Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

When I can move, that is. When this dreadful numbing cold stops creeping through my arms and legs and now my chest, which is making it very hard to breathe, and when I can move something and get off the sofa.

There’s a strange cottony taste in my mouth and I’m very, very thirsty. If I could move my arm, I could reach for the glass that’s still lying where it fell a few minutes ago. Or is it hours? There might still be a drop of whisky in it.

I like a drop of whisky. Everybody knows that.

The Death of Doc Virgo by Hal Charles

The two Eastern Kentucky University professors who write under the byline Hal Charles often choose rural Kentucky as the setting for their stories. This time out they take us back to a turbulent era, the 1960s, when the citizens of Kentucky reacted very differently from urban America. As usual, they’ve added a touch of humor to their tale of mayhem.

* * *

You know, it’s been eight years since high-school graduation, and this is the first time I’ve been back to Woodhole. Too many painful memories. But one day last week I realized it was finally time to return to the Clement County Public Cemetery to pay my respects. Not a day passes I don’t think about the way you died.

1968. The Vietnam War had reached a turning point in public acceptance — except in Clement County, where kids dropped out of Woodhole High to enlist. The mini-dress was in. Not here. The Woodhole Alliance for Cleaner Kids (WACK) got the city council to pass an ordinance requiring girls under twenty-one to have their skirts one inch below their knees. The Wild Bunch was showing up in Lexington, but in the land time forgot, the Starz ’n Stripes Theater ran The Odd Couple for five straight months. It was either Mark Twain or W. C. Fields who looked prophetic for having proclaimed, “If I heard the world was going to end, I’d move to Kentucky because everything happens there later.”

But at Woodhole High in 1968 we couldn’t even read Mark Twain. WACK convinced the school board to ban his most famous book. Because Huck didn’t live with his father or mother, they labeled the classic as “un-American.” In English IV class, we were fed a steady diet of A Tale of Two Cities, To Have and to Hold, and Ivanhoe. All our meals consisted of Miss Large’s getting us to read the classics round-robin. Once when J.D. Bracy, who was both class clown and valedictorian, interrupted her dramatic rendering of Sidney Carton’s “far, far better” speech to ask if the uprising of Dickens’s French peasants could be equated to the Vietnamese expelling the French from their land, Miss Large paused in her crocodile tears, peered over her Ben Franklins with a look that could lop years off a young man’s life, and banished J.D. to the principal’s office till he could conduct himself “like a proper young gentleman.”

Luckily for J.D. and the rest of us, prim and proper Miss Large got knocked up by some local big shot and had to take a “leave of absence.” The way we heard it, Hortense, the wife of our county judge-executive, Homer Fanning, had a nephew who was truly desperate for a job. Wily old Hortense withheld her favors till His Honor convinced the school board that Waverly (we never knew if it was his first name or last) was the perfect temporary replacement for Miss Large. Those of us who had been to Judge Fanning’s traffic court feared this new appointment was going to come down on our heads harder than His Honor’s gavel.

While we waited for Waverly to walk into our senior English class that late September morning, we took to speculating about our substitute teacher. Leah Cokely hoped he was cute ’cause she was tired of turning down dates with “little boys who had more pimples than IQ points.” Brad “Bigasa” House, who played left tackle on the football team, guessed Waverly’d be “skinnier than the pole on a butterfly net” ’cause all the real men were in Vietnam — only he said “in country”; Brad wanted to be a jarhead even more than he wanted to be an NFL player. Howie Bowles figured the teacher had to be gay — his exact word was “queer.” Everybody knew, he claimed, that was the only type that went to college. But when Waverly entered the class, we were all proved wrong.

Muscular, and taller than most basketball players, he appeared to us in torn jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of sandals on which somebody had printed FLIP and FLOP, hair longer than Miss Large’s (who was Pentecostal), and a pair of wire-frame glasses like Nana, my mom’s mom, wore.

“You male or female?” says Brad half-seriously.