The Croning (15 page)
“This was 1979. Thanks to my stellar performance knocking poor sophomores around the gridiron, I managed to land that scholarship to UW and that settled matters. Tell you the truth, Dad, if the scholarship hadn’t gone through, I’d made up my mind to enlist on my birthday and go into the military with Frankie Rogers and Billy Summerset. Frankie died in the Beirut barracks explosion, and Billy was one of the unlucky bastards shot during the Grenada invasion. They were Marines, though. Marines see the worst of it. I still exchange Christmas cards with Billy’s younger brother, Eli. Eli joined up for the Gulf War and managed to make it home with all his parts.
“Anyway, senior year. Graduation nine months away and coming fast, coach counting on me to lead the defense to a state championship. I knew damn well he held the keys to my scholarship, and Coach wasn’t exactly peaches and cream, not with the booster club and the principal on his ass to bring home the hardware every year…I had a lot going on; my mind was racing a thousand miles an hour. Seemed as if half the time I was a little woozy, almost in a dream state, and that could’ve contributed to what came later. Certain people are susceptible to hallucinations. Perhaps that’s me—Mr. Cotton Head. Dunno. I’d love to believe it.
“Me and the boys—Frankie, Billy, Toby Nethercutt, and Mike Shavenko, and a couple other guys from Oakland—raised a bit of hell at night. We’d gather at the old Celadon Park—definitely not wise with the druggies cutting each other to ribbons with broken bottles—or that deserted carnival by the boardwalk. Sometimes, when there was a party, a bunch of us loaded into Mike Shavenko’s Caddy and cruised down the coast and stood around a bonfire with kids from half a dozen other schools, and drank beer and played football on the beach. The whole
Sometimes a Great Notion
deal sans anybody as gray or cantankerous as Henry Fonda. There were a few brawls and the usual fooling around, but things were remarkably innocent. Nothing like the kids get up to today. I think the worst thing I did was get drunk a few times and fall into the habit of smoking. Frankie and Billy got me hooked. Especially Frankie, who was a pack of Lucky Strikes a day fellow. Hell everybody smoked; it was the height of cool. I remember sneaking into the bathroom to get a couple drags in between classes. What did we know?
“Frankie’s parents were divorced, had been since he was eleven. I knew him since second grade. Happy kid. Class cutup, though the teachers loved him because he was so damned quick with a wise-ass remark. You know the kind. He’d make you want to punch him except you were laughing so hard you were in danger of pissing your pants.
“His mom lighting out for parts unknown changed everything. She met an advertising exec and left with the guy—packed a single case and was gone forever. His dad went over the edge. Jack Somerset worked on the docks as a longshoreman. Shoulda seen his arms and shoulders—a bison stuffed into a plaid shirt. Scary. He took to drinking—would stop at Clausen’s Liquor and pound a sixer on the way home from work—occasionally, when I came over to visit Frankie, I saw his old man slouched in that Chevy of his, knocking back a half case of Lone Star. He sluiced those cans into his mouth; one after another, like a machine. Then he’d carry another half rack in and polish it off while he watched basketball. Never said squat, either. Just sat there like a boulder, face white as a sheet from the T.V. glow. You could practically hear him ticking.
“Worse part was, he started slapping Frankie around; and for nothing. Well, maybe not for ‘nothing’—Frankie was an inveterate smart mouth, after all. This was different, though. No warning—Jack would just walk over and pop him one. He couldn’t fight his dad, of course. Tried it once and the old man chucked him through the screen door like a sack of meat. He smashed into the sidewalk and skinned his hands. The doc had to tape them like a boxer’s. So, yeah, here was my boon comrade living in hell for seven years. He couldn’t get into the Marines fast enough. Not fast enough to keep from going bad. When Frankie’s personality turned dark, I wasn’t exactly surprised. Yet, even knowing his damage, the transformation chilled me, drove an icy spike right through my guts. I watched him rot from the inside…an apple being eaten from the core by a worm. Broke my heart.
“It got worse that spring of ’79 and went to complete shit by summer. Jack went from the once a week whippings to kicking his kid’s ass every day. Sickest part? The guy got real careful not to leave marks. He’d rabbit-punch him, squeeze his neck until his eyes bulged, that sort of thing. I wasn’t there to see it, thank God. Frankie told me what happened, made a black comedy of the account. He’d laugh and shrug and say something along the lines of, ‘It’s just T.V., Kurt.’ His laugh had changed, too. It sounded like the bark of a crow.
“He got mean at the end of our junior year, became savage as a junkyard dog. He stole money from his dad and paid the goons who loitered outside the brick and bar liquor stores on 10th and Browning to buy booze for him. Not beer, either. Nah, he graduated directly to Jim Beam; stashed the bottles under the seat of Mike Shavenko’s car—Shavenko was kind of Frankie’s squire. He drove Frankie to all the backyard beer parties, especially the cross-town mixers where trouble could be found if one was sufficiently determined. They’d get good and scotched, then Frankie would pick a fight—one, two, three guys, didn’t matter to him. He’d take all comers and beat them down. The kid was scrawny, which goes to show viciousness is more important than natural athletic ability during a brawl. He became something of a legend, honestly. Frankie took plenty of licks, but I guess it wasn’t anything compared to what his old man laid on him.
“Now, it can be told—I gave Frankie a key and let him crash on the couch whenever the scene got too heavy at home. He was there, dead to the world on a few mornings, both eyes blacked like a raccoon’s, and snoring loud enough I thought he’d choke in his sleep. And once, Jesus, Joseph, Mary I found him sprawled on the couch literally covered in blood, so much blood I scarcely recognized him. He looked like he’d been in a car wreck; his face was pancaked with gore, his tee shirt was black and hard as a plaster shell. For a few seconds I figured he was dead—then he started snoring that honking, godawful snore of his. I drove him to the clinic. Turned out he’d been in a hell of fistfight against two college juniors at a bonfire party. Frankie had one of them on the ground and was tattooing his face with a sealed can of Black Label when the second dude tried to kick a field goal with his head—the asshole was wearing hiking boots with studs, too. Frankie finished off the first one, then jumped up and chased the other guy along the beach for half a mile and beat him to a pulp. He was frothing at the mouth; tried to drown the guy until cooler heads prevailed and a bunch of kids dragged them apart. Frankie lost three teeth and needed forty-odd stitches in his scalp. Nasty deal.
“The whole arrangement was a kind of betrayal of your trust, letting somebody the entire school considered a bad element flop at the house while you were out of town. Believe me, I wasn’t happy about the situation, skewered on the horns of a dilemma. I had to choose between helping my friend and keeping the faith with my parents. It was a tough call. I asked myself what you would do in my shoes, Dad.
“As it developed, Frankie was a perfect gentleman. He didn’t touch a blessed thing. He even helped me with the yard work a couple of weekends. Looking back, it’s lucky for us his dad didn’t put two and two together and come hunting for Frankie to use as a punching bag. Maybe Jack didn’t give a damn. He was so screwed in the brain by then he’d managed to get fired by the union—which gives you an idea what a colossal mess he’d become to provoke that drastic a move. Last I heard of him was during college—he finally lost his house, and relocated to an Airstream trailer in New Mexico and was living with a prostitute who made her bones, so to speak, under a freeway overpass.
“While all this drama with Frankie was coming to a boil, I reported to Coolidge’s store every other evening at eight o’clock sharp and worked until midnight. Unless we had deliveries; then Coolidge’s assistant manager, Herb Nolton kept me around until one or two A.M. It wasn’t exactly backbreaking labor. Herb usually stayed in the office and watched the tube, or fell asleep in the comfy leather swivel chair Coolidge referred to as ‘the Captain’s Seat.’
“I worked with another guy named Ben Wolf. He’d graduated two or three years before and got married to his high school sweetheart. They had a baby, so Ben worked three jobs trying to keep the roof nailed down over their heads. We took long breaks smoking in the alley and talking football. Ben had played running back for the team. Didn’t get bupkus for playing time, although he sure looked fast enough. Nice fellow—he even brought his wife and baby to watch me at the home games later that fall.
“Then there was the other member of our nightshift fraternity—Doug Reeves. Reeves was way older than us; did piece work for a few local businesses. A jack of all trades type; not an electrician or a plumber, yet he could rewire faulty outlets in a pinch and knew how to sling a monkey wrench. He usually kept to himself and that’s probably because he toted a hip flask. He wore heavy aftershave to disguise the whiskey reek. At least once a night I spotted him ducking behind boxes in the storeroom to take a swig. Poor Reeves couldn’t go fifteen minutes without lighting up, either. Mr. Coolidge forbade us from smoking in the building. Smoke got into the clothes and sleeping bags. He woulda been pissed if he knew Reeves walked around with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I imagine he woulda fired Herb for letting it go on. Fortunately, Coolidge didn’t drop in for any surprise inspections. Nelly told me once that her parents fought like cats and dogs. Eventually they just came home, had a few scotches and stumbled off to separate bedrooms. That’s how divorce was done back then, right? Still, their misery was our salvation.
“Things took a turn for the weird. Reeves started hanging with me and Ben during our smoke breaks in the alley. It seemed odd—he didn’t say anything, didn’t want to join the conversation. He smiled at our jokes in the half-ass way people do when they’re trying to get along and not draw too much attention to themselves. At first it happened once every couple of shifts. By the last three weeks I worked there, Reeves was connected to my or Ben’s hip wherever we went in the store. He slunk around back there, puffing his cigs and slugging booze. Got to the point me and Ben couldn’t even sneak off and leave him. Soon as the coast was clear and we’d tiptoe for the door, I’d hear a paint can or a crescent wrench clatter on the floor and here’d come Reeves like a bat outta hell. In hindsight, that might’ve been the case.
“Ben’s the one who finally decided to pull him aside and have a man-to-man chat. He planned to set Reeves straight, break it to him as gently as possible that he might want to crawl out of the bottle and get his act together a bit. The stalking routine was getting on our nerves and it better stop, pronto. I remember Ben’s expression about ten minutes later when he came back with Reeves in tow to where I was stocking tennis rackets and baseball bats. Ben asks Reeves to repeat what he said and Reeves shrugs and stares at his feet. Eventually we got him to spill that he’s scared shitless of somebody lurking in the storeroom. ‘The Witch,’ he called this person. Claimed she was tall, spindly, and white as chalk. She wore a dirty dress that dragged the floor. That’s how he noticed her—he saw the hem of her dress disappearing into the shadows from the corner of his eye. He thought it was a hallucination, his wacked version of a pink elephant. Until he saw her in the flesh a few minutes later when he walked by the office and she’s in there leaning over Herb, who’s sleeping, as usual. Reeves shook while relating this yarn. Guy’s teeth were clicking like he was freezing. Allegedly this had gone on for two weeks before we got tired of him grasping after our apron strings, as it were. That’s why he didn’t want to be left alone in the store—once, he turned around and there she was on the other side of a rack, grinning at him with pure evil. He wanted to quit, except he was too in hock at the bar and a month behind in rent. If he left, he’d starve. Or have a heart attack from DTs.
“We didn’t know what to make of it. Ben took the lead again. He patted the guy on the back and made me cough up twenty bucks so the old-timer could go get hammered Friday night—said it was the least we could do. There went my dinner and movie plans with Nelly. Irritating thing about dear, sweet Nelly—free as she was with treating her friends, she fully expected me to pay the freight during our liaisons. That girl was a cock tease and all around power-tripper. I’m shocked she didn’t go into politics, what with her gift for manipulation.
“As it happened, Herb called me Friday morning to say an unexpected shipment of exercise equipment was sitting on the loading dock. Neither Ben nor Reeves were scheduled to work, so he begged me to come in and do the heavy lifting because he’d slipped a disk in his back. Since I was flat broke and dateless, I jumped at the offer, although lugging barbells and cast iron plates wasn’t my first choice for an evening’s recreation. I ran into Nelly at the soda shop. One thing leads to another and pretty soon we’re necking in the back of my—uh, your car, Dad—and I’m not really getting into it because my mind is on the freaky revelations of Doug Reeves. Nelly asked me what’s wrong, so against my better judgment I gave her the whole story. She took it seriously.
“The store was built in 1916 and the Coolidges took it over in 1950. Nelly leaned close and whispered conspiratorially that she’d heard from a friend of a friend that an employee died in the store during the Roaring Twenties; hanged themselves from one of the railings. Only a ghost could come and go like this figure did. I asked if she’d ever seen anything. Not exactly; nonetheless, she remained convinced something spooky was afoot. She’d been sweet on one of the stock boys a couple of summers back and he’d mentioned the ghost too. Same description of a tall, spindly woman with a wicked grin. That sealed it for her.
“Right there, in the middle of our preempted make-out session, Nelly’s eyes brightened and she pinched me and said what we needed to do was provoke the spirit into appearing, then perform a ritual to banish it from the property. My jaw dropped. I didn’t quite believe what I’d heard. She worked herself into a lather and nattered on about these two friends of hers, outcast girls who dressed in black and moped around and how they were into all kinds of occult bullshit. One of them had promised to show her how to use a Ouija board and take her to a séance they planned for Halloween. Precursors to Goth chicks, those two. Samantha and Cassie. Nobody liked them, not even the chess nerds, or the stoners, or even the fat kids in band. Nelly was slumming, sampling their ‘quaint’ lifestyle; no doubt so she could mock them to her circle when she grew bored. Once she’d decided to bring her pals to the store, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.