by Ed Gorman
Again the whisper to me: “See what I mean about having kids? It’s always something.”
A few moments later, I was back in my ragtop.
I took the ten-mile blacktop back to town. Two-lane. Less than a year old.
Smooth and wrinkle-free. Just made for an Indian summer night and a car like mine. Elvis way way up singing “Mystery Train” and me with a fresh Lucky in my mouth and a sudden crazed optimism about Mary. We . were going to find her and she. was going to be all right and-I saw her in the rearview.
She first appeared as headlights. Coming fast.
She was still some distance behind me, so I didn’t think about it much. Lots of cars went fast. The Lord and the county supervisors had blessed us with our own drag strip-perfectly flat, a moon-silvered river running along one side, shaggy pines on the other-one of the few safe places to drag in the entire state.
Then she was less than three car lengths in back of me. Not slowing at all.
The Ford propeller-style grille. Her beautifully shaped head framed inside the driver’s half of the window. Blond hair, black scarf, and dark Audrey
Hepburn shades. Even at night.
All I could do was floor it. Otherwise the mystery woman would run right into me.
Then she stunned me.
She pulled out around me going eighty or eighty-five miles an hour. And man it was scary and exhilarating and wonderful and terrible all at once.
Member of the bar.
Responsible investigator for Judge Esme Anne Whitney.
Sober counselor to indigent Negroes and Indians and migrant Mexican field hands.
Former altar boy. Eagle Scout, for
God’s sake.
My future all ahead of me.
But right now, I didn’t give a damn. I was on some kind of autopilot. Badass.
Black leather jacket and motorcycle boots.
Brando Dean Bogart all rolled into one.
When she pulled up alongside me and stared at me with those dark dark shades, I found myself losing control. Some force pressed my foot to the gas pedal, brought out my best Robert Ryan grin, made me resolve to give the mystery lady the run of her life.
We raced.
I could smell wind and river and hot car oil.
I could see an empty black slab of road and bouncing headlight patterns and diamondlike eyes of cats and raccoons hiding in the grass on the piney side of the strip.
I could hear wind and motor rev and dual exhausts and rush and roar of speed speed speed.
We wouldn’t make a decent can of dog food if we crashed now. She looked straight ahead.
Both hands on the wheel. Roaring into the night.
Pulling ahead. Eighth of a car length.
Quarter of a car length. She was going to leave me behind.
I was standing on the sonofabitch. I was yelling at the sonofabitch. I was foaming and frothing at the sonofabitch. Faster faster.
Crazy was what I was.
I regained some of my momentum. My hood pulled even with her rear fender. Then my hood was even with her passenger door.
I raised my ass from my seat, pushing myself against the wheel, hoping that this position would somehow add to the velocity.
I pulled up to her front fender.
Wind taste. My Lucky butt so tiny it was burning my lips. I spat it out, the flame exploding into a million minor meteorites, burning my cheek and hair. Not that I cared. I just kept pushing, willing.
For the first time, she looked over at me. And then she somehow put even more power into her car.
And then I saw her. Not the mystery woman but the woman running down the piney hill to the blacktop.
She came up out of the small gully, looking crazed. She was waving her arms. Her face was smudgy with dirt and what appeared to be blood.
Her blouse had been ripped so you could see her white bra and the blood smeared on her shoulder and chest. Her jeans were ripped out at the knees.
She looked like an animal who has just survived a cruel ordeal.
The funny thing was, I didn’t recognize her at first. I had to cut back my speed so I wouldn’t run over her if she suddenly lunged onto the blacktop. That took most of my attention. The black Ford raced on ahead me, a shadow among shadows, vanishing.
My Ford bucked, swerved, screeched, whined, and bucked some more before I could fight it to a stop on the wrong side of the road. By now, the woman’s image had finally registered. Mary! It was Mary!
I jumped out of the car and ran back to where she’d been.
But she wasn’t there any longer.
I was alone on the blacktop. Prairie moon. Bay of coyote. Distant odor of skunk. Alone.
I ran up and down the shoulder, frantically calling her name. My legs wanted me to sit down. Bringing the ragtop from 100 mph to zero so quickly hadn’t been good for me or the car.
I ran way past where she’d been. No sign of her.
I looked up at the pines. Had she gone back into the forest? This particular patch went on for miles. Finding her, if she had set her mind on hiding, would be impossible.
Something moved on the edge of my vision, something to the right. But when I turned to look all I saw, about three hundred feet away, was a large culvert. I could hear water trickling from it. There’d been a lot of rain recently.
She peeked out again. That’s what I’d seen moments ago. She might have been a frightened deer, scared of the nearby human, uncertain of his motives.
She saw me. Our eyes met for a second.
She still looked wild, bestial. And then she retreated back inside the culvert. I imagined her racing through the culvert and out the other side to the riverbank.
I had to grab her quickly.
I hurried down the gully, through the knee-high grasses, to the culvert itself. The interior smell was terrible. Rancid water, weeds, animal feces.
She crouched in the center. I could barely see her.
“I want to help you, Mary. Please don’t run away.”
It really. was like talking to a frightened animal.
I was afraid she’d bolt at any moment.
“Please, Mary.”
I started into the culvert on hands and knees.
I could feel the sodden waste soak my trousers and coat my palms. I moved inch by inch.
She starting moving too. Every time I moved, she moved. Back.
“Mary. You need help.”
Our game continued. I’d move forward; she’d move backward. The stench kept getting worse.
She made her move without any warning whatsoever. She had room to turn around, and turn around she did. And immediately started scrambling from the culvert.
She was gone before I could get moving. When I crawled out to the riverbank, I saw her stumbling away far downstream. After the darkness of the culvert, the stars seemed especially low and bright and numerous. Dark water gently lapped the bank.
I ran after her. She helped me by looking over her shoulder every few yards and by stumbling several times.
The river’s edge was sand and hard mud. On a warm night like this, you’d usually find a fisherman or two. The rutted mud explained her stumbling. I stumbled a few times myself.
And then I closed on her. By this time, we were both out of breath and had slowed down measurably. I came dragging up behind her and took her shoulder and pulled her to a stop.
She screamed.
I pulled her to me and clamped my hand over her mouth.
She started kicking me in the shins. It hurt like hell.
“Mary, what’s wrong with you?” I said. “It’s me, McCain. McCain, Mary.”
Then I saw something awful. Something impossible. Those eyes of hers. There was no recognition in them.
Exhausted, she’d quit kicking me. Quit wrestling inside my grasp. I let go of her, took my hand from her mouth.
“Mary,” I said, “don’t you know who I am?”
She looked at me with the frank, uncomprehending gaze of a chi
ld. In a very quiet voice, no melodrama whatsoever, she said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
Part III
Sixteen
“You’re saying she has amnesia?” Miriam Travers said.
Dr. Watkins pawed at his jowly face.
He still wore a black rinse on his once-gray hair and still filled his showerhead with aftershave lotion.
He stank of it the way frontier docs, according to legend, had stunk of John Barleycorn. His wife had died two years ago. He was sixty-four and had just started dating. There were a lot of gentle jokes about his love life.
“Now that’s one of those five-dollar words I hate to use,” he said, fiddling with his stethoscope. The only hospital in Black River Falls was a sixteen-bed affair. If you were very bad off, you went to Cedar Rapids; worse than that, you went to Iowa City. He peered down at Mary, asleep in her hospital bed. She’d been cleaned up but you could still see bruises. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock. So right now she’s not remembering too good.”
“But she didn’t even recognize me!”
Miriam said. She’d held back tears for quite a while now. It was 2ccjj A.M. and she was spent. She had a very sick husband at home and a daughter whose state had yet to be determined.
I slid my arm around her. She leaned against it, frail and weary.
“Again, Miriam, we don’t know what happened. But obviously something pretty bad did. Amnesia, as they like to call it on television, comes in all kinds of forms. It rarely lasts very long. I expect in a day or two she’ll be saying hello to you when you walk into the room.”
“But where has she been? What happened to her?”
Miriam said.
Those were the questions of the evening. I’d brought her straight to the hospital. She’d slept most of the way. Not once had she shown any recognition of me. A couple of times, I wondered if she was still alive.
“As I told you, Miriam, there’s no sign of concussion. She has feeling in all her extremities. Her limbs are functioning well. And the bumps and scrapes she has are relatively minor. Cleaning them up made them look a lot less threatening. Her injuries mostly seem to be psychological. And there again, once she gets her physical strength back, she’ll be better able to deal with whatever happened to her.”
“Was she… raped?” Miriam asked, obviously dreading the answer.
“Not that we could tell.”
“I didn’t tell Bill about any of this,” she said to me.
“Good,” I said.
“I’m not sure he could stand to hear it.”
I gave her another squeeze.
“Now, I recommend some bedrest for you too.
You’re nearly as worn out as your daughter. You need some sleep. And you also need some help around the house.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I’ve got a high school girl who plans to go to med school at the university. She helps out in my office ten hours a week. I pay her thirty-five cents an hour. She wants to get as much experience as she can. I’ll have her give you a call.”
“That’s very nice of you, doctor.”
He smiled. “Well, isn’t that what doctors are supposed to be, Miriam?
Nice?”
On the way back home, she said, “She was going to tell you something.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I knew what it was.”
“So do I.”
She turned and looked at me. “I shouldn’t say this, Sam. But she loves you so much.”
The streets were empty. A rising wind whipped the streetlights around, casting shifting patterns of tree leaves on the street. The cars along the curb looked like slumbering animals. All the house windows were dark.
She said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine, Miriam. It’s fine. It’s just I don’t know what to say back.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s all right, Sam.”
“I keep wondering about that envelope from the county.”
“So do I. I don’t know why she’d write them. What would she be looking for?”
“I’ll have the Judge call over there,” I said. “The woman I spoke to didn’t want to wade back through all her correspondence.
That’s what she said, anyway. She was speaking to a peon so she didn’t have to worry. You know how bureaucrats are. But she won’t try that with the Judge.”
“Judge Whitney is some woman. I wish I could be more like her in some ways.”
I laughed. “Not all ways, huh?”
She smiled sadly. “No, I wouldn’t ever want to be as stuck-up as she is. You know, you think people are stuck-up sometimes just because they’re shy or because they’ve been hurt and they’re afraid to be hurt again. But with the Judge you know she’s stuck-up because she really does consider herself superior.”
“Oh, yes. Very much. Maybe it was all the Connecticut water she drank growing up.”
“Is there something wrong with Connecticut water?”
“Well, the longer you drink it,” I said, “the bigger your head seems to get. There must be a connection somewhere.”
The sad smile again.
When we reached her house, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a good man.”
“Thanks, Miriam.”
There were a lot of lies, social lies, I could have told just then but I didn’t have the spiritual energy. You know, that everything was going to be fine.
Mary would be fine. Bill would experience a miraculous recovery. And she’d open her bankbook and find an extra $100eajjj in her account, the angels having deposited it before fluttering their way back to heaven.
“Good night, Miriam.”
I returned her kiss. I started to get out of the car but she said, “I’m not quite that feeble yet, Sam.”
I watched her walk to the door. There were a lot of people like her in our town: good, solid, hardworking people who took care of their own. Her bad luck had bent her but it hadn’t beaten her. She moved slower than I’d ever seen her move before.
On the porch, after getting the front door open, she turned and waved back to me.
I went home.
TV had long ago signed off. The Cedar Rapid stations never broadcast past midnight; often they went off after the eleven o’clock news. I was drained but not sleepy. I spent half an hour twisting the rabbit ears back and forth, trying to form pictures out of the noisy snow on my screen. I had a pair of rabbit ears that were the envy of Mrs. Goldman’s apartment house. They must have weighed twenty pounds and had more buttons and dials and doodads and doohickeys than most intergalactic spaceships. If you knew all the right codes and combinations, it would also mow your lawn and give milk. It was quite a rig. Most nights anyway. But not tonight. Every once in a while, an image would sort of form and I’d hear dialogue and get my hopes up, but then the signal would fade and there would just be snow again. I gave up. That’d be one of the nice things about living in Chicago. You could watch Tv all night.
I sat in my reading chair and drank a beer.
So many questions, including the identity of the girl in the black Ford ragtop. Would I have been in the right spot to find Mary if the mystery lady hadn’t challenged me to a race? Was she some kind of guardian angel? And Mary’s amnesia. The doc was probably right.
Temporary amnesia was probably fairly common in accident victims. But it was still disturbing that she couldn’t recognize her own mother.
I picked up a John D. MacDonald novel called Dead Low Tide. I’d read it a couple of times before. I always came back to it. It made me feel better in the way saying a prayer made me feel better. The ritual of repetition. There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero.
He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be. I think that’s why
John D.’s books are so popular.
Because we all know deep down we’re sort of jerks. Not all the time. But every once in a while we’re jerks and we have to face it and it’s never fun. You see how deeply you’ve hurt somebody, or how you were wrong about somebody, or how you let somebody down. But facing it makes you a better person. Because maybe next time you won’t be quite as petty or arrogant or cold.
Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without ever letting on. All this is according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as taught in lively and deft style by Dr. Harold Gelbman at the University of Iowa.
Forgive me. It was late at night and I was in a ruminative mood. Creak of old house.
Jet plane far above roaring into darkness, contrail across prairie moon. Needing to take a leak but too lazy to get up. Hungry but too tired to fix anything. Sleepy now but too comfortable to walk to bed. Dozing with one cat on my lap, one cat on the arm of the chair, and one cat sleeping on the back of the chair with her head resting on the top of my head. And snoring. Cats can snore pretty good when they’re up to it.
And then the phone rang.
It’s a measure of how deeply asleep I was that I jumped up as if I’d been poked. The cats jumped up, too, scattered quickly.
I was baffled for a moment, staring at a small black jangling instrument I’d never seen before.
I couldn’t imagine what its purpose was.
And then I snatched up the receiver.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello!”
“Mr. McCain?” Very faint.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. Ellie. Ellie…
Chalmers.”
“Hi, Ellie.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Just reading is all.”
Silence.
“Ellie?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“He’ll be mad if I do.”
“Who will?”
“My dad.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
“I’m just scared is all.”
“What happened?”
“Sykes came to where Dad works today and hauled him out in front of everybody. They pick on him a lot anyway, on account of he was in prison.”