Alive and Dead in Indiana Read online

The Kiwanis Club sponsors airplane rides all summer. Taking off from Baer Field, the tour flies over most of the city. I saw the Wayne Knitting Mill’s tall smokestack, Wayne built right into the bricks. I flew by the elevators, followed Main Street downtown and circled the courthouse. Then over the Old Fort, looking defenseless, and the filtration plant with the ponds. I followed the Maumee from the three rivers downstream, sweeping by the old Studebaker plant, Zollner Piston, all the wire-and-die works, Magnavox. Then banking up the bypass, north, over the shopping centers and malls and their parking lots, over Eckrich and the campus, to my house.

  I could see my house. I knew it even from the air. There were people in the front yard I did not know, looking up, shielding their eyes, waving.

  Grandfather, all you can see are the contrails. The plodding lines of the bombers and the lyric corkscrews of their escort. It is how this city chooses to die. Daylight raids, everyone is watching. This is the American Way. To see it coming. The bombs are inverted exclamations at the beginning of their sentence.

  I can hear the planes looking for the city each night. I keep my eyes closed as they fly over the house. Their engines pulse like the sirens. It is a patient sound. And I wait too.

  I wait for them to drop the flares, or for a few of them to come in lower. We did not ask for this. They fly by overhead. You can hear them, but you cannot see them. They are showing no lights. Low clouds. No stars.

  They go on, on some heading to the west. But they will be back later. Then, further east, there will come the panting sound, almost comic, as they drop the bombs randomly, hoping to hit something, and then, empty, go back to where they came from.

  Tarsk and Hartup have been taking aerial photographs for years. All the merchants and the schools, each new mayor, every public place has one of their pictures. Sometimes the picture is of one building and at other times of whole blocks. There are calendars, too, that everyone gets from Lincoln Life. In Mike’s Car Wash people will try to find their house in the picture that hangs in the lobby while their car is being dried. Every day Tarsk and Hartup fly over the city taking pictures—but no matter what picture you look at, someone will always point out what is missing, or what has since disappeared.

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