I think of those boys as lost on that road. In Indiana then, if you got killed on a marked road, the highway patrol put up a cross as a reminder to other drivers.
Some places looked just like a graveyard. But out on the unfinished highway, when those boys piled into a big yellow grader or a bulldozer blade or just kept going though the road stopped at a bridge that had yet to be built, it could be days before they were even found.
The last time I saw Jimmy alive, we were both driving cars. We did a little dance on Main Street. I was backing out of a parking slot in my Buick Special when Jimmy flashed by in the Winslows’ car. I saw him in the rearview mirror and craned my neck around. At the same time, I laid on the horn.
One long blast.
Riding with Jimmy was that Life photographer who was taking pictures of everything.
Jimmy had on his glasses, and his cap was back on his head.
He slammed on the brakes and threw his car in reverse, backing up the street, back past me. He must have recognized my car. So out I backed, out across the front of his car, broadsiding his grille, then to the far outside lane where I lined up parallel with him.
He was a handsome boy. He already had his window rolled down, saying something, and I was stretching across the front seat, trying to reach the crank to roll down mine on the passenger side. Flustered, I hadn’t thought to put the car in park. So I had to keep my foot on the brake. My skirt rode up my leg, and I kept reaching and then backing off to get up on one elbow to take a look out the window to see if Jimmy was saying something.
The engine was running fast, and the photographer was taking pictures.
I kept reaching for the handle and feeling foolish that I couldn’t reach it. I was embarrassed. I couldn’t think of any way to do it. You know how it is — you’re so busy doing two things foolishly, you can’t see through to doing one thing at a time. There were other cars getting lined up behind us, and they were blowing their horns. Once in history, Fairmount had a traffic jam.
The fools. They couldn’t see what was going on.
Jimmy started pointing up ahead and nodding, and he rolled up his window and took off. I scrunched back over to the driver’s side as Jimmy roared by. He honked his horn, you know. A shave and a haircut. The cars that had been stacked up behind us began to pass me on the right, I answered back. Two bits.
I could see that photographer leaning back over the bench seat, taking my picture. I flooded the engine. I could smell the gasoline. I sat there on Main Street getting smaller.
When the magazine with the pictures of Jimmy and Fairmount came out, we all knew it would be worth saving, that sometime in the future it would be a thing to have. Some folks went all the way up to Fort Wayne for copies. But Jimmy was dead, so it was sold out up there too.
I wasn’t in the magazine. No picture of me in my car on Main Street. But there was Jimmy walking on Washington with the Citizen’s Bank onion dome over his shoulder. Jimmy playing a bongo to the livestock. Jimmy reading James Whitcomb Riley. Jimmy posing with his cap held on his curled arm. He wears those rubber boots with the claw buckles. His hand rests on the boar’s back.
Do you remember that one beautiful picture of Jimmy and the farm? He’s in front of the farm, the white barn and the stone fences in the background. The trees are just beginning to bud. Tuck, Jimmy’s dog, is looking one way and Jimmy the other. There is the picture, too, of Jimmy sitting upright in the coffin.
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.”