I didn't find out that Mr. Mays had passed away until a couple months after the funeral service. Initially, I was going to seek out his family in order to send my condolences, but it wasn't as if Mr. Mays and I were best friends or anything like that; so, I refrained. I continued through my college career and graduated a year or so after our bar meeting.
Graduating with English as my major wasn't a mistake, but it wasn't exactly something that landed me any sort of immediate jobs after college. Now, I had saved a pretty solid amount of money while I was in school and decided that I deserved a bit of a vacation, if you will. I took my spare cash, got together with my college buddy Steve, packed up and hit the road, aiming for somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. I had lived near Littleton, Colorado when I was younger and remembered loving the area, so this destination was as good as any.
The trip was a success. We made it somewhere around Estes Park, Colorado and found a cheap cabin that we rented for about a month. The days were filled with lounging, hiking, and generally things that involved little-to-no work on our parts. After our rental was through, we packed up again and headed on our way back east.
Sometime during this trip, we had met up with a couple Estes Park natives in one of the local bars. We never typically "hung out" with them or anything like that; we just had conversations now and then over drinks and food. One night, these guys were paying their tab and packing up to leave awfully early; they were usually there until the wee hours of the morning. When we questioned them about it, they told us that they were headed to a little get-together with some friends of theirs, and they invited us. Having nothing else to do, we hopped in the car and followed them to the party.
The party itself was very low-key, and ultimately inconsequential to this story; however, the important thing about it was that at some point in the night, we were all sitting around the fire and swapping ghost stories. At this point in my life, I wasn't as much of a ham as I was in my younger years. But, with a little bit of encouragement, I started on a couple of stories that I remembered telling in my youth. Eventually, I made it to Mr. Mays' story about "The Showers." Every time that I had told it after hearing it from Mr. Mays, I had spiced it up a little bit. But, out of some sort of subconscious respect for my former teacher, I went straight into the version that he told my class in my sophomore year of high school.
The group enjoyed my stories for the most part, "The Showers" being the mutual favorite among the partygoers. Steve and I left for the cabin at around five in the morning, and he asked me about that story on the drive home. I told him all about Mr. Mays, that class, my love for everything horror-related and whatnot, and he suggested that we tried to find the place on our return trip to New York. Initially I was reluctant simply because I didn't feel like aimlessly wandering through Nebraska for days, looking for some old farm building that was probably demolished at this point. But, a couple of days before we left Colorado, I told Steve that it sounded like fun. We weren't going to be able to do another trip like this for a long time, so I figured that we might as well make the best of it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought of it as a little tribute to Mr. Mays, a guy that, in retrospect, helped me realize that I wanted to be a writer.
Anyway, we left Colorado and made the long, boring, and barren drive to Broken Bow, Nebraska, or "Hell on Earth" as Mr. Mays had put it. We found a motel in town and hung around for a couple of days, venturing out a hundred miles or so in any given direction each day after that. I had remembered Mr. Mays telling us that it was somewhere outside of Broken Bow, but I don't think he got any more specific than that.
We tried asking the townsfolk if they had any information about The Showers, but we were usually met with blank stares or eye-rolling when we told them what exactly this place was. The only person who seemed to know anything about it was an older lady that worked at a gas station on the outskirts of town. I don't recall her name, but this woman was just one of those cheerful old people, very helpful and generally interested in what anyone had to say to her. Steve had started talking to her at checkout and she asked about our license plate, commenting about the fact that we were very far from home. We had nowhere in particular to be, so Steve and I ended up talking to this woman for about fifteen minutes, at which point we brought up our hunt for the place known as "The Showers."
