Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

  “You can say it, Pruitt. Calling me a checkered-shirt cowboy.”

  “Now a few boxes of unsold popcorn and—”

  Both Pruitt and Millie Macmillan told me what the sheriff said next. Millie said it with pride. Pruitt with cold disgust. I wished I could have heard it myself. “Those aren’t just a few unsold boxes of popcorn in there,” the sheriff told the government man. “That popcorn represents the economic well-being of Weebawauwau County. The lives of the hard-working men and women I have been elected to protect. Woebegone men and women with scruffy little children who’ve had their hopes and dreams shattered by four long years of depression, degradation, and despair.”

  Unaware he was being played like a jug-band fiddle, Pruitt came very close to crying. “I think I understand,” he said.

  The sheriff looked into Pruitt’s watery eyes and bent over in a dry laugh. “You don’t understand shit from Shinola, Pruitt. I own 51 percent of this movie house. And I’ll be damned if that crazy Gus Gillis or his floozy girlfriend are going to put me in the poorhouse.”

  So that’s what finally did it. A pyramid of unsold popcorn. When I first discovered that during my trip back to Weebawauwau in 1942, I was mad enough to kill someone. Mad enough to kill myself. Since then I’ve realized that unimportant things like unsold boxes of popcorn often have a greater impact on your life than big things like war, disease, or acts of Congress:

  If that recruiting sergeant in Akron hadn’t had a quota of cooks to fill, I might have ended up an ace like Eddie Rickenbacker, at the very least on a bomber crew; maybe I’d have been the guy on the Enola Gay who let that first A-bomb go.

  If it hadn’t been for that double-decker Big Boy sandwich with that secret sauce, I might have hung onto the R&R Luncheonette all my working life; stayed married to Lois Cobb and had a son named Will.

  If Miss Ina Blanche hadn’t told us to start reading newspapers, Will might never have learned about the World’s Fair being planned in Chicago. What if that farmer’s melons had been ripe and not green? We’d have bought a couple and been on our way long before Gus and Gladys drove up in their yellow Auburn. Think of the trouble Clyde’s earwax caused. Unsold popcorn boxes are more dangerous than a loaded gun.

  It’s nearly impossible to sleep on a wood floor with nothing but a blanket under you for a mattress. When Clyde started whimpering I woke up right away. The studio was dark but I could see Will sitting next to him, cradling him, brushing back his hair. “I want Mother to come get us,” Clyde said.

  “I want Mother to come get us, too,” Will said.

  “Have her come and get us, Will.”

  “Mother’s too far away to come get us. But she’d know what to do, wouldn’t she? She’d make quick work out of Gus Gillis.”

  Clyde sniffed and giggled. “Mother would send him packing with a swift kick in the pants.”

  “That’s what she’d do all right,” Will said. He told him a beautiful story, one that made me wish I had a little brother to comfort. “I remember once when you were just a baby,” Will said, “a big black Oldsmobile full of Gypsies pulled up and started beeping the horn. Mother warned Father not to pump them any gas. But Father went out and pumped, and before you knew it those Gypsies were all crowded in the garage with Mother and us, stealing everything they could get their hands on. She was afraid they’d try to steal you, too. She went after those Gypsies with nothing but her Southam wrath and a broom.”

  “She kill any of ’em?” Clyde wondered. The story was working on his pain like a ten-pound aspirin.

  “Naw. But she knocked a couple of them in the head pretty good. And taught me some words even Gypsies don’t know. They all got away. Cleaned us out of Baby Ruths and spark plugs and a few cans of motor oil. But they didn’t steal you, Clyde.”

  Will eased Clyde back on his blanket. “Try to hum yourself to sleep.” He picked up his shoes and tucked them in his back pockets.

  “What you gonna do?” Clyde asked him.

  Will kissed him on the forehead. “When your mother’s not around, sometimes you’ve got to do what your mother would do if she was.”

  I should have followed Will. But I didn’t. And it wasn’t because I was a coward. It was the way Clyde and Will had talked to each other. It was a holy moment between brothers. Between Randalls. Maybe I was Will’s best friend. But at that moment I was an outsider. Whatever Will was going to do, I knew he had to do it alone.

  I watched him step over Lloyd, slip across the studio, and ease the control room door open. In a radio station where microphones can pick up the faintest noise, you can’t have a squeaky door, so it was a well-oiled door and didn’t squeak once. Will stood in the doorway for a few seconds, then eased toward the bed where Gus and Gladys were sleeping side by side like frozen fish sticks. I saw Will bend over the bed and reach for something. He straightened then tried again. Gladys later told me she was watching him, too. He was trying to get Gus’s shotgun, sandwiched between them. The third time he tried Gladys gently pushed him back. She reached under her pillow and handed him her pistol, the one with the silver kittens on the pink pearl handle. He pointed the pistol at Gus.

  Will had only shot a gun once before. My .22. I took him target practicing along the shale cliffs on Healy Creek. We set up some old glass bottles. When we were finished he picked the glass out of the water and took it back to his house for proper disposal, so the raccoons wouldn’t get cut when fishing for minnows and crayfish. Today Healy Creek is full of broken glass and Styrofoam and old tires and plastic pop bottles. Sewage long ago killed the minnows and crayfish. Only God knows where the raccoons moved to.

  So I sat there in the dark figuring Will was going to shoot Gus right there in Lloyd’s bed, with Gladys lying next to him like a fish stick. He didn’t. He slowly backed to the control room door. Backed all the way to the outside door. He saw me watching but didn’t motion for me to follow. If he had I would’ve. The outside door did squeak a bit and I waited for Gus to raise up and let loose with his shotgun. But he didn’t. Will slipped outside.

  Gladys and I watched each other’s dark shape for a few seconds, then we both hinged back on our pillows. The year I went to Mingo Junction I asked her if she went back to sleep. “Funny, but I did,” she said. “I figured whatever Will had in mind was already in the works and there was nothing I could do. I actually slept better than before.”

  I confessed I’d slept better, too. For pretty much the same reason. Will Randall had taken charge. He was always cautious. Always had everything planned out in advance. So whatever he had in mind would surely work. I slipped off to sleep confident and serene.

  “You’re a builder upper, a breaker downer

  a holder outer, and I’m a giver-iner

  Sad, but true, I’m a sap-a-roo, too”

  “YOU’RE A BUILDER UPPER,”

  WORDS BY IRA GERSHWIN AND E.Y. HARBURG,

  MUSIC BY HAROLD ARLEN

  Twenty-Two/Dog or Two Barking

  Where do you think Will went that night with Gladys’s pistol? You’d think he’d go to the nearest farm for help. Have them call the sheriff. I would have. But that wasn’t Will Randall. In his cautious mind that might lead to any number of unpredictable, unplanned-for consequences. Will went to get his brother more eardrops.

  How he found Dr. Woodruff Claypool’s office is anybody’s guess. One of the few pieces of the puzzle I haven’t put together yet. Yet? Like I’m ever going to get out of Sparrow Hill alive! No, how Will got to the doctor’s office is a permanent mystery. Lloyd Potts thought maybe he found Dr. Claypool’s address in the jumble of papers on his desk in the control room—being host of the Thursday Night Remedies show, it’s possible the doctor’s address was there, somewhere. Millie said maybe Will just walked around in the dark until he found it. “I don’t think so,” I told her that summer in 1942 when I looked her up. “Will never just walked around in his life.”

  Clyde had the best guess.

  “He was pretty good with his ma
ps,” he told me that day in 1946 when we talked old times over bottles of Pepsi. “All that time we were driving around Weebawauwau County he might have been drawing a map in his head. He probably knew exactly how far the radio station was from Weebawauwau Center, and just what roads or fields he needed to take to get there.”

  Clyde is probably right. Will probably had a map of Weebawauwau County in his head. It could have been a combination of all three, of course. Maybe he had the doctor’s address from Lloyd’s desk, and having that map in his head, he knew where to find Weebawauwau Center, and once he got there he just stumbled in the dark until he found the place.

  I do know that Will did find Dr. Claypool’s place. It was right on the edge of downtown, just two blocks from the Weebawauwau Palace. Dr. Claypool had his office right in his house, as most country doctors did then. Will found the place a little past three in the morning. I know that because it was a little past three when Dr. Claypool heard a dog or two barking and then a few minutes later heard someone prying open a downstairs window.

  I didn’t talk to Dr. Claypool in 1942. He was attending a convention in Chicago that weekend I took the bus up to Weebawauwau. But I did call him in 1948, during my honeymoon with Lois Cobb, from a motel outside Elsie, Michigan, on our way to Mackinac Island. Dr. Claypool told me he thought about calling the sheriff when he heard the window open, but he didn’t know the number at Millie’s, though he’d been there several times giving her girls shots. So he crept downstairs with an ironing board, figuring to swat the head off whomever he caught stealing pills.

  He heard clinking and snapped on the light. There was Will, holding up a brown bottle to the moonlight. Gladys’s pistol was stuck in his belt. “I need drops for my brother’s ear,” Will told the doctor. “His other bottle was shattered by an airplane propeller.”

  Dr. Claypool put down the ironing board and took the bottle from Will’s hand. “Unless he’s got the world’s worst case of constipation, you don’t want that bottle,” he said. He found a bottle of eardrops and gave it to Will.

  Will fished in the front of his pants for his secret money sock.

  “If you had the money you could have knocked on the door,” the doctor said.

  “I didn’t want to wake anybody,” Will said.

  “Two dollars,” the doctor said.

  Will paid him and left through the window. The doctor went back to bed.

  Until I called him in 1948, Dr. Claypool had never connected Will’s visit with the affair at WEEB. He told me he was sorry about what happened out there. He asked me if Clyde’s ear ever cleared up. I just hung up the phone. Lois was coming out of the bathroom, ready for our first night of official married lovemaking.

  It didn’t go as well as I’d planned. We’d done it several times already in my little apartment above the R&R Luncheonette, so it wasn’t stage fright or the mechanics of the thing. All the time I was sliding north and south on Lois Cobb’s bony hips, Will Randall was in my head, trudging through cornfield after cornfield in the dark, bottle of eardrops in his hand, heading straight into trouble; and there I was, fourteen years into the not-so-glorious future, selfishly poking my wife.

  I should have slipped out with Will. But the way Will had cradled Clyde in his arms, I just sat there in the dark and let him go alone. We could have taken Clyde with us. We could have escaped a dozen times that week. Gus wasn’t going to shoot us. Gus wasn’t going to shoot nobody. Who would shoot a helpless boy?

  “Grain is literally shot from guns in an action display of the manufacture of a cereal breakfast food. A colored mammy making pancakes and a kilted Scotch lassie baking scones, demonstrate two uses of cereal products.”

  OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Twenty-Three/Jeez

  I was inside WEEB, sound asleep when it happened. Still, in my mind I can see Will running through the endless tall Indiana corn with that precious bottle of drops in his hand, the dark just beginning to fade, streaks of gray and pink in the purple clouds, the dew bubbling up on the sagging corn leaves, dripping off the golden silk; I can feel his heart beating like hell; his lungs are aching and all he can think about is getting back inside the radio station before Gus wakes up and goes berserk, yelling and throwing and shooting the ceiling plaster. Just as he sees the zigzag ironwork of the radio tower sticking above the trees, thinking he’s home free, he hears crackling gravel and muffled engines. He looks toward the road and sees a line of cars and trucks, lights off, snaking toward WEEB. On the lead car he sees a large gold star dimly flickering with light from the thinning moon. Under his breath he says “Jeez.” That’s all he would say, just “Jeez,” and he’d run even harder. But the cars and trucks beat him. They park out of sight and dozens of doors open—front doors and back doors, driver side doors and passenger side doors—and dark Frankenstein shapes pour out and drift forward through the corn. He sees the silhouettes of rifles, pistols growing out of hands. Will stops. He doesn’t say “Jeez”—he’s afraid of being heard—but he feels Jeez in his stomach. He doesn’t know what to do. Something unplanned is happening. He rubs his nose and scratches his neck and his liver bile is right up to his Adam’s apple and he starts walking toward the Frankenstein shapes spreading out around the radio station. He walks toward them because there is nothing else he can do. As he walks he weighs carefully the pros and cons of various possibilities. He toys with the idea of surrendering. But that doesn’t get Clyde his drops. That keeps Clyde from getting his drops for a long while. He thinks about showing the sheriff where the door is, so they can burst in and get Gus before he can yawn himself awake. But surely the sheriff already knows where the door is, he thinks, and what if Gus is already awake and waiting and all these men start shooting? He pictures bullets ripping into Clyde and me, and Lloyd and Gladys, and he gives up on that idea. He’s only a few yards behind the men now. They’ve kneeled just three cornrows from the edge of the lawn. Maybe he sees Sheriff Barnes, badge on his hat dimly flickering. Maybe he sees Pruitt standing next to him. Surely he sees the milkman, dressed in his white uniform. Then Will’s well-oiled logic does him in. These men are waiting for someone to come out of WEEB, not go in. Just as clearly as I can see him in my head now, he sees himself walking right through their line, like he was one of them, fading right into the early morning gray. So that’s just what he does. He inches forward, testing the waters, seeing if anybody notices him. He stands shoulder to shoulder with a couple of those farmers and townsmen, and then he inches forward some more. Nobody says anything. Their eyes and minds are fixed on WEEB. He reaches the third cornrow and then the second and now he’s standing right there in the first row, straight and still as a tall stalk. He takes a steadying breath, gets the blinks out of his eyes, and starts walking.

  I have been seeing that scene in my head for more than sixty years. I was inside WEEB sleeping, but I’m certain it happened exactly how I’ve described it.

  Goddamn. Sonofabitch. What made Will think he was going to get away with such a crazy plan? He was only a few yards up the lawn when Pruitt spotted him.

  “Who’s that?” Pruitt asked the sheriff.

  “Stop right there,” the sheriff said, his voice not sure if it was supposed to whisper or yell.

  Will kept on walking.

  The sheriff raised his flashlight and put a halo on the back of Will’s head. Will peeked over his shoulder, squinty eyes flying.

  The milkman from the Willow Farm Dairy recognized him from our morning of banditry by the river. “That’s one of them,” he said.

  Will started running. The milkman pulled a pistol from his white belt. He was standing right next to Pruitt. Pruitt could have grabbed that pistol. He could have told the milkman to put it down. But Pruitt didn’t. Only a few months before he’d put a bullet in John Dillinger. He’d spent years knowing instantly, instinctively, where the right side of the law ended and the wrong side began. He saw that gun in the milkman’s hand. He saw the milkman raise it, point it. He could have sto
pped him. But he didn’t and a bullet screwed into the small of Will Randall’s back. The pistol’s crack echoed against the concrete block walls of WEEB.

  Will buckled but kept on walking. Sheriff Barnes, figuring only someone from Chicago could have done such a stupid thing, charged at Pruitt like a bee-stung bull. Grabbed him by the lapels of his expensive city suit and shook the shit out of him. Someone else in the corn saw who really pulled the trigger. It was a small stocky man, with a mustache just like Adolf Hitler’s. He rammed himself into the milkman like a bull stung by a whole hive of bees. Uncle Fritz slugged and kicked that milkman silly, both arms and both legs going at once. When the milkman crumpled to the ground, Uncle Fritz stomped on him until his dairy whites were muddy and bloody. “Communist communist communist,” Fritz screamed at the top of his German lungs.

  The shot woke us up. We descended on the window. We couldn’t see much, only that someone in the corn was getting the shit kicked out of him. Gus was in seventh heaven. “They’ve come for me, by God. By God! By diddly damn God!”

  Gladys was happy, too. She danced around the studio, pulling herself into a clean flowery dress. Gus was too busy with his dreams of dying in a hail of bullets to notice that Will was missing. Only when Will appeared at the window, tortured blue-gray face, his fingers splayed against the dirty glass, dawn lighting his unblinking eyes, looking the world like some strange European painting, did we realize that pistol crack had done more than wake us up. I opened the window. Lloyd and I hauled Will in. His back was bent like a banana. We eased folded blankets under him. Put a couple of pillows under his head.