Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  81. Blindly he turned north on a narrow winding climbing road called Cemetery Ridge though possibly he hadn't been aware of the name. Past Ridge there was a Sunoco station, a food store, a beer and liquor store and a discount clothes outlet but John Reddy wouldn't have known of these.

  The sun had darkened. Tall evergreens drifted around him. In the mountains you can't see the mountains, it's mostly timber you see.

  McQuade said cynically, not being a nature lover, the same God-damned tree multiplied a million million times. When the sun isn't out don't want to be in the mountains. A gloomy haze like spent, breaths. You can see why the locals drink all winter, and hang themselves or blow their brains out, with. 12-gauge shotguns, in February.

  determined John Reddy's choice of a place in which to hide, or try hide, a private unplowed lane off Cemetery Ridge to turn onto, no one would know.

  Even Verrie Myers would hesitate to call it destiny. Evangeline spoke of "random destiny." Dexter Cambrook cautioned, "You can't too much into these things. You can become psycho'--paranoid."

  John Reddy was attracted to the lane winding between evergreens 2.

  north of the crossroads of Mount Nazarene up a considerable hill because, 2 nailed to the mailbox, there was a weathered NO TRESPASSING sign.

  He might have reasoned that he'd be safe there for a while because intruders warned off. Because clearly no one had driven back the lane for a long time.

  The Jeep had four-wheel drive and could barely make it. John Reddy must've sweated, gunning the motor, stuck in snow and rocking the vehicle back and forth in desperation until it skidded forward. He hadn't thought that, if the Jeep was stuck in snow, it would be seen from the road and the be alerted to him, this was a thought he hadn't had, yet so thought, any asshole might've thought it, he'd have reason now to know he wasn't in his right mind and couldn't trust himself, his judgment.

  Yet he had only himself and his judgment. The hazy light glowered on his skin like the sweat of self-reproach. Yet he managed to drive the Jeep, grinding and floundering forward like a frenzied, wounded beast.

  managed to drive the Jeep, gas gauge on Empty, a quarter-mile into the woods, much of it steeply uphill. There emerged then a cabin out of the gloom, made of logs. Another faded NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to tree.

  This cabin, into which John Reddy would break by way of a rear window, was a single part-furnished room measuring perhaps twenty feet by fifteen. (Some of us, the following summer, would make the pilgrimage to the site out of bold and unapologetic curiosity. Eleven years Jon Rindfleisch, by that time a prominent real estate broker in Buffalo, would seriously consider purchasing the property, rundown cabin scrubby acres, deciding against it only because there was no lakefront and because Mount Nazarene "isn't exactly a chic address in the Adirondacks. ") The cabin had a lavatory, a gas stove and electricity though these weren't turned on. It had a debris-cluttered fireplace which John Reddy would use that night, in fear of freezing to death in subzero temperatures

  cobwebbed firewood and damp moldy papers to produce little heat but virulent, eye-watering stink. It would seem that John Reddy chose not to contemplate the risk of sending up smoke where there should be none, or, contemplating it, reasoning that, by dawn, the smoke should have ceased.

  Possibly he wasn't thinking of the smoke but simply of surviving the night.

  The next few hours. He had not slept and would not sleep. He had changed his clothes since fleeing Willowsville and would not. He was hungry, ravenous. He'd devoured all the food from the 7-Eleven store.

  He drank melted snow and was grateful for it. In a cupboard in the cabin he discovered a few provisions--two six-ounce cans of Heinz's Pork & Beans, the stale and inedible remains of a jar of Maxwell House Instant Coffee.

  rusted can opener John Reddy would attempt desperately to open the cans.

  He would attempt to tear off the lids with his fingernails. We shrank from imagining his hunger, his trembling hands and the tears of frustration and rage in his eyes. "If only he could have gone to Tupper Lake where our lodge is," Trish Elders said tearfully, "--if only, somehow, he could have known.

  There would have been things there for him to eat. He could have for weeks." Instead, this happened, at about ten a. m. of the next day, a Nazarene mailman, delivering mail as usual in his pickup to the who lived on Cemetery Ridge year-round, noticed the churned-up, trespassed driveway, made a call to the owner (who lived in Watertown)

  then to the Hamilton County sheriff's office. When two deputies arrived at about ten-thirty a. m. they discovered the abandoned Jeep, whose plate would quickly be traced, the cabin that had been broken into, of a fire in the fireplace--but no perpetrator. For John Reddy Heart must have had a premonition he was in danger ared had fled the cabin, dawn, on foot.

  Within a half-hour a dozen law enforcement vehicles would converge the scene. New York State troopers, Hamilton County deputies.

  manhunt had begun.

  For the next seven hours John Reddy Heart, sixteen-year-old murderer, believed to be dangerous, would be tracked in the wilds of Mount Nazarene, ascending the mountain in a zigzag, staggering course.

  blindly, without direction. It was a windy, snow-swept, day. The temperature dropped to -10 F. John Reddy was wearing denim jeans, leather jacket and biker boots that came only to his ankles and provided little protection against snow. His toes began to freeze.

  His ears began to freeze. His head was bare. His breath steamed and froze in his eyelashes, nostrils. Tears froze in rivulets on his cheeks. Yet he was sweating inside his clothes. Back in the cabin fainting with hunger he'd devoured the Maxwell's M... instant coffee mix and now his heart raced and pounded and skipped beats.

  Ilis lungs were on fire. He heard in the distance the dreamlike howling of I wolves, which was in fact the baying of bloodhounds. He heard the shouts of strangers. His name--"John Reddy Heart"--harshly enunciated megaphone. Indicate your whereabouts. Throw down your arms.

  Surrender.

  You will not be hurt if you surrender. We believed that John Reddy rather have died than surrender. Some of us believed that John Reddy must have regretted impulsively throwing away his grandfather's gun--"He taken one or two cops with him, before they mowed him down." Like a hunted beast John Reddy tried to disguise his trail. He would have waded upstream except the narrow mountain streams were frozen solid. He climbed panting into the branches of toppled trees, lifted himself from the ground. He crawled across rock faces, swinging his legs into and dangling like a hanged man. On his hands and knees he crawled ice fields.

  In the sky a helicopter whined. He hid. His fingers had turned to ice and were in danger of breaking off. His eyeballs had turned to ice in their sockets. Yet his legs carried him forward mechanically.

  Afterward his would acknowledge they "didn't know how the hell the kid kept going." They'd been informed that Willowsville police had retrieved the murder weapon but couldn't know for certain that the suspect hadn't another weapon, or two, on his person. Bo Bozer believed they'd wanted to think John Reddy had another gus, that wouldtve given him, and them, a sporting chance. They must've been hot to shoot him down in the with their high-powered rifles, to spatter the snow with his blood.

  "You got to figure--here's this sixteen-year-old kid with long hair, biker leather and boots who'd put a bullet through Melvin Riggs's brain, they'd want to kill him bad enough to taste it. Those guys are only human." But it didn't happen that way. Instead, John Reddy was tracked and captured in an ice field halfway up the eastern slope of Mount Nazarene. It was late afternoon of the third day of the manhunt.

  He'd managed to get six miles from the cabin, in his wavering course, he must have covered at least ten miles. When they finally found him he'd from a steep, rocky incline and injured his ankle. Bloodhounds upon him, howling. A dozen troopers. Seeing he was unarmed they at him, laid their hands on him, and John Reddy who'd seemed conscious surprised them by fighting--"resisting arrest." They'd dragged, beaten, kicked
and billy-clubbed him into submission, his face been frozen like a mask now bloodied like lacework, his left eye swollen shut.

  They'd practically dragged him by his hair, clumps of it were torn from his scalp His wrists were secured halfway up his back for maximum pain, much pain John Reddy fainted, to be then borne down the mountainside in triumph like a hunter's trophy carcass. Of course, John Reddy's we had reason to believe it had been his father's) was broken.

  Recounting these facts for us, Evangeline Fesnacht began to cry. It shocked the guys initially--other girls cried often, our hearts melted seeing them, but Frog Tits? We were embarrassed yet impressed. It was the first clear sign, as Smoke Filer said approvingly, that Evangeline was "an actual female, not a dyke." But we were all in danger of breaking down.

  We'd been humbled too, humiliated by state troopers in their Gestapo gear.

  We could taste something tarry, part vomit and part instant coffee mix, at the backs of our mouths. We believed if we'd had a choice, though we never would, we'd have wanted to "go down in a hail of bullets." In waking nightmares for months we would see the glaring ice field, skeletal trees and windwhipped clouds. We knew what it was to be pursued by hounds, and falling in the snow, writhing in pain. Kicked in the ribs, the stomach, in the groin and in the chest and face by Gestapo boots. "You fucker! "--we heard the furious shouts of adult men, we felt their fists closing in our hair, dragging us along the ground. "Give it up, you little fucker!

  You're under arrest!" Dwayne Hewson who'd been butted in the head by a West Seneca linebacker in his junior year and had had to be carried off the football field and taken by ambulance to Amherst General said ruefully, "Christ, you never forget it. Being concussed. Like, you never get over thinking it could happen to you again, any time. The earth just opening up like a big black hole and you fall in." We would never learn exactly when John Reddy made his single statement to police. We believed he couldn't have made it at Mount Nazarene since they'd beaten him there, and at the Onondaga Medical Center he was in emergency for hours being treated frostbite, exposure, exhaustion, a sprained ankle, a detached retina in his left eye, plus miscellaneous bruises and lacerations as the medical report would indicate--"Injuries sustained by the prisoner while resisting arrest." Yet there was the famous photo of John Reddy glaring up at us next morning in the Buffalo Courier-Express that was delivered before we left for school. The photo to be taped inside hundreds of school lockers, laminated to endure for years! The photo Roger Zwaart would tear out of Suzi Zeigler's fingers and rip into shreds! The photo Evangeline Fesnacht would reproduce in a gilt duotone on the cover of Death Chronicles! The photo about which Louise Schultz's second husband, a deceptively mild-mannered New State public health of ficial, would say, having discovered it in Mary Louise's lingerie drawer in their mutual mahogany bureau in their suburban home twenty-two years after the morning of John Reddy's arrest, "What-what the hell is this?" John Reddy Heart, just a boy, his bloody and left eye swollen shut but staring defiantly at the camera as if into his own and our unfathomable future, having made the only he'd make to police--even to his own lawyer--"O. K. Do what you have to do." These words, Verrie Myers confided in us, haunted her for years.

  In time, they would haunt her through her life. She would hear them--O. K. you have to do--as she sank into her most exhausted, fevered sleep.

  As she performed before movie cameras--"Again, again and again proving' myself.

  But why?" She would hear these words, resigned, fatalistic, yet hopeful, as, maintaining a serene and beautiful facade, Veronica sweated out the announcement of the Oscar winner for "best supporting actress in a feature film" for which, at the age of thirty-two, she'd been nominated. (Verrie's sole Academy Award nomination. Of course, she hadn't won. ) She would hear O. K. Do what you have to do at her mother's funeral, at the very gravesite in the Unitarian cemetery in Willowsville.

  She would hear O. K. Do what you have to do as, with a trepidation that have surprised her old friends and classmates, as well as her and scattered "fans," she gave herself up, for the dozenth time, love. (Verrie would be married only once--in her forty-ninth year.

  But we knew from People and elsewhere that she'd had numerous love affairs with actors, directors, writers, artists, most of them dark-haired swarthy-skinned and "fatally unreliable" men. ) She would hear O. K. Do what you to do as the anesthe ic gripped her when she had her first abortion, and her second. Probably, she anticipated, she'd sink into her consoled by John Reddy's mysterious words--O. K. Do what you have to do.

  Even more vivid in our collective memories than these words was newspaper photograph accompanying the story of John Reddy's arrest.

  "Like he'd already been taken from us. Like he belonged now to history.

  " At our fifteenth reunion we were drunk and tearful yet happy in our postcoital way as Art Lutz described it) in the sunken rec room of Art's buff-brick neogeorgian house on the Common (who among us could've predicted that our Class Clown Artie Lutz whose principal mode of expression had been the lip-fart would become CEO at the age of thirty-three of his grandfather's multimillion-dollar company Lutz Magic Kleen, Inc.. 7--and a seriousseeming husband, father, Willowsville citizen? ) giddy on champagne and a marathon

  "The Ballad of John Reddy Heart" in the background to our most glamorous alumna, Veronica Myers, confide in us, her friends, that to make herself react emotionally on screen, to lacerate her heart, to weep true tears, she had only to envision that image of John Reddy.

  So tough, and so vulnerable! So sexy, and so fated! To work into the mood for a cinematic love scene ("Total nudity now, nothing left imagination, but my contracts assure me a body double so at least, the audience thinks that's me, it isn't" she had only to recall that image or, maybe, John Reddy in the school parking lot by the acid-green Caddie smoking a cigarette or yanking a pull top from a can of Coke, or John Reddy as a shadow-silhouette behind the blind of a window down on Water Street. We were moved by Verrie's intense face which seemed to even the most sharpeyed among us to be hardly older than the face of the girl who'd Shakespeare's Portia, we were moved by the mournful starkness of her pale blue eyes. Is she performing? Is she "real"? Is there any distinction? We'd made every effort to "see" Verrie Myers as just one of us, a girl from WHS, but we were overwhelmed by the aura of her film self, her celebrity, that Veronica Myers who towered above us on movie screens like a gorgeous come to life. Yet in Willowsville, Verrie was embarrassed and evasive when the subject of her film career came up. "My career began as a way of saying to lohn Reddy--'Look at me! Why won't you look at me? I'm more than rich man's spoiled daughter. But damn him he never did." We protested she couldn't know that for a fact. "I do know! I know for a fact!

  never saw a single play of the eight plays I was in, in school.

  one."

  "But you don't know about your movies," we pointed out, as reasonable adults, "how could you possibly know?" For John Reddy Heart had abruptly left Willowsville, never to return, a few days after his last exam and though it was vaguely believed he still lived in upstate New York, in the vicinity of Lake Ontario, none of us had seen him again and he was in contact, apparently, with no one. (Dino Calvo? He'd moved away. Sasha Calvo? She'd married, and moved away, too. ) But Verrie insisted she knew, somehow. "It's as Dwayne used to say--'We didn't, for John Reddy, exist." Were we then shocked! --or would have been if we hadn't been drunk-Norm Zeiga had actually fallen asleep on the far side of the fireplace--when beautiful Verrie Myers suddenly pulled down the front of her sleek-fitting summer-knit minidress, tugging at the thin straps and baring her left breast, an amazing breast, lovely in shape, not flaccid, roseate-nippled we'd seen, in fact, some of us more than once, in Veronica Myers's hit of some years ago), to show us, on the milky pale flesh near her breastbone, a jewellike little heart tattoo of about the size of Verrie's fingernail, bright strawberry-red.

  See? You guys are the only people in the fucking world who'd have a clue what this means. I love you guys." We hadn
't realized how drunk Verrie was until she began laughing, and then she began crying. Afterward we puzzle over whether the tattoo must have been camouflaged by makeup Verrie's most spectacular nude scene, with Jack Nicholson, for we couldn't believe that the tattoo was recent. Millie Leroux Pifer said enviously, "Oh, Verrie! Just like my daughter! But that must've hurt--didn't it?

  McCord Siefried cried, "You had the guts! Verrie, I love you." Guys-who'd been crazy about Verrie Myers as long ago as junior high gaped at tattoo--and at the breast--swallowing like fish out of water though we'd long ago lost our virginity as we'd lost our boyhoods, cruelly transformed it seemed overnight into husbands, fathers, IRS-terrorized adult citizens like Bo Bozer, Jon Rindfleisch, Larry Baumgart, Ken Fischer.

  Circe's swine we blinked and stared and swayed as if about to topple over, swelling, puffing, swallowing without saliva--"Verrie, my God!

  " one of us managed to cry in a cracked, reproachful voice. We were astounded then as, suddenly, Ken Fischer, still handsome though ravaged-looking from hours of determined drinking and (it was rumored) marital difficulties back home in Quincy, Mass. , fell forward onto his knees and boldly shuffled across the carpet to press his hot tremulous mouth against the strawberry-red heart on the luminous floating breast.