Going to Chicago

A Novel

Rob Levandoski

New York

To my father, the real Clyde,

one of the original Three Travelers

“You have come here to see the great drama of man’s struggle to lift himself to the stars. The spectacle is enormous, for it includes all the manifestations of man’s restless energies—the patient laborious researches of the cloistered scientist, exploration, adventure, war, the vast works of industry, the slow climb from the naked cave man to his descendant of today.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

One/Monkey Wrench

Do I remember the Great Depression? Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I remember it. So many people out of work. Out of hope things would ever get better. The whole country wobbly with worry. That’s not to say young people didn’t have their big dreams. Their burning ambitions. Their uncontrollable urges. They did.

The one thing Will Randall and I had that smoldering August of 1934 was ants in our pants. We’d lived the meat of our lives there in Bennett’s Corners, Ohio. Done everything there was to do a thousand times. As Will used to say, we were ready to kill that place. Ready to go kill someplace else. Even if it was just for a little while.

Will first got the bug to go to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1930, I guess it was, when we entered the high school in Brunswick Center and our English teacher, Miss Ina Mae Blanche, informed us we were on the doorstep of adulthood, that it would be a good idea to start reading the newspaper, to know what was going on in the world. “Miss Blanche,” I wisecracked from my desk in the back. “We already know what’s going on in the world. Nothing good!”

I got the giggles I expected.

“All the more reason to read the paper, isn’t it then, Mr. Ace Gilbert?” Miss Blanche said. While I squirmed, Will, like Moses dutifully chiseling the Ten Commandments in stone, wrote in his spiral notebook: Start reading the newspaper.

And of course he did start reading the newspaper. From that day on. Every afternoon after school, before changing his clothes or even taking a leak, he’d walk over to Ruby & Rudy’s General Store and page through one of the Cleveland Presses stacked on the counter. He’d read every story, never tearing or creasing or smudging a single page, and then he’d put it back on the stack so no one would suspect they were buying a used paper. Ruby and Rudy didn’t mind. They liked Will Randall. And so did I.

That was how Will learned about the World’s Fair being planned in Chicago, from an article in the Cleveland Press. That was when he started planning our pilgrimage. “You and I are going to that fair,” he announced one Saturday afternoon when we were sharing an eight-ounce Coca-Cola in front of his father’s Shell garage.

“I’m game,” I said.

He already had it worked out in his head. “Lucky for us, the Fair is on a collision course with our coming of age,” he said. “It’ll open in May of 1933. We’ll still be too young to go that year. But it’s going to run for two consecutive summers, Ace. Two consecutive summers! That second summer we’ll be graduated. Making our own decisions. And that’s when we’ll go.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Let me say right here that Will Randall and I were two very different squirrels. He was just as adventurous as me, but unlike me, he was purposeful and cautious, reluctant to do anything, or try anything, that didn’t somehow enrich his life. He’d agonize for days over doing the simplest things, weighing the good and bad of it until I was out of my mind. When he did decide to undertake something, he then had to plan it out. Make lists. Timetables. Draw maps. Decide in advance how every minute should and would unfold. He’d prepare for every possible emergency, no matter how remote. He carried a safety pin in his pants pockets just in case his zipper broke, for christsake. Just that kind of squirrel.

The World’s Fair became an obsession with him. The more information he amassed about it, the more information he needed, and the more he had to go see the Fair for himself. He wasn’t content with the occasional stories he found in the Press. He had his Aunt Mary in Indiana send him clippings from the Chicago papers. At night he zeroed in on the big Chicago radio stations, WENR, WGN—Will had the fingers of a safecracker when it came to a radio dial—and WLS, his favorite because it was owned by the same big wonderful company that sold him the very radio he listened to them on, Sears & Roebuck. For a graduation present, his aunt sent him an Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair, personally signed by Fair president Rufus C. Dawes. To Will, it was like receiving an autographed Bible. It was filled with photographs and maps and page after page of the grandest-sounding manure you ever read in your life. He shoveled every word of it into his brain. Tried to shovel my brain full, too.

Needless to say, our reasons for going to the World’s Fair were night and day. Will wanted to see the technological wonders of the modern age, as he continually put it, to understand how things ticked, to find out what the smart people of the world were thinking and doing, to prepare himself for the glorious future that was sure to wash the depression from our shores any day now. I wasn’t against preparing myself for the glorious future. I liked knowing how things ticked as well as the next guy. But the closer we got to our trip, the clearer my reason for going became. I wanted to find a willing city girl and poke her.

So after four years of thinking and planning, and me masturbating like a fool, we were going to Chicago! Nothing could stop us. Not the Depression. Not the embarrassing death of Will’s father the previous summer. We were eighteen. High school graduates. Men. The only question that remained now was whether Will’s younger brother Clyde was going with us.

Neither Will nor I wanted Clyde to come along. Reason One: Clyde was only thirteen. Reason Two: Clyde was a pain in the ass. But Will had so painstakingly built up the educational value of the World’s Fair to his mother, that she insisted Clyde go with us. “Clyde’s got to prepare himself for the glorious future, too,” she said. No sense arguing. Mrs. Randall was as hard and sour as the times.

Good news struck two days before we were to leave. Clyde’s left ear clogged up with wax. No way he could go to Chicago now, we figured, not with the side of his head throbbing. Lucky for us Clyde’s threshold for pain was low.

It didn’t take much to start him crying. Well, you couldn’t really call it crying; it was this endless hum, like an old radio with bad tubes, that just went on and on, loud when the pain sharpened, soft when the pain eased, but always there. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. You just wanted to reach out and slap his head, just like you’d slap an old radio with bad tubes.

The danger, of course, was that Clyde’s wax wouldn’t be bad enough to keep him home; only bad enough to make our trip miserable. A week-long adventure in the great city of Chicago, Illinois, serenaded every minute by that endless, endless hum. Will wasn’t as worried as me, though. “Don’t fret it, Ace,” he said, “Mother won’t let Clyde out of bed, much less out of Bennett’s Corners. It’ll be just you and me killing the road. Just you and me, Ace, drinking in the technological wonders of the modern age.”

“While Clyde lays in bed humming,” I added joyfully.

The morning before we were to begin our journey west, Mrs. Randall threw us a most unexpected monkey wrench. She decided to take Clyde to the doctor. Will was absolutely dazed with disbelief. So was I. Mrs. Randall had never taken either of her boys to the doctor before. She was as tight with a dollar as she was hard and sour. In the Randall family, unless you were on your deathbed, you just rode your afflictions out. In the six years I’d lived in Bennett’s Corners, Will had ridden out the mumps, an abscessed molar, a bladder infection that turned his urine yellow as an egg yolk, and a cut from a rusty Boy Scout hatchet that went right to the white of his knuckle bones. God knows how many undoctored maladies Clyde hummed his way through.

Will called me right after his mother and Clyde headed off in the tow truck for Berea, the nearest town with a doctor. “Where you at?” Will asked without a hello. “We got a lot to do today.” I could hear him pacing the linoleum right through the receiver.

“I just finished loading my stuff,” I said. “I’ll be there soon as my mother fixes lunch.”

“You packed your new coffee pot, didn’t you?”

“Absolutely,” I said. I used the word absolutely all the time in those years. Guess I liked the reassuring pop of it.

“And the coffee?”

“Absolutely.”

“I bought an extra pound just in case,” he said.

“For two guys who don’t drink coffee, we’re sure taking enough,” I said.

“We’ll want to drink lots of it when we get on the road,” he said.

Just the way Will said that—“when we get on the road”—made me want a cup of roadside coffee as much as I wanted to find a willing city girl. As it turned out we wouldn’t brew a single pot the entire week. And not because of what happened to us. Even if things had gone as planned it’s doubtful we would have made any. But it was a wonderful thought that morning on the phone: Will and me sitting on the side of the road over a campfire, hundreds of miles from home, bitter steam rolling out the nose of that big tall pot I’d bought at Ruby & Rudy’s. I wouldn’t become a coffee drinker until World War II; all those years when I was in England, every cup I drank, and it was ten or fifteen a day, made me think of Will Randall and the pots of roadside coffee we never drank on our trip to the Chicago World’s Fair. “Mother’s motioning for me to get off the phone,” I said to Will. “See you about one.”

“One? Jeez, Ace. We got a lot to do.”

We did have a lot to do: Load the old Boy Scout tent and Will’s gear into my car; walk over to Ruby & Rudy’s and buy our groceries; and then after the fifteen minutes all that would take, sit on the porch for eight or nine hours while Will studied the ink off the new Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois road maps he’d ordered through the Shell Oil district man. That would take us right to bedtime, and after a good night’s sleep, which we knew full well we wouldn’t get, we’d be killing the road. “I’ll come straight after lunch,” I promised.

“You better. We got a lot to do.”

“Absolutely. How’s Clyde’s wax?”

The life went out of Will’s voice. “Mother’s on the way to the doctor with him now.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“Wish I was.”

“That’s awful, Will. What if the doctor fixes him? You don’t think she’d actually make us take him along, do you?”

Will hung up without saying good-bye.

I ate lunch as fast as I could. It was probably bacon and eggs. We ate bacon and eggs morning, noon, and night in those depression years, given that we raised chickens and pigs on our little farm on Stony Hill Road. I hugged my mother and told her not to worry. I’d said good-bye to my dad that morning when he left for work. Somehow he was hanging onto his job at the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Company in Akron, though he’d been demoted from salaried foreman to hourly tire-builder and his hours had been cut to twenty a week. We were very grateful for those twenty hours. That stink of rubber on his overalls was more reassuring than anything Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say. I headed for my Model T.

I loved that old machine. If I was going to Chicago, it was flying with me. I say flying for a reason. My whole life was wrapped up in flying then. My dad had flown with the 94th Aero Squadron in World War I, the famous Hat in the Ring bunch. In fact, he and the great Eddie Rickenbacker were best friends, just like Will and I were best friends.

Before the war Dad and Eddie worked together at the Columbus Buggy Co., building race cars, and when Eddie went to work for the Mason Automobile Co. in Des Moines, Dad went with him. Eddie became the top race car driver in the country, setting a land speed record of 134 miles per hour. Dad was his top mechanic. When the Wild Teuton, as Eddie was known on the race circuit, went to France to offer his services as a dogfighter, Dad went with him. They earned their wings after just seventeen days of training. By the end of the war Dad and Eddie had collectively sent twenty-nine German Fokkers and Albatrosses spinning into the vineyards. Eddie twenty-six and Dad three. That’s how I got the name Ace. In honor of the dogfighting aces of World War I. Not just a nickname either, but my legal name. I was born Lawrence Gilbert but when my father came home from France, he immediately had it changed to Ace. Glad he did.

I planned to do the name proud. Just as Jesus was destined to grow up and be Jesus, I’d grow up to become a famous ace and add mightily to the list of Gilbert air victories, just as soon as a new war broke out. That’s why I was wearing an aviator’s cap and goggles that morning, and why my old Model T was fitted with wings and a propeller and had the famous red, white, and blue Hat in the Ring emblem painted on the door.

My T was something to see. I called it a Gilbert SXIII, after the Spad SXIIIs Dad and Eddie flew. My wings weren’t full length of course—you couldn’t drive on narrow country roads with twenty-six feet of wing sticking out—but they did extend a good three feet on either side; double biplane wings, wood and varnished canvas just like real ones, connected with struts and brace wires. When I drove fast, which was all the time, those stubby wings picked up enough air to lift the chassis high on its springs, and keep my wheels tickling the gravel.

I carved the propeller from an old two-by-six; it was full size, the blades tapered just like real ones. I mounted it in front of the radiator, so when the wind hit those tapered blades, that propeller spun like crazy. Looking out through that whirling blur, bouncing and twisting sideways from the wind up under those wings, goddamn if I wasn’t at sixty-five hundred feet looking for Huns over the vineyards of France. Sonofabitch it was fun.

Neither my folks nor Mrs. Randall were crazy about us driving to Chicago and back in the Gilbert SXIII—Will figured it was 284 miles one way—but my dad needed his Plymouth for the daily drive to Akron and Mrs. Randall couldn’t go a week without the tow truck. So, if we were going, and there was no way to stop us now, it would be in the Gilbert SXIII.

You can’t imagine how much fun driving a Model T was. Even the Ts without wings and propellers were fun. Mine was a 1923 touring car. A boxy two-seater. Dad paid $265 for it new and drove it right up until the year we moved to Stony Hill Road and he took his big job at Goodrich. It waited patiently under a tarp in the barn until I turned fourteen, then proudly allowed itself to be transformed by my imagination into an airplane.

I hopped on the running board, waved one last time to my mother, and reached for the spark advance under the steering wheel. Then I ran to the front, and pretending I was giving the propeller a yank, I gave the hand crank my expert twist. The Gilbert SXIII purred like a bushel of cats.

I jumped in and lowered my goggles. The lenses turned the world yellow. Ts didn’t have a clutch and gearshift like others cars. There was one foot pedal on the left to go forward, one in the center to send you jerking in reverse, and one on the right to stop you in your tracks. A lever by your left knee let you choose between high speed or low. I taxied down the front yard in low, and then with my tongue hanging out over my teeth, rammed her into high and gave her as much gas as she could swallow without choking.

Away I flew for Bennett’s Corners.

“The best position in aerial combat is that where one can shoot at the enemy from close range without him being able to reply.”

THE DICTA BOELCKE

Two/White Dust

I flew the Gilbert SXIII straight up Stony Hill Road, painting the cornfields with white dust. I was probably going no faster than twenty-five, but with the wind up under my stubby wings and my hard rubber tires sliding in the gravel, it seemed like I was going three hundred. It was a few minutes past one and the sun was beginning to tilt west. Babcock Road was just ahead. I cut the throttle but stayed in high. I leaned left until I saw the world sideways, just like when you bank an airplane. I waited until I was on top of the intersection, then drove the steering wheel hard. Gravel rattled through the trees. Dust soaked into my tongue and gums and coated my goggles. My right wheels left the road. Then they sat down hard, sending the entire chassis into a frenzy. I was on Babcock now, flying straight west.

God but I wanted to be a dogfighter like my dad and Eddie Rickenbacker, hunting down Huns, sending Fokkers and Albatrosses spinning into the vineyards. Not that I had anything against Germans. Eddie Rickenbacker was a German by blood, after all. My own mother was the daughter of one-quarter Germans, making me one-sixteenth German myself. No, I was only against the Germans who flew airplanes over France.

One of the most famous Germans who flew airplanes over France was an Argentina-born asthmatic named Oswald Boelcke. Dad and Eddie Rickenbacker revered him even though he was on the other side. Boelcke was one of the first true aces of the war. Recorded forty victories, way more than Dad and Eddie. It was the studious Herr Boelcke who first set down the rules for the new art of aerial combat. The Dicta Boelcke, it was called. Dogfighters on both sides followed it. Dad taught me all ten rules. I planned to use them when World War II broke out, but the U.S. Army Air Force wouldn’t let me fly. Wouldn’t even put me on a bomber crew. They sent me to cooking school.

As I flew along Babcock Road that morning I saw a wobbling dot on the hill ahead of me. No doubt who that wobbling dot was. It was that turtle-faced Marty Boyle on his red bicycle. The ten rules of the Dicta Boelcke went crazy inside my head.

Rule One: The best position in aerial combat is that where you can shoot at the enemy from close range without him being able to reply. Easy enough. Marty didn’t even know I was behind him. I’d be on him before he could fart or pray.

Rule Two: Climb before the attack and dive from the rear. Altitude imparts speed in the dive. Perfect. If I cut my speed a bit, I’d arrive at the top of that hill just as he was reaching the valley on the other side.

Rule Three: Use natural cover. Clouds and the glare of the sun. The sun would be in both our faces, but with the cloud of dust I was coughing up, Marty would look over his shoulder and think I was just some friendly Chevrolet.

Rule Four: Attack when the enemy is unsuspecting and preoccupied with other tasks. Had him again. There were lots of ruts and puddle holes at the bottom of that hill. His eyes and mind would be on those.

Rule Five: Do not fire until the enemy is within range and squarely in your sights. I crawled up the hill just as Marty disappeared into the valley. I dropped into low speed and edged the Gilbert SXIII’s nose over the top. There he was, head down, elbows out, ass high, enjoying the long coast, flat pancake ball glove swinging on his handlebar. I slapped her into high, throttled up and dove for the kill.

Rule Six: The best offensive maneuver is to turn more tightly than one’s opponent, thus eventually coming into a position on his tail. Marty heard my four cylinders banging and swung to the right to let me pass. But I stayed right with him.

Rule Seven: Never turn your back and run from the enemy. Turn and face the enemy with your guns. Marty should have known that rule. When he finally peeked over his shoulder and saw it was me, wings and propeller protruding from a cloud of white dust, his eyes went as round as cereal bowls. He started pedaling for his life.

Rule Eight: To parry an attack from ahead, turn directly towards the opponent and present as small and fast a target as possible. Obviously that rule didn’t apply here since Marty was already in full retreat, ass and elbows even higher than before.

Rule Nine: To parry an attack from behind, enter and maintain as tight a turn as possible to make it as difficult as possible for the enemy to stay on your tail. Marty actually tried this one. He went left and right across the road, bouncing over ruts and stones, trying to shake me. But this was Ace Gilbert he was dogfighting. I wasn’t about to shake. I went straight for the reflector on his back fender.

Marty panicked. He pulled the ball glove off his handlebar and flung it at me. It hit my propeller and shot right back at him. Hit him right in the head. Marty, his bike, and that old pancake ball glove went flying into the ditch. I finished him off with my imaginary machine gun. Enk-enk-enk-enk-enk—enk-enk-enk-enk-enk.

Rule Ten: Foolish acts of bravery are fatal.

Oswald Boelcke, by the way, died during an attack on a squadron of British DH 25s, in October 1916, a year and a half before Dad and Eddie Rickenbacker ever got into the war. Flying a tight formation, he clipped the wing of a fellow Hun and plummeted into the vineyards. I’m sure he must have spent his last seconds on earth embarrassed as hell.

As I sped up Babcock Road I took a piece of chalk from my shirt pocket and marked another little X on the side of the door. There were already dozens of little Xs there. About half courtesy of turtle-faced Marty Boyle.

I took a right on Townline Road and flew straight to Bennett’s Corners. In the morning we’d be killing the road to Chicago. Me and Will Randall, the best friend I ever had. Maybe Clyde was coming along, too.

“Only a hundred years ago Chicago was a huddle of huts, hewn of logs, clinging to the shadows of Fort Dearborn for safety from the Indians, and four years after its incorporation as a village, in 1833, its population, conquering patches of dreary swamp, had reached 4,000. Today it is nearly 4,000,000—3,376,438 for the sake of accuracy, by the census of 1930—and growing at a rate of 70,000 a year.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Three/Long Burn

Bennett’s Corners is not a real place. By that I mean it’s not an official town. No legal boundaries. No mayor. Not on any map. It’s just a place where six roads come together like slices of a pie. A place where a few people decided to settle in and practice life. Don’t ask me who Bennett was. Probably one of the first settlers to buy land there after the Indians were chased out. Just as Sherman’s Corners to the south was named after some forgotten pioneer named Sherman and Goodman’s Corners to the west after somebody named Goodman. By the time Will and I came along, the Shermans and Goodmans and Bennetts were long gone.

Today Bennett’s Corners is like any other lump of suburban vomit: housing developments, strip malls full of hairdressers and dry cleaners and Chinese takeouts; and a few precious pieces of open land with plywood signs heralding the coming of more housing developments and more strip malls. As I speak they’re installing not one, but two traffic lights, so all the new people who think they’ve actually moved to the country can safely maneuver through those six roads coming together, and get to their jobs in Cleveland, twenty-five miles away, alive and on time.

In 1934 Bennett’s Corners was still a wonderful place to live, protected from the outside world by miles of cow pastures and cornfields. There were two churches, the shabby Free-Will Baptist Church and the handsome United Methodist Church. There was a barber shop just big enough for a chair and spittoon. There was the community ballfield and a cemetery surrounded by a fine black iron fence paid for by the Ladies’ Aid Society. There were a handful of white clapboard houses and a couple old sway-back barns. There was Ruby & Rudy’s General Store, a strong, two-story frame building that would years later become my first place of business, the R&R Luncheonette. And there was Randall’s Shell Garage, a low, flat-roofed brick building with one bay for repairs and a long portico that stuck out over the pumps.

Both Randall’s garage—which from the fifties on was a beer joint—and Ruby & Rudy’s fine building—in its last incarnation Poppie’s Pizza—have just been torn down so Townline Road can be widened to four lanes. Bennett’s Corners, Ohio, like thousands of such unofficial places across the country, is being butchered on the sacrificial alter of country living.

So, on that late August day I was flying north on Townline Road toward the Corners. I passed the Warner farm—the Ruby half of Ruby & Rudy’s General Store was a Warner before she married Rudy Zuduski and became a Polack storekeeper—and I passed the Loomis place and the Hyler place and the cemetery and the barber shop. I started my descent in front of the ballfield, skidded past Ruby & Rudy’s, landed safe and sound in front of Randall’s garage.

Will was outside leaning against the kerosene pump, reading his Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair. I yanked off my cap and goggles and hopped to the ground. I just had to laugh every time I saw Will. We both wore our hair straight back in the fashionable pompadour style of the day. Will’s pompadour, however, never stayed pomped. It was fine when he first slicked it back in the morning with water and Brylcreem, but as the day progressed it kept rising up. By noon he looked like a porcupine. His drooping nose, timid chin, and high puffed cheeks didn’t help. Neither did his eyes. They were shy and blinky, hiding the fact that he was probably one of the smartest and most stubborn souls to ever walk the earth. “Where you been?” Will said. He carefully folded the guidebook before sticking it in his back pocket.

“Clyde and your mother back from the doctor yet?” I asked.

“You don’t see the tow truck, do you?”

I didn’t.

Will laughed at my foolishness and we went inside.

The place had the smell of dust and oil. Will sat in his father’s brown swivel chair and spun around. After three revolutions he propped his feet on the counter and pulled out his guidebook again. “This is something we sure don’t want to miss,” he said, paraphrasing what he read as he read it. “By the Thirty-seventh Street entrance there’s a poultry show, with an international egg-laying derby as the principal feature. Champion hens from twenty-eight states and Canada, and four other nations competing. Doesn’t say which ones.”

“We absolutely don’t want to miss that,” I said, watching out the window for the tow truck. Will made several more revolutions in the chair and then slammed the guidebook on the counter. “Jeez, Ace. What if the doctor says Clyde can go?”

I didn’t want Clyde coming along either. Still, I couldn’t stand seeing Will upset. He wasn’t sewn with very strong thread. He was liable to throw something or kick a hole in the plaster. “It’ll be swell having Clyde along,” I said. “If that’s the way it goes.”

“You wouldn’t want that little pest along if he was your brother.”

“It’ll be swell. We can tease the piss out of him.”

Will wasn’t convinced. He spun some more.

“Better than me teasing the piss out of you for a solid week,” I said. “You know that’s what I’d do.”

Will stopped spinning and went back to the guidebook. “I guess it wouldn’t be that bad.” Again he slapped down the book. This time he clapped his hands in sweet joy. “Can you believe it? We are going to the World’s Fair! Wilford D. Randall and Ace L. Gilbert, Going to the Chicago World’s Fair! Sixteen hours and fifteen minutes from right now!”

His excitement spread to me. I dropped on all fours and started growling like a dog. Will winced. He knew what was coming. “Come on, Ace,” he said, “don’t do it.”

I cocked my head and snarled. I charged like a rabid bulldog. I took his pantleg in my mouth and pulled him off the chair. Soon we were both laughing and rolling on the dusty oily linoleum, a tangle of sweet joy. When we stopped, Will’s pompadour was standing straight up. He raked it back with his fingers, then made sure his zipper wasn’t broken. He had that safety pin in his pocket in case it was. “Doctor probably won’t let him go anyway,” he said.

I fished a bottle of Coca-Cola from the huge red cooler by the door. I popped the cap and took a long burn of it. “Can’t see how he possibly could,” I said. Outside the gravel started crackling and we saw the tow truck’s nose peek under the portico.

Mrs. Randall slid out. She was wearing baggy men’s pants and a sweater buttoned to her neck even though it was eighty-something. She carried a black purse as well as her customary scowl. Her uncombed hair was cropped short in the twenties style. Clyde slid out next. He walked with his head lying on his shoulder, cotton sticking out of his afflicted ear. He carried a paper bag and I knew from his twisted face he was humming.

Mrs. Randall banged through the door. I quickly hid the Coke behind my back. “You owe us a nickel,” she said without looking at me.

“Absolutely.” I raised the Coke for another burn.

“You owe it to us now, Ace.”

That’s how Mrs. Randall was. Hard and sour and tight with a dollar. Tight with a nickel. It wasn’t just the depression or her husband’s embarrassing death that made her that way. She was one of the Granger Township Southams. All the Southams were hard and sour and tight. My own mother, who grew up in Granger Township herself, told me once that the Southams were afraid of going broke in this life and afraid of not going to heaven in the next. As a result they overworked both their farms and their prayers, leaving them poor, guilt-ridden, and generally unhappy. How Will’s mother ended up with Will’s father is anybody’s guess. He was a laugher and a dreamer. You never had to sneak Cokes from the cooler when he was alive. He’d offer you one the second you walked into the garage, and toss you a Baby Ruth, too. I dug a nickel from my pocket and flipped it to Will, who dutifully put it in the cash drawer.

Clyde finally shuffled in. He’d been checking the score on the door of the Gilbert SXIII. He was humming. “There’s our man,” I said.

“Hi Ace. See you shot down another one.”

I demonstrated my invisible machine gun for him. “Went down in a slow spiral of smoke and fire. So, how’s Clyde’s ear, Mrs. Randall?”

She scooted Will from the chair and sat down, putting her own feet on the counter. “Looks like you got a passenger.”

Will melted against the wall. “Jeez.”

Clyde shook his paper bag. “Dr. Craddock gave me a bottle of drops to keep my ear from waxing up again.”

“Two dollars for three cents’ worth of medicine,” Mrs. Randall said.

Will started kicking the wall with his heel. “What if it does wax up? I’m not cutting short our pilgrimage to the World’s Fair because Clyde can’t keep his ears cleaned.”

Mrs. Randall took out the cash drawer and rested it in her lap, ready to count the morning’s receipts. “Don’t have a canary, Will. Your pilgrimage will go just fine. Just make sure he gets his drops.”

Clyde pulled the cotton wad from his ear and showed me the big spot of yellowy ooze. We let Mrs. Randall count in peace and walked up the field to their house, where Will presided over an official World’s Fair meeting. If Clyde was going along, he’d have to keep his humming to a minimum. It was also his responsibility to take his drops on time. “Ace’ll be watching the road and I’ll be watching the maps,” Will told his brother. “It’s your job to watch your watch.”

While Will and Clyde put their gear on the lawn, I taxied the Gilbert SXIII up to the house. There was a lot to load. There was no way we could afford a hotel when we got to Chicago. We’d have to do what most fairgoers from our economic class did. Camp. On top of our suitcases and a week’s worth of food, that meant the big Boy Scout tent and blankets and pillows and cooking utensils, a saw and hatchet for cutting firewood, a lantern and small can of kerosene. Will was happy to see that I had, indeed, remembered to pack my new coffee pot. When we were finished the Gilbert SXIII was loaded to the gills. What we couldn’t fit in the backseat—we had to leave a little room for Clyde—we tied to the running boards.

Now it was time to buy the food, an event nearly as glorious to Will as the Fair itself. It was final proof that after four years of dreaming and planning, we were actually going. We headed back down the field toward Ruby & Rudy’s. We bought pancake flour and syrup, lard, butter and sugar, cans of beans and corn and peas, Wheaties, sardines and potatoes, onions, apples and pears to keep us regular, ketchup and mustard. We had salt and pepper from the house. Hot dogs and hamburger meat we could buy on the fly. Will and I giggled when Ruby asked if we didn’t need a roll of toilet paper. We bought two. Will also bought an extra roll of film for his camera and even contemplated an additional pound of coffee. Ruby added up the damage while we played with the dollar bills in our pants pockets. We’d worked hard for that money, Will in the garage and me on any number of farms. We paid with adult pride.

We put the groceries in the kitchen to be safe and then covered up the Gilbert SXIII with a canvas in case it rained. Which was unlikely. It hadn’t rained in three weeks and all of Ohio was as dry as chapped lips. It was now 2:30 in the afternoon. We went straight for the porch and Will’s new maps from the Shell Oil district man.

Clyde sat on the step and hummed softly, checking his pocket watch every few minutes so he wouldn’t forget his drops. I sat next to Will in the rockers and watched him study the maps. He’d move his finger along, then write in his spiral notebook. Every few minutes he’d tell me about some spectacular exhibit we just had to see. Mrs. Randall closed the garage at six. We ate supper and then sat around the radio until nine trying to dial in WLS. Not much luck. Didn’t they know we were on our way? Didn’t they know we needed the latest information? We went to bed anxious.

I had Clyde’s bed all to myself. Will was forced to share his with Clyde. I put a pillow over my head to block out the humming. I suppose Will’s mind was alive with images of the World’s Fair. Mine was alive with images of that faceless willing city girl I was going to find.

Thinking back now, I don’t think I really believed I’d come back from Chicago with my wick dipped. Intercourse was a lot for an eighteen-year-old kid who looked like me to expect in 1934. But there was the real possibility that somewhere in that great metropolis I’d find some half-blind girl lacking in all carnal compunction, who’d neck with me, maybe let me rub my face across her nipples or even let me wiggle my fingers in her cupcake, things I’d never done, but needed desperately to do.

Will’s alarm went off at 5:00. We were already awake. Even Clyde. I helped him with his drops. We washed and went down to breakfast. Mrs. Randall was in the kitchen doing battle with a pan of fluttering eggs and snapping sausages. Pancakes were swelling on a skillet. We huddled around the table and hurt our teeth on glasses of ice-cold milk. Clyde’s head was sideways on his shoulder. Will’s face was buried in his maps. Mrs. Randall filled our plates and went back to the stove for round two.

We ate like rats.

“Who’s ready for more sausages?” Mrs. Randall asked.

Mouth stuffed full, I held up my dirty plate. “That’d be me, Mrs. Randall.”

My gluttony didn’t please Will. “Jeez, Ace. There ain’t time for more sausages. It’s almost 5:30.”

His mother piled the sausage on my plate. “Couple more eggs, Ace?”

“Absolutely.”

Will started a slow shake.

Mrs. Randall gave everybody another fried egg. “You got plenty of time. More pancakes anybody?”

Everybody got one. Will said, “Jeez.”

Mrs. Randall had never tried to stop us from going—she even insisted that Clyde go along—but my gut always told me she didn’t like the idea. Subconsciously I think she was trying to get us so fat we couldn’t fit through the back door. She poured more batter on the skillet and then poured me another glass of milk. “I was surprised your folks said you could go, Ace. That’s a big farm for your daddy to work alone, even for a week, considering his tire job.”

“I guess they figured I’d be worthless all week if they forbade it,” I said.

“I know all about worthless,” she said. “Will’s been worthless around here since the day he heard about that World’s Fair.”

Will’s dam broke. He kicked the table leg. “I don’t have to go to the World’s Fair! I don’t have to see the technological wonders of the modern age! I can stay right here in Bennett’s Corners pumping gas and fixing flats the rest of my life, if that’ll make you happy!”

His mother calmly flipped the pancakes. “You go get the World’s Fair out of your system. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hearing how I kept you from seeing the technological wonders of the modern age. I’ve pumped plenty of gas since your father passed. Patched plenty of tires. I think I can handle things while you go prepare yourself for the glorious future.”

Will gathered up the plates before they could be loaded down with another round of pancakes. “Five thirty-seven,” he said. “Time to kill this place.”

We put our empty glasses in the sink. We hoisted the boxes of food and headed for the door. Mrs. Randall turned the burner off in motherly surrender and followed us to the porch. “Got your medicine, Clyde?”

“Got it, mother.”

“He’ll lose those damn drops somewhere yet,” Will called back as he stalked toward the Gilbert SXIII. “Screw up our entire week at the World’s Fair.”

“I ain’t gonna lose ’em anywhere,” Clyde whined, food box in his arms, head folded on his shoulder.

“Thanks for the swell breakfast,” I said to Mrs. Randall.

“Be sure you’re back by Sunday,” she called out. She wasn’t sure if she should stay by the house or follow us to the car. She hovered in between, worried arms wrapped tight around her waist. “I’m sure Mrs. Gilbert doesn’t want Ace missing church.”

Will assured her we’d be home at 7:15 Saturday evening. Seven-thirty at the very latest.

“Make sure you are.”

“We’ll be here,” Will said.

“And remember Clyde starts back to school on Monday. I want him rested. Eighth grade ain’t a piece of cake.”

“He’ll be rested,” Will said. He put his box of groceries in the backseat and produced his camera from the front seat. “Come take a bon voyage picture with us, mother.”

“I saw friends of mine—men I had been to school with—digging ditches and laying sewer pipe. They were wearing their regular business suits as they worked because they couldn’t afford overalls and rubber boots.”

FRANK WALKER, HEAD OF PRESIDENT

ROOSEVELT’S NATIONAL EMERGENCY COUNCIL

Four/Killing the Corners

Will stood his mother alongside the Gilbert SXIII. Clyde got on one side of her, Will on the other. I took the picture. Then Will took a picture of Clyde and me with Mrs. Randall. Then Clyde took a sideways picture of Will and me with their mother. Finally Will showed his mother how to work the camera. This time Clyde was in the middle. We all waved. “The official photograph of the Three Travelers,” Will said through his frozen smile.

It was finally time to kill the Corners. Clyde climbed in the back. Will climbed over the tent strapped to the running board and sat down in the copilot’s seat. He opened his spiral notebook in his lap and unfolded an Ohio map over that. He was ready.

I pulled on my aviator’s cap and headed for the crank.

The sight of her boys seated in the Gilbert SXIII ready to fly to Chicago thawed Mrs. Randall to remorse. “I should’ve put my foot down and said you couldn’t go,” she said. “It’s not right for them to spend all those millions on that fancy World’s Fair nonsense when there’s so many people living in the streets and eating stray cats.”

Will slid down in the seat and let his lungs empty. “Nobody’s eating stray cats, mother.”

“Well, it’s still a sin wasting money like that.”

“These times won’t last forever,” Will said. “It’s time to start thinking about the glorious future.”

Mrs. Randall folded her arms around her waist. She knew he was right. “Keep your money hidden in your underwear,” she said. “The road’s teeming with bums and lowlifes.”

I yanked the crank and the Gilbert SXIII purred again like a bushel of cats. I jumped inside. Got my feet ready on the pedals. Mrs. Randall’s arms wrapped tighter. The moment had come. “We’re gonna be fine,” Will said to his mother.

“I know it,” she said.

Will’s face begin to shine like the head of a six-battery flashlight. “Well, fellas. Time to kill this place.”

His mother took a backward step toward the house. “Tell your Aunt Mary I’ll write as soon as I can. And don’t you dare tell her I made kitchen rags from that ugly red apron she made me for Christmas.”

“I won’t,” said Will.

“Me neither,” said Clyde.

I throttled up and slipped the gear into low speed. We started to roll. “See you in five days,” Will yelled.

“You got your medicine?” Mrs. Randall yelled.

“I got it,” Clyde yelled.

“Make sure he uses it,” she yelled at Will.

“I will,” yelled Will.

“Ace, you make sure, too.”

“Absolutely,” I yelled.

We bounced down the field and took a left on Townline Road. We passed the garage and turned left on Hunt Road. It was one of the six roads that angled into Bennett’s Corners. We passed the Dapplemier farm and flew in a northwesterly direction toward Strongsville. We had a full day ahead of us. By supper time we had to be in Valparaiso, Indiana. Will’s Aunt Mary would have supper waiting. We’d camp in her yard that night and then in the morning, kill the road to Chicago.

We took Hunt Road to Drake Road to U.S. 42, three and one-quarter miles. U.S. 42 was the nearest blacktopped road to Bennett’s Corners, paved just the year before when the new Roosevelt crowd went on a paving spree to make jobs for the unemployed. We took 42 north to the Strongsville town square and then took a left on State Route 82. We were back on gravel.

Will checked his watched. “Six A.M. and we’re right where we should be.”

“We’re flying all right,” I said. Loaded down, the Gilbert SXIII didn’t have the same dangerous bounce it usually did. Still, the fact that we were finally on our way to Chicago made this the most exciting ride of my life.

Will studied the speedometer. “You hold it right there at thirty, Ace, and we’ll be at the Indiana line at 11:30. Somewhere we’ll stop along the road and boil a pot of coffee. And that won’t be a wasted hour either. You know why?”

I didn’t know. Clyde didn’t either.

“Because just west of South Bend we’ll change from Eastern to Central time,” he explained, proud of his genius. “So instead of reaching my aunt at 4:15, it’ll only be 3:15. In other words, a free hour to drink coffee.”

I was proud of his genius, too. “That’s great, Will. Absolutely great.”

Clyde was humming. But he was no competition for my four-banger. We heard him call out from the backseat: “How long ‘til I put my drops in?”

“You’re supposed to be keeping track yourself,” Will reminded him.

“I forgot my watch in my other pants.”

Will pounded himself on the legs. “Jeez! We ain’t two mile west of Strongsville and our whole trip’s ruined. I knew something like this would happen.”

I patted my copilot’s arm. “It’s OK. I’ll keep track for him.”

Will started to wad up his Ohio map, to throw into the ditch I suppose, then thought better of it and reflattened it on his lap. “We might just as well go home.”

“It’ll be OK.” I asked Clyde how many hours he was supposed to go between squirts.

“Four.”

“When’d you last take them?”

“Right at 5:00 when Will farted me awake.”

“Then you’ve got three more hours.”

“Three more hours? My ear’s hurting like hell already.”

Will started to laugh. He twisted around with his camera, clicking his brother’s sideways face.

Clyde wasn’t happy. “What you doing that for?”

“I’m keeping a photographic record of our historic pilgrimage to the World’s Fair,” Will said. “We’ll call this one ‘Clyde in one of his better moods.’”

“It ain’t my fault my ear hurts like hell,” Clyde said.

Will went back to his map and notebook. “If we’re on the road at 5:30 again tomorrow morning, we can be in Chicago by 8:00 sharp. Figuring in an hour for finding a campsite at the tent park and another hour to stand in line for our passes, we should be strolling down the Avenue of Nations by 10:00, heading straight for the Hall of Science.”

Will was my best friend, and I knew how he was, and I loved him for being that way, but the freedom of the open road was soaking into my skin. “I hope you don’t have our whole week planned out minute by minute. We gotta have a little time for unexpected things, don’t we?”

He knew what I meant by unexpected. “We gotta keep a tight schedule if we want to catch every exhibit. Do you know that there are over seventy thousand things to see?”

“I seem to recall you mentioning that about seventy thousand times,” I said.

Will ignored my dig. “We may want to spend all tomorrow afternoon in the Hall of Science. It covers over eight acres. The technological wonders of the modern age all under one seven-hundred-foot by four-hundred-foot roof. Illuminated by over fifteen thousand light bulbs.”

I’d done a little studying myself. “You can spend all day gawking at those bolts and wires and lightbulbs if you want. First thing I’m going to do is find out where Sally Rand is doing her dance.”

Clyde’s voice fought it’s way over the seat. “Who’s Sally Rand?”

“She dances naked,” Will said.

Clyde’s voice soared an octave. “Dances naked?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Naked as a plucked duck.”

Will explained Sally Rand to him, dryly and scientifically. “She’s a fan dancer. Dances with two big feathery fans. She’s naked all right, but she keeps those fans moving so fast you don’t see anything but feathers.”

“The heck you don’t,” I said. “When my cousin Ralph was there last summer, he saw plenty. I bet if you watched her dance all day long—which is exactly what I plan to do—little by little you’d see everything she’s got.”

Clyde leaned forward and rested his sideways head on the seat. “I’m tagging along with you, Ace.”

“You can forget that,” Will said in a flat fatherly way.

“Well I ain’t spending all day in the Hall of Science.”

Will was adamant. “Yes you will. And you won’t whine about it all the time we’re in there, either.”

“I will whine about it,” Clyde said. “I’ll whine about it from the minute we walk in to the minute we walk out.”

Will directed his anger at Clyde, though I knew he was including me. “If you didn’t want to see the technological wonders of the modern age, you shouldn’t have begged to come along.”

Clyde pulled out his cotton and checked the ooze. “I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.”

Will stubbornly turned the page of his notebook. “When we finish the Hall of Science we can go to the Firestone Pavilion and watch them make tires.”

Having gone with my dad to the Goodrich plant once or twice, I’d seen plenty of tires being built. “That’ll be a lot more fun than watching Sally Rand dance naked, won’t it, Clyde?”

It seems odd that the City of Chicago would hold a World’s Fair at the height of the Great Depression, doesn’t it? Of course when they started planning it in the twenties no one knew the country was headed toward a depression, let alone a great one. By the time the depression hit, the World’s Fair ball was already rolling. So while families slept on sidewalks and stood in line for soup, and bankers in their business suits shoveled dirt for a day’s pay, great palaces of promise went up on the shore of Lake Michigan, a mirage of plywood and plaster.

Will’s guidebook went into grueling detail about the Fair’s beginning. Who’s idea it was. Why it was important to spend all those millions. Years later Mrs. Randall gave me Will’s Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair. Every few years I stumble across it. I always stop what I’m doing and read it cover to cover, relishing every word, just as Will Randall used to.

Chicago had held its first World’s Fair forty years earlier, in 1893. The excuse then was the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World. That Columbian Exposition was designed—in part at least—to stop the rest of the country from laughing about the city’s famous fire of 1871, which killed 200, rendered another 100,000 homeless, and turned $200 million worth of real estate into charcoal, all because, it was said, a cow kicked over some Irish woman’s lantern. If you can believe the figures, more than 27,000,000 people attended that first World’s Fair, about a third of the country’s population.

Chicago, like the rest of America, went simply nuts after that 1893 fair; an orgy of invention and industry people figured would last forever. By the 1920s Chicago was ready to show off again. This time the excuse was the city’s 100th birthday. In December 1927, the same month and year my father moved us from Columbus to the farm on Stony Hill Road, so he could take that job at Goodrich, Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson called a public meeting to consider the idea of an international exposition. Everyone agreed it was a grand idea. A committee was formed, somebody named Rufus C. Dawes put in charge. Three weeks later, on the fifth day of January, 1928, a Century of Progress was organized as a nonprofit corporation—that’s what the second fair was called, a Century of Progress, celebrating all of the wondrous things humankind had accomplished in the hundred years since Chicago’s first four thousand inhabitants crawled out of their log cabins and proclaimed themselves a metropolis.

On February 5, 1929, 264 days before the New York Stock Market collapsed and sent America’s optimism swirling into the Hudson River, the Congress of the United States passed a joint resolution inviting the nations of the world to participate in the Fair. The Illinois State Legislature did its part, too, allowing the Fair to be built on 424 acres of reclaimed lake just east of the Illinois Central Railroad yards. The Fair would be built without a penny of public money. Fat cats threw a thousand bucks each into the kitty. Well-heeled Chicagoans kicked in fifty bucks. More than one hundred thousand average citizens coughed up five bucks.

With laws passed and earnest money raised, the far-sighted giants of industry rose to the occasion: Oil companies signed up; car companies signed up; airline and railroad companies signed up; companies that made radios and tires signed up; companies that made steel, glass, and bathroom fixtures signed up; beer brewers, bread bakers, and meat packers signed up; makers of vitamins and wall paint and magical chemical compounds signed up; makers of cameras, refrigerators, furances, boilers, vacuum cleaners, furniture wax, toothpaste, elevators, and garage doors signed up; makers of a million things mankind had been waiting eons for signed up.

Big companies would build their own palaces; small companies would crowd into big halls like the Travel and Transport Building, the Electrical Group Building, the Housing Group Building, the Horticulture Building, the Dairy Building, the Agriculture Building.

Entire nations jumped on board. Italy would build a pavilion. Czechoslovakia would build a pavilion. Sweden would build a pavilion. Morocco. England. Japan. Egypt. Norway. Denmark. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. They’d all build pavilions, filling them with food and music, goodwill and affordable knickknacks. The forty-eight states would have exhibits. Departments of the federal government would have exhibits. There would be a Hall of Religion to remind Fairgoers of their holy obligation to the past and a Hall of Science to remind them of their even holier obligation to the future. There would be a building filled with $75 million worth of famous paintings. A giant thermometer. Lifelike cement dinosaurs. There would be lagoons and gardens and fountains, a bathing beach and aquarium and planetarium, pageants and shows and a grand esplanade of geranium-red flags. There would be a dazzling midway where you could ride on mechanical dragons, devour delightful lumps of grease and sugar, waste your precious nickels on games of chance, and see real whales and gorillas and that naked fan dancer named Sally Rand.

Despite the embarrassment of holding such a grand circus during a depression—despite the incongruity and audacity of it—the Century of Progress opened on May 27, 1933, as planned.

And now it was August 1934, the closing months of the two-year extravaganza, and we were killing our way west in a ridiculous old Model T with wings and a propeller, to see it for ourselves.

We took State Route 82 through Copopa and Eaton, two unofficial Bennett’s Corners-like places that were still sound asleep. Just south of Elyria, a real city, we turned onto U.S. 20, which would take us straight across western Ohio and northern Indiana. We flew through Oberlin and Kipton, Wakeman and East Townsend. All the little towns we went through were just beginning to wake up. A little past Norwalk we drove past some roadside campers just rolling up their blankets; a man in a leather jacket, the brim of his cap pulled down to the ashes of his cigarette, was tending a pot of coffee on the campfire. Even driving by at thirty miles an hour we could smell that coffee and for the next twenty minutes Will and I babbled about how great it was going to be, brewing our own pot of roadside coffee, during that free hour the time-zone change would give us.

We flew through Monroeville and Bellevue and into Clyde. “Look, Clyde,” I said, “they’ve named this town after you.”

“Did they really?” he asked between hums.

Will laughed and called him a moron. I laughed, too. We flew on through Green Creek and then Fremont, a good-sized burg, then Hessville and Woodville and Lemoyne, Stony Ridge and Lime City. Will already had all these places listed in his notebook, along with the precise time we’d be passing through. When we did, he’d draw an X next to its name and immediately start worrying about making the next one on time. Just outside Perrysburg we came up fast on a truck loaded with crates of live turkeys. As I barreled past, Will stood up and flapped his arms and gobbled. We laughed like hell. Even Clyde stopped humming and laughed a little. When nine o’clock arrived, Will helped Clyde with his drops.

We crossed the Maumee River into the town named after it. Will said just a few miles north was the big city of Toledo. “Holy Toledo,” I cracked. “How big is it?”

“Holy Toledo,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Before we’d flown through Maumee, we’d used “Holy Toledo” in dozens of stupid jokes like those. I even pretended to cry and when Will, knowing another stupid joke was coming, asked, “What’s the matter, Ace?” I said, “I want my Maumee!” We laughed like hell some more and then I said “Holy Toledo” for real. There, struggling behind one of those old hand lawnmowers was a magnificently breasted girl. She was wearing a pair of tight-fitting dungarees rolled above her knees and her blouse was sticky with her wonderful sweat. I blew her a grand kiss. She blew one back. If girls in a so-so town like Maumee were that bold, God almighty, I thought, what must those Chicago girls be like?

We stayed on U.S. 20, passing through Caragher and Assumption, Oak Shade, Fayette, Alvordton, Ainger, and Columbia. Will made us stop and pose for a picture by the “Welcome to Indiana” sign. When it was clear no cars were coming we took a leak in the ditch. Will fished through the groceries for a roll of toilet paper and headed into the corn. I waited a minute then followed with his camera. Clyde followed me. We found Will, pants down, eyes squeezed, doing the silent grunts. I hid the camera behind my back and advanced, doing my famous mad dog imitation.

“Jeez, Ace, don’t start that now,” he pleaded. His shit was tumbling out. I produced the camera and snapped. “Jeez. Quit wasting my film!”

I took another picture. “I thought you wanted a photographic record of our historic pilgrimage to the World’s Fair? I think we’ll call this one ‘Will down in the dumps.’”

Will duckwalked toward me. “Give me my camera.”

“Will down in the dumps,” Clyde repeated.

Will wasn’t the least bit amused by my prank. I started to feel like a pile of shit myself. I handed him the camera. Clyde repeated “Will down in the dumps” all the way back to the Gilbert SXIII.

In the Army Air Force I noticed a peculiar thing about men taking shits. All the urinals and crappers in the barracks were right out in the open, no walls for privacy, so what you did was there for all to see and hear and smell. Now men don’t mind pissing in front of each other. You can talk and tease and do just about anything you want when a man’s draining his chain. But don’t mess with a man taking a shit. Urinating is a communal celebration of brotherhood. The more pissers the merrier. Shitting is a private thing. A man is never more vulnerable, never closer or farther from God, than when bent low. If you encounter a man shitting, pretend he’s invisible. Go on about your own business.

I wished I’d known all this that day in the cornfield. At least we let Will wipe in peace.

“Just north of the Twenty-third Street entrance, a great 200-foot tower rises. It is a thermometer, perhaps the largest the world has ever seen, and it accurately tells visitors the temperature in Chicago.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Five/Green Inside

We crossed the Indiana line at 11:30, just as Will planned. It was already so hot you could almost hear the cornstalks sucking up dirt. We flew through Ellis and Angola, where we stopped to gas up. Next came Brushy Prairie, Plato, Lagrange, and after an unexpected jag in the road that almost toppled us, Shipshewana. We all liked the sound of that place and thought up dozens of jokes about it. Finally Will said, “Well, you wanna?”

“Wanna what?” I said.

“Stop and brew that first pot of roadside coffee.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said. I landed the Gilbert SXIII by, what else, a cornfield, and after Clyde’s bad ear was squirted full of medicine we looked around for some wood to burn. We found a few dry briars but that was all. I put my new pot from Ruby & Rudy’s away. We each ate an apple. Pledged we would stop for that coffee the first available firewood we passed.

Elkhart and South Bend were both big towns. When we flew through New Carlisle, I wondered where Old Carlisle was. We laughed like hell. Then Will announced we’d just crossed into the Central Time Zone and that we’d gained that free hour—an hour we’d unfortunately have to give back on the way home. He was as excited about changing time zones as a moon-bound astronaut breaking free of the earth’s gravitational pull. He reset his watch and proudly showed me the new time.

Bootjack was about the best sounding name for a town we ever heard. It was between Bootjack and another nub of a place called Rolling Prairie that we passed a farmer selling melons and tomatoes in his front yard. I landed for a look.

The old farmer, as white and dry as a bedsheet on a clothesline, was sitting up on his porch reading the paper. We strolled over to his pile of melons. Will began eyeballing them and thumping them with the skill of a jeweler. The old farmer, almost angry that his reading had been interrupted, meticulously folded his paper and shuffled down the lawn. He spat a drop of his precious saliva as he stopped and studied the Gilbert SXIII and its Ohio plates. “You boys be from Ohio, I see.”

Will held up a melon. “These ripe?”

“Of course they be ripe.”

Will was nobody’s fool. “They don’t thump like they’re ripe. They thump green to me.”

Again the farmer spat. “You boys be from Ohio all right. These be Indiana melons. Don’t thump like Ohio melons.”

“They sure look the same as Ohio melons.”

The farmer contemplated a third spit but sucked it back. “Well, they may look the same as Ohio melons. But these be Indiana melons. Thump totally different.”

I could see the stubborn resolve rising in Will’s blinky eyes. He rapped the melon with his knuckles. “They still thump green to me.”

The farmer took the melon away from him. “Ohio folks make that mistake all the time.” He gave the melon a slap. “Here that? That’s the thump of a ripe Indiana melon. A very ripe Indiana melon.”

While Will and the farmer dueled over the melons, a swell-looking yellow Auburn stopped across the road. Twelve-cylinder job. Bright yellow. Acres of dusty chrome. Behind the wheel was a fellow in his twenties, smooth-faced and skinny. Looked like he was wearing an expensive new suit.

He had a smart fedora on his head, brim dangerously cocked. Next to him was a woman. She was young and almost pretty, powdered face, bright red lips. Her hair was yellow as the car. Her dress was flimsy and gaudy, open neck, sleeveless, pink roses on black. They both started primping in their door mirrors.

The old farmer eyed the Auburn and its occupants, spat, and went on. “Pity we don’t have no Ohio melons to compare. You boys didn’t bring any with you, did you?”

Will smoothed back his pompadour in frustration. “Why would we be buying Indiana melons if we had Ohio melons in the car?”

Clyde and I were watching those two in the Auburn primp more than we were watching Will and the old farmer dicker. I was especially watching the woman. Even fifty feet away I could smell her perfume. “Pity,” I heard the farmer say. “If you had an Ohio melon with you, I could demonstrate just how different they thump.”

The man in the Auburn gave the brim of his hat one last tug and then reached into the backseat. Brought out a double-barreled shotgun.

Will nervously checked his watch. The melon standoff was putting us behind schedule. “All right,” he said. “How much you charging for these Indiana melons?” He reached down the front of his pants to retrieve the money hidden in his underwear.

The farmer wasn’t quite sure what he was fishing for. “Quarter each.”

Will brought his hand out empty. “Quarter? They’re only a dime in Ohio.”

The man and woman got out of the Auburn. The man rested the shotgun over his shoulder. They strolled up the lawn.

“Dime’s about right for an Ohio melon,” the farmer said. “But Indiana melons be a lot sweeter that Ohio melons. Worth a quarter. If not more.”

We were all watching the man and woman from the Auburn now. They stopped in front of the melon pile. The man slowly lifted the shotgun from his shoulder. Pumped both barrels into the melons. Melon guts went everywhere. Clyde grabbed his ear and sank to his knees.

While the woman smiled at us, the man calmly reloaded both barrels. “You know, Mr. Farmer man,” he said. “I think these here Ohio boys are right about these here Indiana melons. They do look pretty green inside.” His voice was as mushy as Cream of Wheat. He was a hillbilly for sure.

Amazingly, the farmer was not deterred by this crazy man. “Now that’s the peculiar thing about Indiana melons,” he told him. “They don’t lose that green when they get ripe, like the melons of so many other states.”

The hillbilly fired another shell. This time into a basket of tomatoes. It exploded like a shithouse full of dynamite. He pointed his gun in the general direction of the farmer’s head. “You know what, Mr. farmer man? I think you should give these boys all the free melons they want. Only a suggestion from a stranger, of course.”

The farmer carefully considered the hillbilly’s suggestion. “All right. If they want ’em, they be more than welcome.”

We piled as many of those free Indiana melons as we could into the back of the Gilbert SXIII. As we did, we watched the farmer empty his change purse into the hillbilly’s patient hand. I especially watched the hillbilly’s girl suck the juicy meat out of a tomato.

The hillbilly tipped his hat to the farmer and strolled toward us, shotgun back on his shoulder. The woman and her tomato followed. I knew from the way her hips swayed that jazz music must be playing in her head. “Hope you boys enjoy those melons,” the hillbilly said.

All three of us were twitching. “I’m sure we will,” Will answered.

I threw in an “Absolutely.”

The hillbilly grinned. “I’d give them a day or two in the sun.”

Clyde looked sideways at him, his face twisted with puzzlement and pain. “Ain’t you gonna rob us, too?”

Will smoothed out his pompadour again. “Jeez, Clyde.”

The hillbilly grinned even wider. “You boys rich?”

“No sir,” Will said. “We’re anything but rich.”

“Then I won’t stick you up. But if ever you are rich and I run across you, I’d be obligated to steal every nickel you had.”

“We won’t ever be rich,” I assured him, trying not to watch the tomato juice drip off his girl’s powdered, strawberry-shaped chin.

“Not if we can help it,” Will added.

The hillbilly’s grin vanished. He shifted his shotgun to the other shoulder. His voice went up an octave. He became what in those days I considered to be philosophical. “That’s just the problem,” he began. “Rich just runs in some people’s blood, no matter how poor they start out in life. Guy ain’t got two nickels to rub together one day, and the next his pockets are full of other people’s money.”

“Really?” asked Clyde.

“Sure. Take me for example. I started out one of the poorest sons-a-bitches you ever saw. And look at me standing here now. Fifty-dollar suit of clothes and a matching ten-dollar hat. Pockets so loaded down with money I can barely walk.” He watched our eyes drift to his pockets. He grinned and jingled his pants for us. “You see boys, that’s what this depression is all about. Too many poor people’s money ending up in too many rich people’s pants.”

Will had to agree. He’d been reading the Cleveland Press every day for years now. He knew the score. “That’s the problem, all right.”

“Damn right that’s the problem,” the hillbilly said. “Just imagine how bad things would be if I wasn’t here to even things out.”

Will checked his watch. We were way off schedule. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be part of the problem.”

The hillbilly got the hint. “Well, that’s comforting to hear.” He tipped his hat and headed for the yellow Auburn. His girl took a final long suck on her tomato and threw it at the farmer. She swayed to the jazz music in her head all the way to the car. They drove off, east toward Bootjack. We flew west toward Rolling Prairie.

“Flash! Col. Stoopnagle and Budd will begin a new series over the Columbia network on December 7. And for your added interest, this comic pair is under contract to Columbia until December 7, 1935.”

RADIO STARS MAGAZINE

Six/Cherry Pie

Our hearts didn’t stop bass-drumming until we reached Rolling Prairie. We left the paved comfort of U.S. 20 and flew south on State Route 2. It was dusty, gravelly, and narrow, with more than a few unexpected bends. But it would take us right to Aunt Mary’s house in Valparaiso, Will said, in just an hour, if I could hold my speed at thirty.

With the dangers of U.S. 20 behind us, we relaxed and started making dumb jokes again, teasing the piss out of Clyde. Out of the blue Will slapped the dashboard and shouted “Jeez.”

“What’s wrong?”

“We didn’t get any pictures of those two.”

“You crazy? They were professional criminals. You think they’d pose for a picture? That hillbilly would’ve blasted your head like one of those melons.”

Will calmed. “I guess so.”

Now I slapped the dash. “You see the way his girl was sucking that tomato? I wanted to lick that juice right off her chin. Just think, that hillbilly gets to poke her every night of the week.”

That revelation startled Will. “Every night?”

“Absolutely. All those gangster girls are crazy for poking.”

Byron. La Porte. Pinola. Pinhook. Coburg. My mind and mouth stayed on sex all the way to Valparaiso. “You think this town is big enough to have a whorehouse?” I asked Will while we waited for one of the longest trains I’d ever seen to pass. Boxcar after boxcar after boxcar. Thu-clump, thu-clump, thu-clump, like a squeaky mattress going up and down.

“No town in Indiana is big enough to have a whorehouse, from what I’ve seen,” he said.

“This one looks pretty big. I bet there’s a whorehouse somewhere.” The caboose finally bounced by and the gate went up. I took off. “Can’t we drive straight through to Chicago? They got whorehouses on every corner there.”

Will didn’t take my talk about whorehouses seriously. It was just the biologically inspired baloney of an eighteen-year-old. But being eighteen himself, he went along with my baloney as if I really intended to act on my urges. Will and I always respected each other that way, no matter how far from reality the other occasionally strayed. “We’re going to Chicago to see the technological wonders of the modern age, Ace. Not to count whorehouses. You don’t have the bile to go to a whorehouse anyway.”

“You are absolutely dead wrong about that,” I said as the train thu-clumped.

Will reminded me that I hadn’t exactly been Rudolph Valentino with the girls back home.

“That’s because I’ve intentionally kept my distance,” I informed him. “You poke a farm girl and you’ve just married her for life. But when you poke a whore, or any city girl for that matter, you ain’t got that lifetime of misery to worry about. Unless they give you the bugs.”

“Who’s Rudolph Valentino?” Clyde asked.

We came to Tecumseh Street. I throttled down and turned. It was a nice street. Fine houses. Tall trees. Dark slate sidewalks.

Will said his aunt’s place was the twenty-fifth house on the left. I flew low and slow while Will counted houses and Clyde hummed. It was 3:35. We’d driven halfway across Ohio, all the way across Indiana, been waylaid by criminals, and we were just twenty minutes late. Will, however, was blinking like it was twenty hours.

We passed a short bull of a man carrying a bag of groceries. It was their Uncle Fritz. Will ordered me to land. Uncle Fritz was a real German. Born in Berlin. Came to Baltimore as a boy. Shucked oysters for a few years, then migrated to Gary, Indiana, to work in the oil refineries. Met and married Will’s aunt, an elementary school teacher. They moved down to Valparaiso to get away from all the Negroes flooding in from Chicago. But he kept his oil job, paying for his fears with an agonizing daily commute. Bennett’s Corners today is lousy with people like that. Anyway, Uncle Fritz smelled like motor oil the way my dad smelled like tires. He had a mustache that stuck down from his nose like a shaving brush. “It’s us,” Will called out. “Jump on the running board. We’ll give you a ride.”

Uncle Fritz kept his distance, eyeing the Gilbert SXIII like it was Satan’s chariot, making a direct delivery to hell. “I ain’t taking no ride on dat got-dambled ting,” he said.

“She’s as safe as she can be,” Will said. “Brought us all the way from Bennett’s Corners, Ohio. Two hundred and eighty-three miles.”

Uncle Fritz started down the sidewalk. “I’ll walk on da legs Got gived me. Sanks anyway.”

We flew on, Will counting houses. “Your uncle looks just like that Adolf Hitler, doesn’t he?” I said.

“Like who?” asked Clyde, surrounded by melons.

At that age I had little patience for anybody who didn’t know what I knew. Figured what I knew was the true measure of worldliness. Which goes to show you how unworldly I was. I let loose: “Ain’t you never heard of anybody, Clyde? Adolf Hitler! That funny little guy in Germany, remember? He was in that newsreel when we saw King Kong.”

“I remember King Kong, but not Adolf Hitler,” said Clyde.

In fairness to Clyde, not many Americans knew who Adolf Hitler was in 1934. He’d only come to power the year before and was still something of a joke. Crazy little sausage stuffed in a Boy Scout suit. Mustache like Charlie Chaplin. Ranting in unintelligible German. Seven years later that crazy little sausage landed me in Air Force cooking school. You still see lots of shows about Hitler on PBS or A&E and every once in a while the classic movie channel runs King Kong. Too bad the gorilla wasn’t the real monster. All he did was climb up the Empire State Building and swat a couple airplanes out of the sky. I landed alongside Aunt Mary’s house.

I was about to meet Will’s aunt for the first time. Twelve years later, when I tracked her down at a trailer park in Michigan City, she was a sad lump of a woman, constantly rubbing her forehead with her iced-tea glass, to numb her memories of Fritz and Will and her happy past. But that summer of 1934, when Mary Koch stepped off the porch and walked toward the Gilbert SXIII, I was encountering the most sumptuous woman alive. She was in her forties and a little plump. But that plumpness stretched her house dress in all the right directions. And the tiny lines springing out from her devilish eyes were an encyclopedia of experience. Experiences I needed desperately to experience myself. Hard to believe she was Mrs. Randall’s older sister. Three happy-go-lucky beagles followed her out of the house. They ran in circles sniffing the lawn and each other.

“Three-fifteen and here you are,” Aunt Mary said. “Just like you said.”

Will, Clyde, and I were already out of the car, rubbing the miles out of our kidneys. “Three thirty-seven, actually,” Will said. “But here we are. All the way from Bennett’s Corners, Ohio.”

She saw the cotton sticking out of Clyde’s sideways head. “You got an earache, honey?”

Clyde poured it on. “My ear’s badly afflicted with wax, Aunt Mary.”

She pulled Clyde’s pained face into her swollen, sympathetic bosom. “You just give me a hug.” What I wouldn’t have given for a little ear wax at that moment.

Will was next in line for a hug. “We passed Uncle Fritz up the street.”

“He wouldn’t take a ride,” I said.

Aunt Mary finished hugging Will and extended her hand for a shake. “You must be the famous Ace Gilbert.”

“That would be me.”

“Will’s told me all about you in his letters. Your daddy was a hero in the war.”

“He flew with Eddie Rickenbacker in the famous 94th. Between them they sent twenty-seven of those butchering Huns into the vineyards.”

I saw her eyes giggle at the Gilbert SXIII. “Looks like you plan to follow in your daddy’s footsteps.”

“Absolutely. Soon as there’s another war.”

Then she did it. Buried my face in her bosom just like I was a third nephew. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ace Gilbert,” my muffled ears heard her say. “If you want to stay alive until the next war, I wouldn’t mention butchering Huns around my Fritzie.”

“Absolutely not,” I echoed into her cleavage.

“We better get the tent set up,” Will said. I’m sure he saw I was enjoying my hug a little too much.

We started unloading our gear. Aunt Mary offered us each a bed in the house, but Will insisted we needed practice setting up the tent. “It hasn’t been up since Dad took our scout troop camping to Niagara Falls.”

She frowned and nodded. She knew that camping trip was just two weeks before his father’s embarrassing death. “How is your mother doing?”

“Well enough to drive me crazy,” Will said.

“That’s my sister.”

“She’s doing fine,” Will said.

“You know I worry.”

“I know. We’re all doing fine.”

“Except for my damn ear,” Clyde added.

“I hope your mother had enough sense to get you some medicine.”

“Got a whole bottle of drops in the car,” Clyde said proudly. “Take a squirt every four hours.”

Aunt Mary waved at her Fritzie, who was still several houses away. “Good. I never saw anybody hold onto a dollar like your mother.”

“Money and mother are a legend,” Will agreed.

“That’s for sure. I hope she’s getting good use of that apron I made her for Christmas.”

Clyde informed his aunt she’d torn it up for kitchen rags.

Will’s eyes went to blinking. “Jeez, Clyde! Red just isn’t her color, Aunt Mary.”

She laughed so hard she had to grab her knees. “Kitchen rags? At least she’s getting good use of it.”

The Gilbert SXIII was unloaded. Uncle Fritz was working his way up the lawn, playing with his beagles. “Say, Aunt Mary,” Will said. “Let me get a picture of you and Uncle Fritz by the car with Ace and Clyde. I’m keeping a photographic record of our historic pilgrimage.”

She was all for it. Uncle Fritz waved us off in disgust and went inside. But the beagles joined in the photograph. It’s one of my favorite pictures from our trip to Chicago. I’ve still got it. Along with the others. Mrs. Randall gave them to me along with some of Will’s other things after I returned from England in 1946. Too bad Will wasn’t in the picture along with me and Clyde and Aunt Mary and those three sniffing dogs. But I know he snapped it. So I guess he’s in the picture as much as the rest of us.

Will wanted to build a campfire in the backyard and cook some beans and brew a pot of coffee. But his aunt insisted we have a proper supper inside. Roast chicken and baked potatoes. Canned corn and rolls. Bowls and platters passing clockwise and counterclockwise around the table in a minuet of near misses. It wasn’t long before talk turned to our encounter with that hillbilly gangster on U.S. 20 between Rolling Prairie and Bootjack.

“You must have been scared to death,” Aunt Mary said. “More corn, anybody?”

Will waved off the bowl. “It all happened pretty fast. Ka-boom. ka-boom.”

She made him take more corn anyway. “I’m sure I would have wet myself.”

“I think that farmer did,” I said, adding some drama to our encounter. From my chair I could see the beagles on the porch, pawing and licking the window.

“At least you’re all safe. Have another potato, Ace. They’re small.”

“Small potatoes,” Will laughed.

“Doze robbers sound like a couple no-good communists to me,” Fritz said.

“They were nice enough to give us those melons,” I pointed out.

“Nice enough to give you da farmer’s melons,” he said. “Dey was communists OK.”

Aunt Mary sent the chicken platter on another tour of the table. “Some people are just bad on their own, Fritzie. Not everybody’s a communist.”

“More people den you tink, Mary. Da whole country’s lousy with communists since Mr. Roosevelt.”

For some reason I felt the need to defend the hillbilly and his girl. “I wouldn’t say they were actually bad. They were pretty square with us, anyway.”

“Only because we weren’t rich,” Will reminded me.

“Well, how about Robin Hood?” I said. “He was like that. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor.”

“Who’s Robin Hood?” Clyde asked.

“Da first communist,” Uncle Fritz said.

Will had the chicken platter in one hand and the plate of rolls in the other. His tongue chased a corn niblet trying to escape over his lower lip. “The way that robber and his girl were dressed, and that fancy car, I don’t think they share too much of their loot with the poor.”

I continued my defense. “All I’m saying is that they were nice to us, regardless of how bad they are to everybody else.”

Aunt Mary wanted me to shut up. “Eat some more of this delicious chicken, Ace.”

Now Will put his foot in it. “When’d you grow that mustache, Uncle Fritz? You didn’t have it at Christmas.”

“Ace says it makes you look just like Adolf Hitler,” Clyde said. I quickly took the chicken platter.

“Now see, Mary? I told you I’d look just like Mr. Hitler if I grew dis mustache. Now dere’s a man who wouldn’t put up with all dese communists shooting up everybody’s melons.”

That time I went to see Mary in Michigan City she told me Fritz felt so betrayed when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, that he not only shaved his mustache, but changed his named to Bob and sent three hundred dollars to the Sons of Warsaw in Chicago. He gathered more scrap metal for the war effort than anyone in Valparaiso. But in August 1934, Uncle Fritz was still very high on the no-nonsense Mr. Hitler.

We finished dinner and rushed into the living room for pie and radio.

It was cherry pie. Tart. Top crust sprinkled liberally with sugar. While Will and Clyde watched Uncle Fritz play with the radio dial, I watched Aunt Mary clear the dining room table. Better than a striptease. Stretching for the empty potato bowl. Bending for the corn bowl. Back and forth from the kitchen. Hips meandering like the wide Maumee.

Uncle Fritz loved his radio. It was a big six-tube Distatone. Beautiful walnut cabinet with mahogany inlays. Ornate pillars running up the sides. It sat on a table by his rocker, as imposing as the Ark of the Covenant, imparting the voices of faraway gods. We huddled around that Distatone for the next four and a half hours listening to what Uncle Fritz wanted to listen to. No talking allowed. No fork clinking allowed. No laughing. Even a squirm got a scowl.

There were three national radio networks then: one operated by the Columbia Broadcasting System and two by the National Broadcasting Company, NBC Red and NBC Blue. Chicago I believe had two CBS stations, two NBC Red stations, and four NBC Blue stations. Add to those all the independent stations and all the signals floating in from other cities and, well, you had a real beehive. There was more variety on radio than cable TV today. Drama. Comedy. Sports. Music for every taste. News. Political harangues from left and right. Gossip. More advice than you could use in a hundred lifetimes. Religion so fierce you wanted to jump off a barn roof. Anything you desired could be had by rolling that magic dial up and down the kilocycles. None of the slime you get today, of course, but occasionally things did get a little cheeky.

Uncle Fritz had us on the sofa with our pie right at 5:30. He thumbed the dial to WBBM, one of Chicago’s two CBS network stations. The announcer’s voice exploded: “Wheaties, breakfast of champions, brings you the thrilling adventures of Jack Armstrong, All-American boy!” We all loved Jack Armstrong back in Bennett’s Corners. Jack was just like us, and his fictitious Hudson High just like our real Brunswick High, except Brunswick High never produced too many heinous crimes that needed solving by a boy. Like most of the serial dramas of the day, Jack Armstrong lasted just fifteen minutes.

Next came a program called Little Italy, right there on WBBM, fifteen minutes of phony Italian accents. Uncle Fritz loved it. Next came Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd, on WMAQ, one of the NBC Red network stations. I quietly gathered up the pie plates and took them to the kitchen.

Will’s aunt was taking a sheet of cookies from the oven. I piled the plates in the sink and sat down at the kitchen table. “I’m baking you boys some cookies for your drive up to Chicago,” she said. She took one of the cookies off with a spatula and deposited it right in my mouth.

“I like hot cookies right from the oven,” I said.

“You’re not a fan of Colonel Stoopnagle?”

“He’s about as funny as wet shoes. I thought you might need some help out here.”

“Now I like Little Orphan Annie,” she said, opening the icebox door, bending her housedress tight. “How about a glass of milk, Ace?”

“Nothing better than hot cookies and ice-cold milk.”

She sat across from me and poured me a glass. She started singing the Little Orphan Annie theme song: “Who’s the little chatterbox? The one with the pretty auburn locks? Who can it be? It’s Little Orphan Annie!”

I laughed and sang the next line: “She and Sandy make a pair. They never seem to have a care!”

In the living room Colonel Stoopnagle was putting one over on Budd. Aunt Mary watched me dunk my cookie and suck the milk out of it. The three beagles were watching us through the screen door. “You know, I envy you boys,” she said. “A whole week in Chicago to raise hell.”

I can still feel my shiver. I couldn’t believe a worldly woman like that was saying “raise hell” to a dopey kid like me. “I don’t know about raising much hell,” I said. “Will’s got our entire trip planned minute by minute, looking at one scientific wonder after the other.”

“Well, I hope you find a little time to raise some hell.”

I licked the crumbs off my lip. “Me too.”

“Nothing wrong with a young man your age raising a little hell. It’s natural.”

The way she said natural. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. “How about raising a lot of hell?” I asked.

She pretended to frown. “I’m not so sure about a lot of hell, but raising a little hell is an absolute requirement of growing up.”

You can imagine what that word absolute did to me. “An absolute requirement,” I repeated. Colonel Stoopnagle signed off. Uncle Fritz thumbed the dial back to WBBM for Just Plain Bill, fifteen minutes about the kindly barber of Hartville, brought to us by Whitehall Pharmaceutical Company, the makers of Anacin.

She broke off a corner of my cookie and nibbled on it. “Boys are born with more than one extra organ, you know.”

Organ. I was ready to faint. “They are?”

“Uh-huh. And that extra little organ works away quietly year after year, deep inside them, storing up drop after drop of hell-raising juice.”

“Hell-raising juice?”

“Uh-huh. And when a boy gets a certain age that extra little organ gets so full, some of that juice just has to spill. He might explode into a million pieces otherwise. Want another cookie, Ace? While they’re still hot?”

Spill. Explode. You bet I wanted another cookie. I watched her move inside her dress all the way to the counter and back. “What about girls?” I asked. “Do they ever fill up with that hell-raising juice?”

“Sometimes they do.”

Like a fool I called her Mary. “You ever, Mary?”

She shot me a wicked wink. “I guess I was pretty full of it my senior year. When I went to the state spelling bee. Two days and two nights free as a bird in Cincinnati.”

Sin-sin-atti. “So, did you get a chance to spill any of it?”

“The last night there I did.”

“What’d you do?”

Her eyes froze on the icebox door. “I’m not so sure what I did. Except the next morning I came in eighty-seventh out of eighty-eight at the bee.”

“What word tripped you up?”

Her eyes left the icebox and landed square on mine. “I think it was yes.”

Well, that did it. I threw my face across the table and sucked her on the mouth like a nursing calf. I cooled my fire with a long drink of milk. I could feel the mustache it left.

She didn’t get mad and she didn’t laugh. She moved her face close to mine and wiped the milk off my upper lip with her little finger. “Naughty naughty, Ace Gilbert,” she said. For the rest of my life, whenever I made love to a woman, “Naughty naughty, Ace Gilbert” rang in my ears, enhancing the experience greatly.

She slid out of her chair and headed for the doorway. “Buck Rogers is coming on next, I think. You like Buck Rogers, don’t you, Ace?”

“Absolutely.”

Buck Rogers was in fact next, right there on WBBM. It was only 6:30 Chicago time, but following Aunt Mary out of that kitchen, I was years older than I’d been going in. I’d been toyed with by an older woman, two rooms away from her German husband. I felt wonderful.

The Goldbergs came on at 6:45 on WENR, an NBC Blue station. I laughed out loud when Molly Goldberg gave us her very Yiddish “Yoo-hoo! Is anybody?” Uncle Fritz shushed me. “Laugh to yourself inside,” he growled, “so da rest of us can hear what’s funny, too.”

At 7:00 he thumbed in WMAQ on NBC Red for the Eno Crime Clues program, a half-hour detective show we all listened to in Bennett’s Corners. Halfway through the clues he thumbed to WBBM to hear Singin’ Sam the Barbasol Man. At 7:15 he thumbed the dial back to WMAQ for Lady Esther Serenade, a half-hour music program featuring the Wayne King Orchestra. Halfway through he thumbed to WLS, another NBC Blue station, to hear Trade and Mark, a team of song-and-patter men who made up with long shaggy beards like the Smith Brothers on the cough drop boxes. At 8:00 he stayed on WLS for Ben Bernie’s Blue Ribbon Orchestra. The Old Maestro was a legend. Everybody knew his closing by heart: “Until the next time when … possibly you may tune in again … keep the Old Maestro always in your schemes … Yowsah. Yowsah. Yowsah … Au Revoir!” We didn’t dare sing along. But back home in Bennett’s Corners I’m sure everybody was.

At 8:30 Uncle Fritz thumbed back to WMAQ for the Texaco Star Theater featuring Ed Wynn, The Fire Chief. It was hard to keep your laughs inside with a guy funny as Ed Wynn. But we managed. At 9:00 Fritz stayed with WMAQ for Lives at Stake, real-life death defying stories accompanied by the Harold Stokes Orchestra. Aunt Mary helped Clyde with his drops. At 9:30 we stayed tuned to WMAQ for Madame Sylvia’s Hollywood Interviews. She gabbed for fifteen minutes—minus the advertisements for cold cream and lipstick—with Maureen O’ Sullivan, who was currently starring with Johnny Weismuller in Tarzan and his Mate.

One by one we made trips to the bathroom, except for Uncle Fritz, who dutifully stayed in his rocker, thumb ready. At 9:45 it was over to WBBM for Myrt and Marge. This was a fluffy serial about two career girls struggling to make it big in New York City. At 10:00 the dial was back on WMAQ for Amos ‘n’ Andy. White guys talking like Negroes. We all wanted to laugh out loud. Even Uncle Fritz. It was the thirties and laughing at Negroes was just as proper as laughing at Italians, Jews, country barbers, ambitious women, and Arkansas hillbillies like Lum and Abner, who came on at 10:15 on WENR, on NBC Blue.

At 10:30 we went out to the tent. The three beagles had peed all over the flap, making that old bag of canvas smell even worse than it already did.

“You see machines that tabulate, sort and file. They can automatically sort out any group of cards from a file of hundreds of thousands in a few minutes. Books and records are kept by machinery. Intricate tasks that would require thousands of eyes and fingers are rattled off at a dizzy speed.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Seven/Whizzing By

Will, Clyde, and I lined up like sardines on the tent floor, our noses itching from the stink of fresh dog urine and moldy canvas. Will clicked off his flashlight. “This is something, isn’t it?” he said.

“If you mean how the tent smells, it’s something all right,” I said.

“I mean just being here. Almost to Chicago. On the greatest adventure of our lives.”

“I just wish you two would shut up and go to sleep,” Clyde said. “I don’t want be awake when my ear starts aching.”

Will hit Clyde on the belly with his flashlight. “You’re the one who better shut up.”

Clyde was defiant. “I’ll shut up when you do.”

“You’ll shut up or I’ll take that medicine bottle and give you an earache right up the ass.”

Clyde didn’t want to risk that. He rolled over and buried his head under his blanket. Will continued his inspirational lecture: “Week from today we’ll be different people, Ace. We’ll be men of the world. We’ll have seen the future. We’ll be armed to the teeth with knowledge. Ready for whatever life has in store.”

I was squirming like a beached catfish. “All I’m ready for is a real bed. There’s a rock hard as an algebra test in my back.”

Will’s flashlight clicked on. He reached under his pillow for his guidebook. “That reminds me, right after we see them make tires at the Firestone Pavilion we’ve got to get over to the International Business Machine Company Exhibit. They’ve got these machines that can count and sort numbers with the push of a button. Listen to this: ‘Intricate tasks that would require thousands of eyes and fingers are rattled off at a dizzy speed.’”

I answered with an unenthusiastic, “Imagine that.”

Will put his guidebook away. Clicked off the flashlight. “If you want to spend your whole life empty as a pumpkin, that’s all right with me.”

I’d been disrespectful. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry all right.”

We both laughed, instantly recementing our friendship.

“How’d you and me ever end up friends anyway?” I asked.

“I’ve been wondering that for six years.”

“I mean it,” I said. “We’re such different squirrels. You like to stand back and look at life. Study it. Discuss it. Take notes on it. But me, I like to live life.”

Will protested. “I like to live life.”

“No you don’t. All the way here you had your snoot stuck in your maps while the real world was whizzing by. You didn’t see none of it.”

“Sure I did. Two hundred and eighty-three miles of cornfields.”

“Maybe you knew those cornfields were there. But you didn’t see them. Not the way I did.”

“Now that makes a lot of sense.”

“It does. Remember when we dissected that frog in science? You couldn’t wait to cut that little croaker open to see how it worked, like it was a broken radio or something. I wanted to see its guts. See how bad it smelled.”

“That frog did smell bad, didn’t it?”

“Remember how I cut out its little brain and stuck it in Gloria Gerber’s ear?”

I didn’t know it then, but that was the deepest talk Will Randall and I would ever have. It chiseled in unerodible tombstone granite just who he was and just who I was. It didn’t matter a lick if we were two different squirrels, only that we accepted and respected, and enjoyed each other unabashedly. In that old Boy Scout tent. In Mary and Fritz’s backyard in Valparaiso, Indiana. With the smell of dog urine and moldy canvas.

“I have drove Fords exclusively, when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from troubles the Ford has got the other car skinned.”

CLYDE BARROW, IN A LETTER TO HENRY FORD

Eight/Nothing But Vanilla

Aunt Mary yelled over the purr of the Gilbert SXIII. “We enjoyed having you.”

“We had a swell time,” Will yelled back. “Thanks for the cookies.”

“Be careful in dat got-damned ting,” Uncle Fritz yelled from the porch. He was in his underwear. The three beagles were sniffing his furry legs.

Will yelled back. “We’ll send you a postcard from the fair.”

I backed down the driveway. Aunt Mary followed, fingers splayed down her happy hips. “Take care of that ear, Clyde.”

Clyde assured her he would.

Finally she yelled at me. “Nice meeting you, Ace.”

I began a slow roll up Tecumseh Street, anxious to kill Valparaiso. More ready than ever for Chicago and the willing city girls that lived there by the thousands. As I took off I heard her voice chase after me like a siren: “Y.E.S.”

We reached State Route 2 and took it to U.S. 30. It was seven in the morning. Understandably, Will was antsy. He had planned on leaving at 5:30. But Aunt Mary had insisted on gluing us full of French toast and syrup. So we were well behind schedule before we got started.

The plan was to take U.S. 30 west into Illinois, all the way to Joliet, then take the famous U.S. 66 into the city. There were several closer routes. But Uncle Fritz insisted we approach from the west, to skirt “Nikker town” as he called Chicago’s south side. We flew through the tiny burgs of Deep River and Ainsworth, Merrilville, Shererville. At some forlorn crossroads we stopped to gas up.

Will handled the pump. He was a professional, after all. Then while Clyde sat outside on the step and looked sideways at the empty road, Will and I went inside to pay and maybe get a bottle of pop. Sure it was only eight o’clock in the morning and nobody respectable drank pop that early. In the Methodist world we lived in, you didn’t dare treat yourself to anything until late in the afternoon, after a day of sacrifice and accomplishment. But we were on the open road now. Free as birds. Released by adventure from all such religious restraint.

Anyway we didn’t get pop. We got ice cream. Three tall vanilla cones. Nickel each.

We sat on the step next to Clyde and licked. It was already hot. Will watched the melting ice cream dripping off Clyde’s knuckles. “If you don’t hurry up you’ll have to lick yours off the step.”

Whether it was his ear or the French toast and syrup, Clyde was in a foul mood. “It can drip straight to hell for all I care. You know I like chocolate better.”

We were already ninety minutes behind schedule and Uncle Fritz’s detour would cost us another hour maybe. Those cones, good as they were, were costing us a few more precious minutes. Understandably Will was simmering. “Don’t you think we’d all gotten chocolate if they had any?”

Clyde wouldn’t retreat. “I want chocolate.”

Will came to a boil. “Excuse me for spending a nickel on you!” He grabbed the cone from Clyde’s sticky hand and threw it as far as he could.

“Why’d you do that?” Clyde whined. “I woulda ate it.”

That’s when I noticed a man and woman walking up the road toward the garage. “Hey,” I whispered. “It’s that hillbilly gangster and his girl, isn’t it?”

It was them. The hillbilly had his shotgun over his shoulder. His girl was dragging two big suitcases. They walked right up to the Gilbert SXIII. They were covered with sweat. The girl started primping in the mirror on the door. The hillbilly waved at us. “Hiya boys! See you still got your melons!” They joined us on the step.

“Where’s that shiny Auburn?” Will asked.

“Thirsty bitch ran out of gas,” the hillbilly said. “Had to put her out of her misery. Two sweet how-do-you-dos through the radiator. God rest her oily soul. So how’s this thing—whatever it is—on gas?”

My entire body prickled. “You aren’t gonna steal it?”

He rubbed his chin. “It sure ain’t the kind of veekle I steal generally. But we are in a pinch.”

I reminded him of what he’d told us only the day before, that he wouldn’t rob us unless we were rich. “Well, we’re just as poor as we were twenty-four hours ago,” I assured him.

The hillbilly sized me up. “I can see you are. But at the moment you boys have the misfortune of being a lot richer than us. Funny how the world works ain’t it?”

The woman was sizing up Will. His cone especially. “Sweetie. Go in there and steal me one of those.”

The hillbilly liked the idea. “I could go for a cone myself. And whatever’s in the cash drawer.” Chuckling at his own joke, he sauntered in, shotgun over his shoulder. The woman tipped her head and looked parallel at Clyde, who was still mourning the loss of the cone he didn’t want. “He thin in the head or something?” she asked us.

“Ear wax,” Will said.

“He got any drops?”

Boom! Boom! Glass showered our backs. The hillbilly stepped through the shattered window, steaming shotgun in one hand, two cones in the other, both several scoops high. “They didn’t have any damn chocolate,” he said. “Nothing but vanilla.”

“I coulda told you that,” Clyde said.

I watched the woman sink her red lips into the white vanilla. It was a better show than the tomato.

“Well boys,” the hillbilly said, “it’s time to say goodbye again.” He crawled in the Gilbert SXIII. The woman danced to the other side, sucking ice cream and listening to that jazz music in her head.

Will tossed his cone and stormed toward the Gilbert SXIII. “You can’t leave us here.” It wasn’t a plea. It was an order. Will, after all, had a World’s Fair to see.

The hillbilly was smiling. “Sure I can. I’m a bad man with a big gun. I can do anything I want.” Then he looked down at the controls. His smile disintegrated. “Judas Priest! Damn old Model T. I don’t have time to relearn this crazy-ass thing. Boys, consider yourself kidnapped.”

We watched him load his shotgun and motion us forward. He made me get behind the wheel. He stretched out on the passenger side and made his girl squeeze in between Will and Clyde and the melons in the back. He waved a grand good-bye to the garage owner, who was already sweeping up the glass, and ordered me to fly—not west toward Joliet, or back east toward Valparaiso—but south down some dusty farm road into the steamy Indiana corn.

Will demanded to know where we were headed.

“Who knows?” the hillbilly said. When his cone was gone he had his girl hand him a melon, which he sliced open with a pocketknife. He filled his face. “These are almost ripe,” he said. He tossed the rinds into the corn and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his expensive suitcoat. “Since we will be traveling together for a while, let me introduce myself. I am Gustavus P. Gillis. Better known as Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, professional lawbreaker. That sweet little biscuit seated there in the back is my moll, the talented Gladys Bartholomew.”

“When Gus gets killed I’m going to become a famous actress on the radio,” she informed us.

Gus reached over the seat and thrust his hand at Will. Will reluctantly shook it. “I’m Will Randall. That’s Ace Gilbert driving. And this is my brother Clyde.”

Gus made me shake and then reached back and pumped Clyde’s hand for a long time. “You are a lucky man, Clyde!”

“I am?”

“You sure are. You share the name of the greatest lawbreaker in history. The late Clyde Barrow. You never met him, did you, Clyde?”

Clyde shook his sideways head. “I ain’t never even heard of him.”

Gus pushed back his hat and scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. Face pained. He was taking Clyde’s ignorance personally. “Ain’t never heard of Clyde Barrow?”

Will came to his brother’s defense. “He’s never heard of anybody. Hitler. Robin Hood. Rudolph Valentino. Not anybody. But I have. Ace, too. Bonnie and Clyde. We’ve heard of them.”

The pain left Gus’s face. “Someday you boys can tell your grandchildren you were once held hostage for days by the famous Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis.”

Will didn’t want to hear that. “Held for days? Jeez! We’ve got to be in Chicago this morning or our entire trip to the World’s Fair will be down the toilet.”

Gus didn’t want to hear that. “Judas Priest! Here you are on the lam with a famous lawbreaker, and you’re worried about being a few days late for that awful World’s Fair?”

“We’ve only got four precious days,” Will said. “Can’t be home any later than church on Sunday.”

“And I got school Monday,” Clyde said.

Gus was clearly disappointed in the boy with the famous name. “School? This is your school, Clyde!”

In 1955, the year the R&R Luncheonette folded, and I was between dreams, I went to see Gladys Bartholomew. She was back in Mingo Junction, a suburb of Steubenville, on the banks of the Ohio River, married to a man who drove a beer truck. I wanted to get everything straight in my mind about what happened that week in Indiana. Why things unraveled the way they did. We sat in her kitchen and watched the river barges. “Why’d he kidnap us?” I asked. “Three dumb farm boys in a Model T with wings. There would’ve been other cars along he could steal that morning. Fancy cars with transmissions he could drive.”

Gladys sipped on her coffee. She’d put that part of her life far behind her. Questions that had bedeviled me for twenty years—and bedevil me still—didn’t bedevil her one iota. “I suppose just for the fun of it,” she said. She screamed at her kids to turn down the TV. I went home and opened a Dairy Doodle franchise in Brunswick, right across from the high school where Will and I graduated twenty-one years before. Will was valedictorian. He had to give a speech on what our graduating meant to the rest of the world. It was filled with quotes from his Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair. Quotes about the progress of the past. Quotes about the progress sure to come.

Indiana is considerably flatter than Ohio. Hotter, too. Gus made me zigzag through the cornfields all morning. We avoided both official towns and unofficial ones. About noon we came to a sign that said Weebawauwau County Line. Gus liked the way it rolled off his hillbilly tongue. He said “Weebawauwau” several times, then asked us, “What you boys think that means in the Indian language?”

“It means ‘release your hostages so they can go to the World’s Fair,’” Will said.

Gus really laughed. “No Will, I think it means ‘county full of rubes ripe for picking.’ Let’s go find some rubes, Ace.”

We came to a main highway, freshly blacktopped. Gus pointed me toward a collection of little white buildings rising out of the corn. “Let’s go see what that’s all about,” he said. It turned out to be a tourist camp. A place called Hal’s Half Way, meaning I suppose it was located halfway between two important places on that highway. I still remember the sign out front. It was something. Actually it was a whole bunch of signs, one above the other, twenty feet high. At the very top was the cutout face of a happy man who I suppose was Hal. One of those cartoon balloons came out of his O-shaped mouth, asking Why not stop? The sign below that had “Hal’s Half Way” scripted in red light bulbs. The next sign down said “ALWAYS OPEN.” Then came a string of smaller signs attached to each other like Venetian blinds:

COMFY CABINS

RUNNING WATER

CLEAN TOILETS

TASTY FOOD

HOT COFFEE

PIE BAKED DAILY

HAMBURGERS

KIDS EAT FREE

CIGARETTES

PAY PHONE

FREE MAPS

WORLD’S FAIR GIFTS

ICE COLD COCA-COLA

SORRY, NOT HIRING.

It was hardly surprising that the parking lot was full with an impressive sign like that. Gus put his shotgun down his baggy suit pants. In the fifties when Gunsmoke came on TV, and that hillbilly deputy Chester Goode limped after Marshall Dillon on his stiff leg, it always made me think of Gus Gillis, struggling across that parking lot at Hal’s Half Way.

We followed Gus inside. Squeezed into a booth by the window. Unable to bend, Gus was almost lying down. There were lots of folks eating. The air stank of coffee, hamburger grease and cigarettes. Through the serving window behind the counter I could see Hal working the grill. The waitress brought us menus, nearly tripping over Gus’s Chester leg. “Order anything you want, boys,” he told us when she left. “It ain’t like we’ll be paying.”

Will, Clyde, and I ordered hamburgers and home fries. Will added a side of applesauce. Gladys asked about the chicken and the fish dinners before settling on a ham steak with scalloped potatoes and cottage cheese. Gus ordered two bowls of chili and the meat loaf. Peas and mashed potatoes came with that. For drinks we all ordered Cokes. By the time our food came the lunch-hour trade was beginning to taper off. Gus frowned at every empty booth and counter stool as a lost opportunity. He made us eat fast.

Mouth still full of meat loaf, he pulled himself up on his stiff leg and excused himself. “Nature calls,” he said. Two minutes later he came out of the men’s room, shotgun out of his pants. He slipped into the kitchen and came out with Hal and a big hamburger. A bite was gone. “Hal,” he said, “you are a wonderful cook.” He gave him a greasy kiss on the cheek. “Now, who had the burger with onion?”

A mousy man at the counter raised his hand. Gus put the wounded hamburger in front of him. “You’ll enjoy that,” he said and with a nod of his gun barrel bade the man take a bite. The mousy man did. “See?” Gus said as the man chewed. Then he peppered the ceiling with shotgun pellets. The blast made the waitress scream and drop a full pot of coffee into the glass pie case. With everyone frozen in their seats, Gus launched into a speech we’d hear dozens of times as we robbed our way across Weebawauwau County that week: “I am Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, professional lawbreaker. Seated by the window there is the talented Gladys Bartholomew. Stand up Gladys, so the men can have a proper oogle.” Gladys wiggled up and waved as if being introduced at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, which, by the way, I got my fill of the years I ran the R&R Luncheonette and the Dairy Doodle; when I ran the Clam Shack on Pine Island, in Florida, I refused to join the Chamber, inasmuch as it hadn’t prevented me from losing my shirt twice in Ohio. “She’s one buttery biscuit ain’t she? Now seated with her are three fine young men all the way from Ohio.”

Gus told us to stand up and take a bow. Which we did, Will more reluctantly than Clyde or me.

“Now before we pick the lint from your pockets,” Gus said, “I want to make it clear these boys, vicious as they look, are not official members of my gang. They are, in fact, unwilling kidnappees, held begrudgingly against their own inclinations.” He urged the mousy man to take another bite, then got down to business. “While Hal here empties the cash drawer into my ten-dollar hat, Gladys will move among you. Be generous with your valuables. The men may keep their wedding rings. Any man dumb enough to have one deserves to keep it.

“The boys will stand and watch, being, as I’ve said, kidnappees held begrudgingly against their own inclinations.”

Hal couldn’t make his shaking hands open the cash drawer. Gus wasn’t pleased. “Judas Priest, Hal! It’s only money. You’d think I was asking you to put your hands in a bucket of pig guts or something.”

Hal tried again. The drawer flew out. Hit the floor. Pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters bounced in every direction. Then something happened that drove a permanent wedge between Will and me. “Ace, come here and help with this money,” Gus said. “It seems Hal’s got the dropsy’s today.”

I went behind the counter expecting to pick up money. Instead Gus handed me his shotgun. He got down on all fours and chased the rolling coins. I couldn’t aim the gun at Hal like Gus wanted. I was jelly. The gun just hung from my arms, pointing right at Gus’s hillbilly head. “Would you mind getting that out of my face, Ace? Hal’s the dangerous one, not me.”

Will couldn’t believe it. His blinky eyes implored me to do something. My eyes told him I wasn’t that crazy. Will’s eyes went cold and still and for the rest of his life he never looked at me the same. But what was I going to do with that gun? Shoot Gus in the head? Of course not. Tell him to “Get those arms up, mister”? Like I was the Lone Ranger? Gus would’ve laughed and gone on chasing nickels. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. Will wouldn’t have done anything either! But it didn’t matter. I had joined forces with the devil! Succumbed to the temptations of thoughtless, unplanned adventure! Gus Gillis had wedged us good. Probably on purpose.

When the cash drawer money was recovered and the customers husked of their valuables, Gus made me fill a milk crate with clean plates and cups from the kitchen, and we headed for the door. “Folks,” he said. “I’m sure you agree this terrible crime must not go unpunished, that a bastard like me ought to be shot down like a frothin’ old dog. After we’ve driven off, someone please call the law. Tell them you’ve just been stuck up by the famous Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis and the beautiful Gladys Bartholomew, and that the three boys in our tow are unwilling kidnappees.”

The mousy man at the counter raised his hand. Gus let him speak. “How about a dime for the call?”

Gus admired his courage. Flipped him a dime from his hat. We fled. I thought for a moment Gus might take one of the real cars—there were some dandies in the parking lot—and set us free, having firmly established that we were unwilling participants in the affair. But he didn’t. We piled in the Gilbert SXIII and flew. Not toward one of the important places equal distances from Hal’s Half Way, but back down the gravelly side road, into the cover of the Indiana corn. “You know boys,” Gus said. “The great Clyde Barrow always drove Fords. Of course nothing like this overgrown horsefly of yours, Ace.”

“At the east end of the ground floor there stands a giant man. He is six feet tall, and rises from a pedestal three and one-half feet high. He is transparent. As though you were suddenly endowed with X-Ray eyes you may view the inside of the human body.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Nine/Mincemeat

We flew unencumbered along the dusty roads of Weebawauwau County. Gladys helped Clyde with his midmorning drops. We ate the cookies Aunt Mary baked. Will read his official guidebook. I took as many peeks at Gus as I could.

He didn’t seem much older than us. Twenty-two, twenty-three maybe. I remember thinking that if I was wearing an expensive suit and hat like that, and holding a double-barreled shotgun between my legs, I’d probably look as mean and mature as he did. Then I started to feel silly. Here I was nearly this man’s age and what was I doing? Pretending my T was an airplane. Wearing an aviator’s cap and goggles like I was some moron. When everybody’s eyes were elsewhere I pulled them off and stuck them under the seat.

As for Gladys, I figured she wasn’t much older than Will or me. Sand off that face powder and lipstick, yank her out of that floozy dress, drive that jazz music out of her head, and she was just another skinny kid politely asking permission to leave the supper table. But of course she did have that makeup on, and she was wearing that dress, and that jazz music was playing away in her head. She was the most sumptuous thing I had ever seen, Will’s aunt notwithstanding.

In the mirror I could see her leaning against Will, chin on his shoulder, sharing the guidebook with him. “That’s not a real dinosaur in that picture is it?” she said.

“Naw, it’s mechanical,” said Will. “It’s part of the Sinclair Oil Company exhibit. But it’s as big as a real dinosaur. And it moves. See what it says there: ‘The forty ton brontosaurus swings his long neck, jerks his huge tail, clashes his jaws and emits life-like screeching grunts.’” Will then explained that motor oil was made from the grease of long-dead animals like dinosaurs, and that’s why Sinclair had those mechanical monsters in its exhibit, which incidentally was located right next to the Firestone exhibit where they demonstrated how tires were made. I tipped my head back and told Gladys my father worked at Goodrich and that during the war he flew with Eddie Rickenbacker and that’s why my Model T had wings and a propeller.

“Oh,” she said.

They went on flipping pages. “Look at that,” she said. “You can see that man’s insides.”

“That’s the famous Transparent Man,” Will said. “He’s not any more real than those dinosaurs. Made of plastic. He’s located in the Medical Section of the Hall of Science, which is centrally located between the North and South Lagoons. See what it says: ‘He is six feet tall, and rises from a pedestal three and one-half feet high. He is transparent. As though you were suddenly endowed with X-Ray eyes you may view the inside of the human body.’”

I watched Gladys wince and turn the page. “I’m glad real people aren’t made of plastic,” she said.

We drove all day, stopping once to use the outhouse behind a Mennonite school and once to rob a country grocery. At the grocery Gus appropriated a long chain of wieners, buns, ketchup, and pickle relish to go along, a case of Whistle orange soda, plenty of gum and candy, and of course the contents of the cash drawer. He made Will take a picture of him and Gladys with the storekeeper and then launched into his speech about how his crime should not go unpunished and how the three of us were “unwilling kidnappees held begrudgingly against their own inclinations.”

Late in the day Gus made me drive right into a field of high corn—a quarter mile or more—to a secluded cow pasture. He ordered Will and me to put up the Boy Scout tent and then took off with Clyde and the box of dishes we stole from Hal’s Half Way. For all we knew he was going to kill Clyde and eat him. Soon it was clear he had nothing worse in mind than a little skeet shooting. We watched as he made Clyde throw the plates in the air so he could blast them.

Gladys sat on her suitcase while Will and I struggled with the tent. Her legs were hinged just like she was wearing men’s pants, which she wasn’t of course, and you could see the back of her legs right up to her underwear. She knew we were trying not to look. Every few seconds there’d be a boom and the shatter of china. “He’s really fast on the trigger isn’t he?” Gladys said.

“How long have you and Gus been at it?” Will asked her. “Robbing rubes I mean.”

The setting sun was in Gladys’s eyes, making her squint. “About three weeks, I think.”

Will was amazed. “I figured you’d been at it for years.”

She knocked her knees together and laughed. “Don’t you think we’d be robbing better than gas stations and greasy spoons if we’d been at it for years?”

Back in Bennett’s Corners Will couldn’t put two words together in front of a girl, but suddenly here in Indiana, he was talking with this yellow-haired gangster girl as easily as he could talk to me. I forced myself into the conversation. “How’d you and Gus meet? In a fancy Chicago whorehouse or something?”

“I wish it was that romantic. Actually Gus and I met when he first held up my daddy’s store in Mingo Junction. Gus was just getting started in his life of crime and he stuck up Daddy’s store every day for a week. Every night at closing time he’d come storming in, waving a shotgun. Demanding all our money. Smiling at my smooth white legs.”

She let us take a long look at those smooth white legs before tucking them under her dress. “It was so exciting. I couldn’t wait for the next night to come. After a few days I realized I’d fallen helplessly in love with him. I was already helplessly in love with the idea of getting the hell out of Mingo Junction.”

We could relate to her desire to kill Mingo Junction. It sounded an awful lot like Bennett’s Corners. “So you just took off with him?” Will asked.

“Not right away. He had to escape from the Jefferson County jail first. It was so funny! Just as Daddy was telling me how glad he was they finally put that stump-jumping maniac away, Gus himself barged in, toting his brand-new shotgun. He smiled at my legs, made Daddy hand him the day’s receipts, and away we went.”

“Jailbreaker,” I marveled. “How’d he escape?”

She shrugged with modesty. “Gus says Ohio cops always underestimate West Virginians.”

Neither of us had ever met anyone from West Virginia. Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Germany, and that was it. “I could tell he was a hillbilly,” I said.

Gus’s shotgun boomed. Dishes shattered. The tent went up.

“You really going to be a radio actress?” Will asked.

Gladys nodded proudly.

“I listen to the radio all the time,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose like I was a turd. “Everybody listens to the radio all the time.”

“You ever been on the radio?” Will asked.

“Not yet. But I will once Gus dies in a hail of bullets. He’s got it all figured out. After he’s dead and pictures of his riddled body are spattered all over the newspapers, he says I can trade on his ill fame and become a famous actress. Gus says the public loves fallen angels like me almost as much as it worships dead criminals. And I’ll have starring roles, too, right off the bat. Gus says if he works his death right, I won’t have to work my way up from the bottom like all those other dizzy biscuits.”

Will was entranced. “I bet you’ll end up the most famous radio actress ever.”

Gladys was suddenly girlish. “You ever see a real radio script before? I’ve got three episodes of Daphne Darnell’s Country Girl Theater right here in my suitcase. Gus stole them for me when we stuck up the Kokomo School for the Performing Arts.” She slid off her suitcase. Popped the finger locks.

I’ll tell you, there is no greater aphrodisiac than the inside of a woman’s suitcase. Nothing more intimidating either. It’s like looking into a woman’s vagina and soul at the same time. You don’t know whether to look away or lunge. First there’s the smell of it, the intermingling aromas: perfume; sweat; fresh hankies and already worn underwear; musky hairs caught in combs and hairbrushes; the leather of extra shoes; the tang of creams and powders and other mystical greases. And then there’s the look of it, necessary and unnecessary things given equal space: blouses folded smooth and sharp; socks and panties in wads; bras; belts of many colors; sprinkles of jewelry; candy and razor blades.

Gladys’ suitcase also contained those Daphne Darnell scripts stolen in Kokomo, a pistol with an inlaid silver kitten on the pink pearl handle, and a Bible, if you can believe it. What a place that suitcase was! Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalene sharing the same little windowless apartment.

“My mother never misses Daphne Darnell,” Will said. “I listen too sometimes.”

“When I’m famous on the radio, you and your mother can listen to me.”

“We will.” He took one of the scripts from the suitcase, reached right in there like a gynecologist. “Hey! ‘The Handsome Hobo!’ I remember that one.”

Gladys joyously watched him fan the pages. “I’ll be a better actress than Daphne Darnell, that’s for sure.”

Will assured her she would.

“I just wish Gus would hurry up and get riddled,” she said. “Waiting for fame and fortune is boring as the flu.”

While they flipped through the radio scripts, I watched Gus and Clyde destroy Hal’s dishes.

I didn’t have much contact with Clyde after that week in Indiana. For a long time I stayed on the farm on Stony Hill road and then a few days after Thanksgiving my father got me a job stacking tires at Goodrich. My attention drifted away from Bennett’s Corners and more toward Akron. When I came home from England in 1946, I went to the Corners to see Mrs. Randall. Clyde was still running the garage, though he was thinking about closing the place and taking a job delivering bread for Spang Bakery. Clyde was twenty-five. Married. A new father. He was happy to see me. He bought me a Pepsi and we eased our way into our 1934 trip to Chicago.

“Bet you were scared when Gus took you off alone,” I said.

“Alone?”

“That day in the meadow. With that box of dishes from Hal’s Half Way.”

“Not really. He said up front I was going to help him target practice.”

“Will and I thought he was going to eat you.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely—no, not really. Did you and Gus have a chance to talk much? Between plates?”

“He never stopped talking. You remember how he was. Of course I couldn’t hear much of it. Not with one ear clogged with wax and the other ringing from his shotgun.”

I begged him to remember what he could.

“I do remember him telling me I had a good arm, the way I was flinging those dishes. He said I was probably good with a gun, too.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’d made my share of mincemeat out of field mice with my father’s .22. You remember that rifle, don’t you, Ace? He was always letting Will and me shoot it. Didn’t please Mother much.”

“He used to let me shoot it, too. Couple of times. What did Gus say then?”

“He asked me if I wanted to make mincemeat out one of those plates.”

“He didn’t!”

“He handed me the shotgun. Just like he gave it to you in that diner. Remember?”

The memories were sad. But we both laughed. “Your brother wanted me to shoot Gus in the head. We were never the same after that.”

“He had his chance, too.”

“That’s right, he did,” I said. “We all had our chance to shoot Gus Gillis and didn’t.”

“Gus asked me if I was going to,” Clyde said.

“He didn’t?!”

“I shook my sideways head no.”

We laughed into the necks of our Pepsi bottles. “What’d he say?”

“He said that was good to hear. He said when he did get killed he didn’t want it to be with just one lousy gun. He wanted dozens of guns blasting away at him. Said he wanted his body riddled with holes just like Clyde Barrow.”

Then we laughed at how Gus actually did die. That made us think of Will, of course. We stopped laughing and I went over to Ruby & Rudy’s for cigarettes. That’s when I found out they wanted to sell; when I first got my brainstorm for the R&R Luncheonette. I could have returned to my tire-stacking job at Goodrich. They were hiring every veteran they could get their hands on. But I’d spent three and a half years cooking. I figured I might as well use what the Army Air Force taught me.

Clyde was in World War II, too. Never left the States. Made Staff Sergeant just like me. Spent the whole war in Washington, D.C., supervising Negro privates in the War Department laundry. Shortly after our talk he took the job with Spang. Did real well. Worked his way up to a desk job. I see him every other Thursday now.

“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf,

big bad wolf big bad wolf.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf,

Tra la la la la.”

FROM WALT DISNEY’S THREE LITTLE PIGS,

WORDS AND MUSIC BY FRANK CHURCHILL

Ten/Pass the Ketchup, Clyde

It was doubtful Gus had ever been a Boy Scout like Will and me, nonetheless he knew his way around a campfire. We had a grand feast: pork and beans and fried potatoes, hot dogs and melon—a day in the Indiana sun had sweetened them up fine—and all the Orange Whistle we wanted. Will was anxious to boil coffee. He showed Gus my new pot and the two bags of fresh-ground we brought from Bennett’s Corners. Gus got a sour look on his face and waved Will off. “Me and the coffee bean don’t agree,” he said. “Just the smell of it retches my guts.”

We were still feasting when the sun set. The meadow was lousy with crickets. Que-queek que-queek que-queek que-queek.

Gladys lit up a cigar and blew the smoke on her legs to strangle the mosquitoes feeding off her. Gus taught Clyde the words to “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.” It was one of the biggest hits of the decade, an anthem for FDR’s New Deal. Everybody was singing it or whistling it. Appropriately, Clyde had never heard of it.

Our feast dwindled to the last wiener. Gus claimed it. He masterfully twirled it low over the coals. “You know boys, I feel just like the Lord Jesus at the Last Supper, here with y’all. I think tomorrow may be the big day. Every gun in Weebawauwau County making Swiss cheese out of my mortal flesh. Pass the ketchup, Clyde.”

Gus slid the blackened dog into a bun and drowned it with the ketchup. He piled several spoons of beans on top and shook pickle relish over that. Took a messy bite. “I truly pray that none of you get yourselves killed along with me,” he said. “But if that’s what the Almighty has in mind, I hope you’ll die with dignity, and not start squirming and crying like a bunch of amateurs when the lead starts flying. Judas Priest! How would that read in the papers?”

Another messy bite. “Bonnie and Clyde took their medicine like the professionals they were. One hundred and eight-seven bullets. I heard that a half dozen of those bullets went straight through old Clyde’s manhood.”

“His manhood?” our Clyde asked.

“His winger,” explained Gladys.

I hadn’t heard about the manhood part, but everybody alive knew how Bonnie and Clyde lived and died. They’d been robbing and running since 1930, mostly in their home state of Texas. They robbed hundreds of gas stations and banks and groceries. Along the way Clyde killed at least thirteen men. There were lots of famous gangsters in those days. The way the law dogged them, and their daring escapes, made Bonnie and Clyde the most famous.

Only three months before our own adventure to Chicago a Texas Highway Patrol officer named Frank Hamer—a real tough sonofabitch who’d tracked down and killed sixty-five outlaws in his career—ambushed Bonnie and Clyde on a country road between Sailes and Gibsland, Louisiana. Twenty after nine in the morning. Clyde was driving in his socks. Bonnie was eating a sandwich. In their big Ford V-8 they had a shotgun, a dozen pistols, three Browning automatic rifles, two thousand rounds of ammunition, and fifteen stolen license plates. Hamer and his lawmen fired continually for four minutes. After it was over they counted 187 holes, twenty-five of them in Clyde and twenty-three in Bonnie. I remember reading that the stream of fire was so thick that it slashed Clyde’s necktie in half and cut Bonnie’s dress away from her shoulders. But there was nothing in the papers about Clyde’s manhood getting riddled. A few years ago I saw a documentary on PBS that said Clyde was a homosexual and Bonnie a nymphomaniac. I didn’t know anything about that in 1934, and I doubt Gustavus P. Gillis did either.

It was clear to me even then that Gus and Gladys were playing Bonnie and Clyde, the way kids might have played the Lone Ranger and Tonto. When I went to see Gladys in Mingo Junction in 1955 I asked her about it. “Who really knows what’s playing and what’s real,” she said. “Gus truly did want to die in a hail of bullets, I know that.”

“Why was that?”

“Because he hated being a poor dumb hillbilly with no hope of ever being anything but a poor dumb hillbilly. When he heard how Bonnie and Clyde died, he figured that was the way for him. Riddled right out of his miserable existence.”

I brought up a subject I’d always wondered about. “Did Gus ever kill anybody? He didn’t the week we were with him.”

Gladys laughed. “Gus never shot anything more alive than those melons in his life. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. Just himself. And it bothered him that Clyde Barrow actually killed people. ‘Clyde Barrow was a great man,’ Gus used to tell me, ‘but shooting people was his one fatal flaw.’” She watched a barge crawl up the Ohio River. “Gus was a good kid. We were all good kids.”

That brought me to something else I’d wondered about. “How’d you feel about Will that week? The two of you seemed to hit it off. I saw you kissing in the corn.”

She stared at the river long after the barge slid across her window. “He was a sweet boy, wasn’t he?”

Both of us were on the brink of tears, so I changed the subject. “Did you really think you’d become a famous radio actress?”

“Good lord! I’d forgotten all about that.”

No she hadn’t. Her face said she hadn’t.

“I was just playing for Gus’s sake,” she said. “I knew that wasn’t really going to happen.”

And I didn’t think I’d be a famous dogfighter like Eddie Rickenbacker and my father, dispatching Huns into the vineyards. Of course she thought she’d be a famous radio actress.

“Evolution of the human face—from fish to man—is shown by a series of models in the Paleontology exhibit.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Eleven/Strictly 9 to 5

Will woke up angry. It was already Thursday. We’d missed our first day at the World’s Fair. His minute-by-minute itinerary was in shambles. His dream was in shambles. He ate dry Wheaties out of the box and glowered at the scorched bean cans in the fire ashes.

I woke up ashamed. Ashamed we hadn’t had the guts to escape during the night. The Wild Teuton and my dad would have escaped had they been shot down and captured. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. We could have gotten away easily, too. Gus and Gladys were in the tent snoring like broken accordions. We could have been in the Gilbert SXIII and flying before they could untie the tent flap. Of course I say this now knowing that Gus never shot anybody in his life. We didn’t know that then. Then we knew he’d shoot us down like dogs if we tried anything. We’d seen him kill that farmer’s melons. So we didn’t try to escape during the night and I was feeling lousy about it. I ate some dry Wheaties, too.

Clyde woke up humming, anxious for his drops. He had a pack of Juicy Fruit gum for breakfast.

Gus crawled out of the tent happy. Confident this was the day he’d die in a hail of bullets. He pissed in the ashes. Made the bean cans roll.

Gladys came out of the tent brushing her teeth. I watched the foam pour out of her mouth and wondered if Gus had poked her during the night. I hadn’t heard anything. But who knows? Not everybody were squealers and moaners like my parents. They might have poked for hours in there. They had dry Wheaties and melon for breakfast.

Will and I started to police the campsite. But Gus made us stop. He wanted to leave as much evidence as possible. He even left an affidavit, flying like a flag on his wiener stick: I Gus “The Gun” Gillis camped here with the talented Gladys Bartholomew and my three unwilling kidnappees.

Gus made Will take several pictures of Gladys and him standing by the Gilbert SXIII. He made Clyde and me get in two of them. Had Gladys take one of him and Will, just so he wouldn’t feel left out.

We drove back through the cow flops and corn to the road. Drove until we stumbled onto a main highway. It wasn’t much past dawn. The landscape became surprisingly hilly. Below us we could see a muddy river—the grand Weebawauwau itself—and beyond that the silvery roofs of a fair-sized town. Gus was delighted. Told us he had a reign of terror in mind. “I plan to rob as many people possible in as short a time as possible,” he said. “To bring the law blazing.”

He had me park under the bridge. We were next to a long field of cabbage. The heads looked about ready to harvest. “Well let’s go fishing,” he said.

“Fishing?” Clyde said. “We ain’t got any poles or tackle.”

Gus reached back and squeezed Gladys’s knee. “But we got bait, Clyde.”

Gladys crawled out with her suitcase and started up the embankment for the road. We stayed with Gus under the bridge. I can tell you what happened next because later that afternoon Gladys lavishly recounted every minute of it, using voices and gestures and sound effects. She was after all an aspiring radio actress.

She walked a quarter mile or so up the road and then waited, one leg up on her suitcase. Soon a little white milk truck came along, heading toward town to make deliveries.

Naturally the milkman stopped. He drank in her legs and yellow hair. “Trouble, miss?”

As soon as Gladys saw the truck coming she’d lathered her cheeks with spit to make it look like she was crying. She made her voice tremble. “I didn’t think anyone would ever come along—ever ever.”

“You’ve always got a friend at Willow Farm Dairy,” the milkman said, smiling heroically, tugging the black plastic visor on his white cap. He was wearing a white shirt, white pants and white shoes. Gladys said he looked like a big bottle of milk himself.

She staggered forward and grabbed the door like it was a life raft. “I was afraid he’d find me alone out here. Shoot me dead. Just like he did the others.”

The milkman’s heroic smile froze. Adam’s apple went up and down. “How can I help you, miss?”

“Just get me away from here. That crazy man could be anywhere. With that big gun.”

Gladys could barely tell us the next part. She laughed and gasped and pressed on her bladder so she wouldn’t pee. “That milkman curdled right before my eyes. ‘Oh my! Oh my! Get in! Get in!’ he said. ‘I’ll drop you off at the sheriff’s. I’ve got to start my deliveries right at six. But I can drop you! I can do that! You’ve always got a friend at Willow Farm Dairy! Yessiree Bob!’”

So Gladys got in and the milkman sped off. “I can’t begin to thank you,” she said. “He’s such a deadly shot.”

With the immediate danger of getting shot behind him, the milkman’s heroism returned. So did his libidinous stare. “It’ll be fine, miss. It’ll be fine.”

“He is the most jealous boyfriend I’ve ever had,” she told him. “Killed a man once just for admiring my shapely legs. Do you think my legs are shapely?”

The milkman’s eyes shot back to the road. “Why don’t you have a bottle of milk to soothe your stomach. Courtesy of the Willow Farm Dairy.”

Gladys couldn’t resist toying. She opened a bottle of cream and slowly licked it. Wrapped her eyes around his. “He turned straight into cottage cheese,” she told us. “Then I screamed ‘Dear lord! There he is!’”

The milkman frantically looked out of every window in his little truck. “Where? Where? Where?”

That’s when Gladys produced the pistol from her suitcase, with the silver kitten on the pink pearl handle. “Hiding under that bridge up there,” she said. “Waiting for his sweet little biscuit to bring him a big white sucker fish.”

We witnessed the rest for ourselves. The milk truck skidded to stop. Gus, shotgun over his shoulder, climbed slowly to the road. We followed. He waved his fedora at the milkman like he was an old friend. The milkman crawled out, arms over his head, relieved he’d fallen victim to highway robbery and not that jealous boyfriend.

“Great little actress, ain’t she?” Gus said.

The milkman agreed.

“Did you really believe I was a woman in distress?” Gladys asked him. “Distress is one of the hardest emotions to play. And really be convincing.”

The milkman assured her he’d been completely bamboozled. Gladys was thrilled.

We unloaded several wire baskets of milk and cream. Gus made Will take a picture of the milkman with Gladys and him, then launched into his speech about the three of us being unwilling kidnappees. He made the milkman promise to report the holdup as soon as his route was finished. The milkman promised and drove off fast.

That’s the way the ruse went. By midmorning Gus and Gladys had hooked more than a dozen such suckers. Stacked in the cabbage by the river were trays of bread, cases of Coca-Cola, several big bags of ready-mix cement, baskets of eggs, a salesman’s sample case full of doorknobs and hinges, two bundles of the Indianapolis Star, all that milk and cream of course, three gumball machines and a bag of pennies, assorted wallets, watches, pocket change, and jackknives. Every victim got his picture taken with Gus and Gladys.

After a few hours traffic completely stopped. Which made Gus a happy man. “I’m sure roadblocks are up by now,” he said. “Only a matter of time before we see the law sneaking up. This is all so perfect, ain’t it Gladys? I couldn’t have picked a better spot to die if I was George Armstrong Custer.”

Clyde asked who George Armstrong Custer was.

Will, nose in his Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair, told him.

The morning wore away. So did the afternoon. No sign of the law. Gladys sat on the ground and went through the wallets, then counted the pocket change and finally the bag of pennies liberated from the gumball machine man. She announced the take: “Forty-nine dollars and thirty-seven cents.”

Gus wasn’t the least bit heartened. He wanted a hail of bullets, not a pile of cash. He climbed to the road and shook his shotgun in both directions. Yelled and whistled. Nothing. That’s when Gladys began recounting her acting job with the milkman, the bread man, the Coca-Cola man, and all the rest. Will put down his guidebook and listened to every word. So did I. Clyde hummed and drank several warm eight-ounce Cokes. Gus gave up and joined us. He cracked an egg in a quart bottle of milk and sipped it lying flat on his back, head propped up on a cabbage.

“All in all,” Gladys said, “I think my amnesia act with the doorknob salesman was my best work.”

That’s when Gus blew. “Judas Priest, Gladys! All you ever do is think about yourself.”

Gladys blew back. “My career is just as important as yours!”

“It’s important. But don’t forget that you’re not going to have any damn career until I’m riddled with lead.”

“Just because you haven’t been riddled yet you think it’s the end of the world.”

Gus wilted. “I was sure today would be the day, that’s all.”

I was playing with the pile of stolen watches. “There’s still plenty of time,” I said. “According to these it’s still somewhere between 4:50 and 5:03.”

Tiny rivers of milk and egg yoke were meandering through the stubble on Gus’s unshaven face. “I appreciate your trying to cheer me up, Ace. But you don’t know these small-town badges like I do. They are strictly nine to five. If they ain’t come yet, they ain’t coming. All on their way home to supper by now.” He jumped up and stalked down the row, angrily kicking cabbage heads. He stopped and turned thoughtfully toward us. “How’d you like to be the poor saps who have to pick all these bastards?” Then he lifted one of the bags of ready-mix cement over his head and heaved it in the river. We watched it splash and sink. “Now that’s what I need to do,” he said.

Gladys was as puzzled as the rest of us. “How do I become a famous actress by you drowning in a river?”

Gus came back up the row, excited. “Not drown, sweetie pie! Make a bigger splash! I’ve been thinking too small. No hick-town hundred-a-month badge is going to risk his life over greasy spoons and Coca-Cola men. I’ve got to think of a crime so stupendous that the local badges got no choice but to come after me, guns puking lead.”

I’d already driven a wedge between Will and me by not shooting Gus in the head when I had the chance at Hal’s Half Way. Now I drove it further. I grabbed one of the cabbages Gus kicked off its roots and hurled it into the river. It didn’t sink like the cement, but bobbed like a headless green duck. “You ought to rob a bank.”

Will’s rebuke was instant. “Jeez, Ace.”

Gus hurled a cabbage into the river, too, several feet farther out than mine. “You’re thinking big, Ace. I like big thinking. But there ain’t no money in robbing banks in Indiana no more. What John Dillinger hasn’t stolen by now, the damn bankers have themselves.”

“How about a train, then?” I said.

“Jeez! Now we’re going to play Jesse James!”

Gus threw another cabbage. “Don’t stifle Ace’s imagination, Will. Robbing a train is a good idea. Unfortunately what we need here is a great idea.”

I threw another cabbage, too. I was straining to think of a great idea. Gus laid back down and pulled his fedora over his eyes. Sipped his milk and egg.

Now Will threw a cabbage in the river. It went farther than all the rest. “You want a great idea? I’ve got the greatest idea in the world.”

Gus slipped back his fedora, very interested. “What is it?”

“Let us go and then kidnap someone who isn’t on such a tight schedule. Then you can take all the time you want thinking how to get yourself riddled.”

Gus’s fedora went back over his disappointed eyes. “Judas Priest! You’re as selfish as Gladys. You ain’t going nowhere until I’m dead. The sooner you all get that through your heads, the happier we’re all going to be.”

“Who’s Jesse James?” Clyde asked.

“Jeez!”

“Judas Priest!”

We all took a nap. Cabbages for pillows.

Somewhere around six I heard the sky chattering and opened my eyes. Airplane. I watched Gladys’s chest swell and fall. The chattering got louder. Today there’s not an inch of America where your ears aren’t filled with the chainsaw of a jumbo jet or at least the bee-buzz of some little puddlejumper—Bennett’s Corners is right on the southern flight path into Cleveland Hopkins and the air there shakes continuously—but in 1934 hearing or seeing an airplane was still an event. I stood up and searched the tree lines. I couldn’t see it yet, but I could tell it was coming straight toward us from the west. Low, too.

Finally a double set of wings popped over the treetops. The air quivered like the inside of a church bell. The plane sank to within a few yards of the field. Came right toward us. There was an explosion of white powder. I could feel it settling on my face. See it settling on the cabbage heads. On Gus’s head. Gladys’s head. Will’s head. Clyde’s head. We were being crop dusted.

The plane slipped over the river and climbed. Turned for another pass. Everybody was awake now, coughing and pawing at their hair and faces. “It’s a Curtiss JN-4,” I said. “A Jenny! Just like my father trained in before going to France.”

Gus didn’t care what kind of airplane it was. “Judas Priest! Can’t he see us?”

Another cloud of insecticide boiled down. “Get that thing of yours cranked up, Ace,” Gus shouted. “We’re going to blast that crazy bastard out of the sky.”

By thing Gus meant the Gilbert SXIII. A minute later Gus and I were in rabid pursuit, chasing that real airplane all over that field of cabbage. Squished heads flew in every direction. “Stay on his ass,” Gus shouted. “Stay on his ass!”

It was the strangest thing. Eight years later when I returned to Weebawauwau County and looked the pilot of that old Jenny up—his name was Bud Hemphill—I asked him why he’d let us chase him around that field. “You were in a real plane for christsake! Up in the air! You could have just flown off!”

“I was a’scared,” Bud said.

“Of a Model T?”

“Not of you,” he said. “A’scared of losing my job. My boss Bill McDougall said if I didn’t get them cabbages dusted by six I was fired. Couple nuts in an old car with wings wasn’t going to get me unemployed.”

So that’s why the Jenny stayed over the cabbage field, boiling insecticide, while we gave chase in the Gilbert SXIII. I tried to apply the Dicta Boelcke to our pursuit.

Tried to close on his tail so Gus could get off a useful shot, but Bud had the upper hand. He was really up in the air. Soon as I’d close the gap he’d fill our faces with insecticide and roll out of the way. “Land, you damn fool!” Gus kept yelling. “Land, you damn ding-donged fool!”

We finally got to Bud. He made a nice pass over the cabbages, but he must have been watching us instead of the tree line. When he finally saw that mountain of maples he had to swing up sharp to the left. Too steep. Wings lost their air. Went into a stall. Nose down. Plummeted toward the cabbages. I figured he was dead. But Bud was a pro. He rammed the throttle and lowered the elevators on his tail wing. He nosed up and scraped safely over the ground. Unfortunately for him, I was right on his tail. Gus put a shell into the insecticide tank. Dust and tin flew. Bud panicked. Cut the throttle. Yanked his elevators up. Bounced to a landing.

We drove alongside. “Ace,” said Gus, “we’ve bagged us an airplane!”

Bud slid out of the Jenny. Hands over his head. He was wearing a cap and goggles not unlike mine. Which I suddenly wished I was wearing. I pulled them from under the seat cushions and put them on. I smiled at poor Bud and wondered if any of those three Germans my father shot down made it to the ground alive?

“No one ever looked forward to hand-propping a Hisso engine after a cold night in the open, or washing the cow dung from the underside of the wings, or sitting miserably under a wing during a thunder-storm, your raincoat draped over the wooden propeller to keep it from soaking up moisture which could cost you rpms. But we were flyers and the whole vast sky out there belonged to us alone and that was enough.”

BARNSTORMER EARL C. REED

Twelve/Descending Like a Dove

My father not only trained in a Curtiss JN-4. He barnstormed in one for a while. For a few years after the war it was a good way for former dogfighters to make a buck, and more importantly, stay in the sky. The Jenny was too clumsy for combat, but most American flyers had trained in them before shipping overseas to fly French-made Spads and Nieuports. After the Armistice you could get an old Jenny dirt cheap. Flying was still new. Still an adventure. Farm folk would pay as much as twenty bucks for a three-minute ride over their own cow pastures.

My father barnstormed like that for about a year, all over the Midwest. Finally my mother’s threats of divorce—never seeing his Little Ace again—got him thinking straight and he returned to Columbus for a normal family life as a race-car mechanic.

Today when I see one of those television programs about people living out in the middle of nowhere being abducted by space aliens, taken up in their saucers, I tend to believe them. Those aliens are nothing but barnstormers, dropping out of the heavens to give earth folks the best three minutes of their lives.

By the late twenties the barnstorming era was over. Everybody who wanted to go up, had been up. Price of a three-minute ride over a cow pasture fell to a buck or two. Regular passenger service was starting. Airplanes were as common as crows.

So that Jenny was no stranger to me. My father had told me a thousand times how they flew, what you could do with them in the air and what you couldn’t. I had drawings of them on my bedroom wall. And now I was standing right next to one. It could have been the Jenny my father trained in. Maybe it was the one he barnstormed in. Goddamn it could’ve! Sonofabitch it could’ve! Only about a thousand Jennies had ever been made! So why not?

Whether it was or wasn’t, Bud Hemphill’s Jenny was in piss-poor condition. Its canvas skin was covered with patches. More than one of its wing struts was cracked and mended with baling wire. The engine had scabs of rust and lots of oil drips. And of course now it was caked with cabbage juice and insecticide. Still it was grand to see.

I felt Gus’s hand on my shoulder. “Think you could fly it, Ace?”

“Absolutely,” I bragged, unaware that he meant it.

“Then let’s do it.”

My entire body went clammy. “What you saying, Gus?”

“I’m saying my prayers have been answered! This is my bigger splash, Ace! This is my great idea! This will get me riddled for sure!” He grabbed the top of my head and danced around me like I was a maypole. “We’re going barnstorming, Ace! A-barnstorming-we-shall-go!”

“Barnstorming?”

“That’s right. Barnstorming. We’re going to float above Weebawauwau County like hungry buzzards and when we see somebody rich on the ground, we’re going to set down and put our sweet beaks right down their pants pockets.” Gus kept maypoling around me. “I ain’t a religious man, but I truly believe the Almighty sent you to me, Ace! You are my guardian angel! My ticket to the grave!”

“Ace ain’t no angel,” Clyde said.

“The hell he ain’t,” Gus said. “The hell he ain’t.”

So that was Gus’s big idea. And I was all for it. I didn’t dare look into Will’s eyes, of course. I knew what they were telling me: You’ve crossed the line, Ace, gone from unwilling kidnappee to unadulterated criminal. Naturally that wasn’t how I looked at it. What choice did I have? If Gus told me to fly the Jenny, I had to fly the Jenny. If Gus told me to set down and rob people, I had to set down and rob people. What right did Will’s eyes have to judge me? He’d helped unload that milk truck and the Coca-Cola truck and all the rest, hadn’t he? How was this any different? Same thing, only higher in the air!

“Sure you can fly this thing?” Gus asked me again.

“Absolutely.”

I kept my own eyes away from Will’s and crawled in. Gus crawled in the front passenger seat. Bud Hemphill got ready to prop the propeller. I glued my eyes on the instruments, wiped my palms on my pants, adjusted my goggles several times. Then I heard Gus say something that just sucked the blood from my brain: “Say, Clyde! You wouldn’t want to come along, would you? There’s plenty of room up here on my lap.”

Goddamn. Sonofabitch. Why’d he say that? I didn’t mind risking Gus’s life, or mine, but not Clyde’s.

In 1942 when I looked up Bud Hemphill, to help me piece together what happened that week, I asked him how Will looked when we took off. “Like a dog left out in a blizzard,” Bud said. “There was why written all over his face.”

I felt guilty as hell. Kept my eyes looking straight ahead.

“Can I really go up?” I heard Clyde ask his brother.

“No, you can’t,” I heard Will say. His voice was like a hammer on an anvil.

“You keep forgetting who’s in charge here,” I heard Gus say. “Climb in, Clyde.”

I was still staring at the instruments but I could see Clyde in the corner of my eye, his head sideways, medicine bottle in his hand, climbing up on the wing. I could also make out Will’s arm pulling him by the pantleg. “Let go of my pants,” I heard Clyde snarl.

I heard Gus laugh and say, “Kick like a mule, Clyde.”

Clyde did and Will fell back on the ground. I saw Clyde squirm down on Gus’s lap. I opened the fuel shutoff and set the throttle. In a lot of ways flying a Jenny wasn’t much different than driving a T. I gave Bud a nod. He gave the propeller a yank. The Jenny shook to life. I saw Gus point his shotgun toward the ground. “Gladys, honey,” he yelled, “sit on that crazy boy until we’re off the ground.” Bud Hemphill later told me that’s exactly what she did. Sat right on Will’s chest, all the time twirling her little pistol with the kitten on the pink pearl handle.

“Don’t do it, Ace,” I heard Will yell.

“Quit squirming,” I heard Gladys yell. “Clyde’ll be fine. It’s not in Gus’s cards to be killed in an airplane crash.”

“You crash and I’m gonna break your nose, Ace,” I heard Will yell.

“That sounds fair enough, don’t it, Ace?” I heard Gus yell. “Now let’s fly!”

“Absolutely!” I advised Gus he’d lose his fine fedora the second we picked up some wind. He gave me an over-the-shoulder thumbs up and tucked his hat under his leg.

I hadn’t flown before, but I’d been up once. In 1931 when my father took Will and me to the Cleveland Air Races. Because B. F. Goodrich made airplane tires, we all got in free. Dad knew a lot of the pilots from the war and his barnstorming days and we walked up and down the field saying hello and drooling over the machines. One of the flyers my father knew was the famous Dorothy Hester. She was young. Fairly pretty. She had a smile that lifted you right off the ground. She’s the one who took me up. Will could have gone up with her, too. But Will wasn’t much for heights—I never saw him climb a tree much higher than the second row of limbs—and as I’ve said, he sure wasn’t one for unplanned risks. So he stayed on the ground with my father while Dorothy gave me a grand tour of Cleveland. She even flew me out over the lake where we buzzed an ore boat plowing in from Duluth. I was disappointed she didn’t do her famous outside loop. It was considered aviation’s most dangerous stunt, flying in a vertical circle, like a Ferris wheel high in the sky. Dorothy had set a new world’s record for consecutive outside loops only three months before at the air races in Omaha. I think she did sixty-two of them.

I fixed my goggles one last time, then let the Jenny roll. Bounced down the length of the cabbage field. It was a typical Indiana day and there wasn’t much wind blowing, but I had to get what wind there was in front of me. I couldn’t believe my own gall. I was really going to do this! I squeezed the throttle open. Let the Jenny gallop through the cabbages. As I gained speed I could feel the wings lift. I raced through the Lord’s Prayer, and then eased back on the stick. Felt my tail sink. Saw the nose raise up. Raced through the Lord’s Prayer a second time. I was up. Climbing. Hopped right over the bridge. Leveled off. Headed straight up the river.

I knew I was flying too low, no more than two hundred feet. Do something dumb at that height and you’re sucking soil with the worms before you have a chance to correct it. But I just couldn’t make myself ease up any higher. Not with Clyde sitting in front of me. Not with Will being sat on down there. I was controlling the pitch and yaw pretty good, holding the nose and tail steady, but I was having a devil of a time keeping the Jenny from rolling to the left. My feet simply didn’t have a good touch on the rudder bar yet. “Judas Priest!” Gus screamed back at me. “I thought you could fly.”

“We’re up in the air, aren’t we?”

“For the time being!”

“I’ll have the hang of it in a minute,” I said. And I did. After a few bends in the river my hands and feet and mind were in complete agreement. I was flying straight and steady.

“Now you’re peeling apples,” Gus crowed.

I was peeling apples!

When I went to see Clyde in 1946, I didn’t bring up that evening in the Jenny. Just too painful. Considering what it led to. But through all our small talk about the old days in Bennett’s Corners, it was sure on my mind. Why did Gus want Clyde along? Was it just to drive the wedge between Will and me deeper? Was it all wrapped up in Clyde’s unfortunate name? Did having our Clyde along make Gus feel closer to his Clyde, that murdering maniac Clyde Barrow?

I did talk to Gladys about it when I went to see her in Mingo Junction in 1955. “Which you think it was?” I asked her as we sat drinking coffee in her kitchen.

“How should I know?” she said.

We watched another barge struggle up the Ohio.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” she said.

I wasn’t surprised that Gladys didn’t have much to say about that week in Indiana. None of the people I’ve looked up over the years—Gladys, Bud Hemphill, Sheriff Barnes’s whore ladyfriend, Albert Finley, Pruitt the FBI man, Lloyd Potts—none of them had much of an opinion about why things unraveled the way they did. For example when I asked Bud in 1942 what he thought about me flying off in his Jenny, he just scratched the dandruff off his eyebrows and said, “I didn’t think nothing of it, I guess.”

Didn’t think nothing of it? How could he think nothing of it? How could any of them have put that week behind them? That week has spooked me my entire life. Even now in my final Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa years it spooks me. Didn’t think nothing of it? Goddamn. Sonofabitch.

The river wound like a bedspring through woods and pastures and, of course, fields of tall corn. We spotted some boys fishing off a bridge and exchanged waves. Then Gus pointed to a jumble of cars and a big tent. He ordered me to land. I dropped low over the tent, expecting to see an elephant or a camel or something. All I saw was a procession of Baptists marching for the river.

I’d taken off. And flown. Now I had to land. I flew on up the river a bit, silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer twice. Then I turned for my approach. It looked like a fine flat field and I figured I could set down alongside the tent easy enough. You couldn’t hear them, but I could see by the way the Baptists were swaying that they were singing. I came in steep, like my father taught me. I inched up the elevators on the tail wing and revved the engine. All was going fine. Gus was laughing like the bastard he was. I throttled down. Kept the Jenny’s nose up. Felt the old balloon tires bounce. Trimmed my elevators. I’d done it.

Gus pointed for me to chase the procession of Baptists.

With the engine nothing but a mumble, you could hear them singing. “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Their feet were still headed confidently toward the river but their uncertain faces were glued on us. There were about a hundred of them, men and women and kids, all dressed in their Sunday suits and dresses, even though it was a Thursday. At the head of the procession was a preacher walking backwards with an open Bible. Behind him were a dozen or so teenagers carrying their shoes.

Gus had me follow alongside the procession, a big winged wolf stalking a flock of sheep. We reached the riverbank. Gus shook the wrinkles out of his fedora and before putting it on his head, tipped it generously toward the preacher. “Just watching the Lord’s work,” he called out.

I was watching one bit of the Lord’s work in particular: a trim, black-haired girl pressing her shoes against her bosom. The procession stopped. The singing stopped. The minister began to read from his Bible. It has since become my favorite verse. I can’t walk past a Bible without looking it up. Without reading it. Without remembering Will Randall and our week together in Indiana. The preacher’s voice was thunderous but sweet: “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straight-away out of the water. And lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the spirit of God, descending like a dove, and lighting upon him. And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Too bad Gus hadn’t seen the Spirit of God that evening. All he saw were wallets and watches and the modest handbags the women carried.

The preacher took off his shoes and led the soon-to-be-saved teenagers into the brown water. Dunked three or four of them before it was the black-haired girl’s turn. When she came up, her white lacy dress sticking to her like the skin of an angel, I almost popped out of that Jenny’s cockpit like a well-done piece of toast. That’s when Gus produced his shotgun.

In five minutes every Baptist on the riverbank was standing in the middle of the river, wearing nothing but their underwear, singing hymn after hymn while Clyde and I went through every pocket and handbag, taking up the collection. It was a pretty good haul for a bunch of Indiana Baptists.

“Maybe it’s the meek who inherit the earth,” Gus said to Clyde. “But it’s the SOBs with the guns who get to spend their money.” He strolled to the water and tapped his toe while the Baptists finished their soggy concert. Then, shotgun over his shoulder, he offered a short sermon: “Very moving, folks. Very moving indeedee. Now before we ascend back into the heavens in our fiery chariot, I’d personally like to thank each and every one of you for this inspiring act of Christian charity. I know good people like yourselves believe in turning the other cheek. But I would appreciate it if at least one of you would turn my heathen ass into your local sheriff. Tell that chickenshit bastard exactly what Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis put you through this fine summer evening. I seem to be having a little trouble getting his attention.” He then told the Baptists that Clyde and I were unwilling kidnappees held against our inclinations. Which made me happy. Maybe Will considered me a criminal, but Gus still didn’t.

The preacher helped with the propeller. We took off without a hitch, and flew upriver.

“Ride the breath-taking roller coaster. Play the games. Watch the tricks of magic. Visit the place where daring youths dive into tanks and wrestle with alligators.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Thirteen/Play Ball

Gus, Clyde, and I were about to drop out of the blue into one of the oddest baseball stories I’ve ever heard. I didn’t realize how odd it was until I returned to Weebawauwau County in ’42. It wasn’t Bud Hemphill who filled me in. It was Millie Macmillan, Sheriff Orville Barnes’s whore ladyfriend, and Albert Finley, the sheriff’s cousin and half owner of the local movie house, the Weebawauwau Palace.

As I’ve said, I stayed away from Bennett’s Corners and the Randalls after we returned from Indiana. Worked with my father at Goodrich. Parked the Gilbert SXIII in the barn, where it would still be today if lightning hadn’t burned that barn to a crisp in October 1948, the same night, strangely enough, that the Cleveland Indians won the World Series.

Anyway, when World War II erupted, my dream of sending Huns into the vineyards came back strong. Two days before Christmas 1941, I took a day off work and visited the Army Air Force recruiter in Akron. Told him of my father’s exploits with the Wild Teuton in the first war. Told him I was anxious to join the flyers heading to England, but I’d even consider sending Japanese into the rice paddies, if that’s what my Uncle Sammy needed.

“How old are you, Ace Gilbert?” the recruiter asked.

“Twenty-five.”

“Ever flown before?”

“No,” I said. That was a lie, of course, but I could hardly tell him about that time in Indiana, which nearly sent me to prison.

The recruiter screwed his face in several directions. Then he smiled. “Ace Gilbert. I’m sending you to cooking school.”

And so I went to cooking school. After my basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, I was sent to Fort Benjamin Harrison, just outside Indianapolis, to learn how to fly ovens. It was an eight-week school. Halfway through I got a weekend pass and took a bus to Weebawauwau. I found Bud Hemphill easy enough and in five minutes learned everything he knew about our week there in 1934. He told me Sheriff Orville Barnes was dead, but he told me where I could find his whore ladyfriend and his cousin. “If anybody can tell you what Sheriff Barnes did and thunk that week, it’s them two,” Bud said. So from Millie Macmillan and Albert Finley I learned a lot about our week in Indiana. I learned about Sheriff Barnes and the FBI man named Pruitt.

And I learned about that baseball game.

Orville Barnes was elected sheriff of Weebawauwau County in 1920, so by 1934 he was pretty much king of the place, setting the pace, setting the tone, moving people and opinions around like they were pieces on a giant chess board, which, by the way, is pretty much what Indiana looks like from the air, squares of corn and pasture separated by hedgerows and ruler-straight roads.

Orville Barnes loved games. Any kind of game. From playing jacks on the sidewalk with little girls to refusing to hunt down a crazy hillbilly who wanted to be riddled with bullets. He loved baseball most of all. It was the plodding pace of the game that excited him, Albert Finley told me. “Orville used to say it’s the kind of game you not only have fun playing, but also have fun having fun,” he told me.

So Orville Barnes had arranged a baseball game with Big Mike Minsky’s Manhattan Meteors, a traveling professional ball team from Missouri that would bus in and clobber the living crud out of your local team for only a hundred bucks.

Big Mike Minsky’s star attraction was a pitcher named Moon Man Morton. His specialty was the tobacco ball. He’d drool a glob on the ball, and then skid it right over the plate for a guaranteed strike. Moon Man Morton never lost. The shills Big Mike placed in the crowd cleaned up like bandits on side bets. The Manhattan Meteors roared through unsuspecting towns like an Oklahoma dust storm. “Folks joked it wasn’t Herbert Hoover but Big Mike Minsky who brought on the depression,” Millie Macmillan told me.

Sheriff Barnes knew all about Moon Man Morton’s tobacco ball and the shills in the crowd when he set up the game, which, wouldn’t you know it, was held on the same evening Gus hijacked that old Jenny and made me fly it up and down the river looking for rich people to rob. So just about the time we were landing on the Baptists, Orville Barnes was yelling “Play ball!” As sheriff, he had the honor of calling the balls and strikes. He knew how the game would go before it started.

The Manhattan Meteors batted first and intentionally went down in order, to the delight of the Weebawauwauan crowd. In the bottom of the first, Moon Man Morton kept his tobacco juice in his mouth and threw enough dry slop to give the local team two runs. With the score a surprising two to nothing, Big Mike’s shills went to work making dozens of two-, five-, and ten-dollar side bets.

Then in the second inning the Manhattan Meteors hit six straight home runs before succumbing to three intentional strikeouts. That would bring the Moon Man back to the mound, jaws chipmunked full of tobacco juice.

Sheriff Barnes expected all this, and now in the bottom of the second he quietly instructed every Weebawauwau batter not to swing. Every pitch Moon Man Morton threw was a strike. The sheriff called every one a ball. Weebawauwau loaded the bases and then miraculously scored three quick runs on walk-ins. The dirt from the pitcher’s mound to home plate was splattered with tobacco juice.

Both Moon Man and Big Mike descended on home plate, both swearing and spitting. The sheriff was ready for them. “Problem?” he asked in a very calm Indiana way.

“You mole-eyed idiot,” Moon Man slobbered. “You know damn well I’m throwing strikes.”

“There’s no way I’m letting you walk in six runs,” Big Mike grizzled through clenched teeth.

“Big Mike,” Sheriff Barnes said, “lets you and me walk and talk a little.”

So Orville Barnes and Big Mike Minsky strolled down the third-base line. The crowed was hissing and laughing and begging the shills to make more bets. From 1934 to his death in ’39, the sheriff told the story so many times, both his cousin and Millie knew every word by heart. “Now Big Mike,” the sheriff said, “baseball is a wonderful game. And these are hard times. I took a hundred dollars out of my own reelection fund to bring your fine team to Weebawauwau County. Why? Because I wanted to put a little magic back into the lives of these poor hard-working voters. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

Big Mike pulled open his collar and let some of the blood sogging his face run back down his neck. “I can appreciate a little monkey business to make it close, this being an election year. But six straight walks? You’re not cheating fair, sheriff. You’re not cheating fair!”

Orville Barnes pulled a paddle and red rubber ball from his back pocket and expertly bounced the ball higher and higher. Blump blump blump blump. The crowd cheered and applauded. They loved it when he played with his paddle. “I’m sure once the local boys get eight or ten runs on the scoreboard, Moon Man will start getting a few more over the plate,” he said.

“Eight or ten runs? You nuts?”

“How about an even nine?”

Big Mike snatched the paddleball out of the air and threw it into the outfield. The crowd was on the cusp of lunacy, applauding in unison, chanting. “Or-ville, Or-ville, Or-ville.”

“How about I put my team on the bus,” Big Mike threatened, “and let you explain to all these hard-working voters why all the damn magic has just driven off in a cloud of Indiana dust?”

The sheriff waved to the crowd and then produced a stack of papers from under his chest protector. “Maybe we need to look at this thing from a fresh perspective,” he said. “See these? Wanted posters from all over the country. I get thousands of them. If the government spent more on prisons and less on paper, the country would be a lot safer place, don’t you think?” He casually leafed through the posters. “You’d be amazed who shows up on these things.” He pulled one out and showed it to Big Mike. “This one looks remarkably like old Moon Man Morton himself, doesn’t he? And how about this guy? Spitting image of your shortstop, Jupiter Joe Jolly. And this one. You’d swear that was Mercury Muldoon, your leftfielder.”

Big Mike knew he was beat. “OK. Nine runs.”

“Nine runs this inning,” the sheriff agreed. “And then we’ll see how well your batters do from there.”

And that’s how the game went. Nine to six in the second inning. Twelve to seven in the third. Weebawauwau County was headed for a bigger financial windfall than getting a WPA project. And Sheriff Orville Barnes was cruising for reelection. In the bottom of the fourth Gus ordered me to land in the outfield. I taxied right up to second base.

Gus waved his shotgun and slid to the ground. “Good evening all,” he shouted over the engine’s tinny growl. “Let me introduce myself. I am the very same Gus Gillis who waylaid your milkman and Coca-Cola man this morning and now I’ve set down to waylay all of you. How about that?”

Baptists are one thing. Ballplayers are another. I watched Moon Man Morton slather his ball with tobacco juice, then throw a strike off Gus’s forehead. I heard the umpire yell “Steeee-rike!” The crowd loved it. The Manhattan Meteors began to close on the Jenny. The locals emptied their bench, bats in hand. Gus staggered back against the plane. Clyde and I grabbed him by the neck of his suit coat and pulled him in. I spun the plane in a defensive circle, chasing everyone back. Gloves and bats and balls were flying at us. I roared toward home plate, turned, throttled up, and headed for the home run fence. Broke off my left wheel on the scoreboard. But made it up.

Albert Finley told me Sheriff Barnes immediately resumed the game. The Manhattan Meteors lost 33 to 27. Deputies made the shills pay up. Big Mike Minsky and his team roared off in their bus to a more hospitable county. Orville Barnes was reelected in a landslide. He died of a heart attack in 1939, giving Millie Macmillan one of his nine-inning pokings. Imagine dying doing that! Almost as embarrassing as the way Will’s father died. But nowhere near as embarrassing as the way Gus Gillis finally got his.

“So that umpire was the sheriff,” I said to Millie when I looked her up at her cathouse by the railroad tracks.

“That’s right,” she said. “Orville had spent all morning watching with binoculars while you worked the bridge. He enjoyed your game with those deliverymen immensely. And the way you landed on the ballfield—that Gus Gillis getting beaned—he laughed all night about that. And the next morning when he heard about what you did to those Baptists! Orville just about had his heart attack right there.”

So that was the beginning of our entanglement with Sheriff Orville Barnes. A crooked baseball game on a hot Indiana evening.

After I talked to Millie and Albert Finley and Bud Hemphill, I went back to Fort Benjamin Harrison and finished my schooling. On August 31, 1942, I graduated First Cook.

Scored 93.1 percent on my proficiency test. Tenth best in a class of 238, up to that time the largest cooking class in American military history. I was immediately shipped out to England. They sent me to a little town called Stone, in Staffordshire, on the banks of the River Trent. There I settled in with the 156th Replacement Company, 130th Replacement Battalion, 8th Air Force. For the duration of the war I supervised a three thousand-man-capacity mess hall. Fed fresh B-17 bomber crews waiting their assignments. When they discharged me on November 29, 1945, I wasn’t a First Cook anymore. I was a Master Sergeant, with a commendation for superior service. It read: “You have had to train many men who had never before been in a kitchen, and those men have also made a name for themselves with the training which you instilled in them.”

Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I left the U.S. Army Air Force a Cooking Ace!

“Men compare her with other girls and find her lovelier by far! Her lips never shriek ‘paint.’ For she always uses a marvelous new kind of lipstick that brings smooth, natural color. Rich, glowing color—but not a trace of paint to her mouth conspicuous!”

ADVERTISEMENT FOR TANGEE LIPSTICK,

RADIO STARS MAGAZINE

Fourteen/Just Traveling Through

Will Randall and I had been joined at the hip since my family moved up from Columbus to the farm on Stony Hill Road. More than six years. Everything important in our lives, Will and I had accomplished together. School. Scouts. Church. Dreaming about the future. Now I was up in the air and Will was down on the ground. I had recklessly driven a wedge between us, and Gus had wickedly driven it in farther.

That hour I was airborne with Gus and Clyde has spooked me, as I’ve said, all my life. All through the thirties when I stayed away from Bennett’s Corners it spooked me. During my years in the military it spooked me. My restaurant years it spooked me. During my sorrowful nine-year marriage to Lois Cobb it spooked me.

What was Will doing that hour?

What was Will thinking that hour?

Was he seething because I’d crossed the line?

Bewildered because I’d betrayed his dream?

Scared numb because, thanks to me, Clyde’s life wasn’t worth a nickel?

Or was he all wrapped up in Gladys Bartholomew?

Those were the questions spooking me that weekend in 1942 when I took the bus up to Weebawauwau.

I got off the bus in my uniform, feeling ashamed and smug at the same time. Little did the Weebawauwauans know that hidden under these summer-weight cotton khakis was the woolly monster who’d terrorized their peaceful blue sky eight years before. I went straight to the barber shop. Stuck my head in the open door. “Say, I’m looking for a fellow who used to crop dust around here,” I said. “Maybe he still does.”

The barber, the man in the chair, and the three waiting, all smiled at my uniform. “That’d be Bud Hemphill,” the barber said. “Runs the Standard Oil station on the north end.”

“Still flies some, but don’t crop dust no more,” the man in the chair said. “Not for seven or eight years.”

I walked to the Standard Oil station. Maybe a quarter mile. Bud Hemphill was inside behind a big desk, tinkering with a carburetor, empty pop bottles rising from the desktop like crystal stalagmites. Told him who I was. He was glad to see me. He didn’t have the Jenny anymore. Wished he was young enough to join the Army Air Force himself. Was I a pilot? He frowned when I told him they were training me to be a cook. He had pictures of airplanes everywhere. Under his electric Quaker State Oil wall clock was an old magazine picture of Eddie Rickenbacker. I told him my father flew with Eddie in France. Bud gave me a free bottle of pop, the way Will’s father did before his embarrassing death.

Bud Hemphill had been alone with Will and Gladys that hour I was up with Gus and Clyde. I told him I needed to know everything that happened, minute by minute. What Will said and did. What Will might have been thinking and feeling.

Between my visit with Bud in ’42 and my visit with Gladys in ’55, I’ve pieced that hour together pretty well. Though I’ll never know what was bubbling in Will Randall’s brain, or his heart, or his loins, of course.

According to Bud, Gladys crawled off Will’s chest as soon as we were in the air. She threatened to shoot Bud dead if he tried to escape. She was excited, certain that in a few hours Gus would be riddled, and she’d be on her way to Chicago and fame. “When those newspaper writers crowd around me I’ll let it slip I want to be a radio actress,” she said, “to pay back in listening pleasure all the harm my Gus did during his pitiful life.”

Then Gladys panicked, fearing she wasn’t quite ready for the airwaves. “I need to rehearse,” she said, anxiously patting fresh face powder on her sweating forehead and cheeks. “I need to rehearse.”

So that’s what Will did that hour. Rehearsed with Gladys. Bud was forced to rehearse, too. Gladys put away her pistol and pulled out her Daphne Darnell scripts. I’ve still got them. They were in the backseat of the Gilbert SXIII when I drove home alone from Chicago in ’34. I took them with me to Mingo Junction when I looked Gladys up in ’55. Figured she’d be tickled to get them back. But she didn’t want them. Backed away like they were radioactive, which I suppose to her they were. I took them home with me to Bennett’s Corners.

So Gladys leafed through the scripts and chose one to rehearse. “This is my favorite,” she told Will and Bud, “‘The Dashing Stranger.’ I’ll play the heroine, Eleanor White, the big-hearted country girl whose life is changed forever by a knock on the door.” She made Will sit on her left, Bud on her right. Bud told me he could feel the heat from her thigh oozing right through his canvas overalls. I suppose Will was feeling her heat, too. “Will, you’ll play the Dashing Stranger,” she said. “And you, flyboy, you’ll be Mr. White, my daddy.”

And so the rehearsal for Gladys’s impending fame began. From my visits and from those old Daphne Darnell scripts, I pretty much know word for word how that hour went:

GLADYS

(as the door)

Knock, knock, knock.

BUD HEMPHILL

(as Mr. White)

Who could that be knocking at the door of our little cottage in the country at this time of night?

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

I’ll put down my mending and get it, Father, since you are both blind and crippled from a lifetime of unrewarded toil.

BUD HEMPHILL

(as himself)

If I’m blind how can I be reading this?

GLADYS

(as herself)

Good lord, flyboy. You ain’t blind. Only your character is.

BUD HEMPHILL

(as himself)

Oh. Sorry.

GLADYS

(as the front door)

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

Hello! You’re a stranger, aren’t you?

WILL

(as the Dashing Stranger)

Why yes I am. I thought perhaps a green-eyed beauty like yourself, with your father sitting there before the crackling fire, might have an odd job or two, for an honest traveling man down on his luck.

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

Well, let me think for a moment.

BUD HEMPHILL

(as Mr. White)

Who is it, Eleanor?

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

A handsome young traveling man, Father, in a tattered but clean coat, looking for an odd job or two.

BUD HEMPHILL

(as Mr. White)

Say young fella, you haven’t—

GLADYS

(as herself)

You have to say it loud. Like you’re calling out to somebody at the door.

BUD HEMPHILL

(as himself)

Oh. Sorry.

BUD HEMPHILL

(loudly, as Mr. White)

Say young fella, you haven’t ever repaired a levee before, have you? With nothing but a shovel and your strong back? Farmer’s Almanac says it’s going to rain cats and dogs, and it’ll wash away our little cottage by the river if that levee isn’t fixed in time.

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

Please! Will you fix that levee for us?

WILL

(as the Dashing Stranger)

By golly! I’ll do it!

And so it went. During the commercial break at the end of Act One, Gladys gave Bud exactly one minute to drink a warm Coke. Except for a couple more lines at the beginning of Act Two, Bud’s part was over. From there on out it was all Eleanor White and the Dashing Stranger—Gladys and Will—as the imaginary sky threatened and the imaginary levee was repaired. Bud told me Will and Gladys seemed to get lost in each other as they read. Their eyes were glued on the script, he said, but their voices were looking at each other. “It was as if him and Gladys really were Eleanor and the Dashing Stranger,” Bud said. “I was so enraptured I completely forgot about you flying my Jenny.”

I’ve read that old Daphne Darnell script many times over the years, picturing Will and Gladys sitting there in the cabbage field by the river, her thigh against his, their voices looking at each other as Bud said.

GLADYS

(as herself)

A torrent of rain can be heard.

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

You did it, my dashing stranger. You fixed that levee just in time!

GLADYS

(as herself)

Eleanor hesitates, uncertain, then lets her love for the stranger gush.

GLADYS

(As Eleanor White)

Please stay a few more days. Please stay forever!

WILL

(as the Dashing Stranger)

It would be easy for me to stay. To fall in love with you. Especially the way those raindrops are cascading down your porcelain cheeks like tears.

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

Those raindrops on my cheeks are tears.

WILL

(as the Dashing Stranger)

I am a traveling man. The open road is in my blood. Sure kid, I could stay. We’d get married. Build a cottage of our own. But drat it. Sooner or later, my old wanderlust would return, as certain as the rains always return. And I’d leave. Break your heart. Break both our hearts. No, I gotta travel on.

GLADYS

(as Eleanor White)

Good-bye—my dashing stranger.

GLADYS

(as herself)

The end.

After they finished Gladys’s radio script, Will read aloud from his guidebook. Bud said it was a lot more interesting than the “Dashing Stranger.” He said Gladys drew her legs up under her chin and listened with closed eyes, as if Will’s descriptions of industrial exhibits were romantic poems, which, of course, to Will they were.

I’m not surprised Gladys and Bud were moved by Will’s reading. I always was when he read his guidebook to me.

Bud Hemphill was happy I looked him up. Having his Jenny stolen was the highlight of his life, he told me. Nobody in town had been much interested in hearing about it. With the despair and disillusionment of the depression all around—with real criminals like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson all around—that one week in August, as quirky as it was, was after all just one week in August. So Bud was happy to talk over old times with me. He told be where I could find Sheriff Orville Barnes’s whore ladyfriend and where I could find the sheriff’s cousin, Albert Finley, and Lloyd Potts, too.

Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I miss Will. I loved him. And I’m not at all shy about saying so. Not at my age.

Today you talk about loving someone of your same sex and they write you off as either queer or a Democrat. Believe me, I’m neither, though I did vote once for Bill Clinton. Will was more than a friend. I’ve had lots of friends. Friends I respected. Friends I liked to laugh with. Bull with. Fish with. Go out for chili with. Will was more than that. He was always on my mind and in my heart. I felt different when we were together. Better. More like the real Ace Gilbert. Felt the world was OK. Felt God pretty much knew what he was doing when Will Randall and I were together.

It is one of the great secrets of our age that men love other men that way. We call somebody our best friend and let it go at that. But what we’re talking about—and what other men know we’re talking about—is some guy we really love. A guy we wish we could be with all the time. A guy that makes us feel more like ourselves when we’re with him. That makes us feel personally proud when he accomplishes something and makes us feel personally like shit when things go bad for him. That changes our life forever when he dies.

I’ve read that ancient civilizations, the Greeks I think, understood this kind of love between men. Relished and honored it. We don’t today. At least not publicly. But all men know what the feeling is. I know I sure do. I loved Will Randall and he loved me. And I’m not the least bit ashamed that the other old men here at the Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa know it. Goddamn it I’m not. Sonofabitch I’m not.

Women have an easier time with this kind of love. Once at a wedding I remember watching my mother polka with her dearest old friend from high school. Arm in arm. Around and around. Smiling faces no more than three inches apart. Sharing their love with the world. I’m sure my father and Eddie Rickenbacker never did the polka together. But if Will Randall could be here right now, I’d polka him right up the goddamn hallway, right up through all the wheelchairs and walkers.

“The skyride was built by five great companies, Otis Elevator company, Mississippi Valley Structural Steel Company, John A. Roebling’s Sons Company, Inland Steel Company, and Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company and is an appropriate expression of their faith in the future of American industry.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Fifteen/Thanks a Million, Lloyd!

I flew the Jenny back along the river toward the cabbage field. We’d only been gone an hour or so, but it seemed like years. I’d taken off three times and landed twice. Terrified a riverful of Baptists. Had nearly been killed by professional ballplayers. Most people didn’t achieve that much in a lifetime. If only I hadn’t lost that wheel on the scoreboard.

As I skimmed the trees my brain bounced back and forth between two big questions: How was I going to land on one wheel and what were Will and Gladys doing on the ground while I was up in the air with Gus and Clyde? I knew what I’d be doing. Steering Gladys toward a poke! I played out the improbable scene in my head. “Oh Ace,” she’d say to me. “I was hoping you’d want to. It’s all I’ve wanted since I first saw you by that pile of melons.” We’d make Bud Hemphill look the other way, or maybe put an empty cement bag over his head. Then I’d glide right in like the Ace I was, as masterfully as I’d ridden that old Jenny into the air. Goddamn. I could see Gladys and me entwined, rocking like a sonofabitch. I could also see the Jenny cartwheeling through the cabbages, Clyde, Gus, and me on fire, blood spurting, bones protruding through our bruised, blistering flesh. How was I going to land on one wheel? Goddamn. Sonofabitch.

Clyde held up one of the watches we stole from the Baptists. He studied it sideways, then took out his medicine bottle. He jabbed Gus in the chest to get his attention. It was time for his drops. Still dumb in the head from the Moon Man’s beaning, Gus thought he was being offered a drink. He took the bottle, unscrewed the top, and sucked the oily medicine down his throat. He gagged and threw the bottle right through the spinning propeller. Now I had two problems: getting on the ground alive and then staying that way when Will learned what happened to that three-dollar bottle of drops.

I saw the bridge and swung wide for my approach. I could see Will and Gladys and Bud standing in the cabbages, chins up, hands over their eyes like little porches. I turned back toward the field and cut the throttle. The Jenny dropped. Even if I set down gentle as a saltine floating in a bowl of chicken noodle, I knew I’d still snap a wing when my wheelless side hit. Went through the Lord’s Prayer, perfectly. Cut my speed some more. Kept the Jenny’s nose up. Felt my one wheel touch and roll. Felt the Jenny lean. Felt my wheelless wing dig in and plow. I remembered to trim my elevators. But I’d forgot to close the throttle. The lopsided Jenny tore in a circle like a crazy dog on a chain. Dirt and cabbages flew. The wing ripped away at the shoulder. We shot forward, an arrow unleashed, straight into the river.

It was a shallow river. No current at all. We came to a stop right where we hit. By the time I wiped the water off my goggles, Will and Gladys were wading toward us. Will yelled to his brother. “You OK, Clyde?”

“Gus drank my drops,” Clyde yelled back.

I slid into the river. Smiled at Will. He punched me right in the mouth.

I took my punishment. “At least we’re alive,” I said. I could taste a bit of blood. I could feel my lip swell.

We took Gus by the arms and waded to shore. Clyde carried his shotgun. We watched Bud Hemphill flee into the woods. The sun was setting. We gathered some firewood. Nobody was interested in putting up the tent. Decided we’d sleep under the bridge. “It doesn’t ever rain in Indiana anyway,” I said. We cooked a big pan of scrambled eggs. Opened two cans of beans. One can of corn. All three tins of sardines. Finished off the apples and pears. Drank milk and Cokes. Clyde hummed. Gus slowly came to his senses. He had a dumpling-sized knot on his forehead, the cross-stitching of the baseball Moon Man threw imbedded into his skin like a tire track.

Surprisingly, Gus was happy that our flight went the way it did. “Maybe we didn’t fleece those ballplayers like we did the Baptists, but we sure got everybody’s attention,” he said. “Everybody in Weebawauwau County must have been at that game. It’s only a matter of time before the law comes after me now. I bet we’ll wake up tomorrow surrounded. A hundred gun barrels pointed right at our heads.”

Only Gus slept. He woke up disappointed. There wasn’t a single gun barrel pointed at him. “Judas Priest,” he said. “What’s it gonna take? What’s it damn-diddly gonna take?”

Gladys soaked a ragful of river water and patted Gus’s knot. He winced and shouted “Judas Priest” after every pat.

“Am I hurting you?” she asked.

“No, Gladys. It feels so good I just can’t take the pleasure.”

We waited all morning for the law to arrive. Gus stood on the bridge and waved his gun. Whistled and shouted. Gladys worked on her makeup. Will tidied up the cabbage field, putting empty Coke bottles back in their cases, carrying the egg baskets under the bridge so they wouldn’t go bad in the sun, collecting all the empty cans and candy wrappers. I sat on the bank and watched the Jenny soak up water.

About noon Gus came down from the bridge. He was wound tight. He made us throw everything we’d heisted the day before in the river—all the Cokes and milk and eggs and bread, the three gumball machines and the ready-mix cement, the stacks of Indianapolis Stars, and the salesman’s case full of doorknobs and hinges. He even made us throw the torn wing from the Jenny in the river. He ran through the field and stomped as many cabbage heads as he could. He piled us all in the Gilbert SXIII. Off we drove. It was Friday already. What a day Thursday had been!

For hours we drove the backroads, lacing in and out of Weebawauwau County like a runaway shoestring. “Why don’t we try another county,” Gladys said. Gus slammed his fist against the door. “Because we ain’t finished with these Weebawauwauans yet,” he said. We didn’t hold anybody up all day, though we did pull away from a gas pump without paying. Will kept his nose in his guidebook. Gladys studied her scripts. I drove and listened to Clyde’s quiet hum. Gus slid down in the copilot’s seat and sulked, hugging his shotgun like a favorite teddy bear.

“Gladys, give me something to eat,” he said about six o’clock. She handed him a melon. He threw it into the passing corn. “Ain’t we got anything else?”

“Nothing you don’t have to cook,” she said.

He held out his hand for another melon. He sliced it in two with his pocketknife and worked on both halves. “I don’t know about you folks, but I’m hungry as a suckling lamb.”

Will watched him gobble. “For someone who was supposed to be dead two days ago, you sure eat a lot.”

I clenched my teeth, expecting Gus to turn on Will. Instead he was genuinely apologetic. “You all know I fully intended on being dead by now,” he said.

Gladys leaned forward and sympathetically rubbed the knot on his head. “You boys can’t blame Gus because the Weebawauwauans don’t have the walnuts to kill him.”

Gus swatted her hand away. “Quit playing with my head, Gladys.”

Will should have let matters rest. He couldn’t, of course. Gus Gillis had ruined his life. “All I know is that it’s already Friday afternoon and we’ve got to be home before Church on Sunday. Even if you get killed in the next five minutes and Ace drives like hell to Chicago, we wouldn’t have time to see one-fourteenth of the wonders.”

Gus sank deeper into the seat. “You sure know how to burden a guy.”

Will stayed with it. “You sure know how to ruin a guy’s pilgrimage.”

I saw Gus’s hands tighten around the barrel of his gun. “You got any film left in your camera?”

“A whole roll,” Will said. “Unless you ate it.”

Gus’s knuckles went white. “Judas Priest! You have got to be the orneriest creature to ever wear shoes. I’ve half a mind to blow that funny head of yours right into Lake Michigan. Pull this thing over, Ace.”

This was years before Gladys told me that Gus was incapable of shooting anybody. So I took his threat for real. “You wouldn’t kill Will just for talking back a little, would you?”

“Just pull it over.”

I kept on flying.

Gus pointed his gun in the general direction of my head.

I pulled it over.

Gus jumped out, and with his gun sticking straight out from his hip, started across the empty field. We scrambled after him, all certain Will was about to be executed for his sass. “He ain’t gonna shoot Will, is he?” Clyde asked in a sideways whisper.

“I doubt it,” Gladys whispered back.

“He might as well,” Will said in anything but a whisper. “I won’t ever get to the World’s Fair anyway.”

Gus stopped.

We all stopped.

Gus looked at Will through squinty, disappointed eyes. “Where’s your camera?”

Will sheepishly pointed toward the Gilbert SXIII.

I could see the veins wiggling in Gus’s reddening neck. “Well go get it!”

Will hurried back to the Gilbert SXIII, stumbling more than once.

“What a flat tire that boy is,” Gus said.

Will returned with his camera. He held it up to his eye and pointed the lens right at Gus. “OK, go ahead and shoot me. But I can’t promise the picture won’t develop a little jumpy.”

Gus just about melted into the ground like April snow. “You are a whole set of flat tires. You think I want you to take my picture at the same time I’m blowing your head into Lake Michigan? Judas Priest. I don’t even know which direction Lake Michigan is. I ain’t gonna shoot you. I ain’t gonna shoot nobody.” He stuck his chin out and slowly turned his head left and right. “Can’t anybody see it on my face?” he asked. “Look close. Look close. You can see it, can’t you, Gladys?”

Gladys studied his face. “You mean the goose egg on your forehead?”

“Not the goose egg, Gladys. My whole face. My whole diddly-damn face!”

We all studied his face now. We were stumped.

“Are you all blind? Can’t you people see how low I am?”

“I can see it,” I said, even though I couldn’t.

He patted my shoulder. “Thank you, Ace.” Then he shuffled away, maybe ten feet. He turned and dropped to one knee. Pressed his cheek against his gun barrel. “I am in the blackest mood of my life,” he said. “I have been trying for nearly a month now to get killed in a hail of bullets. And here I am. Still alive. I’ve let you down, Gladys. I’ve let you boys down. Most of all I’ve let myself down. Will, I know you don’t owe me nothing, but I want you to capture this black mood on my face. And when I do manage to die, I want you to give that picture to every newspaper in the country, big and small, so the whole world can see what a troubled soul I was.”

“Be happy to,” Will said. While he readied and steadied his camera, Gus played with the brim of his fedora. We all held our breath. Right in the middle of Will’s click, Gus’s black mood gave way to an inspired smile. He rose. Walked right past us. In a trance. He stopped and pointed to a faraway line of trees. “Is that what I think it is?”

We all strained to see what he was seeing.

Gladys saw it. “Oh Gus! It is!”

What it was, was a radio tower.

Ten minutes later we were sneaking toward a little flat-roofed building made out of cement blocks. The building sat at the end of a long driveway, atop a grassy knob that rose out of the tall corn. On one side of the building stood a chicken yard with only one nervous hen. On the other side of the building stood the radio tower itself, a zigzag of rusty iron surrounding an inner ladder nobody in his right mind would climb. An old school bus and a dusty panel truck sat next to the door.

We reached the door. An On the Air sign hung from a nail. Gus thought about knocking, then barged in. Hillbilly music hit us in the face.

This wasn’t Radio City Music Hall. There was one main room about twenty by twenty and a second room with a large glass window which apparently had combined duty as control room, kitchen, and bedroom. Behind that window sat an enormous man in bib overalls. He had Virginia ham jowls and a black-as-coal pompadour. There was a microphone in front of him and several empty Canada Dry bottles, all quart sized. He was plucking a chicken. In the main room there were twenty or so chairs set up in rows, all empty. On one wall hung a banner proclaiming the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down Featuring the Harmony Heavers. Below the sign were the Harmony Heavers themselves. They were singing some dumb song called “Chawin’ Chawin’ Gum.”

The Harmony Heavers were one of those strange country jug bands all the rage then. Clowns and minstrels wrapped into one. One man was dressed as a hobo with a ratty porkpie hat and a bandanna around his neck; he was playing a guitar. Another wore a farmer’s straw hat, big rubber boots, and a pasted-on Uncle Sam beard; he was going crazy on a little squeeze-box accordion. A third member of the band was wearing fancy cowboy garb, woolly chaps and a tall Hopalong Cassidy hat; he was playing a fiddle. A man wearing huge fake ears was blowing on a jug. The drummer intrigued me most. He was wearing a fancy three-piece suit and derby; had a black goatee glued on his chin. His bass drum was an old washtub, his snare drum a round tin box sitting atop a wooden crate; his cymbals were pot lids. All five men sported big show business smiles, even though every chair was empty.

Gus motioned for us to sit in the front row. Apparently we were going to enjoy the hoedown before holding it up. The Harmony Heavers finished “Chawin’ Chawin’ Gum.” Their show business smiles immediately slid into frowns of boredom. The enormous man behind the glass set aside his chicken and leaned into his microphone: “Evening everyone. This is Lloyd Potts, your fave-or-rite announcer. You are listening to the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down, featuring the heavenly harmonies and hilarious hijinks of the Harmony Heavers. Howdy boys!”

The Harmony Heavers stepped up to their microphone, their show business smiles back and beaming. “A Hoosier howdy to you, Lloyd,” they said in unison.

Lloyd Potts waved through the glass. “We want to welcome you fellas back for your fifty-seventh consecutive appearance here on the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down.”

“Our pleasure to be back, Lloyd!”

“And ours, boys!”

“Thanks a million, Lloyd!”

“Well, thank you a million. Say, how about another musical treat for our studio audience and the fine folks out there in radio land?”

“Our pleasure, Lloyd!” One. Two. Three. Four. They broke into a worthless song called “My Horse Ain’t Hungry.” Halfway through the number the drummer came out front, tipped his derby to Gladys, and tap-danced like a goddamn fool.

Later Will had them pose for a picture with Lloyd.

I still have all those pictures Will took: the bon voyage pictures with his mother, the picture by the Indiana line sign, the one of Will down in the dumps, the one with Aunt Mary and the beagles, all the pictures of Gus and Gladys posing with our victims, the blurry one of Gus having his epiphany in that empty field, the one of Lloyd Potts and the Harmony Heavers. I keep them in a box along with his Official Guide Book of the Fair and Gladys’s radio scripts. My aviator’s cap and goggles are in there, too. So’s my cooking school diploma and my discharge papers, my commendation, and my blue spiral notebook with my recipes for feeding one thousand men at a crack. All under my bed here at the Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa.

“You can talk to Jesus, get the answer right away;

there will be no static, every word he’ll hear you say;

In the air above, or on the earth below,

you ’re in touch with heaven o ’er God’s radio.”

“GOD’S RADIO” BY J. W. P. BAILEY

Sixteen/Checkered-Shirt Cowboy

Piecing together what happened wasn’t easy. It took most of my life. But I had to do it. I owed it to Will. Owed it to Mrs. Randall and Clyde. Owed it to myself.

My first attempt was in the summer of 1942 when I took that bus up to Weebawauwau Center and found Bud Hemphill, Sheriff Orville Barnes’s whore ladyfriend Millie Macmillan, his cousin Albert Finley, and Lloyd Potts, too. Millie told me about the Chicago FBI man named Pruitt. Told me about the part he played. Another twenty-two years passed before I cooled down enough to look him up.

After the war I returned to my parents’ farm on Stony Hill Road. I could’ve gone back to work at B. F. Goodrich but I needed more out of life. When I drove to Bennett’s Corners to see Will’s brother Clyde—just back from the war himself—I stopped in to visit with Ruby and Rudy and buy some cigarettes. I learned they were about to retire. Wanted to sell out. I didn’t want to become a storekeeper, but their fine building would make a dandy restaurant. The war and depression were over. Jobs were falling out of the sky. Money was growing on trees. People were crazy about eating out. So I put my uniform on and took my cooking school diploma and commendation to the bank. Got a loan. Bought Ruby and Rudy’s store. Opened the R&R Luncheonette. It was a good name for a restaurant I figured. All the returning GIs knew what R and R was—rest and relaxation. It also stood for Ruby and Rudy, giving, I figured, my new business a bit of emotional continuity. Everybody in Bennett’s Corners loved Ruby and Rudy. On their last day in business I took a picture of them standing arm in arm on the front step. Hung an eight-by-ten print of it on the wall by the cash register. Outside I put up a venetian blind string of signs just like the one I’d seen at Hal’s Half Way.

I met and married Lois Cobb and settled down to make a fortune in my fine ten-stool, ten-booth restaurant, located right where six roads came together like pieces of a pie. I did pretty well for a few years. Then they built the Big Boy on U.S. 42. I fought like the devil to compete. I sold triple-decker hamburgers for the same price as their double-deckers. I concocted a secret mayonnaise sauce five times better than theirs. By 1955 I was broke and on the verge of divorce. Sold out to some dreamer home from the Korean War who figured he could make a better go of the place if there was a television set on the wall and a pinball machine by the window. That’s when I went to see Gladys Bartholomew in Mingo Junction. She didn’t want her old radio scripts back and she didn’t want to talk much about that week in 1934. Still, I learned a little.

I took my R&R money—the half Lois Cobb didn’t get—and opened a frozen-custard stand in Brunswick. Called it the Dairy Doodle. The whole country was goo-goo over frozen custard in the fifties. And lots of autoworkers were moving out from Cleveland, buying little three-bedroom ranch houses with attached garages. Put up a new string of venetian blind signs offering passersby every frozen temptation imaginable.

I did pretty well until 1968 when a McDonald’s came in. I started selling hamburgers again, too. But I couldn’t make them as fast as McDonald’s, or sell them as goddamn cheap. Sonofabitch. I was out of business again. Fifty-two years old. Sold the farm on Stony Hill Road for what was a fortune then. Fifty-seven thousand. I took a drive to Indiana. Looked up Will’s Aunt Mary. She was living in a trailer park in Michigan City, on the banks of Lake Michigan. She was an old woman now. And sitting there, I couldn’t imagine how I once thought she was the most sumptuous woman alive. Learned how her German husband Fritz had tried to rescue us. I never knew that. Fritz died of a stroke in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, carrying a huge bag of canned food back from the supermarket. Mary said he was worried to death about a Russian H-bomb being dropped on Valparaiso. He planned to hole up in his basement with a can opener until the radiation wore off.

From Aunt Mary’s trailer I drove to Chicago and found the FBI man named Pruitt. He was living in a suburb called Elmhurst, west of the city. He’d just been forced to retire and he was angry about it. Hippies were descending on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention and he wanted desperately to give them all haircuts with the heels of his wingtips. Pruitt told me more about what happened that week in 1934 than anybody else. It took every bit of religion I had not to kill him right there on his patio.

Then I drove to Fort Meyers, Florida. Northern retirees were moving down in droves. I found Pine Island. Saw all the little houses going up. Bought a lot right across from the new bingo hall and put up the Clam Shack. My venetian blind signs offered fried clam strips, onion rings, fish dinners, and milkshakes made with real ice cream. No more hamburgers or frozen custard for me. I soon discovered I hated Florida. Flat, hot, and nothing else. But I stayed in business until 1988. Finally sold out to some dreamer who said frozen yogurt was taking over the planet. He called his place the Yogurt Shack, certain that the emotional continuity of the word Shack would make him a wealthy man.

I was seventy-two. Had my Social Security check and my windfall from the Clam Shack. On my drive back to Bennett’s Corners I stopped off in Mingo Junction to see if Gladys wanted her radio scripts after all. A neighbor told me she’d divorced the beer-truck driver and moved with her kids to Florida, sometime in the sixties, to Bonita Springs, not fifteen miles south of Pine Island.

The Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa is located five miles north of Bennett’s Corners, in what is now the city of Strongsville. It was just a crossroads when we flew through it in August 1934, on our way to the Chicago World’s Fair. I’ve got two rooms and a toilet. Will’s brother Clyde picks me up every other Thursday and we go to Perkin’s for pancakes.

So over the years I’ve pieced this thing together pretty well. Bud Hemphill, Gladys Bartholomew, Millie Macmillan, Albert Finley, Lloyd Potts, Will’s Aunt Mary, all helped me understand what happened and why. I learned the most from Pruitt, though. Like I said, it took every drop of religion I had not to kill the sonofabitch. If the Army Air Force had made me a fighter pilot, or even put me on a bomber crew, I might have killed him right there on the patio. But they trained me to be a cook. So after we’d talked all morning, I went into his kitchen and made us big omelets with onions and Spam cubes. I spit in his. He said it was the best omelet he’d ever had.

Both Sheriff Barnes and Pruitt were listening to the Hoe-Down that night. Barnes was at Millie’s, shooting marbles on her bedroom floor while Millie’s five girls were getting ready for the Friday night rush. I suppose it was good for the sheriff to have a ladyfriend who ran a whorehouse, and good for Millie to have the sheriff for a boyfriend, though I gathered from Albert Finley they genuinely loved each other.

Pruitt was at his office in Chicago, working late as he always did. He was one of Melvin Purvis’s young G-men. They’d killed John Dillinger just a month before outside the Biograph Theater and they were all full of vinegar. Pruitt was from Tennessee and loved hillbilly music. He never missed the National Barn Dance on WLS and he never missed the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-down. WEEB couldn’t have been more than a five-hundred-watt station, but his big government-bought receiver could suck up every signal in North America.

We, of course, had just barged in on Lloyd Potts and the Harmony Heavers. When they started playing “My Horse Ain’t Hungry,” and their drummer jumped out front and started tap dancing like a fool, Gus, hillbilly that he was, couldn’t stand still. He dragged Gladys to her feet for a dance. Danced her right into the control booth. I saw him point his shotgun in the general direction of Lloyd Potts’s head. Lloyd’s microphone was turned off, but I gathered from his bouncing jowls he and Gus were having quite a discussion. Lloyd finally put down the chicken he was plucking. Gus and Gladys pulled up chairs beside him. “My Horse Ain’t Hungry” ended with a fine fiddle solo by the man wearing the Hopalong Cassidy hat.

Lloyd snapped on his microphone. “I just love the way you fellas sing that song.”

The Harmony Heavers flashed their show business smiles. “Thank you, Lloyd!”

Lloyd got down to business. “Say folks, the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down has some special guests in the studio. Give a big Hoosier hello to Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis and the beautiful Gladys Bartholomew.”

Gus and Gladys leaned timidly into the microphone and took turns saying hello.

“So what brings you to WEEB, Gus?” Lloyd asked.

Gus launched into the monologue that stitched our fate to Sheriff Orville Barnes and the FBI man Pruitt: “As you know Lloyd, me and Gladys, and those three Ohio boys out there in the empty chairs, have been robbing our way across Weebawauwau County for two and a half days now. And not one badge has come looking for us. Not a badge! Heck Lloyd, we even stole an airplane and stuck up a whole riverful of Baptists.”

“Say Gus,” Lloyd asked in his friendly, on-the-air voice, “that wasn’t you who set down on the ballfield last night, was it?”

Gus answered good-naturedly. “Yes, it was us, Lloyd. Unfortunately all did not go as planned. But it does underscore our dilemma.”

“How’s that, Gus?”

“I should have been surrounded and riddled full of bullets long before I desperately descended on that ballfield. To put it in plain Indiana English, Lloyd, your local sheriff is a chickenshit coward.”

“A chickenshit coward,” Gladys repeated in her best Daphne Darnell voice.

Lloyd knew he was in a dilemma of his own. He wanted to be an amicable host, put on a good show, stay alive. Yet he was honor bound to defend the public air waves. “Checkered-shirt cowboy? Why I’ve never seen Sheriff Orville Barnes wear a checkered shirt in his life! Have you, boys?”

The Harmony Heavers leaned into their microphone and smiled. “No we haven’t, Lloyd.”

Gus watched his language after that. He knew he needed to stay on Lloyd’s good side. Without using another offending word he told the people of Weebawauwau County about his miserable life in West Virginia, about how he met Gladys, what a talent and a beauty she was. He talked about their crime spree across southern Ohio, up the slender length of Indiana, sticking up the Kokomo School of Performing Arts, working their way north to the melon stand outside Bootjack. He told them about kidnapping us. About keeping us from our pilgrimage to the Chicago World’s Fair. About how innocent and unwilling Will, Clyde, and I were. He summoned every clean word in his vocabulary to describe how loathsome he was. How deserving he was of a Bonnie and Clyde-like riddling.

“How can WEEB help, Gus?” Lloyd asked with every ounce of radio sincerity he had in him.

“Well, Lloyd,” Gus said, “we’ve decided to stay right here at WEEB, on the air, day and night, until that checkered-shirted cowboy of a sheriff does his duty.”

The Harmony Heavers played for another two hours. Lloyd finished plucking his chicken and put it in a pot of boiling water, along with carrots and onions and a bowl of egg-sized potatoes. Gus made repeated trips to the door, to listen for the sound of sirens. Gladys danced in and out of the Harmony Heavers, trying on all their stupid hats, like Goldilocks tasting porridge. Will buried his nose in his guidebook.

Clyde sat and hummed. I just took it all in.

Sheriff Orville Barnes took it all in, too. He was at Millie’s whorehouse near the tracks, on the floor of her room, in his underwear, listening to the Friday Night Hoe-Down, playing a game of marbles. Sheriff Barnes loved games. Any kind of game. Millie said he laughed like a hyena when Gus called him a chickenshit coward over the air. Laughed like two hyenas when Lloyd prudently changed it to checkered-shirt cowboy. For the rest of his life he told the joke on himself: “Well, I’ll be a checkered-shirt cowboy,” he’d say. When he ran for reelection that fall he wore a checkered shirt on the campaign trail. Won in a landslide.

Pruitt took it all in, too. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he told me when I looked him up in 1968. “Armed robbery, destruction of property, auto theft, airplane theft, kidnapping, swearing on the radio. As soon as the Hoe-Down was over, I was on the road.”

The Harmony Heavers finished with a hymn called “God’s Radio.” At the end, as they hummed and strummed, the jug player with the fake ears blowing sorrowful bass notes, Lloyd signed off: “Join us again next week on the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down, featuring the heavenly harmonies and hilarious hijinks of the Harmony Heavers. Until then, this is your humble host, Lloyd Potts, saying, get some sleep already!”

Lloyd stood by the door and handed each Harmony Heaver a dollar as they filed out. Gus stood right next to him, taking each dollar away. After they’d driven off in their old bus, Gus had us unload our suitcases and bedding from the Gilbert SXIII. We were staying a while, he said.

“There is a case of machine guns and revolvers with rogues’ gallery portraits of mail-car bandits captured and convicted. Figurines of Christ on the cross between two thieves, all enclosed in a quart bottle, are part of the museum of strange articles found in packages in the Dead Letter Office of the Post Office exhibit.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Seventeen/Hopscotch

Yes, Sheriff Orville Barnes loved games. Games that took brains. Games that took muscle, guts, bluff, and mendacity. Games that required a good eye and nimble fingers. Games that required a straight face and the hunger of a cannibal. Indoor games. Outdoor games. Beer-joint games and kitchen-table games. Church basement games. Sunday games and Friday night games. Adult games in whorehouses. Schoolyard games. He always played to win and never played unless he knew he would.

Sheriff Barnes also liked to invent games. Games using real people. Games so secret, so sneaky and convoluted, only he knew they were being played. Every poor soul in Weebawauwau County—including those dropping in for a crime spree—were game pieces to be moved this way and that for Orville Barnes’s amusement.

Pruitt arrived at three in the morning. Parked across from the courthouse and slept on the front seat of his Chevrolet, clothes off so they wouldn’t wrinkle. He dressed before dawn, cleansed his breath with a mint, and then sat square-backed on a park bench, legs crossed, socks pulled tight and gartered, until Sheriff Barnes showed up for work.

It was almost nine before Pruitt spotted him coming up the sidewalk. The sheriff suddenly started hopping on one leg and then the other. It took a minute for Pruitt to realize the sheriff was playing hopscotch, and not having an epileptic fit. When the sheriff reached the end of the chalk boxes, he pirouetted and hopped back the other way. “He looked like a grasshopper caught in a spiderweb,” Pruitt told me. It was the only time he smiled the entire morning I was at his bungalow in Elmhurst.

Pruitt went to rescue him. “Sheriff Orville Barnes?”

The sheriff landed on both feet in front of him. “That’s right.”

“Norman Pruitt, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’ve driven down from Chicago.”

Sheriff Barnes pirouetted. “Pretty drive, ain’t it?”

“It was dark.”

The sheriff turned and hopped away. “I like night driving. Always fun to see how many skunks you can hit. Fun to watch the deputies wash the car afterwards.”

Pruitt frowned at the chalk boxes on the sidewalk. “You don’t have an ordinance against this?”

“Against playing hopscotch?”

“Defacing public property.”

“It’s only chalk. The rain washes it off.”

“And if it doesn’t rain, sir?”

“Then I round up a posse and we piss it off.”

Sheriff Barnes led his newest game piece into the courthouse, to his office on the ground floor. There was a dart board on the back of the door, boxes of board games stacked on the filing cabinets. The sheriff sat behind his desk and scraped a maze of dominoes into the pencil drawer. “That’s some World’s Fair you’ve got up there, Pruitt. Something to see.”

“I haven’t had time myself.”

The sheriff produced a small children’s top and gave it a spin on the desktop. “Why doesn’t that surprise me? You ought to unbutton your vest and go over there before it closes. They got a midway longer than three Main Streets end to end. Hundreds of games. Throwing balls. Tossing rings. I couldn’t carry all the Kewpie dolls I won. Gave some to the orphanage, some to Millie and her—what brings you to Weebawauwau County, Pruitt?”

“Gus Gillis.”

The sheriff stopped his top. Sourly gave it another spin. “And how does such a busy government man know about Gus Gillis?”

Pruitt told him what he’d heard on the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down. The sheriff was delighted. “Those Harmony Heavers are the best jug band in Indiana. Headed for big things.”

“I’m sure they are,” Pruitt said. “About Gillis—”

Sheriff Barnes blew on the top to keep it going. “I’ve seen rinky-dinky crooks like this Gus Gillis before. It’s usually best to wait them out. Sooner or later they move on to somebody else’s county.”

“He’s apparently kidnapped three boys from Ohio. That’s a federal offense.”

“Do we know for sure they’re from Ohio?”

“Kidnapping anybody from anywhere is a federal offense,” Pruitt said. He snatched the top and squeezed it. “These are difficult times. Murderers. Thieves. Communists. Union organizers. Defilers of every stripe. Sheriff Barnes, we have responsibilities as officers of the law, no matter how dangerous.”

The sheriff pushed his chair back. Walked to the door. Retrieved the darts and counted off ten paces. He let the darts fly. All but one struck the bull’s-eye. “That’s the second time in fourteen hours I’ve been called a coward.”

The sheriff’s marksmanship tempered the government man a bit. “I didn’t say that, sir.”

“I’m not a coward, Pruitt. Not a hero either. Gus Gillis is crazy as a bedbug. You heard what he did. Those poor Baptists. Almost ruined my ballgame. He wants to die, Pruitt! You gotta be careful with a guy who wants to die.” He collected the darts. Paced off ten.

“You are going after him?” Pruitt asked.

“I suppose I might have to.”

“When?”

One by one the darts speared the bull’s-eye. “When I’m ready. Not when he’s ready. Not when you’re ready. When I’m ready. To be honest with you, Pruitt, I’m interested to see what he comes up with next. He’s got quite an imagination. Want to give these darts a try?”

I heard about this first meeting between Sheriff Orville Barnes and Pruitt three times. When Pruitt himself told it to me in 1968, he made the sheriff sound like the biggest fool in America. You can guess who came off the fool when Millie Macmillan and Albert Finley told it to me in 1942. The sheriff and Pruitt were both fools as far as I’m concerned.

CHOCOLATE PUDDING FOR 1000 MEN

78 eggs

26 lbs. sugar

13 lbs. corn starch

4 7/8 oz. vanilla

22 3/4 qts. cold milk

9 3/4 lbs. cocoa

65 qts. water

4 7/8 oz. salt

Dissolve corn starch in cold milk, add beaten eggs. Dissolve sugar and salt in heated (not boiling) water. Add water to milk/corn starch/eggs mixture. Add cocoa and vanilla and stir until pudding thickens.

FROM THE RECIPES OF A WWII

ARMY AIR FORCE MESS SERGEANT

Eighteen/Outfoxed by a Hen

Lloyd Potts had been looking forward to his usual one-man, post-Hoe Down feast. Now he had company. The chicken and vegetables boiling away in his control room pot had to be split six ways. Gus ate both drumsticks and half the potatoes.

Gus and Gladys slept together on Lloyd’s bed in the control room. Lloyd slept with us on the studio floor. In the morning Lloyd started to make a pot of coffee. Gus made him stop. Told him just the smell of it retched his guts. So we all drank warm Canada Dry ginger ale. Lloyd had cases of it. “I’m not real fond of it,” he told us, “but the bottler in Fort Wayne sponsors both the local farm report and Harmonica Sal’s Wednesday Night Wingding. I get four free cases a week.”

Will shivered. “Jeez. I hope we’re not still here next Wednesday.”

“Don’t worry,” Gus assured him. “I’ll be dead long before Wednesday. You’ve got my word on it.”

It was already Saturday. Had our pilgrimage gone as planned, we’d be spending our last morning at the World’s Fair before driving home, racing like thirsty dogs through the last few exhibits we hadn’t seen yet. Our heads would be filled with all the wondrous things mankind had accomplished since the Creation, or would accomplish just as soon as FDR got the depression by the throat. We’d be smart as whips. Ready for the glorious future. But here we were at WEEB. Dumb as when we left Bennett’s Corners.

Lloyd got his morning record show underway at seven. Some of those scratchy 78s he played must have been ten years old. Songs like “Barney Google” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “Don’t Bring Lulu” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” While the records played Lloyd made us French toast, the bread, he said, courtesy of the Logansport Bakery, proud makers of Tippecanoe Rye, sponsors of the Reverend Donald Aylesworth’s Hour of Reflection. “What day’s that on?” Will asked.

“Tomorrow morning at six,” Lloyd said.

“Judas Priest,” Gus moaned, running his finger around the inner lip of the maple syrup jug. “I pray Sheriff Barnes riddles me before I have to sit through that.”

After breakfast Gus and Gladys and Lloyd went to work, planning that evening’s broadcast. Gus had a brilliant plan: We were going to perform Gladys’s Daphne Darnell scripts. All three of them: “The Dashing Stranger,” “The Handsome Hobo,” and “The Saintly Soldier.” During the commercial breaks, Gus would harangue the sheriff. “Between Gladys’s lilting voice rousing his manly juices and my nonstop badgering getting his dander up, I’ll have that checkered-shirt cowboy out here before the Reverend Aylesworth crawls out of bed.”

“You don’t have to say checkered-shirt cowboy when we’re off the air,” Lloyd told him.

“I know, but I don’t want to slip up later. I don’t mean you or your fine station any harm, Lloyd, only myself.”

Lloyd appreciated that.

So while Lloyd and Gladys and Gus planned, Will and I listened to the scratchy 78s and Clyde’s humming. Clyde was getting louder by the hour. He was waxing up for sure. He needed more drops.

“Tonight’s broadcast is bound to work,” I told Will. “That means Gus’ll be dead sometime tomorrow morning and we’ll be on our way home. We can’t make it home before church, but we’ll be in time to have Clyde rested for school on Monday. We can just turn the Gilbert SXIII around and fly straight to Chicago. Spend all the time at the World’s Fair we want.”

Will brightened. “Jeez. You think so?”

“Absolutely. We haven’t spent hardly any of that money hidden in your underwear.”

“I don’t think Mother will go for it.”

“We’re men now, Will. Once we get out from under Gus’s claws we can do anything we want.”

“We can, can’t we!”

“Absolutely. Why, with Gus dead, Gladys will be free to go with us if she wants. Imagine spending a week in Chicago with her. I bet she’ll let both of us give her a poke.”

Will pulled out his guidebook and started reading. His way of telling me I’d crossed another line. Apparently he’d claimed all impossible dreams about bagging Gladys for himself.

The French toast was good. Lloyd loved to cook as much as he loved to eat. It was still eight years before the Army Air Force sent me to cooking school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, and I’d never seen a man who loved to cook before. He stood in front of his stove directing those sizzling pieces of egg-soaked Tippecanoe Rye with his spatula like a maestro guiding a cello section through “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

I still have my recipes from the war. They’re in the box under my bed. Lloyd went through a dozen eggs making French toast for six. For a thousand airmen you need six hundred eggs; plus 250 one-pound loaves of bread, sixty gallons of condensed milk, sixty gallons of water, ten pounds of sugar, pound and a half of salt. I did some real cooking in England. Everything I made was for a thousand men. Cooking big like that is what made my first two civilian restaurant ventures so popular, overgenerous portions. My hamburgers stuck out from the bun like the brim of an Amishman’s hat; I stacked my French fries up like cord wood; my chili always came with free refills; my frozen custard cones leaned like the Tower of Pisa; I let the hot fudge pour like rainwater. The truth is, my portions killed me as much as the secret sauces and speedy service of the franchise chains. I’d learned my lesson by the time I opened the Clam Shack on Pine Island. My customers only got what I could afford to give them. They don’t let you cook here at Sparrow Hill. Can’t even have a goddamn microwave. Sonofabitch.

Every meal I cooked in England I made as big and rich as possible. Most of those airmen were never going home. I wish the Sparrow Hill cook thought that way. None of us are going home either.

At noon Lloyd delivered the Weebawauwau News. Usually that meant birth and death notices and ticket information for potluck suppers, but Gus made him report on our holdups, both on the ground and from the air. Made him advertise that evening’s special broadcast. We ate cheese sandwiches for lunch, the cheese courtesy of the Willow Farm Dairy, sponsors of Thursday Night Remedies with Dr. Woodruff Claypool. “Don’t worry,” Gus assured everybody, “I’ll be long dead before the doctor shows up for his show.”

Lloyd played 78s all afternoon. Some of the records wobbled as well as scratched. Supper was looming. Gus sent me outside to behead the last hen in Lloyd’s chicken yard. A shipment of thirty new hens was due Monday, Lloyd told us, payment from the Big Brook Chicken Farm for a month’s worth of free advertising on the Suppertime Serenade.

I’d never beheaded a hen before. We had plenty of chickens on our Stony Hill Road farm. Hens past their egg-laying prime and extra roosters always ended up on the table. But my mother always did the beheading. She was good at it. Good at cornering them. Good at grabbing their legs out from under them. Good at holding them breast down on the block so they couldn’t flop. Good with the hatchet. One whack almost always did the trick.

I’d watched my mother behead chickens dozens of time. If I could fly an airplane without having flown before, I was sure I could manage that hen in Lloyd Potts’s chicken yard. “Sure you can handle it OK?” Lloyd asked as he handed me his hatchet.

“Absolutely.”

Lloyd’s chicken yard wasn’t much. Odds-and-ends lumber covered with rusty chicken wire. My first mistake was taking the hatchet inside with me. That hen, the last of a month’s worth of dinners, had seen that hatchet in action twenty-nine times before.

I locked the door behind me—nothing but a wire loop over a nail—and started herding the hen toward the nearest corner. The hen blustered back and forth, chest out, head high, clucking defiantly, eyeing me sideways with annoyance. I closed in, trying to stay calm and unthreatening, the way my mother did it. The hen squeezed into the corner and froze. I slowly bent down. Grabbed. The hen went right over my head. Lost a few of her feathers on the ceiling wire but glided to a safe landing on the other side of the yard. Started pecking the ground for bugs like nothing had happened. I advanced again. Cornered it. Didn’t bend so low this time. Grabbed. The hen went through my legs. Glided to a landing and pecked for bugs. That’s how it went for twenty minutes: corner, grab, glide, peck for bugs. I didn’t dare look to see if anyone was watching from the window. I did see Gladys and Will descending side by side into the cornfield. “Now what’s that all about?” I asked myself. Pretty soon I could hear them ripping ears.

Sonofabitch. There I was flailing at a goddamn hen while Will was alone in the tall corn with Gladys.

The sight of those two entering the corn together has spooked me all my life. When I went to see Gladys in Mingo Junction in 1955, I steered our conversation to that afternoon as quickly as I could. “You and Will were in that cornfield a long time.”

Gladys smiled and watched the river, even though there wasn’t a barge passing at the moment. “He was a nice boy.”

The way she said that. He was a nice boy. So wistful. Made me feel like a piece of shit. She’d only known Will less than a week, yet I could see she had feelings for him. The same kind of feelings I did. Maybe they didn’t bubble up several times a day and make her ache, haunt her from restaurant to restaurant, haunt her out of her marriage, but she had them nonetheless. “You don’t have to talk about it,” I said.

She did, though. “I think Gus thought there was something going on between Will and me. Not physical of course. But something in our minds. That’s why he sent us together to pick corn. To see how we acted when we got back. Maybe to see if we ran off together. We saw you chasing that hen and laughed all the way down to the cornfield.”

The thought of Will laughing at my expense cut me like a butcher knife in the belly. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to leave Mingo Junction that second. Then I shook my head and grinned. “I must have looked like a drunk chimpanzee trying to corner that hen,” I said.

Of course Will laughed at me. If he was in that chicken yard, I would have laughed at him. We always laughed at each other’s predicaments. That’s how you let a guy know you love him.

“This corn is going to taste terrible,” Will told Gladys as they picked. “This is sour old field corn. Grown for cows, not people.” Gladys watched as he expertly yanked off the ears. When she tried it the whole stalk pulled out of the ground. “Let me show you how to do that,” Will said. “Quick jerk and a twist. Squeaks right off.”

Gladys tried again. The stalk still came out.

“Takes a little practice,” Will said.

“Tell you what,” Gladys said. “You pick and I’ll carry.” They continued up the row. Will squeaking ears. Gladys’s arms filling up. “You nervous about tonight’s performance?” she asked.

“Some.”

“You were good the other day as the Dashing Stranger. You could be a famous radio actor if you put your mind to it.”

“I don’t think I could ever put my mind to something like that,” he said.

“You’re very talented. You truly had me believing you were the Dashing Stranger. And not just a bashful boy.”

Gladys said Will’s head almost disappeared down his collar. His blinky eyes took off like a flock of frightened geese, she said. “How many ears you think we’ll need?” Will said, changing the subject as fast as he could. “Lloyd and Gus are both big eaters.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being bashful,” she told him. “And there’s nothing wrong with being a boy. I wish I had spent a few more years being a girl before I ran off willy-nilly into womanhood. I’m only eighteen you know.”

Will was as surprised that day in the cornfield as I was twenty-one years later in Mingo Junction. “Only eighteen?” he said.

“How old did you think I was?” Gladys asked.

“Jeez. Twenty at least.”

“I do come off as older, don’t I.”

“You sure do.”

“If you’re a good actress, you can be any age you want.”

“I have enough trouble just being my real age.”

Gladys was already up to her chin in ears of field corn. “Gus and I haven’t made it any easier.”

“I don’t blame you for any of this,” Will said. “You’re just along for the ride like the rest of us, from what I can see.”

She took him by the chin and looked into his eyes. “You’ve got the finest soul I’ve ever seen.”

Will went scientific on her. “You can’t see a soul.”

“I can see yours just fine,” she said. She kissed him on the lips.

Right on the goddamn lips! Sonofabitch! I’d only been kissed on the lips once myself and it sure wasn’t by anybody what looked or smelled or walked with jazz music playing in her head like Gladys Bartholomew.

Not knowing what to do with the kiss, Will started squeaking off ears like a madman. Gladys stopped him. “We pick any more corn and Gus will know for sure we weren’t up to any good.”

Halfway through their corn picking, Gus came out to the chicken yard. “Having some trouble, Ace?”

“I almost had her a couple times,” I said.

I saw Gus’ eyes drift over the cornfield, then land on the hen. “Don’t feel bad about being outfoxed by this old hen,” he said. “If she wasn’t wily, she wouldn’t be the last one in the yard.”

It was one of the smartest things anyone ever said to me. Over the years it has helped me accept life’s sudden surprises and slow inevitabilities. Good as you may be, you sometimes find yourself up against someone—or something—better. Going bust at the R&R Luncheonette wasn’t my fault, it was the Big Boy chain’s fault. The Dairy Doodle’s demise was McDonalds’ fault. Getting too old to run the Clam Shack was God’s fault. So when Gus said that—“If she wasn’t wily, she wouldn’t be the last one in the yard”—my embarrassment floated right through the holes in the chicken wire.

Gus now entered the ring. He edged sideways toward the hen, so it would think he was really moving in the other direction. His ruse appeared to be working. The hen clucked some but didn’t move. When Gus got within three feet of the hen he stopped and sank slowly down on hinged knees. Zzzzip! His arm shot out like the sticky tongue of a frog. The hen went right over his head. Glided to a stop and started pecking for bugs.

Gus wasn’t any better at this than me! He tried again. Missed again. He pushed back his fedora and scratched his hair. “Ace,” he said, “you are witnessing here one of the major lessons in life.”

“What’s that, Gus?”

“Eating a chicken is a helluva lot easier than catching a chicken.” Another bit of West Virginia wisdom that from time to time has seen me through life’s little surprises. My marriage to Lois Cobb comes to mind.

Gus and I now went after that hen with all we had. Finally got her, too. Gus carried her out to the block. I handed him the hatchet. “You ever kill anyone?” I asked as he stretched the hen’s neck out. The hen seemed as interested in Gus’s answer as me.

“Naw, I ain’t ever killed no one. Not that I couldn’t. Not that I wouldn’t if I had a good reason to.” Humility and threat in one answer. That was Gus Gillis.

“Clyde Barrow killed lots of men,” I said. “The newspapers say for no reason at all.”

Gus spit on the hatchet blade. “The papers are right on that score. But sometimes you have to look past a man’s faults to see his true greatness. And Clyde Barrow was a great man, Ace, driven to his miserable behavior by a miserable world.”

“I suppose,” I said.

“You bet you suppose,” Gus said. He raised the hatchet high. He looked me square in the face. “What about me, Ace? You think I’m a great man?”

“I sure do. Absolutely.”

“You really mean that?”

Naturally I didn’t really think he was a great man. But I didn’t think he was such a bad man either. Not at that time. Sure he wielded a gun and shot it off more than was necessary. Sure he committed lots of crimes. But they were all low rent. And the way he wanted to die—in a hail of bullets—seemed almost heroic, sacrificial. An imperfect soul voluntary retiring to the nether world. “Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis,” I said. “Greatest lawbreaker of all time.”

“Thank you, Ace.” He brought the hatchet down. The hen’s head skipped off the block like a tiddlywink.

“Boy Scouts are on duty throughout the grounds, ready to speed messages, help to find lost children and in any way serve visitors according to the Boy Scout code of courtesy.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Nineteen/Nobody’s Going Nowhere

Gus looked up from his ear of corn, butter-soaked niblets stuck all over his face. “What’s the matter, Clyde? You don’t like Lloyd’s cooking?”

Clyde stopped humming. “I like it fine.”

Gladys licked the chicken grease off her white fingers. It was ten after six. The Gladys Bartholomew Theater went on in just fifty minutes. Everybody but Lloyd Potts was antsy. “Your ear hurting worse?” Gladys asked Clyde.

“Hurting like hell,” he said.

Will was smashing his boiled carrots like they were poisonous spiders. I was watching Gladys’s fingers, wondering what they would taste like in my mouth.

“He needs his drops,” Gladys said.

Gus took the untouched chicken thigh off Clyde’s plate. Sucked it to the bone. “You need to put your mind on something else, Clyde.”

“He needs more drops,” Gladys said. As far as I know they were the first words she had directed at Gus since returning from the cornfield with Will. They were spoken with a coolness I hadn’t heard from her before.

Gus threw the thigh bone against the wall. “Judas Priest! How many times do I have to apologize for throwing Clyde’s medicine bottle through that propeller? I was nine-tenths unconscious.”

“He doesn’t need an apology,” Gladys said. “He needs another bottle of drops.”

Gus threw his ear of corn against the wall. “Where am I supposed to get another bottle of drops? Pick them off a damn cornstalk?”

Gladys looked in Clyde’s ear. “Is that wax or pus?”

Lloyd, sitting on Clyde’s other side, pulled him over on his lap. He drilled his little finger into Clyde’s ear. Came out with a yellow glob. He smelled it. “Looks like pus but it’s just mushy wax.” He offered Gladys a smell.

Gus—whose stomach couldn’t even handle the aroma of roadside coffee—nearly threw up. “I’m trying to eat here.”

“Then go ahead and eat,” Gladys said. The temperature of her voice was dropping like the first week of January.

Will came around the table now. He took his brother’s face in his hands. “Jeez, Clyde. The whole side of your head is swollen. We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

Gus threw his boiled potato against the wall. “In case everybody’s forgotten, my life’s riding on tonight’s broadcast.”

“We haven’t forgotten,” I said.

“We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” Will said again.

Gus threw the potato from my plate. “It’s only a earache,” he screamed. “A diddly damn earache!”

Lloyd moved his plate before Gus could get his hands on his potato. “I had an uncle who died of an earache once.”

Clyde’s hum took off like a fire engine. “I ain’t gonna die, am I?”

“Of course you’re not going to die,” Will said. “But we better see a doctor.”

Gus couldn’t reach Lloyd’s plate. But he could reach the chicken platter. The whole carcass went against the wall. “You put your mind on something else, Clyde, before I put it on something else!”

“Earache killed my aunt Myrtle, too, I think,” Lloyd said.

Gladys showed Lloyd the face of Mother God. “Telling us about your dead relatives isn’t helping things, Mr. Potts.”

Lloyd retreated. “It was some kind of pain in the head that killed her. I was only about five so I can’t remember exactly what her problem was.”

Clyde went limp in Will’s arms. “I am gonna die, ain’t I?”

“You’re not going to die,” Will said. His voice was on the precipice of real anger. “We’ll get you to a doctor.”

Gus reached for his shotgun. “Ain’t nobody going to the doctor until I’m dead.”

“We should let Will take Clyde,” Gladys said.

Gus threw a quart-sized Canada Dry bottle against the wall. When that didn’t calm him, he threw his hat. “Gladys! Your big debut is in just a few minutes. You need Will to play all those strangers!”

“Lloyd can play the strangers.”

“Lloyd? Nobody’s going to believe Lloyd’s somebody a girl would fall in love with.”

“Then you can play the strangers,” Gladys said.

Gus’s head was vibrating. “I can’t lower myself to that! I’m Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, sponsor of the show! The bastard Sheriff Barnes gets so mad at he can’t wait to kill me! Will and Clyde are staying right here. That’s the end of it!”

It wasn’t the end of it. Will stood up, serene as a block of granite. “I’m taking Clyde to a doctor. Ace, go start the Gilbert SXIII.”

Goddamn. Sonofabitch. Was I in a pickle now. I looked at Gus. He was smiling at me, waiting for me to choose sides. Either way I was cooked. If I chose Gus’s side I’d really be crossing the line. Crossing it for good. Turning my back on Will Randall and civilization in general. If I chose Will—which of course is what I wanted to do—I’d be condemning all three of us to certain death. No, Gus hadn’t killed anybody yet, but not three hours earlier he’d stood with that hatchet and hen in his hands and told me he would if he had to. I looked at Will. He looked away. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I started for the door.

I was expecting to feel shotgun pellets in my back. Instead I felt a hand on my collar. Gus yanked me back so hard I skidded right across the top of the table, corn and carrots and potatoes and quart-sized bottles of Canada Dry flying.

Will was the next Christian to volunteer. He put his arm around Clyde and led him toward the door. Gus raised his shotgun. Before I could get off the floor, Gladys grabbed the barrel, put herself between Will and Gus. “Gus, please. We’ll do the broadcast but then you have to let the boys go.”

Gus pried Gladys’s fingers off his gun barrel. He backed up like she was contagious. “I saw you kissy-facin’ in the corn.” He pointed the gun in Will’s general direction. “Can’t even wait until I’m dead. Can’t even wait until I’m diddly damn dead.”

Now my hands were on the shotgun and for a few seconds we had a fairly even tug of war going until Gus stomped on my feet. When I let go he kicked me right in my never-tested manhood. As I went down in a ball of black stars I heard the gun boom. I felt a shower of plaster. Gus had killed the ceiling. He swiveled toward the control room window and killed that, too.

Thirty-four years later, on a patio in Elmhurst, Illinois, I learned that while Gus was going nuts inside WEEB, Sheriff Orville Barnes, Pruitt, and a deputy were outside in the corn, on their bellies, watching with binoculars.

Pruitt rolled over and drew his pistol when Gus shot the ceiling.

Sheriff Barnes continued to play with the ladybug on the ground in front of him, bumping it with his fingernail, making it change directions after only a few tiny steps. “Put that government-issued pecker of yours away,” he told Pruitt. “He ain’t shooting at us.”

“He’s shooting at somebody,” Pruitt said.

Sheriff Barnes carefully lifted the ladybug and giggled as it skidded down his fingernail. “More than likely at some thing. I’ve been calling around, Pruitt. Gus Gillis seems to like killing doors and windows more than real people. You don’t see any blood flying around in there, do you deputy?”

The deputy lowered his binoculars and blinked his eyes into focus. “Just a lot of plaster.”

“See there, Pruitt. Just a lot of plaster. Lloyd and those Ohio boys are safe enough.” The sheriff freed the ladybug. “Let’s go home.” He started crawling through the corn toward his car. Told his deputy to stay. “If anything important happens, let me know. Coming, Pruitt?”

Pruitt, disgusted, holstered his revolver and followed, growling every time the dry Indiana dirt ground into the knees of his expensive suit pants.

“I’d invite you to listen to The Gladys Bartholomew Theater with me and Millie,” Sheriff Barnes teased, “but I wouldn’t want you shooting her girls.”

Pruitt reminded him that prostitution was against the law.

“No worse than defiling the sidewalk with hopscotch chalk,” the sheriff said. He kept Pruitt crawling much farther than was necessary. “Who do you fear most, Pruitt? God or J. Edgar Hoover?”

“God, of course.”

“Not me. Hoover scares the bejesus out of me. Sure there’s a few bastards that need frying, but there’s also a lot of decent saps hanging on the edge of the law only because there’s nothing better. Even some of the bank robbers are decent saps. But Hoover’s bent on pushing them all over the edge. Hell Pruitt, the more of these public enemies you government boys put away, the more elbow room you create for penny-candy losers like this Gus Gillis. Hoover’s the one who scares me. God’s never pushed anyone over the edge in his life, from what I’ve seen.”

Pruitt was still boiling with contempt when he recounted this conversation to me in 1968. As a decent sap who’d spent the better part of a week on the edge myself, I tended to agree with Sheriff Orville Barnes. That’s when I went into the kitchen and spit in Pruitt’s omelet.

Having had a run-in with one of Hoover’s field men—that idiot Pruitt—I was always interested in what J. Edgar was up to. In the forties I read about all the Nazis he was chasing down. In the fifties all the communists he was chasing down. In the sixties all the Negroes and hippies he was chasing down. Except for the Nazis, all decent saps. When he died in May 1972, I was generally happy about it. But when the word got out that Hoover might have been a homosexual—all that stuff about him and Clyde Tolson, his number two man who ate dinner with him every night and went away on vacation with him, went to Broadway shows together and all that—I felt some sympathy. Will Randall and I would have been lifelong buddies like that. What would people have said about us?

I met Will within a week of our moving from Columbus to the Stony Hill Road farm. My mother inherited the place from her uncle, a wifeless loner. The farm looked it. The barn was in better shape than the house. My father wasn’t keen about moving there, but it was a free farm and his low-paying race-car job didn’t give him much leverage with my mother. So on a Monday in June 1928, six days after I turned twelve, we moved up to the Stony Hill Road farm. On his first day looking for work Dad came home with the foreman’s job at B. F. Goodrich. The stock market crash was still more than a year away and jobs were easy—especially for someone who’d flown and raced with the Wild Teuton. Dad was as conversant in tires as anybody.

My first two days on the farm were fun enough. Exploring the barn. Chasing the chickens and hogs we’d inherited. Hiking the fields and woods. But after a couple days I started missing Columbus and my Columbus friends. I was happy as Christmas when Dad woke me up Saturday morning and said we were driving up to Bennett’s Corners for groceries and gas.

It was my first trip to the Corners. I wasn’t expecting Columbus but I was expecting a real town. “Isn’t much, is it?” I said. Dad agreed. But mother said it was all we needed. We dropped her off in front of Ruby & Rudy’s and then pulled down to Randall’s garage. Will’s father came out and pumped gas into our brand-new Plymouth. He was friendly and talkative. He sent me inside for a free bottle of Coca-Cola. There was Will, sitting on the floor in the corner, reading some tiny brown book.

I fished a bottle from the cooler. Will’s blinky eyes were watching over the top of his book. “The man out front said I could have a free bottle,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I was stealing.

Will slid his back up the wall and walked over. “You a Boy Scout?”

Now was that an insult? On the hard streets of Columbus, Ohio, being called a Boy Scout was the same as being called a goody-goody. I was something of a goody-goody—a boy with a mother like mine couldn’t help but be a little spongy—but I didn’t want to be called one. Didn’t want to be called a Boy Scout either. “Not especially,” I answered.

“I am,” Will said. “Troop 203.”

I fished another Coca-Cola from the cooler and offered it to him. “No thanks,” he said. “Only customers get free Cokes.” I felt guilty now. So I took a nickel from my pants and bought him one. After a few sips he started laughing. “This is dumb, ain’t it?” he said. “The son of a total stranger drinking a free Coke while the son of the owner drinks a paid-for Coke—paid for by the son of the stranger.” Nothing made Will laugh harder than the ironic twists of everyday life.

Those Cokes cemented our friendship. By the middle of July, I was spending nights at the Randalls’ and Will was spending nights with us. We spent most of our time hanging around the Corners. I fell in love with the place. We played catch on the ballfield and volunteered as bat boys when the Bennett’s Corners’ team played some other corner’s team. We mowed the church lawn and played in the cemetery. We sat in front of the garage and counted passing cars. In August I joined Troop 203. In September we went off to seventh grade together, taking the school bus all the way to Brunswick, five and one-third miles away.

Until I moved to Bennett’s Corners, Will’s best friend had been Lindsay Blum. He was a heavyset kid with bugged eyes. Thyroid I think. For a while that first summer Lindsay hung around with us. He was nice enough, except he knew a lot less than he thought he did and he let off a lot of gas. I started calling him Ass Eyes. By the time school started Lindsay saw the handwriting on the wall and drifted off to find other friends.

Now it was just Will and me. He kept me from flunking too many tests, and I kept him from being roughed up by the eighth grade boys. Not that I ever had to fight any of them. Just knowing I was from Columbus kept them in line. Little did they know I was a goody-goody. I moved up quickly in Troop 203, within three months becoming a First Class scout just like Will. Will’s father was scoutmaster. He took us on great hikes. Took us canoeing at Hinckley Lake. One summer he took us to a big three-state roundup at Niagara Falls.

Will’s caution and my reckless adventure made for an exciting but safe friendship. After our scouting trip to Niagara Falls, Will’s caution kept me from going over the Hinckley Lake dam in a leaky barrel. My knack for adventure saw to it we were the only Bennett’s Corners boys who ever saw a circus midget take a leak in a camel’s water pail.

Boy, we were friends!

Will took it upon himself to educate me long before he got the World’s Fair bug. We’d sit at night on the gravestones at the cemetery or under the bridge over Healy Creek and he’d pontificate for hours. Pontificate on everything. For example, he’d pontificate on religion: “The Bible is half bunk and half true,” he’d say. “The hard part is figuring out which half is which and then living your life accordingly.”

He’d pontificate on the mysteries of becoming an adult: “Don’t spend a second worrying about what kind of adult you’re going to wind up, Ace. There’s no such thing as adults. No such thing as kids either. There’s just people with different age bodies. The reason so-called adults are in charge of everything is because they’ve lived long enough to figure this out, and they keep it a secret from those who haven’t yet, so they can rule the roost.”

He’d pontificate on politics: “People say they hate politics, just like they say they hate fighting and killing. In reality people love all three. They love to see somebody weak get the snot kicked out of them, whether it’s with a gun or a fist or a ballot. Makes them feel good to know they’re not the only losers on the planet. And they’re all for a winner, until the winner actually wins. Then they turn on him like a mouse on cheese. Franklin Roosevelt’s a one-termer, you just watch.”

He’d pontificate on death: “Reverend Sprung’s assurances about eternal life aside, I try not to think about dying. You’ve seen dead cats rot away to nothing on the road? I’m afraid that’s exactly what God’s got in store for us. Just be content with the one life you know you’ve got—make all you can out of it—and let the Almighty worry about what does or doesn’t come next.”

He’d pontificate on money: “I think a fella ought to have as much as he can legally get. But you shouldn’t try too hard to get it. Look at my parents, Ace. My mother is always mad at the big money she hasn’t got her hands on yet while my father is happy as a clam with the little money he has. When my body’s older I’m going to take money more seriously than my father does, but not much.”

Most of all he’d pontificate on the future: “If you’re not prepared, the future will eat you alive. That’s why we’re going to the Chicago World’s Fair. So we don’t get eaten alive by the future.”

I did my share of pontificating, too, usually about sex: “No, Will, I can’t imagine what it feels like, or exactly how you get the deed done. And I don’t want to know either. I plan to go into it green and savor it as I learn.”

Will was smart beyond his years and had every right in the world to pontificate on religion, adulthood, politics, death, money, the future, or anything else. I was the last person on earth to pontificate on sex. I didn’t get close to poking a willing city girl during our pilgrimage to the Chicago World’s Fair—wouldn’t have come close even if Gus Gillis hadn’t hijacked the Gilbert SXIII or Pruitt hadn’t done what he did. In fact I didn’t poke anybody until 1941, when I was learning how to cook at Ft. Benjamin Harrison. It was a mulatto girl from Chicago, who had traveled across Indiana. She cost me five dollars. No doubt it was the quickest five she ever made. I’m sure she forgot about me the second I stepped out her door and the next future Army Air Force cook stepped in. Still my memory of that first sexual experience has lasted me a lifetime. The clap I caught lasted me five months. I had sex six times in England, four in London and twice in Manchester. The first time I made love to a woman, that is, lingered before and after, talking and laughing, and not having to pay for it, was in 1948 with Lois Cobb, the woman I was about to marry.

Lois Cobb and I were married for eleven years. Never had children. A couple years into our marriage the R&R Luncheonette was doing well enough that we began talking about having children. I told her if we had a boy, his name would be Will. “It’s bad enough I have to live with Will Randall’s ghost,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to give birth to it, too.”

Little by little my chance of ever becoming a father dwindled as our marriage bed turned into an ice cube tray.

Our accumulating debts didn’t help matters. Despite my triple-deckers and secret sauce, people kept flocking to the new Big Boy restaurant on U.S. 42. Lois divorced me six weeks after I sold the R&R to that dreamer home from Korea. Lois married an Irish autoworker from the west side of Cleveland and had three quick sons. She died of lung cancer in 1977. She wasn’t a smoker, but her Irish husband was a goddamn chimney, the sonofabitch. I had nothing against Lois Cobb. Even after she divorced me I thought she was one hell of a fine woman. Will Randall and the new Big Boy on U.S. 42 just got in our way I guess.

“Do women on the air give you the screaming meemies? Do you feel jittery when you hear the sweetness and light heroine of the ‘He, She, and It’ dramas, who talk as no regular girl ever spoke on land or sea. In such a propah, propah mannah, my deah, that you long to kick her in the nether part of her lingerie and say, ‘Be yourself, dearie.’”

RADIO NEWS MAGAZINE

Twenty/Digging All Night

Gus killed more than the ceiling, he killed any hope of getting Clyde and his ear to a doctor. Seven o’clock came around much too quickly. We were on the air.

Lloyd read the introduction he and Gus had worked on most of the afternoon: “WEEB proudly presents The Gladys Bartholomew Theater, starring the beautiful and talented Gladys Bartholomew. Tonight’s broadcast is brought to you by the notorious Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, still terrorizing the goodly people of Weebawauwau County because Sheriff Orville Barnes is too much of a checkered-shirt cowboy to come after him, lead a’flying. Gus will be along a little later to egg the sheriff on, but now what do you say we settle back with a refreshing glass of Canada Dry ginger ale and enjoy the program. In our first episode, entitled ‘The Handsome Hobo,’ Gladys portrays Gladys White, sweet Georgia peach whose life is changed forever by a knock on the door.”

The next thing the goodly people of Weebawauwau County heard was me asking, “Now?” Then after Gladys rolled her eyes and nodded they heard me rap three times on a block of wood, knock knock knock. “The Handsome Hobo” was underway.

“The Handsome Hobo” was nearly identical to “The Dashing Stranger.” Instead of a country girl and her blind father needing someone to fix the levee before the rains started, it was about a southern girl and her grandfather needing someone to find a hoard of Confederate gold before the Yankee tax collectors arrived to confiscate their farm. Luckily a good-looking tramp, played of course by Will, showed up.

WILL

(as the Handsome Hobo)

You bet your curly brown hair I’ll find that gold for you and your granddaddy. If I have to dig all night.

GLADYS

(as the Georgia Peach)

You will? Here’s a shovel and a lantern. I’ll be out directly with some lemonade. Do you like it with lots of sugar?

That’s the way it went. Hard to say what the people of Weebawauwau County thought of the story or the acting—both were pitiful—but I do know everybody was listening. Maybe today people wouldn’t give a second thought to a carload of criminals taking over a radio station and then haranguing the sheriff all night on the air, but in 1934 in the middle of Indiana, it was a big thing. Eight years later when I looked up Lloyd he was still strutting with pride about our huge success.

Sheriff Barnes was listening at Millie’s, with her girls gathered around the radio, since the broadcast had interrupted all local desire for illicit sex. Pruitt was alone in his room at the Weebawauwau Inn. Others were listening, too: Albert Finley from the nearly empty Weebawauwau Palace; all five Harmony Heavers from an empty roadhouse on the highway; Bud Hemphill from the barn where his one-winged Jenny was drying out; Will’s Uncle Fritz in Valparaiso.

Lloyd introduced Gus at the end of Act One.

Gus slid back his fedora and leaned into the microphone. “Thank you, Lloyd. I hope everyone is enjoying tonight’s broadcast—and I hope everyone enjoys having a checkered-shirt cowboy for a sheriff. That’s right! That’s exactly what I said! Checkered-shirt cowboy!”

Gus recounted all our crimes; the delivery men we stuck up, the riverful of Baptists, even the ballgame; he told them about kidnapping Will, Clyde, and me, how he was keeping us from our pilgrimage to the Chicago World’s Fair; told them how Sheriff Barnes’s refusal to enforce the law was preventing Clyde from getting the ear drops he needed to dissolve his painful wax. Gus went on for ten minutes, his hillbilly voice getting higher and higher. “Come on, Mr. Sheriff Orville Barnes. Come and free these poor Ohio boys. Come and free ol’ Gus Gillis from his despicable fleshy host. Send my worthless soul to roast in hell alongside Clyde Barrow’s. Come riddle me full of little holes, sheriff, riddle me full of little diddly damn holes.”

Lloyd thanked him, recapping much of what he said. Will and Gladys launched enthusiastically into Act Two.

Gladys’s acting was as overdone as her makeup. Will on the other hand was brilliant. He’s been reading aloud to me for six years. Now he was reading those terrible phony lines just as natural as could be. Just an hour earlier he was ready to die to unwax Clyde’s ear. Now he was lost in the radio play. He was somewhere in Georgia, digging in a dark swamp for Confederate gold, helping a beautiful Georgia peach save her granddaddy’s fahm from heartless Yankees.

Gus called Sheriff Barnes a checkered-shirt cowboy several more times during the next commercial break. Act Three began. The Handsome Hobo had dug all night. Drank lots of lemonade, the sound of which I made by pouring Canada Dry into a coffee cup, about an inch away from the microphone, and then gulping it down myself like a noisy bullfrog.

GLADYS

(as the Georgia Peach)

Oh Mr. Hobo, you have found the gold just in time. The sun is rising and I can hear that Yankee tax collector’s big black Oldsmobile coming up our dusty country road.

This drivel led of course to the inevitable saying-goodbye scene.

WILL

(as the Handsome Hobo)

Sure, it would be easy for me to stay. To fall in love with you. Especially the way the sun makes your hazel eyes sparkle.

GLADYS

(as the Georgia Peach)

That sparkle is my love for you.

WILL

(as the Handsome Hobo)

I’m a hobo. It’s in my blood. In my soul. I could stay, shave my two days of stubble. We’d get married. Settle down. Have a couple kids. But, drat it, sooner or later my old wanderlust would return, as certain as the tax man always returns. And I’d have to leave. Break both our hearts. No, I gotta travel on.

GLADYS

(as the Georgia Peach)

Good-bye—my handsome hobo.

I, by the way, got to play more than the door and the lemonade. I was also the girl’s granddaddy and the Yankee tax collector, as well as a couple of Negro sharecroppers passing by with fishing poles. Clyde didn’t get to play any parts. He was in the corner humming. I remember wondering if the studio microphones were picking up his humming. I wondered how many people were sitting in their parlors trying to slap that hum out of their radios?

I was exhausted. But we weren’t finished yet. After Gus lit into Sheriff Barnes for another ten minutes, we launched into “The Saintly Soldier,” followed by a reprise of “The Dashing Stranger.” Our performance ended with a final harangue by Gus and a few closing words from Lloyd: “Unless Sheriff Barnes comes and riddles Gus, we’ll be back tomorrow night with the three same episodes of The Gladys Bartholomew Theater.”

We snacked on cheese sandwiches and Canada Dry. Will sat with his arm around Clyde, rocking him, telling him he wasn’t going to die.

In Valparaiso, Will’s Aunt Mary was just getting home from the movie house. She’d gone with a neighbor lady to see Cleopatra starring Claudette Colbert. “Mary dear,” Fritz said when she came in, “guess who wus on der radio yust now!”

In Weebawauwau Center Sheriff Barnes herded the whores from the room and made love to Millie. Pruitt sat in his hotel room making a list of all the laws Gus Gillis had broken.

We slept pretty sound. Except Clyde. Sunday dawned. The Reverend Donald Aylesworth showed up for the Hour of Reflection.

The Reverend Aylesworth was a crackerjack preacher. He knew how to take a current event and run with it. For an hour he dashed back and forth between the Old and New Testaments, digging out biblical truths that might bring Gus to his senses. Gus sat in the control booth, shotgun between his legs, thoughtfully taking it all in. Toward the end of the hour the reverend launched into a description of an earthly paradise, which would materialize overnight, he said, if only people would love their neighbor more and themselves a little less. “The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb,” he said, “and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together.”

Gus was watching the wall clock, wanting the Hour of Reflection over. He rapped his fingers impatiently on his gun barrel, leaned into the microphone. “That’s all fine and dandy, Mr. Preacher man, but even Jesus said you can’t unscramble an egg.”

The Reverend Aylesworth rippled with Christian indignation. “Where in the scriptures does our Lord say that?”

Gus didn’t want an argument. “Play some music, Lloyd.” He escorted the reverend out, shotgun pointing in the general direction of his head.

Gus did not expect Sheriff Barnes to come after him right away that morning. He knew everyone in a place like Weebawauwau County went to church on Sunday. But he was sure the sheriff would show up after lunch. “Any minute now you’ll see that corn start to dance with lawmen and vigilantes, closing in with pockets full of bullets.”

The afternoon slipped by. Clyde’s head continued to swell. He was humming full bore. We sat on the lawn and watched the corn. It wasn’t dancing. Gus paraded back and forth, making a target out of himself. The corn still wasn’t dancing at suppertime. Gus looked sad enough to cry. He sent Will and Gladys inside to rehearse with Lloyd. He sent me to pick field corn.

We’d eaten the last chicken the night before, so we didn’t have any meat. Just field corn, canned corn, rye bread, and Canada Dry. Gus wasn’t as disappointed as you might imagine. “That Barnes is a sneaky bastard,” he said, buttery niblets flying. “He’ll wait until we start the broadcast, then barge in, guns blazing. Y’all make sure you duck.”

At seven The Gladys Bartholomew Theater went on the air. Between harangues from Gus, we worked our way through our three Daphne Darnell masterpieces. Sheriff Barnes didn’t barge in. Gus had survived another day. He dragged Gladys off to bed depressed. Will gave Clyde a boiled rag to hold on his face. “Something’s got to be happening back in Bennett’s Corners by now, don’t you think?” Will whispered. “I bet Mother called out the dogs when we didn’t show up last night.”

“If she didn’t I bet my folks did,” I said.

“What dogs?” Clyde asked.

“Not dogs,” Will said. “The authorities. Mother’s probably called out the authorities.”

“Authorities on what?” Clyde asked.

“The police,” I said. “She’s probably called out the police.”

“Let’s hope they don’t show up wearing checkered shirts,” Clyde said. Both Will and I were impressed with his sarcasm. Clyde wasn’t as dumb as we thought. Later I learned that both Mrs. Randall and my parents had called out the dogs. But not until after church on Sunday. Had they called them out Saturday night, or even before church, things might have been different. But they didn’t. Things also might have been different if Will’s Aunt Mary had believed Uncle Fritz when he told her he’d heard us all on WEEB. But she didn’t. Neither Mrs. Randall or my parents would arrive in Weebawauwau until late Monday afternoon. Too late. Too goddamn late. Sonofabitch.

“Scientific and sanitary meat preparation for the market is shown by a mechanical bacon slicer with a capacity of 1,000 pounds an hour. Girls in spotless uniforms wrap and pack the bacon as it flows from the machine.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Twenty-One/Overpopped

Sheriff Barnes made his move. Not because he wanted to. He wanted the game to go on a while longer. Millie Macmillan later told me he was prepared to wait us out all week. “It’ll be like a whole week of February 29ths,” he told Millie.

Others weren’t as enthusiastic. His cousin Albert Finley in particular. Immediately after the Sunday night performance he called the sheriff at Millie’s and asked him to come by the movie house. “Albert sounds suicidal,” the sheriff told Millie. He scooped up his marbles and called Pruitt. Figured mixing the no-nonsense government man with his nervous cousin would be fun.

They met in front of the Weebawauwau Palace. The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup was playing. It was only a little past nine but there wasn’t a car on the street. The sheriff small-talked his way to the ticket booth. “You enjoying your stay, Pruitt?”

“It’s a fine little town,” Pruitt said.

“It’s the finest town in America. Finer than wherever you’re from.”

“Bucksnort, Tennessee.”

“Finer than Bucksnort, Tennessee,” the sheriff said.

He small-talked the ticket girl. “How’s your momma and daddy, Lucy?”

“Fine as fine can be,” Lucky said.

“Tell your daddy I’m going to bowl his britches off tomorrow night.”

“I will.”

They went inside. He small-talked down the long empty lobby. “Bucksnort got a bowling alley, Pruitt?”

Pruitt told him it didn’t.

“Didn’t sound like it did,” the sheriff said. “You can come bowl with us tomorrow night if you’d like.”

“I’m not a bowler.”

“Didn’t think you were.” They found Albert Finley behind the concession counter. The crack under the theater door was flashing. Groucho was wisecracking. Nobody was laughing.

The sheriff introduced Pruitt to his cousin. “Albert, this is Pruitt. Government man down from Chicago, to tell us how to live our lives.”

Pruitt told me in 1968 that shaking Albert Finley’s hand was like grabbing a bluegill under water.

“So what’s the problem, Albert?” the sheriff asked. “You catch Donny Fish drawing talking assholes on the bathroom wall again?”

“Talking assholes, Mr. Finley?” Pruitt asked through his iron lips.

“You know, assholes with words coming out in those cartoon balloons,” Albert Finley said.

Pruitt pressed the investigation. “What are these assholes saying?”

“Usually just ‘Hi,’” Albert Finley said.

“Donny’s lonely but safe enough,” the sheriff assured the government man. “Good drawer, too.”

Albert Finley dragged his clammy hands down his face. Started to quiver. “I didn’t call you because of Donny Fish’s talking assholes, Orville.”

Sheriff Barnes knew Albert’s quivering was nothing to mess with. His cousin had been a bed-wetter right through puberty; hid in a barn for three days after getting a C-minus in high school Latin; over the years his breakdowns and depressions had cost the Finley and Barnes families an arm and a leg in doctor bills. “Then what’s the problem, Albert?”

His cousin pointed at the pyramid of red-and-white boxes on the counter. “All this popcorn for starters.”

“It does look like you overpopped a bit.”

“No more than usual for a Sunday night. But you can’t sell popcorn if people don’t come to see the movie.” He swung his sweaty finger toward the theater door. “There’s not a soul in there, Orville. Not a one.”

Pruitt offered federal assistance. “Maybe you should change movies, Mr. Finley. I never thought the Marx Brothers were that funny.”

The government man’s stupidity emboldened Albert. “Everybody loves the Marx Brothers. I could run the Marx Brothers backwards and sell out the house. It’s that Gus and Gladys. Everybody’s stayed home to listen on the radio. Last night, too. All of Weebawauwau County’s gone goo-goo over those two.”

The sheriff jerked out a bottom popcorn box without making the pyramid collapse. He rammed his mouth full of corn and pushed sideways through the theater doors. When the box was empty he came out, chuckling. “That Harpo laughs me to hives,” he said. He started down the lobby. “Let’s go, Pruitt.”

Pruitt raced after him. “Where we going?”

“We’re going to make Gus Gillis the unhappiest man in the state of Indiana. That’s where we’re going.” Being the sonofabitch he was, Pruitt figured they were going to shoot Gus down like Dillinger. But the sheriff had no such intention. “I don’t get it,” Pruitt said as they rushed toward the door. “For two days he’s been out there, calling you a—”

“You can say it, Pruitt. Calling me a checkered-shirt cowboy.”

“Now a few boxes of unsold popcorn and—”

Both Pruitt and Millie Macmillan told me what the sheriff said next. Millie said it with pride. Pruitt with cold disgust. I wished I could have heard it myself. “Those aren’t just a few unsold boxes of popcorn in there,” the sheriff told the government man. “That popcorn represents the economic well-being of Weebawauwau County. The lives of the hard-working men and women I have been elected to protect. Woebegone men and women with scruffy little children who’ve had their hopes and dreams shattered by four long years of depression, degradation, and despair.”

Unaware he was being played like a jug-band fiddle, Pruitt came very close to crying. “I think I understand,” he said.

The sheriff looked into Pruitt’s watery eyes and bent over in a dry laugh. “You don’t understand shit from Shinola, Pruitt. I own 51 percent of this movie house. And I’ll be damned if that crazy Gus Gillis or his floozy girlfriend are going to put me in the poorhouse.”

So that’s what finally did it. A pyramid of unsold popcorn. When I first discovered that during my trip back to Weebawauwau in 1942, I was mad enough to kill someone. Mad enough to kill myself. Since then I’ve realized that unimportant things like unsold boxes of popcorn often have a greater impact on your life than big things like war, disease, or acts of Congress:

If that recruiting sergeant in Akron hadn’t had a quota of cooks to fill, I might have ended up an ace like Eddie Rickenbacker, at the very least on a bomber crew; maybe I’d have been the guy on the Enola Gay who let that first A-bomb go.

If it hadn’t been for that double-decker Big Boy sandwich with that secret sauce, I might have hung onto the R&R Luncheonette all my working life; stayed married to Lois Cobb and had a son named Will.

If Miss Ina Blanche hadn’t told us to start reading newspapers, Will might never have learned about the World’s Fair being planned in Chicago. What if that farmer’s melons had been ripe and not green? We’d have bought a couple and been on our way long before Gus and Gladys drove up in their yellow Auburn. Think of the trouble Clyde’s earwax caused. Unsold popcorn boxes are more dangerous than a loaded gun.

It’s nearly impossible to sleep on a wood floor with nothing but a blanket under you for a mattress. When Clyde started whimpering I woke up right away. The studio was dark but I could see Will sitting next to him, cradling him, brushing back his hair. “I want Mother to come get us,” Clyde said.

“I want Mother to come get us, too,” Will said.

“Have her come and get us, Will.”

“Mother’s too far away to come get us. But she’d know what to do, wouldn’t she? She’d make quick work out of Gus Gillis.”

Clyde sniffed and giggled. “Mother would send him packing with a swift kick in the pants.”

“That’s what she’d do all right,” Will said. He told him a beautiful story, one that made me wish I had a little brother to comfort. “I remember once when you were just a baby,” Will said, “a big black Oldsmobile full of Gypsies pulled up and started beeping the horn. Mother warned Father not to pump them any gas. But Father went out and pumped, and before you knew it those Gypsies were all crowded in the garage with Mother and us, stealing everything they could get their hands on. She was afraid they’d try to steal you, too. She went after those Gypsies with nothing but her Southam wrath and a broom.”

“She kill any of ’em?” Clyde wondered. The story was working on his pain like a ten-pound aspirin.

“Naw. But she knocked a couple of them in the head pretty good. And taught me some words even Gypsies don’t know. They all got away. Cleaned us out of Baby Ruths and spark plugs and a few cans of motor oil. But they didn’t steal you, Clyde.”

Will eased Clyde back on his blanket. “Try to hum yourself to sleep.” He picked up his shoes and tucked them in his back pockets.

“What you gonna do?” Clyde asked him.

Will kissed him on the forehead. “When your mother’s not around, sometimes you’ve got to do what your mother would do if she was.”

I should have followed Will. But I didn’t. And it wasn’t because I was a coward. It was the way Clyde and Will had talked to each other. It was a holy moment between brothers. Between Randalls. Maybe I was Will’s best friend. But at that moment I was an outsider. Whatever Will was going to do, I knew he had to do it alone.

I watched him step over Lloyd, slip across the studio, and ease the control room door open. In a radio station where microphones can pick up the faintest noise, you can’t have a squeaky door, so it was a well-oiled door and didn’t squeak once. Will stood in the doorway for a few seconds, then eased toward the bed where Gus and Gladys were sleeping side by side like frozen fish sticks. I saw Will bend over the bed and reach for something. He straightened then tried again. Gladys later told me she was watching him, too. He was trying to get Gus’s shotgun, sandwiched between them. The third time he tried Gladys gently pushed him back. She reached under her pillow and handed him her pistol, the one with the silver kittens on the pink pearl handle. He pointed the pistol at Gus.

Will had only shot a gun once before. My .22. I took him target practicing along the shale cliffs on Healy Creek. We set up some old glass bottles. When we were finished he picked the glass out of the water and took it back to his house for proper disposal, so the raccoons wouldn’t get cut when fishing for minnows and crayfish. Today Healy Creek is full of broken glass and Styrofoam and old tires and plastic pop bottles. Sewage long ago killed the minnows and crayfish. Only God knows where the raccoons moved to.

So I sat there in the dark figuring Will was going to shoot Gus right there in Lloyd’s bed, with Gladys lying next to him like a fish stick. He didn’t. He slowly backed to the control room door. Backed all the way to the outside door. He saw me watching but didn’t motion for me to follow. If he had I would’ve. The outside door did squeak a bit and I waited for Gus to raise up and let loose with his shotgun. But he didn’t. Will slipped outside.

Gladys and I watched each other’s dark shape for a few seconds, then we both hinged back on our pillows. The year I went to Mingo Junction I asked her if she went back to sleep. “Funny, but I did,” she said. “I figured whatever Will had in mind was already in the works and there was nothing I could do. I actually slept better than before.”

I confessed I’d slept better, too. For pretty much the same reason. Will Randall had taken charge. He was always cautious. Always had everything planned out in advance. So whatever he had in mind would surely work. I slipped off to sleep confident and serene.

“You’re a builder upper, a breaker downer

a holder outer, and I’m a giver-iner

Sad, but true, I’m a sap-a-roo, too”

“YOU’RE A BUILDER UPPER,”

WORDS BY IRA GERSHWIN AND E.Y. HARBURG,

MUSIC BY HAROLD ARLEN

Twenty-Two/Dog or Two Barking

Where do you think Will went that night with Gladys’s pistol? You’d think he’d go to the nearest farm for help. Have them call the sheriff. I would have. But that wasn’t Will Randall. In his cautious mind that might lead to any number of unpredictable, unplanned-for consequences. Will went to get his brother more eardrops.

How he found Dr. Woodruff Claypool’s office is anybody’s guess. One of the few pieces of the puzzle I haven’t put together yet. Yet? Like I’m ever going to get out of Sparrow Hill alive! No, how Will got to the doctor’s office is a permanent mystery. Lloyd Potts thought maybe he found Dr. Claypool’s address in the jumble of papers on his desk in the control room—being host of the Thursday Night Remedies show, it’s possible the doctor’s address was there, somewhere. Millie said maybe Will just walked around in the dark until he found it. “I don’t think so,” I told her that summer in 1942 when I looked her up. “Will never just walked around in his life.”

Clyde had the best guess.

“He was pretty good with his maps,” he told me that day in 1946 when we talked old times over bottles of Pepsi. “All that time we were driving around Weebawauwau County he might have been drawing a map in his head. He probably knew exactly how far the radio station was from Weebawauwau Center, and just what roads or fields he needed to take to get there.”

Clyde is probably right. Will probably had a map of Weebawauwau County in his head. It could have been a combination of all three, of course. Maybe he had the doctor’s address from Lloyd’s desk, and having that map in his head, he knew where to find Weebawauwau Center, and once he got there he just stumbled in the dark until he found the place.

I do know that Will did find Dr. Claypool’s place. It was right on the edge of downtown, just two blocks from the Weebawauwau Palace. Dr. Claypool had his office right in his house, as most country doctors did then. Will found the place a little past three in the morning. I know that because it was a little past three when Dr. Claypool heard a dog or two barking and then a few minutes later heard someone prying open a downstairs window.

I didn’t talk to Dr. Claypool in 1942. He was attending a convention in Chicago that weekend I took the bus up to Weebawauwau. But I did call him in 1948, during my honeymoon with Lois Cobb, from a motel outside Elsie, Michigan, on our way to Mackinac Island. Dr. Claypool told me he thought about calling the sheriff when he heard the window open, but he didn’t know the number at Millie’s, though he’d been there several times giving her girls shots. So he crept downstairs with an ironing board, figuring to swat the head off whomever he caught stealing pills.

He heard clinking and snapped on the light. There was Will, holding up a brown bottle to the moonlight. Gladys’s pistol was stuck in his belt. “I need drops for my brother’s ear,” Will told the doctor. “His other bottle was shattered by an airplane propeller.”

Dr. Claypool put down the ironing board and took the bottle from Will’s hand. “Unless he’s got the world’s worst case of constipation, you don’t want that bottle,” he said. He found a bottle of eardrops and gave it to Will.

Will fished in the front of his pants for his secret money sock.

“If you had the money you could have knocked on the door,” the doctor said.

“I didn’t want to wake anybody,” Will said.

“Two dollars,” the doctor said.

Will paid him and left through the window. The doctor went back to bed.

Until I called him in 1948, Dr. Claypool had never connected Will’s visit with the affair at WEEB. He told me he was sorry about what happened out there. He asked me if Clyde’s ear ever cleared up. I just hung up the phone. Lois was coming out of the bathroom, ready for our first night of official married lovemaking.

It didn’t go as well as I’d planned. We’d done it several times already in my little apartment above the R&R Luncheonette, so it wasn’t stage fright or the mechanics of the thing. All the time I was sliding north and south on Lois Cobb’s bony hips, Will Randall was in my head, trudging through cornfield after cornfield in the dark, bottle of eardrops in his hand, heading straight into trouble; and there I was, fourteen years into the not-so-glorious future, selfishly poking my wife.

I should have slipped out with Will. But the way Will had cradled Clyde in his arms, I just sat there in the dark and let him go alone. We could have taken Clyde with us. We could have escaped a dozen times that week. Gus wasn’t going to shoot us. Gus wasn’t going to shoot nobody. Who would shoot a helpless boy?

“Grain is literally shot from guns in an action display of the manufacture of a cereal breakfast food. A colored mammy making pancakes and a kilted Scotch lassie baking scones, demonstrate two uses of cereal products.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Twenty-Three/Jeez

I was inside WEEB, sound asleep when it happened. Still, in my mind I can see Will running through the endless tall Indiana corn with that precious bottle of drops in his hand, the dark just beginning to fade, streaks of gray and pink in the purple clouds, the dew bubbling up on the sagging corn leaves, dripping off the golden silk; I can feel his heart beating like hell; his lungs are aching and all he can think about is getting back inside the radio station before Gus wakes up and goes berserk, yelling and throwing and shooting the ceiling plaster. Just as he sees the zigzag ironwork of the radio tower sticking above the trees, thinking he’s home free, he hears crackling gravel and muffled engines. He looks toward the road and sees a line of cars and trucks, lights off, snaking toward WEEB. On the lead car he sees a large gold star dimly flickering with light from the thinning moon. Under his breath he says “Jeez.” That’s all he would say, just “Jeez,” and he’d run even harder. But the cars and trucks beat him. They park out of sight and dozens of doors open—front doors and back doors, driver side doors and passenger side doors—and dark Frankenstein shapes pour out and drift forward through the corn. He sees the silhouettes of rifles, pistols growing out of hands. Will stops. He doesn’t say “Jeez”—he’s afraid of being heard—but he feels Jeez in his stomach. He doesn’t know what to do. Something unplanned is happening. He rubs his nose and scratches his neck and his liver bile is right up to his Adam’s apple and he starts walking toward the Frankenstein shapes spreading out around the radio station. He walks toward them because there is nothing else he can do. As he walks he weighs carefully the pros and cons of various possibilities. He toys with the idea of surrendering. But that doesn’t get Clyde his drops. That keeps Clyde from getting his drops for a long while. He thinks about showing the sheriff where the door is, so they can burst in and get Gus before he can yawn himself awake. But surely the sheriff already knows where the door is, he thinks, and what if Gus is already awake and waiting and all these men start shooting? He pictures bullets ripping into Clyde and me, and Lloyd and Gladys, and he gives up on that idea. He’s only a few yards behind the men now. They’ve kneeled just three cornrows from the edge of the lawn. Maybe he sees Sheriff Barnes, badge on his hat dimly flickering. Maybe he sees Pruitt standing next to him. Surely he sees the milkman, dressed in his white uniform. Then Will’s well-oiled logic does him in. These men are waiting for someone to come out of WEEB, not go in. Just as clearly as I can see him in my head now, he sees himself walking right through their line, like he was one of them, fading right into the early morning gray. So that’s just what he does. He inches forward, testing the waters, seeing if anybody notices him. He stands shoulder to shoulder with a couple of those farmers and townsmen, and then he inches forward some more. Nobody says anything. Their eyes and minds are fixed on WEEB. He reaches the third cornrow and then the second and now he’s standing right there in the first row, straight and still as a tall stalk. He takes a steadying breath, gets the blinks out of his eyes, and starts walking.

I have been seeing that scene in my head for more than sixty years. I was inside WEEB sleeping, but I’m certain it happened exactly how I’ve described it.

Goddamn. Sonofabitch. What made Will think he was going to get away with such a crazy plan? He was only a few yards up the lawn when Pruitt spotted him.

“Who’s that?” Pruitt asked the sheriff.

“Stop right there,” the sheriff said, his voice not sure if it was supposed to whisper or yell.

Will kept on walking.

The sheriff raised his flashlight and put a halo on the back of Will’s head. Will peeked over his shoulder, squinty eyes flying.

The milkman from the Willow Farm Dairy recognized him from our morning of banditry by the river. “That’s one of them,” he said.

Will started running. The milkman pulled a pistol from his white belt. He was standing right next to Pruitt. Pruitt could have grabbed that pistol. He could have told the milkman to put it down. But Pruitt didn’t. Only a few months before he’d put a bullet in John Dillinger. He’d spent years knowing instantly, instinctively, where the right side of the law ended and the wrong side began. He saw that gun in the milkman’s hand. He saw the milkman raise it, point it. He could have stopped him. But he didn’t and a bullet screwed into the small of Will Randall’s back. The pistol’s crack echoed against the concrete block walls of WEEB.

Will buckled but kept on walking. Sheriff Barnes, figuring only someone from Chicago could have done such a stupid thing, charged at Pruitt like a bee-stung bull. Grabbed him by the lapels of his expensive city suit and shook the shit out of him. Someone else in the corn saw who really pulled the trigger. It was a small stocky man, with a mustache just like Adolf Hitler’s. He rammed himself into the milkman like a bull stung by a whole hive of bees. Uncle Fritz slugged and kicked that milkman silly, both arms and both legs going at once. When the milkman crumpled to the ground, Uncle Fritz stomped on him until his dairy whites were muddy and bloody. “Communist communist communist,” Fritz screamed at the top of his German lungs.

The shot woke us up. We descended on the window. We couldn’t see much, only that someone in the corn was getting the shit kicked out of him. Gus was in seventh heaven. “They’ve come for me, by God. By God! By diddly damn God!”

Gladys was happy, too. She danced around the studio, pulling herself into a clean flowery dress. Gus was too busy with his dreams of dying in a hail of bullets to notice that Will was missing. Only when Will appeared at the window, tortured blue-gray face, his fingers splayed against the dirty glass, dawn lighting his unblinking eyes, looking the world like some strange European painting, did we realize that pistol crack had done more than wake us up. I opened the window. Lloyd and I hauled Will in. His back was bent like a banana. We eased folded blankets under him. Put a couple of pillows under his head.

“I think I’ve been shot, Ace,” he said.

We turned him on his side. There wasn’t much blood and only a little hole, the size a .22 might make. “You’ve been shot all right,” I said.

Clyde and I were crying. Gladys was whispering “Sweet boy” over and over, playing with his porcupine hair. Gus was at the window, screaming at the sheriff. “You’re supposed to shoot me, not my boys. Judas Priest, what is wrong with you Weebawauwauans?”

Will held up the bottle. “I got you some drops, Clyde.”

Gladys helped Will unscrew the lid. I helped Will with the dropper. Clyde turned his head sideways, tears dripping on the floor. Will filled his ear. “You’ll feel better in a second,” he assured his little brother. “Once the drops start working.”

Gus screamed a few final insults and slammed the window shut. He kneeled next to Will. “I bet that bullet hurts like hell.”

Gladys pounded Gus on the leg. “For Pete’s sake, Gus.”

“It ain’t my fault he got himself shot,” Gus said. He knew he was on shaky ground—it’s hard to make people feel sorry for you because you haven’t been shot, when somebody else has. He lowered his face to Will’s. “Don’t worry about dying, Will. This is my day to die, not yours. Once I’m riddled with holes, Ace can take you to the doctor. You’ll do that, right Ace?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “You’re gong to be fine, Will.”

“Hear that?” Gus said, smiling like a little kid with a candy bar. “You’re going to be fine.” He returned to the window, pressed his grinning face against the glass. “There’s dozens of them out there. Dozens of angry men who’ve never met me. Willing to get up early just to riddle me full of holes. Ain’t that something. I owe it all to you, Lloyd.”

Lloyd flashed his on-the-air smile. “Thanks, Gus.”

“No Lloyd, thank you.”

Gladys had been increasingly cold toward Gus as the week wore on and Will Randall wormed his way into her heart. Now she went to Gus and kissed him on the cheek. Maybe her affection was real, but I think she was acting, giving his ego a boost so he’d get himself killed just as soon as humanly possible. “It’s your big day,” she said, red lips on his sunburned hillbilly ear.

He turned and hugged her hard, burying his nose in her yellow hair. There were tears in his eyes. He told me to get his shotgun off Lloyd’s bed. I did as I was told, happy as a clam he was only a few minutes from that hail of bullets he wanted. I also brought him his hat from the bedpost. “A man can’t die without his hat,” I said.

He cradled the gun in his arms and fussed with his hat until the brim was angled just right. He pressed his nose against the window. Gladys dusted the dandruff off his lapels and pulled down the points of his collar. “You’re going to be famous, Gus. Just like Clyde Barrow.”

A stoic smirk froze on his face. “It’s gonna hurt like hell, ain’t it? All that lead all at once.”

“You’re not having second thoughts?” Gladys asked playfully.

It was just the right thing for her to say. “Second thoughts?” he crowed. “Heck no! I ain’t having second thoughts. I’m just trying to imagine what it’s gonna feel like, that’s all. You’ve got to be prepared for that sort of thing.”

“I bet you’ll end up more famous than Clyde Barrow,” she said. Her eyes were going back and forth between Will and Gus. She was fighting hard to keep the worry off her face, for both their sakes, I suppose.

“Bet I do, too,” he said. “And I bet you’ll end up even more famous than Bonnie Parker and that two-bit actress Daphne Darnell put together.”

Gladys blushed right through her face powder.

Gus bent over Will. “You make sure the newspapers get those pictures of me you took, OK? The ones where I look so lousy?”

Will told him he would.

Gus straightened and fixed his eyes on the door. “Well, this is it, boys. I’m sorry I ruined your trip to the World’s Fair. But another one will come along, I’m sure. And I’m sorry you got yourself shot, Will. And Clyde, I’m sorry I threw your medicine through that propeller. You ear’s gonna be fine. I had lots of damn earaches when I was your age. Keep them washed all the time, that’s my advice. And Ace, I hope there’s another war someday. You’re gonna make the best damn dogfighter in the U.S. Army Air Force.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Gus nodded his assurance. “You bet you will. And you, Lloyd, you boil the best damn chicken I ever et. And I’ve et lots of chicken in my time.”

“Thanks, Gus.”

Gus tugged on his hat and blew a final kiss to Gladys. “Sweetie pie, if I ever loved anybody, it was you.”

Tears that looked pretty real to me wiggled down her cheeks. “I know it,” she said.

Gus made sure his shotgun was loaded. He rested it over his shoulder and pointed his toes toward the door. “Time to die,” he said.

I’ll never forget the look on Gus’s face as he walked to the door. We’d been watching his faces for several days now. We’d seen his confident criminal face. We’d seen his boyish hillbilly face. We’d seen his out-of-control crazy face. And we’d seen his low face, the one he’d made Will take pictures of for the newspapers. When you’re under someone’s thumb you pay close attention to their face, so you know what kind of look to keep on your face, to keep yourselves out of trouble, the way kids continually examine their parents’ faces, to know what will or won’t be tolerated at any given moment.

Gus’s walking-to-the-door face was something new. People who’ve had stomach pains for six months and finally find the courage to see a doctor wear that face when the nurse calls them into the examining room: They know the news will probably be bad; but they’re relieved the uncertainty that’s been eating them is over. I suppose Gus’s face that day looked a lot like Jesus’ face when he was forced to drag that cross up to Golgotha, relieved his miserable years on earth were almost over; not that any other comparisons between Jesus Christ and Gus Gillis come to mind.

As soon as Gus and his face were out the door Gladys and Lloyd scrambled to the window. I sat on the floor next to Will and held his hand. “I bet the doctor in Weebawauwau can dig that bullet out of you in five minutes once Gus is dead,” I said. “Couple of days in bed and we’re on our way to the World’s Fair.”

Clyde, curled up on a nearby chair waiting for his earwax to melt, kicked me in the shoulder. “That ain’t fair, Ace. I gotta go back to school and you two will be at the Fair, watching them make tires and watching that naked woman dance with her fans.”

I wanted to hug Clyde and break his nose at the same time. Didn’t he know Will and I weren’t really going to the Fair? Couldn’t he see that dream was finished? Maybe he did see it. Maybe he was acting, just like Gladys was acting, just like Will was acting, just like I was acting.

I didn’t want to leave Will’s side. And I shouldn’t have left it. But having read the newpspaper accounts of Bonnie and Clyde’s death, machine-gun bullets making their legs and arms flop like the wooden limbs of puppets, their clothes ripping away, smoke flying out their various orifices, I could not control my bloody curiosity. I patted Will’s hand and joined Gladys and Lloyd at the window.

In 1955 when the R&R Luncheonette went belly up and Lois Cobb divorced me, I drove downstate to Mingo Junction, on the banks of the Ohio River, just below Steubenville, to see if anybody knew where Gladys Bartholomew was. The first person I asked knew exactly where Gladys was. She was right there in Mingo Junction, living in a two-story house with brown tar-paper shingles, two doors down from her father’s store, not fifty yards from where I was standing.

Gladys was not particularly happy to see me. It had been twenty-one years. But she invited me inside, and we sat in her kitchen nervously playing with the handles of our coffee cups while barges went up and down the river. I asked her all sorts of questions about our week together in Indiana. I asked her if she was acting that morning in the radio station, when she told Gus how famous he was going to be after he was riddled. “Goodness no,” she told me. “I just wanted him dead so I could be free.”

I’m not so sure. I don’t think she liked Gus very much, but I think she bought into his dreams, hook, line, and sinker. He was going to die in a hail of bullets like Clyde Barrow and she was going to trade on his notoriety and become a famous radio actress like Daphne Darnell. Just because her dream didn’t come true, doesn’t mean it wasn’t real in 1934. My dream of becoming a famous flying ace like Eddie Rickenbacker and adding to the total of Gilbert kills was real enough in 1934. Will’s dream was real enough. The World’s Fair, all those thousands of wondrous exhibits, were going to transform him from a backwards Bennett’s Corners’ boy into a man of the world, a man ready for anything.

None of our dreams came true. Not mine. Not Will’s. Not Gladys’s. Not Gus’s. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t real that scorching summer of 1934.

“They class them as cold-blooded killers

They say they are hardened and mean

But I say this with pride, that once I knew Clyde

When he was honest and upright and clean.”

“STORY OF SUICIDE SAL” BY BONNIE PARKER

Twenty-Four/Singing and Dancing

Gus’s plan was to charge down the lawn, shotgun blasting, straight into that hail of bullets he’d been dreaming about. Apparently his eagerness faltered once he was outside the door. Several very quiet, hour-long minutes went by. Gladys was not happy with the delay. “Where is that hillbilly?” she growled, face flat against the window glass.

“Probably leaning against the door,” Lloyd said. “Letting the cowardice sweat out of him.”

That’s exactly what Gus must have been doing because a few seconds later we heard a high-pitched Indian war whoop. A few seconds after that Gus was charging down the lawn, whooping and shooting straight up at God’s ceiling. There was no heavenly plaster and no hail of bullets. The men in the corn held their fire. Gus kept running, whooping, pulling shells from his suitcoat pockets, reloading and firing. Not a bullet in return. Despite that unexpected hiccup when the milkman shot Will—and the little German fellow stomped him silly—Sheriff Orville Barnes’s game was unfolding as planned.

Gus stopped twenty yards or so from the corn. Even from his backside you could tell he was in total disbelief. His outstretched arms were asking why? Sheriff Barnes rose and waded forward. He was bouncing a red rubber ball on a paddle. Blump blump blump blump. Pruitt followed the sheriff out. We opened the window so we could hear.

“How’s the boy?” the sheriff asked, red rubber ball not missing a beat. Blump blump blump blump.

“He ain’t singing and dancing, but he’s breathing,” said Gus.

Blump blump blump blump. “I’m through playing games with you, Gus,” the sheriff said, not through playing games at all. “I want you to lay down your peashooter, put your hands on top of that nice hat of yours, and walk over to my handcuffs real slow.”

Gus fired over the sheriff’s head. Pruitt and everybody hidden in the corn went flat. Sheriff Barnes stood tall. Blump blump blump blump.

Gus now made a counteroffer. “Start riddling me with lead before somebody gets hurt.”

“We’re not going to riddle you, Gus,” the sheriff said. “Not going to shoot you once.”

“The hell you ain’t.”

Gus and the sheriff glared at each other for ten minutes. Blump blump blump blump.

All my life, every time I heard somebody’s loud clock, or heard a faucet drip, or heard the bedsprings under me while I was making love, I thought of Gus Gillis and Sheriff Orville Barnes glaring at each other, Will on the hard floor, back bent like a banana, bullet in his back. Blump blump blump blump.

Sheriff Barnes won the glare. Gus swiveled like a tin soldier and marched back to the radio station. “There’s been a change of plans,” he told us. He had that low look on his face again. He made Lloyd shut the window. I could still see Sheriff Barnes bouncing his little ball at the edge of the cornfield. But mercifully the blumps were gone.

“You know what im-potent means, Ace?” Gus asked me.

“Absolutely. When a man can’t get his third leg to kick.”

“I’m afraid Sheriff Orville Barnes has that problem, Ace. I’m afraid every man in Weebawauwau County has that problem. Question now is, how we going to cure those bastards?”

“How we going to get a rise out them?” I said.

“That’s exactly what I mean, Ace. Exactly what I mean.”

We watched Gus think. He rubbed his eyes so hard I expected them to crack and run down his face like breakfast eggs. After a minute or two he had a plan. He told Lloyd to gather up Will. Told Gladys to get the suitcases. Didn’t give her enough time to put her Daphne Darnell scripts away, so she tucked them under her arm and we all headed for the door and the Gilbert SXIII.

Lloyd eased Will into the backseat. Gladys and Clyde crawled in next to him. Gus sent Lloyd to crank the engine. Sometimes when the Gilbert SXIII sat for several days it didn’t like to start. But it was as anxious as the rest of us. Purred right away. Gus climbed in next to me. “We going to run for it?” I foolishly asked.

“Ain’t you been listening? We’re going straight for the sheriff’s third leg.” He made me circle the radio station several times, to get everyone’s attention, I guess. Lloyd hurried back inside. He went straight to his microphone. Being only a little past dawn on a weekday, very few were listening to their radios. But little by little, those who were, yelled to those who weren’t. “My audience just swelled and swelled like a bowl of Grape-Nuts,” Lloyd told me in 1942. “Cows going unmilked, hogs unfed, tea kettles left whistling.”

Gus ordered me to fly straight for the sheriff. I pushed the lever into high speed and throttled all the way. Gus stood on the seat and somehow managed to stay standing. He fired both barrels. Sheriff Barnes kept bouncing his red rubber ball. Pruitt and everybody else scattered. At the time I didn’t know Will’s Uncle Fritz was out there, but I could see the milkman hobbling. “Run ’em down, Ace,” Gus ordered, “run ’em diddly-damn down.”

Sheriff Barnes didn’t jump out of the way until I was on top of him. His red rubber ball, deserted in midbounce, cracked against my windshield. I smashed into the corn. It hadn’t rained in days, maybe weeks, and the Indiana soil was as hard as concrete. Stalks fell like dominoes. “What now?” I yelled up to Gus.

“Mingle!” he yelled down.

I guess I knew what he meant by mingle. I looped and cut the retreating Weebawauwauans off. None of Oswald Boelcke’s ten rules covered this kind of dogfighting. I made figure eights and zeroes, figure fives and figure sixes. Those Weebawauwauans were hopping every which-a-way, like scared rabbits. Scared impotent rabbits. Gus kept reloading and firing. Always in the air, of course. Falling pellets rattled the dry corn and stung the rabbits like bees. When I could, I looked to see how Will was faring in the backseat. He was sitting stiff as a board but he was smiling. Gladys was hugging him. Clyde was having the time of his life, waving at the rabbits, head sideways on his shoulder.

Little by little they made their way to their cars and trucks. I stayed right with them, weaving in and out. Then somebody finally got his third leg to kick. Stood dead in my path and fired his rifle. My windshield shattered. Others started shooting. “Now you’re cooking with gas,” Gus shouted. He stood taller on the seat so they could hit him. But I wasn’t having any of that. I rolled out and headed for the road.

Gus sat down, angry. “Where you think you’re going?”

“We’re killing this place,” I said. “Before somebody gets killed.”

“Judas Priest! That’s the whole idea!”

“Not anymore it’s not,” I said. The ditch was deep and steep and I nearly went airborne for real. I hit the gravel and took off. High speed. Full throttle.

The Weebawauwauans piled into their cars and trucks and followed, Sheriff Orville Barnes in the lead, full sun exploding off the big gold star on his door. Siren full warble.

Gus’s anger didn’t last long. “You know,” he said, “this may not turn out too bad. Some of the most famous criminals alive get killed in car chases. Bonnie and Clyde died in their Ford, you know.”

“Don’t count on finally getting lucky,” I said. “I can outrun anything they’re driving.”

Actually I couldn’t. They couldn’t catch me, but neither could I get away. They stayed right with me, three hundred yards away or so. The gravel flew, white dust billowing, painting the corn. The wind was under my stubby wings, my tires tickling the road. But it didn’t feel like flying anymore. I’d flown a real airplane, Bud Hemphill’s Jenny, and now it just felt like very dangerous driving.

“How fast you going?” Gus asked me.

I checked the speedometer needle. It was teetering just shy of forty, the fastest I’d ever dared. “Forty.”

“They won’t catch us at that speed. Slow down a bit.”

“One thing I’m not going to do is slow down.”

Gus not only pointed his shotgun in my general direction, he pressed the barrels against my jaw. “Thirty-five ought to do it,” he said.

I eased back on the throttle and watched the speedometer needle retreat. “Thirty-five,” I said.

Gus was happy, but only for a minute. The sheriff’s caravan didn’t get an inch closer. They’d apparently cut their speed, too. “Trim ‘er another five,” Gus ordered. I didn’t need his gun barrel to coax me this time. I throttled back to thirty.

So did the sheriff.

When I returned to Weebawauwau in 1942, Albert Finley told me it was his cousin’s plan to drive us out of the county right from the start. “Orville never liked arresting criminals,” he told me. “He’d have to put them in the county jail and then feed them breakfast, lunch, and supper until their trials came up. None of them ever had the money to hire their own lawyers, so the county had to spring for their defense as well as their prosecution, which always seemed odd to Orville. Once convicted they had to be driven all the way to the penitentiary in Indianapolis, in a gas-sucking bus with two guards and a driver. It was cheaper just to chase them into a richer county.”

“Twenty-five,” Gus ordered.

Five at a time our speed dropped, all the way to five miles an hour. The distance between us and the sheriff’s caravan never changed. The sheriff was having the time of his life. He sat in his big official car, gold star glimmering on the door, deputy driving, sipping coffee from his Thermos, eating cookies, giggling like a girl being tickled, as the chase got slower and slower.

Every time I see a chase scene on television, cars roaring at a hundred, screeching corners, just missing trucks, smashing crates conveniently stacked on the sidewalk, flipping on their roofs and twirling, I think of that morning in Indiana; Gus squirming in frustration, Sheriff Orville Barnes in cold pursuit at five miles an hour.

“Slow down some more,” Gus ordered. “We’re almost getting away.” Too late. We passed a sign that said JASPER COUNTY LINE. SPEED STRICTLY ENFORCED. Behind us cars and trucks were backing up and turning around, heading back to Weebawauwau Center. The sheriff’s game was finally over. He’d won. He knew all along he would. Because he always did.

I stopped the Gilbert SXIII. “I suppose you want me to go back?”

Gus’s face was low and sour. “Wouldn’t do any good.”

I looked back at Will. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Just looking straight ahead. Eyes blinking once every three seconds. I looked at Gladys. She was trying to keep her disappointment off her face. “This Jasper County looks nice,” she said to Gus. “Maybe you’d have better luck getting riddled here.”

Gus played with his nose and his lips and scratched the stubble on his chin. “No I wouldn’t. One Indiana county is as bad as the next.” He got out and took a leak in the ditch. Came back rejuvenated. Philosophical. “I’m just too bad to get killed in Indiana. They couldn’t kill Dillinger in Indiana. Had to wait until he was in Chicago. That’s where we’re going, Gladys. Going to Chicago. Should have went there right from Mingo Junction. But I guess a man has to pay his dues. Well, mine are paid full.”

We dug out Will’s maps and charted a course to Chicago. We had no idea what road we were on at the moment. But it had to be close to U.S. 231, which would take us nearly to U.S. 41, a clean shot into the city. I warned him about the Negro section on the south side, an area Will’s Uncle Fritz said we should avoid, but Gus said he wasn’t afraid of Negroes, not even a million Negroes, and we flew off.

We stopped once to steal gas. Gus stole us cold Cokes and Hostess cupcakes. As the miles ticked away he made plans: We’d pull some easy stickups in the city, maybe go right down a block, hitting every store. That would give us enough money to pay a backalley doctor to dig the bullet out of Will’s back. Then after a day or two holed up in some flophouse, we’d head downtown, robbing banks and maybe the World’s Fair itself. He expected that to make Will happy. Will just sat and blinked.

We flew through North Marion and Aix and Kersay. We saw a sign pointing toward Valparaiso, thirteen miles away. We went in the other direction through Hebron and Leroy, all sorts of little places, some of them official and some not.

Good thing I didn’t know it was the milkman who shot Will. I’d have run him down in that cornfield if I had. I could have, easy, given the beating Uncle Fritz gave him. I thought about finding that bastard when I returned to Weebawauwau in ’42. But I knew it wouldn’t be smart. I’d been through basic training and I knew how to dispatch men in foreign uniform with nothing but my bare hands.

I might have dispatched Orville Barnes, too. But he was already dead in ’42. His heart gave out riding Millie Macmillan. He hadn’t deserved such a pleasurable death. He’d played a cruel game with us. Especially after Will was shot. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. He knew Will was shot. He knew we weren’t really part of Gus’s gang. We were unwilling kidnapees, three innocent boys from an unofficial place in Ohio. He should have obliged Gus with the hail of bullets he wanted. He should have rescued us. It wasn’t a game.

Nothing’s a game.

Pruitt tried to have the sheriff charged with malfeasance in office. But J. Edgar Hoover, as much as he loathed local lawmen like Orville Barnes, needed their goodwill. There were killers and communists loose in the land, bums who’d lost their farms and factory jobs and all respect for the Constitution of the United States. Pruitt sat there on his patio in Elmhurst, thirty-four years later, making all sorts of excuses for that milkman, but he made no excuses for Sheriff Barnes. He despised him. So much he threw an ashtray into his azalea bushes when I brought up his name. Frightened the goldfinches off their feeder. He told a couple secrets he’d never told anyone: The next election he sent a campaign contribution to Barnes’s opponent; a big contribution, too, a month’s pay; Barnes still won, in a landslide, wearing a checkered shirt and cowboy hat, but Pruitt said it still made him feel better. He also drove down to Weebawauwau for Barnes’s funeral in 1939. He paid the grave diggers twenty bucks apiece to let him urinate on the casket as they lowered it into the clay. That made him feel better, too. As Pruitt told me this he chewed on his omelet, my saliva mixing with his. A communion of mutual distaste.

“Should you gasp with amazement as, with the coming of night, millions of lights flash skyward a symphony of illumination, reflect again that it is progress speaking with exultant voice of up-to-the-second advancement.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Twenty-Five/Bathed in Rainbows

Somewhere along U.S. 41 we got lost. I don’t know how many times we crossed the Calumet River. Or how many times we shoelaced back and forth across the Illinois state line. We were tangled helplessly in Chicago’s lower intestines. It was flatter than Indiana, swampy, smoky, and oily. You could lick rust right out of the air. We passed refineries and steel mills and chemical plants and patches of small wooden houses. Cars and trucks sat right on the roadway where they’d died. We saw lots of loose cats and dogs. Lots of loose men, too, some with their hands on lunch pails, lots with nothing on their hands but time.

We stopped for a while along the river. We stretched Will out on a blanket. Only one of his hands was working. He used it to put drops in Clyde’s ear. The river reeked of dead fish. The sandy bank reeked of wild onions. We reeked of sweat. We drank Cokes and ate dozens of Hostess cupcakes. Everybody tried to sleep but nobody could. We were too tired. After a few hours we eased Will back in the Gilbert SXIII and resumed our search for U.S. 41.

We never found it again. What we did find were Negroes. More Negroes than I, in my ignorant youth, thought existed in the entire world. Uncle Fritz had warned us to skirt that part of town, and I’d warned Gus. But there we were, no more than two hours before dark, up to our necks in Negroes. Ten years later in England I’d be around Negroes most of the day; cooking side by side with them, at night sitting with them on the barracks steps passing a precious American cigarette back and forth; sometimes sharing sips of precious American beer; talking about our families and the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees and what was on the menu for tomorrow. The first woman I would ever have sex with would be half a Negro. But in 1934 my life was entirely white and rural and excruciatingly Methodist. All those Negroes terrified me. “I’ve never seen so many Negroes,” I said.

“There are a lot of them all right,” Gus said. “And look at all these pretty little Negro stores, one right after the other. Pull it over, Ace.”

I kept flying. “Don’t you think we should take Will to a doctor first? Or a hospital? I bet Chicago has lots of hospitals.”

Gus watched the little Negro stores blur by. “We will, Ace, I promise. Once we get some of this Negro cash in our pockets.”

I knew he was making excuses. “We’ve got plenty of cash from those Baptists,” I said.

“Not enough for Chicago,” he said. “You need lots of cash in a city like this. Now please pull over.”

I was watching Will in my rearview mirror. He was still staring and blinking, as if solving some terrible arithmetic problem in his head. “He doesn’t look very good.”

Gus looked at me like I was crazy. “He’s been shot. How good can he look? But he’s gonna be OK. I had a brother get bit by a rattler and he looked that way for nearly two weeks. Then all of sudden he got up and started dancing.”

We flew past a prosperous little grocery with baskets of fruit and vegetables stacked on the sidewalk. Gus pointed his shotgun in my general direction. I stopped. The street was lousy with Negroes, some just hanging out, some on their way to someplace important. Gus and I jumped out. “Come on, Gladys,” he said, “I’ll steal you whatever you want.”

She didn’t budge.

“Come on, sweetie pie. Clyde can watch Will.”

She didn’t budge again.

Gus’s hillbilly voice twanged up a full octave. “Ain’t you coming?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she said.

Up another octave. “Well, I’m planning on it.” He grabbed her arm and yanked her, right over the top of the door. He raised his hand to slap her but didn’t. The three of us went inside. It looked just like Ruby & Rudy’s. Smelled the same. Pickles and bananas, peanuts and dust. We strolled toward the counter, Gus’s shotgun hidden behind his back, the floor squeaking. Behind the counter stood a middle-aged Negro couple. Except for their skin they looked just like the Zuduskis, smart and clean, all business. The man even wore wire-rimmed glasses like Rudy’s.

Gus swung his shotgun over his shoulder. Didn’t stop walking until his belt buckle was rubbing against the counter. “Evening folks. I’m Gus Gillis. Professional stickup man. The Weebawauwau Warrior they call me.” He took off his fedora and extended it upside down. “Kindly put your green right in there.”

The Negro Ruby and Rudy couple didn’t budge.

Gus’s smile went weak. “I was hoping we might complete our transaction without me taking this gun off my shoulder.”

Two fists the color of dark Dutch chocolate, a left from the man, a right from the woman, plowed into Gus’s pink face. Gus went over like a bowling pin. His head cracked on the floor. His shotgun exploded, killing the pickle barrel. Green brine washed over the floor. Gus’s suitcoat soaked it up like a sponge.

Gladys bent down and wiggled his broken nose. “You all right?”

He was out. I took her arm and lifted her. “It wasn’t a hail of bullets,” I said, “but it’s close enough.” I tried to pull her toward the door but her feet were nailed to the floor with indecision. “Come on,” I said. “You’re free now. We’re all free.”

She unnailed her feet. We backed out, arm in arm. “Sorry about the pickles,” I said to the Negro couple. “He’s got plenty of Baptist money in his pockets you can have for the damages.”

Gladys cranked the Gilbert SXIII and got in next to me. We flew off. We never saw Gus Gillis again, though we did learn two days later when we were sitting in a precinct holding cell that he was dead. Not from those dark Dutch chocolate fists. He died a much more embarrassing death than that. Even more embarrassing than Will’s father’s death.

The setting sun was on our left. That meant we were heading north. Buildings were getting bigger. A lot bigger. There were more and more white people on the sidewalk. Pretty soon no Negroes at all. “He’s acting funny,” I heard Clyde say.

Will wasn’t blinking anymore. His breaths were long and noisy. I saw a bubble of blood on his lip. “We’re going to get you to a hospital right now,” I said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Absolutely fine.”

We were suddenly downtown. The streets were clogged with cars and people and noise. The cars weren’t moving very fast, but the people sure were. Even a line of tattered men in front of a soup kitchen was moving fast. A traffic cop made me take a right. Another made me turn left. We were now on Michigan Avenue. I remembered from Will’s maps that Michigan was Chicago’s main north-south spine. Somewhere to our right was the World’s Fair. Will was breathing like a punctured accordion. More blood was bubbling on his lip. “Hold on,” I said. “We’ll find a hospital any minute now.”

“Take me to the World’s Fair, Ace,” Will said.

My steering wheel was slippery with sweat. “You’re talking out of your mind. I bet there’s a hospital right up here, after this next stoplight.”

“I want to go to the World’s Fair, Ace.”

“I can’t take you to the Fair, Will.”

“Ace.”

“I can’t, Will.”

Will’s voice was drifting. “I’ve got to show Gladys the Transparent Man,” he said. “She thinks he’s real. But he’s just made out of plastic. Someday everything will be made out of plastic.”

“Well, you’re not made out of plastic,” I said. “I’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

“Ace!”

I was crying and I could hear Gladys and Clyde crying, too. The traffic was terrible. The light wouldn’t change. It just hung there over the intersection, electric blood.

“Take him to the Fair,” I heard Gladys say.

“Take him,” I heard Clyde say.

Goddamn. Sonofabitch. The light finally changed and I made a right, knocking off one of my stubby wings on a light pole. “All right, we’ll go to the World’s Fair,” I yelled. “But I’m not spending all night in the Hall of Science, that’s for damn sure.”

“You’ll want to when you see it,” Will said. “It’s 240 feet long, sixty feet wide with a ceiling fifty-seven feet high, packed with everything you’d ever want to know about mathematics, geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine.”

Gladys asked him if the Transparent Man was in the Hall of Science.

“Sure is,” he said. “So is the Clock of the Ages. It’s got a ten-foot dial that compresses two billion years of the earth’s history into one four-minute revolution. Mankind doesn’t appear until the last second or two.”

The downtown gave way to a broad swath of railroad tracks. On the other side, looking like a huge Christmas tree lying on its side along the endless indigo lake, against an endless black eastern sky, lights and ornaments of every color, skyride cables strung through the air like garlands, sat the Chicago Word’s Fair. We were spellbound. I pulled right up on the railroad tracks and stopped. Will mumbled “Jeez” a dozen times in a row.

I’d been looking at the photographs of the World’s Fair in Will’s guidebook for more than a year. Tiny black and white pictures. This was real. This was immense. This was in color. Bright colors. Audacious colors. Wanton colors. Bright blues. Bright greens. Bright reds. Bright oranges. Bright yellows. Hues that would make a good Methodist look away. And the buildings. Audacious shapes. Wanton shapes. Some as ornate as old parlor chairs. Some as plain as cereal boxes. All huge. Bathed in rainbows of light. Castles where only Martians could live. Flags by the hundreds, some as big as our barn on Stony Hill Road, flapped in the steady lake wind. Fountains rising and falling. Searchlights slashing like giant swords.

Thousands of people, tiny as bugs, were moving in and out of these buildings, in and out of the rainbow lights. Their collective feet and mouths made the air shake. Scores of songs were playing at once. Exotic smells were butting heads.

We just looked and listened and smelled. I remember thinking that we were as far from Bennett’s Corners as anyone could get. Clyde began reading the huge words splattered all over the huge buildings: SEARS, ROEBUCK AND COMPANY; FIRESTONE; TIME; VALVOLINE MOTOR OIL; GENERAL MOTORS; FORD; CHRYSLER; reassuring words; words everybody knew in their heart; knew in their soul; knew would eventually save us from the depression.

“There’s that big dinosaur,” Gladys said. “It looks alive just like you said.”

“It isn’t though,” Will answered.

We looked and listened and smelled some more. “We made it, Will,” I said. “The technological wonders of the modern age, smack dab in front of us.”

Will didn’t answer me. Will was dead.

His father had died only thirteen months earlier. Both should have lived a lot longer.

Will’s father had survived the dogfights over France. Survived the wild Atlantic Ocean, going and coming. Survived barnstorming and racing cars. But he couldn’t survive his weakness for bootleg whiskey. He couldn’t survive hundred-year-old lath and plaster.

Just five months before Prohibition ended in December 1933, a Model A filled with gallon tin cans of bootleg sped down Townline Road, more than likely on its way to some illegal drinking establishment in Cleveland. It was a rainy black night and the driver didn’t know the stone steps of the Methodist church came right down to the gravel road. The A’s front left wheel hit the bottom step. It flipped and skidded across the road on its roof, right onto the community ballfield. Driver crawled out and ran. In the morning they found all that green whiskey. They emptied the cans into the ditch. Rudy Zuduski supplied a box of stick matches. The ditch burned all day.

Two days later Will’s father disappeared. Two days after that, halfway through the Sunday sermon, the church ceiling caved in. Will’s father, gallon tin cradled in his arms, came down headfirst. Broke his neck on the back of a pew. Two rows in front of where Will and Clyde and Mrs. Randall were sitting, praying for his return.

It was an embarrassing way for a man to die. Especially a good family man like Will’s father. A good man who gave away free Cokes and candy bars and always had something friendly to say. A good man who bought the shirts and caps the Bennett’s Corners baseball team wore. He was scoutmaster of Troop 203. Took us camping all the way to Niagara Falls. He performed the church’s janitorial chores free of charge. A man with only one weakness. A weakness God said was unconscionable. A weakness the government said was unconstitutional.

Apparently Will’s father heard that Model A flip in the night and went out to investigate. I suppose he looked inside and saw those shiny cans. He probably had a key to the church on his belt. He only took three cans and hid them in the church attic, figuring that when he was alone dusting under the pews, he’d sneak up and take a few swigs.

But that whiskey wouldn’t let him back down. He might have swigged a whole can, slept that off and swigged another. Lost track of time. Lost track of his senses. Maybe the Sunday morning hymns woke him, the scolding voices of earthbound angels vibrating around his feet. Maybe he tried to crawl out across the rafters. He came right down through the lath and plaster. Broke his neck on a pew. Five months later everybody in the country agreed Prohibition was a big mistake and ended it. For years Bennett’s Corners was known as that place where the drunk fell through the church ceiling during Sunday services.

There was nothing embarrassing about Will’s death. Yes, it was sad and senseless and absolutely preventable. Yet it was a noble death. He died for a good reason. He wanted to see the technological wonders of the modern age, to prepare himself for the glorious future that was sure to bloom just as soon as Franklin Delano Roosevelt figured the depression out. He planned our trip to the Chicago World’s Fair thoroughly. Dreamed it thoroughly. Finally, in August 1934, we started out for Chicago. Odds were we’d get there and back with no trouble at all. Odds were Will would learn exactly what he wanted to learn, and be as ready for the future as anybody alive.

I’m not saying Will would have done something grand with the things he’d learn. He probably wouldn’t have invented anything. Found the cure to anything. Wouldn’t have built a great corporation. But Will might have become a teacher. I could see that. He might have taught at the high school in Brunswick. Or he might have opened a little business fixing radios and phonographs and eventually television sets.

I’ve often wondered how Will would have died had Pruitt taken that milkman’s pistol away. He’d talked some about taking night classes at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, so he might have been killed in a car crash returning home half asleep. He might have been killed in the war, though I doubt the Army would have let somebody that smart anywhere near the front. But his ship might have been torpedoed or his barracks bombed or he might have died on some island in the Pacific from malaria. No, I doubt they would have let him get anywhere near a gun. Those blinky eyes and that cautious demeanor.

He might have died of cancer or a heart attack, the way most people die. He might still be alive, living with me here at Sparrow Hill, reading to me every day out of the National Geographics stacked on the coffee table in the sun room.

I wonder how my life would have been different had he lived a full life. He might have dragged me off to Baldwin Wallace College with him. When the war broke out, he might have gone with me to that recruiter in Akron, and talked me out of signing up for cooking school. “Hold out,” he would have said. “You were born to fly, Ace.” Of course that might have gotten me killed fifty years too soon, but my life sure would have been different. Infinitely better. More noble. He might have talked me out of opening the R&R Luncheonette. Might have talked me out of marrying Lois Cobb. Even if he didn’t, our marriage might have been different. God knows she wouldn’t have had Will’s ghost in bed with her. We might have had a son and she might even have let me name him Will.

Even if I had opened the R&R things might have gone differently. Will would have kept me from making mistakes. Kept my hamburgers down to a profitable size. Would I have sold out to that dreamer home from Korea? Would I have opened the Dairy Doodle? Moved to Fort Meyers and opened the Clam Shack? Who can goddamn say? Sonofabitch, all I know is that my life would have gone differently with Will Randall alive.

When I went to Mingo Junction in 1955 I asked Gladys if she thought her life might have gone differently if Will hadn’t been shot. “Maybe the two of you would have stayed in Chicago and become famous radio stars. You two were something together. The Will and Gladys Show. Darlings of the airwaves. I bet you’d have a television show, on right after Milton Berle. Be rich as skunks, married to each other, living in Beverly Hills.”

“None of that would have happened,” she said.

That’s what she said, but I could see the whole scenario playing in her eyes.

I bet she thinks all the time how her life might have been different if Will had lived, the same way I do. If she’s still alive herself, of course.

“Millions are Expended. A Magic City Created. Throngs Come. The World Watches. Then It Vanishes.”

OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

Twenty-Six/Freeze, Mr. Iceman

What do you do when somebody dies in your car? Hell if we knew. So we sat there on the railroad tracks for another hour until the Fair closed for the day and they turned off the lights. Trains went by on other tracks but not ours. I sat there wishing one would. Finally I walked down to the fairgrounds and found a security guard. “I think there’s somebody dead in my car,” I said. I didn’t say “dead in the Gilbert SXIII” or “dead in my airplane.” This was no time for playing.

The security guard called the Chicago police and they knew what to do. Dead people in cars was nothing new to them. They shined a flashlight in his face and asked me how he died. “Shot in the back,” I said. They weren’t surprised.

Arrested all of us. Took Will to the morgue and the three of us to a precinct house. Locked us in a holding cell.

We told them everything, though I did try to portray Gladys as unwilling in the affair as Will, Clyde, and me. They bought it at first but then Pruitt arrived and they took her downtown. Didn’t see her again until 1955 when I went to Mingo Junction. She served three years.

Not long after Pruitt showed up, Uncle Fritz arrived with Aunt Mary. Mrs. Randall, too. She slapped me several times on the head, then hugged me and cried in my ear. My parents arrived shortly after breakfast. My mother and Mrs. Randall were from the same mold. She slapped me several times in the head, then hugged me and kissed me all over the forehead.

Mrs. Randall and my mother got into a pretty raw argument, blaming the other for letting us go to the Fair in the first place. My father had nerves of steel—he’d faced down Huns over France and driven race cars at well over a hundred miles an hour—but he couldn’t stand listening to those two women screech at each other. I could hear him grinding the enamel off his teeth. I was figuring any second he’d start slapping them in the head the way they slapped me. Instead he put his arms around them. Will wasn’t my father’s son, but he liked Will and I suppose having dared the gods so much when he was young, he knew I might have been shot just as easily as Will.

As bad as I felt about Will being dead, I sat in that holding cell feeling the most sorry for Clyde. Only a year earlier his father had died. Now his brother was dead. He was left to tiptoe around his mother all by himself now. He was destined to have a hard life. And he did. All through high school he was chained to that Shell station. Chained to his mother’s sorrow and Southam sourness. Mrs. Randall has been dead for years now. Still every time Clyde picks me up for pancakes, he’s got that edgy look in his eyes, as if he’s expecting to hear his mother’s voice boom through the clouds at any second: “Clyde! Clyde Randall!”

Clyde being thirteen was home free. Pruitt, however, wanted me sent back to Weebawauwau County to face charges; the relish with which I flew Bud Hemphill’s old Jenny was evidence in Pruitt’s mind I wasn’t all that unwilling a kidnappee. But Bud wasn’t interested in pressing charges. Neither were the Baptists. Sheriff Orville Barnes sure didn’t want his county to incur the cost of trying me, or jailing me. So they let me go, too.

Gladys didn’t get off so lucky. Sheriff Barnes wasn’t interested in trying her, but several other Indiana counties were. I heard that various county prosecutors drew straws to see which got the honor. Howard County won. Kokomo is the county seat. Home of the Kokomo School of the Performing Arts, where Gus stole those Daphne Darnell scripts for her.

I almost had to go to Kokomo myself, to testify against Gladys. A week before I was to board the westbound train the Kokomo police called and said Gladys had confessed to everything. In the weeks before her trial not one newspaper had written a story about her exciting life on the lam with Gus Gillis—not even the newspaper in Steubenville, right up the road from Mingo Junction. Not one radio station had offered her an acting job—not even WEEB, where the owner, Lloyd Potts, knew her talents well. Her dream was as dead as Gus and Will. Now she just wanted to get that embarrassing summer behind her. Serve her time. Get on with whatever life had in store.

I didn’t get any of this from Gladys. She wouldn’t say word one about her weeks in the Howard County Jail or her three years in the state women’s prison. I got it from Pruitt, in 1968, when I visited him at his bungalow in Elmhurst. He’d kept track of her. Just as he’d kept track of me. He kept track of all the criminals he encountered. Thousands of them. Had a row of file cabinets in his basement, next to his Ping-Pong table. We played three games. I won all three. By big scores.

Mrs. Randall bought Will an inexpensive casket. She and Clyde took him home on the train. Uncle Fritz drove the tow truck back. Aunt Mary followed in their Chevrolet. My mother expected me to drive back to Bennett’s Corners with them, in the Plymouth. But I wasn’t going to leave the Gilbert SXIII in Chicago! One wing missing or not! My father saw it my way. “I had a hard time leaving my Spad in France after the Armistice,” he told my mother.

“Don’t you think this is a little different?” she said.

“Not any different at all,” he said.

So I was permitted to drive home alone in the Gilbert SXIII. My parents drove me to the police impoundment lot, then headed home. Will’s maps and spiral notebook were still tucked under the front seat, so I wouldn’t have any trouble finding my way. Will’s camera was also under the seat. I had all the film developed, but not until 1940. The pictures all came out fine. I found Gladys’s radio scripts in the backseat. One had a few drops of Will’s blood and all of them smelled of earwax.

It wasn’t easy flying the Gilbert SXIII with only one wing. It drifted left all the way home. It didn’t have the same dangerous, gravel-skimming bounce either. Half the time my propeller didn’t spin at all. But this drive wasn’t about adventure. It wasn’t about pretending I was thousands of feet in the air. It was about getting home, putting that damn Model T in the barn, and burying my head under my pillow.

I followed U.S. 41 down the curve of Lake Michigan, through Whiting, East Chicago, and Hammond. In Gary I found U.S. 20, the road that brought us across Indiana and most of Ohio. I drove along the lake to Michigan City, where Will’s Aunt Mary would move after the fear of an H-bomb falling on Valparaiso killed her Fritz. I drove through Trail City and Springville and Rolling Prairie. I saw the melon farm coming up. The farmer was on the porch, reading his newspaper. I throttled down to stop. I intended to tell him how his green melons cost Will Randall his life. But I didn’t. I throttled up and flew by. For several miles I gave serious consideration to turning around. I’d just race up his lawn and drive right through his melon pile, then continue on. Didn’t do that either.

I reached Bootjack and left the Central Time Zone behind me. I flew through New Carlisle, South Bend, Elkhart, Shipshewana, Lagrange, Plato, Brushy Prairie, Angola, and Ellis. Crossed into Ohio. I was hungry but I didn’t stop to eat. Didn’t even buy a candy bar or a Coke when I stopped to gas up. I flew through Columbia and Ainger, Alvordton, Fayette, Oak Shade, Assumption, Caragher. I passed the sign pointing north toward Toledo, remembering all the “Holy Toledo” jokes Will and I made. When I crossed the Maumee River I remembered the dumb “I want my Maumee” joke Will had told. I laughed and cried at the same time. Doing both at once gave me the hiccups. They lasted through Perrysburg and Lime City, Stony Ridge and Lemoyne.

Woodville. Hessville. Fremont. Great Creek. Clyde. Boy, I’d had my fill of that name. Clyde Barrow. Clyde Randall. Clyde, Ohio. There were lots of Clydes back then—even J. Edgar Hoover’s best friend’s was named Clyde, Clyde Tolson. That name’s totally out of style today and I hope I’m long dead if or when it ever comes back in style.

After Clyde I flew through Bellevue, Monroeville, East Townsend, Wakeman, Kipton, and Oberlin. Outside Elyria I eased onto Route 82 for the last leg of my flight home. It was late in the afternoon. The sun was behind me. There were rain clouds to the north, drifting my way, but it never rained. I don’t think it rained more than two or three times that entire summer. Eaton. Copopa. Strongsville, right past the spot where the Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa now sits. It was just another cornfield in 1934. I drove down U.S. 42, past the field where twenty years later they’d build that Big Boy. I turned left on Drake Road. Turned right on Hunt Road. Followed it right to Bennett’s Corners. I went by Randall’s garage as fast as I could, full throttle, in high speed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the tow truck sitting in front of the pumps.

Just this past Thursday they brought in bulldozers to push down Randall’s old brick garage and the wonderful two-story frame building where Ruby and Rudy Zuduski had their store and where I for a time operated the R&R Luncheonette. The buildings had to go so they could widen Townline Road, so all the new people moving to Bennett’s Corners can get to work on time through that crazy six-way, pie-slice intersection. When Clyde came to pick me up for pancakes he asked if I wanted to go watch the bulldozers do their work. I said I didn’t.

I flew up Townline Road, past the cemetery where Will’s father was buried. Where Will Randall would be buried in a day or two. I turned left on Babcock Road. Flew past Marty Boyle without running him into the ditch or shooting him with my imaginary machine gun. Turned right on Stony Hill Road. Flew all the way to our farm. My parents had pulled in just an hour earlier. The hood of the Plymouth was still hissing. There was bug guts and bird shit all over the windshield. I pulled the Gilbert SXIII into the barn. Covered it with a tarp. There it rotted until lightning burned it to a crisp in October 1948, the same night the Cleveland Indians won the World Series.

I went inside and buried my head under my pillow just like I’d planned all the way from Chicago. But I didn’t keep it there very long. My mother started frying ham and eggs. I hadn’t eaten all day. Father went to bed early. He’d missed one day of work and he couldn’t miss another. Mother and I listened to the radio for a while. I made sure we kept the dial away from any Chicago stations.

The next day I walked in the woods and looked for arrowheads in the cornfields. Found a bottom half. The point was either broken off by a plow or by the hard bones of a bear several thousands years before. The next day was Will’s funeral. I didn’t want to go.

“Of course you have to go,” my father said. “You were his best friend.”

“I am his best friend,” I said. “And that’s why I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see him in a box. I don’t want to see them lower him into the ground.”

“Death is a part of life,” my mother said.

“Not a part of mine,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned Will finally won one of those magazine contests he’s always entering, and he won a long trip to England, and he’s over there looking at old castles.”

I remember telling my parents that because when I won my trip to England in 1942, I remembered what I’d said to them every time I passed an old castle, which was about every ten minutes. On one weekend pass I took the train down to London. The hotel where I stayed was hit by a buzz bomb when I was taking a tour of the Tower of London with my Negro buddies from the mess hall. The Tower of London isn’t one tower, by the way, it’s a whole castle full of towers where all sorts of crazy Englishmen lost their heads.

Gus Gillis didn’t exactly lose his head, but his head finally did him in, just three hours after Will died in the backseat of the Gilbert SXIII. Pruitt told me all about it in 1968. It was the only thing Pruitt told me that made me laugh. Pruitt never let go of a criminal once they crossed paths. He brought up Gus’s file from the basement.

Before that Negro couple could get his shotgun or the Baptist money in his pockets, Gus came to. He shot the ceiling several times, robbed them, and then staggered northward up the street, nose broken, lip bloody, reeking of pickle brine. He made it all the way to the fancy part of town, where a jeweler, taking rings and watches out of the window for the night, chased him away with a fancy revolver. He then tried to rob some newsboys shooting craps in an alley. They kicked his shins raw, pushed him into a stack of garbage cans, and went on with their game.

Gus apparently limped up the alley until he saw an iceman climbing the back stairs of a brownstone with a forty-pound block of ice in his tongs. Gus raised his shotgun. “Freeze right there, Mr. Iceman,” he said.

The iceman kept climbing. This was Chicago. Gus staggered to the base of the stairs and fired straight up. The startled iceman dropped his tongs. Forty pounds of Lake Michigan ice tumbled two stories to the top of Gus Gillis’s head. The ice and Gus’s skull did the same thing. Shattered.

It’s hard for me to sympathize with Gus Gillis’ life of crime. He robbed me of the best friend I ever had, after all. But given what Gladys told me about Gus when I visited her in Mingo Junction, I think I can understand why his life unraveled like it did. He was too smart but not smart enough. He knew he could never make it through teacher’s college the way his father had, but he also knew he was too smart to spend thirty years in a West Virginia coal mine. Out of high school he moonshined with his uncle and worked a while for the county fixing mountain roads that washed out. But the inadequacies of his mother’s bloodline, and the pride inherited through his father’s, echoed back at him continuously from the mountainsides, battering his soul to a pulp. One day he drove across the Ohio River to Mingo Junction and robbed the Bartholomews’ grocery of the day’s receipts.

Gustavus P. Gillis didn’t get the hail of bullets he wanted. But he got what he deserved.

Looking back on my life, I’ve gotten pretty much what I deserved, too.

Will Randall got a lot less than he deserved.

I loved Will Randall. And he loved me. We were best friends.

We remained best friends even after he died in that Chicago parking lot in August 1934.

We remained best friends all through my World War II years in England.

We remained best friends all those years in Bennett’s Corners when I ran the R&R luncheonette, and later when I ran the Dairy Doodle in Brunswick and the Clam Shack on Pine Island.

Will Randall is still a boy, his eyes still fixed on the glorious future.

I am an old man.

But goddamn.

But sonofabitch.

Will and I are still best friends today.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 by Rob Levandoski

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1195-2

The Permanent Press

4170 Noyac Road

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

www.thepermanentpress.com

Distributed by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EBOOKS BY ROB LEVANDOSKI

FROM THE PERMANENT PRESS

AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Available wherever ebooks are sold

Founded in 1978 by Martin and Judith Shepard, the Permanent Press is committed to publishing works of social and literary merit. Since the press’s inception, its authors and titles have received over fifty honors, including the American Book Award, the PEN New England Award, the Macavity Award, the Nero Award, the Hammett Prize, the Small Press Book Award, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, and the New American Writing Award. They have also been finalists for the National Book Award, the Edgar Award, the Chautauqua Prize, and the Shamus Award.

FIND OUT MORE AT

WWW.THEPERMANENTPRESS.COM

FOLLOW US:

@tpermanentpress and Facebook.com/thepermanentpress

The Permanent Press is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign up now at

www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

FIND OUT MORE AT

WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

FOLLOW US:

@openroadmedia and

Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

One/Monkey Wrench

Two/White Dust

Three/Long Burn

Four/Killing the Corners

Five/Green Inside

Six/Cherry Pie

Seven/Whizzing By

Eight/Nothing But Vanilla

Nine/Mincemeat

Ten/Pass the Ketchup, Clyde

Eleven/Strictly 9 to 5

Twelve/Descending Like a Dove

Thirteen/Play Ball

Fourteen/Just Traveling Through

Fifteen/Thanks a Million, Lloyd!

Sixteen/Checkered-Shirt Cowboy

Seventeen/Hopscotch

Eighteen/Outfoxed by a Hen

Nineteen/Nobody’s Going Nowhere

Twenty/Digging All Night

Twenty-One/Overpopped

Twenty-Two/Dog or Two Barking

Twenty-Three/Jeez

Twenty-Four/Singing and Dancing

Twenty-Five/Bathed in Rainbows

Twenty-Six/Freeze, Mr. Iceman

Copyright Page