The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  They sat there in the alley light, the Buick handsome and imposing, sleek as all hell. You could faintly hear words spoken. Gentle words. And those hurt more than the harsh ones. A lot of times, you don’t mean the harsh ones. You just kind of blurt them out unthinkingly. But the gentle ones, man, those are the killers; the considered words; the I-don’t-want-to-hurt-your-feelings words; the final words.

  Then the driver’s door opened and Wes awkwardly got out of the car and shouted over the rooftop. “C’mon, you son of a bitch, let’s get this over with!”

  I don’t know which surprised me more, that he wanted to fight or that he was sloppy drunk.

  He came around the back of the car, slipping and sliding in stumbling drunken anger, throwing his fists up like old John L. Sullivan in the days of bare-knuckle fighting.

  “You son of a bitch!” he said.

  Mary burst out of the passenger door.

  “Wes! Wes! Stop it! Stop it!”

  “You son of a bitch!” he yelled at me again. I’d have to teach this boy some new swear words.

  I stood next to the garbage cans and watched Mary try to stop him from coming at me. At first, she seemed to do a pretty good job. He put his gloved fists down, anyway. He looked lost and frantic, the way drunks get when the booze is turning ugly in them.

  Then he went around her. She grabbed for him but slipped and went down on one knee on the ice.

  And then he was there in front of me. His fists came back up and he started swinging. He caught me a square one right on the temple, surprising me. There was some ego involved, too. He was a stuffy man and stuffy men shouldn’t be able to throw punches like that.

  Mary was screaming at him again and then it was all frenzy because he leaped on me and started choking me. You know how it gets in fights—all kinds of things going on at the same time, little explosions of anger and fear and confusion, the neighborhood dogs suddenly starting to yowl, sweat and blood and snot covering my face. That was when I kicked him in the balls. I know that’s something that heroes never do, take those dirty little shortcuts that frequently mean victory, but he was too big and I was not exactly a great fighter. I got him good, real good. He screamed and then he started to flail backward. Mary grabbed him to keep him from falling and then he lunged to the right of her and started throwing up. You never see this in movies, the vomiting, but a lot of parking lot puking goes on after two drunks have at each other. Then he went facedown in the snow and Mary screamed and sank down beside him and started rolling him over so she could see his face. When she got him on his back, he started crying and it was so miserable, that sound—those tears went all the way back to his childhood—and I felt like shit for so many reasons all I could do was walk away, around the side of the house to my car and drive away and head out for Darin Greene’s place.

  24

  IN THE SNOW AND moonlight, the trailer court looked snug and cozy. Window lights seemed inviting and the silver flash of TV screens promised fun and excitement. Friday nights like this, 77 Sunset Strip was on, one of those entertainingly improbable private-eye shows where the hero drives a new T-bird and even nuns throw themselves at him.

  Passing the trailers leading to Darin Greene’s, I heard babies cry, Fats Domino sing, a couple argue and a car being jump-started.

  When I pulled up to Greene’s trailer, I saw Lurlene Greene stashing two small children into Darin’s battered Olds convertible. I started to pull into a parking spot but Darin slammed out of the trailer and waved me away.

  “You don’t have no business here, man,” he said. “Now get your ass out of here.”

  “Your wife asked me to come out.”

  “I make the rules around here.”

  I glanced over at Lurlene. She was just opening the driver’s door of the Olds. Our eyes met briefly but then she looked away and climbed inside. The Olds took a couple of tries to start then was rumbling like a prairie train in the middle of the night. Darin slapped the trunk of the car the way a man would slap a horse’s rump. Lurlene gave the big car some gas, backed out of her parking spot and drove off down the narrow lane between the trailers.

  Darin watched her go. He wore a T-shirt and dark pants and no shoes. He smelled sourly of sweat and whiskey.

  I said, “Lurlene said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Lurlene wanted me to talk to you and that’s a whole ’nother thing, man.”

  “Why did you and Kenny Whitney have a falling out about a year ago?”

  “Who says we had a falling out?”

  “You did, for one.” He obviously didn’t remember much of our earlier conversation. “And about a hundred people who saw you get into a fight down at Paddy’s Tap one night. You pulled a knife on him. And then you had another fight about a week later and broke out a window over at Russert’s bar throwing a beer glass at him.”

  “We was just drunk is all.” Then he waved me off. “I had enough of this bullshit, man. I ain’t got no shoes on. I’m goin’ in. An’ you get the hell out of here and leave my wife alone. You hear? You leave her alone, McCain.”

  I hit him with the only weapon I had. And, who knew, maybe it wasn’t a weapon at all. Maybe my guess was totally wrong. “You ever find that gun of yours?”

  He tensed up. No doubt about it. “What gun, man?”

  “Your thirty-two.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Yesterday. When they were throwing you out of Paddy’s. I drove your car, remember?”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “You said you couldn’t find your gun.”

  “Not me, man. I never had no gun to lose.” He’d forgotten that, too.

  “I think I know where it is.”

  He looked startled. “What you talkin’ about?”

  “Cliffie Sykes has got it. It’s the gun he found at Kenny Whitney’s. It’s the gun that was used to kill Susan.”

  He started walking. I don’t know where he was going, but he seemed frantic to get there. He must have walked, barefooted in the icy night, four, five hundred feet down that narrow asphalt strip of road. And then he stopped and walked back, the Platters loud about two trailers down.

  “I didn’t kill her, man. I swear I didn’t. A colored man like me, Sykes’d hang my ass for sure if he ever found out that was my gun.”

  Actually, Sykes probably wouldn’t hang his ass. He was having too good a time sullying the familial pride of the Whitneys, but I didn’t want Greene to know that.

  “How’d the gun get out at Whitney’s?”

  He looked sullen and then he looked sad. “I gave it to Susan. About a year ago or so.”

  “Why?”

  Another sullen look. “This isn’t any of your business.”

  “Why’d you give her the gun, Darin?”

  After a time, he said, “Because she was afraid.”

  “Of whom?”

  “My feet’re freezin’, man.”

  He started doing a little dance step to impress me with how cold his feet were.

  “You can sit in the car.”

  “Up yours.”

  “Who was she afraid of?”

  He was silent for a time. “Kenny.”

  “What happened between you and Kenny?”

  An old Plymouth pickup truck came down the narrow lane. The man inside waved at Darin and Darin waved back. Inside, his phone started ringing.

  “I better get that,” he said.

  And then he was gone and I knew he’d answered all the questions he was going to. I listened to him slam the door and then bolt it from the inside. He must have had three different kinds of bolts.

  I backed out of the parking space. I thought maybe I could find Lurlene, but then I decided she had too much of a head start. Besides, I was worrying about Ruthie again. I hadn’t liked the way we’d left it, that a couple of her friends would help her take care of things. That was the trouble with the abortion laws, a subject I’d argued about in law school. The alternative to legal a
bortion was illegal abortion and that meant a lot of innocent girls dying every year because well-intentioned friends had decided to help them out.

  When you came into town from the northeast, as I did, it looked a lot bigger, a monument of Mammon out here on the prairies. We even had a Howard Johnson’s motel and restaurant and that was the new place for the more social teenagers to hang out. Not the motel—there was only one motel in town that’d let teenagers shack up, a trucking place out on the highway—the restaurant. It was kind of funny seeing all these hot rods in the Howard Johnson parking lot, chopped and channeled louvered Mercs and street-rods and Bob Mallory’s beautiful ’39 Ford Phaeton, all those Turbo heads and Johannsen ignitions and extra pots to soup everything up.

  I drove up to the edge of the parking lot where there was a pay phone. I called my folks and tried to sound chatty. Then I said, calmly as I could, “I told Ruthie I’d help her on this history test she’s got next week.”

  “Oh?” Mom said. “That’s strange. I didn’t know you helped her with her tests.”

  I laughed. “You mean, she’s the smart one so why would she want help from me?”

  “Well—” Mom said. And laughed, too.

  “Is she around, Mom?”

  “No. She called and said she was staying at Gloria Spellman’s tonight. Said they’d both be up studying all night.”

  It wasn’t true. I wondered where Ruthie really was tonight. I got scared. “Well, tell her I’ll call her in the morning.”

  “I’ll tell her, honey.”

  “And say hi to Dad.”

  “I will. Love you, honey.”

  “Love you, too, Mom.”

  I drove downtown. The girl-cruise was in full flower. Cars of every description moved slowly along Central Avenue where the theaters and pizza shops and hamburger joints were located—where the girls were located. Up and down, down and up, the cars drove, most of the boys resorting to grins and gawks and graceless waves. That was how the uncool boys handled it, the ones in Dad’s car or driving the 1948 Kaiser or the 1950 Henry or an old dog of a Dodge that was rusting into death even while you watched. The kids fit their cars. In my day, I’d maneuvered a 1951 Studebaker with bad steering problems up and down Central Avenue. I had science fiction magazines and Gold Medal paperbacks stacked in the backseat and the only radio station I could get played Lawrence Welk every third song. I’d suffered from pimples, wet dreams, athlete’s foot and a secret terror that I’d never really be a man. Women only thought you were cool if you thought you were cool—and I knew I wasn’t cool.

  Things didn’t look as if they’d changed much. Three exquisite young blondes were flirting with some guy in a leather jacket sitting inside a cherry-red street rod. There was only room for two inside. He was probably deciding which of the lucky girls he was going to let inside. He was doing this while all the losers (those carrying on in my tradition) drove their clunk-mobiles up and down the street.

  I found another outdoor phone. But realized I didn’t have the change for a long-distance call. I looked up and down the street. The nearest place where I could get change was the Rexall that Wes owned. At first I ruled it out but then decided he wouldn’t be there. He’d be home sleeping it off. Or at Mary’s letting her help him sober up.

  Jim the handyman was the only customer in the pharmacy when I walked up to the counter. A teenaged girl was working tonight. She handed Jim’s package over and said, “Here you go, Jim. Your animals sure are lucky, the way you take care of them.” She smiled when she said it.

  “Animals are just like humans to me,” he said. “They keep me company since my wife died.”

  “You must have quite a few,” the girl smiled.

  When Jim saw me, he said, “Hey, hi, McCain. Tell your folks I’ll have that roofing estimate for them by Tuesday.”

  I nodded. “You’ll wait ’til better weather to put it on, won’t you?”

  He laughed. “I sure will.”

  I asked the girl for change for a five and she gave it to me. Just as I was turning to leave, I heard noise from the back of the store, boxes tumbling down in a crash. Then a drunken man’s voice said, “You think I want you anymore after you’ve treated me this way? You get the hell away from me and you stay away from me. You understand that? You stay away from me.”

  The girl and I stared back there for a long moment.

  Then Mary Travers appeared, walking quickly out from between the heavy green curtains that concealed the stockroom.

  She walked very quickly to the front of the store. She kept her eyes straight ahead, mortified. She was out the front door in moments.

  I went out after her. She was already halfway down the block. I caught up with her, sliding on an icy patch the last few steps. Ever the hot dog, I am. I grabbed her by the sleeve as she kept on walking.

  We didn’t say anything. Just looked at each other. And then I fell into step, walking.

  The night was cold enough to numb your nose. We walked by the town square. It looked cold and lonely. The bandstand had smashed snowballs frozen to its sides. The guy on the Civil War memorial had a real bad case of snow dandruff on his shoulders.

  She said, “I really hurt him.”

  “I guess you probably did.”

  “And maybe I love him.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  For the first time since we’d started walking, she looked at me. “I don’t think he ever got drunk before.”

  “He isn’t any better at it than I am.”

  “No, you’re the worst, McCain.”

  “Thanks.”

  We walked some more. “Maybe I’m so used to thinking that I’m in love with you—well, maybe I’m not anymore and I don’t even realize it.” She sounded as if she was trying to solve a particularly difficult math problem. “On the other hand, maybe that’s true for you, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Uh-huh. With Pamela.”

  “Oh.”

  “That you don’t really love her anymore, you just think you do.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, hell, McCain, I just never thought it’d be this hard when we were growing up. When you’re a little kid, it looks like adults know everything.”

  “Yeah.”

  We were on a block of taverns now. Every open door treated us to a different form of music—country-western, rock and roll, pop. You could smell beer and smoke. It was payday money being spent on Friday nights. And spending payday money meant not buying groceries and not buying shoes for the kids and breaking your promise again and again to your wife. You work as a public defender for a year, as I did, you hear about payday money a lot.

  “I’m going to marry him, McCain.”

  “I just heard him tell you he never wanted to see you again.”

  “He’s just drunk and hurt.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose.”

  “How’s that going to make you feel? If I tell him I’m going to marry him?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Will you try and stop me?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I figured you’d say.”

  “Then you’re going to do it?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am.”

  And then she broke away, running down a dark street, her breath plumes of silver, her near-frail body disappearing in the gathering shadows on the dark side of the streetlight.

  “Hey, wait up, Mary.”

  “Just go to hell, McCain. Just go straight to hell.”

  And then I couldn’t see her anymore. It was almost eerie the way she vanished. I couldn’t see her or hear her. She was just gone.

  I found a phone booth and got a long-distance operator. It got complicated. I didn’t know the number so she first had to call information. By the time we made a connection, my nose was frozen and I really had to piss.

  “I’ll be damned,” a smooth whiskey-voiced man said. He was my age, but sounded ten years older and twenty years smarter. His name was Wyatt Coo
per and we’d graduated law school together. He was a Republican, but I liked him anyway.

  “You got a few minutes to talk?” We hadn’t spoken in six months but the one thing I liked about Wyatt was you could count on him when you were in a spot.

  “Well, I’ve got a friend here. But I suppose she could spare me for a few minutes.”

  “I appreciate it, Wyatt.”

  “You think you can keep your hands to yourself for a few minutes, darlin’?” he said.

  A female voice giggled in the background and said, “I’ll try real hard.”

  We spent a few minutes talking about the careers of some of our friends who’d journeyed to Chicago and Washington and New York. One of our old cronies had gotten a very good job in Ike’s justice department. He was already working for Nixon’s election campaign.

  “I’m worried is what I am.”

  “About what?”

  I hesitated. “I know somebody who needs a little illegal medical help.”

  “You could always get married. I’m thinking of that, myself.” I heard the female voice coo in the background.

  “I’m not involved. Not directly, I mean.”

  “McCain, the white knight.”

  “It’s my sister.”

  “Oh, shit, man, I shouldn’t have made a joke.”

  “It’s all right. What I want to know is can you help?”

  “Just a sec.” He cupped the phone. They talked for several minutes behind his hand. “How far along is she?”

  “A month.”

  He repeated. “A month.” Then he cupped the phone again. They talked some more.

  “My friend Sue here knows a doctor,” he said.

  “A real one?”

  “A real one. He’s a staffer at one of the local hospitals here. Could you get her over to Des Moines?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sue’s a nurse. She knows this doc’ll help out once in a while if the girl isn’t too far gone and if he knows all the people involved. He doesn’t want to get his ass in a sling, obviously.”