Shoot The Moon (and more)

by Max Allan Collins

  Platform trucks. Two of them. The type of truck that has a sort of floor it drags along behind its cab, just a flat open floor. A platform.

  The two trucks took up a lot of the space in the street.

  Both of them pulled down by the saw-horse divider that was blocking the street off, and as soon as they had come to a stop, two panel trucks rolled in and joined them.

  The panel trucks had writing on them. One had the words “Country Plowboys” written on the side. One had the word “Rox” written on the side. I watched, in fascination and horror, as amplifiers and other sound equipment was hauled out of the panel trucks and set up on the platforms of the platform trucks. It was, of course, the country western band (the Plowboys) and the rock group (Rox) who were setting up to play dance music at different intervals during the afternoon and perhaps (I shuddered to think) the evening, as well.

  Meanwhile, the talent show was getting under way on the stage. A boy of about thirteen was playing “Jesus Christ Superstar” on a saw. What can I say.

  After the musical saw number terminated, a girl played a medley of Beatles songs on the Hammond organ, which gave me the insane urge to rollerskate to Liverpool, and I began looking at people in the crowd, studying them, trying to see who made up the little town of Wynning.

  They were just people. Not hicks, either. There was a certain number of men who were obviously farmers, with old-fashioned apparel of the man who works on a farm and is proud of it. But the wives and children of these men didn’t look any different from the wives and children of the middle class anywhere.

  Of course I admit I grew up in Nebraska, and went to school in Illinois, and that naturally means the ways of the Middle West aren’t new to me. They are, in fact, all I know. But as far as I can tell, those ways aren’t particularly different from any place else in the country. Television is probably what’s done it, what’s made us all pretty much the same. I guess maybe we should be thankful for things like the Wynning Founder’s Day, and other regional nonsense, designed to make us remember we come from towns and states, and not just a country.

  Anyway, the people here looked normal enough. The town seemed to have its share of kids with long hair and fashionably sloppy clothes, and pretty young girls in stylish, sexy outfits, and young married couples wearing the same sort of clothes young married couples in New York wear on a hot summer day, I suppose. And little kids were running around and making noise and falling down and wearing clothes that were already dirty, even though the morning was barely half over.

  I also thought I could pick out a few University people. Wynning is just a stone’s toss from Iowa City and the University of Iowa, and apartments and houses in a university town are hard (and expensive) to come by, so not surprisingly a certain number of bearded, pipe-smoking men in poorly fitting somber sportshirts walked arm in arm with lean-faced, short-haired liberated women wearing studiously unattractive slacks and sweaters.

  One person, though, particularly caught my eye. This person was female, as you may have guessed. This person was wearing a red, white and blue sparkle swim suit.

  Well, not exactly a swim suit, but that’s as close as I can come to describing it properly. You see, she was the band majorette I mentioned before, briefly, and she was really something. She had blond hair and dark blue eyes. She had a very nice figure. She looked familiar to me, but then all pretty girls look somewhat familiar; I mean, the conventional sort of attributes that make girls pretty makes for a lot of them looking alike. If you follow me.

  I followed her, with my eyes, as she practiced with her baton, out in the street; she had the good sense not to bother with the entertainment on the bandshell stage (right now a middle-aged heavy-set lady was imitating Groucho Marx) and was prancing out there, probably playing the exhibitionist more than practicing her baton work (which was as flawless as it was intricate) and had drawn a crowd of guys, who were watching, with round-eyed adoration.

  The more I watched her, the more familiar she looked. Wishful thinking you might say, but I really felt I had seen her somewhere before, though what any acquaintance of mine would be doing in Wynning was beyond me, too, so I kept studying her, forcing myself to focus on her face, to try to dredge up the memory of where it was I’d seen her before.

  And then it came to me.

  It was the girl I had bumped into when I was streaking through the DeKalb Holiday Inn. The girl in the bikini. There was no mistaking that young, pretty face. That blond hair. Those dark blue eyes. Or the rest of her, either.

  And here I was staring at her! What if she noticed me, and, Lord! What if she recognized me, too?

  As the thought passed through my mind that I had to turn away, before our eyes met, our eyes met. She dropped her baton.

  She smiled.

  She recognized me.

  Chapter 28

  She rushed over, a blur of blond hair and flashing thighs and patriotic glitter, and said, “Well, hello!”

  “Er,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She giggled and scooted in next to me on the bench. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

  That elicited a startled look from the middle-aged couple on the other side of me, but my pretty majorette didn’t seem to notice, or anyway care, and she bubbled on, “I’m so glad to see you! And surprised!”

  A fat man in front of us turned and held a finger to pudgy lips and shushed us. There was a talent show going on, after all. A man was on stage doing tricks with a yo-yo.

  “We better get out of here if we want to talk,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll let you buy me a lemonade.”

  And before I could answer, she was standing up, and two of the nicest boobies (as Wheat would say) ever to be decorated in red, white and blue sparkles were looking right at me. She took my hand, pulled me to my feet and led me away.

  Normally, I wouldn’t mind at all being led away by a girl as beautiful as this, a girl who had that golden-haired wholesome look used in television commercials to make the American male think of sex and buy milk.

  But I was in no mood for sex or milk or lemonade, either. I was, remember, in the middle of the worst situation of my life, and this vision of blond Midwestern liveliness was walking in at a most inopportune moment. I don’t mean to be a complainer, but I think you’d have to agree that Fate just hadn’t been on my side through this whole thing, and this was a hell of a time to throw me a crumb, even a beautiful, shapely crumb like this.

  Anyway, pretty soon we were standing in front of the Tacomobile and she was saying, “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in Wynning.”

  I opened my mouth, but my mind couldn’t seem to find anything to fill the opening.

  “I know!” she said, suddenly brightening. “You came to see me, didn’t you!”

  “Right,” I agreed. “Right. To see you.”

  “How did you know where to look for me? How did you find me?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “You’re a sly one,” she said, nudging me in the ribs, winking. “Going to keep me guessing, huh?”

  “If I, uh, told you how I found you,” I heard myself saying, “that’d take, uh, some of the fun out of it. Some of the mystery.”

  A nice-looking brown-haired girl in one of the hideous marching band uniforms was ahead of us in line at the Tacomobile window. She heard us talking and turned and looked with envy and even scorn at her fellow band member wearing the skimpy, sparkly majorette outfit, and said, “Who’s the new boyfriend, Sue Ann? Find a replacement for Bo Bo so soon?”

  Sue Ann put her hands on her very attractive hips and smiled at her catty friend in genial defiance. “His name is Fred Kitchen,” she said. “And he came all the way from Sycamore, Illinois, to see me, didn’t you, Fred? Fred? Are you all right, Fred?”

  I was Fred, all right. The TILT light in my head was going on, but I was Fred. I conjured up a smile as weak as my knees. “I’m fine,” someone said. Me, apparently.r />
  The brown-haired girl said, “Hi, Fred. I’m Julie.” She extended a hand.

  I looked at it. After a while I remembered about shaking hands, yes, that’s a native American custom, shaking hands. I shook her hand. I shook period.

  Sue Ann said, “Fred, are you sure you’re all right? You look kind of sick.”

  “Uh, Sue Ann,” I said. “Could we go someplace private and talk?”

  The brown-haired girl, Julie, said, “Well!” huffily, like Jack Benny, and turned quickly away. I guess I hurt her feelings or offended her or something, although I hadn’t meant to be rude; my mind was not organized enough at the moment for me to do anything so controlled as to be purposely rude to someone.

  But Sue Ann didn’t seem to mind my accidental rudeness, and even smiled at me for it. Even in my shell-shocked state, it was coming through that the two girls didn’t like each other much.

  So I bought lemonades at the Tacomobile window and Sue Ann led me behind the concession wagons up onto the step-up sidewalk, where we sat on the slight porch of one of the storefronts.

  Sue Ann slurped at her lemonade. Through a straw. She had on some sort of pale, frosty lipstick that made her lips glisten like the sparkles on her skimpy suit.

  So she knew me. I remembered vaguely telling here my name was Fred, when I bumped into her, streaking; but I didn’t remember telling her Fred Kitchen. Or had I?

  Finally she looked up from her lemonade and said, “Are you always so quiet, Fred?”

  “No. I’m just a little... surprised.”

  “Surprised? Why? I’m the one who’s surprised, having you come look me up like this!”

  “Well, I’m surprised you remembered my name, is all.”

  “Silly! You were in all the papers! Don’t you think I was interested, having bumped into you like I did? I almost felt famous myself! I saved all the clippings.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Sure! That’s a really funny picture, you know, of you and your friend streaking through those wedding guests. But maybe it doesn’t seem so funny to you. I mean, going to jail and all.”

  “Jail wasn’t so bad.”

  “Really? Well, I suppose if you’re stuck inside a place like that for a whole month you learn to live with it. Maybe even make some friends, I suppose.”

  “I made some friends I’ll never forget.”

  “I’ll bet! Do you keep in touch with any of them?”

  “Now and then.”

  She slurped her lemonade thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Listen, Fred, I’m... I’m really touched by what you’ve done.” I was touched, too: she was touching my knee. “I mean, it’s really something, you going to so much trouble to track me down so you could see me again.”

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said, “you know, it’s not necessary for me to hang around here, at this Founder’s Day thing. I mean, I’m done for the day. All I had to do was my majorette stuff when we marched in behind the governor’s car, and that’s it. I don’t have any part in the band concert, later on, there’s no part for a majorette in that, so... so how would you like to go over to my house, and try to think of something to do?”

  I would like that fine. It was escape. Limited escape, perhaps. Illusionary, temporary escape, certainly. But escape.

  Out of this Founder’s Day nightmare, for a while at least.

  “What... what if your parents should come home?” I asked.

  “Who says we’d be doing anything they wouldn’t approve of?” she asked, coyly. Then squeezed my knee again and said, “Besides, Mom’s out of town, tending her sick sister. And Dad was called out of town, too, on business, unexpectedly.”

  “Your dad was what?”

  “Called out of town on business, unexpectedly. He works right here.” And she jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the building behind us.

  At which point I realized for the first time we were sitting on the stoop in front of the bank.

  When my heart started up again, I said, “Your... your father is the local banker?”

  She nodded. “But don’t you worry about him coming home. He’s going to be tied up all day.”

  Chapter 29

  We walked to where she lived. It wasn’t far. In fact it was just around the corner from the bank, on a street as quiet, clean and residential as those I’d driven through coming into town this morning. These homes were newer, however, and there were fewer trees. Modern houses, ranch styles mostly, three-bedroom numbers, sitting on flat, well-tended lawns. Wynning’s two-and-a-half block housing addition.

  Sue Ann Wynning, her mother and-father (Sue Ann was an only child, I quickly learned) lived in one of the nicest of these homes, a split level, with barnwood siding, a double garage and money written all over it.

  “That’s some house,” I said, slightly awestruck, as we walked up the driveway toward it.

  We were arm in arm. Sue Ann was snuggling in against me. Affectionate child. She said, “It’s okay. I liked our other house better.”

  “Other house?”

  “Daddy wanted something smaller, this time.”

  “Smaller?”

  We were walking up the front steps, now.

  “Our other house, in Cedar Rapids, was one of those big old gothic places, with secret passages and a tower and everything. It was an estate, really.”

  “No kidding?”

  Sue Ann opened the front door. It was unlocked. She said, “See, Daddy’s sort of semi-retired. His family’s been in banking for years, and he used to be president of the big bank in Cedar Rapids, like his Daddy before him.”

  “Is he old enough to be semi-retired?”

  “Not really, but what with his heart condition and all, he doesn’t have much choice.”

  “Heart condition?”

  “Yes. He had a lot of stress in his work in Cedar Rapids, and the doctor told him to slow down, so he quit his president job and took this little branch office thing here in Wynning, four years ago.”

  “How... how bad is his heart condition?”

  “Why, Fred! You seem really upset. I think you’re trembling! What’s the matter?”

  “Uh, it’s just, uh, there’s been some heart trouble in my family, too, and it’s something you really have to watch.”

  And then she looked at me like she had never seen such compassion before, like I was a saint. “Fred, I feel like I’ve known you for years,” she said, breathlessly. Lips moist. Eyes hooded. “I feel I want to know you for years.”

  I wondered how she’d feel if she knew she was entertaining Charles Manson, which is who I might as well have been. It would make a good headline for the cheap tabloids: SHE FELL IN LOVE WITH HER FATHER’S MURDERER! I pictured myself walking down that long corridor to the little room where the electric chair would be waiting, my Methodist minister father walking alongside me, Bible in his hands, asking me why I took off my clothes and streaked through the DeKalb Holiday Inn.

  “How about a tour?” she asked.

  “Tour?”

  “Of the house, silly. Fred, you don’t take drugs, do you?”

  “Uh, no. Of course not.”

  “Because I’m a firm believer in maintaining a healthy body.”

  “I can see that.”

  “And well, I couldn’t go for a boy who took drugs. I like a good time like anybody else, but I’m anti-drug as heck.”

  “Me too.”

  “Then how come you look so strung out?”

  “Oh. Do I? Well. I’m just, uh...”

  “I know,” she said with a Mona Lisa smile. “I understand. Really I do.”

  I was glad somebody did.

  “You’re surprised,” she continued, coming over and sitting in my lap.

  “I... I sure am.”

  “I mean you’re surprised to find that I feel the same way about you as you do about me. You met me just for a moment, and yet I stayed in your thoughts. No, now don’t be shy. Don’t be modest. That’s how it
was. Just like in the song.”

  “The song?”

  “‘Some Enchanted Evening’.”

  She sang a few bars. She was a soprano.

  “We did South Pacific in high school,” she explained. “I had the lead.”

  “You really ought to go out for Founder’s Day Queen. You’d be a snap to win talent.”

  “Don’t be so silly. That rinky-dink thing! Did you see that bunch of dogs they had this year? It’s a joke. Besides, I couldn’t be in it because I was already committed to be band majorette.”

  “I see.”

  “Where was I, Fred?”

  “You were singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in my lap.”

  “Oh. Yes. Anyway, you saw me for just a moment, but that moment meant something to you. You remembered me. You came looking for me, like a detective or something. And you didn’t know it, but I felt the same way about you. Especially when I saw that picture of you in all the papers and everything. Did you know you were on the NBC news?”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “John Chancellor told about you streaking, and that you got thirty days for it. He smiled when he told about the streaking, and frowned when he told about the thirty days.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Now do you see why I felt famous just bumping into you that fateful night?” And she grinned and giggled after saying the phrase “fateful night” and then leaned up and gave me a big, wet, soulful kiss.

  And hot. I left that out: hot. Maybe that was implied in soulful, but I want to get across to you just how powerful a kisser this girl was. She really put herself into it, and I appreciated the effort.

  She kissed me a few more times, and when she was done, she said, “How about it?”

  “How... how about what?” I said, drunkenly. Hopefully.

  “How about that tour I promised you?” she said, hopping out of my lap, giving me a teasing grin, and then taking me by the hand again, hauling me out of the chair and leading me around the house.