Authors: Zev Chafets
Mack stopped at a red light on the corner of Monroe and Dixon and watched a group of defeated-looking men sharing a bottle in front of the Jive-5 party store. They huddled together under a billboard that pictured a giant black fist and the words:
MINISTER ABIJAMIN MALIK TEACHES: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION—WHITE MAN’S DISTRACTION. SELF-RELIANCE MEANS BLACK DEFIANCE. JOIN ARCH AND START TO MARCH
.
Mack was surprised to see Malik’s name here; he thought he was a New York phenomenon. The sign seemed incongruous, even a little exotic for Oriole—the last time he had been on the corner of Monroe and Dixon, there had been a Wonder Bread billboard.
Downtown, which Mack recollected as a cheerful, bustling area with a mock-Corinthian county courthouse, fine stores and three tall office buildings, looked like it had been hit by a neutron bomb. The courthouse and the stores—Federals, Kresges, Gottleib’s Fine Mens Wear—stood empty and abandoned. There were boards over the windows of the Oriole Hotel and steel bars on the doors of Golden’s Department Store. A few dazed-looking people wandered through the streets, but they seemed more like survivors of some horrible disaster than downtown shoppers.
As he passed the State Bank Building, Mack simultaneously
remembered the phone number of his father’s law office, and a conversation he had once had with Eddie Yew, a Korean freelance photographer who hung around the Flying Tiger drinking whiskey sours.
“How much you weigh when you twenty years old, Mack?” Eddie had asked him one day.
“One seventy-five.”
“How much you weigh now?”
“One ninety, give or take.”
“All the food you eat in twenty year, maybe one thousand pound of food. And you only gain fifteen. Where rest of food go?”
Green had shrugged and the Korean smiled broadly. “One thousand pound of food go right in you mouth and out you asshole.”
It had been a sobering thought then, and it was now. How many bytes of information had his brain absorbed in the years since he had left Oriole? How much had gone straight out his asshole? And why did he still remember his father’s number? “Proust, Proust, you’re becoming a fucking Proust,” Mack said to himself over the sound of Junior Walker and the All Stars.
Past downtown he took Bannister Avenue west, heading instinctively toward Nutmeg Village, his old neighborhood. He drove slowly, surveying the changes, and for the first time he began to feel a bittersweet nostalgia. The A&W, which had been his first Flying Tiger, was now an adult video rental shop. A new post office stood where his elementary school had been. Most of the little shops he remembered had vanished. But J. D. Murphy’s Funeral Home, to which Buddy Packer had once obtained a key and sold illicit glimpses of the corpses for fifty cents a peek, was still there. He wondered where Buddy was now; probably dead, he figured, or in jail. His name wasn’t in the phone book, Mack had checked from New York.
He passed Two Brothers Market, where the Kazonis boys didn’t check IDs too carefully, and next to it, Vic Snipes’s drugstore,
where Vic, Oriole’s Ping-Pong champion (how in the hell did he remember that?), had sold him Trojans with a manly wink and, after Green’s father dropped dead, filled the prescriptions for Mack’s mother’s sleeping pills. Just past Vic’s was the Oriole National Savings and Loan, where Mack had opened his first account. He was glad to see that the little bank hadn’t succumbed to the S&L scandal.
The Bannister Theater was showing a Jodie Foster flick that had closed in New York eight months earlier. The summer Mack and Linda Birney fell in love they had gone to the Bannister almost every night; the little theater had a special nursery room for crying children that was unused after dark—except by them. He remembered the night the manager had found them, stoned and naked, lying on the carpet. Linda had looked up and said, “We’re having a private moment here, do you mind?” Twenty-five years and a thousand women later, Mack still couldn’t forget the cool, ironic sound of her voice, the fragrance of her long, silky hair, the taste of sex on her tongue, the contours of her willowy body.
Linda wasn’t in Oriole anymore, either; he had no idea where she was, although over the years he had often searched for her by calling telephone information in probable locations—New York, LA, Miami—asking for a Linda Birney or a Linda Flanders. But she was gone, vanished like Oriole’s downtown, the A&W, his old elementary school. Driving past the Bannister Theater, thinking about Linda, Mack’s stomach ached.
At the corner of Berkley, he automatically turned left and the pain went away; there were too many other memories here. He cruised slowly down the street, effortlessly assigning a name to every house: Campanella, Graff, Walton, Rafferty, Moore, Valuchi, Hakenberger, Flite, Andersen with an
e
, Old Man Janowitz, who had a German shepherd that chewed tin cans, Mr. Chones, who drank and cried in his yard, Reverend Strickland, whose son, Terry, had been killed in Vietnam when Mack was a senior in high school. He hadn’t seen any of these people in years, but he remembered
them and the pointless details of their lives—the cabbage smell that hung in the air at the Raffertys, the day the Waltons got their first color television, the drama when Al Campanella left his wife and then came back. He wondered if any of his old neighbors carried around memories of him, but he doubted it. Small-town people with families to raise and jobs to go to each day probably wouldn’t bother.
Mack stopped the car across from 52 Berkley and inspected the house with the expert eyes of a maintenance man. The black wrought-iron door knocker he had installed as a teenager was still in place. The shutters on the front windows, upstairs and down, that he and his father painted every second April, had a fresh white look. The ivy his mother had planted wound up the red brick on the side of the house.
There was no one on the street and only an occasional car passed by. Green sat in the LeBaron listening to Mary Wells sing “Two Lovers,” and stared at his house, wondering who lived there now. In New York, the idea of starting his diary with a visit to his boyhood home had been a simple literary strategy, but now that he was here, he felt a curious shyness. He pictured being greeted at the door by his own sixteen-year-old self. “You’re me?” the kid would say, disappointed.
“Jesus Christ,” said Mack out loud, “I’m starting to crack up.” He shut off the radio with a decisive jab, slipped out of the car and walked slowly across the street. On the front porch he hesitated, took a deep breath and rang the bell.
The door swung open almost immediately and Mack found himself face to face with a thin, coffee-colored woman. She seemed to be about sixty, although he had never been good at judging the ages of black people. She wore a flowered housedress and an expression that combined curiosity with caution. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Hi. My name’s Mack Green. I used to live here. A long time ago.”
The woman smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh. I was watching you from the window, just sitting out there in your car. Now that I see you up close, I recognize you. Come on in, you must want to see the house.”
Mack followed her into the small front hall. He let his gaze wander, feeling a little dizzy.
“Brings back memories, huh?” said the woman softly. “I’m Joyce McClain. My husband and I have been living here for, oh, ten, eleven years now. It’s a fine house.”
“My grandfather built it,” said Mack. “Did you say you recognized me?”
“From your picture. On the jacket of
The Oriole Kid
.”
“Ah, that,” said Mack.
“I liked it,” she said in a low, soft voice with just a touch of a drawl, “and I liked
Light Years
even more.
The Oriole Kid
is my husband’s favorite. He’s read it probably half-a-dozen times. It’s one of the few books he
has
read. Tell you the truth, the fact that you once lived here made him want to buy the house.”
“How’d you know I lived here?” asked Mack, warmed by the woman’s recognition. Praise for
Light Years
always made him feel especially good.
“The lady we bought the house from, Mrs. Polk, told us. It was a selling point I guess you’d call it—you know, the home of a famous novelist.”
“My mother died in the upstairs bedroom,” Mack blurted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that—”
“That’s all right,” said Mrs. McClain. “I’m not the kind of black woman’s afraid of ghosts.” Green couldn’t judge if she was being ironic. “Why don’t you just take a tour of the house?” she offered. “Then we’ll have a cup of coffee and you can tell me what it was like growing up here.”
“I really didn’t mean to barge in on you. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Joyce McClain took him gently by the elbow and squeezed.
“This isn’t an intrusion, it’s a pleasure,” she said. “Isn’t every day we get a visit from a celebrity. You just take your time, I’ll be in the kitchen.”
Mack climbed the stairs to his old bedroom, which the McClains had converted into a guest room. Surprisingly, it hadn’t changed much. There was still a desk under the window overlooking the street, bookshelves along the wall and a single bed in the far corner. The decor was different—a Watson lithograph hung on the wall where his Tiger pennant had been, a large Persian carpet covered the once-bare hardwood floor and an unused-looking stationary exercise bicycle dominated a corner of the room—but the place seemed much more familiar than Mack had supposed it would.
He sat gingerly on the narrow bed and let himself remember. When he was small his father had taught him a bedtime prayer in this room, and for years thereafter he had been unable to fall asleep without mumbling it like an incantation. Here, one unforgettable Saturday morning when he was nine he had turned on his Zenith clock radio and heard a sound so new and raw that it made him want to dance and cry and grow up all at the same time—it was the Chantels singing “Maybe.” He had his first orgasm here, too, self-administered, thrilling and terrifying.
Mack lay back and put his hand on his crotch. He thought of Linda, and for a moment he was tempted to close the door and quickly masturbate. Then he heard the sound of voices downstairs—a sound that brought back boyhood afternoons when his father came home from the office and he could hear the reassuring murmur of his parents’ conversation.
The thought of his parents melted his hard-on. Still, it was a great idea for the
Diary
, the hero beating off in his old room. He took out his notebook, quickly jotted down the thought and headed downstairs. He was ready for a cup of coffee, although what he really wanted was a drink at the Bannister Inn next to the firehouse.
“… any more of that gumbo?” Mack heard a man say as he entered the kitchen, coughing to announce his presence.
Joyce McClain turned from the sink and smiled. “Mr. Green, this is my husband, John,” she said, gesturing toward a tall, paunchy but powerfully built white man with grizzled silver hair, amused blue eyes and a large, hawklike nose, who was leaning against the refrigerator door.
McClain straightened and extended a giant hand. “Joyce told me you were here,” he said. “I hope you’re staying for dinner.”
“I can’t,” said Mack.
“Other plans, eh? Meeting old friends?”
“Not really. But I just got into town and I haven’t even checked into the hotel yet. Maybe another time.”
“The hell with another time, check in later,” said McClain with gruff heartiness. “Let’s have a couple drinks and get acquainted. I guarantee you won’t get a meal as good as Joyce’s gumbo anywhere around here.”
There was something immediately likable about the big man’s direct, open manner. Mack had the feeling that he had seen him before, although he couldn’t place him.
“Well—”
“Great,” said McClain. He opened a well-stocked liquor cabinet and grinned. “Mack—okay if I call you Mack? And you call me John—”
“And me Joyce,” said Mrs. McClain in her soft, low voice.
“—you’re a bourbon drinker, right?” Without waiting for confirmation he splashed three fingers of Old Grandad into a glass.
“How did you know that?”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” said McClain.
“John’s a retired police detective,” said Joyce, pronouncing it
po-lice
, “and he’s never gotten over it.”
Now Mack knew where he had seen McClain.
“You don’t read your own books,” said McClain, pouring
himself a scotch and a Campari-and-soda for Joyce. “Bourbon’s what ‘The Kid’ drinks.”
“He’s not me,” said Mack. “None of my characters are.”
“Yeah, right,” said McClain. “You take it on the rocks, don’t you?”
Mack laughed and nodded.
“You two fellas go in the other room and talk. I’ll get the gumbo on the stove and join you,” said Joyce.
The McClains’ living room was decorated for comfort, like the set of a family sitcom. Mack’s mother had had an artistic streak—he recollected Chinese prints, low-slung couches and lots of little Asian statuettes of bald figures with pot bellies in this room. But there were no statuettes now, just well-worn leather easy chairs, a soft sofa under the bay windows and some nondescript landscapes on the wall. Mack noticed ashes in the fireplace; when he was a boy they had never used it.
“Place changed much since your day?” asked McClain, who had been following his eyes.
“It seems pretty much the same. It’s in good shape.”
“They don’t build ’em like this anymore,” said McClain, slapping a wall. “Solid, made to last.” He took a gulp of his drink. “You don’t get back here often.” It was a statement, not a question.
“How’d you know that? Another clue from
The Oriole Kid
?”
“Naw, just logic. We’ve been here eleven years now, and this is the first time you’ve come around to see the house. Besides, I figure if you’d been in town it would have been in the
News
. What brings you back after all this time?”
“Work, basically. I’m writing a book set in Oriole, or at least part of it is …”
“A book set here? Sounds exciting,” said Joyce, wiping her hands on her apron as she entered the living room. She sat down next to her husband on the couch and he shifted his drink to take her hand. “You going to pull a Thomas Wolfe on us?”