The Hunt

by William Diehl

  “I don’t believe this,” he said. “We fought side by side with some of these boys, Frank.”

  “I know, I know,” Keegan had answered, trying to regain some semblance of composure. “Let’s get out of here, Jocko.”

  They had gone back to the hotel, slept fitfully and left before dawn for the two-day drive back to Boston. By the first light of dawn, the main highway leading from Washington had looked like the aftermath of Gettysburg or Atlanta. Women, children, tattered men, confused and lost, straggling like robots along the two-lane blacktop highway, a vagabond population with no place to live, nothing to eat and no hope in their tortured eyes on an aimless pilgrimage to nowhere, for they had no homes to return to. Under every bridge and beside every railroad crossing were ragged Hoovervilles, tent cities filled with decent men who rode the rails from one desperate camp to the next in search of hope; men who had lost faith in their institutions, the banks, the manufacturers, the insurance companies, their leaders.

  They stopped for gas and Keegan had bought a morning paper, hoping to get the same sense of the tragic sweep of the night’s events that once he had gotten from Bert Rudman’s story of Belleau Wood, yearning to know what misguided insanity had sent an army against these men who had once faced death for their flag. But the stories were fragmented, inconclusive, inaccurate. On the front page, Hoover praised MacArthur for “delivering us from the siege of Washington” and later in the story:

  “Beware the crowd—it destroys, it consumes, it hates—but it never builds.”

  Keegan crushed the paper and threw it on the floor.

  “When we got to New York we drove up to Roosevelt’s campaign headquarters and I wrote him a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn’t just that, it was a lot of things, that just brought it all to a head. Anyway, a week later I left and I’ve been here ever since.” He- stopped for a moment, watching a group of swans paddling down the estuary toward them.

  “And now you miss it and you want to go home,” she said. “You have not given up on America. Some of us have not given up on Germany either.”

  He nodded slowly. “You made your point,” he said. “But Jen, you have to go on living. People still fall in love and get married, have kids. Hitler can’t stop that. Politics and love don’t have anything to do with each other. That’s oil and water. Sure, things are bad, that’s even more reason to get out. Marry me, darling. Come to America. Give it a chance. When things settle down here, we’ll come back.”

  “I love you desperately,” she stammered, “but I. . . I..

  She stopped, trying to sort out all the threads of the dilemma, and sensing her dismay he reached up and laid his hand on her cheek.

  “Hey,” he said tenderly, “forget it for now. Look at the swans.”

  The swans moved slowly past, drifting aimlessly with the current.

  “Did you know the only time swans titter a sound is when they’re making love and when they die?”

  “Oh, you made that up,” she said.

  “Absolutely true,” he said, placing his hand over his heart. “That’s why they call a dying man’s last words his swan song.”

  She laid her hand on his chest and fear flickered momentarily across her face. He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips, soft and full, parted slowly and her tongue caressed his lower lip.

  “Never fear,” he whispered. “There’ll be no swan songs for us.

  Spring came early that year, bringing with it relief from the winter snows, much-needed rain and honey-sweet prairie winds which urged the first sprouts of corn and wheat above the ground and promised that 1934, like the five years before it, would be a fertile and prosperous year. Once the land of the Delaware and Potawatomi Indians, the central plains of Indiana were extremely fertile, abounding in lush produce and hogs the size of ponies, of which the Hoosiers were justifiably proud. This was the sweet land of Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley, a land settled by Scottish, Irish and German descendants who only begrudgingly acknowledged that Cole Porter, writer of “dirty” songs for blue Broadway shows, was also from the Hoosier State.

  There was a small billboard on Route 36 that read: “Drew City, Indiana. Founded 1846. Home of 2,162 happy people,” under which someone had painted “and one old grouch.” A signpost a hundred feet past it had arrows pointing northwest toward Chicago, one hundred and forty miles away, to South Bend, eighty-one miles north, and Indianapolis, seventy-two miles to the south.

  Drew City was a typical mid-American town, located on the southeast bank of the Wabash River, along the route of the Illinois Central Railroad, and proud of its heritage—the Battle of Tippecanoe having been fought near Lafayette, twenty or so miles away. The town was surrounded by miles of fertile, sweeping fields of yellow wheat, head-high stalks of juicy corn and the sweetest tomatoes in the country, if you listened to the farmers talk on Saturdays in front of Jason’s hardware store or in the park across the street from the courthouse where they congregated to trade lies and gossip once a week. There were four churches in town, which was about a third Catholic, the rest being Lutheran, Episcopal and Presbyterian. There were two Jewish families, no colored people and a small community of Mennonites a few miles east of town.

  The main drag, called Broadway although it was barely two lanes wide, was actually Highway 36. The streets were paved for three blocks on either side of the main street, and there was a small park at the edge of town on the bank of the river with a baseball diamond maintained by the Masons, half a dozen cooking fireplaces, and several wooden tables. The Illinois Central was located on the far side of the river, crossing a bridge to the outskirts west of town. Neither isolated nor along the main traffic routes, it was a prosperous town for the times, for while it had felt the sting of the Depression, there had been five or six years of good harvest and the town’s two industries, a machine mill and switching station for the Illinois Central, and a shoe factory, had both survived the ravages of the Depression relatively intact.

  There was nothing quaint or unique about Drew City. It was a plain American small town, a town of stucco, brick and wood, of galvanized iron rooftops, cornices and Victorian parapets, squatting in the flatlands of northern Indiana, distinguished only by its citizens who had the same ailments, problems and minor victories as folks in any other town of its size. The business section was actually only two blocks long. There were stores on the first floors of the two-story brick buildings and above them, professional offices. Dr. Kimberly, the family doctor, was over the Dairy Foods and Dr. Hincrafter, the dentist, was across the street over Brophy’s Dry Goods Shoppe. The town lawyer, William Horton, who drank a lot, was over Aaron Moore’s Drug Emporium, his sign reading “W. B. Horton, Atty at Law,” and on the line under it “Wills—Divorces—Complaints.” Horton’s office was perfectly placed since he started each day in Aaron’s drugstore, hunched over one of the tiny round tables in the front of the store by the soda fountain, nursing his hangover with a B-C fizz chased with black coffee.

  The town had its share of ne’er-do-wells, alcoholics and eccentrics but it had escaped the collapse in morals and the increase in alcoholics and gambling brought on by the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. When the Literary Digest reported that seven out of every ten people, evenly divided as to sex, had relations prior to marriage, it was a shock to the nervous system of the town and a subject to be discussed in whispers in Mildred Constantine’s beauty salon and over weekly bridge games where backseat petting was still regarded by some as a sin and an overture to unmarried pregnancy and even worse, abortion, a word never spoken above a whisper in public.

  True, teachers and the police were paid in scrip, slips of paper which were like promissory notes from civic employers, a promise to pay when things got better, but scrip was honored almost every place in town. The bank had survived the crash and the town had only one suicide, an accountant for the railroad who had been playing fast and loose with company funds until the crash cleaned him out. He had gone dow
n to the picnic grounds by the river, finished off a pint of bathtub gin he got from Miss Belinda Allerdy’s and done himself in with a shotgun.

  “Nobody jumped outa any windas here,” Ben Scoby, president of the bank, once bragged.

  “That’s because the tallest building in town’s only two stories high,” his daughter Louise pointed out.

  “Well, now, we got the water tower,” Ben countered. “If you were real determined you could go up there and take a leap.”

  Hoboes still came to back doors looking for odd jobs to earn a sandwich or a piece of pie. But, as in most small towns in America, they were treated decently, and occasionally they even found work in the fields or at the railroad yards on the outskirts of town. The chief of police drew the line at Hoovervilles, however, and when makeshift camps began to develop he was quick to urge the peripatetic unfortunates to move on. Violence was virtually unheard of here, except for an occasional fistfight over some buxom cheerleader at a ball game, and the chief of police, Tyler Oglesby, who was also mayor, often lay in bed at night, listening to the mournful sigh of the ten o’clock freight rattling through on its way to Lafayette, secretly thanking his lucky stars that in twelve years he had never drawn his gun from its holster except to clean it.

  All that was soon to change.

  * * *

  When Fred Dempsey moved to town from the bank in Chicago, Louise Scoby was a tall, slender, raw-boned woman, her straw- colored hair usually tied in two pigtails that framed stern, heavy features. Her splendid figure had been disguised under loose- fitting cotton frocks since she was a teenager and she wore little makeup to soften her windblown, sun-ridged features. She had the look of early pioneer stock, a hardy woman, stern-faced and formal, whose attitude some folks considered haughty.

  Then Fred had come to the bank and soon afterward there had begun a subtle change in Louise. Little things through the months. She began to wear lip gloss. Then a slight dusting of face powder. She began plucking her eyebrows. She had her hair cut shorter, then shorter still, and then curled under. On occasions, such as the Saturday night dance at the YMCA, she appeared in silk dresses and sweaters that implied there was more to Louise Scoby than had once met the eye. But the biggest change had little to do with lip gloss and silk and hairstyling. Her features seemed softer and she smiled a lot. Fred Dempsey had kindled a glow in Louise Scoby and it became obvious to the folks of Drew City that she had finally found a man who measured up to her haughty standards.

  Dempsey was a tall, muscular, quiet man, his balding black hair graying at the sides and widow-peaked over steel-gray eyes encircled by thin, wire-framed glasses. His thick black mustache also showed the gray of his years and while he never discussed his age, it was known around town that he was forty, almost the perfect age for Weezie Scoby, who would soon turn twenty-five. Dempsey was a pleasant man, well educated and well informed. He had moved up rapidly at the bank, from assistant teller to teller to loan manager. He made it his business to know the people of Drew City and to be a friendly banker, not the intimidating ogre that most people conjured in their minds when they had to make a loan to buy a new plow or get one of the new plug-in refrigerators or buy an automobile. Dempsey was sympathetic. When he did turn someone down, he did so with compassion and a suggestion that they should try again in a few months.

  He also spent a lot of time with little Roger Scoby and even that boy had emerged from his shell. He was no longer the sensitive, sequestered little kid who barely mumbled “hello” and looked at his feet when he spoke. Roger had turned into a typical seven-year-old and at least part of the credit had to go to Dempsey, for while Ben Scoby was a pleasant man, honest as a ten-cent piece, the kind of man for whom the description “salt of the earth” was invented, he had never spent proper time with his son. He adored both his children and although it had taken him almost a year to recover from his wife’s death, recover he had, only to settle into a dull, complacent routine at the bank. He was secretly pleased when Louise and Fred started dating. Ben Scoby knew in his heart that it had been unfair to burden his teenage daughter with the responsibilities normally reserved for motherhood. She had grown older than her time under that yoke, and Fred Dempsey seemed to have rekindled her youthful spirit. And so it seemed to Ben Scoby and to the wash-line gossips of Drew City that this was truly a match made in heaven.

  Louise reserved Saturdays for Roger, for shopping, getting her hair done. And for Fred Dempsey.

  Although the Scobys lived less than a mile from town, Roger was permitted to go into the village only on Saturdays and on special occasions, his father reasoning that once a week was enough temptation for a seven-year—old. So it was always a special experience for him. There was a sense of security for the small boy, knowing week by week that everything was still there, still in the same place and unchanged. Well, almost. Occasionally a new store would open or change hands, like the new Woolworth’s Five and Ten. The manager, whose name was Jerry, had come from back East in the fall to get the store started and had once given Roger a kite that came all the way from Japan and then flirted with Louise. Roger was old enough to tell that. She was polite but she let it be known that Fred Dempsey was her man. Roger kept the kite anyway and once at the park Jerry had helped him get it aloft. He liked the young manager, but not the way he liked Fred. Next to Paul Silverblatt and Tommy Newton, Fred was his best friend. Besides, Fred and Louise were going steady and he worked in the bank for Roger’s dad so it was all perfect. Roger had his loyalties in order, kite or no kite.

  Every Saturday, Louise and Roger would walk into town together. He would tuck his hand in hers and he always managed to get on the right side of the street and steer Louise past the filling station and garage, its floor slick with oil and grease. The station scared him, though he wasn’t exactly sure why. It wasn’t the stacks of tires or the rows of motor oil on sagging shelves, or the pungent odor of gasoline heavy in the air. It was the oil pit. To Roger, there was something dangerous and foreboding and mysterious about the grave-like hole in the floor. And he secretly admired Frankie Bulfer, whose father owned the station, because he was only seventeen and he went down in the dread hole with his little light and worked on automobiles. Roger would stand at the garage door and watch, his eyes saucer-like, and listen to the clicking of ratchet wrenches and the hissing of the air hose as Frankie performed his operations on the bowels of the boxy automobiles that straddled the pit over his head.

  There followed the Dairy Foods, which was fairly new and was the high school hangout and the only place in town where you could get Coca-Cola at the fountain. Then came Otis Carnaby’s grocery store, Mr. Hobart’s meat market, the Christian Science reading room, which Fred had explained was kind of like a small library. Then there was Barney Moran’s Lunchroom with its oilcloth counters and cracked linoleum seats and the welcome odor of strong coffee and pancakes and burned toast and the sounds of bacon and sausage sizzling on its blackened grill. And finally his father’s bank, the Drew City Farmer’s Trust and Guarantee Bank, which was on the corner.

  Across the street in the middle of the block was Roger’s favorite place of all, the Tivoli Movie Palace, framed on one side by The Book Shoppe, run by the spinster lady, Miss Amy Winthrop, and on the other by Lucas Bailey’s General Store, a place of velveteens and sateens and buttons on little cards and galoshes and dress patterns and bib overalls and cellophane shirt collars. There was a smattering of toys—red wagons, jigsaw puzzles, stamps for collectors, wooden whistles—in the store but its real allure to Roger was the glass case near the cash register filled with penny candy. Roger usually spent a nickel, half of his weekly allowance, at Mr. Bailey’s, poring over the trays of jujubes, caramel swirls, jawbreakers, all-day suckers, twists of red and black licorice, chocolate kisses and Necco wafers, painfully making his choices. He saved the other nickel for the matinee at the Tivoli.

  The most taboo alcove on the main street was Joshua Halem’s poolroom, adjacent to the general store. It was forbidden to
boys until they were fourteen for it was here the men gathered to tell the latest bawdy stories and occasionally resort to less than studious language. Roger and other young boys would gather around the front window thick with years of grease and dust, peering past the NRA and WPA signs with the Blue Eagle and the slogan, “We do our part,” at the forbidden green felt tables lit by Tiffany-shaded lamps. Old Halem, who had lost a leg in the war and had a genuine, honest-to-God peg-leg, was always perched high on his long-legged stool near the front, his wooden spike sticking straight out, overseeing every table, and when he frowned at the youngsters scanning the pool parlor and gave them his evil eye, they would scatter.

  Then came Isaac Cohen’s furniture store, a dark and cramped place with rows of chairs, beds, mattresses, rockers, cribs and sofas, all jammed together, and beside it, Nick Constantine’s barber shop smelling of talcum powder and shoe polish where Roger had received his first haircut and where he went once a month to keep it trim. Above it on the second floor was the town’s beauty parlor run by Mildred, Nick’s wife, and on the corner across the street from the bank, The Zachariah House, a rundown hotel where traveling men and drummers could spend the night on sagging springs for two dollars. The only legitimate bar in town was in the rear of the lobby, a place forbidden to children and women.

  One of Roger’s favorite places was Jesse Hobart’s butcher shop, for it was there he had seen his first real-life “miracle.” Mr. Hobart had brought the chicken from the back where the pullets were in cages and held it up, all flapping wings and clucking, for Louise to inspect. “Nice fat one,” Hobart had told Louise. “Should dress out at about five pounds.”

  “That’ll be perfect,” she had answered and turned her head as he whirled the chicken around at arm’s length until it was totally dizzy, then laid it on the wooden block and whap! chopped off its head with his big, shiny cleaver. Usually, the dark deed done, Hobart would stick the chicken, neck down, in a bucket until it stopped twitching, but on this day it had jumped —jumped!—out of his hand. The headless pullet had run frantically around the store, blood spurting from its neck, bouncing off the counters and slipping in the sawdust until it fell, twitching, on the floor and Hobart had retrieved it. Louise had become faint and stepped outside, later confessing she had a difficult time cooking it. Roger had been five at the time. It was one of his most amazing memories.