Alive and Dead in Indiana

by Michael Martone

  Alive and Dead in Indiana

  Michael Martone

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1984 Alive and Dead in Indiana by Michael Martone

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2012 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  Some of these stories were previously published in the following publications: Antaeus, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review and Shenandoah

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-936873-50-0

  eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

  Printed in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  for Theresa

  CONTENTS

  EVERYBODY WATCHING AND THE TIME PASSING LIKE THAT

  PIECES

  ALFRED KINSEY, ALONE, AFTER AN INTERVIEW, DREAMS OF INDIANA

  WHISTLER’S FATHER

  DEAR JOHN

  THE GREEK LETTER IN THE BED

  BIOGRAPH

  VOCATION

  ALIVE AND DEAD IN INDIANA

  EVERYBODY WATCHING AND THE TIME PASSING LIKE THAT

  Where was I when I heard about it? Let’s see. He died on that Friday, but I didn’t hear until Saturday at a speech meet in Lafayette. I was in the cafetorium, drinking coffee and going over the notes I had made on a humorous interp I’d just finished judging. The results were due in a few minutes, and the cafetorium was filling up with students between rounds. I had drama to judge next and was wondering how my own kids had done in their first rounds. So, I was sitting there, flipping back and forth through the papers on my clipboard, drinking coffee, when Kevin Wilkerson came through the swinging doors. I saw him first through the windows in the doors, the windows that have the crisscrossing chicken wire sandwiched between the panes. He had this look on his face. I thought, “Oh my, I bet something’s happened in his round.” He looked like he’d done awful. But he’d probably flubbed a few words or dropped a line or two, or so I thought. I once judged a boy making his first speech who went up, forgot everything, and just stood there. Pretty soon there was a puddle on the floor and all of this in silence. The timekeeper sat there flipping over the cards. So I spoke up and repeated the last thing I could remember from his speech. Something about harvesting the sea. And he picked up right there and finished every word, wet pants and all.

  They were corduroy pants, I remember. He finished last in his round, but you’ve got to hand it to the boy. I’d like to say the same kid went on to do great things. But I can’t because I never heard. So I tell this story to my own kids when they think they have done poorly, and I was getting ready to tell Kevin something like it as he came up to the table. Kevin was very good at extemp. He’s a lawyer now, a good one, in Indianapolis. He said to me then, “Mrs. Nail, I’m afraid I’ve got some real bad news.” And I must have said something like nothing could be as bad as the look on your face. Then he told me. “Jimmy Dean is dead. He died in a wreck.”

  They’d been listening to the car radio out in the parking lot between rounds. That’s how they heard. “Are you all right, Mrs. Nail?” Kevin was saying. Now, I’m a drama teacher. I was Jimmy’s first drama coach, as you know. I like to think I have a bit of poise, that I have things under control. I don’t let myself in for surprises, you know. But when Kevin said that to me, I about lost it, my stage presence if you will, right there in the cafetorium. Then everyone seemed to know about it all at once, and all my students began showing up. They stood around watching to see what I’d do. Most of them had met Jimmy the spring before, you know, when he came home with the Life photographer. They just stood watching me there with the other students from the other schools kind of making room for us. Well, if I didn’t feel just like that boy who’d wet his pants. Everybody watching and the time passing like that.

  But you were wondering where I was, not how I felt.

  I suppose, too, you’d like to know how I met James Dean, the plays we did in high school, the kids he hung around with and such. What magazine did you say you’re from? I can tell you these things, though I don’t quite understand why people like yourself come looking for me. I’m flattered—because I really didn’t teach Jimmy to act. I have always said he was a natural that way. I think I see that something happened when he died. But something happens, I suppose, when anybody dies. Or is born for that matter.

  I guess something is also gone when the last person who actually knew him dies. It’s as if people come here to remember things that never happened to them. There are the movies, and the movies are good. It’s just sometimes the people of Fairmount wonder what all the fuss is about. It isn’t so much that the grave gets visited. You’d expect that. Why, every time you head up the pike to Marion, there is a strange car with out-of-state plates, bumping through the cemetery. It’s just that then the visitors tend to spread out through town, knocking on doors.

  Marcus and Ortense, his folks (well, not his parents, you know), say people still show up on the porch. They’re there on the glider, sun up, when Ortense goes for the Star. Or someone will be taking pictures of the feedlot and ask to see Jimmy’s bedroom. Why come to the home town? It’s as if they were those students in the cafetorium just watching and waiting for things to happen after the news has been brought.

  People are always going through Indiana. Maybe this is the place to stop. Maybe people miss the small town they never had.

  I’m the schoolteacher, all right. I remember everyone. I have to stop myself from saying, “Are you Patty’s little brother?” Or “The Wilton boy?”

  That’s small town.

  The first I remember him, he was in junior high. I was judging a speech contest for the WCTU, and Jimmy was in it, a seventh grader. He recited a poem called “Bars.” You see the double meaning there?

  He started it up kneeling behind a chair, talking through the slats of the back, you know. Props. It wasn’t allowed. No props. I stopped him and told him he would have to do it without the chair. But he said he couldn’t do it that way. I asked him why not. He said he didn’t know. He stood there on the stage. Didn’t say one word. Well, just another boy gone deaf and dumb in front of me. One who knew the words.

  I prompted him. He looked at the chair off to the side of the stage.

  Couldn’t speak without his little prison. So he walked off.

  “Bars” was a monologue, you see. In high school, Jimmy did a monologue for me, for competition. “The Madman.” We cut it from Dickens.

  We took it to the Nationals in Colorado that year. Rode the train out there together for the National Forensic League tournament. As I said, it was a monologue. But it called for as many emotions as a regular interp which might have three or four characters. You never get more than five or six characters in a regular reading. But Jimmy had that many voices and moods in this single character. Could keep them straight. Could go back and forth with them. He was a natural actor. I didn’t teach him that. Couldn’t.

  I know what you’re thinking. You think that if you slice through a life anywhere you’ll find the marbling that veins the whole cake. Not true. He was an actor. He was other people. Just because he could be mad doesn’t mean he was.

  You know the scene in the beanfield. Come to the window. There, you see that field? Beans.

  They used mustard plants in the movie.

  And here, we know that. J
immy knew that too. Beans are bushier. Leave it to Hollywood to get it all wrong.

  In the summer, kids here walk through the beans and hoe out the weeds. They wear white T-shirts and blue jeans in all that green. Jimmy walked too when he was here.

  That’s the town’s favorite scene. Crops. Seeing that—those boys in the bushes, white shirts, blue pants. How could he have known how to be insane? Makes me want to seal off those fields forever. Keep out everything. You can understand that, can’t you?

  It was quiet then. Now the Air Guard jets fly over from Peru. I notice most people get used to it. At night, you can hear the trucks on I-69 right through your bed. I lost boys on that highway before it was even built. They’d go down to the Muncie exit and nudge around the barricades in their jalopies. Why, the road was still being built, you know. Machinery everywhere. Imagine that. How white that new cement must have been in the moonlight. Not a car on the road. This was before those yard lights the rural electric cooperative gives the farmers. Those boys would point their cars south to Indianapolis and turn out the lights, knowing it was supposed to be straight until Anderson. No signs. No stripes on the road. New road through the beanfields, through the cornfields. Every once and a while a smudge pot, a road lantern. That stretch of road was one of the first parts finished, and it sat there, closed for years it seemed, as the rest of the highway was built up to it along with the weight stations and the rest stops.

  I think of those boys as lost on that road. In Indiana then, if you got killed on a marked road, the highway patrol put up a cross as a reminder to other drivers.

  Some places looked just like a graveyard. But out on the unfinished highway, when those boys piled into a big yellow grader or a bulldozer blade or just kept going though the road stopped at a bridge that had yet to be built, it could be days before they were even found.

  The last time I saw Jimmy alive, we were both driving cars. We did a little dance on Main Street. I was backing out of a parking slot in my Buick Special when Jimmy flashed by in the Winslows’ car. I saw him in the rearview mirror and craned my neck around. At the same time, I laid on the horn.

  One long blast.

  Riding with Jimmy was that Life photographer who was taking pictures of everything.

  Jimmy had on his glasses, and his cap was back on his head.

  He slammed on the brakes and threw his car in reverse, backing up the street, back past me. He must have recognized my car. So out I backed, out across the front of his car, broadsiding his grille, then to the far outside lane where I lined up parallel with him.

  He was a handsome boy. He already had his window rolled down, saying something, and I was stretching across the front seat, trying to reach the crank to roll down mine on the passenger side. Flustered, I hadn’t thought to put the car in park. So I had to keep my foot on the brake. My skirt rode up my leg, and I kept reaching and then backing off to get up on one elbow to take a look out the window to see if Jimmy was saying something.

  The engine was running fast, and the photographer was taking pictures.

  I kept reaching for the handle and feeling foolish that I couldn’t reach it. I was embarrassed. I couldn’t think of any way to do it. You know how it is—you’re so busy doing two things foolishly, you can’t see through to doing one thing at a time. There were other cars getting lined up behind us, and they were blowing their horns. Once in history, Fairmount had a traffic jam.

  The fools. They couldn’t see what was going on.

  Jimmy started pointing up ahead and nodding, and he rolled up his window and took off. I scrunched back over to the driver’s side as Jimmy roared by. He honked his horn, you know. A shave and a haircut. The cars that had been stacked up behind us began to pass me on the right, I answered back. Two bits.

  I could see that photographer leaning back over the bench seat, taking my picture. I flooded the engine. I could smell the gasoline. I sat there on Main Street getting smaller.

  When the magazine with the pictures of Jimmy and Fairmount came out, we all knew it would be worth saving, that sometime in the future it would be a thing to have. Some folks went all the way up to Fort Wayne for copies. But Jimmy was dead, so it was sold out up there too.

  I wasn’t in the magazine. No picture of me in my car on Main Street. But there was Jimmy walking on Washington with the Citizen’s Bank onion dome over his shoulder. Jimmy playing a bongo to the livestock. Jimmy reading James Whitcomb Riley. Jimmy posing with his cap held on his curled arm. He wears those rubber boots with the claw buckles. His hand rests on the boar’s back.

  Do you remember that one beautiful picture of Jimmy and the farm? He’s in front of the farm, the white barn and the stone fences in the background. The trees are just beginning to bud. Tuck, Jimmy’s dog, is looking one way and Jimmy the other. There is the picture, too, of Jimmy sitting upright in the coffin.

  Mr. Hunt of Hunt’s Store down on Main Street kept a few coffins around.

  That is where that picture was taken.

  In Indianapolis, they make more coffins than anywhere else in the world. The trucks, loaded up, go through town every day. They’ve got CASKETS painted in red on the sides of the trailers.

  You wait long enough downtown, one’ll go through.

  See what you have made me do? I keep remembering the wrong things. I swear, you must think that’s all I think about.

  What magazine did you say you were from?

  Jim’s death is no mystery to me. It was an accident. An accident. There is no way you can make me believe he wanted to die. I’m a judge. I judge interpretations. There was no reason. Look around you, look around. Those fields. Who could want to die? Sure, students in those days read EC comics. I had a whole drawer full of them. I would take them away for the term. Heads axed open. Limbs severed. Skin being stripped off. But I was convinced it was theater. Look, they were saying, we can make you sick.

  It worked. They were right.

  I’d look at those comic books after school. I’d sit at my desk and look at them. Outside the window, the hall monitors would be cleaning out the board erasers by banging them against the wall of the school. The air out there was full of chalk. I flipped through those magazines, nodding my head, knowing what it was all about. I am not a speech teacher for nothing. I taught acting. I know when someone wants attention. The thing is to make them feel things before anything else.

  I taught Jimmy to kiss.

  I taught Jimmy to die.

  We were doing scenes from Of Mice and Men. I told him the dying part is pretty easy. The gun George uses is three inches from the back of Lenny’s head. When it goes off, your body will go like this—the shoulders up around the ears, the eyes pressed closed. He was on his knees saying something like “I can see it, George.” Then bang. Don’t turn when you fall. After your body flinches, relax. Relax every muscle. Your body will fall forward all by itself.

  Well, it didn’t, not with Jimmy. He wanted to grab his chest like some kid playing war. Or throw up his hands. Or be blown forward from the force of the shot.

  “Haven’t you ever seen anything die?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s like this,” I said, and I got up there on the stage and fell over again and again. I had George shoot me until we ran out of blanks. It was October, I remember, and outside the hunters were walking the fields flushing pheasants. After we were done with the practice, we could hear the popping of shotguns—one two, one two. We hadn’t noticed that with our own gun fire.

  Hunting goes so fast and that’s what irritates me.

  Jimmy was so excited, you know, doing things you couldn’t do in high school. Dying, kissing. That’s how young they were. Kids just don’t know that acting is doing things that go on every day.

  “Just kiss,” I told Jimmy after he’d almost bent a girl’s neck off. “Look,” I said, taking one of his hands and putting it on my hip, “close your eyes.” I slid my hands up under his arms so that my hands pressed his shoulder blades. H
is other hand came around. He stood there, you know. I tucked my head to the side and kissed him.

  “Like that,” I said.

  I quieted the giggles with a look. And then I kissed him again.

  “Do it like that,” I said.

  Even pretending, Jimmy liked things real. No stories, action. He was doing a scene once, I forget just what. The set for the scene called for a wall with a bullet hole. Jimmy worked on the sets too. I was going to paint the hole on the wall, and Jimmy said no. We waited as he rushed home. He came back with a .22, and before I could stop him, he shot a hole in the plywood wall.

  I tell you, the hole was more real than that wall. I remember he went up to the wall and felt it, felt the hole.

  “Through and through,” he said. “Clean through and through.”

  The bullet had gone through two curtains and lodged in the rear wall of the stage. I can show you that hole. If you want to look, I can show you.

  Right before he died, Jimmy made a commercial for the Highway Safety Council. They show it here twice a year in the driver’s education class. The day they show it, I sit in. The students in the class each have a simulator. You know, a steering wheel, a mirror, a windshield with wipers that work, dials luminous in the dark.

  Jimmy did the commercial while he was doing his last picture. He is dressed up as a cowboy, twirling a lariat. Gig Young interviews him. They talk about racing and going fast. Then Gig Young asks Jimmy, the cowboy, for advice. Advice for all the young drivers who might be watching. And I look around the class, and they are watching.

  It is the way he begins each sentence with “Oh.”

  Or it’s the lariat, the knot he fiddles with.

  That new way of acting.

  What is he thinking about? Jimmy was supposed to say the campaign slogan—The life you save may be your own. But he doesn’t. He looks toward the camera. He couldn’t see the camera because he wouldn’t wear his glasses. I can see what is happening. He is forgetting. He says, “The life you save may be”—a pause—“mine.” Mine.