Teenagers sparked over by the hot-dog counter.
“Say,” I said, ever the sly one. “I saw you last night.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Out at Muldaur’s church.”
She actually blushed. “Oh… We were just passing by. And saw the ambulance and everything.”
“I thought maybe you knew somebody there. I saw Reverend Courtney.”
The flush had faded. An abrupt coldness came into eye and voice. “Yes, we’d taken a ride together. He… helps me sometimes. You know, with-” She hesitated. “You know I went to the Mayo Clinic.”
She looked humiliated. Hard to look at pain so fresh in those lovely eyes.
“It’s all right, Sara.”
“Well, he helps me sometimes. Sort of counsels me.”
But if he was the kind and gentle counselor, why had her first reaction been anger when his name came up? And going for a ride together? But then I’d probably been reading too many books by Dr. Edmond DeMille, astksta Kenny Thibodeau, and was suspicious of even the most generous acts.
“I really need to go. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to bring up anything unpleasant, Sara.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
She touched shapely fingers to the edge of her erotic mouth. “It was nice seeing you.”
Wanting to keep her here as long as I could, hoping something useful would just spurt from her, unbidden, I said, “How’s your daughter?”
A tiny tic at the outer corner of her left eye. I didn’t make much of it. Coincidence.
“Fine. She’s just fine.” But she sounded tight again, the way she had about Courtney.
“I heard her sing at the springfest in the park.
She’s got a beautiful voice.”
She smiled, looking happy for the first time.
“Folk music. The Kingston Trio eighteen hours a day.” Then the tic came back. “I need to go. Bye.”
I gave her a long minute, then I followed her. There was a bar on the edge of the mall. I hoped I hadn’t driven her to it. I felt guilty and confused. Everybody always clucked about her “nervous personality” but her response to what I’d said seemed awfully dramatic.
She acted as if I’d accused her of something sinister.
She went into a bookstore. I sat on a bench and smoked a Lucky. I was there two or three minutes when I saw Reverend Courtney appear from the far end of the L-shaped brick mall. He wore a yellow golf shirt and chinos and white Keds. He looked like Yale’s most successful graduate of recent vintage.
He went into the bookstore, apparently not seeing me, and emerged a bit later in the company of Sara Hall. She looked angry again.
Angry but on the verge of cracking, her feelings threatening to overwhelm her.
He had her by the arm, led her to The House of Beef. I’d been there a few times. It was cave-dark, cavern- cold. It was the preferred trysting place. The martinis were good, the food better. All the upwardly mobile young men who imagined themselves to be cool-a la Peter Gunn or Tony Curtis I suppose-called the place “The House,” the way Frank Sinatra would.
I wondered if she’d drink. I wondered if she’d cry. I wondered if she’d get violent. She’d seemed on the verge of all three. And then I wondered if she was in love with Courtney. It was the kind of thought I didn’t especially want to have. I’d always liked Sara Hall.
Seven
I spent half an hour at the gas station where I get my ragtop worked on. Being a
Saturday, they were busy with cars up on the hoist. I’d stopped in just to schedule a time for a tune-up but I liked the particular atmosphere of the place-the smell of gasoline and oil, the clank of tools hitting the concrete, the hoist that lifts and lowers the cars-andthe male camaraderie that is second only to a barbershop. Taverns don’t count for camaraderie because alcohol skews everything. But barbershops and gas stations… that’s where men are men. And someday I plan to be one of them.
The topics today included how bad the Cubs were doing, how muchsthow little they looked forward to Nixon visiting our town, the high-school girls parading up and down the sidewalk in short-shorts (“God, I wish they woulda worn ‘em that short back when I was in school!”), how Jack Kennedy’s wife walked like she had a cob up her ass (republicans) or looked like a glamorous movie star (democrats), and finally how Muldaur’s murder was inevitable, him being the center of “all them nuts out to his church.”
The gas-station consensus was that one of Muldaur’s own had done him in. Nobody mentioned Muldaur’s affinity for cheating on his wife. In fact, they didn’t offer any specific reason for his being killed. They just felt that anybody who messed around with snakes the way he did was bound to come to no good.
I stopped by Rexall for lunch, bought a new John D. MacDonald paperback and a copy of Galaxy, which I read through while I ate my burger and fries. While I was sitting at the counter, I saw Muldaur’s sergeant-at-arms towering above the patent medicines in aisle three.
He wore a worn, blue work shirt and was the strapping size of Muldaur himself, but there was nothing messianic about his face. He looked well-attached to reality, and not all that happy about whatever his particular reality was doing to him. I left a tip and slid down off the stool.
I started toward him but decided this wouldn’t be a good place to talk. There was a lull in business.
Too easy for people to overhear. The quiet would intimidate him.
I followed him outdoors after he bought a carton of Wings and a bottle of
Pepto-Bismol. He made his way toward a pickup truck that had once been a
Model-T. The back half had been sawed off and two-by-fours set in behind the front seats. It was the kind of truck that got a lot of poor families through the Depression.
After he’d climbed in and started the engine, which sounded pretty damned smooth given the age of the vehicle, I went up to him and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
“So what?”
“You remember me from the other night?”
“Yeah. You were with that Jew girl.”
“What makes you think she was Jewish?”
“They smell.”
“Why don’t you keep your filthy mouth shut?”
“You just can’t take the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That bringing a Jew in there is what killed him.”
“So it was her fault, huh?”
He patted a Bible on the seat next to him.
It had an outsize golden cross on its imitation leather cover. And next to the Bible was a stack of his leaflets about Jews and Catholics.
“Jews killed Our Lord. They start trouble wherever they go.”
I wanted to laugh. I’d had the same problem with Hitler. He was, for all his evil, laughable. His theories of a “pure race” were ridiculous on their face. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the Vikings visited most places on the planet. And they were one randy bunch of guys, let me tell you. There hadn’t been a “pure” race since. In fact, it’s doubtful even the Vikings were a pure race. That’s the trouble with evil sometimes-it turns into farce.
Jews smell. The presence of a Jew had caused a murder to take place. Uh-huh.
“I’m curious about something.”
He ground the car into gear. Sounded as if the transmission teeth needed a little work. I notice stuff like that.
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
