Cliffie tells you to stay out, he gets most unpleasant if he sees you defying him.
He lunged for the kid and shouted, “Hey, you, twerp!”
“Maybe he’ll shoot him,” Kylie said.
“Nah. Nothing worse than a pistol-whipping, probably.”
The kid wanted to see the snakes, was the thing.
He rushed up to the cage and stood gazing in fear and amazement at the serpents that hissed and rattled at a world as alien to them as theirs was to us.
“You get away from there now,” Cliffie said.
“They wouldn’t bite me, Chief,” the boy said. He was probably eight, with a bowl-job haircut like Larry’s of the Three Stooges, something Mom probably gave him at home. “I don’t have sin in my heart. I really don’t.”
“You heard what I said.”
Cliffie yanked him down from the platform and dragged him outside.
Something had been troubling Kylie all evening.
Something that was becoming clearer and clearer on her girlish, elegant face. Somehow, I sensed that it didn’t have anything to do with the church here, frightening as that had been.
“You give me a ride home, McCain? I guess I’ve about had it. Watching him die like that took it out of me.” She slid her arm through mine.
“Let’s go outside.”
Heat, mosquitoes, fireflies, and the smell of gasoline, cigarettes, and sweaty people awaited us. The place was already becoming a carnival. On a summer night in a small town there’s nothing front-porch folks would rather do than follow ambulances. Put up some iced tea there, honey, and we’ll see where that ambulance is goin’. Hurry, now. More dramatic than Tv, cheaper than the movies. And they were just now pulling up, forming a semi-circle around the cars of the churchgoers. They were practiced enough at all this to leave plenty of room for the official vehicles to get in and out. And they were bold enough to go right up to Muldaur’s flock and ask them questions. They were sure this just had to involve snakes, and what could be more exciting than something that involved snakes and was cheaper than going to the movies?
But it wasn’t all front-porch types, and that surprised me. Reverend Thomas C.
Courtney was there, for one, the first minister to look as if Esquire had dressed him. I wondered if the apostles had worn starched blue dress shirts, white ducks, and deck shoes. And driven green Mg’s. I always enjoyed driving past his church to see the titles of his forthcoming sermons. “You, John Paul Sartre, and The Crucifixion” was still my favorite. We used to parody that title. I came up with “You, Gabby Hayes, and The Heartbreak of
Hemorrhoids.” (i was reading Mad magazine a lot in those days.) Courtney appealed to what we call, out here anyway, the gentry. He’d angered a lot of Catholics lately by preaching a piece written by Dr.
Norman Vincent Peale, the most successful Protestant minister of our day, who claimed that Jack Kennedy was, as a Catholic, beholden to Rome and that a vote for Kennedy was thus a vote for papal rule.
Finding Sara Hall here was even more surprising. A fading country-club beauty who’d been to the Mayo Clinic several times for what was locally called “a little drinking problem,”
Sara was a friend of my employer, Judge Whitney, and a woman I liked. Her hands twitched sometimes, and she was known to have had a couple minor breakdowns in very public places a few years back. One day, seeing me on the street and having met me only once, she asked if I’d have a cup of coffee with her. I was surprised but I went. And when our coffee came and she’d had a couple of swallows, she said, “I was just afraid I might pop in somewhere and have a drink. But instead I can sit here and talk to you.
I really appreciate this.”
Muldaur’s people had gathered in front of two battered Chevrolet trucks, from one of which issued the plaintive cry of hill music in its purest form, not steel guitars but slide guitars, the kind of music first heard on these shores a couple hundred years ago when Irishers landed on the shores of the Atlantic.
The voices of the girl singers were my favorite parts, high-pitched wails relating tales of doomed lovers and the men who enslaved them. The lyrics were changing now, influencing country music and being influenced by it at the same time. This was the music of a subculture that would never become mainstream. To find life as it was lived a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, you didn’t have to travel far.
I saw it peripherally, not sure at first that I did see it, the big man who’d guarded the church door leaning over to slap a small woman, hard, across the mouth. This was in the far shadows, beyond the wall of crunched and crushed vehicles they drove. They stood between two such vehicles.
They were easy to see.
It was just at that moment that Cliffie started baying orders for all the people who’d been inside the church to start giving statements to his men-first cousins, second cousins, shirttail cousins-who were now moving among the flock with ball-point pens and nickel back-pocket notebooks. Cliffie had once seen Bci agents do this and had forever after imitated it. Hey, this idea of interviewing witnesses seemed like a pretty neat-o keen idea. Boy, where was this scientific detection stuff going to end, anyway?
“You mind if we leave? I’m getting kind of tired.”
Kylie’s voice broke somewhere in the middle of that last sentence and then she did something I’d never seen her do before. She started crying. Not hard, not loud, mostly just large, gleaming tears collecting in the corners of her dark eyes. She didn’t wait for my answer. “C’mon,
McCain, let’s go, all right?”
Four
It is a strange summer for me. The girl I’ve loved since grade school is in Kansas City, hiding out from the scandal of running off with our town’s most important lawyer.
Married lawyer, I should add. Two kids and all. Lawyer and wife have made up. The beautiful Pamela Forrest is, however, pretty much gone forever. Mary Travers, the girl I should have fallen in love with-z much as you can determine something like that, I mean-is getting married to the man whose father owns the local Rexall plus a whole lot of other property in the county. She still loves me, or so she said the last time I saw her, but I’ve screwed up her life too many times as it is.
And the other day I was sitting in the backyard of my folks’ place and I started to study them. Not just look at them. Study them. And see how old they’re getting. And I felt scared and sad and lonely because they’re such good people and I sure don’t want them to die. And Mrs. Goldman, my landlady, about whom I’ve had more than a few erotic fantasies, went to some kind of cancer meeting in Iowa City-her sister recently died of cancer-and she came back with those sticker decals you put on your medicine cabinet mirror, Cancer’s Seven Danger
Signals. And put them on every medicine cabinet mirror in the house, including mine. And I started thinking about it. I mean, she meant well. But I started thinking about it. That I could die, too. That it wasn’t impossible for a twenty-four-year-old to pass over.
And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs.
I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.
And now here I am with Kylie, whom I have this sort-of stupid half-assed crush on even though she’s married and I sure don’t want to get involved in anything like that, and we’re just riding the prairie night with the top down in my red Ford ragtop, taking the long way home at her request, out on the blacktop that runs between the woods and the river, the moon high and round and silver-gold, and the cattle and the horses lowing in the farmyards, and a lone motorboat out on the river, its wake phosphorescent as it cuts the moonlight, and I’m wondering if Kylie feels as lonely as I do at this moment.
She said, “This feels good.”
