by Paula Guran
"Huh?" I asked.
She nodded toward the big dictionary on the stand by the door.
I dutifully got up and went to it.
"P-?"
"P-E-D-A," said my aunt, still typing.
I looked it up. "Hmmm," I said. "Okay." Then I sat back down.
"They're talking like she won't walk again without braces or crutches. That's what they told my friend Frances in nineteen and twenty-one," she said. "You see her motorboatin' all around town now. She only limps a little when she gets really tired and worn out."
Frances worked down at the dress shop. She looked fine except her right leg was a little thinner than her left.
"My aim is to have your sister walking again by herself by next summer."
"Will it happen?"
"If I have anything to do with it, it will," said Aunt Noni.
I never felt so glum about the future as I did sitting there in my aunt's sunny office that July afternoon. What if she were wrong? What if my sister Ethel never walked again? What would her life be like? Who the hell would I play croquet with, in Alabama in the summer, if not her, when I wasn't fishing?
Of course, a year later, the Salk vaccine was developed and tried out and started the end of polio. And a couple of years after that came the Sabin oral vaccine, which they gave to you on sugar cubes and which tasted like your grandfather's old hunting socks smelled, which really ended the disease.
We didn't know any of that then. And the future didn't help my sister any right then.
My parents had of course taken off work and driven from Texas at the end of the first week; there were many family conferences to which the me part of the family was not privy. My parents went to see her and stayed at the hospital.
What was decided was that my sister was to remain in Alabama with my grandparents for the next year and that I was to return to my dead hometown in Texas with my parents and somegoddamnhow survive the rest of the summer there.
My sister Ethel would be enrolled in school in Alabama, provided she was strong enough to do the schoolwork. So I fished the Big Pond and the Little Pond one last time, till it was too dark to see and the bass lost interest in anything in the tackle box, and I went over the low hill to my grandparents' house, robbed of a summer.
Next morning we got the car packed, ready to return to Texas, a fourteenhour drive in a Flathead 6 1952 Ford. Then we stopped by the hospital. Aunt Noni was already there, her purple Kaiser parked by the front door. My parents went in; after a while Aunt Noni waved at the window, then I saw a blur in the mirror and a shape and I waved and waved and jumped up and down with an enthusiasm I did not feel. Then I got in the car and we went back to Texas
Somehow, I did live through that summer.
One of the things that got me through it was the letters my aunt took down from my sister and typed up. The first couple were about the hospital, till they let her go, and then about what she could see from the back room of my grandparents' house.
We'd usually only gone to Alabama for the summer, and sometimes rushed trips at Christmas, where we were in the car fourteen hours (those days the Interstate Highway System was just a gleam in Ike's eye—so he could fight a two-front war and not be caught short moving stuff from one coast to the other like they had in the Korean War when he was running Columbia University in NYC). We stayed at our grandparents' places Christmas Eve and on Christmas morning and then drove fourteen hours back home just in time for my parents to go to work the day after Christmas.
So I'd never seen Alabama in the fall or the spring. My sister described the slow change from summer to fall there after school started (in Texas it was summer till early October, and you had the leaves finish falling off the trees the third week of December and new buds coming out the second week of January.) She wrote of the geese she heard going over on the Mississippi flyway.
She complained about the schoolwork; in letters back to her I complained about school itself: the same dorks were the same dorks, the same jerks the same jerks, the same bullies still bullies. And that was third grade. Then, you always think it's going to change the next year, until you realize: these jerks are going to be the same ones I'm stuck with the rest of their lives. (As "Scoop" Jackson the senator would later say—it's hard to turn fifty-five and realize the world is being run by people you used to beat up in the fourth grade.)
Third grade was the biggest grind of my life. My sister was finding Alabama second grade tough too; there was no Alamo, no Texas-undersix-flags. In Alabama there was stealing land from the Choctaws and Cherokees, there was the cotton gin and slavery, there was the War for Southern Independence, and then there was the boll weevil. That was about it. No Deaf Smith, no Ben Milam, no line drawn in the dirt with the sword, no last battle of the Civil War fought by two detachments who didn't know the war was over six weeks after Appomattox; no Spindletop, no oil boom, no great comic-book textbook called Texas History Movies which told you everything in a casually racist way but which you remembered better than any textbook the rest of your life.
I told her what I was doing (reading comics, watching TV) and what I caught in the city park pond or the creek coming out of it. It was the fifties in Texas. There was a drought; the town well had gone dry, and they were digging a lake west of town which, at the current seven inches of rain a year, would take twenty-two years to fill up, by which time we'd all be dead.
I told her about the movies I'd seen once the town's lone theater had opened back up. (There were three drive-ins: one in the next town west, with a great neon cowboy round-up scene on the back of the screen, facing the highway—one guy strummed a green neon guitar, a red neon fire burned at the chuck wagon, a vaquero twirled a pink neon lasso; one at the west edge of our town; and one near the next town to the east.)
Anyway, I got and wrote at least one letter a week to and from my sister, my aunt wrote separate letters to me and my parents, they called each other at least once a week.
Somehow, Christmas dragged its ass toward the school year; my parents decided we'd go to Alabama during the break and see my sister and try to have a happy holiday.
My sister was thinner and her eyes were shinier. She looked pretty much the same except her left leg was skinny. She was propped up in bed. Everybody made a big fuss over her all the time. There was a pile of Christmas presents for her out under the tree in the screened-in hall that would choke a mastodon.
I was finally in her room with no one else there.
"Bored, huh?" I asked.
"There's too many people playing the damned fool around here for me to get bored," she said.
"I mean, outside of Christmas?"
"Well, yeah. The physical therapist lady comes twice a day usually and we go through that rigmarole."
"I hope people got you lots of books," I said.
"I've read so many books I can't see straight, Bubba."
"Have you read All About Dinosaurs?" I asked.
"No."
"I've got my copy with me. You can read it but I gotta have it back before we leave. I stood in a Sears and Roebuck store in Fort Worth for six hours once while they shipped one over from the Dallas warehouse. The last truck came in and the book wasn't there. They were out and didn't know it. I'd saved up my allowance for four weeks! Without movies or comic books! I told anybody who would listen about it. A week later one came in the mail. Aunt Noni heard the story and ordered it for me."
"Bless her heart."
"I'm real sorry all this happened, Sis," I said, before I knew I was saying it. "I wish we hadn't fought the day before you got sick."
"What? What fight?"
"The croquet game. You hit me."
"You hit me!" she said.
"No. You backsassed Mamaw. She hit you."
"Yes she did," said my sister Ethel.
"Anyway, I'm sorry."
"It wasn't your fault," she said.
I really was going to talk to her more but some damnfool uncle came in wearing his hat upside down
to make her laugh.
My sister grew up and walked again, and except for a slight limp and a sometime windmilling foot (like my aunt's friend Frances when she was very tired), she got around pretty well, even though she lost most of a year of her life in that bed in Alabama.
I remember walking with her the first day of school when she had come back to Texas and was starting third grade.
"Doing okay?" I asked. We lived three whole blocks from school then, but I wanted her to take it slow and not get too tired.
"Yeah. Sure," she said.
I remember the day they handed out the permission forms for the Salk polio vaccine, which was a big shot with a square needle in the meat of your arm. My sister laughed and laughed. "Oh, bitter irony!" she said "Oh, ashes and dust!"
"Yeah," I said, "well . . . "
"Have Mom and Pop sign yours twice," she said. "At least it'll do you some good."
"Once again, Sis, I'm sorry."
"Tell that to the school nurse," she said.
At some point, when we were in our late teens, we were having one of those long philosophical discussions brothers and sisters have when neither has a date and you're too damned tired from the school week to get up off your butt and go out and do something on your own and the public library closed early. Besides, your folks are yelling at each other in their bedroom.
The Time Machine was one of my favorite movies (they all are). I had the movie tie-in paperback with the photo of Rod Taylor on the back, the Dell Movie Classic comic book with art by Alex Toth, and the Classics Illustrated edition with art by Lou Cameron—it had been my favorite for years before the movie had come out in 1960.
"What would I do," I repeated Ethel's question, "if I could travel in time? Like go see dinosaurs, or go visit the spaceport they're going to build just outside this popsicle burg?
"Most people would do just what I'd do: first I'd go to the coin shop, buy ten early 1930s Mercury dimes, then go back to 1938 and buy ten copies of Action Comics #1 with Superman's first story, and then I'd go write mash notes to Eve Arden."
I'd just finished watching reruns of Our Miss Brooks on TV.
"No," she said. "I mean, really?"
"No," I said. "I mean, really."
"Wouldn't you try to stop Oswald?" she asked. "Go strangle Hitler in his cradle?"
"You didn't ask 'What would you do if you could travel in time to make the world a better place?' You asked 'What would you do if you could travel in time?' "
"Be that way," she said.
"I am that way."
And then she went off to work at some Rhine-like lab in North Carolina. That's not what she set out to do—what she set out to do was be a carhop, get out of the house and our live local version of The Bickersons. (Bickering=Pow! Sock! Crash!)
She first worked as a carhop in town, from the time she was fourteen, and then she got the real glamour job over in Dallas at the biggest drive-in cafe there, twenty-five carhops, half of them on skates (not her). She moved in with two other carhops there. A few months later, King and Bobby Kennedy got killed and half the US burned down.
Something happened at the cafe—I never found out exactly what. But a week later she called home and said this research lab was flying her to North Carolina for a few days (she'd never flown before). And then she left.
I started getting letters from her. By then our parents had gotten a divorce; I was living in the house with my father (who would die in a few months of heart failure—and a broken heart). My mom had run off with the guy she'd been sneaking around with the last couple of years and we weren't talking much. I was in college and seeing the girl I would eventually marry, have a kid with, and divorce.
My sister told me they were really interested in her, that other institutes were trying to get her to come over to them and that she wasn't the only polio survivor there. My first thought was—what's going on? Is this like Himmler's interest in twins and gypsies, or was this just statistically average? This was the late sixties; lots of people our age had polio before 1955, so maybe that was it?
Her letters were a nice break in the college routine—classes, theater, parttime thirty-six-hour-a-week job. Of course I got an ulcer before I turned twenty-two. (Later it didn't keep me from being drafted; it had gotten better after I quit working thirty hours a week in theater plus the job plus only sleeping between three and six a.m. seven days a week.)
"The people here are nice," she said. "The tests are fun, except for the concentration. I get headaches like Mamaw used to get, every other day." She sent me a set of the cards—Rhine cards. Circle, triangle, star, square, plus sign, wavy horizontal lines. They had her across the table from a guy who turned the cards, fifty of them, randomly shuffled. She was supposed to intuit (or receive telepathically) which cards he'd turned over. She marked the symbol she thought it was. There was a big high partition across the middle of the table—she could barely see the top of the guy's head. Sometimes she was the one turning the cards and tried to send messages to him. There were other, more esoteric ones—the tests were supposed to be scientific and repeatable.
From one of her letters:
I don't mind the work here, and if they prove something by it, more's the better. What I do mind is that all the magazines I read here think that if there is something to extrasensory perception, then there also has to be mental contact with UFOs (what UFOs?) and the Atlanteans (what Atlantis?) and mental death rays and contact with the spirit world (what spirit-world?).
I don't understand that; proving extrasensory perception only proves that exists, and they haven't even proved that yet. Next week they're moving me over to the PK unit—PsychoKinesis. Moving stuff at a distance without, as Morbius said, "instrumentality." That's more like what happened at the drive-in anyway. They wanted to test me for this stuff first. Evidently I'm not very good at this. Or, I'm the same as everybody else, except the ones they catch cheating, by what they call reading the other person—physical stuff like in poker, where somebody always lifts an eyebrow when the star comes up—stuff like that.
Will write to you when I get a handle on this PK stuff.
Your sis,
Ethel
"You would have thought I set off an atom bomb here," her next letter began. She then described what happened and the shady-looking new people who showed up to watch her tests.
Later, they showed her some film smuggled out of the USSR of ladies shaped like potatoes doing hand-schtick and making candles move toward them.
My sister told them her brother could do the same thing with two-poundtest nylon fishing line.
"If I want that candle there to move over here, I'll do it without using my hands," she'd said.
And then, the candle didn't move.
"They told me then my abilities may lie in some other area; that the cafe incident was an anomaly, or perhaps someone else, a cook or another carhop had the ability; it had just happened to her because she was the one with the trays and dishes.
"Perhaps," she had told them, "you were wrong about me entirely and are wasting your motel and cafeteria money and should send me back to Texas Real Soon. Or maybe I have the ability to move something besides candles, something no one else ever had. Or maybe we are just all pulling our puds." Or words to that effect.
A couple of days later she called me on the phone. The operator told her to deposit $1.15. I heard the ching and chime of coins in the pay phone.
"Franklin," said Ethel.
She never called me by my right name; I was Bubba to everyone in the family.
"Yes, Sis, what is it?"
"I think we had a little breakthrough here. We won't know till tomorrow. I want you to know I love you."
"What the hell you talkin' about?"
"I'll let you know," she said.
Then she hung up.
The next day was my usual Wednesday, which meant I wouldn't get any sleep. I'd gotten to bed the night before at 2:00 a.m. I was in class by 7:00 a.m. and had three classes and la
b scattered across the day. At 6:00 p.m. I drove to the regional newspaper plant that printed all the suburban dailies. I was a linotype operator at minimum wage. The real newspaper that owned all the suburban ones was a union shop and the guys there made $3.25 an hour in l968 dollars. I worked a twelve-hour shift (or a little less if we got all the type set early) three nights a week, Monday-Wednesday-Friday. That way, not only did you work for $1.25 an hour, they didn't owe you for overtime unless you pulled more than a sixteen-hour shift one night—and nobody ever did.
Linotypes were mechanical marvels—so much so that Mergenthaler, who finally perfected it, went slap-dab crazy before he died. It's like being in a room of mechanical monsters who spit out hot pieces of lead (and sometimes hot lead itself all over you—before they do that, they make a distinctive noise and you've got a second and a half to get ten feet away; it's called a backspill).
Once all linotype was set by hand, by the operators. By the time I came along, they had typists set copy on a tape machine. What came out there was perforated tape, brought into the linotype room in big, curling strands. The operator—me—put the front end of the tape into a reader-box built onto the keyboard, and the linotype clicked away like magic. The keys depressed, lines of type-mold keys fell into place from a big magazine above the keyboard; they were lifted up and moved over to the molder against the pot of hot lead; the line was cast, an arm came down, lifted the letter matrices up, another rod pushed them over onto an endless spiraled rod, and they fell back into the typecase when the side of the matrix equaled the space on the typecase, and the process started all over. If the tape code was wrong and a line went too long, you got either type matrices flying everywhere as the line was lifted to the molder, or it went over and you got a backspill and hot lead flew across the room.
Then you had to turn off the reader, take off the galley where the slugs of hot type came off to cool, open up the front of the machine, clean all the lead off with a wire brush, put it back together, and start the tape reader back up. When the whole galley was set and cool, you pulled a proof on a small rotary press and sent it back to the typists, where corrections would come back on shorter and shorter pieces of paper tape. You kept setting and inserting the corrections and throwing away the bad slugs until the galley was okayed; then you pulled a copy of the galley and sent it up to the composing room where they laid out the page of corrected galley, shot a page on a plate camera, and made a steel plate from that; that was put on the web press and the paper was run off and sent out to newsboys all over three counties.
