How the Hula Girl Sings

by Joe Meno

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Pirate Signal International Cover photo by Todd Baxter

  Published by Akashic Books

  Originally published in hardcover by ReganBooks/HarperCollins

  ©2001, 2005 Joe Meno

  ISBN-13: 978-1-88451-83-5

  ISBN-10: 1-888451-83-1

  eISBN: 978-1-61775-231-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005925469

  All rights reserved

  First Akashic printing

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following: “Folsom Prison Blues,” words and music by John R. Cash. ©1956 (Renewed 1984) by House of Cash, Inc. (BMI)/Administered by Bug Music.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Akashic Books PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  www.akashicbooks.com

  In memory of Johnny Cash

  I know I had it coming I know I can’t be free but those people keep moving and that’s what tortures me …

  —Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues”

  Table of Contents

  title page

  copyright page

  acknowledgments

  ghost town

  old tattoos

  honeymoon veil

  two birds and one broken wing

  a beautiful thing

  that sweet young bird ain’t sweet no more

  knot in the flesh

  clout

  the red ventricle along the wall

  the fair queen of all corn

  strange customer

  long black veil

  lonely driver

  home

  old red organ

  christ told the woman at the well

  buried treasure

  last words at the bus depot

  tonight

  Bonus Material: Excerpt from Marvel and a Wonder

  About Joe Meno

  About Akashic Books

  acknowledgments

  With gratitude, thanks to:

  Koren, my folks and family, Cheeb, Mr. Mark Zambo, Jake, Chad, Jimmy, Erica Lund and Mark Anderson, Texas Dave, Chris Christmas, Rob Robbins, Michelle Mason, Sheryl Johnston, Randy, Gary, Patty, Don, Julie Caffey, Bill Hayashi, Ann, Alex, Melissa, Alicia, Diane, Lot, Renee, Sam Weller, Sam Jemielty, Shelly Ridenouer, Susan, Laurie and fellow artists and dreamers at the New Leaf, Marion, Paul, Rose, Mr. Hubert Selby, Mr. C. Michael Curtis, Mr. Johnny Cash, Mr. Link Wray, Dr. Michael Schnur, Dr. Morales, Cook County Hospital, Columbia College Fiction Writing Department, Todd and Ashley Baxter, the New City, especially Elaine, Dan Sinker, and Johnny and Johanna at Akashic.

  ghost town

  Out of nowhere, I did what I ought not to. I thought of the girl I loved, waited for my chance, then robbed the liquor store where I worked. I got in my car, sped away, imagining the howl of sirens where no sirens were.

  The highway itself was dark as hell and led up to the sky.

  There was no room for headlight beams among the silver stars. Cat’s eyes. That’s how they glowed. Thick gray eaves of fog hung all along. There was no sign of anything around. No sign of providence or luck. It was like some lonesome dream where it’s just you and your desire, left out to burn in the dark.

  Did you ever watch the sky at night all over a lonely road?

  Night can be the emptiest, most hollow thing you might ever feel driving toward your home, at fifty miles an hour, with an open bottle of port and the liquor store’s returns for the night and that sweet plastic-faced Virgin Mary staring down at you from her all-fiery position on top of the red vinyl dash. No, there might not be any room for your poor thieving dreams in that incorruptible night, at all.

  The Virgin did a little curtsy as I pulled off the highway and straight down La Harpie Road. The black vinyl steering wheel was loose in my greasy hands. My fingers were slick with my own sweat.

  I had never stolen, really stolen, before.

  I never had the need.

  It’s strange the things a desperate man will do to keep sane.

  It’s strange the things a desperate man will do to keep himself from feeling so desperate in the first place. My mouth was full of spit and cheap liquor. It tasted like old steeple dust. Streetlights flashed somewhere up ahead. I could hear the dtt-dtt-dtttt stutter of the wheels over the rough pavement, rattling along to the poor mechanisms in my mind. My eyes began to shut. I needed to sleep. A nice soft place to hide. The engine gave a little start. I opened my eyes.

  Then this pretty lady walked right in front of the car.

  No.

  Sweet Jesus, no.

  In those still moments, I could see her soft round face; her dress was long and pale blue. Her neck was thin and made her seem about as real as some shadow. Her lips made a little helpless move as the headlights fell across her face.

  There wasn’t any time to stop.

  The wheel went dead right in my hands.

  The baby carriage this lady pushed met the cool steely grill and shot straight up into the dark night sky, losing itself among all that pleasant distance and the sparkle of the silver stars. Good night, the tiny round wheels seemed to say, as they spun around. Good night, like I was falling right into a kind of dream.

  Then it was all over. Then it was as good as done.

  I fell out of the car and vomited all over my dull black shoes, right before the night moved in straight through my eyes and sore mouth, knocking me down, pulling me along some desperate road out of my body, out of my own unhappy life, and straight up to Pontiac for a three-to-five bid for manslaughter and reckless driving. My old boss at the liquor store was Christian enough not to press charges for robbery, seeing me sunken in the sad state I had fallen.

  “The prisoner will be remanded to the State of Illinois Department of Corrections until his sentence has been served or until the courts see fit for his release …”

  That night played over in my dreams every evening like an awful jukebox song. I would try to fix it all in my head, stopping just a foot or so short, keeping my eyes open long enough to see this poor lady with her baby carriage, her pale skin lit up with fear and the certainty of that unwieldy moment, her brown hair hanging long down her back, the twisted knot at the end somehow sealing all our fates, and me, me, gripping the steering wheel tighter or hitting the brakes sooner. Somehow I would try to trick myself so it didn’t happen and that sky never fell apart, but those still seconds always ended the same: the sound of the engine spinning right through my ears, pulling all the blood straight out of my body, and that tiny blue carriage being knocked up into the night, like it was so light and empty and hollow and was being lifted by the invisible hand of Solomon, straight up, disappearing among the brightest of the stars, taking its place in a fixed spot laid out by Jesus or the Virgin or some fleeting angel somewhere above, just before it all faded to black and was done.

  No events before that night mattered anymore.

  Those dark little moments suddenly held everything.

  All the things that would follow would come from that single hopeless second in all of the heartlessness of space and time. All those things would send me straight through my acquaintance with the old state pen and Junior Breen and would forever change the life I would then lead.

  old tattoos

  They gave me back my full Christian name and my own clothes and three miserable old Viceroy Golds. I had hidden them in the lining of my red suit coat. They were the stalest cigarettes I ever tasted, I swear. There were some little nicotine ghosts with unfiltered moans that drifted up
within that smoke because those goddamn cigarettes were so old.

  They gave me back my full name and the life I had lost, but still that baby carriage rolled on cold through my head. It rocked and wavered right past me as I wandered out of those penitent iron gates and back to being a sovereign man. I bought myself a vanilla shake at the Dairy Queen right away and sucked it down slow, holding that straw between my teeth until it was all gone and just a cold feeling along my teeth. Then I bought myself a bus ticket for the passenger line home and took a seat up near the front.

  That trip home was kind to me as an open wound.

  I sat still in my seat, watching this other con I knew, Jimmy Fargo, feeling up his sweaty home-fried girl, undressing her right on the bench in front of me, trying to give her the time right on those awful gray cloth seats. Jimmy Fargo’s girl was a plump redhead with a pleasant round face and a white blouse unbuttoned all the way down to show her ample bosom and freckled white flesh. There was a wave of pure undulation as ol’ Jimmy unclasped her bra. It echoed along my mouth and in my own head.

  “Hey, now, watch it back there!” the old buzzard of a bus driver shouted over his shoulder. “Or I’ll stop in the next town and turn you over to the cops and they’ll send you right back to the old pen.”

  Jimmy snarled a little and nuzzled his sweet’s rouge-stained cheek. I wondered if there was something in his thin eyes that gave him away. Something that gave some accurate sign, some portal of his time spent behind locked prison metal doors. I wondered if the same gray halo hung over my own head. Maybe it was his haircut. Trimmed a little too straight. A little too thin above the ears. My own hair was cut in a high and tight pompadour, trimmed expertly by Darcell, the prison’s only barber, who would do a real right cutting job on you if you slipped him a generous tip.

  Two years and ten months had faded right away like old skin left dead in the sheets. There was nothing in that time that made me think I’d been forgiven. There was nothing that made me think I’d ever be able to breathe without hearing that baby’s soft name.

  Hyacinth.

  Sent straight up to the sky.

  Those letters were burned in my mind in a way I could never forget. The way it had always been figured for me, it had only been a matter of time before I ended up in the pen anyway. Looking back, it seemed my whole life kind of led up to that single moment, accidental and horrible as it was.

  They let me go and I took a job back in my hometown of La Harpie, Illinois. There were still some folks that had once known my own old man, Rowdy Lemay, as a decent hog farmer and either didn’t remember where his son had gone or never knew exactly why they had both left in the first place. In a small town, rumors tended to circulate and die pretty fast. The problem with that was people might forget what horrible thing it was you did but still remembered your name with a kind of undistinguished shame. It’s a thing you can see go dark in other people’s eyes and faces. It was a thing I’d expected to find in anyone that had once known me back home.

  My own mother had split town when I was ten. My old man had moved away after I had been sent to the pen and now lived somewhere south of Minneapolis. There was no pretty gal or weepy-eyed father waiting outside those concrete-and-wire gates for me. I would be going home to a place where none of my own blood was living and where most everyone else disregarded or completely mistrusted me.

  That bus had a sugary smell like sleep.

  I fought the whole way between unsettling, unwholesome dreams.

  I startled myself awake. I wiped my face and looked down at my hands, worn, but well-scrubbed and clean. Everything was fine. Someone mumbling something right in my ear.

  “The only thing you’re missing there is gasoline,” he whispered. This crazy old man beside me gave a little smile. Then he gave a gentle wink. We were already within the city limits. Nearly at the bus station on Trotter Road.

  “Do you need any gas?”

  This old guy had a dirty red gasoline can sitting in his lap. His eyes were black, his lips were pale. There were flies sticking to his sweat. Beneath the stink of his breath, there was the faintest odor of gasoline rising up from the can that shook in his lap. “This here gas is only five dollars.”

  “No. No thanks.” I smiled. There was always some kind of poor fellow on the bus. Always some sort of stranger or something unsettling like that.

  “This is premium gasoline.”

  I stared out the dirty windows. It was already getting dark. I shook my head, feeling it turn down in my gut.

  La Harpie.

  A place of a kind of quiet villainy and secret lust. A place where the dirty dreams of every twelve-year-old man-child were visible on the bus station’s bathroom walls in hand-scrawled tattoos of ladies with oversized breasts and inappropriate female genitalia, inaccurately portrayed as a singularly dangerous triangle of doom. Those kinds of drawings set me up for a world of confusion.

  I stared out the huge glass windshield and frowned.

  A pretty girl walked right in front of the bus.

  Jesus—no.

  The bus heaved to a stop, burning up its brakes, almost running the pretty lady down where she stood, tall upon her cheap high heels. The girl just shook her head and straightened her white blouse. Those breathy pneumatic doors opened with a hush and she climbed on up.

  “Nearly ran you down, missy.” The gray-toothed bus driver frowned. The pretty lady just gave a little smile.

  “Then you might’ve mussed up my skirt.”

  The bus driver gave a weak chuckle and took her fare. She held her black suitcase at her side and took a seat across from me.

  The girl was really something. A nice toast-and-butter kind of gal. Her eyes were big and brown, her hair was dark black like fine molasses and ran in curls down to her shoulders. Her whole neck was covered in little beads of sweat. There was a tiny white collection of her perspiration along her blouse’s thin collar. I could see her delicate white brassiere moving beneath. I could hear her underwear as she crossed her legs.

  My god, I hadn’t touched a woman in nearly three years. My hands began to tremble. I began to feel like a real stranger, impure and swarthy as hell. The bus shook a little as it moved. This lady just flipped her curly hair over the other shoulder and stared down at her feet. Then she looked up. Then she looked me right in the face.

  “I know you, don’t I?”

  “I don’t think so,” I grunted. I turned and held my breath and looked straight ahead. My face began to get all red and hot.

  “No, I think I know your name,” this woman whispered. “Isn’t it Luce Lemay?”

  “Sure is.” I grinned. “How’d you happen to know that?”

  “We’ve met before. My name is Charlene Dulaire.”

  “I’m sure I would have remembered meeting a pretty lady like you,” I whispered.

  The lady blushed a little, then stared hard at my face. She looked down at my arms, along the back of my sweaty hands to my wrists.

  “I do know you.” Her thin black eyelashes fluttered just once. “I know those tattoos.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Her eyes were bright as she ran her fingers over my wrist, up my arm. Her touch was so light, so soft. I felt my stomach curl into a knot. There was a dark black tattoo of a sacred heart burning along my forearm. She smiled.

  “You’ve had those for a while, haven’t you?”

  “Since I was about sixteen or so.”

  Her soft face blushed red like two perfectly round apples turning hard on her cheeks.

  “You used to make it with my older sister in high school.”

  “How’s that?” I mumbled. My face was creaking with humiliation.

  “Ullele. That’s my older sister’s name. You used to sneak into her bedroom and make it with her on Sunday nights when our parents were at Mass. My Aunt Fiona, remember her, the one who thought she had a bird living in her chest, she just kept getting crazier and crazier, so my folks would go to church every Sunday and light a can
dle. Then you’d sneak in up the tree and climb in my sister’s room. Me and my other sisters used to listen to you doing it through the heating vents.”

  “Jesus.” This girl, Ullele, her eyes were dark and round and brown, her legs were thin and long, but there was some problem with her teeth. There were three or four extra teeth that made her mouth look huge. It was a horrible thing to see that poor girl smile. Her daddy owned a used car lot in town and was known as Milford Dulaire, the Used Car King of the Greater Southern Illinois and Northern Kentucky Area. He was a tall thin man who hated me more than you could ever believe.

  “Which sister are you?” I asked.

  “The littlest one. I remember my father wanted to murder you. He really did. He told my sister to stay away from your kind. He called you a hood. He said you were born with those tattoos.” She looked away, down at her feet. Those big brown eyes got sad. “He shook his head when he heard about you in that trouble a few years ago.”

  I gave a frown. I felt like I couldn’t breathe at all.

  “That was a few years ago all right …” I said in a kind of sigh. “It was all some kind of accident … it was all some kind of mistake I made …”

  “My older sister cried all night when she heard you’d been sent away. Cried all night and through the better part of a day.

  Nearly left a running stream in her bed there were so many tears. But that’s Ullele for you. She cries sometimes when the sun’s too bright. She’ll cry in the middle of the day for missing the night.” Charlene gave a little smile and stared up into my face.

  “Looks like you made it through it okay. I mean to say, you still look good. How long were you in for?”

  “Three years,” I replied. “Three longest years of my own short life.” This pretty girl was so smooth and soft. I wanted to press my fingers along her lips and kiss her chin more than anything. I wanted to feel something good beside my skin. But now she knew. No parole board could make me a different man in any beauty’s big brown eyes.

  “Did you ever get married to that girl?” Charlene asked.