There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do for that kid. He had the best clothes they could buy him. When he was sixteen — that was in sixty-one — they bought him an almost new convertible for his own. He wasn’t careless and reckless with it. He was a good driver for a kid. A good safe driver.
I think it was about then he started seeing less of my kids. He spent a lot more time alone. I don’t know where he’d go off to, but sometimes he’d stay away overnight. It didn’t seem to worry Joe and Connie too much.
They sent him off to school when he was eighteen, and three months later he was back home. That was the damnedest thing. I don’t know what kind of people they have at that college, but they were certainly way off the mark when they said that Jimmy wasn’t emotionally mature enough for college. Jimmy had all his emotions under control. Why, he could talk to you just like you were talking to another grownup. It was a pleasure to talk to that kid.
It seemed to me like a kind of a waste when he got that job at the drive-in. A good-looking, bright kid like that. I suppose it means something to you people’ that he never had a girl, and never had very much to do with girls. I suppose that’s what you call significant. He didn’t have anything to do with girls until... I can’t say it and I even hate to think about it.
You take a kid like that. Hard-working parents who did everything in the world for him. Nothing was too good for Jimmy. It makes you wonder.
I see you keep writing things down. I don’t see what good I can do you. He was a good kid from a good neighborhood.
Last night Martha and I stayed up a long time, talking about it. What can you say? Even if you could have asked Jimmy about it before he died, I don’t think he could have told you why.
What Martha and I said, we said it seems as if there is kind of... of an evil thing loose in the world these days. Something terrible and full of hate. Like maybe it lands here from those UFO’s. And then it takes over somebody, some ordinary person like Jimmy Bell.
I don’t know what Joe and Connie are going to do. They won’t answer the door or the phone. Can’t blame them, with those reporters and all hanging around. I talked to some of them at first, yesterday, but then they made me mad the questions they asked, like they wanted me to say the kid was a monster or something, wanting to know if I ever noticed him hurting animals or anything like that when he was little.
Well, that third waitress died this morning, but I guess you can say it’s a blessing. The other one will recover, they say. Just thinking about it turns my stomach. A knife is a terrible thing.
You know something funny? Peculiar, I mean — sure God not funny. I swear to you as sure as I’m sitting here that if Jimmy heard of anybody killing women like that it would turn his stomach, too.
He was always a good boy.
Green Gravy for the Blush
by Jon L. Breen[4]
Jon L. Breen is considered one of today’s best parodists of the mystery story. The author whom he now parodies is considered one of today’s best mystery writers. Thus, a happy combination — the true-read MacB and the true-bred MacD...
You’ll be interested to know John D. MacD’s reaction to Jon L. B’s satirical takeoff. The “victim” thought it a “very delicious parody,” and he read it, prior to publication, “with pink ears and uncertain smile, the way all authors should read parodies of their stylistic twitches.”
A devastating burlesque of “the saga of Trygue McKee”...
The flustered blush rocked fitfully in her temporary harbor in Ferry Landing, Florida. I felt the bracing Florida breeze on my face and watched the warming Florida sun rise above the glittering glassy faces of the overpriced Florida hotels and brushed away an overeager Florida bug about to take a high dive into my corn flakes. I took a long drag on my Donald Duck orange juice and stared northward toward Battle Creek, Michigan. Your com flakes aren’t what they once were, Battle Creek, and try as you will you cannot disguise the fact by designing a new way to get into the box every year.
But then you aren’t what you were, Battle Creek, because you’re an American city and American cities are like archaic broads who try to ward off time, that agent of decay, with ever-increasing layers of junk that only heightens what it’s trying to conceal. Even Miami has that look these days.
It was one of those mornings when all the sun and all the Donald Duck orange juice in the world can’t give balance to the teeter-tauter of my outlook, when my lonely melancholia is so heavy it outweighs soaring birds and flying fish and all the vibrant life around me, and I arise from my bed in my seagoing home full of penetrating social commentary that longs for expression.
I guess I should have been happy that particular morning. I knew she was ready, my little wounded bird, to fly out again on her own, or as ready as she would ever be. She wasn’t scared any more like she was the day I fished her out of the Miami Beach yacht harbor where Chili Warlock had left her to sink.
A broken spirit takes more time to mend than a broken wing, and in the past seven months she hadn’t once stepped off the deck of the Flustered Blush and into the world outside. But now we knew, as if by mutual consent, that she was ready.
She came out now, still looking like a fragile blonde wisp longing for protection. She sat down beside me shyly and said, “Good morning, Trig.”
“Morning, kid.”
She reached for a box of raisin bran from the variety pack. She didn’t hesitate. She reached for it decisively. I liked that. She looked at it for a second, bewildered. “Trig.”
“Yeah, honey?”
“They changed the box again, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, I guess they did.” I didn’t help her. I couldn’t. She had to face it herself this time. And I knew she could. I was right. Two minutes later she had it open.
“I didn’t lose a single raisin, did I, Trig?”
“You did fine, baby, just fine.”
I guess it was a good breakfast, but I didn’t taste much. I never do at times like this. Sometimes I could kick myself for being such a sentimentalist. But other times I think that sentimentality is the stuff of which life is made, however much you can lose by it. What you have to know is when to be sentimental and when to be unsentimental. I usually know, but sometimes I’m too damned sentimental to act on what I know.
When she’d finished her breakfast, except for half a glass of her Donald Duck orange juice, she looked at me, unspeaking, not really knowing what to say. She ended up saying just about what they all say.
“Trig, explain to me again what sort of a business you’re in. I mean, you haven’t had a job in seven months. If you’re in the rest-home business you really ought to charge something for your services, even though I can’t pay you.”
“Well, kid, you might say I’m a knight in faintly tarnished armor, a sort of capitalistic Robin Hood, kind of a sun-drenched Don Quixote.”
Honestly, Trig, you keep giving me answers like that, like you were a dust jacket or something. Now if you can’t tell me what you and this darling little boat do to keep yourselves afloat, just say so. But I can’t help being curious. I mean, are you a detective or a spy or a gunrunner or a smuggler or what?”
“All of those and more.”
“Honestly, Trig! You are utterly infuriating!”
“Take it easy, honey. Just relax. It’s no secret.”
“I want an answer, damn it!” Her voice was tinged with hysteria. “What the hell do you do for a living anyway? I want an answer to that question, a straightforward answer, not an evasion. Is that asking so much of a man I’ve lived with for seven months?”