Ed Gorman - Wake Up Little Susie

That’s what she said, anyway. She was speaking to a peon so she didn’t have to worry. You know how bureaucrats are. But she won’t try that with the Judge.”

“Judge Whitney is some woman. I wish I could be more like her in some ways.”

I laughed. “Not all ways, huh?”

She smiled sadly. “No, I wouldn’t ever want to be as stuck-up as she is. You know, you think people are stuck-up sometimes just because they’re shy or because they’ve been hurt and they’re afraid to be hurt again. But with the Judge you know she’s stuck-up because she really does consider herself superior.”

“Oh, yes. Very much. Maybe it was all the Connecticut water she drank growing up.”

“Is there something wrong with Connecticut water?”

“Well, the longer you drink it,” I said, “the bigger your head seems to get. There must be a connection somewhere.”

The sad smile again.

When we reached her house, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a good man.”

“Thanks, Miriam.”

There were a lot of lies, social lies, I could have told just then but I didn’t have the spiritual energy. You know, that everything was going to be fine.

Mary would be fine. Bill would experience a miraculous recovery. And she’d open her bankbook and find an extra $100eajjj in her account, the angels having deposited it before fluttering their way back to heaven.

“Good night, Miriam.”

I returned her kiss. I started to get out of the car but she said, “I’m not quite that feeble yet, Sam.”

I watched her walk to the door. There were a lot of people like her in our town: good, solid, hardworking people who took care of their own. Her bad luck had bent her but it hadn’t beaten her. She moved slower than I’d ever seen her move before.

On the porch, after getting the front door open, she turned and waved back to me.

I went home.

TV had long ago signed off. The Cedar Rapid stations never broadcast past midnight; often they went off after the eleven o’clock news. I was drained but not sleepy. I spent half an hour twisting the rabbit ears back and forth, trying to form pictures out of the noisy snow on my screen. I had a pair of rabbit ears that were the envy of Mrs. Goldman’s apartment house. They must have weighed twenty pounds and had more buttons and dials and doodads and doohickeys than most intergalactic spaceships. If you knew all the right codes and combinations, it would also mow your lawn and give milk. It was quite a rig. Most nights anyway. But not tonight. Every once in a while, an image would sort of form and I’d hear dialogue and get my hopes up, but then the signal would fade and there would just be snow again. I gave up. That’d be one of the nice things about living in Chicago. You could watch Tv all night.

I sat in my reading chair and drank a beer.

So many questions, including the identity of the girl in the black Ford ragtop. Would I have been in the right spot to find Mary if the mystery lady hadn’t challenged me to a race? Was she some kind of guardian angel? And Mary’s amnesia. The doc was probably right.

Temporary amnesia was probably fairly common in accident victims. But it was still disturbing that she couldn’t recognize her own mother.

I picked up a John D. MacDonald novel called Dead Low Tide. I’d read it a couple of times before. I always came back to it. It made me feel better in the way saying a prayer made me feel better. The ritual of repetition. There are no heroes in John D. novels, and that’s probably why I like them. Every once in a while his man will behave heroically, but that still doesn’t make him a hero.

He has a lot of faults and he always realizes, at some point in every book, that he’s flawed and less than he wants to be. I think that’s why John D.’s books are so popular.

Because we all know deep down we’re sort of jerks. Not all the time. But every once in a while we’re jerks and we have to face it and it’s never fun. You see how deeply you’ve hurt somebody, or how you were wrong about somebody, or how you let somebody down. But facing it makes you a better person. Because maybe next time you won’t be quite as petty or arrogant or cold.

Good books are always moral, contrasting how we are with how we should be. And the good writer knows how to do this without ever letting on. All this is according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as taught in lively and deft style by Dr. Harold Gelbman at the University of Iowa.

Forgive me. It was late at night and I was in a ruminative mood. Creak of old house.

Jet plane far above roaring into darkness, contrail across prairie moon. Needing to take a leak but too lazy to get up. Hungry but too tired to fix anything. Sleepy now but too comfortable to walk to bed. Dozing with one cat on my lap, one cat on the arm of the chair, and one cat sleeping on the back of the chair with her head resting on the top of my head. And snoring. Cats can snore pretty good when they’re up to it.

And then the phone rang.

It’s a measure of how deeply asleep I was that I jumped up as if I’d been poked. The cats jumped up, too, scattered quickly.

I was baffled for a moment, staring at a small black jangling instrument I’d never seen before.

I couldn’t imagine what its purpose was.

And then I snatched up the receiver.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Hello!”

“Mr. McCain?” Very faint.

“Yes?”

“It’s me. Ellie. Ellie…

Chalmers.”

“Hi, Ellie.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“Just reading is all.”

Silence.

“Ellie?”

“Yes.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

“He’ll be mad if I do.”

“Who will?”

“My dad.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“I’m just scared is all.”

“What happened?”

“Sykes came to where Dad works today and hauled him out in front of everybody. They pick on him a lot anyway, on account of he was in prison.”

“What happened?”

“Sat in the squad car and accused him over and over of killing the Squires woman and now Squires. A lot of the men would sneak up to the door and watch Sykes workin’ him over. It hurt Dad’s feelings. Now he says Sykes is gonna arrest him for sure.”

“So what’s your dad going to do?”

Long silence. “Run away.”

“That’s the worst thing he could do.”

“That’s what I keep tellin’ him.”

“He won’t get far.”

“He’s got money. Somebody was out here today and left a package for him.”

“You know who it was?”

“Uh-uh. There was just this big manila envelope on the doorstep. Dad’s name on it.

There wasn’t any stamp or anything.”

“How do you know it was money?”

“I saw Dad open it and put it in his suitcase.”

“What’s supposed to happen to you, he runs off like that?”

“He said to go see you. That you’re his lawyer now and you’d know what to do.”

“I’m on my way out.”

“I’d really appreciate it.”

“You just hold him there as long as you can.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I appreciate the call, Ellie. You did the right thing.”

“He didn’t kill those people.”

“I know he didn’t, Ellie. I know he didn’t.”

Pale red fire bloomed in bursts against the dark moon-streaked sky. A war scene. It might have been night fighting in Korea.

When I reached the top of the hill looking down on Chalmers’s acreage, I saw the source of the pale red bursts: two police cruisers.

Because the house was isolated from its neighbors, there were no onlookers. A cop with a shotgun stood in front of the door. I pulled up.

“He ain’t gonna be happy to see you,” Pat Jarvis said.