The Clarinet Polka (32 page)

There's some polka singers got a sweet, easy voice you can listen to all night long—like Marion Lush or Happy Louie. Then there's others—like Eddie Blazonczyk or Scrubby Seweryniak on their best tunes, or Walt Solek on damn near anything—and they've got a voice that goes straight through you like a laser, and you just can't get enough of it. It's like you've been waiting your whole life to hear that voice. Janice had a voice like that. What was Poland like in the old days? Do you know? I sure don't. But the feeling was that she'd just shot us right back there.

Don has been sprawled back on the couch, totally mellowed out, but he sits up so fast you'd think something stung him. And I swear to God, the hair's standing straight up on the back of my neck. Janice is singing

“Obiecała buzi dać,

  
ale nie dała, psia mać!”

That means something like, “She promised to give him a kiss, but now she's changed her mind—damn it!”

“Oh,
yeah!
” Patty yells and comes blasting in with her drums. My sister, like instantly, is right there with her, and she's taking those big trumpet notes and shoving them in our faces.

“Nie dam ci,

  
nie dam ci,

  
bo by było znać.”

That's “I won't give it, I won't give it, because it'd leave a mark.” It's not like the girl in the song really thinks a kiss is going to leave a mark on her. It's more like she's afraid everybody's going to be talking about her.

And they've blown free of the vocal and blasted off into the drive. Mary Jo and Bev come in together like they'd rehearsed it a million times.

Janice and Linda are facing each other, the trumpet and clarinet locked so tight they might have been welded. Both of them sweating like pigs. Doing bent notes, you know—that old-country sound—right bang together. Then Janice sings the next part. That's where the girl says, “If you kiss me, I won't forgive you. Have you lost you mind, or what?”

“Boś nie małe dziecię,”
she says. “You're not a little kid, so there's not going to be any kissing for you, buddy.”

The boy's pretty pissed off. “I'll never believe in a girl again,” he says. “You promised, but then you didn't deliver. You'll answer for this in hell, you bad-news girl!”

Then they hit the drive again and don't hold back nothing, and Mary Jo's big foghorn voice comes ripping up out of her, and she's going,
“Hop, hop, hop, HOPLA!”
You could almost see a whole hall full of dancers going crazy.

They slide into home, whoom, and it's over. Stopped dead. And we're all completely blown away. Everybody kind of lets out a breath, like, wheww. For a few minutes there, they weren't just a good polka band, they were the best polka band anybody had ever heard in the history of the world.

We're all just thinking our own thoughts. Then Patty stands up like somebody coming to attention, and she faces Janice, and she presses the palms of her hands together, and she bows to her. Just once. Then she sits down. Janice doesn't know what to do with that.

“We need someplace people can hear us,” Patty says. “No point in just playing for each other.”

“You know Franky Rzeszutko's place?” Linda says.

“Yeah. Sure. We used to eat there when I was a kid.”

“I'll bet he'd let us play in there some Saturday night.”

“Oh, sure he would,” Mary Jo says. “He'd be glad to do that. He used to have musicians in there all the time in the old days. We could pass the hat. Come out with a few bucks.”

They're packing up their instruments. Nobody said, “Let's stop now,” but when it's over, it's over. “We need a PA system,” Patty says.

“You can rent one at Kaltenbach's,” Bev says.

“Jimmy,” Linda says, “you can do that, can't you?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Wow,” Patty says, “is my dad ever going to shit when he hears this. We got a name?”

“Mary Jo thought we should be the Polka Dolls,” Linda says. Kind of doubtful.

“Naw,” Mary Jo says, “that doesn't feel right anymore.”

“How about ‘Three Hunkies and a Hick,'” Patty says and gets a laugh.

“Well, Mary Jo is the Polka Lady, right?” Bev says. “Why don't we be the Polka Ladies?”

Patty groans. “No way. Nobody's going to make a lady out of me.”

“How about the Polka Dots?” Mary Jo says.

“Isn't there a band already called that?” Linda says.

“It's too cute anyway,” Patty says.

So they're tossing ideas back and forth. They try out the Raysburg Polka Girls. No, that's just dumb. Besides, Bev's not from Raysburg. Well, does that matter? They try out the Tri-state— the Nail City— the Friendly City— the Steel City— Polka Girls. “Isn't the Steel City Pittsburgh?” somebody says. And do they want to be Polka Girls anyway? They try out the Polkatones, the Polkateers, the Polkarettes.”

“Come on,” Patty says, “nothing that ends in ‘ette.'”

“But the name's gotta say we're all girls,” Bev says, “even if it hasn't got Girls in it.”

“Look,” Linda says, “we're not going to solve this today.”

“Patty,” Mary Jo says, “you'll clean up a little bit, won't you?”

“Aw, come on, Mary Jo, I got common sense. When you're playing for people, you're playing for people. You gotta make the folks happy.”

We wandered out of the living room and through the kitchen and out to my car. There was a funny kind of feeling. It wasn't till hours later it dawned on me what it was. It was the same feeling you get walking out of Mass.

*   *   *

I dropped Mary Jo at her place, and then I shot up to Edgewood to drop Janice. I was still trying to get my head wrapped around what had just gone down.

Once when I was in the eighth grade, we were having football practice on that little field in Pulaski Park, and practice was over—the coach was blowing his whistle and waving us to head back to the school—and somebody flips the ball up in the air, and easy as pie Georgie Mondrowski catches it and takes off running. And like instantly, the name of the game is get Mondrowski. We were all of us trying to get Mondrowski—kids all over that field trying to tackle him. But none of us got Mondrowski. It was the sweetest little bit of broken field running from a kid my own age I ever saw—all the way across to the other side of the park. Well, he slammed the ball down like he'd made a touchdown, and he came back laughing, and we walked back to the school, and I remember looking at him and thinking, Mondrowski, you're wonderful.

So it was the same feeling. I kept looking over at her riding in my car and thinking, Janice, you're wonderful. We got to her house, and I asked her, “You have a good time?” She hadn't been saying much of anything.

“Oh, yeah.” And then she just stood there a minute with the car door open. You know what she said? “I'm just so thankful.”

Then I'm driving back down to South Raysburg, and there's this dead silence, so just to get the air vibrating I say to my sister, “Pretty good start for your band, huh? That Patty Pajaczkowski's something else.”

Linda goes, “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.”

“Yeah, but she's a good drummer, isn't she?”

And Linda just explodes crying. I pull over, and I'm going, “Come on, Linny. Hey, come on, it's okay.” I don't think I ever heard anybody cry so hard in my life.

She's howling, you know what I mean? She's pounding her fists on her legs. She going, “I've got a
degree
in music. All those damn years— I sacrificed. I could have been— So what did I get out of it? I can read anything—on the piano. I can play Chopin. I can play Bach. It doesn't matter a damn. I was terrible. I was pathetic. I was shitty. I've never been so mortified in my life.”

She finally gets so she can talk. “Do you know what's funny? It was my idea in the first place. Isn't that funny? I don't want anything to do with it now. It's all ruined for me now. They'll have to find somebody else. They even sound okay with just the clarinet.”

“Come on, kid.”

“I mean it.
I just can't do it
.”

“Yes, you can.”

She starts crying again. “Do you know what I had to go through to get that degree? Dad gave me shit the whole time. He never let up, not once.”

“Oh, yeah? I thought you were his darling baby girl who could do no wrong.”

“Not that time, I wasn't. All I heard was, ‘Aw, Linny, where's it going to get you? Why don't you switch into education?' Oh, God, Jimmy, why did I ever think I could learn to play the trumpet!”

“Come on, kid, cut yourself some slack. How long you been playing the damn thing?”

“A year and a half—no, a little bit longer. Almost two years.”

“So what do you expect? In two years you're going to be Louis Armstrong?”

So I start giving her my pep talk. I sound just like the Central Catholic football coach. I'm telling her how much she improved when she got relaxed, and how good the band sounded at the end, and like that. How she's just got to give herself some time. “Listen to me, Linny,” I say, “you may not be the best player in that group, but you're the heart of it. Without you, there's no band.”

We sit there and look at each other. She's cleaning her glasses. She's cried herself out, and now she's just quiet and sad. “It's nothing like I expected,” she says.

She thinks about it awhile longer, and then she says, “I guess I'd better call up Mr. Webb and take some lessons. How the hell did I think I could learn to play the trumpet without ever taking a single lesson?”

TWELVE

Summer was right around the corner and I wasn't feeling half bad. I'd even catch myself sometimes and I'd be almost cheery. You can't be working out four days a week and not be feeling at least a little bit better about yourself, you know what I mean? And I had my drinking turned back into what I thought was normal. That means I only got falling-down dead drunk on the weekends. So comes this one Sunday morning—it was early in May, the best I remember—and I've got my usual end-of-the-world hangover, and somebody's knocking on my trailer door.

Guess what? It's my long-lost buddy, Mrs. Constance Bradshaw. She's got a tracksuit on— No, wait a minute, let me get it right because she was kind of spectacular.

She'd had her hair cut real short but still with the long bangs, you know, kind of Twiggy style. And she had on top-of-the-line running shoes, like right out of the box, not a mark on them, and this little track top and shorts. Pink. I mean, except for her shoes, everything was pink. Even her socks were pink. Her goddamn fingernails were pink. She was wearing a lot of makeup, and she looked like if the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders decided to have a track team, she was on it.

What she wasn't wearing was her wedding ring. She used to take it off when we went up to the Night Owl, but other than that, she always wore it. She didn't say a word about not seeing me since The Italian Renaissance, and if she was pissed off at me for not answering my phone all those times, she didn't mention it. She was acting like the last time we'd seen each other had been a couple days ago, and she was cheery as all hell, laughing at the sorry state I was in.

I put some coffee on and had a shower. That gave me a minute or two to scrape myself together and try to get my head wrapped around what was going down. Was this just a friendly little visit from an old girlfriend, or did she have something more serious on her mind?

Now I hadn't been thinking too much about Mrs. Constance Bradshaw lately. In fact she'd practically slipped right out of my mind. Who I'd been thinking about was Janice Dłuwiecki—which is probably not going to come as any surprise to you, right? But I'm a little on the slow side sometimes, and I was still having a hard time admitting to it, but— Well, to make a long story short, Janice was starting to get to me.

It had started off totally innocent because to me Janice was just a little kid, and then after I got to like her, she was just a second little sister. So we'd had all this time together, all those Tuesday nights, to get to know each other, talking about anything at all. But then— I don't know when it started exactly, maybe it was her birthday, maybe it was Easter, maybe it was hearing her sing over at Patty's place, but I'd crossed some kind of line and there was just no way I could see her as a little kid anymore, and— Oh, hell. After I first noticed her hipbones, I couldn't
stop
noticing them, you know what I mean?

I liked the way she looked, and I liked the way her mind worked, and I liked the person she was turning out to be, and I just plain liked
her
—and I liked her a whole hell of a lot—and there was absolutely no way any of this was leading anywhere because of the simple fact she was sixteen years old. I wanted to do the right thing by her, and I'd been asking myself over and over what that right thing was, and I always came up with the same answer. The right thing for me to do about Janice Dłuwiecki was absolutely nothing.

I never said a word to her that was the least bit suggestive, and I was always real careful not to touch her. When we walked anywhere together, I even left plenty of space so our shoulders wouldn't bump. And it was kind of obvious she had a little kid's crush on me, but whenever she alluded to it, like making remarks about how she'd always liked older boys, I'd just ignore it, but anyhow—

I've probably told you how the nuns were always yammering away at us about impure thoughts. Well, when you're a little kid, you don't have a clue what they're talking about. I remember thinking, hey, I got real mad at Mom yesterday. Is that an impure thought? That's how out of it you are at six. But then the years go rolling by and all of a sudden, yeah, you know what an impure thought is, all right. And I'd been having an impure thought or two about Janice. And it just bothered the hell out of me. And the whole thing was, I guess you could say, starting to put a certain amount of strain on the old peace of mind.