Alive and Dead in Indiana (3 page)

It wasn’t until I was back on the road again that I saw her hitchhiking. At first, I thought she might be a boy. She wore pants and had her hair up short. She had a small roll at her feet, a silver frying pan tied up on it. She stood, thumb out, too far from the road. But I saw her. She grabbed her things and ran to the car and opened the door without looking in first.

“Where you going?” I asked her.

“Wherever you are.”

Fair enough. I put it in gear and got back on the highway. It didn’t take her long to notice.

She said, “Jesus, what’s that smell?”

I told her what the smell was and what I was doing on the road. I didn’t ask anything because I felt she didn’t want me to, nor could I tell from her looks whether she had been on the road for a while or if I was her first ride. She didn’t say a word when I pointed the car toward Michigan. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t care.

It seems to me there aren’t any real crossroads anymore for most people. Most of us are going against the grain. She had nothing to decide, only tendencies. I had taken her up. Your part of the country is a funnel of flat land with a bias. I worked as a ferryboat captain on the Ohio. A small boat. Ferried autos and walkers from Jeffersonville to Louisville. I made the trip once an hour, seven hours a day. I heard about Mark Twain and read some of his books. I wanted to be a river pilot like him. I took to wearing white suits like his. Piloting that boat, you could feel what I mean. The Ohio wants to sweep you west.

She said, “You’re from the South, aren’t you?”

I said that all depends on what you mean. Some people will say the South starts at 38th Street in Indianapolis.

The accent, the funny suit. I knew she was thinking of it all. The greasy diet, the in-breeding. I don’t mind. On these trips, I let people think what they think. It’s good for business. My age helps too. But I try not to go on about what I’ve done or seen. Let them imagine what they want.

I’d say she was a city girl. Movie stars on her mind. She probably thought the road led somewhere, that it was not just for the nation’s business, the national defense. The “big road,” you call it in Kentucky. The road to town. The road that leads to something different. As I think of it now, I didn’t understand her half the time. She was restless on the seat, read the road signs to me, wanted to play games with license plates. I said she should follow along on the maps I keep in the glove box. She didn’t want to.

There were things I didn’t want to be with her but couldn’t help being because they are what I am. An old man, a salesman, a gentleman, her father. But she needed to be talked to. The country whizzing past needed to be filled up with fun. I have advice, though I try to hide what I mean. I’ve done my share on posses walking through field stubble and dragging rivers while dogs bawled. Maybe I wanted to scare her, but I say I didn’t.

She put on her sunglasses so I couldn’t see her eyes and slouched in the scat against the door. It wasn’t locked, but I held off from doing anything about it. We went on miles that way, me lecturing. She leaning into the unsafe door. Finally, I reached across the seat behind her. Pushed the button down. She didn’t say a word except “Thank you.”

We were traveling through the lake country near the Michigan line. The trees along the road would open up to water. I talked about me then. I couldn’t help myself. I had made a sale. Like that waitress, I just wanted everybody served. I left home when I was twelve. I told her that I had worked on farms, been a streetcar conductor, was in the Army in Cuba, worked jobs that disappear. I studied law by mail waiting on the ready track of freight yards. Boiler was my light. I was a justice of the peace in Little Rock. Sold insurance and tires. Headed the Chamber in Columbus, Indiana. You can check that out if you want. I’m not really from the South, you see. Not from anywhere.

“Yes,” I said. I pulled it all together, a piece here, a piece there. Yes, I have seen things. I rode the reefers and the blinds, saw a man frozen to the metal of the baggage car when the tender threw water picking it up on the fly. I was on a train with ballast in my pockets. Then I said something I thought she could use.
Never get off where there is no shade
.

I meant that.

She asked me when I left school, and I told her when they started in with algebra. If X was what you didn’t know, then I didn’t want it.

She lost interest after that. She turned to look out the window at the orchards being sprayed.

We were heading, though she didn’t know it, to Mackinac Island in the straits. It’s at the top of Michigan. The road is like a life line through the state s palm. It was there we got mixed up in a troop convoy. On maneuvers, I guess. Reserve Guard. I had seen convoys in the southbound lane with their lights on, antennas bowed over on the jeeps. The trucks have a round-shouldered look, like they’re hunching down the hot highway. We came up on their replacements heading north. The last vehicle was a jeep with MPs in white helmets in it. I scooted around, and then around the next deuce and a half. I blew my horn. I could see the cops shaking their heads, yelling and pointing. They weren’t happy to have their string broken up. I tucked the Pontiac in between two trucks, waited for the lane to clear, then leapfrogged another truck.

I could see, when I swerved out there to pass, that the line went on for what looked like miles ahead. She perked up when we started passing. Rolled down her window. Took off her sunglasses.

As we got along deeper into the convoy, she waved to the boys. I could tell they knew right away she was a girl. Some drivers sped up to get a good look, pacing us and not letting me jog around. I could see the jeep of MPs in the rearview. It was working its way up the line behind us. They passed when we passed, eyes on us.

She yelled out to each truck. How far you going? Where you going? And then she would listen for a boy to shout how good-looking she was. I kept my eyes on the road. Listen to them, will you?

Laughing.

I felt sad seeing her reach out so far and trying to hold hands with some boy while the wind blew.

But I got to the head of the line, and that was that.

It was dark in Mackinaw City. A storm was on the lake. We could see the white in the water. Here was the end of the world as far as I was concerned. Even the roads ran out.

Across the water there was an island with no cars, restaurants that might sell my chicken. We’d take the ferry in the morning.

I arranged for a cabin. It had a small stove and a sink. I grabbed some food from a grocery just as it closed. Then I cooked dinner, using her skillet. I took my knives and started cleaning chicken, telling her I’d been cooking it since I was six. I told her about Momma peeling tomatoes all day for Stokely–Van Camp in Henryville. I told her about May apples, greens, sassafras buds. I let her help, showing her how to peel a potato, snap the skin off the garlic with the flat of the knife. She was helpless, and I asked her why she brought the pan along anyway. She had seen pictures of Johnny Appleseed when she was a kid. She was serious, she said, about leaving home. I was cutting an onion. I can cut an onion, if it is a good onion, in such a way that it stays whole for a few seconds after I am done slicing. One instant it is whole, the next a pile of a hundred pieces. She had me do this several times. You have to know what to do with it once you have it, I said, thinking of her frying pan, of the onions, well, of everything. We were both crying tears we didn’t mean. We ate in silence. She said she loved the food. Everybody does.

The storm boomed on outside. I don’t think she knew where she was. Not just that moment—an old log cabin with an old man—but where in the world. Maybe if she knew, she would have considered turning back. The highway was pretty slow after all. Camping with her family all over again. I looked at her as she looked at the fire and wondered if she would be telling stories about this ancient man crossing roads with chickens. She asked me what held the onion together in the first place and if I ever tried to put it all back together like a puzzle.

I slept outside in the backseat of the car. She hadn’t said one thing, not one way or the other. There are certain lines I don’t cross. I hadn’t offered her candy, only stone soup. To me it is all the same. When my belly’s full, so is the rest of me. Maybe she just didn’t have the words. Outside the Pontiac, it was bad. The chief’s head flashed. I went to sleep in the smell of sage and fresh ground pepper.

In the morning, it was all there. My spices, the storm, the girl in the cabin.

We drove to the ferry. But we could see from the water that no one was going anywhere. We got out and stood around. Some places you never reach.

I asked her what she wanted.

She said, “Let’s just go. Just keep moving.”

We headed south down 131. Nothing to talk about. No sun to give her a clue to the direction. The tin of the pressure cooker whistled as we drove.

It is the pressure cooker that is the secret. No waiting. Eight minutes to cook your goose. Didn’t she know how much danger she would have been in if she hadn’t been with me?

We crossed back into Indiana. Sleeping, she didn’t wake up till I slowed for an Amish buggy around Nap-panee. Horses and wagons were everywhere on the roads and in the fields. I got the car wheels to straddle the manure. That part of the country is the way Henryville was when I was growing up. Broad-brim straw hats and beards, suspenders and serge. Lordy, what I’ve seen. Now she wasn’t half an hour away from where I picked her up in Fort Wayne, but she was way back in time. She was losing ground. She made me pass a wagon real slow as she stared, from behind her sunglasses, deep into the bonnet of the lady driver. She wanted to know what they were doing in the fields. Why they looked the way they looked. It was all so far away to her.

Not much farther up U.S. 6, she said here was where she would get out. All she had to do was say the word. She thanked me. I pulled over and stopped, got out and fetched her roll from the trunk. We’d parked next to a muckfield planted in peppermint. It had already been cut and raked into rows. The air reeked of it and onions in a field nearby. No shade in sight. She hadn’t gotten a thing from me but a ride down the road. I told her to be careful.

I was able to look back at her a long time since the peat fields are so flat. I wondered if she realized what a difference a few feet make, that just this side of Fort Wayne is that continental divide turning the river back on its tributaries and dividing up the country as sure as the mountains out west. She probably didn’t know how it all fit together. A small rise on the plain could cut her off forever. I turned a corner and never saw her again. I drove the rest of the day and night only stopping for gas.

Now it’s your turn to tell me what this is all about. Who was she? Has something happened? Have I broken some law?

All the time I was with her I could see she didn’t know word one about drummers or bums or bindle stiffs. But who was I to tell her? The roads are different now. But what’s it to do with me? I’m glad that part of my life is behind me.

I could never tell a dirty story. There is the one about the new convict and the numbered jokes, but that is not the type of thing I am thinking about. Well, anyway, the new convict calls out a number, and no one laughs because some people can’t tell a joke. Pomeroy used to laugh at that one, probably more out of respect than anything else. I was, by that time, a kind of authority.

In the fall, Clara and I would borrow a car and head out of town on a Sunday. The leaves would be turning. I like the way fall works. The leaves not turning really, only the green going, and the carotene showing through for once.

We always saw it on our way to Brown County, saw a car pulled off onto the shoulder, occupants out there picnicking or napping near an overlook. And with the leaves forgetting themselves all around us, so would we. We’d try to get a look at the parkers. All this nature, but what we wanted was a look at each other. I always used this anecdote to teach my beginning classes the concept of species recognition. Interbreeding population is the last distinction before variety, I am convinced. It is the only instinct. Our heads are literally turned.

Martin kept expecting the women to lift their blouses. He was always saddened by the disparity between the public and the private history. He never doubted which was true. I remember him going over the histories of his classmates at Indiana. With the files open before him, he just sat there shaking his head. He had believed everything his friends had told him.

The first warm day and the whole department would head out to the quarries around Bloomington. Imagine, in the first days of spring, their spouses within reach again, everyone is on the lookout for the return to life of some specific fauna. All these men, knowing the oestrus of their special species, have these females next to them on crazy quilts. Our peculiar nature. Look at them. Their heads bent to the obscene buzz of zoology. The University spelled zoology with that pesky umlaut overhead. The mark the Prussians left behind after drawing out the blood. There was a white dust on all the leaves from the gypsum factories. Spring in Indiana. The cut and tumbled blocks of the abandoned quarry must have looked like ruins to a German scholar. This was a new world for me. Let them find a story here. Clara was next to me, white from the winter but already tanning. The rocks were warming up. I had just turned associate, and felt secure. So I stopped them before they could get their killing jars from the car. Yes, I stopped them by taking off my clothes and diving headlong into the pool of someone else’s reflection.

We could talk shop in the most public of places because of the code. I would say, “My last history liked Y better than CM although Go in Cx made him very ez.” That type of rendering made everyone more comfortable. That was during McCarthy and the Customs Case. Our books could not be sent through the mail. The Institute and the University were very sensitive. We had recently lost the Rockefeller money. No one was laughing at anything.