Even back home in Abilene, Plennie’s people read the news. His little sister clipped the story from the newspaper and took it to school the next day for show-and-tell, proud as could be.
* * *
On his way into Checotah, Plennie flagged down the sheriff and told him about the gypsies. The lawman informed Plennie he’d already received several complaints and was on his way to chase them out of the county. Plennie told him about his resolution, to respect all nationalities on his walk, but he didn’t know what to make of the handsy gypsies. The sheriff warned him to beware of them.
When Plennie reached Muskogee, it seemed like the whole town knew his name, like they’d been expecting him. He was pleased to learn that the McIntosh County Democrat had run a story about his visit to Checotah, and the Miami Daily News-Record ran two photographs and a few lines saying he was headed in the direction of that city. “Crabs walk backwards, but Plennie L. Wingo of Abilene, Texas, is not a crab although he does walk backwards,” the odd news nugget read. The Muskogee paper, too, published a story in advance of his arrival.
When he hit downtown, a handful of businessmen hustled out to meet him, squeezing his hand and offering up invitations to hotel accommodations and dinner that evening. He met Frank Jamison, secretary of the Muskogee Automobile Club, and L. F. Scroggins, who sold road machinery, and A. H. Craig, who had eaten at Plennie’s Mobley Café several years ago, on a trip to Abilene when times were good. Plennie ate for free in a private booth at Pete’s Quick Lunch on West Okmulgee and then popped into the American Shoe Shop a few doors down so J. G. Cooper could replace his soles after twenty-two days dragging down gravel roads. A customer in the shoe shop got curious and asked Plennie what brand of shoe he wore.
“It’s a good brand,” Plennie said, “but until some shoe company decides to sponsor me, no one will ever know what kind of shoes I wear.”
“I don’t blame you,” the fella said.
* * *
North of town he came upon a gas station, the sun high and the sky partly cloudy, the mercury a tad above seventy degrees. A handful of country boys were sitting around in the shade of the overhang, swapping stories. They perked up when Plennie approached. The station boss lifted the hose and motioned with the nozzle toward Plennie.
“Need refueling?” he asked good-naturedly.
“Sure,” Plennie said, “but with water and soda pop.”
The country boys looked him over, read his sign, then started asking a variety of silly questions.
“You ever stop to sleep?” one said, and the others laughed.
“You eat like other people, or backward, like you walk?” asked another.
Plennie took the ribbing with a smile.
“I’m just human, same as you,” he said.
He downed a soda, told the boys to take good care, then began backing north up Highway 73. He wasn’t gone long before he heard the whine of an automobile on the Oklahoma wind. When the dust-covered car overtook him, he noticed it was the same old boys from the filling station, slowing down now, stopping. The passenger in the front seat stuck his head out the window and asked if Plennie needed a ride. He politely declined.
“I’m walking all the way,” Plennie said.
“Oh, come on,” the kid said. “We won’t tell anyone.”
Plennie kept walking. It would’ve been nice to take a little ride. He’d already put in more than two hundred miles going backward. His legs were tired and his feet were sore.
“We’ll drop you out just this side of town and no one will know about it,” the boy pleaded.
“Yes,” Plennie replied, “but I will.”
Still, they insisted, almost like they had a bet going among them. The boys in the back wanted to know why he refused.
“Let’s put it this way,” Plennie said. “If I took a ride with you, wouldn’t it be nice if I got a story in the paper that I was cheating?”
He looked hard at the boys.
“Just me knowing that I cheated would spoil the rest of my trip around the world,” he said.
The car crept along beside him. One of the boys turned to another.
“I guess you owe me a dollar,” he said.
Sure enough.
The stretch of road shimmered before them under the high sun. Gusts of prairie wind made the Indian grass dance on the shoulders and out in the fields, where little clumps of sawtooth oaks offered the only shade between them and the tree line. To the east rose the foothills of the Boston Mountains. And to the west, 237 flat miles away, at the bottom of a deep gully, there lay buried in the red dirt, undiscovered, the skull of a bison.
This skull was much larger than the familiar animals and had massive straight horns protruding from the sides of the cranium. It was also quite different in that a jagged, zigzagging line, like a lightning bolt, was painted on the forehead. The substance from which the brick-red paint was made was hematite, an ore of iron, common on the Earth’s crust and mined from rock. The hematite itself had begun to form about two and a half billion years earlier, when oceans were rich in dissolved iron but void of free oxygen, and cyanobacteria somehow became capable of photosynthesis. The blue-green wormlike bacteria began using sunlight as energy to convert carbon dioxide into the first free-floating oxygen in the oceans. The oxygen combined with iron in the water to form hematite, which sank to the bottom and became rock. The deposits grew over hundreds of millions of years, layering rock upon rock upon rock, and when the oceans pulled back many years later they revealed mountains made of the stuff.
Much more time passed before an aboriginal hunter or shaman or medicine man mined the rock for ore to make paint, carried it some great distance along one of the innumerable ancient trails crossing the great continent, and drew upon the sun-bleached bison bone a jagged line, a symbol of power, a sign of his skill at killing. It would be another sixty-three years after Plennie took his trip before a university archaeologist would find the skull, painstakingly remove it from the earth, and declare the art to be more than ten thousand years old—the oldest painted object ever found in North America, made by a people who followed no calendar, for whom the seasons and the rising and setting sun ordered life.
The boys in the car watched Plennie.
“This walking backwards is no trick,” one of them shouted. “Anybody can do it.”
The boy’s buddies started questioning his manhood, suggesting he couldn’t keep up with old Pennie Wingo for a mile. They’d put money on it.
Plennie was a good sport. He agreed to pace the boy, and out of the car came the kid, shuffling to an imaginary starting line. And they were off. Plennie didn’t try to make it hard on the boy, but by that time he was quite skillful at reversing, and people who saw his legs said that his calves had already started to move around to the front, like ripe grapefruit on his shins. The boy stayed with him for a while and then began to fall behind, the kids in the car razzing him as he gave up distance of Oklahoma road to the older man. Plennie watched him and could see the boy puffing hard. Soon he was weaving like a cowboy full of whiskey. By a half mile the boy had tuckered out and plopped down in the middle of the highway.
“I quit,” he told his friends. “You can have all the backward walking. I don’t want it.”
* * *
Plennie stayed for free at the New Majestic Hotel in Wagoner, and the Butler Hotel in Pryor, and the Cobb Hotel in Vinita, and the Palmer Hotel in Afton. Somewhere along the way a man slipped him a business card, which Plennie tucked into his notebook. The card offered a profound paragraph of text explaining what it called the “Theory of Reincarnation”:
When a man dies he is buried and his body is turned to fertilizer, which makes the grass grow green. A horse come along and eats the grass. Which after it has been digested, becomes a horse turd. Never kick a horse turd—it may be your uncle.
He spent his last Oklahoma evening in the beautiful Hotel Miami, seven stories tall, 180 rooms and “fireproof,” on May 13, 1931. It had risen just a f
ew years before and would service visitors to Picher, Oklahoma, a few miles north, where in 1913 men had discovered the richest lead and zinc mines in the world. Picher sprang up quick after the discovery, and the metal fields went on to produce twenty billion dollars’ worth of ore in thirty years and half the lead and zinc used during World War I. The population skyrocketed to nearly fifteen thousand residents in 1926. When Plennie backed through on May 14, 1931, the town was at its apex.
But greed and ignorance have consequences in time, though not always for those who deserve them. The coming decades of unrestricted subsurface excavation would undermine the entire town and raise mountains of toxic, contaminated rock fragments heaped across the region, like the pocked crust of a moonscape. The groundwater would be poisoned. The people would fall ill and die in undignified ways. The government would declare the region ruined and pay people good money to move away and never come back. The homes and businesses would sit vacant, collecting graffiti and broken beer bottles. The city’s pharmacist, a man who swore he wouldn’t leave until no one else needed him, who became known as the “last man standing,” would die at age sixty of a sudden illness. Residents of Picher and several other nearby ghost towns would be mostly gone by the time a historical marker was planted, nearly a century after man found value in the minerals. It would stand as a relic among toxic mountains, and a reminder of the toll of the taking.
10.
The Intent Is Sublime
Her name was Irene. He would always remember. She was the first sight that appeared in his rearview mirrors as he backed into the lobby of the first hotel he saw in the Kansas town of Baxter Springs. And what a sight she was.
Irene was talking to the landlady when Plennie walked in, but she looked up and fixed her eyes on this regressive but dapper gentleman making his way across the hardwood floor. Then he turned around, gave her a nod, and asked about getting a room for the night.
Before long they were sitting together at a table in the lounge, at her invitation, and Plennie was waxing about the first month of his inverted epic, about the gypsies and whatnot. He wore no wedding ring, and it’s unknown whether Irene asked any questions that might have brought Della and Vivian to mind, but Plennie was happy to be in the company of anyone who was interested in his tales. As they talked and laughed, two little girls—pretty, neat, well-mannered—came down the stairs and hurried across the floor to join their mother.
Irene told Plennie that her husband was an interior decorator and he had been working a job in a nearby department store. As she spoke, he noticed that she kept glancing at the lobby door, and through the windows toward the street. Suddenly, she apologized and excused herself, then hustled the little girls up the stairs from whence they came. A few seconds later a man walked into the lobby, just in time to see them headed upstairs. He scanned the lounge, empty but for Plennie. The man gave him a hard look, then hurried up the stairs after his family.
Plennie exchanged glances with the landlady, still behind the counter. When the coast was clear, she walked over and, watching the stairs, told Plennie that the man was Irene’s husband, and that he had a proclivity toward jealousy. Irene was so fearful of his covetousness that she didn’t dare let him see her speaking with another man. In fact, the landlady said in a whisper, he had threatened to kill any man he caught talking to Irene.
This was a new one for Plennie.
Baxter Springs was a hopping little town, and the new Route 66, opened just five years before, had clearly been good for business. Three drugstores stood like soldiers along the main drag, Military Road, and automobiles lined the curbs. The place had gained notoriety as one of the bulliest cow towns in Kansas, a stopover where pokes could take a bath, tie one on, and get laid all under the same roof. Some thirty ladies of the night worked the crowds of cowboys and miners, prostitution the oldest capitalist by-product of men with time and money. It was a town bathed in blood, too, going all the way back to 1863, when a pro-Confederate band of guerrilla bushwhackers called Quantrill’s Raiders slaughtered an unwitting Union detachment in the process of moving command headquarters from Kansas to Arkansas. The death toll totaled 103 men, including the marching band and an artist-correspondent for a news magazine. In 1872, the mayor of Baxter Springs shot dead a marshal trying to serve him with a warrant. In 1876, the outlaw Jesse James held up the Crowell Bank and made off with $2,900, headed for Indian Territory. A posse caught up to him and an accomplice about seven miles south, but the pursuers were waylaid, disarmed, and sent back to town empty-handed. There weren’t many spots in Baxter Springs, in fact, that hadn’t been the scene of bloodshed or thievery.
Plennie tried hard to keep to himself, wasting the day in the hotel, which sat on the same drag as a business called Harvey Undertaking and Furniture.
That Thursday evening, Plennie carried his pen and notebook and a few sheets of loose paper downstairs to the lobby to write a few letters to the folks back home. He wanted to check in on his mother and on Della and Vivian, to update them all and see how they were getting along. He had just about finished the first letter when Irene came down the stairs. He quickly began to fold the paper so he could proceed to his room and finish in privacy, but Irene stopped him with her eyes. He noticed again how attractive she was.
“Mr. Wingo,” she said, “I’m terribly sorry about my husband.”
She wore concern on her face. He was silent.
“But he is on this job now and won’t get through until two a.m.,” she said. “I’m terribly interested in your adventures, and there is no reason why we can’t sit and talk, is there?”
Plennie, between a rock and a hard place, sat back down.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps we can talk for a little while.”
He began to tell of his journeys and the people he had met, but before long the beautiful woman began to pour her heart out there on the polished hotel table. She had marital troubles, she told him in confidence, and her husband was the root of much strife. He was so jealous, she said. She lived in constant fear of him flying off the handle and doing something he’d regret. Plennie couldn’t keep his eyes off the front door. Sensing his unease, Irene kept assuring him that her husband would be working well past midnight and Plennie need not worry. They were, after all, just two human beings having a conversation, and what was wrong with that? The minutes ticked by, and Plennie couldn’t remember ever being so acutely aware of time passing.
He was a man weighing choices and consequences, and as soon as he decently could, he said good night to Irene, excused himself, and made his way to his room, where he prepared for bed, tucked in, and lay there, wide awake.
At about two o’clock in the morning, the best he could figure, he heard a man’s voice. It seemed to be coming from a nearby room, but he wasn’t sure which. Then he heard cursing. Then he heard yelling. Then he heard hard-soled shoes on hardwood floors. Then, like a cry in the night, he heard his own name, clear as a bell.
He lay still, his thoughts slamming around inside his head, his heart beating in his ears. Irene and Irene’s husband were talking about Plennie L. Wingo.
He would’ve escaped forward or backward or sideways if he could’ve, but then he heard Irene’s husband say something unmistakable. The man said he was going to beat Plennie’s door down and pound the backward-walking son of a bitch to death. He heard Irene’s voice, higher, more frightened now, begging her husband to leave Plennie Wingo out of it. He had done nothing wrong. Nothing.
Fate visits Kansas just like it visits anywhere. It had done so a good number of times before, and it would again. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow would rob Eden’s Grocery Store down the street twice in the same week. A man would shoot himself and his son, eight years old and named after the god of thunder. Another would douse a grandmother and two police officers with gasoline and set them alight.
That night, Plennie heard pounding on the door. Then he heard a loud voice that did not belong to Irene’s husband, but to the hotel manager, who told I
rene’s husband that if he caused any more trouble the police would be here in no time. Silence followed the shouting, and you could almost cut the stillness.
Plennie eventually found a little sleep and slipped out unnoticed the next morning around sunup, a Friday, as good a day as he could ever remember.
He was long gone, crossing northbound on the Rainbow Curve Bridge over Marsh Creek on Route 66, when the next issue of the Baxter Springs Citizen and Herald hit doorsteps. The edition included a column bemoaning what seemed to be a spike in killings. “It is utterly astounding and amazing the way in which wholesale murder exists and thrives in this country,” the editor wrote. “Pick up almost any newspaper and read where someone somewhere was shot down on the street or in a café or other public place. As a general rule the news story will close with ‘the assailants ran to a car and quickly escaped.’ And this is the year of our Lord 1931 when we are supposed to be enjoying the greatest civilization this old world has ever known.”
In the column adjacent was an account of the strange, unnamed man who had come backward through town just a few days before. He was held up as an object lesson on how to thrive when your back is against the wall.
WHEN a man passed through Baxter Springs one day this week, walking backward, he was set down by many as just another nut but, like the inebriate who believes all of his fellow men are drunk and himself entirely sober, they are wrong.
This young caterer, who is out of a job, conceived the idea of wearing a pair of spectacles with adjustable reflecting lenses that would allow him to see ahead while walking backward and is willing to punish himself for a period of three years to support his little family down there in Texas. His judgement may be poor but the intent is sublime, while a lot of the fellows who call him a nut are, figuratively, walking backward and looking ahead through reflective spectacles, hoping for good times they are sure they will not experience.
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 9
