by Ed Gorman
She said, “Did they recover the body?”
“Yes. The ambulance took it away.”
Amy winced and brought her shoe up-an oxford -and squeezed it. “Ruined my new white Keds this afternoon on the side of the house. I’ve got them hanging on the wash line. Hope it’ll get the oil out.” Then, “But who cares about my shoes at a time like this?”
She was getting disoriented, which is how some people deal with bad news.
Molly came up. She started toward Emma but Emma pulled back abruptly, as if a plague victim had tried to touch her. “This isn’t a good time for your whining, Molly. And tell Rita the same thing. I don’t want to hear from either one of you for a long time. Maybe never.”
She was trying to deal with it her way, I realized now. Amy was somewhat dithering. Emma wanted to be strong and in this instance being strong meant measuring your words and not giving in to the moment.
“Sam, will you come over in the morning after mass?” Emma said.
“Of course.”
“You don’t want to go over there and look?”
Amy said to her sister.
“For what? So we’ll have some more bad memories?”
I’d never heard Emma speak to Amy this way. It wasn’t a barroom brawl but for two loving sisters it was certainly a cold question.
Amy looked at me, embarrassed. They weren’t public women. They left that to the Irish menfolk, the brawlers and bellyachers and bullies with all the storms they dragged around with them.
“Let’s go,” Emma said to Amy.
“But we’ve only been here a few minutes.”
“I don’t want to be here anymore,”
Emma said. She touched her sister’s arm. “I shouldn’t have spoken that way to you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Emma,” Amy said. “We each have different ways of dealing with things is all.”
“See you in the morning, Sam,” Emma said.
“Good night, Sam,” Amy said.
“Good night,” I said.
I heard it before I saw it. And when I heard it I wasn’t sure what it was. Just some kind of whimper, some kind of curse.
Somebody shouted.
Something heavy and fast-moving slammed into me.
Rita had just jumped on Molly’s back. She had a handful of that lovely coppery hair and she was jerking Molly’s head back and forth.
I returned the favor, grabbing a handful of Rita’s hair and yanking on it hard enough to make her cry out. “Let her go, Rita.”
She wouldn’t let go. I wound more of her hair around my hand and jerked all the harder. This time she screamed. And let go.
When she was free of Molly, I shoved her away.
“You happy you came out here and ruined his night for him, Molly?” Rita screamed at her. “You and this asshole lawyer of yours? Maybe if you two hadn’t given him all your grief he wouldn’t have smashed his car up. Maybe he was so mad at you two he couldn’t think straight.”
We all need somebody to blame. Maybe in the future there’ll be something called a blame robot, a little metal guy that follows you around and takes the blame for anything you do wrong or anything fate decides to dump on you.
For Rita, Molly was handy. Her accusation made no sense. But it didn’t need to make any sense.
Molly slipped her arm through mine.
“Will you take me home?”
“Oh,” Rita said. “Isn’t that so sweet?
Maybe she’ll sleep with you if you’re real nice to her, McCain.”
Brainard came over. Slid his arm around Rita’s shoulder. The hurt I’d put on him had apparently faded. He said, “C’mon, Rita. These two ain’t worth botherin’ with.”
His gentleness surprised me. Guy his size, his temperament, being capable of such a quiet, soothing tone. Was it because Egan was dead or because Brainard had more feelings for Rita than he usually let on?
Molly led me away.
Halfway to her place, she said, “I’ve really got a headache.”
“If it’s any comfort, the way I grabbed her, I’m sure Rita’s got one, too.”
“I never liked her. She was always sneaking around with David behind my back. But I’ve never hated her the way she hates me.” Then, “I haven’t really cried yet.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“Oh, that was nothing. I was inhibited by all the people around.”
“When you get home then-”
“When I get home I’ll have to go through the Inquisition. And then they’ll gloat.”
“I assume you’re talking about your parents?”
“Could you turn the heat on?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. And yes, I’m talking about my parents. They’ll try to hide it. Their gloating.
They’ll say how sorry they are about him dying.
But they’ll be relieved. He won’t be around to bother them anymore. Meaning he won’t be around to bother me. Anymore. My father hated him.
Really. Deep, deep hatred. I was a virgin until I met David. He’s the only boy I’ve ever slept with. I made the mistake of telling my mom that. Supposedly in confidence.
But she told my father, of course. I really think he’s jealous. He just got crazy. He got drunk for several nights in a row and then he’d come upstairs and start screaming at me. He even called me a whore a couple of times. My mom really got scared.”
“Did he ever confront David?”
“Once. One night he got really drunk and went looking for him. My mom says he keeps a loaded forty-five-his old army pistol-in the nightstand drawer. She went to look for it but it wasn’t there. She was afraid Dad would kill him or something. The whole night was crazy. She couldn’t call Cliffie because he’d tell everybody that Dad went off with a gun looking for David. Fortunately, she didn’t have to tell Cliffie anything. Cliffie saw Dad weaving down the street and pulled him over.
Made him park the car and then brought him home.
Dad didn’t say anything about David or the gun apparently. If Dad weren’t so important, Cliffie would’ve run him in.
Anyway, he didn’t get to David.”
My headlights pierced the leafy darkness of her narrow street. The eyes of raccoons gleamed silver in the shrubs and undergrowth. The family dog began yapping before I was even halfway up the drive.
When I pulled up, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I wish you were younger or I were older.” She was all coppery hair and heartbroken smile. Egan had been a fool.
“Or you were shorter or I were taller.”
“We’re a pair.” Then, “You know what I’m doing, don’t you?”
“Stalling for time before you have to go inside.”
“You’re very perceptive.”
“What scares you the most, facing your parents or being alone in your room?”
“Being alone. Because I’m going to fall apart.”
“Maybe that’s what you need,” I said.
“Falling apart. Then when you wake up you’ll be stronger.”
“Rita could’ve stopped him tonight. This is her fault, you know.”
“Kiddo,” I said, not up for another flaying of her romantic rival, “it’s time for you to go inside.”
I drove around for an hour. This time Saturday night there would still be kids out cruising.
The hard drunks would be done for the night, passed out or punched out or puked out. Only the melancholy ones would be left. They’d had dates and the dates had to be home at midnight and now they were cruising alone, melancholy for the girls they’d just dropped off, because they loved them so damned much; or melancholy because they were so damned afraid they would lose them, secretly reviewing all their inadequacies and just hoping the girls never found out about them for themselves.
They would hit the highway and turn up the rock and roll and let the moon shine on them with its ancient solitary soothing truths.
The local Tv stations always signed off
at midnight, even on weekends. Nothing’s lonelier than the keen of a test pattern.
I climbed into bed shortly after one, read six pages, and fell thankfully into a deep and dreamless sleep. I went through all the usual tussles with the cats, Tasha deciding at some point during the night to examine my face the way a dermatologist would, her purring almost as loud as her snoring; little Crystal head-butting my arm so I’d give her a sleepy scratch; and Tess biting my foot when I made the mistake of trying to move it so I could get comfortable. I’d slept with my boyhood dog for years so I knew all about how to sleep with, around, and through the experience of pets in the same bed.
It was darktime when the phone woke me. No particular time or place or world. Just darktime.
My weary hand reaching out for the telephone on the nightstand. My weary ear feeling the cold receiver against it. My weary mind trying to make sense of the words. He or she was stingy with words. A regular haiku master. I say he or she because it was either a female talking through a handkerchief or a male talking through a handkerchief and sliding his voice up an octave, not quite falsetto.
“It wasn’t an accident.”
No emotion. No elaboration.
“You hear me? It wasn’t an accident.”
Thirteen
Next morning, I went out there even though there was no reason to do it. I went up to the edge of the crevice where the bridge had ripped away and I just stood there. It was a cool, sunny, autumn Sunday and even this far away from the center of town you could hear the bells of the Catholic church. The red limestone wall on the opposite side of the river was like a bulletin board of bits and pieces of Egan’s Merc, bits and pieces that were strewn everywhere. A chrome headlight rim, bent and busted, caught the sunlight. A foot-long length of tire was somehow adhered to the wall. What appeared to be a section of bumper stuck straight out. The front of the car had left an outline in the limestone. Parts of the display were oily from impact. There were violent rents and deep gouges but they didn’t leave any discernible pattern.
I had no idea what I was looking for.
Maybe I wasn’t looking for anything. Maybe that phone call had made me suspicious enough to come out here, even though the chances were it was a prank.
There are people who enjoy making miserable events even more miserable for those involved. I don’t understand people who admire communism, I don’t understand people who hurt children, I don’t understand people who rob and cheat old people, I don’t understand White Sox fans.
And I especially don’t understand people who find human grief something to exploit for laughs or profit. Someday I’m going to build my own private death row and I’m going to put all these people in it. Except for the White Sox fans.
Following that team is punishment enough. No incarceration required.
I drove back down to the starting line. The blue air was alive with pheasants. You could watch them take fragile flight, their elegant colors vivid above the cornfields and the meadows. In another week it would be legal for hunters to put their rifles and shotguns on them and blow the shit out of them. From all the gunfire in the surrounding hills it sounded as if at least a few of the brave and intrepid hunters were already blasting away. Those damned pheasants are mean.
The area around the starting line was a mess of crushed beer cans, crumpled cigarette packages, pop cans, smashed bottles, empty potato chip packages. But when you looked away from the debris, looked up at the smoky autumn hills, everything was clean and coherent, and the death of a young man last night seemed not obscene but impossible.
I wasn’t looking for it when I found it. I walked right past it, recognizing it for what it was, of course, but not connecting it to Egan or last night.
I was just walking back to my car when I happened to see the trail of it glistening there, a gleaming snake that had already claimed its victim -a gleaming trail of oil.
I walked over to the snake and measured its lengths in steps. The snake extended well beyond my desire to count off its length. I wasn’t sure what it meant. There might be a harmless explanation. Or a harmful one.
Extremely harmful.
It was getting hotter. I went over and put the top down on my ragtop. I headed back to town.
People clog the churches on Sunday morning, so I always feel self-conscious when I’m tooling past a church and the congregation is gathered on the steps to congratulate the minister on another dynamic sermon-the congregation always gives you the look it reserves for burglars and heathens.
I was hoping to find Egan’s smashed-up car at the Dx station where I trade.
It sat in front of an open bay waiting for its autopsy. The motor might be salvageable -probably was-z well as some of the custom accoutrements that private owners would pay decent money for.
Jay Norbert was looking it over and nodding his head in rhythm to whatever his customer was saying.
The car itself was a great alien metal beast to be pondered and studied. A lot of people would want to know what had gone wrong. Had it been the car or Egan or both?
The customer walked away just as I approached. Jay had just gotten out of the army.
He’d been a good mechanic when he went in; he was an even better one now that he was out. He was a skinny twenty-two-year-old who was already losing his hair. He always kept his uniform spotless. His boss had opened another gas station across town and put Jay in charge of this one. A doctor in a nearby town had done some questionable things during the pregnancy of Jay’s wife; that was why I knew his story. We were suing the doc.
“Sonofabitch,” Jay said. “There isn’t enough left here to haul to the junkyard.”
“The poor bastard.”
“I didn’t like him but I sure wouldn’t wish this on him.”
“Why didn’t you like him?”
“He came on to Marie one day.” Marie being his wife, a pretty farm girl. “Right in front of me, too. I started to say something but Marie dragged me away. Was hard workin’ on his car when he came in.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“His car. I was wondering if you’d check something for me.”
He smiled. “Cliffie was in. He’s already got it figured out, he says.”
“Really? This should be good.”
“Friday night Egan kills the girl, see, and Saturday night he’s so guilty he gets all gooned up and then runs his car right off the road. Case closed.”
“Man, that Cliffie. When he puts that brain of his to use, stand back and watch the sparks fly.”
He laughed. “I suppose it could’ve happened that way.”
“He didn’t kill her.”
I was just walking back to my car when Donny Hughes pulled up. His heavily chromed black leather jacket was just as inevitable as his waterfall blond ducktail. “Holy shit. No wonder he died.” His entire face tightened as he looked at the remains of Egan’s Merc.
“That’s right. You keep on drinking and drag racing, that could be you.”
He stayed in his street rod, an elbow on the open window of the driver’s side. “Wonder how Rita’s doin’?”
“I wouldn’t bother her right now.”
“Things may change, McCain. With Egan dead, maybe she’ll see how much I dig her.
I buy her gifts all the time. Just bought her a pair of desert boots and a new green sweater.
You should see that sweater on her.”
“I wouldn’t move in on her just yet, Donny. I think the mandatory grieving time is something like an hour and a half in this state.”
“Hey, McCain, I didn’t mean-”
I waved him off and went to my car. It never takes long for the “good friends” to move in on the spoils.
Scrambled eggs, blueberry muffins, three strips of perfectly cooked bacon, orange juice-th was the breakfast Emma and Amy Kelly had fixed for me.
Theirs was an immigrant Irish house, a tiny white clapboard box on a tiny lot w
ith a tiny garage on its back edge. A well-scrubbed living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms packed with doilies, small statues of the Virgin and assorted saints, an eleven-inch Tv screen, and framed paintings of Christ that managed to be sad and somehow lurid at the same time.
We ate in the dining room on a table that smelled of its new oilcloth covering with a decades-old record player scratching out Irish jigs from the living room.
Emma looked as composed, even cold, as she had on the highway last night. Amy’s eyes were red and ruined and her flesh was gray.
Emma said, “I suppose you’ve heard what that stupid ass Cliffie is saying.”
“That it was suicide?”
Emma nodded. “He isn’t Catholic. He doesn’t understand. For a Catholic to take his own life-” his-eternal damnation,” Amy said.
“He got drunk and wrecked his car. That’s all that happened. And he didn’t kill that Sara Griffin girl, either. He loved her.”
“That’s exactly what he said? That he loved her?”
“He told both of us that,” Emma said. “And she was the only girl he’d ever said that about.”
“When did he say that?”
She looked at Amy. “Tuesday?”
“Monday, I think,” Amy said. “It was right after “The Lucy Show.””
“You and your “Lucy Show”,” Emma said.
She reached over and patted her sister’s hand.
“We each have our favorite shows and argue about which of them is best. I like Jackie Gleason.”
“He’s not a very good Catholic is what I read in the papers,” Amy said. “He’s married but he runs around on his wife all the time.”
“They’re separated,” Emma said.
“That doesn’t matter in the eyes of the church,”
Amy said. “He still shouldn’t be running around on her.”
I wondered if Jackie Gleason’s ears were burning. His sex life was being discussed with some force by two elderly Catholic ladies in rural Iowa.
“David wanted to marry Sara,” Amy said.
“He treated her differently from the others.”
“How so?”
“For one thing,” Amy said, “he had to chase her rather than the other way around.”
