Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

  “Gus Gillis.”

  The sheriff stopped his top. Sourly gave it another spin. “And how does such a busy government man know about Gus Gillis?”

  Pruitt told him what he’d heard on the WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down. The sheriff was delighted. “Those Harmony Heavers are the best jug band in Indiana. Headed for big things.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Pruitt said. “About Gillis—”

  Sheriff Barnes blew on the top to keep it going. “I’ve seen rinky-dinky crooks like this Gus Gillis before. It’s usually best to wait them out. Sooner or later they move on to somebody else’s county.”

  “He’s apparently kidnapped three boys from Ohio. That’s a federal offense.”

  “Do we know for sure they’re from Ohio?”

  “Kidnapping anybody from anywhere is a federal offense,” Pruitt said. He snatched the top and squeezed it. “These are difficult times. Murderers. Thieves. Communists. Union organizers. Defilers of every stripe. Sheriff Barnes, we have responsibilities as officers of the law, no matter how dangerous.”

  The sheriff pushed his chair back. Walked to the door. Retrieved the darts and counted off ten paces. He let the darts fly. All but one struck the bull’s-eye. “That’s the second time in fourteen hours I’ve been called a coward.”

  The sheriff’s marksmanship tempered the government man a bit. “I didn’t say that, sir.”

  “I’m not a coward, Pruitt. Not a hero either. Gus Gillis is crazy as a bedbug. You heard what he did. Those poor Baptists. Almost ruined my ballgame. He wants to die, Pruitt! You gotta be careful with a guy who wants to die.” He collected the darts. Paced off ten.

  “You are going after him?” Pruitt asked.

  “I suppose I might have to.”

  “When?”

  One by one the darts speared the bull’s-eye. “When I’m ready. Not when he’s ready. Not when you’re ready. When I’m ready. To be honest with you, Pruitt, I’m interested to see what he comes up with next. He’s got quite an imagination. Want to give these darts a try?”

  I heard about this first meeting between Sheriff Orville Barnes and Pruitt three times. When Pruitt himself told it to me in 1968, he made the sheriff sound like the biggest fool in America. You can guess who came off the fool when Millie Macmillan and Albert Finley told it to me in 1942. The sheriff and Pruitt were both fools as far as I’m concerned.

  CHOCOLATE PUDDING FOR 1000 MEN

  78 eggs

  26 lbs. sugar

  13 lbs. corn starch

  4 7/8 oz. vanilla

  22 3/4 qts. cold milk

  9 3/4 lbs. cocoa

  65 qts. water

  4 7/8 oz. salt

  Dissolve corn starch in cold milk, add beaten eggs. Dissolve sugar and salt in heated (not boiling) water. Add water to milk/corn starch/eggs mixture. Add cocoa and vanilla and stir until pudding thickens.

  FROM THE RECIPES OF A WWII

  ARMY AIR FORCE MESS SERGEANT

  Eighteen/Outfoxed by a Hen

  Lloyd Potts had been looking forward to his usual one-man, post-Hoe Down feast. Now he had company. The chicken and vegetables boiling away in his control room pot had to be split six ways. Gus ate both drumsticks and half the potatoes.

  Gus and Gladys slept together on Lloyd’s bed in the control room. Lloyd slept with us on the studio floor. In the morning Lloyd started to make a pot of coffee. Gus made him stop. Told him just the smell of it retched his guts. So we all drank warm Canada Dry ginger ale. Lloyd had cases of it. “I’m not real fond of it,” he told us, “but the bottler in Fort Wayne sponsors both the local farm report and Harmonica Sal’s Wednesday Night Wingding. I get four free cases a week.”

  Will shivered. “Jeez. I hope we’re not still here next Wednesday.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gus assured him. “I’ll be dead long before Wednesday. You’ve got my word on it.”

  It was already Saturday. Had our pilgrimage gone as planned, we’d be spending our last morning at the World’s Fair before driving home, racing like thirsty dogs through the last few exhibits we hadn’t seen yet. Our heads would be filled with all the wondrous things mankind had accomplished since the Creation, or would accomplish just as soon as FDR got the depression by the throat. We’d be smart as whips. Ready for the glorious future. But here we were at WEEB. Dumb as when we left Bennett’s Corners.

  Lloyd got his morning record show underway at seven. Some of those scratchy 78s he played must have been ten years old. Songs like “Barney Google” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “Don’t Bring Lulu” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” While the records played Lloyd made us French toast, the bread, he said, courtesy of the Logansport Bakery, proud makers of Tippecanoe Rye, sponsors of the Reverend Donald Aylesworth’s Hour of Reflection. “What day’s that on?” Will asked.

  “Tomorrow morning at six,” Lloyd said.

  “Judas Priest,” Gus moaned, running his finger around the inner lip of the maple syrup jug. “I pray Sheriff Barnes riddles me before I have to sit through that.”

  After breakfast Gus and Gladys and Lloyd went to work, planning that evening’s broadcast. Gus had a brilliant plan: We were going to perform Gladys’s Daphne Darnell scripts. All three of them: “The Dashing Stranger,” “The Handsome Hobo,” and “The Saintly Soldier.” During the commercial breaks, Gus would harangue the sheriff. “Between Gladys’s lilting voice rousing his manly juices and my nonstop badgering getting his dander up, I’ll have that checkered-shirt cowboy out here before the Reverend Aylesworth crawls out of bed.”

  “You don’t have to say checkered-shirt cowboy when we’re off the air,” Lloyd told him.

  “I know, but I don’t want to slip up later. I don’t mean you or your fine station any harm, Lloyd, only myself.”

  Lloyd appreciated that.

  So while Lloyd and Gladys and Gus planned, Will and I listened to the scratchy 78s and Clyde’s humming. Clyde was getting louder by the hour. He was waxing up for sure. He needed more drops.

  “Tonight’s broadcast is bound to work,” I told Will. “That means Gus’ll be dead sometime tomorrow morning and we’ll be on our way home. We can’t make it home before church, but we’ll be in time to have Clyde rested for school on Monday. We can just turn the Gilbert SXIII around and fly straight to Chicago. Spend all the time at the World’s Fair we want.”

  Will brightened. “Jeez. You think so?”

  “Absolutely. We haven’t spent hardly any of that money hidden in your underwear.”

  “I don’t think Mother will go for it.”

  “We’re men now, Will. Once we get out from under Gus’s claws we can do anything we want.”

  “We can, can’t we!”

  “Absolutely. Why, with Gus dead, Gladys will be free to go with us if she wants. Imagine spending a week in Chicago with her. I bet she’ll let both of us give her a poke.”

  Will pulled out his guidebook and started reading. His way of telling me I’d crossed another line. Apparently he’d claimed all impossible dreams about bagging Gladys for himself.

  The French toast was good. Lloyd loved to cook as much as he loved to eat. It was still eight years before the Army Air Force sent me to cooking school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, and I’d never seen a man who loved to cook before. He stood in front of his stove directing those sizzling pieces of egg-soaked Tippecanoe Rye with his spatula like a maestro guiding a cello section through “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

  I still have my recipes from the war. They’re in the box under my bed. Lloyd went through a dozen eggs making French toast for six. For a thousand airmen you need six hundred eggs; plus 250 one-pound loaves of bread, sixty gallons of condensed milk, sixty gallons of water, ten pounds of sugar, pound and a half of salt. I did some real cooking in England. Everything I made was for a thousand men. Cooking big like that is what made my first two civilian restaurant ventures so popular, overgenerous portions. My hamburgers stuck out from the bun like the brim of an Amishman’s hat; I stacked my French fries
up like cord wood; my chili always came with free refills; my frozen custard cones leaned like the Tower of Pisa; I let the hot fudge pour like rainwater. The truth is, my portions killed me as much as the secret sauces and speedy service of the franchise chains. I’d learned my lesson by the time I opened the Clam Shack on Pine Island. My customers only got what I could afford to give them. They don’t let you cook here at Sparrow Hill. Can’t even have a goddamn microwave. Sonofabitch.

  Every meal I cooked in England I made as big and rich as possible. Most of those airmen were never going home. I wish the Sparrow Hill cook thought that way. None of us are going home either.

  At noon Lloyd delivered the Weebawauwau News. Usually that meant birth and death notices and ticket information for potluck suppers, but Gus made him report on our holdups, both on the ground and from the air. Made him advertise that evening’s special broadcast. We ate cheese sandwiches for lunch, the cheese courtesy of the Willow Farm Dairy, sponsors of Thursday Night Remedies with Dr. Woodruff Claypool. “Don’t worry,” Gus assured everybody, “I’ll be long dead before the doctor shows up for his show.”

  Lloyd played 78s all afternoon. Some of the records wobbled as well as scratched. Supper was looming. Gus sent me outside to behead the last hen in Lloyd’s chicken yard. A shipment of thirty new hens was due Monday, Lloyd told us, payment from the Big Brook Chicken Farm for a month’s worth of free advertising on the Suppertime Serenade.

  I’d never beheaded a hen before. We had plenty of chickens on our Stony Hill Road farm. Hens past their egg-laying prime and extra roosters always ended up on the table. But my mother always did the beheading. She was good at it. Good at cornering them. Good at grabbing their legs out from under them. Good at holding them breast down on the block so they couldn’t flop. Good with the hatchet. One whack almost always did the trick.

  I’d watched my mother behead chickens dozens of time. If I could fly an airplane without having flown before, I was sure I could manage that hen in Lloyd Potts’s chicken yard. “Sure you can handle it OK?” Lloyd asked as he handed me his hatchet.

  “Absolutely.”

  Lloyd’s chicken yard wasn’t much. Odds-and-ends lumber covered with rusty chicken wire. My first mistake was taking the hatchet inside with me. That hen, the last of a month’s worth of dinners, had seen that hatchet in action twenty-nine times before.

  I locked the door behind me—nothing but a wire loop over a nail—and started herding the hen toward the nearest corner. The hen blustered back and forth, chest out, head high, clucking defiantly, eyeing me sideways with annoyance. I closed in, trying to stay calm and unthreatening, the way my mother did it. The hen squeezed into the corner and froze. I slowly bent down. Grabbed. The hen went right over my head. Lost a few of her feathers on the ceiling wire but glided to a safe landing on the other side of the yard. Started pecking the ground for bugs like nothing had happened. I advanced again. Cornered it. Didn’t bend so low this time. Grabbed. The hen went through my legs. Glided to a landing and pecked for bugs. That’s how it went for twenty minutes: corner, grab, glide, peck for bugs. I didn’t dare look to see if anyone was watching from the window. I did see Gladys and Will descending side by side into the cornfield. “Now what’s that all about?” I asked myself. Pretty soon I could hear them ripping ears.

  Sonofabitch. There I was flailing at a goddamn hen while Will was alone in the tall corn with Gladys.

  The sight of those two entering the corn together has spooked me all my life. When I went to see Gladys in Mingo Junction in 1955, I steered our conversation to that afternoon as quickly as I could. “You and Will were in that cornfield a long time.”

  Gladys smiled and watched the river, even though there wasn’t a barge passing at the moment. “He was a nice boy.”

  The way she said that. He was a nice boy. So wistful. Made me feel like a piece of shit. She’d only known Will less than a week, yet I could see she had feelings for him. The same kind of feelings I did. Maybe they didn’t bubble up several times a day and make her ache, haunt her from restaurant to restaurant, haunt her out of her marriage, but she had them nonetheless. “You don’t have to talk about it,” I said.

  She did, though. “I think Gus thought there was something going on between Will and me. Not physical of course. But something in our minds. That’s why he sent us together to pick corn. To see how we acted when we got back. Maybe to see if we ran off together. We saw you chasing that hen and laughed all the way down to the cornfield.”

  The thought of Will laughing at my expense cut me like a butcher knife in the belly. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to leave Mingo Junction that second. Then I shook my head and grinned. “I must have looked like a drunk chimpanzee trying to corner that hen,” I said.

  Of course Will laughed at me. If he was in that chicken yard, I would have laughed at him. We always laughed at each other’s predicaments. That’s how you let a guy know you love him.

  “This corn is going to taste terrible,” Will told Gladys as they picked. “This is sour old field corn. Grown for cows, not people.” Gladys watched as he expertly yanked off the ears. When she tried it the whole stalk pulled out of the ground. “Let me show you how to do that,” Will said. “Quick jerk and a twist. Squeaks right off.”

  Gladys tried again. The stalk still came out.

  “Takes a little practice,” Will said.

  “Tell you what,” Gladys said. “You pick and I’ll carry.” They continued up the row. Will squeaking ears. Gladys’s arms filling up. “You nervous about tonight’s performance?” she asked.

  “Some.”

  “You were good the other day as the Dashing Stranger. You could be a famous radio actor if you put your mind to it.”

  “I don’t think I could ever put my mind to something like that,” he said.

  “You’re very talented. You truly had me believing you were the Dashing Stranger. And not just a bashful boy.”

  Gladys said Will’s head almost disappeared down his collar. His blinky eyes took off like a flock of frightened geese, she said. “How many ears you think we’ll need?” Will said, changing the subject as fast as he could. “Lloyd and Gus are both big eaters.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being bashful,” she told him. “And there’s nothing wrong with being a boy. I wish I had spent a few more years being a girl before I ran off willy-nilly into womanhood. I’m only eighteen you know.”

  Will was as surprised that day in the cornfield as I was twenty-one years later in Mingo Junction. “Only eighteen?” he said.

  “How old did you think I was?” Gladys asked.

  “Jeez. Twenty at least.”

  “I do come off as older, don’t I.”

  “You sure do.”

  “If you’re a good actress, you can be any age you want.”

  “I have enough trouble just being my real age.”

  Gladys was already up to her chin in ears of field corn. “Gus and I haven’t made it any easier.”

  “I don’t blame you for any of this,” Will said. “You’re just along for the ride like the rest of us, from what I can see.”

  She took him by the chin and looked into his eyes. “You’ve got the finest soul I’ve ever seen.”

  Will went scientific on her. “You can’t see a soul.”

  “I can see yours just fine,” she said. She kissed him on the lips.

  Right on the goddamn lips! Sonofabitch! I’d only been kissed on the lips once myself and it sure wasn’t by anybody what looked or smelled or walked with jazz music playing in her head like Gladys Bartholomew.

  Not knowing what to do with the kiss, Will started squeaking off ears like a madman. Gladys stopped him. “We pick any more corn and Gus will know for sure we weren’t up to any good.”

  Halfway through their corn picking, Gus came out to the chicken yard. “Having some trouble, Ace?”

  “I almost had her a couple times,” I said.

  I saw Gus’ eyes drift over the cornfield,
then land on the hen. “Don’t feel bad about being outfoxed by this old hen,” he said. “If she wasn’t wily, she wouldn’t be the last one in the yard.”

  It was one of the smartest things anyone ever said to me. Over the years it has helped me accept life’s sudden surprises and slow inevitabilities. Good as you may be, you sometimes find yourself up against someone—or something—better. Going bust at the R&R Luncheonette wasn’t my fault, it was the Big Boy chain’s fault. The Dairy Doodle’s demise was McDonalds’ fault. Getting too old to run the Clam Shack was God’s fault. So when Gus said that—“If she wasn’t wily, she wouldn’t be the last one in the yard”—my embarrassment floated right through the holes in the chicken wire.

  Gus now entered the ring. He edged sideways toward the hen, so it would think he was really moving in the other direction. His ruse appeared to be working. The hen clucked some but didn’t move. When Gus got within three feet of the hen he stopped and sank slowly down on hinged knees. Zzzzip! His arm shot out like the sticky tongue of a frog. The hen went right over his head. Glided to a stop and started pecking for bugs.

  Gus wasn’t any better at this than me! He tried again. Missed again. He pushed back his fedora and scratched his hair. “Ace,” he said, “you are witnessing here one of the major lessons in life.”

  “What’s that, Gus?”

  “Eating a chicken is a helluva lot easier than catching a chicken.” Another bit of West Virginia wisdom that from time to time has seen me through life’s little surprises. My marriage to Lois Cobb comes to mind.

  Gus and I now went after that hen with all we had. Finally got her, too. Gus carried her out to the block. I handed him the hatchet. “You ever kill anyone?” I asked as he stretched the hen’s neck out. The hen seemed as interested in Gus’s answer as me.