Ed Gorman - Save The Last Dance For Me

Except people in those westerns didn’t wear pink hair curlers that made them look like Martians, or Cubs baseball caps and Monkey Ward sleeveless undershirts that emphasized hairy, beachball-like stomachs. And in westerns Annette Funicello wasn’t playing on car radios.

Main Street was empty otherwise, and shadowy, and like the people in the crowd, it suggested a movie, too, small-town Americana. I glimpsed a shooting star and then heard the steady sound of a plane lost in the clouds. Any kind of plane sound suggested only one thing to Americans these days. That’s why we taught civil defense in our schools-? Duck and cover”-and that’s why forty percent of us, according to the Eastern newspapers, were busy building some form of bomb shelter. There were a lot of jokes going around about what Hugh Hefner would put in his bomb shelter.

One of Cliffie’s cousins-a dense deputy named Jebby Sykes-stood in front of the front door of the jail with a shotgun in his arms.

He didn’t look scared. He looked sleepy and he looked rumpled.

“Hey, where you goin’, McCain?”

“Little pecker, he thinks he’s hot stuff, don’t he?”

“Him and that damn Judge Whitney!”

I should have known that it would not be the hard-working people of town who would tumble out of bed in the middle of the night to see somebody prominent thrown in jail.

No, it would be Cliffie’s vast array of cousins, shirttail kin, and mutants who would find this so thrilling. Just imagine, one of them high-tone women who bathed regularly and wore clean clothes spending the night in Uncle Cliffie’s jail. Who could ask for a bigger thrill than that?

“You got cause to be here, McCain?”

He got all swole up the way unimportant people do when they’re trying to be important, all swole up with his badge and his wrinkled uniform and his Remington shotgun, all swole up keeping the hair-curlers and the Cubbies caps at bay, all swole up because nobody had ever let him be before. And it was almost sad. That was the terrible thing about the Sykes family. But every once in a while their coarseness, vulgarity, greed, ruthlessness, and stupidity made you sad, too. They were, in the cosmic sense, your brothers and sisters. And there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it.

“I’m supposed to meet Judge Whitney here, Jebby.”

“She’s inside. But that don’t mean I got to let you in.”

“Are you still mad because I caught your fly ball that day?”

“You damn right I-” Then stopped himself.

“What fly ball he talking about, Jebby?” said a mostly toothless man.

“Never you mind, Cousin Bob,” Jebby said.

He looked pained. “Cliff said I was to pack you people up in your cars and get you back home.

Otherwise he’s gonna gnaw on me somethin’ terrible. Now, will you do that for me?”

“Maybe she’ll try’n escape,” somebody said.

“Yeah, and then Cliff would have to shoot her,” said another.

“Now, we wouldn’t want to miss somethin’ like that,” said the first.

Jebby scowled.

“She ain’t gonna escape. She’s really ladylike. How’d she ever get outta jail?

No, now you folks get back home before Cliff gets mad at me. Please. I promise to have my mama make you some of her special rhubarb pie for the family reunion this year.”

“Enough for everybody, Jebby?”

“Enough for everybody.”

A woman said, “You know how Cliff can be on people who work for him. Maybe we better leave Jebby here alone.”

“She escapes, though, don’t forget them dogs of mine,” a man said.

I wanted to ask if anybody had any tanks or B-52’s. Sara Hall was a dangerous woman. You couldn’t be too careful.

They all said their good-nights, and now there was something peaceful about them and their shabbiness made me feel guilty for always holding myself to be so superior to people like them, and then they left.

“That was a home run. You stole it.”

“I didn’t steal it,” I said.

“It was over the center field fence.”

“Yeah, but I caught it, didn’t I?”

He looked at me squarely. He was just faintly cross-eyed.

“That would’ve been the only homer I ever hit.

I wanted my folks to be proud of me. My daddy was at that game. He had that heart condition.

I wanted him to see me do good at somethin’ because he always said I was like him, that I wasn’t good at nothin’. He died about two weeks later.”

Ninth grade that had been. Ten years ago.

I’d felt so damned good about making the catch, all the way back to the wall in the American Legion baseball park built over by the old swimming pool, all the way back to the wall, snatching it from being a certain home run. God, I’d strutted around. Major leagues, here I come. But knowing all the time that I was just about like Jebby, I wasn’t much good at things either, not the manly things so treasured by all boys, not good with hammer, not good with football, not good with car engine, not good with simple physical labor that required even the dimmest skill. And for that wonderful moment-my teammates patting me on the back and telling me what a great player I was-I was good at the manly and thus important things. It had been pure fluke to catch it and now here was Jebby telling me that it had been pure fluke to hit it.

“God, I’m sorry I brought it up,

Jebby. I just said it to piss you off.”

He shrugged. “I don’t blame you,

McCain. Neither of us was worth a shit.” He smiled. His slightly crossed eyes smiled, too. “It was time for one of us losers to have a little bit of luck, wasn’t it? You was never mean to us Sykeses the way some of them was, so if anybody had to catch that homer of mine, I’m glad it was you.”

Then he stood back and said, “The Judge, she’s in Cliff’s office.”

The Judge was in Cliffie’s office, all right. He was crouching in his desk chair, doing everything but covering his face with his arms, while she shouted at him and blew Gauloise smoke in his face. Not even his crisp khaki uniform and all the framed photos of him holding various types of rifles, shotguns, howitzers, could make him look in control of this moment.

“The idea of arresting one of this town’s most upstanding citizens-and my best friend-is ridiculous. You know and I know, Cliffie, that this is just one more of your little games to embarrass me as the only intelligent representative of law and order in this town!”

Oh, she was blistering. Oh, she was bombastic. Oh, she was absolutely right.

What sort of reason would Cliffie have for arresting poor Sara Hall? And she did all this in a white shirt, dark slacks, and a blue suede car coat that cost a lot more than my ragtop.

“You always have to arrest somebody, don’t you, and it’s always the wrong person, isn’t it?” she concluded.

Which is what I asked him as soon as the Judge saw me and gave me the floor. “You had to arrest somebody, didn’t you, Cliffie? You just can’t let a few days pass without throwing somebody in that pigsty of a jail of yours, can you?”

“We clean it once a week. And we clean it good.”

“Yeah, but the drunks puke in it every night,”

I said.

“I don’t want to coddle prisoners the way you two do. The smell of puke’ll be an incentive to stay out of jail.”

The Judge looked at me and said, “He’s medieval.”

“And moronic.”

“And malevolent.”

“And malignant.”

“And a lot of other M words,” she sneered, “if we just had time to go through them all.”

With “malevolent” and “malignant”

Cliffie’s face had gone blank. He was still trying to figure out what they meant.

“I’m holding her on a charge of first-degree murder,” he said, sitting up straight, trying to convince us, and himself, that he was back in control.