WITH FRANK AND SHIRLEY IN WALNUT, IOWA
By Mark Crane
A grain elevator appeared blue, breaking the shaggy horizon that ran between the black fields and the cloudy night sky. Over the hood, fat, long-legged flies sparkled in the headlights. They were hovering, soaking in the hot air that smelled of pigs and chickens–before splashing against the windshield. I flicked on the wipers and pushed the button for that blue fluid to come out. In three swipes, the pixie remnants of the last half mile were washed clear.
Newspapers, maps, and cassette tapes cluttered the wide front seat between Gina and I. Wrecked styrofoam coffee cups spilled from a McDonald’s bag at Gina’s feet. All that we owned was either on top of the huge-o ‘79 Ford L.T.D. station wagon or stuffed in the back, filling every last square inch of space that was out of the rear-view miror’s line of sight. Though Harvey, our fat, orange tomcat, seemed to be having a great time creeping atop the boxes, watching out the tailgate window, Gus, a black cat who’d grown little since we’d adopted him a few years before, maintained a pretty high level of terror, remaining curled beneath the front seat, howling any time the car accelerated or slowed. A hand-painted sign appeared beside the shoulder: CROSSROADS MOTEL – exit 19, 4 miles.
We rolled into Walnut, Iowa at 9 p.m.–giving ourselves an early break from our usual dawn-to-midnight schedule. We’d crossed more than a third of the country in four days. Though we’d been stopping punctually at the various touristy spots along the way to take pictures and walk the cordoned paths, at Lincoln’s Tomb, the Amish Farm, and Gettysburg Battlefield I hadn’t really gotten the feeling I’d mingled with the yokels.
Before leaving New York, I’d had a clear impression of the cross-country trip scattered with allusively* meaningful experiences, offered to us like stepping stones at places named, “Wally’s Snake Farm” or “Lost River Caverns.” But, as far as Gina was concerned, the yokels could take a flying leap. Hourly, she tabulated our credit card debt, which grew each time the guzzling station wagon went dry. She worried about the 150 thousand mile, ten-year-old engine, and, with each of its congested groans, clinks, and fizzles, she seemed to become a little more impatient with that part of me that would have been relieved to have never found an end point to our trip.
The Crossroads Motel came into view, and I searched the flat landscape for its companion greasy spoon where a disheveled but wise old woman served soggy roast beef sandwiches and long-necked beers, but even Walnut had traded in its musty soul to the pop-up plastic sheen of some chain restaurant.
Gus was howling after the car slowed and we pulled up the motel driveway. Gina had an arm draped over the back of the seat, her hand holding Harvey below the window. As we passed the office, our tail-sagging blue bomber was scrutinized by a sixty-pushing woman, leaned over the counter of the motel’s office, aglow in fluorescent light, squinting at us through large bifocals. I pulled through the car port quickly and found a spot to park that was out of her view.
It was beginning to be routine, this checking-into-motels business. Like a shopping list, desirable features swarmed in my mind: price, cable TV, movies, queen-sized beds, air conditioning, telephone, and so on. But, facing the fact we would not be moving on if dissatisfied, I did not complete the chore of gathering the list into my head.
I’d believed it to be the speed of the car that made the cloud of flies on the highway seem dense, but now, I stepped out into a swarm. I ducked and hurried across the parking lot, seeing them gathered under the bowl-shaped lighting fixtures that were spaced along the row of rooms. They filled the beams in swirling tempests.
The woman at the front desk stuck her head toward me, away from her body, greeting me with twisted lips and an eyebrow lifted, in a way that made me feel like I was late, like she was being generous with her attention.
“How much do you charge for a double?” I asked through a smile, raising my voice above Oprah Winfrey’s. It was nine at night and Oprah Winfrey was blaring away in Walnut, Iowa.
“Thirty-five,” she answered, and she watched me blankly, unconcerned with which way my decision would go, her eyes straining to resist the temptation of following Oprah’s voice back down to its source below the counter.
I filled out the paperwork, and she put a call through to my credit card company. “Lots of flies,” I said, watching her eyes. She ducked her artificially waved hair-do over the counter as she hurried to jot down the confirmation number she was being fed over the phone. The flies were crawling up and down the other side of the glass door and windows. They roamed aimlessly until their suction cup feet gave out and they dropped like acorns out of the lucency. Looking around the office, however, I could not find one bug inside. She put down the receiver and slid my credit card, the receipt, and the room key–room 23–across to me without a response.
An old guy was sitting in a folding chair beside the open door of room 22 watching us–one of those hundreds of vacationing retirees we’d seen on the highway. I glanced at him a few times as I pulled the car into the space in front of our door. He sat up straight, his hands clasped on his spread knees, a big grin on his face. Though I did not make eye contact at first, the old man called out to me.
“Hello, Joe,” he called, as I emerged carrying the litter box. He dipped his forehead at the back of the car. “That’s sure a big load you’re hauling.” I smiled and shook my head that he was right. I hurried into our room behind Gina who brought the carrier stuffed with the cats.
“Where you folks headed?” the old man called as the two of us returned for the overnight bags. A small battery operated fan was blowing up on him from the motel pavement between his feet. At his side, a gravy streaked plate and a can of beer rested on one of those folding tray tables. Through the screen door to his room, I could see two electric fans set at different angles atop the dresser and a woman in the back, dressed in a striped sailor’s shirt and shorts, busy at the sink with some chore. An extension cord ran under the screen door and up behind the old man’s chair to a crackerbox-sized bugzapper that was fastened by a loose section of hanger wire to a beam supporting the overhang.
Zap… zap… zap, zap, zap… zap, zap….
The glittery bugs were falling like snowflakes around him.
“Seattle, we were thinking,” I told him as I checked the tarp on the car’s roof for tears. “But, we’re stopping at other cities along the way, trying to find a good place to live.” Gina nudged me aside and opened the back door. She burrowed under the boxes and bags and suitcases with both hands at first. She stopped for a moment, breathing heavily, and then crawled in further, her knee pushing against the window crank.
“You from New York, then?” he asked, poking his chin at our Statue of Liberty-embossed front license plate. Gina emerged, gasping, a jar of peanut butter clutched in her hand. She shoved the jar in one of the two overnight bags and carried both the bags to our room.
“Yeah, well, I’m originally from Philadelphia, Gina’s from Kansas, but we’ve been living in New York for ten years.”
“Is that right.” He took a swig of beer. His eyes passed from me back to our car. He studied the details from his perch.
“Sugar,” he called, and I watched the small woman come striding vigorously.
“Reg,” Gina called, appearing at the door to our room. She told me calmly, “There is no air conditioning in this room.”
The old man leaned forward in his chair, trying to see her. “Nope,” he called. “Isn’t it the damndest thing? It’s gotta be at least eighty degrees and this place has no air conditioning.” Gina slammed the door shut.
The man took the towel that hung around his neck and wiped it over his neatly trimmed grey head. He pushed a thumb over his shoulder and from under the towel he rasped, “This is my better half.” He leaned back and said loudly, without looking at his wife, who was in fact standing just behind him, “Sugar, these folks are from New York City. They’re moving–not sure where to.” His attention dropped to his hand’s grasping attempts to locate the beer can. She smiled, as her eyes grazed over me and our car. For some reason, I stopped fooling with the cord I had been working on tightening. I sort of posed there, waiting for her decision.
“Was that the girl I just heard?” she asked with a smile aimed at me. Her husband nodded and she walked to our room’s door.
I leaned my back against the car and lit a smoke, leaving the initial puff in the still air around my face, wondering whether it repelled the bugs. The old man pulled a six-pack with four beers on it from a small cooler beneath his seat. “Come on and have a beer wih me,” he offered, quickly turning away, squinting at the highway. “Oooo, it’s warm.” He plucked a can of beer off and held it out to me. “You’d think there’d be some rain behind it.”
“Yeah,” I said. I walked over and took the beer from him. To create some small-talk, I ignored the fact they were obviously pensioners, asking, “So what brings you out here?”
He nodded toward their motor home. It was a humongous thing that stretched from the curb of the walk out across the parking lot, so far that I’d needed to maneuver the station wagon carefully through the narrow lane of blacktop between its end and the cornfield that bordered the lot. Though it was parked, some motor still rumbled from within. Air was blowing out a vent in its side. “I get tired of that fold-out mattress. Every now and then, I got to sleep on a real bed.”
“I’d have a glass of beer, if you was to, girlie,” I heard the old woman say to Gina as the two of them edged by me and passed into the old folks’ room.
I thought of how happy I was to have had the camper parked between our room and the office–happy we hadn’t needed to worry about the manager spying us sneaking in the cats.
I thought of these two–confident in the way they just moved into this place. I liked the way the guy had just parked himself there on the walkway–the way he had called out to me without worrying how I might judge him.
His head pivoted as his eyes followed another motor home speeding up the highway. He looked up at me standing beside him as if he’d forgotten I was there. After chewing a bit on his lower lip, he decided to stick his hand out to me. As he squeezed my hand hard, he said, “Frank Gallo. How dee do?” He pulled my hand across his ribs, bringing me down to him. His feathery eyebrows hid his eyes as he leveled his sight on the station wagon. “I want to hear why you are moving all the ways out here.”
He did not release me as I spoke, bent over, telling him how we were looking for a place where we could get good jobs and, at the same time, be able to afford to rent a house, so we could maybe start a family. I could feel against my cheek the damp heat of his face.
“What’s your line?” he asked. It took me a moment to decipher the expression and another to realize I did not have an answer.
“Clerical,” I guessed, though I delivered it confidently to him.
He let me go, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Look at me. I worked 43 years, and I’d be financially secure even if I cruised around for another 40. My line was sales. I seen single guys who were comfortable on clerical work, but men have always kept families strong with good sales jobs.”
It wouldn’t matter to me, I thought.
“You’re talking about a family,” he told me. “Boy, that means you need a paycheck coming in no matter what–steady. When you work pushing papers, you depend on the company. When you are a salesman, the company depends on you. YOU call the shots, you know? When you go to bed at night, you sleep like a baby, ’cause you know when you wake up, you’re still gonna be a salesman. They can’t take it away from you.”
I pictured myself sleeping with a smile on my face in a large, sturdy house full of children. A salesman. They humiliate themselves and don’t seem to care. They must be getting something out of it.
I remembered the time Gina’s cousin came to visit–a waterbed salesman. He smoked pot the entire time he was with us. I wouldn’t have a hard time competing with that guy, I thought.
“And with babies, don’t kid yourself, expenses come up outta nowhere. But when you’re a salesman, when you need extra money, you just gotta go out and work extra hard.”
Christmas time. I could see myself returning home at the end of an extra long day. My arms are full of gift-wrapped presents. A Labrador retriever greets me at the door. Gina asks me to get the fireplace going. Little Janie at the punchbowl, dropping in cut fruits.
“Next thing you know, your mortgage is paid up. You take the kids to the playground, you watch ‘em get over stage fright in the school play…. You walk with your family to church and find it hard to keep your shirt buttoned, your chest is heaving so much with pride.
“Before you know it,” he said, pulling out his wallet, showing me a photo of him standing in a parking lot of cars at the base of a huge fiberglass sign that read, “Frank Gallo Chevrolet.” “…you got your own business.”
Frank cocked his head in thought, his hands gripping the straps of his tanktop and his craggy elbows sticking out in the air.
I could see how I hadn’t really been looking at my life strategically. I could see how lame my usual approach to life was. It was like I’d written myself off as a victim, and I was trying to figure out the best ways to avoid failure. I did not have enough confidence in a field to call it my “line” and make it such an important part of my life. Frank had done so, though. He’d concentrated all his efforts, and received what appeared to be a big pay-off. I could see Gina and I leaving a list by the phone for the babysitter. “We’ll be home by eleven,” I tell her as we head out to some cocktail party. There’s a dog waiting at the door. I think, tonight, after the whole family is asleep, I’ll take him down the street without a leash. I’ll be sipping on a brandy, listening to the breeze pass through the trees.
“You’ve got to meet the tide,” Frank said, gasping a little, as though he’d said it a million times before.
“Huh?”
“You can’t wait for it to come to you.”
I thought back on that high school summer I sold T.V. Guide over the phone.
“Sales is a pain in the neck, though. You got to admit,” I said, planning on going on to tell him how salesmen often don’t succeed and how you have to constantly kiss people’s asses.
But, he responded, “–Of course it’s a pain. I always said it was like getting a lawyer’s pay for being a garbage man. But that’s life. When you have kids, you don’t care about how hard your work is. You just care about being able to provide for your family. And eventually, it all pays off. Look at me.” He stuck his cigar between his teeth and leaned back, his arms spread apart. “Does this look like work?”
I could work, I thought. I had never had a shortage of willpower. I watched his eyes turn cross. He stood and walked to the side of the camper, where he crouched for a moment. The old man unlocked the camper’s door and, without a word to me, stepped in.
The flies were hovering around my face and I stepped to his seat. I sat down beneath the bugzapper and thought how the guy had made his life work so well. It seemed so easy to me, right then. I felt like I’d just come out of a jungle. “Sure,” I thought. “Put me in any city tomorrow. I’ll have a job by the end of the day.”
When he returned, he had a curtain rod in his hand. He bent over, poking the rod under his camper, muttering about a leak. “How old are you, Frank?” I called.
He nearly wrung his own neck the way his face shot around so fast. He leapt up, twirling once around in the air and landing with the soles of his shoes clapping rhythmically on the asphalt. “Seventy-six!” he answered, pulling himself upright with just one slight heaving up of his barrel chest.
He wanted to know what I’d said under my breath. “What? What?” he called.
“I said, ‘Wow!’ I can’t believe it. You look no older than sixty.” He sauntered over to me, a little strain showing as he came closer.
He poked me with the curtain rod, as he whispered, “People ask how we go on so long. It’s all in the head. You got to be strong upstairs–determined.”
Frank told me about his children. Three of them were keeping Frank Gallo Chevrolet going. The fourth was living in Utah, selling burritos to supermarket chains.
Gina eventually emerged with her new pal, Shirley. Shirley was offering her one of their fans. “Nooo, I think it’s getting cooler now,” Gina said with slightly slurred speech, the way she’d get after having a drink on an empty stomach. We wished them goodnight and they nodded to us. Before we were in our door, they were involved in some controversy over whether or not one or the other had plugged in the mobile phone recharger.
“Good, sociable people,” I thought. Just the type of experience I’d needed.
Our room was simple, and skimpy compared to others we’d stayed at, but cleaner. Though there were no framed prints on the walls, neither were there any strange stains. The TV had only three channels, but it was one of those with the radio built in, which I always liked for the mornings when I’d be able to tune in some local flavor. While I waited for Gina to come to bed, I rifled the nightstand and the bureaus for one of those motel handbooks. I settled for a map of downtown Omaha in the front section of the phone book.
The cats were busy exploring the underside of the bed, or perhaps they were frightened by Frank and Shirley’s continued banter that sounded clear, as though the couple was sitting at the table in our room.
“Remind me to stop in Des Moines and have someone clean out the radiator, Okay?” Frank asked Shirley.
“Where’s my book? Did you see my book?” she responded.
“We could overheat. Do you know that? Remind me.”
“All right, but where’s my book?”
Gina stretched out on her back, pulling the sheet over her body. “If we can hear them so clearly,” I whispered. “They can probably hear us just as well.” Gina nodded slowly. Their conversation stopped and I did not whisper anything else to Gina, for fear they’d hear and think we were saying something about them.
I fell asleep that night, thinking of how surprised Gina would be by the new me. She’d tell our friends, “And I remember the first day we got to Seattle, Reggie found a job. The very first day. He worked like crazy our first year here, and, before you know it, we were able to start a family.” I’d been listening to her, but I’d been watching the kids romping with the golden retriever in the yard behind our house–a rolling lawn that ended beside a creek.
The creek turned to a line as I lay there. The line ran down the center of a highway. Frank and Shirley were ahead, plowing the way. I was driving the blue bomber, my foot pressing the accelerator carefully, so as to stay just behind the motor home, because I’d heard you could save gas by driving in the vacuum that followed such behemoths. Frugal urges, those creations of my more conscious mind, softened as the night progressed into a lack of desire. I felt how I’d felt as a boy in Pennsylvania, sitting on the front porch, making circles in the dark with the glowing tip of a punk. I woke cold and pulled the sheet up over a numb shoulder.
By morning, the flies had been exterminated, perhaps until noon, by the cool air’s lack of moisture. I woke, repressing my hunger for breakfast with an urge to get going. Without confusion, I washed my face and, as Gina showered, packed.
Frank and Shirley had not yet left. When I went out to check the oil and coolant, I found Shirley, sitting in Frank’s folding chair, beside the door to their camper. He was crouched beside her, again poking the curtain rod at some hidden problem.
“G’mornin’, neighbor,” he called, as I stepped around between the camper and the station wagon. He stood up straight. “Isn’t it a nice one?” I squinted at the white sky and agreed. There wasn’t much to say after that and our gaze fell down on the station wagon.
“Doesn’t that need a little air?” Shirley asked, pointing at our front tire.
Frank agreed, “I think she’s right, kiddo. You could use a little air in that one. How ’bout those springs? They holding out back there with all that weight?”
“No,” I told him, as my fingers played, pulling the wipers across our dewy windshield. “They were shot when we first left the city.”
“That’s okay,” Frank hurried to say. “A little bumpy of a ride never hurt anyone.”
“You two about ready to get on the road?” Shirley called to Gina, who’d appeared in our doorway.
Gina carried a bag to the car, answering with her first smile of the day, “Just about.”
“You might better stop in a car wash and vacuum out the radiator,” Frank told me. He’d found his way around to the front of our car. I walked over and bent beside him. Our grille was jammed with bugs–big ugly bugs with long, fat, tan bodies. Like puzzle pieces, they fit between the squiggly radiator fins.
“Where you headed?” Shirley asked.
“Well, we were thinking we’d head up through South Dakota. I want to visit Hot Springs. They’ve got a pit of mastedons there they’re excavating.” She waited. I added, “And Little Big Horn and Mt. Rushmore are just a stone’s throw away.”
“Sure,” Frank said, taking a step closer to me, smiling with perfect dentures but godaweful breath. “That’s swell. How’re you going?”
“I think we get 29 in Omaha to route 90,” I said. I made a start for the front door on an instinct to get the map. For some reason, I had begun to feel like they were planning on following us.
Gina came back out, this time carrying the litter box. “Well,” Frank said, exchanging glances with Shirley. “We hope you kids all the best.” He brought his hand around, and, when I moved to shake it, I found a twenty dollar bill slapped into my hand. I slid my hand out quickly, leaving the money in Frank’s hand. I immediately regretted it, in a way, because Frank turned red and seemed to feel so stupid. It was one of those moments that did not work right.
“We want the two of you to have breakfast on us,” Frank protested.
I guess I should have just considered myself lucky, grabbed the money, thanked Frank and Shirley, and, with as few parting words as possible, parted. Instead, I said something stupid like, “No, no, no… we’re riding on plastic this trip!”
I have worried since then over whether or not I thanked him for the offer–I can’t remember if I actually said, “Thanks.” All I can remember is him coming towards me, the twenty still in his hand, with that beet red color in his face and neck, and me, backing up, awkwardly changing the subject, asking, “Frank, what’s the problem under here?”–bending over where he had been poking the curtain rod.
We spent a while discussing a cracked hose, which I ended up working on for a half hour–removing the hose, recutting it, and getting the clamps back on it. I emerged, sweaty and grimey. Frank and Shirley thanked me, complimenting my mechanical skills.
Gina and I were late, though, and we got ourselves into our car. We pulled out, waving to them.
I can still see Frank, as he looked in the rear-view mirror, watching us go. He looked a little bitter. I turned my eyes ahead, thinking how Frank’s inspirations had not lasted the night with me, which was somehow proof to me that I should not chase them down and try to revive them. I reached over the seat and flicked open the door of the cat carrier, and then probably started to worry again about the abilities of our ‘79 Ford L.T.D. station wagon.
Vrooooom….
I wrote this somewhere around 1990.