Эд Горман - Fools Rush In

“I didn’t know she was a drinker.”

Renning nodded. His rug moved a half inch down his forehead. “The woman who identified her, her sister, said that Rachael here was in AA and had been up to that clinic for alcoholics in Mason City. Twice, in fact.”

First her husband had beaten her up with his fists. Then she’d beaten herself up with liquor.

I became aware of where I was. The bodies in the drawers. The terrible cold stench of the place. The hum of gurney wheels as corpses were moved around, the efficiency of it all as depressing as the sight of a man and woman weeping on the other side of a glass door as I’d come in. Weeping silently because I couldn’t hear them, a scene from an ancient silent movie.

But mostly I was aware of poor Rachael, the left side of her face almost black with bruising from her accident. And various other bruises and small cuts up and down her body. Meat now. Just human meat. I wish Dylan Thomas had been right about death not having dominion. But that was just a poet’s fancy to put up against eternal darkness. Death has plenty of dominion. Plenty.

“Got a suicide I need to check out,” Renning said, his toupee looking like a squirrel sprawled over his bald pate. “We about done here, Sam?”

If there were a list of Top Ten Barbershop Topics over the past few years it would include the birth control pill (“Shit, why didn’t they have somethin’ like that when I was young; McCain, your generation’s got it knocked!”); the Berlin Wall (“Who gives a shit? After what the Krauts did, screw ’em!”); Ernest Hemingway (“All the money and all the broads that guy had and he kills himself?”); the recent trip by Rick Paulson to the Playboy Club in Chicago, the first of our townspeople to enter those sacred doors (“Hefner just walks around in his tuxedo with that damn pipe of his and the gals are all over him!”); and the recent murder of Medgar Evers (“I think the colored people are pushin’ it pretty hard these days but I don’t hold with no murder.”).

“That wife of Williams’s didn’t look so snotty when I seen her at the post office yesterday, I’ll tell you that much.”

“’Bout time we got a Democrat in there, anyway.”

“I had a daughter seein’ a colored boy, I’d whip her ass good.”

“I can tell you I’d take a couple of colored boys I used to serve with in Korea over some of the white boys around here.”

“They say in France they treat Negroes just like white people.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the French. We had to save their ass in the big war and they never have thanked us.”

“I don’t want to be nowhere around ’em. I don’t like lookin’ at them or talkin’ to them or even thinkin’ about them.”

“Segregation’s good for them. They do better when they’re with their own.”

“Ike was the one who named that son of a bitch Warren to head up the Supreme Court. He’s the one who started all this.”

“My son in Des Moines says my grandkids go to school with colored kids and they all get along just fine.”

“Look at Sammy Davis. He don’t care who knows he’s married to a white woman.”

“Well, they fought in the war just like I did. They shouldn’t get shoved around the way they do. You see them little kids when they get them hoses turned on ’em? I went south one time and you can keep it. Didn’t care for one bit of it.”

“I’ll take Nat ‘King’ Cole any day. He’s my kind of colored man. A gentleman.”

“I hear a couple of those bikers really had it in for that Leeds kid.”

Somehow, if you listened long enough and carefully enough, you heard the kind of prairie debate that was going on, in a more sophisticated way perhaps, all across the country. You heard the men good and true and the men confused and struggling and the men who hated, one or two of them who might even be capable of violence against Negroes in the great wrong moment.

And once in a while, no matter what the subject was — and it could be anything from did Marilyn Monroe really commit suicide to why Roger Maris really was entitled to that home run record after all — once in a while you really learned something specific and useful.

In this case, it had to do with David Leeds.

“Hey, Karl, where’d you hear that?” I asked just as Mike was using the whisk broom on me.

“About the bikers and the Leeds kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Out to Savio’s, getting a tune-up. One of the bikers was in there. The one wears the bandana around his head like an Indian? Name’s De Ruse, you know the one I mean? After he left, Savio told me that when De Ruse was drunk he talked a lot about killing Leeds. He doesn’t go for white gals and Negroes gettin’ together. Savio said he saw De Ruse out in that area near those cabins when he was driving home around the time Neville and Leeds got killed.”

“He really said that about De Ruse wanting to kill him?”

“He sure did.”

One of the old gents laughed. “You’re forgetting you’re talkin’ to a private investigator, Karl.” And then the inevitable: “I always thought Mike Hammer was taller’n you, McCain.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m a lot handsomer.”

That got the kind of laughs and smiles a wise man uses as his exit line. Old vaudeville truism.

“Hey, McCain, didn’t one of them bikers get arrested already?”

“Yeah, but as usual Cliffie arrested the wrong one.”

I got another laugh at that one.

“So what’ll it be?” the cutie in the pink ruffled blouse and matching pink Capri pants asked me when I was two steps across the threshold of Gotta Dance Studio! She had dimples you could hide quarters in and happy little breasts that said, “Glad to see you.” You could tell she hadn’t worked here long. Chick Curtis hadn’t been able to browbeat all happiness out of her yet.

She asked her question while she was still walking across the shining hardwood floor where instructors and students came together.

“You can see our list right up there on the wall. You can learn any three dances today for only nineteen ninety-five. I’m Glory, by the way.”

The list was long if nothing else, and carefully hand-lettered on a white length of cardboard.

The Stroll

The Twist

The Monkey

The Jerk

The Watusi

The Mashed Potato

The Shimmy-Shimmy

The Dog

The Pony

“You look like you’d be a good dancer,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“Oh, you know, just the way you move.” She seemed flustered, as if nobody had ever questioned her ability to spot good dancers. I could see why Chick had hired her. Even in her early twenties she’d retained a bit of the innocence and freshness of a much younger girl. How anybody as seedy as Chick had ever come by her, I was afraid to guess. (WHITE SEX SLAVERY IN AMERICA! the supermarket tabloid had cried last week.)

“And there’re a lot more dances, too, on a sheet I can give you.” Then: “Oh, darn!”

She ran over to a bulletin board filled with black-and-white Polaroids of couples who’d become Chick’s Cool Ones. The odd thing was that most of the Cool Ones appeared to be in their forties and fifties. Well-dressed, middle-class folks clearly trying to capture the Kennedy mystique, Jackie Kennedy having been filmed on dozens of chi-chi dance floors twisting the night away with movie stars, political figures, and various members of the Kennedy clan. So now the Lincoln and Cadillac doctors and CEOs and real estate rich of the Midwest were rushing to grab a little bit of that Camelot luster for themselves.

I tried not to stare at her friendly little bottom as she bent to right a photo that was falling off the bulletin board. I would learn anything she cared to teach me, even, God forbid, the shimmy-shimmy.