The Day the Music Died (12 page)

“Probably.”

“Boy, that’s really reassuring, McCain.”

“I’ll go check.”

“Oh, McCain—”

She grabbed me and held on to me. “You sure you want to do this over some stupid snowball contest?”

Every other winter around here, somebody drowns trying to walk out on the ice. One year, two teenaged valedictorians drove their car out on the ice. I didn’t want to be this year’s dummy. “I’ll just go out a foot or so. See what it’s like.”

“Just be very careful.”

“I will.”

We walked over to the snowbound rise above the pond and then stepped ponderously down the small hill until we reached the ice.

“You really want to do this?”

“I’ll be fine.”

But talking about it sort of spooked me. What if I walked out there and dropped straight down to my icy death?

I decided to get it over with. I walked to the pond’s edge, and for some reason looked up at the full moon. And just then the coyote chose to cry again. And that spooked me a little. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Maybe he had psychic powers, the way those ads in the magazines claim you can have for only $1.99. Or you can get a truss or a bust enhancer, just in case you’re a little skeptical of the psychic powers deal.

I went out one foot, two feet, three feet. It felt as solid as the rink ice.

“C’mon back, McCain. Don’t go any further.”

“It’s perfectly safe.”

“I thought I heard a crack,” she half-shouted.

“It’s your imagination.”

“C’mon, McCain, please come back.”

“I’ll be fine.”

And I was.

I got bolder with each step. The ice felt perfectly solid. I kept walking toward the canoe. I even put on a little skit for Mary. “Oh, my God! The ice is cracking!” And I started windmilling my arms like I was going to sink into the water.

“McCain! McCain!”

“I’m just kidding. I’m fine.”

And to demonstrate that I was fine, I slid across the ice on my boots, right up to the canoe. Oh, I was the dashing one, I was, showing off for a girl the way I used to try and show off back in seventh grade. I was pretty good at sliding, too. I put on a regular show for her; all the while she kept shouting at me to be careful. And all the while I enjoyed her shouting because it made me feel so manly, the carefree adventurer striking terror in the heart of the woman who loves him so much. Move over, Robert Mitchum.

And that’s when both things happened. I saw the dead girl in the canoe. And the blood all over her tan skirt. And I felt the ice start to fold under me. And that crack that Mary had mentioned hearing? Well, all of a sudden, I was hearing it, too.

And then Mary wasn’t alone. Shouting, I mean. I was shouting, too.

Could I pull myself back up without pulling the entire canoe down on top of me and sinking myself to the bottom of the deep, dark pond?

D
ON’T PANIC: THOSE WERE
the two words I remembered from Boy Scout camp. When you find yourself in a dangerous situation, keep your head and don’t panic.

But of course I panicked. Natural human reaction after being dumped into deep and icy water.

I wrapped my arms around the end of the canoe and hung on. I did my best not to move. Every time I shifted even slightly, I heard the ice crack some more.

I could hear Mary hollering for help and that was about all.

And then I took hold. The rational part of me did, anyway. I decided that if I could stay absolutely still I’d be all right. I occupied my time by trying to get a better look at the dead girl in the canoe. I thought of the girl missing the next county over. There was at least a chance it was her.

Mary was at the canoe, jerking a wooden oar out. Walking carefully over to me. I guess her slight weight kept her from breaking through the ice.

She pushed the oar at me and said, “Just grab on to it, McCain.”

“Thanks, Mary.”

It always looks easy in the movies but it’s not, pulling yourself out of icy water with whatever safety device is thrown to you. For one thing, you’re cold and soaked and about as mobile as a block of concrete. For another, your hands are numb, so it’s hard to get a grip on anything.

Mary stayed calm. And she looked very pretty doing it, her cocked beret and elegant face outlined in the moonlight. But she was all work: no slacking, no wasted words. She was slowly pulling me back to the ice again.

I finally got the middle of my body even with the ice and, between her pulling on the oar and me grappling with my elbows, I was able to pull myself up. I collapsed on the ice for a few moments, my breath coming in terrible shaken gasps. I heard the noises my lungs and throat were making. I didn’t know human beings could make noises like that.

“I don’t know how strong this part of the ice is,” she said. “Maybe you’d better get up now, McCain.”

“God, thanks for saving me.”

“I couldn’t just let you drown,” she said. She smiled. “Though sometimes I’ve thought about it.”

I slowly got to my feet. “What’s that sound?”

“Your teeth.”

“My teeth?”

“They’re chattering.”

I hadn’t known until that very moment that teeth actually do chatter.

The flashlights were like insect eyes coming at us through the dark woods. All I could think of were those hokey earth-invasion movies at the drive-in. I just hoped these folks wouldn’t be wearing papier-maché masks. They’d heard Mary’s calls.

They came out of the woods in silhouette. You could see their silver breath and you could see the insistent bobbing eyes of their flashlights. But there was no human detail. They could have been phantoms.

They were shouting now, mostly things like “Are you all right?”

A few of them hit the ice and started walking tentatively toward us. One of the women had thought to bring a blanket. When she saw me standing there soaked from the waist down, she forgot about the ice and walked out to me. She threw the blanket over my shoulders. “Bring that thermos over here!” she called to somebody on the edge of the pond.

Matt Tjaden was the man who brought the thermos out. He’s the county attorney and plans to run for governor someday, sooner rather than later. He was the Kiwanis Club’s Man of the Year for the entire midwest two years ago. The only club I’ve joined since reaching my majority is the Science Fiction Book Club, which is to say that Tjaden and I don’t have a lot in common. I suspect he’s a decent guy when he’s not being official, but I’ve never had the chance to find out. He’s the stalking horse for the Sykes clan and I’m the unofficial representative of the Whitneys.

“I’ve always said you were all wet,” Tjaden said. “And now you’ve proven my point.”

“Har de har har,” another guy said. “Just give him the damn coffee, Matt, and spare him the jokes.”

Tjaden has the kind of bland Van Johnson good looks that old ladies like and men don’t dislike. He probably believes at least half the corny things he espouses, and if he isn’t especially bright, he also isn’t especially mean or vindictive, which is a lot more than you can say for the Sykes clan. The only time he can get you down is on the Fourth of July when he gives his inevitable death penalty speech right before the fireworks. If Tjaden had his way, we’d be hanging people every other week. Tjaden sees our state’s unwillingness to execute more people as “the subtle and nefarious influence of Communism.” The quote by the way is from J. Edgar Hoover. I think Tjaden carries a photo of J. Edgar in his wallet.

Tonight, Tjaden looked like a skiing ad in
Esquire
magazine. He had on some very fancy red and blue ski togs and some blue boots that came up to his knees. He looked like a superhero in a comic book. Except for his slight jowls. And slight paunch. And slight baldness. And slight nearsightedness. After he poured me a cup of coffee, he started telling people to go back to the rink, that everything was under control here.

I said, “There’s something we need to talk about.”

“You should be more careful, McCain.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“You’d never catch me out on this ice.”

“I hate to point this out,” I said, shivering inside my blanket, “but you’re on this ice now.”

“Oh,” he said, and then looked down at the ice. “Well, you know, I mean standing where the ice is weak.”

“There’s a body in the canoe over there.”

“What?”

“A body.”

“Dead?”

“No, she’s sunbathing.”

“Who is she?”

“I was going to find out but then the ice gave way.”

He looked over at the canoe. “You think it’s safe to go over there?”

“If we walk wide and come in from the north.”

“God, this town is going to hell in a handbasket. First, Kenny Whitney goes nuts and kills his wife and himself, and now there’s a dead girl in a canoe.”

What I really wanted to do was go home and soak in a hot bath and drink some brandy while steaming out the head cold that was already mounting a cavalry charge.

Tjaden wouldn’t go to the canoe. I had to do it. This time, I got a good look at the girl. She wasn’t at all familiar. She was probably Ruthie’s age. She had on a winter coat but it was open. I had an irrational thought, about how cold she must be. I wanted to put my blanket on her. Then I remembered that she was dead.

I moved closer. In the moonlight, the blood that soaked her tan skirt looked black. There was blood all over her hands and legs. Her white blouse was clean, as was her face. I wondered what could have caused this much blood.

I walked back up and grabbed the stern of the canoe and dragged it across the ice. I pulled it up on the snowy shore.

“God Almighty,” Tjaden said. “Look at that blood.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“You see any bullet holes or cuts or anything?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither,” he said.

Then he got pious on me. “The way girls run around today, just like our pastor says, you dress like a whore, people are just naturally going to think you are a whore.”

“She isn’t dressed like a whore.”

“If she’d stayed home and done her schoolwork at night, she wouldn’t be in this canoe right now.”

“What if she died during the day?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t die during the day.”

“How do you know?”

“I can just tell is all.”

Who needs scientific detection when you’ve got Tjaden around?

I heard voices.

To my right, coming down the hill from the gravel road that fronted this section of timber, I could see more flashlights bobbing in the gloom.

“Looks like Cliff,” Tjaden said.

“Thank God,” I said. “We’re all saved.”

“He’s a lot better lawman than you give him credit for, McCain.”

“That wouldn’t be hard, since I don’t give him any credit at all.”

It was Cliffie all right, gunbelt slung low, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He still wasn’t wearing a jacket. My hero.

“What happened to McCain?” he asked Tjaden.

“Fell in the pond.”

Cliffie smiled at me. “Too bad he didn’t drown.”

I wondered if Tjaden would do one of his har-de-har-har routines.

Two other people came up behind Cliffie. One was Paddy, Sr., from the bar and the other was Jim Truman, the handyman.

Paddy didn’t bother with amenities. He went right over to the canoe and looked down at the girl. He looked over at me. “This looks like somethin’ that coon friend of yours might’ve done.”

“We don’t even know that it was foul play yet,” I said.

“All that blood and it’s not foul play?” Paddy said. “You’re some goddamned lawyer, you are.”

“Any of you ever see her before?” Cliffie said, playing his flashlight on her face.

Everybody took a turn gawking at her. Each shook his head.

“Still think you should look up Darin,” Paddy said. “You know how them bucks like white gals.”

Jim Truman came up and said, “Paddy, I sure don’t know why you’re always on that colored boy’s case. When he’s sober and all, you couldn’t ask for a nicer young boy.”

Paddy looked disgusted. “You plannin’ to go down to Memphis and help out the jigs, are you, Jim?”

Way back before the Civil War, some Iowa farmers used to shoot any slave hunters they’d find. They figured anybody who’d profit on runaway slaves deserved to be shot.

Cliffie smirked. “I’ll bet ole Jim here’s got a taste for dark meat.” Then he looked over and saw Mary coming back our way. “I’ll get an ambulance out here. Get her over to the doc’s for an autopsy.”

I sneezed.

“Aw,” Cliffie said, “the counselor’s getting a cold.”

“C’mon,” Mary said, sliding her arm around my blanket-covered body. “I’ll walk you up to the road and then I’ll go get your car.”

“I’ll stay warmer if I walk, too,” I said.

So we started to leave.

“That’s three bodies you’ve been involved with today, McCain,” Cliffie yelled after us. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say our counselor has turned mass murderer.”

The walk back was even colder than I’d expected. When we got to the rink, a lot of people came over and asked us about the rumors of a dead girl found in a canoe. It was like a press conference. I was freezing. Mary kept trying to drag me away, telling everybody about how cold I was. But they had just one more question. And then one more. And so on.

She drove to my place. We turned the heater up so far it sounded like a B-52 engine.

She knew just what to do. While I got out of my wet clothes, she was in the bathroom running hot water into the tub. I grabbed a bottle of brandy from the cabinet, a couple of glasses from the kitchen and the portable radio from my bedside.

She said, “Get in. I’ll pull up a chair out there and we can talk through the door.” She smiled. “That way you can remain modest and virginal.”

It worked out well, actually, the water steaming hot and all. I think I invented a few new swear words in that moment of torture when flesh first met water. But I gradually got used to it. I started sipping brandy and then I started feeling warm.

What we talked about was the Knolls and what it was like growing up there and how, for all the poverty and occasional violence, we’d actually had some pretty good times. She made me remember people and moments that came back to me vivid as snapshots. She even brought back certain smells and sounds. She didn’t talk about us, not about a romantic us anyway, and I appreciated that because every few minutes Pamela would come into my head. I’d see her or hear her and then Mary wouldn’t be there anymore. It would be Pamela.