“We hold hands and feeled our way. Across almost, a big light blind us.”
It was a locomotive rounding a curve. The boys turned and started back, but they couldn’t hop from tie to tie quickly enough in the dark. Only one thing to do: laying poles and fish across the timbers, they slipped between the ties and hung by their arms. The engine, roaring above, knocked cinders in their eyes and nearly shook them loose. The cars kept coming, coming. Then the last clacked over. They started to pull up, but their arms were too tired.
“We can only hang like chickens at market.”
The comrade tried to swing his feet up, but nearly lost his grip, so they hung and argued whether to drop in hopes of hitting the river.
“When we cross, we are not afraid to take a chance to die, but when we hang, we become afraid to take chance to live. Life is so.”
“How long can a boy hang by his arms?”
“When it is all things you hang for? Who can answer?”
The comrade was in favor of dropping, but he couldn’t get the nerve to go first. They settled on a course of yelling alternately every several minutes. They hung and they hung. The train had shaken the stringer of trout through the ties, and four dead fish dangled in their faces. “If we move, the fishes kisses us.” They kept hanging. The next locomotive would shake them loose.
“I tell my comrade, ‘Soon we will be dying.’”
The boys whimpered and Karl wished he had been a better son to his poor mother and had not lied so often to the priests. He promised God he would change his ways. Then a beam from under the bridge played over them.
“‘Schnell,’ we call, and a voice say, ‘What’s this happening here?’ I see big eyes looking into mine. Eyes blink and I see a man’s face and it say, ‘What are you stupid boys doing?’ We look down and see his boots. He is standing in marsh. We was hanging with our fishes ten inches off the ground.”
Whether the man’s story was truth or tale, it had held me, and I had forgotten to see about the shore disappearing from view. I jumped up. We were almost across. It would remain a mystery. When I turned around, the old fellow was gone.
The sandy dunes of Michigan glowed pink in the late sun, and at the mouth of the Elberta harbor, there was a marvelous sight: little slivers of silver jigged on their tails over the blue water. They were alewives looking for all the world like dancing spoons. These were the fish that had washed ashore to foul beaches in the days of high pollution.
The Viking let loose with her horns, the crew tied up and sprinted across the dock and into cars and roared off to supper, and I wished the Viking were sailing all the way to the Atlantic.
14
SOME evenings on the road were like this one:
East of Elberta, across the Betsie River, and down route 115, I got choosy about where to spend the night. Looking for a town whose primary business was not tourism, I drove on through stands of birch girdled for souvenirs by sightseers, through a countryside of motels and sewer-hook-up campgrounds. Nothing satisfactory. In an hour, I was unexpectedly on U.S. 27, a limited-access highway. Insisting on multi-access roads and resisting controlled-access living, I had driven right onto a no-U-turn, minimum speed, tractors-with-lugs-prohibited mainline. I was irritated, but things were to get worse.
Through the oilfields of middle Michigan and into Mount Pleasant with the last drop of light, and onto the campus of Central Michigan University. I opened the cooler and found a butt end of bread, a wrinkled orange, and the can of chopped liver. Off I went for a calendared cafe serving Michigan pasties and ended up at an assembly-line sandwich hut.
I stood with the other ambulatory digestive tubes reading the wall-mounted, internally lighted menu showing full-color photographic representations of hamburgers and French fries twelve times life size. A slice of potato big enough to lay steel track over did not look appealing. All prices ended in nine. I ordered, and the cash register hummed, spun its mechanism, glared a red number, and an agent pushed me my texturized substitute in its polystyrene sarcophagus. I joined the other diners, some of whose gizzards had already begun wrestling hamburgers named for their weight.
Sticky from the heat, I faced another warm night in the truck. I went back to the campus and stopped at an old stone dormitory. Although spring term had ended and summer session hadn’t begun, somebody was living in the building. No one around. I heard a noise from a shower room, so I went in and started to call out when I noticed a tampon dispenser. TRESPASSER JAILED. Backing out quickly and quietly, I turned and bumped into a nude body. “What’s going on?” A young man’s voice.
“The person,” I fumbled. “The resident assistant. Looking for him.”
“He’s out. What do you need?”
“Wanted to buy a shower.”
“Help yourself.”
“Isn’t this a women’s dormitory?”
“Usually. Right now it’s for some businessmen taking a seminar.”
When I came out of the shower, the student offered a vacant room. It would be cooler. I was almost asleep when the light went on, and in walked a man, about forty, wearing a baby-blue terrycloth hat—the kind you can wipe a sweating face with—and a blinking, multimode, programmable, digital chronograph that gave him a continuous readout on what microsecond, second, minute, hour, day, and month he was currently in, as well as his lap time, split time, and whether he was in first or second place. He set down two monogrammed suitcases, looked at me, said nothing, opened a case, undressed, wrapped a personalized towel around his looseness, locked the suitcase, stuck his billfold in his towel six-shooter style, and walked out, leaving the light on. After ten minutes I got up and turned it off.
He came back smelling of baby powder, turned the light on, studied his fret of a face in the mirror, got his shaving kit, and walked out, leaving the light on. After five minutes, I got up and turned it off. He came back, turned the light on, sat down, belched, wiped his tasseled shoes, lighted a Vantage Menthol, took out a Consumer Reports, Penthouse, and a plastic binder with North Central Assurance Group or something like that embossed on it. A man laughed in the hallway, and he walked out again.
“Larry,” a voice said. “You fly in?”
“Drove the stationwagon. Say, who’s the creep in my room?”
“The jigaboo?”
“No. Tonto.”
“Don’t know.”
I got up and turned off the light. I was almost asleep when the door banged open and a flashlight blinded me. That was it. I jumped up.
“What the hell is this? Get that light out of my eyes.”
“What’s your name, buddy?”
“Sparkle Plenty. What the hell’s going on?”
“Are you registered?”
“I’m not a Communist. What is this?”
A blinking readout reached over and switched on the light. Larry had brought a watchman. I explained the student’s invitation, but the watchman didn’t believe it and told me to get out. I pulled on clothes and rolled up my sheet. As slowly as possible. As I left, I said to Larry, “Be sure you call Sam Spade here if those two beds aren’t big enough for your fat ass.”
“Shut your own ass, you freak.”
The watchman interrupted the exchange, and I went to the hot truck and lay down in a cold anger. I couldn’t get to sleep so I wrote out a little report. When I finished, I went back and pinned it to the door:
AUTOPSY FINDINGS ON LARRY ANONYMOUS
THE EXAMINATION: It was found that the life of the deceased was given over to the concerns of surety bonding, net profit margins, and total shareholders equity. As a student of actuarial statistics (i.e., letting the dead tell you where to put your money), the deceased formulated Larry’s Law, which has become a leading piece of desk-plaque philosophy: RISK NOTHING.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Acute myocardial infarction due to the continued gathering and piling of material good upon material good and desire upon vain desire, aggravated by an ongoing fear that the deceased would one day find himself withou
t his driver’s license and wristwatch.
SUMMARY: Like a poorly written policy, the Primal Underwriter has declared this man of trifling sorrows null and void.
Respectfully submitted,
S. Plenty
15
ACROSS her T-shirt was SKI. She leafed through Stalking the Wild Asparagus in the college bookstore. I was in the middle of Michigan and looking for a place to go next, so I asked whether she lived in Mount Pleasant, but she didn’t look up. I tapped her arm.
“I’m from Missouri. Traveling. I’d like to find a good place to visit in Michigan.” She watched but said nothing. “Maybe you know a nice spot.” She just stared. Northerners really carry taciturnity too far, I thought.
A clerk came up and said, “She’s deaf. Probably having trouble reading your lips.” He repeated what I’d asked.
She said, “Oh,” and put the book down. Holding up her right hand as if to say “How” in Hollywood Indian fashion, she said, “Dumb.”
“Dumb?” the clerk repeated. I didn’t know whether she meant me or herself.
“Dumb Miss Ginn,” she said and wagged her right thumb.
“Thumb of Michigan?” the clerk asked.
The girl smiled, wagged her thumb again, and nodded. “Berry bootful.”
“It’s very beautiful,” the clerk translated.
Looking at her SKI T-shirt, I said, “Do you ski on the Thumb?”
“Dumbs due plat. By dames car water ski.”
“Thumb’s too flat to ski,” the clerk said. “Her name’s Karworski.”
So that was how I ended up on the Thumb of Michigan.
On a map, lower Michigan looks like a mitten with the squatty peninsula between Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron forming the Thumb. A region distinctive enough to have a name was the only lure I needed, but also it didn’t hurt to have towns with fine, unpronounceable names like Quanicassee, Sebewaing, Wahjamega, or other names like Pigeon, Bad Axe, Pinnebog, Rescue, Snover, and—what may be the worst town name in the nation—Freidberger. People of the Thumb have come from many places, but Germans and Poles predominate.
I headed due east across the flat country, past the great industrial pile of Dow Chemical at Midland, past the Victorian houses in Bay City. Near Quanicassee, canals draining the wet land to make farming possible flanked the highway. In the ditches, mile after mile, violent flashes of polished bronze roiled the murky water. I stopped to see what it was. The hot, muddy banks frothed with the courtship of eighteen-inch carp. Males, flicking Fu Man Chu mustaches, metallic scales glittering like fragments of mirrors, orange tails thrashing, did writhing belly rolls over females as they demonstrated the right of their milt to prevail.
Away from the bay and lake, Thumbland was agricultural land: sugar beets, navy beans, silage; but on the bay from Caseville to Port Austin, the Thumb was an uninterrupted cluttering of vacation homes, tourist cabins, motels, and little businesses selling plastic lawn-ornament flamingoes and used tires cut into planters. The houses and cabins and businesses pressed in tightly, and in the few places where beach delivered itself to the road were “no trespassing” signs.
Whoever called Americans a “rootless” people never saw the west shore of the Thumb, where houses used eight weeks a year block off the lake every day of the year. If Americans are truly rootless, why weren’t a few lodges and hotels built to leave the shore undeveloped as the “rooted” Europeans might do it? As it is, the rootless family drives up from Ypsilanti to spend its allotted time cutting grass, painting the boathouse, and unplugging the septic tank.
But the northeastern shore was another story: open. Farms and fields came down to the edge of Huron, and the people had collected into towns rather than stringing out along the lake. If west Thumbland was unrestrained America, the east Thumb was the best of rural England—settled yet uncongested.
Harbor Beach, a factory village and a pleasant one, had both a harbor and a beach inside a long stone breakwater; it also had a plant manufacturing plastics, one making food seasonings, and another producing pharmaceutical goods, as well as a big power station. People who argue that pretty towns and industry cannot live together should look at Harbor Beach.
A very long wooden pier ran out toward the breakwater. That Friday evening the whole village must have been fishing from it; although nobody was having any luck, the night before a crazy run of perch had swum in.
“This water was something to see,” an angler said. He had that blankness of expression that comes only from years of watching eight-pound-test monofilament disappear into placid water. “Fish assaulted our bait.”
He usually fished for whatever was running—perch, steelhead, chub; in the winter, he opened the ice and fished for pike. Most of his life he had worked in Detroit as a machinist turning parts for gasoline blowtorches.
“Now kids don’t know what a gas blowtorch is, but they were beautiful things that built the country. Precision brass fittings machined to critical tolerances. Blew like thunder and ran like steam engines, and they lasted forever because they were designed and built and not just assembled. The throwaway propane bottle put us out of business. Those things are designed as junk and built accordingly. But the true blowtorch! A son inherited his dad’s torch. I loved the work because I knew somebody would keep what I made.”
He reeled in a nibbled-over minnow and reloaded. “The war changed things. During the forties, our shop converted to making brake shoes for Jeeps. There wasn’t satisfaction in the job except for good money and helping our boys. When the war ended, things began breaking down, you might say, and that’s when I and the wife started spending time up here.”
In 1942 he had bought a small farm on the Thumb. “It was a good time to buy because I had money and land was available and going at a low price if you were white. People, you see, were afraid Coloreds were going to move in to do war work at the factory—a gunpowder plant I think it was—so they sold low to whites. It worked to my advantage. But I don’t think any Coloreds ever came up to work anyway.”
He jigged his bait and said to the water, “Hello?” then reeled in the dead minnow. “I like my role now—of no consequence whatsoever.” He looked down the pier for activity. “I decided to buy the place up here on a Friday evening similar to this one. Went home from the shop and realized when I got home that I was just waiting for Monday. Funny thing was, I didn’t like the job anymore.”
As he packed up his gear, he asked why I was in Harbor Beach. I told him I was looking for a good hamburger. “That would be the Crow’s Nest if you get out before ten,” he said. “Be sure to see the painting. That thing stirs up almost as much commotion as a fast run of perch.”
16
AT the Crow’s Nest we drank “America’s Only Fire-Brewed Beer,” a brew remarkably interchangeable with any other American beer. Maybe that was why a man called Stitch took his Stroh’s with a nip of ginger brandy. He wore coveralls and a herringbone sportcoat with a Buddy Poppy in the lapel. He was old and looked older. Before he lost coherent speech, I heard several things in his gargle of words. This was one: “I got healed when I was sixteen. Healed in a church basement on Wednesday night. Never been a religious man, but I been a believer since.”
“What were you healed of?”
“An affliction to bear. I had feet flat as waffles.”
He told a story about tracking down a pair of coyotes that were eating his mother’s chickens. A long tale of the chase he’d recounted many times before, it was one of those events by which a man comes to define himself; no matter where else he’d failed, he’d killed the coyotes.
Above the bar hung the painting the fisherman had mentioned. On black velvet was a stacked, shimmering-haired, bronzed-bodied blonde in Indian-style headband and loincloth. That’s all she wore unless you counted the expression on her face. Just another backbar nude, more silly than indecorous, I thought. I asked the bartender, a comely blonde herself, if the fuss about the painting was due to the mocking of Indian traditions.
“Indian traditions? What’s with Indians? It’s the bare tits, dearie.”
“I see.”
“Some people have gotten on my case because of a rumor that I posed for it.” She stared at the painting as she pulled a draft. “Of course it isn’t me. No woman’s built like that. Those are fantasy knockers. They look like muscles.”
Indeed they did. At nine o’clock, five post-adolescents with cigarettes rolled in their T-shirt sleeves came in and began setting up a band. They had speakers the size of closets, an amplifier control panel like the Kalamazoo switchboard, a siren to alert all of Lake Huron, enough strobes to light an airfield, and more drums than the Indian nation. I wondered what the group would do if they had to make music from cow bones and a washtub.
At ten o’clock they cut loose. I saw why I was supposed to be out before ten. I heard the band through my elbows on the bar, heard them against my forehead. The guitarist took off his shirt and flaunted a curved chest white as the gut side of a catfish. He was singing. I knew that because his mouth opened and closed, and he wasn’t eating.
Sidling to the bar came a fellow in a blue suit large enough for a dancing partner to step in with him. He puffed a Swisher Sweet and didn’t cough much. To the barmaid he said, “Pretty lady, this man’s here to boogie.”
“Anybody else know that, Shorty?”
Two young women drinking Scotch and Coke sat and waited to dance. The one with deep, dark eye sockets relentlessly worked a stick of chewing gum. The other, wearing snakeskin knee boots and golden slacks that fit as if gilded to her, was slender and had the eyes of a lynx. Boys in yellowed shirts took her to the dance floor one after another. They were stumps. Dancing out of her pelvis, she swirled around them like smoke, moving across the floor, inching back, sliding away. The siren went off, and the strobes flashed her into a wispy possibility. The boys were dying for her, but they got drunk and sat down. She danced on alone against the amplified drums and moved through the shadows of other dancers. Six college boys from Ann Arbor came in to drink Heinekens, and one had a few turns with the lynx, but only his shoulders and hands danced. No one else even tried.
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 36