by Tom De Haven
But whenever Willi finds himself buzzing with discontent he still can hear Lois’s voice whispery in his head: It’s not better than Riker’s Island?
So it’s better than Riker’s Island.
Okay, all right, but still!
While his companions read leisurely in county libraries or talk to leathery old-timers, Willi clomps around snapping the kinds of pictures you’d find in the dullest geography textbooks. Some grassed-over stop along the original Pony Express trail, lambs fattened for the State Fair, So-and-So’s mansion, that Grecian Court House, this land-grant college, those cement silos.
Today—Saturday, October 12—in the town of Tabor Lodge (816 alt., 1,249 pop.), Willi passes half the morning taking pictures of buffalo troughs and a war memorial, then hikes back to the house in town where the team has rented a couple of rooms.
He shares the attic with Dave Nero and Studs Dillon. Their names make them sound like pulp-magazine writers, but in fact they are partnered-up playwrights working in the light-comedy mode. Nero is quick with the one-liners, Dillon is the plot man. Their plays, which have gone unproduced over the last several years, are set on the Philadelphia Main Line or in some Manhattan penthouse, worlds of money and pedigree Willi cannot imagine they know about firsthand. They resemble a couple of stew bums, dressing identically in dingy white dress shirts and cheap gray trousers. Dillon has a dead leg, wears a stirrup around his left elevator shoe that connects to a brace strapped to his calf. Maybe he had polio. Willi wonders about it but never asks. Early on he decided it was best not to get too chummy with his traveling companions. He doesn’t have his new autobiography worked out enough that it could stand close scrutiny.
When he comes in this morning a little after ten, the superheated attic air is oppressive. Instantly Willi feels cranky. If this crazy unseasonable heat wave doesn’t break soon …
Nero is pacing. Dillon sits at the typewriter.
“ ‘… taken all of the bruises from that beast that I intend to,’ ” says Nero. “Hey, Willi. Okay. ‘Taken all of the bruises from that beast,’ et cetera. And then she says, ‘Metaphorically speaking, of course, darling.’ ”
Dillon stops typing. “I don’t like it.”
“You’re mad! It’s a guaranteed laugh!”
Willi lays his camera and paraphernalia on his cot, then changes into a clean shirt. Sits on a chair and reties his work boots. He is wearing dungarees rolled twice at the cuff. “I seen the car down in front,” he says. “Be all right if I took her out for a couple hours?”
“You’ll need a fill-up,” says Dillon. “And get a receipt.”
“Yeah, all right. See you guys later.”
Nero says, “Willi—hold on. Before you go. Would Candace let herself be actually bruised?”
“Which one is Candace?” In the car (riding west, riding south, riding east, riding south, riding west, riding … ), Nero and Dillon usually read new scenes out loud to Willi and the other two guys, Whitey Wolverton and Floyd Price. The former is a greeting-card poet, the latter a laid-off lecturer in sociology who also writes but rarely publishes English-style detective novels under the pen name Abigail Lyric. Everyone has agreed that Never Too Tired is a pretty good play. It’s about soul mates, marriage, monogamy, adultery, and divorce. “Is Candace the ghost?” Willi asks.
“No, the actress!”
“Oh, she’s pretty tough. Nah, the actress wouldn’t let anybody really bruise her.”
“Did you hear Willi, did you hear what he just said? Smart guy.”
Dillon says, “All right. But somebody else says that same line, ‘metaphorically speaking,’ in the first act. I forget who.”
“Amanda,” says Willi.
“Amanda,” says Dillon.
“Oh damn,” says Nero.
Willi says, “See you guys later.”
Outside it is hot as blazes, but driving with the windows rolled down he can at least catch a breeze. Bedraggled fields of stripped cornstalks press against both sides of the concrete highway. The occasional crossroads are marked with arrow-shaped signs: 7 miles to Parris, 10 miles to Tillerton, 14 miles to Smallville. Smallville! Right away Willi imagines an animated-cartoon village, everybody tiny, an elf with a high, chirpy voice. He’d be like Gulliver.
I’m losing my mind, he thinks.
Just beyond a bridge that spans a slow river comes Parris. It doesn’t seem like it’s even a town anymore—the few clapboard houses look abandoned—but when Willi sees a filling station on his left he steers off the road. He stops alongside of the two Perfection Gasoline pumps before noticing that both the office and garage bay windows are swirled over with glass wax. Out of business. His gas needle jiggles above empty. Maybe he should turn around and go back. But according to the last sign it’s only a few miles to Tillerton. With any luck he can find a station open there. Willi is about to release the hand brake when he changes his mind, opens the door, and gets out. Here’s as good a place as any to relieve himself.
He walks on around to the back of the small white building and waters the ground. As he rebuttons his fly, he glimpses a carport up a slight incline. It’s slat-sided, decrepit, and jungled over with crispy vines, but there are gaps enough to glimpse an automobile parked inside. A DeSoto woodie, he discovers when he takes a closer look, the body filmed with powdery dirt, a headlamp shattered, and not much tread on the front tires. Once upon a time, though, it was a nice machine.
Willi’s heart jumps when he comes back around to the front of the station and discovers a wide-shouldered older man standing in front of the government Ford, one foot braced on the fender. The man is dressed in overalls heavily spotted with grease. A yellow cigarette dangles from his bottom lip. One cheek is badly waffled with acne scars. His high bush of curly brown hair is shaped like a footballer’s helmet.
The office door stands partly open now, and Willi has the feeling somebody’s in there.
“I was hoping to get a fill-up,” he says.
The curly-haired man stands there scowling. Then he tosses away his cigarette and points at the smeared windows. “Look open to you, mope?”
“Guess not.” Willi decides to move again but stops when the man abruptly kicks the Ford’s license plate with the heel of his shoe. “So you a guvmint man, are you?”
“Me?” Then he catches the reason for the question: impressed into the plate, right above the mix of letters and numbers, it reads: US GOVT. “Nah. I’m just taking some pictures for the WPA.”
The man lifts his foot from the fender and sets it back down on the ground. “Pictures of what?”
“Whatever they tell me. But if you want I’ll take a picture of you. Standing over there in front of your station. If you want.”
“I don’t want.”
“Well, then I won’t.” Definitely somebody else is watching from inside the office; Willi registers a slight but distinct movement there, a shadow flicker, and it gives him the creeps. Time to boil. “Would you happen to know if there’s a filling station in Tillerton?”
“Tillerton?”
“Isn’t that the next town up the road?”
Elaborately offhanded, the man gives a shrug, which only makes Willi a little more nervous. He gets back under the wheel and slams the door. The man doesn’t move. Willi pushes the ignition button, shifts into gear, fully intending to back out of there in another two seconds, but finally the man steps off to one side and lets the car pass.
Turns out, in Tillerton there is no filling station either, but at a milk-and-bread store Willi asks the counterwoman if there’s one in Smallville. She thinks there might be. Seems to recall there is. She looks groggy, unsteady in the store’s damp heat. “Well, I’ll give it a shot,” says Willi. And if there isn’t one, soon he’ll be walking.
On the outskirts of Smallville, a Hooverville sprawls randomly in a scrub field. Most of the camps are constructed of blistered interior doors, but some are made well of planed boards or good logs and look fairly permanent. On an impulse Willi
steers onto the grassy berm, stops the car, and sets the hand brake. Grabbing his camera, he walks back to the place that’s called “Smallerville Pop. 147,” according to a staked hand-painted sign, or “Smellville” according to another, cruder sign whitewashed on a tree and underscored with a blaze.
Near the roadside Willi sees a young fellow about his age wearing a cheap suit and writing in a nickel pad while he talks to a little colored girl at a lemonade stand (an upended wooden soda crate). She has pigtails and wears a shapeless blue dress. A dinner plate across the top of her pitcher keeps out the bugs. There is a single Dixie cup.
“Got a thirst, mister?” she asks as Willi approaches.
“I guess.” He nods to both the girl and the young guy in the suit.
While she carefully pours Willi a cup, he puts down his camera and pats his trouser pockets for coins. Then gives her a nickel.
“I don’t got change.”
“That’s all right.”
“You can have three drinks.”
“One’s plenty.” You can say that again: it’s sour and full of pits and stringy pulp. “Could I take your picture, honey?”
She beams, flattered to be asked.
“No, no, just be yourself,” he says, glancing over at the guy who steps back and watches, smiling. “You don’t have to pose. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Rose.”
“That’s pretty.” Click, he takes her picture. Advances the film and, click, takes it again. “Is there a filling station close by? I’m sure hoping the answer is yes.”
“About a mile ahead,” says the young guy.
Willi nods his thanks, then strolls off into Smallerville. Behind him, he hears the guy say to Rose, “So that makes how many customers you’ve had today … ?”
Asking permission first but taking the scantest shrug as a yes, Willi photographs several old black men in Big Smith coveralls talking on rope-bottomed chairs; a woman offering her baby water in a Coca-Cola bottle that has a rubber nipple squeezed over the lip; and two young brothers who stare anxiously at his camera like it’s a schoolmaster with a hard question and a mean disposition. He also photographs a mangy yellow dog that appears with a stick in its mouth, wanting to play.
At a trudging sound behind him, Willi turns his head.
It’s that young guy in the cheap suit again, saying, “Hiya.”
Willi nods.
“Would you mind my asking your name?”
“I might. Why?”
“I just …” He holds up his pad, waggles it. “I thought I could put it in the story I’m writing. If you don’t mind.”
“Story you’re writing.”
“I’m sorry,” says the guy, “I’m Clark Kent. Smallville Herald-Progress.” When he flips his pad to a clean page, Willi laughs out loud.
“You really got your own newspaper in a dinky place like this?”
The guy’s face turns red but he smiles, snapping his notebook shut like he’s probably seen it done in the movies. “Thanks anyway,” he says and walks away.
After lighting a cigarette, Willi calls after him: “Hey!” Running lithely, he catches up. “I didn’t mean anything,” he says, falling into step beside Clark. “Was only a joke. So. You write for the paper?”
Clark glances at him but keeps going.
“So what’re you writing, you writing about that little girl?”
Clark stops. “I’m writing about kids selling lemonade during this heat wave, she’s just one of them.”
“Oh. Hey. Interesting.”
“No, it’s not,” says Clark, “but that’s what I’m doing.”
“They let you run stories about colored people in your paper? Must be a pretty advanced little town you got here.”
Clark’s mouth moves fractionally, lips pushing out. For a moment it seems as though he might say something. But he doesn’t. He starts walking again, heading for the highway.
“Wait! Hey, wait! I took a picture of that little girl—think your paper might be interested? Could run with your story.”
“We don’t run pictures.”
“None?”
“Sometimes we run drawings, but nobody around here can draw too good, so it’s mostly just stickmen.”
“You serious?”
Clark laughs, hiking along the edge of the highway now.
“Jeez, I thought for a minute you were serious. Stickmen. That’s pretty good.” Willi watches him go. “Hey! You want a lift? I’m going into Smallville.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride. What’s your name again?”
“Clark.”
“That your last name?”
“First. First name Clark, last name Kent.”
“And I’m Willi … Boring.”
Clark grins.
“Yeah, yeah, get in the car.”
They go scarcely a hundred feet when the engine coughs and cuts off, and the sedan rolls slowly to a stop. Making a fist, Willi punches the steering wheel, then flings himself back against the seat.
“Want me to take a look under the hood?”
“Don’t bother. I’m out of gas.” He punches the wheel again, this time striking the horn, and it blows.
“The filling station’s not a mile up the road.”
“I don’t have a gas can.”
“What do you need that for? You steer, I’ll push.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Walking around behind the car, Clark braces himself on his toes, stretches out his arms, palms against the trunk. “Ready?”
“Get off of it—you said a mile?”
“You ready?”
The Ford starts to roll …
“Enough,” says Willi, “let’s just—”
… and picks up speed.
Willi has to grip the wheel.
Especially once the sedan accelerates, the speedometer needle arcing steadily to the right: 15, 20, 25 …
As Clark gets ever smaller in the rearview mirror Willi hunches further over the wheel, clutching tighter. Taps on the brakes. Then tromps on them when he sees a Red Crown station coming up fast on the right.
The Ford rolls to a gradual stop beside one of the two round-topped pumps. Overhead a canopy stretches to the front door of the little glazed-brick office. Gas is nine cents a gallon, a penny more than it cost the other day in Lyndon.
Willi’s hands drop to his lap. That, he thinks, didn’t happen. Whatever just happened? Didn’t.
“Fill ’er up?” A white-haired old man in a gray shirt and trousers lifts the hose from a pump. At the same time he gives the side crank one half turn. “And check your oil?”
“Yeah. Please.” Willi feels dazed. Sits there frowning while the attendant raises and braces the hood, reads the dipstick.
“You’re okay for a while.” Slam! He goes to check on the progress of the fill-up. And now: “Hiya, Clark, how’s the boy?”
In disbelief Willi watches as Clark Kent conies scuffling off the road and, whistling tunelessly—being deliberately nonchalant, show-offy—heads for the car.
“Fine, Mr. Thayer—yourself?”
“Oh, I guess I’m doing all right. Say, Clark, that was a nice story you wrote there about Geraldine Natwin’s birthday party.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Only thing, son, it was her tenth birthday, not her twelfth.” Mr. Thayer hitches back the hose, replaces the gasoline cap, and tells Willi that’ll be ninety-two cents.
Looking sullen, cheeks darkly pinked, Clark climbs into the passenger side and pulls the door closed. “Can we go now?” he asks Willi. Adding “Please?” when Mr. Thayer speaks to him again through Willi’s open window, saying, “And you know that softball game at the Church of Christ … ?”
Willi drives.
“You want to tell me how you did that, Hercules?”
“I pushed you downhill, big deal.”
“What downhill? What hill?”
2
Now th
at Jiggs Makley is dead and four of the other boys have headed off to Mexico, Ike—Curly Ike—Kelting is boss of what’s left of the old gang: Milt George and Claude Draper, both of them, like Curly Ike, natives of Okfuskee County, Oklahoma.
Before the Depression Curly Ike worked as a cowboy and a wildcatter. He was married and raising three small children. He was a thirty-third-degree Mason. But after things went bust he was reduced to stealing just to feed his family. Well, and to enjoy a few small luxuries. Hunting rifles, ammunition, flabby girlfriends. It all worked pretty well, for a time. He would get word that he’d be welcome to help rob this office or burgle that house and take away from each job at least twenty bucks.
Then Jiggs Makley passed through town. They met one day at a ranch where Curly Ike was rustling a few head of beef cattle, and Makley invited him to join his gang. It seemed a good deal. Two months on the road robbing banks, three months at home enjoying life. Regular work.
Unfortunately at his first bank job, in Pawnee, Curly Ike was identified by someone in a teller’s line who used to live several houses away from Ike when they were both kids. If only Ike had noticed him! He could’ve shot the bum and continued on the way he’d been. But no, suddenly Curly Ike was a wanted man (with his own wanted poster!) and he stopped going home. Had to. For a while he regularly mailed his family envelopes full of cash. Eventually, though, he convinced himself that his wife had taken up with someone else, and he quit sending money.
He left home for the last time in late March of 1932. More than three years ago. He’s tired now and near broke, and his right shoulder is a constant agony: he was shot there ten months ago robbing a bank in West Plains, Missouri. The bullet just ruined the muscles.
Soon as he has a decent stake, a few thousand bucks, Curly Ike plans to move to Canada, Toronto maybe. Rent an apartment, find a big soft woman, and start life over again.
He is looking forward to Canada so badly that whenever he thinks of it and about how many things can go wrong so he’ll never get there, his belly seizes up like he has a bad appendix.
Right now in Smallville, Curly Ike is suffering that kind of agony. He sits behind the wheel of a silver-green and dark-green eight-passenger Cadillac Fleetwood limousine parked up the street from the white clapboard Church of Christ. He’s wearing a chauffeur’s cap but not the complete livery. That would have been too much of a production. Overalls will do.
