The Wrong Case

  As I pushed away from my incipient failure, I glanced into the Diablos. Summer thunder showers lurked about the peaks, shot with hairs of lightning and trailing transparent veils of rain too light to dampen the vigor of a lightning fire. By morning there would be fires, but not enough rain, and the valley smog would fill with the odor of pine pitch and smoke. On the ridges and timbered slopes, gray clouds would rise, writhing with flames, the animals would move nervously downhill, and in Meriwether the people would look into the hills, some hoping for small things—hoping the fires wouldn’t frighten the tourists or ruin the fishing—others hoping that the fires might grow too large for the Forest Service crews so that civilian crews would have to be hired, hoping for a few days of work in hell to buy a few drunk nights. Since some of that timber was my last ace in a deep and empty hole, I hoped for a front off the northwest coast, for long steady rain, easy showers without lightning, clouds to cut the sun, cool air to slake the heat, and a long slow rain.

  Some hopes aren’t foolish, some prayers are answered. Just as I had decided to write off my timber, the shades on the western windows, lowered against the afternoon sun, darkened and rattled in a rising wind. I raised them; the front waited just behind Sheba Peak—a broad thick blanket of blue clouds heavy with rain, already lapping at the late afternoon sky behind the peak. Even as I watched, the gray cone of Sheba fell prey to the vaporous arms. Once again, by the grace of those infamous gods, who tend to fools and drunks, the long bitter summer was eased.

  The wind kicked up a notch, rattling the shades in a dry brittle clamor that sounded like a soothsayer’s bones being cast. And the wind moaned in the hollow Sunday streets below me, lifting cheap cowboy hats off the sun-baked heads of tourists, tilting the random shirt, hurrying the pedestrian on his way. I lifted my head into the wind, tilted my face.

  Simon, who sensed rain and cool air in his bones, who could forecast the weather better than ants or barn swallows, was heading north over the Dottle bridge, scurrying and scuttling and limping like a sorely wounded crab intent on the safety of his hole—wrapped loosely in a tweed overcoat, surely purchased only moments before from the Salvation Army store south of the river.

  So he has it now, I thought. The overcoat. It had been my father’s, a heavy Harris Tweed overcoat, purchased in Winnipeg on a binge, a coat he loved and wore at the slightest excuse, as a woman might a new mink. Ensconced within the coat, his thick unruly black hair set above like a fur cap, my father was prepared to weather any storm. At home he used it in preference to whatever robe my mother might buy him. Outdoors it became his shield, his cloak against the world’s expectant daggers. Sometimes, wearing the coat, if his hair hadn’t yet been tangled by the wind or his thick fingers, if his whiskey flush still resembled a tan, sometimes he might have been taken for a successful businessman instead of a rich drunk. After his death, I stayed wrapped in it, unafraid in the solid odor of wool and sweat and whiskey, curled like a sleeping pup on the study couch, until my mother took it away, gave it away, along with all his other clothes, to the Salvation Army.

  So the drunks and bums could have them, she said, so the whole town could know for certain and remember forever what a drunken bum he had been. I didn’t even know how to protest, how to stand before her hate and rage, which poured off her like heat from a burning house. I did ask why she had married him, and she answered “Because of you!” so vehemently that I flinched. But I didn’t understand what she meant until I was older, and after I understood, I became very nervous when people talked about abortions upon demand.

  I grew up as my mother meant for me to, watching my father’s clothing parade up and down the streets of Meriwether, warming the backs of whatever dispossessed came into them. A retired NP engineer had been buried in his favorite tweed suit. His Russell snakeboots wore to greasy decrepitude on the feet of a local garbage man. Once I saw his Malone hunting pants on a drunken Willomot squaw, dirty and worn, the fly broken and a scrap of pink panties bulging out like a coil of gut. As I grew up, I saw my father sodden in doorways, urine snaking across the sidewalk toward the gutter, saw last rounds poured into him like coups de grâce, then saw the stumbling body disgorged like a walking corpse from two o’clock bars, saw brains and eggs shoveled into his toothless mouth, saw a brigade of fallen men falling to their death in his clothes.

  Over the years I bought up what I could, haggling my allowance away to the Salvation Army, the Goodwill store, the secondhand dealers of Meriwether. On the streets and in the bars and skid-row hotels, I sought his clothes, bought and burned them. Once the winos found me out, I bought more clothing than my father had owned in his life, and if I had had enough money, the winos of our fair city would have been rich but naked.

  But in the haggling, I learned that they were men also, that they had had lives full of chances too, not all of which had gone begging. And they still had dreams, dreams and lies enough to live with them. Unlike my mother, they were honest drunks, not too often ashamed. In their odd moments, drunk or sober, they knew who and what they were; they had looked at the world for a long steady moment, and found it wanting. As they took on individual faces and histories, I began to see them, both in the bars and at work—many did work, shoveled Meriwether’s shit like white niggers—and the more I saw them, the more I preferred them to sober citizens. And I understood the defiance in the pathetic motto: I ain’t no alcoholic, Jack, I don’t go to no fucking meetings. And they needed no army for their salvation.

  Just before I went to Korea, I thought I had found all the clothes except the overcoat, which I assumed had been garnered on the sly by a tall, portly professor or trundled out of town on the warm back of a railroad bum. When I came back from the war, it was back on the street, but I didn’t care anymore. The war taught me that I wasn’t the heroic type, and my childish notion of slaking my grief by burning his clothes had always seemed vaguely heroic. So I stopped. When I saw the overcoat around town, I tipped my hat and said hello, let it cover whatever back needed warming. It had endured so long, I knew it wasn’t about to wear out in my lifetime, thought it might outlive us all.

  Once later, I thought I had found his red felt crusher hunting hat on the head of a dead Assiniboin buck who was in a carload of breeds that had missed the last curve coming down Willomot Hill. Even in the ragged light of my unit, I saw the name inked into the felt, black as blood through the sweat and grease of countless men. But it was my childish scrawl on the name, not his firm hand, darkly smeared where the buck had tried, like a cowboy in a B Western, to wear his hat all the way through the fight.

  That was when I cried for my father. Or perhaps for myself. And I quit the sheriff’s department. No more car wrecks, no more bar fights, no more lost children whimpering at the dark mouths of canyons, no more family disturbances. No overcoats, no hats.

  And now the overcoat had passed from deathbed to secondhand store to Simon. The coat wasn’t an omen of death but of life; Simon had been dying for years. I leaned out the window into the deepening dusk, shouted and waved at him in the rising wind as the first splatters of rain shattered against my face. He didn’t hear me; he turned into Mahoney’s as if it were home.

  —

  My past exhumed and worn ragged, I gave it up and went back to work. I called Dick, hoping he could tell me where Helen was staying and what history professor had had the delight of living with her little brother, but one of his little girls answered the telephone. Usually children are death on telephone conversations, but Marsha, with her infinite patience, had taught their children to cope, and the child went obediently to fetch her father.

  She came back shortly, saying carefully, “He’s busy, sir, and can’t come to the telephone. Can I—may I take a message?”

  “Honey, would you please go back and tell him that it’s Milo and that it’s important.”

  After a longer wait, she returned, her small voice full of wonder and apology, “Hello?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told him—but
he didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, thank you, honey,” I said, but before I could hang up, I heard a clatter of footsteps and Dick’s muffled voice, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “What the hell do you want?” he asked.

  “Two things, old buddy. Helen’s motel and the name of the guy in the history department who lived with her little brother last summer. Okay?”

  He paused, his breathing harsh against the mouthpiece, then said, “Why don’t you do your own fucking work for a change?”

  Behind him, in her shocked stage whisper, I heard Marsha saying, “Richard! Not in front—”

  But then the line went dead. I hung up, then dialed the first two digits of Dick’s number, thinking to mend fences, but then I realized that I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up again. Then I picked it back up and called Hildy Ernst.

  The telephone rang until my ear started to ache, but she finally answered breathlessly, as if she had just run up the stairs to her apartment.

  “Hello,” she said. Hildy had one of those voices that rub women the wrong way and men the right. My knees were suddenly weak. But there were odd noises behind her, grunts and groans and thumps. It sounded as if she was holding the NCAA wrestling championships in her living room.

  “Hildy. This is Milo.”

  “How nice. Where have you been, love?”

  “Recovering. How have you been?”

  “Comme çi, comme ça. You know how boring summer can be, darling.”

  “Right.”

  “Then why haven’t you called me, you terrible man?”

  “I meant to. But every time I tried, my hands shook so badly, I couldn’t dial.”

  “You’re sweet, Milo.” There was a thud, then cheering.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Oh, some friends dropped by. We’re playing charades, darling. You want to come over?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Crowds make me nervous. Besides, I’m working. But I need some information. Last summer a history professor left his wife to live with one of his male students—”

  “How tragic.”

  “—and I wondered if you knew who it was.”

  “Of course.”

  “Who?”

  “If I tell you, will you stop by?”

  “Some other time?”

  “Promise?”

  “Sure, Hildy.”

  “I don’t believe you, darling, but his name is Elton Crider. He’s one of those hillbilly types, all bone and Adam’s apple. You will stop by soon?”

  “Sure.”

  “You bastard, Milo.”

  “Say, Hildy.”

  “Yes?”

  “What did you ever see in me?”

  “I get bored with younger men, Milo. They all expect me to be grateful,” she said, then laughed in her husky voice.

  “Thanks,” I said, then hung up, laughing. Hildy was the sort of woman an older man could fall in love with—if he could keep up. I couldn’t.

  —

  Elton Crider wasn’t listed in the telephone book, and when I drove over to the address listed in the university directory, another family lived there. They had no idea where the Criders had moved, except that it was somewhere in the country. So I called my telephone-company creep, and for fifty bucks, his weekend price, he went down to the office and got me the unlisted number and the new address.

  At ten o’clock and fourteen miles up the Meriwether River, I found a dark house and an empty garage. I rang the bell anyway, standing close to the door under the narrow eaves of the tacky new house, trying to stay out of the soft rain. The door flew open so quickly that I nearly toppled into the dark hole of the doorway.

  “You son of a bitch,” a shrill voice rasped from the darkness. Then an angry hand whipped back and forth across my face as the voice cursed me with each swing. I backed off the low concrete stoop, but the hand followed me.

  “Hey, lady, I give up,” I said, trying to hold my hands in front of my face.

  “Elton?” she asked, her raised hand somewhere above my hot face.

  “No, ma’am.”

  She stepped back to switch on the porch light. In the yellow glow of a bug lamp, we considered each other. She was a tall woman wrapped in a faded pink chenille robe. An angular face with a broad mouth and a large straight nose and a sharp chin jutted out at me. She might have been a handsome woman once, but the softness had been eroded from her face, and the yellow light wasn’t flattering. Sallow skin stretched tightly over her facial bones. Then she giggled slightly, and her face softened.

  “Ah’m sorry, mister. Ah thought you’s my husband,” she said in a Southern voice that twanged like an out of tune E-string, which was an improvement over her shout, which sounded like a ripsaw in a pine knot.

  “You always wait in ambush for your husband?” I asked, but she didn’t answer, so I rubbed my cheek, playing for sympathy. “I guess I’m glad I’m not him. You nearly took my head off.”

  “Ah didn’t even double up my fist,” she said, smiling as if she had made a joke. The fist she held out to me was large, heavy, with knuckles like stones.

  “I’m glad,” I said, shrugging and smiling.

  “Well, Ah’m sorry Ah hit you,” she said, wrapping her long arms around her spare chest. “What was it you wanted?”

  “To begin with, you could let me out of the rain.”

  “This’ll do fine,” she said quietly.

  It was late on a dark rainy night and the nearest house was five hundred yards away, but she wasn’t a bit frightened. She was a hell of a woman.

  “Is your husband home?” I asked, then remembered that he wasn’t. “Sorry. Silly question,” I said, rubbing my cheek. “My name’s Milodragovitch. I’m a private investigator.” I showed her my photostat. “I’d like to talk to your husband. Do you know where I might find him?”

  “Why?”

  “Business.”

  “In the middle of a Sunday night?”

  “I work strange hours,” I said. “I’ve got to catch an early flight tomorrow morning, so I thought I’d try to catch your husband tonight.”

  “What’s Elton got business with a private investigator for?” she asked in a hard voice, as if I were the law.

  “I’m looking for a missing student, and somebody told me that your husband knew her quite well.”

  “Who?”

  “Elaine Strickland,” I answered quickly. Elaine had been my childhood sweetheart; she had beaten me half to death with a rag doll in the third grade.

  “Never heard of her. Who says Elton knew her?”

  “Ah, her parents. She mentioned Professor Crider in several of her letters.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she’d had several classes under him, that he had helped her with some research. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh. Why don’t you leave a number, and Ah’ll have Elton call you tomorrow or the next day.”

  “I won’t be in town for a week or so. I’m flying to Seattle to follow another lead,” I said importantly. “If I could talk to him tonight, I’d really appreciate it. If you know where he is.”

  “Ah damn sure know where he ain’t. Ah’d have to guess where he was.”

  “A good guess is better than nothing.”

  “Yeah. Lemme see that thing again.” I handed her my license. She examined it carefully as I stood in the rain. “Milodragovitch, huh?” she said as she gave it back to me. “Ain’t that the name of that park in Hell-Roarin’ Canyon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kin a yours?”

  “Used to be my front yard.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah’ll be damned. What happened?”

  “Family fell on hard times,” I replied.

  “Some folks don’t never have no good times to fall onto hard from,” she said, her voice shifting closer to the rhythms of the Southern hills, full of hardscrabble farms and lost chances, fai
led crops and good hounds ruined by mean coons. She stared into the rain over my head as if she could see all the way back there to the dim hollows flanked by steep, sharp ridges.

  “Kentucky?” I asked. “Tennessee?”

  “Don’t matter none,” she answered. “Don’t live there now.” She shook herself like a lanky dog just awake, brought herself back to this new place of young mountains and old strangers. “Elton is probably drinkin’ at the Riverfront. He hangs out there some. We had a little fuss, and sometimes he goes there to sip whiskey and gnaw on his liver. You might find him there.”

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Crider,” I said. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  “Me too,” she whispered, “sorry as hell.” Then as if the apology made her feel better, she brightened and smiled. “Ah’ve been impolite to make you stand in the rain. Why don’t y’all come on in? Coffee’s on the stove. Warm yourself up.” Then she paused and added, “May be that Elton will come on home ‘fore the bars close this once.”

  We looked at each other, both knowing he wouldn’t. I didn’t know what the invitation meant, and I decided that I didn’t want to know, so I declined.

  “Thanks, but I’ve got to be going. Thanks for your help,” I said, then turned to trudge out to my rig.

  “Take care,” she said, her voice warm and vibrant through the easy fall of the rain.

  After the divorce business went bankrupt, I thought I was finished with the long signs of dead marriages, but as I backed out of the driveway, she stood framed in the saffron glow, a tall woman, her long hair growing lank in the damp air, her strong hands strangling her waist with the cord of the ragged robe.