Ed Gorman: Save The Last Dance For Me

Then she was up and gone to the dark cottage, cursing when the key didn’t open the front door first try, exploding into sobs once she was inside.

I thought of going in after her but she probably wanted to be alone. I liked her and I felt sorry for her. The good ones always get it.

Maybe the Reverend Thomas C. Courtney could explain that one in one of his sermons. Why the good ones always get it. Or maybe I could put in a long-. tance call for John Paul Sartre and he could tell me.

I went home.

Judge Whitney called me early the next morning and told me what she wanted. Soon after the call I ate breakfast at Also

Monahan’s. Al lost both his legs on Guam but the way he gets around in his wheelchair should qualify him for the Indy 500. People, including the wasp Brahmins, started going to Also’s out of duty and pity. But they kept coming back because the food’s so good. Al and his harried crew have the most successful restaurant in town.

When I got outside on the street again with my toothpick and my Lucky, my easy-over eggs and toast sitting just fine and dandy in my stomach, I saw three middle-aged men standing beside a small black car, assessing it. There’d been an advertising sign for the Edsel-? Rock and Roll, Sputnik, Flying Saucers, and now the Edsel!”-t had irritated the old-timers. But that was because it reminded them of their age, and seemed to exclude them from driving such a youthmobile.

The Volkswagen this trio was looking at was controversial for another and far more serious reason.

Men their age had fought hard to defeat Germany, leaving many of their friends behind on European soil.

Now here came the krauts insinuating their way into the American economy with their undersized, underpriced cars that were threatening to displace a segment of the American car market. The fear was that these little cars would ultimately throw a whole lot of American workers out of jobs. I didn’t have to stop to hear the dialogue. I knew it by heart.

And agreed with it. “This was the car that Hitler had built for his people. They shouldn’t be allowed to sell it over here.”

I was glad to get into my red Ford and head out to the edge of town. It was a butterfly morning.

In places beneath heavy branches the shaded areas still gleamed with dew. All the early-morning kids on their trikes and bikes looked fresh and alert at the top of the day. A skywriting plane was writing “Make it Pepsi!” The radio was wailing a great old Elvis tune “I Want You, I Need You, I Love Y.” The Church of

Elvis. I was a faithful communicant.

I tried not to think about rattlesnakes or Kylie’s unfaithful husband or my loneliness.

I just tried to enjoy the day, the way all the positive-thinkers like Pat Boone tell you to. His best-seller of advice to high-schoolers “Twixt Twelve and Twenty” had teenagers laughing from coast to coast.

And I did, too, all the way out to the trailer behind the church where Muldaur had died last night. The exchange of gunfire, however, took the day down a notch. Even Pat Boone would have to admit that gunfire tends to put a pall on a nice day.

Six or seven quick shots burnished the air.

It was a butterfly day out here, too.

Except all the butterflies were hiding behind boulders so they wouldn’t get hit in all the gunplay.

The first thing that came to mind was the Hatfield-McCoy feud of lie and legend, two hillbilly families that warred with each other generation unto generation. They came to mind because the trailer resembled a shack, patched as it was with cardboard, sheet metal, stucco, anything that could be adhesed, nailed, or otherwise appended to the rusted-out abode. A shotgun poked from its lone front smashed window.

Then there was the motorcycle with a sidecar. A very small man, not much bigger than a munchkin, looking an awful lot like Yosemite Sam with his long red beard and floppy battered hat, crouched behind his cycle, firing away with his shotgun at the trailer. What you have to understand here is that neither party was seriously trying to hit the other. Nobody’s aim could be that bad. The sidecar was more interesting than the gunfire. From it stuck the barrels of at least eight or nine long rifles, shotguns, and even-I kid you not, as Jack Paar likes to say-a hunting bow. As in bow and arrow.

The first thing I considered was the health and well-bbing of my ragtop. I swung back in front of the church and parked it there. Then I snuck around the side where I could be seen and heard. The folks firing the guns were under the impression-probably correct-t out here in the boonies nobody would bother them. Hell, nobody would probably hear them.

But being the good-citizen type, I raised my voice and said, “If you people don’t put your guns down I’m going to call Sykes and have him come out here.”

“Viola! Viola! Who the hell is this guy?” shouted the man with all the weapons.

“He works for Judge Whitney!” a female voice from inside the trailer shouted back.

“Judge Whitney! She’s the one threw me in the jug for lumpin’ Bonnie up that time!”

“Lumpin’” in mountain language means putting lumps on another person’s body.

“We better stop firin’, Ned!”

“Put your gun down and walk away from your motorcycle,” I said. “With your hands up.”

“You ain’t even got a gun,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“And you ain’t even much bigger’n me, either.”

“Right again, pal. But it’s me or Cliffie.”

He frowned and spat a stream of tobacco that was probably carcinogenic enough to scar the earth forever.

“Cliffie. One day me’n that sumbitch is gonna tangle, I’ll tell you that.”

“Away from the motorcycle. Hands up.

Now.” I said it just the way Robert Ryan would h.

Cliffie loved beating up people who didn’t have the education or the money to fight back legally. A man like this would give Cliffie plenty of thrills.

He moved away from the motorcycle. With his hands up.

“Now, you come out of the trailer,” I said.

“With your hands up,” Ned said. Then to me, “I gotta have my hands up, they gotta have their hands up.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

There were two of them, mother and daughter, the Muldaurs. They wore the same kind of tent-dresses they’d worn last night, the kind that hides bodies too big, shame dresses really.

“C’mon over here,” I said. “I want you folks to tell me what’s goin’ on.”

“I want my money,” Ned said.

“What money?”

“Money their mister owed me for snakin’.”

“I thought Muldaur did his own snakin’.”

“He could handle ‘em but he couldn’t find ‘em.

I took him out with me about six months ago and he couldn’t find nothin’. Not even a garter snake. Muldaur’s the only one made any money that day.”

“He paid you what he could,” Viola

Muldaur said. She had a wide, Slavic face that had likely been pleasant before hard times had taken their toll. It was too easy, what with her snakes and all, to dismiss her as an alien of some kind.

“So he paid you to find them?” I said.

He nodded. If he weighed 120, 100 of it had to be dirt, grime, slime. The ratty red beard had things crawling in it. The gums looked charred-yes, folks, charred-andthe one blue glass eye managed to appear goofy and sinister at the same time. He wore a filthy cotton vest with nothing but scrawny, hairless chest beneath, and a pair of Sears Roebuck jeans even more vile than the vest. And no shoes. His toenails had some kind of luminescent green-blue fungus growing on them. I’d be proud to have him in my family.

“He owed me for that last batch.”

“And you came here with your shotgun?” I said.