The Clarinet Polka (29 page)

I don't know why it came down on me so heavy right then—well, I guess there was all kinds of things leading me to it—and I don't know if I can tell you what I was feeling. It was like I was an old car or some other piece of worthless junk, and I was just being hit over and over with a sledgehammer and reduced down to shit. I'm there in the church with these two good Catholic girls, and they're both saying their rosaries, and so I just grab the first prayer that comes into my head, and I say it like maybe a dozen times.
“Zdrowaś Maryjo, łaskiś pełna, Pan z Tobą, błogosławionaś Ty między niewiastami i błogosławion owoc żywota Twojego, Jezus. Święta Maryjo, Matko Boża, módl się za nami grzesznymi teraz i w godzinę śmierci naszej. Amen.”

I don't know how long we were in the church. We walked outside, and I was thinking, oh, God, do I ever need a drink, and the girls hugged each other. They just threw their arms around each other and for a minute or two they hung on to each other for dear life, and where my head was at, that didn't seem the least bit strange to me. Then I drove Janice home, and nobody said a word. Then I drove Linda home. I pulled up in front of our house, and she said, “You coming to the service tomorrow?”

“Good Friday? Come on, Linny, I'm bummed out enough for the week.” I was trying to make a joke, right? But she didn't even smile.

“You're coming to the Resurrection Mass.” She wasn't asking me.

“I am?”

“Yeah, you are.”

She got out of the car, and I had most of a fifth of Jack Daniel's in the glove compartment. I went down to the riverbank and I drank it.

*   *   *

The start of that little binge I remember real clear. I didn't feel like going in a bar. I didn't feel like talking to anybody. As drunk as I was, I had enough sense to ooze along at about twenty driving back to my trailer. I turned on the TV, but I wasn't really watching it. I had a gallon of Paisano Red in there, and I started in on that. After I got a ways down in the bottle, I found a half a fifth of gin Connie had left there from The Italian Renaissance, and I poured that in the wine jug—you know, to up the octane. I had some beer in the fridge too, so I figured I was set for a while.

I don't remember much of Good Friday. I got some more wine and some Jack Daniel's from somewhere. The state stores were closed, so I probably got it from Burdalski at the PAC. I must not have made an asshole of myself in public because nobody said anything to me about it afterward, but the next time I had a coherent thought was Saturday morning. I'm laying on the riverbank, and I'm chilled right down to the bone marrow. I've got my Levi jacket on, and it's wet, and everything's wet—from the dew, you know—and the sun's just come up. Well, sort of up; it's a murky morning. I don't even know where I am or how I got there, and I've puked all over the place.

I must have carried the fifth and that gallon jug down there, and the only thing that stopped me from starting in again was that both bottles were empty. I crawled up the riverbank, and lo and behold, I'm just down on the other side of the railroad tracks from the church, and there's my car waiting for me, and I'm pawing around in the glove compartment and in the trunk and under the seats looking for another bottle, but there's nothing. I drive back to my trailer and crank up the heat in there to the last notch, and then I go through every inch of my trailer looking for another bottle, but everything there was to drink, I'd drunk it.

I figured I had to pull myself together enough so I could make it to the State Store, but I couldn't even do that. I was just too sick. I crawled into bed and fell asleep for a few hours, and that's what broke the binge. I woke up, and you can imagine what I felt like. I knew if I kept on with that kind of drinking, I was on the one-way road to nowhere.

Everybody's got their things they do for a hangover, and I did mine, and I ended up wrapped in a blanket watching TV. When the pain starts to back off—well, it's not like you're happy or anything, but there is a kind of peace that sets in. I was so beat to shit I fell asleep about midnight. The next thing I know it's the middle of the night—still pitch-black—and somebody's banging on my trailer door.

Tried to ignore it, but it wouldn't go away. Just bang, bang, bang, over and over. Some girl yelling, “Jimmy, Jimmy, get up.” The only girl I can think of it could possibly be is Connie, and I'm thinking, boy, is she ever going to get it.

I go lurching over to the door, and it's Linda—the one person in the world I can't just start yelling at. She shoves a takeout coffee at me. “You've got plenty of time,” she says. “You need a shave.” And it dawns on me. Oh, yeah, Easter. Oh, yeah, the Resurrection Mass. That's
at dawn
.

I'm going, “Aw, Linny, give me a break. I don't think I can make this one. I've had kind of a hard time. I don't feel so hot.”

She isn't buying a word of it. “I'll bet our Lord didn't feel so hot hanging up on the cross either.”

I'm really pissed off at her. Like here we go again—my little sister trying to run my life for me. And then I look at her, and she's really dressed up for Easter. I mean dressed to the nines. She's even got a nice new pair of little white shoes, and she looks terrific. And the only way she could have got out to my trailer was by borrowing Old Bullet Head's car. Hell, I think, she must have got up hours ago, and she's out here on Bow Street, and our house is only two blocks from the church. And what's wrong with her running my life every once in a while? It's not like I was doing such a terrific job with it on my own.

So I scraped my act together, and I even put a tie on, and I went to the Resurrection Mass. Even as hung over as I was, I was glad to be there. It was just what you'd expect at Easter, right? There was the procession, and everybody was wearing their best—the moms had got all their little boys with ties on and their little girls in their cute little white dresses the way they always do—and we processed in and sang all the old hymns in Polish that you always hear at Easter, and candles were burning and everything was restored because Christ had risen.

I don't remember what Father Obinski talked about. I do remember the Gospel he was referring to—it was the resurrection story in John. It's always seemed to me you don't really have to add anything to that story, so that's probably why I don't remember Father Obinski's homily. You know that story in John, right?

Mary Magdalene goes to the sepulchre where Christ's body was laid, and she sees that somebody's taken the big stone away from the entrance. Well, she runs and tells Simon Peter what's happened, and he and another disciple go running back, and they see the grave clothes laying there, so it's kind of obvious that somebody's taken the body.

Well, Peter and the other guy go home, but Mary sticks around. She's weeping. She looks into the sepulchre, and there's two angels in there, and they ask her why she's weeping. “Because they've taken away my Lord,” she says, “and I don't know where they've laid him.”

She turns around, and a man's standing there, and she thinks he's the gardener. And he asks her why she's weeping. “Who are you looking for?” he says.

“Sir,” she says, “if you're the one who's moved him, tell me where you've laid him, and I'll take him away.”

But it's not the gardener, it's Jesus. And he says to her, “Mary.”

*   *   *

You always hope you'll have a nice sunny day for Easter, and that year we sure had us one. I dipped my fingers in the holy water and crossed myself and stepped outside, and the sun was wonderful. I'll never forget this. People standing on the sidewalk, standing on the street, hanging around in little clumps, you know, because you don't get up in the middle of the night to come to the Resurrection Mass just to go rushing home afterward. No, you want to take a few minutes to say hi to everybody—all those other crazy Polaks who managed to get up so early—and wish everybody a happy Easter, especially if you've got a real pretty morning with a big fat bright sun pouring down on you.

So there's this buzz of voices, people laughing, and I remember talking to Mondrowski and Burdalski and their families, and I was with Mom and Dad, of course, and my aunts and uncles and my grandma, and I remember seeing Dombrowczyk and Arlene Orlicki, and Bill Winnicki and I don't know who all. Well, everybody, that's all—the people you've known your whole life—and I remember feeling this little lift, like, yeah, maybe— Yeah, maybe there is a way for me after all. And I thought, well, if Easter's not about getting another chance, what is it about?

Janice was there with her family. They'd been on the other side of the church, and I hadn't had much of a chance to— It was crowded, you know, but you couldn't miss her wonderful hair with all those tiny waves—it was like spun gold—and Mom and Dad stopped to say a few words to Janice's mom and dad, real polite and awkward the way they always were with each other, and Linda had caught up with us. You always had to wait a minute or two for her because she had to go hang up her choir robe.

“You going to come home with us?” Linda asked Janice. She'd promised Janice she'd show her our Easter eggs, and Janice said to Linda and me,
“Wesołego jajka.”
That's an Easter greeting that means in English something like, “Happy egg.” We all laughed, and Linda wished her the same back,
“Nawzajem.”

Janice looked at her mom, and her mom said, “Oh, Janusiu, you shouldn't have told the Koprowskis you'd go to their house. You should be home on Easter.”

“I am going to be home on Easter,” Janice said. The Dłuwieckis were having a big fancy Easter dinner, but that wasn't until five, and Janice kept saying she'd be home in plenty of time to help her mom with it. “Come on, Mom,” her brother Mark said, “let her go.”

“We don't want to disturb your plans,” my mom said, trying to keep the peace.

“Of course she can go,” Janice's dad said, “for a short time,” and his wife gave him a dirty look. “Be home by two,” she said. “Promise me.”

“Oh, I promise,” Janice said.

So we walked back to our house. That dress Janice had on— It wasn't white. It was one of those natural colors like wheat, only more pale, and you couldn't imagine anything more simple. The skirt came down almost to her knees, and it had a short little jacket with it, and it wasn't tight. It flowed with her when she moved, and it made her seem so tall and lean and willowy, the most grown-up she'd ever looked to me.

We got home, and I excused myself and went shooting up to my room and got the Jack Daniel's down from my emergency stash I'd hid in my closet and had a good snort. That eased the pain considerably. I rinsed my mouth out with toothpaste so I wouldn't smell like a distillery, and when I got back downstairs, Mom and Linda and Janice and my aunt Eva and my grandma were laying the food out—a real nice breakfast spread—and seeing as Lent was over, Linda was going to get to eat all the sweet things she loved, so there's doughnuts and sweet rolls and like that, and scrambled eggs and fried
kiełbasa
naturally, and Linda's going, “Oh, yum.”

Whenever my parents or my aunt and uncle drifted off into Polish—talking to Babcia Wojtkiewicz—Janice drifted right along with them. Stas and Eva had never really talked with Janice before, and naturally they were amazed at her just like everybody always was. Instead of getting annoyed the way I used to, I thought it was nice that Janice could speak Polish. I even thought, hell, Koprowski, if you put some effort into it, maybe you could croak out a word or two yourself.

So we had a nice breakfast, and Janice admired our Easter eggs. Have you ever seen Polish Easter eggs?
Pisanki
we call them. The ladies do these wonderful, complicated traditional designs. You put the wax on the egg where you don't want the dye to take, and then you build it up, layer after layer, and the colors get real rich and deep, and if you want to keep them, you use blown eggs. It's a real art, and we've got a terrific collection going all the way back to when Mom was a little girl. Every Easter she takes them out so we can see them again.

Janice looked so grown-up and— Well, she didn't have much more figure than a boy, but that little jacket kind of disguised it, and dressed up the way she was, she looked a lot older than she usually did, and Aunt Eva whispered in my ear, “You better grab that one, Jimmy, before somebody else does,” and I'm going, “Come on, Auntie Eva, she's just a kid.”

It was such a pretty morning. Janice and Linda and I went out on the back porch to drink our coffee. Naturally Mom's cleaned every square inch of everything for Easter, but she's got to run out and wipe down the glider one more time to make sure Janice won't be getting any red dust on her pretty dress. “Oh, this dress,” Janice says, “it's more trouble than it's worth.”

She told us that for Easter she was one hundred percent designed by Mom—Mrs. Dłuwiecki had made that dress from a pattern, and she'd bought Janice shoes to match. They were definitely not little-kid shoes, and they made her feet look real dainty like— I don't know, like the tiny hooves on a deer. And her hipbones—well, when you're used to seeing somebody in little pleated skirts like the Central Catholic uniform, you don't really notice her hipbones, but in that dress, her hipbones were these two sharp points.

“It's nice out here,” Janice said, and I laughed and said, “It is?” You go out onto the back porch at
her
house, you see hills and grass and trees. On our porch you're looking across the alley into the back of the Lewickis' house.

For some reason I told her about how when I was a kid, me and the boys would hop the trains—if they were going slow enough—and we'd ride up to the top of 30th Street and jump off onto the big sand piles they had at the cement plant. Lots of trains in those days—they were still running big-time back then—and if they were long enough, we could get four or five jumps off one train.