Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

I wanted out of there, then. The mildew smell, the beer smell, the sagging single bed, the shabby clothes. I wondered what he dreamed of, what could possibly keep him going in these circumstances. There was not even a window to look out of. Only a few years ago he'd been a teenager, when there was always the hope that the cards would run good, but the cards hadn't run good at all for him.

"How about this suitcase?" he said.

"What about it?"

"What's in it?"

"I'm not sure."

"Why you want it?"

"Because I was hired to find it."

"But you don't know what's in it?"

"That's right, Chuck. I don't know what's in it."

He smiled.

"What's funny?"

"It's Karen, isn't it?"

"Karen?"

"Sure. This sounds like some kind of deal she'd get you involved in. Having you look for something but not telling you what it is exactly."

I glanced around. He had a poster of Farrah Fawcett in a swimsuit and a RE-ELECT REAGAN bumper sticker on the wall.

Sitting on a bureau was a travel brochure to sunny Arizona with an envelope that looked to contain an airline ticket.

"You ever think of moving out of this place?"

"It getting to you?"

"Sort of, I guess."

"Gets to me, too." He shrugged. "It's about all I can afford these days. After the Amway thing went to shit, I mean."

"You sold Amway?"

"Yeah. You ever go to any of their meetings?"

"Uh-uh."

"Man, they get you all het up. It's like going to one of them TV evangelists. One night I was watchin' the tube here and I was pretty gassed up on beer and this TV evangelist came on and I watched him, really watched him for the first time, and I'll be damned if I didn't stand up and pledge myself to Jesus, and I mean I had tears streamin' down my cheeks, and I wrote him out a check for one hundred dollars and staggered down to the post office and mailed it in. It was like this light was shining in my eyes, this real strong light, and for about an hour or so it was like I was on this high I'd never been on before, really whacked out, you know, better than drugs or sex or booze or anything." Then he stopped and sighed. "But then in the morning I got up and remembered what I'd done, sending the check in and all, and I remembered that I'd closed that account and that the check would bounce and-" He smoked some of his cigarette. "Anyway, Amway was like that for a while. I'd go to these meetings and get real psyched up, but then. ."

He let it drift off, the way so much in his life had drifted off.

The room was getting oppressive again.

"She's getting it together."

"Karen?" I said.

"Yeah. She dumped that spook."

Which almost caused me to smile, never understanding why one set of outcasts wants to put down another set of outcasts. Didn't he see that the same people who dismissed him as a clubfoot probably dismissed Glendon Evans for being black?

"But you don't know where she is?"

"Not really, man. She calls sometimes. I'll tell her you're looking for her."

"So you don't know anything about a suitcase?"

"Why you keep asking? I already said no. Jesus, man." He stubbed out his cigarette. "It's because of the baseball glove, isn't it?"

"Nah."

"Bullshit."

"Well."

"I take a crummy baseball glove thirty years ago and you still blame me."

I felt myself flush.

"People change, you know, Dwyer."

"I know." He had me feeling guilty. He had me feeling the way he wanted me to feel.

"I don't know from no suitcase, all right?"

"All right."

"And the next time you come down here, try not to look like you just walked into a leper colony, all right? Like you're going to get contaminated or something?"

I stood up. Held out my hand. "Good to see you, Chuck."

He got up and getting up was an effort and I averted my eyes and he saw me avert my eyes and then he shook my hand and said, "Being a gimp isn't so bad, Dwyer. It's other people thinking it's so bad that really gets to you, you know?"

I babbled. "Take it easy, Chuck."

"Right. That's how I always take it. Easy. I've got the charmed life, you know."

These days they have names like the Dead Kennedys and The Sea Hags and The Virgin Prunes, and when my sixteen-year-old son plays them for me I try to remember that back in my sixteen-year-old days I drove my own parents crazy with some very offensive people named Little Richard and Howlin' Wolf and, not least, Elvis himself.

Now I stood outside a four-story brick building in the middle of the Highlands looking up at a sky filled with stars and a slice of quarter moon and tumbling clouds the color of ghosts. There was no sign of a black Honda.

From inside St. Michael's came a medley of songs, including "Don't Be Cruel" and "Sea of Love" and "Blue Jean Bop" and "Runaround Sue" and "Walkin' to New Orleans," all done with feverish amateurish fun. I wanted for the sake of my son to enjoy the music of The Dead Kennedys, but maybe it was my age or the calculated offensiveness of their name, but when he showed me their album cover I had an instant fantasy about putting them up against a wall and punching their faces in. I didn't say that to my son, of course. I just put my arm around him and said, "Whatever happened to that Dion and the Belmonts tape I gave you?"

"It was all right till I found out what he's doing these days."

"What's that?"

"Making religious albums."

"Really?"

"Yeah, Dad, and I just have a real hard time taking anybody seriously who makes religious albums. Like all those ministers on cable. You know?"

So Dion, once of rock 'n' roll leather and rock 'n' roll heat, was making a very different kind of album now and maybe even believing the too-sweet, too-easy hype of commercial religion, and who the hell was I to judge him anyway? And now here I was standing outside the school where nearly forty years ago I'd started kindergarten and where twenty-five years ago I'd graduated high school. I had a Bud in one hand and a cigarette in another (these days I don't smoke more than ten cigarettes a week, just enough to keep myself worried and guilty and coughing), and I heard music that should have lifted me back to other times when you measured success by the kind of car you drove or whom you hung out with or what base (first, second, or third) you'd gotten to the night before. But all I sensed now was how time cheated you, tricked you, and one day you were young and then one day you were not young. And then people you loved began dying so that one funeral service became very much like another, the grimace on the faces of those bearing the casket, the chill silver drops of holy water sprinkled on the newly turned earth, the sound of tears lost in the cold wind and the flapping sound of the canvas tent at graveside. And so you stood on nights like this, the stars washed across the endless sky, and just tried to make simple animal sense of it all. But you couldn't, of course, because ultimately it made sense to none of us, not the priest who whispered solace nor the hedonist who tried to deny it in the noisy illusion of his passion nor the puzzled six-year-old trapped in the confines of a white hospital bed he'd never leave. All you could understand was how many millions had stood on just such evenings down the time-stream thinking the same thoughts and coming to the same conclusion, which was really no conclusion at all, just the hope, even among the most cynical of men, that there really was a God or something very much like a God, and that all this did indeed have significance somehow in the relentless cosmic darkness.

"Say, there's a Shamrock!" cried a drunken male voice.

And like some berserk chorus line, three people came down the front steps of the school, doing some kicks and singing along to "Take Good Care of My Baby."