Michael O'Meara

I arrived in Peoria in an eight year old 1958 Chevy, with absolutely no reverse, the day before classes were to start for my senior year at Peoria Central High School.  It was only 200 miles from Madison, where I had grown up, but to my parochial and protected young mind it might have been another country.  This was before most of the interstate system was completed and there was no I39 heading straight south, meaning I had to snake around southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois on narrow, back country roads. When cars got larger during the ’40s and ’50s, engineers grafted on another foot of pavement on both sides of the roadways creating a seam right where your tires wanted to go.  Those seams had a tendency to push your car toward the edge of the road where you could get in real trouble if your front tire left the pavement and fell onto the receding gravel shoulder.  Getting your front tire back on the road would often hurl your car towards oncoming traffic.  What would years later become a mellow, three hour drive took me five and a half hours of heart pounding terror.  With no reverse, if  I had to stop for anything, I had to find a slope and park facing up hill so that the car would roll backwards out of the parking spot.  If it didn’t clear the cars next to me, I’d get out and push it the rest of the way.  I had a road map my father had sent me and about twenty bucks to my name.  Gas was twenty eight cents a gallon and a diner lunch a buck and a half so money wasn’t an issue.  The trick was surviving the trip and somehow finding my new home.

Peoria was a gritty, blue collar town, home of Caterpillar Tractor and Hiram Walker where many of the kids I got to know wanted to work at right after high school.  A good union job at one of those plants meant instant success, paving the way to marriage, a house and kids.  It also meant quickly leaving behind crushing poverty.  The kids who were lucky enough to grow up with more wealth, continued their educations at the large university in Champaign or locally at private Bradley College.  A fortunate few went further afield.  

After high school and getting turned down by Champaign, I enrolled in a brand new junior college set up in temporary buildings in the middle of a corn field on the other side of the Illinois River.  There wasn’t anything to do at this commuter college and next to nothing for young people in Peoria so bar hopping became the thing.  The drinking age in Illinois was twenty one but fake I.D.s were easy to make and universally accepted at all town taverns.  I spent the vast majority of my free time drinking with the rough trade that inhabited Peoria and surrounding towns.  My favorite dive had a table bowling game with large, painted, wooden, balls that you rolled at pins that reset from the top of the machine.  It also had Cindy, a thin, long haired, bell bottomed beauty of a hipster.  She hung out there too and was actually old enough to legally drink, having graduated from Bradley. The men around her were older still and had the look of experience, some rednecky and others sporting lefty clothing and strategic hair.  I decided that a goatee would make me look older, fit in better with my fellow bar flies and increase my chances with Cindy.  A month later, my dozen or so chin hairs could be seen clearly if the light was just so and I began my massive charm assault on her.

Cindy was from a wealthy family who owned several chemical plants around the country.  Bradley was an exclusive and expensive college and is what connected her to Peoria.  She wasn’t close to her family and had recently made the decision to go it on her own financially or perhaps her family had arrived at that conclusion for her.  She was intensely political and several years ahead of me in most things.  She slept with me the first time I came up the long flight of stairs, to her tiny, attic apartment, making love on a thin mattress laid out on the floor.  Above the mattress was a poster of Che, with that pensive look on his face.  We listened to Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., over and over, which had recently been released by a couple of guys I’d never heard of.  Cindy was nothing but cool, my first, full on, mad about you, adult crush.  We got high, made love, argued politics, laid for hours saying nothing, with only the sound of music carrying us along.  

I always called first before coming to see Cindy except on a beautiful, clear, Saturday morning in early spring.  I was taking a chance that we were close enough for me to risk that.  She was a strong, independent woman which meant she had other men in her life, like it or not.  I knocked and could hear women’s voices through the door.  She asked who it was and I told her.  There was silence for a while until she told me to go away and come back in an hour.  I made the long trek down the stairs and decided I’d wait in her back yard which is where her downstairs door was.  I found some shade and sat, waiting.  A long while later, I heard her apartment door close and the sound of hard shoes on wooden stairs, a soft crying came down too.  She appeared a moment later, stopping just past the door to sob uncontrollably, her hand on the knob to help keep her balance.  She looked to be around thirty, neatly but comfortably dressed,  the look of a school teacher or perhaps a corporate secretary on her day off.  The sobbing had made her face turn a bright shade of red.  I stood up and walked towards her to see if there was anything to be done.  She saw me approach and a horrible look of fear and shame flashed in her swollen eyes.  Before I could speak, she turned and ran towards the front of the house.  I stood for a moment, then decided I needed to know.  Anger and tears were in Cindy’s eyes when she let me in, asking why I had come.  I tried to hug her but she pulled away.  I tried harder and she let me.  She started crying and we stood there, just inside the door, for a while.  I asked if she had any wine which I found and poured two glasses.  Obviously something had happened between the two women and I was not going to be privy to any of it. We finished the wine and I asked if there was anything I could do to help.  She started crying again and said there was something that had to be done but didn’t think she had the strength to do it.  She asked if I would bury something in the back yard.  I said yes.  Cindy went to the kitchen and came back with a paper milk carton that had been torn open at the top and refolded closed.  The sides of the carton bulged slightly as if something had been put inside.  Her voice was strained as she asked me to please not look inside the carton but just bury it in the yard and forget it ever happened.  I made that promise.  I took the carton from Cindy’s shaking hands, it’s weight surprising me.  She went to a closet and came back with a  gardening tool useful for digging small holes.  I took it and without saying anything, turned and left for the back yard, the carton in a cupped hand and the tool in the other.  I didn’t look in the carton.  I didn’t have to.  I knew.  I buried that small, lonely carton in Cindy’s back yard on a sunny, Saturday morning, in a spot that felt peaceful and had the shade of a lovely elm tree.