THE CALL CAME AFTER I’d been asleep for about two hours. I woke dazed and confused, the way you get when you’re sleeping off whiskey. Not that I get that way very often. Two drinks, I go to sleep. Three drinks, I generally throw up. My dad’s the same way. Heredity, I guess. For the sake of everybody concerned, I mostly stick to Pepsi.
A sunny dawn sky was at the windows of my apartment, bare black branches like antlers on the panes. I cleared my throat and said hello.
“I’m sorry to bother you, McCain, but I need you to throw your clothes on and get out to Kenny’s place.”
She didn’t need to identify herself. There was only one voice like hers in the entire state. Not only was it imperious, it was somehow Eastern too—Smith College, I think—though she’d lived here all her life, Judge Esme Anne Whitney.
Tasha and Crystal, my cats, were lost among the muss of winter covers, yawning and stretching and deeply resenting being awakened at this time. I’m not a cat guy, actually. Samantha, a local community college drama star, left them with me when she went to Hollywood to become a movie star. She writes me every six months or so to tell she’ll be sending for them as soon as director Billy Wilder gives her a part. She’s fixated on Billy Wilder. Meanwhile, I have the cats, and, worst of all, I’ve started to consider them family. I know guys aren’t supposed to like cats (out here, you still occasionally find the stout masculine type who goes out and shoots cats), but I can’t help it. They’ve won me over.
“Does it have to be right now, Judge?” I almost asked, “I just got to sleep.” Then I stopped myself. If I admitted to being out that late, I’d not only have to get dressed, I’d have to listen to a sermon while I was fumbling around with my clothes and shoes.
“Eight hours’ sleep should be plenty for an active young man like yourself, McCain.”
“Yes, I guess it should.”
“Kenny seems to be having some kind of difficulty.”
“Your nephew, Kenny?”
“Yes, my nephew, Kenny. I know you two don’t like each other much but he seems to be—hysterical.”
Her nephew, Kenny, had given me my one and only shiner. Eleventh grade. Mr. Stearns’ civics class. Kenny and I had started arguing about civil rights. Kenny had a vast ship upon which he wanted to put all Negroes, non-English speakers, atheists, union members, communists, Jews, Catholics and people who’d ever refused to cooperate with the House on Un-American Activities. He inherited his beliefs from his father, Judge Whitney’s brother, who was head of the local bar association. I made a few points that got Kenny snickered at. One thing a Whitney can’t abide is being ridiculed. Kenny waited for me in the parking lot, in full view of Pamela Forrest. Kenny was starting fullback for our Wilson Warriors. I stood five-seven and weighed 130 pounds. Hence, my black eye, and my humiliation in front of Pamela.
“I’m not sure I’m the right man for this, Judge.”
“He won’t hurt you.”
“I know he won’t hurt me. I’m bringing my forty-five if I go.”
“Are you serious?”
“Damned right, I’m serious. But I still don’t think I’m the right man.”
“You may not be the right man but you’re the only man I can reach. Now get out there.”
I reached over the petted Tasha, who was an elegant tabby. Then I stroked Crystal, a black-and-white beauty with a Disney profile. “You could always call Cliff Sykes.”
“Are you always this hilarious at five seventeen A.M.?”
“I’m at my most hilarious at five seventeen A.M.”
Cliff Sykes is the local police chief. For four generations, Whitney money ran this town. Then Sykes, Sr. got rich during WWII building training facilities for the Army-Air Force. Now Sykes money runs the town. Judge Whitney always refers to him as “that damned hillbilly” and she isn’t far wrong.
“Get out there, McCain, and find out what’s going on. He sounded pretty bad.”
“His house?”
“His house.”
Then she hung up.
I decided to wear my pink shirt from last night. You remember a couple of years ago when everything went pink? Well, I went right along with it. I am the proud owner of three pink dress shirts and the damned things never seem to fade, frazzle, stain or wear out. I am happy to report, however, that I do not own a pink tie, pink socks or a pink sport coat. Moderation in everything.
I shaved, took what my mom always called a sponge bath (face, neck, pits, crotch, backside with a soapy washcloth), went heavy on the Old Spice, easy on the Wildroot hair cream.
As I got dressed, I called Val’s Diner and had them put up a three-cup paper container of coffee for me. I picked it up on the way out of town. The local gravel roads being what they are, I had a nice soaked spot right in my crotch. Pretty smart, putting a coffee container between my legs as I sped over roads so rough your voice trembled when you talked. Not for nothing did I toil in the intellectual fields of the University of Iowa.
I was a couple of miles out of town—racing along under several Air Force jets whose direction indicated that they’d probably come from Norfolk, Nebraska, where there was a base, which I was personally thankful for, given the fact that I just assumed someday Mother Russia would drop the atomic bomb—when the word came on the radio news.
Plane crash. Buddy Holly. Richie Valens. Big Bopper. Taking off from the town where we’d seen them at the Surf Ballroom last night. It’s odd how we are about celebrities. We invent them to suit ourselves and they stay that way until the press gives us a good reason to think otherwise. I liked Buddy Holly because he was kind of gawky and I liked Richie Valens because he was Mexican. They didn’t fit in and I’ve never fit in either. So they were more than really great rock and rollers. They were guys I identified with. I was tired and then I was sad for two guys I’d never really known, and I thought of how my aunt had been that day in 1944 when she learned that my uncle had been killed in Italy, her just sitting at my folks’ kitchen table with a bottle of Pabst and a pack of Chesterfields and the Andrews Sisters on the record player in the living room, a woman who never drank or smoked, just sitting there and staring out the warm open April window, staring and saying nothing, nothing at all even when the day cooled and became dusk, even when the dusk darkened and became night, saying nothing at all.