The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Page 5

  “Edna, tonight we got us something a little differ’nt. I need the rules and regs, need chapter and verse, on somebody’s trying to … no, somebody managing right well, seems-like, to have sexual congress, Edna, with, Edna?—with a corpse, Edna.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s just me, it’s Officer Cutcheon. It’s me, Wade, dummy. I mean it. Look it up, the law, because I need a citation, I need to be official, because I am feeling so damn harem-scarab out here.”

  Edna goes, “You that drunk, Wade? You should have Millie pour you all-black coffee. But Millie closed early on account of her stepdaughter’s birthday. So you just hightail it back here quick, hear me? You do that, I swear I ain’t going to write this up and ruin you boys’ next fitness reports.”

  Then I had to tell her everything. And the second I said, “An employee of Nowell-Johnstone’s Mortuary Needs,” Edna goes, “It’s John Bill Whitehead.”

  I swallowed hard once.

  “I knew it,” she gloated. Edna does that. She gloats. “It is that John Bill, ain’t it, Wade? Because, just before Mother’s funeral, he had me in for the viewing. And … I don’t like to announce this on the air, Wade, but it was something—about Momma’s mouth. I can’t say it. But, in some way, I’ve known. Whoever he’s got out there at the edge of a dark peanut field—I believe Mr. Martin put in peanuts last year?—I swear to you, Wade, it ain’t his first. Who has he jumped?”

  “The little Hartman girl.”

  There was a pause. It may be the first time I ever did (or will) hear a decent, blinky, gulping, human pause from veteran police dispatcher Edna so-called “Mouth City” McCabe.

  She recovered, though. No surprise. Finally went: “The child is thirty-eight if she’s a day. IQ of a collie, they claim.” Then I could hear Edna inhale a full one-third of her Camel at a gulp. “Still, you know, Wade? It’s something about his pickin’ a person that slow: like he knew that even if Debbie Jo woke up, she still couldn’t squeal on him. It’s something even way nastier ’bout that. Me, I can abide anything but a sneak. Ten-four, over and out. Bring the scuzz in wearing cuffs, leg irons—hop him up the front center courthouse steps, and don’t let him pull a windbreaker or nothing over his bald ole head. I got to get off this line, boy. I got people to talk to, Smoky. I got people to wake. But first … you know what this is, Wade?”

  “Nome.”

  “This is History.”

  “Well, I reckon.”

  “Wade? I’m three years from retirement. So I best to thank you now, because you finally brought me one that’s … well, this un’s national, Wade. Love you to pieces. Overandout.”

  Edna had mentioned her dead mother’s mouth. She’d said nothing more. Edna never spelled out what she meant by “it was something about Momma’s mouth.” But I rushed in and imagined how, if you know a person real good, and especially if you’ve been with them during their hard dying (is there any other kind?), and you’ve seen them wheeled out of the hospital room and you’ve known them through and through, and then you turn up at the home for the viewing not two days later and you can just tell from the look of them, from some relaxing of the face, some tightening, some twist or angle of the closed eyes, that something extra has got hold of them. As if Death ain’t enough! I mean, something besides embalming. I mean, before embalming. I mean, a more familiar type of embalming, easier to administer, harder to detect.

  Somebody like me yelled, “What’d you do to my momma and Aunt Mary, you?” And before I knew it, I had Moleman flung up against his own hearse. Did. I had that John Bill pretty much by the throat and him suspended mostly across the roof of it, pointy black shoes dangling—the guy weighs that little.

  “Look, ah, Wade?” Rocky was behind me rapping on my shoulder like a door.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “But, Rock, did John Bill lay out any of your people?” I let the undertaker settle back on his feet.

  “Only my brother, my kid brother that drowned, the pretty one that we …” I heard how Rocky, a little slower, got my drift.

  “Why, you little …”

  I had to hold Rocky back.

  Edna being always on the job, it’s in less than eighty seconds we commence to hear the sirens growing more and more out our way. Why she sent the fire department is not clear, beyond her owing several fellows there a favor.

  I hated that. I didn’t want others looking at the Hartman child. Not yet. Or, as far as that goes, studying myself either. I leaned forward, pulled at the blue blanket part-covering Deborah Jo’s face, planned to ease it down, cover her whole slender body. In such a high-octane moon, her amazing little carcass shone white as a lit forty-watt white bulb. But soon as I tugged at the blanket, oops, her whole face was exposed. Rocky’s light was trained right on it, with me hunkered not twelve inches above the thing. Its eyes were opened, see. I just kept staring down at her. Her face had this look—with its extra lids and the little mouth curled up at either end. “Poor thing,” I said. “Poor pretty little thing.” I never knew where beauty could seep up from. Then I heard Whitehead, behind me, whimpering, “No,” like I was planning to cross-examine her. “Leave her be.” His voice hoarse, him without an overcoat, and it fifteen degrees out there.

  Now, with sirens building, Rocky, suddenly too interested, leaned closer to the mortician and whispered, “Ain’t it cold, John Bill?” (I figured Rock meant Whitehead’s lack of muffler or coat.)

  “Only at first,” the mortician answered, voice gone all soft and mothy.

  “Oh,” thought I. “Uh-oh,” thought I.

  II.

  BY 12:40 we’ve got Whitehead secured in holding cell number four. By 12:43 we have United Press International on the phone asking about hotel accommodation and Edna referring them all to her late husband’s aunt’s three-room boardinghouse.

  Our jail’s cell-side hall is lit by green-glass hanging lamps. Like the kind you see over pool tables. Cells are mercifully cut off from any busyness out front. One swinging portholed door (left over from the chief’s last kitchen remodeling) muffles tonight’s miked TV question-askers. I’ve never before seen such flashbulb blaze, what us bass fishermen call “a feeding frenzy.” Never, except on live TV.

  I am right glad to hang back here. I sit studying John Bill—“suicide watch,” him stripped of belt, his good black Parker fountain pen, two shoestrings, one skinny black tie. (Most prison suicides happen in the first three hours of incarceration, for what it’s worth.)

  I feel like half a fugitive myself. I just know that future strangers will come right up to me on the street and grill me about tonight for as long as I live. Betty, I remember your hints about retirement and how nice Florida is. And for the first time ever, I consider not living—in Falls, I mean.

  From the public waiting-room, I hear a blabbering of words in Yankee accents: “Outrage,” “Final taboo,” “Some people just sure are sickies.”

  Out yonder, we already had us the Raleigh News & Observer, the Greensboro News & Record, Rocky Mount Evening Telegram and, of course, late but finally here, despite needing all of forty seconds to stroll across Main Street, our own Falls Herald Traveler. Plus, double-parked out front on Courthouse Square, with nobody bothering about its being illegal, CNN, with two ferry-sized trailers spiked with antennas enough to supervise the next moon walk.

  Concerning TV, and being on it or not, it’s strictly Us and Them. Your National Power seems measured by how often you get on there. Or stay off it, by choice. Our Edna sure feels qualified. She’s earned the title “dispatcher” hands down. (You want to tell “Mouth City” only your good news.) Her married daughters—all four—arrived by 3:30 a.m., toting garment bags containing Edna’s five best Sunday dresses, plus a portable hair-burner. By 4:45 (huddled in that unlikely beauty parlor, cell number one), they’d done major home improvements to Edna’s entire head and girdled person.

  By now, out there, holding forth behind a flannel board commandeered from the Second Baptist’s Sunday School and made int
o a map with an X marking the “Hearse Locale (Actual [presumed] Sexual Act Crime Scene),” police spokeswoman Edna McCabe is part Welcome-Wagon hostess, part cold-front weather anchorwoman, part sweet ole apron-lady Aunt Bea. “Any further clarifications, coffee, doughnuts, required, boys? Because, given the gravity of all this mess, you got you instant access, I mean, whatever….” Suddenly, chain-smoking, chain-talking, chain-charming Edna perches out yonder high behind the bailiff’s desk, hair sprayed half-stiff as a cycle-patrolman’s helmet, acting as prim as bossy in her suit all Jackie-pink. Our Edna is already sounding at least … semi-national.

  Meantime, back here in shadow, in this guarded quiet, I’m still hunched outside our body snatcher’s holding pen. I keep gaping in at John Bill Whitehead—the homely, blinky, half-blind mortician, a mild town-joke till now. Suddenly he’s Falls’ most famous native since the oldest living Confederate soldier died here (possible homicide). There is so much I long to ask him, I become tongue-tied. Only jokes dawn on me, rude, crude salesman-type jokes: “Did you, as a gent, let her go first? That it?” Stupid things. But my questions are real ones. What had scared me? Guessing … if I let myself, I might know some of why he did it.

  All this tonight unseals all these possibilities: The way I see it, sex desire is surely the most living part of being alive, right? But to think of it in, actually inside, the dead: that put me off a week’s feed and religion. What kind of God lets this stuff happen, then arranges it so’s I’ll be the one who comes upon it whilst on duty and holding that caliber of flashlight!

  Dead folks? In my line of work, I see them biweekly, and battered besides. You try, but you never do get accustomed. You can’t be vaccinated against the slow Novocain shock that comes from glimpsing Old Death ever new again. How casual it stuns you! like the jolt of seeing “skin,” what boys here call “full-out beaver.” Your mouth goes cotton. Without asking, your breath signs on for time-and-a-half. “Aha” and “Uh-oh” blend. Your legs feel lead. I used to make out Death to be a man. Poppa Time, ragged beard, bad sandals, that sickle and an attitude problem. But now, after seeing Debbie Jo, Death means Female. And that’s what’s shaking me. Death can screw us pretty much anytime she chooses. Astride, she can bear down on us, hard, and that, I reckon, I’ve long known. But now I have to consider a new possibility. You know, screwing her back.

  Maybe I’m making no sense here.

  I keep scanning John Bill Whitehead. But I never ask him anything. That’d seem rude. He just smiles, a milky smile, blinking out at me. Still has no idea.

  “You thirsty? How’s it going?” I say, to be nice. Somebody has to.

  Folks hereabout have always known which single thing to remark about a tragedy over coffee at Millie’s Diner downtown. It’s like they vote on just one line per disaster, a show of hands, then stick with that.

  Till now, it’s always run maybe: At least there were no children involved, that’s one thing.

  Or: It would’ve been worse if he hadn’t already lived seventy-nine years and had him a full life. Still, it was a rough exit. (This about gentle Cyril Mangum, whose Chevy pickup hit a 160-pound whitetail stag that was tossed into the air, came back down through the windshield and seven of whose ten-point antlers stabbed poor Mangum right there in the cab in his safety-belt.) If just this single time he’d left the seat-belt flap unfastened, why, even as we speak, he might be out playing golf. Loved him some golf, our Cyril.

  And now, salted back here, safe from the world press, I wonder: What will we say about John Bill and his little victim girlfriend?

  Does poor Falls, North Carolina, get more than its fair share of this grim stuff? Or is it that we’re all so bored, so far from Action Central, we just remember it longer?

  And how will Whitehead ever explain his motive? If he ever does, I want to be there. I bet no local act’s ever likely to breed more rumors or sadness or more of this strange building excitement. Just wait till every citizen of Falls who’s buried a lady loved-one out of Nowell-Johnstone’s hears about this over breakfast, then starts making mind-pictures that cannot be erased.

  I’m slumped here, elbows on knees, big chin propped in either palm, remembering how school-smart we’d always figured weak John Bill to be. The principal’s secretary told my sister that Whitehead was the only one for years with near a genius IQ. He was a couple of grades in front of me at school, from a family of dirt-poor mill-workers. He was always considered good at pinning up hall bulletin boards: TRAFFIC SAFETY WEEK SAVES LIVES; PLANET OF THE WEEK. Polite but panicky-acting, unable to take the slightest joke, while wearing glasses thick as the bottoms of Coca-Cola bottles when there were glass Coke bottles. His science fair project—a working model of the solar system, one hooked to bicycle pedals—had him sitting at the center of these tinfoil moons and worlds, little feet cranking, smiling, watching what he made spin and orbit around him.

  My thought’s a jumble. I sure need sleep. You probably hear that in my tone. It only just happened. But, Betty, hon? Already I suspect I know who’s waiting for me in my very next dream. There, on ice, ahead, she is, so white. It feels like a date, a blind date, prearranged. I am scared of it, yet part of me looks forward. Like an appointment made for me the second I got born.

  I didn’t choose this.

  I’m looking in at Whitehead. I get a little case the shakes. He sits on the metal bunk not four feet away, grinning through the bars, combing his hair, just so, with both wrists still cuffed. His white rubber gloves make his hands seem like ten separate condoms. His pointy shoes can’t even reach the floor, keep swinging, swinging.

  “One thing, Wade,” he says, half-smiling. “Don’t tell my wife?”

  “Pardner, it’s past that now. You hear the noise out-front? Those are just the ones that know so far, buddy.”

  He stops his combing. I feel sorry for him. But when I recollect my own lady kin, and the folded cash money I slipped him to honor what-all he’d done on their behalf, and with them being female and buck-naked and not bad-looking for their age and state, and all too trusting and so dead and totally alone with him, I want to reach in through the bars, slap him, maybe bang his head against the concrete wall.

  “Rocky, pal?” I holler. “Care to come on back in here, spell me, please? ’Cause I’m starting to see things. All this brings up stuff a person’d rather keep …”

  “Buried?”

  “Buried.”

  I’m in pretty much total agreement. Rocky scuffles towards me from the blinking flash of the media-type carnival out yonder. But as he moves nearer, I see that the boy is weaving. Dragging like somebody drunk or older, maybe both. Young Rockford, a nice-looking, lanky fellow, doesn’t act happy to leave the distracting reporters. He’s coming through light and shade from the low green lamps. Me, I rise to offer him my chair. It’s only now I see that this fine, rosy boy I’ve known all his life—excepting his Marine years—is crying. Rocky stands before me, his veiny hands a heavy load at either side of him. And he’s sobbing like some kid too tired to know why he’s cranky and can’t admit to wanting sleep. Deputy Rockford Suggs II keeps on, right in front of Whitehead. Rock’s nose is running, his eyes a sudden mess. Even John Bill quits swinging his legs. It’s the guiltiest I’ve seen him act so far. First real guilt I’ve seen out of him.

  I hug Rocky, in plain view of our town’s overnight celebrity corpse-screwer. I hug Rocky and hear myself say, not knowing how I know, “Whole thing makes you think of ’Nam, don’t it?”

  I feel the boy nod against me.

  Rock speaks into my shoulder, arms up hard around me. “Along the road into villages. They’d be wearing those black pajamas, some still under pointed straw hats. And’d be not a mark on them. Women no bigger than our kids here. But dead. We saw them all over. Some sitting up, like still expecting something.” And he sobs now. “Why did we do that?” Rocky asks.

  A bit, in my way, I cry with him.

  It’s while I’m patting Rock and him pretty much boo-hooing, glad no repor
ter will pry or know, I look back through the bars. At Whitehead. He is zooed like he deserves, I guess. But he’s weeping too, snuffling, and, with his rubber gloves, wiping his face. Tears for him will always be a turn-on. Tears’ll always be a part of it—babies we all are. When it comes right down to it, we think we know decency and what local folks will do for other locals, but we ain’t got clue number one as to what-all lurks in any human heart, much less lower-down especially, now, do we? Ever?

  Betty, hon, please tidy this up to sounding semi-official. Keep things from seeming just personal.

  As to the question: Guilty or not guilty?

  I am forced to say: Guilty. If anybody is. Guilty of anything. Whitehead, over the Hartman girl, allowing himself to: I’ve got to say, yeah, guilty as charged. But there’s more to it….

  So, “The End.” Only, when is it, the end? If a live man, put in charge of a dead girl, can manage to fall in love with her and believe he’s fallen hard enough to try stuff without notarized family permission, then dear Lord, God, the possibilities.

  I just don’t have the experience to judge any of this with.

  Well, tonight one thing’s for sure: Deputy Wade Watson Cutcheon here has plainly earned his week’s paycheck. And now I’m heading home. To catch what helpful winks I can, and dream whatever scary dreams a person must.

  I swear, dear Betty: the longer I live, the more of nothing, bigger percentage of nothing, do I firmly know.

  Except, of course, a single saving fact.

  I love my wife.

  HE’S AT THE OFFICE

  TILL THE JAPANESE BOMBED Pearl Harbor, most American men wore hats to work. What happened? Did our guys—suddenly scouting overhead for worse Sunday raids—come to fear their hat brims’ interference? My unsuspecting father wore his till yesterday. He owned three. A gray, a brown, and the summer straw one. Its striped rayon band could only have been woven in America in the 1940s.