After Visiting Friends (30 page)

Peggy Appleyard stands up to remind everyone that if they move, please notify her
because it costs seventy-five cents for every class newsletter that gets returned.

Don Lieberth tells us he recently had open-heart surgery. He unbuttons his shirt,
points to a thick scar running neck-to-navel, and says, “I got a zipper now.”

“Class clown,” Kay whispers to me. She shakes her head.

Marla Sutton tells us she’s been married fifty-four years and has had “a wonderful
life.” Donna Madron stands. Helen Herrmann stands. All of them, one after another,
stand. There’s a happiness to the room. A pleasure in being alive and being back among
those who know you.

Kay touches my arm.

“Let’s hear from Bones’s boy,” she says to the room.

“Yes!” someone says.

I look at Kay, trying to tell her with my eyes that I can’t do this.

“It would mean so much,” Kay whispers to me.

I stand, thank them for letting me be among them tonight, and then sit down.

“You have to tell us more than that!” Elinor Nielson shouts. “What would Bones say?”

Yes, what would Bones say? I have no idea.

I begin again.

“I think you all know that after graduating, my father became a newspaperman for the
Tribune
. He met my mother there. Some of you might have met her. Maybe your tenth reunion?
They had two sons. Me and my older brother, Chris. He lives in Chicago with his family.
My mother’s there, too. I’m in New York.”

I look around the room. So many faces raised to me, smiling across the chasm of time.
I can hear words coming out of my mouth.
And I can see myself, too. And them—how they’re looking at me: It’s not me talking
to them. It’s him, my father.

I remember something.

I check my pocket. I still have the piece of paper. I pull it out and unfold it: the
“Senior Prophecy” my father wrote for them.

I say, “Before I came here tonight, I was rereading what my father had written about
you all, looking toward your futures after graduation. He got a few things wrong,
probably most spectacularly not foreseeing the jet age and believing that he would
return to McCook in 1975 aboard the Burlington Zephyr.”

The room laughs.

“But,” I tell them, “he got a lot right. Most of all, what he wrote at the end: ‘After
a few hours in the old haunts, I decided that even though I was wrong on many counts
when I wrote the class prophecy years ago, I still found that everyone was happy and
a big success in his own right. I realize that the belief that I had cherished years
before had come true. Nothing but the best had been accomplished by the grads of ’52.’ ”

People clap. I can’t look at them, I think, or I will lose it.

Kay says, “Your father would be so proud of you.”

I push past her and go outside and feel the cool evening air as tears brim in my eyes.
Kay comes to me. I smell the lavender again in her hair. She cups her hands to my
face. I see tears in her eyes, too, and then she says, “Won’t you come back to us?”

#

There’s a woman at the table in the back. She has short hair and glasses and is wearing
a white blouse.

Kay says, “That’s Veneé. She and your father were sweethearts.”

Kay leads me over and tells Veneé who I am.

“Well, you look like your father. Taller, though.”

I ask her how long she and my father dated.

She tells me they started dating in their senior year and stopped that summer of ’52,
when my father left for Northwestern. “I
never saw him again. Well, I did, but that was in 1962, at our tenth reunion. I got
married soon after Bob left,” Veneé says. “My husband and I moved to Wisconsin and
have seven children.”

She grips an empty paper coffee cup in her left hand while her right hand turns the
rim of the cup, over and over.

“Your father was a perfect gentleman. Always kind. Did you know that he converted
to Catholicism in his senior year of high school?”

She tells me that she had no idea that he was even considering it. One day toward
the end of the school year he asked her if she would be in Saint Patrick’s the following
Sunday. She asked him why. He told her because he would be there, completing his catechism.

“I think he might have done it so my parents would be more accepting of him. My parents . . . ”

She looks down at the table.

I ask her about his parents. What his home life was like.

“I never went to his house. I think life was hard for him. I think he felt awkward
about his home, his parents. I was never there. You have to understand—I’m only guessing.”

Kay returns to tell us that the café wants to close up.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Veneé says.

I say good-bye to Kay and walk into the night.

Son of Bones?

What am I but a ghost chained to a skeleton? The clack and clatter of him as I drag
him around the room. Up and down these streets. Through my life.

I go back to the Chief Motel. I pull the curtains and sit in the dark, drinking a
six-pack. From beyond, I hear the muffled slamming of metal on metal—the sound of
switchmen hard at work, coupling and uncoupling freight cars at the edge of town.

#

The following morning, it seems everyone in town and from whatever other small towns
are around here is lined up on Norris Avenue
to watch the parade for McCook’s Heritage Days. Some politician is the grand marshal,
leading it off, riding a stagecoach. Behind him is a pickup truck pulling a float:
two guys in a wooden canoe. They wear coonskin caps and pretend to paddle water that
is not there. A sign on the float tells us that they are Lewis and Clark. For the
next forty-five minutes, the parade unfolds: the school marching band, playing OutKast’s
“The Way You Move” while baton twirlers lead them; the local chapter of Future Farmers
of America, impossibly handsome, clean-cut teenage boys and girls in blue windbreakers
with giant FFA golden crests on their backs; a Victorian-era horse-drawn hearse, courtesy
of Carpenter Breland, the local funeral home; the National Guard unit handing out
Frisbees; the local Shriners band; the local Boy Scouts, carrying small plastic pails
and throwing handfuls of candy into the crowd, children scurrying to grab the pieces
from the bricked street; and then the finale: thirty-eight John Deere tractors of
every decade. A chugging, grinding, puffing, blocks-long green-and-maize chain of
American industrial and agricultural beauty. Dinky, strange-looking tractors from
the 1920s and huge spaceship-like current-day ones, with the driver looking like he
is encased in the cockpit of some sort of beta-generation X-wing fighter.

#

I head out of town, east. I want to see it from his perspective—what it was like,
leaving McCook, heading to Chicago. I want to know what he saw as he left it all behind
him. And then, no more than a mile out of town, I see it, just past a grove of cottonwoods.
It’s abandoned and so run-down that I don’t notice it until I’m almost past it. But
there it is—the faded neon sign: The Red Horse Motel and Fireside Inn Restaurant.

All my life I’ve remembered this motel. Summer of 1969. My family stayed here. It
was white and V-shaped and there was crushed gravel underwheel. As my father pulled
off the highway, he killed his lights. He said he didn’t want to be shining his light
into other people’s rooms.

A neon sign the color of electric coral.

Vacancy.

From the backseat, I watch my father.

No one behind the desk. He hits the bell fast, once. The linoleum white and bright
under the office light. The postcards, over there. Wire rack, squeaks when spun. Nickel
each. Scenes of broken wagon wheels and tumbleweeds and Scotts Bluff sunsets and enormous
rabbits with saddles on them being broken by buckaroos. Jackalopes in Kodachrome.

A yawning man, old and robed and hairless, comes out. He looks at his wrist and does
not speak. From below the counter he produces a registration card, slides it across
the linoleum. My father puts pen to paper. Slides it back to the man. My father looks
over his shoulder, looks to see if he can see us in the car. Only a reflection of
himself. Harsh light.

The yawning man gives my father a key joined to a piece of plastic the color of pine
needles and the shape of a stretched diamond.

My father comes back to us, eyes blinking in the darkness. When he gets into the Buick,
he drops the key on my mother’s lap.

#

I remember a swimming pool set in the lawn, just outside the door of our room. And
I remember how a field of corn came right up to the window of our room. So close my
father reached out and pulled in an ear of corn. He told us that the cornstalk was
like Jack’s magic beanstalk and we could climb it into the clouds.

That night, I lay in my bed, my brother beside me, our mother and father in the bed
next to us. I could not sleep. All I could do was listen to the crickets in the cornfield,
calling out to one another.

#

I swing my car into a U-turn. The driveway is still here, still crushed stone. But
it’s pockmarked by weeds now and across it someone has staked a rusty chain. The motel
is abandoned. Dead. It’s the
kind of place rarely seen anymore: small motel by the side of the road. A row of rooms,
looking like cozy summer cottages all pushed together, and a long, shaded porch running
in front of them all. I stop at a door. I want to believe it was our room. It’s open.

I peer in, wondering. Listening. Dusty sunlight fills the room from somewhere I cannot
see. There is brown shag carpet and two chairs stacked near the window. Dark wood
paneling on the far wall has slouched free of the wall, drooping forward. I step in.
Mattresses and some desks are stacked against the wall. I can see, too, where the
sunlight is coming from. The window, in the rear of the room. I walk toward the window
to get an angle on the light. And I look out and what do I see: the remains of the
cornfield.

I walk past the swimming pool. It has been filled in with stone and gravel. I stand
on the deck, cracked and crumbling. Every few feet, mounds of dirt, maybe six inches
high and three feet in circumference. Fire ants tending to their world.

#

There is a reunion dinner that night at my motel, in the same indoor-pool area where
my brother and cousin and I had our talk. Some round tables are set up near the diving
board, and there’s also a small table where people place their BYOB. More people are
here than last night. This is the formal event. The women in dresses and the men in
jackets and ties. I meet people I didn’t meet last night. Like Roger Ely, who worked
with my grandfather. Roger asks me if I knew my grandfather was a griever.

“Know what that is? You probably don’t. It’s a union position. He took the members’
grievances to the employer.”

I ask him what else he can tell me.

“There were two old dogs at the switching yard. And wherever your grandfather went,
there those old dogs were sure to follow. Any cars he was switching, well, those dogs
would hop right up on them and ride along. Every day after work, he’d walk to the
five-and-dime and those dogs would walk alongside him. Then he’d buy
both dogs a candy bar.” He rubs his hand over his head and laughs. “Curious, isn’t
it?”

I meet Charlie. He’s standing by himself. He asks me what I’m doing there. I tell
him and I ask him what he does.

“I’m a fisherman. That’s what I like to do,” he says. “But they’ll all tell ya I’m
the no-account. That’s what they always said about me.”

When it is time to eat, Kay says, “I want you next to me.”

I am happy to be next to her. Another guide. Another helping hand along the way.

Eight o’clock comes. I don’t want it to be like last night. I want to slip out while
they’re still having a good time. I whisper good-bye to Kay.

“But you haven’t had cake.”

I hug her. I feel her hands full and firm across my back. Her, not wanting to be let
go.

It’s one more good-bye.

#

A couple of weeks later, I get an e-mail from Veneé.

Dear Michael,

I was taken back in time while talking with you. You are so much like your dad; looks
and mannerisms. Your dad would be so proud of you as I’m sure your mother is.

I felt I left you with more questions to be answered but I was totally surprised to
meet you as I knew nothing of Bob’s life after the 10th class reunion.

I thoroughly enjoyed talking with you and want you to know that I liked your dad very
much but, as he said in my yearbook, “maybe next year at this time, you’ll be a little
more decided about the future.” These many years since have given me a better view
of our relationship. I don’t think it would have been a good match. Bob knew his goal.
I wasn’t interested in college but marrying
and raising a family. I’m sure my marriage and move to Wisconsin helped me grow and
become who I am today. Your mother was a perfect fit for him and from what I see of
you, she has done a great job of raising her sons. I do hope she is no longer jealous
of me as Bob and I were high school sweethearts only.

I am curious, however: Did Bob remain with the Catholic faith? I was completely surprised
when he told me he had joined the church as he hadn’t told me he was going to.

Is your mother still in Chicago? Maybe we should meet sometime in the future.

Thanks for allowing me to take up your time.

Veneé

I write her, telling her how grateful I am to have met her. I answer her questions:
Yes, he stayed with the Catholic Church, as he and my mother were married in it and
he was buried out of it. A few days later, I get another e-mail from her.

Dear Michael,

My friend/daughter-in-law has suggested I send you the page that your dad wrote to
me in our yearbook. Her thought is that you might like to see, in his handwriting,
something that may give you a better idea of who your dad was.