Black Cat Weekly #93

Chapter 7-1

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

personally selected by one of the most acclaimed

personally selected by one of the most acclaimedshort stories authors and editors in the mystery

short stories authors and editors in the mysteryfield, Barb Goffman, for Black Cat Weekly.

field, Barb Goffman, for .

byBefore our father set it on fire, my big brother, Stevie, amassed what was possibly the largest collection of 45 singles in our town. He started buying them when he was seven. By the time he was twelve he was nearly obsessive, funneling the money from a paper route and his grudgingly tendered allowance directly to the local record shop. When he was fifteen, he scrounged scrap wood from around the neighborhood and built shelves of his own design to hold the hundreds he’d collected and lovingly maintained, allowing me, his worshipful little sister, to touch or play them only in his presence. At sixteen, he brought home “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the flip side and spent one blissful Saturday listening to the two songs over and over again.

At eighteen, his number came up in the draft lottery.

I sat on his bed and watched him pack. By then we’d started to hear about boys who ran off to Canada rather than risk Vietnam. I knew Stevie wouldn’t, but, watching his slender fingers folding shirts, I was heartsick at the thought of him in uniform. To distract me, I think, he made me promise I would take care of the records while he was gone. He said I could choose one of them to have as my own as payment for being their guardian. He probably expected me to pick one of the new songs, a mind trip from the Beatles or a grinder from the Stones.

I ran my fingers along the alphabetized rows, letting the corners of the paper sleeves rustle under my nails. When I chose, it was a record he’d had for more than five years, one of the first ones I remembered loving. I handed it to him shyly.

“Monument 851,” he read. “‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ by Roy Orbison and the Candy Men. B side ‘Yo te Amo Maria.’” He looked at me. “How come?”

“I like the way he says mercy at the end of the first verse.” As I said the word I tried, without much success, to imitate Orbison’s teasing delivery, the playful lasciviousness layered over something that wasn’t play, something I didn’t yet understand. “And then the growl after the second verse.” I didn’t even try to replicate that.

mercyStevie laughed. He picked up a pen and turned the record over.

He had written his name on the back of the sleeve of every single in his collection. In later years, when I worked in a record store myself, I learned this reduces their value. I don’t think Stevie would have cared about that, if he’d known. He didn’t want the records for money. He wanted the records for the records.

On the back side of “Oh, Pretty Woman,” he wrote, under his name, “Traded to Lila Benson for services rendered.” He signed and dated it and handed it to me, grinning.

Five months later I came home from school and saw the telegram from the Army on the kitchen table. Dazed, I walked to the window and saw our father in the backyard. He had stacked Stevie’s records in a pile and poured the gasoline from the shed over them, and now he stood there while they burned, not even seeming to watch as the sleeves darkened, came apart, and drifted away, black scraps edged with fading red embers.

For years, I tried to feel some sympathy for my father. He was widowed when I was born, left alone with an infant daughter and a two-year-old son. It must have been hard in ways beyond my comprehension. I couldn’t use it to explain or justify, though, the ease and speed with which he reached for his belt, or the feeling of the back of his hand across my face. It couldn’t undo the jolts of pain or erase the ugly purple welts everyone at school looked away from.

Stevie intervened when he could, often accepting bruises meant for me. After Stevie was killed, my father’s cold rage filled the house, seeking a target, finding one as often as not in his strange, quiet daughter. It grew all the stronger as he started to suspect what I’d discovered for myself years earlier. My complete disinterest in the boys on the football team. My not-quite-casual-enough ogling of Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island and Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. There would be no strapping, beer-guzzling son-in-law to take me off his hands.

Gilligan’s IslandLaugh-InI hid the Orbison single, the last remnant of Stevie’s collection, under a floorboard in my closet, alongside the lurid paperbacks about fallen women, shoplifted from The Book Emporium. I started spending as much time as I could manage anyplace else but the house where I’d grown up. On a good day I didn’t have to see my father at all.

A couple of years after Stevie died, I was out of high school and working on being out of the house for good. I clerked part-time behind the counter at Music’s Last Stand, the record store where they remembered me as the little sister of their all-time best customer. I crashed on friends’ couches when I could, slept at home when I had to, took a couple of classes at the community college, and spent a lot of time in the town square, hanging around in what was half a homeless camp and half a permanent protest against the war. There was a lot of pot, a little bit of LSD, and always music, but we didn’t think of ourselves as hippies. Altamont had happened by then. Manson had happened. We had lurched into the ’70s. It felt like the hippie thing was over, but we still had Nixon, and we still had the war, and we sensed it was still our duty to hold up the signs and chant once in a while. A lot of towns would have run us out, but the police chief had lost his youngest son during Tet. As long as we didn’t panhandle or hassle people going about their business, he let us be.

One May morning I was perched on the low wall circling the square. I hadn’t been home in a couple of weeks. I’d saved a little bit of money and I was wondering if I could manage the rent on my own apartment and who to ask to be my roommate. I stopped thinking about all of that when a woman I’d never seen before walked around the corner.

I forgot to breathe. The world reoriented itself around her, like loose playing cards returning to order as you tap them against the table, edges all lined up. In that instant I understood everything about Roy Orbison’s growl.

Her short jet-black hair was swept up into an Elvis pompadour. She wore a leather jacket over a white T-shirt and tight jeans, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses blacker than Spiro Agnew’s soul. She carried no purse, wore no jewelry, but her mouth was outlined with neon-red lipstick, one corner turned up in the barest hint of a smile. Her clothes clung to her in a way that made Goldie Hawn drop clean out of my mind, but it was her walk that slayed me, smooth and confident, moving fast while barely seeming to move at all. A guy would have said she walked like she owned the place, and he would have said it with a bit of a sneer, but that wasn’t it. She didn’t walk like she had a claim on the world.

She walked like it had no claim on her.

I had ten seconds to look at her after she rounded the corner and before she was past me. I didn’t turn my head, because I didn’t want to watch her disappear around another corner. I wanted to save her, whole in my mind, always coming toward me. I closed my eyes and a voice spoke, right at my elbow. “Hey, pretty girl.”

It was her. The corner of her lip had lifted a little more and her head was tilted. I had the feeling she knew everything I’d just been thinking, and I felt my face flush.

“You look like you know what’s what,” she said. “Where can I get a good breakfast around here?”

I had to swallow a couple of times before I could answer. “McCoy’s Diner. A couple of blocks.”

“Cool. You want to come have breakfast with me?”

“Yes,” I managed. I had just enough dignity not to add please. I stood up and nodded in the direction she’d been going. “It’s this way.”

please“Lead on.”

We started down the sidewalk together, my heart hammering. I felt like an oaf next to her. I had on a Monkees T-shirt I pretended to wear ironically and a flowered skirt that already seemed like some kind of costume, a pretentious bit of Woodstock playacting. I tried desperately to think of something to say that wouldn’t make me seem like the clueless dolt I was. I couldn’t come up with anything. We covered a block in silence, my humiliation growing with every step.

Halfway to the diner we were passing the mouth of an alley when she put her hand on my elbow and pulled me into the opening. She spun me up against the brick wall and put her forearm against the wall next to my head and leaned toward me. Her right hand slipped casually under the hem of my T-shirt, and there was the electric touch of her warm fingertips against the bare skin of my side.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Lila,” I got out.

“Lila,” she said. “I don’t want coffee on my breath the first time I kiss you.”

It was slow and sweet and warm, and when it was over, she pulled back, tipping the dark glasses down, and for the first time I saw her blue eyes.

“My name’s Mercy,” she said.

Mercy had a green VW Bug she’d been driving around the country for two years, working odd jobs and waitressing, moving on whenever she wanted. She had a set of tools to keep the Bug running and a switchblade knife to keep overly helpful men at bay. She had a rock she’d picked up on a Key West beach that she worried with her thumb when she was thinking. She had a dream of settling down and running a little bookstore, somewhere in Arizona. She had an atlas she hardly ever looked at, a box full of Green Lantern comic books she reread constantly, and parents in New York City who had made it clear they never wanted to see her again.

Green LanternI didn’t learn all this at that first breakfast. I learned it, and much more, over the course of the week we spent together, starting right then. I had to work a shift at Music’s Last Stand, so she sat on a stool next to mine behind the counter, swinging her legs and teasing the customers, one hand resting on my thigh. When the shift was over, I took her to the back room of the house where I was crashing. I won’t talk about that. There are moments that are only for the people who are in them.