Madman on a Drum

by David Housewright

  We were pulling away from the curb before Karen asked, “Who’s Joley?”

  “A woman Scottie was once involved with,” I said. “I’m surprised you weren’t informed about her.”

  “Why would I be?”

  “She had to take out a restraining order to keep him from stalking her.”

  Her mouth hung open for a moment, and then she closed it with a snap. I could hear her teeth grinding behind her lips. After a moment, she said, “I should have been told that.” Later she hissed, “Bureaucracies,” as if the word were an obscenity.

  Who was I to disagree?

  7

  Jolene Waddell was one of those girls who peaked at age seventeen, going from high school midwinter queen to dowdy middle-age in about a summer. Back in school, she was perky with a long-jumper’s body and legs. But the legs were the first to go, then the waist, then the rest of her. Only her voice remained unchanged. You’d hear that hot and humid voice over the phone and you knew—knew!—that she had the goods.

  We met her under the porch light of her small bungalow in Highland Park, not far from where the Ford plant used to be. It had been a long time since I’d seen her, and when I hugged her my arms easily made it around her torso.

  “You’ve lost weight,” I said.

  “Thirty-five pounds since New Year’s,” she said. “Another thirty to go.”

  “You’re lookin’ good.”

  She smiled like a woman who hadn’t received a compliment in a long while, yet still remembered how it felt.

  “No, I’m not,” Joley said. “I will be, though. I’m trying to get to my high school weight plus ten. That’s fair, isn’t it, McKenzie? Weighing ten pounds more than you did in high school.”

  “More than fair,” I said.

  “Our high school reunion is coming up, you know.”

  “Is it?”

  Joley nodded and smiled. “Still, a girl can’t hope to look like she did in high school.”

  “I don’t know, Joley. You look pretty damn good to me.”

  She smiled some more. She had a lot of lines around her mouth and wrinkles at her brow, and her hair had gone through so many dye jobs it had forgotten its original color and had settled on crayon brown. Her eyes—I had known her when they sparkled with blue. They had since deepened to gray, yet they remained clear and luminous.

  “Oh, McKenzie. You were always so sweet.” Looking over my shoulder, she asked, “Who are you?”

  “I apologize,” I said. “I should have introduced you. Jolene Waddell, this is Karen Studder.”

  “Ms. Waddell,” said Karen and extended her hand. Joley shook it carefully.

  “Karen is Scottie Thomforde’s parole officer.”

  “Oh,” said Joley. She released Karen’s hand as if it were suddenly radioactive.

  “Have you seen Scottie?” Karen asked.

  “Seen him? No.”

  “You’ve heard from him,” I said.

  Joley hesitated for a moment, then said, “Come in.” She held the door open for us. I could almost feel her thinking as I moved past her into the house.

  I was surprised by how clean her home was. Her living room was furnished with matching sofa and chairs that looked as if they had never been used and a rich blue carpet that looked as if it had never been trod upon. The prints on all four walls were enclosed in identical silver frames and mounted at the exact same height. The novels in her bookcase were arranged in alphabetical order, and so were the CDs on the shelf next to the CD player. There was no dust, no dirt anywhere, and it made me feel uncomfortable, made me feel like I was soiling her house just by being there. ’Course, I’ve lived like a bachelor since I was twelve years old. My idea of cleanliness is stacking plates in the dishwasher.

  The only thing that seemed unplanned was the well-used blue three-ring binder bustling with ruffled white paper that lay opened on the gleaming coffee table and the cell phone that was next to it. The phone rang while Joley was suggesting that we take a seat. She picked up the phone, wrote down a number that she read off the display onto one of the pages in the binder, and returned the phone to the table.

  “We’re not interrupting, are we?” I said.

  “No,” Joley replied. “He’ll call back.”

  “Who?” said Karen. I was sure she thought the call came from Scottie.

  “A client,” Joley answered.

  “Joley’s a telemarketer,” I said.

  She smiled at me and said, “That’s a diplomatic way to put it.”

  Karen seemed confused, and I would have been happy to let her stay that way. Joley wasn’t.

  “I’m a phone-sex operator,” she said.

  Joley had acted in a few plays in high school—played Marian the Librarian in The Music Man and Emily in Our Town. Afterward, she did some voice work in radio spots and videos, only not enough to pay her bills until she met a woman who put her to work selling a variety of products over the phone. Joley discovered that she had a knack for it, that she was particularly good at drawing men out in conversation. Her employer noticed, too, and asked Joley if she would be interested in a different kind of telemarketing, something that would utilize her acting skills.

  Now the phone rings and she answers, “I’m blond, and I have big brown eyes, and I’m about a thirty-six double D.” The men who call believe her, too. Listening to that sweltering voice, they believe her to the tune of about two-ninety-eight a minute, not counting the forty-dollar panties that she has never worn or the twenty-five-dollar photographs of a blond brown-eyed woman she has never met that she also sells. On a good day, for five hours’ work she’ll gross as much as eight hundred bucks that she splits with her employer. Add that to what she makes for her legitimate voice work and Joley does very well for herself.

  “It’s not like it’s prostitution,” she told Karen. “It’s not unsafe sex. It’s not stripping. It’s just words, just talking dirty on the phone. A lot of the men who call, they’re lonely. They’re calling cuz they need someone to talk to. What my callers are really buying—it isn’t sex. What they’re really buying is a few minutes of human contact.”

  I wondered if that wasn’t the reason Joley had agreed to work the job in the first place, why she kept going back to it even though she had quit at least three times that I knew of. For the human contact. I wondered if that wasn’t the same reason she continued to involve herself with Scottie Thomforde. Joley had been as popular as hell in high school—pretty can do that for you. Only she wasn’t pretty anymore, and losing another thirty pounds wasn’t going to change that.

  Karen nodded her head when Joley finished her story. She said, “I can see where the job rewards your creativity and imagination,” and nodded some more.

  “I’m not educated,” Joley said. “Unlike the big guy here”—she waved her hand at me—“I wasn’t what you call college material. I doubt there’s another job anywhere that they would let me do that pays as well as this.”

  Karen nodded again. She had the gift of empathy. She understood other people’s emotions and knew how to make you feel good about having them. Either that or she was one of the most duplicitous women I have ever met.

  “Tell me about your relationship with Scottie,” Karen said.

  Joley gave me a quick glance and settled on the sofa next to Karen.

  “The summer after we graduated from high school, we started to spend time together,” she said. “I suppose mostly it was out of self-defense. Neither of us was going on to college, and a lot of our friends, like McKenzie here, that was all they could talk about. It was fun, being with him. I’d go to his gigs and listen to him play. And then—you know about the robbery.”

  “I know,” Karen said.

  “Scottie says that to this day he doesn’t know why he let Fulbright talk him into it. It was just so dumb.”

  “Is that what you spoke about on the phone?”

  Joley’s eyes grew cautious.

  “Scottie’s brother, Tommy, said you talked f
or hours a couple of weeks ago,” Karen added.

  “Yes, when he spent the weekend with his mother.”

  “Have you spoken to him since?” I asked.

  “A few times.”

  “Did he ever mention any of his friends?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes we’ll talk about the people we grew up with and went to school with, you know, Peter, Steve, Mary, Milo, Zap, Bev, John, Mary Beth—those people.”

  “Bobby Dunston?”

  “Bobby? No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “No one from prison? A guy called T-Man, maybe? Or Mr. T? Anyone like that?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might be now?”

  “No.” Joley’s eyes swept up to her ceiling and back to me. “How much trouble is he in?”

  “We don’t know that he is in trouble,” Karen said. “We’re just trying to find him.”

  Joley was staring at me when she said, “Why can’t people just leave him alone? He’s not a terrorist. He’s not a drug dealer. He didn’t abuse schoolchildren—”

  “Jolene,” Karen said.

  “If people would leave him alone—”

  “Jolene.” Karen snapped off the name, forcing Joley to face her. I was convinced she did it to keep me from saying or doing something foolish at the mention of schoolchildren. Like I said, empathy.

  “Jolene, I’m trying to keep Scottie from going back to prison,” Karen said. “Can you help me?”

  “I don’t know where he is. He said—”

  “What did he say?”

  “When we were talking, he said he would never go back to prison.”

  “Why were you talking to him at all?” I asked. “I thought you were through with him.”

  “The last time—the last time, he was mean to me. This time, though, he was kind and funny, and he was up, you know, up, like he had plans, like he had a future. And he seemed a little sad, too, like he needed a friend.”

  “What about the restraining order?”

  “I didn’t think about that. I forgot about that.”

  “Why did you take out a restraining order in the first place?” Karen asked.

  “That was because of when he got out of prison the first time. When he went to prison—it was so awful what happened to him, and we would talk about it all the time. I would visit him while he was waiting for his trial, and afterward he would call me from prison and write, and I would write back and sometimes I would visit him there. I was eighteen years old, though. Eighteen. My life was just beginning. Was I going to spend years waiting for Scottie?”

  “You met a man,” Karen said.

  “I met a guy, yes, and I told Scottie about it and asked him not to call anymore and not to write. He kept at it anyway. He said we were meant to be together. I guess he thought that way because I was his first, and I guess I was his last, too, because now he was in prison. I said no, no, no, only he kept calling and writing until I called the prison and they restricted his phone use and wouldn’t let him send me letters anymore. Then he got out, and he began coming over and calling and following me, and finally I got the restraining order, and the judge told him that if he didn’t leave me alone they would put him back in prison to finish the rest of his sentence. And then he stopped.”

  “How did you get back together?” Karen asked.

  “Well, we didn’t really get back together. At least, not yet. I mean, I didn’t hear from him again until he went back to prison the last time for check fraud. He wrote me a letter. It was a beautiful letter, a beautiful thing. In the letter he told me how sorry he was for frightening me. He said that he finally realized, now that he was back in prison again, how much pain and anguish he’s been causing others, causing his family and me and people, and how he had finally seen the light and was going to change his life. He wrote that he didn’t expect me to answer the letter and that was okay. He wrote that he only wanted to apologize to me for what he did and wish me well. He said I should have a long and happy life. That is what he wished for. So I answered the letter. It was such a beautiful letter. Did I already say that? I told him that I wished that he had a long and happy life, too. And then he wrote me back. And I wrote him back. Anyway, we’ve been in touch ever since, just writing and talking. Talking on the phone.”

  Imagine what a voice like hers might mean to a man in prison, my inner voice told me.

  “You haven’t seen him?” I said aloud.

  “No. He can’t have visitors at the halfway house except family. He invited me to visit when he stayed at his mother’s house, but I didn’t think that would be right cuz I’m not family.”

  “So you haven’t actually seen him at all since he got out?”

  “No.”

  Imagine what Scottie is going to think when he sees where that voice came from, my inner voice added. I silently told my inner voice that it was a jerk. It wasn’t listening, as usual.

  “Jolene?” Karen said. “If you see him, if you hear from Scottie, will you call me?”

  “Is Scottie in trouble?”

  “He will be if I don’t hear from him soon.”

  “Then I’ll call you.”

  Joley was staring at me when she took Karen’s card. That’s your cue, my inner voice said.

  I gave Joley pretty much the same story I told Tommy: I ran into Karen while I was looking for Scottie; I was hoping Scottie might do a favor for me. I didn’t explain why, and Joley didn’t ask for more.

  She was escorting us to the door when her cell phone rang.

  “No rest for the wicked,” Joley said.

  My own cell phone rang while I was pulling away from the curb. I don’t often use the phone while I’m driving, but the display told me that Nina Truhler was calling. For her I make exceptions.

  “Hi, sweetie,” I said.

  “Hello, honey,” she said.

  After two years, we’ve reached a point in our relationship where we call each other names.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Business sucks.”

  “Does it really?” Nina owns Rickie’s, a jazz club named after her daughter, Erica, located in the Summit Hill neighborhood of St. Paul.

  “Actually, it’s a pretty good crowd for a Wednesday,” she said. “Except there’s this spot at the bar where a man I know usually sits, and since he’s not here tonight, I figure the bar must be losing a fortune.”

  “Since you usually comp the man his dinners and drinks no matter how often he demands a bill…”

  “I like that you always ask for a bill.”

  “So, business isn’t off.”

  “Tips, McKenzie. Tips. The man nearly always leaves a tip that covers the cost of his meal and beverages. Do you know what that means to the waitstaff, especially considering how poorly their employer pays them?”

  “I hadn’t given it that much thought.”

  “You didn’t honestly believe Jenness and the others were extra nice just to suck up to me, did you?”

  “And they say money can’t buy love.”

  “Besides, I distinctly remember you telling me this morning that you were dropping by.”

  “I meant to. Something came up.”

  “Oh, really? Another one of your crusades? Pity you couldn’t be bothered to tell me about it.”

  “Nina…”

  “McKenzie, you can be so inconsiderate sometimes.”

  “Nina, don’t say any more,” I said. “You’ll only feel worse later when I explain everything.”

  Nina paused before asking, “What is it?”

  “I’m on the road. I really can’t talk about it now.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “As serious as it gets.”

  She paused again. “Shelby and the girls,” she said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “If it’s that serious, it has to be someone you love. Who do you love besides Shelby and the girls? And Bobby?”

  “You.”

  “W
ell, it’s not me and it’s not Rickie. That leaves Shelby and the girls. Should I call? Should I go over there?”

  “No, no, it’s… it’s still… Later, maybe. Later would be better.”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Not now.”

  “You will tell me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Promise?”

  “I’ll call first chance I get.”

  “Thank you.”

  I deactivated the phone. We were already on I-94 and heading toward the East Side of St. Paul when Karen said, “Was that your wife?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Nina Truhler.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “She’ll do until the real thing comes along,” I said. It was a pat and stupid remark, but I didn’t want to discuss Nina with a stranger.

  “You called her sweetie,” Karen said.

  “Stop asking so many questions and I’ll call you sweetie.”

  8

  For decades, when you thought about the blue-collar East Side of St. Paul, you thought about the Payne Reliever, an infamous rock ’n’ roll club and strip joint located on Payne Avenue. With its catchy name and wicked reputation, the Payne Reliever pretty much defined the rough-and-tumble neighborhood to the outside world, so much so that once when I told a guy in Florida where I lived, he asked if that was anywhere near the club. And did I go there? And how many shootings and knife fights had I seen? It’s gone now, just like the Faust and Flick adult theaters, replaced, I swear, by an Embers family restaurant. Yet the reputation for mayhem it embodied persists. As a result, people seldom go to the East Side unless they actually live there, and many of those are cagey about it, telling outsiders they reside in Hazel Park, Prosperity Heights, or Lake Phalen. Still, most East Siders are fiercely loyal to their neighborhood. I played hockey with one guy, you could insult him, insult his politics, his religion, even his mother, but say something nasty about the East Side and he’d drop his gloves. Boom.

  Mrs. Thomforde was loyal like that. Her husband might have moved her to Merriam Park, yet once a month she’d faithfully return to gossip with her East Side friends. As kids we used to think that she was tremendously courageous—or just plain crazy.