Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

  JIM GUHL

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

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  Copyright © 2018 by Jim Guhl

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Guhl, Jim, author.

  Title: Eleven miles to Oshkosh / Jim Guhl.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018011135 | ISBN 9780299319106 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: | LCGFT: Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.U4732 E44 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011135

  This book is a work of fiction. The settings and many location names are real, including businesses, street names, and other places that existed in the years 1972 and 1973 in the Fox River Valley of northeastern Wisconsin. Shattuck High School has been represented based on the author’s memory of the place. Descriptions of individual homes are fictitious. All characters and their actions are fictitious and not intended to represent actual individuals or events. The negative portrayal of law enforcement agencies and individuals is, likewise, fiction and not intended to reflect on actual people, behaviors, or events.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31918-2 (electronic)

  For my parents

  JACK and MARY

  with love and thanks for everything,

  especially a wonderful childhood

  1

  As near as I could tell, every cop in Wisconsin was there. Hundreds, thousands, maybe a million of them. Firemen and paramedics came too, from all over the Fox Valley, standing like toy soldiers along the winding narrow road through the cemetery that led to the gravesite. The parked police cars stretched even further, lights flashing, as they lined up in a row along Main Street and halfway down Tullar Road in Neenah. That’s how they did things when a police officer was killed on the job in Winnebago County. The officer’s name was Deputy William S. Finwick. My mom called him Billy. To me he was Dad.

  Mom clung to the sheriff’s elbow as he guided her to a metal folding chair in the shade of a large oak tree. My sister, Sally, and I sat to her left. Grandpa Asa was on her right. That was it—our whole family—or what was left of us anyhow.

  The last chair was for Pastor Olson, who we knew from Christmas Eves at Ebenezer Lutheran. I liked him. He wasn’t one of those television preachers. Instead, he was quiet and seemed to actually care about my grieving mom.

  Once the bagpipe player started up, Mom sobbed and pressed her face against Grandpa Asa’s shoulder. Pastor Olson touched her hand, but nothing helped. She couldn’t even look at the flag-draped casket being carried forward by six men in Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department uniforms. The casket moved ahead slowly, like an empty canoe in a slow-flowing current. Along both sides, those thousands of officers all saluted with their white gloves. The bagpipe player followed behind, getting louder and louder as the procession came near. When Dad’s casket finally reached us, the funeral men guided it gently on the platform over the grave and backed away. That’s when I started crying, too.

  Pastor Olson said some things but, to be honest, I don’t remember the words. When it was over, our small family gathered around Mom and someone got her a glass of water. By the time we were ready to go home, most of the officers and other folks had left. Except for the cars and trucks on Highway 41, the cemetery was quiet again, and I could even hear the robins singing in the oak trees.

  The funeral man drove our car up the narrow road and helped Mom get in the front passenger seat. Grandpa Asa got behind the wheel. Sally and I climbed in back. As we started out toward home, I looked out the window and saw two men standing in the shade of an especially large burr oak. The men were dressed in blue coveralls. I thought they were mill workers until I saw each one leaning on a shovel. After we passed, I turned around to look at them again. They were walking toward Dad’s grave.

  2

  My brain said that school would be better this year. How could it not? I had shaken off that miserable freshman label and moved on to the rank of sophomore. That had to make a difference.

  I banked into the turn onto Reed Street and stood on the pedals. Then reality set in. Just like last year, there they were again. Dirtballs, grits, and stoners, all huddled around their favorite spot outside the chain-link fence that marked the property line at Shattuck High. Jeez! It was like they had never left, standing around in knee-torn pants and faded denim jackets. Their morning routine hadn’t changed one iota—smoking cigarettes and weed, acting tough, looking around for easy targets—like me.

  I tightened my grip on Ike’s handlebars. (Ike stood for Eisenhower, which was the name of my red Schwinn Typhoon because it was built like a World War II tank.) I lowered my head and worked up a grimace as I accelerated toward the goons. The bike racks stood on the other side of the smoking herd, just beyond an opening in the chain-link fence.

  “Here comes Minnow,” I heard one say.

  I recognized the guy with the scraggly brown hair as Larry Buskin and knew him to be the leader of that gang of mindless thugs. He considered me an easy mark, but who didn’t? That was the problem with being me. I was always an easy mark. Hiding from dirtballs was practically a part-time job for me—ever on the alert for an escape route—always turning to run away.

  “The toll is a quarter,” said Larry. He and five others stepped out to block my path as they waited to grab Ike’s handlebars.

  After Dad’s murder, I had sort of hoped they would lighten up. Cripes! Hadn’t summer been bad enough already without more of the same old “let’s pick on Minnow” crap? Believe it or not, a little part of me wanted to fight back this time. That’s right—me—the little shrimp who was afraid of everything.

  Have you ever seen a movie called The Great Escape? Did you see the part where Steve McQueen dodges the German Nazis on a motorcycle? That’s who I wanted to be. But in my movie, instead of jumping the barbed wire fence, I would slam my front wheel right into Larry Buskin’s crotch as he groans and falls backward in the mud. Then I would leave a black tire track right down his chest like a zipper, and one of the dirtballs would say, “Hey, I guess we better not mess with Minnow anymore.”

  Yep, there was a tiny molecule of courage inside me, and if you had an electron microscope, maybe you could have found it. Unfortunately, the biggest part of me was still the scared of everything part. And that part of me said, when your name was Del Finwick and your nickname was Minnow and you weighed eighty-four pounds in high school, it was time to run away—again.

  I hated it, of course. I hated being scared of everything. And I hated it even worse that the whole world knew about it. My dad used to try to give me pep talks, trying to pump confidence into me like a blood transfusion.

  “Stand up to them,” he would say. “What’s the worst that could happen? A bloody nose?”

  Now
with Dad gone, who was I supposed to listen to? Mom? Yeah right! She needed all of her energy just to get out of bed and turn on the coffee percolator in the morning.

  Larry Buskin and the other Nazis hadn’t moved. They stared me down, and I quickly recognized that I wasn’t Steve McQueen, and Eisenhower wasn’t a motorcycle. As usual, I had sixty-five cents in my pocket for my school lunch and not a nickel to spare. Option one was to pay the twenty-five-cent toll and skip lunch. Option two was to make a run for it. Either way I was still a stupid coward.

  I chose option two, did a quick U-turn, and zoomed back onto Reed, where I ducked behind a line of yellow buses.

  “I’ll find you, Minnow!” Buskin yelled. “This will cost double tomorrow!”

  “Crap,” I said out loud. Now what? The school bell was set to ring in ten minutes, and I still needed a place to park Ike.

  I kept my skinny legs pumping until I was completely out of their sight. Then I took a right turn on Division and spotted Randy Schnell stepping out his front door with a sack lunch in one hand and a notebook in the other. Unlike anyone else I had seen that morning, Randy Schnell was a good guy.

  “Hey, Randy,” I said.

  “Hey, Minnow.”

  “Can I park my bike behind your house?”

  “Sure,” he said. Randy showed me where I could lock Eisenhower to his apple tree. I grabbed a Macintosh for my pocket and we walked together to the front entrance of Shattuck High. Five minutes till homeroom bell and I had already dodged the grits for the first time in the new school year, knowing that it would not be the last.

  In case you’re wondering about the whole Minnow thing, the name was nothing new. I had been the smallest kid in my grade since kindergarten and had been branded with the name ever since. I was fifteen now, but getting pegged as a seventh-grader was normal. Being picked last for every sports team on earth was so common it was practically part of my DNA.

  Have you ever heard of a poem called “The Charge of the Light Brigade”? It talks about how I felt on my first day as a sophomore at Shattuck High. The poem was written by a British guy named Alfred Lord Tennyson about a million years ago, and my favorite part went like this:

  Theirs not to reason why,

  Theirs but to do and die.

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  The six hundred were the soldiers. They were probably just a bunch of ordinary guys with swords, leather scabbards, and sixty-five cents for lunch money in their pockets, but because of jerks, like a stupid king or army general, they all get sent to be killed in battle. Just like me they didn’t have any good options either. Unlike me, they at least had the guts to fight.

  Shattuck used to be the only high school in Neenah, but shortly before I showed up, a new one was built across town. After that, Shattuck was just for ninth and tenth graders, but that was still over a thousand students, all piled into a building built before my grandpa Asa was even born. On the other side of Neenah the juniors and seniors all switched over to the brand-new school, named Neil Armstrong High after the astronaut. (Our nickname was the Rockets—pretty clever, weren’t we?) Unlike Shattuck, the new building was modern and nice and, according to my sister, Sally, hadn’t even been vandalized yet.

  If you thought it sounded a little weird to split the two schools by grade instead of just making one Neenah East and the other Neenah West, then you didn’t know much about the town religion—high school basketball. The holy grail, of course, was the Wisconsin state basketball championship, and we had been chasing it for a long time. Can you imagine what would have happened if Neenah had split the upper classmen into two completely separate schools? Talk about destruction of the talent pool. Good grief! We would have become another Hortonville.

  I found both my homeroom and my locker within minutes, a minor miracle considering that Shattuck was designed like a maze. Then a second good thing happened. Steve Hawkins showed up in my homeroom.

  “Hi, Del,” he said.

  “Hi, Steve.”

  Steve was a pal and a science nerd like me except he stood six feet tall. He had blond hair that hung down to his eyes like the fringe on a lamp shade and wore black plastic Buddy Holly glasses, which made him look even goofier. All the cool kids had already switched to wire rims.

  Steve was always making sketches in his notebook, and most of them were pretty funny. My favorite one was a picture of Richard Nixon riding an atom bomb like a bull and wearing a cowboy hat. The other thing Steve did was invent stuff. He had about a hundred thousand ideas for inventions sketched here and there in his notebook, and one day, he said, he was going to build every one of them.

  Our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Willison, had one of those big smiles that was all teeth and gums, and she wore a dragonfly pin on her blue sweater. At the front of the class she wrote her name in perfect cursive and explained a few rules about behavior and tardiness that we had all heard fifty-seven thousand times before. We sat through the announcements, stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, and for a few minutes that morning I actually thought the year might be okay.

  Things kept being okay for three whole hours. Then, in the hallway, between third and fourth periods, something happened that ended my dreams of world peace.

  I was flowing with the stream of bodies toward geometry class when I approached a flight of stairs. On the second step stood two dirtballs, plugging up traffic, shooting their mouths off, and basically looking for trouble. The Neanderthal on the right didn’t worry me. It was the tall, weasel-faced goon in the Budweiser hat that I was watching. His name was Leon Dinsky. I knew him as the scumbag who had made a career out of spotting out nerds and other unsuspecting weaklings in the hallways between classes.

  “Hang onto your books!” someone yelled. I clamped down.

  For those not trained in tenth-grade terrorism, spotting out was the time-honored tradition of slapping a kid’s books out of his arms and then kicking them down the hallway during the mad scramble between classes. The practice had grown rampant at Horace Mann Junior High, and a few creeps, like Dinsky, had kept it going at Shattuck.

  I kept my head down and muddled along with the flow, trying to make myself invisible. I was just a couple yards away, nearing the moment of truth, when the unexpected happened. Dinsky didn’t pick on me. Instead, he set his snake eyes on the person behind me. At first this came as a relief. Then I saw who he had chosen to destroy.

  The girl was small and pretty, wearing a pink blouse and matching ribbon in her hair, and she was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely just minding her own business. On top of that, she was a brand-new student to Shattuck High. Maybe you’re wondering how I knew that. How, in a collection of over a thousand kids, could I tell right away that she was an innocent rookie? Well, let’s just say she stood out from the crowd. Yep . . . she had a distinctive feature from every other kid in the entire ocean of students who attended Shattuck High. Dinsky’s target was a black girl.

  Dinsky lifted his arm over his head. “Welcome to hell!”

  The announcement was followed immediately by a karate chop of the girl’s books such that the entire stack, complete with papers, notebooks, pens, and pencils, was driven to her feet in a scattered pile. Leon smiled like some zit-faced jack-o’-lantern.

  “Good one, man,” said his chubby pal with the silver front tooth.

  They nodded and yukked it up as if causing mayhem and misery was a hobby for which they had both taken lessons.

  “Watch this,” said Dinsky.

  The six-footer reached back with his long right leg and kicked all the girl’s books and papers like he was attempting a fifty-yard field goal. From there, it was over. The foot shuffling of the migrating masses spread the girl’s books and papers to the outer reaches of the halls. At first her face showed shock. Seconds later, tears streamed down both cheeks.

  But wait. Here’s the worst part—I did nothing.

  The black girl slumped to her knees. The river of people flowed around he
r. The girl’s books, papers, pens, pencils, and everything else drifted away with the current of shuffling and kicking feet.

  She was right behind me—I did nothing.

  As usual, my stupid survival instincts had taken over. Instead of helping the girl, I just lowered my head and burrowed through the crowd until I landed at a desk in room E132. I tried to justify my behavior. I couldn’t be late for class. I got stuck in the flow of people. I was too small to do anything about it.

  Through it all, I knew the truth. I did nothing. I did nothing. I did nothing. Any kid with a milligram of courage would have helped that unsuspecting black girl. What I should have done was punch Dinsky in the nose and live with the consequences. At the very least, I should have helped her gather up her stuff.

  So, there you have it. Other than my size, that was the other reason folks called me Minnow. I was never the predator and always the prey. I was scared of everything and never fought back. I, more than anybody, should have helped that little black girl in the hall with her books kicked every which way by those two crumbs. I, more than anybody, knew how she was feeling. But what did I do? Not one damn thing.

  3

  When I sat down for a breakfast of Froot Loops the next morning, I was alone in the kitchen. Just as well. Worthless cowards weren’t supposed to talk to anybody.

  The thing that happened between Dinsky and the black girl kept running through my head like a bad TV movie that I couldn’t turn off. I saw myself, the despicable coward, watching it all happen. The enemy attacked and I ran away. The United States Army tracked me down and tossed me in the brig, where I ate stale bread and drank warm water. That I would be executed after my court martial was a foregone conclusion. The only question was whether I would die by hanging or firing squad. I wiped my nose, chewed my Froot Loops, and drank my glass of Tang.

  Do you want to know what else I kept asking myself? How come I didn’t inherit some guts from my dad? Jeez! He wasn’t afraid to go after creeps a hundred times worse than Dinsky and Buskin. He wasn’t afraid to tackle a felon. He wasn’t scared one bit about searching for the very same Highway 41 Killer who ended up murdering him. That’s right: in a way, it was Dad’s own bravery that killed him—that and the sheriff dumping him onto the graveyard shift to work the highway all by himself.