The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (18 page)

Unfortunately, I realized now, my father’s space capsule had suffered a hard landing, and my father had received a concussive bump, which had wiped his memory clean and left him with one or two slightly strange habits—a crippling cheapness and a disinclination to wear underpants after dark being the principal ones—and spent his whole life tragically unaware that he had the innate capacity to summon up superpowers. Instead, it was left to his youngest son to make that discovery. That was why I needed special clothes to assume my Electron powers. I was an Earthling by birth, so I didn’t come by these super-gifts naturally. I required the Sacred Jersey of Zap for that.

Of course. It all made sense now. This story just got better and better, in my view.

Chapter 10

DOWN ON THE FARM

MASON CITY, IOWA
—A pretty blonde bride’s playful tickling of her husband to get him out of bed to milk the cows led swiftly to tragedy early Tuesday. Mrs. Jennie Becker Brunner, 22, said through her tears in a Cerro Gordo County jail cell here late in the day that she shot and killed her husband, Sam Brunner, 26, with his .45 caliber U.S. Army Colt pistol. Mrs. Brunner said she and her husband quarreled after she tickled him under the arm to get him out of bed.

—
The Des Moines Register
, November 19, 1953

GIVE OR TAKE
the occasional ticklish murder, Iowa has always been a peaceful and refreshingly unassertive place. In the 160 years or so that it has been a state, only one shot has been officially fired in anger on Iowa soil, and even that wasn’t very angry. During the Civil War, a group of Union soldiers, for reasons that I believe are now pretty well forgotten, discharged a cannonball across the state line into Missouri. It landed in a field on the other side and dribbled harmlessly to a halt. I shouldn’t be surprised if the Missourians put it on a wagon and brought it back. In any case, nobody was hurt. This was not simply the high point in Iowa’s military history, it was the only point in it.

Iowa has always been proudly middling in all its affairs. It stands in the middle of the continent, between the two mighty central rivers, the Missouri and Mississippi, and throughout my childhood always ranked bang in the middle of everything—size, population, voting preferences, order of entry into the Union. We were slightly wealthier, a whole lot more law-abiding, and more literate and better educated than the national average, and ate more Jell-O (a lot more—in fact, to be completely honest, we ate all of it), but otherwise have never been too showy at all. While other states of the Midwest churned out a more or less continuous stream of world-class worthies—Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh—Iowa gave the world Donna Reed, Wyatt Earp, Herbert Hoover, and the guy who played Fred Mertz on
I Love Lucy
.

Iowa’s main preoccupations have always been farming and being friendly, both of which we do better than almost anyone else, if I say so myself. It is the quintessential farm state. Everything about it is perfect for growing things. It occupies just 1.6 percent of the country’s land area, but contains 25 percent of its Grade A topsoil. That topsoil is three feet deep in most places, which is apparently pretty deep. Stride across an Iowa farm field and you feel as if you could sink in up to your waist. You will certainly sink in up to your ankles. It is like walking around on a very large pan of brownies. The climate is ideal, too, if you don’t mind shoveling tons of snow in the winter and dodging tornadoes all summer. By the standards of the rest of the world, droughts are essentially unknown and rainfall is distributed with an almost uncanny beneficence—heavy enough to give a healthful soaking when needed but not so much as to pummel seedlings or wash away nutrients. Summers are long and agreeably sunny, but seldom scorching. Plants love to grow in Iowa.

It is in consequence one of the most maximally farmed landscapes on earth. Someone once calculated that if Iowa contained nothing but farms, each of 160 acres (presumably the optimal size for a farm), there would be room for 225,000 of them. In 1930, the peak year for farm numbers, there were 215,361 farms in the state—not far off the absolute maximum. The number is very much smaller these days because of the relentless push of amalgamation, but 95 percent of Iowa’s landscape is still farmed. The remaining small fraction is taken up by highways, woods, a scattering of lakes and rivers, loads of little towns and a few smallish cities, and about twelve million Wal-Mart parking lots.

I remember reading once at the state fair that Iowa’s farms produced more in value each year than all the diamond mines in the world put together—a fact that fills me with pride still. It remains number one in the nation for the production of corn, eggs, hogs, and soybeans, and is second in the nation in total agricultural wealth, exceeded only by California, which is three times the size. Iowa produces one-tenth of all America’s food and one-tenth of all the world’s corn. Hooray.

And when I was growing up all this was as good as it has ever been. The 1950s has often been called the last golden age of the family farm in America, and no place was more golden than Iowa, and no spot had a lovelier glint than Winfield, the trim and cheerful little town in the southeast corner of the state, not far from the Mississippi River, where my father had grown up and my grandparents lived.

I loved everything about Winfield—its handsome Main Street, its imperturbable tranquillity, its lapping cornfields, the healthful smell of farming all around. Even the name was solid and right. Lots of towns in Iowa have names that sound slightly remote and lonesome and perhaps just a little in-bred—Mingo, Pisgah, Tingley, Diagonal, Elwood, Coon Rapids, Ricketts—but in this green and golden corner of the state the town names were dependably worthy and good: Winfield, Mount Union, Columbus Junction, Olds, Mount Pleasant, the unbeatably radiant Morning Sun.

My grandfather was a rural route mailman by trade, but he owned a small farm on the edge of town. He rented out the land to other farmers, except for three or four acres that he kept for orchards and vegetables. The property included a big red barn and what seemed to me like huge lawns on all sides. The back of the house was dominated by an immense oak tree with a white bench encircling it. It seemed always to have a private breeze running through its upper branches. It was the coolest spot in a hundred miles. This was where you sat to shuck peas or trim green beans or turn a handle to make ice cream at the tranquil, suppertime end of the day.

My grandparents’ house was very neat and small—it had just two bedrooms, one upstairs and one down—but was exceedingly comfortable and always seemed spacious to me. Years later I went back to Winfield and was astounded at how tiny it actually was.

From a safe distance, the barn looked like the most fun place in the world to play. It hadn’t been used for years except to store old furniture and odds and ends that would never be used again. It was full of doors you could swing on and secret storerooms and ladders leading up to dark haymows. But it was actually awful because it was filthy and dark and lethal and every inch of it smelled. You couldn’t spend five minutes in my grandfather’s barn without banging your shins on some piece of unyielding machinery, cutting your arm on an old blade, coming into contact with at least three different types of ancient animal shit (all years old but still soft in the middle), banging your head on a nail-studded beam and recoiling into a mass of sticky cobwebs, getting snagged from the nape of your neck to the top of your buttocks on a strand of barbed wire, quilling yourself all over with splinters the size of toothpicks. The barn was like a whole-body workout for your immune system.

The worst fear of all was that one of the heavy doors would swing shut behind you and you would be trapped forever in a foul smelly darkness, too far from the house for your plaintive cries to be heard. I used to imagine my family sitting around the dinner table saying, “Well, I wonder whatever became of old Billy. How long has it been now? Five weeks? Six? He’d sure love this pie, wouldn’t he? I’ll certainly have another piece if I may.”

Even scarier were the fields of corn that pressed in on all sides. Corn doesn’t grow as tall as it used to because it’s been hybridized into a more compact perfection, but it shot up like bamboo when I was young, reaching heights of eight feet or more and filling 56,290 square miles of Iowa countryside with a spooky, threatening rustle by the dryish late end of summer. There is no more anonymous, mazelike, unsettling environment, especially to a dim, smallish human, than a field of infinitely identical rows of tall corn, each—including the diagonals—presenting a prospect of endless vegetative hostility. Just standing on the edge and peering in, you knew that if you ventured more than a few feet into a cornfield you would never come out. If a ball you were playing with dropped into a cornfield, you just left it, wrote it off, and went inside to watch TV.

So I didn’t play alone much at Winfield. Instead I spent a lot of time following my grandfather around. He seemed to like the company. We got along very well. My grandfather was a quiet man, but always happy to explain what he was doing and glad to have someone who could pass him an oil can or a screwdriver. His name was Pitt Foss Bryson, which I thought was the best name ever. He was the nicest man in the world after Ernie Banks.

He was always rebuilding something—a lawn mower or washing machine; something with fan belts and blades and lots of swiftly whirring parts—and always cutting himself fairly spectacularly. At some point, he would fire the thing up, reach in to make an adjustment, and almost immediately go, “Dang!” and pull out a bloody, slightly shredded hand. He would hold it up before him for some time, wiggling the fingers, as if he didn’t quite recognize it.

“I can’t see without my glasses,” he would say to me at length. “How many fingers have I got here?”

“Five, Grandpa.”

“Well,
that’s
good,” he’d say. “Thought I might have lost one.” Then he’d go off to find a bandage or piece of rag.

At some point in the afternoon, my grandmother would put her head out the back door and say, “Dad, I need you to go uptown and get me some rutabaga.” She always called him Dad, even though he had a wonderful name and he wasn’t her father. I could never understand that. She always needed him to get rutabaga. I never understood that either since I don’t remember any of us ever being served it. Maybe it was a code word for prophylactics or something.

Going uptown was a treat. It was only a quarter of a mile or so, but we always drove, sitting on the high bench seat of my grandfather’s Chevy, which made you feel slightly regal. Uptown in Winfield meant Main Street, a two-block stretch of retail tranquillity sporting a post office, two banks, a couple of filling stations, a tavern, a newspaper office, two small grocers, a pool hall, and a variety store.

The last stop on every shopping trip was a corner grocer’s called Benteco’s, where they had a screen door that
kerboinged
and
bammed
in a deeply satisfying manner, and made every entrance a kind of occasion. At Benteco’s I was always allowed to select two bottles of Nehi brand pop—one for dinner, one for afterward when we were playing cards or watching
Bilko
^*12
or Jack Benny on TV. Nehi was the pop of small towns—I don’t know why—and it had the intensest flavor and most vivid colors of any products yet cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. It came in six select flavors—grape, strawberry, orange, cherry, lime-lemon (never “lemon-lime”), and root beer—but each was so potently flavorful that it made your eyes water like an untended sprinkler, and so sharply carbonated that it was like swallowing a thousand tiny razor blades. It was wonderful.

The Nehi at Benteco’s was kept in a large, blue, very chilly cooler, like a chest freezer, in which the bottles hung by their necks in rows. To get to a particular bottle usually required a great deal of complicated maneuvering, transferring bottles out of one row and into another in order to get the last bottle of grape, say. (Grape was the one flavor that could actually make you hallucinate; I once saw to the edge of the universe while drinking grape Nehi.) The process was great fun if it was you that was doing the selecting (especially on a hot day when you could bask in the cooler’s moist chilled air) and a torment if you had to wait on some other kid.

The other thing I did a lot in Winfield was watch TV. My grandparents had the best chair for watching television—a beige leatherette recliner that was part fairground ride, part captain’s seat from a space ship, and all comfort. It was a thing of supreme beauty and utility. When you pulled the lever you were thrust—flung—into a deep recline mode. It was nearly impossible to get up again, but it didn’t matter because you were so sublimely comfortable that you didn’t want to move. You just lay there and watched the TV through splayed feet.

My grandparents could get seven stations on their set—we could only get three in Des Moines—but only by turning the roof aerial, which was manipulated by means of a crank on the outside back wall of the house. So if you wanted to watch, say, KTVO from Ottumwa, my grandfather had to go out and turn the crank slightly one way, and if you wanted WOC from the Quad Cities he turned it another, and KWWI in Waterloo another way still, in each case responding to instructions shouted through a window. If it was windy or there was a lot of solar activity, he sometimes had to go out eight or nine times during a program. If it was one of my grandmother’s treasured shows, like
As the World Turns
or
Queen for a Day
, he generally just stayed out there in case an airplane flew over and made everything lapse into distressing waviness at a critical moment. He was the most patient man who ever lived.