by Ed Gorman
“He tell you he was leaving me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He say he was in love with her?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He say he couldn’t face me because he “didn’t want to put any more hurt” in my eyes?”
“Yeah. Some kinda bullshit like that. He probably thinks it’s a good line.”
“He does. He thinks all his lines are good lines.”
“And by the way, thanks for telling me what I was supposed to tell you. I was sorta nervous about how I’d say it.”
“I almost told him I was pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“No. But it would’ve made him suffer. This way he just gets to walk away.”
She finished her drink in three gulps. Then swung her legs off me and stood up.
“You ready for another one?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“I’m going to make a stiff one.”
“The night’s young.”
She actually smiled. “Yes, McCain, and so are we.”
She poured about half a glass full of sour mash, ran a silver slip of tap water into it, added a couple ice cubes from the fridge, and then came back, bringing those wonderful long legs with her.
When they were once again inhabiting my lap, she said, “Tonight’s the night we sleep together, McCain.”
“Probably not.”
“C’mon, McCain, I’ve got to sleep with you tonight.”
“Because he’s sleeping with her tonight.”
“No, because I want to sleep with you.”
“You like me. I like you. We’re friends. That part’s true. But the reason you want to sleep with me is because of her.”
“Well, maybe part of the reason.”
“Most of the reason.”
“Maybe fifty percent of the reason,” she said.
“Maybe eighty percent of the reason.”
“Maybe fifty-five percent of the reason.”
We listened to Oscar Brown, Jr.
“Boy, this drink’s really getting to me,” she said.
“That’s probably more booze than you’ve had in your entire life—right there in that one drink.
Nobody says you’ve got to drink it.”
She set it down on the coffee table.
“Wow. I’m woozy.”
She laid her head back against the arm
of the couch. Closed her eyes.
“Would you dance with me?” she said.
“I thought you were woozy.”
“I’m all right now.”
“You’re a dancer, huh?”
“Not really. I mean, I used to dance with my sister sometimes when we watched “American Bandstand.” And I danced in high school the few times the boys would ask me. They wanted to slow-dance with girls with big breasts so that let me out.” Pause. “I want you to hold me, McCain, I really need you to hold me, and dancing’s a good way to do that.”
“How about some Nat King Cole?”
“Perfect. I need to go to the bathroom first, though.”
I had an album of ballads by Cole. It was Mathis or Cole or Darin when I wanted ballads. Hearing Bobby Rydell ruin a Jerome Kern song wasn’t something I dealt with very well.
I heard the glass smashing in the bathroom and a terrible thought filled my mind. The jagged glass from the Skippy peanut-butter jar I kept my toothbrush in—ripping across her wrists.
I lunged for the door.
She’d been emotional, after all—suicidally so.
The door swung open and there she was.
“Dammit, I broke your glass,
McCain. You had it sitting right on the edge of the sink and I thought it wouldn’t fall off. But you had some kind of greasy stuff all over it.”
“Hair oil. I probably picked the
glass up after I put the hair oil on.
Greasy kid stuff, as they say in the ads.”
“Hair oil, then. Anyway, when I picked it up, it slid right through my fingers. Get me a dustpan and a broom and I’ll clean it up.”
She fixed me with a sharp eye. “And it wasn’t because I was drinking, either.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, but it’s what you were thinking.”
“Guilty as charged, I guess.”
She looked so bedraggled and exasperated just then, her hair sort of mussed and her face damp from the heat and her clothes a little mussed, she just looked so damned sweet and lost and sad and nice and girly and true and just plain wonderful that I leaned forward and touched my lips
to hers.
I forced my eager arms to stay put.
I said, “I’ll get the broom and the dustpan.”
A few minutes later, we were dancing.
“This is nice,” she said.
“It sure is.”
We were listening to “Lost April” and it was great, dancing there in the living-room of my apartment. I turned the light off. A quarter moon hung in a pane of glass and a coyote cried in growing flower-scented darkness. This was kind of a medical procedure for both of us. A healing, if you will. It had been way too long since I’d held a woman and way too long since this particular woman had been held by a man she trusted. It wouldn’t last long—dawn would turn us back into our real selves—but for now we were shadowshapes and nothing more.
“Is it all right if I kiss your neck, McCain? Because if I don’t I’ll start crying about you-know-who.”
“Well, in that case, because it involves you-know-who, I guess I don’t have much choice do I?”
One tiny little peck on my neck and I set a land speed record for getting an erection.
We got tighter.
I thought of Groucho’s old gag line, “If I held you any tighter, I’d be behind you.”
And then we were kissing. And I do mean kissing.
And thrusting. And rubbing. And stroking. And kissing and thrusting even harder. And then rubbing and stroking even harder.
“I want to if you want to,” I said.
“Well, I want to if you want to,” she said.
All this said in great swooping gasps on both our parts.
And then we started dancing at a slight eastward angle, toward the bed.
I could see over her shoulders into the bedroom.
Tasha, Crystal, and Tess seemed to sense what was about to happen.
They jumped off the bed as if it were a sinking ocean liner.
And then we reached the bed and then-“Thanks,” she said when we were all finished.
“Are you crazy. Thank you!”
“I’m not that great a lover, McCain.”
“Well, neither am I.”
“You were pretty good.”
“Well, look who’s talking. You were pretty good yourself.”
“At least we’re being honest.”
“Honesty is always the best policy.” I guess that’s the myth of Stranger Sex. The fury of it is great but sex is actually better —at least for me—af you’ve been together a few times. Get to know what to do, what not to do, when to do it, when not to … need I go on?
But I was already wondering if we hadn’t been a mite hasty about being perfectly honest about our first experience. We’d been expecting a
Technicolor and Cinemascope musical.
What we’d gotten was a nice, lusty B
second feature in black-and-white on a regular-size screen. And no reassurance.
And I think we both needed reassurance.
“You’re not telling me I am a great lover and I’m not telling you you are a great lover.”
“Yeah, but you did say I was pretty good, Kylie.”
“Oh, you were pretty good, all right. In fact, you were very good.”
“Well, that’s what I meant to say to you, too. Not that you were merely pretty good. But that you were very good.”
“And so were you, McCain. Not just very good. Very, very good.”
Now, that was mo
re like it. Two verys.
“You got a smoke?” she asked.
“I thought you only smoked filters.”
“I’m being European tonight, McCain. Like Simone Signoret or somebody like that.
European movie stars never smoke filters.”
“There’s nothing more alluring than lung cancer.”
I got us cigarettes and got them going and gave her hers.
“God, that breeze feels good,” she said, inhaling with epic depth.
We lay inches apart on the bed. Letting the breeze balm us.
“I ever tell you what he did to me the first time I ever met him at a dance?”
“I guess not.”
“Could you stand to hear about it?”
“Sure.”
She rolled over and kissed me on the
cheek. Her breast felt swell against my arm.
“Thanks for putting up with me.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, we met at this dance in
Manhattan, see. And we danced like every other dance together. Fast and slow. And it was obvious there was something going on. You know? So I said, “Be sure and save the last dance for me.” And he kissed me. Right there in the middle of the floor.
This big dramatic kiss. An Mgm kiss.
And then you know what the asshole did? He started dancing with this blonde who came in. Very Vassar, if you know what I mean. Vassar or Smith. One of those real bitch schools. And then all of a sudden he forgot me entirely. He not only danced the last dance with her, he took her home.”
“So how’d you meet him again?”
“Luckily—or unluckily, as things turned out—we’d already exchanged phone numbers by that point. I called him the next day.”
“What he’d say about the Vassar chick?”
“Said she was an old girlfriend and he was taking pity on her.”
“That Chad, always thinking of other people.”
We then proceeded to nuzzle, snuggle, cuddle, grope, bite, nibble, lick, groan, gasp, and giggle. I was almost ready but first I said, “Need to go to the can.”
“Don’t be long.”
“Thought I’d take a paperback in there with me.”
“Har-har.”
I got up and walked to the john and—since I have to reconstruct the thought process here—I guess the next few seconds went this way.
I walked into the john.
And stepped on a piece of glass we hadn’t swept up. Just a sliver. But it cut me enough to remind me of the glass I kept my toothbrush in.
And when I thought of the glass, I thought of it slipping out of Kylie’s hand.
And then I knew who had killed Muldaur and Courtney. Things work out that way sometimes.
She watched me as I yanked my clothes on.
“But where’re you going?”
“I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
“You’re forgetting something, McCain.”
“What?”
She was already throwing herself off the bed.
“I’m a reporter, McCain. And I’m
going with you.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
She grinned. “Doesn’t matter.”
Twenty
On the way out there, we stopped at the Nite Owl grocery store and bought a can of lighter fluid. Then we were back on the road and I was explaining everything to her.
Fifteen minutes later I pulled off the gravel road.
“This is the part you won’t like.”
“What part is that, McCain?”
“I’m going in there alone.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“I’m acting as the investigator for Judge Whitney. You’re a reporter. If Cliffie wanted to make a stink about me taking you along, he could.”
“So I wait till you wave a white
flag?”
“Something like that.”
She leaned over and kissed me.
“I guess that makes sense.”
Which made me suspicious. She took her reporter’s job very seriously.
I got out of the ragtop. The moon was riding high. The prairie gleamed with moonlight. A John Deere tractor with lights in a distant field looked like a giant alien insect, like the mutated kind you always see on drive-in movie screens.
The garage resembled a jungle ruin in the shadowy light. A lost race of auto
mechanics had once thrived here, sacrificing virgin Fords to the motor gods until the very degeneracy of their actions caused them to vanish utterly from the earth. There was a good chance they’d gone to Atlantis.
There was light and mountain music coming from the nearby trailer.
First, to do my good deed for the day. The Boy Scout ethic was not lost on me, even though I’d been tossed out for smoking a cigar in the back of a troop meeting. Somebody had dared me to do it and in those days a good dare was a bracing and irresistible spur.
The snakes were inside the church now. I could hear them hissing from the makeshift altar. And, as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, see the outline of their cage.
But the snakes didn’t interest me—or even especially frighten me—now.
What I wanted was the corner where all those flyers were stacked. You know, John Kennedy, Secret Rabbi.
The stack sat right next to a window. I was hoping the folks in the trailer would see the fire and come running. And there I’d be with my .45 and my accusations.
I took my can of Ronson lighter fluid and went to work. I did those babies up proud. By the time I was done, the entire four-foot stack of flyers glistened. And I was out of the giant-size can of fluid.
I struck a match and very casually tossed it on to the fliers.
Whoosh! and Whoom! The words you frequently see in comic book panels applied here. The things whooshed and whoomed for several full seconds, like a singer sustaining a high note.
The flames leapt in every direction, burning blue-yellow. They filled the window, too, which faced the trailer. Any eye looking casually from the trailer was bound to see-The flames lent an ugly light to the church, a light that did not soften and flatter but revealed and scorned. All the oil marks on the walls; all the cracks and fungi on the floor; all the cobwebs collected in the high rotting corners.
But the massive painting of the angry Christ was the most startling. He was beyond anger, into hard-core psychosis. He was not my Christ—y could believe in his divinity or not, it didn’t matter —a Christ of sympathy, tolerance, understanding, forgiveness. He was the dark Christ embraced by dictators of all kinds, especially the darkest dictators of all, the ministers and priests who teach their followers to hate anyone different from themselves. Anyone who doesn’t believe, think, dress or behave the way they d. Any mercy or compassion this Christ had ever felt was gone now, gone utterly, as he glared down at me from the wall behind the altar.
The fire burned itself out in just a couple of minutes. Ash was all that was left.
A voice said, “I could kill you right
now for trespassing, Mr. McCain.”
I’d been fixated on the painting of Christ and hadn’t heard them come in.
Mother and daughter. The Muldaurs.
Mom, as most Midwestern moms were wont to, carried a sawed-off shotgun.
“That’s our personal property, what you just burned.”
“I’ll be happy to pay you for it. I just don’t want it dirtying up our little town.”
“What you don’t want is for people to know the truth, Mr. McCain. About the Jews and the Catholics. And the niggers.”
Ella just stood there in her worn gingham dress, the blue eyes of that sad pretty face not quite here with us but somewhere else. But she wasn’t the soft-spoken, shy Ella she pretended to be for the people who didn’t know her well. There was a hardness and a harshness in the face now; and a genuine lunacy in the eyes …
She said, “My mom’s right, Mr. McCain.
The Jews
killed Our Lord and they won’t rest until they take over the world. You probably don’t even realize that several of the popes were Jews.”
And what should have been funny—Jewish popes, Jewish guns in the basements of Catholic churches—wasn’t funny at all. It was sorrowful. Because not long ago she’d been an innocent little girl who should have been given the chance for a full, free life. But Mama and Papa had recruited her as a soldier in their dark army. The Koreans and Chinese had nothing on these folks when it came to brainwashing. The Muldaurs had turned their daughter into a vessel of pure rage and hatred. She was beyond reasoning with. She believed all their conspiracy theories, no matter how ludicrous; and even did their bidding.
“You couldn’t do it yourself, so you had your daughter do it,” I said.
“I wanted to do it, Mr. McCain. It’s the sort of thing God rewards you for.”
“For killing your father?”
“He’d defiled the Lord, Mr. McCain,”
she said. “And so did Reverend Courtney. He had defiled the Lord just the way my pa had—with sins of the flesh.”
“How’d you know it was Ella?” her mother said.
She didn’t sound angry or frightened.
More curious than anything.
“They found some kind of ointment all over the neck of the bottle your husband drank from. I didn’t make the connection till tonight—ffElla’s poison ivy salve.”
“You’re a good detective.”
“Look at her, Mrs. Muldaur. Look
at her face. She shouldn’t look like that. She should be a nice, ordinary teenage girl.”
“Wearing tight sweaters and going all the way, I suppose, like other girls in this town, Mr.
McCain?”
“That’s a lot better than this, Mrs.
Muldaur. I said to look at her and you didn’t. Because you see it too, don’t you?
She’s insane. That’s why she doesn’t feel any remorse for what she did. She killed devils, not human beings. And you and your husband were the ones who taught her to think like that.”
“You kill him, Mama,” the girl said. “Or I will.”
For the first time, Mrs. Muldaur looked nervous, uncertain. She wasn’t a killer.
Her daughter was.
“We could just let him leave,” Mrs.
Muldaur said. “Nobody’d believe what he said.”
“You know better than that, Mama. Now, either you kill him or I will.”