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

by Ed Gorman

  “You wouldn’t be communist spies, would you?”

  Emma: “Oh, Sam.”

  “Or be running a bawdy house?”

  Amy: “Sam, what a dirty mind you have.”

  “Or be running a white slavery ring?”

  “Help yourself to the lemonade if you

  want, Sam. You know where the refrigerator is.”

  I passed on the lemonade, making my way up the interior stairs to the second floor and David’s room. Instead of teenage idol pics, his walls were covered with hot rods.

  Street rods, most of them, mostly Fords from the 1930’s cut down and sculpted into mythic beasts of style and grace. His small bookcase held hot-rod magazines arranged carefully by date, and a dozen or so paperbacks lurid of cover and violent of copy: “Speed, switchblades …

  and sex! Today’s teens on the prowl!” They seemed to be the prose equivalent of drive-in movies. Egan had no doubt identified with the troubled protagonists.

  Closet, desk, bureau didn’t reveal anything useful. His aunts bought most of his clothes at Sears; his better shirts-presumably he’d chosen them himself—had come from J. C. Penney’s.

  Underneath the desk were two shoeboxes I hadn’t noticed while I’d been looking through the drawers. I drew them out and sat down on the bed and went through their contents. I looked out at the dusky sky. I wondered how many times Egan had sat on this bed staring out at the same backyard-garage-alley scene. It was a comforting sight. Home in a small town. I wondered if he’d taken solace in it or if his bitterness and self-pity had made peace impossible for him.

  The first box contained maybe four dozen photographs of hot cars he’d taken at the drag strip in Cordoba, Illinois. It was in the second box that I found the love letters.

  I spent half an hour going through them, interrupted twice by yoo-hoos shouted up the stairs by the Kelly sisters. Was everything all right? Did I want to stay to supper? Was I sure I didn’t want some fresh-squeezed lemonade?

  The letters came from a dozen different girls in Black River Falls and a few surrounding towns. He’d taken his show on the road, apparently. Most of them were awkward and pained of expression, and heartbreaking in their earnest pleas for his attention and love. I could imagine him sitting in his room late at night, beyond the comfort of liquor and easy sex, making himself

  feel better by going through these letters. It wasn’t as simple as egotism. Not with the life he’d had.

  These were objective affirmations of his worth and for the first time I felt as sorry for him as I did for the girls who’d loved him. To at least a few people in this life, he mattered. He was the somebody he’d always longed to be.

  The most literate letters were from Molly. She reminded him that she had loved him since that time in seventh grade when he’d asked her to slow dance at a school mixer. She reminded him of how she’d been able to get him to cut way back on his drinking and how she’d convinced him to go to the board of education soon and see how he should go about taking a high school equivalency test. Rita’s were rock-and-roll treatises that sounded very much like the copy on the paperback covers … speed, switchblades, and sex. She shared his “greed for speed” and enjoyed all the “wild and dangerous places” they’d made love in. And like Molly, she reminded him that she’d loved him a long time, too, since ninth grade and that he was only truly himself when he was with her. Rita mentioned that she’d even given up her best friend Molly because of him.

  At the bottom of the box were a few dozen photographs of Egan in his school days. The pictures told the tale. Half of them featured Molly, the other half Rita.

  Despite this obvious rivalry, neither had ever thrown him over. I thought about my waning addiction to the beautiful—and absent—Pamela Forrest.

  Sometimes you’re the only one who doesn’t know she’s never going to fall in love with you.

  The two girls were more interesting to look at than Egan. He’d always looked pretty much the same. He’d aspired to James Deanhood since 1955, when Dean became a popular actor.

  But the girls … for such beauties, neither had been especially pretty in young girlhood. Their bloom would come later. Molly had enough braces on her teeth to shred a car fender and was thin to the point of looking like a poster kid encouraging you to stamp out world hunger; Rita was plump and squinty-eyed and unsmiling. There was a kind of symbiosis here, the three of them. There was even one photo—they were in maybe seventh grade—ofthe three of them together, one girl on each side of him, a tetherball pole in the

  background, the girls smiling as if they were friends.

  They all had one thing in common: David Egan was the center of their lives.

  I found the half-smoked marijuana stick on the bottom of the box. The grass was fresh as I squeezed it. Egan must have stashed his contraband in here. I’d tried the stuff a number of times in Iowa City but I always had the same reaction I did to booze. It put me to sleep.

  When I went downstairs, the ladies were on the living room couch watching a quiz show with Garry Moore. I carried the box over and showed them the half joint in the box. “You know what this is, ladies?”

  Amy said, “Oh, Lord, sister, I told you he’d find out.”

  “So you knew he was smoking marijuana?”

  “We’re not addicts, Sam,” Amy said.

  “We just tried it a few times.”

  “Amy,” Emma said, “will you please be still?

  Sam just wanted to know if we knew that David smoked it.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “you mean you were smoking it, too?” I couldn’t help smiling. I tried to imagine these two elderly Irish ladies, mass-goers seven days a week, smoking a reefer.

  “We just tried a few of his sticks was all,”

  Emma said.

  “He talked us into it, Sam.”

  Emma said, “He was always talking us into things.

  He’d get us a little tipsy once in a while.

  Or he’d teach us some new dance step while he played some of his records. Or he’d get us to watch some naughty movie on Tv.”

  “He said we had to know what was going on in the world. He got a big kick out of it. He wasn’t in a good mood all that often-especially near the end of his life—s we went along with it.”

  “Seeing him happy made us happy,

  Sam,” Emma said.

  I looked at one face and then the other. I could see them now in the newspaper: Saintly old ladies arrested for smoking reefers.

  I laughed. “Well, did you enjoy it?”

  They glanced at each other.

  “Sort of,” Emma said.

  “Not that we’d ever do it again,” Amy said.

  “It mostly made us hungry the

  three times we smoked it,” Emma said. “We made this huge chocolate cake.”

  “It was the first lopsided cake Emma ever made. Marijuana kind of confuses you.”

  “So,” Emma said, obviously wanting

  to change the subject. “Did you find anything else?”

  “Letters and photos.”

  “He sure kept a lot of them, didn’t he?” Emma said.

  “Did either Molly or Rita come over here much?”

  “Oh, sure,” Emma said. “All the time.

  They were all good friends at one time.”

  “That’s why Molly hated her so much, I think,” Amy said. “She felt betrayed, I guess. She used to bring Rita along when they were in ninth grade. Then David and Rita started sneaking off together. I felt so sorry for Molly.”

  “I did, too,” Emma said, “up until she smashed all the windows out in their cars.”

  “Molly smashed out windows?”

  “Isn’t that something?” Amy said. “You’d never think anybody like her could do something like that. But she was heartbroken.” She spent a moment gazing at the past. “A long, long time ago, and I’m sure Emma will remember this, I went out with this Nabisco salesman from Davenport. He’d come to town once a week. I had
a head full of silly notions. The silliest being that he would marry me someday. I eventually found out he was married.”

  “You wonder why we ended up old maids, Sam? That’s why. I had a similar experience.

  Mine wasn’t married. But he wasn’t true blue, either. Hers was 1939 and mine was 1941.

  We decided then to stay with our parents and work at our little jobs—we both worked in dime stores back then—and never be hurt again.”

  “So I could see why Molly did what she did, Sam,” Amy said.

  “So could I,” Emma said and smiled at her sister. “And I’m supposed to be the “sensible”

  one. Molly probably didn’t think she was being very sensible but I’m sure she was having a good time smashing in those windows.”

  Amy grinned. “Why, look at his face, sister. He’s shocked. First, he finds out that his favorite two old maids smoke

  marijuana. And now he has to listen to us condoning smashing in car windows.”

  “I’ll never recover,” I said. And I half wondered if I would. People become fixed points in your life, like stars. But sometimes you find out that they aren’t as fixed as you thought. “You don’t chop up people and keep them in the basement, do you?”

  “We’ll invite you over for a delicious “meat” dish some night,” Emma said deadpan.

  “Emma!”

  “I’d keep an eye on that sister of yours, Amy,” I said as I was leaving.

  “Don’t worry, Sam, I do.”

  “Don’t forget that special meat dinner of ours,” Emma said. Amy slapped playfully at her arm.

  Twenty-one

  Andrea Prescott’s mother didn’t sound so happy to hear from me this time. Apparently her daughter had been helping her bone up on how to be snotty on the phone. “I’m not sure I want her to talk to you.”

  “It’s really important.”

  “To you, maybe, Mr. McCain. But we’re respectable people and we don’t want to get dragged into anything having to do with that terrible David Egan.”

  “I may not be respectable, Mrs.

  Prescott, but I am trying to find the proof.”

  “That was an awfully stuffy thing to say, don’t you think?”

  I laughed. I sort of liked her again.

  “Yeah, come to think of it it was. I mst’ve heard that in a movie or something.”

  She sounded much friendlier. “A very bad movie, Mr. McCain.” Then, “You may speak to her for two minutes and no longer.”

  “You going to run an egg timer?”

  “I have a watch and believe it or not, I know how to tell time.” Then, “Here, honey.”

  “I wish you’d quit bugging me,” the girl said to me.

  “Nice to speak with you again, too, Andrea.”

  “I told you what I know and Mom and Dad wish I hadn’t even told you that much.”

  “Jack Coyle was seeing her again, wasn’t he? He broke it off for a long time but then he started seeing her again, didn’t he?”

  “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “And the baby wasn’t David’s, it was Coyle’s, wasn’t it.”

  “Good-bye, McCain.”

  “Where did they meet? They couldn’t go to a motel. That’d be too dangerous. But they had some rendezvous spot, didn’t they?”

  She hesitated. Then whispered. “Mom just went into the kitchen. She really doesn’t want me to get involved. But I’ll tell you this.

  There’s a hunting cabin out by Scarecrow Rock.

  Sara mentioned it once to me.” Hesitation.

  “That’s what they were fighting about the night before she got killed. She was still in love with Coyle and it was driving David crazy.”

  I heard footsteps and then her mother say, “Tell Mr. McCain that my egg timer just went off.”

  “Thanks for the help, Andrea. I

  appreciate it.”

  I guess if you lie flat on your back and look straight up at it and the moonlight behind it is just right and the night is cloudless and if you really use your imagination, you can kinda sorta perhaps see how this tall, slender piece of red limestone came to be called Scarecrow Rock. One night in high school when I was particularly brokenhearted over the beautiful Pamela Forrest, I lay on the ground and did exactly that. And in my drunken state of poetic heartbreak, lying right at the base of the damned thing, I could indeed kinda sorta see how it did, if you closed one eye, more or less look vaguely like a scarecrow. I have spent my time in this vale of tears wisely, wasting not a moment.

  It didn’t look at all like a scarecrow tonight. A small forest. A moonlit mesa. A five-foot-tall piece of limestone jutting up from a limestone base almost blood-red in this light. A buck deer heard me, pausing momentarily on the mesa and then fleeing with the fragile grace of its kind.

  The mesa came at the end of what locals called the Comanche Trail. If you read much about the Comanches, it’s hard to believe they ever got as far east as Iowa. But somehow the narrow, winding dirt trail got itself named that and the locals liked it enough to keep it, accurate history be damned.

  In true pioneer spirit, I stopped

  to take a pee a couple of times, stoke up a Lucky, and get whipped hard enough by sharp-edged pine branches to draw a little blood on my forehead.

  I also kept stumbling. I wondered if the pioneers had worn penny loafers.

  Probably, wouldn’t you think?

  River smell. A lone motorboat somewhere in the darkness. The trail would soon swing northwest, away from the river where, as I recalled, I’d find the hunting cabin.

  I had to make a trail of my own, straight down through the loamed and leafy undergrowth you find in any deep woods, the mixed scent of mint and mud and a million feces samples from the little ones—foxes and rabbits and possums and raccoons, among them—^wh gleaming eyes followed me as I tripped and stumbled downslope toward another trail that would take me to the cabin. I hoped I was giving them enough entertainment to last them for a while. That I know of, they don’t have Tv.

  I ended my downslope travels with an homage to Buster Keaton. My foot got lodged in a massive claw root extending from a tree. Yanking it free, I stumbled the edge of the slope and fell headfirst to the trail three feet below.

  I banged my head hard enough against the earth of the trail to knock myself out momentarily. I also embarrassed the hell out of myself. I could hear the owls laughing now.

  I got up, lit a Lucky, and started

  walking again. Low-hanging pine branches slapping me from either side. The trail angled upward abruptly. At the top of the rise I stood looking down on the cabin I was looking for.

  I’ve never figured out why they call these things cabins. It’s really a summer house. Two stories, screened-in front porch, one-car garage. The pioneers, the people who really did live in cabins and soddies, would have called this a mansion.

  When I got up close, standing on the beach in front of the place, I found that the garage was empty and the front door locked. No lights inside. All I could hear was the river rushing past thirty yards away. A half-moon had risen above a tiny, nearby island, tall ragged pines silhouetted against its glow.

  I stayed on the front porch for a time, squinting inside through the large windows on

  either side of the door. A nicely furnished place, from what I could see. Large, native stone fireplace, leather furnishings, and a spectacular display of animal heads on the wall, everything from moose to bobcat, spectacular if you weren’t one of those displayed, anyway.

  It was time for drastic measures. I took out my Swiss Army knife, which at last count had something like 2eacdgeajjj uses and cost only $2.99 if you also included the coupon the pulp magazine provided.

  I started walking around the house, carrying an empty wooden Pepsi case to stand on, looking for a window I could pry open. Two baby raccoons watched me from a tree limb, their bottoms hanging below the limb, their tails twitching kittenlike.

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to use my Swiss A
rmy knife. One of the back windows had been left unlocked. I set the Pepsi case up. It was wobbly but it stayed upright long enough for me to grab the window ledge and pull myself inside.

  Tobacco. Whiskey. Coldness. These were the things I smelled immediately. The deeper I went into the shadowy house, the more the odors shifted. A recent meal, fried meat, probably beef.

  Then—coffee percolating in the dark kitchen.

  Somebody here. Shampoo in the downstairs bathroom. A scent of perfume on the stairway leading to the second floor.

  I stood on the landing, not sure where to start. The downstairs hadn’t given me anything. I was self-conscious. My breathing sounded too loud.

  And wherever I stepped, the flooring squeaked. Then the dust of the place made me sneeze. A cat burglar I was not.

  There were four doors, two on each side of the hall. The first door opened on a dormitory-like bedroom. Two pairs of bunkbeds, a bureau with a clock radio on top, a closet where various hunters over the years had left odds and ends of their pleasure, a couple of duck calls, a camouflage jacket, a rain hat, a pair of waders that I associated more with fishing than hunting. In other words, nothing.

  Same setup in the next room, the pair of bunkbeds, the bureau, the dormlike configurations. Maybe these middle-aged

  men missed college life and these cramped little rooms brought back all kinds of remembered pleasures.

  I was just leaving this room when Jean Coyle appeared in the moonlit doorway and said, “You shouldn’t be here, Sam. You’re trespassing.”

  The moonlight gave her an ethereal presence.

  But the black steel gun in her hand kept her very real. Even though I’ve carried a gun sometimes, being around them still spooks me. At least she wasn’t pointing it at me.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Sam.” Her voice was dulled. Exhaustion, maybe; alcohol.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Do I look all right, Sam?”

  “I wish you didn’t have that gun, Jean.”

  “I heard somebody breaking in. I knew where Jack keeps it in the bedroom down the hall.”

  “I’m just doing my job.”