Part Two

Glen Oak

Forty-two years after he had moved away, thirty years after he had last visited, sixteen years after his week of fame walking on the moon, Richard Baedecker was invited to come back to his hometown. He was to be guest of honor during the Old Settlers Weekend and Parade. August 8 was to be declared Richard M. Baedecker Day in Glen Oak, Illinois.

Baedecker's middle initial was not M. His middle name was Edgar. Nor did he consider the small village in Illinois his hometown. When he did think of his childhood home, which was seldom, he usually remembered the small apartment on Kildare Street in Chicago where his family spent the years before and after the war. Baedecker had lived in Glen Oak for less than three years from late 1942 to May of 1945. His mother's family had owned land there for many years, and when Baedecker's father had gone back into the Marine Corps to serve three years as an instructor at Camp Pendleton, the seven-year-old Richard Baedecker and his two sisters found themselves inexplicably whisked from their comfortable apartment in Chicago to a drafty old rental house in Glen Oak. For Baedecker, memories of those times were as hazy and out of context as the thought of the manic paper and scrap-metal drives that had seemed to occupy his weekends and summers during their entire interlude there. Despite the fact that his parents were buried just outside of Glen Oak, he had not visited or thought of the town in a long, long time.

Baedecker received the invitation in late May, shortly before embarking on a month-long business trip that would take him to three continents. He filed the letter and would have forgotten it if he had not mentioned it to Cole Prescott, vice president of the aerospace corporation for which he worked.

'Hell, Dick, why don't you go? It'll be good PR for the firm.'

'You're joking,' said Baedecker. They were in a bar on Lindbergh Boulevard, near their offices in suburban St. Louis. 'When I lived in that little Podunk town during the war, it had a sign that said POPULATION 850 — SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED. I doubt if it's grown much since then. Probably gone down in population, if anything. Not many people there would be interested in buying MD-GSS avionics.'

'They buy stock, don't they?' asked Prescott and lifted a handful of salted nuts to his mouth.

'Livestock,' said Baedecker.

'Where the hell is this Glen Oak, anyway?' asked Prescott.

It had been years since Baedecker had heard anyone say the town's name. It sounded strange to him. 'About 180 miles from here as the provincial crow flies,' he said. 'Stuck somewhere between Peoria and Moline.'

'Shit, it's just up the road. You owe it to them, Dick.'

'Too busy,' Baedecker said and motioned to the bartender for a third Scotch. 'Be catching up after the Bombay and Frankfurt conferences.'

'Hey,' said Prescott. He turned back from watching a waitress bend over to serve a young couple at a nearby table. 'Isn't the ninth of August the beginning of that airline confab at the Hyatt in Chicago? Turner got you to go to that, didn't he?'

'No, Wally did. Seretti's going to be there from Rockwell and we're going to talk about the Air Bus modification deal with Borman.'

'So!' said Prescott.

'So what?'

'So you'll be going that way anyway, pal. Do your patriotic duty, Dick. I'll have Teresa tell ‘em you're coming.'

'We'll see,' said Baedecker.

Baedecker flew into Peoria on the afternoon of Friday, August 7. The Ozark DC-9 barely had time to climb to eight thousand feet and find the meandering path of the Illinois River before they were descending. The airport was so small and so empty that Baedecker thought fleetingly of the asphalt runway at the edge of the Indian jungle where he had landed a few weeks earlier at Khajuraho. Then he was down the ramp, across the hot tarmac, and was being urgently hailed by a heavy, florid-faced man he had never seen before.

Baedecker groaned inwardly. He had planned to rent a car, spend the night in Peoria, and drive out to Glen Oak in the morning. He had hoped to stop by the cemetery on his way.

'Mr. Baedecker! Mr. Baedecker! Jesus, welcome, welcome. We're really glad to see ya.' The man was alone. Baedecker had to drop his old black flight bag as the stranger grabbed his right hand and elbow in a two-handed greeting. 'I'm really sorry we couldn't get up a better reception, but we didn't know ‘til Marge got a call this morning that you were comin' in today.'

'That's all right,' said Baedecker. He retrieved his hand and added needlessly, 'I'm Richard Baedecker.'

'Oh, yeah, Jesus. I'm Bill Ackroyd. Mayor Seaton would've been here, but she's got the Old Settlers' Jaycees Fish Fry to take care of tonight.'

'Glen Oak has a woman mayor?' Baedecker resettled his garment bag on his shoulder and brushed away a trickle of sweat on his cheek. Heat waves rose around them and turned distant walls of foliage and the half-glimpsed parking lot into shimmering mirages. The humidity was as bad as St. Louis's. Baedecker looked at the big man next to him. Bill Ackroyd was in his late forties or early fifties. He was sagging to fat and had already perspired through the back of his JC Penney shirt. His hair was combed forward to hide an encroaching baldness. He looks like me, thought Baedecker and felt a blossom of anger unfold in his chest. Ackroyd grinned and Baedecker smiled back.

Baedecker followed him through the tiny terminal to the curved drive where Ackroyd had parked his car in a space reserved for the handicapped. The man kept up an amiable stream of small talk that mixed with the heat to produce a not-unpleasant nausea in Baedecker. Ackroyd drove a Bonneville. The engine had been left running, air-conditioning blasting to cool the interior to an unhealthy chill. Baedecker sank into the velvet cushions with a sigh while the other man set his luggage in the trunk.

'I can't tell you what this means to all of us,' said Ackroyd as he settled himself. 'The whole town's excited. It's the biggest thing that's happened to Glen Oak since Jesse James's gang came through and camped at Hartley's Pond.' Ackroyd laughed and shifted the car into gear. His hands were so large that they made the steering wheel and gearshift look like toys. Baedecker imagined that Ackroyd came from the kind of Midwestern stock that had used such huge, blunt hands to string up outlaws.

'I didn't know that the James gang ever went through Glen Oak,' said Baedecker.

'Probably didn't,' said Ackroyd and laughed his big, unself-conscious laugh. 'That makes you the most exciting thing ever to happen to us.' Peoria looked like it had been abandoned or bombed. Or both. Storefronts held dust and dead flies. Grass grew up in cracks in the highway and weeds flourished in the untended medians. Old buildings sagged against one another and the few new structures sat like overscaled druid altars amid razed blocks of rubble.

'My God,' muttered Baedecker, 'I don't remember the city looking like this.' Actually Baedecker hardly remembered Peoria at all. Once a year his mother had taken them to town to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade so they could wave at Santa Claus. Baedecker had been too old for Santa Claus, but he would sit with his younger sisters on the stone lions near the courthouse and dutifully wave. One year Santa had arrived in a jeep with the four elves dressed in the uniforms of the different services. Baedecker remembered that the lawn of the city square had risen in a gentle arc to the elaborate stone gingerbread of the courthouse. He would play at being shot and roll down the grassy incline until his mother yelled at him to stop. He noticed now that the square — he thought that it was the same block — had been turned into a fussily landscaped sunken park near a glass box of a city-county building.