Save The Last Dance For Me

Seven

I spent half an hour at the gas station where I get my ragtop worked on. Being a

Saturday, they were busy with cars up on the hoist. I’d stopped in just to schedule a time for a tune-up but I liked the particular atmosphere of the place-the smell of gasoline and oil, the clank of tools hitting the concrete, the hoist that lifts and lowers the cars-andthe male camaraderie that is second only to a barbershop. Taverns don’t count for camaraderie because alcohol skews everything. But barbershops and gas stations… that’s where men are men. And someday I plan to be one of them.

The topics today included how bad the Cubs were doing, how muchsthow little they looked forward to Nixon visiting our town, the high-school girls parading up and down the sidewalk in short-shorts (“God, I wish they woulda worn ‘em that short back when I was in school!”), how Jack Kennedy’s wife walked like she had a cob up her ass (republicans) or looked like a glamorous movie star (democrats), and finally how Muldaur’s murder was inevitable, him being the center of “all them nuts out to his church.”

The gas-station consensus was that one of Muldaur’s own had done him in. Nobody mentioned Muldaur’s affinity for cheating on his wife. In fact, they didn’t offer any specific reason for his being killed. They just felt that anybody who messed around with snakes the way he did was bound to come to no good.

I stopped by Rexall for lunch, bought a new John D. MacDonald paperback and a copy of Galaxy, which I read through while I ate my burger and fries. While I was sitting at the counter, I saw Muldaur’s sergeant-at-arms towering above the patent medicines in aisle three.

He wore a worn, blue work shirt and was the strapping size of Muldaur himself, but there was nothing messianic about his face. He looked well-attached to reality, and not all that happy about whatever his particular reality was doing to him. I left a tip and slid down off the stool.

I started toward him but decided this wouldn’t be a good place to talk. There was a lull in business.

Too easy for people to overhear. The quiet would intimidate him.

I followed him outdoors after he bought a carton of Wings and a bottle of

Pepto-Bismol. He made his way toward a pickup truck that had once been a

Model-T. The back half had been sawed off and two-by-fours set in behind the front seats. It was the kind of truck that got a lot of poor families through the Depression.

After he’d climbed in and started the engine, which sounded pretty damned smooth given the age of the vehicle, I went up to him and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“So what?”

“You remember me from the other night?”

“Yeah. You were with that Jew girl.”

“What makes you think she was Jewish?”

“They smell.”

“Why don’t you keep your filthy mouth shut?”

“You just can’t take the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That bringing a Jew in there is what killed him.”

“So it was her fault, huh?”

He patted a Bible on the seat next to him.

It had an outsize golden cross on its imitation leather cover. And next to the Bible was a stack of his leaflets about Jews and Catholics.

“Jews killed Our Lord. They start trouble wherever they go.”

I wanted to laugh. I’d had the same problem with Hitler. He was, for all his evil, laughable. His theories of a “pure race” were ridiculous on their face. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the Vikings visited most places on the planet. And they were one randy bunch of guys, let me tell you. There hadn’t been a “pure” race since. In fact, it’s doubtful even the Vikings were a pure race. That’s the trouble with evil sometimes-it turns into farce.

Jews smell. The presence of a Jew had caused a murder to take place. Uh-huh.

“I’m curious about something.”

He ground the car into gear. Sounded as if the transmission teeth needed a little work. I notice stuff like that.

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“I saw you slap a woman the other night.

Was that your wife?”

He grabbed me. So quickly, so skillfully that I wasn’t sure what happened till it was over. He flung me back across the sidewalk, propelling me into a corner mailbox.

He pulled away.

I shouted, trying to recover at least a modicum of dignity for the interested bystanders, “Was Muldaur sleeping with your wife? Was that why you slapped her?”

A guy the town seemed to employ as a wise guy-he’d always been here, I’d never seen him gainfully employed, he just kinda wandered around and made sarcastic remarks, a modern version of the Greek chorus-sd, “Good thing he took off.

Otherwise you would’ve killed him, McCain.”

The groundlings who were standing around all looked at me and laughed.

I wasted an hour walking around to the various print shops. Half of them were closed on such a baking Saturday afternoon and the other half claimed that they didn’t know anything about who’d printed the leaflets and the slick pamphlets that came from Muldaur’s church and were plastered all over town. Most people of all denominations found them disgusting and complained about them in The Clarion letters column.

In a small town like ours, you have to be very careful of who you offend. There were just enough Catholics that printing Muldaur’s hate mail could cost you any Catholic business you had.

But if anyone knew anything, they weren’t talking about it. Only one person gave me anything remotely resembling a lead.

He said that there was a former press operator who now had a small press in his basement and did odd jobs. He’d taken a full-time job in the Amana factory where they made freezers because the pay was so much better. The guy said he didn’t know if Parnell, the former press operator, had done the Muldaur work but that he was probably worth checking out. He gave me Parnell’s address. I thanked him. I’d gone to Catholic school with Parnell. We hadn’t been friends, but then we hadn’t been enemies.

Reverend Courtney was sitting on his church steps talking to a dowager in a summer frock and a large summer hat. They looked quite handsome, the church of native stone magnificent in the afternoon light, the large front lawn well-tended and very green, a watercolor cover from The New Yorker perhaps, even a breeze cooperating by fluttering the long blue ribbon that trailed from the dowager’s hat.

Her name was Helen Prentice, and she and her husband were not only wealthy but also generous. There wasn’t a hospital, library, or auditorium within a hundred miles in any direction that the Prentices hadn’t contributed substantially to.

“Hello, Sam,” Helen said, extending her hand. We shook. I’d met her at various soirees at Judge Whitney’s house.

“Afternoon, Helen.”

She checked her watch. “I need to run.”

Courtney, now in dark slacks and a white shirt, started to raise himself from the church step but she stopped him with a gloved white hand.

“The last time I checked, Reverend, I wasn’t royalty. There’s no need to stand.” She smiled at me. “George and I really enjoyed sitting with you at the Judge’s dinner table last month. You’re a very funny young man.” Then back to Courtney. “See you in the morning at the ten o’clock service.”

When she was out of earshot, or so he assumed, he said, “There goes one very rich lady, McCain.”

“I’d think that a man who’d dedicated himself to following in the footsteps of Jesus might also point out that she’s a very decent person, too. Very generous with her riches.”

“Nice to know you’re not afraid of being pompous.”

I said, “How was the food at The House today?”

He wasn’t intimidated. “I knew you were an unsuccessful lawyer. I guess I’d forgotten that you were an unsuccessful gumshoe, too.”

“You and Sara Hall just happened to be driving around last night and ended up at Muldaur’s church completely by coincidence?”

“That’s right, McCain.”

He looked vital and modern standing against the massive medieval-style doors of the church.

“I’m sorry I got you Catholics in a tizzy by quoting Dr. Peale. It’s a free country, you know. Or so they tell me, anyway.”

“Right now, I’m more interested in you and Sara Hall. What were you really doing out there last night?”

He smiled. He had great teeth, of course.

Movie-star teeth. “As I said, I’m told it’s a free country. Or didn’t they teach you that in that second-rate law school you went to?”

He came down off the steps and walked over to where a rake leaned against an elm. From his back pocket he took a pair of brown work gloves, cinched them on, and started raking.

As I walked back to my office, I noticed leaflets on car windows, placed under windshield wipers. A block before I reached my place I saw a boy of maybe twelve toting an armload of the leaflets and getting punched in the face by a much bigger kid. The Flannagan boy. Flannagan was no doubt displeased with the anti-Catholic nature of the leaflets. But mostly he just liked punching kids smaller than him. Flannagan, who’d played fullback on the Catholic school junior varsity squad until they realized he didn’t have any talent, was born to bully.

I got between them and gave Flannagan a shove.

“What’re you stoppin’ me for, McCain? You see that shit he’s got about Catholics? He says we ain’t Americans.”

“You’re a lot bigger than he is,

Flannagan.”

“I don’t care. He still deserves to be punched.”

Nice to know that Muldaur’s work was living on beyond him. He’d brought the town to a boil in life -andthe water was still hot now that he’d died.

“Who told you to pass these out?” I said to the kid. He wore bib overalls with a striped T-shirt. He had freckles and a cowlick and a squirt of blood in his right nostril from Flannagan’s fist. And bare feet. I was surprised he wasn’t dancing a jig.

“God told me to,” he said.

I almost laughed.

“God,” Flannagan said. “My ass.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that. Dirty, I mean,” the kid said. “My mom says Catholics and Jews talk like that all the time.”

Now I’ll double back on what I said earlier about the foolish side of evil. There’s nothing more frightening than a youngster who has been completely indoctrinated by his parents. He’s as soulless as a robot and as deadly as an assassin. You can’t reason with him because the “on” switch in his brain doesn’t operate. His parents turned it off permanently long ago.

“Why don’t you let me take those?” I said.

I reached for the leaflets and he jumped back a foot.

“No! You’re a dirty Catholic just like Flannagan here.”

“You call me a dirty Catholic again and I’ll knock you out.”

“Shut up, Flannagan,” I said. “Kid, I want the leaflets.”

“They’re mine and you can’t take them away from me.”

“Let me handle him, McCain,”

Flannagan said, “c’mon.”

And with that, not unexpectedly, the kid took off running down the sidewalk. Flannagan lunged, as if he were going after him. I grabbed him by the shoulder.

“I should be able to hit him if I want to,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s one of your inalienable rights. Punching kids who weigh forty pounds less than you do.”

“He hates Catholics.”

“Or at least his parents do.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

His moon face tightened into a sneer. “You mind if I go now, your royal highness?”

“Always a pleasure to see you, Flannagan.”

There are some people you just don’t want on your side.

As I climbed into my ragtop and headed home, I tried not to think about some of the feelings that Jack Kennedy seemed to stir up. Otherwise reasonable, decent people still had their bias toward Catholics in office. William Jennings Bryan always said that he wished he hadn’t run for president because it taught him just how deep anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish bias ran in this country. Things had improved since then but, as with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, even respectable ministers felt safe in talking about Kennedy as a stalking horse for the pope.

Then there were the unrespectable people-the Klan, the Nazi sympathizers left over from the American Bundt days of the big war, the small-town radio ministers, the pamphleteers of every description. There’d been an article in Time magazine a few years back noting that any fund-raising letter or pamphlet with the word “Jew,” “Communist,” “Catholic,” or

“Negro” in its headline would earn twice as much money as a letter or pamphlet without. Judging by the entertainment shows on the tube, everything was just okey-dokey here in the land of Lincoln. But we knew better, didn’t we?