On March 3, 1952, Eldon and Betsy ”Betz” Langdon walked up Dallas City National Bank’s faux marble steps and hesitantly plunked down ten percent of the $11,300 owed on a modest two-bedroom house with a small backyard they had just purchased at the corner of 2nd and Cottonwood. They promised to pay the bank $57.78 each and every month for the next twenty years, which, God willing, should be doable with her working at the fountain pen factory in Fort Madison (females with small, dexterous hands for piece-meal work were employed on the factory floor, but nowhere else) and him, employed by the Hancock County road department to patch roads and fix bridges (by manual labor).
Because they were both employed and because Betz often got home much later than the shift-over horn at 4:30 due to the open drawbridge that allowed barges to pass under, but not vehicles over, the Mississippi, the three Langdon kids, hammered out in quick succession, were on their own after school. They were latchkey kids before the term was coined.
Doug, the oldest, a Steve McQueen-type, wasn’t much of a student, but was popular at parties, supplying the goods he siphoned from the old man’s liquor bottles hidden underneath the sink behind the waste basket. Doug drove the baddest car in town, favored rock band t-shirts and tight Levis, and smoked Marlboro Reds in a box openly. He was the cool kid in class until he knocked-up his fifteen-year old girlfriend, dropped out of school, got hitched, and became a welder.
Janey was the only daughter. She was popular with the boys, an easy make-out mark. The free spirit who wore flowers in her hair and went barefoot, got pregnant at 16, the father, any number of high school horndogs. Two years short of Roe v Wade, she gave birth to a son, William. Unmarried--what pre-adult male would want that anchor?--she was keenly aware of the invisible scarlet A she bore whenever she and her bastard son Billy went about town.
The youngest, Robbie, was a quiet kid who loved animals. He was the only progeny who not only graduated high school, but from veterinary school, as well. Dr. Landon married a girl from nearby Fountain Green, raised a large family out in the country, and prospered, although his success did not play well with his jealous, struggling and miserable siblings.
The little house at 2nd and Cottonwood became a little house of chaos--high school kids hanging out (near the kitchen sink), wounded or sick animals in cages given space (if there was any) in the unkempt house, a rambunctious toddler running amok. Betz preferred the distance and peace of factory work; her husband’s only obligation was to bring home the dead and sliced pig belly packaged in cellophane.
2
Eldon Langdon went to work on an already sweltering August 22, 1978, morning; by noon, the temperature was 89° with 78% humidity—typical summer weather conditions along the river—yet his crew’s schedule for the day was filling in the minefield-like potholes on Connable Road by muscle and shovel. (Back in those days, meteorologists had not yet come up with a heat index, the feels-like combination of temperature and water vapor in the atmosphere which, on this day, reached 113°.)
Because hard work, rugged individualism, and macho swagger was still the ideal for most white, blue-collar working stiffs, the road repair crew labored over hot asphalt without complaining, at least to each other. Complaining, and worse--slacking off--wasn’t manly or American, and if you did complain or slacked off you risked being teased as a Liberace, a homophobic moniker bandied about with a wink and a nudge. Us non-Liberaces don’t take breaks and we don’t bitch and moan, neither. And bringing bottled ice water to the workplace would be for the weaker sex, that’s why they call ’em jugs. Haha!
At lunch break, Eldon sat along the edge of the blacktop using a truck tire for shade and ate a bologna sandwich on Wonder Bread lathered in Miracle Whip, a little baggie of chips staled by the hot, wet air, a banana and some knock-off Oreos; for dessert, he enjoyed a couple luke-warm beers (water bad/Schlitz good) and a unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette. It was an unhealthy last meal.
3
Eldon’s demise by heat stroke was warm and squishy.
He went back spading asphalt dehydrated from lack of water, hastened by the alcohol, his body temperature rising to 101 degrees, three above normal. The arteries protruding on his forearms look like grape vines wrapped around a post—very unLiberacelike—his dilating blood vessels trying to move as much overheated blood to the surface as possible.
His heart began to pump madly, trying to keep the vessels full, but not enough blood, and the oxygen it carries, to reach his brain. He paused to rest, feeling lightheaded and faint. His vision dimmed and narrowed. He felt wobbly and strange. He thought, wrongly, that his cramping muscles would be temporary.
When his temperature rose to 106 and his limbs and core began convulsing in seizures and Eldon started puking, his foreman loaded him into the truck and rushed him the 15 miles to Carthage Memorial. His internal power plant was melting down:
At 111 degrees his cells began to degrade, his liver cells, shot halfway to hell, anyway, dying; the tiny tubes in his kidneys grilled. Now his muscle tissues started to disintegrate. The sheaths of his blood vessels began to leak, causing hemorrhaging throughout his body, including his lungs and heart. Bloody puke now drenched the cab’s interior.
Almost to the emergency room, but now the holes in his intestines allowed toxins to escape, disintegrating his insides. Purple hemorrhagic spots appeared on his skin; underneath the dermis, the internal damage was so extensive that almost no major organ escaped untouched.
Wheeled into intensive care, his limbs askew, eyes staring vacantly, Eldon received a small measure of good fortune when he lapsed into a coma. A first-responder touched his bare arm. The skin was clammy. He felt for a pulse. There was none. He was permanently retired.
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