Facts Behind the Fiction: The Hump Yard

Here's a link to a YouTube video of a pneumatic hump yard. This sound is familiar to anyone who lived in Old Town Pocatello before the hump yard was closed in 2002:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndryMwF41Kk&NR=1

Here's more information about Pocatello's hump yard, from http://utahrails.net/up/up-yards.php

Pocatello, Idaho
Pocatello was Union Pacific's first hump yard and was opened in 1947 (it was called a retarder yard when first completed). When the new Pocatello hump yard was opened, motive power consisted of single, and later, double sets of new NW2s. As rail traffic grew during the late 1940s, so did the number of trains operating through Pocatello. Train length was also increasing, necessitating increased use of double NW2s as hump power, with their attendent full, six-man switch crews. 

A news item about Union Pacific ordering seven double-rail Model 31 electro-pneumatic car retarders from Union Switch and Signal Company for use at their new Pocatello yard. (Railway Signaling. Volume 40, number 8, August 1947, p.504)

A news item about new two-way radios for Union Pacific's yard offices and Diesel switch engines. Also mentioned was that the new yard at Pocatello cost $2.6 million. (Railway Signaling. Volume 40, number 11, November 1947, p.727)

The Pocatello yard has a 14-track receiving yard, a 28-track classification yard (designed for 40 tracks), and an 11-track departure yard. Other facilities included a car repair yard and a locomotive fueling station. Pocatello is a junction for routes from four directions on Union Pacific. To the south is Salt Lake City and traffic destinations in southern California; to the east is a connection at Granger, Wyoming, with the original 1869 Omaha to Ogden mainline, and all destinations eastward; to the west are the destinations in Oregon and Washington; and to the north is the traffic points in eastern Idaho, and the mineral traffic and connections with Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Milwaukee Road at Butte, Montana. The lines in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington originate large volumes of fruit, vegetables, lumber, phosphate, and live stock. Points in the Northwest are also the destinations for much coal and manufactured products. The amount of rail traffic through Pocatello varied with the seasons, but in the late 1940s when the new yard was opened, the peak was about 2,200 cars per day. 
Previously, switching at Pocatello was done in two flat yards that had become inadequate to handle the growing levels of rail traffic being moved through the terminal. The new yard required the purchase of 75 acres and the realignment of 4,400 feet of the adjacent Portneuf River. The ascending portion of the hump grade raises at 2 percent grade, and the descending portion was built with a short stretches of 4 percent, 1.6 percent, and 1.3 grades until a general west to east descending grade of 0.2 percent is attained. Included in the construction of the hump itself was a car inspection point, manned by five inspectors, that allowed inspection, with lighting and plate glass covered inspection pit, of both sides and the under side of each car as it passed over the hump. Access to the inspection pit was gained through a concrete passageway under the crest of the hump. The new yard also included the installation of a new 150-ton Fairbanks-Morse track scale and 30,000 gallon diesel fuel tank to service the seven Diesel switch engines assigned to switching duties in the yard. ("New Classification Yard on Union Pacific". Railway Signaling. Volume 41, number 1 (January 1948), pp.36-43. A general article about the new "recently constructed" yard at Pocatello, Idaho.)

[Magazine article] "This Modern Yard Expedites Traffic", (Railway Age. January 10, 1948, p.120)

Buddy's, Part XIV "The Hump Yard"

Henry S rustles his papers. “Uh, let’s see. Oh, yes. Describe an intimate moment that you and the subject shared.”

       “Well, if by intimate, you mean physical--”

       “Not necessarily,” says Henry S briskly.

       “I was there when Rose’s daughter was born.”

       “Good,” says Henry S, making a note.  “And?”

       “And we shared personal information--about boyfriends and lovers, stuff like that.”

       “Yes.” Bob-bob.

       “She held my head for me once when I was sick, drunk after my boyfriend and I split up. She stayed up all night, taking care of me. I threw up on her shoes.”

       Henry S wrinkles his nose. “That’s not exactly what I’m looking for.” His wire-rimmed glasses flash a little, reflecting the glow from a nearby cluster of faded chili pepper lights.

I must have dozed off for a while, because when I woke up, it wasn’t morning yet, but the room was no longer dark. Blue-grey moonlight came through the slats of the window blind, striping my arm and the blankets like those uniforms prisoners wear in old movies. Rose was breathing deeply and regularly, but when I turned toward her, I saw that her eyes were open. Her left arm was bent up above her head, and she was staring at the raku mask that hung on the wall near the foot of the bed. 

       “You’re still awake?”

       “Yeah.”  She shifted and yanked on the covers a little.

       I stuck one leg outside the blanket to cool off. “It’s hot in here.” My pillow had worked its way down between the mattress and the wall. I pulled it out, swatted it into fluffiness, and tucked it behind my head, pressing it into the curve at the back of my neck. I closed my eyes again, but I could imagine the stripes of moonlight and shadow as they lay across my face. “My god, I was sick,” I said. “I can’t remember ever throwing up that much. Sorry ‘bout your shoes.”

       “That’s okay.  They’re only Italian leather."

       I started to laugh, but that made my stomach hurt again, so I stopped and lay quietly, trying to breathe evenly. I was just about asleep again when Rose spoke softly, as if from a long, long way away. I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. Her voice was like a voice in a dream. I didn’t open my eyes. 

       “My family stayed right here in this house one time. I was about ten. It used to belong to the Imperial 400 Motel next door. They rented it out by the night to families that were too big to stay in the regular rooms. My aunts and cousins and I stayed here for a couple of days while my folks looked for a new place to live. Can’t remember why we had to leave the old one. I slept in this bedroom--maybe even this bed--and I remember waking up about 4:30 in the morning. There must have been a full moon, because the room was pretty light, like it is now.”

       Rose stretched both her arms up over her head and slowly brought them down on top of the blanket. “What woke me up was this strange noise. It was kind of like a flute--a tonette, we used to call them in school--and it went from a long, low tone to a higher one, and a higher one, ’til it reached a note so high--it was almost like a musical scream, if there is such a thing. I couldn’t imagine where it was comin’ from. All I could think of was that someone in the next room or maybe next door must be playing some kind of flute. It was so eerie. I lay there for the longest time, listening to it, feelin’ kind of enchanted. Almost afraid. Then, just when the tone got so high I didn’t think it could go any higher, there was this terrible booming noise in the distance--walls crashing together, buses colliding, a big noise like that. Then nothing."

       I waited, but she didn’t say anything more.

       “Well, what was it?”

       “I didn’t get up to see. I fell back asleep, I guess. When I woke up later, I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed it or not. Nobody else said anything about it.”

       “Did you ever find out what it was?”

       “Sure. You’ve heard it.”

       “I have? I haven’t heard anything like that here.”

       “Sure you have. It’s the trains. When they sort the trains over in the railroad yard, the hump yard. They ease the cars down this incline. The retarders--brakes--make the screaming flute sound, and the boom is the release of the pneumatic controls.”

       “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that. But not in the middle of the night.”

       “It was the weirdest sound I’ve ever heard.” She yawned and turned to face me. “In the morning,” she said, her voice low, like she was telling me a secret, “I got dressed and walked across the street to the campus. It was really early. Nobody was out yet. The dew was really thick on the grass, and the air was so fresh, and the trees were so still, like they were waiting for the day to begin. Everything was just waking up. I remember thinking how beautiful and still and green it all was."

       I put my hand outside the covers and felt for her hand. Her long, cool fingers were smooth in my palm, like well-polished silver. 

       “I wish I could have been there, too,” I whispered. Rose didn’t say anything, and soon I was back asleep.

“How would you characterize the subject, in relation to yourself?” Henry S’s pen hovers over several small boxes. Reading upside-down, I can see choices such as “Spouse,” “Friend,” “Neighbor,” and “Co-worker.” I don’t see one that says “Beautiful Dark Soul” or “Sister Spirit” or even “Mentor.” 

       “She was my best friend,” I say. 

       Henry S bobs his head and makes his final note.




[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

Buddy's, Part XIII "The State Trooper"

The last time, on my last visit to Pocatello, I sat in Buddy’s waiting for Rose. Waiting on my barstool by the jukebox, drinking beer and playing song after song, until I had to go break another twenty for quarters, and while I was standing by the cash register, the Idaho State trooper came in and looked around and then walked right up to me and said, “Ms. Lish? Jackie Lish?” I nodded, wondering why a State trooper would be patrolling Buddy’s parking lot and what did I do? Forget to re-register my plates? Then he said, “Ms. Lish, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your friend has been in an accident,” and I knew that it must be bad, because they don’t send State troopers into Buddy’s to get you if everything’s going to be all right.

       Rose was killed almost instantly, in spite of the helmet she was wearing, and Tamsin’s father died, too, a few days later, without regaining consciousness. Tamsin was going to graduate from high school in a few days, and I was in town for that and to help celebrate her eighteenth birthday. After the funeral, I called and quit my job and had a friend pack up the stuff in my apartment and send it to me, and I’ve lived here in Pocatello ever since.   

       Actually, that bad night wasn’t the last time Rose and I met at Buddy’s. It would have been if she’d showed up, but, of course, she didn’t. The last time we met at Buddy’s was when I came back for my mother’s funeral, a couple of years earlier. I hadn’t been to Paris in a long time, and my brother Kip had to hunt me down by calling the University Alumni Office. Rose met me at the airport and drove me straight to Buddy’s for lunch. She said I needed the garlic to help me get through the funeral and seeing all my relatives after being away for so long. She was right: all afternoon I sucked the fumes of my own breath, reminding myself that as soon as it was over, I could leave and go to Rose’s house, where no one would ask me wasn’t I married yet? and when was I going to come back to Paris? and did I know that DeMaughn Young’s wife died last winter and his two cute little children sure missed having a mommy?  Not “their mommy,” just “a mommy.”

Buddy's, Part XII "Two Dead Rats"

“And these difficulties,” says Henry S, “these differences were usually resolved in what way?”
     “Oh, we’d spend a few days apart, but one of us would usually call or stop by before long, and--like I said--we could pick up where we left off. Pick up where we were before the argument.”
     “Admirable,” Henry S says to his notebook.

*

       “If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one,” said Rose when I opened my back door about two weeks later.  She held up two neatly-rolled joints.

       I opened the door wider. “Get out of here, you slut. I’m still mad at you.” She stepped through the doorway, and I gave her a hug, making an exaggerated grab for the joints at the same time. She hugged me back, and we struggled, still embracing, into my kitchen.

       Rose flopped into a chair and put the joints on the table. They formed a yellow paper arrow, ends touching and pointing at me as if asking a question.

       “I’m sorry, Rose. You were right. He’s a jerk, and I knew it all along. But, you know how it is, I wanted to believe it was different.” I sat down in the chair opposite hers and put my hands, palms up, on the table.

       “Forget him.”  She looked around the room. “I’m assuming he’s gone?”

       “Came and got his stuff last week.” I laughed one short ha! “After I got home that night, I stayed up, thinking. First I was mad at you. Then I was mad at him. Then I cried and fell asleep for a couple of hours. When I woke up, he still wasn’t home, so I sat here and worked out this whole speech I was going to give him when he got here. By then it was about five in the morning, and I sat here talking to myself, talking myself right up into being angry and then back down into this really calm, really tight place. This went on for about an hour, when suddenly I realized he wasn’t coming home.”

       Rose nodded and touched the joints, aligning them into a more perfect arrow, still pointing my way.

       “So, I got out a bunch of those big Orbie bags that I use for the trash, and I started loading them up with all his stuff. All his clothes and football shit and those stupid trophies. I put them out on the curb next to the grass clippings.”

       “Perfect! They got hauled away with the garbage!”

       “No.  It wasn’t trash day. They sat there for a couple of days, and then they disappeared. He must have come by when I was at school. But he did take the grass clippings.” We both laughed. 

       “I think he moved back into the dorms. I can’t afford to stay here by myself. I don’t even want to. So, I’ve been looking for another place. Found a little apartment over on the west side of town.”

       “I’ll help you move,” said Rose. “I’ve got a friend who’ll loan me his truck.”

       “Saturday okay?” 

       Rose nodded.

       “Good,” I said. “That was easy. Now, fire up one of those dead rats.” 

       Rose pulled her little box of matches out of her pocket.

The waiter brings me another beer and another bottled water for Henry S. Maybe it’s the beer, but I’m feeling pretty relaxed.
“One time we got high. I don’t know if you ought to put that in, though, about getting high.” Henry S nods, and I go on. “And we modge-podged everything in my house.” Henry S’s pen writes m-o-d and hesitates. He looks up.

       “It’s a craft thing. Like glue, only clear. You paint it over pictures and stuff, and they stick to whatever you put them on.” I make painting motions on the side of my water glass, then rotate it as if to show him the design.

       “And it’s called ‘mod pod?’ ‘Mod podge?’”

       “We always called it ‘modge-podge.’ I don’t know. It’s in craft stores. I still have a lot of the stuff we made. Ashtrays with pictures on the bottom, pencil holders and trays, a cigar box with a Kliban cat cartoon on it. Two cats are sitting on a fence in the moonlight, and one cat says to the other, ‘If I had two dead rats, I’d give you one.’”

       Henry S arrests himself halfway into a bob. “I’m not sure I understand.”

       I shake my head. “Not important.” I point at his sheet of questions. “How many do we have left?”

       “Just a couple.” He moves his pen over the list. “Describe the last time you saw the subject.”

       I look at the little red tricycle hanging over Henry S’s head. “Can’t say that I can remember exactly when that was. I’d been living out of state, you know, there at the end.”


*Cartoon from Cat by B. Kliban, 1975

Buddy's, Part XI "Kip's Story"

I thought of the first time I met Joe, right after I got to Pocatello. I was in the Corner Pocket using the pay phone to call some friends who said I could crash at their place. Their line was busy, and while I waited, I watched these three guys playing pool. I could tell they were football players by the way they stood--kinda hunched, with their arms away from their bodies. The best-looking one kept turning around to stare at me before he took his shot, giving me the come-on in a “look-at-me-aren’t-I-cool?” sorta way. And then he started talking to me, only it was like he was really talking to his friends. Or the other way around. Saying stuff like, “Never had me a farm girl. A big ol’ Idaho farm girl,” in a drawling, mock-country voice. The way he was talking to me, about me, I remember wondering when or--terrible thought--if I would ever shake off the look of Paris, Idaho.

       He kept talking and flirting, and by the time the game of pool was over, he had bought me a couple of beers, and I was standing with his arm looped around my shoulders and neck, ready to go home with him. I never did call my friends. We went back to the little house on Fifth, and I didn’t even get out of bed for the next four days, except to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. I just lay around, watching TV, reading magazines, and painting my toenails, until Joe would get home from class or football practice and we’d get into the shower together and then spend the rest of the evening fooling around.

       When I thought about how Joe liked to razz me, talking in his fake country accent about “big ol’ farm girls,” I began to understand what Rose was telling me. I remembered Joe saying something about having “a Chinese chick” one time, just to see what “Chink Poontang,” as he called it, was like.

       I stood up, swatted some leaves off the seat of my pants, and went into the Student Union. I put a quarter in the pay ‘phone by the door and dialed my own number. It rang six times before Joe answered. He must have been asleep; his “hello” was deep and blurry.

       “I just had an interesting talk with your girlfriend,” I said, making my voice as dry and cold as I could. I didn’t feel dry and cold; I was sweating, and my hand was shaking.

       “Whazzat?”

       “Your old girlfriend, Portland Rose Harris.” I pronounced each of Rose’s names slowly and deliberately.

       There were a few seconds of silence, then, “Aw, Jack. That was a long time ago. She ain’t nothin’.”

       Just my best friend, I thought.

       “Jack? Jackie? You there? What’ve you been doin’, baby? Com’on home.”

       I didn’t say anything. I held the receiver tightly and looked at the little plate in the middle of the dial. Someone had scratched over the printed numbers with a ball-point pen. I could read the “(208) 232-” but the rest was obliterated.

       “Baby, you there? Come home. Let’s get some dinner goin’. Jack?”

       “Joe?”

       “Yeah.”

       “My dad used to have this gun, this old twenty-two pistol. Not big enough for hunting. He used it for plinkin’. Target practice, you know?”

       “Yeah.”

       “He never cleaned it, and it was in pretty bad shape, but he liked to carry it around. In his pocket.”  I looked at the ball-point pen scratches. Why would you do that? I wondered.

       I went on. “He used to take it with him to the bar. Liked to show off, I guess, with the handle of it sticking out of his pocket. But one night he got all liquored up, and he took the gun out--just to show to somebody, you know--and the bartender got mad and told him to get rid of it or he couldn’t stay in the bar. So he gave it to my brother, Kip, who happened to be in there playing pool with some friends, and Kip took it out and put in under the seat in his truck.” I stopped. I noticed that I wasn’t sweating anymore, and the telephone receiver was light and dry in my hand.

       “So?  Jack?”

       “So, nothing. Kip drove around with the gun under the seat of his truck for several weeks--months, maybe.”

       “Is that it?” Joe exhaled heavily into the ‘phone. “What’s the point?”

       “No point,” I said. “Except one day, Kip’s cleaning out his truck, and he remembers the gun. Reaches under the seat and gets it out, puts it on the seat, thinking he’ll give it back to Dad next time he sees him. Drives around for a couple of days, then one day goes by the house to drop off the gun. Stops the truck, opens the door and starts to get out, when BLAM! The gun goes off. Shoots Kip in the leg.”

       “Shit!”

       “Yeah.”

       “Was he hurt? I mean, bad?”

       “No, not too. It was just a twenty-two. He was laid up for a few days, ‘til his leg healed, but he’s okay, now. Doesn’t limp or anything. Does have a scar, though. Little round hole near the top of his thigh. Looks like a big dimple.”

       Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

       “Uh, Jack?  You comin’ home now?”

       “Yeah.  I’ll be there in a few minutes.” A few more seconds of silence, then, “Joe?” I said.

       “Yeah?”

       “I don’t really feel like seeing you when I get home. Don’t you have someplace you could go?”

       “Uh, yeah, I guess. Yeah.”

       “Okay. Good. ‘Bye.” I heard his “Bye, Jack,” as I hung up.

Buddy's, Part X "Sucker!"

Just then, the front door of the restaurant opened, and Rose came in, rushing a little and waving at me. She called her order to our waitress as she crossed the room to the table. I decided not to wait until she got too comfortable.

       “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Joe?” I said as soon as she sat down.

       Rose looked a little surprised. “I did. First day we met.”

       “No, I mean knew Joe. Slept with him. You were his girlfriend.”

       This time she looked a lot surprised, but something else, too. Several expressions, including what I thought were anger and sadness, passed over her face. “Jack, I wasn’t his ‘girlfriend,’” she said finally. 

       “Everyone in here seems to think so, including” --I tossed my head in Susie’s direction--“the waitress.” I paused. Rose was looking down at her hands. She wasn’t wearing nail polish these days; in fact her nails were stained and chipped on the ends, and she picked at the rough skin of a callous that had formed on her right palm. I repeated my question. “So, why didn’t you tell me? D’you think I’d be jealous?”

       “No.”

       “Well, what?”

       Rose looked up. “Are you gonna break up with him, Jack?”

       “No.  I don’t know.” I tried to read her face, but all I could see was that she was concentrating--the look that she had the first time we met, when she crossed the street. “Maybe. But I don’t get it. I thought you were my friend. How come you didn’t tell me  Do you still have a thing for him?”

       “No!”  The word came out louder than she probably meant it to. The people at the next table looked our way.

       “No,” Rose repeated. “I don’t ‘have a thing’ for him. And you shouldn’t, either.”

       “Hey, I love Joe. He’s been really great to me. I can’t help it if he dumped you and--”

       “He didn’t dump me. It isn’t like you think.”

       “So tell me how it is.”

       Rose exhales heavily. She looked angry again, her brow creased and her dark eyes glittering. “It isn’t. I don’t want him  He doesn’t want me. But he’s a creep, Jackie, and I don’t want you--"

       "Oh, stop it!” I interrupted. “We’ve been friends for a year. Why didn’t either of you say anything?”

       “He probably doesn’t remember.”

       “Whattaya mean? Because he was drunk?”

       “Well, he was drunk, we both were, but that’s not why. I... I wasn’t anything to him, Jack. Just something he wanted to do. An experience he wanted to have.”

       I didn’t know quite what to make of this, but, I didn’t like it, so I got up, pushing my chair back hard against the wall. Susie had just come up to our table carrying glasses of ice water in both hands. I brushed past her roughly, making her spill the water, and I ran out of the restaurant and down the block toward home. I don’t think Rose tried to follow me, because after I slowed down and looked back at Buddy’s, there was no one on the sidewalk.

       It was only a few blocks to my house, but I didn’t want to go home right away, so I angled up toward the campus and cut across the quad to the Student Union. It was just about dusk, and nobody much was around. I sat down on the steps by the Union. I felt like crying, but I didn’t. 

       I sat there breathing kind of hard and watching the bats that come out that time of the evening. They flapped out of the big trees that ring the quad and looped, one by one, around the grassy square. I remembered watching my brothers “fish” for bats from the front porch of our house in Paris. They’d tie a small sinker on the end of their fishing line and cast it up in the air toward the trees in our yard. The bats, mistaking it for some kind of flying bug, would swoop out of the trees at the sinker, pulling up at the last minute, when they realized it wasn’t something to eat after all. “Sucker!” my brothers would yell at the bats and cast again. 

Buddy's, Part IX "What the Hell?"

I look up. Henry S is asking me a question, repeating a question, I think.
“Reunion?” he says. “You had an argument at a family reunion? A class reunion?”

       “No, not a reunion. I was thinking of something else. What argument are you talking about? What reunion?”

       Henry S huffs a little to show his exasperation. He repeats his question to me in a clear, careful voice that I imagine he usually reserves for speaking to the mentally retarded. “Did you and the subject ever argue or have an altercation you would characterize as a ‘fight?’”

       “No.”  I paused. “No. We liked to discuss things, and Rose was pretty determined about her opinions--so am I, for that matter--but nothing I’d call a fight, really.” My answer doesn’t satisfy Henry S this time. This time, he doesn’t hurry to make his notes and get on to the next question. He looks at me directly, bobbing his head only a little, sensing something.

       “Well,” I say finally, “we did argue some over graduate school. Rose was supposed to go to graduate school, but instead she took a job at the railroad.” Henry S is writing now, satisfied. I feel relieved, off the hook. “I always thought she wasted herself, wasted her talent,” I add. “She would have been a great teacher.”

I had a beer while I waited for Rose. She’d said she might be late getting off work. She was new on the job and had to finish up some of the scut work after everyone else left for the day. That’s partly what I wanted to talk to her about: her job. Her last year in the Art Department, her teachers had talked her into applying to graduate school to get her MFA, maybe even teach. Rose submitted several applications and art portfolios, and she got accepted at Kent State and a couple of other big schools back east. Tony and I got all excited, and the three of us would talk about which school was the best. I noticed that Rose seemed less enthusiastic than either of us, but I didn’t really think anything about it until May came, and Rose graduated, and she still didn’t say where she was going to go. 

       Then she got that job with the railroad, and every time I called her she was just getting home from work or just getting ready to go back or too tired to talk right then, and I saw that her job was starting to swallow her up. And it was just a job in the railroad yard! They moved her around, like they did all the new people, training her in all aspects of the yard--some security patrolling, some maintenance, all kinds of work. Whenever I asked her why she wanted to work there, she’d say something about the good money, but I couldn’t believe that was all there was to it. 

       In the year and a half since I’d met Rose, I’d really gotten my act together. I finished my GED and started talking college courses, including a couple of art classes. Joe and I still lived in the house on Fifth, and we got along pretty well together, although he refused to do much of what I was interested in, saying that he needed time by himself and besides practice and class and games during the season took all his energy. In many ways, that was okay with me, because I could spend as much time with Rose as I wanted. At least I could until she got the railroad job. 

       That day in Buddy’s, I was going to pin her down, make her explain to me what was going on with her, why she wasn’t making plans for graduate school or at least to do something more with her art.

       The bartender cleared his throat to get my attention. “D’you wanna order something to eat?”

       “Naw. I’ll wait ‘til my friend gets here.” I slid off my barstool and tugged a couple of quarters out of my pocket. I plugged them into the juke box in the corner and punched up some ELO and Ozark Mountain Daredevils, then climbed back on my stool and idly twisted back and forth with the music. Buddy’s was fairly crowded for a weeknight, but not with anyone I knew. When both songs ended, I got a fresh beer and wandered into the dining room, thinking I’d grab a table and, if Rose didn’t show up soon, go ahead and eat without her.

       The dining room was crowded, too, so I leaned in the doorway, watching a waitress clear a table that three guys--jocks, they looked like--were leaving. The waitress was laughing, and I heard her say what sounded to me like “Fussarelli,” so I listened more closely to the end scraps of the conversation. I caught the words, “kicked them outta here,” and then, from one of the jocks, “nigger.” I was startled to hear this word, and I must have stopped listening for a few seconds, because the next thing I heard came from one of the guys as they passed me on their way toward the door. “Did her in the back room of the art gallery,” he said, and the others snickered lewdly.

       They went on by, and I sort of stumbled over to their recently-vacated table. The waitress was wiping up the last of the crumbs and replacing them with fresh placemats and sets of silverware. She smiled at me and indicated that I should go ahead and sit down. 

       “Excuse me, but were you”--I waved toward the door and the jocks’ retreating backs--“were you talking about Joe Fussarelli? The ISU football player?”

       The waitress, whose nametag read “Susie,” nodded in a friendly manner.

       “And a woman named Rose?”

       Her smile faded a bit, and she shrugged. “I don’t know what his girlfriend’s name was.”

       I persisted. “But she was a black woman? Tall?” I held my hand an inch or so above my head.

       Susie considered. “Yeah, pretty tall. Little bun on top of her head. D’you want to order now?”

       “In a minute.” I pulled out the chair and sat down heavily. “When was this?”

       She had started away from the table. “Beg pardon?”

       “When were Joe Fussarelli and this woman in here?”

Susie stopped and turned. She looked up at a tangle of fishing line that dangled from the ceiling. The line was laden with bright red plastic bobbers and brass fish hooks. “Let’s see,” she said. “I guess it was, oh, about two years ago. Yeah, two years, because Jeremy--the bartender? He’d just started working here, and he was the one had to ask them to leave.”

       “How come? What were they doing?”

       Susie slowly shook her head and laughed that “boys will be boys” way dads and businessmen do with their sons and young male customers. “They were sooo drunk. And making a lot of noise. And then, well, he got a little crude, and some of the other customers were getting annoyed, so Jeremy told them they’d have to leave if they couldn’t quiet down. And I know Jeremy was nervous, because Fussarelli is so much bigger than he is. But it was all right. They left okay. No problem.” 

       She looked at me as if to say Isn’t your curiosity satisfied yet? and I gestured at the menu. “Could I get a salad, please?”

       “Sure,” said Susie. “And garlic bread?”

       I nodded, and she moved away toward the kitchen. I sat there staring at my beer glass and thinking What the hell?

            

Buddy's, Part VIII "Prayer to the Kiln God"

“With what frequency did you and Portland Rose have contact?” asks Henry S.

       “Look, please just call her Rose. She didn’t really like the Portland part.”

       “Yes, well, I see. I already have the information about the origin of her name.” He flips the pages of his notebook. “I talked to some former customers of her father’s restaurant.” He takes a sip of his bottled water.

       “Sure you don’t want something to eat?” I nudge the plate with half of my Chick’s Special on it. “Try some.”

       Henry S eyes the open-faced sandwich laden with juicy meatballs and thick, red sauce. “No, thank you,” he says. “I’m vegan.”

       “Pardon? You’re Norwegian?”

       “Not Norwegian. Vegan. It’s a kind of vegetarianism.”  He looks back down at his sheet of questions. “How often would you say you and Rose”--he emphasizes the single name--“had contact?”

       “Oh, at first, two-three times a week. After she graduated and went to work for the railroad, I didn’t see her very often. Then I moved away and didn’t see her for a few years at a time.”

       “But you still kept in touch?”

       “No. Yeah. Neither one of us was a very good letter writer. Thing about it though, we could always pick right up where we left off.”


       Like the time I picked up the ‘phone, and Rose’s voice said, “It’s a girl. I want to name her Tamsin, after my mother. What do you think?” and I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.

       “That motorcycle guy?”

       “Yeah. We’ve been gettin’ along pretty well.”

       “Evidently. Hey, I wanna be god mother.”

       “That’s why I called. See you soon?”
       Or one night when I was working late in the ceramics studio, trying to pull a tall jar the way Tony had been showing us in class, only I kept making the walls of the jar too thin, and my fingers would pop right through the clay, and I’d have to squash it all down and begin again. I could make tall stuff in class, when Tony was there helping me. He was flirting with me, though, not just helping, because he’d lean in close behind me, putting his arms around me, holding my hands on the jar with his big hands. He’d probably say how else could he show me? but I noticed that he never helped the guys in class the same way he helped the women.

       I kept trying and trying, but my clay kept collapsing, so I decided to take a break and call Rose, who I hadn’t seen in about three months. As soon as she picked up the ‘phone, I asked her to meet me at Buddy’s. She said give her fifteen minutes. She’d just gotten off work, and she sounded tired, but by the time I’d cleaned the clay off my hands and walked the eight blocks or so to the restaurant, she was there. Without even bothering to ask Rose how she’d been doing, I launched into a tirade about my frustration with the clay. She must have just come off a full shift at work--it was about 9 p.m.--but she said, “Let’s go,” and we got our Chick Specials to go and went back to the studio. 

       Under Rose’s tutelage, I was pulling up tall, graceful jars within an hour. True, she used Tony's “hands on” technique at first, but hers were the arms of an encouraging mother--no need to breathe heavily on my neck--and as soon as she could feel that I was in charge of the clay, she let go. When I was finally working all on my own, Rose wandered around the studio examining the stuff that my classmates had made. She peered into a half-loaded oven in the kiln room, and without hesitating, she was able to pick out the pieces I had done. 

       She pointed at a thick bowl that had been placed adjacent to one of mine in the kiln. “That’s going to blow,” she said.

       “D’you think so?”

       “Positive. Look how much clay’s left in the bottom. It’s sure to have a big air bubble in there. I’d move my piece, if I were you. Whose bowl is that, anyway?”

       “This guy in my class. He’s new.”

       “Well, his stuff oughta be on a shelf by itself,” she said. She lifted the heavy bowl gingerly and set it to one side, then carefully rearranged the tiers of pieces waiting to be fired. “No sense ruining everyone else’s stuff.”

       “As I remember, some of your best work was made of stuff that got blown up.”

       “Well, yes, but that was before I learned to avoid it. I never intentionally broke things.  If I said I did, that was just a way to cover the mistakes I made.”

       “Rose, I’m disappointed! Here I thought you were this big reconstructionist, this great collage artist.”

       Rose made a sound like she had something stuck in the back of her throat. “You were pretty easy to impress in those days,” she said. 

       When we had the kiln reloaded, Rose pulled a small chunk from a block of wet clay in a plastic bag on a nearby shelf. She sat down on a stool near the kiln and worked the clay between her fingers, kneading and shaping it with sharp twisting motions. I went back to my work in the main studio and successfully threw three pieces, one after another. When I finally sat up to stretch my cramped back and shoulders, it was very late. Rose wasn’t in the studio, and I looked for her in the kiln room. At first the room seemed empty, but then I spotted Rose, asleep on a pile of newspapers and straw near the raku kiln. Her hands were folded under her cheek as if in prayer, and her knees were drawn up toward her chest. 

       I started to wake her, but my eye was caught by something hanging on the side of the nearest kiln, the one we had reloaded. On the top of the kiln crouched a new god, a little woman about five inches high. The woman had a round fat face and belly and little round breasts. Her legs and arms were fat, too, but the fat was twisted into spirals that dwindled away into points instead of feet and hands. Her hair, too, began as thick clumps that sprouted from her head and twisted off at wild angles, drooping finally down her back and the sides of her face. The little god’s mouth was open, as if to scream or command, and her eyes were tiny diamond-shaped dots of clay set into deep-pit sockets in her plump face.

       Anchored by the squatting kiln god’s fat buttocks, was a strip of coarse, grey paper which I recognized as a length of hand towel torn from the roll in the women’s bathroom. Rose had written something on the paper towel in black ink. It was a poem, a prayer to the kiln god, and the words of the poem were shaped like a flame sitting in a saucer. I leaned closer to the paper and read:  

To

put

it  in

the fire

--that's the

hardest thing.

 I struggled for this

pot. Centered, lifted

it up, up between strong

fingers.   My back shaped it

with every ache. Sweat dripped

from my brow, sponged into the

clay, and we were one.  But you

would take it from me and test it

in the flame.  Kiln god, please

be merciful! Scorch it, bake

it, bend it to your whim.

Just don't blow it or

its neighbor

to bits.

When your mercy is fused, your anger cooled, may I recognize it

Waiting with the others for our reunion.

Buddy's, Part VII "Chick's Special"

We went to Buddy’s. It was only a few blocks down Fifth from the Fine Arts Building, and we walked in a friendly silence, with me stretching out of my usual rambling shuffle to match Rose’s long-legged, straight-ahead stride. When we got within about twenty feet of the restaurant, the smell of garlic hit my nose, and when Rose pushed through the door and held it for me, the tangy odor drew me right inside, like a warm, welcoming vacuum cleaner.  

      I’d heard Joe talk about Buddy’s, but he always made it clear that it was the place he went with his teammates and that I was not to expect him to take me there. I wasn’t old enough to drink legally anyway, although we could have sat in the restaurant side. At the same time Joe was indicating that Buddy’s was off-limits to me, he did so much talking about the place that it made me want to go there.  He said their cooking came as close to what he called “real New York Italian” as anything outside his mom’s house could, but the way he said “anything” and “could” told me that he still didn’t think that much of the food.    

       It was near closing time when we got there, and I followed Rose through the restaurant part of Buddy’s where two dispirited couples lingered over their pasta, idly stirring the last few bloodied strands of spaghetti. We went on into the bar, which was livelier than the restaurant. Rod Stewart moaned “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” from the rainbow-lit jukebox, but he didn’t drown out the raucous laughing of a group of jocks pushed close around a table in the middle of the room. I recognized a couple of Joe’s teammates, but they were so deep in the telling of a joke that they didn’t notice me. A couple of older guys--professor types with beards and those little round wire glasses--leaned against their stools at the bar, arguing and waving their beer glasses at each other for emphasis. Rose nodded a greeting to two women dressed in bikers’ leathers who were sitting at a table for four by the window. I thought they might ask us to join them, but as we passed, they just smiled briefly and went back to their conversation, leaning far over the table, their faces only a few inches apart.

       Rose pulled two chairs around the smallest table near the back door of the bar.  “What’ll ya’ have?  I’ll get it.”

       “Uh, beer, I guess.”

       “Well, yes, beer.  Any particular kind?”

       “Oh, yeah.  How ‘bout a Bud?”

       “Bud,” said Rose and turned away toward the bar.

       I felt a little embarrassed. I’d drunk plenty of beer with my brothers and with Joe, but to be honest, I’d never paid attention to what I was drinking; I’d just downed as much as I could, as quickly as I could, trying to be like the guys. My oldest brother liked to brag about how much beer his little sister could put away, and he used to buy it for me and my friends whenever we wanted it. Rose was the first person who had ever asked me what kind of beer I wanted, and it made me feel more grownup but also kind of stupid.

       I watched Rose reach over the bar. In one graceful motion, she gathered a beer bottle in the circle of each thumb and forefinger, hooked her third fingers through the handles of two icy mugs, crooked a five-dollar bill at the bartender with the little finger of one hand, and pivoted back toward our table.

       A waiter ambled up behind Rose, and she said to him over her shoulder, “A salad and a Chick’s Special with meatballs. Two plates.” I waited for him to ask me what I wanted, but he turned toward the kitchen without even glancing my way. We sat in silence for a few minutes, Rose drinking her beer in big, thirsty gulps and me sipping mine and looking around the room at the people, the jukebox, the collection of red items hanging from the ceiling.

       Rose laughed.  “D’you think they’ve got enough shit up there?”

       “Yeah.  What’s it all for?”

       “For?  For decoration.” She pointed to a mobile of lacquered boxes hanging in one corner, their shiny red sides twisting in the warm air. “That’s mine. One of my first art projects. Ah! Here’s our salad.” The waiter plunked two plates of food on the table and drew two smaller plates from underneath his arm. 

       “Anything else?”

       “Nope,” said Rose.  “Thanks.”  She dealt me one of the smaller plates and filled it with large, oily hunks of lettuce from the overflowing salad bowl. “Antipasto?” she asked.

       I didn’t know what she meant. “Anty--?”

       “Antipasto.” She held up tiny triangles of pale cheese and salami. “Like an appetizer.”

       “Oh!  Oh, okay, yeah. A piece of cheese, please.”

       Rose flipped the small pieces onto my plate. “Take half that sandwich, too. Don’t try to talk while you’re eating. Just enjoy it.”

       I did. I thought the food was absolutely exotic. Buddy’s garlic salad, dripping with olive oil and mined with huge chunks of bleu cheese, was about as far from the plain green Jello salad served by the church ladies in my home town as New York City was from Paris, Idaho.

       We sat and ate and listened to the jukebox and the laughter of the guys at the bar, and it was wonderful. I felt sophisticated and excited, yet content, and, of course, at that moment, I had the biggest crush on Rose that I’d ever had on any teacher or any boy in school back home in Paris.

       So Buddy’s became the place where Rose and I usually met. I didn’t tell Joe, not until the end, mostly because he’d staked out Buddy’s as his territory, but also because Buddy’s became part of a secret life I had outside the one I had with him. I didn’t mean to make it secret, and if he had asked, I’m sure I would have told him all about Rose and going to Buddy’s. He just never asked. Which should have clued me in about my relationship with him. Now, it seems obvious. Oddly enough, Joe and I never ran into each other at Buddy’s. I sometimes saw his teammates there, but if they told him, he never mentioned it to me.  

Buddy's, Part VI "What Heaven Looks Like"

I’d never been to an art show in a real art gallery, and the first thing that struck me was how empty the room seemed to be.
There were all kinds of pictures hanging on the walls, and here and there around the room were wooden stands topped by glazed jars and glass boxes filled with small metal angles and quirky silver jewelry. But there was lots of room around each piece on display, and the walls and floor and wooden stands were painted flat white. Rows of spotlights mounted on black metal pipes crisscrossed the ceiling, each light shining on a different part of the room.  There was so much white and light, I thought that this must be what Heaven looks like. There were no shadows anywhere.
     A girl about my age with an embroidered shawl and one, long, dangly earring handed me a thin paper book with a big “W” on the cover, and, opening it, I saw that there was a page for each of the artists who had work in the show. On the third page was a picture of Rose. She was looking straight at the camera in the same concentrating way she’d stared at me the day I met her, and underneath the picture was a paragraph written in tall, spiky lettering.

        I build and rebuild.  My art is concerned with the

         mechanics of construction, and I want the viewer

         to focus on the rhythm of joins and departures. 

         Meetings are never smooth, conjunctions never

         perfectly symmetrical, and partings never com-

         plete or permanent. To achieve the disjunction
         of connections, it is sometimes necessary for me to

         destroy a piece in order to create--or recreate--it.
I didn’t know what to make of this.  Underneath the paragraph was a small picture of a clay mask--a man’s face--which looked familiar, and I wondered if it was some famous guy I’d seen before, maybe in the newspaper or on TV.

       I started around the room, moving methodically from one painting to another, dutifully noting the title and each artist’s name. When I found a piece with Rose’s name on it, I stood an extra long time in front of it, examining it for traces of her, clues--other than her name on the small white square of paper tacked next to it on the wall--that it belonged to her. In one water color of a forest lake (or at least that what it looked like to me, in spite of its colors that no lake ever contained and its appearance of floating in the air above the trees) I found a faint image of Rose’s long, tapered fingers. In purply crayon lines smeared on rough-fibered paper, I caught a glimpse of a dangling pendant that I imagined Rose might have worn low in the sparse depression between her breasts. The pendant seemed to sway as I tilted my head slightly right and left in front of this sketch, the thick layers of crayon catching the light and moving it almost undetectably back and forth like one of those little holographic pictures that you get sometimes in cereal boxes.
       Under a square glass dome I found Rose’s name next to a trio of silver pieces that resembled miniature tornadoes, heavy, swirling masses that tapered viciously to slender funnels. The jewelry confused me; it seemed both beautiful and dangerous, and I imagined lifting those turbulent earrings to my lobes and fastening that shimmering, angry cloud on my breast.

       “Like ‘em?”  Rose’s voice came so suddenly, so close in my ear, that I jumped and knocked my wrist against the edge of the glass case.

       “Jeez!  You scared me! What’re you doin’ here?”

       “Well, I am one of the people in the show, you know. I’m sort of expected to be here. The proud but humble artist and all that.” She shrugged and laughed offhandedly. “You like my stuff?”

       “Yeah. This jewelry is great. I’d like to have some of it.”

       “Sorry, it’s promised,” Rose said flatly. Together we stared into the display case. Our reflections were creased and bent in the middle by the angle of the glass top. Rose’s hair was again knotted tightly on top of her head, which made her reflection extend an inch or so beyond mine.

       “You look nice, Rose.” She was wearing levis again, but this pair looked fairly new--not torn or stained. Her shirt was heavy and black, with triangles of emerald and teal green. She wore flat-heeled boots of dark teal leather and heavy silver rings on each hand.

       “Thanks.  Have you seen the raku pieces? Over here.” She took my arm and steered me across the gallery to a wall of plates and masks. Large slabs of porous clay gleamed with metallic blues, greens, and golds. In the places where the pieces were unglazed, the clay was rough and sooty.  A series of faces fashioned to be neither completely human nor wholly animal grinned and grimaced darkly. Some of the masks looked familiar: I thought I recognized a larger relative of the little chicken kiln god, her gaping beak ready to cackle or gulp worm. An over-sized man’s face with thick, pursed lips--the mask that was pictured in the brochure--stared stonily out over the gallery.
       I gestured at the man’s face.  “Do I know him?”

       Rose smiled. “Well, sort of. Last time you saw him, you smothered him in leaves. This is the stuff we fired a couple of weeks ago.”

       “Wow. They sure look different.” I studied the finished pieces before me, but I could find only a vague resemblance between these hard, glittering images and the fiery living things that Rose had pulled from the blazing kiln with her tongs and baptized in my barrels of newspaper. “How do you know how to do this?”

       “I assume you mean besides taking an art class?”

       “Yeah, I mean, how do you make them look like you want them to? I mean . . . I’m not sure what I mean . . .” I stopped and looked at the wall of masks for help.
       "If you’re asking how do I plan for them to turn out this way,” she gestured at the masks, “I don’t. That’s what I like about working with clay. There’s a limit to what you can plan. You have an idea about the shape of the pot or whatever you’re making; you can use a glaze that you’ve seen on another piece; you can try for the same affect each time, but you can’t predict what will happen in the kiln. There are chemical reactions between the fuel source and the glazes, between individual pieces. A slight change in kiln temperature can make a big change in the glazes.” Rose touched the edge of the chicken mask, adjusting its angle on the wall ever so slightly. Her voice floated up toward the pieces on the wall.  “At some point, you have to turn your piece over to the kiln gods and trust that they’ll know what to do with it.”

       “I remember you said something like that before, when we were in the kiln room.” I thought about all those Sundays I spent going to church all day long: Sunday School and sacrament meeting and whatever that was in between--Merry Miss?--before my mom finally gave up and let me sleep in. “You know, I never heard of anybody believing in stuff like that. That kinda talk wouldn’t go over very well where I come from."
       "Well, I talk a lot of trash sometimes.” Rose shrugged. “Come on. Have you seen it all? I’ve put in enough time. They’re gonna close soon anyway. Let’s go get a beer.” Without waiting for me to answer, Rose started for the door. I folded the show’s program carefully and put in it my jacket pocket, then hurried after her out of the gallery.