The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Read online

  “Now that you covered my Stacey’s wedding so nicely, why not write him up? People enjoy topics like close calls during famous storms. But, past that, young man, picture a boy being held midair while getting to look down on all of Tuscarora County. And afterwards, it really improved young Larry. You see, I attended second grade with him, before. And he was … I won’t say sneaky-mean but … he would torture frogs and three of our weaker girls. Get them into corners, et cetera. He tickled one till she, well, dampened herself. No names. But nowadays there’s just something extra about Larry Winstead. Changed for the better. It’s lasted, too. There’s a thing when you see him you’ll know, son. Larry is like … maybe a man you always lived near but who never once let on he’d maybe saved his whole platoon then won the Silver Star? Like that. Strong.

  “I reside on his same road and pay attention. And, for instance, Larry vegetable-gardens to give most of it away. Not just excess August zucchini, either. Headed the Cub Scouts, and, let’s see, coaches Pee Wee Football. I even know people he has lent thousands of dollars, but once they skip out on him? Larry still speaks to them, in church, at stores. He is a fellow very little bothers. An overqualified reporter like you, from ‘away,’ you might well find Larry and his wife ‘a little bit’”—she looked around then whispered—“‘country.’”

  “But Duke Power values him. We hear Larry’s their operational brain for this whole end the state. Don’t let his being quiet fool you. Most people talk better than they write. First get him telling it, then you do the write-up. Being so bright and bushy-tailed, you’ll someway force Larry to go on-record. ‘In his own words’ type thing. It’ll be like pulling teeth. But you’ll end up with your biggest prizewinner. Just make sure you spend three-four hours with him. Over-educated people like you make too many appointments. Which keeps them feeling important but wears ’em out early. But Larry? Not someone who ever hurries, Larry. Lives right on Rodgers near where wind took him up. The child flew nude. Neighbors still swear he landed on his feet like a bird would.”

  She made me look him up. I now see that—like his famous storm—I started circling Larry long before I found him. Why has it taken almost four years to bother tracing him? I just didn’t believe the thing really happened—unassisted human flight. But, maybe this very delay strengthened me into the writer-interviewer-detective needed for landing such a tale?

  Now I can finally depart Falls with a clear conscience. For years I’ve been here, listening so hard I couldn’t hear. The best true stories? they are the most unlikely. I learned that here in Falls.

  STALKING OUR SUBJECT

  SURPRISING TO FIND Larry’s home and work numbers right online. Friends spoke of him as being hermit-shy, at least about his most unexplainable incident. So, exactly one year ago, I sent him a first respectful text; it named those ten character-witnesses most stubbornly urging me to finally get on-record his aerial adventure. Three weeks later, no response.

  While awaiting a reaction from Lawrence Alston Winstead, electrical engineer, I did my own due diligence. Being a recent grad of Carolina’s J-school, I have classical training. I love facts.

  —I am not like some of these guys who’ll try and sneak in layers of ticky-tack frosting without admitting such spun-fluff is plain ole “Fiction.” I so worship unvarnished “Nonfiction,” I’ve grown downright anti-novelistic. Who needs make-believe—given a world constructed so weirdly as ours? I now believe the girders of the mysterious are what really hold us all in place. Those provide limitless horror stories plus surging daily poetry. But first I had to know the likelihood of wind’s taking up any object heavy as some tree-climbing country boy aged eight.

  I queried “children carried off by cyclones but staying alive.” I discovered that L. Frank Baum, bard of the prairie, heard tales of actual kids riding in houses borne heavenward then returned. He gave his Dorothy a last name acknowledging easement with her own storm: “Gale.” I found that, in South Dakota in July 1955, a nine-year-old girl plus the pony she rode both got hoisted by wind but survived, wounded only by major subsequent hail.

  I phoned the National Hurricane Service down along our NC coast at Nags Head. I figured I would make an appointment then drive that pretty ocean-side road on the company dime. I called a few days prior to Christmas. An office-party sounded ongoing. I heard secretarial shrieks and carols played upon what seemed a skilled amateur accordion. (I had never thought of meteorologists as party animals but, being not quite twenty-six myself, I admit I am always learning!)

  The fellow that answered said, well, if I was a real reporter he might take just one official question; he explained being off-duty and drinking eggnog, though steeped in decades’ savage storm experience. “I’ll turn sixty-five this June,” he bragged and confessed. First he sounded mellow then moderately drunk. But his love of terrible weather flung a certain sea-dog’s salt into his tone and authority. Was Child Flight possible? I asked.

  “Sir, not unusual for youngsters weighing less than eighty pounds to be carried aloft by winds exceeding a hundred miles per hour. (I’m told the kids that fight it often come out worst.) Soon as an infant gets sucked into the sky, I’d say trust becomes essential. Think about it. If winds can uproot silos, homes, bridges, winds’ll sure shift kids from spot to spot, as an oversight. Hardest part of any ride comes as it ends, of course. Like life, buddy, getting up and started’s easy, right? It’s your coming down’s the killer. I wonder how retirement will feel. Oh well, here’s to the luck of fools and children, Merry Christmas!” Click.

  Now I’d somewhat affirmed the likelihood of child air-time. I turned to our own paper’s coverage of that fatal tornado. It’d happened thirty-three years ago tomorrow!

  The Herald Traveler does not keep microfilm, we keep the papers. With those stacked at our warehouse and consulted most often for the making of rodent nests, it took me hours to find the actual piece. Newsprint had darkened to a hue between manila-envelope and Cuban cigar. “Emma Hague” read the original byline.

  Now deceased, then an unmarried lady well up into her sixties, Emma was, aside from me, the Herald Traveler’s best local “color” artist, ever.

  Some say her style sounds dated but Hague’s legwork never fails to still check out. She attended Smith College, did well, but came right home. That happens. She lived with an argumentative grandfather and so—locals claim—she never minded being called out to fires, etc., at all hours, fearless apparently. True, her storm-item opens with one of that era’s typical hokey human interest-grabbers. My best J-school professor once discredited this as a “little did they know” lede:

  At exactly noon on Saturday September the fifth, severe weather had been widely predicted and yet residents of a small mobile home park named Whispering Pines Camp went about their midday errands undeterred. Maybe autumn’s warm spell gave a false sense of security. Though trailer parks are lately known hereabouts as “tornado magnets,” nobody among that Saturday’s resident car-waxers, yard-sitters or bike-riders paid the skies much attention.

  Winds up to one hundred and sixty mph (with swirling gusts in excess) came suddenly, survivors claim. A tempest, swirling clockwise, instantly dismantled three-fifths of the park’s metal and plywood domiciles.

  Pets lost to violent updrafts included cats and especially chickens. “It was more a howl than the train-sound folks tell you to expect,” one elderly resident confided. She asked that her name go unlisted to avoid alarming her distant children. “Then my bone china went to powder and yet, look at me, bruised but left in my same rocker.”

  Eight-year-old twins, Larry and Barry Winstead, were “swimming” in a four-foot blue rubber bathing-pool beside their mother’s rental trailer. The mother, Amanda, 32, Merchant Mart’s Fabric Department Manager, worked inside at her sewing machine, making clothes to order. It being so warm, the twins’ water games remained innocent of any bathing apparel. One section of the family trailer landed directly on top of Barry. He would suffer contusions to the head (then likely
drowned). Brother Larry, however, would meet a fate far different.

  Sheriff Walter Pate soon after coined the phrase now enjoying wider usage, “Our ‘Miracle Boy.’” Larry himself seemed unimpressed and, on later hearing this epithet, asked, “Our the what?”

  Weighing but fifty-five pounds, young Winstead found himself somehow carried aloft by a massive wind surge. Witnesses claim that, when forty feet up, he fell from one “shelf of wind.” But Larry was somehow caught by a second plateau of force and thereby saved. The storm dropped temperatures into the forties. Shortly afterwards, Winstead was unaccountably found at a location over one-quarter of a mile away. Versions differ as to how Larry arrived there. “Flew,” Belinda Hobgood, 22, attested. “I saw him do it. Like some pink angel without the wings. Larry was so far up, didn’t look big as a minute.” The child himself, if physically unharmed, seemed understandably numb and could explain but little when….

  But, no, instead of quoting the Herald Traveler’s first version over thirty years out-of-date, I prefer to go with an older-wiser Larry alert in the here-and-now.

  And yet I’d find extracting one F5 storm memory from the grown Larry involved an eleven-month communal campaign. By the end it had lassoed into my acquaintance a fond posse of former strangers. —Even while strategizing, I wondered why a true story that sounded so amazing had—these many years—stirred so little retrospective press interest. True, along the Rodgers Road it remains a topic of pretty continual discussion.

  Myself, I will do anything for a story. Plus I am truly not a snob about what’s possible or not. For instance, I have written five features on area haunted-houses. I’ve spent whole nights in about three. Yes, I saw things. No, I can’t explain them. I am in the reporting, not the explaining, business.

  People laughed off my account of a seeming funeral-home resurrection. The auto-accident victim, believed dead, was mere minutes from becoming embalmed. Waking, considering himself still in his car, smelling chemicals, he imagined he’d arrived at a service station. He sat bolt-upright yelling, “Fill her with high-test!” The attending mortician nearly died of fright. That really happened. I spoke to both pertinent parties. I’ve kept the recordings.

  In other words, I am not shy about reporting events which strain credibility. My one worry is that Richmond will be more guarded, secretive. The Fan District might prove too refined now that my taste has sensibly relaxed and possibly coarsened in Falls, NC.

  One reason Larry’s saga has gone unnoted for three decades: The Winsteads, if a respectable farming family on record hereabouts since the first U.S. census of 1790, have never been a rich one. Another cause for his flight’s weak coverage might sound more esoteric.

  —Tornadoes do not merit human names. Such storms are categorized only by their listed force then seasonal ranking. Larry’s? simply called F5. —If some personally named hurricane had grabbed him, if she had been called, say, “Conchita,” more attention would surely have been paid. —In 1953 hurricanes first got tagged with human names. Women’s ones only—alphabetical from Abigail to Zelda. Then came 1979. Feminism intervened: Didn’t lady-monikers imply that semitropical property-damage must be a periodic, tantrum-y female by-product caprice? Thereafter hurricanes alternated monikers from male to female.

  Still, “Conchita Sucks Up Farm Boy, Sends Him Down Unhurt” has gale-force headline impact!

  —“F5 Lands Lad Safe” made, I believe, a smaller grab at local attention.

  I used the storm’s approaching anniversary as my excuse to spearhead a Herald Traveler “Memory-Lane Special.” I phoned Winstead’s home but the wife answered, startling me. I should’ve hung up. Instead I explained that, what with this commemorative tornado-supplement, I would, of course, need a full sit-down with Larry Winstead himself. His spouse stated that the thirty-third anniversary of anything was, even for a weekly as small as ours, “one raggedy-ass date to make much of, idn’t it?” Mrs. Winstead certainly had a point.

  She explained that recalling the storm still pained her husband. She stated that her Larry did not intend to visit his particular F5 upon people too young to actually recall one. She said I should remember that Larry’s identical twin had been killed that day.

  “Understood?” She hung up on me.

  No sweat. Hang-ups merely pique a good reporter’s interest. Given my youth, my almost-horndog need-to-know, I endure “terminated calls” three to five times weekly. The First Amendment permits, indeed demands, that.

  But I did feel coerced to reach out to my catfish man and the well-dressed bride’s intelligent mother. I told them I had hit a definite wall with Larry. I asked their help in loosening him up.

  I’d learned that Winstead was by now the father of young kids. I suggested—in my follow-up note—that he leave some written record of the storm’s havoc, “as a legacy that might be someday treasured by your sons.” I laid it on pretty thick, I guess.

  Larry did not answer. Naturally I had to drive out to his farm on a non-invasive scouting mission. I observed, parked beside the two-story log-cabin, his Duke Energy company sedan. Winstead’s vegetable garden, surrounded by deer-proof fencing, is indeed huge. It is so neat it looks like an illustration from some how-to manual. But, seeing me guiding my new-used red pickup back and forth past his pond, one large man summoned wife and sons indoors. He gave me a look not-unusual-hereabouts—land-proud, country-tough, definitely gun-owning.

  Next I hand-wrote Winstead using official Herald Traveler stationery. I enclosed a copy of the original article. My own crime-scene time-line questions I jotted in its margins. No response. So I needed to attend Larry’s church. I asked deacons to please single him out for me, and so they stepped right over, pointed my way and told Larry I had come into God’s house “a-prying.” Being a gent myself, having already been forcibly seated on the empty front-row, I actually stayed for that whole two-hour service. And Larry? During “Announcements” he slipped out the choir’s side-exit.

  Desperate, I now contacted all those who’d ever urged his child-flight story on me. I chose a single date for our whole group to phone Larry, urging him to finally tell it. The poor guy probably dragged home from work to find his answering machine glutted. I’d planned to call last but the tape proved full. Finally, after two more tries (never at dinnertime), I caught him by phone.

  I begged for any or all of Larry’s philosophy and observations. I mentioned being interested in “how the storm helped form you.” I vowed wanting far more than the fireworks of yet another disaster story, however good. I craved Aftermath. I was open to lessons, confusions, the unsavory payload left behind once the adrenaline has first saved then abandoned you, etc….

  I admitted being ambitious and a short-timer in Falls. My eyes were already fixed upon a more glittering Richmond two hundred miles to the North. There I would work for a famous daily, not our beloved farm-village weekly. I conceded my own drive had likely lured me to imagine the heights Larry had already scaled, by age eight. There came a breathing silence. I braced myself for another hang-up. His admirers had been reassuring me: whatever the tornado’d changed in Larry might, thirty-three years along, drive this flying boy to open up at last.

  His unpromising response: “How long you figure it would take?”

  ACTUAL UNASSISTED FLIGHT INTERVIEW

  I BROUGHT CHIANTI and a whole-wheat baguette from our Farmers’ Market. I wore understated denim but sure shined my best black church shoes. I arrived prompt: Saturday eleven-thirty a.m. His comfortable log-cabin-kit home dominates Winstead’s ten-acre farm. It stands just off the Rodgers Road, one mile from the site of his destroyed childhood trailer camp. Larry’s homestead is almost scarily tidy, all its painted surfaces newly coated. An anti-algae compound has turned his round pond the disturbing chem-blue of cleaning products.

  On first entering the Winstead home, you see a framed advanced degree (an “M.Eng./M.Sc.”; “Master of Engineering/Master of Science”). Its placement reflects the pride of someone pretty much self
-made.

  He is a big man now, Larry, large and loping, not un-magnetic. He’d put on a striped tie for my visit and that made me ache for him; I myself felt disrespectful, underdressed. It was hard to connect this silvering red-haired bear of a fellow with the alert child seen blinking in school photos. Winstead offered me any of five kinds of ale on-hand. One he’d personally brewed. His burliness suggests enjoyment of this drink.

  Larry has a ruddy complexion and his manner is accepting and interested, very present. When he looks at you, you feel strictly examined but accepted anyway. You sense you’re in the company of an experienced survivor, getting on with things. You sense he would, if possible, defend you. (If only because you are, now, his guest.) I had plotted so long to meet him, I felt jumpy as I get when around the few film stars sent on press junkets to Raleigh. At first I found myself staring just above Larry’s eyes and head.

  The cabin’s interior makes you know at once that Larry is a major fan of his alma mater, North Carolina State University. Its athletic teams’ red-and-white school-colors so constitute his residence’s décor the home appears almost a Red Cross headquarters.

  Being myself a graduate of UNC, State’s archrival, I chose to keep my true-blue affiliation quiet. I did risk, “How about that Wolfpack this season?” But I soon saw the topic was far too precious to be taken up so lightly, and certainly with a stranger Ohio-born.

  Instead we started talking weather (which at least has storms in it!). Larry admitted he’d begun feeling fidgety about his F5’s upcoming anniversary. He acted gloomy at having sort of promised to finally go on-record today. I asked if he would mind taking his tie off, to make me feel less on-duty? He gave me a look of pure relief. He loosened it between red clawing thumbs.