by P. F. Kluge
Eddie.
The Airship Tavern was a roadhouse Eddie used to like. Twenty years later, it hadn’t changed: tar-paper shingle siding, a neon sign shaped like the Hindenburg, and a bartender who looked me over twice before drawing a draft beer.
I sat there for half an hour, sobbing, shaking, struggling to get a handle on a situation that didn’t have any handles. “Eddie’s back … larger than life,” Doc Robbins had said. Doc was dead. And Eddie? “Eddie’s on the radio again, Eddie’s coming back!” Wendell had exulted. But Wendell was half crazy, wasn’t he? What did he know? What did I know? Was I half crazy too?
Somewhere—then, or now, or sometime in between—there was something I’d missed, and that missing something had plunged me into the middle of a nightmare. A lurid tabloid horror story: James Dean biding his time in a sanitarium, Elvis alive in Brazil, Buddy Holly up in the mountains. Forget the shattered car, the smashed plane, the broken bodies; forget the televised funerals and the thousand mourners, the so-final-seeming tombs. There was something I’d missed, and now I was paying for it.
I ordered more beer and tried hard to reenter the normal world. I studied little things. The foam in my beer. The labels on the bottles along the bar. I stared at a jar of Polish sausage, pickled in brine—formaldehyde—and I gagged. I watched a TV quiz show. I started feeling better, thought that I was coming around. Someone played the jukebox, and that was all right with me, till “Far-Away Woman” sounded. I spun off the stool, looking for someone to accuse, and lurched toward the men’s room, vomiting. Nausea, cramps, sweats, tears: all hit at once. I felt that I had eaten something spoiled, something that had been dead too long. I staggered from sink to toilet, and finally passed out on the bathroom floor. When I awoke, the linoleum felt cool beneath my cheek; the sweat was drying on my clothing.
“Coffee’s all you get, friend,” the bartender said when I’d washed up and come back out.
“Okay with me.” He poured it black and strong and nodded approvingly when I asked for change to make a phone call.
“Hello?”
“Joann?”
“Yes.”
“Frank.”
Like a million other phone calls. It surprised me to be so suddenly and easily in touch with the largest fraction of the life I’d never lived. It cost a dime, was all.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “Where are you?”
“Airship Tavern. Eddie’s old place.”
“You got lost?”
“Yes …”
She lived fifteen minutes away, she said. She proceeded to give me some fairly complicated directions, listening to me repeat them back to her, correcting me when I slipped.
“Be nice to see you again, Frank,” she said as she hung up. That was it. Nice. Competent and friendly and in control, like she was a real estate agent arranging to show me some likely houses.
• • •
This time I drove slowly, straight past the turnoff to the quonset. You could hardly see it in the dark: a slightly wider opening between the trees. I shuddered as I passed. Pull yourself together, Wordman. There’s got to be an explanation.
Sure there is. You’re crazy. That explains it. You saw the wreck, didn’t you? You watched them pull his body out of the car. You attended the funeral, right? And twenty years later, stopping by the quonset on a summer afternoon, he’s in there, standing in darkness, like he’d been waiting all along for you to show.
Only he hadn’t. That was the most frightening thing of all. I’d intruded. I was unwelcome. An enemy. He knew it and I knew it.
How are you supposed to react when the dead come back? Who wrote the book on that one? Is surprise appropriate? Joy? Well that wasn’t what I felt when I recognized his voice. I’d been terrified. I ran away. I knew that the return of Eddie Wilson was something to be feared.
He’d been one of my nicest memories, till this afternoon. Remembering him made me feel good. But he’d been a memory, like a picture you treasure, or a souvenir. That’s the way I’d handled him. That way he was manageable. But now I’d kept pressing and rummaging in the past, and somehow, without knowing it, I’d crossed a border that divided then and now. The past had come to life, and I feared it.
We’ve all seen those articles about how people react to the coming of death: how denial turns to rage turns to acceptance. I think that the people who survive a death go through a similar process. I remembered feeling all those emotions about Eddie’s early, pointless passing. And when I was done mourning, I learned to live with the fact that he was gone. A life became a memory which I pictured in the sepia tones of an old film. But now the process had reversed itself. The old picture flushed with new color. Eddie was back. The past no longer contained him.
So how about it, Wordman? Are you crazy? You think that Eddie’s back? Or that he never left?
No. I couldn’t buy it. I wasn’t crazy. But there was craziness around. That was for sure. And somebody was taking advantage of it. Someone was using the past, using memories like weapons. And that, I thought, was the most brutal kind of ambush.
A dozen mailboxes and a sign that invited people to come pick blueberries: those were the last landmarks in Joann’s instructions. I turned down the road she’d told me to follow to the end. I passed some small lakes and an abandoned poultry farm, with roofs caved in and weeds growing through the bottom of wire runs. After the blueberry farm, the macadam turned to sand, the pines closed in, more like weeds than trees, and the road curved farther into the barrens.
I’d been all full of Eddie Wilson, ever since that Sunday morning at the Safeway. If the dead live on in the memories of the people they leave behind, then Eddie Wilson had lived in me. I’d replayed all of it—words and music, ups and downs. I couldn’t believe that anyone could have thought more of him, more about him, than I had. For sure, no one would remember me that way. And my reward for remembering was a voice that set me screaming. Now I couldn’t bear to think of him at all. Picturing his face set me trembling. A bar of his music made me gag.
That outraged me. What was happening to my memories of that Cruiser year hurt me more than my wife’s infidelities, my students’ indifference, my own failures and defaults. It hurt me where I lived, in the only place and time I’d really been alive. That was unforgivable. That made me an enemy of whoever was out there. I thought of him as a traitor, whoever he was. Not a murderer or a thief, but a betrayer of memory, of the bond of private feeling that links the dead with the living, that holds a generation together, that enlarges the fallen and guides survivors.
The road crossed a wooden bridge and ended in what looked like a picnic site. There were campfire ashes and soda cans, and a path leading down to the river, to a place where it looked deep enough to swim.
But there wasn’t any house.
Half an hour, I said. By then it would be dark, and I didn’t want to stay there in the dark. I turned the car around, pointed it back the way I’d come, switched on the parking lights, and waited.
No mistake, I was sure of that. She gave me the directions carefully, I repeated them, she corrected me. I followed them, and everything was just where she’d said it would be. Except her house.
I was exactly where Joann Carlino wanted me to be. At the end of a dirt road, in an empty clearing, near dark.
Fifteen minutes down, fifteen to go. That morning I’d talked with what was left of Wendell Newton. That afternoon, a brush with Eddie’s ghost. Now I’d spoken with Joann. A full day, all things considered, and I wanted it to be over. I didn’t want to sort things out or weigh possibilities. I didn’t care anymore whether I’d guessed right or wrong. All I wanted was for it to end.
Ten minutes left. It wasn’t the hardest problem in the world, I told myself. Not when there were just two basic possibilities. Two possibilities for Eddie, two possibilities for all of us. Either we were alive or we were dead. Dead or alive—that’s all it boiled down to. Nothing in between. Dead or alive. Not even a multiple choice.
I opened the door, stepped out, looked around: a stood-up date. When I’d arrived half an hour before, I’d been scared. Now I felt plain foolish. I double-checked to make sure there were no houses within earshot. Then I shouted, loud as I could.
“Joann!”
So much for the foolishness. Now came the fear, for real. A flashlight snapped on inside a nearby grove of pine. Its beam was powerful. I covered my eyes.
“Joann, is it …” I held my hand over my eyes, opened my fingers, squinted out, but all I could see was that glaring light.
“Whoever you are … I can’t see … put it down, please …”
The flashlight didn’t budge. It pinned me against the car, like an escaping prisoner caught against the wall, a deer blinded by a poacher.
“I came here because I was told to!” I pleaded. Maybe it was a farmer outraged by trespassers.
“Joann Carlino asked me.”
No move.
“You want me to leave? Is that it? Okay …” I reached for the handle to the car door.
That decided it.
The flashlight closed in on me. Whoever held that light was running straight at me, and I knew that if one hand held a flashlight, the other could hold a gun or a knife. But still I couldn’t move. I tried, I swear I tried, but nothing budged, not even a scream, because my lungs couldn’t pump the air to carry it out of my throat, and now my executioner was five feet away and I guessed I’d die without knowing what it was all about. But the flashlight dropped to the ground. I blinked in the sudden darkness, peered out, and saw her standing in front of me.
“Hello, Wordman.”
“Joann … why … this …”
“I had to check you out, but you wouldn’t get out of your car …”
“What’s going on?”
“These past few days … phone calls … and the house, there’s someone watching it, and then you called and … I thought it was you … There’s someone around …”
“I know there is,” I said.
“I live just down the road, but I had to see if you—”
“Get in the car. I’ll drive you home.”
She owned the blueberry farm. A hundred and fifty acres to which she admitted pickers in the summer and hunters in the fall and Christmas-tree choppers in December. A barn where she lodged horses for suburban equestrians. An old brick farmhouse where she said she lived alone. First I saw the property. Then, when we were inside, in the kitchen, I saw Joann.
Never go back. Isn’t that the conventional wisdom about old flames? Remember them as they were, and let them get better as the years go by, till your memory becomes a work of art, your grain of sand a pearl. But never go back or everything falls to pieces. Now, here I was, risking everything. I admit it: it was the longest possible shot. I admit more: I didn’t just want to find that she was alive and well, that she’d earned money or aged nicely, that she’d gone on to college or into business. I wanted more. I wanted to feel exactly as I used to, the same surge, the same rush. I wanted to want her, right then, that first minute.
And I did.
She was still Joann. That was the important thing. There were gray streaks in her hair, and maybe she was ten pounds heavier, but it hadn’t collected in any one place that I could see, and even in muddy boots, slacks, T-shirt, and windbreaker, she was still Joann.
I know what you’re thinking, because it’s what I would think myself: that I made too much of a woman, that I placed an impossible burden on her, mistakenly regarding her as the key to the life I hadn’t lived. Okay, but every life has a pivot. And she was mine. She had been, she still was, my turning point. And, what’s more, I bet she knew it. While I studied her, she looked at me. Her fear faded. The old sly smile crept out again when she saw how I was looking her over.
“You haven’t changed much, Wordman.”
“Maybe I should have.”
“So where do we start?” she asked. “Now? Twenty years ago? In the middle someplace?”
“Better start now. Anyone else here?”
“No.”
“Anybody live here, except you?”
“No.”
“Who’s got keys?”
“My sister on Long Island.”
“Lock the doors.”
She peered out front, where we’d come in, then turned to check the back.
“Done.”
“Windows.”
“Closed. Latched.”
“Do you have a gun?”
She reached into the pocket of her windbreaker, pulled out a pistol, and set it on the kitchen table.
“I wasn’t sure about you,” she said.
“What convinced you?”
“When you came out of the car and called my name. Hearing your voice again. And when I blinded you with the flashlight, you just stood there, like you couldn’t help yourself. And I remembered.”
“What?”
“The way you used to be.”
“How was that?” I asked.
She laughed mischievously, as if at the memory of an old joke she wasn’t sure she should share with me.
“Helpless,” she said. That was the joke.
My dismay must have registered. It wasn’t the way I wanted her to remember me.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” she added. “Nice and smart and all, but always kind of lost. Needing someone to give you a push or a shove. Otherwise, just waiting for things to happen to you.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t take it so hard, Frank. It’s just your nature. And when I saw you at the dead end of the road, standing helpless, blinded by the light, I knew that there was no way you could be behind what’s been going on lately. No way. Not you …”
“Thanks … I guess.”
She still treated me like I was a kid. The other Cruisers were men, but not me, and twenty years didn’t change that. Job, seniority, home ownership—they might fool other people, but not Joann. A long time ago she decided that I hadn’t quite grown up. Maybe you could take it as a compliment, since it suggested my best work was still in front of me. Sure, on paper you could call it a compliment. But not sitting at her kitchen table.
She brought out a pot of coffee, a bottle of brandy, and a plate of gingersnaps. She sat in one chair, put her feet up on another.
“Why’d you come, Wordman.”
“Things have been happening lately. I think that I’m in danger. And that you’re in danger too.”
“Wordman to the rescue?” She tried, but she couldn’t quite take me seriously.
“Yes,” I said. “Rescue you, and me … and … Eddie.”
I told her everything except for that encounter in the quonset. There was no fitting that in anywhere. The rest of the story fell into place. The Safeway. Mannheim. Sally in Ohio, Kenny in church, Wendell in prison. Doc Robbins dead in Pennsylvania.
Yet even as I told her the story, I sensed that I wasn’t really answering questions. I was asking them. I was establishing my need to know about Wendell’s “kings” and the Leaves of Grass. It felt like she was Eddie’s surrogate, his earthly representative: all requests to him would be handled by her.
“You haven’t changed,” she said, when I finished. “You always had so much on your mind.”
She sat there, mulling things over, and I thought that of all my questions, she was the largest mystery. I didn’t know her, for all my years of wondering. It brought me up short, how easy it had been for me to idolize Joann Carlino and yet remain ignorant of the most basic facts about her. I sensed that it would be a challenge loving her; not a romantic challenge so much as a daily test. Even now, I could tell she was judging me, measuring whether I was worth her time. Did I deserve to share her confidences about the past? What business did I have, sitting in her kitchen, asking questions about Lakehurst?
&
nbsp; “You used to have the answers,” I said. “Got any answers for me now?”
“Some,” she nodded. “And some questions.”
She poured a shot of brandy into her coffee. “It’s a funny thing about secrets. About keeping secrets, I mean. First you keep secrets because that’s what you’d promised you’d do, right? You said you wouldn’t tell anybody, and you don’t. Time passes and still you keep your mouth shut. More time. Years. People die. People disappear. And you keep the secret for a different reason. First, because everybody was alive. Then, because they’re not … they’re gone. Then you’re gone too. Bingo. End of secret.”
“Wendell said the same thing, more or less. I don’t know, I think most secrets are meant to be told eventually. It’s not like a vow of eternal silence. It’s more like a trust. You put yourself in someone else’s hands. You count on them …”
“That’s just what that kid Mannheim said,” she countered. “Only he’s a little smoother than you are.”
“When was he here?”
“Yesterday. he had money.”
“For the tapes?”
“What tapes? He wanted an interview.”
“No deal?”
“No deal.”
“How about me?”
“What’s it mean to you, Wordman? After all this time, what could it possibly mean?”
“Eddie was your guy,” I said. “Okay? But he was my friend too. So maybe I’m entitled.”
“Entitled to what?”
“To know. That’s all.”
“Know? All you want is to know.”
“That’s all,” I answered quickly, hoping to impress her with the simplicity of my mission. Money wasn’t the point, or fame, or music. The truth was all.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked, unimpressed. “What good is just knowing.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“Why should I? Eddie was my guy. You said it. What’s left of him? Some records I can play when I feel blue. A couple of snapshots. And memories. That’s all I have. And you’re asking me to share it.”
