Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (2 page)

    We walked.

    All these people, all these cars, you'd think there was a county fair going on. Nice warm September afternoon and all. That tender smoky autumn scent in the piney hills. Hawks swooping down their glide paths. Corn so ripe it's like spilled gold in the fields. Auburn-colored colts running in the high meadows.

    Not the afternoon to be talking about murder.

    

    

    "I started getting letters a few weeks ago," Conners said. "Well, not letters exactly; hammers and sickles drawn in blood. Human blood. I had a chemist friend at the college analyze them. Then flat tires and a mysterious fire in my office at the school. And then late-night phone calls. You know the kind. They just hang up. Don't say a word. Last week my dog was poisoned. And last night somebody took a shot at me when I was bringing my horse back from my early evening ride.

    "My suspicion is that it's Jeff and that crowd."

    Jeff Cronin had been a likable guy when I was growing up. He was several years older but, despite his heroics on the football field, was always decent to us younger kids. The Korean War changed him. (I know we're supposed to call it a police action and all, but around here we call it a war.) Six of our own died over there in the first year. Anyway, Jeff's brother got captured and brainwashed, and Jeff couldn't seem to get past it. The communists had destroyed his brother and they destroyed Jeff, too. Hating communists had become the most important thing in his life.

    Conners went on. "They graduated from Trawler and are very prominent alumni and they keep trying to get me fired. That hasn't worked - thanks to Dean Wyman's courage - so maybe now they're trying the more direct approach. I think this has to do with that magazine article, 'The Red Who Got Away.' Walter Winchell gave it a lot of play. They imply I turned state secrets over to the Russians but the State Department covered it up to save embarrassment with that sonofabitch McCarthy coming after them. That article sure didn't do me any good. I mean, back east they know I'm not a communist. But out here - well, you know how people are."

    "Hell, yes, I do. We're a bunch of bumpkins and we wouldn't recognize a smear job if you put it up our most delicate orifice."

    He looked hard at me. "What the hell are you, a member of the Chamber of Commerce?"

    "No, just somebody who likes most of the people in Black River Falls and thinks they're a lot smarter and nicer than you do. Very few people hassled you when you came back here. They took you back as a lost son. The library gave your daughter a job and the women went out of their way to try and make your wife feel comfortable. So don't tell me what a bunch of bigots we are, because it's not true. For every asshole like Jeff Cronin, there are ten very nice people."

    "Boy, McCain, are you a hothead."

    I shook my head. "I'm not a hothead. I just don't like snobs. And Conners, you're a snob."

    He laughed. "You little guys sure have tempers."

    "You big guys sure have egos."

    He stopped walking. "Now that we've decided not to like each other, how about going to work for me? Esme is quite taken with you."

    I'd cooled some. I smiled. "She hides it well."

    "Oh, Esme's all right. A bit of a lush, a bit of a poseur - I mean, God, her extended family is riddled with white-collar crooks if you look back far enough; that's where their fortune comes from - but she has a decent heart and a very good mind."

    "Which she wastes on Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley."

    His laugh was mythic too. He was one of those giant men - like Orson Welles - who should be given to opera capes and top hats. "Now there's something we can finally agree on."

    "I'm not sure what I could do for you."

    "Try and find out who's after me. This thing is escalating. I'm not a physical coward. But I sure as hell don't like people setting fire to my office and taking shots at me. And then there's something else that happened. It requires more of an explanation than we've got time for now, but - "

    I was thinking about telling him I'd make the time when Bill Tomlin approached. Bill and Chris Tomlin lived in a house next to the faux-mansion Conners had bought. Tomlin was, and would always be, the class brain. There was a sad earnestness about the crude haircut, the expensive but wrinkled suit. You never saw him without his briefcase. He had it now, in fact. He also had an occasional tic that jerked his entire head a quarter inch to the right, made more obvious than it had to be by a blue walleye.

    "We'd better get going, Richard. You've got that radio interview at nine."

    "Oh, thanks for reminding me." He reached out a massive arm and gave Bill a brotherly hug. "I wish the girls got along as well as we did." Then, to me: "What I told you is between us. Not even Esme should know. I don't want that dunce Cliffie Sykes Junior hearing about this."

    "Like it or not, he's the law in Black River Falls."

    "Yes, and he's also an idiot."

    "No argument here."

    "And he supports Jeff wholeheartedly. I doubt he'd put much effort into an investigation. Hell, he may be involved himself. Wouldn't surprise me." He turned toward his car. "Gotta go. There's a dinner thing at the school tonight." He looked at me. "I want to give you something tomorrow. Want you to keep it for me."

    Then he and Bill Tomlin, big striding brother and shambling little one, headed back toward their fancy car.

    

    

    "You know what I am, McCain?"

    "Yes, I do know what you are: fetching."

    "No, I'm serious."

    "So am I."

    The beautiful Pamela and I were going back home in my red '51 Ford convertible with the white sidewalls and the extra-powerful radio that can pull in clear-channel KOMA, the world's best rock-and-roll station, with no problem at all. Though the top was still down, and the sky was filled with those impossible colors only near-dusk can create, a chill was in the air and I knew that soon enough she'd be asking me to stop and put the top up. Such are the duties of ragtop owners.

    Pamela had put a sweater over her elegant shoulders. "I was watching this movie the other night."

    "Uh-huh."

    "With Alexis Smith and Zachary Scott. Did you happen to see it, by any chance?"

    "Uh-uh."

    "Zachary Scott is married and he's got two little daughters, but he's having this affair with Alexis Smith."

    "I see." Not sure where this was going.

    "The Other Woman. That was the name of it."

    "Makes sense."

    "Well, think about it, McCain."

    "Huh?"

    "The similarities? Stu and me? He has a wife and two sweet little daughters. So what does that make me?"

    "Oh, I see."

    "I'm the other woman."

    I reached over and took her hand. Sometimes that's OK with her; sometimes it's not. This time it was. "Yeah, I guess you're right. I'm sorry, Pamela."

    "So the first thing next morning I called him at the office and said that either he did the right thing and ask his wife for a divorce or it was over for us. I couldn't hurt his wife and daughters anymore."

    "And he said what?"

    "He said he'd get back to me."

    "He'd get back to you? What did he think he was doing, closing on a mortgage?"

    "He always talks like that. I never said he was real romantic."

    "Apparently not."

    "Anyway, I told him if people ever found out, just think what my reputation would be like. Everybody'd think I was a whore." She looked off at the cornfields and pastures and then back at me. "Maybe I am a whore."

    "You know better than that." Then: "So, did he get back to you?"

    "Yes," she said. "He called me last night. When I told him I was going to see Khrushchev with you, he got mad."

    "Because of me or Khrushchev?"

    "Both. He's jealous of you, though he always says that's ridiculous because you're so short; and his dad is a member of the John Birch Society, so he wouldn't cross the street to see a communist."

    I was afraid to ask. "What did he say about leaving his wife?"

    She looked at me, and I couldn't ever remember seeing her more lovely. "He said yes, McCain. He said he wants to marry me. I still can't believe it. He's going to tell Donna about us tonight."

    

    

    There's a great F. Scott Fitzgerald story called "Winter Dreams," in which the protagonist falls in love with this girl when he's barely a teen and loves her throughout his life. He becomes all the things she wanted for a husband: rich, powerful, successful. And yet she always eludes him. She ends up having a pretty terrible life - marrying a faithless alcoholic, losing her looks - and when this is recounted to him many years later he isn't sure what to feel. He still loves her too much to feel good about her dashed hopes. But what he mostly feels is nothing, his care having been blunted by losing her so many times. He wants to cry - maybe for himself; maybe for her; maybe for both of them - but nothing comes. His grief over not having her was something to cling to. Now there is just emptiness.

    I guess I felt that way. She didn't gloat. I mean, she knew her happiness meant my doom. So she would move beyond me forever. The worst part of it was Stu. His ambition was to become governor. He stood a good chance. But now he was willing to sacrifice it for Pamela. He loved her as much as I did, maybe more. How could I blame him?

    Just at dusk, with clouds and shadows tinted in that midwestern violet, I stopped to put up the top. She used the rest room of the tiny gas station. I leaned against the car, smoking a Lucky, and for just a moment, and utterly without warning, tears stung my eyes. God, I'd loved her for so long. And now it was done.

    

    

    I'm not a drinker. Like my dad, I'm small and I just don't have the capacity. By the time I dropped her off and tooled back downtown, the liquor store was closed. They keep strict hours, and you have to sign for every bottle you take out so the state has a record of it. This is what you get when boozers and teetotalers work out a compromise.

    But there were bellhops at all four hotels who could provide you with a bottle for twice what it would cost you at the liquor store. I wasn't even sure I wanted one. But it seemed like the kind of thing Robert Ryan would do in one of his crime movies, and sometimes in my head - and this is sort of embarrassing because I'm going on twenty-six years old - sometimes in my head I'm Robert Ryan. I used to be Gene Autry, but at least then I had an excuse. I was seven years old.

    I got a fifth of Old Grand Dad and drove back to my apartment. Mrs. Goldman, the widow who owns the house and lets out two upstairs apartments - I'd call her my landlady but if you ever saw her you'd never call her a landlady - wasn't home, so I knew I'd be drinking alone.

    Things got fuzzy pretty quick. I told you I just don't have the capacity. I hauled out some old photos of Pamela, and then I didn't have any trouble crying at all. I had to damned near nail my hand down to keep from calling her and telling her what a mistake she was making. Around two I started vomiting, and the first time I tried to flop into bed I missed and hit the floor face first. Then I vomited some more and then I tried the bed again. I did a little better. I got most of my body on the mattress. The rest is a blank.

    

    

    "C'mon, now, don't be a baby."

    "You really didn't have to do this."

    "Yes, I did."

    "Why?"

    "Because you asked me to."

    "I did? When?"

    "When you came down last night."

    "I came down last night?"

    "Yes."

    "When?"

    "Maybe four."

    "Oh, my God, I'm sorry."

    "You told me all about Pamela. And then you told me you were afraid you'd never be able to get up in the morning. And that you had too much to do to sleep in. So I said I'd make sure you got up."

    What she'd done was serve me breakfast in bed, Mrs. Goldman. I always say that when Lauren Bacall gets older, she'll look like Mrs. Goldman - if she's lucky. When her husband died and left her this two-story Victorian, people wondered if she'd be able to get along. She's doing just fine, thank you.

    Especially where I was concerned. She had me sitting up in bed drinking coffee, smoking a Lucky, and eating off a breakfast tray that offered three poached eggs, two slices of buttered toast with strawberry jam, and a glass of orange juice.

    My three cats wanted to share the meal. Mrs. Goldman and I had to fight them off. Tess was the most creative. She started at the foot of the bed and tunneled all the way up, so that her head appeared right next to my toast.

    Mrs. Goldman said, "You have to get all this down, McCain. Isn't your first appointment for nine?"

    "Umm-hmm. With the Judge."

    "Well, it's eight-fifteen. You still have to take a shower."

    "I really appreciate this."

    She touched my sleeve. "I was rebounding when I met my husband. I'd loved this guy all the way through college and he wouldn't give me a second look. The first six or seven times I went out with Ken I thought he was the dullest guy I'd ever known. How could anyone compare? But you know, after a couple of months, Ken became my whole life. And he stayed that way for almost thirty years. That'll happen to you, too, McCain. Wait and see."

    "I sure hope so."