Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool

by Ed Gorman

  She wore a white sweater, jeans, and a rust-colored suede car coat that only enhanced the copper tones of her hair. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “May I see some Id?”

  She laughed. “Believe it or not, I still have to sneak around. At home, I mean. My father found a cigarette that had dropped out of my jacket one night. He grounded me for four nights and I was seventeen.” She used the dash lighter, inhaled deeply, exhaled a long blue stream of smoke. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “I’ve been thinking. If he wants to avoid Cliffie, the two best places would be Graves Hollow or that road that runs by where the old closed mines are.”

  “Graves Hollow I’d thought of, too. But I forgot about the road by the old mines.”

  “I don’t know where else to go so we may as well start there.” Then, “If I were with him, I wouldn’t let him race. Not as drunk as he is.”

  “How would you stop him? He’s pretty hotheaded when he’s drunk.”

  “I don’t know—take his keys and throw them in the bushes if I had to.”

  “He’d just hot-wire his car.”

  “Then I’d take off his distributor cap and throw it in the bushes.”

  “Do you know what a distributor cap looks like?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then how would you find it?”

  “I’d ask somebody.”

  Neither of us could keep from smiling about that one.

  “Or maybe I’d stop by a gas station and pick up one of those car guides,” she said.

  “They’d have something in there about a distributor cap, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe it’d be easier to just take his tire iron and knock him out with it.”

  “Believe me, I’ve thought about it. He starts brooding about his childhood and drinking—he gets so irrational. I feel sorry for his aunts. He doesn’t seem to appreciate how much time and love they put into raising him.

  He always says he was orphaned. But he wasn’t. They saw to it he wasn’t. That’s the one trait I get tired of. The way he feels so sorry for himself. He didn’t have it easy, I know that. But a lot of kids had it a lot worse.” Then, “And she doesn’t do anything to stop him when he gets drunk and crazy.”

  “She being Rita?”

  “Of course. The lovely Rita. That bitch.

  I know I sound like a spoiled brat but I’m a lot better for him than Rita is. A lot better.”

  She obviously wanted me to agree with her.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Against the quarter-moon a scarecrow, arms flung wide, watched over a fallow

  cornfield and a small farmhouse with faint smoke eeling out of its chimney. Every once in a while the headlights would pick out empty beer cans and beer bottles scattered on the brown-grass sides of the road. These were the back roads where teenagers drank and went to first, second, or third base—or hell, maybe even hit a homer—depending on mood, pluck, and luck.

  Graves Hollow was so named because of a graveyard that had been abandoned right after World War I. Between our war dead and two plagues of influenza, a new and much larger cemetery had been required. The dead were so long dead up on the hill that nobody alive could remember them, so nobody visited except kids who wanted to scare each other or put the make on their girlfriends. I’ve logged my share of make-out time in cemeteries. The cheap Freudian take on it all is that you’re defying death with the affirmative act of lovemaking. The less fancy explanation is that it’s a quiet place to get laid.

  We drove the long, straight section of Hollow Road that local kids since the early 1920’s had been using for drag racing. The west side of the road was steep and piney. The east side of the road was more fallow cornfields.

  No sign of cars.

  We headed for the old mines.

  “Do you think he’ll ever grow up?”

  “Sure. Someday.”

  “How long will it take, do you think?”

  “Offhand, I’d say three years, eleven months, and forty-two hours.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I don’t have any idea, Molly. It’s easy for us to say he feels too sorry for himself. He hasn’t had an easy life, even with all the stuff his aunts have done for him.”

  “That’s why he treats women the way he does. That’s what I think, anyway. He’ll see some boy he’s jealous of and then he’ll take the kid’s girl from him. Just for a week or so. But it makes him feel good, strong, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure. And when he gets women to fall in love with him, it lets him, at least for a little while, think that he’s as good as everybody else.

  Especially girls from the upper class.”

  “I read an article that said that for boys like him the conquest is everything. Then they have to move on to more conquests to make themselves feel good again.” She tamped a cigarette from her pack. “That’s what Sara was all about. I couldn’t compete with her money.”

  She made a small fist. “God, I can get so mad at him—and yet I love him so much, too. I go around wanting to protect him all the time. Mostly from himself.”

  Right after the Civil War, coal mining came to our state and prospered until well into the next century, at which point, as if by divine edict, the mines began to be too expensive to operate.

  A few mines remained open but for the most part the miners moved on.

  There was a moonscape ruggedness to the mined-out land now—stubby, mutated-looking pines dotted over hills of rocks and coarse grass on the sides of which were the boarded-up yaws of the mines themselves. A fair number of adventurous kids had been lost in those mines over the years, and about the same number of derelicts, fugitives, and madmen had hidden out in them. A small trestle bridge had washed out about two miles from the mining area about ten years ago and since the mine road wasn’t used all that much anyway, the county supervisors decided to leave the land bridgeless.

  Two miles of flat concrete were not anything the drag-racing teenager wanted to pass up. At first, this was the site Cliffie and his boys chose to patrol, but it became so heavily patrolled that the kids went elsewhere, leaving the mining

  road abandoned. But now it was the new places that Cliffie and his crew were patrolling. So little by little the dragsters were coming back to the mining road. Life is indeed a circle.

  I’m a big fan of drive-in movie

  posters. I like the titles, too, such as Hot Rods from Hell and Dragstrip Danger.

  The posters, and the movies they advertise, bring up the old argument of art imitating life—or life imitating art. Kids would’ve found out about racing their cars all by their lonesome. But it helped to have posters and movies that choreographed those events for them and showed them how to do it for the most powerful dramatic effect.

  Makes you wonder what inspired kids in the Middle Ages, when there weren’t any drive-ins.

  As we reached the top of the hill a three-dimensional drive-in movie poster awaited us on the mining road below.

  Twenty or so souped-up cars parked on the sides of the highway. The guys were divided into two styles—black leather jackets and jeans, or red James Dean jackets and jeans. The girls were inclined to wear tight skirts and even tighter sweaters and blouses.

  Some of them wore their boyfriends’ jackets over their shoulders because of the cold. Most of them wore colorful neck scarves.

  Everybody had a beer. Everybody had a cigarette. Everybody knew that they were in a movie of some kind.

  There were two cars at the starting line—a fire-red 1950 Oldsmobile and David

  Egan’s black Merc. The driver of the Olds had a blond hanging around his neck. From what I could see, Rita Scully was pouring coffee from a thermos into a cup for Egan.

  “God, I hope this isn’t liquor,”

  Molly said.

  “I’m sure it’s coffee.”

  I pulled over to the shoulder and parked. The night air was clean and pure. Only as we got closer to the other ca
rs along the road did the smells of gasoline and oil and cigarettes and beer begin to diminish the fresh prairie air.

  We weren’t popular with the drag-racing crowd.

  They let their faces show their displeasure. They didn’t say a word, but smiles changed to sneers and conversations stopped to become practiced

  scowls. Just like in teenage gang movies.

  But the movie images broke down when you saw them close up. All girls and boys in the juvenile delinquent movies were pretty and dramatic. But up close these kids had noses that were too big or small; a walleye here, a cross-eye there; a kid with oily blackheads, a kid with an overbite that was probably funny to everybody but him. A fat girl, a boy whose name-calling was marred by his lisp.

  The eyes told you even more. In the movies, the actors had no lives but the plot. These kids had too much life and it was all there to see in the anger and cold amusement and sorrow of their eyes.

  Divorce, expulsion from high school, a year or two in reform school, low-wage jobs they’d toil at for long years, the scorn of their community, the anger that scared even them sometimes—it was all there to see and hear in the poses of anger and arrogance they struck as we moved deeper into the crowd.

  Donny Hughes looked at me and said, “It’s the fuzz.”

  Donny Hughes was the resident fool. Every group has one. He looked about eleven years old and had a black leather jacket so covered with zippers and chrome buttons that it was a parody, something a Tv comic would wear in a skit about bikers. He was so short and so scrawny that the coat looked like a burden on him. He wore owl glasses and a blond duck’s ass that would require six washings to get rid of all its butch wax.

  He said, “Nobody invited the fuzz.”

  Molly said, “Shut up, Donny, you

  annoying little twerp.”

  I don’t think you’re supposed to talk to big bad bikers that way. Several people laughed.

  Rita saw us before Egan did. Egan was so drunk I wasn’t sure he was capable of seeing us. She whispered something to Egan as he was swearing at his cup for being too hot. He looked up.

  Frowned.

  “What the hell’re you doing here?” he said to me.

  Rita glanced at Molly. “I hope you

  realize she’s almost jailbait, McCain.”

  Molly said, “Rita, you can’t let him race.”

  “What’s this shit all about?” Egan

  said. “Get the hell out of here. I’m fine to race.”

  “I don’t want him to race, either,” I said to Rita.

  “He’s a big boy,” Rita said.

  “He sure isn’t acting like it tonight,” I said.

  “One of Cliffie’s boys ever see him, he’d yank his license for a year. Maybe longer. And he’d have it coming, too.”

  That was the first time I noticed Kevin Brainard, a beefy, older guy who went six-two and easily better than two hundred pounds. He was drinking from a glass quart of Hamms. His hair was already thinning.

  He wanted to intimidate and he did. You put five-five up against six-two and you don’t have much of a contest.

  “He was a hell of a lot drunker than this when he raced Mitch Callahan couple weeks ago,” Brainard said.

  “He was lucky, then,” I said. “Maybe he won’t be as lucky tonight.”

  “Who gave you the right to come out here, anyway?”

  Brainard said.

  “Egan’s my client.”

  “That don’t cut shit out here, man. This strip belongs to us.”

  Drive-in dialogue. Real bad

  drive-in dialogue. He seemed unaware of just how bad, how self-conscious.

  I said to Egan, “Cliffie finds out you were drag racing and drunk on top of it, you’ll go right to jail.”

  “Just get the hell out of here, McCain, and leave me alone. And take the princess with you.”

  “God, David, please listen to him—”

  Molly said, stepping toward him.

  Rita came up in front of Molly.

  “Tell McCain here that in five seconds I’m telling Kevin to start breaking him in two.

  And I’m serious.”

  “But this is ridiculous,” Molly said. “People don’t do—”

  But people do do. And people do do it all the time. They use clubs, fists, knives, guns, whatever it takes. Not in Molly’s world but in the world at large—they do do it all the time.

  We were in a movie and the inevitable scene of violence was upon us. I was getting my one and only close-up right now. I looked scared

  shitless was what I looked like. I didn’t like to think of what Kevin Brainard could do to me.

  Molly tried to walk around Rita but Rita wouldn’t let her. She shoved Molly. “You take him, Kevin. I’ll take her.”

  And then it started, that inevitable scene of violence I talked about.

  Rock-and-roll radios blasting. Kids forming a circle around us. Rita twisting Molly around and getting her in a hammerlock. And Brainard hunching low and coming at me.

  Fight scene—take one—the assistant director shouts.

  And the camera starts rolling.

  My dad taught me one thing about fighting when you’re our diminutive size. Fight dirty.

  Only chance you have. Leave the heroics to John Wayne and the movie stars.

  So when Brainard came hulking toward me, his hands coming up and automatically forming clamps that would fit nicely around my throat, I steadied myself and hoped that my aim was as true as it usually was. He had to be in the right position and I had to be damned quick or the moment would be lost.

  He came closer and closer.

  Everybody was cheering him on. Some of the drive-in movie things they said were so stupid, I almost broke out laughing. Which I would’ve done if Brainard hadn’t just spat in my face. He apparently believed in demolishing you only after he’d humiliated you. Still and all, even with spittle dripping down my forehead, “Kill him, daddy-o!” distracted the hell out of me.

  “Daddy-o” was a word that was popular from approximately 1954 to 1958 or thereabouts.

  Slang expires just like bread and milk do at the supermarket.

  But this was the wrong time to worry about the social faux pas of using dated slang. Because this huge, angry guy showing off for the crowd was about to seize my throat.

  I fired my one and only weapon, which is the toe of my 8-D penny loafer. You can’t tell right away if it worked. That’s the only thing about getting somebody in the balls. It always takes a couple of seconds to register in the other guy’s brain, as if his sac has to send his mind a telegram.

  He kept coming, leaving me with the impression that my aim had been off. His clamplike

  hands groped for me—and then his face changed. It was as if he’d slipped on a new mask. If he’d been wearing rage, he was now wearing pain.

  Pain and misery and an anger he could only put into a few spluttering curse words.

  He dropped to his knees, holding his crotch. He was momentarily immobilized.

  I heard Molly scream. Rita still had Molly in a hammerlock, bending her over a car hood.

  I started toward them but Egan reached them before I did. He put a quick hand on Rita’s shoulder and said, “Let her go.”

  “She shouldn’t be here.”

  “Let her go, Rita. Now.”

  Rita relented reluctantly. You could see that the pain didn’t subside any for Molly.

  As she slumped against the car hood, I took her shoulder and gently tried to help her up. I knew better than to touch the arm Rita had been so expertly working on. Molly’s eyes gleamed with tears as she began the

  millimeter-by-millimeter process of trying to straighten her arm out.

  “You two get out of here,” Egan said to my back. “A lot of these people here don’t seem to like you. Anyway, I got a race.”

  His words were still slurred; he squinted to find focus.

  Molly started to say something. I took her good arm and tugged her
away from the car.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Then we were back to living our life inside that drive-in movie poster. There was a lot of posing and pouting, girls as well as boys, as I led Molly up the hill toward my car. Several of the hot-rodders revved their engines and their radios. It was a rock-and-roll moment, daddy-o.

  “You really kicked Brainard hard,” Molly said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “How’s the arm?”

  “I wish I would’ve been able to kick her.

  She’s really mean.” Her arm was at her side.

  She rubbed it with her good hand.

  By the time we reached the top of the hill and the ragtop, the shouts below turned away from us and to the race.

  We turned and watched. Rita positioned herself in the middle of the strip, arms raised above her head. She’d drop her arms and the cars would come screaming off the line.

  “He’s really going to do it, isn’t he?”

  “I’m afraid so, Molly.”

  “He could get killed.”

  “He’s old enough to know what he’s doing.”

  “I shouldn’t have said what I said about him feeling so sorry for himself. I love him. I really do.”

  And then they were off.

  We had a good place to watch. From here, the two dragsters were the size of huge toys.

  They both fishtailed off the line, scarring the road with black tread, rubber crying like lost children.

  Molly’s fingers dug into my wrist as we stood there in the nose-numbing wind, looking down into the darkness where headlights carved out an area that looked not unlike a cave. It was all primitive and it was all dangerous and it was all juvenile but I couldn’t deny the excitement.

  I’d been in a lot of drag races myself.

  What’s the point of having a hot car if you can’t prove it’s hot? But I’d never gone into a race drunk.

  The black car and the red car stayed pretty close right up until the end and then the black car lurched ahead.

  I realized what was going to happen before Molly did. From up here it was pretty easy to spot.

  The ones on the ground wouldn’t realize it until it was over and too late.

  The red car fought and fishtailed to a stop a few yards before the road ended, where the trestle bridge had once been.