“Yes.”
“And you’d still consider taking her back.”
“I’d consider it, I suppose.”
“Well, that’s exactly how I’d feel, McCain. I’d consider it.”
“We’re a couple of fools,” I said, “is what we are.”
“Damned fools.”
“Double-damned fools.”
“We’re really pathetic, you know that?”
“Do I know it? Do I know it? I make myself sick I know it so much.”
And that’s when I saw this guy working his way up the street, slipping leaflets under windshield wipers.
“I’ll call you at work this afternoon,” I said.
“I’m really going to need you tonight, McCain.”
“Good. Because I’m really going to need you, too.”
She grabbed my hand. “You are?”
“Sure I am.” And then I did something I really shouldn’t ought to have done. I leaned over and gave her a kiss right on the mouth. A married woman-well, a somewhat married woman-right on the mouth.
Just the kind of thing I’d expect from you, I could hear my ninth-grade nun, Sister Mary Florence, saying. Just the kind of thing I’d expect from you.
Eleven
John Parnell was a chunky guy with a limp that resulted from a grade-school tractor accident. He wore a lime-colored
T-shirt and jeans and sandals. He was bending over a Ford station wagon to slap a leaflet beneath its windshield.
“Hi, John.”
He backed himself off the car hood he’d been bent over and said, “Hey, McCain, how ya doin’?”
“Fine. Or I was till I saw you putting those leaflets on car windows.”
He grinned. “Yeah, that’d make the nuns mad, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded to the stack of leaflets in his car.
He was still the freckled, snub-nosed guy I’d always known. I couldn’t connect him to the leaflets.
“You printed them and now you’re distributing them?”
“Yep. That’s what God wants me to do, McCain.”
“He told you that?”
“Now you’re being blasphemous, Sam.”
Maybe this wasn’t the old Parnell I’d known.
“You’re a Catholic, Parnell, and you’re handing this stuff out?”
He shook his head. “Not anymore I’m not.
A Catholic, I mean.”
“Since when?”
He shrugged. “Well, the wife-I’m not sure you ever met her, gal from Sioux City I met when I was doing my printing apprenticeship up there-anyway, she was raised as an evangelical. And what with one thing and another she kinda got me interested in the whole thing. She always says you should feel bad when you go to church.
And I tried ‘em all-Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian. But they always tried to make you feel good. But bad’s the only way you know your religion’s workin’ for you. When you feel terrible.
And that’s what we both liked about Reverend Muldaur. His whole deal was how unworthy we all are. And I believe that, McCain. You might believe something else-but that’s what I believe, McCain.”
“But the snakes-”
“That’s what people don’t understand.”
“What don’t people understand?”
“They’re not snakes.”
“They sure looked like it to me.”
“They’re devils. Really and truly.
Devils. Evil spirits. I’ve held them. I can feel their evil. I truly can. But they didn’t bite me because Reverend Muldaur cleansed my soul before he handed me the snakes.”
“But all this bullshit about Jews and Catholics-”
“I don’t use words like bdds. anymore, Sam. But I’ll tell you, they’re both out to conquer the world. They know they can’t do it alone, so they’ve joined forces. And the only people who can stop them are people like me.” He leaned forward confidentially. He smelled of sweat and onions.
“And there’re a lot of people in this town who believe the same way I do, Sam. But they don’t want people to know it.”
“So you just gave him all this printing free?”
“Heck, no. A friend of his paid for it.”
“What friend?”
He leaned toward me again. He mst’ve had an onion sandwich with some onion rings and onion juice on the side. “Like I said, Sam, there’re a lot of folks in this town who agree with everything we do. And one of them was nice enough to pick up the tab for the printing. I just charged my costs.
No profit. That wouldn’t be right, seeing’s how I was doing it for the Lord.”
Parnell, Parnell, what did somebody drug you with? How can you possibly believe this crap?
Then I realized it was time for me to go pick up the rabbi and the monsignor. We were doing some target practice this afternoon with the guns in the church basement.
“I’d really appreciate it if you told me who paid for the printing, John. I’m trying to find out who killed Muldaur.”
“I know you are. We all hear the Judge is trying to get it all cleaned up before Nixon gets here. Now, there’s a guy with almost as many Jew friends as Kennedy has. Hard to know who to vote for.”
I couldn’t deal with it any longer.
“You’re making me so damn sad, Parnell.”
“And you’re making me sad, too, Sam. I saw you over there eating with that Jewess. She’s not fit company for a true Christian, Sam.”
“Well, she’s fit company for me. She’s a damned good woman, in fact.”
He shook his head. He really did seem sad. “The ways of the flesh, Sam, the ways of the flesh.”
At one time, the two-room house had probably looked pretty nice sitting all alone by the fast creek in the curve of a copse of pine. It looked like one of those houses a fella could order himself from the Sears Roebuck catalog late in the 1890’s. Such homes came with assembly instructions; the fancier kits even included hammers and other tools. You could see some of these Sears houses standing well into the 1940’s, by the grace of spit and God, as the old saying had it.
Ned Blimes, whose last name and current address I’d learned by asking around, didn’t seem to be at home as I pulled my ragtop behind a stand of pine to the west of his house. I didn’t want my car to pick up any stray bullets.
A dainty man, he wasn’t. His meals apparently included a lot of self-shot squirrel meat because the grass on the side of his place was strewn with carcasses. Several gleaming crows hovered nearby. I’d interrupted their meal. I’ve never been able to tolerate the smell of squirrel meat frying. The air was coarse and bloody with it.
I knocked on the front door of the shack-like house. The lone front window was filled with cardboard and just a jagged remnant of the glass that had once covered it.
The crows went back to eating. The pollen got to me and I sneezed. And somebody poked something in my back.
