The Clarinet Polka (35 page)

And Janice is telling him his mind's stuck in Poland, and the United States is not Poland, and he's got everything twisted around backward. It was the students who were trying to defend the traditional freedoms of the university, and the Ohio National Guard was worse than the Endeks. They were like the Gestapo.

“The Gestapo,”
he's yelling at her, his eyes bugging out. “What would you know about the Gestapo? You don't know anything about the Gestapo.”

“That's right, I don't,” she yells right back at him,
“because you won't tell me.”

He looks like he's just on the edge of totally losing it, but then he yanks himself up short, and he takes a deep breath and says, “Janusiu, you forget yourself.”

“I'm sorry,
Tatusiu
,” she says, “I guess I did.”

So then they both back off a notch or two, but they won't shut up. Oh, no, not by a long shot. She's going on about how stupid American foreign policy is—we'd just inherited a big mess from the French—and Vietnam was no threat to American security whatsoever, and the war was wrecking America, and we've got to stop it right now. I was surprised how well informed she was. And every argument she's got, he's coming right back at her with his side of things.

As you can imagine, I kept my mouth shut. There was no way I was going to get caught in between those two. And every once in a while, this really weird thing goes down. Czesław looks over at me, and he's got a little half smile on his face and he does this little nod, like he's saying, see, Jimmy, what a terrific kid she is, and then he turns back to Janice, and he's all grim again. It's like— Well, never in a million years would he have admitted that anything she was saying had even a grain of truth to it, but he sure admired her for the way she could stand up to him.

After about a half hour of this, I figured the best place for me to be was anywhere else. Janice walked me out to the car. She was shaking all over. “Oh,” she said, “he makes me soooooo mad.”

*   *   *

Here's something else I almost forgot. It's just a dumb little thing, but maybe it'll give you a feeling for the time. After Kent State, a lot of demonstrators came to Washington, and one night that asshole Nixon wandered out of the White House and ended up trying to talk to some of them at the Lincoln Memorial. He rambled on incoherently and the demonstrators didn't know what to think. Mondrowski says to me, “Hey, the sucker's losing it,” and I go, “Yeah, it looks like he is.” That's the president of the United States we're talking about, right? The guy with his finger on the button.

Kent State, yeah. You know, it was even worse than it seemed at the time. It's like everything else—what first hits the papers and the TV is never even close to the whole story. Yeah, the truth always comes out later when nobody gives a shit anymore. Well, maybe a few people still give a shit. God knows why, but I'm one of them. You want to know what really happened, I'll tell you a little bit of it.

That demonstration where the kids got shot was a peaceful demonstration, and it was really stupid to try to break it up. Most of the students who got injured were over two hundred feet from the guard, so when the shooting went down, the guardsmen weren't in any danger at all. The guardsmen turned and fired like they'd planned to do it. None of the kids who got killed had anything to do with burning down the ROTC building, and one of them was even in ROTC. He threw himself down on the ground and they shot him in the back. One of the girls who got killed wasn't the least bit political, and she hadn't been in any of the demonstrations. She'd just been walking to class.

THIRTEEN

The band was just a few days away from making its premiere performance at Franky Rzeszutko's when it finally occurred to Linda to ask Janice if she'd ever let her dad in on the little secret that they were playing polka music. Nope, Janice said, she hadn't quite got around to it yet. “Oh, my God,” Linda said, “when are you going to tell him?”

“Don't worry,” Janice said. “It'll be okay.”

It's fairly useless to say, “Don't worry,” to Linda. Anything you want worried about, she's your girl.

“Janice
has
to tell him,” Linda said. “She can't just let him walk into Franky's expecting to hear some—I don't know what—some ancient folk songs from the
Kolberg Collection
, and all of a sudden everybody's dancing the polka.”

What Janice always said was, “Nobody's going to stop me from playing this music. It's
my
music,” but Linda was pretty sure that if Mr. Dłuwiecki really put his mind to it, he could probably do a pretty good job of stopping her, and seeing as Janice was turning out to be the star of the polka band—even Mary Jo had managed to figure that one out—that might put the old quietus to the whole works. Comes the big night and Linda says, “So, is everything okay with your father?” and Janice says, “Oh, it will be.”

“What do you mean, it
will
be? You
still
haven't told him?”

“Well, no. But don't worry, Linda. He's my father, and I know him really well. We're members of St. Stanislaus Parish, and he's not going to do anything in public to embarrass me—or embarrass himself. Believe me, everything's going to be fine.” And then she said to me—but not to Linda—“And if he gets upset about it, it serves him right.”

So of course Linda was worried sick about Mr. Dłuwiecki. That on top of worrying about playing her trumpet—and a million other things that absolutely had to be worried about. I'd rented the sound system at Kaltenbach's, and I'd hauled it over and set it up, and the band had gone through a sound check. Janice had been real fascinated by the mike—holding it up close to her mouth, whispering in it, holding it a foot away and yelling into it, just generally seeing all the tricks she could do with it, but Linda was convinced that when the time came for them to play for real, Janice would screw it up.

Then when everything was set up and ready to go, Bev said, “I'm going uptown and meet my brother. What time we supposed to be back here?” and so naturally Linda has to worry about Bev not getting back on time—or at all. The last straw was that the band didn't even have a name yet, and Linda figured it was her responsibility to come up with the perfect one before they started playing.

Linda was in a state where she was just annoying everybody. Georgie comes up to her and starts stroking her back. She jumps about a foot. “Stop that!” she yells at him.

“I'm just trying to get your fur to lie down,” he says. Which the rest of us thought was pretty funny, but she didn't.

“Come on, kid,” he says to her, “we're taking a walk.”

“Walk? What? Where?”

“Shhh,” he says and wraps his arm around her and starts leading her to the door.

Linda's wailing, “Where are we going? There's all these things I've got to do!”

Georgie puts his hand over her mouth like he's kidnapping her. “There's nothing you've got to do,” he says and gives us all a big grin and they're out the door. All of a sudden it's real calm in there. I don't know where he's taking her. I just hope it ain't down to the riverbank to get her stoned for the first time in her life.

*   *   *

It was a warm night in early summer. Not hot yet, but pleasant. Not quite dinnertime, but getting there. Some of Franky's regular customers were coming in, saying, “Oh, there's going to be music? Great.”

The band had a table over on the wall next to Patty Pajaczkowski's drum set. I'm sitting there drinking a beer, and on one side of me there's Mary Jo and old Gene Duda and on the other side Patty and Janice, and I'm just enjoying the hell out of the show.

Mary Jo and Gene are talking about Gene's colon. He's had some problems with it lately. They're mainly talking in Polish, but every once in a while they swing over into English. A lot of the older folks from the second generation are like that—you can't figure out why they pick one language or the other. Maybe it's like whenever they have a thought, whatever language pops into their head with it, that's what comes out of their mouths. But when they're speaking English, there's always a little Polish tossed in, and when they're speaking Polish, sometimes half the words are English words with Polish endings crammed on them. Like Gene's talking about the
barium enemaia
he had, which he didn't enjoy much and whether or not the
palisa
, you know, the
helt insiurns
, is going to pay for it. It's the kind of Raysburg Polish that gives Janice's old man the fits.

Red and white are the colors of the Polish flag, so Janice is wearing a red jumper with white kneesocks and a white blouse, and little-kid shoes like she always does, only this pair's red, and she's got a silver Polish eagle pinned on her blouse. That night she's wearing her pigtails little-girl style, and she looks like she's going to be in the eighth-grade recital on Pulaski Day. Patty's got cleaned up for the occasion too. She's dug up a top and a pair of pants that she last wore maybe back around 1958. The top is one of those things that doesn't have any sleeves in it, so you can see the lizard tattooed on her shoulder clear as anything.

Patty is perched on the edge of her chair twitching away, tapping out a little drumbeat on the table. Janice is asking Patty if she knows any Polish. Patty says, “Oh, yeah. Sure. You want to hear my Polish?
Daj mi piwo, dziękuję, na zdrowie, pocałuj mnie w dupę—
That's all the Polish I've got.” That's, “Give me a beer, thank you, here's to ya, kiss my ass,” and naturally Janice cracks right up.

Gene's talking Polish, and he's saying that all he needs is a lot of cabbage. Especially red cabbage. No, Mary Jo says, that gives you gas. “To hell wit that,” Gene says in English. Back in the old country, he says in Polish, they ate a lot of cabbage, and they never had problems with their colons. You want to bet? Mary Jo says in English. Her friend so-and-so's mother ate cabbage every day of her life, and she died of colon cancer. “The doctor says it ain't cancer,” Gene says.

“You eat too much cabbage it will be,” Mary Jo says.

“Does your mom make you dress like that?” Patty's asking Janice.

“Oh, no. She wants me to get my hair cut and wear dumb little dresses and high heels.”

“What? You're saying, to hell with you, Mom. I'm never going to grow up?”

Janice looks startled. She's not used to people talking to her the way Patty Pajaczkowski does. Nothing's too personal for Patty, even if she's only known you five minutes. “Of course I want to grow up,” Janice says, “but I'm going to do it my way.”

Mary Jo's very patiently explaining to Gene what the doctor told him. His colon's got these things sticking out of it that are like pockets in a pair of pants. Shit gets trapped in there and causes pain.
“Masz rozum?”
he says, “You think I don't know that?”

Patty wants to know if Janice would do a braid for her. “Sure,” Janice says, but then nobody's got a comb. I didn't think Mary Jo was paying any attention to the girls, but she reaches in her purse and hands Janice a comb, and Janice starts combing Patty's hair. “I love people touching my hair,” Patty says. “It puts me right to sleep.”

Janice runs her fingertips over Patty's lizard, like tracing the outline of it. “Why'd you get a lizard?” she says.

“Because he's my ally. He's a sacred lizard.”

“A sacred
lizard?
”

“Yeah. He's older than time. He crawls down in the cracks in the earth and brings us back messages from the ancient entities that live down there.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not kidding. Just when you've forgot all about him, he crawls up on your shoulder and whispers in your ear.”

Now Janice is sure Patty is putting her on, but she's decided, I guess, to humor her. “What's he say?”

“Well, one time he said to me, ‘Patty Pajaczkowski, you are wasting your life.'”

“Oh, come on.”

“No shit, sweetheart. I thought I was doing just fine. I was on a couple records, and I was getting a lot of work—and I was doing some of that heavy-duty partying. Just enjoying the hell out of myself. But the lizard climbed up on my shoulder and told me I was wasting my life. And I
was
wasting my life.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went out into the desert and I found a sacred place and I stayed there till my life came back to me.”

Mary Jo says, “Patty Pajaczkowski, you are nuttier than a fruitcake. What are you telling that poor little girl?”

“Me?” Patty says. She's laying back in the chair with her eyes shut. “You must have heard wrong. I ain't saying a thing.”

Everybody in the band had friends and relatives that turned up that night at Franky Rzeszutko's for dinner. Mom and Old Bullet Head got there early to get a good table, and then all our aunts and uncles started coming in, and Babcia Wojtkiewicz showed up with a couple other old ladies. Patty Pajaczkowski's parents came, and we found out that her dad and Old Bullet Head had worked together at the mill for years. And Patty's big sister with her husband and kids—two little boys going, “Hi, Aunt Patty. You gonna play your drums, Aunt Patty?” And then Patty's grandma, and of course she turned out to be tight with our grandma. And some of Mary Jo and Gene Duda's kids, and their kids. And that rat pack of Polish girls Janice hung around with, and they'd brought their families with them. And the Mondrowskis, and some of Linda's friends from high school.

Franky was almost out of tables when Janice's mom and dad came in with her brothers. Old Czesław and his boys were the only guys in the place with suits and ties on. I was a little surprised that John Dłuwiecki would have driven all the way from Columbus just to see his little sister playing in a polka band, but he said, “I wouldn't miss it for anything,” so I gave him top scores in the big-brother department.