The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  Mary stayed calm. And she looked very pretty doing it, her cocked beret and elegant face outlined in the moonlight. But she was all work: no slacking, no wasted words. She was slowly pulling me back to the ice again.

  I finally got the middle of my body even with the ice and, between her pulling on the oar and me grappling with my elbows, I was able to pull myself up. I collapsed on the ice for a few moments, my breath coming in terrible shaken gasps. I heard the noises my lungs and throat were making. I didn’t know human beings could make noises like that.

  “I don’t know how strong this part of the ice is,” she said. “Maybe you’d better get up now, McCain.”

  “God, thanks for saving me.”

  “I couldn’t just let you drown,” she said. She smiled. “Though sometimes I’ve thought about it.”

  I slowly got to my feet. “What’s that sound?”

  “Your teeth.”

  “My teeth?”

  “They’re chattering.”

  I hadn’t known until that very moment that teeth actually do chatter.

  The flashlights were like insect eyes coming at us through the dark woods. All I could think of were those hokey earth-invasion movies at the drive-in. I just hoped these folks wouldn’t be wearing papier-maché masks. They’d heard Mary’s calls.

  They came out of the woods in silhouette. You could see their silver breath and you could see the insistent bobbing eyes of their flashlights. But there was no human detail. They could have been phantoms.

  They were shouting now, mostly things like “Are you all right?”

  A few of them hit the ice and started walking tentatively toward us. One of the women had thought to bring a blanket. When she saw me standing there soaked from the waist down, she forgot about the ice and walked out to me. She threw the blanket over my shoulders. “Bring that thermos over here!” she called to somebody on the edge of the pond.

  Matt Tjaden was the man who brought the thermos out. He’s the county attorney and plans to run for governor someday, sooner rather than later. He was the Kiwanis Club’s Man of the Year for the entire midwest two years ago. The only club I’ve joined since reaching my majority is the Science Fiction Book Club, which is to say that Tjaden and I don’t have a lot in common. I suspect he’s a decent guy when he’s not being official, but I’ve never had the chance to find out. He’s the stalking horse for the Sykes clan and I’m the unofficial representative of the Whitneys.

  “I’ve always said you were all wet,” Tjaden said. “And now you’ve proven my point.”

  “Har de har har,” another guy said. “Just give him the damn coffee, Matt, and spare him the jokes.”

  Tjaden has the kind of bland Van Johnson good looks that old ladies like and men don’t dislike. He probably believes at least half the corny things he espouses, and if he isn’t especially bright, he also isn’t especially mean or vindictive, which is a lot more than you can say for the Sykes clan. The only time he can get you down is on the Fourth of July when he gives his inevitable death penalty speech right before the fireworks. If Tjaden had his way, we’d be hanging people every other week. Tjaden sees our state’s unwillingness to execute more people as “the subtle and nefarious influence of Communism.” The quote by the way is from J. Edgar Hoover. I think Tjaden carries a photo of J. Edgar in his wallet.

  Tonight, Tjaden looked like a skiing ad in Esquire magazine. He had on some very fancy red and blue ski togs and some blue boots that came up to his knees. He looked like a superhero in a comic book. Except for his slight jowls. And slight paunch. And slight baldness. And slight nearsightedness. After he poured me a cup of coffee, he started telling people to go back to the rink, that everything was under control here.

  I said, “There’s something we need to talk about.”

  “You should be more careful, McCain.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  “You’d never catch me out on this ice.”

  “I hate to point this out,” I said, shivering inside my blanket, “but you’re on this ice now.”

  “Oh,” he said, and then looked down at the ice. “Well, you know, I mean standing where the ice is weak.”

  “There’s a body in the canoe over there.”

  “What?”

  “A body.”

  “Dead?”

  “No, she’s sunbathing.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I was going to find out but then the ice gave way.”

  He looked over at the canoe. “You think it’s safe to go over there?”

  “If we walk wide and come in from the north.”

  “God, this town is going to hell in a handbasket. First, Kenny Whitney goes nuts and kills his wife and himself, and now there’s a dead girl in a canoe.”

  What I really wanted to do was go home and soak in a hot bath and drink some brandy while steaming out the head cold that was already mounting a cavalry charge.

  Tjaden wouldn’t go to the canoe. I had to do it. This time, I got a good look at the girl. She wasn’t at all familiar. She was probably Ruthie’s age. She had on a winter coat but it was open. I had an irrational thought, about how cold she must be. I wanted to put my blanket on her. Then I remembered that she was dead.

  I moved closer. In the moonlight, the blood that soaked her tan skirt looked black. There was blood all over her hands and legs. Her white blouse was clean, as was her face. I wondered what could have caused this much blood.

  I walked back up and grabbed the stern of the canoe and dragged it across the ice. I pulled it up on the snowy shore.

  “God Almighty,” Tjaden said. “Look at that blood.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You see any bullet holes or cuts or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  Then he got pious on me. “The way girls run around today, just like our pastor says, you dress like a whore, people are just naturally going to think you are a whore.”

  “She isn’t dressed like a whore.”

  “If she’d stayed home and done her schoolwork at night, she wouldn’t be in this canoe right now.”

  “What if she died during the day?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t die during the day.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can just tell is all.”

  Who needs scientific detection when you’ve got Tjaden around?

  I heard voices.

  To my right, coming down the hill from the gravel road that fronted this section of timber, I could see more flashlights bobbing in the gloom.

  “Looks like Cliff,” Tjaden said.

  “Thank God,” I said. “We’re all saved.”

  “He’s a lot better lawman than you give him credit for, McCain.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard, since I don’t give him any credit at all.”

  It was Cliffie all right, gunbelt slung low, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He still wasn’t wearing a jacket. My hero.

  “What happened to McCain?” he asked Tjaden.

  “Fell in the pond.”

  Cliffie smiled at me. “Too bad he didn’t drown.”

  I wondered if Tjaden would do one of his har-de-har-har routines.

  Two other people came up behind Cliffie. One was Paddy, Sr., from the bar and the other was Jim Truman, the handyman.

  Paddy didn’t bother with amenities. He went right over to the canoe and looked down at the girl. He looked over at me. “This looks like somethin’ that coon friend of yours might’ve done.”

  “We don’t even know that it was foul play yet,” I said.

  “All that blood and it’s not foul play?” Paddy said. “You’re some goddamned lawyer, you are.”

  “Any of you ever see her before?” Cliffie said, playing his flashlight on her face.

  Everybody took a turn gawking at her. Each shook his head.

  “Stil
l think you should look up Darin,” Paddy said. “You know how them bucks like white gals.”

  Jim Truman came up and said, “Paddy, I sure don’t know why you’re always on that colored boy’s case. When he’s sober and all, you couldn’t ask for a nicer young boy.”

  Paddy looked disgusted. “You plannin’ to go down to Memphis and help out the jigs, are you, Jim?”

  Way back before the Civil War, some Iowa farmers used to shoot any slave hunters they’d find. They figured anybody who’d profit on runaway slaves deserved to be shot.

  Cliffie smirked. “I’ll bet ole Jim here’s got a taste for dark meat.” Then he looked over and saw Mary coming back our way. “I’ll get an ambulance out here. Get her over to the doc’s for an autopsy.”

  I sneezed.

  “Aw,” Cliffie said, “the counselor’s getting a cold.”

  “C’mon,” Mary said, sliding her arm around my blanket-covered body. “I’ll walk you up to the road and then I’ll go get your car.”

  “I’ll stay warmer if I walk, too,” I said.

  So we started to leave.

  “That’s three bodies you’ve been involved with today, McCain,” Cliffie yelled after us. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say our counselor has turned mass murderer.”

  The walk back was even colder than I’d expected. When we got to the rink, a lot of people came over and asked us about the rumors of a dead girl found in a canoe. It was like a press conference. I was freezing. Mary kept trying to drag me away, telling everybody about how cold I was. But they had just one more question. And then one more. And so on.

  She drove to my place. We turned the heater up so far it sounded like a B-52 engine.

  She knew just what to do. While I got out of my wet clothes, she was in the bathroom running hot water into the tub. I grabbed a bottle of brandy from the cabinet, a couple of glasses from the kitchen and the portable radio from my bedside.

  She said, “Get in. I’ll pull up a chair out there and we can talk through the door.” She smiled. “That way you can remain modest and virginal.”

  It worked out well, actually, the water steaming hot and all. I think I invented a few new swear words in that moment of torture when flesh first met water. But I gradually got used to it. I started sipping brandy and then I started feeling warm.

  What we talked about was the Knolls and what it was like growing up there and how, for all the poverty and occasional violence, we’d actually had some pretty good times. She made me remember people and moments that came back to me vivid as snapshots. She even brought back certain smells and sounds. She didn’t talk about us, not about a romantic us anyway, and I appreciated that because every few minutes Pamela would come into my head. I’d see her or hear her and then Mary wouldn’t be there anymore. It would be Pamela.

  I stayed in the tub an hour. I had to keep replenishing the hot water supply. I’d get it just hot enough that I could break a sweat.

  Then Mary said, “Well, I’d better get going. It’s almost nine o’clock. Wes’s meeting’ll be breaking up pretty soon.”

  She stood on the other side of the half-opened door. I got a brief glimpse of her beret. “Thanks for taking care of me,” I said.

  “My pleasure.”

  We didn’t say anything, which was, in its own way, terrible.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Thanks again.”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by tomorrow for lunch.”

  “Great. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well, good night.”

  “’Night.”

  I listened to her going down the back stairs. I don’t know if footsteps can actually sound sad but hers seemed to. And I, of course, felt like shit. Wes was a pompous ass and what was I doing letting her marry somebody like him? Why the hell did I have to be so hung up on Pamela? I could picture Mary walking home alone, in and out of those pools of light cast by streetlights, pausing on corners like a good little girl to look both ways even though there wasn’t any traffic, fetching in her beret and with those earnest brown eyes of hers. She’d walk the two blocks home from here and then a girlfriend would drive her out to get her car at the rink in the morning before work.

  I stayed in the tub another half hour. My thoughts drifted to two subjects, the cleatlike soles on the bottoms of Robert Frazier’s shoes, and the fact that Susan Whitney had been killed by a .32. Judge Whitney wanted me to prove that her nephew wasn’t a murderer—a wife beater, a gambler, a drunk and a bully, yes, but not, God forbid, a murderer.

  I watched twenty minutes of Jack Paar and then went to bed. I tried to read but I kept dozing off, the paperback falling on my chest. Finally, I clipped the light off and gave in to sleep.

  I don’t wake up easily. You wouldn’t want me as your first line of defense. About the time the Russian Army was marching down Main Street, my eyelids would slowly be opening.

  But something woke me. There was winter wind, more November than February, and a shutter next door banging. And there were footsteps. I began to picture one careful footstep after another pressing down on the wooden stairs leading to my back entrance.

  I slipped out of bed in the darkness. Both Tasha and Crystal looked seriously disturbed. They tried to cover their fear with yawns but I could tell they were scared.

  I wore pajama bottoms. I carried the Louisville Slugger, Mickey Mantle model, that I keep next to my bed for good luck—good luck to split open the skull of any uninvited nocturnal guest.

  I crept to the back window. Eased back the shade a quarter-inch. Looked down upon the backyard.

  Blue midnight snow. A sentry row of silver garbage cans. A small shed where the lawn mower and other yard equipment is kept, the smell of mown grass intoxicating and powerful inside the tiny shed, a contraband sniff of summer. A narrow alley where tots rode brooms all summer long, said brooms turned into fiery steeds with a child’s alchemy.

  No sign of anybody. Everything so still, except for the windstirred crystals of blue midnight snow, that it might have been a painting.

  No sign of anybody.

  And then the inching wood-aching sound of secret steps on stairs.

  My visitor was working his way up to the door.

  I gripped the bat and stood next to the back door, the one he’d have to come through. Surprise is always the best weapon.

  Three, four, five, six steps. I decided, given how my calves hurt from my tiptoeing, that I’d probably pass on my next chance to become a ballet dancer. That stuff hurts.

  I was at the door. And so was he. The topmost step creaked.

  I got my bat ready. I reached out and gripped the doorknob. And then I jerked the doorknob as hard as I could.

  Forgetting that it was locked.

  That’s one of the problems with being awakened from a sound sleep. You don’t think clearly.

  He heard me. My guest heard me and started down the stairs about eight times faster than he’d come up them. I wasn’t going to chase him in pajama bottoms and bare feet.

  I ran back to the kitchen window, flung back the shade and looked down on the backyard where my retreating guest was leaving heavy footprints in the blue snow.

  No mistaking who he was. There was only one person that big in town who could run that fast: an ex-football player named Darin Greene.

  15

  AL MONAHAN LOST BOTH his legs on Guam. When he got home, he took a small inheritance he’d come into and opened his restaurant downtown. Folks didn’t have much hope for him. Much as they felt sorry for him, and much as they liked him and much as they appreciated the sacrifice he’d made as their wartime surrogate, there were already three cafes that catered to the daytime crowds. But Al surprised them. He could zip around his restaurant in his wheelchair right smartly, and he was a damned good cook. It took a year, and a couple of modest bank loans, but Al finally got the place in the black and eleven
years later had the restaurant where all the local Brahmins chose to eat breakfast and lunch. Al had one wall fixed up like a war memorial. Everybody in town who’d served in the big war got his photo on the wall plus newspaper stories citing any medals or awards he’d won. Al got in a flap with some Korean War vets, Al claiming, like a lot of other WWII vets, that Korea wasn’t a war, it was a United Nations police action, and that they therefore weren’t really veterans of a bona fide war. People figured that he had a right to his bigotry, having lost two legs in the big war, but Al wasn’t alone. A lot of veterans’ groups didn’t want to let in Korean-era vets, either. Al came to his senses one day when the front door of his place opened up and a man rolled in a wheelchair. Both his legs and an arm were gone, lost in Korea. A few hours later, the man’s photo was up on the wall, as well as the newspaper clipping about his purple heart and silver star, and Al had himself a new cook trainee.

  Al’s was crowded as always. I sat down at the counter and ordered my four pancakes, hash browns, orange juice, coffee and Pepsi. I’m pretty much a Pepsiholic. Mom always says she’s surprised I don’t take it intravenously while I sleep.

  Juanita, the voluptuous farm-girl waitress, took my order and sashayed to the back to call it in, her hips swinging in time to the rhythms of Jo Stafford’s cheery “Mockingbird Hill” played low on the jukebox. You would find no rock and roll on Al’s jukebox. Al’s favorite song was “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” He never tired of the dog barking in the bridge of the song. As a culture maven, he’s a great short-order cook.

  When the voluptuous Juanita brought my coffee, she asked me about falling into the pond last night, and then everybody along the counter joined in, too. The consensus was that I was lucky. A farmer said that there were places in that pond that were twenty-feet deep. Then we started talking about the dead girl in the canoe. Her identity seemed to be a mystery and it was getting on to 7:30 A.M. But they were working very hard—“they” being Cliffie, on the assumption that she was the missing girl.

  He was late arriving. Most mornings, he was already here when I took my place at the counter. Not today. He would have been busy with funeral arrangements for his daughter, Susan. But folks out here are creatures of strong habit. I knew a guy who went for a mile walk every morning and he went no matter what, even during a tornado one day. He wasn’t hurt, but he’d seen a couple of trees uprooted.