How Angel Peterson Got His Name Read online

  By pooling all our money we spent nearly a man's daily wages on Carl. We got him the best equipment we could find.

  We found flight goggles—the kind with the large, soft rubber wraparound frame—and a leather flight helmet. A leather flight jacket used up four dollars; it was on sale because it had three holes that were kind of stained. We did not say the jacket might bring him bad luck even though some of us were thinking it.

  Then came sheepskin flight pants, only half a foot too long, sheepskin-lined flight boots just two sizes too large and a jumbo pair of genuine sheepskin gunner's mittens with a separate trigger finger.

  When Carl was fully dressed, standing there in Bruce Carlson's garage, he looked like a large leather ball with tinted green eyes.

  “It must have taken four or five sheep to make his outfit,” Bruce said.

  “I can't see through the goggles,” Carl said. “Should they be all fogged up like this?”

  “Don't worry,” Bruce said. “Once you're outside and moving in back of Archie's car they'll clear right up.”

  “Should the pants legs be bunched like that around my ankles?”

  “Don't worry,” Bruce said. “Once you're outside and moving, the wind will tighten them up.”

  “Should the jacket be this loose around my neck?”

  “Don't worry,” Bruce said. “Once you're outside and moving …”

  And so, with all Carl's worries completely covered, we walked down to the Texaco station and approached the second most important ingredient in the record attempt: Archie.

  “No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

  He was adamant until Bruce said, “We'll give you five dollars.”

  We all looked at each other, then gave Bruce the evil eye. What five dollars?

  “Cash?” Archie asked.

  Bruce nodded.

  “In advance?”

  Silence.

  Pete finally said, “As soon as we've made it shoveling walks after the next snow …”

  Archie thought a moment. He probably knew we didn't have that much ready money, knew we had spent what we had on Carl's clothes. He also knew we would pay him. Not paying a debt to Archie—Archie of the ducktail haircut and hot car, who was said to sometimes carry a switchblade, that Archie—would be something close to suicide for a thirteen-year-old.

  He shrugged. “All right—but you pay me right after the next snow.”

  We were standing in Alan Grenville's garage because Bruce's parents were home and we didn't want anyone to notice us. Carl was suited up. We had opened the garage to let the cold air in—it was fifteen below zero outside—so Carl wouldn't overheat, but he looked a bit sweaty just the same. I thought it might be nerves and he might back out.

  “You don't have to do this,” Alan said, as though reading my mind. Still, I had that healthy scientific curiosity about just exactly what would happen to Carl.

  We all turned to look at Alan and Carl. Alan's mother was Canadian and that made him somehow more sensible and wiser than the rest of us. Canadians were known to be smarter because they had better schools and even though Alan had been born in the States and had never actually lived in Canada, he had a certain status.

  “You can back out now with no shame.”

  Alan always sounded so …so official, maybe because he had some of his mother's accent. He actually said that: “No shame.” Just like a Mountie would say, I thought.

  But Carl shook his head. “No. I want that record. Call Archie. Now.” He looked out the garage door at the Friday evening light. “We still have a couple of hours before dark.”

  But it turned out that Archie wouldn't be able to make the run until the next day, which was probably better because it was Saturday and we'd have more time. So I slept over at Carl's house and we spent the night getting his gear ready.

  Of course it was as ready as it could be but we kept going over it. Then Carl brought up the fact that he hadn't waxed his skis. I'm pretty sure it was Carl because I don't want to be the one who said it, because everybody later agreed that waxing the skis the way we did might have been where the problems started.

  I had heard of waxing skis somewhere but Carl had seen a picture taken in Norway in a National Geographic magazine when he was looking for purely educational pictures of naked women in Africa or South America. In this picture some Norwegians were waxing their skis.

  “It said the wax made their skis faster.”

  “We don't have any wax,” I pointed out.

  “Mom does. Her canning paraffin. She's got tons of it.”

  Everybody canned vegetables and fruit in the fall and they poured wax over the top of the jars to seal them airtight. One of the best things in the world was opening a new jar of chokecherry jelly,because the wax had been poured in hot and the jelly had mixed into it as it hardened, so you could chew on the wax and taste the jelly for hours. It was better than candy.

  We found the wax and I held a cake of it and one ski, and he had another cake and the other ski. “How do we put it on?” I asked.

  “Rub it back and forth on the wood until it warms up and then it should stick.”

  So we rubbed, and rubbed, and just when I thought it wouldn't work, the wood actually warmed and the wax became sticky and almost seemed to flow onto the surface of the ski.

  “How much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Wipe it all on. The more the better.”

  And so we did. Each ski had on it what amounted to a good quarter of a pound of wax, nearly a quarter of an inch thick along its full length, and when we leaned the skis against the outside wall of the house and went to bed the last thing Carl said to me as I curled up on the floor in a sleeping bag was:

  “Man, those things ought to be fast.”

  We didn't know that there was special ski wax, that some waxes made the ski faster and some slower for climbing hills. We didn't know that paraffin was most decidedly not good ski wax and that when the temperature was zero or below, paraffin actually gripped the snow.

  The next morning we walked a block and a half to meet Archie at ten o'clock behind Erickson's grocery, out of sight of any houses because most parents didn't exactly approve of Archie. And it was a sure bet that if Carl's mother or father saw him leaving the house dressed exactly like a World War II bomber pilot ready for combat with a pair of skis over one shoulder and a coil of nylon parachute cord over the other and saw him get into Archie's hot car, they might ask embarrassing questions and actually might not approve of Carl's going for the world speed record on skis—parents being notoriously shortsighted about such things. As we made our way to meet Archie, Carl smiled. He seemed confident.

  “It's a great day for it,” he said, looking up at the clear blue sky. There were ice crystals in the air because it was at least twenty below. “Perfect …”

  Archie was grumpy. It was early for him and he'd had trouble getting the car started because of the cold, and the heater hadn't fully started cooking yet.

  But the five dollars loomed higher than his objections, since he only made seventy-five cents an hour working at the Texaco. Wayne and Alan soon showed up. Wayne was bundled so thickly his body was almost invisible. Alan smiled and held up a small Brownie camera, the kind you had to look down through from the top.

  “I thought I'd get a picture right when you break the record,” Alan said, and nobody smiled.

  It had to be said of Archie that once he made a decision he was in for the whole ride.

  “We'll head out east of town, along that drainage ditch that runs past all that old swamp-land beyond those farms,” he said as we all packed into the car. Three of us sat in back while Carl and Archie sat in front. Archie had tied the skis to the side with some of Carl's parachute cord.

  As he drove, he said, “It's flat for miles out there and except for the crossroads, which are iced over, it should give us a great place for the run.”

  “Good,” Carl said. He said only one word, and he was the only one speaking. Alan and I wer
e busy with our own thoughts. Wayne was sitting in back of Archie and was trying to turn his head upside down and see the woman in the steering wheel knob, which was a waste because she was just a blur and you couldn't see her even if you closed one eye and squinted, and usually Archie had his hand over her anyway.

  It took about half an hour to get out along the ditch, which was really more of a shallow depression that had been installed to drain hundreds of square miles of swamp and make farmland. The ditch itself was nearly twenty miles long.

  At every mile a road crossed the ditch and led back to one of the farms scattered here and there. When we'd passed four of the roads and found each one of them iced over, Archie stopped the car. “This is as good a place as any to start. How do you want to do this?”

  We all turned and looked at Carl. He was looking away from us, in front of the car, down the long ditch, which stretched to the horizon. It was full of snow and nearly level with the road, with small ripple-drifts from the wind that blew across the huge open area. Where the snow in the ditch came up to each small crossroad, there was only a slight bump, then ten feet or so of icy snow on the road and then a slight bump back down into the ditch.

  “How do you want to do this?” Archie repeated. “I have to work this afternoon.”

  We had planned it and talked about it most of the night. Carl nodded and said softly, “I'll get in the ditch and we'll tie the rope to the back bumper. You start slow and pick it up until you get to seventy-five miles an hour.” He stopped and looked at Archie, a new authority in his voice. “Will your car do seventy-five?”

  Normally this would have constituted a grave insult, but Archie only nodded. “She'll do better than that.”

  Carl smiled. “That's all I want. The man in the newsreel did just over seventy-four. If we do seventy-five I'll have the record.”

  The way he said it, so clean and simple and straightforward, he made it sound as if it would be a walk in the park. Carl clumped into the ditch on the skis and we tied one end of the parachute cord to the bumper and Archie ran the car a hundred feet down the gravel road, driving on the left so he'd be close to the ditch, and we handed the other end of the rope to Carl.

  He tied a double knot at the end so it wouldn't slip out of his hands and then lined himself up in the middle of the ditch and nodded.

  “All right. Let's go.”

  Archie let the clutch out carefully, eased it out until the rope was tight, looked back, saw Carl nod and started out.

  Carl fell flat on his face and let go of the rope.

  With the thick paraffin wax binding to the cold snow, the skis didn't move at all.

  “The skis are stuck,” he said, getting up. “I think it's the wax.” He thought a moment and then said, “All right. I'll tie a loop in the rope around my wrist so I won't let go. You start slow and I'll lean back until the wax is rubbed off, then you go faster and faster until we break the record.”

  Archie looked at him, then shrugged. “We'll need a signal. Some way for you to tell us when you're ready to go faster.”

  “I'll hold up my thumb when I want you to go faster, hold it down when I want you to slow down.” Carl demonstrated with the big gunner's mitts and the thumb stood up, easily seen.

  “I'll watch for the signal,” I said.

  “I'll be ready with the camera,” Wayne said. He had the camera because he was sitting in the back-seat on the same side as the ditch.

  “I'll be ready to give first aid,” Alan said.

  Archie said nothing but coolly got back in the car.

  And for a second or two it seemed as if it might work. Archie let the clutch out, Carl leaned back and wrapped the rope around his wrist and the rope tightened and Carl started to move.

  Slowly at first, as the wax first smeared, then scraped off his skis. I watched carefully as the load came onto the rope and the stretch came out of it and Carl's thumb was pointed straight up.

  “Faster,” I hollered over the noise of the wind. I had the window open so I could see better. “He wants to go faster!”

  “Thirty miles an hour,” Archie yelled. “No, thirty-five, now forty …”

  I squinted. Some snow blew up off the road, obscuring Carl a bit, but then it cleared as the speed increased and I could see him better.

  “More speed!” I cried. “His thumb is still up.”

  “He seems,” Alan said, sounding exactly like a Mountie, “to be in complete control of his situation.”

  “Fifty!” Archie yelled. “Fifty-five …”

  I glanced quickly out of the corner of my eye to see if Wayne had the camera ready but he was looking at the steering wheel knob and as I watched he raised the camera and tried to take a picture of it.

  “Wayne!” I bellowed. “Get ready!”

  Then I looked back at Carl. He was really moving now, the skis cleaned off and the rope taut. And Alan seemed to be right, Carl was in control. We came upon the first crossroad and Carl leaned back, looking for all the world like a professional water-skier: He slapped the skis up over the small bump, slid cleanly over the icy road and dropped neatly into the ditch on the other side.

  “Sixty!” Archie screamed. “Sixty-one, -two, -three …”

  I looked into the ditch and through the wind and snow and I thought now that perhaps things weren't going as smoothly as I had thought. The goggles were tinted but still I could see that Carl's eyes looked larger—they seemed to fill the goggles. Maybe we should begin to slow the car down a bit.

  But the thumb was still pointed up, straight up, wonderfully and courageously up, and I nodded at Carl, marveling at his bravery.

  “He wants to go for it!” I slapped Archie on the shoulder, something I never would have done before then. You didn't touch Archie. But to illustrate the intensity of the moment, Archie didn't seem to notice. Instead he nodded and yelled, “I didn't believe the little bugger had it in him!” and floored the pedal.

  The Ford seemed to leap ahead.

  “Seventy!” Archie screamed. “Seventy-one, -two, -five, -six … he's got it! He's got the record!”

  I waved out the window at Carl and gave him the thumbs-up signal. But he didn't seem to notice. He was in a semicrouch, one arm holding the rope and the other waving, or trying to wave as the wind slapped it down and back like a rag.

  “Oooohhhhhhh!” Carl screamed. I couldn't believe it. He was yelling “Goooooo!” The thumb was still straight up—he wanted to go faster!

  “Eighty.” Archie shook his head. “That's all I can get—eighty-two and a half miles an hour!”

  And then it happened.

  I turned and looked ahead and saw to my horror that we were coming up to the next crossroad and that the grader had been there and planed the icy snow down.

  It was bare gravel.

  And before I could think or say anything Carl bumped over the small snow bump next to the road and landed at almost exactly eighty-two and a half miles an hour in the middle of the gravel.

  We would learn that somewhere early on in the run, after approximately thirty-five miles an hour, Carl realized that he had made a terrible mistake and that he did not want to go any faster, did not want to try to break the record and most emphatically did not want to go to eighty-two and a half miles an hour.

  He had tried to scream, had bellowed, “No!” but all we heard was “Ooooohhhh!” The rest was torn away by the wind.

  He had tried to wave but the wind just knocked his arm down and on a bump the rope went slack and then tightened and caught his right arm around the wrist so he couldn't get it loose, couldn't signal with that arm either. And then, because the speed gods had apparently taken over his life and they wanted to see him break the record—as Wayne said—or because he was just plain unlucky—as Alan said—or because he was dumb as a fence post—as Archie said—the same loop that caught his wrist had snagged the right thumb on his flight mitten, jerked it off his thumb and twisted it in such a way as to make the empty mitten thumb stand straight in the air
, as if Carl wanted to go faster and faster….

  But for now, we watched in awe.

  The skis stopped dead.

  Stopped dead when they hit the gravel and Carl skipped out of them like a rock across the top of a pond—that is, if the rock weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds and if it were made out of flesh and blood encased in sheepskin and if it were being towed by a car at over eighty miles an hour, and if the water were snow and ice.

  Wayne was still looking at the steering wheel knob and Alan had turned for a moment to look at the road, this being the first time he had ever gone over eighty miles an hour.

  But I was watching Carl, looking for his signal. For a second he reminded me of a swordfish I'd seen in a newsreel that had jumped out of the water and was trying to shake the hook out of its mouth.

  Carl did not hit the gravel road, which was a miracle because it would probably have killed him. Instead when the skis stopped he seemed to spring into the air, clearing the rest of the road and flying into the snow on the other side, burrowing in for half a second or so, then exploding out, almost vertical, his hands twisting like the swordfish's head as he tried to rip himself loose from the rope.

  He failed. At the height of his arc the rope snapped tight at eighty miles an hour and snaked him back under the snow, where for two heartbeats he looked for all the world like a high-speed gopher. We couldn't see him at all, just this rippling little bulge of snow, and then he burst forth into the open again.

  You notice funny things in an emergency. I saw that his thumb was still pointed straight up and I thought, Man, Carl is one brave guy. He doesn't even care if he's got skis on, he's still going for it.

  “Stop the car!”

  It was Alan. He had turned and seen what was happening and had more presence of mind than me—everything had happened so fast that I hadn't had much time to react. And, to be honest, I still had that great curiosity. Carl's thumb was still pointed up and who was I to deny him fame?