Isn't It Romantic?

Next to the video tapes was a door marked Private and he motioned for Pierre to follow him as he sidestepped to it through the high walls of clutter. With his hand on the doorknob, Owen stopped and peered at Pierre solemnly. “You gotta say, ‘Go Big Red.’”

Pierre just stared at him.

“It’s what we say in honor of our four-time national champs. You try it now: ‘Go Big Red!’”

Pierre, just mimicking, said, “Go beeg uhr-red.”

“Now say, ‘What game you watching, ref?’” But Owen laughed and the door gave way to a bungalow attached to the gas station.

The front room seemed furnished wholly in red blankets, bleacher cushions, jackets, banners, pens, glassware, and framed posters of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Even the lamps and red telephone were particular to the team. Owen heaved his sizeable self down on his blanketed sofa and with fresh eyes surveyed the magnificence of what he had created there. “I just wish I could be looking at all this like you are now. I’m kinda jaded after all these years. There’s fancy touches I hardly see anymore. And the thrill of a perfectly unified interior motif isn’t there like it once was.”

Pierre was in scan mode and unsure of his emotions. “C’est dégueulasse,” he said. (It’s disgusting.)

Owen got up and went to a bookcase that held his many tomes on wine as well as Husker memorabilia and annuals that went back to the days when Bob Devaney so brilliantly coached. “What’d you say your surname was?” Hearing nothing from Pierre, he asked. “Pierre . . . what?”

“Smith,” Pierre said.

“Are you funning me, Pete?”

“It is that we are British on my father’s side.”

Owen frowned like a welfare worker. “Was that a burden when you were a boy?”

Pierre shrugged and did that puffy French thing with his mouth. “They could not pronounce. I was called Smeet.”

Owen seemed to get the shivers. And then he hunted up the Smith name in his vintner’s directories as Pierre fascinatedly wandered about the bungalow, examining the Husker paraphernalia. Wallpaper borders bore the Nebraska Cornhusker logo. A dining room sideboard was filled with Husker dishware and glassware and steins. A signed picture of Doctor Tom Osborne hung there like a household saint. The bathroom was painted red. Pierre switched on the light and heard the Husker theme song of “There is no place like Nebraska” harangue him from the overhead vent before he hurriedly switched it off. A sponge finger gesturing that the team was #1 was on the commode’s flush handle and the seat cover was furred in red. Pierre hesitantly lifted it like someone fearing the worst in a horror movie. There was no blood, no floating head.

Owen went to another book. “Here we are. Pierre Smith, neego-see-ant.”

Walking out of the bathroom, Pierre corrected his pronunciation: “Négociant.”

“Why, for goodness sakes, you’re the WalMart of wines over there!”

“But no. That is my big father.”

“Your beeg fahzer? Oh, your grandfather! But you’re inheriting the business, right?”

“Peut-être.” (Perhaps.)

Owen was all but overtaken by delirious joy. “You could not know this, but it’s been my life’s work and my great big impossible dream to someday chaperone my wines into the loving embrace of a fancy wine importer, and lo and behold from out of the blue comes waltzing into my life the MVP of the wholesale market!”

“Yes?”

Owen put a Budweiser football schedule marker at his name and solemnly placed the directory in his bookcase. With wet eyes he said, “I have a feeling of reverence about this occasion. I mean, what are the odds

of meeting you here, now, without a handy boost from good ol’ divine providence? You represent my ship coming in, Mon-sir Pierre Smith. And me? I represent the flat-out best new wine you’ll ever taste.”

Pierre registered that with great disbelief, and a feeling of What-else-can-go-wrong? “You are makings the wines?”

“Absolutely!”

“Here?”

“You bet!”

Pierre pointed to the floor. “In Nebraska?”

Owen crooked his finger in a hithering gesture and hustled out back through the kitchen and screen door to the yard while getting out his padlock key. Pierre hesitantly followed. Owen called behind him, “Experimented with sixty percent cabernet sauvignon grape and about thirty percent merlot, plus some cabernet franc and malbec to keep it true to the soft and fruity Bordelaise style.” He unlocked a padlock to a root cellar whose doors were aslant at his feet. “But what I happened on by sheer accident was the petit verdot grape, which doesn’t yield all that much so it’s not commercially viable, but you add about five percent of that to the mix and you get surprising depth of character and a rich, reddish-black color in an otherwise fragile wine.”