Thomas Disch: On Wings of Song

The demise of the Register came at a bad time for Daniel. Over and above his father’s theoretical objections to allowances for teenagers (which Daniel had lately become) the money just wasn’t there. Though he had at last taken up his indentures and was no longer in debt to the county, Abraham Weinreb did have to meet stiff monthly payments on the house, and now there were the hospital’s bills to settle. What’s more, he was under strict orders to cut back on his work load, so there was significantly less money coming in.

Daniel stewed over the dilemma for the better part of a month, while the daily demands of friendship and ostentation ate up the little money he’d saved against the day, next July, when Young Iowa was to go camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Then he took the initiative and went to speak to Heinie Youngermann at the Sportsman’s Rendezvous, one of the taverns that sold the Star-Tribune . Not only was Daniel able to secure a route for himself, but he was put in charge of the entire delivery operation (with a two percent rake-off). Admittedly, there weren’t as many subscribers as there had been for the above-board Register , but the per-copy profit was as good, and by making each route a little larger each of the boys stood to earn as much as he used to, while Daniel, with that beautiful two percent, was pulling down a weekly income of nearly fifty dollars, which was as much as a lot of grown-ups got at full-time jobs. His friend Eugene Mueller continued to deliver in the Linden Drive section of town, virtually guaranteeing that the police would not interfere, for who’d dare hassle Roy Mueller’s son?

Besides the basic good news of being flush, it was spring. Lawns were turning green before the rains had washed away the last traces of the snow. The main street was alive with pushcarts and bicycles. Suddenly it was Central Daylight Time and the sun stayed up till seven-thirty. Milly’s face went from sallow to rosy to tan from her stints of backyard gardening. She acted happier than he could ever remember. Even the twins seemed interesting and agreeable now that he no longer had to be their bed-warmer. They’d learned to talk. In (as Daniel had quipped) a manner of speaking. Buds swelled on branches, clouds scudded through the sky, robins appeared out of nowhere. It truly was spring.

One Sunday for the sheer hell of it Daniel decided to ride his bicycle out along County Road B to where a schoolfriend of his, Geraldine McCarthy, lived in the village of Unity, a round trip of fourteen miles. In the fields on either side of the road the new cornplants were springing up through the black Iowa soil. The cool air rippled through his cotton shirt as if on purpose to share its growing excitement.

Halfway to Unity he stopped pedalling, overcome with a sense that he was an incredibly important person. The future, which usually he never gave much thought to, became as intensely real as the sky overhead, which was sliced in two neat pieces by the vapor trail of a jet. The feeling became so powerful it almost got frightening. He knew, with an absoluteness of knowing that he would never doubt for many years, that someday the whole world would know who he was and honor him. How and why remained a mystery.

After the vision had departed he lay down in the young weeds by the side of the road and watched the clouds massing at the horizon. How strange, how fortunate, and how unlikely to be Daniel Weinreb, in this small town in Iowa, and to have such splendors in store.

General Roberta Donnelly, the Republican candidate for President, was going to be giving a major speech at a Fight Against Flight Rally in Minneapolis, according to the Star-Tribune , and Daniel and Eugene decided to go and hear her and even get her autograph if they could. They’d have a real adventure for a change instead of just going off into the Muellers’ attic or the Weinreb’s basement and acting one out. In any case they were getting too old for that sort of thing. Eugene was fifteen, Daniel fourteen (though of the two he seemed the older, being so much hairier everywhere it counted).

There was no way they could let their parents know what they were planning. Setting off for Des Moines on their own would have been gently discouraged and maybe eventually allowed, but Minneapolis was as unthinkable a destination as Peking or Las Vegas. Never mind that the reason for their going there was to see General Donnelly, as true-blue and red-blooded a motive as any undergoder could have asked for. For all right-thinking Iowans the Twin Cities were Sodom and Gomorrah (On the other hand, as right-thinking Minnesotans liked to point out, what had happened there would have happened in Iowa too, if only six percent more voters had swung the other way). It was scary — but also, for that very reason, exciting — to think of going across the border, and there comes a time in your life when you have to do something that is scary in this particular way. No one else would ever need to know about it, except Jerry Larsen, who had agreed to take over both their routes for the two afternoons they meant to be gone.

Having told their parents they were going camping and skillfully avoided saying where, they rode their bikes north as far as U.S.18, where they folded them up and hid them inside a storm culvert under the road. They struck luck with their very first ride, an empty semi returning to Albert Lea. It smelled of pigshit, even up in the cab with the driver, but that simply became the special smell of their adventure. They became so friendly talking with the driver that they considered changing their plans and asking him to say that they were all together, but that seemed an unnecessary complication. When they got to the border Eugene needed only to mention his father’s name to the Customs Inspector and they were across.

The unspoken understanding was that they were on their way to see the latest double-feature at the Star-Lite Drive-In outside of Albert Lea. Flying was far from being the only forbidden fruit available in Minnesota. Pornography was also an attraction, and — in the eyes of most Iowans — a much more real one. (It was chiefly on account of its ads for border drive-ins that the Star-Tribune was banned in neighboring Farm Belt states.) Eugene and Daniel were doubtless a little young to be sneaking across the border to the Star-Lite, but no one was about to make a fuss over Roy Mueller’s son, since both Roy himself and his older son Donald were such frequent visitors at this particular check-point. Sexual precocity has always been one of the prerogatives — if not indeed a solemn duty — of the ruling class.

From Albert Lea it was eighty miles due north to Minneapolis. They went in a Greyhound bus without even bothering to try and hitch. The fields you could see from the bus window seemed no different from equivalent fields in Iowa, and even when they hit the outskirts of the city it was distressingly like the outskirts of Des Moines — patches of ramshackle slums alternating with smaller well-secured stretches of suburban affluence, with the occasional shopping mall and service station saluting them with the giant letters of their names revolving on high poles. There was possibly a little more traffic than there would have been outside Des Moines, but that may have been on account of the rally. Everywhere you went — on lawns, in store windows, stuck to the sides of buildings, — were posters announcing the rally and urging the enactment of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment. It was hard to believe, when there were obviously so many million people behind it, that the Amendment could ever be defeated, but it had been, twice.

Downtown Minneapolis was an amazement of urbanity: its colossal buildings, its sumptuous stores, its swarming streets, the sheer noise, and then, beyond these ascertainable realities, the existence, surmised but wholly probable, of fairies swooping and darting through the glass-and-stone canyons, flitting above the trafficked streets, lighting in flocks on the carved facades of monolithic banks, then spiraling larklike into the azures of mid-afternoon, like a vastation of bright invisible locusts that fed not on the leaves of trees or on the potted flowers decorating the Mall but on the thoughts, the minds, the souls of all these calm pedestrians. If indeed they did. If indeed they were there at all.