George Eddy churned out wooden puzzles, clocks, checker sets, letters, numbers, and other knickknacks by the thousands, which he and his wife, Libby, loaded into their Ford Esquire station wagon each Friday evening. Bill and I would watch from a hidden vantage point, lest we be drafted into helping.
“Where you going tomorrow?” I would ask in a whisper.
“To the Cornbread Festival,” Bill would whisper back. “Want to come?”
“Sure, I like cornbread.”
On any given Saturday, in any given direction, there were dozens of festivals or craft fairs to choose from—the Covered Bridge Festival in Mansfield, the Popcorn Festival of Clay County, the Navy Bean Festival in Rising Sun, the Elwood Chili Cookoff, or the Ligonier Marshmallow Festival. There were, and still are, more festivals in Indiana than in all the other states combined—annual celebrations of little-known foods, persons, plants, or architectural features, pageants honoring industries that had died years before—and the Eddys sold wooden doohickeys at every one of them.
The night before the festivals, I’d sleep on the floor beside Bill’s bed, then wake up early the next morning to watch Libby Eddy cook bacon in the microwave oven. The Eddys owned the first microwave oven in our town, and Libby was accustomed to an audience. The microwave was big, clunky, and emitted huge amounts of radioactive power, shorting out every pacemaker in a ten-mile radius, but it did a great job with bacon.
After breakfast, we would pile in the Esquire, Mr. and Mrs. Eddy in the front seat, Bill and me sprawled out atop the knickknacks in the back. One year, Mr. Eddy made nothing but letters, his Esquire filled with A’s and P’s and even Q’s and Z’s.
“Can’t forget the Z’s,” he told me. “Especially if it’s a sausage festival. Then you get your Poles and they all have Z’s in their names—Zielinskis, Zuranskis, Zukowskas, Zawadzkis. One time I sold twelve Z’s to a man named Zeztzl.”
“What if,” I asked Bill on our way to the Marshall County Blueberry Festival, “we had a wreck and I was thrown from the car and the letters D-E-A-D landed on top of me?”
“More likely the letters P-E-R-V-E-R-T would land on you,” he said.
Bill Eddy was a laugh a minute.
After an hour in the car, lying on the letters, we would arrive at the festival, vowels and consonants pressed into our backs and butts.
Of all the festivals, my favorite was the Covered Bridge Festival in Mansfield, situated on the banks of Raccoon Creek. Bill had a canoe that Mr. Eddy lashed to the top of the Esquire, so we spent the day canoeing several miles upstream, then floating back down, coming to shore near an old mill that had recently been restored. The mill had been built in the mid-1820s. It had ceased operations in 1968, but several old men were on hand to give tours. They would start their memorized spiel, reciting the dramatic history of corn and its many virtues. Bill and I would interrupt when they paused to catch their breath, asking them corn questions: How much corn does there have to be in a corndog for it to be a corndog? Are there wheatdogs? Why do they call thick skin on your toe a corn? As corn fans, does it bother you to see something so unpleasant named after your favorite crop? If a cornucopia is shaped like a horn, why isn’t it called a hornucopia? Had the corn people paid for naming rights? The corn men offered no satisfactory answers.
In late afternoon, we’d reload the Esquire and head back to Danville, Bill and me stretched out in the back, planning the rest of our weekend.
“How about we go camping?” he’d suggest.
Bill lived across the road from Mrs. Blanton’s woods. Her house sat a quarter mile toward town, so it was a simple matter to slip into her woods unseen and spend the night, camping on the bluff above the White Lick Creek. We would arrive at the campsite just before dark, and set up camp. Since the woods were across from Bill’s house, he was our de facto leader and would sit by the fire issuing orders. I would scurry about like Hop Sing on Bonanza, cutting firewood, cooking supper, toting water, pitching the tent, digging a pit toilet, then gathering soft pine needles for Bill to sleep on.
Bill was never one to do anything halfway, and he’d accumulated enough camping gear to equip an army—knives, hatchets, tents, stoves, cooking supplies, lanterns, backpacks, and sleeping bags. Before long, he had me loaded down like a pack mule, and though it was only a quarter mile from his home to our campsite, I was reduced to crawling the last hundred yards, dragging his equipment behind me. He would surge ahead, his hand shading his eyes, staring off into the distance, pointing to the horizon, urging me forward.
Occasionally, others would join our ventures. Don Dodson was a favorite companion, a consistent source of entertainment. The part of his brain responsible for self-restraint not yet developed, Don could always be counted upon to do something reckless for our enjoyment, usually involving hatchets, rifles, or other implements of death. In one of his more inspired moments, he placed me against a tree, counted off one hundred yards and fired at me with his .22 rifle to see how close he could come without hitting me. It was that kind of innocent fun that made my teenage years such happy ones.
We would sit by the campfire late into the night, me collapsed on the ground dog-tired, Bill resting against a nearby tree smoking a cigar.
“What you gonna do when we graduate?” he’d ask.
“Forest ranger,” I’d say. “What about you?”
He would draw deeply on his cigar, look thoughtful, then say, “Plumber.”*
Whatever he undertook, Bill had a knack for landing on soft ground. His first job in high school was for the Walt Land Construction Company, where he was given his own truck to drive! This, at a time when driving any vehicle required weeks of negotiation with your parents, promising them you’d buckle down in school, attend church, and be nice to your sister. Even then, the car mileage was allotted like precious gems. “It’s one mile to the grocery store,” my mother would tell my brothers, checking the odometer on our car. “I don’t want to see a tenth of a mile over two miles.”
But on Bill’s first day of work, Walt Land tossed him a truck key, twenty dollars, and said, “You drive that pickup. Let me know when you need more gas money.” It was like giving a drug addict a bushel basket of cocaine. Bill nearly fainted dead away, and for the next two years could be seen driving the truck all over the western half of Indiana, running errands for Walt Land, always taking the long way around, driving south to go north, looping miles out of his way past our homes, where he’d bump the horn and wave.
Bill’s teenage years possessed a magical quality. He had only to say aloud that he wanted something and it was as if an incantation had been chanted. Within a few hours he would possess it—a new bicycle, a new BB gun, a new pocketknife, a date with a certain girl. How he acquired these treasures, I do not know. His parents didn’t give him the money, he never stole anything, he just had immense good luck. If a billionaire were ever spontaneously moved to slip a kid a thousand-dollar bill, Bill would have been the kid walking past at the exact moment of inspiration.
Bill had a mystical hold on me, and I was always endeavoring to stay on his good side. We’d ride our bicycles to the Dairy Queen, and I would plead with him to let me buy. He’d pause, mulling over my offer, then say, “Well, all right, if you really want to.” I would order a cup of water for myself so I could spend more money on Bill. When we were delivering newspapers, I would beg to deliver his papers, happily adding his thirty-five customers to my twenty-six, and paying him for the privilege. He had such charisma he would have made a tremendous diplomat. Fortunately, he was good natured and never used his magnetism for immoral ends. Even now, people phone Bill daily, vying for his plumberly attention, pleading with him to drop by their house for a few moments to repair a clogged or leaky pipe, pledging to shower him with riches for his slightest consideration. It is unlike anything I have ever seen.
Bill knew everyone in town, and everyone knew him. Precocious didn’t begin to describe him. I met him in first grade, and even then he was a man about town. Ad
ults, when passing him on the street, would call out greetings, going out of their way to shake his hand or pat his head. It was like growing up best friends with Ronald Reagan. You were in the company of greatness, you knew it, and did everything within your power to remain in a position of favor. If Bill had asked me to kill someone, I would have looked him in the eye and asked, “Poison, knife, or gun?”
One of our associates was Bunny Runyan, whom we’d met delivering the Great Hoosier Daily. This was in the era of nicknames, when kids, as a matter of course, assigned alternative names to their peers, usually based on some physical peculiarity. My town was populated by children named Bucky, Gimps, Fats, Pizza Face, Crack, Carrot Top, Onion, and Dog Breath. Brad Runyan, Bunny’s older brother, was nicknamed Rabbit, so it followed that Bunny would be Bunny.
Bunny Runyan, for as long as we were kids, was the picture of sunny optimism. We could be fifty miles from home on our bicycles with flat tires, our legs broken, tornadoes swirling about us, and Bunny would find the upside in it. But more than that, if there was even the faintest glimmer of good in a situation, Bunny would find it. “Boy, it sure is nice having that tornado at our backs. It’s pushing us right along! Aren’t we lucky!”
Bill, Bunny, and I spent many afternoons tromping through the woods outside of town, bristling with weapons, intent on killing any animal unfortunate enough to cross our paths. We were hampered by our poor eyesight, and our secret inclination toward pacifism. We liked the manliness of hunting, but the idea of spilling blood was repulsive to us, so we aimed wide, then blamed the miss on faulty equipment. For years, our campfire talks had to do with animals we’d almost killed and fish we’d almost caught.
In our later teenage years, we would take bicycle rides through southern Indiana, three or four days in length, letting only our moods determine the duration. Bunny had an abundance of relatives dispersed throughout the state. We would ride from one relative’s home to another, sleeping on their fold-out couches. They all looked like Bunny and shared his traits of wild optimism and good humor. Some of the relatives were quite distant—third, fourth, and fifth cousins—but we were always warmly received. We had only to show up on their doorstep, announce our kinship, and we’d be welcomed into their home. One night, south of Terre Haute, Indiana, ninety miles from home, Bunny woke me in the middle of the night to tell me he’d just remembered his cousins had moved the year before.
“Then whose house are we sleeping in?” I asked.
“Not exactly sure,” Bunny said. “But they sure are nice!”
We woke four hours later, ate bacon and eggs prepared by our hosts, said our good-byes, with Bunny’s assurance that he would see them at the next family reunion.
The next day, we rode through the southern Indiana town of Loogootee, where a reporter, in search of news on a slow summer day, took our picture and wrote a story about us, supplemented with my liberal embellishment of our feats. Then we pedaled on to Paoli and stopped for lunch at Kaelin’s Restaurant, where my future wife was waiting tables, saving for college, though I didn’t know that then, or I’d have left her a tip.
After lunch, we rested in the shade of a tree on the courthouse lawn. “I was in this town once,” Bill said. “Countdown to Christmas Festival. Year before last. Sold lots of Q’s. Qualkenbushes, Qualls, Quinns. This town is full of Q’s.”
“I could be happy in a town with lots of Q’s,” Bunny said.
“There’s nothing like a Q,” I said agreeably. “I’m descended from a Q myself. Quinetts from Vincennes.”
“That would be the Hedgehog Huzzah Festival,” Bill said.
“Imagine that, a tribute to the lowly hedgehog,” Bunny said. “What a great state we live in!”
Yes, indeed, what a state!
Chapter 19
Government Work
In the spring of my sixteenth year, Mr. O’Brien, our high school’s guidance counselor, posted an advertisement on the bulletin board outside his office, urging teenagers to enlist in the Youth Conservation Corps, a program begun by the federal government to provide, in the words of its brochure, “meaningful employment to young people.” I filled out an application, wrote the requisite three-page essay about why I wanted to work long hours for little pay, and mailed everything to Washington, D.C. Mr. O’Brien told me not to get my hopes up, that never in the history of the program had a kid from our town been selected to be part of the Corps. This was typical of Mr. O’Brien. His standard response to our aspirations was to tell us they were impossible, that we aimed too high, that we should give serious thought to pumping gas at Logan’s Mobil. It was pure genius on his part, motivating us to prove him wrong.
Several months passed, and I’d forgotten I’d applied. Then I received a phone call telling me I’d been accepted and to report the next week at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in Chesterton, Indiana, for an eight-week camp. “Twenty boys and twenty girls have been selected,” the man told me. Twenty girls!
My parents seemed especially happy for my good fortune. Indeed, they seemed positively gleeful at my moving 150 miles away for the summer.
Peanut was beside himself with envy. “You’re going to spend the summer away from home with twenty teenage girls?”
“It appears so,” I said, neglecting to mention the other nineteen boys. “From what I understand, we’ll be sharing living quarters.”
I arrived at the camp on a Sunday afternoon and was assigned to a barracks with the other boys, across the camp from the girls, who were surrounded by land mines, razor wire, and armed sentries to discourage intermingling.
The camp director, a Mr. Neil Fleck, gathered us on the lawn for a pep talk. We would be paid fifty dollars a week, plus room and board, for the pleasure of “meaningful employment,” mostly working nine hours a day picking up dead fish from the beaches of Lake Michigan. “You’ll get a nice tan,” he said, “and be doing your country a real ser vice.” For the entire eight weeks of camp, Neil Fleck appealed to our patriotism whenever our zeal for picking up dead fish dimmed.
The fish were called alewives. An Atlantic coastal fish, they’d invaded the Great Lakes during the 1950s and ’60s, and were still mating like rabbits in 1977 when I was hired to clean them from the beaches. By some quirk of nature, millions of young alewives died during the summer months and washed up on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, where they were raked into great piles and buried by easily duped teenagers earning $7.14 a day.
It was a grotesque job, made worse by the camp cook who sent us off to work each morning with tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. Maggots swarmed over the dead alewives, and great clouds of flies rose from their rotted corpses. It was like one of the deeper levels in Dante’s Inferno, and I spent the summer wondering what I had done to so deeply offend God that my life had come to this. I could think of several things, most of them having to do with impure thoughts.
Raking up dead fish with twenty girls was mindless labor, giving me more time to spend on impure thoughts. So strong was my libido that not even the stench of rotting fish could turn me from the path of romance. I had never had a girlfriend, but I reasoned that there being an equal number of boys and girls, the odds were even that by the end of summer I’d hit the jackpot. Unfortunately, the general consensus among the girls was that they loved me like a brother, thought of me as a dear friend, and didn’t want to risk our relationship by engaging in any activity that might lead to hurt feelings. Even when I told them I was ready to assume that risk, they remained unswervingly devoted to preserving our friendship. Meanwhile, every spare moment found them out in the woods with the other nineteen boys, whom they apparently didn’t love like brothers, while I stayed back at camp peeling potatoes. The entire camp was one surging hormone. Our counselors were college students, who quickly paired off and also spent much time in the woods, ostensibly studying nature.
The alewives were dying faster than we could bury them, so a fellow group of YCCers from another camp came to help for a week. This group was co
mprised mostly of girls, and their first day there I fell in love with one, and remarkably, she with me. We met at the beach. Her rake was clogged with dead, stiff alewives.
“Let me help you with that,” I said, deftly plucking the alewives from the tines of her rake.
We worked side-by-side the rest of the morning, stopping occasionally to de-fish our rakes and smile longingly at one another. By lunchtime, we were in love, and I shared my tuna sandwich with her. That evening we went for a walk in the woods, then smooched behind the camp kitchen until our lips were chapped. When we parted a week later, she gave me her picture and promised to love me forever, forever lasting approximately one month, before she wrote to tell me she thought of me as a brother and wanted to be my friend. My lips had scarcely healed, and I was alone again. Naturally.
Midway through the summer, the assault of the alewives tapered off and we began building a trail through a nearby bog. Like much employment involving the federal government, it was obvious make-work, building a trail no persons in their right minds would ever hike. As a child I enjoyed watching war movies, and the trail building we did that summer was eerily reminiscent of the WWII movie, Back to Bataan. Each day we hacked our way through dense undergrowth, mosquitoes and horseflies tearing chunks of flesh from our gaunt, malarial bodies. We would stagger forward, on the verge of collapse, only to have Neil Fleck spur us onward, urging us to remember Valley Forge, the Alamo, the Maine.
Two weeks before camp was over, Neil Fleck announced we’d be driving to Kentucky where we would carry fifty pound backpacks thirty-five miles through the Appalachian wilderness and sleep on the ground. Everyone else was elated, but I sensed four days in the woods did not bode well for me or my spastic colon, and asked Neil Fleck to drop me off at a Holiday Inn and pick me up on their way back home.
I Love You, Miss Huddleston Page 12