by Ed Gorman
We swung for a while. It was nice out here.
Anytime I stay outdoors on a sunny day I decide to give up my law practice and move west to the mountains and live off snake meat and tree bark. It’s a hell of an exhilarating feeling. But that’s usually when the first mosquito sinks its stinger in me so deep you suspect it’s drilling for oil. And that’s when I see the ants in the picnic basket and realize I’ll have to go take a pee behind a tree, and then moving west suddenly doesn’t sound so good.
She said, “It’s on account of my leg.”
“Oh?”
“That I’m afraid to go to school.”
“Oh.”
“Most kids try and be nice to you. But some kids make fun of you. And I always end up leaving early and coming home and crying. Dad says don’t give ‘em the satisfaction, but I can’t help it. It hurts my feelings. I mean I didn’t ask to get polio.”
Polio used to be a scare word. In summers, moms were afraid to let their kids go into theaters and swimming pools and shopping centers. Dads got terrified when their little ones ran a fever for more than a day or showed any kind of sudden weakness.
It was our Black Plague. At best you might lose the use of a limb. At worst you could spend the rest of your life in an iron lung. Early death would be a mercy. Thank God for Jonas Salk.
“The worst is when we have little dances in the afternoon.”
I watched her jaw muscle work.
“Mrs. Grundy at school said she was sure I could do it. Dance, I mean. Slowdance. Not rock-and-roll. That if I did a slow dance I’d be fine. There’s a girl on American Bandstand who does it all the time. She’s got a brace just like mine. But I’m scared to.”
“You’re too pretty to sit on the sidelines.”
“You really think I’m pretty?”
“I sure do.”
“You can’t really be pretty if you limp.”
“You sure can.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s what Dad says too. But I know as soon as I get out there and start dancing, they’ll start laughing at me. You know, kind of whispering and all.”
“They laugh about me being short.”
“They do?”
“You bet they do.”
“Does it hurt your feelings?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me mad.”
“Yeah, it makes me mad sometimes too.”
We swung some more.
“What happened to your real mom?”
“Cancer.”
The phone rang inside. She got up and struggled to go get it. I pitched the water over the side of the porch and felt kind of dirty about it.
She was such a nice kid and here I wouldn’t drink out of her glass. It was like I was betraying her or something.
She came back and said, “The social worker’s coming out. I guess I better pick up the house before she gets here.”
“You like her?”
“Not much.”
“How come?” I handed her the glass.
She shrugged beneath her faded dress. “She always asks too many questions.”
“Like me?”
“Oh, you’re all right,” she said. Then: “I saw you.”
“Saw me?”
“Phone’s right by the window.”
“Oh.”
“Throw the water out. Dad says I should be more careful, the way I do the dishes. Mom, she used to get on me all the time too. She’d always wash her own dishes after I washed them. Said they were filthy.” She looked inside. “I better get moving.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.
Throwing the water out.”
She shrugged. “Stuff like that don’t hurt my feelings. It’s mostly stuff about my leg.”
I gave her a little hug. Nothing that’d scare her. Just a quick little hug. Then I kissed the top of her head and went down the steps and drove away.
Eight
“Doc Novotny asked me if I was going to see you today.”
“He did?” I said.
“Uh-huh. Told him you had a haircut scheduled at one.”
“He say anything else?”
“Said he’d been trying to get ahold of you all morning. Said he wanted to talk to you. Said you should stop over to his office at the morgue this afternoon. Said he should be around till about five or so. Said you probably wanted to see him too.”
Just the mention of the morgue filled my nostrils with the stink of death. The rot of flesh. The cold shadowy refrigerated room. I didn’t want to go.
Bill and Phil’s is the barber shop of choice in Black River Falls. All the important people go there. Bill cuts their hair.
Bill has what the nuns used to call aspirations. He’s been serving important people for so long, he’s started thinking of himself as important too. He and his Irma didn’t have any kids-in a town like this, there’s a lot of speculation about whose fault exactly it was-and he inherited a couple of farms, which he promptly sold before the ‘ec recession, so he’s doing pretty well for himself. He’s the conservative of the pair. You can tell that by looking at the photos he’s got up on his barber’s mirror behind the pump chair: Joe McCarthy.
John Foster Dulles. And the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, who wouldn’t let Negro students into an all-white high school. There are also American flag decals, American Legion decals, America First decals.
Phil is the Democrat. His photos run to Jackie Robinson, Fdr, and Adlai
Stevenson. He’s got lots of American flag decals too.
Whenever customers get bored waiting their turn for a chair, they bait one or the other of the barbers.
It helps pass the time. And it’s more fun than radio.
Take today.
Lem Fuller, of Fuller’s Hardware, was reading a Confidential magazine he’d bought at the newsstand before he came over. He said to Phil, the Democrat, “You ever read this magazine?”
“Wanda wouldn’t let me bring that trash into the house,” Phil said, knowing he was being baited.
“Well, here’s sure an interesting piece.”
Here it comes, I thought. Lem was more of a reactionary than Bill, unimaginable as that was.
“That little colored fella? Sammy Davis, Jr.?”
“Uh-huh,” Phil said, snipping away at my hair.
“Says here he dates white women exclusively. Won’t even give a colored girl a tumble. How do you like that?”
“I sleep fine at night,” Phil said, “No matter who Sammy Davis, Jr., is with.”
“You sure don’t want the coloreds messin’ with white gals, do ya, Phil?”
“Oh, heck,” Bill said, snipping away at his own customer. “Phil wouldn’t care if old Sammy took out every white woman in America. Phil’s all for integration, don’t you know. Colored and white mixin’ it up all the time.”
“I never said that,” Bill said. “I just said we should treat ‘em better.”
“Well, Sammy Davis, he’s sure gettin’ treated better, I’d say,” Lem said. “White gals with their tits hangin’ out of their dresses and holdin’ his hand and everything. Them white gals probably don’t even care he’s got one of them glass eyes.”
Phil winked at Lem. “Maybe he’s got somethin’ else that’s glass.”
Lem laughed and said, “You think, Bill? You think he’s got a glass dick?”
“I hear somebody else’s got a glass dick,” Phil said. He named another colored singer. “I hear he’s a queer.”
“Two for the price of one,” Lem said.
“He’s colored and he’s a queer. Lord God a’mighty.” But the whimsical tone stopped suddenly and he put the magazine down and his face hardened in a way I’d never seen before. It was like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, how when you became a pod person your face changed, too, to something not quite human. “I’ll tell you one thing. I got two daughters. Two nice, clean white daughters. I ever catch a buck nigger around either one
of my daughters he’s a dead buck nigger, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Aw, hell,” said Bill. “I know some nice colored folks, don’t you, McCain?”
“Sure,” I said. “Lem’s dad, for one.”
“I’m gonna shut your goddamn mouth one of these days, McCain,” Lem said. We’d hated each other for a long time.
“That before or after you burn the cross on my lawn?”
“Now, now, boys,” Bill said.
I guess Lem was doing me a favor.
He’d made me actually want to go to the morgue. Anywhere to get away from him.
I was about two blocks from the morgue when a police motorcycle, a big Indian with a windshield and chrome handle grips and chrome saddlebags and streamers half as long the bike itself, came right up over the curb and sent me flying and my briefcase skidding down the sidewalk.
Cliffie. Clifford Wilbur Skyes, Jr.
“Aw, gee, counselor, I’m sorry.
Guess I didn’t see you there.”
I’d like to say he only hurt my pride.
But he’d also given my left hip a hell of a jolt. “I can see how that’d happen, Cliffie.
Clear sunny day like this one.”
“I thought we had an agreement about that Cliffie stuff.” He had his Glenn Ford duds on, and he was looking fierce the way only an overweight bully with little pig eyes and jagged teeth can look fierce.
“Long as you keep pushing me around the way you do, the Cliffie stays.”
“Don’t forget, counselor, I could throw your ass in jail.”
“Yeah, and I want to hear your lawyer in front of the Iowa Supreme Court when he tells them that you threw me in jail because I called you Cliffie. They’ll get a good laugh out of that one.”
“Yeah, well, they won’t be laughing when my lawyer says you obstructed justice.”
“Cliffie learned a new term. I’m proud of you.”
“You’re messin’ again, McCain. And that’s one thing I won’t abide this time, and that’s messin’ by McCain. And there ain’t even a reason to mess in this one, McCain. Me and my deputies already figured out who the killer is.”
“This should be good.”
“That peckerhead Chalmers. He’s got it in for Squires-Squires sent him up-s he killed Squires’s wife.” He grimaced suddenly and leaned forward on his Indian, his butt off the seat.
“What’s wrong?”
“You ever get hemorrhoids?”
“Not so far.”
“Usually use Vaseline. But I tried this stuff on Tv. Like to set me on fire. Doc Baines says it’s ‘cause I’m worried all the time. You know, about little Kim.”
He wouldn’t even give you the satisfaction of letting you hate him 100 percent clean and pure. He had to mitigate your hatred by having a two-year-old daughter with water on the brain.
He was corrupt, violent, stupid, and yet he suffered. I’d seen him in the park holding her one day on his knee. I saw a tenderness and love I wish I hadn’t seen. Even bad guys have good sides. Sometimes that can get downright exasperating.
He set his ass back down on his seat and said, “You’ve been warned, counselor. This is our case and we’re just about ready to wrap it up and we don’t want no interference from you or the Judge. Understand?”
He got the motor gunning so loudly, he couldn’t have heard me if I’d answered him.
He wheeled the bike off the sidewalk and accelerated down the street, mufflers roaring.
Rita said, “She was a beautiful girl.”
When I was younger, I never appreciated older women. Rita Fahey is forty-something and what the paperback writers always call “lushly built.” She also has a lovely face, and eyes you just can’t keep from watching. Kind of green but then again kind of blue. She’s Doc Novotny’s secretary in the morgue. She keeps the rock-and-roll loud, as if its festive qualities push back the cold stench of the place.
“She sure was.”
“You know her, McCain?”
“No. But Mary Travers did.”
She yawned. I tried not to notice what her sweater did. She never wore them tight, but it didn’t really matter. “Cliffie’s moving in for the kill. Between us, I mean.”
As Doc Novotny’s cousin and tacit boss, Cliffie gets first dibs on all murder information. I have to give him one thing.
Cliffie’s great at finding the person who looks like the killer.
“Oh? Who?”
“Mike Chalmers.”
“God.”
“Cliffie laid it out for the doc this morning. You ask me, it was Amy Squires. I saw her slap Susan Squires one night in the face at the dance pavilion. Out in the parking lot.
My husband and I were walking to our car. She was screaming she wanted Susan to let go of her husband.”
“When was this?”
“Three-four years ago.”
“Well, look who’s here,” Doc Novotny said. He has the air of a politician who resembles Humpty-Dumpty. He smokes cheap cigars, paints himself with aftershave, and wears a rug that looks like a badly injured forest creature. “Cliffie’s favorite guy.”
“Rita said you gave him all the information already,” I said, in a joking tone. “We get the crumbs as usual.”
“Are you kidding? How long was Cliffie here, Rita?” He dragged a stray hand down his paunch, as if he were stroking a pet.
“Oh, five-six minutes.”
“My cousin’s got the attention span of a kindergartner. I started explaining things to him and he immediately started looking at his watch. He thinks he’s got his murderer already; why bother him with facts?”
“Mike Chalmers?”
“Rita tol’ ya, huh? But if he would’ve listened to what I said, he might’ve changed his mind.”
“You got something interesting?”
“Very interesting.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
The shadows. The cold. The stench. None of it had changed. We walked into a tiled room with body drawers on one wall and two operating tables in the center.
He showed me the body. The head wound was vicious. Susan had one of those quietly pretty faces that holds an erotic power for men who take the time to look closely, that kind of First Communion chastity crossed with a whispered suggestion of desire.
“She die instantly?”
“Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”
“Blunt trauma the cause of death?”
“Without question.”
“Time of death?”
“Nine to eleven P.M. Friday night.
Can’t do any better than that. She had a nice little body on her. Never showed it off much.”
I’d thought the same thing and felt guilty about it.
“Pretty open and closed?”
He nodded. “Except for the bruises.”
“Bruises?”
He took out a Penlite and worked it up and down her body. The bruises were old but still violent, even as they were fading. Upper thighs.
Ribs. Lower back.
“They’re old bruises.”
“Yeah,” he said. “They are.”
“They have any significance to her death?”
“Not directly. But they suggest that somebody beat her up pretty often. Somebody who knew what he was doing. These aren’t the kind of bruises that show when you have clothes on. The amateur wife beater, he’ll give the old lady a black eye or a busted nose or a split lip and everybody knows what’s going on. But your more devious wife beater, he puts the hurt on her where it don’t show. Her thighs?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s an iron burn.”
“Iron?”
“Yeah. Like the old lady does her ironing with?”
“She was burned with an iron?”
“Yeah. And pretty bad too.”
“You ever heard of that before?”
“Oh, sure. Job like mine, I’ve heard of everything before, McCain.”
“So what you’re saying is that her husband,
David Squires, put all those bruises on her?”
“You said it,” Doc Novotny said. “I didn’t.”
Part II
Nine
My kid sister, Ruthie, said to her friend Debbie, who was sitting on the living room floor in front of that great postatomic social icon, the Tv console, “She shouldn’t dance with that blond guy. She looks better when she dances with dark-haired guys.”
“Yeah, like that cute Eye-talian,” Debbie said.
“Which cute Italian?” Ruthie said.
“There’re a lot of them.”
“The one who sort of looks like Paul Anka except his nose isn’t as big.”
“Paul’s gonna get his nose fixed.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Mom showed it to me. It was in the newspaper.”
“I wonder if his singing’ll be different. You know, when they whack off his nose that way and all.”
“Personally, I wish he wouldn’t get it fixed.”
“It’s pretty big, Ruthie.”
“Yeah, but it’s sort of cute.” Then: “I’ll ask my brother. Sam, do you think Paul Anka’s nose is too big?”
I said, “His nose isn’t. But his mouth is.”
“I think he’s a good singer,” Ruthie said.
“I’ll take Tony Bennett,” I said.
“He’s old,” Ruthie said.
“Your brother’s sure a wise ass clown,”
Debbie said.
“He sure is,” Ruthie said, glaring at me. She was pretty, like Mom, slender and fair. A lot of awkward guys trooped to our door to ensnare her. But at sixteen she wasn’t quite ready to get ensnared.
It was Monday at 3ccdg P.M. on the prairies of America, and for teenagers that meant just one thing: American Bandstand with Dick Clark. And conversations just like this, teenage girls (and boys, if they’d admit it) pondering the fates of the various stars Clark was featuring on his show to lip-synch their latest records. The Platters and Frankie Lymon and Gene Vincent and people like that. Some of them lip-synched pretty well; standing in front of a gray curtain they almost looked as if they really. were singing live. But most of them were pitiful, lagging behind the record or given to sudden vast melodramatic showbiz gestures. More important than lip-synching, however, were the questions burning in the minds of the girls watching at home.