So Audrey, Caeli, and I sat on the floor in Caeli’s parlor with mugs of hot chocolate and a bowl of Toll House cookies, telling stories. Caeli said she spent every summer of her youth with Brenda Lee riding their horses Ermine and Blast through the majestic purple mountains of Mississippi. At night, after a chuck-wagon supper and showers, they’d sit out on the porch of the ranch house, which was owned by Brenda’s record company. They’d drink lemonade, watch the fireflies, and admire the pretty cowboys smoking cigarettes outside the bunkhouse. On one of those nights, Brenda sang “My Daddy Is Only a Picture” for Caeli as the sun went down in the west. “I guess I didn’t have to say ‘in the west.’ As the sun set. As the blood-red sun set.”
Audrey said, “What did Brenda wear to bed?”
“Flannel pajamas with cowgirls on them. I still cry every time I remember that night.” Caeli sang about the angels taking Daddy to heaven and blotted her eye with a tissue.
Audrey recalled the evening she spent with St. Gerard Majella in 1753. St. Gerard could be in two places at the same time, so while he was on his knees in supplication in the monastery chapel, he was also in the vineyard teaching Audrey to fly. Audrey told us that Gerard was very light and hollow-boned, and when he lifted off the ground, he sounded like someone shaking out a pillowcase. I heard sirens coming up O’Connell Street. Audrey said how you fly is you empty yourself. Emptiness is purity. It’s not easy to do, of course. You have to release your thoughts through your pores and let the light shine in. When you’re pure enough, you will rise off the ground. And then all you do is look to where you want to go. The body follows the eyes.
Before I could launch into my story about watching the northern lights in the Yukon with Muhammad Ali, the pair of us like giants in this village of diminutive and gracious Eskimos, the sirens from the street went quiet, and we realized we had stopped hearing them, and now their absence was unsettling. Flashing red lights stunned the parlor windows. Caeli touched her throat. “Violet’s heart.”
We heard a ruckus on the front porch and then the clomping of feet on the stairs. Red Morrissey yelled, “Fire!” We ran to the kitchen. Caeli felt the door, sniffed the air. We hurried down the back stairs to the sidewalk. Out front, we saw the medics loading someone into the ambulance. Red told us, “False alarm” and sipped his beer. Blackie said, “She’s going to be all right.”
I said, “Your mother?”
“Your mother.” He held my arm, told me to stay here and watch Audrey. He’d go to the hospital.
“I’ll come with,” Caeli said.
I said, “What happened?”
Blackie said, “Where’s your sister?”
I found her on the back porch, Deluxe cuddled in her lap.
She said, “You were just going to let him fry.”
“I forgot.”
Audrey kissed Deluxe on his head. He yawned, laid his chin on Audrey’s arm, blinked at me, and shut his eyes.
I TOLD Violet I should call my dad.
“Does he have a telephone in his truck?”
“I’ve got an emergency number.”
“Let’s wait till Blackie gets home with the news.”
Audrey and I were in our pajamas and up way past our already liberal bedtimes, but we all knew we wouldn’t be going to school in the morning, and I found it a bit exhilarating. We’d be sleeping in Garnet’s room, me on the bed and Audrey and Deluxe under it. Right then, Audrey was in the parlor with Red, playing Crazy Eights and watching the Bruins on TV. Audrey loved hockey. Her favorite expression those days was, “Jesus saves! Esposito rebounds!” Violet and I were at the kitchen table, both of us peeking occasionally at the Kit-Cat clock and listening to the phone for that faint click that came just before the ring. I was drinking Welchade and nibbling on nonpareils. Violet drank her Salada tea. I read her the saying on the tea bag’s paper tag: A man who says his wife can’t take a joke forgets that she took him.
Violet asked me about Veronica. “She’s your girl, isn’t she?”
I shrugged. “I like her.”
“Her brother was killed.”
“In Vietnam.”
“That’s ten boys from Requiem.” She shook her head.
When Veronica’s brother Pinky came home from boot camp, before they shipped him to Asia, he took a ride on the back of Duke Duquette’s Electra Glide. The two of them rode out to the reservoir, smoked some dope, and talked about the chopper shop they’d open after Pinky’s tour. On the drive back Duke took a turn off Bell Ave. a little too sharply, hit a patch of sand, and laid the bike down. It didn’t seem so bad. Pinky got right up. Some angry-looking scrapes on his left arm, a sore elbow, but otherwise okay. He was thinking how a broken leg might not have been entirely unwelcomed—keep his ass out of ’Nam—and he joked to Duke how they’d have to try that one more time. But Duke didn’t laugh. His forehead had been split open like a melon, juices leaking to the pavement. Veronica’s mom told everyone who would listen that her son’s survival was a miracle. God wasn’t finished with Pinky Carrigan, not just yet. God had plans for Pinky, megaplans. A week after Duke’s funeral, Pinky caught a Trailways bus back to Fort Dix.
For a while after Pinky died (friendly fire) I was afraid to talk to Veronica. Finally she cornered me in Charlie’s. I told her I was sorry. She said she couldn’t get over the loss. “It’s not that he can’t be with me. He always will be. It’s that I can’t be with him.”
I changed the subject and asked Violet how come she liked to read all those romance novels.
“They take me away.” She told me she’d probably read a hundred thousand or so romance novels, and her all-time favorite was called Her Persian Lover. I told her she should write one herself, and then Blackie could film it.
She shook her head. “A movie’s a lazy way to tell a story.”
“Did you and Red have a romance?”
“We weren’t thrown together like in the books. We grew up together. Next-door neighbors. Twelve years in the same classrooms. From when we were toddlers everyone knew we’d get married. So did we. We had no black moments, nothing that prevented us from being together. No mystery and no mayhem. No outside agitator, no stumbling block, no monkey wrench.”
“You got the happy ending.”
“We did.” Violet stared into her cup. She folded her napkin in a triangle. “I don’t expect romance in my life. I’m just glad it’s out there in the world. It makes me happy to know that.”
I HAD been sitting up with Red in the parlor when I nodded off on the couch and dreamed I was in an empty room that had no doors or windows. I didn’t know if it was day or night, winter or summer. I did know that somewhere inside was a source of light because I could see, but I could see no shadow. I also knew that I was dreaming, and I tried my best to insinuate an exit into that room, the way you can do when you know it’s a dream. They knew what they were doing, the people who invented the jail cell. And then I thought, I’ll get out the same way I got in, only how did I get in? A trapdoor. Of course. I felt around the floor for the telltale groove, and then the lights went out, not in the dream, in the parlor, and the sudden darkness woke me up. I heard the whisper of vinyl as Red settled back into his easy chair. He said, “Everybody knows that I drink, but nobody understands my thirst.”
And then we heard Blackie saying goodnight to Caeli on the porch. He came in and sat on the couch. Red slid his whiskey glass and the bottle across the coffee table to Blackie. Blackie said, “She’s had her stomach pumped. She’ll be fine in the morning. She took some pills, then changed her mind and called for help.”
I said, “What time is it in Louisiana?”
ROSCOE DESCHENES’s WIFE asked me who was calling, please. I told her I was Rainy’s son. “I’ve heard all about you,” she said. She told me her name was Stevie, asked me to hold on a sec, and told someone to get his face out of the dog’s dish. “How many times do I have to say it?” She apologized for the interruption. She said, “Lord, it’s like some people were raised on p
ig farms.”
“Could you give my father a message?”
“Be happy to.”
“Tell him to call me. It’s an emergency, tell him.”
“Hold on, sugar.” She put the phone down. I heard a child barking.
“Johnny.”
“Dad? What are you doing…What’s going on?”
“Visiting. I dropped in on a friend. Passing through town, thought I’d be sociable. In the neighborhood and all.”
“Well, you have to come home,” I said, and I told him why.
“You two okay?”
“We’re with the Morrisseys.”
“All right. I’ve got a load to dump in Jackson, and then I’ll bobtail it home.”
“Who’s that growling?”
Dad cupped the phone, said, “Stevie, don’t you think the boy ought to be in bed by now?” And then he asked me for Mom’s room number at the hospital, told me to go to bed, he’d call Mom and me in the morning.
We said goodnight. Before he hung up I heard him say, “He bit me in the leg, Stevie. I think he broke the skin.”
I borrowed a flashlight from Blackie and took it to bed. I read from a volume of Garnet’s diaries. This one’s title was Perpetual Diary and Daily Reminder and was one of four. The diaries weren’t hidden away. Garnet had often read to me from them. Audrey snored beneath the bed. On October 4, 1967, Garnet wrote, Everyone thinks when I pull one of my stunts, as Mom calls them, it’s because I want the world to look at me. I do want them to look at what I do, so that they don’t see who I am. Today I imagined that my parents and brother died in a terrible accident, and I had to identify the bodies. I did not feel sad. I felt tall. The Red Sox lost today. Thing 1 is despondent.
Concessions
I WAS KEEPING MY mother’s appointment with Dr. Christian Reininger since she wasn’t up to it. Her teeth throbbed, she told me; her eyes burned, and all of her internal organs were pressing up against her skin. Miss Teaspoon came along with me so I wouldn’t feel like a juvenile delinquent, not being in school and all. People would be staring at me if I were alone, I knew, wondering what no good I was up to, and one of those gapers just might be the truant officer, an avenging angel in a wool suit and fedora, a character I’d read about in stories and seen in the movies, and figured was likely patrolling the mean streets of Requiem, hunting down wayward children, exiling them to reform school. Only fresh kids, Violet told me, chippies and hoodlums, roamed the streets on school days. And I knew she was right.
I had, in fact, a year earlier, skipped school with Chas Wrixon. I had no good reason to skip, just that Chas asked me nicely, said he didn’t want to be alone. Chas, on the other hand, had good reason to hate school. The nuns were forever sprinkling him with holy water to drive out the devils and asking the rest of us to pray for the salvation of his soul. We played pool at the Strand with two brothers named Brothers, Tee and Dee, who beat us like yard dogs and laughed at our incompetence. We ran into a guy that Chas knew named Bobby Sham, short for Shamgochian. Bobby Sham was this compact guy in his fifties, maybe. Hard to say. Trim, tidy, and snug. He was shorter than we were, but fully grown. He was someone you’d think of if you needed a portable man for any reason. His brown hair was cut in a boy’s regular, short sides and a half-assed quiff up front set with Brylcreem or Wildroot Cream Oil or something. His skin was flaky and raw. He limped enough to need a cane, and he carried a walnut one with a pink rubber cup at its tip. His green plaid shirt was buttoned at the collar. The index and middle fingers of his left hand were stained with nicotine. He lived in the Hotel Royal on Front Street in a room over a corset shop. Which was where we ended up. Chas seemed right at home. He opened the top drawer of Bobby Sham’s dresser and took out a deck of playing cards with pictures of naked women where the pips should be.
The room was dim and smelled of yeast, like maybe something was fermenting in a closet, only there was no closet, only a metal armoire with a busted door. The only chair in the room was attached to a telephone table on which sat a ticking alarm clock and an old Brownie camera. A black plastic transistor radio sat on the windowsill and a shadeless wall lamp hung above the iron rails of the bed. The springs of the bed squeaked when Chas and I sat. Bobby Sham never unzipped his poplin jacket, never stopped smoking, never moved from the center of the room, never smiled, not even when he laughed. When he laughed, he coughed. Chas never took his eyes off those cards. Bobby Sham asked Chas about his job. Every Sunday Chas worked for his uncle Ray at the Proutyville Rod & Gun Club, loading charcoal skeet onto a trap in a bunker. Eight hours of that in the freezing cold. Chas said it was okay. Bobby Sham aimed his cane like it was a shotgun and followed the flight of an imaginary pheasant across the room to Chas’s face and fired. Bang! Chas fell back on the bed. I noticed a dull and dented Brand X saucepan on a hot plate on the dresser. I wondered why Bobby Sham had allowed this despair to take over his life. I felt the sun through the window on the side of my face. Bobby Sham was saying something, but all I heard was a humming. He hung the cane over his elbow and closed his eyes. I told Chas we should leave. He told me to wait for him downstairs.
We ended up later at the lunch counter in the Trailways bus terminal drinking chocolate frappes. Chas told me he had enough money to get a bus to Bismarck. Where the hell is Bismarck? It’s colder there than here, I told him. North Dakota. He said he had a good mind to hop on the bus and leave anyway. I told him he was having too much fun right here in Requiem. He said, I am? And then he said, You’re kidding, right? We watched Slim Diggins load luggage onto the departing buses. Slim was six-foot-four and thin as a crane. He had no chin to speak of, was all nose and larynx, and his nose was running. He wore his Trailways parka unbuttoned and an aviator cap with fur earflaps, but he didn’t snap the button on the chin strap, so the flaps swept out from his head like wings. Somehow his cigarette clung to his glossy lower lip even as he talked to himself a mile a minute.
Everyone in Requiem had a theory about Slim: he was a millionaire; he’d been an orphan; he’d been raised by nuns in a convent; he was the illegitimate son of the actor who played Joe Palooka; he owned a dozen triple-deckers on Harp Hill; he’d been a child prodigy, a mathematical genius, summa cum laude at Req Tech, who either: (a) took a one-way trip on Owsley acid, or (b) was exposed to ungodly amounts of radiation in the Bikini Atoll H-bomb tests.
Slim took a break and sat at the counter beside us. Chas offered to buy Slim a coffee. Slim ignored him three times. Chas said, You don’t have to be an asshole. I said we should probably leave. Before we did, Chas whispered something—Fuck you, I suppose—into Slim’s left ear. Slim didn’t flinch.
I would meet Slim again eighteen years later at James Dean’s grave in Fairmount, Indiana. This is kind of hard to believe, I know, but it happened. I was driving back to Requiem from Arkansas, where I was going to grad school. (This was after the dissolution of the marriage.) I figured to drive ten hours the first day, which would take me to Indiana. I thought, What would I want to see in Indiana? So I drove to Fairmount and checked into the Hoosier Motor Court. In the morning I got directions to Park Cemetery. Once there, I crept along the loop road, hoping to find a sign that would direct me to the grave. I parked the car in front of Clystia Ballinger’s final resting place, got out, and surveyed the landscape. I thought if I were an undertaker, where would I bury a movie star? Hmm. I know, I know—in the ground. I didn’t have all day, but I figured I’d wander through the headstones for twenty, thirty minutes and maybe get lucky. Just when I was thinking why don’t they bury them in alphabetical order, I noticed a tall gentleman in a tweed overcoat standing on a low rise a hundred yards away. I didn’t want to interrupt what might be his grieving with my insignificant question. But then I noticed that he wasn’t praying. He was smoking and looking around. As I headed his way, I could see he looked a lot like Slim Diggins, but what were the odds? And then I saw it was Slim Diggins. How could this be? His hair had thinned and gone gray at the temples. I said hi, and he told me
he was standing watch over Jimmy’s grave, and he nodded to the plot beside us.
I said, “James Dean’s?”
“Someone’s stolen the headstone.”
“You’re Slim Diggins.”
He seemed pleased that I knew him, but didn’t ask me how I did. He said, “I flew in as soon as I heard the news.” He told me he was a family friend; in fact, the family considered him one of their own. Mark—whoever Mark was—had driven him out to the cemetery this morning. Slim was staying in Jimmy’s old room. A patrol car drove through the gate, and Slim waved to the policeman, who waved back. They’d been roommates, he and Jimmy, back in New York in the fifties. He said, “Juvenile delinquents.”
“What?”
“Took it. Took the headstone.”
I never saw him again. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. I Googled him just now—what the hell. Did not match any documents.
MISS TEASPOON and I stopped for lunch at J. J. Newberry’s. She slid her purse onto the shelf beneath the counter. We ordered grilled-cheese sandwiches and Frostie root beers. Miss Teaspoon said she was happy to be living in this day and age when two pals could relax and have someone cook their meals while they chatted and watched people.
I said I thought it was a bad idea to have the cosmetic department so close to the lunch counter. All I could smell was lilac. “Makes my head ache. Makes me think of my gran’s bedroom. It’s like I’m back there again tugging on the white tufts of her chenille bedspread. I can see the white coat button at the end of the pull string for the light, the wall socket without a faceplate. The snow globe on her bureau.”
“And it smells all lilac-y?”
“They used to make me nap in there in a crib when I was little. Me, a bottle of warm milk, and a stuffed green clown.”
Requiem, Mass. Page 11
