After Visiting Friends (26 page)

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.
L
AKE
P
ARK
P
LAZA
, 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.”

“You think so?”

“You were family. And you would’ve done it in the right way. Hell, maybe you could’ve
answered questions for her. You’re not the only one who needed to close some circles.”

The door opens.

“Spaghetti?”

We walk to my rental car. The trees are starting to turn colors and the effect on
the hills is peaceful. I tell Natty he has a nice piece of land.

“Ah, it’s nothing but cave country. I got people always showing up on my property,
looking for holes. They ask me how to find a way in, if I know any secret entrances.
I just look at them and think, The way people get obsessed with holes around here?
Crazy, if you ask me.”

#  #  #

His mother is newly dead and that makes him think of it.

“I want you to see where I grew up,” he says to Bobbie one night at Andy’s.