Going to Chicago (16 page)

Then I drove to Fort Meyers, Florida. Northern retirees were moving down in droves. I found Pine Island. Saw all the little houses going up. Bought a lot right across from the new bingo hall and put up the Clam Shack. My venetian blind signs offered fried clam strips, onion rings, fish dinners, and milkshakes made with real ice cream. No more hamburgers or frozen custard for me. I soon discovered I hated Florida. Flat, hot, and nothing else. But I stayed in business until 1988. Finally sold out to some dreamer who said frozen yogurt was taking over the planet. He called his place the Yogurt Shack, certain that the emotional continuity of the word Shack would make him a wealthy man.

I was seventy-two. Had my Social Security check and my windfall from the Clam Shack. On my drive back to Bennett's Corners I stopped off in Mingo Junction to see if Gladys wanted her radio scripts after all. A neighbor told me she'd divorced the beer-truck driver and moved with her kids to Florida, sometime in the sixties, to Bonita Springs, not fifteen miles south of Pine Island.

The Sparrow Hill Retirement Villa is located five miles north of Bennett's Corners, in what is now the city of Strongsville. It was just a crossroads when we flew through it in August 1934, on our way to the Chicago World's Fair. I've got two rooms and a toilet. Will's brother Clyde picks me up every other Thursday and we go to Perkin's for pancakes.

So over the years I've pieced this thing together pretty well. Bud Hemphill, Gladys Bartholomew, Millie Macmillan, Albert Finley, Lloyd Potts, Will's Aunt Mary, all helped me understand what happened and why. I learned the most from Pruitt, though. Like I said, it took every drop of religion I had not to kill the sonofabitch. If the Army Air Force had made me a fighter pilot, or even put me on a bomber crew, I might have killed him right there on the patio. But they trained me to be a cook. So after we'd talked all morning, I went into his kitchen and made us big omelets with onions and Spam cubes. I spit in his. He said it was the best omelet he'd ever had.

Both Sheriff Barnes and Pruitt were listening to the
Hoe-Down
that night. Barnes was at Millie's, shooting marbles on her bedroom floor while Millie's five girls were getting ready for the Friday night rush. I suppose it was good for the sheriff to have a ladyfriend who ran a whorehouse, and good for Millie to have the sheriff for a boyfriend, though I gathered from Albert Finley they genuinely loved each other.

Pruitt was at his office in Chicago, working late as he always did. He was one of Melvin Purvis's young G-men. They'd killed John Dillinger just a month before outside the Biograph Theater and they were all full of vinegar. Pruitt was from Tennessee and loved hillbilly music. He never missed the
National Barn Dance
on WLS and he never missed the
WEEB Friday Night Hoe-down
. WEEB couldn't have been more than a five-hundred-watt station, but his big government-bought receiver could suck up every signal in North America.

We, of course, had just barged in on Lloyd Potts and the Harmony Heavers. When they started playing “My Horse Ain't Hungry,” and their drummer jumped out front and started tap dancing like a fool, Gus, hillbilly that he was, couldn't stand still. He dragged Gladys to her feet for a dance. Danced her right into the control booth. I saw him point his shotgun in the general direction of Lloyd Potts's head. Lloyd's microphone was turned off, but I gathered from his bouncing jowls he and Gus were having quite a discussion. Lloyd finally put down the chicken he was plucking. Gus and Gladys pulled up chairs beside him. “My Horse Ain't Hungry” ended with a fine fiddle solo by the man wearing the Hopalong Cassidy hat.

Lloyd snapped on his microphone. “I just love the way you fellas sing that song.”

The Harmony Heavers flashed their show business smiles. “Thank you, Lloyd!”

Lloyd got down to business. “Say folks, the
WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down
has some special guests in the studio. Give a big Hoosier hello to Gus ‘The Gun' Gillis and the beautiful Gladys Bartholomew.”

Gus and Gladys leaned timidly into the microphone and took turns saying hello.

“So what brings you to WEEB, Gus?” Lloyd asked.

Gus launched into the monologue that stitched our fate to Sheriff Orville Barnes and the FBI man Pruitt: “As you know Lloyd, me and Gladys, and those three Ohio boys out there in the empty chairs, have been robbing our way across Weebawauwau County for two and a half days now. And not one badge has come looking for us. Not a badge! Heck Lloyd, we even stole an airplane and stuck up a whole riverful of Baptists.”

“Say Gus,” Lloyd asked in his friendly, on-the-air voice, “that wasn't you who set down on the ballfield last night, was it?”

Gus answered good-naturedly. “Yes, it was us, Lloyd. Unfortunately all did not go as planned. But it does underscore our dilemma.”

“How's that, Gus?”

“I should have been surrounded and riddled full of bullets long before I desperately descended on that ballfield. To put it in plain Indiana English, Lloyd, your local sheriff is a chickenshit coward.”

“A chickenshit coward,” Gladys repeated in her best Daphne Darnell voice.

Lloyd knew he was in a dilemma of his own. He wanted to be an amicable host, put on a good show, stay alive. Yet he was honor bound to defend the public air waves. “Checkered-shirt cowboy? Why I've never seen Sheriff Orville Barnes wear a checkered shirt in his life! Have you, boys?”

The Harmony Heavers leaned into their microphone and smiled. “No we haven't, Lloyd.”

Gus watched his language after that. He knew he needed to stay on Lloyd's good side. Without using another offending word he told the people of Weebawauwau County about his miserable life in West Virginia, about how he met Gladys, what a talent and a beauty she was. He talked about their crime spree across southern Ohio, up the slender length of Indiana, sticking up the Kokomo School of Performing Arts, working their way north to the melon stand outside Bootjack. He told them about kidnapping us. About keeping us from our pilgrimage to the Chicago World's Fair. About how innocent and unwilling Will, Clyde, and I were. He summoned every clean word in his vocabulary to describe how loathsome he was. How deserving he was of a Bonnie and Clyde-like riddling.

“How can WEEB help, Gus?” Lloyd asked with every ounce of radio sincerity he had in him.

“Well, Lloyd,” Gus said, “we've decided to stay right here at WEEB, on the air, day and night, until that checkered-shirted cowboy of a sheriff does his duty.”

The Harmony Heavers played for another two hours. Lloyd finished plucking his chicken and put it in a pot of boiling water, along with carrots and onions and a bowl of egg-sized potatoes. Gus made repeated trips to the door, to listen for the sound of sirens. Gladys danced in and out of the Harmony Heavers, trying on all their stupid hats, like Goldilocks tasting porridge. Will buried his nose in his guidebook.

Clyde sat and hummed. I just took it all in.

Sheriff Orville Barnes took it all in, too. He was at Millie's whorehouse near the tracks, on the floor of her room, in his underwear, listening to the
Friday Night Hoe-Down
, playing a game of marbles. Sheriff Barnes loved games. Any kind of game. Millie said he laughed like a hyena when Gus called him a chickenshit coward over the air. Laughed like two hyenas when Lloyd prudently changed it to checkered-shirt cowboy. For the rest of his life he told the joke on himself: “Well, I'll be a checkered-shirt cowboy,” he'd say. When he ran for reelection that fall he wore a checkered shirt on the campaign trail. Won in a landslide.

Pruitt took it all in, too. “I couldn't believe what I was hearing,” he told me when I looked him up in 1968. “Armed robbery, destruction of property, auto theft, airplane theft, kidnapping, swearing on the radio. As soon as the
Hoe-Down
was over, I was on the road.”

The Harmony Heavers finished with a hymn called “God's Radio.” At the end, as they hummed and strummed, the jug player with the fake ears blowing sorrowful bass notes, Lloyd signed off: “Join us again next week on the
WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down
, featuring the heavenly harmonies and hilarious hijinks of the Harmony Heavers. Until then, this is your humble host, Lloyd Potts, saying, get some sleep already!”

Lloyd stood by the door and handed each Harmony Heaver a dollar as they filed out. Gus stood right next to him, taking each dollar away. After they'd driven off in their old bus, Gus had us unload our suitcases and bedding from the Gilbert SXIII. We were staying a while, he said.

“
There is a case of machine guns and revolvers with rogues' gallery portraits of mail-car bandits captured and convicted. Figurines of Christ on the cross between two thieves, all enclosed in a quart bottle, are part of the museum of strange articles found in packages in the Dead Letter Office of the Post Office exhibit
.”

O
FFICIAL
G
UIDE
B
OOK OF THE
W
ORLD
'
S
F
AIR

Seventeen/Hopscotch

Yes, Sheriff Orville Barnes loved games. Games that took brains. Games that took muscle, guts, bluff, and mendacity. Games that required a good eye and nimble fingers. Games that required a straight face and the hunger of a cannibal. Indoor games. Outdoor games. Beer-joint games and kitchen-table games. Church basement games. Sunday games and Friday night games. Adult games in whorehouses. Schoolyard games. He always played to win and never played unless he knew he would.

Sheriff Barnes also liked to invent games. Games using real people. Games so secret, so sneaky and convoluted, only he knew they were being played. Every poor soul in Weebawauwau County—including those dropping in for a crime spree—were game pieces to be moved this way and that for Orville Barnes's amusement.

Pruitt arrived at three in the morning. Parked across from the courthouse and slept on the front seat of his Chevrolet, clothes off so they wouldn't wrinkle. He dressed before dawn, cleansed his breath with a mint, and then sat square-backed on a park bench, legs crossed, socks pulled tight and gartered, until Sheriff Barnes showed up for work.

It was almost nine before Pruitt spotted him coming up the sidewalk. The sheriff suddenly started hopping on one leg and then the other. It took a minute for Pruitt to realize the sheriff was playing hopscotch, and not having an epileptic fit. When the sheriff reached the end of the chalk boxes, he pirouetted and hopped back the other way. “He looked like a grasshopper caught in a spiderweb,” Pruitt told me. It was the only time he smiled the entire morning I was at his bungalow in Elmhurst.

Pruitt went to rescue him. “Sheriff Orville Barnes?”

The sheriff landed on both feet in front of him. “That's right.”

“Norman Pruitt, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I've driven down from Chicago.”

Sheriff Barnes pirouetted. “Pretty drive, ain't it?”

“It was dark.”

The sheriff turned and hopped away. “I like night driving. Always fun to see how many skunks you can hit. Fun to watch the deputies wash the car afterwards.”

Pruitt frowned at the chalk boxes on the sidewalk. “You don't have an ordinance against this?”

“Against playing hopscotch?”

“Defacing public property.”

“It's only chalk. The rain washes it off.”

“And if it doesn't rain, sir?”

“Then I round up a posse and we piss it off.”

Sheriff Barnes led his newest game piece into the courthouse, to his office on the ground floor. There was a dart board on the back of the door, boxes of board games stacked on the filing cabinets. The sheriff sat behind his desk and scraped a maze of dominoes into the pencil drawer. “That's some World's Fair you've got up there, Pruitt. Something to see.”

“I haven't had time myself.”

The sheriff produced a small children's top and gave it a spin on the desktop. “Why doesn't that surprise me? You ought to unbutton your vest and go over there before it closes. They got a midway longer than three Main Streets end to end. Hundreds of games. Throwing balls. Tossing rings. I couldn't carry all the Kewpie dolls I won. Gave some to the orphanage, some to Millie and her—what brings you to Weebawauwau County, Pruitt?”

“Gus Gillis.”

The sheriff stopped his top. Sourly gave it another spin. “And how does such a busy government man know about Gus Gillis?”

Pruitt told him what he'd heard on the
WEEB Friday Night Hoe-Down
. The sheriff was delighted. “Those Harmony Heavers are the best jug band in Indiana. Headed for big things.”

“I'm sure they are,” Pruitt said. “About Gillis—”

Sheriff Barnes blew on the top to keep it going. “I've seen rinky-dinky crooks like this Gus Gillis before. It's usually best to wait them out. Sooner or later they move on to somebody else's county.”

“He's apparently kidnapped three boys from Ohio. That's a federal offense.”

“Do we know for sure they're from Ohio?”

“Kidnapping anybody from anywhere is a federal offense,” Pruitt said. He snatched the top and squeezed it. “These are difficult times. Murderers. Thieves. Communists. Union organizers. Defilers of every stripe. Sheriff Barnes, we have responsibilities as officers of the law, no matter how dangerous.”

The sheriff pushed his chair back. Walked to the door. Retrieved the darts and counted off ten paces. He let the darts fly. All but one struck the bull's-eye. “That's the second time in fourteen hours I've been called a coward.”

The sheriff's marksmanship tempered the government man a bit. “I didn't say that, sir.”

“I'm not a coward, Pruitt. Not a hero either. Gus Gillis is crazy as a bedbug. You heard what he did. Those poor Baptists. Almost ruined my ballgame. He wants to die, Pruitt! You gotta be careful with a guy who wants to die.” He collected the darts. Paced off ten.