Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  Steve was twitching again. He started unfolding the master design, but I gave him the stop signal and checked to make sure Mrs. Schwartz wasn’t watching. She had her nose in a file cabinet. I nodded my head and Steve continued. The plans for the volcano were drawn in colored Magic Markers on brown paper that had once been a Red Owl grocery bag. Not exactly the stuff of real engineers, but good enough for a couple of tenth-graders.

  Like I said before, Steve was a danged good illustrator. The drawing showed a cutaway view of the Menasha High School football field at the fifty-yard line with a big “M” in the middle. A thick, horizontal line separated the aboveground parts from the underground parts. The aboveground parts included details like school buildings, clouds, trees and goal posts. He even had a black crow sitting on a telephone pole. On the field, the drawing showed stick figures representing a whole army of people, two of which were wearing capes and crowns on their heads. They stood right above the volcano tube at the fifty-yard line. The below ground parts included the workings of the volcano, which had two big oval shapes that were side by side and some smaller squares, lines, and circles in between. Steve had also drawn in a few worms and bugs below ground, just for effect.

  “Do you have any questions?” asked Steve.

  “How does it work?”

  Steve pointed at the oval shape on the left. “This is the vinegar tank,” he said. “Right next to it is the baking soda tank. That’s where the chemical reaction will happen. The pipe that runs up to the fifty-yard line is called the conduit. The lava goes up the conduit and shoots up in the air all over the field and the unsuspecting victims.”

  I was following so far. “But how does the vinegar and baking soda get mixed together at just the right time?” I asked.

  “That’s the tricky part,” said Steve. “We’ll need a pump to push the vinegar into the baking soda tank. And to drive the pump, we need a motor and probably a battery to power the motor and some kind of switch to turn it on at the right time. Once the vinegar gets pumped into the baking soda the chemical reaction should take care of the rest.”

  “Holy crap!” I said. “This is complicated.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Do you know how to get the stuff and put it together?”

  “Not really.”

  I shrugged. “My grandpa can help us.”

  We folded up the plans and I put them inside my geometry book. I glanced over at Mrs. Schwartz. She still wasn’t looking.

  Before going to see Grandpa Asa after school, I rocketed over to the lighthouse at Kimberly Point with my swim trunks and diving mask. After my success selling fishing lures at the Fox Point flea market I was determined to replenish my supply and get back there with another batch of lures. I already felt like Rockefeller with the money from last Saturday. If I could make another eight bucks . . . Wow!

  The trick was to get as much diving in as possible before the water got too cold. It was the third week in September. Swimming season at the Neenah Rec Pool had wrapped up weeks ago. I locked Ike to a park bench and did a quick change in the lighthouse bathroom.

  The only problem (other than maybe freezing to death) was the fishermen. A half dozen of them all stood casting for white bass and walleyes up and down the rocky shore. My only opening was way down by the old Council Tree monument where the Indians and the early explorers used to meet. Well, I figured if it was good enough for Chief Four Legs it was good enough for me, so I tightened the laces on my tennis shoes and waded in.

  I thought I was prepared for the shock, but I wasn’t. The cold water bit into my legs like muskellunge teeth. For a few seconds I stood there, knee deep, wondering if I really wanted to do this. On the one hand, I needed more lures. On the other hand, I wasn’t crazy about freezing my you-know-what off. A slimy, flat rock made the decision for me. My feet went out from under me and suddenly I was in all the way with what must have been a pretty impressive splash.

  I worked as fast as I could, using my special technique of following old fishing lines to the prize. Being pretty far into the mouth of the river, the current was stronger than usual and I had to hang onto rocks to pull myself along the bottom without getting swept away. It paid off, and right away I was picking up Spinno-Kings, Little Cleos, Mepps Spinners, and plastic worms. I even found a Black Bucktail with a silver spinner blade as long as my thumb. I figured it must have been lost by the cigar-smoking guy I had seen wearing a straw hat. Nobody else threw lures that big. The treble hook was huge, and I shivered at the thought of something like that getting jerked into my head while diving beneath the surface.

  It had been a pretty long spell in the cold water and my whole body was numb. When I finally stood up, I was chest-deep, shivering like a human tuning fork and looking toward shore for a place to get out. Suddenly, my eyes landed on something that made me drop back in up to my neck. A Winnebago County patrol car with Sheriff Heiselmann himself standing outside.

  What’s he doing here? I wondered.

  I just watched as the sheriff looked left and right and then walked over to a black Cadillac where another man had pulled into a parking place and rolled down his window. The sheriff leaned over and talked to the guy for a few seconds. Then he stood up again and looked left and right, up and down the street.

  Somehow my brain still worked even though the rest of me was frozen. Thoughts raced through my mind like minibikes on a dirt track.

  Why is he acting so nervous? What’s he up to? Who is that man in the black Cadillac?

  At the same time, my whole body was a Popsicle and getting colder. I couldn’t stop shaking but lowered myself nose-deep in the cold, green water and continued keeping watch.

  The man in the Caddy had a square head and black hair. Between puffs on a cigarette he said something that made Heiselmann smile, but then the sheriff stood again and looked left and right on the street. Whatever he was up to, he sure didn’t want anybody watching. I took a breath of air and lowered myself to eye level. Then the Cadillac Man handed a yellow envelope to the sheriff. Heiselmann took it quickly and looked left and right again before walking back to his car. That’s when the Cadillac Man decided to get out of there. He tossed his cigarette butt out the window, backed up from his parking spot, and drove away. As he left, I noticed a big, melon-sized dent in the rear bumper on the driver’s side.

  The sheriff stood alone now and again he looked left and right on the street. He looked in the envelope and took something out. Whatever it was, he was flipping through it like the pages of a book.

  Is that money?

  I was pretty sure. He shoved it into his pants pocket, ripped up the envelope, and tossed the little pieces into a trash can. Heiselmann looked left and right one more time. Then he got in his car and sped away.

  By the time I got out of the water, I was shaking like my mom’s old washing machine, and it wasn’t just from the cold. I didn’t even look through my bag of fishing lures. As quick as I could, I changed back into dry clothes and unlocked my bike. I don’t know why, but something told me to go look in that trash can where the sheriff had ripped up the yellow envelope. I rode up to it and stopped. I looked left and right. Then I went in head first and picked out every single scrap from that ripped-up yellow envelope and put all the pieces in the plastic bread bag with my lures.

  On the ground I spotted the cigarette butt that the Cadillac Man had tossed out the window. I picked it up and read the word Winston in blue letters before tossing it back down and wiping my hand on my pants.

  I jumped on the pedals and rode Eisenhower as fast as my legs could crank. I sailed past the big red-brick paper mill and past the millworker taverns and over the tracks. My heart hammered like an engine that had run out of oil as I skidded to a stop in front of the Emerald Gardens apartments, where I locked Ike again to the light pole. The same man with the spider tattoo was sitting there again on the concrete steps, drinking from a quart-sized brown bottle this time.

  “You here to see Asa again, boy?”
r />   “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He nodded and I walked by. I pulled the brown paper with Steve’s volcano plans out of my geometry book and knocked on the door at apartment 118.

  8

  The next morning, before breakfast, I thought some more about Sheriff Heiselmann and what the heck he was doing with that Cadillac Man by the lighthouse. After a night’s sleep it seemed sort of dumb all of a sudden. What difference did it make if he was talking to somebody at the park? It was all part of Winnebago County, wasn’t it?

  Anyhow, I still had the scraps of yellow paper and I decided to try to put them together. I spread them out on my bedroom floor and noticed lines of ink on the outside of some. I arranged the puzzle pieces to make the envelope into a rectangle again and stuck them all together with Scotch tape.

  I don’t know what I was expecting to find—maybe an address or a phone number, I supposed. What I got were doodles. That’s right, little pictures like people make when they’re bored while talking on the phone and need something to do with their hands. The doodles were pretty good. I had to admit that at least. In one corner of the envelope someone had drawn a little house with smoke coming out of the chimney. In another corner he had sketched a sea gull and a crescent moon. Underneath that he had a picture of a sailboat. And off to the side, a basketball player shooting a layup.

  “Doodles,” I said out loud.

  I dropped the taped-up envelope into my Eskdale gallon-sized milk bottle along with a red rock I had found by the railroad tracks. The fishing lures went in the Hughes candy box, same as always.

  School came and went and, except for the tuna casserole served up by the cafeteria ladies, things were okay. I had locked Eisenhower again to Randy Schnell’s apple tree and managed to avoid Leon Dinsky all day long. I sat by Opal Parsons in English class and found out that she was all the way done with The Scarlet Letter and itching to get going on the report. Meanwhile, I had barely cracked chapter 3.

  I couldn’t dive for lures or read after school because it was Thursday and I had Hoot Owls to deliver. The Hoot Owl Shoppers Guide was sort of a miniature newspaper where ordinary people advertised things they were trying to find or get rid of. In Neenah, it seemed like everybody was trying to buy or sell something—dogs, cats, cars, trucks, sewing machines, drum sets, bean bag chairs . . . you get the idea. Anyhow, every Thursday, I delivered 232 of them on my route that covered about a third of Doty Island. With good weather, I could get it all done in three hours by carrying them around on my bike. It took a little longer in the wintertime.

  In case you’re wondering, nobody ever got rich delivering Hoot Owls. They paid a penny a paper, so once a week I got a little orange envelope with two dollar bills, a quarter, a nickel, and two pennies inside. I know, I know—but when you were fifteen years old and your allowance was fifty cents a week, you took what you could get.

  I had finished rolling and banding the entire stack of Hoot Owls and, as usual, my hands were black from the ink. I loaded half of ’em in my canvas delivery bag, slung it over my shoulder, and took off on Eisenhower.

  Like always, I started out by riding along the Fox River by Doty Park where Neenah got named in the first place. The naming of Neenah was a pretty good story, and I’ve heard it about two hundred times, including every time my grade-school class toured Governor Doty’s cabin. Mr. Doty was chatting with some Winnebago Indians near his cabin and wanted to know their word for the land on the other side of the river.

  “What do you call that?” he said, pointing across to the other side.

  The Indians must have figured him to be a slow learner, because why else would a grown man be asking how to say “water.”

  “Neenah,” they said, which was, of course, their word for water. Mr. Doty wrote it down and the future city of Neenah had its name. That story, told by Doty Cabin tour guides, was usually good for a groan from fifth-graders.

  Once past Doty Cabin, my Hoot Owl route took me along the riverbank where I could chat with fishermen along the shore and find out what was biting. I mostly cared about walleyes, white bass, small-mouths, northerns, and mooneyes. Bullheads and sheepsheads were too plentiful to worry about. After updating the fishing report, it was time to get back to work.

  The route followed Park Drive on the east end of the island. I zigged and zagged through the numbered streets starting with Twelfth and working my way down to about Sixth before I had to fly home again to reload my satchel with more papers and my stomach with a glass of milk. Then I started up again where I left off and kept pedaling and tossing and pedaling and tossing until I got down by the hospital and kept going west past the sweater-knitting factory, railroad tracks, and the YMCA. One thing I’ll say about my Hoot Owl route is that it covered a pretty good slice of every sort of people, from the rich to the poor, who lived in the city. And I’ll tell you something else. If you kept your ears and eyes open, you could pick up some local gossip too. That’s how I found out that there was an Indian living in a hiding place just beyond the train tracks.

  On that particular Thursday I had three goals on my Hoot Owl route. The first was to find Opal Parsons’s house. She had told me it was on Fourth Street, and I planned to keep an eye out for her. The second was to locate Leroy Kazmynski’s place. He was a Green Bay Packer player, brand new on the team, and Mark told me he lived on Second between Forest and Lincoln. I planned to ride slow and look for clues. My last goal, of course, was to get done before dark so I could spin over to the Menasha locks and see what the fishermen had caught and if any boats were passing through. Those were my goals, and I struck the jackpot on two out of three.

  Finding Opal’s place was easy enough. All I had to do was read the names on the mailboxes. I found Parsons painted in white letters on a black mailbox and knew it had to be hers. Instead of riding by and tossing the Hoot Owl from the sidewalk, I took the extra time to stop and walk right up on the porch. Through the screen door I could hear the TV going, so I knew somebody was home. Now, anybody who knew me even just a little realized that I wasn’t the type who horned in on other people’s business. But finding Opal’s house seemed sort of like spotting a shooting star, and if there ever was a time to stop and take a chance, well I figured this was it. My knees shook, but it wasn’t from being scared. I was nervous, and there’s a difference. I walked right up to that screen door, tapped with my right hand, and held out a Hoot Owl with my left.

  After just a few seconds, a black lady poked her head around the corner of what must have been the kitchen. She studied me, wiping her hands on a dish towel. The lady wore a blue uniform dress that had a patch with her name, Ellie, stitched in the middle of a white oval. Her face looked tired and her eyes cautious, like a deer’s eyes. They were big and black like Opal’s, and her skin was the color of cocoa powder a little lighter than Opal’s. I know I shouldn’t have been paying such close attention to skin, but black people were rare in our part of Wisconsin, and Opal’s mom was only the second I had actually seen up close.

  “Can I help you?” asked the lady.

  “My name is Del Finwick,” I said. “I’ve got your Hoot Owl, ma’am, and I’m also Opal’s friend from school.”

  The scared look washed off her egg-shaped face and a friendly smile showed up instead.

  “Yes, she tol’ me ’bout you.” The lady had a different way of speaking, and I was pretty sure it didn’t come from northeastern Wisconsin.

  “We’re doing a report together on The Scarlet Letter. I was wondering if she was home.”

  “She at piano practice,” said Mrs. Parsons. “But I’ll tell her you stopped by.”

  “Thank you. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you too, Del.”

  As I tossed Hoot Owls onto porches on Fourth Street I felt all warm and happy on the inside. A river of confidence flowed through me and my pride swelled up like a lake after the snowmelt. I had talked to Opal’s mom and she was nice. In fact, it felt almost like she was happy to see me. I don’t know what
I had expected, but it sure wasn’t that.

  My focus returned when I saw the sign for Second Street. It wouldn’t be as easy to figure out which house belonged to a Green Bay Packer. Everybody knew that NFL linebackers weren’t the type to paint their name on a mailbox. I rode my bike slowly from house to house looking for a clue.

  At the side of an ordinary, white two-story, I spied an Arctic Cat snowmobile parked on a trailer. On a hunch, I coasted Eisenhower up to it. The name Kazmynski was permanently burned into the trailer by an arc welder and then painted over.

  Jackpot! Wait until Steve and Mark hear about this.

  If I had a plain piece of paper and a pencil, maybe I could have made a rubbing on the bumpy name on the trailer like my mom did on her great-grandmother’s gravestone.

  Wait a minute.

  I did have the stump of a pencil in my right front pocket. I dug it out. I just needed a piece of paper and took a chance by lifting the lid on a trash can beside Leroy Kazmynski’s house. About a million flies buzzed out and it smelled so bad I put the lid back on. Then I remembered the pink insert inside each Hoot Owl. I grabbed one of the sheets. It only had writing on one side so I lined it up over the name on the trailer and started rubbing with the side of my pencil.

  Just then, a lime-green Dodge Charger rumbled up the driveway. Oh-oh! Kazmynski’s giant head and gorilla shoulders filled up the whole inside of the car. I lifted the pencil and paper off the trailer, stood up with quivering knees, and waited for him to squish me like a lake fly.

  He stepped out of his car and scowled. The bone over his eyebrows stood out like a small log. His jaw and chin were made of iron. Between all of that and his dark hair and beard stubble, Leroy Kazmynski was one of the scariest guys I had ever seen. His shadow on the garage door was a picture right out of Famous Monsters magazine.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Sorry. I was just copying your name to show my friends.”