Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

Dixie shifted into her southern accent and said, “May I speak to Dr. David Pease? This is Mrs. Nelson Wigmore? Mr. Jack Adair’s niece?”

When his stainless-steel Omega Seamaster said it was exactly 6 A.M. on Monday,the fourth of July, Merriman Dorr grabbed the rope with both hands, pulled down hard and rang the old schoolhouse’s cast-iron bell.

By the ninth pull, which now was more yank than pull, the big bell’s clangor and peal were being answered by the distant howls of at least two dozen dogs. Dorr rang the old bell faster and faster, yipping and howling back at the dogs and occasionally bursting into snatches of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Dixie” and “God Bless America.”

He rang the school bell for exactly ten minutes. At 6:10 A.M. he marched to the old schoolhouse flagpole, ran up the Stars and Stripes and stood at rigid attention, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Still at attention, Dorr gave the flag a snappy salute and a look of utter adulation. He also gave it a glorious smile that easily could have been worn by either a devout patriot or, as some suspected, a nut.

After a smart about-face, Dorr marched back to the front entrance of Cousin Mary’s, still wearing his Glorious Fourth smile, but thinking now of breakfast that would include fresh orange juice, pork sausages, blueberry pancakes, two or three eggs, lightly basted, salt-rising bread toast, and at least three cups of coffee. After that he would go downtown and watch the parade.

The parade began forming at 9 A.M. down near the Southern Pacific tracks and Durango’s former train depot, which had lost its purpose, if not its usefulness, when the railroad concluded there was no longer any profit in hauling humans.

The depot had been transformed into Durango’s Tourist and Cultural Center. This lasted until the city discovered that it served precious few tourists and provided no culture to speak of. After scrapping the center, Durango rented the depot in rapid succession to a head shop, a sushi bar, an adult bookstore, a Tex-Mex cafe and an acupuncturist. All of them failed. The depot now housed the city’s Venereal Disease Control Center, which Sid Fork and others usually referred to as the clap clinic.

The parade would have begun as scheduled, at 10:30 A.M., if twelve-year-old Billy Apco’s mother, a single parent, hadn’t had to deal with a flat tire on her Ford Bronco that took her and Billy fifteen minutes to change. But since Billy was the one who beat the bass drum in the Kiwanis-sponsored Fife and Drum Corps, the consensus was to delay the parade’s start until he arrived.

The parade’s route would take it straight up North Fifth Street through the heart of the business district until it reached Handshaw Park at around noon, where it would disband and Mayor B. D. Huckins, speaking from the bandstand, would deliver what the Durango Times had said would be “brief patriotic remarks.” The mayor’s audience would be lured to the park by the promise of free hot dogs and soda pop, courtesy of the Safeway and Alpha Beta supermarkets, and five-cents-a-plastic-cup beer for adults, a traditional courtesy of the Blue Eagle Bar.

Jack Adair and Kelly Vines, glasses of draft beer in hand, stood outside the Blue Eagle, waiting for the parade. A little behind them and to their left was Detective Joe Huff, looking far less bald and a bit less professorial because of his Chicago Cubs baseball cap and huge cigar. To the right of Vines and Adair was Detective Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, whose height enabled him to see over the heads of the parade watchers who were lined up one-deep at the curb.

Leading the parade was a color guard composed of American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars members, all of them old enough to have fought in either World War Two or Korea. After the guard came the Pretty Polly’s Sandwiches and Pies float, one of the nine commercial floats in the parade. Then came “The Wild Bunch,” a geriatric biker’s club whose members all rode Harleys, followed by the Durango Palomino and Philosophical Society, which boasted some beautiful mounts; the Kiwanis Fife and Drum Corps, with Billy Apco banging away on his big bass drum; the splendidly costumed Gay Vaqueros, who were excellent riders and outrageous flirts; more floats; the mayor, riding on the folded-down convertible top of a 1947 Chrysler Town and Country; the chief of police, waving from the back of a 1940 Buick Century convertible; the members of the City Council, riding together and grinning like fools in an open carriage drawn by two fine bays; a troop of Boy Scouts; a bicycle club; fourteen clowns who belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and gave away Hershey Kisses and Fleer’s bubble gum; and, finally, twelve barely pubescent baton twirlers who twirled to the strains of “Colonel Bogie” as played and whistled by the Rotary Club’s Drum and Bugle Corps.

After the parade went by, Adair, Vines and Virginia Trice walked to Handshaw Park, trailed by Detectives Bryant and Huff. They ate free hot dogs and drank five-cent beer while listening to the city attorney introduce Mayor B. D. Huckins.

Quoting Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Bruce Springsteen, Huckins gave what Jack Adair decided was the best eight-minute all-purpose political speech he had ever heard.

“She’s not only got a good voice and a great delivery,” he told Kelly Vines, “but she also knows a secret that ninety-nine percent of today’s politicians have either forgotten or never knew.”

“Which is?” said Vines, slipping into what he was beginning to regard as his customary straight man role.

“She knows how to leave them wanting more,” Adair said. “And any politician who can do that these days can get reelected forever unless, of course, as the ex-governor of Louisiana says, they find him in bed with either a dead woman or a live boy.”

At 12:31 P.M., just after her sister finished her brief patriotic remarks in Durango’s Handshaw Park, Dixie Mansur turned off U.S. 101 at the Kanan Dume Road exit in Agoura and crossed over the freeway to the Jack in the Box where Theodore Contraire had said the black Cadillac Seville would be parked.

As promised, the 1986 Cadillac was parked behind the restaurant. Dixie got out of her husband’s white Rolls-Royce, locked it and, carrying the same plain shopping bag Contraire had given her, went into the Jack in the Box and entered the women’s toilet.

No one in the place noticed the brown-haired woman in the wrinkled, frumpy-looking tan linen suit and the green-tinted glasses who came out of the toilet five minutes later. Nor did anyone ever remember that she went around to the rear of the restaurant and got into the black Cadillac instead of the white Rolls she had arrived in.

The key to the Cadillac was in the ashtray, just as Contraire had said it would be. Dixie started the engine, checked the gas gauge, which registered full, backed out, crossed over U.S. 101 and, after less than a mile, found the winding narrow blacktop road with no shoulders that led up into the brown hills.

Dixie had left San Diego and the home of her weekend hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Reva Moussavvis, at seven that morning, cutting her visit short with the plausible excuse that she was growing more and more worried about the holiday traffic.

At exactly 12:46 P.M., which made her one minute late, she turned the Cadillac into the Altoid Sanitarium, went past the twin stone pillars, up the zigzag drive and parked the Cadillac directly in front of the massive redwood door. She slid over into the passenger seat and inspected herself in the sun visor’s vanity mirror, pushing the tinted glasses up her nose and watching them slide back down. She also examined her new brown eyes, courtesy of the contact lenses, and her newly lined and tanned face, which she decided was one of modern chemistry’s minor wonders.