“I’ll go quietly,” I said to Officer Pike. “There is no need for force.”
“Good to know,” Officer Pike said. He didn’t get out of the car, but I knew what to do. I opened the back door and climbed in.
“Okay, then,” said Officer Pike.
I shut the door. The vehicle started moving. We rode a block in silence. We stopped for a pedestrian at the corner. Officer Pike waved the pedestrian across. Then who should walk by on the sidewalk right alongside us but Winky Wheaton. Officer Pike waved to Winky. Winky waved back.
“Goodbye,” I whispered to Winky. I put my hand up to the glass, which was around two inches thick. Apparently, Winky couldn’t bear to put his hand up to mine. He couldn’t even look at me, poor guy. I looked out the back window as the cruiser pulled away, but the seat was kind of high and I was too short to see much. Winky was probably standing there sadly, watching me roll away.
Officer Pike was chewing a donut that magically appeared. I could see him in the rearview mirror. He was silent as the grave. I would know.
I couldn’t take it. I cracked.
“Then you know about the gambling?” I said. My throat closed up, and there was a pressure in my chest, just like that time a butterscotch candy went down the wrong pipe. I don’t even like butterscotch. “You know about the money? The checks? The trespassing? The grave robbing?” My voice was strangely loud and clear and ongoing. “The bank? The forgery? The bar? The lies?”
Officer Pike seemed to be having a lot of trouble swallowing the donut. Then he reached up and moved the mirror a little, and after that I couldn’t see him anymore. I stared out the window at the town, my town, going by. Beautiful Hamburg. Beautiful, beautiful Hamburg. Would I ever get to walk freely to the Pay ’n Takit again? Officer Pike was taking the scenic route, driving up and down every block. Looking for troubled kids, I guessed.
We drove past Winky’s house. The TV was on in the living room. Then on to Unexpected House. Hey! There was a big pickup truck parked in the driveway, and the front door was wide open! For the first time ever! The cruiser rolled on by before I could see who was inside. I sat back in the seat again. My eyes teared up, they truly did. Now I’d probably never know what was happening on Desirable Street.
What about school in the fall? Was there a TV at the courthouse? I hadn’t noticed when I had visited Joe Viola those times. I wasn’t thinking about TV back then. Now I thought I would miss it quite a lot.
The drive to the courthouse was probably the longest four minutes of my life. When we got there, I was cold, but sweating, and that hard lump of butterscotch in my chest hadn’t melted at all.
I peered out the window of the cruiser. I’d always thought the courthouse looked like a castle, what with its three stories of sparkly granite, and those columns and the big windows. Now the building’s true, grim nature showed itself to me. It was a prison. For breakers of the law, like me.
Suddenly my view was blocked by a dark blue shirtfront with a badge on the chest. The door opened. “You comin’?”
Asa Pike led me into the building and down the hall to the cells. He nodded to Joe Viola, in the first cell. Joe raised a hand weakly. I guess that’s what happens, here, I thought. You weaken.
Any reminders of better times were gone. There was no aroma of Asa Pike’s lunch coming from the kitchenette. The vending machine was nearly empty. Gone was my folding chair outside Joe Viola’s cell. Gone, gone, gone. Officer Pike opened the door of the second cell. “You can have a seat in here, Josie,” he said.
I nodded.
I went in. The door swung shut behind me.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
I sat down on the bunk. I figured I’d better save my strength.
A couple long minutes went by.
Want to know how time passes in jail?
Wicked slow.
Joe Viola got up from his bunk. He stepped to the wall of bars that separated the cells. Our eyes met, and what passed between us was the kind of understanding that only two prison-mates share.
Then Joe Viola burped. “Urp. Sorry. Salisbury steak.” He thumped his chest.
And I started crying my head off.
Turns Out I Am Not Actually Arrested
I know you don’t believe me,” I blubbed. I dragged my sleeve under my runny, snotty nose. “But I am positive you are my real father, and I need my father, so if you could just”—hic! Great, now I had the hiccups!—“just believe me. I need you.”
Joe sighed. “I won’t say ‘and I need a smoke,’ because I can tell you’re pretty emotional.”
Blub-blub-blub!
“Hey, now,” he said, “it’s going to be all right, you’ll see.”
“How do—blub—hic—you know?” Blub-blub-blub!
I was about ready to sock him in the nose, but one look at his face and I didn’t want to anymore. He was looking sadly at me. Like I was a little puppy he thought was helpless and didn’t know any better than to pee on the carpet.
“I’m not a—hic—puppy!”
“ ’Course not,” Joe said. Not mean. Okay.
I blew my nose and hicced a few more hics.
“Hey,” Joe said, “you know it’s not necessarily so great having a full set of parents. It depends.”
I honked my nose again.
“My parents split up when I was about your age. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?”
I sat up a little straighter. “Eleven.”
He nodded. “Ah, right, eleven. My ma used to buy me all kinds of stuff she couldn’t afford. I was the first kid in the neighborhood to get a whole little suitcase set of Matchbox cars!”
“That sounds nice,” I said.
He frowned. “Yeah. And then he’d buy me more stuff. First kid in the neighborhood to sport a three-piece suit!” He snorted and shook his head. “Stuff was just to get back at each other, and cover up they didn’t want to have a thing to do with me. Our house was a battleground, I’m telling you.”
“That sounds crummy,” I said. No kid wants to wear a three-piece suit, for example.
“But I always had this thing inside me, this important thing,” Joe went on. “I always had baseball, and the game, the players, the coaches—those people were more like family. And that place became my home. Know what I mean?”
He made a sort of pffff sound, like a balloon emptying that last little sad bit of air, and he lowered himself onto his bunk bed like a tired old man.
“I guess I got a new home now,” he said. “Got all I need, right here handy.”
I stared through the bars at him. I needed my mom. I needed my house not to have burned to the ground. I needed Grandpa to quit feeding all those squirrels and slot machines. I needed money and time and a plan and Winky Wheaton’s faith. All I had was Emily Dickinson’s hope, and that was just a little fluffy bit of stupid… poetic… fluttery…
“Quit feeling sorry for yourself!” I said, all of a sudden. I jumped up. “I need Number 23!” I said. I actually stomped my foot. “I need—” I covered my mouth because I thought I might cry again, and I spoke through my fingers. “I need help. I thought you would help.”
Joe Viola didn’t even straighten up one inch.
“Kid,” he said to his striped kneecaps, “I guess you’re outta luck.”
I sat back down on my bunk, and the two of us were quiet for a minute, just breathing and sitting there. We sat there a couple more minutes. He had no place to go, of course, and I didn’t either.
Then Asa Pike came waddling down the hall wearing the Harry the Hot Dog costume and a fanny pack. “I’m doing double duty today at the game,” he said. “Mascot and Security.” He zipped the fanny pack, patted it, and swiveled it around the back of the buns. “To hold the cuffs,” he said. “You’ll be okay?”
He pulled up the puffy foam hot dog hood and cinched it under his chin.
“Will I be okay?” I said. “Isn’t there some paperwork you have to file?”
“Paperwork?”
“For my arrest?”
He looked very seriously at me, and pressed his lips together, hard. Then he said, “Why, you’re not arrested, Josie.”
“I’m not?”
“You’re free to go.”
“I am?”
“Ayup. So long as your grandfather doesn’t want to press charges, that is.”
Asa Pike made a big show of pulling open the unlocked cell door using only his pinky. “I was driving around on my coffee break and saw you someplace you might not oughta be, and picked you up and”—he shrugged—“you did the rest.”
Joe Viola didn’t laugh, I’ll give him that.
Then Asa Pike noticed something down the hall beyond the cells. “There you are, you ole thing,” he said, and he went and grabbed the folding chair and came back and unfolded it for me. “Have a seat. Your grandpa is on his way.”
I sat.
“You’ll be okay?” Asa Pike/Harry the Hot Dog asked again.
“Yes.” How embarrassing. “Fine.”
Asa Pike/Harry the Hot Dog waddled away.
Inside his cell, Joe slumped over and rubbed the back of his head with both hands, kind of moaning, and mumbling to himself things like, I’m all washed up. She isn’t coming back. I’m outta the league. I’m done. I’m cooked.
I knew how he felt. I didn’t have a mom. Joe didn’t think he was my dad, or else he didn’t want to be my dad—either way meant I was an orphan. An orphan! And Grandpa was not ever going back to the way he was before the blurting and the saluting and all that started. The house was history. It had been a long day already. And it had been what they call humbling, being released from jail by Harry the Hot Dog. Humbling, and—silly. I started to laugh.
Joe Viola straightened up and looked at me like I was nuts. Then I cried again. I cried really hard, for a really long time. Joe kept stretching his hand through the bars and trying to reach me and saying “Hey, now,” and “There, there,” and then I inched closer and he was patting my shoulder and my head, sometimes missing when I tipped one way or the other from the force of my tears.
After a while I started to feel like I might be cried out, and then I really was cried out. I was feeling a little better, and it looked like Joe Viola was feeling worse, kind of moaning again, and sighing like a steam iron.
That’s maybe why I remembered a story I read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Crimes and Misdemeanors Edition, long before I took up visiting people in jail. It was about an inmate in an Oklahoma prison. He married twelve different lady-visitors, one after another, while serving out a sentence of thirty-to-life.
I was thinking about that Oklahoma inmate being so lonesome he married twelve ladies, and how Joe Viola would probably do just about anything for a chance to get his girlfriend back, when Grandpa and Mrs. Blyth-Barrow came charging down the hall.
I stood up. “You want to press charges?” I said to Grandpa, knowing by now it was a joke.
“I certainly do!” he said.
“No, you don’t,” said Mrs. B-B.
“Certainly not,” Grandpa said.
“Come along, Josephine,” Mrs. B-B said. “We have lots to discuss, and you must be hungry. We saved you some breakfast.”
“Crumpet!” said Grandpa.
“I’ll be right out,” I said.
Grandpa and Mrs. B-B headed back the way they came. I waited till they disappeared around the corner. Then I stepped right close to Joe Viola’s cell, and gripped the bars, and looked straight into his red-rimmed eyes.
“What’ll you give me if I can get your girlfriend to come and talk to you?” I said.
* * *
“No way, no how,” he said. “Uh-uh, nope, not gonna do it.”
“You big baby,” I said. “A big tough baseball player like you ought to be able to do it with your eyes closed and your hands tied behind your back!”
“Oh, my eyes will definitely be closed,” he said, “and they’ll have to tie my hands behind my back!”
“So you’ll do it?”
“No!”
“If it isn’t true,” I said, ignoring him, “if the blood test shows you’re not my real father, then I’ll go away and no harm done and sorry I touched your glove that time, and it was nice knowing you.”
We’d learned all about this DNA testing thing in health class, and I knew it was possible to get that test done… maybe not likely… but maybe…
He looked at the ceiling of his cell and then he smiled a little. “It has been nice knowing you, sorta,” he said to me.
“Thank you.”
“I mean you’re not that bad.”
“Okay.”
“For a kid.”
“Joe,” I said, serious as a heart attack. “If it is true, if you are my real father… well… wouldn’t you want to know?”
He looked at me a long time. He ran a big hand over his face and then he nodded. “Yeah. I guess I would. But I’m not. And even if I am, Josie, there’s nothing I can do for you. I’m broke, I’m no good to anybody, I’m all washed up.”
He flopped down on his bunk and crooked an arm over his eyes. “Be careful what you wish for.”
Pajamas!
I wish… oh, everything’s changing,” I said.
We were back at Mrs. B-B’s apartment, and she’d brought out some lemonade.
“Naturally. Everything changes,” Mrs. B-B said. “Change is life’s only constant. Look at my hair! Do you think I was born with this color?” She folded her hands in her lap. “I miss my husband,” she said. “Howard was a kind and gentle man who up and followed me hither and yon wherever my jobs and enthusiasms took us. Howard had a hungry mind and a pleasant disposition. Yes. I miss him every day.”
It’s strange when you learn something private and personal about your teacher. I didn’t know what to say about Howard, so I said, “Your hair is really nice.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s very… bright.”
“Miss Clairol number seventy-one, and Aqua Net Atomic Hold. Change is good! You lose things—jobs, husbands. Houses. But if I were a betting person”—she shot a look at Grandpa—“I’d bet you gain much more than you lose.”
I thought about Mom. I thought about Winky and his eyesight and Beep Baseball. I thought about Joe Viola. Then I sat down on the flowery loveseat and I told Grandpa and Mrs. B-B everything, the whole story. I didn’t have anything to show, I didn’t have any proof. What little I’d had—the baseball card in a red plastic heart-shaped frame and signed with X’s and O’s—burned up in the fire.
They listened. The cats purred. Want to know what eight cats purring sounds like? Wicked sympathetic.
When I finished talking, I glanced at Mrs. Blyth-Barrow. She hadn’t moved an inch. I knew she’d once been an artist’s model, and that she could sit perfectly still for thirty minutes at a time.
“Do you… believe me?” I asked.
Grandpa stood up. “Coincidence Is Fate’s Favorite Tool,” he said.
“Who said that?” I had never seen that saying on any plaque, but I thought it deserved one.
“I did,” Grandpa said. “Didn’t you recognize my voice? Pajamas!” he added.
“Of course we believe you believe it,” said Mrs. B-B. “But we don’t have to theorize. Perhaps you don’t know that I once was employed at a medical laboratory in Portland, and through connections I maintain in the field, I understand the new method to test paternity is based on the analysis of human leukocyte antigens… quite accurate, affordable, and quick.”
“I thought of that!” I said.
“Of course you did, Josephine. You’re no dummy.” Mrs. Blyth-Barrow scooted away a large marmalade tabby from under the end table. “Shoo, Pajamas,” she said.
Whole Lotta Love
Joe gave me Tina Taylor’s number, and I called her on the phone. I told her I was the kid she met on the field, the one who touched Joe Viola’s glove (“You!” she gasped), and that I had something wicked important to talk to h
er about.
“It’s Joey, isn’t it,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is he sick? Is he dyin’?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“Too bad,” she said.
Not that I asked, but she told me Joe was a three-time loser in the marriage department—
“Four-time,” I said, but she kept talking right over me—
And how he didn’t trouble himself to share that information, and how he was a gall-dang liar and sure there were good times, puh-lenty of good times (her voice turned all low and drippy, euw) but if you can’t trust a man to inform his potential wife that that role has been previously filled three times—
“Four”—
“Well, then you can’t trust him as far as you can throw him, am I right?”—
“Well—”
“You know it, child, and speaking of children, for all I know, he’s got a pack of kids”—
“Just the one”—
“And can I tell you somethin’?”—
“Uhh”—
“I want a pack of kids! And Joe says he doesn’t want any! Says his childhood was a horror show, what with the hole in his heart”—
“Murmur, went away by itself”—
“And his folks not being exactly top-notch and him leaving home when he was just a little squirt, but you wanna know somethin’ else?”—
“Uh-huh”—
There was a pause.
“I can’t help it,” Tina said. “I love the big jerk, just how he is.”
I didn’t want to ruin the love-spell, so I didn’t say a word.
“And I think I can change him,” Tina added, wicked heartfelt.
You’d have thought she was all talked out, but she agreed to come and talk to me in person at noon on Thursday.
* * *
Tina pulled up in front of Moody’s Diner in a rusted yellow Mustang with the top down and the music blaring. The music quit but the car seemed to want to hang on, chugging and shuddering and ticking while she fussed with her hair and made it the big perfect cloud it was the last time I saw her, at Hot Dogs Field. Then she unfolded herself from the driver’s seat and slammed the door with a hip-check.
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 13