Save The Last Dance For Me

Eighteen

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.

Just moved things around a little. I stepped down even harder.

“You’re going to tell me that you bought strychnine at Clymer’s two days after Muldaur was murdered and then planted it in Sara Hall’s garage.”

“I’m not gonna tell you anything.”

“Which leads me to believe that you didn’t kill Muldaur or Courtney. But somebody you care about did. And now you’re protecting her.”

I took my foot off his hand.

“Get up.”

He didn’t, of course. He just kind of lay there wriggling his hurting hand around, working it like a piece of equipment that was on the fritz.

Then I went and stepped on it again.

He clearly wanted to deny me the satisfaction of giving me the big dramatic scream. But he did make one of those real strange throat noises.

“Get up.”

This time he did, using his good hand to swat away some of the floor dirt he’d gotten on his Osh Kosh overalls.

We’d just left the shadows of the garage when Pam Oates opened the screen door at the back of the house and said, “You all right, Bill?”

“You just go on inside, woman,” he snapped.

“You ever think I worry about you, Bill?”

“Were you worried about me those times you were with Muldaur?”

This was a long way from the home life depicted on “Father Knows Best” every week. Oates hated her and loved her. He needed to forgive her and it was obvious he couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe someday.

Sometimes, something happens that you can’t forgive. And it kills you because you can’t forgive. You drag it along with you your whole life and remember it at odd moments and no matter how old you get, that one thing still retains its fresh and vital pain.

And a part of you knows that the other person has gone on and probably never thinks about it at all.

She closed the screen door quietly and disappeared behind it.

“She killed him,” I said, “because she wanted to end it and he didn’t. And then she tried to blackmail Courtney-give you two enough money to go on the run-but he said no and she got mad and stabbed him.”

“You should write books, McCain.”

Moving, all the time moving. Along the side of the garage in the blistering, bleaching sun.

The rattlers were getting loud now. My mental picture of them was getting clearer and clearer.

We reached the back edge of the garage and there they were. Same cage. Same number of rattlers. Out there in the scathing sun. As much as I could, I felt sorry for the damned things.

I prodded Oates forward with the barrel of my. 45.

“Now we’re going to find out how holy you are, Mr. Oates.”

“What’re you talking about, McCain?”

“I noticed that you never handle the snakes yourself. Not the night Muldaur died, not the time you tried to force me to shove my hand into the cage. Now it’s your turn.”

“Oh, no. I ain’t stickin’ my hand in there.”

“Sure you are, Oates. Or I’m going to shoot you in the arm. And if you still won’t do it, I’m going to shoot you in the leg. And I’m gonna tell Cliffie I did it in self-defense. He hates you people even more than he hates me. So he’ll go along.”

“No,” he said. “No. You can’t do this.”

All his mountain swagger was gone.

He glanced over his shoulder at me.

“I have nightmares about these snakes, McCain. I really do.”

“I thought you were so holy.”

“Nobody’s holy, McCain.”

“Then how do some people handle these snakes?”

“They’re just lucky, I guess. Please don’t make me handle them, all right?”

“Then tell me the truth about the strychnine.”

“I can’t do that, McCain. No matter what.

Just please don’t-”

This could’ve been a briar-patch routine.

Please don’t throw me in that briar patch, oh, my, don’t. But I doubted it. His eyes were starting to look frantic, the stigma of real bowel-wrenching fear.

Looked like he was going to tell me all the things I wanted to hear.

We reached the cage.

The rattlers didn’t look any prettier or any friendlier.

“Reach down and open the lid.”

“I-c’t do it, McCain.”

“Well, you’ll have to do one or the other.”

He just shook his head.

I surprised both of us by firing a shot that missed his head by about three inches.

He jerked, sobbed. He was too fierce for jerking and sobbing. Or so I’d thought. You want bad guys to be bad in every way and that included not responding to stress the way we common folk do.

This wasn’t any briar patch.

Between my bullet and the snakes and the burden of holding his secrets, he was in a bad, bad way.

I clubbed him on the side of the head with my. 45. Got him hard on the ear. And then I changed gun hands and planted a fist into his stomach. What he did was puke. Not a lot. But his whole stomach, not so much from my punch but from all the tension he was feeling, backed up on him.

This time when I hit him on the side of the head, he dropped to his knees right next to the snake cage, which is where I’d wanted him in the first place.

“Open it,” I said.

The snakes were as crazy at this moment as he was, and he knew it.

“No.”

I kicked him in the hip.

“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you.” He was starting in with the Bible again. He was begging the Lord to get him out of here and I couldn’t really blame him.

“Open it up, Oates.”

“For thou hast been to me a fortress and a refuge in my day of distress.”

“Open it up, Oates.”

Either he’d run out of Bible quotes or he’d finally realized that he didn’t have much choice here.

He put his long, shaking hand to the lid of the cage.

And that was when somebody shoved a metal rod into the base of my back.

“I want you off our land, Mr. McCain.

You don’t have no call to treat a man like you’re treating him.”

“You should’ve seen the way he treated me, Mrs. Oates.”

Oh, yeah, well he punched me first, Sister Mary Francis. I’d used that line all the way through grade school and it was nice to know that a variation of it still applied.

“I just want you to go. I just want all this over with.”

“Somebody killed two men, Mrs. Oates.

I’m wondering if it was you.”

“Don’t say nothin’ to him,” Oates said.

“Maybe Courtney was killed because he’d run out of money to pay the blackmailer,” I said, “and the blackmailer was afraid Courtney might go to see Cliffie.”

“You heard what I said,” Oates snapped.

“Don’t say nothin’ to him.”

So he was inclined to see things the way I did.

He thought his wife killed the men and he had planted the strychnine to make it appear that Sara Hall was the guilty one.

“You need to leave now, Mr. McCain,” she said.

I didn’t have much choice.

He took the rifle from her and sent her to the house and then, after dropping my gun in the pocket of his overalls, he walked me back to the car.

“She let the Devil take her a few times,” he said, as if I’d just accused the missus of something. “But she has cleansed herself since. She ain’t even afraid of the snakes, which shames me. The man of the house shouldn’t show fear.

But I just can’t stand those things.”

“She killed those men, Oates.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“Maybe not. Though I think you do.”

The sun was so hot not even the dust wanted to rise when an old truck passed by in front of the yard. I was betting the chickens wished they had electric fans.

“You don’t trouble us no more,” he said when we reached the ragtop.

“You really think things’re this easy, Oates?”

“You don’t dwell on things, sometimes the good Lord just takes them away.”

“The good Lord may but then Cliffie brings them right back.”

“You can’t prove anything. And anyway, you know how them Sykeses don’t like to be showed up. You tell him about that strychnine and he’ll say “so what?” Strychnine is sold all the time.

He’s got Sara Hall all zeroed in on and nothin’s gonna change his mind.”

Oates was probably right. I didn’t know for a fact that Pam had killed anybody. I just had a suspicion that he had a suspicion that his wife had killed the two men. But that was surmise, not fact.

I got in the Ford and did a little backside-dancing. The seats, back and bottom, were blast-furnace hot. The steering wheel was probably going to brand my palms for life.

“You get away from here now,” he said. “And you don’t come back.”

The seats were still scorching when I got back to town.