'Not really their fault,' grunted Ackroyd. 'Caterpillar's fault for dependin' so much on selling to ‘em. When Carter pulled the plug on heavy equipment exports after Afghanistan or whatever the hell it was, it all went downhill. Caterpillar, GE, even Pabst. Everybody was getting laid off for a while. It's better now.'
'Oh,' said Baedecker. His head hurt. He still felt the motion of the plane as it had banked in over the river. If he couldn't fly an aircraft this day, he wished that he at least could have driven a car to work the cramps out of arms and legs that ached to control something. He closed his eyes.
'You wanta go the quick way or the long way?' asked the big man at the wheel.
'The long way,' Baedecker said without opening his eyes. 'Always the long way.' Ackroyd obediently took the next exit off I-74 and descended into the Euclidean geometries of cornfields and county roads.
Baedecker may have dozed for a few minutes. He opened his eyes as the car stopped at a crossroads. Green signs gave direction and distance to Princeville, Galesburg, Elmwood, and Kewanee. There was no mention of Glen Oak. Ackroyd swung the car left. The road was a corridor between curtains of corn. Dark seams of tar and asphalt patched the road and provided a rhythmic undertone to the air-conditioner. The slight vibration had a hypnotic, equestrian quality to it.
'Into the heart of the heart of the country,' said Baedecker. 'Hmmm?'
Baedecker sat up, surprised he had spoken aloud. 'A phrase a writer — William Gass, I think — used to describe this part of the country. I remember it sometimes when I think about Glen Oak.'
'Oh.' Ackroyd shifted uncomfortably. Baedecker realized with a start that he had made the man nervous. Ackroyd had assumed that they were two men, two solid men, and the mention of a writer did not fit. Baedecker smiled as he thought about the seminars the various services had given their test pilots prior to the first NASA interviews for the Mercury program. If you put your hands on your hips, make sure your thumbs are toward the back. Had Deke told him about that or had he read about it in Tom Wolfe's book?
Ackroyd had been talking about his real estate agency before Baedecker had interrupted. Now he cleared his throat and make a cupping gesture with his right hand. 'I imagine you've met a lot of important people, huh, Mr. Baedecker?'
'Richard,' Baedecker said quickly. 'You're Bill, right?'
'Yeah. No relation to that guy on the old Saturday Night Live reruns. Lot of people ask me that.'
'No,' said Baedecker. He had never seen the program.
'So who was the most important, you think?'
'What's that?' asked Baedecker, but there was no way to steer the conversation a different direction.
'Most important person you ever met?'
Baedecker forced some life into his own voice. He was suddenly very, very tired. It occurred to him that he should have driven his own car from St. Louis. The stopover in Glen Oak would not have been much out of his way, and he could have left when he wished. Baedecker could not remember the last time he had driven anywhere except from his town house to the office and back. Travel had become an endless series of airhops. With a slight shock he realized that Joan, his ex-wife, had never been to St. Louis, to Chicago, to the Midwest. Their life together in Fort Lauderdale, San Diego, Houston, Cocoa Beach, the five bad months in Boston, had been near the coast, all in places where the continent clearly ended. He was suddenly curious about what Joan's impressions of this great expanse of fields, farmhouses, and heat haze would be. 'The Shah of Iran,' he said. 'At least he was the most impressive. The court show they put on there, the protocol, and the sheer sense of power he and his retinue conveyed, they put even the White House and Buckingham Palace to shame. Little good it did him.'
'Yeah,' said Ackroyd. 'Say, I met Joe Namath once. I was at an Amway convention in Cincinnati. Don't have time for it since I got involved in the Pine Meadows deal but used to do real well at it. Thirteen hundred one month and that was without really working at it. Joe, he was there for another thing, but he knew a guy who was real good friends with Merle Weaver. So Joe, he told all of us to call him that, he spent the whole two days with us. Went down to the combat zone with us and everything. I mean, he had commitments, but every time he could, he and Merle's friend would go out to dinner with us and pick up a round of drinks and all. A nicer guy you wouldn't want to meet.' Baedecker was surprised to realize that he recognized his surroundings. He knew that around the next curve in the road there would appear a dairy with a floral clock in the center of the driveway. The dairy came into sight. There was no clock, but the parking lot looked newly paved. The purple-shingled house to the left of the road was the one his mother used to refer to as the old stagecoach stop. He saw the sagging second-floor porch and was sure it was the same building. The sudden superimposition of forgotten memories over reality was disturbing to Baedecker, a sense of déjà vu that did not dissipate. He looked straight ahead and knew that it would be only a long sweep of curve and then another mile before Glen Oak would declare itself as a fringe of trees and a single, green water tower visible above the cornfields.
'You ever meet Joe Namath?' asked Ackroyd.
'No, I never have,' said Baedecker. On a clear day, from thirty-five thousand feet in a 747, Illinois would be a verdant patchwork of rectangles. Baedecker knew that the right angle ruled the Midwest in the same way that the sinuous, senseless curves of erosion ruled the Southwest where he had done most of his flying. From two hundred nautical miles up, the Midwest had been a smudge of green and brown hues glimpsed between white cloud masses. From the moon it had been nothing at all. Baedecker had never even thought to look for the United States during his forty-six hours on the moon.
'Just a real nice guy. Not stuck-up like some famous people you meet, you know? Damn shame about his knee.' The water tower was different. A tall, white, metal structure had replaced the old green one. It burned in the rich, slanting rays of the late-summer evening sun. Baedecker felt a curious emotion seize him somewhere between the heart and throat. It was not nostalgia or some resurrected form of homesickness. Baedecker realized that the scalding wave of feeling flowing through him was simple awe at an unexpected confrontation with beauty. He had felt the same surprised pain as a child in the Chicago Art Institute one rainy afternoon while standing in front of a Degas oil of a young ballerina carrying an armful of oranges. He had experienced the same sharp slice of emotion upon seeing his son Scott, purple, bruised, slick, and squawking, a few seconds after his birth. Baedecker had no idea why he felt this now, but invisible thumbs pressed at the hollow of his throat, and there was a burning behind his eyes.
'Bet you don't recognize the old place,' said Ackroyd. 'How long's it been since you been back, Dick?' Glen Oak appeared as a skirmish line of trees, resolved itself into a huddle of white homes, and widened to fill the windshield. The road curved again past a Sunoco station, past an old brick home, which Baedecker remembered his mother saying had once been a way station on the underground railroad, and past a white sign that read GLEN OAK — POP. 1275 — SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED.
'Nineteen fifty-six,' said Baedecker. 'No, 1957. My mother's funeral. She died the year after my father.'
'They're buried out in the Calvary Cemetery,' said Ackroyd as if he were sharing a new fact.
'Yes.'
'Would you like to go out there now? Before it gets dark? I wouldn't mind waiting.'