“I’m sorry for the bad ones you met here.” I laughed but without pleasure. “The old love-hate thing I have for this town. Most of the folks here are decent. Not saints, nothing like that. Decent people. But there are always a few—”
“Hannity and Anderson might get away with it because their people have money and influence.”
“In most cases, money and influence can buy you out of trouble. But not a double murder like this. Every paper in the state is covering this. The race angle’s in everybody’s mind. Anybody who’s charged will be prosecuted right up to the maximum sentence.”
She put her cigarettes in her purse and sat up straight, with her hands folded in front of her. She was ready to shove off.
“Those Freedom Riders, that’s why most people around here’ll want to see justice. Even some of the folks who hate us see what’s happening to the riders and Dr. King and they know it’s not right. They’re doing our suffering for us.”
“You’re probably right. A lot of the haters probably don’t like watching fire hoses and dogs put on little kids.”
Her smile was bitter. “Thank God for the wee ones. They can get to adults the way we can’t. It’s the old plantation thing — the pickaninnies sure are cute till they grow up. Then they’re just more colored folks to put the lash to. David paid the price for that. He stayed real cute right into his twenties and somebody around here didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all.”
20
Clammy sweat. Otherworld darkness. Nightmare. My conscious mind trying to reject — to banish — the hellish sounds that forced blood to run dripping from my ears. The cats were in my nightmare, too, each of them crawling beneath the covers to free themselves from the tortured voice that refused to stop.
And then I was sitting up and wide awake the way movie people always are right after nightmare time. Disoriented for a few moments. Trying to comfort the cats that now clung to me as if I were their father.
And still that noise—
Aw, shit.
And then I realized what it was. Kenny Thibodeau’s new girlfriend Noreen De Grasso, who fancied herself the nation’s only serious rival to Joan Baez in the folksong singing business.
Trying to untwist my boxers, I stomped over to the open window next to the back door. Had to be 100 degrees in here and it was nearly ten at night. The window air conditioner Mrs. Goldman had bought for my apartment was brand-new not long ago and was already in the shop getting repaired. She’d let me pick out the one I wanted. Some picker-outer.
I found a pack of smokes on the kitchen counter and fired one up before I yelled down there and told them to cool it.
But the way they were passing that half-gallon jug of Gallo back and forth, it was unlikely they even heard me.
Finally Kenny looked up and saw me in the window and waved.
“Hey, man, we’ll be right up!”
This was how I’d lived for six, seven months — this being a few years before even Mary dumped me — after it became clear that the beautiful Pamela Forrest and I were never getting married. I had planned, in my early twenties, to try to become something remotely resembling a grown-up. But the heartbreak was such that all I wanted was to stay numb. Kenny was eager to show me the wastrel route and I went along willingly.
That six or seven months was a frenzy of self-indulgence that was at least manic and maybe even clinical. In memory, everything runs speeded up, the way the old silent films look to us today.
Piling in and out of cars, apartments, movie theaters, taverns, the abodes of girls you were somewhat serious about, the girls you selfishly used for lonely sex (and who were using you right back the same way) — anything and everything was never enough. Two hours’ sleep before you went to work? No sweat, man. Your car never having more than a quarter tank of gas because you’d spent all your money on girls and beer? Cool. Waking up on the floors of strangers and strangers waking up on your couch and pissed in their psycho hangovers because you weren’t serving breakfast, and their girlfriends commandeering your toilet for an hour or two—
And the people you only vaguely remember through the haze of alcohol — my haze was pretty transparent; two beers and I was drunk and doing my yodeling impression — loners and losers and grotesques and dangerous people who somehow stayed with your group through barhopping, dancing, pissing in tavern parking lots, breaking up fights, starting fights — somehow they were always with you. One night this guy pulled a knife on Kenny because he said Kenny’s porno was grabbing the money and attention that he, the knife-wielder, should rightly claim for his own writing, which just happened to be Literature. Another night I’m in bed with this girl who was far gone drunk but still very sexy and when I rolled over there was a steely lump of something beneath the sheets and it turned out to be a .38 because “I always take a gun along with me the first time I sleep with a guy because he might be, you know, creepy or something.” True tales of the bedroom. Would-be communists, anarchists, pregnant girls stepping out on their husbands (more true bedroom tales), and of course the entire range of ex-cons you always stumble on in the taverns where the girls go.
But all this was in another part of the galaxy. Whoever that moron had been who’d lived that way sure wasn’t me anymore. I just gave it all up and went back to being a pretty serious young man.
Kenny hadn’t.
So they tromped up the stairs and I grabbed a pair of Levi’s cutoffs and slammed a six-pack of Schlitz down on the coffee table and readied myself for the siege.
Coming through the door, Noreen said, “Man, do I have to take a dump!”
Kenny howled. “Isn’t she something?”
“‘Something.’ I think you hit it, Kenny. You know what time it is?”
“Aw, hell. Relax.”
He helped himself to one of the beers on the coffee table and said, leaning forward, “You know what she did, man?”
I was afraid to ask.
“She wrote a song for you.” He put a finger to his lips and went sssh. “But act surprised when she tells you.”
Could this be real? Maybe this was one of those real tricky nightmares that went on for a long time.
I hate the prig side of me. The unkind, snotty thoughts. But Noreen brought them out in me. It wasn’t just her singing. She always wore short skirts and no underwear and when she sprawled on my couch it was impossible not to look. She just helped herself to whatever she wanted from fridge or cupboard. And a couple of nights she asked if she could sleep on my couch because she was pissed at Kenny. And she didn’t bathe very often. She said she had read an article in some health magazine — one can only imagine what kind of magazine that was — that if you bathed or showered more than once a week you caused a “frisson on your epidermis.” And as she always said when she was finishing up, “A lot of scientists are signing on to that, McCain. This isn’t just, you know, bullshit or anything.” I was pretty sure that most of these “scientists” had probably been educated on the lost continent of Atlantis.
And one more thing — as I heard her exploding from the bathroom door — she never washed her hands after attending to her toilet needs.
“You asshole,” she said, “I heard you telling him I wrote a song about him.” She whacked him pretty hard across the back of the head. He giggled.
She jumped on the couch, managing to snag her acoustic guitar in the process, and landed with enough force to make one end of the couch jump a quarter inch. What’s remarkable about this is that she weighed only about a hundred pounds. She was five-two, junkie-thin, with scraggly black hair down to her ass and a face that was pretty in a sort of psycho way. Not even Norman Bates could have claimed eyes as crazy as her baby-blues.