Copper Heart (17 page)

“I don’t even remember any songs,” I said for the sake of appearances.

“We have sheet music. Here.” Johnny tossed a book of Beatles music we had stolen from the town library eons ago onto the table.

I grimaced. Coming back here and playing with Johnny, Jaska, and Pasi the same songs we had jammed to half a lifetime ago was both fun and grotesque. Of course Jaska had always turned his nose up at anything like the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, or Hector. He had thought they were too tame and, judging from his expression, he still did. But I thought they were perfect for three thirtysomethings walking down memory lane together.

“How about this?” Johnny had turned to “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

Getting into the right rhythmic flow took me a while. Johnny’s voice wasn’t as clear as it had been back in the late seventies when he was the dulcet lead singer for the Snow Tigers. Our singer for Rat Poison, on the other hand, was the guy with the roughest voice we could find. But when we all jammed together, the singer was whoever got there first, sometimes even me.

We played a few more familiar Beatles tunes. Even though my fingers were stiff and I was nervous, it was still fun. Playing in a rock band was different from anything else I had ever done. The adrenaline rush was just like running. But in a band, I was one with the other musicians, a part of the music itself, my heart beating in time with the drums. After “I Saw Her Standing There,” I realized that I really missed this.

Then we changed to Hector, some classic Finnish folk rock. First we played his translation of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” and then “The Snow Made an Angel”—two of our old standbys. I had always liked the latter’s scale-like bass lines that launched into each succeeding phrase. I sang with Johnny and the keyboardist right up until the chorus of the second verse:

And Daddy went to Sweden,

Mommy flew to heaven.

And the priest got to drink his coffee again.

And brother was drunk,

I saw him crying in pain.

A strange pling came from Jaska’s guitar, and I wondered whether he was thinking about Aniliina too. Or was he thinking of the twisted orange angel lying on the gravel at the base of the Tower? Only the keyboardist and drummer carried the song through to the end.

Johnny had turned toward the music shelf. I didn’t know whether he was really looking for something or if he just wanted to hide his face. When he turned back toward us, his expression was suddenly mischievous.

“Do you remember this, Maria?”

It was a handwritten Finnish adaptation of CCR’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.” The boys in the Snow Tigers had played it one year for the battle of the bands during the town festival and had taken the top prize. But one of the big men from the mining company had been in attendance and got all wound up over the verse: “My daddy done died, fallen down in the mine. I guess the boss and his men couldn’t get him up in time. That was the day, made up my mind, I ain’t goin’ down that hole.” The local director of the mining company called Johnny directly and forbade him from playing the piece at the county music competition. I couldn’t remember exactly what the threat was, but he succeeded in getting Johnny to promise not to play the song.

At the county festival, I remembered sitting with sweaty palms in the audience, nervous for the Tigers and nervous about whether Johnny would play the banned song. When the familiar opening riffs blasted over the speakers and Johnny started to sing, I almost cried. Johnny was a hero. No one could tell him
what he could and couldn’t play! Afterward, we had been pretty disappointed when no one made a big deal about it.

I would have known this bass line even if you woke me up in the middle of the night. C, E, F, A. Da-da-da. Da-da-da. I smiled at Johnny. When he smiled back, my knees went weak and my mouth dried up. We all screamed the refrain, “I ain’t goin’ down that hole!” Even though we ended up laughing, there was something melancholy about it. When we were kids, we thought we really had a choice. We just had to shape our lives to be exactly what we wanted. Life would hand us everything on a silver platter if we just got out of this little town.

“Now some noise,” Jaska demanded when we finished a John Fogerty song. So we ran through a few early Eppu Normaali and Pelle Miljoona pieces, which left the ankle biter on the keyboard completely out in the cold. Then Johnny sat down on the edge of the table, clamped a capo on the neck of his guitar and started plucking, repeating an E-minor arpeggio sequence. I listened for a few seconds and then began strumming the bass tonic and then the melody.

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair…” The boyish brightness was back in Johnny’s voice. “Scarborough Fair” was one of the few songs we had always sung together. This was exactly the song that made me feel connected to Johnny; whenever I heard it, I thought of him, my Johnny Guitar. I couldn’t help looking at him as we sang, his focused yet contemplative expression and his hand stroking the guitar strings. They were the same, although the years had made the joints and the veins in his arms more prominent. I wished he were stroking me instead of the guitar. Then I saw the Band-Aids on the knuckles of his right hand, and the enchantment melted away.

Now it was Pasi’s turn to leave.

“Did you have something you wanted to talk about? Let’s go down to the Copper Cup for a beer and we can watch Kaisa’s meet,” Jaska suggested.

“No, I’m fine.” I didn’t want to step back into my police role and ruin such a fun night by harping on my suspicions. I wanted to go home and pretend for a while that everything was still the way it used to be. I wanted to forget that I no longer believed singing could change the world.

If only I had known how much I would regret that decision two days later.

“Oh, you have your car? Could you drop me off at home so I don’t miss the beginning of the javelin throw?” Johnny asked when he saw my uncle’s rattletrap in the parking lot. I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded toward the car.

We sat in silence for the first mile and then Johnny opened his mouth. “Maria, do you think I was lying to you about Friday night? I didn’t see Meritta after the party. I went back out for a bike ride because I was messed up. Because of you.”

I tried to upshift, but my feet fumbled with the gas and clutch, making the affronted gearbox snarl.

“I just rode around thinking about what life would have been like if fifteen years ago we would have…My relationship with Meritta was drying up. I was just material for her art. She only wanted me until she got bored and found something new to paint. She didn’t need me, not really. But, Maria, couldn’t we still give it a try?”

I had imagined Johnny saying those words so often in my daydreams. Now I realized how completely absurd they sounded. I had never loved the real Johnny. I loved the image I had built up around him. He was just good material for my adolescent dreams, the same way he had been good material for Meritta’s paintings.

“It wouldn’t work. And I wouldn’t have been able to make your life any better.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Johnny’s voice was raspy now.

“Maybe I don’t.” I turned the car into the Miettinens’ yard and forced myself to look into Johnny’s yellow-flecked blue eyes. “Let’s have this discussion again after Sergeant Järvisalo has caught Meritta’s murderer.”

Johnny got out, slamming the car door shut behind him.

I swung the Lada so hard into the turn onto the highway that the tires screamed and I dented the line of mailboxes. Really? I had just been offered the thing I once wanted more than anything else in the world, and now I was ready to just toss it away with some vicious words thrown in for good measure?

For a fleeting moment, I decided to turn back and tell Johnny that I had changed my mind. I imagined what it would feel like to make love with him, how he would taste, how he would smell next to me every morning.

But instead I drove home, lured Mikko into my arms, and sat on the steps listening to the evening trilling of the skylarks. This was definitely one of the two days of the week when I would have turned down a proposal from Antti. Mikko purred contentedly as I told him that I probably wouldn’t say yes to Johnny on even one day out of seven.

9

The evening ended nicely with Kaisa winning the Helsinki World Grand Prix with the best throw of the summer, 71.74 meters. The next morning the papers were all atwitter with “delicate, charming Kaisa’s” rock-solid conditioning.
The Karelian
declared her the absolute favorite for European Championships gold. In the picture, Kaisa was just releasing a javelin, but compared to Meritta’s paintings, the photograph felt strangely lifeless.

My first customer of the day was the manager of the Copper Cup Bar & Grill, the mother of a former classmate who always made sure minors didn’t have any business trying to get into her pub. Although Marsa still didn’t have a single hair out of place, her face, despite her makeup, was now wrinkled and gray. The worst thing about returning to Arpikylä was that everyone I knew had aged eleven years, and looked as if they were wearing masks.

“So I have an entertainment permit application to submit,” she began hesitantly after we were done with small talk. “Our owner is worried that Kivinen’s restaurant at the mine is going to eat up all our customers. Apparently we have to come up with new ways to draw the crowds. So…well…There’s this stripper who’s going to start coming in on Saturday nights.” Marsa
handed me a brochure. Posing on the front was a woman with large breasts and freckled skin, who went by the stage name Miss Miranda. All she was wearing were thigh-high pink vinyl boots and a matching sequined G-string.

“If this brings the customers back, the owner intends to try topless waitresses,” Marsa continued, her voice filled with despair.

“What does the staff think about it?” The brochure promised a high-class erotic show and “unforgettable experiences.”

“Well, no one who works there now is going to take off her shirt! And who would want to look at old ladies like us anyway? Kivinen already hired away all the best-looking girls in town.”

So not all of the townsfolk were completely on board with Kivinen’s massive project. I understood full well that a burg the size of Arpikylä didn’t have space for three restaurants. The Old Mine and the Copper Cup were competing for the same clientele, since the Matador was a greasy spoon best visited only after you were drunk.

“Do you happen to have the Cup’s business license with you?” I asked.

Marsa dug it out of her bag. Looking it over, I couldn’t find anything in it that would give me grounds for refusing to grant a permit for the stripper, since it seemed as though that was what Marsa was hoping. The Copper Cup Bar & Grill was authorized for dancing and dinner shows, which also gave them more flexibility in pricing than if they had simply sold alcohol.

“Unfortunately I don’t have any legal basis for rejecting this application. But I’ll be there on Saturday, and if things don’t go exactly as the law prescribes, then we’ll see. But I think you should start gathering signatures for a petition against this. Tell female customers to boycott the restaurant.” I knew that sounded
a little desperate since women around here didn’t spend much time sitting in bars anyway, at least not without their husbands.

“The staff can’t start a campaign against our own employer. He’ll just throw us out…And that’s probably what he wants anyway so he can get these topless girls to replace us. I have talked to a few of the women city council members though. Meritta Flöjt had promised to do something, and then there was that Christian member of Parliament…”

“Contact her again.”

Meritta was the one we needed here, since she wasn’t sex-shy like that Christian old maid. Arpikylä’s first parliamentarian’s most notable accomplishment so far had been proclaiming that every Member of Parliament who supported gay rights was going to hell. And no doubt she had been involved in arranging Kivinen’s development subsidies for the Old Mine.

Grimacing, I signed the permit. When was I going to find a job where I didn’t have to constantly violate my own principles? Marsa looked disappointed, as if she were thinking that having a woman sheriff wasn’t much use after all. But the same laws were in effect regardless.

And now on Saturday nights, Jaska and his ilk in town would be sitting in the Copper Cup drooling over Miss Miranda’s shapely butt…which brought to mind the sexy nightgown Koivu had bought for Anita’s birthday. Today was the day. How had Anita reacted to her gift?

Before I could pick up the phone, it rang. My mother. They were leaving for Joensuu to see Uncle Pena—a call had come from the hospital reporting that he had experienced some sort of attack again.

At first I thought I would have to cancel my meeting with Kivinen, but my mother assured me that Pena wasn’t going to
die in the next few hours. Each attack seemed to be carrying him closer to the end though.

“I’ll come at four,” I promised. “We can drop in on Eeva and Saku too while we’re there.”

On my office couch, Meritta’s mine paintings radiated blackness. I thought of Uncle Pena, who had spent ten years of his life in that pit. I imagine you got used to it, that it was only dramatic seeing it for the first time. After my grandfather died, Pena took over the family farm. He had never married or fathered any children. His cat, liquor, and local politics had given color to his life. I didn’t know whether Uncle Pena had been a happy man. He had always seemed that way, sitting on the steps at the farm after sauna with a bottle of Koskenkorva Vodka at his feet and Mikko in his lap, telling us salacious stories about people in town.