And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

by Craig Heimbuch

  I got dressed, having laid my clothes out in the dining room the night before so I wouldn’t wake my in-laws up in my room, and, with a kiss on Rebecca’s head, slipped out into the predawn darkness.

  For anyone not accustomed to getting up this early—and here I have to assume that’s most people—there’s something genuinely surreal about being on the road before five A.M. Unlike, say, one or two A.M., when you might have to contend with night owls and barflies on their way home for the evening, this time of morning is eerie in its silent emptiness. The sky is especially black. The roads especially open. I grabbed a cup of coffee from the gas station where I normally go on my way to work and found that it was fresh-brewed and delicious. It made me wonder how long the stuff I drink hours later in the day has been sitting there. Best not to dwell on such things. In the thirty or so miles from our home to the Indiana state line, I passed a single other motorist. These are roads that a couple of hours later would be choked with traffic and I had them essentially all to myself. It was wonderful. For someone who loves to drive, what could possibly be better than having an entire interstate all to yourself?

  I set the cruise and popped the first CD of John le Carré’s The Mission Song into the player on my dashboard. The narrator’s voice was a silky baritone with a slight central Africa accent. I listened for perhaps a half hour before my eyelids began to feel like antique quilts and I turned to a morning talk show for some relief. I didn’t begin regretting that third episode of The Vampire Diaries until I neared Indianapolis. I could feel that hollow, empty feeling that comes with sleep deprivation. I tried slapping my face and rolling down all the windows. I put on some hard rock music, but to no avail. I was falling asleep just two hours into my day and with eight or nine more hours of driving ahead of me; I knew I wouldn’t make it. So I decided to stop at a McDonald’s on the east side of Indianapolis for a fresh cup of coffee, a pee, and some food.

  Getting up early for a drive to Iowa is something of a family tradition for me. My dad used to insist that we leave our house in Cleveland in the wee small hours in order to reduce the likelihood of getting stuck in Chicago traffic. Plus, he, like me, loves the feeling of being on the open road. I was going nowhere near Chicago on my route, but traffic was a concern. There was some construction on the west side of Indianapolis that might slow me down, so I wanted to make my stop brief, but when I pulled into a parking spot in the still-dark night and turned my car off, the level of my exhaustion came to bear and I didn’t have the energy to get out and go inside.

  Just fifteen minutes, I told myself. Fifteen minutes, then I’ll get some coffee and be on my way.

  I reclined my seat and, with elbow over eyes, drifted quickly to sleep. I was awakened forty minutes later by a knock on my window.

  “You okay in there, buddy?” said a man in a blue dress shirt and dark jeans. The sun had come up, but was still low in the sky and the man’s face was pressed close to my window. I must have looked dead, lying there in such an unnatural position. I shook my head and inclined my seat.

  “Yeah, yup, fine,” I said.

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “You looked dead.”

  “Nope, yup, fine,” I said and realized that I must sound either drunk or mentally disabled. I wanted to say something clear and intelligent. “Thank you very much for your concern.” And with that, he began to walk away, turning to flip a concerned wave in my direction and telling me to have a blessed day. How kind of him, I thought, to show such concern. And then I realized that I was parked in the back of the lot and his car was near the door. There was no possible way he just happened to be walking by and noticed me. There was nowhere to be walking to. With my seat reclined, he would have had to have been peering into my window, casing my possessions in order to see me lying there. By the time I realized that I should probably get the man’s license plate number just in case, he was gone and I was once again in the vertical and in need of both a urinal and a pot of coffee.

  Apart from a little bit of traffic around the Indianapolis airport, the drive was a breeze. I set the cruise and listened to le Carré’s toffee-voiced narrator as the sun rose in my rearview mirror and the Midwest came alive to my right and left.

  When Rebecca and I were young and dating, I took her to Iowa for my cousin’s wedding. It was a crucible of sorts. Would she be able to remember all my cousins’ names? Would it take her as long as it had me—I was twelve or thirteen by the time I figured it out—to remember that Carolyn and Sue are the same person? Would these fluffy, red-cheeked, good-natured people approve of my cheerleader girlfriend? Would she survive an eleven-hour drive with my parents? We left before dawn—she, my mom, my dad, and I piled into my dad’s Buick Park Avenue. Some time around the west side of Chicago, my dad offered Rebecca a challenge. He would buy her a steak dinner if she could keep track of and, upon arrival at my grandmother’s house, tell him the exact number of cornfields we passed from the point we crossed the Mississippi River to the time we rolled through Mason City. For the first hour or so, it seemed like she was trying to keep track. Her head swiveled back and forth. She made mental tick marks after every fence line and country road. She must have really loved me early on to want to impress my dad so much.

  Eventually, she gave up and when we arrived, true to his word, Dad asked her for the count.

  “So?” he said. My family has a way of doing this—loading entire thoughts into single word questions.

  “So what?” she shot back, whip smart and unintimidated by my old man.

  “How many was it?”

  “Do you really know the answer?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. I fully believed he did too. My dad keeps ledgers for everything: records, notes, accountings. The guy lives for data. I had no doubt he knew the exact number of cornfields we would have passed, and I felt a nervous sweat forming in my palm. I wanted her to be right. I needed her to be right. I loved her that much too.

  “Well, I may have missed a few, but I’d say around 547,” she said confidently and threw me one of those looks that says I have no idea what I’m saying and this whole business is ridiculous.

  “Oh, too bad,” Dad said. “You were off by just a little bit.”

  “Oh well,” she said. “So how many were there?”

  “Two,” Dad said. “One on either side of the road.”

  Groan. Eye roll. It was a joke. One of the better of my dad’s career as a merrymaker, but a bad joke nonetheless. It would take me years to appreciate his forethought and patience—he asked her to keep track a good three hours before we crossed the big river and he waited another three once we were in Iowa to follow through. I had to give the old man a little bit of credit; once he committed to something, he certainly followed through.

  I think about that joke every time I find myself driving west in the direction of Iowa. And I began thinking about it as I climbed out of the shallow valley of Peoria, Illinois. As a rule, I don’t like driving through Illinois. Indiana, sure. Iowa, fantastic. But Illinois is flat, even for the Midwest, and kind of ugly. Plus, the whole state feels somehow neglected once you leave Chicago, like an afterthought. Driving through Illinois, at least the parts of the state I’ve seen from major interstates, seems stuck between east and west; between urban and rural; between salt-of-the-earth and road salt. My mom hates it. She was born and raised in Chicago and goes out of her way to never step foot in that city. I once had to beg her to accept Rebecca’s offer to join her after I had a chance encounter with a man whose daughter was a producer on the Oprah Winfrey Show and he had gotten me tickets. Mention the word Chicago to Mom and she literally cringes. Perhaps the rest of Illinois suffers in my opinion by extension and association. Except, I love Chicago. Of all the big cities in the United States I have spent any significant amount of time in, it is my favorite.

  Driving across the “Illini Plains,” as Kerouac called them, is an exercise i
n endurance, a man versus boredom fight to the death. Thirty or so miles from the border, my cruise unmolested and le Carré’s narrator bringing his story to an end, I was nearly out of fuel and decided to stop for gas and a hamburger. The gas station was just off the highway and seemed to cater to truckers and, judging by the crowd around the soda machine, unwed teenage mothers. It was one of those places so starkly on its own, so out of place among the surrounding landscape, that I couldn’t help but ponder the thought process that went into its construction.

  Developer: “I’ve got an idea, let’s put a gas station that serves pizza, hamburgers, and Chinese food in the middle of nowhere.”

  Builder: “What do you mean ‘the middle of nowhere’? Are we talking near the Danville grain silos?”

  Developer: “Grain silos? Preposterous! I’m talking way in the middle of nowhere. Nothing else around!”

  Builder: “Nothing? What about a McDonald’s?”

  Developer: “No way!”

  Builder: “Burger King?”

  Developer: “Nope! Nothing! Nothing but fields, baby! And we can have an entire aisle dedicated to air fresheners in the shape of medieval weaponry!”

  Builder: “An entire aisle?”

  Developer: “Maybe two!”

  Builder: “Let’s go crazy! We can sell mud flaps and CB radios and pregnancy tests!”

  Developer: “Can the mud flaps have silhouettes of naked women on them?”

  Builder: “Are there any other kind?”

  Developer: “Yes!”

  Builder: “But wait! Who will come to this place?”

  Developer: “Truckers and unwed teenage mothers and, maybe, one day, a wayward author!”

  Builder: “Genius! . . . Well, except the author. He can’t come.”

  Developer: “Agreed.”

  And . . . scene.

  I ordered a cheeseburger wrapped in plastic from behind a large, glass-front deli counter and, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might not recommend eating meat products from such a place, found to my amazement that it was, in short, one of the best things I have ever put into my mouth. I’m not joking. Delicious doesn’t describe it. It was juicy and fresh and almost enough to change my general opinion about rural Illinois. Almost. And since I hadn’t ordered from a clown, king, or redhead with pigtails, I didn’t feel like I had cheated my moratorium on fast food. My goodness, can I split hairs.

  The stop at Indianapolis had put me slightly behind schedule. I had told Uncle Mark and Tom that I would arrive midafternoon Iowa time—early enough that I could spend some time outside with my cousin before it got dark. So I decided not to stop at my favorite Iowa diversion—the previously mentioned world’s largest truck stop—and continued north from Iowa City through Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Nashua, and on to Mason City.

  When I pulled into Mark and Linette’s driveway, I was startled by a large man in cowboy boots and jeans, a T-shirt stretched over broad shoulders and a thick chest. Had I not known I was in the right place, I might have thought I was at the wrong house. The man turned around and to my great surprise, he looked an awful lot like my youngest cousin, who I had seen just four months before.

  “What’s up, cuz?” he asked.

  “Tommy?”

  “You made good time,” he said. I could not believe my eyes. Mark would tell me later than Tom had grown six inches and gained thirty pounds of raw muscle in less than a calendar year. It was like looking at the Incredible Hulk when you expect to see Bruce Banner. Shocking, and for a moment I felt old. Here was the youngest member of my generation in the family and he had gone from a cute, soft-about-the-edges preteen to a full-grown, corn-fed man in roughly the same amount of time between the All-Star Game and the World Series.

  After we unloaded my gear, I told Tom—it felt strange calling him Tommy given his adult frame—that I needed to buy a hunting license, and he recommended we go to a store called Fleet Farm to get me legal before our hunt the next morning. If you have never been to a Fleet Farm, as I hadn’t, the best way to describe it is by imagining that a farmer is given magical powers to create a one-stop shop for every single masculine need he might have, save anything to do with sex or church. Though, now that I think about it, there were condoms in the toiletries aisle and I’m pretty sure I saw a few New Testaments on a bookshelf, wedged between the latest editions of Modern Woodworking and Soldier of Fortune. If Ted Nugent and Bob Villa were stocking a fallout shelter that they planned to share in the event of nuclear attack, it would look very much like Fleet Farm. The store starts in a front corner, where the clothing section is stocked almost exclusively with tough canvas coveralls made by Carhartt and emanates from there in aisle after aisle of goods designed to set a man’s heart atwitter. Hardware, hunting, horticulture (this is Iowa after all), and husbandry seem to be the name of the game. Home decor? Well, they’ve got some industrial-sized cans of paint. Food? There’s an entire row of shelves dedicated to jerky. This was no Walmart or Target. None of that sissy stuff at Fleet Farm. No, this was a store for the red-blooded, God-fearing American male.

  I liked it instantly.

  In the forty or so minutes Tom and I spent wandering, I saw enough power tools, duck decoys, and pickup truck bed liners to last a lifetime and not a single greeting card in sight. Though, to be fair, we only covered perhaps two-thirds of the store in three-quarters of an hour, so they may have been tucked back behind last year’s machetes and chain saws. I had not brought the proper ammunition for my shotgun and needed to pick out some different shells. Iowa, which literally lives and dies by its soil, had implemented stringent regulations regarding the materials hunters may use when hunting on public land in recent years. Lead shot, over time and given enough of it, can damage soil as pellets oxidize and disintegrate, changing the pH levels of the dirt. It wasn’t likely that we’d be hunting public land, but Tom thought it would be a good idea to look for a deal on some steel or composite shells to be safe. Not finding one and not wanting to leave any of the three—yes, three—aisles devoted to ammunition of all stripes empty-handed, I bought some new lead shells designed for felling pheasant and offered to buy some for Tom, but he demurred, assuring me that between him and his dad, they had plenty. Then he led me to the customer service desk, where a short, thin woman with leathery skin, feathery hair, and an orange employee vest began walking me through the process of buying a nonresident small-game license.

  “What’s your zip code?” she barked in a scratchy, I’ve-been-smoking-since-I-was-nine voice.

  I told her.

  “And how do you spell your last name?”

  “It’s Heimbuch,” I said. “H. E. I. M, as in Mary. B, as in boy. U. C. H.”

  She punched some keys on the computer behind the counter. “Have you ever had an Iowa hunting license before?”

  “No.”

  “And what’s your zip code?”

  Hadn’t I just told her that? I told her again and she typed furiously on the keyboard.

  “And you’ve never hunted with a license in Iowa before?”

  “No,” I said and it was followed by way too much typing. Was she writing a novella while doing this? E-mailing her best high school friend?

  “And your last name, how is that spelled?” She had asked me more than a half-dozen questions relating to exactly three pieces of information and with every answer, her fingers flew across the keyboard. And with each subsequent asking, her voice grew increasingly terse. I tried to image the fields on the form she was filling out.

  Zip Code:

  Last Name:

  Ever Had an Iowa License?:

  Brief Description of General Demeanor in No Fewer Than 700 Characters:

  Zip Code (in Roman Numerals):

  Ever Had an Iowa License?:

  If You Could Be a Kitchen Appliance, What Would You Be and Why?:

  Last
Name (in Pig Latin):

  The woman asked to see my driver’s license and as she was entering the information into the computer (information, incidentally, that included the spelling of my last name and zip code), she casually asked me for my hunter’s ID number.

  “I’m sorry, my what?” I asked.

  “Hunter’s ID number,” she, well, retorted is the only word for it. “You have taken a hunter’s safety class haven’t you? They have those in Indiana?”

  “Ohio.”

  “What?”

  “I’m from Ohio, not Indiana,” I said.

  “This says your zip code is in Indiana.”

  “But I’m from Ohio,” I said. “My license is from Ohio. My home is in Ohio.”

  “Hold on. What’s your zip code again?”

  After several whole minutes, we finally established that I do live where I have always thought I lived and she again asked me for my hunter’s ID number. I pulled the card they had given me when I finished my hunter’s safety course from my wallet and handed it to the woman.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s what they give you in Ohio when you pass hunter’s safety.”

  She began looking at the card skeptically. On one side was a photo of a hunter emerging from the woods with the seal of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. On the other was a statement signifying that I had passed the class, signed by head instructor Arthur—that crazy son of a gun—and myself. But no number.

  “This can’t be all they gave you,” she said. “You have to have a number.”

  My heart began to pound. Had I really just driven the better part of seven hundred miles and spent nearly a year preparing only to be shut down at the last second by inconsistency in bureaucratic record-keeping? Then I remembered it. A receipt. Arthur had given me a receipt along with my card, and I distinctly remembered packing it along with my books about pheasant hunting and one called Field Dressing and Butchering Small Game and Upland Birds: An Illustrated Guide into my work bag, which was in the backseat of my car in the parking lot.