Collected Short Fiction, page 253
She turned around and gave him a two-hundred-watt smile. ‘I’m almost done, Tony. How ya doin’, Ralph?’
‘Seriously,’ Tony said, and he sounded it. ‘Right now, MillieLou, or I’ll have to come and get you.’
‘Uh-huh, you bet.’ MillieLou was shooting through the front door now.
‘I’ll give you to the count of five,’ Tony told her, pushing through the fence. ‘One. Plus four is five.’ He was on her in three quick strides and escorted her off the property even more quickly.
‘The bum’s rush – really?’ MillieLou said, pulling away from him with wounded dignity. ‘After all we’ve meant to each other?’
‘Gimme a break,’ Tony said unhappily. ‘I had to. The neighbours are watching.’
‘It’s a Neighbourhood-Watch area,’ the other cop, Ralph, put in. ‘They’re always watching.’
The two of them ushered us politely but firmly towards the sidewalk. To their cruiser, I thought, so the neighbours could see them taking us away. Instead, however, they ticketed us. I was fine with that until I saw the amount.
‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ Ralph asked, looking concerned. He opened the back door and had me sit down on the seat. Tony handed me a bottle of water, insisting I drink; it was actually warmer than I was but I barely noticed. Ralph’s calling me ma’am bothered me more.
‘She’s fine, it’s just sticker shock.’ MillieLou took the ticket away from me and tucked it into her purse. ‘The graft in this town has always been a scandal. Don’t worry, Lucy, it’s on the Jones. You just catch your breath while I have a chat with these two fine public servants.’
I’d have gone limp with relief except I was already on the verge of melting anyway. The inside of the police car was no cooler than outside, but at least it was out of the sun. I leaned back, poured a little water into my palm, and splashed it on my face, not caring how much dribbled down onto my shirt. I might have poured the whole thing over my head except the cops probably wouldn’t have appreciated my flooding their back seat. Assuming it all didn’t just turn to steam.
After a bit, I looked around; MillieLou and the cops were gathered in front of the cruiser, deep in conversation. Only the cops were doing most of the talking while MillieLou nodded attentively and took notes. I could see it wasn’t a scolding, but maybe the neighbours couldn’t tell the difference. Finally, she flipped her notebook closed, gave each cop a pinch on the cheek, and beckoned to me.
We headed back downtown. I was hot enough by then to be slightly disappointed that we ended up at the library instead of back in the morgue.
‘Sure I can’t help you?’ I said as MillieLou cranked her way through spool after spool of microfilm.
‘Nah, just keep me company,’ my boss said cheerfully. She knew the offer was strictly polite. I hated microfilm because it was always in negative, white on black. I had a hard time seeing anything that way; on a good day, it would still take me ages to find even a front-page item.
MillieLou had no such trouble – her eyeballs were more adaptable, I guess. But we were there for at least an hour while she ran through spool after spool, consulting the notes on her steno pad (in shorthand, thus unreadable to me) before she finally found something.
‘A-ha! Found it. Remind me to send Tony and his family a deluxe basket for Thanksgiving!’ She annotated the squiggles on her pad with more squiggles and leaned back in her chair so I could look at the page on the screen. ‘Bottom right. Your other right,’ she added automatically.
For once, I found the headline immediately: NO NEW LEADS IN TONGANOXIE FREEZER DEATH; PARENTS CONTINUE TO CLAIM INNOCENCE. It wasn’t a long story. The twelve-year-old daughter of a couple in Tonganoxie, Kansas, had been missing for two days before her dead body had been found frozen stiff under the double-wide trailer where they lived. Her parents insisted they hadn’t known she was there, hadn’t done anything to harm her, and didn’t know who had.
‘When was this?’ I asked.
‘August, 1973. That was a hot summer.’
‘I remember,’ I said, and I did, vividly. Just thinking about it made me sweat even in the overdone air-conditioning. Considering how long we’d been here, I should have been starting to feel cold, but I wasn’t. I was still comfortable. Maybe my body had finally acquired a Kansas City thermostat.
MillieLou found the original news story, made more notes, and then went on spinning through spool after spool. She found another item from the summer of 1969 – famed for being the last year in which she had ever felt cold, although she was so taken with whatever she found I thought it would be rude to point it out.
She didn’t invite me to look at it or at any of the other items she found; from what little she said, I gathered they involved people who had frozen in hot weather. There weren’t very many of them and she couldn’t always find the original story.
Until she got to the 1930s, that is.
‘Should’ve known,’ she said with a grim little chuckle.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘The ’30s were the Dust-Bowl years. Drought set in and peoples’ whole lives blew away in dust storms. Like the Great Depression wasn’t bad enough.’
‘I know my history and I’ve read Grapes of Wrath,’ I said.
‘Reading about it and living through it are two very different things. I was only a little girl then – a very little girl – but it’s a big part of my background. The Kansas City Machine meant a lot of people didn’t end up in Hoovervilles with the Okies. But nobody could do anything about the heat. The heat was awful. Watch weather report on the ten o’clock news – you’ll see just about every night that the record for highest temperature on the date, whatever it is, was set in the 1930s, during the Dust Bowl.’
‘People must have died in the heat then, too,’ I said. ‘Without air conditioning.’
‘Actually,’ MillieLou said as she started another spool, ‘Kansas City is the home of the first air-conditioned building – the Armour Building, in 1902.’
‘No kidding,’ I said, genuinely impressed.
‘Ten years later, Clarence Birdseye developed a system to flash-freeze food. Used a conveyor belt. Not in Kansas City, though; I forget where. That was before most people even had refrigerators – in those days, it was all iceboxes, with deliveries from the ice-man. You didn’t find a lot of refrigerators in peoples’ homes till the late 1920s. Window a/c units were around for a while, but didn’t really come into general use until after World War II.
‘So yeah, people died in the heat. People have always died of exposure, either heat or cold. We just haven’t always kept real good records, even when things were reported. Which they weren’t always. A lot of people were born at home, not in hospitals, and that’s where a lot of them died, too. Families made their own arrangements and, unless their doctor saw obvious bullet-holes or knife wounds in Grandpa, cause of death would be old age. Or the flu, or pneumonia, depending.’
‘Anyone flash-frozen by the Birdseye method?’
‘Good question.’ She cranked through a few more spools in silence, pausing to make notes on her notes. I looked at her pad, sorry (and not for the first time) I hadn’t taken shorthand in high school.
I thought she’d quit after the 1930s but she just kept on going, into the ’20s and even farther back. I was starting to doze off when she finally announced that she was all microfilmed out. I could go home, she said, but she was going back to the office to see if she could arrange her notes into some kind of order. I told her I was sticking with her – I wanted to see how this came out . . . if it came out.
MillieLou didn’t type much but when she did, it sounded like machine-gun fire. She waved away my offer to proofread. If I really didn’t want to go home, she told me, I could keep busy by checking the AP printout for fluff, just in case I called in sick the day we ran out of filler.
You wouldn’t think of the Associated Press as a source of non-news. The teletype machine used up long rolls of paper, printing out story after story. If you read through it, however, you’d find that after the first yard or so, it was déjà-vu – stories were repeated, sometimes updated with new facts, sometimes cut shorter. But twice a day, they threw in a substantial horoscope and an assortment of human-interest stuff, even the occasional movie or book review.
Lately the main topic on the wire had been the upcoming Republican National Convention in Detroit, and how Ronald Reagan was going to get the nomination to run against Jimmy Carter.
Jerry and Irene referred to the Carter administration as the Beverly Hillbillies in the White House. They were both right of centre, which I couldn’t really understand in the post-Watergate era. But then, the previous Republican National Convention had been right here in Kansas City and the conventioneers had been given a hero’s welcome (particularly by the adult bookstores and downtown sex workers, MillieLou had confided to me).
Four years on, I was sure TV coverage of Tony Orlando trying to do the bump with Betty Ford would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Most of the non-political items had to do with the weather. The entire Great Plains region, between the Rockies and the Appalachians, was being cooked to death.
Some of the stories were a lot more scientific and technical than usual, even though, like all AP stories, they were written in what MillieLou called inverted pyramid style, with all the hard information up front so you could shorten them without losing anything essential (working for MillieLou was like going to an inverted-pyramid style J-school).
I read a few, then put them aside and went in search of more stuff like horoscopes and celebrity gossip-column pap. Not because I couldn’t understand it but because I could, only too well. I had taken a geology course at KU taught by a rather charismatic man named Ed Zeller, whose lectures had included a lot of material about changes to the atmosphere and how this could induce substantial changes in climate.
He’d scared us all silly, which is a good way to get students to retain what you tell them – in a class of five hundred, the lowest grade was a 2.9. I still remembered a lot of what he’d told us but if I hadn’t, the weather stories would have refreshed my memory.
My gaze fell on the thermostat outside MillieLou’s office. I felt comfortable – not cold, or even cooled off, but just right. I went over to check the temperature. The tiny dial said 68ºF but I wasn’t sure how reliable that was – if the room was really that cool, my teeth should have been chattering. The control was set on maximum cooling and the a/c was definitely running. MillieLou had left it on while we were out and that hum was probably the sound of the ozone layer disintegrating. I gave the lever a guilty little nudge with my pinky, and then another.
‘What are you doing?’ MillieLou asked in a pleasant, gotcha tone, and I jumped. ‘Funny, you don’t look like you’re turning blue. In fact—’ she frowned and came over to me. ‘You look like you’re finally getting acclimated to the local standard. And not a moment too soon.’ She pushed the lever back to maximum. ‘Something tells me this summer is going to redefine the term ‘hot weather’.’
‘Do you want me to proof your notes now?’ I asked, following her back into her office.
‘No, this isn’t a story. Yet.’ She had pulled down the shades on the two big windows, but the afternoon sun seemed to be trying to burn its way through them. MillieLou ushered me out to my own desk. ‘Right now it’s just a bunch of facts I’ve pulled out of a lot of old newspapers,’ she said, perching on the edge. ‘There’s no way to know how accurate any of it is.’
‘The Star and Times should be pretty reliable, though, shouldn’t they?’ I asked.
‘I wasn’t just looking at them. The Times/Star has always had the newspaper market pretty much cornered in KC but, in the suburbs and points beyond in any direction, they had some competition. Most are defunct; a few barely lasted a year before going under. Some were obviously mouthpieces for those of the crackpot persuasion, people who would call Barry Goldwater a pinko commie stooge.’
That jerked a laugh out of me, but I sobered quickly. ‘I was about to say that’s funny but, on second thought, it isn’t.’
MillieLou beamed approval at me. ‘You’re learning. I wasn’t sure how reliable these other papers might be. I checked for a corroborating story in the Times or Star. At first I couldn’t seem to find anything. I had to read more carefully – some of the references went right by me.’
I shook my head slightly. ‘Maybe you’d better tell me what you were trying to corroborate.’
‘In the last seventy or so years, a number of people have been found frozen to death during heat waves,’ she said. ‘Exactly what that number is, I’m not sure. More than twenty, fewer than sixty.’
‘That’s a pretty big margin for error,’ I said. ‘And that’s just in the Kansas City area, right?’
MillieLou’s eyes widened. ‘Migod, I didn’t think of that. Just the idea of combing death notices for the whole of Missouri and Kansas makes me want to lie down and rest.’
‘Me, too,’ I said, ‘so let’s keep the focus local. Did it happen every year, or can you even tell?’
My boss shook her head. ‘Good question, Lucille. There isn’t enough information either way. Which makes me think it wasn’t an annual event. Not around here, anyway. If it had been happening regularly, it would have been news. There’d be half-a-dozen active conspiracy theories and Wendell and Anne’ud be working in mentions at six and ten Monday through Friday.’ She studied her typed notes for a moment, then looked up at me. ‘By the way, how’s your finger?’
Even with the bandage impeding almost every movement, I had actually forgotten about it. I wagged it from side to side. ‘Okay, I guess. The Novocaine wore off but it doesn’t hurt.’
‘That’s good. Surprising but good.’
‘Surprising?’ I had a sinking feeling. ‘Why? No, don’t tell me!’ I added quickly. ‘It doesn’t hurt, that’s all I care about. Happy ending. Tell me more about people freezing to death in heat waves.’
MillieLou hesitated and I could almost see the little wheels and gears turning. Then she shrugged. ‘Actually, the biggest weather event before 1920 is the big freeze of November, 1911. Climatologists called it the Big – no, the Great Blue Norther of 11/11/11.
‘The day started out unseasonably warm, practically summery. Then the clouds lowered, temperatures plummeted, rain turned to sleet, then to hail, followed by thunderstorms and tornadoes, all topped off by blizzards. And not just here, but all over the Midwest and as far east as Virginia. According to more than one paper – reliable papers – the winds were so high that they torqued buildings out of true.’
‘And all that happened on 11/11/11?’ I shook my head. ‘That would have made me superstitious for life.’
‘You wouldn’t have been alone. Sometime I’ll show you all the silly-season material I’ve got on 11/11. The First World War officially ended at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, but that’s not why. There’s something about 11/11 that makes people jumpy in ways that 10/10 and 12/12 don’t.’
‘Maybe it’s because eleven’s a prime number?’ I said.
MillieLou laughed. ‘Ask twenty people at random if they know what a prime number is. Half of them won’t. Okay, maybe not that many. Even Jerry knows what a prime number is and he has to have Irene balance his chequebook every month.
‘But sixty years ago, you’d have been lucky to get two. Prime meant meat around these parts, not numbers. No, I think it’s the way 11/11 looks. Four ones in a row. You have a digital clock?’
I nodded. ‘Clock radio. Dick and Jay get me out of bed every morning.’
‘Sometimes I forget you’re such a kid,’ MillieLou chuckled. ‘Does it ever seem to you as if you always manage to look at it just when it’s 11:11?’
‘Honestly? No,’ I replied. ‘But I don’t look at it a lot. Time is pie to me. Like a pie chart,’ I added in response to her puzzled expression. ‘When I think of what time it is, I imagine a clock-face.’
‘For a second there, I thought you were getting whimsical on me. Time as pie – kinda sweet, really. You’re the wrong person to ask anyway, though. You don’t obsess over things and you don’t seem to be at the mercy of any compulsions. You’re just always cold. Or you used to be. Tell me, are you ever too hot in the winter?’
‘No, I get cold then, too. Did anyone freeze to death the summer before 11/11/11?’
‘If they did, no one noticed. But the following summer, the Edwardsville Visitor – one of those other papers I mentioned, lasted all of a year? – ran a story about an unidentified man found in a boxcar. They had some inches to fill I guess, so they quoted one of the police officers on the scene: “I thought he was froze solid but the doc said that was how dead bodies do, they get cold and stiff.” That was . . . let’s see . . . Officer Richard McElroy.’ MillieLou smiled. ‘Big family, the McElroys, and none of them dummies.
‘Then, the day after a big Fourth of July party at a steak house called The Happy Steer, the head chef found one of the clean-up crew dead in the freezer. Circumstances seemed to indicate the guy thought drinking beer in the freezer was a great idea. Apparently he’d already had a few when inspiration struck. Identified as 43-year-old Eli Washington, originally from Shreveport.’
‘Was the freezer really that cold?’
‘Sure – if you’re an out-of-towner who can be conveniently written off as an alcoholic and suspected dope fiend.’ MillieLou said, looking sour.
‘A black janitor with no one to care what happened to him,’ I said.
‘You’re catching on.’ MillieLou’s unhappy expression deepened. ‘I couldn’t find any more freezer deaths for 1912 or the year after. But in November 1913, the weather bomb fell on the Great Lakes. They called it the Big Blow or the White Hurricane – a blizzard with hurricane-force winds.’
‘11/11?’ I asked.
‘Actually, it was done with the Great Lakes by the 11th and moved on to eastern Canada. Without the warmer water to provide the lake effect, however, it lost a lot of its power. As far as I can tell, it didn’t even graze Kansas City.’
