Free Sam McCain - 05 - Everybody's Somebody's Fool by Ed Gorman Page B

thought about it. He starts brooding about his childhood and drinking—he gets so irrational. I feel sorry for his aunts. He doesn’t seem to appreciate how much time and love they put into raising him.
    He always says he was orphaned. But he wasn’t. They saw to it he wasn’t. That’s the one trait I get tired of. The way he feels so sorry for himself. He didn’t have it easy, I know that. But a lot of kids had it a lot worse.” Then, “And she doesn’t do anything to stop him when he gets drunk and crazy.”
    “She being Rita?”
    “Of course. The lovely Rita. That bitch.
    I know I sound like a spoiled brat but I’m a lot better for him than Rita is. A lot better.”
    She obviously wanted me to agree with her.
    I didn’t say anything.
    Against the quarter-moon a scarecrow, arms flung wide, watched over a fallow
    cornfield and a small farmhouse with faint smoke eeling out of its chimney. Every once in a while the headlights would pick out empty beer cans and beer bottles scattered on the brown-grass sides of the road. These were the back roads where teenagers drank and went to first, second, or third base—or hell, maybe even hit a homer—depending on mood, pluck, and luck.
    Graves Hollow was so named because of a graveyard that had been abandoned right after World War I. Between our war dead and two plagues of influenza, a new and much larger cemetery had been required. The dead were so long dead up on the hill that nobody alive could remember them, so nobody visited except kids who wanted to scare each other or put the make on their girlfriends. I’ve logged my share of make-out time in cemeteries. The cheap Freudian take on it all is that you’re defying death with the affirmative act of lovemaking. The less fancy explanation is that it’s a quiet place to get laid.
    We drove the long, straight section of Hollow Road that local kids since the early 1920’s had been using for drag racing. The west side of the road was steep and piney. The east side of the road was more fallow cornfields.
    No sign of cars.
    We headed for the old mines.
    “Do you think he’ll ever grow up?”
    “Sure. Someday.”
    “How long will it take, do you think?”
    “Offhand, I’d say three years, eleven months, and forty-two hours.”
    “I’m serious.”
    “I don’t have any idea, Molly. It’s easy for us to say he feels too sorry for himself. He hasn’t had an easy life, even with all the stuff his aunts have done for him.”
    “That’s why he treats women the way he does. That’s what I think, anyway. He’ll see some boy he’s jealous of and then he’ll take the kid’s girl from him. Just for a week or so. But it makes him feel good, strong, you know what I mean?”
    “Sure. And when he gets women to fall in love with him, it lets him, at least for a little while, think that he’s as good as everybody else.
    Especially girls from the upper class.”
    “I read an article that said that for boys like him the conquest is everything. Then they have to move on to more conquests to make themselves feel good again.” She tamped a cigarette from her pack. “That’s what Sara was all about. I couldn’t compete with her money.”
    She made a small fist. “God, I can get so mad at him—and yet I love him so much, too. I go around wanting to protect him all the time. Mostly from himself.”
    Right after the Civil War, coal mining came to our state and prospered until well into the next century, at which point, as if by divine edict, the mines began to be too expensive to operate.
    A few mines remained open but for the most part the miners moved on.
    There was a moonscape ruggedness to the mined-out land now—stubby, mutated-looking pines dotted over hills of rocks and coarse grass on the sides of which were the boarded-up yaws of the mines themselves. A fair number of adventurous kids had been lost in those mines over the years, and about the same number of derelicts, fugitives, and madmen had hidden out in them.