how he sank, like a laundry bag weighted with rocks. Art Lutz yelled, "Can he swim? Who is it? Jesus--one of the geeks. Don't let im drown, grab his or something. Never mind, I'll get im." Art was shirtless, barefoot, and stripped to his paunchy boxer shorts to dive into the pool, quite a respectable dive, so we applauded him, too, and stamped our feet, and Dwayne Hewson yelled, laughing, "If you fucks crack my terrace, I'm sue you." Art hauled poor limp Ritchie up onto the tile where he aqua water and choked and coughed so miserably some of us decided should practice "artificial respiration" on him--pumping his arms, hard on his soft midriff, as we hadn't done since our Mom's First Aid classes at the Willowsville Country Club when our kids were babies. "So we save Ritchie Eickhorn! Another emergency rescue operation. It good." Zappa's Hot Rats was playing, loud and funky.
Next, Made in USA's
"The Ballad of John Reddy Heart"--our all-time favorite we could identify within a nanosecond, the first striking of an amplified guitar chord. We'd memorized the interminable stanzas of the "ballad" decades ago and now we shouted, bawled, wept them as, like eels, we thrashed about in the pool, on the terrace and on the dewy lawn.
In unison we shouted, stamped our feet at our favorite stanza, John Reddy looked his man in the eye.
Said John Reddy, Time to die!
John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.
A single thought swept through us like an electric current, would it be too much to hope for that John Reddy would show up at our reunion at the very moment this song was playing? We asked Dwayne please to play the again, and he did, but, well--John Reddy didn't show up just then.
"What time is it? Oh, Christ--three-twelve a. m. ") It was then we how excited, or more than excited, Evangeline Fesnacht had become. In the days she'd scorned
"The Ballad of John Reddy Heart" as "exploitative kitsch" but now she grooved with it like the rest of us, was clear. We'd noted how, all evening, this mysterious classmate of ours had been watchful and silent ("We just knew, she's taking all this in, she's going write about us! ") and we were given the impression she still believed herself superior to us, but had come around to liking us, somehow. In fact most of I damned impressed by
"E. S. Fesnacht," the career if not the woman, though I we weren't certain that we liked, or even understood, her peculiar prose.
Hurriedly we skimmed a new novel of Fesnacht's seeking traces of ourselves, 1 our shared Willowsville past, and invariably we were disappointed--"What's this stuff about? What's it mean?" Some of us persisted in defending E. S. Fesnacht, out of loyalty, while others, the majority, had long ceased reading her. "My daughter who's in college reads Fesnacht," Dwayne Hewson grumpily, "so she's quizzing me on her. Like that's Daddy's claim to fame, he knew Frog Tits in high school." Chet Halloren said, more thoughtfully, "Fesnacht's is a perverse cosmos. You're drawn in, the landscape looks familiar, but it isn't. Spiritual' people come to destructive ends while seemingly 'evil' people are redeemed and rewarded. As if she's turned our wishes upside down. I'm proud of her." At the reunion what impressed us most about Evangeline was her totally changed appearance, we her as a dumpy, middle-aged adolescent girl with a blemished skin weird, weird ways but now, in middle age, she more resembled an adolescent, androgynous figure of surprising attractiveness. That hair!
We couldn't decide if our Vangie had gone prematurely white, like some of the fellas in the class, or if she'd bleached all the color out of her hair for some mysterious symbolic (or dramatic? ) purpose. It was strange to see her photo in the paper, or in a magazine, or on the back cover of one of her books, and think, "Is this the girl' I went to school with?" knowing it couldn't possibly be, though in literal fact it was. The organizers of our Thirtieth Reunion Weekend, hearing that E. S. Fesnacht was planning to attend, worried she'd be writing a satire on us--"You can't trust writers. Any more than can trust cartoonists." But maybe they'd misjudged her! Evangeline Fesnacht been friendly, if quiet, she'd smiled, and she'd laughed, she'd certainly eaten roast pig with the rest of us--the front of her purple satin jumpsuit was stained and spotted with grease. We thought it was sweet as hell Ritchie Eickhorn, our poet, had a crush on her after all these years (" But isn't he married? Out in Minnesota, or Dakota? ") and had been
about all night like a puppy, the two of them had tumbled together into the Pifers' ravine, and seemed to have escaped unscathe. But now was a strange, urgent luster in the woman's eyes as she took up the of John Reddy Heart, and we recalled how, in high school, she'd been possibly the most obsessed of us all, with her brimming Death Chronicles. She was saying, pleading, "Excuse me? Will you listen? Why would only John Reddy's fingerprints have been on that gun? The murder weapon. Obviously should have been other prints. The gun belonged to John Reddy's grandfather. But there weren't other prints because John Reddy them off.
He was protecting the true killer of Melvin Riggs."
"For sure!
Dahlia. She killed Riggs. I always knew." Who was this. 7--Dougie Siefried?
He'd come up stealthily in our midst, a nervy, intense figure in T-shirt, numeral 11, his boyish freckled face familiar to us as own but ghastly pale and his tall lanky frame almost as wasted as Larry Baumgart's.
There was a rush to greet our Dougie we'd feared was no longer with us, one of our most popular jocks, we grabbed his hands, we hugged and kissed him, though, conspicuously, Dougie's former wife Ginger McCord kept distance, as startled as we were but trying not to show it.
tried to regain our attention but there was a new distraction, poor Pifer, haggard and distraught, and clearly in a rotten mood, had come to bring Millie home with him, and Millie, indignant, for no one told Millicent what to do, refused to budge, standing barefoot at the edge of the aqua-shimmering pool like a figure in a lurid film still, in a borrowed fuschia swimsuit with a flounced skirt that emphasized her matronly hips and the veins and dents in her lardy thighs, saying calmly, "How dare you. I'm not a child.
away, please. I'm with my friends, my oldest friends, I love them and they love me, you scarcely know me, there's a deep spiritual bond between these and me you couldn't comprehend, who cares if your precious deck collapsed? --it's nothing but a material object and who cares about material objects? Go away and leave me alone, damn you!" MacK Pifer whom we'd believed to be one of your good-natured gregarious fellas, a businessman but a creampuff when it came to women, the kind of man women marry for their money and social position and come frequently, in time, to love, said harshly, "Millie, you're drunk. This is disgraceful. You're not yourself, you'd better come home at once." He reached to take hold of her wrist, and Millie backed away from him screaming. It was at this point that Dwayne Hewson, glowering and menacing, fists raised in a classic boxing stance, moved protectively toward Millie--we were led to wonder Dwayne and Millie, who hadn't dated in high school, were closer than any of us knew? Poor MacK Pifer exchanged a few words with Dwayne, then retreated humiliated and quivering with rage, Millie ran off weeping to the bathhouse. By this time only Ritchie Eickhorn was listening to Evangeline Fesnacht--"I believe you, Evangeline," he said earnestly. "I know you must be right." Ritchie had managed to recover from his near-drowning, clothes and plastered to his thin, somewhat round-shouldered frame, and mouse-colored hair plastered to his head. "Excuse me, please," said, raising her voice. "Will you listen?" We tried, some of us, though we'd been drinking for hours and overhead the mirrored disco balls winked and glared as if with a malevolent life of their own. And a thin high marred the next set, a heavy-breathing rhythm-and-blues number by Waters--"Just Want to Make Love to You." Desperate, Evangeline to get the attention of Verrie Myers and Trish Elders, raising her voice, pleading, "Not only did John Reddy wipe the killer's prints off gun, he tossed the gun on a frozen creek so it would be found. Obviously!
He sacrificed himself for someone in his family--maybe the mother, the grandfather. Or the brother Farley. It might even have been the sister.
one who's a nun, who's made a life of ministering unto the needy and the
troubled. All along lohn Reddy Heart was innocent." Verrie cried angrily, "I knew! He wasn't ever a killer in his heart." Trish cried, "I knew!
Just to look in his eyes, to be close to him and look--you knew." Sandi Scott who hadn't heard all of this clearly said, in a passionate voice, "John did what he had to do. Looked his man in the eye, said Time to die! We've known this for thirty-two years." Others came forward, gallantly, like Ken Fischer--"I'd do the same for my mother, or any woman--if a man was abusing her.
I'd blow him away and take the consequences." Dougie Siefried said eagerly, with a furtive glance at Ginger McCord who stood stiffly close by, "Right, Ken! Any man would do as much for any woman. At sixteen, when of us were popping zits in the bathroom and trying to scrounge more allowance out of our dads, John Reddy was a man." Poor Evangeline was a plaintive sight in her purple satin jumpsuit which was now stained and spotted, her too-white hair lifting from her scalp like quills, her eyes hollow and intense. Impatiently she said, "No. You're not hearing me.
It's like high school--you don't hear. I don't mean that John Reddy killed Riggs to protect his mother from Riggs. I mean that John Reddy took the blame for the killing--to protect the true murderer. All these years! And was the most mistaken, I believed he had killer eyes. I wanted him to have killer eyes." But the music was too loud and our mood too frenetic, no seemed to be listening, even Verrie Myers who'd have sworn she was in love, still, with John Reddy Heart (for didn't she cherish her secret t tattoo on the creamy soft flesh of her left breast? ) found it difficult to concentrate on Evangeline Fesnacht's words. And there was another confrontation poolside, a young man in khaki shorts and WHS track T-shirt came charging into our midst, clearly disdainful, disgusted, to lead a glassy-eyed and disheveled Bibi Arhardt away with him stumbling in her high-heeled shoes, humbled unresisting. "Who was that?"
"Bibi's son vince. He's a senior at the high school."
"Bibi's son? since when? Is Bibi married?"
"Are you kidding? We're all married." Evangeline cried drunkenly, "I wanted him to have 'killer-eyes.
Nobody in Willowsville had killer eyes. John Reddy, forgive me! On the tape deck there came Black Banana's
"Love Like a Beast (Die Like a Saint)" none of us had heard since junior high.
This was a funky but danceable song and to Evangeline Fesnacht's dismay many of us began to dance again. "As if our legs, our like sides of beef began to twitch to the music, and we hadn't any choice but to follow. Wow." Even sniffy Carolyn Cameron the oncologist we'd guessed might have gone home hours ago was dancing, shaking hips breasts, head flung back, with horny Jax Whitehead. And who were greaser-guys we hadn't seen in years--Clyde Meunzer? Jake Gervasio?
Buhr.7--who'd evidently crashed the party, swinging and stamping with certain of our "good" girls? Emboldened by the late hour and frenzied music and a glazed look in Mary Louise Schultz's tawny-golden eyes, Art Lutz at last asked her to dance, and they sank into each other's arms like longdistance runners who've rushed over the finish line just in time, or almost, to collapse. Mary Louise breathe ," Loooove like a beast (diiie a saint), yes yes!" into Art's burning ear. He stumbled but retrieved the rhythm. since cocktails at the Rindfleisches' he'd been gazing at this woman and now, close up, his mouth loosened into a foolish smile, he noted how, except for a net of fine wrinkles around her eyes, and a slight puckering of her mouth, she was exactly the girl he'd loved long ago. Mary Louise quietly. "Artie? Remember? That drive we took together? You got lost, and we were late getting home? My father was furious." Art said eagerly, "The night we drove by the Buffalo House of Detention where John was being kept, and we parked by the lake--"
"We were with Roger and Suzi and coming back from Crystal Beach you took a wrong turn, we got lost in rural Canada--wow." Art said, with a hurt smile, "I guess that other time, Mary Louise. Must've been some other guy."
"Oh, no.
I'm sure it was you, Artie. In that car of yours? I remember that car."
Louise gave a little shiver, and bit her lower lip in a naughty little-girl smile. "It couldn't have been my brother's car," Art said, puzzled, "--unless Jamie date? You went out with Jamie? You did?" Mary Louise laughed, snuggled closer. He inhaled the wan, spent fragrance of an and the more immediate odor of a woman's body after hours of eating, drinking, dancing. "Hmmm. Like I said, I remember that car." Blake Wells had been contemplating Evangeline Fesnacht all evening. At the pig roast, he'd wanted to sit beside her, but Ritchie was always there. Now he made his move, seeing the woman staring about. He came up to her and shook her hand, reintroduced himself thirty years, in case she'd forgotten him, though not wanting to seem to boast, Blake felt that he had to bring his old rival up-to-date, for she was surely one of those who tossed out the class newsletter without glancing into it, so he rapidly recited his major career accomplishments ending with the fact that he'd recently been inducted as president of Williams College. He told Evangeline that he "very much admired" her novels (though he'd only finished two or three of the eleven she'd published) and
"if you might accept an honorary doctorate from Williams next spring? -we'd all be so honored." The white-haired woman seemed to listening, with a polite, neutral expression, her pale face drawn in fatigue and the corners of her pug-mouth drooping in disappointment. This remarkable, didn't the woman care that Blake Wells was speaking to her?
Inviting her to Williams to be honored? After a moment she murmured what sounded Yes thank you or Maybe, thank you and Blake leaned closer to confide, over the grunts and groans of
"Love Like a Beast," "Evangeline, I've never told a living soul but, our senior year, I was terribly depressed--'fucked up' as kids say today. Then, I'll never know why, just a gesture of friendship, I sent you a dozen yellow roses--'To Evangeline Fesnacht, first among equals'--and somehow it was like the sun shone again in my heart. I wanted to live, and to excel, and by God I did." At this revelation, Evangeline's face tightened like a fist. Indifferent a moment before, her eyes widened in a look incredulity, fury. "You--what? You sent me those roses? You?"
"But you must guessed. How many others could have written first among--'?" But Evangeline Fesnacht hissed at him these words he could scarcely believe, afterward, he'd heard from the mouth of a woman of culture and breeding, "You duplicitous S. O. B. Fuck-er!" For having offered the woman an honorary doctorate? But why?
The headbanger Lollipop's
"Pops You Gonna Gimme the Car Keys (Or Am I Gonna Have to Take Em from You? )" came on fast, funny and furious.
It was then we heard a sudden roaring noise. Louder even than Lollipop.
Thunder? An earthquake? (we'd been conditioned by the collapse of redwood deck, we expected the worst). A motorcycle? Speeding Race Lane, of all unlikely Willowsville roads? From somewhere the despairing female cry, "It's John Reddy! --he was here, and he's gone." What? "Who?"
"It's John Reddy, I'm sure! --he was here, and he's gone." Confusion, and near panic. We rushed at one another clutching arms, hands. "Who? Who?"
"John Reddy. He was here."
"Here? Where?
" We collided with one another in our hurry to run out to the street, of us rushing through the Hewsons' house, others taking the long way around the wetted grass and a prickly boxwood hedge. Upstairs in a guest into which they'd stolen to sit on twin beds and clasp hands, whispering, kissing, laughing, weeping, Jenny Thrun (who was in fact Roger Zwaart's wife but knew divorce was imminent now he'd found Suzi again) and Halloren (married too, and "innocuously happy") would claim to outside the window the passing motorcycle, and the cyclist--clearly identical to the blurred photos Kate Olmsted had shown us earlier.
Heart had come to Dwayne's party after all and knocked at the front and in the din no one had heard! And so he'd gone away again.
John Reddy Heart had come to our thirtieth reunion, and now he was gone.
Clyde Meunzer, eyes reddened from drink, a day's glinting-gray beard on his thickset jaws and chin, shouted at stunned Dwayne Hewson,
"You John Reddy away, Hewson? Didn't let him in your house? You cheap fuck, you!" Clyde would've rushed at Dwayne to batter him with his fists but his friends restrained him. Dwayne protested, "I didn't even know he was here!
I was the one who invited him for Christ's sake! John Reddy was more my friend than yours, Meunzer, we were close as brothers." One hundred feet away on Mill Race Lane, unknown to any of us, in parked, darkened Ford Escort with rust-flecked Pennsylvania plates, slouched Norm Zeiga, groggy from whisky and cigarettes, a newly
38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in his jacket pocket, Norm was wakened by the deafening roar of the passing motorcycle, a rarity St.. Albans Hill, whose driver he hadn't seen clearly except to know it was a man, not a kid, wearing a black T-shirt and a crash helmet, he the noisy, milling crowd on his ex-friend Dwayne Hewson's sloping front lawn, and was confused and panicked thinking somehow that police had already been called, and decided not to go through with the desperate kamikaze act of vengeance he'd been plotting for months.
Leaving Suzi Zeigler and Roger Zwaart alive, and reasonably healthy, destined to marry at last in their fiftieth years.
Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Page 48
