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April 18th, 2011
George has lived a full life as a decorated WWII veteran, high-end attorney, family man. But the incident that haunts him only took five minutes, five minutes when he shared a Coke with a woman on her way to California, a woman who would die hours later. Murdered. Maybe even by George. Winner of the Ellery Queen Magazine Readers Choice Award
A mystery short story by Edgar nominated writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and other e-bookstores. Also available in the collection, Secrets and Lies: Ten Acclaimed Mystery Stores, available for $4.99 on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and other e-bookstores.
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Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
No more alcohol, no more steak. In the end, it’s the little things that go, and you miss them like you miss a lover at odd times, at comfort times, at times when you need something small that means a whole lot more.
I’ve been thinking about the little things a lot since my granddaughter drove me to the glass-and-chrome hospital they built on the south side of town. Maybe it was the look the doctor gave me, the one that meant you should’ve listened to me, George. Maybe it was the sight of Flaherty’s, all made over into a diner.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m seventy-seven years old and not getting any younger. Every second becomes a detail then. An important one, and I can hear the details ticking away quicker than I would like.
It gets a man to thinking, all those details. I mentioned it to Sarah on the way back, and she said, in that dry way of hers, “Maybe you should write some of those details down.”
So I am.
***
I know Sarah wanted me to start with what she considers the beginning: my courting — and winning — of her grandmother. Then she’d want me to cover the early marriage, and of course the politics, all the way to the White House years.
But Flaherty’s got me thinking — details again — and Flaherty’s got me remembering.
They don’t make gas stations like that no more. You know the kind: the round-headed pumps, the Coke machine outside — the kind that dispenses bottles and has a bottle opener built in — and the concrete floor covered with gum and cigarette butts and oil so old it looks like it come out of the ground.
But Flaherty’s hasn’t been a gas station for a long time. For years it was closed up, the pumps gone, plywood over the windows. Then just last summer some kids from Vegas came in, bought the land, filled the pits, and made the place into a diner. For old folks like me, it looks strange — kinda like people being invited to eat in a service station — but everyone else thinks it looks authentic.
It isn’t.
The authentic Flaherty’s exists only in my mind now, and it won’t leave me alone. It never has. And so I’m starting with my most important memory of Flaherty’s — maybe my most important memory period — not because it’s the prettiest or even the best, but because it’s the one my brain sticks on, the one I see when I close my eyes at night and when I wake bleary eyed in the morning. It’s the one I mull over on sunny mornings, or catch myself daydreaming about as I take those walks the doctor has talked me into.
You’d think instead I’d focus on the look in Sally Anne’s eyes the first time I kissed her, or the way that pimply faced German boy moaned when he sank to his knees with my knife in his belly outside of Argentan.
But I don’t.
Instead, I think about Flaherty’s in the summer of 1946, and me fresh home from the war.
***
I got home from the war later than most.
Part of that was because of my age, and part of it was that I’d signed up for a second tour of duty, WWII being that kinda war, the kind where a man was expected to fight until the death, not like that police action in Korea, that strange mire we called Vietnam, or that video war them little boys fought in the Gulf.
I came back to McCardle in my uniform. I’d left a scrawny teenager, allowed to sign up because old Doc Elliot wanted to go himself and didn’t want to deny anyone anything, and I’d came back a twenty-five year old who’d killed his share of men, had his share of drunken nights, and slept with women who didn’t even know his name let alone speak his language. I’d seen Europe, even if much of it’d been bombed, and I knew how its food tasted, its people smelled, and its women smiled.
I was somebody different and I wanted the whole world to know.
The whole world, in those days, was McCardle, Nevada. My grandfather’d come west for the Comstock Load, but made his money selling dry goods, and when the Load petered, came to McCardle. He survived the resulting depression, and when the boom hit again around the turn of the century, he doubled his money. My father got into government early on, using the family fortune to control the town, and expected me to do the same.
When I came home, I wasn’t about to spend my whole life in Nevada. I had the GI Bill and a promise of a future, a future I planned on taking.
I had the summer free, and then in September, I’d be allowed to go East. I’d got accepted to Harvard, but I’d met some of those boys, and decided a pricey snobby school like that wasn’t a place for me. Instead, I went to Boston College because I’d heard of it and because it wasn’t as snobby and because it was far away.
It turned out to be an okay choice, but not the one I’d dreamed of. Nothing ever quite turns out like you dream.
I should’ve known that the day I drove into McCardle in ’46, but I didn’t. For years, I’d imagined myself coming back all spit-polished and shiny, the conquering hero. Instead I was covered in the dust that rolled into the windows of my ancient Ford truck, and the sweat that made my uniform cling to my skinny shoulders. The distance from Reno to McCardle seemed twice as long as it should have, and when I hit Clark County, I realized those short European distances had worked their way into my soul.
Back then, Clark County was so different as to be another country. Gambling had been legal since I was a boy, but it hadn’t become the business it is now. Bugsy Siegel’s dream in the desert, the Flamingo, wouldn’t be completed for another year, and while Vegas was going through a population boom the likes of which Nevadans hadn’t seen since the turn of the century, it wasn’t nowhere near Nevada’s biggest city.
McCardle got its share of soldiers and drifters and cons looking for a great break. Since gambling was in the hands of local and regional folks, its effects were different around the state. McCardle’s powers that be, including my father, took one look at Siegel and his ilk and knew them for what they were. Those boys couldn’t buy land, they couldn’t even get no one to talk to them, and they moved on to Vegas which was farther from California, but much more willing to be bought. Years later, my father would brag that he stared down gangsters, but the truth of it was that the gangsters were looking for a quick buck and they knew that they’d be fighting unfriendlies in McCardle for generations when Vegas would have them for a song.
Nope. We had our casino, but our biggest business was divorces. For a short period after the war, McCardle was the divorce capitol of the US of A.
You sure could recognize the divorce folks. They’d come into town in their fancy cars, wearing too many or too few clothes, and then they’d go to McCardle’s only hotel, built by my grandfather’s dry goods money long about 1902, and they’d cart in enough luggage to last most people a year. Then they’d visit the casino, look for the local watering holes, and attempt to chat up a local or two for the requisite two weeks, and then they’d drive off, marriage irretrievably broken. Some would go back to Reno where they’d sign a new marriage license. Others would go ab
out their business, never to be thought of again.
In those days, Flaherty’s was on the northern-eastern side of town, just at the edge of the buildings where the highway started its long trek toward forever. Now that Flaherty’s is dead center. But in those days, it was the first sign you were coming into civilization, that and the way the city spread before you like a vision. You had about five minutes of steady driving after you left Flaherty’s before you hit the main part of McCardle, and I decided, on that hot afternoon, that five minutes was five too many.
I pulled into Flaherty’s and used one thin dime to buy myself an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
I remember it as if it happened an hour ago: getting out of that Ford, my uniform sticking to my legs, the sweat pouring down my chest and back, the grit of sand in my eyes. I walked past several cars to get to the concrete slab they’d built Flaherty’s on. A bell ting-tinged near me as someone’s tank got filled, and in the cool darkness of the station proper, a little bell pinged before the cash register popped open. Flaherty himself stood behind the register in those days, although like as not by ’46, you’d find him drunk.
The place smelled of gasoline and motor oil. A greasy Philco perched on a metal filing cabinet near the cash register, and it was broadcasting teen idol Frankie Sinatra live, a pack of screaming girls ruining the song. In the bay, a green car was half disassembled, the legs of some poor kid sticking out from under its side as he worked underneath. Another mechanic, a guy named Jed, a tough who’d been a few years behind me in school, leaned into the hood. I remembered Jed real well. Rumor had it he’d knifed an Indian near a roadside stand. I’d stopped him from hitting one of the girls in my class when she’d laughed at him for asking her on a date. After that, Jed and I avoided each other when we could and were coldly polite when we couldn’t.
The Coke bottle — one of the small ones that they don’t make any more — popped out of the machine. I grabbed its cold wet sides, and used the built-in bottle opener to pop the lid. Brown fizz streamed out the top, and I bent to catch as much of it as I could without getting it on my uniform.
The Coke was ice-cold and delicious, even if I was drinking foam. In those days, Coke was sweet and lemony and just about the best non-alcoholic drink money could buy. I finished the bottle in several long gulps, then dug in my pocket for another dime. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was or how tired; being this close to home brought out every little ache, even the ones I had no idea that I had. I stuck the dime in the machine, and took my second bottle, this time waiting until the contents settled before opening it.
“Hey, soldier. Mind if I have a sip?”
The voice was sultry and sexy and very female. I jumped just a little at the sound. I hadn’t seen anyone besides Flaherty and the grease monkeys inside, even though I had known, on some level, that other folks were around me. I kept a two-fingered grip on the chilly bottle as I looked up.
A woman was leaning against the building. She wore a checked blouse tied beneath her breasts, tight pants that gathered around her calves, and Keds. She finished off an unfiltered cigarette and flicked it with her thumb and forefinger into the sand on the building’s far side. Her hair was a brownish red, her skin so dark it made me wonder if she were a devotee of that crazy new fad that had women lying in the sun all hours trying to get tan. Her eyes were coal-black but her features were delicate, almost as if someone had taken the image from a Dresden doll and changed its coloring to something else entirely.
“Well?” she said. “I’m outta dimes.”
I opened the bottle and handed it to her. She put its mouth between those lips and sucked. I felt a shiver run down my back. For a moment, it felt as if I hadn’t left Italy.
Then she pulled the bottle down, handed it back to me, and wiped the condensation on her thighs. “Thanks,” she said. “I was getting thirsty.”
“That your car in there?” I managed.
She nodded. “It made lots of pretty blue smoke and a helluva groan when I tried to start it up. And here I thought it only needed gas.”
Her laugh was deep and self-deprecating, but beneath it I thought I heard fear.
“How long they been working on it?”
“Most of the day,” she said. “God knows how much it’s going to cost.”
“Have you asked?”
“Sure.” She held out her hand, and I gave the bottle back to her, even though I hadn’t yet taken a drink. “They don’t know either.”
She tipped the bottle back and took another swig. I watched her drink and so did most of the men in the place. Jed was leaning on the car, his face half hidden in the shadows. I could sense rather than see his expression. It was that same flatness I’d seen just before he lit into the girl outside school. I didn’t know if I was causing the look just by being there, or if he’d already made a pass at this woman, and failed.
“You’re not from McCardle,” I said.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and gave the bottle back to me. “Does it show?” she asked, grinning.
The grin transformed all her strange features, making her into one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. I took a sip from the bottle simply to buy myself some time, and tasted her on the glass rim. Suddenly it seemed as if the heat of the day had grown more intense. I drank more than I intended, and pulled the bottle away only when my body threatened to burp the liquid back up.
“You just visiting?” I asked which was the only way I could get the answer I really wanted. She wasn’t wearing a ring; I suspected she was here for a quickie divorce.
“Taking in the sights, starting with Flaherty’s here,” she said. “Anything else I shouldn’t miss?”
I almost answered her seriously before I caught that grin again. “There’s not much to the place,” I said.
“Except a soldier boy, going home,” she said.
“Does it show?” I asked and we both laughed. Then I finished the second bottle, put it in he wooden crate with the first, and flipped her a dime.
“The next one’s on me,” I said, as I made my way back to the Ford.
“You’re the first hospitable person I’ve met here,” she said and I should’ve heard it then, that plea, that subtle request for help.
Instead, I smiled. “I’m sure you’ll meet others,” I said and left.
***
Kinda strange I can remember it detail for detail, word for word. If I close my eyes and concentrate, the taste of her mingled with Coke comes back as if I had just experienced it; the way her laugh rasped and the sultry warmth of her voice are just outside my earshot.
Only now the memory has layers: the way I felt it, the way I remembered it at various times in my life, and the understanding I have now.
None of it changes anything.
It can’t.
No matter what, she’s still dead.
***
I was asleep when Sheriff Conner showed up at the door at ten a.m. two mornings later. I was usually up with the dawn, but after two nights in my childhood bed, I’d finally found a way to be comfortable. Seems the bed was child-sized, and I had grown several inches in my four years away. The bed was a sign to me that I didn’t have long in my parents’ home, and I knew it. I didn’t belong here anyway. I was an adult full grown, a man who’d spent his time away from home. Trying to fit in around these people was like trying to sleep in my old bed: every time I moved I realized I had grown beyond them.
When Sheriff Conner arrived, my mother woke me with a sharp shake of the shoulder. She frowned at me, as if I had embarrassed her, and then she vanished from my room. I pulled on a pair of khakis that were wrinkled from my overnight case, and combed my hair with my fingers. I grabbed a shirt as I wandered barefoot into the living room.
Sheriff Conner was a big man with skin that turned beet-red in the Nevada sun. His blond hair was cropped so short that the top of his head sunburned. He hadn’t changed since I was a boy. He was still too large for his uniform, and his watch dug
red lines into the flesh of his wrist. I always wondered how he could be comfortable in those tight clothes in that heat, but, except for the dots of perspiration around his face, he never seemed to notice.
“You grew some,” he said as the screen door slammed behind my mother.
“Yep,” I said.
“Your folks say you saw action.”
“A bit.”
He grunted and his bright blue eyes skittered away from mine. In that moment, I realized he had been too young for W.W.I, and too old for this war, and he was one of those men who wanted to serve, no matter what the cause. I wasn’t that kind of man, only I learned it later when I contemplated Korea and the mess we were making there.
“I guess you just got to town,” he said.
“Two days ago.”
“And when you drove in, you stopped at Flaherty’s first, but didn’t get no gas.” His tone had gotten sharper. He was easing into the questions he felt he needed to ask me.
“I was thirsty. It’s a long drive across that desert.”
He smiled then, revealing a missing tooth on his upper left side. “You bought a soda.”
“Two,” I said.
“And shared one.”
So that was it. Something to do with the girl. I stiffened, waiting. Sometimes girls who came onto a man like that didn’t like the rejection. I hadn’t gone looking for her over to the hotel. Maybe she had taken offense and told a lie or two about me. Or maybe her soon-to-be ex-husband had finally arrived and had taken an instant dislike to me. Maybe Sheriff Conner had come to warn me about that.
“You make it your policy to share your drinks with a nigra?”
“Excuse me?” I asked. I could lie now and say I was shocked at his word choice, but this was 1946, long before political correctness came into vogue, almost a decade before the official start of the Civil Rights movement, although the seeds of it were in the air.
No. I wasn’t shocked because of his language. I was shocked at myself. I was shocked that I had shared a drink with a black woman — although in those days, I probably would have called her colored not to give too much offense.
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