Up here?
We Cell Block D. We maximum security, top floor. We get guys like you when the drunk tank’s full. We the only block with empty cells.
Overnight guests, he added, chuckling.
How long you here for? I said.
I got another eleven years and two hundred thirty-four days to go.
I whistled.
Ain’t nothing. Guy here looking at sixty years for his third offense. They’ll move him to Terre Haute when there’s room. Prolly move me too eventually.
What’s your name?
They call me Banjo.
I think the younger guys all had names like Ice Dawg, but Banjo must have been past forty. I talked to him some more and I got the outlines of his life. He was from Evansville, grew up ten blocks from my house, and went to my high school twenty years before I did.
Years later I met Banjo’s nephew out on the street in Bloomington. A black guy sitting on a doorstep with a piece of paper asked me for help. The paper was a job application and he said he couldn’t read or write so he asked me to fill it out.
I was taking down his address, education, and work history when certain parallels and some family resemblance suggested Banjo to my mind. I asked and it was a match.
He got the job and kept it for three days. Can’t stand washing dishes, he said. I had graduated by then, and working mornings in the forest left my afternoons completely free. I offered to help this guy learn to read—I had become a volunteer literacy tutor at the local library, mainly to impress Lola, also a volunteer. I’d see this guy sometimes in the Video Saloon and we would knock back beers and talk and I said just bring the Sports page over sometime. Anything you like. I gave him my address. He never came.
Sometimes during those conversations he would put his beer down and walk off to make a deal in a corner, leaving me and all the black dudes in his entourage just staring at one another. Then he’d come back and we’d talk like nothing had happened.
On one occasion I alerted him to blue flashing lights in the window at the end of the bar. He didn’t freak out. He gave some whispered orders to the henchmen around him and they left in a hurry and he turned to me and said thanks. If I ever did anything jail-worthy, that was probably it.
One day he just stopped showing up at the Vid, and I’ve always wondered whether he is in jail. If so, I hope he’s down in Terre Haute with Banjo.
The reason they make you wear an orange jumpsuit is so you won’t talk back to the judge. When someone says you’re free to go, and you’re wearing handcuffs, you might be inclined to argue. But you’ve just spent the night on a hard narrow cot and you look ridiculous, so you don’t.
It was about three in the afternoon when they called my name and led me down to the courtroom, and this judge said I was a dumb drunk kid not worth his time. He didn’t use those words. He said I was released “on my own recognizance” and other stuff I had to look up later. I didn’t get a criminal record.
I was astonished when they took me back to where I came in and got strip-searched and deloused and interrogated. There was that same fat cop and that wiry mustached cop, except they were real friendly. They gave me my clothes and said good luck, good-bye, hope we don’t see you again, no offense.
None taken.
Cool Hand Luke is worth watching if you’ve never seen it. It opens with Paul Newman cutting the heads off parking meters. After that he breaks out of jail several times over the next three hours. Everyone thinks he’s some kind of natural-born jail-breaking genius, but he swears he’s never planned a damn thing in his life.
At the end he gets shot. It’s a messiah thing.
I walked out of the jail into a cold November sunshine and I felt like I should probably take a big breath, so I did, and I watched it unspool in the air. I started walking toward home along Third Street when I saw John walking toward me, maybe fifty feet away. I stopped and waited, watching his floppy blond hair and silly grin.
You’re out, he said, and he was genuinely pleased.
Yeah. Just now.
I was coming to turn myself in. Tried to raise bail but couldn’t find anyone with the cash. And hey—he gave me a big smile—you got a Greyhound to catch!
I still don’t know if that was a selfless gesture or a sincere apology or what.
Either way it was too melodramatic for me. I pictured the tears rolling down his face as he sang “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” and I felt nauseous; I was sure that if we went back to his place for a drink I’d have to smash his toilet with a baseball bat and set his mattress on fire.
I shouldered past and we haven’t spoken since.
V
Nationwide
The Gypsy Moth wasn’t what you’d call roadworthy but I kept her awheel for a while. The radiator had two big cracks, and I discovered these in the middle of nowhere, so I plugged them with bread from my sandwich. Ten miles later I had toast. After that I kept an eight-gallon plastic canister in the passenger seat and refilled it every time I passed a lake. When necessary I pulled over and poured lake water into the radiator along with a few tadpoles. I thought she could use the protein. I found other leaks of other fluids all over the underside of the truck and I patched these up with duct tape or chewing gum, depending what I had on hand. At that time, I was crisscrossing Indiana counting birds for the Department of Natural Resources, and I generally had to make my repairs deep in the forest somewhere. You can use water for brake fluid too. I promise.
The other problem with the Gypsy Moth was her appearance. Lola had persuaded me one sunny Sunday that we should spray paint butterflies and fairies and mushrooms on the hood, roof, and sides. Across the top on both sides of the flatbed cover she had written Gypsy Moth in gold glitter. This kind of thing was okay in university towns like Lafayette and Bloomington, but out in real Indiana I might as well go around in a skirt (also okay in Lafayette and Bloomington, by the way). I let her do it because I had my own remodeling plans. While she was painting I put a wooden pallet in the back and a mattress on top of that. I was sure that in her new creation she’d enjoy going out to watch birds with me. Then she met a potter with four motorcycles, but that is a different story.
One afternoon I was driving east away from Lincoln State Park and toward the town of Santa Claus. They wanted to call it Santa Fe but the Post Office told them some other town had got there first. Bourbon whiskey may have played a role in the resulting town meeting, but this was 1825 and nobody knows for sure. Anyway, it was over ninety in the shade, which made the Gypsy Moth even thirstier than usual. She started knocking at me like an old washing machine about to scamper across the kitchen floor. I pulled up at a truck stop—the old-fashioned kind with a chrome-trimmed diner, open twenty-four hours, where they put the same stuff in your coffee mug they put in your gas tank. As it was so hot, I parked in the shade of a thirty-foot concrete statue of Saint Nick by the side of the highway, across the forecourt from the diner.
I popped the hood and hopped out with my lake water in hand. I got the radiator cap unscrewed and started to pour, with an eye out for twigs or minnows, and then I heard flip-flops flapping on the asphalt. I stopped pouring. A plump woman in her fifties with bland hair and bland eyes was looking to speak to me.
“You got a leak?” she said.
I said that I did.
“Hold on right there,” she said. “I’ll get you some eggs.”
I thought she must be making a joke about the weather; you could fry an egg on the engine block, that sort of thing. She didn’t smile, though, just turned around and flip-flopped back to the diner. I could see there were no customers inside and I guess she sat in there with the air-conditioning on high just waiting for people like me. There was nothing around but cornfields for several miles. The Michelin Guide to Indiana by Nathan Lochmueller is real short. Everything’s flat, everyone’s fat, and you can’t buy beer on Sunday. That is all you need to know. But I admit that sometimes you do run across a colossal Santa Clau
s on the highway.
“Put these in,” she said. She held a carton of six white medium chicken eggs out in my direction. “Two or three to start.”
“In where?” I said.
“Your radiator. Seal the leak. Sometimes you can just use paprika but a real leak needs eggs.”
That bread had held up for ten miles the first time, so I was inclined to try her eggs out. I thought that for future reference, I should find out which forest songbirds laid the best eggs for automotive repair.
“Do I crack it first?” I picked the nearest egg out.
“It’ll crack itself but you could give it a hand,” she said. “You probably don’t want the shell in there, though I don’t suppose it would hurt.”
Lola can crack an egg perfectly on first try every time. It’s a skill I’ve always admired. I wound up with half on top of the radiator and the other half over my hand.
“Try again,” she said. I selected another and managed to drop its contents into the radiator.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the shells. I could see she kept the premises very clean—what else would she do out there—and dropping the shells might seem like littering.
“Another one,” she said.
“I never heard of this,” I said. She shrugged as if she expected as much. It’s easy to see the egg will solidify as it boils, but how anyone figured out it will fill up a crack in the process is beyond me.
We’d gotten four eggs in there when a thin man in a greasy apron joined us outside.
“You don’t look like a gypsy,” he said. He had a sharp stubbled chin and a permanent squint. I didn’t know what he meant.
“It says Gypsy Moth,” said the woman. “You can throw them shells in the grass.”
“I know what it says,” the man replied. “You ain’t finished it, though, right? You’re going for Gypsy Motherf—”
“Ernie!” the woman interjected.
“Like truckers, Maud,” he insisted. “Everett’s rig all done up with Ivan the Terrible and Kevin’s says Big Bishop.” He was giving me the benefit of the doubt.
“You don’t look like a Gypsy, though,” he repeated.
Maud had begun inspecting the rest of the truck.
“You know screws is cheaper than duct tape,” she said. “Muffler on this model is attached to a plate. Supposed to be, anyway.” I had the whole thing taped to the back bumper.
“I didn’t have any screws,” I said. I had assumed the whole thing needed a professional mechanic with heavy equipment.
“We prolly got some that’ll fit,” she said.
Ernie continued his efforts to be friendly. “I like this girl with the boobs,” he said, pointing at a mermaid on the side. Lola painted that, not me.
Maud was on her knees looking underneath the truck. Her voice was remote, muffled.
“You got a Band-Aid over your gas line,” she said. “Couple of them.”
I was getting embarrassed. “It leaked and I was miles from anything,” I said.
She stood up and shrugged. “Just don’t drive over an open flame.”
“Tell you what,” said Ernie. “I’m glad to see a truck like this doing what she was built for.” Lola’s artwork lay under all kinds of grime and mud and forest grit, and the body was peppered with small dents from rogue gravel on country roads. That truck had even seen a tornado up close. “Mostly these days they get waxed every Sunday so they can run to the mall twice a week. What line of work are you in?”
This was always a tricky question. I’m a birdwatcher was the sort of answer they might expect from a man who drove a truck called Gypsy Moth; it suggested that back home in Bloomington or Lafayette I went around in a skirt. I should have made Lola name it Gypsy Queen or something.
“I’m a researcher,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” said Ernie. “What do you research?”
“Birds.”
“That’s real nice,” he said. “I wish I had a job like that.”
“Let me ask you a personal question,” said Maud. “Birdwatcher’s pay not enough to get your truck fixed?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Ernie can patch you up,” she said. “Better than you are now, anyhow.”
“I patch anything up,” said Ernie. “Less it’s electronic. Don’t hold with that kind of thing. This here is an honest truck.”
“If you don’t want to wait in the heat, come inside,” said Maud. Ernie handed his apron to her and I handed the keys to him.
The diner was cavernous and cool, and it was the kind of place I thought extinct outside of Hollywood film sets. There was chrome wainscoting, if that is even the word, all around, punctuated by booths upholstered in dark green faux vinyl, and there were stainless-steel napkin dispensers and sugar dispensers and glass ashtrays on every table. Most of the wall space on three sides was given to windows, so you could sit looking at the endless expanse of nothing on the other side. Where there was any wall it was devoted to big framed pictures and illustrations of Cadillacs and Chevrolets from the fifties and sixties, jolly cars with jaunty tailfins.
“Get you a coffee?” said Maud, and I accepted.
I sat in the booth nearest the door, where I could watch Ernie working in the improbable shade of Father Christmas. I could also see across the room to an enclosed area with pool tables and pinball machines and an immense silent jukebox. There were pictures of cars in there, too, but they were modern sports cars with blondes in bikinis draped over the hood. I surmised that Ernie ran the game room and Maud the restaurant.
I had some work to do that I had brought in with me. Finding nests and counting eggs was only half the job; crunching numbers like nest heights and terrain slope was the other half. My topographical maps were slathered in square root calculations. When I started I could always get Gerald to correct my errors, but working freelance I had to be careful. I spread one of these maps over the table to assess my finds that morning.
“I’d get lost with a map like that,” said Maud, delivering coffee. She had a big canvas bag marked U.S. Postal Service over her shoulder. “I’d wander around looking for the number two.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said. “Sometimes I get lost too,” I added, to be polite.
“What kind of birds do you watch?” she said.
“All of them. I try to see how they interact. Some get along fine and some don’t.”
“I noticed that,” she said. “I seen crows and blue jays give a hawk a hard time.”
At that time I was most interested in brown-headed cowbirds, but Maud had a point.
“Same principle,” I said. “Different birds.”
“Mind if I join you?” she said. Every other table was free but I guessed she didn’t get much conversation out there.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m Nathan.”
“Maud,” she said. She had a sizable middle and settling into the booth with that canvas bag took a while.
“Don’t let me trouble you though,” she said. “I’ve got some work of my own.” She extracted a clutch of envelopes from the bag along with a pen and some stationery.
I returned to my map. I had been calculating slope between two nests, but I had fluffed a cosine. I realized that I had left my pocket calculator in the Gypsy Moth.
Ernie was halfway underneath it already inspecting the gas pipe.
Across the table Maud began writing something. The envelope she had opened lay facing me. It was addressed to Santa Claus, Indiana, 47579. The other, unopened envelopes I could see bore the same address.
Maud noticed my curiosity. She might have been waiting for it. “We’re the only postally recognized Santa Claus in the world,” she said. “Come December I’ll have five or six of these bags. We send a handwritten reply to each one.”
“Just the two of you?”
“No,” she said. “The whole town chips in.” There are a couple of houses and a convenience store where Santa Claus is marked on the map, a mile and a half east of Maud’
s truck stop. In other words, it was just the two of them. “Been running since 1912 or 1914, depending who you ask.”
I suppose most letters to Santa wind up in the dead letter office, but these were smart kids, dedicated kids: they looked him up. They figured Santa would never stay at the North Pole when he could move to a real wasteland. I looked at the return addresses. Most of them were from the United States but I spotted some eye-catchers, too: Farleigh Wick, England, and Hamamatsu, Japan, and Canberra, Canberra. That got me wondering who paid the reply postage. I never found that out.
“What do you write?” I said.
“Whatever we want. We ain’t paid and we aren’t the federal government. Ernie had a letter from a little boy last week calling his sister a bitch. Ernie wrote back, said it must run in the family. I got one here from a girl who says Santa always please wear your slippers and drink lots of orange juice.”
“So what are you writing?”
“Santa will if you will,” said Maud.
The door swung open and Ernie yelled, “I need baling wire!” Maud extricated herself from the booth, but left her letters and the canvas bag. “Take one,” she said. “Write a reply if you want.”
I folded my map. I preferred to do square roots at home with a beer anyway. I selected one pale blue envelope with a return address in Seminole, Texas.
I didn’t open it immediately, though. I watched an eighteen-wheeler roll to a halt outside. It had artwork on the cab door that contrived to combine the Confederate flag, the Grim Reaper, and Lady Luck, just about free of her leather bikini. The man who got out was shirtless, in shorts and sandals. I couldn’t have said which was more noticeable, his tattoos, all akin to the illustration on the door, or the billows of sweaty flesh around him that were trying desperately but unsuccessfully to drip down below his hips. That said, in a red suit and beard he could have done the town proud.
Maud checked him at the door.
“No shirt, no service,” she said.
“Hell, Maud. Nice to see you too.”
“No shirt, no service,” she repeated. As an afterthought she added, “Bob.”
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