Around the time that the barely solvent town of Hale, Connecticut banned minstrels, it discontinued its firecracker shows after my sister Hawaii took a spark from an exploding firecracker into her eye during the Independence Day celebrations at the baseball field. It hurt her like hell, as do-gooders poured Pepsi Cola into her eye to flush out the chemicals, until Earl “Wheel” Barrel brandished his big thumb and plucked the cinder and ashes out of her eyeball. The he threw a Fourth of July blanket over her and herded her into his truck for a drive to the local emergency room.
No one thought that this was unusual, Wheel had served as a medic in World War II and worked for an ambulance company in New Haven and had always seemed a good neighbor. The rest of our family flung ourselves into our gold station wagon, the Catholic limousine, then our Dad followed Wheel’s truck to the hospital.
Hawaii recovered yet bore the shame as the one who had caught a live spark with her eye and got the annual July 4 firecracker show scrapped. Until she moved away to college.
For years after the incident, Hawaii maintained a special relationship with Wheel, with my parents having to explain to the rest of us why she received one extra present each year from Santa. When he bumped into her, Wheel always took time out to talk to Hawaii, like an adult.
“You know why your folks named you Hawaii?”
“No Wheel, they never told me.”
“During World War Two your Dad served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor and he met your Mom, well she wasn’t your Mom then mind you, just a young girl who had joined the WAVEs to help the servicemen overseas.”
“What’s a WAVE?”
“The Navy doesn’t take women into their ranks, but they needed a lot of people to win that war, so they did a lot of things like clerical stuff, breaking codes, making sure things ran right. They just couldn’t get on ships and fight the enemy hand to hand.”
“What did you do in the war?”
“I was a medic, I got to wear the usual soldier’s helmet but with a red cross in the center, so the Germans would know that I was trying to pull our men out of danger once they got wounded and save their lives. Just like you see in the movies or on Combat. I fought in Sicily, then later in France and Germany, but it wasn’t like your parents had it in Hawaii, everything was destroyed by the time I got to the front. Craters everywhere. I never saw Paris or the Southern coast of France. Your parents were lucky, I always wanted to go to Hawaii.”
My sister loved hearing Wheel talk like this, a gentle man, a medic who ran out with no thought of himself to save his buddies’ lives, like he had rescued her.
That is the Wheel that she saw, the man who during the day drove a school bus and helped ladies carry their groceries to their cars and who gave children silver dollars and smiled and joked with all of the Dads. By dusk, Wheel’s smile receded and his eyes stopped winking, converted to half- mast. Many local adults like Wheel Barrel celebrated independence clutched by alcohol, a member of the Greatest Generation who didn’t always feel so great. Shell shocked is what they called it.
Wheel patronized the only three bars legally serving alcohol in Hale, the Three Bears Lounge, Eleven of Hearts and the one at the Lithuanian-American Club, except for Sundays when they closed and he reshuffled his brain. Luckily for Wheel, we had no police force, and fortuitously for those on the town roads Wheel never ran into a pedestrian or another motor vehicle operator. Wheel specialized in driving his car off the sides of roads.
Some started calling him Asleep at the Wheel, but a small town accepts everyone who lives there, particularly a vet, and inevitably we categorized Wheel as a drunkard and he embraced it. We hugged him back.
Though on one Independence Day, once the town had reinstated the fireworks show for the Bicentennial, Wheel got hugged a bit too much.
Here’s how it started. It was past midnight, the three bars in town had each turfed Wheel out of their premises and he had driven his car into Mountain Lion Brook. Wet, drunk and spinning, he stuck out his thumb for a ride back to his parents’ home.
It took a week for Wheel to arrive at his destination.
At this juncture, what next happened revolves around how one views the world; the gullible few accepted that some naughty ladies stopped to give him a ride and borrowed him. Contrarily, skeptics assume that he simply blacked out and stood a greater chance of aliens abducting him than beauties kidnapping him and debasing him in an apartment for a week.
Factually, the police report from New Haven states that an emaciated Earl Barrel ran into a precinct station on July 11, 1976 and swore out a report that he had been violated by three women, and he showed them his wrists, which did indicate that someone had bound him up. Or Wheel had someone tie up his hands to keep him out of bars and gin joints, something he occasionally did when he took the pledge to forsake alcohol.
Sensing the policemen’s incredulity, Wheel insisted a squad car take him to the alleged crime scene but once they got there, he pointed to an empty lot. The cops took him to the train station, bought him a ticket back to Hale and advised him to never return.
His parents picked him up at the depot and threw him in a hot tub with a waterproof Bible they had purchased at Waterbury’s Holy Land. Uncertain that their prayers had been answered, his parents insisted that he tell no one what he insisted had happened.
Unfortunately, in the next morning’s New Haven Register, a cub reporter typed up and ran the story; to think that this genial town drunkard, Wheel Barrel, marinated in body odor, had been whisked off the road by some ladies in a car and repeatedly ravished by them against his will. We chuckled at the rape of Wheel Barrel.
“A case of beer and a weekend in a hotel with three babes getting laid all week…and he did not even have to pay for the room…that does not much sound like rape me, that sounds like a wet dream!”
“And wouldn’t you know, old Wheel is the only guy who could screw up a wet dream.”
“I guess “the Wheel” disproved the theory that you can be too drunk to fuck!”
Wheel had always been able to balance his valor in war against his subsequent alcohol dependence, but the incident dispelled that illusion. As insignificant and often shiftless a person he was, he could talk to God and God listened. God knew him as Earl, it was wondrous that even a habitual drunkard talked to God. After his abduction and the negative press, Wheel doubted that God wanted to listen to him any longer.
He wanted to leave town as Hawaii had, but his experience in New Haven cost him his job, so he vanished by moving back into his parents’ home.
He lived in the basement, unworthy to sleep in his old bedroom adorned by his Boy Scout merit badges and war medals; he never saw the sun after his father banged in plywood with masonry nails to blot out each small window. His parents religiously bought Wheel his booze a few towns over for appearances sake.
I knew this because I worked in a package store a couple summers during college, the one that the Barrels patronized. One evening a particularly saddened Mrs. Barrel came in and bought a few flasks of brandy. I caught her eye and realized that she recognized me.
I blurted out, “I’m really sorry about Wheel, he didn’t deserve it.”
She nodded and said, “Neither did Hawaii.”
I never saw any of the Barrels again.
I don’t know why we did not believe him, because if everyone had just pooled their stories about what occurred during the holiday and its aftermath, Wheel might not have felt so betrayed. For instance, Clay Fay had seen Wheel get into a car on July 4th, then saw Wheel’s own car married to the brook. He thought nothing more of it, figuring that some Good Samaritans had given Wheel a lift back home, to sleep it off.
Some of the tougher teenagers in town, the ones who smoked and had sex at an early age, partied earlier that night of the alleged abduction with three older women, who offered some of the more adventurous young men a free ride to New Haven and a weekend of pure enjoyment. The ladies did not look so good, even in the dark, so all the guys passed on the offer.
A few months after Wheel’s picaresque detour, the New Haven police raided a brothel and located Wheel’s wallet, laying on a floor, with only a few photos and enough identifying information inside so that the cops mailed it back to him.
But we only shared the facts after Wheel died, until it seemed plausible that Wheel was held against his will. Wheel’s parents had him cremated and they asked my parents to spread his ashes somewhere in Hawaii, where Mom and Dad had bought tickets to travel to for their fortieth anniversary. It was a creepy thing to ask, but my parents served in the war and were simple decent people, so they complied, or at least they said they did.
I suspect that they buried him in the backyard or spread the ashes in the local brook, rather than lug his urn for hours across unfriendly skies. My Mom let something slip once that indicated that Wheel had not traveled far. Probably he never did want to leave town, his service in the military in Europe crippled him and he had plenty of opportunities to fly to Hawaii or any other resort he wished to visit when he had a job, with no children or any other restraints preventing him from world travel. He once liked it in Hale, Connecticut, where he knew everyone and they liked him and he was Hawaii’s hero.
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Donald Hubbard has written six books, one of which was profiled on Regis and Kelly and another was a Boston Globe bestseller and Amazon (category) top ten. Two books have gone into a second edition and he was inducted into the N. E. Basketball Hall of Fame as an author. He has published stories in magazines including Notre Dame Magazine and Crack the Spine. He studied English at Georgetown University and the University of Kent.
