Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool (6 page)

“But—what happens when the night’s over?”

“I come home and take a cold shower and sit in an ice bath and read the Bible. Same thing I do every night.”

Her laugh again. It was a small, shy, affecting laugh. “You clown.”

“You know you want to go.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I can just tell. I have these powers.”

“It’ll get awful frustrating for both of us at some point.”

“We’ll worry about that when we get to that point. How’s that?”

“I really appreciate this, Sam.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Listen, and I’m being serious now. I’m not doing you a favor. This isn’t some kind of pity date. I like you. Last night I had a good time—if you discount the underlying existential dread that’s always with me, I mean.”

This time she giggled. “I think that’s what I h. Existential dread. And that sounds a lot more impressive than telling people you’re depressed.

Just about everybody’s depressed. But not all that many people have existential dread. I’m not even sure what it means and I’m impressed.”

“Maybe we’ll fall in love.”

“Oh, Sam, c’mon.”

“Why not? You’re lonely and I’m lonely and you’re short and I’m short.”

“And you have existential dread and I have existential dread.”

“See, what did I tell you? Sounds like love to me.”

“So what time are you planning on picking me up?”

“How about seven?”

“I’m staying here at my mom’s. Not in Iowa City.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“So am I.”

“Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot. I was working in the emergency ward one night about six

months ago. I had to substitute because there was a very bad virus going around and a lot of staff were home sick. Anyway, this woman came in.

She’d cut her wrists. She was in pretty bad shape. We got her fixed up and then she took off. You’re probably wondering what the point of this is.”

“I’m getting a little curious.”

“The woman was Brenda Carlyle.”

“Mike Carlyle’s wife?” Mike

Carlyle being the owner of the most successful local lumberyard, and a former All-Big Ten running back.

“Right.”

“Was Mike with her?”

“No. That’s what was so funny about it.

David Egan brought her in. I walked in on them once and he was kissing her.”

The Griffins lived in one of those venerable old brick mansions that had probably looked venerable and old the day the builders finished it. It belonged in one of those sappy Mgm British romances with Greer Garson, all noble and cold, and Ronald Coleman, all noble and hesitant.

They’d each do three or four noble things in the tedious course of the flick and then one of them would die doing something so noble it was difficult to even speak about it. Personally, I prefer Hot Rods from Hell.

There were vines up the ass (and on all sides of the house, too) and mullioned windows that bespoke even greater antiquity than the vines.

A blue Caddy convertible and a dark green Caddy sedan were in their proper garage slots. The doors were open for some reason. The drive and a half block in either direction were jammed with new and expensive cars of various kinds.

Inside, amid all their friends consoling the Griffins, there would be canap@es and sandwiches and hard liquor served by a maid who made less in a lifetime than most of the men present made in a year and who probably worked twice as hard. It was my class anger and sometimes it was fine, resenting the upper class, and sometimes it wasn’t fine, not when one of their daughters had been killed and I was petty enough to deprive them of my pity.

I would have made a good Marxist if

only I could have believed in all the economic and sociological horseshit the Commies hand out.

I said a kind of prayer for the soul of poor Sara Griffin and also a kind of prayer for her parents. My older brother had died. None of us in the family, even all these years later, was ever again quite the same. The Griffins, despite the two fine and shiny cars in their open garage, would never again be quite the same, either.

No way I was going to go inside and try to talk to them with all the company they had.

Late afternoon now, autumn sky ripening into the color of grape and blood as a quarter-moon traced itself against the blue of the sky between gold-outlined clouds. There’s a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night’s. I had always felt it as a child and felt it still.

I decided to get ready. A shower and fresh clothes would knock the mood out of me. I felt ridiculously eager to see Linda again, to be bound up in that quiet, sensible, good-girl prettiness of hers, the gray gaze so eternal and wise behind her glasses. How fitting she should be a nurse, I thought. And then smiled. It didn’t take much to tumble me down the rabbit hole of infatuation. And with Linda I sensed the tumble would be worth the risk.

One hour later, shaved, showered, smelling of Old Spice and Lucky Strikes, I stood at the door of her mother’s two-story white frame house on a narrow working-class street that showed—with its shiny new cars and all the new home repairs—how well most people were doing in the United States at the moment. There had been some violent economic ups and downs after the war, but for the most part, this was the golden age of America.

There were jobs aplenty, several years of peace following the Korean War, college money for anybody who needed it, Playboy clubs, American Bandstand, the Twist, and the Flintstones, and who the hell could ask for more than that?

She was surprised to see me. She wore a quilted robe. I could smell supper. It smelled very good. She said, “Didn’t you get my—”

I handed her the note she’d thumbtacked to my back door. “I believe you left this at my place.”

She looked flustered for only a moment and then said, over her shoulder, “Mom, I’ll be on the porch a few minutes.”

“Supper’s almost ready, honey.”

“I know, Mom. I’ll be right in.”

When the door was closed, she said, “My mom’s so sweet. She really is. But I’ll always be her little girl, emphasis on “little.””

“So how do you explain that?” I said, flicking the note she’d kept in her slender fingers.

“I was going to explain it to you in person but then when you weren’t there—”

“Chickened out, huh?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, Sam.”

There was a swing on the porch. I took her hand and led her to it and we sat side by side.

“I keep trying to put it into words, Sam, and I can’t. So you’ll understand, I mean. I was so excited when we were riding around last night—I felt so much better than I had in two years-but then when I got home and went to bed and started thinking of things … I just feel foolish, Sam.

That’s the best way to put it, I guess.

Foolish that I got married so young and foolish that I’m back living at home and foolish that I can’t deal with this better. My being sick, I mean.”

“You’re not sick now.”

“No, not physically, anyway. But mentally.”

She tapped her sweet Midwestern head.

I took her hand. “We’re all foolish.”

“Oh, Sam, you don’t have to try and make me feel better. I should be doing that for myself.”

“I’m not kidding. We’re all foolish.

Foolish with ourselves, foolish with other people. And we’re too tough on ourselves about it. Life’s tough and unfair and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So we do and say foolish things because it’s all we know how to do. You’re going through a very rough time—something most people won’t have to face in their whole lifetime—and you’re trying to adjust to it.

And you’re doing a whole hell of a lot better job of it than I would.”

She put her head on my shoulder. I liked it. I liked it a lot. The stars had started to come out. We stayed in that position and then we started to swing. Just a little bit. But the rhythm was nice and so was the cool, clean chill on the wind.

“I’m not going to give up, Linda.”

“I hope you don’t.”

“Tomorrow night we’ve got a date.”

“I’d like that.”

“And I don’t want any notes left on my door.”

“There won’t be any.”

“And I don’t want any

we-now-interrupt-th-program-messages on Tv to tell me the date’s off, either. When I’m watching professional wrestling, I don’t want some announcer cutting into the match.”

She laughed softly. “None of those, either.”

“And I’ll expect you to wear that perfume you were wearing last night.”

“I promise. I don’t have any other kind of perfume, anyway.”

“And one other thing.”

“What’s that, Sam?”

I kissed her on the mouth. I started to pull back but she held me there, slender fingers against the back of my neck.

“What I was going to say,” I said finally, “was that I care about you. All of a sudden last night it just happened.”

The gray gaze got impish, amused. “As I recall, you fall in love pretty

easily.”

“I’m not sure I’m falling in love. I don’t know what it is. Except every time I think of you I feel a whole lot better than I have in quite awhile. And I get this really urgent need to see you.”

She was just about to say something when the front door opened and her mom stuck her head out. I was back in eighth grade again, tense about moms, and hoping I didn’t say anything stupid or unforgivable.

“Oh, hi, Sam, haven’t seen you in a long time,” said her mom, who looked very much like her daughter. “I didn’t realize you were still here.

Would you like to stay for supper?”

“Afraid I can’t, Mrs. Dennehy. I just stopped by to say hi to Linda.”

She smiled. “Well, say hi to your folks.

I always see them at mass but that’s about all these days.”

“I’ll be right in, Mom.”

“Nice to see you again, Sam.”

“Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Dennehy.”

Linda walked me to the edge of the porch. “I wish it were tomorrow night.”

“I could pick you up later tonight.”

She took my hand and kissed me on the cheek.

“No, let me live in that “glow of

expectation” they’re always talking about in those romance novels I read.”

“It’s a deal, then. We’ll both glow for the next twenty-four hours and I’ll see you right here tomorrow night.”

This time she kissed me on the mouth. Not for long. “I’d have kissed you longer but Mrs.

Sullivan is peeking out her curtain from across the street.”

“Want to put on a real show for her?”

She took my shoulders, turned me forward like a wooden soldier, and then set me marching off to my ragtop.

I honked at her as I pulled away. She waved good-bye with a girly hand. Don’t you love it when they wave good-bye with a girly hand?

Kenny Chesmore’s got one of those tiny silver house trailers that the military used in army camps during the war. After the fighting stopped, you could get them cheap. A lot of people did, especially Gi’s who went to college on the Gi Bill.

Kenny’s trailer was set up in the shade of a giant oak with branches of mythic proportion.

Easy to imagine Arthur’s knights sleeping beneath its mothering wings on a stormy night preceding the battle next day.

Or in a more modern context, a pornographer cranking out twenty pages of pure art a day.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Kenny

Chesmore. The typewriter you hear is his, a sweet little Olympia portable of a model they don’t make anymore. I’ve offered him $150 for it. He won’t take it.

Out front there’s a big, lazy golden collie that butterflies like to pick on and who steadfastly refuses to go outside when the thermometer strikes below thirty. His name is Herbert.

As the door opened you could see for yourself the kind of image Kenny chooses to project for himself-beatnik. Bohemian. Outsider. The short dark hair combed forward. The goatee. The ragged gray T-shirt. The wrinkled chinos. The dirty white tennies. I’m not sure

where this “beatnik” uniform came from—I’ve never seen any of the holy trinity,

Kerouac-Ginsberg-Corso, wearing anything like it.

But all you have to do is go to a city and you’ll seen dozens if not hundreds of such getups. Kenny also has a bumper sticker on his door-Khruschev is a Commie. Kenny likes

what they call sick jokes.

When he’s not writing, he’s usually in a political demonstration of some kind in Chicago, which is four hours away. I’d accompanied him to the one for Caryl Chessman and the one for civil rights but some of the others bothered me enough to stay away from. Any group that is willing to forgive Joseph Stalin for all his atrocities is not a group I want to be part of.

The inside of Kenny’s trailer is, as you might imagine, a garbage dump of dirty clothes, pizza wrappers, books of every size and description, stacks of records running to some really good stuff such as Sara Vaughan and Gerry Mulligan, and a huge Admiral console Tv. Kenny likes his politicians to be twenty-four inches. He thinks it makes it easier for them to hear when he screams at them about what lying capitalist devils they are. He’s right, of course—I like capitalism but it sure has produced more than its share of devils—it’s just that he’s awfully damned noisy about it.

The windows were open so the trailer smells weren’t too bad. He gets some fresh breeze off the wide creek that runs in back of his place. He also gets some interesting animals, especially the raccoons and the possums that manage to break into his trailer whenever he’s gone. One day I pulled up to find him out. But there were three raccoons staring out at me from his living room window.

He has a small table on which he both writes and eats. You can tell when he’s about to eat because just before he puts his Tv dinner into the tiny oven, he shoves his typewriter to the far edge of the table. Dinner, as they say, is served.

On the wall, high and just to the right of the table, are six or seven of his latest paperback covers thumbtacked to the wall. He makes three hundred dollars a book and usually does one a month. The covers are usually photographs of buxom women wearing as little as the law will