The Clarinet Polka (13 page)

Sometimes I'd sneak down to listen to them. A couple times Mom hauled off and belted him one. I mean, WHAM, right across the face. He's a big man, and he could have snapped her like a matchstick, but he'd just stand there looking sad and amazed, and that would drive her absolutely nuts.

So anyhow, what always happened if it went on long enough, is that Linda would wake up and come looking for me. If I'm in bed, BANG, she'd jump right onto my bed. She'd shake all over like a dog, and she was so scared she couldn't even cry. I'd take her by the hand and lead her back to her own bed and tuck her in just like Mom did, and I'd get her to say her prayers for me just the way Babcia used to do, and I'd sit there and tell her stories until she fell asleep.

I was scared too. I wanted somebody to tuck me in and tell me stories and make me feel better, and taking care of my five-year-old sister did make me feel grown-up—a big boy—but I would have passed on it if I'd had the chance. I'd hear them yelling, and I'd pray, “Oh, please, Holy Mother, don't let Linda wake up,” but she'd always wake up, and there I'd be again, stuck with her. I don't know what stories I could have told her. It was probably all the fairy tales Babcia ever told us mixed up together.

Oh, I just remembered this. Babcia had a little song she used to sing to put Linda to bed. It goes like this,
“Ta Dorotka, ta maluśka, ta maluśka—tańcowała, do koluśka, do koluśka—”
It's about a little girl named Dorothy, and she dances around and around in a circle. She's dancing in the morning dew and stamping her little bare foot. And then she's dancing in the middle of the day when the sun's laying by the well. And then she's dancing in the evening when the sun's setting behind the hills. And now she's sleeping in her little bed on her little pink pillow as the sandman walks beside the fence.
“Cicho bo tam śpi Dorotka, śpi Dorotka,”
it says. “Be quiet because little Dorothy is sleeping, little Dorothy is sleeping.”

It had a dance that went with it, and Linda just loved doing that dance, so we'd sing Babcia's song, and I'd let her do the dance a couple times, and then I'd tuck her into bed. And I'd sing the song for her again, and I'd change Dorothy into Linda, and I'd hope that when I got to the part where little Linda is sleeping—
“śpi Lindusia, śpi Lindusia”
—she would be, and if I was lucky, she was.

Looking back on it, I'm really glad I did it, that I never let her down—that when I was nine I had enough backbone, or whatever you want to call it, to take care of my little sister—because it was the right thing to do, and I knew it. I only wish things stayed as clear for me for the rest of my life as they'd been when I was nine.

FIVE

Fall's the nicest time in the Ohio Valley. The heat lets up, the leaves are turning, you start to get that bite in the air that makes you think, hey, football season, and I can remember waking up in the morning feeling halfway decent for a change. Georgie and I would get together in the PAC and ask each other, “Well, you got yourself reintegrated back into civilian life yet?” and have a laugh over it, but the truth of the matter is we were both making an effort.

Georgie surprised everybody by buying himself an old junker VW bug and fixing it up and taking off in it to that big demonstration they had in Washington. He was gone a couple weeks, hanging out with a bunch of crazy Vietnam vets he met there, and when he came home, he'd turned into a one man antiwar movement. His position was real simple—peace now. People would ask him how on earth we were ever going to get out of Vietnam, he'd say, “We get out exactly the same way we got in—by aircraft.”

Like me, he was feeling kind of optimistic. “Things are bound to get better, Jimmy,” he'd say. “They sure as hell can't get much worse.” Of course the only time he wasn't stoned was when he was asleep.

That big demonstration really impressed him. He couldn't get over how many plain ordinary people there'd been. “Sure, there was weirdos, you know, but there was all kinds of people too—moms, housewives, guys with jobs, you name it.” He wandered around talking to everybody, and he went off on a side demonstration where the Weathermen tried to smash through the door of the Justice Department with a battering ram, and he got himself gassed.

He was really proud of that one. “Okay, so you want a crowd to disperse, right? So you give them some place to disperse to, right? So what do they do? They block off all the side streets and then they just gas the living bejesus out of everybody. Disperse? That's a joke. It was, ‘Oh, you want to demonstrate, do you? Okay, assholes, here's what you get.'” They'd used CS gas, which is against the Geneva Convention, and he'd brought back a canister to prove it. He passed it around at the PAC.

After Connie stood me up, I figured any promise I'd made to her about keeping things secret was pretty well off, so I told the whole story to Georgie, and he thought it was just about the funniest thing he'd ever heard in his life. “Yeah, that woman's really sane,” he said. “Some big hairy swinging dick drops down out of the rafters, starts talking dirty to her in the St. Stevens Mall, and she goes, ‘Hey, I can dig it, dude, lead me to the nearest panel truck. Oh, and by the way, I got to park my kid somewhere.'”

When I got to the part about her running naked through the cornfield, he was laughing so hard he was practically hysterical. “Yeah, she's
perfectly
sane. Listen, asshole, it's got nothing to do with you. It's all about her and her old man. So do you want to wander out into the middle of that one?” And of course he was right.

*   *   *

I was almost enjoying working for that old bastard Vick Dobranski, if you can believe that. I kept coming up with all these schemes on how he could expand his business, get into retail in a big way, and not just TVs but home stereos, car stereos, pretty much anything electronic, and how maybe he could run some radio ads, or newspaper ads, you know, or anything to get beyond servicing the same old customers he'd had for the last thirty years. And he'd always say, “If I was a younger man just starting out in business, that'd make a lot of sense.”

One afternoon we've completely run out of work. Vick's drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and reading the paper, and there's nothing I hate worse than having nothing to do, so I start fixing up his front window. Before I came along, most of the sets he took in trade just went into the Dumpster, but I'd started rebuilding them—anyhow the ones that didn't need a picture tube—so I'm shoving them in the window with amazing prices on them, you know, like fifteen bucks for an old RCA twenty-one incher that works perfectly well, and I'm humming away to myself and Windexing the window, and Vick's peering at me over the top of his glasses, and he says, “You know, Koprowski, I never would have guessed it, but you got a lot of ambition.”

The funny thing about me is that I've always liked working—if the work, you know, has a little more to it than putting doohickeys on light bulbs—but back in those days I'd never admit it. “Not me, Vick,” I say. “I just get bored easy.”

He sits there watching me for a while, and then he says, “I'd love to get out of this sorry business, spend some time with my grandchildren. Why don't you think about buying me out? I'd give you a fair price.”

I just laughed at him. I couldn't imagine ever being in the position where I could buy him out—although the idea did stick in my head. Yeah, I thought, I could run a little business like Vick's. As a matter of fact, I could do a hell of a lot better job than he was.

*   *   *

Another thing that made me feel halfway decent that fall was moving out of the house. Bobby Burdalski had put out the word for me—“a fixer-upper,” I'd said, and that's how I got the trailer. It was sitting on a pad on Bow Street. You know, down behind Raysburg Hill when you're going in town the back way. Dirt cheap because it needed a lot of work.

I slapped on a coat of paint and got the fridge and stove working. I picked up some nice furniture cheap from the Sally Ann, and I salvaged a bunch of components and built a pretty good stereo, and there was a little TV that Vick was going to throw away, and I got that working just fine. I even put curtains on the windows. I'll tell you a secret. To make curtains, you don't have to know how to sew. You've just got to be able to operate a staple gun.

So I've got my own place, and immediately I'm getting along great with Old Bullet Head. I'm still eating dinner at home five nights out of seven, and every time I get a paycheck, I slip Mom a few bucks. I know she's going to take it and she knows she's going to take it, but we always have the same conversation. “You sure you're okay, now, Jimmy? You don't need anything?”

“No, Mom, I'm just fine.”

“You sure now?”

“Yeah, Mom, everything's fine,” and the money instantly vanishes into her pocket.

After dinner, Mom and Linda are washing up in the kitchen and I'm sitting in the living room in front of the tube with the old man, and he passes me part of the paper, and sometimes we even have something like a conversation. I'm there, but I don't have to be, and we both know it, and of course he knows about the money I'm slipping Mom, and so I'm A-okay in his book, and life just kind of falls into a routine. And you know what? That's not a bad thing.

*   *   *

Somehow or other that fall I got to be the godfather to Linda's polka band. She kept talking to me about it, and I kept offering my opinions, and the next thing you know she was talking to me like it's my band too—which in a funny kind of way it was.

Now the first big problem was that Linda and Mary Jo Duda were at cross purposes right off the top. Linda didn't want some slick, high-power outfit that'd be stealing work from the Andrzejewski brothers; she just wanted a nice friendly little band playing old-time Polish tunes, preferably with all the musicians from St. Stanislaus Parish. But for years Mary Jo had been trying to form an all-girl polka band, and I guess because Linda was a girl, Mary Jo took it as a sign from God.

Mary Jo wasn't thinking that much about the music. She figured with her playing the accordion, the music would pretty much take care of itself. A polka's a polka, right? What she wanted was a bunch of young pretty girls dressed up in cute outfits so they could play all over the tri-state area at every Polish, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, Czech, Bohemian, or German event where people liked polkas and pretty girls, and make lots of bucks.

“I don't know where she thinks all these girls are going to come from,” Linda said, but she thought the best thing to do was humor her, because Mary Jo just naturally believed, what with her many years of experience and all, that whatever band there was, she was going to be the leader of it.

Well, the way South Raysburg was in those days, all you've got to do is say, “Hey, my sister's starting a polka band,” and the next thing you know everybody and their dog is giving you free advice. So I'm talking to Burdalski in the PAC, and I'm saying, “Well, if there was any
girl
musicians, you know—” and he says, “How about Patty Pajaczkowski?” Her name kept coming up, but I didn't pay much attention because the word was that Patty was crazier than a shithouse rat.

Finally I'm even hearing about her from Linda. “Hey, Jimmy, what do you know about Patty Pajaczkowski? Everybody says she's a fantastic drummer, and Darlene Mondrowski told me she's playing with an all-girl country-western band.”

So what did we know about Patty? Nothing really. It was all myth and legend. She went to Central for a while, and Georgie took her out a couple times when he was a senior and she was a freshman. “Hooo, Patty,” he says, “she was weird even back then.” Patty dropped out of school and turned into one of those teenage runaways. She went out west and lived in a hippie commune, somebody says. No, she lived with the Indians, somebody else says. It was the Hopis. No, I heard it was the Navajos. She got in some kind of trouble out there—wasn't she busted for possession? And somebody else heard she was down in Nashville making records. Or maybe it was San Francisco. But wherever it was, she's the drummer on three records. Or maybe it's four. Can she play? Everybody agrees on the answer to that one. You bet she can play. She's a regular Gene Krupa.

It turned out that Patty Pajaczkowski really was in an all-girl country band and they were playing in the Sugar Shack over in Bridgeport, which is how Linda and I ended up in there one Saturday night.

“Oh, God,” Linda says when we walk through the door. The place is wall to wall shit-kickers, so you've got your young bucks on the make with a hundred and forty-seven empty beer glasses on their tables, and your honeys with their spray-painted blue jeans, and your bartender that looks like a fat gorilla with the hair shaved off, and everybody's having themselves one hell of a good time. We cram ourselves into the edge of a table up front so Linda can check out the band.

I forget what they called themselves, but they were your classic bar band—lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums—and they would've been a major hit with that crowd before they even played a note, you know, what with their pink cowboy hats and sequin vests, white cowgirl boots and super-short pink miniskirts. Doing old classic numbers like “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and some fifties rock 'n' roll countrified and covering whatever was on the country charts in those days. The rhythm guitar was the lead singer; she wasn't half-bad, and she knew how to work the crowd, and they were going over just fine. Patty Pajaczkowski on drums. “How is she?” I asked Linda.

“She's just keeping time. I don't know. I don't think she's trying very hard.”

When the first set was over, I invited Patty to come over and have a drink with us. She sort of knew us, just like we sort of knew her, just like everybody in South Raysburg sort of knows everybody. “What are you guys doing in here?” she says.