Beaming Sonny Home

by Cathie Pelletier

  “I wish he’d let them both go,” Marlene said. “Get this circus over with.” Now Mattie watched as Sonny’s silhouette appeared in the same window of the same door, Sonny’s balcony, his patio, his terrace, his courtyard. Mattie knew that, behind the window screen, he was again wearing his cheek-to-cheek smile. It had always been tough, even in times of great stress and difficulty, for Sonny to go anywhere without that smile. It was that very smile that used to get him into so much trouble with Lester. How many times had Mattie seen Lester strike the boy just because of that ear-to-ear grin? “Wipe that goddamn smile off your face,” that’s about the only sound advice Lester had ever given the boy. But Mattie also knew something else. She could sense it right through her skin as she watched the outline of her son in the window.

  He’s getting desperate, Mattie thought. She hasn’t turned up from Atlantic City. She hasn’t even called.

  “Remember now,” Sonny’s voice was cautioning from behind the screen. “Just ’cause you can’t see my hands don’t mean there ain’t a gun in them. So don’t try anything foolish.”

  “I doubt it,” said Marlene. “Sonny’s too lazy to hold a gun on anyone. That’d be like lifting weights.” Now the door of the trailer slowly opened an inch or two. Mattie could almost see a physical hush descend upon the crowd. Donna’s face edged into the corner of the picture.

  “Chief Melon has told Sonny Gifford to send out the hostage now, Dan,” she said. “And he seems about to do that. At this point, we don’t know if the released hostage will be Stephanie Bouchard or Vera Temple. Needless to say, Dan, the tension here is quite visible among the police officers as well as this crowd of fans who have turned out to catch a glimpse of Mr. Gifford. Someone seems to be coming out now, Dan!” Donna said excitedly, and then turned to watch the events on the porch.

  “You can be sure he’ll send out the homeliest one,” said Marlene. Mattie’s heart was beating so rapidly she couldn’t reply. If he let one go, there’d be only one left. And when he let that one go, there would be jail time, yes, but it would be over. She would send him bulging packages of cookies and fudge, and a huge stack of those scary comic books he loved so much. Did they allow picture puzzles in prison? If so, she would dig out The Desert with Night Moon, that one puzzle she could never solve, the one with mostly black pieces in it. That would keep Sonny busy for his entire sentence. And what would he get? Surely, with no one harmed, with a judge able to gaze upon that broken heart Sonny was wearing on his sleeve, with good behavior and even more charm, he could be out in a couple years. Especially if that gun he claimed to be toting was a fake one after all. He could start all over. The door opened another six inches. Everyone waited. Reporters were silent, anticipating. And then, to everyone’s astonishment, out trotted the poodle, a prance to its gait, its head held high, as though it were taking part in a beauty contest. It paused on the end of the porch and seemed to be scanning the crowd for a familiar face. One of the police officers scooped it up and, as Mattie watched, a bit of a struggle followed until the policeman threw up his arms and the poodle jumped to the ground.

  “I think it bit him,” said Marlene.

  “You’ll notice it didn’t bite Sonny,” Mattie noted for the record. He did have that invisible way with animals. Now Sonny seemed to be waving behind his screen. Reporters turned their attention back upon the door, which had again closed.

  “This is a bit embarrassing,” Sonny said from the window, “but it’s getting quite dog dooey in here. It ain’t like he’s a cat, after all, and I can have some litter sent in.” A chorus of questions rose up from the reporters. Why had he not released one of the two women? Sonny raised a silhouetted hand to calm the storm of words coming at him.

  “Well,” Sonny said, “that’s because my guests, these two very lovely ladies, girls from right here in Bangor, Maine—and let me say here and now that Bangor has some of the prettiest girls I personally have ever seen—these two young women are not exactly agreeable about which one should go.”

  “They both want to go?” a reporter shouted from the pack.

  “On the contrary,” said Sonny. “I don’t want to brag or nothing, gentlemen, but they both want to stay. And just for the record, I’m going to expand my Great Americans list to include these two fine female specimens.” He closed the door. His silhouette disappeared from the window. The crowd roared in jubilation. Mattie smiled. He had it, all right. Sonny Gifford could talk the Virgin Mary into dropping her pants.

  “He released the poodle?” Marlene asked. Mattie found herself smiling. She didn’t want to since it was too serious a thing, but she couldn’t help it. The laughter was involuntary, a nervous laughter that came from somewhere down in her stomach and was simply unstoppable. While the world had waited with bated breath, Sonny turned the poodle loose! The phone rang loudly and Marlene rose.

  “Let it ring!” Mattie said sternly. She was no longer interested in what her Mattagash neighbors might have to say.

  “What if it’s Sonny?” asked Marlene.

  “It ain’t gonna be Sonny,” said Mattie, “so let it ring.”

  Donna’s face was back on the screen.

  “This appears to be some kind of a joke on Mr. Gifford’s part, Dan,” she said. “Chief of Police Melon doesn’t seem to be very pleased with how these negotiations have turned out.” A man appeared behind Donna’s back, unbeknownst to her, and waved his arms frantically at the camera. As Donna stepped out of the picture, the camera’s eye fell upon the man’s chest. He was wearing a T-shirt which announced: I Visited Bangor and All I Got to Show for It Is Two Women and a Dog.

  “Make that two women,” said Marlene. “He’s gonna have to change his T-shirt now that the dog’s gone. But they can print T-shirts in an hour these days.”

  “Sonny! Sonny! Sonny!” The pack was now howling.

  “I feel sorry for them hostages,” Marlene said. “This is like what happened to Patty Hearst. It’s brainwashing, is what it is.” Yes, it was brainwashing all right. But Sonny had been doing it to women ever since he grew his first mustache and his arms filled in with taut muscles, and his legs grew long enough to make him tall and give him that sexy swagger. And his voice developed that little pain in it when he talked about life and such things, a pain that so many women felt it was their duty to take away. His mother was one of those women.

  Suddenly Mattie needed air, good old Mattagash air wafting up from the Mattagash River. She rose without a word to Marlene and went on out through the screen door. It slammed behind her. The porch was cool, caught up in the shadows left behind by the setting sun. On the porch, she could think. If only Elmer Fennelson were there for her to talk to, for her to say, That boy’s got to be careful, Elmer. He’s carrying things too far this time. It’s getting way out of control, growing bigger than something he can hold on to. I can smell what’s going on, Elmer. I can smell it like it’s something coming from the swamp, like them blue flags Sonny was always picking for me. That crowd is trying to make my boy a hero, and that’s a job he ain’t gonna turn down. That’s a job Sonny Gifford’s been applying for all his life. This was the fear she was feeling in her heart, this knowledge of an upcoming sacrifice. There was a crowd turned out for Sonny all right, but another name for crowd was mob, and to Mattie they were one and the same: folks with nothing better to do, folks who should be home, folks sniffing for a little blood.

  “Elmer Fennelson, where are you?” Mattie said to the curve of tarred road stretching past her house on its way to Elmer’s. Nothing answered, except the whine of a distant truck that must have been climbing the portage. “I wish you were here, Elmer,” Mattie said to the river that was winding itself away from Elmer’s house, in the direction of the ocean. “I wish you were here because I think there’s a fire being lit under Sonny’s pants in a big way.”

  For a long time, Mattie sat on the porch. Down in the swamp, night peepers were making their racke
t, sounding almost like a pond of ducks. Stars were sprinkled overhead, a light dusting, overshadowed by the brightness of Venus. Now and then, a car passed on the road in a rattle of sound, then disappeared again, some Mattagasher headed to or from home. Mattie sank down into her rocker, but she didn’t rock any, even though rocking had always soothed her, the way she remembered feeling in those early days when her own mother had actually rocked her. Those days before the kitchen knife and the fake stomach cancer and the jagged wrists and that blood-red valentine Mattie had made for nothing. But this wasn’t a time for soothing. It was a time for sorting out the laundry. She stared at Venus, hanging like a crystal ball in the western sky. Funny how she had lived all her life thinking Venus was some magnificent star. Why hadn’t anyone told her before? Why did she have to be so far into her life before her son-in-law Henry Plunkett would point up at that shiny ball and say, “That there’s Venus”? Sitting in her rocker, Mattie felt as though maybe her life would’ve been different somehow, if she had known. She felt a little like she did the day she found out Lester had been sleeping with so many women all those years and everyone knew but her. It was a feeling of being left out of a shiny new secret.

  “Venus,” Mattie said softly, and now she could hear the relentless nighthawks eating up their share of flying ants and mosquitoes. A truck rumbled past and Mattie heard radio music blasting from within its cab. “Sonny,” she then said, as though maybe the two words were one and the same. Maybe she hadn’t known Sonny all those years, either. After all, he was a boy without a name, the way Venus had been without a name, all those sixty some years it had dangled before Mattie’s eyes, dangled like that shiny pendant a hypnotist swings. But that was how Mattie had lived her life, wasn’t it? She had lived it like a woman in a stupor. It was important that she outwit her husband, Lester, outwit poor little birdbrained Martha Monihan. And she had been so content on doing so that the years had dissolved before her eyes. Her life had come and was nearly gone, and what did she have to show for it?

  “Venus,” Mattie said again, and settled further down into her sweater. But not even that soft Canadian wool—this was a sweater Mattie had knit for herself, and let’s just see one of her girls knit something—not even her handmade sweater could thwart the chill that was creeping into her bones. Trouble was in the air, trouble as real as the nighthawks, as real as the two bats that were now circling the night-light, looking for moths and bugs. Sonny had taken his hostages on Monday and now here it was Wednesday night. Mattie had felt the tension mounting as she watched each news segment, tension growing as the crowd grew, silently, the way mold grows on bread. She could see Chief Melon’s face go from relaxed and in control to edgy and nervous, his skin stretched on his face as though it were a wide elastic band. And the people who had turned up to cheer Sonny onward, well, that was trouble walking on two legs. A crowd of trouble. And now Sonny had done the unforgivable. He had made the chief of police and his entire department look like fools on television, in front of everyone. Mattie had felt, up to that point, that Chief Melon saw inside Sonny, too, almost the way she did. He had spent all that time on the phone with her boy and, surely, he had come to realize that Sonny Gifford’s actions were forty percent broken heart and sixty percent county fair. Sonny couldn’t turn his back on an audience, even if he was lovesick. But now things had changed. Mattie thought about Sonny’s words earlier that day, when he told his listeners that he must boldly go where those Star Trek people went. It reminded her of another piece of the puzzle, something else Sonny had done as a child. He must have been about ten years old, as well as Mattie could remember, and he had had a bad dream, in the heart of a winter’s night. Mattie could remember waking to his cries of terror and seeing the bed empty beside her, Lester not yet home. The latter wasn’t unusual, but Sonny’s cries were. In his room, she found him out of his bed, cuddled in a little heap on the floor, elbows and arms shielding his head as though something or someone was trying to hit him. Mattie reached out to touch him, calm him, eventually to hold him. But the minute he felt her hand upon his body, he cried out, “Beam me up, Scotty! Please, beam me up!” And Mattie took it almost as an insult. It had always seemed to her that Sonny was in search of a family, someplace he would feel safe. Some planet he could live on in peace. And this was in spite of all the love she had personally given him. But it wasn’t enough. He needed Lester’s love, too, and the love of his sisters. He needed to feel comfortable enough in his own home that when he drew pictures at school of his family, he could draw them all in one room, instead of placing himself apart from them. And there he was, wishing to be aboard the Enterprise rather than living in Mattagash, Maine. Daring to conquer new worlds, rather than abide in pain in the old one. He was looking for a father in the likes of Captain Kirk. Maybe a sister in that black woman who wore the short skirts. Yet, to this day, Mattie couldn’t be sure where Sonny’s pain had come from. Maybe in the way big, looming Lester had made him feel tiny as a mite. Maybe that was it. And no matter how big Mattie tried to make Sonny feel afterward, it never seemed to do any good. Maybe that was the answer, Mattie decided, sitting on her summer porch and gazing at Venus. Maybe that was Sonny’s secret. He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life. He had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face and set about life hoping to become Mattagash, Maine’s Biggest Underachiever. And he had succeeded. But now he was underachieving on television, with a bevy of cops watching him do it, and trouble was floating in the air like a good old river breeze.

  The girls were back, Rita and Gracie. They pulled up to the house in Rita’s big black Buick, the radio playing loudly. Both car doors opened, slammed, feet trod upon the porch, and then they disappeared inside the house without having seen her sitting in the shadows. Her girls were home from the hunt, from the battle, from the assault on Sonny’s life. Mattie released the breath she’d been holding, and it seemed as though even the peepers in the swamp heard her, for they grew still for a moment. A blinking light appeared in the sky above Venus and Mattie saw that it was an airplane. Or maybe it was the Enterprise. She watched as it slowly ate a path across the sky and then disappeared behind the farthest mountain range. The door opened again and Gracie ambled out, with that little bounce to her gait that she seemed to have acquired after Charlie left her for Sally Fennelson.

  “It’s a bit chilly out here, Mama,” she said. “You want me to bring you a coat or something?”

  Mattie shook her head. “Thank you, Gracie, all the same,” she said, “but I got my handmade sweater keeping me warm.” She smiled, and in the light wafting out from the living room window, she saw Gracie smile back. How long had it been since this kind of soft emotion floated between them? But every once in a while, and who knew for what reason, Mattie and her daughters, one at a time, seemed almost ready to bust down all the walls they had put up, those years of architecture. And then a little wind would come up and blow all those good designs away. And it did just then.

  “You ain’t sitting out here planning on sneaking a ride to Bangor, are you?” Gracie asked. “At least, we’ve been inside wondering about just such a thing. You think too much when you’re sitting in your rocker, Mama, and I mean to tell you that you’ve thought up some doozies in your lifetime.” So Gracie had come as a spy after all. Mattie smiled again at her youngest daughter, born in 1954, a mere month after Martha Monihan had stopped by the little mushroom house to announce to her best friend, Mattie Gifford, that Lester was in bed with Eliza Fennelson. Mattie still had an ornamental plate tucked away in her trunk of special things, a birthday gift from Martha, back when they were still in school. The artwork showed two little girls walking hand in hand across a meadow of bluebells. The word Sharing was painted in red swooping letters above their heads. Below their feet, at the bottom of the plate, was the sentence That’s What Good Friends Are For. Mattie had almost laughed that day she ha
d finally tucked the pretty plate away in her trunk, where she wouldn’t have to look at it. I didn’t know you meant sharing husbands, too, Martha, she had thought as she wrapped the plate in tissue paper. And, if she told herself the truth, sitting there in her rocker, with Gracie hovering in the light drifting out of the living room window, she hadn’t been in her best frame of mind to accept Gracie into a burdensome world. She had given birth to Gracie after losing her best friend to her husband. That had been Gracie’s trousseau. Maybe Mattie even sent her a kind of jolt she never got over, right through the umbilical cord, a trait in life that would ensure that her own husband would be unfaithful. After all, why Gracie? Why not the other girls? Yet Henry Plunkett and Wesley Stubbs were as faithful to their wives as husbands could possibly get without being family pets. Only Gracie knew what it was like to wake up at night and feel how cold sheets can get on the empty side of a bed. But it was even wider than that, this scab that grew over their family life, this hideous scar. There was something about how Lester doted on his daughters—they were women, after all—that had always torn at Mattie’s heart. This was true, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there anguish in seeing him tousle their hair, cuddle them onto his lap, tweak their noses, tickle them into silly confessions of childhood pranks? He had stopped touching his wife, stopped touching her in that loving and tender way that takes place in a kitchen, or in a living room, just weeks after they were married. He only touched her in the bedroom, until, with so many other bedrooms to keep warm, he even forgot about her there, too. But what was even worse, or as Mattie came to feel over the years, was that he never touched his boy, Sonny. “Because he’s a boy, that’s why,” Lester would always answer. “We don’t want him turning into a sissy right before our eyes.” But then, the girls courted Lester, didn’t they? Jumping him from behind doors, combing his hair into peculiar styles. All this while Sonny watched from that lonely distance that grew like a field between him and his family. One time, when they were in their early teens, the girls even put makeup on Lester, as a Halloween prank, and then goaded him into wearing a dress. Mattie remembered how she was struck with the fact that Lester was even beautiful as a woman, more beautiful, certainly, than she was. More beautiful than most Mattagash women, what with his full lips and naturally long eyelashes made even longer with mascara. That was the day she put their wedding picture away for good. She tucked it down into the trunk where the ornamental plate and other sad memories were lurking. There was no need to keep it out any longer. For one thing, the marriage had been bogus for years. And for another thing, it had become apparent to Mattie that, beautiful as he was, Lester had been both bride and groom on that day of their marriage. He had razzled and dazzled the troops, while she fought desperately to walk a steady gait in shoes that were killing her.