Эд Горман - Fools Rush In

Marie Leeds’s hotel had a taproom full of road-weary salesmen, half of whom stood at one end of the bar and told dirty jokes, the other half of whom sat at the bar and stared at their drinks, as if by trying hard enough maybe they could levitate them.

We were sitting at one of those knee-knocking little cocktail tables that get wobbly pretty fast. A candle encased in a tube of red glass flicked rose-colored light across our faces.

“How about we start with your real name, since you aren’t really his sister.”

“The first name really is Marie.”

“Gosh, I know we’re on the right track now.”

“And my last name is Denham.”

“And you knew David Leeds how?”

She leaned back and picked up her package of Tareytons, got one going, put an explosion of smoke in my direction, and said, “I was his English teacher in high school. He came from a bad home situation. I sort of adopted him. I gave him the small apartment above my garage and that’s where he spent his senior year.”

“His folks didn’t have any objections?”

“His father was dead. His mother was an alcoholic and not easy to get along with. We had our battles, she and I. David made the mistake of telling her he had a crush on me. It didn’t last long, but the damage was done.”

“She thought you were sleeping together?”

“Yes.”

“Were you?”

She smiled. It was slow and sweet, that smile, suggestive of whatever you wanted it to suggest. “I wish I could say yes. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently. David was extremely impulsive. He never got into big trouble, but he certainly got into his share of scrapes. Maybe it would have allowed me to keep tighter control of him.” The smile slowly disappeared. “But, no, I didn’t. My mama didn’t raise me to do things like that.”

“Why did you register at the hotel here as Leeds?”

“Because I was pretending to be his sister.”

“You mentioned scrapes. What kind of scrapes?”

“Girl scrapes mostly.” She smiled. “He wasn’t just handsome. He was Negro and handsome. A lot of white girls were curious about that. But he also got into scrapes out here. Somebody at the hotel told me David caught Hannity cutting the tires of his scooter. I guess Hannity’s a pretty big guy. But David was so mad he plowed right into him.”

“When was this?”

“My understanding is that it was a couple of weeks ago.”

Rob Anderson’s father had hinted that Hannity might be worth checking into. The two young men hadn’t been together during the time of the murders. This had all been self-serving, a dad trying to help his son, but Marie had given me one more reason to look Hannity up again. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t get my own tires slashed. I rented a car this afternoon and drove around. Most of the people were very nice to me. But there’re a few — they always want you to apologize somehow for existing because you’re different than they are. And they think they know you just because of your skin color. And worst of all, they hate you. You can see it in their eyes. You’re something vile to them. I’m not sure I could live in your town.”

“You just said it was a minority of people who were like that.”

“That’s all it takes, Sam. A handful. Being just as hateful as they can be. The Klan doesn’t have all that many members, but they’ve never been stronger because we’re finally standing up for our rights. It doesn’t take many bad guys to cause a lot of pain and consternation. Look at poor Medgar Evers.”

“I’m sorry for the bad ones you met here.” I laughed but without pleasure. “The old love-hate thing I have for this town. Most of the folks here are decent. Not saints, nothing like that. Decent people. But there are always a few—”

“Hannity and Anderson might get away with it because their people have money and influence.”

“In most cases, money and influence can buy you out of trouble. But not a double murder like this. Every paper in the state is covering this. The race angle’s in everybody’s mind. Anybody who’s charged will be prosecuted right up to the maximum sentence.”

She put her cigarettes in her purse and sat up straight, with her hands folded in front of her. She was ready to shove off.

“Those Freedom Riders, that’s why most people around here’ll want to see justice. Even some of the folks who hate us see what’s happening to the riders and Dr. King and they know it’s not right. They’re doing our suffering for us.”

“You’re probably right. A lot of the haters probably don’t like watching fire hoses and dogs put on little kids.”

Her smile was bitter. “Thank God for the wee ones. They can get to adults the way we can’t. It’s the old plantation thing — the pickaninnies sure are cute till they grow up. Then they’re just more colored folks to put the lash to. David paid the price for that. He stayed real cute right into his twenties and somebody around here didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all.”

Clammy sweat. Otherworld darkness. Nightmare. My conscious mind trying to reject — to banish — the hellish sounds that forced blood to run dripping from my ears. The cats were in my nightmare, too, each of them crawling beneath the covers to free themselves from the tortured voice that refused to stop.

And then I was sitting up and wide awake the way movie people always are right after nightmare time. Disoriented for a few moments. Trying to comfort the cats that now clung to me as if I were their father.

And still that noise—

Aw, shit.

And then I realized what it was. Kenny Thibodeau’s new girlfriend Noreen De Grasso, who fancied herself the nation’s only serious rival to Joan Baez in the folksong singing business.

Trying to untwist my boxers, I stomped over to the open window next to the back door. Had to be 100 degrees in here and it was nearly ten at night. The window air conditioner Mrs. Goldman had bought for my apartment was brand-new not long ago and was already in the shop getting repaired. She’d let me pick out the one I wanted. Some picker-outer.

I found a pack of smokes on the kitchen counter and fired one up before I yelled down there and told them to cool it.

But the way they were passing that half-gallon jug of Gallo back and forth, it was unlikely they even heard me.

Finally Kenny looked up and saw me in the window and waved.

“Hey, man, we’ll be right up!”

This was how I’d lived for six, seven months — this being a few years before even Mary dumped me — after it became clear that the beautiful Pamela Forrest and I were never getting married. I had planned, in my early twenties, to try to become something remotely resembling a grown-up. But the heartbreak was such that all I wanted was to stay numb. Kenny was eager to show me the wastrel route and I went along willingly.

That six or seven months was a frenzy of self-indulgence that was at least manic and maybe even clinical. In memory, everything runs speeded up, the way the old silent films look to us today.

Piling in and out of cars, apartments, movie theaters, taverns, the abodes of girls you were somewhat serious about, the girls you selfishly used for lonely sex (and who were using you right back the same way) — anything and everything was never enough. Two hours’ sleep before you went to work? No sweat, man. Your car never having more than a quarter tank of gas because you’d spent all your money on girls and beer? Cool. Waking up on the floors of strangers and strangers waking up on your couch and pissed in their psycho hangovers because you weren’t serving breakfast, and their girlfriends commandeering your toilet for an hour or two—

And the people you only vaguely remember through the haze of alcohol — my haze was pretty transparent; two beers and I was drunk and doing my yodeling impression — loners and losers and grotesques and dangerous people who somehow stayed with your group through barhopping, dancing, pissing in tavern parking lots, breaking up fights, starting fights — somehow they were always with you. One night this guy pulled a knife on Kenny because he said Kenny’s porno was grabbing the money and attention that he, the knife-wielder, should rightly claim for his own writing, which just happened to be Literature. Another night I’m in bed with this girl who was far gone drunk but still very sexy and when I rolled over there was a steely lump of something beneath the sheets and it turned out to be a .38 because “I always take a gun along with me the first time I sleep with a guy because he might be, you know, creepy or something.” True tales of the bedroom. Would-be communists, anarchists, pregnant girls stepping out on their husbands (more true bedroom tales), and of course the entire range of ex-cons you always stumble on in the taverns where the girls go.