Racing in Place: 33 Hoosier Haiku

Racing in Place: 33 Hoosier Haiku Michael Martone ? The first thing you did was tune in the radios. Everyone had the new transistor radios, most the size of cigarette packs, in pastel hard-sheU plastic. Some were upholstered with protective leather-like vinyl with flaps and snaps and die cut openings for the gold embossed tuning dials, a sUt for the coin-edged volume wheel, an aperture for the earjack out ofwhich an always-too-short and easily kinked wire attached to a single waxy plug you screwed into your head. But today, race day no one listens to the "500" on the earphone. My father and the other fathers in the neighborhood are pouring a patio. It's what they do on Memorial Day. The elms, for some reason, haven't died on ParneUAvenue, and their vaulting branches arch over the street throwing it into deep shade. The parade route runs from State Boulevard along ParneU out to the War Memorial CoUseum. We Uke to sit near the Dairy Queen, unfolding our lawn chairs in the parking lot driveway. We have brought the big radio with the stitched handle. It is the size ofmy school lunch box. The cars at the track make a swishing sound as they zoom about. I sit on the curb and think I see the horses' hooves throwing sparks. A semi-trailer is havfling a retired F-86 from the airbase out to be displayed on the CoUseum's lawn. The Navy Club's bus-long gray destroyer, number 48, floats by above me, its wheels hidden by a skirt ofwaves. My mother and the other mothers are sitting on the patio next door, a concrete slab in the middle of the yard. It is cured to a marble white. The 191 192Fourth Genre furniture is new, webbed candy-colored nylon and aluminum tubing. The Thompsons' patio. It was poured last year. The men are wearing white Tshirts , khaki pants, and their old work shoes, standing in a circle around the wheelbarrow filled with crushed ice and bottles of Old Crown beer, tuning in, each one holding his little radio next to his ear, worrying the tuning dial, thumbing up the volume. One by one they findWOWO, the local station on the network, coax the static into sound, cocking the radios at angles to align their tiny antennae. It is primitive. It is magic. It is like they are blowing on a smoldering tinder to get it to spark. And they do. The thrum of the engines brought us outside. We looked up, shading our eyes against the sun. The bUmp wasjust above the tops ofthe dying elm trees and descending, it seemed, toward the field behind our house. Then there was a change in the engines' pitch, and the blimp yawed and floated up and away. We ran to the car to foUow, slowly cruising through the meandering neighborhood streets. Stretched out on the back seat of the '57 Chevy, I looked up at the bUmp as it waUowed overhead, framed first in the back window then in the one at my feet then in the one above my head as it maneuvered and my father, turning, came about and circled beneath it. It setded, at last, in a field near the three rivers, a ground crew hauling it down. The cars that had been chasing it parked in a big ring around it. It was May and the blimp was on its way to take up station above Indianapolis. Moored, it levitated a few feet off the ground. We aU sat transfixed on the car's hood and watched the blimp float but stay perfectly stiU. Another radiojoins the nest oftransistor radios on the grass nearby, ampUfying the tinny voice of Sid CoUins, the Voice of the IndianapoUs 500. The men begin to work, finishing die frame and leveling the bed while others mix the cement and sand. I hear beneath theVoice in the grass a sound Uke static but it isn't static. It is the pulsing siren of the racers' engines flying around the track, the two-beat peal as they scream past the mike, an JS then a long...