Read Online Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover - Free Book Online

field between us and the plant seemed almost to glow in the blazing light, and I thought at the time: It’s a stage, waiting there for us, almost magical in its alluring power. For the present we are all hovering in the wings, but who on either side will be able to resist its shimmering pull?
    There were many that seemed unable to resist it that afternoon, and Leo was worried about them. He and the rest of the organizers tried to distract them with softball games, pamphleteering, speeches, safety and marching drills, first-aid training, idle legwork, but it was very hot and people were impatient. A lot of them distrusted the organizers, resented being manipulated in any way. Others thought the organizers were moving too slowly for reasons they couldn’t understand. They wanted to get this over with and get back to work. Why wait for Girdler to bring in reinforcements? This waiting was no good. Only action would change anything. Why not at least march across to the plant, get close enough to reach the men still inside with loudspeakers, shame the honest ones into coming out? Not even the organizing committee was in complete agreement about strategy, torn between the reluctant voices and the rash. But a Memorial Day picnic had been called for Sunday when other workers and their families could turn up, a wooden stage was being built, folksingers and speakers had been scheduled, Gloomy Gus included, there was a newsreel guy expected from Paramount Pictures; it made no sense to rush things, not to Leo anyway, so he used me most of the day scouting out hotheads and helping him cool them down.
    It was a long day. The heat and the glare didn’t help, the sweat, the short tempers. It was like those long July days out in San Francisco three years ago during the dock strike, only grittier. Leo noticed it, too. They’d brought out the National Guard in San Francisco with machineguns and rifles, and Leo worried about it happening here. It made him feel tempted to side with the hotheads, go now and get the jump on them. He hated all those scabs in there, knew a lot of them were ruthless armed hoods, could even see the propaganda value in provoking them. And he was upset about his UAW friends Frankensteen and Reuther, who’d been badly beaten Wednesday up in Dearborn by a goon squad hired by Ford. Plainclothes cops, it was rumored: someone saw a badge, or handcuffs. “Where is Richie,” Leo had remarked wryly, “now that we need him?” He was referring to San Francisco again, 1934. After a dozen good men had been shot out there on Bloody Thursday, Blaine had caught a scab trying to sneak off the company ship for a rendezvous with his girlfriend, had made some buddies hold the scab’s legs across a curb, and had jumped up and down on them. Richie is now a commissar with the Lincolns in Spain, we’ve heard. And that was another thing. The dusty field between us and the mills with its scraggly marsh grass and stunted shrubs looked too much like the pictures we’d seen of the country around Madrid. It looked like a place where people went to die. About a week after the bombing of Guernica, I’d got it in my head that Maxie had been killed. It was stupid, I had no reason for it, he probably wasn’t even in Spain yet. And I distrust all premonitions, hate such rubbish as precognition and mental telepathy (one of my aunt’s more appalling quirks: needless to say, she went running to the old folks’ home screaming that my uncle was dead about ten times before he finally kicked off—and that day she was happily playing bridge with her North Lawndale cronies). In my case (as in hers), a projection of guilt, I supposed. But still I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Maxie was dead. And it was with me like some kind of morbid affliction all day Friday.
    Toward sundown, the sky behind the plant reddening like a taunt, Leo got a report from a guy named Bill, who’d also been