Evangeline Fesnacht, the sole geek-girl of the Circle, basked in her newfound popularity, moving confidently through all cliques with her datarich ever-expanding black-satin Death Chronicles, now to John Reddy Heart. Unshaven Clyde Meunzer and Dino Calvo in leather and grease-stained jeans were glimpsed in the company of Hewson, Smoke Filer, Ken Fischer. Norm Zeiga, a recent transfer from the Niagara County school district, would complain for the next thirty years that he was never able to grasp the social intricacies of since, after that historic March day, the old class distinctions had dissolved, as in a violent seismic upheaval. Katrina Olmsted and Ray Gottardi going steady, thrown together often at Nico's. And it was at Nico's, in a crowded, smoke-hazed booth, that Dougie Siefried came to realize he'd fallen in love with Ginger McCord who cried easily, seeing her face streaked with tears and her pale red-lashed eyes shimmering with hurt as Dougie teased Ginger and her friends mercilessly--"Hell, you girls have got to face reality. Before Riggs was shot, that evening, John Reddy wasn't home, right? That's what his mom told police? He got back home one a. m. when Riggs was already there, so--where was John earlier?
who? Dino knows more than he's letting on. You can't trust any wop. Dino says they were just driving around in John's car but what must've was Dino was not with John, John was alone with Dino's sister Sasha. It figures. John doesn't want cops questioning Sasha and the Calvos wouldn't so Dino is saying he was with John till about quarter to one but the fact is--lohn Reddy's got a girl and that girl is Sasha Calvo." It was at this point that Ginger began snuffling and burst into tears and Dougie stared at her hearing his cruel bully's voice ringing in his ears and wishing to hell he'd kept his damned mouth shut.
Our teachers, too, crossed barriers. It was embarrassing. We cringed to see sharp-eyed Miss Bird lunging in our direction, or heavy-breathing Mr..
Dunleddy loitering in the doorway of his classroom with its faint
* odor of formaldehyde. Mme. Picholet daintily inquired of us before class, "Quelles nouvelles de John-Reddy Heart?" Mr.. Lepage affected disdain of "tabloid journalism" yet was keen to know, nevertheless, the bulletin.
During the tense three days following the shooting when John Reddy a fugitive from justice and no one knew his whereabouts apart from a wishful rumor that he'd escaped to Quebec. ) Miss Flechsenhauer, a tall, rangy, sinewy woman with a foghorn voice, detained us in girls' gym. In ed. , Mr.. Schoppa who smelled of cigars instructed students to
8 Meridian Place repeatedly, attempting parallel parking in front of the Hearts' very house, while keeping up a steady stream of chatter about the Buffalo Hawks and
"Texas-style justice." In Mr.. Cuthbert's social classes we began those painstakingly theoretical discussions that were to continue for months and be resumed in the fall and again continued it's said) Mr.. Stamish spoke with Mr.. Cuthbert urging him to on from his idee fixe--the ironies of fate, the paradox of chance and destiny, the "interchangedness" of victim and executioner, and the ways in which, as Mr..
Cuthbert expressed it with gleaming eyes, "countless tributaries feed into the great rushing river of Fate that leads to an irrevocable existential act like aiming a gun at another person and firing." We were particularly embarrassed to see Mr.. Stamish himself, our ordinarily gruff and principal, dawdling in the first-floor corridors with hopeful glances in our direction as if to inquire, with Mme. Picholet, Quelles nouvelles de tohn-Reddy Heart?
Yet Mr.. Stamish was too reserved to actually ask. We hurried past him averting our eyes as we might in our homes glimpsing a naked parent.
In time, we would know more about the Riggs shooting and John Heart's involvement than we would wish to know and more than would seem to have been healthy for us to know. More than our fevered brains could metabolize. Many of us memorized as much as we could of the chronology of events of the fatal March night and subsequent through to the capture of John Reddy, on foot, in a desolate mountain area two hundred sixty miles northeast of Willowsville, on the slope of Nazarene in the Adirondacks. A number of us maintained time charts maps to which we added more information as it was revealed during subsequent months. Evangeline Fesnacht maintained the most elaborate of these, of course, yet there were others who startled us with diligence-Janet Moss who'd once been so shy she'd never dated, "Nosepicker" Nordstrom who was famous for snorting No Doz to keep his starting on the varsity swim team, brainy-neurotic Clarence McQuade who'd our New York State High School Science Fair prizewinner the previous year for a massive project involving a homemade telescope and planetary charts.
And there was swarthy Norm Zeiga with his
"Transylvanian" looks and exotic accent like one of Sid Caesar's comic impersonations, Norm was always deadly serious, Norm, a transfer to WHS, by the caprice of alphabetical destiny seated just in front of Suzi Zeigler in their and fated to be the instrument of her breakup with Roger Zwaart, who intrigued with his meticulous time chart and map in colored inks--as Suzi declared, "Like everybody else, I'd been thinking Norm was just weirdo. A kind of interesting weirdo, but, y'know, a weirdo. Now, he out this fantastic time chart not just of where John Reddy was that night, months leading up to it, and maps of Willowsville and the route John Reddy took into the mountains, he said, The search for truth compelled me. It is the most powerful human instinct second only to the instinct to the species, in that accent of his, and, God! --was I impressed. I looked at Norm for the first time, really looked at him, and I saw. Those eyes." (While Roger who'd been around forever, since first grade, Suzi's boy friend and familiar as an old sock, wasn't at all sympathe ic with Suzi's interest in John Reddy Heart. He'd say, out of the corner of his mouth, to anyone who'd listen, "Jesus, why care? This is like mass hysteria or something.
What's that guy to any of us? He isn't in our crowd, for Christ's sake." We knew what Roger meant, sure, and with a part of our brains we agreed, but Roger, like our fathers, just didn't get it. ) Even Millicent Leroux whom boys calling to ask for dates (Millie was so placid, so sweetly vague, "Who'd you say this is? Dougie? Oh--Clarence. Oh, gosh, thanks. But I I'm busy Friday, and all the Fridays on the calendar. But, gee, thanks!
")
aroused by new news of John Reddy and was several times seen actually trotting into the cafeteria, breathing quickly, swaths of color in her cheeks and breasts bobbing, to appeal to, of all bipolar personalities, Evangeline Fesnacht whom she'd been snubbing since kindergarten--"Vangie, what? What?
What? People are saying you know something that just happened?" In retrospect, Bart Digger would recall our collective anxiety on the third night of John Reddy's flight from the law when several of us brainy guys, members of the WHS chess team, sat up most of the night in the lot between Burnham Nurseries and Glen Creek, smoking and drinking beer.
Bart's older brother Tracy had bought the six-packs for us. ) It might've been unspoken among us that this was a mode of guy behavior not typical of geeks so if we behaved this way we couldn't be geeks. Ritchie Eickhorn, who would become, like the more celebrated and controversial E. S. Fesnacht, a published writer in his twenties, a poet and professor of literature at a small Minnesota college, recalled being alarmed by the "wild, that buzzed my head" after a single can of lukewarm Molson's, but "I believed that a new, radical personality was emerging in me, at age sixteen, s bound up somehow with John Reddy Heart. I didn't know him, but this fact." Clarence McQuade who was the team's star chess player, to blow out by his own estimate not less than twenty percent of his brain on speed, meth, "crank" in graduate school at Berkeley, researching problem in de Rham cohomology for a math Ph. D. that would forever him, recalled, "I was terrified, I don't know why. That I might shoot my own dad by accident somehow. We didn't even have a gun in the house!
I'd be hunted down like a dog and shot, too. It was my first but it wouldn't be my last." Dexter Cambrook said broodingly, "Not that John Reddy Heart any more than he knew me. I sort of think I'd mixing him up with other kids who resembled him--'hoods, greasers' we called them--I never went to basketball
games, or any big-crowd sports.
But I was scared, too. It was like a vision of the next decade in America.
kid shot down by police. I was sure they were going to kill him. Us them. And we didn't have any choice who us' was--it was us." Bart Digger agreed, saying, "I trace the start of thirty years of existential anxiety to those hours.
Those beers, and puking into Glen Creek at three a. m. while my worried sick where I WS*. Jesus, now I've been a parent myself, know." As the beers took hold thisubject shifted from John Reddy Heart to God, to "free will and destiny" and "whether Christ died for our sins really." Blake Wells surprised us by saying vehemently that he resented God for "all the evil He permits." Petey Merchant who never talked, hardly five tall at fifteen and a half, said, frightened, "That's wrong, to talk way. Don't." Dexter Cambrook who was drunk and laughing spoke of how he'd made asshole of himself calling Pattianne Groves to ask for a date though he knew it was hopeless, she was going with Dwayne Hewson and she'd turn down and of course she did--"In this kind of whispery, stricken girls have like you're a cripple they're trying to be nice to, truly do wish you weren't a loser-geek with pimples so they could say yes." But none of the others laughed. Bitterly we spoke of guys like Dwayne Hewson, Ken Fischer, Smoke Filer and that crowd. Bart Digger said, his voice heavy sarcasm, "If they have pimples, pimples are in." Clarence McQuade said, a vulgar zest that surprised us, "If one of them farts, it's a joke." Ritchie Eickhorn hadn't known he might be drunk until he heard his bitter, voice, "Their dads make more money than ours do. Their moms are betterlooking. They live on the Hill and we live south of Garrison." Blake Wells said savagely, "But they won't get into Harvard, those assholes. Dexter Cambrook laughed, beer dribbling out of his nose, "Shit, will we?" This was met with shocked silence, a kind of sobriety that hinted of violent headaches to come, teary eyes and pissy-tasting bile at the back of the mouth.
Eickhorn would recall coming to a realization that night with his that none of them would ever forget the occasion though it wasn't clear what the occasion was. A death watch for John Reddy Heart--though in fact John Reddy would not die in a hailstorm of bullets but would be captured and returned in shackles to Willowsville by ten o'clock that morning.
A vigil on a starry March night, temperature -5 F Eighteen years to the day later on a starry March night in even colder weather in St.. Paul, Minnesota, Ritchie Eickhorn, now Richard Eickhorn, would begin to compose Lyric, lovely America I Hear Your Heart Breaking which would gain him a but respectable reputation in literary circles and the Walt Whitman from the Poetry Society of America. (Though none of Richard Eickhorn's several awards, nor even his perdurable reputation, would ever erase for him the exquisite pain of their original catalyst. ) "The poem was an attempt to evoke a mood. A passion. Not an individual passion--something communal, collective. Our yearnings of infinitude'. It's the black hole in the firmament where God used to be. Americans are likely to feel it young, we're and we never grow out of it." At first we knew only that Melvin Riggs, Jr. , had been "shot dead" in the Heart house. And that John Reddy Heart had fled with the "murder weapon" in his car but unwisely, impulsively, in confusion and panic he'd tossed the gun off the Castle Creek Bridge about a mile from his home-where it skidded along the ice, for of course the creek was frozen.
Willowsville police would discover it in the morning--the. 45-caliber revolver registered, in Las Vegas, in the name of Aaron Leander Heart. "The kid's prints are all over that gun. It's an open-and-shut case."
"It must have been an accident."
"And the kid isn't too bright, is he? Tossing his gun out onto ice." Verrie Myers, trembling, stared in dismay at her sneering, scornful father.
Her Daddy! Her Daddy she'd adored since infancy! He was laughing.
Laughing! Reading of the "shooting death" of Melvin Riggs in the morning's Courier-Express (of course, Mr.. Myers acknowledged that Riggs's death was a "tragedy"--"but somehow not very surprising, considering Riggs's reputation with women") and shaking his head at her as if, infuriatingly, she were still a small credulous child. "I mean, hell, what can you say about a kid so dumb he tosses the alleged murder weapon' out onto frozen ice?" It was the repetition that did it. The gloating, the rubbing-salt-in-thewound as into tearful Verrie's aching eyes.
Ice. Frozen ice. How could he!
Suddenly, as in a movie scene where the music signals a crisis, Verrie realized she'd never truly seen her father as a man and individual independent of their relationship until that terrible moment.
Her voice was hoarse from crying. She whispered, "Daddy, I hate you." It was a whisper! Mr.. Myers would forever recall it as a "hysterical scream." Then Verrie was running! running! running from that room and that suffocating bourgeois house! running from my old dead false self, life as somebody's daughter. Forever!
We vied with one another memorizing the chronology of the fatal night, the incident at the house, and John Reddy's flight to Mount Nazarene, and the capture. Quickly it became a movie we'd all seen. After John Reddy's second trial, in November, naturally we were able to fill in certain frustrating gaps and to add relevant remarks by various individuals (excluding Reddy, who proudly refused to speak). In Death Chronicles, Evangeline Fesnacht, with a fanatic scrupulousness scarcely hinted when she'd been class secretary in grade school, divided the chronology into sections, "The Fatal Night"--"The Fugitive and the Manhunt"--"The Capture"--"The Return to Willowsville." In this, even Evangeline's detractors concurred.
Here, much abbreviated, it is, On March 18, a schoolday, John Reddy Heart, enrolled as a junior WHS, cut all hls morning classes, arrived in time for fifth-hour where his gradlanged from C+ to D-) and attended basketball from 3,30 P. M. to 5,00 P. M. ("playing competently, though he easy shots and seemed distracted" as Coach McKeever told police), from the high school, he drove to Farolino's Cabinets & Carpentry on Street where he worked until about 7,00 P. M. ("John was helping down and stain a battered old cherrywood bookcase, he did a good job as usual but seemed distracted, got stain on his hands and on the floor"), from Farolino's he drove to his home at 8 Meridian Place, arriving, at Mrs.. Heart's estimate, at about 7,20 P. M. , he showered, shaved, put on clothes and hurried out again saying he was seeing his friend Dino Calvo and "some other guys, maybe", Mrs.. Heart urged him to sit down with the family and eat dinner ("Every night I prepare a hot, home-cooked meal for my family, every night I'm able to be home") but John Reddy left before 8,00 P. M. , driving to the home of Mr.. and Mrs.. Joseph Calvo of 93 Division Street where he was evidently a frequent visitor ("No matter what they say about him, John Reddy Heart is a good boy--and a good friend to Dinov as Mr.. Calvo police). From about 9,00 P. M. to 12,40 A. M. of March 19, John said to be in the company exclusively of seventeen-year-old Dino Calvo, riding in John Reddy's car with no special destination "Just talking, no we weren't drinking, we maybe stopped at a few places just to hang out, got a pizza at Enrico's off Humboldt, I ran in and John stayed with the car, just the two of us," as Dino told police) then bringing Dino back to and returned to his own home at 8 Meridian Place. We didn't this!
We believed that, on the fatal night, John Reddy had been with Sasha Calvo, Dino's beautiful fifteen-year-old sister. It's possible that Dino and some other kids were with them, or just Dino, for all or part of the evening, the information provided us was vague and contradictory and close to John Reddy who might've known, Orrie Buhr, Clyde Meunzer Dino himself, surely wouldn't tell us. "It's a measure of how these people are," Evangeline Fesnacht said, with the air of an anthropologist making an observation, "--they'd risk breaking the law to protect one of their own." The entire Calvo family clammed up of course. (What happened to Calvo? He wouldn't be one of John Reddy's friends to testify for the defense, as a character witness. And beautiful Sasha Calvo disappeared from Willowsville soon after John Reddy's arrest, said to have been away to live with relatives in Brooklyn. ) Apparently unbeknownst to John Reddy, a friend of his mother's, Robert P. Rush (of the distinguished Buffalo law firm Ch
ase, Rush, Beebee Pepper) arrived at the house uninvited and unexpected at about 11,00 P. M. upon coming inside to speak with Mrs.. Heart, to inform her that he'd asked Mrs.. Rush for a divorce because he was in love with her, he'd been drinking, and was upset, Mrs.. Heart felt she couldn't just turn the distraught man away, and so let him in--"For just a few minutes. He promised." Unfortunately, at about 11,45 P. M. , as Rush was about to leave, Riggs, also uninvited and unexpected, also having been drinking, arrived at demanding to be let in. The two men, confronting each other in hall, got into a shouting, shoving match, Rush, his nose from a blow of Riggs's, was persuaded to leave, but Riggs refused to leave, and soon afterward, Riggs and Dahlia Heart retired upstairs to the privacy of her bedroom--"I swear, and my family will confirm this, it was the first time Melvin Riggs ever climbed any staircase in my house. Yes, we were lovers.
But I'd never allowed him to come into my house, where my children are, I swear! The man had such power over me, I'm so ashamed! He me, saying if he couldn't have me no other man would." Around I,00 A. M. , John Reddy returned home, saw Riggs's car in the driveway (did he L whose car it was? ), came inside and was met by his grandfather Aaron Leander Heart who was still dressed, who told him about his mother's and the fracas in the front hall--"John Reddy says, Is one of them here now? Upstairs? and I says, Yes, but it's peaceful now. It's our business, now. So John Reddy went off to his room at the back of the house.
Broke Heart Blues Page 13
