Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  I FIRST met Veronica in the schoolyard when we were six. I was sitting on the basketball court, leaning back against the pole holding up the backboard, arranging my hundred or so baseball cards alphabetically by team. I looked up and saw this sandy-haired girl smiling at me. She had an unopened pack of cards in her hand. She said, “Wanna flip?”

  “Who you got?”

  We opened the pack. We split the gum. She had a Roger Maris, an Ernie Banks, and a Jim Lemon. We flipped. Veronica wiped me out. I couldn’t speak. She offered to give me the cards back. Offered to give me hers, too. I couldn’t accept. She could see that I was distraught. This is what comes of gambling, I could hear Sister Maximo saying. Veronica and I sat down. She told me that she thought we were playing for funsies, and so she couldn’t keep the cards, really. She put the pack on the ground between us. I was choking back tears. I’d lost my Yaz, my Steady Eddie Bressoud. I ran home.

  After that I might be drinking a lime rickey at Charlie’s or maybe reading a Life magazine at Iandoli’s, and suddenly Veronica would be standing beside me smiling a Christmas-morning smile, like she could not imagine wanting to be anywhere else. Or maybe she would bump me, but stare straight ahead like I wasn’t there, only I was and she could see me out the corner of her eye. She wouldn’t say a word until I did. I found this all so endearing every time she did it. She always seemed so delighted to see me and to be seen by me.

  And then her life got sad. Her parents separated, reunited, fought like Rottweilers, separated, and divorced. Veronica didn’t blame herself for the divorce like some kids do, but she thought her mother may have. Her grandmother died from sugar diabetes. Her cousin Carl molested her. Her uncle Reno beat Carl with a tire iron, leaving him a brain-damaged drooler. Veronica had to stop her tap lessons at Honey Fellicetti’s Dance Studio because her mom couldn’t afford them anymore. Then her mom pulled her out of St. Simeon’s and put her in public school at Rabbit Maranville Elementary, where Veronica found herself way behind in math and science. When she told her new teacher, Mr. Vanderhoof, that she could diagram compound-complex sentences, he said, Why would you want to do that? Her brother came home from the war in a sealed coffin.

  Audrey played in the parlor with a suitcase full of Veronica’s old Barbies. The dolls, Audrey let us know, were saving up the money they made waitressing at Ken’s Diner to buy Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. They liked to ride and they liked to sing. Veronica and I made lunch. Boiled rice with margarine and ketchup. Raspberry ZaRex to drink. Veronica told us her mom was dating a Puerto Rican guy named Mike who was in the Coast Guard.

  “They’re out on the lake now with his cabin cruiser. They could have asked me to come.”

  I said, “I hate boats.”

  Audrey said, “Boats are a measure of success.”

  I said, “How many boats does Dr. Bondurant have?”

  “A speedboat and a yacht.” Which she rhymed with hatchet.

  After lunch Veronica let her hamster Ringo out of his cage, and we watched him try to burrow through the linoleum on the pantry floor and then chew his way through one of Veronica’s orthopedic shoes. Meanwhile, at home things hadn’t gone so well.

  WE HEARD Deluxe before we saw him. He meowed. We stopped at the front steps, called his name, and waited. Audrey peeked under the porch. He meowed again, and we looked up. He was twenty feet up, nestled in the crook of an oak limb, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t come down. He whined for our attention or assistance, but he couldn’t be coaxed from his roost. I clucked for him to come. Audrey stamped her foot and commanded him to get down here on the double. He blinked, wailed a little.

  When we got upstairs, Audrey went out on the piazza to reason with Deluxe. I went inside. Caeli was sweeping up pieces of what had been my grandmother’s bone china off the kitchen floor. She stopped when she saw me. She put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. Nunzie was on the telephone, pacing in front of the fridge. When he saw me, he turned to the wall, wagged his finger at the ceiling, and said, “Pardon my French, Your Eminence, but you tell that Kraut bastard that he plays ball here, or I’ll have the Hub pay him a little visit. Trust me, he does not want to speak with the Hub. Capisce?” Dad sat at the kitchen table, holding an ice pack to his forehead. I saw that the window by the table was shattered and the storm window beyond it cracked. I said, “Where’s Mom?” like I didn’t know, like I wanted to find out.

  Caeli said that Mom had pitched a bit of a fit. “She’s sick. She put her face through the window there. She wasn’t trying to jump out or anything. The ambulance came for her. They gave her something to calm her down.”

  Dad said that Mom thought he was someone else. He didn’t look to me like a man who’d lost something dear to him, but like a man who’d grown accustomed to loss. Resigned and resolved. “I’m so sorry you had to live with her like this.”

  Caeli said, “She’ll get the help she needs now.”

  Nunzie hung up the phone. He said, “I don’t know why you have to live like a fucking gypsy, Rainy.”

  Caeli put her hands over my ears and smiled.

  Nunzie said, “You got a family here.”

  “A family I have to support.”

  I said, “You’re leaving again?”

  Caeli said, “What did the bishop say?”

  Dad said, “It’s just temporary. I’m working on a solution to this whole mess, the kerfuffle. Goddamned can of worms.”

  “I want to know where you are every minute, Rainy,” Nunzie said.

  “I’ll call.”

  “I can have you driving a cement mixer for Caputo Construction tomorrow.”

  “When I get back, maybe.”

  “You got three weeks.”

  Nunzie had prevailed upon the bishop to call off his Catholic Charities social worker and to find Audrey a room at St. Anne’s. “It’s not an orphanage,” he told me. “It’s a children’s home.” This until Dad returned in three weeks, he promised. I’d be staying with the Morrisseys. Audrey couldn’t because of her age and because she had special needs, Nunzie said.

  I said, “What are you talking about?”

  He said, “She’s a little touched in the head like your mother.”

  “Is not.”

  Nunzie looked at Caeli and shrugged. Caeli said, “You’ll see her every day after school.”

  Audrey came in and said we had to call the fire department. I called the O’Connell Street fire barn and explained Deluxe’s problem. The fireman told me they didn’t do that sort of thing. “That only happens in the movies, kid. We’ve got better things to do.”

  I said, “What are you doing now?”

  He said, “Don’t be a wise guy.”

  I asked him what I was supposed to do, then. He said, “Have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree?”

  Boysville

  I WAS THINKING about what I would do if Spot died. Would I buy another dog? Another setter puppy? Call him Pavlov? Would I do things differently this time? Obedience school. Dry food. Walkies. Heel. Spot stopped gnawing his pig ear and stared at me.

  I said, “What?”

  He woofed.

  “You can’t read my mind, Spot, so don’t even pretend to.”

  “Ouah, ouah!”

  Spot had been listening to conversational French language tapes with me and had been affecting a laughable French accent lately. I told him I was thinking about his aunt Audrey.

  A dismissive woof this time.

  “You don’t have to believe it. That’s your business.”

  Spot and I were on the deck after supper, he with his delectable chewy pig ear and me with my healthy pomegranate martini, chock-full of antioxidants. Annick was working late at the theater building the sets for the Dania Beach Playhouse production of Grease. What had me thinking about a Spotless life was what had happened to the Hargitais’ apricot pug Hedy earlier in the week. Attila and Linka Hargitai live five houses down where the tidal estuary and canal empty into the lake. The indomitable Hedy had been out in her ba
ckyard yipping furiously at an unflappable six-foot iguana, who placidly munched on pink hibiscus blossoms. Whenever Hedy barked, she turned in tight little excited circles, always spinning to her left (the Shaquille O’Neal of pugs). Maybe her circles got her dizzy, but for whatever reason, Hedy drifted too close to the iguana, who flicked his tail and swept Hedy over the retaining wall and into the water. Poor girl couldn’t climb back up the three-foot wall, though she struggled mightily to find purchase.

  A couple of kids fishing for snapper on the footbridge saw what had happened, dropped their Shakespeare Ugly Stiks, and ran to the rescue. They tried to scoop Hedy up in their landing net, but that only frightened and confused her. She turned and swam for the middle of the lake. There she was bobbing toward the island, and then she wasn’t. And then the water roiled and reddened. And then the crocodile surfaced.

  When the grieving Attila tried to take revenge on the crocodile that evening by firing several rounds from his .38-caliber Colt Commander at the monster, he was arrested. You can’t kill an endangered species. You can’t fire a pistol in the city limits. Attila hasn’t given up, however. He injected a Butterball turkey with strychnine and tossed it in the lake. But if the croc ate Attila’s turkey, he or she felt no ill effects. Mrs. Maradona told me she ran into Attila at the marine flea market over in the jai-alai parking lot. He was carrying a harpoon. He seemed gleeful, she said. A little distracted, but gleeful.

  That afternoon I’d gotten an e-mail from my friend Gaspar in Requiem letting me know that our old (as in “long ago”) English professor, Walker Roberts, had died unexpectedly. He was seventy-two miles into a hundred-and-fifty-mile charity bicycle race across the state when his heart gave out. He was dead, they figured, before his head met the pavement. Turns out his arteries were ninety percent blocked, that he’d had a heart attack a year earlier, which he was apparently unaware of. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about him and how he was not much older than I was. What would Spot do if I died?

  I took Dr. Roberts for Literature and Social Change when I was a sophomore. I was all about social change in those days. I was earnest, literal-minded, and a complete stranger to irony. I remember our spirited exchanges about Doris Lessing. I thought The Four-Gated City was profound and prophetic, and he thought it was polemical and pompous. Dr. Roberts liked to stand with his hands in his jeans pockets when he lectured. When he made an amusing remark, he smiled and looked at the ceiling. His blue eyes were not quite aligned with each other. If you asked him a question, he would smooth his mustache before he answered.

  I met my pre-Alice girlfriend Ray in that literature course. She let me borrow Under the Volcano, which I still have and still have not read. The class met in a room on the first floor of the Mark Saunders Science Building. There was an upright piano in front of the room, its fall board closed and secured with a padlock. I was quite taken with Ray’s charm, wit, intelligence, and Slavic beauty. Smitten in spades, you could say. She folded her hands on her lap when she spoke, and she spoke so eloquently and articulated so precisely. She could spin a pencil around her thumb, fold a paper rose, touch her nose with the tip of her tongue. I changed my seat to the one beside hers. Soon we were taking the bus together, stopping for coffee at the Jersey Bar. And now Walker Roberts is dead; Ray lives in Requiem and does I-don’t-know-what, and I am far far away.

  Not long after I had left Requiem for good I heard from Gaspar that Walker Roberts had been stabbed by a disgruntled or obsessed student. The guy just barged into Walker’s office with a serrated kitchen knife and lunged at him over the desk. The obsessed ones are the dangerous ones. And the dangerous ones are an occupational hazard, I’ve come to find out. If you’re breathing and you have a line of credit, you can get into a public university after all. No background checks, no psychological workups. So one day you’re in a room with one of your best and brightest—you want to ask her to apply for your graduate program—and she suddenly accuses you of stalking her through the back alleys of Coconut Grove and dressing as a priest while you do it. You notice the classroom door is closed. You back away slowly. Or you get a hundred threatening daily e-mails from a screwball who can’t write a coherent sentence but does manage to savagely murder someone with your name in all of his short stories. Or the woman who sends you and your girlfriend anonymous letters discussing the details of her torrid and longstanding affair with you. Sooner or later, after a judicial hearing or a restraining order or two, and if you’re lucky, they usually drift back to their sad little lives, but there are days when dealing with sociopaths makes you want to quit the business and maybe do something less worthwhile and less stressful. Like drive a cab. Or do some landscaping. But then you remember your allergies.

  Annick came out to the deck with a glass of red wine and kissed me on the head. Spot ran to her, wagging his mighty tail, his whole backside, in fact. Annick took his face in her hands and kissed his nose. He whined to her.

  She said, “You two bickering again?” She sat in the chair beside me.

  I said, “He started it.”

  Spot gave her the poor-puppy eyes.

  She told me I was older and should know better.

  “You always take his side.”

  It was the first day of hurricane season, the day you look at your house and your possessions and wonder if they’ll all be here in six months. You wonder is it too late to call about the shutters. Annick told me they caught the kids that did it.

  “Did what?”

  “The thing with the monkey.”

  A couple of tourists kayaking the Dania Cutoff Canal had come upon the crucified skeleton of a monkey nailed to an Australian pine. Looked like it was a warning to the other monkeys. Maybe some kind of voodoo Santeria ritual or something. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in Iowa, they told a reporter for the Sun-Sentinel.

  I said, “How did they catch them?”

  The kids bragged about it on MySpace. Posted photos of the monkey, nailed and alive.

  BLACKIE SLEPT in our apartment with me (but only after I’d removed the milk from the fridge) so that we could keep Deluxe company, but Deluxe was depressed, confused, and aloof. He curled himself into a furry mound on Audrey’s pillow, tucked his tail under his chin, and slept. He ran to the door whenever he heard the latch bolt click, but then collapsed in a heap when he saw it was me or Blackie, or maybe it was Caeli peeking in to see if we needed anything at Iandoli’s. He wouldn’t chase his marbles, could only manage to give his plaid catnip mousie a cursory swat now and again. Blackie sat at the kitchen table and worked on the storyboard for The Drone. The Devious Dr. Diabolus was on hold while Blackie looked for backers. The Drone was an adaptation of my own creation, actually. A serial story I told myself every night of my childhood from when I was six or so until I was eleven, when I suddenly found myself more interested in the mysteries of girls and the afterlife than in the now-pallid thrills of adventure. The Drone of my fantasies was named Frankie Raines. He was me, of course, with a sexier name and a better haircut. He began life as an orphan and cowboy, the charismatic leader of the bunkhouse gang at the Circle T Ranch in Catville and defender of the downtrodden in rural Requiem County, but by the time I was eight, Frankie had become a secretive, some would even say furtive, boy of singular crime-solving skills, unassuming, unrelenting, and uncompromising, a stealthy superhero without superpowers, but with a finely calibrated moral radar and a refined ability to read a face. He was a human lie detector and an extraordinary liar himself.

  Blackie changed Frankie’s name to Conbert H. Benneck. Not unsexy, Blackie argued, retro-sexy. We decided for the sake of Blackie’s serial movie that Conbert grew up in an orphanage called Boysville in Central City, USA. He was a shy kid and preferred solitude to organized violence. He was assigned to keep the bees in the Boysville apple orchard. Conbert’s birth is shrouded in mystery. His father might be the president, for all we know, his mother the queen of Slovenia. Blackie drew pictures of young Conbert in his white oversized overalls, mesh
helmet, and leather gloves. The other boys began to call him Honey.

  AFTER SCHOOL that Friday, I met Audrey at St. Anne’s, and we walked over to Farrell Field. The sun was already going down over the tops of the triple-deckers on O’Connell Street. We played on the swing set. Audrey hung by her knees from the sidebar and talked to me upside down. She wiped her runny nose with her mittens. My ears were so cold they burned. Audrey said she really didn’t mind the orphanage so much. I could smell burning leaves. I told her not to keep wetting her lips; they’d chap.

  “Then I’ll look like I’m wearing lipstick.”

  “It’ll hurt like heck.”

  “You have to suffer for beauty, Mom always says.” She dropped to the ground, pulled up her wool hat, and showed me the nasty-looking stitches on her forehead. She told me Cosmo Haddad hit her with a turtle. “Pretty neat, huh?”

  “He what?”

  “A red-eared slider.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Because he’s a spaz? He eats Vaseline sandwiches.”

  “Does not.”

  “On Wonder bread.” Audrey sat on a swing and twisted in circles until the chains were braided as tightly as possible. “And then Cosmo Haddad killed Shelly, stomped on her shell. He told Sister it was an accident.”

  “I still don’t understand why he hit you in the first place.”

  “He wet his pants. He caught me sniffing the air. He lost it. I was handy. Plus his father is dead, and I called him Cosmo Had-a-dad.”