Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Racing in Place: 33 Hoosier Haiku

1

The first thing you did was tune in the radios. Everyone had the new transistor radios, most the size of cigarette packs, in pastel hard-shell plastic. Some were upholstered with protective leatherlike vinyl with flaps and snaps and die-cut openings for the gold-embossed tuning dials, a slit for the coin-edged volume wheel, an aperture for the ear jack, out of which an always too-short and easily kinked wire attached to a single waxy plug you screwed into your head. But today, race day, no one listens to the 500 on the earphone. My father and the other fathers in the neighborhood are pouring a patio. It's what they do on Memorial Day.

2

The elms, for some reason, haven't died on Parnell Avenue, and their vaulting branches arch over the street, throwing it into deep shade. The parade route runs from State Boulevard along Parnell out to the War Memorial Coliseum. We like to sit near the Dairy Queen, unfolding our lawn chairs in the parking lot driveway. We have brought the big radio with the stitched handle. It is the size of my school lunch box. The cars at the track make a swishing sound as they zoom about. I sit on the curb and think I see the horses' hooves throwing sparks. A semitrailer is hauling a retired F-86 from the airbase out to be displayed on the Coliseum's lawn. The Navy Club's bus-long gray destroyer, number 48, floats by above me, its wheels hidden by a skirt of waves.

3

My mother and the other mothers are sitting on the patio next door, a concrete slab in the middle of the yard. It is cured to a marble white. The furniture is new, webbed candy-colored nylon and aluminum tubing. The Thompsons' patio. It was poured last year. The men are wearing white T-shirts, khaki pants, and their old work shoes, standing in a circle around the wheelbarrow filled with crushed ice and bottles of Old Crown beer, tuning in, each one holding his little radio next to his ear, worrying the tuning dial, thumbing up the volume. One by one they find WOWO, the local station on the network, coax the static into sound, cocking the radios at angles to align their tiny antennae. It is primitive. It is magic. It is like they are blowing on smoldering tinder to get it to spark. And they do.

4

The thrum of the engines brought us outside. We looked up shading our eyes against the sun. The blimp was just above the tops of the dying elm trees and descending it seemed toward the field behind our house. Then there was a change in the engines' pitch and the blimp yawed and floated up and away. We ran to the car to follow, slowly cruising through the meandering neighborhood streets. Stretched out on the back seat of the '57 Chevy, I looked up at the blimp as it wallowed overhead, framed first in the back window then in the one at my feet then in the one above my head as it maneuvered and my father, turning, came about and circled beneath it. It settled, at last, in a field near the three rivers, a ground crew hauling it down. The cars that had been chasing it parked in a big ring around it. It was May, and the blimp was on its way to take up station above Indianapolis. Moored, it levitated a few feet off the ground. We all sat transfixed on the car's hood and watched the blimp float but stay perfectly still.

5

Another radio joins the nest of transistor radios on the grass nearby, amplifying the tinny voice of Sid Collins, the Voice of the Indianapolis 500. The men begin to work, finishing the frame and leveling the bed while others mix the cement and sand. I hear beneath the Voice in the grass a sound like static but it isn't static. It is the pulsing siren of the racers' engines flying around the track, the two-beat peal as they scream past the mic, an "ee" then a long "em." EEmmmmm. But so small, an insect humming in the greening grass. There will be locusts this summer idling in the trees. Summer is racing toward us. I coast my bike down the Kaimeiers' drive, join the other kids on their bikes doing laps around the manhole covers on either end of the street.

6

I go to college in Indianapolis. My mother went to the same school. Near noon, I cross the muddy campus. I slog along on the way to class. The bells ring out, as they do every hour, every day, the opening bars of "Back Home Again in Indiana." It is a gray day with the clouds lowering. It is often gray, the result of the atmospheric accident in which we live. Ground zero for an occluded ceiling generated by the lakes, the wind, the flat flat ground. Back home again in Indiana, I whisper, where the sun refuses to shine. Then in the silence after the tolling, I hear a distant screech, a prehistoric trumpet, a beast's yawning scream originating high up in cavities of a skull. The scraps of sound drift in the thick air. Tire tests at the track across town.

7

The race is on on the kitchen radio. I sit at the kitchen table coloring in the outlines of racecars. My mother has drawn a simple template-a side view of two wheels, the tube of the fuselage, a wedge of windshield, a hump of the rear engine. I have traced out thirty-three copies, placing a clean sheet of paper on top of her drawing and following the outline. Now I am coloring each a different color. On the radio there are announcers in each turn of the track and on the straightaways. They follow the leader around the lap. Sid Collins, the Voice of the Indianapolis 500, says that this is the greatest spectacle in racing. But I've never seen it. It is only on the radio. The table is layered with the brightly colored cars, scrambled together, a wreck of color. I stay inside the lines I've outlined in black. I know that the shades of green are unlucky. The blues are beautiful and limitless. Outside my father is mowing the lawn. I hear the mower's engine fade as he goes around the far side of the house.

8

There are high-school bands but they are mostly quiet, saving their practiced marches for the reviewing stands on the other side of the river. The drummers thump a cadence of the wood sticks against the metal rims of their drums. They slide their feet on each step. I see green puttees and canvas gaiters of the Legion and the VFW posts' colors. It is strangely quiet for a parade. The swish of cloth. The silky flags sliding along the polished poles. The whispered humph, humph of a drill sergeant. Each unit slowly disappears down the dappled tunnel of the street. The drive shaft turns beneath the flatbed truck, an honor guard, at parade rest around a mock-up of a tomb on the carpeted bed. In the silence, the echoes of hundreds of portable radios. The race in Indianapolis, a hollow drone.

9

My father drilled a hole in a rubber-coated baseball, threaded a rope through it and knotted the end so it wouldn't slip back through. On the other end of the rope was a handle. In the field behind the house, he twirled the ball around above his head. I stood to one side with a bat and tried to hit it as he banked it toward me. It zoomed by. I was getting my timing back for summer, he said. A garbage can lid was on the ground, a makeshift home plate. The ball wobbled, warbled a hiss as it made its orbit. Around and around. I'd catch it coming in the corner of my eye and step into the approaching sound.

10

The simulators were painted gunmetal and arranged three to the row before the movie screen. I was driving through a neighborhood like mine though its colors were faded or too brightly lit. There were people walking on the sidewalks wearing clothes from when I was a kid. The women wore white gloves and hats with net veils; the men wore suits and ties. A freckled boy, his head shaved, broke away from his parents and darted out into the street lined with old elms. I seemed to slow to a stop. The machine in the back whirred and clicked, recording whether or not my brake pedal was depressed. Then I was entering a highway, a new interstate, its concrete brilliant white. All the turn indicators were ticking in the room. Then it was raining and it was night. I'd glance at the speedometer from time to time as I was instructed. The needle slowly swept around from zero as I sped up. The room filled with a throaty engine noise. The sound track ran through the gearbox. The brakes complained slightly as I pulled into the driveway of a house like my house. The machine in the back came on again to see if I had put the car in park and turned the key to stop the engine. I had put the car in park. I had turned the key. I waited a few more minutes, my seat belt buckled, until the bell rang for the next class.

11

I remember the smell of the newspaper, the way it was folded to the page with the starting grid, the ten rows of three cars each, the blocks of information-number, driver, owner, sponsor, engine, body, speed. My father's scribbled notes as each car dropped out of the race. Engine. Transmission. Tires. Crash. My mother finishing up the dishes picked up the coffee cup my father had forgotten he used to weigh the edges of the paper down. There was a blot staining the top of the statistics, a blurred circle, smeared, smearing. My father sat and listened to the race's mur mur, my baseball mitt on one hand, the other hand rubbing the neat's-foot oil into the darkening pocket.

12

The pace car moved by at the walking pace of the parade. We were on the Parnell bridge over the St. Joe. Ricky Brown was going on about the 'Vette, the particulars of its engine displacement, the block's bore, the compression ratio. A girl from our high school was a queen of something that year, and she waved at us. Too cool, all of us but Ricky turned away from the parade and, leaning on the bridge's railing, looked at the river just below the deck, swollen and running fast in spring. Ricky called out to the guy driving the car, hunched over listening to the radio, "Who's leading? What lap?"

13

A Saturday before the race, I went with my dad to May Sand and Stone to pick up the bags of cement and sand. He had an Olds Cutlass coup, white with a blue top and bucket seats. In high school I would total it, running off the road into the ditch. The windows were cranked down and the radio was cranked up high to the time trials. We followed the trace out to the gravel pit. I liked hearing about the driver on the bubble, the slowest car about to be bumped by another qualifier. The overgrown ditch on the side of the road was all that was left of the canal built to connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi, bankrupting Indiana before the Civil War. The water was stagnant and weedy. On the bobbing cattails, red wing blackbirds perched. Their calls were like the rattles of mixing balls in cans of spray paint.

14

Small planes circled, dots followed by a dash of their banners, their advertisements, unreadable from this distance, tracing their spiraling paths. I was driving home, north, to Fort Wayne. I took the wrong exit on purpose to circle the city the long way around so I could listen to the race. The radio said the race was halfway through and under a yellow caution flag. A survivor of the most recent wreck was thanking God. Thirty-three miles of four-lane beltway until 1-69. I worked my way between the other cars and trucks, racing. I could not see the track from the highway, just the planes trailing their exhaust of messages, circling above it in the distance.

15

The race, on the radio, is background, drowned out by the stutter of the electric clippers my father uses to sculpt the hedge in the backyard. His shirt is off, stuffed into his back pocket. It looks like a tail. Mother sits on the chaise lounge on our slab of a patio, painting her toenails a bright red. Two orange extension cords snake out through the grass, one winding toward the radio and one attaching to the clippers. We've planted impatiens in the shade of the garage, the egg carton nursery flats nest inside each other. I coil the hose next to the spigot. Maybe later we will wash the car.

16

I walked to my high school. I took State Boulevard, which was an old township road running east and west that had, when the city grew up around it, become a main cross-town corridor. When I walked it, during the rush hours, I kept pace with the cars crawling along in the daily traffic jams. Sometimes a string of cars would break away only to stall again at the next light, a half block ahead, where I would catch up again. Ahead of me was my high school, North Side, across the St. Joseph River from the Old Crown Brewery. It was spring. The brewery made the neighborhood reek of fermented spent grain. Behind me was North Highlands, where I lived and where, as it was high ground, the radio and television stations planted their transmission towers. Coming home, I saw the strobing beacons on each become visible as the sun set and the city grew dark. The cars creeping along next to me in the street had their windows down. It was spring. The patter of the radio leaked out. A song, a weather report, the ninth caller. As I walked along, the volume seemed to fade and pulse with the strips of tiny suspended warning lights at the other end of the road.

17

A sign says this is the deepest hole in Indiana. Empty yellow dump trucks follow the access road cut into ledges screwing down to the quarry's floor where groaning excavators gnaw at a trench. I am in a metal observation cage extending out over the lip of the pit looking down forever. The loaded trucks spiral up, trudging around ever-widening loops scored against the sloping walls to the top. The reports from the track of the time trials and practice laps are running on the PA system interrupted by an announcement that someone's order has been filled or someone else has a phone call. Dust steams up to the brim. I am floating above the dust swirling below me, looking at it roil through the open steel grid at my feet. Suddenly, Phantoms from Baer Field rip by overhead, practicing the Memorial Day fly-by.

18

"Stay tuned to the greatest spectacle in racing," the voice on the radios said. The transistor radios seemed to be fading, their batteries taxed. The cement of the patio was setting up. In a corner of the slab, our fathers allowed us to write our names with a ten-penny nail and press our handprints into the spongy surface. We washed our hands at the spigot, a puddle of mud forming at our feet. We stretched out on the grass. A tire commercial. A milk commercial. An interview in the pits. The cars roaring by drowned out the people speaking. I tried to hold the level level. I held it above me, up to the sky, nudging the bubble back and forth between the hairlines in its little yellow tube of fluid.

19

My mother went to the race once. When she was in college in Indianapolis, women from her sorority rode in the festival parade before the start in vintage cars around the track. My mother rode in a horseless carriage made by Studebaker. She wore an antique duster and a big hat with goggles. She waved to all the people in the grandstands, a half a million people. The speedway becomes the second largest city in Indiana on the day of the race, she always says. Making deviled eggs on Memorial Day, flicking the dollop of yolk mixed with mayonnaise in the cup of the hollowed half, dusting the two dozen halves with paprika and pepper, she remembers the boxed lunch she ate that day in the sunny stands, the race itself an intermittent distraction in the background.

20

When I was in kindergarten, I was in the parade. I rode a float, sitting in a lawn glider that glided back and forth beneath an arching garden arbor decorated with paper roses and on a lawn of artificial grass staked with lawn flamingoes and a plastic birdbath with real water that got us wet when the wind blew. A white Impala pulled the trailer, and my father was in the back seat looking out the back window up at me riding on the glider. I wore a crown I kept for years afterward on the globe in my room. I remember the old trees making a roof over us, how slow we went down Parnell, the way people on each side of the street waved with one hand while the other hand held a radio to an ear.

21

The high school loop ran north and south from one Azar's Big Boy to the other through the center of town. The lights were timed and we hit every one, not stopping. We went over rivers and under overpasses where sometimes hulking Nickel Plate or Wabash trains clanked on tracks above us. The streets were the old state highways, wide and one way, lined with glass-globed lights still painted on the top to black them out from the air. You couldn't be too careful. We talked, my buddies and me, about going to Ohio, where they sold 3.2 beer to minors, but we never did. We were unable to escape the gravitational pull of the place. Our high school going by. The musk of the brewery and the slow-moving river choked with cottonwood. WOWO on the radio. "I have no desire to ever see that race. You sit in one place and see the cars for, what? a second or so and then wait a couple of minutes for it to happen again." There, the neon cross of Calvary Temple. There, the old City Light power house. There, the armory. Powers Hamburgers. The Lincoln Tower. The Old Fort, a replica of the old fort, a guard walking the walls looking out for the vandals we fancied ourselves to be.

22

I have a picture of my mother and father sitting on their graves. Always planning ahead, they purchased the plots in the Catholic cemetery years ago. They bought the monuments too, already engraved with their names and birthdates. They were optimistic enough not to have the 19 of the death date inscribed, but their names are there and their birthdates. The markers are simple slabs of polished granite the size and shape of swing set seats, very low to the ground. It looks as if they are sitting on the ground. They are smiling. We went there one Memorial Day to look at all the graves. My father's parents' and sister's, my mother's parents' and grandparents'. We ended up checking out how their own graves were doing. There they were. The stones were supposed to be that small and low to make the maintenance of the cemetery efficient. No flowers allowed. There were flags on Memorial Day but those were taken back up after a day or two. In the future, the mowers would cut right over the stones as they sank the rest of the way into the ground.

23

Our bicycles are piled in a wreck we have simulated. We are sprawled, casualties, on the strip of grass between the curb and sidewalk. After a while, we forget we have died. We look up at the streamlined and spoiled clouds, racing.

24

My father went to the time trials one year but it rained. The showers were scattered, and when the sun came out they tried to dry the track by driving ordinary cars and trucks around it. He sat in the fourth turn and watched fire engines, ambulances, wreckers, buses, and pace cars speed by, accelerating the evaporation. Just as it was drying off, racecars with their big slick tires revving their engines in the pit lane, it rained again. Bored, ushers with opened black umbrellas walked around the two-and-ahalf mile oval, and in the homestretch a few of them broke away from the group with longer and longer strides trying to be the first to cross the finish line.

25

Behind the chain link fence, the patients of the State Hospital and Training Center watch the parade. Some of them march along behind the fence, falling into step with the passing bands and color guards or drifting along with the creeping floats. The fence runs for what would be five blocks along Parnell. The streets that dead-end at the boundary of the hospital grounds are used as staging areas for the parade's start. The patients wear hospital gowns and robes of pastel pinks, blues, greens, and yellows. They press their faces into the fence. Some climb a foot or two to get a better view, their fingers wrapped in the weave of the metal links, until the orderlies, who have been listening to the race huddled around the radio in an old ambulance, peel them off and plop them on the ground again. The ones who have been shadowing the parade are stopped when the fence turns a corner blocks away. They race back to the beginning, focus on a new drum major who trills his whistle, high stepping in place. The patients turn with him and begin to march once again.

26

Stuck in the stalled traffic on State, this year's pace car, a red Ford Mustang. The local dealerships of the winning manufacturer would get a shipment of special-edition models each year to show off. You would see them racing around town, advertising the brand's fortune. On each door was a decal of a wheel with wings and the array of all the racing flags. One day each year, pace cars appeared, migratory birds or butterflies. A woman sat at the wheel blowing bubbles of bubble gum. Spring.

27

One year, something happened. A wreck at the start of the race had killed several drivers. I remember listening to the restart in school a day later. I was in art class rolling out clay to coil into pots. Others were kneading the clay or cutting blocks of it with wire. The teacher was firing pieces in the small kiln, and you could hear the whoosh of air as it burned. The announcers at the track were subdued and sad. It seemed the completion of the race was more of a chore now, something that had to be done. The engines sounded muffled. I liked my art class. It was quiet as we worked. The teacher moved from table to table, here smoothing the lip of a pitcher with his thumb, there applying a slip with an old brush. The radio muttered in the corner.

28

Sid Collins, the Voice of the Indianapolis 500, will kill himself. I'll hear the news on a radio in a car in Indiana.

29

We sit on the car hood at the end of the runway. The Phantoms, in formations of two, glide over us, their flaps flared and gear down. In the distance, we see them touch down. Then the afterburners ignite and they leap back up off the shimmering runway. The pilots are logging hours on the weekend. Above us, pairs of jets bank and turn, circling on approach. Climbing, their engines make a sound like ripping blue cloth. Some cars in the race this year have turbine engines. They whine and whistle on the radio, breaking records during practice laps. There's a war. There's always a war. But it is far away.

30

I practice driving in the cemetery. My father sits in the passenger seat playing with the radio. The yellow Rambler is a company car he bought at auction, a decal of the company's logo peeled from the door. It's a big cemetery. In the older part there are old trees and the monuments are columns and urns and obelisks. Wrought iron fences or low walls of stone outline family plots. The roads curve around in circles. I stop and start and signal. I ease out the clutch, and the engine bucks. I can gain a little speed on the straightaways of the new section where the markers are in ordered rows and next to the ground. Mary, the Mother of God, directs traffic at an intersection. I go by my grandmother's grave again. A troop of Boy Scouts carrying backpacks filled with toy flags sifts between the stones, dipping down to the ground, in ones and twos, to decorate them for the weekend.

31

I walk the sidewalks of the old neighborhood. Summer started after Memorial Day, and I spent those summers riding my bike behind the city crews cutting down the dying trees. The chipper with its long-necked Victrola hood sounded, as it bit into branches, like the whooping engines at Indy howling out of the corners. The people who live here now are not home. At the parade perhaps. Picnicking. At the cemeteries. In cars. At the race. Or on their way someplace listening to the race on the radio. The patio is still here. The owner's just hosed it down, and it is drying in the light breeze and warming sun. My name and the names of my friends. And, there, the dimple of my handprint holding a puddle of water in the depression of the palm. In some other backyard I hear the chirp of a radio.

32

We dream about the moonlight on the Wabash. We sang it before our own bike races along the meandering side streets and oxbow loops of the neighborhood. We sang the song like we heard Jim Nabors sing it on the radio before the race. We tried to swallow the words as we sang them, holding notes on the verge of a yawn. We sounded, to our own ears, operatic and oldfashioned and grown-up. We marveled at the transformation of his voice every time he sang. Our own voices were changing. Things could change. The crowd cheering at the end of the song had one voice, a static static. We could stay out until the streetlights came on. The streetlights came on. We raced our shadows between pools of light. The gibbous globes, dabbed with black paint during the war, were caught glowing softly in the black branches of the leafing trees.

33

I took a job five hundred miles from home. Five hundred miles was what the odometer ticked off as I drove the Dodge Dart from Fort Wayne out to Iowa on old US 30. It took twelve hours with pit stops, the time it would take to run three or four races around the track in Indianapolis. As I drove, I imagined unspooling the concrete of the Speedway, shaking out the kinks of its turns and stretching it straight out behind me. I lost WOWO somewhere near the finish, swallowed in the local chatter of interfering frequencies. At night, though, I heard the edges of it when I was at the edge of sleep. I imagined a pulsating bleat of energy springing from its tower near my old home, the expanding circle of the signal opening from ground zero and rolling toward me. On the edge of sleep, just below hearing, the engine of my own body, the rush of blood in my ear, circulating.