by Ed Gorman
“Hell, the mayor’s already a zombie,”
Phil said. “He don’t need no fluoride to help him.”
The men in the chair laughed. Bill and Phil had their mutual excoriation polished smooth as a vaudeville routine.
“Thanks for taking care of that contract for me,”
Jim Truman said. “I really appreciate it, Mr. McCain.”
“My pleasure.”
Truman had a long, angular face and brown eyes that had an almost cowlike docility, leading to the rumor that he might be slightly retarded in his deliberate, Osh-Kosh way. But he wasn’t retarded. He just took his time, which was what made him such a good craftsman. He’d done a lot of home repairs for my folks and charged them about the fairest prices you could ask for.
Phil said, “They hear anything more about that girl?” to no one in particular. It was his way of starting us on a new topic of conversation.
“What girl?” I said dutifully.
“Next county over. Been missing four days now. Reason I asked, she’s a shirttail cousin of one of my customers. He said she’s a real nice little gal.”
“Real nice little gal” translated to virginal. I like to sit in the barbershop and smell the hair oil and the talcum powder and the butch wax and the smoke from the various cigarettes, cigars and pipes. I like the friendship of the men and the sense you get when you have three or four generations of them sitting in the same room arguing about the Cubs or the Republicans or the latest scandal in Hollywood. An old-timer’ll tell you about his Model-T, a Ww2 vet’ll tell you what is was like in a Japanese concentration camp, somebody just back from Chicago’ll tell you about the latest skyscraper going up. What I don’t like is the local gossip, the cruelty of it. In a small town, you get punished for being different in any way, and sometimes when you sit in a small-town barbershop you get a sense of what Salem must have been like during the witch trials.
Reputations get smeared, sometimes ruined permanently. Women get ripped up especially hard. A divorc@ee is inevitably a whore, and a widow is invariably a pent-up, frustrated sex machine. The modern version of the lynch mob: They hang you with innuendo and lies.
Jim Truman said, “Maybe she ran away.”
Bill shook his head. “This cousin of hers says she wasn’t the runnin’-away type.”
Win Sullivan, the banker in Phil’s chair, laughed and said, “Maybe she ran into Sammy Davis, Jr., the way he’s been stealin’ white gals lately.”
Everybody laughed. Davis had been in the news for all his affairs with white women. I always felt sorry for him. He was a very talented guy but you could see how nervous and probably scared he was. Three southerners had recently run up on the stage where Nat King Cole was playing to a white audience and beaten him up.
America was a dangerous place for certain kinds of people.
And so it went until it was finally my turn in the chair. I dozed off and dreamed of the beautiful Pamela Forrest. We were out canoeing on a gentle blue lake and she was telling me how much she loved me.
“All done, Counselor,” Bill said, waking me up.
No lake. No canoe. No Pamela.
I was out on the street again and the aftershave Bill had slapped on stung pretty good in the February winds.
Over the noon hour, at the Woolworth lunch counter and the Rexall soda fountain and the courthouse cafeteria, the town had a dilemma.
They couldn’t decide which they should talk about first, the murder-suicide out at the Kenny Whitney place, or the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly.
I was at Rexall having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, and reading a new Peter Rabe paperback. I always sat at the far end of the counter because that’s where the metal paperback rack was. It creaked rustily and threatened to fall over every time you turned it. I usually read while I was eating. I was a big fan of Gold Medal books. For twenty-five cents (plus a penny for the governor, as folks in Iowa like to say), you could get the likes of a brand-new novel by Rabe or Charles Williams or, my favorite, John D. MacDonald.
They were well-written, intelligent books, too, despite the lurid covers. Of course, when you told people that, they’d just wink at you and say, “Sure they are.” Then they’d nod to the cover with the seminaked girl and wink at you again.
“How about some more coffee?” a female voice asked. And I looked up into the pretty and almost impossibly sweet face of Mary Travers.
Mary works days behind the counter at Rexall. She was the brightest girl in our class but her dad got throat cancer just before Mary started at the U of Iowa. She never did make it to college.
Mary is the girl my mom and dad want me to marry and God, I wish I could make myself love her. A lot of times I get so mad at Pamela that I try to make myself love Mary.
We went out several times, even went to the county fair three nights running, and we ended up making out pretty passionately at the drive-in. Mary had loved me just about as long as I’d loved Pamela. She’d lived down the block from me up in the Knolls. I’d finally gone to the senior prom with her after it was clear that Pamela wasn’t going at all because Stu Grant was going with someone else. I’d bought Mary a corsage and even managed to prevail upon an older cousin to buy me a pint of Jim Beam. He also gave me a rubber, a Trojan, and I hadn’t even asked him for it.
“Maybe you’ll need it,” he said. “It’s Mary,” I said. “I won’t need it. I don’t think of her that way.” “Mary is beautiful, cuz. Every guy in town’d like to be with Mary, even if she is an egghead.” But at the dance, the whiskey made me sad and I couldn’t stop thinking of Pamela. Mary sensed this and then she got sad, too, and we ended up out at Tomahawk Park on the cliffs, drinking until we both got sick, and then just sitting there and listening to the wilder kids who were strewn all over the park in dark hideouts of delicious sin. A lot of girls were going to lose their virginity tonight.
Senior prom night was the time to do it. I was sitting there smoking a Pall Mall and drinking one of the Pepsis that Mary had brought along. She handed me the Trojan. “It fell out of your pocket, McCain.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve never seen one before.”
I was going to say something sophisticated-something Robert Mitchum would say-y know, trying to impress her, but this was Mary. “I’ve seen them, but I’ve never used one before.”
“Did you go in and buy it yourself?”
“Rolly kind of gave it to me.”
“Did he kind of give you the whiskey, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Russian hands and roamin’ fingers,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Your cousin,” she said, “Rolly. I went on a hayrack ride with him one night. Talk about fast.”
Then, “I’m sorry I threw up,
McCain.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I threw up, too.”
She said, “I mean maybe you were thinking we might-y know, use the rubber. I mean, I don’t know if I’d actually have done it. But I guess now we’ll never know.”
I didn’t say anything. She started to cry and I didn’t know what to do and I sort of slid my arm around her and while I was doing it I could see down the front of her formal. She had small breasts but they were very sweet. I mean there’s all kinds of breasts when you think about it, noisy breasts and quiet breasts and angry breasts and melancholy breasts and sincere breasts and superficial breasts and arrogant breasts and shy breasts and probably lots of other kinds, too; her breasts were just very sweet, like Mary herself.
I guess that was the first time I wanted to love her. I mean I couldn’t love her, not in the way she wanted me to, because I loved Pamela that way. But right then, if God had given me a choice, I would’ve said reach in my brain and take Pamela out and put Mary in.
Because it would’ve made her so happy if I could have loved her that way. Pamela didn’t care if I loved her at all. But Mary would have been all shiny and new and fine with it, just a few stupid words that you hear on the jukeb
ox all the time, and she would have been so happy. So I held her and I kissed her and then we really started kissing and then we started rolling around on the grass and then it got real serious and while we didn’t use the Trojan, we came damned close, damned close, and then we were in my older brother’s 1946 Plymouth and headed out on the highway to where there was supposed to be a beer party at the old quarry and the radio was blasting Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins and the prairie night air was so cool and fresh and she sat so close to me and I was so almost in love with her that I didn’t have a single thought of Pamela for at least an entire hour.
And now, all these years later, in the sort-of maid’s outfit that Rexall made her wear, Mary filled my coffee cup and watched my face and said, “I just wondered if you’d heard.”
“You mean about you and Wes?”
“Umm-hmm.”
“Yeah, I did. And congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“He’s a very nice guy.” Actually, he was a nice guy except when it came to me. He didn’t like me at all, and I supposed I understood why.
“Yes,” she said, “he sure is.” Then, “I just decided it was time to have kids, McCain.”
She was speaking in a code I understood. What she was really saying was that she was tired of waiting around for me to come to my senses.
“I’m happy for you, Mary. I really am.”
She looked as if she was going to say something else but just then two high school girls sat down at the counter. They were best friends. You could tell because they were dressed identically. Poodle haircuts, pink sweaters and large pink skirts decorated with dancing poodles and dancing 45Rpm records. The Pink Monster had invaded their brains and taken them over while they slept. The inevitable bobby sox and saddle shoes completed the ensemble. The only thing that kept these two girls from looking like twins was that one was tall and willowy and blonde and the other was short and stout and brunette.
While Mary took their orders for cheeseburgers and fries and Cokes, I wandered over to the magazine stand. Ike was on the cover of Time again, responding to the Russian general who’d boasted recently that the Ussr had atomic weapons superior to ours. And Dick Nixon was on the cover of Newsweek hinting that he just might run for president in 1960. The movie magazines had just come in and were lined neatly in a row, covers featuring Natalie Wood on a motorcycle, Tab Hunter in a cowboy outfit, Brigitte Bardot in a bikini, and Marlon Brando staring somberly out at the world. I picked up Manhunt, which had a new Shell Scott story in it, and started back to the counter.
I didn’t recognize her at first. I know how odd that sounds. She was, after all, my kid sister, Ruthie, all the years we’d lived in the same house over on Clark Street together, how could I not recognize her? I guess because I always think of Ruthie being happy, but she didn’t look happy now. She looked furtive.
She was at the far end of a medicine aisle and it was easy to see what she was doing because she was so bad at it. She was shoplifting. Fortunately for her, there weren’t any store employees around. My instinct was to run down the aisle and stop her, but there wasn’t time. Her hand flicked out snake-qk, grabbed a small box of some kind, and dumped it in her open purse. Then she started looking frantically around for a way out of the store.
She didn’t appear to be in danger of becoming a great criminal mastermind.
She started up the aisle and, when she saw me, she froze in place and started looking frantically around again. I walked up to her and slid my arm through hers and whispered, “Why don’t you put it back, Ruthie?”
Ruthie got the standard-issue McCain looks. There’s a factory somewhere in Indiana, I think, that mass-produces McCains. A family reunion looks like one of those vast General Motors storage lots but instead of hundreds of identical Chevrolets, it’s McCains. The outsize blue eyes, the freckles, the slightly imperious nose and the kid-grin. Even Great-grandfather McCain, God love him, looked like he was twenty when he smiled. Even with his store-boughts.
Ruthie wore a black winter coat, open so I could see her black sweater and tight tweed skirt. She had a cute little pink barrette in her short blond hair. She’d bloomed in the past year or so, our little Ruthie, not only pretty but sexy, if I can say that without getting too Freudian. Mom and Dad said our driveway never wanted for junky cars with teenage boys behind the wheels.
“C’mon, Ruthie,” I whispered again.
“Put it back.”
There was panic and embarrassment and anger in her soft blue eyes. I felt all the same things.
I didn’t want to see my sister get nailed for shoplifting. I also didn’t want to see the family name ruined. When I was in tenth grade, we managed to move out of the Knolls and into town, into a nice little frame house. And Dad got a better job, a tie-wearing kind of job, as warehouse manager over at Fugate
Industrial, which manufactures safety parts for various kinds of electronic companies. It’s not too often Knolls people turn respectable. A shoplifting daughter wouldn’t exactly help my folks’ reputation. And it wouldn’t do a hell of a lot of good for Ruthie, either.
All this was in my head as I tried to grab her arm again without anybody noticing. But as I got to the front of the aisle, Ruthie broke ahead.
She nudged into a large display of hula hoops that had been marked down since the summer. But didn’t slow down at all. She marched straight to the in-out doors and bolted right out to the sunny street.
I was maybe six steps behind her when I felt a large hand on my shoulder and I turned to see Wes Lindstrom, the pharmacist and the man who was engaged to Mary nodding to my hand. “I hope you’re planning to pay for that.”
Of course, I first thought of Ruthie. He’d seen her steal the box and wanted restitution. But then he said, “Wouldn’t look real good for one of the town’s most prominent attorneys to be arrested for shoplifting.” And with that he snatched the Manhunt magazine from my fingers.
“Oh,” I said. “The magazine.”
He smiled icily. “It just looks a little suspicious when you’re walking out the door with it, without paying for it.”
He looked like one of those soap opera actors who play doctors. He was tall with a somewhat craggy face and strawberry-blond hair in a widow’s peak. I suppose women found him handsome but there was something superior and judgmental about him. You could see it in his mouth, the way it was always tightening inffdispleasure and disdain. As it was now.
I dug into my pocket, took out a crumpled dollar bill, and laid it on his palm.
He looked at the magazine cover for the first time. It showed a half-naked woman sprawled on a bloody bed and a dark-suited killer with a gun in his hand crawling out a window.
“Still reading all the intellectual stuff, huh?” His lips became a disapproving editorial on my reading tastes.
“You might like it, if you gave it a try.”
“I doubt it. Not with all the medical journals I need to read.” He nodded to the sales counter. “I’ll get you your change.”
I wondered if he really thought I’d been trying to steal the magazine. I wondered also if he’d tell people he really thought I’d been trying to steal the magazine. We all like to gossip, I suppose, though of course I’d deny I liked to if you asked me, but Wes was a legendary gossip. He could kill you faster than a bullet. All he had to do was whisper the right words.
He gave me my change then put the magazine in a sack. “People might think you were stealing it otherwise.” A quick, icy smile.
“That medicine you gave me for my corns really worked, Wes,” an elderly lady said behind me.
“I need some more of it.”
“You wouldn’t have all those corns, Betsy, if you weren’t out all night doing the mambo and the cha-cha-cha,” he said.
She giggled and you could hear the girl that remained alive inside her despite her seventy years and it was a nice, pure, inspiring sound. I had to give it to Wes. He could be a charmer when he wanted to.
I went
back to the counter. “I think your boyfriend thinks I’m a shoplifter.”
Mary was wiping off the counter. I told her what happened. “He’s just sensitive about you is all. You know, about how you and I grew up together and all.”
I wanted to kiss her. Right then and there. I guess it was her sweetness. Her goodness. I needed something to believe in after I’d seen my sister stealing that small box.
I spent the next few minutes listening to the radio that played over the speakers in the store.
Small-town radio alternates between Bing Crosby records and local news and what they call Trader Tom, who conducts a five-minute show every hour to tell the good people what kind of deal you can get on certain second-hand items, and who to call if you’re interested. Right now, he was listing a refrigerator, a sectional couch that made into a bed and a complete collection of Saturday Evening Posts from 1941 through the present. I figured my dad would like them. He loved the western serials, the Ernest Haycox ones especially. Then Trader Tom had his “Farm Folks” segment where he talked about the kind of things farmers had up for sale or trade.
Today a farmer had a calf he wanted to trade for a good hunting rifle. Trader Tom gave the guy’s phone number, of course. Townsfolks always feel superior when they hear the “Farm Folks” segments. We live in the big city, after all.
Mary came over with the coffeepot but I put my hand over my cup. “I’m starting to get the jitters.”
“You hear about the skating party tonight?”
“Uh-uh.”
“They’re going to dedicate it to Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and play all the records tonight.”
“That’s nice.”
“I’ll probably go if Wes’ll let me.”
“You have to check with him now?”
She shrugged. “He just thinks it looks funny if I go places without him. You know, like I’m still single or something.”
What the hell are you marrying him for? I wanted to say. You’re so damned decent and smart. And he’s such a sanctimonious prig.
