Ed Gorman: Save The Last Dance For Me

The voices of the girl singers were my favorite parts, high-pitched wails relating tales of doomed lovers and the men who enslaved them. The lyrics were changing now, influencing country music and being influenced by it at the same time. This was the music of a subculture that would never become mainstream. To find life as it was lived a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, you didn’t have to travel far.

I saw it peripherally, not sure at first that I did see it, the big man who’d guarded the church door leaning over to slap a small woman, hard, across the mouth. This was in the far shadows, beyond the wall of crunched and crushed vehicles they drove. They stood between two such vehicles.

They were easy to see.

It was just at that moment that Cliffie started baying orders for all the people who’d been inside the church to start giving statements to his men-first cousins, second cousins, shirttail cousins-who were now moving among the flock with ball-point pens and nickel back-pocket notebooks. Cliffie had once seen Bci agents do this and had forever after imitated it. Hey, this idea of interviewing witnesses seemed like a pretty neat-o keen idea. Boy, where was this scientific detection stuff going to end, anyway?

“You mind if we leave? I’m getting kind of tired.”

Kylie’s voice broke somewhere in the middle of that last sentence and then she did something I’d never seen her do before. She started crying. Not hard, not loud, mostly just large, gleaming tears collecting in the corners of her dark eyes. She didn’t wait for my answer. “C’mon,

McCain, let’s go, all right?”

It is a strange summer for me. The girl I’ve loved since grade school is in Kansas City, hiding out from the scandal of running off with our town’s most important lawyer.

Married lawyer, I should add. Two kids and all. Lawyer and wife have made up. The beautiful Pamela Forrest is, however, pretty much gone forever. Mary Travers, the girl I should have fallen in love with-z much as you can determine something like that, I mean-is getting married to the man whose father owns the local Rexall plus a whole lot of other property in the county. She still loves me, or so she said the last time I saw her, but I’ve screwed up her life too many times as it is.

And the other day I was sitting in the backyard of my folks’ place and I started to study them. Not just look at them. Study them. And see how old they’re getting. And I felt scared and sad and lonely because they’re such good people and I sure don’t want them to die. And Mrs. Goldman, my landlady, about whom I’ve had more than a few erotic fantasies, went to some kind of cancer meeting in Iowa City-her sister recently died of cancer-and she came back with those sticker decals you put on your medicine cabinet mirror, Cancer’s Seven Danger

Signals. And put them on every medicine cabinet mirror in the house, including mine. And I started thinking about it. I mean, she meant well. But I started thinking about it. That I could die, too. That it wasn’t impossible for a twenty-four-year-old to pass over.

And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs.

I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.

And now here I am with Kylie, whom I have this sort-of stupid half-assed crush on even though she’s married and I sure don’t want to get involved in anything like that, and we’re just riding the prairie night with the top down in my red Ford ragtop, taking the long way home at her request, out on the blacktop that runs between the woods and the river, the moon high and round and silver-gold, and the cattle and the horses lowing in the farmyards, and a lone motorboat out on the river, its wake phosphorescent as it cuts the moonlight, and I’m wondering if Kylie feels as lonely as I do at this moment.

She said, “This feels good.”

“Yeah. It does.” Though I wasn’t quite sure what “x” referred to.

“Everybody should have a convertible.”

“Can’t disagree with you there.”

“Even the pig shit smells sort of good tonight.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that myself. Boy, this pig shit really smells good tonight.”

She slugged me on the arm.

She didn’t say anything for a time, we were just cruising along the river, and there was this houseboat then and even from here you could hear the Latin music and the people all laughing, and she said, “I wish I was out there.”

“On the houseboat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How come?”

“Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”

“What you’ve got is some sort of secret, don’t you?”

She laughed. “Cliffie Sykes, Jr.,

Herpetologist. Samuel McCain,

Mind Reader.”

“So you going to tell me what it is?”

“No. Because if I do I’ll get sad again.

And I don’t want to be sad for a while.”

“I don’t blame you there.”

“Sometimes, it feels sorta good to be sad.

You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“But most of the time it just feels like shit to be sad.” Then, “Could you turn up that song? I love it.”

Fats Domino. “Blueberry Hill.”

I got her home about half an hour later.

She lived in a cottage isolated on the edge of a creek and snuggled between elms. There was an old swing set in the side yard. You could almost hear the happy squeals of kids from other times.

Every once in a while, tired of newspapering, she’d say, “I should just pack it in and have some kids, McCain.” She hadn’t said that for some time.

The house was dark. Her road-weary

Dodge sat in the grassy drive. Chad’s car wasn’t there. Chad taught English at the University of Iowa, forty-five minutes away. He was one of many grad students there writing a novel on the side. We’d never cared much for each other. He was this big, blond guy who dominated every room he was in with his harsh opinions and uncharitable evaluations of everybody around him. I think the word I’m struggling for here is jerk. He caught me reading a Gold Medal paperback by Charles Williams at the Rexall lunch counter one time and has ever since called me, with great scorn, “The Gumshoe.”

I planned to tell him someday that Williams was a better stylist than he or his fellow wanna-bes would ever be. But I was waiting till I got my full growth before I did. He was something like six-two.

“Guess Chad’s still in Iowa City, huh?”

I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Probably working on his novel.”

“You know better than that.” Not looking at me.

Just staring at the dark house.

“I do?”

“You’re not exactly an idiot, McCain.”

“I’m not?”

“Chad’s got himself a girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what he’s doing in Iowa City.”

“You sure?”

“I skipped work one day and went to Iowa City and followed him around. She lives off-campus.

They spent all afternoon in her apartment. She’s a junior. Really beautiful.”

“Maybe it’s not what you think.”

“All afternoon and it’s not what I think?”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“Kill him is what I should do.”

It was a night of fireflies and frogs on the cusp of the creek and boxcars rattling through the darkness up in the hills. The ragtop idled a little rough. Tune-up time.