The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove (2 page)

I speak loudly to my neighbor in the Tap so he can hear me over the omnipresent television set mounted above the bar. Other patrons cast a wary eye at me.

“Antonio Vivaldi was a late seventeenth-century Italian composer, and lived halfway into the eighteenth,” I say. The guy beside me is looking panicky, so I hurry on before he can bolt: “You may know his composition,
Four Seasons.
Probably you’ve heard it on an elevator in Madison or somewhere—but Vivaldi composed a lot of other great stuff, too: concertos, a bunch of oratorios, more than ninety operas. He wrote pieces for lute and viola da gamba and pianoforte, chorales—even songs for solo voice. He made his living teaching music in a fancy school for orphan girls. He was an ordained priest, but he was always sniffing around the young ladies and sometimes the prefects had to send him away to cool off.”

I give these little twists in my biographies sometimes to give them a snap that folks in Soldiers Grove might relate to.

“Oh . . . yeah?” the guy says to me out of the side of his mouth. He still hasn’t looked at me.

“What’s your name?” I ask. “Mine’s Cyril.” I stick my hand out for a shake.

He’s slow to respond, but at last he says, “Vern,” and holds out some limp fingers for me to grasp.

“Well, Vern, let me tell you a little more that might surprise you: Vivaldi apparently had some influence on Johann Sebastian Bach. They lived around the same time, and scholars have found transcriptions of Vivaldi’s music in Bach’s hand. They never met, but it seems like Bach might have taken some leads from Vivaldi. Bach wrote a lot of music, and he was a raunchy guy, too, but he wasn’t hung up being a priest like Vivaldi, so he had twenty-two kids.”

Vern finally gives me a quick flash, to make sure I don’t seem too dangerous, then he swishes his drink around and drains it to the cubes. It looks like a double Jack Daniel’s. That was my father’s drink—starting around eight in the morning.

“Vivaldi was a grouchy guy, too,” I hurry on, “he was always stewing about things. Maybe his chastity made him irritable. He used to pack a knife in his cloak, and if anyone messed with him on the street in Venice, he’d back them off fast.” I’m pumping this part up too, trying to make things interesting for Vern, but I see he’s trying to signal Burkhum for his tab.

“I got to go see to my milking,” he explains from the side of his mouth.

I hurry on, “One time Vivaldi sliced up a gondolier for shortchanging him, but they let him off without a charge because he was in the middle of composing an oratorio for the king. In those days governments gave you a little credit for being artistic.”

Burkhum comes over—but before Vern can ask for his bill, I say, “Hey, Burkhum, give me another Leinie, and I’d like to buy Vern here another of whatever he’s drinking.” Vern relaxes just a little now. Double mixed drinks cost four big ones in the Tap, and Burkhum puts out big plastic bowls of fresh popcorn on Friday nights.

“Maybe you don’t favor music, Vern,” I say. “I see you’re wearing a Brewers hat. How about a little baseball? You know you look a little like Cookie Lavagetto, too.” Vern is starting to look uneasy again. Burkhum brings our drinks and Vern takes a big pull on his double, but doesn’t thank me. I go on talking.

“Cookie came up with the Pirates in 1934, and then was traded to Brooklyn in ’37. He became the Dodgers’ regular third baseman in ’39 and hit .300. But in a few years he got drafted for the war and didn’t get back to baseball until ’46. Mostly he warmed the bench for the Dodgers then because they had Spider Jorgensen playing third. In the ’47 World Series against the Yankees, in the fourth game, Bill Bevens is tossing a no-hitter in the ninth, but he walks the first two guys. The Dodgers decide to put Cookie in to pinch hit, and he smacks a double off the right field wall to ruin Bevens’s no-hitter and beat the Yankees 2-1. Cookie is king of Brooklyn.

“How did the Dodgers thank Lavagetto for this? They released him the next season. He’d given them everything he had. Baseball’s like Russian communism. You get the red star one day, and you disappear the next.”

Vern seems a little more interested in this biography, but he is still leaning away like he’s expecting me to explode at any minute.

“Hey, Vern,” I say. “Am I boring you? That’s all I know about Cookie Lavagetto and Antonio Vivaldi. Would you like to know what I know about Alfred Sisley or Buck Clayton? Harold Stassen? Cagliostro? Bucky Pizzarelli? Sara Teasdale? Saint James the Greater? Amelita Galli-Curci? How about Sonny Tufts? Sister Kenny? Maybe you like those Italians. Cosimo de Medici? Boom Boom Mancini? Johnny Antonelli? Amedeo Modigliani?”

But Vern is gone. He knocks his glass over making his break and spills ice cubes down the bar. Everyone’s looking at me, and I feel like a backhoe on a wet clay tennis court. What the hell
is
wrong with me? Why do I go on gassing like this? Why can’t I just stay in my room and keep my trap shut?

Because I have all this stuff in my head—I’ve got to let some of it out once in a while or I’ll explode. I mean, what the hell! I am keeper of the
lives
! That’s important. This is my work, but I’m like a guy who mucks out barns for a living. People stand clear of me.

Burkhum brings me the bill. “Bring me another Leinie, please,” I say.

“That’s enough today, Cyril,” Burkhum says. “The nurses are going to be in here looking for you in a minute, and they’re going to give me holy hell as it is.”

“Well, I don’t want to be a problem for you.” I pay my tab. “Say, Burkhum, did anyone ever tell you, you look like Sinclair Lewis?” Burkhum quick steps away.

Just as I’m fixing to put on my stocking cap and leave the Tap, a guy I know from the nursing home comes in the door. His name is Nobleson. He lives in the “self-sufficient” section and can take a powder anytime he wants. He doesn’t have to sneak out like I do. Nobleson checks out the crowd and sees me waving to him. He hesitates, but then slowly heads over because he knows I’ve got dough and will buy him a drink.

“Nobleson,” I greet him. “How’re you, buddy boy? Sit down here for a minute. What are you drinking? You know, when you were walking over here I was thinking to myself that you look like Arthur Godfrey.”

Nobleson knows the course, so he steers me in a direction he favors more. “Not me,” he says. “You’re thinking about somebody else. But I’ve always been told that I look a lot like a young Van Johnson.”

“Now
there’s
a guy!” I say to Nobleson.

Burkhum has approached us. “Double Old Crow on ice,” Nobleson tells him.

“And give me another Leinie,” I say.

“Crow coming up,” says Burkhum, “but no Leinie for you, Cyril. You need a nap.”

Burkhum is sometimes an obscenity. “Burkhum,” I say to him, “you remind me of George Jeffreys. You know who he was?”

Burkhum wipes off the bar in front of us, but he doesn’t answer.

“He was the hanging judge for King James; the ‘Bloody Assizer,’ they called him, the keeper of the seal. The king’s muscle. He’d swing anyone from the gallows if they mouthed off about the king. No questions asked—and no defense allowed.”

“Sure, Cyril,” Burkhum says. “And I’ll be a bloody abettor if I give you another Leinie.” Burkhum might be a prick, but I have to admit, he has some snap. He went to the university in Madison for a year before he started tending bar.

“But you!” I turn back to Nobleson, “You
are
a ringer for a young Van Johnson.”

I have to admit here, I’m in a bit of a panic, scuffling with my gray cells, trying to come up with the goods on Johnson. I’m getting just a little rusty as I get older. I haven’t thought about Van Johnson in years, and the four Leinies have addled me a bit—but there’s some Johnson stuff in there, I know it, and I can feel it beginning to shake loose, the filamentous branching of my neurons is extending. Then—aha! Bingo.

“The Human Comedy,
now wasn’t Van Johnson in that? He played a young guy going off to the Second World War. Wasn’t that his first movie?” Clickety-click-click, I was on my way now. “Mickey Rooney was in it, too. And Frank Morgan. From a William Saroyan novel. Schmaltzy, but pretty good. It was okay to be a little sappy in those days.

“Let’s see. What was next for Van Johnson?
A Guy Named Joe
. Then
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
. They liked him playing young soldiers. Hell of a story. Pilot gets shot down and loses his B-25. Johnson did a heap of suffering in that movie. That was a big one for him. You’re right, buddy. You
do
look like him. He was a pretty boy.”

Nobleson is smiling at me in a sort of wonder. “You are a living Google,” he says, and shakes his head.

I’m not sure I know what he means, but I don’t think it’s an insult—something about all this electric gibberish floating through the air these days—but I was buttering him up, trying to keep him sitting on his stool. “Van Johnson . . . let’s see.
The Last Time I Saw Paris
, with Elizabeth Taylor. He was a soldier in that one, too. Wow! Can you imagine? Johnson was 4-F in Hollywood during the war. All the other guys were off fighting. All those lonely actresses. I’ll bet he used to get more ass than a toilet seat when he was making it big. But then some folks claimed he was gay, so maybe he was even working both sides of the pump.”

Oh-oh! Too much. I’d gotten overly excited. I talked too loud and everyone in the bar heard that scatology. I put that last bit in just to give the story some zing. Sometimes the lives need a little pepping up, you know—but now I’m over the top. I try to hurry on with something else. “Johnson was born in Rhode Island,” I say. I think that’s actually true. I pulled that out of my ratty hat—pretty damned good for an assisted-living guy.

But too late—Burkhum is standing in front of me, and he is not impressed. He doesn’t allow dirty talk in his bar. “Cyril, there’s ladies in here. You’re getting kind of salty. You need to go outside and breathe some cold air.”

Nobleson has drained his glass and is gone. I pay the tab, pull on my stocking cap, slip into my coat, and shuffle out the door into the winter.

Hard snow is flying sideways, but I don’t want to go back to that pissified room in assisted living just yet. I pull my collar up, duck my head, and walk across the parking lot to the Mobil station.

A guy’s pumping some lead free into his pickup, so I walk over to him and ask, “How you doin’?” The man has his head covered in one of those button-down fur balaclavas, so I can’t see his face.

“You got any money?” That’s all he says. His voice is sort of croaky, coming out of that big hat. I don’t answer his question, so when the gas pump snaps off, he shoves the nozzle back in the cradle, claps his arms around his sides to warm himself up, and hustles into his truck to get out of the cold. But he cranks his window partway down. “I mean it, brother,” he says. “I could use a little help.”

His covered face makes him mysterious, but I try to size him up so I can give him a life. I say, “You know, with that hat on, you look like Elisha Kent Kane.” I step up to his window so he can hear me over the wind. “You probably don’t know who Kane was. He was a doctor from Philly and one of the earliest arctic explorers. He got his party lost in the tundra in 1855, but he led them on a hike all the way out to Greenland. It took three months, and they damned near all froze to death, but he kept them plugging along and saved most of them in the end. They put his picture on a postage stamp, and there were parades and national celebrations, but you don’t hear much about Elisha Kent Kane anymore.”

The wind boots up through the gas pumps and a tin “Self Service” sign is swinging and squawking just over my head. “She’s fixing to snow good,” I say. I’d forgotten my big scarf in Burkhum’s and was starting to feel the cold.

“How about it, grandpa, you going to give me a hand with my gas?” the guy asks again. The gas pump is ringing and buzzing now. The guy’s tone is tetchy and uneven. “I’m running short. Got to make it all the way to Peoria tonight.”

“They’re talking more than a foot of snow on the radio,” I say. I’m beginning to feel a little uneasy. The guy seems weird. But I still can’t help myself: “That reminds me. There was this guy named Snow—C.P. Snow—in the fifties and sixties, a scientist who started writing novels as a hobby, and got deep into it. One of those real smart Brits. They made him a peer, and he was always trying to mix literary stuff with scientific in his novels. It started out as a good shtick for a while and he cleaned up with some best sellers. Lord Snow. Not many folks read him these days.”

I can’t see the balaclava guy’s eyes, but I feel his mean look from deep in the fur. I know he’s wondering which wall I’d bounced off of. That’s the way it is with me.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he growls from deep in his cold throat.

“Well, good luck on Peoria,” I say, and make to head off. “I better get back to my room.”

“Hold it, pops!” His voice snaps off and shatters on me like icicles from a spouting. “Get in.” He’s lowered his window all the way and has something pointed at me. It is one
hell
of a gun he is holding, more like some sort of monstrous pipe fitting.

“I’m just an old man,” I say. “I don’t have anything that would help you.”

“Get your creaky ass into the truck!”

I make another move to walk away, but he shouts, “
Now
, geezer—or you die!”

I know he means it. I hobble around to the other side of his truck, pull the door handle, and struggle in. “I don’t know what you want, but folks are going to be looking for me,” I say.

He turns on his ignition and hits the gas pedal all in one motion, and his truck jumps forward. Somebody in the station flashes lights, but he doesn’t stop; he’s down the drive, spinning fast without looking onto the highway. Snow is really flying now and beginning to mount. There must be four inches down already. He hasn’t paid for his gas, and he’s making fast on the icy road out of Soldiers Grove with me in his passenger seat. He’s a mean guy, and I’m thinking that all the lives in the world aren’t going to save my ass now.

Heavy snowflakes twist down into the windshield. We are barreling toward Readstown through windblown drifts. “You can have all the money in my wallet,” I say. “There must be about twenty-five in there.” He doesn’t answer.