Songs in Ordinary Time (8 page)

Benjy turned down the radio and hurried back downstairs.

“Is he still studying?” his mother asked.

“I guess so.”

“I don’t know how he can think with all that racket,” she said as she unrolled a wet towel on the arm of the couch. She shook out another damp starched shirt. The iron hissed as she pressed it into the collar. Benjy squirmed, wishing he’d turned the radio off. What if it got loud again and she went up herself?

“God, he’s funny!” she said, shaking her head, as a new skit began. Milton Berle wore a wig and a dress as he battered a policeman with a purse. The audience screeched with laughter. Leaning over the ironing board, Benjy’s mother hugged herself and laughed until there were tears in her eyes.

He smiled uneasily.
Be careful
, he was thinking.
Be careful
.

“He’s so funny!” she gasped.

Outside, a car had just pulled into the driveway. Klubocks’ dog was 34 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

barking. The rap on the door was hard and curt. His mother opened the front door, which was beside the television, so in an odd way it seemed to Benjy that he was watching two screens, two shows. There was a Pepsodent ad now on one screen with a toothbrush dancing around a tube of toothpaste, while in the other stood Billy Hendricks with head bowed and a swollen lip he kept touching. Beside him was Mr. Hendricks, who still wore his mailman’s uniform.

“Oh,” Marie said, stepping directly in front of them, making it clear they couldn’t come in. “It’s you, Eddy. The light’s broken….”

“We just came from the dentist, Marie. Billy here’s got to have a new cap made and I know times are tough right now, but it seems to me fair’s fair, which is how I brung my boys up, so your Norm’s the one ought to be responsible now, Marie, because a lesson lived is a lesson learned, I always say. And believe me, I know how hard it is for—”

“Eddy! What’re you talking about?” she finally broke in.

“His cap,” Mr. Hendricks said, nudging his son. He was nervous. “Show her…show her!” Mr. Hendricks ordered until Billy opened his mouth, revealing the black gap of a missing front tooth.

Just then, Alice came out of the bathroom in her old red chenille bathrobe with its raised white roses on the pockets. Her wet hair dripped onto her shoulders. “Oh!” she said when she saw Billy, his lip being stretched up now by his father, who was pointing at the damage and explaining that Dr.

Yale had promised a rush job so it would look all right for graduation.

“Agh…agh,” Billy groaned, pushing away his father’s hand.

“Oh, hi,” Alice muttered, turning her head. Looking just as miserable, Billy muttered “Hi.” She ran so fast up the stairs that she tripped on her bathrobe and fell forward. Benjy stared down at the floor.

“Norm!” Marie called. “Get Norm,” she said through clenched teeth.

He closed his eyes on his way upstairs, praying, hoping that Norm had climbed back in through the window.

“Bastard,” his mother groaned, flying past him into the room. “Where is he? Where the hell is he?” she cried, turning in a bewildered little circle.

She ran to the window and looked out, and then she locked it. “He’ll pay,”

she cried, kneeling by Norm’s bed and reaching under the mattress. “Damn right he’ll pay,” she said, pulling out Norm’s thirty-one dollars. Benjy couldn’t believe she’d do that. That money was for the used car Norm wanted. For the past year he had saved every penny that came his way.

At ten o’clock, Norm still wasn’t home. Marie sat on the couch staring at the door, waiting.

Alice lay in bed. She saw the lights go out in the Klubocks’ upstairs windows and she stroked her thigh, imagining Mrs. Klubock in a sheer nylon gown opening her soft arms to Mr. Klubock.

In his room Benjy heard the first clink. Clink clink clink from the backyard.

Then louder and more insistent.
Clink! Clink clink
! He crept to the foot of his bed and with his cheek against the cool wood of the window frame, he SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 35

could see the tall white-suited form of Omar Duvall, bracing the clothesline while he pounded the metal pole into the wet night earth with a rock, down deeper and deeper.

A
t ten o’clock, Weeb Miller peeled his father’s white-and-coral Pontiac out of the weedy gully where they’d spent the last hour drinking and waiting for parkers. They threw their empty cans out the window, and Norm unwrapped three sticks of gum for himself, Weeb, and Tommy Mullins, who sat in back, his huge arms hanging over the front seat between Weeb and Norm.

“Sit back!” Weeb hollered. “For chrissakes all I can see in the mirror’s your fat face, Mullins!”

Tommy laughed. Instead of sitting back he lowered his head, digging his chin into the top of the seat.

“That’s no good!” Weeb groaned, and so Tommy laid the side of his head on the back of the seat. Norm laughed. Mullins was a hopeless creep, but his father owned the bakery and he always had money. When they couldn’t get beer out of Weeb’s father’s refrigerator in the garage, they always picked up Mullins to buy it for them from Mrs. Carper up in the Flatts.

“So what do you think, Norm?” Weeb said, once again bringing up tomorrow’s game. “It’s worth a try anyway.” All night long, Weeb had been after him to have his mother’s boss, Ferdinand Briscoe, call Coach Graber like he had the last time Norm got in trouble for fighting. “At least ask him,”

Weeb said, his voice getting whiny. “Graber’d eat shit if Briscoe said to.”

Mr. Briscoe supplied Saint Mary’s with free baseball uniforms.

“Hey”—Norm laughed—“I just don’t give a shit.” And right now he didn’t. Not after six beers. Plus he’d rather miss the game than have his mother find out he’d been kicked off the team again.

“You give a shit,” Tommy Mullins said. “’Course you give a shit.”

They both looked back at him. This was none of Mullins’s business.

Mullins shook a cigarette from his pack and offered it to Norm, who was about to say he was in training. Instead he lit it with a deep satisfying drag.

Norm turned up the radio. Ricky Nelson was singing “It’s Late.” Weeb reached under the seat for his drumsticks, which he beat on the wheel, dashboard, and windshield as he drove. Tommy sang loudly. He knew the words to every song, and he had a loud catchy voice Norm envied. Norm put his head back with his eyes closed while he smoked. He was thinking of Alice with her blouse inside out and the horrible look on her face as their mother bore down on her. Jesus Christ, sometimes he thought they were all nuts. Sometimes all he wanted was to get as far away as he could from this whole fucking disaster his life was turning into. He thought of Billy Hendricks’s startled, flattened face, and he turned toward the open window and couldn’t help smiling.

When they got to the 4-Clover Bowling Lanes, Weeb’s father’s team was still bowling, so they headed in to watch. Norm caught their reflection in the plate-glass window. Their walk was the same, thumbs tucked into their 36 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

side pockets and on their faces a scowl that was supposed to be menacing, but instead came off looking peevish.

He saw his uncle Renie bowling inside. He was afraid his uncle might say something about the job interview at town hall. If he did get the job, he didn’t want everyone knowing it had been with the help of a creep like Renie LaChance. He hung back in the doorway and watched Uncle Renie’s short thick body approach the lane. Nervously, Renie kept wiping his hand on the sides of his pants. Then he wiped his brow and, taking the ball, went into a frantic running delivery that wobbled the ball along the edge of the lane, missing every pin. Someone laughed. Asshole, Norm thought as his uncle tried again, rolling the ball into an erratic spin that sank into the gutter halfway down the lane. Renie wiped his hands on his pants as he hurried back to his seat. When he sat down, none of the men spoke to him. Renie smiled happily, watching each man get up, and when his team did well, he shook his fist in the air and hollered to no one in particular.

While Weeb and Tommy stood behind Mr. Miller’s team, Norm waited by the desk, watching Bernadette Mansaw up on her platform, where she gave out shoes and, when they were returned, sterilized and buffed them.

Bernadette was the same age as Alice, but here under the fluorescent lights she looked older, her flesh faintly lined in purple creases. Her eyelids were painted deep blue and her full mouth was a slick red. She sat on a stool smoking. She yawned and smiled at Norm, then watched the shoes pass slowly by on the conveyor belt that fed them through the sterilizing ultraviolet rays of the glass box. Every time the light in the box flashed on, it outlined the long sling of her heavy breasts in her thin white sweater that was buttoned down the back.

“League night sucks,” she said, yawning again.

Norm glanced back, then realized she was talking to him. To him! The ball rolled down the alley. The pins rattled and fell with a roar from the crowd.

Bernadette sighed. “I’m glad someone’s happy. I missed my ride and now I gotta walk home and I got my groceries.” She nodded at the two full bags on the floor. She looked at Norm. “You waiting for somebody?”

He nodded, still chewing his gum.

“Who you waiting for?”

“My friend Weeb. Well, his father…Weeb’s waiting, too.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed. Her gaze fell dully back to the glass box.

She passed another pair of shoes through, then with a chamois dipped in cream buffed their heels and toes. “The thought of walking all that way kills me,” she sighed.

Norm looked back at the lanes. With all the beer and now this glare and racket, his head was starting to spin.

“They’re almost done,” she said, picking up another pair of shoes. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Oh yah!” she said when he told her. “You’re Alice Fermoyle’s brother.”

She ground out her cigarette in a large ashtray loaded with red-ringed butts.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 37

“I was in school with Alice. All the way to freshman year. After that I kinda quit on school. Couldn’t take the nuns.” She lit another cigarette. “I never could figure them out. I mean never getting married or having kids or having a good time, but Jesus Christ, lemme tell you, they got the life!” She laughed. “The voice of experience, that’s two kids later talking!”

The men were coming out of the alleys, jabbing each other’s arms and wiping their faces with towels. After them came Tommy and Weeb, who carried his father’s duffel bag. Mr. Miller was a serious red-faced man who always looked worried. He had a government job, the nature of which Weeb had only recently confided to Norm. Mr. Miller was a venereal disease specialist with the State Health Department. Weeb said his father was afraid people might take it the wrong way. Weeb said it was mostly the kidding his father couldn’t take. He said his father hated kidding, hated fooling around, especially about sex.

“See you next week, doll…. Take it easy, sweet lips…. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, unless I’m there,” the men called out to Bernadette in spite of the fact that most of them had children her age.

“Yah…Hey…sure…you can bet on it…. Hey, Harry, up yours.” She laughed, then whooped as Harry Temple vaulted the counter and bent her back in a swooning embrace. As she giggled and struggled to get free, Norm watched those thick fleshy breasts drag over Mr. Temple’s arm. He followed Mr. Miller, Weeb, and Tommy outside. “Hey!” he heard his uncle call.

“Norm! Hey, that’s my nephew there! Quite a baseball player, that one…”

“Norm!” Mr. Miller said, getting into the car. Norm was already in back with Tommy. “That’s your uncle calling.” Norm waved as Weeb pulled out. “Renie’s an alternate,” Mr. Miller said. “Somebody couldn’t come.”

They drove with all the windows open to flush out the smell of beer.

Weeb told his father they were going back to Norm’s house and try to cram one more history chapter in before tomorrow’s final.

“Good luck, men,” Mr. Miller said, giving them the thumbs-up sign as he got out of the car. With his long, straight stride up the moonlit path to his front door, he looked like the officer he’d been in the war. Weeb said his father had a scar from his groin to his neck that was purple and lumpy and throbbed in cold weather. Norm had told Weeb that his father had been wounded in the war too, but then when Weeb didn’t ask him about it, he felt like an asshole for lying.

As soon as Mr. Miller was in the house, they burst out laughing and turned on the radio as loud as it would go. Fats Domino was singing

“Blueberry Hill,” and with Weeb rapping his sticks all over the inside of the car and Mullins singing, they headed back toward West Street along the route Norm said Bernadette Mansaw would be taking.

“What’d she say?” Mullins asked.

“It’s not what she said,” Norm said, his heart a strange pinching beat in his chest. “It’s what she wants.” He scanned the sidewalks ahead.

“What’s she want?” Weeb asked, his voice pitching recklessly high the way it did whenever girls or sex was the subject.

38 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Me,” Norm laughed. “She fucking wants me!”

“She’s fucking married!” Mullins gasped.

“She’s not fucking married,” Weeb said.

“Well, she’s got two fucking kids,” Mullins said.

“So?” Norm laughed.

“And her boyfriend’s a fucking convict. He’s in fucking jail!” Mullins said. “And his fucking brother’s Blue fucking Mooney!”

“Holy shit, that’s right,” Weeb said, turning down the radio. “Norm, I don’t want to—”

“There she is!” Norm yelled. “There she fucking is!”

Ahead, teetering along the dark sidewalk on stiletto heels, her beehive hair swaying, her small round hips churning, her arms hugging two grocery bags, was Bernadette Mansaw, seventeen-year-old legend.

“Slow down…slow down!” Norm cried with a jab in Weeb’s ribs that made him yelp. “Want a ride?” he called out the window.

“Oh shit, do I ever! Am I happy to see you!” Bernadette groaned.

Norm made a squealing noise, and in the back seat, Tommy Mullins giggled as Bernadette climbed eagerly into the front between Norm and Weeb. She smelled of leather and shoe polish. Norm put his arm over the back of the seat, his fist nudging Weeb, who stared over the wheel, his mouth fixed in a foolish smile as they cruised along.