Alive and Dead in Indiana (2 page)

Mr. Hunt of Hunt’s Store down on Main Street kept a few coffins around.

That is where that picture was taken.

In Indianapolis, they make more coffins than anywhere else in the world. The trucks, loaded up, go through town every day. They’ve got
CASKETS
painted in red on the sides of the trailers.

You wait long enough downtown, one’ll go through.

See what you have made me do? I keep remembering the wrong things. I swear, you must think that’s all I think about.

What magazine did you say you were from?

Jim’s death is no mystery to me. It was an accident. An accident. There is no way you can make me believe he wanted to die. I’m a judge. I judge interpretations. There was no reason. Look around you, look around. Those fields. Who could want to die? Sure, students in those days read EC comics. I had a whole drawer full of them. I would take them away for the term. Heads axed open. Limbs severed. Skin being stripped off. But I was convinced it was theater. Look, they were saying, we can make you sick.

It worked. They were right.

I’d look at those comic books after school. I’d sit at my desk and look at them. Outside the window, the hall monitors would be cleaning out the board erasers by banging them against the wall of the school. The air out there was full of chalk. I flipped through those magazines, nodding my head, knowing what it was all about. I am not a speech teacher for nothing. I taught acting. I know when someone wants attention. The thing is to make them feel things before anything else.

I taught Jimmy to kiss.

I taught Jimmy to die.

We were doing scenes from Of
Mice and Men
. I told him the dying part is pretty easy. The gun George uses is three inches from the back of Lenny’s head. When it goes off, your body will go like this—the shoulders up around the ears, the eyes pressed closed. He was on his knees saying something like “I can see it, George.” Then
bang
. Don’t turn when you fall. After your body flinches, relax. Relax every muscle. Your body will fall forward all by itself.

Well, it didn’t, not with Jimmy. He wanted to grab his chest like some kid playing war. Or throw up his hands. Or be blown forward from the force of the shot.

“Haven’t you ever seen anything die?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

“It’s like this,” I said, and I got up there on the stage and fell over again and again. I had George shoot me until we ran out of blanks. It was October, I remember, and outside the hunters were walking the fields flushing pheasants. After we were done with the practice, we could hear the popping of shotguns—one two, one two. We hadn’t noticed that with our own gun fire.

Hunting goes so fast and that’s what irritates me.

Jimmy was so excited, you know, doing things you couldn’t do in high school. Dying, kissing. That’s how young they were. Kids just don’t know that acting is doing things that go on every day.

“Just kiss,” I told Jimmy after he’d almost bent a girl’s neck off. “Look,” I said, taking one of his hands and putting it on my hip, “close your eyes.” I slid my hands up under his arms so that my hands pressed his shoulder blades. His other hand came around. He stood there, you know. I tucked my head to the side and kissed him.

“Like that,” I said.

I quieted the giggles with a look. And then I kissed him again.

“Do it like that,” I said.

Even pretending, Jimmy liked things real. No stories, action. He was doing a scene once, I forget just what. The set for the scene called for a wall with a bullet hole. Jimmy worked on the sets too. I was going to paint the hole on the wall, and Jimmy said no. We waited as he rushed home. He came back with a .22, and before I could stop him, he shot a hole in the plywood wall.

I tell you, the hole was more real than that wall. I remember he went up to the wall and felt it, felt the hole.

“Through and through,” he said. “Clean through and through.”

The bullet had gone through two curtains and lodged in the rear wall of the stage. I can show you that hole. If you want to look, I can show you.

Right before he died, Jimmy made a commercial for the Highway Safety Council. They show it here twice a year in the driver’s education class. The day they show it, I sit in. The students in the class each have a simulator. You know, a steering wheel, a mirror, a windshield with wipers that work, dials luminous in the dark.

Jimmy did the commercial while he was doing his last picture. He is dressed up as a cowboy, twirling a lariat. Gig Young interviews him. They talk about racing and going fast. Then Gig Young asks Jimmy, the cowboy, for advice. Advice for all the young drivers who might be watching. And I look around the class, and they are watching.

It is the way he begins each sentence with “Oh.”

Or it’s the lariat, the knot he fiddles with.

That new way of acting.

What is he thinking about? Jimmy was supposed to say the campaign slogan—
The life you save may be your own
. But he doesn’t. He looks toward the camera. He couldn’t see the camera because he wouldn’t wear his glasses. I can see what is happening. He is forgetting. He says, “The life you save may be”—a pause—“mine.” Mine.

I guess that I have seen that little bit of film more times than anyone else in the world. I watch the film, and he talks to me, talks to me directly. I have it all up here.

He kissed me.

He died.

Leave his life alone.

I know motivation. I
teach
motivation. I teach
acting
.

I parked that night in a lot across the street from a restaurant I wanted to call on the next day early. I had gotten into Fort Wayne late, having driven all day from my home in Corbin, Kentucky. I had made a side trip crossing the Ohio at Brandenberg to Maukport, then on to Henryville, Indiana, where I was born and grew up. It was for old times’ sake. No one knows me there now. I talked with no one. Climbing north, I had this sense of things starting up again. It was already hot. They were running, and I took my place in the stream of white-haired travelers hauling those silver trailers, driving those new finned cars, passed only by Negro children being driven south out of the cities to Grandma’s place on the land in Mississippi or Alabama. These are the times of real migrations. With the warm weather and those new highways, people had started to move. I was on the road all the time and hadn’t seen anything like it. Not since the thirties.

The traffic put me late in the city. I got my bearings from the bank building downtown. I’d been here before a few years earlier in 1950. I found Anthony Street, and followed the overhead trolleybus lines, a main street, and must have even followed a trolleybus because I remember thinking they still have these, the smell and the sparks and the sound of sliding metal. Fake lightning. And there might have been real heat lightning that night and lightning bugs.

The elms looked real sick in the streetlights. I didn’t have time to find a place, or money if I had found one, having not much more than enough for gas and a bit extra, just in case. Nor am I so inclined. I like sleeping in a car, especially my car. I have my spices. And there was a change in the weather that night. So when I spotted the Hobby House Restaurant—and I had some trouble since it was locked and dark—I pulled into the lot across the street which had a huge sign still on that late. It was a painter’s palette with three brushes poking through the thumb hole. Each dab of paint was lit up by a different color of neon.

It wasn’t a paint store but an ice-cream parlor. Each color a flavor of ice cream, I guess. The sign burned and buzzed to high heaven, but I was able to settle down in the backseat with beaten biscuits and my scales.

I weighed my spices and herbs in the pools of colored light for the next day’s meeting.

The palette was on some type of timer.

At midnight, it went out and silent just like that, even though no one was around to switch it off. And there was lightning that night but no thunder. It flashed as I put my things away in the dark.

Am I telling you too much? These things might not be to the point of the matter. But give me a little room to build up speed.

I’m sixty-six years old, which should give me a pretty good enough excuse to act this way.

I can remember fifty years ago as if it were yesterday. I can’t remember yesterday.

The maps in my time you had to read.
Three miles from the county line, turn left on the macadamized road, an old Indian trail, and at four and a half miles, with red barn on the right, take another left. This is county road 16. Oil mat
. Roads weren’t lines then. Give me time and I’ll make the turn.

I sell a recipe for fried chicken. That’s what brought me to Fort Wayne that night. I used to have my own place in Corbin, and I couldn’t complain. Business was good because my cooking was good. Country ham, black-eyed peas, red-eye gravy, okra and string beans, watermelon pickle, hoe cake, baked apples. Duncan Hines wrote me up in his
Adventures in Good Eating
before the war. Gave directions. The shed on your left, the fence on your right. That kind of thing. He got you right to my door. No Worcester Diner, tablecloths, and gravy boats. And the thing was in place. I even had a root cellar with roots.

Eisenhower’s defense highways put me out of business. I sold it all for a big loss. My wife said that it was about time we went south anyway, and she wanted to head down that new 75, a clear shot to Florida,
SEE ROCK CITY
on every barn and birdhouse. But I wasn’t going to manage on my Social Security wearing Bermuda shorts, thinking twice about buying this pack of Beechnut gum.

A few years ago, I taught a good friend of mine, Pete Harman of Salt Lake City, how to fry chicken with this recipe and every indication was that the chicken did a job for his business.

There are some other places too. Other men who have heard about it. They would send me four cents, a nickel a bird. But it was nothing I worked at or thought about. And now these cars were passing my place. Though I couldn’t see the traffic, I could feel its steady rumble through my feet. Those roads are so big you can hear things like you can over open water.

My last good days were feeding the crews who drove the graders and dozers. Their hard hats were lined up on the rack by the door like skulls. I’d rather wear out than rust through. So I got on that road, joined the rumble with the Pete Harman deal in mind. I put a pressure cooker, the spices and scales, my apron and knives in the backseat of my ‘53 Pontiac. It had an amber Indian head on the hood, and it handled like a boat. I shipped out over that sound.

It was no great adventure. I’m an old man, after all.

I started by cooking for my family. Time to get out of the kitchen and take it on the road since the road had up and gone. It’s not so strange. You fellows are fretting right now about what to do with your folks, I bet. I had to make up my own mind, had to make a little money.

So I hadn’t met her yet. Instead, I am in a parking lot in Fort Wayne, waiting for this restaurant to open up for breakfast. A crew of high school kids is tarring and repainting the lot. They are making noise as thev close off a section with rope laced through the handles of gray sealer cans. I’m the only car in the lot. It’s a big lot. They lay down the parking stripes that look like fish bones on the tar. I can see the painter’s palette sign is turquoise. Down the way is the baseball stadium where the Pistons play. There are big silver pistons on the press box. I know beyond the stadium is a road being built.

The elms look even sicker in the daylight. More like willows than elms. The restaurant has the look of being open now, though I haven’t seen anyone unlock the doors, and, sure enough, cars start turning in. I start mine and drive across the street carefully as the traffic is picking up. I park and go in. I like the place. The walls have stained, knotty pine paneling. The tables have red checkered tablecloths and each, no matter how large, is set for two. There are wagon wheels on the walls; half-wheels are buried in the backs of booths; the chimney lamps on the tables rest on little wagon wheels. The coffee is streaming into pots.

In the restroom, I wash my face and shave quickly. I have very little beard. The room is well lit and clean. Before going back to my booth, I knock on the women’s restroom door. When there is no answer, I peek in. It’s the same story, clean and bright, a couch for nursing.

It is a breakfast menu. Combinations of eggs, ham, potatoes. They have steak, hash, all the juices, and a specialty—a doughnut with its hole teed up in the center, glaze dripping from one to the other. But I order lunch—a hamburger, fries, and a Coke.

“No problem, hon, but the deep fryer’s not on till eleven. Hash browns okay?”

Everything is fine.

There’s a regular clientele. Coffee is poured before anyone asks. Conversations are picked up where they left off the day before, morning papers left behind to be picked up. So are large tips. There are men in uniforms. They use their fingers and dip their toast. They stack their own dishes. This feels like home.

“Here, let me heat that up for you,” the waitress says, pouring coffee with a smile.

Even though it is crowded, it is comfortable. There are dining rooms closed off. I can just sit, drink the coffee, and read your local news.

After the morning rush has left for work, what remains are the old men talking about the weather, a feeble-minded boy sweeping up, and my waitress with the bright glass coffeepot still steaming in her hand. I ask to see the owner. I know his name. At first she looks at me as if I’ve betrayed her hospitality. Then she reads me as a salesman, smiling as she says, “All right, I’ll get him, wait right here.”

The owner comes through the swinging doors, out from his office. He is followed by my waitress, who brings him coffee as he sits. I get right to the people we know, talk about the National Restaurant Association, mention the new highways. He’s at a disadvantage when I make my pitch. I could be his father. I ask him to let me make some chicken for him. What’s he out but some shortening and flour? That’s right. I stayed on to cook for him and then for his customers. Then we shook on it, and I taught his people in the kitchen how to do it. Next thing was to make arrangements for getting the ingredients mailed and him sending all the money back home.