The Clarinet Polka (2 page)

My mom comes running in yelling, “Jimmy, Jimmy, what's the matter?” I yell back at her, “I'm okay, Mom, just leave me alone, okay,” and I go tearing out of the house just like I used to do in high school and head straight down to the river. Just sit there on the bank, and I'm really hurting, you know what I mean?

I couldn't stop reading that letter over. “As soon as I finish writing this, I'm going to go get totally shitfaced,” Doren said, “but I thought you'd want to know about it right away, and I thought you'd want to know exactly how it happened,” and he was right about that.

“Things were real harsh around here for a while,” he said, “but anyhow, it's down to you and me, so listen up, asshole, we got a date in the Soap Creek Saloon. We'll drink to Ron Jacobson, just about the nicest guy I ever knew.”

I didn't want to go home because I wasn't ready to talk about it, so I started hitting the bars. I ended up in the PAC bullshitting with Bobby Burdalski, asking him about the girls, who's got married and who's still available—and, of course, which of the girls I should call up if I'm looking for a little action. You know, just talking about anything to distract myself. By closing time, I was pretty well loaded but not quite loaded enough, so I slipped Bobby a bill and he slipped me a pint of Four Roses out the back door.

I sat on the riverbank and drank it. I had enough sense to go home while I could still walk. You can imagine how nice and cool it was up in my room right under the roof where the sun's been beating down all day long. I lay there sweating like a pig and killed the rest of the bottle.

I was doing my best to pass out, and I did eventually, but I woke up again around four—totally wide awake with the kind of hangover you think death might be preferable—and, God, did I ever want another drink. There was nothing in the house but a six-pack I'd stashed in the icebox, but I was afraid if I went down to get it, I'd wake up Old Bullet Head, so I just lay there trying to get back to sleep, but every time I'd start to drift off, I'd be seeing Jacobson.

He was a huge guy, kind of sandy colored. Over six feet. Not fat, you know, just big. And strong? Hell, I once saw him walk up five flights of stairs with a refrigerator strapped to his back. He said it was the easiest way to get it up there. He used to say, “My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” and it was true. His heart
was
pure. I never heard him bad-mouth anybody. Even the biggest prick in the world, Ron Jacobson would find something nice to say about him.

Doren and Jacobson and I got to be tight at Carswell, and out there in Texas—you know, among the young bucks—duking it out is considered a pleasant way to pass the time, about on a par with shooting pool. But Jacobson just plain hated fighting. He even hated seeing other guys fighting. A man would have to be a total fool to try to break up a fight in a Fort Worth bar, but I've seen Jacobson do it.

Back in Wisconsin, he'd been his high school's heavyweight wrestling champ, and I've seen, oh, five or six guys take a swing at him, but I never saw one of them connect. Something magical would always happen and they'd end up sailing through the air. He was so good he could land them easy or he could land them hard; he always started off landing them easy. Then he'd go, “Hey, come on, buddy, we don't want to be doing this shit. We're just wasting good drinking time.” It was really weird, and you had to be there to believe it, but he could get two guys who'd been trying to kill each other—and to kill
him
, for that matter— He could somehow get those guys calmed down again, drinking a beer, and laughing at some silly story he's telling them.

Jacobson and Doren volunteered for Vietnam. Now with Doren I could sort of see it. He about half believed in the war—like maybe three days out of seven he believed in it. But Jacobson's opinion on the topic never changed a bit, and it was real simple. “We got no business in Vietnam whatsoever,” he'd say. “It's not our country.” He'd joined the air force to get
out
of going to Vietnam, so when I heard he'd volunteered, I just couldn't believe it. I said, “You idiot, what the hell'd you do that for?”

“Well, you know, Jimmy,” he said, “it's what's coming down, and I figure I ought to catch my share of it.”

And remembering that, I was so mad at him, if he hadn't been dead already, I could have killed him myself. You goddamn stupid son of a bitch, I was thinking, look where it got you.

Finally I checked my watch, and it was after five, and I thought, to hell with this.

I lurched down to the kitchen and sucked back a couple cans of beer and then carried the rest into the living room and sat there nursing the next one because once I'd killed the six-pack, there'd be no way to get anything more until the stores opened. About five minutes later, there's my sister in her bathrobe. She goes, “What's the matter, Jimmy?” you know, whispering it.

I've still got the letter in my pocket, so I just hand it to her. She reads it and says, “Oh, I'm so sorry.”

“You want to talk about it?” she says, and I just shake my head.

“Is there anything I can do?” she says, and there's nothing she can do, but I don't want her to feel bad, so I say, “Just sit here awhile, okay? Keep me company.”

I don't remember much what we talked about, but every time I closed my eyes, I could see Jacobson clear as if he was standing in front of me, and finally I kind of snapped—like, “Fuck this goddamn war. Just fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.”

I look over at Linda, and she's got her glasses off, wiping the tears away, and then it hits me—hey, that's my little sister, my number-one fan. She isn't just being nice, she really cares about me, and I'd been home for damn near a month and I hadn't paid the least bit of attention to her except to get pissed off at her for playing her trumpet.

Linda and I have always been close. It's not like we hung out together or anything like that. I'm four years older, and we had a totally different set of friends, totally different interests, but we were—I don't know how to say this—I guess like a two-person team. We could always tell each other anything, and no matter what went wrong, we always had each other. So it just starts pouring out of me, and I'm telling her about being in the service and all that.

Jeff Doren was from Austin, and four times he took us home with him, and we just plain fell in love with the place. Then, lo and behold, we found ourselves on the delightful Isle of Guam, and there's nothing to do on Guam but drink, and that's the whole story, alpha to omega. So that's what the three of us did, and naturally we shot the shit a lot, and, I guess you could say, peered deeply into each other's souls.

All his life Ron Jacobson wanted to get off the farm. “You bust your ass for nothing,” he said. “The bank owns everything you've got.” And by that time, I'd figured out that maybe I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the crazy Ohio Valley. And Doren kept saying, “Come to Austin, come to Austin. You can always get work in Austin.” So that's how we cooked up the scheme that after they let us out of the war effort, we were going to have a big reunion in the Soap Creek Saloon, and we were going to rent us a little house in Austin and just basically party on.

What I was supposed to do when I got out was go straight to Austin and warm it up for them—and talking about all this, I just can't see Jacobson dead. I just can't. He seems so real. I can close my eyes and see him, you know, as alive as anybody. “Koprowski,” he used to say, “you got the greatest laugh I ever heard in my life. I hear you laugh, it always makes me feel good.” Shit, I can almost hear him saying it.

“It's weird,” I told Linda, “how you keep wishing there was something you could do for him, and there's nothing. When somebody's dead, they're dead. But it keeps popping into my head I should have a Mass said for him—maybe because it's the only thing I can think of. That's really stupid, huh? He wasn't even Catholic.”

“It's not stupid,” she says. “Go ahead and do it. God won't mind that he wasn't Catholic.” Even before Pope John, Linda's theology was always, I guess you could say, liberal. I don't know where she could have got it from. It sure wasn't from the nuns.

“Aw, Linny,” I say, “I don't know if I believe any of that shit anymore.”

She lets that one go, and we talk awhile longer, and then she asks me if I've been to confession. “Oh, hell, no,” I tell her. “Not in years.” It's been maybe three years since I've even been to Mass.

“You ought to go. You'll feel better.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“No, I mean it. It'll really take a weight off you. You'll feel a million times better.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I was humoring her. I didn't have the slightest inclination to go to confession. If Father Joe was still around, maybe, but with this new priest they'd got in there, forget it.

It's broad daylight by then, and all of a sudden we hear Old Bullet Head's alarm go off. We don't say another word, just jump up and go scurrying back to our rooms. And poor Linda's got to pull herself together and drag herself in to work, but I'd pretty well said piss on it by then, so I grabbed a few Z's and drifted into the shop around two. Of course I had to listen to Vick going, “Hey, Koprowski, you dipshit, are you working for me or are you working for me?”

When I got off that day, the first thing I did was go in the PAC and write a letter to Doren. “You watch your ass, buddy,” I said. “You and me got that date in the Soap Creek Saloon.” And then on the way home I bought four gallons of Paisano Red and four fifths of Jack Daniel's and stashed them in my closet because I sure as hell was never going to get caught in an emergency like that again with nothing in the house.

*   *   *

Okay, so living in South Raysburg is like living in a fishbowl—everybody knows everybody's business—and we're having dinner a day or so later and Old Bullet Head says to me, “I hear from Vick you ain't exactly responsible.”

The old man could piss me off faster than anybody alive. “What the hell's he talking about? I missed half a day's work? Big deal.”

“You know something about working, Jimmy? I'll tell you a secret. The main thing about working is you show up.”

Then, just like she's done for years, there's Linda interceding on my behalf. “Come on, Dad. He got real bad news the day before.”

Old Bullet Head looks at me. “Oh, yeah? Is that right?”

But I'll be damned if
I'll
tell him. Mom goes, “A buddy of his got killed—in Vietnam.” Now I've got both Linda and my mom lined up on my side, so I'm in pretty good shape.

“Oh, yeah?” the old man says. “That's rough. Yeah, that's really rough. But hell, Jimmy, you could have called in. That's just common courtesy,” but I can't even give him that—that's how mad at him I am.

I don't know when I started calling him Old Bullet Head—probably in high school and never to his face. He always wore his hair in a real short buzz cut, and he has one of these heads that narrows in at the top and widens out at the jaw, and he's got no neck at all, just a big head that goes straight down to these enormous shoulders like an ape, and if you look at him from behind, he looks like a bullet with a shirt on. I spent half my life trying to please the son of a bitch, but he was never pleased, or if he was, he sure never told me about it.

It's hard to imagine a Polish guy my father's generation not drinking, but he didn't, not even a beer. He'd been a real lush when Linda and I were little, but then he quit, and he never fell off the wagon that I know of. My strongest memory of him—you know, on festive occasions—is of him sitting back out of the way, kind of watching everything go by, with a 7UP in his hand.

He worked his whole life for Raysburg Steel. He was a heater, which is just about as high up as you can get before you pass from union into management. He liked being a heater, he said, because you have to think all the time. He used to brag that he'd started at the bottom and on his way up he'd worked every job in the mill, and twice they offered him promotions to turn foreman, and twice he turned them down. He told me that when everything goes right for a change—that's once in a blue moon—making steel can be real satisfying. Starting when I was about four years old he said to me at least once a week, “Listen to me, Jimmy. If you end up working in a steel mill, I'll kick your ass from here to Ohio.”

Whatever shift the old man was on, the rest of us had to fit in around it. He'd come home dog tired and all covered with red dust, and the last thing he wanted was any shit from you. When he wasn't working, he was always fixing things around the house. Like it'd never cross his mind to call in a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. Paying somebody else to do what you could do yourself was just a waste of money. Looking back on it, I'd have to say I learned a lot from him, but I had a hell of a time trying to talk to him. I don't want to give you the impression he was mean or anything like that, but he was the kind of guy that—well, let's just say he was a man of strong opinions and after he expressed them, he didn't leave you a lot of room.

He threatened us plenty. He had this story he just loved to tell about
his
old man, how he had this goddamn whip hanging on the wall, you know, like a cat-o'-nine-tails, and if any of the kids got out of line, he'd tan their hides but good, and if we didn't straighten up, he was going to send over to the old country and get one of those damn things. Poor Linda believed him, but I figured out pretty quick it was all hot air, and it's true, he never laid a hand on us—although I could see a few times he was sorely tempted. Mom was another story. She had a short fuse, and she'd just haul off and belt you one, but she couldn't stay mad longer than ten minutes, and she never held a grudge. Old Bullet Head could stay mad for years, and he never forgot anything— Well, that's not quite right. Some things he forgot and some things he didn't.