Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

Now this part of the development was as forgotten as Dwight Eisenhower's golf scores. In the late-afternoon sunlight, the houses looked faded now, and scraped in places and smashed in others, tape running the length of some picture windows, and chain-link fences giving some of the tiny homes the air of fortresses, particularly those with Day-Glow BEWARE OF DOG signs. Blacks and Chicanos were pushing up the valley now, taking the same route as these whites had twenty-five years earlier. But you saw a lot of Dixie-flag decals on the bumper stickers of the scrap-heap cars along the curb, and, you saw in the eyes of the ten- and eleven-year-old kids-already wheezing on cigarettes and walking with their arms possessively around girls every bit as tough as the boys-you saw the sum total of decades of hatred. Meals, at least steady ones, were something you had to fight for up here, and blacks, to feed their own families, meant by one way or another to take your meals. So you had the old lady sew an NRA decal on your work jacket, and you even-just for curiosity's sake-went to the Klan rally held out on an outlying farm. You wouldn't kill a black man personally, but you wouldn't condemn someone who had.

The Roberts home was freshly painted white, and a new white Chevrolet sedan sat in the drive. The place was so clean and neat, it must have made its neighbors want to come over and smear dirt on it out of sheer envy.

I parked behind the Chevrolet and got out. A collie came up. He was bathed and smelled clean when he put his front paws on my stomach and asked to be petted. From this angle I could see into the backyard. There was a clothesline filled with white sheets and shirts and the kind of pink rayon uniform waitresses wear. Beneath the sheets flapping like schooner masts in the breeze, I saw a pair of jean-clad legs.

I went back to the clothesline, the collie keeping me eager and friendly company, and when I got there I said, "Susan?"

And then I saw the feet go up on tippy-toes and saw her head appear over the sheets.

"My God," she said.

She was older now but stillpretty. There was only a little gray in the otherwise auburn hair, and as she came around the sheets, I saw that she'd put on just a few pounds-far fewer than I had-and looked trim in her white blouse and blue man's cardigan and pleasantly snug jeans. In high school she'd always been one of my favorite people-she'd had a kind of wisdom that I attributed to the early loss of her father; she knew what mattered and what did not-and just the way her brown eyes watched me now, with humor and curiosity, I knew she was still going to be one of my favorite people.

"I don't believe it," she said. Then she smiled. "It's really nice seeing you."

"It's really nice seeing you." I nodded to the clothes, the pink waitress uniform, the shirts, the sheets. "I didn't know people still hung wash out."

She laughed. "I do because it's the cleanest smell in the world. Here. Grab one of those sheets and smell it."

"You serious?"

"Of course I'm serious."

So I did and it smelled wonderful, clean as she'd promised. "I see you on TV. On commercials. You're a good actor."

"I'm learning."

"It must be exciting."

"Sometimes." I nodded to the house."How's Gary?"

For the first time, her face tightened. "He's in there working."

"He sell anything yet?"

"Stories here and there."

"He'll make it. You can't lose faith."

"That's the funny thing. I haven't, but he has." She shook her head. "He's been writing stories since we were in high school, right? That's why he went into teaching high school English, so he could stay close to what he loved. Well, he finally got some real interest on a novel a few weeks ago-after nearly twenty years of trying-and he burns it."

"He burned the novel?"

"Yes. Said it wasn't good enough."

She shrugged, glanced down at her hands. She had always been pretty rather than beautiful, with an almost mournful grace. It was a grace that had only deepened as she got older. Then she smiled and I wanted to hold her, she gave me that much sense of tenderness. "I'll bet I know why you're here."

"She here?"

"No. But she called. Said she'd see us at the reunion dance tonight. You going?"

"I hadn't planned on it. But if it's the only way I can see her, I will."

She said, "You're not starting up with her again, are you?"

"Do I look crazy?"

"I shouldn't have said that. She's my friend."

"She can still be your friend and you can still tell the truth."

"She's pretty messed up. All those husbands." She reached out and took an edge of the sheet and brought it to her nose. "I always associate this smell with my mother. 1 always helped her hang out the wash and I loved to put my face against wet clothes and let them freeze my cheeks till my skin got numb." She inhaled the aroma. "Unfortunately, I can't convince either of my kids to help me. It's a different age." She put the sheet back down. "But I was talking about Karen, wasn't I? She's kind of a basket case."

"She also may be in some serious trouble."

"Why?"

I started to tell her, but then the back door opened and a small, slight man with thinning brown hair caught back in a ponytail and rimless eyeglasses came up. Gary.

"God," he said and put out his slender hand. We shook. He looked much older than Susan, and much wearier. He was still thin, but it was a beaten thin, and his clothes were redolent of the sixties, faded tie-dye shirt and bell-bottoms, like a hobo looking for the ghost of Jim Morrison. Gary and I had lived two blocks away from each other in the Highlands, and sometimes I'd gone to his parents' apartment, where we smoked Luckies and drank Pepsis all afternoon and listened to Elvis and Carl Perkins and Little Richard, dreaming of owning custom cars and having as our own the women Robert Mitchum always ended up with. But that was just one side of Gary. He'd had a battered bookcase filled with paperbacks reverently filed alphabetically, everything from Arthur C. Clarke to John O'Hara, from Allen Ginsburg to e.e. cummings (he'd gotten me into Jack Kerouac, an affection I've never lost), and the only time I'd ever seen him hit somebody was one afternoon when a kid drunk on 3.2 beer tripped into Gary's bookcase, knocking a brand-new Peter Rabe to the floor. Gary, not big, not known for his temper, slapped the kid across the face with the precision of a fabled pachuco opening up somebody's gullet with a shiv. Now we stood on either side of twenty-five years and he said, "God, look at you."

"Look at you."

"I mean, you look great, Jack. I look like a sixty-year-old man."

And I heard then what had always been in him-some generalized bitterness, half self-pity, half frustration with a world that had passed your old man by and was intent on doing the same thing to you-and I glanced over at Susan, who watched her husband with the same concern she'd always had for him. In ninth grade she'd simply adopted him in some curious way, part maternal and part sexual, and she had never let go of that impulse or of him down all these long years.

Gary said, "We see you on TV."

"Yeah." Then, "How about letting me read some of your stories?"

"Oh, they're not much. You know that."

"Really, I'd like to read some." And I wanted to, too. He had the early knack for telling stories, very good ones when he wrote in the vein of the magazines we both liked, Manhunt and Ellery Queen, less so when he affected the styles he found in the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

"Hubris," he said.

"Why?"

Gently, she said, "He wrote a perfectly good detective story three months ago but wouldn't send it off."

"Why not send it out?"

"I don't want to be a detective writer. I want to be a real writer."