No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “I understand. It’s part of post-traumatic stress syndrome. What they used to call battle fatigue. But what makes you think that what he’s told you didn’t happen?”

  “He says that the incident took place near the base camp where he was stationed and that there had been no enemy soldiers near there in months. And he says that there were no mines or booby traps or anything connected with Viet Cong, but he’s convinced that it was they who killed his friend and wounded him.”

  The psychologist hadn’t said anything, but had written himself a note and then told her that he’d do his best to look into the situation; that as soon as he found something out he’d call her. She said to please not call her at home and wrote down the number of the school where she taught. She said she would meet him whenever he wanted. The psychologist nodded gravely and said he would do his best. She waited months, but he never called back.

  27. The Band

  When Lurleen had pretty much given up hope of hearing from the psychologist at the Veterans Administration, she came up with her own plan to take Billy’s mind off his troubles. One afternoon as she sat at her desk during lunch, eating a ham sandwich and an apple she’d brought from home, she began thinking that Fawn, Horty, and Cliff were playing exceptionally well. It would be interesting if the three of them could play together with their father, although Fawn, as good as she was, wasn’t interested in the flute, preferring to play with drumsticks, and spent most of the time beating out rhythms wherever she could, her hands moving almost mechanically and her beautifully mournful eyes far away, so that at times she reminded Lurleen of Billy, as if perhaps his melancholy had always been with him.

  That evening, after the children were asleep, Lurleen spoke with Billy.

  “I think you ought to try and play with the kids once in a while,” she said. “Kind of encourage them. They’re getting pretty good, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” he’d said, looking up from a magazine.

  “I think they’d like it, Bill. They’ve seen you play the guitar. They know you can play and that you understand music better than any of their teachers.”

  “Not better than you,” he said, smiling weakly.

  “Yes, even better than me,” she replied, frowning. “I may know a great many technical things about music, but I’m not a performer.”

  “Well, you coulda fooled me, lady,” he said, playfully, so that she felt as if she was getting through to him with the idea. “You had me totally bamboozled.”

  “Please, Billy,” she said. “I think we should form a family band. They’ll love it.”

  He said he’d play with the children on one condition—she had to play as well. She hadn’t planned on that, but now she had no choice. She got out her fiddle and they all learned to play tunes like “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” “The Fox,” “Camptown Races,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” throwing in things from the Beatles like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Hey Jude,” which Hortense insisted on calling “Hey Dude.”

  Every once in a while somebody came in with a new song like the time Horty said they ought to play the “Que Bonita Bandera” that Pete Seeger sang, about the Puerto Rican flag and independence for the island, so they learned how to play it and Hortense sang it. It became a big hit when they played in Tompkins Square Park on spring and summer afternoons. They learned to play “Alegría, Alegria” and “De las Montañas Venimos,” which are both Puerto Rican Christmas songs. Playing these songs in the middle of the summer produced great mirth in the Ricans who came to see them, especially the older people, who would then talk about las navidades and eating pasteles and clapped with total delight at the hippies, the five of them blond and raggedy: Billy on guitar, Horty on sax, Cliff on trombone, Lurleen with her fiddle, and Fawn with a snare drum strapped in a harness Billy had made for her, so she looked like a little Revolutionary War drummer boy, which somebody said, and which she promptly corrected. “Oh, no, I’m a drummer girl. A drummer girl,” she’d repeated several times, making Horty and Cliff uncomfortable, because they knew nothing at that time about Fawn and her condition. They all became lost in playing, oblivious to everything except the music. People dropped coins and dollar bills into Billy’s guitar case, on which Cliff had written out different funny messages like: LOST OUR PASSPORTS AND MONEY, or NEED PLANE FARE TO GET BACK HOME TO RIVINGTON STREET, or WE ARE BOAT PEOPLE FROM STATEN ISLAND.

  But the band sounded weird. It was confirmed when the family went up to Grandpa Buck Sanderson’s house on the Fourth of July, and they played and Buck tried joining in. He ended up shaking his head, saying they ought to consider making some changes to their repertoire. After they ate—broiled hamburgers and hot dogs in the backyard—they all played bluegrass, with the old man on banjo, Billy the guitar, Horty the sweet potato, Cliff the mandolin, Fawn the harmonica, and Lurleen her fiddle, the music just flowing out of her like the times when she was back home playing with her own family and friends and people had stood around openmouthed that a little girl could handle a fiddle like she did at ten years of age. At one point she looked across at Billy and he truly seemed to be enjoying the experience.

  After they finished playing, Grandpa Buck told Hortense and Cliff to get their regular instruments, and the kids came back with the sax and trombone, and Grandpa got out a bunch of sheet music and handed it out, explaining how Cliff and Horty should transpose it. After that afternoon they felt more like a family band. Coming home on the subway that night, Fawn asleep against Lurleen, and Horty and Cliff snuggled against their father, their instruments under their legs, Lurleen recalled Buck Sanderson—who was her uncle’s cousin or something, she couldn’t keep track of her connection to him and just called him Grandpa Buck—telling them that they ought to play old standards from the twenties like “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “Carolina in the Morning,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “California Here I Come,” “Bill Bailey,” “Birth of the Blues,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Let’s Do It,” which was “Let’s Fall in Love,” and a dozen more, because they were upbeat melodies and the kids could get a chance to solo and improvise, which they could learn to do real easy, he said, if they listened.

  After that, they began playing the old songs, and she put a little extra money aside and bought Fawn a trap set with one cymbal and a pretty good-sized bass drum. Again it was Horty who came up with a name for the band. The Southern Constellation Family Band, she said, and Billy took the drum over to Sixth Street, where one of his buddies, Boyd Perkins, from around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who painted portraits and lived in a storefront, wrote out, on the face of the drum, the name of the band in red circus letters. In time she heard about getting a permit to play in the subways. And that is what they did. It was the only thing that saved Billy, she thought. His life perked up, and he began getting more jobs in the neighborhood, writing in a little notebook to keep track of them.

  A few years later they added a tub bass, which Lurleen played from time to time when she wasn’t playing the fiddle. When Vidamía joined them, Lurleen brought out her accordion from the closet, expecting fully for Billy to have an odd reaction to the keyboard. She had given up playing the instrument after observing, over the years, what happened to Billy whenever he saw a keyboard. But the accordion didn’t affect him at all now, so that it wasn’t the black and white pattern of the keys, but actually the piano itself which caused the reaction in him. She was convinced that the band had saved Billy and brought him closer to the children, helping him to understand how much they relied on him.

  On summer days when they weren’t playing music in the subways, time seemed to stop for her. After the children had gone off to summer camp and Billy to do his odd jobs, repairing one thing or another in the neighborhood—a busted pipe, replacing a window, or fixing the railing on a staircase—she would sit in his rocker and knit or embroider, walking about her mind, stopping in a meadow of memories, wishing to get respite from her quest to understand life. She had tried meditation, chanting
mantras, study, but couldn’t control her thirst to make sense of the mystery of existence. It was an ever-present concern, part of her mind for as long as she had been conscious that, in her own community of decent but small minds, there was something wrong in teaching folks that there was a supreme being who sat in judgment on individuals. The notion of a creator reduced life and its complexities to a fairy tale and kept the human race at an infantile stage in its development.

  She had always loved the symmetry and the cold exactitude that seemed to be the universe, awed by its magnificence. As a young girl she would stand for hours on the back porch of her parents’ house a halfmile from town, transfixed as she watched the night sky, the outline of the hills a shadow on the horizon; above her, in the breathtaking blackness, a thousand stars. Every once in a while a shooting star streaked across the firmament, burning itself out, making her think that perhaps it was a rocket ship traveling from one planet to another. At some point her mother broke gently into her trance and brought her, shivering, inside, rubbing her arms through her sweater and bringing her a cup of sweet cocoa, which she held in her two hands, feeling alternately the warmth of the cup and the sweet liquid within her. She’d ask her mother about the stars, and her mother would say that it was all God’s doing. Lurleen was later disappointed when she understood the scientific explanation of shooting stars.

  These days she was lucky if, going up on the roof of the old factory building, she was able to see even a few stars. In the winter, when arctic weather descended on Manhattan, enveloping everything in its frigid winds and ten-and-twenty-degree temperatures, she bundled up after the children were in bed and climbed the stairs to stand there again, awed by the beauty of the night sky. If she concentrated she was able to block out the lights of the city and let her mind drift away in search of an answer to the mystery.

  She sat in the rocker, moving slowly and letting the motion relax her. Everything she’d seen, from the snake handlers of her childhood to the more sophisticated Christian denominations, was superstition. Everything else, every kind of ism that relied on blind faith, robbed people of reason, and therefore freedom. Whatever provided sublime and humble feelings and at the same time lifted the spirit of exaltation, served the same purpose as religion. This convinced her more than ever that in America music was the religion of young people, and it was in this primitive form of celebration that black and white, rich and poor, worshiped. The more she thought about it the more convinced she was that she was correct. People came alive when they heard music that was consonant with their lives. There was never superstition where music was concerned, although there were people afraid of certain music. She’d read in some conservative journal put out by Lyndon Larouche’s people that jazz wasn’t truly music, that it was a plot between blacks and Jews to distort people’s sense of spiritual structure and destroy classical music. The article cited Gershwin as one of the culprits.

  Most nights, when she finally was able to relax, she’d think about the vastness of the universe and let her mind wander in the utter loneliness of individual human life. If Billy wasn’t feeling amorous, she’d drift off, traveling through her knowledge of the galaxy, naming the constellations until she was asleep. “Amorous,” she thought, was a curious word since all Billy did was get into bed totally naked and like a child snuggle up to her, reaching a hand to her breast and resting his bearded face on her shoulder, seemingly making himself smaller, and then she would reach down gingerly as if it were a game, her hand creeping barely below his stomach and always thrilled by the hardness and the heat as if she could feel his heart beating down there and then he’d touch her with the index finger of his clawed hand until she was gasping and sucking at his mouth and he was inside of her and she was lost in him because she loved him so much and he was so damaged by the war.

  Sitting in the rocker made her drowsy and sensual, so she stopped, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of water before returning to her musings. These days, between Fawn and Bill she didn’t know which way to turn and was certain that her mind was being affected like crazy Woodrow Rayburn’s, who was the brother of Aunt Sarah’s husband, Wilbur Rayburn, back in those Tennessee hills when she was a little girl. Crazy Woodrow Rayburn stole Bibles. When everyone else was sleeping, he was sneaking around in the woods and crawling into people’s homes, stealing their Bibles and burying them in the ground. But he wasn’t totally crazy, because he didn’t steal the family Bibles where they kept the births of people; he only stole their personal Bibles. Nor did he bury all of them. He saved some and used the pages for wiping himself in the outhouse, claiming that it was no big thing since it wasn’t the word of the Lord, anyhow.

  “Just some crazy-ass scribbling by Jews,” he’d say. “And if you listen to Jews, who killed Jesus, then you’re headed for eternal damnation and the fires of hell, because the word of God is revealed to people in dreams and not through some damn Jew writing.”

  If God existed, Lurleen was sure, He would have punished Woodrow Rayburn. But He had not, choosing instead to let him live on year after year so that at the age of seventy-four he was still cussing and carrying on, healthy as a horse, and had even taken a new wife, a little black-haired, mean-looking teenage girl from East Arkansas, or “Arkansaw,” as they all pronounced it, who pleasured him with her mouth, almost toothless from eating candy, and who helped unearth Bibles all up and down the hills so that he could read sarcastically out loud Deuteronomy or Romans or Corinthians or Acts, farting and shitting while he sat in that latrine rain or shine, massaging that big ugly horse dick which he liked showing young girls and which she had seen. Her cousin, Willa Bailey, said she watched him beating his daughter, Doreen, and then stripping her naked and driving his nasty old thing into her and the girl just ten years old, so that she began going crazy after that and eventually wandered off into the woods and people say bears ate her, but most likely her father killed her to shut her up about what he’d done and then buried her along with the Bibles. Lurleen had run to her grandpa, crying about what Willa had told her she’d seen, because Willa was too scared to tell anybody, even though she was already fifteen years old.

  “You gotta do something, Grandpa,” she said. “Willa saw him, Grandpa.”

  Her grandfather shook his head and told her he felt real bad about young Doreen, but he couldn’t rightly interfere in the business of another man’s family, but one thing was sure. She needn’t worry about Woodrow.

  “Lurleen, if he ever tells you anything, just tell him you’re Otis Meekins’s granddaughter and that he’d rather kiss a rattlesnake than mess with a West Tennessee Meekins. Ole Woodrow’s just the spawn of one of those trashy ole Rayburn boys that come up from Mississippi chasing a hound dog after the war.”

  “The war Daddy was in?”

  “No, darlin’, the war a long time ago. Against the Yankees.”

  “Are Yankees bad, Grandpa?”

  “Naw, they’re just folks. It ain’t got nothin’ to do with you. You’re a smart young girl and shouldn’t be botherin’ with all that nonsense. But I’ll tell you one thing, if that son of a bitch Woodrow Rayburn says anything to you just let me know. Only good that ever came out of those folks was his brother, Wilbur, that married your aunt. As for the rest of them Rayburns, they’re all trash, every one of them. All they was ever good for was beating their women and laying around drinking whiskey they stole from other people’s stills. Mean and ornery coots. Only thing they understand’s a 12-gauge aimed dead at their noggin. So don’t fret none, Lurleen, darlin’, cause if he as much as lays a finger on you I’m gonna make that ole woman of his a widder.”

  As she sat, she recalled arriving in New York, coming off the bus over at the Port Authority Terminal, her heart beating with anticipation because she’d read about how grand things were and how large and fast everything was in New York City. She had fallen asleep in Pennsylvania somewhere reading Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and she had dreamt of stepping out of a house in the middle of Central
Park. She was wearing a bonnet and there were millions of small, yellow butterflies and every one of them that came near her kissed her gently on the face and some rode on her bonnet as she walked. She was so happy in the dream. She sat up, awakened to the blinding sunlight beating on her as she lay on Billy’s shoulder, his good left hand resting perfectly on her left breast as she slept, even in his own dream world insatiable in his need for her. As the bus got closer to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel, which connected the United States to Manhattan Island, she saw the Hudson River and across it, like some distant fantasyland that she had only imagined, the majesty of the New York City skyline.

  She couldn’t wait to ride the subways and go to the top of the Empire State Building. She wanted to visit Rockefeller Center, see the Statue of Liberty, the lights of Broadway, Yankee Stadium, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum, Carnegie Hall. She’d even heard of the Russian Tea Room and ‘21’ and El Morocco, and was disappointed when she learned that the latter was no longer open. Everything she knew was acquired through reading novels. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Butterfield 8, Call It Sleep. And the authors of other novels: Ayn Rand, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, all of them painting New York so that every sight of the city evoked for her some memory from her reading.

  They had gone outside of the bus terminal with all their bags and instrument cases and Billy waved and up came a big yellow Checker cab. She had pointed at the jump seats resting on the floor and asked what they were and Billy’d laughed and pulled one up. She bounded up and sat in it, facing him as they sped across town.

  “Thank you, Billy Farrell,” she said. “I love you.”

  “And I love you,” he said, unashamedly. “God bless you.”

  He sat shaking his head and two big tears appeared in his eyes, so that she’d always remember him that way. He was a great big, blond boy with a broken heart and she was going to mend it. She had sat on his lap and kissed him deeply, feeling him instantly erect beneath her so that she pressed herself against him, hugging him desperately to herself until she couldn’t breathe and got off his lap and looked at the city as it sped by on the East River Drive, pointing at the bridges in the distance and asking where they led.