by Ed Gorman
I’d stopped by the parole office in the courthouse and gotten Chalmers’s address. He was living on an acreage where he worked part of a farm for a salary. Kepler, the parole officer, didn’t seem to have much faith in the man. “You know what the first thing he did was when he got out a few years ago?”
“What?”
“Cruised David Squires’s place.”
“Squires tell you that?”
“Squires didn’t have to. A cop did.
He saw Chalmers out there several times and thought I should know about it. So I call Squires and warn him and I call Chalmers and try and scare him.”
“He scare, did he?”
“You know Chalmers pretty well?”
“Pretty well.”
“Well, then, whaddaya you think? You ever know anybody who could scare Chalmers?”
I put the top down. Figured if I had to work, I might as well enjoy it. I
was sixteen again. It’s funny how quickly you can get nostalgic. Here it was 1957 and I was looking back at 1952 as the Golden Age already. Senior year in high school. Somehow, it seemed a slower, gentler time. Beer parties at the sandpits. Dancing with Pamela on the boat that goes up and down the river all summer. Seeing my dad finally shake off the war. No more nightmares. No more depressions. The year 1952 was just about as perfect as a year could get.
I was sitting at a stoplight when the black Ford convertible mysteriously appeared next to me.
A beautiful blonde. Kim Novak. Head scarf. Shades. Radio blasting Buddy Holly. Revving the engine. Daring me to drag her. A smile that said we knew each other, disturbing without me understanding why. And then she was fishtailing and her tires were screaming and she was laying down a quarter block of rubber. And then she was gone.
The acreage was scruffy, overgrown with weeds.
Wire fences falling. Bottles and cans and papers littering the front yard. Windows crisscrossed with tape. A chimney that was little more than a pile of bricks atop a shingle-bare roof.
From what I could see, Chalmers had himself what was essentially a tenant-farmer agreement. There were a lot of acres in the adjacent land given over to soybeans and even more given over to corn. In the distance along the horizon line you could see a new big blue silo, a new red barn, and a new white farmhouse. Whoever lived there was doing all right for himself. But he still had some back acres he wanted worked so he offered a subsistence wage and a faded frame two-story farmhouse and disintegrating outbuildings and told the tenant farmer, in this case Chalmers, to go to it. Miserable as the conditions were—I had the sense that there was electricity but no indoor plumbing, thus the outhouse in the backyard—it still had to beat being in prison.
There was a rusty Ford pickup sitting at the end of the dirt drive. The house and the outbuildings looked even rougher close up, badly in need of washing and painting. A John Deere even older than the truck sat near the left-leaning barn.
A sweet-faced border collie ran in sad useless circles before slowing down to take
a look at me. All that frantic pointless energy.
I got out. The border collie came over and growled. I put out my hand. She licked my fingers. I smiled at her and patted her head.
She looked old and dusty and lost, a kind of quiet doggy sadness that can break your heart.
I went to the back door. Knocked. No answer. I went to the side door. Knocked.
No answer. I went to the front door.
Knocked. And that’s when the girl came out.
She was probably around twelve or thirteen, slender, shoulder-length blond hair with a tiny blue plastic barrette in it. Her flowered dress had been washed a few dozen times too many. You noticed the eyes first, the animal sorrow, the animal fear. And then, as she came into the sunlight on the porch, you saw the metal brace on her leg.
She just looked at me. “He isn’t here.”
“Who isn’t?”
“My dad.”
“Mike Chalmers your dad?”
She nodded. “I’m Ellie.”
“You know when he’ll be back?”
“He’s at work.”
“Your mom around?”
“My mom’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
“That isn’t what girls usually say when their moms are dead.”
“Well, it’s what I say, mister.”
She was going to step back inside at any moment. Shut the door.
“You wouldn’t happen to have an extra glass of water on hand, would you?”
“My dad said I shouldn’t ever let anybody inside.”
“I’ll drink it on the porch.”
“You wait here.”
When she turned and started walking I felt terrible about asking her for water. Walking looked to be such a ponderous effort for her.
She brought back a glass that was a couple of notches this side of clean. Handed me the water.
I thanked her. There was an ancient porch swing suspended on rusting chains. I went over and sat down. Pulled out my cigarettes.
She said, “I bum one of those offa
you?”
“Wouldn’t your dad get mad?”
“My dad lets me smoke.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
I held my pack out to her. And made her walk again. She did what I’d hope she’d do.
Sat down next to me in the swing. She took a cigarette and I put a match to it. She inhaled and wiggled into a comfortable spot. I pushed on the swing. It glided gently back and forth.
“He was in prison.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever go see him in there?”
“A couple of times. He cried whenever I had to leave. Just broke down and cried.” She said this with no particular emotion.
“How come you hated your mom?”
“It don’t matter. She’s dead.”
“It’s just funny, that’s all.”
“What is?”
“A girl hating her mother.”
Head back, eyes closed, exhaling smoke.
Fetching nymphette profile. “I’d get scared to go to school and she’d call me a sissy and slap me and stuff.”
“How come you were scared?”
“Oh, you know.”
“I guess I don’t.”
She looked over at me with one eye. She was a skilled con artist. “Maybe if you gave me another cigarette I’d tell you.”
“You’re not done with that one.”
“For later.”
“Ah.”
For the very first time, she smiled. “I like that.”
“Like what?”
“That word. Ah. I like words sometimes. Maybe I’ll start saying it.”
I gave her another cigarette. She tucked it behind her ear.
“How come you want to know all this?”
“I work for Judge Whitney.”
“She’s the one that sentenced my daddy.” Again, and curiously, without emotion.
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 dow
n 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?”
