Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  Through adrenaline and quickness I continued to evade the red-haired deputy on my tail.

  “This is a peaceful protest!” I yelled. “We’re marching to Oshkosh!”

  My luck ran out. It was Sheriff Heiselmann who finally brought me down with a cross-body tackle that sent my body flying and my head thumping into the crusty snow. When I opened my eyes I was face-to-face with him. His eyes bulged and the veins in his cheeks and nose glowed red. His gray teeth showed through snarling lips. I saw a shadow block the sun and suddenly something busted me in the side of the face. The next thing I knew, I was in the back of a cop car with Mark.

  “You’re going to have a shiner there, Delmar.”

  I brought my hand to my face and pulled it away with a smear of blood on my fingers. Suddenly, my mind was on a hundred things all at once. What was happening to us? Were we under arrest? Would Mrs. Parsons even find us? Were we all going to jail?

  Once I caught my breath I imagined myself behind bars and almost started to cry. But then I looked over at Mark and he sat there with his head held high, steady as the Neenah lighthouse.

  “We did it, Delmar,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “We did it.”

  Hearing those words helped, and somehow I held it together realizing what we had all just accomplished. We got the sheriff to show his true colors. He had cracked. He had blown his lid, and it was all caught on film.

  35

  In case you’re wondering, Sheriff Heiselmann never did throw us in jail. As it turned out, fifteen-year-olds can be locked up for killing people, stealing cars, or robbing banks, but not for trying to march across a bridge.

  Instead, they gave us each a citation for walking on a restricted highway and in my case, a warning about resisting arrest. The deputies called our parents and talked to us about the foolishness of our actions. They told us it was our duty as young men and women to obey the laws of the land and quit causing unnecessary disruption. Through it all, we never saw Sheriff Heiselmann.

  Opal’s mom arrived first at the Sheriff’s Department headquarters. She was angry at the cops and let them know it. “How dare you go around handcuffing minors just for expressing their constitutional rights of free speech?!” Her words echoed through the halls and nobody said a thing.

  She walked right up to the group of three deputies and told them that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Then she told us she was proud of what we had done before glaring again at the deputies. I thought about the lump on her head. She had seen worse than we had—much worse.

  Rhonda’s dad was next to arrive. He was a scruffy-looking guy who hadn’t shaved in a few days. His shoes were untied and one side of his flannel shirt hung lower than the other because the buttons were lined up wrong. The man didn’t say a word to any of us, not even Rhonda. He just waved her toward the car and they drove off.

  Mom came next and when I saw her face I almost wished they had thrown me into solitary confinement. She wore a blue overcoat, but her pajama pants showed underneath. Her eyes were red and wet.

  “You lied to me,” she said.

  I hung my head and walked to the car.

  As Mom started driving away, I thought about Mark sitting there all by himself. “We can’t leave Mark,” I said.

  “He’s not my responsibility,” said Mom. “His father will pick him up.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not.”

  “His father doesn’t care about anything except getting drunk.”

  “That’s Mark’s problem, not mine.”

  As soon as Mom said those words I could tell that she regretted them. We drove toward home on the lake road, neither of us talking. Snow piled in drifts as the wind whipped in off the frozen desert of Lake Winnebago. It was a nasty day on the ice but I sure wished I was out there. Nothing could be worse than the climate I was feeling inside the car.

  When we reached the Neenah city limits sign, Mom slowed to a stop, checked her mirrors, and turned around.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Going back to get Mark.”

  As you can imagine, we were the lead story on Channel 2 Eyewitness News at six o’clock. That’s right—me, Rhonda, Opal, and Mark. Only the real star was Sheriff Heiselmann, and they captured him in living color—red face, purple veins—the whole works. They even caught the part where he punched me. He was on top of me, and as I squirmed to get away, he pulled back his arm and swung it forward, blasting my face.

  After the news, the phone started ringing. First, a man at the Post-Crescent wanted an interview, and I spent a half hour telling him the whole story. Then a lady called from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern and I did it all again. It was after ten o’clock when the man from the Green Bay Press-Gazette called, and I gave him the whole run-down just like the others. After those three, Mom pulled the plug on the phone.

  Every reporter I talked to was focused on one thing in particular and it wasn’t even the punch I got from Sheriff Heiselmann. It was the bullet. How had a couple of fifteen-year-old kids found more evidence at a crime scene than the entire Sheriff’s Department? And why hadn’t the kids turned over the evidence?

  Even after the ten o’clock news ended, Mark and I kept reviewing every little event of the day. We talked about how the reporters had covered the story and wondered how it would appear in the newspapers the next day.

  “Enough is enough,” said Mom. She pointed Mark toward the living room couch, and I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

  I needed sleep more than anybody. My head was drooped like a stuffed bear on the dart board at the County Fair, but there was still one very important thing I had to do before going to bed. I had to hide the bullet.

  I snuck into the garage and turned on the light. Every hiding place I looked at seemed too obvious. The workbench drawer. The corner behind the shovels. The stack of scrap lumber. Then my eyes landed on the old, red gas can in the corner that we used to fuel the lawnmower. I lifted it by the handle. It was still half full. The lid unscrewed easily, and I took a sniff to make sure. Retrieving the bullet from my pocket, I dropped it into the can with a ploink and screwed the lid back in place.

  The very next morning, right after Mark went home, my family started laying into me. We were all in the kitchen, Sally and Mom drinking coffee at the table while I stirred a glass of Tang and waited for two Pop-Tarts to jump out of the toaster.

  Sally spoke up first. “Thanks for destroying my life, Del.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you that stupid? Don’t you realize that I’m now the sister of a juvenile delinquent? You broke the law and your face was all over the TV, you idiot. And to make it worse yet, Kevin’s parents know the sheriff, personally. So thanks for wrecking my life.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “None of this is going to bring Dad back, you know. Why don’t you just quit harassing all of the good people who work in law enforcement?”

  “I’m only harassing the sheriff,” I said. “Because he deserves it.”

  As you can probably imagine, none of that went over very well. Sally called me a hopeless jerk and asked my mom why she had to live with a criminal. Mom yelled at both of us, but especially me, and said I should quit harassing my sister. Holy crickets! I had to get out of there. It was Sunday morning—Christmas Eve morning—and I decided to go to church. At least those people would be on my side. Right?

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. As soon as I stepped through the heavy wooden doors all eyes drilled into me and the whispering started up. I couldn’t hear everything, but I detected certain words like “such a shame” and “disrespectful.”

  Then a scowling old lady with steel hair and a blue hat stepped up to me. “Are you pleased with yourself, young man, besmirching the reputation of one of our finest civic leaders?”

  I said nothing.

  “Maybe you didn’t realize that the sheriff donated his time and fifty dollars to the L
adies Aid Society. He’s a good citizen and an honorable man—unlike some people.”

  “He killed a swan. That’s not honorable.”

  “You’re just a mouthy little brat aren’t you? What would your father think?”

  “I think he would have been proud of me,” I said, looking directly into her eyes.

  The lady gasped and made a face she had probably been saving for Fidel Castro.

  “Hooligan!” she shouted.

  I half-expected to see crusaders in armored uniforms storming out of the janitors’ closet to slap me around before running me through with a sword.

  Then, just in the nick of time, Mrs. Borger showed up.

  “Mr. Finwick.”

  “Oh, hi, Mrs. Borger.” I braced myself. What would she think? Would she put me on trial for sorcery?

  “I saw you and your classmates on television, and I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. That took real courage.” She studied my face. “Looks like they got a little rough with you.”

  “It’s just a bruise,” I said.

  “He deserved it,” said the scrap-iron lady under the framed picture of Jesus holding a lamb.

  “He most certainly did not deserve it!” Mrs. Borger nearly shouted. She took a step toward the blue-hat lady, and for a second I thought I would have to jump between them like a hockey ref.

  The two women glared at each other for a while until Mrs. Borger finally spoke. “Like I said, Del, it took courage. And even more courage to show up here, I see.” With that comment, Mrs. Borger earned her own gasp. The blue-hat lady made a face and stormed off to the fellowship hall, where she was probably fixing to report that the devil and his English teacher had just showed up for worship.

  For the third time since Dad’s murder, Mrs. Borger grabbed me by the elbow and marched me down the aisle, to a pew near the front. Both of us were wound up tighter than mouse-trap springs. I could hear Mrs. Borger still huffing and mumbling to herself. It took a few minutes, but we finally settled down and focused our attention on the pulpit.

  I don’t know how he did it, but Pastor Olson said all the right things again that Sunday morning. The title of his sermon (and I’m not kidding here), was “The Road Less Traveled.” It was all about how the right direction isn’t always the easy one, and that, sometimes in life, a person has to go against the grain. Sometimes a guy just has to do what feels right, and if it upsets some folks—well, tough cookies.

  My own personal road less traveled had stirred things up all right. It was still too early to tell whether or not that road even went in the right direction. Would it make a difference in the long run? Maybe—maybe not. Would it bring back my dad? Nope.

  I still needed to get out of the house for the afternoon, so I called Mark on the telephone. Guess what. He was trying to get away too, and from his father’s yelling in the background I figured that we had better do something quick. We agreed to meet at his hideout in the swamp. I made two peanut butter sandwiches and bugged out the door.

  We showed up at the hideout at around the same time. Mark had bought a Sunday Post-Crescent at Red Owl and we opened it to see what they had written about us and Sheriff Heiselmann. On the top of page 2, we found the story, including a headline printed in big bold letters.

  Protesters Clash with Authorities at Butte des Morts Bridge

  The written part filled up about a third of the page, but it was two photographs that really caught our eyes. One photo showed the four of us marching on the shoulder of the highway with our signs and raising our fists to the sky. The words “Sheriff Heiselmann Killed a Swan” were easily readable, and we must have been singing because our mouths hung wide open. The second picture was an action shot of Heiselmann tackling me as I tried to escape. Snow flew in every direction as the two of us tumbled to the ground. I could see the sheriff’s clenched fist and the anger in his face. Lucky for me, I didn’t look scared.

  As we read the whole story out loud, a feeling of pride surged through me. Jiminy Crickets! The whole Fox River Valley was reading about our protests. Now everybody would know that Sheriff Heiselmann killed a swan. Now everybody would know that we didn’t trust him. No wonder the people in church were hot under the collar. We had busted the lid off Pandora’s Box and there was no telling what the newspeople might dig up next.

  Mark felt the same way I did and gave me a solid punch in the shoulder. “We did it, Delmar! Heiselmann’s a bug under the microscope now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe nothing. Let’s celebrate.”

  I smiled, not knowing for sure what Mark meant. Then I watched him pull a bottle out from the inside of his coat. He twisted open the metal cap.

  Mark took a big gulp from the bottle that sent an air bubble gurgling up through the clear liquid. He blinked hard and grinned before handing it to me.

  I worried that I would gag and have to spit it out, but I tipped the bottle and let a little bit drain down my throat. It was like candy—nothing to it.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Peppermint Schnapps,” said Mark.

  Proud of myself, I took a bigger swallow and wiped my mouth on my sleeve before handing the bottle back to Mark. It took less than an hour to empty the quart of flavored booze. I felt warm all over and laughed at everything. Holy smokes! Mark was practically Johnny Carson, he was so funny all of a sudden.

  I lay back on the bed of frozen mud and closed my eyes. Whoa! My whole universe was swirling around me. I sat back up and shook my head.

  “What’s wrong, Delmar?”

  “Everything’s spinning.”

  “Of course it’s spinning. You drank half a bottle of booze, you idiot! Son of a bitch, Delmar, you finally got drunk!” We both laughed and punched each other in the shoulder a few times. It was all pretty neat and I felt sort of grown-up for a change. Look at me. I thought to myself. I’m a drinker. I felt pretty darn cool, even cocky. I joked around about how I wished Mark had another bottle.

  Ten minutes later the feeling in my head started moving toward my stomach. Five minutes after that, I was on hands and knees trying to pull my face out of the snow with puke dripping out my mouth and nose and all over the front of my coat. I kept on coughing and gagging even after everything in my stomach had already been heaved up. Without any water to drink, I couldn’t get the sickening taste of peppermint-flavored puke out of my mouth. I tried eating snow but it only made things worse. I heaved and hacked and hunched my back until I thought I was going to cough up my own stomach.

  Mark laughed at first. “One shot too many, Delmar?” But then he saw my whole body shaking and clammed up. It wasn’t funny anymore, even to him. I felt like I was going to freeze to death, and maybe I would have. Then I felt the dull pressure of two arms around my chest. Mark grunted loudly and lifted me to my feet.

  The two-mile slog home from the swamp marked a new low point in my dull and stupid life. Mark propped me up the whole way as I wobbled along on sewing machine legs. We must have been a sight to the passing drivers on their way to and from Christmas Eve services at churches all over town. There I was, the proud and courageous protester, now drunk, shivering, eyes half-closed, with streaks of frozen vomit all over my hair, face, and unzipped coat.

  I thought we would never get home but we did. Mark cleaned me up as best he could with some shop rags in the garage.

  “You’re on your own from here, Delmar.” He guided me through the door to the kitchen and disappeared.

  Using the table for support, I found my way to the sink and drank a glass of cold water. I barely made it to the toilet in the downstairs bathroom before I was puking it all up again.

  I felt Mom’s eyes on me as I stumbled up the stairs to my bedroom. She said nothing. I woke up in the middle of the night beneath a stack of quilts that Mom or Sally must have placed over me while I slept. My clock radio showed a time of 2:15. My head pounded like a drum at a Rockets pep rally.

  “Merry Christmas, jerk,” I whispered to myself.

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  Someone nudged my shoulder and I opened my eyes. Mom looked down at me, smiling. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “I think so.”

  “Jump in the shower. Breakfast will be ready in a half hour.”

  Suddenly, I noticed that Mom wasn’t in her pajamas. She was dressed in black slacks and a bright-red sweater. Her hair was fixed up nice too. I heard her slow, even steps going back down the stairs.

  I looked in a panic for the vomit-stained clothes that I had left in a heap. They were gone. Mom must have put them in the washing machine. I touched my hair and felt the hard splotches of dried puke. It brought back the day before, and for a second I felt sick again. In the bathroom I dreaded turning on the light, not sure what I would see in the mirror. With a flick of the switch I had my answer. My skin was the color of cooked fish. My hair was like a swallow’s nest. And the bruise where Sheriff Heiselmann nailed me was an even bigger, purple half-moon under my right eye. I wouldn’t be posing for pictures in front of the Christmas tree.

  After a shower I almost looked human and felt a whole ton better than before. I got dressed in clean underwear, jeans, and socks and even found my red-and-green plaid shirt.

  The whole house smelled like bacon as I walked down the stairs and a platter full awaited me when I got to the table. Another plate held German-style coffee cake with candy cherries mixed in with the breading and white frosting on top. A steaming bowl of scrambled eggs completed the makings of a swell Christmas morning breakfast, just like when Dad was still alive.

  “Thanks, Mom.” I nibbled on a corner off the coffee cake, trying to put on a good front.

  “Sally did most of it,” said Mom.

  “Thanks, Sally,” I said. She forced a little smile.