Beaming Sonny Home (14 page)

“I can't find my cigarettes,” she said.

“That's because they're out on the porch,” said Mattie, “which is where smoking will take place from now on, at least while you're all staying in this house.”

“Now, Mama,” said Gracie. “You're overreacting again.”

“I'm curious about something,” said Mattie. “So just for the fun of it, fill me in. Why aren't you all in your own homes?” Marlene exchanged looks with Gracie, who peered anxiously at Rita.

“Well, I'll tell you,” said Rita, as though she were talking to a ten-year-old. “We've been all through this before. You don't exactly have your thinking cap on tight when it comes to Sonny. And when them journalists find out the truth, which they will because even journalists can root up the occasional acorn, they're gonna come down on this house like locusts.” She shook her head, tired of explaining the obvious.

“So?” asked Mattie. “I can handle a few locusts.”

“Mama, listen to me for a minute, please.” It was Marlene's turn. Mattie directed her full attention to her middle daughter. Marlene was probably the prettiest of the girls, had been so when she was a baby, what with Lester's deep chestnut eyes and butterfly lashes, not to mention his ample lips. Mattie waited.

“Come on, Marlene,” said Gracie, “say something or get off the pot.”

“It's just that Mattagash, Maine, is kind of used to watching Sonny carry on. It's nothing real new to them, except that now it's on television.” Rita seemed too eager to agree with Marlene for once. She was nodding so much, Mattie feared her neck might break and the head roll away. Or maybe it was the onslaught of a nicotine fit Mattie was watching unfold.

“Sonny always did stand out like a turd at a pee party,” Rita said. Mattie shook her head. More pious talk from the Born Again. Rita must have gotten that from Deuteronomy.

“And you, Mama,” Marlene continued, “well, you're what they call
vulnerable
right now. You could say and do anything. Everybody knows how you favor Sonny, and, well, if something tragic should happen, who knows what might swim through your mind.” She was finished. Mattie watched her closely, watched her fidget in her chair. They never could take being stared down, the girls couldn't.
Swim
through
her
mind
. What did Marlene think? A school of salmon was gonna swim upstream in Mattie's head and spawn there? She looked at Gracie, who looked again at Rita. Were these really the babies she'd born, anemic but healthy babies, babies who had missed out on those things, what the doctor called antigens? Were these three grown women her
kin?

“We're just trying to help,” Rita, one of them, said.

“This is one way,” said Gracie, that schoolbook look on her face again, “for us four to finally bond, the way mothers and daughters should do.” Now
they
waited, the daughters. Mattie thought about the consequences of throwing them out the front door, onto the porch with their cigarettes. They had been whining for almost thirty years that Sonny was the pet, Sonny was too spoiled, Sonny called the shots in Mattie's life. Well, she would sit it out another day, holed up in the house. Sonny had two women. She had three. And Mattie knew very well why the girls weren't taking turns watchdogging her. They were all afraid that if one spent too much time with Mattie,
bonded
too well without the other two being there to prevent it, the little mushroom of a house would go to that one daughter in Mattie's will.

“You'll smoke on the front porch,” Mattie told them. “And that goes for all of you.”

“Wesley says that Sonny's losing his charm when he has to take women at gunpoint,” Marlene told her sisters, who both snickered.
Wesley
. This was Wesley Stubbs, from Watertown, who had swum upriver himself one day, to spawn with Marlene. Sonny used to say that if Wesley Stubbs had been born Indian, they'd have called him Brave Who Cheats Workmen's Comp. “He's a chiropractor's best friend,” Sonny had told Mattie many times, and the two of them had laughed together, as the girls were now laughing. They had
bonded
, she and Sonny, many times. “If it weren't for workmen's comp, Wesley would be putting the holes in doughnuts in one of them Dunkin' places,” Sonny would say. And then he would have to quote his favorite line. “If Wesley Stubbs had been born Indian, Mama, they'd have called him Skidoo That Rides Like the Wind.” It was pretty much general knowledge that Wesley spent the summers with his hands grasping a fishing pole, winters with his hands grasping the throttle of his yellow snowmobile. Mattie smiled, just thinking of Sonny and his crazy sense of humor. “If so-and-so had been born Indian” was the beginning of one of Sonny's many routines.

Rita went out on the front porch, letting the screen door bang behind her. Mattie watched through the window as she beat a cigarette out of her pack, lit up, and then exhaled. In seconds she was back at the screen door, peering through, her left hand cupping her right elbow as she held her cigarette aloft. Smoke rose up behind her head and wafted off in the general direction of downtown Mattagash, “the metropolitan district,” as Sonny called it.

“Were you saying anything?” Rita wondered through the screen.

“You didn't miss a single syllable,” Mattie reassured her. Marlene turned to Mattie.

“I ain't looked in my purse yet,” said Marlene. “Are my cigarettes still in there?”

“They probably are,” said Mattie. “I don't go looking in purses. I never did when you was all teenagers, and I ain't about to start now. I do, however, lay claim to what I find on my kitchen table.” Marlene sighed a weary sigh.

“I don't smoke nearly as much as Rita,” she said. “But you're sure none of us are allowed to smoke in the house.” This came not as a question but as a statement. Mattie answered her, anyway.

“Ditto,” said Mattie. Marlene took her purse and went out to join Rita.

“You got a spare match?” Mattie heard her ask. Now Mattie turned to look at Gracie.

“I'm trying to quit,” said Gracie, foreguessing what was on Mattie's mind. “Smoking and exercise don't really mix.” Mattie nodded. Well, maybe some good would come out of being holed up with Gracie.

In a few minutes, Rita and Marlene were back from smoking their cigarettes. Marlene measured coffee and water for the percolator and then plugged it in.

“If we get you a nice Mr. Coffee for your birthday,” Marlene wanted to know, “will you use it, Mama? 'Cause there's no sense in getting you one if it ends up in the attic.”

“I like my old percolator just fine,” said Mattie.

“You gotta catch up to the world, Mama,” Gracie now noted. “It's running ahead of you.” Let it run, Mattie thought. And while it's running, she would sit on the front porch of her tiny house and have a cup of freshly perked coffee. That's what that word meant.
Perked
. Coffee that's been in a damn
percolator.

“Not to change the subject,” said Rita, who was famous for doing just that, “but I run into Clarence Fennelson's mother at Craft's Filling Station this morning, and she told me it's been twenty-eight years since Clare died. June of 1966. Can you even believe that?” Mattie was now not only interested in what Rita had to say—she was caught with surprise, just as she was whenever Father Time revealed himself to her for the trickster that he was. Twenty-eight years since Clarence Fennelson was treading the highways and byways of Mattagash, Maine! Twenty-eight years that the town had carried on without him, had got up in the mornings and perked their coffee, had turned down their bedcovers at night. Mattie guessed it wouldn't have mattered a whit if Clarence had had an old-fashioned percolator or a Mr. Coffee. Except that the old-fashioned percolator might've kept him at home a couple minutes longer, and maybe he could have used that extra time to consider if he really wanted to take his own life. He had been such a nice boy, and such a neat dresser, his suntan pants always carrying a straight, orderly pleat down each leg, his white shirts always smoothly pressed. But then, Alma Fennelson had been his mother, and you could eat off Alma's kitchen floor. Everyone said so. Clarence Fennelson, who had once scored fifty points in a basketball game against Watertown and gotten his picture in the
Bangor
Daily
News
for doing so. When a small town loses one of its own, the death becomes a marker of sorts. “That was the summer before Clare Fennelson died,” someone might say. Or “That was only a couple winters after Clarence Fennelson jumped off the bridge,” someone else might say, and then time would do its snowball act, with the years rolling over each other, until the statistics of Clarence's life and death had faded into Mattagash history, no longer a yardstick to anybody but the folks who came to stare at his tombstone once in a while and ponder at such a short life span.

“I can still remember where I was the day he died,” said Rita. “I was a junior in high school, and I was having my hair done for the Watertown prom, me and Lorraine and Theresa, at Chez Françoise Hairstyles, when Eleanor Ryan come running into the shop. She turned off all our dryers as fast as she could, one after the other, and that's when she told us.” Rita had spent that time under the hair dryer for nothing, as Mattie remembered, because that star basketball player from Watertown High School had not bothered to pick her up and had later claimed he had never even
asked
to take her, that he was taking some Watertown girl instead. Poor Rita, and it broke Mattie's heart to see her, it really did. She had waited in her long white gloves and yellow gown, her French curls piled high on her head, like little brown bales of hay. That's probably why Rita would never forget where she was on the day Clarence Fennelson had died. With the clock ticking away the time and still no Watertown basketball star, she had asked Lester for the car and he had given it to her. Mattie still didn't know who gave her the bottle of vodka. The police
said
it was vodka, and they should know. They were the ones who found it in the car. And that's why they carried Rita from off that Watertown front lawn after the boy's mother phoned them, as if Rita was some kind of big unwanted dandelion in her bright yellow gown.

“I was helping to decorate the gym for graduation,” Marlene said. “I must've been fifteen that summer. We heard the sirens coming full wail and we dropped all our pine boughs and run outside to see what was happening. That's when Emily Hart tripped on the pavement and broke her leg in two places, and that's the only reason they made birdbrained Debbie Plunkett the captain of the cheerleaders that next September. Emily's leg never did heal right.”

“I was picking up some stuff at Blanche's Grocery,” said Gracie. “I remember to this day what I was getting, too. It was a bottle of Pepsi, a pack of cigarettes, and a candy bar.”

“Things ain't changed much,” said Mattie. “Does that mean you were smoking even then?” Gracie nodded.

“Cripes,” said Mattie, and shook her head. The stuff she learned from her girls when it was too late to do anything about it. Just as Clarence's mother had learned too late. “If we had only knowed Clare was feeling that low,” Alma Fennelson had said for years, at every Tupperware party, at every fudge sale, at every PTA meeting, at every Christmas play, until no one had the heart to hear it anymore. “If we had only knowed,” Alma would say, looking off at the past as though it were a place one might still get to, in order to change all the buttons on the time machine. “We might've done something to stop it.”

“I was twelve,” Gracie said. “Denny Plunkett stopped in to Blanche's for something and he told us. He said that Clarence Fennelson had climbed up onto the Mattagash Bridge, made the sign of the cross, and then let himself fall, silent and still as a leaf. He went right out of sight and they still hadn't found him.”

“Some still claim it was an accident,” Mattie reminded them.

“
Some
are his relatives,” said Rita. “The rest of us know the truth. You don't jump off a bridge by accident.”

“It was awfully rainy that day, as I remember it,” said Mattie.

“And slippery,” said Marlene. “That was why Emily Hart broke her leg. Her legs were just like two little pencils, though, so it's no wonder.”

“He might've just been trying to walk that rail,” said Mattie, although she knew better. Tom Hart had come along and saw it all take place. He'd gotten out of his pickup and shouted when he saw Clarence standing on the bridge rail, in all that gray rain. “You better get down, son,” Tom had shouted. But it was as if Clarence was in a daze, Tom said, and then he saw him make the sign of the cross. And that's when he fell.

“You don't jump off a bridge by mistake,” Rita repeated.

The phone rang. Marlene beat Rita to it. It was Willard, Rita's green-haired child.

“Willie says to turn on the TV quick,” Marlene shouted. “Sonny's giving another press conference!”

And that's what happened, no teaser, no time for the girls to pop up some popcorn or pick up a pizza. Sonny was back by popular demand, for now a crowd had swelled up in the background, ordinary folks who seemed excited just to be lined up on the road in front of the trailer. As the camera panned through the crowd, Mattie saw some of those folks waving happily.

“Hi, Mom!” one tall boy yelled, a baseball cap pulled down to his bushy eyebrows.

“What's happening?” Mattie asked. “Why are all those regular people hanging out at the trailer?” Marlene turned the volume higher. Rita and Gracie dropped down before the television set, pulled their legs up beneath them and waited, just as they did as children when professional wrestling came on. Of course, back then everyone thought the wrestling was real. Donna was back, and so was the thin-haired, thin-faced man, and the important-looking woman. But more new faces were now standing in front of the trailer as well, microphones in their hands, cameramen breathing down their backs. The Channel 4 camera focused in on a plump man in the sea of faces. He was pointing happily at a sign he had hoisted into the air, his chubby face a massive smile. The camera zoomed in. JOHN LENNON LIVES! the sign declared.

Donna was gripping her microphone in one hand, holding it up to her face as though it were a big black ice cream cone.

“Dan,” she said to the camera in front of her, “there have been dramatic developments in the hostage incident here at Marigold Drive Trailer Park.” Mattie could see the crowd growing even larger behind Donna's shoulder. Many of them seemed to be college students in a party mood. They were waving caps at the camera, making funny faces. If Mattie hadn't known better, she might have thought they were attending a football game. Others appeared to be there just for the sheer entertainment of the thing:
a
man, two women, and a dog, all holed up in a house trailer.

“What do you suppose the new developments are?” Marlene wondered. She was leaning back against the sofa, her knees drawn up.

“Shh!” said Mattie. “Donna's talking.”

“Dan, we're told that Sonny Gifford, after intense phone negotiations with Chief Melon, has agreed to release one of the hostages,” Donna said. She was slowly making her way to the area that seemed to be reserved for newspeople only, next to the yellow plastic ribbon that encircled the porch of the trailer. Police were motioning the spectators to move back, behind another yellow ribbon encircling the lawn itself, confining them to the road. People scattered in the background as Donna and the cameraman made their way toward the porch. Now the flock of television reporters with microphones in their hands seemed even larger and more important.

“I think that's a CNN camera!” Rita shouted, and pointed at the screen. “I'm going to Lola's!” She was on her feet in an instant, Gracie following. Mattie watched as they flew through the screen door and out to Gracie's car. An engine roared and pebbles flew, and then the sound of a disappearing car faded away to wind rushing in through the screen of the door.

“Are those two completely loco?” Marlene asked. The camera now did a quick pan of the scene on the road, where excitement seemed to be building further. Policemen were directing the spectators to stay behind the yellow plastic ribbon. But the crowd was having too good a time to care. Donna, who could not get to the trailer, put the microphone into the face of a young man, who had his arm around a freckle-faced girl.

“Why are you here today, sir?” Donna asked. Scarlet inched into the boy's face as he fought for the right words. Even on Mattie's small TV, she could see the color spreading.

“We just wanted to come by and tell Sonny thanks,” the boy said, and the words were barely spoken before the crowd pressing in behind him to listen picked up on his comment and began to chant, “Sonny! Sonny! Sonny!”

“Are you an acquaintance of Mr. Gifford?” Donna now wanted to know. The eavesdropping crowd behind the boy quieted to hear what his reply would be.

“We don't know him,” the girl offered, “but he's speaking up for poor people, and that's what counts.” The group behind her liked this answer. They repeated their little song. “Sonny! Sonny! Sonny!” Another boy, wearing a University of Maine sweatshirt, pushed out in front and lowered his mouth to the microphone.

“As the great John Lennon once said, imagine if there was no hunger!” He held a fist into the air and the crowd went wild with enthusiasm.

Mattie looked at Marlene. “What's wrong with them people?” she asked. “Why ain't they home?”

Marlene shrugged. “Everybody needs a hero, I guess,” she said, “and those poor, misguided souls think Sonny's theirs.” Now the camera was back on Chief Melon, who was waving instructions to a line of policemen who had taken up strategic positions on the trailer side of the rope. Chief Melon raised what looked like a cheerleading megaphone and said something Mattie couldn't hear, and Channel 4 missed. She imagined Rita and Gracie getting the full story on Lola's satellite dish and resented them for it.

“I wish he'd let them both go,” Marlene said. “Get this circus over with.” Now Mattie watched as Sonny's silhouette appeared in the same window of the same door, Sonny's balcony, his patio, his terrace, his courtyard. Mattie knew that, behind the window screen, he was again wearing his cheek-to-cheek smile. It had always been tough, even in times of great stress and difficulty, for Sonny to go anywhere without that smile. It was that very smile that used to get him into so much trouble with Lester. How many times had Mattie seen Lester strike the boy just because of that ear-to-ear grin? “Wipe that goddamn smile off your face,” that's about the only sound advice Lester had ever given the boy. But Mattie also knew something else. She could sense it right through her skin as she watched the outline of her son in the window.

He's getting desperate, Mattie thought. She hasn't turned up from Atlantic City. She hasn't even called.

“Remember now,” Sonny's voice was cautioning from behind the screen. “Just 'cause you can't see my hands don't mean there ain't a gun in them. So don't try anything foolish.”

“I doubt it,” said Marlene. “Sonny's too lazy to hold a gun on anyone. That'd be like lifting weights.” Now the door of the trailer slowly opened an inch or two. Mattie could almost see a physical hush descend upon the crowd. Donna's face edged into the corner of the picture.

“Chief Melon has told Sonny Gifford to send out the hostage now, Dan,” she said. “And he seems about to do that. At this point, we don't know if the released hostage will be Stephanie Bouchard or Vera Temple. Needless to say, Dan, the tension here is quite visible among the police officers as well as this crowd of fans who have turned out to catch a glimpse of Mr. Gifford. Someone seems to be coming out now, Dan!” Donna said excitedly, and then turned to watch the events on the porch.

“You can be sure he'll send out the homeliest one,” said Marlene. Mattie's heart was beating so rapidly she couldn't reply. If he let one go, there'd be only one left. And when he let
that
one go, there would be jail time, yes, but it would be over. She would send him bulging packages of cookies and fudge, and a huge stack of those scary comic books he loved so much. Did they allow picture puzzles in prison? If so, she would dig out
The
Desert
with
Night
Moon
, that one puzzle she could never solve, the one with mostly black pieces in it. That would keep Sonny busy for his entire sentence. And what would he get? Surely, with no one harmed, with a judge able to gaze upon that broken heart Sonny was wearing on his sleeve, with good behavior and even more charm, he could be out in a couple years. Especially if that gun he claimed to be toting was a fake one after all. He could start all over. The door opened another six inches. Everyone waited. Reporters were silent, anticipating. And then, to everyone's astonishment, out trotted the poodle, a prance to its gait, its head held high, as though it were taking part in a beauty contest. It paused on the end of the porch and seemed to be scanning the crowd for a familiar face. One of the police officers scooped it up and, as Mattie watched, a bit of a struggle followed until the policeman threw up his arms and the poodle jumped to the ground.

“I think it bit him,” said Marlene.

“You'll notice it didn't bite Sonny,” Mattie noted for the record. He
did
have that invisible way with animals. Now Sonny seemed to be waving behind his screen. Reporters turned their attention back upon the door, which had again closed.

“This is a bit embarrassing,” Sonny said from the window, “but it's getting quite dog dooey in here. It ain't like he's a cat, after all, and I can have some litter sent in.” A chorus of questions rose up from the reporters. Why had he not released one of the two women? Sonny raised a silhouetted hand to calm the storm of words coming at him.

“Well,” Sonny said, “that's because my guests, these two very lovely ladies, girls from right here in Bangor, Maine—and let me say here and now that Bangor has some of the prettiest girls I personally have ever seen—these two young women are not exactly agreeable about which one should go.”

“They
both
want to go?” a reporter shouted from the pack.

“On the contrary,” said Sonny. “I don't want to brag or nothing, gentlemen, but they both want to
stay
. And just for the record, I'm going to expand my Great Americans list to include these two fine female specimens.” He closed the door. His silhouette disappeared from the window. The crowd roared in jubilation. Mattie smiled. He had it, all right. Sonny Gifford could talk the Virgin Mary into dropping her pants.

“He released the
poodle?”
Marlene asked. Mattie found herself smiling. She didn't want to since it was too serious a thing, but she couldn't help it. The laughter was involuntary, a nervous laughter that came from somewhere down in her stomach and was simply unstoppable.
While
the
world
had
waited
with
bated
breath, Sonny turned the poodle loose!
The phone rang loudly and Marlene rose.

“Let it ring!” Mattie said sternly. She was no longer interested in what her Mattagash neighbors might have to say.

“What if it's Sonny?” asked Marlene.

“It ain't gonna be Sonny,” said Mattie, “so let it ring.”

Donna's face was back on the screen.

“This appears to be some kind of a joke on Mr. Gifford's part, Dan,” she said. “Chief of Police Melon doesn't seem to be very pleased with how these negotiations have turned out.” A man appeared behind Donna's back, unbeknownst to her, and waved his arms frantically at the camera. As Donna stepped out of the picture, the camera's eye fell upon the man's chest. He was wearing a T-shirt which announced:
I
Visited
Bangor
and
All
I
Got
to
Show
for
It
Is
Two
Women
and
a
Dog.

“Make that
two
women,”
said Marlene. “He's gonna have to change his T-shirt now that the dog's gone. But they can print T-shirts in an hour these days.”

“Sonny! Sonny! Sonny!” The pack was now howling.

“I feel sorry for them hostages,” Marlene said. “This is like what happened to Patty Hearst. It's brainwashing, is what it is.” Yes, it was brainwashing all right. But Sonny had been doing it to women ever since he grew his first mustache and his arms filled in with taut muscles, and his legs grew long enough to make him tall and give him that sexy swagger. And his voice developed that little pain in it when he talked about life and such things, a pain that so many women felt it was their duty to take away. His mother was one of those women.

Suddenly Mattie needed air, good old Mattagash air wafting up from the Mattagash River. She rose without a word to Marlene and went on out through the screen door. It slammed behind her. The porch was cool, caught up in the shadows left behind by the setting sun. On the porch, she could think. If only Elmer Fennelson were there for her to talk to, for her to say,
That
boy's got to be careful, Elmer. He's carrying things too far this time. It's getting way out of control, growing bigger than something he can hold on to. I can smell what's going on, Elmer. I can smell it like it's something coming from the swamp, like them blue flags Sonny was always picking for me. That crowd is trying to make my boy a hero, and that's a job he ain't gonna turn down. That's a job Sonny Gifford's been applying for all his life.
This was the fear she was feeling in her heart, this knowledge of an upcoming sacrifice. There was a crowd turned out for Sonny all right, but another name for crowd was
mob
, and to Mattie they were one and the same: folks with nothing better to do, folks who should be home, folks sniffing for a little blood.

“Elmer Fennelson, where are you?” Mattie said to the curve of tarred road stretching past her house on its way to Elmer's. Nothing answered, except the whine of a distant truck that must have been climbing the portage. “I wish you were here, Elmer,” Mattie said to the river that was winding itself away from Elmer's house, in the direction of the ocean. “I wish you were here because I think there's a fire being lit under Sonny's pants in a big way.”

For a long time, Mattie sat on the porch. Down in the swamp, night peepers were making their racket, sounding almost like a pond of ducks. Stars were sprinkled overhead, a light dusting, overshadowed by the brightness of Venus. Now and then, a car passed on the road in a rattle of sound, then disappeared again, some Mattagasher headed to or from home. Mattie sank down into her rocker, but she didn't rock any, even though rocking had always soothed her, the way she remembered feeling in those early days when her own mother had actually rocked her. Those days before the kitchen knife and the fake stomach cancer and the jagged wrists and that blood-red valentine Mattie had made for nothing. But this wasn't a time for soothing. It was a time for sorting out the laundry. She stared at Venus, hanging like a crystal ball in the western sky. Funny how she had lived all her life thinking Venus was some magnificent star. Why hadn't anyone told her before? Why did she have to be so far into her life before her son-in-law Henry Plunkett would point up at that shiny ball and say, “That there's Venus”? Sitting in her rocker, Mattie felt as though maybe her life would've been different somehow, if she had known. She felt a little like she did the day she found out Lester had been sleeping with so many women all those years and everyone knew but her. It was a feeling of being left out of a shiny new secret.