by Ed Gorman
And then I realized something.
The only thing more terrifying than watching Muldaur throwing himself voodoo-crazed all over the floor of the platform was watching him lie there absolutely still.
Which is what he was doing now.
And it didn’t take me long, worldly gadabout-philosopher and Hemingway sort of guy that I am, to realize what this meant.
Muldaur was dead.
“What’d he do? Crap his pants? God, that smell is awful. I knew those damn snakes would kill somebody eventually.” We were still inside the church. Sykes’d shooed a lot of the worshipers outside.
With his usual dignity and professionalism, Cliffie Sykes, Jr., hitched up his holstered Colt. 45, hitched up the Bowie knife he carries in a belt scabbard, touched a tip of his black Western boot to the corpse, and screwed up his fat face into a parody of Porky Pig, no personal offense meant to you, Porky.
Cliffie, Jr., is the chief of police.
At one time Black River Falls was owned and operated by the Whitney family, a branch of Eastern millionaires who came out here when one of the men got involved in some kind of legal trouble involving stock swindles. They tried to create a small version of a New England town out here on the prairie. They were imperious, of course, and snobs, of course, and contemptuous of the rest of the town, of course. But they brought sound town government, good and fair law, and an eagerness to keep the town clean and modern, all the virtues of New England Yankees.
World War Ii changed all this, as it changed so many things, good and bad. Cliff Sykes, Sr., owned a small construction company at the start of the war. Then he entered into various federal contracts with the government. He built airplane runways, roads, training camps. And his brothers and sisters practiced every kind of black-marketing there was. One of his sisters was even an Allotment Annie, a woman so-called because she married soldiers just about to ship overseas and collected their monthly allotment checks. One New York woman was indicted for having forty-six husbands. I doubt that Helga Sykes had had that many husbands, only because there weren’t that many blind soldiers.
Anyway, the long run of the Whitney family, begun in the previous century, came to an end. The Sykes clan were not only wealthier, they were more powerful. They took over this part of the state, including our town. And thus it was that Cliffie Sykes, Jr., who had failed to pass the police entrance tests given by six other towns, started his law enforcement career as our chief of police.
“You smell that, McCain?”
“Yeah, I smell it.”
“He crapped his pants.”
“Yeah, you said that, Sykes.” I only called him Cliffie when I was so mad I didn’t care anymore.
He pointed to the snake cage. “I should go get my shotgun and kill every one of those bastards.” He pawed his stubby hands on the front of his khaki uniform, the kind Glenn Ford always wears when he’s playing a lawman.
Secretly, Cliffie thinks he’s Glenn Ford. Secretly, I think I’m Robert
Ryan. Which I am, pretty much, except for the height, the good looks, the deep voice, the masculinity, and the charm.
“Or you could always just take them to the woods and set them free,” Kylie said.
He seemed to see her for the first time. She’d be pretty hard to miss. She was the only pretty one of the three of us. Everybody else he’d run outside.
“Say, what’re you doing here?”
“I’m with McCain.”
“And what’s McCain doing here, while I’m at it?” he said.
“McCain is doing here what Muldaur asked him to do,” I said.
“And that would be what exactly?”
“Exactly, that would be trying to ascertain if somebody was trying to kill him.”
“He told you that?”
“He told me that.”
“Why’d he think somebody was trying to kill him?”
“He thought it was because of all those pamphlets he was handing out.”
“What was wrong with those pamphlets? I read a couple of ‘em and they seemed all right to me.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said.
“And anyway, the snakes killed him.”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“No, it wasn’t. That’s what you told yourself.
You haven’t even asked me what killed him.”
“Well, if he was doin’ all that heebie-jeebies stuff, then what killed him?”
Kylie said, “Poison.”
“Yeah, snake poison.”
She shook her fetching head. “I don’t think so. We studied snakes in biology in college.”
“College,” Cliffie scoffed. “A training ground for commies.”
Kylie sighed. She was used to him. “Snake venom rarely produces symptoms like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like what you call the heebie-jeebies.”
“So if it wasn’t snake poison, what was it?”
“We’ll have to let the autopsy tell us,” I said.
The ambulance siren cut through our conversation as the boxy white truck swept up in front of the open doorway. You could hear the attendants hitting the ground and yanking the gurney from the back.
Cliffie, thumbs in his gunbelt, swaggered up to meet them.
“Why aren’t I surprised Cliffie liked those pamphlets? And I’m not saying that just because I’m Jewish. I’d be mad even if I wasn’t.” Then she smiled. “And by the way, McCain, the rabbi put some more guns in the basement of your church last night.”
“I’ll alert the monsignor.”
They made swift work of Muldaur, the ambulance boys.
When they were lifting him onto the gurney, Cliffie, ever helpful, said, “Sorry about the smell, boys. He crapped his pants.”
“You calling Bci?” I said, referring to the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Without their help, small towns just can’t do adequate scientific crime investigations.
“For what?”
“For what? To find out who poisoned him.”
“Did it ever occur to you, McCain, that maybe one of his snakes bit him earlier and he was just having a delayed reaction. Snakebites can do that, you know.”
“Clifford Sykes, Jr.,
Herpetologist,” Kylie said.
“What’s that herpe-thing mean?”
“It means snake expert.”
“Oh.”
He’d obviously thought she’d insulted him.
Then he said, “So I call them in and it turns out to be an accidental snakebite and then I look like a fool.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine you ever looking like a fool, Chief,” Kylie said in her sweetest voice.
“Well, God knows you and that left-wing rag you work for have tried to make me sound like one every chance you get.”
Maybe it was the innumerable times he’d arrested people for crimes they hadn’t committed. Maybe it was the year he pocketed half the ticket sales to the policeman’s dance. Maybe it was the time The Clarion pointed out that it was Cliffie’s first cousin Luther who was not only selling our town its police vehicles but also charging twenty percent over the sticker price. It wasn’t real hard to make a case against Cliffie.
“We couldn’t do it without your help,” Kylie said, all sweetness again.
Cliffie was about to respond when one of the children raced into the church. Cliffie did not like this. When Cliffie tells you to stay out, he gets most unpleasant if he sees you defying him.
He lunged for the kid and shouted, “Hey, you, twerp!”
“Maybe he’ll shoot him,” Kylie said.
“Nah. Nothing worse than a pistol-whipping, probably.”
The kid wanted to see the snakes, was the thing.
He rushed up to the cage and stood gazing in fear and amazement at the serpents that hissed and rattled at a world as alien to them as theirs was to us.
“You get away from there now,” Cliffie said.
“They wouldn’t bite me, Chief,” the boy said. He was probably eight, with a bowl-job haircut like Larry’s of the Three Stooges, something Mom probably gave him at home. “I don’t have sin in my heart. I really don’t.”
“You heard what I said.”
Cliffie yanked him down from the platform and dragged him outside.
Something had been troubling Kylie all evening.
Something that was becoming clearer and clearer on her girlish, elegant face. Somehow, I sensed that it didn’t have anything to do with the church here, frightening as that had been.
“You give me a ride home, McCain? I guess I’ve about had it. Watching him die like that took it out of me.” She slid her arm through mine.
“Let’s go outside.”
Heat, mosquitoes, fireflies, and the smell of gasoline, cigarettes, and sweaty people awaited us. The place was already becoming a carnival. On a summer night in a small town there’s nothing front-porch folks would rather do than follow ambulances. Put up some iced tea there, honey, and we’ll see where that ambulance is goin’. Hurry, now. More dramatic than Tv, cheaper than the movies. And they were just now pulling up, forming a semi-circle around the cars of the churchgoers. They were practiced enough at all this to leave plenty of room for the official vehicles to get in and out. And they were bold enough to go right up to Muldaur’s flock and ask them questions. They were sure this just had to involve snakes, and what could be more exciting than something that involved snakes and was cheaper than going to the movies?
But it wasn’t all front-porch types, and that surprised me. Reverend Thomas C.
Courtney was there, for one, the first minister to look as if Esquire had dressed him. I wondered if the apostles had worn starched blue dress shirts, white ducks, and deck shoes. And driven green Mg’s. I always enjoyed driving past his church to see the titles of his forthcoming sermons. “You, John Paul Sartre, and The Crucifixion” was still my favorite. We used to parody that title. I came up with “You, Gabby Hayes, and The Heartbreak of
Hemorrhoids.” (i was reading Mad magazine a lot in those days.) Courtney appealed to what we call, out here anyway, the gentry. He’d angered a lot of Catholics lately by preaching a piece written by Dr.
Norman Vincent Peale, the most successful Protestant minister of our day, who claimed that Jack Kennedy was, as a Catholic, beholden to Rome and that a vote for Kennedy was thus a vote for papal rule.
Finding Sara Hall here was even more surprising. A fading country-club beauty who’d been to the Mayo Clinic several times for what was locally called “a little drinking problem,”
Sara was a friend of my employer, Judge Whitney, and a woman I liked. Her hands twitched sometimes, and she was known to have had a couple minor breakdowns in very public places a few years back. One day, seeing me on the street and having met me only once, she asked if I’d have a cup of coffee with her. I was surprised but I went. And when our coffee came and she’d had a couple of swallows, she said, “I was just afraid I might pop in somewhere and have a drink. But instead I can sit here and talk to you.
I really appreciate this.”
Muldaur’s people had gathered in front of two battered Chevrolet trucks, from one of which issued the plaintive cry of hill music in its purest form, not steel guitars but slide guitars, the kind of music first heard on these shores a couple hundred years ago when Irishers landed on the shores of the Atlantic.
The voices of the girl singers were my favorite parts, high-pitched wails relating tales of doomed lovers and the men who enslaved them. The lyrics were changing now, influencing country music and being influenced by it at the same time. This was the music of a subculture that would never become mainstream. To find life as it was lived a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, you didn’t have to travel far.
I saw it peripherally, not sure at first that I did see it, the big man who’d guarded the church door leaning over to slap a small woman, hard, across the mouth. This was in the far shadows, beyond the wall of crunched and crushed vehicles they drove. They stood between two such vehicles.
They were easy to see.
It was just at that moment that Cliffie started baying orders for all the people who’d been inside the church to start giving statements to his men-first cousins, second cousins, shirttail cousins-who were now moving among the flock with ball-point pens and nickel back-pocket notebooks. Cliffie had once seen Bci agents do this and had forever after imitated it. Hey, this idea of interviewing witnesses seemed like a pretty neat-o keen idea. Boy, where was this scientific detection stuff going to end, anyway?
“You mind if we leave? I’m getting kind of tired.”
Kylie’s voice broke somewhere in the middle of that last sentence and then she did something I’d never seen her do before. She started crying. Not hard, not loud, mostly just large, gleaming tears collecting in the corners of her dark eyes. She didn’t wait for my answer. “C’mon,
McCain, let’s go, all right?”
Four
It is a strange summer for me. The girl I’ve loved since grade school is in Kansas City, hiding out from the scandal of running off with our town’s most important lawyer.
Married lawyer, I should add. Two kids and all. Lawyer and wife have made up. The beautiful Pamela Forrest is, however, pretty much gone forever. Mary Travers, the girl I should have fallen in love with-z much as you can determine something like that, I mean-is getting married to the man whose father owns the local Rexall plus a whole lot of other property in the county. She still loves me, or so she said the last time I saw her, but I’ve screwed up her life too many times as it is.
And the other day I was sitting in the backyard of my folks’ place and I started to study them. Not just look at them. Study them. And see how old they’re getting. And I felt scared and sad and lonely because they’re such good people and I sure don’t want them to die. And Mrs. Goldman, my landlady, about whom I’ve had more than a few erotic fantasies, went to some kind of cancer meeting in Iowa City-her sister recently died of cancer-and she came back with those sticker decals you put on your medicine cabinet mirror, Cancer’s Seven Danger
Signals. And put them on every medicine cabinet mirror in the house, including mine. And I started thinking about it. I mean, she meant well. But I started thinking about it. That I could die, too. That it wasn’t impossible for a twenty-four-year-old to pass over.
And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs.
I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.
And now here I am with Kylie, whom I have this sort-of stupid half-assed crush on even though she’s married and I sure don’t want to get involved in anything like that, and we’re just riding the prairie night with the top down in my red Ford ragtop, taking the long way home at her request, out on the blacktop that runs between the woods and the river, the moon high and round and silver-gold, and the cattle and the horses lowing in the farmyards, and a lone motorboat out on the river, its wake phosphorescent as it cuts the moonlight, and I’m wondering if Kylie feels as lonely as I do at this moment.
She said, “This feels good.”
“Yeah. It does.” Though I wasn’t quite sure what “x” referred to.
“Everybody should have a convertible.”
“Can’t disagree with you there.”
“Even the pig shit smells sort of good tonight.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking that myself. Boy, this pig shit really smells good tonight.”
She sl
ugged me on the arm.
She didn’t say anything for a time, we were just cruising along the river, and there was this houseboat then and even from here you could hear the Latin music and the people all laughing, and she said, “I wish I was out there.”
“On the houseboat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How come?”
“Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”
“What you’ve got is some sort of secret, don’t you?”
She laughed. “Cliffie Sykes, Jr.,
Herpetologist. Samuel McCain,
Mind Reader.”
“So you going to tell me what it is?”
“No. Because if I do I’ll get sad again.
And I don’t want to be sad for a while.”
“I don’t blame you there.”
“Sometimes, it feels sorta good to be sad.
You know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“But most of the time it just feels like shit to be sad.” Then, “Could you turn up that song? I love it.”
Fats Domino. “Blueberry Hill.”
I got her home about half an hour later.
She lived in a cottage isolated on the edge of a creek and snuggled between elms. There was an old swing set in the side yard. You could almost hear the happy squeals of kids from other times.
Every once in a while, tired of newspapering, she’d say, “I should just pack it in and have some kids, McCain.” She hadn’t said that for some time.
The house was dark. Her road-weary
Dodge sat in the grassy drive. Chad’s car wasn’t there. Chad taught English at the University of Iowa, forty-five minutes away. He was one of many grad students there writing a novel on the side. We’d never cared much for each other. He was this big, blond guy who dominated every room he was in with his harsh opinions and uncharitable evaluations of everybody around him. I think the word I’m struggling for here is jerk. He caught me reading a Gold Medal paperback by Charles Williams at the Rexall lunch counter one time and has ever since called me, with great scorn, “The Gumshoe.”