And I learned about that baseball game.
Orville Barnes was elected sheriff of Weebawauwau County in 1920, so by 1934 he was pretty much king of the place, setting the pace, setting the tone, moving people and opinions around like they were pieces on a giant chess board, which, by the way, is pretty much what Indiana looks like from the air, squares of corn and pasture separated by hedgerows and ruler-straight roads.
Orville Barnes loved games. Any kind of game. From playing jacks on the sidewalk with little girls to refusing to hunt down a crazy hillbilly who wanted to be riddled with bullets. He loved baseball most of all. It was the plodding pace of the game that excited him, Albert Finley told me. “Orville used to say it’s the kind of game you not only have fun playing, but also have fun having fun,” he told me.
So Orville Barnes had arranged a baseball game with Big Mike Minsky’s Manhattan Meteors, a traveling professional ball team from Missouri that would bus in and clobber the living crud out of your local team for only a hundred bucks.
Big Mike Minsky’s star attraction was a pitcher named Moon Man Morton. His specialty was the tobacco ball. He’d drool a glob on the ball, and then skid it right over the plate for a guaranteed strike. Moon Man Morton never lost. The shills Big Mike placed in the crowd cleaned up like bandits on side bets. The Manhattan Meteors roared through unsuspecting towns like an Oklahoma dust storm. “Folks joked it wasn’t Herbert Hoover but Big Mike Minsky who brought on the depression,” Millie Macmillan told me.
Sheriff Barnes knew all about Moon Man Morton’s tobacco ball and the shills in the crowd when he set up the game, which, wouldn’t you know it, was held on the same evening Gus hijacked that old Jenny and made me fly it up and down the river looking for rich people to rob. So just about the time we were landing on the Baptists, Orville Barnes was yelling “Play ball!” As sheriff, he had the honor of calling the balls and strikes. He knew how the game would go before it started.
The Manhattan Meteors batted first and intentionally went down in order, to the delight of the Weebawauwauan crowd. In the bottom of the first, Moon Man Morton kept his tobacco juice in his mouth and threw enough dry slop to give the local team two runs. With the score a surprising two to nothing, Big Mike’s shills went to work making dozens of two-, five-, and ten-dollar side bets.
Then in the second inning the Manhattan Meteors hit six straight home runs before succumbing to three intentional strikeouts. That would bring the Moon Man back to the mound, jaws chipmunked full of tobacco juice.
Sheriff Barnes expected all this, and now in the bottom of the second he quietly instructed every Weebawauwau batter not to swing. Every pitch Moon Man Morton threw was a strike. The sheriff called every one a ball. Weebawauwau loaded the bases and then miraculously scored three quick runs on walk-ins. The dirt from the pitcher’s mound to home plate was splattered with tobacco juice.
Both Moon Man and Big Mike descended on home plate, both swearing and spitting. The sheriff was ready for them. “Problem?” he asked in a very calm Indiana way.
“You mole-eyed idiot,” Moon Man slobbered. “You know damn well I’m throwing strikes.”
“There’s no way I’m letting you walk in six runs,” Big Mike grizzled through clenched teeth.
“Big Mike,” Sheriff Barnes said, “lets you and me walk and talk a little.”
So Orville Barnes and Big Mike Minsky strolled down the third-base line. The crowed was hissing and laughing and begging the shills to make more bets. From 1934 to his death in ’39, the sheriff told the story so many times, both his cousin and Millie knew every word by heart. “Now Big Mike,” the sheriff said, “baseball is a wonderful game. And these are hard times. I took a hundred dollars out of my own reelection fund to bring your fine team to Weebawauwau County. Why? Because I wanted to put a little magic back into the lives of these poor hard-working voters. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”
Big Mike pulled open his collar and let some of the blood sogging his face run back down his neck. “I can appreciate a little monkey business to make it close, this being an election year. But six straight walks? You’re not cheating fair, sheriff. You’re not cheating fair!”
Orville Barnes pulled a paddle and red rubber ball from his back pocket and expertly bounced the ball higher and higher. Blump blump blump blump. The crowd cheered and applauded. They loved it when he played with his paddle. “I’m sure once the local boys get eight or ten runs on the scoreboard, Moon Man will start getting a few more over the plate,” he said.
“Eight or ten runs? You nuts?”
“How about an even nine?”
Big Mike snatched the paddleball out of the air and threw it into the outfield. The crowd was on the cusp of lunacy, applauding in unison, chanting. “Or-ville, Or-ville, Or-ville.”
“How about I put my team on the bus,” Big Mike threatened, “and let you explain to all these hard-working voters why all the damn magic has just driven off in a cloud of Indiana dust?”
The sheriff waved to the crowd and then produced a stack of papers from under his chest protector. “Maybe we need to look at this thing from a fresh perspective,” he said. “See these? Wanted posters from all over the country. I get thousands of them. If the government spent more on prisons and less on paper, the country would be a lot safer place, don’t you think?” He casually leafed through the posters. “You’d be amazed who shows up on these things.” He pulled one out and showed it to Big Mike. “This one looks remarkably like old Moon Man Morton himself, doesn’t he? And how about this guy? Spitting image of your shortstop, Jupiter Joe Jolly. And this one. You’d swear that was Mercury Muldoon, your leftfielder.”
Big Mike knew he was beat. “OK. Nine runs.”
“Nine runs this inning,” the sheriff agreed. “And then we’ll see how well your batters do from there.”
And that’s how the game went. Nine to six in the second inning. Twelve to seven in the third. Weebawauwau County was headed for a bigger financial windfall than getting a WPA project. And Sheriff Orville Barnes was cruising for reelection. In the bottom of the fourth Gus ordered me to land in the outfield. I taxied right up to second base.
Gus waved his shotgun and slid to the ground. “Good evening all,” he shouted over the engine’s tinny growl. “Let me introduce myself. I am the very same Gus Gillis who waylaid your milkman and Coca-Cola man this morning and now I’ve set down to waylay all of you. How about that?”
Baptists are one thing. Ballplayers are another. I watched Moon Man Morton slather his ball with tobacco juice, then throw a strike off Gus’s forehead. I heard the umpire yell “Steeee-rike!” The crowd loved it. The Manhattan Meteors began to close on the Jenny. The locals emptied their bench, bats in hand. Gus staggered back against the plane. Clyde and I grabbed him by the neck of his suit coat and pulled him in. I spun the plane in a defensive circle, chasing everyone back. Gloves and bats and balls were flying at us. I roared toward home plate, turned, throttled up, and headed for the home run fence. Broke off my left wheel on the scoreboard. But made it up.
Albert Finley told me Sheriff Barnes immediately resumed the game. The Manhattan Meteors lost 33 to 27. Deputies made the shills pay up. Big Mike Minsky and his team roared off in their bus to a more hospitable county. Orville Barnes was reelected in a landslide. He died of a heart attack in 1939, giving Millie Macmillan one of his nine-inning pokings. Imagine dying doing that! Almost as embarrassing as the way Will’s father died. But nowhere near as embarrassing as the way Gus Gillis finally got his.
“So that umpire was the sheriff,” I said to Millie when I looked her up at her cathouse by the railroad tracks.
“That’s right,” she said. “Orville had spent all morning watching with binoculars while you worked the bridge. He enjoyed your game with those deliverymen immensely. And the way you landed on the ballfield—that Gus Gillis getting beaned—he laughed all night about that. And the next morning when he heard about what you did to those Baptists! Orville just about had his
heart attack right there.”
So that was the beginning of our entanglement with Sheriff Orville Barnes. A crooked baseball game on a hot Indiana evening.
After I talked to Millie and Albert Finley and Bud Hemphill, I went back to Fort Benjamin Harrison and finished my schooling. On August 31, 1942, I graduated First Cook.
Scored 93.1 percent on my proficiency test. Tenth best in a class of 238, up to that time the largest cooking class in American military history. I was immediately shipped out to England. They sent me to a little town called Stone, in Staffordshire, on the banks of the River Trent. There I settled in with the 156th Replacement Company, 130th Replacement Battalion, 8th Air Force. For the duration of the war I supervised a three thousand-man-capacity mess hall. Fed fresh B-17 bomber crews waiting their assignments. When they discharged me on November 29, 1945, I wasn’t a First Cook anymore. I was a Master Sergeant, with a commendation for superior service. It read: “You have had to train many men who had never before been in a kitchen, and those men have also made a name for themselves with the training which you instilled in them.”
Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I left the U.S. Army Air Force a Cooking Ace!
“Men compare her with other girls and find her lovelier by far! Her lips never shriek ‘paint.’ For she always uses a marvelous new kind of lipstick that brings smooth, natural color. Rich, glowing color—but not a trace of paint to her mouth conspicuous!”
ADVERTISEMENT FOR TANGEE LIPSTICK,
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Fourteen/Just Traveling Through
Will Randall and I had been joined at the hip since my family moved up from Columbus to the farm on Stony Hill Road. More than six years. Everything important in our lives, Will and I had accomplished together. School. Scouts. Church. Dreaming about the future. Now I was up in the air and Will was down on the ground. I had recklessly driven a wedge between us, and Gus had wickedly driven it in farther.
That hour I was airborne with Gus and Clyde has spooked me, as I’ve said, all my life. All through the thirties when I stayed away from Bennett’s Corners it spooked me. During my years in the military it spooked me. My restaurant years it spooked me. During my sorrowful nine-year marriage to Lois Cobb it spooked me.
What was Will doing that hour?
What was Will thinking that hour?
Was he seething because I’d crossed the line?
Bewildered because I’d betrayed his dream?
Scared numb because, thanks to me, Clyde’s life wasn’t worth a nickel?
Or was he all wrapped up in Gladys Bartholomew?
Those were the questions spooking me that weekend in 1942 when I took the bus up to Weebawauwau.
I got off the bus in my uniform, feeling ashamed and smug at the same time. Little did the Weebawauwauans know that hidden under these summer-weight cotton khakis was the woolly monster who’d terrorized their peaceful blue sky eight years before. I went straight to the barber shop. Stuck my head in the open door. “Say, I’m looking for a fellow who used to crop dust around here,” I said. “Maybe he still does.”
The barber, the man in the chair, and the three waiting, all smiled at my uniform. “That’d be Bud Hemphill,” the barber said. “Runs the Standard Oil station on the north end.”
“Still flies some, but don’t crop dust no more,” the man in the chair said. “Not for seven or eight years.”
I walked to the Standard Oil station. Maybe a quarter mile. Bud Hemphill was inside behind a big desk, tinkering with a carburetor, empty pop bottles rising from the desktop like crystal stalagmites. Told him who I was. He was glad to see me. He didn’t have the Jenny anymore. Wished he was young enough to join the Army Air Force himself. Was I a pilot? He frowned when I told him they were training me to be a cook. He had pictures of airplanes everywhere. Under his electric Quaker State Oil wall clock was an old magazine picture of Eddie Rickenbacker. I told him my father flew with Eddie in France. Bud gave me a free bottle of pop, the way Will’s father did before his embarrassing death.
Bud Hemphill had been alone with Will and Gladys that hour I was up with Gus and Clyde. I told him I needed to know everything that happened, minute by minute. What Will said and did. What Will might have been thinking and feeling.
Between my visit with Bud in ’42 and my visit with Gladys in ’55, I’ve pieced that hour together pretty well. Though I’ll never know what was bubbling in Will Randall’s brain, or his heart, or his loins, of course.
According to Bud, Gladys crawled off Will’s chest as soon as we were in the air. She threatened to shoot Bud dead if he tried to escape. She was excited, certain that in a few hours Gus would be riddled, and she’d be on her way to Chicago and fame. “When those newspaper writers crowd around me I’ll let it slip I want to be a radio actress,” she said, “to pay back in listening pleasure all the harm my Gus did during his pitiful life.”
Then Gladys panicked, fearing she wasn’t quite ready for the airwaves. “I need to rehearse,” she said, anxiously patting fresh face powder on her sweating forehead and cheeks. “I need to rehearse.”
So that’s what Will did that hour. Rehearsed with Gladys. Bud was forced to rehearse, too. Gladys put away her pistol and pulled out her Daphne Darnell scripts. I’ve still got them. They were in the backseat of the Gilbert SXIII when I drove home alone from Chicago in ’34. I took them with me to Mingo Junction when I looked Gladys up in ’55. Figured she’d be tickled to get them back. But she didn’t want them. Backed away like they were radioactive, which I suppose to her they were. I took them home with me to Bennett’s Corners.
So Gladys leafed through the scripts and chose one to rehearse. “This is my favorite,” she told Will and Bud, “‘The Dashing Stranger.’ I’ll play the heroine, Eleanor White, the big-hearted country girl whose life is changed forever by a knock on the door.” She made Will sit on her left, Bud on her right. Bud told me he could feel the heat from her thigh oozing right through his canvas overalls. I suppose Will was feeling her heat, too. “Will, you’ll play the Dashing Stranger,” she said. “And you, flyboy, you’ll be Mr. White, my daddy.”
And so the rehearsal for Gladys’s impending fame began. From my visits and from those old Daphne Darnell scripts, I pretty much know word for word how that hour went:
GLADYS
(as the door)
Knock, knock, knock.
BUD HEMPHILL
(as Mr. White)
Who could that be knocking at the door of our little cottage in the country at this time of night?
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
I’ll put down my mending and get it, Father, since you are both blind and crippled from a lifetime of unrewarded toil.
BUD HEMPHILL
(as himself)
If I’m blind how can I be reading this?
GLADYS
(as herself)
Good lord, flyboy. You ain’t blind. Only your character is.
BUD HEMPHILL
(as himself)
Oh. Sorry.
GLADYS
(as the front door)
Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
Hello! You’re a stranger, aren’t you?
WILL
(as the Dashing Stranger)
Why yes I am. I thought perhaps a green-eyed beauty like yourself, with your father sitting there before the crackling fire, might have an odd job or two, for an honest traveling man down on his luck.
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
Well, let me think for a moment.
BUD HEMPHILL
(as Mr. White)
Who is it, Eleanor?
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
A handsome young traveling man, Father, in a tattered but clean coat, looking for an odd job or two.
BUD HEMPHILL
(as Mr. White)
Say young fella, you haven’t—
GLADYS
(as
herself)
You have to say it loud. Like you’re calling out to somebody at the door.
BUD HEMPHILL
(as himself)
Oh. Sorry.
BUD HEMPHILL
(loudly, as Mr. White)
Say young fella, you haven’t ever repaired a levee before, have you? With nothing but a shovel and your strong back? Farmer’s Almanac says it’s going to rain cats and dogs, and it’ll wash away our little cottage by the river if that levee isn’t fixed in time.
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
Please! Will you fix that levee for us?
WILL
(as the Dashing Stranger)
By golly! I’ll do it!
And so it went. During the commercial break at the end of Act One, Gladys gave Bud exactly one minute to drink a warm Coke. Except for a couple more lines at the beginning of Act Two, Bud’s part was over. From there on out it was all Eleanor White and the Dashing Stranger—Gladys and Will—as the imaginary sky threatened and the imaginary levee was repaired. Bud told me Will and Gladys seemed to get lost in each other as they read. Their eyes were glued on the script, he said, but their voices were looking at each other. “It was as if him and Gladys really were Eleanor and the Dashing Stranger,” Bud said. “I was so enraptured I completely forgot about you flying my Jenny.”
I’ve read that old Daphne Darnell script many times over the years, picturing Will and Gladys sitting there in the cabbage field by the river, her thigh against his, their voices looking at each other as Bud said.
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