The Clarinet Polka (62 page)

Georgie's lieutenant doesn't much like to worry about prisoners. No, the main thing that lieutenant worries about is keeping his body count up. So they've captured this VC, and the lieutenant says, “Hey, Mondrowski, I think that man needs some
medical attention
.” Georgie goes over to where this VC is laying there, wounded, glaring up at him, and Georgie blows his brains out. “
Xin loi
, motherfucker.”

He's telling me God knows what all. I can't remember a lot of it, and most of it I don't want to. Besides, it's his story, and if you want to hear any more about it, you ask him. But anyhow I'm sitting there listening to him, and I'm thinking, Christ, how could anybody live through that shit, and he's probably never told even half of it to anybody so it's probably a good thing he's telling me, and yeah, sure, I feel real bad for him, but the main thing I'm thinking about is my next drink.

He starts to get a little calmed down, so I say, “Hey, man, you want to go find another bar?” thinking, you know, he's probably got a few bucks.

He reaches in his coat and pulls out a pint of rye and hands it to me. I grab it and knock back a good one. I offer it to him, and he shakes his head. “You drink it, man. You need it.” I feel like a piece of shit, but I kill the bottle. He's obviously gone downhill some since I saw him last—but that makes two of us—and I'm thinking, hell, he's got lots of reasons to be fucked up, so okay, Koprowski, what's your excuse?

He fires up a J, offers me that, but I shake my head. He's stopped crying, and a little while later he says, “You know, Jimmy, I keep having this dream. It's always the same dream. I'm back over there, you know, in country, and I hear this little rustle, and I waste the son of a bitch, and then I look and I see that it's my mother or my sister or somebody like that,” and he drops his head down between his knees and starts bawling again.

I'm patting his shoulder, hoping he'll get straightened up enough so we can go to a bar. Eventually he pulls himself together, and he does another J, and we're just sitting there staring at the lights in the river, and oh, God help me, I'm really needing that next drink. I'm thinking, shit, this is horrible. How did I get so lost? How did it happen so fast?

“Hey, Jimmy,” he says, “I knew you wasn't in Texas. I figured if you was in Texas, you'd send me a card.”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Somebody said they saw you pumping gas somewhere.”

“Yeah, I was doing that for a while.”

“So what the hell you
doing
, man?”

“Georgie, that's something I really couldn't tell you. But what's happening with you, man? When I left, you were working for the city.”

“Yeah, well, that one kind of went down the tube.”

He stares in the river and then he says, “We had a big demonstration in Washington just a couple weeks ago. Just us, you know—Nam vets.”

“Yeah, I saw something about it on the tube.”

“Well, I was there. I chucked my medals over the White House fence. It was a big relief. I keep thinking maybe I can turn things around now, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Jimmy,” he says, “we got to stick together. We got to help each other out, you know.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“We can't spend the whole rest of our lives like this, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I sure as hell do.”

“Jimmy, anything you need, you just ask, okay? You need a drink, you don't go begging in some goddamn bar. You ask me. Anything I got is yours.”

“Christ, man, I appreciate that. Thanks a lot for saying that.”

“You don't have to thank me. I don't have to thank you. You understand what I'm saying here? We're brothers, right?
Bracia.
”

He bends over and gives me a big kiss right on the mouth. “How you like that?” he says, “and we ain't even queer. Come on, man, you got to come home.”

*   *   *

After that night I worked real hard at staying away from any place I thought Georgie Mondrowski might go. The last thing in the world I wanted was to run into him again. Why was that? Because he was one of the few people left who still gave a shit about me. Does that make any sense?

I don't know how I managed to keep on going as long as I did. Most of it's a blur in my mind. But I made it till sometime in the spring when I finally threw it away up in North Raysburg. It was getting to be nice weather, and I've always liked driving around. Yeah, driving was just about the only little speck of pride I had left. Like, hey, at least I'm not like those other assholes flopped at the Floss—I've still got a car, and I'm leaving for Texas any day now.

So it was early in the evening—anyhow the sun was still up—and I was out on the river road headed back into town, and there's a nice stretch there where you can really open her up, and I'd picked up a cop. Somehow I sensed him in plenty of time. I checked my rearview and he was floating along right behind me, and I thought, whew, that was close, because if my sixth sense hadn't been operating, I could have been really burning down that road. I drifted into town with my speedometer pegged right on the speed limit. Ordinarily what I would have done was flipped over to the island and then on into Ohio because I never drove through Raysburg—especially, you know, anywhere near South Raysburg.

We get into town, and I don't have a clue what I'm doing wrong, but all of a sudden the cop does his little WHEEUUR on the siren, so I pull over and check him out in the mirror. Just him, no partner, right? And it occurs to me that one of my taillights is missing—it's been missing for a while, and it's just another damn thing I could never get around to. So what? He's going to give me a ticket for it. And then maybe a drunk-driving charge on top of it—because I'm fairly loaded, and that's going to be obvious even if he turns out to be the village idiot. So I let him get out of the cop car and walk up to where he's just about to bend down and lean on my window and then I blast out of there like Evel Knievel.

What was I thinking? Who says I was thinking? I can remember I was really pissed off. Like that was the last straw, like something in me just snapped. Like screw you guys, I'm not going to take any more shit from you. And for a while there, I thought I'd lost him. I'm just driving the bat piss out of that old Chevy. I'm burning down alleys and powersliding corners and running red lights and jumping curbs, and people are pulling over and blowing their horns at me, and I'm just rocking and rolling and having a good time. I am, by God, brilliant.

I can't see him, but I can still hear his siren. Then I check my rearview, and yep, there he is, about a block away, coming up fast. So I go screaming around the next corner and go whipping into an alley—you know, sliding at some damn crazy angle—and I get this picture like a flash going off and it's burned into my brain forever. There's a little boy maybe nine or ten years old, and he's pushing his bike, and he's right at the end of the alley, and he's frozen, staring straight at me.

The kid had been headed to my left, so I stand on the brakes and haul the wheel over to my right, and then KABLAM, there's your screaming metal, exploding glass, the whole bit. It sounds like the whole world's coming down around my ears. At the time, I was a little vague about what'd happened, but I'd smashed into the corner of somebody's garage.

It could have been a brick wall, right? Or the poor bastard's car could have been parked in that garage, right? And then the chances are I wouldn't be here telling you this story. But I ripped out the corner of the garage, and went smashing through the garage door—and that took up some of the impact—and then I went on through to the inside. No car in there, just empty space, so I rammed up against the inside corner, you know, at a sideways angle, and that got me stopped. I mean, it was ridiculous. One of those Keystone Kops kind of crashes. Totaled my Chevy—totaled the garage too—but all I got out of it was a hell of a bang on the chest from the steering wheel and my big nose broke on the windshield. You see the bump there in the middle? That's it.

I jump out of the car. All I can think is, oh, my God, what happened to that little boy? But I run right into the cop, and he's so pissed off he just punches me right out.

I sort of remember being handcuffed and shoved in the cop car, but it's not real clear. Nobody'd ever heard of prisoner's rights in those days, so they just hauled my sorry ass down to the Raysburg cop shop. I was obviously impaired, right? And what you do with some slobbering idiotic drunk you've just caught after a high-speed chase that's endangered the lives and limbs of a vast number of Raysburg's citizenry, is you throw him in the drunk tank until he sobers up, and then you throw the book at him.

They dump me on the floor somewhere—that's all I know—and I pass out. I wake up and I'm in a cell, and not a very big one. Where I am is down in the basement of the police station, but I don't know that. There's not a breath of air, and the place stinks of shit and vomit. A couple bare bulbs burning away in the corridor outside, and that's the only light. I've got no way of knowing what time it is, but it feels like the middle of the night. And the first thing I can think of is—oh, my God, what happened to that little boy? I can't imagine anything worse than hurting a child.

I'm in there for hours. They've taken my wallet and my smokes and my belt and my shoes. Nothing but me and a wooden bench and a hole to piss in. I don't see a sign of anybody, and somehow I can't bring myself to start yelling. It's been—oh, I don't know, eight or ten hours since my last drink, and I'm not feeling real fine. I keep thinking, oh God, please, please, please let that little boy be okay.

This cop comes strolling down the hallway, and he stops to check on me, and his expression says, give me any trouble and you're dead meat. I was not in the mood to give anybody any trouble, believe me.

Well, at some point I started throwing up. I got down to the dry heaves. Every bone and muscle in my body ached. I lay there on the floor doubled up, and I kept thinking about that little boy. You know, that picture I had in my mind—frozen, staring down the alley straight at me. Scared shitless. I kept praying for him.

Oh, God help me, did I ever need a drink. Right, so how was I going to get one? Weren't they supposed to let you make one phone call? Wasn't that part of the deal? So where the hell was my one phone call? And who the hell was I going to call? Everybody must have pretty much written me off by then. Well, Linda I could call. She was the only person in the world I knew I could always count on no matter what. I didn't know what time it was, but after eight I could get her over at that dentist's where she worked.

The cop comes strolling down the corridor again, and I don't care if he beats the crap out of me, I've got to know what happened. “Excuse me,” I say. “I'm sorry. Excuse me, but can you tell me what happened to that little boy?”

I don't think he's going to answer me, but finally he says, “He's okay. He jumped clear.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah. Just quick as a cat. He's pretty shook up, but not a scratch on him.”

“Oh, thank God,” I say, and something in me cracks open and I start bawling.

Then he says—you know, like he's got to give me my due even though he'd just as leave not, he says, “And it's a good thing you swerved when you did.”

I'm crying so hard I sink down on the floor. The cop looks at me for a minute and then he just walks away.

I'm huddled up on the floor, and I'm crying like a baby. I start saying one of those prayers my grandma taught me.
“Spowiadam się Bogu wszechmogącemu, Najświętszej Maryi Pannie, błogosławionemu Michałowi Archaniołowi, błogosławionemu Janowi Chrzcicielowi, świętym Apostołom Piotrowi i Pawłowi—”
That's the
Confiteor
. You know, where you confess to anybody who might have some interest in the matter—to Almighty God, and to the Blessed Virgin, and to the archangel Michael, and to John the Baptist, and to the apostles Peter and Paul—that you've sinned.

I get to the part that goes,
“moja wina, moja wina, moja bardzo wielka wina”
—that's, “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”—and I get stuck there.

Then I prayed to the Holy Mother, “Please, help me. I can't go on living like this.
Módl się za nami grzesznymi teraz i w godzinę śmierci naszej
—Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

I really thought I might die. Right there in that hole before anybody found me. And if I didn't die, I'd have to stop drinking. And then I finally admitted the truth to myself. There was absolutely no way in hell I was ever going to stop drinking. I'd been lying to myself for years about all kinds of things, and especially I'd been lying to myself about drinking. Anything I promised myself—or the Holy Mother—was just going to be another pack of lies. There was nothing I could do about it. I was going to be a drunk for the rest of my life, so I might as well be dead.

Well, somehow I got through the night and they had a shift change. One of the Polish cops on the Raysburg force was Tiny Cieslak—you can guess why they called him Tiny—and I looked up and there he was looking down at me through the bars. “It's okay,” Jimmy,” he says, “I called your dad. He's on his way up here.”

I was not real pleased to hear that. Old Bullet Head was the last person in the world I wanted to see. I figured he'd just tell them to throw away the key. Which was exactly what I deserved, but I had to get out of there somehow because I needed a drink. And I tried to pull myself together, because, you know, you don't want to look like a total broken-down wreck in front of your father.