Twisting Topeka (2 page)

“
And you two get yourselves
settled, or neither of you will get to watch.” Mr. Hooper sets
Claire back on her feet and swats her backside to get her moving
toward the house. You follow at a safe distance—beyond arm or foot
reach. The dads bring up the rear, talking about “rambunctiousness”
and how you’ll both grow out of it soon. Twelve seems to be the
agreed-upon age for when kids should be past that stage. Whatever
“that stage” is. Mr. Hooper hopes the two of you survive the next
two years to see it.

“
Damned kids,” he
says.

“
Damned kids,” your dad
agrees. “How about another beer?”

Claire heads for the kitchen, where
the neighborhood women are gathered, gossiping over cheese dip and
Mrs. Hooper’s fruit cocktail. Moms are always more receptive to the
silly things little girls think than dads. The men head out onto
the back patio, where the beer coolers and crass language await.
Every now and then, you hear a cheer or a boo from the backyard.
Which depends on whether the baseball gods are being kind to the
White Sox or the brand new Kansas City Royals at the time. You
detour to the living room - you’re a Cardinals fan, after all - and
grab a seat in front of the television before any of the little
kids can steal the best spots. Dad bought a brand new set for the
occasion; it’s the first color T.V. your family’s ever owned and
involved a trip to White Lakes Mall to get. “Something this
momentous, you want to really see it,” he said. Your mom has
already covered the top in family photos to block the “ugly” rabbit
ears. Also makes it harder for you to get at them again. It’s not
your fault they’re so fun to mess with.

“
D’ya think it’s gonna
work, Joey?” Tommy Hitchens settles next to you with his G.I. Joe
clutched tight in his hands. Tommy’s only eight.

“
Course it’ll work. Took
off, didn’t it? Landing’s easy. Landing’s just falling on purpose.”
This sounds like perfect logic to you. You deliver it with all the
authority of your extra two years on the planet and a firm nod as
backup.

The living room is stifling, even with
both windows open. There’s only an occasional breeze, and when one
does manage to blow through the window it’s nothing but hot air.
Kansas summers are like that; it didn’t take ten of them for you to
figure that out. As you sit there, watching Walter Cronkite talk
over footage of the launch, “Sweet Caroline” playing lowly from the
radio in the kitchen, you pull at the collar of your t-shirt and
wish you were still outside, sprawled out in the shade of the elm
in the front yard. Nothing blocks the breeze out there. Maybe one
day they’ll invent T.V.s you can take outside, just for days like
this. You wonder if the cord would stretch at least to the flower
bed. Could take the window screen out. Sure, some flies would get
in and your mom’s roses might get a little squished. They’ll grow
back, though! And didn’t Dad say this is an historic moment that
can’t be missed? Roses can be sacrificed for that,
right?

You’re still pondering that when
Claire plops down beside you. She’s got two sweating bottles of
Coke in hand. One she reluctantly holds out to you.

“
Your mom says put it
against your eye,” she says. A few seconds later, she follows that
up with a reluctant, “I’m sorry.” She huffs out the apology in a
quiet, noncommittal rush and doesn’t look at you while delivering
it.

“
Yeah. Me too. I guess.”
 

“
Only because you got
punched.”

“
Only because you got in
trouble for punching me.”

She shrugs. You shrug, too. For a
minute, you sit and watch the same footage of the astronauts
walking to the scaffolding and the rocket lifting off from the
launch pad that WIBW’s replayed all afternoon. Tommy watches the
two of you instead; when you catch him doing it, he looks down at
his G.I. Joe.

“
Gonna have a really swell
black eye from it, though,” Claire finally says. You reach up and
poke at the sore spot beneath your eye.

“
Think so?” you ask with a
wince. She nods. “Anyone asks, you weren’t the one who gave it to
me. Right?”

“
Maybe.” She grins around
the mouth of her bottle before taking a long drink. You wonder if
the bruising will look gorier if you don’t ice it. Makes sense, in
the way anything else does. “If you admit girls can go to space
too.”

You give her a sideways glance and
mentally kick yourself. She managed to trick you somehow. Your dad
warned you about that. Girls get trickier as they get older. You
mutter “fine” into your bottle, but you don’t believe it. Don’t
need the rest of the neighborhood knowing you got hit by a girl,
either, though.

The screen changes. The rows of desks
and men in white shirts and loosened ties you’ve seen before every
previous launch replaces the looping footage and Mr. Cronkite’s
commentary. All the NASA people are staring at the big screen in
front of them. You can almost make out the colorful rows of numbers
stretched sideways across it.

“
Mom! Dad!” You and Claire
both yell at the same moment. “It’s happening!”

The adults rush in, chattering. The
moms have glasses of wine with big chunks of fruit floating in it.
The dads have their cans of beer. You snuck a sip of wine once when
your parents had Claire’s over to play Gin Rummy. Maybe the fruit
is supposed to make it taste better? It was pretty gross on its
own. So is beer, though. Learned that the same day.

You watch the grown-ups struggle for a
minute over empty couch space like it’s a round of musical chairs.
The losers settle for standing behind it. Your dad claims his
La-Z-Boy like it’s his throne; your mom perches on the chair arm.
In the excitement, no one’s turned off the radio. No one really
cares that Stevie Wonder is serenading the empty dining
room.

“
Look at how peach they all
look,” Mrs. Dudley from down the street says, leaning heavy against
the back of the couch. Her glass threatens to tip over and dump
wine over Mrs. Hooper’s head.

“
That’s prime color there,
Dale,” Mr. Groves chimes in. You don’t care about the color. You
don’t care how peach any of them look. You’re waiting for the
cameras on the rocket to take over. You’ve watched clips of Neil
and Buzz and Michael in their tiny command module, shaving and
eating and all that normal stuff. Now you want to see them land.
You want to see someone walk on the moon.

The screen changes. It’s bumpy footage
of a surface growing closer and closer, sometimes filling half the
screen, sometimes just a corner of it. The tinny voices of Houston
and the crew replace Mr. Cronkite. You nudge Claire with your
elbow. She looks at you and smiles, her face pink with excitement.
Her fingers wrap so tight around her Coke bottle that the tips have
gone white. So have yours.

“
Eagle,” you hear one of
the voices say, “You’re go.”

“
Thirty-five degrees. Seven
fifty. Coming down at twenty-three.” That’s Buzz Aldrin. You can
only guess what most of it means, but you know it’s Buzz doing the
talking.

“
Seven hundred and fifty
feet to the surface. Degrees are the angle they’re coming down,”
your dad says, smiling. “Twenty-three feet a second. That’s how
fast they’re descending.”

“
Seven hundred feet.
Twenty-one, thirty three degrees.”

“
Pretty rocky area,” the
voice you’ve come to recognize as Neil Armstrong’s says. He doesn’t
sound concerned. You know what worried adult sounds like by now;
you’ve heard it enough in your mom’s voice whenever they talk about
money. Like when your dad announced he’d bought a new TV when
they’d just argued over the cost of your sister’s
braces.

“
Six hundred feet. Down at
nineteen.”

“
Eagle, check your gauge
again. We have you coming in hotter.” The view on the screen is
shakier now. The ground is rushing toward the camera faster
than a minute ago. Houston sounds like your mother talking
about orthodontists. Houston is worried.

“
Gauge holding steady at
nineteen, Houston. Don’t see any…”

Audio and video cut out all at once.
The screen fills with static. You turn your head to look back at
your dad. “Something wrong with the TV, Dad?”

“
Maybe,” he says. He gets
up and wedges himself in behind the set to adjust the rabbit ears.
He fiddles with one, then the other, bending them each as far as
they’ll go in either direction. “Screen look any better?” he asks,
but it’s an act. He’s lying. You can tell, because you’ve heard him
lie before. Like the night he told your mom he was at the movies
with you all afternoon. He dropped you off at the Fox Theater with
money enough to keep you in movie tickets and ice cream for most of
the day and came back smelling like perfume three shows
later.

“
I don’t think it’s the
T.V.,” Mr. Groves says. ”Listen. Can still hear
Houston.”

“
Eagle, respond. Eagle,
this is Houston. Respond.” There’s not a single sound. Not on the
T.V., not in the room. All you hear is the creaking of sweaty legs
shifting on vinyl seat cushions. No one’s breathing – you’re pretty
sure a dozen people are all holding their breath, yourself
included. “Columbia, Houston. We’ve lost all data with Eagle,
over.”

When you finally hear the mic in the
command module engage, everyone inhales in unison. “Houston, this
is Columbia. Eagle is…” Michael Collins, the lone crew member left
behind in the still-orbiting module, sobs. It’s the first time in
your life you’ve ever heard a grown man cry. “They’re gone. I
repeat. Eagle is gone…”

The room behind you fills with gasps
and wails. Your dad’s head falls forward until his chin nearly hits
his chest. He hides his face behind his hands. They shake. Your
mother cries quietly, one arm wrapped around herself. Tommy
scrambles into his mother’s lap and hugs his G.I. Joe with all the
strength his little eight-year-old body possesses, like it’s his
teddy bear.

A hand finds yours, cold and damp from
a bottle of Coke, and holds on so tight your fingers might break
beneath it. You don’t care. Yours are squeezing just as tightly
back.

“
I don’t think I want to go
to space anymore,” Claire whispers.

“
Me either.”

In the background, “Bad Moon Rising,”
starts to play. You’re still too young to appreciate the
irony.

Native Son

Marian Rakestraw

John Steuart Curry paused for a
moment, brush raised, ready to add another black line to the fresh
expanse of plaster. He could feel the visitor. Not see him, but
feel him. It was odd how fast he’d developed this sixth sense that
let him know when he was being watched. It was useful,
too.

None of them ever actually came
into his space. He had come to feel that the second floor of the
rotunda was his personal space. They came to the boundaries. They
edged up to the brass-railed limit of the third floor, outside the
house and senate chambers. They peeked in as they scuttled from the
elevator to the governor’s office. He was surrounded by the low hum
of people and the shotgun activity of government all day. The walls
of the rotunda, though, and the ten foot ring of floor surrounding
them, were a country unto themselves these days. He was their king
and sole citizen.

It wasn’t supposed to have come to
this. He was supposed to have come home to Kansas in a rosy glow of
acceptance and to have felt the admiration and respect of the home
state crowd. He’d started wearing overalls, for Christ’s sake, and
looking jolly in photographs. He’d remade himself into the ideal of
the country boy made good but still happy down on the farm. It had
worked well enough, had gotten him this commission. It just hadn’t
been enough. A pair of overalls hadn’t dispelled the suspicions of
the people of Kansas. Right off the bat they’d started criticizing
his work – bulls didn’t stand correctly, pig’s tails didn’t curl in
the accepted fashion, a Prairie Madonna’s skirts were on the short
side. Then there was the painting of John Brown, the lodestone for
qualms. Curry had no idea how the figure had gotten quite so big,
quite so wild, so clearly mad. Placing it right outside the door to
the Governor’s office now seemed a slightly less brilliant idea
than it had at the time.

So here he was. Still painting.
Still being seen producing murals on the sacred walls of the state
house. Bringing the gift of art - as he’d been hired to do by the
people. Except now he was doing it in an atmosphere that could most
kindly be described as poisoned. He’d almost walked off the job
when the legislature had threatened to block the removal of the
marble slabs covering the lower walls of his work space, marble
that made his envisioned frescos an impossibility. It was ugly
marble - pretentious and gaudy and in no way representative of the
spirit of Kansas. The Capitol was the house of the people, not a
snooty country club. He’d tried to bring some of the energy and
spirit of the state into the Capitol and been brought to book like
a school boy caught slipping frogs into the teacher’s
desk.

He should have left. He should
have refused to sign his work, and stormed off in a fit of artistic
pique. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d presented cartoons of his
proposed work, let them pass through committees which had vetted
them for insidious political ideas and “corrected” the content.
He’d smiled and nodded and chewed on his pipe and
waited.