Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

“Well keep that in mind, because if you take this too lightly, we just might be living there for a while.”

“I understand that, Kitch.”

“Good. Now run along and be inconspicuous.”

“No problem,” he said, and wandered off.

I myself went and found a bench (not in the front row, this time!) and sat, entertaining not just a few doubts about Wheat’s ability to be inconspicuous.

No entertainment was as yet under way on the bandshell stage. The Governor was still standing down in front of the bandshell, chatting with his constituents, granting autographs, while Highway Patrolmen lurked in the backgorund. This went on for another fifteen minutes or so, and finally the Governor departed, waving as he walked back to his black Cadillac. Soon the Cadillac and the two accompanying Highway Patrol vehicles had managed U-turns in the relatively narrow Wynning main street and were headed out of town.

This left the street temporarily clear, though the Mustang was still banked (you should pardon the expression) by the remaining Highway Patrol car and the Tacomobile. Still, the departure of the other Patrol cars was good news indeed. I considered asking the Chinese lady in the Tacomobile if she could back up just a hair, so we could get our car out. Those other two Highway Patrolmen were apparently here for the day, but presently they seemed to be swallowed up in the crowd, and the crowd itself’s attention was hardly drawn toward the bank, so perhaps the money could be moved from the bank to the car without anyone noticing. It was still risky, to say the least, but I began to wonder if we’d been hasty in settling down for the Founder’s Day duration. Maybe we would be able to get out of Wynning, yet. In one piece, even.

I was just getting up off the bench, to go tell everybody about the Governor and the Highway Patrol cars leaving, and about my idea for us leaving too, when the trucks rolled in.

Platform trucks. Two of them. The type of truck that has a sort of floor it drags along behind its cab, just a flat open floor. A platform.

The two trucks took up a lot of the space in the street.

Both of them pulled down by the saw-horse divider that was blocking the street off, and as soon as they had come to a stop, two panel trucks rolled in and joined them.

The panel trucks had writing on them. One had the words “Country Plowboys” written on the side. One had the word “Rox” written on the side. I watched, in fascination and horror, as amplifiers and other sound equipment was hauled out of the panel trucks and set up on the platforms of the platform trucks. It was, of course, the country western band (the Plowboys) and the rock group (Rox) who were setting up to play dance music at different intervals during the afternoon and perhaps (I shuddered to think) the evening, as well.

Meanwhile, the talent show was getting under way on the stage. A boy of about thirteen was playing “Jesus Christ Superstar” on a saw. What can I say.

After the musical saw number terminated, a girl played a medley of Beatles songs on the Hammond organ, which gave me the insane urge to rollerskate to Liverpool, and I began looking at people in the crowd, studying them, trying to see who made up the little town of Wynning.

They were just people. Not hicks, either. There was a certain number of men who were obviously farmers, with old-fashioned apparel of the man who works on a farm and is proud of it. But the wives and children of these men didn’t look any different from the wives and children of the middle class anywhere.

Of course I admit I grew up in Nebraska, and went to school in Illinois, and that naturally means the ways of the Middle West aren’t new to me. They are, in fact, all I know. But as far as I can tell, those ways aren’t particularly different from any place else in the country. Television is probably what’s done it, what’s made us all pretty much the same. I guess maybe we should be thankful for things like the Wynning Founder’s Day, and other regional nonsense, designed to make us remember we come from towns and states, and not just a country.

Anyway, the people here looked normal enough. The town seemed to have its share of kids with long hair and fashionably sloppy clothes, and pretty young girls in stylish, sexy outfits, and young married couples wearing the same sort of clothes young married couples in New York wear on a hot summer day, I suppose. And little kids were running around and making noise and falling down and wearing clothes that were already dirty, even though the morning was barely half over.

I also thought I could pick out a few University people. Wynning is just a stone’s toss from Iowa City and the University of Iowa, and apartments and houses in a university town are hard (and expensive) to come by, so not surprisingly a certain number of bearded, pipe-smoking men in poorly fitting somber sportshirts walked arm in arm with lean-faced, short-haired liberated women wearing studiously unattractive slacks and sweaters.

One person, though, particularly caught my eye. This person was female, as you may have guessed. This person was wearing a red, white and blue sparkle swim suit.

Well, not exactly a swim suit, but that’s as close as I can come to describing it properly. You see, she was the band majorette I mentioned before, briefly, and she was really something. She had blond hair and dark blue eyes. She had a very nice figure. She looked familiar to me, but then all pretty girls look somewhat familiar; I mean, the conventional sort of attributes that make girls pretty makes for a lot of them looking alike. If you follow me.

I followed her, with my eyes, as she practiced with her baton, out in the street; she had the good sense not to bother with the entertainment on the bandshell stage (right now a middle-aged heavy-set lady was imitating Groucho Marx) and was prancing out there, probably playing the exhibitionist more than practicing her baton work (which was as flawless as it was intricate) and had drawn a crowd of guys, who were watching, with round-eyed adoration.

The more I watched her, the more familiar she looked. Wishful thinking you might say, but I really felt I had seen her somewhere before, though what any acquaintance of mine would be doing in Wynning was beyond me, too, so I kept studying her, forcing myself to focus on her face, to try to dredge up the memory of where it was I’d seen her before.

And then it came to me.

It was the girl I had bumped into when I was streaking through the DeKalb Holiday Inn. The girl in the bikini. There was no mistaking that young, pretty face. That blond hair. Those dark blue eyes. Or the rest of her, either.

And here I was staring at her! What if she noticed me, and, Lord! What if she recognized me, too?

As the thought passed through my mind that I had to turn away, before our eyes met, our eyes met. She dropped her baton.

She smiled.

She recognized me.

She rushed over, a blur of blond hair and flashing thighs and patriotic glitter, and said, “Well, hello!”

“Er,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

She giggled and scooted in next to me on the bench. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

That elicited a startled look from the middle-aged couple on the other side of me, but my pretty majorette didn’t seem to notice, or anyway care, and she bubbled on, “I’m so glad to see you! And surprised!”

A fat man in front of us turned and held a finger to pudgy lips and shushed us. There was a talent show going on, after all. A man was on stage doing tricks with a yo-yo.

“We better get out of here if we want to talk,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll let you buy me a lemonade.”

And before I could answer, she was standing up, and two of the nicest boobies (as Wheat would say) ever to be decorated in red, white and blue sparkles were looking right at me. She took my hand, pulled me to my feet and led me away.