The Clarinet Polka

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

In Memoriam

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Acknowledgments and Notes

Also by Keith Maillard

Copyright

 

IN MEMORIAM

 

William Wayne Barringer

April 17, 1940 – August 28, 1996

 

George Cedric Hudacek

November 24, 1942 – December 6, 1996

 

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling: hold not thy peace at my tears.

For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.

O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.

—
PSALM 39

ONE

I got out of the service in '69. The last place I was stationed was down at Eglin, and I had an old beater Chevy, so I put a picnic cooler on the passenger seat, filled it up with a case of beer and a couple fifths of Jack Daniel's, and started driving. I thought I was on my way back to Texas, but eventually it occurred to me that it might take me a while to get there. Then at some later point—I was pretty well into the second fifth by then—I'd kind of lost track of my exact location, so I figured the best thing to do was keep on driving, and wherever I was when I passed out, I should just cool out there for a few days until I figured out what to do next. I was supposed to reintegrate myself back into civilian life, right? So why shouldn't I just drive around? See America first, right? I don't remember much more than that, but my automatic pilot must have taken over because I ended up back in Raysburg feeling like shit.

That was the most miserable time of my life, and for years afterward I tried to figure out why. You know how it is—you've got to find something or somebody to blame, and the easiest thing to blame it on was the Vietnam War. But that didn't make any sense. I'd never set foot in Vietnam.

I'd been trained as an instrument technician, so damn near the first thing Old Bullet Head—that's my father—said to me was, “Okay, Jimmy, you've got a trade now, so use it.” He was looking for me to start paying room and board like my sister, but I wasn't in any great hurry to do that. I wasn't in any great hurry to do much of anything. I'd done my four years in the air force, and I figured the world owed me a good time. Nobody else thought that, of course, and I couldn't figure out why they didn't. So after I'd been laying around the house for a few days, Old Bullet Head took matters into his own hands and went out and got me a job doing TV repairs with an old buddy of his, and I couldn't
not
take it, if you know what I mean.

Vick Dobranski had a little rat's-ass shop up in Center Raysburg. After running a one-man operation for years, he hired me to do the in-home repairs. That way he could stay in the shop and work on the sets that people brought in to him. That was the theory anyway. What it meant was that I got to drive around the valley all day in his panel truck, and the main thing I remember is that nothing looked right to me. Everything looked dumb and grim and, I don't know— It was like while I'd been gone, everything had shrunk.

Our neighborhood is a narrow strip from 43rd Street down to 48th Street where Millwood starts. One set of railroad tracks runs along the river, and then there's three streets and another set of railroad tracks and, bang, you're slapped up against the side of the hill. That's South Raysburg. We just called it Polish Town, but the old folks called it
Stanisławowo,
you know, after the church, and they'd got that right because St. Stanislaus was pretty much the center of everything.

You'd come out of the church at night and look south toward Millwood and the sky'd be lit up bloodred from the blast furnace, and you'd get up in the morning and you couldn't see much of anything over your head except a kind of ugly brown haze, and sometimes in the winter the air pollution would be so bad you'd get these unbelievable fogs and you couldn't see from the church down to the PAC—that's the good old Polish American Club—and every damn thing would be covered with this fine red dust from the iron ore. My mom must have spent half her life sweeping that red dust off the front porch and the front steps. Even when I was a kid, I remember thinking, hey, this can't be good for you.

The guys in South Raysburg really kept up their houses, and you'd never see one looking the least bit run-down—which was no mean feat considering that the Raysburg rain in those days was so acid it ate right into your paint job. Our house was pretty much like everybody else's. You walk in the front door and you're facing the stairs and a long hall that runs back to the kitchen. You turn to the right and you're in the living room, and it's just big enough to hold a couch and a chair and the old TV set—you know, one of the first color TVs that's so big it takes up half the room. You walk through the sliding doors and you're in the dining room, and there's my sister's piano and the long mahogany table Mom uses for company—it's her pride and joy, and if you want to die young, just scratch the top of it—and then, what with the matching chairs and everything, you've got to turn sideways to squeeze though to the kitchen where we eat dinner around the old beat-to-shit blue table, crammed in so tight we got our elbows in each other's ears half the time.

On the second floor there's a little bedroom for my parents, and a little bedroom for my sister, and a mouse-sized room that used to be Babcia Koprowski's when she was still alive, but now it's where my mom goes when she pays the bills or does her ironing, and of course our one and only bathroom's up there, and it's big enough for maybe half a midget. Then at the end of the hall you see a little door that looks like it should be in a doghouse. Crawl through it and climb up the stairs to the attic—if you've got broad shoulders, you'll be touching the walls on both sides—and you've made it up to my room, and everything there's exactly the same as it was when I left, and that just depresses the hell out of me.

It used to be the attic, and the ceiling is sloped, so if you're a tall guy like me, the only place you can stand upright is in the center of the room. There's my football trophies on a shelf, and in my closet there's a whole bunch of ridiculous clothes I must have thought looked real sharp when I bought them. The sloped ceiling is covered with all the
Playboy
centerfolds I taped up in high school, and if you can imagine anything more depressing than Miss November from 1960, then tell me about it. The picture of me and Dorothy Pliszka from the senior prom is still sitting on my dresser, and, yeah, I've got to admit that might be even more depressing than Miss November.

Except for my room, where Mom never goes—we made a deal about it when I was sixteen—the whole house is spotless, and I don't just mean clean, I mean eat-off-the floor clean, because if one of the other moms dropped in for a cup of coffee and saw it any other way, the world would come to an end. But of course none of the other moms ever drop in for coffee because they're all too busy keeping their own houses clean in case somebody drops in. And I'm hearing the same things I heard all the time I was growing up—“Hey, Jimmy, what the hell's the matter with you? Were you born in a barn?”

So there I am at home again, paying room and board like a good son, and wiping my feet on the mat and worrying about getting flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, and I'm working for that sour old bastard Vick Dobranski for a couple cents above minimum wage, and I'm hanging out at the PAC with a bunch of old farts because the Sylvania plant's closed down and Raysburg Steel's been laying off and most of the guys I went to high school with have left town looking for work, and when I crash out in the living room to watch the tube, what I see is Vietnam and Vietnam protesters and tricky Dick Nixon lying to us. Are you getting the picture? It's funny what can really get to you, but the last straw is my sister's learning to play the trumpet.

All her life Linda's played the piano, and I'm used to that. I even enjoy it. She was so good on the piano, she won a scholarship to go down to Morgantown and get herself a B.Mus., and, like Old Bullet Head must have told her about a million times while she was getting it, a B.Mus. adds up to absolutely nothing, so she's working as a receptionist for some dentist in Bridgeport, a job she could have got straight out of high school. She's also teaching piano to a bunch of little kids on Saturdays, and she already had piano students before she ever got the B.Mus. But, hell, she's certified musical, right, and she's got the degree to prove it. But no matter how musical you are, the trumpet is not an instrument you just pick up and play. At that point she's maybe a notch above “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

I don't know if you've ever lived in the same house with somebody who's learning to play the trumpet. Linda comes home, goes in her room, shuts her door—for all the good that does—and it's BLAT, BLAT, BLAT for a couple hours. She carries her trumpet mouthpiece around, and when you're trying to have a conversation with her, you look up and she's got the mouthpiece up to her lips going BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ like a mosquito. When she's not playing the trumpet, she's sitting at the piano singing songs in Polish. When she's not doing that, she's playing polkas on the stereo.
Polkas?
Yeah, polkas. How about a little variety? The Jefferson Airplane might be too much to ask for, but how about a Beatles record? Or even Frank Sinatra? No way. Just more polkas. “What's with Linda?” I say to my mom. “Is every day around here Pulaski Day or what?”

Mom just shakes her head. “You think
I
know?” It seems like ever since Linda came home with her B.Mus. she hasn't had a single date, and the way Mom sees it, Linda is aging rapidly—she's twenty-one, for Christ's sake—and so she's in serious danger of ending up an old maid. “I don't know about your sister,” my mom says. “She's turned out even crazier than you are.”

*   *   *

There's one thing you learn in the service, and that's when you think things can't get any worse, they get worse. So I come home from the shop, walk in the house, look down at the shelf where the mail goes, and I've got a letter. It's one of those flimsy airmail things like you get in the service. I rip it open, and it's from my buddy Jeff Doren in Da Nang, and he's telling me that Ron Jacobson has bought it. Now me and Doren and Jacobson were real tight. Shit, we were like the Three Musketeers. And except for Georgie Mond-rowski who I grew up with, Ron Jacobson was just about the best friend I had in the world. And I'm standing there reading the letter, and I'm going, oh no, this can't be real.

There'd been a night raid, you know, mortar fire. Jacobson had his right arm blown off and part of his face. They rushed him to the hospital, and he hung on until the next afternoon. A couple other guys we knew from Carswell got killed too—Tom Foley and Dick Hewitt. You never know how you're going to react to something till it happens. I'm reading this shit, and I'm just crying like a baby.