The Clarinet Polka (44 page)

It's pretty dark, and the first I know there's somebody else down there is I smell the dope. Nothing else smells like that. I stop like automatic, but Janice is a couple steps ahead of me and she keeps right on going, and I hear this voice saying, “Hey, Goldilocks.”

“Oh, hi,” Janice says, kind of startled.

There's two dark shapes sitting there on the riverbank. One of them's Patty Pajaczkowski and the other one's Georgie Mondrowski. I'm thinking, oh, shit, but they've already seen us, and there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it. We plunk down next to them, and Georgie offers me the joint they're smoking. I shake my head, so he offers it to Janice. “Are you going to turn me on?” she says.

You know how when you're stoned, something can strike you as hysterically funny? Well, Patty and Georgie are howling like two hyenas.

Now I would've thought Janice would've been deeply offended, but she says, “Come on, you guys. I can't help it if I'm not as old and cool as you are.”

Janice takes the joint sort of gingerly like it might explode, and she looks at me like, hey, should I do it? I can't begin to tell you how much I did
not
want her to smoke that joint, but at the same time I didn't want to come on like your friendly neighborhood nark, so I kind of shrugged, like suit yourself. She takes a puff on it and about coughs her head off.

“No, honey,” Georgie says, just as helpful as can be, “you do it like this,” and he shows her how to take a tiny bit of smoke and then WHOMPF, inhale and hold it. It takes her a few tries, but she finally gets the hang of it. “There you go,” he says. I am feeling, I guess you could say, real apprehensive.

She offers the joint to me. “He doesn't like smoke,” Georgie tells her. “He's your classic juicehead.”

“Smoke makes me gloomy and paranoid,” I say, hoping she'll get the message and stop. But she doesn't. Every time the joint comes around, she takes a hit on it. Then after a couple passes I start smoking the damn thing. I don't know why I did that. Maybe I wanted to keep her company.

“So how's your summer going, Rapunzel?” Patty says.

“I don't mind you teasing me,” Janice says, “but please don't call me by a German name.”

“Oh, okay,” Patty says, real serious. “I didn't even know it was a German name. I'll remember that.”

“She's been reading up on the Nazis,” I say. I don't know why I felt I had to explain Janice to those two goofs, but I did.

“Nazis?” Georgie says, “that's some heavy shit.”

“Why are you doing that?” Patty says.

Dope affects different people in different ways. Me it's always made silent as a stone, but some people get real talkative, and Janice was one of them. She started out telling them about her parents and the war. I guess Georgie and Patty must have decided to be nice to her, or maybe they were real interested in WW II, or maybe it was just that thing that when you're smoking dope, anything can be interesting. But, anyhow, they keep asking her questions, and pretty soon she's giving them big chunks of the story. She's talking faster and faster.

There's something strange happening to her. Of course she's getting stoned; that's not what I mean. What's strange is how it affects her. She's speaking English the way she speaks Polish, and I've never heard her do that before— It's kind of hard to describe. She's using the same voice she uses when she speaks Polish—kind of high and breathy—and the same gestures. It's weird. Or maybe she's not doing that and it only seems that way because
I'm
getting stoned.

She stops in the middle of a sentence and goes, “Am I supposed to feel something? I don't feel anything.” Which is ridiculous because she's obviously whacked out of her gourd.

“Well, shit,” Georgie says, “we better fire up another one then.”

“Maybe they were right all along,” Janice says. “Maybe they shouldn't have told us. There's all these things I wish I didn't know. I can't get them out of my mind. They keep going around in my mind.”

“Yeah, I know that one,” Georgie says. “That's a hard one.”

“All those poor people kneeling on the edge of the pit, getting shot in the back of the head. I keep wondering what you'd think about while you're waiting to get shot in the back of the head. I guess I'd pray— And the Germans hanging my grandfather in front of his clinic. I can almost see it— And my father killing those German boys, and that soldier sitting under a tree. I don't know why that bothers me so much. The Germans were awful. I don't have any sympathy for the Germans. But I keep thinking, my
dad
? My dad
did that?
”

“People do things in war that—” Georgie doesn't know quite how to get at it. “You know, war's like a different— It changes you. You know what I mean?”

“No, I guess I don't.” He passes her the new joint, and she takes a hit on it. She's been imitating the way Patty and Georgie smoke dope, so she's got to where she can hold the smoke in real good. She passes the joint to Patty, and she's still holding the smoke in. Finally she exhales. “I keep trying to imagine it,” she says, “but I know I can't—like really really imagine it. When you— When you first got to Vietnam, was it a big shock for you?”

For a minute I didn't think he was going to answer her. Whatever it was Georgie had that night—Well, it wasn't as strong as the Thai-stick we'd smoked that other time when I'd got stoned with him like a stupid idiot, but it was real intense, and I could feel like this little vibration that went through him and the way his mind was moving with it. Up till then he didn't know for sure that she knew he'd been in Vietnam, and I could feel him dealing with it. He says, “Yeah, I guess it was a shock. They try to prepare you for it, but they can't. Not really.”

“You know what I can't understand?” Janice says. “Down deep, I just can't understand how people can kill each other.”

We sit there for the longest damn time and then Georgie says, “You want to know the sorry truth, honey? It's as easy as pie.”

Patty hasn't said much for a while. I figured she'd been on the nod. But now she says, “That's the reason you came down here. So he could tell you that.”

Janice goes, “What?”

“We all of us had a reason to come down here tonight. That's yours.”

“What's your reason?” Georgie asks her.

“It hasn't figured me out yet. When it does, I'll let you know.”

Then we fall into one of those pockets of silence you get with dope—you know, where you get lost inside your head and you can't really focus on anything and you're afraid of where you might be going. And I'm thinking, come on, somebody say something—because I sure can't. “Easy as pie?” Janice says. “Is it really like that? As easy as that? Oooh, that's sickening.”

“You want to know what's really sickening?” Georgie says. “You come back and you can't forget how easy it is. It makes things kind of harsh.”

“Yeah,” I say, “reintegrating yourself back into civilian life,” and we both get a laugh out of that one, and I'm congratulating myself because I managed to choke some words out, and I'm hoping that now the conversation can maybe drift off in some direction that's not so heavy, but no such luck.

“The Indians out where I was,” Patty says. “If someone's been in battle, and if he's killed anybody, they make him take the cure for insanity before they let him come back.”

“Hey, I like that,” Georgie says.

The joint's coming around again, and I realize I've had enough, like more than enough, and I say that. “No thanks. That's enough of this shit,” trying to send Janice a message, you know. Georgie and Patty are somewhere out beyond the asteroid belt by now, and pretty soon Janice is going to be joining them.

It's dark down on the riverbank, and we can't really see each other, but I can sense how she's looking at me. “I don't feel anything,” she says and takes another hit.

“Sometimes I wish I could go back to the way I was when I was little,” Janice says, and she starts telling them about how she thought Krajne Podlaski was just down the river a ways, and how she dreamed of it, and it was a fairy tale place for her.

“Yeah,” Patty says. “Yeah, I can dig it.”

And then Janice just launches into this speed rap. “Every Sunday night we read to each other in Polish,” she says, “and my parents would correct our pronunciation. I can recite parts of
Pan Tadeusz
from memory—
‘Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie—'
Oh, and we read ‘
Śmierć pułkownika
.' That's about the Virgin Maid of Lithuania. She fought the Russians. And the prophet Wernyhora. He told the Poles and the Jews and the Ukrainians to love each other for we're all children of the same mother, and it was— What am I saying? I'm kind of losing track— Oh, it's that scary— In fairy tales when you don't want to hear the bad part, the scary part. I didn't want to hear what the witch was going to do to Hansel and Gretel— Why are children in fairy tales always
German
? There must be Polish fairy tales. Oh, right, I remember. When I was little I didn't want to hear the scary part, but everything they told me was the scary part, and I wish sometimes I could go back. You know what? I don't like how I feel sometimes, how much I hate the Germans and the Russians. Maybe it is easy to kill. I can find— Sometimes I have this feeling, that, yes, I could kill somebody. There were girls in the Resistance. Girls fought the SS. That's incredible. Isn't that incredible? Girls got killed all the time, and killed people. The Virgin Maid— But see, that was a story. It's not a story anymore. I almost wish they hadn't told me. I don't know if I could kill somebody or not. How could you put somebody in a cell full of water and torture them every day? How could you take millions of people and gas them and burn them? Where was God? You could pray and pray— I keep wondering if I'd lose my faith. I read where the Nazis— This poor girl— Did you ever read about the rabbit girls? The Polish girls? What they did to them? Oh. God. Help— I feel— So awful— Oh, God, please— What's happening to me?”

She takes a deep breath and goes, “Am I dying?”

“Not any faster than you were before,” Georgie says.

“Don't mind-trip her, Mondrowski,” Patty says. “She's out there on that thin ice.”

Patty puts her hand on the back of Janice's neck and rocks her back and forth a little, very gentle. “Come here,” she says. “Come on.” Janice scoots over in front of Patty, and Patty starts massaging the back of her neck. “Oh, boy, are you tense,” Patty says.

Now I'm sunk deep in the paranoid gloom. I keep thinking of things I should say, but by the time I go through this whole thing in my head about whether I should say them—am I going to make things worse?—the time when I should have said them is long gone. Why do I do this? I should know by now that grass doesn't agree with me. What am I, some kind of moron?

“Look out there,” Patty says, pointing at the river. “There's Poland.”

Janice goes, “What?”

“You see the city in the river?” It's the reflection she's talking about—the reflection of the lights on the Ohio side. “When I was a little girl, I'd come down here, and I'd want to go into that city so bad. You know what I learned from that? How close some other world is.”

Patty starts unbraiding Janice's hair. “We all love you,” Patty says. “We're not going to let you fall.”

Even in the dim light, Janice's hair is like this torrent of gold. Patty runs her fingers through it, like combing it out, and then she starts massaging Janice's scalp. “Oh, that feels good,” Janice says.

“You're on a spirit quest,” Patty tells her. “That's something the Indians do. When a boy gets to be a certain age, he's got to go off by himself until he finds his spirit guide—his ally. Until
it
finds
him
. But you don't have to go off into the woods. Or the desert. You can do it right here. Anything can be a message. You can get a message from me or Georgie or Jimmy—or even from looking at the river. And anything you do, and anything you say, and anything you think—it changes that other world. See it out there?” She points at the river. “Well, it's real dangerous, it's true. But you can come back, you know? To where the river's a river again.”

“Did you come back?” Janice says.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Is it okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I came back so you could tell me things.”

“What things? What am I supposed to tell you?”

“You already told me. Poland's in the river. And we can stand up right now and walk over to it. You want to go?”

Patty takes Janice's hand and they both stand up kind of poised, and for a second there I think they're going to take off and walk right into the river. Then Mondrowski stands up, and I stand up, and he goes, “Whoa, Patty, are you ever a trip.”

Janice looks around for me. She reaches out her hand for me, and I take it. “Are you all right?” she says.

“Yeah, sure. Are
you
all right?”

“Yeah, I think so. This is so weird. Do people do this for fun?”

“Well,
you
don't do it for fun, that's pretty clear,” Patty says.

“I got the munchies,” Georgie says. “Is there someplace we can get some ice cream?”

I look at my watch and it's a quarter of twelve. “Naw, everything's closed.” And I say to Janice, “I should get you home. Your dad's going to kill me.”

We walk up the hill and into Pulaski Park. We can see each other again, and it's like back to reality—instead of, you know, just being these strange voices in the dark. “There's air to breathe and dirt under our feet and nobody's shooting at us,” Georgie says, “so we must be doing fine.” The sky to the south is burning bloodred from the blast furnace.