The Hour of the Innocents Page 16

  I resolved to care nobly for Laura. Yet, while I never fantasized about Angela, I imagined fresh grapplings with Joan, who seemed so gorgeously normal.

  When Angela had gone, I stripped the mattress, bagging the sheets and my father’s robe for a trip to the Laundromat. I cleaned the bedroom and bathroom so thoroughly that Mrs. McClatchy would have found no fault. An earring of Angela’s had been tucked in where the box spring met the floor. It struck me that she had left it there on purpose.

  * * *

  “Angela wants to know if you’d like to come up the house for Thanksgiving,” Frankie said, “since Laura’s not around to keep you company.”

  “Can’t. I promised my mother I’d spend Thanksgiving with her. But thanks.”

  It was a relief to have an excuse that Angela couldn’t expose as a fraud. I imagined the proposed dinner with her and Frankie turning into a nightmare of curses and violence.

  Angela had not hinted about our encounter, and she didn’t seem to have told anyone else what she knew about Laura. Frankie was released from the hospital on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday, the band got together for a strategy session and laid-back rehearsal with the convalescent. Everything seemed normal.

  We compromised on the demo. We would book an initial block of time at the cheap studio in Reading. After fine-tuning the songs based on what the tape revealed, we’d book the Philly studio for the real demo. As for work, offers continued to come in, but we agreed to hold some key dates open a while longer, until we saw how the pre-Christmas gig at the Electric Factory went. Hardly four days after Frankie’s beating and a crisis that threatened to finish off the band, we were all in good spirits and confident. Stosh told us he was quitting his uncle’s mining operation, and I had already turned over my guitar students at the music store.

  Frankie was still hurting, though, and popping prescription downers. We didn’t try any demanding rock-out numbers, but worked on a goof arrangement of “Winter Wonderland” for the holiday season. Frankie hammed it up like Robert Goulet on mescaline. I cracked up the guys with rewritten lyrics for “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” The new first line was “I’ll be stoned for Christmas.” It went downhill from there. The novelty numbers were for the bars and the college crowd. We wouldn’t perform them at any serious gigs. After more clowning around, I finally got the chance to introduce the song I’d written for Laura. I ran through it with my guitar turned down and no mike.

  Carlotta, just knowing you’re out there keeps me alive …

  I know how you’re trying, it saves me from all compromise …

  And the way that I love is something no words can describe …

  Carlotta, I’m lost in the thought of your wide-open eyes.

  Carlotta, I know you’ve the soul of a traveler, too.

  It’s that and these ribbons of starlight that bind me to you …

  When the moonlight runs wild and illumines the landscape with blue,

  The roads in the farthest of countries remind me of you.

  After the chorus, there was another double verse, chorus, bridge, double verse, chorus, and wrap-up. I thought it had some great lines, such as “The lips of our lovers leave kisses and scars on the years.” When I finished, I waited for everyone’s approval.

  After a stretch of embarrassed silence, Frankie said, “It’s too wordy. It doesn’t rock.”

  I looked at Stosh, who just shrugged.

  I turned to Matty.

  “Frankie’s right,” he said. “For once. It’s all about words, not the music. It doesn’t … I don’t know…”

  “It doesn’t grab you and shake your ass,” Frankie told me. “It’s not like your other stuff. You write some heavy shit, man.” He did two light karate chops on one of Stosh’s cymbals. “Stick to the beat, man. Keep it rockin’.”

  Stosh smiled. “It reminds me of that folk crap I caught you listening to. Donovan or whoever the shit it was.”

  “Tim Buckley.”

  Twice before, the band had rejected heartfelt suggestions of mine, although not songs I had written. The first time had been when I thought we should do a Dylan medley, while the second occasion had come just after the release of the Love album Forever Changes, which I thought was a masterpiece. That time, too, Frankie said that the song I wanted to cull was too wordy and didn’t rock.

  “Okay, forget it,” I told them. “Here’s another one I just finished. It’s kind of country-rock, like the last Byrds album. But harder. Buffalo Springfield with edge. Just let me run through it.”

  I played a Keith-Richards-goes-C&W lead-in, straight C major. Then I sang:

  She told me that her name was Sally Reno,

  Working as a dancer in a bar,

  And she had this crazy notion …

  That faith was all it took to be a star.

  I spent a little while with Sally Reno …

  Her loving made me shake my head and smile,

  But I kept a space between us,

  ’Cause even heaven wears out after while.

  I closed my eyes and did a guitar run leading into the chorus.

  Well, here’s to Sally Reno: She always kept the faith,

  And that’s more than I could do in Sally’s place.

  Yeah, I remember Sally in that dusky barroom light …

  I wonder where she’ll rest her head tonight …

  The song went on for several more verses, with no bridge. Matty began to play Nashville-on-acid riffs around the melody. Near the end, Stosh tapped along on the snare drum with his fingertips.

  As soon as I finished, Stosh said, “I like that. I don’t hear a dance beat, but I like it.”

  Matty nodded.

  Finally, Frankie said, “Yeah. Heavy song, man. Good album stuff. But you can sing that one yourself.”

  * * *

  I almost phoned Joan that night. Instead, I stayed up late, practicing without an amplifier and calling myself an asshole. On Thanksgiving morning, I worked for three hours with the amp turned on, keeping the volume low. I was trying to hone my sound, to train myself to manipulate the Les Paul’s tone and volume knobs more skillfully. Matty could do it without thinking or looking, curling his little finger around the control appropriate to the instant, at any point in a song. I wasn’t quick or sure enough to do that and had always relied on setting the controls on my guitar at the start of a number, then just shifting between pickups with the toggle switch or, at most, turning up the volume knob for a solo.

  As much as I practiced—sometimes I managed five hours a day—I seemed to have reached a plateau. As part of the ensemble, I fit in fine. But my lead turns lagged Matty’s by a discouraging distance.

  Whenever I thought of my collision with Angela, my only satisfaction was that I had gotten something Matty wanted and couldn’t have.

  I passed a polite and desolate afternoon with my mother and my father’s ghost. The food was richer in memories than flavor. My mother and I had reached a tacit agreement not to speak of Laura. I was doubly glad. After Angela’s Sherlock Holmes revelations, I was afraid I’d blow up if my mother so much as mentioned Laura’s name.

  I could have endured Matty or even Frankie being right about Laura, had they questioned our relationship. But I couldn’t bear it from my mother.

  We were both relieved when the hour came for me to drive down to Lebanon for a club job. My mother and I had reached a point where we hoped to rebuild our relationship but didn’t know how. My father had been our binding mechanism. He was the one who knew how to laugh and take others along for the ride.

  The club had a go-go dancer, but Frankie didn’t even look at her. He was still a little drugged out, but he performed solidly enough. The band was tight. The days off seemed to have helped us, not hurt us. The kiddie gig on Friday was a hoot. By Saturday, Frankie was post-Darvon and we rocked a club in Scranton well past the official closing time. On Sunday, we headed south again, to Franklin & Marshall, a university sufficiently expensive to have a vibrant drug culture.
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br />   Laura showed up, as promised. I had no idea how she had gotten to Lancaster, but her ice-blue eyes looked clear and untroubled. Her face seemed charged with joy at our reunion.

  “I wish we were in your apartment,” she said.

  But we weren’t. It was time to play, and she went over to the bleachers to sit with Angela and Red, who opened a space for her between the two of them.

  The job went well. Everyone was in the best of spirits. Stosh had killed an eight-point buck out bow hunting and he said he was going to have a party for everybody as soon as the meat came back from the butcher dressing it.

  On Monday morning, I asked Laura to marry me.

  She said, “No.” Then she smiled and laughed, before crying and telling me, “I wonder if you’ll ever know how terribly much I love you?”

  * * *

  Stosh held his venison party on the Sunday afternoon before the Electric Factory show. Red had a place of her own, one half of a double in Mahanoy City, and she hosted. Stosh wasn’t quite living with her, but the two of them behaved as if they had been together, happily, for years.

  We took the back way over the mountain. A dirty sky hung low over gaping strip mines, and naked birches climbed enormous waste banks. Runoff flowed orange by the roadside, scouring beer cans and broken bottles. “Keep Out” signs and rusty chains marked the edges of company property. No friend to man, a wild dog chased the car. The road’s surface had buckled, and fault lines in the macadam grabbed my tires. Our landscape had been raped for over a century, then abandoned. Laura said, “I don’t know how people can live here.”

  Inside Red’s house, the human magic warmed us. Everyone was in high spirits, and a rough coal-town comradeship took us in thrall. Methed up or not, Angela appointed herself as Red’s kitchen maid, rushing about with heaping plates and allowing Red to maintain her mild aloofness. Joey and Pete had both shown up with dates, all of them stoned to giggles except Joey. For once, his girl of the moment looked as if she might be at least eighteen. Pete’s date was a Dutchie gal twice his size who went straight for the food.

  Red had put up a real Christmas tree, even though artificial trees were in vogue north of the mountain—Angela and Frankie had a big aluminum tree with dime-store balls, but Red’s tree was straight from my childhood. The evergreen scent evoked memories the instant the door opened. The next aroma, floating above the cooked-meat smell, was the fragrance of boilo heating on the stove. Boilo was the holiday beverage of choice north of the mountain, the Hunky reply to eggnog. You began with bootleg white lightning, then stirred in honey, cloves, cinnamon, perhaps a bit of peppermint or nutmeg … every family guarded its secret recipe. Fools—which meant most of us—knocked it back in shots. It was like swallowing hot cough syrup that ferried tiny hand grenades straight to your brain.

  In addition to the deer roasts and venison meatballs, there were rings of kielbasa with condiment dishes of horseradish or ketchup straight from the bottle, big bowls of pierogies—some deep-fried, others boiled to be eaten with sour cream—and lima beans cooked with bacon, a few other vegetables that interested no one, pumpkin pie squirted with Cool Whip, and paper plates laden with Christmas cookies painted in tooth-killing icing. Between pots of boilo, we drank beer or coffee and laughed. I could not recall a time when we all seemed happier.

  Red had an old console stereo—a Magnavox—and the background music alternated between Rosemary Clooney or Nat King Cole singing Christmas songs and an inscrutable selection of pop albums that gave no hint of Red’s own personality. Then Frankie discovered a hidden Monkees album, which resulted in a round of teasing and urgent cries to put it on the turntable. Everyone sang along until, after three or four songs, a consensus arose that we had heard enough. Thereafter, we strummed guitars and sang. Matty could play anything by ear and he accompanied us as we howled carols and holiday songs. I learned that Laura had a lovely alto voice. Midway through “Silent Night,” the other voices began dropping off, one by one, as she continued to sing to Matty’s soft chording. Laura knew the words to every verse.

  The party didn’t run late. Perhaps we all sensed that a day so perfect shouldn’t be pressed too far. By nine that night, Laura and I were back in my apartment, nestled close on the sofa. We had a bit too much alcohol in us, but that, too, was part of the blessing of the day. The lamps were off and only the strand of lights on my Christmas tree lit the room. The small tree was a Scotch pine, my father’s favorite.

  We were happy. No matter what had gone before or what might come after, that night we felt the happiness in each other, as if happiness were as palpable as a breast or a beating heart. A jazz piano album of Christmas standards—purchased at a discount store—played softly. There was no need to say a single word. All that we lacked was a fireplace. My mother’s house had a handsome tiled fireplace, but the hearth had been cold for years.

  “I’m so happy,” Laura said, breaking the spell. We couldn’t help ourselves, we had to talk.

  “Me, too. Everybody was happy today. Even Angela.”

  “She does seem to be a terribly sad person,” Laura said. “I’d hate to have her life. With Frankie. And everything else. Matty’s in love with her, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He needs a girl. I wish I knew the right girl for him. He deserves somebody nice. Somebody nicer than her.”

  The stereo played “Silver Bells.”

  “Well, at least Stosh found somebody,” I said. “He and Red seem perfect for each other. I just hope marriage doesn’t take the edge off his drumming.”

  Laura tensed. Just slightly. She drew a few inches away from me.

  “They’re getting married?” she asked.

  “They haven’t said anything, I didn’t mean that. But I’ll be surprised if they don’t.”

  She looked down at me. The lights on the Christmas tree shone in her eyes.

  “I guess that would make sense,” she said at last. “If they both plan to stay around here. Marriage would be a good cover for both of them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She looked at me again. Bewildered by a foreign alphabet and deciphering me as best she could.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend with me.”

  “Know what?”

  “That Stosh is a homosexual.”

  It was my turn to pull away and sit up.

  “That’s not true. That’s absolutely nuts. He’s a coal miner, for God’s sake.”

  “You don’t think there are homosexual coal miners?”

  “Laura … Stosh isn’t queer. Come on.”

  She shook her head in disbelief at my naïveté. “You mean to tell me you’ve known this guy for years and you haven’t figured out he’s a boy’s boy? The guy who never met a satin shirt he didn’t like? Your friend who never had a girl until Red?”

  “Well, he’s got one now, doesn’t he?”

  “My God,” Laura said. “You really have no idea. Do you? Red’s a lesbian. You didn’t pick up on that? That’s why they get along so well. They give each other … protective coloration, I suppose you’d call it.”

  “What makes you think Red’s a dyke?” I recalled the old rumors about her.

  Again, Laura had to pause over a decision before answering me.

  “Well, if I hadn’t already figured it out for myself, I suppose it would’ve been clear enough when she followed me into a stall in the girls’ bathroom at Franklin and Marshall. She had her tongue halfway down my throat and her hand in my pants before I could push her away.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I bit her tongue. She’s really an aggressive bull dyke type. I mean, we get along okay. But you have to be clear with her. Then it’s all right, she’s just one of the girls.”

  “Does Angela know?”

  “Of course. I don’t think Angela misses much. She was waiting there when we came out of the restroom. Red’s terrified of her, I can tell you that. She’d do a
nything to keep Angela’s mouth shut. And I mean anything.”

  “I really had no idea. About Stosh. I just had no idea. I’m still not sure I believe it.”

  “You people really do lead a sheltered life up here,” Laura told me.

  “Jesus,” I said, sinking back into the sofa. “Poor Stosh.”

  “Why? Maybe he’s happy. Who knows? I’ll bet he’s happier than Angela, anyway. She may be the unhappiest person I’ve ever met.”

  “She was pretty happy today.”

  “She was so doped up she forgot to flush the toilet.”

  “So … what was it like? Kissing Red?”

  Laura laughed, happy again. “Don’t be an ass.” She kissed me.

  We fit our bodies back together and didn’t move until long after the stereo’s needle reached the dead zone in the center of the record.

  We are not fair. We mean to be, but we are never fair. Even as I held her close, I couldn’t stop wondering who else might have shoved a hand down Laura’s pants.

  Don’t blame the snake. It was the human beings who spoiled Eden.

  FIFTEEN

  Framed by snow flurries, my visitor looked like an undercover narc: hair timidly shaggy, jeans pressed, leather jacket too new, complexion too healthy.

  “Will Cross?”

  I nodded. Was he going to read me my rights?

  “Sorry to bother you. I’m trying to link up with Matthew Tomczik. His mother sent me to his friend Stanley. He told me Matt might be here.”

  It took me a blink to remember that Stosh’s legal name was Stanley.

  “Matty’s not here,” I told him, with the Blues Project on the stereo behind me. “He went to Philly.”