Revival: A Novel Page 17

  He opened the door, saying, “If it’s not important, I wish you’d come back la—” and then a farmer in bib overalls and a Case cap (a pissed-off Okie if ever an Okie there was) punched him in the mouth. Jacobs went staggering back, got tangled in his own feet, and went down, narrowly avoiding giving his head a good whap on the dinette table, which might have knocked him unconscious.

  Our visitor barged in, bent down, seized Jacobs by the lapels. He was about Jacobs’s age, but a lot bigger. And he was in a rage. This could be trouble, I thought. Of course it was already, but I was thinking of the kind that ends with an extended stay in the hospital.

  “You’re the reason she got took in by the police!” he shouted. “Goddam you, she’ll have a record that’ll follow her around for the rest of her life! Like a tin can tied to a puppydog’s tail!”

  I didn’t think, just seized an empty pot from the sink and bonked him briskly on the side of the head. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the Okie let go of Jacobs and looked at me in astonishment. Tears began leaking down the grooves on either side of his considerable beak.

  Charlie scooted away, propped on his hands and propelling himself with his feet. Blood was pouring from his lower lip, which was split in two places.

  “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I asked. Hardly reasoned discourse, I know, but when we find ourselves in that sort of confrontation, how the schoolyard comes back.

  “She got to go to court!” he shouted at me in that out-of-tune banjo Okie accent. “And it’s that sucka’s fault! That sucka rah-chair, scuttlin like a dadburn crab!”

  He said dadburn. He really did.

  I put the pot on the stove and showed him my empty hands. I spoke in my most soothing voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, and I’m sure”—I almost said Charles—“I’m sure Dan doesn’t, either.”

  “My dotta! My dotta Cathy! Cathy Morse! He told her the pitcher was free—because she got up onstage—but it wa’nt free! That pitcher has costed her plenty! Rooned her dadburned life is what that pitcher did!”

  I put a cautious arm around his shoulders. I thought he might clobber me, but now that his initial fury had been vented, he only looked sad and bewildered. “Come on outside,” I said. “We’ll find a bench in the shade and you can tell me all about it.”

  “Who’re you?”

  I was going to say Mr. Jacobs’s assistant, but that sounded like pretty weak tea. My years as a musician came to my rescue. “His agent.”

  “Yeah? Can you gi’ me compensation? Because I want it. The lawyer’s fees alone are ’bout to half kill me.” He pointed a finger at Jacobs. “On account of you! Your dadgum fault!”

  “I . . . I have no idea . . .” Charlie wiped a palmful of blood off his chin. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Morse, I assure you.”

  I had gotten Morse as far as the door, and I didn’t want to lose the ground I had gained. “Let’s discuss this out in the fresh air.”

  He let me lead him out. There was a refreshment stand at the edge of the employees’ parking lot, with rusty tables shaded by tattered canvas umbrellas. I bought him a large Coke and handed it to him. He slopped the first inch out on the table, then drank half of the paper cup in big swallows. He set it down and pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.

  “I never learn not to take a colddrink like that,” he said. “Puts a nail in your head, don’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and thought of standing naked in scant moonlight, poking the tines of a fork into my blood-engorged upper arm. Something happened. To me, and, it seemed, to Cathy Morse, as well.

  “Tell me what the problem seems to be.”

  “That pitcher he give her, that’s the goddarn problem. She walked around with it damn near ever’where. Her friends commenced on to makin fun of her, but she didn’t care. She tole people ‘That’s how I really look.’ I tried to shake the notion out of her one night and Mother tole me to stop, said it would pass on its own. And it seemed to. She left the pitcher in her room, I dunno, two days or three. Went on down to the hairdressin school without it. We thought it was over.”

  It wasn’t. On October seventh, three days previous, she had walked into J. David Jewelry in Broken Arrow, a town southeast of Tulsa. She was carrying a shopping bag. Both salesmen recognized her, because she had been in several times since her star turn at Jacobs’s midway pitch. One of them asked if he could help her. Cathy blew past him without a word and went to the display case where the most expensive geegaws were kept. From her shopping bag she produced a hammer, which she used to shatter the glass top of the case. Ignoring the bray of the alarm and two cuts serious enough to warrant stitches (“And them will leave scars,” her father mourned), she reached in and took out a pair of diamond earrings.

  “These are mine,” she said. “They go with my dress.”

  • • •

  Morse had no more than finished his story when two wide boys with SECURITY printed on their black tee-shirts showed up. “Is there a problem here?” one of them asked.

  “No,” I said, and there wasn’t. Telling the story had finished venting his rage, which was good. It had also shriveled him somehow, and that wasn’t so good. “Mr. Morse was just leaving.”

  He got up, clutching the remains of his Coke. Charlie Jacobs’s blood was drying on his knuckles. He looked at it as if he didn’t know where it had come from.

  “Siccin the cops on him wouldn’t do no good, would it?” he asked. “All he did was take her pitcher, they’d say. Hell, it was even free.”

  “Come on, sir,” one of the security guys said. “If you’d like to visit the fair, I’d be happy to stamp your hand.”

  “Nosir,” he said. “My family’s had enough of this fair. I’m goin home.” He started off, then turned back. “Has he done it before, mister? Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?”

  Something happened, I thought. Something, something, something.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “Like you’d say, even if he did. You bein his agent and all.”

  Then he went away, head lowered, not looking back.

  • • •

  In the Bounder, Jacobs had changed his blood-spotted shirt and had a dishtowel filled with ice on his fattening lower lip. He listened while I told him what Morse had told me, then said, “Tie my tie for me again, will you? We’re already late.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to fix her up. The way you fixed me up. With the headphones.”

  He gave me a look that was perilously close to contempt. “Do you think Daddy Dearest would let me within a mile of her? Besides, what’s wrong with her . . . her compulsion . . . will wear off on its own. She’ll be fine, and any lawyer worth his salt will be able to convince the judge that she wasn’t herself. She’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.”

  “None of this is exactly new to you, is it?”

  He shrugged, still looking in my direction but no longer quite meeting my eyes. “There have been aftereffects from time to time, yes, although nothing quite so spectacular as Miss Morse’s attempted smash-and-grab.”

  “You’re self-teaching, aren’t you? All your customers are actually guinea pigs. They just don’t know it. I was a guinea pig.”

  “Are you better now, or not?”

  “Yes.” Except for the occasional early-morning stab-a-thon, that was.

  “Then please tie my tie.”

  I almost didn’t. I was angry with him—on top of everything else, he’d snuck out the back way and yelled for security—but I owed him. He had saved my life, which was good. I was now living a straight life, and that was even better.

  So I tied his tie. We did the show. In fact, we did six of them. The crowd aaaahhhed when the close-of-fair fireworks went off, but never so loud as they did when Dan the
Lightning Portraits Man worked his magic. And as each girl stared dreamily up at herself on the backdrop while I switched between A minor and E, I wondered which among them would discover that she had lost a little piece of her mind.

  • • •

  An envelope sticking under my door. Déjà vu all over again, Yogi would have said. Only this time I hadn’t peed in my bed, my surgically mended leg didn’t ache, I wasn’t coming down with the flu, and I wasn’t jitter-jiving with the need to score. I bent, picked it up, and tore it open.

  My fifth business wasn’t one for gooey goodbyes, I’ll give him that. The envelope contained an Amtrak ticket envelope with a sheet of notepaper paper-clipped to it. Written there were a name and an address in the town of Nederland, Colorado. Below, Jacobs had scrawled three sentences. This man will give you a job, if you want it. He owes me. Thanks for tying my tie. CDJ.

  I opened the Amtrak envelope and found a one-way ticket on the Mountain Express from Tulsa to Denver. I looked at it for a long time, thinking that maybe I could turn it in and get a cash refund. Or use it and make the musicians’ exchange in Denver my first stop. Only it would take awhile to get that groove-thing going again. My fingers had gone soft and my chops were rusty. There was also the dope thing to consider. When you’re on the road, dope is everywhere. The magic wore off the Portraits in Lightning after two years or so, Jacobs had said. How did I know it wouldn’t be the same with cures for addiction? How could I know, when he didn’t know himself?

  That afternoon I took a cab to the auto body shop he’d rented in West Tulsa. It was abandoned and bare to the walls. There wasn’t so much as a single snip of wire on the grease-darkened floor.

  Something happened to me here, I thought. The question was whether or not I’d put on those modified headphones again, given the chance to do it over. I decided I would, and in some fashion I didn’t quite understand, that helped me make up my mind about the ticket. I used it, and when I got to Denver, I took the bus to Nederland, high up on the Western Slope of the Rockies. There I met Hugh Yates, and began my life for the third time.

  VII

  A Homecoming. Wolfjaw Ranch. God Heals Like Lightning. Deaf in Detroit. Prismatics.

  My father died in 2003, having outlived his wife and two of his five children. Claire Morton Overton wasn’t yet thirty when her estranged husband took her life. Both my mother and my eldest brother died at the age of fifty-one.

  Question: Death, where is thy sting?

  Answer: Every-fucking-where.

  I went home to Harlow for Dad’s memorial service. Most of the roads were paved now, not just ours and Route 9. There was a housing development where we used to go swimming, and a Big Apple convenience store half a mile from Shiloh Church. Yet the town was in many essential ways the same. Our church still stood just down the road from Myra Harrington’s house (although Me-Maw herself had gone to that great party line in the sky), and the tire swing still hung from the tree in our backyard. I suppose Terry’s children had used it, although they’d all be too old for such things now; the rope was frayed and dark with age.

  Maybe I’ll replace that, I thought . . . but why? For whom? Not my children, certainly, for I had none, and this place was no longer my place.

  The only car in the driveway was a battered ’51 Ford. It looked like the original Road Rocket, but of course that was impossible—Duane Robichaud had wrecked Road Rocket I at Castle Rock Speedway in the first lap of its only race. Yet there was the Delco Batteries sticker on the trunk, and the number 19 on the side, in paint as red as blood. A crow came down and roosted on the hood. I remembered how our dad had taught all us kids to poke the sign of the evil eye at crows (Nothing in it, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure, he said), and I thought: I don’t like this. Something is wrong here.

  I could understand Con not having arrived, Hawaii was a lot farther away than Colorado, but where was Terry? He and his wife, Annabelle, still lived here. And what about the Bowies? The Clukeys? The Paquettes? The DeWitts? What about the crew from Morton Fuel Oil? Dad had been getting up there, but surely he hadn’t outlived all of the home folks.

  I parked, got out of my car, and saw it was no longer the Ford Focus I’d driven off the Hertz lot in Portland. It was the ’66 Galaxie my father and brother had given me for my seventeenth birthday. On the passenger seat was the set of hardbound Kenneth Roberts novels my mother had given me: Oliver Wiswell and Arundel and all the rest.

  This is a dream, I thought. It’s one I’ve had before.

  There was no relief in the realization, only increased dread.

  A crow landed on the roof of the house I’d grown up in. Another alighted on the branch supporting the tire swing, the one with all the bark rubbed off so it stuck out like a bone.

  I didn’t want to go in the house, because I knew what I’d find there. My feet carried me forward, nonetheless. I mounted the steps, and although Terry had sent me a photo of the rebuilt porch eight years before (or maybe it was ten), the same old board, second from the top, gave out the same old ill-tempered squawk when I stepped on it.

  They were waiting for me in the dining room. Not the whole family; just the dead ones. My mother was little more than a mummy, as she had been as she lay dying during that cold February. My father was pale and wizened, much as he’d appeared in the Christmas card photo Terry had sent me not long before his final heart attack. Andy was corpulent—my skinny brother had put on a great deal of meat in middle age—but his hypertensive flush had faded to the waxy pallor of the grave. Claire was the worst. Her crazed ex-husband hadn’t been content just to kill her; she’d had the temerity to leave him, and only complete obliteration would do. He shot her in the face three times, the last two as she lay dead on her classroom floor, before putting a bullet in his own brain.

  “Andy,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  “Prostate,” he said. “I should have listened, baby brother.”

  Sitting on the table was mold-covered birthday cake. As I watched, the frosting humped up, broke apart, and a black ant the size of a pepper-shaker crawled out. It trundled up my dead brother’s arm, across his shoulder, and then onto his face. My mother turned her head. I could hear the dry tendons creak, the sound like a rusty spring holding an old kitchen door.

  “Happy birthday, Jamie,” she said. Her voice was grating, expressionless.

  “Happy birthday, Son.” My dad.

  “Happy birthday, kiddo.” Andy.

  Then Claire turned to look at me, although she had only a single raw socket to look out of. Don’t speak, I thought. If you speak, it will drive me insane.

  But she did, the words coming from a clotted hole filled with broken teeth.

  “Don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car.”

  And my mother nodding like a ventriloquist’s dummy while more huge ants crawled out of the ancient cake.

  I tried to cover my eyes, but my hands were too heavy. They hung limply at my sides. Behind me, I heard that porch board give out its ill-tempered squeal. Not once but twice. Two new arrivals, and I knew who they were.

  “No,” I said. “No more. Please, no more.”

  But then Patsy Jacobs’s hand fell on my shoulder, and those of Tag-Along-Morrie circled my leg just above the knee.

  “Something happened,” Patsy said in my ear. Hair tickled my cheek, and I knew it was hanging from her scalp, torn off her head in the crash.

  “Something happened,” Morrie agreed, hugging my leg tighter.

  Then they all began to sing. The tune was “Happy Birthday,” but the lyrics had changed.

  “Something happened . . . TO YOU! Something happened . . . TO YOU! Something happened, dear Jamie, something happened TO YOU!”

  That was when I began to scream.

  • • •

  I had this dream for the first time on the train that took me to Denver, although—fo
rtunately for the people riding in the same car with me—my screams emerged in the real world as a series of guttural grunts deep in my throat. Over the next twenty years I had it perhaps two dozen times. I always awoke with the same panic-stricken thought: Something happened.

  At that time, Andy was still alive and well. I began calling him and telling him to get his prostate checked. At first he just laughed at me, then he grew annoyed, pointing out that our father was still as healthy as a horse, and looked good to go for another twenty years or so.

  “Maybe,” I told him, “but Mom died of cancer, and she died young. So did her mom.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, neither of them had a prostate.”

  “I don’t think that matters to the gods of heredity,” I said. “They just send the Big C wherever it’s most welcome. For Christ’s sake, what’s the big deal? It’s a finger up your ass, it’s over in ten seconds, and as long as you don’t feel both of the doctor’s hands on your shoulders, you don’t even have to worry about your backdoor virginity.”

  “I’ll get it done when I’m fifty,” he said. “That’s the recommendation, that’s what I’m going to do, and that’s the end of it. I’m glad you cleaned up your act, Jamie. I’m glad you’re holding down what passes for a grownup job in the music business. But none of that gives you the right to oversee my life. God does that for me.”

  Fifty will be too late, I thought. By the time you’re fifty, it will already have taken hold.

  Because I loved my brother (even though he had in my humble opinion grown up to become a moderately annoying God-­botherer), I made an end run and went to Francine, his wife. To her I could say what I knew Andy would scoff at—I’d had a premonition, and it was a strong one. Please, Francie, please have him get that prostate exam.

  He compromised (“Just to shut you both up”) by getting a PSA screening shortly after his forty-seventh birthday, grumbling that the damn test was unreliable. Perhaps, but it was hard for even my scripture-quoting, doctorphobic brother to argue with the result: a perfect Bo Derek ten. A trip to a Lewiston urologist followed, then an operation. He was pronounced cancer-free three years later. A year after that—at fifty-one—he suffered a stroke while watering the lawn, and was in the arms of Jesus before the ambulance got him to the hospital. This was in upstate New York, where the funeral was held. There was no memorial service in Harlow. I was glad. I went home all too often in my dreams, which were a long-term result of Jacobs’s treatment for drug addiction. Of that I had no doubt.