Ed Gorman - Save The Last Dance For Me

“And there’re a lot of people in this town who believe the same way I do, Sam. But they don’t want people to know it.”

“So you just gave him all this printing free?”

“Heck, no. A friend of his paid for it.”

“What friend?”

He leaned toward me again. He mst’ve had an onion sandwich with some onion rings and onion juice on the side. “Like I said, Sam, there’re a lot of folks in this town who agree with everything we do. And one of them was nice enough to pick up the tab for the printing. I just charged my costs.

No profit. That wouldn’t be right, seeing’s how I was doing it for the Lord.”

Parnell, Parnell, what did somebody drug you with? How can you possibly believe this crap?

Then I realized it was time for me to go pick up the rabbi and the monsignor. We were doing some target practice this afternoon with the guns in the church basement.

“I’d really appreciate it if you told me who paid for the printing, John. I’m trying to find out who killed Muldaur.”

“I know you are. We all hear the Judge is trying to get it all cleaned up before Nixon gets here. Now, there’s a guy with almost as many Jew friends as Kennedy has. Hard to know who to vote for.”

I couldn’t deal with it any longer.

“You’re making me so damn sad, Parnell.”

“And you’re making me sad, too, Sam. I saw you over there eating with that Jewess. She’s not fit company for a true Christian, Sam.”

“Well, she’s fit company for me. She’s a damned good woman, in fact.”

He shook his head. He really did seem sad. “The ways of the flesh, Sam, the ways of the flesh.”

At one time, the two-room house had probably looked pretty nice sitting all alone by the fast creek in the curve of a copse of pine. It looked like one of those houses a fella could order himself from the Sears Roebuck catalog late in the 1890’s. Such homes came with assembly instructions; the fancier kits even included hammers and other tools. You could see some of these Sears houses standing well into the 1940’s, by the grace of spit and God, as the old saying had it.

Ned Blimes, whose last name and current address I’d learned by asking around, didn’t seem to be at home as I pulled my ragtop behind a stand of pine to the west of his house. I didn’t want my car to pick up any stray bullets.

A dainty man, he wasn’t. His meals apparently included a lot of self-shot squirrel meat because the grass on the side of his place was strewn with carcasses. Several gleaming crows hovered nearby. I’d interrupted their meal. I’ve never been able to tolerate the smell of squirrel meat frying. The air was coarse and bloody with it.

I knocked on the front door of the shack-like house. The lone front window was filled with cardboard and just a jagged remnant of the glass that had once covered it.

The crows went back to eating. The pollen got to me and I sneezed. And somebody poked something in my back.

The smell told me it was Yosemite Sam himself.

“Put your hands over your head.”

“This high enough?”

“Higher.”

“This is as high as I can go.”

“What’chu want, McCain?”

“I wanted to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

“About Muldaur.”

“Don’t want to talk about Muldaur.”

“Why not?”

“Because that was part of the bargain.”

“What bargain?”

He guffawed. Or whinnied. I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was a guffaw-whinny. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Gee, I haven’t heard that one since third grade.”

“Huh?”

“How about taking the gun out of my back?”

“Then how about you gettin’ in that car of yours and gettin’ the hell out of here?”

Then he started marching me back to my car.

I still had my hands above my head. There was a variety of animal poop all over the buffalo grass. I am happy to report that my black penny loafers didn’t touch any of it.

“What happened out there the day you took Muldaur snakin’?”

“Who tole you somethin’ happened?”

“You did.”

“I did? When?”

“When I saw you at Muldaur’s place. You said something like “He was the only one who made any money that day.””

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“You sure I said that?”

“I sure am.”

“Then I shouldn’t’ve. Me’n my big mouth.”

We’d reached my car.

He prodded and poked me with the barrel of his rifle. I got in and got behind the wheel.

“You just forget I said anything, mister.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Well, you damned well better,” he said.

“You can’t make me.”

“Bet I can,” he said, and put the tip of the rifle about three inches from my face.

“You always talk like you’re in third grade?”

“Do you? Now you get the hell out of here and you don’t bother me no more, you understand that?”

When I got back to the office, I got out my list and added a few more items.

Why were Sara and Dierdre Hall so angry at each other?

Who paid Parnell the printing costs?

What happened the day Muldaur and Ned Blimes went snaking? Jamie had left me a typed note:

I Finisshed Up Tyyping Earlie

So Me And Tturc Went Swimming.

This Time Wit Our Close On.

He-he. I Cracked A Funnie,

Mrr C. Jamie

Well, she was coming along, anyway, God love her. A couple of times she’d even mistyped her own name-? Jammie” and “Jaamie”-s hanging around Turk-excuse me “Tturc”-was apparently starting to pay off. The first time I’d interviewed her for the job, she’d told me, “My dad says he hasn’t got a lot upstairs, Turk I mean, and maybe he doesn’t. But he’s got a lot of common sense. Like one day this big dog was really growling at me and he had this kind of foamy stuff dripping from his mouth. And you know what Turk said?

He said, “Don’t try to pet him or nothing, Jamie. He looks kinda mad.” See what I mean? He’s got a lot of common sense, Mr. C.”

The Common Sense Typing Method.

A volume that should be in every school library.

Between 2ccji and 3ccec I got four calls.

Two of the callers were clients explaining why they couldn’t pay me this month, and two were people who wanted to sell me some things. Maybe if the first two callers came through with money, I might be able to buy things from the second two.

I looked through some court documents the county attorney had shipped me; a dunning letter from my alumni association; a copy of Time with Ike on the cover. The Wwii people would always be my true heroes. Even a little town like ours lost twenty-eight men and women in the war. And you never forgot. Some people talked about their war experiences and some didn’t. But whether they held their memories public or private, they could never let go of them. There are some things you go through that change you forever -even if you don’t want to be changed-and war is one of them. My dad still has nightmares sometimes, my mom says, and they’re always about his war experiences. I didn’t agree with everything Ike believed politically but I admired him a damned sight more than I did showboats like Patton and MacArthur. MacArthur I gave up on when he said we should drop atomic bombs on China. He enjoyed war too much to be trusted. He loved posing against a backdrop of explosions and bombed-out people trooping down lonely roads. I always laughed about what Ike said when asked what he’d done as an Army captain in the South Seas during the 1930’s, when he’d served as MacArthur’s secretary: “I studied drama under General MacArthur.” MacArthur never forgave Ike for that crack.

Just before Sara Hall was due, my dad called and said, “Don’t forget Monday’s your mom’s birthday.”