Alive and Dead in Indiana Read online

  “You must tell me my fortune,” he said. I went to his rooming house. The stair was opposite the front door. His room was at the top and to the right. He went first and made the housekeeper make some tea, following her to the kitchen. I snuck in and up the stairs. The room was small—a bed, some chairs. Doilies and fringe. There was a big square pillow with a needle-worked “P” that I thought stood for his name but he said later it was for Pennsylvania, where he had gone to school. “Your girl makes you a pillow there. It’s all the rage.”

  “You have a girl?”

  “No,” he answered.

  The tea tasted good. It was English tea. He had some cold cornbread in his pockets. He gave me the bed and put the chairs face-to-face for himself and ht a cigarette without asking me.

  “There is much literary tradition in Crawfordsville, you know. Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, died here.” He said he visited Indianapolis just to see James Whitcomb Riley, that he’d found him entertaining schoolchildren on his porch, a little girl on his lap. Mr. Riley had suggested they get drunk. And, later, they did.

  “Won’t she hear us?” I said.

  “She thinks I talk to myself.”

  He must not have been a poet then. He talked about the provinces in France because he had been there the summer before. “Hills and peaks and castles,” he said. “Not this flat Athens of the Midwest.” He was lonely and young. You could tell that. The boys in the Teke House today would have thought him strange, a sissy. The way he dressed. He never did anything but talk to me. He told me about his friends in Pennsylvania and how he loved to take baths. There was something in his voice. The way he talked was like writing a letter. He stretched out in the chairs, throwing his head back and closing his eyes. He fretted about not being happy here or not wanting to stay in Indiana. “I shouldn’t feel that way,” he said. “I’m a nomad, you see. You are too, aren’t you? Don’t you want to stop wandering? Don’t you want to stay someplace?”

  I didn’t. I suppose if I could have known about it then, I would have headed out to Hollywood. Instead, I went to sleep, listening to his voice, wondering why there are so few people with red hair. I never told his fortune. Were there leaves I could read? I was his fortune. Behind the red hair was a blue wall, and the ashtray and the tea tray were filled with cigarette butts.

  I woke up the next morning and the first thing I saw was Miss Grundy, her arms full of sheets, looking as if she was disappointed I wasn’t dead. “That man,” she said. “You poor girl.” He was fired that morning by President Mackintosh. I was told Ezra begged to stay. It was understood nothing happened between us and that I was not the reason he was dismissed. The trustees thought it a charitable action, suggested Wabash was not suitable for Mr. Pound. I gave Ezra my ticket, and that night he was on his way south to Indianapolis, pillow under his arm. Miss Grundy suggested the college find me a position. Next thing you know, I was centering a canned cherry in the middle of each chocolate pudding in the TKE house.

  I got a letter from him, care of Miss Grundy, a few months later. “Venice, a lovely place to come to from Crawfordsville, Ind.”

  The other mothers wouldn’t care, anyway. We swap recipes, sour cream cookies and butter brickle bars. We plan menus and really worry about color on the plate. The price of tea in China. And the boys don’t dream. The ones who know who he was and that he was here, never ask me. I hear his name sometimes after English 3. Another gentleman with a girl in his room. He forgot his tie. Maybe if I was a poet, I could tell them how it was. Instead, I am quiet at my table. The only thing I’m asked about, besides the salt, is when the letters were stolen and when they were returned. And if it’s true that the skull is all that’s left of the one pledge that told the house’s secrets.

  Walking through the halls at night with my Boston, I look at the annual pictures. Mine is the only face that never changes. My vanity. It is the same picture every year since the first year. That peek-a-boo look. I had skull-tight hair, veiled eyes, dark, bow lips. What a funny way to grow older and stay younger. The matting is the same every year—a circle for me, their sweetheart and their favorite. The boxes are filled with boys aging over four years like presidents in office. When I meet the real mothers during parents’ weekends, I look for the faces in those faces. The way I stare must make them uncomfortable. “Boys,” I say, “will be boys.”

  I saw that Pound again in 1958 when he was in the hospital. I took my vacation that year in Washington so I could try to see him. Ever since the war, The Star had run these articles about him because he had been here once. I didn’t think I would be able to see him. I was too early at the hospital, so I waited. At two, another woman arrived. She had the profile of a face on a coin. I found out later it was his wife. She never said a thing to me but hello. She had an accent. I followed her and a man in a white coat up a metal spiral staircase. We went down a hallway. In an alcove by a window, I was introduced. He couldn’t remember me, of course. But that’s because he was sick.

  “Indiana,” he said. “Elephants walking in the corn.”

  He made tea. He talked about Italy. There was a chance then that they would let him go in the care of his wife. She sat with her back to the window. Other patients came up to the screen that divided us from the ward. He gave them pennies and sent them away. He wore a green visor cap like a card player or a banker. I thought of crumbs in my lap and I brushed my skirt with the side of my hand. He talked about Idaho and maybe going there. The potato.

  Other people visited. They called him E.P. He talked about poetry to them. I thought then: Had I been a poem? Maybe I was a poem. The only other visitor I recall was another woman because she was from Fort Wayne. She could remember walking the tow path on the canal. She talked to him in Greek. She told me that later. Then, I was watching two of the other patients dancing. Two men, dancing.

  I gave him a pound cake meaning a little joke by it, or a token of who he was.

  “It’s got a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of sugar,” I told him.

  He smiled at that. I knew he didn’t remember me.

  I followed his wife and the other woman out of the hospital. The woman took me back downtown in her limousine.

  “He’s an old fart,” she said, “but important.” She said that Wabash was a good school. “I taught in an all-girls’ school in Baltimore for years. I have never been back to Indiana. I must go back sometime before I die.” I thought that was a strange thing to say.

  I went back to Indiana on a night train. The cars were powder blue, and the trip through Ohio seemed to take forever. Have you been through Ohio? I would like to say that the boys missed me, but my vacation is during initiation in the house. That is in early January. They are too busy to miss me. I would like to say too that I was important to someone, to E.P. maybe, but that would not be true. I’m simply one of the somethings that happened to him. I didn’t change myself. Or I’m left over, an extra part. The clock still runs. What happens to yeast in bread? There’s no story here. He took the stories with him. I think people think sometimes that they make up their own world. There always has to be people like me in those made-up worlds. Nothing would happen if there weren’t.

  Did I tell you what I do when the nights are cold like this one? I put a big Greek letter in my bed and plug it in. The lights are so bright, they bleach the blankets. It looks like a person curled up in bed. When I get home, it is nice and toasty. I pull back the covers like I was opening a living thing. I look at the huge θ or π lighting up my bed. And my room’s all upside-down because the light’s coming from below. What does it look like? It looks like nothing else at all. It looks like a letter in a bed.

  You must see it sometime. That skull, it never sleeps. Do you need a place to stay?

  BIOGRAPH

  Iced air. How do they do it? We could’ve gone to the Marbro, but they don’t have it there. I like the sign outside here, snow on top of all the letters. Everybody sitting outside on the street, looking over at the gl
owing white in the light. Light bouncing off the awnings. People dying in the heat. But you got a little money, and you are in where it’s cool. They must take the heat right out of the air. But how do they know which is the hot part? In the loft, one time, placing bets, I saw the guy who runs the machine out in the middle of the street looking at something he held in his hand. The drays and the trucks working their way around him. Only the trolleys creeping up to him, the motorman yanking on the bell. I couldn’t hear it because the windows were closed. The iced air. Everybody squinting at the man in the street holding his hand up staring at it, at something in it. Things moving slow in the heat. Boy, it’s swell. I want to stay for the whole show. Let my shirt dry out, roll my socks back up.

  Everybody’s sitting in the dark. Up there in the ceiling they got the little lights that are supposed to be stars. Palm trees in pots up there on the sides of the stage. Ushers in monkey suits by the fire doors. It’s like in Mooresville at the Friends with everybody sitting and waiting for somebody to get up and talk. I could stand up here and tell them a story. Mrs. Mint is the only one who knows, and she’s worried about getting back to Romania, thanks to the house she ran in Gary.

  She treats me square. No trouble when I stay with Patty. And Patty, still married to the cop, doesn’t have a clue.

  Thanks me every time she smiles because I’m the one who got her teeth fixed for her.

  Smiling at me in the dark.

  Jimmie, she says, when you going to take off those sunglasses. You can’t see the movie. She likes a man who carries a gun, but she can’t say why.

  The girls down where Patty works all tell her I look like him. I just laugh, buy her a diamond, tell her I work for the Board of Trade.

  There’s a guy named Ralph Alsman’s arrested all the time because he looks like him. The story’s in the papers. How he keeps robbing banks.

  There’s nothing better to do. Rob a bank, go to a movie, buy a paper. It’s all the same.

  I read the paper all the time, and I start out thinking I don’t know the man. Then I think that could be me.

  You have to keep your mind busy or you go nuts. Think of Homer beating it by tying string to flies he caught while he stood time on the mats in Pendleton. You go nuts without something to do. You buy a little time out of the heat.

  I bet the girls wouldn’t know what to do if I was him. Wouldn’t want me to really be him. It only gives them something to talk about without no customers while Patty’s putting on her hat and I’m leaning in the doorway waiting for her to blow.

  I like Patty good enough, with her smile and all. She is nice and heavy leaning on my arm when we walk on the street. My hand will be in my pocket on the gun, and I’ll tap her leg with it through the clothes. She’ll smile. Our secret. My husband, she says, only has the revolver they gave him.

  I like Patty. She’ll do for now. But she’s not Terry.

  Sometimes, I think I see Terry in the Loop when I’m down there with a bag of corn feeding pigeons. Out of the house pretending I’m working. I’ll be looking at the birds and her legs will walk by and I’ll follow them up and something will go wrong.

  I want to ask the doll where she got those legs from, but they just clip along through the crowd of strutting pigeons.

  It’s like that with a day to kill downtown. Her hand waving for a cab. And in the store windows, I see all the things I could buy that she would like. And all the other women, their hair thrown off their forehead just like hers, tilting their heads and thinking that the stuff they see will make them look like Terry. I can’t go and get her. South Bend wasn’t enough, and they’ve hidden her in some county jail. For harboring.

  There has been a fire on a boat that had a party going on it. A little boy in a sailor hat is crying behind a glass window. It’s beginning to fill with smoke in there, and you can’t hear him cry. People are jumping off the ship. The railings are giving out, and people are falling into the water. There is a priest swimming with the boys. And then it is night, and the moon is shining, and the burning ship is shining on the water. Along the shore bodies are washing up, and people and police are looking through them.

  So, you’re out, Pete is saying as we drive south out of Lima. They’ll go up to the farm while we’ll go down to Cincinnati.

  You’re out, I say. I hadn’t seen them since I got parole. I was in Lima by the time they broke Michigan City. Dumb. I see you got my message, I say.

  We’re laughing. There he was standing at the dayroom door. Too many pistols. Too many shots had been fired. Terry would be at the house.

  Thanks.

  Mac is reading off directions. Left here, right, right here. Something they learned from Baron Lamm’s gang. In the dark. Clark is sucking on his fingers. He shot himself. Kind of rusty, he is saying, his finger in his mouth. The sheriff didn’t look too good.

  We told him, Pete said, that we were Indiana state parole officers. Mac laughs. He didn’t believe us. They laugh. Nervous.

  You’re out. You’re out, I say.

  You should’ve not locked up the sheriff’s wife, Mac says. Right here.

  I tell you he’ll be all right, Pete says.

  It’s going to be tough watching him die from across the room and behind bars, Mac says.

  It’s not that bad. He’ll be okay.

  He’d been square with me. The food is good.

  There’s just no going back, somebody says in the dark.

  The sun is just getting into people’s eyes. The light going all one color on the store windows. Mothers yanking the kids on trolleys to get them home in time to make supper. It takes longer for the men to get off and on the Toledo scales by the door. Harder to think. Almost time to go home. Not enough time to start something new. The tellers begin stacking the coins, and the hack’s in the basement looking for work.

  When we were together around a kitchen table planning a job, drinking beers but no hard stuff, and it would come that time of day, why, we’d all know it. And someone goes to the window and looks out, another stretches out on the davenport, reads the morning papers again. Not working.

  After getting out of the pen we’d show up at the bank, 2:45 on me dot. The bank was closed. Closed from Roosevelt’s holiday and never opened. We’d stand there, heavy in the vests and the guns. Looking through the bars and then looking real quick to see if anyone has seen us. Time thrown all off by something that happened years ago when we weren’t in the world.

  I hear in Mexico they go to sleep all the afternoon.

  It’s too hot for anything, even robbing the banks.

  Then there are just two pair of hands. Blackie’s throwing dice, shuffling cards, and counting poker chips. Jim’s writing, turning pages in a book, and accepting a law degree. Then just Blackie’s hands, his fingers tapping on a felt-covered table, waiting for the cards to be dealt. Then Blackie spreading the cards in his hand, looking them over and getting ready to bet.

  Somewhere in the Wisconsin countryside and Pete saying, That’s it. I’m feeling pretty good. We could be anywhere now. The fields all gleaned. Some shocks still standing. It’s a big Buick, and the cold wind is blowing through it since we’ve taken out the windows.

  We’re going to take them to the hideout, says Mac, kidding.

  Meaning the two citizens we have.

  Can you cook? I am asking the lady without smiling.

  She’s wearing Pete’s coat. The fellow’s got on Pete’s hat.

  Pete’s not even cold.

  After a fashion, says the lady.

  So we go along watching the phone wires. Down to two and then one. Birds all puffed up on them. Then no wires at all, just the fields and the white sky.

  Pete runs them out into a turned field. Mac changes the plates. Pete turns them away, back to the wind. The three of them out in the big field. Pete ties their hands and then he comes back half the way, stops and goes back to get his hat and coat.

  After Greencastle, we could kick back. It had been Homecoming weekend at the c
ollege, and the stores were making big deposits. Pete feeling grand. I say to him, Why don’t we move in with you two and share a place? He says, Sure, without asking the girls. At the Clarendon, we carried the bags with the guns while the boy took the rest. Margaret set out right away to bake the new money. Crumbling the bills as we made fists, then smoothing them out. All the time we talked about what to do next. Not thinking about it at all. It takes time for new money to get old. But it all fell apart when Terry didn’t do her bit. She sat and made up for hours though we weren’t going anywhere. One day there was no breakfast on the table. What gives?

  There’s your girl friend, says Margaret.

  Terry starts right up. I can’t cook.

  Well, you better start learning, I say.

  Pete making a fist all the time and the green squeezing out through the fingers.

  If they don’t know me, they don’t know how to say my name. The g is like in girl or gun. When they showed up from the Star and News at the farm and asked Dad what he thought about me and said the name, Dad just said, I dont know him, never heard of me. But he’s a junior, they said.

  That’s not my name, Dad said. And he pronounced it for them.

  That’s all changed now, they said to him.

  The old man just sat there right in front of them.

  That’s okay. Left all that behind. Even left that g behind.

  Who told me that? Toms of the Star in Tucson while we waited for Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin to double-cross us. He came up to the bars during the sideshow, all those locals going by to look at us for a quarter. Pete steaming at Leach. Mac saying how great the weather was down there. Toms called me by my real name and told me the story. He asks me if that’s how I wanted to be known, by the other name and all. Hell, it wouldn’t do any good. It’s out of our hands, just like everything else.

  The police are leaving after doing nothing. They open the door, and there is a woman standing on the other side just about to knock. Shows she’s surprised to see them, but she knows them all by name. She asks them if it is that time of month again. They nod and file out, the plainclothes first and then the uniforms. She stops one who is eating a sandwich as he goes by, takes out a hanky, and polishes his badge. AU I had was a big bolt wrapped up in a neckerchief. I kept hitting him but only knocking off his straw hat. He’d pick it up and put it on again, and I’d knock it off. He was making that godawful sound, and I could hear the Masons come running. He didn’t have no money. I didn’t know a thing then. Just a kid. Same grocer gave me a talking to when I’d swiped some jawbreakers. He knew my dad. I ran, and someone chucked a bottle after me. They found me in the barn.