The Clarinet Polka (47 page)

I wanted to say something to her, but what the hell could I say? I'd been planning on eating something, a cheeseburger or something, but all of a sudden I couldn't have eaten anything if you'd held a gun to my head.

Georgie had his ice cream, and I drank about three glasses of water, and if you can believe it, Janice and I did not say a single word to each other. I wanted to get out of there as quick as I could, and I wanted to sit there and look at her forever—if that makes any sense.

The problem with Mondrowski is he knows me too well, the son of a bitch. When we were leaving, he gives me this sly smile, and he says, “So Jimmy, how do you like being back in high school?”

*   *   *

A few nights later I'm in bed dead to the world and somebody's banging on my door. I look at my alarm clock, and it's after one. I jerk the door open and it's my sister. “Is Janice here?” she says.

“Linny,” I say, “do you think I'm completely and totally insane?”

It seems like Janice had run away—or some damn thing. Mom and Dad and Linda had all been asleep when the phone rang. It was a good thing Mom got it instead of the old man. It was Czesław Dłuwiecki—apologetic as all hell—asking for me or Linda. “He was just beside himself,” Linda says. “He kept switching from English to Polish, and I don't think he even knew he was doing it.”

They'd had a big fight with Janice—an unpleasantness, Czesław called it—and she'd just walked out and they hadn't seen her since. After eleven they started to get worried. After midnight they got real worried.

“Hell,” I said, “it's not that late—not if you're sixteen. She's off somewhere with Maureen and Sandy. Sandy's got her driver's license, you know. One of Maureen's sisters probably bought them a case of beer.”

No. Czesław had already thought of that. He'd called the Wierzcholeks' and the Czaplickis'. Sandy and Maureen were both home in bed. Neither one of them had seen Janice that night.

Czesław was right on the edge of calling the police, but Linda said, no, no, no, don't do that. Not yet. I'll check around and see if I can find anything out and I'll get back to you. And she'd jumped in the old man's car and driven right up here, praying the whole way that Janice wasn't with me.

I looked Linda right in the eyes, and I said, “Linny, do you think I'd do anything with that little girl?” She shook her head.

Well, it took me all of about thirty seconds to figure out where Janice had to be. I told Linda to go home and call Mr. Dłuwiecki and tell him I was on the case, that I'd either bring Janice home or call him. And then I drove over to the Island, fuming the whole way, going, oh, you dumb little girl, what do you think you're doing?

I didn't knock, just went storming into Patty Pajaczkowski's, and there's that whole sorry crew slouched around her kitchen table. Patty and Bev Wright, that black guy Don, some other Vietnam vet whose name I don't remember, and Georgie Mondrowski—I could have murdered him—and big as life, pigtails and all, Miss Dłuwiecki herself. The dope in the air's so thick you could have sliced it and made a sandwich out of it. Patty says, “Well, hey, look who's here. It's Sunshine Superman.” I'm so mad I've got steam coming out my ears.

“Come on,” I say to Janice, “I'm taking you home.”

She goes, “No, you're not,” and all the potheads yuck their asses off.

“Okay, then, call your dad. He's real worried about you.”

“No,” she says, just like that—flat, bang. And that one's really the joke of the century. Everybody's practically pissing themselves laughing at me. I feel like a total idiot.

“Sounds like one of those Mexican standoffs to me,” Georgie says, and I give him a look like, okay, buddy, one more word out of you and your head's going through that wall.

“Then
I'm
going to call your dad,” I say to Janice. There's a phone on a shelf in the corner of the kitchen. I walk over to it, pick it up, and start dialing. Janice follows me and slams her hand down on the bar—you know, breaking the connection—and we're standing there glaring at each other. Before that, I never could have imagined her mad at me. Or me mad at her. I could feel this high-energy charge coming off her. Her eyes were like blue fire.

“Hey, you guys,” Mondrowski says, “mellow out.”

I suppose I could have physically removed her hand from the phone, but something told me it wasn't a good idea. “Janice,” I said, “this is ridiculous. You going to make me drive over to that phone booth on Huron Street?”

She just walks away and out the door, and everybody's laughing at me again. I go running after her. I was thinking she'd just take off and I'd have to chase her. Looking back on that horrible moment, it gave me, like they say, some insight into what it must be like to have teenage kids who won't do what you tell them. At what point do you just pound them one? And if you're like me and you could never in a million years just pound them one, then what do you do?

But she didn't make me chase her. She just got into my car. I started driving back, and we didn't say anything for the longest damn time. Then I asked her if she was stoned.

“No, I am
not
stoned. I told you I didn't want to do that again. Did you think I would lie to you?”

Big silence. “You don't have any right to even ask me that,” she says. “Who do you think you are?”

Another big silence. I know she hadn't meant it like a real question, but I was thinking about it anyways. I wasn't her boyfriend, and I wasn't her father, so who the hell
did
I think I was? Maybe I should have just left her in Patty Pajaczkowski's kitchen with that bunch of stoners. But I didn't like that one either.

We get to her house, and I pull up, and she says, “I'm not a child. Stop treating me like one,” and jumps out and BANG, slams the car door.

I felt—I don't know, just sick and miserable. I watched her go stomping up the steps and into her house. I should have driven away, but I was like paralyzed. I was calling myself every kind of name—fool, moron, idiot, shit-for-brains—because all Janice was doing was acting like she was sixteen, which is what she was, which I should have expected. If I'd built things up in my mind into something a lot bigger than it was, then that was my problem, not hers. What the hell was wrong with me?

Well, I sat there too long. I'm just starting to pull away when here comes Mr. Dłuwiecki running down the steps and waving his arms in the air. His hair sticking out in all directions. Scared the shit out of me. I thought maybe he was going to smash me one in the mouth right through the window of my car, but he shoves his hand through the window. I take it, and he pumps it up and down and goes, “Thank you, Jimmy, thank you.”

We had us this weird little chat. “She says she was with this person Patty Pajączkowska. Who is this person Patty Pajączkowska?”

Well, that was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, wasn't it? I gave him the short answer—that Patty was the drummer. “Oh, the drummer,” he says, “that strange girl with the—”

“The tattoo.”

“Yes. The tattoo. Is she a bad influence?”

I told him that Patty was pretty much harmless. He's running his hands through his hair and shaking his head. “American children!” he says. “When I was a boy, we kissed our father's hands—like this,” and he holds out his hand like there's an invisible kid standing there ready to kiss it. “She never gave us any trouble before. What is it, Jimmy? American children. Having things too easy? We always gave her everything she wanted.”

I told him the ways of American children pretty much beat the hell out of me too but I sympathized with him—which I did—and he says, “Thank you, thank you,” again, and he pumps my hand again, and that's that.

I went back to my trailer and got really loaded and didn't make it into the shop the next day till noon. Naturally I gave Mondrowski shit when I saw him. “Man,” I said, “you don't have the brains of a carrot.”

“I don't know what you got so upset about, Jimmy,” he says. “She was perfectly safe. She was with us.” The ridiculous thing was, he meant it.

*   *   *

All right, so here comes that horrible moment of truth you hear so much about. I'm sitting on the riverbank and I'm trying to get loaded, but I don't really feel like getting loaded—if you can believe that. I have a couple drinks, and then I'm just staring at the water. And I'm thinking, hell, what's the matter with me? It felt real familiar. It was like Dorothy Pliszka revisited.

I thought maybe I'd never see Janice again—oh, I might see her, but things might never be the same again—and it was like somebody had died. I had a rough few days—you know, where the only thing that gets you out of bed in the morning is you've got to go to work. I couldn't sleep much. I couldn't even eat—and believe me, when I can't eat, I'm in fairly horrible shape. Connie called me up right in the middle of this, and I put her off with something or other. Right then I couldn't have touched Connie with a barge pole. I kept thinking, hey, this can't be happening. It's so stupid. And it's just not right.

If it'd gone on much longer, I'm pretty sure I would've just got up one morning and said piss on it and tossed a few things in my car and driven to Austin. It wasn't one of those numbers where you're conning yourself, like—oh, hell, one of these days I'm going to Austin. I was right on the edge of really doing it.

When you feel that bad, you just got to keep going through the motions, right? What else can you do? So comes Friday, and Mondrowski and I hit the weight room, and I bust my ass—one of those workouts where you finish it up and you're shaking all over. And we sit in the steam room for a while, and we have us a nice long shower, and I've reduced myself down to Silly Putty. Then we're walking through the lobby of the Y, and the main thing on my mind is an iced pitcher of beer, and who's sitting in one of those chairs they got lined up along the wall but Janice.

This time it wasn't just the little tap in the pit of the stomach. It was like somebody hit me in the chest with a tire iron. And Mondrowski laughs and raises his eyebrows at me and keeps on walking. “Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say. “What're you doing here?”

“I'm waiting for you. What else would I be doing here?”

So I plunk down in the chair next to her, and we sit there and look at each other for a while. I keep telling myself that the main thing I've got to do is keep my cool—giving myself a pep talk, you know, exactly like I'm back in high school.

“I guess I should apologize,” she says, “for being such a brat.”

What do you say to that? I had enough sense to know what I shouldn't say—“Yeah, you were pretty much of a brat, all right.” She was dressed up like for some big occasion—maybe even a date—so I figured she was going to make her little apology and then be on her way. “No problem,” I say. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of. No, not really.”

“Yeah? So what's happening?”

She shrugs. “I guess I blew it.”

There's a couple of the fat old guys you usually see hanging around in the Y, and young studs coming in for their workout—the real fitness nuts, you know, or the losers who've got nothing better to do at seven o'clock on a Friday night—and it seemed kind of a ridiculous place to be having that conversation. Also I was dying of thirst. I kissed good-bye to that pitcher of beer in my head and bought myself a Coke from the machine. “Let's get out of here,” I said.

We walked to my car. She had her hair in a different way. It was still braided but wound up on her head in this, I don't know, real complicated style. I didn't know whether I liked it or not. “Can I drop you somewhere?” I said.

She didn't answer me. She had her full-tilt teenybopper makeup on—I remember that shiny lipstick—and she was wearing a dress. That's why I thought she must have a date or something. It was weird, what she had on. This short dress and over the top of it this other thing, kind of like an apron—you know, with straps going over the shoulders—but a skirt that goes almost all the way around to the back. Like from the front it's two skirts, one over the other. And white stockings and little black kiddy shoes, flat as pancakes. She sure looked cute, and it just annoyed the hell out of me.

We got to my car, and she said, “I'm still mad at you, you know.”

I was pretty mad at her too. “You want to go for a ride or what?”

She got in and I went tearing out of there. “What are you mad about?” I said.

“The way you came into Patty's like that. The way you treated me.”

“Yeah. Well. What did you expect?”

If you drive up Pike Street—you know, in North Raysburg—there's this turnoff to this strange place where somebody was building a house once and just gave up. It's been there as long as I can remember. Like they poured the foundation and started some walls and that's it. You get a wonderful view of the city from up there, and the whole curve of the river from the Top Mill practically down to where we live. I'd taken Janice up there before. We walked to the edge and looked out at this, I guess you could say, spectacular panorama. We got a great view of the air pollution.

“Did Linda really get you out of bed?” she asked me. “That's what she told my father.”

“Yeah, she did.” That was Linda covering for me. If Czesław was any kind of suspicious guy, he might have thought Janice had been out with me the whole time.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

She told me she'd got in a huge fight with her parents, mainly about her brother John. She'd been “playing little Miss Fix-It,” she said, kind of bitter, and she'd been trying to get them to see just a hint of John's side of things, and they went ballistic. So she walked out on them and caught the bus into town and walked across the bridge to Patty's. She didn't feel the least bit bad about walking out on them, but she should have called home. That was really stupid of her—and wrong. “I hate admitting I'm wrong,” she said.