“What about Köchel 527?”
“Absolutely.”
She didn’t even bother to change her expression. “Don’t you ever quit? Köchel 527 is Mozart. Don Giovanni. Which I’d think would be a favorite of yours. You play the guitar, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“The fingertips of your left hand. I dated a guitarist. Not for very long. What’s the other book you have there, Mr. Clapton?”
On firm ground at last, I held it up for her to see. Dostoyevsky. The Possessed.
“Which translation?” she asked.
* * *
She caught up with me at the crosswalk. To my astonishment.
“I’m sorry for being such a bitch,” she said. “You really were endearing.”
No girl had ever called me “endearing” before.
“I was a horse’s ass.”
“Am I expected to argue the point?”
“You’re the most beautiful woman who ever stood on this corner.”
“Please. No more pickup lines. Truce?” She held out her hand. “Laura Saunders.”
“Will Cross.” I took her hand and, worried about holding it too long, let it go too quickly. “That wasn’t a line.”
“Beautiful or not, I’m hungry. And thirsty.”
“There’s a pizza place just down the block.” I tried to remember how much cash I had in my pocket.
The two Italian guys behind the counter at Roma Pizza were befuddled. In their universe, no woman who looked like Laura would have anything to do with a male whose hair fell onto his shoulders.
“You seem to win new fans wherever you go,” I said between bites.
“Italian men are hopeless.”
“Like guitarists?”
“Rock musicians aren’t exactly pillars of society. May I have that, if you’re not going to finish it?”
I had intended to eat the rest of my slice, but I passed it over. The request was the first thing that didn’t tally with my image of her playing tennis on a grass court and devastating prep school boys.
“I eat like a horse,” she said, as if reading my mind.
“You said you’re going to Penn State?”
“Schuylkill Campus. I must’ve committed a grievous sin in a previous life. It’s where Penn State dumps third-raters.”
“I go there,” I said.
Her recovery skills were more agile than mine. “Then we can be third-raters together.”
“I asked to go there. So I could keep playing in my band. My mother wanted me to go to Penn, like my father.”
“I was accepted at Penn,” she said. “The scholarship wouldn’t reach, though.”
“You don’t strike me as a scholarship girl. More ‘old money.’”
“You’re not a very good judge of people. You and Caravaggio.”
“Where are you from?”
“Doylestown.”
“Not Main Line?”
“Doylestown. If you want the whole story, my mother’s a schoolteacher and my father sells insurance. They’re divorced. Penn State may not be Penn, but it’s affordable. Unfortunately, the terms of that scholarship condemn me to Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, for the first two years and to the local dormitory. I arrived yesterday and I’m still figuring out the bus schedules. End of saga.”
I knew the dormitory well. It was in a converted Bureau of Mines building across the highway from the miniature campus, which previously had been the county home for the indigent. The girls had no trouble slipping in and out of the dormitory’s first-floor windows after curfew.
“Like to walk back to my apartment for a glass of wine? I could show you some of Pottsville along the way.”
“Would I find the corpses of your former wives behind locked doors?”
“Bartók,” I said. “Bluebeard’s Castle.”
“Well, well! Don Juan’s apprentice isn’t all bluff.”
“Look, I know I’m tripping all over myself. But I don’t want you to walk away yet. I just don’t want you to disappear.”
“You really are endearing. Pop quiz. What’s your favorite novel? Answer right now. Your fate depends on it.”
“Fathers and Sons.”
Her playfulness eased. “That’s a good answer.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Le Grand Meaulnes.”
“Alain-Fournier.”
“Have you read it?”
“No.” I wasn’t going to try bluffing her again.
“It’s about the way love always disappoints those who believe in it most.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I’ve never been in love. I wouldn’t know.” Catching me off guard, she reached across the table and seized my hand. “Are you going to disappoint me?”
* * *
“As long as it’s not sangria,” she said as I approached the refrigerator.
Pivoting toward the cabinet that protected the cereal and bread from all but the most intrepid mice, I pulled out a bottle of Bolla Valpolicella from the stash Frankie kept stocked for me. Not only wasn’t I old enough to buy alcohol in the state store, I wasn’t supposed to be playing in bars all night.
When I turned back toward her with the glasses, Laura was still on her feet, despite the heat and the walk.
“You should get rid of the Dalí print,” she said, accepting the wine. “You’re better than that. Why the Grünewald?”
“I have a Gothic sensibility.”
“I’d say you were Georgian. More Joseph Andrews than Peter Abelard.” She unpinned her hair and shook it out, then took up her wine again and turned on the concert posters. “I’m afraid I don’t really care for your kind of music. Does that disappoint you much?”
“What don’t you like about it?”
“It all sounds the same. And the lyrics are silly.”
“Ever listen to Jefferson Airplane?”
“No.”
“Or Bob Dylan, for that matter?” I revered Bob Dylan.
“I think he’s pretentious and silly.”
I took her glass from her, set it down, and kissed her.
She kissed me back.
* * *
I adored everything about her: her taste, her smell, the fragility that strengthened into wildness and collapsed in elated exhaustion. A first, infatuated coupling often provokes the illusion that no previous sex could ever have been its equal. I already understood that. Yet Laura was different in ways beyond my ken. I lay beside her, with my world upended. The stillness after the blaze of flesh evoked the hyperlucid interval in an LSD trip. All else before that afternoon had been clumsy, childish nonsense.
I opened my mouth to speak, to praise her. She laid her fingers over my lips.
“Don’t say anything.”
But she and I teemed with arrested words. Inevitably, some escaped. She broke the impeccable silence. Clutching me tightly, as if suddenly terrified, she told me, “I never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted you.”
“That wasn’t my first impression.”
She hugged me again, less fiercely. “I had to pretend a little.”
For the first time in my nineteen years, I feared the passage of time. I did not want the afternoon to end. But the world is as it is. Eventually, I had to go to the bathroom.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Just for a minute.”
“As long as you come back.”
As I rose from our damp sheets, I noticed blood.
“I didn’t realize you had your period,” I said.
“I don’t.”
FIVE
I couldn’t see why Matty wanted me to ride along to Philly. Every attempt I made to start a conversation died. We skirted Reading, took the turnpike from Morgantown to King of Prussia, then rattled down the expressway. The boathouses and the art museum popped up across the river. All I got out of Matty was that Alvin Lee was a sloppy guitarist and we were going to Philly to check on a guy he knew. The clouds overhead wouldn’t rain and Matty would
n’t talk. The radio was all Motown and corn syrup.
After we crossed the bridge, Matty turned away from John Wanamaker’s and City Hall. I hadn’t expected that. Despite my taste for playing big-amp blues, I was uncomfortable around spades. A previous, naïve trip to North Philly to hear B.B. King at the Uptown had convinced me that I wasn’t welcome on their turf, while back in Pottsville, the number of blacks had almost reached the vanishing point. As King Coal died, kick-the-helpless politicians shut down the last struggling brothels on Minersville Street to make way for low-income housing, a boulevard to nowhere, and kickbacks my father shunned, sealing his fate.
During Minersville Street’s heyday, Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey had played Pottsville, Packards and Cadillacs lined the curb outside of speakeasies, and everyone knew which local doctors had lucrative sidelines. Now our Negroes worked on garbage trucks and kept out of the way. I knew two by name, from Pottsville High. The angry one got a scholarship, the funny one dropped out. On the other hand, if any white boys were entitled to play the blues, it was the coalcracker kids from the patches north of the mountain, whose yonko families had been slaves to the Reading Company and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation. I was along for the ride, just as I was with Matty that cloudy day.
Columbia Avenue still had a smattering of bars and jazz clubs after the Philly riots, but the street looked like an old rummy with gaps in his teeth. The uproar hadn’t been as fierce as in Detroit or Washington, but clusters of buildings had burned and shops wore plywood windows. Black Power graffiti covered blistered posters. Two white guys in a clanking Buick Skylark attracted attention.
Matty knew less about that part of Philly than I did. It soon showed. We got squirreled around south of Columbia and west of Broad.
“We’re looking for North Bouvier Street. The 1500 block,” he told me.
We might as well have been in Africa, with the tribal elders dolled up for church and all the young warriors hungry for a fight.
Matty got us to our destination, though. We parked and faced the mockery of sullen kids. Half my size, they spooked me. None of it fazed Matty.
He pressed the doorbell until convinced it didn’t work, then he knocked. A lean kid down on the sidewalk asked, “You cops? You come to bust Crip Carley?”
Matty knocked again, then looked down from the stoop at the kid. To my surprise, the kid retreated instantly.
The door opened. A caricature peered out at us, a heavy woman got up in her Sunday best. Either she wore a wig or her hair had been done by Dow Chemical. She didn’t say a word, but waited for one of us to speak.
“Mrs. Carley? Is Gerald home?”
“You police?”
“No, ma’am. I’m a friend of Gerald’s.”
“He don’t sell no drugs, and he don’t take no drugs, if that’s what you’re after.”
“Yes, ma’am. If he’s in, would you tell him Matthew Tomczik’s here to see him? Please?”
It took the woman a moment to process the request. Then a high stone wall crumbled between us.
“That Sergeant Tomczik? The one Gerald went on writing me about?”
“Is he home?”
She turned and shouted. “Gerald! Gerald, you get out of that bed and come down here! Somebody here to see you.” Judging me as superfluous, she turned back to Matty. “Sergeant, you talk to my boy. You tell him he got to stir himself up. They took his leg, but he still got a head on his shoulders. You tell him that for his mama, all right? And you come on in here now. Sunday dinner isn’t fancy this week, but you’re welcome.”
The row house was the urban-slum version of the company houses back in Schuylkill County. The odor was strange, as if perfumed, but the only other difference was that the woman’s house was scrubbed to perfect cleanliness, a condition rarely encountered north of the mountain. The furniture was equally bright, plush, and cheap-looking, although the picture of Jesus on the living room wall announced a darker Savior.
The footsteps on the stairs sounded like the approach of Long John Silver. When the small young man with the artificial leg had descended far enough to see who had come to call, he spoke the second most versatile word in the English language:
“Shit.”
* * *
They hugged each other, a bear embracing a jockey. It was the most emotion I had seen Matty display.
When they broke apart, Matty’s face became inscrutable again. His Army buddy’s expressions shifted constantly, as if he couldn’t decide which mask fit best.
“Shit,” he said again. “Shit, I can’t believe this, man.” His Afro looked as if it had been groomed with a flyswatter.
“You watch your mouth,” his mother told him. “In this house.”
“It’s all right, Mama. Sarge here done heard worse.”
“Well, you save your nasty language for the street out there. Not in my house.” The woman seemed positively exhilarated by our presence. “You boys sit here and visit. I’m going to do my cooking and you all come when I call.” She waddled off and left me to imagine the story of her life as Matty and his pal felt their way back toward each other.
“You got a gig yet, Doc?” Matty asked.
“Sure, Sarge. Sure. More than one.”
“Don’t call me ‘Sarge.’”
Gerald Carley shielded his eyes, as if from a spotlight. “Man, I can’t believe you’re sitting here. Just sitting right here. Sarge. Sitting right here. Craziest motherfucker I ever known.”
“I thought we could play some music. I’ve got my guitar out in the trunk.”
Alarm pinched Gerald’s face. “What’re you driving?”
“A ’62 Skylark.”
Gerald laughed. It sounded like the “tee-hee-hee” of a comic book character. “That’s all right. Nobody going to fuss with that car. People got pride.”
“Got your sax back?”
“Yeah, I got it, man. And I’m going to pay you back, I’ll make good on it. How’s Nick Toomey, man? He got to be out now, too.”
“He’s dead. I wrote you.”
Gerald shifted his artificial leg. He handled it like an enemy. “Yeah. I didn’t read all the letters. When I first got back. That crazy fucker. Crazy asshole motherfucker.” He shut the back of his right hand over his eye. “Stupid fucking honkie motherfucker.”
“We all liked Nick.”
“How about Everett? What about King Kong?”
“Home. He’s okay.”
Gerald wiped his left eye. “That dumb-ass nigger’s never going to be okay. Born to carry a baseplate. Makes me ashamed to think of him, wish I was Chinese or something. He marry that big brown cow? Used to scare me with that woman’s picture.”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“He’d be dumb enough to do it. But Nick, man. Nick was all right. The worthless motherfucker. He step on a mine or some shit? That asshole?”
“Blood poisoning.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“He picked something up.”
“Shit. What about Mote?”
“Down at Fort Benning. Last I heard.”
“Lifer asshole.” Gerald let down his chosen mask for a moment. His smooth, small face grew earnest. “Man, you still think about that shit all the time? Nam and all?”
“No,” Matty insisted.
“Got a gig yourself, Sarge?”
“Yeah.”
“Serious?”
“Bark here writes songs for us.”
It was the first time I’d been acknowledged since Gerald came downstairs. I rose and reached out my hand. “Will Cross.”
He barely touched my fingers. “‘Will Cross’? Like ‘Will he cross the street?’” He tee-heed and put on an armored smile. “This his first trip to the zoo, Sarge? He wouldn’t have lasted two weeks in Second Platoon.” He shook his head. “Not even two days.”
“You would’ve looked after him, Doc.”
“Not a chance.” He glanced at me. “He’s a born FNG. You just have to look at him. An
d he’d stay a Fucking New Guy till they stuffed him in a body bag and loaded him in the belly of that Freedom Bird. That, or they’d make him some dick officer.”
“Mind if I use the latrine?”
Gerald pointed around the corner. “Not a honey wagon in sight. And paper on the roll.”
Matty rose. From the low chair in which I sat, it seemed his head would scrape the ceiling. The house had not been built to accommodate Polack miners and their broods.
Just before Matty left the room, he turned back to Gerald and said, “He’s not an FNG, Doc. That’s all over.”
I expected Gerald to ignore me in Matty’s absence, but he only waited until he heard a door shut before asking, “That crazy motherfucker kill anybody yet?”
“Matty?”
“Yeah. Him. Sergeant T. Sergeant Shake-and-Bake. Who do you think I mean?”
“No. He hasn’t killed anybody.”
“Well, praise Jesus.”
“He’s a quiet guy. All he wants to do is play music.”
Gerald laughed. Tee-hee. But the sound turned savage and the mirth was not supported by a smile. “He’s the meanest motherfucker ever walked, man. You never seen anybody go to killing like that. He loved killing fucking dinks. And he was good at it. You never seen nothing like it. He loved that shit.” Staring into his lap, Gerald shook his head. “Me, I hated it. I didn’t want no part of whitey’s war, didn’t want to hurt nobody. So I raised my hand to be a pill pusher. And look what it got me. But Sergeant T, man, he ate that shit up like it was Rice fucking Krispies. And he comes back all in one piece, after all that crazy shit he done.” Laughter shrank him. “Driving a Buick.”
“You’re pulling my leg, right?” The instant I spoke, I was sorry for my choice of words.
The aroma of frying seeped in from the kitchen.
Gerald looked at me. I’d never associated brown eyes with such coldness. “Ask him. You ask good old Sergeant T.” He smiled, flashing yellowed teeth. “Ask him about the time he broke the lieutenant’s jaw. You ask him about that.” He snorted. “Honkie motherfuckers couldn’t make up their minds whether to court-martial him or give him a medal.”
A toilet flushed.
“What happened?”
The Hour of the Innocents Page 6