The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  “I can’t see without my glasses,” he would say to me at length. “How many fingers have I got here?”

  “Five, Grandpa.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he’d say. “Thought I might have lost one.” Then he’d go off to find a bandage or piece of rag.

  At some point in the afternoon, my grandmother would put her head out the back door and say, “Dad, I need you to go uptown and get me some rutabaga.” She always called him Dad, even though he had a wonderful name and he wasn’t her father. I could never understand that. She always needed him to get rutabaga. I never understood that either since I don’t remember any of us ever being served it. Maybe it was a code word for prophylactics or something.

  Going uptown was a treat. It was only a quarter of a mile or so, but we always drove, sitting on the high bench seat of my grandfather’s Chevy, which made you feel slightly regal. Uptown in Winfield meant Main Street, a two-block stretch of retail tranquillity sporting a post office, two banks, a couple of filling stations, a tavern, a newspaper office, two small grocers, a pool hall, and a variety store.

  The last stop on every shopping trip was a corner grocer’s called Benteco’s, where they had a screen door that kerboinged and bammed in a deeply satisfying manner, and made every entrance a kind of occasion. At Benteco’s I was always allowed to select two bottles of Nehi brand pop—one for dinner, one for afterward when we were playing cards or watching Bilko *12 or Jack Benny on TV. Nehi was the pop of small towns—I don’t know why—and it had the intensest flavor and most vivid colors of any products yet cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. It came in six select flavors—grape, strawberry, orange, cherry, lime-lemon (never “lemon-lime”), and root beer—but each was so potently flavorful that it made your eyes water like an untended sprinkler, and so sharply carbonated that it was like swallowing a thousand tiny razor blades. It was wonderful.

  The Nehi at Benteco’s was kept in a large, blue, very chilly cooler, like a chest freezer, in which the bottles hung by their necks in rows. To get to a particular bottle usually required a great deal of complicated maneuvering, transferring bottles out of one row and into another in order to get the last bottle of grape, say. (Grape was the one flavor that could actually make you hallucinate; I once saw to the edge of the universe while drinking grape Nehi.) The process was great fun if it was you that was doing the selecting (especially on a hot day when you could bask in the cooler’s moist chilled air) and a torment if you had to wait on some other kid.

  The other thing I did a lot in Winfield was watch TV. My grandparents had the best chair for watching television—a beige leatherette recliner that was part fairground ride, part captain’s seat from a space ship, and all comfort. It was a thing of supreme beauty and utility. When you pulled the lever you were thrust—flung—into a deep recline mode. It was nearly impossible to get up again, but it didn’t matter because you were so sublimely comfortable that you didn’t want to move. You just lay there and watched the TV through splayed feet.

  My grandparents could get seven stations on their set—we could only get three in Des Moines—but only by turning the roof aerial, which was manipulated by means of a crank on the outside back wall of the house. So if you wanted to watch, say, KTVO from Ottumwa, my grandfather had to go out and turn the crank slightly one way, and if you wanted WOC from the Quad Cities he turned it another, and KWWI in Waterloo another way still, in each case responding to instructions shouted through a window. If it was windy or there was a lot of solar activity, he sometimes had to go out eight or nine times during a program. If it was one of my grandmother’s treasured shows, like As the World Turns or Queen for a Day, he generally just stayed out there in case an airplane flew over and made everything lapse into distressing waviness at a critical moment. He was the most patient man who ever lived.

  I watched a lot of television in those days. We all did. By 1955, the average American child had watched five thousand hours of television, up from zero hours five years earlier. My favorite programs were, in no particular order, Zorro, Bilko, Jack Benny, Dobie Gillis, Love That Bob, Sea Hunt, I Led Three Lives, Circus Boy, Sugarfoot, M Squad, Dragnet, Father Knows Best, The Millionaire, Gunsmoke, Robin Hood, The Untouchables, What’s My Line?, I’ve Got a Secret, Route 66, Topper, and 77 Sunset Strip, but really I would watch anything.

  My favorite of all was The Burns and Allen Show starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. I was completely enchanted with it because I loved the characters and their names—Blanche Morton, Harry Von Zell—and because George Burns and Gracie Allen were, in my view, the funniest double act ever. George had a deadpan manner and Gracie always got the wrong end of every stick. George had a television in his den on which he could watch what his neighbors were up to without their knowing it, which I thought was just a brilliant notion and one that fed many a private fantasy, and he often stepped out of the production to talk directly to the audience about what was going on. The whole thing was years ahead of its time. I’ve never met another human being who even remembers it, much less doted on it.

  NEARLY EVERY SUMMER EVENING just before six o’clock we would walk uptown (all movement toward the center was known as going uptown) to some shady church lawn and take part in a vast potluck supper, presided over by armies of immense, chuckling women who had arms and necks that sagged in an impossible manner, like really wet clothes. They were all named Mabel and they all suffered greatly from the heat, though they never complained and never stopped chuckling and being happy. They spent their lives shooing flies from food with spatulas (setting their old arms a-wobbling in a hypnotizing manner), blowing wisps of stray hair out of their faces, and making sure that no human being within fifty yards failed to have a heaped paper plate of hearty but deeply odd food—and dinners in the 1950s, let me say, were odd indeed. The main courses at these potluck events nearly always consisted of a range of meat loafs, each about the size of a V-8 engine, all of them glazed and studded with a breathtaking array of improbable ingredients from which they drew their names—Peanut Brittle ’n’ Cheez Whiz Upside-Down Spam Loaf and that sort of thing. Nearly all of them had at least one “ ’n’ ” and an “upside down” in their names somewhere. There would be perhaps twenty of these. The driving notion seemed to be that no dish could be too sweet or too strange and that all foods automatically became superior when upended.

  “Hey, Dwayne, come over here and try some of this Spiced Liver ’n’ Candy Corn Upside-Down Casserole,” one of the Mabels would say. “Mabel made it. It’s delicious.”

  “Upside down?” Dwayne would remark with a dry look that indicated a quip was coming. “What happened—she drop it?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe she did,” Mabel would reply, chuckling. “You want chocolate gravy with that or biscuit gravy or peanut butter ’n’ niblets gravy?”

  “Hey, how about a little of all three?”

  “You got it!”

  The main dishes were complemented by a table of brightly colored Jell-Os, the state fruit, each containing further imaginative components—marshmallows, pretzels, fruit chunks, Rice Krispies, Fritos corn chips, whatever would maintain its integrity in suspension—and you had to take some of each of these, too, though of course you wanted to because it all looked so tasty. Then came at least two big tables carrying tubs and platters of buttery mashed potatoes, baked beans and bacon, creamed vegetables, deviled eggs, corn breads, muffins, heavy-duty biscuits, and a dozen types of coleslaw. By the time all these were loaded onto your paper plate, it weighed twelve pounds and looked, as my father once described it, distinctly postoperative. But there was no resisting the insistent blandishments of the many Mabels.

  Everyone for miles came to the suppers. It didn’t matter what the denomination of the church was. Everybody came. Everyone in town was practically Methodist anyway, even the Catholics. (My grandparents, for the record, were Lutherans.) It wasn’t about religion; it was about sociable eating in bulk.

  “N
ow don’t forget to leave room for dessert,” one of the Mabels would say as you staggered off with your plate, but you didn’t have to be reminded of that for the desserts were fabulous and celebrated, the best part of all. They were essentially the same dishes, but with the meat removed.

  On the few nights when we weren’t at a church social, we had enormous meals at my grandparents’ house, often on a table carried out to the lawn. (It seemed important to people in those days to share dinner with as many insects as possible.) Uncle Dee would be there, of course, burping away, and Uncle Jack from Wapello, who was notable for never managing to finish a sentence.

  “I tell you what they ought to do,” Uncle Jack would say in the midst of a lively discussion, and someone else more assertive would interject a comment and nobody would ever hear what Jack thought. “Well, if you ask me,” he’d say, but nobody ever did. Mostly they sat around talking about surgical removals and medical conditions—goiters and gallstones, lumbago, sciatica, water on the knee—that don’t seem to exist much anymore. They always seemed so old to me, and slow, so glad to sit down.

  But they sure were good-natured. If we had a guest from beyond the usual family circle somebody would always bring out the dribble glass and offer the guest a drink. The dribble glass was the funniest thing I had ever seen. It was a fancy-looking, many-faceted drinking glass—exactly the sort of glass that you would give to an honored guest—that appeared to be perfectly normal, and indeed was perfectly normal, so long as you didn’t tilt it. But cut into the facets were tiny, undetectable slits, ingeniously angled so that each time the glass was inclined to the mouth a good portion of the contents dribbled out in a steady run onto the victim’s chest.

  There was something indescribably joyous about watching an innocent, unaware person repeatedly staining him- or herself with cranberry juice or cherry Kool-Aid (it was always something vividly colored) while twelve people looked on with soberly composed expressions. Eventually, feeling the seepage, the victim would look down and cry, “Oh, my golly!” and everyone would burst out laughing.

  I never knew a single victim to get angry or dismayed when they discovered the prank. Their best white shirt would be ruined, they would look as if they had been knifed in the chest, and they would laugh till their eyes streamed. God, but Iowans were happy souls.

  WINFIELD ALWAYS HAD more interesting weather than elsewhere. It was hotter, colder, windier, noisier, sultrier, more punishing and emphatic than weather elsewhere. Even when the weather wasn’t actually doing anything, when it was just muggy and limp and still on an August afternoon, it was more muggy and limp than anywhere else you have ever been, and so still that you could hear a clock ticking in a house across the street.

  Because Iowa is flat and my grandparents lived on the very edge of town, you could see everything meteorological long before it got there. Storms of towering majesty often lit the western skies for two or three hours before the first drops of rain fell in Winfield. They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.

  The greatest fury in Iowa—in the Midwest—is tornadoes. Tornadoes are not often seen because they tend to be fleeting and localized and often they come at night, so you lie in bed listening to a wild frenzy outside knowing that a tornado’s tail could dip down at any moment and blow you and your cozy tranquillity to pieces. Once my grandparents were in bed when they heard a great roaring, like a billion hornets as my grandfather described it, going right past their house. My grandfather got up and peered out the bedroom window but couldn’t see a thing and went back to bed. Almost at once the noise receded.

  In the morning, he stepped outside to fetch in the newspaper and was surprised to find his car standing in the open air. He was sure he had put it away as usual the night before. Then he realized he had put the car away, but the garage was gone. The car was standing on its concrete floor. It didn’t have a scratch on it. Nothing of the garage was ever seen again. Looking closer, he discovered a track of destruction running along one side of the house. A bed of shrubs that had stood against the house, in front of the bedroom window, had been obliterated utterly, and he realized that the blackness he had peered into the night before was a wall of tornado passing on the other side of the glass an inch or two beyond his nose.

  Just once I saw a tornado when I was growing up. It was moving across the distant horizon from right to left, like a killer apostrophe. It was about ten miles off and therefore comparatively safe. Even so it was unimaginably powerful. The sky everywhere was wildly, unnaturally dark and heavy and low, and every wisp of cloud in it, from every point in the compass, was being sucked into the central vortex as if being pulled into a black hole. It was like being present at the end of the world. The wind, steady and intense, felt oddly as if it was not pushing from behind, but pulling from the front, like the insistent draw of a magnet. You had to fight not to be pulled forward. All that energy was being focused on a single finger of whirring destruction. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was killing people as it went.

  For a minute or two the tornado paused in its progress and seemed to stand on one spot.

  “That could mean it’s coming toward us,” my father remarked to my grandfather.

  I took this to mean that we would all now get in our cars and drive like hell in a contrary direction. That was the option I planned to vote for if anyone asked for a show of hands.

  But my grandfather merely said, “Yup. Could be,” and looked completely undisturbed.

  “Ever seen a tornado up close, Billy?” my father said to me, smiling weirdly.

  I stared at him in amazement. Of course not and I didn’t want to. This business of not ever being frightened of anything was easily the most frightening thing about adults in the fifties.

  “What do we do if it’s coming this way?” I asked in a pained manner, knowing I was not going to enjoy the answer.

  “Well, that’s a good question, Billy, because it’s very easy to flee from one tornado and drive straight into another. Do you know, more people die trying to get out of the way of tornadoes than from any other cause?” He turned to my grandfather. “Do you remember Bud and Mabel Weidermeyer?”

  My grandfather nodded with a touch of vigor, as if to say, Who could forget it? “They should have known better than to try to outrun a tornado on foot,” my grandfather said. “Especially with Bud’s wooden leg.”

  “Did they ever find that leg?”

  “Nope. Never found Mabel either. You know, I think it’s moving again.”

  He indicated the tornado and we all watched closely. After a few moments it became apparent that it had indeed resumed its stately march to the east. It wasn’t coming toward us after all. Very soon after that, it lifted from the ground and returned into the black clouds above it, as if being withdrawn. Almost at once the wind dropped. My father and grandfather went back in the house looking slightly disappointed.

  The next day we drove over and had a look at where it had gone and there was devastation everywhere—trees and power lines down, barns blown to splinters, houses half vanished. Six people died in the neighboring county. I expect none of them were worried about the tornado either.

  WHAT I PARTICULARLY REMEMBER of Winfield is the coldness of the winters. My grandparents were very frugal with the heat in their house and tended to turn it all but off at night, so that the house never warmed up except in the kitchen when a big meal was being cooked, like at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when it took on a wonderful steamy warmth. But otherwise it was like living in an Arctic hut. The upstairs of their house was a single long room, which could be divided into two by a pull-across curtain. It had no heating at all and the coldest linoleum floor in history. But there was one place even colder: the sleeping porch. The sleeping porch was a slightly rickety, loosely enclosed porch on the back of the house that was only notionally separate from the outside world. It contained an ancient sa
gging bed that my grandfather slept in in the summer when the house was uncomfortably warm. But sometimes in the winter when the house was full of guests it was pressed into service, too.

  The only heat the sleeping porch contained was that of any human being who happened to be out there. It couldn’t have been more than one or two degrees warmer than the world outside—and outside was perishing. So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss.

  Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen. You had no choice but to stay totally immobilized. It was a strange and oddly wonderful experience—to be poised so delicately between rapture and torment.

  It was the serenest, most peaceful place on earth. The view from the sleeping porch through the big broad window at the foot of the bed was across empty dark fields to a town called Swedesburg, named for the nationality of its founders, and known more informally as Snooseville from the pinches of tobacco that the locals used to pack into their mouths as they went about their business. Snoose was a homemade mixture of tobacco and salt which was kept embedded between cheek and gum where the nicotine could be slowly and steadily absorbed. It was topped up hourly and kept in permanently. Some people, my father told me, even put in a fresh wad at bedtime.