No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Billy hadn’t said anything, but was angry at Butterworth for nearly a month. It didn’t matter, because his mother found out and marched up to the house on MacQuesten Parkway, demanding to see the owner. He had to stop going to the place, being banned and unable to see Effie, feeling ashamed and hating himself for a while; not forgiving his mother for interfering in his life, having then to wake up in the middle of the night to wet dreams. He suspected, and later confirmed, the fact that Butterworth had finally come to Buck, and Buck had gone to his mother. Maud had gone up and raised hell with Ruby Broadway. Of course, that’s how they became friends, even though Ruby, her hands on her hips, had told Butterworth at the time, “I’m not going to lie to you, Pop. I was two seconds away from smacking that big-tit white bitch for getting into my business, and telling her to suit herself if she thought it was better for her son to beat his meat.” All this Butterworth later confessed.

  Thinking back to meeting Joey at Pendleton had made him recall playing baseball at Hayes and those late-spring days when the wind blew from the south and brought the smell of summer. The diamond’s grass was new and sweet and his muscles felt strong and taut and his soul invincible. But thinking about good things always triggered the horror of his time in combat. Almost twenty years—1970 to 1988—and he still saw the gaping wound in Joey’s chest. It was as if he had no right to feel joy in his life. Seeking respite from the torment, his mind still returned to the raw wounds in Joey’s chest and how he had died. There had been some sort of strife, but it hadn’t been with Joey. He was positive of that, and yet lately the doubts came more frequently and with greater intensity. As if his life didn’t have enough suffering with his missing fingers and Joey’s death, he still saw his father’s face clearly and saw a picture of him lying on the barroom floor, his body twisted so that his arm looked as if it were part of the barstool. His only release from the agony was the memories of Lurleen when they first met.

  It was all so crazy, his life and everything about it; lying there and listening to the music in his mind now that Vidamía was in his life, not quite knowing if the two were connected. She had come in and taken his hand, the ugly hand, the claw, the three-finger monstrosity, had taken it in her own delicate one and walked him slowly but briefly out of the dark. Whenever he ducked back into the tunnel, she’d follow him through the dark fog that was his memories and bring him out again, making him feel safe in the presence of someone kind and good, aware that this precious daughter whom he had somehow created out of his despair understood his life.

  This past year she had grown into her womanhood so that he could see in her the stoic strength of her grandmother Ursula, who had remembered him and was happy to see him when he’d gone to pick Vidamía up at her apartment for their first Christmas together four years ago, the old woman, small, weak, and sickly, actually hugging him and crying, saying how glad she was that he and Vidamía had been reunited. She said she wished things had been different when Elsa was carrying Vidamía and he’d gone back to his family, softening the situation for Vidamía’s sake, even though back then Elsa had been brutally cruel and gone inside her bedroom to get his things together.

  “Elsa should’ve been more patient,” Ursula said. “She should’ve let you see the baby.”

  He’d said it was okay, not to worry. The girl also reminded him of the fragility and conviviality of his own mother, Maud, her other grandmother; all of the wonderful qualities of the two women blended into this wonderful child.

  Lying on the roof of the building, lost in his musings, he recalled once again meeting Lurleen.

  “This here’s Lurleen Meekins. Her people are from right here, but she’s been going to school to the west over near Claymore, near the Missouri border.”

  “How do you do?” she’d said, reaching for his hand, which he kept in the pocket of his jacket. Lurleen lowered her head and smiled shyly when he said hello. The attraction had been instantaneous. She was dressed in a simple, silk-like green-and-blue dress with flowers that outlined her small breasts and waist. Below the curve of her waist she had strong hips and buttocks. Her belly was flat except for a slightly rounded part that made him want to touch her so that he immediately could imagine going up into her, which was the first time he had thought of such things in more than a year.

  Because after living with Elsa those four months when she was pregnant with Vidamía, there had been no one else except some nights he woke up after a dream and the stuff had come out of him as it did in high school; and now as if inside of his being something had awakened and insisted on being sated he felt a deep hunger for Lurleen, who had graduated from college but looked to be about sixteen, though she turned out to be twenty-three, her nose pugged a little like a fighter’s and her lips thick as if she were black, although he knew some black people had thin lips, and her blue eyes large and animal-like, fearful and innocent at the same time, and when she smiled her teeth were perfect, and, a little nervously, she kept pushing her lank, ash-blond hair behind her ears; all of her appearing to him magnetic, drawing him closer to her.

  He had remained at his granduncle’s home three weeks, walking in the woods day after day with Lurleen; some days going into town and sitting at the soda fountain drinking Cokes; she driving the beat-up pickup; people nodding seriously at them; men and boys carrying shotguns and birds or one or two furry animals slung across their backs—rabbits, coons, possums—grinning at them and pointing at their game and then at their mouths and then at him and themselves as if to say that they’d shot the game special for him.

  There were times when he didn’t know whether it was possum or coon he was eating, but he ate everything they put in front of him, the cold mountain air making his appetite blossom; the people sometimes stopping on the clay roads and watching them as they walked or drove by; the young girls smiling happily at them because evidently the word had gotten around that cousin Lurleen was engaged to be married to a boy, a cousin from New York, grandnephew to Frazier Sanderson.

  “That’s right, the banjo maker’s brother.”

  “Harley Sanderson who people say played music with Negroes in Memphis?”

  “That’s right, Frazier’s little brother, Buck, who went to work at the mill in Claymore and then went to Memphis around 1929, ’30?”

  “Yep, that’s him.”

  “And he brought his grandson to hitch him up with the smart, pretty little Meekins girl?”

  “Yep, he sure did.”

  “Reckon that boy better have his britches on good if he’s gonna get hitched to that little gal.”

  The marriage issue had not yet been decided, but Grandpa Buck returned to New York after the first week, reassured that his grandson and Lurleen stood more than a good chance of hitting it off and making a go of it. The end of the third week found Billy sitting with Lurleen in a clearing, the two of them bundled up in sweaters and sitting under a blanket even though it was June, watching the sky and its thousand stars and she pointing out to him the different constellations, like Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Big Bear and Little Bear, though commonly known as the Big and Little Dippers, and focusing on the brightness of Polaris, the North Star, and then others like Cygnus the Swan and Pegasus the Flying Horse, and telling him that if she had a few more years to continue studying she would want to study astronomy, but in the meantime she was reading and studying on her own and did he know that the signs of the zodiac were based on constellations and only Libra wasn’t based on a living thing and did he believe in God.

  He thought a moment and then said he did and she nodded and in the light of the small fire they had built she said she didn’t know what he was going to think of her and she truly didn’t know what she believed; that in college she had studied so many wonderful things and had read many books but that there certainly was some sort of order, although she didn’t know whether there was a being that had a hand in it all, if he knew what she meant. And he said Creation was a bit confusing to him, but that looking up at the sky it was pr
etty hard to believe that things just happened.

  They went on like that for a few more minutes and then sensing that he was uncomfortable talking about God, she asked him about New York, because her Aunt Crystal told her that he was a wonderful piano player and could he tell her about the clubs because she’d heard records at her aunt’s house and wondered about places like the Village Gate and the Village Vanguard and Boomer’s and Birdland and the Five Spot. And had he ever seen Sonny Rollins or Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk? Talking excitedly about the people and places as if she knew their music and histories intimately, Billy finding out later that Lurleen knew more about jazz than most musicians or disk jockeys from reading Crystal Bailey’s Downbeat magazines.

  He thought about the city and said that he no longer played the piano and held up his hand in the light of the fire so that the three-fingered silhouette looked like the head of a snail, and that, sadly, not too many people wanted to listen to jazz anymore. It’s all rock and roll now. And rhythm and blues.

  And then, as if he had no control, he was in one of his flashbacks that plunged him back into the midst of the horror, and he was suddenly in combat, the automatic fire clicking steadily and his machine gun blasting away at the undergrowth; hearing the bullets crash into the vegetation but never knowing whether his own bullets had torn the flesh and bones of the enemy; dreading going forward later to count and dispose of the dead and tend to the wounded; the voices on the radio calling for air strikes and people yelling for medics and in the background copters and mortar fire and beyond it all as either a memory or an actuality the bombers heading north to strike at the enemy. He tried fighting it, repeating to himself that he was safe in America again, safe in the bosom of his homeland, which he knew and loved and had fought fiercely for, without resentment, knowing that his father would have wanted him to, but the woods and the darkness beyond were an illusion and he was there in the jungle again.

  As always, beauty intruded into the ugliness of his life to make things more difficult. He recalled sitting in an English class at Hayes and Brother Cassidy reading in his Irish accent out loud a Robert Frost poem that talked about a well-traveled road. All he could remember were two lines: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both. Billy never told anyone in the Marines that he had musical training because he was his father’s son and had chosen a road less traveled, so instead of playing in the Marine band because he knew several instruments, he went beyond infantryman’s training and asked to be assigned to advanced infantry school so that he’d ended up at the front, carrying a machine gun and there would be no doubt about his valor, hearing the bagpipes of his childhood over and over whenever fear threatened to overwhelm him; the pipes, skirling, far away across the sea, in the mist, through the heath, keening their deadly music so that in the marrow of his bones his life urged him forward to his duty. Later, when he returned downstairs to the loft, he found the book of Frost poems and read “The Road Not Taken” again, and understood it clearly, and the sadness of his life overwhelmed him, and he sat in his rocker, frozen, paralyzed, as if by sitting very still he could erase the past.

  20. Choices

  He had once seen maggots feasting on a dead Viet Cong, the body bloated and the silvery worms making what was once his face alive as they fed, so that he thought, experiencing a high fever, a malarial ailment that still attacked him periodically, that the maggots were making not motion but noise as they quivered in unison, the snarelike rhythm too rapid and complex for him to follow, but definitely a sound rather than movement. And that’s how he felt whenever Lurleen or anybody else wanted him to talk about the music. Immediately the maggots began quivering and setting up in his brain a steady buzzing sound which vibrated on some infernal frequency too delicate for a human to follow and yet alluring enough in its brilliance to make him imagine that he could play at that rate, the music and his talent and his knowledge of himself entangled in the quivering of the maggots.

  What was there to talk about? He had gone and that was it. And now all his boys were gone. McDougal from Texas was gone as was Bobby Ingram, from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, who was going back to play football at Pitt, cause he was the baddest mothafucka who ever played cornerback and not only was he gonna be All-American at Pitt, but he’d go in the first round and of course be picked by the Steelers, my man, because they’d traded somebody in order to get that first pick, which was yours truly, Robert J. Ingram. Riddled by machine-gun fire so that his entire chest had caved in, the fatigue shirt shreds. And Joey Santiago gone. All of them, memories. And he with his three fucking fingers, one each, so that every day he’d have to remember his boys. And they wanted him to talk about it. But all Lurleen had asked him about was the jazz clubs and he couldn’t understand why that reference had triggered the malady of the flashbacks.

  He recalled walking with Mr. Butterworth and the old man talking to him about how good a musician he was and he ought not to waste his life by going in the army and him saying “My mind’s made up. I gotta go.” So what was poor Butterworth supposed to do? It was what his father would’ve done. His father had been decorated and he loved his country. Billy would have gone into the army but that didn’t seem like much of a commitment, so it was the Marines. Semper Fi. But if he’d gone into the army he wouldn’t have met Joey Santiago and perhaps Joey would be alive and his own life might’ve turned out different. Or would it have? Maybe he’d be dead like his father, but maybe Joey’d be alive. But he wouldn’t have met Elsa and there would be no Vidamía. It was all crazy.

  His father hadn’t shied away from going into that bar and confronting the guys holding up the place. In 1967 Tom Rafferty, his father’s partner, had refused to tell him how his father had died, even though he was then seventeen and could handle the knowledge. He’d asked him straight out: “What happened, Tom?” The two of them sitting in a booth at Clancy’s out on Long Island, where Rafferty lived, and where he’d taken Billy to get him away from the city. His mother said he was definitely sent back to white school for retraining with Tom Rafferty, working at the marina with Rafferty’s brother, Martin, learning all about boats and helping out when they took people fishing out into Long Island Sound. Tom Rafferty even pushed his daughter, Fiona, on him, urging the two of them to go for walks or giving him money for the movies, but pretty as Fiona was, he wasn’t interested and neither was she, confiding in him that she liked an Italian boy from New Hyde Park, but that her girlfriend, Christine Toomey, really liked him.

  Christine was even prettier, a small girl, with brown hair and brown eyes and a very clear complexion for a girl sixteen years old. The only trouble was that she was a hockey nut who spent most of her time talking about Jean Ratelle and the New York Rangers, but who nevertheless found time on several occasions during that summer to French-kiss with him for long periods of time so that he had blue balls because she always let him play with her breasts and her wonderful Catholic-schoolgirl pussy, the liquid flesh throbbing with each caress that she’d taught him; explaining exactly, almost clinically, how she liked to be touched, and then with uncharacteristic gentleness giving him prolonged, extremely satisfying handjobs as they lay in the summer darkness of the Oyster Bay shore, collecting the powerful spurts of his life in delicate little handkerchiefs which she would discard with articulate ceremony, but not before mockingly christening them: Rose, Michael, James, Margaret—good solid, Irish Catholic names she’d say—and told him toward the end of the summer that she’d let him do it to her because she really liked him, but, if she could be permitted some honesty, he’d probably end up on the job, meaning a cop or a fireman, and she wanted to finish high school, go to college, and then law school. And she did.

  He had run into Fiona Rafferty about two weeks before Christmas last year when he was coming out of a hardware store on Fourteenth Street. Fiona had gotten heavy. She told him Christine Toomey was an assistant DA in Kansas City. He wanted to know if she’d gotten married and Fiona said she’d married someon
e in law school but it hadn’t worked out. She showed him pictures of Christine looking very professional in a business suit. She was still small and pretty, but Billy couldn’t imagine that she would remember their summer together. He felt a longing for the part of his life that had passed into faded memory.

  That summer Billy had kept asking Rafferty about his father. “Oh, Billy, what’s the use,” Tom said one evening, sitting downstairs in the finished basement with the gun rack, the bowling and softball trophies, and a plaque from the Emerald Society, and the pictures of Rafferty in uniform receiving a citation for bravery from Mayor Lindsay in 1965, and even one of Rafferty with Billy’s father, Kevin Farrell, standing on Danny Rafferty’s first boat, Kilkenny, the two of them smiling as they stood with a shark hanging between them. “Your father was a hell of a man. What’s the use talking about it? Don’t ask me again, son.” Billy persisted, saying he had to know what happened. Rafferty finally said the two of them were riding around in Yorkville, working the 2-3 when a call came about two men with guns trying to hold up the bar on 103rd Street and Third Avenue in East Harlem. This was 1961.

  “And off we went, me driving and your father telling me where it was even though I knew where the place was located. ‘Turn here and then another hard right and it’s right there,’ talking like I had just transferred into the precinct. It all happened so fast I didn’t even get a chance to turn on the siren, if you know what I mean. Maybe if I had, the cocksuckers woulda taken off,” Rafferty said, as if he’d just thought of the idea. “We screeched up to the front of the place and everything was still and you knew something was gonna happen. It was the Estrella Bar on Third Avenue. I think it’s a drugstore now. The old precinct was around the corner on 104th Street, so you figured this had to be a couple of hophead yahoos to pull a stickup so close to the precinct. I tried holding your father back. I said, ‘Hold on, Kevin, let’s wait for backup,’ but he was out of the car even before I had stopped. ‘Cover me,’ he said and he was gone. I got out and he waved me forward and then he went inside the bar. I could hear sirens of the squad cars heading for us, but everything happened too quick. I don’t think ten seconds went by before I heard four shots and then the two Puerto Rican fellas came out, their guns in their hands. I blasted both of them. One bought it right there and the other one’s paralyzed for life, if that’s any consolation. Luckily, the ones I got were the ones who shot your father. About ten squad cars showed up fifteen seconds later, their sirens and lights going like crazy.”