Boarded Windows (26 page)

Before I made it to the church’s office, however, I saw a boy standing alone in the middle of its parking lot. As I got closer, I recognized Rowan, and when I got closer still I saw that he was crying. It was a whimpery, soft-pedal cry. I said hello, kneeled, moved within hugging distance of him, smelled his troubled breath. There was dirt on both his fat cheeks. I wanted to suck up his tears with a medicine dropper and drink them.

“They stole my bike and they kicked me,” he said.

“Who did?”

“These guys.” He sobbed.

“Where’d they kick you?”

“Here.” He spread his arms to indicate the parking lot.

“No, I mean which parts of your body did they kick?”

“Leg,” he said and pointed.

I lifted his pant leg; there was no visible injury.

“Who are you?” Rowan said.

“You know me, I’m a good friend of your mom’s. Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Your mom. Where’s your mom?”

“I’m an orphan.”

“No, you’re not, Rowan. Your mother is alive and she loves you more than anything.”

“It was a new bike.”

“Do you know the serial number?” He didn’t.

He snuffled, and I told him that I’d once recovered a stolen bike, which was not exactly true, though a roommate of mine had. After a while he started to calm down. I told a dumb joke and just as he lightly laughed I heard a sound similar to the ring of a telephone, and he reached into a slanted zipper-pocket on the side of his pants and took out a mobile phone. “Why do you have a phone?” I said.

“For safety,” he said before answering the call, soon into which he resumed crying.

“Is that your mom?” I said. He shook his head yes. “See, I told you you weren’t an orphan.” I held out my hand.

“This guy wants to talk to you,” Rowan said, and handed me the phone.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Why don’t you”—it was Wanda; Maryanne had passed off the phone—“have an answering machine?” she said.

“I hate answering machines.”

“We’ve been trying to get in touch with you for three weeks. You didn’t get my note?”

“What note?”

“I left a note with the super at your apartment.”

“The super’s a drug dealer,” I said.

“Well, he told me he’d get it to you.”

“Why is your house all boarded up?”

“For a film,” Wanda said. “Maryanne and her boyfriend are making a film.”

“The city allows that?”

“Filmmaking?” she said.

“No, not fucking filmmaking; boarding up a house like that just for kicks.”

“It’s not for kicks, it’s for a film. The back door isn’t boarded.”

“Rowan’s really distraught here. All alone, without a bike.”

“We’re on our way. Look, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Because it’s not gonna work.”

“What isn’t?”

“Renting the basement.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“I’m all moved out,” I said. “I’m on the street if you renege.”

“We’ve been trying to get in touch. All your emails bounced back.”

“I got a new address. I was getting all this porn spam at my old one.”

“Well, I don’t know, you can stay with us a few days, but it’s not gonna work long-term. Maryanne and Jeff are gonna live upstairs and I’m taking over the basement unit.”

“You’re gonna live in the basement of your own home?”

“That way they cover more of the mortgage. I’m overextended.”

“Is that why the place is boarded up?”

“No, that’s for the film. I just explained that.”

“Did Maryanne write the script?”

“I don’t think there’s a script.”

“Is this a stag film?”

“No—what? No!”

“I have a lease, Wanda.”

“If you want to live in the basement for two months, fine. But in that case I’m giving you your two months’ notice now.”

“It’s not right.”

“I’m really sorry about this. We’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.”

“You might have gone to greater lengths.”

She invited me again, this time with some tenderness, to crash at their place awhile. I didn’t know how to hang up the phone. I don’t mean I was apoplectic, though there might have been some of that; I mean I didn’t know which button to push, in part because I have little intuition for such things and in part because I cultivate a luddite or elderly helplessness that some find charming. I handed the phone back to Rowan. Seconds later the bullies returned, most on bikes, a few on foot. One of them hopped off Rowan’s bike and let it fall on one of the parking lot’s corners, then started running, leaving behind a few incomprehensible shouts. “Joy ride,” I said to Rowan, and explained the concept while we went to inspect the bike, a discount-store BMX painted a mean black and silver like the Oakland Raiders’ uniforms. Part of the joy, I told Rowan, is simply in riding on or in a strange vehicle, and part of it comes from knowing that the vehicle’s owner is, for instance, crying in a parking lot. He got on the bike. “There’s nothing quite like the happiness you feel when something bad didn’t happen after all,” I said, and he started to pedal, built up a good head of steam on the sidewalk, then sailed off the curb and back onto the lot.

I could have left then. Maryanne and Wanda were due back soon and seemingly laid-back about leaving Rowan alone with bullies. But I thought I’d better stay, so I pulled my twelve-speed out of Maggie’s van, and Rowan and I pedaled around the puddly lot. He did loops of no-hands and several jumps off the sidewalk ramps, sometimes whooping with the jump, while I rode off the saddle, coasting slowly, leaning over the handlebars, my legs locked straight, sometimes turning my face to the sun. I felt a strange mixture of calm and despair. Anything and nothing were possible. Then a young man whom I took for the youth minister, who earlier must not have heard the taunts and cries during and after the bike theft, came outside and commended Rowan’s balance, stayed at Rowan’s request to watch a few more tricks. I stopped coasting, straddled my bike, and the sweat-shirted possible youth minister and I watched Rowan together for a minute or two. As he opened his car door, the minister gave me a complimentary smile and wave, stinging in its kindness and misdirection, though I relished it for a moment.

Maryanne, Wanda, and a man unknown to me, the filmmaker-boyfriend presumably, pulled into the lot a few minutes later. I rode up to Rowan. “You’re a good boy,” I said, almost sternly, and booked over to Maggie’s van. Rowan yelled goodbye and Maryanne yelled “Hey!” but I didn’t turn around. I had some trouble wedging the bike back into the van—the boyfriend called out to offer a hand—but I managed. I climbed into the driver’s seat without looking over at the group, pulled carefully away from the curb to avoid any embarrassing tire squeals, then drove abstractedly for half an hour, briefly thought about driving to some clean-slate city or town, Fostoria or Wapakoneta, say. But I had almost no money, and before long Maggie Tollefsrud and I were unloading the van and replacing some of its benches. My homelessness made me more receptive to her deathless advances, and it was in her bed, six months later, that I watched Sting and others usher in the briefly anti-climactic new millennium.

O
N MY TRIP BACK TO ENSWELL, I FOUND A microfilmed review of Bolling’s concert at the Enswell Municipal Auditorium (HED: “The Greene-ing of Enswell” SUBHED: “Country Star Heats Up EMA”), which is how I’m able to say that Wade, my mother, and I went to Bey’s Food Host for the last time together on November 10, 1978, just before the show. I keep mentioning these dates, as if the dates themselves were important. By citing them I must hope that a few indisputable facts will offset the mysteries I’m forced or impelled to let stand. There is something pleasing about the certainty, about being able to mark the origins of a distant memory on a calendar, as diarists’ can, or as most of us can for our lifetime’s historically notable dates. There must be dates from which I have two or more discrete and relatively insignificant memories whose proximity I’ve forgotten (this fascinates me), as well as dates (hundreds? thousands?) that fall well within my postmemorial life but from which I nonetheless have no memories (these vanished days fascinate me too—today, I suspect, will become one).

At Bey’s I got a plain hamburger, black and crispy on the outside, instead of my habitual D-Luxe Frenchy. All the booths were full so we had to sit at one of the tables. I conducted a football game between differently colored sugar packets. The owner-manager stood by the cash register whistling “Wichita Lineman.” Wade and Marleen were reconciled uneasily, like the somewhat accusable harmonies Bolling and his band sang later that night.

From Bey’s we drove Wade’s dolphin-like coupe down hilly Foster Avenue to the auditorium. I sat as usual between the adults on the front bench, my mother’s hand on my knee. In the parking lot, Wade kept the car running, reached over the seat, lifted a baby blanket, and picked up a compartmental black leather case, a jewelry case or, I thought at the time, a tackle box (but tackle boxes are rarely if ever made of leather). “Oh Lord, put that away,” my mother said. I looked intently at the case. Bolling’s “West Texas Winds” was on the radio: “The west Texas winds / Blow angles in the rain / Tinfoil down the lane / It’s still a-crinklin’ in my brain.” Wade must have turned the dome light on, or perhaps by radio- and lot-light I got a good look at the contents of the case, the bottles of pills, the assorted plastic baggies: grams of coke, quarters of weed. Also needles—I thought I saw needles, but when I asked my mother about this much later she said that Wade never dealt heroin, that there was no real market for it in Enswell; most likely, she said, I’d seen Wade’s darts, since back then he carried around his own set.

Spirits were high in the auditorium as we walked underground to the main floor or basketball court and found our seats. It was open seating, but a friend of Wade’s from KECF had set aside some folding chairs for us near the front. Our names-even mine—were Sharpied on typing paper and taped to the backs of the chairs. The seats in the stands were various colors, and I tried to count if there were more empty reds or more empty greens, but soon there were hardly any empties at all. Over a tenth of the city was there (well, many attendees must have come from smaller towns nearby). I doubt Bolling’s performance was cynical, impartial, or perfunctory, but I know it wasn’t magical like the State Fair show. I could feel my mother’s enthusiasm quickly wane. The crowd seemed satisfied, though. They stood up for some of the fast songs, so that all I could see were backs, asses, and legs, though Wade lifted me up for part of “In Spades,” one of Bolling’s clunkers (“But now I know I dig you in the sunshine and the shade / So darling, please come back to me in spades”). After Wade put me down he left his seat to talk with one of the security guys. During the encore, my mother told me years later, Wade leaned into her ear, said he was going backstage. She could come too if she wanted, he said. “What am I supposed to do with him?” she said, pointing at me. He gave her the car keys. “I hate driving your car,” she might have said. “Well, you guys can wait for me if you want,” he might have answered. They argued a bit more, and in the end he said he’d see her at home, that he’d walk or get a lift. I watched the security guard step aside to let Wade backstage. Wade was wearing a long-sleeved henley shirt, navy blue with one wide horizontal red stripe across the middle, and I could still see the red stripe through the glamorous smoke after I’d lost sight of the rest of him. My mother and I didn’t stay for the whole encore. Backstage, I later learned, there was more than the average partying, and then the band, crew, and tagalongs moved to Oran’s, where there was an after-hours guitar pull and dart tournament, Wade victorious.

I was awake that next morning when Wade left in the silver bus, behind schedule, the driver-trombonist hopped up for a long day of lead-footing. My mother always said I slept through his exit, as was noted earlier, implying that I’d made up my memory, but the reliability of her narration has been questioned. I clearly remember hearing the commotion, remember sneaking out to the living room, peering through the mail slot. Wade and Bolling were on the front lawn, Marleen was on the stoop, closest to me, and accordingly seemed much taller than the others (she would have been an inch or two taller than Bolling even if they’d all been standing on the same level). By the time my eyes made it to the mailbox, the three of them, it seemed, had been talking and fighting awhile. The first thing I made out was Bolling saying, “Marleen, we gots to ramble.” And then my mother let loose: “Be quiet, you fucking clown. You Bozo, you charlatan, you fucking sellout. Take off that vest, that fucking hat, take off that fucking hat. You.” She pointed. “You sold us out, you and all the rest. Take off that stupid hat.”

Wade looked at the ground. I’m not sure why my mother took out her rage and disappointment on Bolling, who, clearly hurt, started playing the jester on cue, looking fixedly at the ground, circling one of our rented spruce trees, patting his pockets. “So where’s my money, Marleen?” he said. “From the sellout. Where is it?”

“Who gave you permission to call me by my first name?” my mother said.

“Ours is an informal nation, Marleen,” Bolling said.

“Get back on your bus.”

“Marleen, I’m coming back,” Wade said.

“No, you’re not,” she said. “Get on your bus. Get on your bus.”

So they did, and I scampered back into my room. I listened for the front door and screen, both squeaky; they didn’t open for half an hour. Maybe my mother was smoking and crying on the stoop, or maybe she cried later. I know I waited a half hour for the doors to open because I watched my little white bedside alarm clock. Its hour and minute hands were black, which is standard, but its second hand was blue, which is not; most clocks in that all-business style have red second hands. See, I remember. And then when my mother came in the room to check on me (not to wake me up, it being a Saturday), I quickly closed my eyes and expertly played asleep.

S
ECONDS AFTER THE DISPIRITED YOUNG WOMAN FOR some reason walked away from preparing my toasted sub sandwich, a fly landed on a frayed, floppy edge of roast beef and started working its way to the congealing white cheese. The sandwich went unattended for at least a minute. My useless attempts to shoo the fly through the sneezeguard seemed to amuse the
UPS
driver behind me in line. Mentally I practiced the lordly umbrage I’d use in demanding a new sandwich, but when the young woman returned, seeming more dispirited than before, I let it slide. I left my car in the sub shop’s parking lot and walked in the sunny Milwaukee afternoon to the Golda Meir Library, for several blocks tasting irrational hints of the fly’s filth.