Ed Gorman - The Day The Music Died

“Maybe you should talk to Renauld,” she said, opening the door and flipping the butt of her Winston out the door.

“That’s a good idea.”

“I just hope, if Kenny didn’t kill her, you find out who did.”

“So do I,” I said.

She was gone then, hurrying through the dusk into the lights and hustle of the supermarket where a hundred shoppers were trying to hurry their way home.

I drove past the police station. The big black Indian motorcycle, the one belonging to our esteemed police chief, Cliff Sykes, Jr., wasn’t there.

A block away, I pulled up to a phone booth. It was getting dark, cold-winter dark. Across the street was a small diner with a long, wide front window. Edward Hopper was my favorite painter and the window of the diner looked like something he would have painted; there were six, seven working-class men sitting at a long counter eating their dinner but not in any way communicating with anybody else. Totally isolated in this little strip of light in the otherwise black prairie night. Even the plump waitress in the pink uniform, standing alone by the cash register, seemed forever cursed by isolation and loneliness.

I put in my nickel.

“Hello?”

“Were you eating, Mom?”

“No, honey. But I’ll be putting supper on the table in about fifteen minutes if you want to come over.”

“I’m afraid I’m working tonight.”

“For yourself or the judge?”

I lied. “For myself.”

“Good. You’ll be on your own if you just keep trying. Won’t that be nice when you don’t have to work for the judge anymore?” Having grown up in the Knolls, my mother had no time for the imperious Whitneys.

“Is Ruthie there, Mom?”

“No, hon. I’m afraid she already left for the library. Said she had a lot of homework to do. School seems to be getting her down this year.”

“Oh?”

“She looked so tired lately. And her appetite’s awful.”

“How’s Dad?”

“Well, Cheyenne is on tonight so he’s happy. You know how he likes his westerns.”

The judge had been nice enough to give me a good bonus at Christmastime. I’d finally been able to replace my family’s old 12-inch Arvin with a brand-new 21-inch Admiral console. Now Dad could really enjoy his westerns.

“We’d like to see you sometime, hon.”

“I know, Mom. It’s just I’ve been so busy.”

“Well, the water’s boiling over on the potatoes. I’d better go grab them. Thanks for calling.”

I spent a lot of time in the library when I was a kid. I liked books. But I also liked girls and the library was a good place to sit with a book and watch girls troop in and out. I think even back then, I was looking for a girl to make me forget Pamela. She was never a girl from the Knolls, though. She had to be better than the Knolls. Just as, for Pamela, her ideal man had to be from old, secure money and reputation. Sometimes I wondered if that was the only thing Pamela and I had in common, our shallowness.

On a cold winter night, the steam heat was turned all the way up and the pipes clanked ferociously. The library was built with a Carnegie grant right after the turn of the century.

It was still a pleasant place but it was starting to get too small. At dinnertime, the library was largely empty. I couldn’t find Ruthie anywhere on the ground floor. I paused long enough to look over the best sellers, from Majorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk to Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. I’d still take John D. MacDonald and Peter Rabe.

I went upstairs, to the reference section.

Ruthie sat at a long table near the back of the second floor. She looked up when I started walking toward her, my slushy shoes squeaking on the floor. She was reading a book. As soon as she saw me, the book was closed and quickly put on the empty chair next to her. Whatever she was reading, she didn’t want to share it with me.

I sat down. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How you doing?”

“Just studying. You know, for a test.”

“So what’d you do with the Potassium Permangatel?”

“The what?”

“The stuff you stole from Rexall’s.”

“Oh. It was for a science experiment. You know, at school.”

“What kind of experiment?”

She looked at me steadily for a long moment.

“You going to tell Mom and Dad?”

“No.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You ever stolen anything before?”

“No.”

“You plan on stealing anything else?”

“No.”

Now I looked at her steadily for a long moment. “So what’s going on, Ruthie?”

“It’s just all these tests. I’m worn out.

That’s why I took that stuff at Rexall’s.

One of the girls at school told me it was really good stuff if you were rundown. Said she got all her energy back.”

“So it’s for energy?”

She nodded.

“I thought it was for a science experiment.”

“Well, I used it for the experiment and for myself.”

“And you didn’t have enough money?”

“Right.”

“Or you wouldn’t have stolen it?”

“Right.”

“Ruthie, we’ve had a charge account at Rexall for years.”

“I mst’ve forgot.”

“I love you, Ruthie.”

“I know you do.”

“So be honest with me. Whatever it is, I want to help you.”

She shrugged. “It was just for a science experiment.

I mst’ve forgotten about our charge account. I needed to get back to school right away.”

I stood up. She looked happy I was going. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”

I like the second floor of the library. One has the sense of timelessness there. The dust and the opaque windows, the neat and hushed rows of books. It’s like being inside the time capsule they buried over at Runyon Park last summer.

But the library time capsule would be filled with Chaucer and Melville and Poe and Dreiser and people like that. There was something almost religious about a life of contemplation and every once in a while I wished I was monastic. I knew it wouldn’t last much longer than a day or two and then I’d be wanting to see the new Tony Curtis at the Strand or buying the new Everly Brothers record or the latest Shell Scott novel.

But it was nice to think about sometimes.

I found what I wanted and came back.

“Guess what I did,” I said.

“What?”

“Looked up Potassium Permangatel in the medical reference book.”

“Oh.”

I put my hand on hers. “Maybe we should go for a ride.”

“A ride? What for?”

“So we can talk.”

“We can talk here.”

“No, we can’t,” I said.

We went outside. Four boys were having a furious snowball fight. They stopped abruptly when two girls walked by. The girls, who obviously considered themselves more mature than the boys, rolled their eyes at the very idea of snowball fights.

We walked to my car.

“Your car is always so cold,” Ruthie said.

“Not in the summer.”

“Very funny. And it happens to be winter.”

We got in.

“God, can you turn on the heater?”

“It’s on. It just takes a while to warm up.”

“I’m sorry I’m so crabby.”

“You’re always crabby. It’s part of your charm.”

“Not this crabby.” Then, “You know, don’t you?”

“Yeah. The medical reference book.”

“What’d it say?”

“Well, you know, about douching.”

She sighed and looked out the window. “Just what I always wanted to have. A conversation with my brother about douching.”

“Maybe later we could talk about menstrual cramps.”

I was driving out the river road. The ice-covered river was beautiful in the silver moonlight. The heater was roaring. It was still colder than hell in the ragtop. The seats were like ice.