But this was years later. At first I saw the hull. I saw the pile of rivets he collected from the temples of old eyeglasses. He collected spools for depth charges, straws for gun barrels, window screen for the radar. He collected scraps from the floor of the shop and stockpiled them near the ship. Toothpicks, thimbles, bars of soap, gum wrappers. Life Savers that were lifesavers, caps from tubes for valves and knobs, pins for shell casings. Everything was something else.
At first he started building only the ship but knew soon enough he’d finish. So he went back and made each part more detailed, the guns and funnels, then stopped again and made even the parts of parts. The pistons in the engines, lightbulbs in the sockets.
Some men do this kind of thing. I whittled but I took a stick down to nothing. I watched the black knots of the branches under the bark grow smaller with each smooth strip until they finally disappeared. Maybe I’d sharpen the stick, but that got old. Finally it is the shavings thin like the evening paper at my feet. That was what I was after. Strip things so fine that suddenly there is nothing there but the edge of the knife and the first layer of skin over my knuckle.
One of the anchors of the real battleship is on the lawn of the Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne. The anchor is gray and as big as a house. I took my then wife to see it. We looked around that state for the other one. But only found deck guns on lawns of the VFW, a whole battery at the football stadium near the university. In other towns, scrap had been melted and turned into statues of sailors looking up and tiny ships plowing through lead waves.
The deck of the model was the only real thing. He said the wood was salvaged from the deck. A guard brought him a plank of it. He let me plane it, strip the varnish and splinter it into boards. A smell still rose from it of pitch, maybe the sea. And I didn’t want to stop. I’ve seen other pieces of the deck since then in junior high schools made into plaques for good citizens. It is beautiful wood. The metal plates engraved with names and dates are bolted on, and near the bottom there is another smaller one that says this wood is from the deck of the battleship. It is like a piece of the true cross. And that is why I came to the capitol in Indianapolis to see the governor’s desk. I heard it was made from the teakwood deck of the USS Indiana.
So imagine my surprise when in the rotunda of the building I find the finished model of the ship in a glass case with a little legend about the prisoner in Michigan City. He’d finished it before he’d died. The porthole windows were cellophane cut from cigarette packs. The signal flags spelled out his name. It was painted that spooky gray, the color between the sea and sky, and in the stern a blue airplane was actually taking off and had already climbed above the gleaming deck where a few seamen waved.
I felt sad for that con. He spent his life building this. He never got it right. It wasn’t big enough or something.
I walked right into the governor’s office. I’m a taxpayer. And the lady told me he wasn’t there, but I told her I was more interested in the desk. So she let me in. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, opening the curtains for the light that skidded across the top cut to the shape of the state. One edge was pretty straight and the other, where the river ran, looked as if that end had melted like a piece of butter into toast. I was running my hand along the length of it, feeling how smooth it was — the grain runs north and south — when the governor walked in with his state trooper.
“It’s something,” he said. He’s a Republican. The trooper followed and stood behind him. “It has its own light.”
The trooper wore a sea blue uniform with sky blue patches at the shoulders and the cuffs. Belts hung all over him. Stripes and creases ran down his legs. Braids and chains. The pants were wool. He watched me. And I looked at him.
Jesus, you’ve got to love a man in uniform.
I stepped up to the desk and saw my face and the shadow of my body deep inside the swirling wood. I took my finger and pointed to the spot not far from Zulu where I knifed a man and said, “Right there.” I pushed hard with my nail. “That’s where I was born.”
Limited
I saw the rock, saw the boy who threw it. I saw it hit the window next to the seat in front of me. Saw the window shatter instantly. Saw that now I couldn’t see through the window anymore. And we were gone out of Warsaw on the Broadway Limited. We hadn’t stopped at Warsaw but gone through at sixty miles an hour. I saw the boy and the rock and his friends around him on their bicycles, and I imagined our train rocking the town, pushing the sound of the horn ahead along the tracks. Not stopping.
Now the whole car, everyone, is talking and pointing at the window. There is a high-pitched whistle. The light is different in the window since the windows are tinted. And the guy who sits there has just come back from the club car, dumb with luck, not drunk enough yet. I could have been sitting there, he says again. Everyone is talking about the kid with the rock and the window and outside now are cornfields and a few houses and the highway far away.
The conductor is looking out the rear door of this last car, and it looks like he is shaving. He is not shaving but whispering into a radio while he looks back at the tracks coming together. I saw the rock, saw the boy, I tell him. He says that it’s not the first time. Called someone who’ll call the police. He’s an old man. He’s seen it all. He can’t understand it.
I saw the rock float along with us at our speed, saw it barely catch up to us. I saw the boys on the bikes holding up their arms, jubilant, already tearing away from the place. The window went white.
He waited. Waited for the engines and the baggage cars, the coaches, the dome, the sleepers, the diner, the cafe. He waited, the rock already in his hand. More sleepers, more coaches, this last car. He waits, sees the people in the windows. Something so big and so much metal. Silver and blue. His whole town shaking. One long horn. He can’t hear his friends egging him on. This rock won’t stop a thing, won’t slow nothing down. He throws it, and it’s gone.
Three Tales of the Sister City
1
If the Chamber of Commerce had known the chef was arriving on the last United flight that evening someone would surely have been there to welcome him.
At first he waited near the doors that led out to the apron and the parked airplanes. It was raining. The airport is not equipped with the ramps that connect the planes to the terminal. Instead, passengers that night were given red, white, or blue umbrellas.