“Muldaur tried to get frisky with his wife.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“Oh, no,” Mom said. “One of the women at the beauty parlor said that the same thing happened to her daughter-in-law. Apparently, he was a frisky man.”
I don’t have to tell you what frisky means.
Dad rarely uses vulgarities and Mom never does. That particular genetic streak ended with me, I’m afraid.
I wondered if Cliffie knew anything about this. Muldaur was not only a religious bigot but a ladies’ man as well. Two motives had already surfaced for his being killed. There would likely be more. There usually are in homicide investigations. You take a guy like Muldaur, you might find six, seven people who’d considered killing him, each with very specific and unique reasons of their own.
Part of my mom’s long john got soaked and fell in her coffee. She used her spoon to rescue it, then ate it like a piece of cereal. I’m more careful with my dunking. More timid, I guess. I’m well aware of how pieces get too wet and fall off. I don’t want that to happen to me.
“Where’d Walter move to, anyway?”
“Cedar Rapids. Penick and Ford plant.
He’s got a brother-in-law there who’s a big shot in the union.”
“He didn’t happen to move because of Muldaur, did he?”
“Heck, no. Walter? He knew what he was getting into when he married Jinny.”
“What he was getting into? What’s that mean?”
“You know,” my dad said, as if we were telepaths. “Her, uh, bosoms.”
“She had big knockers, as the men like to say,”
Mom said, “your father included.”
“Yeah, now that I think about it,” I said, “I guess she did.”
“Guys were always gettin’ frisky with her,”
Dad said. “Muldaur was just one more. His wife was the one who thought the snake stuff was so neat, anyway. So when she told Walter about Muldaur askin’ her to meet him out to the old Tyler farm, he just told her that he didn’t ever want her to go back there to church.”
“You know who you should talk to,” Mom said.
“Who?”
“Kenny Thibodeau.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He wrote a long article on
Muldaur and his church, back when he worked for The Clarion.”
Kenny Thibodeau was a local kid who graduated from the University of Iowa journalism school in 1955 or so. He came back to town here, became the assistant editor of the local paper, got himself married, had a son, took up golf, and could even be seen ushering at the Pentecostal church on Sunday morning.
Then he read On The Road by Jack
Kerouac and claimed to have the same kind of vision St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, or wherever he was going. Well, not exactly the same, of course. Paul claimed to have seen God and renounced all sin. Kenny Thibodeau, on the other hand, claimed to have seen Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy. And instead of renouncing sin, he embraced it. All kinds of sin. He left his wife and child and moved to the West Coast. He reappeared a year later, his wife and child long gone, no longer the buttoned-down, crew-cutted Kenny we’d known and ignored. He was a beatnik. I hate that word, it’s a press word, but that’s what he was.
He had the goatee, he had the black horn-rimmed glasses, the black turtleneck, the black chinos, the black socks, and, worst of all, the Jesus sandals.
I’m no fashion plate but there’s something about socks and sandals that rankles. At least he’d spared us the beret.
Kenny had been coming and going ever since. He went to London, Paris, San Francisco, New York. And always returned. He supported himself by writing pornography, or what the moralists called pornography, anyway. Paperbacks with sexy covers and suggestive titles but virtually nothing explicit inside. Lesbo Lodge was one of his, as was Life of a Lesbo. Kenny lived in a trailer near the west end of town.
We had coffee whenever we ran into each other. I enjoyed him without quite approving of him. And I disapproved of him because I was probably jealous.
He traveled, he supported himself writing, albeit somewhat scandalously, and he was always going to Iowa City on the weekends and coming back with wild tales of undergraduate English majors who “know how to swing, man, and I do mean swing.”
I’d never thought of asking Kenny for actual hard information. I’d never suspected Kenny of having any hard information. But maybe Mom was right. Maybe before he’d taken up marijuana, cheap wine, and Zen there had been an actual fact or two rolling around inside his mind.
“He looks so silly in that goatee,” Mom said. “But he’s still a nice boy.”
Dad laughed. “Don’t tell that to Emily at the rectory. She thinks he should be put in jail for writing those dirty books.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She also was going to start a petition to put D. H. Lawrence in jail until she found out he was dead.”
Summer Saturday mornings in Black
River Falls are a good time to be on the streets. The merchants are happy because business is good; the farm wives are happy because they’re getting their hair done or buying something new for themselves-it could be a dress or an electric mixer, it doesn’t matter, it’s just the idea of getting something new; the little ones are happy because there’s a triple feature plus a chapter of a serial at the Rialto; the teenage girls are happy because they’ll be modeling their swimsuits at the public pool; and the teenage boys are happy because they’ll get to watch the teenage girls model those swimsuits.
The street rods are out already. They’ll go out to the park where the boys will polish them the way pagans used to polish false idols. Chopped and channeled hymns of metal and fiberglass and rubber that wouldn’t think of playing Fabian or Frankie Avalon or anybody like that, sticking strictly to Mr. Chuck Berry and Mr. Little Richard and Mr. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps. There are also “jes’ folks” kinds of cars, bicycles, a horse-drawn Amish buggy or two (there’s an Amish community twenty miles due east of here), and a whole bunch of motorcycles, most of the riders being Marlon Brando in their minds (but then who do the grandmas riding the big Indians imagine themselves to be?).
Kenny Thibodeau made it easy for me. He was sitting in the town square reading a John Steinbeck paperback, In Dubious
Battle.
His black uniform was intact. Even his shades were black. The only way I knew he saw me was the way he tilted his head up at me.
“Hey, man.”
“Hey, man, yourself, Kenny.”
I sat down next to him on the bench.
“How they hangin’, man?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. I’ve never known how to answer that particular cliche. They’re hangin’ low, hangin’ high? Which way is best? “How’s the writing going?”
“Pretty good. They jumped me up in advances.”
Two paperbacks rested on the pigeon-blessed bench between us.
“Take ‘em, I was gonna give ‘em to you anyway when I ran into you.”
I picked them up. The covers were nicely illustrated. One showed a virginal young blonde woman in a matching skirt and sweater and bobby sox and penny loafers staring over her shoulder at a severe but coldly beautiful older woman standing in a shadowed doorway. “Student Advisor
… Lesbos ruled this campus until a stud professor was hired.” The other one featured a well-built shirtless young girl in bed with a nearly naked older woman. “Sex Machine… His “tools of the trade” could turn lesbos into man-lovers.”
“The Nobel Committee wants every copy of those they can find,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “so they can burn ‘em.”
“You ever actually meet a lesbian?”
“I heard one on the radio once.”
“How do you know she was a lesbian?”
“She said she was.”
“I guess that’s one way of telling.” Then I said, “My cousin’s a lesbian and she’s actually very nice. I mean, nobody in the family wants to acknowledge it but she never even pretends to be interested in guys romantically.”