Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Read online

  Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

  First Printing, July, 1999

  There was a time in the Village of Willowsville, New York, population 5, 640, eleven miles east of Buffalo, when every girl between the ages of twelve and twenty (and many unacknowledged others besides) was in love with John Reddy Heart. John Reddy was our first love. You never forget your first love. And where John Reddy wasn't exactly our first love (for after all, our mothers must've loved our fathers first, when they were young, in that unfathomable abyss of time before our births--and certain of our Willowsville mothers were in love with John Reddy) he supplanted that first love, and its very memory. This time we most cherish isn't the tense "public" time of John Reddy's notoriety, those seventy-two hours when he was an actual fugitive from justice and the object of a statewide manhunt by New York State troopers and other law officers, to be tracked down in the mountains and arrested and brought home in shackles and most of it reported on TV and in the local papers, John Reddy Heart's face reproduced in the media daily for weeks, sixteen years old, good-looking even though battered and bleeding, stubborn, mysterious in his refusal to speak, his eyes heavy-lidded with secrets. Nor did we most cherish the drama of his trials in the fall, and yet more publicity, lurid screaming headlines, SUBURBAN TEEN TRIED IN SHOOTING DEATH OF MOTHER'S LOVER--16-YEAR-OLD TRIED AS AN ADULT, D. A. CALLS "VICIOUS MURDERER"-in Time, Newsweek, Life. And footage on network TV (Even in English and European papers, we were told, there were articles, with accompanying photographs, of John Reddy Heart. ) Nor did we most cherish the giddy weeks of "The Ballad of John Reddy Heart," by the rock band Made in USA, which was number one on the charts within a week of its release.

  John Reddy, you had our hearts. John Reddy, we would've died for you.

  John Reddy, John Reddy Heart. Words you couldn't actually hear clearly, the amplified guitars, drums and general screeching were so loud. ("The Ballad of John Reddy Heart" sold more than any other single record--this was before tapes and CDS--in the history of Willowsville and vicinity.

  Though the music was kind of crude, you'd have to acknowledge, and Made in USA might be characterized as early, unintentional grunge. And we all resented the way, in the ballad, "John Reddy Heart" was portrayed.

  For he just wasn't the John Reddy any of us knew, our classmate. ) More distorting yet, and luridly sensational, was the CBS TV film in two parts The Loves of the White Dahlia, a docudrama supposedly based on the private lifew of Mrs.. Dahlia Heart, John Reddy's mother--the most controversial femul to ever reside in the afftuent suburb of Willowsville, New York, in its century and a half of history. But this film, in our mayor's incensed words "a libel upon our village as upon the Heart family," wasn't aired until several years later, when we were all away at college, and the Hearts themselves long departed. No, it's a quieter time we cherish. Those of us who knew John Reddy well.

  As Trish Elders would say, "He's someone you feel. Though he enters you through the eyes, he's someone you feel." This time when John Reddy, on probation, was living alone on Water Street, devoted to finishing his senior year of high school after twelve months' incarceration at Tomahawk Island Youth Camp (in the Niagara River) where he'd "maxed out" (as we'd learned to say casually) for getting into fights, failing to rack up a single day off for good behavior. The fights hadn't been John Reddy's fault, we were sure. He'd had to protect himself against other inmates, bigger, older guys, and guards, too, not just his physical self but his honor "as a man." So John Reddy's basketball teammates Dougie Siefried and Bo Bozer told us, incensed--"Because you know John Reddy, he's not gonna take any shit from anybody. John Reddy's the kind of guy you'd have to kill to make give in." It was thrilling to hear Willowsville boys talk like this.

  The boys we'd gone to school with all our lives. Alluding to matters girls weren't supposed to know, though we could guess (we believed we could guess) what they were, sort of--"Forbidden acts," as Verrie Myers said gravely. Dougie and Bo were a year younger than John Reddy, in our class at school, but, speaking of John Reddy, they took on the elusive qualities of someone older, deeper into masculine experience. They frowned, brooded, sniffed, lit up cigarettes (forbidden for guys on teams) and shifted their shoulders inside their maroon Wolverine jackets in the way that John Reddy shifted his inside his black leather jacket. A signal they were restless, eager to be gone. Their aggrieved nasal voices were eerie echoes of John Reddy's voice. A slight drawl and sexy drag to vowels that wasn't western New York State but John Reddy's enthralling accent we'd been informed was west Texan. Not that it was one hundred percent certain where John Reddy was from, still lessbwhere he was born.

  One newspaper, at the start of his trial, claimed he'd been born in Gila Bend, Arizona. Another, in Las Vegas, Nevada. All we knew absolutely, as Bo Bozer said, with satisfaction, was, "Anywhere but here."

  "On probation? What's that mean, exactly?"

  "He's out of prison. But he's, like, still in. Under the surveillance of the state. He has to report to a probation officer. He isn't free."

  "He's maybe--being watched?" It was a melancholy kind of glamour, John Reddy back among us, in Willowsville, but not living in his family house on St.. Albans Hill (though still furnished, the Heart house was empty), instead, he lived in a shabby tworoom apartment (we'd been told, we'd never seen) on narrow, hilly Water Street, south of Main and a short block from the old Willowsville Water Mill. John Reddy would be eighteen the following February. (We knew of his birthday from the papers. ) He'd lost a whole year of school, his own class had graduated and moved on while he'd been shut up in prison--"You have to know that injured his pride as much as being an ex-con. And being on probation' for another twelve months!" John Reddy's family, the Hearts, had vanished from Willowsville. This surprised us--we'd always believed they loved him. They'd stand by him. It was said that John Reddy was stubborn and "unrealistic"--wanting to reenter our school, which had the reputation of being possibly the best, the most academically demanding high school in upstate New York, to get his State Regents diploma. He'd personally petitioned to be reinstated to WHS and the board debated the issue heatedly, and after a close ballot voted to allow him back--with the mean proviso that he be barred from "all sports and extracurricular activities of any kind taking place outside regular school hours (8,45 A. M. to 3,15 P. M. ). A slap in the face to all of us! Especially Coach Woody McKeever and the varsity basketball team.

  John Reddy had been their star forward. Of four hundred seventeen students enrolled at WHS at that time, John Reddy Heart was the only one not living with any family, any adult. The only one "on his own." It seemed strange to us, and wonderful. We spoke of him in hushed, reverent tones. It was enough to utter his name, to summon tears to our eyes. Living alone? Alone? But he's only a boy. Because John Reddy was a minor on probation, he had a nine p. m. curfew weeknights, an eleven p. m. curfew weekends, and was forbidden to associate with other persons on probation or on parole. He was forbidden to drive more than twenty miles from his official place of residence without permission and he was forbidden to drink alcoholic beverages or associate with people who did. (Did this mean that John Reddy couidn't drop by the Haven for even a Coke, or hang out at Tug Hill Park if some of the guys were playing softball and somebody's older brother had brought along beer on ice? ) Of course, John Reddy was forbidden to use drugs or to associate with people who did. "But John Reddy would never get lonely, like the rest of us," Verrie Myers argued. "He wouldn't be weak in that way. He doesn't need other people." Verrie had been in love with John Reddy Heart since the age of eleven years, two months, and eight days. Quickly Mary Louise Schultz said, "If John Reddy seemed to need another person,
it would be out of kindness to him. Or her." Those stolen evenings in Verrie Myers's canary-yellow Olds convertible her parents had given her as a surprise present for her sixteenth birthday. Remember the sharp lovely smell of new, the leather interior of the hue of butterscotch, soft as human skin. And the gleam of flawless chrome like the purest of smiles. The glittering instrument panel. "I'm the luckiest girl in the world," Verrie would say, smiling, as if by rote, as if she'd been taught these words, this refrain, almost a song, by her elders, "--and part of my luck is I know it. Except--" And she sighed wistfully, yet happily too, and we sighed with her, for there was John Reddy Heart and none of us had him.

  Six or seven of us crammed breathless into the Olds. Skinny-haunched Ginger McCord half sitting on Millicent Leroux's sturdy lap. We smoked a shared pack of Winstons, a secret from our parents, who wouldtve been shocked (though most of them smoked too). As John Reddy Heart was a secret from our parents. "God! I'd want to die if anyone found out.

  If he found out," Trish Elders murmured. Her fair skin emitted a feverish heat. She squirmed in excitement. We laughed but we were thinking the identical thought. If our parents knew. If guys at school knew. Shelby Connor said, "He wouldn't tell." Millicent Leroux said, "That isn't the point. The point is, we've got our pride. Dignity. We are who we are. I mean--aren't we?"

  "No! No, no! "--we squealed like maniacs. In Verrie Myers's canary-yellow Olds convertible swinging into what was called the lower village from the hilly St.. Albans neighborhood at the northern edge of Willowsville where we lived on the Common, Hampton Hill Drive, Meridian, Castle Creek, Turnberry, Glen Burns Lane. Passing at Brompton and Seneca the glimmering-pale Unitarian church. The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house where Smoke Filer lived, slabs of granite, planes of glass, looking at dusk like a seductively lighted cave. There was our school, Willowsville Senior High School set back on its ten-acre lot, bell tower lighted. There was Tug Hill Center, a Revolutionary War landmark.

  turned onto Main Street passing familiar storefronts, some darkened, some lighted, the Willowsville Sport Shop, The Bookworm, The Silver Shoppe, Harwood's Stationers, the Glen Theatre where on weekend evenings were taken by our boyfriends often on double or even triple dates sidelong shivery glances at one another and biting our fastidiously lips to keep from dissolving into peals of unfeminine laughter.

  you going to kiss your date tonight? That guy? That mouth? And what about tongue, ugh! And his/hands! And--the rest. Zipped up inside his clothes where you can't see. Vcrrie slowed the car to cruise past the Avenue of Fashion (as it was called), our favorite stores were Laura Ashley, Jonathan Logan, the Village Tartan Shoppe, Pendleton. We were rich girls but we were kept on strict allowances. Not one of us had her own credit card. No one at WHS had a credit card. When money was spent on us, as it would be, summer camp at Lake Placid, tennis lessons at the Club, riding lessons, ballet lessons, SAT tutorials, our debuts at the Buffalo Cotillion, beautiful cars like Verrie Myers's, our parents would spend lavishly but it was their entirely, their generosity. We wouldn't have believed we were entitled, for we were good moral Protestant girls anointed with the virtue of frugality.

  "God! I don't think we should be doing this. Last time--I got we'd be caught. It's kind of--crazy, isn't it?" Pattianne Groves pleaded. "--I mean, isn't it?" And now past Spring Street. Mill Street. The Old Eagle House Inn Willowsville Free Library in its 1838 granite-gray wedge of a building. The Willowsville Police, the Willowsville Fire Co. , the colonial Township Building on Willowsville Green. Traffic was light on Main at this hour of evening, almost nine p. m. Most stores were closed.

  Even the Sunoco station was closed. Verrie deftly timed the Olds to cruise green lights block after block at twenty miles per hour--"just like does." We'd begun to breathe quickly. We fumbled cigarettes, coughed as we exhaled smoke. We knew that Pattianne was right. Yet we couldn't ourselves. We'd lost John Reddy Heart to his fate for a year and almost seven months of our young lives while he'd been at Tomahawk Island and, that, incarcerated in the Buffalo House of Detention awaiting trial, and now he was returned to us, how could we help ourselves.7--leaning forward eager and tremulous as songbirds on a wire in a fierce head wind. "He'll be there.

  I know. Verrie spoke softly, as if, like a stage actress, she prepared words. She exhaled smoke in thin jerky streams. At North Street she turned right by Burnham Nurseries and so onto pothi, ed Street and across a narrow plank bridge spanning Glen Creek. herr leapt. "Now we can't turn back--can we?" We were in lower Willowsville, a no-man's-land it seemed to us, grassy vacant lots, a hulking railroad overpass, a used car dealer's and smudged-looking stucco buildings, row with cramped front yards--a neighborhood so different from the rest of our village it might have been in Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, or the gritty urban edge of Buffalo itself. Hungrily we stared at the of John Reddy's neighborhood for we were determined to memorize Reddy's exterior life. "This is so sad. He's alone. And here." Where once he'd lived like us on the Hill. Decades later, some of us could recite in unison the litany of names of Water Street, Gino's Grocery, Ace TV-Radio Repair, Midas Shoe Repair, Glenside Vacuum Cleaner Repair, North China Takeout with its mysteriously steamed window and glaring interior.

  "When I'm in danger of getting a migraine," Shelby Connor confided in us, at our tenth class reunion, "--it's signaled by a flash of that steam-andfluorescent. Vague-and-dissolving light and blinding light. And blindness rising in my left eye. North China Take-Out!" We knew what Shelby Connor, through her life a gawky lovely bird-girl of fluttery hand motions and eyes so pale a blue you'd believe you could see through them, meant exactly, yet could not have explained. It was above the North China's steamed window that John Reddy Heart lived, and this was a fact that filled us with an excitement so immense it verged upon terror.

  We were approaching John Reddy's building--three-story sandstone taking up most of the block. Behind it was Glen Creek, invisible street, a short block away was the old "historic" water mill, darkened at night. The creek made a murmurous whispering sound. It was Willowsville's single creek, with several waterfall drops, a creek so narrow and visitors believed it must be man-made, but in fact it was natural, it was ours.

  If seemed right that John Reddy lived by Glen Creek even if, from Verrie's car, we couldn't see the creek. We could hear it, like silk shaken, shaken, shaken.

  "I'm afraid. If he sees us--?"

  "I can't believe we're doing this. Oh God."

  "Who's going to know?"

  " If--he--"

  "He would never tell." Verrie braked her car to a jolting stop. We saw she was excited, clumsy.

  There were cars parked along the curb and one of them was John Reddy's, a rust-flecked old Mercury that yet exuded an air of sinister seductive power.

  Just to look at that car, its darkened windows, a cobwebby crack in the rear window, a crooked radio antenna and dented right front fender--"You felt you'd been in it. Taken for a fast, rough drive somewhere unknown.

  him." The Mercury was there, John Reddy was home! We jostled one leaning over to peer up at his lighted window on the third, top floor of the building. Or what we believed to be John Reddy's window. "Is that it? Are you sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure! Don't be ridiculous."

  "Who's ridiculous? That's an insult."

  "Shhh! Look." We stared, breathless. We saw that the blind at that window had been pulled down carelessly and hung crooked.

  Possibly it had been tugged off its roller, broken, exactly what John Reddy might've done. (He had a short, hot, dangerous temper.

  temper had beven his undoing. We knew. ) Anxiously we studied the blind, which was like, 8 none we'd ever seen in our homes, the blinds in homes, selected by our mothers, or interior decorators, were custom-made, slatted venetian blinds, this blind was parchment-colored, soiled, **skip**with cracks. Verrie cried, "Oh! --look."

  "What? Where?"

  "Where?"

  "Millie, damn--move your head." Passing across the inside of the blind there'd come
a faint fleeting shadow, blurred like a bird in flight, that might've been the shadow of a human figure, a tall lean young male figure--but we couldn't be surf. Trish Elders said, as if in pain, "That's him. I saw.

  For a moment." Trish was the one of us who'd come belatedly to adoring John Reddy, she who'd once laughed at us. Mingled in her feeling for him was a shaken sense of her own judgment, for if she'd been blind and ignorant only a short while ago, mightn't she be blind and ignorant another time? ) Shelby cried, "But where? My eyes are staring but I can't seem to see." Mary Louise murmured something inarticulate, groaning. For suddenly there was nothing above us but the blank lighted window, a taunting rectangle of light. A grimy window and soiled crooked blind. Pattianne, who a good Christian girl and never, ever swore, even under her breath, was heard to say huskily, "Damn." Verrie parked the car and gave the command--"Come on." She was the first out of the car, panting as if she'd run from St.. Albans to here. The rest of us climbed out timorously and were surprised to discover the night air so chill, moist and almost hurtful to our nostrils. "Like the very air, the smell and taste of the air, was different in John Reddy's neighborhood.

  Downhill, like at the bottom of a well." We realized it was November already, winter imminent. A hurtful bright moon like bone glared above us.

  "Oh, God. Oh." We clutched at one another. Hands grappled hands, cold There seemed to be too many hands--too many icy fingers. From somewhere above (John Reddy's window had been opened by about six inches, you could imagine him shoving it up with his muscled arms, scowling, impatient because the room was overheated and stuffy) came a of blues music--heavy, p. ercussive, adult. It wasn't the simple pop-rock music we listened to. In that instant we knew that our fates would be a single fate, we were virgin Willowsville girls and would remain virgin girls all our lives. Though John Reddy would be our first lover, our virginity would grow back. We were impenetrable. This virginity, like a curse, would persist through our brave, desperate attempts at adulthood.