Nebraska (14 page)

APR 20. Etta sixty-seven. Took a lovely little breakfast to her in bed, with one yellow rose in the vase. Nightgown and slippers just perfect, she says. Foursome with Sam Cornish, Henry, and Zack. Shot pitiful. Kept getting the Katzenjammers up on the teebox. Hooked into the Arkwright rangeland on #3. Angus cattle just stared at me: Who's the nitwit? And then skulled a nine iron approach on #17 and my brand-spanking-new Titleist skipped into the water hazard.
Kerplunk.
Hate the expense more than the penalty stroke. And to top it off, Cornish approached me in pro shop with a problem on the Waikowski codicil. Hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about. Sam has always loved those
ipse dixits
and
sic passims,
but that wasn't the problem. The problem is me. I just can't listen fast enough. Everything gets scrambled. I say to him, “What's your opinion?” And when he tells me, I pretend complete agreement, Sam pretends I helped out. Humiliating. Roosevelt at Yalta. Etta had her party today. She hadn't predicted it, so apparently I managed to keep the cat in the bag for once. Had a real nice time; plenty of chat and canasta. She needed the pick-me-up.

APR 25. Walked a slow nine with Henry and Eugene. No birdies, two bogeys, holed out once from a sand trap. Eugene and Henry getting straighter from the tees. Haven't pointed out to
them that their mechanics haven't improved—they're just too weak to put spin on the golf ball these days. Lunched at Sandhills and shot the breeze until four, then walked by the practice range. Wild Bill out there with you know who. And Wild Bill slicing! shanking! Everything going right. Lunging at the ball like Walter Hagen. Butch dumbfounded. Addled. Looked at hands, stance, angle of club face, completely overlooking the problem. Head. Yours truly walked up without a word, put a golf ball on the tee, took a hard hold of Wild Bill's girl-killer locks and said, “You go ahead and swing.” Hurt him like crazy. About twenty hairs yanked out in my hand. I said, “You keep that head in place and you won't get so onion-eyed.” I just kept holding on and pretty soon those little white pills were riding along the telegraph wire, and rising up for extra yardage just when you thought they'd hang on the wind and drop. Walked away with Wild Bill winking his thanx and our kid pro at last working up the gumption to say, “Good lesson.” Will sleep happy tonight.

APR 30. I puttered around the house until ten when Wild Bill invited me to a round with Wilbur Gustafson's middle boy, Keith. We've let bygones be bygones. Keith also on golf team. Ugly swing—hodgepodge of Lee Trevino and Charlie Owens—but gets it out okay. Keith says he hasn't got
William
’s
(!) touch from forty yards and in, but scored some great sand saves. Was surprised to hear I lawyered. And Wild Bill says, “What? You think he was a
caddy?”
Was asked how come I gave up my practice, but pretended I didn't hear. Was asked again and replied that a perfectionist cannot put up with mistakes. Especially his own. Hit every green in regulation on the front nine, but the back jumped up and bit me. Old Sol nice and bright until one
P.M.,
and then a mackerel sky got things sort of fuzzy. (Cataracts? Hope not.) Well: on #12, Wild Bill couldn't get the
yardage right, so without thinking I told him, “Just get out your mashie.” You guessed it: “What's a mashie?” And then we were going through the whole bag from brassie to niblick. Kids got a big kick out of it. Hung around and ate a hot dog with Etta, Roberta, and Betsy, then jawed with Crisp on the putting green. Watched as a greenskeeper strolled from the machine shed, tucking his shirt in his pants. Woman walked out about two minutes later. Won't mention any names.

MAY 6. Weather getting hotter. Will pay Wild Bill to mow yard. ($5 enough?) Endorsed government check and sent to Farmer's with deposit slip. Helped Etta wash and tidy up. Have been bumping into things. Match play with Zack, a one-stroke handicap per hole. Halved the par threes, but his game fell apart otherwise. Would have taken $14 bucks from him but urged Zack to go double or nothing on a six-footer at #18 and yanked it just enough. Zack's scraping by just like we all are. AA meeting, then Etta's noodles and meat sauce for dinner. (According to dictionary, P. Stroganoff a 19th century Russian count and diplomat. Must be a good story there.) Early sleep.

MAY 15. Nice day. Shot a 76. Every fairway and fourteen greens in regulation. Four three-putts spelled the difference. Took four Andrew Jacksons from Dr. Bergstrom, but ol P.C. probably makes that in twenty minutes. Will stop playing me for cash pretty soon. Tish got a hole-in-one at the 125-yard par three! Have telephoned the
Press-Citizen.
Her snapshot now in pro shop. Oozy rain in the afternoon. Worked on Pete Upshaw's irons until four
P.M.
His temper hasn't improved. Went to Concord Inn—Ettta driving—for the prime-rib special. Half price before six. And then out to Sandhills for Seniors meeting. We
finally
gave out prizes for achievements at Amelia Island tourna-
ment. (Marie sorry for tardiness, but no excuse.) Joke gifts and reach-me-downs, but some great things too. Expected our “golf professional” to give me a chipper or yardage finder, something fuddy-duddy and rank amateur, but the guy came through with a seven wood, one of those nifty presents you don't know you want until you actually get it. We have no agreement, only a truce. Zack got a funny Norman Rockwell print of some skinny kids with hickory sticks arguing golf rules on a green. Looked exactly like Zack and Felix and Squeegee and me way back in the twenties. Talked about old times. We're thinking Pinehurst for next winter trip. Have suggested we open it up to get some
mannerly
high-school golfers to join us. (Would be a nice graduation present for Wild Bill.) Everybody home by nine.

MAY 22. Early Mass and then put in an hour mixing up flapjack batter at the Men's Club pancake breakfast. Heard Wilma has Alzheimer's. Earl Yonnert having thyroid out. Whole town getting old. Went out to links at noon. Wild Bill there by the green with his shag bag, chipping range balls into a snug group that looked just like a honeycomb. Etta asked him to join us. Have to shut my eyes when she gets up to the ball, but she skitters it along the fairway okay. Wild Bill patient, as always. Has been getting great feelers from Ohio State, thanx to my aggressive letter campaign and his Nebraska state championship. Everything may depend upon his ranking on the Rolex All-American team. Says he hopes I'll visit him in Ohio, maybe play Muirfield Village, look at videotapes of his swing now and then. Has also politely let me know that he now prefers the name William. Wonder what Frank Urban “Fuzzy” Zoeller would have to say about that? But of course the kid never heard of Wild Bill Mehlhorn and his cowboy hat at the 1925 PGA. Well: Went nine with him and got skinned. His drives now a sand wedge longer than mine, so I'm hitting my seven wood versus his nine
iron or my sixty-yard pitch versus his putt. Waited on the teebox at #7 while some guys in Osh Kosh overalls and seed-company caps yipped their way across the green. Etta laughed and said she just had a recollection of Squeegee saying, Even a really bad day of golf is better than a good day of work. We all grinned like fools. Especially Wild Bill. Hit me that my lame old jokes have always seemed funny and fresh to him. One facet of youth's attractiveness for tiresome gaffers like me. Tried a knock-down five iron to the green, but it whunked into the sand trap. Easy out to within four feet, and then a one-putt for par. Wild Bill missed an opportunity. Etta got lost in the rough with her spoon and scored what the Pro/Am caddies used to say was a “newspaper 8.” Walked to the next tee in a garden stroll under an enormous blue sky, just taking everything in, Wild Bill up ahead and my wife next to me and golf the only thing on my mind. And I was everywhere I have ever been: on the public course at age nine with Dad's sawed-down midiron, and again when I was thirteen and paired three in a row, and on my practice round with Tommy Armour and Byron Nelson in 1947, or playing St. Andrews, Oakmont, Winged Foot, Pebble Beach, or here at Sandhills years ago, just hacking around with the guys. Every one was a red-letter day. Etta said, “You're smiling.” “Second childhood,” said I. Wild Bill played scratch golf after that and then went over to the practice range. Has the passion now. Etta and I went out to the Ponderosa for steak and potatoes on their senior-citizen discount. Have been reading up on Columbus, Ohio, since then. Home of the university, capital of the state, population of 540,000 in 1970, the year that her own Jack Nicklaus won his second British Open.

MAY 30. Went to Holy Sepulchre Cemetery with Etta and put peonies out for the many people we know now interred there. Etta drove me to the course—getting license back Wednesday.
Eugene was there, trying out putters, stinking like turpentine, getting cranky. Went eighteen with me, but only half-decent shot he could manage was a four-wood rouser that Gene Sarazen would have envied. Were joined by a spiffy sales rep from Wilson Sports and Eugene just kept needling him. And a lot of that raunchy talk I don't like. Then hot coffee in the clubhouse. Was asked how long I have been playing the game and said sixty years. Eugene worked out the arithmetic on a paper napkin and the comeuppance was I have spent at least five years of my life on a golf course. “Five years, Cecil! You can't have ‘em back. You could've accomplished something important. Ever feel guilty about that?” I sipped from my cup and said, “We're put here for pleasure too.” And then we were quiet. Eugene crumpled up the napkin and pitched it across the room. Looking for a topic, I asked how his chemotherapy was playing out, and Eugene said he'd stopped going. Enjoyed my surprise. Said, “What's the point? Huh? You gotta die of somethin’.” And I had a picture of Eugene at forty, painting my window sashes, and headstrong and ornery and brimming with vim and vigor. Saddening. Hitched a ride home with him, and Eugene just sat behind the wheel in the driveway, his big hands in his lap, looking at the yard and house paint. “We have all this technology,” he said. “Education. High-speed travel. Medical advances. And the twentieth century is still unacceptable.” “Well,” I said, “at least you've had yourself an adventure.” Eugene laughed. Went inside and repaired the hosel on Butch's Cleveland Classic. ($15.) Watched TV. Looked at Nebraska Bar Association mailing about judges under consideration. Have no opinion on the matter. Etta sleeping as I write this. Hope to play nine tomorrow.

Nebraska

T
he town is Americus, Covenant, Denmark, Grange, Hooray, Jerusalem, Sweetwater—one of the lesser-known moons of the Platte, conceived in sickness and misery by European pioneers who took the path of least resistance and put down roots in an emptiness like the one they kept secret in their youth. In Swedish and Danish and German and Polish, in anxiety and fury and God's providence, they chopped at the Great Plains with spades, creating green sod houses that crumbled and collapsed in the rain and disappeared in the first persuasive snow and were so low the grown-ups stooped to go inside; and yet were places of ownership and a hard kind of happiness, the places their occupants gravely stood before on those plenary occasions when photographs were taken.

And then the Union Pacific stopped by, just a camp of white campaign tents and a boy playing his Harpoon at night, and then a supply store, a depot, a pine water tank, stockyards, and the mean prosperity of the twentieth century. The trains strolling into town to shed a boxcar in the depot sideyard, or crying past at sixty miles per hour, possibly interrupting a girl in her high-wire act, her arms looping up when she tips to one side, the railtop as slippery as a silver spoon. And then the yellow and red locomotive rises up from the heat shimmer over a mile away, the August noonday warping the sight of it, but
cinders tapping away from the spikes and the iron rails already vibrating up inside the girl's shoes. She steps down to the roadbed and then into high weeds as the Union Pacific pulls Wyoming coal and Georgia-Pacific lumber and snowplow blades and aslant Japanese pickup trucks through the open countryside and on to Omaha. And when it passes by, a worker she knows is opposite her, like a pedestrian at a stoplight, the sun not letting up, the plainsong of grasshoppers going on and on between them until the worker says, “Hot.”

Twice the Union Pacific tracks cross over the sidewinding Democrat, the water slow as an oxcart, green as silage, croplands to the east, yards and houses to the west, a green ceiling of leaves in some places, whirlpools showing up in it like spinning plates that lose speed and disappear. In winter and a week or more of just above zero, high-school couples walk the gray ice, kicking up snow as quiet words are passed between them, opinions are mildly compromised, sorrows are apportioned. And Emil Jedlicka unslings his blue-stocked .22 and slogs through high brown weeds and snow, hunting ring-necked pheasant, sidelong rabbits, and—always suddenly—quail, as his little brother Orin sprints across the Democrat in order to slide like an otter.

July in town is a gray highway and a Ford hay truck spraying by, the hay sailing like a yellow ribbon caught in the mouth of a prancing dog, and Billy Await up there on the camel's hump, eighteen years old and sweaty and dirty, peppered and dappled with hay dust, a lump of chew like an extra thumb under his lower lip, his blue eyes happening on a Dairy Queen and a pretty girl licking a pale trickle of ice cream from the cone. And Billy slaps his heart and cries, “Oh! I am pierced!”

And late October is orange on the ground and blue overhead and grain silos stacked up like white poker chips, and a high silver water tower belittled one night by the sloppy tattoo
of one year's class at George W. Norris High. And below the silos and water tower are stripped treetops, their gray limbs still lifted up in alleluia, their yellow leaves crowding along yard fences and sheeping along the sidewalks and alleys under the shepherding wind.

Or January and a heavy snow partitioning the landscape, whiting out the highways and woods and cattle lots until there are only open spaces and steamed-up windowpanes, and a Nordstrom boy limping pitifully in the hard plaster of his clothes, the snow as deep as his hips when the boy tips over and cannot get up until a little Schumacher girl sitting by the stoop window, a spoon in her mouth, a bowl of Cheerios in her lap, says in plain voice, “There's a boy,” and her mother looks out to the sidewalk.

Houses are big and white and two stories high, each a cousin to the next, with pigeon roosts in the attic gables, green storm windows on the upper floor, and a green screened porch, some as pillowed and couched as parlors or made into sleeping rooms for the boy whose next step will be the Navy and days spent on a ship with his hometown's own population, on gray water that rises up and is allayed like a geography of cornfields, sugar beets, soybeans, wheat, that stays there and says, in its own way, “Stay.” Houses are turned away from the land and toward whatever is not always, sitting across from each other like dressed-up children at a party in daylight, their parents looking on with hopes and fond expectations. Overgrown elm and sycamore trees poach the sunlight from the lawns and keep petticoats of snow around them into April. In the deep lots out back are wire clotheslines with flapping white sheets pinned to them, property lines are hedged with sour green and purple grapes, or with rabbit wire and gardens of peonies, roses, gladiola, irises, marigolds, pansies. Fruit trees are so closely planted
that they cannot sway without knitting. The apples and cherries drop and sweetly decompose until they're only slight brown bumps in the yards, but the pears stay up in the wind, drooping under the pecks of birds, withering down like peppers until their sorrow is justly noticed and they one day disappear.

Aligned against an alley of blue shale rock is a garage whose doors slash weeds and scrape up pebbles as an old man pokily swings them open, teetering with his last weak push. And then Victor Johnson rummages inside, being cautious about his gray sweater and high-topped shoes, looking over paint cans, junked electric motors, grass rakes and garden rakes and a pitchfork and sickles, gray doors and ladders piled overhead in the rafters, and an old windup Victrola and heavy platter records from the twenties, on one of them a soprano singing “I'm a Lonesome Melody.” Under a green tarpaulin is a wooden movie projector he painted silver and big cans of tan celluloid, much of it orange and green with age, but one strip of it preserved: of an Army pilot in jodhpurs hopping from one biplane onto another's upper wing. Country people who'd paid to see the movie had been spellbound by the slight dip of the wings at the pilot's jump, the slap of his leather jacket, and how his hair strayed wild and was promptly sleeked back by the wind. But looking at the strip now, pulling a ribbon of it up to a windowpane and letting it unspool to the ground, Victor can make out only twenty frames of the leap, and then snapshot after snapshot of an Army pilot clinging to the biplane's wing. And yet Victor stays with it, as though that scene of one man staying alive were what he'd paid his nickel for.

Main Street is just a block away. Pickup trucks stop in it so their drivers can angle out over their brown left arms and speak about crops or praise the weather or make up sentences whose only real point is their lack of complication. And then a
cattle truck comes up and they mosey along with a touch of their cap bills or a slap of the door metal. High-school girls in skintight jeans stay in one place on weekends, and jacked-up cars cruise past, rowdy farmboys overlapping inside, pulling over now and then in order to give the girls cigarettes and sips of pop and grief about their lipstick. And when the cars peel out, the girls say how a particular boy measured up or they swap gossip about Donna Moriarity and the scope she permitted Randy when he came back from boot camp.

Everyone is famous in this town. And everyone is necessary. Townspeople go to the Vaughn Grocery Store for the daily news, and to the Home Restaurant for history class, especially at evensong when the old people eat graveled pot roast and lemon meringue pie and calmly sip coffee from cups they tip to their mouths with both hands. The Kiwanis Club meets here on Tuesday nights, and hopes are made public, petty sins are tidily dispatched, the proceeds from the gumball machines are tallied up and poured into the upkeep of a playground. Yutesler's Hardware has picnic items and kitchen appliances in its one window, in the manner of those prosperous men who would prefer to be known for their hobbies. And there is one crisp, white, Protestant church with a steeple, of the sort pictured on calendars; and the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, grayly holding the town at bay like a Gothic wolfhound. And there is an insurance agency, a county coroner and justice of the peace, a secondhand shop, a handsome chiropractor named Koch who coaches the Pony League baseball team, a post office approached on unpainted wood steps outside of a cheap mobile home, the Nighthawk tavern where there's Falstaff tap beer, a green pool table, a poster recording the Cornhuskers scores, a crazy man patiently tolerated, a gray-haired woman with an unmoored eye, a boy in spectacles thick as paperweights, a
carpenter missing one index finger, a plump waitress whose day job is in a basement beauty shop, an old woman who creeps up to the side door at eight in order to purchase one shot glass of whiskey.

And yet passing by, and paying attention, an outsider is only aware of what isn't, that there's no bookshop, no picture show, no pharmacy or dry cleaners, no cocktail parties, extreme opinions, jewelry or piano stores, motels, hotels, hospital, political headquarters, philosophical theories about Being and the soul.

High importance is only attached to practicalities, and so there is the Batchelor Funeral Home, where a proud old gentleman is on display in a dark brown suit, his yellow fingernails finally clean, his smeared eyeglasses in his coat pocket, a grand-child on tiptoes by the casket, peering at the lips that will not move, the sparrow chest that will not rise. And there's Tommy Seymour's for Sinclair gasoline and mechanical repairs, a green balloon dinosaur bobbing from a string over the cash register, old tires piled beneath the cottonwood, For Sale in the sideyard a Case tractor, a John Deere reaper, a hay mower, a red manure spreader, and a rusty grain conveyor, green weeds overcoming them, standing up inside them, trying slyly and little by little to inherit machinery for the earth.

And beyond that are woods, a slope of pasture, six empty cattle pens, a driveway made of limestone pebbles, and the house where Alice Sorensen pages through a child's World Book Encyclopedia, stopping at the descriptions of California, Capetown, Ceylon, Colorado, Copenhagen, Corpus Christi, Costa Rica, Cyprus.

Widow Dworak has been watering the lawn in an open raincoat and apron, but at nine she walks the green hose around to the spigot and screws down the nozzle so that the spray is a
misty crystal bowl softly baptizing the ivy. She says, “How about some camomile tea?” And she says, “Yum. Oh, boy. That hits the spot.” And bends to shut the water off.

The Union Pacific night train rolls through town just after ten o'clock when a sixty-year-old man named Adolf Schooley is a boy again in bed, and when the huge weight of forty or fifty cars jostles his upstairs room like a motor he'd put a quarter in. And over the sighing industry of the train, he can hear the train saying
Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska.
And he cannot sleep.

Mrs. Antoinette Heft is at the Home Restaurant, placing frozen meat patties on waxed paper, pausing at times to clamp her fingers under her arms and press the sting from them. She stops when the Union Pacific passes, then picks a cigarette out of a pack of Kools and smokes it on the back porch, smelling air as crisp as Oxydol, looking up at stars the Pawnee Indians looked at, hearing the low harmonica of big rigs on the highway, in the town she knows like the palm of her hand, in the country she knows by heart.