On Hoosier Hysteria
This is true. During the annual high school basketball tournaments in Indiana, the winning small towns send a team to the cities for the regional or semistate finals. Those towns empty completely for the games, the whole population evacuated by yellow buses and strings of private sedans and wagons. The Governor declares an emergency and sends a few state troopers or a truckload of the Guard to patrol the deserted streets.
I got sent to Marion one spring when that team was playing up in Fort Wayne. I was attached to a clerical unit stationed at Fort Benjamin Harrison outside of Indianapolis. We convoyed up from the south and parked on the outskirts of the ville as the residents streamed north. We could hear the horns. A muscle car sped by camouflaged with crepe paper and tempera. We were humping it into town, two files, one to a gutter, along the main street. The lieutenant sent a squad down a side street. Dogs barked. Up ahead was the small downtown of two-storied stores and offices. Hovering just above the brick buildings, a huge water tower seemed to float like a dark cloud, its supporting legs obscured by the buildings and trees. There was writing on its side that couldn’t be read from where I was, the town name and zip code perhaps, the sense of it stretched around out of sight. We had to hold the town for the day, and, if the team won its afternoon game, stay the night in bivouac set up on the high school football field.
It took us a few hours or so to walk the streets and rattle some door handles. Tacked up on every garage was a scuffed backboard and rotting net. I looked in the windows of the empty homes, saw the big glossy house and garden magazines scalloped on the coffee table, the dishrag draped over the faucet in the kitchen, an old pitcher filled with pussy willow branches in the middle of the dining table. Some places were unlocked, and I poked my head in, shouting to make sure no one was there. As I walked through one house, I listened to the clocks ticking. There was Eckrich meat in the refrigerator. I turned on the television and stood in front of it as it warmed up. The game was on, live, the boys going through warm-up drills at each end of the court. Somewhere in the crowd, the people who lived in that house shook pom-poms behind the cheerleaders. I stood there, too close to the set, in the living room, in full gear, my helmet on my head, cradling my rifle in my arms. The boys in their shiny outfits did layup after layup. Each of them took a little skip as he started to break for the hoop, meeting the feeding pass in midstride, the ball then rolling off his fingers, kissing the glass. A sergeant tapped on the picture window. “Quayle,” he said, his voice filtering into the house, “get your butt out here.”
I followed a squad down an oiled street. The sidewalks had crumbled into dust. The Kiwanis had tapped the maple trees growing along the side of the road, the sap plunking inside the tin buckets. We formed up at the end of the block, where the town met the surrounding field of corn stubble. The field went on for miles, broken only by a stand of trees, a cluster of buildings, a cloud of crows rising from the ground. We stood there waiting for something to happen. How strange and empty the world had become. In a few more weeks spring would be here for good, but you would never guess it from the way things looked. It was as if we had survived something horrible. I felt frightened and relieved. Then, the sergeant told us to saddle up and get back to town.
Later, we watched the game on a television we brought with us from the armory. The little diesel generator sputtered outside the tent. Marion won and would play again that night. We ate K rations while we watched, fruit salad in Army green tins. I saved the cherries for the last after eating the peaches, the pears, the pineapple, and the grapes in that order.
And later still, I climbed the water tower and circled the tank on the wire catwalk, looking down on the town. I saw the grid of streetlights come on automatically in patches down below. A sentry in one neighborhood waded through the puddles of light. A truck or a car would rumble up the main street and brake at the checkpoint near the square. On the wall of the water tank, high school kids had scratched their initials in the paint, coupling them with the stitch of plus signs. Now I was too close to read the huge letters of the town name and the legend that declared Marion was the Home of the Little Giants and the numbers of the years they had won the state championship. You had to read that from the ground. In my pocket was a souvenir I’d pilfered from a house below, a gravy boat from a corner cupboard. I have it still.
And when Marion won the game that night, I could hear the troops shouting that the home team had won. I watched from the platform on the water tower as all the patrolling soldiers came running from their posts to see the team cut down the nets on TV. From my perch, I looked north to the haze of light where Fort Wayne was supposed to be, recreating in my own mind the whole celebration I knew by heart.
I was floating above a peaceful Indiana in the dark. Out there, there were winners and losers. After tonight, we’d be down to the final four. I thought then, and I think now, that this is what we were fighting for.
On 911
He used to walk everywhere, Ed, the incumbent I beat for the congressional seat that got me to Washington. His campaign consisted of taking walks. He’d walk through a neighborhood in Fort Wayne, going up and knocking on a few doors, waving at cars as they passed by him. He gave out stickers in the shape of footprints and in the outline of shoes. He’d walk out into the country, out to Zulu and Avilla, Markle and Noblesville. The few reporters that trailed along tired after a few miles, caught a ride back downtown. He was a tall thin man. He slung his jacket over his shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. His pants were too short. Along Indiana 3, he’d wade through the patches of wild carrot and goldenrod. He was bombed by the angry blackbirds. He had thin hair and wore glasses with clear plastic frames. Near Leo, the Amish, who don’t even vote, passed him by in their buggies. He would stop at a farmhouse for a drink of water from a well. He’d get his picture in The Journal, the Democratic paper, kicking an empty can along the gutter in the streets of the new suburbs of St. Joe Township. He was always alone, hardly talked to anyone that mattered. No one walked anymore. His shoes were always dusty. It was a cinch.
After I won and Ed was showing me around the Hill, he refused to ride the Capitol subway over to his office. He put me onboard, and we left him behind to walk over by himself. His aides even rode with me. They didn’t bother looking back to see him shrink in the poor light of the dark tunnel beneath the streets of Washington.
He was too pitiful for words. He had more than enough rope to hang himself. The few rumors we fanned at Rotary clubs and the Zonta were enough. His skin was milky. His voice was pitched too high. He smoked a pipe. The pictures you saw in The Journal always showed him from behind, the loose white shirt draped with that summer-weight jacket. Such a target, his back exposed, brought the best out of the voters. I salivated along with my staff as we watched him walk through the fall.
His one piece of legislation was the bill that established an emergency telephone number, 911. Something a child could remember and dial. I can just imagine the debate. Who would oppose it? What could be wrong with it?