On the Wing (7 page)

Lemuel resumed the narrative, and as it continued, with occasional eye-witness interruptions from Gurney and others, a thrill of recognition began to run through me. I knew the story they were telling. I knew it well. It was
The War of the Worlds,
and the version that Lem was telling resembled the version broadcast by the Mercury Theatre under the direction of Orson Welles, on October 30, 1938, six years—almost to the day—before I was born. I had become interested in the story after seeing a movie version of it at the Babbington Theater when I was nine. Inspired by that experience, “once bitten” and infected in a positive rather than a negative way, I had read the original version, by H. G. Wells, and I had also read the radio play by Howard Koch that had been the basis for the Mercury Theatre broadcast. It was a case of once bitten, twice eager. Not only had I read Koch's radio play, but when I was approaching my eleventh birthday a friend and I had made our own version of the radio broadcast, using a tape recorder. Together we had created some sound effects that we considered pretty realistic. For instance, for the scene in which the top of the Martians' spaceship begins unscrewing, we put the microphone right up next to an empty mayonnaise jar while one of us slowly unscrewed the lid. The effect was so realistic that when the kids in our class at school heard it—

“You got something you want to say, son?” the interrogator asked.

I did! I did! I wanted to tell them everything about my experiences with
The War of the Worlds.
I wanted to begin at the beginning, with some background about the Babbington Theater and brief plot summaries of the most memorable movies that I had seen there before I saw
The War of the Worlds,
but in the moment of hesitation when I was deciding just where I ought to begin, I noticed that Lem had grown perplexed and irritated, and from the way he was scowling at me I surmised that I was the cause.

“Um—no,” I said. “What makes you think—”

“You're moving your lips and twitchin' and bouncin' up and down on the balls of your feet like somebody's got to go to the bathroom.”

“That's it!” I said. “I didn't want to interrupt the story, but, you know, I've been on the road for a long time, and I—I've really got to go.”

“Well, heck, son, why didn't you say so? Gurney, your place is about the closest. What say we all head on over there where the boy can relieve himself and Lem can go on with the story?”

“It would be an honor,” Gurney claimed.

*   *   *

ON THE WAY TO GURNEY'S FARM,
Spirit
had time to give me some stern, unwelcome, but necessary advice.

“That was close,” she began, realizing, I suppose, that it's best not to launch right into stern, unwelcome, but necessary advice without some preamble.

“I know,” I whispered.

“You just barely managed to keep your foot out of your mouth.”

“I wonder why we say that?” I asked, because it was an expression that had puzzled me for some time, and because I didn't welcome the stern but necessary advice that I knew was coming.

“Never mind,” she said in the manner of people who find that fate has given them an opportunity to deliver the kind of advice that is more pleasant to give than to receive.

“It just seems to me that it's backwards,” I said. “Wouldn't it make more sense to say, ‘You should have put your foot in your mouth'?”

“Listen to me.”

“Okay.”

“These people think they've got something that's uniquely theirs, a place in the history of these parts, of the United States, of the world, that is theirs alone. They've got a story to tell—and you almost took that away from them because you always want to tell your story.”

“I know, I know. You don't have to tell me.”

“But I think I do have to tell you to keep your mouth shut while you're here.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.”

I really did know. What I knew, what I understood then but hadn't understood a few moments earlier, was that through many outward and visible signs I had betrayed my impatience with Lem and his story, my eagerness to tell everything I knew about
The War of the Worlds,
and my burning desire to make Lem's audience mine. Fortunately, those signs could also be interpreted as signs of a need to relieve myself, which, of course, they were. But I also knew that
Spirit
was right: from now on I was going to have to let Lem tell his story and let him have his audience and include myself in it. I'd have to keep my mouth shut—put my foot in it if necessary.

*   *   *

I HEARD LEM'S WHOLE STORY that night, and some parts of it I heard many times. Keeping silent while he told it was very difficult. As I listened, Lem's deviations from the versions of the story that I knew and considered correct, including my own, sometimes annoyed me so much that my emotions bubbled and seethed within me, producing a kind of reactionary pressure that threatened to force an objection or correction from me. I stifled the urge, and instead I let the steam off in bursts of inoffensive interjections.

“Wow!” I said when I wanted to say “That's an outrageous fabrication, sir!”

“Amazing!” when I wanted to say “Totally unbelievable!”

“Astonishing!” when I wanted to say “You're full of it, Lem!”

In Lem's version of the invasion story, the men of Hopper's Knoll defeated the Martian invaders, but the Martians, routed and in full flight, blasted the village with a memory-eradication ray to erase any recollection of their ignominious defeat. The true story of Hopper's Knoll might have gone forever untold, even unknown, if Lem hadn't caught the flu a couple of years later. Fortunately for his career as local historian and raconteur (and unfortunately for the integrity of the tale as I knew it and told it myself) he
had
caught the flu, and in an influenza fever dream he recovered his memory of the battle. Through the agency of the story that he told, Lem's recovered memory became the catalyst for recovered recollections from other townsfolk, who—one by one and little by little—added bits of plausible detail to Lem's account, in an epidemic of fantastical recollective collaboration, until the whole town remembered what had happened, and their story had become full and rich and multi-faceted, with a large cast of characters whose roles and remembrances reinforced one another. At last, “tetched by Mnemosyne,” as Lem put it, they remembered in full how they had saved the world.

I remember Lem's story, and I remember that I was fascinated by his telling of it, and the way that the others who remembered having been a part of it contributed their bits on cue, clearly savoring the opportunity to strut onstage for a moment. Later that night, lying in bed in the spare room upstairs in the farmhouse at Gurney's place, I rehearsed the story until I fell asleep, so that I would remember it and be able to reproduce it and criticize it when I got the chance, but when I recall the story and the telling now, I find that the whole experience is dominated and somewhat obliterated by the memory, in the peripheral vision of my mind's eye, of a dark-haired girl on the edge of the listening crowd. I remember the story well enough, but it isn't what interests me now. She is.

*   *   *

IN THE MORNING, I soldiered my way through the endless farmhouse breakfast that Ma and Pa Gurney insisted I needed for the trials of the road ahead and then began preparing
Spirit
for takeoff. I was just about to say goodbye to the Gurneys when the man who had been my interrogator pulled into the driveway in a pickup truck, stopped beside
Spirit,
got out, and joined us.

“Son,” he said, in a kindly but no-nonsense way, “I'd like a word with you before you leave.”

“A word to the wise?” I asked.

He gave me that squinty-eyed look that I was getting used to, and took me aside, a few steps away from Ma and Pa.

“You know,” he said, “a lot of people are suspicious of strangers, especially kids who come flying into town on motorcycles.”

“So I've learned.”

“On this trip of yours, I'm afraid you're always going to be the stranger riding into town.”

“An object of suspicion.”

“That's it.”

“Strange as a Martian.”

“Oh, folks may not think that you're a Martian in disguise necessarily—Hopper's Knoll may be unique in that respect—but they are apt to suspect your motives, and, once they have begun suspecting your motives, they're pretty generally likely to decide that the safest course is to regard you as a troublemaker, at least a potential troublemaker.”

“That doesn't seem fair.”

“Fair or not, that's the way it is.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“It helps if you agree with them. Accept what they've got to say.”

“Don't interrupt, you mean.”

“That would be a start.”

“But what if I've got something to say, too?”

“Best keep it to yourself. Just nod your head and say nothing.”

“I guess, but—”

“I guess what I'm trying to tell you is, don't put your foot in it.”

“In what?”

“In your mouth.”

“You know,” I said, shaking my head, “I've just got to say—”

He put a strong hand on my shoulder and gave it a cautionary squeeze. “What is it that you've just got to say, boy?”

“I've just got to say that you've really given me something to think about.”

He narrowed his eyes, but he relaxed his grip, and I mounted
Spirit
and hit the road.

Chapter 6

The New Sheboygan

Humor … is almost never without one of its opposite moods—tenderness, tragedy, concern for man's condition, recognition of man's frailties, sympathy with his idealism.

Ben Shahn, “The Gallic Laughter of André François”

 

'Tain't funny, McGee.

Molly, to Fibber

 

Ha-ha!

Bosse-de-Nage, in Alfred Jarry's
Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll

“AS I ATTEMPTED TO EXPLAIN to
Spirit
so many years ago,” I said, “I really do think that ‘to put one's foot in one's mouth,' is generally misused. People use it to indicate that someone has made a gaffe, spoken out of turn, said what should have been left unsaid, or divulged a secret that should have been kept secret, right? Isn't that the way you hear it used?”

“Yes,” she said, but she was concentrating more on highway traffic than on what I had to say, I think.

“That's the way I hear it used, too. People say, ‘You really put your foot in your mouth,' when they want to point out a lack of circumspection when circumspection would have been a good policy. What they really mean, I think, is something more along the lines of ‘You should have put your foot in your mouth' or ‘I wish that you had put your foot in your mouth instead of blurting out all that stuff about Uncle Albert's checkered past' or ‘Why, oh why, couldn't you have put your foot in your mouth when we got to the party and kept it there until we were safely back in the car?'”

I waited for a response. None came.

“In the course of its history ‘put your foot in your mouth' must have suffered a semantic shift from its original cautionary meaning of ‘shut up before you make a fool of yourself' to ‘it's too late now, you jerk.' You want to know what evidence I have?”

As before, I waited for a response. Again none came.

“Well,” I announced triumphantly, “here it is: the shift forced people to come up with an alternative that better expressed the original meaning, namely, ‘put a sock in it.'”

I allowed her another moment.

“Foot, sock, they're clearly related,” I pointed out.

Another moment.

“Don't you agree?” I asked.

“I'm sure I do, my darling,” she said, “but I haven't really been paying close attention. The traffic is heavy, I'm playing dodgem cars here, and I'm trying to find our motel. Put a sock in it for a while, okay?”

I did.

*   *   *

THE PLACE that Albertine had chosen for our night's stop was not at all what I would have expected. It was one of the chain motels that line the major intersections of major highways and offer little more than a bed. When she turned off the highway, I assumed that she would hurry past the chaotic congeries of gas-food-lodging and send us down a winding lane to the only cozy inn in these-here parts. Enormous signs towered at the edge of the highway, urging the weary traveler to spend the night in a bed provided by the chains called It'll Do, Inn-a-Pinch, and Cheapo-Sleepo. I chuckled at them in a superior manner, but I choked on my chuckle when Albertine slowed and signaled for a turn into It'll Do.

“This is not at all what I would have expected you to choose,” I said. “I'm disappointed, if you don't mind my saying so.”

“It has a fitness center, a pool, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant, a free breakfast buffet, and the cheapest rate in a hundred miles,” she informed me. “It was the best I could find.”

“In these-here parts,” I suggested.

“Right,” she said, pulling into a parking spot with an abruptness that I didn't ordinarily see.

“Okay,” I said with a shrug. “I guess it'll do in a pinch for a cheapo sleepo.”

“Ha-ha,” she said.

We took our bags from the car and rolled them to the entrance, where, as soon as the doors slipped open to let us in, a clerk at the desk looked up, bestowed on us a practiced smile, and recited a scripted greeting: “Welcome to the It'll Do experience! We hope your stay will be okay!” Then he shook his head and added with a weary sigh, ad lib, “Please—please—don't try any funny stuff.”

“What?” I said, surprised.