I wonder what I looked like with my face all blue. No way to forget it. That’s me, all right.
Homer was thinking twice, cursing the tattoo. Finally went ahead and called it a goddamn mess. Lester sitting around drinking from a bottle of beer changes his mind a couple of times. Keeps what he has. Damn doctor was probably glad to let him.
Blackie sits and sketches all through his trial. The DA is examining a witness. Blackie’s lawyer starts to get up to make an objection. Blackie stops him, says, Relax, you’ve been beaten by the best, smiles at the DA, who is telling the jury that people like Blackie must be stopped.
The cops are happy to show us the guns and vests. We act dumb. What do you call this? we are saying.
Oh, that. That’s your submachine gun. They have some.45s too.
We tell them we’re from the East, doing a story on the crime wave. Sports is my regular beat, says Homer.
Yeah, well I’ve never been east, says one cop.
You should see the Fair in Chicago while you’re in this neck of the woods, says the other one.
They talk it up. We listen.
I like hearing about myself. It’s like being at your own funeral.
Being tourists got us in trouble in Tucson. Pete telling a cop he thought he was being followed, and the cop saying no. Tourists from the North. And I take pictures of cops directing traffic. You look good in a uniform, I tell them. The Sam Browne belts. The buttons picking up the light, turning white in the picture.
Pete used to say, I wish you’d stop that. It’s not smart.
I’d say, It’s my hobby.
We tell the cops in Warsaw we’ll send them the story when we get done writing it.
The governor is in his car, racing to Sing Sing so he can see Blackie before he goes to the chair at midnight. Sirens getting closer, governor’s car, motorcycles, everything speeding.
Guess who, I say to Margaret through her door. When she opens it, she knows me right away.
What happened to your face? You in an accident? I try to laugh. It’s not her fault. I go on in. She’s tough, but she misses Pete. I give her some money from Mason City and tell her about the tear gas and the bag of pennies. She says she doesn’t think it would do any good. You never know, I say.
I’ve been down seeing my folks on the farm, I say.
She says that she reads about me all the time in the papers.
You know half of it ain’t true.
It wasn’t no good with nothing to plan.
She says she was at a dance when I broke out of Crown Point. She says she made sure a cop saw her that night. Says she makes sure a cop sees her every night. She tells me she’s thinking about going into vaudeville. People had been around to ask.
I could hear her sister in the next room taking a bath.
It didn’t matter now that we had shields. They kept shooting, and the people with their hands up got hit first. The bags were too light. I was working the inside with two guys I didn’t know. They were the only ones who would work with us now. Homer was outside with a rifle and Lester by the Hudson.
We walked out and everyone started to get hit. Homer in the head from a shotgun that took the pants leg off a local. I pulled him into the car.
He said we should wear something different when we did South Bend.
New faces. Sure.
So we had on overalls over the vests. Always a clown. We wore straws too. Changed his luck. Pieces of straw mixed in with his hair in the hole in his head. Lester wanted to count the money again.
Blackie walks with the priest. The warden is there, the governor, two guards. Blackie says so long. Someone is playing a harmonica.
Mrs. Mint saying again over ice cream that Romania isn’t a country, just what was left of a place after the war. Patty holds the cherry up for me.
I don’t know anything about the world.
I’m seen everywhere.
Cops in England are searching the boats going to France. Every body that turns up is what’s left of me.
I could call the Leach home, hear him stutter while he tries to keep me on the line. But it could be anybody with a gun. I’m worth too much now that the governors got together.
I’ll check in with Henry Ford. Send a messenger to Detroit with a note. All the models I left on the edge of Chicago. Good little cars.
Mrs. Mint told me she’s already turned the bed down back at Patty’s place. But I want to stay and watch the cartoons.
The lights are going up and everybody’s squinting coming out of the dark. I can see who’s been next to me. And Patty crying. Mrs. Mint looking through her purse for a hanky for her. I can’t keep my eyes open. Pete, Mac. I’ll see their Mouth at Wrigley tomorrow, give him what I can spare from the trip.
Patty touching my hand. Then both of the women are squeezing by, heading for the aisle. The crowd is buzzing and I can smell the smoke from the lobby. It’s cold in here. Just this once I’d like to open my eyes and have it be all different.
VOCATION
This is a city of poets. Every Wednesday, when the sirens go off, a poet will tell you that, after thirty years, Fort Wayne is still seventh on Hitler’s bombing list. And you half expect to hear the planes, a pitch lower than the sirens, their names as recognizable as those of automobiles. Heinkels lumber out of the east, coast up Taylor Street, or follow the Pennsy from one GE plant to another. Stukas dive on the wire-and-die works, starting their run at the International Harvester bell tower, left standing on purpose, and finish by strafing the Tokheim yards. Junkers wheel, and Messerschmitts circle. All the time there would be sirens.
Grandfather keeps his scrapbooks upstairs in the window seat of the empty bedroom. When he dies, they are to be mine, and I am to give them to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Grandfather started keeping these scrapbooks when he felt the time was right for war. He felt the war coming. In the years before the war, the scrapbooks that he kept were pieces of the world he found — a field outside of Peking where old people go to die, a man being buried alive, all the All-American football teams of those years, the bar of soap Dillinger used at the Crown Point jail, a man cut into three parts by a train, a Somalian warrior with no clothes on. These things made sense to Grandfather.
A real poet knows how to bomb his own city.
In the window seat where Grandfather keeps his finished scrapbooks, there is also his collection of missals, all the handouts from Wendell Willkie’s campaign, and everything Father Coughlin ever wrote. The scrapbooks have interesting covers. There is one with a mallard duck on the wing worked into the leather. One is made of wood and has an oak leaf carved into it. Most, though, have only company names or Season’s Greetings.
I have never been able to read all the scrapbooks. They are in no order, and nothing in them is. Every page is dated with the newspaper itself. He went straight through the book. One day I can read about the Battle of Britain, the next day VE day, the next the Soviet Pact. I have never gotten to the bottom of the window seat.
Once I found Hitler’s list.
There are cottonwoods along the rivers. In the spring, a poet will look up at the undefended sky and announce, “At any moment we could be destroyed.”