I

I had a bad feeling about Indiana from the first moment I heard we were getting assigned there. We had been assigned all over the US and had done two tours in Europe, so Indiana shouldn’t have been much different. A foreign place, but less foreign that the small village in Germany we were leaving after four years.  Somehow there was something about the sound of the word Indiana, that made my stomach clench and a feeling of dread wash over me in a chilly wave. Perhaps it was the fact we were going to Grissom AFB, the only Air Force Base in the world named for an astronaut. The place was named for him because he was a native son and because he had died “heroically” in a fire at Cape Canaveral, but, contrarian that I am, I also knew he was the only one of the Mercury astronauts to have lost his capsule at sea. Maybe it was because of Tecumseh’s curse after the battle of Tippecanoe which cursed the Limber Lost forever and began the series of presidential deaths in the zero years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Maybe it was because of the close proximity to Kokomo which just sounded like a name stolen from the Beach Boys song, and to Peru. I said to Kathy, also known as Tech Sergeant Kathleen Wells, since she was the Air Force member, “Sounds like we are moving into the wilds of America—Peru and Kokomo, just up from Indian—no place.”

She smiled at that. It is one of the reasons I married her in the first place. She laughs, or at least smiles at my jokes. To her credit she has been doing so for thirty plus years. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” she said. “At least you can be sure of the mail.”

“Yeah I guess. APO isn’t the best mail for sure. I just got a feeling.”

“You and your feelings.”

“Yeah, but they are usually right, aren’t they?”

She shrugged, but didn’t say no.

Still, a military family, even a strange one like ours where Mom wore combat boots and Dad cooked the dinner and wrote stories, goes where it is sent, so the Wells family packed up our two sons, Jack Junior, most of the time called Deuce because he hated being called Junior, who was seventeen, and Mitch, who was fifteen, and came to Grissom AFB.

We settled into our house on the base, a four-bedroom condo connected to three others just like it, and all set in the midst of a giant corn field seven miles south of Peru and fifteen miles north of Kokomo.

As with every other place we had been stationed, I began to look around the area to familiarize myself with everything around, which was tough since we didn’t have a car yet. We bought a new family van in Germany, but it had not arrived at the same time as us. The process of getting a car shipped is an adventure at best. We bought the van a year before we left Germany and drove it all over Europe, but when it came time to ship it home, we had to drive all the way up to Bremerhaven—we were stationed in Frankfurt—to put the car on a ship. So, we drove up there with someone who was going to pick up a car shipped from the states to Germany so we could ride back with them. Standard procedure. Air Force Standard Procedure isn’t always so standard, so we were left without a car when we got to Grissom. I spent two weeks walking around the base, and riding the base shuttle, and bumming rides from neighbors to get groceries and such. That doesn’t sound bad, I know, but when it is January in North Central Indiana it becomes problematic. I swear to you there was not so much as a wire fence between Grissom and the North Pole. There was snow on the ground when we landed, and snow remained on the ground for weeks after we got there. The temperature hovered around twenty degrees. Now we had been in plenty cold weather in Germany, but there was just something about Indiana.

Finally, the van got there. We called it Blue Monday. It was a blue Dodge that might have been Air Force blue except for the black stripes up the sides. It handled like a herd of cattle, but it had a good heater and the radio worked so we did okay.

I took a ride up to Peru to check out the town. I had been told Peru was a circus town, meaning a lot of old small circuses called Peru home in the winter when they weren’t touring, but the old big tent touring circuses were mostly a thing of the past, so Peru became the retirement settlement for lots of circus people and circus animals. There were literally lions and tigers and bears, oh my, all housed in various compounds in the area around the town. There were also elephants and camels, both of which sometimes managed to jump their enclosures and stop traffic along Highway 31.

Aside from the traffic hazards, Peru was tied to circus by the Circus Hall of Fame, which was a huge arena building right in downtown Peru. The first time I drove by it I almost crashed the Blue Monday into a light pole because right outside of the Circus Hall was a gaggle of clowns standing on the sidewalk. Maybe they were actually called a squadron of clowns, but whatever you call them there was a gang of them. Red fuzzy hair and big floppy shoes and stripped pajamas. There must have been twenty of them all standing around on the corner by the Circus Hall dancing with the cold. I found out later Emmet Kelly, probably the most famous Hobo Clown in America retired in Peru.

The whole clown thing made a shiver run up my back. I didn’t know why then. I know there are lots of people who are afraid of clowns, but I had never been one of them. I grew up on Bozo the clown and Chuckoo the Birthday clown, and we used to get international circus shows on German TV. Though my German got pretty good most of the time, it was hard to understand the announcers for the circuses, but clowns and acrobats are generally mum so we enjoyed the shows sans announcements.

The circus wasn’t the only thing I found in Peru. I found Ole Olson of the Olson and Johnson Vaudeville team who formed an amateur theater in Peru. Olson and Johnson only made one movie called Hell’s a Poppin, but I happened to have seen it on the old Channel 9 movie when I was a kid, so I knew them. Ole was long dead, but his theater company was still going strong, producing four shows a year.

Finally, there was Peru’s favorite son, Cole Porter. He started in Peru, went to Europe, came back to Broadway then retired to a considerable estate outside of town. He is buried in New Hope cemetery along with a whole mess of the Cole family. His grave and monument is a tourist draw like James Dean is for another Indiana town, but no one tries to steal Porter’s grave stone. At least not that I know of.

Along Broadway—Peru’s Broadway, not New York’s—sorta catty corner from the Circus Hall was the Peru City Hall; standard small town mid-west city hall with pillars in front and a broad set of steps leading up to them. I was surprised there was not a street going completely around the court house. Most small southern and Midwestern towns had their main drag go all the way around the town square, even if there was no court house. I found the local police station tucked into a sort of hidden corner on Broadway between bars—no pun intended. I found out later that Peru was famous for having more bars than a small city really oughta have, but there ya are. There was Big Wong’s Restaurant, an only semi-Chinese joint with an amusing name.

Along Main street, which should have been called Church street, there were as many churches as bars on Broadway. Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians and there among them was a fine old Indiana Gothic Episcopal Church. That was good to find. We had been doing base chapel in Germany. It was alright, but it wasn’t what we were really about. We had all been baptized in the Episcopal church, and Kathy and I were married in same. We had been involved in the battle to preserve the old Prayer Book before we left California.

Out at the other end of town were the fast food joints we had not found in Germany. McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, and even Taco Bell which had not been much national when we left for Germany.

All of Peru was set beside the Wabash River, with which I was not much impressed. I figured from the song that it would be a wide pretty river, but it was just a kind of an ugly creek up where Highway 25 crossed it.

Surrounding Peru were other small towns—Chili (Pronounced Ch I lie), Mexico, Miami, Bunker Hill, Denver, Walton, and Roann. They were all barely wide spots in the corn and soy bean fields. Gonna be a kinda boring assignment I thought, and then a whisper in my mind said I hope.

~ * ~

The boys went to school at a school called Maconaquah and started making friends on base. They were good at that since they had been moved from pillar to post every few years since they were small, so making friends was usually pretty easy. They had made friends in three languages, but this time, though the natives spoke English, friends didn’t come so easy.

The kids they went to school with were “farmer kids,” which sounds idyllic but wasn’t. Perhaps that was because there was a sort of on-going war between the “farmer kids,” the “Base Kids” and Peru’s “Townies,” but whatever the reason, I knew we were in for a rough time the first week of school when Jack and Mitch both came home looking like they went ten rounds with Ali. Both were pretty scuffed up. Deuce had a split lip and a mouse under his eye. Mitch just had a bruised scratch on his cheek.

“What the hell happened?” I demanded when we got the bleeding stopped and the ice bags applied.

Both boys shrugged and shook their heads. “Farmers,” Deuce said with disgust. “They don’t like Base people, so they jumped us at the bus stop.”

“Jumped you?”

“Yeah.”

“We didn’t say anything to them or anything,” Mitch said, sounding defensive. “They just rolled up in a pick-up truck and piled on.”

Now I am not much of a fighter though I have had my share. The neighborhood I grew up in was pretty tough which meant everyone was generally polite to everyone else because if you weren’t polite, you were liable to get killed. You learned pretty fast if you had trouble it was best to run if you could. If you had to fight, you had better make it quick and dirty cause fights only ended with one man walking away and the other unable to walk away.

I taught my sons to be polite and never to provoke trouble, but I also taught them if some fool wants to fight, there is no way to deter him, so if you must fight make it quick and dirty. No “fisticuffs.” Kick, stomp, bite, gouge, whatever was necessary to be the one who walked away at the end, and they learned pretty well. There hadn’t been many fights, but the few there had been were short and sweet with no marks left on Mitch or Deuce, but not this time.

“How many?” I asked

“I don’t know,” Deuce said. “I was too busy to count.”

“There were eight of them,” Mitch said.

“Okay, time to go to the SP’s…”

“No. they both said at once.

“No need to, Pop,” Jack said. “I don’t think they’ll mess with us again.”

“I think I broke one guys knee,” Mitch said—at fifteen he was five feet ten and whip thin. “On top of that I kicked one in the balls real hard.”

“I know I busted one guys nose and kicked a couple in the balls,” Deuce added.

He was already six three and weighed about two hundred and ten.

“They had to help each other back to the pick-up.” He grinned and after a few seconds Mitch did too.

I looked them both over for several seconds before I reluctantly said, “All right, no cops this time. In the future watch yourselves, okay? The other guys didn’t know what they were walking into this time, but they will next time so watch yourselves.”

They both nodded agreement and we let it go, but it didn’t stay gone. A couple of hours later Kathy rolled up from work, earlier than she should have, followed by a Security Police car.

Kathy was more upset than angry but was a pretty good mix of both when the SP’s followed her up the walk to the house. We all met on the stoop.

“We’d like to talk with Jack and Mitch Wells please,” the SP’s said, but clearly the please was only format. The request was more order than request.

“What for?” Kathy asked, but I put my hand on her shoulder to quiet her then turned back and called the boys out.

They were upstairs already working on homework so it took them a minute, but they came crashing downstairs and right to the group on the stoop.

Kathy’s mouth fell open when she clapped eyes on them. In some ways they were looking worse now than when they first got home. Bruises had time to really blue up and swelling had really set in.

The ranking SP, a staff sergeant looked the two of them over. “We got a report from Maconaquah that there had been some trouble. Some parents were upset that their kids had been beat up by a gang of Air Force kids.”

“Gang?” Jack said. “There wasn’t a gang except the gang of farmers…” he made the word farmers sound nasty “…who jumped us at the bus stop.”

“Yeah,” Mitch agreed. “There was eight of ‘em.”

The Staff Sergeant looked both skeptical and impressed. “Whatever, you guys hurt a couple of them pretty bad…”

Mitch and Jack looked at each other with lifted eyebrows and smiles, and I could tell they were pleased to hear they did some damage.

“So, what’s gonna happen here Staff Sergeant?” Kathy asked.

“Well, looking these guys over I think we will let it go with just a warning this time. We have had some of this kind of trouble before with some of the farmer kids. Just don’t let this happen again, or we may have to do charges, and lawsuits and such.”

Both boys, who had been military since they were small said, “Yes, Sir. What do you suggest we do if they come after us?”

The cop looked them over and said, “From what I heard, they may think twice before they try it, but just keep an eye out.”