Alive and Dead in Indiana Read online

  They told me later I swallowed my tongue. Last thing I can remember is the towel on my face. Hotel Drake in gold. And the smell of the ether.

  I should’ve had a local. But I couldn’t stand the thought of that, of looking at them when they did it. I wanted to wake up different.

  I was always waking up the same.

  The dimple was gone. But I could see where it had been. And the mole left a mark.

  I was puffy and sore.

  I saw a picture in a newspaper of a boy that turned out to be a picture of all the boys in a high-school class, one face on top of another. It didn’t look like anything, and it had all the parts. I remembered that picture, looking at my face. Rob another bank and I’d have to get rid of this one too.

  I wonder what I looked like with my face all blue. No way to forget it. That’s me, all right.

  Homer was thinking twice, cursing the tattoo. Finally went ahead and called it a goddamn mess. Lester sitting around drinking from a bottle of beer changes his mind a couple of times. Keeps what he has. Damn doctor was probably glad to let him.

  Blackie sits and sketches all through his trial. The DA is examining a witness. Blackie’s lawyer starts to get up to make an objection. Blackie stops him, says, Relax, you’ve been beaten by the best, smiles at the DA, who is telling the jury that people like Blackie must be stopped.

  The cops are happy to show us the guns and vests. We act dumb. What do you call this? we are saying.

  Oh, that. That’s your submachine gun. They have some .45s too.

  We tell them we’re from the East, doing a story on the crime wave. Sports is my regular beat, says Homer.

  Yeah, well I’ve never been east, says one cop.

  You should see the Fair in Chicago while you’re in this neck of the woods, says the other one.

  They talk it up. We listen.

  I like hearing about myself. It’s like being at your own funeral.

  Being tourists got us in trouble in Tucson. Pete telling a cop he thought he was being followed, and the cop saying no. Tourists from the North. And I take pictures of cops directing traffic. You look good in a uniform, I tell them. The Sam Browne belts. The buttons picking up the light, turning white in the picture.

  Pete used to say, I wish you’d stop that. It’s not smart.

  I’d say, It’s my hobby.

  We tell the cops in Warsaw we’ll send them the story when we get done writing it.

  The governor is in his car, racing to Sing Sing so he can see Blackie before he goes to the chair at midnight. Sirens getting closer, governor’s car, motorcycles, everything speeding.

  Guess who, I say to Margaret through her door. When she opens it, she knows me right away.

  What happened to your face? You in an accident? I try to laugh. It’s not her fault. I go on in. She’s tough, but she misses Pete. I give her some money from Mason City and tell her about the tear gas and the bag of pennies. She says she doesn’t think it would do any good. You never know, I say.

  I’ve been down seeing my folks on the farm, I say.

  She says that she reads about me all the time in the papers.

  You know half of it ain’t true.

  It wasn’t no good with nothing to plan.

  She says she was at a dance when I broke out of Crown Point. She says she made sure a cop saw her that night. Says she makes sure a cop sees her every night. She tells me she’s thinking about going into vaudeville. People had been around to ask.

  I could hear her sister in the next room taking a bath.

  It didn’t matter now that we had shields. They kept shooting, and the people with their hands up got hit first. The bags were too light. I was working the inside with two guys I didn’t know. They were the only ones who would work with us now. Homer was outside with a rifle and Lester by the Hudson.

  We walked out and everyone started to get hit. Homer in the head from a shotgun that took the pants leg off a local. I pulled him into the car.

  He said we should wear something different when we did South Bend.

  New faces. Sure.

  So we had on overalls over the vests. Always a clown. We wore straws too. Changed his luck. Pieces of straw mixed in with his hair in the hole in his head. Lester wanted to count the money again.

  Blackie walks with the priest. The warden is there, the governor, two guards. Blackie says so long. Someone is playing a harmonica.

  Mrs. Mint saying again over ice cream that Romania isn’t a country, just what was left of a place after the war. Patty holds the cherry up for me.

  I don’t know anything about the world.

  I’m seen everywhere.

  Cops in England are searching the boats going to France. Every body that turns up is what’s left of me.

  I could call the Leach home, hear him stutter while he tries to keep me on the line. But it could be anybody with a gun. I’m worth too much now that the governors got together.

  I’ll check in with Henry Ford. Send a messenger to Detroit with a note. All the models I left on the edge of Chicago. Good little cars.

  Mrs. Mint told me she’s already turned the bed down back at Patty’s place. But I want to stay and watch the cartoons.

  The lights are going up and everybody’s squinting coming out of the dark. I can see who’s been next to me. And Patty crying. Mrs. Mint looking through her purse for a hanky for her. I can’t keep my eyes open. Pete, Mac. I’ll see their Mouth at Wrigley tomorrow, give him what I can spare from the trip.

  Patty touching my hand. Then both of the women are squeezing by, heading for the aisle. The crowd is buzzing and I can smell the smoke from the lobby. It’s cold in here. Just this once I’d like to open my eyes and have it be all different.

  VOCATION

  This is a city of poets. Every Wednesday, when the sirens go off, a poet will tell you that, after thirty years, Fort Wayne is still seventh on Hitler’s bombing list. And you half expect to hear the planes, a pitch lower than the sirens, their names as recognizable as those of automobiles. Heinkels lumber out of the east, coast up Taylor Street, or follow the Pennsy from one GE plant to another. Stukas dive on the wire-and-die works, starting their run at the International Harvester bell tower, left standing on purpose, and finish by strafing the Tokheim yards. Junkers wheel, and Messerschmitts circle. All the time there would be sirens.

  Grandfather keeps his scrapbooks upstairs in the window seat of the empty bedroom. When he dies, they are to be mine, and I am to give them to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Grandfather started keeping these scrapbooks when he felt the time was right for war. He felt the war coming. In the years before the war, the scrapbooks that he kept were pieces of the world he found—a field outside of Peking where old people go to die, a man being buried alive, all the All-American football teams of those years, the bar of soap Dillinger used at the Crown Point jail, a man cut into three parts by a train, a Somalian warrior with no clothes on. These things made sense to Grandfather.

  A real poet knows how to bomb his own city.

  In the window seat where Grandfather keeps his finished scrapbooks, there is also his collection of missals, all the handouts from Wendell Willkie’s campaign, and everything Father Coughlin ever wrote. The scrapbooks have interesting covers. There is one with a mallard duck on the wing worked into the leather. One is made of wood and has an oak leaf carved into it. Most, though, have only company names or Season’s Greetings.

  I have never been able to read all the scrapbooks. They are in no order, and nothing in them is. Every page is dated with the newspaper itself. He went straight through the book. One day I can read about the Battle of Britain, the next day VE day, the next the Soviet Pact. I have never gotten to the bottom of the window seat.

  Once I found Hitler’s list.

  There are cottonwoods along the rivers. In the spring, a poet will look up at the undefended sky and announce, “At any moment we could be destroyed.”

  When I was little, I would pra
ctice making bomb noises, the whistling sound of a bomb falling. I would take a deep breath, form my lips, begin. I could make it sound as if the bomb were falling away from me, or on me, by modulating the volume, adjusting its fade or rise. I preferred the perspective of the plane, starting with the loud high note. A second or two of silence as the bomb is out of earshot. Then the tiny puff of air reaching me from the ground.

  This is why old men smoke at night in the middle of parks. They do it to attract bombers.

  Mother remembers certain things about the war. She remembers making dolls out of hollyhocks, taping butcher paper on the windows, and not being able to look at the newspaper until Grandfather had cut out the things he wanted. Once, in the A&P, she lost her underwear while waiting in line to buy milk. There was no rubber to hold up the underwear. She tells me this story every time I think I have troubles. Mother danced in the USO shows for the troops from Baer Field and Casad. Once she shared the stage with Bob Hope.

  The whole city watches as the skywriter finishes the word.

  SURRENDER.

  Before going through the scrapbooks, I would sit on the window seat as if to hold the lid on. I would look out over the front lawn, across Poinsette to Hamilton Park. Through the pine trees and the blooming cherries, I could see the playground and the circling tether ball, the pavilion, the war memorial, the courts. I wasn’t old enough to change the world.

  At a high-school bake sale, the frosted gingerbread men remind a teacher of her students drilling on the football field during the war. They wore letter jackets with shiny white sleeves, or bright sweaters with stripes and decorations. They carried brooms at trail arms in the sunset.

  How does evil get into the world?

  Witches. Or children crying, “Catch me, if you can.”

  I watch Mother feed a baby. “Nnnnaaawwwhh,” she goes, “here it comes in for a landing.” She conducts the spoon on a yawing course, approaching. “Open the hangar door,” she orders.

  Mother looks at me as the baby sucks the spoon. “Remember?” she says.

  “I remember,” I say.

  She sends out the second wave of creamed cereal.

  In the fall, the new Chevrolets arrive, and Hafner sets up his old searchlight. It is surplus from the war, painted silver now. The diesel motor rotates the light. The light itself comes from a flame magnified and reflected into a beam. People come across the street to look. They look at the new cars lined up.

  From Hafner’s lot, you can look across the St. Joe River, south, to where three other beams sweep back and forth in the night. Those are coming from Allen County Motors, Jim Kelley Buick, and DeHaven Chevrolet. From the west is the lone light of Means Cadillac tracing a tight circle and toppling over into a broad arc, catching for an instant the tip of the bank building downtown and righting itself like a top. To the north is another battery of lights playing off one another, intersecting, some moving faster than others. Toward you and away. Bench’s AMC, Northway Plymouth, Ayres’ Pontiac. The illusion of depth in the night. The general vicinity of each source.

  What are they looking for?

  Something new is in the world.

  There was a Looney Tunes cartoon Engineer John showed almost every day on his TV show. It was made during the war. Hitler, upset with the way the war is going, flies a mission himself, only to have the plane dismantled over Russia by “Gremlins from the Kremlin.”

  I would look through the scrapbooks to see how it really happened.

  There has been a plane circling all day. There appears to be a streak of smoke coming from its tail. But I’m sure it’s some kind of banner too high to read.

  In the scrapbook with the wood cover, there is a picture of Gypsy Rose Lee selling war bonds.

  This is the only picture in all of Grandfather’s scrap-books where he’s made a note. It says: I bet the Lord is pleased.

  During the war, the top hemisphere of the streetlight globes were painted with a black opaque glaze. They stayed that way after the war. No one seems to mind. Parts of dead insects show in the lower half of the globe. There’s more and more of them in there summer after summer.

  Grandfather read meters for his living. During the war, he was made block warden because everyone remembered the way he’d kept calm during The War of the Worlds. They also figured that he knew a little bit about electricity.

  The city practiced blackouts all the time because they’d heard that Fort Wayne was seventh on the list. One night everyone stumbled into Hamilton Park for a demonstration. A man from the Civil Defense wanted to emphasize the importance of absolute dark, lights really out. Grandfather said that the man lit a match when the rest of the city was all dark. He said that you could see the whole park and the faces of everyone in the park. They were all looking at the match. He said you could see the houses. He said you could read the street sign. Poinsette.

  The man blew out the match with one breath. The people went home in the dark.

  Were they wishing they could do something about the stars?

  They kept German prisoners in camps near the Nickel Plate yards. People would go out to the camps and look at the prisoners. Everyone felt very safe, even the women. Many of the prisoners had worked on streets downtown, or in the neighborhoods, and were friendly with the people.

  Some of these prisoners stayed in town after the war. Some sent for their families. You ask them, they’ll tell you—Fort Wayne is a good place to live.

  In one of Grandfather’s scrapbooks, there is a series of pictures taken from the nose of a B-17. The first picture is of the bombs falling away from the plane. In the background are the city streets already burning. In the second picture, the nose of another bomber is working its way into the frame and under the bombs, smaller now by seconds. The third picture shows the plane in the path of the falling bombs. One has already taken away the stabilizer without exploding. The perspective is really terrifying. The fourth picture shows the plane skidding into its tailspin. All this time the bombs are falling. And the fifth picture is the plane falling with the bombs.

  Grandfather has arranged these pictures to be read down the page. One after the other.

  Casad is a GSO depot built during the war just outside of town. I go there sometimes to watch them dust the fields nearby, the fertile strip near the bend in the Maumee. High school kids race by on the township roads on their way to Ohio to drink. I don’t know if they even use Casad for anything now.

  Casad was built to be confusing from the air. All you can see, even from across the road, are mounds of different-colored stones. Some of the piles are real, others are only camouflaged roofs. If you look closely at some of them, you can see a small ventilation pipe or maybe some type of window. The important things are underground. There are stories that date from the war of one-ton chunks of rubber in storage. They feared the damage that would be caused if they dropped any during transportation. Tin, copper, nickel, tungsten, and mercury were all supposed to have been stored there. From the road, quarry piles and sandpiper tents hump out of sight through the cornfield to the river.

  It must all look pretty harmless from the sky.

  The high school kids will stop on the way back. Late at night, they will sit on the hoods of their cars guessing which of the shadows are real. They are waiting to sober up and weave home.

  Mother remembers his Prospero at the Civic Theatre. He lived here years ago. The only time I saw Robert Lansing act was on the TV show where he played the wing commander and flew B-17s. All I remember now are the shots in the cramped cockpit with the flights of bombers in the background. Most of the action took place on that tiny set, two seats and the man in the turret, aft, always moving as the actors talked or rocked from the flak or were riddled by “bandits” or feathered the number three engine.

  Robert Lansing visited our high school and talked about acting. He said there was a method that allowed him to use his past experiences in new situations. He said he was afraid to fly. He told us this standing in the middle of
the gym floor, targeted in the cross hairs of the time-line.

  In the stores downtown, there are bowls of lemon drops and cherry drops next to the cash registers. The merchants have broken into some of the supplies of the bomb shelters in the basements of their stores. They found that the water had soured years ago in the tins. The candy is sweet even though it is over twenty years old. They say the candy and water have been replaced in the bomb shelters. “No sense letting anything go to waste,” they say. Every time you buy something, the person running the register will say, “Have some candy.” And then they will mention where the candy comes from.

  The small drums the candy came in are being used as wastebaskets. They are painted drab. Sometimes, the stenciled CANDY has been crossed out. The Civil Defense emblem can still be seen—the pyramid in the circle, pointing up to the sky.

  Grandfather saw Bob Hope in the coffee shop of the Hotel Anthony. He showed him the clipping he had been carrying around for years, the one about Mother dancing in Bob Hope’s show. Grandfather said that he wished Bob Hope could be home for Christmas but was grateful that someone did what Bob Hope did.

  In the fall, the wind turns the trees to silent puffs of smoke.

  Grandfather wants to know why I want to be a poet. He shows me a clipping of Eldon Lapp, who goes to our church. There is a picture of Eldon in his flight jacket and soft hat. During the war, Eldon was shot down over Germany. Before his capture, he lived for months in the Black Forest. He survived that long with the aid of another flyer who had been trained as a Boy Scout and had been in Germany during a world jamboree. This flyer knew all the tricks—how to fish with a line and makeshift hook, how to conceal a trail, how to secure a camp, how to read signs. Eldon swore then that if he got out of this alive he would dedicate his life to scouting.

  “That’s vocation,” Grandfather says to me.