Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  “About sundown, especially after harvest, we’d have to start watching for long, dust trails heading for Galatia. They were like skinny tornadoes, but these weren’t going to veer off. They were going to arrive on Main Street, sure as hell, and touch down like a thrown punch. And they were coming for the likes of us. We townies — except maybe sometimes for the biggest of us — we’d scatter like mice running for holes in the wall. If you were young enough, though, you didn’t have to worry. You could stand back and watch and learn that your time was coming some year. It was kind of an initiation rite, but we never saw it that way. We wanted to avoid it, not pass it.

  “Even though I was kind of a squirt, one Halloween I made a miscalculation and learned I’d come of age. I stood watching the batch from down behind Otis come riding in on their dust clouds that curled back behind them like the tail of a giant bull. I wasn’t worried, because I thought I was too young, and besides, for the last couple of years I’d been picking out hidey-holes all around town. No place, of course, was very far from any other place in little Galatia. I knew about an empty cistern, two storm cellars, an old shack — I can’t remember all of them, but I remember all of them were dead ends, you might say. The way out was the way in, so you better not be seen going in. We were like prairie dogs — get too far from one of your holes, and you’ve had it.

  “That Halloween the dust clouds started rising from the east, then from the south, then another from the west. Those things were scary. You see, Galatia was at a kind of crossroads, and the damn Otis batch had us in a pincer movement. They didn’t know the term, but they knew how to hunt. Karl Klinghammer and I stayed around to watch the streets empty till it was just us two shrimps. When the farm boys unpiled from their jalopies and rattletrap trucks, they got mad they couldn’t find anybody. They’d come for bear, and the bears were in hibernation. So they milled around and decided to go for mice.

  “One of them said for us to hear it, ‘Let’s get them two little turds.’ They were hoping somebody bigger would come out to rescue us. Karl took off one way, and I went the other. He told me later, when they caught him hiding down behind the gas station, they stripped him to his drawers, took a bucket of used crankcase oil and daubed him top to bottom with thick, black oil and grease, and sent him home which was back across town. Half Galatia staring out their windows at the poor kid. From then on, I’m sorry to say, little blue-eyed Karl was Sambo. The name even came up in his obituary.

  “I was short, but I was fast, but their longer legs covered more ground. I saw I wasn’t going to make it to any of my hidey-holes, so I dodged behind old-man Schenk’s place because he had a dilapidated Chic Sale he’d stopped using when he plumbed out his house. We didn’t call it a Chic Sale then. It was just a privy or some other terms that are on the coarse side. The thing was nothing more than worn-out boards full of knotholes and wide cracks between the planks. You could say it was well-ventilated. Half the boys were right on my heels, and I barely managed to make it inside and throw down the latch just in the nick. They really had their piss and vinegar up by then. Piss and beer’s what I should say. They were a pack of dogs smelling the kill. They pounded on the door and shook the Chic Sale and shouted in at me, ‘Come out of there, you little fart, and face the music!’

  “I didn’t think they’d tip the thing over because old Schenk was known to enjoy slapping around troublesome boys, especially when he was drunk. Besides, he had folks down by Otis and up by Milberger. Those country boys were yelling, but there wasn’t any cussing except to call me names of a certain sort. One of them said, ‘Who’s in there?’

  “That was good news. If they didn’t know who it was, I might survive without any long-term damage. They were looking in, but it was too dark inside for them to tell, even though there was moonlight on the grass, and I could recognize some of them. And I kept my cap pulled down low. They started arguing about lifting the privy up to pull me out like a nut out of his shell. My only hope was old Schenk would hear the ruckus and come out and start laying hands on them, but there wasn’t any light on in his house. He probably was in there with his bottle all right, three sheets to the wind. Couldn’t hear, and if he could hear, couldn’t move.

  “One of the bunch said he had a better idea and pulled them off a ways to huddle. Then they came back and surrounded the privy. I just knew I was going to get stuffed down that hole and end up with a name worse than Mudhead.

  “They all sort of turned away from me, then, one at a time, turned around again. They had a plan. They were saying, ‘Where is he?’ ‘Over in the corner.’ ‘Okay, he’s yours, Richter.’

  “Then this skinny thing comes through a knothole. You know I don’t like snakes, so I whacked at it with my cap, and Richter Diebenkorn let out a yell. It wasn’t a snake. It was Diebenkorn’s dipsey-noodle. Then it popped in through another hole, and he let loose with it and hosed down my shoes before I could jump away. Then another stream came in through a crack in the door, then one from the other side. I got up on the seat. It was a one-holer, so that was good. The streams were arcing before they could get higher than my pant legs. I was mostly out of the line of fire — you know, out of the trajectories. But then somebody got boosted up to the little vent-window under the eaves, and there wasn’t any escape, except maybe down the hole.

  “Oh, they got me. Did they get me! Head to toe. Didn’t leave a dry inch. All I could do was put my hands over my face. Hell. They’d been drinking beer, so their reservoirs were full, and they took turns. I mean, there were so many peckers coming through those planks, that privy looked like a horse chestnut turned inside out. They were saying things like ‘Come on! Let me have a shot at him!’ Or ‘Aim for his eyes!’ Or ‘If that little pizzle of yours can’t hit him, mine will!’

  “The only justice was when somebody yelled at the fat boy, Albert Tesselhoff, ‘Damnit, Tesselhoff, you just got me! Watch your goddamn aim!’

  “But I refused to yell, so they still didn’t know who I was, and there was no way on earth I was coming out. Then they started going dry, and finally one of them says, ‘Man, he stinks!’ And they all left.

  “They were probably waiting for me around the corner. I knew they weren’t going to touch a pee-soaked kid now, but they’d like to know who they got so they could pin a name on him. You know, something like ‘Carry Nation’s boy, Yuri.’ The day would come when I might be over to Hoisington or down at Great Bend and somebody would walk up and say, ‘How you doing, Pisspants?’ And my future wife would ask me to explain it. Or maybe I wouldn’t even have a wife. I mean, what girl would want to marry a boy who’d been hosed down like a scarecrow on fire? You see, right there along with me, my future was locked in that Chic Sale.

  “I wasn’t coming out until I was sure the coast was clear, so I sat there, first steaming, then shivering. Teeth chattering. Trying to huddle up in those stinking clothes. But it was better than getting recognized.

  “About midnight, after when they usually left town, I dared a sneak for home. I crept through backyards, behind bushes, wherever there was shadow. Like an old alley cat. Which is also what I smelled like. Have you ever walked in soaking-wet corduroy pants? Shoes squeaking?

  “It was so late I knew Ma would be worried and waiting up for me, but hell, I had no choice. I went down to a little dug-pond and slipped in real quiet. Cold? Man alive! Then I got out and went on home. She was always the kindest woman you could hope to meet, even when she had the paddle out. She looked at me and only said, ‘Gott im Himmel!’

  “I told her I had to hide in a pond to escape that batch from down behind Otis. She was proud of me. She ran a hot bath with a bar of lye soap, and gave me hot tea, and let me have a jigger of schnapps, and put me to bed under the best quilt. The next morning Pop said, ‘I hear you used your head, boy, but next time find yourself a dry hole.’ But there wasn’t any next time, and I never got a nickname, and I later got to marry your beautiful aunt. But I waited till we’d been together a few years before I ever told h
er about that Halloween.”

  3

  In the Light of Ghosts

  ALLOW ME, LUCID READER, to argue the existence of ghosts. Set aside for the moment your suspicion this writer has at last gone around that bend immemorial, a trip three or four of you may have deemed already accomplished sometime back when he began praising a particular letter of the alphabet. I won’t defend my position on that bend, but I do hope to persuade you to an enlarged view of ghostdom.

  If a ghost is an immaterial immanence able to work changes in the material world, such as scaring somebody, then its actuality seems to me no more questionable than other immanences, such as love or morality, mathematics or logic, or — the greatest of all — memory, that force from which our humanity, our humanness, our civilization, our loves and lives, proceed. We can survive without morality or arithmetic or logic, but without memory, we haven’t a chance. We are who we are and where we are in no insignificant measure because of immaterial memories. If you are not yet in accord, try this test: point to love — not the object of love or its expression but the “thing” itself. Or wrap up a carton of courage and send it prepaid to one fearful; give a birthday box of belief to the skeptical; for the corrupt, pour them a healing draft of invigorating ethics; go down a lane and seek the fountain of truth. Take any concept we live by — fidelity or deity or gravity or any other invisibility that keeps us from floating off into the ether of one realm or another — and snap a photo of it and stick it to the refrigerator for those moments when you need a reminder of its importance. Do we not live according to immanences as much as substances?

  You know all of this because you know that to speak the name of anything, real or imagined, is to give it existence in the actual world of sound. From nothing instantly rises something. I might say to you, before we start our stroll into a deep woods or down a dark alley, “Keep an eye out for the Nodgort. It can be dangerous here.” With those words, at least for a moment, I’ve put the dreaded Nodgort into your life, and you must make a decision about the reality of its threat to you. (Lest I lose you in needless speculation, I confess I coined the word and, as far as I know, in setting down that sentence I’m likely the only person on Earth who has ever uttered or written Nodgort.)

  In some ways, the following pages are about Nodgorts — quoz of a certain immaterial kind, and how they came to shape the route and events on the road Q and I were slowly finding into the Southwest. I hope now you’ll sanction talk of ghosts of several orders and at least for the moment accept their theoretical existence.

  On a rainy Tuesday we were in southwestern Missouri, six miles from Kansas, eight from Oklahoma, and a half hour from Arkansas; more specifically, we were at the intersection of Fourth Street and Main, the historical center of Joplin, where old Route 66 once passed through. I sat at a table in the southeast corner of the public library, and before me was a three-inch file of articles and clippings about the Quapaw Ghost Light, also called the Hornet or Seneca Spook Light, the Ozark Mystery Light, the Devil’s Jack-o’-Lantern, or a couple of other combinations of those adjectives. I’d heard about it for half-a-century but had only then finally gotten around to looking into the truth — or untruth — of it. Q was in another place in the library where she was reading microfilmed newspaper accounts of a certain dire event in 1901 that I’d first learned of a decade before hearing about the strange light near Hornet, Missouri, ten miles distant, down along the Oklahoma border on the old Quapaw Reservation.

  After a couple of hours, finding me halfway through the Ghost Light reports, she placed in front of me several photocopies from two Joplin newspapers of a little more than a century earlier. “You’d better set the Ghost Light aside,” she said, and returned to the microfilm reader. I pushed back the file and began reading her gatherings from 1901 when the place where I sat had been a bank lobby in the corner of the Joplin Hotel, then the social and political locus of town. A long sequence of events had culminated only a hundred feet away, at the southwest corner of Fourth and Main. Instead of stories about a Ghost Light, I took up the shade of one William Grayston.

  I want to tell you this calamitous tale not necessarily objectively (for human objectivity, like ghosts, is possible only in theory and has even less substance than a Nodgort) but at least accurately and evenhandedly, although when I reach the conclusion, I’ll have to interpret. The story, one I’ve long wanted to relate, was earlier impossible to me because I didn’t have the details until Q, an investigator of no mean order, began dragging them into the light, a ghostly light. Or perhaps I mean the light of ghosts. I am, in a sense, a participant in this crime, and my life has been turned a certain way because of those occurrences in 1901. While you read the next some pages, your life too will be participant.

  By the end of its first quarter century, Joplin, Missouri, was a mining community on a rapid clip toward high prosperity, a lead and zinc boomtown full of situations and characters commensurate with such development. Any place whose early history contains a Three-Finger Pete and a county coroner surnamed Coffin is bound to have a past as lively as it is deadly. What cattle were then doing to Dodge City (not far westward), metals were doing in Joplin. We all know, in America, ore cannot be taken from the ground below without the assists of saloons, games of chance, and houses of ill fame on top of it. When such gathered enterprises lie within a gallop of two “dry” states and an alcohol-prohibited Indian Territory, booze will determine things as rainfall does a forest. The usual lubricant of a spinning roulette wheel or a bordello is alcohol, and without it, mechanical rotations and purchased pleasures tend to come to a frictioned, squeaking halt.

  One of Joplin’s folk historians, Dolph Shaner, wrote in 1948 of that town named after a Methodist preacher:

  Several decades ago, when a crusade was being organized, one of the speakers libeled the city as being as bad “as Babylon with its hanging gardens.” But it wasn’t that bad. There were saloons, gambling places, assignation houses, and bawdy houses. Time was when a circus parade brought faces of dozens of female denizens to upstairs windows along Main Street.

  Those denizens, of course, were not one-flight-up dentists or lawyers or even typists; their profession was older, at least as old as hanging gardens. A man was to tell me, “Fourth and Main in nineteen hundred was a place a miner could come up above ground to wet his whistle and his weasel until his Saturday wages were gone.”

  At that intersection of Fourth and Main — the topographic, political, and social heart of town, the location where north-south electric trolleys crossed east-west lines — stood the two best hotels: the three-storey Joplin (the center of the “brick hotel ring”) and the newer, eight-floor Keystone built by a Pennsylvanian and therefore not a component of an oligarchy I shall soon speak of. On opposite corners were the Worth Building and its aptly named House of Lords Restaurant and Bar at street side, with a gambling den on the second floor and a flesh parlor on the third. Catercorner stood a two-storey, ramshackle frame building that had been moved fifteen miles by mules across the Kansas border in 1873, the year of the official founding of Joplin. On its upper floor were blossoms in a hanging garden, and at sidewalk level was the Club Saloon where, a few years before our year in question, a fatal shooting happened.

  (Here’s a little incident from about 1900 to help set the tone for events to come: An attractive guest in one of the Main Street hotels arrived in Joplin by train. She was selling encyclopedias. Aware that a mining town is only slightly more literary than, say, a mine shaft, she had learned how to circumvent such unlettering. Counting on her shapeliness to gain entry to a businessman’s office, she would pointedly mention her wish to see the beauty of the countryside: If only she had a buggy — perhaps at eleven on Tuesday morning. At that hour on that day in front of her hotel, the number of shined buggies with men, mustaches waxed to perfection and hat brims dashingly rolled, was unusual. At half past eleven, one expectant blade went inside to inquire after the bookish miss. “What!” said the clerk. “Why, she ca
ught the evening train for points west last night!” Evidence of this story may be the large number of unsoiled encyclopedias showing up at estate sales a few years later.)

  In 1924 Joplin became so desirous of cleaning itself up it prohibited “cheek-to-cheek dancing, extreme side-stepping, whirling, dipping, dog walking, shuffling, toddling, Texas tommying, the Chicago walk, the cake-eater or Flapper hop, and stiff-arm dancing.” Whether you might be cited in Joplin eighty years later for, say, an excessive side step or a bit of toddling, I don’t know, but I do know the city is no longer much of a mining town or particularly “wide-open.” Where once stood the House of Lords Restaurant and Bar and its upstairs sportations is a pocket park not of wetted whistles and weasels but of birdsong and squirrels. At the time Q and I were at the historic crux of Joplin — accurately depicted in Thomas Hart Benton’s mural in city hall — words like tavern and saloon were in some circles almost as coarse as whorehouse, and it took me three inquiries in the library to learn the location of the nearest spirituous beverage, although it was only a block away in a restaurant I’ll call the Blue Tomato.

  It is not digressive, as you will see, to mention here a sign, partly overgrown and showing decay, I saw on the north end of Main Street. The hand-painted words came from Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man”:

  Vice Is A Monster Of So Frightful Mien,

  As, To Be Hated, Needs But To Be Seen,

  Yet Seen Too Oft, Familiar With Her Face,

  We First Endure, Then Pity, Then Embrace.

  For a pint and a quiet place to discuss ghostly histories emerging before us, Q and I walked a block east of Main to the Tomato, a pleasant establishment free of hard spirits, as one might guess from cash-register receipts imprinted with “SERVING JOPLIN IN JESUS NAME!” Ignoring the beloved American Aberrant Apostrophe (the one on the tab having wandered from the register and out the door to end up down the street on a CLOSED MONDAY’S sign), I asked our “server,” Jessie, a bubblelating young blonde, about the slogan. She said, “What slogan?” After she poured our glasses of ale, I mentioned to Q the catchphrase had me hoping to have service from the Anointed Himself, and Q responded, “How do you know you didn’t?” Alert the tabloids: JOPLIN JESUS, AKA JESSIE, SPOTTED SERVING SUDS.