The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  “So do I,” I said.

  She was gone then, hurrying through the dusk into the lights and hustle of the supermarket where a hundred shoppers were trying to hurry their way home.

  11

  I DROVE PAST THE police station. The big black Indian motorcycle, the one belonging to our esteemed police chief, Cliff Sykes, Jr., wasn’t there.

  A block away, I pulled up to a phone booth. It was getting dark, cold-winter dark. Across the street was a small diner with a long, wide front window. Edward Hopper was my favorite painter and the window of the diner looked like something he would have painted; there were six, seven working-class men sitting at a long counter eating their dinner but not in any way communicating with anybody else. Totally isolated in this little strip of light in the otherwise black prairie night. Even the plump waitress in the pink uniform, standing alone by the cash register, seemed forever cursed by isolation and loneliness.

  I put in my nickel.

  “Hello?”

  “Were you eating, Mom?”

  “No, honey. But I’ll be putting supper on the table in about fifteen minutes if you want to come over.”

  “I’m afraid I’m working tonight.”

  “For yourself or the judge?”

  I lied. “For myself.”

  “Good. You’ll be on your own if you just keep trying. Won’t that be nice when you don’t have to work for the judge anymore?” Having grown up in the Knolls, my mother had no time for the imperious Whitneys.

  “Is Ruthie there, Mom?”

  “No, hon. I’m afraid she already left for the library. Said she had a lot of homework to do. School seems to be getting her down this year.”

  “Oh?”

  “She looked so tired lately. And her appetite’s awful.”

  “How’s Dad?”

  “Well, Cheyenne is on tonight, so he’s happy. You now how he likes his westerns.”

  The judge had been nice enough to give me a good bonus at Christmastime. I’d finally been able to replace my family’s old 12-inch Arvin with a brand-new 21-inch Admiral console. Now Dad could really enjoy his westerns.

  “We’d like to see you sometime, hon.”

  “I know, Mom. It’s just I’ve been so busy.”

  “Well, the water’s boiling over on the potatoes. I’d better go grab them. Thanks for calling.”

  I spent a lot of time in the library when I was a kid. I liked books. But I also liked girls and the library was a good place to sit with a book and watch girls troop in and out. I think even back then, I was looking for a girl to make me forget Pamela. She was never a girl from the Knolls, though. She had to be better than the Knolls. Just as, for Pamela, her ideal man had to be from old, secure money and reputation. Sometimes I wondered if that was the only thing Pamela and I had in common, our shallowness.

  On a cold winter night, the steam heat was turned all the way up and the pipes clanked ferociously. The library was built with a Carnegie grant right after the turn of the century. It was still a pleasant place but it was starting to get too small. At dinnertime, the library was largely empty. I couldn’t find Ruthie anywhere on the ground floor. I paused long enough to look over the best sellers, from Majorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk to Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. I’d still take John D. MacDonald and Peter Rabe.

  I went upstairs, to the reference section. Ruthie sat at a long table near the back of the second floor. She looked up when I started walking toward her, my slushy shoes squeaking on the floor. She was reading a book. As soon as she saw me, the book was closed and quickly put on the empty chair next to her. Whatever she was reading, she didn’t want to share it with me.

  I sat down. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “How you doing?”

  “Just studying. You know, for a test.”

  “So what’d you do with the Potassium Permangatel?”

  “The what?”

  “The stuff you stole from Rexalls.”

  “Oh. It was for a science experiment. You know, at school.”

  “What kind of experiment?”

  She looked at me steadily for a long moment. “You going to tell Mom and Dad?”

  “No.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “You ever stolen anything before?”

  “No.”

  “You plan on stealing anything else?”

  “No.”

  Now I looked at her steadily for a long moment. “So what’s going on, Ruthie?”

  “It’s just all these tests. I’m worn out. That’s why I took that stuff at Rexall’s. One of the girls at school told me it was really good stuff if you were run-down. Said she got all her energy back.”

  “So it’s for energy?”

  She nodded.

  “I thought it was for a science experiment.”

  “Well, I used it for the experiment and for myself.”

  “And you didn’t have enough money?”

  “Right.”

  “Or you wouldn’t have stolen it?”

  “Right.”

  “Ruthie, we’ve had a charge account at Rexall for years.”

  “I must’ve forgot.”

  “I love you, Ruthie.”

  “I know you do.”

  “So be honest with me. Whatever it is, I want to help you.”

  She shrugged. “It was just for a science experiment. I must’ve forgotten about our charge account. I needed to get back to school right away.”

  I stood up. She looked happy I was going. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”

  I like the second floor of the library. One has the sense of timelessness there. The dust and the opaque windows, the neat and hushed rows of books. It’s like being inside the time capsule they buried over at Runyon Park last summer. But the library time capsule would be filled with Chaucer and Melville and Poe and Dreiser and people like that. There was something almost religious about a life of contemplation and every once in a while I wished I was monastic. I knew it wouldn’t last much longer than a day or two and then I’d be wanting to see the new Tony Curtis at the Strand or buying the new Everly Brothers record or the latest Shell Scott novel. But it was nice to think about sometimes.

  I found what I wanted and came back.

  “Guess what I did,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Looked up Potassium Permangatel in the medical reference book.”

  “Oh.”

  I put my hand on hers. “Maybe we should go for a ride.”

  “A ride? What for?”

  “So we can talk.”

  “We can talk here.”

  “No, we can’t,” I said.

  We went outside. Four boys were having a furious snowball fight. They stopped abruptly when two girls walked by. The girls, who obviously considered themselves more mature than the boys, rolled their eyes at the very idea of snowball fights.

  We walked to my car.

  “Your car is always so cold,” Ruthie said.

  “Not in the summer.”

  “Very funny. And it happens to be winter.”

  We got in.

  “God, can you turn on the heater?”

  “It’s on. It just takes a while to warm up.”

  “I’m sorry I’m so crabby.”

  “You’re always crabby. It’s part of your charm.”

  “Not this crabby.” Then, “You know, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. The medical reference book.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “Well, you know, about douching.”

  She sighed and looked out the window. “Just what I always wanted to have. A conversation with my brother about douching.”

  “Maybe later we could talk about menstrual cramps.”

  I was driving out the river road. The ice-covered river was beautiful in the silver moonlight. The heater was roaring. It was still colder than hell in the ragtop. The seats were like ice.

  “I sure hope it works,” she s
aid.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, what do you think happened?”

  “Boy, you really are crabby.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Was it, uh, all right for you?”

  “You mean doing it?”

  “Yeah.” Doing it. My kid sister. Doing it. Sweet little Ruthie McCain.

  “Does he know? The father, I mean?”

  “Yes. He knows.”

  “You told him?”

  “I wrote him a letter.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said he was scared. He said this’ll screw up his whole life. He wants to start in premed at the university next year.”

  “How about your life? What’s supposed to happen to your life?”

  She looked out the window some more, the way Pamela did driving home last night. You could see the paper mill along the river, big and modern and alien in the night, floodlights giving it the look of a prison. Somehow it seemed wrong, even obscene, out here on the prairie where the Indians had roamed for several hundred years.

  “You going to tell me who this little bastard is?”

  “First of all, he’s not little. And second of all, he’s not a bastard. And third of all, no, I’m not going to tell you. And it’s not going to do you any good to get mad.”

  I couldn’t believe how calm she was. “God, Ruthie, don’t you want to cry or something?”

  “No, do you?”

  We rode along some more.

  “Mind if I play the radio?” she said.

  “We shouldn’t listen to the radio at a time like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. We just shouldn’t.”

  “Are we punishing ourselves or something?” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Then can I have a cigarette?”

  “A cigarette? Since when do you smoke?”

  “I just smoke every once in a while. Don’t worry, I don’t inhale or anything.”

  “You’re my little sister.”

  “And you’re my big brother. What the hell does that prove?”

  We rode along some more. I accidentally on purpose forgot to give her a cigarette. She didn’t mention it again.

  “God, I wish you hadn’t found out about this.”

  “I’m your brother, remember?”

  “We already went through that. And anyway, I’m the one who did it and it’s my responsibility.”

  “Do you love him?”

  She thought a moment. “I did until I saw what a little boy he is. I’m a lot more grown up than he is.”

  “So marriage is out?”

  “Absolutely.” Then, “I’ll just have to try this stuff is all.”

  “You actually think it’ll work?”

  “I guess it does sometimes.”

  “Who said?”

  “Jenny knows somebody it worked for.”

  “Oh, yes, Jenny, the sixteen-year-old gynecologist.”

  “God, I wish you hadn’t found out. You’re worse than he is about this.”

  “I just can’t believe how cool you’re being. Don’t you care what happens to your future?”

  “How is getting into a panic going to help me? I just have to try to think through this the best I can.”

  I didn’t say anything for a time. Just looked out at the frozen, snow-covered river in the moonlight, sled tracks deep in the snow, the faraway small islands of birch and pine. In the summer you could see girls in bikinis all night long on those islands, headlight flashes of flesh and drunken merriment.

  I looked over at my seventeen-year-old sister. She really was calm. And she was right. My intensity wasn’t helping either of us. “I guess that’s why you’re the valedictorian of your class and I graduated with a big C-plus average.”

  “You’re not stupid,” Ruthie said.

  “Face it, you got the brains in the family.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “And the looks.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m a regular movie queen.”

  “You’re beautiful and you know it.”

  “I’m pretty but not beautiful.”

  I knew at least twenty kids who’d vehemently disagree with her assessment.

  I pulled onto a cliff that overlooked a cove. On the cliffs across the waters you could see some of the town’s mansions.

  I said, “That’s where I want you to live.”

  “Where?”

  “Over there. In one of those mansions.”

  “Are you crazy? I don’t want to stay here.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. What, and have three kids and a husband and get fat and cranky by the time I’m thirty. Like Aunt Tish.”

  Aunt Tish was legendary. On a high school trip to Hollywood right before WWII, a producer from MGM spotted her at a hamburger joint and gave her his card and asked her to make a screen test. Well, she made the test, and she was good. Not great but good, good enough anyway for MGM to offer her a short contract when she graduated high school the next year. Tish became the local celebrity. A local station even gave her a fifteen-minute radio show once a week called Tish Tish Tish on which she sang (not so good), told jokes that her listeners sent in (even worse) and then gave the lowdown on a lot of high school activities. The assumption being, of course, that Tish would board the train for Hollywood the day she got her diploma. But she didn’t go. Her mother said that she’d gotten scared. What if she failed? What if she had to come back here in a year or so? How could she ever face all the people who had such great expectations for her? Tish started to put on weight. Nobody around here had ever seen anybody put on weight the way she did. In five months, she went from 95 pounds to 151 pounds. Mr. Berenson, the MGM man, kept calling long-distance and asking her what the holdup was. They were doing a Betty Grable musical set on a college campus and Tish would be perfect for a small part as one of the freshman girls. Then Tish broke down and told him about her weight problem. Mr. Berenson was most sympathetic, but after her confession he didn’t linger on the phone. Nor did she ever hear from him again. She stayed in town. Within one year, she weighed 170 pounds which, at five-one, was considerable. She got married to a milkman, had three kids bing-bing-bing and then got a local religious radio show in which she, among other things, reviewed movies through “God’s perspective.” At least she’d given up singing and telling jokes. She was still around: Aunt Tish, a dour woman who always brought terrible potato salad to family reunions and always managed to bring up her near-miss in Hollywood.

  “I want to be a lawyer, like you.”

  “Oh, yes. A big success like me.”

  “I want to go to law school at the U of I because the tuition’s so cheap, and then I want to go to Chicago and join a really prestigious firm.”

  “What about kids?”

  “I want kids. But not now. And not ’til I get my career going.”

  “You sound like Ayn Rand.”

  “It’s nineteen fifty-nine. Girls can do a lot more than they used to.”

  I heard the motorcycle before I saw it. At first, I didn’t think enough about it to look down the dark, winding road for it. There are a lot of motorcycles in a town like ours. Personally, I prefer custom cars. They’re my weakness. But motorcycles are fine, too, except for the ones with all the saddlebags and air horns and plastic streamers on the handle grips.

  The flashing red light caused me to turn my head. The flashing red light, mounted on the fender of the big Indian, also announced who it was, one Chief Cliff Sykes, Jr.

  Cliff goes to a lot of cowboy movies and it shows. While the rest of his sixteen-man force wear the traditional blue of the police officer, Cliffie prefers the kind of tight khaki uniform Glen Ford likes to wear in westerns, sort of a modern-day gunfighter’s outfit. He wears his Colt that way, too, in a holster slung low over his right hip. And he has a mustache, a black line that perfectly traces the arc of his insolent mouth. He wears cowboy boots made out of rattlesnake skin.
And he carries a Bowie knife in a scabbard that hangs off the back of his belt. He’s shot and killed five men in the six years he’s been chief. A lot of people, including me, think the killings didn’t need to happen, that a little police know-how and patience would have brought the incidents to a more humane conclusion. He’s also famous for getting confessions out of innocent people. Cliff, Sr., his father, controls a lot of jobs in this town and when you put a grand jury together, you’re always looking at a number of people whose fates are one way or the other in the hands of Cliff’s father. So are they going to charge Cliffie with excessive force? Not likely.

  He got off his motorcycle, emergency light flashing. For all his affectations and little-boy tough-guy stuff, all the silly B-movie stuff, he truly was a spooky guy because he took a pornographic pleasure in the pain and suffering of others. There’s smart evil and there’s dumb evil in this world of ours. Smart evil conspires and plots and manipulates; dumb evil just reaches out and grabs. Cliffie was definitely dumb evil.

  He shone his light in the window. The beam revealed Ruthie first and then me. The huge flashlight was actually a club and he often used it that way. He knocked on the window.

  I rolled it down. “Something I can do for you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I can’t say it in front of your little sister.” A car went by, headlights angling through the darkness, slowing down when it reached us, trying to figure out what little Cliffie was doing. Anywhere that Cliffie went, excitement was sure to follow.

  “In fact, McCain, get out of the car.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he said, slapping his flashlight in the palm of his hand. “A, because I said to, and B, because I said to. That clear enough for you?”

  I looked over at Ruthie. “I’ll be fine.” I wanted to reassure her just in case she was scared.

  “Gee, all he said was he wanted you to step out of the car. He didn’t say he was going to shoot you or anything.”

  “Sensible girl, your little sister,” Sykes said, smirking.

  I got out of the car.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  “To where?” I said.

  “Just along the road.” Then, “Oh, you got a weed?”

  That was another thing about Cliffie. He never bought what he could mooch. He probably hadn’t bought a pack of cigarettes since he’d graduated from high school. “Light?” he said, after I handed him the smokes. I gave him my Ronson. He lit up and handed the lighter back.