The Day the Music Died (11 page)

I went over to my bedside table; I keep a flashlight there. It isn’t half the size of Cliffie’s but it’s handy and serviceable when there’s a power outage or I hear strange noises in the darkness. The noises usually turn out to be raccoons. I made the mistake of putting out food for a couple of baby raccoons one night, and now I have a whole family of them working their way up my back stairs several nights a week. But they’re all so cute I can’t break it off.

I followed the footprints from my bedroom to the door. The pattern of the prints resembled a waffle iron. An image came to me: Robert Frazier, sitting in the leather chair across from Judge Whitney, and the imposing, expensive winter shoes he wore. I remembered thinking they looked like rubber cleats. They’d make a pattern similar to the one on my floor. But why the hell would Frazier be in my apartment? What would he be looking for?

I felt better. Yes, there’d been an intruder in my apartment and yes, I now knew who it had been. Or thought I did, anyway. Now, all I needed to know was why he’d been up here.

I went and got my skates. They were black and dusty. At least the blades looked reasonably sharp. A skater, I’m not. I changed clothes, too. Jeans and a button-down blue shirt and a black pullover sweater. I was glad to get out of my suit and tie. They always feel confining to me and I feel like an impostor in them, like I’m a kid pretending to be a grown-up. Which, come to think of it, maybe I am.

As I changed clothes, the two cats sat on the bureau watching me. I wasn’t all that interesting but the TV wasn’t on so I’d have to do. They have their programs. For some unfathomable feline reason, they loved westerns, especially the gunplay and the cattle stampedes.

I tossed my skates over my shoulder as casually as I could, hoping I resembled one of those ski bums you always see in whiskey ads. You know, the ones with the perfect teeth. For what they’ve spent on their teeth, we could build several new schools.

A few minutes later, I was down in the driveway trying to get the car to run smoothly. I kept using the choke and swearing a lot. That was a combination that always seemed to work.

T
HE SKATING RINK WAS
packed. I had to park on a graveled shelf looking down on the rink. Parking spots were hard to find.

It’s a great rink, built just a few years ago. The rink itself is kidney-shaped, carved out of a plot of timber that runs to firs and jack pines and hardwoods. On the southeast edge of the rink is the warming house, a log cabin-style structure where you can buy hot chocolate, hot dogs, popcorn and Pepsi, plus get warm around an old-fashioned potbellied stove. Probably the prettiest the rink ever looks is at holiday time. Two nights before Christmas, there’s a costume pageant of people on skates. It’s probably not quite up to Broadway standards but it’s pretty to watch and the choir always sounds great. The rink is a place where a lot of romances start and a lot of romances end. The couple you saw last year positively enraptured with each other are this year enduring sporadic fights and glowering silences. Or they’re with new mates.

The music over the loudspeakers was a lot better than usual tonight. Out here, they play a lot of music that was popular five years ago, like the Ames Brothers and Eddie Fisher. They can’t quite bring themselves to play rock and roll unless it’s by the Chipmunks or the McGuire Sisters, but tonight, the air was filled with Buddy Holly and “That’ll Be the Day” and, man, it made me feel great, all charged up and convinced that Pamela Forrest was going to fall in love with me.

She would, anyway, if I could ever find her.

I spent my first half-hour skating around the rink looking for her. To no avail. Not a sign of her on the rink or in the warming house.

As for the skating, I stuck to the outside of the rink. Fewer people noticed me falling down that way. Every once in a while, I’d get going pretty well and I’d think that I’d suddenly somehow mastered the ice, and then the ice would dump me again. It’s not good for your ego to have five-year-old girls giggle and point at you. I was going to give them the bird but then I thought that that probably wouldn’t look real mature on my part.

I was thinking about going home—I was spending more time on my butt than on my blades—when Mary Travers slipped an arm through mine and drew me out into the center of the rink where the grown-ups and young show-offs were skating. She smelled wonderful, and looked even better, her jaunty raspberry-colored beret angled beautifully across her silky chestnut-colored hair and her cheeks tinted with the night’s air. She wore a heavy turtleneck sweater that matched her beret, jeans and a pair of white high-top skates that flashed artfully whenever she made one of her elegant, practiced moves.

“You should hire me, McCain.”

“For what?”

“To teach you how to skate.”

“You don’t think I’m any good?”

“I saw those little girls laughing at you.”

“Yes, and I’m planning to sue them, too.”

She laughed and squeezed my arm tighter and took me around the rink. It was fun. I didn’t have to do anything. She was strong and fleet enough for both of us.

She said, “I don’t see Pamela anywhere.”

“Well, I don’t see our friendly druggist—i.e., your fiancé—anywhere, either.”

“He’s at a city council meeting.”

I was going to say something snide but decided against it. She deserved her happiness. She was the most decent person I’d ever known, and if I could have, I would have fallen in love with her in a second. I wanted her to be happy.

“Does he know you’re here?” I said.

“No.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I didn’t. I just told him I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.”

“So you came out here?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” She smiled but I could see the sadness in her eyes this time, the sadness I always put there without meaning to.

We skated some more. I kept looking around for Pamela.

Mary said, “I really don’t want to marry him, McCain.”

“I know.”

“He always reminds me I’m from the Knolls, like he’s doing me a favor or something by marrying me.”

“So why don’t you just call it off?”

“I want kids.”

“His kids?”

“Well …”

We skated some more. She kept a good strong hold of my arm. You could smell stove smoke from the warming house and every once in a while somebody would skate by with a hot dog and you could smell mustard and ketchup.

“He’s going to build them a house.”

“Build who a house?” I said.

“My folks.”

“He’s going to build your folks a house?”

“That’s going to be my wedding present.”

“Wow.”

“He owns this land up on Ridgedale, where they’re putting in a new development. That’s where he’s going to build it. They’ll be out of the Knolls and into a brand-new house. He’s even going to furnish it for them.”

I looked at her. “And he’s going to hold it over your head the rest of your life.”

A male voice came on the loudspeaker and said, “We’d like to have a moment’s silence to commemorate the deaths of the fine young men who died in a plane crash not very far from here.”

And I kind of felt it, even though all the other stuff was going on, Kenny and Susan dead and Ruthie pregnant and Mary marrying the wrong man—even with all that turmoil, there was still room to think about Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and the Bopper and to feel sorry for them and their families. I know they say that young men consider themselves invincible. I guess that changed for me a couple of years ago when I was doing my stint as a weekend warrior with the National Guard. I’d wanted to go on to law school so the Guard was the only way I could avoid the draft.

One rainy Saturday when I was off-loading a supply truck in the warehouse, this skinny kid from Cedar Rapids hops in another truck and tromps on the gas. He always liked to lay down a strip of rubber in reverse. The sound echoing off the warehouse ceiling was pretty cool, I had to admit. He always ended his routine by coming within inches of the wall behind him and then slamming on the brakes. Everybody liked to watch him. He was a crazy son of a bitch. But this one day Belaski, this Polish farmer, he was walking behind the truck when the kid was backing up at sixty miles an hour. And the kid didn’t see Belaski and, no matter how loud we screamed, he didn’t hear us
warning
him about Belaski, either. It’s a terrible way to put it, but he just squashed Belaski against the concrete block wall like a bug. Belaski popped and oozed like a bug, too. The major on duty that weekend made me and my friend and fellow law-school partner Dick Freidman clean up with a hose after the ambulance took Belaski away. No more sense of invincibility for me. Not ever again. And I thought of Belaski now as Mary and I stood there on the skating rink. And I got sad and scared and confused the way I do sometimes because no matter how we try to explain it—through religion or randomness, it doesn’t matter—existence just doesn’t seem to make any sense. I had a philosophy instructor at the U of I say that the only question that mattered in all of philosophy was Verlaine’s “Why are we born to suffer and die?” All else was irrelevant, my instructor said. And sometimes, without wanting to, I let myself slip into that frame of mind. But I never stayed there long. I was afraid to. Even if it all ultimately means nothing, you’ve got to play the game not only for yourself but for the people you love.

Like looking around at the rink now. All the generations. And mostly good people, too. Handing down the best and most sacred things from one era to another. They made me feel good, these people, watching them tonight. They had a real dignity, the grandfather showing the five-year-old how to skate, the ten-year-old boy blushing when the girl next door took his hand, the six or seven black couples up here with their kids, joining in and being welcomed. Maybe life didn’t make sense but then it was our business, I guess, to
impose
meaning on it.

I said, “How about a walk?”

“Sure. Where?”

“Oh. Through the woods, I guess. There’s a full moon and plenty of light.”

“Great,” she said.

So we changed into our boots and went for a walk.

We found a winding trail through the low-hanging boughs, still heavy with snow that gleamed blue and silver in the moonlight. The noise and lights of the rink stayed with us for a time, like a memory you don’t quite want to let go of, but then we were in the darker woods, and the silence was deep and wide, broken only by the crunch of our footsteps on the snow and sticks in the path. I knew this area pretty well. My dad and I used to hunt out here. He wasn’t very good and I was worse and in all our years of trying, I don’t think we ever got anything, which was fine with me. I look at dead deer roped across car roofs and it either pisses me off or depresses me.

We came to an open field at the base of a steep, clay cliff. There was a small circular pond where kids swim in the summer. They also push rowboats and canoes in the water and play around. The pond is too small for motor boats. It was pretty, the pond, and the snow ridged around it, all shimmery and gleaming in the moonlight. The cliffs looked rugged and red and the jack pines atop them were silhouetted perfectly against the winter clouds. Far off, you could hear dogs, and then semis on the highways and then, closer by, the faded forlorn bay of a coyote.

“God, it’s great out here,” Mary said. And then scooped up some snow and made a snowball. “Bet you I can hit that canoe.”

“Bet you can’t.”

The canoe was a remnant of summer, like the pair of cheap cracked sunglasses you find in the glove compartment around Christmastime, or the tube of suntan lotion you find wrenched like a tube of toothpaste in the back of the medicine cabinet. Somebody had left the canoe here and it sat in the middle of the pond looking silly and somehow pathetic in its uselessness.

But it made a great snowball target.

“Here goes,” she said.

She didn’t come close, but she came close enough to surprise me.

“Now you try, McCain.”

“I hate to show off.”

“In other words, you can’t do it, either.”

God, she looked so great just then, she was the pretty girl up in the Knolls again, young and vital and sweet.

I made a snowball. “Stand back. The velocity’ll probably knock you on your butt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And there’ll be pieces of debris flying all over when I hit the canoe.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see who’s saying ‘uh-huh’ after I hit it.”

“Uh-huh.”

I was Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians. I could throw a ball faster than any man alive. And more accurately, too. I was Bob Feller and I was really going to show her my stuff.

I cocked my arm back and threw.

The snowball arced high and looked as if it was going to skid away south of the canoe. But then it dipped abruptly and came down, landing very near the aft end of the target.

“Nice, McCain, but not good enough. How about giving me one more throw?”

“You already had your throw.”

“Afraid I’ll beat you?”

“Hardly.”

“Then give me one more chance.”

She was too pretty to say no to. “All right. One more.”

She made another snowball, packing it good and tight in her red mittens. “I’m going to humiliate you.”

“Sure.”

“I am.” Then, “Here goes, McCain.”

The throw was good but not great. Or that’s what I smugly told myself a few seconds after the snowball left her mitten. But when I saw the trajectory I got this funny feeling that maybe it was great after all. We watched it go up and we watched it come down. Mine had just fallen suddenly from the sky. Hers fell in a graceful downward curve. Even before it landed, she was jumping up and down and slugging me in the arm the way girls do.

From here, it was impossible to tell whose snowball had come closer to the canoe. We were talking less than an inch of difference probably, both snowballs having gone
splat
very close to the canoe itself.

“I won!” she said.

“Too close to call. We’ll have to go look.”

“Is it safe? The ice, I mean?”