Plug saw the future in Willie’s dying eyes and decided to avoid it by getting arrested per arrangement with the chief of detectives—nothing too serious, just a few years away for a robbery he had indeed committed—so Jellyroll and the others might forget his face, forget several things he’d done to earn his nickname while running with Willie. But in the passage of those few years in stir Plug slowly grew toward the available light and became aware of an astounding interior truth—he actually hated tough guys with their dullard insistence on petty tributes and gaudy hats worn at an angle, despised them, hated their humorless jokes and gleeful violence, maybe always had loathed them at a subterranean level even as he carried out their orders, and he would seek their company no more. Tough guys, once pondered in a quieted mind, were revealed to be boring, really, just so tediously dangerous and boring! As Freddy Poltz he amassed for himself an innocuous history as a commonplace rustic who’d done no notable wrongs or rights anyplace, ever. He married a sunny woman in the sticks who didn’t know his real name until he died in the blast, and had two children who after his passing felt timid and unmoored the remainder of their lives. His wife, Mae, worked as a cook and laundress for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Williams over on Curry Street. She was a regular on the bench outside the Greek’s, where every maid in town came to know and admire her seriousness of intent and casual charity.
The unraveling of Freddy Poltz began when the leaves were down. A fog bank low to ground lapped the skin on the mud to a treacherous slickness, and two eight-man football teams banged away at each other on sliding feet in that field beside the old high school where the Methodist church sits now. The leather ball disappeared into the huddling gray sky whenever punted, leading to entertaining miscalculations by stumbling players staring skyward who could only guess where the booted thing might squirt from the cloud and slipping off their heedless feet as they shifted directions to make a catch.
The teams churned the field of blanched autumn grass into a thin flat wallow and drew an audience with their animated voices. The small crowd was free with suggestions on how players might want to improve and were disputed from the scrum in return. At game’s end Freddy was exhausted, spattered by mud to the distance of his hair, and alarmed by a face beneath a brim hat that stared his way from the center of the crowd. He looked at the face and the face kept looking back. Freddy quickly said his so-longs and left the mud and the face followed. Freddy walked directly across the railroad tracks and took the path under the Fussell Creek bridge, where he stopped in the shadow, turned around, “What do you want?”
“You’re Plug, ain’t you? From Egan’s?”
“Not lately.”
“Who is it you are now, Plug?”
“A decent man, and I’m stayin’ him, too. So let’s us promise to not be seein’ each other again, Mikey.”
“Can’t make that promise, Plug—or Freddy—I hear you’re Freddy these days—might make myself into a goddam liar, and how’s Mother goin’ to feel if word I’m a goddam liar gets back to Kerry Patch?”
“So you’re still in the game.”
“It’s the only game that tickles me right.”
“Well, I don’t tickle no more, so leave me out. Just leave me the hell out of everything you might get up to—am I bein’ clear?”
“Okay, okay, don’t get in a huff. Just wanted to say hello ’cause I knew you when you was up to no good in the city, and here I go scoutin’ the boondocks—and this is sure ’nough the boondocks, brother, nothin’ but brush apes eatin’ dingleberries and draggin’ their squaws by the hair—when I see a city face from home to talk at, so I do that. Listen, I got no kick with you, we’re still pals, far as I care. But Humbert and Jellyroll and them, they wouldn’t call you pal. No, Mr. Poltz, I don’t think so. I don’t think they ever will. Not after what you done on Ashley Street that time.”
“What’s your bite?”
“Nothin’. I don’t want nothin’, not really. Only, say if people who know people you know dropped by while passin’ through here, solid people scoutin’ for safes and things like that, could you help them all they want? I think you should.”
Freddy walked home by a looping, indirect route and pulled the shades, told Mae and the kids he was going fishing of a sudden and might be away two or three days, but don’t worry if it’s more. He had no pistols, only a shotgun for taking game birds, a hefty double-barreled he’d never fired, and when he grabbed it dusty from the closet beside the bed, Mae asked, “What kind of fish is that for?”
“I might want to eat meat.”
“Why bother with the fish, then?”
“See you.”
He returned in three days, clean-shaven, wearing new clothes, with no fish and no meat. During the coming weeks his personality began to warp and erode; behavior she’d become accustomed to from him was now unconvincing or gone, his regular good cheer replaced by pacing about with a narrowing face and glancing from the windows. Her singing irritated him at any hour and he’d bark he wanted more gravy on his potatoes from now on and other days bark for not so much. He let the children climb onto him and play but did not join the play, seemed not to note them on his lap or clung to his leg or otherwise seeking his attention. He quit football on Saturdays and ate less. His sleep had stories in it that he mumbled in jags until certain scenes shouted him upright. After his death, she found among his personal effects inside a bottom drawer a folded edition of the Scroll reporting the big news that a dead man had been discovered in a clearing at Saunders Camp, beside the Twin Forks River. The victim had been shot until his face scattered beyond identification, the only clue to his name or origins a brim hat with a tag inside that read, Selz Fine Clothing, Carr Street, St. Louis, Mo.
Mr. Isaiah Willard was a jackleg preacher, a man of hard convictions walked up from Little Rock after he’d walked from several places before that. His preaching was not deeply rooted in the styling of any single church and had a rough angry tone, accusatory subject matter, sparks and ash flying from his mouth. He cast out plenty who had blackened spots on their souls and argued or would not tithe. He offered an unforgiving response to those who failed to accept his rendering of Scripture into a parched syllabus of sacrifice and toil, pain at unpredictable intervals but guaranteed, then death in the ground and a life eternal above if you’d minded his teachings to the end, hell if you hadn’t.
His church changed names and angles as he’d walked the nation, and here it was known simply as the Tree of Christ, housed in a small white storage shed at the southern edge of town. There were still a few tools leaning in a corner, half a sack of feed and a torn washtub, but he attracted a flock of seven who liked to be chastised by a stranger and raked across the coals. As his influence over the seven grew his preaching ranged about and added features that some would call vindictive, purely and simply, once they thought it over, but his flock doubled as these ranting subplots attracted those locals who dearly craved wrath.
There were so many acts or thoughts or mere thoughts of acts that could plant rot in a person and choke the flow of the blessed spirit until the soul became wizened and shrunken and fell away from the body, useless as a dry booger, and a soulless body was but a hospitable husk soon become filled by a demon. The soul of the damned was now a dry booger on the ground somewhere and the newly resident demon shielded behind the face of the husk laughed and laughed, threw stones at stained-glass windows, made babies sick, mothers die, pestilence abound. Preacher Willard accepted the Ten Commandments as a halfhearted start but kept adding amendments until the number of sins he couldn’t countenance was beyond memorization. He appeared to be adding new ones shaped to your own reported shortcomings until you were tailored appropriately for a residence in hell, and nowhere else, but a complete and prostrate begging of God and an increased tithe might, just might, earn you one more chance at heaven, who knows, give it a try, it’s only money.
Among the easiest portals to the soul through which demons might enter was that opened by dancing fe
et. Evil music, evil feet, salacious sliding and the disgusting embraces dancing excused provided an avenue of damnation that could be readily seen and blockaded. Through the spring of 1929 Willard and his knotty flock protested the Arbor Dance Hall. Those young decadent fools upstairs shook their bodies all about in thrall to impudent music, smoked cigarettes in mixed groups on the sidewalk, and from the alley a spill of devil juice scented the entire ugly picture. He reared back with the Book raised overhead and preached blue peril on the street outside until revelers began to mock him from the high windows, then from the street while walking past him with their promiscuous hands wandering one another. The top of Preacher Willard’s head unscrewed and hovered out of reach when derided by these gathered sinners with their smug hedonism and flouncy garb, and before the start of summer he said in a mighty letter of epic frustration printed in the newspaper, “I’ll blow this place to Kingdom soon and drop these sinners into the boiling pitch—see how they dance then!”
At least twice a night little brother pissed into a milk bottle and I marked the yellow-depth on the glass with a green crayon. He’d wake me when he had to go, and it was my job to then block him from the bathroom, holding him, threatening, sitting on his back if called for, until I could hear a convincing trill of pain in his voice, then hand him the milk bottle. We were trying to stretch his bladder so he’d have no more accidents. We slept three boys to a room, triple bunk beds with one lowered, but older brother was busy with his increasingly adult dreams (this was not quite a full year before he married at seventeen and moved to the basement with his younger bride), so I’d take the warmed bottle out to empty it in the toilet. Dad would often be at the kitchen table, beer cans beside his textbooks, a smoky cloud of scholarship hung between the table and the light. He used a church key as a bookmark and always wore white shirts (such attire meant something deep to him that I never needed to ask about), dress shirts for work, old dress shirts for daily life around the house, mowing the lawn, leaning over a fence to joke with neighbors, chasing the bums who stole milk off our porch. Dad was a drinking man who worked all day selling metal in St. Louis, came home, had a couple of beers (Mom’s greatest domestic victory was when she convinced him to forgo scotch whisky except for the most special of occasions and stick to beer otherwise) and a ham sandwich, then drove back across the river to attend Washington University on the G.I. Bill. He was a dedicated student at night and never missed a day of work.
He’d look up at me carrying that piss bottle in the wee hours and say something like, “Had economics class tonight, Alek—I learned that if you’re going to steal, you should steal a lot.” Or, “Have to read a whole goddam novel about baseball, only it’s not really about baseball, see, it’s about sad-assed stuff I already know all I need to know about, but there will be a test.”
The house was a dinky box on a street of dinky boxes, with two bedrooms, one small, the other smaller. When visiting from West Table, which she began to do after the summer I had with her, Alma slept at the far end of the kitchen on an army surplus folding cot. The reconciliation with my dad seemed to have dismissed her focus, and she began to float languidly among her own pliant thoughts. Alma was almost hourly becoming less anchored to the day she was living and twirled into and out of days gone by or days she’d imagined. She often addressed us boys by the wrong names and I would answer to any of them, but the others wouldn’t, and an expression of agonized confusion would slacken her features as the correct names bounded into the summer weeds and hid from her.
The house was mostly a riot by day. Mom worked till noon answering phones at St. Joe’s Hospital, and with Mom gone we boys ran amok—blasted the Animals, Chuck Berry, Hot Rod Hootenanny—bounced fat rubber balls off the ceiling, interrupted others on our party line to call grocery stores that had Prince Albert in a can, stuck darts in windowsills, closet doors, upholstery or flesh, brought in neighbor kids and beat hell out of each other for practice—while Alma would go into Mom’s kitchen and demonstrate her superior domestic expertise; put the pots and pans here instead of there, move the plates higher on the shelves, set the skillets under the sink, stack the canned goods differently, rethink the entire knife, fork, spoon drawer. Mom would come home and again spend an hour of her day mumbling and putting everything back into place, then lie on the front room floor with a wet cloth over her eyes. For two or three days Alma would overlook the disorder in the kitchen, the poor strategy employed by her silly daughter-in-law, then fix it all once more.
Dad was in a rough spot between Alma and Mom, and it was made rougher by Alma’s deep suspicion that strange men came to the kitchen window and looked in on her at night as she changed for bed. These men were usually silent, but she could hear them breathing when the wind was right, and see beams from their flashlights lashing the walls. She would throw grumpy little tantrums in the evenings, vent her fear through the early TV programs, and Dad would on several occasions finally have to go out back and watch for perverts so she could get into her sleeping gown. I would sit with him. Two metal lawn chairs were set in a good vantage point, and Dad and me would watch and snicker, then catch ourselves and say it wasn’t funny. Or at least not the kind of funny we should be laughing about.
Headlights cresting the slope on the next street over played briefly on the window nearest to the cot and bled through slits between the curtains. She’d sometimes part a curtain suddenly and stare about for culprits, then withdraw. A big twin-trunked cottonwood tree blocked the moon. The houses had been built so cheek-by-jowl that in warm weather we could hear conversations, snores, sometimes farts or lovemaking from inside houses in two directions.
“Why won’t you talk about Ruby?”
“When you’re older.”
“But something wrong happened, Dad—don’t you care?”
He’d light a cigarette, raise a beer can, mutter scraps of sentences he avoided pulling together. He’d watch smoke trickle toward the sky until the muttering ceased and he spoke coherently again: “She sent me home a little agitator, didn’t she? A goddam protester. If it isn’t Ruby with you, it’s taking up for those bums sleeping by the river who steal our milk. Why is that?”
“I know them, is all.”
“She got hold of you too young and gave you a hard twist in the head, got you facing the wrong way. That’s my fault.”
“All I do is ask questions.”
“Look, Fidel, listen to me good—you’ve got to learn you can’t go around being angry at everybody out there who has a swimming pool or a shiny car—that attitude won’t work very well in this ol’ world. Takes you nowhere. Those fancy-pants sorts are the people have to hire you someday—they can tell if you hate them in general.”
Alma’s sad furtive undressing continued, with a few peeks between curtains, then the light went out. Fireflies signified all around our yard. There was the scent of cut grass, a slight stench of motor oil and gasoline, honeysuckle. Somebody’s mother called impatiently across the dark to bring in the children from the street behind. Dad smelled of beer and the warm smell of beer has always made me feel hugged and home.
“I will say this much; if it wasn’t for him, I’d’ve never gotten to here, gotten to someplace that didn’t know who I’d been born as and would give me a goddam chance, let me fight for some of the pie, at least. I lived through the war for this, son. A chance. We needed help getting away from home the year you were born, you know, sick, and I needed to leave to find a decent-paying job, and Harlan wouldn’t offer. Not a dime, not a dollar. You know how he is about his money. Glencross gave it, though, without me even asking. I bet she never told you that.”
He didn’t know what he truly liked between the sheets until she showed him. She saw inklings of his desires in his eyes, sifted through his bashful talk and long silences and deciphered what wasn’t said, then delivered those mute cravings onto his novice body. He had spasms he thought holy in nature and in her embrace could have them again more quickly than he’d ever believed possible. She
knew all the worthwhile crevices and wrinkles and bulbous places that made the body entire sing and sing of release, and the more release he experienced the more he sought. Her lips were fine on his, so learned, and her hands moved over him like those of a necromancer delivering a resurrection, for she raised him up with fingertip touches and her fragrant breath and pink caresses. She probed him while lying on quickly spotted sheets in ways he tried to halt, but didn’t quite, then didn’t try, then asked for again. She took him to places inside a shaded room that he’d only dimly imagined might exist, and while there in sweaty reality he reclined like a pasha of lust, a man lost to squirts, sighs, fresh angles of entry and the enveloping stink, and to find this carnal enchantment for the first time at his age was to welcome a streaking of madness into his life—madness he prayed had no end now that it had begun.
The Burton family brought the very first piano to West Table in 1883, ordered out of Cincinnati and delivered from the railway station by ox-drawn wagon, but no one in town knew how to play it until their youngest daughter was born and taught herself the rudiments. In time she had her own daughter, a sweetheart named Lucille Johnston, who was by age eleven a local prodigy, a little blond girl bent reverently over the keys releasing waves of grace with her tiny fingertips. By seventh grade Lucille began spending a fortnight of her summers studying with the best available pianists in Springfield, usually, but upon graduation she did also experience an eye-opening month in Chicago. Back home again she supplied chaste and stately music at church affairs and civic affairs, but at house parties attended by quite different flocks would let her hair down and bang those eighty-eights until the girls danced barefoot and the men had to go sit on the porch to cool down.