John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

It was late. We had talked a long time. He leaned and rubbed the final sodden inch of cigar out in the glass motel ashtray. We were quiet. He was a strange one, I thought. A man softened and souring in his years, looking used up, but he wasn’t. There are many kinds of cop. This one was a good kind. Flavor of cynical tolerance, grasp of all the unchanging human motivations, respect for the rules and procedures of cop work.

He laughed softly. “Just thinking about Southtown, one Christmastime long back. Maybe nineteen forty-eight, forty-nine. I’d been three years in the paratroopers, so I got appointed Sanny Claus by the City Council, jump into the park a day or two before Christmas, and the toys would come down on the next swing around, in a cargo chute. Kids swarming all over.”

It gave me a grotesque mental picture of Santa Stanger lifting some little blond supplicant onto his red velvet knee, and with one Ho Ho Ho of that venomous breath turning her crisp and sere as a little autumn leaf.

“One year Sid dropped me too damned high. Maybe seven thousand. Supposed to make it last longer. Wind started gusting strong and I tried to spill some air to get down far enough so I could use the shrouds to steer me into the park. But I could see right away I couldn’t even come close. So I rode the wind and it carried me all the way to Southtown. Sid made his next swing around pretty low and dumped the chute with the toys upwind of the park and put them right where I was supposed to already be. But I was by then steering myself into a field right behind Lincoln School right in the heart of Southtown. Landed good and collapsed the chute and balled it up and slipped out of the harness, and then I looked around and standing around me in a big silent circle there’s more dang colored kids than I ever seen in one place before. All big-eyed, just looking. There I am saying Merry Christmas!!! and saying Well, Well, Well! and saying You been good little boys and girls? and they just look. All of a sudden I can hear old Boyd coming to get me — he’s been dead for years — with that siren on high scream all the way, the gusty wind blowing the sound of it around. Ten seconds later I could see just a few of those colored kids way in the distance, just the ones too little to run so fast, and twelve seconds later there wasn’t a kid in sight, and I was all alone in that field when Boyd came showboating up to me, making a skid turn that stopped him where I could reach out and touch the door handle. Took me back to the park and I spread that sack of toys so fast they didn’t get the pictures for the paper. They took a toy away from a pretty little girl and gave it to me to give back to her, so they got their picture, and that was the last time. The next year I said I had a bad ankle, and they didn’t have anybody wanted to jump, so from then on they didn’t do it anymore. I used to wonder what those little colored kids thought, hiding behind things and under things, and seeing the cop car pick up Sanny Claus. Maybe it didn’t puzzle them at all, them thinking anybody can get arrested anytime.”

He stood up and yawned. “Be getting along.”

I walked out into the night with him and said, “Al, I have one little ice-cold patch on my back, the size of fifty cents, just under the left shoulderblade. It seems to happen when there are things I should know and don’t know, and find out later.”

“With me, the back of my neck gets a kind of cool feel.”

“I didn’t bring a handgun.”

He thought that over and said, “The check I ran on you, nobody said you were about to become a director of any kind of bank, but nobody could say you should have been busted if they’d had more evidence either. How do I know you wouldn’t be a problem to yourself and anybody who happened to come along?”

“You’d have to make a guess.”

He took me to his car and unlocked the trunk. He said, “You took this off Holton and gave it to his wife and told me and I took it off her, so we’ll leave it that you took it off him and you’ll get around to turning it in to me later on, because I haven’t talked about it or filled out the forms yet, and not having to fill out forms is a blessing these days.”

“Remember, I phoned you about it and you said bring it in as soon as I had a chance?”

“Remember clear as day, McGee.” He watched me as I turned toward the light, swung the cylinder out and checked the full load, used the ejector to spill the six rounds into my hand, snapped the cylinder back, checked the knurled safety to be certain it would not fire either double action or with the hammer back while on safe, then dry-fired it four times into the turf, twice on double action, twice with hammer back, to check the amount of trigger pull and trigger play, swung the cylinder out, reloaded, put it on safe, and thrust it inside my shirt and inside the waistband of my slacks, metal cool against the belly flesh.

He got into the car and drove away. I saw pink lightning, a pale competition for city neon, then heard deep, fumbling thunder, a hesitant counterpoint to the truck sounds. There was just a hint of rain freshness in the wind.

Third time I’d gotten my hands on this same.38. Forgive me, Miss Penny, for tricking you and then bad-mouthing you that first time to get it away from your lover. You see, I didn’t know you then, knew nothing about your silly honest earnest heart. Who were you staring at when you fell to your knees on the kitchen floor, putting your hands in disbelief to the blue handle of the shears? Did you think it some monstrous mistake and wanted only a chance to explain? But no chance. Tumbled and bled and died. Always tripping, falling, hurting yourself. Freckled clumsy girl.

Two portly tourists, male and female, she in a slack suit that matched his sport shirt, came plodding down the walk. They were in the floodlight pattern and did not see me in the shadows.

She was speaking in a thin and suffering voice. “... but no, you can’t stand it to have anybody think for one stinking minute that you aren’t rolling in money and so you have to tip every grubby little waitress like she was some kind of queen bee, and all it is, Fred, is just currying favor, trying to be a big shot, just showing off with the money we both saved to take this vacation, but if you have your way, the way you throw it around, we’ll have to go home—”

“Shaddap!”

“They laugh at you when you tip too much. They think you’re a fool. You lose all respect when you—”

“Shaddap!”

She began again, but they were too far away from me to hear her words. The tune was the same, however.

Up early on Tuesday. Fifteenth day of October. Pull the cords and slide the draperies away, feel crisp pile of miracle motel rug under the toes. Wonder who the hell I am. That is the blessing of morning routines — soap, brush, towel, lather, paste, razor. Each morning you wake up a slightly different person. Not significantly. But the dreams and the sleep time rearrange the patterns inside your head. So what you see in the mirror is almost all you, and three percent stranger. It takes the comfort of routine to fit yourself back into total familiarity.

Even the little concerns are therapeutic. Does that tooth feel a little bit hollow? Seems like a lot of hair coming out. Little twinge in the shoulder when you move the arm just so. Sudden sideways unexpected glimpse in the mirrored door. Belly a little soft? Pat yourself, wash the hide, scrape the beard, brush teeth and hair. Little comforting attentions. Recognition symbols. Here I am. Now then. Me. The only me in existence.

Came walking slowly back from breakfast, marveling at how this tidy prosperous community of Fort Courtney kept producing more and more unknowns, making all its secret equations ever more insoluble. The doctor’s wife, slick little Dave Broon, Hardahee’s change of attitude, the strangeness of Helen Boughmer, the whisperer, and all the other little fragments of this and that. The diffusion was too wide. No new fact, no sudden inspiration, was going to link everything together into any pattern I could understand. So find one chunk of it, break it down, find out all the why and the who and the what-for.