Alive and Dead in Indiana Read online

  Nobody tells the visitors what they’re getting into. They just have to catch on. It must seem like these are real fights at first.

  The visitors move around, trying to get out of the way, and I ignore the whole thing. So we’re pretending all the time, and as the summer’s gone on, the little things we’ve started with have been added to.

  It takes all day to do everything we’ve invented to do.

  One soldier shoves me up against the flagpole every morning to show how nasty he was supposed to have been. Someone else does nothing but stay in bed in the hospital. He dies all summer. But he’s been gaining weight.

  We are always saying how we could really use people who can speak French the way they did back then.

  This is educational for everybody. The fathers are always quieting their sons saying, “Listen to this,” as the Sergeant Major pats the barrel of the howitzer and tells his little story about Fallen Timbers. The women and the girls hang around the kitchens and out near the bower down by the river, where the ladies from the fort do the laundry. Sometimes people will help weed the plots of vegetables or churn butter. They’ll add a few stitches to the quilt.

  The college kids who work here get credit, I think. Or write papers. Something.

  Everybody who visits is interested in sanitation.

  I take people around to the privies, point out the chamber pots, tell them how it was a real problem in the previous fort during the war and the siege.

  “Here is the gutter that Major Whistler, my father, had dug around the parade ground for the water to run off.”

  I’ve learned a lot too about history and speaking in front of people. I like talking about these things and having people listening. I like it when they nod and whisper to each other. The little boys look at what I’m wearing.

  Kids my age will try to trip me up, asking about hamburgers or the Civil War. But I haven’t made a mistake once. Well, once I did, but the guy who asked didn’t know I did, so it was all right.

  I’ll be a senior next year at North Side High School, which is up on the banks of the St. Joe near the site of a French fort. Fifty years ago, when they dug the foundation, they found an Indian burial site. That’s why we’re called the Redskins. My teachers think this will be good experience. They wrote good recommendations for me. My own father isn’t so sure, but he is happy I have a job and that I work outside.

  To him, it’s a summer job, that’s all.

  Lieutenant Curtis, who is my brother-in-law by marriage to my sister Eliza, has mustered the garrison together for the morning assembly and flag raising. The orders and officers of the day are posted, regulations concerning fraternization and venereal disease are read. He goes on a bit about B. F. Stickney, thinking aloud about the man’s character. The men are at parade rest. They’re dressed in the hot wool uniforms or the white fatigues.

  The flag is popping.

  There is already a large crowd watching.

  Behind the crowd is a file of late arrivals going in and out of the buildings.

  Before we opened, we talked about fudging a bit, holding up the flogging until we had enough people to make it worthwhile. That won’t be a problem now. It’s something we always have to work out since the visitors aren’t around for the whole day usually. We don’t want anyone to go away without seeing a special event, a rifle firing or the band playing at least. But we can’t be flogging every hour on the hour.

  “Next flogging in twenty minutes.”

  We try to be true to the facts we have. The trouble is that the visitors see a few hours of what took years to come about. So it’s kind of hard to explain why they’re whipping this man today. It’s funny that more people don’t ask.

  It is all done by the book—down to the knots and the tattoo the drummer’s doing. I am sitting on the roof of the magazine. The magazine is the shed where they kept the powder and munitions. It was supposed to be brick, so it wouldn’t burn or blow up. But there were just too many trees around. Major Whistler sodded the roof instead, and the grass is long and green.

  The magazine is near the east wall. Between the thwap, thwap of the whip and Marshall’s screaming, I can hear the traffic going by on Spy Run.

  The street is on the other side of the wall. Cars honk at the sentry in the blockhouse from time to time as they go by.

  The real fort was on the other side of the river, near where the apartments are now, up on the high ground. That’s how they got the land to build this fort. It’s on the flood plain along with all the parks.

  There is a lot of flood plain when you have three rivers running through a town.

  One of the first jobs I did in the spring was sandbag the fort during the flood. We pumped the water out into Spy Run and back into the river. But the water really didn’t go anywhere. I was happy to work three days and nights without pay. It was a good way to get to know the people I was going to work with. And it was a big flood, a hundred-year flood, and I was in it with historians.

  That night the President’s helicopter was beating around overhead. Its spotlight was dancing all around and lighting up this little clearing. There we were, passing heavy wet bags. The water was rippling into waves from the rotors. Looking up I could see the rain pouring through the beam of light. Jim still worries about rot damage to the wood, termites and such, but everything is green and cool this summer, and it will probably stay this way until fall.

  The roof is nice with clover blooming.

  Most of the people in the crowd wear dark glasses. We can’t, of course. My face is tired at night from squinting. I have just started wearing contacts, so I can go without my glasses. Jim’s face is lined from the weather and from worry. We’re always trying to get the visitors to see how much quicker people aged then.

  This will be my only summer here, you know. George Washington Whistler has to be sixteen.

  Marshall’s been carried off to the hospital. Lieutenant Curtis has dismissed the men, and they are dispersing. My sisters have been dabbing the corners of their eyes with handkerchiefs. Their bonnets hide a part of their faces. My father is talking to a group of visitors, slapping his gloves, in his hand, on his flexed knee—talking about discipline and justice and a peacetime army, I imagine.

  “Who are you?” says a little boy, calling up to me on the magazine roof.

  He is wearing sunglasses with six-shooters in the upper corners of the lenses.

  I tell him who I am, and he asks if I know the soldier who was beaten.

  I tell him that I do know him and why he was punished.

  “Can I come up there?” the boy asks.

  “Nope,” I say.

  This isn’t the only thing I’ve been doing this summer. I still go out. I ride around town with some of the guys from school. We make the loop from the one Azar’s Big Boy out on the bypass to the other one by South Side High School. Everybody’s got their first jobs, running registers or dropping fries. They cut grass on Forest Park. It gives them money for the cars and enough left over to order food and hold down a booth without getting kicked out.

  Some of my friends are going to summer school, and that’s what my job seems like to the others, like summer school.

  We go by the Calvary Temple sign that flashes Calvary, Temple, Calvary, Temple.

  Clinton splits off into a one-way street. We go past the old power plant and the fenced substation with wires going out everywhere. On the ribs of the big transformers are these fans pointed at the fins on the side. They are on sometimes to cool down the transformers. But at night the blades are feathering, turning slowly in the breeze.

  Les always says how funny it is that they use some electricity to run the fans to cool the transformers to make the electricity. Over the St. Mary’s, by the armory, under the overpass, through downtown, under the overpass, and into the near south side of the city. Coming back, we go up Lafayette, which turns into Spy Run by the bridge. We go by the fort, all dark of course, except for the lights of the cars playing along the walls, an
d the guys all kid me. One night, they’ll break in, and it will be trouble for me. Maybe T.P. the whole place. They’ll leave my name in red paint on the walls.

  We head north by Penguin Point, with the trash cans shaped like penguins, and then run along the bike path on the bank of the St. Joe. We cross State and off to the right is North Side across the river. The ventilating scoops all swiveling like weather vanes left and right. That’s another thing we can never figure out, how those scoops are all pointed in different directions in the same breeze. Spy Run bears down on the Old Crown Brewery, dead ahead, but turns sharp left to meet up again with Clinton. Mr. Centlivre is all lit up on the building’s roof. His foot is planted on a keg like a big game hunter. We start talking about going to Ohio. But we never do.

  On weeknights I keep score for my dad’s softball team. I fill up the frames with little red diamonds. They’re winners. It’s fast pitch. They have uniforms and everything. When the ball gets by the catcher and no one’s on base, he throws it to the third baseman, who always plays in. The third baseman relays it back to the pitcher, a windmiller, his ball jumping over the plate. They’re sharp. I call out the lineups. On deck, in the hole.

  They all ask about the fort and tell me how they mean to come by.

  They work during the day, and on vacation they usually go away. I tell them there is plenty to see right here in town. But they know I am kidding.

  I like the plinking sound of the aluminum bats. I like to see the white ball go bouncing beyond the lights out into the high grass of Hamilton Park, a grown man chasing after it like a kid.

  I warm Dad up before the game, taking one step back after two throws. He’s always very deliberate, pretending to throw after he throws. He tells himself what he’s doing wrong. I can hear snatches of it. I’m all encouragements. When he’s not in the field but swinging the lead bat, I hold his glove to keep it off the ground, make sure there’s a ball inside to keep the pocket.

  Dad takes some of us from the fort to the various parades and festivals where we’ve been appearing. We go all over this part of Indiana. Mom comes along to help with the maps and to look over the handicrafts. They won’t accept mileage. We’re all in the backseats of the station wagon in full-dress uniforms. Shakos, crossing white belts, bayonets in the scabbards. The muskets are up on the luggage rack. Mom always says, “I bet the wool is itchy.”

  We don’t look very smart since our clothes are authentic and handmade. You’d expect more. But we do all right in the parades, staying in step and following orders. We fire off a salute at least once.

  Dad works for Rea Magnet Wire and worries about the way the car smells. As long as I can remember, his cars have smelled of copper and the enamels. He even smells that way when I get close enough to him. It’s like something you were trying to melt in a pan, chocolate or butter, was just starting to burn instead.

  He hangs little green paper Christmas trees from the rearview mirror, but they don’t do any good. Mom asks why draw attention to it by trying to cover it up. I don’t think the people from the fort notice—or if they do, they get used to it like we all do. They’re nervous about the parade and how they look.

  All summer I have been thinking about my chemistry problem. I’ll be taking third-year chem in the fall. I’ve liked chem since the first class. It’s the teacher, I think, and because I have a knack for it. My senior year will be organic and a special project. I’ve known what I wanted to do for a long time, ever since Mr. Dvorak showed us the clock reaction in an early lecture.

  A clock reaction is close to magic.

  The stuff in the beaker changes colors all by itself.

  It didn’t seem like science at all. That’s why it was great for beginning classes. He poured these three clear liquids into a beaker. The liquid turned a bright orange and seemed to thicken. He kept on stirring slowly with a glass rod, clinking it against the glass beaker. All of a sudden, the orange turned black. It was just like someone had flicked a switch. He told us that a professor at Princeton had designed the reaction, and that orange and black are the Princeton colors.

  Since then, I’ve been thinking about my own clock reaction in white and red, North Side High colors. It has to be in that order since the white couldn’t cover the red.

  I need to find three compounds, ABC. A and B can’t react. B and C can’t react. But A and C do react, and their product is a white solid. In that product somewhere there has to be something that will then combine with B, but not all at once.

  I can’t have pink.

  For two years I’ve been mixing precipitates—blue-green coppers, orange potassiums, cobalt blues, the yellows. The test tubes go from clear to color, and the solid settles instantly or suspends, milky and in motion.

  Iron gives red, and there are many white metals.

  Dvorak says there are tables and books that just list the colors. That would save me time, but I like to see them for myself—the colors and the grades of solids, sand or silt or crystal. There’s one, just a drop, that turns as it falls through the acid, a little gray worm by the time it hits the bottom.

  Don’t worry—one day I’ll say, “See?”

  White, red.

  My mother thinks I think too much. She’s caught me staring into the sink, watching the Ajax oxidate and turn blue. She thinks I should go out more. My dad doesn’t say anything but worries out of habit. We’ll sit together out on the porch swing. I’ll be reading, and he’ll be smoking a cigar. “Boats this year,” he’ll say after a while. “Sailboats.”

  He’s thinking about the Junior Achievement projects for next fall.

  Rea gives copper wire to a JA company.

  The kids make pictures of things by stringing the wire between carefully arranged pegs. Cars, trains, airplanes—all made out of thread-gauge copper wire, gold-headed tacks, black cloth for the background.

  I am waving to the Kiwanis pontoon going by on the river. I can hear pieces of the talk about the beautification project, the downtown, the fort, the portage that made this spot worth fighting for in the first place. My two sisters are washing nearby, letting the crowd of visitors overhear them talk about the Major, our father, and finding him a wife, how that would make him more tolerable to live with. I go on back to the clearing in front of the gate where the rifle squad is drilling and the cannon is being readied for firing. The visitors shade their eyes, take pictures.

  They’ve been blowing up buildings across the river downtown. It’s the easiest way to demolish the vacant old hotels. From here, we can see some of it. A building turns to dust and disappears from between the other buildings. If the wind is right, there is hardly any sound, just the cloud of dust rolling away. The Keenan Hotel. The Van Ormen. Once the gun crew tried to time a firing with one of the explosions. They aimed the cannon in the general direction so it would look like we were shelling the downtown, the building collapsing before our guns. Jim said it was a stupid idea. The visitors were more interested in the drill, swabbing out the barrel, ramming, loading, the slow-burning fuse. The visitors were from out of town anyway and probably didn’t know what was going on. The local people would be downtown to watch the building go.

  The problem is that it is so hard to imagine this place without buildings even though so much of the old city is leveled now into fields of rubble. The view is broken only by the steeples of the old German churches.

  It’s easy for me to pretend I’ve never tasted white sugar. Basketball hasn’t been invented. But I think I stick too close to the facts. Maybe I can’t see much beyond the things I can see.

  My friend Les isn’t like that at all. He told me once of the project he’d like to do. Since energy is just matter traveling at the speed of light, he told me, what he’d like to come up with would be some kind of filter that would slow things down. Hold it up to the light and solid blocks of stuff would fall out of the air.

  “That would be better than your clock reaction,” he says. “You might have to pick stuff up, but you wouldn’t have the
mess afterwards.”

  And Jim has no trouble at all being someone else. It is 1816 to him. “Listen,” he says, “what bird did that? One of the swallows from the blockhouse?”

  He’s proud of the fort’s innovations—the cubiles for putting out fires, the overhanging ports to shoot down on intruders crouching by the walls. He’s proud that he’s convinced the banks to see it all like he saw it and that he convinced the city fathers to go along. There are signs all over town pointing in this direction. See Old Fort Wayne. For the longest time, all there was of the fort was one replica cannon in the lobby of the library, flanked by a glass case with a model made out of toothpicks and paper.

  It had been there as long as I could remember.

  It is late in the day. The pies that Harriet and Eliza made are in the windows. I’m supposed to swipe one and take it off to the soldier’s mess. The sisters search each building, rolling pin at the ready. But the men hide me from my sisters. The visitors scream with laughter as I race from one building to another a step ahead of my pursuers. The visitors are on all the porches, resting on the hand-hewn chairs and benches. The sun is hot. The sky is blue. I make it to the hospital and disappear inside just as the sisters emerge from the southeast blockhouse.