The Man Who Walked Backward Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Ben Montgomery

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: September 2018

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  ISBN 978-0-316-43804-9

  E3-20180824-DA-PC

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Map

  1. Those Golden Days

  2. Doing Something

  3. Dirt Devils and Details

  4. Postcards and Publicity

  5. Where the Grass Grew the Thickest

  6. Round, Spinning

  7. Rubble and Race

  8. Standoff at the Red River

  9. Just Human, Same As You

  10. The Intent Is Sublime

  11. American Dream

  12. Bone Dry Forever

  13. Don’t Stop

  14. An Ounce of Attention

  15. Are You Crazy?

  16. Mopery in the Second Degree

  17. Choices and Consequences

  18. Persevering Pedalist

  19. Bamboozled

  20. Reverse in Wedded State

  21. Vengeance

  22. Powder Keg

  23. Hinterlands

  24. A Year on Foot

  25. Murder Jail

  26. Going Back, Forward, Upright

  27. Lone Star

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Also by Ben Montgomery

  Newsletter

  For John Burruss

  Never mind how far he got.

  What it is, is the tilt of the hat.

  —Dodie Messer Meeks

  Dear reader,

  Plennie Wingo died in poverty in the fall of 1993. He was buried in Wichita Falls, Texas, about 180 miles from my hometown of Slick, Oklahoma. I first heard of him in 2013 while researching unconventional pedestrians. A few years later, when I could not forget him, I decided to try to write a book. The first thing I did was buy a Clason’s Touring Atlas, circa 1931, one of the first ever made, so I could follow in his footsteps to see what he might’ve seen, and to see how we’ve changed. One note about change: to avoid littering the text with calculations, I’ve left it to you, dear reader, to put dollar amounts into familiar context. So, $1 in 1931 is equal to roughly $16 in 2018; $5 then is $80 now; $10 is $160; and so on.

  I’ve tried my best to tell his story true. Nothing in this book is fabricated by me, including the dialogue. If it’s in quotes, it comes from a historic document or Plennie Wingo’s own humble account of his trip. I’ve tried to tell the story of that dark period true, as well. For that reason, and because we are occasionally mean to one another, you should be aware that this book depicts quite a bit of violence.

  Thank you for reading,

  Ben

  1.

  Those Golden Days

  Sunrise, West Texas.

  Time of morning when the dead black gives up to the first throws of yellowpink in the east, out beyond Fort Worth and Dallas, past Shreveport and Jackson and Montgomery and Savannah. A man here in Abilene walks this morning, like every morning, down a bone-dry farm-to-market road outside town. He is out before the sun because he walks backward, that is to say, he walks in reverse, and he chooses this time so he may behave in this odd fashion cloaked in darkness lest his neighbors see and cast judgment upon him, make him for crazy. His own mind is fairly certain on the point, but he’ll admit there is room for doubt.

  He is not a brilliant man. Some would say he does not even encroach on smart. But inside his balding head he has a bold idea, and sometimes when a certain kind of man has a certain kind of idea, one that he considers good, that good idea takes hold of him and it swells up behind his eyeballs and expands, balloonlike, so big that it crowds out all the other thoughts and ideas, and it becomes the one thing he thinks about, the only thing. Such is the case with Plennie Lawrence Wingo, who is nearly penniless but full of ambition just shy of his thirty-sixth birthday and a hair short of what would be one of the worst years in American history.

  The idea has become an obsession, though he’s not ready to admit that just yet. He thinks of it when he wakes in the morning and it follows him all day long, and when he closes his eyes at night he is wrapped completely in the blanket of his vision.

  The idea is why he walks. It is why he walks backward.

  Five miles some mornings. Ten, others. Hours alone in the last gasp of night, scooting retrograde across the long shadows drawn on the dawning landscape, the place they called the Great American Desert, Llano Estacado, past the roadside tufts of buffalo grass and thickets of honey mesquite, the reaching lechuguilla rods and smoke bush and angry explosions of butterfly weed. Backward across the land from which they pulled oil until that went bust; the land upon which, before the oil, they raised cattle until that too went bust; the land from which, before the oil and the cattle, they harvested buffalo bones, full skulls and skeletons that once gave shape to the great roaming beasts of the Plains, the givers of tools and food and warmth for the natives, and, after them, fertilizer for the white men in sweat-stained cowboy hats who stacked their bones like cordwood, building white hills head-high and as far as you could see. The bones brought twelve to fifteen dollars a ton to any man resourceful enough to pile them high, and they were plentiful in Abilene, the epicenter of this macabre market for three hundred miles in most directions. They took the bones, then the beasts, then the oil beneath, and then it was all gone. What was next for the taking was anyone’s guess. What else was left?

  Now the town near which he walks holds abundant life, or at least enough to advertise to the outside world. The rising sun in the east outlines its elegant business structures and its beautiful, commodious homes, its apartment houses with up-to-date Frigidaire refrigeration, its magnificent public buildings and institutions like the Abilene State Hospital for Epileptics and Simmons College, its model school buildings, three now, its federal post office and courthouse, its compress, its oil mill, its electric light plant, its ice factory, its impressive fairgrounds, its artificial lake, its parks, its paved boulevards, its railways, and, pitched against the weak sunlight, its Paramount Theatre, built this very year, 1930, its grandeur unrivaled between El Paso and Fort Worth. To think that so much had sprung forth from nothing but dry Texas dirt in just fifty years.

  That same dry dirt chalks his teeth and cakes his forehead, and his garments
show signs of a man who has put in a full day’s work by the time most are beginning to wipe sleep from their eyes, drag on their trousers, and start the percolator. He thinks about them, how they’d whisper if they ever caught sight of him out here, all alone and going backward. How they’d wonder what he was up to, what kind of crazy had gotten hold of him. They would, of course, ask him, Why? Over and over again, Why are you doing this? Even now, he is formulating his response.

  He has not known a full day’s work in some time. They’d talk about that, too, for sure. How his lot had soured. How they’d read about his troubles with the police in the paper. Another reason he is here, backpedaling in the dawn.

  He hoped they’d remember the good times and his good name. He’d experienced high days, sure, when his future seemed full of promise. He was a man of business for a time, resourceful, straight as a preacher on Sunday.

  His professional life in Abilene began six years before, in February 1924, at age twenty-nine, when he struck a lease deal with C. Hall for the north half of the lower story of the Morgan Jones building at 127 Chestnut Street, in Abilene’s busiest district, for a monthly payment of $65, and opened a restaurant soon after. He was P. L. Wingo, owner of the Crescent Café. Those golden days.

  Then, in March of ’27, looking for a bigger slice, he signed a lease with C. C. Tate, renting the basement beneath Tate’s Dry Goods store on Lots 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, at the corner of Chestnut and South First Streets for a sum of $30 a month on the promise that Mr. Tate would build a staircase from the basement to the first floor so customers could use the water closet. He was then P. L. Wingo, owner of the Mobley Café and Dining Room. Glorious days.

  He swept floors and bused tables and counted dollar bills. He served meat-and-threes to tenant farmers and ham and eggs to country lawyers and fried squash to the ladies from the Baptist church. The city directory called him proprietor and the humble newspaper advertisements he ran beckoned the hungry, the conservative, the children. There is no better way to make mother happy than to take her to a nice lunch room for a Sunday dinner.

  Things were good for Plennie Wingo. Things were good for most everybody.

  In the blink of the last few breakneck years of that roaring decade, something incredible happened. Something happened that had never happened before and would never be repeated. Books would be written, scores of them, about the era of vision and optimism and boundless hope.

  Who knows exactly where it started, but if you back up a bit, you can see the boom taking shape. Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell in 1914. Germany sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915. Ten million American men walked to their local polling stations in the summer of 1917 to register for the war Woodrow Wilson had finally decided to enter. Fifteen days later, Newton D. Baker, Wilson’s secretary of war, stuck his hand into a goldfish bowl containing 10,500 numbers and drew out a black capsule marked No. 258, drafting into service one man from each precinct across a country that was not at all ready for the First World War.

  If this was the sowing of the seeds of hope, maybe its roots took hold in one of those foreign foxholes filled by one of those 24 million American doughboys along the Paris-Metz highway or in Murmansk or Romonofska. Or maybe it was back home, where the women planted victory gardens in public parks and went to work in huge numbers for the first time on assembly lines in factories, building trucks and munitions for shipment overseas. Maybe its first shoots emerged from the soil after 17 million soldiers and civilians had been killed abroad, when the American men came home—some disengaged and disenfranchised, all having passed the first big test of loyalty in a young multicultural nation—to a newfangled communal exaltation conjured by a government trying to dampen nationalism abroad and fuel it at home: the patriotic parade.

  They marched stone-eyed down American boulevards and heard tell they were heroes. Some of them believed it.

  Whatever the building blocks of the prosperity to come, when Warren Harding was elected president in November 1920 by the smallest turnout of voters in American history, he did something that set the tone for the next decade in a country weary of war and scares and moral rebukes. He gathered his clubs and balls and played a round of golf.

  “America’s present need,” the former small-town newspaperman said, “is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

  What followed was optimism, and mass production, and the mass production of optimism. The city skylines rose and invention burst and productivity soared. Henry Ford turned out a new car every ten seconds and the nation’s first network of dealers rose up to sell them, followed quickly by a vast web of paved roads, traffic lights, hot dog stands, repair shops, and filling stations, allowing the weekend adventurer to drive the countryside confident that he wouldn’t wind up spending the night stuck in a rut or searching for a spark plug. Almost as quickly rose a nationwide network of antennae and broadcasting stations and hookups to pipe the phenomenon called radio into homes across America. Advertisers immediately lined up to introduce a Happiness Boys song with a quick pitch about insurance or greeting cards, a controversial new offense on family circles called a “commercial.”

  If you looked at a graph that mapped economic ebbs and flows of the decade, you’d see a jagged but lofty incline starting in 1923 and growing yearly toward a glorious mountain of prosperity. The United States was on its way to manufacturing 43 percent of the entire world’s products, and the advertisements in the new glossy national magazines like TIME made a man want one of everything.

  A pretied bow tie, a pair of fringe-tongued Mayflowa brogues, and a Jordan roadster in the garage. “Somewhere west of Laramie, there’s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about,” smooth-talked the Vanity Fair ad for the latter. “She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is, the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame.…”

  And Campbell’s, by God! Campbell’s was making twenty-one different kinds of canned soup. Not just tomato and beef and pea soup—you could get ox tail soup, turtle soup, mutton soup. Some Plennie Wingo couldn’t even pronounce. Julienne? Printanier? Consommé?

  By 1925, American capitalism churned like a hungry machine. The number of manufacturing facilities in the United States had skyrocketed and the worth of that output sprang up. In just five years, industrial production had nearly doubled. Bellwether radio sales, which accounted for $60 million in American spending in 1922, grew 1,400 percent.

  “No Congress of the United States ever assembled…has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time,” said President Calvin Coolidge, who had taken over from Harding and whose name would become synonymous with “prosperity,” in his last message on the State of the Union to Congress in 1928. “In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment…and the highest record of years of prosperity.”

  This wasn’t a speculative splurge like in 1637, when Dutch venturers saw wealth in tulip bulbs, or 1720, when Parisians lost their shirts hoping to find gold in Louisiana. It wasn’t the real estate bubble of 1814 or untamed speculation in canal investment in 1830 or the railroad boom of 1873. The economy was buoyant, profits endless.

  “The main source of these unexampled blessings,” the president said, “lies in the integrity and character of the American people.”

  Business earnings soared. Big corporations ate smaller ones whole. The market gave birth to powerful companies like United States Steel Corporation, International Harvester, and American Tobacco, and gave rise to a wealth of utilities, food
retailers, variety stores, motion picture theaters, and chain retail stores like Montgomery Ward, American Stores, and Woolworth, companies built to last.

  And men dumped their money into investments and reaped the profits hand over fist. They threw money at the stock market, as much as they could scrape together, and became proud shareholders in companies that were great and some that were phony. They flocked south, with income and access never before available, and bought subdivided land in Florida, sight unseen, both waterfront properties with golden views and worthless mosquito-filled tracts of muck and detritus, and called it all paradise. Then they sold it for a profit. These new playboys and sun worshipers didn’t need to be coaxed to buy in. They needed an excuse. And even the swamp had value.

  Never before had so many become so stupendously, so painlessly, so expeditiously rich.

  They were happy. They were credulous.

  And there stood Plennie Wingo, whose father died when he was a baby, whose mother married his uncle and bore ten more children, who learned to read and write and saved his money and opened a shop to cash in on the swirling American adventure. He was a self-made man at a time when the business of America was business, as the president said. The businessman, someone else said, was the dictator of destiny, ousting the statesman, the priest, the philosopher. The Man Nobody Knows, which cast Jesus of Nazareth as “the world’s greatest business executive” and the parable of the prodigal son as the world’s greatest advertisement, topped the best seller list, and the optimistic autosuggestion that “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better” was on the lips of men everywhere. It was an age of improvement, and Plennie was riding shotgun, all angular youth and bootstraps. He had a house in the city and a wife who loved him and a young daughter to whom he could one day leave his fortune. He leaned in the doorway of his café before the crowds trickled in, one hand in his pocket, a smile on his face, his necktie tight, shirt starched stiff, and his spit-shined wing tips planted firm on the productive earth of a country oozing with promise.