Jericho Page 10

  Pete gets up to the top and Cappy sends him up a canvas bag of tools on a line. The line isn’t heavy enough to support Cappy, so Pete decides to do the job himself while Cappy’s the lookout. Pete makes a hell of a lot of noise breaking through the skylight because he didn’t have the sense to tape the glass up before smashing it. Cappy’s getting pretty nervous about now, as I understand it. Pete drops down inside the office—and turns on the lights! Cappy’s yelling at him as loud as you can yell in a whisper to turn off the damn light switch, but his brother doesn’t hear him.

  Pete finds the safe. It’s just one of those old iron boxes with a flat front. He tries to pry it open with a crowbar but of course gets nowhere. So then he takes his sledgehammer and starts trying to knock off the knob. He thought it was going to be easier than it was. He has one stick of dynamite, which he attaches to the safe with turn after turn of friction tape, using about a mile of the stuff. That’s not enough, of course, and anyway he places it all wrong and all he manages to do is to break the top hinge on the door—which still won’t open.

  Now there’s been this explosion in the middle of the night. Cappy’s yelling for his brother to get the hell out of there or he’s going to leave him behind. Pete hears this and starts yelling back. What a scene. Pete has the line wound round the safe and is trying to pull it on its casters over to where the skylight is. What he would have done with it if he’d managed to move it, I’m not sure. But as the thing weighs maybe three hundred pounds it doesn’t move very far. He gives up in the nick of time, makes a pile of some furniture to climb on and gets back out through the skylight, cutting himself pretty bad on the broken glass and leaving all his tools behind.

  They’re both still young men at the time, in their twenties maybe, and they’ve made a lot of dough, relatively speaking, for young fellows. Cappy later says: “Okay, I’ve had enough of this. You almost got us sent to Kingston. Hell, they may get us yet. Your tools are back there, your blood’s all over the place. You weren’t even wearing gloves, you crazy bastard. Here’s the choice you got to make: either go the States and disappear and never come back here again or else let’s do an even split on what we’ve got so far and you go become a Citizen, go sell Hoover vacuum cleaners or something, anything, but stay out of Snaketown and quit the Life for good and keep your mouth shut forever. This is a one-time-only choice, good for the next two hours. You decide.” They don’t speak after that. They don’t see each other.

  Cappy builds a house for his family in a nice nondescript part of the city, surrounded by Citizens. The place looks just like everybody else’s. Frame house, wooden porch, two dormer windows on the second storey, et cetera et cetera. The only difference is he gets me to build him a room right in the centre of the basement that has no doors or windows leading to the outside, kind of a stronghold. I make it out of cinder blocks with that phony stone facing on them. Two sets of walls, floor to ceiling, with twenty-four inches of air between them, which I fill with poured concrete after putting up reinforcing rod both ways, up and down and across. There’s one vent running to the bushes outside the house, so you can’t see it. The pipe’s got a plumber’s elbow on the other end with a screw cap. The whole thing’s filled with sand so nobody can drop a bomb or tear gas inside it but so Cappy can get air by unscrewing the cap and letting the sand fall out by gravity. The whole thing rests right on the foundation. It’s got a little steel door that you have to stoop to go through or you’ll hit your head. The door has the hinges on the inside. It wasn’t exactly the hardest job I ever did but it was one of the strangest.

  [Lonnie was getting tired. I could tell by his voice but I could tell by his eyes too. I guess he wasn’t seeing the past as clear as he did when he was really feeling up, early in the mornings, “feeling chipper” is how he would have put it. I guess the voice box took orders from the eyeballs.]

  Like Lonnie, I live with the past. Partly his past, partly mine. I once told somebody that I still live at home with my parents even though they’ve been dead for years. She didn’t get it, thought I was trying to freak her out. In my mind, that’s what I meant. I never knew much about my father. I started out with a few memories but they grow fainter and get all distorted when they’re repeated and repeated until I’m not sure what’s true and what I made up to fill in the blanks. My mother worked one of the cash registers at the big Dominion store in downtown Windsor. Maybe working in a supermarket gave her the satisfaction of dealing with silver all the time. I’m not sure if this is a family trait or not. Maybe she just liked talking to people. Kids at school would tease me that she was in the Life, though of course that’s not the term they knew. “Your mother’s a whore!” they’d scream at me. Once, I got up the courage to ask her about this after thinking for a long time about how best to phrase it.

  “Mama,” I said, “do you work in a cathouse like the kids say?”

  She paused thoughtfully. I think she’d been expecting the question for years and was relieved to finally have it out in the open.

  She sat me down.

  “We prefer to call them homes of prostitution” is how she began.

  She continued at the checkout counter as long as I can remember. I’ve never heard of a hooker with a minimumwage day job before. I guess she wasn’t very successful. I was raised by Lonnie and Paulette until I was old enough to go out on my own. Lonnie and Paulette, that’s all I ever called em, never Grandfather and Grandmother.

  “You know what’s been tragic in my life?” Lonnie asked me once. I thought he was going to talk about my mother, but instead he says: “I never figured out how to have fun. When I was little, I never learned how to play with the other kids. When I tried they just wouldn’t have anything to do with me except use me as a punching bag. Once, they tied me up to a tree and left me there. This has left me with a fear of trees. So I never knew how to have fun when I grew up either. I’m not saying that I didn’t have pleasure sometimes. Everybody gets a little pleasure to break up the monotony of the pain. The pleasure’s mostly when you’re young, the pain mostly when you’re old. And I’m not saying that I didn’t get into my share of interesting trouble. I’m just saying that I never had anybody to teach me, so I never learned.”

  I knew there was a moral here, but I was afraid to ask what it was.

  “Your grandmother was a smart woman. She read a lot of books. She had an education and yet she was always trying to make herself even better. She said to me once that I was like the first map of someplace after the explorers discovered it. There was stuff marked on the seacoast and a little bit more a few miles in, but the centre was empty.”

  I knew that Lonnie liked jazz when he was young. Deetroit was a pretty good jazz town. It was the Swing Era. Not the sort of jazz that anybody likes now. In the bottom of one of his dresser drawers he had a photograph that Paul Whiteman had autographed to him with a fountain pen when he was playing one time in Deetroit. I remember seeing it once when I was going through his dresser looking for money. Whiteman was a fat bald guy with more chins than he needed and a thin little moustache that looked drawn on.He looked a bit like Hardy of Laurel and Hardy, the fat one, not the skinny one. Lonnie liked that era. His favourite movies when they came up on television were The Glenn Miller Story with Jimmy Stewart and The Benny Goodman Story with Steve Allen. He also liked a terrible movie about a trumpet player played by Jack Webb, the world’s absolute worst actor until Jack Palance. But it wasn’t just this awful white jazz that he cared about. He had a thing for Louie Armstrong and a lot of black musicians popular at the time. I guess all of us always remember the music that was popular when we were a certain age. It was just his bad luck to be that age at that particular time.

  Once, when I was still living with Mama, he said he was going to take me to the Imperial Room in Toronto to hear Nat King Cole. I got all excited about taking a trip with him. I was excited at the destination, I wasn’t particularly excited at the thought of Nat King Cole from television, except that I’ll never forget
it because we actually got to meet him. Lonnie was done up in his best outfit (he had two suits, maybe three absolute max), with lapels so wide and shoulders so big that I was embarrassed, though even I could tell this had been good stuff when it was new. We took the train, four hours or so sitting in coach, and got into Union Station and then had to walk around a long time before going to the Imperial Room even though it was right across the street from the terminal. Toronto seemed big but pretty dead to me. No obvious play. Young as I was, I made it to be a place full of Citizens. The head waiter did a weird little flicker at how Lonnie was dressed, but that was all.

  Lonnie had written out a note to Nat King Cole and bribed somebody to take it back to him, like he bribed em to let me in the place at all. After the show, another guy came by where we were sitting and said that Mr. Cole would be happy to see us for a minute. We were shown back into the dressing room, which was pretty posh but pretty small, with a mirror surrounded by light bulbs, just like you see in old movies. Nat King Cole shook Lonnie’s hands. I saw Lonnie’s note on the top of the makeup table. Lonnie said how big a fan he was and then introduced me. Nat King Cole shook my hand. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket and had a white towel around his neck that made his face look even blacker and more beautiful. He asked if we were from Toron-to. That’s how he pronounced it. Lonnie told him we were from Windsor, across from Deetroit. “Toron-to’s my favourite city,” Nat King Cole said. “This is the only room I play where I don’t have to come in through the kitchen. That’s because the Duke broke the colour barrier here years ago.” He didn’t say this with any bitterness. He just said it matter of fact. Lonnie told me afterwards: “The Duke. Duke Ellington.”

  [The older and lonelier and sicker Lonnie got, the more he liked to talk about the old days. It’s not that his thoughts were disconnected, it’s that he seemed to be carrying on one long conversation but with the speakers turned off some of the time so that nobody could hear him.)

  I thought I was marrying a real lulu. Oh, she was a looker back then. You’d never know it later but she looked like June Allyson in The Glenn Miller Story, only better. A sweet girl but sort of a pout-look on her face all the time. That was before the war. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I guess neither of us did. One good thing, though. I didn’t know she was a late sleeper. She drank back then but it wasn’t a problem. Can you imagine that?

  I’d be reading the paper. [Lonnie never read anything but the Windsor Star and the Daily Racing Form. She went through a lot of novels but they got trashier and trashier.] I’d always say, “Good morning, dear. You’re looking chipper.”

  “You can’t talk that way about the dead.”

  [You see, by this time, she was starting to lose to the booze.]

  “I’ll talk any way I please. It’s my damn apartment. I’m just glad we don’t have her around here any more, always getting in the road. She’d come here and stay and bring a cross to hang up over the bed. It used to give me the creeps.”

  “She had good sense, too. Warned me you’d never amount to anything and she was right as rain.”

  “Now we’re getting back to that again, are we? I don’t see you making much progress either, you know. No, all you do is bitch about other people.”

  “I’m—only—doing—it—to—help—us—make—something—of—ourselves—before—it’s—too—late.”

  “It wasn’t me that wanted this life. Not by myself.”

  “You just won’t pull us up and now you’re too old. We’re both too old, goddam you. Look at you. You dress like a bum.”

  “I’m a working man.”

  “You’re more than a body can stand.”

  [I’m recalling this as well as I can. I remember that the phone rang again and they both tried to grab it but she won the wrestling match and he went back to his paper while she cleared her throat and put on what she must have thought was a classy manner.]

  “Yes, it is … This is his wife. Oh yes, that will be fine. Thank you. Goodbye.” Then: “That was the doctor’s secretary. She said she’s confirming your appointment for Friday in case you forget.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, at least you’re getting out all the time, going to work, going to the doctor. A woman gets the heebie-jeebies stuck here all the time. Everything’s always the same, nothing ever changes. You leave in the morning and come back at night, or leave at night and come back in the morning, doing God knows what. Christ, I don’t even need a clock in this place.” [She threw their clock to the floor, smashing it in a big explosion of springs and gears. I remember that clearly.] “It doesn’t matter what time it is.”

  [There was silence until her voice crackled again, like squelch on a radio.]

  “You know the difference between you and me.”

  “Surprise me.”

  “I don’t want to be something I’m not, because I was properly brought up to begin with. I don’t make out like I’m somebody I’m not.”

  “You mean I don’t have any spunk.”

  “You don’t. We never even came close to getting out of this place.”

  “You wouldn’t be in the damn apartment so much if you didn’t drink until you fell down in it.”

  “I don’t just mean the apartment. This place. This area. I grew up in this area too, but—really.”

  “At least I don’t—pretend—to be anyplace but where I am, in Snaketown, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I don’t mean I don’t want things to be better. But I don’t go around making believe. Besides, I like it here. This is a pretty good burg. You can get whatever you need here. It’s been pretty good to us.”

  “That’s the stupidest lie you’ve ever told.”

  [I could go on and on describing the bickering, to use one of their old-fashioned words that I love so much.]

  “You don’t listen to a goddam word I say. I want something better than this. I want the kind of life I’m entitled to. Something different. Come back to earth, why don’t you?”

  “Me come down to earth? See, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you if you’d open up your ears. You’re the one who won’t sit tight. It’s not the place I’m talking about now.”

  [In my memory, he went back to reading the paper.]

  “They say it’s going to get colder than a gravedigger’s ass out there today,” Lonnie said.

  “Your family was no jewel either, you know.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your family.”

  “And he wasn’t a gravedigger, he was a mortician.”

  “He was a sharpie.”

  “Don’t you talk about my father like that. Accuse yourself if you want to call somebody that. You and your friends.”

  [Then it would be her turn to go on for a while. I found the language fascinating.]

  “He wasn’t any dummy, I’ll tell you that. He built up a business. He warned me against you too, didn’t he? He told me you’d never amount to anything and he was right, God rest his soul.”

  “You were the one that gave up.”

  “I didn’t give up anything.”

  “You passed out.”

  “You bored me to sleep, you bastard. The same goddam round robin all the time, it never stops. How many years has it been, I forget, and you know why? Because they’re all the same.”

  [This I remember because the phone rang in the middle of it. The phone, one of those old black jobs with the big clear plastic dial on the front, rang all the time.]

  “Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s all right. We can talk. It’s all set, then, right? What time is he coming in? Okey-dokey. Well, the thing gives me the willies, but don’t worry about me. Nothing can go wrong, eh? He says he’s probably good for the jake. The jake—the cash. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, I’ll see you down there. That’s right. I’ll be there. Yessir. So long.”

  “I bet I know who that was,” my grandmother said.

  “He’s okay. He’s a good egg. Fact is, he’s a great man. And he’s always been better to you than you have to him
.”

  [At that point Lonnie stood up on a chair in the middle of the kitchen and felt for some hiding place in the wall. He took down an object wrapped in old cloth and uncovered it. I knew what it would be. It was a very old handgun. He got his coat, stuffed the gun inside and hid the wrappings, which looked like a shroud after the grave robber’s left.]

  “I’m going now.” [There was no answer from the other room.] “I don’t know when I’ll be through.”

  [He took me with him but I had to stay in the car.]

  You see, I didn’t quite appreciate it at the time but thinking back on it later I see that Lonnie talked to me in a different language from what he used talking to people his own age. Makes sense, I guess. With me, he was the historian, passing along his stories. With them, he was the carpenter who was either happy-go-lucky—one of his favourite ways of describing someone—or anyway willing to please all the time. I suppose he was clinically depressed most of his life, but we didn’t think in those terms back where I came from, not in those days at least. (God—that sounded like his ghost was speaking through me.) Even the simplest conversation could be in a kind of code without ever getting to be more than simple talk. Even before I went to live with him and Paulette, he used to read the weekend funnies to me from the Toronto Star Weekly (I should have added that to the list of his favourite reading materials—they had the best funny papers). When I was living in their place, he used to let me follow him around, be his helper on jobs, buy me Cokes when he went to have a drink. He tried to do his own drinking away from Paulette. I used to think this was because he was afraid of having another fight with her, but now I see he was trying not to encourage her any more than he had to, not that she needed much encouragement. Lonnie even took me to his old barbershop where men got shaves with hot towels and the works. That’s illegal now in Ontario cause everybody’s afraid of getting blood all over himself. I’m sort of glad he didn’t live to see this part of downtown culture get outlawed too. So much already destroyed. I’m not sure he could have stood it.