CHAPTER 2
Carol Palladino was the first dead person I ever saw. "She looks so nice," everybody whispered as they filed by the coffin. I guess she looked OK, but I hadn't known her when she was alive so I had to take their word for it. She had pale skin and long lashes and her wavy dark hair was spread out on the satin pillow. She looked a little like Gina Lollobridgida, and was dressed in a white high-necked dress. She had been strangled to death. She looked a lot deader than people do on TV; it gave me the creeps, and I went back to my seat.
It was close and sticky in the little white frame church as the hot summer air drifted in through the open windows. I tugged at my collar and plucked at my sweaty, clinging shirt. I wasn't too crazy about ties, anyway, and a hot day in July was definitely the wrong time to be wearing one.
Velma Thompson, the murdered girl's aunt, sat stiffly on the hard wooden pew dabbing at sad red eyes with a tiny lace hanky. A dozen of her friends, all middle-aged hens in cheap print dresses and wing glasses, roosted around her, looking sad and sympathetic.
The body had been sent here from across the river in Kentucky, Velma being the decedent's closest living responsible relative. I was here because I was a friend of the decedent's brother, Nick.
I glanced around surreptitiously at the people who had turned out to say good-bye to CaroI. It was small crowd, mostly friends of her aunt's. A couple of guys who knew Nick, three or four Calhoun residents who had nothing better to do, an athletic looking guy with blond hair dressed in a dark suit whom I didn't recognize. I watched Nick Palladino as he walked by the coffin and looked at his dead sister. His lips were compressed into a tight line and his dark eyes were like hard black little rocks. He didn't linger at the coffin, either, and walked quickly back and sat down next to his aunt.
Then the preacher, chunky, bald-headed, and benign-looking with rimless glasses, began talking about what a wonderful person Carol had been. He droned on in a monotone and my mind began to wander... Girls...cars...baseball...girls... I glanced over at Nick and he looked pretty restless, too. I knew he didn't feature sitting around in a tie listening to speeches, either.
When the service was finally over they took the casket outside and planted it in the little shaded cemetery behind the church. I took off my coat and tie and threw them in the back seat of Nick's car. Everybody milled around the door outside the church talking to the preacher and to Velma. I could hear snatches of whispered, hushed conversations as people began to leave.
"...wasn't married, but had that little boy."
"...dark, dirty night club."
"...never knew her father."
Nick stood around stoically with his hands in his pockets looking solemn while his aunt talked to the preacher. When he went back inside the church she came over to where I was standing next to Nick's car in the shade of the huge oak tree that stood in front of the church.
"Thank you so much for coming," she said. "I know it meant a lot to Nick." She gave me a little hug.
"Oh, sure, Mrs. Thompson," I said, patting her on the back. "I'm real sorry about Carol."
"She was a real sweet girl," she said, snuffling a little. "I know people have been talking bad about her, but she was really a sweet person, and the only real family Nick had left, besides me." I think Velma thought most people were sweet, especially those who were victims of some tragedy. I could hear her telling her friends how sweet I was to come to the service.
Rosie Murcherson, Velma's next door neighbor, came up and gave Velma a squeeze around her thin shoulders. "Are you all right, dearie?" she asked sympathetically.
Velma was OK. She smiled wanly at me and let Rosie lead her away. As she was getting into Rosie's Oldsmobile the blond haired guy came up to her and they talked for a few moments. She smiled at him, then drove off with Rosie.
Nick walked over. "I guess that's it," he said, flipping his jacket into the back seat next to mine.
Cars began pulling out. Chevies and Fords, mostly, with Ohio or Kentucky plates. There was a big Imperial with Indiana plates, but I couldn't see who was driving.
We got into Nick's car and I struggled for something to say. What can you say to a guy whose sister has just been murdered? "Nick, man... that's tough. I wish..."
"Aaahh, we didn't get along, anyway," he said shortly, yanking his tie loose and undoing the top button of his white shirt and rolling the sleeves up to his elbows, revealing a cobra tattooed on his right forearm. "Haven't even seen her in almost a year."
I think he meant this to sound casual, but it came out sounding kind of grim.
Nick was 18 in 1963, three years older than I was. He was from Cincinnati, but had moved to Indiana when he was still a kid. We were both about 5'10", but he was a lot heavier, and it was mostly muscle. He had broad shoulders and powerful legs, built like a fullback, though he didn't play sports. Nick didn't talk a lot, or pal around with anybody in particular, or belong to any group or gang, or get too close to anyone, but everybody knew who he was. Parents hated him, other guys admired him or feared him, and girls loved him. Not much was really known about him. He had his car, which was the fastest around, and his girlfriend, who was the best looking babe in town, and his job, which was pretty cool, and an air of enigmatic complexity about him and was generally regarded as a kind of magnificent loner, ala James Dean in "Rebel Without A Cause." He'd never talked to me about his parents, but I'd heard that they were dead.
He'd come town a couple of years ago from Indianapolis to live with his aunt Velma, and the first week he was here he whipped the shit out of two hillbilly truck drivers from Kentucky who'd stopped off for a few beers at the one bar in Calhoun and got drunk and started bothering some high school cheerleaders on their way home from a pep rally for the football team and that had got his reputation started off in the right direction. The girls fell in love with him, their boy friends got jealous, and the parents figured he was a greasy-haired hoodlum. He had graduated from Taylor high in Calhoun the previous spring and worked as a mechanic at a nearby Chevy dealership.
He keyed the engine to life and let it idle for a minute or two while he ran a comb through his gleaming black hair, Brylcreemed and arranged in an oh-so-perfect DA. Then he lit a Camel with a Zippo lighter and fiddled with the radio and got Jan and Dean singing "Surf City".
"Cops find out anything yet?" I asked.
"Nah."
I had heard all about it on the news; everybody in Calhoun was talking about it. Carol Palladino had been found in the parking lot behind her apartment building across the river in Covington by a delivery man at six o'clock in the morning on Tuesday. She had been strangled to death and tossed out of her second story bedroom window. The murder had occurred some time after midnight.
Mary Jane Kelly, who shared the two-bedroom apartment with Carol, had been out for the evening and got home about two o'clock. Carol's bedroom door was shut and she assumed Carol was asleep. The cops found a few smudged fingerprints, but not enough to do much with. The neighbors weren't much help. The old lady who lived down the hall said she thought she heard some people arguing about one o'clock and then the sound of a car driving off, but she was a little hard of hearing and she said it could have been a TV or a radio.
There was no sign of a struggle, except for a small silver chain that had been found on the bedroom floor near the window. It had apparently been ripped from the victim's neck. Mary Jane said it was from a silver crucifix that Carol always wore. There was cash and jewelry in the bedroom, but nothing seemed to be missing except the crucifix. There was an address book with
Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana phone numbers and the cops were checking on boyfriends. They were still wondering about the motive.
"What did she do? She work somewhere?" I asked. I hadn't even know Nick had a sister until all this happened.
"She was a waitress in a night club. Her and that girl she lived with." Nick put the car in gear and we began to roll.
"She was older than you, I guess?"
"Yeah. She was twenty two."
I thought she'd looked older than that, but maybe that was because she was dead. "She was pretty."
"Yeah, I guess."
"Did you know anybody she was dating? Any of her friends?"
"Nah."
"Why would anybody want to kill her?"
"No idea."
"I feel sorry for your aunt. She's a real nice lady."
"Yeah." Nick clenched his cigarette tightly in the corner of his mouth and watched the road intently through his mirrored sunglasses. He didn't want to talk about it, so I just shut up and enjoyed the ride. It was a nice day, and I was out of that tie, and riding in Nick's car was one of the highlights of my life at that time.
Nick had the bitchinest car for miles around, a '55 Chevy with a 283 bored out to 301 CID that turned in the low 12's in B-Modified Stock at nearby Edgewater drag strip. It was painted about a million coats of candy apple red lacquer and had a four-speed and 4:11 gears and ran like Jack the Bear. Like, it could really get lost. Nick knew everything about a car, and did all the work on it himself, except for the paint job. He wanted his own garage some day, where he could build custom cars.
When I was in town I usually went with him when he ran it at the drag strip. I was pretty good with a wrench too, and I liked to think that I was at least partly responsible for the shelf full of trophies he had at home. That's how I'd first met Nick. I had been hanging around the pit - my aunt Eva cooked hamburgers at the concession stand and could get me in for free - and when he had needed a hand with his headers I was right there. I wasn't old enough to drive yet, so I didn't have a car, but I liked working on them, and my sixteenth birthday seemed light years away.
"Here ya go, Champ," Nick said as we drove up in front of my Grandparent's white two-story house. My name wasn't Champ, but that's what he liked to call me. Grandma and Grandpa were sitting on the front porch swing looking a little unhappy. Nick reminded them too much of Elvis.
"Well, I'll see ya," I said, fishing my clothes out of the back seat.
"Hey, Champ..."
"Yeah?"
"Uh... thanks for comin' along, y'know?" He said this quietly, looking a little embarrassed.
"Sure, Nick."
"Later," he said. I got out of the car and closed the door gently. He put his shades back on and drove away in a swirl of dust, the dual glass packs echoing off the houses down Front Street.
* * * *
My cousin Ricky came over later. He was nice-looking, smooth-talking, about my age, and a sharp dresser. He knew everybody and everything that went on in Calhoun. Which wasn't much, but he was still young, and he would widen his horizons considerably in the years to come. He wasn't ambitious or hard-working in the usual sense, but he was always figuring angles, always trying to find the easy way to do something, always trying to talk someone into or out of something. My Grandma said he was fifteen, going on thirty. Ricky had a rare talent. He could talk while he burped, and that was pretty impressive when we were kids. He could say the alphabet like that all the way to "S".
We hung around together every summer when I came down, and he'd been up to my house in Chicago a couple of times. When we were younger we just went fishing together and played baseball, but we were beginning to outgrow that, and now every time I saw him he had something new to lay on me. Last summer I'd drunk my first beer with him, not counting the sips my Grandpa used to give me out of his, and the summer before that he showed me how to smoke a cigarette. When we were ten he tried to explain to me how babies were made and got most of it right. He got C's and B's in school and his teachers called him an underachiever, but he was no dummy. He read newspapers all the time, and one of his hobbies was reading the encyclopedia. His parents had the World Book, and he liked to open a book at random and read about whatever was on the page. He wasn't the kind of guy who would start with "A".
"What's goin' on, Cuz," Ricky said, climbing the cement steps to the back porch. He wanted the word on the funeral.
I had changed into jeans and a T-shirt and was sitting on the back porch swing fiddling around with my old guitar, a recent acquisition, trying to make a C chord.
"Just got back from the funeral." I was a little depressed. Like I said, I had never seen a corpse; I would see that dead white face in my dreams.
"So what's the deal, they catch the guy?" he asked, stuffing some Fleer into his face.
"No." I used my right hand to position my left hand fingers on the strings.
"Carol Palladino was a pretty wild girl, I hear."
"Oh, yeah?" I'd been wondering about that from the snatches of conversation I'd heard. I wasn't about to ask Nick about it, and I figured Ricky would fill me in. I strummed the strings and got a sort of metallic thud.
"Yeah. Linda knows some girls who knew her."
Linda was Ricky's 17-year-old sister. She was pretty neat, for an older sister, Ricky always said. He had caught her kissing the TV screen once when Ricky Nelson was singing his song at the end of "Ozzie and Harriet". Embarrassed her to death and he would never let her forget it.
"She worked at that night club over in Covington, Vito's," Ricky said.
"Yeah, Nick told me she was a cocktail waitress, but he didn't say where. Vito's is a pretty swingin' place, I hear."
"Well, hell, yes," Ricky said, trying to sound like he would know all about a swinging night club in Covington. "They got gambling, girls, whatever ya want."
Vito's was, in fact, legendary. All the kids talked about going there. It was run by Vito Siri, some kind of mysterious Mafia-type guy who was supposed to have a lot of big-time political connections.
"So, what made her so wild?" I said.
"She had a kid. And she'd never been married."
"Really?" I was surprised.
"Oh, yeah." Ricky ran a comb through his dark blonde hair, greased back like Nick's.
"She was living with some guy that worked for Vito Siri, a bodyguard or enforcer or something, and he left town." He raised a knowing eyebrow at me. "At least, they say he left town, but he could be dead or in jail. Nobody's seen him for awhile." Ricky was prone to exaggeration sometimes. "Anyway, this was about a year ago, and after he's gone Carol has this kid and she goes to work for Vito."
"What happened to the kid?"
"She put it up for adoption."
"So what you're saying, is, she was no Mousketeer," I said, thudding away on my guitar.
"No shit," Ricky laughed. "Hey, did you hear about Mickey and Minnie Mouse getting a divorce? They're in court and the judge says, 'So, Mickey, you say your wife is crazy?' And Mickey says, 'I didn't say she was crazy, I said she was fucking Goofy!'"
I chuckled a little and Ricky howled, popping his gum. "Fucking Goofy!" he said as he burped. "Ha, ha!"
"Hey, look!" he said suddenly, grabbing my arm.
Reba Davis, Nick's girl friend, lived next door. There she was, coming out the back door with a towel and a radio and a glass of lemonade.
"That's a nice swim suit she's almost wearing," Ricky said, clutching my arm tighter.
"Yeah, boy!" I agreed, trying to work my arm free.
Reba was wearing just a few ounces of bright yellow fabric that looked real good wrapped around her tanned bod.
The Davis's were a motley group of in-laws and step-relations who always had an old car or two jacked up in the back yard and who kept their washing machine on the front porch. Ol' Man Davis, Reba's step-father, was a sloppy, loud-mouthed, burr-headed guy about fifty with a beer belly sagging out from underneath a dirty white T-shirt who chewed tobacco and drank a lot at the saloon down the street. His fat wife, Frances, who had a mustache and shoulders like a wrestler, drank a lot with him. Their kids swarmed all around the neighborhood and word was that they lived mostly on Moon pies, potato chips, and RC Cola.
Ol' Man Davis was just back from the Ohio State Prison, where he'd done a year for auto theft. Once a month he rattled into Cincy in his old station wagon to yap with his parole officer. He drove a garbage truck part-time, but that was only until a more suitable form of employment came along. That would be about the time the Cubs won another pennant.
Reba was different, though, despite her unfortunate gene pool. She was bright, always freshly scrubbed and sober, and did OK in school. My Grandparents wouldn't have anything to do with the Davis's, but they liked Reba. She was always polite, helpful, cheerful, (and she wasn't even a Scout) and that's the way children were supposed to be. They knew she had a rotten deal, and they felt sorry for her.
Reba was the local beauty, and the studs in town were always sniffing around her, though they played it pretty cool when Nick was around. He was known to be a mean motor scooter with a bad temper when riled, as a few guys with spaces in their smiles could testify.
We watched as Reba spread out her towel on the sparse grass in her back yard next to a '39 Ford on blocks and lay down. She had legs all the up to her ass and honey-colored hair all the way down to her butt, though it was tied up now. (Her hair, not her butt.) She got Dion on the radio and adjusted her tiny swim suit so it lined up with her tan lines. She was a girl who knew how to wear a swim suit.
Grandma interrupted our reverie, calling from the kitchen: "Honey, would you run down to Woody's and pick up a few things for dinner?"
I opened the screen door and pocketed the five she handed to me. Grandma - Emma - was the kind of grandma everybody should have. She had short gray hair, cut at the same barber shop my Grandpa went to, and the kindest blue eyes I'd ever looked into. She couldn't do enough for me, and my Dad was always complaining good-naturedly that she spoiled me every summer when I was at her house. If the phone was ringing and she didn't get to it in time, she would call everyone she knew until she found out who had tried to call her. She figured her main purpose in life was to cook, and she was always asking Grandpa and me if we had had enough to eat. Grandpa was a slim guy; I was surprised he didn't weigh 300 pounds. Grandma didn't like to eat in restaurants, said you didn't know what you were getting. Her specialty was fried chicken, and she usually served it with green beans she grew in her little garden in the back yard. The chicken was fine, once you got the skin off, but I wasn't too crazy about eating anything green.
Woody's was the little grocery store next to the Post Office and the saloon, three blocks away. Ricky and I walked along the cracked and lumpy sidewalk down Front Street kicking at a tin can and discussing our plans for the evening. We had big plans, all right. Had to do with rock'n'roll and girls.
Most residents of Calhoun were on their front porches this time of day reading the Cincinnati Post. Bees buzzed lazily in Mrs. King's flowery front yard, across the street from my Grandparents. Mr. Toomey, two houses down, was out pushing an old lawn mower back and forth. Mr. Griffith was washing his new car, a 1963 Chevy Impala he'd bought at the Chevy dealership where Nick worked. It was only a 283 automatic, but it was the first new car anyone in Calhoun had bought in a while, and all the neighbors had come over to admire it the day he drove it home.
There was Debbie Shelton's house, two blocks down and across the street from my Grandparents'. My heart beat a little faster when I saw her on the porch with a couple of her girl friends. She gave us a haughty little wave as we passed and I waved back, trying to look nonchalant. I had been in town since Tuesday and had only talked to her once.
I fell in love with Debbie every summer, but she had never really paid much attention to me until she had seen me riding in Nick's car last summer with my arm hanging out the window and a Pall Mall stuck behind my ear. Hanging around with Nick meant that I had at least a chance of being a cool guy. She had a soft, tanned, long-legged body and teased blonde hair and was a dancing fool. She'd been on the local version of "American Bandstand" doing the Twist, the Watusi, and all that stuff. Besides dancing, her main interests in life were angora sweaters and Merle Johnson, Jr. (AKA Troy Donahue). She was no magna cum laude, but I wasn't looking to discuss Sartre or the theory of relativity.
Debbie was a year older than me, and she liked to keep me in a state of confusion and frustration. She had an older sister, Donna, to teach her the womanly wiles that would produce this state in a man. But, I could tell she liked me. At least a little. She wasn't supposed to know that I knew, but I did know, and that helped even things out a little.
We got passionate with each other once or twice after dark in Ricky's back yard, but so far nothing to brag about. Not that I would brag about it... Well, I might hint a little to Nick. Debbie had pouty Bridgitte Bardot lips flavored with strawberry frost lipstick and sexy blue eyes that could jump-start my uncle's pace maker.
Woody's was a little wooden building badly in need of paint with Coke signs on the door and a bare wooden floor. His specials were advertised in the windows on butcher's paper and the place usually smelled like old lettuce. Some of the kids in town made a little spare change digging up soft drink bottles and returning them to Woody for the deposit.
Woody, himself, was a languorous middle-aged guy with dark curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses who smoked cigars and wore a butcher's apron. He used to run a big A&P store in Cincinnati, but he'd moved to the serenity of Calhoun ten years ago and opened Woody's because he didn't like the rush of the big city. He was pretty relaxed; he never got in a hurry for anyone. He wouldn't hot-foot it if Elvis stopped by for some peanut butter and bananas.
There was a brand new Lincoln Continental parked in front of Woody's, big and black with tinted windows so you couldn't see inside. The chrome glinted in the sunlight. We could smell the rubber of the tires and the hotness of the engine; it almost seemed alive, like the huge grill could open into a ravenous metal mouth ready to devour anything that got in its way. The town looked smaller and rattier with the marvel from Detroit parked in its midst.
"Hey! Elvis is here!" Ricky exclaimed.
"Nah, Elvis rides around in Cadillacs," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot."
"It's got a Kentucky tag."
We admired the car quickly and went inside Woody's to see what was up and saw a tall thin man with a pencil mustache standing at the counter talking to Woody. He was dressed in a dark tailored suit with a lavender silk tie and black patent leather shoes. His close-set flinty eyes flicked over us quickly. He was buying cigarettes from Woody, and I saw a thick wad of bills that he flashed when Woody gave him his change. He lit a cigarette with a gold monogrammed lighter and exhaled a cloud of smoke. There was no one else in the store but the four of us.
"Looking for a fellow named Otis Davis," he said to Woody. His voice was cold and flat, barely above a whisper. "Know him?"
Looking for Ol' Man Davis!
"Oh, sure, " Woody drawled, peering at the man over the top of his glasses. "Wife comes in all the time. Blue house on Front Street. Two stumps in the front yard." Woody pointed in the direction from which we had come.
"Thanks," the stranger said, and left in a swirl of after-shave.
I grabbed some milk and bread and put them on the counter. "Who was that?" I asked, "Somebody from 'The Untouchables'?"
"That was Vito Siri. Smokes Old Gold," Woody said, punching the cash register with a stubby finger.
Ricky jabbed me in the ribs. He was in a hurry to leave. I gave Woody the five. Ricky was at the window watching Siri leave.
"Here ya are, son," Woody said, giving me my change. "Tell your Granny I said hello."
"Sure. See ya later." I grabbed the brown grocery sack and Ricky and I hurried home. There was the Lincoln, parked in front of Davis's. I delivered the groceries to the kitchen and went out on the front porch with Ricky to see what we could see.
The neighbors were rubbernecking the Lincoln, too; normal afternoon activities were put on hold while we all watched this strange visitor from a distant planet.
A couple snotty-faced kids came from Davis's back yard and began creeping around the Lincoln, jabbering at each other between bites of the jelly sandwich they were sharing. One of them put a sticky hand on the front bumper and began to climb up onto the hood but the driver's door opened suddenly and a skinny pimple-faced guy with a cigarette dangling from his mouth got out and hollered at them and they scuttled to the safety of the front porch.
The screen door creaked and Grandpa came out and sat down in the wicker chair next to me and lit his pipe. Grandpa was white-haired with a thick, drooping mustache and bright brown eyes. He didn't talk a whole lot; he enjoyed sitting back puffing his pipe and watching what went on in the world around him. He didn't read much, except for the sports section of the Enquirer, but he never missed the evening news on TV with Al Schottlecotty
"Company next door, hey?" he said between puffs.
"Vito Siri," I said.
"Hmmm," he muttered, taking a pipe cleaner from the pocket of his flannel shirt and running it through the stem of his pipe. He wore flannel shirts nearly all the time, no matter what the weather. And buttoned them all the way up, too. He wore an old brown fedora when he went out anywhere. He had two brand new hats in the hall closet, one brown and one gray, that my Dad had bought him, but he never wore them.
"What would Vito Siri want with the likes of Otis Davis?" he mused.
The first time I had ever heard the word "trash" applied to people was when I heard Grandpa say it in reference to his next door neighbors. Later I heard it refined to "white trash". There was a Davis kid about my age named Dicky Bird, but Grandpa wouldn't let me have anything to do with him.
"We saw him down at Woody's," Ricky said. "He was asking where Davis lived."
"And he's got a chauffeur driving that car," I said.
"Man like that can afford a driver," Grandpa said.
Just then Siri walked out of Davis's house onto the front porch, the screen door banging behind him. He looked up and down the street and flipped his cigarette butt at one of the unsightly white stumps in Davis's front yard. He had a grim look on his face. His dark eyes met mine for an instant, and I was glad there was some space between us. He was a mean-looking bird, for sure. The brats on the porch gave him plenty of elbow room and he walked to his car and drove off.
Ol' Man Davis appeared on the porch and watched him leave. He had a bottle of Hudepohl in one hand and a cigar in the other. He wore a worried look on his jowly face and had on a torn undershirt and grease-flecked overalls. The brats were swarming around his legs; he batted them away and went back inside and the screen door banged behind him.
I suddenly realized my hands were clenched so tightly around the arms of my chair that they were hurting.
Grandma came to the door wiping her hands on a dishrag. "Time to eat, boys," she announced. "Fried chicken!"
Fried chicken! Hey! What a surprise. I bet we've got green beans to go with it. I wished she would learn to make pizza or something. She could use some cooking lessons from Aunt Eva down at the drag strip.
Grandpa knocked out his pipe and stood up. "Did you make some more iced tea, Emma?"
"All you can drink." Grandpa was a real iced tea nut.
"I'm gone," Ricky said. He winked at me meaningfully, in reference to the big evening we hopefully had ahead of us. He jumped off the porch and went through the gate and I got up and trooped inside with Grandpa for the fried chicken.
* * * *
There was a teen club called the Top Deck in a neighboring town about three miles down the Old River Road. It had just opened this summer and I was all on fire to go. Ricky had been there and he said it was a real boss place. They had rock bands from Cincinnati on the weekends and once a month they had a national act, and Ricky had seen Chubby Checker at the grand opening. Nick had told me that the place was crawling with pussy, so it seemed like a place that would want me to come to it.
I had been hinting around to G&G all week about going, but they had heard about the Top Deck and figured it was some sort of adolescent den of iniquity. I was their only son's oldest son and they took this responsibility pretty seriously, but, hell, I was 15 and I could read, and dress myself, and go to the bathroom by myself and everything. I even had a couple of hairs on my chest, and I figured it was time they lightened up a little. So Ricky got his Dad, my Uncle Bill, to agree to come over after dinner and have a little chat with G&G about my social life.
Uncle Bill was square-faced and handsome, with dark wavy hair shot with flecks of gray at the temples. He had an easy going manner and an athletic build and he liked to tell stories about the days when he played minor league baseball in the Red's organization. He had been an outfielder and had hit 40 home runs in 1942. But then he went off to war and when he came back with a piece of shrapnel in his leg his pro baseball days were over and he went to work at the refinery. But he still liked to play, and he coached a sandlot team of 12 to 16 year-olds. He had helped me a lot with my swing, and he said I would be a pretty good hitter once I filled out a little.
For a Dad, Uncle Bill was pretty cool; he didn't get on us about our hair, or clothes, or music or whatever. My Grandparents liked him a lot; to them he was a war hero, so I felt pretty sure I would be rockin' and rollin' with some fabulous babes that night when I saw him coming across the street after dinner.
He had iced tea on the back porch with G&G and told them how Ricky had been going to the Top Deck and so far hadn't shown any signs of moral decay or incurable disease. Kids just like to get together and have a little fun, he said. Listen to music, dance a little. After all, we were good kids, and he was sure it would be OK.
"All set, Kid," he said when they were done talking.
He called me Kid, an expression he had picked up from Babe Ruth. He had actually known him.
"Yay! Thanks a lot, Uncle Bill!" I had been sitting in the living room clunking around on my guitar, trying to hear what they were saying, waiting for the Big Verdict.
"Come over about 8:30 and I'll drive you boys over there."
I took my guitar upstairs and danced around the bedroom banging on it gleefully, wishing I could actually play something. Then I worked on my hair for awhile and then I rummaged through my closet, picking out something cool to wear. Ricky lived on Creighton, two blocks away, and I was there at 8:28, decked out in white stretch jeans, Madras shirt, and cordovan Chukka boots. This was going to be a great night. We got into Bill's bullet-nosed Studebaker and off we went.