Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  I was about to chicken out and ask Rhonda if we could do our report the regular, boring way when I saw her eyes. I didn’t know it before, but Rhonda Glass actually had blue eyes the color of a melting glacier. They were mermaid eyes—Catwoman eyes—Miss America eyes. Wow . . . how had I not seen them before? Maybe nobody ever had because her head usually hung down as she clomped around in those frumpy clothes. But now, under the fluorescent lights, with that rare smile on her face and her eyes wide open and beaming right at me . . . criminy—there was no way in heck I could say no.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess we can try it.”

  It was like I had flipped the on switch to Rhonda’s creativity. Other than nodding my head, I didn’t have to do a thing. She picked out all the scenes. She matched them up with discussion topics right off our outline. Before I knew it she had the whole script put together and even volunteered to type it again. I thought we were done and was getting ready to leave when she stopped me.

  “Have you ever acted before, Del?”

  “No,” I said honestly.

  “To do it well, we’ll have to practice.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you have to be expressive.”

  “Okay.”

  “But more than anything else, you have to really get into the mind of the character. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.”

  I looked at her. Was this really the girl who stared at the floor? “How do you know all this?”

  “I read things.”

  “You read things?”

  “And I watch a lot of movies—carefully.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Let’s meet at the same time next week,” said Rhonda. “I’ll get you a copy of the script so you can practice. And I have one more question for you.”

  I watched and waited.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Del Finwick?”

  “Wrong. Your name is Atticus Finch. It’s the most important part . . . remember? You have to get into the mind of the character. You have to be Atticus.”

  I know this is going to sound weird, but all of a sudden, I actually wanted to be an actor.

  “See you later,” said Rhonda, smiling as she plodded out the door with that thump, thump, thump echoing through the halls.

  Heavy, wet snowflakes fell as I prepared to walk into the Oshkosh headquarters of the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department.

  “You can do this, Delmar,” said Mark.

  “We’ll be waiting right here for you,” said Asa.

  I took a deep breath, and walked up the sidewalk and into the building, where I brushed the snow off my hair and coat. A white-haired receptionist at the front desk glanced up at me.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I called to see when I could talk with the sheriff. I was told that he gets done with a meeting at four o’clock.”

  “He’ll just be a few more minutes. There’s a chair right outside his office door.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sitting in that wooden chair, I couldn’t keep from squirming. I twisted my scarf until it looked like a pretzel. I got up a couple times for a sip of water from the bubbler. I found a copy of Field and Stream and pretended to read it but could barely even look at the pictures.

  Then a voice boomed through the corridor, and I knew right away it was Sheriff Heiselmann as he shouted orders at someone. He stopped outside his door and I stood facing him.

  “Who are you?” he asked, looking at his watch.

  “I’m Del Finwick.”

  It took a few seconds for Heiselmann’s brain to process those words. Then, suddenly, his attitude switched to smiling politeness.

  “Yes, of course. How are you? Are you doing well in school?”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “She’s okay, sir.”

  “And what can I do for you today?”

  “I have a couple questions.”

  “Fine. Fine.” He chuckled. “I hope they’re easy.”

  “They should be, sir.”

  “Well?” Heiselmann looked right at me, leaning forward slightly with his hands behind his back. The fake smile on his face was wearing thin. “I’m waiting.”

  “Where is the .357 Magnum revolver that killed my dad?”

  The fake smile melted away fast. He tried to salvage it a couple of times but it flickered out and eventually became a hard flat line.

  “I don’t know anything about a .357 Magnum revolver,” he said.

  I didn’t flinch but kept my eyes steady and straight at the sheriff. “And who was the man in the black Cadillac who handed you a yellow envelope at the Neenah lighthouse?”

  His eyes gave him away first—darting and flashing. Then it got scary, starting with the big veins in his neck bulging out and turning purple. The redness moved to his cheeks and it looked like tiny rivers of blood forming on a topographic map. The anger stretched out across his whole face until every square inch was on fire. Only one word could describe what was pouring out of Sheriff Heiselmann, and that word was hate.

  Maybe I should have backed off, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have nodded and walked away. Instead, I just stood there, staring hard at the sheriff. I don’t know where it came from, but I suddenly had all the power. It was like I was a fox and Sheriff Heiselmann was a gopher. And the funny thing was, Heiselmann knew it too.

  Not knowing what else to do, the sheriff finally turned to the receptionist. “This boy has come here by mistake,” he said, trying hard to look and sound human. “Please show him the door.”

  With that, Heiselmann retreated into his office and closed the door slowly with nothing more than a mild thud.

  The receptionist looked at me with a sort of wonder in her eyes. “What did you say to him?”

  “I just asked him a question.”

  “Well—it must have been a doozy.”

  I don’t know what I was thinking as I walked through the falling snow to Grandpa Asa’s truck. Maybe I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. The knot in my stomach from Dad’s loss ached stronger than ever. But that wasn’t the only thing churning inside me. Mixed in there was something else—maybe pride. Yes, I felt pride for having confronted the sheriff, but there was even more. Then it came to me. Courage. That’s right. Courage. At long last I had found some. Criminy! It made me feel so big that I figured that maybe my name shouldn’t even be Minnow anymore. The truck door flung open.

  “Well?” asked Mark.

  I lifted my eyes to meet his. “He’s guilty as hell,” I said.

  30

  I couldn’t wait to tell Opal about my meeting with Sheriff Heiselmann, so I taped a note to her locker.

  HI,

  MET WITH S.H.

  CAN WE MEET AT LUNCH?

  D.F.

  The cafeteria ladies were in a good mood because they were serving Italian Spaghetti and knew that people liked it. As usual, it came with lime Jell-O, carrot sticks, and a half peanut butter sandwich. I had just found a table in the corner when I saw Opal and waved her over.

  “That looks good,” she said, glancing at my tray.

  “It’s got all four food groups,” I said.

  She squinted. “I guess so—if you count lime gelatin as a fruit.”

  Opal organized the items from her brown bag lunch on the table, including a salami and cheese sandwich, a bag of pretzels, three radishes, and a small carton of milk.

  “So, you talked to the sheriff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well? Let’s hear about it.” Her eyes grew big like a kindergartener at story time.

  I told her the whole thing, starting with Mark coming up with the question and ending with the sheriff turning several shades of red before asking the receptionist to show me the door. By the time I was done, Opal had stopped eating her lunch and had a huge smile on her face.

  “You really
did it.”

  I couldn’t keep a grin from bubbling up on my own face.

  “That took nerve,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”

  Do you know what it feels like to get a compliment like that? Do you remember the lump of pride that I felt in my gut, walking out of the sheriff’s office? Well it was back again. I sat there quietly, because there was nothing left to say.

  “But what does it all mean?” Opal asked.

  “It means Sheriff Heiselmann’s guilty,” I said. “I don’t know if he pulled the trigger himself or not, but one way or the other, he’s in on it.”

  “You still can’t prove it, Del. That’s the problem.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do next?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We both sat quietly, nibbling our lunches. When I had finished my spaghetti I picked up the peanut butter half sandwich and used it to clean all the red sauce off my tray before gobbling it down. I looked at Opal in the hope that she could answer the “What next?” question. That zigzag wrinkle in her forehead had returned. I kept my mouth shut so she could think.

  At last her eyes met mine. “I have a suggestion,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You need to talk about this with someone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You need to talk to someone with experience going up against authority.”

  “Experience pushing back against the cops?”

  “That’s right,” said Opal. “Experience against forces even more powerful than Sheriff Heiselmann.”

  “But what person has that kind of experience?”

  “My mom,” said Opal.

  Opal worked it out so I would come over to her house for supper again on Friday evening. I told my mom I was going to Robby’s Hamburgers to hang out with some friends. I know, I know. Another lie, but I had to. Otherwise she would try to stop me from “fraternizing with the Negroes.”

  Mrs. Parsons had dishes clanking and steam rolling out of the kitchen when Opal and I walked in. Fried shrimp sizzled in a large pan on the stove. Sweet corn boiled in another and something that smelled and looked like pumpkin pie appeared behind the oven door when she peeked inside.

  “How are you, Del?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “How’s your mama and sister?”

  “They’re okay.” At least the part about my sister was probably true.

  “You can sit down right there.” She nodded at the chair next to me. “Opal, honey, you can set the table. Just three places. Your father’s working late.”

  “Why does he have to work late, Mama?”

  “He’s got a machine acting up at one of the mills. He need to stay until it’s fixed and you know how that go sometimes.”

  “Yes.” Opal rolled her eyes.

  “Dinner be ready in two shakes. You not allergic to shrimp, are you, Del?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Ever have sweet potato pie before?”

  “No.”

  She smiled and those little wrinkles popped up in the corners of her eyes. “Well then . . . I guess you is in for a treat.”

  Let me tell you something about Mrs. Parsons’s sweet potato pie. Maybe it sounded like a weird creation, but it was delicious and I told her so. The whole meal was full of tasty flavors about a hundred times better than those TV dinners Mark and I ate on Thanksgiving.

  “What was it like living in Alabama?” I asked. I was just trying to make small talk, but the question turned out to be more complicated than I thought.

  “Well, that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “It depends on which part of my life in Alabama you talking ’bout. You see, I was born in 1933. It was a hard time for most people, and especially for black folk.”

  Mrs. Parsons went on to tell me all about her life growing up as the daughter of share-croppers on a cotton farm where they all had to work in the fields, even the little kids, and there was almost no chance to build a better life for your family.

  “Maybe you’ve learned about it in school,” she said. “The system was rigged for the landowner. They put us up in a one-room shack with a leaky roof and some raggedy clothes and a bag of dry beans and maybe a few chickens. But them beans and chickens was no gift, let me tell you, and when that cotton crop was picked and sold at the market, the expenses were subtracted out, and then, of course, the owner had to take out a profit for his-self. Well, what you think was left for the family after that?”

  “Not much, probably,” I said.

  “Not much is right. And families went hungry. Blacks and whites, but especially blacks. And school? Well, most black children never made it past the fifth grade.”

  “What was school like?” I asked.

  “Well, everything in the South was segregated of course. Bathrooms, restaurants, hotels, even drinking fountains were separated between blacks and whites. The same was true for schools, and the black schools were shabby—especially in the countryside.”

  “How did you get to be a nurse?”

  “I was lucky. Our family moved to the city when the war broke out, and my parents both got jobs at a munitions factory. Because of that I was able to go to high school and go to a black college. Plus, I was lucky enough to meet Sam Parsons. He ain’t never went to high school or college but was so good with machinery that everybody needed him. Sam Parsons could fix anything—still can. And that’s what got him into Pearson & Greene, and that’s how we be following the paper mills all the way up here to Neenah, Wisconsin.”

  “Tell Del about Selma,” said Opal. “I told you why he needs to know.”

  She nodded and then scooted her chair over next to me. “Touch my head right there.” She pointed to the top, left side of her head with an index finger. “Go ahead and press down right there on my skull.”

  I did as she asked and my finger rose up on something like a knot on a tree. “There’s a lump,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “And the hair gone on that spot too.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s where a police officer done clubbed me and nearly cracked my skull.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I stood up for something.”

  “You protested?”

  “That’s right. I protested for black voting rights.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, I did. Have you heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever heard of John Lewis and Hosea Williams?”

  “No.”

  “Well they were our leaders on March 7, 1965. I was one of a group of six hundred at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Have you learned about what happened there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Good Lord! Now honey, I knows Wisconsin be a long ways from Alabama, but this is important to the whole country.” Mrs. Parsons looked at me. Her jaw was set. “Now Del, I already aware that you like history, so I reckon you ought to read up on this.”

  “I will,” I said, and I meant it.

  “We was beginning a march from Selma to Montgomery, about fifty miles. Both cities were known for their rules making it difficult for black people to vote, and somepin needed to be done about it. Opal was seven at the time and I left her for the day with her grandmother.”

  I looked at Opal and she looked at me.

  Mrs. Parsons continued. “The plan was to have a peaceful march, but when we approached that bridge it be blocked by Alabama State Troopers in their riot gear with helmets on their heads and clubs in their hands.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “We stood our ground.” Mrs. Parsons dropped her head briefly. Then she looked toward the wall and blinked several times as she brought her hand up to her cheek. Her chin quivered.

  “Are you okay, Mama?” asked Opal.

  Mrs. Parsons nodded, pressed her lips tightly together, and then looked me s
traight in the eyes.

  “Like I said, Del, we stood our ground. That was the main thing. We was face-to-face, us and the troopers.”

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “The troopers fired tear gas and came right at us until they was running us over. It was awful. Keep in mind that this was a nonviolent protest, Del. We was only fixin’ to march. But that’s when the clubs come out, the policemen went crazy, and the screaming began. Like I said, they didn’t just push us back away from the bridge either. They run right over us. It weren’t even a fight, Del. It was a beating.”

  I said nothing.

  Mrs. Parsons’s lips tightened up. “Do you think the State of Alabama won on that day, Del?”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Parsons nodded. She had a serious and prideful look on her face, sitting up with clear, bright eyes and a perfectly straight back, and I wondered if that’s what Chief Oshkosh looked like when he stood up for the Menominee Indians when the government tried to push them off the land.

  “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on between you and the sheriff? Opal tells me you gots your own kinda struggle.”

  31

  As I sat in the kitchen stirring up a glass of orange Tang the next morning, my head was still spinning from my talk with Mrs. Parsons the night before. The whole idea of organizing a protest march seemed both exciting and crazy at the same time. On the one hand, I knew that something had to be done to put pressure on Sheriff Heiselmann and bring attention to my dad’s unsolved murder. On the other hand . . . Gosh! A protest march? It all seemed so extreme.

  While pondering the dilemma, I noticed the afternoon paper on the kitchen table. I grabbed it and started flipping through the pages. On the front was an article about an earthquake in Nicaragua. Page 2 had a story about an airplane crash rescue in the Andes Mountains. Page 3 explained how Australia was pulling all its soldiers out of Vietnam. Gosh Nixon—take the hint.

  Then, as I turned to the local news section, my eyes crashed into five words that hit me harder than a Mohammed Ali punch.

  Fisherman Drowns in Fox River