by Ed Gorman
That seemed to affect her. She touched
a flour-white hand to her hair, as if for the first time she was concerned about her appearance. As if for the first time, she saw me as human and thus somebody to look presentable for.
She shrugged. “He found out a week before John died. He had his suspicions and he just kept workin’ on me.”
“What did he do?”
“He sent the girls to stay down to his in-laws and then he tied me up in our bedroom.
Tied me up naked and then he beat me with his razor strop. Beat me on my body so
nobody could see it. He didn’t want nobody to know what I’d done and I didn’t blame him. I’d wandered again and I had promised him on God’s holy head that I wouldn’t. I’d even been able to handle the snakes a few times without them biting me. Now, after what I done with John, they’d kill me sure. They’re
demons, you know.”
Then: “So he let me go after a few days.
He carried on, though, even after he let me g.”
“Carried on?”
“Cried and pounded his fists against the walls and got so drunk he kept falling down. I could see what I done to this man and I wanted to take my life and that’s God’s truth, mister. I wanted to take my life. But I’d be damned to hell if I did and I knew it, what with my two young ones and all. Who’d take care of them?
That’s the first thing God would ask me. Who’s gonna take care of your girls now, Pam?”
I heard the panel truck before I saw it.
It rattled like a wagonload of pots and pans.
It came up the driveway about forty miles an hour, lost in its own dust.
We both watched as he jumped out of the car.
Oates. He had a shotgun in his arm. Pointed at me.
He said nothing. Just charged at me.
“Bill!” Pam Oates cried.
But it was too late. He swung the rifle barrel toward the side of my head, the same thing he’d done to me in the empty church.
But for reasons of manliness I suppose-I’d seen an awful lot of Roy Rogers movies growing up—I decided I was too pissed to care at this point. He had pushed me, shoved me, pounded me long enough.
I ducked under the barrel of his weapon. My foot caught him directly in the crotch.
I jumped to his left, while he was still trying to absorb his pain, and slammed a fist into the side of his head. The crotch kick had forced him to stoop so reaching his face was no longer a problem. I doubled up and put a fist against his nose, too.
Blood sprayed out of his left nostril. I can’t speak for him but I was having a hell of a good time.
Pam took the opportunity to yank the rifle from his hands.
“Now, get in the house, Bill. And I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now, McCain. And I don’t want to see you back anytime soon. You understand what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because the next time, I’m callin’ Sykes.”
Her husband, in pain and shame, had already reached the back door and was going inside.
The violence had disoriented the collie and I felt sorry for her. She was running around in frantic circles, obviously not comprehending the exact nature of what was going on here but very affected—.mayed, startled—”the air of violence.
A hot, sleepy day on the acreage was not supposed to be like this.
Pam Oates followed me back to the car.
“He’s a good man.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“He’s never wandered off on me.”
I wondered about his wandering and why he’d been at Muldaur’s trailer with Viola so early.
Maybe he wasn’t quite as innocent as Pam thought. He was likely the man who’d fired at Muldaur. Sleeping with a man’s wife can get you in that sort of trouble sometimes. But this wasn’t exactly the time to raise the question.
She touched my car with an almost shocking tenderness. Her touch had a sexual quality to it.
“Boy from Macon used to drive up and see me —th was before I knew John—and he had a nice convertible, too. We had some fun in that car.”
Her face and voice lost twenty years. “We sure did have some fun.”
I ate a late lunch at the Rexall
counter. Lunch-dinner, I guess. I
probably wouldn’t be eating much more today. Between the heat and my frustration with the case, I was
ready to lie on the floor in front of the fan and the Tv and be entertained.
Rexall was pretty busy. Bug spray,
suntan lotion, charcoal starter, charcoal briquettes, cigarettes, and beer seemed to be the most popular items at the cash register. The air-conditioning was freezing but that was all right after the baking sun.
I looked over the men’s adventure
magazines. I never bought them but I sure had a good time looking at the covers of he-men fighting off Nazis, Nazi alligators, Nazi
snakes, Nazi bats (rabid, of course).
The cover quotes were what I enjoyed most of all. And this month’s batch had some honeys.
“Sexual Psychopaths … Oversexed
Women!” “Nympho Outlaw and Her Legion of Outcasts!” “Nazis Dive-Bombed My Body!” “Confessions of a Nazi Call
Girl!” My favorite was “Nude Queen of the Communist Cannibals!” Whoever came up with the commie cannibals deserved a bonus. Now that was real writing.
Kylie was at the checkstand. Looking sweet but nervous, she set a small boxcar load of cosmetics on the counter.
“You don’t wear all this stuff.”
“I thought I’d really get dolled up tonight.”
“You don’t need dolling up, kiddo. You’re a good-looking girl.”
“You’re prejudiced, McCain. You like me.”
“He’s your husband. I’m assuming he likes you, too.”
She bit her lower lip, half-whispered, “You should see what I’m up against, McCain. She looks like a movie starlet.”
I wanted to hold her, protect her. Any man who could throw away a young woman this bright, this decent, this caring—but she had to go through with this, I knew. Same as I’d had to go through it with Pamela Forrest all those years. Being desperately in love is grand, isn’t it?
She nodded to my ham and cheese. “You should eat better.”
“I know. Usually, Mrs. Goldman fixes me meals three or four times a week. But her sister took sick all of a sudden.”
“Where’s her sister?”
“Des Moines.”
I saw how her right hand was twitching.
It made her even more vulnerable.
“I wish I was in Des Moines,
McCain.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I try to be objective about it, you know.”
“One thing you can’t be objective about is being in love with somebody.”
“I mean, I really can’t blame him.”
“I can.”
“I’m what you’d call pretty, I
guess.”
“Very pretty.”
“But you should see her, McCain. She makes me want to hide in the basement.”
“Is she as smart as you are? As much fun as you are? As deep as you are?”
“Oh, McCain, I’m not deep.”
“Are you kidding? You know things, Kylie. You understand things. You have insight into people.”
“I don’t fill out a bikini very well.”
“I happen to’ve seen you in a bikini one time. And you filled it out just right.”
“And my nose— You know, back east a lot of Jewish girls get bobs.”
“You don’t need a Bob. Or a Dave.
Or a Rick.”
She smiled.
“You’ve got a very fine nose. It fits your face perfectly.”
We went through this every once in a while. Her insecurities ran pretty wide. But then again, so did mine. I figured that’s why we liked each other.
&nb
sp; “You’ll be fine tonight. You just have to relax.”
“It’s like a first date. And look how long we’ve been married.”
I held her hand. “You’ll do fine.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She asked about the case and I told her what I’d learned. She tried to seem interested but her anxiety made that impossible. She said good-bye and fled.
I hate to admit this but that night I drank more than my usual two beers. I drank three beers. Which meant, given my size and my inability to hold alcohol at all well, I was pretty stinko.
I banged my knee going to the
bathroom, I banged my head getting a slice of cold pizza from the refrigerator, and I banged my butt when I miscalculated how far the end of the coffee table extended.
My dad and I are about the world’s worst drinkers. It takes most accomplished drinkers a long time to get stupid when they drink. We can do it in about the length of time it takes to guzzle a beer-and-a-half.
Things get all out of proportion for us. Something mildly amusing becomes unbearably hilarious.
Something modestly sad becomes a cause for great theatrical tears.
Tonight, for instance, Art Carney did a routine on “The Honeymooners” that made me laugh so hard I had to dash (well, stumble forward quickly) to the bathroom before I yellowed my Sears underwear; and then on “Gunsmoke” they had this story about a young crippled girl who becomes a gunfighter in order to avenge her brother, and man, tears were dripping off my chin when she got killed in the end.
I had the great good sense to go to bed shortly after that.
Sometime in the sticky murk of sleep—not even the fan cooled things off in any substantial way—the phone rang. Rang several times.
Rang loud enough to stir me but not loud enough to make me pick it up.
I fell back to sleep.
The phone started ringing again and this time, I picked it up.
“Hullo.”
“McCain?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Never.”
“This is Judge Whitney.”
“Yes, I recognized you. You’re sort of hard to confuse with anybody else.”
“Get some coffee in you and then head for the jail.
I’ll meet you there.”
“The jail? What for?”
“Cliffie, Jr., in his infinite wisdom, has just arrested Sara Hall for murdering Muldaur and Courtney.”
249
Part Iii
Sixteen
You have to wonder how word could spread at three o’clock in the morning. No air-raid sirens had sounded, no words were bellowed from the loudspeakers the city had planted in various places, no Paul Revere had hopped in his car and driven up and down the dark streets announcing that Sara Hall had been arrested for murder.
And yet there they were, maybe as many as fifteen of them, looking like the kind of crowd you always saw in westerns, the low-murmuring crowd that could turn into a lynch mob when the guy in the black hat appeared and stirred them up.
Except people in those westerns didn’t wear pink hair curlers that made them look like Martians, or Cubs baseball caps and Monkey Ward sleeveless undershirts that emphasized hairy, beachball-like stomachs. And in westerns Annette Funicello wasn’t playing on car radios.
Main Street was empty otherwise, and shadowy, and like the people in the crowd, it suggested a movie, too, small-town Americana. I glimpsed a shooting star and then heard the steady sound of a plane lost in the clouds. Any kind of plane sound suggested only one thing to Americans these days. That’s why we taught civil defense in our schools—?Duck and cover”—and that’s why forty percent of us, according to the Eastern newspapers, were busy building some form of bomb shelter. There were a lot of jokes going around about what Hugh Hefner would put in his bomb shelter.
One of Cliffie’s cousins—a dense deputy named Jebby Sykes—stood in front of the front door of the jail with a shotgun in his arms.
He didn’t look scared. He looked sleepy and he looked rumpled.
“Hey, where you goin’, McCain?”
“Little pecker, he thinks he’s hot stuff, don’t he?”
“Him and that damn Judge Whitney!”
I should have known that it would not be the hard-working people of town who would tumble out of bed in the middle of the night to see somebody prominent thrown in jail.
No, it would be Cliffie’s vast array of cousins, shirttail kin, and mutants who would find this so thrilling. Just imagine, one of them high-tone women who bathed regularly and
wore clean clothes spending the night in Uncle Cliffie’s jail. Who could ask for a bigger thrill than that?
“You got cause to be here, McCain?”
He got all swole up the way
unimportant people do when they’re trying to be important, all swole up with his badge and his wrinkled uniform and his Remington shotgun, all swole up keeping the hair-curlers and the Cubbies caps at bay, all swole up because nobody had ever let him be before. And it was almost sad. That was the terrible thing about the Sykes family. But every once in a while their coarseness, vulgarity, greed, ruthlessness, and stupidity made you sad, too. They were, in the cosmic sense, your brothers and sisters. And there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it.
“I’m supposed to meet Judge Whitney here, Jebby.”
“She’s inside. But that don’t mean I got to let you in.”
“Are you still mad because I caught your fly ball that day?”
“You damn right I—” Then stopped himself.
“What fly ball he talking about, Jebby?”
said a mostly toothless man.
“Never you mind, Cousin Bob,” Jebby said.
He looked pained. “Cliff said I was to pack you people up in your cars and get you back home.
Otherwise he’s gonna gnaw on me somethin’
terrible. Now, will you do that for me?”
“Maybe she’ll try’n escape,” somebody said.
“Yeah, and then Cliff would have to shoot her,”
said another.
“Now, we wouldn’t want to miss somethin’ like that,” said the first.
Jebby scowled.
“She ain’t gonna escape. She’s really ladylike. How’d she ever get outta jail?
No, now you folks get back home before Cliff gets mad at me. Please. I
promise to have my mama make you some of her special rhubarb pie for the family reunion this year.”
“Enough for everybody, Jebby?”
“Enough for everybody.”
A woman said, “You know how Cliff can be on people who work for him. Maybe we better leave Jebby here alone.”
“She escapes, though, don’t forget them dogs of mine,” a man said.
I wanted to ask if anybody had any tanks or B-52’s. Sara Hall was a
dangerous woman. You couldn’t be too careful.
They all said their good-nights, and now there was something peaceful about them and their shabbiness made me feel guilty for always holding myself to be so superior to people like them, and then they left.
“That was a home run. You stole it.”
“I didn’t steal it,” I said.
“It was over the center field fence.”
“Yeah, but I caught it, didn’t I?”
He looked at me squarely. He was just faintly cross-eyed.
“That would’ve been the only homer I ever hit.
I wanted my folks to be proud of me. My daddy was at that game. He had that heart condition.
I wanted him to see me do good at somethin’ because he always said I was like him, that I wasn’t good at nothin’. He died about two weeks later.”
Ninth grade that had been. Ten years ago.
I’d felt so damned good about making the catch, all the way back to the wall in the American Legion baseball park built over by the old swimming pool, all the way back
to the wall, snatching it from being a certain home run. God, I’d strutted around. Major leagues, here I come. But knowing all the time that I was just about like Jebby, I wasn’t much good at things either, not the manly things so treasured by all boys, not good with hammer, not good with football, not good with car engine, not good with simple physical labor that required even the dimmest skill. And for that wonderful moment—my teammates patting me on the back and telling me what a great player I was—I was good at the manly and thus important things. It had been pure fluke to catch it and now here was Jebby telling me that it had been pure fluke to hit it.
“God, I’m sorry I brought it up,
Jebby. I just said it to piss you off.”
He shrugged. “I don’t blame you,
McCain. Neither of us was worth a shit.” He smiled. His slightly crossed eyes smiled, too. “It was time for one of us losers to have a little bit of luck, wasn’t it? You was never mean to us Sykeses the way some of them was, so if anybody had to catch that homer of mine, I’m glad it was you.”
Then he stood back and said, “The Judge, she’s in Cliff’s office.”
The Judge was in Cliffie’s office, all right. He was crouching in his desk chair, doing everything but covering his face with his arms, while she shouted at him and blew Gauloise smoke in his face. Not even his crisp khaki uniform and all the framed photos of him holding various types of rifles, shotguns, howitzers, could make him look in control of this moment.
“The idea of arresting one of this town’s most upstanding citizens—and my best friend—is ridiculous. You know and I know, Cliffie, that this is just one more of your little games to embarrass me as the only intelligent representative of law and order in this town!”
Oh, she was blistering. Oh, she was bombastic. Oh, she was absolutely right.
What sort of reason would Cliffie have for arresting poor Sara Hall? And she did all this in a white shirt, dark slacks, and a blue suede car coat that cost a lot more than my ragtop.
“You always have to arrest somebody, don’t you, and it’s always the wrong person, isn’t it?” she concluded.
Which is what I asked him as soon as the Judge saw me and gave me the floor. “You had to arrest somebody, didn’t you, Cliffie? You just can’t let a few days pass without throwing somebody in that pigsty of a jail of yours, can you?”