The Clarinet Polka (10 page)

I'm laying on the floor in the piss and cigarette butts in some can somewhere with my arms wrapped around the base of the commode. It's broad daylight, and Lazarus waking up in the tomb couldn't have felt any worse than I do. I go lurching out to try to figure out where the hell I am, and lo and behold, I'm in the back room at the PAC, and I'm locked in there. Just about the time I'm thinking about trying to crawl through a window, Bobby Burdalski turns up. “How you doing, numbnuts? I figured you might be conscious by now.”

He told me what'd happened. I'd gone sneaking up behind the bar and grabbed a fifth of Seagram's. “You were giggling to yourself,” he said, “and you were crawling along on all fours pretending you were invisible.” He said I wouldn't give the fifth back, and I wouldn't pay for it, and I kept yelling that I'd fight anybody in the goddamn place who tried to take it away from me. I can't imagine myself doing that, but what the hell do I know about it?

Eventually I passed out on a table, but if anybody came too close, I'd jump up and take a swing at them. “You weren't landing anything,” he said, “but it wasn't because you weren't trying.”

There were two schools of opinion on what to do with me—and I'm telling you the story exactly the way he told it to me. One school advocated punching me out and the other advocated locking me in the back room and leaving me there. The two schools contended until the wee small hours of the morning, but eventually the second school prevailed because they pointed out that once I was punched out, they would have to deliver my body somewhere, to my home most likely, and the thought of waking up Władysław Koprowski at four-thirty in the morning was too horrible to contemplate.

“What you need,” Bobby said, “is Burdalski's world-famous award-winning ancient Polak hangover cure.” That turned out to be two shot glasses. In the first was a raw egg with a jolt of bitters; in the second was chilled vodka. “The trick,” he said, “is to get to the vodka before your mind has a chance to dwell upon the egg.
Na zdrowie
.”

FOUR

I slept all day and when I woke up, I felt all right. My mind was clear. I lay there staring up at those
Playboy
bunnies plastered all over my ceiling, and it occurred to me that I'd seen way too much of those damn bunnies and I wouldn't mind a bit if I never saw any of them again. And it occurred to me that being stood up by Mrs. Constance Bradshaw might be just about the best thing that ever happened to me.

At that time in my life I was certainly not what anybody would call a practicing Catholic, but I still knew right from wrong, and screwing a married woman was not something I could justify. How would I feel in her husband's place? Here he is, working his ass off trying to make a good life for his family, and meanwhile she's off fucking some idiotic goof in the back of a panel truck. And it occurred to me—believe it or not, this was the first time it had occurred to me—that maybe I was drinking too much.

I do not have to stay here, I thought. I do not have to repair ancient television sets for pissass money for Vick Dobranski. I do not have to live with Old Bullet Head who watches every move I make so he can be the first to point it out to me when I fuck up. As a matter of fact, I do not have to go through the rest of my life in this sorry valley. I've got a reasonably good-running Chevy and a few bucks in the bank, and not only that, I am a trained and certified government-issue instrument technician with an honorable discharge, and the skies of America are filled with aircraft, and you know what? When those aircraft come down, somebody's got to maintain them.

All they've got in Austin is a dumb-ass little airport—kind of surprising for the capital of the state—but at least an airline or two operating out of there and openings did come up from time to time—anyhow that's what I'd been told. And if that didn't pan out, I could always work for Doren's old man. He ran a service station, and he didn't pay a whole hell of a lot, but hell, Austin's a cheap place to live. The last time we were there, he told me, “Anytime, Jimmy. If you need a place to stay, a job, anything at all,” and I could tell he meant it. Right, so how about leaving tomorrow?

I was feeling almost cheery, and I thought, well, shit, if I'm serious about this, I've got to get a set of new tires and a tune-up and a brake job. And I've got to give Vick some notice; it's only fair. And maybe I should call up Doren's old man and tell him I'm coming. And I was feeling really pleased with myself, you know, because I was being so sensible and responsible—even though the reality of it was that I hadn't managed to get out of bed yet.

It was quiet in the house. All I could hear was my sister playing the piano, some pretty classical piece, the notes far away, drifting up the stairs, maybe Chopin, and then I remembered—oh, Christ, Jacobson's dead. I'd forgot it there for a minute.

I got up, pulled on some clothes, and went downstairs. My sister was flipping through some music books. “Where's Mom and Dad?” I said.

“Dinner and a movie. You know, big night out.”

I went in the kitchen and opened the icebox. I'd been planning on an ice-cold Iron City, but I thought I should have something in my stomach first, so I poured myself a glass of milk.

Then something stopped me, and I don't know what. Maybe it was thinking about Jacobson—you know how it takes forever to get used to the idea that somebody's dead—but anyhow it was so quiet in the house I could hear the icebox humming. It was late in the day, and the sun was low, pouring in the windows around the front door, and the sunlight came all the way down the hall and into the kitchen, and I could see the little, you know, the dust motes floating in it. For some reason I just got stuck there, taking it all in. It was like I could stand there forever. I was listening so hard I could hear my sister breathing all the way out in the dining room.

Then, just like everything was planned to go with everything else, Linda started to play something. Lots of Polish tunes have real pretty melodies, and this was one of them. It's a tune I've heard a million times since then, and they've turned it into a polka, but she was playing it slower than that and she started to sing the words.
“Zakochał się młodzieniec w dziewczynie i chciał się z nią ożenić—”
In English, that means, “A young guy fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her.”

Linda's sung in the church choir since she was in high school, and everybody's always said she has a great voice for a choir, not a big voice, or a voice that knocks you dead, but a clear easy voice that blends in. Singing by herself, she sounds like a little girl. I could tell she wasn't singing for me. She'd forgot all about me. And I was kind of surprised that I remembered enough Polish to follow the story, but I did.

Well, the families weren't big on the kids getting married. The fathers said, “No way, buddy,” and the brothers said, “Forget it.” What I'm giving you here is, you know, what they call a free translation. So anyhow, they told the boy to go out in the world and make something of himself. And he does that. And when he comes back, naturally he wants to see his sweetheart. He goes up to her house, and he peers through the window, and he sees that her mom is real sad, and his heart's going a mile a minute. So he says,
“Powiedz mi, moja mamusiu droga, gdzie twoja córeczka jest?”
That means, “Please tell me, my dear Mother, where's your little daughter?”

And the girl's mom says that the girl died just a week ago yesterday and the sheets are still warm on her bed. She says the girl's in the cemetery, three graves over from the monument, right near the three roses. So the boy goes to the cemetery to find her, and the three roses bow to him and show him the way to her grave. And how the words go in Polish— It's hard for me to explain this. Okay, in an English song, you'd expect it to pause, you know, take a break every once in a while, but the Polish words just keep tumbling along. It's always reminded me of water running over stones.

“Powstań, moje lube serce,”
the boy says,
“powstań. Przemów słóweczko do mnie.
Rise up, my beloved heart, and say a little word to me,” and the girl says,
“Luby, jak mam powstać i z tobą rozmawiać kiedy ja już twardo śpię?
Oh, my love, how can I rise up and speak to you when I'm sleeping so hard?”

Linda got to the end of the song, and I walked into the dining room. “That's just about the saddest song I ever heard in my life,” I said, and she turned around on the piano bench and looked at me.

“Yeah, it is, isn't it?” She had that sad sad look in her eyes she used to get when she was a little kid right after Babcia Koprowski died.

It was Saturday and I said, “Haven't you got a date?” and she shook her head, and I said, “Yeah, you do. With me. I'm taking you out to dinner.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Don't
you
have a date?”

“Not tonight, I don't. Come on, Linny, anywhere you want. The Pines, the Far East, Tomerellis', that new place over on the Island, you name it.”

She lit up like a light bulb. She's so transparent it breaks your heart sometimes. “Oh, Jimmy, that's so sweet of you. Let me get changed. You know where I want to go? Franky Rzeszutko's,” and I had to laugh because that's where we used to go with Mom and Dad when we were kids.

*   *   *

Neither of us had been in Franky's place for years, but except for a coat of paint, not much had changed. There was the bar for the guys in the front—Franky had put in a color TV since we'd been in there—and in the back was a big room with tables for families. On a good night in the old days you'd see everybody in that back room all the way from babies on up to Grandma and Grandpa, and if you felt like dancing to the jukebox, you'd push the tables back and go to it. Franky told us once that he'd had to have the floor reinforced. Some of those old guys doing the
oberek
, stomping their heels down, he was afraid they'd end up in the basement.

The minute we're sitting at a table, Franky comes over and starts in with, “Hey, it's great to see you kids. How've you been?” and we've got to do that number for a while—all about my wonderful years in the service and Linda's wonderful years getting her B.Mus. She says how sorry she is about Franky's mom, and of course I didn't even know his mom had died. She did the cooking in the old days, good home cooking, so you could get
pierogi
or
gołąbki
or whatever, but when Linda and I were kids, we didn't want any part of that stuff—that was just what we'd get at home—so we'd have cheeseburgers and French fries and Cokes. The cheeseburgers were real thick and came with a big slice of raw onion on them.

“Ethel Warsinski comes in now on the weekends,” Franky says. Everybody knows Mrs. Warsinski. She used to keep house for Old Man Cotter back when he'd been the head honcho at Raysburg Steel, and she'd been the number-one cook at the church for years.

So Linda says, “Oh, it must be good then. You tell her whatever she recommends, that's what we'll have.”

I know Linda will only drink a glass or two of beer, but I've got a hell of a thirst, probably from sleeping all day, so I order us a pitcher. Franky keeps his pitchers in the freezer, and they come out all covered with frost, and I'm just happy as all hell to be drinking cold beer and shooting the shit with my sister. Naturally we've got to reminisce about our childhood.

When we were little, we'd go out for dinner usually about once a week—it was like family night—and we'd always go to Franky's. My mom would put on a nice dress and lipstick and her high heels and she'd look like a million bucks and the other moms were always saying to her, “It's just not fair, Mary Koprowski. How can you have a figure like that after two kids?”

“I always thought Mom was the last word in glamour,” Linda says. “I thought I could never be as glamorous as Mom.”

Damn near everything on the jukebox in those days was Polish. Linda and I would shove our quarters in and punch the numbers at random. I don't know who those bands would have been back in the fifties. Linda could give you a better guess than me. I know Walt Solek was on that jukebox because I remember playing “Who Stole the Kishka?” and there must have been some of the big Eastern bands because that was their heyday, and for all I know Li'l Wally was on there, but whoever those bands were, that music sure sounded good.

It wasn't every night that people danced, but on those nights when they did, everybody danced. I mean, everybody danced with everybody. I danced with Mom and my aunts and my cousins and any girls from St. Stans who were there with their families—it was just whoever came in any particular night—and I danced with Linda until I got to the age where dancing with your little sister was definitely not cool. Then later on, when I got to be a teenager, even going out to dinner with your family was definitely not cool—that's when me and the boys thought we were a gang and wore cheap phony leather jackets and called ourselves “the South Raysburg Rats”—so that left Linda to go out with Mom and Dad.

“You know, Jimmy,” she said, “those nights were magical.”

I don't know if I'd go that far, but they were fun. It's nice to see your parents having a good time. Mom liked her beer, and she'd get silly and flirt with the old man, and he'd grin back at her and drink nothing but 7UP. He never made a big deal out of not drinking, but he was serious about it—he wouldn't even drink a beer—but he could get pretty damn happy sober, and he was one of those guys Franky must have been worried about stomping through the floor. “I loved dancing the
oberek
with Dad,” Linda says. “He'd spin me around and around and around until I thought my head was going to pop.”