Going to Chicago

by Rob Levandoski

  But that whiskey wouldn’t let him back down. He might have swigged a whole can, slept that off and swigged another. Lost track of time. Lost track of his senses. Maybe the Sunday morning hymns woke him, the scolding voices of earthbound angels vibrating around his feet. Maybe he tried to crawl out across the rafters. He came right down through the lath and plaster. Broke his neck on a pew. Five months later everybody in the country agreed Prohibition was a big mistake and ended it. For years Bennett’s Corners was known as that place where the drunk fell through the church ceiling during Sunday services.

  There was nothing embarrassing about Will’s death. Yes, it was sad and senseless and absolutely preventable. Yet it was a noble death. He died for a good reason. He wanted to see the technological wonders of the modern age, to prepare himself for the glorious future that was sure to bloom just as soon as Franklin Delano Roosevelt figured the depression out. He planned our trip to the Chicago World’s Fair thoroughly. Dreamed it thoroughly. Finally, in August 1934, we started out for Chicago. Odds were we’d get there and back with no trouble at all. Odds were Will would learn exactly what he wanted to learn, and be as ready for the future as anybody alive.

  I’m not saying Will would have done something grand with the things he’d learn. He probably wouldn’t have invented anything. Found the cure to anything. Wouldn’t have built a great corporation. But Will might have become a teacher. I could see that. He might have taught at the high school in Brunswick. Or he might have opened a little business fixing radios and phonographs and eventually television sets.

  I’ve often wondered how Will would have died had Pruitt taken that milkman’s pistol away. He’d talked some about taking night classes at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, so he might have been killed in a car crash returning home half asleep. He might have been killed in the war, though I doubt the Army would have let somebody that smart anywhere near the front. But his ship might have been torpedoed or his barracks bombed or he might have died on some island in the Pacific from malaria. No, I doubt they would have let him get anywhere near a gun. Those blinky eyes and that cautious demeanor.

  He might have died of cancer or a heart attack, the way most people die. He might still be alive, living with me here at Sparrow Hill, reading to me every day out of the National Geographics stacked on the coffee table in the sun room.

  I wonder how my life would have been different had he lived a full life. He might have dragged me off to Baldwin Wallace College with him. When the war broke out, he might have gone with me to that recruiter in Akron, and talked me out of signing up for cooking school. “Hold out,” he would have said. “You were born to fly, Ace.” Of course that might have gotten me killed fifty years too soon, but my life sure would have been different. Infinitely better. More noble. He might have talked me out of opening the R&R Luncheonette. Might have talked me out of marrying Lois Cobb. Even if he didn’t, our marriage might have been different. God knows she wouldn’t have had Will’s ghost in bed with her. We might have had a son and she might even have let me name him Will.

  Even if I had opened the R&R things might have gone differently. Will would have kept me from making mistakes. Kept my hamburgers down to a profitable size. Would I have sold out to that dreamer home from Korea? Would I have opened the Dairy Doodle? Moved to Fort Meyers and opened the Clam Shack? Who can goddamn say? Sonofabitch, all I know is that my life would have gone differently with Will Randall alive.

  When I went to Mingo Junction in 1955 I asked Gladys if she thought her life might have gone differently if Will hadn’t been shot. “Maybe the two of you would have stayed in Chicago and become famous radio stars. You two were something together. The Will and Gladys Show. Darlings of the airwaves. I bet you’d have a television show, on right after Milton Berle. Be rich as skunks, married to each other, living in Beverly Hills.”

  “None of that would have happened,” she said.

  That’s what she said, but I could see the whole scenario playing in her eyes.

  I bet she thinks all the time how her life might have been different if Will had lived, the same way I do. If she’s still alive herself, of course.

  “Millions are Expended. A Magic City Created. Throngs Come. The World Watches. Then It Vanishes.”

  OFFICIAL GUIDE BOOK OF THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Twenty-Six/Freeze, Mr. Iceman

  What do you do when somebody dies in your car? Hell if we knew. So we sat there on the railroad tracks for another hour until the Fair closed for the day and they turned off the lights. Trains went by on other tracks but not ours. I sat there wishing one would. Finally I walked down to the fairgrounds and found a security guard. “I think there’s somebody dead in my car,” I said. I didn’t say “dead in the Gilbert SXIII” or “dead in my airplane.” This was no time for playing.

  The security guard called the Chicago police and they knew what to do. Dead people in cars was nothing new to them. They shined a flashlight in his face and asked me how he died. “Shot in the back,” I said. They weren’t surprised.

  Arrested all of us. Took Will to the morgue and the three of us to a precinct house. Locked us in a holding cell.

  We told them everything, though I did try to portray Gladys as unwilling in the affair as Will, Clyde, and me. They bought it at first but then Pruitt arrived and they took her downtown. Didn’t see her again until 1955 when I went to Mingo Junction. She served three years.

  Not long after Pruitt showed up, Uncle Fritz arrived with Aunt Mary. Mrs. Randall, too. She slapped me several times on the head, then hugged me and cried in my ear. My parents arrived shortly after breakfast. My mother and Mrs. Randall were from the same mold. She slapped me several times in the head, then hugged me and kissed me all over the forehead.

  Mrs. Randall and my mother got into a pretty raw argument, blaming the other for letting us go to the Fair in the first place. My father had nerves of steel—he’d faced down Huns over France and driven race cars at well over a hundred miles an hour—but he couldn’t stand listening to those two women screech at each other. I could hear him grinding the enamel off his teeth. I was figuring any second he’d start slapping them in the head the way they slapped me. Instead he put his arms around them. Will wasn’t my father’s son, but he liked Will and I suppose having dared the gods so much when he was young, he knew I might have been shot just as easily as Will.

  As bad as I felt about Will being dead, I sat in that holding cell feeling the most sorry for Clyde. Only a year earlier his father had died. Now his brother was dead. He was left to tiptoe around his mother all by himself now. He was destined to have a hard life. And he did. All through high school he was chained to that Shell station. Chained to his mother’s sorrow and Southam sourness. Mrs. Randall has been dead for years now. Still every time Clyde picks me up for pancakes, he’s got that edgy look in his eyes, as if he’s expecting to hear his mother’s voice boom through the clouds at any second: “Clyde! Clyde Randall!”

  Clyde being thirteen was home free. Pruitt, however, wanted me sent back to Weebawauwau County to face charges; the relish with which I flew Bud Hemphill’s old Jenny was evidence in Pruitt’s mind I wasn’t all that unwilling a kidnappee. But Bud wasn’t interested in pressing charges. Neither were the Baptists. Sheriff Orville Barnes sure didn’t want his county to incur the cost of trying me, or jailing me. So they let me go, too.

  Gladys didn’t get off so lucky. Sheriff Barnes wasn’t interested in trying her, but several other Indiana counties were. I heard that various county prosecutors drew straws to see which got the honor. Howard County won. Kokomo is the county seat. Home of the Kokomo School of the Performing Arts, where Gus stole those Daphne Darnell scripts for her.

  I almost had to go to Kokomo myself, to testify against Gladys. A week before I was to board the westbound train the Kokomo police called and said Gladys had confessed to everything. In the weeks before her trial not one newspaper had written a story about her exciting life on the lam with Gus Gillis—not even t
he newspaper in Steubenville, right up the road from Mingo Junction. Not one radio station had offered her an acting job—not even WEEB, where the owner, Lloyd Potts, knew her talents well. Her dream was as dead as Gus and Will. Now she just wanted to get that embarrassing summer behind her. Serve her time. Get on with whatever life had in store.

  I didn’t get any of this from Gladys. She wouldn’t say word one about her weeks in the Howard County Jail or her three years in the state women’s prison. I got it from Pruitt, in 1968, when I visited him at his bungalow in Elmhurst. He’d kept track of her. Just as he’d kept track of me. He kept track of all the criminals he encountered. Thousands of them. Had a row of file cabinets in his basement, next to his Ping-Pong table. We played three games. I won all three. By big scores.

  Mrs. Randall bought Will an inexpensive casket. She and Clyde took him home on the train. Uncle Fritz drove the tow truck back. Aunt Mary followed in their Chevrolet. My mother expected me to drive back to Bennett’s Corners with them, in the Plymouth. But I wasn’t going to leave the Gilbert SXIII in Chicago! One wing missing or not! My father saw it my way. “I had a hard time leaving my Spad in France after the Armistice,” he told my mother.

  “Don’t you think this is a little different?” she said.

  “Not any different at all,” he said.

  So I was permitted to drive home alone in the Gilbert SXIII. My parents drove me to the police impoundment lot, then headed home. Will’s maps and spiral notebook were still tucked under the front seat, so I wouldn’t have any trouble finding my way. Will’s camera was also under the seat. I had all the film developed, but not until 1940. The pictures all came out fine. I found Gladys’s radio scripts in the backseat. One had a few drops of Will’s blood and all of them smelled of earwax.

  It wasn’t easy flying the Gilbert SXIII with only one wing. It drifted left all the way home. It didn’t have the same dangerous, gravel-skimming bounce either. Half the time my propeller didn’t spin at all. But this drive wasn’t about adventure. It wasn’t about pretending I was thousands of feet in the air. It was about getting home, putting that damn Model T in the barn, and burying my head under my pillow.

  I followed U.S. 41 down the curve of Lake Michigan, through Whiting, East Chicago, and Hammond. In Gary I found U.S. 20, the road that brought us across Indiana and most of Ohio. I drove along the lake to Michigan City, where Will’s Aunt Mary would move after the fear of an H-bomb falling on Valparaiso killed her Fritz. I drove through Trail City and Springville and Rolling Prairie. I saw the melon farm coming up. The farmer was on the porch, reading his newspaper. I throttled down to stop. I intended to tell him how his green melons cost Will Randall his life. But I didn’t. I throttled up and flew by. For several miles I gave serious consideration to turning around. I’d just race up his lawn and drive right through his melon pile, then continue on. Didn’t do that either.

  I reached Bootjack and left the Central Time Zone behind me. I flew through New Carlisle, South Bend, Elkhart, Shipshewana, Lagrange, Plato, Brushy Prairie, Angola, and Ellis. Crossed into Ohio. I was hungry but I didn’t stop to eat. Didn’t even buy a candy bar or a Coke when I stopped to gas up. I flew through Columbia and Ainger, Alvordton, Fayette, Oak Shade, Assumption, Caragher. I passed the sign pointing north toward Toledo, remembering all the “Holy Toledo” jokes Will and I made. When I crossed the Maumee River I remembered the dumb “I want my Maumee” joke Will had told. I laughed and cried at the same time. Doing both at once gave me the hiccups. They lasted through Perrysburg and Lime City, Stony Ridge and Lemoyne.

  Woodville. Hessville. Fremont. Great Creek. Clyde. Boy, I’d had my fill of that name. Clyde Barrow. Clyde Randall. Clyde, Ohio. There were lots of Clydes back then—even J. Edgar Hoover’s best friend’s was named Clyde, Clyde Tolson. That name’s totally out of style today and I hope I’m long dead if or when it ever comes back in style.

  After Clyde I flew through Bellevue, Monroeville, East Townsend, Wakeman, Kipton, and Oberlin. Outside Elyria I eased onto Route 82 for the last leg of my flight home. It was late in the afternoon. The sun was behind me. There were rain clouds to the north, drifting my way, but it never rained. I don’t think it rained more than two or three times that entire summer. Eaton. Copopa. Strongsville, right past the spot where the Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa now sits. It was just another cornfield in 1934. I drove down U.S. 42, past the field where twenty years later they’d build that Big Boy. I turned left on Drake Road. Turned right on Hunt Road. Followed it right to Bennett’s Corners. I went by Randall’s garage as fast as I could, full throttle, in high speed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the tow truck sitting in front of the pumps.

  Just this past Thursday they brought in bulldozers to push down Randall’s old brick garage and the wonderful two-story frame building where Ruby and Rudy Zuduski had their store and where I for a time operated the R&R Luncheonette. The buildings had to go so they could widen Townline Road, so all the new people moving to Bennett’s Corners can get to work on time through that crazy six-way, pie-slice intersection. When Clyde came to pick me up for pancakes he asked if I wanted to go watch the bulldozers do their work. I said I didn’t.

  I flew up Townline Road, past the cemetery where Will’s father was buried. Where Will Randall would be buried in a day or two. I turned left on Babcock Road. Flew past Marty Boyle without running him into the ditch or shooting him with my imaginary machine gun. Turned right on Stony Hill Road. Flew all the way to our farm. My parents had pulled in just an hour earlier. The hood of the Plymouth was still hissing. There was bug guts and bird shit all over the windshield. I pulled the Gilbert SXIII into the barn. Covered it with a tarp. There it rotted until lightning burned it to a crisp in October 1948, the same night the Cleveland Indians won the World Series.

  I went inside and buried my head under my pillow just like I’d planned all the way from Chicago. But I didn’t keep it there very long. My mother started frying ham and eggs. I hadn’t eaten all day. Father went to bed early. He’d missed one day of work and he couldn’t miss another. Mother and I listened to the radio for a while. I made sure we kept the dial away from any Chicago stations.

  The next day I walked in the woods and looked for arrowheads in the cornfields. Found a bottom half. The point was either broken off by a plow or by the hard bones of a bear several thousands years before. The next day was Will’s funeral. I didn’t want to go.

  “Of course you have to go,” my father said. “You were his best friend.”

  “I am his best friend,” I said. “And that’s why I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see him in a box. I don’t want to see them lower him into the ground.”

  “Death is a part of life,” my mother said.

  “Not a part of mine,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned Will finally won one of those magazine contests he’s always entering, and he won a long trip to England, and he’s over there looking at old castles.”

  I remember telling my parents that because when I won my trip to England in 1942, I remembered what I’d said to them every time I passed an old castle, which was about every ten minutes. On one weekend pass I took the train down to London. The hotel where I stayed was hit by a buzz bomb when I was taking a tour of the Tower of London with my Negro buddies from the mess hall. The Tower of London isn’t one tower, by the way, it’s a whole castle full of towers where all sorts of crazy Englishmen lost their heads.

  Gus Gillis didn’t exactly lose his head, but his head finally did him in, just three hours after Will died in the backseat of the Gilbert SXIII. Pruitt told me all about it in 1968. It was the only thing Pruitt told me that made me laugh. Pruitt never let go of a criminal once they crossed paths. He brought up Gus’s file from the basement.

  Before that Negro couple could get his shotgun or the Baptist money in his pockets, Gus came to. He shot the ceiling several times, robbed them, and then staggered northward up the street, nose broken, lip bloody, reeking of pickle brine. He made it all the way t
o the fancy part of town, where a jeweler, taking rings and watches out of the window for the night, chased him away with a fancy revolver. He then tried to rob some newsboys shooting craps in an alley. They kicked his shins raw, pushed him into a stack of garbage cans, and went on with their game.

  Gus apparently limped up the alley until he saw an iceman climbing the back stairs of a brownstone with a forty-pound block of ice in his tongs. Gus raised his shotgun. “Freeze right there, Mr. Iceman,” he said.

  The iceman kept climbing. This was Chicago. Gus staggered to the base of the stairs and fired straight up. The startled iceman dropped his tongs. Forty pounds of Lake Michigan ice tumbled two stories to the top of Gus Gillis’s head. The ice and Gus’s skull did the same thing. Shattered.

  It’s hard for me to sympathize with Gus Gillis’ life of crime. He robbed me of the best friend I ever had, after all. But given what Gladys told me about Gus when I visited her in Mingo Junction, I think I can understand why his life unraveled like it did. He was too smart but not smart enough. He knew he could never make it through teacher’s college the way his father had, but he also knew he was too smart to spend thirty years in a West Virginia coal mine. Out of high school he moonshined with his uncle and worked a while for the county fixing mountain roads that washed out. But the inadequacies of his mother’s bloodline, and the pride inherited through his father’s, echoed back at him continuously from the mountainsides, battering his soul to a pulp. One day he drove across the Ohio River to Mingo Junction and robbed the Bartholomews’ grocery of the day’s receipts.

  Gustavus P. Gillis didn’t get the hail of bullets he wanted. But he got what he deserved.

  Looking back on my life, I’ve gotten pretty much what I deserved, too.