Island of Divine Music (15 page)

The manager laughed and mopped his brow.

T
he world was spinning off-kilter for Joe of late, and it wasn’t just the gin and tonics from the fish grotto or the fact that he’d been an inch from getting into a fight with Kris Kringle. Sometimes he would cruise along the freeway and imagine how simple it would be to let the wheel drift a little and plow into a concrete wall. Sometimes the only thing in the world which made him happy was the only thing which made him want to drive his car through concrete at sixty miles an hour, and that was his attraction to Julie, a woman barely older than his daughter Penny.

A decade earlier he had counted himself among the luckiest of men, but something about the mid-’60s gave him a feeling of disgust and exhilaration at the same time. He tried to figure this out as he crept through the downtown traffic, and he took a long detour in order to figure some more. Hell, he wasn’t hungry, anyway, and sometimes sitting at the dinner table made him nauseated. Mickey had an excuse for eating like a slob, but Angelo, who was now in high school, was the worst, especially when they ate at Joe’s mother’s with the whole clan. Maybe it was that his first two, his beautiful oldest girl and his quiet, athletic son, were both gone from the house. More than that, one was now an angry college student who hung out with long-haired beatniks while her brother, Joe’s pride and joy, had lost the light of happiness in his face.

That was it, he thought: they were a couple of sobersides, and the few times he’d seen them in the past three years neither one of
them had been able to laugh. Of course they were sitting on opposite sides of the fence, and if you believed the papers they had a lot of company on each side of that fence, but one thing Joe had realized about living, and this was something which Julie had helped him realize, was that if you can’t get a kick out of it now and then you may as well give it up. A lifetime of being the serious one in a family of loud laughers and wine drinkers, of being the guy who worried about every yard of material and every margin of profit for an extended family which reaped the benefits of his fretting, had brought him to this point at midlife where he felt obliged to live it up now and then. Get out and dance at one of those damned go-go places Julie liked. Take a weekend at South Tahoe with the brothers and slip away to meet Julie for lunch.

Okay, the lying was a big piece of his feeling off-kilter. His pop had chased women and ended up living with a little Mexican whore his last couple of years, and Joe always used the old man as the yardstick of negative integers in the measure of a man, but here he was spending time with a girl who didn’t know who Douglas MacArthur or Benny Goodman were. Although it was still just friendship, it confused the hell out of him. That love was a messy thing, that it didn’t always play by the rules, was common coinage of the times, particularly this era of bushy sideburns and short skirts, but it didn’t take the sting away from Joe’s duplicity, and it didn’t help him understand his love for his oldest children, which had nothing messy about it now but felt frozen and out of grasp.

The house resonated with Burl Ives singing about a little drummer
boy, and even this popular carol seemed off-track to Joe. Mary nodded, barrumpapumpum, the ox’s ass kept time, barrumpapum-pum? He wouldn’t say that, would he? There seemed to be a new liberality in common language which struck Joe between the eyes now and then. People said things on TV you would have heard only in a locker room a few years earlier. Billboards looked pornographic. As Joe stepped inside he heard a high-pitched, whining cry weave itself into the music, and as he entered the living room a soldier stood up from the couch and extended his hand. It was his son.

Hey! Joe reached to give him a hug. He felt stiff, all sinew and bone, and his face looked gaunt and bruised around the eyes.

Dad.

How’s it going, Tiger?

All right.

How much time off did Uncle give you?

A month.

That’s great!

I’m only here a couple of days, though. What’s eating Mickey?

For a moment Joe was at a loss for words. His wife, Mary Louise, stepped into the room and told the Santa Claus story, including the part about Joe’s going downtown to talk with the manager. Mickey’s whining underscored the nasal voice on the phonograph record.

Joe started to tell them both how close he had been to fistfighting with Kris Kringle, but his son’s last words kept interfering with
his thoughts. A couple of days out of a month? A horn sounded in their driveway, and Paulie stepped briskly to the door. These were some buddies who wanted him to show them around Frisco, he told his parents.

You’re not going to eat at your grandmother’s?

Probably not, Mom. I told these guys I’d show them Frisco, and they’re going to show me Dago and Ensenada.

Paulie, what the hell do you mean, Dago?

Dad, that’s San Diego. I’ll be back tonight.

Burl Ives kept crooning about that goddamned drummer boy playing his nuts off for Jesus as Joe watched his son climb into a green car filled with boys in uniform and the ox’s ass kept time on the backbeat. His wife was yammering, something about never even looking into her eyes. Joe, she said, are you listening to me?

Going to show me Dago, he said.

You don’t look in my eyes, either, she said.

J
oe was awake at midnight, on his side, facing away from Mary. He was awake two hours later when he heard a car pull up and the front door open and close. Joe crept downstairs. His son had placed the couch cushions on the floor and unrolled a smelly sleeping bag. Why the hell don’t you sleep in your own bed? Joe asked.

Paulie said he didn’t want to wake up Angelo and besides, he was used to the bag. He reeked of cigarette smoke and booze. Joe watched him slide out of his pants and into the musty bag. His legs were thin and pimply, and even the boy’s underwear was olive-drab
colored. Joe sat on the couch frame and cleared his throat. Your mother and I want to know your plans, he said.

Day after tomorrow, Paulie said. He yawned luxuriously. We fly south out of Travis. Lay on the beach. These guys saved my fucking life, Dad.

Could you watch your goddamned language? Joe asked.

Sorry. I’m bushed, Dad. I am really sorry.

Joe sat for another ten minutes wanting to say many things which seemed stuck in his throat. His son started snoring, and Joe hit the light switch.

He couldn’t sleep. Dinner at his mother’s had felt disjointed by the conspicuous absence of the war hero, by the defensive expression on Penny’s face whenever Paulie was mentioned by Ludovico or Gino, by the whimpering of Mickey and the recounting of the Santa Claus story. Joe’s brother Narciso was particularly agitated by Saint Nick’s poor treatment of little Mickey, who weighed in at a good fifty pounds more than Narciso himself. Mary had drunk too much and said too much, Penny had said something snide about the government, and Angelo had taken that opportunity to do his impersonation of President Johnson’s Texas twang: Let us all ree-zin to-gay-ther, mah fellah Amer-kins.

There was a phone in the basement, and Joe wrapped himself in a towel and started to dial Julie’s number, then decided she might hate him for it at this ungodly hour, and not just because it would shake her from a deep sleep but also because it would show a weakness of his character. He went back to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of brandy, then climbed back into his marriage bed.

A few hours later Joe was back in the basement with a cup of instant java and the towel over his shoulders. Julie sounded sleepy and soft. I needed to hear your voice, Joe told her.

They talked on for a while, and while they talked Mickey got up and padded to the kitchen in her blue Chinatown pajamas. She had a phone number for the North Pole which the paper had published last week, but when she picked up the kitchen phone she heard her father’s voice. He sounded strange. A woman’s voice was there, too, and they said things to each other about weird things, about how she wished he could get his shit together, about how he wished he could hold her on his lap. Mickey thought of sitting on Santa’s lap and saying what you wished for, and she said, Daddy, why are you wishing for that? and then the phone went dead. She listened to the silent chamber of the phone and tried to dial Santa’s workshop at the North Pole, then set the phone down. She walked into the living room where the sleeping bag with her brother in it filled most of the space and leaned over Paulie to ask him to help with the phone.

In an instant her head was slammed onto the carpet. Both of her arms were twisted behind her back, and several places in her body were in pain, but the wind was knocked out of her stomach so her mouth couldn’t scream.

A moment later her brother released her. He knelt beside her and said, Oh, Mickey, fuck me, man, goddamn it, I am so fucking sorry.

And her father was there an instant later, kneeling beside them on the floor as she started bawling, and then her mother and other
brother and baby sister stampeding down the stairs like horses while Paulie leaned against the couch frame in his green underwear and muttered curse words at his own feet.

They took Mickey to the doctor, and her mother said she’d fallen off the garage roof, and the doctor said her shoulder was dislocated. Paulie was gone by the time they returned, and so was her dad, and she wondered about the telephone and the line to call to make a wish, and why her father had been wishing with some woman, but the doctor’s pills made her so sleepy she stopped wondering, and about the time she took her coat off she was falling asleep.

She could hear her sister when she woke up. Her sister Penny was talking with her mother about Paulie, and Mickey thought then that she should live with Penny from now on, in an apartment near the college in San Francisco, so she’d be safe from Paulie.

They were standing outside her door, Mom and Penny talking about Paulie. Her mom sounded kind of mad at Penny, and then her brother started arguing with Penny, like her mom had left and the boy had jumped in like a tag-team wrestler to take her place. You know, Angelo said, Mickey looked just about like one of them.

One of them? One of whom, Penny asked in a hard voice.

Pardon my French, Angie said, but to Paulie she would look like a gook.

Jesus, Penny said, please don’t add racism to your mountainous ignorance.

Well, I mean, she was wearing those pajamas, and she has those Oriental eyes.

This justifies our brother attacking our sister?

Well, they say you should never sneak up on a soldier, especially when he’s asleep. I read that somewhere. I think that was one of my Sergeant Rock comics, Angelo said.

I’d be the last person on Earth to contradict Sergeant Rock, Penny said, but I think there’s something sick going on in our country when your brother practically kills your sister by mistake just because his mind is so screwed up by this fucking war.

Hey, Angelo said, somebody has to fight.

No they don’t, Penny said. Paulie wasn’t even drafted, and he re-upped last year. He’s sick, you guys. He’s General Westmoreland’s little robot.

And you’re Ho Chi Minh’s, Angelo said.

S
he could feel it, the lines being drawn, and Mickey knew she and Penny were on the same side. Maybe they were both more Oriental than the others or something. Smaller, feminine, weaker. The papers and the TV showed them now and then, the little Chinese-looking people getting killed by the American soldiers like Paulie, and the little people were supposed to be bad, they were Reds, but she could tell her sister was on their side, and so was she because she and Penny were more like them than the American soldiers.

But she still loved Paulie, and it was so scary to think that her brother could be changed into something mean by Satan. She and Penny went out for lunch later that day in Berkeley, they wore the
same sweatshirts and jeans like they were twins except Mickey had to wear a sling, and they had Chinese noodles because they both liked Oriental things. In fact, Penny bought her a beaded necklace from an import store and a fat little Buddha you could rub the belly on for good luck, and they walked among the Christmas lights of downtown, and Penny stuck her middle finger out at the Hink’s store.

After Penny left for her apartment Mickey lay on her bed and thought about Paulie slamming her face down and wrenching her arms, and she started crying again. Her mom tried to cheer her up, and Uncle Ciso came by with a box of chocolates, but she kept crying. Paulie’s attack was mixed up in her mind with the strange things her father and that woman had been wishing for on the phone, as if a kind of craziness had come into her house over the telephone wires and made her brother and father act like different people. And the woman seemed like she was from far away, maybe even the North Pole, and maybe her father wanted things he could never have, and Mickey drifted into sleep and dreams and wondered if she were still dreaming when, several hours later, she heard her parents talking through the wall next to her bed.

Her father said he was not happy here, and her mother said who is, but her father said, no, he meant here, in this house, and her mom was quiet for a minute. Then she started crying, and her father said, Mary, and she said there was a woman, and he said there wasn’t a woman but he was just unhappy, and Mickey thought of the woman from the North Pole that her father wanted to hold on his lap. She heard them hiss at each other like snakes through the wall,
and then the sound of doors opening and closing and the car starting up and leaving. Mickey cried into her pillow and her mom came to her bedroom and they cried together and fell asleep.

The weekend before Christmas Mickey’s uncles went to Reno, and Narciso complained about what was breaking his poor niece’s heart to anybody who would listen. One sympathetic ear was attached to one of the ugliest faces in the casino, the massive and brutally scarred countenance of James Scalabini, who was known by his associates as Jimmy the Finger. What kind of bastard, Jimmy wanted to know, breaks the heart of a little retarded girl?