Alive and Dead in Indiana Read Free

died, Jimmy made a commercial for the Highway Safety Council. They show it here twice a year in the driver’s education class. The day they show it, I sit in. The students in the class each have a simulator. You know, a steering wheel, a mirror, a windshield with wipers that work, dials luminous in the dark.
    Jimmy did the commercial while he was doing his last picture. He is dressed up as a cowboy, twirling a lariat. Gig Young interviews him. They talk about racing and going fast. Then Gig Young asks Jimmy, the cowboy, for advice. Advice for all the young drivers who might be watching. And I look around the class, and they are watching.
    It is the way he begins each sentence with “Oh.”
    Or it’s the lariat, the knot he fiddles with.
    That new way of acting.
    What is he thinking about? Jimmy was supposed to say the campaign slogan— The life you save may be your own . But he doesn’t. He looks toward the camera. He couldn’t see the camera because he wouldn’t wear his glasses. I can see what is happening. He is forgetting. He says, “The life you save may be”—a pause—“mine.” Mine.
    I guess that I have seen that little bit of film more times than anyone else in the world. I watch the film, and he talks to me, talks to me directly. I have it all up here.
    He kissed me.
    He died.
    Leave his life alone.
    I know motivation. I teach motivation. I teach acting .

PIECES
     
    I parked that night in a lot across the street from a restaurant I wanted to call on the next day early. I had gotten into Fort Wayne late, having driven all day from my home in Corbin, Kentucky. I had made a side trip crossing the Ohio at Brandenberg to Maukport, then on to Henryville, Indiana, where I was born and grew up. It was for old times’ sake. No one knows me there now. I talked with no one. Climbing north, I had this sense of things starting up again. It was already hot. They were running, and I took my place in the stream of white-haired travelers hauling those silver trailers, driving those new finned cars, passed only by Negro children being driven south out of the cities to Grandma’s place on the land in Mississippi or Alabama. These are the times of real migrations. With the warm weather and those new highways, people had started to move. I was on the road all the time and hadn’t seen anything like it. Not since the thirties.
    The traffic put me late in the city. I got my bearings from the bank building downtown. I’d been here before a few years earlier in 1950. I found Anthony Street, and followed the overhead trolleybus lines, a main street, and must have even followed a trolleybus because I remember thinking they still have these, the smell and the sparks and the sound of sliding metal. Fake lightning. And there might have been real heat lightning that night and lightning bugs.
    The elms looked real sick in the streetlights. I didn’t have time to find a place, or money if I had found one, having not much more than enough for gas and a bit extra, just in case. Nor am I so inclined. I like sleeping in a car, especially my car. I have my spices. And there was a change in the weather that night. So when I spotted the Hobby House Restaurant—and I had some trouble since it was locked and dark—I pulled into the lot across the street which had a huge sign still on that late. It was a painter’s palette with three brushes poking through the thumb hole. Each dab of paint was lit up by a different color of neon.
    It wasn’t a paint store but an ice-cream parlor. Each color a flavor of ice cream, I guess. The sign burned and buzzed to high heaven, but I was able to settle down in the backseat with beaten biscuits and my scales.
    I weighed my spices and herbs in the pools of colored light for the next day’s meeting.
    The palette was on some type of timer.
    At midnight, it went out and silent just like that, even though no one was around to switch it off. And there was lightning that night but no thunder. It flashed as