1
The first thing you did was tune in the radios. Everyone had the new transistor radios, most the size of cigarette packs, in pastel hard-shell plastic. Some were upholstered with protective leatherlike vinyl with flaps and snaps and die-cut openings for the gold-embossed tuning dials, a slit for the coin-edged volume wheel, an aperture for the ear jack, out of which an always too-short and easily kinked wire attached to a single waxy plug you screwed into your head. But today, race day, no one listens to the 500 on the earphone. My father and the other fathers in the neighborhood are pouring a patio. It's what they do on Memorial Day.
2
The elms, for some reason, haven't died on Parnell Avenue, and their vaulting branches arch over the street, throwing it into deep shade. The parade route runs from State Boulevard along Parnell out to the War Memorial Coliseum. We like to sit near the Dairy Queen, unfolding our lawn chairs in the parking lot driveway. We have brought the big radio with the stitched handle. It is the size of my school lunch box. The cars at the track make a swishing sound as they zoom about. I sit on the curb and think I see the horses' hooves throwing sparks. A semitrailer is hauling a retired F-86 from the airbase out to be displayed on the Coliseum's lawn. The Navy Club's bus-long gray destroyer, number 48, floats by above me, its wheels hidden by a skirt of waves.
3
My mother and the other mothers are sitting on the patio next door, a concrete slab in the middle of the yard. It is cured to a marble white. The furniture is new, webbed candy-colored nylon and aluminum tubing. The Thompsons' patio. It was poured last year. The men are wearing white T-shirts, khaki pants, and their old work shoes, standing in a circle around the wheelbarrow filled with crushed ice and bottles of Old Crown beer, tuning in, each one holding his little radio next to his ear, worrying the tuning dial, thumbing up the volume. One by one they find WOWO, the local station on the network, coax the static into sound, cocking the radios at angles to align their tiny antennae. It is primitive. It is magic. It is like they are blowing on smoldering tinder to get it to spark. And they do.
4
The thrum of the engines brought us outside. We looked up shading our eyes against the sun. The blimp was just above the tops of the dying elm trees and descending it seemed toward the field behind our house. Then there was a change in the engines' pitch and the blimp yawed and floated up and away. We ran to the car to follow, slowly cruising through the meandering neighborhood streets. Stretched out on the back seat of the '57 Chevy, I looked up at the blimp as it wallowed overhead, framed first in the back window then in the one at my feet then in the one above my head as it maneuvered and my father, turning, came about and circled beneath it. It settled, at last, in a field near the three rivers, a ground crew hauling it down. The cars that had been chasing it parked in a big ring around it. It was May, and the blimp was on its way to take up station above Indianapolis. Moored, it levitated a few feet off the ground. We all sat transfixed on the car's hood and watched the blimp float but stay perfectly still.
5
Another radio joins the nest of transistor radios on the grass nearby, amplifying the tinny voice of Sid Collins, the Voice of the Indianapolis 500. The men begin to work, finishing the frame and leveling the bed while others mix the cement and sand. I hear beneath the Voice in the grass a sound like static but it isn't static. It is the pulsing siren of the racers' engines flying around the track, the two-beat peal as they scream past the mic, an "ee" then a long "em." EEmmmmm. But so small, an insect humming in the greening grass. There will be locusts this summer idling in the trees. Summer is racing toward us. I coast my bike down the Kaimeiers' drive, join the other kids on their bikes doing laps around the manhole covers on either end of the street.
6
I go to college in Indianapolis. My mother went to the same school. Near noon, I cross the muddy campus. I slog along on the way to class. The bells ring out, as they do every hour, every day, the opening bars of "Back Home Again in Indiana." It is a gray day with the clouds lowering. It is often gray, the result of the atmospheric accident in which we live. Ground zero for an occluded ceiling generated by the lakes, the wind, the flat flat ground. Back home again in Indiana, I whisper, where the sun refuses to shine. Then in the silence after the tolling, I hear a distant screech, a prehistoric trumpet, a beast's yawning scream originating high up in cavities of a skull. The scraps of sound drift in the thick air. Tire tests at the track across town.
7
The race is on on the kitchen radio. I sit at the kitchen table coloring in the outlines of racecars. My mother has drawn a simple template-a side view of two wheels, the tube of the fuselage, a wedge of windshield, a hump of the rear engine. I have traced out thirty-three copies, placing a clean sheet of paper on top of her drawing and following the outline. Now I am coloring each a different color. On the radio there are announcers in each turn of the track and on the straightaways. They follow the leader around the lap. Sid Collins, the Voice of the Indianapolis 500, says that this is the greatest spectacle in racing. But I've never seen it. It is only on the radio. The table is layered with the brightly colored cars, scrambled together, a wreck of color. I stay inside the lines I've outlined in black. I know that the shades of green are unlucky. The blues are beautiful and limitless. Outside my father is mowing the lawn. I hear the mower's engine fade as he goes around the far side of the house.
8
There are high-school bands but they are mostly quiet, saving their practiced marches for the reviewing stands on the other side of the river. The drummers thump a cadence of the wood sticks against the metal rims of their drums. They slide their feet on each step. I see green puttees and canvas gaiters of the Legion and the VFW posts' colors. It is strangely quiet for a parade. The swish of cloth. The silky flags sliding along the polished poles. The whispered humph, humph of a drill sergeant. Each unit slowly disappears down the dappled tunnel of the street. The drive shaft turns beneath the flatbed truck, an honor guard, at parade rest around a mock-up of a tomb on the carpeted bed. In the silence, the echoes of hundreds of portable radios. The race in Indianapolis, a hollow drone.
9
My father drilled a hole in a rubber-coated baseball, threaded a rope through it and knotted the end so it wouldn't slip back through. On the other end of the rope was a handle. In the field behind the house, he twirled the ball around above his head. I stood to one side with a bat and tried to hit it as he banked it toward me. It zoomed by. I was getting my timing back for summer, he said. A garbage can lid was on the ground, a makeshift home plate. The ball wobbled, warbled a hiss as it made its orbit. Around and around. I'd catch it coming in the corner of my eye and step into the approaching sound.
10
The simulators were painted gunmetal and arranged three to the row before the movie screen. I was driving through a neighborhood like mine though its colors were faded or too brightly lit. There were people walking on the sidewalks wearing clothes from when I was a kid. The women wore white gloves and hats with net veils; the men wore suits and ties. A freckled boy, his head shaved, broke away from his parents and darted out into the street lined with old elms. I seemed to slow to a stop. The machine in the back whirred and clicked, recording whether or not my brake pedal was depressed. Then I was entering a highway, a new interstate, its concrete brilliant white. All the turn indicators were ticking in the room. Then it was raining and it was night. I'd glance at the speedometer from time to time as I was instructed. The needle slowly swept around from zero as I sped up. The room filled with a throaty engine noise. The sound track ran through the gearbox. The brakes complained slightly as I pulled into the driveway of a house like my house. The machine in the back came on again to see if I had put the car in park and turned the key to stop the engine. I had put the car in park. I had turned the key. I waited a few more minutes, my seat belt buckled, until the bell rang for the next class.