Still, farm fields Kum & farm fields Go, but it’s Chicago that really pulls you back. Horst took his sons to the traders’ cafeteria at the CBOT, and to the Brokers Inn, where they ate the legendary giant fish sandwich, and to old-school steak houses in the Loop where the beef is hung aging in the front window and the staff address the boys as “Gentlemen.” Where the steak knife next to your plate is not some flimsy little serrated blade with a plastic handle but whetstoned steel riveted into custom-hewn oak. Solid.
The Loeffler grandfolks, all through their visit, were over the moon, the specifically Iowa moon, which from the front porch was bigger than any moon the boys had ever seen, rising over little trees whose silhouettes were shaped like lollipops, making everybody forget about what they might’ve been missing on the tube, which was on inside but more as an accent light than anything.
They ate at malls all across Iowa, at Villa Pizza and Bishop’s Buffet, and Horst introduced them to Maid-Rites as well as to local variations on the Louisville Hot Brown. Further into the summer and days to the west, they watched the wind in different wheat fields and waited through the countywide silences when it grows dark in the middle of the afternoon and lightning appears at the horizon. They went looking for arcade games, in derelict shopping plazas, in riverside pool halls, in college-town hangouts, in ice-cream parlors tucked into midblock micromalls. Horst couldn’t help noticing how the places had, most of them, grown more ragged since his time, floors less swept, air-conditioning not as intense, smoke thicker than in the midwestern summers of long ago. They played ancient machines from faraway California said to be custom-programmed by Nolan Bushnell himself. They played Arkanoid in Ames and Zaxxon in Sioux City. They played Road Blasters and Galaga and Galaga 88, Tempest and Rampage and Robotron 2084, which Horst believes to be the greatest arcade game of all time. Mostly, wherever they could find it, they seemed to be playing Time Crisis 2.
Or Ziggy and Otis were. The big selling point of the game was that both boys could play at the same machine and keep an eye on each other, while Horst went off on various commodities-related chores.
“I’m just gonna zip in this bar here for a minute, guys. Some business.”
Ziggy and Otis continuing to blast away, Ziggy usually with the blue handgun and Otis the red one, jumping on and off the foot pedals depending on whether they need to seek cover or come out shooting. At some point, going after more tokens, they notice a couple of local kids who’ve been lounging nearby watching them play, but strangely, for these arcades, reluctant to kibitz. While not actually drooling or packing any real-life weapons that Ziggy or Otis can see, they still radiate this aura of blank menace with which the Midwest so often fails to endear itself. “Something?” inquires Ziggy as neutrally as possible.
“You fellas ‘nerds’?”
“Nerds, how’s that?” sez Otis, who is wearing a midnight blue porkpie hat and Scooby-Doo shades with green lenses. “This is the package, live wid it.”
“We’re nerds,” the shorter of the two announces.
Ziggy and Otis look carefully and see a pair of suburban normals. “If you guys are nerds,” Ziggy cautiously, “what do the non-nerds around here look like?”
“Not sure,” sez the bigger one, Gridley. “They’re kind of hard to see most of the time, even in the daylight.”
“Especially in the daylight,” adds Curtis, the other one.
“Nobody scores this high on Time Crisis. Usually.”
“Ever, Gridley. Except that kid from Ottumwa.”
“Sure, but he’s a space alien. One of those distant galaxies. You guys space aliens?”
“It’s mostly just piling up bonus points.” Ziggy demonstrates. “These guys in the orange suits? New on the job, worst shots in the game, worth 5000 a pop, but 5000 here,” Pow! “5000 there,” Pow! “pretty soon it begins to add up.”
“We never find that many.”
“Oh,” Ziggy suavely as if everybody knew, “next time you see the Boss heading away from you—”
“There!” Otis points.
“Right, well, you shoot his hat off—see? real quick, four times, lead him and aim a little above his head—so now you don’t have to go straight for that tank there, first you can go in this alleyway full of all these lame bonus guys. Get em in the head, you pick up extra points.”
“You guys from New York?”
“You noticed,” sez Ziggy. “It’s why we’re into shooters.”
“How about powerboats?”
“Sounds kind of wholesome, somehow.”
“You ever try Hydro Thunder?”
“Seen it,” Otis admits.
“Come on,” Gridley sez. “We can show you how to get into the bonus boats right away. There’s a police boat with a cannon on it, Armed Response, that ought to be your kind of thing.”
“And you get to sit on a subwoofer.”
“My brother’s a little strange.”
“Hey, forget you, Gridley.”
“You guys are brothers? Us too.”
So Horst, returning from the bar after covering a margin call, arranging a July-November soybean spread, social-engineering an update on Kansas City hard red winter wheat, and putting away an indeterminate number of Berghoff longnecks, finds his sons screaming with, you would have to say, unaccustomed abandon, blasting souped-up powerboats through a postapocalyptic New York half underwater here, suffocating in mist, underlit, familiar landmarks picturesquely distressed. The Statue of Liberty wearing a crown of seaweed. The World Trade Center leaning at a dangerous angle. The lights of Times Square gone dark in great irregular patches, perhaps from recent urban warfare in the neighborhood. Intact buildings are draped in black scaffold netting all the way to the waterline. Ziggy is in the Armed Response, and Otis has the helm of the Tinytanic, a miniature version of the famous doomed ocean liner. Gridley and Curtis have vanished, as if they were shills not quite of this earth, whose function in the realworld was to steer Ziggy and Otis into the ruinous waterscapes of what might lie in wait for their home city, as if powerboat skills will be necessary for Big Apple disasters to come, including but not limited to global warming.
“So Mom, we were thinking, maybe we could move to someplace less at risk? Murray Hill? Riverdale?”
“Well . . . we’re up six floors . . .”
“So at least a lifeboat, keep it near the window?”
“With what floor space, give us a break you goofballs will you.”
After the boys are in bed, Maxine trying to settle in in front of another homicidal-baby-sitter TV movie, Horst approaches diffidently. “Would it be OK if I stuck around for a while?”
Resisting anything like a double take, “You mean tonight.”
“Maybe a little longer?”
What’s this? “Long as you like, Horst, we’re still splitting the maintenance here.” Gracious as it is possible at the moment to be, when she’d rather be watching a former sitcom actress pretending to be a youngish Mom in Peril.
“If it’s problematic, I can stay someplace else.”
“The boys will be thrilled, I think.”
She watches his mouth begin to open and then close again. He nods and withdraws to the kitchen, from which soon can be heard sounds of refrigerator entry and plundering.
The drama on the tube is approaching a crisis, the babysitter’s evil scheme has begun to fall apart, she has just grabbed the Baby and is trying to make a run for it, in inappropriate heels, into some kind of alligator-intensive terrain, a squad of police who look like catalog models with no firm idea of which end of the gun do you point at the suspect are speeding to the rescue—all night shots, natch—when Horst emerges from the kitchen with a chocolate mustache, holding an ice-cream package.
“There’s Russian writing all over it. This Igor guy, correct?”
“Yeah, he gets it shipped in, always more than he can use, I get to help with some of the overrun.”
