No Matter How Much You Promise Page 21

  “I hear what you’re saying, homegirl. And I’m a think about it,” she added, each day feeling more comfortable with the patois of her summer freedom.

  “Word,” her sister said.

  She endured the rest of the birthday party, but something began to gnaw at her. There was something else behind her father’s morose nature. Having seen Billy’s pain double after seeing Alfred Butterworth, Vidamía’s curiosity began scratching insistently at the screen door of her mind. She wondered if perhaps she ought to speak to her great-grandfather, Buck Sanderson, and maybe also to this Mr. Butterworth, to see if they could shed some light on the matter.

  19. A Road Less Traveled

  The following night, after they recuperated by staying in Tarrytown, sleeping late and helping to clean up, Vidamía, Cookie, and Cliff returned home. After they had eaten supper, having brought with them a duffel bag full of Saran-wrapped whole hams, turkeys, and sundry other uneaten foods, when people were watching television or listening to music and her father had gone over to his corner to read, sitting on his rocker, his head bent over a magazine, Vidamía brought a chair over from the dining room, sat next to him, and began to brush his hair. After a few moments she asked if it was all right for her to ask him a question.

  “Go ahead, baby. Ask away.”

  She asked him how long he’d known Mr. Butterworth. He paused and looked at her, the sadness etched in his eyes, and said warily that he’d known him a long time, and then asked her why she wanted to know.

  “He seemed so happy to see you.”

  “I was happy to see him, too.”

  “He looked a little sick.”

  “Yes, he did. He’s getting old.”

  “Is he as old as Grandpa Buck?”

  “Grandpa’s older. They knew each other down south and came up to New York together.”

  “Where from?”

  “Memphis, Tennessee,” he said and then stopped and looked up at her, smiling sort of sadly. “Why are you asking? You writing a book?” feigning the New York question, but not able to pull off the right amount of sarcasm so that she took up the joke where he’d failed.

  “Yeah, maybe I am,” she said, then changed her tack. “No, I really want to know what happened to you.”

  “It doesn’t do any good to talk about it,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t want to know. It was bad. I was in Vietnam. Enough said. It makes me remember, and I don’t want to. Me and your uncle were in Nam. He died, I survived. Don’t ask me about it, okay, baby?” he said, and begun running his hand over his face as if he were trying to erase something from it.

  “Sure, Daddy. It’s okay.”

  “Thank you, baby.”

  “Can I ask Mr. Butterworth about you?”

  “I guess so, but I don’t think he can tell you much.”

  “But you don’t mind if I ask him?”

  “No, I guess not. He gave me his number and the place where he lives.”

  He got the number, recited it, and she copied it.

  “It’s up in Harlem, but don’t even think of asking to go see him by yourself.”

  “I’m not, you don’t have to worry.”

  “Good,” he said and turned away from her. “I’m going up to the roof for a while. If Mama asks, tell her I’m up there.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  “No, I just want to be by myself,” he said. “I’ll be okay,” he added, but to her it sounded like maybe he wouldn’t, and for the briefest moment she wondered if he ever contemplated suicide. She recalled conversations on suicide she’d heard from adults and it frightened her.

  “You sure?” she called after him.

  “Yeah,” he said, and chuckled. “I’ll be fine.”

  She wanted to respond, to say okay, but suddenly, as if she were again peering into that window long ago, when her mother and Barry had stopped off in the desert to get water and she’d looked into the abandoned house and knew that some type of horror had taken place there, she sensed for the first time the depth of her father’s agony.

  They had been driving through Texas or Arizona, maybe New Mexico, and they had stopped at an abandoned farmhouse, the land around it barren and flat, three-foot-high tumbleweeds blowing over the dusty ground. She had gotten out of the car while her parents tried to get a water pump in front of the house to work, her stepfather’s ever present fear of running out of water in the desert urging him to replenish their reserves at every chance. She had gone around to the back of the house and, through a broken window—one shutter missing, the other hanging from one hinge—she looked into one of the rooms. The room was nearly empty except for an old metal army cot and a chipped porcelain chamber pot lying on its side. In the corner of the room near the cot she saw an animal about the size of a cat, but furrier, scurry by, raising the fine dirt from the floor. Like an arid mist the dust rose in the sunlight streaming into the room so that she was at once frightened and fascinated by the golden particles dancing in the band of sunlight painted against the dark shadows of the room.

  The scene, the barrenness and desolation, suddenly frightened her and she ran to the Mercedes, opened the back door, got in, and, as if she were very cold, curled herself up in a corner of the leather-upholstered backseat and closed her eyes against the vision, knowing that something horrible, a murder, or worse, had taken place in that room because it was a room from which every last vestige of humanity had been torn forcibly away, leaving the house bereft, a place absolutely forsaken and without hope of redemption from the sins it had witnessed. When Elsa and Barry returned to the car with water, they sensed something was the matter and asked her. Stoically, she said she was cold, and they turned down the air-conditioning.

  Her helplessness at not being able to reach her father angered her. And she knew with increasing certainty that there was more than her uncle’s death troubling him. She would have to fight with even more ferocity to rescue him.

  Billy turned away from Vidamía, climbed the stairs to the roof, and sat under the summer sky, the lights of downtown Manhattan like a firmament so that he imagined traveling, if not in space at least in time. He recalled the events of the afternoon a week ago when he had observed the slight black man, carrying his saxophone case, blend into the midday subway crowd, fading from sight and being replaced by images of years past when he was a boy feeling safe with his parents at Christmas or going over to his grandpa’s and playing the piano for hours, never getting tired or bored except sometimes in the summer when the Yankees were playing and he’d rush from the piano to turn on the television set. Unable to control his thoughts, he recalled the intrusion of death into his daily life. Often while he sat watching Mantle bat or watched Whitey Ford—to whom he was often compared, being they were both blond and left-handed-pitch, he returned to his father’s death, over and over, as if there were within the truncating of that human life a truth to be learned that could only be understood by reliving every aspect of the tragedy.

  As he sat, his mind traveled from his father’s death to Joey’s, back and forth over the same terrain like an animal trapped in a confined space, skipping entire years to fix his glassy-eyed stare upon the two incidents which, when examined, left him powerless. As he did each day, Billy tried to be very still and think about the day’s events. He’d heard something like this at a Veterans Administration counseling session, and he thought that by concentrating on the recent past he could somehow replace the horror of the distant past. He had become aware that if he recalled the recent past it would trigger other memories that had nothing to do with the two deaths, and thus he hoped to minimize their power over him.

  He returned to the events earlier in the week and attempted to place them in order. He recalled Hortense belting out “Lover Man” in the background and could feel himself chording the changes on the guitar and picking out little riffs in back of the rhythm; he had been hiding in the background of his mind, running to the pleasure of lovemaking, feeling himself growing aroused as he sat
playing his guitar and watching the open area of Lurleen’s dress beneath her arm as she held the accordion, the curve of her breast making the sensation of his organ grow stronger, so that he pressed down on it with the guitar and immediately felt the same Catholic-school guilt he’d always felt, wondering always what it would feel like to “jack off,” like Tollerson and McPherson called it in their southern twang when they were in boot camp.

  There were times when he just lay in the dark after making love to Lurleen, lost in her, knowing that he was a lucky man; her body and the texture of her skin the same even after seventeen years; watching her closing in on forty and beginning to age so that she was no longer the pretty little blond girl whom he had gone down home, as his grandfather said, to find in 1973; everything strange then as if he had stepped into another world, the voices of the people sounding like Bobby Hammond except that Bobby was from Arkansas; Bobby had been hit by a sniper; got him in the shoulder, but the bullet traveled downward, deflected off a rib, and went through his heart. He had lain there looking so peaceful that everyone thought he was kidding, but after a few minutes you knew he wasn’t, because he had that indefinable look of eternal languor which the dead affect.

  He had traveled anxiously but trustingly, with Grandpa Buck Sanderson on the train from New York to Cincinnati and then southward on a bus through Kentucky and into Tennessee, feeling small again, his grandpa telling him how the family had been in central and western Tennessee for hundreds of years. They had then taken another bus, getting off in the middle of a country road, riding in a pickup, and finally going on foot up into the hills, his heart pounding each time he looked out into the distance of the blue and green canopy of the Tennessee forest, the vegetation thick enough so that he had the expectation that choppers would come rising up from the horizon, the persistent beating of the rotor blades like a deathly promise of the firepower they carried, even if it was supposed to be friendly fire, because sometimes the bullets got awfully confused and plumb forgot who was friend or foe, as Tollerson said, but instead of those noises hearing the insistence of ax hitting wood and being able to laugh inwardly at the joke of hearing a different kind of chop-chop sound.

  Later on, after the first few nights, relaxing a bit more, and as evening closed in feeling the chill of the night even though it was summer, and smelling the wood smoke, the rivulets rising in the distance from little clearings in the woods, and along with the smoke the smell of cooking, rich and inviting, and as if carried by the wind someone twanging away on a banjo or tuning up a fiddle. Lurleen was a distant cousin, maybe fourth or fifth, related through Grandpa’s brother Frazier Sanderson’s wife, who was a Meekins, he had been told, as if everyone were not related anyway, they had joked, and laughed good-naturedly.

  Time had gone by so quickly, nearly twenty years, and he could still see Joey’s face clearly. One minute he was laughing and the next clutching at his chest and then his body suddenly moving wildly and then falling against him, his own mind blacking out for a moment but then coming to and finding that he was sitting in the rice paddy holding Joey’s nearly lifeless body. They shouldn’t have gone through the clearing at that time of day. Even though the perimeter had been secured and no Viet Cong had been in the area for weeks, he knew better but hadn’t listened. This is what he had told Elsa back then when he’d gone looking for Joey’s family, and now, almost twenty years later, he still wasn’t sure what had actually happened. Some mornings he woke up convinced that nothing he recalled had occurred and that something quite different had taken place and he was indeed totally responsible for Joey’s death.

  Not because they had gone in that direction, but as if his part of the responsibility had been more than simply a choice of what path to take in order to get across the clearing. Perhaps he’d had an argument with Joey and had shot him. Whenever he thought of that possibility, he rejected it outright. They were the best of friends. They had met at Camp Pendleton before they went over to Nam; by chance their bunks were next to each other, both assigned to the same “B” Company; liking one another immediately, Joey reminding him of Victor Delgado, who played second base at Hayes and had made two unassisted double plays when Billy was pitching one day against Mount St. Michael’s. He’d thrown a four-hitter and the following week in the school newspaper there was a big headline: LEFTY FARRELL SHUTS OUT THE MOUNT. It was the last game he’d pitch, because the following year he just couldn’t stay away from that piano, the music pulling him further away from baseball. At school people stopped calling him Lefty.

  After the business at Ruby’s he forgot totally about baseball and began smoking grass; lingering inside the school under the pretext that he was studying until pretty much everyone had gone home and then crossing the Grand Concourse and going into Franz Siegel Park across from the school and sharing a joint with Matty Halligan and his cousin Sean every day; sitting up there watching Yankee Stadium in the distance and laughing, imagining what it would be like being high and standing up at the plate trying to hit a Goose Gossage fastball. Today Matty Halligan was a junkie and Sean was up in Greenhaven for selling almost a kilo of cocaine to undercover cops. At that time none of them had had much contact with girls. He was sure that was still the case with Sean.

  He recalled his first experience with a woman. At first he thought that he should’ve never asked Pop Butterworth about the place. Butterworth wouldn’t discuss it for almost a month, deflecting all inquiries as best he could, until he relented.

  “I got urges, Mr. Butterworth,” he’d said one time. “Strong ones.”

  Butterworth laughed.

  “Shit, my man’s grown up and he want him some pussy. No way, son. Your grampa’d have my neck for sure. It was okay for us to carry on when we was young men down in Memphis, but he wants you on the straight and narrow.”

  “Please, Mr. Butterworth, I won’t tell anyone. Just take me there.”

  “I guess it can’t hurt none,” the old man finally said. “You’re ready to burst. You got money?”

  “I got a hundred from playing the two weddings last weekend.” He’d ended up with a small, very curvy, dark-skinned black girl by the name of Effie Gilliam. She was from Philadelphia and had a deep, smoky voice. She laughed all the time, like everything in life was a joke. He was scared and nervous and shot his load as soon as he was inside. The girl had giggled and he’d said, resolutely, “Again!” He’d paid another twenty-five dollars and she’d excused herself, douched, came back, washed him off and got him ready. This time he’d gone at it, working up a sweat and making the girl grip him in her arms and move her hips to his rhythm, which is what Pop Butterworth said he had to do. “Make them earn their money, son,” he’d said. “They whores but they recognize when they being loved by a real man and when it’s just somebody jacking off.” He went back every week. After a few dozen times he enjoyed walking in and asking Ruby for Effie Gilliam and then going upstairs to her room and going crazy as soon as he saw her, loving the touch of her skin and the chocolate-brown color, day and night yearning for her full lips and sweet tongue, even telling her that he’d go to work on a real job and take her away from the place.

  When she was with someone else he’d tried going at it with Petra, who was a tall, olive-skinned, melancholy girl who looked as if she were going to cry. Petra had some kind of accent, and Ruby Broadway advertised her as being from a very respectable family in Europe. She was in fact a Romanian-Polish girl who had been abandoned by her aunt and uncle after her parents died in a fire and had grown up begging around the Bronx; doing little tricks starting at the age of eleven; twenty-five-cent handjobs for high school boys, fifty cents for a blowjob, and a dollar for fucking; sleeping in the horse stables over on Park Avenue in East Harlem in Manhattan and letting the old Italian ragman finger her every night as she fell asleep. Or else Peggy Oppenheimer, an Irish-Jewish girl with blond hair who spoke Yiddish and kept the Sabbath; neither one, nor the other five girls who worked at Ruby Broadway’s, including the other black gir
l or Lucy, the Chinese girl, made him feel the way he felt with Effie Gilliam.

  “My God,” he once told her, “you’re only seventeen years old. You should be in high school, learning things.”

  “And you’re seventeen, so you can’t be telling me what to do, white boy,” she laughed sweetly, pushing him playfully.

  “Please, Effie.”

  “What? You jealous? You jealous that I be giving my pussy to somebody else?”

  Her teasing him made him want her even more.

  She drove him crazy, and made him reckless and wild, his playing of the piano so different that it made people stomp their feet and laugh and cheer and want him to do more of the same. He was sure he’d never love anybody ever again. One day, coming home from jamming at a loft in the Village, he told Pop Butterworth all this. His friend and mentor looked at him and shook his head.

  “Son, she’s a whore. What’s the matter with you? That’s what she does for a living. You play the piano and she fucks men. She doesn’t give one good goddamn what happens to you. All whores are the same when it comes to men. They make you feel good, but that’s it. They don’t cook, they don’t sew, they don’t mend, they don’t sweep, and they certainly don’t take shit from men the way most regular women do. That is, when they’re working regular in a house, although if they gotta work the street and got some pimp they love they behave just like most women and carry on like they was honest-to-goodness housewives bitching and moaning about not having enough money for groceries or some fool nonsense like that.”