“Holy moly.”
“You think he’ll like it?”
“Are you kidding? He’ll break down in tears.”
She smiled. “You never overstate things, McCain. That’s one of your finest qualities.”
She leaned over and gave me a motherly kiss on the cheek. “I appreciate the compliment. I need it. I keep running to the bathroom every five minutes, just the way I used to when I started dating my husband. I have a bladder that’s very sensitive to romantic feelings.”
She smelled great too.
Then: “Oh. David Squires stopped by to see you.”
“David Squires? Are you sure it was him?”
She laughed. “Are you saying that I should have Dr. Kostik check my eyes tonight? I know David from the Fine Arts committee at the library.”
“God,” I said, stunned. “Why would he want to see me? He and the Judge despise each other.”
“That’s what I was thinking. But his wife was murdered, so maybe he needs to talk to you. The poor man.”
Five
Dillon’s Stables had a huge red barn for dances and three big hayracks for rides. I wore a T-shirt, a denim jacket, jeans, and desert boots. To get in the Western mood I wore a red kerchief around my neck.
Mary was dressed in a similar outfit. Her mahogany-colored hair was pulled back into a ponytail. A hundred male eyes did terrible things to her. She was a beauty. No doubt about that.
From inside the barn came music:
Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly. This was a young crowd tonight. If Dillon had his way he’d still be playing songs from the ‘dj’s. Fortunately, his twenty-year-old daughter chose the music. Just because you dressed Western didn’t mean you had to listen Western.
Especially when you had your hair swept back into a duck’s ass.
The hayracks filled up pretty fast.
Mary and I got on the third one. We sat high on the stack, about four feet up. A friendly old mare pulled the wagon, following an ancient Indian trail along a creek painted silver by moonlight. The night was chilly, the hay smelled fresh and clean, and the mare was sweetly scented of field dust and road apples.
“Did you ever try and count the stars?” Mary asked.
“Not after they let me out of the mental hospital.”
She nudged me. She had a cute way of doing that. She’d done it since grade school.
For some reason I’ve always taken great pleasure in being nudged by her.
“They made me do that at Girl Scout camp. Sit up all night and count the stars.”
“Nice girls.”
“Yeah, but I was dumb enough to do it.”
There were six other couples. One of the guys had a guitar. He played some Gene Autry and Roy Rogers songs, and then he played Vaughn Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” I still like to lie on my stomach and look out the window to see if I can spot any of the ghost riders he sings in that song. It isn’t hard to spot them. Not if you had an imagination like mine. Big silver ghost horses and cowpokes trailing across the midnight sky.
“She was a nice woman.”
“Susan Squires?”
“Ummm.”
“Why’d she marry him?”
“She was in love with him.”
“Poor girl.”
Some of the other couples were already making out. A Tribute to Gonads seemed to be the theme of the evening. I had my arm around Mary but that was it.
“She stopped in for lunch at Rexall,”
Mary said.
“About a week ago.”
“She say anything?”
“She just kept toying with an envelope. She was so nervous, she left it behind.”
“Anything on the outside?”
“Just the return address for a county courthouse. I’ve got it at home. She called later that afternoon. Sounded scared. Wanted to meet me for a Coke downtown. But Dad got very sick. They’re trying this new medication on him. I had to help Mom.”
“That was the last you heard from her?”
“Yes. Now I feel guilty. I mean,
I had to help Dad and Mom. But I feel as if I let Susan down.”
“You sure she sounded scared?”
“Positive. I knew her well enough to know that.”
“Know much about her marriage?”
Before she could answer, the wagon gave a sudden jerk and stopped. We had crested a hill. Below us spread the town of Black River Falls.
This should have been the makeout point of choice for all the town’s teenagers, but the mud-ribbed roads and brambled roadsides made it too hard to get to.
The sight was gorgeous. If you grew up in a city, a town of 25eajjj probably doesn’t look like much. But spread out this way, the lights vivid against the prairie night, it was a lovely spectacle. For all its flaws and shortcomings, I loved the old town. Back in the stables, they had a wall posted with photos of various generations who had gone on hayrack rides, all the way back to the 1880’s, when the men wore bowlers and the women wore huge picture hats. There were doughboys from World War One and dogfaces from World War Two. There were flappers and Frank Sinatra’s bobby-soxers and Johnnie Ray’s teary teens. And somehow I was a part of it, just like Mom and Dad and Sis and Grandad and Grandma were part of it, and that made at least a little sense of life for me, being part of a town and a tradition, and if that was all I ever got, it was enough.
Then we were moving again, the wagon jostling left and right, bouncing up and down, the kid with the guitar singing a Frankie Laine song called “Moonlight Gambler.” He did a pretty good job of it too.
“She ever talk about her marriage?”
“Just kind of hinted about it from time to time.”
“Anything specific?”
“Well, that he spent a lot of time away from home. His legal practice and everything.”
“Ever mention divorce?”
“No.”
“His ex-wife ever get over it?”
“You think she might have killed him?”
“It’s a thought.”
“Gee, I hadn’t even considered her.”
“Susan ever mention the woman’s confronting her or anything?”
“Say,” she said, “you’re right! One day at Nicole’s.” Nicole’s On Main was the high-fashion emporium of the town. They have indoor plumbing and everything. “She came right up to Susan and slapped her.”
“See? There you go. You could be a detective.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, you just told me something very important.”
Right there we were headed into the white birches where the creek widens out. The Mesquakie Indians used to call the birches ghost trees, and that’s what they looked like, too, with their spectral moonlit glow.
Then I surprised both of us by leaning over and kissing her.
As I’ve told you, a couple of times we almost went all the way, Mary and I. One was the night of our high school graduation and the second time was just a regular night at the drive-in watching a couple of really bad Japanese science-fiction movies. Both times both of us pulled back. Our relationship was complicated enough. I’d wanted to sleep with her for many long years but I was worried that it would hurt her.
But within five minutes tonight I was on first base and rounding toward second. And in her sweet, somewhat tentative way I sensed she was as up for it as I was.
We sank into the hay and did some serious making out. A hoot owl and a coyote crooned to the moon to lend everything a note of prairie romance.
I always carried my emergency red Trojan, and I had reason to believe that my erection would soon start making overtures in that direction. Bad enough I wasn’t in love with Mary. But to make love to her and still not be in love with her would be awful.
“We’d better stop,” I whispered.
“Oh, God, why?”
“You know.”
“Oh, McCain, c’mon. I’m twenty-two years old. You want to see my driver’s license?”
“It’ll just make things worse.”
“For whom?”
“For you. And me.”
“For you, you mean. The guilt.”