couldn’t recognize her own mother.
I picked up a John D. MacDonald novel called Dead Low Tide. I’d read it a couple of times before. I always came back to it. It made me feel better in the way saying a prayer made me feel better. The ritual of repetition. There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero.
He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be. I think that’s why John D.’s books are so popular.
Because we all know deep down we’re sort of jerks. Not all the time. But every once in a while we’re jerks and we have to face it and it’s never fun. You see how deeply you’ve hurt somebody, or how you were wrong about somebody, or how you let somebody down. But facing it makes you a better person. Because maybe next time you won’t be quite as petty or arrogant or cold.
Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without ever letting on. All this is according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as taught in lively and deft style by Dr. Harold Gelbman at the University of Iowa.
Forgive me. It was late at night and I was in a ruminative mood. Creak of old house.
Jet plane far above roaring into darkness, contrail across prairie moon. Needing to take a leak but too lazy to get up. Hungry but too tired to fix anything. Sleepy now but too comfortable to walk to bed. Dozing with one cat on my lap, one cat on the arm of the chair, and one cat sleeping on the back of the chair with her head resting on the top of my head. And snoring. Cats can snore pretty good when they’re up to it.
And then the phone rang.
It’s a measure of how deeply asleep I was that I jumped up as if I’d been poked. The cats jumped up, too, scattered quickly.
I was baffled for a moment, staring at a small black jangling instrument I’d never seen before.
I couldn’t imagine what its purpose was.
And then I snatched up the receiver.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello!”
“Mr. McCain?” Very faint.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. Ellie. Ellie…
Chalmers.”
“Hi, Ellie.”
“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Just reading is all.”
Silence.
“Ellie?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“He’ll be mad if I do.”
“Who will?”
“My dad.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
“I’m just scared is all.”
“What happened?”
“Sykes came to where Dad works today and hauled him out in front of everybody. They pick on him a lot anyway, on account of he was in prison.”
“What happened?”
“Sat in the squad car and accused him over and over of killing the Squires woman and now Squires. A lot of the men would sneak up to the door and watch Sykes workin’ him over. It hurt Dad’s feelings. Now he says Sykes is gonna arrest him for sure.”
“So what’s your dad going to do?”
Long silence. “Run away.”
“That’s the worst thing he could do.”
“That’s what I keep tellin’ him.”
“He won’t get far.”
“He’s got money. Somebody was out here today and left a package for him.”
“You know who it was?”
“Uh-uh. There was just this big manila envelope on the doorstep. Dad’s name on it.
There wasn’t any stamp or anything.”
“How do you know it was money?”
“I saw Dad open it and put it in his suitcase.”
“What’s supposed to happen to you, he runs off like that?”
“He said to go see you. That you’re his lawyer now and you’d know what to do.”
“I’m on my way out.”
“I’d really appreciate it.”
“You just hold him there as long as you can.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I appreciate the call, Ellie. You did the right thing.”
“He didn’t kill those people.”
“I know he didn’t, Ellie. I know he didn’t.”
Pale red fire bloomed in bursts against the dark moon-streaked sky. A war scene. It might have been night fighting in Korea.
When I reached the top of the hill looking down on Chalmers’s acreage, I saw the source of the pale red bursts: two police cruisers.
Because the house was isolated from its neighbors, there were no onlookers. A cop with a shotgun stood in front of the door. I pulled up.
“He ain’t gonna be happy to see you,” Pat Jarvis said.
As far as I could tell, the only thing the Jarvis family had ever done, except butter up the priests, was produce a daughter with breasts so enormous even the withered monsignor could be seen eyeing them. Patrick had none of her charm.
“Chalmers got away, and Cliff, he figures you had somethin’ to do with it.”
Nice going, Mike, I thought. Give
Cliffie an excuse to blow your ass off when he finally catches up with you.
“I go inside?”
“If I don’t shoot you in the back, you’ll know it’s Ok.”
“Very funny.”
A grin. “Ol’ Cliff’s pissed, and I ain’t ki. in’.”
I went inside. He didn’t shoot me in the back.
Cliffie saw me and said, “I should plug you right here.”
“There’s a witness,” I said, nodding to Ellie. She wore a high school sweatshirt, jeans, and white soiled sneakers without socks.
“You told him to do it, didn’t you?”
He lunged at me. His face was booze red.
His eyes were pretty much the same color.
“You really think I’d tell him to run? I’d lose my right to practice.”
“I gave shoot-to-kill orders, in case you’re interested.”
Ellie started crying.
“Great, Cliffie,” I said. “Why don’t you scare her some more? The guy’s only her father.”
