by Ed Gorman
He got some more laughs and more winks from his customers.
The record changed, the new selection being Ray Charles. You could feel the life force in the place change. He sang “I Got a Woman” but the exuberance of his voice said that he had everything else, too.
“Cliffie send your ass out here?” the bartender wanted to know.
“You call him Cliffie, too?” I asked.
“Yeah. So what?”
“That’s what I call him.”
“Cliffie and him hate each other, man. This boy is all right. Leastways, he ain’t no Sykes.”
The speaker was gray-haired old and cheap-beer fat and he sat on a wooden chair near the shuffleboard. He had a cigar butt in a corner of his mouth and a bottle of Hamms in his right hand. He wore dark glasses.
“That’s old Earle,” the bartender said. “He’s blind. But don’t be fooled, man. Old Earle knows everything.”
“Well, he’s right about me and Cliffie. We hate each other.”
“That still don’t explain why you’re out here.”
“Looking for Darin Greene. Just the way I told you.”
“What you want Darin for? He’s a friend of mine.”
“Well, for one thing, his wife would like him to come home. Their little girl is running a high fever.”
“And for another thing?”
This was the keeper of the Darin gate. You see this all the time in small towns, a man or woman who latches on to somebody important, and appoints himself the gatekeeper. The important person doesn’t even know about it sometimes, not at first anyway, but eventually he finds out and comes to appreciate the service. And meanwhile, the gatekeeper, in his own mind anyway, becomes pretty damned important himself. To the bartender, Darin would always be the gleaming high school football star.
“For another thing, I need to ask him some questions.”
“’Bout what?”
“Just something that happened recently.”
“I can’t put you on to Darin less you first put me on to why you want him.”
“He paid me a visit last night.”
“Oh?”
“Late last night.”
“Oh?”
I had a growing audience. They’d watch me when I was speaking, then they’d watch the bartender when he spoke. Back and forth, forth and back. It was better than shuffleboard.
“I’m just trying to find out why he came to my place.”
“Maybe you’re mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t Darin at all.”
“It was Darin, all right. I’m just curious is all.”
“Just to find out what he wanted last night.”
“Right.”
He’d started glancing to his right and that was making me curious. There was a curtain hanging there. A doorway. In the back there’d be stacks of beer cases and other tavern supplies. There might also be a Darin Greene.
Though it was winter, the bartender wore only a white T-shirt. He kept pawing his black hands on the front of the shirt now. He was nervous. He kept glancing at the curtained doorway.
“You boys make sure he don’t move from here.”
“Sure thing, Donny,” one of the customers said.
“I’ll be back.”
The curtain setup surprised me. There was a door behind the curtain. When it opened, I could hear the click of dice rolling across the floor.
“C’mon, you motha,” an angry colored voice said. “Be good to me for once, you bitch.” From his groan, I could tell that the dice hadn’t been good to him this time. The door closed.
We just stood there watching each other, the men at the bar and me.
“You don’t want to screw with Donny,” one man said.
“No?”
The man shook his head. “He don’t look like it now, maybe, he’s got that little gut on him and all, but he had thirty-two professional fights. He even fought Hurricane Jackson in Chicago one night.”
Hurricane Jackson was a legendary slugger who had never quite mastered the art of boxing. What he knew how to do was punch and that had taken him a long, long way, further than his limited skills deserved. If Donny had fought him, he must have had at least a respectable career. I was impressed. Donny’s career was a long way from my Golden Gloves glory.
Two things happened at once. Donny came back and a car engine started up. A big car engine. Out back. An Oldsmobile.
“I thought he mighta snuck out the back way,” Donny said. “But he wasn’t there.”
“I see.”
“But if I see him, I’ll tell him you was lookin’ for him.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Donny nodded to my beer. “Hate to see a beer wasted like that, man.”
“I just remembered something I need to do.”
“Well, I’d bet you could hold on here another five minutes, couldn’t you? We just startin’ to be friends, man.” He was trying to stall for time to give Darin a good five-minute head start. He didn’t try to disguise his nod to a giant economy-size guy down at the end of the bar. The man slid across the space separating bar from front door. The front door vanished when he took his place in front of it.
Donny the gatekeeper decided to be extra careful for the important man he represented. He gave Darin a ten-minute head start for good measure.
19
I SORT OF LIKED the music they played in Leopold Bloom’s. Not that I had any idea exactly what it was, classical music not being my preferred form of listening. But this, whatever it was, was nice.
The store was laid out in three sections. The books were up front. The records were in the center. And the home furnishings, all of them expensive and many of them mysterious to a hayseed like me, were at the rear. There were Persian rugs on the floor and large photographs of authors from Gertrude Stein to Jack Kerouac on the walls. I’d really liked On the Road but I wondered what a working-class guy like Kerouac would have made of the Renaulds. They’d have a tea for him and show him off as they would a new car and then, when he’d left, they’d talk about him with the easy intimacy of true friends. I’m leery of people who run stores like these. They’re unimportant to the world at large, but within their own domain, they are kings and queens, handing down opinions and judgments like hanging judges ordering executions. They’d gone to the University of Iowa, the Renaulds, and were, at various times, working on novels, paintings and musical compositions that would probably be simply too good to ever show the ingrate world. Steve Renauld had come from money and his father had bought him everything but the one thing Steve wanted most—talent.
It was a few minutes before anybody appeared. A wan young woman, pretty in a studied way, came out of the back room. She wore a black turtleneck, black jeans and sandals. Francois Sagan, a writer I liked, had shown Midwestern girls how to look European: get the hair shorn, wear the black clothes and look innocent and world-weary at the same time. It took a certain concentration, no doubt about it, looking that way.
I said, “Is Steve around?”
“He’s upstairs doing the books.”
“I’d like to see him.”
“I don’t think I recognize you.”
“I buy most of my books down at the bus station.”
She didn’t know how to take that. Was I joking? It happened to be true. The bus station had large wall racks of paperbacks.
“He really hates to be interrupted when he’d doing the books.”
“I won’t need much of his time.”
“God,” she said, “you really can’t take a hint, can you? He’s busy. If you’d like to leave your name and number, I’ll have him call you.”
She was beginning to irritate me, which took some doing, given how pretty she was.
“Tell him it’s about Susan.”
“Susan.”
“Uh-huh. Susan.”
“No last name?”
“No last name.”
She seemed to see me for the first time, and looked mightily displeased at the info
rmation her eyes were receiving. “That crack you made about buying your books at the bus depot? You weren’t kidding, were you?”
I relished her disdain. “Uh-huh. That’s where I buy most of my magazines, too.”
Just then, the classical orchestra chose to swell up, as if in angry response to what I’d just said.
“I’ll go talk to him.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“He won’t be happy.”
“Life,” I said, “is like that sometimes.”
She went up and he came down. Quickly. She hadn’t been kidding about him being unhappy. He had a gaunt face with little James Joyce glasses and auburn hair too long for his skinny neck and long head. He wore a white starched shirt with a tab collar, a dark vest and jeans. “Just what are you trying to pull?”
“I wanted to talk to you about Susan.”
“Susan who?”
I made a face. “C’mon, you can do better than that.”
“I know a lot of Susans.”
I walked over and picked up a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. “Good book.”
“I don’t want to talk about books.”
“Really?” I said, looking at him. “Usually, you can’t wait to give your opinion.”
He leaned toward me and said, “Who the hell told you, anyway?”
“Say her name.”
“What?”
“Say her name. You owe her that much.”
He shook his head. “You bastard.”
The front door opened and Eileen Renauld came in. She wore a cape and a beret and a pair of dramatic black pants and leather boots that laced up to her knees. She had large and dramatic features, austere yet imposing. She wasn’t as petulant as her husband but he was a few years older and had had more practice. I had no doubt she’d catch up.
She seemed to know instantly that something was afoot. She said, “What’s going on?”
I started to say “nothing,” but he said, “He wants to know about Susan.”
For just a moment, her dark eyes showed pain and faint embarrassment and I felt sorry for her. When she didn’t have Proust to hide behind, she was almost human. But then instead of being the girl from Mt. Vernon, Iowa that she was, she struck a pose. “You wouldn’t expect someone like him to understand, would you, Steve?”
“I guess not.”
“I saw him at the bus depot one day looking at girlie magazines.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I had a copy of Ezra Pound inside the magazine.”
She whipped off black gloves and slapped them on top of a glass counter that housed rare books.
She walked right up to me. “Why don’t you leave?”
“Because I want to find out what happened between them.”
She stared at me and shook her head. “What do you think happened between them, McCain? Or do you want me to draw you a picture? They had an affair. It wasn’t very long, and I doubt it was very worthwhile, but Steve loves French novels and so to him it was very important.”
I didn’t know which of us to feel embarrassed for at this point. Maybe I felt embarrassed for all three of us.
But she wasn’t finished. “She had big tits and a very nice smile and she loved the way he read poetry to her in bed. He used to read poetry to me in bed, too, back when we were courting. He’s especially good with e.e. cummings. It’s a better aphrodisiac than wine. But then, I’d hardly expect you to understand that, McCain.”
“Did you kill her, Steve?” I asked.
He did something he shouldn’t have. He looked scared. His eyes clung to his wife’s for help. I’d rattled him.
“Did he kill her?” she asked. “Of course, he didn’t kill her. What the hell are you talking about, anyway? Kenny Whitney killed her.”
“You’re sure of that?” I said.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Quite sure.”
The clerk came back. She wore a fitted gray winter coat. There was something Russian about it, which was probably the effect she wanted. “It’s my break time. I thought I’d go get a Danish.”
“Fine,” Eileen said. “But yesterday you took twenty minutes. Our agreement is fifteen.”
The girl’s gaze met Steve’s. He looked away quickly, not wanting to anger his wife but appearing to be sympathetic to the girl. The girl left.
“You probably guessed,” Eileen said, “Steve and she are at the ‘eye’ stage of their relationship. Nothing serious yet. Just those wonderful little accidental brushes against each other in cramped spaces, and the occasional hand on the shoulder or on the elbow. Nothing overt, as I say. But they’re slowly getting there.”
“Why the hell you do have to say things like that, Eileen?” Steve said, miserably.
“Because they’re true,” she said. “And isn’t that what we’ve dedicated ourselves to, Steve? Truth above all? And that’s what McCain wants, too, isn’t it, McCain? Truth.”
I wanted to run out the door. I’d learned far more about their relationship than I’d wanted to. I hated her for being so pathetically strong, and him for being so ruthlessly weak. He was a lot more dangerous than she was. He’d pull you down and destroy you without even understanding what he was doing.
“Anyway,” she said, nodding toward the front door and the girl who just left. “She has bad ankles. And that’s a moral failing of some kind, don’t you think, McCain? Bad ankles? At least Susan had wonderful ankles along with those breasts of hers.”
She picked up her gloves from the top of the glass rare bookcase. “I think I’ll go make some very strong tea now.”
She left, sweeping her cape off as she walked to the back.
“When’s the last time you saw Susan?”
“You don’t really expect me to talk now, do you, after everything Eileen said?”
“When was the last time you saw Susan?”
Fear was in his eyes again. “Why the hell are you asking me these questions?”
The front door opened. A matronly woman in a fur coat came in. She moved with ease for a woman of her age and size. She came directly to Steve. “Eileen called yesterday and said my D. H. Lawrence books were in.” She smiled at me. She had a nice smile, actually. “They’re not for me, they’re for my niece, believe it or not. She loves D. H. Lawrence. And she’s seen La Dolce Vita three times. I guess she’s sort of a beatnik. They live in Chicago and her husband’s in advertising. He’s a beatnik on weekends.”
“I’ll get the books, Mrs. Beamer.”
I waited around, looking at the new Hemingway editions Scribner’s had published over the past year. If I ever got money, these were the kinds of editions I would buy. Steve came back but two more customers came in.
There was no point waiting anymore. I walked to the front door. The matron with the D. H Lawrence books was just ahead of me. “I hope I don’t get arrested for having pornography,” she laughed.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “Call me if you need me.”
She giggled naughtily.
It was nearing lunchtime. I decided to stop by my folks’. I started to go get my ragtop. Somebody said, “Hey. Hey, you!”
When I turned, I saw the girl from Leopold Bloom’s running to catch up with me.
“I overheard what you were talking about with Steve. About Susan Whitney?”
I nodded.
“He had this real battle with her on the phone the day before she died.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“Oh, it was her all right. He was obsessed. He called her all the time and threatened her. He couldn’t let go.”
I thought about what Eileen had said about this girl and Steve. “Eileen thinks you and Steve are about to have an affair.”
She laughed. Her face was tinted red from the cold. It was a healthy and appealing red. “An affair? Are you kidding? They both give me the creeps. All that melodramatic artsy-craftsy bullshit.” She leaned closer. “She’s got a stack of romance novels in the back she’s always reading a
nd he’s got a bunch of dirty paperbacks. You hear the crap she gave me about a fifteen-minute break? They don’t know it yet but this is my last day. I’ve got a better job in Iowa City.”
“Well, good luck, and thanks for telling me that.”
She laughed again. “I think it’d be cool if Steve had killed her. At least he would’ve done something with his life. What a douche bag that guys is.” Then, “Say, do you know Maggie Yates?”
The name jolted me. I wondered if she knew about Maggie Yates and me.
But she quickly went on. “I saw Maggie and Susan in the store together a few times. You might ask Maggie about her. She’s kind of crazy, but I like her.”
“Maybe I should look her up.”
“You know where she lives?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know where she lives.”
I should. I’d slept there often enough.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
She gave me a pert little salute, cute as hell, and then turned and walked away. Iowa City already had a million great-looking girls. Why couldn’t she stay here?
20
THE COLORS IN HOUSING developments always get me. Orchid and mauve and puce, among others. Colors I don’t associate with houses. The other thing that always gets me is how many TV antennas there are. The houses look as if they’re hooked up for direct contact with Mars.
But despite my misgivings about housing developments—little villages whose dynamics Nathaniel Hawthorne would have understood very well—I was glad for Mom and Dad that they had this place. Mom not only got a new place out of the Knolls but also a garbage disposal, a telephone with an extension in another part of the house, a sundeck and a full basement. Dad got a garage, a big backyard and a look of pride when he sat on the small front porch with his can of Falstaff and listened to the Cubs on the radio.
Personally, I like an older house with fewer neighbors. And a lot less excitement. All the people who bought houses out here lived through the Depression, and most of the men fought in the war. So this is nirvana to them. This is what they dreamed of in the years following the stock market crash, and when they were overseas watching their friends die. And so there’s an edge of desperation here, everybody always telling one another how lucky they are and how happy they are. Steak is the talisman: a family that can have steak twice a week is in good shape. And these days most blue-collar families can eat steak just about as often as white-collar families. It’s as if they’re scared it’ll all go away if they don’t constantly remind themselves of their great good fortune.