Some Luck: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  Mama said, “You didn’t know our oldest boy, Frank, but he is the same way. It now looks as though he will go to the University of Chicago!”

  “My goodness,” said Miss Perkins. “Why not Iowa State? You get everything you could want there.”

  Lillian, who was standing by the front door of the car, helping Lois get out, said, “I’m going to take Lois home.”

  The two ladies kept talking, and Lillian took Lois’s hand. They walked down the edge of the road, which was clean of snow—in fact, there was only snow in the ditches anymore, and the sun was almost warm. Lois unbuttoned her coat.

  Lillian and Lois mounted the steps of the Fredericks’ big front porch. The Fredericks’ house was a very nice one, and Lillian appreciated it every time she visited. It had come on a train from Chicago—or, rather, all its parts had come, with instructions on how to build it—and she imagined that all houses in Chicago, all the houses Frankie saw when he was walking to school, looked like this one. She and Lois opened the big dark front door with the windows in it and went in. They hung their coats by the fireplace. Mrs. Frederick was just coming down the stairs.

  She gave Lillian a welcoming glance and said, “I do think I saw some cookies cooling on the kitchen table. They might have been gingersnaps.”

  “I hope they were,” said Lillian.

  “Me, too,” said Lois.

  Mrs. Frederick said, “I’ll go look.”

  Lillian was very fond of all the Fredericks, and sometimes she lay in bed at night imagining their house, where someone was always making a joke and there was never any fighting. Lillian imagined that they had a secret about that, and she liked to come over and watch them, hoping she would figure out what it was.

  ONE MORNING, after school was out and the corn planting finished, Joe got up and went to feed the animals, and he saw a mound, pale in the early light, lying in the grassy muck of the east pasture, half under the Osage-orange bush. He knew what it was without even going to look, but he went anyway, and when he got there, he squatted down and petted Elsa for a few minutes, along her neck and the roots of her mane; then he closed her eye. She was a bit of a mess—he hadn’t brushed her in a week, maybe, and her coat, now snowy white, was grimy. What was she, twenty-three?

  Jake was at the far end of the pasture, standing among the cows. He took a few steps toward Joe, then stopped and flicked his ears. Jake was over twenty himself. The only thing either horse ever did anymore was walk around and eat, sometimes with Henry on board—Jake was better at that than Elsa had been. When Henry kicked him, he would actually speed up his walk a bit and stop putting his head down to eat. He would also turn when Henry pulled one way or another on the lead rope. Joe himself sometimes got on Jake and rode through the fields—easier than walking, and more fun. But Joe hadn’t done that in almost a year. He gave Elsa a last pat and went into the barn, where he got a couple of burlap sacks and laid them over the corpse. At breakfast, Mama said, “Don’t say anything. Maybe Henry won’t notice.”

  “Well,” said Papa, “he’ll notice when the rendering wagon comes out to pick her up.”

  “I think they have a truck now,” said Joe.

  “There you go,” said Walter. “Even the renderer drives a truck. Even the renderer hasn’t much use for animals anymore.”

  A couple of weeks later, Joe came home from Rolf’s farm, where he had been cultivating the corn, and Papa stopped him as he walked out of the barn toward the house. He said, “Joey, I sold Jake to someone.”

  Joe’s voice shot out of his mouth, loud, surprised, “I think of Jake as my—”

  “But he’s just standing there. This fellow has a use for him.”

  Papa spoke sharply, but he had an abashed look on his face, and Joe said, “What use would that be?”

  “I guess he has an old buggy he likes to drive in parades. A light thing, nothing to pull for a horse like Jake. He’s healthy, he should have a job.”

  Joe didn’t disagree with this, but he was suspicious. He said, “How’d he find out about Jake?”

  “I guess the man from the rendering plant told him we had a nice horse.”

  “Well, I don’t want to sell him.” Joe pushed past Papa—but gently, respectfully—and headed toward the house. It was suppertime, and he was hungry.

  Papa said, “It’s forty dollars. That’s Frankie’s fees for a quarter at Iowa State.”

  Joe spun around. “I thought he gave that up for a year. He was going to go up to Wisconsin and hunt fox and beaver for his fees.”

  “Now he doesn’t have to.”

  “What about that ‘labor school’ Eloise and Julius were talking about? Brook something? That was free.”

  “I guess it closed.”

  But Papa was neither asking permission nor seeking advice. The horse was sold, and Papa already had the money—the man would be by to get Jake the next day.

  Mama was more thoughtful. She came into Joe’s room when he was getting into bed, and sat down. She took his hand. She said, “Lillian is crying, too. I told her, but I think I’ll wait till Henry asks. Sometimes children get used to things by not knowing quite what’s happened for a bit. But Papa and I understand how attached you are to Jake. Papa is sick about this.”

  Joe removed his hand from Mama’s and pushed back his hair. He didn’t say anything.

  “Joseph. It’s not just Frankie going to school for himself. He’s going for all of us. The world is changing, and someone has to go out into it and be prepared for it.”

  Joe snorted.

  “Son, you know that that someone is him and not you. You love the world you live in, and that’s good. He loves the world we don’t know much about, and that’s good, too. I consider myself lucky to have one of each in my boys.”

  She took his hand again, and patted it, then left. Joe knew that there was no hope for saving Jake, and it was true, he would live longer with something to do, and enjoy himself more with an equine friend—the man had another horse with an old lameness, who couldn’t pull the buggy anymore. What drove him crazy was that he couldn’t find his way around any of their arguments, never had. His own family left him confused and dumb. He didn’t think he was stupid—he could plow a straight row, repair a fence, shear a sheep, milk a cow, predict the weather, even get a robin to sit on his finger. He could mimic the calls of seventeen birds and animals, and often did for Henry’s and Lillian’s amusement (Lillian would tell the story, and Joe would pretend to be saying the parts in “real animal language”). He thought of Uncle Rolf, whose field he cultivated, whose life seemed to be buried in that very field. But he wasn’t Rolf, and would never be, thought Joe. Not in a million years.

  FRANK WAS SITTING in the Lincoln Way Café in Campustown, across from the college in Ames, and the man who had just taken his order was, to his utter amazement, none other than Ragnar, Papa’s farmhand from years ago—eight or ten, anyway. He recognized Frank, though Frank hadn’t recognized him. And now here came a woman—Irma, it would be. She looked slightly more familiar. She rushed up to him, grabbed his hands. “Goodness gracious! Frankie Langdon, welcome to Iowa State! When I saw you last you were Mr. Mischief! Do you remember hammering that row of nails into the railings of the front porch? Oh, your papa was fit to be tied! And now here you are! Where do you live?”

  Frank said, “In the freshman dorm. But I want to join Sigma Chi if I can. They have a good scholarship.”

  “Oh, goodness. Have they told you about the fraternity houses? Since the flu epidemic after the war, everyone sleeps in the attic with all the windows wide open through the winter. The dorms and even apartments are at least above freezing!”

  Frank laughed. He said, “Like home, then.”

  “And how are your folks doing? I was so worried about them.”

  Frankie stiffened. “Fine. They’re fine. Henry was born. He’s almost five.”

  “And darling, I’m sure,” said Irma. She squeezed his hand. “Back to the kitchen now. But have the special. Corned b
eef and cabbage. On the house.”

  Frank had ordered the chicken soup, the cheapest thing on the menu, but he said, “Thanks.” In a few minutes, Ragnar brought him a plate of the corned beef, with not only cabbage but some fried potatoes on the side, and a piece of apple pie. Frank made himself eat it with leisurely deliberation, even though he was ravenous.

  Frank had been in Ames for six weeks, and he was sleeping not in the dorm but on the banks of the Skunk River, in a tent he’d gotten at the Salvation Army. He had kept back the dormitory money that Mama had given him, because he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to continue at Iowa State, and he didn’t want to waste a penny if he didn’t have to. Maybe it would be better in Iowa City, but Chicago had wrecked him for Ames. Everyone in Ames was just like the landscape—open, bright, friendly, dull. In Chicago, if you didn’t smile all the time, people thought you were normal. Here, they thought you were unhappy and hostile, and maybe he was.

  However, he liked his classes. If the students were a uniform breed—say, Herefords, contentedly chewing their cud as they kept to the paths and filed mindlessly to their classes (now he was sounding like a communist)—then the professors were animals of every stripe, caged in their classrooms, making their tweets and roars and whinnies. He listened to their lectures, asked his questions, made his contributions, was getting high marks on tests. The cattle scratched their heads and kept turning the papers over, wondering where the clues were, but Frank did fine. Except he didn’t have a friend, and for the first time in his life, he wanted one.

  Even here, as he cleaned his plate, he was the only person sitting by himself. Every table was full of kids—Irma was a good cook—and everyone was gabbing and laughing. Frank felt awkward and out of place. Somehow, he’d thought there would be someone from Chicago here, someone who was a little like Bob and Mort or even Lew. If he’d taken those guys back to his tent, they would have been inspired by the daring of it. These kids were so clean that Frank thought they would just find it dirty. So he was a farm kid. But the farm kids here were all like Joey.

  He pushed away his empty plate and reached for the apple pie. The crust was good, like Mama’s. He thought he remembered Mama showing Irma how to make a crust. The apples were good, too. Sometimes, by the river, Frank shot himself a rabbit, skinned it, and cooked it. He had also caught a couple of catfish and cooked those himself, over a fire. When he caught a fish or bagged a rabbit, he thought maybe his year hunting in Wisconsin might have been a better idea than this—he could have chosen a different college or a different life. He savored the crust of the pie. It was crispy and delicious. He estimated that he had about a month left in the tent. He was sure he would think of something, but he didn’t know what.

  He left Ragnar a tip and walked out of the café. Then he crossed Lincoln Way and entered the campus. It was dark. The gymnasium was up to the left, and the student union was just to the right. Usually when he was looking for a bike, he walked along the road in front of the union, but this time he decided to try the gymnasium. The key was to remember where he’d found it, and then return it early in the morning. That way, he made use of the bike and also put one over on the hapless twit who had left it there in the first place. He was fond of his old bicycle, the cruiser he’d left on the farm, but this method had its attractions, only one of which was that he got to try out various models.

  It took him about twenty minutes to head east on Lincoln Way to Duff, then south to 16th Street, where his very small and easily disguised tent was pitched in some bushes. He had stored other things in two trunks, also purchased at the Salvation Army, and they were pushed even deeper into the thickets (he had checked for snakes and poison ivy). The hoboes weren’t down here—they were east of downtown, in a wooded area not far from the Chicago and Northwestern tracks; a few younger ones hid out on campus. He was therefore extremely taken aback when he knelt down, opened the flap of his tent, and discovered someone in there. The person lit a match under his own chin as soon as Frank stuck his head in, and then lit the kerosene lantern Frank used for light. It was a guy about his own age, and someone he had never seen before. He was wearing nice clothes. Frank then remembered having seen a car, a REO Flying Cloud, maybe a 1936, on the bridge.

  The person said, “So someone is living here.”

  “Maybe,” said Frank.

  The person laughed. He said, “Where do you shower?”

  “There’s the pool at State Gym. Don’t you have curfew?” said Frank.

  “Maybe,” said the person. “I’m Lawrence Field. Shenandoah.”

  “Frank Langdon, Denby. I’m not in the seed business.” The Fields were famous nursery-and-seed purveyors, and that explained the car.

  Lawrence grinned. “Are you in furs?”

  “You must have come by before dark if you saw the rabbit skins.”

  “That’s what I first saw—rabbit skins tacked to trees.”

  “And you decided to snoop.”

  “Wouldn’t you have?”

  Frank had to admit that he would have.

  Ten minutes later, they were in the car, and fifteen minutes after that, they were passing through Nevada, which was dark on both sides of the street. Frank said, “Nice car,” and it was—as smooth as advertised, sleek, cushioned, fast, and quiet.

  “REO is out of the automobile business now—that’s what I hear. But my dad wanted one of the last ones.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “How about Chicago?”

  Frank was a little startled, but he said, “I like Chicago. I lived there last year.”

  “There’s a Cubs home game tomorrow. Against the Cards. The season’s about over. They aren’t going to get out of second place, but I’d like to see it.”

  Frank shrugged. They shot out of the east end of Nevada, and the flat road stretched before them, as pale and straight as a string between the dark cornfields. Frank had never been in a car driven by another kid before. He said, “Let’s go.”

  1938

  FRANK HAD KNOWN GUYS who did whatever they wanted to, but Lawrence Field was the first he’d met who had the money and imagination to broaden his horizons beyond smoking cigarettes, drinking rotgut, skipping school, trying to feel up girls, and stealing things. Lawrence Field never stole anything—he had class—and was the reason Frank lingered around Iowa State through the first quarter and went back after three weeks on the farm for the second quarter. Frank didn’t see Lawrence much of the time, and Lawrence didn’t solve all his problems, but he did solve one of them—he found Frank a job, working in the horticulture lab, and so Frank could get himself a room, at least for a few months, until the snow stopped.

  Lawrence turned out to be twenty, but he looked younger than Frank. Even though his father had put him to work around the nursery and on the family farm from an early age, he was still “waiting for his growth.”

  “It’ll come,” he said. “Everyone in our family lives forever.” Frank had been back at school after Christmas for a week when Lawrence showed up. Outside, the Flying Cloud accelerated up the street—its motor had a distinct sound—and then stopped below his window. Frank looked out, put up the sash. Lawrence called, “Wear something nice. I’m feeling restless.”

  Frank didn’t mind hurrying when Lawrence was feeling restless—he was down the stairs in five minutes, dressed in a suit and a camel-hair coat that he’d found in a pawnshop in Des Moines. Lawrence loved pawnshops. Frank got in the passenger’s side, noted that there was no one else in the car, and said, “Back to Chicago?” They’d been to Chicago three times since the Cubs game (a win, 5–1).

  “Better,” said Lawrence. “Rock Island.”

  “Rock Island!” exclaimed Frank. “Rock Island is a dump!”

  “Just wait. Anyway, I need a drink.”

  One of the “responsibilities” that Lawrence took seriously as the son of a famous family was not drinking in Iowa, which was still dry.

  The Flying Cloud did, indeed, fly—eight cylinders and al
l of them powerful. Straight through Nevada, on to Colo, then south of Usherton, and through the Indian lands around Tama and the dips—an area of hills that reminded Frank of a roller coaster. Then they angled south through Tipton, and east again, through a hillier and more wooded area that Frank wasn’t familiar with—he had never been to Iowa City, though he’d meant to go. The car ran so smoothly that Frank drifted into sleep, and only woke up when Lawrence made a turn. He woke up to a big lighted sign: “Roadhouse.” Lawrence turned into the parking lot, which was large and full of cars. The Flying Cloud was the only one of its kind, though. Lawrence pulled up toward the rear of the longish building and opened his door. He said, “Not that cold here. I doubt you’ll need your coat.”

  The building had two stories, four doors, and no windows. Men were entering and exiting through all of the doors, but Lawrence headed toward one of the ones near the center of the shingled wall. Frank jogged to catch up to him. Lawrence said, “This is Little Chicago. Heard of it?”

  “Maybe,” said Frank. This time he meant it.

  The bar was long, shiny, and well stocked. It ran in an elongated horseshoe among scattered tables, and the brass foot-rail glinted in the multitude of lights that both drew him toward the bar and accentuated the darkness. The stools were attached somehow, had red leather seats, and spun. Lawrence settled his backside onto one and leaned toward the bartender like he’d done it plenty of times. Frank, who’d only visited two bars in Chicago the previous spring, imitated him. As he put his elbows on the bar itself, he noticed a metal trough beneath the brass rail, and dipped his head to get a better look at it. Lawrence said, “You piss into that. I never have, but some fellows don’t like to give up their spots.” Sure enough, as he spoke, a dark but glistening stream of water trickled past. Lawrence said, “The bartender flushes it every fifteen minutes or so.”