Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  guess I was sort of--excited. Upset. Maybe crying a little. He came around front of me and took my hands, lifted my hands from my lap where I was holding my books, I was too surprised to pull away, I was too surprised to anything, John Reddy turned my hands over and saw the palms, the little in my palms, I could hardly look at his face, his eyes were so bright hurt me to see them. He said, You are not a leper, Katie, and neither am I. was crying now I guess. I was saying, angry, Yes yes I am, God damn it I am, I am a leper, John Reddy, and so are you, and John Reddy said softly, you think Jesus was a leper, Katie? Maybe Jesus was a leper, too.

  "He'd opened Miss Bird's door so I could roll myself inside, he said goodbye and when I looked around he was gone." Do you think tesus was a leper? immediately began to be whispered among us. Even by those who didn't know that John Reddy Heart had uttered the words, or in what circumstances. (Of course, Katie Olmsted would claim the circumstances, "It was a revelation to me. Like Jesus to me." Never again would she surrender to "dark desolating despair.

  Never! ") Clearly, John Reddy's words were a riddle. They were responsibility to cherish if not to fully comprehend. Maybe tesus was a leper, too. Secret talismanic words fastidiously recorded in school notebooks, inside lockers and in flaming lipstick in the toilet stalls of girls' restrooms not only at school but throughout the village and into Amherst as well. In those days, a surprising number of us prayed. We must have God was attentive and basically sympathe ic. We shut our eyes, moved silently. Was tesus a leper, too? Like me? Maybe tesus was a leper, too.

  Of all of us, only Blake Wells, in his late twenties a Peace

  worker in Kenya, assigned to a leprosarium, would resist the metaphor- "Lepers are just sick people. Nothing special." Months after John Reddy Heart had pushed Katie Olmsted in her wheelchair, in May of our senior year, Reverend Ogden, the middle-aged minister of the Willowsville Unitarian Church, preached a poetic sermon titled

  "Maybe Jesus Was a Leper, Too"--one of Reverend Ogden's most stirring and inspirational sermons, the consensus was.

  Unknown to our parents we'd begun, in November of that year, to the lower village after dark. Where we had no more purpose in we'd have had in gritty downtown Buffalo. Like guys cruising the strip looking for Cheektowaga girls to pick up. Looking for trouble. Except we weren't looking for trouble but seeking John Reddy Heart.

  "Oh God! I'd want to die if anyone found out. If he found out."

  "He wouldn't ever tell." We were sick with apprehension, for we were good girls. We were breathless! ashamed! thrilled by our own audacity! Our destination was Street, south of Main. The shadowy downside of the jewel-box village.

  Where, above the perpetually steamy windows of the North China Takeout which no one we knew ever patronized, John Reddy Heart, classmate, lived alone as no other student at Willowsville Senior alone. As no other seventeen-year-old of our acquaintance lived alone.

  "It wasn't just that. Not just him. It was"--the wounded middle-aged woman with the girlish lined face who'd startled us by insisting she was Shelby Connor, "Shelby Connor formerly Simms," would one day to explain to us a mysterious facet of our own experience--"it was drawn like moths to that tender, almost inexpressible moment at end of the day when lights come on, headlights, streetlights, store-window lights, lights inside houses, the moon, the stars--and the world isn't a place of solids any longer, not brick, not stone, not concrete, not wood, but a place of magic held together by lights. Remember? --we'd drive down from into John Reddy's neighborhood and there everything would be dark, be night. And, if his window was lighted--" Unknown to our parents. Unknown to our fathers who loved us too much to trust us, or to trust the world with us. Virgin daughters of Willowsville, New York, soon to leave home but, that final high school year, living still beneath their protective roofs. In their mortgaged homes in tree-lined residential neighborhoods, on costly soil. "If Daddy finds out about this he'll kill me. I'm not joking."

  "I'm not joking. My would kill me!" We laughed together. We shivered. In the crowded back seat Verrie's car, four of us, or were there five of us, clutched at one another's icy fingers.

  Descending south on Main Street, passing the seductively lighted store windows of the Avenue of Fashion, those glimmering mirages with the power to evoke in our dreams of the next forty years, and beyond, that emotion of hope, elation, certainty and well-being perhaps found solely in dreams. We'd been talking of John Reddy Heart, what we'd heard of him in recent days. How at Farolino's Cabinets & Carpentry he worked in silence at the back of the shop for hours. Mr.. Farolino, who tended toward garrulousness, had learned not to bother him. But there were customers who into the shop, inquisitive, cruel. Staring at him. Whispering Mr.. Farolino "Is that the boy who--? Is that--John Reddy Heart? Here? ") and sometimes even speaking to John Reddy themselves, asking how his was? his family? what his plans were for after graduation.7--and John Reddy muttered a reply, or continued working in "dignifred silence." One asshole, it was told to us by Bart Digger, actually asked John Reddy "what's it like at that place you were in? --'Indian Island'?" but it wasn't known how responded. There was a report that came to us from Mary Louise Schultz's mother who'd heard it from Agnes Scroop who was a close friend of guidance counselor Miss Crosby, evidently John Reddy had hoped to the Air Force after graduation, his father had been in the Air Force and died in active duty--"But that's out of the question now, of course.

  U. S. armed services don't allow anyone in with a criminal record. An ex-convict." Hearing this cruel, crude bit of news, we wiped angrily at our eyes. "Oh God.

  John Reddy. They're making a martyr of him."

  "A leper, you mean.

  "A leper!

  Yes." And there was another report of a curious remark of John Reddy he'd allegedly made in Mr.. Salaman's geometry class that morning--"Just to something doesn't mean it's true." Mr.. Salaman had spent fifteen at the blackboard working out the solution to a Byzantine homework problem in his flamboyant, ironic manner, and when he'd finished, gloating at the expressions of bewilderment and panic in his students' faces, Reddy, who was seated, as in all his classes except shop, in the first row, extreme right, to be under the teacher's eagle eye, shifted his long legs violently beneath his desk and muttered skeptically, "Just to doesn't mean it's true." Mr.. Salaman had stared at John Reddy, rarely he glanced in John Reddy's direction, disliking him, or fearing him, his adult presence amid adolescent presences, Mr.. Salaman seemed to be debating a reply, one of his quick quippy put-down replies, then thought better of it.

  None of his WHS teachers cared to confront John Reddy Heart in classrooms.

  Richard Eickhorn would record John Reddy's enigmatic remark in I Hear Your Heart Breaking--"Just to prove something doesn't mean it's true." Ritchie didn't credit John Reddy Heart with the statement but it was set off in quotes at the start of a section and we all recognized it of course. In fact, Ketch Campbell whose desk was close by John Reddy's claimed John Reddy had actually said, in exasperation, "Shit. Just to something doesn't mean it's true." Ray Gottardi had claimed that had said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, "Bullshit!

  Just to prove something doesn't mean it's true." Steve Lunt who was in the that morning, one of only three students who'd been able to crack the homework problem, dismissed John Reddy's remark as "illogical.

  be proved' as true unless it is true." But Clarence McQuade who was taking advanced calculus with Mr.. Sternberg, another WHS math teacher, claimed that John Reddy's remark was "profound--if Heart knew what was saymg.

  Later that night it would rain, and the rain would turn to sleet but now a bone-bright moon glowed overhead.

  How the moon drew us. And the wind!

  We were impressed that Verrie drove her new car so capably. Not a single green light on Main Street. We weren't envious of Verrie, we loved her car, the four-door canary-yellow Olds convertible her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday. It glittered like a sleek Christmas-tree ornament. Its interior was buttersco
tch-colored leather soft as skin and smelling of newness so rich and so sharp it took your breath away. "A beautiful car for a beautiful girl," Mr.. Myers had said, winking at us, as he'd handed the keys to Verrie in our presence. We knew that, in time, we'd all be cars for our birthdays. This was Willowsville, we were Willowsville girls.

  Our fathers strove, like suitors, to please us even as they despaired of controlling us. So we weren't envious of Verrie Myers, we loved her car and would remember it all our lives, the plush seats, the low seductive hum of the motor, the dashboard lights like code, the radio turned low to WWBN-AM "Radio Wonderful" playing the Top Pop Fifty hour after hour, a new hit single "Broke Heart Blues" we sang at the top of our lungs. Verrie, teary-eyed, shouted, "Somebody pass me a cig, will you.7--I'm dying for one." We were passing Spring Street. The darkened Sunoco station with wind-whipped banners. Darkened Burnham Nurseries where, one summer, some of us had glimpsed John Reddy Heart shirtless, tanned dark as an Indian, working in the sun. And now we were passing North Long, and turning onto Water Street, narrow, potholed, leading downhill to plank bridge above Glen Creek. Mist rose from the creek like dread in our bowels. "It's kind of--crazy, isn't it? Maybe we shouldn't--"

  "Will please just shut up." We were not thinking of our fathers whose voices murmured warnings of impotent rage in our ears. If I ever catch you.

  If I ever hear of. That boy. That criminal. That white trash. If you disobey me.

  If you, my daughter. If. Instead we were thinking, Would John Reddy Heart be home?

  Upstairs in his apartment? If home, would he pass by a window?

  he passed by a window, would he look out? Look down? At the street, at us?

  Would he recognize us? Should we call to him? Would we dare call to him?

  There was the shabby sandstone apartment building, there the North China Take-Out. There, John Reddy's battered old Mercury at the curb.

  "He's home." His windows were lighted. No turning back.

  Verrie jolted the car to a stop at the curb. We stared as a shadowsilhouette passed fleetingly by the window. "It's--him."

  "Him."

  "We'd better leave. We--" Yet we were outside on the sidewalk. Frantically we whispered, clutching at one another, the wind blew our words away. We laughed.

  Hysteria touched us like quick-darting flames. One of us, it might have been Verrie, framed her mouth with her cupped fingers and called softly, thrillingly, "John? John Reddy?" One of us slapped her. One of blindly away and collided with something, a trash can, which toppled, making a clattering noise on the sidewalk. A couple leaving the North glanced at us before driving off. Had we been recognized? We hid heated faces. John Reddy's window overhead had been yanked up by inches. "Who the hell's there? "--we saw him leaning out the window, looking down. His hair hung forward partly hiding his face. We to hide our nakedness. Verrie fumbled for her car keys, they slipped through her fingers to fall to the pavement. We panicked hearing John Reddy's footsteps on the stairs. And the door opened and he leaned out, staring at us. He scratched with a thumbnail at his chest. He wore a T-shirt, jeans.

  stubble covered his jaws. He was breathing quickly, his breath perceptibly visible as steam. When had it begun to rain, when had the rain turned to sleet, when had the bright moon disappeared? A jocose wind blew grit and scraps of paper into our pretty-girl faces. John Reddy stared at us, each in turn, possibly recognizing us, possibly not. It was that several of us, varsity cheerleaders, had once boldly chanted, in the company of hundreds of screaming spectators as well as John Reddy Heart and his teammates, "John Reddy we're ready! JOHN REDDY WE'RE RE-ADY!"

  we were not ready and could not, outside the lighted basketball court, outside the contained delirium of the game, have dared such an invitation.

  There was nowhere to hide. In his warm bemused Texan drawl John Reddy said, "Well, shit. C'mon up. I sure wasn't expecting tonight, but--" As if practiced in this maneuver, John Reddy didn't lead way up the narrow flight of stairs to his apartment but stood on the sidewalk herding us, one by one, before him. We were silent, terrified. We could not glance at each other. We fled upward like birds whose wings have them. At the top of the stairs we stepped into a bright blinding space- "Like the way you feel taking nitrous oxide at the dentist's.

  sick-excited sensation of letting go. Of not being able to not let go. You're not asleep but you're not conscious, either. You're paralyzed.

  You're not yourself. You're deeper somehow." John Reddy Heart closed the us so gently we failed to hear the click! of the lock. Or, if we heard it, we heard it belatedly, as an echo. There was a faint throbbing sound of music.

  Not words, only music. Already he'd taken one of us by the hand.

  Drew her to him, and took both hands. "Hey look. Don't be scared.

  Nobody's make you do anything you don't want to do, O. K. ?" The light was but warm and comforting. You seemed to understand that, though everything was bathe in light, you would not be seen, you would not be recognized. John Reddy laughed at us but in a kindly way. He led one of us, possibly Verrie, though it may have been Trish Elders, into the next room, we understood that it was John Reddy's bedroom. Quietly, the door was shut behind them. Frightened, not daring to glance at one another (as girls' locker room at school some of us shrank from glancing at one out of modesty or out of an emotion stronger and less definable than modesty) we hurriedly removed our clothes. Our sweaters, shirts, skirts from the Tartan Shoppe. Our rayon panties, our white cotton bras. Only then, trembling, did we dare raise our eyes to one another. What bodies! Our faces were blurred but our bodies were curiously illuminated, pearly-pale, slender yet well-shaped, breasts, nipples, the rosy-brown surrounding the nipples, the crescent of shadow beneath each breast. We stared at our perfect bellies, the lovely curve of our thighs and hips. The fluffy tracery of pubic hair--pale on several of us, dark on others. We hadn't guessed how beautiful we were. John Reddy had returned, and was leading of us into his bedroom. "Anytime you want me to, I'll stop. O. K. ?"

  were laughing, clutching at one another. We couldn't seem to catch our breaths! There were more of us here in John Reddy's apartment than we'd believed.

  Six of us, or seven. Maybe eight. Ten? A dozen? One of them was Bibi Arhardt who was like a sister to us, the kind of sister you quarrel with, but you love, though Bibi wasn't a member of the Circle and never could be.

  was Katie Olmsted, on her feet, not in her wheelchair, her body healthylooking as any of ours though she moved unsteadily, needing support herself on our arms. John Reddy was in the room with us, and John Reddy was gone from us. John Reddy kissed us gently each in turn and led us one by one into the other room. There too, unexpectedly, was a blinding light. One of us halted just inside the doorway, stammering, "I'm afraid.

  I--" and John Reddy said gently, "O. K. , then we won't, honey.

  " She whispered, "Don't send me away, John Reddy," and John Reddy laughed.

  "O. K. , honey. You bet I won't send you away." John Reddy's warm mouth, Reddy's warm hands, John Reddy's warm lean muscular naked body in dark hairs swirling thick and damp on his torso, at his groin and thighs.

  John Reddy's erect blood-engorged penis sprouting like a strange, ripe fruit at his groin. "I'm afraid, don't hurt me, don't send me away, Reddy?

  Please?" It went on like that, through the night. A November wind blew pitiless sweeping across the lake from Canada and making John Reddy's windows shudder in their frames.

  John Reddy jumped in that ol' Caddie and floored er. tohn Reddy said, Man I'm gone from here.

  We looked we looked we looked John Reddy was gone from here. ohn Reddy, tohn Reddy Heart.

  Not the Caddie of course which he'd lost to the cops and to the course of oblivion, instead the low-slung rustbucket no-color old Mercury he'd bought from Mr.. Farolino, his employer, for (Ray told us, marveling) just $250--"Of course, John did a lot of work on the fucker." Essentially, though, the words of the song got it right, he drove out of our lives without saying good-bye, d
idn't even come to graduation to accept diploma and shake hands with Mr.. Stamish. Nor did John Reddy come the senior prom. We waited, waited, we're still waiting. "We'd elected him King. Even if it didn't work out. And if it had worked out, he wouldn't have been there. I'd have a hard time forgiving that." It was a delirious time. A roller-coaster ride. Some of us, three of us, fell off, died.

  Smoke's date survived, with "extensive facial cosmetic surgery.

  ") That final year at WHS, senior year. Our final year as our truest selves "spilling gold coins from our pockets" (as the poem says). Couldn't catch our breaths! Some of our teachers chided us, Slow down! We were dazed, mesmerized.

  The future at us like a windstorm--dazzling blinding light. We were excited, we were terrified. "You kids. Sweet dumb kids. If you only knew.

  But--you don't." Suzi Zeigler was catatonic with humiliation when her dad drifted into the rec room, drink in hand, watery-eyed, in what looked like pajama top, wrinkled Bermuda shorts, none of us knew how to answer, smiling H'lo, Mr.. Z. , how's it going Mr.. Z. , yes sir things are O. K. We figured Suzi'd been keeping it a deep dark secret her dad had been canned from his job at Lackawanna Steel, you had to feel sorry for her but that didn't make it any easier on us. It was harder to figure out Bart Digger's attitude--his father was being transferred to Peoria, Illinois, which sounded like a bad joke, and Bart was telling his friends he didn't care, he was away to college next year anyway, he'd been admitted to Yale, why should a shit if his family moves to Peoria, Illinois--"It isn't as if things won't be coming to an end in Willowsville anyway," Bart said bitterly.