I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  “What’s incinerate mean?” Suds asked.

  “It means it can’t be used in a prison,” I said.

  “I had an uncle in prison,” Suds said. “He never said anything about bug spray not being allowed.”

  “Maybe it’s a new rule,” I said.

  This led to a lengthy discussion about prison and who among our acquaintances seemed destined to land there. “Probably Danny Millardo,” Suds said.

  “I wonder what happens when you puncture a can of bug spray,” Suds asked, returning to the subject at hand.

  “It probably explodes,” I said.

  “So it’s like a bomb,” Doug said, and with that insight, our day was transformed.

  “Set it on the floor and I’ll shoot it with my slingshot,” Suds said.

  “Are you crazy?” Peanuts said, ever ready with a historical tidbit. “The shrapnel will kill us. Do you know how many people died from shrapnel in World War II? Over a hundred million, then they stopped counting. Set the can on the ground and we’ll drop a rock on it from the window.”

  We went in search of a rock of sufficient size to split open a can of bug spray, then laid the can on its side underneath the barn’s second-story window. Since it had been mostly Doug’s idea, we let him have the first turn. We crowded around the window while Doug sighted down the rock, like a WWII bombardier zeroing in on a Nazi gun factory. “Bomb’s away,” he said, dropping the stone.

  It struck the canister dead center. The can exploded, lifting high into the air and whirling about, spewing bug spray in a wide, poisonous arc. We stood at the window, dumb-struck, then turned to gaze at the cases of bug spray filling the hayloft, the realization of our newfound power slowly dawning.

  “Our very own bombs,” Suds said, his voice trembly with awe. “Just think what we can do.”

  Over the next several days, a barrage of bug bombs were detonated behind our barn. Cans were shot at, impaled, imploded, and exploded, releasing such vast quantities of toxins that every bug within a mile was gassed, the topsoil contaminated, and the humans struck with an asthmatic hack. There was, and remains to this day, a white, cracked-earth dead zone thirty feet out from the barn in all directions.

  The following Saturday my father wandered around the barn, peering into the stalls and hayloft, and scratching his head. “I seem to be out of bug spray,” he said. “Have you seen any?”

  “Last time I saw the bug spray, it was next to the canning jars,” I said.

  “Aha!” he said. “I’ll check the attic.”

  Within a few minutes, he’d found his old army uniform and was reminiscing about his days at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

  My brothers and I shared many exciting summers, but our season with Ginger the mannequin surpassed them all. My cousin Matt continued to visit us for a week each July, but never topped his creativity with Ginger at the bridge. That evening still shines in the Polaroid hues of memory. As for Peanut and Suds, we would share other vegetable holocausts over the years, but our tomato summer remained the crowning glory of our felonious youth.

  Chapter 15

  Bicycle Glories

  The Schwinn Varsity ten-speed bicycle was invented in 1960, but I didn’t get mine until June 16, 1975, when my mother drove me to A-1 Cyclery in Indianapolis and I plunked down $138.78 for a green Schwinn Varsity (Model #124, Serial # DL545900). I had been promised a bicycle in lieu of a school trip to Washington, D.C., but my parents never paid me back. I still have the receipt and bill them monthly, but it appears they’ve stiffed me, a sordid little detail I intend to mention when I deliver their eulogies.

  Floyd Jennings owned the Schwinn bicycle shop in our town, in the basement of the Abstract and Title Building next to Vern Hedge’s barbershop. Floyd was prickly tempered, prone to outbursts, and my mother refused to do business with him. “I will not give that man my hard-earned money,” she said. Mom was dogmatic about few things, but Floyd Jennings was one of them. I was not that particular. I would have bought my Schwinn Varsity from Adolf Hitler if he had been in the bike business.

  So on a Monday morning in 1975, thumbing our noses at convention, we drove the Plymouth Valiant to the city to buy my Varsity. The bike didn’t fit in the trunk, so I rode it home, my mother following behind me, flashing her hazard lights. We were on Highway 40, which crossed the nation from Atlantic City to San Francisco. I imagined I was traversing the country on my bike, raising money for legless orphans. When I reached San Francisco, I would appear together on The Phil Donahue Show, where I would smile modestly and say it was nothing, a walk in the park, an unfortunate turn of phrase when discussing amputees, but the audience would clap anyway and Phil Donahue would weep. A billionaire would be watching that day and, inspired by my altruism, send me a million dollars.

  I’d had my green Varsity several months when Tim Trapp and Frank Freeman, whose wretched lives had also been transformed by the purchase of Schwinn Varsitys, suggested we bicycle the fifty miles to Turkey Run State Park and camp overnight. Though we were only fourteen, our parents allowed it. Indeed, they seemed pleased at the prospect of being shed of us for a weekend.

  We left on a cold, rainy autumn morning. We had packed brownies, a radio, a book of crossword puzzles, harmonicas, pocket knives, and a BB pistol, but no rain gear. Within two miles we were soaked to the bone and shivering uncontrollably, on the verge of hypothermia. We rode single file, with Tim taking up the rear, calling out advice like a coxswain in a racing shell—“Downshift!” “Pothole!” “Turn right!” “Dead raccoon!”

  Tim was well-versed on every hazard and prior to our departure had delivered a lecture on the hidden dangers of wet railroad tracks. “Perpendicular,” he warned us. “You must cross railroad tracks perpendicularly.”

  Frank and I looked at one another, confused.

  “What’s perpendicular?” I asked Frank when Tim had walked away.

  “Beats me.”

  We’d ridden twenty miles when we approached our first set of railroad tracks at the base of a long hill. We streaked down the incline toward the tracks, which angled across the road.

  “Perpendicular!” yelled Tim, far behind us, “Cross the tracks perpendicularly!”

  I recall Frank’s crash in the grayed tones of memory, like a World War II newsreel. His front tire hitting the first railroad track, slick with rain, the bike sliding sideways, Frank sailing through the air and landing on his knees, in the convenient posture of prayer, then toppling over in a heap, his skin flayed by gravel.

  Tim and I stood over him. “Don’t move him,” I said. “He could have a broken neck. If we move him, he’ll die.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw it on TV, on Emergency,” I said. “This guy wrecked and they moved him and his neck snapped, just like that. His head was flopping to one side. It killed him. They might as well have shot him.”

  I had been an ardent fan of Emergency, viewing it faithfully every Saturday evening, and had amassed a tremendous store of medical trivia.

  Tim nudged Frank with his foot. “I told him perpendicular.”

  “You certainly did,” I agreed. “He should have known better.”

  “This rain is certainly a blessing,” Tim said. “It appears to be washing away his blood.”

  Frank came to after a few minutes, and we resumed our trip. The rain continued the next thirty miles as the temperature fell. When we arrived at the state park, I remembered Tim phoning the night before, reminding me to bring the tent. Unfortunately, in my haste to leave that morning, I’d forgotten it. I wondered how to tell them, and decided the rugged he-man approach would work best.

  “If we were real men, we’d build a shelter from pine boughs instead of using a tent,” I said.

  “You go right ahead,” said Tim. “But I’m sleeping in a tent.”

  “I’m sure there’s a cave around here we can sleep in,” I persisted. “That’s what Daniel Boone did on his bicycle trips.”

  “Daniel Boone didn’t have a bicyc
le,” Tim said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have a tent. I forgot and left it at home.”

  Frank was slumped against a tree, lying in the mud, his wounds oozing blood.

  I suggested we rent a room in the park inn. Frank groaned. He hated spending money.

  We sat down under the tree next to Frank, splats of rain dropping on us from the leaves.

  I asked Tim what he’d brought for supper.

  “Brownies,” he said.

  Frank was in no condition to eat, so Tim and I split the brownies.

  We pooled our money and stayed in the inn that night. We had spent all our money on the room, the brownies were gone, and we were down to one box of CoCo Wheats, a chocolaty grits-like breakfast food invented for prisoners.

  I had remembered to bring a cookstove, which we fired up the next morning to cook our CoCo Wheats. Unfortunately, we burnt them, triggering the room’s smoke alarm. The manager was at our door within seconds. Frank and Tim hid the stove, while I dumped the CoCo Wheats in the toilet, just before the manager peered into the bathroom, looking for fire, but spying the CoCo Wheats. I was standing next to the toilet, appearing somewhat distressed. “He doesn’t feel well,” Tim told the manager. “Spastic colon.”

  We departed shortly thereafter, at the manager’s request. It was still raining. Within a few miles, Frank hit a patch of gravel on a turn and crashed again, landing in a roadside ditch.* After that trip, it would be years before he rode again, so deep were his emotional scars. As for Tim and me, we were pleased to note that the Schwinn Varsity was so ruggedly constructed it could sustain wreck after wreck with scarcely a scratch.

  That was the first of many trips I made that summer, launching forth on my Varsity to see the world, my provisions strapped to the rack over the rear wheel, lashed to the handlebars, or crammed into my bug backpack. My dietary needs were simple. I carried a case of Dinty Moore beef stew and nothing else. Riding a bike was hard work and I was constantly famished, stopping every three hours to fire up my small camping stove and warm a can of stew. When I was halfway through the case, roughly eighty miles from home, I would turn back, stopping a few hours outside Danville to consume the last of the Dinty Moore, then coasting the last mile on fumes. To this day, whenever I eat a can of Dinty Moore beef stew, I hear the rubbery whine of tire against the road and the click of the sprocket, feel the burn in my thighs, and the wind in my face.*

  There were days when I entertained the notion of riding my bicycle to the Hormel Food Corporation in Austin, Minnesota, where Dinty Moore beef stew was made, but it was 530 miles away and would have required nearly ninety cans of beef stew, which I couldn’t carry. Appeals to my father to vacation in Austin fell on deaf ears, even when I pointed out we could stop at the Hormel Chili plant in Beloit, Wisconsin, and see the world’s largest can of chili.

  While my parents let me ride my bicycle long distances on busy state highways, they forbade me from riding my bicycle down Main Street, fearing I would be killed. Roughly four cars each day passed through our town. Dogs slept in the road for hours at a time, unmolested. But my parents viewed Main Street as the Highway of Death and Carnage. Every night at supper, my mother peered at me from across the table. “That wasn’t you I saw on Main Street today, was it? I’ve told you before I don’t want you riding your bike on Main Street.”

  “Wasn’t me,” I lied.

  “You heard your mother,” Dad would say. “Stay off Main Street.”

  “I was thinking of riding my bicycle up to the city this weekend and looping I-465,” I would say a few moments later.

  My mother would smile from across the table. “Oh, that sounds fun. Why don’t you take your little brother with you?”

  Who could figure parents?

  Living nineteen miles from the Indianapolis 500, the kids in my neighborhood were obsessed with racing, though none of us had actually attended the race. Years before, while selling bug spray, my father had met Tony Hulman, the owner of the track, and they’d hit it off. Every spring, tickets to the race appeared in our mailbox. My father gave them to my cousin Matt, of mannequin fame.

  “You wouldn’t catch me dead up there,” Dad said. “All that traffic. No thanks. You can have that mess. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  Every Memorial Day weekend, my brothers and I and our friends would listen to the 500 on the radio, it being blacked out on local television. When it was over we would stage a bicycle race, stretching out in a line in front of Suds Norton’s house, a dozen of us arranged from one sidewalk to the other, a row of Schwinns, Raleighs, Vistas, and Peanut on his Huffy. Peanut swore by Huffys and would walk before riding anything else.

  Suds’s mother was our official starter. She would stand on the sidewalk, cigarette dangling from her mouth, scowling, while Peanut pumped away madly, inflating his bicycle tires until they nearly burst from the rim. Peanut believed the firmer the tire, the less of it would touch the road, minimizing resistance and giving him an advantage. As theories go, Peanut was correct. In practice, his tires were time bombs. Within the first block, he would hit a patch or pothole, and the tires would explode, catapulting him over the handlebars and into a tree.

  “What the hell you thinkin’?” Mrs. Norton would yell after a few minutes of watching Peanut pump his tires. “I don’t got all day. Get your butt on that bike and let’s get going!”

  We would spin our cranks around, positioning the right pedal at twelve o’clock for maximum thrust. Mrs. Norton would count to three, pausing between each number to draw on her cigarette, then hit the word Go, and we would hurl ourselves forward like Mario Andretti at the Speedway.

  Our block was a half-mile around, so ten laps gave us a five-mile race. Unlike the 500, we were not constrained by rules. Cheating was permitted and encouraged. Our favorite tactic was to jam sticks in the spokes of the other riders, causing their bikes to come to a dead stop, flinging our competitors onto the road, where they would be struck down by the other riders and squished into the tar.

  Without fail, the winner would be disputed, and the race would end in a fistfight in Suds’s front yard, while his mother looked on from their front porch yelling advice. “Hit him in the nose, that’ll teach him.” She would take a long drag from her cigarette. “Yep,” she would say to no one in particular, “a good shot to the nose will shut up just about anybody.”

  After the fight, I would run home, get my first-aid kit and patch up the loser, just as I’d learned from watching Emergency.

  Several years later, my brothers and I would get our driver’s licenses and race the same way, except in cars. Miraculously, none of us died. Then God, in that ironic way of the Divine, gave us children to show us how worrisome it could be when boys were long on wheels and short on brains.

  Chapter 16

  Mildred

  In my fourteenth year, I received a letter from Mildred Harvey summoning me to her home. Mrs. Harvey lived four doors west of us. Her husband was in the nursing home, leaving her to keep up their home place. She was well into her seventies, weary of the effort, and looking for help. “Philip Gulley,” the note read in shaky, old-lady handwriting, “I would like to hire you as my yard boy. Please come see me. Mildred Harvey.”

  I’d met Mildred Harvey shortly after we’d moved to Broadway Street. The first time we met, I called her Mrs. Harvey, as I had been taught to address my elders.

  “I am a Quaker,” she said. “We don’t use titles. You may call me Mildred.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We don’t say ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ either.”

  “Yes, Mildred.”

  Quakers, I concluded, were peculiar people.

  I walked down the sidewalk to Mildred’s home the next Sunday. She was seated on her front porch, in a wicker rocking chair, fanning herself with the newspaper.

  “Hello, Mildred Harvey,” I said.

  “Hello, Philip Gulley. Please have a seat,” she said, gesturing to her porch swing.

  I ment
ioned receiving her note.

  “Let’s not discuss business on the Sabbath,” she said, fanning herself. “It will keep until tomorrow.”

  For as long as I knew Mildred, she had strong ideas about proper Sabbath activity—no doing work, no speaking of work, no thinking of work. Card playing, however, was permissible, and she passed long summer hours on her front porch playing Solitaire.

  We visited awhile, then I went home and returned the next morning. Mildred Harvey was clipping the hedge that ran along her driveway. After I greeted her, taking care not to offend her Quaker sensibilities, she asked if I wanted to mow her yard. Her home sat on two acres, which her husband had cut with an old-fashioned reel mower. She never mentioned why her husband was in the nursing home, but I suspected that pushing the lawn mower around their yard had finally broken him.

  “You can use my lawn mower,” she offered. “It’s nice and quiet and doesn’t use gas.”

  Mildred Harvey was not a fan of the internal combustion engine and was forever preaching against its use, as if it were a moral failure to employ motorized assistance.

  “If you don’t mind, I would prefer to use a gas mower,” I said.

  Mildred Harvey frowned. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell I had slipped a notch in her estimation.

  The Harveys had moved into the house fifty years earlier and had been hard at it ever since, planting flowers, bushes, and other annoyances to mow around. She showed me around the yard, pointing out various plants, expressing the hope that I wouldn’t annihilate them with my out-of-control gasoline mower. I suggested we might begin by clear-cutting her yard, but my suggestions fell on deaf ears.

  Everything I said to Mildred Harvey fell on deaf ears. She was hard of hearing, which impeded our ability to converse. One of our more memorable conversations happened the winter after I’d begun mowing her lawn. I had stopped by her house the day after Christmas, and was sitting in her front parlor, recounting my family’s holiday.