Accordion Crimes (58 page)

“What can I say,” he said. “It’s light in the day and dark at night. It’s cold in the winter and warm in the summer. I’ll see you,” he said.

Dick finished his turnip and asked for more, watching Conrad gun his truck out of the parking lot, noticing that his seat belt wasn’t fastened—what a fool to take the risk. He smoked too. Something heedless about that family. Whereas his sister had taken every care of Russell and again and again terrible things had happened to him. Dick finished his glass of milk, sorry that the toast had run out before the milk. He had a thought.

“Any rice puddin?”

“Not ‘til lunch, Dick. There’s very few eats rice puddin for breakfast.”

He left her a dime and went out, waded into the freezing wind, strung now with fine snow, toward his truck in front of the post office, eight blocks down. He always parked there. The wind in his face was unpleasant enough for him to turn his head every few steps and walk blind. It was awful cold, he thought, and his hands were freezing, even with good warm gloves. The bank’s digital thermometer read eight below but the wind had to be gusting to forty. He ducked into the store—Out West Antiques—to get warm, better there than the yarn shop or the health food store, walked around looking at the tools: beautiful old mahogany planes, a well-balanced little tack hammer, some wrought-iron hinges. He checked the junk table; usually it wasn’t worth looking at, but once he’d found a tiny brass spirit level with fancy engraving on it, a cabinetmaker’s level. Now he discovered a small green accordion and took joy in the find. He’d get it for Conrad’s girl even if she could never play. She could listen to tapes and look at it and pretend. He paid his dollar and carried the old thing out to the truck.

At home he thought he’d clean it up a little—in truth, it was a dirty piece of work—and he put it in the sink, turned on the vegetable sprayer, hit it with a good squirt of detergent. The damn thing took on water. It was heavy now, though clean, but when he squeezed it not a sound came out, even when he pushed all the buttons at once. He’d just dry it out a little. He put it on the hot air register under the window. Sure enough, it was dry by afternoon, and it was clean in a way that showed up how old and beat the thing was. The bellows was nearly as stiff as wood, you could only get a few inches of
squeeze out of it and a weird, shrill chord. He sprayed it with WD-40 inside and out but it didn’t seem to make any difference. What the hell, it was only for her to look at.

Driving down to the diner the next morning, bumping over the railroad where a track gang was taking a break, wiping their mouths with paper napkins, dropping their empty soft drink cans and paper coffee cups into the trash bucket on the flatcar, he switched on the radio—it was NPR; his wife had used the truck after supper—and heard John Townley singing “Land’s End” to the accompaniment of his rare Dipper Shantyman concertina of West Indian cocobolo wood and goatskin, with handmade reeds, the ends fitted with nautical engravings of stout mermaids and cresting waves, the air button a tiny arm of polished bone which gleamed against the dark wood like the arm of a deus ex. machina. The rich, oboelike tones set off Townley’s voice, but in midsyllable, “and the great seas ro—,” Dick shut him off. Those sea songs ended only in drowning and forsakenness.

(His nephew, Russell, had been born blind, and the family considered it a mercy when he showed an aptitude for music. He learned to play the accordion from an Italian woman, and his first solo piece was a Swedish version of “Life in the Finnish Woods” before its transformation into “Mockingbird Hill.” She gave him good advice: “try to develop a sound all nationalities can identify with—that way you’ll never be out of work.” By age thirteen he was playing a big square Chemnitzer concertina, studded with six hundred rhinestones, in kiddie contests and winning them all with his version of “Cattle Call,” by way of Eddy Arnold out of a tune octogenarian Old Glorians knew as “The St. Paul Waltz.” His father, anxious to see the kid bring in a little money, started booking him for the Friday entertainment hour at the local
summer resorts. The Lake Hideaway belonged to his friend Harvey Westhold [born Waerenskjold] who abused and ravished Russell twenty minutes before his first performance.

“Go ahead, kid, take a quick shower. You smell. Can’t play for a high-class crowd all sweaty like that. Here, I’ll help you get your clothes off. The shower’s right over here.
Uh-uh-uh-uh.
Don’t say nothing about this or I’ll kill you.”

By the time he was twenty-one Russell was a troublemaker. Blind or not, he’d sneak out of the house at night and stand by the road until somebody picked him up. In town he played the concertina for drink and drugs, invited tattoo artists to “do what you want.” These illustrations were banal, curious, some were obscene. He worked as a street musician in Minneapolis for a year or two, then, his mind frayed by chemistry, excesses, and the longing for something more, he bought a bus ticket for Las Vegas. Forty miles out from that destination and full of multicolored pills, he got to his feet, took a pistol from his concertina case and fired it into the roof. He was quickly overpowered by two women from the University of Ohio swim team. The bus driver pulled over and asked them to put him out. They prodded him forward and down the steps, lifted him, with his instrument, over a five-strand barbwire fence and left him in the desert. Nobody heard from him again.)

It had happened because she was bored. She’d been in the yard, swinging a broom at the swallows. There were dozens of them under the eaves of the old barn and inside, tatty nests balanced on dusty beams or stuck up under the roof and for half the summer the birds tore in and out of openings, their
beaks full of beetles, ants, wasps, spiders, flies, bees, moths and darning needles.

A thunderstorm to the north was approaching, a curled lofty plume with a dark wedge at the base, tongues of wind rushing violently out from it. The wind made her feel crazy and vigorous though she kept her back to it because of the dust it stirred up. But that’s all it was, wind, thunder; somewhere to the north, rain would fall. She was bored; there was nothing to do in Old Glory, nothing ever to do at home with her stupid mother and father, and Sunday was the worst, just nothing, nothing, nothing to do when the television wasn’t working and there was nowhere to go and nothing in the refrigerator to eat except a raw turkey breast that had been there a week and stank. So she marked the openings the swallows used and leaped up, swatting at them, pretending they were tennis balls and she was a girl champion. The wind gusts flared, hissing and tearing at the leaves of the tree. She heard a truck coming, rattling like it was going to fly apart, and she spun around gracefully with the broom racket and saw Ed Kunky’s black whiskers in the smeary windshield and beside him his son Whitey, good-looking Whitey, a class ahead of her, who made her daydream of sitting in a kindergarten chair so that her skirt came down around her ankles like a bell and he came over to her with something in his hands, it was never clear what, a bunch of flowers or a rolled-up paper or a candy bar (a Freudian analyst clarified this years later), but he bent over her and leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, a kiss like a mosquito dapping across her lips, across her hair at night, and in the daydream she fainted. But now she held up the broom, wrestled it against the wind, and she was primed to smack a swallow into the middle of next week. No swallow came, the truck drew abreast
and beyond, rattling and banging with a load of jagged-edged metal roofing and flashing from the old Knudsen barn to the north. Three swallows dived for high holes in the wall, a ferocious gust caught up a piece of roofing as she leaped, swinging the broom at the swallows. The sharp metal sailed across the yard like a silvery flying guillotine and sheared off both of her upstretched arms above the elbows, smashed into her face, cutting and breaking her nose.

The Kunkys didn’t even notice they’d cut her arms off, drove up the hill, shedding metal, and out of sight. She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows darting and reappearing with insects clasped in their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in the first moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright sound of the metal striking. But she couldn’t look at the ground, wouldn’t see her hands down there, still curled as if grasping the broom.

She bellowed.

From her filled-to-straining lungs poured a great pealing shout, the defiant roar at the end of life everyone wishes to give and few manage. It lifted her parents off the bed like a spear from the springs.

Conrad formed the habit of eating breakfast at the Home Away in less than a week. The food had savor, the place was cheerful, full of news and bustle. It was a relief not to hear his
wife fussing over Vela. He loved his daughter, but he couldn’t stand sick people, couldn’t stand seeing her scar-laddered arms and hear her whining and panting when the physical therapist, a brown-headed woman with a baby voice and a huge rump, put her through the exercises. How easily his daughter and his wife wept. The house was damp and miserable with weeping.

He enfolded a ketchup-shot egg in a slice of toast and bit into it, mashed the other egg into his corned beef hash and asked Mrs. Rudinger for two jelly doughnuts. Dick Cude came in lugging a plastic garbage bag.

“What you got, Dick—your lunch?”

“No, it’s for your girl. Seen your truck out front. You said she couldn’t get enough of those old tapes? There’s about fifty in there and I picked up a old accordion, found it at Ivar’s, y’know, thought she might get a kick out of looking at it while she plays the tapes, y’know; even if she can only look at it, least it’s something. It’s a miracle. She’s a tough little girl. Y’know, it was criminal, hauling sheet metal in that truck without any tarp or tie-downs. I don’t see how Ed Kunky can look you in the eye. Criminal. Isn’t his boy in school with Vela? I suppose you seen a lawyer about it.” He handed the black sack to Conrad who was belching and suffering from the first doughnut.

“You hear the one about the guy got in a plane crash and everybody’s killed but him? He’s in some wild place, Alaska, I don’t know. So he stumbles around for a week, not a sign of human beings, he’s half crazy. Then he comes to a tree and there’s a rope hanging down and on the end of it is a dead nigger. Guy says, ‘praise God, civilization.’ Get it?”

“Yeah. That’s a southern joke. I heard it about a Chippewa. But it couldn’t happen. There’s no place in North America
farther than twenty miles from a road. Nobody can be lost for a week. It was in
National Geographic
.” He ate the second doughnut, swallowed the coffee in his cup and tossed his head to get the grey curl up. He quelled the bitter rising in his throat.

“Thanks,” he said and got up, a sensation of scalding itch spreading over his torso. “I’ll give them to her tonight. Time to go to work and make a dollar.” He was out the door and Dick Cude saw how he threw the bag into the truck cab, saw from the way he was bending over and scrabbling on the floor that the tapes must have fallen out. He’d slung in the sack hard enough to burst it. Those plastic tape cases had sharp corners. He noticed Conrad still didn’t fasten his seat belt and he was smoking as he drove out of the parking lot. The way he twitched the hair off his forehead like that, he was asking for a neck injury. Dick pursed his lips.

When Conrad pulled into his driveway that evening, every window in the house shot mango-yellow light into the dusk and there were three or four cars parked out front. Oh Jesus, don’t let something else have happened, he said aloud, letting the wind catch the truck door and strain the hinges, running up the steps and into the smell of oregano and yeast, from upstairs a tumult of music and feet and voices. His wife stooped over the sink whipping cream and the counter was arranged like a buffet, the blue and white plastic plates, a fan of teaspoons, celery and carrot sticks, squares of orange longhorn and two-tone olives in geometric formation, a wooden bowl bristling with potato shoestrings.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Don’t tell me you forgot. I must of said it a hundred times: The
fifth,
Vela is having a
party,
her friends from
school
are coming over for a
party.
They’re all upstairs now. I made strawberry shortcake. I’ll never do it again; this damn dark old
kitchen, it’s like threading a needle in a coal mine. They’re gonna eat up in her room, all the chairs are up there. We can eat in the living room. I got a card table set up in there for us. There’s a couple beers for you in the icebox. What’s in the bag?”

“Something for her. Dick Cude got some tapes for her, or something. Christ I’m sick of hearing him go on about the accident. It’s like that’s all he can talk about in that drooly voice. He kept trying to edge the conversation around to Russell.”

“Russell who?”

“The nephew. Cude’s goddamn nephew that’s still out in the desert.” The music throbbed through the floor in a steady awful beat that made him clench his jaws.

“Who’s up there?”

“Audrey. Your boss’s daughter. Audrey Henry and a few other girls. I’ll bring it up unless you want to go up and tell them the food’s ready. You want to go up?”

“No, you handle it. Maybe they can turn down the bass while we eat.”

She laughed, not her normal laugh but a stagy ha-ha she had learned from television. “Oh I doubt it. It’s a party.”