Long Way Home (12 page)

During the Civil War, Frank and John salted their pockets as bounty jumpers. They enlisted in the Union Army more than once, snatched up a bonus on each occasion, and never reported for duty. In the course of their chicanery, they met several other psychopaths who formed the nucleus of the gang with Sim and Will.

The Renos started small, robbing general stores and a post office. They were captured once or twice, but they conveniently murdered any witnesses scheduled to testify against them. They bunked at the Radar Hotel in Seymour and intimidated the other guests, beheading one and floating his corpse down the White River. “Be wary of the thieves and assassins that infest the place,” went a travel advisory of the period.

In October 1866, the Renos pulled off the first peacetime train robbery. They broke open an Ohio & Mississippi safe and made off with about twelve grand, then held up two more trains and terrorized the Midwest until John was intercepted with his hand in the coffers of a Missouri courthouse. He served ten years in prison and wrote a bestselling autobiography, tales of criminal glory being in vogue then as now.

With the Pinkertons in pursuit, the other gang members lit out for the territories, but the “natural malefactors,” as the
Cincinnati Commercial
portrayed them, were rounded up at last. The
Commercial's
account of their final days begins on a note of high drama:

For a number of years Seymour, a village of perhaps 2500 inhabitants, has been held in terrified subjection by a mere handful of skulking thieves, who have gradually grown courageous from the deplorable lack of resistance, and have perpetrated outrages unparalled in the chronicles of any densely populated city in the country …

and swiftly descends into tabloid muck with a grisly account of the brothers' demise.

The Pinkertons nabbed Sim and Will in Indianapolis, and Frank in Windsor, Canada, and transported them to a jail in New Albany by the Ohio border. The boys chilled out until a posse of vigilantes in hoods confronted the sheriff, asked for the keys to their cell, and beat him to a pulp when he refused. His wife, more sensible than brave, complied.

Under the cover of night, the vigilantes escorted the brothers to Hangman's Corner outside Seymour, where they were strung up on a spreading beech tree. Thousands filed past their pine coffins afterward, gaping at their swollen faces and black tongues. John, the last surviving Reno, hadn't gone straight in spite of his bestseller. He got caught dealing in counterfeit bills, and returned to prison for another three years.

The City Cemetery in Seymour is no Père Lachaise. Flat and weedy, it's the sort of neglected spot where teens gather to smoke dope and listen to Metallica. The Renos are the only celebrities in residence.

They don't have proper headstones anymore, because vandals kept stealing them. Instead they're buried behind a fenced enclosure, as if they might yet rise again to rob another train. Some fans had adorned Frank's grave with a vase of plastic geraniums. Americans never met an outlaw they didn't like.

A DRIVE ACROSS
southern Indiana teaches one why the Renos appealed to the public's imagination. The region is so placid it begs for some larceny to disrupt the surface calm. It may be no accident that the Midwest has spawned such a trove of gangster idols. Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd all emerged from the cornbelt to entertain the nation. An overdose of tranquility and harmony, it appears, may result in a life of crime.

Southern Indiana defied interpretation. It just laid its cards on the table, so to speak. Hoosiers were solid, direct, and unaffected. They farmed, hunted, fished, held parades, and went to church on Sunday, rooted for the Pacers and the Colts and could name the star drivers of NASCAR, listened to country music, and ordered personalized licensed plates that read “In God We Trust.”

From Seymour I traveled through Brownstown and over the White River's East Fork. Sinclair Lewis came to mind again—his Elmer Gantry this time, not George F. Babbitt. Had churches truly sunk to the level of burger joints by advertising the benefits of redemption on billboards? “Say what you will about the miracle of unquestioning faith,” warned the Hoosier sage Kurt Vonnegut, “I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

There was no surcease to the corn and soybeans on U.S. 50. Wherever you glanced, the view was the same. It taxed the ingenuity of such trade organizations as the Indiana Soybean Alliance, which was charged with promoting new uses for the crops—soy-based candles, for example, cleaner and greener than petroleum-based paraffin. Airplane deicer, crayons, and an additive for jet fuel can be made with soybeans, too. Corn's not just for slathering with butter anymore, either. It turns up as corn-based cups for cold drinks.

Three words were on the lips of Indiana farmers: “biotech,” “biodiesel,” and “ethanol.” Biotech seeds account for 80 percent of the corn and 92 percent of the soybeans grown in America. Corporations such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical develop the genetically modified organisms to tolerate herbicides and combat pests.

The GMOs increase the yield of the crops, their manufacturers assert, but the Union of Concerned Scientists disagreed after a judicious study. Improvements in agriculture could as easily explain the higher yield, the union declared in a 2008 report.

No country in Europe grows GMO corn commercially, because it may damage the soil and reduce biodiversity. Biotech seeds have a drift factor and have already invaded farms in faraway Puebla and Oaxaca, Mexico, endangering the native varieties of maize.

As for biodiesel, it's composed almost entirely of soybean oil. Indiana has four processing plants, the most anywhere in the United States, for blending it with petroleum. Ethanol uses corn in the same way, even though other crops—switchgrass, for one—are more energy-efficient.

The corn and soybeans, so apparently benign, extended all the way to Bedford. Every aspect of modernity is a prisoner to complexity, I thought in the moment. We know too much and also too little. Perhaps this will be the central paradox of the twenty-first century. When Frank Reno was bothered or confused, he just robbed a bank or shot somebody and felt better. While the strategy can't be advocated, one can understand its attraction.

Bedford wasn't merely Bedford, of course. It was the Limestone Capital of the World. Its quarries had supplied the stones for the Pentagon and the Empire State Building. There were lots of quarries around, too, and they had steep cliffs. The standing water ran to a depth of thirty feet, so the locals slipped through holes in fences to go swimming on sultry summer days.

In Oolitic, also a “Stone Belt” town, some punks had bashed a limestone statue of Joe Palooka, the heavyweight champ of DC Comics. Joe's nose was busted, and moss covered the back of his skull like a yarmulke. In Needmore, where boosters had planned to construct a limestone replica of the pyramid at Giza, the dust was doing its triumphal dance.

AFTER AN EXCEPTIONALLY
quiet night in Bedford, I took the highway southwest past Bluespring Caverns, watching the corn and soybeans disappear as I entered Hoosier National Forest, where the oaks and hickories were bathed in autumn radiance. The day was another gift, warm and bright, with shafts of sunlight filtering through the leaves. I couldn't remember a better, more forgiving October.

Huron and Willow Valley were tiny and obscure, half hidden in the swirl of color, and Shoals wasn't much bigger. It occupied a junction with U.S. 150, a road that ran through the forest to French Lick.

If you mention French Lick to sports fans, they reply with two words: Larry Bird, not biodiesel and ethanol. Bird, surely among the finest hoopsters ever, first honed his skills on the edge of the forest. You might imagine young Larry, a child of poverty and misfortune, practicing on Dr. Naismith's peach basket, but his hometown and its neighbor West Baden Springs have been sophisticated resorts for more than a century.

From my map, I couldn't tell how long the drive would be, so I inquired at a Shoals grocery store. The clerk, a good old boy in a loose-fitting T-shirt, was suffering from the heat. He mopped his brow with a paper napkin and swigged from a liter of Coke. His voice carried a southern inflection. I might have been in Alabama or Mississippi, except for the absence of black folks.

“French Lick, it's maybe fifteen miles.” He balled up his napkin and started on a new one. “ 'Course, it might be take you an hour on that windy road.”

“I won't mind. It's a pretty forest.”

“You fixin' to gamble at the casino?”

“I'm going to the Larry Bird Museum,” I said, making a bold assumption.

The clerk looked at me funny. “Ain't no Larry Bird Museum that I know of.”

I could scarcely believe it. The one museum I might actually want to visit didn't exist. French Lick had missed a golden opportunity. Mitchell, Indiana, had created a museum for the astronaut Gus Grissom, and Lawrence County laid claim to three astronauts. The others were Kenneth Bowersox and Charles Walker, although Bowersox had been born in Portsmouth, Virginia.

“There's a railway museum down there,” the clerk added helpfully.

I had a lovely drive. Between Shoals and French Lick, U.S. 150 adheres to the old Buffalo Trace, a path thousands of bison followed as they migrated from the prairies of Illinois and Wisconsin to some salt licks at the falls of the Ohio River. The great herds wore away the earth to a depth of twelve feet in places. Pioneers later used the same route, arriving by riverboat at the falls and heading overland to Indiana, then still a frontier.

Some émigrés from France set up a trading post by a salt lick in the forest, hence French Lick. An itinerant sawbones opened a spa nearby in 1852, subsequently West Baden Springs after Wiesbaden, Germany, renowned for its healing waters. The spa, later acquired by Lee Wiley Sinclair and his partners, burned down in the 1890s, but Sinclair rebuilt it as the Eighth Wonder of the World in 1902.

The new fireproof West Baden Springs Hotel featured a domed atrium larger than St. Peter's or the Pantheon. Guests could avail themselves of such amenities as a church, a bank, a barbershop, a pony track, and a stock ticker, yet it was the sulfur springs that kept the rooms full. A regimen of baths could purportedly cure a laundry list of ailments from arthritis to Zellweger syndrome.

Pluto Water, bottled in French Lick, played a part in the treatments. Billed as America's laxative, its slogan was, “When Nature Won't, Pluto Will.” Fast-acting and dependable because of its high content of mineral salts, it supposedly delivered the afflicted from such side effects of constipation as grouchiness, fatigue, and loss of libido. In children, it corrected plain old bad behavior. Many a fraternity used it to haze their pledges, forcing them to drink a bottle before leaving them stranded in the woods far from any facilities.

The hotel fell on hard times during the Depression, and its next two owners—a Jesuit seminary and Northwood Institute, a private college—allowed it to deteriorate. A foundation financed a partial restoration in 1996, but no hotelier would touch West Baden Springs until Indiana licensed casino gambling in Orange County in 2004.

The Cook Group of Bloomington owns West Baden Springs now, where “luxury springs eternal,” and French Lick Springs Hotel, where “history meets luxury,” two concepts that eluded me since history, though eternal, is seldom luxurious.

West Baden Springs Hotel qualifies as a stately pleasure palace, its ruby-colored dome and four Moorish towers highly visible in an otherwise tumbledown landscape. Visitors are free to wander the hotel's public rooms or pay ten dollars for a guided tour, but some Hoosiers still approach the place with caution. Opulence may be the flip side of decadence, so they creep along the elaborate driveway as if they're about to cross an invisible bridge and be separated from the real Indiana forever.

In the parking lot, I joined a crowd of pilgrims and marched into the hotel. We stepped lightly over the marble floor and craned our necks in the Sistine Chapel position to admire the dome and the atrium. To be honest, I was impressed but also fidgety. I'd been in Indiana long enough for a casino to sound mildly exciting, so I quit West Baden for French Lick Springs.

Hoosiers like to gamble almost as much as they like to hunt. Very few of them live more than fifty miles from a casino, a racetrack, or an off-track betting parlor, and even in the scruffiest of lowlife taverns, they find something to wager on—pull tabs, punch boards, or raffle tickets.

Indiana earns a quarter on every dollar squandered in pursuit of Lady Luck. The state ranks fourth behind Nevada, New Jersey, and Mississippi in total gambling revenue, but it surpasses all the others when it comes to the amount of money it receives in gaming taxes.

French Lick Springs could be West Baden's knock-kneed cousin. The rooms were cheaper, and the décor was flashier. It suited the clientele of bikers in club leathers, skeletal chain smokers, guys with ZZ Top beards, plus-size matrons, and a coterie of small-town players ardently indulging in the vices they kept under wraps at home. Solid citizens sojourned among them, too, various pillars of community who weren't so hidebound by the Bible that they couldn't enjoy a little spin of the roulette wheel.

With its vast array of slots, French Lick smacked of the purgatorial. You could feel countless brains being lulled to sleep, switched over to drone mode; small wonder, then, that zombies held such fascination for Americans. Hardly anyone bothered to make conversation even at the bars, where eyes dipped instead to video poker screens.

The farmer I sat next to grew soybeans in Gibson County, about two hours away. He'd just won a nice pot with a full house and let out a modest whoop before he scooped up his coins and popped them into a cardboard tub. Almost everyone carried a tub, as they might a votive candle.

“First decent hand all day,” he volunteered, as if to excuse the outburst. “I drew three to a pair of queens, and what do you know?”