Broke Heart Blues

  Losers."

  It wasn't just the shock of it but the shame. For Tomahawk Island was a place for losers--guys who couldn't be classified as juvenile delinquents any longer but weren't adults either. Dangerous characters.

  John Reddy Heart?

  Roger Zwaart's dad tried to soften our hurt and disappointment by explaining, with lawyerly logic, that since John Reddy had shot Riggs--'And I don't think anyone seriously doubts he did, yes? "--the Erie County prosecutor's office wasn't going to let him walk away free.

  "Trippe understood this perfectly. I've heard that, without the Hearts knowing it, Trippe had been negotiating for a reduced-sentence deal all along.

  his client wouldn't plead even involuntary manslaughter--he wouldn't plead anything, at all. Which is why the offlcial plea was not guilty." Mr..

  Zwaart shook his head as if, in Trippe's place, he might have handled things differently, yet, if he hadn't handled things differently, his client wouldn't have been acquitted. "But if there'd been a second trial on these charges, the Heart kid would've been found guilty and sent away a long time. A judge would've taken one look at him and at the case and sent him away for twenty years minimum. The jurors at his trial obviously that Riggs, the victim, deserved killing. Trippe helped them see that, but so, inadvertently, had Dill. Punishing a deserving victim makes sense to some citizens, and that's what they did. But the Heart kid wouldn't have had such luck a second time, and believe me it was luck, I mean like getting struck by lightning, that Dill was enough to allow Laetitia Riggs to sabotage his case. And Trippe knew it. So Trippe advised his client to plead guilty, for a reduced sentence, and the kid went for it, and got a terrific bargain, believe me. For a killer." Mr..

  Zwaart laughed soundlessly. He saw the sick, sad look in our eyes, and our knowledge, the gift that one generation yields to another, the sweetest gift wrested from us against our wills, that he was right.

  Why did we waste so much time and energy as kids, we'd ask one another in our flaccid-fitting adult disguises, in our balding-creased maturity, resisting most of what our fathers had to tell us? For they were right, like Mr..

  Zwaart. And even if they weren't right the substance of what they told us would become what we'd tell our children, more or less, fumbling and faltering to recall the very cadences of speech that, at the time of its utterance, we'd despised. ) At about this time in November of that exhausting year a memorial service was held at the high school for Art's older brother Jamie, James Michael Lutz, Private First Class, U. S. Army, who'd graduated from WHS few years before and who'd been killed "in the line of duty"--"serving his country"-"protecting the cause of freedom and democracy" in some spot in Vietnam that may have been mispronounced by Mr.. Stamish at the ceremony, or misheard by Willowsville residents whose ears could accommodate combinations of consonants and vowels not already known us--"Cameron Bay" it sounded like. The WHS staff and most seniors recalled Jamie Lutz but younger students were vague about which of good-looking jocks he'd been. There would always be a scattering students who would confuse, over the decades, to our exasperation and their own perplexity, the deceased Jamie Lutz with the still-living John Heart, or the still-living John Reddy Heart with the deceased Lutz.

  Where you gonna go when there's no goin' farther?

  Who you gonna love when there's no love for you? tohn Reddy, tohn Reddy Heart.

  Twelve months imprisoned at Tomahawk Island we in Willowsville to imagine but could not. Even Evangeline Fesnacht our chronicler disaster, devotedly accumulating her Death Chronicles in her until it spilled out onto the floor. Even our broody intellectuals Ritchie Eickhorn, Clarence McQuade, Dexter Cambrook, Elise Petko. Even Art Lutz, and Tommy Nordstrom (sporting his new, truly weird "convict crew cut") who drove out to Tomahawk Island one rainy Saturday afternoon to out the facility from a short distance--"Jesus. What a depressing place. You drive over a nightmare bridge. You come along this crappy road.

  There's a tall fence like high-tension wires. Signs warning RESTRICTED. NO TRESPASSING. OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY. A camp'--yeah! A camp." The guys had had a vague idea of visiting John Reddy but hadn't been able to get within fifty yards of the mustard-colored building, a

  "Gestapo guard" turned them back.

  Shelby Connor, hearing this, burst into tears. We were excited, this frail pretty bird-girl dissolve like a watercolor.

  Bibi Arhardt, hearing this, crammed in our booth at the Haven, her hands against her ears and screwed up her glamour face into the babypig face that'd made us laugh since third grade. "Guys, shut up! My heart's broken enough as it is." Dwayne Hewson said menacingly, "Somebody should break John Reddy out. Like a revolution in, y'know--Mexico. Paris, Bastille Day.

  We didn't forget John Reddy Heart through those twelve months but there were some of us, maybe even the majority of us, for whom he became, in Bart Digger's words, "increasingly abstract. Like a geometry theorem." Not a day off for good behavior? --that sucks! tohn Reddy won't play their ass-kissing games.

  So? He's locked up, isn't he? The bastards have got him.

  Nobody's got tohn Reddy. Nobody ever!

  Where were the other Hearts? Living in Buffalo? But where?

  We never saw him with our own eyes but there were frequent of old Mr.. Heart on local roads, prowling Tug Hill Park and the Hundred Weeping Willows Walk beside Glen Creek, usually in the morning, emerging out of the mist, a tall bony white-haired and apparition tirelessly searching for discarded bottles. "You can hear the bottles clanking like chimes. Even if, when you look really closely, you can't see Mr.. Heart anywhere." Another report, which we didn't want to hear, was that Aaron Heart had died. After his testimony at his grandson's trial. The strain had been too much for him. Speaking the truth had been too much for him. Lying ("Lying through his beard--what a character! ") had been too much for him. An aunt of Chet Halloren's who was a friend of Mrs.. Roland Trippe had said the pity of it was, the old man had died, of a massive coronary, after John Reddy's case had gone to the jury but before the verdict had come in.

  "The Hearts have caused tragedy in others' lives. But they're not immune to it, in their own." Dahlia Heart's Willowsville men friends, humiliated by the publicity, insisted that they knew nothing of her whereabouts.

  "She'd been here, she's gone. Like a tornado. What more is there to say?" Herman Skelton, divorced and living alone in the Blackbridge Apartments

  Green, said bitterly. "What a gal! She's reinvested the money got from Riggs. Which was a helluva lot more than five thousand, let me you.

  She's right here in Buffalo, she hasn't gone anywhere. That babe tough as nails," Frank Diebold, our mayor, said mysteriously. The Courier-Express column

  "Out Our Way" noted that Dahlia Heart has been spied in the company of none other than--Buff Stansell, the Hawks' fair-haired boy.

  it be, our Buff is "looking to be a victim"?

  Like old Mr.. Heart, Dahlia Heart was occasionally sighted in Willowsville.

  Always at dusk, or after dark. Frequently in the company of an man, a stranger to our village--"an older gentleman driving an exotic European sports car." Dougie Siefried insisted he'd tracked Heart one Thursday evening at the Amherst Hills Mall through several stores, losing her finally in the Designer Collections on the floor of Saks--"She went into a changing room behind some mirrors and I and waited and she never came out, I mean I waited like an hour, swear." The elder residents of Meridian Place often called one another claiming they'd just seen Dahlia Heart close by. She and her friend with the sports car, variously identified as a Porsche, a Fiat, a "sinister black Jaguar," arrived at 8 Meridian Place, stayed for several hours but (apparently) didn't spend the night--"Next morning when I came downstairs, at about six-thirty, which is my usual waking time now, my brain switches to on! and I can't switch it to off! so I might as well get up, I figure--I looked over, and their car was gone," Aickley Thrun reported. He and his wife and the Hearts' other nextdoor neighbors the Bannisters complained bitterly at their clubs to whoeve
r would listen--"Why don't terrible people sell! Every one on the Hill is waiting for them to sell! Even ignorant white trash, you'd think, could comprehend when they are not, not, not wanted!" It became a time of cruising past the Heart house though no one home or likely to be home. At dusk, or after dark. When we wouldn't be noticed. As some of us, girls, would later cruise Reddy's lonely-romantic apartment on Water Street. We dreaded a real estate agent's FOR SALE sign at 8 Meridian Place. We took heart from the fact that, though no one was (apparently) in the house, lights burned deep in the interior. If we parked and if we were patient we began to see through the near-opaque draperies and venetian blinds, fleeting of human figures. We heard raised voices. A woman's scream.

  Gunshots.

  Parked one night at the foot of the driveway amid a slow silent snowfall that would, by the time they left, entirely cover the car to a height two inches, Suzi Zeigler and Norm Zeiga saw vividly reenacted the entire drama of the shooting of Melvin Riggs--the flight of John Reddy Heart--the arrival of squad cars, an ambulance--as if it were a shared vision, they the occasion by making a kind of love that left them dazed, breathless, frightened and exhilarated--"And we vowed never, never to tell, was so sacred." At school, there were unexpected encounters. Verrie Myers, John Reddy, restless and reckless, began dating, in a tentative way, unknown to her parents, a senior named Jake Gervasio (his dad owned Gervasio's Lawn Service), tough and sexy in John Reddy's style, a vocational arts major who scorned the preppie-jock-St.. Albans Hill clique to which belonged but who had the distinct attraction of being a buddy of Orrie Buhr, thus a buddy of John Reddy, Verrie confessed, shivering, she was "scared stiff " of Jake and never went anywhere with him in his car "that might be remotely dangerous." And Jake treated her, she said, "like a lady.

  I'm serious." But then one day Verrie found herself cornered in a restroom in a part of the school she didn't ordinarily visit, there rushed at her several senior girls including Lulu Lovitt who'd been Jake Gervasio's girl off and on since ninth grade, and Verrie was shoved, poked, pinched and slapped by the Lulu--"I was so terrified! I didn't know what was happening! I walked in, and they were on me like ravenous birds! Crazy Lulu was wearing a vest and studs in her ears and her hair was teased like a banshee's and she slapped my face and screamed, You hot-shit cheerleaders better leave our guys alone or you'll regret it. And she called me--she called me--" But Veronica Myers who would one day on stage and in films utter any words, perform any actions, so long as they were prescribed for her by another, could not bring herself to pronounce the crude monosyllabic word that Lovitt had called her, we were left to imagine it, blushing.

  Relations were even more strained among the boys. None of us understood how bitter friends of John Reddy's were about those of the basketball and track teams who hadn't testified as character witnesses for John Reddy at his trial until, one afternoon as school was letting out, shortly before Christmas recess, Clyde Meunzer in black T-shirt, oily jeans, duck'sass hair and an unlit cigarette clamped between his deliberately collided with Dwayne Hewson. There was a quick exchange of words, and before Dwayne knew what was happening Clyde swung at him, saying, "Fucker, you let John down!" Dwayne staggered backward, taking with a look of total astonishment, too surprised to defend himself.

  Clyde was shorter than Dwayne by at least an inch, and lighter by as much as fifteen pounds, he was built like a fire hydrant and knew how fight, as the larger boy gaped at him, already bleeding from the mouth, another mean, hard overhand right at Dwayne's unprotected face, him back against a row of lockers. There were cries, girls'

  screams. Chet Halloren, shoving his books into his locker nearby, said, "It just didn't seem like what was happening was actually happening.

  was so fust." For possibly there hadn't been an exchange of serious blows, resembling a "fistfight," at Willowsville Senior High, in our memory. Chet, a tall, thin, honor-roll boy with a sardonic temperament, as he'd characterize himself in our yearbook "a Diogenes-class skeptic," nonetheless tried to pull Clyde off Dwayne, and Clyde responded by Chet expertly in the head, opening a two-inch gash above Chet's right eye, the jagged scar of which he'd proudly exhibit for the remainder of his life-'A memento of my adolescence on the mean streets' of Willowsville, York." Seeing both Dwayne and Chet sprawled on the floor, and Meunzer with clenched fists cursing them, Ken Fischer was drawn into the melee, which, despite the confusion, he'd swiftly and accurately as us Yersus them, and before he could lay a hand on Clyde Meunzer came out of nowhere, silent as a pit bull, Orrie Buhr who grabbed him in a vicious hammerlock, threw him to the floor, and stood kicking his ribs and groin with steel-toed biker's boots. Ken would recall, afterward, how both Orrie Buhr and Clyde Meunzer were grinning. Even as they cursed fallen, dazed victims. "They called us fuckface white boys'--what the hell?

  They're white themselves, aren't they?" Ken who'd imagined wellliked, a popular guy who in fact liked most other people, was shocked. Hulking boys whose names and even faces were unfamiliar of us, whose yearbook captions would consist of a single terse line, Major, Industrial Arts, rushed out of Mr.. Hornby's shop classroom to join the fight, screaming revenge for John Reddy as they punched, elbowed, kicked wrestled preppie-jock boys like Smoke Filer, Jon Rindfleisch, Bo Bozer who more than Ken Fischer might've had reason to believe himself a to such guys, bloodying faces, knocking bodies against lockers onto the floor, attacking even Bart Digger and Ritchie Eickhorn who'd naively into the danger zone, breaking Dexter Cambrook's nose, Ketch Campbell's buck teeth and smashing Petey Merchant's new hornrimmed glasses. "Stop! At once!" There came Mr.. Lepage in tweed coat and paisley tie, clapping his hands as if the brawling six-foot boys were young children. He so startled Ray Gottardi, who was his student, by grabbing Ray's collar and dragging him backward, that Ray ceased his vicious pummeling of Ritchie Eickhorn. But then Mr.. Hornby rushed up grabbed Mr.. Lepage by his coat lapel, swinging him around, growling, "What the hell's going on? You better keep your hands to yourself, Frannie." (Mr.. Lepage's first name was Francis. None of us had until this encounter that Mr.. Hornby so despised Mr.. Lepage and the knowledge, a family secret, both thrilled and disturbed us. ) Blake Wells who'd begun to bring a camera to school was snapping photographs of the fight when Gervasio noticed him, wrenched the camera from his fingers and smashed it against the row of lockers, when Blake dared to protest, Jake slammed him against the wall, too. ("I never knew what it meant--to have the knocked out of you," Blake said wonderingly. "Now I know. ") Mr..

  came running, shouting, "Order! I command you! Now! Boys!" but he have stumbled, or been pushed, for he fell sprawling to the floor, his glasses, too, thrown from his face and his necktie twisted like a noose.

  said afterward, laughing, "Jesus. I looked down at this guy my ankles, and it was Stamish. Lucky for me the old fart can't without his g asses.

  The brawl only came to an end when Willowsville police arrived, summoned by Mr.. Stamish's secretary.

  Clyde Meunzer, Orrie Buhr and several other boys were singled out ringleaders and expelled permanently from school, the rest of the arts boys who'd been "actively aggressive" were placed on probation, boys who'd been victims were reprimanded, some of us thought unfairly, for "participating in barbarism and chaos" instead of seeking help faculty or staff. Most of us never saw Clyde Meunzer or Orrie Buhr again.

  We'd wondered where Dino Calvo was at the time of the brawl and that Dino had quit school and gone to work at a factory in Lackawanna. ) Though Bo Bozer would recount for us at our fifteenth reunion how, the previous year, he'd come back to Willowsville with his family a wife, two children) to visit his mother (Bo's father, long estranged from the family, had been dead for six years by this time), they'd driven out to a popular farm stand on the Millersport Highway, and Bo was hauling baskets of apples and peaches to his car when he happened to see a man in the parking lot looked familiar. "A tall husky guy about my age with a fattish kid of about ten, Denny's age, they're walking past me and the big guy sees me and a look comes over hi
s face--a strange look. And a few minutes later I'm loading my car trunk, my mother and family are buckling up in the car, and feel a tap on my shoulder and I turn and, Christ! --it's Orrie Buhr. He's heavier by possibly thirty pounds. He's losing his hair as badly as I am. He hasn't shaved that day and he's looking a little hung over. Though his acne's cleared up, like mine, and that ratty little mustache is gone. He's wearing Hawks baseball cap and so am I. I say, Orrie! Hello. Whenever run into someone from high school, from those days, I feel so happy, so excited-hopeful, somehow. And almost a kind of dread, that there's so much emotion I might not be able to handle--you know what I mean? Yeah.

  I'm extending my hand to shake Orrie's big hand and he just stands there staring at me, and at my hand, like he's smelling a bad smell, but sort of enjoying it, and he smiles and says in a low voice so nobody else, my family in the car, his kid standing a few yards off, can hear, Bozer, you fucker--you let John down. And Orrie shoves me with the flat of his hand and against my chest, knocks me back against the opened trunk lid, and it hurts.