report cards and monitors Shannon and Crystal’s progress as three-year-old ballet dancers.
She plops the green river float and accoutrements on the counter in front of Gideon.
Norman Rockwell could have invented Pearson’s, could have drawn its waitresses. ‘Pearson’s is Iowa City,’ I tell Karin, almost every time I bring her here. The city expands, food and muffler franchises multiply, demolition crews chip away at history. Rows of elegant old houses are replaced by pink brick warrens that house stereo sets and university students; but Pearson’s survives, a little piece of the past intact, cool, dark and chocolatey-smelling.
‘Hey,’ says Doreen, bustling back from delivering a sandwich to the other end of the counter, ‘want to hear a riddle?’
‘What choice do I have?’ There is no choice. Doreen’s riddle will be clean and simple, probably something to do with elephants.
‘What’s the one thing you can never do during your lifetime?’
I lick the end of my straw contemplatively. I have no idea, but I usually like to make a weak guess or two before giving up.
‘Attend your own funeral?’ I say finally.
Doreen snorts. ‘Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral. Lots of people have faked their deaths and attended their funerals.’
‘You’re right,’ I say, pretending to be chagrined.
‘See the back of your neck,’ says Gideon, stirring his green river.
‘Can’t you do better than that? Anyone can set up enough mirrors to see the back of their neck.’
‘We give up,’ I say.
Doreen waits a long minute before divulging the answer, savoring her triumph. ‘Don’t care who you are, you never get to read your own autopsy report,’ Doreen chortles. ‘You can fake your funeral, but once you’ve been dissected like a biology-class frog, that’s all she wrote. Ha!’
‘I read mine,’ says a high-timbred voice behind us.
Gideon and I both swivel on our stools. Doreen raises her eyebrows, waiting for further explanation. There he is. He must have entered at the front, crossed the store and come down the far wall so he could sneak in behind us. He is a slight young man, with sandy hair. Too small to have been a major-league pitcher. His hands are slim and white. He doesn’t look dangerous.
Doreen moves down the counter to where someone is signalling for a refill, while the three of us shake hands.
Having spent most of my life being a researcher, instead of driving directly to Pearson’s I stop first at the University of Iowa library and spend a fast fifteen minutes scanning recent issues of the L.A. Times and Des Moines Register.
Joe McCoy certainly wasn’t lying about being a criminal. Reading of his exploits over the past several weeks makes me wonder how I could get so out of touch with what is happening in America. Not that anything McCoy’s been doing is of great importance. He’s an ex-major-league pitcher, working as a reporter in Los Angeles, who, for no apparent reason, was involved in a rather bizarre kidnapping. I vaguely remember his name—perhaps Stan has mentioned him—and I guess I knew, at least subliminally, that he grew up in Lone Tree, the next town down the line from Onamata.
McCoy looks very much as I had pictured him from the blurry mug shots in the newspapers. He is only about 5´8˝, wiry, with long reddish-blond hair and quick, almost furtive blue eyes. He is wearing faded jeans and sneakers, and a red-and-white satin baseball jacket, old and glazed with dirt, with LONE TREE in red, carpet-like letters on the back. He takes a long time to decide to sit on the stool between Ray Kinsella and me. He has that about-to-spring demeanor of a startled bird, the look of a second baseman caught napping on a bunt play, still at his position when he should have covered first, wishing that everyone would stop staring at him.
‘The autopsy thing is true,’ he says. ‘But so routine as almost not to count. Remember that business in L.A. where they thought the body in the burned-out car was me?’ He waits for a response, doesn’t get one.
‘You didn’t read about it, did you?’ he says with disappointment. ‘I’ve been away from the Midwest too long.’
Ray and I remain silent. On the drive into Iowa City I had heard a song on a country station that was called, I think, ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ McCoy displays what seems to me a false bravado. I’m sure the autopsy thing is true. I don’t like him very much.
‘It’s been ten years since I’ve been in here,’ he says, as Doreen takes his order for a chocolate malt made with chocolate ice cream. ‘I have, I had, a friend-enemy at LAPD. He let me read the autopsy report.’ He shrugs.
Doreen pays no attention to him as a person, it is obvious he means nothing to her, yet Doreen is one who keeps up on the news; she often asks me about local and national events I have no knowledge of. She would be aware if there was a nationally known fugitive at large who used to live at Lone Tree. She would recognize his face. But she goes to make his order without a backward glance.
While Joe and Ray talk quietly about where their paths may have crossed I remember who and what Joe McCoy reminds me of. A couple of months ago a salesman came to my door. I couldn’t avoid him because I was sitting on the porch swing reading a book when he strode up the sidewalk and knocked on a porch pillar to attract my attention.
He was wearing a white shirt, black pants and tie. At first I thought he might be a Mormon missionary, but no, he was a salesman hawking encyclopedias, and since my body was warm, I was a prospect. He moved in for the kill.
He buried me in an avalanche of words. He was delivering a canned sales pitch, but even my all but ignoring him failed to deter him. He simply pretended that I had acknowledged the importance of what he was saying and crashed onward like a moose through a thicket.
I found him totally detestable. And when he finally finished his presentation, sweat running in his eyes, yards of brochures, and sample copies spread about the porch swing, the railing of the verandah, and the floor, I told him so.
‘It doesn’t matter what you’re selling,’ I told him. ‘It could be carpet tacks, carpet itself, or a whole new interior to my house. If I like you, I’ll buy any product from you that isn’t totally fraudulent, and the average person will buy the fraudulent products too.
‘What you’ve shown me this morning is a loud, self-centered, obnoxious, hot-shot salesman out to swindle a small-town rube. Now get off my property.’
‘But I’m not like that,’ the young man said. His shoulders slumped and he took a deep breath. For a second I thought he was going to cry.
‘I’m not loud. I’m no more self-centered than anyone else. And I’m sure not a hot shot; I’m scared to death. I haven’t made a sale in two weeks and I’m out of cash and every time I go to buy food or gas on my credit card I expect it to be seized, and I’ve got a wife
