Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool sm-5 Read online

  But right when it was really getting serious, I thought what if I can’t do it? What if I can’t perform with the homecoming queen? What am I doing with a homecoming queen? I mean, she hadn’t been homecoming queen for a while-th was just a couple of years ago-and she wasn’t wearing her crown or anything. But still and all, the idea of me with a homecoming queen was pretty intimidating. Here she was offering herself to me and what if I couldn’t do anything? It’d be all over town. I could write all the jokes myself. He can write it but he can’t do it. I just didn’t have any right to be with a homecoming queen.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Exactly. You don’t either. Few do, in fact, when you think about it. Very few do.

  Anyway, what I did was pretend she was this girl I dated the summer I worked at the fair.

  With the blackheads and the stuff on her teeth?”

  “I always felt sorry for her,” I said.

  “So did I but it didn’t make it any easier. Anyway, once I put her face on Sandy’s face, I didn’t have any trouble at all. I was batting in my own league again and everything was fine.”

  “And then she went and married Nick Dixon.”

  He smiled. “The coolest kid in high school. And if you don’t believe me, just ask him.”

  “Yeah, excessive modesty wasn’t exactly a problem he had.”

  “So now that’s two things you’re not going to tell anybody about, right, McCain?”

  “Two? What else besides Berkeley?”

  “That I was afraid I couldn’t do it with a homecoming queen.”

  Sandy Mitchell. He was one lucky pornographer, he was.

  Ten

  In my high school days I always tried to have a date on Saturday nights. Tried, but usually failed. So I cruised the streets with some buddies who were every bit as hard up as I was. The bowling alley; the pizza joint; the Y, where they had mixers; all the usual places where guys went to find the girls who didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

  The last resort was the Dx station, which the custom cars and street rods used as their home base. They only came out at night, like vampires, shined, chromed, sculpted masterpieces that even the drunkest biker-who always made clear that he thought that street rod owners were femmy-pd awe and respect. You could tell this because they didn’t stove-in the street rod doors or smash in the windshield.

  The custom car crowd didn’t like us any more than they liked the bikers. We were just pimply kids who couldn’t even get chicks on Saturday nights-the custom boys always had plenty of good-looking chicks-and so when we asked them our dopey questions, their answers were short on information and long on contempt.

  But there they’d be on the drive, six or seven of the finest mechanical animals rubes like us had ever seen. Andfora while it was enough in the accompanying blare of Chuck Berry and Little Richard to walk around and around these beasts and take in as much of their beauty as we could handle without fainting dead away.

  The lone car on the drive tonight was David Egan’s chopped and channeled black Merc.

  David leaned against it, cigarette hanging at an angle from the corner of his mouth, his James Dean uniform natty as always. I don’t mean to imply he never changed his clothes. I was pretty sure he did. He didn’t smell, anyway. But his wardrobe seemed to consist of interchangeable James Dean duds, so that even when he changed red nylon jackets, snowy white Tshirts, and jeans, his clothes looked exactly the same.

  The smells of gasoline, cigarettes, and oil were pleasant on the Saturday night air as I pulled in.

  Dean had taken him over completely tonight, giving me that little two-finger salute while he watched me walk toward him with squinched-up eyes. I always wondered if old folks secretly wanted to imitate Lawrence Welk.

  I said, “No girl on Saturday night?”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “Yeah. But I have an excuse. I’m short and stupid.”

  He smiled. “I don’t know why you’re always putting yourself down.”

  “I do,” I said. Then, “It’d be nice if you’d write a condolence note to the Griffins.”

  “For what?”

  In the first hours following the murder, David had been frightened enough to show only his nicest side.

  David the lost boy. But there was the other side, a cold and arrogant side. And I felt I was just about to hear it.

  “Because she was a nice, decent, troubled kid and because some sonofabitch murdered her.”

  “You think I did it, don’t you?”

  “David, she’s dead, all right? Her folks will never get over it, no matter how long they live.”

  “Sure they will. They’re always flying off to Europe and soaking up the gin and name-dropping so much it’s embarrassing. Sara couldn’t stand them.”

  He smirked. “And neither could I. But they had a nice house.”

  I shouldn’t have done it but I did. I grabbed him by the collar of his James Dean jacket and flung him the length of his car.

  “Hey, you little prick,” he said.

  “She’s dead, David. You could at least be decent to her folks.”

  He straightened his jacket and T-shirt and gave me the squinted-eyes routine again.

  “Just get out of here, McCain.”

  “She’s dead, David. Her parents deserve a note of condolence.”

  “They’ll just throw it away.”

  “Even if they do, it needs to be written.”

  The sullen face was all his own. “All the shit I’ve had to go through.”

  “That doesn’t give you any right to treat women the way you do.”

  “They know what they’re getting into.”

  It was a bad movie line. The desperado.

  The rebel no woman could tame. You could hear it coming through a tinny drive-in speaker now.

  “You’re taking your life out on them, David, and they deserve better. Sara and Rita and Molly are good young women.”

  “They hire you to say that?”

  I said, “I don’t want to represent you anymore, David.”

  He came off the car and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “There are other lawyers in town. I’ll arrange for one of them to help you. But I’m done.”

  “That’ll make it look like I’m guilty.”

  Then, “You can’t do this, McCain. You really can’t.”

  “You going to write that note to the Griffins?”

  “All right, God, if that’s what you want me to do.”

  “That’s a start. And knock off the heartbreaker bullshit. Everybody knows you love ‘em and leave ‘em, David. But you may have to face a jury here pretty soon. And you’re gonna need all the friends you can get.”

  He smirked again. “Maybe I should wear a cassock and a Roman collar.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt, David.” I got sick of him from time to time-his childhood hadn’t corrupted him but his reaction to his childhood, his self-pity, certainly had-but I hadn’t ever been as sick of him as I was at this moment.

  I walked away to my ragtop.

  “I knew you were bluffing, McCain. I knew you wouldn’t really drop me.”

  I said nothing. Just drove away. Leaving a bad imitation of James Dean standing alone in the muzzy yellow light of the gas station drive.

  In the rearview mirror, I watched as he slipped his hands in his back pockets, pure James Dean. And now, unfortunately, pure David Egan.

  Eleven

  I’d been in my apartment only a couple of minutes before there was a knock on the inside door. Mrs. Goldman.

  “I baked some cookies,” she said, “and thought you might like some.”

  “Say, thanks.”

  She handed me a plate with a dozen chocolate-chip cookies on them. Mrs.

  Goldman is a widow. She lived in this house for years with her husband and then decided to rent out the upstairs when he died. Lauren Bacall can only hope she looks as good at fifty as Mrs.
Goldman does. In her crisp white blouse and blue skirt, she looked thirty-five. An envelope was tucked inside her right arm. “I’m also delivering this. I found it on the porch. I don’t know why they didn’t put it in the mailbox.”

  The phone rang. Mrs. Goldman smiled.

  “I’ll let you catch that, Sam.”

  “Thanks for the cookies.”

  On the phone, Mom said, “I really had a good time at the game today, dear. I just wanted to thank you.”

  “My pleasure. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Very much. Even though I didn’t exactly understand a lot of what was going on. There are an awful lot of people on that field at one time. It gets confusing.”

  I smiled at the thought of Cliffie’s cheer, “Kill those bastards!” If people would have shouted it, I think Mom would have mentioned it.

  “Well, I’m glad you had a good time.”

  “You sound sort of rushed, dear. Is everything all right?”

  “Just got in the door. Haven’t even had time to get my sport coat off.”

  “Well, I’ll let you go. But I just wanted to thank you for the tickets. That halftime show was great. I think that was my favorite part.”

  In the interest of good health, I fixed a peanut butter, mayo, and mustard sandwich before plowing into the cookies. That particular sandwich recipe probably doesn’t sound all that good but you should give it a try.

  I watched Mike Hammer with Darren

  McGavin, which was pretty good; and a Lone Wolf rerun with Louis Hayward. It was always sort of sad to see once-prominent actors have to resort to humiliating cheap-O Tv shows. I wondered if fading Tv stars worried about me the way I worried about them.

  I’d inherited three cats-Tasha,

  Crystal, and Tess-f a girl who’d left them with me while she went to La to become a star.

  She was waitressing in Redondo Beach and the cats were still mine. I’d never been what you call favorably disposed to felines but they’d grown on me.

  They were nice enough to give me a portion of the bed around ten o’clock. The stuff on Tv looked bad so I picked up the Steinbeck I was rereading, In Dubious Battle, and lost myself in the bleak rage of the early labor movement. For me it was his best book.

  I was asleep by eleven-thirty. The phone rang at just before midnight according to the glowing hands of my alarm clock.

  One of these nights it’s going to be Natalie Wood telling me how lonely she is and that she’s always wanted to see Black River Falls, Iowa, and couldn’t she please come out and stay with me a few months.

  It was Molly Blessing, who barely took time to introduce herself.

  “I’m really scared, Mr. McCain.”

  “What about, Molly?”

  “David got real drunk tonight.”

  “Where is he?”

  “That’s the thing. I’m not sure. And that’s not the worst part, he’s going to drag tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. He said the cops always check out the spots everybody uses, so they were going to find a different place.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “He said he was going to pick up that bitch Rita. I’m a lot better for him than Rita is. I try to get him to stop drinking and drag racing. She just encourages him to keeping doing them.

  I know I sound like a goody-two-shoes but if you really love somebody, Mr. McCain, shouldn’t you want them to do the right thing?”

  “I agree, Molly. But right now the important thing is to find David.”

  “He said you two had had an argument tonight. That you threatened to dump him.”

  “I got pretty mad, I guess.”

  “You’re the only one he can rely on, Mr.

  McCain-if you didn’t represent him, I don’t know what would happen to him, I mean a lot of people think he killed Sara.” Then, “I’m at the AandW. At the phone booth. Could you pick me up and we’ll go looking for David?”

  “Yeah, maybe between us we can figure out where he went.”

  “He’s so drunk, he’s-”

  “All we can do is hope for the best. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “I really appreciate this.”

  “I appreciate your calling, Molly. We need to stop him.”

  She waited on the corner for me. Even given the sudden autumnlike turn in the temperature, the AandWill was crowded with cars, kids, and brave short-skirted carhops on roller skates.

  Molly got in quickly. “I’m glad you put the top up. I’m kinda cold.”

  She wore a white sweater, jeans, and a rust-colored suede car coat that only enhanced the copper tones of her hair. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “May I see some Id?”

  She laughed. “Believe it or not, I still have to sneak around. At home, I mean. My father found a cigarette that had dropped out of my jacket one night. He grounded me for four nights and I was seventeen.” She used the dash lighter, inhaled deeply, exhaled a long blue stream of smoke. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “I’ve been thinking. If he wants to avoid Cliffie, the two best places would be Graves Hollow or that road that runs by where the old closed mines are.”

  “Graves Hollow I’d thought of, too. But I forgot about the road by the old mines.”

  “I don’t know where else to go so we may as well start there.” Then, “If I were with him, I wouldn’t let him race. Not as drunk as he is.”

  “How would you stop him? He’s pretty hotheaded when he’s drunk.”

  “I don’t know-take his keys and throw them in the bushes if I had to.”

  “He’d just hot-wire his car.”

  “Then I’d take off his distributor cap and throw it in the bushes.”

  “Do you know what a distributor cap looks like?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then how would you find it?”

  “I’d ask somebody.”

  Neither of us could keep from smiling about that one.

  “Or maybe I’d stop by a gas station and pick up one of those car guides,” she said.

  “They’d have something in there about a distributor cap, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe it’d be easier to just take his tire iron and knock him out with it.”

  “Believe me, I’ve thought about it. He starts brooding about his childhood and drinking-he gets so irrational. I feel sorry for his aunts. He doesn’t seem to appreciate how much time and love they put into raising him.

  He always says he was orphaned. But he wasn’t. They saw to it he wasn’t. That’s the one trait I get tired of. The way he feels so sorry for himself. He didn’t have it easy, I know that. But a lot of kids had it a lot worse.” Then, “And she doesn’t do anything to stop him when he gets drunk and crazy.”

  “She being Rita?”

  “Of course. The lovely Rita. That bitch.

  I know I sound like a spoiled brat but I’m a lot better for him than Rita is. A lot better.”

  She obviously wanted me to agree with her.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Against the quarter-moon a scarecrow, arms flung wide, watched over a fallow cornfield and a small farmhouse with faint smoke eeling out of its chimney. Every once in a while the headlights would pick out empty beer cans and beer bottles scattered on the brown-grass sides of the road. These were the back roads where teenagers drank and went to first, second, or third base-or hell, maybe even hit a homer-depending on mood, pluck, and luck.

  Graves Hollow was so named because of a graveyard that had been abandoned right after World War I. Between our war dead and two plagues of influenza, a new and much larger cemetery had been required. The dead were so long dead up on the hill that nobody alive could remember them, so nobody visited except kids who wanted to scare each other or put the make on their girlfriends. I’ve logged my share of make-out time in cemeteries. The cheap Freudian take on it all is that you’re defying death with the affirmative act of lovemaking. The less fanc
y explanation is that it’s a quiet place to get laid.

  We drove the long, straight section of Hollow Road that local kids since the early 1920’s had been using for drag racing. The west side of the road was steep and piney. The east side of the road was more fallow cornfields.

  No sign of cars.

  We headed for the old mines.

  “Do you think he’ll ever grow up?”

  “Sure. Someday.”

  “How long will it take, do you think?”

  “Offhand, I’d say three years, eleven months, and forty-two hours.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I don’t have any idea, Molly. It’s easy for us to say he feels too sorry for himself. He hasn’t had an easy life, even with all the stuff his aunts have done for him.”

  “That’s why he treats women the way he does. That’s what I think, anyway. He’ll see some boy he’s jealous of and then he’ll take the kid’s girl from him. Just for a week or so. But it makes him feel good, strong, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure. And when he gets women to fall in love with him, it lets him, at least for a little while, think that he’s as good as everybody else.

  Especially girls from the upper class.”

  “I read an article that said that for boys like him the conquest is everything. Then they have to move on to more conquests to make themselves feel good again.” She tamped a cigarette from her pack. “That’s what Sara was all about. I couldn’t compete with her money.”

  She made a small fist. “God, I can get so mad at him-and yet I love him so much, too. I go around wanting to protect him all the time. Mostly from himself.”

  Right after the Civil War, coal mining came to our state and prospered until well into the next century, at which point, as if by divine edict, the mines began to be too expensive to operate.

  A few mines remained open but for the most part the miners moved on.

  There was a moonscape ruggedness to the mined-out land now-stubby, mutated-looking pines dotted over hills of rocks and coarse grass on the sides of which were the boarded-up yaws of the mines themselves. A fair number of adventurous kids had been lost in those mines over the years, and about the same number of derelicts, fugitives, and madmen had hidden out in them. A small trestle bridge had washed out about two miles from the mining area about ten years ago and since the mine road wasn’t used all that much anyway, the county supervisors decided to leave the land bridgeless.