The new girl came to school and she was almost painfully pretty and just as painfully stuck-up. I went up to her twice and tried to introduce myself but she saw me coming and then pretended to fall into deep conversation with the other stuck-up girl she was walking down the hall with. Stuck-up girls have this secret club they all belong to, and it runs coast-to-coast.
Then in the mornings on the way to school, you’d suddenly see skins of ice on the creek water, and the wraith of your breath as you spoke. Dad had his two best months ever at the store in September and October, Mom finally got the wall-to-wall carpeting she’d always wanted (a combined birthday-anniversary-Christmas gift, Dad explained) and Debbie got her first boyfriend, this very shy chunky kid who walked her home from school every night and then took off like an arrow whenever he saw me or Mom.
Somerton itself changed, too. The town square, for instance, had a naked and lonely look, shorn as it was of blooming trees and growing foliage. Litter skittered across the dead, brown grass and the bandstand took on the look of a home that had been mysteriously (and perhaps violently) abandoned. Even a little Dixieland music was preferable to this.
A few store owners started putting up Christmas decorations in early November, with the expected number of old ladies complaining about it — “Show some proper respect. The Lord’s birthday is in December, not November” — and there was the expected number of letters in the local paper about how crass Christmas had become.
Hunting season opened and while I could never kill an animal that way, I had to admit there was something thrilling about the stalking part of it, all dressed up in red-and-black checkered caps and jackets and armed with a long rifle and creeping through the fallen cornstalks and along the frozen creek and up the red clay hills, the air pure and fine and chill, and the chestnut roans beautiful as they ran the pasture land nearby.
And you’re no doubt wondering about Barney and Cushing.
As of November 10, Barney still hadn’t spoken to me. We had several classes a day together, we had the same lunch period, we took the same route home, but Barney always managed to avoid me.
His friendship with Cushing ended right after the governor’s appearance. At least I think it did. At any rate, you never saw him with Cushing anywhere. About the only person you ever did see Barney with was a country kid that everybody was always pretty cruel to, a cross-eyed boy who wore Big Mac bib overalls and who had a bad stutter. Jennings, his name was.
As for Cushing, he got himself a snazzy new aqua Plymouth two-door and gave the gossips some very good news by dating the town’s only femme fatale, a very dramatic divorcee named Babe Holkup, who had once been the exclusive property of one R. K. “Buddy” Holkup, former high school football great and now resident of Ft. Madison Penitentiary because he kept taking home samples from the bank where he worked. Babe, whose real name was actually Elberta, divorced Buddy when he still had five years to go on his sentence. About this same lime, at least according to the gossips I mentioned above, Elberta also started wearing falsies and hose without seams. And getting threatening letters from Buddy. It all sounded like one of those old George Raft movies they play on late-night TV. The times Cushing saw me, he just smirked a bit. He didn’t call me a girl anymore and he didn’t try to look scary. He just moved on. Apparently he didn’t think I was any kind of threat to him.
And I guess I wasn’t, not until I had the dream, the strangest dream of my life.
Here was Mitch and here was Roy and damned if they didn’t look more alike than I’d even thought.
And Mitch said, “It’s time you grow up, Tom. It’s time you do right by Roy.”
Well, first of all, I’d never had a movie star in my dreams before, so that part of it was startling enough, especially since it was Robert Mitchum himself.
And second of all, Roy looked kind of pissed off. Like maybe I really hadn’t done right by him.
“I’m sorry, Roy.”
And Roy said, “He’s got the money.”
“I know.”
And then Mitch said, “You can get the money, Tom. You’re a young man now. You’re not a boy anymore.”
And what was I going to do? Argue with Robert Mitchum, for whom there was no cooler guy in the entire known universe?
And then Roy said, “It’s in his house somewhere. That’s where you’ll find it.”
And then the dream was over and it was November 13 of a gray and frosty morning and I was just waking up and needing very badly to urinate and Mom was calling upstairs for breakfast and Debbie was in the bathroom gargling, which she always did very, very loudly.
— It’s in his house somewhere, Tom.
— You’re a young man now, Tom. You’re not a boy anymore.
in his house somewhere in his house somewhere in his house somewhere kept echoing through my mind the way it does in the movies sometimes.
And all the time I peed and all the time I showered and all the time I dressed and all the time I teased Debbie about her insistence on taking the first bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and all the time I walked along to school and all the time I played basketball in gym class during first period—
— all that time I just kept hearing it over and over and over and over again—
in his house somewhere in his house somewhere in his house somewhere.
After school, I went home and got out my bike. Strictly speaking, it was a little late in the year for the old Schwinn. People were bundled up inside parkas already. And the Offenberger kids had already built their first snowman of the year — they built them so tall that sometimes the Des Moines Register put them in the paper — and the streets were so icy in spots they were dangerous.
Cushing lived on the east edge of town where the houses grew much farther apart, and where the yards looked more like acreages because most of them had scrawny white chickens and grunting quick little hogs running around enclosed areas.
Cushing’s place was an old two-story white clapboard house with a big red barn in the back. It sat on four acres of farmland which somebody down the road owned and farmed. There was a fat oak tree across from it, so I pulled in over there so I could look more closely at the house.
A screened-in porch covered the front. On the right side of the place was another door. The windows were all dark in the drab gray November afternoon. Smoke curled from the chimney. There was no garage nor a driveway as such but there were two strips of concrete that the tires of a car would fit. The strips ran along the left side of the house. A lost and lonely-looking stray mutt ran around in frantic circles in the winter-flat cornfield.
Unless Cushing had his car out back or something, nobody was home. His night shift would start in another twenty minutes, just at four. He was probably already at the station.
I wanted to walk over to that side door, jimmy it open, go in and find the cash and then carry it straight to the chief’s office, drop it on his desk and then tell him where I got it.
Then I saw a black-and-white patrol car coming from a block and a half away so I quickly ran my bike down a slanting hill under a small bridge nearby. I waited there until I heard and felt the patrol car rumble over the ties overhead.
I didn’t want a patrolman telling Cushing that he’d seen me standing across the street from Cushing’s house.
It was completely dark and no more than twenty-five degrees when I left the house on foot that night.