Accordion Crimes (23 page)

Standing in the back rows and holding silence did not save him. In the fourth grade the older boys fell upon his name.

“Hey, Dollar! You must be rich! Give me some money!”

“Doughnut! Hey, Doughnut, how’s your hole!”

Mrs. Breath, the director of Birdnest, tapped her fountain pen on a note from the school.

“You know, I think it would be better for you if you had a regular boy’s name. Which do you prefer, Frank or Donald?”

“Frank,” he whispered. And so he was renamed and another fragment of self fell away like a flake of rust.

When he was eighteen he finished Old Rattle Falls High School but did not go to the graduation ceremony. The thought of having to climb up the wooden steps, cross the stage and shake the principal’s hand, then grasp the diploma, gave him a blinding headache, made his joints ache intolerably.

The mirror reflected an oval face, dark hair parted on the left, brown eyes under black bushy brows, a long nose with a slight bulb at the tip. His ears were well proportioned and set close to his head, the horizontal mouth somewhat full and unsmiling. He made himself smile, showed the crooked teeth, the high cheekbones and skin very pale under the black hair. An arrow of black hair descended his torso. He had neither photographs nor memories with which to compare his image, and he did not expect anything from anyone. He was free to leave Birdnest.

In the office, the steam radiator hissing despite the leaves still on the trees, Mrs. Breath gave him her good wishes and a large, awkward parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with dark red cord. It was heavy.

“Yours,” she said. “Personal belongings from when you first came here. It was in the storeroom.” He blushed, did not want to open the package in front of her, believing in family letters and photographs never seen. She handed him a white envelope.

“Good luck, Frank.”

On the bus to Portland he got a seat to himself in the back, opened the envelope, though he knew what was in it—a twenty-dollar bill and the standard Birdnest letter of good character on a sheet of paper decorated with the image of a bird bearing a writhing worm in its beak. He put the money and the letter in his new vinyl wallet. In the front of the bus a natty man, hair touched with grey, fingering his sandy, pockmarked face, got up and moved down the aisle testing different seats. He settled across the aisle from Dolor, pulled at the sleeves of his brown jacket.

“Don’t want to sit with the sun in my eyes,” he said to the window and began a pleasant, modulated conversation with himself. He spoke in a rapid southern accent. “Now I’ll split it,” he said. “Thank you, Inspector.” A gold wristwatch with an expansion bracelet showed at his wrist. “I can offer you three hundred dollars. I’m taking this trip, this important trip and I don’t know how it’s going to come out. Hmmm, hired—hired?”

To keep from staring, Dolor got down the brown-paper parcel from the overhead rack and worried it open, carefully undoing the hard knot, its twists dark with dust, pulling the paper away gently, embarrassed by the way it crackled, made the southern man watch him.

He didn’t know what to make of it. Nothing but a wrecked accordion, the wood case charred on one corner, the bellows torn open. Rows and rows of little buttons on one side and on the other black and white keys. The name “GAGNON” on the end looked as though it had been scratched in with a jackknife blade. An odor rushed up from it, the smell of softwood smoke and damp. A lousy burned accordion. Suddenly he heard his mother’s cough, though he had not
known she coughed until that minute. Now he was sure of it. Maybe she’d given him up because she was sick. He examined the instrument, the paper it was wrapped in, but there was no message, no note or photograph or letter, and his past remained unknown.

“I never smoke now,” said the man in the brown jacket. “Never. I no longer drink.”

In Portland Dolor got off the bus, walked to the army recruiting station. The back covers of
Double Detective
and
Weird
and
Argosy
all ran the same ad—
HELP YOURSELF GET THE JOB YOU WANT IN THE ARMY.
He carried the instrument, rewrapped in the brown paper, under his left arm. He gave his name as Dolor Gagnon, signed up for four years. It was 1954 and the job he wanted was television repair but the closest thing was electrician and they were full up. They put him in the quartermaster corps.

In some ways the army was like Birdnest: he did what he was told and kept out of the way. When they landed on him he never complained. He got through basic training by being quick and invisible, barely looking at the bigger men, the loudmouths and smart alecks who attracted the interest of sergeants as limping hesitation attracts predators. He was assigned to Germany.

“Be fuckin glad you got the Fräuleins instead of Frozen Chosen,” drawled the sergeant standing behind him. “Be goddamn glad you didn’t have to go to Korea. There was nothin worse than Korea. Guys froze solid standin up.”

All around him men talked of getting married when they got back home. Everyone had a photograph in a wallet, girls, girls, looking the same with their rolled-under shining hair and deep-colored lips, the pastel sweaters and the distant tender gazes. He found one of these photographs in the pages
of a book from the base library and kept it in his wallet. The girl looked Swedish, with crayon-yellow hair and protruding blue eyes. He invented a name for her, “Francine,” he would say, “that’s Francine, we’re getting married when I get back, she’s a kindergarten teacher.”

In Germany he took the wrecked accordion to an elderly man in a cold, dark hole of a repair shop. The man was as thin as a sheet of cardboard, beside him slouched a young girl with a ferret face and lipstick although she was not more than ten or eleven. The girl watched the old man attentively as he examined Dolor’s accordion.

“
Französisch. Sehen Sie hier?
” Pointed to the metal crest.
Maugein Frères—les accordéons de France.
His nasal voice sounded as though he were close to weeping.

“How much to fix it?” muttered Dolor. “
Wie viele?
” The old man did not answer, shook his head, pointed at the burned wood, the scorched buttons, gently stretched the cracked and torn bellows. He touched the brittle folds.

“
Diese Plisseefalten
…” He leaned over and talked to the child in his sadness.

She looked at Dolor. “He says he cannot repair this, all the folding parts must be new, he cannot get the right kind of wood for the end, the keys are ruined, it is burned, you see, and even if it is new it is not good. French accordions are not good. You must buy a German accordion, these are the best ones. He will sell you one.”

“Naw,” he said, “I guess not. I don’t even know how to play it, I just wanted to know if it could be fixed.” It was the only thing he had. The old man didn’t wrap it up again and he left the shop with the paper loose around it, trailing string and the smell of burn. Back in the barracks he separated the end piece engraved “GAGNON” from the instrument and threw the
rest away. He, too, had a passion for cutting his name or initials in everything he owned.

A few weeks later in the damp German spring he caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. The illness ebbed from his lungs, seemed to shift to his legs. He was in the base hospital for two months, wobbling around half paralyzed, a cane in each hand, sucking air through his teeth with the pain.

“Frankly, it may be paralytic poliomyelitis,” a doctor with a pointed mole on his right nostril said. “I see they gave you this new vaccine, this Salk vaccine, when you were inducted, but who really knows how efficacious it will prove to be?” Gradually he recovered, but the same doctor said he was unfit for active duty and after a year and a half in the army he limped out on a medical discharge in the summer of 1955.

He was supposed to get a plane to Boston, then catch a train to Portland where he would be processed out, but the plane landed in New York and seven hours later when they gave him his new ticket he tangled up with a parade of kids in red, white and blue costumes and moved into the second leg of the mistake, dodging a boy disguised with a paper Uncle Sam beard and a tall blue hat pasted over with stars, getting away from the acned girl with a sign on her breast,
AMERICA FIRST
, he somehow boarded a civilian flight heading, not for Boston, but for Minneapolis. He sat next to a woman in a polka-dot blouse that reeked of dye and underarm odor.

“You dumb shit,” said a sergeant at the recruiting booth in Minneapolis when Dolor turned up, nervously showing his travel orders and asking for help. “Didn’t you see at the gate it said Minneapolis? Can’t you read the word Minneapolis? Is
that word too big for you to read? Did you think it said Marmalade or Mystery Booth?” He made telephone calls, letting Dolor stand there, shifting from one foot to the other.

“I thought they were going by way of Boston. I thought they’d stop at Boston. The girl didn’t say nothing when she took the ticket.”

“You thought so. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, don’t it, go to Minneapolis by way of Boston. Like Los Angeles by way of Singapore. What a moron. OK, here’s what you do. You’re gonna stay in a hotel, here’s a chit, the Hotel Page on Spivey, and I will personally see you get to Boston. Don’t expect no cushy civvy plane, soldier. You are going on the dirt-bag train at nine ayem
mañana.
You be right here where you’re standing right now at eight tomorrow morning. I’m afraid you might see the Boston sign and think it says Bingo.”

He walked around for a while, taking in the city. There was a black man on Prairie Avenue playing an alto sax, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” the instrument case open, some quarters and halves lying on the blue crushed velvet. It sounded good. He threw in two dimes and a nickel. The guy didn’t even look at him.

He ate at Happy Joe’s Café, lured by the sign in the window, “It’s Air Conditioned COOLER Inside,” ordered the special and got some kind of strange food, little meat dumplings and steamed cabbage with white sauce and plenty of bread, the custard pie dessert, all for sixty cents. There wasn’t any point in going to the hotel until he had to, so he drank two beers in a place where they spoke a foreign language, he guessed Polish, but it was a good place and the beer was cheap, then he found a movie palace, gilt and marble inside, where
Seven Samurai
was playing. He sat in the dark eating licorice. He didn’t understand half the action because
the subtitles were hard to read, and it was funny as hell to hear the actors spouting Japanese. He left halfway through the film and went across the street to see
The Killer Shrews,
decided it was the worst movie he’d ever seen, blamed it on Minneapolis.

When he came out of the movie into night, the neon blue and yellow of a café, a woman in a clear plastic raincoat, carrying a spray of ferns, her white shoes flashing over the sidewalk, the shine of trolley tracks and stoplights reflected in windshields dazzled him. He heard music crisscrossing in the street, slow piano like a dripping faucet, a snare drum. The hotel was twenty-seven blocks away. He was dog-tired after two days on planes and the mix-up and hauling his duffel bag around, but he started walking. The streets were swarming with people—midnight kids on junk bikes, a blind woman led by a dog, a man whose suitcase pulled his shoulder down, black people. After two blocks he saw the same saxophone player on the sidewalk ahead of him and somehow he didn’t want to pass him again. His legs hurt. The guy was still playing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Probably the only song he knew. He held up his arm for a taxi and, although he waited for a long time, caught one as it pulled away from a hotel back up the block.

There was something on the floor of the cab, a kind of case, an overnight case. Furtively he seized the handle. When he got out of the cab at the Hotel Page, a dump of a place, he carried his duffel bag and the case, telling himself if it had the owner’s name in it he would call the guy up and say, I found your overnight in the taxi, and the guy would maybe offer a reward. Or if it was a woman’s suitcase, he’d call her up and she’d say, why don’t you bring it to such and such an address, we’ll have a drink, you’re very nice to call, and she would live in a beautiful apartment with white rugs and he would miss the train. He couldn’t believe what he found. Another goddamn
accordion, like it was a message from God, or something. For something to do, he spent an hour with a nail file picking out the glass rubies that formed the letters
AR
and scratching “GAGNON” in the wood while he watched
The U.S. Steel Hour,
some army show about sergeants, on the hotel’s dinky metal TV, a round seven-inch screen, like looking out of a porthole in a storm. The sound was bad and he couldn’t get the gist of the action, ended up watching the ads for Breast o’ Chicken tuna and Winston cigarettes.

In Maine again, he spent a few days in Augusta trying to get a copy of his birth certificate, bought a used Chevrolet truck, a secondhand RCA with a twelve-inch screen, though he really wanted one of the new portables, then headed up to Random. The birth certificate did not say much. The date. Both parents from Canada. His father, Charles Gagnon, had been twenty-nine, his mother, Delphine Lachance, twenty-eight. Five living children before him. His birth weight, six pounds, one ounce. That was all.

Through the rain-streeled windshield, Maine appeared as alternating plats of spruce, slash and clear-cut, withered acres of poplar and cherry, rolled-up leaves like charred scraps of paper on the defoliated trees, dark, too, with rain, and roadside moose the shade of old butternut husks, darkness unrelieved by whatever pale strip the sky unrolled, the crippled rivers and chains of lakes bordered by tattered horizons. He drove over a maze of roads that circled, looped, crossed and recrossed.