GLADYS
(as herself)
A torrent of rain can be heard.
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
You did it, my dashing stranger. You fixed that levee just in time!
GLADYS
(as herself)
Eleanor hesitates, uncertain, then lets her love for the stranger gush.
GLADYS
(As Eleanor White)
Please stay a few more days. Please stay forever!
WILL
(as the Dashing Stranger)
It would be easy for me to stay. To fall in love with you. Especially the way those raindrops are cascading down your porcelain cheeks like tears.
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
Those raindrops on my cheeks are tears.
WILL
(as the Dashing Stranger)
I am a traveling man. The open road is in my blood. Sure kid, I could stay. We’d get married. Build a cottage of our own. But drat it. Sooner or later, my old wanderlust would return, as certain as the rains always return. And I’d leave. Break your heart. Break both our hearts. No, I gotta travel on.
GLADYS
(as Eleanor White)
Good-bye—my dashing stranger.
GLADYS
(as herself)
The end.
After they finished Gladys’s radio script, Will read aloud from his guidebook. Bud said it was a lot more interesting than the “Dashing Stranger.” He said Gladys drew her legs up under her chin and listened with closed eyes, as if Will’s descriptions of industrial exhibits were romantic poems, which, of course, to Will they were.
I’m not surprised Gladys and Bud were moved by Will’s reading. I always was when he read his guidebook to me.
Bud Hemphill was happy I looked him up. Having his Jenny stolen was the highlight of his life, he told me. Nobody in town had been much interested in hearing about it. With the despair and disillusionment of the depression all around—with real criminals like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson all around—that one week in August, as quirky as it was, was after all just one week in August. So Bud was happy to talk over old times with me. He told be where I could find Sheriff Orville Barnes’s whore ladyfriend and where I could find the sheriff’s cousin, Albert Finley, and Lloyd Potts, too.
Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I miss Will. I loved him. And I’m not at all shy about saying so. Not at my age.
Today you talk about loving someone of your same sex and they write you off as either queer or a Democrat. Believe me, I’m neither, though I did vote once for Bill Clinton. Will was more than a friend. I’ve had lots of friends. Friends I respected. Friends I liked to laugh with. Bull with. Fish with. Go out for chili with. Will was more than that. He was always on my mind and in my heart. I felt different when we were together. Better. More like the real Ace Gilbert. Felt the world was OK. Felt God pretty much knew what he was doing when Will Randall and I were together.
It is one of the great secrets of our age that men love other men that way. We call somebody our best friend and let it go at that. But what we’re talking about—and what other men know we’re talking about—is some guy we really love. A guy we wish we could be with all the time. A guy that makes us feel more like ourselves when we’re with him. That makes us feel personally proud when he accomplishes something and makes us feel personally like shit when things go bad for him. That changes our life forever when he dies.
I’ve read that ancient civilizations, the Greeks I think, understood this kind of love between men. Relished and honored it. We don’t today. At least not publicly. But all men know what the feeling is. I know I sure do. I loved Will Randall and he loved me. And I’m not the least bit ashamed that the other old men here at the Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa know it. Goddamn it I’m not. Sonofabitch I’m not.
Women have an easier time with this kind of love. Once at a wedding I remember watching my mother polka with her dearest old friend from high school. Arm in arm. Around and around. Smiling faces no more than three inches apart. Sharing their love with the world. I’m sure my father and Eddie Rickenbacker never did the polka together. But if Will Randall could be here right now, I’d polka him right up the goddamn hallway, right up through all the wheelchairs and walkers.
“The skyride was built by five great companies, Otis Elevator company, Mississippi Valley Structural Steel Company, John A. Roebling’s Sons Company, Inland Steel Company, and Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company and is an appropriate expression of their faith in the future of American industry.”
OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR
Fifteen/Thanks a Million, Lloyd!
I flew the Jenny back along the river toward the cabbage field. We’d only been gone an hour or so, but it seemed like years. I’d taken off three times and landed twice. Terrified a riverful of Baptists. Had nearly been killed by professional ballplayers. Most people didn’t achieve that much in a lifetime. If only I hadn’t lost that wheel on the scoreboard.
As I skimmed the trees my brain bounced back and forth between two big questions: How was I going to land on one wheel and what were Will and Gladys doing on the ground while I was up in the air with Gus and Clyde? I knew what I’d be doing. Steering Gladys toward a poke! I played out the improbable scene in my head. “Oh Ace,” she’d say to me. “I was hoping you’d want to. It’s all I’ve wanted since I first saw you by that pile of melons.” We’d make Bud Hemphill look the other way, or maybe put an empty cement bag over his head. Then I’d glide right in like the Ace I was, as masterfully as I’d ridden that old Jenny into the air. Goddamn. I could see Gladys and me entwined, rocking like a sonofabitch. I could also see the Jenny cartwheeling through the cabbages, Clyde, Gus, and me on fire, blood spurting, bones protruding through our bruised, blistering flesh. How was I going to land on one wheel? Goddamn. Sonofabitch.
Clyde held up one of the watches we stole from the Baptists. He studied it sideways, then took out his medicine bottle. He jabbed Gus in the chest to get his attention. It was time for his drops. Still dumb in the head from the Moon Man’s beaning, Gus thought he was being offered a drink. He took the bottle, unscrewed the top, and sucked the oily medicine down his throat. He gagged and threw the bottle right through the spinning propeller. Now I had two problems: getting on the ground alive and then staying that way when Will learned what happened to that three-dollar bottle of drops.
I saw the bridge and swung wide for my approach. I could see Will and Gladys and Bud standing in the cabbages, chins up, hands over their eyes like little porches. I turned back toward the field and cut the throttle. The Jenny dropped. Even if I set down gentle as a saltine floating in a bowl of chicken noodle, I knew I’d still snap a wing when my wheelless side hit. Went through the Lord’s Prayer, perfectly. Cut my speed some more. Kept the Jenny’s nose up. Felt my one wheel touch and roll. Felt the Jenny lean. Felt my wheelless wing dig in and plow. I remembered to trim my elevators. But I’d forgot to close the throttle. The lopsided Jenny tore in a circle like a crazy dog on a chain. Dirt and cabbages flew. The wing ripped away at the shoulder. We shot forward, an arrow unleashed, straight into the river.
It was a shallow river. No current at all. We came to a stop right where we hit. By the time I wiped the water off my goggles, Will and Gladys were wading toward us. Will yelled to his brother. “You OK, Clyde?”
“Gus drank my drops,” Clyde yelled back.
I slid into the river. Smiled at Will. He punched me right in the mouth.
I took my punishment. “At least we’re alive,” I said. I could taste a bit of blood. I could feel my lip swell.
We took Gus by the arms and waded to shore. Clyde carried his shotgun. We watched Bud Hemphill flee into the woods. The sun was setting. We gathered some firewood. Nobody was interested in putting up the tent. Decided we’d sleep under the bridge. “It doesn’t ever rain in Indiana anyway,” I said. We cooked a big pan of scrambled eggs. Opened two cans of beans. One can of cor
n. All three tins of sardines. Finished off the apples and pears. Drank milk and Cokes. Clyde hummed. Gus slowly came to his senses. He had a dumpling-sized knot on his forehead, the cross-stitching of the baseball Moon Man threw imbedded into his skin like a tire track.
Surprisingly, Gus was happy that our flight went the way it did. “Maybe we didn’t fleece those ballplayers like we did the Baptists, but we sure got everybody’s attention,” he said. “Everybody in Weebawauwau County must have been at that game. It’s only a matter of time before the law comes after me now. I bet we’ll wake up tomorrow surrounded. A hundred gun barrels pointed right at our heads.”
Only Gus slept. He woke up disappointed. There wasn’t a single gun barrel pointed at him. “Judas Priest,” he said. “What’s it gonna take? What’s it damn-diddly gonna take?”
Gladys soaked a ragful of river water and patted Gus’s knot. He winced and shouted “Judas Priest” after every pat.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked.
“No, Gladys. It feels so good I just can’t take the pleasure.”
We waited all morning for the law to arrive. Gus stood on the bridge and waved his gun. Whistled and shouted. Gladys worked on her makeup. Will tidied up the cabbage field, putting empty Coke bottles back in their cases, carrying the egg baskets under the bridge so they wouldn’t go bad in the sun, collecting all the empty cans and candy wrappers. I sat on the bank and watched the Jenny soak up water.
About noon Gus came down from the bridge. He was wound tight. He made us throw everything we’d heisted the day before in the river—all the Cokes and milk and eggs and bread, the three gumball machines and the ready-mix cement, the stacks of Indianapolis Stars, and the salesman’s case full of doorknobs and hinges. He even made us throw the torn wing from the Jenny in the river. He ran through the field and stomped as many cabbage heads as he could. He piled us all in the Gilbert SXIII. Off we drove. It was Friday already. What a day Thursday had been!
For hours we drove the backroads, lacing in and out of Weebawauwau County like a runaway shoestring. “Why don’t we try another county,” Gladys said. Gus slammed his fist against the door. “Because we ain’t finished with these Weebawauwauans yet,” he said. We didn’t hold anybody up all day, though we did pull away from a gas pump without paying. Will kept his nose in his guidebook. Gladys studied her scripts. I drove and listened to Clyde’s quiet hum. Gus slid down in the copilot’s seat and sulked, hugging his shotgun like a favorite teddy bear.
“Gladys, give me something to eat,” he said about six o’clock. She handed him a melon. He threw it into the passing corn. “Ain’t we got anything else?”
“Nothing you don’t have to cook,” she said.
He held out his hand for another melon. He sliced it in two with his pocketknife and worked on both halves. “I don’t know about you folks, but I’m hungry as a suckling lamb.”
Will watched him gobble. “For someone who was supposed to be dead two days ago, you sure eat a lot.”
I clenched my teeth, expecting Gus to turn on Will. Instead he was genuinely apologetic. “You all know I fully intended on being dead by now,” he said.
Gladys leaned forward and sympathetically rubbed the knot on his head. “You boys can’t blame Gus because the Weebawauwauans don’t have the walnuts to kill him.”
Gus swatted her hand away. “Quit playing with my head, Gladys.”
Will should have let matters rest. He couldn’t, of course. Gus Gillis had ruined his life. “All I know is that it’s already Friday afternoon and we’ve got to be home before Church on Sunday. Even if you get killed in the next five minutes and Ace drives like hell to Chicago, we wouldn’t have time to see one-fourteenth of the wonders.”
Gus sank deeper into the seat. “You sure know how to burden a guy.”
Will stayed with it. “You sure know how to ruin a guy’s pilgrimage.”
I saw Gus’s hands tighten around the barrel of his gun. “You got any film left in your camera?”
“A whole roll,” Will said. “Unless you ate it.”
Gus’s knuckles went white. “Judas Priest! You have got to be the orneriest creature to ever wear shoes. I’ve half a mind to blow that funny head of yours right into Lake Michigan. Pull this thing over, Ace.”
This was years before Gladys told me that Gus was incapable of shooting anybody. So I took his threat for real. “You wouldn’t kill Will just for talking back a little, would you?”
“Just pull it over.”
I kept on flying.
Gus pointed his gun in the general direction of my head.
I pulled it over.
Gus jumped out, and with his gun sticking straight out from his hip, started across the empty field. We scrambled after him, all certain Will was about to be executed for his sass. “He ain’t gonna shoot Will, is he?” Clyde asked in a sideways whisper.
“I doubt it,” Gladys whispered back.
“He might as well,” Will said in anything but a whisper. “I won’t ever get to the World’s Fair anyway.”
Gus stopped.
We all stopped.
Gus looked at Will through squinty, disappointed eyes. “Where’s your camera?”
Will sheepishly pointed toward the Gilbert SXIII.
I could see the veins wiggling in Gus’s reddening neck. “Well go get it!”
Will hurried back to the Gilbert SXIII, stumbling more than once.
“What a flat tire that boy is,” Gus said.
Will returned with his camera. He held it up to his eye and pointed the lens right at Gus. “OK, go ahead and shoot me. But I can’t promise the picture won’t develop a little jumpy.”
Gus just about melted into the ground like April snow. “You are a whole set of flat tires. You think I want you to take my picture at the same time I’m blowing your head into Lake Michigan? Judas Priest. I don’t even know which direction Lake Michigan is. I ain’t gonna shoot you. I ain’t gonna shoot nobody.” He stuck his chin out and slowly turned his head left and right. “Can’t anybody see it on my face?” he asked. “Look close. Look close. You can see it, can’t you, Gladys?”
Gladys studied his face. “You mean the goose egg on your forehead?”
“Not the goose egg, Gladys. My whole face. My whole diddly-damn face!”
We all studied his face now. We were stumped.
“Are you all blind? Can’t you people see how low I am?”
“I can see it,” I said, even though I couldn’t.
He patted my shoulder. “Thank you, Ace.” Then he shuffled away, maybe ten feet. He turned and dropped to one knee. Pressed his cheek against his gun barrel. “I am in the blackest mood of my life,” he said. “I have been trying for nearly a month now to get killed in a hail of bullets. And here I am. Still alive. I’ve let you down, Gladys. I’ve let you boys down. Most of all I’ve let myself down. Will, I know you don’t owe me nothing, but I want you to capture this black mood on my face. And when I do manage to die, I want you to give that picture to every newspaper in the country, big and small, so the whole world can see what a troubled soul I was.”
“Be happy to,” Will said. While he readied and steadied his camera, Gus played with the brim of his fedora. We all held our breath. Right in the middle of Will’s click, Gus’s black mood gave way to an inspired smile. He rose. Walked right past us. In a trance. He stopped and pointed to a faraway line of trees. “Is that what I think it is?”
We all strained to see what he was seeing.
Gladys saw it. “Oh Gus! It is!”
What it was, was a radio tower.
Ten minutes later we were sneaking toward a little flat-roofed building made out of cement blocks. The building sat at the end of a long driveway, atop a grassy knob that rose out of the tall corn. On one side of the building stood a chicken yard with only one nervous hen. On the other side of the building stood the radio tower itself, a zigzag of rusty iron surrounding an inner ladder nobody in his right mind would climb. An old school bus an
d a dusty panel truck sat next to the door.
We reached the door. An On the Air sign hung from a nail. Gus thought about knocking, then barged in. Hillbilly music hit us in the face.
This wasn’t Radio City Music Hall. There was one main room about twenty by twenty and a second room with a large glass window which apparently had combined duty as control room, kitchen, and bedroom. Behind that window sat an enormous man in bib overalls. He had Virginia ham jowls and a black-as-coal pompadour. There was a microphone in front of him and several empty Canada Dry bottles, all quart sized. He was plucking a chicken. In the main room there were twenty or so chairs set up in rows, all empty. On one wall hung a banner proclaiming the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down Featuring the Harmony Heavers. Below the sign were the Harmony Heavers themselves. They were singing some dumb song called “Chawin’ Chawin’ Gum.”
The Harmony Heavers were one of those strange country jug bands all the rage then. Clowns and minstrels wrapped into one. One man was dressed as a hobo with a ratty porkpie hat and a bandanna around his neck; he was playing a guitar. Another wore a farmer’s straw hat, big rubber boots, and a pasted-on Uncle Sam beard; he was going crazy on a little squeeze-box accordion. A third member of the band was wearing fancy cowboy garb, woolly chaps and a tall Hopalong Cassidy hat; he was playing a fiddle. A man wearing huge fake ears was blowing on a jug. The drummer intrigued me most. He was wearing a fancy three-piece suit and derby; had a black goatee glued on his chin. His bass drum was an old washtub, his snare drum a round tin box sitting atop a wooden crate; his cymbals were pot lids. All five men sported big show business smiles, even though every chair was empty.
Gus motioned for us to sit in the front row. Apparently we were going to enjoy the hoedown before holding it up. The Harmony Heavers finished “Chawin’ Chawin’ Gum.” Their show business smiles immediately slid into frowns of boredom. The enormous man behind the glass set aside his chicken and leaned into his microphone: “Evening everyone. This is Lloyd Potts, your fave-or-rite announcer. You are listening to the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down, featuring the heavenly harmonies and hilarious hijinks of the Harmony Heavers. Howdy boys!”
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