Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  Then blood started coming out of his mouth and nose. I had seen enough war movies to realize what it meant. The spear had passed through the man’s lungs and they were filling with his own blood. He coughed and spat. I started feeling sick to my stomach and even guilty about what I had done—about what I was doing.

  “You worthless little maggot!” He snarled the words through bloody teeth.

  Those words flipped a switch in me and brought back an image of Dad lying dead in the gravel on the shoulder of Highway 41. I climbed that spear and pushed down hard.

  “You killed my dad,” I said between grunts.

  I repositioned my arms so that both palms were on the very end of the spear shaft and called on the remaining strength of my pull-up muscles to bear down as hard as I could on the murderer. I heard myself groan. My teeth ground together so hard it’s a wonder they didn’t turn to dust.

  I knew it was over when his face went white as pulp and his eyes turned to glass. For a couple more minutes, I just stood over him with all of my weight on that spear. Only when I could no longer grip the thing did I finally let it go. I fell flat, shivering like crazy.

  I found enough strength to lift my head and looked all around me at the vast emptiness. “Can somebody help me?” I asked. It came out weak—lost to the wind and sky.

  I looked down at the bullet wound in my leg, still bleeding. The patch of blood was soaking one leg of my pants and starting to leak over to the other. A weird sort of hopelessness passed through me like a ghost. I tried crawling toward shore but couldn’t move. Was it over for me too? After everything—after marching to the Butte des Morts Bridge—after Dad and the sheriff getting shot to death—after Larry Buskin’s help—after finding the Cadillac Man at the Rockets game—after Operation Snake Den? After all of that, was it really over for me? I slumped into the slushy snow and closed my eyes.

  Have you ever read a story called “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London? Well I have, but only about five hundred times. As I drifted off to die on the ice that story played through my mind like a movie.

  Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray. . . . The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice.

  I tried to lift myself but fell flat.

  The old-timer had been very serious. . . . No man must travel alone on the Klondike after fifty below.

  After all of that, was I going to let the stupid cold kill me?

  He pictured the boys finding his body the next day.

  “No! Not that way!”

  Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known.

  “No!”

  The dog whined loudly. . . . It crept close to the man and caught the scent of death.

  “No! No! No!” I scared myself with my own yelling. Where had that voice come from? Something inside me wasn’t ready to die.

  I rolled over onto my belly and tried to stand again but couldn’t. On hands and knees, shivering, soaking wet, and bleeding, without boots, socks, gloves, or coat, I started out on the long crawl toward shore.

  It must have been late afternoon when I slapped my palm three times against the door of a small house.

  The next thing I remembered, a man was dragging me inside. A woman appeared and started throwing quilts and blankets over me. While she was doing that I heard the man yelling something about an ambulance into the phone. The quilts kept coming until the pile must have been ten deep. There they left me to lay on the kitchen floor. All was quiet until I heard them whispering.

  “Do you suppose he’ll die?” asked the woman.

  “Don’t know,” said the man.

  I remembered nothing more. I was off the Yukon trail. I had built a fire. I knew that much.

  52

  I woke to the inside of a hospital room with a tube stuck in my arm connected to a bottle hanging from a hook. The clock said twenty past three. The window was dark, but I was alive.

  I threw off the bedsheet and about a dozen heating pads fell to the floor. A big, giant bandage was wrapped around my thigh where the Cadillac Man’s bullet had plowed a furrow.

  I wasn’t cold anymore. Gosh—I was sweating.

  “About time you woke up.” My eyes landed on the scowling face of the largest nurse I had ever seen. She grabbed my wrist like it was a frying-pan handle and checked my pulse while looking at her watch, then wrote something down on a clipboard.

  “Where am I?”

  “Mercy Hospital in Oshkosh.”

  “Does my mom know I’m here?”

  “She was here. The police were here. The FBI was here.” She rolled her eyes and gave her head a shake of annoyance.

  “Do they know what happened?”

  “Everybody knows. Another death, thanks to you.” The nurse dropped the clipboard loudly on the table and walked out.

  The sun came up and shot a yellow beam of light through the window, really brightening things up. The nurse situation got better too. A young, pretty one named Miss Kittleson took over for the day shift and unlike that sledgehammer from the night before, she liked me. Heck, it was more than that. It was as if I had just won the Olympic Marathon. Her eyes sparkled like the sunrise on Poygan, as she pulled up a chair.

  “I heard the story this morning,” she said. “Was he the Highway 41 Killer?”

  “Well, he killed my dad. I’m sure of that.”

  She just shook her head and beamed at me. We were Clark Kent and Lois Lane. She took her time taking my pulse with her soft, thin fingers. “Would you like some water or juice?”

  “Apple juice?”

  She hustled out the door just as my mom walked in—without a cigarette—believe it or not. She smiled and kissed me on my cheek. “Thank God you’re alive,” she said.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “They said that you almost died.”

  “Almost.”

  “I can’t lose you, Del. Not after losing Dad.”

  “I can’t lose you either, Mom.”

  Mom started crying and I did too. And it wasn’t the little sniffle and wipe-away-a-tear sort of crying. We sobbed and shook as we held each other. I sure hadn’t made life easy for my mom. Cripes! How many times had I lied to her? She was the one person who really loved me, and not just a little bit either. Mom really, really, really loved me, and if you think that sounds sappy, then too bad for you.

  After a few minutes, Miss Kittleson came back with my apple juice, but when she saw us, she placed the juice on the table and scrammed.

  Two cops came next and asked me questions for more than an hour. One of them was the red-haired deputy who had called me a “little bastard” when he was trying to cuff me at the Butte des Morts Bridge. The other one was Agent Culper.

  Both guys had already been to the scene on the lake and had put two and two together by themselves. All the same, it took an hour to spill the whole story. I told them almost everything, starting with spotting Sheriff Heiselmann talking to the Cadillac Man at the Point and ending with me driving a sturgeon spear through Howard W. Shulepick’s chest. They looked a little skeptical when I told them the part about swimming underwater from one ice shanty to another. When I was all the way finished, the red-haired deputy asked me a question I didn’t expect.

  “How many laws do you think you broke yesterday?”

  I didn’t answer but started tallying them in my head. Trespassing, busting into Shulepick’s house, damaging property (the window), theft (the cookies), driving without a license, speeding, running stop signs, busting into a fish shanty (two counts), driving with a broken windshield, abandoning a vehicle. All of that and I hadn’t even gotten to the part where I killed a man. I swallowed hard and kept my mouth shut. The cops could do the math for themselves.

  “How old are you, Del?” asked the red-haired deputy.

  “Almost sixteen.”

  After two days in the hospital, they let me go home. That’s when the newspeople got their first crack at me. T
he most ambitious ones waited outside the hospital. The rest were loitering in front of my house. They jabbed their microphones right in my face as I hobbled up the steps.

  “Can you tell us how you were shot?”

  “Why did he chase you?”

  “Why did you drive on the lake?”

  “Is it true that you killed him with a spear?”

  As a gift to my mom, I kept my mouth shut. I just waved and offered a smile from my dashboard-bashed face. Then I walked in the house, shut the door, and unplugged the phone.

  Mom saw me staring at the sink full of dishes. “Your kitchen duties have been temporarily suspended,” she said.

  Somehow the newspeople still got the story. The cops blabbed, I suppose. After that, we had more visitors. Opal and Mark stopped over. It kind of bugged me, the two of them holding hands as they sat on our couch.

  Opal was polite as we made small talk about school. Mark didn’t say much until Opal got up to help my mom with dishes in the kitchen. When they were busy talking, he slid his chair over next to me. For a whole minute neither one of us spoke. Finally, a smile came to his face as he leaned over and slugged me hard in the shoulder.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “That’s for killing the bastard.”

  There was a knock at the door. I could see Steve’s face pressed against the glass, and Mark let him in. For a few minutes he asked me how I was doing, and we talked about what happened between me and Howard W. Shulepick.

  After that, he got down to the serious business. For the next half hour we yakked about our plans for the giant kite and the bombing mission over Menasha’s baseball field.

  The parade of people kept coming. Pastor Olson, Mrs. Parsons, Mrs. Borger, and even Mrs. Eckert, our down-the-street neighbor, walked over with a plate of cookies. For years she had ignored me. I guess things were different now that I had made the front page of the Post-Crescent.

  Neither I nor Mom was a bit surprised when the church ladies showed up just short of suppertime.

  “Dorothy! We heard! Where’s the boy!?” Mrs. Samuelson charged right past Mom and plopped a big bowl of potato salad on the kitchen table.

  I limped into the kitchen. “Hi,” I said.

  She attacked me with outstretched arms, placing a pork-chop hand on either side of my injured face and burying my head between her giant breasts as she rocked me back and forth. “Oh my . . . poor dear . . . poor, poor dear.” To tell you the truth, I didn’t mind that experience.

  Mrs. Stevens and Mrs. Weiden hugged me too and made their own deliveries of lime Jell-O with pear halves and a pan of chocolate brownies. Mrs. Stevens went straight to work, dusting the window ledges and cabinet shelves, a move that clearly bugged my mom. She couldn’t say anything though because, as everybody knows, when people bring you food they can do what they want. Mrs. Samuelson, for one, had no intention of leaving until she had heard the whole story. She pushed my butt into a chair at the head of the table, put two chocolate brownies and a glass of milk in front of me, and ordered me to proceed.

  It took over an hour, but I told them just about everything. By the time they went home the church ladies had as much information as the cops and ten times more than the Post-Crescent or Eyewitness News. Mom finally succeeded at guiding the women out the door.

  “Thank you, ladies. See you again soon.”

  Clunk! Click! . . . Clunk! She shut and latched the door and would have thrown a barricade over the top if she had one. That last clunk, by the way, was her head falling back against the wall with her eyes closed.

  53

  Grandpa Asa died on Easter Sunday. Mom said it was old age but I saw two ladies at the funeral whispering to each other and looking at me like his death was all my fault. Crud! Were people still keeping score on me?

  Let me tell you a few things you probably didn’t know about my Grandpa Asa. For starters, he defeated that big jerk, Kaiser Wilhelm, in World War I, and if you’ve ever read history, you know it wasn’t easy. Then he married my grandma and raised a great family that included my mom, all the while working at the foundry making manhole covers and sewer grates so he could buy a house on the island and put food on the table. When he went to Emerald Gardens, he sold his house to Mom and Dad for like a thousand bucks or some cheap amount so they could raise their family, and that included me.

  You already know that he treated me nice and gave me ice cream every time I came over. And you already know that he let me drive the truck when I was just fifteen and bought me the Eaglewing steel-toed boots when I needed them. You even know that he went to jail because of me. He had confidence in me when I didn’t. He was a grown-up I could talk to after Dad died and when Mom could barely get out of bed. Yep, and if I ever do anything right in my life, I owe a great big part of it to Grandpa Asa.

  His funeral, of course, was nothing like my dad’s. There weren’t any police cars or news reporters. There were hardly any people at all. Pastor Olson and the church ladies came, of course, and Mrs. Samuelson did an outstanding job of hugging and consoling Mom, Sally, and me. After that it was just Mark, Steve, Rhonda, Opal, Mrs. Parsons, Mrs. Borger, and a few neighbors from the island.

  When we got to the graveside part, Pastor Olson said some nice words that made me feel better. He said that we weren’t the only ones looking on. Some of the people who loved Asa the most were already waiting for him in heaven. Grandma Lydia was waiting for him, along with his brothers and sisters, old neighbors, folks who worked at the foundry, even people he may have helped during the war.

  When folks wandered off to their cars I paused and looked back at Asa’s grave. The only thing left was a tiny American flag standing upright in a metal stand and two men leaning on their shovels by that old burr oak.

  Speaking of graves, Wolf eventually got a proper gravestone with his name on it. Yep . . . between Mark, Opal, Rhonda, and me, we managed to scrounge up enough money. The stone said:

  WOLF

  AMERICAN INDIAN FISHERMAN

  DIED JANUARY 15, 1973

  I asked Pastor Olson if he would say a few words when we put down the new marker, and so he came with us. We were a small group, just the pastor, Mark, Opal, Rhonda, and me, but the words were nice, and the little ceremony was a million times better than leaving Wolf under that stupid little post with the number 648.

  While everyone was walking back to Pastor Olson’s car, I got down on my hands and knees and dug a little trench by Wolf’s gravestone. In there I placed a few fishhooks, a couple of split shot sinkers, and a slip bobber, along with a few feet of monofilament line, and covered it all back up. I wasn’t sure if mooneye fishing was allowed in heaven, but I figured on taking the shot.

  The lilacs were blooming as I drove the Chevy Apache out to the lighthouse on the point. The truck was mine now since Grandpa Asa had left it for me in his will. I even had my driver’s license, having passed the test on my very first try right after my sixteenth birthday. The truck was all fixed up too. Grandpa’s insurance had paid for new glass all the way around, and Mr. Johnson helped me plug and paint most of the bullet holes. (We left one unfixed in the rear bumper just for the heck of it.)

  I parked the truck near the lighthouse and sat down at a picnic table with the bright sunshine warming my back and reflecting off Lake Winnebago. A dozen fishing boats rocked back and forth in the waves. Across the lake, the pale bluffs of High Cliff Park stood there like they had since the glaciers. To my left, across the Fox River, my eyes rested on the greenery of Doty Island, my home base, and for the first time in a long while, the earth seemed to be spinning on its axis at a normal speed.

  Mom was doing better. She had cut down to a half pack of cigarettes a day and had even joined the YMCA. She swam there three times a week, if you can believe that. Sally graduated from Armstrong and the ceremony was coming up in just two days. She got accepted into college at Stevens Point, and her boyfriend decided to follow her there. Pretty soon it was going to be just me and Mom, and I gues
s that was okay with all of us.

  In case you’re wondering, I never did play Romeo in the school play. What, with my injuries and the cops and newspeople and everything, it just seemed like too much. I asked Mrs. Borger and Mr. Schirmer for a reprieve and they were cool with it. They only had one back up—Norwood Heckmeyer—but, boy oh boy, was he ever happy.

  Then another funny thing happened. About a week after I quit the Romeo role, Marjorie Bickersly came down with mono (you know—the kissing disease). Well, guess who got picked to play Juliet? Yep—after all those bends and turns, Rhonda got the part. I’m pretty sure Mrs. Borger did some serious arm twisting to make it happen because, as we all know, Mr. Schirmer could be a dipstick sometimes. Anyhow, things all worked out, and I never saw such a big smile on Rhonda’s face. I went to the play—twice—and her performance was out of sight. And when everybody came out for their bows at the end—guess what. Rhonda got the biggest applause of all. Heck, little kids were asking for her autograph and everything.

  If you think all of that was crazy, wait until you hear this part. Norwood Heckmeyer asked Rhonda to go to Spring Fling, and she accepted. Ever since, those two were transformed into Shattuck High’s hottest couple. Rhonda ditched her frumpy clothes and got her hair fixed up nice. She even started wearing tight sweaters and they looked pretty good on her too, if you know what I mean.

  Mark and Opal were still dating. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I was still a little jealous. Opal was the first girl who sort of liked me. On top of that she was pretty, fun, and smart, and it was really cool hanging out with somebody so different from every other kid in school. Like my mom says, things and people are always changing. She said it was true for the whole world, and it was definitely true for Shattuck High.

  Mrs. Parsons still liked me. Sometimes on my Hoot Owl route she would invite me in for a piece of corn bread or whatever just came out of the oven. You know what she liked to talk about most? You guessed it: history—and not just about the civil rights movement either. Mrs. Parsons wanted to learn everything there was to know about the Fox, Winnebago, and Menomonie Indians. She said that ever since I told her about the people who lived here for thousands of years, she couldn’t get them out of her head.