Eighteen

by Jan Burke

  “But I thought…”

  “I went downtown. To South Street.”

  She looked more scared than when I told her that her husband wanted to poison her.

  “Please don’t tell Harvey!” I said.

  “Don’t tell Harvey what?” I heard a voice say. He was standing in my bedroom door.

  “Oh, that he got a bad grade on a spelling test,” my mom said. “But you wouldn’t get angry with him over a little thing like that, would you, dear?”

  “No, of course not, sweetheart,” he said to her. He faked another laugh and walked off.

  Although I don’t think Harvey knew it, she hadn’t meant it when she called him “dear.” And she had lied to him for my sake. Just when I had decided that meant she believed me about the poison, she said, “You and I will have a serious talk very soon, young man. Good night.” She kissed me, but I could tell she was mad.

  That was a terrible week. Harvey was nervous, I was nervous, and my mom put me on restriction. I had to come straight home after school every day. I never got far enough in the story to tell her what happened when I went downtown; she just said that where Harvey went at night was his business, not mine, and that I should never lie to her again about where I was going.

  We didn’t say much to one another. On Friday night, when she came in to say good night, I couldn’t even make myself say good night back. She stayed there at my bedside and said, “We were off to such a good start this week. I had hoped…well, that doesn’t matter now. I know you’re angry with me for putting you on restriction, but you gave me a scare. You’re all I have now, and I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

  “You’re all I have, too,” I said, “I don’t mind the restriction. It’s just that you don’t believe anything I say.”

  “No, that’s not it. It’s just that I think Harvey is trying to be a better husband. Maybe Father O’Brien has talked to him, I don’t know.”

  “A leopard doesn’t change his spots,” I said.

  “ Harvey ’s not a leopard.”

  “He’s a snake.”

  She sighed again. She kept sitting there.

  All of a sudden, I remembered that Harvey had mentioned Saturday, which was the next day, and I sat up. I hugged her hard. “Please believe me,” I said. “Just this once.”

  She was startled at first, probably because that was two hugs in one week, which was two more than I’d given her since she married Harvey. She hugged back, and said, “You really are scared aren’t you?”

  I nodded against her shoulder.

  “Okay. I won’t let Harvey fix any meals for me or give me anything in a rectangular box. At least not until you get over this.” She sounded like she thought it was kind of funny. “I hope it will be soon, though.”

  “Maybe as early as tomorrow,” I whispered, but I don’t think she heard me.

  I hardly slept at all that night.

  The next morning, Harvey left the house and didn’t come back until just before dinner. He wasn’t carrying anything with him when he came in the house, just went in and washed up. I watched every move he made, and he never went near any food.

  “C’mon,” he said to me after dinner, “let’s go on down to the church.”

  A new thought hit me. What if the weed killer was for someone else? What if Harvey hired Mackie to shoot my mom? “I don’t want to go,” I said.

  “No more back-talk out of you, buster. Let’s go. Confessions will be over if we don’t get down there.”

  I looked at my mom.

  “Go on,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  As Harvey walked with me to the car, I kept trying to think up some way to stay home. I knew what Mackie looked like. I knew he carried his gun in a shoulder holster. I knew he liked silver dollars, because I had one of his in my pocket.

  I looked up, because Harvey was saying something to me. He had opened the car door for me, which was more than he usually did. “Pardon?”

  “I said, get yourself situated. I’ve got a surprise for your mother.”

  Before I could think of anything to say, he was opening the back door and picking up a package. A rectangular package. As he walked past me, I saw there was a label on it. South Street Sweets.

  My mother took it from him, smiling and thanking him. “You know I can’t resist chocolates,” she said.

  “Have one now,” he said.

  I was about to yell out “No!”, thinking she’d forgotten everything I said, but she looked at me over his shoulder, and something in her eyes made me keep my mouth shut.

  Harvey followed her glance, but before he could yell at me, she said, “Oh Harvey, his knee must be bothering him. Be a dear and help him. I’m going to go right in and put my feet up and eat about a dozen of these.” To me, she said, “Remember what we talked about last night. You be careful.”

  All the way to the church, Harvey was quiet. When we got there, he sent me in first, as usual.

  “But the choir loft is closed,” I said.

  “It hasn’t fallen apart in a week. They haven’t even started work on it. Go on.”

  I went inside. He was right. Even though there was a velvet rope and a sign that said, “Closed,” it didn’t look like any work had started. I wanted to be near Mary Theresa’s window anyway. But as I got near the top of the stairs, I noticed they sounded different beneath my crutches. Some of the ones that were usually quiet were groaning now.

  I waited until almost everyone was gone. By the time I turned the lamp on, I had done more thinking. I figured Harvey wouldn’t give up trying to kill my mom, even if I had wrecked his chocolate plan. He wanted the house and the money that came with my mom, but not her or her kid. I couldn’t keep watching him all the time.

  I turned the lamp on and waited for him to come into the church. As usual, he didn’t even look toward me. He went into the confessional. I took one last look at the window and started to turn the lamp off, when I got an idea. I left the lamp on.

  I knew the fourth step from the top was especially creaky. I went down to the sixth step from the top, then turned around. I held on to the rail, and then pressed one of my crutches down on the fourth step. It creaked. I leaned most of my weight on it. I felt it give. I stopped before it broke.

  I went on down the stairs. I could hear Harvey, not talking about my mom this time, but not admitting he was hoping she was already dead. I went into the other confessional, but I didn’t kneel down.

  I heard Harvey finish up and step outside his confessional. Then I heard him take a couple of steps and stand outside my confessional door. For a minute, I was afraid he’d open the door and look inside. He didn’t. He took a couple of steps away, and then stopped again. I waited. He walked toward the back of church, and I could tell by the sound of his steps that he was mad. I knocked on the wall between me and Father O’Brien.

  “All right if I don’t kneel this time, Father?” I asked.

  “Certainly, my son,” he said.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I lied three times, I stole sixty cents and…”

  I waited a moment.

  “And?” the priest said.

  There was a loud groaning sound, a yell, and a crash.

  “And I just killed my stepfather.”

  He didn’t die, he just broke both of his legs and knocked himself out. A policeman showed up, but not because Father O’Brien had told anyone my confession. Turned out my mother had called the police, showed them the candy and finally convinced them they had to hurry to the church and arrest her husband before he harmed her son.

  The police talked to me and then went down to South Street and arrested Mackie. At the hospital, a detective went in with me to see Harvey when Harvey woke up. I got to offer Harvey some of the chocolates he had given my mom. Instead of taking any candy, he made another confession that night. Before we left, the detective asked him why he had gone up into the choir loft. He said I had left a light on up there. The detective asked me if that was true, and of
course I said, “Yes.”

  The next time I was in church, I put Mackie’s silver dollar in the donation box near the candles and lit three candles: one for my father, one for Mary Theresa Mills, and one for the guy who made up the rule that says priests can’t rat on you.

  After I lit the candles, I went home and took out my wooden box. I put my father’s pipes on the mantle, next to his photo. My mom saw me staring at the photo and came over and stood next to me. Instead of thinking of him being off in heaven, a long way away, I imagined him being right there with us, looking back at us from that picture. I imagined him knowing that I had tried to save her from Harvey. I thought he would have liked that.

  My mom reached out and touched one of the pipes very carefully. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

  You know what? I believed her.

  A Fine Set of Teeth

  I saw Frank drop two cotton balls into the front pocket of his denim jacket and I made a face. “Those won’t help, you know.”

  He smiled and said, “Better than nothing.”

  “Cotton is not effective ear protection.”

  He picked up his keys by way of ignoring me and said, “Are you ready?”

  “You don’t have to go with me,” I offered again.

  “I’m not letting my wife sit alone in a sleazy bar. No more arguments, all right?”

  “If I were on a story-”

  “You aren’t. Let’s go.”

  “Thanks for being such a good sport about it,” I said, which made him laugh.

  “Which apartment number?” Frank asked as we pulled up to the curb in front of Buzz Sullivan’s apartment building. The building was about four stories high, probably built in the 1930’s. I don’t think it had felt a paintbrush along its walls within the last decade.

  “Buzz didn’t tell me,” I answered. “He just said he lived on the fourth floor.”

  Frank sighed with long suffering, but I can ignore someone as easily as he can, and got out of the car.

  As we made our way to the old stucco building’s entry, we dodged half a dozen kids who were playing around with a worn soccer ball on the brown crabgrass lawn. The children were laughing and calling to one another in Spanish. A dried sparrow of a woman watched them from the front steps. She seemed wearier than Atlas.

  Frank muttered at my back about checking mailboxes for the first of the three flights of stairs, but soon followed in silence. Although Buzz had moved several times since I had last been to one of his apartments, I knew there would be no difficulty in locating the one that was his. We reached the fourth floor and Frank started to grouse, but soon the sound I had been waiting for came to my ears. Not just my ears: I heard the sound under my fingernails, beneath my toes and in places my mother asked me never to mention in mixed company. Three screeching notes strangled from the high end of the long neck of a Fender Stratocaster, a sound not unlike those a pig might make-if it was having its teeth pulled with a pair of pliers.

  I turned to look at Frank Harriman and saw something I rarely see on his face: fear. Raw fear.

  I smiled. I would have said something comforting, but he wouldn’t have heard me over the next few whammified notes whining from Buzz’s guitar. A deaf man could have told you they were coming from apartment 4E. I waited until the sound subsided, asked, “Should we drop you off back at the house?” and watched my husband stalk over to the door of number 4E and rap on it with the kind of ferocious intensity one usually saves for rousing the occupants of burning buildings.

  Q: What’s the difference between a dead trombone player and a dead snake in the middle of a road?

  A: The snake was on his way to a gig.

  The door opened and a thin young man with a hairdo apparently inspired in color and shape by a sea urchin stood looking at Frank in open puzzlement. He swatted a few purple spikes away from his big blue eyes and finally saw me standing nearby. His face broke into an easy, charming smile.

  “Irene!” He looked back at Frank. “Is this your cop?”

  “No, Buzz,” I said, “that’s my husband.”

  Buzz looked sheepish. “Oh, sorry. I’ve told Irene I’m not like that, and here I am, acting just exactly like that.”

  “Like what?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t mind that you’re a cop,” Buzz said proudly.

  “That’s big of you,” Frank said, “I was worried you wouldn’t accept our help.”

  Buzz, who is missing a sarcasm detection gene, just grinned and held out a hand. “Not at all, man, not at all. It’s really good of you to offer to take me to the gig. Guess Irene told you my car broke down. Come on in.”

  Buzz’s purple hair was one of two splashes of color in his ensemble; his boots, pants and shirt were black, but a lime green guitar-still attached by a long cable to an amp-and matching strap stood out against this dark backdrop.

  There was no question of finding a seat while we waited for Buzz to unhook his guitar and put it in a hard-shell case. The tiny apartment was nearly devoid of furniture. Two empty plastic milk crates and a couple of boards served as a long, low coffee table of sorts. Cluttered with the several abandoned coffee mugs and an empty bowl with a bent spoon in it, the table stood next to a small mattress heaped with twisted sheets and laundry. The mattress apparently served as both bed and couch.

  There were two very elegant objects in room, however-a pair of Irish harps. The sun was setting in the windows behind them, and in the last light of day, they stood with stately grace, their fine wooden scrollwork lovingly polished to a high sheen.

  “You play these?” Frank asked him in astonishment.

  Without looking up from the guitar, which he was carefully wiping down with a cloth, Buzz said, “Didn’t you tell him, Irene?”

  “I first met Buzz at an Irish music festival,” I said. “He doesn’t just play the harp.”

  “Other instruments, too?” Frank asked.

  “Sure,” Buzz said, looking back at us now. “I grew up in a musical family.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “He doesn’t just play it. He coaxes it to sing.”

  “Sure and you’ve an Irish silver tongue now, haven’t ye, me beauty?” Buzz said with an exaggerated brogue.

  “Prove my point, Buzz. Play something for us.”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t touched them in months except to keep the dust off them,” he said. “That’s the past.” He patted the guitar case. “This is the future.” He laughed when he saw my look of disappointment. “My father feels the same way-but promise you won’t stop speaking to me like he has.”

  “No, what you play is your choice.”

  “Glad to know at least one person thinks so. Shall we go?”

  “Need help carrying your equipment?” Frank offered. I was relieved to see him warming up a little.

  “Oh, no, I’m just taking my ax, man.”

  “Your ax?”

  “My guitar. I never leave it at the club. My synthesizer, another amp and a bunch of other equipment are already at the club-I just leave those there. But not my Strat.”

  Q: How do you get a guitar player to turn down?

  A: Put sheet music in front of him.

  On the way to Club 99, Buzz talked to Frank about his early years of performing with the Sullivan family band, recalling the friendship his father shared with my late mentor, O’Connor.

  “O’Connor told me to come to this music festival,” I said. “There was a fifteen-year-old lad who could play the Irish harp better than anyone he’d ever met, and when he got to heaven, he expected no angel to play more sweetly.”

  “Oh, I did all right,” he said shyly. “But my training wasn’t formal. She tell you that she helped me get into school, Frank?”

  “No-”

  “It was your own hard work that got you into that program,” I said.

  “Naw, I couldn’t have done it without you. You talked that friend into teaching me how to sight read.” He turned to Frank. “Then she practicall
y arm-wrestled one of the profs into giving me an audition.”

  Frank smiled. “She hasn’t changed much.”

  “Sorry, Buzz,” I said, “I thought it was what you wanted.”

  “It was!” Buzz protested. “And I never could have gone to college without your help.”

  “Nonsense. You got the grades on your own, and all the talent and practice time for the music was your own. But when your dad told me you dropped out at the beginning of this past semester, I just figured-”

  “I loved school. I only left because I had this opportunity.”

  “What opportunity?” Frank asked.

  “The band you’re going to hear tonight,” he said proudly.

  I was puzzled. “It’s still avant garde?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. I guess I never thought there was much money in avant garde.”

  “Not here in the U.S. -locally, Club Ninety-nine is about the only place we can play regularly, and they don’t pay squat there. Our band is too outside for a lot of people.”

  “Outside?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it means-different. In a good way. You know, we push the envelope. Our music’s very original, but for people who want the Top Forty, we’re a tough listen. That’s the trouble with the music scene here in the States. But Mack-our bass player-came up with this great plan to get us heard over in Europe. We made a CD a few months ago, and it’s had a lot of airplay there. We just signed on for a big tour, and when it’s over, we’ve got a steady gig set up in a club in Amsterdam.”

  “I had no idea all of this was happening for you, Buzz. Congrats.”

  “Thanks. I’m so glad you’re finally going to get to hear us play-three weeks from now, we’ll be in Paris. Who knows when you’ll get a chance to hear us after that-Frank, it’s been awhile since Irene heard me play and-oh!” He pointed to the right. “Here’s the club. Park here at the curb. There’s not really any room at the back.”

  He had pointed out a small, brown building that looked no different from any other neighborhood bar on the verge of ruin. A small marquee read, “Live Music. Wast Land. No Cover Charge Before 7 P.M.”