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".
The Top Deck was in an old high-ceilinged building that had once been a department store. The parking lot across the street was full. I saw Neal Nance's Ford, Nick's only competition at the drag strip, parked slanted under a light so no one would bang a car door against his black paint job. Liz Daly's red Edsel - she supposedly screwed the whole football team after last year's homecoming game - sat next to Joe Crump's banged-up '57 Chevy. Crump was intense and moody and liked to fight; a little off in the head, everyone figured. There was a group of motorcycles parked by the front door, a couple of Triumph 650's, a BSA, and a couple of Harleys. Hardly anyone rode Jap bikes back then.
A cop at the door gave everybody the skunk-eye as they paid their dollar to get in. The club was hot and crowded and noisy and there was an electricity in the air that I could feel when I walked inside. The place was dimly lit; the ceiling faded away in the smoky gloom, and the floor throbbed with the beat of the five-piece band that was playing on the stage at the far end. Ricky produced a crumpled pack of Marlboros and we lit up and began cruising the perimeter of the dance floor, like about a hundred other guys, eyeing the leg and trying to look cool.
"That's the Teen Tones," Ricky said, nodding at the band. "From Cincinnati. Good band."
They were doing a good job on "Long Tall Sally". They had bass, drums, electric piano, and two guitars. The piano player played piano with his left hand and trumpet with his right hand on a couple of songs. Real neat, that was. And he sang great. There was a gaggle of girls crushed together in front of the bandstand watching them play. Yeah, I needed to start practicing the guitar a whole lot harder.
"Hey, Ricky!" Someone hollered.
"Hey, Kenny, whaddya say?" Ricky said to the tall, beak-nosed guy who came up to us. "'Smy cousin from Chicago," he pointed at me. I shook hands with Kenny.
"Big city, huh?" Kenny had a funny eye, and I couldn't really tell where he was looking.
"I live in the suburbs, really." I had only been downtown a couple of times, and one of those times didn't really count, as it was with my social studies class and Mr. Farr wouldn't let us have much fun, or even be very social.
I was wondering why Kenny was wearing a jacket in that hot club, and I found out when we went into the men's room and he pulled out a pint of Southern Comfort and passed it around. It was the first time I had ever tried whiskey. I took a big hit that brought tears to my eyes. For a moment I was afraid that it would come back up.
"Smooth," I gasped.
Ricky knew a lot of the kids there, mostly from school.
"There's Dodie Moss," he said, pointing out a girl with reddish hair teased up high on top and cut short in the back. The sides of her hair came down in front of her ears like pointy little sideburns and curled around her cheeks. "They call her Dodie Frog, 'cuz she jumps from bed to bed. Ha! Ha!"
"Shit, how would you know?" Kenny snorted.
"Hey, man, I been there."
"Your dyin' ass."
"Your dyin' ass!"
The only industry in Calhoun besides the refinery was the old gravel pit. It was on the outskirts of town, on the Old River Road. I never did know exactly what they did there; I guess they dug gravel out of the ground and sold it to construction companies or something. There was a big silver conveyor-looking thing that ran over the road from one part of the operations to another part, and gritty dump trucks ran in and out of the place all day. A fine white dust covered everything around there; the trees along the road for a half a mile in either direction were coated with it. Kids would go swimming in some of the old unused pits that filled up with rain water. A kid drowned a few years ago, I guess because he couldn't climb out. My Grandparents had warned me how dangerous it was back there for as long as I could remember, so naturally I'd sneaked off to check it out a couple of times.
This was where Reba's body had been found, in the wooded area between the old unused part of the gravel pit and the river, a place where a brave couple would go parking late at night once in a while. Tramps hung out there and it was supposed to be haunted.
"Tommy Andrews and Alvin Carruthers found her, the poor dear, at dawn this morning. They were out there fishing, though why their parents let them go fishing in that place is more than I can say," Josephine Cowan said.
Josephine was in her Sunday best, a flowery purple dress and a broad-brimmed white hat, ready for church. She smelled like lilac. She nervously sipped the cup of coffee Grandma had poured for her and wiped her eyes with a lace hanky. "She was such a sweet girl, never gave anybody any trouble."
Josephine had really knocked us out when she had come over with the news. We were eating breakfast. Grandpa's fork clattered to the floor and Grandma, who was standing at the stove working on a second pan of bacon, muttered "Land'O'Goshen" and sat down heavily in a red kitchen chair. Grandpa picked up his fork and moved the bacon off the burner. Josephine told us what she knew.
"She was strangled. Strangled!" she repeated in a hushed voice. "And left laying back there in that old woods behind the gravel pit. Oh, it just makes me ill, I don't know if I'm even up to going to church this morning. Good Lord, it's so terrible. Terrible."
"Yes, it is," Grandma said, patting her on the shoulder. "I just don't know what to think lately. So many bad things happening. More like a big city." She was twisting her apron into a knot as she talked.
"And, anyway, Tommy and Alvin ran home and told Tommy's dad, you know Edward's with the Civil Defense, and he called the State Police."
"Any idea who did it?" Grandpa asked, pulling at his mustache.
"Not that I heard. The police are over there now."
Grandma went to church with Josephine, and Grandpa, who wasn't the religious type, settled down with the Sunday sports section and his pipe. I ran over to Ricky's. I met him running out of his front door. He had already heard about it; I guess it was too much to expect to spring this one on him, too.
"Hey, let's go!" he said, reading my mind.
"I'm with you!"
We heard a siren wailing as we ran toward the gravel pit. It was quite a ways, and it took us about ten or fifteen minutes to make it. A narrow dirt road led back to the woods where the body had been found. Thick underbrush and low-hanging trees gave the place a gloomy atmosphere, and the closer you got to the river the fishier the air became. Beer cans and other trash lay along the side of the dirt road and an old rusted Ford was parked behind a pile of old tires. It had been a couple of years since I had been back there; Ricky and I used to play Tarzan there. There were a lot of vines to swing on and some good climbing trees with sturdy branches. But we had come across a tramp sleeping under a tree and that had scared us away. Ricky had wanted to come back and talk to him, to tell him we were reporters doing a feature article for the kids' section of the Sunday paper about hobos. But I said no way and he didn't want to go back by himself. Ricky had told me that some gangster from Covington had been knocked off back there in the 20's by a rival bootlegger, and I believed him; it looked like a good place for a murder, if there was such a thing.
"Whew, this place is still creepy," I said. I had kinda thought that it might look a little better now that I was older, but it still had a sinister aspect, especially now, when I knew what had happened here last night. And the day had turned dark gray, with black-looking clouds moving in from the north.
"Yeah, you'd think this'd be a good place to hide a body." Ricky answered. "I bet the murderer didn't think it'd turn up so soon."
We came to the murder site. There were a bunch of cop cars and a TV truck. I recognized a reporter I'd seen on the evening news. A weedy area under some willow trees about twenty feet off the road was roped and a crowd of people were ringing it. Cops were keeping people from getting too close. We got as close as we could and then we saw it - Reba's body lying there on the ground. This was the second dead body I'd even seen, and a sick feeling ran through me. She looked fragile, like a bird that had fallen from the sky. Her head was at an odd angle and her face looked bluish. She had on the same clothes we had seen her in last night when she left with Nick, only one shoe was missing.
In about two seconds people came rushing out of the club like it was about to sink or something. We got caught in the crowd and were swept outside along with the musicians, bartenders, hookers, and customers. A fat guy with a scared look on his face stumbled out, trying to fasten his pants and tuck in his shirt, and a wild-eyed blonde with smeared lipstick and a disheveled hairdo wearing only a man's overcoat that she was trying to button up was hot on his heels. Everybody was yelling and pushing. The guitar player from Frankie's band had his Stratocaster with him, hugging it close to his body. A couple guys had drinks they were trying not to spill. What the holy hell was going on? Then we heard someone shout: "Vito's been shot! He's dead!"
Holy jumpin' horseshit! A gangland killing or something?
In the hubbub I heard Nick's name mentioned, and I turned to Ricky. "You hear that?"
"Yeah," he said, a puzzled look on his face. "Somebody said somethin' about Nick."
Then we saw it, parked right across the street, gleaming and flashing under the neon signs. I hadn't noticed it before. Nick's '55 Chevy.
"Let's get the hell outta here!" Kenny said frantically. He was in a sweat, ready to panic, trying to make a path through the crowd to safety.
People were trying to get out of the club while others were jamming the doors trying to see what had happened. We heard sirens in the distance; the cops from the donut shop screeched up and hopped out of their car. We were shoved this way and that. I saw Ginger sneaking out, followed by the bouncer from the back room. I was looking around for Nick, but I didn't see him.
"Hey, there's Ginger, man," Ricky said. "Wanna ask her for your money back?"
"Fuck the money, the cops are comin'. Let's get outta here." Kenny said.
Sounded like a good idea to me. I didn't want a ride downtown to the police station as an underage witness.
"Let's just ease on over here," Ricky said coolly, finding a path through mob to the sidewalk where a group of passersby were standing around watching the show. "Nobody'll even know we were in the place."
He was right; nobody was paying any attention to us, and in about three seconds we looked like innocent bystanders. We all casually lit cigarettes and waited further developments. Most of the people from the club had disappeared down the street into cars or other clubs and we were left with the growing throng on the sidewalk.
"You see Nick anywhere?" Kenny asked. "There's his car."
"No," Ricky said. "Hey, maybe he can get your money back for you."
"Yeah, right," Kenny said dourly.
Then more cops showed up, two cars with sirens and lights going. They left two guys at the door to handle the crowd and the rest went inside. Then a plain car drove up and two guys in suits got out and went inside. A few minutes later an ambulance arrived and two guys in white rushed inside with a guerney. Cops directed traffic and cleared out the doorway to the club. Red lights blinked from their cars, reflecting off the startled white faces of the onlookers.
A TV crew drove up in a white station wagon just as the ambulance guys were carrying out a still figure on the guerney. The figure was covered with a bloody white sheet and wasn't moving, and we craned our necks to get a look.
"Vito?" I said breathlessly.
"Bet it is," Ricky said.
When they loaded the body into the ambulance they went back inside with another guerney.
Some other people from the club had the same idea we had, and had hidden in the crowd to watch what happened. We recognized our waitress and a couple others.
"Wanda said that greasy-haired kid just walked up and started shooting at Vito," our waitress said to a girl standing next to her. We moved a little closer to them.
"Jesus, that guy's gotta be crazy," the girl answered. "Then what?"
"Moe and the boys opened up on him. Dropped him in his tracks."
"Dead?"
"I guess."
"What about Vito?"
"Dead."
"Jesus."
What greasy-haired kid? What were they talking about?
Another body was carried out by the grim-faced ambulance attendants. I had stopped breathing. The sweat was cold on my forehead. There was an arm hanging down from under the sheet. On it was a tattoo of a cobra. It was Nick.