Cinnamon Girl

by Lawrence Kessenich

  “I’ll go take of Jonah,” he said, and walked away down the hall.

  I sat down in the overstuffed chair across from the couch. I knew there was nothing I could do, but I felt as if I should be there for Kolvacik. I studied Claire as she sat holding him. She was entirely present for him at that moment. This was the quality that had made me fall in love with her. There were no half-measures with her. If someone needed her, she was there one hundred percent. You could depend on her affection, her comfort, her willingness to listen. Even if she was feeling distracted, her thoughts elsewhere, she would bring herself back into the moment and be with you. And she was never bitter about having to do it. It seemed to come naturally to her. It was no surprise she worked with needy people and wanted to be a doctor.

  Seeing her like that, love welled up inside of me. I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. It would kill me to lose her, just as losing his best friend was killing Kolvacik. Did I want to continue trying to win her if it would cost me so much to lose her? It was a rhetorical question. I had no choice. But as I watched Kolvacik, I felt as if I was watching a preview of what I would suffer if Claire left my life.

  Jonathan came down the stairs and, hearing Kolvacik’s sobs, came into the living room to investigate. He looked at the tableau on the couch with a disdainful face. He’d never liked Kolvacik.

  “What’s his problem,” he whispered to me.

  “His best friend was blown up in Vietnam,” I whispered back.

  “Crying won’t do any good,” he said. “Instead of smoking his brains out all the time, he should’ve been thinking about his friend and taking action. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  “Jonathan,” I said, looking him square in the eye, “fuck off.”

  He raised his hands and eyebrows, demonstrating his innocence. “Hey, man, that’s how I feel about it.”

  “Well, take your feelings elsewhere, okay? The guy’s in pain.”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  When Kolvacik stopped crying, he fell asleep in Claire’s arms. She and I looked at one another over his sleeping head and shared an unspoken sympathy that felt deeper than anything we’d shared before. Perhaps it was because we were there together with Kolvacik, while Tony and Jonathan had retreated to the kitchen.

  Eventually, Claire nodded toward the couch, indicating that she needed help laying Kolvacik down. I went to them and put my arms under Kolvacik as Claire tipped him back. We stretched him out on his back, lifted his legs onto the couch, and covered him with the afghan. We stood over him for a few moments, our shoulders touching, like parents watching over a sick child. Then we heard the clip-clop of little feet in the hall.

  “Sweeping?” said Jonah. “Tim sweeping?”

  “Yes, honey,” said Claire, “Tim’s sleeping. So you have to be very quiet.”

  Jonah put his index finger to his lips. “Ssssshhhhhh!” he hissed.

  Claire and I looked at one another and smiled.

  “I need a cigarette,” she said. “Let’s go into the kitchen.”

  Tony and Jonathan were deep in conversation when we entered, but stopped talking as soon as they saw us. All I caught was Jonathan saying, “… so we need some new people to commit to the project.”

  “How’s he doing?” asked Tony.

  “He fell asleep,” said Claire.

  “Poor bastard.”

  “He’s going to need to talk to you about this, you know, Tony,” said Claire.

  “I know,” he said resignedly.

  “He shouldn’t talk,” said Jonathan. “He should do something about the situation.”

  “Can you give him a couple days to grieve before you try to recruit him?” I said.

  “There’s no time to waste,” he answered, ignoring, or perhaps not catching, my sarcasm. “The longer we wait, the more innocent people get blown up. It’s that simple.”

  “Nothing’s that simple,” I said.

  “Jonathan’s right,” said Tony, looking very serious. “We’ve been pissing our time away back here while guys like Joe and Mickey are getting blown up over there. It’s time to stop it.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” said Claire, suddenly wary.

  She had lit a cigarette and leaned back against the counter next to me, but she straightened up when she spoke. Tony looked at Jonathan, who knitted his brow and shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “There are ways,” said Tony.

  “Just don’t go blowing up yourself or anybody else trying to save other people from getting blown up, okay? You’ve got a wife and child, you know.”

  Tony turned around in his chair and looked at her hard.

  “Do I?” he said.

  Claire didn’t answer, she just stared back at him, looking, she later told me, for clues to how she’d lost the man she’d fallen in love with. She felt as if she didn’t know the one who was sitting in front of her. Tony looked away and stood up.

  “I’m going up to do some work on my room,” he said. “I’ll take Jonah up with me.”

  As he walked down the hall, he called to Jonah, who came running from the living room. I saw them start up the stairs, hand-in-hand. Jonathan excused himself next and went back up to his room. While Claire made another pot of coffee, I sat at the table, staring out the back window at the giant maple that overhung the garage. It had always looked protective to me, but suddenly its branches seemed to hover ominously. I didn’t come out of my reverie until Claire set a mug of coffee down in front of me. I looked up at her sweet, pale face and nearly broke into tears.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I don’t know … I just feel vulnerable, all of a sudden. Afraid of losing people. Afraid of losing you.”

  She rested a hand on my shoulder, and leaned down to kiss my cheek, but she didn’t linger. She picked up her own mug from the stove and sat down across the table from me, where she took a fresh cigarette from her pack on the table and lit it. I did the same. Then we stared at one another for a few minutes through the cloud of smoke.

  “You know we’ll always be friends, at least, don’t you?” she said.

  “I suppose,” I replied. “But that won’t be enough anymore. You know that.”

  “I know you believe that. I’d hate to think we could never be friends again because of all this.”

  “Are you trying to give me a hint?”

  “No. I’ve told you before I don’t know how things will work out.”

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “I sit here with my heart hung out to dry. You can pluck it off the line any time you want, or you can leave it there. Very convenient for you.”

  “Does my life seem convenient to you? You’re welcome to it, then. I’m not using you, John. You’re my best friend. Maybe you’ll be more, someday, but maybe not. I have a previous commitment to deal with. I’d be more than happy if we’d started with a clean slate, but we didn’t, and I can’t make that easy for any of us. If you can think of a way, let me know.”

  We smoked our cigarettes in silence. An absurd, panicky fantasy came into my head. I suddenly felt that, if we both finished our cigarettes while we were sitting there, our relationship would be over. I stubbed mine out and took another one before Claire could finish hers. I only took a few puffs, but it comforted me to have it burning in my hand.

  “Do you love me?” I said, hating the whining sound of my voice.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and reached across the table to take my free hand in both of hers. “I do love you, John. I’ll always love you—no matter what happens. Even if I can’t have you, because the price is too high. But I love Tony, too. I can’t pretend you’ve taken his place. He and I have been through a lot together. Maybe we aren’t meant to be together any more, but I’m not sure of that, yet. I can’t rush into something new.”

  I looked deep into her mesmerizing green eyes—not mesmerizing because she was trying to make them so, but because I was so in love with
them.

  “I’ll wait,” I said. “It may kill me, but I’ll wait. I couldn’t give up if I wanted to.”

  Tony went back to work at the docks the next day. The union was so sympathetic to the fate of veterans they’d granted him a two-week leave-of-absence to be with his wounded brother. They’d knocked his number down a few notches, but he was still high enough on the list to get work most days. Within a few weeks, instead of enrolling for night courses, as Claire had expected him to, he started going off with Jonathan in the evenings. Jonathan had found it impossible to lay low for long and had begun meeting with some of his old comrades. He was too sure of the rightness of his cause to worry about the consequences, and Tony, radicalized by the visit with his brother, felt the same way.

  He and Claire had one long, knock-down, drag-out fight over this— she accusing him of not caring about himself or her or Jonah, he accusing her of being selfish and apathetic—and then they’d stopped talking entirely. To his credit, Tony managed to see Jonah as much as he always had. He arrived home at 3:30 and never left with Jonathan until after Jonah was in bed, at 7:30. And since he and Claire weren’t talking, he dedicated virtually all of this time to Jonah.

  Only Kolvacik cut into Tony’s time, as well as mine and Claire’s. The death of his friend Mickey had sent him into a spiral of drinking and smoking dope that quickly cost him his job at the Harley plant and further estranged him from Mina. She kicked him out of the house most evenings, and he came to us. Mostly he sat in the living room, smoking dope or drinking or both, trying to reel in anyone who came by so he could retell his pitiful tale, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Someone once said that there is a fine line between sympathy and disgust, and Kolvacik’s self-pitying behavior pushed each of us over that line occasionally. Hardly a day went by when one of us—including Claire—didn’t end up lecturing him about how his life was going down the drain. But that was exactly what he wanted; it fed his self-pity.

  For a time, I did nothing political. Carl’s plan for classes on the war had fallen through for lack of interest, and little else was going on politically, at least in public. After the national student strike failed to generate any palpable change in U.S. policy—except perhaps a slightly less aggressive stance by President Nixon, calculated to win him a few points from moderates, no doubt—most people, including me, returned to their normal life, unsure what to do next. It wasn’t until things heated up over the curfew at Water Tower Park again, as they had the previous summer, that I felt drawn back in.

  The curfew was a small thing, compared to the war, of course, but it seemed to symbolize for many of us the conservatives’ desire to control things and take all the joy and spontaneity out of life. Besides, Claire and I had started going to the park together often that summer, alone when we could, or with Jonah, if he couldn’t sleep, which started to happen more often that June. Perhaps it was the tension in the air between his mother and his father. Perhaps it was just a natural transition in his sleep pattern. Whatever the reason, he was often awake long after Tony tucked him into bed and went off with Jonathan.

  So, Claire and I would put him in a stroller, or let him walk, if he wanted to, and stroll the few blocks to Water Tower Park to see the fountain. The sight and sound of the water always soothed Jonah—and us, for that matter, especially when it got dark and the fountain was lit up. And it was after dark the police always showed up to inform everyone they were no longer welcome there. Usually, we were ready to leave anyway, but it was the principle of the thing. There seemed no good reason to prevent people from congregating quietly—the loudest thing being an acoustic guitar—after dark in a public urban square.

  It wasn’t long before the alternative media began to call for protests against the curfew. The thing didn’t take shape until July, but when it did, I was ready to be part of it. As I’d grown closer to Claire and Jonah, I’d begun to feel a new sense of purpose in political action. I wanted to help make a society for them that was less repressive, gentler, more open. Claiming that small piece of urban greenery called Water Tower Park for “the people” seemed a manageable step in that direction. Milwaukee had had a succession of socialist mayors in its history and the affects of their attention to the needs of the people was evident in the city, which had more public parks per square mile than any city in the nation and more public access to undeveloped waterfront than any city built on a large body of water that I knew of (except Chicago, which had its own socialist mayors). In light of that history, keeping Water Tower Park open to the public late in the evening seemed a small but noble cause.

  I even tried to recruit Kolvacik, hoping an immediate cause might rouse him from his lethargy, but he’d been indifferent to the cause the previous summer, and in his current state he was hostile.

  “Who gives a flying fuck about that little shit-ass park,” he said, a drop of wine from the swig he’d just taken trickling down into his raggedy black beard. “If you wanna blow the fucking place up, I’ll help, but don’t bother me about curfews. Let the pigs wallow in the goddamn fountain. I don’t give a shit.”

  “You don’t give a shit about anything, do you, Kolvacik? I thought you might like to think about something besides yourself for one night, but I guess not. You’re too busy wallowing in self-pity.”

  “I know,” he said, suddenly self-abasing. “I’m a worthless piece of shit. I’m no good for anything.”

  He took another drink from the bottle.

  “You go off and fight your battles,” he continued. “You can do it better without me trailing along. I’d just fall on my ass.”

  Suddenly incensed, I leapt up and snatched the bottle from his hand.

  “Put this shit away, Kolvacik. Do something. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I know you lost a friend, but you’re going to lose all your friends if you keep acting this way. Life goes on. You can suffer and still keep on living. People do it all the time. Some of them even take their pain and make something out of it. They start caring more for other people. You can’t do anything with your pain as long as you keep submerging yourself in it. We can’t see you anymore. You’re under water. Come out here and join the living again.”

  He didn’t answer me. He didn’t even look at me while I spoke. He started searching slowly for something, first in his pants pockets, then in his shirt pocket, where he finally fount it—a joint.

  “Wanna do this up with me?” he asked innocently, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

  The big confrontation at Water Tower Park took place spontaneously on a warm July night that felt uncannily like the night I’d met Tony, the previous summer. The whole scene was pervaded by a sense of deja vu. The police lined up in the same place, TV cameras were there, and the crowd chanted the same chants.

  Claire had sent me off with a warning not to get my head bashed in, so I’d even planned to use the same escape route Tony and I had used the previous year, if necessary. The picture was completed when I looked across the crowd to see Tony on the other side, punching his fist in the air and chanting. At the same moment, he spied me, and in the few seconds our eyes were engaged, the whole year seemed to pass before me.

  I saw him lying on the beach laughing with me, sitting beside me at the courthouse, cutting lumber to build the walls of his new room, heading off to the docks in the morning. I saw Claire in her short white dress beneath the standing lamp, sitting across the kitchen table from me, smoking and listening intently, lying beneath me on the front seat of her car. I saw Jonah on the couch, his young/ancient eyes looking deeply into mine. I saw Kolvacik grinning mischievously over his African drum, and I saw Mina perched on my lap. I saw the parties, the arguments, the demonstrations, the hugs and kisses, the comings and goings. It was all so rich, so full of life and passion. And Tony was the man who had led me into it all by taking me home with him that night, one long year before. Suddenly, the night seemed ominous.

  When Tony broke eye contact, I noticed Jonathan was beside him. It seemed odd to me
that the two of them, who seemed full of bigger plans, would participate in such a “petty-bourgeois” demonstration, but I didn’t give it much thought. I didn’t have time to. The crowd started surging forward suddenly, advancing steadily toward the police, who tightened their ranks.

  There were a lot fewer police that evening than there had been at the big confrontation the previous summer and more demonstrators. There had been no indication the demonstration would be any larger that night. The police were caught unprepared. Even so, the small number who were there could probably have driven us back, if they’d chosen to, armed with shields and sticks as they were, but since we were moving away from the center of the park, their leaders chose to pull back and let us follow them out of the park. They backed across the street to the opposite sidewalk, and, when the crowd kept coming, they backed down North Avenue, which ran perpendicular to the park.

  Police cars, their lights whirling, rushed to block off North Avenue at the next corner, where it met Prospect Avenue. I wanted to stop. I saw no point in leaving the park when our objective was to stay there. But the crowd had a life of its own, and I was carried along with it. Seeing the police retreat excited them. I saw Jonathan and Tony in the front rank, urging everyone on.

  The pace of the action picked up slowly, until, as we approached the intersection, the crowd was almost trotting forward as the police backpedaled rapidly. I guessed the police would make a stand at the intersection, and they were apparently slowing down to do that when, suddenly, the crowd wheeled away from them and started streaming down Prospect Avenue, spreading out across the street in front of the Oriental Drugstore and the adjoining Oriental Theatre.