jail where the young woman was being kept. He’d outfitted a horse for her, and he gave her enough money and provisions to make it to Minnesota. The girl was never seen again, and no one ever went after her. Her name had been Helen, and she grew so mythic in the minds of the settlers that they called their county Helena.
“You saw him squirm?”
“I saw him squirm. That was a great idea, Judge, asking him if he wanted me to pitch in.”
“He’ll take it under consideration.”
“He wasn’t too happy when I called him Cliffie.”
“And Squires wasn’t very happy to see us.”
“He sure wasn’t.”
“It was one of the few times he could challenge me and get away with it.”
When we reached the steps, she said, “I want to humiliate Sykes, McCain.”
“I figured you did.”
“I want to really rub his face in it.”
It was the only way a Whitney could get back at a Sykes these days. A series of embarrassments.
“Do I have time for a beer first?”
“One,” she said. “And no more.”
“How about two?”
“Two and you’ll be asleep. You’re a terrible drinker, McCain.”
She strode up the courthouse steps, used her Saturday key on the door, and went inside.
Three
Elmer’s Tap is a working-class tavern where my dad and I play shuffleboard two or three times a week. Elmer, the owner, refuses to let rock and roll be put on his jukebox so the music runs to Teresa Brewer, Frankie Laine, and The Four Lads. I’m old enough to appreciate that kind of music but it’d still be nice to have Little Richard rattle the windows once in a while.
On a football Saturday when the
Hawkeyes had a home game, most of
Elmer’s regulars were in Iowa City in the stands.
Elmer is in his late sixties but still strong enough to throw around large kegs of beer. Thirty years ago he was the state executioner. This was when he lived in Fort Madison, where the hangings were done. He won’t talk about it unless he’s drunk, which isn’t often, and then he’s clinical about it. He keeps a hangman’s noose tacked to the wall above his cash register.
Sentimental, I guess. Every once in a while you’ll catch him staring off into the past, that window we all carry around with us, and you wonder if he’s thinking about what it was like, killing those men, and if he ever sees them in his dreams. He was a swabbie in the war, with the anchor tattoos to prove it. Maybe they ward off evil dreams of trapdoors flying open.
The stools along the bar were empty. Elmer was washing glasses, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the smoke stinging his eyes so that he kept blinking. He was a scrawny man with thick glasses. He was also a Taft Republican.
One night my dad and I made the mistake of telling some of the regulars that we didn’t think much of Joe McCarthy. A couple of the drunker ones tried to pick fights with us, but Elmer broke it up and said there were three things you should never discuss: “Politics, religion, and the size of your dick, ‘cause you don’t want to make everybody jealous.” Words to live by.
“How they hangin’, McCain?” he managed to say around his cigarette. He didn’t seem to know anything about the Squires woman. I decided to let him find out on his own. I didn’t want to go through it all again.
“Oh, pretty good. How about a Falstaff in the bottle?”
With a soapy hand, he jerked the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it to the floor, where he proceeded to smash it with his foot as if it were a particularly pesky bug.
He got me my beer.
“Shit,” he said. “You hear that?”
The radio said it was halftime and the Hawkeyes were down by seven.
“This was supposed to be a Rose Bowl year.”
Then: “How come you don’t like sports, anyway?”
“My heart can’t take the excitement.” I’d always preferred books. This may have explained my distrust of Joe McCarthy. Why couldn’t he have been a Baptist? Why did he have to embarrass the rest of us Irish Catholics?
He smirked and shook his head and then said, “That buddy of yours is puttin’ them away.”
I looked along the opposite wall where the booths ran all the way to the back. I didn’t see anybody.
“He’s on the inside of the last booth so you can’t see him. Cronin. Somethin’s really got him down.”
I was going to be Jeff Cronin’s best man in less than a month. What was going on?
I decided to find out. I picked up my beer and went back there.
The booth was wood. It had been painted a few years back. A few of the dirty words scrawled into it I didn’t understand. But they sure sounded foul.
I sat down. He didn’t seem to see me.
Just stared at his beer. His head was bobbing. He’d had enough to start losing muscular control.
“Jeff?”
He looked up. “Hi.”
“You all right?”
“Pretty drunk, actually.”
“Yeah. I kind of noticed that.”
Jeff Cronin was a big guy. Everybody always said he should have played football but he was slow and clumsy. His father bred horses, and horses were Jeff’s love. He was one of four local veterinarians. He wore a blue sweatshirt. His blond hair was ragged. He hadn’t shaved. “Marriage is off, buddy.”
“What?”
“Off. O-f-f.”
“Off? What the hell’re you talking about?”
“Off. That so hard to understand? Off.”
“But why?”
“Because I said so, that’s why.”
It was one of those moments of unreality we all have once in a while. The people and the place look familiar, but something makes you think you’re in a parallel universe where everything is subtly different.
Eight-nine years Cronin had been going out with Linda Granger, and three-four years they’d been engaged, and now the wedding was suddenly off?
The dating possibilities in Black River Falls are limited. In our high school class, for instance, there were twenty-two boys and eighteen girls. That isn’t a huge base to pick a mate from, especially when you eliminate the ones who find you obnoxious, the ones who find you ugly, the ones who find you boring, and the ones who find you embarrassing. In my case, that left with me a six-girl potential, Pamela and Mary included. The alternative, to increase the mate pool, was to date someone younger or older. Boys tended to date someone younger, girls someone older.
Or you could date someone from Crowley, which was twenty miles away, who we beat the shit out of every year in basketball, making it all right for us to date them. Or Nashburn, which was thirty miles away, who beat us every year in basketball, making it not all right to date them.
Cronin, the drunk guy in front of me, the guy who kept reeling around even though he was sitting down, had accomplished the most amazing feat of all: right in our very own class he’d discovered a girl who was (a) nice, (but) smart, and (can) very pretty. And who also just happened to have a pair of knockers that should be enshrined somewhere, the Boobs Hall of Fame, perhaps, which I believe, if I’m not mistaken, is somewhere in Pennsylvania.
