by P. F. Kluge
“Jesus Christ, Doc!”
I lifted his leg out of the ladder. He screamed when I did it. The knee looked terrible, and another shot must have found the inside of his thigh. Blood was soaking through his trousers. I ran out to the bathroom, found a towel, wrapped it tightly around his thigh, securing it with my belt. The towel turned red in no time.
“I thought you were dead, Doc.”
“Wish to hell I was,” he gasped. I could hardly hear him. “I’m sorry. For shooting. Missing. Hitting. All kinds of sorry. Lemme count the ways …”
“That was you I talked to when I called the radio station?”
“‘Master of voices, maker of choices,’ you remember, don’t you? Daddy Toecheese, the all-night black and bluesman, with a voice so dark it leaves a thumbprint on coal. Or Edsel Hickey, with the dawn hog-belly prices.”
“And Eddie Wilson?”
“Long as you don’t ask me to sing. It goes flat, I try to sing.”
“What were you doing at the quonset?”
“I followed you to the prison. After that, I knew where you were headed. I arrived ahead of you. I remembered the studio. And the river. I was gonna take a swim. I parked back in the pines, stripped, and was headed for the river when I saw your car coming.”
“You were at Joann’s?”
“Yes.”
“You could have killed her!”
“Oh hell, no way,” he assured me. I’ll never know whether he was telling the truth or lying to save my opinion of him. “I’da picked up the tapes and run.”
“You rousted Eddie’s folks?”
“Not me. That was the competition. America’s sweet-hearts.”
“Who?”
“In the pool.” He was turning pale and tremulous. The towel wasn’t working.
“Doc … you blew them away. Why?”
“This morning, I stopped by. I knew Mannheim’s game the minute I met him. I knew we were both after the same thing. I wanted to make a deal. Him, you, and me. Everybody would get a cut. But he treated me like …”
I knew how Mannheim treated Doc. Like he was smalltime and out-of-date, not worth talking to, a radio character in a cheap toupee and a loud suit.
“He had it in the bag, he said. He laughed at me. Who needed me?”
He was crying now, not just because his leg was hurting. All the indignities and slights, the near-misses and might-have-beens piled in on him. So he returned, driving the car that was as dated as he was: a blast from the past.
“Who needed me?” he sobbed.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” I said.
“No,” Doc said. “Ambulance means doctors. And cops. And prison. I want it here.”
“You need help.”
“Yeah. What would you say … if I asked you to leave?”
“Leave you here? Like this?”
“I brought you into this. Now I’m telling you to pull out.”
“You’ll die!”
“Either way, I die. It’s a no-win situation. This is how I want to end it.”
He wouldn’t have long, without help. Any minute, he’d lose consciousness.
“Get out, Wordman. It’s over!” And then, begging me, “Please!”
I’ll never know if what I did was right. It’ll haunt me through the years, the picture of Doc bleeding on the floor and me backing away, shaken and crying. I tell myself I’d have done anything for Doc. And that’s just it: I did what he asked.
“Doc …” I stood over him. He looked up, but I’ll bet he didn’t see more than a shadow. “Why’d you bring me in?”
“You were the only one I trusted … and the only one who trusted me … Wordman.”
I left, a step at a time, each step turning life to death, doubt into finality, present into past, a step at a time, dividing yet connecting us forever. The last I saw of Doc, he was reaching for his thigh, to loosen the belt and let his life flow out.
A second time, I mourned him. At fifteen miles per hour, driving out of The Tides, waving pedestrians across, slowing for golf carts, I mourned him. Down corridors of hibiscus, past golf course and nursery, out onto the highway, my speed increasing, the distance between us widening, I mourned him more.
That night, when I finally got finished talking to the police, I played the tapes.
Epilogue
She came down the steps at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, saw me waiting at the newsstand, ran toward me.
“Is it over?”
“The bad part is,” I said. “I guess.”
At a Greek restaurant in the West Forties, I brought out my machine. And the tape.
“Four of them were blank. Not a sound on them.”
“That’ll break Wendell’s heart.”
“He gets out next month. I plan to be there. Will you join me?”
“Yes.”
“Listen closely now.”
She held my hand. I felt it tighten when we heard Eddie’s voice, half speaking, half singing, unaccompanied.
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from under the grass I love
If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles
You will hardly know who I am …
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
“It’s the ending from ‘Song of Myself,’” I said. “In Leaves of Grass.”
“It sounds,” she said, “like Eddie was saying good-bye.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s all there was? A scrap of poetry?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m grateful for that.”
She didn’t say a word.
“I mean it, Joann. I’m glad you left the poem.”
She was something! She still didn’t react.
“Four reels of blank tape and twenty seconds of poetry on the fifth. Come on, Joann! Why’d he give you all that tape if so little was on it?”
Now she smiled. I suspect she was grateful I’d figured it out. I don’t think she would ever have volunteered it, but she was glad I knew.
“You lied to me about never listening,” I said. “I guess you had a reason.”
She nodded, reaching for my hand.
“Sure I listened. Right after he died. I wanted to know why Eddie left. I figured he wanted me to know.”
“And?”
“It hadn’t worked at Lakehurst. You want me to tell you all the different ways it didn’t work?”
“No.”
“I kept the tapes. But when ‘Far-Away Woman’ came back and it looked like people would want the tapes—would want anything—I had to ask myself what Eddie would want. We had an acid test, you know. Whether we could close our eyes and hear it playing at Vince’s Boardwalk Bar.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Eddie wouldn’t have wanted people picking over bits and pieces, dubbing in new arrangements, violins and voices and all. And he wasn’t into being a curiosity. ‘Top Forty’s where it’s at,’ he used to say. ‘All the rest is stamp collecting.’”
We laughed at that, hearing Eddie say it, remembering his voice and picturing the expression on his face. It felt fine, remembering him that way.
“The night before you came I erased everything but the poem. That I was saving for us.”
“Thanks.”
“And … what now, Wordman?”
“Get on with the music.”
The Garden was packed. Thousands of kids.
“I feel old,” she said.
“No you don’t.”
We waited past Bobby Rydell and Jay and the Americans, till Sally Amato and the Original Parkway Cruisers came on.
“They sound good,” Joann said. “Never better.”
“Want to say hello backstage?”
“No. This is close enough.”
Near the end of the set they darkened the houselights. We all lit a candle for Eddie Wilson.
Joann Carlino and I cruised out of the Holland Tunnel and drove once more through that weird, fallen la
ndscape which Eddie had loved. The Pulaski Skyway carried us over the refineries and marshes he celebrated. The turnpike and then the parkway led us south along the tawdry, half-romantic shoreline where his voice still reached the corners of a hundred common bars. Somewhere after the Raritan Bridge at Perth Amboy, we passed the place he died. I reached a hand out to Joann and she took mine, but it was Eddie we loved. I loved him that night. I loved him for his intervention in my life, then and now, for the way the memory of him would encourage and reproach me always. I loved him for the music he wove into my time on earth. I loved him for his dream, too, his Leaves of Grass.
It was past one when we reached Toms River.
She never turned on the light in the living room.
“The couch?” I asked.
“Upstairs.” She reached for my hand and led me up the steps.
“Wordman?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been wanting this a long time?”
“Seems like a lifetime.”
Also by P.F. Kluge
Gone Tomorrow
978-1-59020-090-2
“The novel is suffused with Kluge’s obvious affection for books, and has some cleverly aphoristic things to say about the joys of teaching, the pitfalls of academic infighting and the tragedy of artistic expectations left unfulfilled. …[Kluge] combines elements of Citizen Kane and Goodbye, Mr. Chips for a satisfying resolution.”
—Publishers Weekly
Also Available from The Overlook Press
The Dog of the South
978-1-58567-931-7
True Grit
978-1-58567-938-6
“Charles Portis is the greatest writer you’ve never head of.” —The Boston Herald