The View from Mount Joy (11 page)

“Joe, my man!”

I turned around to see who belonged to the hand that clapped my back with a little too much enthusiasm.

It was Kirk Casey.

“Please don’t tell me my mom gave you a solo.”

He had been drumming at our jam sessions, but he played the trumpet in the school band.

“Didn’t she tell you? This whole thing”—he swept the air with his trumpet—“is just accompaniment. To me. I’m going to be playing the entire Jethro Tull oeuvre.”

“Oeuvre,”
I said, laughing. “Looking forward to it.”

I could have pretended I didn’t see my aunt wave, but I did.

“I should have saved us seats up front,” I said, sitting next to her. “I didn’t think there’d be this many people.”

“Carole’s reputation has preceded her,” said my aunt, looking around at the auditorium filling up with people.

She had come straight from work and was wearing her corporate attorney clothes and looked, well, nice. I mean, you’d never guess she was a lesbian, not that I ever did. I was ready to get all mad at her again for her secret little life that she thought she had to hide from me, but I was distracted by the two people getting into—or trying to get into—the row across from ours.

They looked a little lost, a little tentative, like a trailer park couple checking into the Ritz, and as the man parked his walker at the end of the row, the woman helped him ease into the seat on the end. She looked at me right before sitting down and stared at me the way a clerk in a convenience store stares at a guy coming in at 2:00
A.M
.:
Is he coming in for cigarettes or a stickup?
Finally recognizing me, she offered a little wave and a smile, and it was Kristi’s smile, once removed and aged a couple decades. I nodded back at Mrs. Casey before looking around for her daughter—seeing that smile had made me want to see the real one, the full-beam this-can-get-me-whatever-I-want smile of Kristi’s. But if she was at the concert, she wasn’t sitting with her parents.

The house lights dimmed at seven o’clock sharp and then the center of the curtain flapped open and a spotlight found my mom.

She stood with her arms behind her back, looking like she’d just been surprised by a group of people jumping out at her and shouting, “Happy birthday!”

“Welcome,” she said finally, her smile both shy and thrilled. There was a squeal of feedback from the microphone.

She waited a moment and tried again.

“I promise that’s the most discordant note you’ll hear all evening,” she said, and then, tilting her head and cupping her hand to the side of her mouth, she said, “Right, kids?”

“Yes, Mrs. A.,” chimed a bunch of voices from behind the curtain.

The audience laughed, and then my mother said, “Well, then, without further ado, let the music begin.”

The house lights dimmed and the pulleys squeaked as the curtain opened and my mom strode to the music stand that served as her podium and tapped it with her baton. Within seconds, she was conducting the orchestra in the theme from
Romeo and Juliet,
followed by the theme from
The Pink Panther,
followed by the theme from
The Days of Wine and Roses.

It was after all, a spring concert that was “saluting the magic of movie music.”

I can’t say I have any basis of comparison, but for a junior high school concert, this one was pretty good. In Granite Creek, one of her piano students had given my mom a framed poster on which, in cramped and irregular calligraphy, she had written,
Fluency in music means you can communicate anywhere in the world.

I was recruited to hang it above the piano, besides several other of her favorite sayings immortalized by her students in various handwritten signs and needlepoint wall hangings:
The wrong note you played in one piece will be the right note in the next. Musicianship is next to godliness. Do you speak music here?

Watching her onstage, it was easy to see she believed in all those slogans and easy to see she had made her students believe; they played with enthusiasm and care, and when they played “Lara’s Theme” from
Doctor Zhivago,
I saw a couple of women dab at their eyes with a tissue. One of the women was my aunt.

Noticing me noticing her, she shrugged and whispered, “It’s such a pretty song.”

I rolled my eyes, and she stuck her tongue out at me.

After hearty applause, the band played a soft accompaniment as a flutist in a miniskirt began her solo.

She was what my mother would call “a real musician,” and playing the theme song from
Alfie,
she filled the auditorium with notes as full and pure as a northern sky full of stars.

Why hire magicians when there are musicians?
was another one of my mom’s sayings, and I looked in my program to read the name of the cute flute player who was imitating Merlin up there onstage. Jenny Baldacci was the ninth-grade alchemist turning music into something that not just the ears heard. When her solo was finished I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wanted to personally thank her for taking me into a dream when I was still awake, for the assurance that for a few moments it was possible to be drunk on clear 200 proof beauty.

When the band started playing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” I felt a tiny little tick go off inside me, like the tick a combination lock makes just before it’s ready to drop open, and I realized that something had been released in me too and that I didn’t hate my aunt anymore. Or wasn’t mad at her. Whatever it was I felt, it was stupid; my aunt Beth was always going to be my aunt Beth, whether she wore her fancy work clothes or bib overalls, whether she cried at a junior high school band playing “Lara’s Theme” or at John Lennon singing “Imagine.”

I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped me, knowing my aunt Beth was always going to be my aunt Beth, even if she didn’t think Paul Newman
or
Robert Redford was the cutest in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
but Katharine Ross.

Beth shot me a look that asked,
What’s so funny?
and instead of telling her, I took her hand and squeezed it.

Man, if you were to look at me, you would have thought I was class nerd of ’72, sitting there in a darkened auditorium, bobbing my head as the first measures of the theme from
Shaft
began its sneaky climb, patting the hand my lesbian aunt had tucked in the crook of my elbow.

Nine

From the
Ole Bulletin,
June
1972:

This is the last time the Roving Reporter will take his pen to paper, asking the questions everyone wants answers to. The last time the voices of the mighty Bulls, Class of ’ 72, will be recorded. And so your Roving Reporter, standing with his classmates on the precipice of a whole new world, asked seniors to look beyond the near future of college and/or work, and answer the question, “Where do you hope to be in ten years?”

Darva Pratt:
“Through the doors of perception and into the Outer Limits.”

Blake Erlandsson:
“Playing center for the North Stars would be nice.”

Leonard Doerr:
“Boy, that’s a good question. Maybe I’ll earn a degree in German and be living in Bavaria with
mein e Frau
! As some of you may know, I’ve placed in the top five of the Minnesota Youth Chess Tournament for the past three years, so maybe I’ll step up my game and take on some of those Russians! Or maybe I’ll be pursuing a doctorate in one of my many fields of interest—electrical engineering, chemical engineering, or Germanic languages! Or…” (
Ed. note: Mr. Doerr has many plans for the future, but because of space limitations, we must end his soliloquy here.
)

Sharon Winters:
“I hope to either be a Rockette or a mom.”

Hugh Jorgan:
“If I’m not in jail, I’ll be happy.”

Kristi Casey:
“On the front page.”

The bell rang and as the staff of the paper filed out of our zero-hour class, Mr. Lutz motioned Greg Hoppe and I to his desk.

“Hugh Jorgan,” he said, drumming his fingers on a copy of our final issue of
The Ole Bulletin.

Greg and I exchanged the kind of look people do when they’re busted.

“And don’t think I wasn’t aware of those other charming sobriquets you used throughout the year. Mike Oxenfire…Heywood Jablome.” He shook his head.

“Sorry, Mr. Lutz, we were just—”

“You’re lucky no one ever called in to complain.”

I stammered out an apology over Greg’s. Mr. Lutz waved his hand, dismissing us, and as we raced toward the door, he muttered, “Hugh Jorgan,” and laughed.

My senior year at Ole Bull High didn’t end in any great crescendo; in fact, it was sort of anticlimactic in the way it petered out.

Since that rainy night in front of her house, Kristi hadn’t spoken to me, and pretty soon I stopped making overtures. She wasn’t the only one with pride. I became just another member of her public, grateful to get my glimpses of her in the hallway, in pep rallies, and finally in the commencement program.

It was tradition at Ole Bull that two seniors give speeches: the valedictorian and one that the entire class nominated. And so, on a hot June evening, the class of ’72 sat on the football field, sweating in our caps and gowns, as we got a lesson in public speaking. The example of what
not
to do was given by Marcy Greblach, a girl so shy she acted like a simple hello was an assault rather than a greeting. Her speech was so quiet and breathy and hard to understand that the principal had to get up twice to adjust her microphone.

“Did she just say to ‘give ourselves to Satan’s power’?”

Sitting next to me, Darva chuckled softly. “I think she said ‘we can never sate our potential to’…”

“To what?”

Darva shrugged. “I couldn’t hear.”

At least Marcy was smart enough (she should be; after all, she
was
the valedictorian) to understand the importance of brevity and ended her mumbling before we all fell unconscious in a collective bout of narcolepsy.

The next speaker on the program was the antidote to dozing off, one Miss Kristi Casey, who couldn’t, of course, merely
stride
to the podium; nope, she had to stride with a bass drum strapped to her chest. She banged out the beginning of our school song and then stood with one hand behind her ear, our cue to clap back the rhythm. We did, thunderously, after which Kristi beat out another tattoo, followed by our rhythmic clapping. The frenzy grew until it seemed more a rally than a graduation ceremony, until Kristi belted out an intricate cadence and as we clapped back our answer, she pounded on the drums, going faster and faster until we could do nothing but stand up and cheer, clapping our hands until they stung.

She took off her drum in the middle of all this applause, offering us one of her famous sly and glimmery smiles, and motioned us to sit. We obeyed and I added my sigh to the hundreds issued by all members of the male population in the audience.

“Good God,” said Darva. “I bet if she gave the
sieg heil
sign everyone would give it right back.”

Kristi’s speech was full of the usual rah-rah maxims (“Let’s go out and show the world what the Class of ’72 is all about!”) and reminiscences (“Can it only be three years ago when we were wide-eyed sophomores stumbling through the hallways, studying our class schedules like treasure maps?”), but what she didn’t give us in substance, she more than made up for in style, and when she was done she grabbed her drum again and beat out a rhythm to her chant, “Free at last! Free at last! Free at last!”

We all stood—even Darva—raising our fists and shouting the same declaration. My mom told me later that my grandmother, who’d come down from Granite Creek, had leaned toward her to say that in all her born days, she’d never seen such a radical assemblage that was my graduation ceremony.

That summer after graduation, I worked a lot at Haugland’s. Sometimes while I was shelving boxes of macaroni and cheese or cleaning up a spill on aisle seven, a couple of girls might wander by, their rubber flip-flops slapping the bottoms of their feet, beach towels tied low on their hips, their perfume a blend of coconut suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and, inexplicably, orange pop, and I’d hold my breath because I didn’t want to do anything to interfere with my appreciation of the passing parade.

“Hey, Joe,” the ones who knew me would say, and I’d draw in breath again and say something that would make them all laugh; everyone seemed to laugh more easily in the summer.

“You realize I personally search shoplifters,” I said once to a trio of girls whose bikini tops were skimpy geometrics of fabric straining to hold back their luscious, lotion-slathered breasts. “So please,
shoplift.
”

It became one of my standard lines—especially after a tall, dark-eyed girl scanned the shelf of groceries behind her and grabbed a packet of birthday candles, which she shoved under one of the strings of her string bikini.

“So search me,” she said, and as her friends tittered, she took my hand and placed it on the crocheted triangle that covered her left breast.

“Well, yes, here it is,” I said, moving my hand to pull out the little cardboard packet. I was wearing a long white work apron that I hoped was hiding my excitement because honest to God, I’d sprouted a woody big enough to knock over the pyramid of Duncan Hines cake mix I’d been setting up.

“You want to play more hide-and-seek later?” asked the tall brunette.

“Sure,” I said, in a voice that sounded more amphibian than human.

The girl smiled at my croaking. “Well, good. What time do you get off work?”

“Nine,” I said, my head going crazy in a spasmodic nod.

“We’ll be waiting for you outside,” she said, and I watched as she and her friends slunk down the aisle, the globes of their butts moving under their beach towel sarongs.

The tall brunette hide-and-seeker never showed up. It was that kind of summer—nothing ever really got off the ground. Shannon Saxon came in once or twice but always with a purpose that had everything to do with groceries—“Where’s the peanut butter, Joe? A bunch of us are going on a picnic tomorrow”—and nothing to do with me. Too bad; she looked pretty cute in a sunburnt, nose-peeling way, and the overflow of her bikini top was something to behold.

Darva and I took in a movie now and then, but she was working practically all the time to pay for her trip to Europe. I never saw Kristi.

“Oh, she’s gone for the whole summer,” said Kirk when I casually asked why she never gave him a ride to or from work. “Lucky for me.”

A flare of disappointment ignited in my chest—my fantasies of seeing Kristi walk through the store in a beach towel sarong weren’t going to come true?

“Where’d she go?”

Kirk rolled his eyes. “She’s a camp counselor, if you can believe it. Imagine how messed up the kids in her cabin are gonna be.”

I hung out with Greg Hoppe and some of my hockey teammates, but as far as social lives go, mine was as slow to start as the used Dodge van for which I had just forked over two hundred bucks. (The low price had something to do with the balky ignition and, I was convinced, the fact that it smelled of feet.)

What turned out to be the high point of that whole summer were the jam sessions we had in Ed Haugland’s. Every Tuesday and Thursday night after closing we played covers from Ed’s glory days in the Courtmen—Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis. We also played more current stuff—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Beach Boys, Santana, Led Zeppelin, Small Faces, and in deference to Kirk, the occasional Jethro Tull. A three-piece band composed of a balding supermarket owner on guitar, a stockboy on keyboards, and a pimply cashier on drums wouldn’t be a groupie’s dream come true, but trust me, we rocked. It sounds dumb, but it was true: We were brothers and the blood we shared was our music. We just understood one another—a riff on Ed’s guitar would set off one on my keyboard, and Kirk in his sunglasses (“I drum better in them”) would bring us all together with the steady anchor of his beat.

The store closed at nine, but we didn’t get out of there until one or two in the morning, and then only because Ed had to be back at the store a couple of hours later for the deliveries.

“Your parents don’t care when you get home so late?” I once asked Kirk as I drove him home.

“The good thing about having your bedroom in the basement is that you don’t wake anyone up when you come home. Plus the fact that it’s hard to wake up someone who’s in an alcoholic stupor.”

This he said matter-of-factly and, as far as I could hear, with no bitterness.

“How long…how long have they been that way?”

“Since my dad’s accident.”

“When was that?”

“Uh, I’d just started fifth grade, so—” He fanned his fingers on his thigh. “So four years ago. Well, almost five.”

“What happened to him?”

“I vant to suck your blood.”

I looked at Kirk, wondering if he had a freaky side he just now felt comfortable enough to share with me, but seeing his finger pointing upward, I ducked to see better over the steering wheel and spotted three bats swooping around in the halo of light cast from the street lamp.

“They spook me out, man,” said Kirk, shuddering. “I feel like I could get rabies just by looking at them.”

I eased the van over the curb, shifted into park, and turned off the ignition, staring up at the bats. After a long moment, Kirk said, “You okay, Joe?”

I nodded, even though I’d just been sledgehammered by sadness.

When I spoke, my voice broke. I cleared my throat.

“Once on my paper route I threw a paper at old lady Rumdahl’s house. She was kind of the town witch—you know, she had this long gray hair and she’d yell at kids for walking on her lawn. Anyway, I threw the paper and all of a sudden a whole bunch of bats flew out of the chimney. I burned rubber riding home, man, ’cause I was sure those bats were chasing me. I got a bunch of calls from people who didn’t get their paper that day. I was still scared the next day, so my dad got on my mom’s bike—it was a blue Schwinn with a basket
and
handlebar tassels, no less; I guess he didn’t have his own bike—and anyway, for a whole week he rode along with me. At five-thirty in the morning. Until I wasn’t afraid anymore.”

“That was cool,” said Kirk, nodding. “Nice of him to do.”

“It was.”

I watched as one of the bats dove to the right and another to the left, leaving one to circle above the street lamp before zigzagging off in a third direction. Embarrassed, I pulled my fingers under my eyes to wipe away the tears.

“He turned those rides into little nature lessons,” I said. “Telling me how much bats contribute to the ecosystem, how they can pollinate night-blooming flowers, stuff like that. After all the papers were delivered, he’d take me to Kit’s Kaboodle for breakfast.”

Kirk laughed. “What the hell is a Kit’s Kaboodle?”

“Granite Creek’s premier dining institution. Well, that and Wally’s Casa de Spaghetti. Only Wally’s wasn’t open for breakfast.” I sighed, my ribs rising slowly under the ache in my chest. “We’d have blueberry pancakes and a side of bacon, and we’d sit by the window and watch the sun come up behind the old courthouse.”

I rarely talked about my dad—it just hurt too much—but now I found myself telling Kirk how thrilled he’d been when I taught him the trick all paperboys learn pretty early on: how to grab the rolled-up paper out of your shoulder sack and throw it onto the porch or steps, all while riding no-handed.