After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  There’s still no good reason for a man to live on this parched stretch of the American plains, where Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska all huddle against one another. The driving forces of McCook’s creation were like so much of America: necessity and money. Maybe McCook’s most glamorous moment came in the 1930s when the Burlington Zephyr, “a cruise ship on wheels,” regularly passed through McCook. The Zephyr epitomized streamlined elegance and ran from Denver to Chicago. On May 26, 1934, the first one roared through McCook on a dawn-to-dusk run; that day, it set a record for train speed. The Zephyr still runs, under the Amtrak banner. And it still stops in McCook—at 3:43 a.m.

  We go to Bieroc’s, a café on Norris, to get coffee. There are two thermoses, labeled REGULAR and MIDWESTERN. I ask, “What’s Midwestern?”

  “Strong,” the woman says.

  We walk the main drag. We pass the JC Penney catalog store. The Ben Franklin five-and-dime. We pass the shuttered old hotel where my grandfather lived for a couple of years after his wife and my father had died. We pass the McCook Daily Gazette office. We pass the long-gone Gochis, the candy store/bar where, back in my father’s day, kids got candy and ice cream at one counter while their parents enjoyed “spirits” at a counter on the other side of the room.

  We go to the family home, 1209 West First Street, where our fathers grew up.

  Ding-dong.

  Nothing.

  The four of us on the porch, cupping our hands to windows, peering.

  A woman next door comes out. “They went to Lincoln today. Gone to the game.”

  “What’s the game?” I ask.

  “Don’t you know? Bisons are in the state championship.”

  We loop back.

  The train station squats at the bottom of Norris Avenue, a brown brick building built in the 1920s. Inside, an empty waiting room. The benches have all been ripped out. Holes in the floor, all that remains. That and stains from where they were bolted. A Shroud of Turin in terrazzo. From a window I see strings of track fanning out to form the switching yard. Bright knots of rail. Battered freight cars, brown and green, sit silent, waiting to be delivered from here. The sky is gray and the wind rattles the glass in the window frame.

  Outside, I find the others. The wind is cold, unceasing, but we gather beside the station’s MCCOOK sign and take a photograph of ourselves. Timed exposure.

  Then, like everyone else here, we move on.

  #

  The last time I was in McCook was 1989. I drove out to see my father’s house.

  Four concrete stairs to a concrete stoop. Empty rocking chair. Redbrick columns support the overhang. Storm door. Two windows on either side. Wood siding. All of it white. Hedges, low. A mailbox in the midst.

  I get out to take a picture, and as I stand with my camera, the front door opens. A small woman with gray hair pops out, waving.

  “Stop! What agency are you with?”

  “I’m not an agent,” I say.

  “Everyone’s an agent.”

  “My father was born here.”

  “This house isn’t for sale,” she yells.

  She steps down. Squints. Hand on the railing for balance.

  “Are you a Hainey?”

  The woman tells me that she bought the house from my grandfather, and then she says, “Would you like to see inside?”

  Remember those dioramas from the field trips you took as a child to the natural-history museum? KEY MOMENTS IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT? The beasts on the foreshortened Serengeti. Dust on their hides. Cro-Magnons clutching spears, hunched over a papier-mâché fire, peering into the darkening horizon.

  The woman takes me inside the house, into the living room. Call it Diorama #1: See it? Depression, and into the War. Silent save for the tick-tick-ticking on a table. A woman sits in a worn stuffed chair. It’s a small room. A bedroom opens off of it. Panes in the door, curtained. A man walks out. Young, twenties, ranch hand. Works on the edge of town, rents the bedroom from this family that can’t make ends meet.

  Diorama #2: The back porch. Winter. 1930s through the ’40s. Enclosed by windows, sagging in their frames. Straw blinds. Half up, half down. Feel the draft. See the boy, asleep on the cot. Two wool blankets. Socks. A stocking cap. This is where he sleeps now that they’ve given the boarder his room. See him roll over, crumple some newspaper, wedge it in the gaps between the slats. Something to stop the wind.

  Diorama #3: The kitchen. 1940s. Can you see the boy at the table? Pre-dawn darkness. Winter. His father tells him, Light is a luxury. So the boy works by the last light of the moon that reflects off the snow piled high in the yard. He’s nine, maybe ten here. Omaha World-Heralds stacked at his galoshed feet. He creases them, snaps a rubber band around them, drops them in his canvas bag. When it’s full, he shoulders it. Walks into the dawn, into the rising light, into the prairie cold. A young boy, sure of his mission. A boy bearing news.

  The woman takes me into the basement, points at the crawl space: Diorama #4. “Look in there,” she says. It’s filled to the walls with beer bottles. All shades. Brown, green, clear.

  “What am I looking at?” I ask.

  “Your grandfather,” the woman says. “We found it when we moved in. He sat down here and drank. Filled that hole with his empties.”

  #

  Up the street from the diner there is a small 1970s-era building: the Museum of the High Plains.

  “Let’s go in,” my brother says.

  Three aged women sit behind a folding table. They’re wearing hats and gloves and winter coats. One of the ladies tells us that they can’t afford to heat the building.

  “People say we should close down,” she says. “We don’t have any more money. But we think we’re doing something important. Someone has to hold on to the memories.”

  The woman in the middle—she has a scarf wrapped around her head, in the style of a soldier at Valley Forge, so all I can see are her eyes—pushes a brochure for the museum across the table.

  OPEN YEAR ROUND!

  HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE

  STORE WHERE KOOLAID WAS DEVELOPED

  GERMAN PRISONER OF WAR PAINTINGS

  WW II ARMY AIR BASE DISPLAY

  Next to me, there’s a mannequin dressed like a railroad conductor. My nephew stands in front of the lifeless form, his orange-hooded head tilted up. He says, “What does this guy do?”

  “He rode the rails,” I say. “A railroad man. Probably around the same time as Great-grampa.”

  My nephew says nothing. Not even a shrug.

  #

  My brother waves me over.

  He’s in a corner of the museum, under a sign that says RAILROAD ROOM—PAYING TRIBUTE TO MCCOOK’S RAILROAD HISTORY.

  My brother points to a black-and-white Kodak snapshot—a bald man stands on a small front lawn, hat in hand, facing into the hard, white sunlight. It’s C.P., 1960.

  The photo is in an album of men in McCook who worked for Burlington. Someone’s idea of a town history. Another album holds page after page of men posing beside locomotives lying on their sides, off the rails, tipped over. An album of local train wrecks. Tucked inside this one is the front page of the Zephyr newsletter of 1938. The headline: SIAMESE TWINS RIDE TRAIN. It’s a story about how America’s only Siamese twins—Mary and Margaret Gibb of Holyoke, Massachusetts—rode the Zephyr. There’s a photo of them, smiling, giving their single ticket for the two of them to Mr. Mathers, the conductor, who, as the caption makes sure to point out, is from the Twin Cities.

  My cousin is looking at a giant ledger from the local railroad men’s union. He points to a page that is C.P.’s railroad-man file:

  CONRAD P. HAINEY, BRAKEMAN

  DATE OF BIRTH: JULY 2, 1889

  EMPLOYEE NUMBER 255,408

  EMPLOYMENT HISTORY:

  SEPT 29, 1916

  APPLICATION 2624 NOT APPROVED

  JULY 31, 1917

  HIRED AS SWITCHMAN

  APRIL 22, 1928

  YARD CLERK

  JULY 1, 1928

&
nbsp; RETURNED TO SWITCHMAN

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1959

  RETIRED

  There it is. A life. In one page. The measure of a man, in triplicate. Carboned. Bound. Put on a shelf.

  Switchman.

  #

  There is a story in our family about C.P. He takes my father to Denver for the day. A father-and-son adventure. Big day in the big city.

  My father’s eight, maybe nine. They get to Denver, and C.P. takes my father to the movies. Buys a ticket and gives it to my dad and tells him to go into the theater and watch the show and that at the end of the movie, he’ll be back to get him. My father goes in, watches the movie. It ends. No Dad. He sits through the movie again. Still no Dad. A third time. A fourth. It’s 10 p.m. now. The theater manager turns up the houselights, sees a thin boy sitting all alone. “Show’s over, son,” he says. “You need to go home.” My father tells him he can’t go home because his father hasn’t returned yet. “He told me to wait for him.” The manager calls the police. They take my father to the station and telephone McCook. My grandmother answers, shocked, and tells them my grandfather is nowhere to be found. A neighbor named Lindstrom gets on the next train to Denver and escorts my father home. Two days later, C.P. shows up in McCook. He’d gotten drunk in Denver, passed out in a freight car in the switching yard. When he came to, he was in Los Angeles.

  #

  In the museum, it’s getting late. We have a date to meet up with a friend of my father’s. Kay. But we can’t find my nephew. After a few minutes, I discover him upstairs, staring at a large metal cylinder. A mannequin’s beat-up head with chipped, painted-on hair sticks out of one end. There’s a sign next to it, telling us that this is an iron lung, once used to treat polio patients at the county hospital.

  My nephew reaches out, touches the side of the cylinder with his small hand. He looks up at me.

  “Is this a time machine?” he asks.

  #

  I had forgotten about Kay. But when I told my mother we were going to McCook, she reminded me to look her up. After my father died, she and my mother stayed in touch for a few years. I think the friendship drifted around the time word came to us that Fuzz, her husband, had died. But I sent her an e-mail and she insisted we see her. She and my father grew up together. Best friends from the time they were four. Their houses on the same street. When we’d come out here, we’d always go to visit her and Fuzz. She had kids the same ages as my brother and me, and I remember there was a small, gentle hill behind her house and it was a warm summer night. The sun orange and low. Twilight. And we were having log-rolling races to the bottom of the hill while our parents sat atop the hill, cocktails in hand, talking and laughing. I think of my father. Who doesn’t long for such a scene? Returning to your small town with your family. Seeing your lifelong friend. And you, now part of something in the big city. You, the one who left. But still able to return. Still welcomed home.

  Kay lives in the same house, beside that small, gentle hill. It’s late afternoon when we get there, and she’s all dressed up. Hair’s done. In a movie, she’s Julie Andrews. Radiant. From the moment she opens the door, you just feel love. In the living room she’s set out food on a card table. Shrimp, crackers, popcorn, Swedish meatballs, coffee, chocolate, chili crusting over in a Crock-Pot. Carrots and celery in bowls.

  Next to the table there’s a man and a woman.

  Kay says, “You don’t know this man, but this is Stew Karrer and his wife.”

  “How you doing?” Stew says, and he gets up to shake our hands. He’s wiry, strong. No fat on him.

  “Stew heard you were coming and drove three hours from the other side of the state today,” Kay says. “He and your dad were good friends. Part of ‘the gang,’ as they called it. Right, Stew?”

  Stew says, “Got my evidence.” And he looks toward a foot-high pile of scrapbooks in front of him.

  Kay touches my arm.

  “You look exactly like Bob,” she says.

  I laugh a nervous laugh. Because of my brother. If people say it when he’s around, I get self-conscious. I try to kick away the spotlight, say something like “I think we both do.” Even though inside I am proud. Inside, I feel like Kay’s telling me, You’re handsome.

  Stew opens one of his scrapbooks.

  “Look here,” he says. “I have every issue of The Bison from senior year of high school, when your dad was the editor.”

  It’s a stack of neatly folded, faded newspapers. He presses them onto my lap. For the next hour, he flips pages of his scrapbooks and he and Kay throw memories at us. Like the camping trip when my father had an asthma attack in the night and almost died. Stew says, “I had to drive him off the mountain. He was white as a ghost, gasping for air like a fish on a pier.”

  Stew tells me how my father wanted to be a pro baseball pitcher. And of the time they snuck out in my grandmother’s car and bought cigarettes and beer and crashed the car. Stew comes to a photo of some high school kids, dancing in a gym. He asks if I can spot my father, and I point to a boy—his back is to the camera and I can’t see his face. But I can tell. It’s the blackness of his hair.

  “You’re right,” Stew says, smiling.

  “Oh, he was the most elegant dancer,” Kay says. And she kneels down next to me on the floor. “He would steer you around the floor, his arm always trailing him like a rudder.”

  In the photo, he’s wearing a letter sweater with a buffalo head stitched on it and pants—pleated, baggy, cuffed. He’s got the girl pulled tight to him, wrapped in his right arm. His left arm is curled behind his back, her hand in his.

  “Is this Veneé?” I say. That was his girlfriend his senior year. She shows up a lot in his scrapbooks.

  “Yes,” Kay says.

  “What was she like?”

  “Nice . . . nice . . . ”

  “So you were jealous?”

  Kay laughs. “Oh, you have Bob’s exact sense of humor. That’s how Bob would’ve talked to me. He knew me so well.” She pauses. “I’ll never forget the day he died. I was at the bank, counting coins into coffee cans. Fuzz came in and told me the news. I burst into tears.”

  She chokes up. But keeps talking.

  “He was so brilliant, but so down-to-earth. I miss him so.”

  She stares at her hands, folded in her lap.

  I long to put my arm around her, to hold her. I wish all these people were gone from her house and I could comfort her.

  #

  It’s late. We’ve been at Kay’s for three hours. Stew and his wife need to make the drive back to Grand Island.

  It’s a strange thing, saying good-bye to people you’ve never met before and yet with whom you’ve shared an intense memory. I look at Stew and his wife and think, I’ll never see you again—yet, you emerged out of time and history to be here. And soon, you will be gone. All I see in that moment of good-byes at the front door is mortality. Time pushing forward, even as I’m trying to reach into the past.

  When they leave, I ask Kay if we can take her to dinner. She says yes.

  Outside, the sky gray and mottled. The wind swirling.

  My cousin says, “You want to take a ride out to the air base?”

  During the war, Superfortresses—B-29s—were built in Omaha and flown to McCook, for test runs. Day in and day out, Superfortresses descending onto an air base cut out of cornfields. Come night, their crews would congregate in McCook and drink while base mechanics crawled over the bombers, gave them a once-over. Two of the Superfortresses built in Omaha dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The base is abandoned now. Rusted rows of Quonset huts hunch into the wind. The landing strip cracked and weedy. Sky everywhere. And the wind. Fierce. Shaking the limbs of leafless oaks under the November sky, dark clouds pushing by.

  Some years ago, in his scrapbooks, I found a letter my father had sent Dick. This was 1944. My father was ten and Dick was finishing at Northwestern.

  Dear Dick,

  I’ve decided to write si
nce I didn’t have anything else to do. I’ve been playing marbles with some kids and won quite a few.

  The cub scouts went on a hike down to the river. We dug foxholes in the wet sand.

  The soldier next door fixed my BB gun. The trigger didn’t pull right so he took it to the base.

  I have to take my shot again Monday. I didn’t mind and they certainly do me a lot of good.

  I went swimming yesterday but didn’t have much fun because I don’t know how to swim. I might go to the Y this winter and learn. But they have too much chlorine in the water and it hurts my eyes terribly.

  I started to learn to swim by myself but it takes quite a long time that way.

  Has anything exciting happened where you are?

  Well there is nothing more to say.

  Bobby

  #

  That evening when we pull up, Kay is at her storm door. She smiles and winks the light twice, and as I walk her to the car, she says, “Oh, this is so fun.”

  She’s made a reservation at the Coppermill—“McCook’s fancy restaurant,” she says—and we drive to the edge of town, where the last row of streetlights stretches frail against the sweeping blackness of the Great Plains.

  In the parking lot, a bouquet of flowers tumbles past and for a minute I think I’m imagining a different kind of tumbleweed, but then I hear a man yell, “Catch that!” Three young guys in tuxedos, grinning and gelled, run after it. Behind them, girls in teal dresses and one in white squeal. Turns out Kay knows the bride.

  The restaurant’s that kind of place where you get an iceberg wedge, mashed potato, and a prime rib. There’s a college football game on the TV in the bar. We talk about her children. About her. About my father. She tells us how they walked to school together on their first day. “Never looked back,” she says. “Bob was my first friend and best friend. My whole life, I never felt closer to anyone.”

  “Who was he closer to,” I ask, “his mother or his father?”

  “C.P. One hundred percent. Your grandfather had his problems, but.”

  “Like you mean he drank?”

  She gives a grimace-smile and says, “But C.P. loved your father.”