All afternoon they sit or lie inside the bunker, still separate, with occasional remarks on their immediate situation, the pleasure of not being hungry, the state of Vera’s ankle, the likelihood of being discovered, the chances their friends will show up. Do they want their friends with them? It’s hard to understand the notion of “want.” A gull peers down through the opening over their heads, then takes off with an indifferent cry. A beetle crosses the sandy floor. Saint doesn’t ask Vera what she’s thinking; truly, there is nothing he wants to know. Sometimes she seems to want to touch him—her hand seems to linger on his arm when he helps her to stand. But for the most part she’s oddly passive. She doesn’t complain or criticize, which proffers some relief. His one conscious wish is for time to pass, which will happen without effort on his part. Tomorrow will come, when they have pledged to jump. Nam myoho renge kyo. But Zen doesn’t seem to work in cases like this, or else he’s a lousy practitioner. His mind is locked into images more vivid than anything around him, what she did, what he did. When he thinks of what he did, he still wants to give himself up to an authority, but not to someone like Vera’s father. He wants a master who is pitiless but fair, who views evil like a Zen master and will mete out the kind of justice that restores balance to the world.
Then he thinks of what she did.
After dark has fallen and the park has supposedly closed, Saint returns to the picnic area. Hunger is back, his stomach is cramping. There are no cars in the lot, but he’s cautious now: Around this time yesterday Vera’s father showed up.
Working quickly, he rinses the thermos at the fountain and fills it with water. On the far side of the fountain he finds a decrepit wheelchair with a note taped to the seat: Hail Mary Mother of God. The writing is large and painstaking, like third-grade cursive. Shit, he says to himself. He drags a garbage can over to the light by the restrooms. It offers up only a picked-at bunch of grapes and a bag of Fritos, but in the next can there’s a half-full tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken, including an apparently untouched thigh and an almost full container of red beans and rice. His stomach growls. Plasticware is easy to find. He’s washing the forks in the men’s room sink when a car drives into the parking lot. He peeks out of the restroom door. Two women emerge, one of them seemingly dressed for a party. They look disheveled, maybe drunk, and offer no threat. This is his first thought. Then, as if in a dream, he sees—although it can’t be!—Kay and crazy CJ, in the dress Saint remembers him wearing—when? last night? It seems like years ago.
—
Our midnight encounter occurred long ago, but in memory it’s crystal clear: Saint in his dirty, smelly T-shirt, CJ half-zipped into sequins, and me in my Bermuda shorts looking almost respectable. The light over the pay phone shone on our three-way embrace and on Saint’s beautiful dirty face, his hurt-looking eyes. We were back in Lourdes, Chicago distant and out of mind. Saint was alive, and I was shaking with relief and love for him. CJ too, it seemed.
We wept, laughed, tried to speak. There was so much to say and find out. I held one of Saint’s hands, CJ the other. CJ spoke first. “You look like a bum, man.”
“And you look like a hooker,” I said to CJ with a scowl, then to Saint, “We were afraid you guys left town. I thought we’d never see you again!” He could hardly look at us, as if we were a source of too-bright light. I couldn’t let go of him. I went on about our worries for him and Vera, waiting for information.
“It occurred to us,” CJ said, a bit stiffly, “that you might have done the deed on your own. Without us.”
“I kind of thought you eloped, but that’s just me!” I said. “Hey, is Vera okay? And Garth, where’s Garth? We talked to your mom on the phone. She’s really upset.”
Saint kept hugging us but answered no questions. When, after some minutes, we let go and stepped back, I saw that his face was blank, as it often was, but his jaw was trembling.
28
Last Supper
When night falls on Lourdes, Michigan, and someone’s teenager is not where he said he’d be, after Hamburger Heaven, which closes at eleven P.M., the first place to check is the busy Burger Boy. Two grease-stained locals are cleaning up when Officer DeVito walks in, out of uniform but known and formidable. Cops up here are not called pigs. The employee with the mop knows Garth from Cub Scouts. He knows Vera too. (DeVito scans for sexual innuendo, finds none.) “Not either one of them came by here,” says the mop boy, shaking the mop and his head at the same time. “Hey, good luck, sir, Officer, sir. Mr. D.”
There are a couple of bars with two A.M. licenses, Granma’s and the Dew Drop Inn, but the high school kids hate Granma (a middle-aged man named Lenny, who wears a ponytail), and the husband and wife who own the Dew Drop have children in junior high and won’t let minors in the door. They and he concur as to the sleazebags some of these kids are (for example, the fifteen-year-old moron who made his case for lowering the drinking age by pissing on the floor). So his best guess means more stumbling through the woods. And Deedra’s waiting, and she gets mouthy when he cancels, and anyway, how long can it take for him to satisfy her?
But of course it takes longer than he figured, and when he finally gets back to the park, the goddamn scooter’s gone, and why search, with the kids probably home by now? He calls the house; the phone rings on. Which signifies nothing. Their phone answering is erratic, and by now Yvette is well beyond picking up.
The question, then, is whether to call for backup, but the thought of what his partner, Brod, may light upon (a teen porno flick starring his daughter?) makes him reluctant to do anything till he’s sure of the need. He races home like a maniac. Then Fuck-shit, he says to himself, running down to the basement, then up to the second floor, throwing open doors onto not one but two empty bedrooms. Passing Yvette’s door he spits in disgust. Her kids could be in the hospital and Sleeping Ugly’s snoring away.
But he doesn’t really think they’re in the hospital; he thinks they’re out disrespecting him. At some pot party, when they know what he’s paid to do. Enraged, he calls Brodkey but gets no answer. He calls Jane in the upstairs room of the firehouse that serves as the local police station, and howdy doody, she’s there. Good Jane. But Brod doesn’t answer her either. He can see the fucker parked on the dark side of some residential street too dead asleep to hear the beeper, and sleep is what he needs too if he’s going to do any kind of job tomorrow. No big deal, he says to Jane, who is a fine lady. Thanks, babe.
Before turning in, though, he walks downstairs. Detective work begins at home. In Garth’s desk drawer he finds, not surprisingly, a matchbox filled with marijuana (a quarter ounce) and a vial marked TETRACYCLINE 250 MG containing seven fat black capsules that look like horse pills but aren’t.
Feeling a twinge of annoyance at his son’s nonchalant selection of a hiding place (does he want to get caught?), he climbs the stairs to Vera’s room. If Garth’s illicit possessions could earn him a felony indictment, only God knows what his wild daughter might have. He rifles through underwear, shirts, sweaters. He pulls sheets from the bed. He ransacks. Between her box spring and mattress is a book of Victorian pornography, but it isn’t that steamy.
Shit, there’s no way he can sleep now. With a muscle twinge of long-thwarted rage, and needing a helpmeet, as the Bible says, he enters his wife’s bedroom for the first time in six months and shakes her awake.
—
But even if Officer DeVito had found the Pledge folded inside the pocket of Vera’s winter coat and followed its lead directly to the park, he wouldn’t have known about her little stone refuge. And even with many more hours than the twenty-four that ensued, he wouldn’t have known the bar that was hosting the four compadres’ reunion. Sixteen miles north of Lourdes, so new it wasn’t even in the phone book, on the corner of a Vincentian seminary that had become a prep school and then the Academy of Cosmetology, was the one place local underage insomniacs could buy alcohol and be left alone. As far as Mr. D knew, like most of the adult residents of Lourdes, you
went there to learn how to cut and set women’s hair or get a discount dye job from an advanced student, but in August of 1968 it was two years since the last hair dryer had been carted away. As for its ecclesiastical past, all that remained besides the Friday fish special was the name, Seminary, in white on the green awning. That and a photograph over the cash register, a yellowing aerial view of the Regional Seminary of St. Vincent de Paul bedotted by robed seminarians now dead, frozen in midstroll. In its current incarnation (by two brothers from Detroit), the Seminary Tavern and Grill offered greasy fried fish and an inexpensive, locally brewed Jackalope Light at any hour of the day or night to whoever had money to pay.
Now it’s after midnight, a Thursday, dawn will come in five hours and the Seminary cook has gone home. Besides booze, the fare is reduced to the simmering bottoms of two tubs—Manhattan chowder or “Diehard” blow-your-brains-out chili—so the bartender informs the newly arrived party of four and points to a chalkboard behind the bar. The kids stumble, totter, and lurch to the restrooms, then emerge, all but one of them, and seat themselves at the booth on the end, farthest from the handful of other patrons. “Lookin’ good,” the bartender says under his breath. He just got out of high school. This is a decent job. He can take it till he gets drafted.
It’s CJ who has stayed in the men’s room, and he’s taking the time he needs. After thirty hours in his mother’s dress, some of the sequins are dangling, but he’s zipped at least, hands and feet washed, makeup freshened. He plans to be cool in the face of what he’ll hear from his friends (ex-friends?), because he thinks he knows what’s coming: The happy boy and girl are running off to Disneyland or Florida or Buenos Aires (fuck the Pledge!). Predictable, if sad. Boring. And maybe Vera’s—alas—in the family way? Steady in his high heels, he swings out into the rank-smelling barroom. Why the fuck did they come back?
Involuntarily (he can’t help it), he scans himself in the bar mirror, noting the extra inches the shoes add to his height. He bats his eyes at the stud bartender (can’t help that, either) while the compadres watch from their booth. The bartender makes a remark that’s probably about him, probably defamatory in the crass local style. A listener snorts, meaning I see your point. Two women on adjacent stools regard him with smiles like he’s a good Halloween show. He blows them kisses like a beauty pageant contestant might, adjusts with a black-gloved hand the scoop of his neckline, feels, without looking, his sequins glitter. He’s Miss America (albeit moist and malodorous). Adrenaline has flushed from his brain the dregs of rumination. Oh the boy needs his Librium.
His pals call to him, Kay clucking and shaking her head. Is he sick or something? Time’s a-passing. But he isn’t ready for time to pass. He sits down beside dear Kay and across from Saint and Vera and says the first thing that comes into his head. He wants to write a book about Adolf Hitler. A novel, actually. He wants their advice.
The level of attention isn’t stellar, but he presses on. It will be a historical novel like Napoleon and Josephine, and since Hitler was queer, his book will be called Adolf and Ernst. Ernst Roehm and Adolf Hitler not only started the Nazis, Hitler let Ernst call him Adolf, not Mein Führer, and gave him the storm troopers to lord it over. “And right after the party took power, guess what?” he asks. “Hitler arrested him and had him shot. For treason. But I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, could there have been another reason?”
“CJ,” says Vera, “what is your problem?”
“CJ,” says Kay, “please try to calm down!”
“We have to tell them,” says Vera to Saint, who shrugs.
But CJ is boiling over with Hitler lore. “There’s a dispute here,” he continues. “Some folks think Hitler’s buddy Hermann Goering convinced him his lover was a traitor, but elsewhere you’ll find that Ernst was threatening to tell the world Adolf was queer. He called Adolf du, the only guy allowed to get so personal. In my humble opinion, though, Adolf killed him out of jealousy. There was Rudolf Hess in their club, another queer Nazi. Isn’t it amazing how many Nazis went that way?” CJ raises an eyebrow at Saint’s blank face, then he’s on to Rudolf Hess, who had called Hitler a “profoundly sexually attractive animal.” And Goering was supposed to be a transvestite! God, his mind is going gangbusters. He eyes the other three, silent in their chairs. “Oh dear. Am I talking too much?”
Before anyone can reply, the bartender passes by the booth, a guy who went to Lourdes, whose name is right on the tip of CJ’s tongue. Jock-type head, wider at the jaw than the forehead, short blond jock hair. Cartoon good-looking. One of those Aryan assholes who, in the Nazi days, would have dared his Deutsch schoolmates to kick the Jew-boy. (Otto? Helmut?) CJ waves. What he really wants—it comes to him now—is to be lusted after by other people, male and female alike. As much as his fucked sexual preference, he hates the inequity in personal gifting that grants one human being charisma while others receive only the infinite capacity for longing. On the table in front of him, the red candle lamp is out, out, out, brief candle. He looks through his beaded bag for matches, finds none. Feels over his shoulder someone’s eyes on him, but when he turns, everyone’s minding their business, including Helmut, who is ignoring him, or is that more paranoia? How he would like to stop talking. Be the strong, silent type.
He shuts his mouth—he can do that—and tries to attend to his friends’ concern, whatever it might be. If an abortion is needed, he can help with money, he thinks, picturing skinny Vera with child, like a snake that swallowed a basketball. But she declared once that if she was stupid enough to get pregnant she would have the kid, and Saint would concur. CJ suspects the forthcoming talk to center (alas) on rescinding the Pledge and taking (egad) responsibility for your screwups. The one extra puzzle piece is Garth’s disappearance. But Garth has vanished before.
Then abracadabra, voilà, straight from der Hitler jugend, here’s young Helmut standing before them, so clean-cut his cheeks shine. “What can I get you folks?”
In theatrical slow motion, CJ peels a glove down the length of his arm and picks up the unlit candle lamp. “Mein herr, old chap, would you mind terribly?”
His friends are obviously embarrassed, but so? Helmut’s blond fingers snap a match. CJ nods approval. “And could you wipe down the table? It’s a mite, you know, schmutzig.”
Out comes the Handi Wipe. The table gets a rudimentary rub.
“Now, how about four brews, my man. Brewskies, as vee say in Varsaw!” CJ taps his high heels against the floor as Helmut heads for the bar, then says louder than he has to, “Never trust a pretty face. Not even yours, Mr. Saint.”
Saint suddenly—surprisingly—looks at him. Those blue eyes, long pale lashes. Aryan lashes, not that Nazis liked Catholics much more than Jews. CJ remembers with a surge of grief what he thought was the dawn of love for him and Saint, dawn in the dawn, of forever love in the Eden behind his house—he believed and dreamed for a day or two—a dream, he understands now, that Saint didn’t share and never would. To Saint he says, “You look like a Greek fucking god, but you haven’t a clue.” Then, as the beers approach, “Now, if maybe you focused on internal beauty? Like our Kay here?” Kay seems less than pleased with her representation; he elaborates. “That’s why we all love her.” He pulls a ten-dollar bill from his bag and hands it to the bartender. “Keep it, babe.”
The door opens up front. Enter a man his father’s age in a pink and green palm tree tourist shirt: his father minus fifty IQ points. He has a kid in tow, age three or four, maybe, and the kid’s got one of those wooden paddles with the ball attached by a rubber string. It’s a cheap toy and hard for most people to get the hang of, and the kid basically is chewing on it. And here is what wrings his heart. Dad, good Dad, just takes it out of his mouth, lifts him onto a stool, and hands it back. No scolding, no look of annoyance. The boy twirls on his stool, then stops, facing the row of booths, and points the paddle at CJ.
“Daddy, is that a girl?”
A laugh spurts among the four or five people who over
hear. One of the women, both of whom have stiff, curled, beauty parlor hair, sends CJ a look of sympathy. He feels his ears flush. Then out of nowhere it comes to him, the bartender’s name: Isaac Johansson. Swim team. Isaac’s younger brother was Jake, for Jacob probably, another O.T. name. On the precipice of laughter, CJ refuses to fall. Neither looks Jewish. “Hey there, Isaac,” he calls out, “are you named for the Old Testament Isaac? The kid whose father would have done him in? Or are you Isaac as in Ike Eisenhower?”
“That’s Dwight Eisenhower.”
The bartender’s hand has curled into a fist. In a minute he’s going to punch CJ. Who is nodding vigorously. “You’re absolutely right, Isaac. I was wrong and you were right. How does it feel to be extremely intelligent?”
“Shut up, CJ,” says Vera.
“Don’t make trouble,” says Kay.
Even Saint looks like he might say something. CJ curves his mouth in a goofball smile. “Liebchen,” he whispers, “don’t walk away.”
Isaac retreats without hitting him. CJ doesn’t know whether to feel triumphant or bad. He doesn’t feel triumphant. His feet hurt in his mother’s shoes. “Is anybody hungry?” he says to the booth in general. “Have I done something wrong?”
When the bartender returns, CJ orders four bowls of chili. Kay apologizes—our friend is high, he’s kind of nutsy, we’re really sorry. Vera and Saint concur. The bartender plants himself next to CJ’s ear.
“I don’t care if you come in like a queer Barbie doll, but one more shit-eating word and I’ll kick your fag ass down the block. Is that clear enough?” He lingers half a second while the words implant, then turns on his heel.
—
4EVER was done for, it seemed, a shooting star that had streaked across the sky of our lives. CJ was locked into his avoidance game, with Vera and Saint trying and failing to get a word in. If nothing else, CJ’s performance had welded them more tightly together. They had walked into the bar hip to hip, arm in arm, and now it looked like they had gone beyond being lovers, like they were married to each other; I wondered if this was the news they wanted to impart. Our being here with them seemed almost shameful to me, trying to save these people who didn’t need saving—who sat in a sexual synchronicity I could feel without ever having experienced it. I wanted to run out of the place or else, wickedly, force them to honor the pact they seemed to have outgrown. When Saint shifted in his chair no matter how slightly, Vera did too. And I’d thought the story of our Chicago adventure would illuminate the world for them. I’d wanted to offer it to them like fire to the Neanderthals, when here they were together, warm as toast. When I could imagine myself no lower in anyone’s estimation, I put my hand over CJ’s mouth.
Once, in Lourdes Page 27