by Ed Gorman
"You belong on the stage, son."
An older, male voice brought me out of my fantasy.
It was the mayor. "You hear me, Tom?"
"Uh, yeah, I guess."
The mayor led me up the steps to the stage of the bandstand. The Dixieland band—"The Hellcats" was what they called themselves though in the newspaper letters column one day, Mrs. J. D. Bing, who was always writing letters, suggested for the sake of propriety that they rename themselves the "Heckcats"—the band was rolling out on "When the Saints Go Marching In." The noise was deafening. And I'm a guy who plays "Summertime Blues" by Eddie Cochran so loud even our cats go down to the basement to hide.
Cushing and Barney sat to the right of the podium. The governor, who looked vaguely like the mayor with his big belly and his Panama hat, stood on the edge of the steps shaking hands and waggling his pudgy fingers at little babies and saying over and over and over what a fine lovely day it was for a festivity like this. That's what he called it. A "festivity."
The mayor led me to the front row. Cushing and Barney sat in folding chairs near the podium. Cushing was talking. Barney was laughing. The best of buddies. Didn't Barney remember Roy at all?
The mayor had me sit next to Barney. I started to object—but what was the use?
I could feel Barney and Cushing staring at me as I sat down. They'd quit talking and laughing. They just sat there now.
People came over and shook our hands and clapped us on the shoulders. A newspaper guy snapped several pictures. Aunts, uncles and cousins in the crowd out there would spot me and wave and I'd wave back, feeling self-conscious and awkward but not wanting them to think that being a "hero" had gone to my head, the way it had to my second cousin Larry's head the time he saved that dog from a burning building, and then had his friend in a country western band write a song about him. Larry had that damned thing recorded and pressed and four years later was still handing out copies of "Larry Baines, A Roy Rogers Kinda Guy." And his wife, at every single family gathering I'd attended ever since, always talked about Larry's "political plans" which he'd be announcing any day she always breathlessly confided. Larry pumped gas out at the Clark station on Highway 2.
Then the mayor brought the governor over to meet the three of us. The governor seemed like a real nice guy but shaking hands with him was like picking up a real fatty, greasy patty of sausage.
"This is a real thrill for me," he said to the three of us. "Our country needs more people like you."
I glared over at Cushing. Yeah, he was just what the country needed more of, all right.
And then I saw Debbie, half hidden behind this huge vase of yellow and blue and amber summer flowers. She brought them right up to the podium, setting them down on the railing of the bandstand.
Then she looked over at me and gave a little nod and then leaned up and set the white envelope down on the podium itself.
And then she was gone, half running, back down the steps and into the crowd.
I was starting to sit down again—you had to stand up to meet a governor, I guess—and that's when I saw him watching me . . . Cushing.
His eyes strayed over to the podium and then back to me.
He'd obviously seen me watching Debbie and had gotten curious . . . and now he wanted to know about the envelope.
Just then the band, which had given us all a blessed break, sailed into the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and then there was just the confusion that results from nobody being able to hear anything. The band guys were puffing their cheeks out and bugging their eyes and spitting all over the place and making everybody on the bandstand silently plead for mercy.
Barney still wouldn't look at me but I saw him frown as soon as the music exploded. He hated Dixieland even more than I did. Then the mayor stepped over to the center of the bandstand. And then I saw Cushing get up and kind of edge over to the podium and I knew right away what he was going to do.
He was going to snatch the letter I'd written the governor and make sure that the governor never got to see it.
I got up, too. I had to stop him.
Cushing did it the right way. He didn't make any bold play for the podium, he just eased his way over by shaking a few hands, patting a few backs, grinning a few grins. Even before becoming a "hero," he'd been a popular guy with many of the townspeople. War heroes never went out of fashion.
I got as close to him as I could without stepping on the backs of his shoes.
I knew now that I was going to have to take the envelope myself. I'd just hold on to it till I had the chance to slip it back up there.
Cushing was now maybe a foot from the podium. He was trying to inch his hand behind the broad back of the mayor, who was waving his hands at the band to wrap things up—inch it behind the mayor's back and pick off the white envelope Debbie had just set on the podium.
That was when I moved, moved so fast that I bumped into Cushing.
He looked down at me and scowled. He knew what I was trying to do. The same thing he was trying to do.
His eyes raised and settled on the envelope.
The bandstand was crowded. It was hard to move past all the bodies.
But he took a final step forward, put his hand out, his fingers started to close on the edge of the envelope.
I lunged—and snapped the letter from his fingers. I'd moved quickly enough that he hadn't been able to stop me.
But just as I turned to go back to my seat, he reached down and locked his hand around my wrist.
The odd thing was, the stage was so packed with people standing around gabbing that nobody could see how he was twisting my wrist. We stood in the middle of maybe twenty people. It was like smothering to death inside this tiny hot sweaty box.
Nobody had ever twisted my wrist like that.
"You little bastard," he whispered in my ear. I could hear him even above the band. "Give that to me."
His face was pure rage—but controlled rage—he couldn't afford to lose his poise in front of everybody.
He twisted my wrist harder.
And then the band stopped abruptly.
And the sweaty, important dignitaries made for their seats again.
And there we were, suddenly exposed so everybody could see us.
And Cushing let go immediately. What choice did he have? Here was this supposed hero and he was twisting the hell out of some poor kid's arm.
He let go.
And then I let go, too, my entire hand and wrist so numb from pain that I didn't feel the letter flutter from my grasp.
There it was on the floor—
And I was bending to pick it up—
And Cushing was bending to pick it up—
But before either of us got to it, the mayor stooped—no small feat, given his gut—and retrieved it from the floor.
He held it up and read aloud, "To the Governor."
Cushing glared at me and I glared right back.
"Your Honor," the mayor said, "somebody wrote you a letter."
And the mayor of this fair city personally hand-delivered my letter to the governor for me.
"What's this?" the governor said.
But the mayor was already stepping to the podium and giving a little 1-2-3 test to the public address system.
Cushing stared at the letter in the governor's hand. For a second, I had the sense that he was going to jump the governor and rip the letter from him. Cushing looked highly pissed and at least a little bit crazy.
With the mayor already going into his introduction of the governor—"One of the favorite sons in this land of plenty of ours"—all Cushing and I could do was go back to our seats.
Which we did.
When I looked at the governor again, he was opening the envelope.
He took out the letter—
Unfolded it—
Scanned it quickly—
And just then the mayor said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you our own beloved governor!"
The band played. And grown-ups applauded. A
nd teenagers tried to make it look as if they were applauding. And babies cried because all the hoopla was scaring the hell out of them. And a cop turned on a siren. And several of the town dogs standing on the edge of the square started barking.
And the governor just kept reading and rereading the letter.
Just the way I'd wanted him to.
Everything died down, finally.
The governor stepped up to the podium, adjusted the microphone to his own height, the entire PA system ringing with the adjustment, and then he leaned forward and held the letter up for all the crowd to see and then he said—
"Over the years, I've noted that no matter what the occasion or what the event, there's always somebody who tries to spoil it. Out of envy or spite or plain mendacity, they want to ruin a splendid event that everybody else is enjoying. A few minutes ago somebody handed me this letter—and I'll tell you, I've never read such a pack of lies in my life. And if you don't mind, I'm going to take care of this matter right now."
And right then and right there, our own beloved governor of our own beloved state ripped the shit out of the letter I'd sent him.
White pieces of paper fluttered to the ground and our own beloved governor said, "Now I want to thank you for inviting me here and letting me have the honor of handing out these awards to these fine citizens of yours."
To be honest, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the rest of the ceremony. I only knew that the few times I looked at Cushing, he was smirking.
And when the governor went to shake my hand, Cushing, who was right behind me, kicked me so hard in the ankle I could barely stand up.
iv
Autumn came and with it all the pleasures of that season—the smoky air, the Indian summer sunlight, the ring of the school bell in the crisp morning, the snap and crackle and glow of the bonfire on the prairie night at the Homecoming ceremony behind the stadium, and all the quick excited laughter of the little kids scurrying along the street on Halloween night, tripping on their too-long costumes and hoping that Mrs. Grundy was still giving out shiny new quarters, and shoving Tootsie Rolls and Clark bars and sticky sweet popcorn balls into their mouths—my favorite season.
The new girl came to school and she was almost painfully pretty and just as painfully stuck-up. I went up to her twice and tried to introduce myself but she saw me coming and then pretended to fall into deep conversation with the other stuck-up girl she was walking down the hall with. Stuck-up girls have this secret club they all belong to, and it runs coast-to-coast.
Then in the mornings on the way to school, you'd suddenly see skins of ice on the creek water, and the wraith of your breath as you spoke. Dad had his two best months ever at the store in September and October, Mom finally got the wall-to-wall carpeting she'd always wanted (a combined birthday-anniversary-Christmas gift, Dad explained) and Debbie got her first boyfriend, this very shy chunky kid who walked her home from school every night and then took off like an arrow whenever he saw me or Mom.
Somerton itself changed, too. The town square, for instance, had a naked and lonely look, shorn as it was of blooming trees and growing foliage. Litter skittered across the dead, brown grass and the bandstand took on the look of a home that had been mysteriously (and perhaps violently) abandoned. Even a little Dixieland music was preferable to this.
A few store owners started putting up Christmas decorations in early November, with the expected number of old ladies complaining about it—"Show some proper respect. The Lord's birthday is in December, not November"— and there was the expected number of letters in the local paper about how crass Christmas had become.
Hunting season opened and while I could never kill an animal that way, I had to admit there was something thrilling about the stalking part of it, all dressed up in red-and-black checkered caps and jackets and armed with a long rifle and creeping through the fallen cornstalks and along the frozen creek and up the red clay hills, the air pure and fine and chill, and the chestnut roans beautiful as they ran the pasture land nearby.
And you're no doubt wondering about Barney and Cushing.
As of November 10, Barney still hadn't spoken to me. We had several classes a day together, we had the same lunch period, we took the same route home, but Barney always managed to avoid me.
His friendship with Cushing ended right after the governor's appearance. At least I think it did. At any rate, you never saw him with Cushing anywhere. About the only person you ever did see Barney with was a country kid that everybody was always pretty cruel to, a cross-eyed boy who wore Big Mac bib overalls and who had a bad stutter. Jennings, his name was.
As for Cushing, he got himself a snazzy new aqua Plymouth two-door and gave the gossips some very good news by dating the town's only femme fatale, a very dramatic divorcee named Babe Holkup, who had once been the exclusive property of one R. K. "Buddy" Holkup, former high school football great and now resident of Ft. Madison Penitentiary because he kept taking home samples from the bank where he worked. Babe, whose real name was actually Elberta, divorced Buddy when he still had five years to go on his sentence. About this same lime, at least according to the gossips I mentioned above, Elberta also started wearing falsies and hose without seams. And getting threatening letters from Buddy. It all sounded like one of those old George Raft movies they play on late-night TV. The times Cushing saw me, he just smirked a bit. He didn't call me a girl anymore and he didn't try to look scary. He just moved on. Apparently he didn't think I was any kind of threat to him.
And I guess I wasn't, not until I had the dream, the strangest dream of my life.
Here was Mitch and here was Roy and damned if they didn't look more alike than I'd even thought.
And Mitch said, "It's time you grow up, Tom. It's time you do right by Roy."
Well, first of all, I'd never had a movie star in my dreams before, so that part of it was startling enough, especially since it was Robert Mitchum himself.
And second of all, Roy looked kind of pissed off. Like maybe I really hadn't done right by him.
"I'm sorry, Roy."
And Roy said, "He's got the money."
"I know."
And then Mitch said, "You can get the money, Tom. You're a young man now. You're not a boy anymore."
And what was I going to do? Argue with Robert Mitchum, for whom there was no cooler guy in the entire known universe?
And then Roy said, "It's in his house somewhere. That's where you'll find it."
And then the dream was over and it was November 13 of a gray and frosty morning and I was just waking up and needing very badly to urinate and Mom was calling upstairs for breakfast and Debbie was in the bathroom gargling, which she always did very, very loudly.
—It's in his house somewhere, Tom.
—You're a young man now, Tom. You're not a boy anymore.
In his house somewhere in his house somewhere in his house somewhere kept echoing through my mind the way it does in the movies sometimes.
And all the time I peed and all the time I showered and all the time I dressed and all the time I teased Debbie about her insistence on taking the first bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and all the time I walked along to school and all the time I played basketball in gym class during first period—
—all that time I just kept hearing it over and over and over and over again—
in his house somewhere in his house somewhere in his house somewhere.
After school, I went home and got out my bike. Strictly speaking, it was a little late in the year for the old Schwinn. People were bundled up inside parkas already. And the Offenberger kids had already built their first snowman of the year—they built them so tall that sometimes the Des Moines Register put them in the paper—and the streets were so icy in spots they were dangerous.
Cushing lived on the east edge of town where the houses grew much farther apart, and where the yards looked more like acreages because most of them had scrawny white chickens and grunting quick little hogs running around enclosed ar
eas.
Cushing's place was an old two-story white clapboard house with a big red barn in the back. It sat on four acres of farmland which somebody down the road owned and farmed. There was a fat oak tree across from it, so I pulled in over there so I could look more closely at the house.
A screened-in porch covered the front. On the right side of the place was another door. The windows were all dark in the drab gray November afternoon. Smoke curled from the chimney. There was no garage nor a driveway as such but there were two strips of concrete that the tires of a car would fit. The strips ran along the left side of the house. A lost and lonely-looking stray mutt ran around in frantic circles in the winter-flat cornfield.
Unless Cushing had his car out back or something, nobody was home. His night shift would start in another twenty minutes, just at four. He was probably already at the station.
I wanted to walk over to that side door, jimmy it open, go in and find the cash and then carry it straight to the chief's office, drop it on his desk and then tell him where I got it.
Then I saw a black-and-white patrol car coming from a block and a half away so I quickly ran my bike down a slanting hill under a small bridge nearby. I waited there until I heard and felt the patrol car rumble over the ties overhead.
I didn't want a patrolman telling Cushing that he'd seen me standing across the street from Cushing's house.
It was completely dark and no more than twenty-five degrees when I left the house on foot that night.
It was a long walk to Cushing's. I smoked three cigarettes on the way.
With no nearby streetlight, and no cars washing their headlight beams over the place, Cushing's house was lost in shadow. There was only a quarter moon and a few stars bright above the flat fallen cornfield.
I went up to the front door. I had expected to find it securely locked and it was. I also expected to find the side door securely locked and, you guessed it, it was, too.