5/27/01

Not so long ago, McVeigh was just a kid in the neighborhood

by Heather Hare


I probably played hide-and-seek with Timothy McVeigh.

As soon as I was old enough to stay out after the sun went down, I was
out there with the neighborhood kids, squealing in the dark, peeking out
between the trees, probably sharing a hiding spot in the sumac woods
with the boy who became the country's most vilified criminal.

It was Locust Street Extension. My family lived on one end and Tim's
cousins -- the Krauses -- on the other. The street constantly brimmed
with children. I don't remember Tim, but I'm sure he was around. He
lived only a few miles away, across mostly empty fields.

But maybe he was too old for capture the flag when I was finally allowed
to play nighttime games. By the time I was 8, he was already 16.

Both our fathers worked at the General Motors plant in Lockport. That's
no surprise. The factory employed pretty much everyone's dad. They never
met, but my father said people liked Mr. McVeigh.

Tim and I worked in the same country store. I usually say I worked in an
ice cream stand or a candy store, but it was actually a gun shop.
Shotguns and rifles hung along the rough barn board walls, and pistols
were locked in glass cases that were constantly wiped clean of
fingerprints. But I sold the death-by-chocolate ice cream, old-fashioned
boston baked beans and wind chimes that tinkled every time someone
walked by the rickety display.

I remember the day of the bombing, April 19, 1995, my freshman year at
Westminster College. It was my father's 45th birthday, the first one I
ever missed. I came back from class and the TV was on in the lobby.
Girls were squished together on the beige couches and huddled on the
carpet, hugging their legs in front of them, tissues wadding in their
clenched hands. I asked them what had happened, staring at video of
children pulled from the rubble.

Two days later, when Tim's face filled the screen of the 13-inch
television balanced on a desk in my dorm room, my throat tightened. Here
was a man I probably stood behind in line at Tops Friendly Markets on
Transit Road, a man whose letters to the editor I probably read in the
Union Sun & Journal, a man I probably pumped gas next to at the Mobile
station on the corner near our houses. Every news program ran his
picture every hour.

I was sick for the people suffering in Oklahoma City. A void replaced my
stomach and my head buzzed as if the bomb had damaged my hearing. But
even stranger -- I felt guilty.

Was our town, our neighborhood, our schools somehow responsible? Could I
have played a bit part in the creation of his paranoia, his black heart?
I felt like backing away from it all until I was no longer visible,
until I disappeared. How could a boy who worked at the same store as I
did, a boy whose dad worked in the same factory as mine, a boy who
played in the same yards as my brothers, become the man who drove a
Ryder rental truck filled with deadly explosives into a parking garage
under the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building?

When I returned to college in the fall, I compulsively confessed to new
friends and strangers that Tim McVeigh was from my town, that I must
have known him, even if I couldn't remember him. I did this as if it
would somehow clean my hands, somehow silence the guilt that rang in my
ears, somehow replace the feeling that I could have stopped it, somehow.

But it's not just my hands that are stained with the blood of those 168
innocent victims. We all failed them. And killing another person, a man
we didn't help, a man we didn't recognize as needing our help, even a
man who is seemingly evil, is only going to make those stains harder to
scrub off all our hands.

Hare is a features writer for The Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton, New York.