Only when she turned and walked back to the porch did I notice that all three people in the gazebo were watching me. I wondered if they’d been able to hear what Ellen had said. The way Anderson and Hannity were smiling, I assumed they’d heard every word.
Karen Porter, my one friend here, waved good-bye to me, smiling as always.
Our town likes to claim that its jail once held Jesse James, well-known psychopath and shooter of unarmed people, for a few days back in the bloody prime of the James-Dalton gang. While it’s true that the James boys favored Iowa as a hiding place, they did most of their hiding just inside the Iowa-Missouri border. The man we got, close as we could figure, was a man named Niles Wick, who was a gang straggler.
Of course, in my growing-up years, none of us kids accepted the Niles Wick story. We preferred to believe that the name was simply one Jesse used. In those days, our jail was located one block east of the Royale Theater, the best second-run movie house anywhere, so we could load up on popcorn and a couple of flicks about Jesse — in these Jesse was a persecuted saint of course — and then we could run to the jail and stand on the corner and imagine Jesse looking down at us from behind the bars on the second floor. He looked like either Tyrone Power or Roy Rogers, take your pick. Both men had essayed him in film.
There was a new jail now, and it was located on the third floor of the recently built county courthouse. The design was severely functional, the material was a step up from cinder block, and the overall look was so dreary that you felt the prisoners could be sprung on a charge of cruel and unusual just for having to stay inside.
Cliffie’s uncle, a man named Merle who had formerly been an auctioneer, laid out the plans and used his own construction company to build this monument to civic corruption.
There were at least a dozen Harley motorcycles in the parking lot. Ellen had been right. A biker had been arrested for the murders.
Inside, I said hello to Cliffie’s sister, the receptionist; and the same to Paul the elevator operator, Cliffie’s second cousin; and finally to Norman, Cliffie’s first cousin and the front-desk day man at the police station on the third floor.
“No call for you to be here, Sam,” Norman said, pushing his thick glasses back up his short nose. “My cousin’s got everything under control. Case is all wrapped up.”
“I was just wondering if the accused man has a lawyer yet?”
“He’s guilty, Sam. Why would he need a lawyer?”
“You mean he’s confessed?”
Norman grinned with gray teeth. “He will, time my cousin gets done with him.”
“Misceg — damn, I can never say that word.”
“Miscegenation.”
“Yeah, that’s the hot one now. Forbidden love. Black men and white women. Misceg—”
“No black women and white men?”
“No sizzle.”
“‘Sizzle’?”
“That’s the word my editor always uses. ‘Sizzle.’”
In case you’re wondering, the writer I was talking to was not F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway.
The writer I was talking to was Kenny Thibodeau, the official pornographer of Black River Falls, and not least of all, my best friend since we made our First Communion together nearly twenty years earlier.
On a trip to San Francisco four years ago, where he hoped to set eyes upon his idols Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Kenny read some of his poetry one night at a coffeehouse. Believe me, Kenny is to poetry what I am to astronomy — nowhere.
But this guy came up afterward and said, “I really like your poetry.” I’m sure that Kenny was secretly as shocked as I was when he told me the story. Even he knows his poetry stinks.
But the guy wasn’t finished. “You ever thought of writing novels?”
“Sure. Who hasn’t?”
“How’d you like to make four hundred dollars for a novel?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not. You ever hear of the Midnight Secrets line of books?”
“The ones they keep under the counter in cigar stores and like that?”
“Yeah, in hick burgs they keep them under the counter. Where you from by the way?”
“Iowa.”
“Iowa. I went through there during the war. You’ve got some nice-lookin’ broads back there.”
Kenny didn’t mention that almost none of those nice-looking broads would have much to do with him. Or me. We had yet to grow into the charming, witty Cary Grant-like figures of our later years.
“You know how they work, don’t you?”
“‘How they work’?”
“No dirty words. No explicit descriptions. We generally like it when breasts are compared to fruit and when orgasms are compared to tidal waves. The thing is to make them think the stuff is really dirty. But we know better, don’t we, Kenny?”
“We do?”
“Sure. Because if it was really dirty we’d all be in prison.”
“I guess that’s something to keep in mind. Prison.”
“So anyway, Kenny, tell you what. You walk out to my car with me and I’ll just give you copies of our two latest books, Pagan Pussycats and Niagara Nymphos. You take them and read them and before you leave town you give me an outline and three chapters. If I like what I see, I give you a hundred fifty on the spot and you go back to Iowa and write the rest of the book. How do you like the sound of that, kid?”
“Can I still write my poetry?”
“Kid, you can write all the poetry you want as long as you meet our deadline.”
“How much time will I have before I turn my book in?”
“Three weeks.”
And thus was born, among many other Kenny Thibodeau pseudonyms, Brace Bryant, Cal Cavalier, and Jack Hoffman.
But those were the days of jocularity when you could smirk at the ridiculous business Kenny was in, exploiting serious topics such as civil rights to idiotic ones such as how many stewardesses you could shove into the arms of a studly airline pilot.
But today neither of us was in a joking mood. Kenny said, “I’m thinking of driving down to Birmingham with my .45. Wanna ride along? You see that TV special last night?”
“Yeah. I’d like to kick Bull Connor around for three or four hours and then set him on fire.”
“Right after I get done whipping him, man.”
“Son of a bitch. I had to turn the set off. I couldn’t take it.”
Eugene “Bull” Connor was the Birmingham, Alabama, commissioner of public safety who had turned not only fire hoses but dogs on civil rights demonstrators. It was hard to watch the barrage of water and brutal cops pounding, kicking, and stomping people. And then he’d added those dogs.
The problem was that it was all being laid on Southerners. We lived close enough to the Missouri border to know that not all folks of the Southern persuasion were anything like Bull baby or his henchmen. And discrimination and violence were hardly limited to the South. Try walking down the street hand in hand with a Negro girl in Cicero, Illinois, sometime, or in parts of Chicago or border towns in my state. Or a hundred other northern towns.
Kenny said, “You think the biker killed that Leeds kid?”
“Too early to know.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. Couple of them beat up those two Negroes at the county fair last year.”
“Yeah, and got a weekend in jail for it.”
“Surprised Cliffie went even that far.”
We sat on the front steps of my office. A sleepy burg; a sleepy, hot afternoon. Turk had called and decided to break up with poor Jamie again — this generally happened once a week — and since neither Kenny nor I could take her sobbing, we sat out here with Pepsis and Lucky Strikes, just like the high school kids at least a part of us would always be.