The following event occurred more than once during my youth. But that was sixty years ago and so, I don’t claim this memory to be a historically accurate record of facts. It is simply a fading memory of those events in composite, or one narrative scene in which all my memories are combined and entwined with imagination as all memories are in order to provide a story context. Names have been changed and the time has been warped by my age. Read it and just know that it happened in a small Southern Indiana town long ago and far away from where I’m writing about it.
Many small towns rose from the rich farm soil of the Ohio Valley from a basic idea—symmetry. Symmetry of one kind or another was a human concept that permeated every aspect of the environment molded by human hands in our county as if evenness and balance were always the same thing. My town had been crowned as the county seat, a royal privilege that required every part of it to set a symmetric example. The town grew in squares from a single square. Out of an airplane window you could look down and see a series of perfect blocks expanding from the center on all sides, each border on every side of each block lined with box houses of wood and brick on square lots. One square divided into another like cells of a living organism until the people stopped building and an even perimeter formed the city limits on all sides.
Two main roads ran in and out of town east and west, and two ran north and south. The points where they intersected formed this perfect center and traffic lights hung on each of the four corners. In the center of this the county courthouse, an imposing four-story edifice of brick and concrete, rose majestically, topped by a spire that housed a bell tower and four giant clock faces, one in each direction. The bell hanging in the tower struck a piercing metallic toll exactly at hourly intervals, one for every hour, to signify the passage of time, a necessary ritual due to one hour being very much like the past hour and very much like the next. It was a minor annoyance unless you lived close to the town square at midnight and were awakened rudely from a drunken slumber. Inside this austere building all the county political and administrative functions were carried out with due diligence by judges, clerks, lawyers, two janitors, and military recruitment officers from each of our national branches of service.
Opposite and across the street of each directional face of the courthouse, local businesses that would one day be ruined by a Walmart and drive-thru fast food on the west side of town, enjoyed prosperity. The dystopian urban sprawl that destroyed them was at least a decade away in 1963. My favorite establishment and the favorite of all boys suffering the pangs of a burgeoning pubescent angst was The Palace, a combination diner, sports den, gambling room, billiards parlor, and news hub for the male population of the county. Women never entered this sweaty domain, and we were therefore not subjected to the social awkwardness of our own self-conscious paranoia in their presence. It was the perfect place to grow from an immature boy to an immature man and exactly where I found myself at noon on Friday, November 22nd.
Even though a school day, my being here was not unusual. In those days of a collective sort of innocence, the high school had a policy whereby sophomores through seniors could leave the building for lunch if they came back and didn’t miss the next period after lunch. This privilege was designed to help us understand that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin, I guess. The high school was only three blocks west of the town square and my masculine oasis, The Palace. One dollar would buy a coney island—a hotdog topped with tomato sauce, onions, and ground beef—an order of fries and a coke. Most days I spent my lunch money there among the deranged denizens that provided me with early examples of manhood and the behavior that would be expected from me as I grew older. This day seemed no different than any other at first. It was 11:30 AM and all the regulars were engaged in their usual business.
Tiny Frankie, the town’s only dwarf, leaned against the glass counter by the cash register reading The Dailey Racing Form. Neatly arrayed in a three-piece pin-striped suit and topped by a brown fedora, the crown of which was all that was visible over the counter, Frankie huffed and puffed his way through a cup of coffee. Ron, the fry cook, waiter, bouncer, and cashier stood on the other side opposite the little man with a pot of fresh coffee.
“I’m gonna pour this coffee on top of your hat if you can’t hold the cup still and high enough, you fucking midget.”
In all fairness to Ron, this was spoken affectionately and fifty years before political correctness would have generated a lawsuit.
“Just pour it, fat boy.” Frankie grumbled in appreciation.
Directly across the room a ticker tape machine printed off sports scores and news. Two men I knew to be local farmers sat on a wooden bench and stared at the lunch traffic through the huge plate glass window. They seemed to be paying particular attention to the hustle and bustle around the courthouse across the street. Studs Macon and his buddy Ralph Hudson were looking for something. My guess was something to wager on. These guys were inveterate gamblers who could watch a telephone pole for hours betting on which bird would fly off first. But it was a typical November day full of grey clouds and dirty semi-melted slush from a recent snowfall dampening the pavement outside the window. Nothing was happening that appeared worth a wager. The people walking walked purposefully and with their heads down. They leaned into a stiff wind and hugged themselves tightly against the winter as they moved to their cars or various lunch spots around the square.
The three pin ball machines along the wall clattered and clanged. Bells rang, lights flashed, and three young men stared into the abyss, numbed by their fortunes rolling with the steel balls into the final hole at the bottom of the machines. They added more dimes quickly and began the process again.
In the cavernous rear area of the long narrow building under the dim yellow lightbulbs, a few men danced around the pool tables, cue sticks in hand, in time with the clack and clatter of the numbered balls bouncing off each other and gliding across the green felt. Blueish cigarette smoke lingered in cumulous puffs around the low-hanging light fixtures and the scent of talc and chalk drifted into the dining area where it mingled with whiffs of raw onion, pickles, and bad coffee. It was the incense of my youth and I sat on a stool waiting for Ron to notice me among shop clerks, lawyers, and other students that lined the counter on similar stools.
“What are you having today, ass wipe. How about a Milky Way so you can grow a few more pimples to pop?” asked Ron.
“The usual.”
“The usual? What the fuck does that mean? Do I look like I remember what some kid has for his usual when I’ve got a counter full of actual adults to deal with?”
“Give the boy a coney dog and an order of fries,” said Will Peyton, an auto mechanic at the NAPA parts store on the other side of the square. “He gets the same lunch every day. I’m tired of listening to your bull shit.”
“Oh, does that mean you ain’t leaving your usual nickel tip today, tight ass.”
I suppose this kind of banter is unacceptable now in the 21st century, and at the age of seventy-three I can understand how it could be annoying. But in 1963, the only way men had of showing affection toward other men without risking ridicule was through slinging insults back and forth.
At noon, Ron switched on the TV mounted on the wall above the far end of the counter. The midday national news featured Walter Cronkite and his deep rumbling baritone voice was guaranteed to share a story or two that the political wannabe geniuses could argue about over cheeseburgers and chili before returning to work, which was for most of them a return to some soul-sucking form of small-town banality rewarded by a less than adequate paycheck and a deep-seated anxiety that this was all they could ever expect from life. It was a normal day.
George Willard, who ran a shoe repair shop two blocks north of the courthouse jumped from his stool at the counter and ran to the plate glass window between Studs and Ralph. Studs, a full head taller than George, hauled his large frame upright and spit a wad of Beechnut into a paper cup.
Ralph yelled at the top of his lungs, “Shit’s gonna hit the fan now. The whole crowd, front to back, ceased the boisterous clamor and waited for an explanation of the interruption. The pinball machines stopped their clanging. Ron turned the volume on the TV down, reducing Cronkite to a hoarse whisper. Men stood leaning on their cue sticks and a wave of silence drowned the chitter and chatter of the ordinary conversation that no real man in the Palace would ever be reduced to admitting was gossip. Bill Wilson, the county game warden pulled his brand new dark green Jeep Waggoneer into the courthouse parking lot across the street.
Wilson was a huge man, in stature and mythically. At six foot and four inches, he towered above most of the town and in his broad-shouldered winter anorak, he resembled a walking barndoor. The man had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel as a young sailor and a jagged scar ran red from his hairline past his left ear and ended just above a wide moustache across his upper lip. If you didn’t know Bill, you might have believed him to be a murderous pirate rather than a gentle man who played Santa Claus every year at the Salvation Army for the orphans at the county poor farm. If you did know him, and I did, what happened next seemed surreal.
It all began with bird shit. The county courthouse clock tower and the eaves of the roof provided perfect space and shelter for nesting, and my town was one of those rural farm towns that was blessed with fodder for every species of bird from starlings to chicken hawks, but particularly pigeons. Pigeons attacked the clock tower that year, building an elaborate series of feathered hostels. Hundreds roosted in cracks and crevices along the gutters and on the roof. Pigeon droppings painted the town square with white and black dots. The flying grey rats shat on lawyers, the old circuit judge, the county clerk, and the beehive hairdos of her all-female staff. Even the credit criminals could not dodge the reign of terror as they snuck into a court for bad debts. These winged demons held no regard for status or beauty. They dive-bombed Cadillac’s and Chevy’s alike. They defaced park benches and Civil War statues.
Enough was enough. The mayor phoned our county game warden who arrived on this day with a half dozen shotguns loaded with bird shot and a coffee thermos. We, the miscreants of misogyny, crowded against the plate glass window to watch. The pigeons were no match for our uniformed gladiator, although it did seem that his “Smokey-the-Bear” hat got splattered once or twice. For thirty minutes a sky filled with smoke rained feathers and blood. The air stank of cordite and bird entrails as shotgun blasts rattled shop windows and merchants ran outside their businesses carping like scalded dogs. Pigeon parts were carted off the sidewalks by a gang of feral cats. The onlookers became filled with bloodlust, breaking their silence and cheering as the body count rose.
I was ambivalent as regards hunting, a rite of passage for every red-blooded male in the County, and felt uncomfortable with all the bird murder. But I did not want to be embarrassed. So, as the cacophony of cheers filled the airy room, I joined the choir and soon became as jaded to the violence as the rest. With all the noise, no one heard Cronkite on the black and white TV behind us above the counter as he began describing the noon motorcade of our popular President JFK and his wife, the beautiful Jackie. The line of cars snaked slowly around the square in Dealey Plaza as the couple in the open convertible waved to the Dallas, Texas, crowd and smiled.
Jim McGarrah, Author 