All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Cindasoo, I feel sorry for anyone who married into the Haggerty clan, but I never did like Harry much, and I don’t approve of larceny. If I’d seen him, I’d tell you.…”

  She looked up at me, again the shrewd mountain animal, nodded her head as though I had convinced her, and walked out into the sheets of rain. She winced when the first deluge of water hit her. “Thank you very much for the coffee and donuts, Mr. Murphy. The commandant of the coast guard thanks you, so does the secretary of transportation, and so does the president … only”—and she actually smiled very pleasantly at me—“don’t try to deduct the expenses from your income tax.”

  So I ’lowed to myself that I was in a whole heap of trouble, cogitatin’ ’bout fallin’ in love with a female varmint from the hollers when I should have been doin’ up my term paper.

  Then I ’lowed as how my poah ole mammy would dote on Cindasoo and would never forgive me for not hog-tying her if she found I had the chance.

  One thirty I finished exactly two paragraphs about the Irish traveling folk (or Irish Gypsies, if you want to call them that, though they’re not really Gypsies) in America.

  I gave it up, made two large hamburgers with everything and a thermos of hot coffee, and walked down the slippery stairs to the beach. I noticed that the storm winds (in excess of forty knots, according to KWO from Sears Tower) had knocked over the totem pole at the house next door. It hung drunkenly over two nymphs and fauns in the rock garden, as though it were going to fall against the door on my nutty neighbor’s terrace level.

  Down on the shore the ugly white walls were still sweeping in. It was a nice, soggy beach to walk on, with the sand squishing under your feet, if you didn’t mind twenty-seven knots of wind blowing straight down the lake from the Soo.

  I found Cindasoo a half mile down the beach in the New Buffalo direction, a lonely little figure huddling against a battered old boat house, shivering with the cold and looking all plumb tuckered out. She refused neither hamburger nor coffee.

  “Nice of you to shuckle out and bring me vittels.”

  I pointed out that if you huddled under the overhang of the boat house, you only got half the rain you’d get out on the beach.

  “How long you out here?” I asked over the howl of the wind.

  “Twelve-hour duty. Me and my big redneck mouth.”

  “You don’t really expect to find them out here, do you, Miz Cindasoo?” I asked in my best corn-pone accent, digging into the second half of my hamburger.

  “Look, Pete Murphy, boy anthropologist”—the little bitch had guessed that—“don’t patronize me, or I’ll go after you with my varmint gun.”

  Again she started out being angry and turned friendly. I was getting kind of worried.

  “Anyway, I figure it has to be somewhere between the crick and New Buffalo. No way you can cross the crick when the waves are rolling in. If they walk down toward New Buffalo, they’d run into the permanent residents. That gives them about a mile and a half of beach.…” She continued to munch efficiently on her hamburger. Small girl with a big appetite. And, I filed it away for future reference, a very neat little rear end.

  “If they have the kind of criminal minds that you have and are smart enough to think that way … Harry O’Connell is no prize when it comes to brains.”

  “The woman is. Woulda worked, too, ’ceptin for Mrs. Blue Gazebo.”

  “How do you see the case, Cindasoo McLeod, girl detective?”

  “Well.” She dragged the introductory word out and once again paid no attention to my sarcasm. The attractive little petty officer was perfectly prepared to accept the label of detective. “I been figurin’. If I was goin’ to disappear round hyar, and if I knew this crazy lake, I’d think, Cindasoo, what if the sky clabbers up and the waves turn right smart? I’d take a gander at the beach and not want to climb over that pesky groin in front of you’un’s pump house.”

  “So if you were planning to disappear somewhere near the blue gazebo, you’d have to come ashore between the pump house and the crik … uh, creek.”

  “Yassuh, twixt the pump house and the crik … lessen you get plumb knocked in by them powerful wave things.”

  She drew a diagram on the sand. “So happenchance that you’d be hiding in one of these eight houses ’twixt the crik, hyar, and the pump house, hyar.”

  “That narrows the search, doesn’t it? Only eight houses where they might be, ifin your theory is right, Cindasoo, girl detective.”

  “Six. Ah cased your house this morning. And we can eliminate Mrs. Blue Gazebo.” She rubbed out the diagram with the impatient toe of an absurdly tiny coast-guard sneaker.

  “Cased is not Appalachian English.”

  “Is now.” She smiled at me and my heart stopped stone dead.

  “Let’s go case the other six houses.”

  “Ah cain’t do that. Ah don’t have no federal warrant.”

  “Can’t you watch a civilian poke his shanty Irish nose around?”

  “Ah suppose so … would you really, Mr. Peter Murphy, suh?”

  “For that smile, Cindasoo McLeod, I’d do almost anything.”

  So we climbed over the groin and up the side of the dune, and worked our way through the gardens and the poolsides and the patios on our part of the beach, a-peekin’ an’ a-pookin’ and a-prowlin’. Have you ever prowled a summer resort in early autumn? It’ll give you an idea of what earth might be like the day after the end of the world.

  We didn’t find nothin’. So drippin’ wet, we stood on a concrete seawall and surveyed the angry lake.

  “Ah’m just about ready to holler calf rope.” Cindasoo sighed. “I’m plumb tuckered out.”

  “Climbing up all them stairs like a jackrabbit would tucker anyone out.”

  She had led the way on our a-pokin’ and a-prowlin’ like a forest creature bounding through the mountains, a slender, fragile li’l varmint whose energy and charm would break your heart. Mine anyway.

  “Peter Murphy, suh, the pump house!”

  “You don’t think they could be hiding there?”

  She charged down the dune to the pump house without bothering to answer. I traipsed along after her and arrived a good half minute after she had thrown open the door and bounced inside.

  Thank God the place was empty, save for a powerful lot of spiders.

  I took firm possession of her attractive little shoulders and held her against the slimy and rusty green wall of the dim old pump house.

  “Cindasoo McLeod, don’t you dare take a chance like that again, lessen I have to put you over my knee and spank that gorgeous rear end of yours.”

  “Varmint.” She sighed as I kissed her.

  I could tell Cindasoo hadn’t been kissed very often before. She was startled but not exactly offended.

  “What for did you do that for?”

  “My mammy, who is a psychiatrist, says that it’s natural for young men and women to kiss one another.”

  The good doctor had never quite said that; she never needed to.

  “Ya mammy is a shunuf head shrinker?” Her green eyes opened wide.

  “Uh-huh. So’s my pappy.” I touched the side of her face. “And my uncle is a pure quill Catholic priest.”

  “Does he have horns?”

  I realized that much of her redneck act was just that: an act. Half fun and full earnest, as Grandpa Ned would say. Partly a defense and partly a put-on. Grandpa Ned would like Cindasoo.

  I kissed her again. She pushed me away, but not decisively.

  “Go ’long with you. I’m a decent acorn calf. You got no call to try to hornswoggle me; you’re nothing but a sky-gogglin’ side-hill slicker, a bodacious fuddle-britches.”

  I laughed. She didn’t.

  “Get out of here, ya hear?”

  I had scared her. Shame on me. Shanty Irish bumbler. Still, she was close to laughing.

  “Sure enough, mountain flower.” I walked back into the wind, which seemed to have picked up while I was kissing Cindas
oo. I thought that somehow it was friendly wind, thoroughly approving of my romantic advances. “But at five o’clock—’scuse me, ma’am, seventeen hundred hours,—I’m going to be on our sundeck with something in the way of supper. If you show up, I might just note another tax deduction.”

  Cindasoo McLeod, girl detective, looked at me coldly, almost said something rude, turned her face away, and mumbled, “Can’t tell what someone might do at five o’clock if they’re hungry enough.” She laughed, first time I’d heard it, a kind of bell-like sound in the middle of the woods.

  “The coast guard,” I said, “should not be searching for anything but dead bodies. You sure you don’t want company?” I shouted to be heard above the banshee wind as she walked away.

  She turned back and shook her head decisively. “I’m jes’ moseyin’ round to the beach lookin’. That doesn’t need help. You go back and finish your term paper so your poah old mammy won’t have to worry about you.”

  She must have guessed that, too. Sherlock Holmes at Grand Beach. And I still wondered what she looked like under that sweatshirt.

  Anyhow, at five o’clock—oops, seventeen hundred hours—Cindasoo Lou McLeod (her full, sure-enough name, and her mammy made corn pone and moonshine up the hollers and I didn’t believe any of it anymore) and I were sitting on my family’s sundeck overlooking the seawall which keeps the lake away from the dunes, eating steak and sipping some of my poah father’s best 1961 burgundy. The clouds had finally blown off and the sun sinking toward Chicago turned our lake into a surging mass of expensive diamonds. Cindasoo ate the steak and guzzled the wine like both were going out of style.

  “You shunuf put the little pot in the big pot for me, Mr. Murphy, suh.” She glanced at the vintage year on the almost empty wine bottle, of which she had consumed at least her full share. “Your pa sure must have a powerful heap of money.”

  I said it was better than the mountain dew her father made at the still back by the outhouse. She grinned crookedly and ’lowed as how it shunuf was.

  Well, it was getting to be pleasant, what with the blue sky and the burgundy making me feel warm, and Cindasoo squinting up at the sun. She talked a lot about the hills. I could see why she liked them and why she wanted to leave. Then the grin faded and I had the girl detective on my hands again.

  “Six houses”—she ticked them off on her tiny fingers—“two with concrete seawalls that would be hard to climb, one with that high-headed ole totem pole, ’nother one with an empty prefabricated storage hut by the side of the pool—”

  “’Nother one with a shanty Irish football player.”

  She held my jaw steady with her right hand and kissed me. Her lips tasted of steak sauce and burgundy.

  “Who kisses putty good for a papist.”

  I realized I was being pursued by a shrewd hunter with a varmint gun. No, not pursued, hog-tied, ’fore I knew what had happened.

  “You’re tryin’ to seduce me, bodacious Cindasoo.”

  “Tell me, Peter Murphy, suh”—she changed the subject abruptly—“about that weird old house next door to yours,” she said thoughtfully, eyeing the tilted totem pole, the rock garden, the nymphs, fauns, and elves, and the ugly rusty seawall. “We didn’ find anythin’ there either, but it sure is a passin’ strange place.”

  “It belongs to a crazy lady who is never around. There are all kinds of work persons who come in periodically and do things like trimming the hedges, painting the nymphs, and straightening out the totem pole.”

  “Could anyone be hidin’ in that house?”

  I swear she was sniffing the air like a hound dog.

  “Not likely,” I said. “She pays the town marshal to look around inside every night. I saw him go in last night.”

  “Hmm … well, it was a nice idea. Give me some more of that dew; it shunuff makes the cold go away.…”

  So I poured out the last few ounces of the wine. Our eyes must have locked on the door at the terrace level of the nutty rock garden at the same moment.

  “What’s…” asked Cindasoo.

  “It’s supposed to be an apartment she built there for her husband. A couple of rooms in the side of the hill with beads and cushions. At least that’s the beach legend.…”

  It was crazy, but we went up to have a look. I didn’t even argue. We crawled over the old retaining wall, crept across my neighbor’s smoothly cut lawn, and got to the edge of the roof of the apartment. Cindasoo had her ear to the ground.

  “Don’ hyar nothin’,” she said, now completely the mountain huntress. “Let’s go have a closer look-see.…”

  I helped her down the face of the retaining wall and jumped down next to her. We were right in front of the door, which was a sure enough damn fool place to be.

  The door swung open suddenly. There was a woman, blond and hard-faced, dressed in jeans and a white sweater, pointing a gun at us. Harry O’Connell was cowering behind her, a gun in his hand, too. I wondered, almost as an abstract speculation, whether they knew how to shoot and whether they were going to add murder to larceny and adultery.

  Cindasoo Lou McLeod did more than speculate. She dived at the woman, hitting her in the stomach with her auburn head, shoving the gun away with her left hand. The gun went off, a bullet whistling a safe distance above my head.

  Harry ran over me like a semitrailer, a briefcase in his hand. I never did like the lout. Remembering that I was a strong-side safety, I grabbed an ankle with one hand and tripped him up. I would have had him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a gun barrel come down on Cindasoo’s head. I let him go and jumped the woman, who was pulling the gun back to strike again.

  She was, let me tell you, a biting, scratching tiger, a real cave woman. Finally, All-American honorable mention that I was, I managed just barely to wrestle the gun out of her hands. She took off after Harry, who was scrambling up the hill.

  I carried Cindasoo into the stuffy cave. It did have beads and pillows just like we had believed when we were growing up. Cindasoo’s hair was bloody, but she seemed to be breathing all right.

  I pulled her walkie-talkie out of the jacket. “Mobile one to base, mobile one to base. This is Pete Murphy. I hope you folks are listening. They’re heading for the highway. They’re carrying a briefcase with a half-million dollars of negotiable securities. Get a doctor here; they’ve knocked Cindasoo out.”

  “Base to mobile one.” The slob sounded remarkably cool. “Can you identify the subjects for us, Mr. Murphy? We will notify appropriate police personnel.”

  “To hell with police personnel … get medical personnel here. Didn’t you hear me say they hurt Cindasoo?”

  I turned the damned thing off. Cindasoo was stirring.

  I still hadn’t solved the mystery of what she looked like with her jacket off, but she felt very nice and soft in my arms. She opened her eyes, focused on me, then looked frightened. Firmly and insistently she pushed me away. Well, I told myself, you’ve been given the brush-off before.

  An hour later we were standing on Lake View Avenue behind our house. Everyone was there—the state police, the county police, the township police, and the village marshal. All of them with their red and blue lights whirling. The fugitives had been “apprehended” in the woods, we were told. There was also a battered blue government motor-pool car with a very handsome black J.G., his coast-guard academy class ring on one hand and a wedding band on the other. Cindasoo Lou McLeod, girl detective, looking woebegone and confused, leaned against the hood of the car.

  “You are in real trouble, McLeod.” He seemed ’bout ready to cry. Everyone liked my Cindasoo. “You were not authorized to take subjects into custody. You should have radioed base before you attempted to apprehend them.”

  She shook her head, still dazed. “No, suh, I mean yes, suh, I mean, suh, the information was that they were armed and the woman might be dangerous. I was afraid that they might have radio equipment with which to monitor our calls. If you inspect the apartment, suh, you’ll see I was correct
in my surmise. I did not feel justified in risking Mr. Murphy’s life, suh, by attempting communication.”

  He sighed with relief. None of it was true and he knew that, but now he could write a report. He patted her arm. “Okay, mountain flower, I guess we can stand to have a heroine, though we’d sure as hell hate to have anything happen to you. We need a redneck around here to beat up on.” He flashed even white teeth at the two of us.

  I wasn’t going to be the one to ask why she couldn’t make a telephone call. Or why she endangered my life by trying to peek into the apartment. I was in love, you see, and I figured by the time the CO got around to thinking of those questions, either he’d be content with a real live redneck heroine or Cindasoo would have an answer for him.

  Besides, if our friends had seen us looking at the rock garden from the seawall and were ready for us, they might never have let us back into my house to make the call.

  So who wanted to argue?

  The next week I was sitting on the beach late in the afternoon correcting typos on my term paper (which the professor had told me rated another A-plus, much to my poah ole mammy’s delight) and soaking up the eighty-plus Indian-summer sun. You’d almost forget that there had ever been a storm. A light, peaceful haze hung over the mirror-smooth lake, the smell of burning leaves in the air.

  A girl in a green string bikini with a shirttail type thing over it was walking down the beach. I tried not to stare. She sat down beside me. I wondered how come I was so lucky. But honest, only when she began to talk did I realize it was Cindasoo McLeod, girl detective.

  “You won’t believe it”—she sighed, no redneck accent now—“but it was a waste of time. Mr. Harold O’Connell’s wife and father-in-law are disposed to be forgiving, especially since they have both him and the money back. I guess he found out that there was more to Nurse Walsh than sex when they were locked up in that horrid cave. So unless you and I want to make a fuss about assault with a deadly weapon, the whole thing is dropped.”

  “They might have killed you, Cindasoo,” I said protectively. My question about what the real Cindasoo looked like was now answered. The lines were much more than satisfactory, better than I had hoped; for to tell you the truth about my dirty imagination, it wasn’t her green eyes I was looking at anymore.