Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He's scared of going back to prison." The word scured hovered strangely in the air, we did not associate John Reddy with scared in any way, and so the word was not acknowledged. Possibly, we resented Ken for uttering it.

  John Reddy smoke, of course. When he was on the basketball and track teams he'd "cut down"--like other guys on the teams who smoked--but in general he'd smoked Lucky Strikes since sixth grade at least. We remembered, some of us, from the Academy Street School--"John Reddy had a cigarette in mouth when he climbed up onto the roof, didn't he? That time he us all out by disappearing." We would've liked to ask John Reddy were the brand of choice for inmates at Tomahawk Island, but we were wary, thinking that such a question, however well-intentioned, might be misinterpreted by John Reddy. For it seemed possible to insult John Reddy intending it. He was cool, he was detached from us, but, for sure, wanted to insult him. "Frankly, we were scared of him. Nobody wanted to admit it. I was looking at John Reddy's hands one day in social studies class, his nails edged with grease, hairs on his knuckles, and the came to me, He could beat me to death with those hands." A rumor circulated that, at Tomahawk Island, John Reddy had spent weeks in solitary because he'd gotten into fights "and hurt his opponents pretty bad." Sarepta Voss, one of those Home Ec girls no one ever noticed, drew a measure of

  excited attention for several days telling a story relayed to her by a cousin who lived in Olean and knew a guy who'd done time at Tomahawk when John Reddy was in--"Everybody knew that John Reddy had killed a man, with a knife made out of some metal. Everybody was afraid of him, even the guards." We wondered if he was armed at school, a switchblade knife would've fitted in his jacket pocket, no problem. "We'd get to school a little early, cause John Reddy was required to get there early and check in to Stamish's office, so we'd sit in Bob's car having a smoke and watching for the Mercury to arrive, and John Reddy, it was, like, a thing to do. We really got dependent on it, the last month or so." Dougie Siefried recalled, embarrassed, "I'd try to catch him, mornings, coming out of Stamish's office where they had him in, like, quarantine, and I'd say, How's it going, John? and he'd look at me like almost he didn't know me, we hadn't basketball together for two years, then he'd sort of see me, he'd smile, or make his mouth smile, and say, O. K. , how's it going with you?

  like that was an answer." Evangeline Fesnacht agonized over such an irrevocable, heartbaring act but in the end, succumbing to her fate, pushed a handwritten note, on thin blue stationery, through a slat in John Reddy's locker, You are right to scorn us, we are ignorant spoiled children of the doomed bourgeoisie. But know that there is one who plumbs your heart. You had no choice but to--KILL YOUR OWN SOUL. Sincerely, your friend through life, E. S. John Reddy seems never to have acknowledged this peculiar communication, as he never acknowledged, so far as we knew, any of the notes numberless infatuated girls left for him in his locker, in his desks, under the windshield wipers of his Mercury parked out in the lot, or shoved at him, even jammed into his jeans pockets, as he passed in the halls, nor did he even glance in Evangeline's direction when amid a crowd of others they were in close proximity to each other. But three days after she'd left the note Evangeline received, at home, one of the of her life, one dozen beautiful long-stemmed yellow roses--"

  "Evangeline, first among equals'--and no signature," Mrs.. Fesnacht said, card, excited. "But you must know who it is, Evangeline? Don't you?" My soul-mate. Though we never acknowledge each other in this life.

  More than a year after the trial in which John Reddy had been acquitted of murder, people continued to ask us, with leering eyes, "What's it like to go to school with a murderer?" A female reporter for the Niagara Herald came by with a camera, seeking "candid, unposed shots" of students mingling with John Reddy Heart. We responded coolly. We'd had enough of the media-its distortions, lies. "John Reddy is just like anybody else." In fact, John Reddy was like no one else. We kept waiting for that to happen, Reddy to become one of us but it never happened. New to the WHS was a history teacher, Mr.. Feldman, who didn't have John any of his classes and knew of him only from scandalous articles and faculty gossip. This guy would lecture us in an ironic, scolding tone pissed us, so superior, like he was bringing wisdom to unwashed aborigines.

  "There is an undeclared war between the ninety-nine percent of human beings persist in believing in fairy tales and myths' and the valiant one percent who use their intellects, reason, analyze, come to independent conclusions," pacing at the front of the room with a piece of chalk in his fingers, a youngishfattish guy with thick glasses and thick lips and skin that broke out in hives if he got too excited which he did often, we stared coldly at him thought-waves of dislike, defiance, "The human instinct to create seems to be as deeply rooted in our species as the instinct to bond, to mate, to reproduce, it just is, but, students, it's dangerous in so technically advanced a civilization, it's a primitive remnant that doesn't belong in such a civilization, like the paranoia of the ongoing Cold War, it's up you, a younger generation, to break the cycle of superstitious thinking, you must learn to question all assumptions, all murky thinking, you must ask, Is it so?

  Why? the way scientists examine their material," we continued to coldly, some of us frowning, a little anxious, arms crossed, working our mouths in resentful silence that this guy, this jerk, reported to be completing his Ph. D. at Syracuse University, headed for university teaching, had the right to lecture us about our souls, speaking more and more rapidly, waving the piece of chalk, "Students! It's up to you. The yearning for mythic origins must be exposed as infantile, nostalgia' for what never was, ludicrously out of place in a civilization founded upon scientific progress, time, ceaseless change--history." From the look on Feldman's face you'd think that history was some big-deal balloon he'd blown up to dazzle a bunch of morons, he's presenting it to us, a gift--and from canny Art Lutz at the rear of the room, a brilliantly timed lip-fart executed as only Art could do it, his lips seemingly pursed together, innocent and unmoving, and the rude noise seeming to come from all directions at once. The look on Feldman's face. "Like, welcome to WHS, man." Forty years later we'd still laughing.

  In Mr.. Cuthbert's social studies class the mood was completely different.

  Mr.. Cuthbert liked John Reddy and was respectful of him. And just a little scared of him. The way Mr.. Cuthbert's eyes shifted behind the lenses of his plastic glasses, tugged in John Reddy's direction.

  Killer-Boy! In my classroom. Scottie Baskett swore he'd seen our teacher's hands with the thrill of it--"For sure, Cuthie's got a crush on John Reddy." The usually skeptical-minded Carolyn Cameron, onw day to be a oncologist at the Mayo Clinic, a smart, practical-minded girl who intimidated most of us, spoke of how she'd gaze at John Reddy Heart for most of each class period, unable to break the spell--"I tell myself that he's only a guy. I can see him breathe. I can see veins pumping in his throat.

  I can monitor his complexion over days, weeks--the arrival of a pimple, its eruption, disappearance. I've seen him scratch his underarms, crotch, pick his nose behind his hand if he thinks no one is looking. (But someone is always looking. ) He sweats taking tests and quizzes--literally.

  see his grades when Mr.. Cuthbert hands them back, and they're mediocre--seventyfour, sixty-eight, seventy-seven. I tell myself, He could be my brother. But he turned to ask me, once, if I'd lend him a pen--and I almost melted. I began to stammer. My heart kicked against my ribs. There's no around it--John Reddy Heart isn't like anybody else. He's--only himself." Carolyn shook her head irritably, for there just weren't words.

  this class there were two girls of the Circle. Ginger McCord and Shelby Connor. The intimacies they'd shared with John Reddy Heart set them apart (they believed) from others in the class, yet John Reddy, seated at the very front of the room, in the extreme right row, rarely glanced in their direction. Ginger McCord was in the habit of staring glassy-eyed at John Reddy in profile, at his scruff of shaggy black hair, his right shoulder, right bicep, which was about as much as she could see of him lea
ning forward in her desk in the approximate center of the classroom until her midriff ached from the of the desktop and her slender neck felt as if it had been stretched. (Some of us, guys, gazed at Ginger with the same sort of helplessness with which she gazed at John Reddy. ) If you told Ginger you loved her, like Siefried, or Ginger's own parents and grandparents--"Boring! They don't know me at all." She was convinced that only John Reddy Heart knew her while conceding, for she wasn't a stupid girl, that John Reddy Heart didn't give a damn about her. "I accepted this. But for those months in my life was the possibility that John Reddy would suddenly take notice of me, in public, in Mr.. Cuthbert's class for instance, he'd turn in my direction if my thoughts had summoned him at last, and our eyes would lock. This possibility of something--of happiness, or more than happiness--has stayed with me all my life. It was my way into others' hearts--others' secret hearts." Shelby Connor, who, seated even farther from John Reddy's corner room than her friend Ginger, had to content herself with what she glimpse of him through a maze of intervening heads and shoulders of more consequence to her than department-store mannequins, told us passionately, "I thought, The only way to justify life is to help others. I never saw John Reddy as tough, invulnerable. I understood that he was suffering.

  He'd shot a man without meaning to. He'd gone to prison. He'd family. He lived alone above a Chinese takeout. I thought, He's suffering. Inside, where no one can see. At that moment I was filled with a great happiness. I seemed to know my life's vocation. My destiny before me like a road only I, Shelby Connor, could take." Yet there were disquieting tales even then which neither Shelby nor Ginger, nor any of the enraptured girls of the Circle, wished to acknowledge, Sasha Calvo, a year older, more savagely beautiful than ever, with thick wavy dark hair to her waist, had returned to Willowsville after a year's exile and, though by the Calvos to see John Reddy, was in fact John Reddy's secret love.

  "But where can they meet? Not after school--Sasha's brother Giovanni comes her up. They all watch her like a hawk. ") ("If Sasha Calvo had a baby, she gave it up pretty easily! Wouldn't you think, even for an Italian, she'd be ashamed to show her face? ") Janet Moss, in despair that "nobody looked at me--if you weren't in a clique, you didn't exist," shocked her parents by dyeing her hair black, darkening her eyebrows and letting them grow across the bridge of her nose, wearing tight skirts, tight and crimson lipstick, despite her plans to attend Wells College in the fall, and within days was invited by not one but three guys to the senior prom--"I said yes to Larry Baumgart. I figured he didn't know any more about making out than I did, and I was right." In his private journal, hidden beneath mattress in the book-strewn bedroom in which he'd lived nearly eighteen years of his "essentially tragic" life, Ritchie Eickhorn observed High school life is our metaphor for life that devours what remains of the remainder of life. Help me!

  Blake Wells, who would one day be president of Williams College, one of our class's high-profile achievers, yet again, and again reconsidered suicide for What is life, Blake wondered, writing in his journal which he, too, kept hidden in his room, what is life but the perpetual pushing of a bean with one's nose across a vast filthy floor without end--its "center everywhere, circumference nowhere." Millie Leroux told us solemnly, in confidence, that Farolino had told her mother in confidence that poor John Reddy was sending most of his paycheck to his family--"Old Mr.. Heart isn't dead, he's living somewhere on Lake Ontario. Some Indian-sounding place.

  Mrs..

  Heart is, or his brother and sister, Mr.. Farolino isn't sure.

  me, they're a buncha leeches, the whole family. Sucking the poor kid dry."

  money for a secret fund for John Reddy, it was fantastic how we

  230 almost right away, and Verrie Myers was saying half-seriously she could sell her car, it was her car to dispose of as she wished, a few the guys like Ken Fischer, Pete Marsh, Smoke Filer you wouldn't have expected of, were pretty generous, too--"Hell, I can afford twenty-five bucks. My grandma's always slipping me checks, every time we go there." In the end, against giving the money to John Reddy, it was an agonizing decision and we quarreled over it, the prevailing logic was

  "John Reddy's got his pride for God's sake, we'd be destroying his pride," so the money, by this time it was almost $300, we sent by money order to the American Red Cross--"It about the only place we could think of. We didn't want to spend a whole lot of time thinking." Who instigated the plan to elect John Reddy Heart our King of the Senior Prom isn't definitely known. Who provided the beside his name in the yearbook (there would be no photo)--His ways the ways of mystery--isn't definitely known. Babs Bitterman, ashyblond pageboy was rumored to have caught fire in the backseat Lunt's car, and who could not have anticipated how, one day soon, would die in that car, in the front seat, thrown partway through the windshield, asked John Reddy to be her date for the senior prom--"Like, not? I'm figuring he can only say no." A startled-looking John Reddy, approached by breezy Babs as he was opening his locker, mumbled, "No. Thanks." It was a fact that, through our senior year, John Reddy pissed off a lot of us, especially his ex-teammates who liked to think they had a special relationship with him, by declining their invitations to get together- "For a few beers." Not once but, hell--a dozen times.

  Our dance parties.

  Pool parties. Even parties at the country club he could've come to--as our guest. John Reddy's expression was polite and deadpan and possibly of us thought) ironic. He'd shift his shoulders in that way of his, sort of twist his head like a boxer slipping a slow, dumb punch, and say, "Thanks! but I guess not. Gotta early morning next morning." That series of notorious senior parties to which half our class would trace the source of our "chronic drinking problems," culminating in prom night, when Smoke Filer lose control of his racy Thunderbird just down the hill on Garrison he'd sped a hundred times and some of those times pretty smashed, or high on weed, and this time Smoke's luck ran out and he lost control of T-Bird and swerved into the side of an oncoming car at seventy-five miles an hour, a cool forty-five miles an hour over the speed limit--"Totaled." And worse yet was graduation night, tragic as the papers would exclaim, graduation turns to horror, grief when Steve Lunt in his Buick Lesabre, driving from Coke Smith's house to Tommy Nordstrom's, at about one a. m. , five drunk kids crammed into the car, skidded on wet pavement on Long and crashed head-on into an abutment. "It's a miracle, only two of them died. God must've been looking out for the others." Where Reddy Heart was on prom night, let alone graduation night, only Reddy knew. "Yeah, we were disappointed." "Something he'd said someone, I forget who, made it sound like, yeah, he might be showing up at the prom." A confused tale would circulate that Sasha Calvo had been Queen of the Prom, along with John Reddy Heart as King, but that was erroneous, as well as preposterous, for Sasha was only a sophomore, and none of us would've voted for her, especially the girls--"What's see in her? She doesn't even wear makeup." Petey Merchant agonized for days, it may have been weeks, should he ask Katie Olmsted to the prom--"It wasn't that she might be in her wheelchair right then, I could handle O. K. We'd just sort of be together. It was as if she was on her feet, and wanted to dance. That scared me"--and in the end drew a deep breath and asked. The head custodian at our school, Alistair whose last name nobody knew, dislike of us, and of most of the WHS staff, shone in his whisky-colored eyes, was rumored to have arranged for John Reddy and his girl Sasha to meet in the school basement where he had a cozy if smelly windowless, overheated) office between the mammoth furnaces and the hot-water tanks.

  Alistair's most urgent responsibility was to check the pressure gauges on the furnaces when they were in operation--"Without me, the whole place goes." He spoke with mordant satisfaction, snapping his fingers. Surely Alistair would have lost his job if he'd been caught arranging for Sasha Calvo to slip down the basement stairs from the east, sophomore wing of school, make her way along a shadowy corridor to his cave of an office to which John Reddy would have come, eagerly slipping down the stairs from the west, senior wing of the s
chool. There was said be music playing, a radio turned low. A shaded forty-watt bulb. Shabby still colorful carpet remnants laid on the concrete floor, curling up onto the walls to a height of several inches. And Alistair's old sagging cushioned sofa. "Oh, God. A throbbing womb." We were uneasy, anxious, seeing the us, oblivious of us and of danger. How famished they were for other-kissing, embracing, their hands clutching at each other's bodies.

  No time for words, only murmurs, groans, choked cries. Their lovemaking was tender, yet passionate. Possibly a little rough, bringing tears to Sasha's beautiful eyes.

  As, at the foot of the basement stairs, smoking his foul-smelling pipe, Alistair stood watch. "S'pose Stamish comes down? What's Alistair gonna do?" Some of us were convinced that John Reddy and Sasha met like this a few times, others, that they met every weekday afternoon through winter and spring. For these were the only times they could meet, reasoned--the Calvos guarded Sasha so closely. In our dull rows of seats, in our classrooms on the floors above. The red second hand of clocks in every classroom, positioned uniformly above the blackboard, ticked urgently onward. "What're they doing now, d'you think? Now?"