by Ed Gorman
But Pamela was gone. I was still in love with her. It hurt but it wasn’t a wonderful hurt anymore. It was a hurt hurt. And for the first time in my life I realized that it was a hurt I’d have to work on getting over. She was out of my life -living elsewhere in shame-and she was never going to be in my life again.
“I want you to promise me you won’t go see her.”
“We’re talking Sara Hall?”
“We are, as you say, talking Sara Hall.”
“She just happened to be out there.”
“She just happened to be out there.”
“A country-club lady out at a hillbilly church where they use rattlesnakes in their religious ceremonies?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not even curious why she was out there?”
“No.”
“Well,” I said, standing up so as to avoid the rubber band she’d just shot at me, “you’re the boss.”
“Yes, I am, McCain,” she smiled with her imperious mouth, “and don’t you forget it.”
How I came to talk to Sara Hall twenty minutes later is something I’m not necessarily proud of. I mean, it’s the sort of duplicitous thing only a counselor-at-law could come up with. Or a Republican.
Let me put it to you as a philosophical question.
Say there’s this woman you want to ask some questions. Now, you’ve already given your word that you won’t go see her.
But what if you happen to be driving by her house and you see her backing out of her driveway in her new DeSoto convertible?
And what if you just happen-not having anything else better to do and the day being so beautiful and all and you owning a red ‘ea ragtop and it needing to go for a drive to clean some of the engine sludge away and all-y just happen to follow her to our town’s first, only, and very tiny-twelve stores-enclosed shopping mall.
And what if you just happen to follow her inside?
And wait while she’s in The Moderne
Woman? And when she comes out, she runs into you.
You will notice, I believe, the subtle difference between me running into her and her running into me. Which, technically, she did. She could’ve gone right, she could’ve gone left, but instead she chose-completely of her own volition-ffwalk straight.
Now, to be technical again, it is true that I abruptly moved over from my rightward position to be in front of her when she chose-of her own volition-ffwalk straight ahead. But that’s hardly my fault, is it? There was a sudden draft from the nearby air-conditioning duct, and is it my fault I didn’t want to catch a head cold and be laid up for weeks? Possibly in traction?
“Hi, Sara.”
“Oh, hi, McCain.”
Neither time nor alcohol could ever quite dim her beauty. She had a kind of sensibly erotic face, the schoolmarm whose ripe lips told of discreet and memorable pleasures. The brown eyes were sad-y don’t drink as much as she did and look happy-but again they were not without aesthetic pleasure, fine brown eyes they were, even with their melancholy, and not without a hint of high intelligent humor even in their gentle pain.
White sleeveless blouse, tan tailored skirt, no hose, brown flats. Nice arms.
“That’s funny. I just saw the Judge a while ago.”
“I talked to her this morning,” she said.
“She’s very excited about Richard Nixon coming out here. It’s all she talks about these days.” Then, “Nice seeing you.”
People ebbed and flowed around us. From the record store came the sound of Jerry Lee Lewis.
Teenagers sparked over by the hot-dog counter.
“Say,” I said, ever the sly one. “I saw you last night.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Out at Muldaur’s church.”
She actually blushed. “Oh… We were just passing by. And saw the ambulance and everything.”
“I thought maybe you knew somebody there. I saw Reverend Courtney.”
The flush had faded. An abrupt coldness came into eye and voice. “Yes, we’d taken a ride together. He… helps me sometimes. You know, with-” She hesitated. “You know I went to the Mayo Clinic.”
She looked humiliated. Hard to look at pain so fresh in those lovely eyes.
“It’s all right, Sara.”
“Well, he helps me sometimes. Sort of counsels me.”
But if he was the kind and gentle counselor, why had her first reaction been anger when his name came up? And going for a ride together? But then I’d probably been reading too many books by Dr. Edmond DeMille, astksta Kenny Thibodeau, and was suspicious of even the most generous acts.
“I really need to go. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to bring up anything unpleasant, Sara.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
She touched shapely fingers to the edge of her erotic mouth. “It was nice seeing you.”
Wanting to keep her here as long as I could, hoping something useful would just spurt from her, unbidden, I said, “How’s your daughter?”
A tiny tic at the outer corner of her left eye. I didn’t make much of it. Coincidence.
“Fine. She’s just fine.” But she sounded tight again, the way she had about Courtney.
“I heard her sing at the springfest in the park.
She’s got a beautiful voice.”
She smiled, looking happy for the first time.
“Folk music. The Kingston Trio eighteen hours a day.” Then the tic came back. “I need to go. Bye.”
I gave her a long minute, then I followed her. There was a bar on the edge of the mall. I hoped I hadn’t driven her to it. I felt guilty and confused. Everybody always clucked about her “nervous personality” but her response to what I’d said seemed awfully dramatic.
She acted as if I’d accused her of something sinister.
She went into a bookstore. I sat on a bench and smoked a Lucky. I was there two or three minutes when I saw Reverend Courtney appear from the far end of the L-shaped brick mall. He wore a yellow golf shirt and chinos and white Keds. He looked like Yale’s most successful graduate of recent vintage.
He went into the bookstore, apparently not seeing me, and emerged a bit later in the company of Sara Hall. She looked angry again.
Angry but on the verge of cracking, her feelings threatening to overwhelm her.
He had her by the arm, led her to The House of Beef. I’d been there a few times. It was cave-dark, cavern-cold. It was the preferred trysting place. The martinis were good, the food better. All the upwardly mobile young men who imagined themselves to be cool-a la Peter Gunn or Tony Curtis I suppose-called the place “The House,” the way Frank Sinatra would.
I wondered if she’d drink. I wondered if she’d cry. I wondered if she’d get violent. She’d seemed on the verge of all three. And then I wondered if she was in love with Courtney. It was the kind of thought I didn’t especially want to have. I’d always liked Sara Hall.
Seven
I spent half an hour at the gas station where I get my ragtop worked on. Being a
Saturday, they were busy with cars up on the hoist. I’d stopped in just to schedule a time for a tune-up but I liked the particular atmosphere of the place-the smell of gasoline and oil, the clank of tools hitting the concrete, the hoist that lifts and lowers the cars-andthe male camaraderie that is second only to a barbershop. Taverns don’t count for camaraderie because alcohol skews everything. But barbershops and gas stations… that’s where men are men. And someday I plan to be one of them.
The topics today included how bad the Cubs were doing, how muchsthow little they looked forward to Nixon visiting our town, the high-school girls parading up and down the sidewalk in short-shorts (“God, I wish they woulda worn ‘em that short back when I was in school!”), how Jack Kennedy’s wife walked like she had a cob up her ass (republicans) or looked like a glamorous movie star (democrats), and finally how Muldaur’s murder was inevitable, him being the center of “all them nuts out to his church.”
Th
e gas-station consensus was that one of Muldaur’s own had done him in. Nobody mentioned Muldaur’s affinity for cheating on his wife. In fact, they didn’t offer any specific reason for his being killed. They just felt that anybody who messed around with snakes the way he did was bound to come to no good.
I stopped by Rexall for lunch, bought a new John D. MacDonald paperback and a copy of Galaxy, which I read through while I ate my burger and fries. While I was sitting at the counter, I saw Muldaur’s sergeant-at-arms towering above the patent medicines in aisle three.
He wore a worn, blue work shirt and was the strapping size of Muldaur himself, but there was nothing messianic about his face. He looked well-attached to reality, and not all that happy about whatever his particular reality was doing to him. I left a tip and slid down off the stool.
I started toward him but decided this wouldn’t be a good place to talk. There was a lull in business.
Too easy for people to overhear. The quiet would intimidate him.
I followed him outdoors after he bought a carton of Wings and a bottle of
Pepto-Bismol. He made his way toward a pickup truck that had once been a
Model-T. The back half had been sawed off and two-by-fours set in behind the front seats. It was the kind of truck that got a lot of poor families through the Depression.
After he’d climbed in and started the engine, which sounded pretty damned smooth given the age of the vehicle, I went up to him and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
“So what?”
“You remember me from the other night?”
“Yeah. You were with that Jew girl.”
“What makes you think she was Jewish?”
“They smell.”
“Why don’t you keep your filthy mouth shut?”
“You just can’t take the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That bringing a Jew in there is what killed him.”
“So it was her fault, huh?”
He patted a Bible on the seat next to him.
It had an outsize golden cross on its imitation leather cover. And next to the Bible was a stack of his leaflets about Jews and Catholics.
“Jews killed Our Lord. They start trouble wherever they go.”
I wanted to laugh. I’d had the same problem with Hitler. He was, for all his evil, laughable. His theories of a “pure race” were ridiculous on their face. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the Vikings visited most places on the planet. And they were one randy bunch of guys, let me tell you. There hadn’t been a “pure” race since. In fact, it’s doubtful even the Vikings were a pure race. That’s the trouble with evil sometimes-it turns into farce.
Jews smell. The presence of a Jew had caused a murder to take place. Uh-huh.
“I’m curious about something.”
He ground the car into gear. Sounded as if the transmission teeth needed a little work. I notice stuff like that.
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
“I saw you slap a woman the other night.
Was that your wife?”
He grabbed me. So quickly, so skillfully that I wasn’t sure what happened till it was over. He flung me back across the sidewalk, propelling me into a corner mailbox.
He pulled away.
I shouted, trying to recover at least a modicum of dignity for the interested bystanders, “Was Muldaur sleeping with your wife? Was that why you slapped her?”
A guy the town seemed to employ as a wise guy-he’d always been here, I’d never seen him gainfully employed, he just kinda wandered around and made sarcastic remarks, a modern version of the Greek chorus-sd, “Good thing he took off.
Otherwise you would’ve killed him, McCain.”
The groundlings who were standing around all looked at me and laughed.
I wasted an hour walking around to the various print shops. Half of them were closed on such a baking Saturday afternoon and the other half claimed that they didn’t know anything about who’d printed the leaflets and the slick pamphlets that came from Muldaur’s church and were plastered all over town. Most people of all denominations found them disgusting and complained about them in The Clarion letters column.
In a small town like ours, you have to be very careful of who you offend. There were just enough Catholics that printing Muldaur’s hate mail could cost you any Catholic business you had.
But if anyone knew anything, they weren’t talking about it. Only one person gave me anything remotely resembling a lead.
He said that there was a former press operator who now had a small press in his basement and did odd jobs. He’d taken a full-time job in the Amana factory where they made freezers because the pay was so much better. The guy said he didn’t know if Parnell, the former press operator, had done the Muldaur work but that he was probably worth checking out. He gave me Parnell’s address. I thanked him. I’d gone to Catholic school with Parnell. We hadn’t been friends, but then we hadn’t been enemies.
Reverend Courtney was sitting on his church steps talking to a dowager in a summer frock and a large summer hat. They looked quite handsome, the church of native stone magnificent in the afternoon light, the large front lawn well-tended and very green, a watercolor cover from The New Yorker perhaps, even a breeze cooperating by fluttering the long blue ribbon that trailed from the dowager’s hat.
Her name was Helen Prentice, and she and her husband were not only wealthy but also generous. There wasn’t a hospital, library, or auditorium within a hundred miles in any direction that the Prentices hadn’t contributed substantially to.
“Hello, Sam,” Helen said, extending her hand. We shook. I’d met her at various soirees at Judge Whitney’s house.
“Afternoon, Helen.”
She checked her watch. “I need to run.”
Courtney, now in dark slacks and a white shirt, started to raise himself from the church step but she stopped him with a gloved white hand.
“The last time I checked, Reverend, I wasn’t royalty. There’s no need to stand.” She smiled at me. “George and I really enjoyed sitting with you at the Judge’s dinner table last month. You’re a very funny young man.” Then back to Courtney. “See you in the morning at the ten o’clock service.”
When she was out of earshot, or so he assumed, he said, “There goes one very rich lady, McCain.”
“I’d think that a man who’d dedicated himself to following in the footsteps of Jesus might also point out that she’s a very decent person, too. Very generous with her riches.”
“Nice to know you’re not afraid of being pompous.”
I said, “How was the food at The House today?”
He wasn’t intimidated. “I knew you were an unsuccessful lawyer. I guess I’d forgotten that you were an unsuccessful gumshoe, too.”
“You and Sara Hall just happened to be driving around last night and ended up at Muldaur’s church completely by coincidence?”
“That’s right, McCain.”
He looked vital and modern standing against the massive medieval-style doors of the church.
“I’m sorry I got you Catholics in a tizzy by quoting Dr. Peale. It’s a free country, you know. Or so they tell me, anyway.”
“Right now, I’m more interested in you and Sara Hall. What were you really doing out there last night?”
He smiled. He had great teeth, of course.
Movie-star teeth. “As I said, I’m told it’s a free country. Or didn’t they teach you that in that second-rate law school you went to?”
He came down off the steps and walked over to where a rake leaned against an elm. From his back pocket he took a pair of brown work gloves, cinched them on, and started raking.
As I walked back to my office, I noticed leaflets on car windows, placed under windshield wipers. A block before I reached my place I saw a boy of maybe twelve toting an armload of the leaflets and getting punched in the face by a much bigger kid. The Flannagan boy. Flannagan was no doubt displeased w
ith the anti-Catholic nature of the leaflets. But mostly he just liked punching kids smaller than him. Flannagan, who’d played fullback on the Catholic school junior varsity squad until they realized he didn’t have any talent, was born to bully.
I got between them and gave Flannagan a shove.
“What’re you stoppin’ me for, McCain? You see that shit he’s got about Catholics? He says we ain’t Americans.”
“You’re a lot bigger than he is,
Flannagan.”
“I don’t care. He still deserves to be punched.”
Nice to know that Muldaur’s work was living on beyond him. He’d brought the town to a boil in life -andthe water was still hot now that he’d died.
“Who told you to pass these out?” I said to the kid. He wore bib overalls with a striped T-shirt. He had freckles and a cowlick and a squirt of blood in his right nostril from Flannagan’s fist. And bare feet. I was surprised he wasn’t dancing a jig.
“God told me to,” he said.
I almost laughed.
“God,” Flannagan said. “My ass.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that. Dirty, I mean,” the kid said. “My mom says Catholics and Jews talk like that all the time.”
Now I’ll double back on what I said earlier about the foolish side of evil. There’s nothing more frightening than a youngster who has been completely indoctrinated by his parents. He’s as soulless as a robot and as deadly as an assassin. You can’t reason with him because the “on” switch in his brain doesn’t operate. His parents turned it off permanently long ago.
“Why don’t you let me take those?” I said.
I reached for the leaflets and he jumped back a foot.
“No! You’re a dirty Catholic just like Flannagan here.”
“You call me a dirty Catholic again and I’ll knock you out.”
“Shut up, Flannagan,” I said. “Kid, I want the leaflets.”
“They’re mine and you can’t take them away from me.”
“Let me handle him, McCain,”
Flannagan said, “c’mon.”
And with that, not unexpectedly, the kid took off running down the sidewalk. Flannagan lunged, as if he were going after him. I grabbed him by the shoulder.