Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  The first quarter ended with Menasha leading by a touchdown. They scored again with six minutes to go in the half, and it looked like it would be all blue and white for their homecoming. “The Rockets will crash and burn,” I heard one smart aleck yell as he walked in front of the visiting bleachers. Steve chucked a crunched-up popcorn bag at him and the guy flipped us the middle finger. I took another look around and saw Grandpa Asa hobble up to the fence by the far end zone.

  “There’s my grandpa,” I said. “He came to see the volcano.”

  “He’s going to be ticked off when he finds out we didn’t rig up the trigger like he told us,” said Steve. Now we were both hanging our heads.

  “Hey, nerds.”

  I looked to my left just as Mark slid into the seat next to me.

  “You made it!” I said. Steve looked up and his eyes showed a glimmer of hope.

  “Did you rig up a rope?” Steve asked hopefully.

  “Nope.”

  “We’re screwed,” said Steve.

  “Halftime starts in ten minutes,” said Mark. “I want you guys to just keep your eyes on the fifty-yard line.”

  “You’ve got a plan?” asked Steve.

  “Just watch the fifty-yard line.” Mark jumped down off the bleachers and disappeared.

  Steve and I looked on hopefully as the ref blew the whistle for halftime and both teams ran off the field. The Blue Jays marching band had assembled and the homecoming king and queen were announced as they waved to the crowd from the Menasha sidelines. My eyes flashed in three directions at once: to the sidelines, to the fifty-yard line, and over to the end zone, where Grandpa Asa stood alone with his cane.

  The band members took their positions on the field. If it was going to happen, this was the time. I looked again toward Grandpa and could see him craning his neck. The announcer’s voice rang out over the loudspeaker.

  “Ladies and gentleman, please welcome the Menasha Blue Jays Band with their medley of Big Band tunes, beginning with a Glen Miller favorite, ‘The Chattanooga Choo Choo’!”

  The band started marching to the beat of the drums and the blast of about three dozen trumpets, trombones, and tubas. In their blue-and-white uniforms they pumped their feet in unison. Then, from their positions in the center of the field, the group broke up into a bunch of curving lines until they made the shape of an old steam locomotive. The crowd cheered, clapped, and whooped as the band members forming the wheels walked in a circle to give the thing the look of motion. Two people even walked back and forth with a big silver bar between the wheels to act like piston rods that drove the wheels. Even I had to admit that it was pretty cool.

  We gaped at the spectacle from the perspective of knowing the precise location of our volcano buried in the dead center of the field. Suddenly, our eyes landed on a late-arriving band member in a poorly fitting uniform carrying what appeared to be a small tree branch that he played like a clarinet.

  Steve squinted his eyes. “What the heck?”

  “It’s Mark,” I whispered.

  Mark took an awkward position at the top edge of the locomotive, like a wart on the top of a perfectly straight line. He stood tall and proud like the rest, his head arching back as he pretended to play music out of that ridiculous stick of wood.

  I was frozen in my seat, not knowing whether to laugh, scream, or cry. Steve twitched like a little kid who needed to pee. Then, altogether as a unit, the band began marching toward one end zone and in a split second we realized that the movement would take Mark directly over the top of the trigger to the volcano. He was at the forty-five yard line, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine.

  “Now,” said Steve. “Pull it.”

  Mark dropped to his knees, tossed the tree branch to the side and dug around for the trigger. Other members of the band bumped him and swerved around him. A tuba player tripped on his legs and fell over sideways as the crowd gasped. He scrambled to his feet and ran to find his place in the formation.

  “What’s going on out there?” asked a man’s voice behind us.

  “That boy is doing something on the ground,” answered his wife.

  At that point in the show everybody had noticed that something wasn’t right, and a murmur rose up from the crowd. With everyone moving around him, Mark just stood there watching. No instrument, no marching legs, just Mark, all by himself—watching.

  “Did he pull it?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s happening,” said Steve.

  I don’t know what I expected exactly. An oozing puddle? Maybe a bubbling pile of foam? What came out of the ground was a perfect miracle. A geyser. A pink one. It gurgled and sputtered at first in shots of foam three or four feet tall. Then it was like someone flipped a switch as the stream blasted into the sky as tall as the goal posts.

  To our amazement, people in the bleachers clapped and cheered.

  “They think it’s part of the show!” I yelled to Steve, who hooted right along with the crowd.

  The marching Blue Jays panicked. Their formation came unglued as band members responded to the unnatural disaster unfolding before their eyes. At first, the locomotive changed shape as the kids nearest to the geyser moved out of the way and a giant dent appeared on the top edge that had just been so perfect and straight. Then as the pink spray splattered their perfect blue-and-white uniforms, a few of them took off at a sprint, leaving their instruments on the field. More kids ran for cover and, soon enough, the Chattanooga Choo Choo split in half. The music fell apart too, and sort of simulated the sound of a train coming off the tracks. A lot of screeching and groaning was followed by a few screams and, finally, dead silence as everybody watched. It was perfect.

  I heard the lady behind me paging through her program. “I don’t think it was supposed to happen this way,” she said. Steve snorted in laughter, nearly sliding off his seat.

  Eventually, the geyser died down and shrank into a sort of ordinary volcano after all. Lava flowed up and then out in a puddle matching the bright-red color of the Neenah Rockets symbol. The mess oozed out over the giant letter M on the field.

  Recognition of the prank came gradually, starting with curses and growing into a thunder of boos and jeers.

  “Oh-oh,” said Steve. “Where’s Mark? He better make a run for it.” We searched the crowds of people on the field and found one still standing alone.

  “There he is,” I said. Not only had Mark set off the eruption. He had stayed on the field and watched the whole thing.

  Mark picked that moment to make his getaway. He started by walking toward one end zone but it didn’t take long before a few Blue Jays from the trombone section spotted him. Mark took off at a dead run and the chase was on. A roar went up from the bleachers on both sides of the field and a few adults on the Menasha sidelines even joined in the pursuit. The last thing we saw was Mark throwing off his Blue Jay hat and jacket as he disappeared between houses.

  “Holy smokes,” said Steve. “Mark is my hero.”

  I looked over to where Grandpa Asa still stood behind the other end zone. His crooked back had straightened. His head was upright and his crew cut glistened in the sunlight. Gosh, if he had a uniform and a pearl-handled revolver, he could have been General Patton himself. I half expected to see a salute.

  Steve and I couldn’t keep from smiling. I punched him in the shoulder and he punched me back. My mom once said that there are certain moments of pure joy in a person’s life and that they usually lined up with wedding days and the birth of children. For Steve, Mark, and me, this had to be one of them. Even if I were to strike it rich and become the King of Siam with twenty wives, nothing was likely to top the pink geyser on the fifty-yard line at the Menasha High School homecoming game.

  Believe it or not, Mark escaped. Like I said before, he was a natural athlete, so by dodging between houses and never stopping, he shook off all those angry Menasha guys until he got all the way to the Dairy Queen in Neenah, where he could cool his jets and catch his breath. Mark called me later that a
fternoon to let me know that he made it home safe. He also wanted to talk about the volcano. We all agreed that it was the coolest thing ever when it actually turned into a geyser and the biggest achievement so far in all of our academic careers. I called Steve to let him know that Mark had escaped. I called Grandpa Asa too. He was as proud as the rest of us and agreed that Mark deserved most of the credit.

  14

  When Dad was still alive, Sunday had always been a family time. Mom would make a big pot roast for the midday meal, complete with potatoes, carrots, peas, and apple sauce. Dad would carve up the steaming roast, and we would joke around about who got stuck with the “butt piece” on the end. We had good conversations too. Dad shared funny stories from when he was a kid, and Mom talked about the latest gossip in the neighborhood. Sally usually came up with something funny from school, and I even chimed in with a few zingers.

  As I sat alone at the kitchen table, it finally hit me that those days were never, ever coming back. Gosh—Sally was hardly around anymore, and Mom slept later and later every day. I flipped to the last page of the Sunday comics and decided not to bother with Dick Tracy. My stomach groaned and I checked my watch. Quarter past noon and not a peep from Mom. I fixed a peanut butter sandwich to go with my glass of milk.

  The phone rang and I jumped all over it. “Hello, Finwick residence.”

  “Hello, young man. This is Sheriff Heiselmann. I’m calling to check on your mother. Has she been doing better since the funeral?”

  Holy Hell! Now what?! My thoughts all drifted off to images of Heiselmann smirking alongside the Cadillac Man and of dying swans falling out of the sky. The idea of hanging up the phone and pulling the plug from the wall crossed my mind. Instead, I decided to tell a lie.

  “My mom’s doing lots better now,” I said.

  “Good. That’s real good,” said the sheriff. “Can I speak with her, please?”

  “She’s sleeping right now,” I said.

  As soon as I said the words, guess what. The stairs creaked.

  “Who is it, Del?” asked my mom.

  I thought about lying again but ended up blurting the truth.

  “It’s Sheriff Heiselmann. He says he’s just checking to see how you’re doing.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  I set the phone down and snuck into the living room to listen. The last thing I wanted was for Sheriff Heiselmann, the enemy of my dad, to be sweet-talking Mom all of a sudden. When I heard her say, “Oh, you’re too kind,” I got pretty worried. Then I heard her abruptly say, “Gotta go now. Thanks for calling.” The phone clunked back into the receiver cradle and I felt better again.

  Back in the kitchen I sat down next to Mom. “Why is he calling you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking directly at me. “I don’t even like the man.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Neither did your father.”

  Satisfied, I grabbed my peanut butter sandwich and wandered upstairs to my room and opened a Green Lantern comic book.

  About thirty minutes later I snuck back down the stairs. Mom’s eyes were glued to the TV, watching a rerun of F Troop. I just wanted to get out of the house, but wasn’t sure where to go.

  The phone rang again. I hesitated for a second, then picked it up.

  It was Mark. “Hey Delmar, you want to meet me for a bottle of pop or something?”

  Did I ever? Three seconds later, I bombed out of the garage on Eisenhower.

  Since Mark preferred walking to riding a bike, I met him on his end of town at the Red Owl. He was already sitting out front on the bench with two bottles of Royal Crown and a large box of Milk Duds.

  We yukked it up about our success with the volcano in Menasha.

  “How did you get one of their band uniforms?” I asked.

  “I just walked into their band room with everybody else and grabbed one off the rack.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Nobody even said a word.” Mark’s smile was a mile wide.

  “Good job setting off the trigger too.”

  “Did you see how the Chattanooga Choo Choo broke into pieces?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was tops.”

  We clinked RC bottles and finished them off. I bought us two more for the road, and we walked in the direction of the lake.

  At the Fresh Air Camp we stopped to skip stones and look out at the water. A couple of fishermen were motoring in off the reefs, so I walked over to check their stringer. They had seven decent walleyes and weren’t afraid to show them off.

  “Where did you catch ’em?” I asked.

  “Mansur.”

  “That’s a good reef,” I said.

  The man nodded and smiled. Most people went to Stevens Reef, which anyone could find from the red buoy, or Haystack Reef, where they could line up the radio tower with the notch in the trees. Finding Mansur Reef took some doing. In ten minutes their Alumacraft was trailered up and gone. Mark and I had the gravel beach to ourselves again. At least a dozen other fishing boats glistened in the distance, and a pair of fifteen-foot snipes raced southbound with full sails, toward Fond du Lac.

  “You want to take out a canoe?” asked Mark.

  “We don’t have one.”

  “I know where we can get one.”

  “Okay.”

  We walked through a couple of backyards along the shore. “That’s Mr. Dunn’s house.”

  “The school counselor at Horace Mann?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mark rang the doorbell but nobody answered.

  “Come on. He keeps a canoe behind his garage.”

  “What if we get caught?”

  “Relax, Delmar. We’re just borrowing it.”

  The beat up aluminum canoe wasn’t much, but it floated. The paddles were right underneath, and in two minutes we were on the lake heading south along the shore. The sun broke through the clouds and all of a sudden the green water of Lake Winnebago looked like a trillion flashing diamonds. A pair of mallards took off quacking and passed right in front of me. I turned my paddle around and made like I was shooting the Model 12.

  “Pow! Pow! Got ’em both,” I said.

  We paddled for over an hour, just talking about junk.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I don’t care. All the way to Oshkosh, if you want. You pick.”

  “There’s Blackbird Island,” I said. “How ’bout we stop and take a look.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Blackbird Island was a tiny little clump of ground with a few willow trees in the middle. It took us maybe two minutes to walk around the whole thing. Then we just sat down, facing the bluffs on the east shore and watched the waves wash in. I felt like Huck Finn with my shoes kicked off and my feet dangling, half-expecting to see a steamboat roll by like they did a hundred years ago on Winnebago.

  “Can I ask you a question, Delmar?”

  “I guess.” I sidearmed a skipper.

  “Who do you suppose killed your dad?”

  “The Highway 41 Killer. That’s what everybody says.”

  “Yeah. I know that’s all the talk. But who actually is the creep?”

  I shrugged. My mind was on Sheriff Heiselmann and the Cadillac Man.

  “That’s just bullshit. Three murders in two years and we’ve got nothing. Are the cops even looking for the Highway 41 Killer anymore? Are they even trying to solve the crime?” Mark picked up a stone, weighed it in his hand, and threw it about a mile. We both watched it fly.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if Sheriff Heiselmann knows something but isn’t talking. I’ve got a hunch he might be involved, somehow.”

  Mark quit throwing stones and looked straight at me. “What?”

  “Sheriff Heiselmann was my dad’s boss. They didn’t like each other. I heard Dad telling my mom once that he was getting yanked around pretty bad at work. That Heiselmann didn’t like him looking into certain things.”

  “That’s weird. But it’s
no reason to kill a guy.”

  “Yeah. I know.” I looked at Mark and cocked my head. “I just don’t trust the prick.”

  “Why not?” asked Mark.

  “For one thing, I saw him acting strange one day when I was diving at the point.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Well, he kept standing by his patrol car, looking around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he went up to the driver of a black Cadillac, talked to him, and took an envelope from him. There was something in the envelope that he put in his pocket—money, I think. Then he ripped up the envelope and threw it in the trash.”

  “Son of a bitch, Delmar. You should have told me earlier. You should have saved the envelope.”

  “I did save it. I fished out the pieces and taped them back together, but all it had on the outside were a bunch of doodles.”

  “What do you mean doodles?”

  “Just little drawings of sailboats, basketball players . . . stuff like that.”

  Mark sat down in the gravel and put his hands under his chin. His face got hard as he looked out over the water. I kept my mouth shut for a while.

  He turned his head and looked at me again. “Is there anything else? What else do you know about the sheriff?”

  “He killed a swan at the Poygan Marsh. Me and my grandpa saw it.”

  “What else?”

  “He called our house today and I think he was trying to sweet-talk my mom.”

  “You’re right, Delmar. He is a prick.”

  “Yup.”

  Mark got quiet again. He made a furrow in the gravel with his heel, then turned and looked at me again.

  “Delmar?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think your grandpa would let us use the truck again?”

  “Maybe. Where are we going?”

  “To the place where your dad was killed.”

  A couple hours passed before we returned the canoe and made it back to where Eisenhower was locked up at Red Owl. From there I headed toward home, zigzagging through the side streets. Ike and I chugged north on Reed Street leading up to Shattuck High.

  Wouldn’t you know it—three grits stood there smoking on a Sunday afternoon, and from a distance I could see that one of them was Larry Buskin. He said something to the other two, flicked his cigarette, and started walking directly toward me. I picked up my speed, hoping to get past him, but in two seconds it was obvious that he would catch me unless I took drastic action. I angled Ike hard to the right, jumped a curb, and suddenly found myself making my own trail through the backyards. Buskin sprinted around a couple houses, trying to cut me off, but by the time he emerged onto Congress Street, I had fifty yards on him. At that point he gave up.