Max Collins - Midnight Haul

“Mary Beth said you were a journalism major. You really do know a little bit about what’s going on in the world. Not much, but a little, anyway.”

“Well why don’t you bring me up to your level of awareness, then? If that’s possible without dropping acid.”

She flinched. “I said I was into the anti-war movement, way back when. I didn’t say I did dope.”

“Forget it. Go on.” Crane wondered why dope was a sore point with Boone; but she was talking again...

“Agent Orange is an herbicide. We dumped forty-four million pounds of it on Vietnam. To kill the plants, so we could see the people better, to kill them, too.”

“Don’t take this wrong,” Crane said, “but it was a war. Killing the enemy is the point in a war.”

“The point is that undeclared war was supposed to be saving a country for democracy. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that one of the ways we saved that country for democracy was to dump poison on it? Poison that killed plants, and animals, and people, and caused miscarriages and raised the infant mortality rates and...”

“And Kemco made this stuff?”

“One of the major suppliers, yes. I remember when they came to our campus in the early ’70s, recruiting, and we protested. And nobody protested harder and louder and better than Patrick. Nobody.”

“Only now he works for them. For Kemco.”

“Right.”

“He took the job and you divorced him.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“I’ll tell you what it was like. He told you he’d work from within. Change the system by getting inside the system. That he’d cut his hair and put on a three-piece suit and be quietly subversive.”

He’d struck another nerve: she got up and walked over to him and looked down at him with a stone face and said, “I didn’t leave him, Crane. He left me. Because I wasn’t the corporate wife. I didn’t adjust to the life-style. I couldn’t entertain his business associates. All I could do was spend my time writing my ‘little articles,’ as he called them, for what remains of the radical underground press.”

She sat next to him.

“He bought this house, you know,” she went on, “and filled it with modern furniture. Can you image? This house must be seventy, eighty years old — it’s beautiful — and he fills it with modular this, and modular that. The son of a bitch. He sold me out. He sold us all out. Himself especially. That’s the worst fucking part.”

“People change.”

“Oh, fine. People change. They drift apart. Like in, one of them stays in Iowa and digs ditches, and the other one comes home to New Jersey and slashes her wrists.”

It hit him like a physical blow. She saw it and said, “Sorry. Sorry. I keep taking it out on you, don’t I? Mary Beth didn’t get depressed and kill herself, Crane. Kemco killed her.”

“Yes, well,” Crane said, rising. He handed her the half-empty glass of juice and said thanks.

“You’re writing me off as a nut, aren’t you?” Boone said, quietly, calmly, following him to the door.

“Good night, Boone,” he said, and let himself out.

“You’ll be back,” she said from the doorway.

He’d have felt better about it if there had been some hysteria in her voice, when she said that; some bitter craziness.

But there wasn’t.

“They killed her, Crane,” she called out to him. Quiet. Sane.

He walked away from the house and crossed the quiet town and went to his motel room and tried to sleep.

Waking up came as a surprise to Crane: he didn’t remember falling asleep and, for a moment, didn’t know where he was. Then the yellow walls brought the motel back to him. He sat up in bed. He had a sense that he’d been dreaming, but he didn’t remember what about. He did know that he was glad the dream was over.

He got up and showered and put on his jeans and a shirt and stuck his head out the front door. A brisk morning, but he wouldn’t need a jacket. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes after ten. Had he slept that long?

He sat back down on the bed, feeling disoriented, off balance. He didn’t feel so hot, his stomach grinding at him. Then he realized, suddenly, that he hadn’t eaten yesterday.

He walked from the motel to the business district, five blocks of double-story white clapboards, an occasional church and the constant trees for which Greenwood had undoubtedly been named, a few of which were turning color as fall took hold. The business district took up a couple of intersecting streets and consisted of old buildings with new faces: hardware, florist, druggist, accountant, insurance, jewelry, medical clinic, pizza place, laundromat, one of everything, and two each of bars and cafés. An American flag drooped outside the Wooden Nickel Saloon, an old brick building painted white with a Pabst sign in the window; next door was a unisex hairstyling salon. Across the street was the Candy Shop Restaurant, a two-story brick building with a white wooden front and a green-and-black striped awning that said: “Since 1910.” A neon sign, circa 1940, said candy in yellow, soda in red and lunch in yellow. He went in.

On the right was an old-fashioned soda fountain, with a mirror wall behind it upon which magic marker menus were written; on the left, a “penny candy” showcase — the penny candy starting at a nickel — and an oak cabinet displaying everything from sunglasses to aspirin. There was a high, white sculpted ceiling and walls that were dark wood and mirrors, with booths on either side of the long, narrow room, with porcelain counter tops and reddish brown leather seats.

Behind the soda fountain was a man about seventy with white hair and a white coat and wire-frame glasses who was probably called “Pop.” Crane felt like Andy Hardy.

“Help you?” the man in white said, his voice high-pitched and forty or fifty years younger than him.

“Can I still get breakfast?”

“Sure. Take a booth and the girl will be with you.”

None of the five seats at the counter was taken, but several of the booths were; there was a cop in one of them, drinking coffee and looking at a paper, a guy in his mid-twenties, thin, dark. Crane took a booth.

The person “Pop” had referred to as the “girl” turned out to be a friendly heavy-set woman about fifty. Did this make “Pop” sexist? It was a mystery to Crane. He ordered eggs and bacon and juice and got it quickly, ate it quickly.

Then he went over to the booth where the cop was sitting. The cop looked up from his paper and coffee with a smile, then realized he didn’t know Crane and his expression turned neutral.

“My name’s Crane. I’m from out of state.”

The smile came back, tentatively. “Sit down, Crane. I bet I know who you are.”

The cop had the first real New Jersey accent Crane had run into in Greenwood.

“You do?” Crane sat.

“Mary Beth’s boyfriend. Here for the funeral.”

“You knew Mary Beth?”

“Just to say hello to. My younger brother was in school with her. Beautiful girl. What a waste. I’m really very sorry, Crane.”

Crane glanced at the front of the cop’s uniform to see if his name was there.

The cop picked up on it, smiled again, said, “Name’s Ray Turner.”

They half rose in the booth and shook hands.

“I wonder if you could give me some information, Officer Turner.”

“Ray. Sure, if I can.”

“I’d like to talk with the officer who was called to the scene when Mary Beth’s... when Mary Beth was found by her family.”

“You are talking to him.”

“Oh?”

“That’s right. I handled that.”

“I didn’t expect to stop the first cop I saw and...”