Nebraska: Stories

  Addie sipped hot cocoa as she passed sixty minutes up close to the railroad depot's coal stoker oven and some other party-goers sang of Good King Wenceslaus over a parlor organ. And then an old yardman who was sheeped in snow trudged through the high drifts by the door and announced that no more trains would be going out until morning.

  Half the couples stranded there had family in Council Bluffs and decided to stay overnight, but the idea of traipsing back to Repler's house and sleeping in his sister's trundle bed seemed squalid to Addie, and she decided to walk the iron railway trestle across to Omaha.

  Addie was a half hour away from the Iowa railway yard and up on the tracks over the great Missouri before she had second thoughts. White hatchings and tracings of snow flew at her horizontally. Wind had rippled snow up against the southern girders so that the high white skin was pleated and patterned like oyster shell. Every creosote tie was tented with snow that angled down into dark troughs that Addie could fit a leg through. Everything else was night sky and mystery, and the world she knew had disappeared. And yet she walked out onto the trestle, teetering over to a catwalk and sidestepping along it in high-button shoes, forty feet above the ice, her left hand taking the yield from one guy wire as her right hand sought out another. Yelling winds were yanking at her, and the iron trestle was swaying enough to tilt her over into nothingness, as though Addie Dillingham were a playground game it was just inventing. Halfway across, her gray tam-o'-shanter was snagged out just far enough into space that she could follow its spider-drop into the night, but she only stared at the great river that was lying there moon-white with snow and intractable. Wishing for her jump.

  Years later Addie thought that she got to Nebraska and did not give up and was not overfrightened because she was seventeen and could do no wrong, and accidents and dying seemed a government you could vote against, a mother you could ignore. She said she panicked at one jolt of wind and sank down to her knees up there and briefly touched her forehead to iron that hurt her skin like teeth, but when she got up again, she could see the ink-black stitching of the woods just east of Omaha and the shanties on timber piers just above the Missouri River's jagged stacks of ice. And she grinned as she thought how she would look to a vagrant down there plying his way along a rope in order to assay his trotlines for gar and catfish and then, perhaps, appraising the night as if he'd heard a crazy woman screaming in a faraway hospital room. And she'd be jauntily up there on the iron trestle like a new star you could wish on, and as joyous as the last high notes of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

  Playland

  After the agricultural exhibit of 1918, some partners in a real-estate development firm purchased the cattle barns, the gymkhana, the experimental alfalfas and sorghums, the paddocks and pear orchards, and converted one thousand acres into an amusement park called Playland. A landscape architect from Sardinia was persuaded to oversee garden construction, and the newspapers made much of his steam-ship passage and arrival by train in a December snow, wearing a white suit and boater. Upon arrival he'd said, “It is chilly,” a sentence he'd practiced for two hundred miles.

  He invented gardens as crammed as flower shops, glades that were like dark green parlors, ponds that gently overlipped themselves so that water sheeted down to another pond, and trickle streams that issued from secret pipes sunk in the crannies of rocks. Goldfish with tails like orange scarves hung in the pools fluttering gill fins or rising for crumbs that children sprinkled down. South American and African birds were freighted to Playland, each so shockingly colored that a perceiver's eyes blinked as from a photographer's flash. They screamed and mimicked and battered down onto ladies’ hats or the perch of an index finger, while sly yellow canaries performed tricks of arithmetic with green peas and ivory thimbles. Cats were removed from the premises, dogs had to be leashed, policemen were instructed to whistle as they patrolled “so as not to surprise visitors to the park at moments of intimacy.”

  The corn pavilion was transformed into trinket shops, two clothing stores, a bank, a bakery where large chocolate-chip cookies were sold while still hot from the oven, and a restaurant that served cottage-fried potatoes with catfish that diners could snag out of a galvanized tank. The carnival galleries were made slightly orange with electric arc lights overhead, as was the miniature golf course with its undulating green carpets—each hole a foreign country represented by a fjord, pagoda, minaret, windmill, pyramid, or the like. The Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds were turned by diesel truck engines that were framed with small barns and insulated lest they allow more than a grandfatherly noise; paddlewheel craft with bicycle pedals chopped down a slow, meandering river. Operas and starlight concerts were staged from April to October, and the exhibition place was redecorated at great cost for weekend dances at which evening gowns and tuxedos were frequently required. A pretty ice-skating star dedicated the ballroom, cutting the ribbon in a hooded white mink coat that was so long it dragged dance wax onto the burgundy carpet. A newspaper claimed she'd been tipsy, that she'd said, “You got a saloon in this place?” But after a week's controversy an editor determined that the word she'd used was salon, and later the entire incident was denied, the reporter was quietly sent away, and the newspaper grandly apologized to the Playland management.

  Lovers strolled on the swept brick sidewalks and roamed on resilient lawns that cushioned their shoes like a mattress, and at night they leaned against the cast-iron lampposts, whispering promises and nicely interlocking their fingers. Pebbled roads led to nooks where couples were roomed by exotic plants and resplendent flowers whose scent was considered an aphrodisiac, so that placards suggesting temperance and restraint were tamped into the pansy beds.

  The park speedily rose to preeminence as the one place in America for outings, holidays, company picnics, second honeymoons, but its reputation wasn't truly international until the creation of the giant swimming pool.

  Construction took fourteen months. Horse stables were converted to cabanas, steam-powered earth movers sloped the racetrack into a saucer, the shallows and beach were paved, and over twenty thousand railroad cars of Caribbean sand were hauled in on a spur. The pool was nearly one mile long, more than half of that in width, and thirty-six feet deep in its center, where the water was still so pellucid that a swimmer could see a nickel wink sunlight from the bottom. Twelve thousand gallons of water evaporated each summer day and were replaced by six artesian wells feeding six green fountains on which schooling brass fish spouted water from open mouths as they seemed to flop and spawn from a roiling upheaval.

  And the beach was a marvel. The sand was as fine as that in hotel ashtrays, so white that lifeguards sometimes became snow-blind, and so deep near the soda-pop stands that a magician could be buried in it standing up, and it took precious minutes for a crew with spades to pull him out when his stunt failed—he gasped, “A roaring noise. A furnace. Suffocation.” Gymnasts exercised on silver rings and pommel horses and chalked parallel bars, volleyball tournaments were played there, oiled muscle men pumped dumbbells and posed, and in August girls in saucy bathing suits and high heels walked a gangway to compete for the Miss Playland title. Admission prices increased each season, and yet two million people and more pushed through the turnstiles at Playland during the summers. Playland was considered pleasing and inexpensive entertainment, it represented gracious fellowship, polite surprise, good cheer. The Depression never hurt Playland, cold weather only increased candy sales, rains never seemed to persist for long, and even the periodic scares—typhoid in the water, poisonous snakes in sand burrows, piranha near the diving platform—couldn't shrink the crowds. Nothing closed Playland, not even the war.

  Soldiers on furlough or medical release were allowed free entrance, and at USO stations on the beach, happy women volunteers dispensed potato chips and hot dogs on paper plates, sodas without ice, and pink towels just large enough to scrunch up on near the water. Young men would queue up next to the spiked iron fence at six o'clock in the morning when a camp bus
dropped them off, and they'd lounge and smoke and squat on the sidewalk reading newspapers, perhaps whistling at pretty girls as the streetcars screeched past. As the golden gates whirred open, the GIs collided and jostled through, a sailor slapped a petty officer's cap off, and little children raced to the teeter-totters and swings as Playland's nursemaids applauded their speed.

  The precise date was never recorded, but one morning a corporal named Gordon limped out of the bathhouse and was astonished to see an enormous pelican on the prow of the lifeguard's rowboat. The pelican's eyes were blue beads, and she swung her considerable beak to the right and left to regard Gordon and blink, then she flapped down to the beach and waddled toward him, her wings amorously fanning out to a span of ten feet or more as she struck herself thumpingly on the breast with her beak until a spot of red blood appeared on her feathers. The corporal retreated to the bathhouse door and flung sand at the bird and said, “Shoo!” and the pelican seemed to resign herself and lurched up into eastward flight, her wings loudly swooping the air with a noise like a broom socking dust from a rug on a clothesline.

  More guests drifted out of the bathhouse. Children carried tin shovels and sand pails. Married women with bare legs and terry-cloth jackets walked in pairs to the shade trees, sharing the heft of a picnic basket's straw handle. Pregnant women sat on benches in cotton print dresses. Girls emerged into the sun, giggling about silly nothings, their young breasts in the squeeze of crossed arms. On gardened terraces rich people were oiled and massaged by stocky women who spoke no English. Dark waiters in pink jackets carried iced highballs out on trays. A perplexed man in an ascot and navy-blue blazer stood near the overflowing food carts with a dark cigarette, staring down at the pool. Red and yellow hot-air balloons rose up from the apricot orchard and carried in the wind. A rocket ship with zigzag fins and sparking runners and a science-fiction arsenal screamed by on an elevated rail. Children were at the portholes, their noses squashed to the window glass like snails.

  A girl of seventeen sat on the beach with her chin in her hands, looking at the mall. Her name was Bijou. A rubber pillow was bunched under her chest and it made her feel romantic. She watched as her boyfriend, the corporal named Gordon, limped barefoot away from a USO stand in khaki pants belted high at his ribs, a pink towel yoking his neck, a cane in his left hand. He dropped his towel next to Bijou's and squared it with his cane's rubber tip. He huffed as he sat and scratched at the knee of his pants. He'd been a messenger between commanders’ posts in Africa and rode a camouflaged motorcycle. A mine explosion ruined his walk. Bijou wondered if she was still in love with him. She guessed that she was.

  Bijou knelt on her beach blanket and dribbled baby oil onto her thighs. Her white swimming suit was pleated at her breasts but scooped revealingly under her shoulder blades so that pale men wading near her had paused to memorize her prettiness, and a man with a battleship tattoo on his arm had sloshed up onto the hot sand and sucked in his stomach. But Gordon glowered and flicked his cane in a dispatching manner and the man walked over to a girls’ badminton game and those in the water lurched on.

  “My nose itches,” Bijou said. “That means someone's going to visit me, doesn't it?”

  “After that pelican I don't need any more surprises,” Gordon replied, and then he saw an impressive shadow fluctuate along the sand, and he looked heavenward to see an airplane dip its wings and turn, then lower its flaps and slowly descend from the west, just over a splashing fountain. His eyes smarted from the silver glare of the steel and porthole windows. The airplane slapped down in a sudden spray of water, wakes rolling outward from canoe floats as it cut back its engines and swung around. The propellers chopped and then idled, and a door flapped open as a skinny young man in a pink double-breasted suit stepped down to a rocking lifeguard's boat.

  “Must be some bigwig,” said Gordon.

  The airplane taxied around, and Bijou could see the pilot check the steering and magnetos and instruments, then plunge the throttle forward, ski across the water, and wobble off. The rowboat with the airplane's passenger rode up on the beach and retreated some before it was hauled up by a gang of boys. The man in the pink suit slipped a dollar to a lifeguard and hopped onto the sand, sinking to his ankles. As he walked toward Bijou he removed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his shirt pocket. His pants were wide and pleated and he'd cocked a white Panama hat on his head. He laid a cigarette on his lip and grinned at Bijou, and arrested his stride when he was over her.

  “Don't you recognize your cousin?”

  She shaded her eyes. “Frankie?”

  He clinked his cigarette lighter closed and smiled as smoke issued from his nose. “I wanted to see how little Bijou turned out, how this and that developed.”

  “I couldn't be more surprised!”

  He'd ignored the corporal, so Gordon got up, brushing sand from his khakis, and introduced himself. “My name's Gordon. Bijou's boyfriend.”

  “Charmed,” Frankie said. He removed his hat and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. His wavy hair was black and fragrantly oiled and he had a mustache like William Powell's. He had been a radio actor in New York. He asked if they served drinks on the beach, and Gordon offered to fetch him something, slogging off to a soda-pop stand.

  “Sweet guy,” Frankie said. “What's he got, polio or something?”

  “He was wounded in the war.”

  “The dope,” Frankie said. He unlaced his white shoes and unsnapped his silk socks from calf garters and removed them. He slumped down on Gordon's towel, unbuttoning his coat.

  “You're so handsome, Frankie!”

  “Ya think so?”

  “I can't get over it. How'd you find me at Playland?”

  “You're not that hard to pick out,” Frankie said, and he gave his cousin the once-over. “You look like Betty Grable in that suit.”

  “You don't think it's too immodest?”

  “You're a feast for the eyes.”

  The corporal returned with an orange soda and a straw. Frankie accepted it without thanks and dug in his pocket for a folded dollar bill. “Here, here's a simoleon for your trouble.”

  “Nah,” Gordon said. “You can get the next round.”

  Frankie sighed as if bored and poked the dollar bill into the sand near Gordon's bare left foot. He leaned back on his elbows and winked at someone in the pool. “Somebody wants you, Sarge.”

  “Say again?”

  “Two dames in a boat.”

  A rowboat had scraped bottom, and two adolescent girls with jammy lipstick, Gordon's sister and her girlfriend, motioned for him to come over. Gordon waded to where the water was warm at his calves and climbed darkly up his pant legs. “What're you doing, Sis?”

  “Having fun. Where's Bijou?”

  “On the beach, Goofy.”

  His sister strained to see around him. "Where?"

  He turned. Bijou and Frankie had disappeared.

  Frankie strolled the hot white sand with his cousin and sipped orange soda through the straw. Hecklers repeatedly whistled at Bijou and Frankie winked at them. “Hear that? You're the berries, kid. You're driving these wiseacres off their nut.”

  “Oh, those wolves do that to any female.”

  “Baloney!” He was about to make a statement but became cautious and revised it. “What am I, nine years older than you?”

  “I think so,” Bijou said.

  “And what about GI Joe?”

  Bijou glanced over her shoulder and saw her boyfriend hunting someone on the beach. Gordon squinted at her and she waved, but he seemed to look past her. “He's twenty-one,” she said.

  “Four years older. What's he doing with a kid like you for his bim?”

  “He's mad about me, Stupid.”

  Frankie snickered. He crossed his ankles and settled down in the bathhouse shade. Bijou sat next to him. Frankie pushed his cigarette down in the sand and lit another, clinking his lighter closed. “Do you and Gordo smooch?”

  Bijou prodded sand from bet
ween her toes. “Occasionally.”

  “How shall I put it? You still Daddy's little girl?”

  “You're making me uncomfortable, Frankie.”

  “Nah, I'm just giving you the needle.”

  The corporal was confused. His nose and shoulders were sunburned and his legs ached and Bijou and Frankie had flat out evaporated. His sister and her girlfriend stroked the rowboat ahead and Gordon sat on the rim board near a forward oarlock, scouting the immeasurable Playland beach. Soon his sister complained that she was tired and bored and blistered, and Gordon said, “All right already. Cripes—don't think about me. Do what you want to do.”

  After a while Frankie clammed up and then decided he wanted a little exercise and removed his tie and pink coat as he walked past the USO stand to the gym equipment. He performed two pull-ups on the chalked high bar, biting his cigarette, then amused a nurse in the first-aid station with his impressions of Peter Lorre, Ronald Colman, Lionel Barrymore.

  “I love hearing men talk,” the nurse said. “That's what I miss most.”

  “Maybe I could close this door,” Frankie said.

  “You can't kiss me, if that's what you're thinking. I'm not fast.”