the phone rings, and it’s Mrs. Pratt. I know of course about Dr. Pratt’s murder. In fact, I had heard him speak downtown at the Midwest Modern Language Association convention only a few hours before he was killed. I went to hear him for old times’ sake. I had even planned to look him up afterward to see if he remembered me. To tell the truth, I’d been a little nervous about it.
When I tell Mrs. Pratt on the phone that I had heard her husband’s talk that night, she seems disconcerted. Says it’s eerie—that’s her word—eerie that I heard him speak just before he died. It doesn’t seem eerie to me—hundreds of people heard him speak just before he died. Dying after speaking isn’t any stranger than dying after eating or dying after washing the car. It always comes after something, you know what I mean?
I tell Mrs. Pratt that I’m not a private investigator or anything like one, that I am extremely unlikely to solve the crime, and that the police will only see me as a nuisance. But she insists I “look it over.” She says she doesn’t expect me to find the killer. She just wants more information.
“I just feel like there’s something there to be seen that the police wouldn’t recognize if they tripped over it. I think you can help.”
It’s a new concept for me. To be thought capable of helping, by a woman no less. I let the idea roll around in my psyche for a moment. I’m sure it’s the main reason I say I’ll think about it, even though the ache in my stomach makes me immediately wish I hadn’t.
TWO
I don’t decide right away. I should talk to Judy first. We haven’t been back together long, and I don’t want to mess things up. I have a long history of making seemingly innocent decisions that end up deflecting the universe. Zillah (my soon-to-be ex) calls it a gift for the cosmic screw-up. Big Bang-sized disasters that create galaxies of pain and black holes of confusion. It’s true that I have a kind of congenital clumsiness about life that I can’t seem to shake. Zillah found it moderately charming when we were dating, but it was a different story when she moved in with it.
Anyway, I decide to talk to Judy. We live together now on a rented houseboat in the Mississippi, in the shadow of the Wabasha Bridge in downtown St. Paul. Kind of an oxymoronic place—out on the river, like Huck and Jim, but going nowhere, towered over by government and office buildings on the far bank. Illusory freedom. It’s not a big old tub, as houseboats go. Two tiny bedrooms up top over a fair-sized living room and galley kitchen below. Engineless, like me, neither houseboat nor occupant seaworthy.
Judy sits across the small galley table slowly chewing a hot dog on a fork that she holds up close to her face. She takes a bite and then stares at the end of the hot dog while she chews, slowly but inexorably, balanced between the pleasure of the hot dog in her mouth and the anticipation of the next bite to come. A perfect illustration of the now and not yet—the once and future hot dog.
Actually, Judy does everything slowly. Sometimes it’s maddening, like being stuck in traffic behind a Grandma Moses in a Studebaker when your whole life depends on you being somewhere else. But I’ve decided Judy’s slowness gives her a kind of dignity, like the massive stillness of a glacier. She is protracted, as God is, grinding slowly but exceedingly fine.
Now I know when I say “back together,” you’re thinking “girlfriend.” You can’t help it. We’ve been trained. But think sister instead. If you never thought “girlfriend,” I apologize.
Yes, Judy is my sister. She is a short woman, using up most but not all of five feet. Leans toward stocky. Her hair hangs very straight and thin from the top of her head, as though placed on the crown like pick-up sticks and allowed to fall equally in each direction. She has almond-shaped eyes with sleepy, bulging lids.
Judy takes a certain pride in her shortness. “Good things come in small packages,” she says with a smile.
Only Judy doesn’t say it the way you or I would. She speaks very slowly. Painfully slow I would have said at one time, glacially slow. Now I prefer to think she speaks carefully, with a stateliness won of hard labor.
She doesn’t actually say individual words slowly, except when she stutters. It’s that she pauses between words, her eyes rolling up into her lids, trying various doors in the dim hallways of her brain, searching patiently for a word or phrase that might befriend the one already in the air. It is important to her that words, like companions, get along.
Judy’s speech patterns mirror the discoveries of quantum physics. The words do not roll smoothly off her tongue in a steady progression. Rather, they leap from her lips in interrupted bursts: “Good things … I should say, good things come … in in … in small packages.” She often finishes in a delighted rush, much as someone crossing a stream on a narrow log hurries the last few steps and jumps to shore in relief and triumph. Then she smiles, pleased with herself and how well things turned out.
And she repeatedly inserts the phrase “I should say” into her sentences, a product of decades of correction and efforts to please. It gives her time to line up her words in a row and affords them a faintly aristocratic air. Judy has a high sense of propriety—what one should say or ought to do. It was drummed into her by our parents and by the nuns at the home. They all lived in the old world of right and wrong, and they passed it on to Judy. If you didn’t know what the rules were, how were you going to know if you were doing okay?
“Well, Jude. This woman called and wants me to do some work for her.”
“That’s nice.”
“We could use the money.”
“Yes, we … we could use the money. That’s for sure.”
“But it would mean you’d have to be by yourself sometimes. More than now.”
“Oh?”
“Well, I would have to be driving around a lot.”
“I like … driving around.”
“And I’d have to talk to a lot of people.”
“I … I should say … I like talk … talking to people, Jon.”
I chew on that.
“Of course you do. Well, why not? You wouldn’t have to stay here. You could come along, at least most of the time.”
Judy rosebuds her lips, raises her eyebrows, and smiles. “I could be … I should say … your sidekick.”
“Sure, my sidekick.”
“Like … like the Lone Ranger and … and Tonto.”
“Like Pancho and Cisco.”
“Like … like, I should say, like Mr. Huntley and Mr. Brinkley.”
David Brinkley was Judy’s first love. He gave the network news every night from Washington, while Huntley reported from New York—the only two American cities of consequence to the media at the time. Judy was a Brinkley fan. “I like his pointy nose,” she used to say. “He’s cute.” When I was nine, I wrote a letter to Brinkley asking him to skip his signature “Goodnight, Chet” some evening and say instead, “Goodnight, Judy.” It would have delighted her to no end. If he ever did, we missed it.
THREE
The
