Save The Last Dance For Me

Four

It is a strange summer for me. The girl I’ve loved since grade school is in Kansas City, hiding out from the scandal of running off with our town’s most important lawyer.

Married lawyer, I should add. Two kids and all. Lawyer and wife have made up. The beautiful Pamela Forrest is, however, pretty much gone forever. Mary Travers, the girl I should have fallen in love with-z much as you can determine something like that, I mean-is getting married to the man whose father owns the local Rexall plus a whole lot of other property in the county. She still loves me, or so she said the last time I saw her, but I’ve screwed up her life too many times as it is.

And the other day I was sitting in the backyard of my folks’ place and I started to study them. Not just look at them. Study them. And see how old they’re getting. And I felt scared and sad and lonely because they’re such good people and I sure don’t want them to die. And Mrs. Goldman, my landlady, about whom I’ve had more than a few erotic fantasies, went to some kind of cancer meeting in Iowa City-her sister recently died of cancer-and she came back with those sticker decals you put on your medicine cabinet mirror, Cancer’s Seven Danger

Signals. And put them on every medicine cabinet mirror in the house, including mine. And I started thinking about it. I mean, she meant well. But I started thinking about it. That I could die, too. That it wasn’t impossible for a twenty-four-year-old to pass over.

And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs.

I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.

And now here I am with Kylie, whom I have this sort-of stupid half-assed crush on even though she’s married and I sure don’t want to get involved in anything like that, and we’re just riding the prairie night with the top down in my red Ford ragtop, taking the long way home at her request, out on the blacktop that runs between the woods and the river, the moon high and round and silver-gold, and the cattle and the horses lowing in the farmyards, and a lone motorboat out on the river, its wake phosphorescent as it cuts the moonlight, and I’m wondering if Kylie feels as lonely as I do at this moment.

She said, “This feels good.”

“Yeah. It does.” Though I wasn’t quite sure what “x” referred to.

“Everybody should have a convertible.”

“Can’t disagree with you there.”

“Even the pig shit smells sort of good tonight.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that myself. Boy, this pig shit really smells good tonight.”

She slugged me on the arm.

She didn’t say anything for a time, we were just cruising along the river, and there was this houseboat then and even from here you could hear the Latin music and the people all laughing, and she said, “I wish I was out there.”

“On the houseboat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How come?”

“Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”

“What you’ve got is some sort of secret, don’t you?”

She laughed. “Cliffie Sykes, Jr.,

Herpetologist. Samuel McCain,

Mind Reader.”

“So you going to tell me what it is?”

“No. Because if I do I’ll get sad again.

And I don’t want to be sad for a while.”

“I don’t blame you there.”

“Sometimes, it feels sorta good to be sad.

You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“But most of the time it just feels like shit to be sad.” Then, “Could you turn up that song? I love it.”

Fats Domino. “Blueberry Hill.”

I got her home about half an hour later.

She lived in a cottage isolated on the edge of a creek and snuggled between elms. There was an old swing set in the side yard. You could almost hear the happy squeals of kids from other times.

Every once in a while, tired of newspapering, she’d say, “I should just pack it in and have some kids, McCain.” She hadn’t said that for some time.

The house was dark. Her road-weary

Dodge sat in the grassy drive. Chad’s car wasn’t there. Chad taught English at the University of Iowa, forty-five minutes away. He was one of many grad students there writing a novel on the side. We’d never cared much for each other. He was this big, blond guy who dominated every room he was in with his harsh opinions and uncharitable evaluations of everybody around him. I think the word I’m struggling for here is jerk. He caught me reading a Gold Medal paperback by Charles Williams at the Rexall lunch counter one time and has ever since called me, with great scorn, “The Gumshoe.”

I planned to tell him someday that Williams was a better stylist than he or his fellow wanna-bes would ever be. But I was waiting till I got my full growth before I did. He was something like six-two.

“Guess Chad’s still in Iowa City, huh?”

I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Probably working on his novel.”

“You know better than that.” Not looking at me.

Just staring at the dark house.

“I do?”

“You’re not exactly an idiot, McCain.”

“I’m not?”

“Chad’s got himself a girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what he’s doing in Iowa City.”

“You sure?”

“I skipped work one day and went to Iowa City and followed him around. She lives off-campus.

They spent all afternoon in her apartment. She’s a junior. Really beautiful.”

“Maybe it’s not what you think.”

“All afternoon and it’s not what I think?”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“Kill him is what I should do.”

It was a night of fireflies and frogs on the cusp of the creek and boxcars rattling through the darkness up in the hills. The ragtop idled a little rough. Tune-up time.

Then she was up and gone to the dark cottage, cursing when the key didn’t open the front door first try, exploding into sobs once she was inside.

I thought of going in after her but she probably wanted to be alone. I liked her and I felt sorry for her. The good ones always get it.

Maybe the Reverend Thomas C. Courtney could explain that one in one of his sermons. Why the good ones always get it. Or maybe I could put in a long-. tance call for John Paul Sartre and he could tell me.

I went home.

Judge Whitney called me early the next morning and told me what she wanted. Soon after the call I ate breakfast at Also

Monahan’s. Al lost both his legs on Guam but the way he gets around in his wheelchair should qualify him for the Indy 500. People, including the wasp Brahmins, started going to Also’s out of duty and pity. But they kept coming back because the food’s so good. Al and his harried crew have the most successful restaurant in town.

When I got outside on the street again with my toothpick and my Lucky, my easy-over eggs and toast sitting just fine and dandy in my stomach, I saw three middle-aged men standing beside a small black car, assessing it. There’d been an advertising sign for the Edsel-? Rock and Roll, Sputnik, Flying Saucers, and now the Edsel!”-t had irritated the old-timers. But that was because it reminded them of their age, and seemed to exclude them from driving such a youthmobile.

The Volkswagen this trio was looking at was controversial for another and far more serious reason.

Men their age had fought hard to defeat Germany, leaving many of their friends behind on European soil.

Now here came the krauts insinuating their way into the American economy with their undersized, underpriced cars that were threatening to displace a segment of the American car market. The fear was that these little cars would ultimately throw a whole lot of American workers out of jobs. I didn’t have to stop to hear the dialogue. I knew it by heart.

And agreed with it. “This was the car that Hitler had built for his people. They shouldn’t be allowed to sell it over here.”

I was glad to get into my red Ford and head out to the edge of town. It was a butterfly morning.

In places beneath heavy branches the shaded areas still gleamed with dew. All the early-morning kids on their trikes and bikes looked fresh and alert at the top of the day. A skywriting plane was writing “Make it Pepsi!” The radio was wailing a great old Elvis tune “I Want You, I Need You, I Love Y.” The Church of

Elvis. I was a faithful communicant.

I tried not to think about rattlesnakes or Kylie’s unfaithful husband or my loneliness.

I just tried to enjoy the day, the way all the positive-thinkers like Pat Boone tell you to. His best-seller of advice to high-schoolers “Twixt Twelve and Twenty” had teenagers laughing from coast to coast.

And I did, too, all the way out to the trailer behind the church where Muldaur had died last night. The exchange of gunfire, however, took the day down a notch. Even Pat Boone would have to admit that gunfire tends to put a pall on a nice day.

Six or seven quick shots burnished the air.

It was a butterfly day out here, too.

Except all the butterflies were hiding behind boulders so they wouldn’t get hit in all the gunplay.

The first thing that came to mind was the Hatfield-McCoy feud of lie and legend, two hillbilly families that warred with each other generation unto generation. They came to mind because the trailer resembled a shack, patched as it was with cardboard, sheet metal, stucco, anything that could be adhesed, nailed, or otherwise appended to the rusted-out abode. A shotgun poked from its lone front smashed window.

Then there was the motorcycle with a sidecar. A very small man, not much bigger than a munchkin, looking an awful lot like Yosemite Sam with his long red beard and floppy battered hat, crouched behind his cycle, firing away with his shotgun at the trailer. What you have to understand here is that neither party was seriously trying to hit the other. Nobody’s aim could be that bad. The sidecar was more interesting than the gunfire. From it stuck the barrels of at least eight or nine long rifles, shotguns, and even-I kid you not, as Jack Paar likes to say-a hunting bow. As in bow and arrow.

The first thing I considered was the health and well-bbing of my ragtop. I swung back in front of the church and parked it there. Then I snuck around the side where I could be seen and heard. The folks firing the guns were under the impression-probably correct-t out here in the boonies nobody would bother them. Hell, nobody would probably hear them.

But being the good-citizen type, I raised my voice and said, “If you people don’t put your guns down I’m going to call Sykes and have him come out here.”

“Viola! Viola! Who the hell is this guy?” shouted the man with all the weapons.

“He works for Judge Whitney!” a female voice from inside the trailer shouted back.

“Judge Whitney! She’s the one threw me in the jug for lumpin’ Bonnie up that time!”

“Lumpin’” in mountain language means putting lumps on another person’s body.

“We better stop firin’, Ned!”

“Put your gun down and walk away from your motorcycle,” I said. “With your hands up.”

“You ain’t even got a gun,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“And you ain’t even much bigger’n me, either.”

“Right again, pal. But it’s me or Cliffie.”

He frowned and spat a stream of tobacco that was probably carcinogenic enough to scar the earth forever.

“Cliffie. One day me’n that sumbitch is gonna tangle, I’ll tell you that.”

“Away from the motorcycle. Hands up.

Now.” I said it just the way Robert Ryan would h.

Cliffie loved beating up people who didn’t have the education or the money to fight back legally. A man like this would give Cliffie plenty of thrills.

He moved away from the motorcycle. With his hands up.

“Now, you come out of the trailer,” I said.

“With your hands up,” Ned said. Then to me, “I gotta have my hands up, they gotta have their hands up.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

There were two of them, mother and daughter, the Muldaurs. They wore the same kind of tent-dresses they’d worn last night, the kind that hides bodies too big, shame dresses really.

“C’mon over here,” I said. “I want you folks to tell me what’s goin’ on.”

“I want my money,” Ned said.

“What money?”

“Money their mister owed me for snakin’.”

“I thought Muldaur did his own snakin’.”

“He could handle ‘em but he couldn’t find ‘em.

I took him out with me about six months ago and he couldn’t find nothin’. Not even a garter snake. Muldaur’s the only one made any money that day.”

“He paid you what he could,” Viola

Muldaur said. She had a wide, Slavic face that had likely been pleasant before hard times had taken their toll. It was too easy, what with her snakes and all, to dismiss her as an alien of some kind.

“So he paid you to find them?” I said.

He nodded. If he weighed 120, 100 of it had to be dirt, grime, slime. The ratty red beard had things crawling in it. The gums looked charred-yes, folks, charred-andthe one blue glass eye managed to appear goofy and sinister at the same time. He wore a filthy cotton vest with nothing but scrawny, hairless chest beneath, and a pair of Sears Roebuck jeans even more vile than the vest. And no shoes. His toenails had some kind of luminescent green-blue fungus growing on them. I’d be proud to have him in my family.

“He owed me for that last batch.”

“And you came here with your shotgun?” I said.

“You ever hear of sending somebody a bill?”

“That’s how we settled things in the hills.”

“He’s right, mister,” Viola said. “We wouldn’t actually hurt nobody. Just make a lot of noise. And what’re you doin’ out here, anyway?”

“Just wondered if you’d had any ideas about who might’ve poisoned your husband.”

“I sure do,” the girl said.

“You hush, Ella.”

I studied their eyes. Ella had been crying.

Viola was wiping tears from her eyes. Ella seemed unsteady, ready to erupt. Viola looked calm. Different people react differently to the death of a loved one. Still, Viola’s reaction made me curious. Ella kept touching a rashed spot just below her knee. She’d rubbed something on it.

“You tellin’ me you don’t have no money?”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you, Ned.”

“I suppose they give you credit down at the Tv store.”

“John hisself bought that set. I don’t know nothin’ about it.”

“I bet.”

I said, “You were going to say something, Ella.

About who might have killed your father.”

“Ella wasn’t gonna say nothin’ and

Ella ain’t gonna say nothin’,” Viola said. “You understand that, girl?”

Ella, a whipped dog, nodded slowly. She suddenly seemed winded, washed out. She looked older today, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

“And as for you, mister, I want you off my property.”

“You seem to forget your husband hired me.”

“Yeah. To find out who wanted to kill him.”

She smiled with dirty teeth. “And you done a whale of a good job at finding out who, didn’t you?”

Ned’s whole body did a delighted kind of puppet-dance. “Hee-hee, she sure got you on that one, city boy.”

That was probably the first time a man from Black River Falls, Iowa, had ever been called a city boy. In a way, it was flattering.

I glanced back at his junky motorcycle, big-ass old Indian, and the sidecar with all the artillery in it. “You expecting a war any time soon?”

“I sure am, city boy. And when it comes, I’ll be ready for it.”

I’d suddenly run out of things to say to these people.

I felt sorry about leaving Ella behind- she was young enough there might still be hope for her-but there wasn’t anything I could do short of kidnapping her. And if I did that, Ned here would probably get out his bow and arrow.

I went around and got in my ragtop.

What exactly, you may ask, is the

Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics? Many before you have asked and many after you will do likewise.

As near as I can figure, it’s a diploma mill. The “Medi” part I get (medicine), but the “nomics” thing I think they stuck in there just because it sounds sort of vaguely official.

Its most prestigious, and only, local graduate is Doc Novotony, who is yet another relative of Cliffie’s. Doc had to battle the state medical board to get his ticket but they finally had to give in after the state supreme court ordered them to. Cliffie, Sr. made Doc the county medical examiner, which was all right with everybody because he did so with the tacit understanding that Doc, who is actually a great guy, would never actually touch a living human being. He would work only on corpses, people figuring how much harm can you do to a stiff? And if he didn’t have a stiff to work on, he generally sat in his office in the morgue in the basement of the courthouse, chain-smoked his Chesterfields, gnawed on his Klondike candy bars, read his scandal magazines (“Kim Novak’s Naughty Nite Out With The Football Team!”), and avoided damaging his five-six, 220-pound figure by doing any exercise at all.

“Hey,” he said when I walked in, his feet up on his desk as usual. It being Saturday morning, his voluptuous middle-aged receptionist Rita, with whom he was or wasn’t having an affair, depending on which town gossip you talked to, wasn’t here. He wore floppy loafers, red Bermuda shorts, a polo shirt with a Hawkeye insignia on it (he was quoted as saying once that he was neither Jew nor Christian but Hawkeye, meaning a fan of the various University of Iowa Hawkeye teams), and a smile on his face. He almost always looked happy, as if he were spiting the corpses tucked in the drawers all around him.

“Cliffie said you’d be here, McCain, and that I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything.”

“Good ole Cliffie.”

“How come you’re interested, anyway?”

I shrugged. “I was out there when he died.

Plus I got a phone call.”

His blue eyes became downright merry. “Herr Himmler?”

Which is what he called Judge Whitney, my three-quarter-time employer.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why would she give a damn about Muldaur?”

“She doesn’t. But Richard Nixon’s going to swing through here after he stops in Cedar Rapids and she’s afraid we’ll all look like a bunch of rubes to him if we’ve got a murder going involving a minister who used snakes in his church.

She’s going to have dinner with Nixon. Said she doesn’t want our little town to sound like a bunch of mountain crackers.”

He beamed. “Richard Nixon? Really?

I’m gonna vote for him. I guess I’ve got to give the old broad one thing-she sure is connected.”

As she was. In the past few years, she’s golfed three or four times with Ike and dined with celebrities as various as Leonard Bernstein, Dinah Shore, and Jackie Gleason; next month she was scheduled to be on the same Chicago dais as Claire Booth Luce and Dr.

Joyce Brothers.

“So what’s the word on Muldaur?” I said.

He took his feet down. “You want all the mumbo jumbo or English?”

“English will do fine.”

“He was poisoned.”

One thing about those Cincinnati Citadel of Medinomics graduates-y can’t put anything over on them.

“Anything a little more specific?”

“Ah, you do want the mumbo jumbo. I appreciate the opportunity to sound like I know what I’m talking about.” He cleared his throat.

Pulled up his baggy trousers. The spotlight was his. “Technically, he died from exhaustion.”

“Exhaustion? You’re kidding. I thought you said he was poisoned.”

“He was. Strychnine has that effect. You know all those convulsions he had?”

“God, they were terrible.”

“They literally wore him out. Yes, he was poisoned, and that asphyxiated him. But the convulsions were so severe he also had a heart attack brought on by sheer exhaustion.”

“God, what a terrible way to go.”

“Been better poetic justice if one of his vipers got him. But the vipers wouldn’t have done half the damage the poison did.”

“But doesn’t poison like that taste terrible?”

“Yeah, but the way he worked himself up during those ceremonies… He might have swallowed it and not realized it. He wouldn’t have had to drink a whole hell of a lot of it. Cliffie talked to one of the churchgoers who said Muldaur was always guzzling Pepsi. Somebody coulda put it in that.”

“I need to talk to his wife.”

“Cliffie said she wasn’t any help.”

“Yeah, she probably didn’t respond well to when Cliffie clubbed her.”

Doc grinned. “I shouldn’t put up with you making fun of my beloved cousin that way. Without him I wouldn’t be medical examiner of this here county. And I wouldn’t be permitted to wear my stethoscope in public, either.”

“Now, that would be a shame. You look very good strutting down the street in your stethoscope.”

He giggled. “That’s what the ladies tell me, counselor.”

“Exhaustion, huh,” I said, thinking about everything he’d told me. Then an image of Muldaur convulsing came to me. Seeing something like that diminished our entire species. I’d always known we were vulnerable. I just didn’t like to be reminded of it in such a grotesque fashion.