Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool sm-5

by Ed Gorman

  That’s the best way to put it, I guess.

  Foolish that I got married so young and foolish that I’m back living at home and foolish that I can’t deal with this better. My being sick, I mean.”

  “You’re not sick now.”

  “No, not physically, anyway. But mentally.”

  She tapped her sweet Midwestern head.

  I took her hand. “We’re all foolish.”

  “Oh, Sam, you don’t have to try and make me feel better. I should be doing that for myself.”

  “I’m not kidding. We’re all foolish.

  Foolish with ourselves, foolish with other people. And we’re too tough on ourselves about it. Life’s tough and unfair and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So we do and say foolish things because it’s all we know how to do. You’re going through a very rough time-something most people won’t have to face in their whole lifetime-and you’re trying to adjust to it.

  And you’re doing a whole hell of a lot better job of it than I would.”

  She put her head on my shoulder. I liked it. I liked it a lot. The stars had started to come out. We stayed in that position and then we started to swing. Just a little bit. But the rhythm was nice and so was the cool, clean chill on the wind.

  “I’m not going to give up, Linda.”

  “I hope you don’t.”

  “Tomorrow night we’ve got a date.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “And I don’t want any notes left on my door.”

  “There won’t be any.”

  “And I don’t want any we-now-interrupt-th-program-messages on Tv to tell me the date’s off, either. When I’m watching professional wrestling, I don’t want some announcer cutting into the match.”

  She laughed softly. “None of those, either.”

  “And I’ll expect you to wear that perfume you were wearing last night.”

  “I promise. I don’t have any other kind of perfume, anyway.”

  “And one other thing.”

  “What’s that, Sam?”

  I kissed her on the mouth. I started to pull back but she held me there, slender fingers against the back of my neck.

  “What I was going to say,” I said finally, “was that I care about you. All of a sudden last night it just happened.”

  The gray gaze got impish, amused. “As I recall, you fall in love pretty easily.”

  “I’m not sure I’m falling in love. I don’t know what it is. Except every time I think of you I feel a whole lot better than I have in quite awhile. And I get this really urgent need to see you.”

  She was just about to say something when the front door opened and her mom stuck her head out. I was back in eighth grade again, tense about moms, and hoping I didn’t say anything stupid or unforgivable.

  “Oh, hi, Sam, haven’t seen you in a long time,” said her mom, who looked very much like her daughter. “I didn’t realize you were still here.

  Would you like to stay for supper?”

  “Afraid I can’t, Mrs. Dennehy. I just stopped by to say hi to Linda.”

  She smiled. “Well, say hi to your folks.

  I always see them at mass but that’s about all these days.”

  “I’ll be right in, Mom.”

  “Nice to see you again, Sam.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Dennehy.”

  Linda walked me to the edge of the porch. “I wish it were tomorrow night.”

  “I could pick you up later tonight.”

  She took my hand and kissed me on the cheek.

  “No, let me live in that “glow of expectation” they’re always talking about in those romance novels I read.”

  “It’s a deal, then. We’ll both glow for the next twenty-four hours and I’ll see you right here tomorrow night.”

  This time she kissed me on the mouth. Not for long. “I’d have kissed you longer but Mrs.

  Sullivan is peeking out her curtain from across the street.”

  “Want to put on a real show for her?”

  She took my shoulders, turned me forward like a wooden soldier, and then set me marching off to my ragtop.

  I honked at her as I pulled away. She waved good-bye with a girly hand. Don’t you love it when they wave good-bye with a girly hand?

  Nine

  Kenny Chesmore’s got one of those tiny silver house trailers that the military used in army camps during the war. After the fighting stopped, you could get them cheap. A lot of people did, especially Gi’s who went to college on the Gi Bill.

  Kenny’s trailer was set up in the shade of a giant oak with branches of mythic proportion.

  Easy to imagine Arthur’s knights sleeping beneath its mothering wings on a stormy night preceding the battle next day.

  Or in a more modern context, a pornographer cranking out twenty pages of pure art a day.

  Ladies and gentlemen, meet Kenny

  Chesmore. The typewriter you hear is his, a sweet little Olympia portable of a model they don’t make anymore. I’ve offered him $150 for it. He won’t take it.

  Out front there’s a big, lazy golden collie that butterflies like to pick on and who steadfastly refuses to go outside when the thermometer strikes below thirty. His name is Herbert.

  As the door opened you could see for yourself the kind of image Kenny chooses to project for himself-beatnik. Bohemian. Outsider. The short dark hair combed forward. The goatee. The ragged gray T-shirt. The wrinkled chinos. The dirty white tennies. I’m not sure where this “beatnik” uniform came from-I’ve never seen any of the holy trinity,

  Kerouac-Ginsberg-Corso, wearing anything like it.

  But all you have to do is go to a city and you’ll seen dozens if not hundreds of such getups. Kenny also has a bumper sticker on his door-Khruschev is a Commie. Kenny likes what they call sick jokes.

  When he’s not writing, he’s usually in a political demonstration of some kind in Chicago, which is four hours away. I’d accompanied him to the one for Caryl Chessman and the one for civil rights but some of the others bothered me enough to stay away from. Any group that is willing to forgive Joseph Stalin for all his atrocities is not a group I want to be part of.

  The inside of Kenny’s trailer is, as you might imagine, a garbage dump of dirty clothes, pizza wrappers, books of every size and description, stacks of records running to some really good stuff such as Sara Vaughan and Gerry Mulligan, and a huge Admiral console Tv. Kenny likes his politicians to be twenty-four inches. He thinks it makes it easier for them to hear when he screams at them about what lying capitalist devils they are. He’s right, of course-I like capitalism but it sure has produced more than its share of devils-it’s just that he’s awfully damned noisy about it.

  The windows were open so the trailer smells weren’t too bad. He gets some fresh breeze off the wide creek that runs in back of his place. He also gets some interesting animals, especially the raccoons and the possums that manage to break into his trailer whenever he’s gone. One day I pulled up to find him out. But there were three raccoons staring out at me from his living room window.

  He has a small table on which he both writes and eats. You can tell when he’s about to eat because just before he puts his Tv dinner into the tiny oven, he shoves his typewriter to the far edge of the table. Dinner, as they say, is served.

  On the wall, high and just to the right of the table, are six or seven of his latest paperback covers thumbtacked to the wall. He makes three hundred dollars a book and usually does one a month. The covers are usually photographs of buxom women wearing as little as the law will allow. They all say “For mature readers only” somewhere near the title. The only place you can buy them in Black River Falls is down at the Union cigar store along the river.

  You tell the guy what your favorite brand of literature is and he always winks at you and says, “Okay, you like them there zippy books, do ya?” He always says “zippy.” He’s some kind of immigrant, just nobody has ever figured out what kind. Then he stoops low, lifts up a c
ardboard box, and gives you time alone to look through the various titles.

  The covers Kenny had on his wall now all seemed to share a certain theme.

  Tryst for Triples

  Three-way Thrust

  Thrills for Three

  He handed me a Pepsi-Kenny drinks booze even less than I do-z I said, “What happened to lesbians?”

  “They’re sorta out right now. M@enage @a trois is in.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “The French publishers started it.”

  “Ah, the French.”

  “Hell, in Denmark they’re doing bestiality with bondage.”

  “Ah, the Dens.”

  “I wish the missionary position would come back.

  It’s a lot easier to write. I get a headache thinking up all this stuff. I’ve never done a three-way, have you?”

  “Several times.”

  I’ve always wanted to use the word “agape.”

  And that’s just how Kenny looked. Agape. “You have?”

  “We went all night.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. We would’ve gone longer except the one sheep got tired out.”

  “You asshole.”

  “I’m from Black River Falls, Kenny.

  People from Black River Falls don’t have three-ways.”

  “I’ll bet they do. They just don’t talk about it.” He frowned at his typewriter as if it were deeply disappointing to even gaze upon. “I gotta come up with some pages here. I’ve got four three-way scenes to write and the rules are each one has to be at least fifteen hundred words. That’s a lot of three-wayin’.”

  “Occupational hazard, I suppose.” I paused, “Mind if I pick up that stale sandwich and sit on the chair?”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess I haven’t had much time to clean the old place up. I just got back last night.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Berkeley. It’s really wild out there. It’s like this one big huge enclave of beats. Lots of chicks, too. No bras, either. You can see their breasts swinging under their sweaters and blouses. It’s like one of my books coming true.”

  “You get laid?”

  He shrugged. “I came close.”

  “Well, that’s better than nothing. And you’re doing better than I am.”

  “No nookie, huh?”

  I shook my head. “I’m a virgin again.”

  “Don’t tell anybody I went to Berkeley and didn’t get laid, okay?”

  “That wouldn’t be good for the old reputation, I guess. Especially for a pornographer. “He couldn’t get laid even in Berkeley.” Wow, that’d be some epitaph.”

  “Please, McCain. I’ve told you, I don’t write pornography.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot. For a “writer of erotica.””

  He leaned back in his writing chair and picked up his pack of Kools.

  “I still don’t know how you can smoke menthols,”

  I said. “It’s like lighting up a box of cough drops.”

  “Yeah, but as much as I smoke, I tend to get sore throats.”

  Two ashtrays overflowing. And a dead beer can with a cigarette filter sticking out of it. I guess I saw his point.

  “I got back at six last night and went right to work. I’ve done seventeen thousand words.

  That’s nearly a third of a book.”

  “How many orgasms you figure in seventeen thousand words?”

  He smiled. “Plenty. But the only time you look me up is when you want some scuttlebutt, McCain. So let’s get to it.

  I want to get back to work here. I’m trying to hit twenty-five thousand words in twenty-four hours. That’d be a personal record.”

  “You told me once you did thirty thousand words in twenty-four hours.”

  “Yeah, but I was lying. This would be for real.”

  “You really should think of running for political office, Kenny. You lie so well.”

  You could hear all those Kools in his sharp, scratchy laugh. I don’t expect my voice sounds any better.

  I said, “Brenda Carlyle.”

  “I’d like to see her breasts swinging free underneath a sweater.”

  “I hear David Egan has had that privilege.”

  “That’s an old story.”

  Kenny had always known all the gossip in town.

  Even with all his traveling these days, he still knew more about the private lives of our little burg than anybody else, including the three ministers, the priest, all four beauty parlors, and Cliffie’s police force combined. A lot of these stories found their way, disguised of course, into Kenny’s books. He’d written me into a couple of them as a short private eye named “Bullets McGee,” a name I think he stole from Raymond Chandler but I’m not sure.

  “Could you elaborate a little?” I said.

  Kenny took a hit from his Kool. I could taste that menthol crap even over here. “He did lawn work for her husband, Mike. It was pure D. H. Lawrence. Brenda and Mike haven’t gotten along in years. She starts talking to Egan-and nobody can sling the lady bullshit like that kid-and there you go.”

  “Instant paperback novel.”

  “You bet.”

  “Still going on?”

  “On and off. You know Egan’s problem. When he’s with one girl, he wants to be with another girl. I’ll bet he could get laid if he went to Berkeley.”

  “I’ll bet he could get laid just walking down the street.”

  He grinned. “I always wanted to be handsome.”

  “I always wanted to be tall and handsome.”

  “Well, I always wanted to be tall and handsome and rich. And have a schlong out to here.”

  I laughed. “You pretty much covered the bases.” Then, “Then there’s always Sara Griffin.”

  “Sad case.”

  “Man, I guess.”

  “They covered it up by saying she went to England on some kind of foreign exchange thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She went to the nuthouse.

  How’d you find out?”

  He inhaled deeply of his box of burning cough drops. “This nurse I interviewed for Nympho Nurses. I put it in a nuthouse, figured that’d be a different angle.

  And that way I could put transvestites and ax murderers and people who rip out their own eyeballs all in the same novel.”

  “Didn’t Fitzgerald do something like that right after Gatsby?”

  “Very funny.”

  “So this nurse…?”

  “This nurse told me about this time this girl managed to sneak away from the nuthouse and meet her lover in this nearby motel.”

  “Her lover?” New information. “How old was she?”

  “Let’s see, Sara probably would’ve been fifteen, probably.”

  “This nurse tell you who her lover was?”

  “They never found out. All they know is that it was some older man. His forties maybe. This is what they got from the motel guy, anyway.”

  “What happened to Sara?”

  “More shock treatment. Kept her a month longer than they’d originally planned.”

  “Then she came back here?”

  “Finished high school. And met your client David Egan. Which wasn’t exactly what her folks wanted. They’d spent a lot of time and laid out a lot of jack keeping her away from this older man, and then she picks up with Egan. For her it was strictly friendship. For him, he went gaga. That’s why he dropped out of high school.

  He was so brokenhearted over her, he couldn’t concentrate. But what can you expect from somebody who came from his background? He’s had a rough life.”

  “That’s crap, Kenny,” I said, more sharply than I needed to. “A lot of killers come from wealthy families and a lot of very good, hard-working, moral people come from the slums.”

  “Wow, sounds like you’re going over to the other side. You going to that Dick Nixon rally tomorrow night? I plan to go. I hear his wife is going to wear a bikini.”

  “Asshole,” I said. “It’s just
that half the criminals I represent give me the same story. They have bad lives so they want to make sure other people have bad lives, too. I get tired of it. David could at least be honest with these girls.”

  “Tell him, not me.”

  “I plan to.”

  I stood up.

  “You reading anything good these days?” Kenny said.

  “A lot of Gil Brewer.” Brewer was a good Gold Medal writer, whose paperbacks with the luridly swanky covers I always buy and that seem to distress nearly everybody in town. They think I should be reading great literature-which I do, actually-even though they themselves haven’t read a novel since the teacher threw them to the floor and jammed Silas Marner down their throats.

  “Yeah, he’s great. Got that melancholy down. Always about a woman. He can break your heart. One of these days I’m gonna write a Gold Medal.”

  “I wish you would, Kenny. You’re a good writer.” He was. Amid all that writhing and gasping and groaning you found some eminently sound social observation and some very nicely turned sentences in Kenny’s books.

  “Thanks for thinking so, McCain. But everytime I sit down to write a Gold Medal-I just freeze up. I just think I’m not good enough to pull it off.”

  “Just pretend you’re writing your usual stuff.

  Your books aren’t all that far from Gold Medal, anyway. Kind of sneak up on yourself.”

  “Yeah, the way I did when I slept with Sandy Mitchell.”

  “You slept with Sandy Mitchell?”

  “Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”

  “You slept with the homecoming queen and you didn’t tell me?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Most guys couldn’t have gotten close to Sandy Mitchell with a bag of diamonds and a submachine gun. And here was the merry pornographer sleeping with her.

  “We happened to be on a picnic with some other people on that little island-Tule Island-ou on the river. Anyway, they all went back in the big boat and asked if we’d take the rowboat back. It was a rental. And then this storm came. And we sort of got marooned there on the island. With all this leftover beer and stuff. And you know how it goes, we were both drunk and one thing led to another, that sort of thing.