by Annie Proulx
“OK, then, I’m gonna run. See you in about an hour.”
At midnight she was still waiting, sitting on a folding chair and talking to people about the music and the Bartosik Brothers, looking constantly toward the door until she was too tired and walked back to the motel through the snow, eight inches deep now and drifting. Cars and trucks slid and stalled on the greasy streets and she was shaking with cold by the time the sign HOTEL POLONIA MOTEL came in sight. Under the streetlight, a few hundred feet from the Polonia, something small stuck out of the snow. She picked it up, a pack of cards with a rubber band around it and a folded paper. She pulled the paper loose, it unfolded into two ten-dollar bills. The pack of cards showed whores in bizarre display postures.
It was after two when he sidled in, hot breath stinking all the way from the door. She’d just got Artie quieted down and her throat ached from the liniment and the singing and the vinaigrette salad dressing on the sliced beets. She was bone-tired. He plunged around, swearing, found the bed and sat heavily on the edge. She moved Florry closer to the wall.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “I’m late. Went to the auditorium and nobody there. Gone home.”
He struggled with his shoes, the snow-wet knots difficult to loosen. “I went to the bar where they were all hanging out. What a scene. Cass was there, drunk, had a fight. This old guy played the bandoneon, ever hear one? Tangos. A couple got up and danced. Jesus, like a couple of kangaroos with glue on their feet. They do this little kick, it’s like a dog scratching. Here. Brought you a present.” She could feel something square and hard, then her fingers felt the buttons. She sat up and put on the light, dimmed with a towel wound around the shade. He was a mess, hair wet with melting snow, face flushed, red-eyed, shirt half unbuttoned. He thrust a small green accordion at her.
“Here. You know how to play this. Pretty little accordion for my pretty little wife. Or give it to little Florry, if you want.” His face rippled and he moaned. “Oh, sweetheart.” She stretched her arms out and seized him; maybe she loved him after all. The accordion, caught between them, groaned.
“Your white powdered face …”
After he got rid of the accordions he wasn’t in any mood to go back to the lousy motel and listen to kids whining and coughing and throwing up. He was chilled, he was excited, the check felt hot inside his breast pocket. He filled up the car with gas at an all-night station, dumped in a can of antifreeze so frost wouldn’t form in the line. He thought suddenly of the dead heater, wondered if it was the heater fan fuse; why hadn’t he thought of that before? It was the fuse. Should have been the first thing he checked.
Cruising down the icy street, the present on the seat beside him, the beautiful hot air blowing on his feet, he saw the red neon, Hi-Low Club, and the red banner flapping over the door, NA ZDROWIE POLKA FANS. He pulled into the parking lot, jammed full—Christ, it was cold—and made his way into the noisy bar, hit by a blast of hot accordion music—Cass Bartosik at the mike, drunk and brilliant—got a whiskey and beer chaser and made his way to the long, narrow counter along the far wall, the only place he saw an empty barstool. Half the people in the place had accordions; there was music or at least noise coming from all over, “Autumn Leaves” mixed up with “What’s New, Pussycat?” and polkas.
He sat next to a guy in a grey sweater, an aging man with a big nose and a black hat listening to Bartosik play his rock version of “Okie from Muskogee.”
“I despise this music,” said Grey Sweater.
“I despise it too. Bartosik’s a pain in the ass. He should go back to his typewriter.”
“You know this man?” The sweater guy had an accent he couldn’t place, some kind of Latino thing. An odor of tuna can lids and cat’s breath came from him.
“Yeah. I just come from the Polka Playoffs—this guy threw up onstage. They laughed him out of the place.”
“So, you are a player of the accordion?”
“Yeah. You?”
“No.” He gestured at the square case under his feet. “Bandoneon. The finest of the free-reed instruments. Sonorous, tragic, furious and always—always—sensual. I do not play this pop music, these polkas—only I play tango, music of a tragic character, associated with the torture of love, the assassination of the heart, with suffering.”
“Yeah?” said Joey. “Where you from?”
“Buenos Aires. Argentina. But I left a few years ago because I thought there were some opportunities for me here. There are certain aspects to life in Buenos Aires that are uncomfortable.”
“Yeah?” said Joey. “How about a drink?”
“Thank you, sir. You are a man of sensibilities. I played here in many bands, almost never tango, only once or twice. Americans do not understand tango. They do not know the bandoneon. I tell you, I despise America—the food, the women, the music. My mistake is, I let this show in my face. I do certain things. I am arrogant, I admit it, because I am a superior person and come from a superior culture. But here, at first I try, then I become contemptuous and angry—it is my nature—then, because I am hungry for everything, I turn to crime. I steal a steak from a supermarket, I am drunk in public, I piss on the sidewalk, I rant crazily to all who will listen, I shout filthy words in the cinema, I make a disturbance in restaurants. I am vengeful. A man says something to me that I do not like so I plot to ruin him.” The man’s cement-colored face was rigid with disgust.
“You sound like a tough customer,” said Joey.
“I’ll tell you something,” said the man, shaking a partially smoked cigarette from a crumpled pack and lighting it. “A man insulted me recently, a bartender. I waited outside until he went home. I followed him, saw the door where he entered. The next afternoon when he was at the bar, I went to his apartment for my revenge.”
“What’d you do?”
“I destroyed him. I removed all the labels from the cans on his shelf.” He laughed. “He will not know if he opens soup or pears.”
“That’s it?”
“Also I remove the bolts from his toilet seat.”
“I guess I won’t tangle with you. Have another drink.”
“I’ll tell you something. I am going to Japan. In Japan they are mad for the tango. In Japan and Finland. There they understand. In Buenos Aires I was known as the Tiger of the Tango, the Brute of the Bandoneon.”
“No shit. So you’re pretty good?”
“Probably the best bandoneon player in the world, better than Astor Piazzolla, and I tell you my tangos are not so dissonant, not so new wave, as his. Piazzolla, with his little zips like the plastic zipper of a cheap jacket, his plotted silences, the squealing like rubbing two balloons together. That is a serious, unsmiling, hard music; the faces of the dancers frown furiously; and his tempo, the beat is like climbing cement stairs in a skyscraper with fire behind the doors. And there is that quality of a paper comb that sets the sutures of the skull trembling. Those passionate swellings are musical hives. I think of short men in leather-soled shoes, the languid violin drooling, the huffings and puffings, the stertorous gasps, the runs like beads of sour candy on a strip of paper, the illusions of snow and spiderweb and falling trees. The parts like trains backing up. The business of hens. The officiousness of roosters. The dying moans of slaughtered cows. But in my music there is a wildness; ferocity is in my music, in my tangos. There is an animal in me—it is like a frog with sharp claws, jumping about and tearing at me.” He stretched out his hands and showed the deformed thumb.
Joey had had enough of Bartosik’s noise. He stood up and bellowed:
“Attention! Ladies and gentlemen. Attention! We have tonight—what’s your name?”
“Carlos Ortiz.”
“We have with us tonight the famed Argentinian free-reed artist, the Tiger of the Tango, Mr. Bandoneon himself, Carlo Or Tease!” Everyone clapped; they were fed up with Bartosik. Joey pushed the man in the sweater toward the mike, helping him unsnap his instrument case, urging him along, go on, go on, let’s hear the tango, alternately sh
outing, sit down, Bartosik, go throw up somewhere.
The man stood in front of the mike, the grey and silver octagonal instrument with its glistening pattern of buttons, one hundred forty-four of them, in his hands. He sat on the chair, flexed his hands.
“Thank you. This is a surprise, of course. I play for you a few tangos, a kind of music, a dance sensual and cruel, that is far from its city of origin, Buenos Aires. I begin with something sad and a little bitter, ‘Lágrimas,’ or, as you say here, ‘Teardrops.’”
They stamped and bought him drinks, recognizing the difficulty of his instrument and the virtuosity of his musicianship. Intoxicated, he played on: “Evil Thoughts,” “Secret Dreaming,” “The Crazy Ones,” “My Fiery Past,” “Rough and Tough,” Osvaldo Pugliesi’s “La yumba,” and even Carlos de Sarli’s extraordinary “To the Great Female Puppet.”
A middle-aged couple got up and began to dance. They knew how to do the tango—the brilliant footwork, the close bodies, the static poses and slow, drawn strokes, the deep bend, the flashing head-turn. They seemed to Ortiz exquisite in their knowledge of the somber, irascible music and he played furiously. (Later that evening, in his hotel room and after the requisite exercises that often follow an evening of tango, the male dancer suffered a heart attack and cursed the tango in his last thought.)
But the audience began to tire of the dramatic, ripped-seam music. Cass Bartosik made a funnel of his clumsy hands and shouted, “lighten up, man. Man, that sound is too heavy.” He advanced on the Tiger and the evening ended with a tussle in front of the mike, the pantings and gruntings of the combatants amplified. The Tiger hissed, “fucking fool, do not damage this bandoneon. They do not make them anymore. Have courtesy for this finest instrument. Polka swine! I’m killing you now.”
Joey left without seeing how it came out.
(In 1972, when Perón returned from exile, the Tiger returned to Argentina. After Perón died he shrugged and stayed, in love with a botanical illustrator and enjoying success with his new tangos. One day he aroused the interest of minor dogsbodies of the military junta with “Mala, Mala Junta,” a tango that slyly referred to bad companions, the downward spiral, the dangers of association with criminal types. He was taken in the night, imprisoned and tortured, his fingers disjointed. He did not play the bandoneon again.)
A present
Florry woke her up before daylight.
“Mama. Mama, I want french fries.”
“Umm?”
“Mama, I want some chocolate milk.”
“Are you hungry then?”
“Yeah.” She felt the child’s brow, damp and warm, but not feverish.
“You must feel a little better?” Tried to think what there was to eat in this stuffy room at four-thirty in the morning. She thought of the vending machines in the corridor, soft drinks and candy, maybe some crackers. She whispered, I’ll be right back with something, climbed over Joey, snoring now with the open-mouth rasp of a sleeping drunk, went to the door with her purse and slipped the chain. She left it ajar. The hallway was a mess of melted snow, wadded paper, street handouts for slow-dance partners showing a photo of a bosomy girl with her mouth forming a suggestive O, ticket stubs, an empty pint bottle, crushed Coca-Cola cans, a sodden blue mitten. The machines hummed and throbbed at the end of the hall. Orange soda and a packet of cheese crackers was the best she could do.
Florry ate ravenously and drank like a machine. She was wide awake, ready for the day, her eyes roaming around the squalid room that they seemed to have been in for so long, her father’s clothes hunched over the back of the chair, the chink of light from the hard white window, the gleam of chrome from Artie’s shopping cart bars, the reflection of a quarter on the side table, and a square green object with a red ribbon bow.
“What’s that?” she asked coyly, pointing.
“What do you think it is? What does it look like?”
“A present.” She put her face down in the blankets, blushing at her temerity in saying the word.
“It is a present. Here, see?” She reached over Joey and picked up the green accordion, put it in Florry’s hands, undid the latches and guided the child’s hands in opening the bellows, pressing the buttons.
“It’s a ’cordion. It’s little. Mama, where are the keys?”
“It doesn’t have keys. This kind has buttons. This is the kind Mama learned on. Here.” She pressed the small fingers through Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
“Is it for me, Mama? Is it a present for me?”
“Yes. For you.”
The sheriff
The sky was overcast, dark with more snow, and Joey drove hard to get as far as he could before it started. The plows had been through but the surface was icy and treacherous. The heater grudged anything and she had to keep scraping curls of ice from the inside of the windshield and the windows with the kitchen spatula Joey kept on the dash.
“Is that it? Is that the town, ‘Morley, six miles’?”
“Where the diner is. Where we had the pie.”
“Where the accordions was stolen. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks the police know exactly where to look for these guys.”
“Joey, you didn’t see any guys.”
“I didn’t have to. I know it was niggers with their goddamn greasy dreadlocks, needing drug money. Who the hell else would steal a couple of accordions?”
They were coming into the margin of the town now, ridges of ice on the blacktop, passing an occasional convenience store, small houses fronted by squares of snow bisected by cement walks, sedans parked in front of one-car garages, unused basketball hoops nailed over the open door, then they were stuck behind a travel trailer pasted with decals of the states visited, Joey driving close enough to make out Florida the Home of Sunshine in red and yellow, with a smiling sun face counterbalancing the scrotum-shaped silhouette of the state pasted in the center of the rear door where plastic curtains swayed in the louvered window.
“What the hell are they doing up here in the middle of winter?” marveled Joey. But when they passed they saw it was an old torn-up trailer without plates, towed by a wrecker.
They passed the diner, half obscured by a moving van, and Joey pulled into a Shell station where a middle-aged black man dressed in midnight blue shirt and pants and cap came toward them wiping his hands on a rag, brown turtle-face glassed over with bifocals the size of saltine crackers, the lower lenses catching light in twin hammocks.
“Fill it up, sir?”
“Yeah. Where’s the police station at?”
“No police in Morley. State police barracks about twenty miles north.”
“What do citizens do then if somebody commits a crime, steals your accordions out of the trunk of your car, for instance, when you’re eating some cold slop at the goddamn diner down the road? Then what do you do?”
“Contact the county sheriff. Five seventy, sir, check your oil?”
“No. Where’s he at?”
“Likely at the sheriff’s office in the town hall. Go past the drive-in, past the McDonald’s, past the school, and you can’t miss it, big white building on the right with a cannon and a tank on the lawn. That what happened to you? Somebody take your accordion at the diner? They say music cures crime.” He was mopping at the smeared windshield with a swab.
“Goddamn right,” cupping the change in his hot palm, passing it to Sonia.
He parked ten feet out from a sign that warned DANGER FALLING ICE, ran up the granite steps two at a time, crusted with ice and blue salt pellets. Sonia leaned over the seat to wrap the blanket from the motel around Artie again and to give Florry a stick of chewing gum, but before she turned around, there was Joey again, jumping into the driver’s seat and starting up with a roar.
“Wasn’t he there?”
“He was there.”
“You didn’t take long.”
“No, I didn’t take long. I took one look at Sheriff Jivemonkey and decided not to tell him my problem. The son-of-a-bitch is as black
as the ace of spades. At least he didn’t throw up—just give me a look. A nigger sheriff. Fuck the whole thing. We’ll get new ones.”
He drove awhile in bitter silence. Florry sang in the back seat, pressing random buttons on the green accordion and piping “oh the nigger sheriff, the nigger sheriff is coming to town.”
“Hey!” said Joey, enraged, and she started to cry. When Sonia turned around she saw Florry had got chewing gum in the accordion bellows and she took the instrument from her.
(A year or two later Joey was mugged by three Chinese youths outside the Polish Club.
“We’re getting out of here,” he said. “We’re moving to Texas. Goodbye, fuckin snow, chinks and niggers.” In the MOVING TO TEXAS yard sale, the green accordion went on the sawhorse table with a Charlie Tuna camera, polystyrene dump trucks and guns, a Bakelite yo-yo with a frayed string, a one-legged Barbie doll, tiny useless hands raised in supplication, a desk lamp in the form of a translucent goose, acrylic rulers, a partial set of pale yellow discolored melamine plates, an atom bomb saltshaker, a waffle iron, a candy box half-filled with thread-jammed buttons, a loop of pop-it beads, three empty flashlights, a sagging box of Polonia Clarions and a stack of old 78s.
They moved first to Koskiusco, Texas, then to Panna Maria, where Joey started a catfish farm, branched out into raising ladybugs for the organic garden market, and in a decade made a modest fortune but showed he wasn’t proud by still shopping at the Snoga store. Over the years, he learned to ride, wore cowboy boots and hat and a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle engraved TEXAS POLKA. Sonia’s hair turned silver white, then fell out completely from the chemo treatments in the final months of her illness with throat cancer in 1985. When Pope John Paul II arrived in San Antonio in 1987, Joey and his second wife were part of the special audience for Panna Marians, and Artie chose that time to run away to Los Angeles. He found a temporary job as houseboy for three klezmer band musicians playing supporting roles in the zany hit movie The Cheapskate, then emigrated to Australia and worked for a while on an outback cattle station.)