Sam McCain - 01 - The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  “C’mon, Ruthie,” I whispered again.

  “Put it back.”

  There was panic and embarrassment and anger in her soft blue eyes. I felt all the same things.

  I didn’t want to see my sister get nailed for shoplifting. I also didn’t want to see the family name ruined. When I was in tenth grade, we managed to move out of the Knolls and into town, into a nice little frame house. And Dad got a better job, a tie-wearing kind of job, as warehouse manager over at Fugate

  Industrial, which manufactures safety parts for various kinds of electronic companies. It’s not too often Knolls people turn respectable. A shoplifting daughter wouldn’t exactly help my folks’ reputation. And it wouldn’t do a hell of a lot of good for Ruthie, either.

  All this was in my head as I tried to grab her arm again without anybody noticing. But as I got to the front of the aisle, Ruthie broke ahead.

  She nudged into a large display of hula hoops that had been marked down since the summer. But didn’t slow down at all. She marched straight to the in-out doors and bolted right out to the sunny street.

  I was maybe six steps behind her when I felt a large hand on my shoulder and I turned to see Wes Lindstrom, the pharmacist and the man who was engaged to Mary nodding to my hand. “I hope you’re planning to pay for that.”

  Of course, I first thought of Ruthie. He’d seen her steal the box and wanted restitution. But then he said, “Wouldn’t look real good for one of the town’s most prominent attorneys to be arrested for shoplifting.” And with that he snatched the Manhunt magazine from my fingers.

  “Oh,” I said. “The magazine.”

  He smiled icily. “It just looks a

  little suspicious when you’re walking out the door with it, without paying for it.”

  He looked like one of those soap opera actors who play doctors. He was tall with a somewhat craggy face and strawberry-blond hair in a widow’s peak. I suppose women found him handsome but there was something superior and judgmental about him. You could see it in his mouth, the way it was always tightening inffdispleasure and disdain. As it was now.

  I dug into my pocket, took out a crumpled dollar bill, and laid it on his palm.

  He looked at the magazine cover for the first time. It showed a half-naked woman sprawled on a bloody bed and a dark-suited killer with a gun in his hand crawling out a window.

  “Still reading all the intellectual stuff, huh?” His lips became a disapproving editorial on my reading tastes.

  “You might like it, if you gave it a try.”

  “I doubt it. Not with all the medical journals I need to read.” He nodded to the sales counter. “I’ll get you your change.”

  I wondered if he really thought I’d been trying to steal the magazine. I wondered also if he’d tell people he really thought I’d been trying to steal the magazine. We all like to gossip, I suppose, though of course I’d deny I liked to if you asked me, but Wes was a legendary gossip. He could kill you faster than a bullet. All he had to do was whisper the right words.

  He gave me my change then put the

  magazine in a sack. “People might think you were stealing it otherwise.” A quick, icy smile.

  “That medicine you gave me for my corns really worked, Wes,” an elderly lady said behind me.

  “I need some more of it.”

  “You wouldn’t have all those corns, Betsy, if you weren’t out all night doing the mambo and the cha-cha-cha,” he said.

  She giggled and you could hear the girl that remained alive inside her despite her seventy years and it was a nice, pure, inspiring sound. I had to give it to Wes. He could be a charmer when he wanted to.

  I went back to the counter. “I think your boyfriend thinks I’m a shoplifter.”

  Mary was wiping off the counter. I told her what happened. “He’s just sensitive about you is all. You know, about how you and I grew up

  together and all.”

  I wanted to kiss her. Right then and there. I guess it was her sweetness. Her goodness. I needed something to believe in after I’d seen my sister stealing that small box.

  I spent the next few minutes listening to the radio that played over the speakers in the store.

  Small-town radio alternates between Bing Crosby records and local news and what they call Trader Tom, who conducts a

  five-minute show every hour to tell the good people what kind of deal you can get on certain second-hand items, and who to call if you’re interested. Right now, he was listing a refrigerator, a sectional couch that made into a bed and a complete collection of Saturday Evening Posts from 1941 through the present. I figured my dad would like them. He loved the western serials, the Ernest Haycox ones especially. Then Trader Tom had his “Farm Folks” segment where he talked about the kind of things farmers had up for sale or trade.

  Today a farmer had a calf he wanted to trade for a good hunting rifle. Trader Tom gave the guy’s phone number, of course. Townsfolks always feel superior when they hear the “Farm Folks” segments. We live in the big city, after all.

  Mary came over with the coffeepot but I put my hand over my cup. “I’m starting to get the jitters.”

  “You hear about the skating party tonight?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “They’re going to dedicate it to Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and play all the records tonight.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’ll probably go if Wes’ll let

  me.”

  “You have to check with him now?”

  She shrugged. “He just thinks it looks funny if I go places without him. You know, like I’m still single or something.”

  What the hell are you marrying him for? I wanted to say. You’re so damned decent and smart. And he’s such a sanctimonious prig.

  But, of course, I didn’t say anything like that. I just said, “Well, maybe I’ll check it out.”

  The phone rang and she excused herself to go get it. I noticed how her expression

  changed from a neutral hello to something more complicated and less friendly. “Just a minute please.” She held the phone out to me. “It’s Pamela.”

  “Oh.” I got up and walked down the counter to where the wall phone was. I walked behind the counter and took the receiver from her hand.

  “I don’t think she likes me much,”

  Pamela said. “I suppose it’s because of you.”

  “So what’s going on in the august Judge Whitney’s office?” I said, smiling at Mary as I spoke.

  “A lot, actually. She wants you over here right away. Robert Frazier is in her chambers.”

  Frazier was the father of Susan, the woman Kenny Whitney had married. And perhaps murdered.

  “I tried to call her honor several times this morning,” I said. “The line was always busy.”

  “It was crazy here. The press and all. I mean, both of them, the newspaper guy and the radio guy. And it was questions, questions, questions all morning. Finally, Judge Whitney threatened to get an injunction.”

  I could see the judge up against the shambling, dandruff-laden Earle Peterson of The Bugle and the crew-cutted nitwit (“Hey, hang loose, Jack, elsewise I’ll be blastin’ off, you dig?”) Charlie O’Brian of Tops radio. Not many people knew this—it was sort of like the secret identity of the Shadow—but ace reporter and resident hipster Charlie O’Brian was also the voice of Trader Tom.

  “Well, I’m glad things’ve calmed down.”

  “So should I tell her you’ll be here right away?”

  “Sure. See you.”

  I hung up and when I turned back to Mary, I felt something I would’ve thought impossible. I felt jealous. Wes Lindstrom had his arm around Mary’s shoulder and was talking to her in the intimate whispers only lovers can understand. And she was smiling up at him, nodding.

  When he saw me hang up, he said, loud enough not only for Mary but for the customers along the counter to hear: “I thought I had a shoplifter on my hands this morning. Our es
teemed counselor here was walking out with a trashy magazine and he acted surprised when I asked him to pay for it. But I went along with it and just let him pretend that

  he’d just forgotten about paying for it.”

  There was an angry undertone in his voice and the customers picked up on it. They weren’t sure if they should laugh or not. I saw Mary watching me, unhappy that he was doing this. I had a good comeback, even, asking him what he was selling trashy magazines for in the first place. But I decided against it. The customers were looking me over now and I could sense that the tide was against me.

  “I’ll see you, Mary,” I said. I knew I was blushing. I felt alone, hunted, on the run. Growing up in the Knolls can do that to you.

  Life is like that sometimes, as my father always says.

  As I was walking out of the store, I slowed down in the aisle Ruthie had been in. There was a one-box hole in a span of six small boxes on the shelf. The product was called Potassium Permangatel. I wondered why she’d want something like that.

  Seven

  The day was a postcard, the warm sunlight on the snowy streets making the downtown area look not old but fashionably antique, from the stone gargoyles that guard the entrance to the First National Bank to the octagonal bandstand in the city square where Iowa boy Meredith Wilson of Music Man fame had guest-conducted the local symphony three years ago to the three blocks of retail stores, all showing the blue and tan awnings the chamber of commerce had talked them into buying a few years back. The temperature was up around thirty now and the air smelled clean.

  The people looked clean, too—young, old, rich, poor, clean and bright and friendly, even the young ones in the black leather jackets and the duck’s ass haircuts. They liked to play at being bad, some of the older boys, but mostly what they did was cruise the loop area with their radios up too loud and call out to the pretty girls on the streets, and snarl at any male who wasn’t dressed the way they were.

  There was a shortcut to the courthouse and I took it, down two alleys and one block over.

  Halfway there, I came out on a narrow

  side street with a lumberyard, a Western Auto and a small tavern at the very end of the street. It was from the tavern I heard the shout, “You try’n come in here one more time you black bastard, and I’ll call the law on you! You see if I don’t!”

  There was no mistaking the subject of this tirade: Darin Greene. He stood out in front of Paddy’s Tap with his hands on his hips, facing down Paddy, who owned the place, and Paddy, Jr., who spent most of his time guzzling up the profits and sounding off on politics. In his cups, he’d tell you that he had some kind of connection to the Kkk, but with Paddy, Jr., truth and lies sounded just the same.

  Whenever he got drunk and wanted to pick a fight with somebody white, Darin Greene headed for Paddy’s, the only tavern in town that wouldn’t serve Negroes. Darin had been Kenny Whitney’s best friend all the way through school and until a year or so ago when they’d had a mysterious falling-out. In another time, Darin could have been a movie star. He had Harry Belafonte good looks and when he was sober, he could be a charmer. He’d probably had a dozen jobs since high school, losing all of them because of his drinking. He and Kenny had been the football stars. Darin played two years at the University of Iowa but got in trouble busting up a white dean’s son in a barroom one hot July night. He served six months in county and then headed straight to Chicago. Nobody saw him for nearly a year and then one day he drove back into town in a shiny new Olds convertible, a fine high-gloss yellow one. He’d lost twenty pounds and looked meaner than ever. The small knife scar he’d picked up on his left cheek didn’t hurt, either. Nobody was ever sure how he’d gotten the Olds or the scar but there was a lot of speculation. He immediately started hanging around Kenny again, spending a lot of time out at Kenny’s house, and less and less time with his wife and young son, who had not accompanied him to Chicago, Lurlene staying here and working as a nurse’s aide at the hospital. Cliff Sykes, Jr., our esteemed police chief, tried for a year to run Darin out of town, but thanks to Judge Whitney, he failed. Judge Whitney wasn’t all that crazy about colored people. She just enjoyed thwarting the will of any

  Sykes anytime she got the chance.

  Now, on a beautiful day like this one, two low-life white men were in Darin’s face and he was probably too drunk and confused to understand what was going on. He seemed to come to Paddy’s on autopilot. He got some kind of terrible pleasure out of it, as if this was the way he secretly believed he should be treated.

  I walked on over.

  Darin was drunker than I thought, weaving back and forth, leaning on the fender of his yellow Olds to keep himself from falling down into the slushy street.

  “Why don’t you get in your car, Darin?” I said. “I’ll call Lurlene and she can come and get you.”

  “You get your ass out of here, McCain,”

  Paddy, Sr., said. “This buck wouldn’t be here if that judge of yours hadn’t got all them court orders against Cliff Sykes.”

  “‘Bout time we started handling things our way,”

  Paddy, Jr., said. “The way they handle ‘em down in Mississippi and Alabama.”

  “‘Til the Jews went down there and started stirring up the coons, anyway,” Paddy, Sr., said. Darin was six-three and probably weighed 180 or 190, so it was quite a swing.

  He’d have shattered Paddy, Sr.’s jaw if the punch had connected. But Darin was off-balance when he threw it and he also slipped on the ice. He followed his punch, ending up on one knee.

  Paddy, Jr., moved quickly, raising his foot, ready to catch Darin a good one in the face or chest. Paddy, like his father, was round, sloppy and had a face made for sneering. My rage was right there waiting for me. I supposed Paddy, Jr., could take me in a prolonged fight, but my small size worked for me here. I was faster than he was.

  I took the leg he was just about to use on Darin and yanked it out from under him. He sat down on the ice, shocked, enraged and humiliated. He was wearing a new pair of cowboy boots, a new western shirt with fancy piping and a new white Stetson, pretty much the same thing he and his father always wore.

  Paddy, Jr., called me a lot of names in a very short time. His father came over and started helping him up. By this time, a number of customers had started wandering out of the small dirty-brick tavern. This was like an extra session of the

  professional wrestling they watched every Friday night down at the armory. And this was free.

  Darin couldn’t even get to his feet. I walked over and got one of my arms under one of his and proceeded to inflict a hernia on myself.

  Somehow I got him to his feet and inside the car. He kept muttering things that I didn’t understand at all. I told him, “Get over on the passenger side.”

  “I can drive, man.”

  “Sure, you can, Darin. Now get your ass over there.”

  “I’d watch that white mouth of yours, man.”

  “Just slide the hell over.”

  Paddy Hanratty, Sr., was smiling.

  “He’s all yours, McCain. How you like bein’

  a chauffeur for a coon? Isn’t it usually the other way around?”

  All the customers standing around found this wonderfully hilarious. They were nudging each other in ludicrous exaggerated ways.

  The only one not smiling was Paddy Hanratty, Jr. I’d messed up his cowboy outfit and he was mad. “This isn’t over by a long shot, McCain.”

  I got the key in the ignition. The car barely started. The fine yellow Olds Darin had driven into town a few years ago had now deteriorated just as much as its owner. It hadn’t been tuned up for a long time. The windshield was cracked. The floorboards were muddy. Empty beer cans littered the backseat. A Chicago Bears brochure was angrily mashed up in a corner.

  It was four years old, dating from about the time Darin had tried out for the pros. He was great high school material, solid college material, but no material at all for the pros. Those guys brunch on iron bars.<
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  I got the motor running, albeit raggedly, and then pulled away from the curb. A forest of middle fingers poked the February air at us.

  Darin sat up. “I coulda handled that cracker with a gun if I needed to.”

  “Yeah, you were doing a great job, the way you slipped and fell down.”

  He glared at me. “You better watch that white mouth of yours.” Then, “And anyway, you be drivin’ my car, asshole, so I’d keep that tongue of yours real civil.”

  There wasn’t any point in arguing with

  him. He was speaking gibberish way most drunks eventually do. Being near clinical death—his usual alcoholic intake was enormous—he should have passed out. But he just kept right on going. That was the kind of drunk both he and his pal Kenny had been. If they’d gone through everything alcoholic in the house, they’d go into the bathroom and start on the hair tonic that was 14.2 percent alcohol.

  We went two blocks and then he muttered something.

  “What?” I said.

  “Pull the car over!” he screamed at me.

  I whipped to the curb. Even before I had the car stopped, he had the door open and was vomiting into the gutter. A couple of lawyers were walking by.

  They looked pretty disgusted. Then they saw who was driving the Olds and they smirked. There’d be all kinds of jokes about the kind of clientele I had.

  He puked for quite a while. He was pretty good at it. He’d puke and then raise his head a little and then puke some more. Then he’d spit. He was almost as good at spitting as puking. I was glad that my next meal was still several hours away.

  When he was done, he leaned back inside and said, “Gimme a smoke.”

  “Yes sir, commander.”

  I gave him a Pall Mall.

  “Light,” he said.

  I took out the nice silver Ronson my folks had given me for Christmas. I’d already lost it twice but luckily it had kept turning up.

  “How much your lighter cost, man?” he said.

  “It was a gift.”

  “Lady friend?”

  “My folks. Look, Darin, I have to get going. But there’s something I need to do first.”