by Kris Radish
There weren't that many bottles, but it seemed to Rudy as if they were pointing the way for him. “That's cute,” he said aloud.
They reminded him of his mother, because where he grew up there was still a milkman and she used to line up the empty milk bottles down the long wooden steps at his house. Sometimes she would leave a bag of cookies or a pie or fresh baked rolls near them. Rudy had not bothered to go and see his parents since they retired and moved six years ago. He had a sudden unexpected urge to talk to his mother and tell her something nice. The urge started as a slow thought that gradually took hold of him so fiercely he thought he might cry.
“Jesus,” he said, trying to shake himself out of it. “They're just water bottles on the side of the damn road.”
When the thought would not leave him, Rudy picked up his radio and called in to the station.
“Hey, Brocter,” he said to the dispatcher. “Papa Goose out here chasing the duckies. What's the 10-80? Are they airborne? Crawling? How close am I if I'm near Hanson's farm?”
“Rudy,” answered Brocter, “is that you?”
“Yeah, it's me, who the hell do you think it is, the fucking Queen of England?”
“You sound kind of funny.”
“Well, it's me, okay?”
“Yeah,” said Brocter, still not sure. “What did you want again?”
By now Rudy had actually forgotten why he called in.
“Rudy?”
“Listen, I'm just on this walking thing out here, and I want to know if anyone has seen them yet today, that's all.”
“Geez man, are you sick?”
Rudy thought to himself that anyone who hadn't bothered to see his mother for six years must be sick. Now, where that came from he had no idea but he told Brocter, “No,” when he really wanted to say “Yes, frickin' absolutely, what's it to you?”
Brocter's voice squawked over the radio. “Nothing yet, but maybe they slept late because they haven't stopped or anything for shit, what was it, two days or something.”
“Well okay, then I'll just wait, but if you hear anything, call.”
Rudy couldn't eat his other donut after that. He slowed down, rolled down the window, and took a whiff of the morning. The spring air filled up his lungs and he held it inside of himself for as long as he could, thinking something strange again. He was picturing what the women looked like as they walked down this very stretch of highway.
“I feel like I'm drunk or something.” He put his coffee cup to his nose to see if it smelled funny. “Maybe Brocter's right, and I'm sick or something. Shit.”
Rudy knew he was getting close to the walkers when he spotted one of those big television trucks festooned with antennas parked alongside a ditch. Ahead of that, two other cars and a group of people were standing in a circle sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups. He had to break the news to them that they had to leave the women alone.
When Rudy got out of the car and his feet touched the highway, he felt as light as a feather, yet invincible, like he would do anything to make sure no one bothered a group of women he had never seen before in his life.
First he went to the television truck, totally forgetting that they had the power to send a vision of him clear across the county so fast it could make your head spin. He reviewed the sheriff's orders and warned them that if they went any closer, he would stop them. He said it in a kind way, softer than he might have on any other day of his life. Then he tipped his hat and walked toward the larger group of people. Rudy gave them a polite notice as well. A remark about the nice day, and then he was back inside of his car and studying his palms.
Once when Rudy was fifteen, he went with his cousin Mark to a fortune-teller at the county fair. The woman was so beautiful Rudy got an erection when he looked at her, and he had to pull his jacket down so far the zipper never quite worked the same after that. She looked into his eyes and ran her fingers back and forth across the lines that seemed to swallow up every inch of his hands.
“You a fine boy,” she told him in a hokey kind of foreign accent. “Someday, you make a lotta people, women specially, bery, bery happy.”
Then she winked at him and told him he would travel and see the world and that he would marry a woman with golden hair and have two big sons.
Sitting in his car now, with the sun barely touching the top of his forehead, Rudy traced the same lines in his hand and wondered at what point in his life he had stopped believing that beautiful woman. Was it when he goofed off his last two years in high school and lost any chance he might have had of getting into a good university? Was it two years after that when he flunked out of a small state college and ended up working at a tape plant eight hours a day where he used a big stick to separate rolls of gray tape that hung in sheets? Was it when he forgot to return Margo Blatten's phone call, Margo being the most beautiful woman he had ever met?
When he looked up, the reporters were way up ahead of him on the highway, walking slowly, but at least 150 yards behind what he decided must be the women walkers.
“Oh, piss!” He grabbed for his radio again. “Brocter!” he yelled into the microphone. “The mama ducks are airborne.”
“Ten-four, Big Quacker,” responded Brocter, laughing at his own ridiculous joke. Then he waited for Rudy to say something back, but Rudy didn't.
“Rudy? Yo, are you there?”
“Yeah, hey, Brocter, do you think I should walk behind them or drive in my car?”
“What?” Brocter was stunned that a deputy had bothered to ask his opinion.
“They're walking so slowly, it seems stupid to follow them in this big car.”
“Well, jeez, maybe you should ask them what would bother them the least. It seems like the Sheriff doesn't want them bothered, so you'd better ask them.”
“Yeah,” said Rudy, shaking his head up and down as if Brocter could actually see him. “Hey, I never thought of that. Thanks, Brocter, that's a great idea.”
“Yo,” said Brocter, shaking his head the exact same way but in total disbelief at the conversation he was about to end.
“Hey, Brocter,” said Rudy.
“What now?”
“Did I ever say thanks for all the shit you do all the time to help me out when I don't know what in the hell to do?”
“No man, you never say jack shit, just like everyone else.”
“Well then, thanks, Brocter.”
Rudy signed off then and flexed both hands in and out, as if the palms needed to be exercised. Then he pushed the magic button on his car that instantly rolled down every window in the squad car. After that, he just sat with his head out of the window, trying with all his might to hear the footsteps of the women walkers.
When he thought he had heard something, just a soft tap like someone might have stumbled and caught a heel that made them drop onto their toes, he inched the car forward slowly. As Rudy moved toward the women, he thought about being happy, really happy. So happy that you couldn't wait to get up in the morning. Then he thought about smelling the wet sagebrush in Arizona, and how his mother would look if she saw him standing at the door. He saw her reaching out her stubby fingers and bringing her hands to his face.
“Still got that mustache?” he imagined she would say while his father bellowed, “Who the hell is it?” in the background.
From out of nowhere, these thoughts about different places and people and himself started moving through his head, and for once Rudy knew why. He was elated that he had an answer for at least one of the questions that was floating around inside of him. “The footsteps,” he said out loud. “It's those damn footsteps of those women walkers.”
As the wind kicked up from the fields, the thoughts kept coming, flooding his mind. He thought about working with small children, and coming home at night to just one person. He thought about sleeping outside in a place just like this, where it wasn't crowded and where the dew would settle right onto his face so that he would feel damp and salty when the sun hit him at daybreak. He thought a
bout telling everyone who had ever been nice to him that he was grateful. Asking could he do anything for them. He thought about driving his mother to the rim of the Grand Canyon and buying her one of those pink visors at a gift shop.
Getting out of the car when he was close to the women walkers was not easy. As light as he had felt talking to the reporters, he felt unmovable now, shy and scared. Without taking that one thought any further, he pushed his legs onto the asphalt and came up behind the last walker.
From the back she could have been anybody. Just a short lady wearing jeans that had been washed maybe five hundred times and had shrunk to way above her ankles. Her tennis shoes were a Kmart off brand but they were so clean, Rudy thought she probably hand-washed the laces like his mother did when he was a boy, rubbing them with a bar of Fels Naphtha soap and then gently placing them on top of the cabinet to dry. This woman had short brown hair, and when she moved all the curls in the middle of her head banged together as if they were confused about which way to go.
Rudy didn't want to startle her so he tried to walk heavy and pound his big black boots on the asphalt. This didn't stop her or anyone else, so he leaned over to touch her shoulder. “Excuse me, madam,” he said softly. “I'm Deputy Rudulski, and no one is going to bother you. I just need to ask you one question.”
Rudy asked her why she was walking. He did not even know where the question came from.
The woman didn't stop, but she turned for just a moment to look into the deputy's eyes. Her eyes were as bright and blue as the ocean Rudy had seen in his National Geographic. If he could have jumped right inside of her at that moment, that is exactly what he would have done. Gone swimming right into those blue eyes of the woman with the Kmart shoes, as if he had planned it for fifteen years.
She put up her hand and walked backward for just a minute or two, and Rudy realized that he would have to stay in his car and follow the walkers. This woman was smiling and he smiled too, and then he stood there in the middle of the road for a long time until the woman disappeared over the hill. Then he turned his head to the southwest, right toward the spot where he was certain the sun would set like a big, beautiful red rubber ball that looked as if it were on fire.
Rudy couldn't take his eyes off the horizon. He was thinking about these women and what must have brought them out here like this. Suddenly that thought, something he would never have bothered to bring to the front of his mind an hour ago, seemed as natural to him as waving his hand in the air.
When he got back into the car, Rudy examined his own eyes in the car mirror. They were dark, and small white lines ran from the corners out toward his ears. “From squinting,” he told himself, laughing, just laughing in his police car as the footsteps grew softer and softer until they were gone, and Rudy had to pull ahead slowly to keep up. He had to protect the women, the walkers, and there were other things, hundreds of other things that he had to do.
Deputy Rudulski was still smiling as the women vanished around the corner just before the Stackowski farm. He fumbled for a piece of paper so he could jot down all the thoughts inside his head—places he wanted to go, the people he wanted to see, experiences he wanted to try. Then he slowly inched the cruiser forward again, just a few feet at a time.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec. 14, 1974
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
STREAKER STALKS NEWSPAPER PAGES
by Gina Halkin
Everyone put your ear to the ground and get ready to hear a whole bunch of deceased newspaper editors roll over in their graves.
When the UWM Post, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, ran a full-page photo of a streaker in this morning's paper, that's most likely what happened.
The black-and-white photo caught a rather large man on the bounce as he was running buck naked across the campus outdoor concourse.
The man did have a stocking hat pulled over his face and was wearing track shoes that helped propel him from the end of the concourse and into a waiting and hopefully warm car.
UWM Post editor Chris Boyer said people might be surprised to know that the staff did agonize about whether or not they should publish the photo.
“Believe it or not, even though we like to have a good time down here, we are all serious journalists so we debated this issue for hours before we decided to run with it,” she reported. “And no, we did not consult administrators on campus, because we are an independent newspaper.”
Boyer said she was tipped off about the streaking incident about a week ago and decided to send a photographer to the concourse with a wide-angle lens just in case the streaker showed up.
“This year streaking is a big fad, and it hasn't been unusual to be sitting just about anywhere when suddenly a naked person comes running past,” said Boyer. “It's happening in a public spot so it's news.”
The biweekly Post prints close to 75,000 papers and is considered the most popular paper on the East Side of Milwaukee.
Assistant Chancellor William Bevens said he saw the paper while he was drinking coffee this morning with his wife and almost had a heart attack.
“Ms. Boyer seems to find the most interesting subjects for her newspaper,” he said. “What they did is legal, and they are an independent paper, but I would be lying if I said I'm glad they printed the streaker's photo.”
When students on campus were asked what they thought about the photo, the most common reactions went like this:
* “Cool!” [literally]
* “Did anyone get his phone number?”
* “I'll never miss another issue of the UWM Post.”
“Hey, just a couple of years ago there were veterans protesting all over the place and now we have streakers,” said Chad Gromley, a senior majoring in business. “It's news, man.”
Past issues of the Post have contained controversial stories about professors and their long-ago student-work experiences, humorous looks inside locked campus bathrooms, and interviews with female college students working their way through school as prostitutes.
Boyer said a framed copy of the photo will be hanging in the lobby of the newspaper office in case anyone missed the issue.
—30—
The Elegant Gathering: Chris
Oh, for chrissakes. If I had a camera right now, I could take some pictures that would get me enough money to pay off the mortgage. Alice has on a pair of shoes that belong in the Wal-Mart Hall of Fame. I haven't seen shoes like that since 1972. Poor Alice. Her ankles are taking a hell of a beating out here. I can actually see them swelling. If we would have thought this through for more than thirty seconds, I could have bought her a pair of Nikes, which is exactly what I will do the minute we stop—that is if we stop. But hell, we left the house so damn fast, who thought to bring something serious like tennis shoes that were actually made for walking?
This is the kind of thing our mothers warned us about when they said to make certain we always wore our best underwear if we were going someplace. I've always wondered about that. Did our mothers have one pile of underwear for staying at home and another for going out in public? I never saw the staying-at-home pile. My mother did have wonderful underwear, a trait that was definitely not passed on to me.
My God, I used to watch her folding her little white brassieres, now there's an antiquated and formal word—brassiere, when was the last time you heard that? Anyway, she folded everything that came out of the washing machine as if she were fondling pieces of cloth that had touched the cheek of Jesus. Socks, hankies (she ironed the hankies), hell, my father's work pants, all my brother's geeky plaid shirts. Folding clothes for my mother was a religious experience and those brassieres, she would fold one cup softly into the other and tuck the straps inside that cup and then lift it onto the pile of her pink underwear as carefully as if she were feeding a sick baby.
My mother looked great in her underwear, too. She worked for a time as a model after she ran away from home in the late 1940s. One night I caught her trying to burn a bu
nch of sexy old black-and-white photos that showed her reclining, naked I think, under pieces of silky, see-through lacy satin. My brothers loved to see her run from the bathroom to her bedroom in her panties and bra. Once my father caught them and rapped them upside the head with his slippers. Then he stood there just like them, grinning as my mother ran past him and slammed the door. Last I heard, just before we hit the road out here, she was still streaking down the halls of the condo in Florida.
Maybe it makes perfect sense that I, Chris Boyer, became her bra-burning daughter from hell. For half of my life, I never even wore underwear. Back in the late '60s and '70s when I was chasing around the world as a journalist, underwear was just one more thing that might weigh me down. It also saved time later in the evening when I was dunking donuts with the guys from all those foreign newspapers who had the most fabulous accents. Well, that was a lifetime ago, and now I own the oldest damn jogging bra in the world and I would give my left tit to have a little support out here on this highway.
I'm the tall, big-boned gal who usually walks toward the back of this small crowd of exceptionally good-looking women. When I turned forty, shit, that was nearly ten years ago, I stopped dyeing my hair, let it grow past my shoulders and bought three dozen long cotton skirts so I wouldn't have to shave my legs any longer. Thank heavens I always wear hiking boots too, because this is like the goddamned hike of my life and I've been around this world a time or two. Yes, these big, honking size 10s of mine have been up some pretty sad-ass trails.