The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online Page B

wondered what he was afraid of.
    We were out on the river road now, heading toward the trailer court where virtually every Negro in the county lived. The rent is cheap, I guess. It’s our form of segregation.
    “You were his friend, is what I mean. I thought maybe you could help me.”
    “You haven’t kept up. Me ’n’ Kenny haven’t spoken in over a year.”
    “Why?”
    “None of your business why.”
    “Friendship like that, all those years, and it just ends. That doesn’t make much sense.”
    “I don’t know anything about what happened out there. Far as I can tell, he killed Susan and then he killed himself. He got crazy when he drank and from what I hear, he’d been hittin’ it pretty hot ’n’ heavy.”
    We came up on a little hill. On a wide grassy field below were the trailers. They were the small jobs, the kind they’d built before the war. There were maybe three dozen of them. It was a ghetto. Saturday nights, the good colored folks stayed inside all locked up while the predators prowled. I sometimes felt sorry for myself, coming from the Knolls. But what I’d had to put up with was easy compared to the doom that awaited the black kids from Shady Acres Trailer Park.
    I found his trailer and pulled up. The yard was picked up and the trailer looked homey with crisp yellow-flowered curtains in the windows.
    He looked over at me and grinned coldly. “You went to all this trouble, man, and I wasn’t no help at all, was I?”
    “Nope. You weren’t.”
    “And I ain’t gonna be, either.”
    I decided to lay it out for him. “I’ll be real interested in what caliber gun killed Susan Whitney.”
    The fear was in his face again. “It ain’t none of my business, man. And I could care less about them two.”
    I left the keys in the ignition and opened the door. In the rearview, I could see my dad’s blue ’52 Chevy coupe coming up the road.
    I got out, closed the door, and then leaned back in. “You ever find that forty-five of yours, let me know.”
    “How’d you know it was a forty-five, man? Huh?”
    But I’d decided to be just as uncooperative as he was. “See you around, Darin.”
    Then I walked back to my dad’s coupe.

8
    I STILL REMEMBER STANDING on the platform at the train depot and watching my dad wave to us when he came home from World War II. I was shocked. My parents are small people. My mom is five-two and has never cleared ninety pounds. But I’d grown up with my mom and was used to her size. My dad was a different matter. I’d seen a lot of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan—two of the many brave movie stars who hadn’t actually gone to war—war movies, and so I just figured my dad would be this big heroic kind of guy, too. He’d been gone a long time. Well, he wasn’t big and heroic-looking. In fact, he looked like a kid. He was five-six and weighed maybe 130 and had dishwater blond hair. His khaki uniform looked too big for him, gave him a vulnerability that made him seem even less soldierly. He was an utter stranger to me. The last time I’d seen him I’d been seven years old. I felt sort of ashamed of him, actually, how young and vulnerable he looked in the midst of all these other towering GIs. Why couldn’t I have a dad who looked like Robert Mitchum? And I’ve always been ashamed of myself for feeling that. I know that when I see him in his coffin over at the Fitzpatrick Funeral Home, that’s what I’ll think of, how I betrayed him in my heart that first day he came back from the war.
    The other thing I always remember about him was how he used to jitterbug with my mother on the linoleum in the kitchen in those good giddy days right after the fighting stopped. They’d play the Andrews Sisters and Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and they’d dance for hours. They stayed home a lot, as if they didn’t want to share each other with anybody else. They’d have a quart of Hamms beer on the oilcloth-covered table (I’ve always loved the smell of