Finally, I pushed my way back through people, intending to reach up and take Frog in mid-sentence and risk the consequences. I’d just raised my arms when the big robot Paul Bunyan called “Hello, everyone,” in a clear deep bass that penetrated through walls like the woofer of a boom box and everyone fell silent, including Frog. Paul’s vocal equipment had been upgraded, I thought, since I was a kid.
“The Paul Bunyan Look-Alike contest will begin in three minutes. Everyone that thinks they look like me should gather in the roped-off area just below Babe here. Again, everyone…”
Come to think of it, Thor Olsen would look a little like Paul Bunyan, especially if he wore a red lumberjack shirt. I didn’t know Thor so well that I thought I could pick him out of a crowd of big, full-bearded, guys in lumberjack shirts, however.
People were streaming out, and since Frog stopped talking, no one was hanging around. I held out my hands, Frog jumped down into them, and quickly slipped off into Ellie’s bag. We joined the crowd heading to the Paul Bunyan Look-Alike contest. I spotted Thor, with his wife and the kids, about halfway there. Elsa Olsen is six-five herself and that’s what clinched it.
“Thor, Thor!” I yelled. He turned his head, waved at me and kept on going toward the contest.
“Pagan!” a woman snapped at me.
I gave her a look and fought my way through the crowd toward Thor, hoping vainly that Ellie was able to trail along in my wake.
“Thor,” I huffed as I finally got close to him. “I need your help.”
“Oh, hello, Karl,” he greeted me, then took a look at his watch. “I’m due at the contest. It’ll have to be quick.”
I nodded. He really meant it, or he would have mentioned the weather. So I ignored the preliminaries too and just laid it on directly. “I’ve got an emergency hull job that needs some of that new diamond-aluminum composite Japanese stuff.”
“Diluminum.”
“Whatever. I need a four foot square of the stuff, right away.”
When a seven-foot, three-hundred-pound, giant frowns down on you, something happens to your self-confidence. I began to feel like I could probably explain things to that imaginary family whose vacation I was going to ruin by being late back to the shop.
“I, I need to replace the roof on my boat shed, too, so I’ll be needing about a thousand square feet. May as well pick that up, too.”
A twinkle came to the corner of Thor’s eye and he reached into his pocket and came up with a key.
“Go on over and start loading. I should be around in about an hour. Run you a little over three grand, I’d guess. But you’ll never need to roof again.”
“Whatever.”
We shook. I took Ellie’s hand and we started to work our way out of the crowd. We were almost out of the gate when someone hooked the handle of Ellie’s bag and dumped Frog and assorted things on the walk. Ellie was down in a flash, scooping stuff up, but not quite fast enough.
“Look!” cried a kid, “They’re stealing the talking frog!”
“Hey, he’s right. Hey you, stop!”
Someone grabbed my arms, someone else grabbed Ellie, and the kid’s mother grabbed Frog.
“RRRRibbit!” said Frog, and hopped out of the startled woman’s hand and toward the gate.
“Yuk, it’s real,” she screeched.
“Geeze it’s a big one!”
“I’ll catch it,” shouted half a dozen small boys, who ran off in hot pursuit of Frog.
The hands disappeared from my arms and melted anonymously into the crowd. The woman holding Ellie let go, backed away, and soon disappeared. I grabbed Ellie and headed for the parking lot. Somewhere in my head a small voice was telling me I was missing out on a major lawsuit.
The parking lot was swimming with frog-chasing small boys when we got there. We climbed in the jeep and in a quick moment of instant Grandpa-Granddaughter eye communication, didn’t shut the doors. It needed to air out anyway.
“Oh!” Ellie squealed as a green missile landed in her lap. “Am I glad to see you!”
“There it is!” shouted a young hunter, but we had the doors closed and were on our way before the disappointed frog posse reached us.
“We are becoming somewhat pressed for time,” Frog remarked.
“Especially if I have to load the roofing part of the buy. We’ll have to strap it to the roll bars, overhead.” I was not looking forward to lifting all that myself. But I shouldn’t have worried. When we got there, Frog was an amphibious dynamo. He located some angle iron and tongue-welded a couple uprights to the jeep’s roll bars to keep the Diluminum panels from sliding off. Then he hot-wired the forklift somehow. It was one of these new computer-driven models, so I guess he just cybernetically talked the thing into helping us. Anyway, by the time Thor Olsen got there we had her about all finished. The forklift was back where it had been parked, Frog was back in Ellie’s bag, and I was just tightening up the final tiedown.
“In a bit of a hurry, huh?” Thor remarked, looking very impressed. “That’s some heavy work.”
“I’ve seen worse. Got customers waiting.”
“Here’s the receipt. I’ll send a bill. And let me know how the roofing works out—I haven’t figured out a good way to fasten it yet. It treats drill bits like they were made of plastic.”
Now he tells me. How the devil was I going to be able to cut the stuff?
“Thanks for the warning.”
“No problem. You might keep an eye on the weather.”
“You bet.” I waved and he waved and we were off.
The trip back to Nisswa was a bit cooler with cloud shadows taking some sting out of the Sun. A shower or two would sure be welcome.
“Grandpa, it smells like rain,” Ellie said.
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Conditions are quite unstable,” Frog added. “Our models indicate the front has strengthened.”
I glanced at Frog in surprise. I’d kind of gotten used to him, but now this reminded me that Frog really was connected to, well, something bigger than the U.S. weather service anyway. Driving gives a person time to contemplate a lot of worst-case scenarios, and the rest of the trip was filled with a dark, juicy, suitably depressing worry. Just exactly what was I getting into?
We pulled up to the shop ten minutes late, and my worst-case scenario didn’t have it exactly right. But it wasn’t too far off. The irate family waiting for me to open turned out to be a black mother and daughter from St. Paul, and their boat was tied up by the boathouse with a broken spark plug wire. They’d actually rowed all the way in from Gull. Frog did something to the wire with his tongue while I had them looking the other direction and we got them on their way in fifteen minutes, in plenty of time to catch the fireworks at their resort. So they left all smiles.
It took another half hour for me to mark, Frog to cut, and Ellie and I to bend the shroud into shape. I figured we were starting down the home stretch; it was just a thirty-minute drive down to Steamboat Bay and we could rent a boat from Cragun’s or someone to take us out to the spaceship. From what Frog said he could do, installation would be maybe a ten-minute job in the water, so we’d be back by Ellie’s bedtime. I pulled on some swim trunks and threw a clean pair of work pants in my athletic bag.
Then I started calling around Steamboat Bay for a boat rental and discovered a flaw in my thinking. A last minute rental on the Fourth of July? With everyone and their uncle out on the bay fishing or getting ready to watch the resort fireworks display?