Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (17 page)

“Who dropped you on your head? That’s his way of saying sorry for locking me up with a bunch of loony lesbo nuns and their sick pet of a priest,” she said. “That creep Father Doyle, the only thing he’s interested in having me confess is unclean thoughts. In finding out if they ‘trouble me.’ I tell him, ‘Hey, no trouble at all. I just finger them away.’ Jesus, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get myself kicked out of Sacred Heart Academy.”

Probably it was because Carol was imagining that she was peppering Poppy that she fired off nearly all the cartridges
in a frenzy before Donny’s insistent pleading to
Let him have a go
stopped her. Bob pulled the car up at a played-out gravel pit, the sides of which Donny pocked with the last handful of bullets, little puffs of sand and pebbles spraying like dusty blood.

Bob declined to touch the gun.

After Donny had had his fun, the question arose as to what to do with Poppy’s firearm. Carol had finally understood that if she put it back
without the bullets
, her father would know that she had been meddling with it. Maybe it would be better if the pistol simply disappeared, leading Poppy to believe that it had somehow gone missing during the move.

Bob suggested pitching it in a slough. But Carol had a better idea, one that flushed her face with thoughts of sowing future mischief. “Why not bury it here?” she said. “Somebody finds it years from now, they think it’s a murder weapon maybe. Just imagine that.”

So that’s what they did, scraped out a hole in the gravel, dropped the pistol in, and covered it up. Laid it to rest.

None of this scared Donny, not the dope-foraging expedition, nor Carol’s crazy spree with the pistol. He never got truly frightened until the three of them saw
Where the Boys Are
. The movie was already old news by them, but almost all of the teenaged fare shown at the drive-in consisted of stale reruns. It didn’t much matter what was up there on the silver screen because most of the action was taking place in the cars anyhow.

Where the Boys Are
is a cousin to the beach party movies that Carol delighted mocking, but despite a family resemblance, it is a very queer, misfit relation. The way I remember it, a group of college girls go to Fort Lauderdale for spring break to pursue boys, but unlike Annette Funicello in the beach movies, some of these girls actually contemplate losing their virginity. They have even read
The Kinsey Report
.

Donny had never heard of
The Kinsey Report
, and it had never crossed his mind that the co-eds depicted in
Where the Boys Are
, decent, wholesome girls from good, solid, middle-class American families just like Carol DiPietro’s, could have
desires
. He had never dreamed Carol might have a similar itch, despite her wildness. He had always thought her smutty talk was just an act, her way of saying,
Hey, I’m one of the guys too. We’re all buddies here
. Now he began to wonder if her dirty talk wasn’t her way of dropping a hint that she wouldn’t say no to a little action.

Donny has always been a slow boat to China, not that swift on the uptake, but when he seizes on a notion he doesn’t let it go. As Anne once said to me in a moment of disloyal candour, “Donny’s dogged. It’s his best quality and his worst.”

He began to look for signs that he might be right about Carol, and he found them. Not long after they had seen
Where the Boys Are
, Carol invited Donny and Bob to drop by her house. Her father wouldn’t have stood for entertaining the pond-scum Peels under his roof, but he and his wife were off attending a company barbecue. The boys sat in the living room with its fieldstone fireplace and rich broadloom carpeting while Carol, in a rage, paced back and forth slicing and dicing dear old daddy. Father and daughter had fought that morning
and she was out for blood. She said you’d think he didn’t know which country he had been born in, he was so old-fashioned, “such a wop.” In his books, Frank Sinatra was the top actor and singer in the world. Joe DiMaggio the best ball player who had ever lived. Rocky Marciano the greatest heavyweight. For christ’s sake, he even got misty-eyed listening to Connie Francis, and she had taken a white-bread name to hide the fact that she came from a family of macaroni-eaters.

It was at this point that Carol dug up the 45 of “Where the Boys Are” from Poppy’s record collection, set the platter spinning on the hi-fi, and stood in the lush meadow of DiPietro carpet, singing along to it, pretending that she and Connie were performing a sappy duet. Carol’s performance definitely began as tongue-in-cheek. She made Connie’s mating call to the boy waiting somewhere around the corner
just for her
as ridiculously and romantically dopey as she could, but as she sang that began to change. By the end of the song what she was doing was evident to Donny. He saw she was really serenading Bob, and Bob was lapping it up in his serene, collected way, a slight smile hovering on his lips. Carol DiPietro was announcing that Bob was the boy for her.

Several nights later when Carol pulled up outside the trailer court to drop the Peel boys off, Bob eased himself out of the car, yanked the passenger seat forward, and let Donny exit from the back. But then Bob dipped his lanky frame and slid back in the Beetle. “See you later,” was all he said, not bothering to glance Donny’s way, avoiding his brother’s abject eyes.

Donny watched them drive away. After they were gone, he did what he and Bob had done so many desolate nights in the past; he returned to town to grimly walk the vacant streets. He hoped to cross paths with the Volkswagen, hoped that it would stop, hoped to hear Carol chirp, “What’s the trouble, Bubble? Can’t sleep? Jump in.” But it never happened that night, or any of the nights that followed, which he spent trudging the brotherless hours away. He never once glimpsed Carol’s car.
So where were they?

He knew now that he was a third wheel. It wasn’t that Bob and Carol shut him out totally, but the time always rolled around when Carol evicted him from the car as if he were a stowaway. Worse, she started to treat him like a mascot, a good-luck charm. “If you hadn’t jumped at the chance to go to the pictures that day at the driving range, everything might have been different. Because Mr. Shy Guy here would never have made a move, right?” she’d say, giving Bob a knowing, complicit nudge with her elbow.

In August, as summer was winding down, Carol launched her campaign not to go back to Chicago, to enrol in the local high school here. There were no-holds-barred fights with Poppy. “He puts it all on your head,” she reported to Bob. “He says you’re ruining my future.”

And sweet-natured, reasonable Bob said, “Just take it slow. Ease him into the idea.”

“Wake up and smell the coffee, Bob!” she yelled. “School starts in two weeks! There is no time for slow!”

Carol was right. Shortly, she got packed off back to Chicago. The day she left, she clung to Bob, buried her head in his shoulder for a long time before suddenly, fiercely turning on Donny.

“You better keep all the other skirts away from your big brother. He’s mine. You got that? When Christmas rolls around I’ll be back to check what kind of job you’ve done.”

Donny was happy to see her go.

For the next few months letters flew between Bob and Carol. A minimum of one a day, sometimes two. Then in November, a calamity occurred. One of Bob’s letters was returned to him marked
Not Here. Address Unknown
.

It was the first time Donny had ever seen his brother panic. Bob settled into a phone booth with a fistful of quarters and finally got connected with Sacred Heart Academy in Chicago. The voice on the other end of the line informed him that Carol DiPietro was no longer a student there and that the school could not, under any circumstances, divulge her current address. Bob waited another ten days for Carol to get in touch with him, but no word came.

That’s when he went to John DiPietro’s house and demanded to know where Carol was, stubbornly holding his ground even when Poppy ordered him off the property, threatened to call the cops and have him charged with trespassing and a lot more.

Then Bob sprang the question that had been troubling him ever since he had learned that Carol had left Sacred Heart. Had she been taken out of school because she was pregnant? Because if she was, he would marry her. He would quit school tomorrow, get a job, make a home for Carol and the baby. Please, just tell him where she was.

DiPietro lost it entirely. He raved that he’d rather see his daughter dead, would kill her with his own two hands rather than see her marry some shit-bucket bottom-feeder like Bob Peel.

That was enough for Bob; it convinced him his guess had been correct. He took his father’s car and drove out to the gravel pit. It was November and very cold, a light skiff of snow whitened the ground. It took him a long time scrabbling about in the frosty sand and pebbles with his fingernails to recover Poppy’s pistol.

Bob had got it into his head that brandishing a revolver in Mr. DiPietro’s face would scare him into admitting the truth and into telling Bob where Carol was. It didn’t. Poppy was a hard-ass veteran of World War II and he wasn’t going to buckle to somebody who, in his books, was nothing but a cheap, greasy, little punk. While his wife wailed and twisted her hair in her fists, Mr. DiPietro raced down to the basement, came back with the double-barrel he used for trap shooting, jammed it in Bob’s face, and told him that he was going to count to ten and if Bob wasn’t gone by then, he was going to blow his brains all over the wall. Bob calmly laid the revolver on the coffee table, said goodnight, and walked out of the house, Mrs. DiPietro’s screams reverberating in his ears.

Mr. DiPietro didn’t report Bob to the police. Likely when his rage ebbed, he realized that explaining an unlicensed handgun to Canadian cops, a firearm as good as smuggled over the border, might be a tough sell. Mr. DiPietro had a position in the community to maintain.

Bob left town that night in his father’s Pontiac with whatever money he and Donny had stashed under their mattresses. It took him eighteen hours to reach Chicago, driving non-stop, and another two hours of scooting up the wrong exit ramps and surfing big-city traffic to make his way to Sacred Heart. Unlike Mr. DiPietro, the sisters had no hesitation about calling the cops when they saw he didn’t intend to leave until he got answers to his questions. Bob spent three nights and two days in the county jail before he was shipped back to Canada, no wiser about Carol’s whereabouts. Mr. Peel’s Pontiac remained in the Windy City, held in an impound lot.

Bob didn’t return home. He phoned Donny from the Canadian side of the border and told him he was going to catch a bus back to Chicago and renew his search for Carol. Donny begged him not to do it, but Bob’s mind was made up.

It was another year and a half before Donny heard from his brother again. Bob wanted to know whether there had been any messages for him from Carol. Had she visited her family maybe? Donny said there had been no letters and that the DiPietros had gone to Chile, where Poppy had been sent by the company’s head office to solve some sticky problems in a copper mine there, or so he had heard.

It turned out Bob was in Wisconsin shovelling shit on a dairy farm and saving all he could of his measly wages to hire a private investigator to track down his missing girlfriend. When Donny asked him where he had been for the last eighteen months and what he had been up to, Bob was vague. He said,
There were some things that some people thought needed taking care of
.

Then the subject reverted to the DiPietros’ move to Chile. Bob said, “That’s a good tip, Donny. I’ll have a private investigator look into it, once I get some cash. Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard from Carol. I think her father kidnapped her, made her go to Chile.”

Donny said a person could mail a letter from Chile. They had a postal service there. It wasn’t Antarctica. From the way Bob was talking, he thought his brother might be drunk, especially when he began to ramble on about “finding his family.”

“You don’t need to find us. We’re where we always were. We’re here,” snapped Donny. “Where do you think we got to?”

But by family Bob didn’t mean the Peels. He meant Carol and the baby who most likely didn’t even exist.

Donny said, “If there’s a baby – and I don’t believe there is – it’s been adopted by now. And if Carol wanted to get hold of you, she would have.”

But Bob was sure Carol’s lunatic father was keeping her away from him, and he clung to the bizarre idea that she would never have agreed to let their baby be adopted, that the toddler was waiting in some orphanage for the day when he and Carol would be reunited as a couple and they could take their child home with them.

Donny did his best to persuade him he wasn’t thinking straight, but Bob wouldn’t listen. That was that, he
knew
.

Another period of silence descended, one that lasted a year. By then Donny had finished school, had got hired at the mine, and had rented a two-bedroom apartment so that when Bob finally returned to our town, his brother could move in with him. Late one night Bob called. He was back in Canada,
living in British Columbia, picking fruit for the summer. He admitted that he had never managed to save enough money to hire somebody reliable to investigate Carol’s case. He wanted to know if Donny could lend him what he needed? When Donny asked how much that would be, Bob named a preposterous, astronomical figure. So, playing for time, Donny urged him to come home and get a job at the mine. Then they could pool their money like they had in the old days, for a common cause, and when they had enough to hire a private detective, the search for Carol and the child could well and truly start from a solid foundation.