The Clarinet Polka (66 page)

*   *   *

So I came back from my little camping trip, and I hadn't arrived at any profound conclusions, and about a week later I got a call from Linda. The record I'd paid for had just come out, and she was telling me how wonderful it was, what a terrific cover and how clean and crisp the sound was, a real professional job. And they were going to play at the Pączki Ball at the church at the end of February, and that was going to be their first public appearance since the record came out, and, oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could come back for it? And I made up some excuse the way I always did—how I'd used up my vacation time or some damn thing—and she sounded real disappointed the way she always did, but the minute I hung up the phone, I thought, hey, why not?

But of course I couldn't possibly get the time off, right? I just happened to mention it to my supervisor, and he said, “Sure. You want to take a week off? No problem.” Nobody in their right mind wants to take their vacation time in February.

I was running out of time, so I figured I couldn't possibly get a hop anywhere back east at that late date. “Pittsburgh, huh? Sure. Just so long as you don't want to go on the weekend.” People don't fly much in February.

I didn't really believe I was going until I got on the plane. I didn't bother to tell my sister because I didn't want to disappoint her if I changed my mind at the last minute. But I didn't change my mind at the last minute. I changed it after we were in the air.

TWENTY-THREE

So there I am flying into the Pittsburgh Airport on a Monday afternoon, and I'm just not ready for the Pittsburgh Airport. It was a pissy little dump back in those days—like an overgrown bus station—and the weather was miserable, cold with blowing rain, and it just depressed the hell out of me. I rented a car. I forget exactly what, a compact of some kind, and if I'd fired it up and aimed it south, I would have been in Raysburg by dinnertime, but that isn't what I did. I drove to the Holiday Inn and I checked into it. If you asked me why I did that, I really couldn't tell you.

They weren't doing a booming business so they gave me a big fancy room for the price of an ordinary one, and I dumped my flight bag into the middle of the floor and fell over onto one of the double beds and lay there for maybe an hour watching whatever little bit of daylight was left, and I watched it turn into nothing, and eventually I got up and slithered down to the dining room, and it took every bit of resolve I had not to drink my dinner. I kept thinking, so what did you expect, asshole? A motel room at the Pittsburgh Airport? I just didn't know what the hell I was doing there.

I went back up to my room and called room service and had them bring me a six-pack of tonic water. They probably figured I had a fifth of gin, but I didn't have any gin. If you're used to drinking, you like to have something to drink even if it hasn't got any alcohol in it, and I liked the bitter taste of tonic water, and there's no caffeine so you don't get wired like a Christmas tree, and if you've picked up a touch of malaria, well, it takes care of that too.

So I'm pacing up and down and bouncing off the walls, and I'm sucking back the tonic water, and I'm watching the latest installment of Watergate on the tube. I'd been following it real close. Hell, it was better than the World Series. Do you remember that shit? Is Nixon going to turn over the tapes or is he not going to turn over the tapes? Gee, wonder how they got all those big holes in the tapes? And of course it all comes down to the big question—are they going to get that sucker or not? Are they going to impeach his sorry ass or what? Like a lot of people, I really wanted to see him go down.

Eventually I ran out of news programs, so I was reduced to flipping through the channels looking for any show with some pretty girls in it. I kept thinking that maybe I should just fly back to Texas in the morning. The Ohio Valley felt like a black hole to me—like the minute I hit the gravitational field down there, I'd be sucked right into it and never be seen again—and I can't begin to tell you what was going on in my head. You ever get so scared you can't think straight?

So there I am pacing back and forth till God knows when—after four in the morning, anyway—and I figured, what the hell, maybe I could catch a few Z's, so I crawled into one of the beds, and then I tossed and turned for a couple more hours, having those horrible dreams you can't quite remember. I must have wore myself right out because when I did get to sleep, I was just gone.

I woke up and it was two in the afternoon. Checkout time was noon, but they didn't have a lot of customers—I did happen to mention it was February, didn't I?—and I'd put that “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door, and they'd let me sleep. I went down and had a nice big breakfast. By then I'd been at the Pittsburgh Airport for damn near twenty-four hours.

I shaved and had a nice long shower. I put on a western shirt and a clean pair of jeans, and my belt with the silver buckle, and my cowboy boots—so anybody who saw me would know me for a nice fellow from Texas and maybe they'd let me go back there. I climbed in that dumb little car and drove south—and driving, you know, has always been a good thing for me. I remember a lot more rain and a country music station on the radio. I wasn't feeling any too wonderful, but at least my mind was clear, and I thought, Koprowski, you fool, you're afraid to see Janice.

I didn't need any sign to tell me I was in West Virginia because, like always, I could feel it under my wheels as all of a sudden the road went from good to lousy. And there was the river—the big sad dirty Ohio—and I was following along it same as always, and it looked like nothing had changed and nothing would ever change. There's those lumpy hills all stripped and shit brown in the winter, and the Staubsville Mill blazing away against that pissy gray sky, and all I've got to do is keep on driving south. Then there I am, pulling up in front of our house. I put on my cowboy hat because that's what you wear to keep the rain off your head out in Texas, and I got out of the car and walked up the steps.

I'll never forget this. It was one of the weirdest moments of my life. It wasn't quite dark yet, but the streetlights were on. The rain was blowing itself out, and the sky was clearing, and it was that beautiful painful blue you get sometimes just on the edge of the dark, and there was all this yellow light pouring out of our window, and I felt like— I don't know how to say this. Well, it was like I'd died and I was some kind of ghost.

I'd helped my father put that window in—although I don't know how much help I would have been. I was about ten at the time. Most of the houses in South Raysburg were built back in the twenties and they had dumb little windows, and then in the fifties a lot of the guys decided they needed nice big picture windows in their living rooms. Of course Old Bullet Head did it himself, and I remember being amazed that you could cut a bigger hole in your wall, and bring in a pane of glass without breaking it, and get it to fit into that hole in your wall, and finish it off so it looked just like an honest-to-God window. I remember thinking that you had to be a real grown-up man to be able to do something like that.

Mom hadn't shut the drapes yet. I don't know why I stopped and looked in the window. And I could see through the living room right on back to the dining room, and Mom was doing something in there. She looked kind of preoccupied, or sad, and it just felt so strange to be standing outside watching her—with her not knowing I'm there. Like if she was thinking about me at all, she was probably imagining me out in Texas. I watched her go into the kitchen and come back with some more stuff on a tray, and I finally figured out what she was doing. That was all the
pączki
she'd made, and she was getting ready to take them to the church.

It was my house—or it used to be—so why didn't I just walk in? Or I could have rung the bell or knocked or something. But it was like I was a stranger, like I'd never lived there, like I didn't even have the right to be there. And then all of a sudden I just couldn't stand it anymore, so I went charging right inside, and Mom jumped about a foot.

I'm going, “Hi,
Mamusiu
,” and she's going, “Oh, Jimmy! Mother of God, I can't believe it.” She's hugging me and saying all these dumb things and, you know, patting me like she's got to make sure I'm real. “Scare me half to death, why don't you?” she says. “You about gave me heart failure. What are you doing here? You haven't lost your job, have you?”

“No, no, no. I've just got a week off, and—”

“Everything all right? Look at you, there's no meat on you. Have you been sick?”

“Oh, no, Mom, I'm healthy as a horse.”

“What's the matter? Aren't you eating?”

“Are you kidding? I eat everything I can get my hands on.”

“My God, Jimmy, your sister's going to die when she sees you. Oh, where's your father? I've got to get my
pączki
over to the church. Here, eat one—no, no, take a hot one. Where the hell
is
your father? Jimmy, I just can't believe you're here. I saw you walking in, and I thought, who's that damn cowboy just walking right into my house?”

My mom's going on and on, same as always. “Your sister,” she says, “she's got even crazier. I could just weep when I think of all the money that was spent on her education, and all she cares about is playing in that polka band with Mary Jo Duda and those other crazy girls.”

And she's telling me about the girls Linda's age who've got married already, but fat chance of Linda ever marrying anybody when all she does is play her trumpet. “Your sister got one of those mute things because she was driving your dad and me nuts,” she says, “and you'd think it'd help, wouldn't you?”

And does Linda go out on dates? Are you kidding? All she does is hang out with that little Dłuwiecki girl and Bob Pajaczkowski's crazy daughter, the tattooed lady. “I've spent my whole life surrounded by crazy people,” my mother says, “so why did I expect it was ever going to be any different?”

I'm standing there munching on a
pączek
and laughing at my mother, and thinking, hey, this ain't so bad, and Old Bullet Head walks in. His mouth just drops open. “Look here, Walt,” my mother says, “see what the cat drug in.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” he says.

I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in my life I hugged my father, and we didn't start out to hug each other, but it turned out that way. “Aw, you dumb jerk,” he says. “It's great to see you. When'd you get in? What are you doing here?”

“I came back for the Pączki Ball.”

“You didn't quit your job, did you?”

“Come on, Dad, give me a break. No, I did not quit my job. I didn't get fired either. I got a week's vacation.”

So my father and I carried all the
pączki
out to his car—the latest one of his blue Chryslers—and he says to me under his breath, “You still on the straight and narrow?”

“Oh, you bet,” I said. “I wouldn't trade my sobriety for a million bucks.” It was a standard-issue AA line, but I believed it—or anyhow I was doing my best to believe it.

*   *   *

We got to the church, and Old Bullet Head wanted to play a trick on Linda. That's the kind of sense of humor he's got. So I had to wait outside, and he went inside to tell her some damn fool story he'd cooked up. She steps out the side door from the parish hall, and she's got this annoyed look on her face, and then she sees me and just bursts into tears. She flings her arms around me, and she's laughing and crying at the same time, going, “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, I can't believe it!” The old man's standing there grinning at us like an idiot.

“Dad, that was really mean,” she says. “You know what he told me? He said, ‘Hey, Linny, there's some strange cowboy outside wants to talk to you for a minute.' And I kept saying, ‘What? What cowboy? I don't know any cowboys.'”

She leads me into the parish hall, and she's talking a mile a minute—still crying, you know—and hanging on to me like she's afraid if she lets go, I'll vanish instantly back to Texas, and it's like something's melted inside me. The minute I saw my sister, I knew coming back was the right thing to do.

We go plunging into your basic pandemonium. It's a couple hours till the festivities start, but it takes a lot of volunteers to put on an event like that, and they're all running around—guys from the men's club setting up tables, and the ladies from the sodality coming in with their doughnuts, and people coming in to do whatever—take the tickets, or sell you setups or beer, or doing anything else that needs to get done so you can have yourself a good time at the Pączki Ball.

They've got the hall decorated real nice with red and white crepe paper, and they've put in a little stage for the band—not real high, just a low platform to get them off the floor—and behind the stage there's the Stars and Stripes on one side and on the other there's the Polish flag, I guess to remind us we're Polish Americans in case any of us forgot it for a minute there. It's all so damn familiar, and I know everybody I see—guys shaking my hand, like Patty Pajaczkowski's dad and Larry Dombrowczyk's dad, going, “Hey, Jimmy, great to see you,” and it's all too much—I can't take it in—and Linda's still hanging on to me, telling me how thin I am, and asking me if I'm okay, and not giving me a chance to answer her because she won't shut up long enough.

She keeps trying to lead me back to where the band's setting up, but we keep getting stopped. Here's Burdalski and some of the other guys from the PAC—Bob Winnicki and Franky Wierzcholek and I don't know who all— coming in with kegs of beer, and they've got to do their “Hey, Koprowski, what the hell you doing here? You get lost or something?”