Hopper Read Free

as the wind rustled and the Kansas sky loomed before him. By his side was his trusty dog with a spot around his eye. The tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad split the weathered farmhouse from the wheat fields spreading west as far as he could see. Chugging furiously, the train roared past, leaving nothing else for Dennis to do but pick himself out of the ditch and poke around the dirt with a stick. Filling his lonely world with collections of butterflies and stamps from faraway places—“Occasionally I cleaned out the chicken house. I watched, more than anything else”—he spent most of his hours wondering where the train came from and went. Where had the train taken all those cowboys?
    The confusing question had yet to be answered as Nellie tucked her grandson into bed. Lightning bugs faded away in a Mason jar as off in the distance, storms flashed like blue veins on a giant’s temple.
    Dennis had come to live at the egg ranch shortly before his sixth birthday, after World War II blew in like a mean sou’wester and swept his father away from Dodge. With his mother busy “at the pool,” the family would say without much further comment, Nellie took him in. Fixing lunch in a white clapboard farmhouse like Auntie Em’s in The Wizard of Oz , she kept an eye out as Dennis roamed the alfalfa patch on a Shetland pony given to him by his grandpa. Lonnie even brought him home a sheepdog from the Clutter family, doomed to be brutally murdered by drifters, as depicted in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood . Hard at work in his bib overalls on a wheat field out in Garden City, some sixty miles away, Lonnie left Nellie to raise Dennis and his baby brother, David, along with tending to the coop. The family thought it was too much for the old woman, but Nellie came from rugged stock.
    Long ago, one Mattie Mac Masters McInteer bumped along in a covered wagon to Kansas. Reading her Bible every Sunday, she prayed her daughter might witness more than hardship. She even named her after the famous globe-trotting newspaper girl, Nellie Bly, who beat the record set in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days . Little Nellie Bly McInteer didn’t see alligators in Port Said or lush tennis courts in Hong Kong, but she did grow up to see the grasshopper plague. And the jackrabbit invasion that forced the townspeople to go on roundups—pounding out the rampant bunny problem with clubs so as not to waste bullets. And the Black Blizzard of ’35 when the apocalyptic face of Jesus Christ appeared in a dust cloud over the baseball diamond like the Second Coming.
    Yes, Nellie managed to see a few things through twenty-mile-an-hour winds that sucked dust from the rutted fields and pummeled the egg ranch. It seemed the sun might never shine again, but when it finally did, the dull gray light revealed a weathered old farmhouse with no color at all.
    Then one May day in 1936, screaming in the distance, the Super Chief roared past, splashing its brilliant warbonnet colors of red and yellow onto the egg ranch. Tearing through the Southwest touching speeds of 108 miles an hour, going faster than any train before, the brand-new transcontinental flyer continued its inaugural journey to the Pacific. This Train of the Stars, as the honchos at the Santa Fe Railroad dubbed it, catered to Hollywood big shots ready to discover the next big thing. The egg ranch was just another blip on their juggernaut journey, but one day those big shots would be staring at Dennis, who knew nothing of what went on inside their luxurious sleeper cars named Taos and nothing of their dirty dealings on the Navajo rugs with those aspiring Errol Flynns. But the boy was destined for greatness. Nothing could keep him from lying in the ditch with his dog, waiting for the train. Nellie was so poor she had to make his shirts out of gingham chicken-feed sacks, but she gathered eggs from the coop so they’d have money to go to the movies.
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