Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  Chapter 2: Blaise and Jude and Maria

  From Rosalind’s Journal

  One must take the story back to the 1980's in order to understand why Blaise ended up in prison twice, why he had encountered such loneliness and tragedy on those acres the city was supposed to build to but did not, and why now, out of jail and apparently clean and sober, so much depends on him straightening up and not succumbing to certain old temptations.

  He grew up normally enough, and in fact he had a friend in Jude who was different enough from him to be good for him.

  Jude had always been the voice of caution, but in the end, out of loyalty, he had done things more rash than Blaise, and Blaise had always been the one who should have listened but did not, and yet his instincts and his luck have been more effectual than reason; and now both are here, at Blaise's tilting farmhouse, both of them out of middle age and free and assessing the mess of their lives and the end of the world in the early 21st century.

  Blaise and Jude both went to the local "I don't know what to do with my life" commuter college, albeit Jude only for his sophomore year, one year after he had partied and malaised his way into a suspension from a heard-of university operated under the presumed blessing of St. Ignatius and located somewhere between Oklahoma and "back East" (all signs point to St Louis).

  They played football together, in grade school and high school, where the student body was so small most kids had to play both sides of the ball, and a skinny kid like Jude might find himself having to play guard or tackle when the fat kid got sidelined. But he threw himself into it with gusto, and he liked it when he'd manage to throw a good block for Blaise, because unlike most of the kids on the team Blaise was a genuine specimen, an unknowing Little Abner, big and strong though not the least bit prideful or conscious of it - he just liked running. And Jude liked him and developed a fierce loyalty for Blaise precisely because Blaise was so unwitting and humble, so happy just to do what he could do through the grace of God and not lord it over everyone.

  And so after they had graduated from highschool both fell more or less amenably together in the sub-suburbs after fate had cast most of the rest of their friends to far-flung corners of the country to continue the juvenile enterprise of studying at the knees of adulation-craving professors and trying on personalities one check from home at a time. Black clothes today, Marxism tomorrow, maybe Sartre next week if anyone remembered Sartre, or Buber or Camus, and in general suckling at the teat of whatever "ism" offered the best chance of seeming attractive to members of the opposite sex.

  Unlike many denizens of the suburbs, Jude managed to escape most of the soft vices of a semi-pampered life and still had the capacity to have some grace and charity in him, and this was all due to his eyes, which were cast by God and nature to open one notch wider than a normal person's and thus enabled to soak in the remnants of the awe and aura and mystery of the world, to see God or something like God or more accurately the space where God had been around even mundane things, the self-consciousness amidst the drinks and tits and nonsense that he himself was a mystery, made for love and wanting to be loved, and that the world did indeed have one more secret than hedonism and consumption alone could attest.

  That Jude should have slacked off his first year at the expensive college and ended up doing a probationary year at the community college within the pull of the gravity and ensuing tragedy of the hapless Blaise is therefore not surprising. In his youth Jude's father had had the good fortune to have been made violently nauseous by almost any illicit substance (except weed), and hence he got clean and mostly sober and flew straight although his mind was spacious enough to hold atmans, brahmans, buddhas, the mutterings of Carl Sagan, and Catholic orthodoxy all in one lump. He met his wife at the local Catholic church. She was pious but a flake. She helped unwed mothers keep their pregnancies but would go on the occasional wild spiritual bender to Medjugorje. Jude was slightly embarrassed by her. Her frazzled hair mirrored her mental and emotional state, although to her credit she was the only one in the parish who had never chalked up a single absence as a lector. I think she influenced him more than he realized.

  And so, with these parental influences in his head and a desire to escape them in his heart, Jude went away to school one year and missed neither of them. But his dreaminess came with him. He felt lost, unconvinced. He studied but saw the hackneyed where everyone else saw the uplifting, saw the boredom where everyone else saw the playground for pre-adulthood. He ended up doing poorly; he dropped out; he ended up back in the sticks, in that wide hot, hollow place, that suburb on the edge of nowhere, where time passed slowly and half the people were struggling to pay their bills and the other half were feeling sorry for you, as a promising kid who had gotten off on the wrong foot, and offering to place you in this or that family friend's law office so you could make a few bucks until you got your head on straight.

  And so one part of one dry year put him back in the proximity of Blaise. Unlike Jude and most of his peers, after highschool graduation Blaise had gone nowhere. He was hardly known and hardly missed, save that he had once been athletic - a bull of a physique applied to the position of fullback with success until a succession of injuries sidelined him so that whatever nascent potential for success that transcends class disappeared as quickly as it came. And so he fell back into the ranks of nobodies because he was, in all other social aspects, quite insular and awkward. He dressed shabbily - he was unsure with girls- he might be interested in the outdoors or cars. People tended to think he liked hiking. He never liked hiking.

  This awkwardness might be attributed to his father, who unlike him was a small stick-like man who had withdrawn from life at the death of his wife and had disappeared into a hermit-like hole of despair from which he feigned participation in the world just enough to see that Blaise and his sister Janet finished school. Their older sister, Tess (short for Contessa) had already crossed the barest socially-sanctioned threshold of adulthood and now led the life of a roadie and groupie for whatever local bands would have her. She had a thing for bass players and could roll a joint with one hand and make any pair of jeans or old jacket look kick-ass with a be-dazzler.

  But the old man - he was tired. He hoped to get Blaise and Janet seen through school, if he had the energy, and after that he hoped for nothing but to die. And everything subconscious in him worked to fulfill that prophecy and accelerate it, and Blaise could tell as much, and because he sensed it everything about him withdrew wounded and waiting, just as everything about him made his sisters anxious and furious. Blaise slept and withdrew to escape the inevitable while and his sister Tess told Blaise that he should skip his last year of highschool and leave with her, and she loved Blaise and tried to wake him up to the injury he was doing to himself, but you might as well have tried to pull an old hound from its master. Janet was different. She was as quiet and as patient as Tess was bold. She had an instinct to persevere then escape, to graduate then leave. And so as Blaise finished high school then made his run at college he still had Janet. Tess was gone (and back again, and gone again, in predictable cycles, always running off with musicians) but he survived as long as he had Janet. But then even Janet left, and that left Blaise alone and rudderless and susceptible to his worst temptations. He stayed that way, lost, suspended between the end of youth and the beginning of nothing, until the day his father killed himself out in the hot small shack in which his electronics equipment was kept, with a tower of an antenna behind it, the old man sitting sat in there day after day and turning the dials and straining for voices, for any voice, that would remind him of one beautiful reason for being in the world. The signal never came; the voices spoke of discord and false prophesies and products - always products; the magic of the electrons was dead - they had all been yoked to mercenary masters, and one day with one bullet he ended their transmissions, though it is to be noted he left the receiver on. Blaise discovered that when he discovered him, and he shut down the orange sparking dials, each commanding a
particular circuit to catch a frequency and refine it, to sift the ether for a voice that never came. Blaise shut these down, one toggle at a time, until the last dial faded, and then he went out into the hot July sun that had baked the world into cracked clay and took an axe to the antenna mast until it toppled. He telephoned the police, assisted the investigation quite matter-of-factly to its succinct and predictable conclusion, and then went even deeper inside himself.

  I must at this point interject upon this portrait of despondency. People do go on. Life knows what life should do even in the pit of despair - it will push the body onward; it will ape life and even health. Blaise went on. I do not mean to say that he knew the extent to which he was hollow, because his body and the gift of life is strongest in youth and that pushed him ahead, albeit without a compass. He was young and strong and handsome in a rough way and formerly athletic, and even though he was alone these things were more than strong enough to have pushed him into the machinations of the world, however blindly, however half-heartedly; life ventures out even if the homunculus of Self folds in. Blaise ventured out to make the way from boy to man, albeit without the guidance he deserved or needed. But his instincts propelled him, though not as strongly as his sisters', who knew as sure as the sun rises that they wanted to escape and thrive.

  But unlike his sisters Blaise had a partner in the Angel of Unknowing - that thing that uses opalescent wings like horse's blinders to shield the few it blesses with an unconsciousness about the things they lack, to shield them from an awareness of mockery and from self-pity, and so while to some it may seem as though he persisted and pushed through time in an almost unknowing machine-like way, that could not be said to describe his insides, in which he lived with a sense of spectating and patience, an unconscious abiding, a calmness and a readiness to wonder - all this because of the angel, all with a trust if not an outright conscious knowing that something was moving him, like a chess piece, by a design he did not need to understand.

  From Blaise’s Journal

  I have gotten hold of Rosalind's journal and am adding in parts. I bought her no-good young step-brother a twelve pack so he would let me in and take it long enough to photocopy it. It is a copy of my own journal, which she herself had somehow stolen and photocopied.

  I am changing it back here and there where Rosalind does not know what she is talking about.

  At nights, when I was young and summer was just barely begun, I would look at the phone list on my nightstand. So many of my friends had moved away. A list of names and numbers, some with notes scribbled in the margins, many crossed out.

  Most mornings were like this: I would wake at the crack of dawn but my dad would have already been awake for hours and the coffee already smelled baked and burnt. The summer would be wide and quiet - out in the sub-suburbs especially so. The daylight would yawn awake through dried yellow grass. Two miles over cows lowed and horses neighed, yet under all this would be the not-too-distant sound of the traffic.

  One morning like the many other mornings I walked into the small cluttered kitchen. Plates and pans were stacked near the sink. I found a clean cup and moved past my lean emphysematic chain-smoking father and poured myself some coffee.

  My father jutted out an arm like a sick crow's wing and handed me a scrap of paper. "I need some parts to fix the ham radio."

  "You need to get out of that shack and get some fresh air," I said. "Go see your brother. Go do anything."

  "I just need to fix it. Go downtown to my old TV repair partner. Take this list - he'll give you what I need."

  I took the list but crumpled it into my pocket.

  I did not answer in the affirmative that I would do it. I walked past my father and through the cluttered living room and out onto the porch.

  "Jesus!" I said into the air that was still semi-cool and sweet. Though the list was in my pocket I instantly forgot about it. I wanted to forget about it. The old man should be working. I was ashamed of the old man's malaise, his apathy, his brokenness. And so the note went into my pocket and out of my mind. It might surface a month later, unless the old man got demanding. He was always wanting me to get some part to make that radio one notch better, to hear the voices from one notch further, to makes the circuits that sifted the static for messages one notch more sensitive.

  I finished my coffee, got cleaned up, and walked out into the day. The old man was out of sight, probably already in his ham radio shack, sifting the signals for the reassurances from angels that never came. Already the day was hotter and the summer swallowed all the energy and the optimism I’d felt while showering. I did not intend to drive down to the small brick-crowded blocks of the near-inner city and visit my dad's old partner, Don - I would visit my uncle instead. My uncle Dave owned the car graveyard that sprawled across the acreage next door. It was the reason, or at least part of the reason, my father had relocated here. "The city's going to build out here!" my uncle had said, "Land you buy today will be worth gold tomorrow!" Of course he was the kind of man who talked loud just to see if he believed his own thoughts, but my dad had acted on it, just in time for the oil bubble to collapse and my sisters to blame Dad for every calamity that kept them prisoner to this deadly (and in Tess's case boring) place one micro-second longer than it had to. But I liked my uncle. He worked on cars and had girly calendars from car-parts manufacturers all through his shop. He was a wiry, crafty grease-monkey of a man. He could whip up a whole car out of spare parts in a week. I would go by and look at the hot rod magazines with buxom señoritas on the covers and bum a smoke and help him pull parts.

  As of yet I had no real job. Helping my uncle was not a real job - not one for a young man who needed money to dress nice, to take a girl out now and then (if he met a girl). I hated restaurant work but somewhat yearned for retail. There were pretty girls in retail, in the mall, and it was air conditioned. I liked neat pretty girls who looked like they knew what's what. But folks weren't hiring like they used to and so I had many applications out but still no offers, and I told myself if nothing came along by next week I’d try the restaurants. I hated restaurants because it was always hot and because of all the pushy people you could never please, but a friend who waited tables at a Mexican place nearby said I was sure to make lots of money in tips but he wasn't sure if they were hiring. He'd find out.

  And so I wandered out into the day and into my car - a classic T-Bird my uncle had assembled for my 16th birthday from pieces of about 100 dead cars. It was sweet. It did not look like 100 cars welded together – it looked clean and straight. My uncle knew his stuff. It started with a robust cough then settled to a jangly purr. I had a vague idea of where I would go. Two high school friends of mine had moved out of their parents' houses and launched their bachelorhood in a tiny shared apartment at the local formerly semi-upscale single-n-lovin'-it complex with a pool. The place was populated by kids going to the local commuter college and more than a few of the "my first job and outta the house" crowd, but also by several older divorced-and-paying-alimony guys and, recently, a growing number of single mothers of all ages, complete with brood. This mix made the dynamics at the pool each night interesting, with the older divorced men angling for the young hotties, who flirted with the old men just enough to get some alcohol before they disappeared into the sunset with younger men of their own age and stamina, and that left older men floating in the pool as the last orange rays of the daylight flashed across the topmost mounds of their bellies, upon which they rested their drinks, before they climbed out of the water and skulked off into the shadows either to return to their apartments alone or else to seek the company of one of the single moms with clouds of young-uns who suddenly did not look that bad.

  I went over there to swim. My friends who lived there, Larry and Bill, both had big plans of scoring with the babes, fixing muscle cars, going to the local commuter college, and then becoming cops. But this past year Larry had changed his mind and enlisted in the Navy after an uncle's patriotic harangue at a Memorial Day b
arbeque in which he relived the life of a young man free from worry who had made the most of his chance to see the world from sea to shining sea on Uncle Sam's dime, and boy were them Filipino gals pretty - if he had to do it all again he'd marry one because Americans girls were all nuts. Neurotic - every last white willowy WASP one of them. And so on impulse Larry had enlisted, and so on impulse the Navy held him to his commitment, all of which left Bill with most of a one-year lease left and so whenever one of his friends came by he was always playing up the finer points and luxuries of the Sun Teal Crest Ridge Estate Apartment Homes.

  "And I've got my own concrete patio and look - a hibachi. Grillin' and watchin' the babes every night. What a life I tell ya."

  I eyed the hibachi doubtfully. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen. I suspected that the local cats frequented it as a litter box.

  "Yes sir, livin' large out from underneath the paternal gaze. So Blaise, you going to UOCCC (University of Oklahoma Community Commuter College) again this fall?"

  "I think so. But I don't want to take a loan to pay for it and my old man sure won't fork over. I need a job."

  "Heck, you'll get one. Buddy of mine at Pretzel City says they're about to fire the pothead who works the morning shift and that he'll put a word in for you. Hey - then you and me can batch it here, huh? Gotta love it!"

  I nodded. No way in hell. All the carpet smelled like cat piss. And anyway, I would pull parts out in the hot sun all summer before I worked at Pretzel City. They made you wear paper hats.

  One week later I had avoided both the food court and the summer sun in the car graveyard and was waiting tables. My friend at the Mexican restaurant had come through.

  I was still a fit young man and was in fact "strapping" though I was not conscious of it, and I caught the eyes of many more women than I noticed because I was not yet attuned to what to look for. Waiting tables at the upscale Mexican restaurant turned out not to be so bad, and I bought two new white shirts and was helping out during the busiest shifts at "Las Rayas Leopardo" - literally, the striped leopard, which made no sense other than the fact that the print shop had messed up and now they were stuck with it.

  And the restaurant was in a mall in a part of town where some folks had figured how to keep their money, or had never frittered it away, or had never had it tied into oil to begin with, and so I made good tips and I was becoming more aware of my “animal magnetism” the more attention I got from the lady patrons, who seemed to like the fact that I was not a skinny stick-boy with a button nose. They gave me big tips; they gave me their phone numbers. But with my luck it turned out that when I finally got up the nerve to call one it had not been from a clandestine would-be paramour but from a lady who worked for a local talent agency and wanted me to try out as a male model for the ads of a popular local upscale clothier, J. Rugby Buffingtons, outfitter of prep-school wannabes and washouts, ladies and gentlemen of quality, and whoever else needed to throw together something that said " effortless sophisticated prairie casualness." It was the "I just came from a safari to a cocktail party" look. I understood that. And it only took one session of outfitting me in the rugged but never wrinkled casual fitted clothes to see I fit the image they wanted to portray.

  From Rosalind’s Journal

  He followed the photographer’s directions well – it was certainly nothing schooled. It was sprung of an unquestioning desire to please. Smile? Blaise smiled and the world looked to be a sunny, effortless place. Pout? Blaise frowned (he did so by trying to remember where he had misplaced his car keys) and the world was broody and interesting. Pensive? "Blaise - clear your head…you're looking out at the sea…it’s roiling, Blaise - it’s roiling!" He got the gig. And that was where he met me, Rosalind Russell.

  I was his female counterpart in many ads. I was a good ten years older than he was, but makeup and the fact that my best friend's sister's father had started Buffington's went a long way to keeping me in the business. The Buffington marriage itself was a strange one: Sarah Buffington was the heir to the company established and run until the last decade by J. Barry Retner, who had run a dry cleaner’s until he got sick of hearing oil and cattle men complain that they never had anything decent to wear when they travelled back East to cut some deal or hob nob in. So Retner started a men’s clothing store, stocked it with stuff from back East that might tidy up a person from the Midwest but not sell out his rugged individuality, and he found a ready market for his wares. He expanded over the years but never strayed from the core of his concept. When Retner got older his daughter married a dandy named Buffington who had never worked a day in his life but could sniff out money, and when the spoiled girl pleaded with daddy to change the company name to Buffington's because it sounded more upscale, he agreed as a wedding present to his daughter and new son.

  That the son had more interest in his money than in his daughter became apparent soon enough, and the old man regretted his decision to rename the franchise, but he but lived off his fortune and was glad his name was no longer associated with the place that came to sell what he considered frippery, and he opened a new store named Retners in cowtown that sold just boots, jeans, shirts hats, and tack, and all it promised was high quality merchandise at a fair price, and so he had a hobby and still did well while Buffington’s flitted and dashed from this trendy style to that one, with his daughter increasingly forced out of the decision-making by Buffington and his whimsical buyers. But she still had 25% of the stock solely in her name and she forced her will on small things like saying no to pastel pleather chaps. And she made the company continue to use her girlfriend and sorority sister Rosalind (me) in its ads. She and I were close friends due in part (but not wholly) to shared grief with men; I had been in and out of a marriage to a no-good rat myself.

  When Blaise came on I took him under my wing. I laughed at his ineptitude but helped him hide it, then helped him overcome it, and like most women he met I was charmed by his modesty, and there was maybe a three-day window when we might have moved from being friends to something more, but one day after I had waded in to protect Blaise from the catty critiques of the photographer, he had looked at me with so much gratefulness that I could no more date him than I could a Saint Bernard, but I was ten times more his friend than ever, and we became very good for each other, and I helped pull him away from the gravity of his brooding father and told him which of the girls were coming on to him, and which were nice and which were skanks. But then out of the blue, and completely beyond the circle of the prairie fashion world, he met Maria Mendez, who was a good woman and became the one love of his life.

  He met Maria when his father had asked him for about the hundredth time to "Run down to the city and see my old TV repair partner Don and get me these parts for my radio." Whereas all of the 99 times before Blaise had taken the piece of paper, crumpled it up in his pocket and forgotten about it, this time he turned to his dad and said, "No - but we can both go."

  His dad looked at him uncertainly. "I'm not in such good shape these days. I'd hate for him to see me like this."

  "And you think he hasn't gotten old too? Look, you need to get away from this farm and especially from that shack. You come with me right now and I'll make sure you get enough parts for that damn thing to pluck signals from Mars to Timbuktu. I personally will climb those power lines that cross the highway and tap you into the grid itself with a pair of jumper cables if you’d like. Just get in the car and come with me."

  "I don't know."

  "Well I know what Mom would say - Get out of the damned house."

  The old man's eyes flared up. “She wouldn’t talk like that.”

  "Well, you know what I mean," Blaise said. "She wouldn’t actually cuss."

  The old man stared at him. "Alright," he said at last. "Give me half an hour to drag a comb through my hair and shave."

  It was soon thereafter that the two of them climbed into Blaise's restored Thunderbird and headed from the sub-suburbs toward the downtown, to the "near-northw
est" part of the city, with old brick homes close together and laid out in block upon geometric block, the part of town that had leapt out from the center of the city more or less as far as the streetcar lines had extended. To the part of the city where a well-maintained neighborhood and a warzone might only be a block apart - certitude and rootlessness; restoration and decay; plaster saints and cars on blocks. Don lived there. He had lived there when Blaise's family was still a member of that Catholic parish in the inner city. Don had never moved from there. His neighborhood was close enough to the church and school to enjoy the protection of the Catholic ghetto - flocks of children in navy blue and white uniforms filled the air with joyful noise near the urban decay but were protected from it through the ministrations of an angel that exerted an opalescent forcefield of beneficence for a radius of a block or two. The leaves noticed - they were greener within that zone.

  Don Jr., Don’s son, was just leaving as pulled up to Don’s small brick house. Don Jr. was in all ways the antithesis of Blaise. He loved the suburbs. His mother had divorced Don Sr. in favor of a doctor she had met during her hysterectomy. She had left Don for the doctor, moved to a ritzy mansion in the suburbs, and Don Jr. followed her and loved having money and having his new “dad” buy him a fine car and put him through prep school, and after he graduated, some lady at the Junior League told his mother that Don Jr. could be a male model so he changed his name to "Laredo" and got a bunch of glossies printed and was always on the verge of landing some big gig, any day, maybe even in Hollywood, though for the moment he sold preppy clothes in Le Maison de Chic in the fancy mall. He did not call himself a salesperson. His title was "Suburban Urban Outfitter."

  He was a natural rival to Blaise. He wore pink tinted sunglasses and the sleeves of his blazer were pushed up on his forearms and he drove a newish convertible that Blaise secretly considered a girl’s car and when he saw Blaise and his dad together he frowned.

  "Hello Laredo," Blaise said.

  His dad turned to Blaise. "Hell son, that's Don Jr."

  Laredo shook Mr. Bohr's hand respectfully enough but he greeted Blaise frostily. As he shook Blaise's hand he leaned in and hissed:

  "You don't deserve it! Why the hell do you even do it? You don't believe in what you sell."

  Blaise shrugged. "It pays the bills. What are you here for - hitting up your dad for money?"

  This incensed Laredo. "Like I need any of that - Mom asked me to check on him. And as for you - I find almost everything about you unconscionable. You have to believe in what you sell. There's a whole new bright shiny world unfolding out there and you're too thick to see it. Buffington’s is too thick to see it. No one at the better clubs shops at Buffington's anymore. They’re yesterday, and you’ll be out of a job soon. When you have to claw your way back up from the bottom, maybe you'll appreciate what you had."

  Blaise had nothing to say in reply and Laredo departed. He knew how to exit on a high note.

  "Not much like his dad," Blaise’s dad said.

  Blaise nodded. “He drives a girl’s car.”

  They both walked across the dry postage stamp of a lawn to the porch. Blaise pulled back the old metal screen door but let his father knock and Don answered and looked them up and down and said "Damn it's been a while!" and "Damn you're looking old, Jonathan!" and "Damn you're big, Blaise!" and he let them in and poured them coffee that smelled like it baked down to a primordial tar before being revived with tap water.

  Don Stockton was old but tough as a yardbird, and he had an anchor tattoo on his forearm from his days in the navy in World War II and he still wore his hair in a crew cut and he chewed and spat tobacco and his boxy small inner city house was hotter than hell but he didn’t notice because he was old and always felt a little chilly, and here and there along every wall were stacked boxes and metal cabinets filled with old electronic parts and vacuum tubes and odd grey-metal instruments with meters for faces and odd assortments of toggles with names on tape stuck beneath them and one with a big red button that said "DO NOT TOUCH!" but nonetheless had more than a few grease-smeared fingerprints on it. And where there were not parts or tools there were stacks and stacks of Popular Electronics magazines from every era and on the walls were calendars from electronic parts warehouses with pictures of pretty girls for every month just like the ones that companies that sold parts for muscle cars issued, and Blaise was shocked because he had never thought about old fart electronics hobbyists in that way before but there they were, chicks in bikinis hustling oscilloscopes and rheostats and potentiometers. And parked out front sideways across the lawn, between the driveway and sidewalk, was a white panel van that said "Don's Electronic Repair" in red block stick-on letters and you could tell from the dust stuck to the adhesive left behind that it used to say "John and Don's Electronic Repair," John being Blaise’s father. And the inside of that damned van was just as hot and crowded as the house itself.

  Don and Jonathan Bohrs talked about old times though John did not talk much and Blaise did not talk much and in fact he almost instantly wanted to leave, but Don talked enough for all of them and talked about how the neighborhood was going to hell and although here and there some nice young couples were moving in although the majority of interlopers were welfare mothers or worse, Indians, and he kept a shotgun over the door and his van double-locked and he had a pistol under his bed, but the good Lord always did provide, John, and he still had work to do because no one knew how to fix a damn thing anymore - not TV's, not kitchen sinks, not dryers, not nothing, and John oughta come out of retirement and join him because work would do him good and if there weren't no family to hold him in that mess of a sub-suburb anymore he ought to join him down here and keep an old man company and the two of them keep busy fixing the appliances bought by the nit wits who were popping out of these state colleges with overpriced degrees and no more knowledge than God give a junebug no offense to junebugs but damn what exactly did they learn for their money? But John reminded him he still had a younger daughter to see through school but maybe later and really he just wanted the parts to ramp up his radio and filter and refilter the signals because he was sure there was something to hear if he could just sift better and hear farther. Don looked at him and saw the sort of weakness in his eyes and then he looked at Blaise and said "Okay - Blaise you come with me - I gotta move some heavy boxes to get to the parts he wants." And in the back room he got the parts easily enough out of an old dresser drawer but told Blaise to keep an eye on his dad because there seemed to be no fight left in him, and then when they were all back in the kitchen he said to them both "I got the parts you need, but you got to come to daily Mass with me to get them."

  Jonathan looked struck and almost recoiled. "Now Don, I don't put much stock in that no more…"

  And of course Blaise put no stock in it at all but Don lived near the church and had pushed his own boys through that Catholic school and still went to Mass, and daily Mass was at noon to let the business folks attend, and he insisted with every rigid fiber of his crew cut that they do so and so the father and the son acquiesced, especially after Don interjected that "at noon Padre keeps it under thirty minutes or it's free" and so they went to that big brick church with Italian marble inside, the one near but not quite at downtown, that had been the bishop's seat before the bishop moved one notch further north and west as the money pushed out further, but here it was, a fine old church, and so they went into its semi-darkness at noon and the air was cool and the attendance was sparse and they were able to sit near the back with no one in the pews front of, behind, or beside them, and the priest - a young priest farmed out to an old neighborhood to cut his teeth on one of the most conservative parishes in the diocese - said the Mass with clock-like precision (he had tried a few lofty sermons in his early days before the pastor told him to trim the fat), and Blaise and his father went through the motions from muscle memory though Don was more filled with a sort of quiet reverence, his tough greyness humbled and softened in a way he would let
few people ever see outside of the presence of the Lord. Neither Blaise nor his father went to communion but as always Blaise took this part of the service to look at people, and he focused in particular on a gorgeous head of dark hair that was somewhat near the front, near the ranks of candles and the votives before a statue of Mary. And as she came back from communion she looked up just as he was staring at her and she saw him notice that she was remarkably beautiful. Blaise felt pierced by a light behind her eyes and by a fleeting perception of a reciprocal giving way of that light in her expression, and he wondered if he might know her from when his family used to live down here, from his attending the parish school before the move to the suburbs, and in any case he resolved to find out because he had been so transfixed he did not want to leave without knowing if he might see her again.

  She was escorting a frail old lady (later identified as her grandmother) to their car, guiding her gently by one elbow, and Blaise saw her and saw her see him and both had inadvertently let their eyes linger one second too long in something like lust but he did not care because he did not know when he would get down to this part of town again (hopefully never) and so he ditched the old men he was with and moved with cat-like alacrity and interposed himself between the women and the car door.

  "Thought she might want a little help into the car."

  The young woman and the old woman looked at him. The young woman said, "I can manage, thank you," and the old woman looked at him and smiled and said "Lo que es un chico guapo. Que bien." And so the younger woman let Blaise help her get her grandmother seated.

  As the young woman walked around to the driver’s side of the car she said "You’re Blaise Bohrs, right? I remember you from school."

  Yes,” he said.

  "I'm Maria Mendez - my parents sent me here to parochial school for one year only - fourth grade. You beat up a boy for me then."

  "I did?"

  "You sat on him."

  "He had pulled your hair. I didn't like that."

  "I remember you, because of that."

  "I'm glad. Now listen…"

  But before he could say anything else the grandmother pointed at him and filled the air with a flurry of Spanish. Her tone was sharp and insistent.

  "Look, if I was holding her elbow too hard I'm sorry."

  "No, it's not that. She’s just grateful that you offered to walk her to the car. She says it’s the kind of gentlemanly thing she doesn't see much of any more. For that matter, she doesn't see as many young people at church as she'd like."

  "That's nice."

  “And she asks you to pray every Friday for the conversion of Russia and the death of Castro. And she mentioned that she recognizes you from some recent J. Rugby Buffington's underwear ads."

  Blaise felt his face go red. "I usually do the sportswear and just the sportswear, but the underwear guy didn’t make it in after a party and so when I went in for my shoot the guy throws me these things like lady panties and I spent like five minutes just trying to tell the front from the back."

  The young woman looked at him until he realized he'd been babbling too much, and he shut up.

  "She wasn't saying it in a bad way," she said.

  The old woman gauzed them in a cloud of Spanish again.

  "Grandma says you are a much better man than the Okie trash I usually date. She would be glad to see me in the company of a fine, strong, Catholic boy."

  "I haven't asked you out yet."

  She cut her eyes at him. "And I haven't said ‘Yes’."

  There was a silence between them. All the words Blaise wanted to say rushed up and got caught in his throat. He looked at her with large eyes and opened his mouth but nothing came out except a kind of creak.

  "Listen," Maria said, "I work in a law office where they need someone who speaks English and Spanish and so I meet lawyers and law clerks all the time and I get the come-on. But on the whole they’re too plastic for me. Please tell me you have something lined up besides just modeling underwear."

  Blaise waved a hand dismissively. "That's nothing I hang my hat on. It just fell into my lap. It's my way of paying for school so I can study something solid."

  "Like what?"

  "Like what? Like computers." He had pulled the subject out of thin air but now that he said it, it sounded possible and practical. He was proud of his career.

  Don yelled over to him from across the parking lot. "Blaise - your dad says he's not feeling well. We have to get going."

  So Blaise looked quickly at the girl and she looked at him. "So," he said, "can I see you sometime?"

  She demurred a moment but then she gave him her phone number. After a moment of forgetting his manners he gave her his number too.

  "Look, I got to go…" he said.

  "I do too," she said. "But you have my number. Now don't forget!" It was a mock scold that was his first embrace in a closer circle of intimacy. It sent him to the moon.

  For the rest of the day his head swam and his stomach was jumpy. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw her beautiful brown stare and her dark red lips. He thought he'd play it cool and wait for a few days to call her but he could not endure it and so he called her that night, and she said yes, and their first date was slated for the coming Saturday, and it was followed by many dates after that. After a few nights out she confided to him that she had seen boys come and go and heard all their promises and stories, but there was something in Blaise's eyes that had made her own eyes fall back into themselves to a degree she had not expected.