Free Going to Chicago by Rob Levandoski Page B

brother Clyde.”
    Gus made me shake and then reached back and pumped Clyde’s hand for a long time. “You are a lucky man, Clyde!”
    â€œI am?”
    â€œYou sure are. You share the name of the greatest lawbreaker in history. The late Clyde Barrow. You never met him, did you, Clyde?”
    Clyde shook his sideways head. “I ain’t never even heard of him.”
    Gus pushed back his hat and scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. Face pained. He was taking Clyde’s ignorance personally. “Ain’t never heard of Clyde Barrow?”
    Will came to his brother’s defense. “He’s never heard of anybody. Hitler. Robin Hood. Rudolph Valentino. Not anybody. But I have. Ace, too. Bonnie and Clyde. We’ve heard of them.”
    The pain left Gus’s face. “Someday you boys can tell your grandchildren you were once held hostage for days by the famous Gus ‘The Gun’ Gillis.”
    Will didn’t want to hear that. “Held for days? Jeez! We’ve got to be in Chicago this morning or our entire trip to the World’s Fair will be down the toilet.”
    Gus didn’t want to hear that . “Judas Priest! Here you are on the lam with a famous lawbreaker, and you’re worried about being a few days late for that awful World’s Fair?”
    â€œWe’ve only got four precious days,” Will said. “Can’t be home any later than church on Sunday.”
    â€œAnd I got school Monday,” Clyde said.
    Gus was clearly disappointed in the boy with the famous name. “School? This is your school, Clyde!”
    In 1955, the year the R&R Luncheonette folded, and I was between dreams, I went to see Gladys Bartholomew. She was back in Mingo Junction, a suburb of Steubenville, on the banks of the Ohio River, married to a man who drove a beer truck. I wanted to get everything straight in my mind about what happened that week in Indiana. Why things unraveled the way they did. We sat in her kitchen and watched the river barges. “Why’d he kidnap us?” I asked. “Three dumb farm boys in a Model T with wings. There would’ve been other cars along he could steal that morning. Fancy cars with transmissions he could drive.”
    Gladys sipped on her coffee. She’d put that part of her life far behind her. Questions that had bedeviled me for twenty years—and bedevil me still—didn’t bedevil her one iota. “I suppose just for the fun of it,” she said. She screamed at her kids to turn down the TV. I went home and opened a Dairy Doodle franchise in Brunswick, right across from the high school where Will and I graduated twenty-one years before. Will was valedictorian. He had to give a speech on what our graduating meant to the rest of the world. It was filled with quotes from his Official Guide Book of the World’s Fair . Quotes about the progress of the past. Quotes about the progress sure to come.
    Indiana is considerably flatter than Ohio. Hotter, too. Gus made me zigzag through the cornfields all morning. We avoided both official towns and unofficial ones. About noon we came to a sign that said Weebawauwau County Line. Gus liked the way it rolled off his hillbilly tongue. He said “Weebawauwau” several times, then asked us, “What you boys think that means in the Indian language?”
    â€œIt means ‘release your hostages so they can go to the World’s Fair,’” Will said.
    Gus really laughed. “No Will, I think it means ‘county full of rubes ripe for picking.’ Let’s go find some rubes, Ace.”
    We came to a main highway, freshly blacktopped. Gus pointed me toward a collection of little white buildings rising out of the corn. “Let’s go see what that’s all about,” he said. It turned out to be a tourist camp. A place called Hal’s Half Way, meaning I suppose it was located halfway between two important places on that