The nickel had, as promised, gone into the slot and straight out again. When Ellis returned it, the man pointed to the bench alongside.
“Have a seat.”
Ellis sat there, beside a Zimmer frame.
“Where you boys from?” the man asked.
“European, I’d say,” the non-identical third man added.
“From London,” Ellis nodded.
“Your friend sounded German to me,” the man said.
“Yes, he is,” Ellis conceded.
“Then he’s not from London,” the non-identical man stated.
“No.”
Gerd came over. “Hello,” he grimaced. “My name’s Gerd. I’m a photographer. We’re doing a road trip. Ellis here is my assistant.” He shook hands with the two men facing him. When he held his hand out to the man with the bowed head, the talkative man raised his hand to block him.
“My twin, Dutch, is disabled by a stroke.”
Dutch moved his head slowly round and smiled a lopsided smile at Gerd.
“We’re both seventy-two years of age. This here is Warren, our younger brother by a year.”
The men exchanged nods and smiles. The talkative man, the one whose name they didn’t know, asked Gerd what sort of thing he took photographs of. Gerd told him. The men laughed.
“You make money doing that?” Warren asked, on cue.
“They make books of my photographs,” Gerd said. “If the books sell, I make money.”
The talkative one leant across to his twin.
“These boys here take photographs of vending machines for a living, Dutch!”
Dutch sneered with half of his mouth.
“You don’t like to photograph people?”
“This man does,” Gerd said, slapping Ellis on the back. “He’s photographing people who have lived in the same place all their lives.”
The talkative one took the bait. “You notice Walnut Street when you came into town?” he asked Ellis.
“No, sir,” Ellis replied, scolding himself immediately for adopting
Little House on the Prairie
lingo.
“This here is Main Street we’re on. Us three boys were born on Main Street. Now me and Dutch live on Walnut Street which is directly off Main Street and Warren lives on Main Street with his wife. I’d say we all live within two hundred yards of the house we were born in.”
“Right,” Ellis said, non-committally
Gerd stood up. “I’ll leave you to it, Ellis.” He wished the men a good day and went outside with his camera. Ellis cursed him for leaving and stared at the empty doorway a little longer than he should have.
Dutch raised his head slowly. He was dribbling. His younger brother leant across and wiped his mouth. Dutch fixed his eyes on Ellis.
“Hit the black button,” he croaked.
“The black button,” Warren repeated. “You haven’t hit the black button.”
Warren’s eager eyes directed Ellis back to the table he and Gerd had eaten at. Ellis went to the juke-box selector, found the black button and pressed it. The music started and with it a high-pitched whine from above Ellis’s head. Looking up, he saw, in a corner of the room, a small flower-patterned curtain sliding noisily along a rail to reveal a curved glass cabinet. Inside the cabinet, a miniature model jazz band played to the music. The band members were a foot tall. They were figurines of large-headed black musicians with white tuxedos, fulsome pink lips and oversized toothy smiles. One sat at a miniature drum kit, one held a saxophone to its mouth, another a trumpet. There were a dozen of them and they jigged about with their instruments as the music played. In one corner, a trombone moved back and forth on a rail and where the trombonist had once been there now sat a Barbie doll in a sequined blue evening dress. The handle of the trombone drilled repeatedly into Barbie’s face, where a disheartening hole had been gouged out of her eye socket.
“What happened to the trombone player?” Ellis asked, with a forced smile.
“Someone hung him,” the unnamed man said, patting the bench next to him.
Ellis sat.
“Barbie’s been there many years,” Warren added. “She wasn’t there originally, as you’ve worked out for yourself.”
“We didn’t hang him,” the man said. “There was some of that going on when we lived on Main Street in the fifties, but not us. Murder is wrong when you count to four and stop to think about it.”
“Have you tried the pumpkin pie?” Warren asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Ellis said, feeling his enthusiasm for his first photography project wane.
“Can’t beat Dolly’s fresh pumpkin pie. Why don’t you order some?”
Ellis presumed that Dolly had to be the bald lady at the bar. He wondered if Dolly was dying. He felt queasy about eating food prepared by a terminally ill person and was pretty sure that midsummer was not pumpkin season. The whole issue of what constituted fresh food at the Anvil Bar and Grill was not one he wanted to raise again.
“I’m full,” he said, and patted his stomach appeasingly.
Dutch slid his bowl of half-eaten pie and dribble towards Ellis and nodded, inviting Ellis to finish it.
Ellis’s heart sank. “That’s kind of you, but I’m stuffed, really.”
The unnamed one picked up the conversation. “When we lived on Main Street, we devoted a lot of our time to the battle to keep America as God intended it to be.”
“Right …” Ellis murmured.
“A battle we lost.”
“Mmmm …”
Warren leant forward and fixed Ellis in the eye. “Poor Dutch, here, he still enjoys a slice of pie. He ain’t been robbed of that pleasure. He eats a bowl of pie with cream most days of the week. We come here every day. Dutch enjoys it. He’s still the same brother we knew and loved.”
“It’s important to enjoy these things,” Ellis agreed.
“We don’t mind black people so we none of us didn’t become militant,” the unnamed one continued. “We remained affiliated but we never saw anyone go a certain way. Like I say, I don’t mind them …” he paused for far too long for Ellis’s liking, “but I choose not to mix with them. We have the right to choose, see. Don’t see them rushing out to mix with me, so no one’s missing out.”
“Anyhow,” Warren added, “water under the bridge and Barbie plays that trombone good enough.”
Interstate 48 from Cincinnati to Indianapolis took them across a razor-thin landscape beneath deep skies.
“Why didn’t you go with those brothers and photograph them?” Gerd asked, 175 miles west of Cincinnati.
“They weren’t up for it,” Ellis said.
Twenty miles of silence later, Gerd said, “You’re lying, Ellis. Look, you don’t make a book of photographs called
Things I liked along the way
. The book is
Things I encountered
. Not everyone out there is sweet old Moses Mahler.”
Ellis thought to himself that this was pretty rich coming from a man who photographed Hoovers.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Gerd said, “but I’m telling you, Ellis, you can’t photograph from the outside looking in. You can’t do anything meaningful without getting involved.”
Ellis let this advice hang in the air for another twenty miles of highway. Then he lit two cigarettes, passed one to Gerd, and said, “You’re right. But you’re also a motherfucking German whore for leaving me alone with them.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Gerd roared with laughter. It took forty miles for the grin on his face to subside, slowly and evenly, almost unnoticeably, until his face had settled back to its preferred doom-laden setting.
If I achieve nothing else in life, Ellis told himself, I made Gerd laugh.
On the Fourth of July 1988 at three in the afternoon, Ellis was woken from a deep, sunburnt sleep by the realisation that the car was not moving. He heard the lapping of water and felt a cool, drinkable wind blow through the open windows. He dragged himself out of the car and took in the view of a river so wide and strong that it made him gasp. To the north, two miles away, was a bridge bearing the interstate. Near to it, lining the great river on both sides, were low wood-clad dwellings which gave way to a community of houseboats. Gerd was at the water’s edge where the riverbank was undeveloped and one could pretend that America had not grown up so fast.
“Unphotographable!” he said, with reverence. “Except from space. Do you know what you are looking at, Ellis?”
Ellis shook his head.
“The Mississippi river, Ellis. That’s what you are looking at.”
The river bank rose to a knoll. They sat there and watched the currents toy with the driftwood. Ellis settled on to his back and the blue sky laid itself across his line of sight. He told his dad that he was on the banks of the Mississippi. He pictured the day his dad was strong enough to travel with him. He brought him here, to the great river’s edge, and they watched God flow past, wide and majestic. He felt sure that such a day would come, a day just like today, when his dad was well and life was infinite again. This time next year. When the days are hot but the river breeze is cool. This time next year.
By nightfall they had checked into the one remaining room at the Barron Motel, Barron, Iowa, a shaky
L-shaped
establishment alongside the railroad. At one-thirty in the morning, Gerd was woken by the clanging bells of the railroad crossing and the passing through of a goods train of great length and little speed. The walls began to vibrate.
“Ellis! Wake up,” Gerd said, lighting a cigarette.
Ellis stirred. “What?”
“How can you sleep through this?”
Ellis turned over. When the train had passed, Gerd was left listening to the steady breathing of Ellis’s sleep.
Barron was a town of one main thoroughfare, which was wide and quiet and ran from Church Street at the top of the hill to the railroad crossing at the foot of it. Three silver silos towered over the railroad tracks. They shimmered in the wind and sunshine.
There were few people to be seen in Barron during the day and none at night. Those that were there were at ease with the blistering heat which Gerd and Ellis sought shelter from in the cool rooms of the Barron Candy Kitchen. Michalis and Cynthia Eugenikos had run the soda jerk since 1930, when Michalis took it on from his father, a Greek immigrant. The chrome fittings and appliances were original and mint. It was the last of its kind and that was why Gerd had come. They arrived there late because Gerd had been distracted by a dead cockerel lying at the side of the road.
“For the record,” Ellis said, “if, like last night, you find yourself watching me sleep through the train thing and wondering how I do it, it would be better to ask me how I do it the next day, after I have finished doing it, ‘it’ being sleeping through the train thing.”
“Be quiet, Ellis,” Gerd muttered, ushering him up the steps of the Candy Kitchen.
Cynthia Eugenikos threw herself at the Europeans as soon as they triggered the cow bell. She took a piece of paper from the pocket of her red and white striped apron and read a quick welcome speech. From the ceiling hung a banner: BARRON WELCOMES OUR FRIENDS FROM EUROPE, GERD AND ELI.
She led them to a table where two menus and a posy of flowers awaited them. “You’ll sit here, on the Gregory Peck seat.”
Cynthia placed a hand on Ellis’s shoulder and he glanced at her bright red fingernails and wrinkled, liver-spotted skin.
“For as long as you’re in town, everything here is on the house. The soda jerk is your home. I’ll come take your order in just one moment when I’ve explained to my other customers who you are and exactly what your exciting photography assignment is all about.”
“I’d be interested to know that myself,” Ellis said with a smile.
Cynthia looked at him helplessly, pushed the menu closer to him and scuttled off to her other customers, none of whom was south of seventy.
“There’s a place for sarcasm, Ellis,” Gerd said strictly. “And it isn’t Iowa.”
There were thirty-four different malt milkshakes on the menu. Ellis went for a Malt Peck, formerly known as the Chocolate Truffle Malt until ordered by Gregory Peck on an impromptu stopover in May 1978. A silver plaque on the wall commemorated Peck’s visit. Gerd toyed with the idea of a raspberry and pistachio milkshake as this was the other celebrity item on offer, having been ordered by Brooke Shields and her mother when they visited in 1984, the menu explained.
“I wonder why they didn’t name the milkshake after her like they did with Peck?” Ellis whispered. “Maybe they only do that if you’ve won an Oscar.”
“Maybe they just loved
Moby Dick
?” Gerd said. “Either way, I’m not having one. I’ll have a Butterscotch Malt.”
“They aren’t going to have named a milkshake after Gregory Peck on account of
Moby Dick
. It would have been
To Kill A Mockingbird.
Surely?”
“I agree with you one hundred per cent,” Gerd said.
“You agree as in you agree? Or you agree as in shut up Ellis?”
“The shut-up-Ellis one.”
“It was probably that shot of her having her first period in the Blue Lagoon,” Ellis said. “Put them off naming a milkshake after her.”
Gerd shot him a certain look.
“Brooke Shields,” Ellis explained unnecessarily. “Especially a raspberry milkshake.”
The German grimaced and lit a cigarette. “You’re a strange man, Ellis O’Rourke.”
Ellis lit one too. “But you’re not. Everyone spends two hours photographing a dead chicken.”
The Candy Kitchen was an orgy of original Light-Up Soda Fountains, Palm-Press Syrup Dispensers, Royal Crown Coolers, Rippled 12oz Soda Glasses, Classic Double Ring Bar Stools and more, at every turn and glance. Gerd was in chrome heaven. Ellis observed his choice of lenses, the use of long exposures in preference to flash and the painstakingly slow deliberation over composition. The stillness of the soda jerk during its many quiet hours was finally focusing Ellis’s young mind on the opportunity that watching Gerd offered him. The key to successfully assisting Gerd was recognising when to leave him alone. In such moments – which lasted for hours – Ellis stepped outside, or if Cynthia were loitering he’d divert her to the far end of the counter, sit on a high stool and let her talk. The more he listened to Cynthia Eugenikos the more she spoke and the more she spoke the closer Ellis grew to understanding what it meant to travel.