Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Read online

  was thinking it might've been better for him--John Reddy--if the state troopers had shot him down in the mountains. It might've been better for all of us.

  surgery! Sure I do pro bono work, birth defects mainly, but the bread-andbutter is droopy breasts, hooter breasts, Dixie-cup breasts, bags under eyes, crow's-feet, jowls, turkey necks, liver spots, varicose veins, warts, acne scars, ripple thighs, love handles, hook noses, porky noses, double triple chins, sagging eyelids, sagging upper arms, sagging potbellies, sagging butts. It's about stopping the clock--no, turning it back. Unwinding it. It isn't what I was anticipating going into med school but it's what I got.

  Actually I wanted to be a musician. I played trombone, remember? And Blake Wells, clarinet.

  Pete Marsh fooled around with drums--not bad. We'd smoke pretending it was marijuana and we were high and that's where the came from. Mr.. Larsen said, I quote, we were as good as any band' and maybe he was being sarcastic but I believe he was correct. But, hell. I'm one of the happy graduates of our class. I'm one of the lucky ones.

  There's guys like Bozer who've basically bottomed out. Dwayne Hewson was me Bo calls him at midnight sometimes, wants to talk about the old days, certain of the games, and what's there to say? He won't hang up.

  He makes me hang up. It's like killing him. I hate it, Dwayne says.

  He's doing pretty well, old Dwayne. Running for mayor of Willowsville--man! But there's guys in our class who've killed themselves. I don't mean with cars--Smoke Filer, Steve Lunt. Or even Pete Marsh--that was a long time ago, was just a kid. I mean a guy like Bert Fox. Remember Bert? Just a regular guy, one of us in the math, science' major, not a jock and not a geek and he's married, three kids, living in Batavia selling insurance and one day he's dead.

  You'd have thought--Hell, Bert Fox doesn't have the depth to kill himself.

  Why's Bert Fox who used to screw around in Dunleddy's class taking so seriously, killing himself? Like he's impatient, can't wait nature to do it for him? Tha*,'s what you'd have thought but you'd be wrong. Now Fischer's the latest. You heard? Jesus. Ken Fischer.

  Best-Looking Boy. King of the Senior Prom. He'd gone with Verrie Myers since seventh grade-Veronica Myers. In Europe, someone said. In a hotel room where he was all alone. Or maybe wasn't alone. Who could predict--Ken Fischer?

  was saying that Mary Louise Schultz was in the hospital. Maybe a overdose. That terrific-looking girl--those breasts. Why'd a like that want to kill herself? Her husband's some big deal in Albany.

  of the Governor's. I tried to date her, and no luck. Bibi Arhardt--remember that cool chick? Husband decides he's gay, divorces her and she winds in a detox place in Minnesota. So I was thinking how happy I am--basically.

  How much I love my wife, my kids. Basically. It was like my life, my soul, was a substance thin as smoke that might dissolve into nothing if my will weakened. I stood there trembling in the sun that's like a furnace in Nevada on the sidewalk in front of a rundown shit-stained bungalow trying to explain to a cancer-riddled old man what the Hearts meant to me.

  I was saying, almost begging, I went to high school with Dahlia Heart's son, John Reddy. Do you maybe remember him? No, he doesn't. I tried to Dahlia Heart to the old man--but how do you describe Dahlia Heart?

  "A beautiful woman, a stunning, unforgettable blond woman, a body, sort of like--Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak--but like Grace Kelly, too--" and the words echo in my ears they're so fucking inudequate. We're drowning, dying, our words are so fucking inadequate. So this old guy's sneering at me.

  He's enjoying this, I can see it. Like sometimes in my office I enjoy telling some rich old bossy bag it's essentially too late. He laughs, and rubs at his crotch, and says, Look, doc, you live long enough you learn there's no telling one c--t from another. Give it up. And I was shocked. I mean--shocked.

  Like a kid might be shocked, some old Santa Claus pronouncing such words.

  I got out of there fast. No more Arroyo Seco for me. That night the hotel I got drunk and lost seventeen hundred dollars at blackjack and morning I gave my talk like a zombie and on the flight back to La Guardia I caught some vicious bug like dysentery I couldn't shake for weeks. Dr.. Baskett yanked off his wire glasses and rubbed his eyes, there was nothing more to say.

  We unde_. We were gravely shocked, too. For it had to be false, lie. It wasn't the truth. If there's but one truth we'd all from knowing Dahlia HWT, even if we hadn't known Dahlia Heart, it's that one c--t can certainly be distinguished from another. ohl Reddy, pawn offate? oh Reddy, at Hell's Gate?

  John Reddy, lohn Reddy Heart.

  Was the shooting of Melvin Riggs accidental?

  If you wanted to think that John Reddy was an innocent pawn in some sort of cruel celestial drama, you'd want to think yes. If wanted to think that John Reddy Heart knew exactly what he was doing when he ran to get his grandpa's gun (which the old man kept wrapped in an oil-stained towel in a cardboard carton at the foot of his bed amid a store of empty bottles of all sizes, colors, qualities of glass and designs) and ran back upstairs to his mother's room--the "master bedroom suite" of the Heart residence as it would be called--in which the naked, drunken, rampaging Riggs was abusing Dahlia Heart, and kicked open the door, and dropped to one knee Blake Wells said admiringly, "That's the John Reddy touch") and fired a single shot between the man's eyes, raising the heavy. 45-caliber revolver (it was thrilling, we could envision it! ) steady in both his hands, uttering not a word (for John Reddy's words were famously few, it was our theory that when he was in action the speech center in his brain shut down), merely the trigger--then you'd want to think no.

  Girls and women tended to think yes. The rest of us, no.

  How many dates, gatherings, parties ended in shouting matches--girls on one side, boys on the other. Suzi Zeigler and Roger Zwaart up, were reconciled, broke up and again reconciled how many times, we'd all lost count, over the issue of John Reddy's guilt. So too with Verrie Myers and Kenny Fischer. Janet Moss and Steve Lunt. Mary Louise Schultz and Filer. Shelby Connor and Dwayne Hewson. Pattianne Groves and Hewson. Babs Bitterman and Jonathan Rindfleisch. The Circle (that elite, some said snobby group of eight girls, five boys who'd started together in kindergarten at the Academy Street School and would graduate together, celesrating, not picking at old wounds, old grievances, and issues, Finger McCord in a daffodil-yellow chiffon strapless formal and her grandvmother's pearls turned upon her date, Dougie Siefried in a tux, slapwing and bloodying his nose so that his white shirtfront splattered with red, crying, "John Reddy Heart is not a murderer. He is not." Soon, a number of us joined in, how could we resist? lohn Reddy himself, rumored to have been elected King of the Prom by a flood of ballots, his election angrily denied by school officials, came very late to the prom, at nearly midnight, stayed only about half an hour, and spoke to few of us. Many he'd been there at all--"Just you drunks saw' him. Talked' to him.

  Come on." Babs Bitterman, smoking pot with Steve Lunt in his gorgeous Buick in the parking lot outside the gym, insisted she'd seen John Reddy pull up, park--"In that funky-sexy Mercury, I'd recognize it anywhere.

  my glasses. Even with Stevie's hand between my legs and his tongue in my mouth." (Babs liked to shock us with her racy talk. We'd miss her in later years, as we'd miss Stevie, Smoke and Pete Marsh. ) Decades later fabulous class reunions, the debate continued. The outcome of Reddy's trial hadn't settled anything, it seemed. Nor had the of time that's said to "cure all wounds--almost." For this was an underground fire that smoldered invisibly and malevolently for years, never dying out but flaring up at unexpected intervals. At our tenth reunion, for instance, during a festive pig roast on the terrace of the English Tudor home on Ivyhurst Drive, Amherst, of Shelby Connor Strickhauser (Shelby's first husband was a Buffalo pacemaker manufacturer eight years Shelby's senior, and rich), delicate-boned Shelby with her pale blue staring eyes and fair, flyaway hair forgot her role as hostess, demure in a pink floral Laura Ashley dress, and turned on Bo Bozer (with whom she'd gone out brief
ly in grade) crying, "Damn you, Bo Bozer, John Reddy Heart was not a murderer.

  He was not." We were startled by Shelby's vehemence. In high school, she'd frail-seeming waifishly pretty girl who wasn't quite so striking as her more spectacular girlfriends (Verrie Myers, Mary Louise Schultz, McCord, et al. ) and had no outstanding talent or aptitude of which we knew, she'd sung, in a sweet wavering soprano, a prominent role in Handel's Messiah at Easter of our senior year, and had thrown herself with fevered concentration into knitting a multicolored muffler, though possibly it had been a turtleneck sweater, for John Reddy Heart when he'd been locked Tomahawk Island. Shelby's dad was a banker, and rumored to be a among sharks, but Shelby with her fluttery hands and, a mild propensity for "I stammering was a gawky lovely bird-girl we'd somehow never taken seriously.

  But we saw the stunned hurt in Bo Bozer's doggy eyes, as if, years, in secret, he'd been in love with Shelby though married, as we all were, to other people, Bo shot back at Shelby, forcing a smile, "So what was he, then--an Eagle Scout?" !

  Roland Trippe, the suave, expensive lawyer Dahlia Heart had hired to defend John Reddy, argued eloquently that if the shooting was accidental, as he certainly believed it to be, the most the prosecution should have charged his client with was involuntary manslaughter, not second-degree murder- "Your Honor, this is a shocking and unconscionable case of flagrant misuse of prosecutorial discretion." Trippe took his indignation to the press, gave interviews charging the district attorney's office with "extreme prejudice" toward his client on the bias of his client's youth and his family's "nonconformist lifestyle", but the prosecution held firm, and the of second-degree murder held. In the eyes of District Attorney Dill, and numerous others besides, John Reddy Heart was a "vicious, murderer"--a "shocking example of American teenaged lawlessness and depravity." It didn't help his case that John Reddy stubbornly refused to express remorse, nor did he offer any explanation of what had happened in his mother's bedroom, and why he'd fled Willowsville. Some of us John Reddy's refusal to cooperate with authorities but others, the pragmatic-minded, like our Weekly Willowsvillian editor, Blake Wells, worried aloud--"Why doesn't John Reddy say something?

  Like, I shot the man to protect my mom. That's all he'd need to say." Evangeline Fesnacht, one of several writers in our class, a beetle-browed, hulking girl, said scornfully to Blake, "That's what you would do in John Reddy's place, but you ohn Reddy." For months in Mr.. Cuthbert's social studies classes, Bird's and Mr.. Lepage's English classes, even in Mr.. Dunleddy's classes, Mr.. Salaman's and Mr.. Alexander's math classes, Mme.

  Picholet's French classes, Mr.. Schoppa's driver's ed classes, Coach McKeever's Miss Flechsenhauer's gym classes, the subject was sifted, analyzed, argued.

  The WHS Christian Youth Group pondered issues of sin and forgiveness.

  The Debate Club pondered issues of free will, determinism and guilt. Where the majority of us cared primarily for the minutiae of the case, what John Reddy was wearing at the time of the shooting, for instance (which of his numerous T-shirts, which pair of worn, holey jeans, which of his gray wool sweat socks with the thin black stripes around the elasticized cuffs), and whether it was stained from Melvin Riggs's blood, and the route he'd driven from 8 Meridian Place on St.. Albans Hill to the stark snowy wilds of Mount Nazarene two hundred sixty miles to the northeast, in the Adirondacks, where he'd be captured seventy-two hours later (in the cafeteria at school, in the library during study period, in The Haven, in The Crystal, we pored tirelessly over New York State road maps we'd elaborately in red ink, with more ferocity of concentration than we could manage for our school subjects), the brainier among us like Clarence McQuade, Eickhorn, Bart Digger, Dexter Cambrook and Elise Petko, as well Wells and Evangeline Fesnacht, were obsessed with metaphysical conundrums of accident and necessity, free will and determinism, Original Sin and redemption. Evangeline Fesnacht who proudly asserted she was a "lapsed Lutheran" insisted that, if you believe in Original Sin, you must believe in redemption. Dexter Cambrook argued pedantically that since the had recently been discovered to be "a concatenation of accidents arising out of nowhere and fated to disappear into nowhere, into a second Big Bang, all acts within it, for instance one living humanoid

  'killing' another by firing a bullet through its brain, had to be similarly accidental, and without meaning." Katrina Olmsted burst into tears Dexter's pitiless words. Reggie Edgihoffer denounced Dexter as a "godless agnostic." Elise Petko, Dexter's nemesis (since ninth grade when she'd transferred to our high school from the private Spence School for Girls in Manhattan, and who would in time edge Dexter out by. 19 of a to be named valedictorian of our class, relegating a chagrined Dexter to the rank of salutatorian) brilliantly countered his argument by saying, "If is accidental, then all of mankind is equal in the face of blind chance, and we're all equal in terms of responsibility and guilt."

  "That cruel, cold-hearted bitch!" Verrie Myers fumed. "I hate her."

  "But Elise doesn't mean anything personal," Ken Fischer said, squeezing his girlfriend's cold, combative fingers, "--it's just, like, the 'philosophical perspective."

  "Screw philosophical perspective'--we're talking life and death. tohn Reddy's. ") At the time of John Reddy's second trial, in November of the year Melvin Riggs died, our debate club sponsored a competition with old rival Amherst on the subject, RESOLVED, Man is a rational being is capable of exercising free will. The debate was publicized locally, where these competitions were usually argued in a kind of echo chamber in the auditorium, drawing only a few diehard friends and parents, and even those, this debate filled half the auditorium of five hundred seats, a reporter covered it for the Willowsville Weekly Gazette.

  Eickhorn, one of our writers, an honor student with a faint stammer, spoke with eloquence. Evangeline Fesnacht spoke forcefully, if at too great length.

  Blake Wells had done research into local and national crime statistics relating to "juvenile crime." Both Dexter Cambrook and Elise Petko shone. There were numerous interruptions of applause. Faculty judges lavishly praised the debaters and voted for a draw, and girls in the audience who'd with anxiety that John Reddy Heart would be discovered to be "guilty" fell laughing and weping with relief into one another's arms.

  Thank you, Cgod. Nothing has been decided. st's true, and this is fact not conjecture, the Hearts were accident-prone. And so were others in their vicinity.

  The workmen--roof-repair, painters, plumbers, electricians, crew-who were hired by Mrs.. Heart, through Skelton Construction, to make improvements on the house at 8 Meridian Place, for instance, one, roofer, fell two storys from the edge of the steep mossy-rotted slate roof to seriously injure himself on the ground, another, a young painter his twenties, grew dizzy in the sunshine and toppled off a second-floor scaffolding, his fall fortunately broken by an evergreen shrub, another was dismissed by Herman Skelton for unprofessional behavior (he'd discovered prowling the upstairs of the house, a silk undergarment Heart's in his overall pocket, having thought evidently that no home), an experienced worker for Moss Lawn & Tree Service lost control of his chain saw (watching Dahlia Heart in white silk shirt, white shorts, white scarf tied around her head, digging in the rock garden? ) and severed a thumb. A cleaning woman hired by Mrs.. Heart, on the recommendation of a new acquaintance, scalded herself scrubbing one of the old, enormous ceramic tubs in the upstairs bathrooms, it would turn out she'd been drinking, stealing sips from Aaron Leander Heart's liquor supply. And there were mysterious instances of pilfering, small items (like Dahlia Heart's champagne-colored silk negligee with matching lace panties) missing, with no way of tracing the thief. Crudely hand-lettered notes in the Hearts' mailbox, addressed to

  "MISS DAHLIA"-You know I lovve you.

  I could eat your juicy Heart.

  Dahlia called Matt Trowbridge of the Willowsville Police Department, he came at once to the house to examine the note but declared that, far as he knew, whoever'd written it had not broken any law and could not arrested--"But if we can find out wh
o it is, I could possibly with him unofficially," Matt Trowbridge said grimly, clenching his fists.

  "I could possibly discourage him from harassing you further, Mrs..

  Heart. ") "It's as if some force is trying to drive my family and me away from Willowsville, Dahlia Heart was overheard complaining to Skip Rathke, and manager of the Village Food Mart on Spring Street, who on mornings, his busiest morning, stood at the front of the store greeting customers and chattering like a master of ceremonies, "--but it won't succeed." Mrs.. Heart spoke bravely and defiantly, as if well aware that her words were being overheard and memorized by strangers, primarily women, who, assessing her in her stylish oyster-white silk-and-linen pants suit, cork-heeled shoes with straps that tied around her naked ankles, ropes of pearls around her neck and her bright makeup flawless as if she'd just strode onto the stage of a Las Vegas casino nightclub, did not wish her well.