson the Gorilla, who, as you may know, scared more than charmed like your smaller monkey can. And this fellow at the fair had a smaller monkey, not exactly your organ-grinding type but along those lines, and by that I mean he – the man now, is to whom I’m referring – had people thinking his monkey was cute and therefore that he, the man himself, was a harmless sort. It’s amazing how quickly people judge people by just one pet they take public; for example, who even nods at those who walk bulldogs? The point I’m trying to make here is you can imagine, Father, how this Joanie, at her age back then, took a shine to this man with the small monkey. She probably met him on one of her work breaks away from our tent, where the smell of her blouses often suggested she smoked – though come to think of it in this church here, it could have been only the man with the monkey who smoked.
And I don’t like to gossip, Father, but let’s just say that when you have a young lady and a charming man and cigarettes and smiling and talking intensely against the deadlines of work breaks, the next thing the young lady knows, she can find her face flushed with what she believes is love – and then, if she doesn’t handle the man wisely, she can find herself in the kind of fix she’s been raised to avoid.
No, I can’t say for sure she was pregnant, Father. Who can ever say any of these things for sure? What I can swear on a Bible about is that a man did have a small monkey that year at the fair. And that it did escape from him, and that, as far as my husband Yashu and I know, it stole quite a few of our schnecks.
I think it escaped off the leash because the man wasn’t watching it, and my theory says he wasn’t watching because he and Joanie hid in our stockroom until after we left for the night, at which point these two lovebirds, in the privacy of the darkness then in our tent, went ahead and, you know, made time.
And what gets me is Joanie wouldn’t have met this man if Yashu and I hadn’t encouraged her flirtatious ways with customers while she was selling for us the near-beer. Do you see how it’s all connected, Father? My husband and I wanted more profits – and as a result an unwed niece finds herself with child? Do you see how a young woman pretends to watch for police while smiling and flirting and along comes a man with a monkey and she and the man get to talking and laughing, then chatting and serious flirting and kissing and on and on? Until she’s pregnant and runs off to live in shame? In Canada? Claiming she went there to be an artist when in fact all she ever made creatively, as far as I know these many years later, was a vest made from plastic six-pack holders?
Father, nobody leaves her family and good, cash-paying employment to be an artist. Especially an artist in Canada. I don’t care how much you like that French-Canadian accent, or how much you believe snow piled high around you will force you to make something from nothing people would pay to hang on their walls more than they would a stuffed bass. It just makes no sense to be an artist in Canada. If you ask me, it makes no sense to be an artist anywhere, but if you do happen to be that kind of a dreamer, I’m fairly sure you’d go someplace extra warm, like, say for instance, Costa Rica, where at least you’d save on sweaters, heating bills, and things of that nature such as shovels and salt.
Plus, you have the many colors down there. For example, those red and blue parrots. You need colors for art was what I was taught in school, especially your brighter colors, which is the main reason I never swallowed whole this Joanie’s story about being an artist in Canada. I mean, come on, Father. You must agree with me.
You’re not sure, Father? Okay, then here’s another fact: when the police found the monkey, it had frosting on its lip. Or so it appeared to their eyes. Which proves the monkey ate at least one schneck, which pretty much proves he took ours, and how does a monkey steal and eat a good number of schnecks – at night, when the State’s Fair is closed – unless that monkey’s owner was in our tent, preoccupied with something that caused him to lose his head?
I realize that, Father. And if you say it’s not my fault, I’ll try to believe that. With the appropriate thanks to you.
No, Father. That’s it. I really do think that’s it for now. Other than, since we’re on the subject of the State’s Fair, Yashu and I have sometimes, when business has gotten slow, snuck in a few of our workers by using saliva to transfer those ink-marks they stamp on the back of your hand to prove you’ve paid your way in. But already – I mean before confessing this slight indiscretion – I was feeling more relaxed. Though right now I’ll still ask pardon from God, as well as penance from you, Father. Unless you yourself could swear on a Bible that nothing said here was a sin.
Mark Wisniewski is the author of the novel Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman (Hi Jinx Press, 1997), and the short story collection All Weekend with the Lights On (Leaping Dog Press, 2001). His short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Triquarterly, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Best American Short Stories. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.