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79
then, she professed, she could see that he would go far. How far did he go with you, Mary-Beth, asked one of the sharper 
young wives of the town, and Mary-Beth smiled beatifically, like a Virgin in a coloring book, knowing that either way her 
status could only rise. 
Meanwhile, Touchdown Tiggler had reached the end of Main Street and turned by the hairdresser called Shear Pleasure, 
which would care for your poodle too if you took him round the back, and while the public address endlessly played `I am just 
a country boy/Who's always known the love and joy/Of coming home ...' Spike Tiggler was welcomed three times from one 
direction and three times from the other. The convertible moved slowly, because after the first triumphal sweep Spike got 
perched up on the back so that everyone could see him, and each time the limo tortoised past the gas-station-cum-liquor-store 
its proprietor Buck Weinhart shouted 'Drive it or milk it!' in remembrance of Spike's habit of abusing slow drivers when the 
pair of them used to stir up the town all those years before. Six times Buck bellowed, `Hey, Spike, drive it or milk it!' and 
Spike, a stocky, dark-haired figure, waved back with a good-ole-boy inclination of the head. Later, at a civic lunch in the 
Wadesville diner, which Spike had once thought very grand but which now reminded him of a funeral parlor, the returning 
hero, at first unfamiliar in his astronaut's crewcut and city suit which made him look like he was trying out for President 
Eisenhower, gave a speech about always remembering where you come from however far it is you go, which was accounted 
fine and dignified by those present, and one of those who spontaneously replied to his words even proposed that in honor of 
the achievement of their favorite son they should strike Wadesville and rename the town Moonsville, an idea which flourished 
for a few weeks and then quietly died, partly because of opposition from Old Jessie Wade, last surviving granddaughter of 
Ruben Wade, a travelling man who way back at the start of the century had decided that pumpkins might grow well on the land 
hereabouts. The pumpkins failed, as it happened, but that was no reason to dishonor the man now. 
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Spike Tiggler had not always been as popular in Wadesville as he was that day in 1971, and it wasn't just Mary-Beth's 
mother who'd thought him wild and regretted that the war had ended too soon for them to ship young Tiggler out East and fight 
the Japs instead of fighting half the town. He was fifteen when they dropped the Hiroshima bomb, an event Mary-Beth's 
mother deplored for purely local reasons; but in due course Spike got his war, flying F-86s up to the Yalu River. Twenty-eight 
missions, two MiG-15s shot down. Reason enough for celebration in Wadesville, though Tiggler did not return at that time, or 
for a while afterwards. As he was to explain it in 1975, during his first appeal for funds at the Moondust Diner (a change of 
name approved even by Jessie Wade), the movement of a man's life, of every life, is marked by escape and return. Escape and 
return, escape and return, like the tides that play in Albermale Sound and up the Pasquotank River to Elizabeth City. We all go 
out with the tide, and then we all come back in on the tide. Some of the audience hadn't ever much left Wadesville in most of 
their lives, so couldn't be expected to have an opinion, and Jeff Clayton remarked afterwards that the other year when he'd 
driven through Fayetteville and around Fort Bragg to visit the World Golf Hall of Fame at Pinehurst and come home in time 
for his beer ration from Alma, it hadn't felt to him much like the tides in the Pasquotank River; still, what did Jeff Clayton 
know, and everyone agreed to give Spike the benefit of the doubt, since Spike had not just been out inta the world but - as old 
Jessie Wade herself so memorably put it - had been out outa the world as well. 
Spike Tiggler dated the first ratchet-click of the escape-and-return cycle in his life to the day his father took him to Kitty 
Hawk, way back before the replica ark went up as a worship center. At this time, there was only the flat runway and the flat 
open sky above, and then, across an empty road with barely the glint of a distant truck, some flat dunes and the softly churning 
sea. Where other kids found allure in the lipstick and jazz of a brawling city, Spike found it in the calming simplicity of the 
land, sea and sky at Kitty Hawk. This, at any rate, was how he 
[p. 253] 
explained it at another of his fund-raising dinners, and they believed him, even though neither Mary-Beth nor Buck Weinhart 
had heard him talk like that back at the time. 
Spike Tiggler's home town was strong for the Democrats and even stronger for the Baptists. The Sunday after his trip to 
Kitty Hawk, Spike was heard displaying a rather too disrespectful sort of enthusiasm about the Wright Brothers outside the 
Church of the Holy Water, and old Jessie Wade opined to the thirteen-year-old that if God had intended us to fly, he'd have 
given us wings. `But God intended us to drive, didn't he?' replied young Spike, a shade too quick for courtesy, and actually 
pointing at the freshly-shined Packard in which his elderly detractor had ridden the two hundred yards to church; whereupon 
Spike's father reminded him that if it were not for the Sabbath, the Lord might very well have intended Spike to receive a 
whack upside the head. The exchange, rather than anything about land and sea and sky, was what the inhabitants of Wadesville 
recalled of Spike Tiggler's conversation, c. 1943. 
A couple of years passed, the bomb fell on Hiroshima too soon for Mary-Beth's mother, and Spike discovered that if God 
hadn't given him wheels, then at least his father would occasionally loan him some. On warm evenings he and Buck Weinhart 
would play their game of picking out a slow automobile on a back road and trailing up behind it until their radiator grille was 
almost in the other fellow's trunk. Then, as they pulled softly out and swept past, the two of them would yell in unison, 'Drive 
it or milk it, fella!' It was in the same car and at about this time that Spike, his eyes bulging with hope, said to Mary-Beth, `But 
if God didn't intend us to use it, what did he put it there for?' - a remark which set back his cause quite a few weeks, Mary-Beth 
being of a more church-obedient nature than young Spike, and this courting line of his in any case not being the most 
persuasive ever invented. A few weeks later, however, Spike found himself in the back seat murmuring, `I really don't think I 
can live without you, Mary-Beth,' and this seemed to do the trick. 
Spike left Wadesville not too long afterwards, and more or 
[p. 254]

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½