The invitation to meet for a beer arrived in the mail a week later, the message scrawled on the back of a sixties-vintage postcard for Mammoth Cave. Typical of him, I realized even that early on, to not bother calling on the phone.
Our second meeting had been a few days earlier, when we happened to cross paths outside the Student Union. He seemed friendlier this time, and in the vending room over weak coffee—mine black, his loaded to a pale beige with sugar and fake creamer—he spoke with animation, words spilling out of him, about something called pomo literature. It was only much later that I discovered the term was shorthand for postmodern, the style of writers like Barth and Gaddis and Pynchon, whom I knew nothing about then and still remain only vaguely aware of now. But his enthusiasm was touching, even addictive, and when he suggested we meet out in Tillsburg sometime I gladly passed along my phone number. But apparently he ignored the number, and instead only used it to look up my address before mailing off the postcard.
I had been to Tillsburg once before, passing through as I aimlessly drove around the countryside. Times like those—wandering alone, with nothing better to do—were common then, even before graduation when my few friends were still around. I remembered Tillsburg as a tidy little island of frame houses huddled in an ocean of cornfields, isolated and self-contained. Bowling alley, pizza place, grocery, laundromat—to me, all of the most basic amenities one needed in a town. I didn't discover Tillsburg until after I found an apartment near campus, but later reflected that I could easily have lived in the town while I was in school, were it not for my superior attitude and the long drives to and from Champaign in the middle of winter on a poorly-maintained two-lane county road.
Central Illinois winters, and the frequent ice storms and routine whiteouts from winds whipping across the snow-covered, table-flat fields, were already nothing more than memories from my college days to reminisce over. Winter was long past, with the summer heat still rising and the soybeans first poking up from the soil. Mile after mile of identically monotonous fields flew past me as I single-mindedly drove toward Tillsburg, wondering about this Wheatyard character.
The windows were down, the wind whipping at my left ear, my arm extended and urging the air inside. Though the air-conditioning was functional I kept it turned off, which conserved gas—putting off the next fillup for another day or two—but irritated my allergies. My nose twitched as I drove on, the pollen and whatever else blew out of the fields tormenting my sinuses.
Despite my superior attitude I had to admit it was beautiful here, in its subtle way. My classmates from the coasts always complained about the dullness of the terrain—flat, waterless, almost completely devoid of trees or any landmarks—between Champaign and Chicago, the town where they went to school and the city where they fled to after graduation, either staying in the city for new jobs or hurrying to O'Hare for flights back home to regions of more obvious beauty.
Seeing beauty here required some imagination. The way the bean sprouts swayed languorously in the breeze, the distant line of trees hinting of a hidden stream, the weathered planks of barns that had seen better days, the rising heat shimmering the air, the rod-straight road of sticky black asphalt trailing away into infinity. And the sunsets, god, the sunsets. All that endless sky, wisps of purple rainless clouds, light falling from pink to orange to red to black and another night of a million stars.
Years earlier the beauty would have been easier to appreciate. Wooden barns freshly painted a vivid red, strikingly set off against the jet black of the shingled roof. Spinning windmills pivoting back and forth in the shifting breeze, the fields a patchwork of different-colored grains, scatterings of black-spotted cows dotting the distant pastures.
But the windmills had ceased to function, idling rusty and decrepit when they still stood at all, the water they once drew from the ground no longer needed after the last of the livestock was sold off. The once-red barns were in similar disrepair, not painted in ten or twenty years, many tumbling down and all of them faded to gray and supplanted by stark white buildings of precast aluminum, while the mottled fields had dulled to the uniform green of corn and soybeans.
I had driven through similar terrain so many times that all of it—the swaying sprouts and rising heat and fading barns and asphalt trailing away to the horizon—went mostly unnoticed, lingering only briefly in the furthest reaches of my mind as I drove on, wary of oncoming cars that toyed with the center line, toward Tillsburg and the odd host who awaited me.