After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  #

  Lunch is three hours.

  We walk out into the hard and clean spring sunlight. Tomorrow is the day he died, April 24.

  Moffett tells me he wants to take me to Andy’s. “Seems only right,” he says, “that we have one there. You and me. For your old man.”

  My father’s bar is a giant horseshoe. Maple. The veneer worn thin, scratched and nicked by wet bottles and cigarette lighters. The late-afternoon sun highlights the flaws.

  Moffett guides me.

  “You need to sit right . . . here,” he says. He presses me into place. “Your old man sat on this stool every night.” He looks down. “From what I can tell, looks like the same one. This place ain’t changed too much in forty years.”

  We order two Old Styles, the clink of the longnecks the only sound. We are ahead of the rush.

  “Andy’s was your old man’s alone place. Boul Mich, Radio Grill, Billy Goat, Riccardo’s—he went there, sure. It’s where you had to go to do the bullshit of work. Be seen. Make the scene. But this—this is where he felt secure. Where we could speak our minds and not fear being overheard by superiors. This is where he came to forget everything. This was where the pressmen went. Guys from the composing room, too. It was for the working guys. Your dad and I were both eager up-and-comers, which meant we wore ties, white shirts, and dark suits. And you watched what you said—except in places like this, late at night. In here, your dad was probably the only guy in a suit and tie. But they all considered him one of their own. Your dad was snobby about snobs. Know what I mean? He didn’t care for guys who put on airs.”

  He looks at the bartender.

  “The funny thing about this bar is that it is shaped just like the copy desk, and the bartender is in the same position as your dad was. The bartender is the slot man and all of us on the rim—here, where we’re sitting—we’re the copy crew. Your dad and I had a joke about sitting here, drinking, saying that it was nice because for once he could watch the slot man work.”

  We drink our Old Styles.

  “I think one of the things your dad and I had in common was that we both realized the place we were looking for didn’t exist. I think that we both thought we’d joined a noble profession. I’m not sure he would’ve used those words, but we believed newspapers aimed at getting The Truth. The late ’60s were teaching us otherwise. I’ve often wondered what would’ve become of your dad, had he lived. When I was working the night slot, trying to fill your dad’s shoes, I would summon his memory. For courage. You know, there’s an old saying that goes something like ‘If you’re a step ahead of the crowd, you’re a leader. Three steps ahead of the crowd, and you’re a martyr.’ Looking back, I’d say Bob Hainey was two steps ahead.”

  #

  Moffett and I say farewell. A handshake that becomes a hug.

  I think again about tomorrow. The day of his death. I decide to go to 3930 North Pine Grove. I make my way on the Howard El line. On the ride, I watch the flicker-flacker of the three-flats that back up against the rickety tracks. The flicker-flacker as we speed past, as homes and lives click in and out of view.

  And I think of a girl I once knew.

  I always called her late at night from my mother’s kitchen. We were both in grad school. I’m in seminar the first day of spring classes. April. There are maybe fifteen of us seated around a table and every time I look up she’s pretending she’s not looking at me but I know she is because I’ve been caught too many times doing the same thing. And whenever she isn’t taking notes, she gently strokes the underside of her chin with her new yellow No. 2 lead pencil. I know that, too.

  Two weeks later I’m in the library one night, in the reserve reading room, when I feel a tap on my back, and it’s her. She’s from Louisville. One of those places where people still believe in horses, and she’s standing there in jodhpurs, a black blazer, and a white blouse unbuttoned at the neck. Her blond hair is pulled into a ponytail. She tells me she just got back from riding and has to do the reading for tomorrow. I say, “Too bad I have the only copy of the book.” She smiles. So I say, “Well, I’m almost finished, so I guess you can have it.”

  “Good,” she says, “if you’re finished, we can leave.”

  We dated for maybe three months. April. May. A piece of June. I’d call her late at night and we’d both whisper, me not to wake my mother, she because she found it romantic. And then, after ten minutes, she’d always say, “Come over, baby.”

  I remember driving through the dark Chicago side streets, heading for the lake and then turning north on Lake Shore Drive, riding up to Sheridan Road and Evanston with the windows on the car rolled down and the radio playing and the warm air of summer-on-the-way swirling through the car and it seemed I couldn’t drive fast enough and all I could think of was her whispering, “Come over,” and all I wanted was to get to her apartment.

  She lived on the top floor of a three-flat that butted up against the Howard El line. Late at night when the El swept by, it would roar like you were inside a crashing wave. It was the spring that some woman had an album out and that was all she wanted to listen to and when I got there each time, she’d kiss me and then take my hand in her small hand and lead me to her bedroom where the only light was this blue-green phosphorescent glow from the stereo that would be playing those songs.

  One night toward the end I woke up as an El was passing. She was naked, walking across the room, and that phosphorescent light illuminated her and she looked like a mermaid I saw as a boy in one of those crazy aquarium shows where all the lights in the house go dark except for the colored underwater lights in the pool.

  All I could do was watch.

  And then she reached down and turned off the stereo and the room went dark. When she came back to bed, I pretended I was asleep. I didn’t want to lose my vision.

  For years after, on spring nights when I could not sleep, I’d drive along the lake, listening to radio call-in shows and think of her.

  #

  North Pine Grove. I have walked this street so many times, longing to know the exact spot. Now I do. Number 3930 is a high-rise in a neighborhood of three- and four-flats. LAKE PARK PLAZA, the sign says. The building rises out of a corner of Pine Grove and Irving Park, so tall it casts a shadow across the other homes. So tall it takes the gentle breeze coming off the lake and twists it into a swirling force. I sit on the retaining wall. A small half-circle island before the tower. Grass ripples in waves and buzzes bright green, its volume turned up high with spring. First growth. Not yet cut. The tips, still soft and dull. Everything green, except for the grass beneath the ventilation duct. A circle of grass blown to a dead white color. The color of that stuff you find inside packing crates after you crowbar them open.

  I look up at her building, trying to see that night.

  #

  He’s come to see the hours between two and six as his. Existing out of time and space. “Suspended animation,” he jokes to one of the guys at Andy’s. “Isn’t that what NASA’s been talking about? A new way for man to go farther than he ever has?”

  He lets himself in. A slice of light into her apartment.

  Then, just as quickly, darkness.

  For a minute, he stands in it. Adjusts to it. He steadies himself against the door. Exhales. Takes a moment. He closes his eyes and rubs his temples, thumb and finger making small circles. Trying to erase the tension in his head.

  From the bedroom, “Bob?”

  She’s on one elbow, propped.

  He sits on the edge.

  She rubs his back. He closes his eyes. Falls back. She kisses him, feels for his knot. Her fingers loosen it. The tie, untied.

  She tosses it to the floor.

  “Give me a minute,” he says.

  She lays her head on his chest. For a second, she reminds him of himself as a kid, making like a lone Sioux scout crouching over the railroad tracks. Ear to the ground. Listening for the distant rumbling. Isn’t that the way Injuns do it?

  In the movies
it is.

  He thinks about when he did that with his father, in the switching yard. He thinks, I never could hear anything coming.

  She says, “Your heart’s racing.”

  He asks for a washcloth. Something cold. For his head. Pain in his head so sharp it makes a white blinding light when he opens his eyes.

  “This has got to be the worst headache of my life,” he tells her.

  She walks to the bathroom. Fluorescent tube over the sink shakes itself awake. She pulls the washcloth from the shower rail. It’s brittle, air-dried. She runs it under cold water. Brings it back to life, then wrings it out.

  When she comes back, he’s on his side, bent. She sits beside him, puts her hand on his shoulder.

  “Bob?” she asks. “Bob,” she says.

  His name as the answer to the question of his name. When the question and the answer are one and the same. When you are the answer to your own question.

  He does not answer.

  She reaches out toward the lamp.

  Her fingers find the chain beneath the shade, pull it.

  #

  Somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m., two Chicago Fire Department medics lift his body onto the stretcher that sits on the floor of her living room. They drop a charcoal-gray wool blanket over him, cinch it tight. In the hallway, two cops from District 19 stand with Bobbie. Her feet are bare. She has dressed hastily. The cops ask her questions. The door to her apartment opens. The firemen wheel the stretcher to the freight elevator. My uncle and one of the cops follow. The night doorman ferries them down.

  Bobbie remains. A few more questions from the cops.

  “Walk us through it one more time, if you don’t mind.”

  The medics load the stretcher into the back of Chicago Fire Department ambulance number 6, slam the door.

  “They’ll take it from here,” the cop says to my uncle. “You should do what you have to do.”

  My uncle shakes the cop’s hand, thanks him.

  “Think nothing of it,” the cop says.

  A medic turns the key, the engine starts. No need for sirens. Nothing to rush for. Maybe just the Mars light revolving. They pull out of the half circle. American Hospital is a block and a half away.

  # # #

  It takes me weeks to reach Bobbie’s brother, Tim. He still lives in Tiffin, Ohio, their hometown. I tell him that my father worked with his sister many years ago and that I was working on a story about him. Did your sister ever mention him?

  “My wife knew Bobbie much better than I did. Hold on a sec.”

  A woman comes on.

  “That name doesn’t sound familiar,” she says. “But Bobbie . . . she was a pretty private person.”

  I want to tell her what I know. But it doesn’t feel right, doing it on the phone.

  “What did your dad look like? I have some old photos of Bobbie’s. Scrapbooks. You know?”

  “He was tall,” I say. “Crew cut. Glasses.”

  She tells me she’ll look. Tells me it might take some time. Takes my number.

  #

  Natty Bumppo lives outside Brownsville, Kentucky, near Mammoth Cave National Park. SEE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST CAVE! the road signs say all the way down.

  Natty worked on the desk with my father. His real name—the name my father knew him by—is John Dean.

  “In the early ’70s, I was studying to be a lawyer, looking to ditch newspapering,” he tells me on the phone when I track him down, courtesy of Moffett. “Thanks to Watergate, no one was going to hire a lawyer named John Dean. So I changed my name to the most honest one I knew: Natty Bumppo.”

  I find his house tucked back in the woods. It’s two cabins he built. The smaller one is his law office. (“I’m a country lawyer. I do anything anyone asks me to, from contracts to murders.”) Outside the first cabin, there’s a Franklin stove tipped on its side. Piled around it is a heap of eight or ten junked computer monitors.

  I walk to the main house. Just beside the screen door there’s a large, thick-trunked tree, and on it Natty has nailed a sign: DON’T PISS ON THE OAK. I climb up to the porch and knock. A voice tells me to come in. A man sits at the kitchen table, eating soup. He looks like Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street. White hair swept back and this long, full white beard curling over his collar. He’s wearing work pants, a plaid flannel shirt, and thick black suspenders. Like a lumberjack’s. He reaches behind him. An old tin coffeepot squats on the stove. Natty turns up the flame.

  “How’d you end up out here?” I ask. “It’s a long way from the Sun-Times copy desk.”

  “Back when I knew your father, I was a wannabe hippie. I worked at the Sun-Times in two shots. I quit in ’68 and wandered out to Berkeley. From there I went to Detroit to marry a chick. I ran out of cash and busted up with the chick, so I went back to the Sun-Times. This was right before your dad died. But I figured there had to be a better job than newspapers, so I went to law school. When I got out, a friend told me that a little law office down here was looking for someone. I never left.”

  A woman walks in. She’s short and plump with blond hair. Natty says something to her, not in English.

  “Did you just speak Polish?” I ask.

  “I was telling her who you are.”

  The woman smiles. And while we talk, she brings us food: crackers, wedges of cheese, a sliced apple, purple sauerkraut.

  “So what do you want to know?” he says.

  “What can you tell me about Bobbie?”

  “What’s there to tell? She was a girl from small-town Ohio. I remember one night, sitting at the bar at Andy’s with your dad, and Bobbie came up. I said, ‘She’s so uptight I bet if she ever had an orgasm, she’d split in two and die.’ Your dad nearly fell off his stool laughing. Whether he was already nailing her and laughed out of pride, I don’t know. Maybe he just thought it was funny.”

  He takes a drag on what’s left of his cigarette.

  “I never really thought about it until just now,” he says, “but your old man was the one who split in two and died.”

  He laughs, a short laugh.

  “Sorry. I know that’s not funny.”

  “It’s all right,” I say. “It’s what it is.”

  “I don’t know if you know this: I snuck Bobbie into your father’s funeral. I asked if she wanted to go. She was pretty torn up, but she said she did and she was grateful that I took her. A lot of people never forgave me for it. But she needed a friend and I could see it was important for her to be there. It was a sunny morning. I picked her up at her place and we drove out in my ’68 Camaro. It was yellow. Convertible. On the way to the funeral, we kept the top up. But on the ride home, we threw it down. When we got to the church, we waited in my car until the service started and then we slipped into the last row of pews. She wept hard. But she was poised. And we got out just before it ended. Ahead of his coffin and your mother. And you. The whole way home, Bobbie didn’t say a word.”

  He pauses. “Want to go outside?”

  We leave the food on the table and push open the squeaky screen door. I sit beneath the big oak tree. Natty walks to the far end of the deck.

  “I’m gonna take a leak. Feel free.”

  A minute later Natty wanders back, lights another cigarette.

  “Why do you think these guys stonewalled me?” I ask.

  “Some of them are squares. But I think the real problem was that some of these guys were jealous. And some guys, they just can’t ever be honest. Don’t know why that is.”

  “What do you think my father saw in Bobbie?”

  “Hell, why do fools fall in love? I couldn’t tell you your father’s motivation. All I know is resisting temptation has never been easy. I always think of a song I sang as a boy at my Methodist Church camp: ‘We are teetering on the brink of sin; won’t you come and push us in . . . ’ ”

  He laughs and pulls his beard and asks me, “Are you married?”

  “No. You?”

  “Five times. I met this one in Poland. Well,
online. Then I went over and brought her back. Taught myself Polish. I got some of those tapes and a dictionary. She and I do okay.”

  “But what was it about Bobbie?”

  “She was one of the few women in the newsroom. A young girl from Ohio, fresh out of a university course in journalism and full of visions of big-city newspapering. And your father must’ve seemed a prize to her. The slot man is not just the boss, he’s also literally in the saddle. It’s not that big a stretch to see why she fell for him—or why he went for her. Look, I have to tell you: Your dad was a square. But he was also a newspaperman. And newspapermen are pretty socially maladjusted. If you’re not socially maladjusted when you start, then certainly after you get there. You work strange hours, you get paid to find out the worst about people and society. You get jaded, and your only friends are other newspapermen. So of course Bob’s probably going to end up with someone like Bobbie. Everyone wanted her. Your dad just got there first.”

  “Do you know any of the details of that night? How he died?”

  “My understanding is that he died in the saddle. Bobbie never talked about it. She was dignified. Everyone in the newsroom knew what happened to her, but they gave her her space.”

  He walks to the edge of the porch, his back to me. Time for another piss.

  His wife comes out of the house.

  “You want stay? Dinner? Spaghetti?” She brings her hand up to her mouth, like she’s twirling spaghetti into her mouth.

  “I’d love to, but I need to get back to Louisville.”

  “Spaghetti?” she asks again, still spinning the phantom fork. “Yes?”

  Natty tugs his zipper up as he walks toward us.

  “The man can’t stay,” he says to her. Then he grabs her by the waist, says something to her in Polish, and smacks her butt. She walks away.

  I tell Natty that I always wonder what Bobbie would’ve said to me if I’d found her before she died.

  “She would’ve been happy to see you.”