Songs in Ordinary Time (93 page)

Omar came in and sank into the chair across from her. He looked at the ring.

“Why did you lie to me about the Klubocks’ soap?”

“I didn’t lie,” he insisted.

Of course he had; lied all along and right up to the very moment of delivery had lied, and if he would not admit it now, then he must be disturbed.

There had to be something terribly wrong with a man who not only lied but had to have known when he told the lie that he would be found out.

He hung his head and tried to explain that he hadn’t thought of it as lying.

He had only wanted to help Harvey Klubock.

“But by helping him, you hurt me!”

“But that’s not the way I was looking at it,” he said.

“Oh really? Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that two people right next door to each other, selling the exact same product, are going to be competing for the same customers! It seems like a pretty basic concept, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?” she demanded.

454 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

Eyes closed, he nodded.

He had deliberately misled her, she told him. He had used her, had taken her good faith and trust and made a fool out of her in front of her children.

“And that,
that
is the worst thing you could have done to me!” she cried, hitting the table.

“You don’t understand,” he whispered.

But now she finally did. She pushed the ring across the table. He had gotten all the money from her he was ever going to get and now it was over.

She didn’t feel sad or even angry, just curiously quiet, still. She would find a way out of this mess even if it meant knocking on every door in town or setting up a roadside stand somewhere. She would get a second job if she had to. Nothing and no one, and certainly no man, would ever again threaten her children’s future.

He had not meant to deceive her, had not intended it. “But you see,” he tried to go on. “You see…you see…” He buried his face in his hands.

“If you have any of my money, I want it back,” she said.

All he had after paying for the truck and the driver was this. He put the bills on the table. She counted twenty-one dollar bills.

“Thank you,” she said with a bitter laugh. She stood up.

“Marie!” he cried. “Help me! Please help me!” There were tears running down his cheeks. He had only wanted to help Harvey, he sobbed, and she was right, of course; what he had done made no sense. In fact it was perfectly bizarre. But that was how he always got into trouble, by making promises and telling himself he would deal with it all later, by wanting so badly to please everyone that once again he had ended up ruining his own chance for happiness. It had been the same with his road crew. He had been so good, so generous to them that they ended up wanting all the money and all the inventory for themselves.

She was shocked at how frail he seemed, and for such a sophisticated man, how perilously innocent. She sat back down and tried to make him see how ruthless people could be. The more they were given the more they wanted.

“I know that. I know that,” he said. “But knowing and doing have never been the same thing for me. It’s a curse, a terrible, terrible curse.”

“You promise too much. You give too much of yourself, Omar.”

“I know, I know.”

“Look at you, you’re a wreck. Your clothes are all wrinkled and dirty.

You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

“It was that late run to Connecticut. Just like you said, it turned out to be a total waste of time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have all these great ideas, all this energy and ambition, but I never seem to get anywhere.”

“Because you bite off more than you can chew, Omar.”

“But why? Why do I do that?” he asked, gripping the table edge.

“Because you don’t have a family to consider before you make decisions.”

“You’re right. You are so very right,” he said, and then for a few moments neither one of them spoke. “Don’t send me away, Marie. Please don’t.” He SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 455

reached for her hand and eased the ring back onto her finger. She would not have to sell soap door-to-door or set up a roadside stand. He would, he told her. He would! He would! He couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, of going on without her. “Marry me tomorrow,” he begged. “Tonight, right now, please.”

Yes, but they would have to wait. There were the license and the blood test. And though she did not say it, she had to tell Sam.

F
or the last two mornings Omar had driven off with his trunk loaded with soap that he was selling door-to-door along every back road he could find. Again tonight, Marie had been amazed to see his empty trunk.

“They’re selling like hotcakes,” he said, over the armload of Presto laundry powder boxes he was packing into his trunk for tomorrow’s route.

“Yah, I’ll bet,” Norm said to Benjy in the garage. “He’s probably dumping them someplace.” Norm picked up six of the boxes.

“Oh no!” Benjy said. “He is! He’s selling them.”

“Jesus, I can’t believe you’re still falling for his crap!” He shoved the boxes into Benjy’s arms.

“He is, Norm. I saw all the money! He showed Mom!”

At that, Norm kicked one of the boxes, puncturing it. A stream of white granules gushed onto the floor. Benjy tried to hurry outside, but Norm pulled him back. He brought his face close to his brother’s.

“Am I the only one? Don’t you see? Can’t you feel it?” he hissed.

“What?” Benjy whispered.

“The disaster that’s coming.”

Benjy swallowed hard. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, them getting married,” Norm said, annoyed by the relief on his brother’s face. “Don’t you see? It’s going to be a total disaster!”

“Oh” was Benjy’s only response.

They both looked toward the door as Marie called for them to bring more soap out.

“There’s got to be something she’ll listen to. Everything I say, she’s got an answer for. I mean I could tell her he’s wanted for murder and she’d say,

‘Oh no, you don’t understand. It wasn’t really murder. It was just a little business thing, that’s all!’”

Marie called in again. “What are you two doing in there, making the soap?” She and Omar laughed.

“What do you mean, wanted for murder?” Benjy asked.

He looked toward the driveway. “I mean she’s getting just like him.

Twisting the facts to fit the way she wants things to be. That’s how desperate she is, because nothing fits together, nothing’s real.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean him. Duvall, he’s not real!”

Just then the garage darkened as Duvall stepped into the doorway, blocking the setting sun. “Don’t tell me I’ve stumbled into some kind of brotherly conspiracy here,” he said, laughing, and a chill went through 456 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

Norm to see the cold fix of Duvall’s eyes on Benjy before he hurried outside.

Duvall picked up a carton of soap bottles and started for the door. “Come on, now. Your mother’s waiting.” He grinned, then added, “Son.”

Norm watched the three of them pushing cartons into Duvall’s trunk.

Alice had gone to the lake to spend a few days with her girlfriend Mary Agnes. Without her he had the sensation of being the outsider, a stranger this family had to humor but found threatening. How long had it had been like this, the three of them standing so close, the quick hand on an arm, the wordless amusement of intimates. Seeing them this way through the garage door, framed by hazy shadows and the weathered beams, he felt the same compelling contradiction of tension and distance as if he were watching a movie. Nothing was real, and yet anything could happen, anything, at any moment, and there would be nothing he could do.
Let them believe his lies
, he thought, picking up the punctured soapbox and hurling it in a spray of white powder across the garage.
Let them be destroyed
.
But not me
, he vowed, hurrying outside and realizing as he bore down on them that he enjoyed their fear and apprehension. He had become the spoiler, a force to be reckoned with.

Later that night, Weeb pulled up outside and honked the horn. It was Weeb’s first night out since he’d had his casts removed. Norm was halfway out the door when Marie insisted he take his brother along. Benjy didn’t want to go, but she was adamant, and he knew by the way she and Omar did not once look at each other, the reason for Benjy’s eviction.

It was his first night out with Weeb in almost two months. It was a relief being able to burst into hysterical laughter at the sight of Myrna Merganzer in an orange dress arm-in-arm with her boyfriend, Freddie, their beefy hips and thighs grazing with every waddling step.

“Toodle!” Weeb cried, and Norm collapsed against the dashboard with tears running down his cheeks.

“What’s
toodle
mean?” Benjy asked, leaning over the seat.

“It means…it means…oh shit, you tell him,” Weeb gasped.

“I can’t. Oh shit, I can’t,” Norm squealed. It was too complicated, too dirty and dumb, so long between them that it had come to mean just about anything.

A few minutes later, he asked Weeb the question that had been on his mind for days. “Has your sister gone back to college yet?”

“School,” Weeb corrected him. “You don’t say ‘college.’ That’s taken for granted.”

“Oh, okay, Weeb.”

“Well, you don’t want to sound like a jerk, do you?”

“So did she go?” he asked, rolling his eyes.

“She’s not going back.”

“She’s not!” he cried so eagerly that Weeb looked at him. “How come?”

“Make him sit back,” Weeb said with a glance in the rearview mirror.

“Benjy, sit back!”

Benjy sank low in the seat.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 457

“How come?” he asked again.

As he spoke in a low voice, Weeb kept looking in the mirror. “She’s gonna have a baby, so she has to get married to her boyfriend from college.”

School, Norm wanted to say, but didn’t. Janice Miller, whom he had secretly worshiped since first grade, would soon be a bride, a wife, a mother.

They drove down Merchants Row. The stores were closed. They turned onto Center Street, where a line waited to get into the Paramount theater.

Weeb honked the horn and a bunch of girls waved and gestured for them to come join them.

“Arf, arf,” Weeb barked under his breath and drove on.

“What’d your mother and father say?”

“My father didn’t say anything. He just punched out all the windows in the garage. My mother had to take him to the hospital for stitches.”

He was shocked by Weeb’s offhandedness. Of all the times his father had kicked in doors or been hauled off in a cruiser he had never spoken of it to Weeb. There had always been this fragile duality: the devastating fear that everyone knew and the desperate need to believe that no one did.

“He hasn’t been to work all week. His hands are all bandaged. He just sits around playing his Glenn Miller records.”

“That’s weird, huh?”

“Yah, well, my mother’s afraid he’s having a nervous breakdown. Now he says he’s going to quit his job. He says it was his work, that it was a bad influence, you know, sex and everything.”

“Can I sit up now?” Benjy called. “I can’t see.”

“Shut up!” Norm said, waving his arm over the seat. He looked at Weeb.

Something had just occurred to him, a nagging pinprick of doubt and fear.

Pain swelled in his chest as he recalled waking up in Klubocks’ garage with his pants undone.

“Oh jeez,” Weeb cried as a pickup truck slowed to a stop beside them at the red light. It was Jozia Menka snuggled so close to Grondine Carson that they both fit behind the steering wheel. “Let’s go!” Weeb hollered, turning when the light changed. “It’s egg-run time!”

They sped up the long dirt road to the untended pig farm, where their only concern would be the barking dogs. But Weeb knew exactly how to do it. He pulled in so close to the chicken coops that they only had to jump from the car to the coop door. Benjy had begged them not to come here, and now he refused to leave the car. He crouched low in the back seat, arms folded, eyes closed, lips moving as if he were praying. Inside the chicken coop it was hot and quiet until Weeb turned on the light, and then all the chickens started squawking. Hundreds of them, Norm thought, coming down the narrow walkway between the nesting birds. Their heads rose and their bright sideways eyes gleamed nervously. The reek of shit and ammonia stung his eyes. An old hand at egg runs, Weeb went straight to the end of the coop, where the egg boxes were stacked on shelves. They took ten boxes 458 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

each, then ran back to the car, leaving the lights on in the coop and the door open.

“Hey, you wanna go to the wedding?” Weeb asked as they raced back to town.

“No!” he said too quickly. “I can’t. I got something else that day.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t even tell you when it is yet.” Weeb gave him a sour look.

“When is it?”

“September the sixteenth,” Weeb said. “Come on, Norm. I’d do it for you.”

Norm looked at him. Did he mean Alice? Had he heard about her and the priest? He was getting paranoid. “Janice won’t want me there.”

“I’ll ask her,” Weeb said, parking on Main Street across from the A+X.

They didn’t have long to wait. As soon as Coughlin’s office door opened, they pulled into the lot. The minute he stepped outside, Norm rose up through the open window and pelted him with a flurry of eggs. He sprinted after them with yoke running down his face and chest, but they were already gone, on their way to Jarden Greene’s house, then Kenny Doyle’s, then Coach Graber’s, Donna Creller’s, the Monsignor’s gleaming Oldsmobile.

Benjy turned out to have the best in-flight arm. Splat, spat, splat. No questions asked. Back behind the fruit store. Splat, splat, splat, right up at the cardboard taped in Bernadette’s broken window. They drove down to the baseball field and left the car running with the lights on the infield. Weeb stood on the mound, egg cartons at his feet. Norm’s bat was a fence picket.

Benjy sat on the hood, laughing and clapping every time Norm hit an egg.

The impact sent shells and egg slime flying back at Weeb, but most of the mess covered Norm. It was disgusting, but strangely pleasurable, the sticky goo running down the bat between his fingers, down his wrists. It was dripping from his elbows. From his chin.