The Clarinet Polka (3 page)

When I ran forty-five yards and scored a winning touchdown against the Academy, he forgot that in about a week, but for years he just loved telling the stories of my various little escapades. Like, “Hey, Jimmy, remember that night when you were in high school and you and—I don't know who all—was it Georgie Mondrowski and Bobby Burdalski? And you stole a couple fifths from the PAC and got shitfaced and got arrested for knocking over a parking meter while doing a U-turn on a one-way street in Barton, Ohio, at four in the morning?”

So anyhow, there we are at dinner, and he can't get me for missing half a day's work, but he has to get me for something, so he starts in about Dave Lemish's boy, how he got out of the service and figured he'd take advantage of the GI Bill, so he's down at Morgantown getting himself a degree.

“Come on, Dad,” I say, “I already had a run at that one, and if you recall, I didn't exactly distinguish myself. Besides, you got me that damn job with Vick.”

“Well, you're not exactly going anywhere fast on that one, are you?” he says just like I've been working for Vick for ten years.

You remember the generation gap? Everybody was talking about it back in those days. So here's the generation gap opening up at our kitchen table. My father wants to know what exactly is it I want out of life anyway. What are my plans? And I'm saying, hey, I just got out of the service. Plans? The biggest plan I got is getting up in the morning, and so he's got to tell me yet again that when he was growing up, it was the height of the Depression and he didn't even finish high school—let alone play football or go to proms or any of that other good shit—and then it was the war, and when
he
got out of the service, he already had a kid—me, to be exact—and all he could do was grab the first job he could find and hang on to it for dear life, and he sure as hell didn't have the luxury to let his hair grow halfway down to his asshole and sit around staring at his navel, and so, of course, Linda and Mom have got to defend me and talk about how times have changed, and all the kids are wearing their hair long now—it's just a style—and how I've just got to find myself, and how I'll be surprising him one of these days. “Oh, yeah?” he says. “I already got more surprises out of him than one man can handle.”

“Give him a break, Dad,” Linda says,
“jeszcze się taki nie urodził, co by wszystkim dogodził.”

My sister is the only person I know our age who would suddenly break out in Polish like that, and it's just one of those old sayings that's almost exactly like what we'd say in English, “Nobody can please everybody,” but Linda thinks— I don't know what she thinks. Maybe if she says it in Polish, it'll come out all covered with ancient peasant wisdom like dirt on a potato she's just dug up. My parents give her that look they always give her when she does that. They respect her in a weird kind of way for her lifelong attachment to the Polish language, but they also think she's totally nuts.

“Yeah,” Old Bullet Head says, “that may be. But let me tell you a little secret, Lindusia”—that's what he calls her when she's been talking Polish at him and he wants to tease her about it—“you got to please
some
of the people
some
of the time.”

*   *   *

It's true, I wasn't pleasing anybody very much, and least of all was I pleasing myself. All I really did that spring was drive around in Vick's panel truck. The last few months I'd been down at Eglin, I'd been like a convict doing hard time, but then when I got home, I kept thinking, hey, I got out for
this?
Everything bugged me or made me sad. There I was in the Ohio Valley where I'd sworn I'd never live again, and I just couldn't get used to the idea that Ron Jacobson was dead.

I'd go out on a call to someplace—like Bridgeport—and I'd be gone two hours because once I got in the truck, I just had to keep driving. How Vick put up with me, I'll never know. And everything looked so damn familiar because that's where I'd grown up, and everything looked— I don't know, just ugly as all hell because I didn't want to be there. The river defines everything—you're either going up the river or down the river or away from the river. You're either on the West Virginia side or the Ohio side. And all along the river on both sides there's steel mills with their stacks sticking up, pouring crap into the sky. The hills in the summer look like lumpy green sponges, and there's a million little roads twisting around them, and they keep slapping up more highways so you can drive faster from one end of the valley to the other, going nowhere.

Neither one of my grandfathers was planning on staying here. I don't remember Dziadzio Koprowski, my dad's dad. He died when I was a little kid, but I grew up hearing all these stories about him. He was a steady, quiet man—my dad always said that about him—and like a lot of guys back in the old country in those days, he was wandering around all over the damn place looking to make a few bucks. That's back when Poland was partitioned, and he was desperate for work, so it didn't seem like a big deal to try America, where they said a strong man could always get a job and every day you ate meat like you were a landowner.

Now Dziadzio Wojtkiewicz, my mom's dad, I remember him real clear and I always will. He was a
góral
—that means a guy from the mountains—and he was real proud of it. “Yeah, I'm a Polak hillbilly,” he'd say with his big laugh. He liked to drink vodka, and if he got enough in him, he'd sing you those Polak hillbilly songs with that old-country wobble in his voice. The guys from the mountains—well, hell, they were the best damn men in the world. They could sing, and they could dance, and they could work, and they could fight, and they could screw better than anybody—that's what he told me—and when he came over here, he was going to make the big bucks and then he was going to go back and buy himself a nice little place up there in the Tatra Mountains.

Both my grandfathers got hired as common laborers at Raysburg Steel, and neither one of them made it back to the old country. And those guys and their wives—all that first generation—settled down in South Raysburg close to that blast furnace in Millwood, and they worked their asses off.

God knows how they did it, but they built St. Stanislaus Church, and they brought in a young Polish priest straight out of the seminary in Detroit to minister to their spiritual needs—that was Father Joe Stawecki—and they built a little school and brought in the Felician Nuns to teach at it so their kids could get a good Catholic education. They had Polish baseball teams and basketball teams and football teams, and Polish Boy Scouts, and half a dozen different Polish political organizations, and a Polish choir, and for a while there even Polish dancers. They kept up the customs they remembered from the old country, and they stuck together and minded their own business, and they made it through that big ugly strike in 1919, and they made it through the Depression, and they helped build the USWA in the valley, and they hung on to their little bits of property any way they could and kept up their houses real nice, and they sent their sons off to the war—the big one—and if you want to read the names of the ones that didn't come back, they're on a bronze plaque at the back of the church. And they did all that so assholes like me could have a better life. And I didn't give a shit about any of it.

I didn't give a shit about much of anything. I didn't want to see any more of that polluted river. I didn't want to see any more steel mills. Any day now I was going to Austin, Texas, but in the meantime I was just driving around, killing time. Christ, I kept thinking, nothing makes any sense.

They'd just slapped up a little mall on the Ohio side out near St. Stevens. By modern standards, it wasn't much of a mall, but it was the first one anywhere around here, and it was already pulling in lots of people. I had no call whatsoever to go out there, but it was spring, and I liked sitting on a bench watching the honeys go by.

So I see this girl, right? In my head I called her “the Mommy” because she had a little kid with her. I don't remember much about the kid except it was a boy. I didn't exactly have kids on my mind in those days.

I figured she was about my age. She had on an outfit that made everybody stare at her. It was pink and looked like a jumper you'd put on a four-year-old—you know, with a real short skirt and the straps that go over the shoulders and those little-kid shoes the girls wore back then—and she had an extremely well developed figure, much too well developed for that outfit. She was wearing mirror sunglasses, and she had dark brown hair and a Beatle haircut with bangs that came right down to the top of the sunglasses, and she didn't look like anything you'd expect to see in the Ohio Valley.

I followed her into the record store and pretended to be looking for something. I got close enough to her to smell her perfume. She looked well kept, and of course she was wearing a wedding ring. What I thought I liked in the girl department was those Texas skinny-ass blue-jean babies, and the Mommy wasn't like that at all. I don't know if I've got the point through to you or not, but she was
exceptionally
well endowed, I mean centerfold stuff. “Hey, honey, you're looking good,” I said to her.

She didn't seem surprised. “Don't call me honey,” she said. She sounded bored, like I was some fool she'd known for years.

“Okay, honey,” I said, and she didn't move away. I told her some lies about how I'd just got back from Nam and she was the prettiest thing I'd seen since I got stateside.

She had a way of standing with her ass stuck out that I found extremely interesting, so I told her what I'd like to do to her. Exactly. Like a bull humps a cow, is what I said. Then I went on and described it to her in graphic detail. She didn't look like she was paying any attention to me, but she didn't walk away either. The kid was over on the other side of the store, so I just kept on talking my trash to her.

It wasn't the first time I'd said something like that to a girl, but it was the first time I'd done it sober. Usually what happened was nothing, and the best that ever happened was the girl laughed and said, “Shut up and buy me a drink, you asshole”—that was in Fort Worth and it says something about Texas girls—and the worst that ever happened was I got a frozen daiquiri thrown in my face. It'd never crossed my mind that a girl might be offended, like deep-down offended. It was just a dumb thing you did if you were in the service.

She turned to me, and where her eyes should have been, all I could see was myself looking back in those dead-eye sunglasses. In the same kind of voice you'd say “nice weather” she said, “Follow me, but don't be obvious about it.”

She took the kid into the pinball gallery. When I came along behind them, she was talking to the man in there, and he kept shaking his head no, but she laid a bill on him, and it must have been one of those higher denominations because all of a sudden there was no problem, and he went and found a chair for the kid to stand on. She asked me if I had any change—so much for not being obvious about it—and I gave her all the change I had, and we left the kid there and walked out into the sunshine.

“Where do you want to do it?” she said.

“I've got a panel truck,” I said. She followed me. We climbed in, and I moved the toolboxes out of the way and shut the doors. I tried to kiss her, but she pulled away. “That isn't what you said you wanted to do,” she told me.

I needed to see her eyes, but she didn't take the sunglasses off, and I knew somehow I shouldn't reach out and take them off her. She didn't say another word, but she pushed back from me, kind of like, come on, you jerk, give me some room, and sat down cross-legged and took her shoes off. She hiked her skirt up and pulled off her pantyhose and her panties and tossed them over on top of her shoes. She turned over onto her knees and lay facedown and shoved her ass up. She just waited like that, absolutely still, with her bare ass sticking up under that little pink skirt.

For a minute all I could do was stare at her, and I remember thinking, hey, what if I can't get it up? Because it was like she was daring me to do exactly what I'd said I wanted to do. But then, all of a sudden, the old lust kicks in and I've got no problem—just like I'd said, I'm a bull on a cow. Humping away. Not a thought in my head. I can hear her trying not to make any noise, but she can't help it. A kind of whistling, moaning sound's coming out of her, and I just love that sound, and then it's over in nothing flat, and she stays where she is like she's turned to stone.

I wanted to say something but I didn't know what. I mean, what the hell could you say? We're both of us covered with sweat because it's real close in there with the doors shut. Eventually she sits up. She puts her pantyhose in her purse and her panties back on and her shoes on over her bare feet. She still doesn't say a damn thing. She points to the doors. I open them up, let her get out first. The fresh air feels wonderful. We couldn't have been in the truck ten minutes, if that long.

“Don't follow me,” she says and walks away.

I got the Jack Daniel's out and had my first drink of the day. I didn't give a shit who saw me. I had that wonderful satisfied feeling you get like you're on top of the world. At the same time, I felt kind of sad, and— Well, you know that feeling you get sometimes that something terrible is going to happen but you can't imagine why or what it could possibly be? I leaned back against the truck and looked up into the sky. I've thought about this plenty, but still I couldn't tell you exactly what was going on in my head. I remember I was faced away from the sun and the sky was so bright it was like looking at nothing.

TWO

You'd think I'd be feeling pretty good about myself, right? Scoring like that? But I didn't feel all that good, even right afterward, and eventually that crazy girl I'd tapped at the mall turned out to be just something else to get depressed about. But I couldn't stop thinking about her.