The Last Liberal Outlaw

One

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Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.

— Rose Wilder Lane

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In June most of the real work on an Iowa grain farm is done by the sun.

Burnt-orange, climbing from its bedside, it projected the shadows of a person, a tree, and a mailbox onto the Van Wyck house’s white siding. Pheasants cackled in the U-shaped grove outlining the yard. The clouds on the western edge of the big sky grouped for a charge. As the sun moved higher, the breeze picked up, herding along a late morning shower.

Ronny Van Wyck’s body swayed. His Dutch blue eyes pointed out the one remaining dandelion in the front lawn.

Across the road, the neighbor’s young corn plants suggested broad lawns across the waves of land, the undulations frozen in stop-action, evolved to black velvet.

Joey Van Wyck whammed into the screen door and burst into the glare. He shaded his brow with his right hand.

Ron, hey Ron-ny! You outside?

The two had become friends since Ron returned from the Army and moved back into the second floor across the hall from Joey. Before, Ronny hadn’t had time.

They had shared a love of moonlit chocolate cake heisted from the refrigerator, using flashlights to sneak with their booty out Joey’s window to the back porch roof.

They saw truck lights on Highway 22 a mile away. Ronny had said he wanted to be a truck driver some day and see Miami. Joey asked if he could go along. Ronny said he guessed so.

The tree, with its large lower branches, looked like a big man’s hand held open, palm up. The boys called it their Trip Tree. After dishes they had lounged in it looking at clouds. They imagined themselves captains of a barge inching down the Missouri to the Gulf, or riding a Greyhound to Chicago, or clinging to a magic carpet computer chip zinging through the phone lines and making faces out the screens at the people in Des Moines office buildings.

Every morning when Joey awakened he ran into Ronny’s room to hurry up and begin their day.

This morning Joey had rushed in and found his brother’s bed empty. That meant he was hiding! When Ronny woke up before Joey he would hide in the trees. It was Joey’s job to find him, like on patrol for Apaches.

Joey followed the horseshoe dirt driveway around the house. At any moment Ronny could jump from a tree or grab his ankle from a hiding spot inside the peony bushes.

Joey held his breath and stared off to his right toward the grove as he stalked. The boy’s chest thumped against his Michael Jordan pajama pocket. He felt his heart, like a frog trapped in a gunnysack.

The soft, graded dirt of the drive began to blend with hard gravel and Joey remembered he wasn’t wearing shoes.

The bright sun hurt his eyes when he looked into it, though he wasn’t supposed to.

Joey thought of going into the grove. If he kept to the fence line he could walk in thick grass without hitting any pine needles or cones. He took one step to test, a toe into the pool. In the corner of his eye he picked up movement. Joey swiveled his head back to the house and saw a giant’s shadow on the white siding, an upside down J swinging gently.

Ronnnn...! A scream made it halfway out his mouth before he pulled it back.

The stark, spooky still life made Joey instantly recall a late-night scary show. But, relieved, Joey realized his brother was just trying to fool him with more Army stuff, like when he let one of the tractor tires go over his foot in loose dirt without getting hurt, and when he washed dishes with cold water and assured everyone he positively knew what he was doing.

The earth breathed again and the shadow arms and legs on the house waved.

Joey’s brother hung from a lower branch of the old elm. Joey stopped and stared. Wow, he thought. He smiled proudly and thought of running inside to get a camera. This is really something.

A car going by kicked up a cloud of dust and gravel. The sun ratcheted another notch up its climb.

His brother’s feet were bare. He wore just his blue Nike shorts and a plain white T-shirt. Joey wanted to get Ronny’s white hightops so he wouldn’t be seen like this by the neighbors on their way to work and school. Some stupid people would not understand—only say that the Van Wyck boys were again outside without shoes.

He moved closer. He stepped forward, bent over, creeping, his toes now in the grass. Another car passed. The driver tapped his horn, but like a spaniel on point Joey stared at Ronny. He watched his brother’s eyes—how they did not move. He saw the red in the corner of the mouth and the bluish tinge to the hands and the cheeks.

Then the good life Joey had fallen asleep with the night before turned bad.

Ron! Ron! he screamed and screamed, bent over, hands outstretched to the body. He dashed a step and a half toward his brother, skidded in the grass and sprinted toward the back door.

* * *

Tom Blue awakened to find his own open hand over his face. He dragged the numb limb down and flopped it onto the bed. He rolled to free his other hand from under his body, and with his middle finger and thumb wiped tears. 

Blue lay with slit eyes contemplating the rays from the window, trying to forget the dream about horrible death and someone trapped and someone crying. Since he had started taking Prozac, Tom could not take even a five-minute nap without dreaming. He let the needles fill his arm as the blood whooshed back. Blue forced himself up, tested the arm, then pushed off.

He walked across the hall and tossed Jennifer’s sheet over her legs, then picked up Justin’s blankets from the floor.

He pressed his nose into the screen to feel the breeze. The intersection bathed in the sunlit glow. He admired his favorite view of the world: a cozy corner at the southeast tip of the middle school block in the northwest quarter of Iowa.

Tom moped down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door and turned on the cold water.

He seated himself and stretched to grab the Old Spice and anoint his head and shoulders.

Grunting, Tom gripped the lid with his right hand like a bull rider, heels tight to the porcelain, toes dug into the carpet.

He went red, gasped, and balanced on his tiptoes like Baryshnikov with pants to ankles, for a few sweet seconds between orgasm and nausea; remembering Cheryl telling him having Justin was like shitting a basketball.

How would you like that?

Afterward, Tom picked up the People magazine that had fallen to the floor from Cheryl’s stash between the tank and wall.

Again he skimmed the story about a one-legged Russian veterinarian from Vermont and another on some J.-Brooks-Albright-fuck, the CEO of Prisons, Inc.

Idiots, he thought. They make it sound like such a game. No names or faces for the prisoners. This guy runs twenty-four prisons. How does he sleep at night? Making money by keeping fathers from their children. Wonder if he has any kids.

Goddamn him.

Prisons, Inc. was in the corrections business, and trying very hard lately to convince the federal government and the state of Iowa to let it throw up a gulag archipelago in the countryside.

Da-addy, are you taking a shower? Jennifer sang while banging on the door.

Going to the bathroom! Tom yelled back. Go down-stairs!

Mom’s got the door locked. Can you hu-urry? she said.

Go back to sleep, Tom said.

Daddy!

Throw on your tennies and run around the house for a while. See how quick you can go. You’re a fast one!

Dad.

OK. I’ll hurry, Tom said.

He flushed, turned off the water and unhooked the door, clutching the rolled magazine under his arm.

They glared at each other.

The library is for reading, she said indignantly.

This is my library, my dear, Tom said.

Halfway down the hall he heard the door hook and the water trickle.

At the end of the hall at the top of the stairs Tom stopped because he smelled the coffee Cheryl was brewing in the kitchen.

Get up Justin! he hollered and went into the bedroom to change for work. He stood behind the curtains, crossed his arms and once again marveled at the beauty of a quiet intersection.

Having lived in the area most of his life, Tom knew that in northwest Iowa, handmade boards and signs rented from U-Haul dot the highways: Are You a Slave to Alcohol?; If Your Bible is in Good Shape, You Probably Aren’t; God Bless America.

But pockets of cynical populists also inhabit the backcountry, waiting. They do not put messages on their lawns. They send joke suggestions to Garrison Keillor and review new fiction for The New Yorker. Their grandfathers loved Eugene Debs and Robert La Follette and learned to despise Woodrow Wilson. Their grandmothers admired Dorothy Day and Jeannette Rankin.

And they learned at their knees about a day when life was hands-on: when people read and cared about what was happening, and followed the deeds of national leaders as if they were sitting at the weekly sales barn auction or reading the minutes of the local school board meeting or co-op association. They followed Jack Reed and his fascination with the Russian revolution. They rooted for Marshalltown’s Jean Seberg, hoping the government would leave her alone. It angered them when they read that she had died.

They go to church meetings and school plays realizing they enter and exit always slightly out of step with their neighbors. At election time they enter the middle school gym with seed corn caps in hand, write in their wildest hopes, then go home to milk, leaving the radio on into the night. They mow their lawns, scoop their walks—looking up every now and again at the sound of the city snowplow scraping, listening for the revolution.

In Iowa the town and country people are not overcome by a sighting of a presidential candidate’s entourage outside the cafe. They would talk to him if spoken to, but wouldn’t care to give up their seat.

In Nebraska they would not recognize the candidate. They would smirk at his poofy hairdo, gawk at his wife’s boobs and joke at coffee the next day about how they saw that weather guy from Omaha in town. Their friends would slap the nearest tabletop.

In South Dakota they would recognize the candidate from TV. Nobody would mention it at supper.

In Minnesota they would want to know if the candidate’s home state had ten thousand lakes, St. Olaf College, ten kinds of skiing, bear hunting, gangs, a restaurant on top of the IDS building, and professional baseball, football and hockey teams.

It Begins in the Heart was one of Blue’s most recent editorials about the need for a new American Revolution. If there were to be a revolution in America’s so-called Heartland, something to turn the thousands of church buildings into something more than social halls, it would happen in Iowa. Because in Iowa some folks have it within themselves to know right from wrong. 

You can’t go about your delightful day, letting other people scrounge in the dirt for scraps from your table, and then act all excited and surprised when they try to snatch a sliver of the pie from your kitchen window. That’s what Tom had said.

Blue hoped his writing would get him out of Liberal, Iowa. Somehow an editor in Council Bluffs or Cedar Rapids or Des Moines would find him and invite him to join a real newsroom. Maybe that boss would let him do his job—the job of any good newspaper reporter confronted with small-town hysteria over some stupid thing. He would face it down like a sheriff on Main Street telling the lynch mob that’s far enough.

Tom recalled that once the state’s schools were famous for being the best in the nation. Maybe the people here were smarter than other places.

And in Iowa, a cafe is for more than eating.

Tom closed his door, lay down on the bed on top of the covers, set the alarm for just ten minutes more, wrapped himself in his arms, and dreamed of prison.

Two

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But until that day we must keep hope alive, and now and then a man must set an example, if only an isolated one, by trying to lift his soul out of its isolation and offering it up in an act of brotherly communion, even if he is taken for one of God’s fools. This is necessary to keep the great idea alive.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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Because he was the Editor-in-Chief, every goddamn morning the grass fire of the day’s worries surrounded Tom Blue threatening to devour him as he pushed himself through the Morning Souvenir front door.

He wanted to write, not edit, but they needed the money and this was the job offered.

The radio blared from the empty desk of sports reporter Randy Phillips. A Liberal Cards bumper sticker clung to the side of Phillips’ grey metal desk.

Heelloo Siouxland! This is KSUE 580 on your AM dial, bringing you the hits of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s and your work-week weather forecast...

What have you got for today? Tom Blue marched up to Hugh Flood’s desk. Oh, said Flood, there’s a supervisors meeting, the Pets Parade at the nursing home, and somebody said something to Tori’s cousin about a fire.

Dawn in yet? Tom asked.

Haven’t seen her, Hugh said.

Well, she should be here by eight, Blue looked at Flood. It’s ten after, Blue said to himself. I’m going next door, he reported to Flood.

Tom wanted Hugh’s job—to just be a reporter. Everyone liked the stories that Tom wrote when he got the time. They told him.

He wrote about school boards and war heroes and flower gardens and parades. But what he really wanted were murders and robberies with strings of guts caked to the wallpaper.

At the big paper he’d shine, he’d write about important things, not like the story yesterday about how the wheelchair club petitioned the city council to put in ramped curbs downtown.

He needed to be a hero. He feared he was not good enough to just be normal. He doubted they would let him be a hero in Liberal. And what the fuck was there to be a hero about around here?

If he had half a chance, he could be Super Writer. To shove through the door just before deadline and to punch out literature about the things he’d discovered that day. He would hang a cigarette out his mouth.

Tom had read that Jimmy Breslin did it that way in New York. Tom wanted to be able to write about the castaways, the forgotten ones around town, the way Breslin wrote about the murder victims and the regular guys who stumbled into the path of the oncoming establishment. To the rescue comes the writer, with a telling detail about a Lucky Strike ash about to fall just as the bad rich guy is turned back.

Once Tom turned out a good column about the grocery store checkout crew. How, even though only in high school, they took time to talk to the old ladies when they pushed their carts to their cars and how the old people liked that.

But there had been no guns.

Blue believed in Liberal and in Iowa because he walked past the Cardinal Cafe each morning. He saw it in the man hunched over the griddle, the born-again owner wearing the white, stained T-shirt with the inscription: The Cook Is On Fire.

He looked inside the front window. In an instant he saw Mayberry, Metzger’s Field, and Hooterville, and he saw the Des Moines Register in its good years, the Iowa Girls Basketball Six-on-Six Tournament, the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, and Greg Brown, the Iowa City musician. He saw the baseball Menke brothers of Bancroft and a full moon at midnight over a red combine in Kossuth County. He saw Iowa State and Iowa U and UNI and bustling main streets in Carroll and Sioux Center. He saw Buddy Holly, and minor league baseball, and food on a stick, and the dawn sheep judging at the Plymouth County Fair, and Jesus.

The Cardinal Cafe featured the common script Coke sign you could spot in a fog at midnight or a blizzard at noon: like a lighthouse, here is safety, here we are, you’re almost there, over here.

The bell atop the front door jingled as Tom walked in.

Nine round metal stools at the counter faced a Wells Blue Bunny calendar hanging from three swatches of duct tape on a ten-foot mirror.

The cafe opened at 5 a.m. Through the day small groups gathered in the booths and around the nine tables, sipping coffee and rebuking whatever they had heard on the morning Sioux City radio news or seen on the front page of the Des Moines Register. The 5:35 construction workers would crouch silently in the middle of the room, clinging to white life jacket mugs of coffee to keep them out of the day’s cold for two more minutes. The mid-morning business crowd displayed themselves in the front two booths. Later, the mid-afternoon retired men pulled two tables together in the back to play Hearts and fart.

The checkout sat at the south end of the counter on a glass case filled with Baby Ruth bars, red and yellow suckers, and year-old Junior Mints. An open matchbox of mint toothpicks cozied up next to the register.

Waitress Susan Krill wore her hair short. It used to be in a beehive, before that a bun. This year she had the shop trim it to get that hair off her neck for the summer. The uniforms she wore had been left in the wash with a red towel, and she would just have to wear them now. With the grace of a figure skater she stepped around canes and pacifiers, sliding over the white and black tile between her tables.

She worked Monday through Saturday, five in the morning to two in the afternoon. The owner and his wife cooked breakfast, lunch, and supper, and helped with the tables and cash register. Each summer a different class held its reunion at the Cardinal. During the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s the place was the high school hangout, before McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, and Taco John’s sprang up along the highway.

Susan Krill rushed across a floor gouged with black boot scuff marks just like those from 1932 when the farmers crowded inside before they stormed the Gooley County Courthouse to stop the forced sale of John Scott’s farm. Out in the grove behind the old Catholic church cemetery on the Stanton farm they had the coarse noose pulled tight around the neck of the grizzled old judge who would not agree to stop foreclosing on farms—when the Iowa National Guard arrived with bayonets drawn.

Today, Tom the editor needed to make a list of stories for this issue, tomorrow and the rest of the week, remember to go to the managers meeting at noon, and make it to one of Jennifer’s softball games sometime.

He sat down in his customary front window booth and prepared for the solitary comfort of eating. Food could not be enjoyed any other way. Taped to his office desk he kept a permanent to-do list: cafe, meditate, run. He did not meditate or run, but thought that some day he might.

Cheryl had once called the Cardinal a down-home place. So, on many Saturday mornings Tom tried to have time to walk down and have apple pie, coffee, and milk with the kids. When Cheryl or the children didn’t want to go he would tell them that pie was the goo that held their family together. It holds the entire state together, he said. We are the world, we are the Blu-ues, he would sing at the base of the stairs until they gave in with hands over ears, coming down the stairs like Anne Frank’s captured family.

With his coven seated at one of the three front window booths, Tom would ask them to hold hands under the table. When they refused, with Paul Harvey droning on in the kitchen, Tom would take a deep breath, let it out, cut his first hunk of pie and breath out, Now...this is Iowa, he would sigh.

They would roll their eyes.

Tom said hello to Susan Krill and yes to coffee, the noun. He hated coffee, the verb, because it meant sitting around a table—trapped—having to listen to stupid jokes and conversation. His boss, Mr. Robert Townes, advised that he attend coffee time at the Cardinal. Tom said he would and he did not. Townes also advised that Tom make appearances at noon Rotary and join a church. I don’t care which one, he said, of course that’s your decision.

Yes, please, Tom said to Susan as she brought the coffee pot back for a refill after Tom had taken only two quick sips.

Because of her seniority Susan worked the first shift. Tom could see she approached waitressing as a craft. I try to learn something every day, she often said.

I’ll take two pancakes, said Tom. Three. Four, no butter. Then I won’t eat the rest of the day.

Tom drank his coffee while staring at nothing. He chewed his cakes, looking out the window and thinking. He paid at the counter, left two quarters on the table on his way out, and waved.

Outside, Tom almost ran into Carl Manning hustling out of the Souvenir, headed for his van.

Hey, Tom, the gravel voice said.

Carl. Whatsappenin? 

Manning, Souvenir night delivery driver, stood straight as a plumb line, his blue shirttails hanging loose, old jeans cuffed at the bottom, grey hair sticking out in clumps from under his yellow Liberal fire department cap. 

You should eat earlier, Carl said. You might have some news and I won’t have so many returns.

Tom stared up at Carl, waiting for the rest.

One of the city boys said there was a young guy that killed hisself. Van Wyck place. Big drug deal.

Tom turned his head slightly to see Carl’s face better in the harsh sunlight. Drug deal? No. Really?

Checked the police station? Carl asked.

Dawn goes over in the afternoon. Sometimes the sheriff calls over with a press release.

You won’t get any calls on this one, Carl said.

Uh, huh, Tom said. He bent down to tie his shoe.

Carl hopped into the van with the passenger side graphic of a faded red sunrise and the folded Morning Souvenir in the mouth of the golden retriever that some said looked like a beaver. He was through the stoplight turning left by the time Tom stood.

Tom hurried back into the Souvenir just as reporter Dawn Knight ducked behind her computer and sneezed on her screen. Her short black hair was still wet from her shower. A droplet fell onto her glasses. She removed them and yanked a blue Kleenex from the box on her desk.

Tom walked to his computer to check for sticky notes on his iMac screen.

Let’s have a news meeting, Tom said, frowning like a fire chief trying to get cats out of an apartment in flames. He stood in the doorway waiting for Dawn and Hugh to pass. They both wore wire-rim glasses. Hugh was thin without trying and Dawn wished to be with all her big heart. They both dressed neat and got their work done. He put his head down and relished the familiar whiffs of Old Spice and Captain Crunch as they edged past him up the steps through the composing area to the break room. They made his life easier—the main job of any reporter, just as it was his job to remove some of the pressure from Townes’ shoulders.

When he pulled the door shut Tom noticed the loose knob. He thought of telling someone and immediately let himself forget.

After sweeping the ashes from the table, which served meetings and lunches, hirings, firings, Tom filled his white mug from the machine, careful not to take it all and have to make a new pot. He sat. Dawn and Hugh trailed behind. My cat got out when I went for a run, Dawn said. I had to chase him up the fire escape. By the time I got back from the lake it was almost 8:30. Sorry.

Well, that’s okay, Tom lied. What do you have for today?

Not much, she said.

Well, there’s a Chamber Coffee at that new place, Liberal Furniture Mart, I think they’re calling it. We just need a photo of the ribbon cutting, said Tom. Dawn? She put her head down to jot on her notepad. Carl had something about a suicide. I’ll take that. Hugh, you want the nursing home? We still need more. Let me know by noon. I don’t want to run another prison story unless there’s something new. Heard anything?

They shook their heads no. Tom looked plaintively at Hugh. You got a cigarette?

A suicide? said Hugh, as he took the red pack from his shirt pocket and set it on the table.

Yeah, said Tom, lighting the cigarette with Hugh’s butt. A hanging. I don’t know much about it yet.

Dawn stuck her tongue out a touch, squinted, and looked up from her pad, focusing somewhere above the coffeepot. She turned her pen upside down and tapped it, as if sending out a Morse code preamble. We should be doing something with all these Mexicans, she said. There’s a ton. Looks like Iowuana in Casey’s on Saturday morning.

Townes doesn’t want to make a big deal of it, Tom said. He stared at Dawn, his face betraying an internal growl. He felt a burn in his stomach.

Hugh and Dawn looked at Tom in silence, waiting for him to say something—to lead them. Tom felt the push of their idealism toward the battle and the bottom-line data of the managers meetings he had to go to every week telling him to be practical, to realize they all had to make a living off this little paper and these precious few subscribers and advertisers.

The carpet swooshed and Robert Townes poked his head in. With a frown he jiggled the loose knob. Tom, I’d like to visit with you when you’re finished here. We need to get a story on the new furniture store. I’ve got some ideas.

Sure. We’re done anyway, Tom said.

Good, good, good, Townes said while leaving the door half open and heading off in a hurry to meet with the ad department associates.

Well, let’s be careful out there, Tom smiled. Thanks. Good, good, good.

Tell him about the suicide, the hanging, said Dawn.

Oh, yeah, said Tom. I will. I will.

Three

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Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That’s our problem.

– Howard Zinn

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The next morning Dawn crouched by her camera bag at the entrance to the furniture store as members of the Chamber of Commerce filed in by ones for the red-ribbon ceremony. She had the pen minutes ago, but now couldn’t find it. She searched because she needed her tools and something to do, not knowing anyone to chat with.

"We’re supposed to have someone here, but I don’t