Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“What do you mean?”

“I got brains!” he said, poking a thumb at his chest, hard, like that was where he kept them. “She had money. I offered her a business proposition, and she was too stupid to take me up on it.”

“What sort of business proposition?”

“Why should I tell you this?”

“Would you rather tell it to Sheriff Brennan?”

His dough boy face went slack with concern. Self-concern. “Do you think she was... murdered or something?”

“Or something,” I said. “Tell me about the business proposition.”

His shoulders sagged. “I’ve been developing my own computer programs.”

“Such as?”

“You wouldn’t understand, you dumb ass. Suffice to say I was seeking backing, to package and sell my wares.”

“Suffice to say. Why go to Ginnie?”

“She had money! She just sold that shop, didn’t she? She had money.”

“She turned you down.”

That pudgy face turned into a scowl; it was like seeing a Cabbage Patch doll get pissed. “She didn’t just turn me down. She laughed at me. Said I was... pathetic.”

I knew how he felt; she’d called me that once.

“We fought.”

“Fought?”

“Don’t make anything out of it, Mallory. We had an argument. Words. Like we been having since I was six and she was four, okay? We never got along.”

“Then why’d you ask her for money?”

He looked shocked. “Hell — family’s family, isn’t it? Blood’s thicker than water.”

Ginnie’s was; I’d seen some of it at her farmhouse last night.

His cigarette was down to the butt; he tossed it at the street, trailing orange sparks. Another car with boys and heavy-metal music rolled by.

“If you were such a great friend of hers,” he said, dripping sarcasm, “where were you when our father died?”

That had been last October; I’d been at a convention.

“I was out of town,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt anyway.

“Did you come around and see Mom? Did you go see Ginnie?”

“I sent your mother a card,” I said. “And I called Ginnie. If it’s any of your business.”

“You don’t like it so much when somebody asks you questions,” he said, and waddled inside.

I sat on the steps of the funeral home.

Ginnie’s father.

Jack Mullens. What a great, great guy. Took me fishing once when I was thirteen; let me, a junior-high kid, sit in and play poker with him and his friends, more than once; made me feel like an adult. I could see his blue eyes, under the shock of red hair, in a face full of faded freckles, smiling, the butt of a cigar clenched in his teeth as he studied a hand of poker like it was his private joke on the rest of us. It usually was.

Ginnie and her old man were close, very close; she disdained her mother as an unimaginative housewife, tied to her home and her son and her bottle. A symbol of everything the new liberated female wanted not to be. But Dad, wheeler-dealer Dad, hustler Dad, a born salesman, most of his life spent on the road, he was a guy who knew how to live life to the fullest. He’d died in a head-on collision with a livestock truck; he’d only been going 55, the cops said. That was his age, as well.

I went in and said goodnight to Mrs. Mullens, gave her a kiss on the cheek, smelling “medicine” on her breath, and nodded to her lump of a son. I paused at the casket, the closed casket, but somehow couldn’t imagine Ginnie in it.

Then I went home and tried to write, tried to get the new novel going, and couldn’t.

I lay in bed thinking about the last time I saw Ginnie, thinking about my class reunion.

The class reunion had been held at the local Elks Club, a massive two-story brick building facing Mississippi Drive, overlooking Riverview Park, which overlooked a Mississippi River view, as chance would have it. It was a cool June evening, and under a full moon the river looked gray and was stippled with gentle waves; I felt strangely detached. Somewhere between an out-of-body experience, and watching a rerun of a TV show you hadn’t much cared for the first time around. I was alone. Most of the people getting out of the cars filling the Elks parking lot were paired off. I wasn’t half of a married couple, however; I was a complete single male. Technically complete, anyway.

I felt a little awkward about the whole thing. I’d purposely missed the ten-year reunion, having just had a rather nasty experience with an old girl friend from my high school days. Actually, she went back to my junior high days, but had haunted me through high school as well. Then, ten years later, she and her larcenous husband reentered my life, and, well — that’s another story.

Anyway, on the off chance that Debbie Lee would be at the ten-year reunion, I’d made sure I was out of town that weekend; later I learned that she hadn’t attended (probably ducking me just as I was ducking her) but that a number of my old buddies had made a trip back to Port City, some of whom I hadn’t seen since graduation. I was sick about missing them, and pledged (to myself, and a few people who checked up on me later to see why I’d stayed away) to attend the fifteenth reunion.

And, so, now I was here. There was to be a dinner, a banquet, so I’d worn a navy sports coat and gray slacks and white shirt, and a skinny red tie I’d had for years, but which was passing these days for “new wave.” Even so, I was a little underdressed. It was like a latter-day prom — guys in suits, their “ladies” in gowns, or damn near. There were, of course, a few exceptions; Ginnie, among them, in her layered earth tones and funky jewelry, the late sixties meets Annie Hall in a health food co-op. Her red hair was a mid-sixties shag, and she wore almost no makeup, just freckles and a face that I suddenly realized for the first time in my life was very beautiful. Before this, I’d always looked at it and had just seen Ginnie; now I realized she was a stunning girl. Woman. She hadn’t been a girl for a long time, really — not since I was a boy.

“Looks like you’re another single-o,” she said, finding me in the mob in the wide Elks hallway, slipping her arm in mine. “Let’s pair up.”

“Why not?” I said, and pecked her on the cheek.

A hundred or so “kids” thirty-three to thirty-five, most of them my former classmates, were waiting to go into the dining room. The walls herding us in were papered in a garish red with brocade fleurs-de-lis; in big fancy gold-filigreed mirrors, we looked back at ourselves and saw how old we were; subdued electric lighting hiding in elaborate glass chandeliers attempted to work a soft-focus magic on us. But it wouldn’t take: we just weren’t eighteen anymore. We weren’t even twenty-five anymore. Nobody thirty-three to thirty-five likes to think it, but we were middle-aged.

“Shit,” Ginnie said.

“You’re that glad to see me?” I asked.

We were still arm in arm.

She said, “I was just thinking how old we’re all looking.”

“You look about thirteen.”

“It’s the freckles. You’d never know I was a thirtyish junkie.”

I looked close at her, trying not to seem to be, wondering if she was kidding.

She looked around her, a child taking in her surroundings. “Boy, I haven’t been in the Elks Club since the prom. They remodeled since then, didn’t they?”

“Appears so. Quite the decorating scheme.”

“Early Whorehouse,” she smirked, nodding toward the red brocade paper. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dolly Parton came down those stairs with her personality hanging out.”

We were in fact at that moment being herded slowly past a wide stairway on which some of our former classmates sat, uncomfortable in their suits and fancy dresses, looking like old kids, but chattering like young ones. The racket in the hallway was less than deafening, but just barely. Faces were overly animated, as current personalities faded and old, younger ones reemerged; the return of youthful personas made the age lines stand out even more.