After another block, Gene came to a nicely groomed but desolate park with a brand new jungle gym and empty swings and a wooden sign declaring that the park was donated by Tovani Bros Construction. He sat down on a new wooden bench and surveyed the park and the swaths of green around him, including the large lawn of the library on the other side of the park. A strange stillness had settled on the town. No wind, no people, no movement. Nothing stirred. It was as if the world had slowed to a stop, smothered by green humidity. He’d been in Metropolis for several hours and hadn’t come up with anything that could point to how Miller died. He’d failed. He’d never been as smart or lucky as his brother, which is why Miller ended up a reporter and he ended up a goddamned hog farmer in a nowhere town that had even less going for it than this one. And he couldn’t see anything else to do at this point except return, tail between his legs, back to Carmi where he’d already spent most of his adult life as a failure anyway. He popped another Tums and let it dissolve on the back of his tongue, hoping it would neutralize the taste of failure gurgling up his esophagus.
Gene suddenly realized he had to piss. He pushed himself to his feet, wishing he’d taken care of it before he’d left Miller’s house. The casino still looked like a bit of a hike away. Over the trees and taller houses, he could see the blue Five Star flag, its pentagon of five gold stars waving at the top of the tallest hotel point, in between the Stars and Stripes and Illinois state flag. An old couple hobbled in slow-motion up the stone steps of the library, the first people he’d seen outside yet, so at least its public restroom was still open.
He glanced again at the park dedication sign. Tovani Bros Construction. He reached into the pocket of his T-shirt and pulled out Miller’s notes. He was getting better at reading Miller’s handwriting: Chas Maier, Buildings and Operations Manager, Tovani Bros. Construction. He closed his eyes and tried to think back to the trucks that had dropped the bodies off in his cornfield, perhaps even the one that brought him Miller. Yes. He was sure of it. One of them, he didn’t know which one, had that same name emblazoned on its door. He felt a small surge of new energy. He’d come too far to abandon Miller now. It was the only real lead Gene had found and, thrilled to have made the connection, he took out his phone and called the number. It rang twice.
“Chas Maier,” a friendly baritone answered, buzzing the z in the first name and pronouncing the last name “Meyer,” as in Oscar Mayer.
“Uh, yeah,” Gene stalled a bit. “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for information about Miller Barnes.”
There was a long pause on the other line. Gene could hear a slight wind and what sounded like the man walking a bit, footsteps and somewhat more labored breathing.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you. Never heard of him.”
“That’s not true. Your name and number are in his notes. I hope you can help me out.”
Gene heard a car or truck door slam and the other end grew quieter. He imagined this Chas Maier had walked across the parking lot, maybe a construction site, to have a more private conversation. He pictured him in the cab of a white pickup truck.
“Are you another journalist?”
“His brother.”
“Shit.”
“Can you help me out here?”
“I can’t tell you anything, man. Except I will tell you one thing. If you don’t stop now, you’re not going to like where it ends up. I’m trying to help you out. Quit now. And please don’t call me again.”
The connection went dead, snapping Gene out of Chas Maier’s truck and putting him back in the park. He marveled that the guy had used the word “please.” Although this lead had gone cold, he learned that Chas knew who Miller was and knew he was a journalist. And he knew that Miller and now Gene were onto something. He wasn’t much closer to what Miller had done to warrant a bullet in the brain, and he had to piss more than ever. Gene figured with his luck he’d get a fine for public urination if he pissed behind a tree, so he crossed the park to the library. Off in the west he could see the horizon blurring and darkening to purple gray. A summer storm was coming and seemed to suck all the air into it, out of this town, making everything look still and artificial.
As he approached the walkway to the two-story brick building, he read the words chiseled above the stone entranceway: Metropolis Carnegie Public Library. He walked up the front steps, relieved to see the building open from 9-6, then pulled open the doors and walked up to the front desk. A few old ladies hovered like pastel birds behind a counter piled with books, flyers, and brochures about public events and public health.
“Excuse me, but where are the public bathrooms?”
“Downstairs and all the way to your left, just past the genealogy room,” she said kindly. Gene remembered that librarians he’d met were always generous about information and usually gave much more information than needed, but he was grateful to the old lady for not throwing him out. He half expected it, dressed in his sweaty biking gear.
On his way downstairs he passed a little tri-folded exhibit, like the ones he’d done in grade school for science fairs. This one provided information about cancer, and its pockets bulged with flyers and brochures on symptoms, drugs, doctors, hospitals, and treatment centers. Gene didn’t care about cancer right then. He simply needed to piss and went downstairs, relieved to find the old tiled men’s room and a nice, clean, old-fashioned urinal.
Back up the hall to the stairs, he passed a table with more cancer kiosks and numerous brochures about lung cancer. There were also pamphlets about the risks of Downs Syndrome children and taking care of them. Gene remembered all the coal mines that used to operate in the area and wondered if Metropolis had a higher than usual percentage of people with cancer. Maybe that’s where everybody was, Gene thought—at home with cancer or taking care of Downs Syndrome children. On top of the economic problems, maybe the whole town was sick.
Halfway up the stairs, he remembered that libraries kept old newspapers, and thought maybe he could find some more leads if he looked at recent copies of the Daily Planet. He went back to the front desk and asked the same librarian who had told him where the bathrooms were, noticing that the name tag pinned above her sagging breast said “Mrs. Birkenmeier,” who pointed out boxes of past issues in the periodical section.
“We close in twenty minutes,” she kindly reminded him.
The papers were crammed in slanted boxes, organized in three-month increments. Gene grabbed the boxes marked April-June and July-Sept and didn’t find much except news about the State Fair, the upcoming mayoral elections, Superman Day, an upcoming Comic Books and Toy Show convention at Five Star, gunshot victims in Massac County on the rise, high school sports pages, and several pages of photo-obituaries. Apparently everybody who died down here had his or her two-and-a-half-inch picture at the top of a long column—everybody except Miller.
Then Gene noticed a full-page ad for Five Star and, paging through the paper, saw a half-page ad for Tovani Bros. He almost never paid attention to ads, and looking through some of the papers he’d already scanned, he noticed those had Five Star and Tovani Bros ads as well. Cora hadn’t told him there were so many ads, but she was right in that it seemed like all the parties had become friendly.
Gene paged further back into the archives and noticed that in early November of the previous year the ads stopped—or rather began. In late September he finally found an editorial Miller had written that now seemed relevant:
A FAIRY TALE
Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack, who did little but lie beside the fire and poke at the ashes. His mother worked hard to maintain the farm and scratch a bit of food from the dry earth for the two of them to eat, but there was no one to plant the crops or work the land. The rest of the family had all died off.
“Jack,” she said. “We have nothing left. We will wither and die like the crops. Take our last asset, this old cow, who can no longer even give us milk, into the market and get what you can for her and buy us some vittles.”<
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Jack did as he was told, but before he even reached the marketplace he met a hooded stranger who offered him a bag of magic beans.
“You look like an enterprising young man,” said the stranger. “Take a look at these magic beans. Plant them and they will lead you to riches and wonders beyond your imagination.”
The twist in this story, of course, is that Jack was not hoodwinked. His innocence and idle daydreaming paid dividends of magical proportions—riches and wonders beyond Jack and his mother’s imaginations.
But this is not our fairy tale. We Metropolites could have been duped and merely traded the family asset for a handful of plain old humdrum beans, benign, at least, and capable of growing into more beans.
Not in our fairy tale. Our beans were indeed of the magical variety, but they were not benign. They helped us sow the seeds of our own destruction, and Superman was not around to save us.
Careless what we wished for, we wanted our casino. If it worked for the Native Americans on their reservations, our hooded salesman stranger told us, it will work for us. We dreamed about it. We campaigned for it, voted for it, and approved it overwhelmingly. We bought the bag of magic beans and sowed them ourselves, complicit in our own undoing.
By morning, a huge beanstalk had streaked up to the clouds, and before we could finish our first cup of coffee, a giant had climbed down and gobbled up our scrawny livestock, stomped on what was left of our crops, squashed what was left of our commerce, and set up despotic rule in a fortress surrounded by a deep moat named the Ohio. There was a golden goose all right, but she didn’t lay for us. And what do you know—the stranger who sold us the beans in the first place was the only one who got a job from the giant, and under his stranger’s hood he ended up being one of our own townsmen the whole time.
Is it too late to chop the beanstalk down? Or can we learn to live in its twisting shade?
Surely a little opinion piece wasn’t enough to get Miller killed. He hadn’t even mentioned any names, and it had appeared before all the ads, which he assumed the companies paid for. Before this editorial, Gene found a few articles about Five Star’s potential tourism numbers, the dedication of the park in the heart of the city, but nothing else anywhere near as forthcoming or full of condemnation.
“The library is closing in five minutes,” Mrs Birkenmeier called out.
Gene didn’t have time to grab another box of archives, but he’d seen enough. He put all the boxes back the way he found them and thanked Mrs. Birkenmeier on his way out. He pulled open the front doors of the library and stepped back into the afternoon humidity now capped by a darkened sky. As he headed down the steps, he noticed a small concrete monument he hadn’t seen before.
TIME CAPSULE 2000
OPEN SMALL 2025
OPEN LARGE 2100
Gene spat into the bushes as if he had a wad of Copenhagen in his mouth and shook his head. Seven years ago this town had been optimistic. He hated to see what it would look like in 2025, let alone 2100. “Nothing but weeds and rubble,” he said to no one.
Gene stood on the corner of Ferry and Fifth and tried to imagine Miller and Cora driving through the neighborhood. It was hard to do since he didn’t even know what Miller drove, but he was aware that he looked at Metropolis through the added lens of his brother, now that he’d seen his girlfriend, seen where he lived, and even seen recent pictures. He wondered if Miller and Cora took walks in the evening—surely if they drank green tea they were the type to take walks in the evening—and he imagined them walking around the neighborhood. The last pictures he’d looked at were the two of them in their baseball jerseys, and that’s how he pictured them, but Cora soon reverted to her flowered sundress sticking slightly to her back, her legs just showing through in the sunlight.
Two Vandalia Bus Line busses roared past him, turned left on Ferry Street, and headed south toward the river and the casino. The temperature had dropped a bit, but it was still humid, and from the west the town was slowly turning a dingy aquarium green. Before the night was over the area would be hit with another summer storm. Gene hated riding in the rain at night and cursed the cloudy skies.
Before he was a few blocks from the casino, he’d worked up a good sweat and a bit of an appetite, and he felt the pull of the building’s food and air-conditioning. To his right, though, was an unmistakable spectacle: Americana Hollywood. The whole corner lot, surrounded by a painted fence, blazed with primary colors—eye-stinging yellows and bright reds and glossy blues. Underneath the Americana Hollywood sign were the words “A Whole Lotta Cool Stuff!” Another hand-painted wooden sign said “Famous Monsters” and showed heads of the Boris Karloff Frankenstein, the Bela Lagosi Dracula, the teenaged Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Another sign read:
The Justice League Collection
NOW ON EXHIBIT!
Experience The World’s Greatest Superhero Tribute!
Gene felt disoriented, tugged between two worlds—the dangerous world in which his brother was murdered and this circus-colored world of comic book kitsch. It seemed impossible the two worlds could exist in the same time and place. He hung a right on Third Street to walk along the length of the fenced-in, one-story building, a hodge-podge of add-ons, slowly expanding outward, and every so often slapped with a fresh coat of acrylic paint. Further down, another sign read:
ELVIRA
Mistress of the Dark
Rests in Peace Here!
Elvira’s boobs took up half the sign, and her cartoony ass looked raised and contorted in a position only possible in a horny fanboy’s imagination. Gene looked a little further down Third Street and saw a huge power substation—transformers and towers that probably harnessed, routed, and delivered electricity for most of this Southern Illinois region. No wonder so many of the people suffered cancers and birth defects. The air was probably thick with coal dust and who knows what other kinds of carcinogens. He could see why Miller would live here. Metropolis was exactly the kind of underdog town he could stand up and fight for. But did Miller sell out by selling ads? And if he had sold out, why kill him?
Gene turned and kept walking on Ferry Street toward the river. At Front Street, Ferry Street dead-ended. A vast parking lot, completely full already, sprawled on Gene’s right. To his left sprawled the hotel complex, connected by a circular drive and covered walkway and carport area, a covered three-story parking garage, and the casino itself. A squad of uniformed boys who retrieved cars, opened doors, closed them, carried luggage, and gave directions nodded as Gene walked through the huge sliding doors of the casino. Straight ahead was the restaurant, The Paddlewheel, decked from floor to ceiling with pioneer “antiques” and fake riverboat artifacts—a life preserver, a large made-to-look-antique wooden steering wheel, some fake smokestacks. The walls were covered with sepia or black-and-white pictures of riverboats, river town life, and Mark Twain. A girl in a red-and-white plaid shirt and cut-offs, inspired, Gene presumed, by Daisy Duke or Ellie May Clampitt, greeted him and took him to his seat—a corner booth.
As he waited for his meal, Gene surveyed the room and decided this whole excursion was the most surreal trip he’d ever taken—stranger even than some of his trips to the Phillipines, Shanghai, and Kuwait. Some of his shore leave excursions in Thailand were pretty strange, especially with the weird sex shows and his two-week “girlfriends,” but Gene considered the shape of this trip, beginning with finding Miller, which seemed like days ago, and ending up here at the Paddlewheel next to a fake smokestack with Daisy Duke taking his dinner order.
Gene almost always ate alone, but he never noticed it so much unless he ate in public. He ordered something he thought would at least be fast—cheeseburger and fries. Realizing he hadn’t eaten anything green in days, he also ordered a small salad to make his mother happy. As he waited, he wondered if Miller and Cora had ever eaten here. He concluded that they probably hadn’t, for political reasons, but if they had, they certainly would have had a good time mocking the fake quaintness.
After dinner he decided to explore the casino. He headed down the main corridor, branching down another hallway first to visit the restroom. The corridor was wide as his high school hallways, with several doors off to the right, conference rooms, apparently, and at the far end a small lobby area and, further on, he presumed, the offices. Maybe some of the people in the offices would know something about Miller. Gene wondered if he had the guts to ask, but figured he’d at least get a complete look at the place.
He followed the brand new, barely treaded carpeting past a room with some kind of ’80s hair band music spilling out of it at an unobtrusive volume. Above the door hung a wooden sign with the words “GRAND BALLROOM” cut in swooping letters, and Gene couldn’t help but peek in. The lights were dimmed but not dark, and the whole room, painted a colorless gray, was decorated with red, blue, and yellow balloons and crepe paper streamers, like a kid’s birthday party. On a bright red plastic tablecloth was a long buffet of snack foods—chips and dips, veggie dip platters, and two punch bowls, both clearly marked “ALCOHOL FREE!” A DJ had set up in the corner and an almost-operatic voice belted out “To the Glory of God” with melodramatic metal-fuzzed guitar accompaniment. Gene hated Christian rock even more than heavy metal or rap, which he also hated.
A polite woman with a face smiling behind layers of foundation makeup, blush, and mascara, probably hiding skin pocked with acne scars, stepped toward him and said, “Good evening, sir!” She looked behind him as if Gene were hiding something. “Is your wife with you tonight?”
“Wife?” laughed Gene. “I don’t have a wife. Why the fuck would I have a wife?”
The woman winced at his profanity. She might have been pretty, but it was hard to tell with all the makeup, which made her face look waxy and rigid, like a mannequin. A man, slightly older than the woman, bald except for a colorless fringe at the sides of his shiny dome, and dressed in a light blue suit, pale yellow shirt, and watermelon-pink tie came and stood smiling blandly next to her. Gene immediately thought of an Easter egg. She had shoulder-length yellow hair dyed the color of a fluffy Easter chick, too.
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