Max Collins - Midnight Haul

Her head turned slowly on her neck as she looked at Crane; her movements reflected the sedation she was on — she moved like Lincoln at Disneyland: vaguely human, but not terribly convincing.

But she did manage a slow, small smile, recognizing Crane immediately this time.

“Nice to see you, young man,” she said. It was a voice you could barely hear.

He went over and sat beside her.

“I’m going to be leaving this afternoon,” he said. “And I wanted to stop by and say good-bye.”

“Kind of you,” she said. She was still smiling; the smile hung there on an otherwise blank face.

“I wish you and I could have gotten to know each other better.”

“Yes,” she said, but there was confusion in her face, now, and in her voice; she really had no idea why Crane wished he could have known her better.

So he told her: “I loved Mary Beth. Very much. We’d have been married soon.”

“I know,” the mother nodded, with her blank smile.

“And we’d have been family, you and me. I’m sorry that didn’t happen.”

Somewhere beneath the sedation, what Crane was saying began to sink in. The smile became less mechanical. Mary Beth’s eyes looked out of her mother’s face at him.

Then he was crying, and she was comforting him. Holding him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away gently. “Sorry.”

“I know,” she said. “Can I ask you something, young man?”

“Anything.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why did my little girl die?”

The question surprised him: he had no answer.

She said, “You knew her so well. Can you tell me why?”

“I can’t,” he said, finally. “I hoped I might find the answer here in Greenwood. But I don’t think I can. I hoped your daughter Laurie might’ve been able to tell me, but she couldn’t.”

“You hoped I might tell you, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, confessing to her and to himself, without saying so, that he’d come here today not to say good-bye really, but for one last try at finding the answer to the question that Mary Beth’s mother was now asking him.

“You lived with her this summer,” Crane said, looking into the sedated face and hoping to keep the person behind it in touch with him. “Did you know Mary Beth was depressed? Troubled? Laurie says there were some indications she was.”

The mother thought about that for a few moments. “She seemed a little down,” she said, gazing at the floor. “She talked about her father a lot. She said, two of her best friends in town, their fathers died of cancer, too. She said that more than once.”

“I see.”

The woman looked over toward Brucie and gestured slowly. “She was upset about Brucie’s problem. That made her unhappy. Sometimes she cried about it.”

“She never told me,” Crane said. “We spoke on the phone every week, exchanged our letters, but not a word about any of this.”

“I can tell you one thing,” the mother said, touching Crane’s arm, her smile anything but mechanical now, “she was never down after your phone calls. She was never down after your letters. She loved you.”

Crane held the tears back. “It’s hard to understand how she could love me and take away the one thing that was most precious to me: her.”

She touched his face. “She was sick. Like her father was sick. Just a different kind of sick.”

He hugged her. She hugged back. She was soft. He could’ve stayed in her arms forever; it was as close to Mary Beth as he could get, now.

He rose. Smiled, said, “I’d like to keep in touch.”

“That would be nice.”

“I have your address. Do you have mine?”

“Yes. Send a card at Christmas.”

“I will. You, too.”

“Would you like to hold Brucie before you go?”

“Uh, no. I wouldn’t want to disturb him.”

“He isn’t sleeping. Hold him for a while.”

She got up, moving like a film slowed just slightly down, and gave the bundled baby to Crane. He held Brucie. Looked at him. He was a beautiful baby. Happy. Look Ma. No hands.

He handed Brucie back to her and she took him in her arms and rocked him.

“Well,” Crane said. “I better say good-bye.”

“Good-bye, son.”

Back in the motel room, he sat on the bed and called to find out about the bus and the plane he’d be connecting with. Then he called his friend Roger Beatty, back in Iowa City, to let him know he was coming home.

“I’ll be waiting at the airport for you,” Roger said. “It’ll be good to have you back. There’s nobody here to go to lousy movies with me.”

He and Roger often went to the Bijou, which was a theater within the Student Union where old films were shown.

“I’ll be glad to be back,” Crane admitted. “This hasn’t been pleasant.”

“I can imagine. How’s her family? It’s just her mom and her sister, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. They’re doing pretty good, considering.”

“And how are you doing? Pretty good, considering?”

“I guess. I... well, I hoped to come away from here feeling I understood why this happened. But I don’t, really.”

“You’re going to drive yourself crazy looking for a reason, Crane. You know what Judy said?”

Judy was Roger’s girlfriend, a science major, Ph.D. candidate.

“No. What did Judy say?”

“She said one theory, which is I guess widely accepted these days, is depression comes not just from events in your life that get to you, but a biochemical breakdown in brain function.”

“Jesus that’s comforting, Roger.”

“No. I’m just saying that you want an answer. You want to find out, what? That she found out from her doctor that she had a month to live, so she killed herself. That’s the movies, Crane. I’m saying that, according to Judy at least, depression is a physical thing, not just a reaction to shitty things happening around you.”

“I see your point. Look, this is costing me more money than my ticket back. I better get off the phone.”

“Okay. But you don’t sound so good.”

“Well, fuck, what do you expect?”

“Get your butt home, Crane. Get home and forget about all this.”

“I will, but it’s just... there’s this girl. Woman.”

“Oh, really?”

“Give me a break, Roger. Her name is Boone. She was a friend of Mary Beth’s. She’s a fruitcake, is what she is.”

“What about her?”

“She told me something crazy.”

“Which was?”

“She told me Mary Beth was murdered.”

“What?”

“You heard me. She’s one of these leftist conspiracy nuts who thinks that the chemical plant everybody around here works for was behind Mary Beth’s death.”

“How so?”

“We didn’t really get into it. She’s just a flake, Roger. It wasn’t worth listening to, really.”

“Well it must be worth talking about, ’cause you’re doing it long distance.”

“It’s nothing. I talked to the local cop here who handled it, and he said it was a clear-cut, cut-and-dry case.”

“Really? How many suicides does a small-town cop like that handle, anyway?”

“More than you’d think. He said he’s handled five in a little over a year.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Oh. Nothing probably. Listen, what time should I be at the airport?”

“You were going to make a point, Roger. Make it.”

“Oh it’s nothing. Uh, tell me. What’s the population of that town? What’s it called? Greenburg?”

“Greenwood. 6000.”

“I see.”

“Roger.”

“Crane, it’s no big deal. It’s just that five suicides out of 6000 people is a high suicide rate. I mean, I’m a sociologist. I know these things.”