Authors: Rob Levandoski
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 âer 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
.”
O
FFICIAL
G
UIDE
B
OOK OF THE
W
ORLD
'
S
F
AIR
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.