The Middle of Somewhere

by J. B. Cheaney

  “Hold still.” I snatched the card out of his hand and read, The Blazing, Amazing Cannonball Paul! Limited Engagement! See back for dates and locations.

  “But what is it?” Gee demanded. “What's a Human Cannon?”

  “Cannonball. It's a guy who goes around getting himself shot out of a gun.” I pointed to the huge rifle-barrel thing behind the man.

  My brother's eyes went big and round. “You mean over and over? Like, he never gets killed?”

  “Of course he doesn't get killed. He knows how to do it.” As a career choice, though, it was definitely weird.

  Our grandfather called, “Y'all ready to see Big Brutus?”

  “Pop!” Gee grabbed the card from my hand and bounded over. “We've gotta see this guy!”

  “What's that?” Pop glanced at the front of the card, then turned to the schedule of dates on the back. “Maybe. If we're in one of these places at the right time.”

  That wasn't good enough for Gee, who kept pestering him all the way out of the visitor center.

  I stayed behind to pay for the postcards, while the clerk gushed at me, “You kids are going to have a great time seeing Kansas—you're lucky to have such a nice grandfather!”

  That must have been some impression he made on her. She looked like a sensible lady, aside from a heavy hand with the mascara. I couldn't stay to talk, though; Gee might at that very moment be driving our nice grandfather to distraction.

  I'd learned from the visitor-center exhibits that Brutus was built right where it stands (being too big to move). There used to be a lot of coal here, and Brutus's job was to remove the rock and dirt on top of the coal so smaller shovels could get at it. Once the coal was gone, Brutus didn't have anything to do. Instead of scrapping it, the mining company donated the shovel and the land it was on to some local organization that fixed it up for tours.

  Pop sure did like a tour. He stopped at every single site listed in the self-guiding brochure and read the explanation out loud. Stop number one was the bucket, or “dipper, which held ninety cubic yards or approximately one hundred forty tons of material.” Area-wise, the dipper was as big as our living room and almost twice as high.

  Gee was acting sulky—he and Pop had probably had words about Cannonball Paul—so he refused to stand with me in the dipper to have our picture taken. But the iron teeth that stuck out from the lower jaw might have spooked him a little; in fact, now that he was up close and personal with this humongous thing, he seemed subdued—as if its sheer size had packed him into a ball of subduedness.

  Once we were inside the humongous thing, though, he started expanding again. Inside Big Brutus is an ADHD fun house: rollers, gears, cables, ladders, and lots of portholes labeled KEEP OUT.

  I don't know if “porthole” is the right word, but they were definitely holes, about four feet long, built into the metal walls. Pop said they led to the guts of the machine, where crewmen used to crawl around oiling parts. Ofcourse Gee disappeared into one the minute my back was turned, and when I started looking for him he popped out: “Pow! I'm a human cannonball!”

  I grabbed him by the sleeve and pointed to the wall. “Look what it says: KEEP OUT. Two words. Which one do you not understand?”

  “Hey!” Pop called from station eighteen. “Listen to this: ‘The main hoist was operated by eight five-hundred-horsepower DC electric motors. There are eight hundred feet of cable on each side.

  All those numbers started to mean something when we got to the boom. There's a narrow door beside the operator's cab that lets you go right out on it. Then you can climb 150 feet of steps to the observation platform at the top.

  I was dying to climb those steps, but first we had to discuss my age, because nobody under thirteen was allowed on the boom. I was almost thirteen—just four more months. Pop suggested talking to the gift-store lady for special permission, and I had to wonder if he wanted to gaze into her heavy-duty mascara again. But it was a long walk back to the gift shop, so he decided to let me fudge a little. First I would watch Gee (who'd never pass for thirteen) while Pop finished the self-guided tour in peace, and then we would switch off.

  Easier said than done, of course—try keeping a hyper seven-year-old occupied in a big machine full of ladders and I-beams and holes that say KEEP OUT. To make it worse, a couple of teenage boys with floppy tank tops joined us and set a bad example by ducking in and out of the holes themselves.

  Finally, Pop returned to take charge of Gee, and when I got my chance to climb to the top of those 150 steps, it was worth the effort. I could see all the way to Missouri, or it sure seemed like it. Kent Clark talks about stepping back to look at the big picture, and if that wasn't a big picture I don't know what is: miles and miles of land rolled out in every direction like a huge gray-green quilt marked with roads, dotted with houses and little towns, stitched up with tiny tractors. It all looked so normal—except for the fact that I was seeing it from the boom of a sixteen-story electric shovel out in the middle of nowhere. I looked with one eye, then the other, then with both eyes a little squinty wondering if there was some kind of inspiration to be had from this particular big picture.

  Then I heard my name, out of the blue: “RONNIIIIIE!” Not a voice from the sky, but you probably already guessed that. The likely scenario was that Gee had slipped away from Pop—who didn't yet understand what “watching him” meant—and pushed through the narrow door leading to the boom. I turned around, expecting to see him clutching the guardrails halfway up. But the steps were empty And the noise was still going on.

  When I finally spotted him, it felt like the air had made a fist and punched me in the chest. There he was, a little boy in a red T-shirt, clinging to an I-beam jutting out from the metal wall, about fifteen stories off the ground. The only way he could have got there was by shinnying up the support post rising from the platform, just outside the door. He'd had to climb almost six feet to reach the horizontal beam, which he'd wrapped himself around beforelooking down. Then he panicked, having set a personal best for not-looking-prior-to-leaping.

  And by now he had a lot more attention than just mine. An older couple and a dad with two kids were staring up from the ground, pointing or wringing their hands. One of the teenage boys came out on the stair landing and yelled, “DUDE!” Pop squeezed by and staggered in shock when he saw where Gee was. I pounded down the stairs to meet him, and we had a little discussion.

  POP: What the @#$! is wrong with this kid?

  ME: Gee, stop screaming! And don't look down.

  TEENAGE BOY: (through the door) Dude! Hey, Brad! Come look at this!

  Pop is a man of action, but climbing poles umpteen dozen feet off the ground is not exactly his kind of action. He tried to reach Gee by hoisting himself up on the platform railings, but when he put one foot up and tried to raise the other, his face turned the color of biscuit dough and he broke out in a sweat.

  “Hey, man. Let me give it a shot.” The other boy, Brad, had ducked through the little door. Brad was about six and a half feet tall, which turned out to be very useful in a situation like this. He stepped up on the railings, balancing his weight between them, and when he stood up straight his head was level with Gee's. “Hey, little buddy, how's it goin'?”

  I wanted to say, Hold on tight, Gee! But of course he was already holding so tight he was frozen. Brad had to reassure him about a dozen times before Gee loosened up enough to let go of the I-beam, edge around the verticalpole, and clamp on to the tall guy's shoulders. Brad carefully stepped back down onto the platform and delivered him safely into my arms.

  We didn't stick around. After shaking Brad's hand, Pop hustled us down to the parking lot without even stopping in to say good-bye to the gift-shop lady.

  I thought he might explode when we got to the RV, like Mama does sometimes: Don't you ever scare me like that again! But his color still wasn't quite right, so maybe he just wanted to forget the whole thing as soon as possible. I took over the parent part while checking Gee's seat belt: “What
were you thinking?”

  He stuck his thumb in his mouth. I knew the answer anyway—once he'd got out on that platform, all those pipes and rails overwhelmed his reasoning power. “One good thing,” I told Pop while moving up to my own seat, “every time he does something like that, it puts the fear of God into him for at least a week.” I couldn't tell if Pop was especially reassured, but when we got back to the highway we were still headed west.

  A couple hours of driving got us to a campground southwest of Wichita that happened to have a pool and a Jacuzzi. Everybody felt better after their preferred water therapy. Pop may even have harbored a little guilt for failing to rescue Gee when he had the chance—whatever the reason, he played Grandpa to the hilt that night. After I helped Gee to write his first postcard, Pop even sat down to play Go Fish with us, but after two rounds he said, “Let's play a real card game.”

  Then he taught us poker: five-card draw and seven-card stud, with matchsticks for money.

  Poker is a lot more fun than Go Fish, let me tell you— especially if you win a few hands. Gee didn't win any, but a couple of times he thought he had. The first time he upset his soda can, and the second time he knocked the dinette table off its stand. “That's it,” Pop said after the table incident. “Time to head for the shed.”

  He said it calmly enough, though, and considering we'd come through the crisis du jour okay, I figured it was looking good to get through this trip with no major disasters.

  Famous last words, as Mama would say.

  Welcome challenges! They will exercise your ingenuity.

  —Kent Clark, etc.

  Next morning, Gee wet the bed again—a delayed reaction to Big Brutus, maybe. Sucking in my first reaction, I scrunched up the sheet and took it along with me to the camp shower, where I threw it on the drain and stomped on it. That helped, and also got the sheet pretty clean, too. When I emerged from the shower, a couple of older girls were standing in front of the mirror doing things to their hair that wouldn't last two seconds in the Kansas wind. One of them asked, “Is that your special blankie?”

  All these new challenges were giving my ingenuity a workout: now I had to figure out how to dry a very wet sheet. Since Pop was ready to hit the road, the best solution seemed to be to tie it—really tight—to the hatch handle at the back of the RV, and let 'er flap. At our first pit stop, I'd scoot back there and take it down before he noticed.

  But when we stopped at a town called Medicine Lodge, the sheet was gone. Wind power really is something.

  I could always buy another sheet, but your average convenience store wasn't likely to stock them alongside the Cheez-Its. And convenience stores were about all this town had to offer, aside from the home of Carry Nation, who used to smash up saloons and liquor bottles with ahatchet. Gee wanted to meet her, until he found out she was dead.

  “That's the problem with a lot of the people we'd like to meet,” Pop remarked as he turned onto the highway heading north. We were getting to the part of the map that showed lots of white space between towns. And the towns were mostly small print, meaning something like Partly, MO: hardly a shopping mecca. Pratt was the nearest bold-print town. Farther west lay Greensburg, with the tiny red letters indicating a special attraction: WORLD'S LARGEST HAND-DUG WELL. That sounded like the kind of thing Pop might stop for … but risky. Imagine explaining to Mama how Gee fell down the world's largest handdug well.

  I glanced up just as a billboard for HISTORIC FRONT STREET flickered by. It was the third or fourth Front Street billboard I'd seen, all showing two guys in Western outfits shooting at each other. Something clicked—I checked the map again, looking for Dodge City. It was definitely bold print, more or less on our way, with tiny red letters to boot: HISTORIC FRONT STREET. That settled it for me. If Dodge City had a Wal-Mart, I wanted to go.

  “So what's the big deal about Dodge City?” I asked after a few minutes.

  “The big deal about Dodge?” Pop repeated. “Didn't you ever watch Gunsmoke on TV?”

  “No.” I munched a cracker, glancing back at Gee. Big Brutus had settled him down, so far. Almost three hours on the road, and he'd just now worked up to playing CarryNation, smashing Cheez-Its on the dinette table with baby carrots. “But I've heard of it.”

  For somebody who didn't watch TV, Pop sure knew his Westerns. For the next thirty miles, he gave me a crash course on the shows that shaped his character while he was growing up: not just Gunsmoke (which wasn't even his favorite), but Bonanza, and Have Gun, Will Travel, and Maverick—the whole subject got him pumped. “Maybe we'll stop at Front Street,” he added. “It's not far out of the way. Of course it's a tourist trap, but the last time I went through, they had a pretty decent gift shop.”

  “Dodge City is a real town, right? Not just a tourist trap?”

  “Sure. A real cow town. Ranchers used to herd their cattle up from Texas and load 'em on railcars in Dodge or Wichita or Abilene. The cowboys could get pretty wild after weeks on the trail, so all those towns needed a tough sheriff to keep order. Like Wyatt Earp—he was the sheriff of Dodge at one time.” (In my opinion, somebody would have to be tough to live up to a name like that.) “There was a TV show about him, too….”

  As usual, Pop was hitting his stride just about when my interest started to slip. He went from lawman to outlaw so many times I couldn't tell one from another, but any cow-and-tourist-town had to have some stores, too. I leaned back and squinted my eyes against the glare, thinking up an excuse to stop at one.

  This part of Kansas was what people mean when they say flat. Even the creeks and ponds were flat, in a way I'd never seen back home. Instead of flowing in ditches orsettling into dips, they just kind of lie there, right on the surface, like glass. We rolled past pale-yellow wheat fields so thick the tractor tracks looked like the squiggles you make with your finger on fur. Two cattle trucks passed us, each with a whiff of rolling feedlot: whoosh, whoosh.

  “Yeah,” Pop said. “It might be fun to see ol' Front Street again. We could get there by two, spend a couple hours, and then look for a campsite. You see any on the map, Ronnie?”

  I folded the map to a square with Dodge City in the middle, and was looking for the little triangle camp symbols, when Gee suddenly let out a yelp, unbuckled his seat belt, and threw himself at the windshield. “LOOK!”

  Pop slammed on the brakes; we slewed to the right and stopped. “Look at that!” Gee yelled, pointing at the long white trailer that had just passed us. It was already too far away to make out the logo on it.

  Pop, both hands on the wheel, was breathing deeply but seemed to be in control. Which was more than you could say for me. I grabbed my little brother by the neck and marched him back toward the dinette table. “If you do that again, I'll… lock you in the bathroom. All you have to do when you see something is stay put and—”

  “But, Ronnie, didn't you see what was on the side of that trailer? It was the Human Cannonball!”

  “I don't care if it was the president! What I'm saying is, stop with the yells and the jumping around while we're on the road. Save it for when we stop. You get my point?”

  My real point was, if he cut short my RV odyssey, I would have a tough time turning a negative into a positive.I tried to get this across by staring at him really hard as Pop restarted the RV. Instead of pulling back onto the highway, though, the vehicle rolled slowly forward and stopped again. After a minute, Pop said, “There's something you don't see every day.”

  I crept forward and stared, trying to figure out what the heck we were looking at. At first glance, it was a long, skinny junkyard stretching for maybe a quarter-mile along the right side of the highway. But the junk was moving. In fact, the junk was shaped and bent and punched and welded into a chorus line of moving parts.

  “Whirligigs,” Pop said. “Somebody's got a lot of time on his hands.”

  Each figure was welded to a steel fence post and mounted about three feet from the ground. There were so many it was hard to concentrate on just one at a ti
me, and they didn't seem to have any overall purpose or plan: chickens, tomatoes, rabbits, cornstalks, all kinds of human-like shapes, with only their busy-ness in common. The wind played them like an orchestra. I rolled the window down to listen: Clank-clank. Whirrrrrr. Buzzzzz.

  “Cool!” Gee yelled, and jumped out the back door. I reached for my own door latch, ready to head him off. Pop caught my eye and shook his head.

  Gee was running up to individual creations, where he'd pause for a second, half-crouched, then imitate whatever it was doing. His arms pumped, his feet stamped, his whole body twirled around.

  There were a few he couldn't imitate even if he wanted to because—well, let me just say they were both politicallyincorrect and anatomically incorrect. The guy who made them didn't seem to like anybody in government. Or out of it.

  Pop slowly opened his door and slid out, taking his camera. I followed, and watched him get close to one of the whirligigs to take a picture. Then he lowered his camera and just looked at Gee. Here was a cutout of a skinny guy in running shorts, legs turning like a pinwheel, and there was Gee, pinwheeling. Here was a crazy chicken with its head bobbing up and down—and there was Gee, bobbing. Pop turned to me. “He can't stop, can he? Any more than they can.”

  I was afraid this would happen. “He's getting better, really. He just got through second grade with no teacher crack-ups.”

  That didn't come out right. I meant that no teachers had insisted Gee be transferred to other classes because they couldn't take it anymore. But Pop just said, “They never understand.” Then he raised his voice to call out, “Gee! Five minutes, and we're back on the road.”

  Dodge City is still a cow town, by the smell of it. We had to crawl right through the middle to reach Historic Front Street, competing with cattle trucks and pickups. Pop was getting grouchy about stoplights and drivers who pulled out in front of him and then drove too slow. Gee was getting antsy and I was about to go back and sit on him when we finally pulled into a parking space. Just ahead of us was a high wooden fence, and between the slats of the fence I could see a row of buildings that looked like “the town” inevery Western movie ever made: General Outfitters. Livery Stable. Long Branch Saloon. “Is this for real?” I asked.