After Visiting Friends

“I’d go with you. I want Glenn to see it.”

  So, next thing I know, we’ve got a reunion weekend planned for McCook. Chris, me, Mark, and my nephew. Three generations.

  It had been years since I had seen McCook. The last time, I was a year or so out of grad school (Medill, almost thirty years to the day after my father got his master’s there, too) and I rented a Century and drove I-80 flat and fast to McCook. Looking for him. Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl had just come out, and I play it over and over as I drive from Chicago.

  And now that I am reporting all of this, trying to get inside my father’s head, I need to go back again and see the streets, the house, talk to people. I need to inhabit the space. The fact, though, that I was now leading a group tour freaked me out. Especially when I added in my deception of my brother: Hey, want to come to McCook? It’ll be fun. We can bond. Oh, but by the way, I’m carrying an enormous secret about him and I’m going to keep it from you.

  So often I wonder, do all brothers end up at Kitty Hawk? Flipping a coin to write history. One will fly. The other stands slack-jawed with awe. Maybe chasing his brother. The wind in his face now. The wind that lifts his brother.

  # # #

  Nebraska.

  What do you know of it? If you and I were paired on Password and you gave the clue “Neh-brass-kaaaaahhh . . . ,” I’d shout, “Boys Town!”

  Nebraska—where orphans went. A place where the stronger brother hoists his weaker kid brother onto his back to tote him through the blizzard to the orphanage that will take them in and, when a stranger assumes it must be a wearying weight, tells the man, “He ain’t heavy. He’s m’brother.”

  Makes me think of the movie.

  Sunday afternoons, WGN ran Family Classics, a movie show hosted by Frazier Thomas—a rotund, jovial man whose day job was hosting Garfield Goose and Friends.

  But—Boys Town. If you’ve never seen it, true story. 1938. Trough of the Great Depression. Spencer Tracy plays Father Flanagan, a renegade reverend who starts a home for orphaned boys living on the streets. So long as a boy can get himself to Boys Town, he’ll have a place to live. And the thing is, the place is entirely self-sufficient. There’s a farm, a machine shop. Everything. You see it in the movie and think, Who would want parents when I can live in a town run by kids?

  That’s where Mickey Rooney comes in. He plays Whitey Marsh, the boy who was “born to be hung,” and he spends the first chunk of the movie fighting with Tracy. But there’s this little kid named—what else?—Pee Wee. He’s eight to Rooney’s twelve, and he follows Rooney like a stray. Rooney hates him.

  Until Pee Wee gets hit by a car.

  Rooney cracks and spins into one of those Rooney performances, wailing and sobbing like only Rooney can. But in this moment, his life changes. He is a boy reborn. He becomes a leader of other boys. All is well. But this is not a good movie for a seven-year-old to be watching if he has a dead father from Nebraska.

  It is, however, a good movie to see if you are a boy who is terrified of becoming an orphan. It’s Americanized Dickens. It teaches pluck. Determination. And it gives comfort. Comfort in the knowledge that somewhere Out There, in that place called Nebraska, that place whence I sprang, I could, if and when it all falls apart, find a safe home. It was all so simple. So right. So Nebraska.

  Nebraska.

  For years after he was dead, an envelope would come each Christmas from Boys Town. Their yearly appeal, addressed to my father. I took it as a sign that he was Out There. Somewhere. That he was okay. Alive. Signaling to me, his boy.

  For years, Boys Town was all I knew of Nebraska. That place somewhere Out There.

  That’s why I knew that to go forward, I needed to go back. Back to where he’d come from. What he’d left behind.

  #

  A few days before my cousin and my brother and my eight-year-old nephew and I are set to gather, I get an e-mail from my sister-in-law, Wendy, the subject line being “Glenn”:

  I know he’s very excited about the trip. He went online yesterday and wanted to see what the weather is going to be in Nebraska. Can you do me a favor, though? Keep an eye on him for how much he is talking about dead men. Recently, he made a couple of comments to me about how he doesn’t have any grandfathers. He said, “Dads don’t live very long, do they?”

  7

  THE ZEPHYR

  Denver.

  We meet in the terminal. I am the first, so I wait at the gate for my cousin. Even though I have not seen him in a good thirty years, when he ambles off the jetway, I know him immediately. He looks just like his father: big eyes, gray mustache.

  Soon after, my brother and nephew arrive, and then the four of us start driving east out of Denver, with the remains of the day and Highway 34. For the first few miles, I’m made to trail a rusty combine, bleeding seed before me, across the access road. But then the highway. How the road unreels. Driving out here—the blue sky blanketing you from horizon to horizon—it’s almost like you feel you are driving along the bottom of a gigantic aquarium. The fields, burnished gold and brown like sand on the ocean floor. I always think about the early maps of this territory, where this whole swath of continent from the Rockies to the Dakotas is labeled the Great American Desert. Dry land, smashed flat by the crush of time and ice. Out here, you can almost feel the frontier crack open.

  For centuries, no one really thought much of anything could grow or live here. Then men discovered an enormous lake. Buried. Stretching from Texas to South Dakota. What remains of the glaciers. Ten thousand years ago, when they were leaving the Rockies behind, their cold runoff seeped into the earth and filled up a huge emptiness hidden deep beneath the surface. The Ogallala Aquifer. That’s what scientists call it. In the 1950s, men figured out how to drill pumps deep enough to tap it and harness the water to grow crops. If you’ve ever flown over the flyover states and seen those great wheels of green amid barren brown flatlands, that’s most likely cropland nursed by the Ogallala. “Wheels of Life,” they call them out here.

  #

  I like driving. Relaxes me. Especially out here, places like this. The void of the road lets you meditate.

  That’s not the case now. Not with these guys in the car.

  I’m stressed. Thinking over and over: I am my father. A deceiver. A keeper of secrets. His secrets. I can’t get it out of my head that when I tell my brother what I’ve learned, he will be furious with me. What right do I have to shatter his world?

  So I do what I always do when I am with others and uneasy: I ask questions. Get them talking. Anything to shift the spotlight from me. Some of it is a need to set others at ease. And some of it is a never-ending search for answers. These are key traits of those of us in what I think of as the Dead Fathers Club. I can always spot a member. If you are one of us, you know the traits. We’ll do anything to keep the focus off us. To not talk about who we are. But if you are made to enter the DFC early enough, you are presented with no end of situations in which you are forced to reveal your membership.

  Here’s how it went in first grade. Mrs. Glendon making us do that thing you have to do every year—circle the room and tell your new classmates who you are.

  Mrs. Glendon: “And what is your name?”

  Me: “Mike.”

  Mrs. Glendon: “And tell us about your family.”

  Me: “I have a big brother named Chris and a mom.”

  Mrs. Glendon: “I think you’re forgetting about your father.”

  Me: “I’m not forgetting him. He’s dead.”

  CUT TO: Shocked look on Mrs. Glendon’s face.

  CUT TO: Me at my desk, unease coursing through me, sure that I will be punished for this.

  And the older I got—it only got richer.

  CUT TO: Spanish class, seventh grade

  “¿Miguelito, y tu familia?”

  “Yo tengo mi madre y un hermano.”

  “¿Y tu padre?”

  “Mi padre está . . . ¿dead?”

  “No, Miguelito. No se dice dead. Se di
ce tu padre está muerto. Mwer-toe!”

  “Mi padre está . . . muerto.”

  “¡Bien!”

  #

  The Dead Fathers Club.

  You’ve seen our photographs. Newspapers love a good shot of new members being inducted into the DFC.

  A cop or firefighter dies in the line of duty. A few days later, a funeral. The man’s son stands atop the church steps as the burnished box is borne toward a black hearse. And the boy, he’s maybe eight or ten, maybe for the first time in his life he wears a suit, and maybe for the first time a necktie that his uncle knotted for him, teaching him that morning that bit of male knowledge. There’s so much more that his father won’t ever teach him about what it takes to make one’s way as a man in the world. Never will he know those moments when his father sits side by side with him, his son, and shares the lessons of life. His wisdom. Perhaps his sorrows. A secret. And on this boy’s head now, a battered fire helmet or cop hat, lopsided on his too-small head. And still the boy stands, watching his father’s coffin, aloft. A solitary bagpiper piping the pallbearers to the idling Cadillac. Men in uniforms and white gloves salute. Another new member.

  #

  One reason I ask so many questions, maybe why I became a reporter: It’s what happens when you have a dead father. Even now, my boyhood so far behind me, I believe I might have made something more of my life had my father lived. Had he lived to share with me his secrets to life. His knowledge. To this day, still, I scavenge for scraps in the hearts and minds of men I meet. Forever searching, believing the answers are out there. Somewhere.

  Because we without fathers must out of necessity create ourselves.

  It’s true that necessity is the mother of invention. But for those of us without fathers, there is a deeper truth—necessity is the mother of self-invention.

  #

  My cousin is all too happy to talk. He’s that guy. And because he’s twelve, fourteen years older than my brother and me, he knows parts of the Hainey family story that we’ve never heard. Like with our grandfather, C.P. All I saw was a skeleton in flannel. After my father died, for a few Christmases, C.P. would take the train to Chicago and Dick would plop him at our house for a day or two to visit. He’d sit in the rocking chair, watching reruns on TV with my brother and me, popping out his dentures and fiddling with them, and smelling of that old-man smell. Once, my mother thought he was dead and she had to call an ambulance.

  That look in his dull, yellowed eyes as the paramedic shone a light into them.

  It was during that visit, just before he left, that C.P. gave me his wallet. It was leather, the color of watery bourbon. Whipcord stitching on the sides and western images hand-tooled on it. And in big letters, CPH. We were watching Hogan’s Heroes. He says, “I want to give you this.” And he pushes it into my hands.

  “A man’s got to have a wallet. That’s the only way anyone knows who you are.”

  I open it.

  He says, “What’re you looking for? I gave you a wallet, son, not money. Just because you have a wallet, that doesn’t mean someone fills it with money for you. That’s your job.”

  Then he laughed. Head like a jack-o’-lantern.

  For years I kept that wallet in my dresser drawer. Sometimes at night I’d take it out and wonder if my father had ever carried it. I tried to use it in high school, but it was big and bulky, and one day a kid in the cafeteria made fun of it. Called me Ranger Rick. I never used it again.

  C.P. told people he was an orphan. That’s as much as I really know of him. That, and his roots were in Ireland. No one knew which town. I never knew if he was orphaned in Ireland or in America.

  My cousin says, “He was orphaned in America. That’s what we think.”

  “But how did he come to Nebraska?”

  “Orphan Train.”

  #

  Starting in the 1850s, orphans in the East Coast slums would be packed onto railroad cars and shipped into the prairies, their names pinned to their chests. The locomotives rumbled west, from New York to Kansas, Chicago to the Dakotas. Farm families desperate for extra labor met the trains at the stations and the orphans would be paraded onto the platform, where people would inspect their teeth, examine their hands, test their muscles. If you wanted a kid, you signed the papers, took one home.

  My brother and I are quiet. Just the hum of wheels unseen as we push into the darkness of the High Plains. I think of my grandfather, maybe a boy of eight. Maybe the same age as my nephew now. I think of him on a locomotive to nowhere he knows. Confused. Scared. Leaving his past behind, leaving his dead parents behind. A boy becoming his own man.

  #

  1972. My mother tries to get involved with our church—Mary, Seat of Wisdom. One afternoon, I see her setting the dining-room table, not the kitchen table.

  She tells me that we are having an orphan to dinner. It’s for her church group.

  Ever since my father has died, I’ve obsessed about becoming an orphan. I lie in bed, contemplating the countless ways my mother could die, and what will happen to my brother and me. I am determined not to be caught unprepared.

  Each night in my mind I run through what will be required of me in my orphan life. I foresee talk about splitting up my brother and me, maybe him being sent to live with our grandmother and grandfather, me dispatched to Uncle Dick. Or we will have to live with our grandparents in the house where our mother grew up. We would sleep in the converted attic bedroom and be made to attend Saint Turibius School and be known as the Orphan Brothers.

  Each night, I double-check the shoe box beneath my bed where I hid those things I would take with me at a moment’s notice. My Scramble Box, I called it. I got the idea one night, watching The World at War or one of those shows. An old man spoke of how, as a child, he had to flee his home one night.

  “There was no notice,” he said.

  All that remained of his family, he said, was what he carried, he said. “Nothing.”

  I’d be prepared.

  #

  The Buick. Dark winter night. My mother and I. We drive to get the orphan. An area on the other side of the forest preserve. No homes. Outside our car, nothing but a deep blackness.

  We come to a clearing. The road rises. I see lights on the top of the hill. I ask my mother what this place is.

  “It’s where the orphans live.”

  I fight the voice in my head that believes, in truth, she is making arrangements to leave me here.

  #

  We sit at the dining-room table, my brother, the orphan, and me. My mother makes the only sound, bashing her potato masher against the pot.

  The orphan has long black hair and bangs. She wears a blue dress, and in her hair there’s a bow of red yarn.

  “Our dad’s dead, too,” I say.

  The orphan looks at me, says nothing.

  #

  I hear my nephew, a voice from the back of the car. In the darkness, I strain to see him, but I can’t make him out.

  He says, “At school, I signed up for Journalism Club.”

  I look at my brother in the rearview mirror. My brother says, “He wanted to.” And then my nephew says he’s working on his first story.

  “It’s about hidden things,” my nephew says. “Things you can’t see but are really there. Some men came into our school and knocked down a wall to fix something, and now you can see what was hidden inside. I’m writing about that. Things you never knew were there all along but hidden inside.”

  I say to Glenn, “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Nebraska.”

  “You know we’re going to see where Grampa Bob grew up, right?”

  Glenn says, “Oh.” An “Oh” that I know is not comprehending. But I let it go.

  My cousin breaks in.

  “You know your father was a mistake, right?”

  “What?” I say.

  “Yeah. Do the math. Dick and Bob are twelve years apart. Gramma Hainey was what—almost thirty-five when she had him? And C.P. was f
orty-five—ancient, in those days, to become a father. Dick told me Bob was not planned. Change-of-life baby, they called them back then. And he said Bob knew it. When C.P.’d get drunk, he’d yell, ‘You’ll never be more than a lousy mistake.’ ”

  #

  I get us to McCook sometime after midnight. The Chief Motel at the edge of town. B Street. My brother picked it because it has an indoor pool.

  “A little reward for Glenn,” he says, “after we’ve done our thing.”

  The rooms ring the pool. Well-worn Astroturf the path we walk. In my room, the whiff of chlorine. I lie on the bed, wired from the road, staring at the ceiling, thinking and not thinking of my father. Of a life unplanned. What am I but the son of a mistake?

  I find a scratch pad in the nightstand, beneath the Bible. I write “Men of the Hainey Family” and map our line.

  #

  In the morning, a knock on my door: Glenn.

  I tell him I have something for him.

  He stares at the scratch pad.

  “Know what that is?” I say.

  “Where I come from?”

  “Where we come from. And you know that Daddy and Uncle Mike are going to be around for a long time, right? We’re going to watch you grow up.”

  He looks up at me and nods.

  # # #

  Wind blows in. Wind is all there is. The zephyr, they call it out here: the west wind. No matter where you stand in this town, the wind is always around you. Surrounding you. Pushing you.

  From our motel, it’s a two-minute drive down Highway 34 to Norris Avenue. Two-, three-story limestone storefronts. Many empty. Shuttered. Tumbleweeds stumble in and out of the road, blown here from somewhere out there. Sometimes they get stuck on the grille of a pickup truck. Or you see them underneath. Dragged.

  When my father was a boy here, in the ’30s and ’40s, McCook was a Dust Bowl town of six thousand on the high plains of Red Willow County. The immigrants who settled this land in the late nineteenth century—Swedes and Germans, some Irish—ended up here because they’d been duped by the flyers that American land companies and railroads had circulated in Europe. They came believing they were entering a new Eden.