Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (21 page)

But when he thought of her the pain was still fresh as a knife slash.

“Getting along. She put the kid up for adoption.”

“Yeah. She was too young for a kid, anyway.”

I guess that’s why I’d always liked Bobby.

He had his Ruthie McCain and I had my beautiful Pamela Forrest. All The Sad Young Men, as Fitzgerald titled one of his collections.

“She seeing anybody there in Chicago?”

“I don’t think so. She’s getting her high-school diploma at night and working during the day.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell her I said hi.”

“I sure will.”

He glanced around nervously, as if

he were about to share a nuclear secret with me.

“She ever visits, tell her I’d like to see her.”

“I’ll do that.”

And then he said, “I’m gettin’ my teeth fixed.”

And I, of course, did the social and polite and really bullshit thing and said, “Your teeth? What’s wrong with your teeth?”

“They’re all kinda snaggly and stuff. Got all that green stuff stuck in the crevices and all. Anyway, my cousin Pete is gonna be a dentist in Cedar Rapids and he says he can fix me up. Says he needs the practice and’ll do it for nothin’.”

“Gosh, that’s great, Bobby.”

“You could mention that to Ruthie, too.”

“I’ll be sure to.” Then: “You know, Bobby, I could use a little favor.”

“Sure, Sam.”

And if I do it will you be sure to tell Ruthie? I was using him. I had to.

“Does the store here keep records of the poisons it sells?”

“Some of them.”

“Strychnine?”

“Oh, the Muldaur guy, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I read Mickey Spillane all the time.

I love murder stuff.”

It was a town full of blooming private eyes.

“But didn’t Cliffie arrest Sara Hall?”

“He did. But she didn’t do it.”

“You figure Cliffie’s wrong again?”

“I figure Cliffie’s always wrong.”

A grin. With those teeth.

“So if she didn’t do it, who did?”

“Bobby, listen, I can’t really talk about it, you know?”

“Mike Hammer’s like that.” Bobby tapped his head. “Keeps it all right up here in his head.

Won’t even share it with the cops. No matter how often they beat him up.” Then: “But there might be another way to check on the poison.”

“How?”

“If the person who bought it has a credit account with us.”

“Say, I never thought of that.”

“So whose file should I look in?”

I half-whispered.

“You were just talking to him.”

“Oates? Bill Oates? You think Bill Oates did it?”

A megaphone couldn’t have made his voice any louder.

“Gosh, Bobby. You think Mike Hammer would bellow out somebody’s name like that?”

He blushed.

“Damn, I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Could you check in Oates’ file?”

“Sure. But it’ll take me a few

minutes.”

While he was gone, I walked around. I’m the same way in feed and seed stores that I am in hardware stores. They unman me. Grown-up men know how to use hammers, nails, saws, two-by-fours and lintels. And just so do grown-up men know about soil and plant life and mulch and peat moss. In fact, those are manly code words, mulch and peat moss and two-by-fours and lintels.

I’m not a grown-up man. I walk around with holes in my socks and the elastic loose on my shorts and I can’t get it right with a girl yet-except maybe for Mary Travers, but I’ve already screwed her life up enough and don’t want to do it anymore damage—and I know my twenty-fifth birthday’s coming early next year.

But I won’t be any older. Not where it counts.

Not in the head. Not in the soul. You know that Famous Artists School where you can write away and they teach you how to draw? There should be a Famous Grown-Ups School where real true adults give you all their secrets for being an adult.

The only comforting thing is, I’m not alone. You see guys with white hair and slumped-over backs walking around who say things just as callow and stupid as the things I say. They need to join the Famous Grown-Ups School, too.

I tried faking it.

I walked around and tapped an important hand on a mulch bag and said to a passing couple, “Mulch. Good old mulch. How can you go wrong with mulch?”

I think they went and called the mental hospital eighteen miles due west of us.

I did the same thing with peat moss. Except I sniffed it. An elderly lady named Florence Windom was watching me and said,

“Are you smelling that, McCain?”

“Yes’m.”

“Smelling peat moss? I never heard of such a thing.”

“Most people don’t know about it. That’s why they always end up buying the bad stuff.”

“I’ll have to tell Merle. Thanks for the tip, McCain.”

I would probably have done some more walking around —I was trying to combine strolling and swaggering which, when you think about it, isn’t all that easy to do—when young Bobby came back.

“Strychnine,” he said.

“Is there a date when he bought it?”

He gave me the date.

“That’s two days after Muldaur was killed.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yeah, it is, Bobby. And I’m not even sure what it means.”

“You going to ask him about it?”

“I sure am, Bobby.”

It was then I saw that the couple I’d made the mulch remark to had joined Florence Windom in whispering together and pointing at me. And smirking.

You try and give people a little good advice, and what do you get?

The black cars began appearing late that Sunday morning. The men ran to type. Trim, sunglassed, somehow foreign in style of clothing and manner. But then anybody in these parts who didn’t buy their suits at Sears or J.C.

Penney’s looked sort of foreign. A number of them carried walkie-talkies. Secret Service.

The Vice President of the United States was about to visit our fair town.

They were scoping out the business district. An election being in progress, Nixon would certainly take the opportunity to speak to The People as well as visit his friend the Judge.

Since the scouts seemed to be concentrating on the town square area, I assumed that this was where he’d be giving his speech. Pockets of people had gathered to watch the agents at work. There’d be talk of this for a long time and by the time a year or so had passed everything would have been quadrupled. The number of agents, the number of black

cars, the number of walkie-talkies. One tale-teller would throw in a few submachine guns and another tale-teller would add a sinister-looking foreign type lurking around the edges of the town square, and yet another tale-teller would invent a gun battle between a lurking foreign type and an All-American agent and there you’d go, a tale for the ages. I sometimes get the feeling that this is how most history gets written.

I stayed around twenty minutes talking with people on the street corner about the invasion Black River Falls was undergoing. Dick Nixon was a popular man out here. This was a moderate state, politically, and after the siege of the Taft and McCarthy factions at the last Gop convention-as one guy on Cbs said, “It sounded like Germany in 1931”—Nixon looked pretty moderate, hard as that was for most Democrats to recognize.

The ragtop made the drive enjoyable. I took the long way, the blacktop out along the river. There were a couple of homemade sailboats arcing against the line of horizon and they sure were pretty. A skywriting plane was again championing the virtues of Pepsi-Cola. And half a dozen teenage couples strolled hand-in-hand along the riverbank.

No sign of any trucks or cars at the Oates place.

I pulled up, killed the engine. Got out.

Even with the cows and the chickens, there was a sense of desolation to this acreage. The hill people usually gave this impression—living isolated and transient—whole groups of them had been known to pick up and move away overnight.

Gypsy-like.

I knocked a few mandatory knocks and got in response the mandatory silence. The sun was helping me sweat off a few pounds. I got my handkerchief out and started mopping my brow farmer-style. Farmers know how to look natural daubing themselves with their hankies. City folk always look a little fussy.

I walked down to the garage-like shed at the bottom of the slant, scattering squawking, feather-flying chickens as I went. Turds crunched beneath my shoe leather. In the hazy distance I could see a green John Deere in a cornfield. Nice afternoon to get a nice new paperback and a couple of Pepsis and

sit out in the shade of an oak.

Sheds and garages always fascinate me. I like the ancient, msty smells of them—most of them, anyway—andthe particular kind of shadows they cast and the attic-like jumble of items you find in them.

Oates had tools here, and newly sawed lumber that smelled like the old days when I was a kid and my dad built things in the garage. There were small piles of wood dust on the floor and a worktable covered with hammers, nails, screwdrivers, and four different saws.

But it was the other things that interested me.

People keep old stuff for no good reason.

Maybe they think it’s bad luck to give it away. Or maybe they’re just sentimental about it.

But how attached can you get to toasters that don’t work, a wooden case of cobwebbed Coca-Cola empties, a stack of Liberty magazines that innumerable animal species had gone not only number one but number two on as well, car tires worn beyond repair, a rusty lawn mower, a baby carriage with most of the hood ripped away? These weren’t the kinds of things you’d press into a scrapbook. But they were the kinds of things some people kept in their garages.

I heard them coming. All that rattle of truck metal was hard to miss.

I had to make a calculation. Was there time for me to make it to my car and get away?

Probably not.

Was there any good place to hide?

Not that I could get to in time.

I’d have to make do with the shed here.

My best bet looked to be a stack of slashed tires in the rear of the place.

The truck clattered to a stop.

A truck door in need of oiling resisted opening.

Pam Oates said, “Be careful. He might have a gun this time.”

She was right, actually. This time, I did have a gun. And I’d come to resent Oates enough that I sure wouldn’t mind using it. Not shooting him. I wasn’t certain I could shoot anybody except in a moment of true self-defense. But I sure wouldn’t mind pistol-whipping him for a few days.

“You don’t worry about me, woman,”

Oates said. “You worry about him.”

He canvassed the yard and the other

outbuildings. He called out my name several times, as if he were summoning his dog.

You know how in books and movies and Tv shows nobody ever has to go to the bathroom or shift in their hiding place because their butt goes to sleep.

Or has to sneeze. Or fart. But in fact, it’s stuff like that that gives you away. I was packed in so tight that if I moved, the stacked tires just might come tumbling down.

I mention this because of the bee.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly a bee, it was a small-to-middling yellow jacket. It didn’t even look especially fierce. I mean, you can run into some yellow jackets that are so big and bold they give you the finger and moon you before they sting you.

This one seemed to be just sort of flying around, taking in the scenery. Maybe it was on yellow jacket vacation.

It landed on a tire above my head, it dropped onto the rotting wooden wall behind me, and then hovered above my nose.

Yes, my nose. It’s a little Irish nose and while I don’t especially like it, it’s all I’ve got.

So there were a couple things annoying about the yellow jacket hovering there.

One, with such a clear field, its sting was going to hurt like hell and probably cause me to carom off the wall and knock the tires over.

And two, the sting could really be ugly on my face. You’re surprised I’m vain? I have to admit that Robert Ryan probably wasn’t —or Roy Rogers or Gene Autry if you want to go back to my boyhood—but I was. I didn’t want a sting swelling up on my little Mick schnoz. And what if it were to get infected? Then I’d have this huge disfigurement in the center of my face.

So, please don’t sit on my nose, Mr.

Yellow Jacket. Please don’t sit on my nose.

It didn’t give me the finger. And it didn’t moon me. But it most definitely sat on my nose.

And when it did, I did just what I’d been afraid I’d do.

I lurched forward, hoping the movement would shoo the insect away before it had time to insert its stinger.

Well, I avoided getting stung,

all right. But in the process, I knocked over the highest half of the tires. They didn’t crash, they kinda whumpfed to the dirt floor, but the whumpfing was sufficient to bring Bill Oates on the run.

I ran to the front of the garage, pressed myself flat against the small wall inside.

In the quiet, I heard his feet slapping against the summer-burnt grass, coming faster and faster, closer and closer. And I heard the rattlesnakes.

I wasn’t sure where they were. Somewhere not too far away. Hissing and rattling. I could easily, too easily, picture them in their cage. The whumpfing (yes, it is fun to say that word, isn’t it?) must have stirred them.

When Bill Oates came racing into the garage, all I had to do was suddenly inject my leg into his forward-motion path. He hit the floor, making much the same sound the tires had.

The shotgun he was toting didn’t misfire.

His hand flicked out quickly to grab the weapon but I stopped it with the heel of my shoe. I put the full weight of my body on his knuckles.

One of them made a cracking sound. It was most pleasurable to hear. He made a pitiful noise in his throat.

“Where’re the snakes?”

“What?”

“The rattlers. Where are they?”

“Out back-a the garage, why?”

“We’re going to pay them a visit.”

“What you’re up to, McCain?”

His voice now had real pain in it. I decided I hadn’t broken anything, after all.