Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Read online

  The Caddie was a Bel Air possibly five years old. Painted a Day-Glo pinkishorange, a misconceived repaint job that made your eyes pinch but couldn't look away. (Others on Main Street, including Ketch's mom, must've been staring, too. Willowsville's that kind of place, to intruders, invaders. ) This Caddie, amid the boring beige, buff, matte gray, blackgreen, black-blue, classy black-black of the other cars on Main Street on this typical summer afternoon. Also, the front and rear bumpers of the were stippled with rust. The car was low-slung, dragging its muffler and listing just perceptibly to one side. There was a long wicked dent like a lightmng zlgzag running the full length of the car's left side and the left rear door out of whose rolled-down window a fierce old white-haired and man in a cowboy hat was gazing in Ketch's direction) appeared to be shut. "Yet, Jesus! The car was beautiful." And there was John Reddy Heart behind the wheel. His name unknown.

  John Reddy, only eleven years old! Seated on three Las Vegas directones so he could peer over the steering wheel and along the shinyglaring hood of the car. Ketch had to admit he'd never have that the boy driving the Caddie was so young--his own age--later he'd figure, we'd all figure, that, out West, kids grow up faster, with more than those of us in the East--but it was obvious the boy was too young to be Unless he was a midget or a dwarf, and he didn't appear to be either. Ketch said, "He looked maybe thirteen. Kind of olivish-dark. Not foreign-looking exactly--well, possibly a little Indian--I mean, American Indian--I they aren't foreign, but--you know what I mean. Anyway this kid's of--strange. Exotic you might say. Did I mention the sideburns?

  Like Elvis.

  With really dark aviator-style sunglasses like an adult man would wear, and a straw hat like a fedora with I think a red band"--though in alternate versions of the story told over the years and eventually decades Ketch swear he recalled John Reddy wearing a cowboy hat (like his grandfather in the rear seat) or, yet more unlikely, a Buffalo Hawks baseball cap--"and a baggy white T-shirt. And a watch on his left wrist, sort of a big, pilot-style watch." The kld was maneuvering the Caddie and the U-Haul (a vehicle about the size of a Volkswagen) through Willowsville like a quick, impatient creature, a fox for instance, through a herd of slow-moving sheep. Mrs.. Leroux was backing her Lincoln Continental out of a space in front of Fleda Vetch Intimate Apparel in that blind-cautious way of our lady shoppers and the kid in the Caddie punches his horn with a balled fist and eases past, just missing the Lincoln's rear left fender a feather.

  And there's Mrs.. Marsh maneuvering her bottle-green Mercedes into a tight space in front of Waterford Wedgwood like a woman maneuvering into tight girdle, and the kid driving the Caddie coolly leans on his horn and eases past her--Jesus! --by a fraction of a feather. If you know Willowsville you know that during shopping hours in the area called the Avenue of Fashion, there are always women--wives, mothers, grandmothers--youngish, middleaged, elderly--the third fingers of their left hands with expensive stones, maneuvering their expensive cars in, and out, of parking spaces. In, and out, of parking spaces. In front of Scroop's Shoes, the Bookworm, Gucci, Jonathan Logan, Waterford Wedgwood. In front of pink-mantled Bon Ton Shop. Village Florist. The Village Tartan Shoppe. Laura Ashley.

  The Crystal Tearoom & Sweet Shop. Voss Jewelers. The Gift Box.

  Vetch Intimate Apparel. The English Shoppe. Pendleton. The impatient kid in the Caddie sounded his car horn and our Willowsville ladies yielded.

  Ketch watched fascinated. "It was, like, a historic moment I guess. And none of us aware. Except somehow, it's hard to say and I don't to exaggerate, but--you know." This was plausible. To a degree. But Ketch couldn't help but push too far, claiming that he'd seen a gun, an actual gun, Lying on the rear window ledge of the Caddie---"lt had to be it--the murder-weapon-to-be. What e]se?" The 45-caliber Colt revolver that would be revealed, in time, as registered in Nevada in the name of Aaron Leander Heart, John Reddy's grandfather.

  Bullshit, we retorted. Typical Ketch bullshit. Say the old man might have been carrying the gun on his lap (though that's doubtful), or the might've been on the front seat between John Reddy and his sleeping mother (even more doubtful), but why would it have been in full view on the rear window ledge? Matt Trowbridge, the Willowsville traffic cop shortly to flag John Reddy down, would emphasize that there was no firearm anywhere in the Hearts' car that afternoon--"You think I wouldn't have noticed? Christ, I'm a police officer. I'm not blind." But persisted, he'd seen the gun. Stubbornly through the years as he faded from the swagger and grating hee-haw laugh of adolescence to the morose-ironic pallor-pudginess of a middle-aged CPA at an undistinguished Buffalo money-management company, acquiring a wife, children, the complexities of adulthood, the one among us who'd first sighted John Reddy Heart and for whom this first sighting would be the defining feature of his otherwise insignificant boyhood--"I saw that gun. I saw it somehow.

  I saw John Reddy and I saw his mother and I saw the gun and I saw them in same moment." Of course it was Willowsville patrolman Matt Trowbridge, at that assigned to downtown traffic duty, whose testimony was more reliable. If you deducted some for a cop having to protect his professional reputation.

  Thirty-two years old on that July afternoon, not young, but youthful,. upand-coming in the small village police force, idealistic, energetic, slightly disappointed (in secret) that he'd ended up in suburban cop work and not gritty urban work, packed a gun he'd never have to use, and would rarely remove from its holster while on duty, Trowbridge would long recall staring in disbelief--"What the hell? "--as the Day-Glo pinkish-orange tugging a swaying battered U-Haul with Nevada plates cruised the intersection of Main and Willow even as the yellow traffic turned to red maneuvering its way with bold, insolent agility around a pigeon-colorei Cadillac Eldorado that had just braked to a proper stop.

  blew his whistle--that loud, shrill, ear-piercing whistle that was like a sexual clarion call--and flagged the driver down, and stalked over to confront him. "And, Christ, it's a kid. I mean a young kid, not twelve years old."

  boy cast Trowbridge a look he could only interpret as pissed, not scared.

  Annoyed, not worried. Trowbridge saw the boy's lips move in a silent but expletive--Shit.

  A kid wearing man-sized aviator sunglasses with almost-black lenses. A man-sized hat (a straw fedora, for the record, with a dark band).

  His Indianblack hair longish, sideburns on his cheeks. His skin olive-tan. Young, yet not young somehow, he hadn't the muscles of a boy but the shoulder and arm muscles of a man who's been doing outdoor work.

  "It flashed through my mind, it's Police Academy training, This kid, this car, these folks might be dangerous. The Nevada plates sort of spooked me." Swiftly Trowbridge took in what he could see of the car's other just a family it seemed, kids in the back, oldish man, sleeping woman in the front passenger seat. No sign of trouble. There might've been odd about these folks, but they didn't look dangerous. Trowbridge was staring at the woman in front, evidently sleeping, her blond resting against a plllow and her face shielded from the sun by a thin white veil--"It came to me it was a bridal veil. The woman was wearing all white." Behind the sleepmg woman was a scowling gentleman in his late sixties, hatchet-faced, with iron-gray eyebrows like fierce caterpillars, wearing a soiled cowboy hat and glaring at the traffic officer--"He looked like a real old-West character. But I could see his hands, he was unarmed." Beside the old man was a plumpfaced girl of about six, who looked frightened, beside her, a boy of about nine, thin-faced and frightened, blinking at the patrolman round, smudged eyeglasses. Both children sat hunched forward, their on their knees as if the car's momentum had thrown them nearly off soiled plush seat. (In time, Trowbridge would embellish this episode. He'd recall that old Mr.. Heart "gave off an odor of malt whisky you could smell yards away. If he'd been driving, I'd have had to run him in for DWI." The boy, Farley Heart, in young adulthood to distinguish himself in computerrelated field about which Trowbridge would know nothing, had, he recalled, been "calculating on some sort of plastic gizmo" the way
another child, rest1 1 q less and bored on a lengthy car trip, might play with a toy. The girl, Shirleen Heart, one day to be Sister Mary Agatha of the Sisters of Charity, was as Trowbridge recalled squinting into a "heavy black Bible in her lap and moving her lips--like begging God to intervene. And maybe He did. ") In fact Trowbridge hadn't paid much attention to the passengers in back of the Caddie except to ascertain that they were nonthreatening. It was the sleeping woman, the gorgeous woman in white, who drew his interest.

  She was waking, slowly, murmuring something petulant to the boy the wheel, who grunted an inaudible reply, just possibly, the boy had nudged her in the leg to wake her. The veil still over her face, she yawned loudly, and stretched her shapely bare arms, she arched her back, with amazing results-her heavy, voluptuous breasts strained against a low-cut sweater of fine-knit white nylon, the nipples defined like beads. Trowbridge stared, mesmerized. His mouth had gone dry. There was a roaring in his ears. She's somebody I knofisn't she? Somebody I know. Who loves me. The white linen slacks that fitted her body snugly, her stomach was rounded, not plump but firm flesh like a peach, there was a scent as of ripe, overripe, fruit about her, perfumy perspiration, talcumy deodorant, the halter sweater was low-cut, like no sweater any woman of her age would wear in Willowsville, it had ridden up at her waist to reveal the soft pale of her midriff.

  Her hair, bone-blond, was frizzed to her shoulders in a girlish style. Trowbridge murmured, "Ma'am? Excuse me?"

  "That's my mom. She's kind of tired," the boy said quickly. "We driving a long distance today... sir." The boy was sitting straight as possible, trying to appear taller, and older. He spoke in a liquidy drawl Trowbridge recognized as Southern, Southwestern. Trowbridge asked his name, and the boy answered, "John Reddy Heart, sir." Trowbridge asked his age, and the boy said, with a childlike dip of his head, "My age? I don't know exactly. There's a birthday coming up, I think. My mom would know... " The boy removed his sunglasses in a gesture of abnegation. Trowbridge saw sweating. Pinpricks of anxious sweat on his forehead, on his upper lip.

  He'd have been a good-looking kid, with wavy black hair, deep-socketed thicklashed eyes with irises so intense and dark they bled into the pupils, except for the strain, the anxiety. Eyes of a child who's seen too much and knows it isn't over yet, he'll be seeing more. "Well, son," Trowbridge said, "you don't have a driver's license, I guess?" The boy smiled hard, and said, "Yes, sir. I do." Trowbridge said, surprised, "You do? You? May I see it, p]ease?" There was a moment's pause. The boy was still smiling but seemed not to heard Trowbridge's request. "And the registration for this vehicle?" The boy glanced at the woman beside him, who was still not quite awake, said, reluctantly, "Yes, sir." He opened a woman's straw handbag on the seat between them and rummaged about inside it, pushing aside jars of makeup, an inexpensive pressed-powder compact, bejeweled tubes of lipstick kiss-blotted tissues (Trowbridge would dream uneasily of kiss-blotted tissues, that very night) and an alligator-hide wallet swollen with money, cards, and color snapshots, out of the wallet he extracted a driver's license and a car registration, which he handed to Trowbridge and which Trowbridge examined frowning. He said, "Son. This driver's belongs to one Dahlia Magdalena Heart, blond hair, green eyes, five-foot and a hundred nineteen pounds'--you trying to say that's you?" The boy who'd identified himself as John Reddy Heart fixed his deep-socketed eyes Trowbridge's and said, still courteously, "Sir, you asked if I a driver's license, and I do. Technically, it's my mom's.

  Dahlia Magdalena Heart is my mom." Startled, Trowbridge laughed. He hadn't meant to, and not so harshly.

  "Yes, son, but you happen to be driving this vehicle, not your mother. You're in violation of New York State vehicular law." Stubbornly the boy said, "O. K. , like you say I'm driving' the car, but my mom's me. It's her car. I was just doing what she told me. It's none of my fault if the light changed while I was under it, I'd have gotten through except blocked me, people don't know how to drive here! --jeez. I didn't break any law." Trowbridge smiled, had to admit he was entertained by this cocky little fellow, touched by something desperate in the boy's face. By now Trowbridge's keen eye had taken in the stack of phone directories which the boy was seated, the wrinkled khaki shorts that appeared too large for him, his scabby knees, grimy bare feet. And the impressive, adult-looking wristwatch on the boy's left arm, its face complex with numerals and dials, its worn brown leather band wadded with adhesive tape to make it fit.

  Trowbridge thought, His dad's watch. He felt pity sniffing the animal smell that lifted from the boy, the odor of worry. But he was a police officer, knew his duty, and it wasn't to be sentimental over such folks, strangers to Willowsville and, who knew, a threat to law-abiding residents, saying sternly," John Reddy Heart' you call yourself.7--you've a moving violation, son, and you appear to be a minor lacking a license.

  And your mother is an accessory. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to--" The veil slipped seductively from Dahlia Heart's face.

  So it would come to pass that Patrol Officer Matt Trowbridge of the Willowsville Police Department would be the first individual in village to set eyes upon

  "The White Dahlia." Except, by one of those mysterious coincidences that thread through our lives, arguing for, not mere chance, but fate, destiny, purpose, if but the cruel purpose of cosmic irony, at that very moment Mrs.. Herman Skelton, Irma Skelton, happened to be driving her gleaming dark-green Lincoln past the offensively bright-hued old Cadillac parked at the curb, and would afterward claim that she'd gotten a clear look at a "heavily made-up, 'glamorous' woman making a shameful provocative appeal to a young officer--obviously with the intention of being spared a ticket." How embittered Mrs.. Skelton, Herman's wife of twenty-six years, would be, in time, by the role this "glamorous woman" would play in her life.

  And, additionally, there came Suzi Zeigler and her boyfriend Roger Zwaart, hardly more than children at the time, though, thrown together by alphabetical seating since first grade at the Academy Street School, they'd long been a steady, devoted couple by seventh grade, and would claim that they, too, had a fleeting glimpse of the woman to be known as Mrs.. Heart--and the boy John Reddy--while pedaling their bicycles Main Street ize direction of the Tug Hill swimming pool, they'd the Cadillac and U-Haul and Nevada plates and a uniformed officer in the car window "and these strange-looking people, these sort of freaky, misfit people," Suzi began, and Roger intervened as often he did, completing Suzi's wayward sentences, "--so we knew whoever they were had to be special. Freaky or misfit possibly but special." In the Cadillac, Dahlia Heart was asking Trowbridge what seemed to the problem in a warm, fluid Western accent more honeyed than the boy's, and Trowbridge, mildly dazed, began to explain, and the boy to explain, and Dahlia Heart laid a hand, a beautiful beringed hand, on the boy's surprisingly muscled shoulder--"John-ny, you hush. This is the of ficer and me now." And again Trowbridge tried to explain the running of the red light, the boy's age) but his voice came out sounding, not authoritarian, but apologetic, for he'd have to admit afterward he'd never seen such eyes in any human face--"'Sea green' you could call them but actually more some kind of jewel, what's it--emerald.7--" Trowbridge would words, not being by nature a man of words, and never had he seen such a perfect female face, a beautiful face, dazzling and luminous and a kind to be magnified to gigantic goddess proportions on a movie screen, and all this while Dahlia Heart leaned earnestly in Trowbridge's direction even as Trowbridge earnestly leaned into the rolled-down window of the car, past the now silent, frowning boy, Trowbridge was like one being into a vacuum, the V neck of the blond woman's halter top straining with weight of her breasts. Dahlia Heart was pleading for understanding, sympathy, she had "sensitive eyes" and a "congenital propensity for migraine headaches", she'd been driving that morning since Cairo, Illinois, and was exhausted, so she'd asked her son to take over at the wheel as often she did, it was just a practical maneuver, he'd drive while she her eyes a little, covering them with the veil, but able to watch the road through the veil, and never
sleeping of course, she'd been fully awake and fully conscious all the time. "My son is almost twelve, Officer. He has the intelligence and driving skills of any sixteen-year-old. Back home in the Southwest it's common for young boys to drive cars, trucks, tractors, combines--it's for them to do a man's work. And Johnny is a better driver than I am, in fact." Trowbridge's face was painfully flushed. "Yes ma'am," he said uncomfortably. "But the boy is a minor and doesn't have a valid New York license. And--" Dahlia Heart cried impatiently, her eyes hurt, "Officer, haven't I exp]ained? I was awake. I was him. It's a method we've worked out, Johnny and me, for long-distance driving.