Oliver had no intention of arguing with a third year college student.
The professor pointed at him. “You're Mr. Priddy, right? I take it you disagree with what the gentleman said.”
“Actually, sir, I wasn't finished. I don't know if I agree with him or not, but I think there may even be another conflict at work in this story, and that's man versus man. Once Maurice exposes his vulnerabilities to his friend, there's tension between the two of them.”
Discussions like this went on for the next twelve weeks and Oliver's confidence soared with each one. He lost his lunch before every exam and bit his nails to the quick after he turned in each paper and while he waited for their return with an A scrawled on top. His final essay called for a lengthy discourse on Kafka's notion that a story serves as “an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Not only did he earn a perfect grade on the paper, but the professor said it was so well written that he wanted to publish it in the undergraduate literary journal of which he was in charge on the main campus. Oliver was delighted.
When final grades came out and he saw the A on his official grade form, Oliver said to himself, uh huh, go on, say it! You knew you could do it, didn't you? But around his friends, he downplayed the whole thing. Albert, Penelope, and Early congratulated him until he turned red with embarrassment. His fellow classmates teased him in good taste, and the campus girls said way to go, you scholar.
But what tickled him more than anything was how he was supposed to be doing hard time among hardened cons, and here he had turned his prison into an Ivy League campus. He relished walking down Turk's Street every morning with a bale of books under his arms, flirting with the campus girls who came every day, and staying up until three in the morning, drinking tea and reading Shakespeare, writing in his journal or working on his latest commitment-editing The Wire, the lifers' newsletter. Just about everything he needed was right there in the prison and what wasn't came to him once a week, his own college girl Penelope. Tall and busty, with narrow hips, long shapely legs and a well-rounded behind, she had a face that banged drums of envy among the young ladies and awe among the men. Not only was she pleasant to look at, she was bright and witty, too. During their weekly visits, she always brought their conversation around to some political or current topic in the news. Was it right for the United States to do business with the Shah of Iran? Should we give him refuge if he should fall? On both of these questions she answered in the affirmative and proceeded to put forth a sound argument to bolster her position. Oliver was more than impressed by her logic. Her knowledge of major league baseball baffled him, too. She was a Pirates fan, and he was an Orioles fanatic. After she explained to him why and how her team had beaten his twice in the World Series, he quickly changed the subject to the shade of her lipstick. “Is that strawberry?” he artfully asked her. “No. It just tastes that way. See?” she teased, smiling at him three different ways before she gently pressed her lips against his. These moments and other things they shared in common-their Catholic upbringing, broken families, and the universal need to be needed-had metamorphosed their business arrangement into a deep emotional connection. Being with her each week made him feel he still had another part of himself that had not been taken away. He didn't know how long it was going to last and he tried not to think about it. When they were together they made each other feel like they were the only two people in the world. He never asked her if she had someone else out there; he didn't want to know. Her lack of inhibition and unending desire to please was enough for him.
On their first Christmas holiday visit together, she arrived at six o'clock wearing what she knew would arouse him to no end. Her old Catholic school uniform. A white blouse with a little black ribbon tie, a navy blue blazer, plaid pleated skirt, and knee socks and loafers. They stood in the line that led to the back of the room where a Christmas tree display table, covered in a snow white sheet that hung all the way to the floor, awaited couples who wanted their pictures taken and others who wanted ten minutes of privacy. Ten dollars for ten minutes of privacy was what the Jaycees photographer charged. When Oliver and Penelope reached the front of the line other couples hid them from view while they crawled under the table and made clandestine love to the sound of the Lionel train choo-chooing around the Christmas tree overhead.
THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Freddie the runner brought another visiting pass to his door at nine o'clock in the morning. Oliver thought the word family at the bottom of the pass meant his mother June, his brothers, Skip and Huck, and his sister Anna. So he bolted to the visiting room and then pulled up like a buck in headlights when he saw a man who looked vaguely familiar standing there smiling awkwardly at him. With him were two children and a woman who were also staring and smiling as if they all knew something he didn't. And they did.
Surprised you, didn't we? That's what the woman said. As if it were something pleasant. Good to see you, son, the man said. Meet your new family. This is my wife Isabella. This is your brother, Dickie. Dickie's twelve. And this is Lottie. She's thirteen. Fourteen, Dad! I'm fourteen, the nubile girl told him.
Speechless, Oliver shook hands with each of them and did his best to smile. He took a seat beside Ernie Boy the First, whose nervous apprehension showed each time he blinked and forced a smile.
While they took turns describing their hour-long trip from Youngstown to Pittsburgh, Oliver studied Ernie Boy's face until he found the lie he was looking for. It had been sixteen years since this man had skipped town on his family like a fugitive. Oliver was only five years old and Skip was six the day they had stood on the side of 301 Highway waving to their father as he drove away in his new red Ford. See you boys soon. Those had been his last words. Every day for six weeks, Oliver had looked out the front window of their apartment hoping to see Ernie Boy's car pull up into the parking lot. Each time he saw a new red Ford Fairlane coming up the highway, he thought it was his father. Six week went by and when his father still hadn't returned, his mother told him to forget about him. “He's gone, Oliver, and he's not coming back. Just forget about him.” Every night before they went to bed, he and Skip knelt at the windowsill and watched the tractor-trailers scream through the intersection of 301 Highway and Hawthorne Drive. One night they saw a sixteen-wheeler slice a new red Ford Fairlane in half in the middle of the intersection. The boys put on their sneakers and ran to the scene in their pajamas. Skip stopped at the edge of the highway while Oliver darted around the debris and the men who had come from Mr. Mack's Texaco station to help. He had never seen so much blood. The dead man was lying in front of the car and he was wearing burgundy wingtip shoes. The same kind their father had been wearing when they last saw him. Oliver maneuvered close enough to see that the man's eyes were wide open and were as blue as his father's eyes; his hair was parted on the left side, too, just the way their father parted his, and there was a diamond ring on his left pinkie.
What if it was him? What if God had worked that traffic light to send their father to hell for playing such a bad joke on them? Oliver started to cry. He yelled for Skip. That ain't him, Oliver. But the car's red and he's wearing the same shoes and the diamond ring and… That ain't him, now come on. Oliver wanted to go back and look at the man one more time, but Skip said no. Tears streamed down his face as he watched the ambulance driver pull the white sheet over the man's face. It's him! I know it's him! It is not, Oliver. But this was one time Oliver refused to believe his brother and he was glad his father was gone and he didn't have to wonder about him anymore.
Now he searched the harsh lines on both sides of Ernie Boy's lying mouth-smile lines, but frown lines too and crow's feet at the corner of his lying baby blue eyes. His hair, totally gray, was thick and curly, and he had the great Priddy teeth. He wore a tan suit and a white shirt, with an ice blue tie and high-shine brown Oxfords. Oliver was no more glad to see him than Ernie Boy was to be there. But they talked. They talked and the family went on as if they had just seen Oliver last week and the week before. The kids were beautiful and gracious. Lott
ie told him at the Coca-Cola machine how she had waited all these years to meet her big brother and how handsome he was. Dickie didn't say much. When it was time for them to leave, they promised to return soon and often.
Oliver went to bed that night using sixteen years of pent up love and anger as the ignition to fire up his memory. Seeing his father had left him feeling nostalgic and longing to see his mother June. Nothing in God's creation could console him the way his mother could.
He was not dreaming nor was he asleep. Rather, he was in that space before sleep comes where thoughts and images were like a random slideshow. Chalk and erasers. Venetian blinds and folded letters. Jealousies and longing. Images heavy enough to entertain but not distinct enough for dreaming. Yet he was hopeful that sleep would bring him a dream, the one that always left him with renewed hope and energy. It always started in the kitchen where his mother June was at her best, cooking and baking and tending to her African violets that thrived on the windowsill over the sink. There was joy and contentment in her lovely face. For as long as he could remember they had played a game, his sweet tooth against her ingenuity. He always won. She hid the chocolate candy, he found and unwrapped the foil. Except that one time when his little arms weren't quite long enough to reach the bottom of the ten-pound cut glass punch bowl. It looked like the biggest snowflake God had ever made when it tumbled off the shelf over the kitchen sink and knocked him off the counter and clear across the linoleum floor. Shocked as any child would be, he sat there in a heap of broken glass and O. Henry bars and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. After he felt blood dripping off his forehead, he cried. But there she was. Shocked, too, but she made it all better, and by the time they left the emergency room and she bought him a double scoop of Rocky Road ice cream, she was calm again. He was still seeing stars when she told him to sit in Mr. Winkler's parlor while she disappeared into Mr. Winkler's bedroom to discuss a business matter that had a squeaky rhythm.
It wasn't until years later when he was in the county jail waiting to stand trial for Jimmy Six's murder and Mr. Winkler brought her all the way from Southern Maryland to Pennsylvania to see him that he understood. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter because she was there. With chocolate bars and her beautiful face, she was there. It didn't matter because he and his siblings had never had to eat grits or scrapple for breakfast; there had always been sizzling hot bacon or cured sausages floating beside the sunny side up eggs. Even on Sunday evenings when he and Skip and Anna returned from their weekly visits to their grandfather's farm, after a day of running across acres of honeysuckle and the greenest fields, singing I can't begin to tell you how lonely that song was, even then, she was there. Not June Cleaver in an apron with pearls draped around her neck. But his June, she was there. Hot or cold, in or out, she was there. And he had sooo liked her company, to talk with her, to be around her. Not just because she was his mother, but because she was humorous and witty. They were special to each other. They sang and danced together. She taught him how to jitterbug and when they walked through the side door of the American Legion bar, every man sitting at the bar turned his head to gaze into her big brown eyes. They sat at a corner table with her girlfriends, Mary Jo and Elsie. The women drank Pabst Blue Ribbon; Oliver drank Hire's root beer. And after a dance around the jukebox, Oliver sat on Mary Jo's lap and the first time she pressed his head against her breast, he kept it there for as long as he could because he didn't want the warm feeling that ran through him to end.
When he reached his mid-teens, June and Ernie Boy the Second separated and so did Oliver and his siblings. Anna, who had despised Oliver for as long as he could remember, went to stay with June's sister. Skip, who had always treated Oliver with brotherly affection and relished the role of doing brotherly things, moved to their grandfather's farm and drove a little French car to school. Their younger half-brother, Huck, who was the apple of Oliver's eye, went to live with Ernie Boy the Second and his mother, leaving June and Oliver living in the house. Ernie Boy still had belongings there, but the marriage was over and he only came around occasionally in the middle of the night looking for June. Right around this time Oliver started to do bizarre things to capture June's attention and hold it. On Friday nights instead of taking his girlfriends to the drive-in or to a firehouse dance, he brought them home. One summer evening June came in early and there he was lying on the sofa as naked as the day she had pushed him out of her womb, with a beautiful girl wrapped around him like a vine. June lit an L&M and said who's your friend, Oliver? Oh, this is Marianne, Momma. You're very sexy, Marianne, but not on my good sofa. The kids rose like synchronized swimmers and held hands all the way to Oliver's bedroom. And June saw him. She saw him. And he had never been as proud as he was that night when she saw that he was a man.
That summer, June began an affair of her own with a pint-sized bottle of vodka and Oliver saw less and less of her. She had never been a brood hen and had always enjoyed Oliver and his siblings when the mood struck her. And moods she had. All her life she cried off and on for days at a time and wouldn't talk to Oliver or anyone. But then, just like that, her mood would change and she would feel, once again, natural and easy and playful with him. They talked about piano keys and dance steps, perennials and annuals, cats and stray dogs. They never held grudges, and there was no winning or losing. On Friday and Saturday nights she dolled herself up and in his presence alone she never forgot to ask do I look pretty before she slipped out the door for the evening. There was more than a residue of interest in her big brown eyes as she held her gaze toward him while he told her over and over how beautiful she was.
There wasn't a damn thing he could do that Saturday night when Ernie Boy the Second stumbled into the house at two in the morning and held her hostage in her bedroom. Oliver could hear Ernie Boy punching her and tearing at her gown and when Oliver called out her name from the hall, Ernie Boy dared Oliver to open the door. There wasn't a goddamn thing he could do. After that night though, June got wise and found her way to Oliver's room, knowing perfectly well the bastard wouldn't have the nerve to bother her there. Not in front of her grown son. Oliver, of course, was grateful to tears to protect her. On the morning after the twelfth night he had watched her nightgown fall to the floor, seen the float of her breasts before she crawled into his bed and spooned up beside him, his grandfather called and told Oliver that he was welcome to come and stay for as long as he wanted. June encouraged him to go since they were the only two left in the house and she was often gone for days at a time. Oliver decided to go, but not before he held her like a prom date and promised to stop in every week to see her. He even left some of his belongings there as a reason to return and as a sign to her that his leaving was only temporary. After moving out he spent some part of every night thinking about her living alone in that house. The same house he used to sneak into just before dawn on those nights when he had stayed out all night. He had to admit he liked living in that house when it was just his mother and him. It became his, sort of. A nighttime possession complete with a beautiful mother who let him come and go as he pleased, no questions asked. It was the life. And to think he had traded all that to live on a four hundred acre tobacco plantation just so he could have a little French car of his own.
He had wanted to burn that house to the ground the day he and Skip stopped in after school and found her curled up in a fetal position, rocking back and forth as she stared vacantly at the wall. The boys were terrified. Her jet-black hair, always meticulously coiffed, was hanging in greasy strands. Her eyes were sunken and the skin on her face sagged like dough. At some point she had tried to put on lipstick but had gone wide of the mark. Her face resembled a sad clown. Oliver sat on the side of the bed and held her hand while Skip left the room to call their aunt Harriet, who came right away along with the rescue squad. Oliver and Skip watched helplessly as the attendants loaded her into the ambulance and drove her away to a sanitarium in Baltimore. Ninety-three days later when she returned looking like Maggie in Cat on a H
ot Tin Roof, Oliver was there to greet her. It was the happiest day of his life.
Pleased once again that he had witnessed her sobriety from the day she came home from that sanitarium all the way up to the day he had broken her antique chair over Ernie Boy the Second's back and fled to Pennsylvania, Oliver finally fell asleep. But he did not have the dream he wanted.
IN THE MORNING he kicked off the rugs he called a quilt and hurled his head in the pillow to keep the sunlight out of his eyes and the man from Youngstown out of his mind. When he finally got out of bed to stare at the icy waters of the Ohio River, the pass-runner showed up at his door.
“Priddy, let me hold the horseshoe you got up your ass,” the runner said.
“Freddie, my man. What's up?”
“Here. You got another visitor. That's three this month. What a lucky dude.”
Oliver took the pass and saw the word family written at the bottom. “I hope that cocksucker's not trying to shock me again.”
“Say what?”
“My biological father. He came to see me yesterday for the first time in sixteen years.”
“Did you know he was coming?”
“Hell, no! I didn't even know he was alive.”
“How'd it go?”
“You don't even want to know.” He grabbed his shower kit and towel and opened the cell door.
“Well, just be glad somebody's thinking about you, Priddy. Some of us in here don't have a soul in the world.”
“Yeah, you're right, Freddie. Thanks for the pass. I'm going to get a shower. Whoever it is can wait.”
By the time he finished showering and left his cell for the visiting room, Oliver had changed his mood twenty times. Should I have it out with him, or let it go? Should I ask the motherfucker why he never called or came around, or let it all be hunky dory? He couldn't decide. When he walked into the visiting room and saw his brother Skip looking out the window his countenance changed again. “Good God, Almighty! If it isn't my brother, Skip!” His voice was full of excitement.
Eureka Man: A Novel Page 6
