The Day the Music Died (9 page)

I found what I wanted and came back.

“Guess what I did,” I said.

“What?”

“Looked up Potassium Permangatel in the medical reference book.”

“Oh.”

I put my hand on hers. “Maybe we should go for a ride.”

“A ride? What for?”

“So we can talk.”

“We can talk here.”

“No, we can’t,” I said.

We went outside. Four boys were having a furious snowball fight. They stopped abruptly when two girls walked by. The girls, who obviously considered themselves more mature than the boys, rolled their eyes at the very idea of snowball fights.

We walked to my car.

“Your car is always so cold,” Ruthie said.

“Not in the summer.”

“Very funny. And it happens to be winter.”

We got in.

“God, can you turn on the heater?”

“It’s on. It just takes a while to warm up.”

“I’m sorry I’m so crabby.”

“You’re always crabby. It’s part of your charm.”

“Not
this
crabby.” Then, “You know, don’t you?”

“Yeah. The medical reference book.”

“What’d it say?”

“Well, you know, about douching.”

She sighed and looked out the window. “Just what I always wanted to have. A conversation with my brother about douching.”

“Maybe later we could talk about menstrual cramps.”

I was driving out the river road. The ice-covered river was beautiful in the silver moonlight. The heater was roaring. It was still colder than hell in the ragtop. The seats were like ice.

“I sure hope it works,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Well, what do you
think
happened?”

“Boy, you
really
are crabby.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Was it, uh, all right for you?”

“You mean doing it?”

“Yeah.” Doing it. My kid sister. Doing it. Sweet little Ruthie McCain.

“Does he know? The father, I mean?”

“Yes. He knows.”

“You told him?”

“I wrote him a letter.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he was scared. He said this’ll screw up his whole life. He wants to start in premed at the university next year.”

“How about
your
life? What’s supposed to happen to
your
life?”

She looked out the window some more, the way Pamela did driving home last night. You could see the paper mill along the river, big and modern and alien in the night, floodlights giving it the look of a prison. Somehow it seemed wrong, even obscene, out here on the prairie where the Indians had roamed for several hundred years.

“You going to tell me who this little bastard is?”

“First of all, he’s not little. And second of all, he’s not a bastard. And third of all, no, I’m not going to tell you. And it’s not going to do you any good to get mad.”

I couldn’t believe how calm she was. “God, Ruthie, don’t you want to cry or something?”

“No, do you?”

We rode along some more.

“Mind if I play the radio?” she said.

“We shouldn’t listen to the radio at a time like this.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. We just shouldn’t.”

“Are we punishing ourselves or something?” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Then can I have a cigarette?”

“A cigarette? Since when do you smoke?”

“I just smoke every once in a while. Don’t worry, I don’t inhale or anything.”

“You’re my little sister.”

“And you’re my big brother. What the hell does that prove?”

We rode along some more. I accidentally on purpose forgot to give her a cigarette. She didn’t mention it again.

“God, I wish you hadn’t found out about this.”

“I’m your brother, remember?”

“We already went through that. And anyway, I’m the one who did it and it’s
my
responsibility.”

“Do you love him?”

She thought a moment. “I did until I saw what a little boy he is. I’m a lot more grown up than he is.”

“So marriage is out?”

“Absolutely.” Then, “I’ll just have to try this stuff is all.”

“You actually think it’ll work?”

“I guess it does sometimes.”

“Who said?”

“Jenny knows somebody it worked for.”

“Oh, yes, Jenny, the sixteen-year-old gynecologist.”

“God, I wish you hadn’t found out. You’re worse than he is about this.”

“I just can’t believe how cool you’re being. Don’t you
care
what happens to your future?”

“How is getting into a panic going to help me? I just have to try to think through this the best I can.”

I didn’t say anything for a time. Just looked out at the frozen, snow-covered river in the moonlight, sled tracks deep in the snow, the faraway small islands of birch and pine. In the summer you could see girls in bikinis all night long on those islands, headlight flashes of flesh and drunken merriment.

I looked over at my seventeen-year-old sister. She really was calm. And she was right. My intensity wasn’t helping either of us. “I guess that’s why you’re the valedictorian of your class and I graduated with a big C-plus average.”

“You’re not stupid,” Ruthie said.

“Face it, you got the brains in the family.”

“Oh, come on.”

“And the looks.”

“Oh, yes, I’m a regular movie queen.”

“You’re beautiful and you know it.”

“I’m pretty but not beautiful.”

I knew at least twenty kids who’d vehemently disagree with her assessment.

I pulled onto a cliff that overlooked a cove. On the cliffs across the waters you could see some of the town’s mansions.

I said, “That’s where I want you to live.”

“Where?”

“Over there. In one of those mansions.”

“Are you crazy? I don’t want to stay here.”

“You don’t?”

“No. What, and have three kids and a husband and get fat and cranky by the time I’m thirty. Like Aunt Tish.”

Aunt Tish was legendary. On a high school trip to Hollywood right before WWII, a producer from MGM spotted her at a hamburger joint and gave her his card and asked her to make a screen test. Well, she made the test, and she was good. Not great but good, good enough anyway for MGM to offer her a short contract when she graduated high school the next year. Tish became the local celebrity. A local station even gave her a fifteen-minute radio show once a week called
Tish Tish Tish
on which she sang (not so good), told jokes that her listeners sent in (even worse) and then gave the lowdown on a lot of high school activities. The assumption being, of course, that Tish would board the train for Hollywood the day she got her diploma. But she didn’t go. Her mother said that she’d gotten scared. What if she failed? What if she had to come back here in a year or so? How could she ever face all the people who had such great expectations for her? Tish started to put on weight. Nobody around here had ever seen anybody put on weight the way she did. In five months, she went from 95 pounds to 151 pounds. Mr. Berenson, the MGM man, kept calling long-distance and asking her what the holdup was. They were doing a Betty Grable musical set on a college campus and Tish would be perfect for a small part as one of the freshman girls. Then Tish broke down and told him about her weight problem. Mr. Berenson was most sympathetic, but after her confession he didn’t linger on the phone. Nor did she ever hear from him again. She stayed in town. Within one year, she weighed 170 pounds which, at five-one, was considerable. She got married to a milkman, had three kids bing-bing-bing and then got a local religious radio show in which she, among other things, reviewed movies through “God’s perspective.” At least she’d given up singing and telling jokes. She was still around: Aunt Tish, a dour woman who always brought terrible potato salad to family reunions and always managed to bring up her near-miss in Hollywood.

“I want to be a lawyer, like you.”

“Oh, yes. A big success like me.”

“I want to go to law school at the U of I because the tuition’s so cheap, and then I want to go to Chicago and join a really prestigious firm.”

“What about kids?”

“I want kids. But not now. And not ’til I get my career going.”

“You sound like Ayn Rand.”

“It’s nineteen fifty-nine. Girls can do a lot more than they used to.”

I heard the motorcycle before I saw it. At first, I didn’t think enough about it to look down the dark, winding road for it. There are a lot of motorcycles in a town like ours. Personally, I prefer custom cars. They’re my weakness. But motorcycles are fine, too, except for the ones with all the saddlebags and air horns and plastic streamers on the handle grips.

The flashing red light caused me to turn my head. The flashing red light, mounted on the fender of the big Indian, also announced who it was, one Chief Cliff Sykes, Jr.

Cliff goes to a lot of cowboy movies and it shows. While the rest of his sixteen-man force wear the traditional blue of the police officer, Cliffie prefers the kind of tight khaki uniform Glen Ford likes to wear in westerns, sort of a modern-day gunfighter’s outfit. He wears his Colt that way, too, in a holster slung low over his right hip. And he has a mustache, a black line that perfectly traces the arc of his insolent mouth. He wears cowboy boots made out of rattlesnake skin. And he carries a Bowie knife in a scabbard that hangs off the back of his belt. He’s shot and killed five men in the six years he’s been chief. A lot of people, including me, think the killings didn’t need to happen, that a little police know-how and patience would have brought the incidents to a more humane conclusion. He’s also famous for getting confessions out of innocent people. Cliff, Sr., his father, controls a lot of jobs in this town and when you put a grand jury together, you’re always looking at a number of people whose fates are one way or the other in the hands of Cliff’s father. So are they going to charge Cliffie with excessive force? Not likely.

He got off his motorcycle, emergency light flashing. For all his affectations and little-boy tough-guy stuff, all the silly B-movie stuff, he truly was a spooky guy because he took a pornographic pleasure in the pain and suffering of others. There’s smart evil and there’s dumb evil in this world of ours. Smart evil conspires and plots and manipulates; dumb evil just reaches out and grabs. Cliffie was definitely dumb evil.

He shone his light in the window. The beam revealed Ruthie first and then me. The huge flashlight was actually a club and he often used it that way. He knocked on the window.

I rolled it down. “Something I can do for you?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but I can’t say it in front of your little sister.” A car went by, headlights angling through the darkness, slowing down when it reached us, trying to figure out what little Cliffie was doing. Anywhere that Cliffie went, excitement was sure to follow.

“In fact, McCain, get out of the car.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he said, slapping his flashlight in the palm of his hand. “A, because I said to, and B, because I said to. That clear enough for you?”

I looked over at Ruthie. “I’ll be fine.” I wanted to reassure her just in case she was scared.

“Gee, all he said was he wanted you to step out of the car. He didn’t say he was going to shoot you or anything.”

“Sensible girl, your little sister,” Sykes said, smirking.

I got out of the car.

“Let’s take a walk.”

“To where?” I said.

“Just along the road.” Then, “Oh, you got a weed?”

That was another thing about Cliffie. He never bought what he could mooch. He probably hadn’t bought a pack of cigarettes since he’d graduated from high school. “Light?” he said, after I handed him the smokes. I gave him my Ronson. He lit up and handed the lighter back.

We might have been two friends out strolling for an evening, just walking along, looking out at the moon-silver river, the big pavilion just ahead of us. You could hear the summer echoes, kids and their folks laughing and dogs barking and radios blasting and cars honking merrily as they pulled in loaded with more families and more dogs and more hot dogs and more Pepsi.

He got me in the ribs with his flashlight and doubled me over. It was the second shot, the one in the stomach, that dropped me to my knees.

“Counselor’s been a bad boy,” he said. And then kicked me quickly in the groin.

I’m not much of a pain fan. I know that some people think that spiritual growth can come from pain but I’ll leave that for the philosophers to figure out. I just don’t like pain—not from a dentist, not from a surgeon, not from a drunk, and not from a psychotic chief of police who once told a local fawning radio reporter that he considered his job that of “town tamer, you know, like Wyatt Earp and Bill Tilden and all those men.”

“You were supposed to wait at the murder scene ’til I told you you could go.”

I didn’t say anything. He circled me. When he got square with my back, he gave me a wedge of rattlesnake boot in the kidney. I cried out.

“That’s the first thing that pissed me off today, McCain. The second thing was you starting the story that Kenny Whitney didn’t kill his wife.”

At which point, I got another boot toe driven deep into my kidney.

Ruthie suddenly lurched from the car and said, “You leave my brother alone, you asshole. And I don’t care if you’re the chief of police or not.” I guess she really had believed he was just going to talk to me.

“Nice talk for a young lady,” Sykes said.

“Get back in the car, Ruthie. Please.”

“He doesn’t have any right to hit you.”

“We’ll talk about it later, Ruthie. Please just get back in the car now.”

“You asshole,” she said to Sykes.

“I could run you in,” Sykes said. “Talking to a lawman like that.”

“Too bad I don’t have a necktie, then you could tie me to the jail cell and beat me.” A few years back, Sykes, Sr., had arrested Lem Tompkins, a hardware store clerk who was a rival for Sykes, Jr.’s girlfriend. Sykes, Sr., accused Tompkins of driving while intoxicated then took him back to the cell where he tied him to the bars and beat him pretty badly. Lem ended up in the hospital for a week. Sykes, Sr., somehow managed to convince the town that Lem, who’d been in trouble for breaking and entering a few years back, had attacked Sykes, Sr. Judge Whitney demanded Sykes’ resignation. But the town was in a bind—their choice being the cold, imperious arrogance of the old money Whitneys versus the cold, imperious arrogance of the new-money barbarians at the gate as represented by the Sykes family. It isn’t much of a choice but I guess I’d lean toward the upper-crust intelligence of the Whitneys. The town leaned toward the Sykeses. Sykes, Sr., kept his job.