Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  Zwaart was laughing, as what he'd told us. ) Dill made a blunder anyway. In an ironic, almost playful tone he asked, "Son, your vision isn't defective, is it?" Farley was breathing quickly. He pushed his glasses against the bridge of his nose. "Y-yes, sir. It is."

  "But not with corrective lenses, surely?"

  "Even with corrective lenses, sir, it isn't twenty-twenty. No. Like a man who has stumbled into a trap he's only begun to realize himself has devised, Dill became flustered. He tried to maintain reasonable tone. "In any case, Farley, you were wearing your glasses, weren't you, when you ran out of your room?" Quickly Farley said, "Possibly n-not."

  "Possibly not? But--" A bright student, Farley pursued his advantage. "I might have run out of my room without my glasses. My glasses might have slid down my nose.

  They're loose." To demonstrate, he pushed at his glasses as if to adjust them but they slid off his nose and fell into his lap. Exposed, as if a clearer light, Farley's face without the round schoolboy lenses was a young-old face, the eyes enlarged and myopic, ringed with shadow. Even as Farley's spindly body didn't appear to be the body of a thirteen-year-old but the body of a younger boy, his eyes didn't appear to be the eyes of a thirteen-year-old but the eyes of an older boy. We would recall John Reddy's strange, and certainly unpredictable younger brother Farley on the stand that day when, fourteen years later, his computer software company front-page headlines in the Wall Street fournal and in the business section of the New York Times, though unaccompanied by any photographs of "Franklin Hart" as he would then call himself, a Time feature on

  "The Mystery Man of Software" was illustrated by an adult-schoolboy figure with neatly close-trimmed hair and round-lenses glasses and a bland, blurred face that was in fact an incandescent lightbulb with a hovering ? at its core. Coworkers of

  "Franklin Hart" would claim that they not only didn't know the young genius but had difficulty remembering what he looked like from one meeting to the next. He's always different but the same, somehow.

  Farley was saying in an earnest, stammering voice to Dill, "I wake up from sleep sometimes and I'm still in a dream. Or, I think I'm awake and I'm still asleep I guess. I don't know at these times if I'm wearing my glasses.

  I don't know where I am exactly. Like in a dream you see objects without seeing , them, I mean there's like a blur where a person's face might be like you can't remember what the person looks like but the dream tells you who it is, you w know. Or you're supposed to know. But the person isn't there, the idea.

  Or it looks like someone else instead of--" Dill interrupted, exasperated. "Son. Did you, or did you not see'

  brother John Reddy at that time? In whatever fashion?" * "I... don't know for certain.".

  "Well, did you hear him? His voice? Did you by any chance words?" Farley was breathing through his mouth. Evangeline Fesnacht noted his brother John Reddy, his mother and his grandfather were staring at him, and how, blinking, fussing with his glasses, he made every not to glance in their direction. "Sir, I look at a thing sometimes and it disappears.

  A solid object. A person. It's like it turns transparent.

  Sometimes I don't hear what other people say. Like in school, my teachers... think I'm paying attention, but my mind is somewhere else. My own intrude.

  There are days I think about a problem, a math problem, and it won't let me go. It's like the problem is thinking me. That night... that it happened... it was solid geometry. My head was filled with geometrical figures like blocks and cubes. There's a feeling, like, of wires--a prickly sharp feeling. So I--" Dill said irritably, "Son! We're wandering far afield, aren't we?

  And to what purpose? Is this an attempt to inform the court of your memory of the events of last March nineteenth, or is this an attempt at obfuscation?" Here, like an athlete who has been waiting patiently for action, rose to his feet to object to the browbeating of the witness, Judge Schor, though seeming to share in Dill's exasperation, allowed the objection and urged Dill to proceed more civilly, considering that the witness was a child.

  So Dill said, more patiently, but with subtle irony, "Son, we with your reluctance to name your brother as the agent of Melvin Riggs's death. But the facts known to us, the physical evidence we have, forensic evidence that your grandfather's gun was the murder weapon, suggest exactly that, John Reddy shot and killed Melvin Riggs, fled with the gun, tried to dispose of it in a creek less than a quarter-mile away. If your brother was not the person who carried the gun from the house and threw it onto the frozen creek where it was found next morning, how on earth did it get there?" This was a question for the courtroom to contemplate, not for Heart to answer. But Farley groped for a new idea. "Someone else--another 'agent'--might have carried it there? It might have been--me?" At this, Dill gave up on Farley Heart. He may have thought the mildly retarded or deranged. He threw up his hands and stepped with a glance at the jury. See? The boy is obviously Lying to protect brother.

  Just then, as Evangeline Fesnacht reported to us excitedly, "The unforeseen happened! All hell broke loose." It was the eccentric female juror Mrs.. Connor had remarked upon.

  woman with the damp-bulgy eyes and prune-wrinkled face.

  Incongruously, on this third day of testimony, the woman wore bright red lipstick glared against her grubby-pale skin, even her fingernails, which looked broken and bitten, had been painted red. Through the previous hours of testimony, as the prosecution grimly presented its case, hammering away at John Reddy's "vicious crime" and "self-evident guilt," the woman had forward in her seat staring at John Reddy with a frowning, fixed expression.

  We wondered, was John Reddy aware of her? Had they exchanged looks?

  Mrs.. Connor said, "Once you started noticing that woman, you couldn't not notice her. ") When Farley Heart was dismissed by the prosecutor, and stepped hesitantly from the witness chair, the woman suddenly rose to her feet and pushed hurriedly out of the jury box, stumbling over her fellow jurors and speaking incoherently, her words punctuated by

  "Judge! "--"Judge! It was an electrifying moment, Evangeline Fesnacht told us eagerly. You someone was sick, or fainting. "Jurors are supposed to just sit, like zombies.

  And here was one jumping up." Before the nearest of the bailiffs could prevent her, the woman fell to her knees on the floor in front of the defense table, praying loudly for John Reddy's beneflt, "O Lord, we accept that this boy is guilty! But this boy is an instrument of Your wrath! Who among us can cast the first stone! Lord have mercy! Lord open our eyes!

  "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord." As bailiffs hurried to restrain her the woman repeated in a wilder voice," Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord'!" Everything came to a halt. The trial's proceedings were derailed.

  It was the only time, witnesses agreed, that John Reddy Heart looked surprised-agitated. "He was actually wiping tears from his eyes, I think," said in a lowered, wondering voice. "I mean--gosh! tohn Reddy crying." A CC mistrial? What the hell's that?"

  "Is it a good thing for John Reddy, or--not so good?" We were puzzled. We were fascinated. We'd seemed to know that any trial of John Reddy Heart's would turn out to be somehow special, and dramatic, and draw even more attention to the case, more headlines.

  But--a mistrial?

  "It just means John Reddy will be in custody longer. He won't get until maybe Christmas."

  "Oh, God. You think he'll miss basketball season?"

  "If he gets out at all." The trial halted that day as if a switch had been thrown. It would be reconvened with that jury. Judge Schor overruled the prosecutor to agree with Roland Trippe that the jurors had been exposed to "extreme influence" by the behavior of the maverick female juror, it wouldn't be sufficient simply to dismiss her and name one of the alternates in her place. For it turned out, as we'd read in the News, that the woman had been

  "disruptive element" in the jury room too. On the second morning of the trial she was agitated, fussing and complaining, and insisted upon leading the rest of the ju
rors in prayer that they might "execute God's bidding", next she was the first to arrive, looking as if she hadn't slept all night, yet wearing bright lipstick and fingernail polish, reading the Bible and showing passages to other jurors who were annoyed by her, or embarrassed, or perplexed. Since it hadn't been clear, the jury foreman told Judge Schor apologetically, if the woman was for, or against, the defendant, or for, or against, very concept of a jury trial, they hadn't wanted to report her.

  Several disgruntled jurors, all male, middle-aged, complained to News anonymously. They felt they'd been cheated. Their time had wasted. They were bitter that Schor had dismissed them just a religious kook had gotten it into her head that judging a murderer is wrong. Juror X told reporters, "I speak for myself. I was an open mind. I wasn't going to be swayed by some nutty female." Juror Y said, even more incensed, "It was pretty damned clear to me, and I bet to of the other jurors, that that kid killed Riggs. We can make up our own minds." Juror Z said, "I wouldn't have trouble even with sending him to the chair. I believe in capital punishment. You can trust the cops, right? Why's a cop gonna lie? I am not prejudiced." The second trial of People of the State of New York v. wohn Reddy was scheduled for early November.

  By that time John Reddy had been in custody for eight months.

  We'd begun to lose track exactly of how many weeks, days.

  School had resumed without him of course. Fall sports had resumed without him. ("John Reddy didn't play football anyway, that's a break. ") By degrees it had become less disconcerting, except perhaps to of the girls, to glance out into the parking lot behind the school from, for instance, the cafeteria, the library or the second-floor girls' restroom, realize It isn't there. It's gone. The acid-green Caddie. Other cars were there, lots of cars including Orrie Buhr's gunmetal-gray Buick with the bared-teeth grill, Clyde Meunzer's black-with-red-stripes Trans Am, and Art Lutz surprised us all by driving proudly to school one day in his brother Jamie's sexy black Dodge Castille, in his use while Jamie was in the U. S. Army on far side of the earth. But John Reddy's trademark Caddie with the throaty engine roar was gone. Nor did you see John Reddy in his leather jacket and jeans, longish hair whipping in the wind, out there joking with his buddies. Nor would you catch a glimpse of John Reddy in the second-floor junior corridor, taller than most of the other guys, and quicker on his feet, though without seeming ever to hurry.

  Coach McKeever who'd begun smoking out a rear exit door, a nasty that smelled like burning hemp, said grimly, "He'll be back for season. You wait." The team had been so demoralized after John Reddy's arrest last winter, they'd dropped from first place to third in the division.

  Girls wrote to John Reddy c/o the Buffalo House of Detention but received no replies. Some wrote to John Reddy c/o Roland Trippe no replies. Evangeline Fesnacht hinted she'd been in touch with Trippe discussing "trial strategy" but we doubted this was so. Now we were busier we had less time to drive fifteen miles downtown to cruise by the depressing old ruin of a prison. Except sometimes on weekend nights. After a game, the West Seneca game for instance which we'd won by a fluke goal 21-19, and to celebrate we'd been drinking beer at Dwayne Hewson's and in a caravan of horn-honking cars driving to Sandi Scott's on Park Club Lane (where there was an indoor pool, and her divorced mother was out of town), three or four cars with WHS stickers swerving impulsively off to Main to continue along the familiar route into and through Amherst past Grover Cleveland Park, which few of us had visited since our ninthgrade class picnic and past the darkened campus of the U. of Buffalo many of us were fated to attend while our smarter and more privileged would go to Cornell, Williams, Yale, Harvard and Stanford. In a few passing the vast shadowy windswept autumnal emptiness we knew to be daylight Forest Lawn Cemetery, a staple of Buffalo-area jokes.

  so on deeper into the city as if drawn into a vortex until Main Street itself began to alter, wider than we recalled, windier and more riddled with potholes and litter. Landmarks were out of sequence or missing altogether like Luigi's Pizzeria at Del Mar, where was it? Iike the Royale Theater at Perry, where was it? Years later Doug Siefried, by that time a recovered alcoholic, missing a lung, but damned grateful to be alive, would recall with a the beerblurred signs of cross streets that night he'd have sworn he'd never glimpsed before, such names as Anthrix, Straknel, Bugel. He would wonder it had been a foretaste of the d. t. s. And sweet freckle-faced Ginger McCord in her maroon cheerleader's jumper and long-sleeved white blouse beside him, not too close to him and not too far from him, humming along with WWBNAM turned up deafening-high. Ken Fischer would recall his and mounting worry that three quick cans of beer were more than he handle and he'd somehow gotten lost, and with his girl Verrie in one of her semihysterical moods all evening. Art Lutz and Roger Zwaart in their separate cars had become uneasily aware, crossing Utica, where there'd been an accident, squad cars, an ambulance, red flares and broken glass a powerful smell of gasoline, that the cityscape had somehow changed, there were odd surges of traffic, vehicles running red lights, as if the faceless drivers of these cars, vans and motorcycles (some of whom appeared to be darkskinned) were mockingly aware of us, suburban kids venturing downtown Buffalo on a Friday night. We swallowed hard recalling parents' repeated warnings to which we'd never listened Don't ever go downtown by yourselves do you promise? Don't ever drink and drive do you promise? realizing for the first time that perhaps these warnings had been heartfelt and serious and not the mere exertion of petty parent"Vtyrannical power we'd always believed them to be. But we persevered. Past Bryant. Past North. A

  ' caravan of only three cars (despite Suzi Zeigler's protests, Roger Zwaart had decided to turn back) but soon we lost track of one another. It was a gusty October night. The sour chemical odors of downriver factories stung our nostrils. Dougie Siefried and Ginger McCord in Dougie's $750

  Ford V8, Ken Fischer and Verrie Myers in Ken's almost-new Chevy Lancelot, Art Lutz and Mary Louise Schultz in the sexy Dodge Castille. We

  * ourselves on the nearly deserted expressway passing warehouses, a railroad yard, unfamiliar spaces. At last, the massive weather-stained wall of the Buffalo House of Detention which we might not have recognized except for coils of razor wire atop the wall glinting like malevolent teeth.

  Dougie was sober now, or almost. He shivered. "Christ! That place looks a whatd'you-call-it--mausoleum. For dead people." Ginger said breathlessly, biting at a thumbnail, "Is that it? I didn't remember it so--" But no word came to her. In Ken's car, as they approached the prison, Verrie stared horror, it was a mound of rocks. A ruin. But she hurried to flash the car's headlights in her secret code. Ken laughed. Verrie said hotly, "What is so funny?" Ken said, "For Chrissake, honey. He doesn't see you. He never did.

  There's nobody there." Verrie drew in her breath sharply. She shrank away from her devoted boyfriend as if he'd slapped her and would recall, later, when at last they lay together unclothe and loving in a hotel room twenty miles from their present location, that in fact Ken had slapped her or in any case shoved her away with his elbow. "I hate you," she whispered. Art Lutz was having trouble keeping his brother's car in its lane. Not just the wind from Lake Erie but a perverse willfulness in the car's engine and steering column kept tugging at his arms as if his older brother's spirit, prankish, teasing, slightly bullying, inhabited the car. Hey wamie, cut out. That isn't funny. Or maybe--the strange thought flashed through Art's mind--Jamie had died, he'd been killed that very day, only a few hours ago perhaps, in what would eventually be acknowledged as a "friendly fire incident," and the feisty Dodge was sensing its true master had departed. (In fact, this would turn out to be true. Jamie Lutz, twenty-two, who'd bitterly disappointed his father by dropping out of U-B and joining the army, was killed in Asia at approximately halftime of the WHS-West Seneca game that evening in a game that, in its essence if not in its particulars, been played five years before by Jamie himself as a gifted but erratic running back the crowd had adored. But Art would never dare tell anyone of his chilling premonition, which he hadn'
t taken at all seriously at the time and had almost immediately forgotten. ) Driving Jamie's car, resisting the steering wheel's stubborn drift to the left, Art glanced sidelong at Mary Louise Schultz. This was the first time they'd been alone together. What wild good luck, Mary Louise had agreed to ride with him to Sandi Scott's party, it had been her idea to follow Ken and the others into Buffalo, to drive by the prison. Probably she'd assumed that another couple would ride with them but that hadn't been Art's plan. All the guys had their plans for tonight, reasoning, as Bo Bozer said crudely, if they'd beaten West Seneca's ass they deserved some ass of their own and privacy was essential. Six-packs of beer, foilwrapped Troians in their back pockets. (Dwayne Hewson, captain of team, who'd been hinting for weeks how far he'd gone with Groves already, said with an evil grin, "Tonight's the night!

  or never. ").

  It wouldn't quite work out that way. Somehow, it never did.

  Dougie Siefried meekly exited the expressway at gloomy McIntyre headed back to Willowsville, stone-cold sober, Ginger McCord, sniffing and blowing her nose, fussed with the radio dial until she located, crackling with static, Made in USA's