Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Read online

  marriages, our plunges into motherhood and adultery. Through separations, "nervous breakdowns," divorces, second marriages, further motherhood.

  Mary Louise Schultz, seemingly not so competitive a cheerleader rest of us, would have the most babies, four. ) We were virgins in memory of John Reddy Heart and those lovesick nights on Water Street, on the downside of town.

  Thinking Our fathers would kill us if they knew!

  Thinking Our mothers would die of envy We can't tell them.

  One of us, it might've been Millie Leroux (of all good girls, a school teacher at the First Episcopal Church, a Girl Scout, a Student Council officer, with beautiful calm eyes) suddenly cupped her hands to mouth and called yearningly, "John Reddy! John Red-dy!" Appalled, of us, it might've been Shelby Connor, or Trish Elders, moved to quiet her- "Shhhh! "--and Millie whirled in frantic reaction, driving an elbow into the other's breast, which, fortunately, was cushioned by her WHS cheerleader's jacket. Mary Louise Schultz astonished us by moaning, "John Red-dy!

  John!" Verrie groaned as if she were being tortured, swaying, big-eyed, yanking at her wind-whipped blond pageboy hair. For what was to prevent from calling for John Reddy Heart, screaming like young female in the throes of their first incandescent heat? What if ? And why not?

  it matter that John Reddy Heart had killed a man, and a stark-naked man at that, discharging a. 45-caliber bullet into his brain in an instant of passion never to be reversed, erased, or even comprehended? Did it matter that Heart was condemned and feared by our elders, most of all our appalled fathers? Did it matter that though adoring him we were terrified of him? That his touch would have paralyzed us? There seemed nothing to prevent from rushing up the dim-lit stairs of that shabby building on Water Street to pound on John Reddy's door crying

  "Killer-Boy! Killer-Boy! Let us in! Help us!" How decent sane good-girl behavior was the thinnest of that might be ripped in an instant the way, in the hope of minimizing pain, you tear a bandage off a small wound you believe has healed.

  Next morning and all the mornings to follow for years! the tale told, retold! at our high school with its redbrick opulence and Doric columns that was our unacknowledged church in those heated adolescent years, over the lines connecting individuals as in a massive X ray of a single brain's circuits every household of significance in and surrounding the sacred Village of Willowsville. And through the Village--on the streets, the sidewalks we'd memorized from early childhood. In Nico's, in the Crystal, in Greek Gardens, in the Haven, in La Casa di Napoli Pizzeria 6 Restaurant, at the lunch counter at Muller's Drugs, in the mirrored foyer of the Glen Theatre.

  Breathless the tale of that night John Reddy Heart opened his door to those unnamed girls of the Circle who'd come to him in secret. Their pale flowerlike faces, their fevered eyes. Taking these girls one by one by their chill trembling hands and leading them into his bedroom. Laughing at their fearfulness.

  shyness. Their luminous-beautiful young-girl bodies stripped of the disguise of their clothes.

  John Reddy Heart making love to each of the girls in turn. And than once, in turn. The sexiest boy. The sweetest boy. And the most gentle, because so practiced. Six girls, or seven. In some accounts eight. Ten!

  dozen! John Reddy would've been equal to the challenge. John Reddy would've grinned Sure, why not? Kissing the girls each in turn, and at that she was the sole girl of all the world. And afterward he'd keep quiet it. That wild night on Water Street! John Reddy Heart wasn't the type of to boast about girls he made out with, ever. Or women. Not the type to arsthing--if you were John Reddy, what need? You'd trust John your virginity. With your reputation. With your life. A keeper sacred secrets, John Reddy Heart.

  It wasn't like that.

  Instead, we lost courage.

  A cold drizzle was perceived to be falling, blown slantwise by an unfriendly wind. Overhead the bone-bright moon that had to our madness was being blown away like crumpled trash. On Water Street a car's headlights blinded us approaching and passing and we hid our heated in terror of being recognized. Except for Verrie who, in a trance, was rummaging through a filth-stained green plastic garbage can at curb. We whispered, "Verrie, what are you doing? Verrie!" Verrie Myers schoolwide fame the previous spring playing Shakespeare's Portia.

  Her presence on stage, unnaturally highlighted, had riveted us all. That moonshaped face like a cameo we hadn't realized was beauty until then.

  The way in which, assured, dreamlike, she'd delivered her lines. Who if Veronica Myers could act, and who cared? In awe we'd stared stared. Mr..

  Lepage, our sexy drama teacher who devastated us with his witty sarcasm, stared at her in awe. There was Verrie Myers who was our friend, girl like the rest of us since kindergarten at the Academy Street School but up on stage she was transformed, a girl we hardly recognized. Now on Street, shivering beneath John Reddy's window, we stared in at Verrie dipping her hands into trash and sloppily bagged garbage.

  was a strong smel of coffee grounds, a stink of rancid meat. Yet Verrie didn't hesitate, plunged to the elbows. Her pink-pearlescent manicured nails! the opal keepsake ring on her right hand her boyfriend since ninth grade Kenny Fischer had given her! The silver I. D. bracelet on her left identical to the bracelets all the girls of the Circle, and other girls in emulation of us, owned. Verrie cried, "I got it! Here!" What had she snatched up? --we pulled her to the car, idling all this while at the curb, to escape.

  There were customers at the North China eyeing us curiously. What someone knew us? And cars were passing in the street. John Reddy hear the commotion and look out his window and possibly recognize Myers's yellow convertible. ) Verrie shifted the car into gear violently and drove us away, to safety we thought, we prayed. Swerving on wetted pavement. She was driving too fast for these narrow roads, we could scarcely recognize our surroundings-Beechwood? The bottom of Mill Street? Chalmers?

  Taking the back way home, the long way home, careful to avoid Main Street, crossing Glen Creek over a sturdy metal bridge at Garrison, and now past darkened, Tug Hill Park and Battlefield from which all visitors were officially banned at sunset--" The Bloodiest Single-Skirmish Battle of the Revolution, August 2, 1777." What spiritual influence this bloody battle of nearly two before exerted upon our Willowsville generation was never made clear to us, what agitated ripples in consciousness across the decades, what dreams of reckless and even self-destructive heroism, what visionary hunger to locate in the world the origin of our most vivid and powerful dreams.

  if the search is futile--even if! The mysterious lightweight object had discovered in the garbage can was being passed among us with excitement, shyness, some initial skepticism and even repugnance.

  As Verrie whispered, thrillingly, "His mouth touched this. His actual mouth." Not years after this luminous night there would float across how many hundreds, thousands of movie screens in America the gigantic so-beautiful face of Myers in her film debut and we who gazed upon it with anxious would recall this moment, the demented drama of this moment, Verrie's whispered words which several times she repeated as if in the presence of the deaf--"His mouth. John Reddy Heart's actual mouth." Ginger McCord whispered back, frightened, "Verrie, you're crazy." Was Verrie performing, merely? Or is performing our truest human nature? Less certainly, Louise Schultz whispered, "You're all crazy." Yet by degrees the was sinking in. Even as Verrie's car sped homeward, away from the lower village. Of course. Of course! One of us, it may have been Trish Elders, the least likely among us, touched the can's opening, the mouthlike aperture, with a reverent finger, as we stared, she brought her lips to it, shyly. God! -we felt the visceral charge deep in the pit of Trish's belly. Her soft lips, the sharp-eyed aperture! And in that instant we saw John Reddy carelessly yanking off the pull top, in that quick brisk matter-of-fact way in which boys yanked off pull tops, so very different from the more cautious, timid (for what if the liquid inside fizzes up, spills) way in which girls yanked off pull tops, how many times we'd surreptitiously witnessed such an ac
t, Reddy out back in the school parking lot, at noon, the yanking-off of a pull top, the tossing away, the lifting to the mouth, to drink.

  Verrie's can, which was slightly dented, there was a pungently, sweetly smell, if you shook the can gently you could hear a remote, liquidy sound, roaring like the sound of a seashell pressed against the ear. An empty Coke can, towssed away amid smelly trash. "His mouth. His actual mouth!" We began to laugh, to hyperventilate. We were choked, scandalized, incredulous.

  "John Reddy Heart's actual mouth touched this." The Coke can would be Verrie Myers's to cherish, forever. She was one of us to have snatched it from oblivion.

  John Reddy came out of the west, John Reddy came out of the west.

  John Reddy came to us out of the west.

  John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.

  Does God play dice with the universe? We knew better.

  Not because we were rich men's sons. Anyway, not all of us.

  was a reason that John Reddy Heart came to live in Willowsville, couldn't have been just accident. Every guy in Willowsville of a certain age, twelve through twenty, and many unacknowledged others besides, liked it that John Reddy Heart who was our classmate had killed a man, an actual man, an actual adult man like our fathers (except you could argue, like Hewson, that Melvin Riggs was more like our fathers than any of truly were), but we didn't like it that he was caught. Tracked by bloodhounds in the Adirondacks when we'd come to believe he'd escaped to Canada, we'd wanted to believe he'd escaped to Canada. Beaten by York State troopers and hauled off in handcuffs like a captured wild animal.

  And that picture of John Reddy in the papers--his face bloodied, swollen shut but there he was standing straight between cops with his head high, defiant, unshaven and battered but that cool Fuck you look his face we loved and tried to emulate without much success. Arrested, stand trial and winding up in this crummy place in the Niagara River, Tomahawk Island Youth Camp. "The first boy ever from the Village of Willowsville to be incarcerated at any state youth facility." It hurt us that John Reddy disappeared from our school for a year and a half. So many months! This kid that, as a sophomore, already his basketball and track letters. He'd come close to breaking the dating back to 1941, for points scored in a single season in basketball, and would've broken it his junior year if he hadn't killed Mr..

  Riggs instead.

  If he'd kept on scoring the way he was, through senior year, as expected, John Reddy would've had his pick of basketball scholarships to Syracuse, Cornell, Ohio State, Indiana. We just knew.

  "It's a tragic fate. Like a Greek goddam tragedy like--Sophocles, Homer.

  My heart is broken for that boy." This was the statement our coach McKeever made every time he was asked about John Reddy, and he was asked about John Reddy a lot.

  We felt the same way, mostly. Guys at WHS who were John Reddy's classmates, or a little older or younger than he was. Not that we went around saving so. My heart is broken. Hell, no.

  Still, our hearts were broken. It was like a death. Such tragic goddam bad luck, like Coach said.

  The girls. The girls were all crazy for John Reddy, it got sort embarrassing sometimes. Not that we were jealous. Maybe we were jealous, a few of us, like Ken Rscher who'd been crazy for Verrie Myers since kindergarten, like Dougie Siefried who'd had a crush on all the girls of the Circle, especially Ginger McCord and Shelby Connor, like Art Lutz who'd had a on Mary Louise Schultz since seventh grade and confessed of dreaming of her, every goddam night of his life--"And she doesn't know I exist!

  doesn't care." Dwayne Hewson who was Pattianne Groves's steady understood that, deep in her "secret girl heart, that I or nobody is gonna penetrate," Pattianne Groves was in love with John Reddy Heart, and so Millie Leroux, and little Trish Elders. And others. How many others! We were jealous but we could comprehend the logic. Like the song said, Reddy came out of the West, and not one of us would've remained if we could have changed into John Reddy Heart so how in all could we blame our girl classmates.7--"They're only human, too. Still, we didn't talk about it like the girls did--the arrest, detention, the trials and the Tomahawk Island incarceration. We brooded.

  our wives, these strange, somehow accidental females we'd end up marrying, having kids with, would accuse us of "refusing to share"--"refusing to communicate"--"bottling up everything inside"--"passive-aggressive manipulation"--and we'd protest, Jesus Christ what do you want me to say? what do you want me to say? but deep inside we'd understand, yes was so.

  Some of us would remain married--like Bert Fox said (though maybe wasn't a good example, he'd finally kill himself), it was like taking a deep breath and diving back down into the very water you'd almost drowned in because what the hell else are you going to do? where the hel else are you going to go? and some of us, the more reckless, the more desperate, more luckless, and a few "problem drinkers," bankrupts and crazed adulterers would get divorced, not invariably of our own volition, we'd never become hysterical, never displayed our emotions in public like girls do, or did back in Willowsville in the time of John Reddy Heart, wearing red sequin hearts on their sleeves, for instance, or scattered in their hair, during John Reddy's trials. And bursting into tears when nobody expected it.

  distanced ourselves from such behavior, knowing that John Reddy, never a guy to complain (say he'd pulled a muscle running track or got hit hard in the ribs on the basketball court, or even fouled to the groin--you'd see his face go white, and beads of sweat pop out, but that was all), would've been embarrassed as hell by such excess. Eyes averted, with a little frown he'd ignore the special cheers for him the varsity cheerleaders had worked up-,?

  "S John Reddy we're ready!

  John Reddy we're rea-dy Mmmmm JOHN REDDY WE'RE REA-DDYY YAYYYY!

  And the crowd in the gym went wild cheering, clapping, whistling, their feet till the floor rocked, the overhead lights vibrated.

  Dougie Siefried sighed and laughed sadly, saying in some dreams of his such a aimed at him, and his heart bathe in a feeling of such happiness he knew it was heaven, or as close to heaven as he'd be likely to get, but John Reddy scowled and wiped his face on his jersey in that way he had, like he didn't care if hundreds of people were watching, or wasn't even aware.

  "You don't play to the crowd. You play to the basket"--John Reddy once remarked to Dwayne Hewson.

  So we liked it O. K. (even Artie Riggs, a nephew of the murdered man, thought it was "kind of cool") what John Reddy'd done, though we better than to say so publicly. But the way John Reddy's life was permanently screwed up afterward--that was something else, that made us think.

  That scared us. Like Mr.. Cuthbert our social studies teacher said, at the front of the classroom, pacing excitedly about, his owl and bright behind his glasses--"Students! Consider! How the your lives have been rushing toward you without your comprehension, the Niagara River rushing above the falls, and you can't see the falls, and you make a split-second decision, behaving in a way we might designate as X"-and here Mr.. Cuthbert chalked a swooping X on the blackboard, as if couldn't follow his reasoning otherwise--"and just possibly X is no more and no less than you've been genetically programmed by millennia of and by the fact that you're Texas-born and reared in the West and conditioned by your familial and cultural environment to be and impetuous and prone to acting spontaneously with your fists or whatever's at hand--so in that fatal split second you take up a gun you aren't even certain is loaded, drop to one knee as John Reddy Heart allegedly did and fire off a shot into your oppo, nent's head--into his brain--and both of you pierced by that bullet. Your life forever afterward is changed." Mr.. Cuthbert had a point. A profound point. You do X, your life's X. So changed, you could say it isn't your life any longer.

  The first person in all of Willowsville to set eyes on John Reddy was--Ketch Campbell.

  The sighting occurred right on Main Street, near Willow, at the heart of our four-block downtown as it's called. Thirty years later, Willowsville's downtown will have spread as far as Haggarty Road to the eas
t and Burlingham Avenue to the west--with a shopping plaza set back on Street, and a medical center on Garrison--but when the Heart family arrived downtown was those four blocks you could stroll in less than ten minutes or ride your bikexrough in three minutes. A succession of glittering stores and storefronts memorized as in a recurring dream of such comfort and assurance it seems not a dream at all but an inviolable and solid as a substratum of granite. Ketch would claim it was precisely 4,08 P. M. by the tower clock at the Metropolitan Life Building. The day was warmmuggy like the inside of, say, a Coke bottle. No air stirring. A July afternoon when John Reddy Heart first appeared in Willowsville, and a half years before he would shoot Melvin Riggs, Jr. , down in an upstairs bedroom in an old Dutch Colonial house in the most neighborhood of Willowsville, less than two miles from Main Street at Willow. Ketch was downtown (with his mom who was taking him to Brown's for new sneakers--but this never figures in the story) when he happened to notice "this weird, wild, bright-salmon-colored pulling a U-Haul trailer with Nevada license plates" moving a little too fast, sort of impatiently, weaving out of the ten-mile-per-hour lady-shopper traffic on Main Street. "You could tell immediately," Ketch said, "before you saw the skinny underage kid who was driving, or noticed the plates, that these were folks from somewhere else. Somewhere far else." Ketch who'd been one of those nervous twitchy fattish kids always running and puffing trying to keep up with the rest of the guys. He'd learned to tell this story in the right way, like every factor in the equation, including of course eleven-yearold Ketch Campbell (he'd never mention his age if he could help it), had to be what it was, absolute and fixed. He'd speak excitedly sometimes, couldn't interrupt but had to let him tell it start to finish. And each time the story got a little longer, more like a movie.