by Ed Gorman
Suddenly, they were fast friends, two married women with bad marriages. Debbie’s husband had taken to hitting her; Susan’s to ignoring her. There was a lot of town talk about them being easy lays after a few drinks but you couldn’t prove it by me.
I’ve never had any luck at all with women who are called easy. In fact, once I hear a woman described that way, I know I’ll never score, not even with a sub-machine gun and a bag of cash. Life is like that sometimes.
Debbie wore a pair of festive red
earmuffs and a winter jacket with a fake-fur collar, jeans and loafers with bobby sox. Her nose was red from the cold and looked little-girl sweet. She took a pack of Winstons from her jacket pocket and tamped one out on her gloved hand. She pushed in my car lighter and when it popped out, got her weed going.
She said, after exhaling, “I just hope this town is sorry now for the way they treated her. You know, like she was some whore or something.”
I didn’t have to ask who she was talking about.
“She was the nicest girlfriend I ever had. You know how many clothes she bought me? Like this jacket for instance. You know how much she paid for it?
Thirty-nine dollars. And you know why? Because she said she was tired of seeing me freeze all the time. She knew I couldn’t afford one like this.
Thirty-nine dollars. So I hope all those bastards are happy now that she’s finally dead.”
“I don’t think he killed her.”
She looked stunned. Or stricken. I wasn’t sure which. “What? Chief Sykes is telling everybody he killed her.” That
was the nice thing about a small town. You didn’t have to worry about your pronouns. We hadn’t mentioned any names but we knew exactly whom we were talking about.
“You really believe anything Chief Sykes has to say?”
“Then who killed her, McCain?”
“That’s what I need to find out. I thought maybe you could tell me who she was hanging around with lately. Guys, I mean.”
“Nobody in particular.”
The late-afn traffic was starting to pile up, our version of rush hour. The shadows were starting to kidnap the day, the sky layered salmon and gold and a kind of celestial puce. Kids were lobbing snowballs back and forth, yard to yard.
Scarves were trailing behind the prone bodies of kids steering their sleds downhill to the sidewalks. In a lot of houses, small groups of kids would be gathered in front of the Tv watching Hopalong Cassidy or
Howdy Doody or the Three Stooges.
And moms in kitchens would be starting supper, the smells rich and good on the chill melancholy of the fading winter day, spaghetti and pot roasts and cheese casseroles.
“I really need you to think hard, Debbie.”
“I knew that’s what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?”
“Yeah, when you pulled up back there. That you wanted to talk to me about Susan.”
“You were her best friend.”
She took another drag and looked out the window. “I really like this town.”
“So do I.”
“I just wish people didn’t gossip so much.”
“It’s just the way people are. And most people here don’t gossip that much. Just a few of them. And it doesn’t matter where you move to because they’ll be that way there, too.”
“I suppose.” Then, “She wasn’t
screwing a lot of guys, if that’s what you mean.”
“I didn’t say she was.”
“She only slept with a couple of guys.”
“I don’t suppose you’d tell me who they are.”
“I wasn’t screwing a lot of guys, either.”
“I’m sure you weren’t.” Then, “Would you tell me who she was sleeping with?”
“Well, Tommy Fennelly for one. But he left for the service three months ago. Camp Pendleton.”
“Wasn’t he a little young for her?”
“He was nineteen. But he’s a real nice kid. A couple of times, he tried to get her off the booze. He sat up with her the whole night at his apartment, she told me. Let her cry and throw up and tear his place apart. She quit for a while, too. Couple of weeks, one time. Not one single drink that whole time.”
Tommy Fennelly had always seemed to me nothing much more than a loafer—a little pool, a few card games, minor trouble with the law now and then. But Debbie had swept all that away.
She’d just made him a damned nice kid.
“Who else?”
She sighed. “And Steve Renauld.”
“At Leopold Bloom’s?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t believe it, either. He’s such a loser. Mr. High and Mighty.”
“How the hell did she get hooked up with him?”
“Well, you know, we used to go in there and look around. He and his wife have nice stuff in there.
Or anyway that’s what Susan told me. I couldn’t tell. I mean, Susan was educated.
I’m just a bumpkin.”
“Same here.”
“You’re a lawyer, McCain.”
“A lot of lawyers are bumpkins.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Well, you’re not as much of a bumpkin as I am, anyway.”
“So you started going to Renauld’s place.”
“And he started asking Susan if he could paint her. Him and his painting. I used to call him “Vincent Van Phony.” He heard me once and really got pissed off. But he kind of wore her down. And she started posing for him. You know, he’s got that so-called studio over on Jackson Street. That’s where they did the dirty deed, anyway.”
“When was this?”
“About a month ago. She said they were both pretty drunk the times it happened.”
“She tell you anything else?”
“Just that he wasn’t much in the sack and that she sort of felt sorry for him. She said
that once and I’ve always remembered it.”
“Said what?”
“Said she couldn’t sleep with a man she didn’t feel sorry for. She didn’t like most men. Said they all reminded her of her father. You know, the swaggering type and everything. Renauld’s pretty pathetic so I guess that’s why she slept with him. But I think she got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of Renauld. He was making it a lot more of it than it was. She went to bed because she felt sorry for him, like I said. But he saw it as this big romance. He was going to leave his wife and daughter. He wanted them to move to Iowa City.
You know, he was always talking like Iowa City was —what’s that place the Arabs always go to?”
“Mecca?”
“Yeah, he always talked like Iowa City was Mecca. Or something. She was going to run away from Kenny and he was going to run away from his wife and they were going to be this real cool artistic couple and live in Iowa City.”
“And she didn’t see it that way?”
“Are you kidding? She got to be as afraid of Renauld as she was of Kenny. He really started putting a lot of pressure on her.”
We were at the supermarket. I swung into the drive. A lot of people left their cars running.
You could see the exhaust putt-putting out of their mufflers. Folks trust one another out here, and that’s nice.
“Maybe you should talk to Renauld,” she said, opening the door and flipping the butt of her Winston out the door.
“That’s a good idea.”
“I just hope, if Kenny didn’t kill her, you find out who did.”
“So do I,” I said.
She was gone then, hurrying through the dusk into the lights and hustle of the supermarket where a hundred shoppers were trying to hurry their way home.
Eleven
I drove past the police station. The big black Indian motorcycle, the one belonging to our esteemed police chief, Cliff Sykes, Jr., wasn’t there.
A block away, I pulled up to a phone booth. It was getting dark, cold-winter
dark. Across the street
was a small diner with a long, wide front window. Edward Hopper was my favorite painter and the window of the diner looked like something he would have painted; there were six, seven working-class men sitting at a long counter eating their dinner but not in any way communicating with anybody else. Totally isolated in this little strip of light in the otherwise black prairie night. Even the plump waitress in the pink uniform, standing alone by the cash register, seemed forever cursed by isolation and loneliness.
I put in my nickel.
“Hello?”
“Were you eating, Mom?”
“No, honey. But I’ll be putting supper on the table in about fifteen minutes if you want to come over.”
“I’m afraid I’m working tonight.”
“For yourself or the judge?”
I lied. “For myself.”
“Good. You’ll be on your own if you just keep trying. Won’t that be nice when you don’t have to work for the judge anymore?” Having grown up in the Knolls, my mother had no time for the imperious Whitneys.
“Is Ruthie there, Mom?”
“No, hon. I’m afraid she already left for the library. Said she had a lot of homework to do. School seems to be getting her down this year.”
“Oh?”
“She looked so tired lately. And her appetite’s awful.”
“How’s Dad?”
“Well, Cheyenne is on tonight so he’s happy. You know how he likes his westerns.”
The judge had been nice enough to give me a good bonus at Christmastime. I’d finally been able to replace my family’s old 12-inch Arvin with a brand-new 21-inch Admiral console. Now Dad could really enjoy his westerns.
“We’d like to see you sometime, hon.”
“I know, Mom. It’s just I’ve been so busy.”
“Well, the water’s boiling over on the potatoes. I’d better go grab them. Thanks for calling.”
I spent a lot of time in the library when I was a kid. I liked books. But I also
liked girls and the library was a good place to sit with a book and watch girls troop in and out. I think even back then, I was looking for a girl to make me forget Pamela. She was never a girl from the Knolls, though. She had to be better than the Knolls. Just as, for Pamela, her ideal man had to be from old, secure money and reputation. Sometimes I wondered if that was the only thing Pamela and I had in common, our shallowness.
On a cold winter night, the steam heat was turned all the way up and the pipes clanked ferociously. The library was built with a Carnegie grant right after the turn of the century.
It was still a pleasant place but it was starting to get too small. At dinnertime, the library was largely empty. I couldn’t find Ruthie anywhere on the ground floor. I paused long enough to look over the best sellers, from Majorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk to Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. I’d still take John D. MacDonald and Peter Rabe.
I went upstairs, to the reference section.
Ruthie sat at a long table near the back of the second floor. She looked up when I started walking toward her, my slushy shoes squeaking on the floor. She was reading a book. As soon as she saw me, the book was closed and quickly put on the empty chair next to her. Whatever she was reading, she didn’t want to share it with me.
I sat down. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How you doing?”
“Just studying. You know, for a test.”
“So what’d you do with the Potassium Permangatel?”
“The what?”
“The stuff you stole from Rexall’s.”
“Oh. It was for a science experiment. You know, at school.”
“What kind of experiment?”
She looked at me steadily for a long moment.
“You going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“No.”
“I appreciate that.”
“You ever stolen anything before?”
“No.”
“You plan on stealing anything else?”
“No.”
Now I looked at her steadily for a long moment. “So what’s going on, Ruthie?”
“It’s just all these tests. I’m worn out.
That’s why I took that stuff at Rexall’s.
One of the girls at school told me it was really good stuff if you were rundown. Said she got all her energy back.”
“So it’s for energy?”
She nodded.
“I thought it was for a science experiment.”
“Well, I used it for the experiment and for myself.”
“And you didn’t have enough money?”
“Right.”
“Or you wouldn’t have stolen it?”
“Right.”
“Ruthie, we’ve had a charge account at Rexall for years.”
“I mst’ve forgot.”
“I love you, Ruthie.”
“I know you do.”
“So be honest with me. Whatever it is, I want to help you.”
She shrugged. “It was just for a science experiment.
I mst’ve forgotten about our charge account. I needed to get back to school right away.”
I stood up. She looked happy I was going. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
I like the second floor of the library. One has the sense of timelessness there. The dust and the opaque windows, the neat and hushed rows of books. It’s like being inside the time capsule they buried over at Runyon Park last summer.
But the library time capsule would be filled with Chaucer and Melville and Poe and Dreiser and people like that. There was something almost religious about a life of contemplation and every once in a while I wished I was monastic. I knew it wouldn’t last much longer than a day or two and then I’d be wanting to see the new Tony Curtis at the Strand or buying the new Everly Brothers record or the latest Shell Scott novel.
But it was nice to think about sometimes.
I found what I wanted and came back.
“Guess what I did,” I said.
“What?”
“Looked up Potassium Permangatel in the medical reference book.”
“Oh.”
I put my hand on hers. “Maybe
we should go for a ride.”
“A ride? What for?”
“So we can talk.”
“We can talk here.”
“No, we can’t,” I said.
We went outside. Four boys were having a furious snowball fight. They stopped abruptly when two girls walked by. The girls, who obviously considered themselves more mature than the boys, rolled their eyes at the very idea of snowball fights.
We walked to my car.
“Your car is always so cold,” Ruthie said.
“Not in the summer.”
“Very funny. And it happens to be winter.”
We got in.
“God, can you turn on the heater?”
“It’s on. It just takes a while to warm up.”
“I’m sorry I’m so crabby.”
“You’re always crabby. It’s part of your charm.”
“Not this crabby.” Then, “You know, don’t you?”
“Yeah. The medical reference book.”
“What’d it say?”
“Well, you know, about douching.”
She sighed and looked out the window. “Just what I always wanted to have. A conversation with my brother about douching.”
“Maybe later we could talk about menstrual cramps.”
I was driving out the river road. The ice-covered river was beautiful in the silver moonlight. The heater was roaring. It was still colder than hell in the ragtop. The seats were like ice.
“I sure hope it works,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Well, then what do you think happened?”
“Boy, you really are crabby.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Was it, uh, all right for you?”
“You mean doing it?”
“Yeah.” Doi
ng it. My kid sister. Doing it. Sweet little Ruthie McCain.
“Does he know? The father, I mean?”
“Yes. He knows.”
“You told him?”
“I wrote him a letter.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he was scared. He said this’ll screw up his whole life. He wants to start in premed at the university next year.”
“How about your life? What’s supposed to happen to your life?”
She looked out the window some more, the way Pamela did driving home last night. You could see the paper mill along the river, big and modern and alien in the night, floodlights giving it the look of a prison. Somehow it seemed wrong, even obscene, out here on the prairie where the Indians had roamed for several hundred years.
“You going to tell me who this little bastard is?”
“First of all, he’s not little. And second of all, he’s not a bastard. And third of all, no, I’m not going to tell you. And it’s not going to do you any good to get mad.”
I couldn’t believe how calm she was.
“God, Ruthie, don’t you want to cry or something?”
“No, do you?”
We rode along some more.
“Mind if I play the radio?” she said.
“We shouldn’t listen to the radio at a time like this.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. We just shouldn’t.”
“Are we punishing ourselves or something?” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Then can I have a cigarette?”
“A cigarette? Since when do you smoke?”
“I just smoke every once in a while. Don’t worry, I don’t inhale or anything.”
“You’re my little sister.”
“And you’re my big brother. What the hell does that prove?”
We rode along some more. I accidentally on purpose forgot to give her a cigarette. She didn’t mention it again.
“God, I wish you hadn’t found out about this.”
“I’m your brother, remember?”
“We already went through that. And anyway, I’m the one who did it and it’s my responsibility.”