Sam McCain - 01 - The Day the Music Died

by Ed Gorman

  “I coulda handled those two crackers, man.”

  “When you were sober, yes. Not as drunk as you are now.”

  “I sound drunk, McCain?”

  Actually, he didn’t. He sounded, in fact, almost cold sober.

  “It’s the puking,” he said. “It never fails.

  I just puke my guts up and I’m fine.”

  “Well, you can never underestimate the medical benefits of puking.”

  “Straighten me right up. That’s how I

  can last thirty, forty hours drinkin’. I just puke every once in a while.”

  I started driving again. I pulled into a Dx station.

  “What you doin’?”

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  I jerked the keys out of the ignition.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where you goin’ with my keys?”

  “I told you. To make a phone call.”

  “How do I know you ain’t gonna try and sell this car or some shit like that?”

  “Oh, yeah. I could probably get twenty, thirty grand for this baby. I think the stale beer smell in the backseat is what folks are looking for in a car these days. Not to mention the puke.”

  “There’s that white mouth of yours again.”

  “Just shut up and sit there, Darin. You’re almost as big a pain in the ass as Paddy, Jr.”

  That quieted him down for some reason.

  The pay phone was next to the john. I looked up the hospital number and called. I asked for Lurlene and the operator said just a minute. Out in the car repair section, the greasy silver hoist was raising up a very cherry 1953 DeSoto. A kid in a clean Dx uniform was using his wrench to point out various things on the undercarriage of a car. I was getting sentimental. Nothing I’d rather do than spend a warm afternoon on my driveway working on my ragtop.

  Lurlene came on and I told her who I was and what had happened.

  “Did he throw up?” she asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did.”

  “Then he should be all right to drive.”

  “He may be all right technically. But I’ll bet that Sykes still comes after him.” I was sure that Paddy, Sr., had called Chief of Police Sykes, and I was sure that Sykes would be waiting for Darin Greene to get behind the wheel.

  They’d hit him with several charges, including drunken driving and, for sure, resisting arrest, which would justify the beating they would certainly put on him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McCain, it’s just that they don’t like me takin’ time off at the hospital here. They’re real nice and I hate to take advantage. And you know, with Darin

  not workin’, I’m the only support our family’s got.”

  “All right. I’ll run him home.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Mr. McCain.”

  I hesitated, knowing what I was about to say would disturb her. “Does Darin have a gun?”

  “A gun? He has a hunting rifle. I

  bought him one at Sears a couple years ago.

  For his birthday. Jeff, he’s the oldest boy, he’s eight, he’s startin’ to take target practice with it in the Cub Scouts.”

  “How about a handgun?”

  “He’s got that Army .45 his daddy had in the war.”

  That must be the gun he was referring to when I’d gotten into his car.

  “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “He just mentioned it in passing.”

  Another pause. “Is he in trouble, Mr.

  McCain?”

  “No. He really isn’t, Lurlene.”

  “Would you swear to it on the Lord’s name?”

  “I swear to it on the Lord’s name.”

  “Oh, thank God. I just got so scared there.” She sounded about to cry. “The boys, they’re just always afraid somethin’ bad’s gonna happen to that daddy of theirs.” Now she was crying, not hard, but with the soft, earnest sounds of a good and weary woman. “He ain’t like people say he is, Mr.

  McCain, not when he’s sober. When he’s sober, he can be the nicest man in the world.”

  When I hung up, I dropped in another nickel and called my dad and asked him if he could meet me out at Darin Greene’s place in about twenty minutes. And that I’d explain later.

  When I went back out to the Olds, Darin was leaning against the front of the car, one heel hooked on the bumper. He had to be cold in his short-sleeved red shirt and tan slacks. He did not look happy.

  When I got close, he held his hand out.

  “Keys.”

  “I’m driving you home.”

  “Keys, man. Or I’m gonna make you very sorry.”

  I looked at him. He wasn’t a bully, as Kenny had been. But he had a much deeper and meaner anger. He could make me very

  sorry indeed.

  “Sykes is going to be laying for you.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Sykes right now, man. I just want my keys back.”

  “You want your kids to have to come and visit you in county again?”

  That got to him. Say what you would about him, what he was or wasn’t, he was a man who loved his kids.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  But he got in the car. The passenger’s side.

  When we were going again, he reached under the seat and brought up a pint of rotgut whiskey.

  “You really need that?”

  “You’re pushin’ your luck, man. And that’s no shit.”

  “I take it you heard about Kenny.”

  “‘Course I heard about Kenny.

  Everybody’s heard about Kenny.”

  “I don’t think he killed her.”

  “What’re you talkin’ about, man, of course he killed her.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “If he didn’t kill her, why’d he kill himself, then?”

  “I was hoping maybe you could help me out a little with that one.”

  He glowered at me again. He looked angry, as he often did, but now there was a sense of fear about him, too. I wondered what he was afraid of.

  We were out on the river road now, heading toward the trailer court where virtually every Negro in the county lived. The rent is cheap, I guess.

  It’s our form of segregation.

  “You were his friend, is what I mean. I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “You haven’t kept up. Me ‘n’ Kenny haven’t spoken in over a year.”

  “Why?”

  “None of your business why.”

  “Friendship like that, all those years, and it just ends.

  That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I don’t know anything about what happened out there. Far as I can tell, he killed Susan and then he killed himself. He got crazy when he drank and from what I hear, he’d been hittin’

  it pretty hot ‘n’ heavy.”

  We came up on a little hill. On a wide grassy field below were the trailers. They

  were the small jobs, the kind they’d built before the war. There were maybe three dozen of them. It was a ghetto. Saturday nights, the good colored folks stayed inside all locked up while the predators prowled. I sometimes felt sorry for myself, coming from the Knolls. But what I’d had to put up with was easy compared to the doom that awaited the black kids from Shady Acres Trailer Park.

  I found his trailer and pulled up. The yard was picked up and the trailer looked homey with crisp yellow-flowered curtains in the windows.

  He looked over at me and grinned coldly.

  “You went to all this trouble, man, and I wasn’t no help at all, was I?”

  “Nope. You weren’t.”

  “And I ain’t gonna be, either.”

  I decided to lay it out for him. “I’ll be real interested in what caliber gun killed Susan Whitney.”

  The fear was in his face again. “It ain’t none of my business, man. And I could care less about them two.”

  I left the keys i
n the ignition and opened the door. In the rearview, I could see my dad’s blue ‘eb Chevy coupe coming up the road.

  I got out, closed the door, and then leaned back in. “You ever find that forty-five of yours, let me know.”

  “How’d you know it was a forty-five, man?

  Huh?”

  But I’d decided to be just as uncooperative as he was. “See you around, Darin.”

  Then I walked back to my dad’s coupe.

  Eight

  I still remember standing on the platform at the train depot and watching my dad wave to us when he came home from World War Ii. I was shocked. My parents are small people. My mom is five-two and has never cleared ninety pounds. But I’d grown up with my mom and was used to her size. My dad was a different matter.

  I’d seen a lot of John Wayne and

  Ronald Reagan—two of the many brave movie stars who hadn’t actually gone to war—war movies, and so I just figured my dad would be this big heroic kind of guy, too. He’d been gone a long time. Well, he wasn’t

  big and heroic-looking. In fact, he looked like a kid. He was five-six and weighed maybe 130 and had dishwater blond hair. His khaki uniform looked too big for him, gave him a vulnerability that made him seem even less soldierly. He was an utter stranger to me. The last time I’d seen him I’d been seven years old. I felt sort of ashamed of him, actually, how young and vulnerable he looked in the midst of all these other towering Gi’s. Why couldn’t I have a dad who looked like Robert Mitchum? And I’ve always been ashamed of myself for feeling that. I know that when I see him in his coffin over at the Fitzpatrick Funeral Home, that’s what I’ll think of, how I betrayed him in my heart that first day he came back from the war.

  The other thing I always remember about him was how he used to jitterbug with my mother on the linoleum in the kitchen in those good giddy days right after the fighting stopped. They’d play the Andrews Sisters and Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and they’d dance for hours. But he managed. They stayed home a lot, as if they didn’t want to share each other with anybody else. They’d have a quart of Hamms beer on the oilcloth-covered table (i’ve always loved the smell of oilcloth) and the amber eye of the radio would burn far into the night as music poured from its speakers.

  That wasn’t too long ago but it was hard to believe it was the same guy. Bald, stooped, nearsighted. The war hadn’t taken nearly as much out of him as his various jobs did afterward. Just as I’d barely recognized him that day on the train platform, I had a hard time recognizing him these days. Small to begin with, now he seemed to shrink even smaller in his gray Penney’s overcoat and blue Irish wool walking cap.

  I got in the car. The heater was on. So was Bill Haley. Somehow my dad had picked up a fondness for rock and roll, one not shared by my mom. He was watching Darin slip and slide up to his trailer.

  “I wonder what the hell went wrong with him,”

  my dad said. “I always thought he’d have a nice future. And he’s got such a nice wife and all.” He shook his head. “I s’pose it’s growin’ up out here. How colored people get treated, I mean.” Dad had all the

  insecurities that go along with being a small and somewhat delicate man. But instead of using them to hate or bully, he’d turned them into empathy and wisdom. He always watched the Cbs Evening News with Douglas Edwards and watched what the white cops were doing to black people trying to ride whites-only city buses. Stuff like that got to him as much as it did me. Even my mom, who didn’t vote because she hated all politicians equally, had tears in her eyes when she saw little Negro kids blasted off the streets with fire hoses and their parents clubbed to their knees.

  “I found him over at Paddy’s.”

  Dad made a face. “I wonder why he

  does that. He knows they’ll just throw him out.

  Poor bastard.”

  He put the coupe in reverse, we whipped backward into a small drive, and then turned back toward town. The coupe was warm and snug.

  “Sykes is lookin’ for you.”

  “Sykes?” I said.

  “Yeah. He called the warehouse and asked if I knew where you were. And then he called your mom out to the house.”

  “He say what he wanted?”

  “Said you shouldn’t have left Kenny Whitney’s house before he told you to. He said he could arrest you for leaving. What a dipshit that guy is.

  I had a captain like him in the army. Always struttin’ around and actin’ like he was on top of things. Drove a truck straight off a mountainside when were in Italy. Luckily, he was the only one who died.”

  “Well, I’m going to see Judge Whitney first. That’s been my plan all day but I can’t get in, she’s so damned busy.”

  He looked at me, this old man who had yet to see his fiftieth birthday. “She been any nicer to you lately?”

  I smiled. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “Well, I don’t have to tell you how the Whitneys are.”

  “Eastern money,” I said. “Big Eastern money. The only thing I could never figure out is why her branch moved clear the hell out here to Iowa.”

  We were passing a supermarket on the edge of town. Dad read some of the prices in the windows out loud. “Gosh, look. Pork steak is

  thirty-three cents a pound. And bacon is three for a buck. Guy’d have to be a millionaire if he wanted to eat a good steak these days.” As a child of the Depression, Dad watched food prices the way other men watched stock prices. Overseas and dreaming of home, the men of his generation had imagined heaven on earth when they returned home. They hadn’t known that heaven had inflation and bad spells of recession, too.

  “You know Ross, the guy I work with? You know what he paid for his new Mercury? Three thousand dollars. Hell, we paid that for the house when we bought it.”

  “You were going to tell me why the Whitneys came out here.”

  “Oh. I forgot. The Whitneys. Well, the judge’s grandfather got caught in a land swindle, one of those deals that’s so complicated it gives you a headache to think about. Anyway, what it came down to was that her grandfather cheated the government and they were going to bring him to trial and everything, but the family chipped in and gave the cash back and got the government to drop the charges. And then they gave him a lot of money and told him to get lost somewhere on the frontier. Iowa was as far as he got.”

  I laughed. “So that story she hands out about her grandfather coming out here because he wanted to be a gentleman farmer—”

  “A total crock.”

  We were in town and headed toward the one-story corner brick building where I have my office around back. Dad pulled into the parking lot and said, “Mom wants to know when you’re coming over for dinner.”

  “How about next Tuesday?”

  “Spaghetti night. She makes the best.”

  Mom did housework with military-style orderliness. For years, Tuesday night had been spaghetti night just as Tuesday day had been housecleaning day, just as Wednesday was Swiss steak night and grocery shopping day. She did all these things on a budget so minuscule I felt like a spendthrift every time I bought a candy bar.

  Dad said, “You didn’t mention Kenny.”

  I looked over at him. “I don’t think he killed her.”

  “That isn’t what I was thinkin’ of.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was thinkin’ of how he was always beating you up.

  Ever since you were in kindergarten together. And I could never protect you and I felt like hell about it.

  I remember the time he broke your glasses and I drove out to their mansion and I was ready to be all pissed and everything but when I got inside there I was really intimidated. The way they looked at me and talked to me. It should’ve made me even madder. But it just kind of beat me down. I shoulda stuck up for you a lot better, but I didn’t. All he did, Kenny’s old man, was scratch out this check and hand it to me and tell me to never come out there again. I felt ashamed of myself, I really did, kiddo. I real
ly did.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “You did the best you could, Dad. I wouldn’t have done any better.”

  Then he circled back. “So how come you don’t think he killed her?”

  “I’m not sure. Just a feeling, I guess.”

  He thought a moment and said, “You know what I shoulda done the day I was out at their mansion?”

  “What?”

  “I had real muddy shoes on. I took them off at the door. I shoulda tracked mud all the way into his den.”

  I laughed at the picture of my small father leaving big mud prints on the mansion floor.

  It was like watching a really funny Daffy Duck cartoon.

  “Well, kiddo,” he said, glancing at his Timex. “I better head back.”

  I watched him pull away, and then I walked over to the imperious Judge Whitney’s chambers, the same Judge Whitney whose grandfather had been a federal land swindler.

  Nine

  The stone courthouse had been built before there were any Whitneys or Sykeses to fight over who would get the building contract. It was three stories high, with a small golden dome that flew the American flag, and had the feel of an Italian Renaissance castle in an Mgm musical with Mario Lanza and Kathryn Grayson. For my taste, it was too fancy by half. Cliff Sykes, Sr., was always hinting he’d like to tear it down and build a new one.

  He’d go to the opposite extreme. The

  one he’d build would look like the prefab home developments he was putting up on both ends of town.

  Judge Whitney’s chambers were on the second floor. I’d missed the rush. The outer office, which was nicely carpeted wall-to-wall and filled with mahogany furnishings and several large portraits of Whitney menfolk down the decades, was empty. There was an American flag standing in the corner and a portrait of George Washington on the wall next to it.

  Empty like this, and with paintings of all these dead people, there was a hushed, churchlike air about the place.

  The air was soon changed by a beautiful face and a beautiful body, namely one Pamela Forrest. She walked through the door with an aluminum coffeepot in her hand. “Want some?”

  “Please.”

  “The judge has extra cups in there.”

  She wore a white turtleneck sweater and a blue jumper. She looked very smart in what should have been a fairly humdrum outfit. She also smelled great. I always wondered if I wasn’t in love with her perfumes and not her at all.