Not Fade Away

by Jim Dodge

  She wasn’t shocked or offended. She just looked at me and shook her head.

  ‘You can say no.’

  ‘Dr Gass, I have to say no.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘I work here. I live here. I don’t know you.’

  I lost heart against that three-gun salvo of logic. ‘You’re right. You have to say no, I guess, and I have to wonder if that’s the reason I asked you. I mean that respectfully, as a compliment. So maybe in the future, under the influence of different circumstances, different signs.’ Graceful exits were becoming my specialty.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Carol warned me. ‘They’ll call the cops for sure this time and put you in jail.’

  ‘The Paradise sign?’ I waved my hand in dismissal. ‘I’m too weak to do it without your help. But I wasn’t really intending to anyway. I’m not that dumb. Or that smart, maybe. Besides, I’ve got plenty of other foolishness to keep me busy today, and though it’s proving difficult to release myself from your captivating company, I best get on to it. Call farewell to your rejected suitor as he rides into the desert.’

  She shook her head. ‘You are loony-tunes.’

  My first step out the office door I saw the Caddy’s bullet taillights jutting between two pick-ups. I decided the best tactic was to stroll over casually, jump in, and make tracks. Everything with an easy quickness. The place could still be simmering with animosity. I was about halfway across to the Caddy when I heard Carol’s maiden voice, a bellnote cutting the cold air: ‘Fare-thee-well!’

  I turned around and cupped my hands: ‘I’ll never stop loving you!’

  That sent her jumping back inside the office door. I’d forgotten for a moment she worked there, lived there, had to say no. So had she.

  The Cadillac, praise my autonomic nervous system, was securely locked. I opened the driver’s door and slid in, relocking it immediately. It seemed to me there were a lot of faces peering through the windows of Pancake Paradise. I squirmed on the freezing front seat; no wonder Preparation H, Doan’s pills, and amphetamines are a trucker’s best friends. I shouldn’t have thought of amphetamine, but instead of reaching under the front seat, I reached up and turned the key. The engine cranked slowly, not enough juice in the cold, but then it caught – ragged at first, but warming toward a purr.

  I was so intent on the engine sounds that it took me a moment to notice, right next to my door, the two huge men dressed identically in blue bib-overalls and white T-shirts. They looked like twins, except the one standing to the rear had a silly, glazed smile on his face and a very distant look in his pale blue eyes, while the one rapping on my window with knuckles the size of unshelled walnuts had a very close look in his eyes and no smile at all. I figured that together they could rip the door off the Caddy faster than I could slam it into reverse and pop the clutch, so I powered the window down a short inch and pleasantly said, ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’

  The one with the close look and no smile didn’t believe in such idle pleasantries. ‘Wha’chu out there in the parkin’ lot bellerin’ about?’

  ‘Love,’ I said, nudging the stick into reverse.

  He hunkered down and grinned hugely against the glass. ‘Yup,’ he rumbled, ‘ain’t love a bitch?’

  ‘Glad to see you’re a man of understanding,’ I told him, glad indeed. It was nice to see him smiling.

  He pointed to his massive chest. ‘I’m Harvey.’ He pointed at the other young giant. ‘That there’s Bubba. He’s my brother.’

  ‘George, here.’ I nodded to Harvey, then raised my voice so his brother could hear me: ‘Ho there, Bubba. I’m George. Glad to meet you.’

  Bubba rotated his head slightly to look at me, a movement that elicited the uneasy feeling that someone I couldn’t see was running him by remote control. His mouth began to work for words, a labor that didn’t change his happy, vacant expression.

  ‘What’s happening, Bubba?’ I encouraged him.

  ‘Bubba like head,’ he announced.

  ‘Don’t we all. But love’s a bitch, Bubba. You listen to your brother Harvey here.’

  ‘We’re looking for a whorehouse,’ Harvey confided. ‘Promised Bubba we’d get us some pussy once the crops was all in. One we been to last year and year before got closed up. You know where one is?’

  I looked them over carefully, then lowered my voice. ‘Not a whorehouse, but I know where you can get you a couple of fine women that’ll party you boys till you beg for mercy.’

  ‘Tell me slow so I can remember,’ Harvey said.

  I pointed at the door to Pancake Paradise. ‘Right inside.’

  Harvey shook his head. ‘Been inside. Didn’t see none. Just waitress ladies in there.’

  ‘Whoa down now, Harvey. The women aren’t in there, but their pimp is. Name’s Granger. Granger. He owns the place. Don’t talk to anyone else. Just Mr Granger. He’ll pretend he doesn’t know what you’re talking about and tell you to leave and generally act mad – that’s what he did with me at first – so what you have to do is tell him you’re going to come out here in the parking lot, you and Bubba, and you’re going to tear down his fucking lying Paradise sign with your bare hands unless he sets you up with Mandy and Ramona.’

  ‘Mandy and Ramona,’ Harvey repeated.

  ‘They’re my recommendation. You boys might want bigger girls to romp with, but I’ll tell you, I spent last night with Mandy and Ramona, and look at me.’

  Harvey leaned close against the glass and gave me a long look. ‘Whoooooweeeeee,’ he clapped his hands, beaming.

  ‘Now the thing about Mandy and Ramona is they’re both about five-foot-ten, and Mandy’s got an ass like a valentine and Ramona can suck the knots out of an oak. And let me tell you true, they’re both big where it really matters, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Sure do.’

  ‘That’s right, Harvey, they’ve got the biggest hearts that ever poured selfless love out on a lucky man. You don’t just come with these two, you arrive.’

  Harvey looked puzzled but agreeable.

  Bubba joined the conversation. ‘Bubba like head.’

  ‘Well then,’ Harvey said decisively, grinning at his brother as he stood up, ‘let’s go get us some from that Mr Grange in there.’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ I cautioned. ‘Mr Granger might not be in. If he’s not, get his home address. Tell whoever has it that you want to sell Mr Granger some buckwheat flour. Be really polite to everybody. None of them knows Mr Granger runs the wildest call-girl operation in the county. And remember: he doesn’t like dealing with strangers, which is why you’ll probably have to threaten to tear down this Paradise sign here – shit, I actually had to start rocking on it before he called the girls. And be sure to tell him that if he even thinks about calling the cops, you’ll run his ass through your harvester and chop him up for silage.’

  ‘That’d be murder!’ Harvey was shocked.

  ‘Well Good Christ, don’t do it! Just threaten. Now the sign, of course, you can tear down. You see, you got to show pimps a little muscle or they’ll just ignore you. Personally, I don’t hold with hurting people.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Harvey said. ‘I go to church come Sundays. Bubba don’t like church much.’

  ‘Yeah, but he likes head, and that’s just as good.’

  ‘Come on, Harv,’ Bubba whined, tugging at his brother’s arm.

  ‘Now another thing,’ I said as I slipped the clutch, ‘whatever you do, stay away from the motel over there. It’s swarming with undercover cops. You’ll be in jail before your overalls hit your ankles.’ The clutch engaged and I started to move. ‘You boys have yourself a good time. Give Mandy and Ramona my best.’

  They waved gratefully as I pulled away.

  Siccing Harvey and Bubba on Granger and his false Paradise was mean, dangerous, and stupid, but it was not without wit, and there was the intriguing possibility of justice. Besides, I felt so rotten I wanted it to spread. Benzedrine withdrawal is not conducive to exquisite moral judgmen
ts, especially when there’s a bottle of relief as close as the floor, a whole bunch of tiny white prisoners bearing the sign of the cross, each pounding on the glass and begging, ‘George! Please save me. Swallow me now. Help! Please!’

  I couldn’t bear their pitiful wails, so I pulled over just before the Clear Lake/Mason City on-ramp, took the bottle out from under the seat, and, holding my breath, leaped out of the car and dashed around back and locked them in the trunk inside the cooler, plucking out two cans of beer to make room. I noticed the ice had hardly melted. Colder days and colder nights. I thought about dumping the ice to lighten my load, but that meant opening the trunk and resisting the temptation of that bottle of go-fast again, and once had been tempting enough. Let the ice melt in the blaze, sizzle through liquidity as it leaped from solid to gas. Let the cooler melt and the beer explode. Fuck yes, let it all roar upward in the cleansing flames. Ready or not, I was on my way, the last run. Even if I was crazy, it didn’t matter now.

  Part Three

  THE PILGRIM GHOST

  ‘The self-seeker finds nothing.’

  —Goethe

  RIGHT FOOT NAILED to the juice, needle jammed in triple digits, running full bore and pointblank, I made Mason City in about forty minutes. Given my punky reflexes, to justify flying like that was difficult, but it was a question of paying attention either to haul-ass driving or the wharf rats chewing on my nerves. I was, however, hanging on – like an old toothless hound with a gum-lock on a grizzly’s ass, perhaps, but hanging on nonetheless. Two cold beers helped, the alcohol numbing the rawer edges while the liquid replenished my parched cells. I would’ve downed two more if I thought I could’ve opened the cooler without jumping the bottle of speed; yet another obstacle of my own devising, almost enough to make me curl up on the floorboards and weep. But that I was standing fast against the howling neural need for chemical refreshment made me believe I had a chance – slim, for sure, but gaining weight.

  I didn’t have a plan, though, which was just as well, since I lacked the sustained coherence to carry one out. However, in a typical burst of perversity I recalled all the recent stern injunctions to be careful, attend to details, assess the full range of possibilities, and generally keep in mind that fortune favors preparation – though it seemed to me that both mind and fortune were drunk monkeys in the tiger’s eye. Startled by the Mason City city limits sign, I decided to at least lunge at the basics, so I made a jangled survey of the essential steps: eat; fill the Caddy with high-test; buy some white gas; and find out as exactly as possible where the plane had gone down. I did briefly consider how to get myself and my gear back from the crash site after burning my ride, but I figured a phone call to Yellow Cab could cover that. The first thing was to deliver the gift; then I’d worry about slipping away.

  My first stop was the Blue Moon Cafe for an order of bacon, eggs, a short stack of buckwheat cakes, and some information. They had everything but the information, but one waitress conferred with the other, the other waitress queried the cook, and then the three together quizzed the other four patrons. The consensus was that Tommy Jorgenson was the person most likely to know exactly where the plane hit ground, and that I could probably find him at the Standard station eight blocks down on the left.

  I finished what I could of my breakfast, left a $10 tip, and humped back out to the Caddy through the stinging cold. I’d overheard a ruddy-faced guy in a John Deere cap trying to sucker the Blue Moon’s cook into betting that it wouldn’t snow before dark, and as I fired up the Caddy I wished the cook had jumped on the wager. Not that I would’ve – you could feel snow gathering in the air. I just hoped it held off for a couple of hours. I didn’t need to get sideways on a snow-slick road and wrap the Caddy around a power pole a few miles short of my destination. I’d come too long and too hard for that kind of cruel irony. Once the Caddy was warmed up, I drove downtown to the Standard station at nary a quiver over the posted 25 mph.

  Tommy Jorgenson surprised me. I suppose his name had made me expect a tall, slowly thoughtful Scandinavian instead of what I got, a short wiry guy with spring-coiled black hair and intense brown eyes that never quit moving even when he was looking straight at me – one of those restlessly kinetic people who wash their ceilings every week just to burn off the energy. Until you get to know them, you suspect they’re secretly banging speed. But they don’t need it. They run off their own systems, DC; they’re just naturally wrapped tight.

  I told Tommy to fill ’er up, then got out and followed him around as he put the nozzle in the tank and started on checking the oil and cleaning glass. I introduced myself as a reporter for Life magazine and told him I’d been on vacation visiting my sister in Des Moines when I’d gotten this wild idea about doing a major feature on the three musicians who’d been killed in the plane wreck – sort of a retrospective memorial piece – and that I was interested in visiting the crash site.

  Tommy shot me a glance as he wiped the dipstick. ‘Isn’t there no more.’ He dropped the dipstick back into the hole.

  ‘What do you mean,’ I chattered, ‘it’s not there? It has to be there. It’s a place, a site, a point in fact – even if it’s been paved over for a parking lot, it’s still there.’ The cold was numbing.

  Tommy pulled out the dipstick and held it up for my inspection. It was a hair under full. I nodded rapidly, as much to move some blood to my brain as to indicate that the oil level was fine.

  Tommy said a bit sharply, ‘Of course nobody’s moved the place. I meant there’s nothing left to see. They had the wreck cleaned up right away and the field was plowed and planted the next spring.’

  ‘Now we’re talking.’ I grinned.

  ‘You still want to check it out?’ Tommy replaced the dipstick and dropped the hood.

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Good question.’ I stalled, thinking to myself, Fuck good questions. What I need are good, precise, unequivocal answers. ‘I have lots of reasons, all complicated. I guess the main reason is simply to pay my respects. Another’s more practical. I’ve got this idea for a lead running around in my head. Something like: “On a snow-swirling night in early February, 1959, a small Beechcraft left the Mason City airport and shortly thereafter crashed in an Iowa cornfield. Along with the pilot, three young musicians were killed: the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens. As I stand here at the precise point of impact on a late October afternoon six years later, there is no visible evidence of the wreckage. For six springs this field has been plowed and sown; for six autumns the harvest reaped. The earth and the music heal quickly. The heart takes longer.”’ I paused for whatever effect a pause might have. ‘I know, it’s rough as hell, but you get the angle. I suppose the best way to put it is that I’m hoping to draw some inspiration from the place.’

  ‘I’ll draw you a map,’ Tommy said.

  Music to my ears, the last piece clicking into place. I was starting to like the little dynamo. Maybe the reason Tommy throbbed with energy was that he didn’t waste any. I felt like grabbing a pair of jumper cables and hooking us up, brain to brain – boost some of his juice. The cold was draining mine through the corroded terminals. ‘I take it,’ I said, ‘you’ve been out to the crash site.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘Nope. Last time was early ’62, over three years ago.’

  ‘You see it after it happened?’

  ‘My old man’s a deputy sheriff. I heard the call come in on the box at home. I’d been there the night before, at the Surf Ballroom, where they played that night. That was over in Clear Lake. Almost every kid from around these parts was there; we don’t draw much top-line entertainment in these parts. It was a good show, but not great. They looked tired and beat.’ Course I was shit-faced on vodka. What we called a Cat Screwdriver – half a pint of Royal Gate, half a pint of Nehi orange soda. So when the call came in, even though I was hung over down to my ankles, I had to go out and see if it was true. Had no idea ho
w true it was. Turned me inside out. Must’ve puked for an hour.’

  My stomach churned in empathy. Breakfast wasn’t setting well. The bellyful of cold beer had congealed the bacon grease into a solid, sinking chunk; if it kept falling, it was sure to come back up. It’s hard to grit your teeth when they’re chattering, and it was my turn to ask why: ‘But you went back in ’62, right?’

  Tommy’s sigh plumed in the air. ‘Yeah. Actually, I went out there a couple of times a month for a while. Don’t know why. Nothing to see but the corn growing. I had a chopped ’51 Ford coupe at the time, metal-flake green, dropped a T-Bird engine in it. All souped-up and nowhere to go. Or nowhere better. One thing, it was real peaceful just sitting there watching the breeze move the cornstalks. So, I’d tool out there fairly often – ain’t far, and there’s a long straight stretch where you can run flat out, coming and going. But after I blew the transmission, I went out less and less. Last time was February third, ’62. The anniversary. Don’t know why, though. Never thought about it. Just did.’

  Before I could ask my next question, he turned and was moving back along the Caddy. By the time I caught up he was topping off the tank. ‘Don’t mean to pester a man on the job, but I wonder if you know who owns the land where the plane crashed? Figure I should get permission before I go trespassing around in somebody’s corn patch.’

  ‘Corn’s in,’ Tommy noted, withdrawing the nozzle and shutting down the pump.

  ‘That’s just less cover for my ass.’

  Tommy smiled. ‘Bert Julhal used to own it, but I heard Gladys Nogardam bought it from him a couple of years ago. I’m not sure about that, wouldn’t bet on it anyway, but I’m pretty sure ol’ Gladys bought it. She must be a hundred years old now and people say she’s still sharp as a tack.’

  ‘What’s her story?’ Information is ammunition, and I had a bad feeling I’d best load up. A woman that old and still lucid would undoubtedly know her own mind, which would make changing it more difficult in case she didn’t dig my romantic gesture. I hadn’t been around a lot of old women lately, and the few I knew no longer seemed inclined to suffer what they found disagreeable.