Accordion Crimes (28 page)

Mr. Pelky brought the news to him, his voice low, shaking his head, adding the bloody details and spinning out the telling.

“They had to cut off the stub, see, top and bottom, with a chain saw and bring him to the hospital with that stub still in him. They couldn’t lie him down in the ambulance, see, with that wood in him so they had him strapped on boards along his sides, under his arms, see, and they held him up. It didn’t do no good. He died on the way.”

Dolor could not go near Emma, did not go to the funeral. He went to his distant slope the third morning after the funeral, the back of his truck in grimy order, the scarred Stihl, toolbox and dented gas cans, red paint chipped and marred, the tools becrusted with oil and leaf dust, sawdust, road dust. A light rain smeared the windshield, the sky dull along the east rim of mountains, the houses he passed, inmates in the deepest sleep, his headlights gouging a way through the trees. He yawned, still warm from the bed, a row of stale doughnuts sliding with the candy wrappers on the dash, a cup of coffee sloshing in the homemade wooden holder he’d lashed in place with wire, one by one eating the white sugared cakes, jelly spurting, until his mouth clogged with disgust of the sweet half-raw dough and he had had more than enough. His legs ached.

By noon he could barely keep from fainting when he straightened up because of the pain in his legs. He told the foreman he was sick, staggered to the truck.

As the day wore on, his vision blurred, he hyperventilated, he fought to keep from strangling. The next morning his legs did not hurt so badly but he could barely move them. The Pelkys did not knock on his door until the end of the week, and by then he was feeling better, he was moving around the apartment at least, thought it might have been arthritis, everybody who worked in the cold damp woods ended up with it. Mrs. Pelky came and said Emma was with the kid at her parents’ house in Honk Lake, she was probably going to move back in with her mother and father, she sent her love to Dolor.

“I’ll go up and see her in a few weeks,” he said but didn’t do it.

In the months after the accident he became preoccupied with his body. Strange sensations overtook him. Enormous sensitivities prickled: loud colors, bright light, the beeping of dump trucks in reverse, slamming doors and the conversations around him scraped his nerves raw. He developed allergies to dust, mold, apples and tomatoes. He was constipated, bought packets of laxatives at the Cut Rate drugstore in Millinocket, but nothing worked. He heard of a health food store that had just opened in Portland and made the long drive to forage through the jars of blackstrap and honey, the coarse bran and dark apricot ears. He bought packets of ginseng tea and nerve tisanes but developed abdominal pain, sore throat, shooting pains in his joints. One night pain spread through his face, a dull, severe ache that was unbearable at night. It hurt to rest his cheek on the pillow but if he turned on his back the pain flowed in waves from ear to ear. His mouth was burning up, his tongue swelled until he could barely speak. He woke at two in the morning with groin pains shooting up one leg and into his abdomen, across and down the other leg,
circumscribing an endless circle of pain. It hurt to urinate, to defecate. He wrote out a list of pain and suffering in a shaking, paralyzed hand and brought it to the doctors at the V.A. Hospital. Diverticulitis, they thought, or a spastic colon, a back problem or a kidney problem. Kidney stones or nephritis—

The aches coiled and uncoiled. He was cold, yet there was internal heat as though a ferocious furnace was stoked in his depths. It was too much; one morning he tried to get out of bed, managed a few steps, then fell on the floor where he stayed until the Pelkys heard him pounding with the heel of his hand.

The Pelkys helped him into the back seat of their old sedan, Mrs. Pelky stuffing a bed pillow that still smelled of her night hair under his shoulder. Mr. Pelky, his driving confused by a sense of emergency, squealed onto the highway and sped for the hospital. The trees were in heavy bud, the wet road under the maples covered with their fallen blossom, as dark red as coagulated pools of blood. The car whirred past sloping maple, soft buff and genital-flesh blur, and below this purpled arc a line of popple flashed, then past veins of birch, then the curving line of the ridge and through the branches the puzzled sky, and they were past the roaring arms of the pines and the swamp filled with stalks, coming to the first fields and scratchy lines of red osier, bramble hoops, and all of it strung together with birdcalls and apprehension.

They didn’t know what was wrong with him. He had them arguing, diagnosing unseen injuries, germ warfare, malingering, childhood polio, psychosomatic paralysis, a
slipped disk, chronic fatigue, central nervous disorder, psychogenic pain, loss of pep, muscle spasms, an unknown virus, bacterial infection, a hereditary disorder, posthypnotic suggestion, infectious mononucleosis, depressive hysteria, hypochondriacal delusions, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, brucellosis, or encephalitis. But after three weeks, there was no change and they sent him back to Random in a wheelchair. If he could manage to stand up he could totter a few steps, but that was all, and the pain in his legs and back was relentless.

The social worker at the V.A. helped him get a small government disability pension, but it wasn’t enough to live on because he had to pay Mrs. Pelky to cook for him and help him get to the toilet and in and out of bed. Mr. Pelky built a plywood ramp down the entry stairs.

When he had to get out of the oppressive rooms, when he needed things in town—beer and groceries, haircuts—he pushed himself out to the highway in the wheelchair and stuck his thumb out. Pickup trucks were the only ones that could give him a ride, and the driver had to get out, help him into the cab, put the heavy chair in the bed of the truck, get back in, drive to town, then the whole business had to be repeated in reverse. Not many bothered to stop and he could sit out there for hours, shivering and cursing, before someone pulled over. His strong, muscled torso fattened from lack of exercise and the fried pork, peanut butter sandwiches and beer he consumed. He became a familiar figure on the Random highway, slouched in his wheelchair, long black hair straggling down, raising his gloved hand in supplication as trucks came in sight, and when they didn’t slow sometimes yelling words that could not be heard but were easily guessed, accompanied by an upflung finger.

Only once did the Dentist come on an errand of mercy, kegged and roaring lumbering songs, with a six-pack in each hand, telling lugubrious tales of mishaps in the woods of the horsepower generation.

“Here, ya little bastard,” he shouted, “have one.” He got the accordion out of its case, dumped it in Dolor’s lap. There was nothing wrong with his arms except a minor shooting pain, but even with three or four beers he couldn’t play. It was not just that Wilf was dead, but he kept hearing the formidable virtuosi of Montmagny, kept thinking of the unknown player who had possessed the green accordion before him.

“You ain’t a lot of fun,” said the Dentist.

One afternoon when the door opened it was not Mrs. Pelky with her sauerkraut ragout, but Emma.

“Mrs. Pelky said you wasn’t doin that good,” she said, looking around the stinking room. She’d never seen it, and he was ashamed of the dust and empty beer cans, the dirty clothes in the corner and the crusted dishes in the sink which waited sometimes for days before Mrs. Pelky could get to them. Emma went straight to the sink and the hot water gushed over the greasy plates. He was excited, suddenly happy and maneuvered the wheelchair to the sink where he could watch her lashing the suds up. She looked fine to him and all at once he guessed why she had come. He blushed, ready to cry from excitement. Emma!

“How’d you get down here?”

“Come down with my folks. There’s a wedding, one of my cousins, Marie-Rose, and they asked Dad to play for the dance
after. He’s going to play some of that old music. I thought it was a good chance to see you, see if you want to hear it. I remember how crazy you was to hear the old music.”

“Look at how I am! Can I go to a dance? I can’t even get to the V.A. Hospital once a month without half an army to move me.”

“Dad’s comin over with Emil in his pickup truck. They’ll put the chair in the back, you in the front. There’s gonna be a real good accordionist there.” She laughed slyly. “You got good clothes you can wear?”

“Yeah, yeah. How you doin up there? The kid OK? Who’s Emil?”

“I’m doin real good. I got a job, just on the line at the toy factory. The kid’s growin big—you won’t hardly recognize him—and I get to bring him home free toys, that’s a benefit. Emil is—it’s not only my cousin, it’s in the air—next month we’re gettin married, me and Emil. He’s a nice guy and he likes the kid. They need a father, you know kids need a father. He works at the toy factory, too, in fact he’s the foreman. You’ll like him. He’s the one that plays the accordion. I wasn’t gonna tell you, it was gonna be a surprise, but I guess I told you.”

“Guess you did.” It was only a few minutes since she had come in but he had soared high and plunged into the abyss since she walked through the door. He wanted to yell at her, it’s only eight months he’s been dead, and what about me, I been crazy about you forever. The dishes were shining in the drain rack, she was polishing the faucets and talking to him. He remembered her dress very well, the cadence of her sentences. He couldn’t say a thing.

The wedding reception was at the V.F.W. hall, and a big crowd shuffled along the buffet, paper plates bending as they heaped on sliced ham and turkey, potato salad, the
peppermint chip chiffon cake and orange Jell-O molded desserts. Children ran back and forth, crawled under the chrome-legged Formica tables, bawled in corners, pushed and howled. He sat at a long table covered with paper printed with a design of silver wedding bells. The napkins carried the names of the bride and groom,
Marie-Rose & Darryl.
He sat between Emma’s father and Emil, didn’t know many of the others. Emma’s pale yellow bridesmaid dress made her look sallow and tired. At the bottom of the table sat a fat man with a black eye who kept telling Frenchie jokes in a broken dialect, who winked and said he got his black eye when he walked into a door.

Before the dancing began, Emma’s father announced, “We’re gonna play a little bit of the old music, mostly for the older people in the crowd, not too much though, I know you younger ones don’t go for it. But you know, it’s good music, you can’t listen to it without tapping your toe and feeling good. Myself, I regret we don’t hear it so much no more.”

Dolor was disappointed in the music. He remembered vividly what he had heard in the north beside the great river. Perhaps it was because the first tune Emma’s father and Emil tried after the falsely enthusiastic announcement “Here’s one for the old-timers!” was one he had heard the stiff-faced man play in Montmagny, the “
Quadrille du loup-garou,
” the “Werewolf Quadrille.” Even with two accordions Emma’s father and Emil skimped on the runs, lost notes, played at a dragging tempo and cut the complex piece short, wheeled immediately into “Blueberry Hill,” and then the wedding guests danced, the men sweating in dark suits, their oiled hair breaking loose and flapping against their foreheads, the women’s skirts belling around their nylon legs.

They tried a fast
gigue
that brought an old man onto the floor,
clacking and kicking with stiff legs, only an echo of the youthful dancer he must have been, keeping it up even when Emma’s father forgot the tune and quit playing, though Emil plunged on, his solo and abbreviated playing far short of the intricacies of the St. Lawrence valley, but spirited enough to keep the old man dancing, an animated skeleton. At the end Emma’s father leaned into the microphone and said, “well, that was some pretty fine dancing by Charley Humm, and that’s it for the old stuff. You know, you get a certain age in your life and you forget some of the tunes you used to know and I apologize for that. Now here’s a little haymaker music, Maine’s own Hal Lone Pine’s ‘Cryin’ Cowboy.’ I heard Hal and Betty Cody do this over in Machias years ago in a thunderstorm, the lights all went out, their sound system died, but they sang and played in the dark with the lightnin flashin outside. Now that’s a real performer for you. So here we go, all you country fans,” and applause and cries of
ya-hoo
filled the room. This was Emma’s father’s territory. He wrung heartbreak and yodeling and wailing harmonies from his fiddle and Dolor had to admit he was good. As for Emil, he played well enough, but he was grade C, like everything else in Random.

An aunt of the bride loomed behind him suddenly, sat in Emil’s empty chair, smiled, drank from a smeary glass, coughed in his face as she lit a cigarette—one of those wiry Frenchie women who’d buried two or three husbands.

“They tell me your name is Gagnon.”

Emma leaned forward. “Dolor, this is Delphine Barbeau from Providence, Marie-Rose’s aunt, her father’s sister. Delphine and Tootie gave Marie-Rose the fold-up TV tray-tables. Delphine, you know me and Emil is next. So you better stay right here and you don’t have to come up again in a couple of weeks.”

The woman drew on her cigarette, coughed. “I shouldn’t
even be up here now. I had pneumonia. Me and Tootie was drivin along and the car broke down and we had to walk for miles and miles. Oh, I was soaked, and the wind just chilled me to the bone. So I got sick. They told me at the clinic, don’t travel, no excitement, don’t go to work. I was out of work three weeks. I work at Ferris Combs, they make the hairbrushes, combs that glow in the dark. You work there long enough you start to glow just like one of them combs. So here I am. Yeah, those TV trays are cute. I don’t know if they eat those TV dinners. If you’re gonna get married next I might get you the Toastmaster Hospitality Set, it’s a toaster and these snack trays.” She laughed. Her voice was flat and loud as though they were in a room full of machinery. Dolor thought she might be drunk.