The Clarinet Polka (22 page)

Czesław Dłuwiecki pulls up in his big blue Buick. Everything that everybody holds against him, they're still holding against him—he thinks he's better than us, is what it boils down to. And so everybody has got to be just as polite to him as possible. His wife gets out of the car, and then Mark, and then Janice. She's wearing her hair down. I can see why she wears it in pigtails most of the time because it's so long she could almost sit on it, this big curtain of blond hair hanging down over her coat.

We get into the church and the people clump up at the end of the aisles—genuflecting and crossing themselves—and I'm standing there waiting with Mom and Old Bullet Head to get into the pew, and Janice is right in front of us. She gives us a nice warm smile. She's taken her coat off, and she's wearing a velvet dress, a blue that's so dark it's almost black, and— Well, okay, so the thing for the teenyboppers back in those days was trying to look like little kids—even a lot of grown-up women tried it, and they usually looked totally ridiculous if you ask me—but with a girl like Janice, it just— Okay, so Janice has on this beautiful velvet dress, and the skirt's about a foot above her knees, and white tights and little-girl shoes—you know, black patent leather—and the only figure she's got is two faint bumps under her dress, and she doesn't look like Twiggy or somebody like that, she looks like she really
is
a little kid. And she's cute and all, but she's not ten, she's fifteen, and it kind of bothers me, you know what I mean? Shouldn't she be dressing a little older? What boy is going to want to take her out?

The Dłuwieckis sat in the pew right in front of us, and I kept looking at Janice's hair. When you keep long hair braided in pigtails, it makes these tight tiny waves all the way down. It didn't look real. It looked like something made out of gold. “She looks just like a little angel, doesn't she?” my mother said. Of course my mother would say that, but it was true. Janice did look like one of the angels they had down in front of the altar.

The church was packed, and I knew everybody—maybe not all their names, but I knew all their faces. I hadn't been to Mass at St. Stans for a couple years—not since I'd been home on leave when I was stationed down at Carswell—and I was wondering if Father Obinski was going to be okay. He'd been there three years, but everybody was still calling him “the new priest.” Well, he was just fine. He did half his sermon in English, half in Polish, to try to make it meaningful for everybody, Linda said. She was a real fan of his and always defended him because the old folks in the parish thought it was a crime that there was any English at all. “This is a national parish,” they said. “If you want to hear English, you can go to St. Mary's.”

Father Obinski spoke that educated Polish, but he went slow and kept it simple so everybody who knew any Polish at all could follow him. They'd got together a big choir, and we sang the old Polish hymns I've known my whole life like
“Dzisiaj w Betlejem.”
I'd been worried about taking Communion because I hadn't been to confession—I had no intention of going to confession—but I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself by not taking Communion, you know what I mean? I'd talked it over with Linda, and she'd said, “Look, Jimmy, there's a confession in the Mass.” It's that part of the Mass you call in Latin the
Confiteor
. “You don't need to make your confession to a priest.”

Well, I was pretty sure that old Father Joe wouldn't have looked at it quite like that, but if anybody knew the way the winds were blowing at the Vatican, Linda would, so I took her word for it.

I don't know when it hit me, but at some point during the Mass I started thinking about the Christmas I'd spent on Guam with Doren and Jacobson. We gave each other presents and got shitfaced and talked about our Christmas customs back home, and remembering that, I thought, hey, here I am with my family, and Doren's there in Austin with his family, but Ron Jacobson's not with his family, and he's never going to be with his family again. It really got to me and I couldn't get it out of my head.

When I said the confession, I thought, what the hell have I been doing? One of my best friends is dead, and what's it mean to me? Have I tried to do anything right? No. Just goofing off, drifting along day to day. And then there I was involved again with Mrs. Constance Bradshaw.

I took Communion, and I walked back down the aisle with the wafer in my mouth—that funny papery taste—and I thought about how if Christ was real, and the Church was real, then I'd been forgiven. I don't know how to say this, but it was—I don't know. I don't want to try to pass myself off as somebody who's super-religious. I'm not any more religious than the next guy, but it was just too much, and I was, I guess you could say, kind of choked up.

We sang a hymn and finished up the Mass and Father Obinski dismissed us. I still remember that from the Latin Mass—
“Ite missa est”
—even though he said it in Polish, and everybody started getting it together, putting on their coats and all that, and I didn't want to talk to anybody for a minute, so the first chance I got I pushed my way through the people in the aisle and went on ahead of my family.

There were knots of people leaving, and I dipped my fingers in the holy water and crossed myself, and I remember looking back and seeing my mom and dad, and my aunts and uncles, and Babcia Wojtkiewicz way back there still talking to everybody, and I looked around for Linda. She should have been coming down out of the choir loft, but I didn't see her. Czesław Dłuwiecki and his wife and kids were right in front of me, and just before we were going to step outside, he stopped to help Janice on with her coat, so I stopped too. He kept on going, and she started to button her coat up, and then all of a sudden she turned around like looking for something behind her—I don't know what she could have been looking for—and I was right behind her.

We both of us stopped dead. God knows why. She looked right into my eyes and I felt— This is going to sound crazy, but it's true. I felt something like a huge power surge, a million volts, and it was in slow motion and just rolled right over me, big as a river rolling over me, and for maybe a second or two I was, I guess you could say, honest-to-God terrified. I didn't know what was happening. I wanted to flinch away from her eyes, like when you're in a dark room and you walk outside and the sun's too bright.

I thought, hey, what is this? This is just too weird. How do I get out of it? So I said, “Merry Christmas, Janice.”

She didn't smile or anything. She said,
“Daj ci Boże szczęście, Jimmy.”
Then she turned and walked through the door with her family.

By the time I got down to the street I was telling myself it was ridiculous, nothing strange had happened at all. It was all just some kind of weird blip in my mind. I stood there on the sidewalk with my family and the Mondrowskis and chatted awhile and waited for Linda to come out, and we all wished each other a Merry Christmas.

Then I walked home with Linda and my family, and I felt worse and worse, and I kept thinking about Janice. I thought, well, it's too bad. That little girl just thinks I'm a nice guy she likes to talk to on Tuesday nights, Linda's big brother.

It didn't feel right to me to be driving away. I wanted to crawl though my little doghouse door and spend Christmas Eve in my old room where I'd grown up, and it wouldn't have been a problem. All I would've had to do was open my mouth and I could have stayed there, but then I would have missed out on the brand-new fifth of Jack Daniel's I had waiting for me.

By the time I got back to my trailer, boy, did I feel shitty. I cracked open the whiskey and turned on the tube. Christmas Eve, right? So what's going to be on the tube? You guessed it. Same thing on the radio, so I got out my records and started playing—well, not whole albums but just the songs I liked, the ones that went with the mood I was in—which was, okay, Koprowski, go wallow in self-pity right up to your eyeballs. I played “Crimson and Clover” about a dozen times, and “The Boxer” about two dozen times, and some of the songs from that group Love that Georgie had turned me on to, and whiny old Sweet Baby James. If I hear any of those songs on the radio today, I can't move quick enough to change the station.

It's funny how some of the times when you were totally miserable stick in your mind and seem real important years later. I remember one night I was drinking with some of the boys in Wallach's back room. We didn't have our draft cards yet, but if you hit the right place at the right time, sometimes they'd forget to ask, so we were seeing how much we could pour down before closing time, and I got super bummed out. I was with Georgie and Bobby and Larry and I don't know who all, and I was going on and on and on about Dorothy Pliszka, and they just got sick of listening to me. Looking back on it, I can't blame them a bit. Larry Dombrowczyk said, “Come on, Jimmy, what do you think? She's an angel from heaven? Hell, she's just a girl,” and I got up and walked out.

Somebody must have had a car, and I could have waited and got a ride, but no, I was offended and I just had to get out of there, and I walked along the railroad tracks from 25th Street all the way down to South Raysburg, and I can remember how walking alone in the night worrying about my problems felt good in a strange kind of way, and I went into St. Stans to pray. I did that a lot. Try that with a Catholic church today, you'll find it locked up tighter than a drum, and that's a crime, if you ask me. Sure, I know that times have changed, but a church has got to be a place where some asshole can stumble in dead drunk in the middle of the night to pray to the Holy Mother.

So anyhow, that Christmas Eve was turning into one of those miserable nights that's going to stick in your mind forever. The biggest problem was I didn't know what was bothering me. I knew I was feeling bad about Jacobson, and I knew I was feeling bad about the useless kind of life I'd been living, and I knew I was feeling bad about Dorothy Pliszka—surprise, surprise. I kept thinking that my life would have been totally different if I'd married her—which it would have—and other useless thoughts like that.

And I was feeling bad about getting involved with Connie again. So just how the hell had that one happened? You're probably getting a good laugh out of this—at my expense, right? But it didn't feel like anything I had any control over. I couldn't figure it out. It felt like a magic trick or some damn thing.

And then there was being alone in a trailer out back of Raysburg Hill on Christmas Eve, but the festivities were over for the night and everybody else in the world but me was already asleep. I'd said maybe I'd go to church with my family in the morning, but now I knew I wasn't going to make it. I'd had enough of church.

I'd bought nice presents for Mom and Dad and Linda and Babcia, and silly little presents for my aunts and uncles, and I'd even got something for Georgie, and now I was worried they weren't right—weren't big enough or thoughtful enough or something enough, and I was wondering if maybe I shouldn't have got something for Janice, although, God knows, you weren't expected to give presents outside your family and close friends. And the longer I sat there and drank, the lower I sunk, and it finally hit me how sad it was that there hadn't been any little kids at dinner so Babcia could tell them how on Christmas Eve back in Poland you could go out and talk to the cows and the sheep and they'd talk back to you. You see, they'd been granted the gift of speech on that night because they'd welcomed the baby Jesus into the world. And I kept thinking about Janice Dłuwiecki. Even when I hadn't liked her, I'd never thought of her as a strange little girl, but that's how I thought of her now. Honest to God, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck had stood up when she'd looked at me like that. Why had she said, “God bless you,” to me in Polish?

EIGHT

Whatever weird thing happened between me and Janice on Christmas Eve, she never mentioned it, so maybe to her nothing happened. I wasn't going to bring it up. I began thinking maybe it was just my problem—some malfunction in my mind, you know, like a scratch on a record. I was still driving her home on Tuesday nights, chatting with her in my car, stopping in to have a drink of Clorox with her dad. I was still working for Vick and eating dinners at home and getting loaded with Georgie at the PAC and, you know, still doing pretty much everything I'd been doing before Christmas. There was only one difference, and that was The Italian Renaissance. That's the course Connie was supposed to be taking.

We had more time together than back in the summer, but not that much more. We hated looking at our watches every five seconds, but that's probably what saved us. She had to get home between eleven and midnight, and she had to get there reasonably sober. She counted her drinks—I mean she literally ticked them off in her mind—and I saved my serious drinking until after she left.

“What about The Italian Renaissance?” I said. “Aren't you going to fail it?”

“It's not for credit.”

Well, The Italian Renaissance had only been playing for a couple weeks when Connie says, “It'd be nice to be able to go out somewhere, wouldn't it? Charming as it is, the inside of your trailer does get a little claustrophobic,” so I asked her if any of the folks she and her husband hung out with—the hot-shit young doctors and their wives—would ever have any reason to go up to Staubsville.

Just about the only thing that's happening up there is the Staubsville Mill, and it's your standard-issue milltown—you know, the mill itself takes up damn near the whole town, stacks sticking up, trains rolling in and out of it night and day, and then you've got a bunch of dumb, cheap-ass little houses, a supermarket and a hardware store, maybe eight churches, and four hundred million, sixty-three thousand, nine hundred and forty-seven bars. It's kind of heavy in the smoke department and nobody's seen a blue sky in recent memory. The streets have that funny kind of shiny, evil, metallic look to them, and, yeah, there's lots of that good old red dust, and when you get a slip in a furnace, tons of black crap gets blown out and comes pouring down all over everything. “No,” Connie said, “I can't imagine anybody I know going up there for any reason whatsoever.”