Michael Martone - Alive and Dead in Indiana

There’s your girl friend , says Margaret.

Terry starts right up. I can’t cook .

Well, you better start learning , I say.

Pete making a fist all the time and the green squeezing out through the fingers.

If they don’t know me, they don’t know how to say my name. The g is like in girl or gun. When they showed up from the Star and News at the farm and asked Dad what he thought about me and said the name, Dad just said, I dont know him , never heard of me. But he’s a junior , they said.

That’s not my name , Dad said. And he pronounced it for them.

That’s all changed now , they said to him.

The old man just sat there right in front of them.

That’s okay. Left all that behind. Even left that g behind.

Who told me that? Toms of the Star in Tucson while we waited for Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin to double-cross us. He came up to the bars during the sideshow, all those locals going by to look at us for a quarter. Pete steaming at Leach. Mac saying how great the weather was down there. Toms called me by my real name and told me the story. He asks me if that’s how I wanted to be known, by the other name and all. Hell, it wouldn’t do any good. It’s out of our hands, just like everything else.

The police are leaving after doing nothing. They open the door, and there is a woman standing on the other side just about to knock. Shows she’s surprised to see them, but she knows them all by name. She asks them if it is that time of month again. They nod and file out, the plainclothes first and then the uniforms. She stops one who is eating a sandwich as he goes by, takes out a hanky, and polishes his badge . AU I had was a big bolt wrapped up in a neckerchief. I kept hitting him but only knocking off his straw hat. He’d pick it up and put it on again, and I’d knock it off. He was making that godawful sound, and I could hear the Masons come running. He didn’t have no money. I didn’t know a thing then. Just a kid. Same grocer gave me a talking to when I’d swiped some jawbreakers. He knew my dad. I ran, and someone chucked a bottle after me. They found me in the barn.

It was to have been all set. But the judge didn’t care. I heard he died falling asleep across some railroad tracks, a knife in his pocket because I was coming to get him.

Since the operation, it’s been like I had on thimbles. Patty wonders what’s happened to my fingers. She’s got them spread out in front of her eyes, tired of my fortune. She says, Well, hell. How do you pick up something like a dime?

I start thinking about all the things I’ve touched. Chairs and guns and the counter I hopped over in Daleville. The glasses. The sinks. The steering wheels. The money. It’s like those things remember how I felt. But me, I forgot it as soon as I let go.

Touched Terry all over. Must have left a print on her everywhere. Some cop dusting her rear, blowing it off, saying, We got the son of a bitch . And they’re all looking at her, looking for me. All the other women too. Shaking hands with men and having them look into their palms.

You think twice about punching a light switch.

Red rushing in saying that he killed a cop at the garage. Lost the Auburn, and they got his girl. He quieted down, started in telling us all over again what had happened and that the girl could be trusted. We looked at each other’s faces, knowing that we didn’t look like anybody else no more. Mac looked like a banker. Pete like some college kid, he’s going without a hat and wearing that floppy collar. He walked into Racine and put a big Red Cross poster on the window without anybody taking a second look. And I’m looking like a sissy bookkeeper. Putting on weight.

We got the girls to dye our hair. Thought it was funny, us sitting with sheets around our necks. I said red and let my mustache grow. Terry sitting on my lap, drawing the eyebrows in. Didn’t like your face to begin with , she’s saying. Pete telling me later about the two toes he’s got grown together. And Red holding up his hand, saying, What am I going to do with these . I never thought about them before, the fingers he left on the railroad track in the Soo.

They’re going to fry you, boy .

I could hear Pete calling from the next cell. Leach was taking me back to Indiana. I fought them off awhile and they put cuffs on too hard for it. Some vacation. There was the cop from East Chicago who ran away. He tried to stop me , I tell them. Where is Wisconsin’s Lightning Justice now? I could hear Pete screaming from his cell about going to Wisconsin and staying together and Mac calling from someplace else, See you, John!

I’ll never see them again. I can’t remember their faces. They went from Tucson to Ohio when Indiana waived the bust-out from Michigan City. They’ll get it for getting me out of Lima.

The last thing is voices.

So long, John . Sioux Falls, Mason City. South Bend wasn’t enough. I met their Mouth on the fair grounds to pass them the money. The parachutes dropping from the tower. Tell them I’ll get more .

Indiana flew me to Crown Point. The pilot said that over there is Mexico.

Blackie has won the boat on a bet. They sit together on the deck with the lights of the city behind them. He asks her what she wants to name the boat. She talks about having a house and family . It’s old-fashioned, she says but that is what she wants. Then Blackie kisses her, and she stops talking about leaving the city, sailing away .

We called her Mack Truck. She made breakfast Christmas morning. The fight I had with Terry was all left over from that race driver. I told her to go back to the reservation. Take my car . She’s packing and crying.

Pete’s girl said, A girl’s got a right to choose who she wants to be with .

But it was like I didn’t know Terry no more, and she stopped being pretty.

Christmas in Florida.

Even the joint had snow.

I told her to go where it was snowing, with the race driver. And she left after Red told her how to work the spark on the Ford. I can buy another car! I shouted at her.

It was so hot. I sat around in pieces of suits, and the girls giggled about thinking the tide was a flood. They had never seen an ocean in Indiana.

It got hotter the week after Christmas. The papers said we were still raising hell in Chicago. They blame everything on us. On New Year’s Eve, people were shooting off firecrackers to see the light on the water. Pete’s girl got out a tommy gun, and it rode right up when she shot it. I took it from her and fired it out over the waves, a long rip. But it wasn’t any good firing at nothing. The tracers looked just so pitiful. Everybody else had girls and was heading for Tucson. I said I was going north and look for Terry. Red said he’d come along. We’d fence some bonds in Chicago.

If I make it to Mexico, I’ll never see any of them again. Terry lost in the jails, Pete and Mac in Ohio. We can’t pull off the magic trick again. We broke out of too many places. Even if I could walk in with this new face, there’d be no way to walk them out. The farmers they got to sit with them are taking shots at airplanes flying by. South Bend wasn’t enough.

I’ll never see Sally Rand at the Fair again. Have the woman I’m with tugging at my sleeve to get the hell out of there. But only half pulling, looking up at the stage too, at the feathers and the shiny pieces of paper. A thing like that. You can’t stop watching the fans and balloons — because they are moving and changing and her face is floating, floating above whatever it is she’s using to cover herself where she has to. The cops making such a big deal of it, standing off to the side, looking just like the rest of us looking up at the parts of her. Hiding like that. She didn’t have to hide!