In Hoosier Country

By Ron McFarland

For Mark Toppe

Brock was thirteen when his mother left his stepfather Jerry Bates and Bloomington, Indiana, to return to her hometown, Spokane. She did not wish to poison her children’s memories of their stepfather, she explained, so the less she said of him the better. As it happened, neither Brock nor his older sister Meg expressed much curiosity about their stepfather over the years. Buoyed by a softball scholarship, Meg had been in her first year at Indiana State in Terre Haute when the marriage collapsed. Brock had just failed to make the junior high basketball team, and basketball was everything in Hoosier Country.

“Jesus Christopher,” Jerry swore one night when he thought Brock was asleep, “what’s the kid good at anyway?” He’d almost said “good for,” but he didn’t. He and Melanie had no children of their own after eight years together. Jerry Bates never wanted to be Brock’s “Dad.”

“Tennis,” his mother said quietly, “he’s really good at tennis.”

“He didn’t try, he didn’t work at it, Mel! Kid across the street, he’s out shooting baskets day and night seven days a week. I seen him shooting in the snow one day last winter. He’ll sure as hell make the team next year.”

“Saw,” Melanie wanted to correct but did not, “saw him shooting baskets.”

They’d met at IU, where Melanie was studying music (piano) and Jerry was majoring in business. She never said how she’d met Jerry Bates or why exactly they had married. “I guess I just needed someone,” she said. Now she was dead of breast cancer, and Brock felt, at age 23, suddenly bereft and adrift, too young to be orphaned.

“I’m so sorry,” his mother had said when they left Bloomington ten years back.

“For what?” Meg snapped. “Jerry was never there for us. I don’t think he went to more than one of my games when I was in high school, and I’ll bet he never caught any of Brock’s AAU basketball games either. Let alone his tennis matches.”

Angry at leaving all his friends behind, young Brock at first sulked and raged, but he made friends easily, and within a few months he’d acquired new ones. And while he’d been a B-team AAU basketballer in Bloomington, he made high school varsity in Spokane and got serious about tennis, which became his game. Moreover, recalling what Meg said that day, he knew she was right. Their stepfather had rarely spent time with them, quality or otherwise.

So, Brock came of age without a father, without a “male role model,” and his mother worried about that but refused to marry again and would not expose him to any “special man friend.” She was beautiful, and men were attracted to her—colleagues at the high school where she taught music, fellow actors in community theater, parishioners at First Presbyterian where she played piano and organ—but she resisted their overtures. Even after Brock went away to college, a small liberal arts school in Ohio, which he attended on a tennis ride, she remained steadfastly single. When her cancer returned, Brock was in his first year at the Spokane Chronicle, covering odds and ends, traffic accidents in the Valley, tennis tournaments, road work and traffic diversions in the South Hill—whatever more experienced reporters shrugged off.

He was there for his mother in her last days, and Meg came up from Denver, where she was working for a computer software firm and enjoying prosperity, her husband, and two kids. Their mother made them promise not to contact their stepfather after she died. Jerry was out of their lives, she said, for good. But Jerry learned about her death from Indiana friends she’d kept in touch with over the years, and when he came to the funeral, he convinced Brock to come out to IU and pursue a master’s in journalism. Brock could spend a year establishing residency, and Jerry would take care of everything. He promised.

They’d met only once since the divorce, surreptitiously, when his stepfather showed up at New Concord out of the blue during the fall break of Brock’s sophomore year. It had proven an awkward three days highlighted by Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday in Zanesville—beer and pizza at The Barn. They watched an Ohio State game. Jerry had started off at Ohio State and was an avid Buckeyes fan, and the Buckeyes won big, and although Brock had no interest in football, he appreciated the distraction. Whatever agenda his stepfather might have had during that unannounced visit never manifested itself. How was his mother doing? She was fine. End of that topic of conversation. How was he doing at Muskingum? What was he majoring in? He was doing fine, majoring in English. Brock phoned Meg about the visit, and she agreed they shouldn’t mention it to their mother.

Brock remembered his stepfather indulging a couple too many at The Barn, but it went okay. They spent a day driving to Columbus, so Jerry could reminisce and point out his fraternity house, and the next day they crossed the river into West Virginia, where they grabbed dinner at the Wheeling Brewing House, after which his stepfather said maybe Brock should drive them back to campus. They shook hands and that was it until the funeral in Spokane.

So now here he was in Bloomington, where his stepfather worked for the city’s finance office, and he was staying at Jerry’s place for a year to establish residency—Jerry had never been “Dad”—and he’d picked up a job with the local paper, thanks to an editor at the Chronicle. Mostly, Brock covered the police blotter, which was great compared with what he was doing in Spokane, where he was everywhere. Two more experienced reporters at the Times-Courier took the best leads, but this mid-July afternoon Vance was on vacation and Tanya was across town covering a break-in at the university’s music school. An instrument belonging to a renowned cellist had been stolen and a ransom note left behind—the kind of juicy story anyone would jump on, especially in the heat and heavy humidity that day, when you felt it should rain but it wouldn’t, and you’d be sweltering all afternoon.

What his stepfather promised, in so many words, before Brock left Spokane was free room-and-board, use of either the old Ford pickup or the newish Tempo, and distance. Jerry would not impose. Brock would occupy his own space. He was an adult, after all. They would sustain both literal and esthetic distance—no questions asked—but sure, his stepfather would appreciate having him around after all these years. Jerry wouldn’t admit to being lonely, but sure, it would be good to renew their acquaintance. And it wasn’t the house haunted by memories of Brock’s Indiana boyhood. His stepfather had gotten that in the settlement, but he couldn’t live in it. He’d built that house for Brock’s mother, he said, and “fond memories” haunted the place. He’d sold it for less than it was worth.

This other place had the advantage of being right in town. Brock’s mother had designed the haunted place herself and considered it an advantage that it was not located right in town.

 Unfortunately, the pickup, which had been bright red in 1970 but had faded to a pallid rose in the past quarter century, broke down within two weeks of Brock’s advent to Bloomington that spring, and his stepfather needed the Tempo at work. Brock could use Meg’s old bike. Bloomington was, Jerry proclaimed, the quintessential biking city—Brock had seen Breaking Away, hadn’t he?

About a million times, Brock said—it had been his mother’s all-time favorite movie. She’d swum at the quarry shown in that film dozens of times when she wasn’t practicing piano, had dived from that very spot, had dated a cutter before she met Jerry. Brock’s favorite Indiana flick was The Hoosiers. 1986. Gene Hackman.He’d grown up on legends and myths of the Hoosiers and Bob Knight. “I met him once at a party,” his mother said. “I went to lots of games before I met your stepfather,” she said. “Your father loved the game, but your stepfather didn’t care for it, and he hated Bob Knight.”

So, as he had been doing for the past month, Brock was riding Meg’s pink bicycle to the Times-Courier office the day of the bank robbery. It was a three-speed, still in good shape once he replaced the tires. The second time he rode it to the office Brock found it at the day’s end adorned with a large pink bow, most likely Vance’s gesture, but maybe the work of one of the sportswriters, a quondam local high school football hero named Jeff. In all fairness to the bicycle, it was gendered neutral—not distinctly a “girl’s bike,” but not really a “boy’s bike” either. Perhaps androgynous.

Fortunately, no 23-year-old American male in mid-July 1995 possessed a more confident sense of his masculinity than did Brock Lee Leonard.  “Brock” had been his father’s choice; his mother had wanted “Lee,” her maiden name, and they’d argued all the way to the baptismal font, where they compromised on “Brock Lee.” His mother loved that story. Brock conceived an understandable dislike for broccoli, and by the time he entered high school he had diminished his middle name to “L” with his mother’s reluctant approval.

Not even the new proofreader, Amy, with whom he’d promptly been smitten, knew what the L stood for. Blue-eyed Amy held a freshly minted degree in elementary ed from Butler, but in the process of student teaching had come to realize the classroom did not fit her. An uncle landed her the job at the Times-Courier. Within two weeks she was reciprocally infatuated with Brock, which eased his return to Indiana.

His major achievement during his brief tenure with the paper had been to convert the bland notices of misdemeanors drawn from police blotters into witty bits that garnered him grudging praise but no byline. Example: “An elderly woman from Ellettsville turned herself in at the sheriff’s office for cruelty to animals. Kicked her cat Boots when it darted underfoot. Boots, however, failed to press charges.” Example: “Clear Creek resident reported ‘suspicious man wearing hoodie’ making ‘loud, obnoxious noises’ after 8:00 p.m. in the town park. Authorities determined the gentleman was practicing his anthem for Sunday services at the Baptist church. Miscreant advised to limit his joyful noise to privacy of his own shower.”

Brock left the pink bike unlocked in front of the news office as usual the day of the bank robbery, nurturing some vague hope it might be stolen, not because he doubted his masculinity for an instant, but at least partly because every male who worked at the paper had been twitting him about the thing for more than a month. For his dates with Amy, he was reduced to begging the use of his stepfather’s Tempo (Jerry proved grudging) or hitch a ride with Amy in her ’84 Audi. He planned to buy a can of red spray paint. Soon.

Bill Peters, the news editor and not an admirer of “Brock’s Bloomington Blotter,” met him at the door. “Old National’s been hit! May still be in progress. Get on it, Brock. Now’s your big chance.”

Just like that. His first shot at a byline. He offers a silly grin to Amy as Bill Peters barks at him to get his ass into gear. Vance is fishing in Minnesota and Tanya’s at the U covering the missing cello, so Brock L. Leonard is going to take the lead on this breaking story, and chances are he’ll get there if he humps it on his pink bike before the network crews arrive from Indianapolis fifty miles north. First genuine byline. Maybe. He hops on his bike—Meg’s bike—bank’s just a few blocks away.

 It occurs to Brock he might ditch the pink bicycle instead of riding it directly onto the scene, which turns out to be a crime almost in progress. He’s missed the action by maybe fifteen minutes. The police lieutenant and detective in charge recognize him before he can recall their names or catch sight of their IDs: MacGregor and Arcidiacono. Mac and Archie. “Nice bike,” Arcidiacono gibes. He’s short and stubby, sports the kind of whiskers on his round, dark face that signify five o’clock shadow only minutes after he shaves. Hollywood heartthrobs like Don Johnson in Miami Vice could get away with that sort of beard, Brock Leonard not, and obviously not Detective Arcidiacono either. He’s Sicilian a couple generations back.

Thanks to a fiction writing course he took at Muskingum (he got a B), Brock finds himself roughing out a character sketch wherein the “portly detective” would be hooked on grappa (intelligence acquired from reading Hemingway) and “saddled” (that was the right dead metaphor here) with a voluptuous bitch of a wife about half his age (“bitch with handles,” per Papa Hem).

“Sure, kid, you’ll be the first to know,” the lieutenant says. Has Brock uttered the request to be left in the loop? He has not.

“Thanks?”

“By the way, cute bike. My eight-year-old daughter’s got one just like it.”

So how might he feature Lieutenant MacGregor in that story or novel he will never write? Almost handsome, almost suave, almost debonair, almost Cary Grant (his mother’s favorite actor), but none of the above. No, for all his easy good looks, Mac will come off as a jerk, abusive to his wife, a philanderer, mean to his kids, a hypocritical churchgoer of some ilk, a Rotarian gone to the dark side. He won’t attend his kids’ afterschool activities. He’ll come to no good end. Not unlike Brock’s fiction, probably, and if he doesn’t get himself back on track, ditto for his career in journalism. “What do you have so far?”

The detective sums it up: “Two perps, Caucasian, five-eight or so, black hoodies, sunglasses, blue jeans—could be brothers. Came in right after the bank opened, claimed they had guns, handed over a note and a plastic Kroger’s bag, got away with . . . say ‘an undisclosed amount,’ okay?” No footage yet from the surveillance cams.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all for now,” the lieutenant snaps. He reaches over and rings the chrome bicycle bell a couple of times. Shakes his head. Snorts. “Nice,” he says.

“Looks like a small silver SUV of some sort was waiting for them up the street,” Archie adds, his round face glistening with sweat. “No one caught the make or plates.”

Brock jots down the notes, adds some routine details—how long the officers have been with the department, when was the last time a bank was hit here in Bloomington, have there been other holdups in the area lately? Nope. Indianapolis? No such luck.

What he needs is a crocodile, as his CW prof once told the class: “When in doubt, throw in a crocodile.” Would it be okay if he spoke with the teller? Not right now, he’s told, not till after they have another chat with her, and no, they won’t release her name at this point-in-time. She’s new on the job and pretty shaken up. He can write that if he wants to. And no, he cannot go inside the bank or even look in the door—it’s “a raw crime scene.” Brock figures he can use that phrase, “raw crime scene,” and maybe the bag from Kroger’s, but that looks to be about it. His scoop is running on bland. By this time a sizable crowd of rubberneckers has accumulated.

“So that’s it?”

“Come down to the station after lunch,” the detective says. “Maybe we can let you see what we get from the surveillance tapes.”

“Not likely,” Mac says with a note of reprimand in his voice. “But you can check. Like your bike.” He winks.

Then the TV news crews roll up, and Brock’s moment in the glaring sun ends. He’s tempted to hang around and see how it goes down, but he can catch it “Live at Five.” He’s not into broadcast journalism, even though he knows it’s the future and is tempted by the lure of better paychecks. Amy is very much attracted. “I could be a weather-girl,” she’s declared, more than half seriously.

“So, what do you know about meteorology and climatology?”

“Nothing. I’d learn on the job.”

Brock huffed at that, and they argued. The next time he asked her out, she was busy. They did go out again, but Amy had cooled. That happened ten days ago, and it struck him that when he grinned at her this morning before Peters sent him out to cover the bank heist, she hadn’t smiled, only lifted her chin in response. Well, he’d been stupid, and then he’d been too insensitive to see that he should’ve apologized. He would do that. He would take care of that, but first he must get back to his desk and work on this story.

But before he does that, he’ll have to locate the pink bicycle, which he knows he left leaning against the alley by the Old National Bank. It’s gone now, definitively gone. He pulls away from the mob of gawkers, half expecting to see an eight-year-old girl pedaling furiously down Walnut.

Nothing.

By the time he gets back to the Times-Courier, Brock’s polo is soaked—wrong day to have worn the light blue one. The dark blue polo would’ve been the better choice. He looks, but Amy’s not at her desk and neither is Bill Peters. In fact, hardly anyone’s there in the newsroom, which means a conference must be going on somewhere.

It is.

Tanya has returned from the IU music school with news that the mystery of the kidnapped cello has been solved. A disgruntled grad student from India swiped it. He had been denied a fellowship he believed he’d been promised, and there were problems with his student visa. Amrinder blames the visiting professor, an Italian woman he claims is prejudiced against Indian males, and he insists the ransom note was a joke and not to be taken seriously. It was his way of satire, he says. The professor, he argues, obviously does not comprehend irony.

Bill and Amy inform Brock about this midway through his struggle with the second paragraph of his would-be scoop on the bank robbery, which brief paragraph he has refabricated five times. It will not behave.

Bill Peters follows Amy to her desk, places his hand on the back of her chair, lowers his head to hers, and says something Brock is confident has nothing to do with proofreading. They both giggle, and when Bill turns back to his office, Amy’s nice blue eyes pursue him. Brock almost doesn’t notice.

Brock thinks of Hemingway’s dispatches from 1930s Spain for the North American Newspaper Alliance. “At the front, a mile and a quarter away, the noise came as a heavy coughing grunt from the green pine-studded hillside opposite.” Well, you couldn’t get away with that kind of writing for the Times-Courier in present-day Indiana, particularly if you were Brock L. Leonard instead of Ernest M. Hemingway. Or this: “We lay on top of a ridge with a line of Spanish infantry under heavy machine gun and rifle fire.” Of course, first you had to be under fire, or at least you had to have been under fire. Or maybe this: “The irrigation ditch was full of this year’s crop of frogs. As you splashed forward, they scattered, jumping wildly.” Well, the setting for the matter at hand featured the hot pavement outside the Old National Bank of Bloomington, no heavy artillery in the distance, no infantry or machine guns, no jittery frogs.

Brock plods ahead, his touch heavy on the keyboard, ponderous, certain the next day’s front-page story will involve a stolen cello and a distraught graduate student from New Delhi. At two-thirty he heads on foot for the police station on Third, sustained by vague hopes of a break in the case. Vance is due back in two days, and if nothing fortuitous happens before that, the story will become his, along with the byline. Brock considers the adjective “fortuitous” and deletes it mentally before any such academic adjective can influence his writeup of the bank job.

Detective Arcidiacono runs the surveillance tape for him, but they can distinguish only blurry details. “Old camera,” Archie says, “and they must not ’ve cleaned the lens in years.” No clear facial features emerge from the black hoods and sunglasses. Two white noses appear, but even the lips are indistinct. Brock suggests neither of the robbers seems to be wielding actual weapons inside the pockets of their hoodies, and the detective agrees, “Probably not. Pretty gutsy . . . or pretty stupid. Someone’ll recognize ’em.” He sounds unconvinced by his own optimism. Departmental policy, Brock suspects: Be positive, especially where the press is concerned.

“Sooner or later,” Brock says.

“Yeah,” the detective mutters. “You bet.”

On his way back to the office, Brock creates headlines for his Section B story: “Two Hoods Knock Over Old National.” Maybe a subheading: “Daring Daylight Heist.” “Hooded Duo Holds Up ONB.” Or should it be “Hold”? it doesn’t matter anyway. Bill Peters decides all the major headlines. Maybe this intriguing subhead: “Local Reporter’s Pink Bike Snatched in Broad Daylight.” He sighs and heads to the breakroom where he encounters the predictably scorched and tepid remains of what had never been Grade-A coffee to begin with.

Brock reaches his stepfather’s place around nine-thirty, after posting his writeup, such as it is. He’s relieved to see the light on, as Jerry usually crashes in front of the tube around nine, and he still feels awkward about coming in after that. He only managed to grab a slice of pizza for dinner. He’s glad Peters left the newsroom around six, and he hopes the editor took note that he was still hard at it, not that the paper covered overtime. He feels confident the Pulitzer folks will not be calling soon on Brock L. Leonard.

“You’re late,” Jerry says with a tone of reprimand similar to what Lieutenant MacGregor used on Archie that morning.

“Sorry. Had to work late—covered that bank robbery at the ONB. You hear about it?”

“You should call if you’re going to miss dinner.” Accusation. Reprimand duly noted.

Dinner? In the seven weeks he’s been in Bloomington, Brock cannot recall his stepfather fixing anything approximating an evening meal on more than three or four occasions. Supper had assumed from the outset an ad hoc nature, casual dining at its most indifferent. Or was it indifferent dining at its most casual? His contributions largely came in the form of spaghetti and a runner’s chili his mother loved and that his stepfather spurned, but grudgingly and carpingly ate, complaining about the lack of meat.

Their exchange that evening of the bank robbery doesn’t qualify as “heated,” but Jerry Bates trespasses on sacred terrain when he suggests that something about Brock’s behavior (he cannot recall what) is “just . . .  like . . . your . . . mother.” Brock decides to look for an apartment as soon as he can, maybe sublet for the rest of the summer. Maybe he should hold off applying to the journalism master’s at IU for another year if he decides to follow through on it at all.

Early the next morning (he is eager to be first one there) Brock misses the convenience of the pink bicycle as he trudges the twenty-odd blocks to the Times-Courier office, where he finds a heavily redacted copy of his report on the bank robbery, clearly the work of Bill Peters. He tries to throw only a casual glance at the thing, but he cannot. Bill’s alterations appear capricious, and most of them dilute his meticulous word choices. Fastidious? Fussy? “Don’t go getting poetic on us,” Peters warned, And voice. What has become of his voice in the piece? Any vestige of his individual expression, any vague hint at a Hemingway moment, has been smothered in a blanket of bland denotation. Bill Peters isn’t on site and the account has already gone to press. But after all, the piece isn’t a feature, is it? Just straight reportage, strict facticity—no room for sly qualifiers or verbs with verve. He knows that, but still.

When he picks up the edition, which lies just under his edited text, the front-page headline reads about the way he supposed it would: “IU Grad Student Implicated in Cello Caper.” Of course. There’s been a massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia, and President Clinton is moving to restore relations with Vietnam twenty years after the war, but the local headline captures its share of page one, as is usually the case when something supposedly newsworthy occurs in town. His piece appears in Section C, following Sports, as News of Local Interest: “No Suspects in Holdup of Old National Bank.” So bland. His byline reads “Brock Lee Leonard.”

How has anyone discovered the hidden identity of L? Jeff, the sportswriter, is only the first to greet him as “Broccoli!”

“Brock Lee? Broc-col-li?” Amy teases when she comes in at eight.

“Brock,” Bill Peters says when he shows up at nine, “they’ve got something for you at headquarters. Lieutenant MacGregor called, said to get right over.” Brock appreciates editor’s avoidance of what he assumes will soon become nearly universal enthusiasm for punning on his moniker. Why the grin, he wonders.

He suspects what it’s about before he arrives at the police station.

Half a dozen officers, including Lieutenant MacGregor and Detective Arcidiacono, are assembled on the steps when Brock approaches, and the centerpiece is comprised of two pink bicycles, his own (Meg’s) gender-ambiguous bike and another, also pink, although a shade brighter, which is clearly a girl’s bike. As he comes up to Mac and Archie, the officers burst into applause, surprisingly not jeers but genuine cheers.

They’d kept an eye out for his bicycle after their interview the afternoon of the bank robbery, when he reluctantly reported the theft, although to be frank about it, Archie confesses, they were thinking what a joke it would be to discover the thing in some kid’s front yard, and then maybe call the Times-Courier with the news flash—big break in the stolen pink bike caper.

What happened though was that about two that morning, they got a noise complaint at an apartment complex on the west side of town, and the responding officer spotted two pink bicycles lying outside the apartment in question. Feeling suspicious, she put in a call for backup, and they stumbled onto the bank robbers, not brothers, but a brother-and-sister team. Both the pink bikes had been stolen. The brother was nineteen and had a long record of petty crimes and misdemeanors, small burglaries some drug violations, and he’d lost his driving privileges twice over, to the point that he didn’t dare push his luck with auto theft. Thus, his theft of Brock’s pink bicycle because, yes, he had been so brazen (or so dumb) as to have returned (stereotypically) to the scene of the crime within less than an hour.

The kid saw the reporter leave his bike in the alley and thought it would be, as he explained to the arresting officers, “cool” to snatch the “dude’s wheels.” The kid’s sister, aged sixteen and pathetic, swiped her pink “velocipede” (as Brock would call it in his writeup) the previous week from a family she’d done some babysitting for. She felt they’d underpaid her, so taking “their precious daughter’s Hello Kitty bike” seemed like poetic justice to her, although she did not use that phrase. To her, it was simply justice. Brock imposed “poetic justice” on the event. Peters deleted both “velocipede” and “poetic justice.”

As it happened, the silver SUV spotted up the street from the ONB was not involved in the getaway. The pair had simply slipped up an alley, chucked their hoodies in a dumpster, and walked away. No firearms turned up at the apartment, only a deadbeat stepfather in a drunken stupor who had not even awakened when his “damn stepkids” got into a shouting match over returning the stolen money, which came to only a few hundred dollars. They had been too scared to wait for anyone but the single teller to empty her till, and apparently the bundles of ones, fives, tens, and twenties looked like a windfall to them. The title of a story out of James Joyce’s Dubliners came to Brock: “A Painful Case.”

A police photographer snapped the image of the bikes that appeared on the front page of the next edition of the Times-Courier under the byline, Brock L. Leonard. The bank heist led to a swift trial that ended with the brother headed for the minimum-security prison at Edinburgh and the sister taken to juvie. Brock did not stay for the trial or the fall term at IU but returned to Spokane and his job with the Chronicle, leaving his sister’s pink bike with his stepfather, who concluded that his stepson was just like his mother, a colossal ingrate.

Born in Ohio and raised in Florida, Ron McFarland lives and writes from Moscow, Idaho, but when he was in grad school at the University of Illinois, he occasionally forayed into the Hoosier state where he once jumped into the Wabash after a jumbo carp that got away. But at least he didn’t feel obliged to clean and eat it.