Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  *

  His younger sister Janet has just arrived in town, she who herself had fled that decaying farm decades before, prior to her father's death but after her mother had passed, she who would have been considered slightly too young to make such a decision on her own back then, not even out of high school, she who felt compelled to escape the toxifying atmosphere of death and decay that haunted her old man simply because instinct told her that she had to live - Janet is back. She called me - we always got along. She has checked into the clean but modest Budget Businessman's Micro-Suites Extended Stay Hotel. The building sits on the edge of town. She told me she can look out the window of her room toward the direction the city had never grown but is now growing, toward the direction of the old farm and her brother.

  Now, twenty-some years later, the city has finally recovered from the oil bust and a series of recessions; it is coming into money again. It has a "Bright Future" committee and a "Growing Places" task force. It has been casting its eyes toward the outskirts, toward the car graveyard, the old farms, and Boheme. Janet has said she does not like to see herself in the midst of the dealings around Blaise’s estate, but she has decided that she had been wrong not to be there for her older brother earlier, when he had led and re-led himself into peril, mostly through his angelic naïveté. She will meet him tomorrow. She will finally see if she can set him free, and in doing so, free a little of herself bound up in a twenty-year-old duty unfulfilled. And she intends to see to it that neither Jude nor anyone else around him can to lead him into any further mischief. Not that she attributes malice to Jude. In fact, I think she likes Jude and always has, but she has made herself too good for him, whereas if she had been patient enough to make herself a little less it might have made him grow into something more – his expressed intend I college was to become a lawyer, and he was smart enough. I think that now perhaps she thinks that. I am not sure. In any case, as I said, she has expressed an intention to see to it that neither Jude nor anyone else around him can to lead Blaise into trouble again, and while that phrase is rather vague, I have recently kenned that it involves a one-way plane ticket to the Philippines. That is rather abrupt.

  From the Author’s Notes: Interview with Ray: Did You Find Out Where He Gets His Money?

  On the same day as Janet's re-arrival, the afternoon found a lean, somewhat desperate-looking man named Laredo leaning across the wells of the bait shop to interrogate its owner.

  "Where's he get his money?" the man asked.

  The bait shop proprietor was much younger than he, and was lean but wiry and strong. He was the son of the current car-graveyard owner, who had prospered in the last decade and had purchased the bait shop as a fiefdom for his son.

  The proprietor looked at the man with impatience. This was the third time he had seen him in as many days, and each time he was wearing the same worn-out suit, and each time he had purchased nothing. "What the hell are you on about?"

  "Blaise Bohrs, where does he get his money?"

  The proprietor, whose name was Ray Jr., squinted at him. "You knew him before you went to prison, and you need some cash now?"

  "Who doesn't need a little? So you know Blaise now, right?"

  "He's better left alone. He's lost."

  "But he does come into your store now and then?"

  "Well yes - it’s the closest place for cold pop, or a beer. And of course, it being a bait shop, it's the last store before nowhere, so it's like a bug light for weirdos. But Blaise isn't one of them - he's lost, maybe, but he's not an active loser like so many of the rest of them that comes in here."

  "That's all well and good - now where does he get his money?"

  "I dunno - he's been doing odd jobs since he got back."

  "Like what?"

  "Stuff when folks need help. He knocked a hornet's nest from my eaves; he mows the lawns of some of the older folks down the road; he painted all the address numbers on the curb over in Ritzville. Of course he won't be doing that again. He got off by one number and got them wrong all down the block. Made an ambulance miss a dying guy."

  "That ain’t enough to tide a fellow by. He bought himself a fancy lawyer for his murder trial."

  "Look, I don't know. Folks say his dad left him a little something, or that pig of his nosed up some kind of treasure out amidst those foundations of Boheme. He has full right to whatever he finds there. Wherever he gets it, it’s his business. I expect you are coming around just to trouble him."

  "I know him from way back. I paid my price. I was his friend once. Maybe I just want to be his friend again."

  "Naw, Jude was his friend. My cousin Dale Charboneau is his friend. You, Laredo - you were just a piece of work. I know a little about you. And by the way, Jude's back, too."

  The hollow man looked away at this, and ground a fist in one hand.

  "Jude's gonna meet him here tomorrow. You got something you need to settle, you show up and talk then."

  "Maybe I will," Laredo said.

  "And I'll be keeping an eye on you when you do."

  "I'm in a hard way, and Blaise got what was rightfully mine."

  "You talking about how your dad left his electronics repair business to Blaise instead of you? Look, his dad and your dad were partners, and from what my dad says, your momma left your dad for some rich doctor and you and your momma were too busy burning through his money to give a rat's ass about your real dad at the time. But Blaise - he took care of your old man."

  "Blaise just cozied up to him to take advantage of him, to steal his ideas, to get his help with that electronic deviltry he and his father were up to."

  "He paid the price for that."

  "Couldn't no one never pay the price for that."

  "He did. Look, he was messed up back then, and what he tried was from the pit of loneliness and craziness, and there was no way that stuff was ever going to work, but he ventured more than you ever did, and he fell further than you ever could, but he made up for it. Now look, I'm tired of you hanging around my bait store not buying anything and scaring off my customers. It’s tough to scare off weirdos, but you do it. Now if you want to see Blaise, be here tomorrow. But so help me, if you try to do him wrong, I will see to it that you end your days wearing cinderblock shoes and feeding the catfish at the bottom of that mudhole lake behind me. No one will ever miss you."

  The man swallowed hard and left, but when he was gone Ray noticed that he had left a business card on the counter. He looked at it. It was a remnant from another era and had three successive phone numbers scratched out and replaced. For that matter, it had the business name scratched out and replaced. Where once it had read "Bohrs and Jones - Electronics Repair" it now said "Laredo Jones - Number One Talent Agent in Oklahoma! Let us put the best face on your local business." It was yellowed and bent. Ray tossed it aside.

  "Damned fool blaming someone else for throwing his life in the trash - I know for a fact he sells cars at Lucky Day Auto and makes okay money, if he'd just stop wanting to be something he's not."

  From Blaise’s Journal: Jude

  Jude Drewyer was and is my friend. He was the 12th of 12 kids and a “late-blessing baby.” His father, an ex-hippy, now a balding, round, and bespectacled man, worked for an energy company as an assistant HR director in charge of blood drives and fun runs. He never pulled the trigger on firings - he had too soft a heart for that. He did get to plan office enrichment activities like Pizza Fridays and Get Movin' for Better Health and Give Blood-Save Lives! But when the city swelled on a big boom of money and the energy company moved to a giant campus in the suburbs, he had to grow a pair and move outside his comfort zone or the company would leave him behind and bring in a hired gun, so he decided to learn all about hiring and firing and reprimanding and making sure everyone signed the damned employee handbook and explaining why five sick days a year was enough and why healthcare would cost more this year. It came easier to him than he thought because he could “see how it was for the good of employees and the company a
like.” Anyway he still got to plan the fun-runs although participation was now mandatory. Well, strongly encouraged – he noted who participated and who did not. And this all paid well and let him provide a suburban lifestyle for his kids. But there was still some hippy in him, when no one was looking (except, surreptitiously, his son. He kept his Dead-head albums and smoked weed).

  Jude’s mother was a frazzle-haired woman for whom the basic sacraments of the Catholic faith were never enough, and she criss-crossed the globe trying to catch an apparition of the Virgin Mary. In the clouds, in a new-mown field, in blinding light, in toast. She was a member of the Blue Army. She had raised her kids (well, all except two – Jude and his older sister Laney), and she was due a little something, wasn’t she? Something her family could not provide – maybe something they had taken away? In any case she and her husband did not talk much – they were each in their own world, and that left Jude and his sister in whatever worlds they could construct for themselves.

  Jude never felt at home once his parents began acting estranged, so we hung out. We had both transferred into a Catholic prep highschool in a monied part of town our sophomore year (St. Meershceart – you couldn’t pronounce it just by reading it). And he played enough sports to have a group of friends – we both did, but for a while he didn’t fit it in – the kids were awfully judgmental. I punched a fat snob in the face for Jude once and we kind of hung out after that, even though we’d known each other since gradeschool. Out on my father’s dirt farm we caught tarantulas, talked cars and girls, blew up things with leftover fireworks, drank hooch and looked at nudie magazines. On Saturday nights we’d go hang out at the mall arcade and then we’d go back to my place and take folding lawn chairs out into the fields and play Van Halen and drink and watch the will-o-the-wisps float over the marshy bottomland between the trailer park and the swamp. This was the sort of thing we did until, in junior year, a social eddy caught Jude (consisting of a driver’s license and a girl and dances), and junior and senior year we did not see as much of each other outside of school. Jude sort of became the gilt-saddled polo pony that kids at St. M’s were expected to be. Me? I was content to play sports and blow things up with kids from the trailer park or from the older neighborhood surrounding the Quonset hut (no one knew how long that old neighborhood had been there all by itself, but it consisted of twelve houses arranged around a Quonset hut and encircled by an indestructible WPA sidewalk.) Mostly I would hang around my car graveyard uncle and stay as far away as I could from my dad. My junior and senior years passed in a blur, running or tackling, going out with the occasional girl, not making great grades even though I was smart, and hiding from my haranguing sisters Tess and Janet, and not planning for the future.

  From Blaise’s Journal

  Am I to understand that Rosalind has decided to tell my own story for me? Never let on what you are writing or someone will steal it. She knows I have a box full of notes and sketches I worked on when I was in prison and I told her that it will take time to sift them and put them all in order. And yet she's taken it on herself? I know she is ten times smarter and more efficient than I am - I am afraid she might actually get the damned thing done before I have even finished my map of the sub-suburbs. You cannot tell a story without a proper map any more than you can build a radio without a circuit. She does not understand this.

  I have redrawn and erased parts of my map many times. It is hard to draw cows.

  She wants to mother hen me. She knows I will be out of here soon.