The Autumn Dead

Chapter 7

These days they have names like the Dead Kennedys and The Sea Hags and The Virgin Prunes, and when my sixteen-year-old son plays them for me I try to remember that back in my sixteen-year-old days I drove my own parents crazy with some very offensive people named Little Richard and Howlin' Wolf and, not least, Elvis himself.

Now I stood outside a four-story brick building in the middle of the Highlands looking up at a sky filled with stars and a slice of quarter moon and tumbling clouds the color of ghosts. There was no sign of a black Honda.

From inside St. Michael's came a medley of songs, including "Don't Be Cruel" and "Sea of Love" and "Blue Jean Bop" and "Runaround Sue" and "Walkin' to New Orleans," all done with feverish amateurish fun. I wanted for the sake of my son to enjoy the music of The Dead Kennedys, but maybe it was my age or the calculated offensiveness of their name, but when he showed me their album cover I had an instant fantasy about putting them up against a wall and punching their faces in. I didn't say that to my son, of course. I just put my arm around him and said, "Whatever happened to that Dion and the Belmonts tape I gave you?"

"It was all right till I found out what he's doing these days."

"What's that?"

"Making religious albums."

"Really?"

"Yeah, Dad, and I just have a real hard time taking anybody seriously who makes religious albums. Like all those ministers on cable. You know?"

So Dion, once of rock 'n' roll leather and rock 'n' roll heat, was making a very different kind of album now and maybe even believing the too-sweet, too-easy hype of commercial religion, and who the hell was I to judge him anyway? And now here I was standing outside the school where nearly forty years ago I'd started kindergarten and where twenty-five years ago I'd graduated high school. I had a Bud in one hand and a cigarette in another (these days I don't smoke more than ten cigarettes a week, just enough to keep myself worried and guilty and coughing), and I heard music that should have lifted me back to other times when you measured success by the kind of car you drove or whom you hung out with or what base (first, second, or third) you'd gotten to the night before. But all I sensed now was how time cheated you, tricked you, and one day you were young and then one day you were not young. And then people you loved began dying so that one funeral service became very much like another, the grimace on the faces of those bearing the casket, the chill silver drops of holy water sprinkled on the newly turned earth, the sound of tears lost in the cold wind and the flapping sound of the canvas tent at graveside. And so you stood on nights like this, the stars washed across the endless sky, and just tried to make simple animal sense of it all. But you couldn't, of course, because ultimately it made sense to none of us, not the priest who whispered solace nor the hedonist who tried to deny it in the noisy illusion of his passion nor the puzzled six-year-old trapped in the confines of a white hospital bed he'd never leave. All you could understand was how many millions had stood on just such evenings down the time-stream thinking the same thoughts and coming to the same conclusion, which was really no conclusion at all, just the hope, even among the most cynical of men, that there really was a God or something very much like a God, and that all this did indeed have significance somehow in the relentless cosmic darkness.

"Say, there's a Shamrock!" cried a drunken male voice.

And like some berserk chorus line, three people came down the front steps of the school, doing some kicks and singing along to "Take Good Care of My Baby."

"He is a Shamrock!" cried both of the women on either side of the chubby man. He was bald and plump and wore a red dinner jacket and a cummerbund wide as a pillowcase and a wonderful boozy grin. The women were also plump and wore clever gowns that disguised their widening middles and pushed up voluptuously their fortyish cleavage. The way they did their kicks and sang the tune aloud, they were like an Ample Lady version of the Rockettes and they were exactly what I needed to pull me out of my hole.

"Yeah, I'm a Shamrock," I said, the word on my tongue as silly as it'd ever been. The public schools had always had names like Wilson Wolverines and Roosevelt Rough Riders. We'd gotten stuck with Shamrocks. I'd just always known that Bogart would never have let anybody call him a Shamrock. Not without hitting the guy, anyway.

"Take it from me," the drunk said, "spike your own punch. It's too weak otherwise."

"Georgie has his own bottle," explained one of the women in a loud proud voice.

The other woman giggled. "He also has his own wife. But we lost her a while back."

So they staggered on to the car and I went inside and the first thing I noticed was, that they still used the same kind of floor wax they had for the past uncountable decades, the smell of it making me feel like I was imprisoned in a time capsule: a ten-year-old on an autumn day sitting in a desk at the back ostensibly reading my history book with a Ray Bradbury paperback carefully tucked inside.

"Jack Dwyer."

She sat at one of the two long tables where you checked in and got your name tag.

I had to glimpse at hers quickly so I'd remember who she was. "Hi, Kathy." Kathy Malloy.

"You didn't answer our RSVP. We didn't expect you. Looks like you might have made up your mind at the last minute." She tried to put a laugh on the line but it didn't work. The way her eyes scanned my rumpled tweed jacket and white tieless button-down shirt and Levi's and five-o'clock shadow, I could see that she hadn't changed any. She was one of those people born to be a hall monitor, to watch very closely what you did and to disapprove the hell out of it. She had gray hair now, worn in one of those frothing things that seem to be white women's version of an Afro, and she wore a red silk dress that despite its festive color was redolent of nothing so much as blood. She said, "Helen Manner is supposed to be helping out at the table here." She leaned forward. "Between you and me, I think Helen's developed a drinking problem over the years. She runs inside to the punch bowl every chance she gets. Don't say anything to anybody, though, all right?"

Kathy Malloy had probably done everything but rent a sound truck to broadcast Helen Manner's drinking problem and here she was telling me not to tell anybody. Right.

I got through the rest of it as quickly as I could, signing some things, accepting my name tag, hearing some more gossip, and then I went into the gym, which was like a vast dark cave festooned with low-hanging crepe of green and white, with a stage at front prowled by chunky guys my own age in gold-lamé outfits who, despite their lack of talent, seemed to be having one hell of a good time. Above the stage was a banner that said WELCOME CLASS OF '63, and I realized then how '63 looked as ancient as '23 or '17. I recalled a time when I couldn't believe it was ever going to be 1970. Now we were facing down the gun barrel of 1990. What was going on here?

For the first twenty minutes, I mingled. I was looking for Karen Lane and not finding her and in the process I renewed a lot of acquaintances, some reluctantly, some gladly, learning all those things that somehow measure lifetimes these days-the one who was married three times, the one who was wealthy at least with money, the one who was battling cancer, the one who had turned out gay, the skinny one who had turned fat or the fat one who was now a beauty, the one who was a florid-faced alcoholic, the one who was the cuckold, the one who was the menopausal male with the woman half his age. The ones you'd envied and wished in your petty heart the worst for-they'd all seemed to do pretty well, Buick-comfortable and suburban-smug. And the ones you'd feared for-the ones with limps and lisps and those little spasms of intolerable anxiety or even madness-they stood now in a cluster of the twisted and forsaken, accepting the smiles and salutations of their betters with the same kind of sad gratitude they'd long ago gotten used to.

And I still didn't see Karen Lane, though, according to various people I asked, I was drawing close-she'd just been seen on the dance floor, or at the bar, or out the back door, where a few people stood by the garage where the monsignor had parked his infamous black '57 Dodge (the primo fantasy of the time having been making out with your girl in its back seat). Joints and wine were being passed around among people who seemed almost fanatical in their laughter and who seemed to remember details of twenty-five years ago that I'd forgotten entirely.

I asked a man I recognized as a lawyer if he'd seen Karen Lane. He said, "Seen her? Hell, man, she's so gorgeous, I fell in love with her." Then he nodded to the alley behind. "I think she went out there with Larry Price."

I stood there and stared at him and time was a trap of spider-webbing I couldn't escape. Even after a quarter century, her being with Larry Price had the power to enrage me.

I pushed past the partiers and on out to the alley where a block-long of sagging garages, probably new about the time Henry Ford was rolling his first Model T off the assembly line, stood like wooden gravestones in the moonlight. They smelled of old wood and car oil and moist earth.

I looked up and down the long shadows and saw nothing. I was about to turn around and go back to the party when I heard the unmistakable moan.

Two garages away.

My stomach became fiery with pain and I felt the blind, unreasoning impulse of jealousy.

I wanted to turn around and go back to the school, and as I started to move toward the monsignor's garage again, I heard the slap, sharp as a gunshot.

Then in the soft night I heard Karen say, "Leave, Larry. Please."

"I'm not finished."

"But I'm finished, Larry, and I have been for a long time."

"I'm sick of that goddamn tale of yours, Karen. You know that? It goddamn happened and it's goddamn over and nothing can goddamn be done about it."

"Please, Larry."

"Bitch."

Then he slapped her a clean slap, probably more harmful emotionally than physically. "Bitch."

He came out of one of the garages down in the shadows and looked around as if an assassin might be waiting for him. He had changed very little-six feet, blond, attentive to his tan and his teeth. He sold BMW's and Volvos, mostly during long lunches at the Reynolds Country Club.

He was drunk enough that he leaned perilously forward as he moved. He almost bumped into me before he saw me. "Hey-"

And I dropped him. For a variety of reasons, only one even remotely noble-because he'd slapped her. The second was because he'd beaten me in high school, and the third because I was frustrated with the lies Karen had been telling me and I'd had just enough vodka-laced punch to work up a mean floating edge.

"God," he said, feeling his jaw and shaking his head.

By now, she was out in the moon shadows, staring down at him. "What happened?"

"He slapped you, didn't he?"

She glanced sharply at me. "What are you doing here, Jack?"

"Looking for you."

"Did you get the suitcase?"

"We need to talk about that, Karen. We need to talk very long and very hard about that."

If she hadn't screamed, I might not have seen him lunge at me.

I got him a hard clean shot in the stomach and then clubbed his temple with the side of my fist. He dropped to his knees and started vomiting.

"I can't watch this," she said, starting to pace in hysterical little circles. In her blue jersey jumper and white beads, she resembled a society woman who has just been informed that the entire family fortune has been embezzled.

Then, gathering herself, she went over to him and said, "Are you all right, Larry?"

"What the hell you doing with him?"

"He's helping me find something."

"What?"

"It needn't concern you." She sounded as prim as a schoolmarm. "I merely asked if you were all right."

But now he didn't pay any attention to her. He struggled to his feet, leaning back a bit from the booze. He was more sober now. Losing some blood and throwing up can occasionally work wonders.

"You think you're going to get away with this, Dwyer, you're really crazy. Really crazy." Then he turned on her and said, "You too, bitch. You too."

He left.

He walked bowlegged the way Oliver Hardy had in Way Out West. He wanted to walk mean because he was a basically mean guy and booze only enhanced his anger. But right now all he could do was look like Oliver Hardy and it didn't scare me and it didn't impress me and I'd already decided that if he came back, I was going to put a few more fists into him.

"That wasn't necessary."

"Sure it was," I said.

"You don't understand the situation here."

"I understand that Larry Price is a jerk and always has been."

"But that's all you understand."

"I met Dr. Evans."

Her eyes narrowed. "He was there when you went into the apartment?"

"He was there all right. Unconscious."

"What?"

"And bleeding."

She sighed. Shook her head. "So he did try?"

"Try what?"

"Suicide."

"Sorry."

"What?"

"Somebody hit him across the back of the head. Very hard. And several times. Guess what they were looking for."

"His money, probably. Some junkie or something."

"God, you're just going to keep it up, aren't you?"

"Keep what up? What are you talking about?"

"Keep up this guise that there's something very innocent in the suitcase and that you just kind of want it back for old times' sake. Are you dealing drugs?"

"My God, what kind of person do you think I am?"

"Did you do some jewelry salesman out of his ruby collection?"

"I don't want to hear any more."

"Somebody wants whatever's in that suitcase badly enough to risk B and E and assault with a deadly weapon. Those are heavy raps. “I grabbed her by the shoulder-thinking that Glendon Evans had told me he'd hit her-and I dug my thumb and forefinger into her gentle and wonderful flesh. “You owe it to me, Karen."

"What?"

"The truth."

She laughed without seeming at all amused. "Oh, I wish I knew the truth, Jack. How I wish I knew the truth."

But I was in no mood for philosophy. "What's in the suitcase?"

"Would you make me a promise?"

"What?"

"If we went back into the gym and danced the slow dance medley, would you promise not to step on my feet?"

"Don't try to buy me off, Karen. I want to know what the hell's going on. You're in trouble, whether you know it or not."

"You used to be a terrible dancer, Jack, and for some reason I suspect you still are." She leaned up and kissed my cheek and I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. "But then you're cute and you're sincere, and sometimes those things are even more important than the social graces."

"Have you always been this superficial?"

"No," she said, and there was an almost startling melancholy in her voice. "No, Jack, I've had to work at it. I really have."

Then she took my arm and led me back inside the gym where in tenth grade she'd given me a lingering public kiss right there on the dance floor. Robert Mitchum had nothing on me.

So we started dancing, a little formally at first, as the band went through some Connie Francis numbers and then some Johnny Mathis numbers and then some Teddy Bear numbers, and I started looking around the shadows of the gym at the joke being played out before me.

Here were the kids I'd made my First Communion with and played baseball with and walked home from school with along the railroad tracks that smelled of grease and swapped comics with (Batman was always worth two of anything else) and watched change from little girls into big girls with powers both wonderful and terrible over me and little boys into half-men with a hatred that could only come from growing up in the Highlands-but whatever else we'd been, we'd been young and it had all been ahead of us-the great promise of money and achievement and sex, God yes, sex. But these people were trying to trick me now, they'd gone to some theatrical costume shop and gotten gray for their hair and padding for their bellies and rubber to create jowls, these very same people in my First Communion photo.

"You scared?" she said.

But I'd been lost in my thoughts and all I could give her was a dumb expression. "What?"

"Are you afraid?"

"Of what?"

"Look around."

"That's what I'm doing."

"In twenty years a lot of these people will be dead. Maybe even us."

"I know."

"It went so fast."

I was getting one of those seventh-grade erections, the kind you get but don't really want because it's embarrassing and you don't really know what to do with it. I was getting a seventh-grade erection there dancing in the darkness of our middle age.

"Why don't we go back to your apartment and go to bed?" she said. Her voice was curiously slowed. I wanted to attribute this to the incredible sexual sway I held over women but somehow I didn't think so.

I said, "You're drunk."

"No, I'm not. I only had two drinks tonight."

"Something pretty potent?"

"No, one of the pink ladies fixed me a Scotch and soda is all."

"Pink ladies?"

"Waitresses."

"Ah." And true enough, I had seen waitresses buzzing around. "They must have had some kind of incredible effect on you."

"Why?"

"You sound groggy."

"That's what's funny."

"What?"

"I sort of feel groggy, too."

"You want to sit down?"

"No, just hold me a little closer, will you?"

I sighed, pulled her closer. "Karen, I want you to tell me about the suitcase."

"Not now, all right?"

And she put her face into my shoulder and we danced as I once dreamed we would dance, eyes closed, even the tinny music melodic and romantic, and I felt her eminent sexual presence but also her odd vulnerability, and I held her for the girl she'd been and the woman she was, and I let my lips find her cheek and felt her finger tender on the back of my neck.

And for a time, moving just like that in the Shamrock gym, in unison with all the people in our First Communion picture, I forgot all about Dr. Evans and how he'd been knocked out and forgot all about a curious figure in black on a black Honda motorcycle and all about a suitcase that nobody seemed to possess but that somebody seemed to want very, very badly.

I wasn't thinking of anything at all really, just floating on her perfume and the darkness and the music, and at first I was scarcely aware of how she began to slip from my arms to the floor.

"Karen?" I said. "Karen?"

People around us were looking and a few giggling, making the assumption she was drunk, but I didn't think so.

She was dead weight in my arms. And that was exactly what I thought: dead weight.

And then one of those quick bursts of panic, some sort of concussion, went off inside me and I heard myself shouting for lights up and for people to clear space and I knelt paramedic-style next to her feeling for pulse in neck and wrist, touching the tepid, sweaty skin of her body.

I found no pulse.

A priest and a fat man in a dinner jacket whom I recognized as our class president came running up and said, "What's wrong here?"

"Ambulance," was all I could say, scarcely able to speak at all.

The overhead lights were on now and the magic was gone; you could see how old the floor was, and how beaten up the bleachers, and how cracked the tall windows. It was not the Stairway to the Stars of countless proms, after all. It was just a gym in a school more than half a century old and now in ill repair because the diocese saw no future in the Highlands. Nobody ever had.

She looked comic herself now, fake, the way the dancers had, fake gray tint in their hair, fake bellies, fake wrinkles and jowls and rheumy eyes, but what she was putting on was even more alarming because she was imitating death itself, like some phantom beauty from a Poe poem, but without the flutter of an eyelid or warm breath in her nostrils, not the faintest flicker in wrist or neck.

"Ambulance!" I shouted again, and this time I heard how ragged and desperate my voice had become and saw in the eyes of those encircling me a modicum of pity and a modicum of fear-both of her death and of the potential rage in my voice.

The priest, young as a rookie ballplayer, yet shorn of the grace that comes with age, knelt down beside me and said, "Maybe I'd best say some prayers with her." He didn't say "Last rites." He didn't need to. He produced a black rosary and began saying a "Hail Mary" and an "Our Father" and then a woman somewhere sobbed and for the first time I realized that the music had stopped, and that in the gym now there was just the rush and roar of time itself and nothing more, nothing more at all.