“Oops. There’s the other line, Mr. C.”
I finished my eggs and a fresh cup of coffee while telling Wendy about Sarah Powers.
“Be careful she doesn’t still have that steel rod. You sure you want to help her?”
“No.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because there’s nobody else who’ll sign on. And she definitely needs help.”
“You have a lot of other things to do.”
“I just hate to see her in jail. She’s sort of a sad case. In her mind she was just trying to help her brother.”
“Why is she a sad case?”
“The ugly girl. The fat girl. The boyish girl. Easy to imagine how the other kids treated her growing up. She and Cameron lost their parents when they were still kids. She was defending the only real friend she’s ever had.”
“I hate to remind you, Sam, but you’re still wincing from your headache because of her.”
“Maybe I’m doing it just to piss off Reverend Cartwright.”
She poked me on the shoulder. “Now there’s a reason I can understand, Sam.”
4
“Hippies,” Cliffie Sykes said. “I had my way we’d deport their asses.”
“Sounds reasonable to me.”
The police station was relatively new, thanks to a matching grant from Sykes Foundation. Old man Sykes even sprang for some new Western-style uniforms. Now all the officers dressed like Cliffie, military tans and campaign hats. He had the usual state-celeb political black-and-whites framed on the wall along with a melancholy painting of Jesus.
Behind him, the centerpiece of the office-ruling over all four dark green filing cabinets, the desk, the three- button phone, and the family portrait-was an outsized framed photo of John Wayne all dressed up as a marine in his laughable propaganda movie The Green Berets. I preferred looking at the family portrait. Cliffie’s youngest daughter suffered from spina bifida. When you saw how gentle and loving Cliffie was with her, you couldn’t quite hate him for the bumbling, bigoted fool he was. You could dislike him but not hate him, though I was in a pissy enough mood to give him grief. While I didn’t have a steady headache, I did have attacks of sharp pain that forced me to close my eyes and grit my teeth. “You like ’em, don’t you? You and friend Kenny, you guys were beatniks and now you’re hippies.” I was here to see Sarah Powers, but as Potter had told me last night, I needed to see Cliffie first-the mandatory endurance contest I always had to survive.
“Kenny was a so-called beatnik when we were juniors in high school. I never was. And neither of us are hippies. I mean, if you want to get your facts straight for once.”
“Yeah, well, he still writes dirty books.”
“He writes other things, too.” I was counting on Cliffie’s lack of interest in everything literary. He didn’t ask me to tell him exactly what those “other things” were. In addition to paperbacks such as Satan’s Love Slaves and Lesbo Lodge, Kenny had now started writing for men’s adventure magazines. You know the ones I mean. The guys never have shirts on and they’re usually under attack by Nazis or killer dogs. Well, for that matter, the women don’t have shirts on, either, and they’re frequently attacked by Nazis and killer dogs. But the women don’t have scars all over their mostly naked bodies and they aren’t holding machine guns. “Nazi Terror Orgies” was one of Kenny’s latest. This was not to be confused with “Nazi Lust Prisons.” Kenny had a very good novel in him somewhere; he still wrote seriously good short stories for himself. I had faith in him; his wife, Sue, had faith in him. All we had to do was convince Kenny to have some faith in himself.
“I had my way, we’d put all those pornographers in jail. And that goes for the Smothers Brothers.”
Why correct him? The Smothers Brothers’ politics offended him-offended more than half the nation-so their TV show had become a focal point for all the people who thought that the Vietnam War was just a dandy idea.
But this was just sparring and we both knew it. The main bout would start with something else, something he just couldn’t wait to spring on me.
“I stopped by the Blue Moon Tap and told ’em what happened to you.”
“Had a good laugh, I’ll bet.”
“Couple of ’em were laughin’ so hard I thought they’d puke.”
“Well, thanks for telling me, Chief.”
“One guy had beer runnin’ out of his nose he was laughin’ so hard.”
“I’ll bet that was you, wasn’t it?”
He glared at me. I’d found him out. Glare became glower and he said: “So a girl knocks out Sam McCain and the prisoner escapes.”
He was saying that real men don’t get knocked out by women. “I guess you could tell it that way if you wanted to.”
“Oh, I want to, McCain. I really want to. All the crap I’ve had to take from you over the years. You and that g.d. judge of yours. All the b.s. about how you solved my cases before I did. And you with your law degree and the private investigator’s license your judge made sure you got so you could snoop around. You damn right that’s the way I want to tell it. And that’s the way just about everybody in this town’s gonna tell it. Hotshot Sam McCain tries to collar a killer and gets knocked out by a girl so the killer gets away. That’ll look real nice in the state paper.”
Before he’d mentioned the state paper his words hadn’t had their desired effect on me. I knew that the people in Black River Falls who didn’t like me (and the number seemed to grow every year) would have their fun. I’d be embarrassed and sometimes I’d get mad and sometimes maybe I wouldn’t want to leave my office. But Wendy would help me through it and if I got lucky enough to look good on a few more cases, the story about Sarah smacking me with a steel rod would fade in time. Never disappear, nothing ever does; but fade. But now I imagined what the story would look like under a bold headline in the state paper. They had a photo of me a few years back following a trial I’d won. The trouble was I’d just gotten done tripping on a step in front of the county courthouse so my expression was that of shock and dismay when the photographer snapped his pic. Hapless was what I looked like-hapless.
Cliffie was taking such pleasure in my embarrassment I couldn’t help myself. If he could be petty so could I. I realize that the thought of Sam McCain being petty-unthinkable. But-
I nodded to his framed melodramatic photo of big John Wayne in his Green Beret getup. “You do know John Wayne was a draft dodger, don’t you?”
“What the hell’re you talkin’ about? Some lefty crap you thought up?”
“Not crap, Chief. Facts. It’s in several books. He decided against serving because he was afraid he wouldn’t have a career when he came back-even though most other stars enlisted. So they trumped up some health problem and the draft board went along with it because they’re part of Hollywood, too. So now you have big brave Duke calling war protestors draft dodgers. Kind of a hypocrite, wouldn’t you say?”
“Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“No, but people who knew him at the time agreed that it was true.”
“Lefty crap.”
“Which is the reason you always give for sending your officers out to harass the people who live on that farm. Because they’re all ‘lefties.’ I thought we had an agreement you were going to lay off.”
“I’ll lay off when they start wearin’ shoes and having some respect for this country and cuttin’ their hair so you can tell the boys from the girls.”
“Yeah, that’s a real problem, all right. I get confused all the time.”
“You think it’s funny. But it sure as hell isn’t. A lot of people want to run ’em out on a rail. Reverend Cartwright says he can’t sleep at night thinkin’ of all the fornicatin’ that’s goin’ on out there.”
I couldn’t help myself. I smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Just thinking of Reverend Cartwright and all that fornicating. Must be driving him crazy.” I stood up. “I take
