Читать книгу Seven Mile Bridge - Michael M. Biehl - Страница 13

6

A tear plops onto the glossy yearbook page. I quickly brush it off with the back of my hand, but it leaves a stain. Luckily, it landed not on Lori’s picture, but on that of some kid I barely knew in high school, Jim Hecht. I knew him better in grade school, but the only thing I remember about him is that he liked to eat library paste.

I set the yearbook aside and head downstairs. Didn’t think I’d need a drink this early in the day. When I step on the fifth stair tread it brays mockingly. Hee-haw.

I use the wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen to call Photo-Phast, having neglected to ask when my prints of the Lake Audrey negatives would be ready while I was in the store. A polite, efficient female explains that the “ ‘Prints in 1 hour’ not apply to special aw-duh.” Tomorrow before noon. Photo not so phast after all.

Jim Beam and a ceramic coffee mug with bunny rabbits on it accompany me back upstairs to my room. Good bourbon is wonderfully versatile. On the rocks, it’s perfect in hot weather; straight, it warms you in the winter. It is sweet enough to drink as a digestif but is not too sweet to enjoy before dinner. Or, as in this case, before lunch.

The next thing I pull out of the L.L. Bean box is my mother’s college yearbook from the University of Wisconsin, where she and my father met. The yearbook is from her senior year, so my father would have graduated two years earlier. I flip to my mother’s picture and am surprised at how dramatic her pose is. Body turned, chin lifted high. No smile at all, but instead a theatrically intense stare and slightly parted lips, like you’d see in a publicity still for a ’40s film actress. Her extracurricular activities are listed under her maiden name, Louise Warchefsky. Drama Club every year, president of the club senior year. A list of titles of plays and musicals, some of which are familiar to me: Our Town, MacBeth, Show Boat. On the Drama Club’s two pages in the yearbook are pictures from several productions, and it looks like Louise Warchefsky had the female lead in every one of them. I remember somebody telling me my mother was in some plays as a student, but I had no idea theater was such a big deal to her.

Beneath her college yearbook is one from Oshkosh High, 1943. It looks amazingly similar to Sheboygan North, 1972. The index lists all of the pages on which my mother appears, and I peruse them. She looks about twelve years old in her graduation picture, but no question about it, she was a pretty girl. She’s in the Drama Club again, and there’s one candid shot of her in a hallway. She’s carrying a stack of books in front of her and laughing cheerfully at the camera. Her hair is up and she is wearing an oversized white cardigan sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her books partially conceal the big blue varsity-size “O” on the front of the sweater.

Oddly, the next item I remove from the box is a duplicate copy of the 1943 Oshkosh High yearbook. Can’t have too many of those around, can you, Mom?

The next layer in the box includes my brother’s high school yearbooks and my college freshman class book. Beneath those I find a brown vinyl album with the words, “Our Wedding” in gold script on the cover. Inside are snapshots from my mother’s second wedding, when she married Ray. What a cheesy-looking reception. Paper plates, paper cups, plastic forks for the cake. I remember it was in a rented hall that was part of a tavern and drunks from the bar staggered through on their way to the restrooms. I’m in some of the pictures, dressed in a cheap polyester suit, hair to my shoulders, refusing to smile for the camera and affecting the look of a communist revolutionary, or perhaps a mad poet.

The wedding took place in June after my freshman year. It was only the second time I had met Ray. The first time was the previous December when I came home from Madison for Christmas.

* *

December, 1972

“So this is the college boy, eh?” Ray gripped my hand so hard it brought tears to my eyes. He was short, about five-eight, stocky, and muscular. His crew-cut was gray on the sides and black on top. He pumped my hand up and down like he was using a cross-cut saw.

“How do you do,” I said.

“I do great.” He looked at my mother. “Hey, honeybunch, what say we get your boy here a haircut while he’s home. He looks like one of them hippies.”

I had prepared myself to like Ray. When my mother told me on the phone that she was dating a man she had met at work, I was happy for her. Ray delivered fruit to the Piggly Wiggly store. The checkers who smoked, like my mother, usually took their breaks in back of the store, on the loading docks. One day, she explained, Ray had lit her Tareyton and one thing led to another, “so maybe smoking’s not as bad as they say.”

My father had been dead for over a year. It was time for my mother to move on. She needed companionship, affection, and help with the house and my brother. I was determined to accept Ray, to appreciate whatever there was to appreciate about him, and above all, to get along with him.

“You’re not one of them hippies, are you, son?”

Son? Jesus Christ. I hated the guy instantly. “No, sir.”

“I hope not.” Ray tossed my suitcase into the trunk of his car and slammed the lid. “These peaceniks with their pot smoking and their war protesting make me sick.”

I smoked pot and had attended several anti-war rallies, but I held my tongue. My mother was giving me a look that said “lay off,” so on the way home from the Greyhound bus depot I talked about sports, college courses, and no politics. I remember feeling painfully drowsy in the car.

It felt odd returning to my room after three months. Everything was just as I had left it. My mother had not even dusted. Yet it was not exactly as I remembered it. The desk was smaller, the ceiling was lower and the window was closer to the bed. My memory had distorted the room’s dimensions.

That was the strangest Christmas Eve of my life, even stranger than the previous one, after my father died. My brother seemed different, unusually quiet, distant, and fatuous. Ray dragged us to his church for a candlelight service, which had never been part of my family’s traditions. It was an evangelistic, Jesus-freaky church out in a rural area, and the congregation did a lot of amen-ing and hallelujah-ing. My brother kept giving me goofy looks and I was fighting the giggles through most of the service. Right in the middle of “Silent Night,” Jamie got to me with his wavering falsetto, fluttering eyelashes, and the mockingly exaggerated expression of piety on his face. At “’round yon Virgin,” I let out an audible snort. Ray looked at me like he wanted to kill me on the spot.

Coming out of church I enjoyed the crisp, clean air on my face. The pipe organ was playing “Joy to the World,” and a gentle snow was falling. For a moment, I had a slight hint of Christmas feeling, something I hadn’t experienced in two years. Then just as I was about to get in the car, my mother looked at me sharply and said, “You embarrassed Ray.” The only thing Christmassy about the ride home was that it was silent and cold.

Back at the house, we all drank spiked eggnog, even Jamie, while we watched an unbelievably corny Christmas special on the Philco. My mother went into the kitchen to wash dishes when the ten o’clock news came on.

That was the year of the infamous Christmas Bombings. For a week, American pilots had been flying thousands of sorties, dropping bombs day and night on cities in North Vietnam. The reporter said it was the first time B-52s, which were imprecise area bombers, had ever been used against cities.

When the report ended, I said, “So much for Peace on Earth.”

“You got a problem with it?” said Ray.

“Yeah,” I said, taking advantage of my mother’s absence from the room. “I have a problem with carpet bombing civilians on Christmas Eve.”

Ray waved his hands in the air. “Oh, here we go. I mighta known, with the long hair. Tell me, Joe College, how else we gonna get the Gooks back to the bargaining table?”

“We don’t need to get them back to the table, we should just pull out. The war is lost, why are we still killing people?”

Ray downed an eggnog in a single gulp. A creamy drop trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Those aren’t people,” he said. “They’re inhuman beasts.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“That’s because you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” He thumbed his chest. “I fought in the Pacific in World War Two—I know. And the Gooks are worse than the Japs.” He poured another eggnog, spilling some onto the coffee table. “Just pull out. What about our POWs? You think we should just abandon them? What it if was you over there rotting in a bamboo cage? Or your brother?”

He pointed at Jamie, who had a blithesome grin on his face and a goggle in his eyes. I guessed he was feeling alcohol intoxication for the first time in his life. He raised a wobbly index finger in the air and said, “Fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity.”

Ray’s lip twitched. He stared at Jamie. “Mind your language, son.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Jamie.

Roy flushed. “How’d you like me to wash your mouth out with soap?”

Jamie gave Ray the same look he always gave me when I challenged him athletically. Ping-pong, snowballs, whatever, Jamie had tremendous confidence in himself physically, and he did not even remotely understand the concept of backing down.

“You and whose army?” sneered Jamie.

Ray glowered. His face was beet-red. Then, he smiled amiably. He stood up and pushed the coffee table aside. “Okay, tough guy,” he said, waving a hand toward himself, “let’s go. Ten bucks says I pin you in two minutes.”

I did nothing to stop it. My brother was going to get in trouble and Ray was going to get his clock cleaned, and both of those outcomes were fine with me.

Jamie stumbled when he stood up, but only as a ploy. Dropping to his hands, Jamie swung his legs around in a quick, smooth arc, catching Ray off guard and taking his feet out from under him. Ray went down shockingly hard on his elbow, and I thought he might be hurt badly enough that it would end the fight right there.

“Son of a bitch,” said Ray. He shook his head like he was clearing cobwebs. “Nice takedown, son. Here, help an old man up.”

Ray reached out a hand. The elbow of his shirt was soaked with blood. Jamie gripped Ray’s wrist and pulled him to his feet. Ray spun around and dropped to the floor immediately, taking Jamie down with a fireman’s carry and putting a hammerlock on him in one smooth movement. It was obvious Ray knew what he was doing. He grimaced, and veins bulged in his neck and forehead as he strained to press Jamie’s shoulders to the floor.

Jamie went absolutely berserk. He kicked out furiously with his legs and thrashed his arms wildly. One of his kicks caught a bough of the Christmas tree, and sundry glass ornaments fell to the floor, one of them breaking, a couple of them rolling into the field of battle. In desperation, Jamie went for Ray’s face with his hands, clawing at Ray’s eyes. A cut opened up on Ray’s temple.

That seemed to make Ray even more resolute. He spread his legs out for leverage and twisted his body such that his forearm slid across the front of Jamie’s throat in a ruthless chokehold.

My mother appeared in the room, a look of horror on her face.

“What on earth?” She looked at me. “For heaven’s sake! Jonathan, stop them!”

Fat chance I was getting anywhere near those two. “It’s almost over, Mom,” I said. And it was. With the chokehold applied, Jamie would either be pinned or unconscious in a matter of seconds. Ray hooked an elbow under Jamie’s knee and rolled his shoulders flat against the floor.

“One . . . two . . . three,” grunted Ray. He released his hold and wiped a hand across his sweaty forehead. “Whew! That’s a strong boy you got there, honeybunch.”

“He’s not moving, Ray.” Click, click, click.

Ray got up and straddled Jamie, whose face was as purple as a plum. Ray grabbed Jamie’s belt and lifted it a foot off the floor. Jamie sucked in a breath of air and coughed.

“He’s all right,” said Ray. “Little rasslin’ won’t do a boy like him any harm.”

My mother put her fists on her hips. “No more roughhousing around here. It’s Christmas Eve, for heaven’s sake. Oh, dear . . .”

She walked over to the Christmas tree and looked down at a shattered ornament, distress in her eyes. “That was one of my grandmother’s ornaments, from Poland. Those are irreplaceable, and they’re worth a fortune.”

Jamie got up on all fours and looked at Ray with fierce hatred. For a second, I thought Jamie was going to attack. Instead, he sprang toward the front door and bolted out of the house. My mother yelled, “Not without a jacket! Jonathan, take your brother his jacket.”

I fetched both of our jackets and stepped out onto the front porch. Ray called after me, “Tell your brother he owes me ten bucks!”

I heard my mother say to him, “You can’t get Jamie so excited, Ray. He’s on medication.” I had not known about that. Maybe it explained why Jamie seemed so different to me.

Across the street, Tom and Agnes Atkins’ house was lit up like a tavern, with colored lights strung along the roof line and around the windows, same as every year. My brother’s footprints in the fresh snow led down the street and around the corner, but he was nowhere in sight. I put on my jacket and followed the footprints, even though I knew there was no possibility I could catch up to him. I had just started smoking regularly, and I took a pack of Marlboros from my shirt pocket, tapped one out, and lit it. It was a frigid night, and I couldn’t tell when I exhaled what was smoke and what was my breath. The sublime lightheadedness achieved by combining alcohol with nicotine was still new to me at that point and still an effective treatment for short-term anguish.

As I strolled the quiet, snow-covered streets, I wondered: Why was Jamie on medication? Would he run all the way to the quarry for solitude? Why had Ray picked a fight with Jamie instead of me? How soon could I get the hell out of here and go back to Madison? Did Lori, to whom I had not spoken in over two months, have a date for New Year’s Eve?

Mostly, I wondered how a woman who had married a man as gentle and thoughtful as my father could stand to be around that asshole.

* *

Little did I know then that six months later my mother and Ray would be having their picture taken shoving cake into each other’s mouths. As I set the wedding album aside, I realize it is so cold in the house that I must do something about the furnace. It takes me two hours to figure out that the problem is with the thermostat. Somebody, probably Ray, has installed a cheap, do-it-yourself automatic setback thermostat that uses a nine-volt battery. The battery from the smoke detector in the kitchen fits, and the furnace comes to life like an awakening giant.

It occurs to me that I will not have to scrape frost off my windshield in the morning if I put my car in the garage overnight. I get the opener out of my mother’s old Chevy, which has not been driven in so long that it is covered with dust and all four tires are flat. The opener doesn’t work, but the hard-wired button on the wall does. The garage door sticks a couple of times on the way up.

There is room for my Dodge next to my mother’s car. When I pull in, I am in the exact spot where I found my father on that warm evening in October thirty-six years ago.