THE AIR WRITHED in scarfs of heat. I felt the heat of the engine on my bare feet through the fire wall, the sun beating on my head, the heat-helmet of my black hair. The tar-slurry patches in the road broadcast heat against the door, against the left side of my face. The streets, this far into an August afternoon, sagged in potholes at the intersection. The breath I drew was the heat of the sun, heat-glare of enamel, heat of motor block, fetid exhaust of the engine.
The light changed. I eased the clutch and moving air began to strip the heat. My head cooled until only my eyes still burned behind sunglasses. Second gear and a vacuum began to develop around the car, sucking heat out of the pool of heat and noise we’d been sitting in. I shifted to third at just under sixty in a forty-mile-per-hour zone between lights, downshifting to second to meet the broken stagger of red lights, then to first, engine braking up to the yellow crosswalk, the back hammer of the dual exhaust system one more anger in the anger of heat. Idling on the red. The car fills again with heat.
We surge and lay up like this from light to light, through metal and pavement and glass corridors that heat the heat. We cross burning gangs of steel rail, factory sidings, the road widening as it enters the old industrial core, a battalion of brick buildings disgorging steel bearings and brake drums into yards stacked with pig iron and volcanic slag, ranks of channel iron on rusty flatbeds.
A half mile. Two more lights. The insouciance of cows. Pasture and white board fences break down the brick flanks. At eighty I ease into fourth and the manic heat, ripped silk now, tatters away as if caught on the fences, the concertina wire around town.
Behind us, that’s what we’re thinking. Women in open sandals and damp shorts slumped on their arms at sorting tables in airless Laundromats. People pushing carts from air-conditioned malls raising an arm to ward off the incessant light which glints from mica chips in the griddle sidewalk. Their hands jump back from the door handles of their cars. They recoil from the sting of Naugahyde upholstery and gasp for air in these broilers.
Summer in northern Indiana, the pale light of the dog days, the smolder of towns like South Bend. We were pulling away at over a hundred.
I’d borrowed my younger brother’s car, a two-seat convertible. The open country roads between South Bend and Shipshewana, fifty miles to the east, held some promise of relief in the rush of wind. I drove south on Indiana 331 for Wakarusa, way out of the way, so we wouldn’t have to go through Elkhart, stagger through its impertinent traffic lights in lines of soft-boiled sedans and irritated drivers, not in this car.
We turned east on Indiana 4 and hurtled toward Wakarusa at an illegal and dangerous speed. We could not hear ourselves talk over the wind blast unless we shouted. We smiled at each other. My brother’s taste in those days ran to Corvettes, and this was the most powerful one he had ever purchased. Chevrolet made no bigger stock engine and its Corvette assembly line squeezed no more dynamic force out of a motor block: 430 horsepower at 5200 rpm. “Four hundred and thirty-five pounds of torque at forty-four grand,” in the argot of our youth.
My brother and I had grown up in southern California, where in the 1950s Detroit’s production automobiles were reinvented. What Detroit lifted from all the retooling and fabrication done by teenagers and young men in home garages in the fifties and sixties in California, and what it later borrowed from Europe in the way of steering and suspension systems, became Detroit’s “new” production cars of the late sixties and early seventies. Or we thought that. The Corvette, we maintained, came of age in California, inspired by our fathers and older brothers reboring, tinkering, and improvising with Detroit’s timid creations. It was America’s sole production sports car. What it lacked in finesse (suspension, steering, cornering ability) it made up for in raw power. The car grew out of a drag-strip, not a road-racing mentality. Models like the one I was driving carried even more of that California heritage in a Detroit chassis and body: its standard carburetion system and its shift linkage were designed by California outfits, Holly and Hurst.
California loomed big for us in Indiana in August because we could forget Indiana’s long brutal winters during those flaccid, mercurial days. We could almost imagine California freeways, not Indiana toll roads, and a night run to Barstow holding a steady hundred over the Mojave, not these short six-mile runs between towns. Young men in Indiana pitied the basketball skill and acumen of players from California. So did we with California history shake our heads at what passed for a hot automobile with Indiana men.
Highway 331 rolled past broad-field farmsteads bounded by oak and maple and sycamore copses. The Corvette, set up on wide-tread racing tires, handled smoothly here and the two of us shared a sense of abandon. We had no way then, of course, 1968, to appreciate how little gas cost: thirty-one cents a gallon. But the rip of the wind made us forget the heat and we knew that out here the police rarely turned up. The radar traps were on the Indiana Toll Road and on the main highways west for Gary and south to Indianapolis. I drove with impunity. Our hair vibrated in the slipstream that boiled over the windshield like river rapids.
My father had some experience with race cars, roadsters like a K-2 Allard that he owned when he met my mother, and which he claimed once to have driven from Montclair, New Jersey, to Los Angeles in three days. When I came of age he took me out on back roads in Ocean County, New Jersey, and showed me how to drive, how to pull out of a skid, how to shift, how to use a tachometer. I gained confidence from these lessons, though I didn’t know how deeply ingrained they were, if they were down there in my unconscious solid as a shovel, ready to serve in an emergency. I drove with enthusiasm but not recklessly, a distinction corroborated for me in the detachment and ease apparent in my companion sitting buckled in the other seat. In those days, on the verge of adulthood, courting such danger was a source of our vigor. We were pressed by few responsibilities. We drove aggressively and affected a languid attitude at the steering wheel. Except for the racket from the tuned exhaust system hammering the air as I downshifted into turns, we seemed to draw no one’s attention. Two boys in white T-shirts driving a black convertible very fast on a dry road on a blistering day.
In Wakarusa the face of the law sat in a patrol car at the single light. He nodded his approval as I came to a proper stop and waited calmly on the red, then, glancing both ways for errant traffic, departed slowly at the green, radiating a sense of responsibility and shifting into second gear at about fifteen. I nodded to the cop. Who was fooled?
From Wakarusa we dropped down to Indiana 119, for Goshen, and then headed east and north toward Shipshewana. Shipshe-wana stood at the center of a Mennonite community. My friend, a filmmaker, wanted to find out about a stock auction that took place there regularly. So we said, asking directions. What he really wanted was to scout locations and to discover how the Amish here might take to his desire to document their auction.
We pulled up in Goshen for gas, but also to show off, to parade ourselves and the vehicle. We were full of pretending we were driving in from California, though we were both in school in South Bend. And, sure, there were other 427 ’Vettes around, pal, but not ones like this one. My brother had made it even more intimidating (only to a certain class of people, of course—we were oblivious) by stripping it of ornament. The chrome body trim and manufacturer’s symbols had been removed. The black fiberglass body showed no panel seams. The magnesium wheels were dull gray, the tires black sidewalls with black-on-black lettering. The seats and interior were black. The faces of some of the dashboard instruments showed the only bits of bright color. The floor mats were red.
At the gas station we responded with laconic detachment to the curiosity of the attendant, using an arcane jargon indispensable to this kind of conversation.
“Jesus, some car.”
“Yeah.”
“Three-ninety?”
“Four-twenty-seven.”
“What’s the compression?”
“Twelve.”
“Jesus. You got deuces in there or a four-barrel?”
“Holly four. The exhaust is tuned. The lakers are for real.”
“You got Iskindarian cams?”
“Yeah.”
We bantered like lawyers before a trial. The only way the attendant could win was to know more about the car and the engine than I did. The tank was full before I ran out of esoteric information about the transmission and rear end. I left a discrete chirp of burning rubber in second gear as I pulled away into traffic.
He hadn’t mentioned the heat. If we’d been driving a Plymouth sedan, that would have been his opener. When I told him we were from California, he glanced into the car and told me it was illegal to drive barefoot in Indiana.
We cruised slowly around town in Shipshewana, looking for somebody to introduce ourselves to. It was apparent right away that the car carried no weight at all here. These people preferred buttons on their pants to zippers and they had little truck with electricity. We felt one kind of authority—horsepower—slip away and a second emerge: we were on a professional quest. We acted more intent now, even solemn, though merely sitting in such a car, a high-strung horse all a-jitter in a small corral, made it difficult to regard ourselves in a serious light.
We parked—the only car—near a large barn where we speculated the auction probably took place and got out. There was no one around. Barefoot in Levi’s and T-shirts, our long hair tied back but wind-ravaged at the edges, we tried to appear in need of assistance. No one came, We walked up to the barn and peered in. No one. The bare ground in front of the building had been hoof-beaten to dust the consistency of flour and was pilled with desiccated crumbles of horse manure. In the stillness only one sound came to us, the rising drone of cicadas from elms growing beside a building that could be a store.
No one in there either. Was it Sunday? No.
We got back in the car and pulled out on the highway. We’d go out to one of the farmhouses we could see. In the rearview mirror I spotted a man in dark trousers and suspenders watching us from the shade of the elms. I thought to turn around, but by then Don and I shared a sense that we were so out of place we might as well have been pulling into some town in Mongolia.
I passed a horse-drawn buggy. I began to distinguish men working in outlying fields and stepping through barn doors. And to notice horses standing head down in the heat. We pulled into a yard. A man in a dark hat wearing dark trousers and with his white shirt buttoned to the throat came over to my side of the car. I didn’t want to shut the engine off, to indicate we assumed we could stay. We’d be moving right along. He and Don tried to converse over the ba-bam-bam-buh-bam-buh-buh-bam of the exhaust. I was so chagrined by our outlandish appearance I didn’t pay attention to the conversation. It was cordial and succinct. The man showed no sign of finding us strange or presumptuous. Yes, there was a stock auction coming up in a week. People from all around in Lagrange and Elkhart Counties and from Michigan would be bidding, mostly on draft and carriage horses. And pigs. I realized as they spoke that the air was pungent with the odors of fresh-cut grass and pig manure. And that the air was a bit cooler here and not so hazy as it was in South Bend.
He told us to see a Mr. Huster and gave us directions. We thanked him sincerely, with all the politeness we could muster without seeming to be false. I let in the oversize eleven-inch clutch slowly and pulled away as quietly as possible. While the man was talking with Don, I’d been looking sidelong at his hands, suspended at the level of my face. Large, calm, deliberate hands.
Don asked if I’d brought any shoes. If Mr. Huster was at home he wanted to get out of the car, get away from the car, to inquire about the auction. Yes, I had. We stopped on a swath of golden field stubble at the side of the road and I fished them out from behind the seat.
Don began to laugh. He made an exaggerated sound like an idling engine’s and crossed his eyes and leered in self-mockery at the foolishness we must have represented to the other man, ignorant as North Side Chicago VISTA volunteers on the Navajo Reservation.
Mr. Huster was home. Don raised a finger to signal me from his front porch, where someone had answered Don’s knock, to indicate success. He disappeared behind a closing screen door. My interest in his film had ebbed, and it was too hot to sit in the car waiting. I walked over to a fence in a windbreak of poplars and stood in the cooler air. There were Belgian draft horses in the paddock. White fetlocks, blazed faces. Flaxen manes and docked tails. And Percherons, a darker chestnut than the Belgians and smaller headed. Both breeds, stout as bridge timbers, were huge, even-tempered animals.
There were six Belgians, four Percherons. I studied them to see if I could tell which might be matched pairs. Ants moved along the whitewashed fence rail. The light-blue sky was empty of birds. Only the rising, strident chorus of cicadas and the movement of grazing horses, the streaming of the ants, broke up the stillness, the insistence of the heat.
When Don came back to the car, he had the perplexed look of someone at odds with many things.
“How’d you do?”
“Fine. This guy sort of runs the auction. It’s all right with him to film. I think. Not really sure.”
We stood facing each other on opposite sides of the car.
“Look at these horses,” I said.
“Yeah, what are they, Clydesdales?”
“The light ones are Belgians. The others are Percherons. Same deal.”
“This guy Huster sells horses. Maybe these here are for sale.”
“How much? He say how much?”
A woman was approaching us from the house with a tray. It bore a large stoneware pitcher and two glasses with ice. She was petite. She wore no makeup. Maybe she was twenty. The hemline of her gray jumper broke at her shins. Underneath it, she wore a plain, high-collared blouse with long sleeves. She held the tray out with a demure smile and spoke not a word.
We nodded politely and took the glasses as silently. We drank the ice water in that uh-gluck, uh-gluck, uh-gluck rhythm that is to drink without tasting. She held the tray out for our glasses and poured them full again. We drank again, half a glass each.
“Thanks very much,” I said. “It’s very thoughtful. Appreciate it.”
She smiled and squinted at us with her head tilted, teetering between her world and ours, as though half-convinced we weren’t there. No one spoke. She walked away with an air of having satisfied herself.
“You want to drive back to the barn? Is that where they have the auction?”
“Yeah, let’s go by there. I want to see the situation inside, where we can set up.”
We drove section-line roads back to Indiana 5, the highway on which the barn stood. I sensed the authority of the car again, and took some sort of reassurance from the slickness with which I shifted.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” said Don. He stepped through a side door into the barn.
I looked around for the man I’d seen under the trees before. After a while I got out and walked over to the circles of shade cast by the elms growing next to the building I thought was a store. The rear of the building was open, like a stable shed. The man I’d seen was sitting astride a backless chair with a sickle cupped in his arm like a violin. He was stroking it with a foot-long sharpening stone. He smiled and acknowledged me with a slight movement of his head. Hand tools and small farm implements—harrow rakes and plow bottoms—sat in orderly piles on the ground all around him. Blacksmith, I thought. In spite of his apparent cordiality, I sensed no opening for a conversation. I stood watching as though the scene before me were a diorama.
“Where you boys from?” he said in an even voice, but suddenly.
“South Bend. We’re in school over there. We’re thinking about making a movie here.”
“Oh!”
“We just want to check the lighting in the barn over there.”
He ceased stroking the sickle blade and looked up, but said nothing. He was in his thirties. He looked as though he were regarding a painting in a gallery that had no meaning for him.
“Well,” I said, turning away, “we’re just going to be here a minute. Sorry if we disturbed you.”
He didn’t watch me leave. It wasn’t rudeness I felt as much as a sense that, for him, what I was speaking about was impractical, remote from the task then in his hands. Perhaps it would have been different if it hadn’t been so hot, if the air under the elms hadn’t felt so staggered.
“We going somewhere else?” I asked Don as he got in the car.
He shrugged. “Let’s go up to Michigan, up to Three Rivers and eat dinner.”
I pulled out on Indiana 5 and headed north. We passed the ranks of orderly Amish fields, the neat two-story frame houses and carriage buildings. Towheaded boys and girls stood still in front yards staring, midgame, looking like children from an N. C. Wyeth drawing in that famous edition of Tom Sawyer.
“Gene Stratton Porter is buried around here somewhere,” I said.
“Who?”
“She wrote about waifs and orphans. Like James Oliver Curwood, Rider Haggard, that vein. The stories hold together pretty good when you’re young, then they feel stranger, like zoo animals.”
I slowed at the T-junction with Indiana 120. No traffic. I turned left. Thunderheads building in the west. An afternoon cloudburst to come.
“So, you going to make a movie?”
Don shrugged and leaned down to take my sneakers off. “Yeah. I think so. I want to break through all that … what? Understatement?”
“You mean how reserved, how noncommittal they all are?”
“Yeah. That.”
We were shouting now over the sound of the car’s acceleration. I shifted to third so smoothly the steady line of the Corvette’s hood rose just slightly. We knew what we were doing. I hit fourth doing nearly ninety.