This time everything was bigger. Don’t ask me why. I was at my favorite drugstore, the one next to the theater. The drugstore was at the corner of Division and Center Street. I glanced at a newspaper. June 17, 1956. If memory serves, I would have been over in Alabama at the time, so I wouldn’t be running into myself. I reached in my pocket and looked at my change. Half of it hadn’t been minted yet. (How was that possible?) The guy at the register ignored me—he’d seen me a million times, and I wasn’t one of the kids he had to give the Hairy Eyeball to. When I came in, I came to buy.
I looked at the funny book rack. Everything except the Dell Comics had the Comics Code Seal on them, which meant they’d go to Nice Heaven. No zombies, no monsters, no blood, noBlackhawks fighting the Commies, who used stuff that melts tanks, people—everything but wood. No vampires “saaaaking your blaaad.” Dullsville. I picked up a Mad magazine, which was no longer a comic book, so it wouldn’t be under the Comics Code, but had turned into a 25¢—What, me cheap?—magazine. It had a Kelly Freas cover of Alfred E. Neuman.
I fished out a 1952 quarter and put it down by the register. There wasn’t any sales tax in Texas yet. Fifty years later, we would be paying more than New York City.
I looked at the theater marquee when I stepped outside. Bottom of the Bottle and Bandido—one with Joseph Cotten and Richard Egan, the other with Glenn Ford and Gilbert Roland. I’d seen them later, bored by the first except for a storm scene, and liked the second because there were lots of explosions and Browning .50 caliber machine guns. Nothing for me there.
I walked down toward Main Street.
There was a swooping sensation and a flutter of light and I was back home.
The analog readout on the clock clicked to 10:50 a.m.
I went to the coin shop. I went to my doctor’s office. I went to a couple of other places. I actually had to lie a couple of times, and I used one friendship badly, only they didn’t know, but I did.
Then I found the second letter my sister had sent me from North Carolina and got the phone number of the lab. I called it the next morning. It took a while, but they finally got Ethel to the phone.
“Feeling okay?” she asked.
“Hell no,” I said. “I’m not having any fun. At least let me have fun. Two days from now give me an hallucination about Alabama. In the summer. I want to at least see if the fishing is as good as I remember it.”
“So it is written,” she said, imitating Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments, “so it shall be done.”
I knew it really didn’t matter, but I kept my old fiberglass spinning rod, with its Johnson Century spinning reel, and my old My Buddy tackle box as near me as I could the next two days. Inside the tackle box with all the other crap were three new double-hook rigged rubber eels, cheap as piss in 1969, but they cost $1.00 each in 1950s money when they’d first come out.
This time I was almost ready for it and didn’t panic when the thing came on. I rode it out like the log-flume ride out at Six Flags Over Texas, and when the clock outside the college classroom started jumping backward, I didn’t even get woozy. I closed my eyes and made the jump myself.
I was at the Big Pond and had made a cast. A two-pound bass had taken the rubber eel. The Big Pond was even bigger than I remembered (although I knew it was only four acres). I got the bass in and put it on a stringer with its eleven big clamps and swivels between each clamp on the chain. I put the bass out about two feet in the water and put the clamp on the end of the stringer around a willow root.
Then I cast again, and the biggest bass I had ever had took it. There was a swirl in the water the size of a #5 washtub, and I set the hook.
I had him on for maybe thirty seconds. He jumped in the shallow water as I reeled. He must have weighed ten pounds. When he came down there was a splash like a cow had fallen into the pond.
Then the rubber eel came sailing lazily out of the middle of the commotion, and the line went slack in a backflowing arc. It (probably she) had thrown the hook.
There was a big V-wake heading for deeper water when the bass realized it was free.
I was pissed off at myself. I picked up the stringer with the two-pound bass (which now didn’t look as large as it had five minutes ago) and my tackle box and started off over the hill back toward my grandparents’ house.
I walked through the back gate, with its plowshare counterweight on the chain that kept it closed. I took the fish off the stringer and eased it into the seventy-five gallon rainbarrel, where it started to swim along with a catfish my uncle had caught at the Little Pond yesterday. In the summer, there was usually a fish fry every Friday. We got serious about fishing on Thursdays. By Friday there would be fifteen or twenty fish in the barrel, from small bluegills to a few crappie to a bunch of bass and catfish. On Fridays my uncle would get off early, start cleaning fish, heating up a cast-iron pot full of lard over a charcoal fire and making up batter for the fish and hush puppies. Then, after my grandfather came in, ten or eleven of us would eat until we fell over.
Later the cooled fish grease would be used to make dogbread for my grandfather’s hounds. You didn’t waste much in Alabama in those days.
I washed my hands off at the outside faucet and went through the long hall from the back door, being quiet, as the only sound in the house was of SuZan, the black lady who cooked for my grandmother, starting to make lunch. I looked into the front room and saw my grandmother sleeping on the main bed.
I went out onto the verandah. I’d taken stuff out of the tackle box in the back hall, when I’d leaned my fishing rod up against a bureau, where I kept it ready to go all summer.
I was eating from a box of Domino sugar cubes when I came out. My sister was in one of the Adirondack-type wooden chairs, reading a Katy Keene comic book; the kind where the girl readers sent in drawings of dresses and sunsuits they’d designed for Katy. The artist redrew them when they chose yours for a story, and they ran your name and address printed beside it so other Katy Keene fans could write you. (Few people know it, but that’s how the internet started.)
She must have been five or six—before she got sick. She was like a sparkle of light in a dark world.
“Back already?” she asked. “Quitter.”
“I lost the biggest fish of my life,” I said. “I tried to horse it in. I should have let it horse me but kept control, as the great A. J. McClane says in Field and Stream,” I said. “I am truly disappointed in my fishing abilities for the first time in a long time.”
“Papaw’ll whip your ass if he finds out you lost that big fish he’s been trying to catch,” she said. “He would have gone in after it, if he ever had it on.” He would have, too.
“Yeah, he’s a cane-pole fisherman, the best there ever was, but it was too shallow there for him to get his minnow in there with a pole. It was by that old stump in the shallow end.” Then I held up the sugar-cube box.
“Look what I found,” I said.
“Where’d you get those?”
“In the old chiffarobe.”
“SuZan’ll beat your butt if she finds you filchin’ sugar from her kitchen.”
“Probably some of Aunt Noni’s for her tea. She probably bought it during the Coolidge Administration and forgot about it.” Aunt Noni was the only person I knew in Alabama who drank only one cup of coffee in the morning, and then drank only tea, iced or hot, the rest of the day.
“Gimme some,” said Ethel.
“What’s the magic word?”
“Please and thank you.”
I moved the box so she took the ones I wanted her to. She made a face. “God, that stuff is old,” she said.
“I told you they was,” I said.
“Gimme more. Please,” she said. “Those are better.” Then: “I’ve read this Katy Keene about to death. Wanna play croquet ’til you get up your nerve to go back and try to catch that fish before Papaw gets home?”
“Sure,” I said. “But that fish will have a sore jaw ’til tomorrow. He’ll be real careful wh
at he bites the rest of the day. I won’t be able to tempt him again until tomorrow.”
We started playing croquet. I had quite the little run there, making it to the middle wicket from the first tap. Then my sister came out of the starting double wicket, and I could tell she was intent on hitting my ball, then getting to send me off down the hill. We had a rule that if you were knocked out of bounds, you could put the ball back in a mallet-head length from where it went out. But if you hit it hard enough, the ball went out of bounds, over the gravel parking area, down the long driveway, all the way down the hill and out onto Alabama Highway 12. You had to haul your ass all the way down the dirt drive, dodge the traffic, retrieve the ball from your cousin’s front yard, and climb all the way back up to the croquet grounds to put your ball back into play.
My sister tapped my ball at the end of a long shot. She placed her ball against it, and put her foot on top of her croquet ball. She lined up her shot. She took a practice tap to make sure she had the right murderous swing.
“Hey!” I said .”My ball moved! That counts as your shot!”
“Does not!” she yelled.
“Yes it does!” I yelled.
“Take your next shot! That counted!” I added.
“It did not!” she screamed.
“You children be quiet!” my grandmother yelled from her bed of pain.
About that time was when Ethel hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet; I kneecapped her with the blue croquet ball, and, with a smile on my swelling face as I heard the screen door open and close, I went away from there.
This time I felt like I had been beaten with more than a mallet wielded by a six-year-old. I felt like I’d been stoned by a crowd and left for dead. I was dehydrated. My right foot hurt like a bastard, and mucus was dripping from my nose. I’m pretty sure the crowds in the hall as classes let out noticed—they gave me a wide berth, like I was a big ugly rock in the path of migrating salmon.
I got home as quickly as I could, cutting History of the Totalitarian State 405, which was usually one of my favorites.
I called the lab long distance. Nobody knew about my sister. Maybe it was her day off. I called the Motel 6. Nobody was registered by her name.” The manager said, “Thank you for calling Motel 6.” Then he hung up.
Maybe she’d come back to Dallas. I called her number there.
“Hello,” said somebody nice.
“Is Ethel there?”
“Ethel?”
“Yeah, Ethel.”
“Oh. That must have been Joanie’s old roommate.”
I’d met Joanie once. “Put Joanie on, please?” I asked.
She was in, and took the phone.
“Joanie? Hi. This is Franklin—Bubba—Ethel’s brother.”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t get ahold of her in North Carolina.”
“Why would you be calling her there, honey?”
“’Cause that’s where she was the last two weeks.”
“I don’t know about that. But she moved out of here four months ago. I got a number for her, but she’s never there. The phone just rings and rings. If you happen to catch her, tell her she still owes me four dollars and thirty-one cents on that last electric bill. I’m workin’ mostly days now, and I ain’t waitin’ around two hours to see her. She can leave it with Steve; he’ll see I get it.”
“Steve. Work. Four dollars,” I mumbled.
She gave me the number. The prefix meant south Oak Cliff, a suburb that had been eaten by Dallas.
I dialed it.
“Ethel?”
“Who is this? What the hell you want? I just worked a double shift.”
“It’s Bubba,” I said.
“Brother? I haven’t heard from you in a month of Sundays.”
“No wonder. You’re in North Carolina; you come back without telling me; you didn’t tell me you’d moved out from Joanie’s . . .”
“What the hell you mean, North Carolina?! I been pullin’ double shifts for three solid weeks—I ain’t had a day off since September 26th. I ain’t never been to North Carolina in my life.”
“Okay. First, Joanie says you owe her $4.31 on the electric bill . . .”
“Four thirty-one,” she said, like she was writing it down. “I’ll be so glad when I pay her so she’ll shut up.”
“Okay. Let’s start over. How’s your leg?”
“Which leg?”
“Your left leg. The polio leg. Just the one that’s given you trouble for fifteen years. That’s which leg.”
“Polio. Polio? The only person I know with polio is Noni’s friend Frances, in Alabama.”
“Does the year 1954 ring a bell?” I asked.
“Yeah. That was the first time we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Mom and Dad sure fooled us the second time, didn’t they? Hi. Welcome back from vacation, kids. Welcome to your new broken homes.”
“They should have divorced long before they did. They would have made themselves and a lot of people happier.”
“No,” she said. “They just never should have left backwoods Alabama and come to the Big City. All those glittering objects. All that excitement.”
“Are we talking about the same town here?” I asked.
“Towns are as big as your capacity for wonder, as Fitzgerald said,” said Ethel.
“Okay. Back to weird. Are you sure you never had polio when you were a kid? That you haven’t been in North Carolina the last month at some weird science place? That you weren’t causing me to hallucinate being a time-traveler?”
“Franklin,” she said. “I have never seen it, but I do believe you are drunk. Why don’t you hang up now and call me back when you are sober. I still love you, but I will not tolerate a drunken brother calling me while I am trying to sleep.
“Good-bye now—”
“Wait! Wait! I want to know, are my travels through? Can I get back to my real life now?”
“How would I know?” asked Ethel. “I’m not the King Of Where-You-Go.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Go sober up now. Next time call me at work. Nights.”
She hung up.
And then I thought: what would it be like to watch everyone slow down; the clock start whirling clockwise around the dial til it turned gray like it was full of dishwater, and then suddenly be out at the spaceport they’re going to build out at the edge of town and watch the Mars rocket take off every Tuesday?
And: I would never know the thrill of standing, with a satchel full of comics under my arm, waiting at the end of Eve Arden’s driveway for her to get home from the studio . . .
Afterword The King of Where-I-Go
This was the companion-piece to “Horse of a Different Color” written under the same circumstances, and with the same publishing history.
This was done in 2005, before the hospitalization, and I found myself living some of it out for the two months I stayed with my sister in Mississippi in 2008.
People as me: “Did your sister have polio, like in the story?”
Well, no. The polio survivor was my late Aunt Ethel, who got polio when she was four, and lived to be eighty-six years old. I extrapolated (that’s writer-talk for made up) the rest of it.
A lot of the story touches on the dark underside of American Cold War research, by people knowing, and unknowing.
Stories of the KGB and CIA with great serried rankes of psychics, trying to give Kruschev or Ike heart attacks, trying to panic NATO or Warsaw Pact troops into dropping their guns and running. Ot trying to will the radioactive elements from atomic bombs . . .
All this in a nice story about a brother and sister going through a bad patch.
You have to watch every minute.
This is the last thing of mine that was up for a Hugo.
“The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew . . .”
From Movie Fan Magazine, April 1952:
A NOTE FROM MOVIE FAN’S EDITOR:
Everybody knows the story, or thinks they
do. The most famous find in movie history, before Lana Turner’s discovery at Schrafft’s drustore. A movie producer, desperate for a leading lady, finds exactly the right girl stealing apples from a vendor at the height of the Depression—seven months later she’s the most famous woman in the world.
Her career blazed across the screen for exactly one year—then, like the later Louise Brooks—she left, with no regrets; the usual wisdom is life and Hollywood broke her heart.
But the story is not that simple (Hollywood stories never are) and for the first time, we at the Movie Fan are going to set the record straight, removing all the glamour and tinsel. The true story is both more normal and much stranger than all legend and fiction written about her. Miss Ellencamp has spent the last year assiduously combing through studio records, newspaper articles, and publicity handouts; a truly huge mass of materials, building a true picture of the meteoric star; a piece we call simply:
ANN
By Margot Luisa Ellencamp
First off, she was Canadian, born in the community of Dollerton on Vancouver Bay in 1910. Her father, “Big” Bill Darrow, formerly a logger, was killed with half his battalion at Beaumont-Hamel; her mother, Angelina, was taken off by the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1919.
Secondly (as those who’ve seen her last two films know), she was brunette. For her first and most famous role, the producer Carl Denham insisted she be blonde, to play up the dark vs. light, Beauty and the Beast theme. (She and Charley the cook spent much of the voyage to Skull Island getting exactly the right shade of blonde, and the right amount of curl with the many home-permanent formulas, still in their infancy, that Denham had picked up in a beauty-shop supply store on the way back to the ship, once he had his leading lady, just before they sailed.)
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