Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

Will hit Clyde on the belly with his flashlight. “You’re the one who better shut up.”

  Clyde was defiant. “I’ll shut up when you do.”

  “You’ll shut up or I’ll take that medicine bottle and give you an earache right up the ass.”

  Clyde didn’t want to risk that. He rolled over and buried his head under his blanket. Will continued his inspirational lecture: “Week from today we’ll be different people, Ace. We’ll be men of the world. We’ll have seen the future. We’ll be armed to the teeth with knowledge. Ready for whatever life has in store.”

  I was squirming like a beached catfish. “All I’m ready for is a real bed. There’s a rock hard as an algebra test in my back.”

  Will’s flashlight clicked on. He reached under his pillow for his guidebook. “That reminds me, right after we see them make tires at the Firestone Pavilion we’ve got to get over to the International Business Machine Company Exhibit. They’ve got these machines that can count and sort numbers with the push of a button. Listen to this: ‘Intricate tasks that would require thousands of eyes and fingers are rattled off at a dizzy speed.’”

  I answered with an unenthusiastic, “Imagine that.”

  Will put his guidebook away. Clicked off the flashlight. “If you want to spend your whole life empty as a pumpkin, that’s all right with me.”

  I’d been disrespectful. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry all right.”

  We both laughed, instantly recementing our friendship.

  “How’d you and me ever end up friends anyway?” I asked.

  “I’ve been wondering that for six years.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “We’re such different squirrels. You like to stand back and look at life. Study it. Discuss it. Take notes on it. But me, I like to live life.”

  Will protested. “I like to live life.”

  “No you don’t. All the way here you had your snoot stuck in your maps while the real world was whizzing by. You didn’t see none of it.”

  “Sure I did. Two hundred and eighty-three miles of cornfields.”

  “Maybe you knew those cornfields were there. But you didn’t see them. Not the way I did.”

  “Now that makes a lot of sense.”

  “It does. Remember when we dissected that frog in science? You couldn’t wait to cut that little croaker open to see how it worked, like it was a broken radio or something. I wanted to see its guts. See how bad it smelled.”

  “That frog did smell bad, didn’t it?”

  “Remember how I cut out its little brain and stuck it in Gloria Gerber’s ear?”

  I didn’t know it then, but that was the deepest talk Will Randall and I would ever have. It chiseled in unerodible tombstone granite just who he was and just who I was. It didn’t matter a lick if we were two different squirrels, only that we accepted and respected, and enjoyed each other unabashedly. In that old Boy Scout tent. In Mary and Fritz’s backyard in Valparaiso, Indiana. With the smell of dog urine and moldy canvas.

  “I have drove Fords exclusively, when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from troubles the Ford has got the other car skinned.”

  CLYDE BARROW, IN A LETTER TO HENRY FORD

  Eight/Nothing But Vanilla

  Aunt Mary yelled over the purr of the Gilbert SXIII. “We enjoyed having you.”

  “We had a swell time,” Will yelled back. “Thanks for the cookies.”

  “Be careful in dat got-damned ting,” Uncle Fritz yelled from the porch. He was in his underwear. The three beagles were sniffing his furry legs.

  Will yelled back. “We’ll send you a postcard from the fair.”

  I backed down the driveway. Aunt Mary followed, fingers splayed down her happy hips. “Take care of that ear, Clyde.”

  Clyde assured her he would.

  Finally she yelled at me. “Nice meeting you, Ace.”

  I began a slow roll up Tecumseh Street, anxious to kill Valparaiso. More ready than ever for Chicago and the willing city girls that lived there by the thousands. As I took off I heard her voice chase after me like a siren: “Y.E.S.”

  We reached State Route 2 and took it to U.S. 30. It was seven in the morning. Understandably, Will was antsy. He had planned on leaving at 5:30. But Aunt Mary had insisted on gluing us full of French toast and syrup. So we were well behind schedule before we got started.

  The plan was to take U.S. 30 west into Illinois, all the way to Joliet, then take the famous U.S. 66 into the city. There were several closer routes. But Uncle Fritz insisted we approach from the west, to skirt “Nikker town” as he called Chicago’s south side. We flew through the tiny burgs of Deep River and Ainsworth, Merrilville, Shererville. At some forlorn crossroads we stopped to gas up.

  Will handled the pump. He was a professional, after all. Then while Clyde sat outside on the step and looked sideways at the empty road, Will and I went inside to pay and maybe get a bottle of pop. Sure it was only eight o’clock in the morning and nobody respectable drank pop that early. In the Methodist world we lived in, you didn’t dare treat yourself to anything until late in the afternoon, after a day of sacrifice and accomplishment. But we were on the open road now. Free as birds. Released by adventure from all such religious restraint.

  Anyway we didn’t get pop. We got ice cream. Three tall vanilla cones. Nickel each.

  We sat on the step next to Clyde and licked. It was already hot. Will watched the melting ice cream dripping off Clyde’s knuckles. “If you don’t hurry up you’ll have to lick yours off the step.”

  Whether it was his ear or the French toast and syrup, Clyde was in a foul mood. “It can drip straight to hell for all I care. You know I like chocolate better.”

  We were already ninety minutes behind schedule and Uncle Fritz’s detour would cost us another hour maybe. Those cones, good as they were, were costing us a few more precious minutes. Understandably Will was simmering. “Don’t you think we’d all gotten chocolate if they had any?”

  Clyde wouldn’t retreat. “I want chocolate.”

  Will came to a boil. “Excuse me for spending a nickel on you!” He grabbed the cone from Clyde’s sticky hand and threw it as far as he could.

  “Why’d you do that?” Clyde whined. “I woulda ate it.”

  That’s when I noticed a man and woman walking up the road toward the garage. “Hey,” I whispered. “It’s that hillbilly gangster and his girl, isn’t it?”

  It was them. The hillbilly had his shotgun over his shoulder. His girl was dragging two big suitcases. They walked right up to the Gilbert SXIII. They were covered with sweat. The girl started primping in the mirror on the door. The hillbilly waved at us. “Hiya boys! See you still got your melons!” They joined us on the step.

  “Where’s that shiny Auburn?” Will asked.

  “Thirsty bitch ran out of gas,” the hillbilly said. “Had to put her out of her misery. Two sweet how-do-you-dos through the radiator. God rest her oily soul. So how’s this thing—whatever it is—on gas?”

  My entire body prickled. “You aren’t gonna steal it?”

  He rubbed his chin. “It sure ain’t the kind of veekle I steal generally. But we are in a pinch.”

  I reminded him of what he’d told us only the day before, that he wouldn’t rob us unless we were rich. “Well, we’re just as poor as we were twenty-four hours ago,” I assured him.

  The hillbilly sized me up. “I can see you are. But at the moment you boys have the misfortune of being a lot richer than us. Funny how the world works ain’t it?”

  The woman was sizing up Will. His cone especially. “Sweetie. Go in there and steal me one of those.”

  The hillbilly liked the idea. “I could go for a cone myself. And whatever’s in the cash drawer.” Chuckling at his own joke, he sauntered in, shotgun over his shoulder. The woman tipped her head and looked parallel at Clyde, who was still mourning the loss of the cone he didn’t want. “He thin in the head or something?” she asked us.

  “Ear wax,” W
ill said.

  “He got any drops?”

  Boom! Boom! Glass showered our backs. The hillbilly stepped through the shattered window, steaming shotgun in one hand, two cones in the other, both several scoops high. “They didn’t have any damn chocolate,” he said. “Nothing but vanilla.”

  “I coulda told you that,” Clyde said.

  I watched the woman sink her red lips into the white vanilla. It was a better show than the tomato.

  “Well boys,” the hillbilly said, “it’s time to say goodbye again.” He crawled in the Gilbert SXIII. The woman danced to the other side, sucking ice cream and listening to that jazz music in her head.

  Will tossed his cone and stormed toward the Gilbert SXIII. “You can’t leave us here.” It wasn’t a plea. It was an order. Will, after all, had a World’s Fair to see.

  The hillbilly was smiling. “Sure I can. I’m a bad man with a big gun. I can do anything I want.” Then he looked down at the controls. His smile disintegrated. “Judas Priest! Damn old Model T. I don’t have time to relearn this crazy-ass thing. Boys, consider yourself kidnapped.”

  We watched him load his shotgun and motion us forward. He made me get behind the wheel. He stretched out on the passenger side and made his girl squeeze in between Will and Clyde and the melons in the back. He waved a grand good-bye to the garage owner, who was already sweeping up the glass, and ordered me to fly—not west toward Joliet, or back east toward Valparaiso—but south down some dusty farm road into the steamy Indiana corn.

  Will demanded to know where we were headed.

  “Who knows?” the hillbilly said. When his cone was gone he had his girl hand him a melon, which he sliced open with a pocketknife. He filled his face. “These are almost ripe,” he said. He tossed the rinds into the corn and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his expensive suitcoat. “Since we will be traveling together for a while, let me introduce myself. I am Gustavus P. Gillis. Better known as Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, professional lawbreaker. That sweet little biscuit seated there in the back is my moll, the talented Gladys Bartholomew.”

  “When Gus gets killed I’m going to become a famous actress on the radio,” she informed us.

  Gus reached over the seat and thrust his hand at Will. Will reluctantly shook it. “I’m Will Randall. That’s Ace Gilbert driving. And this is my brother Clyde.”

  Gus made me shake and then reached back and pumped Clyde’s hand for a long time. “You are a lucky man, Clyde!”

  “I am?”

  “You sure are. You share the name of the greatest lawbreaker in history. The late Clyde Barrow. You never met him, did you, Clyde?”

  Clyde shook his sideways head. “I ain’t never even heard of him.”

  Gus pushed back his hat and scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. Face pained. He was taking Clyde’s ignorance personally. “Ain’t never heard of Clyde Barrow?”

  Will came to his brother’s defense. “He’s never heard of anybody. Hitler. Robin Hood. Rudolph Valentino. Not anybody. But I have. Ace, too. Bonnie and Clyde. We’ve heard of them.”

  The pain left Gus’s face. “Someday you boys can tell your grandchildren you were once held hostage for days by the famous Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis.”

  Will didn’t want to hear that. “Held for days? Jeez! We’ve got to be in Chicago this morning or our entire trip to the World’s Fair will be down the toilet.”

  Gus didn’t want to hear that. “Judas Priest! Here you are on the lam with a famous lawbreaker, and you’re worried about being a few days late for that awful World’s Fair?”

  “We’ve only got four precious days,” Will said. “Can’t be home any later than church on Sunday.”

  “And I got school Monday,” Clyde said.

  Gus was clearly disappointed in the boy with the famous name. “School? This is your school, Clyde!”

  In 1955, the year the R&R Luncheonette folded, and I was between dreams, I went to see Gladys Bartholomew. She was back in Mingo Junction, a suburb of Steubenville, on the banks of the Ohio River, married to a man who drove a beer truck. I wanted to get everything straight in my mind about what happened that week in Indiana. Why things unraveled the way they did. We sat in her kitchen and watched the river barges. “Why’d he kidnap us?” I asked. “Three dumb farm boys in a Model T with wings. There would’ve been other cars along he could steal that morning. Fancy cars with transmissions he could drive.”

  Gladys sipped on her coffee. She’d put that part of her life far behind her. Questions that had bedeviled me for twenty years—and bedevil me still—didn’t bedevil her one iota. “I suppose just for the fun of it,” she said. She screamed at her kids to turn down the TV. I went home and opened a Dairy Doodle franchise in Brunswick, right across from the high school where Will and I graduated twenty-one years before. Will was valedictorian. He had to give a speech on what our graduating meant to the rest of the world. It was filled with quotes from his Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair. Quotes about the progress of the past. Quotes about the progress sure to come.

  Indiana is considerably flatter than Ohio. Hotter, too. Gus made me zigzag through the cornfields all morning. We avoided both official towns and unofficial ones. About noon we came to a sign that said Weebawauwau County Line. Gus liked the way it rolled off his hillbilly tongue. He said “Weebawauwau” several times, then asked us, “What you boys think that means in the Indian language?”

  “It means ‘release your hostages so they can go to the World’s Fair,’” Will said.

  Gus really laughed. “No Will, I think it means ‘county full of rubes ripe for picking.’ Let’s go find some rubes, Ace.”

  We came to a main highway, freshly blacktopped. Gus pointed me toward a collection of little white buildings rising out of the corn. “Let’s go see what that’s all about,” he said. It turned out to be a tourist camp. A place called Hal’s Half Way, meaning I suppose it was located halfway between two important places on that highway. I still remember the sign out front. It was something. Actually it was a whole bunch of signs, one above the other, twenty feet high. At the very top was the cutout face of a happy man who I suppose was Hal. One of those cartoon balloons came out of his O-shaped mouth, asking Why not stop? The sign below that had “Hal’s Half Way” scripted in red light bulbs. The next sign down said “ALWAYS OPEN.” Then came a string of smaller signs attached to each other like Venetian blinds:

  COMFY CABINS

  RUNNING WATER

  CLEAN TOILETS

  TASTY FOOD

  HOT COFFEE

  PIE BAKED DAILY

  HAMBURGERS

  KIDS EAT FREE

  CIGARETTES

  PAY PHONE

  FREE MAPS

  WORLD’S FAIR GIFTS

  ICE COLD COCA-COLA

  SORRY, NOT HIRING.

  It was hardly surprising that the parking lot was full with an impressive sign like that. Gus put his shotgun down his baggy suit pants. In the fifties when Gunsmoke came on TV, and that hillbilly deputy Chester Goode limped after Marshall Dillon on his stiff leg, it always made me think of Gus Gillis, struggling across that parking lot at Hal’s Half Way.

  We followed Gus inside. Squeezed into a booth by the window. Unable to bend, Gus was almost lying down. There were lots of folks eating. The air stank of coffee, hamburger grease and cigarettes. Through the serving window behind the counter I could see Hal working the grill. The waitress brought us menus, nearly tripping over Gus’s Chester leg. “Order anything you want, boys,” he told us when she left. “It ain’t like we’ll be paying.”

  Will, Clyde, and I ordered hamburgers and home fries. Will added a side of applesauce. Gladys asked about the chicken and the fish dinners before settling on a ham steak with scalloped potatoes and cottage cheese. Gus ordered two bowls of chili and the meat loaf. Peas and mashed potatoes came with that. For drinks we all ordered Cokes. By the time our food came the lunch-hour trade was beginning to taper off. Gus frowned at every empty booth and counter sto
ol as a lost opportunity. He made us eat fast.

  Mouth still full of meat loaf, he pulled himself up on his stiff leg and excused himself. “Nature calls,” he said. Two minutes later he came out of the men’s room, shotgun out of his pants. He slipped into the kitchen and came out with Hal and a big hamburger. A bite was gone. “Hal,” he said, “you are a wonderful cook.” He gave him a greasy kiss on the cheek. “Now, who had the burger with onion?”

  A mousy man at the counter raised his hand. Gus put the wounded hamburger in front of him. “You’ll enjoy that,” he said and with a nod of his gun barrel bade the man take a bite. The mousy man did. “See?” Gus said as the man chewed. Then he peppered the ceiling with shotgun pellets. The blast made the waitress scream and drop a full pot of coffee into the glass pie case. With everyone frozen in their seats, Gus launched into a speech we’d hear dozens of times as we robbed our way across Weebawauwau County that week: “I am Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, professional lawbreaker. Seated by the window there is the talented Gladys Bartholomew. Stand up Gladys, so the men can have a proper oogle.” Gladys wiggled up and waved as if being introduced at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, which, by the way, I got my fill of the years I ran the R&R Luncheonette and the Dairy Doodle; when I ran the Clam Shack on Pine Island, in Florida, I refused to join the Chamber, inasmuch as it hadn’t prevented me from losing my shirt twice in Ohio. “She’s one buttery biscuit ain’t she? Now seated with her are three fine young men all the way from Ohio.”

  Gus told us to stand up and take a bow. Which we did, Will more reluctantly than Clyde or me.

  “Now before we pick the lint from your pockets,” Gus said, “I want to make it clear these boys, vicious as they look, are not official members of my gang. They are, in fact, unwilling kidnappees, held begrudgingly against their own inclinations.” He urged the mousy man to take another bite, then got down to business. “While Hal here empties the cash drawer into my ten-dollar hat, Gladys will move among you. Be generous with your valuables. The men may keep their wedding rings. Any man dumb enough to have one deserves to keep it.