After Visiting Friends (16 page)

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 forty-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.

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-Herald
s 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

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.