Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

  “Twenty-five,” Gus ordered.

  Five at a time our speed dropped, all the way to five miles an hour. The distance between us and the sheriff’s caravan never changed. The sheriff was having the time of his life. He sat in his big official car, gold star glimmering on the door, deputy driving, sipping coffee from his Thermos, eating cookies, giggling like a girl being tickled, as the chase got slower and slower.

  Every time I see a chase scene on television, cars roaring at a hundred, screeching corners, just missing trucks, smashing crates conveniently stacked on the sidewalk, flipping on their roofs and twirling, I think of that morning in Indiana; Gus squirming in frustration, Sheriff Orville Barnes in cold pursuit at five miles an hour.

  “Slow down some more,” Gus ordered. “We’re almost getting away.” Too late. We passed a sign that said JASPER COUNTY LINE. SPEED STRICTLY ENFORCED. Behind us cars and trucks were backing up and turning around, heading back to Weebawauwau Center. The sheriff’s game was finally over. He’d won. He knew all along he would. Because he always did.

  I stopped the Gilbert SXIII. “I suppose you want me to go back?”

  Gus’s face was low and sour. “Wouldn’t do any good.”

  I looked back at Will. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Just looking straight ahead. Eyes blinking once every three seconds. I looked at Gladys. She was trying to keep her disappointment off her face. “This Jasper County looks nice,” she said to Gus. “Maybe you’d have better luck getting riddled here.”

  Gus played with his nose and his lips and scratched the stubble on his chin. “No I wouldn’t. One Indiana county is as bad as the next.” He got out and took a leak in the ditch. Came back rejuvenated. Philosophical. “I’m just too bad to get killed in Indiana. They couldn’t kill Dillinger in Indiana. Had to wait until he was in Chicago. That’s where we’re going, Gladys. Going to Chicago. Should have went there right from Mingo Junction. But I guess a man has to pay his dues. Well, mine are paid full.”

  We dug out Will’s maps and charted a course to Chicago. We had no idea what road we were on at the moment. But it had to be close to U.S. 231, which would take us nearly to U.S. 41, a clean shot into the city. I warned him about the Negro section on the south side, an area Will’s Uncle Fritz said we should avoid, but Gus said he wasn’t afraid of Negroes, not even a million Negroes, and we flew off.

  We stopped once to steal gas. Gus stole us cold Cokes and Hostess cupcakes. As the miles ticked away he made plans: We’d pull some easy stickups in the city, maybe go right down a block, hitting every store. That would give us enough money to pay a backalley doctor to dig the bullet out of Will’s back. Then after a day or two holed up in some flophouse, we’d head downtown, robbing banks and maybe the World’s Fair itself. He expected that to make Will happy. Will just sat and blinked.

  We flew through North Marion and Aix and Kersay. We saw a sign pointing toward Valparaiso, thirteen miles away. We went in the other direction through Hebron and Leroy, all sorts of little places, some of them official and some not.

  Good thing I didn’t know it was the milkman who shot Will. I’d have run him down in that cornfield if I had. I could have, easy, given the beating Uncle Fritz gave him. I thought about finding that bastard when I returned to Weebawauwau in ’42. But I knew it wouldn’t be smart. I’d been through basic training and I knew how to dispatch men in foreign uniform with nothing but my bare hands.

  I might have dispatched Orville Barnes, too. But he was already dead in ’42. His heart gave out riding Millie Macmillan. He hadn’t deserved such a pleasurable death. He’d played a cruel game with us. Especially after Will was shot. Goddamn. Sonofabitch. He knew Will was shot. He knew we weren’t really part of Gus’s gang. We were unwilling kidnapees, three innocent boys from an unofficial place in Ohio. He should have obliged Gus with the hail of bullets he wanted. He should have rescued us. It wasn’t a game.

  Nothing’s a game.

  Pruitt tried to have the sheriff charged with malfeasance in office. But J. Edgar Hoover, as much as he loathed local lawmen like Orville Barnes, needed their goodwill. There were killers and communists loose in the land, bums who’d lost their farms and factory jobs and all respect for the Constitution of the United States. Pruitt sat there on his patio in Elmhurst, thirty-four years later, making all sorts of excuses for that milkman, but he made no excuses for Sheriff Barnes. He despised him. So much he threw an ashtray into his azalea bushes when I brought up his name. Frightened the goldfinches off their feeder. He told a couple secrets he’d never told anyone: The next election he sent a campaign contribution to Barnes’s opponent; a big contribution, too, a month’s pay; Barnes still won, in a landslide, wearing a checkered shirt and cowboy hat, but Pruitt said it still made him feel better. He also drove down to Weebawauwau for Barnes’s funeral in 1939. He paid the grave diggers twenty bucks apiece to let him urinate on the casket as they lowered it into the clay. That made him feel better, too. As Pruitt told me this he chewed on his omelet, my saliva mixing with his. A communion of mutual distaste.

  “Should you gasp with amazement as, with the coming of night, millions of lights flash skyward a symphony of illumination, reflect again that it is progress speaking with exultant voice of up-to-the-second advancement.”

  OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Twenty-Five/Bathed in Rainbows

  Somewhere along U.S. 41 we got lost. I don’t know how many times we crossed the Calumet River. Or how many times we shoelaced back and forth across the Illinois state line. We were tangled helplessly in Chicago’s lower intestines. It was flatter than Indiana, swampy, smoky, and oily. You could lick rust right out of the air. We passed refineries and steel mills and chemical plants and patches of small wooden houses. Cars and trucks sat right on the roadway where they’d died. We saw lots of loose cats and dogs. Lots of loose men, too, some with their hands on lunch pails, lots with nothing on their hands but time.

  We stopped for a while along the river. We stretched Will out on a blanket. Only one of his hands was working. He used it to put drops in Clyde’s ear. The river reeked of dead fish. The sandy bank reeked of wild onions. We reeked of sweat. We drank Cokes and ate dozens of Hostess cupcakes. Everybody tried to sleep but nobody could. We were too tired. After a few hours we eased Will back in the Gilbert SXIII and resumed our search for U.S. 41.

  We never found it again. What we did find were Negroes. More Negroes than I, in my ignorant youth, thought existed in the entire world. Uncle Fritz had warned us to skirt that part of town, and I’d warned Gus. But there we were, no more than two hours before dark, up to our necks in Negroes. Ten years later in England I’d be around Negroes most of the day; cooking side by side with them, at night sitting with them on the barracks steps passing a precious American cigarette back and forth; sometimes sharing sips of precious American beer; talking about our families and the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees and what was on the menu for tomorrow. The first woman I would ever have sex with would be half a Negro. But in 1934 my life was entirely white and rural and excruciatingly Methodist. All those Negroes terrified me. “I’ve never seen so many Negroes,” I said.

  “There are a lot of them all right,” Gus said. “And look at all these pretty little Negro stores, one right after the other. Pull it over, Ace.”

  I kept flying. “Don’t you think we should take Will to a doctor first? Or a hospital? I bet Chicago has lots of hospitals.”

  Gus watched the little Negro stores blur by. “We will, Ace, I promise. Once we get some of this Negro cash in our pockets.”

  I knew he was making excuses. “We’ve got plenty of cash from those Baptists,” I said.

  “Not enough for Chicago,” he said. “You need lots of cash in a city like this. Now please pull over.”

  I was watching Will in my rearview mirror. He was still staring and blinking, as if solving some terrible arithmetic problem in his head. “He doesn’t look very good.”

  Gus looked at me like I was
crazy. “He’s been shot. How good can he look? But he’s gonna be OK. I had a brother get bit by a rattler and he looked that way for nearly two weeks. Then all of sudden he got up and started dancing.”

  We flew past a prosperous little grocery with baskets of fruit and vegetables stacked on the sidewalk. Gus pointed his shotgun in my general direction. I stopped. The street was lousy with Negroes, some just hanging out, some on their way to someplace important. Gus and I jumped out. “Come on, Gladys,” he said, “I’ll steal you whatever you want.”

  She didn’t budge.

  “Come on, sweetie pie. Clyde can watch Will.”

  She didn’t budge again.

  Gus’s hillbilly voice twanged up a full octave. “Ain’t you coming?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” she said.

  Up another octave. “Well, I’m planning on it.” He grabbed her arm and yanked her, right over the top of the door. He raised his hand to slap her but didn’t. The three of us went inside. It looked just like Ruby & Rudy’s. Smelled the same. Pickles and bananas, peanuts and dust. We strolled toward the counter, Gus’s shotgun hidden behind his back, the floor squeaking. Behind the counter stood a middle-aged Negro couple. Except for their skin they looked just like the Zuduskis, smart and clean, all business. The man even wore wire-rimmed glasses like Rudy’s.

  Gus swung his shotgun over his shoulder. Didn’t stop walking until his belt buckle was rubbing against the counter. “Evening folks. I’m Gus Gillis. Professional stickup man. The Weebawauwau Warrior they call me.” He took off his fedora and extended it upside down. “Kindly put your green right in there.”

  The Negro Ruby and Rudy couple didn’t budge.

  Gus’s smile went weak. “I was hoping we might complete our transaction without me taking this gun off my shoulder.”

  Two fists the color of dark Dutch chocolate, a left from the man, a right from the woman, plowed into Gus’s pink face. Gus went over like a bowling pin. His head cracked on the floor. His shotgun exploded, killing the pickle barrel. Green brine washed over the floor. Gus’s suitcoat soaked it up like a sponge.

  Gladys bent down and wiggled his broken nose. “You all right?”

  He was out. I took her arm and lifted her. “It wasn’t a hail of bullets,” I said, “but it’s close enough.” I tried to pull her toward the door but her feet were nailed to the floor with indecision. “Come on,” I said. “You’re free now. We’re all free.”

  She unnailed her feet. We backed out, arm in arm. “Sorry about the pickles,” I said to the Negro couple. “He’s got plenty of Baptist money in his pockets you can have for the damages.”

  Gladys cranked the Gilbert SXIII and got in next to me. We flew off. We never saw Gus Gillis again, though we did learn two days later when we were sitting in a precinct holding cell that he was dead. Not from those dark Dutch chocolate fists. He died a much more embarrassing death than that. Even more embarrassing than Will’s father’s death.

  The setting sun was on our left. That meant we were heading north. Buildings were getting bigger. A lot bigger. There were more and more white people on the sidewalk. Pretty soon no Negroes at all. “He’s acting funny,” I heard Clyde say.

  Will wasn’t blinking anymore. His breaths were long and noisy. I saw a bubble of blood on his lip. “We’re going to get you to a hospital right now,” I said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Absolutely fine.”

  We were suddenly downtown. The streets were clogged with cars and people and noise. The cars weren’t moving very fast, but the people sure were. Even a line of tattered men in front of a soup kitchen was moving fast. A traffic cop made me take a right. Another made me turn left. We were now on Michigan Avenue. I remembered from Will’s maps that Michigan was Chicago’s main north-south spine. Somewhere to our right was the World’s Fair. Will was breathing like a punctured accordion. More blood was bubbling on his lip. “Hold on,” I said. “We’ll find a hospital any minute now.”

  “Take me to the World’s Fair, Ace,” Will said.

  My steering wheel was slippery with sweat. “You’re talking out of your mind. I bet there’s a hospital right up here, after this next stoplight.”

  “I want to go to the World’s Fair, Ace.”

  “I can’t take you to the Fair, Will.”

  “Ace.”

  “I can’t, Will.”

  Will’s voice was drifting. “I’ve got to show Gladys the Transparent Man,” he said. “She thinks he’s real. But he’s just made out of plastic. Someday everything will be made out of plastic.”

  “Well, you’re not made out of plastic,” I said. “I’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  “Ace!”

  I was crying and I could hear Gladys and Clyde crying, too. The traffic was terrible. The light wouldn’t change. It just hung there over the intersection, electric blood.

  “Take him to the Fair,” I heard Gladys say.

  “Take him,” I heard Clyde say.

  Goddamn. Sonofabitch. The light finally changed and I made a right, knocking off one of my stubby wings on a light pole. “All right, we’ll go to the World’s Fair,” I yelled. “But I’m not spending all night in the Hall of Science, that’s for damn sure.”

  “You’ll want to when you see it,” Will said. “It’s 240 feet long, sixty feet wide with a ceiling fifty-seven feet high, packed with everything you’d ever want to know about mathematics, geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine.”

  Gladys asked him if the Transparent Man was in the Hall of Science.

  “Sure is,” he said. “So is the Clock of the Ages. It’s got a ten-foot dial that compresses two billion years of the earth’s history into one four-minute revolution. Mankind doesn’t appear until the last second or two.”

  The downtown gave way to a broad swath of railroad tracks. On the other side, looking like a huge Christmas tree lying on its side along the endless indigo lake, against an endless black eastern sky, lights and ornaments of every color, skyride cables strung through the air like garlands, sat the Chicago Word’s Fair. We were spellbound. I pulled right up on the railroad tracks and stopped. Will mumbled “Jeez” a dozen times in a row.

  I’d been looking at the photographs of the World’s Fair in Will’s guidebook for more than a year. Tiny black and white pictures. This was real. This was immense. This was in color. Bright colors. Audacious colors. Wanton colors. Bright blues. Bright greens. Bright reds. Bright oranges. Bright yellows. Hues that would make a good Methodist look away. And the buildings. Audacious shapes. Wanton shapes. Some as ornate as old parlor chairs. Some as plain as cereal boxes. All huge. Bathed in rainbows of light. Castles where only Martians could live. Flags by the hundreds, some as big as our barn on Stony Hill Road, flapped in the steady lake wind. Fountains rising and falling. Searchlights slashing like giant swords.

  Thousands of people, tiny as bugs, were moving in and out of these buildings, in and out of the rainbow lights. Their collective feet and mouths made the air shake. Scores of songs were playing at once. Exotic smells were butting heads.

  We just looked and listened and smelled. I remember thinking that we were as far from Bennett’s Corners as anyone could get. Clyde began reading the huge words splattered all over the huge buildings: SEARS, ROEBUCK AND COMPANY; FIRESTONE; TIME; VALVOLINE MOTOR OIL; GENERAL MOTORS; FORD; CHRYSLER; reassuring words; words everybody knew in their heart; knew in their soul; knew would eventually save us from the depression.

  “There’s that big dinosaur,” Gladys said. “It looks alive just like you said.”

  “It isn’t though,” Will answered.

  We looked and listened and smelled some more. “We made it, Will,” I said. “The technological wonders of the modern age, smack dab in front of us.”

  Will didn’t answer me. Will was dead.

  His father had died only thirteen months earlier. Both should have lived a lot longer.

  Will’s father had survived the dogfights over France. Survived the wild Atlantic
Ocean, going and coming. Survived barnstorming and racing cars. But he couldn’t survive his weakness for bootleg whiskey. He couldn’t survive hundred-year-old lath and plaster.

  Just five months before Prohibition ended in December 1933, a Model A filled with gallon tin cans of bootleg sped down Townline Road, more than likely on its way to some illegal drinking establishment in Cleveland. It was a rainy black night and the driver didn’t know the stone steps of the Methodist church came right down to the gravel road. The A’s front left wheel hit the bottom step. It flipped and skidded across the road on its roof, right onto the community ballfield. Driver crawled out and ran. In the morning they found all that green whiskey. They emptied the cans into the ditch. Rudy Zuduski supplied a box of stick matches. The ditch burned all day.

  Two days later Will’s father disappeared. Two days after that, halfway through the Sunday sermon, the church ceiling caved in. Will’s father, gallon tin cradled in his arms, came down headfirst. Broke his neck on the back of a pew. Two rows in front of where Will and Clyde and Mrs. Randall were sitting, praying for his return.

  It was an embarrassing way for a man to die. Especially a good family man like Will’s father. A good man who gave away free Cokes and candy bars and always had something friendly to say. A good man who bought the shirts and caps the Bennett’s Corners baseball team wore. He was scoutmaster of Troop 203. Took us camping all the way to Niagara Falls. He performed the church’s janitorial chores free of charge. A man with only one weakness. A weakness God said was unconscionable. A weakness the government said was unconstitutional.

  Apparently Will’s father heard that Model A flip in the night and went out to investigate. I suppose he looked inside and saw those shiny cans. He probably had a key to the church on his belt. He only took three cans and hid them in the church attic, figuring that when he was alone dusting under the pews, he’d sneak up and take a few swigs.