Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

  “Naw, I ain’t ever killed no one. Not that I couldn’t. Not that I wouldn’t if I had a good reason to.” Humility and threat in one answer. That was Gus Gillis.

  “Clyde Barrow killed lots of men,” I said. “The newspapers say for no reason at all.”

  Gus spit on the hatchet blade. “The papers are right on that score. But sometimes you have to look past a man’s faults to see his true greatness. And Clyde Barrow was a great man, Ace, driven to his miserable behavior by a miserable world.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “You bet you suppose,” Gus said. He raised the hatchet high. He looked me square in the face. “What about me, Ace? You think I’m a great man?”

  “I sure do. Absolutely.”

  “You really mean that?”

  Naturally I didn’t really think he was a great man. But I didn’t think he was such a bad man either. Not at that time. Sure he wielded a gun and shot it off more than was necessary. Sure he committed lots of crimes. But they were all low rent. And the way he wanted to die—in a hail of bullets—seemed almost heroic, sacrificial. An imperfect soul voluntary retiring to the nether world. “Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis,” I said. “Greatest lawbreaker of all time.”

  “Thank you, Ace.” He brought the hatchet down. The hen’s head skipped off the block like a tiddlywink.

  “Boy Scouts are on duty throughout the grounds, ready to speed messages, help to find lost children and in any way serve visitors according to the Boy Scout code of courtesy.”

  OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Nineteen/Nobody’s Going Nowhere

  Gus looked up from his ear of corn, butter-soaked niblets stuck all over his face. “What’s the matter, Clyde? You don’t like Lloyd’s cooking?”

  Clyde stopped humming. “I like it fine.”

  Gladys licked the chicken grease off her white fingers. It was ten after six. The Gladys Bartholomew Theater went on in just fifty minutes. Everybody but Lloyd Potts was antsy. “Your ear hurting worse?” Gladys asked Clyde.

  “Hurting like hell,” he said.

  Will was smashing his boiled carrots like they were poisonous spiders. I was watching Gladys’s fingers, wondering what they would taste like in my mouth.

  “He needs his drops,” Gladys said.

  Gus took the untouched chicken thigh off Clyde’s plate. Sucked it to the bone. “You need to put your mind on something else, Clyde.”

  “He needs more drops,” Gladys said. As far as I know they were the first words she had directed at Gus since returning from the cornfield with Will. They were spoken with a coolness I hadn’t heard from her before.

  Gus threw the thigh bone against the wall. “Judas Priest! How many times do I have to apologize for throwing Clyde’s medicine bottle through that propeller? I was nine-tenths unconscious.”

  “He doesn’t need an apology,” Gladys said. “He needs another bottle of drops.”

  Gus threw his ear of corn against the wall. “Where am I supposed to get another bottle of drops? Pick them off a damn cornstalk?”

  Gladys looked in Clyde’s ear. “Is that wax or pus?”

  Lloyd, sitting on Clyde’s other side, pulled him over on his lap. He drilled his little finger into Clyde’s ear. Came out with a yellow glob. He smelled it. “Looks like pus but it’s just mushy wax.” He offered Gladys a smell.

  Gus—whose stomach couldn’t even handle the aroma of roadside coffee—nearly threw up. “I’m trying to eat here.”

  “Then go ahead and eat,” Gladys said. The temperature of her voice was dropping like the first week of January.

  Will came around the table now. He took his brother’s face in his hands. “Jeez, Clyde. The whole side of your head is swollen. We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  Gus threw his boiled potato against the wall. “In case everybody’s forgotten, my life’s riding on tonight’s broadcast.”

  “We haven’t forgotten,” I said.

  “We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” Will said again.

  Gus threw the potato from my plate. “It’s only a earache,” he screamed. “A diddly damn earache!”

  Lloyd moved his plate before Gus could get his hands on his potato. “I had an uncle who died of an earache once.”

  Clyde’s hum took off like a fire engine. “I ain’t gonna die, am I?”

  “Of course you’re not going to die,” Will said. “But we better see a doctor.”

  Gus couldn’t reach Lloyd’s plate. But he could reach the chicken platter. The whole carcass went against the wall. “You put your mind on something else, Clyde, before I put it on something else!”

  “Earache killed my aunt Myrtle, too, I think,” Lloyd said.

  Gladys showed Lloyd the face of Mother God. “Telling us about your dead relatives isn’t helping things, Mr. Potts.”

  Lloyd retreated. “It was some kind of pain in the head that killed her. I was only about five so I can’t remember exactly what her problem was.”

  Clyde went limp in Will’s arms. “I am gonna die, ain’t I?”

  “You’re not going to die,” Will said. His voice was on the precipice of real anger. “We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  Gus reached for his shotgun. “Ain’t nobody going to the doctor until I’m dead.”

  “We should let Will take Clyde,” Gladys said.

  Gus threw a quart-sized Canada Dry bottle against the wall. When that didn’t calm him, he threw his hat. “Gladys! Your big debut is in just a few minutes. You need Will to play all those strangers!”

  “Lloyd can play the strangers.”

  “Lloyd? Nobody’s going to believe Lloyd’s somebody a girl would fall in love with.”

  “Then you can play the strangers,” Gladys said.

  Gus’s head was vibrating. “I can’t lower myself to that! I’m Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis, sponsor of the show! The bastard Sheriff Barnes gets so mad at he can’t wait to kill me! Will and Clyde are staying right here. That’s the end of it!”

  It wasn’t the end of it. Will stood up, serene as a block of granite. “I’m taking Clyde to a doctor. Ace, go start the Gilbert SXIII.”

  Goddamn. Sonofabitch. Was I in a pickle now. I looked at Gus. He was smiling at me, waiting for me to choose sides. Either way I was cooked. If I chose Gus’s side I’d really be crossing the line. Crossing it for good. Turning my back on Will Randall and civilization in general. If I chose Will—which of course is what I wanted to do—I’d be condemning all three of us to certain death. No, Gus hadn’t killed anybody yet, but not three hours earlier he’d stood with that hatchet and hen in his hands and told me he would if he had to. I looked at Will. He looked away. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. I started for the door.

  I was expecting to feel shotgun pellets in my back. Instead I felt a hand on my collar. Gus yanked me back so hard I skidded right across the top of the table, corn and carrots and potatoes and quart-sized bottles of Canada Dry flying.

  Will was the next Christian to volunteer. He put his arm around Clyde and led him toward the door. Gus raised his shotgun. Before I could get off the floor, Gladys grabbed the barrel, put herself between Will and Gus. “Gus, please. We’ll do the broadcast but then you have to let the boys go.”

  Gus pried Gladys’s fingers off his gun barrel. He backed up like she was contagious. “I saw you kissy-facin’ in the corn.” He pointed the gun in Will’s general direction. “Can’t even wait until I’m dead. Can’t even wait until I’m diddly damn dead.”

  Now my hands were on the shotgun and for a few seconds we had a fairly even tug of war going until Gus stomped on my feet. When I let go he kicked me right in my never-tested manhood. As I went down in a ball of black stars I heard the gun boom. I felt a shower of plaster. Gus had killed the ceiling. He swiveled toward the control room window and killed that, too.

  Thirty-four years later, on a patio in Elmhurst, Illinois, I learned that while Gus was going nuts inside WEEB, Sheriff Orville Barnes, Pruitt, and a deputy were outsid
e in the corn, on their bellies, watching with binoculars.

  Pruitt rolled over and drew his pistol when Gus shot the ceiling.

  Sheriff Barnes continued to play with the ladybug on the ground in front of him, bumping it with his fingernail, making it change directions after only a few tiny steps. “Put that government-issued pecker of yours away,” he told Pruitt. “He ain’t shooting at us.”

  “He’s shooting at somebody,” Pruitt said.

  Sheriff Barnes carefully lifted the ladybug and giggled as it skidded down his fingernail. “More than likely at some thing. I’ve been calling around, Pruitt. Gus Gillis seems to like killing doors and windows more than real people. You don’t see any blood flying around in there, do you deputy?”

  The deputy lowered his binoculars and blinked his eyes into focus. “Just a lot of plaster.”

  “See there, Pruitt. Just a lot of plaster. Lloyd and those Ohio boys are safe enough.” The sheriff freed the ladybug. “Let’s go home.” He started crawling through the corn toward his car. Told his deputy to stay. “If anything important happens, let me know. Coming, Pruitt?”

  Pruitt, disgusted, holstered his revolver and followed, growling every time the dry Indiana dirt ground into the knees of his expensive suit pants.

  “I’d invite you to listen to The Gladys Bartholomew Theater with me and Millie,” Sheriff Barnes teased, “but I wouldn’t want you shooting her girls.”

  Pruitt reminded him that prostitution was against the law.

  “No worse than defiling the sidewalk with hopscotch chalk,” the sheriff said. He kept Pruitt crawling much farther than was necessary. “Who do you fear most, Pruitt? God or J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “God, of course.”

  “Not me. Hoover scares the bejesus out of me. Sure there’s a few bastards that need frying, but there’s also a lot of decent saps hanging on the edge of the law only because there’s nothing better. Even some of the bank robbers are decent saps. But Hoover’s bent on pushing them all over the edge. Hell Pruitt, the more of these public enemies you government boys put away, the more elbow room you create for penny-candy losers like this Gus Gillis. Hoover’s the one who scares me. God’s never pushed anyone over the edge in his life, from what I’ve seen.”

  Pruitt was still boiling with contempt when he recounted this conversation to me in 1968. As a decent sap who’d spent the better part of a week on the edge myself, I tended to agree with Sheriff Orville Barnes. That’s when I went into the kitchen and spit in Pruitt’s omelet.

  Having had a run-in with one of Hoover’s field men—that idiot Pruitt—I was always interested in what J. Edgar was up to. In the forties I read about all the Nazis he was chasing down. In the fifties all the communists he was chasing down. In the sixties all the Negroes and hippies he was chasing down. Except for the Nazis, all decent saps. When he died in May 1972, I was generally happy about it. But when the word got out that Hoover might have been a homosexual—all that stuff about him and Clyde Tolson, his number two man who ate dinner with him every night and went away on vacation with him, went to Broadway shows together and all that—I felt some sympathy. Will Randall and I would have been lifelong buddies like that. What would people have said about us?

  I met Will within a week of our moving from Columbus to the Stony Hill Road farm. My mother inherited the place from her uncle, a wifeless loner. The farm looked it. The barn was in better shape than the house. My father wasn’t keen about moving there, but it was a free farm and his low-paying race-car job didn’t give him much leverage with my mother. So on a Monday in June 1928, six days after I turned twelve, we moved up to the Stony Hill Road farm. On his first day looking for work Dad came home with the foreman’s job at B. F. Goodrich. The stock market crash was still more than a year away and jobs were easy—especially for someone who’d flown and raced with the Wild Teuton. Dad was as conversant in tires as anybody.

  My first two days on the farm were fun enough. Exploring the barn. Chasing the chickens and hogs we’d inherited. Hiking the fields and woods. But after a couple days I started missing Columbus and my Columbus friends. I was happy as Christmas when Dad woke me up Saturday morning and said we were driving up to Bennett’s Corners for groceries and gas.

  It was my first trip to the Corners. I wasn’t expecting Columbus but I was expecting a real town. “Isn’t much, is it?” I said. Dad agreed. But mother said it was all we needed. We dropped her off in front of Ruby & Rudy’s and then pulled down to Randall’s garage. Will’s father came out and pumped gas into our brand-new Plymouth. He was friendly and talkative. He sent me inside for a free bottle of Coca-Cola. There was Will, sitting on the floor in the corner, reading some tiny brown book.

  I fished a bottle from the cooler. Will’s blinky eyes were watching over the top of his book. “The man out front said I could have a free bottle,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I was stealing.

  Will slid his back up the wall and walked over. “You a Boy Scout?”

  Now was that an insult? On the hard streets of Columbus, Ohio, being called a Boy Scout was the same as being called a goody-goody. I was something of a goody-goody—a boy with a mother like mine couldn’t help but be a little spongy—but I didn’t want to be called one. Didn’t want to be called a Boy Scout either. “Not especially,” I answered.

  “I am,” Will said. “Troop 203.”

  I fished another Coca-Cola from the cooler and offered it to him. “No thanks,” he said. “Only customers get free Cokes.” I felt guilty now. So I took a nickel from my pants and bought him one. After a few sips he started laughing. “This is dumb, ain’t it?” he said. “The son of a total stranger drinking a free Coke while the son of the owner drinks a paid-for Coke—paid for by the son of the stranger.” Nothing made Will laugh harder than the ironic twists of everyday life.

  Those Cokes cemented our friendship. By the middle of July, I was spending nights at the Randalls’ and Will was spending nights with us. We spent most of our time hanging around the Corners. I fell in love with the place. We played catch on the ballfield and volunteered as bat boys when the Bennett’s Corners’ team played some other corner’s team. We mowed the church lawn and played in the cemetery. We sat in front of the garage and counted passing cars. In August I joined Troop 203. In September we went off to seventh grade together, taking the school bus all the way to Brunswick, five and one-third miles away.

  Until I moved to Bennett’s Corners, Will’s best friend had been Lindsay Blum. He was a heavyset kid with bugged eyes. Thyroid I think. For a while that first summer Lindsay hung around with us. He was nice enough, except he knew a lot less than he thought he did and he let off a lot of gas. I started calling him Ass Eyes. By the time school started Lindsay saw the handwriting on the wall and drifted off to find other friends.

  Now it was just Will and me. He kept me from flunking too many tests, and I kept him from being roughed up by the eighth grade boys. Not that I ever had to fight any of them. Just knowing I was from Columbus kept them in line. Little did they know I was a goody-goody. I moved up quickly in Troop 203, within three months becoming a First Class scout just like Will. Will’s father was scoutmaster. He took us on great hikes. Took us canoeing at Hinckley Lake. One summer he took us to a big three-state roundup at Niagara Falls.

  Will’s caution and my reckless adventure made for an exciting but safe friendship. After our scouting trip to Niagara Falls, Will’s caution kept me from going over the Hinckley Lake dam in a leaky barrel. My knack for adventure saw to it we were the only Bennett’s Corners boys who ever saw a circus midget take a leak in a camel’s water pail.

  Boy, we were friends!

  Will took it upon himself to educate me long before he got the World’s Fair bug. We’d sit at night on the gravestones at the cemetery or under the bridge over Healy Creek and he’d pontificate for hours. Pontificate on everything. For example, he’d pontificate on religion: “The Bible is half bunk and half true,” he’d say. “The hard part is figuring
out which half is which and then living your life accordingly.”

  He’d pontificate on the mysteries of becoming an adult: “Don’t spend a second worrying about what kind of adult you’re going to wind up, Ace. There’s no such thing as adults. No such thing as kids either. There’s just people with different age bodies. The reason so-called adults are in charge of everything is because they’ve lived long enough to figure this out, and they keep it a secret from those who haven’t yet, so they can rule the roost.”

  He’d pontificate on politics: “People say they hate politics, just like they say they hate fighting and killing. In reality people love all three. They love to see somebody weak get the snot kicked out of them, whether it’s with a gun or a fist or a ballot. Makes them feel good to know they’re not the only losers on the planet. And they’re all for a winner, until the winner actually wins. Then they turn on him like a mouse on cheese. Franklin Roosevelt’s a one-termer, you just watch.”

  He’d pontificate on death: “Reverend Sprung’s assurances about eternal life aside, I try not to think about dying. You’ve seen dead cats rot away to nothing on the road? I’m afraid that’s exactly what God’s got in store for us. Just be content with the one life you know you’ve got—make all you can out of it—and let the Almighty worry about what does or doesn’t come next.”

  He’d pontificate on money: “I think a fella ought to have as much as he can legally get. But you shouldn’t try too hard to get it. Look at my parents, Ace. My mother is always mad at the big money she hasn’t got her hands on yet while my father is happy as a clam with the little money he has. When my body’s older I’m going to take money more seriously than my father does, but not much.”

  Most of all he’d pontificate on the future: “If you’re not prepared, the future will eat you alive. That’s why we’re going to the Chicago World’s Fair. So we don’t get eaten alive by the future.”

  I did my share of pontificating, too, usually about sex: “No, Will, I can’t imagine what it feels like, or exactly how you get the deed done. And I don’t want to know either. I plan to go into it green and savor it as I learn.”