Ticket to Ride (2 page)

“Go home, Bennett! You don't belong here!” somebody in the crowd shouted.

“You're a pig, Bennett!” somebody else bellered.

“Your son died because of people like you! You killed your son!” Ugly as it was, the third cry silenced everybody for a moment.

Bennett's entire body jerked as if he'd been physically wounded. He gaped right, then left, as if he expected somebody to come and rescue him. He looked older, too, and despite the gym-hardened sixty-year-old body, suddenly he seemed frail.

This wasn't what I'd come to hear. I'd never liked Bennett, but I didn't want to see him ripped apart.

Doran made a lunge for him, but Bennett had enough strength to shove him back.

“You people should go home and get down on your knees and thank the good Lord for the lives our fighting men have given you.” At this point he didn't need a microphone. His voice was carrying far past the parking lot behind us. And then he broke: “That's what my son gave his life for. For you and you and you. And what the hell do you give him?” He was sobbing now, his voice cracking. “And what the hell do you give him? You give him this!”

I was pretty sure everybody else was responding the way I was. He'd shocked us. And not because he was the bully who'd commandeered the microphone but because he was this asshole who for at least one startling moment was not an asshole at all. He was just this poor guy who'd lost his son. It didn't matter how he felt about the war in general. The war had taken his son. The son who'd spent his life growing up in Black River Falls. The son who'd been a nice young kid. He'd married a town girl and then went to war and died.

The only light was from the candles and the lights inside the church that filled the glass rear entrance doors. Bennett staggered around like Lear, knocking over the microphone as he did so. Screeching assaulted the steamy air as the microphone bounced off the concrete entranceway.

Nobody was moving to help Bennett. He needed to be assisted off the platform. He just kept stumbling around. I wondered if he'd had some kind of breakdown.

I said nothing to Molly. I just worked my way through the people in front of me and rushed to the steps. I was almost there when I saw Doran finally move. He walked over to Bennett and tried to put his hand on the man's shoulder. And that was when it started. Bennett swiveled around like a spooked animal. But that wasn't all he did. He brought up a massive fist and slammed it hard and unerringly into Doran's face. Doran screamed. Actually screamed. I wondered if his nose was broken.

Doran started to pull away but Bennett followed him and hit him twice more, once again in the face and then in the stomach. I was able to shove Bennett so that Doran would be out of target range.

Bennett was shouting at me. He was also swinging at me but I stayed below the punches and just kept slamming the palms of my hands into his chest to force him back. By now three men among the protestors had jumped up next to us and helped me restrain him.

I glanced behind me once. Molly was nursing the prone figure of Harrison Doran. In that millisecond, I realized that she'd finally managed to hook up with him. I'd sensed that was where it was heading—she'd told me she'd once plastered her bedroom walls with photographs of Fabian; Doran had taken old Fabe's place.

A siren. The police station was only three blocks away. Somebody had warned the police that this sanctioned protest was turning bad.

The men had managed to push Bennett up against the entrance doors where they held his arms so he couldn't swing. He wasn't screaming now, he was sobbing again. I wished he'd been screaming. It was a hell of a lot easier to take.

The candles were all out. The small gathering stood in broken little groups talking quietly. Seeing Bennett snap as he had wasn't good for political morale. Bennett was a bastard, but I pitied him; and Molly's nursing Doran struck me as a betrayal. There was a quarter moon and the lawn had been mowed today and I wanted to float away on the summer sweetness of the scent.

Then I heard him: “You take your hands off the man or I'll throw all of you in jail.”

Clifford Sykes, Jr., known to most townspeople as Cliffie, had arrived in his tan uniform with the big Western star on his breast pocket and his campaign hat slanted on his thick head. In case you missed the Western motif, he wore his Sam Browne low on his hip like the gunfighters in cowboy movies. He didn't have framed photos of Fabian on his office walls, but I bet he had a few of Glenn Ford.

For a while there, Cliffie had started acting like a serious police officer. He'd rescued two people from a burning car, told a deputy to knock off the racial slurs, and had let his cousin Jane Sykes—the district attorney I'd fallen in love with; the district attorney who'd broken my heart—actually give him and his staff a few lessons in police conduct. But when Jane decided to return to Chicago and her ex-husband, Cliffie seemed to forget everything he'd learned.

He elbowed through the gathering and then hurried up the steps. “I should've figured you'd be involved in this, McCain. The only thing I'll say for the judge is she sure as hell wouldn't hook up with a bunch of Communists like this.”

He was moving all the time he was yelling at me. The men had unhanded Bennett, but Bennett hadn't moved. He'd quit sobbing, but he stared straight down and made tiny whimpering sounds.

“Lou, Lou, what the hell did these bastards do to you?”

No response. I moved closer and that was when I saw, peripherally, Doran limping away. Molly had her shoulder under his arm and her hand on his stomach. The shoulder I understood. The stomach looked like the female equivalent of a cheap feel.

“Lou, Lou, you got to look at me, Lou!” As he said this, Cliffie snapped on a silver flashlight the size of a ball bat and waved the beam so his officer would come up here and help him.

“Maybe he needs a doctor.”

Cliffie's facial expression was lost in the shadows but his voice was clear: “McCain, I'm ordering you to disperse this crowd and you to go with them. That permit I gave you is cancelled. And you can tell that to the beatnik pastor too.”

Then he leaned closer, his beer breath scouring my face and said: “That pastor. He's no pastor.”

Pastor Gerard had replaced Pastor Beaton. Gerard was only twenty-eight, and he and his wife were known to serve wine at their parties and listen to jazz. Beaton had been seventy-nine when he finally retired. A town wag had once claimed that Beaton had fallen into a coma around age fifty-five, only nobody had ever noticed. Cliffie had been heard to call Gerard and his wife “bohemians,” which confused some of the locals of Czech heritage. “Now you get them the hell out of here, you hear me?”

I faced the few remaining protestors. I didn't have to say anything. They'd heard Cliffie bellering. I saw Molly helping Doran into her car.

The odd thing was that after that first jab of jealousy, I found myself not caring. Molly and I had been going nowhere, anyway.

I was fifteen feet from my red Ford ragtop when a small red Triumph shot into sight so fast I wondered if it would be able to stop before it overshot the parking lot.

The woman who climbed from it shouted, “Where is he, McCain?”

“Cliffie has him. Your father's not doing very well.”

“You had to have this goddamned thing, didn't you?”

Usually I would have argued with the arrogant Linda Raines, but her father was sick for one thing, and for another I had no energy for it.

Her face was lighted suddenly by headlights. I turned to see a red MG pulling up just a few feet from us. David Raines, Linda's husband, did his best James Bond by leaping over the car door and hurrying to us. “Linda! Wait!” But she was already running toward her father.

“This was a stupid goddamn idea, McCain. You can tell all the people on your stupid little committee that I said that.” He set off after his wife.

I watched her rush across the lawn toward the rear entrance of the church. She was a small, finely made woman of thirty. She'd been a year ahead of me in high school. Her dark good looks made her popular despite her famous dark moods. I'd been told that her moods had calmed over the years, but not her intensity.

She was gone into the shadows, leaving me to stand there and think about Lou Bennett and being forced to see him as a human being instead of a demon, which I resented. He'd spent his years promoting his friends to the city council and getting his way more often than not. I never forgave him for humiliating my father one night at a council meeting. I was twelve or thirteen. We lived in the poorest part of the city, the part called the Hills. My father wanted to know when a long-promised skating rink would be built for people on our side of town. He said, “It ain't right to keep promising and not making good on it.” I was embarrassed; I still remember the shame I felt. And then I hated myself for feeling shame. My father had only gone through eighth grade in the Depression. He read a lot, but every so often an “ain't” would slip out. Lou Bennett stood up in the front row and said, “Well, we sure ain't going to break our word no more, Mr. McCain.” I imagined that my father could still hear the laughter of that night; I still could. It was one of those moments nobody but my father and I would remember. It was a moment I'd never forget.

2

“Y
OU DON
'
T PUT SALT IN YOUR BEER ANYMORE, HUH
?”

“No, I read this article about salt intake.”

Kenny Thibodeau, our town's soft-core pornographer and writer of tall tales for men's magazines, looked across the table and smiled. “I don't have to tell you about ‘articles,' do I?”

“This one's legit, Kenny. By a doctor.”

“I'm a doctor.”

“Yeah, of ‘sexology.'”

When not writing books with titles such as Satan's Sisters and Pagan Lesbians, or “true” articles such as “Hitler's Love Maidens” and “The Wild Rampage of the Sex-Crazed Pirate Women!” Kenny writes a sex advice column under the name Dr. William Ambrose, “PhD and renowned Sexologist.” He cribs all his material from the Playboy Sex Advice column. His real name appears on none of this material. He's saving that for the serious novels I know he has in him, though I'm not sure he himself knows that anymore. There's one more reason for the pen names. J. Edgar Hoover and politically ambitious DAs across the country have been trying to send soft-core editors and writers to prison. Two publishers were already serving time. Their number-one target is comedian Lenny Bruce, of course. He was recently sentenced to jail again.

“So what happened at the demonstration tonight? I'd have been there except Sue had a doctor's appointment in Iowa City and her car's in the garage. I had to give her a ride.”

In high school Kenny's idols were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He was messianic about the entire Beat movement. I was his only convert. I even subscribed to the Evergreen Review, which was the bible of the movement. One summer Kenny drove to the Beat Mecca, San Francisco, where he spent three days running in City Lights Bookstore. This was where he also met the soft-core publisher who convinced him he could make a reasonable living writing the stuff. Until two years ago Kenny still wore the uniform: the goatee, the dark clothes, the hipster talk. Then he met Sue and she changed him, which explained the short hair, blue button-down shirt, and chinos he was wearing tonight.

“Bennett really flipped out, huh?”

I described what happened. Including the angry appearance of Linda Raines.

“Yeah. She gives bitches a bad name.” He stood up. “Have to hit the can.”

I gave myself over to the pleasures of Nealy's, the front part of which used to be a drugstore and the back half of which is a tavern. The east wall in the front still has the old glassed-in wooden cabinetry used for the pharmacy. There's a soda fountain across from it where four or five generations of blue-collar boys and girls made each other happy and broke each other's hearts.

You'll find the town's two finest pinball machines here, as well as a pretty good shuffleboard table. There are booths along one wall where you can bring the plump roast beef sandwiches—their only menu item—and relax. It's a workingman's place, so country music fights rock for dominance on the jukebox and three blackboards chart the betting on various baseball, football, and basketball games. When Cassius Clay came on the scene, they started betting on boxing, too.

After Jane Sykes decided to go back to the husband she'd divorced, I sort of took up residence here. One night I even got belligerent and got into a fistfight out on the sidewalk in back. Since I'd started it, I was on an informal probation here for two weeks. It was like being back in Catholic school after you got caught dropping a water balloon out of the second-story window. I apologized to the guy and we were now friendly if not friends, though I still wince when I see him. Not the finest entry on the biographical sheet.

Kenny returned bearing two glasses of beer. He stretched out in the booth. “What a family. Bennett and all his military bullshit and Linda acting like Scarlett O'Hara and the kid—Bryce—I had some hope for him, though. I'd see him at the library a lot when he was in high school.”

“I thought he was a football player.”

“Just because you don't like sports, you think everybody who plays is an idiot.” Kenny loved football games.

“You're right. That was a stupid thing to say.”

“God, I must've caught you on an off night.”

“Nah. I'm just worried about my dad. I was just being sanctimonious because I'm in a bad mood, I guess.”

“I need to pick up Sue pretty soon here. Maybe you should stop by and see your folks.”

Gloom tends to paralyze me. I can sit and brood for long angry hours. Between the ruined peace rally and my mom's whispers over the phone this afternoon, I felt alone and useless. Kenny's suggestion got me going again.