Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I'm not saying none of that, I think it's a real sad thing Mel's gone from us." Pitcher Buff Stansell who in fact had been treated well by Riggs, and had managed to stay on Riggs's good side through his career as a Hawk, said thoughtfully into the camera, "Could be, Mel Riggs was a murder victim' looking for his murderer. That poor kid happened to be the one to him." Miles away in Willowsville we were approached by media people, too. "A swarm of locusts--repulsive!" Woody McKeever said, smacking his lips, of the WHS staff, Coach was the most popular target. We'd see him his finger at reporters, delivering angry impassioned speeches.

  We'd see him, hat in hand, scowling for photographers. Mr.. Lepage turned up day at school looking subtly different, younger--we theorized he'd had rinsed, a lighter, shinier shade of brown. Mr.. Dunleddy wore brighter neckties and seemed to have grown more youthful, too, it was believed he'd added a hairpiece to his thinning gray-brown hair. Our principal Mr.. Stamish warned us repeatedly over the school announcement system to shun "unwelcome inquiries." Yet he, too, was observed in a new double-breasted suit, frowning and whistling in the school foyer gleaming display cases of brass sports trophies. "We ask you to that WHS students are good, decent, law-abiding and ninety-seven Christian boys and girls from stable families," Mr.. Stamish lectured reporters. "John Reddy Heart is the first of his kind, ever, in Willowsville." Off school property we drew reporters and photographers like magnets.

  better-looking among us were approached on sidewalks, in restaurants, waiting in line at the Glen Theatre. Seeing we were biased in John Reddy's favor, reporters asked Do you condone violence? Do you believe in taking the law into your own hands? and similar crap. We were asked if it was true Reddy Heart belonged to the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, that he "dealt dope," that he'd "bragged of killing someone else." And what of school "sex ring" with which he and his friends were associated?

  There was much TV footage, some of it network, of WHS girls black felt armbands decorated with red hearts in support of John Heart, their sleeves decorated with red sequin hearts. They wore heart-shaped lockets, barrettes, earrings, buttons and pins. Photographers to the good-looking girls of the Circle, statuesque Mary Louise Schultz, wide-eyed freckled Ginger McCord, Pattianne Groves with her thick-lashed dark eyes and wavy auburn hair to her shoulders. Verrie Myers, popular, shocked some of us by posing for Time in a sexy, provocative posture, lips moistened, hands on hips, a glittering cascade of sequin hearts in her long blond hair and on both sleeves of her camel's-hair Pendleton blazer, a heart-shaped I't JHN REDDY! badge on her left breast. Verrie was breathless, feverish, we'd heard she was taking No-Doz as well as drinking black coffee having vowed she "wouldn't sleep or rest or be at peace in my soul" until John Reddy was set free. (Verrie's parents were furious with her when the photo appeared in Time, above the caption Willowsville cheerleader Veronica says she supports alleged killer. They'd had no idea the story was imminent.

  They accused her of demeaning herself in public, bringing disgrace to their name. Fifteen years later Verrie would confide to a Vanity Fair that she'd become a "psychic outlaw" when denounced by her parents, "I realized I was free to live my life however I wished and to dermean' myself however I wished. I knew I would be an artist of some kind.

  ") Domestic-minded Home Ec majors like Sarepta Voss, Alice Goff and Sandy Bangs made costume jewelry from mail-order kits advertised in the back pages Housekeeping, heart-shaped pins of rhinestones and glass "rubies" to be sold at school and in the Village, though these "heart pins" were not very skillfully made, with a visible excess of paste, as if made by handicapped children, we bought them to wear and to give as presents to our mothers and grandmothers. Miss Bird surprised us by buying one of the larger and wearing it prominently on the collar of her tartan coat. A reporter from the Lockport Union-Sun and tournal dared to ask Miss Bird, as she was unlocking her car, "Ma'am, does that pin indicate your support of the alleged killer of Melvin Riggs?" and Miss Bird drew herself up to her full height of five feet and said scathingly, "Young man. I hope, as a teacher, I am always in support of my students. Judge not lest ye be judged." Miss Bird, too, had become more youthful, energized, she'd taken wearing spike-heeled shoes that gave her the look of a red-haired, yet oddly sexy stork. In October, Sandi Scott's mother would seen Miss Bird in the company of Jim Dunleddy at Pumpkin Harvest Day in Newfane, thirty miles away in Niagara County. "I'm sure they were hands. It definitely looked that way." Miss Bird and Mr..

  Dunleddy, having a romance? But wasn't Mr.. Dunleddy a married man?

  At f rst we were thrilled to see ourselves on TV and to read about ourselves in local papers and in mass-market magazines like Time, Newsweek, U. S. News 6 World Report. Our fathers who subscribed to the New Times and the Wall Street tournal were surprised, and annoyed, to see articles about John Reddy Heart and Melvin Riggs, Jr. , even there.

  "That S. O. B. Riggs, why couldn't he have gotten himself killed discreetly?" Dougie Siefried's father cursed. "It makes us all look bad."

  mayor Frank Diebold worried aloud on local TV, "We don't want the rest of the to think our kids are killers and dope fiends. They're good kids and we love 'em." We were most amazed at a five-page feature in Life with the TEENAGE VIOLENCE DOES NOT SPARE UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS BUFFALO SUBURB MURDER, DRUGS, SEX & ROCK-'N'-ROLL IN WILLOWSVILLE, N. Y. The first photo in the feature was the now-famous one of John Reddy being arrested by state troopers, blood shining on his battered, defiant face 16-YEAR-OLD DEFENDANT IN LURID MURDER TRIAL). Next came paired on valentine hearts of Melvin Riggs, Jr. (CONTROVERSIAL CASANOVA FIGURE, OWNER OF BUFFALO HAWKS BASEBALL TEAM), and Dahlia Heart at her glamorous in a sleek white ermine coat to her ankles and oversized dark sunglasses disguising half her face (MYSTERY WOMAN IN WHITE, OF ALLEGED KILLER). We recognized familiar village scenes in other photos-the Avenue of Fashion, the One Hundred Weeping Willows Walk Glen Creek, the palatial neoclassical facade of the Willowsville Club. We almost didn't recognize our school seen from the front across an expanse of well-tended lawn, a building that resembled a temple with slender white Doric columns, russet-red brick. The caption shocking, WILLOWSVILLE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL, BASTION OF PRIVILEGE. There were photos of the football team practicing, cheerleaders practicing on the lawn sexy senior Bibi Arhardt poised in midair, ponytail flying). But were other photos of teenagers none of us had ever seen before, smoking, drinking beer out of cans, sprawled beside graffiti-defaced trees in what appeared to be La Salle Park. A scruffy-looking kid in a black T-shirt who'd identified himself to the Life reporter as a student at WHS, but who absolutely was not a student at WHS, was quoted, smirking, "It's no surprise to hear John killed that guy. He's beat the s--t out of plenty of guys." All of this made us sick, sort of. But we liked it, too. It was like riding on a roller coaster having stuffed yourself with hot dogs, Cokes, cotton candy, you're feeling nauseated, ready to vomit and hoping you will vomit but it doesn't happen, and you climb back onto the roller coaster for more.

  What was most unnerving, we realized, was to see ourselves eyes of strangers. We hadn't understood that we were the children of "privilege"--that we lived in an "exclusive, affluent suburb.

  " We hadn't that our fathers' average incomes were over $100, 000 (and this was ago). We wanted to scream, "Hey! You don't know us! And you don't John Reddy Heart, either."

  It was at this time that the rock group Made in USA came out with "The Ballad of John Reddy Heart." Nobody'd expected this, one day all the radio stations were playing it. More excitement. The record soared to number one on the pop singleswhart within a week of its release. Local record stores had to reorder continuously. We sang the Lyrics to one another, we shouted the lyrics out of car windows, we waded drunk in the duck pond at Hill Park screaming the Lyrics at the tops of our lungs. We were in a din, frenzy of sexual excitement. Art Lutz who'd had a crush on Mary Louise Schultz since sixth grade but hadn't been encouraged to ask her out, in fact by Mary Louise's polite dismissal of his jokey-anxious conversation, dared to approach her in the schoo
l cafeteria as she sat amid her girlfriends, speaking so persuasively in the manner of the lead singer of Made in USA that Mary Louise had faltered, and said, "Well, yes, I guess so. When?

  " Our fathers despised

  "The Ballad of John Reddy Heart" but our mothers, younger, more savvy mothers (Mrs.. Connor, Mrs.. Rindfleisch, Mrs..

  Baskett) liked it fine. Blake Wells, who played clarinet and was something of a snob, a pain in the ass sometimes, pointed out that Made in USA had the basic melody for

  "The Ballad" from an old hymn, "Jesus Walked Lonesome Valley," and given it a cheap rockabilly beat plagiarized from Bill Haley and His Comets. (Not that that mattered, Blake added, Bill Haley had plagiarized the beat from a Negro musician named Willie Mae Thornton--"It's well known that white rock-'n'-roll has been plagiarized totally from Negro sources. ") Mr.. Larsen, school music teacher and longsuffering marching band leader, pronounced

  "The Ballad of John I, Heart" to be sickly pseudo-music, adolescent tripe, moronic Elvis's classic head-banger

  "Hound Dog." Still, most of us loved it. We still do.

  That rush! along our fevered veins! to insinuate itself futally into our hearts like the heartworm parasite in dogs.

  We had to wonder, how did John Reddy feel, being the subject of a single? Made by a rock group he'd never met? His name used permission? His life used without his permission? And he never received a penny of royalties? We learned that once you become famous in America, you no longer own your name or your life. "It's like every S. O. B. who knows you thinks he's entitled to a piece of you," Ritchie Eickhorn said, shuddering. "A piece of you stuck in his teeth." John Reddy looked the old judge in the eye. tohn Reddy said, Don't give a damn if I die. tohn Reddy, tohn Reddy Heart.

  In fact, John Reddy never said a word at either of his trials.

  We all waited for him to speak. But we waited in vain.

  Judge Hamilton W. Schor was the presiding judge. Before him, Reddy stood silent and sullen as the formal indictment was read him with a count of murder in the second degree. He would be tried as an adult, not in juvenile court. In a carefully neutral voice Judge Schor asked, "How do you plead, Mr.. Heart?" It was said you could see in the judge's eyes the contempt he felt for the sixteen-year-old

  "Killer-Boy," as the papers were calling him. John Reddy shifted his shoulders inside his tight-fitting coat and stared at the floor. It was his lawyer Roland Trippe who answered in a firm voice, "Your Honor, my client pleads not guilty." A faint smile or sneer on John Reddy's lips? We imagined that, we see that vividly though none of us was present in the courtroom in downtown Buffalo. John Reddy reflected the old judge's contempt back at him. John Reddy's contempt for all authority, his enemies. O. K. what you have to do.

  Through the first trial of John Reddy Heart, and through the second trial of John Reddy Heart, everyone waited for the sixteen-year-old defendant to take the witness stand. Every one waited for him to try to the silent, staring jury of his elders in his own words that, as his lawyer argued, he was "not guilty" of murder because he'd fired at Melvin Riggs only to himself and his mother from Riggs's violent attack. Or possibly--there was this speculation, too--he was "not guilty" of murder because he'd and pulled the trigger of a gun he'd believed to be unloaded, he'd aimed at Melvin Riggs only to frighten him off. But John Reddy volunteered any remarks. He'd never cooperated with police, had never even admitted he'd been the one to pull the trigger, or even that he'd been present when Riggs was shot.

  He'd never taken a polygraph test.

  The only persons John Reddy was observed speaking with, in the courtroom, in private, were his lawyer Trippe and Trippe's assistant who sat at the defense table with him. And he'd exchanged remarks with the Erie sheriff's deputies who escorted him into and out of the courtroom, guys he'd gotten to know and who'd gotten to know him, and obviously they got along O. K. , wbeing of the same class background and temperament.

  Theories differed about why John Reddy Heart whose plea was selfdefense wouldn't testify in his own defense. Mr.. Zwaart, Roger's father, a lawyer with a downtown firm, said that Trippe, a squash partner his at the B. A. C. , was too shrewd to put that "greaser-killer-kid" on the witness stand to hang himself. Mr.. Cuthbert who'd become obsessed with the believed it would be "suicidal"--"tantamount to admitting guilt"--if Trippe did not put John Reddy on the witness stand. (We'd hear Mr..

  Cuthbert, Miss Bird, Mr.. Lepage and other teachers heatedly the case between classes in the faculty lounge when the door was open. The intellectuals among us, Clarence McQuade, Ritchie Eickhorn and Fesnacht, believed that John Reddy was repudiating the American justice system in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau (we'd been made to slog through Walden and

  "Civil Disobedience" in sophomore English).

  "He's refusing to be a party to his own trial. Why should he conform to the enemy's authority?" With the air of impassioned rectitude with which, as an adult, E. S. Fesnacht would speak at public, literary gatherings, hinted to us that she had access to confidential information from Reddy himself, "He will accept even a verdict of guilty'--he's become his own transcendental fate, beyond good and evil." Evangeline, daughter of solidly bourgeois parents, startled us with her fiery words. In behavior, she was as reckless, or nearly, as certain of the rebellious boys in our class. She would actually attend a number of John Reddy's trial sessions, though these were declared off-limits to area teenagers and the media was filled with warnings from the county board of education that students cutting school to attend the Heart trial would be "taken into custody" by truant officers. She boasted to us that she deceived her thinking she was going to school as usual, she wrote her own "medical excuse," and signed her mother's name to it, she took a bus downtown to arrive at the courthouse by eight-thirty a. m. and mingle with adults filing into the courtroom. "I wonder if I look middle-aged? No one gives me a second glance. ") Smoke Filer, Dougie Siefried and Scottie Baskett dared to crash the trial, too. They disguised themselves "as our dads, sort of." After a few sessions they reported to us how strange it was, that the subject was "John Reddy Heart" on trial for the murder of

  "Melvin Riggs, Jr." but was like John Reddy, the actual person, wasn't there. Like Riggs, the man, wasn't there. "That bullshit legal talk!" Smoke said, disgusted.

  "Guys in suits shooting off their mouths. And the old-fart judge in his big-deal robe presiding. And the jurors sitting there like a bunch of store dummies.

  And the courtroom isn't any big deal either, it's kind of small--it doesn't look like a place anything important could happen." Smoke's long weasel-face crinkled and twisted as if he'd been with a truth too profound, yet too demeaning, to be comprehended.

  Scottie Baskett said, aggrieved, "John Reddy never saw us. He his back to the room. Anyway it doesn't seem like him. Remember he'd jump, that last split-second jump of his, like he was lifted from the floor by some force, and sink the ball? --and whoever was guarding him he'd been hit over the head? Well, this defendant' being tried isn't that John Reddy." Dougie Siefried agreed. "Jesus, it's slow. Not like TV or the movies, y'know, trials you see--made-up stories. This is more like church.

  Shit-faced boring. It's hard to breathe, people are packed in so tight.

  aren't any laughs like maybe you'd get in school, not even dumb laughs. I'd off, and Scottie would elbow me awake--'The bailiff will make you leave, he said. I feel so sorry for John Reddy--he's just, like, there. If he made a break for it, he'd be shot. It comes over you he's already in prison. The bastards have got him." Dougie startled us by wiping at his eyes.

  Ginger McCord found herself staring at him, at his wan, freckled, homely-handsome face, with a sensation of falling.

  The People of the State of New York u tohn Reddy Heart.

  You'd have thought John Reddy was a vicious monster! --the way Prosecutor Dill described him to the jury.

  "A precocious moral outlaw... a savage killer... who shot and killed a defenseless... unclothe man." (There was a dramatic pause. In the a
ir above Dill's bald dome of a head there shimmered, only just perceptibly, the naked torso and quivering haunches of media personality Mel Riggs as on an ectoplasmic billboard. ) "This young killer... did not act in 'blind passion' or as he claims in self defense'... far from it! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he did consciously and deliberately... and with premeditation that the murder weapon was loaded... or had, in fact, loaded it himself. As forensics evidence makes clear... he dropped to one knee, like marksman, and fired"--(Another dramatic pause. Dill may have dropping to one knee before the jury box, in awkward emulation of his showy, nationally known defense attorney colleagues, but quickly rejected the notion. His knee joints would have audibly creaked and what if hadn't been able to straighten up again? )--"fired upward, at an angle, the victim's head as Melvin Riggs unarmed and unclothe... in a state of alcoholic inebriation... staggering backward... Iet us we imagine, ladies and gentlemen of the jury... this poor terrified man begging! begging the murder-minded John Reddy Heart for mercy! not to kill him! Begging for his life."

  pause. Like a TV prosecutor, Dill removed a white handleerchief pocket and dabbed at his forehead in a display of corny emotion.

  While John Reddy Heart at the defense table remained stoic-stony-faced showing no emotion at all. "Say something, John! Tell the old bastard to fuck! "--it was all Scottie Baskett could do, to keep from shouting. ) "Nonetheless defendant fired. w fired three times!... one of these striking and entering Melvin Riggs's skull... penetrating his brain and killing him almost instantaneously. The defendant then fled... the scene of the crime..