Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

  We finally got to Bud. He made a nice pass over the cabbages, but he must have been watching us instead of the tree line. When he finally saw that mountain of maples he had to swing up sharp to the left. Too steep. Wings lost their air. Went into a stall. Nose down. Plummeted toward the cabbages. I figured he was dead. But Bud was a pro. He rammed the throttle and lowered the elevators on his tail wing. He nosed up and scraped safely over the ground. Unfortunately for him, I was right on his tail. Gus put a shell into the insecticide tank. Dust and tin flew. Bud panicked. Cut the throttle. Yanked his elevators up. Bounced to a landing.

  We drove alongside. “Ace,” said Gus, “we’ve bagged us an airplane!”

  Bud slid out of the Jenny. Hands over his head. He was wearing a cap and goggles not unlike mine. Which I suddenly wished I was wearing. I pulled them from under the seat cushions and put them on. I smiled at poor Bud and wondered if any of those three Germans my father shot down made it to the ground alive?

  “No one ever looked forward to hand-propping a Hisso engine after a cold night in the open, or washing the cow dung from the underside of the wings, or sitting miserably under a wing during a thunder-storm, your raincoat draped over the wooden propeller to keep it from soaking up moisture which could cost you rpms. But we were flyers and the whole vast sky out there belonged to us alone and that was enough.”

  BARNSTORMER EARL C. REED

  Twelve/Descending Like a Dove

  My father not only trained in a Curtiss JN-4. He barnstormed in one for a while. For a few years after the war it was a good way for former dogfighters to make a buck, and more importantly, stay in the sky. The Jenny was too clumsy for combat, but most American flyers had trained in them before shipping overseas to fly French-made Spads and Nieuports. After the Armistice you could get an old Jenny dirt cheap. Flying was still new. Still an adventure. Farm folk would pay as much as twenty bucks for a three-minute ride over their own cow pastures.

  My father barnstormed like that for about a year, all over the Midwest. Finally my mother’s threats of divorce—never seeing his Little Ace again—got him thinking straight and he returned to Columbus for a normal family life as a race-car mechanic.

  Today when I see one of those television programs about people living out in the middle of nowhere being abducted by space aliens, taken up in their saucers, I tend to believe them. Those aliens are nothing but barnstormers, dropping out of the heavens to give earth folks the best three minutes of their lives.

  By the late twenties the barnstorming era was over. Everybody who wanted to go up, had been up. Price of a three-minute ride over a cow pasture fell to a buck or two. Regular passenger service was starting. Airplanes were as common as crows.

  So that Jenny was no stranger to me. My father had told me a thousand times how they flew, what you could do with them in the air and what you couldn’t. I had drawings of them on my bedroom wall. And now I was standing right next to one. It could have been the Jenny my father trained in. Maybe it was the one he barnstormed in. Goddamn it could’ve! Sonofabitch it could’ve! Only about a thousand Jennies had ever been made! So why not?

  Whether it was or wasn’t, Bud Hemphill’s Jenny was in piss-poor condition. Its canvas skin was covered with patches. More than one of its wing struts was cracked and mended with baling wire. The engine had scabs of rust and lots of oil drips. And of course now it was caked with cabbage juice and insecticide. Still it was grand to see.

  I felt Gus’s hand on my shoulder. “Think you could fly it, Ace?”

  “Absolutely,” I bragged, unaware that he meant it.

  “Then let’s do it.”

  My entire body went clammy. “What you saying, Gus?”

  “I’m saying my prayers have been answered! This is my bigger splash, Ace! This is my great idea! This will get me riddled for sure!” He grabbed the top of my head and danced around me like I was a maypole. “We’re going barnstorming, Ace! A-barnstorming-we-shall-go!”

  “Barnstorming?”

  “That’s right. Barnstorming. We’re going to float above Weebawauwau County like hungry buzzards and when we see somebody rich on the ground, we’re going to set down and put our sweet beaks right down their pants pockets.” Gus kept maypoling around me. “I ain’t a religious man, but I truly believe the Almighty sent you to me, Ace! You are my guardian angel! My ticket to the grave!”

  “Ace ain’t no angel,” Clyde said.

  “The hell he ain’t,” Gus said. “The hell he ain’t.”

  So that was Gus’s big idea. And I was all for it. I didn’t dare look into Will’s eyes, of course. I knew what they were telling me: You’ve crossed the line, Ace, gone from unwilling kidnappee to unadulterated criminal. Naturally that wasn’t how I looked at it. What choice did I have? If Gus told me to fly the Jenny, I had to fly the Jenny. If Gus told me to set down and rob people, I had to set down and rob people. What right did Will’s eyes have to judge me? He’d helped unload that milk truck and the Coca-Cola truck and all the rest, hadn’t he? How was this any different? Same thing, only higher in the air!

  “Sure you can fly this thing?” Gus asked me again.

  “Absolutely.”

  I kept my own eyes away from Will’s and crawled in. Gus crawled in the front passenger seat. Bud Hemphill got ready to prop the propeller. I glued my eyes on the instruments, wiped my palms on my pants, adjusted my goggles several times. Then I heard Gus say something that just sucked the blood from my brain: “Say, Clyde! You wouldn’t want to come along, would you? There’s plenty of room up here on my lap.”

  Goddamn. Sonofabitch. Why’d he say that? I didn’t mind risking Gus’s life, or mine, but not Clyde’s.

  In 1942 when I looked up Bud Hemphill, to help me piece together what happened that week, I asked him how Will looked when we took off. “Like a dog left out in a blizzard,” Bud said. “There was why written all over his face.”

  I felt guilty as hell. Kept my eyes looking straight ahead.

  “Can I really go up?” I heard Clyde ask his brother.

  “No, you can’t,” I heard Will say. His voice was like a hammer on an anvil.

  “You keep forgetting who’s in charge here,” I heard Gus say. “Climb in, Clyde.”

  I was still staring at the instruments but I could see Clyde in the corner of my eye, his head sideways, medicine bottle in his hand, climbing up on the wing. I could also make out Will’s arm pulling him by the pantleg. “Let go of my pants,” I heard Clyde snarl.

  I heard Gus laugh and say, “Kick like a mule, Clyde.”

  Clyde did and Will fell back on the ground. I saw Clyde squirm down on Gus’s lap. I opened the fuel shutoff and set the throttle. In a lot of ways flying a Jenny wasn’t much different than driving a T. I gave Bud a nod. He gave the propeller a yank. The Jenny shook to life. I saw Gus point his shotgun toward the ground. “Gladys, honey,” he yelled, “sit on that crazy boy until we’re off the ground.” Bud Hemphill later told me that’s exactly what she did. Sat right on Will’s chest, all the time twirling her little pistol with the kitten on the pink pearl handle.

  “Don’t do it, Ace,” I heard Will yell.

  “Quit squirming,” I heard Gladys yell. “Clyde’ll be fine. It’s not in Gus’s cards to be killed in an airplane crash.”

  “You crash and I’m gonna break your nose, Ace,” I heard Will yell.

  “That sounds fair enough, don’t it, Ace?” I heard Gus yell. “Now let’s fly!”

  “Absolutely!” I advised Gus he’d lose his fine fedora the second we picked up some wind. He gave me an over-the-shoulder thumbs up and tucked his hat under his leg.

  I hadn’t flown before, but I’d been up once. In 1931 when my father took Will and me to the Cleveland Air Races. Because B. F. Goodrich made airplane tires, we all got in free. Dad knew a lot of the pilots from the war and his barnstorming days and we walked up and down the field saying hello and drooling over the machines. One of the flyers my father knew was the famous Dorothy Hester. She was
young. Fairly pretty. She had a smile that lifted you right off the ground. She’s the one who took me up. Will could have gone up with her, too. But Will wasn’t much for heights—I never saw him climb a tree much higher than the second row of limbs—and as I’ve said, he sure wasn’t one for unplanned risks. So he stayed on the ground with my father while Dorothy gave me a grand tour of Cleveland. She even flew me out over the lake where we buzzed an ore boat plowing in from Duluth. I was disappointed she didn’t do her famous outside loop. It was considered aviation’s most dangerous stunt, flying in a vertical circle, like a Ferris wheel high in the sky. Dorothy had set a new world’s record for consecutive outside loops only three months before at the air races in Omaha. I think she did sixty-two of them.

  I fixed my goggles one last time, then let the Jenny roll. Bounced down the length of the cabbage field. It was a typical Indiana day and there wasn’t much wind blowing, but I had to get what wind there was in front of me. I couldn’t believe my own gall. I was really going to do this! I squeezed the throttle open. Let the Jenny gallop through the cabbages. As I gained speed I could feel the wings lift. I raced through the Lord’s Prayer, and then eased back on the stick. Felt my tail sink. Saw the nose raise up. Raced through the Lord’s Prayer a second time. I was up. Climbing. Hopped right over the bridge. Leveled off. Headed straight up the river.

  I knew I was flying too low, no more than two hundred feet. Do something dumb at that height and you’re sucking soil with the worms before you have a chance to correct it. But I just couldn’t make myself ease up any higher. Not with Clyde sitting in front of me. Not with Will being sat on down there. I was controlling the pitch and yaw pretty good, holding the nose and tail steady, but I was having a devil of a time keeping the Jenny from rolling to the left. My feet simply didn’t have a good touch on the rudder bar yet. “Judas Priest!” Gus screamed back at me. “I thought you could fly.”

  “We’re up in the air, aren’t we?”

  “For the time being!”

  “I’ll have the hang of it in a minute,” I said. And I did. After a few bends in the river my hands and feet and mind were in complete agreement. I was flying straight and steady.

  “Now you’re peeling apples,” Gus crowed.

  I was peeling apples!

  When I went to see Clyde in 1946, I didn’t bring up that evening in the Jenny. Just too painful. Considering what it led to. But through all our small talk about the old days in Bennett’s Corners, it was sure on my mind. Why did Gus want Clyde along? Was it just to drive the wedge between Will and me deeper? Was it all wrapped up in Clyde’s unfortunate name? Did having our Clyde along make Gus feel closer to his Clyde, that murdering maniac Clyde Barrow?

  I did talk to Gladys about it when I went to see her in Mingo Junction in 1955. “Which you think it was?” I asked her as we sat drinking coffee in her kitchen.

  “How should I know?” she said.

  We watched another barge struggle up the Ohio.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” she said.

  I wasn’t surprised that Gladys didn’t have much to say about that week in Indiana. None of the people I’ve looked up over the years—Gladys, Bud Hemphill, Sheriff Barnes’s whore ladyfriend, Albert Finley, Pruitt the FBI man, Lloyd Potts—none of them had much of an opinion about why things unraveled the way they did. For example when I asked Bud in 1942 what he thought about me flying off in his Jenny, he just scratched the dandruff off his eyebrows and said, “I didn’t think nothing of it, I guess.”

  Didn’t think nothing of it? How could he think nothing of it? How could any of them have put that week behind them? That week has spooked me my entire life. Even now in my final Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa years it spooks me. Didn’t think nothing of it? Goddamn. Sonofabitch.

  The river wound like a bedspring through woods and pastures and, of course, fields of tall corn. We spotted some boys fishing off a bridge and exchanged waves. Then Gus pointed to a jumble of cars and a big tent. He ordered me to land. I dropped low over the tent, expecting to see an elephant or a camel or something. All I saw was a procession of Baptists marching for the river.

  I’d taken off. And flown. Now I had to land. I flew on up the river a bit, silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer twice. Then I turned for my approach. It looked like a fine flat field and I figured I could set down alongside the tent easy enough. You couldn’t hear them, but I could see by the way the Baptists were swaying that they were singing. I came in steep, like my father taught me. I inched up the elevators on the tail wing and revved the engine. All was going fine. Gus was laughing like the bastard he was. I throttled down. Kept the Jenny’s nose up. Felt the old balloon tires bounce. Trimmed my elevators. I’d done it.

  Gus pointed for me to chase the procession of Baptists.

  With the engine nothing but a mumble, you could hear them singing. “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Their feet were still headed confidently toward the river but their uncertain faces were glued on us. There were about a hundred of them, men and women and kids, all dressed in their Sunday suits and dresses, even though it was a Thursday. At the head of the procession was a preacher walking backwards with an open Bible. Behind him were a dozen or so teenagers carrying their shoes.

  Gus had me follow alongside the procession, a big winged wolf stalking a flock of sheep. We reached the riverbank. Gus shook the wrinkles out of his fedora and before putting it on his head, tipped it generously toward the preacher. “Just watching the Lord’s work,” he called out.

  I was watching one bit of the Lord’s work in particular: a trim, black-haired girl pressing her shoes against her bosom. The procession stopped. The singing stopped. The minister began to read from his Bible. It has since become my favorite verse. I can’t walk past a Bible without looking it up. Without reading it. Without remembering Will Randall and our week together in Indiana. The preacher’s voice was thunderous but sweet: “And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straight-away out of the water. And lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the spirit of God, descending like a dove, and lighting upon him. And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

  Too bad Gus hadn’t seen the Spirit of God that evening. All he saw were wallets and watches and the modest handbags the women carried.

  The preacher took off his shoes and led the soon-to-be-saved teenagers into the brown water. Dunked three or four of them before it was the black-haired girl’s turn. When she came up, her white lacy dress sticking to her like the skin of an angel, I almost popped out of that Jenny’s cockpit like a well-done piece of toast. That’s when Gus produced his shotgun.

  In five minutes every Baptist on the riverbank was standing in the middle of the river, wearing nothing but their underwear, singing hymn after hymn while Clyde and I went through every pocket and handbag, taking up the collection. It was a pretty good haul for a bunch of Indiana Baptists.

  “Maybe it’s the meek who inherit the earth,” Gus said to Clyde. “But it’s the SOBs with the guns who get to spend their money.” He strolled to the water and tapped his toe while the Baptists finished their soggy concert. Then, shotgun over his shoulder, he offered a short sermon: “Very moving, folks. Very moving indeedee. Now before we ascend back into the heavens in our fiery chariot, I’d personally like to thank each and every one of you for this inspiring act of Christian charity. I know good people like yourselves believe in turning the other cheek. But I would appreciate it if at least one of you would turn my heathen ass into your local sheriff. Tell that chickenshit bastard exactly what Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis put you through this fine summer evening. I seem to be having a little trouble getting his attention.” He then told the Baptists that Clyde and I were unwilling kidnappees held against our inclinations. Which made me happy. Maybe Will considered me a criminal, but Gus still didn’t.

  The preacher helped with the propeller. We took off without a hitch, and flew upriver.

  “Ride the breath-taking roller c
oaster. Play the games. Watch the tricks of magic. Visit the place where daring youths dive into tanks and wrestle with alligators.”

  OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Thirteen/Play Ball

  Gus, Clyde, and I were about to drop out of the blue into one of the oddest baseball stories I’ve ever heard. I didn’t realize how odd it was until I returned to Weebawauwau County in ’42. It wasn’t Bud Hemphill who filled me in. It was Millie Macmillan, Sheriff Orville Barnes’s whore ladyfriend, and Albert Finley, the sheriff’s cousin and half owner of the local movie house, the Weebawauwau Palace.

  As I’ve said, I stayed away from Bennett’s Corners and the Randalls after we returned from Indiana. Worked with my father at Goodrich. Parked the Gilbert SXIII in the barn, where it would still be today if lightning hadn’t burned that barn to a crisp in October 1948, the same night, strangely enough, that the Cleveland Indians won the World Series.

  Anyway, when World War II erupted, my dream of sending Huns into the vineyards came back strong. Two days before Christmas 1941, I took a day off work and visited the Army Air Force recruiter in Akron. Told him of my father’s exploits with the Wild Teuton in the first war. Told him I was anxious to join the flyers heading to England, but I’d even consider sending Japanese into the rice paddies, if that’s what my Uncle Sammy needed.

  “How old are you, Ace Gilbert?” the recruiter asked.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Ever flown before?”

  “No,” I said. That was a lie, of course, but I could hardly tell him about that time in Indiana, which nearly sent me to prison.

  The recruiter screwed his face in several directions. Then he smiled. “Ace Gilbert. I’m sending you to cooking school.”

  And so I went to cooking school. After my basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, I was sent to Fort Benjamin Harrison, just outside Indianapolis, to learn how to fly ovens. It was an eight-week school. Halfway through I got a weekend pass and took a bus to Weebawauwau. I found Bud Hemphill easy enough and in five minutes learned everything he knew about our week there in 1934. He told me Sheriff Orville Barnes was dead, but he told me where I could find his whore ladyfriend and his cousin. “If anybody can tell you what Sheriff Barnes did and thunk that week, it’s them two,” Bud said. So from Millie Macmillan and Albert Finley I learned a lot about our week in Indiana. I learned about Sheriff Barnes and the FBI man named Pruitt.