Whitechurch (9 page)

I look at him as we pass the donut shop. Circle around in front of him and check the eyes for laugh lines. Unlined, he is serious.

“Oak, what does ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ mean, actually? I mean, pretty much I got it, but—”

“Come on, Pauly, will ya? It means the same thing all the rest of it means. Just, y’know, try to be good if you can. That’s all.”

“Ah, you,” he says, waving me off and walking ahead a few paces. He takes things very seriously, very briefly.

“Y’know, Oakley, you should try harder than you do. Big brain like you got and all. You could possibly make something of yourself, if you only made a little effort.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“And you could help me out, at the very least. Combined, we could be killer. You’d be the brains and I’d be … everything else. We’d make inventions, build cities we’d call Paulytowns, cure diseases, start our own church, basically help out all of humanity, and get ourselves stinking rich.”

“That’s the spirit,” I say. “But, maybe tomorrow …”

“‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” Pauly says.

There are three basic progressions to the Whitechurch postchurch experience. A lot of folks get the hell out. Families piling into cars to go on one drive or another, seeing leaves in the hills or grandparents in other towns or real life in the city. Then a lot more folks ease on down to King’s Diner for what they call brunch which looks suspiciously like their regular menu only they let you pick from either the lunch or the breakfast fare but not both, or over to the Chinese for dim sum brunch which is probably more legitimately a brunch except nobody in this town would be able to tell you whether it was or not.

But by far the most popular postservice worship option is at Rosa’s Cantina. On Sundays, in the modest town of Whitechurch, a good many citizens get the feeling that they have been fortified with the goodness of the Lord, and can drop their pants, so to speak, in the comfort of Rosa’s.

“‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” Pauly says as we pass Rosa’s.

We always laugh about Rosa’s, me and Pauly. Rosa’s has a stink. Hideous country music comes out of Rosa’s. The Christmas lights stay up all year in the windows. The TODAY’S SPECIAL sign has featured the famous ROSA’S RUMP ROAST for so long, there is now a little number in the corner ticking off the days like a hostage crisis. Today is 612. There is a sad and sorry sorry feeling to the place that reaches out and grabs at you like octopus tentacles as you pass it by.

But Rosa’s Cantina is a real bar, with real liquor-license concerns that have caused it to be closed down more than once, so we do not go into Rosa’s. We mock it instead.

“Wanna hear a poem?” Pauly asks as we pass Rosa’s big mirrored front window, with the roses etched all around the edges and mad loud noises blasting out from behind.

“No,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “Here goes.”

Rosa’s #1

What’s

Inside the cantina

Behind the flowers

Inside the cantina

While you’re looking in the mirror

They see out at you

But you don’t see in at them

I’m not peeking anyway

Just fixing my hair

Probably there ain’t even

nobody named Rosa in there

And I find that, while he’s reciting his dumb little poem, we are, actually, staring into that mirror window, inching closer, trying to see through, while idiot Pauly and fool Oakley stare back out at us and god-knows-who-else stares from behind them. There is suddenly an awful lot of laughter going on inside that bar.

“Pathetic,” I say, pushing off and heading down Main Street.

“Well, it’s not my best work maybe, but that’s a little harsh, I think.”

“Not the poem. The dopes in the bar.”

“Whew,” Pauly says, as if my liking the poem was important. “So you
like
the poem,” he says.

“No,” I say.

He catches up to me, then passes me, walking faster now. “Church makes you bitchy,” he says.

“No.
White
church makes me bitchy,” I say.

His turn to be snide.

“So leave, then.”

This is a joke. It’s a bad joke but, anyway, a joke. There is nothing to keep me here. But whenever I consider the alternatives … I stop bad-mouthing Whitechurch is what I do. I can’t decide whether I’m lazy or chicken, though I suppose the distinction hardly matters in the end.

“Wait,” Pauly says, stopping me right there on the sidewalk. He covers his eyes with one hand, and his heart with the other. Pauly’s had a vision, which does not thrill me.

Rosa’s #1.5

When they do finally let me

I’m gonna bring a date in

And I’ll say to them all

Get thee behind me Satan

Maybe he’s right. Church makes me bitchy. “Even Satan deserves better than that. You weren’t going to be satisfied until you worked that into a poem, were ya?”

He shrugs. “I do kind of feel fulfilled now, yes.”

“I hate it when you’re all cheery right on top of church,” I say. But I don’t hate it at all.

He finds this funny. On certain days he finds all things funny. “What, are you implying I’m sometimes not cheery?”

We aren’t half a block past Rosa’s when we hear the crash, the tremendous thunk of the big oak door flying open, banging off the frame of the building, followed by the tumble out of a whole crowd of drinkers tagging after a fight. A loud, messy fight.

“Cool,” Pauly says, pulling me by the shirt. But I’m not really in the mood. I tug out of his grip and follow sluggishly behind. Pauly’s at a trot, but I take my time, running through the sequence of events about to unfold in a classic savage Whitechurch bar brawl. First, one fat guy is going to shove the other guy, who is probably built a little more slightly, but with a similar hard round beach ball of a stomach. He’s going to bark a lot of angry words, having to do with his Slovak heritage, or the condition of our public schools, or hockey. Then he’ll shove him again, then again, then at the point where in a real place he would punch the guy, he will inexplicably stop. Then the other guy will rebut whatever the first guy said or actually say much the same things, but in a voice that sounds like he’s violently disagreeing. They will get really close to each other and the crowd will politely murmur rather than shout because it is Sunday after all and we do have our Sunday blacks on. The waitress will follow the action out into the street and continue to serve buffalo wings and fried mozzarella sticks and take drink orders. Wives will beg fat men to either stop fighting or intervene to stop the fighting. Eventually, having run out of alternatives, the two guys will be forced to engage each other, grabbing, grappling, poking, then rolling into a heap on the ground. Then Wendell, the full-time police officer, will come to them if he is not at his camp up at Moosehead Lake. If he is at Moosehead, one of the part-timers will step up, tell the guys to cut it out, and they will. Usually somebody has to save face by stomping off home, but often enough everybody will just ooze back into the bar. That winds up being the one piece of intrigue in these things, whether somebody’s going to wind up stomping off home, and if I cared, I would be in luck because I come up to the action just about the right time for the exciting cliffhanger conclusion, I figure.

I figure wrong, though. We don’t have two of the regulars here.

In fact there is hardly any buzz at all here, the crowd standing more or less dumbfounded watching a real fight. Not a Whitechurch fight. Not a TV Western saloon brawl with chairs and bottles breaking harmlessly over heads and guys being thrown sliding over polished bartops while the player piano tinkles merrily along. Nope.

“I didn’t even realize he was in town,” I say as I take up my spot alongside Pauly.

The young hard-looking guy looks slightly embarrassed as he stands there in boxing stance, ready to do whatever. Hair grows thick from the backs of his hands, all the way up over his big ropy forearms. You can barely make out the faded blue of his tattoo in the forest of hair. I think it’s a girl swinging on a crescent moon.

“We have to get in there. We have to do something,” Pauly says to me. “How do you want to do it? Whatever you want, Oak.”

My father stands there wobbly. Bloated, very white, bald-headed Dad, his mouth all bleeding, so you can see a small red vivid frame around each tooth as he speaks. He has good teeth still. Nice and white. Always a source of pride with my dad, taking care of his teeth. Flossing, using smokers’ toothpaste even though he doesn’t smoke. Beautiful teeth.

“Take it back,” Dad says to the man. “Or I’ll break your fuckin’ skull.”

“We don’t do anything,” I say to Pauly.

“For Chrissake,” the guy says to Dad, “just fuckin’ drop it.”

“I’ll fuckin’ drop you,” Dad says. Wisdom and wit being the family hallmarks.

Crrrack
, you can hear it echo through the valley as the man hits my father dead in the mouth. Couldn’t blame him really. He waited as long as he could, then my slow old man tried to sucker him. I’d have done the same thing. Not that I have anything against my dad. Just the way it goes.

He really should let me know, when he’s going to be in town. Should call or drop me a postcard at least.

“What’s wrong with you?” Pauly says to me, squinching his face all up like there’s a bad stink and he can’t figure the source of it. I can feel and see looks all around me that are saying roughly the same thing. Some people start slipping back inside.

“What?” I say.

“What,
this
,” he says, making a sweeping gesture over me, head to foot. “You’re like, nothing.”

“Nothing I can do,” I say.

He shakes his head at me, turns back toward the fight. I take inventory over the territory Pauly has just highlighted, and I realize I am all over something between pins-and-needles and nothing at all.

“Go home, Artie,” Pauly yells at Dad.

Dad looks. “You. You’re the goddamn problem, ya little shit. Standin’ together in the window, like a coupla … he’s half right about you.”

“Go home, Artie,” Pauly says, unfazed.

“More than half,” the other guy says.

Dad takes a big awkward sweeping swing at the guy, throws himself way off balance, and nearly falls.

Nearly. Can’t even manage to fall properly, which would have been something, anyway. Instead he does this ass-up little pirouette thing, landing on his feet but with his palms pressed flat to the pavement. My father is now showing the crack of his behind to Whitechurch.

I flash on a cold small thought. One of those joke postcards. Whitechurch says hello. My father’s smiling white ass.

He refuses to wear a belt. We have discussed it, but still he refuses.

The guy walks over toward Dad to finish him up, and Dad’s son feels not a twitch of an impulse to step over there. Lazy or coward? Maybe just smart. Why argue? Let nature take its course. My guiding principle.

Pauly does not subscribe to my guiding principle. Or anyone else’s.

“Can’t let you do that,” Pauly says, sliding his thin self between the men. Every bit as tall as the hard man, Pauly looks still like a child next to him.

“I ain’t never hit a girl before,” the guy says. “Get outta the way or be hurt.”

Pauly stands there and smiles. Not a confident smile, or cocky or anything. Just kind of cosmically amused. A fatal smile perhaps.

“Pauly,” I call, suddenly moved, alarmed. “Come on.”

“You heard the queen, go sit down.”

Pauly points at the man, like he’s practicing for our revival show. “‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’”

From behind him, my father hops to his feet and smacks Pauly aside. He then hits the guy a solid bang on the jaw.

But the punch does nothing. As the guy rears back, Paul straightens up and absorbs the shot, right on the button, and goes down. The guy reloads and drops Dad immediately thereafter.

There is pretty much nobody left on the street when Wendell, who is not at Moosehead, gives the guy a choice between getting the hell outta Dodge and getting the hell into the cage, which would be nothing but a big pain in the ass for Wendell. The guy chooses to vacate.

“Everybody all right here?” Wendell asks. Dad and Pauly are sitting on the sidewalk. Paul’s nose is bleeding and Dad is wiggling two front teeth. They nod. Wendell goes into Rosa’s Cantina.

I walk over to them. “You all right?” I ask. Dad just looks down at the ground.

“Did you see me?” Pauly asks, as if he’s just pulled off a triple somersault with a twist rather than putting his face in front of a fist. He is smiling nuttily.

Gorgeously.

Nothing you can do with the boy some days. He beams up at me, the blood from his nose pooling around his chin. I offer him a hand up. You got every guy in town fighting for your honor, bitch,” he says. “And yet you pick me.”

“Shut up,” I say. Unfortunately he knows I don’t mean it.

“Nobody calls my boyfriend ‘queen’ and gets way with it.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m feeling tough. Let’s go get a steak. Oakley, you wanna go get a steak? I got a few bucks—let’s go eat.”

I look down at my dad, who is still sitting, fingering his teeth. They look brilliant. But they look like they’re stuck in the mouth of a mushy jack-o’-lantern about a month past Halloween. He stares down at the sidewalk.

“You wanna come?” I say to him.

He pauses. “Does
he
have to come?”

I nod.

“Maybe next time then,” he says.

He’s not a bad guy, I swear.

We leave him there.

If any of this at all lowers Pauly’s elevated mood, he doesn’t show it.

“We’ll get something to eat,” he chirps, still within hearing distance of Dad, “and then afterwards we’ll go someplace and I’ll hump ya.”

“Jesus, Pauly.”

“Fine then, you can hump me this time. But don’t get too used to it.”

I have lost the impulse to tell him to shut up, and as we step into the diner we are on the same page.

“‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” we both say, pulling stares from every booth.

“Y
OU GAVE YOURSELF A
haircut.”