The plan was for David to sleep on Cy’s couch all summer. There was a big detasselling operation that worked out of town here. Detasselling paid better than even factory jobs and you damned well earned it. I detasselled for two summers and I rarely had dates. Too tired even on the weekends I didn’t work.
“You sound kinda funny tonight, Sam.”
“Guess I’ll have some of that wine.”
“Help yourself.”
I did, downing half a glass of it in a single gulp. Bombs away.
Crickets and river splashing on rocks and lonesome half-moon and the sound of distant ghost trains.
I spent a minute or so trying to figure out how to tell Cy about it, and then I just said, “Somebody murdered David tonight, Cy.”
I don’t know how I expected him to react. He rocked back and forth. He said nothing, then “Figured it’d be something like that, the way you sounded, so funny and all.”
“I’m sorry. I’m going to find them.”
“You sound like Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke.”
“I’m not tough, Cy. You know that. But I can get things done when I need to.”
“Whites killed him.”
“Probably.”
“Bastards.”
I had never heard him use language like that. It shocked me because it came from him and then saddened me because I heard the tears that overcame the rage in those words.
“Bastards.” A lifetime of anger, frustration, humiliation, fear, and ruined hopes in that single word.
The night birds had never sounded more mordant as we sat in the terrible echoes of that single word, of all the sorrow in that single word.
“He wasn’t perfect. Drank too much. Ran around with white girls too much. He even tole me one night we was helping ourselves to the jug here about how he pulled off a couple robberies back in Chicago. But that don’t give no white bastard the right to kill him.”
“It sure doesn’t.”
“And anyways, he tole me that when a friend of his got sent up, he quit doin’ bad stuff and buckled down and got himself a partial scholarship.” Clink of bottle neck on glass. This time he didn’t offer me any. He sat back and started rocking in his chair. “I think he knew something was comin’.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“That white girl, Lucy. He said she was all tensed up lately. So many people on them. Her folks and that rich boy she used to go out with. And then them bikers always following him around and makin’ fun of him. She told him she had nightmares about something terrible happenin’ to him.”
“How did he feel about it all?”
“Oh, it was getting to him, too. Reason he always liked our town here was because folks were nice to him. He said he never seen so many nice white folks. The bikers and them like that, they didn’t like him. But I mean most folks — we got a nice little town here, Sam. Still is. Even when he was goin’ out with Lucy, people still hired him for the jobs he did. And was nice to him and everything. But there’s always a few—”
I stood up.
“I’ll find them, Cy, the ones who did it.”
“There you go soundin’ like Marshal Dillon again.” He’d allowed himself the one joke. Then: “The colored, we’ve had to put up with shit like this all our lives. I want you to get ’em, Sam, and get ’em good and don’t let that stupid bastard Cliffie get in your way, either.”
Rage and tears, rage and tears. Job was the only book of the Bible that held any meaning for me. Rage and tears against the unfathomable ways of God. Or as Graham Greene put it, “the terrible wisdom of God.” If there was a God. And if not, rage and tears against the unfathomable randomness of it all.
“You do me a favor and go in there and turn up Nat for me?”
“Sure.”
Cole was singing “Lost April,” one of my favorite songs of his. The wan melancholy of it matched my mood exactly.
3
“You know, Mr. C, you should write a book about all your experiences. Look at Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a lot of books.”
In case you haven’t met her before, Jamie is my secretary. She was free when she was part time, now she was full time and I paid her.
I’d represented her father in a property-line case and he ceded her to me as a form of payment. We don’t discuss the fact that she was nineteen when she graduated high school — she once vaguely alluded to the fact that she had to take eleventh grade over again because she couldn’t remember the lyrics to the school fight song — nor do we mention the fact that if murder was ever declared legal the first person I’d shoot was her boyfriend, Turk, who combines the most annoying mannerisms of Marlon Brando and James Dean and that New Zealand tribe said to wash themselves only once every full moon because they fear water will eat their flesh.
Judging by the responses of my male clients, Jamie will never have to want for men eager to woo her. She’s one of those women blessed with a face and body that will keep her looking like jailbait until she’s well into her thirties. The fact that she can only type sixteen words a minute, and not all of them exactly what you would call words, and that she frequently forgets to write down phone messages — they are as nothing compared to the luxurious promise of that body and the merry gleam of those blue eyes.
“He isn’t still alive, is he?”
I’d been studying a brief I needed in court this morning and had been trying hard not to pay attention to her usual babble. My terrible secret is that I have my own fantasies about Jamie — how could I not? — and I even like her because for all of her mindless prattle, there is a genuine sweetness in her that’s rare in our species. She’s a good, if daft, kid. And it doesn’t hurt that, as demonstrated this morning, she’s picked up on the see-through-blouse trend.
“Sorry, Jamie. What did you say?”
“Sherlock Holmes, Mr. C.”
The “Mr. C,” by the way, comes from the Perry Como TV show. All of Perry’s regulars call him Mr. C. Jamie thinks this is pretty cool. That my name starts with “Mc” doesn’t deter her in the least.
“Sherlock Holmes?”
“Yes. I was saying he wrote all those books and you should, too. You know, about your experiences.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Like what happened last night out at that cabin. That would make a chapter in itself.”
“Yeah, but I sure couldn’t write like Sherlock.”
“Is he still alive, by the way?”
The phone, in its mercy, rang.
“Well, you made the wire services this morning,” Stan Green said. “AP and UPI both. Do I get an exclusive if I buy you lunch?” Stan is the Clarion’s managing editor and one of its three reporters.
“That would depend on whether you can take a late lunch and if you’re willing to spend at least sixty-five cents for my food. That would mean ham, lettuce, mayo on white bread with the crusts cut off and a small fountain Coke at Woolworth’s.”
“You are one crafty bastard, McCain. One-ish?”
“One-ish will do it.”
“God, I hate politicians.” A phone rang behind him. “Gotta go.”