by Ed Gorman
Jamie was pushing a ball of pink bub7um into her erotic mouth. “Realized what, Carrie?”
“If Mr. McCain’s name starts with
“M” why do you call him “Mr. C.”?”
Jamie looked half offended that anybody could possibly be daft enough to ask such a question. “Because they call Perry Como Mr. C.” My
God, Carrie, what are you, an idiot?
Carrie rolled her eyes and said, “Boy, I can see what you meant about the filing. It’s kind of a mess.” She walked over to the window and dragged a long finger through a quarter inch of dust.
“Could stand a little cleaning, too.”
“I promised Mr. C I’d sort of clean things up after my hands heal.” Jamie dangled her hands in front of us. “I was using this Rexall lotion my mom bought me. I wanted to throw it away-I mean, Rexall makes beauty products?-but I used it because she’s always talking about how I waste money and I get real sick of hearing that speech. But look at my hands now.”
I looked at her hands. Her cousin Carrie looked at her hands. I looked at Carrie and Carrie looked at me and then we both looked back at Jamie and Carrie said, “Your hands look fine.”
“To you, maybe, they look fine. But I have to wear them everyday. And believe me, they look terrible after using that Rexall junk. So I have to wait till they’re healed again before I can do any, you know, like cleaning or anything. Typing, no problem. Answering the phone, no problem.
Getting Mr. C some coffee from down the street, no problem. But cleaning-not for a while.”
Two-hour lunches with Turk, no problem.
Tying up the office phone gossiping with her girlfriends, no problem. Misspelling every other word in business letters, no problem. But cleaning- “Well,” I said, “I appreciate you coming in, Carrie. Is forty cents an hour all right?”
“Oh, I don’t want any pay, Mr.
McCain. I get class credit for doing this.
I’m taking business courses.”
“I’m going to teach her how to type,” Jamie said.
Carrie winked at me. “Yes, I’ve seen Jamie type. It’s really something.”
I liked this girl already.
“Well,” Carrie said. “Time to get to work.”
“Yes,” Jamie sighed. “That’s about all we do around here, isn’t it, Mr. C? Work, work, work.”
The poor dear girl.
She sat with her tan suede desert boots up on the edge of the desk, some kind of black stuff staining a quarter inch of them above the sole.
Donny Hughes would be glad to know she was wearing them. I assumed these were the ones he’d gifted her with.
She had an ancient stand-up phone in one hand while the other hand held the receiver to her ear. She said, “Mrs. Russell, Calamity’s getting old. None of us wants to face that but we have to.
I know your boys don’t think he’s “exciting” anymore, but if you want “something to happen to him,” you’ll have to do it yourself.
I couldn’t do that. I see Calamity every day. I love him. So you think about it and if you want your boys to get a new horse, fine, I’ll help you get one, but I sure won’t help
Calamity have an “accident.” Good-bye, Mrs. Russell.” Rita Scully replaced receiver on hook, phone on desk, set her feet on the floor and said, “She wants me to kill her horse. It’s been in the family for ten years, ever since her twins were four years old. Now the boys want something younger and faster but she doesn’t want to pay for two stalls, so she wants me to stage an accident so Calamity won’t be a financial drain anymore. Nice folks out there. Say, McCain, you got a smoke? I’m plumb out.”
“Well, lucky for you, I’m not plumb out.”
I pitched her my pack and my lighter. She grinned. “I pick up words from cowboys at the rodeo. Hence, plumb.”
“So which word did you pick up from the rodeo, “hence” or “plumb”?”
She slid the pack and lighter back across the desk. She took a big gulp of cancer and exhaled it right at where I sat on the customer side of the desk. “Did little Molly send you out here to make me apologize?”
“Haven’t seen Molly since the funeral.”
She wore a black Western shirt with white piping and some lovingly fitted jeans. “I used to beat the crap out of my older brother. My mom said that when boys found that out they’d never take me to dances.”
“They’d be afraid you’d beat them up, too?”
“No, they wouldn’t want to be seen in public with anybody so unladylike is what my mom had in mind. But then I got finished with my braces and lost the fat in my cheeks and this body came along out of nowhere. Boys begged me to go to dances.”
“And they say this isn’t a great country.”
The humor in her eyes vanished so completely it was hard to believe it was ever there. “Molly killed David, you know.”
“And how would that be?”
“The pressure she put him under. Constant pressure to marry her.”
“She thought she could help him.”
She shrugged. “Everybody thought they could help him.” She looked around the office.
Framed black-and-white photos of various horses covered the walls as did numerous, and dusty, framed awards. There was another cluttered, battered desk like hers in the corner with another old-fashioned phone and two filing cabinets that looked even older than mine. Hay from the stables covered the floor. The two windows were almost dirty enough to pass as walls. The rest was the usual tack room stuff competing for space with the office-brass hooks with bridles and reins and bits hanging from them; and saddle racks made from reinforced sawhorses that would support the heavy saddles. Along the floor on the east wall were several pairs of Western boots. What I was most curious about were the chaps. I wondered if she ever wore them.
She said, “We make a nice living here. I hope to raise my kids here. When David was sober and thinking straight, he wanted to live here, too.” She took a bitter drag of her smoke. “But Molly and Sara-they made him feel like somebody important. That’s the one thing I couldn’t give him. I know who I am and what I am. I’m nobody important according to our little burg here. And I also know that you can’t force a guy into marrying you.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “Got another one?”
I pushed the pack to her. “How’d you end up with David on Saturday night?”
“I saw him cruising around. He looked pretty bombed. I told him he’d better let me drive or Cliffie’d get him for sure.”
“What time did you see him?”
“Eight or so. Why?”
“I’m just trying to reconstruct his day and his night.”
“Can his aunts help you?”
“That’s where I’m headed after this.” Then, “You think Donny Hughes could’ve killed him?” I hadn’t told her about Brenda Carlyle.
She lighted her second cigarette. “He hated David, that’s for sure. There’s just one thing wrong.” She smiled coldly. “You really think he’d have the nerve to do something like that? Little Donny Hughes?”
It was one of those moments when you realize that somewhere, sometime, a woman smiled like that about you. And that you, in turn, sometime, somewhere, smiled that way about a woman.
“He’s in love with you.”
“Yes, and he never lets me forget it, either.
I shouldn’t have talked about him that way. He’s nice but it’ll be a long time before-” She shrugged. “He’ll make somebody a nice husband.”
“I take it that’s not a quality you’re especially interested in at the moment.”
“I told you, I want kids and a family life. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to settle for some timid little guy who lets me walk all over him.”
I stood up and walked back to the door. She watched me, her dark gaze impossible to read.
She was a formidable young woman.
I said, “You happen to remember where you were Friday night?”
“Ar
e you asking me if I killed Sara, McCain?”
“Something like that, I guess.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something. I thought about it enough. I thought about each and every one of the girls he threw me over for. He almost always came back, though. Even with Molly, he came back. Even with Princess Sara, he came back.” This time the cold smile was for herself. “The trouble was that the bastard never stayed long.” Then, “Just a sec, I’ll walk out with you. I need to change boots. These ones Donny gave me are a half size too small. Isn’t that just like him?”
Sweet Emma and sweet Amy were sitting out on their porch glider. Emma was reading the paper and Amy was darning socks. One of their cats sat on the porch railing watching me. The day was starting the long stretch into dusk, the shadows deep and somehow lonely, a certain melancholy creeping into the laughter of kids playing in a nearby front yard. All too soon moms in aprons would be on front porches calling them in for supper, wash-^th-hands-first, as the first stars came out and the night grew chill. A clunker Plymouth packed with teenagers raced by, Elvis way up high.
You could see Amy had been crying. David would never leave this house. Not except in body.
“Good afternoon, ladies.”
“Good afternoon, Sam.” They both spoke as one and then smiled at each other about it.
Emma said, “We got his room all ready for you yesterday, but with all the excitement about Brenda…”
“Well, you had time to hide all the evidence, that’s for sure.”
Amy said, “We didn’t throw anything away.
We really didn’t, Sam.”
“But you do have a secret, right?”
“How did you know?” Amy said.
Emma scolded her sister with a hard blue glance. “Now he knows we have a secret, Amy. Thanks to you.”
“He already knew we had a secret, didn’t you, Sam?”
“Well, the way you made such a fuss about cleaning it up, I figured something was going on.”
“It’s nothing we’re proud of, believe me, Sam,” Emma said.
“Well, I didn’t notice you turning any of it down last night, if you’re so ashamed of it, sister.”
Nice to know that even saintly women got into the occasional blood feud.
“Do I get to know what you’re talking about?”
“Would you like some lemonade, Sam? I made it from fresh lemons about an hour ago.”
“No thanks, Emma. But I would like to know what you two are talking about.”
The sisters looked at each other and then back at me.
“Why don’t you go up to his room and look through things,” Emma said, “and give us a little more time to talk through this stuff.”
“So I don’t get to know what all this is about?” I kept my tone light but I really was curious.
“You go up and look through his room,” Amy said, “and we’ll decide if we’re going to tell you or not. It’s-nothing we’re proud of, Sam.”
I smiled. Sitting on their glider. Darning socks. Sweet as a sentimental magazine illustration. What kind of secret could they have?
“You wouldn’t be communist spies, would you?”
Emma: “Oh, Sam.”
“Or be running a bawdy house?”
Amy: “Sam, what a dirty mind you have.”
“Or be running a white slavery ring?”
“Help yourself to the lemonade if you want, Sam. You know where the refrigerator is.”
I passed on the lemonade, making my way up the interior stairs to the second floor and David’s room. Instead of teenage idol pics, his walls were covered with hot rods.
Street rods, most of them, mostly Fords from the 1930’s cut down and sculpted into mythic beasts of style and grace. His small bookcase held hot-rod magazines arranged carefully by date, and a dozen or so paperbacks lurid of cover and violent of copy: “Speed, switchblades… and sex! Today’s teens on the prowl!” They seemed to be the prose equivalent of drive-in movies. Egan had no doubt identified with the troubled protagonists.
Closet, desk, bureau didn’t reveal anything useful. His aunts bought most of his clothes at Sears; his better shirts-presumably he’d chosen them himself-had come from J. C. Penney’s.
Underneath the desk were two shoeboxes I hadn’t noticed while I’d been looking through the drawers. I drew them out and sat down on the bed and went through their contents. I looked out at the dusky sky. I wondered how many times Egan had sat on this bed staring out at the same backyard-garage-alley scene. It was a comforting sight. Home in a small town. I wondered if he’d taken solace in it or if his bitterness and self-pity had made peace impossible for him.
The first box contained maybe four dozen photographs of hot cars he’d taken at the drag strip in Cordoba, Illinois. It was in the second box that I found the love letters.
I spent half an hour going through them, interrupted twice by yoo-hoos shouted up the stairs by the Kelly sisters. Was everything all right? Did I want to stay to supper? Was I sure I didn’t want some fresh-squeezed lemonade?
The letters came from a dozen different girls in Black River Falls and a few surrounding towns. He’d taken his show on the road, apparently. Most of them were awkward and pained of expression, and heartbreaking in their earnest pleas for his attention and love. I could imagine him sitting in his room late at night, beyond the comfort of liquor and easy sex, making himself feel better by going through these letters. It wasn’t as simple as egotism. Not with the life he’d had.
These were objective affirmations of his worth and for the first time I felt as sorry for him as I did for the girls who’d loved him. To at least a few people in this life, he mattered. He was the somebody he’d always longed to be.
The most literate letters were from Molly. She reminded him that she had loved him since that time in seventh grade when he’d asked her to slow dance at a school mixer. She reminded him of how she’d been able to get him to cut way back on his drinking and how she’d convinced him to go to the board of education soon and see how he should go about taking a high school equivalency test. Rita’s were rock-and-roll treatises that sounded very much like the copy on the paperback covers… speed, switchblades, and sex. She shared his “greed for speed” and enjoyed all the “wild and dangerous places” they’d made love in. And like Molly, she reminded him that she’d loved him a long time, too, since ninth grade and that he was only truly himself when he was with her. Rita mentioned that she’d even given up her best friend Molly because of him.
At the bottom of the box were a few dozen photographs of Egan in his school days. The pictures told the tale. Half of them featured Molly, the other half Rita.
Despite this obvious rivalry, neither had ever thrown him over. I thought about my waning addiction to the beautiful-and absent-Pamela Forrest.
Sometimes you’re the only one who doesn’t know she’s never going to fall in love with you.
The two girls were more interesting to look at than Egan. He’d always looked pretty much the same. He’d aspired to James Deanhood since 1955, when Dean became a popular actor.
But the girls… for such beauties, neither had been especially pretty in young girlhood. Their bloom would come later. Molly had enough braces on her teeth to shred a car fender and was thin to the point of looking like a poster kid encouraging you to stamp out world hunger; Rita was plump and squinty-eyed and unsmiling. There was a kind of symbiosis here, the three of them. There was even one photo-they were in maybe seventh grade-ofthe three of them together, one girl on each side of him, a tetherball pole in the background, the girls smiling as if they were friends.
They all had one thing in common: David Egan was the center of their lives.
I found the half-smoked marijuana stick on the bottom of the box. The grass was fresh as I squeezed it. Egan must have stashed his contraband in here. I’d tried the stuff a number of times in Iowa City but I always had the same reaction I did to booze. It put me to sleep.
When I went dow
nstairs, the ladies were on the living room couch watching a quiz show with Garry Moore. I carried the box over and showed them the half joint in the box. “You know what this is, ladies?”
Amy said, “Oh, Lord, sister, I told you he’d find out.”
“So you knew he was smoking marijuana?”
“We’re not addicts, Sam,” Amy said.
“We just tried it a few times.”
“Amy,” Emma said, “will you please be still?
Sam just wanted to know if we knew that David smoked it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “you mean you were smoking it, too?” I couldn’t help smiling. I tried to imagine these two elderly Irish ladies, mass-goers seven days a week, smoking a reefer.
“We just tried a few of his sticks was all,”
Emma said.
“He talked us into it, Sam.”
Emma said, “He was always talking us into things.
He’d get us a little tipsy once in a while.
Or he’d teach us some new dance step while he played some of his records. Or he’d get us to watch some naughty movie on Tv.”
“He said we had to know what was going on in the world. He got a big kick out of it. He wasn’t in a good mood all that often-especially near the end of his life-s we went along with it.”
“Seeing him happy made us happy,
Sam,” Emma said.
I looked at one face and then the other. I could see them now in the newspaper: Saintly old ladies arrested for smoking reefers.
I laughed. “Well, did you enjoy it?”
They glanced at each other.
“Sort of,” Emma said.
“Not that we’d ever do it again,” Amy said.
“It mostly made us hungry the three times we smoked it,” Emma said. “We made this huge chocolate cake.”
“It was the first lopsided cake Emma ever made. Marijuana kind of confuses you.”
“So,” Emma said, obviously wanting to change the subject. “Did you find anything else?”
“Letters and photos.”
“He sure kept a lot of them, didn’t he?” Emma said.
“Did either Molly or Rita come over here much?”
“Oh, sure,” Emma said. “All the time.
