After Visiting Friends (17 page)

#

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 since 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.”

“And my grandmother?”

“She could be quite removed.”

“So you mean she was cold?”

Kay smiles and touches my hand and says, “My word, you are just like Bob.”

When Kay smiles, she smiles with her eyes. Her eyes are big and green and bright and
they are never not sparkling. Beautiful. But looking at those eyes, I sense her longing.
Loneliness? Her vulnerability? Or is that just me, projecting? Sitting here, though,
listening to her, looking at her—I can see why my father wanted her to be his best
friend. There’s a calmness about her. Before I met Brooke, I used to have this vision
of what I needed in a woman: her hand on my forehead, calming me, taking away the
sadness and the fury. That was all I searched for: a hand to soothe my fevered brow.

Going home, I tell Kay to sit up front again.

“I’ll never find my way back without you guiding me,” I say.

The streets are empty. The only sound the heater whirring away. Porch lights here
and there define our horizon. In the summertime, there’d be moths and katydids. I
drive slowly. I tell myself it’s because this is what you do in a small town. But
I know it’s because my mind is nervous. And I wish in this moment that I had come—as
I have so often in my life—alone. That when I look in the rearview, I wouldn’t see
my family, but simply blackness. Maybe Kay is what I was meant to discover. I think,
Maybe I can take her back. Give her back those years. Maybe I can give him back to
her.

#

I walk Kay to the door. She says, “Don’t leave. I want to give you something to help
you.”

I stand under the light. Hear the tick-tick-tick of the engine in the driveway. A
minute later she returns with a paper grocery bag. Heavy and squarish, it feels like
telephone books.

“Stew thought you should have these.”

I look inside. His scrapbooks.

#

When we get back to the Chief, my brother tells my nephew it’s pool time. My brother,
my cousin, and I sit at a battered round table. Two six-packs, and bags of chips.
Steam stains the window behind the pool that looks out on B Street. Taillights, headlights—they’re
all made blue by the condensation. The motel is dead.

My nephew yells for me to watch him, and he cannonballs into the pool. A spume rises
and collapses in on itself. A moment later, his head pops above the surface, head
pivoting, searching for us, for his bearings. Like a man overboard quickly calculating
the shore. Looking for the harbor.

He grins and slips beneath the surface, ripples where he once was.

It’s time to tell my brother what I know. In my head, I’ve had this conversation too
many times to count. But I’m nothing but knots. All I can imagine is that he’ll feel
I have deceived him, bringing him all the way out to McCook to destroy his vision
of our father.

“Chris, there’s something about Dad I need to tell you.”

“Did you find out about that night?”

“Well,” I say, “I’m not sure and I can’t prove it. Yet, I mean. But we—I mean, Mark
and I—we think there was a cover-up.”

Mark lays out the story and my brother listens as he always does—quietly.

Then I hear my brother ask, “Do you know for a fact that he was with someone?”

“I don’t.
We
don’t. Not for a fact. But Mark and I have been trying to think of women who worked
at the paper back then. And I’m talking to his old newspaper buddies. Like this guy
Mark suggested—Craig Klugman.”

“I remember him. He used to come to the house when Dad was alive. And for a while
after. Short guy. Glasses.”

My nephew appears. Water’s dripping off his thin body, his teeth chattering.

“We’re going to go upstairs soon,” my brother says. “Get your last dives in.”

My nephew skeeters toward the pool. His brisk bare feet slap the cold concrete.

Splash.

My brother says, “So, does Mom know?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, there’s a chance I’m way wrong about all this. I hope I am.”

I look at Mark.

“We hope we’re wrong,” I say. “But I’m going to see what I can find out. I’ve got
to do this, you know?”

My brother nods. Like I say, he’s a quiet man. Then he says, “For now, I’m not telling
anyone.”

#

In my room, I open the paper bag. Stew’s seven scrapbooks, so similar to my father’s.
What’s with these men, their generation? I’m grateful for the scrapbooks. Seeing how
the narrative of his life unfolds, how moments collide. The pages brittle now, cracking.
So close to crumbling in my hands. The past—how fragile it is to our touch. I find
the scrapbook where Stew has kept every issue of the high school newspaper from senior
year. I find the last one.

VOLUME TWENTY-SIX MCCOOK, NEBRASKA, MAY 13, 1952. NUMBER FIFTEEN

THE BISON

Published by Journalism Class

McCook High School

Printed by Acme Printing Co.

McCook, Nebraska

BISON STAFF

Editor . . . . . . . . . . Bob Hainey