Wingshooters (2 page)

It was, to say the least, a world entirely different from Tokyo. And I was just as alien to the people of Deerhorn as they were to me. They’d been scandalized by my father’s marriage—for many of them, my mother was the first non-Caucasian person they’d ever laid eyes on—and now, in their minds, by bringing me back, he was inflicting on them the terrible fruit of his sins. But since they couldn’t punish him directly for his unacceptable behavior and wouldn’t dare to punish Charlie, they focused their displeasure on me. People glared and sometimes swore at me when I passed them on the sidewalk. No one welcomed me at school or at church. Older boys used me for target practice when I rode around town on my bike, most often throwing apples, but sometimes rocks. And when the occasional child did venture to talk to me—out of sympathy or boredom or just plain curiosity—his parents would soon put a stop to it. Because of the war, I’d hear them say, and I wouldn’t understand until much later what they meant. Many of the older men in town had fought in World War II, and to them I wasn’t just a foreigner; I was the Enemy.

And how did my grandparents react to all of this? In retrospect, my arrival must have been just as big a shock to them as it was to the rest of the town. Not only did they suddenly have a child in their house; that child looked different from them, and came from a different world. Although my stay with them was supposed to be brief, the original two weeks extended into a month, and then another, and then over a year, as my father kept trying to track down my mother. They welcomed me without question—I was, after all, their grandchild—showing a warmth they’d never extended to their son’s wife. But they were ill-prepared to deal with the town’s response. My grandmother, as much as she cooked for me, cared for me, patiently helped me with my English, never directly addressed what was happening. She gave me vague advice about strength in the face of adversity, and said that none of our trials compared to what Jesus had suffered. But my grandfather wasn’t so passive. Although I didn’t tell him any of what happened in town or at school—I knew instinctively that he wouldn’t approve of complaining—the physical proof was undeniable. When a dark blue bruise would appear on my arm, left there by a rock, it was my grandfather who’d touch it tenderly and shake his head. When my knees got scraped up from being knocked off my bike, it was he who knelt down and sprayed them with Bactine. When a group of teenage boys chased me home one day, my grandfather went out to the front yard in his work pants and undershirt and challenged them all to a fight.

Let me make this very clear—my grandfather was a bigot. He wasn’t shy about using racial epithets, or blaming blacks or Jews or Democrats for all the country’s problems. But it enraged him that the town did not embrace me. After I had lived there for almost a year, it was obvious that quiet endurance was getting me nowhere. One day, while I was waiting to see a doctor at the clinic because a rock had opened a cut at my temple, I looked up at Charlie and saw that his face was red with anger. He told me then, voice shaking and low, not to run away anymore. The other kids would never leave me alone, he said, until I stood up to them. After he took me home, he gave me a crash course in how to defend myself. He taught me how to punch, how to block incoming blows, how to throw rocks back with accuracy and strength. These lessons made my life there easier, and the irony strikes me only now: it was my grandfather, the rural, prejudiced white man, the father who refused to embrace his son’s wife, who taught me how to survive as a child of color in America.

My presence was only one of the things that upset the people in town that year. There also was one other. Through the late ’60s and early ’70s, the local clinic had been expanding, and what was once a modest building had grown and transformed into a ten-story, full-fledged medical facility that took up three entire blocks on the outskirts of town. Even in my short time there I had noticed the change. The clinic was right across the street from the Deerhorn cemetery—a fact that had spawned many jokes about the medical staff’s incompetence—and we’d passed by it during the one time my parents had brought me to Deerhorn, when we’d gone out to visit family graves. Then, it had been a small operation with a few local doctors who served only the town and the area immediately around it. But over the years, because of its central location, it was becoming the primary teaching clinic for that part of the state, and patients and nursing students began to come in from all of the surrounding areas. Even though the expanded clinic meant more jobs for Deerhorn residents, no one—at least among my grandparents’ friends—really approved of its presence. A big clinic meant outsiders coming through in order to get medical care. It also meant newcomers—clinic staff, technicians, tie-wearing administrators—who didn’t fit with the town’s blue-collar sensibilities. And it was the clinic that was responsible for what happened to the town and my family, that fall and winter of 1974. Had I been the only change the town had to adjust to, it would only have been me who paid the price. But there was also the clinic. Or maybe it was bigger than that—maybe it was the town, or the state, or the whole changing, unpredictable country. Maybe it was something diseased or off-kilter in human nature itself.

It began on a Friday evening in early September. My grandmother was making supper—steaks, mashed potatoes, and spinach from the garden—while my grandfather sat in the living room with his friend Jim Riesling, watching the Brewers game on TV. I say “sat” but he actually lay, on the couch that was his alone, which had one of my grandmother’s crocheted blankets draped across the back. My grandfather had spent much of the afternoon working in the garden—he’d picked the spinach and potatoes my grandmother was cooking—and he still wore his olive work pants and loose white undershirt. I’d helped him—I’d taken in small baskets of the harvested vegetables, and in between, while he knelt and pulled and shook dirt from the plants, I’d caught the butterflies that left jagged holes in the cabbage. Now, he was tired—he was sixty-eight then—but not too tired to entertain his company.

Jim Riesling was a bachelor nearing forty. Charlie had been his boss at the shoe factory until he’d retired three years before, and Jim, who wasn’t the sort who liked to frequent the bars in town, needed a place to go on Friday evenings. Among my grandfather’s friends, I’d always liked Jim the best. He was a quiet, balding man, and the gentleness that made him so awkward with women was also part of what made him so easy to be around. He sat in the big armchair facing the screen; I was sitting on the floor with my back to the couch.

Pressed against me, with his head on my lap, was my grandfather’s dog, an English springer spaniel named Brett. He was nine then, but in his younger years he had won every major field trial in Central Wisconsin, and could probably have done even better, Jim said, had my grandfather been willing to travel farther than fifty miles from Deerhorn. By the time I came to live with my grandparents Brett was retired from competition; he spent his days lounging around the house and patrolling the yard, saving up his energy for those few weeks in the fall when my grandfather took him hunting.

When I arrived, Brett took to me right away—not because I had any special manner with dogs, but because I gave him attention. My grandfather was an old-fashioned owner of hunting dogs who believed that they were useful tools to flush and retrieve game, but otherwise belonged in the yard. I needed a companion, though, and couldn’t have asked for a better one than Brett. The day I first came to the house he sniffed me up and down, cropped tail wiggling madly. When I sat down to pet him, he gave me his paw and gazed up at me with those sad springer eyes, thus staking his permanent claim.

The two men were drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from cans, and Charlie let me sneak sips of his when my grandmother wasn’t looking. Just as she called for me to come set the table, there was a loud banging on the screen door in the kitchen. That was the back door, so we knew it was a friend; official business always came to the front. Brett sprang instantly to life and ran barking into the kitchen. I could hear my grandmother talking to someone through the screen, then: “Charlie, can you come here for a minute? Earl’s here to see you.”

My grandfather stood up grumbling and made his way to the kitchen. I followed. Through the screen door I saw three men, not one. “Boys,” said my grandfather after quieting the dog, “what’s so important that you want to keep me from my supper?”

The man in front, Earl Watson, stood with his feet firmly planted and his hands poised by his hips, as if ready to pull a weapon. He looked at my grandfather so intensely I thought his eyes might bore a hole through the screen. “We need to talk to you, Charlie. It can’t wait.”

My grandfather stood looking at him for a moment. “Well, all right,” he said.

He moved toward the door but Earl said, “Best that we talk inside,” so my grandfather pulled it open and let them in.

As the men passed by, I held the dog by his collar and tried to move out of the way. I didn’t much like Earl Watson. He was a strong, ageless man who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty years old, and he owned the gun shop on the main strip of town. Earl had fought in the war in Korea, and it was rumored he had killed a man with his bare hands. With his barrel-like body, thick biceps, and large, tense hands, he looked like he still could. Right behind him was Ray Davis, captain of the Deerhorn police. He was in his forties, an unlikely police chief—only about 5’6” or so, and soft around the edges, with thick brown hair he wore down to his collar, long for a policeman even in the 1970s. Davis was now one of the most prominent men in town, but years before, when he was a teenager, my grandfather—who had worked for years with his father at the shoe factory—had taught him how to hunt, and Ray still deferred to Charlie on most matters that didn’t have to do with the law.

Last was Pete Drexel, my great-uncle, who was married to my grandmother’s sister Bertha. Pete was my grandfather’s usual hunting and fishing partner, a tall, easy-going man five years Charlie’s junior who managed one of the cheese operations in town. Every weekend in the summer, we’d drive out to Pete and Bertha’s place in the country, the men cooking ribs or venison over the large open grill while the women cut greens and made their mother’s potato salad. Now Pete ruffled my hair as he filed into the dining room, and the four men together made quite a formidable sight—five, once Jim Riesling stood and joined them. My grandfather was five years older than the oldest of his visitors, almost thirty years older than the youngest, and two of them—Jim and Pete—were taller than him. But of all these men, he was still the most impressive.

The newcomers exchanged greetings with Riesling and then sat down at the half-set table. I tried to stay with them, but Charlie shooed me away, so I took Brett into the kitchen and we sat with my grandmother at the table against the far wall. Through the window I could hear the Thomas children next door, playing tag and yelling loudly, “You’re it!” My grandmother touched the round glass vase that held a single rose cut from the garden, and looked up at the steaks that were cooling on top of the stove. “They could have waited till after supper,” she said. “They know we always eat at five o’clock.”

For my grandmother, talking to me was like talking to herself; she never would have spoken up to Charlie. She was a devout, quiet woman, the older, plainer sister of Bertha Wilkes, who’d been crowned the county beauty queen in 1931. According to Aunt Bertha, the whole town had been shocked when Charlie LeBeau, the handsomest boy in school, had picked Helen Wilkes to be his bride. But he ignored them all and insisted, as he still did forty-eight years after they married, that she was the prettiest girl in town. My grandmother had once been healthy and robust, but by the time I lived with her she’d been reduced by worry into a wisp of a woman who looked like she’d blow over at the slightest wind. She’d seemed especially worn and tired in the last few days, since a letter had arrived from my father. It had come from Kansas City, where he’d been staying for the last two weeks. But he was about to move on, he’d said, and he would write again when he got where he was going next.

I wasn’t thinking, though, about my grandmother or my father just then; I was more interested in what was happening in the other room. I struggled to hear what the men were saying, but I couldn’t make out their words. I did hear the tone of their voices, though—low, serious, and alarmed. For a long time, it was mostly Earl Watson talking, with Ray Davis and Uncle Pete adding a comment here and there. Then there was a long silence, followed by something from Charlie. More discussion, and the voices rose so we could hear a few words. I couldn’t stand being left out anymore, so while my grandmother went down to the cellar to get some more beer, I stood up and moved next to the doorway.

“There’s no way I’d ever let one of them lay a hand on my boys,” said Earl. “Doesn’t matter what it says on the license.”

“You don’t have to worry about it,” my grandfather replied. “If you have to go there, make sure the appointment’s with somebody else.”

“But think about the people who don’t get warning,” said Uncle Pete. His voice sounded different from the others, more like a young man’s; it matched his muscled, slim physique and his full head of hair, which was gray but as thick as a teenager’s. “They go in to get a check-up, and pow.”

“Well, we just got to make sure that people are prepared,” Earl said, his voice low and grim. “If they know what they could be getting into, they’ll just have to figure out something else. We spread the word wide enough, and her business’ll be so slow she’s bound to get the message.”

“You haven’t heard the worst of it,” said Ray Davis, the police chief. “The husband’s a substitute teacher.”

“What? In Deerhorn?”

“That’s what I said. And Janie Hebig’s going to be out for a while because of her baby, so it’s probably her class. Far as I know, he could be showing up this week.”

The exchange reminded me that two of the men had children or grandchildren who were in school with me. Uncle Pete’s were older. Although it was hard to imagine him as anybody’s father, he and Bertha had a grown son, Pete Jr., and his granddaughter Becky was in high school. But Ray Davis’s oldest boy, Dale, was in the third grade. And Earl Watson had two sons—Jake, who was sixteen and a sophomore in high school, and Kevin, who was in the fourth grade. The seven years between them made people wonder if Kevin had been an accident, and the few times I ever saw Earl with the boys, he behaved as if Jake were his true son and Kevin an afterthought. One night the previous summer, not long after I’d come to town, my grandfather and I went with Earl and his boys to watch the Deerhorn Bombers, the local minor league baseball team. And while Earl patiently explained to his older son what the pitchers were doing, describing fastballs and changeups and screwballs that moved away from the lefties, his younger son kept tugging at the sleeve of his work shirt, insisting that he was thirsty. I don’t know if Jake even cared about this lesson; he spent most of his time drinking and smoking with his roughneck friends—but Earl didn’t brook the interruption. After one last tug from his younger son, Earl whipped around and yelled in a voice so loud several players looked up from the field, “God
damn
it, Kevin! Can’t you see I’m busy here? Go drink from the goddamn fountain!”