by Ed Gorman
He put it right up against the screen door.
She didn’t cry out or slam the door or anything. She just stood there. The gun had mesmerized her.
“You gotta be crazy, mister.”
“Unlatch the door.”
“I ain’t got no money, man. I ain’t got nothing you’d want. Believe me.”
“Just unlatch the fucking door or I start shooting.”
“My God, mister, I don’t know what this could be about. I really don’t.”
But she unlatched the door and he went inside.
He closed and locked both doors behind him.
He turned around and looked at the small living room she stood in. The first thing he noticed was that she had not one but two velvet paintings of Jesus above the worn and frayed couch. There was a 17-inch color tv set playing a late movie with Sandra Dee. There was a pressed wood coffee table with only three legs, a stack of paperback books substituting for the missing leg.
She sat on the couch.
He pointed the gun at her.
She said, sounding exhausted now, “You look crazy, mister. I can’t help but tell you the truth. You really look crazy.”
And now he had some idea of how much weight she’d lost. Maybe forty, fifty pounds. And her facial skin was pulled drum-tight over her cheekbones. And her pallor was gray.
There was a bad odor in the place, too, and he didn’t have to ask what it was.
“You fucking bitch,” he said, waving the gun at her. She’d been right. He heard his words. He was crazy.
She looked up at him from sad and weary eyes. “I’m so tired, mister, just from walking over to the door that I can’t— What do you want anyway?”
“You know this is pretty goddamn funny.”
“What is?”
He started pacing. For a time he didn’t talk. Just paced. She watched him. The floorboards creaked as he walked over them.
“You destroy me and you don’t even remember who I am? That’s pretty goddamned good.”
And then she said, seeming to know everything suddenly, “Oh, shit, mister. Now I know why you come here. And all I can say is I’m sorry.”
He turned on her, seized with his fury. “I’ve got a wife and two children. I’ve got a good business. I’m not gay or some junkie or—”
She said, and now her breathing was ragged, and she looked suddenly spent: “How long have you known?”
But he didn’t want to answer questions.
He wanted to shake the gun in her face, the gun that signified how trapped and outraged he felt.
And so he shook it. He went right up to her and shook it in her face and said, “You fucking bitch, couldn’t you have had yourself checked out before you went on the streets?”
Because that was how it had happened. Him visiting Chicago for an insurance convention. Some executive friend of his from Milwaukee who really liked slumming bringing him down here for a little “black poontang” and—
And a week ago his family doctor, just as incredulous as he was, told him. “David, Jesus Christ, these tests can be wrong sometimes but right now it looks as if—”
Only once in eighteen years of marriage had he been unfaithful.
In Chicago.
Insurance convention.
Black woman.
And now he stood above her. “I can’t tell you how badly I want to blow your fucking head off, you bitch.”
She looked up at him and said, “Maybe you’d be doing me a favor. I got maybe six months to go myself, mister, and this is some hard way to die, let me tell you.” Again she sounded completely spent.
“The worst thing is, I may have infected my wife.”
“I know,” she said. “My old man left me when he found out. But it’s probably too late for him, too.”
“You fucking bitch!” he said, no longer able to control himself.
He brought the gun down hard across her jaw.
Almost immediately she started sobbing.
And then he couldn’t hit her anymore.
He heard in her tears the inevitable tears of his wife and children when they found out.
And he couldn’t hit her at all any more.
She just sat there and sobbed, her whole body trembling, weaker with each moment.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
She just kept crying.
He started pacing again.
“I can’t believe this. I keep thinking that there’s no way I could—”
He shook his head and looked over at her. She was dabbing at her nose with an aqua piece of Kleenex.
“Do you get help?”
She nodded. She wouldn’t look at him anymore. “The welfare folks. They send out people.”
“I’m sorry I was so angry.”
“I know.”
“And I’m sorry I hit you.”
“I know that too.”
“I’m just so fucking scared and so fucking angry.”
Now she looked at him again. “The anger goes after awhile. You get too tired to be angry anymore.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my wife.”
“You’ll do it, mister. That’s the only thing I figured out about this thing. You do what you’ve got to do. You really do.”
He dumped the gun in the pocket of his respectable topcoat. And then he took out his wallet and flicked off a hundred dollars in twenties.
“You really must be crazy, mister,” she said. “Leavin’ me money like that.”
“Yes,” he said. “I really must be crazy.”
She started crying again.
He closed the doors quietly behind him. Even halfway down the walk, even in the fog and even in the rain, he could still hear her crying.
There was a three o’clock flight to Baltimore. He wasn’t sure he had nerve enough to tell her yet but he knew he would have to. He owed her so much; he certainly owed her the truth.
He walked faster now, and soon he disappeared completely inside the fog. He was just footsteps now; footsteps.
ANNA AND THE SNAKE PEOPLE
Anna Tolan had just finished her rounds this sunny April morning— checking with merchants to see that their stores had suffered no vandalism during the night—when a man named Wydmore started shouting to her from the other side of the trolley tracks. He was pushing a sleek new bicycle.
Anna recognized the two horses pulling the tightly packed trolley by the patches of white across their foreheads. The duns were brothers and the slowest and most disagreeable animals in the trolley system. Next year, all this would change. Next year, Cedar Rapids was to have an electrical trolley system like the one in Chicago.
A few minutes later, Wydmore came panting up to her. “They did it, Anna, and now one of them’s dead.”
In 1890, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was dominated by one family, the Wydmores, of whom thirty-year-old Trace was the only son. He ran the Visitors Bureau and loved rattling off the statistics that made the town seem even bigger than it was. Twenty thousand citizens. More than four hundred telephones. Electricity throughout the city. And an opera house that featured some of the world’s biggest theatrical names. Last Thursday, Mark Twain had spoken to a full house.
One other thing about Trace Wydmore. He had this painful crush on Anna—painful for both of them. While he loved her sweet Irish face and slight Irish figure, which she kept modest inside the buff blue pinafore she washed and ironed twice a week, he did not approve of her being a police matron. He resented the nights she spent studying the works of Frenchman Marie Francois Goron, one of the creators of a new science called criminology. And he complained frequently that Police Chief Ryan unofficially let her take part in murder investigations. It was not seemly for a woman to investigate homicides.
“Slow down, Trace. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He ruined his handsome, if somewhat weak, face by frowning. “This isn’t the kind of publicity Cedar Rapids needs, Anna. Not if we want to be known as the Athens of th
e Midwest.” That was another thing about Trace. He guarded the city’s reputation with the same vigilance with which a father guarded his daughter’s reputation.
“Trace, I’m sorry, but I still don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Those evangelists!” he said, straightening his black suitcoat and adjusting his freshly laundered linen collar. “The ones Chief Ryan told to get rid of their rattlesnakes. You’d better come quick, Anna! One of them’s dead now!”
Anna’s first thought was to rush back to the police station and tell Chief Ryan, but since he was having a budgetary meeting with the city council—Ryan wanted to hire two additional officers—she decided not to bother him. She’d look into this herself.
“Let’s go,” she said, and then got up on the handlebars of Trace Wydmore’s bicycle with the wooden tire rims and the slanted seat that Trace insisted helped him go faster.
By the time they reached the river bend where the evangelists held their meetings, more than a dozen people had rushed up to Anna to tell her that somebody had died. A few of the women, proper Lutherans and Presbyterians in no way associated with the evangelicals, were crying. Even out on the river, people in rowboats were looking to shore to see what was going on.
From a hundred yards away, Anna saw a group of perhaps twenty people gathered near a gentle turn in the river. It was a day for a picnic, not death—bright April butterflies everywhere, and red and blue and yellow flowers blooming like fireworks against the soft blue sky.
Each member of the evangelical group held a Bible and sang an old fundamentalist hymn called “Amen, Amen, There’s a Higher Power.” They looked like peaceful people until you got close to them and saw their faces. Rage and frenzy claimed every face. They did not love a benign God, rather they loved a terrible and vengeful God whom they believed had turned them into his own terrible and vengeful vessels. Even on the faces of the youngsters Anna saw anger and dark judgment and an almost frantic sorrow. The minds of these children had already been claimed by this sect and Anna felt great sadness for them.
They were dressed in faded work clothes—nothing fancy or ornamental, because their God disapproved of frivolity in any form. They stood in a tight circle, so that from here Anna could not see what was on the ground between them. But she did hear the terrifying noise of the rattlesnakes that had been snatched up and put in a burlap bag and used for the religious ceremony.
John Muldaur, the raw and angry giant who was the minister to these people, taught that if you were pure of soul, then you could hold one, even two angry rattlesnakes and they would not harm you. If you were not pure of soul, they would smite you.
A year ago, Anna had accompanied Chief Ryan to a raid on such a ceremony. She had witnessed children as young as five and six standing at the head of the group, rattlers twisting in their white little hands. Ryan had taken out his six-gun and pointed it directly at the head of John Muldaur and ordered him to take the rattlers from the hands of the children.
This morning, Anna stood a few feet from the group, letting them finish their song. And then she stepped up to a woman wearing a much-patched calico dress and said, “Excuse me, ma’am, I need to step in here.”
She put her hand on the woman’s shoulder and eased her away from the crowd.
Anna then got her first look at what lay on the ground inside the circle. A very pretty young woman lay on the ground, hands folded on her stomach the way they would be in a coffin. This was Rachael, Reverend Muldaur’s wife. She lay unmoving and obviously dead, though no sign of blood or wound showed anywhere. The only sign of anything untoward was a ragged crust of vomit on her chest.
The burlap sack was next to her. It had a life of its own, the rattlesnakes inside enraged at imprisonment and striking out every few moments. Their rattles occasionally sounded like castanets in a Mexican band.
Anna made sure to stay away from the sack. Snakes horrified her. Standing in front of Muldaur, in his protective grasp, was his twelve-year-old daughter Stephanie, a slender girl with tumbling chestnut hair and her mother’s sad, dignified beauty. Her dress was of gingham and, except for a faint green stain near the knee, looked surprisingly good on her.
Stephanie’s eyes were fixed on the form of her mother there at her feet.
Anna went up to Muldaur and said, “How did your wife die?”
He scowled at her. “I don’t honor your law and therefore I don’t honor your questions.”
“She’s dead,” Anna said. “You should respect her enough to treat her properly.”
Stephanie looked up at her father with dark and sorrowful eyes. “Please, Papa. I don’t want Mama to just lie here.”
“How did she die?” This time Anna addressed her question to Stephanie, who wiped her hands on her gingham dress.
“Don’t answer her,” Muldaur said. He pushed his daughter aside, stepping close to Anna. He stood at least six feet three and always wore the same attire—white shirt, black vest, green corduroy trousers. He was bald except for a fringe of white hair. He had the kind of eyes Anna had seen on a trip to Mt. Pleasant, where the insane, particularly the violently insane, were kept.
“What happened here is none of your business,” Muldaur said. He looked at the small badge she wore on the breast of her pinafore. “You defile God’s law—doing a man’s work this way. You’ll be punished for it, too.”
Just then there was a clatter of hooves and the rattling of a wagon, both familiar to Anna’s ears. Bjornsen the undertaker was here, no doubt acting on a tip that there was a dead woman some-where within the confines of the city limits. Chief Ryan always joked that Bjornsen could sniff out a corpse the way a hound could sniff out a rabbit. The wagon was unadorned, a battered farm wagon pulled by a dusty old mare blind in the left eye. Bjornsen saved the fancy carriage for later, after he was sure that the relatives were going to pay him.
Stephanie chose just then to step up to Anna and say, “The snakes did it. Ma brought them down here for the ceremony and one of them must have bitten her through the sack.”
Anna looked down at the dead woman. Snakebite would explain why there was no sign of violence on the woman. “Did your mother handle the snakes very often?”
Stephanie glanced at her father. Though he scowled, he didn’t stop her from speaking. “All the time. She was real good at it, too. Till today.” She nodded to a plump man that Anna recognized immediately as a town drunk named Jake Foster. “Brother Foster was going to handle the rattlers today and prove to us that his heart was pure now, and then we were going to baptize him in the river, but—” She shook her head. Though she was young, she spoke with real authority. Muldaur took his daughter by the shoulder and turned her back toward the silent crowd of evangelicals.
Anna looked at them. They seemed to belong to some other species. Here was a dead woman on the ground, yet none of them expressed the least grief or sorrow—except for a handsome young man who walked with a limp and carried a black Bible in his right hand. Every few moments he would look down at Rachael Muldaur and tears would fill his eyes. Anna wondered what his name was.
“We’re going now,” Muldaur said. “You can do whatever you want with the body. It’s the soul that’s our concern—and Rachael is with her maker now.”
And with that the entire group of evangelicals turned and started up the dusty road to the tiny, closed, two-block neighborhood where they lived. Anna was happy to see Muldaur bend down and pick up the sack of rattlesnakes. She hadn’t looked forward to its disposal.
Just before dinner, Anna went into the backyard of Mrs. Susan Goldman’s rooming house and played basketball for twenty minutes. Anna herself had erected both pole and basket. In the autumn, Anna played on the Cedar Rapids women’s team, wearing an uncomfortable but modest uniform of long black hose, full-length sleeves, and full bloomers of woolen material. Anna preferred her costume tonight—a pair of corduroy pants and one of the work shirts her father had worn until his death two years ago.
As dusk set
tled in, Anna could smell what Mrs. Goldman was making for dinner—pot roast with vegetables and potatoes stewing in the beef juices. Mrs. Goldman was a widow who had turned her nice white sturdy home into a boardinghouse for farm girls who came to the city to work.
A year ago a man had hanged himself and Anna had been the first police officer on the scene. She was afraid to let the other officers see how upset she was. They’d use it as proof that women weren’t meant for this job. After work that day, she’d come back to Mrs. Goldman’s, had gone up to her room, had thrown herself across the bed, had said endless Hail Marys, and had wept. Mrs. Goldman had brought in tea and sweet cakes and stayed up all night with Anna as she described again and again the man’s face and how the flesh had turned ashen. And Mrs. Goldman had held her. Anna’s own mother had died years ago. Anna desperately needed a mother at that moment. In the morning, Mrs. Goldman had made Anna eat a bowl of homemade bean soup, which she insisted was good for the bowels. Mrs. Goldman seemed to rank all foods by what they did for the bowels, a trait Anna found both amusing and endearing.
Now Mrs. Goldman called through the window, “Dinner’s ready, Anna. Take six more shots and then come in.” Anna smiled as she dribbled the ball over the new spring grass. Mrs. Goldman was precise about everything. Take six shots—not five; not seven. Six. And then come in. In a very real way, Mrs. Goldman, who was in her late fifties, had indeed become Anna’s mother.
After dinner Anna went into the parlor and put a match to the wick on Mrs. Goldman’s beautiful new banquet lamp and then sat in a comfortable chair, reading through a new article by Allan Pinkerton on the impact of “electrical science” on the capturing of criminals. As always in any Pinkerton piece, good old Allan managed to brag about himself incessantly while seeming to write about something else entirely.
She was just finishing the Pinkerton article when Mrs. Goldman, tall and slender and regal in her gingham dress, came in and handed her a copy of Arthur’s Home Magazine. “Your friend Trace Wydmore dropped this off for you today.” She smiled. “He’s still trying to convince you that you’re not a proper lady.”