Big Bend Page 3

  “‘No water?’” the boy growled, imitating him. “Nup! No water. There’s something a little bit wrong with the pump again. Carl Andresen was supposed to come out yesterday to fix it, but the thing is, we forgot to pay him last time, so, well, the thing is, I don’t think he’s going to show up, do you?”

  Long silence.

  Joe said, “Got a piece of bread or something? That Kool-Aid …”

  “Look in the breadbox. We got no Irish or Scottish, but we might have English muffins, but then, there’s no gas, so you can’t cook ’em.”

  “Where’s the toaster?”

  “Ha, ha, toaster! The toaster is toasted. And I don’t feel like making a fire. You’ll have to eat it, you know, kind of raw.”

  Joe found the English muffins in the genuinely gorgeous bread box as the kid piped on: “I made that box—well, not really—my father and me made that box, it’s rosewood, that’s why it’s so groovy, like the neck of a really good guitar. You’re a musician?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re hungover as anything?” He leaned forward, with a direct and eager gaze.

  “That, I’m afraid, is right.”

  “And you snorfed a lot of strange powders last night?”

  “No, kid, I did not.”

  “Oh, whoa! ‘Kid.’ I’m cool! Say no to drugs, kid.” The boy broke into hilarious laughter, fully aware of his power to irritate. He turned his book, Dune, over and stared intently at Joe. “And you slept with Connie, right? ‘Cuz I heard you.”

  Slowly: “Ah, hey, I’m sorry, man.”

  “You know how I knew you were a musician?”

  Politely: “You want to chill out a little?”

  The boy lowered his voice to an extravagant whisper. “‘Cuz Connie only likes to boink musicians. Once a month. You’re right on schedule. You’re in the Rockin’Joe Heath band?”

  Humbly: “I am Rockin’Joe Heath.”

  “Oh! Well! Aren’t you special.” Some tag line from a TV show. “Bing! She got the leader this time! How’d you like her?” The boy whooped loud as hell. “Is she pretty sassy?”

  Joe remembered a quick scene from the night, something on the staircase, the inseams of Connie’s blue jeans where they joined, her laughter. “Cut it out,” he said. “I know she’s your mom. You’re Jesse, right? I used to play with your father back in the Blues Machine days. I knew you when you were a stinking peanut.”

  Mock fan, head bobbing in pretend sympathy, fingers under chin: “How come you’re not famous anymore, Rockin’?”

  Joe shrugged, opened the refrigerator again, looked in. Nothing to drink. He shut the door softly, turned to face the boy: “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  Comically solemn face: “Say-no-to-drugs.”

  Joe bit into the dusty English muffin, took a swig of the red bug juice. Four years since Anthony “Gui-tar” DeAngelis died. Connie said last night she still can’t listen to a Neil Young record, since Neil Young was headliner on the tour, and nothing of Tony’s and certainly none of the Blues Machine albums. Not even the radio, just in case. The thought of Paris makes her nervous, or furious, or ill.

  Rockin’ Joe coughed. His hangover made everything seem particular, segmented, unflowing. The kid’s weird teasing and clowning brought nothing but sorrow, a flood from the past: lost auditoriums, band fights, airports, bus trips, lights in the face, and high as hell always. The kid continued to stare, making comical faces in imitation of Joe’s chewing.

  Just like Tony: always goofing.

  Joe felt himself flush like he hadn’t ever. He said, “Your mom and I have been friends a long, long time,” and took another swig of the bug juice.

  “She looks beautiful, huh? She’s only thirty-four.”

  “Beautiful.” Joe turned away.

  The kid turned serious: “It’s all right. She’s my mom, but she’s also like my best friend or my roommate or something.” He flipped Dune over and pretended to read, then looked up. “Did you ever read this book? It’s awesome. You ought to hang around today, stay for dinner and all. I mean, it’s Saturday, right? And watch a movie on the VCR, we got plenty of movies, and the electricity is on for sure.”

  “I got to get back to New York.”

  “This is New York, you big nack-nack, the nice part of New York. And you don’t have a car, anyway, I couldn’t help but notice.”

  Rockin’ Joe laughed. The boy was like a comedian, rapid delivery, raised eyebrows, drumming on the table to accent his punch lines: “We’ve got four hundred acres. Go get dressed and I’ll take you for a walk, all right? But don’t expect much. It’s kind of a mess since summer. I mean, I’ve got to go to school, don’t I? We sold all the cows, but there’s still the llama you could see. And we got pumpkins! Don’t worry. It’s a weekend. Mom’ll sleep till it’s dark.”

  “Has she been all right? Where are the girls? I hear you’ve got sisters now.”

  “Who? Maggot and Hairball? Granma D’s got ’em in Ithaca for the weekend, so Mom can have some fun.” Bap de bap on the table. A mighty whoop. “Fun. That’s you.”

  Joe turned and looked out the window over the sink. The glass was old, bubbled and ridged, and it made the long field of corn stubble out there stretch and jump as he rocked his head. Connie must rent the fields to farmers. At the end of the near pasture was a hedgerow of mature maples filled with dead branches, red at their tops, yellow halfway, deep green toward the ground, flamingly bright in clear sun. Joe waggled the single handle of the sink faucet. “No stinking water,” he muttered. “No stinking shower.”

  “You’ll stinking live. You’re Stinkin’Joe Heath!”

  There was something so comic about this kid, the way he flipped his hands around, the parody of Joe’s hungover mug, that Joe laughed with him now, laughed harder and harder, deep snorts of laughter, the kid not exactly laughing along but imitating Joe’s laughter: hiccups of laughter, bent-double laughter.

  Suddenly Joe choked and gagged, burped, coughed. Mortifyingly, a little acid-pink Kool-Aid splashed on the floor. Joe froze, afraid of more. His towel dropped around his bare feet.

  “Oh, man! You are disgusting,” Jesse said. He flipped Dune back over and began to read.

  Joe retrieved his towel only slowly, wiped his mouth with it, and dropped it over the small red puddle he had made. “It’s that stinking bug juice.”

  Jesse did not look up. He said, “Yeah, right. Like you didn’t drink four quarts of Jack Daniel’s last night. I mean, how old are you, anyway?”

  Joe turned to the sink, rattled the faucet handle with small violence. “No fucking water,” he growled. The taste in his mouth—hell.

  “You need a bath,” Jesse said, so tenderly. Catching himself, he raised his eyebrows—Groucho Marx—did another drum roll on the table. “Why don’t you go get your pants? I mean. I’ll take you down to the pond. You could swim.”

  “Jesus, boy,” Joe said, meaning, Let’s not wake up your mom. If he saw Connie again, he might never leave.

  Jesse said, “Okay. Just hang out. I’ll get your pants for you.” He sprang up and darted out of the room before Joe could protest, pounded up the stairs.

  Three kids, farm and home. That would be the end of Rockin’ Joe. Connie, Connie, Constance. He remembered her, suddenly, in the Blues Machine reunion crowd at The Rongo last night, big surprise that she would show up at all, diffident and streaky blonde at the side of the raging dance floor, big complicated eyes, her cheeks pink from uncharacteristic drinking. Okay, no surprise, though on the phone she’d said, “Forget it, Joe, forget it.” Said she would not be in town. Said she had no taste for crowds. Said she had no wish for music, and not the Blues Machine, not that. Forget it, forget it, forget it. But there in the crowd she held this slight smile, and you would have thought nothing bad had ever happened to her, the peaceful way she bobbed her head, just the slightest nod, to the loud music. Rockin’ Joe, he’d sung two ballads to her from the stage, not really kidding, then looked for he
r in the crush, first break. She was hanging out up by the bar with a couple of local bikers—serious guys—talking intently, her hand on a hairy forearm and cobra tattoo, listening intently, as well. She knew the tender side of everybody. Joe got the message, didn’t approach. The little place was packed. Years since the Blues Machine had played together, more since they’d played someplace so small, more yet since they’d played here, those early days, Tony DeAngelis still in college. Next set, Joe sang every song to Connie, and then in the break they got to talk out on the fire escape over the creek where once they’d all done dope with Tony. You name it. You stinking name it. Talk: Connie was back teaching ceramics at TC3, that earnest little Tompkins County Community College. She still thought Joe should shave his beard, to show his chin again. She had new lines at her eyes that suddenly were the most beautiful thing about her. Joe was smitten all over, listening: her studio, in a storefront right on the main street of Trumansburg, was going strong, had become a hangout for what amounted to the arts scene and the women’s movement in the little town. There was no profit in the place, but Connie would never give it up. She had her wheels in there, and her slab roller and two gas kilns. She’d bought an ornate little woodstove for the gallery she kept open in the front of the place, where her pals put their feet up like farmers (some of them were farmers) and drank coffee and talked whole days away, where nothing ever sold. Her kids were fine, she said. Joe asked for a kiss, actually asked for a kiss before he went back on, but she wouldn’t quite let him, didn’t quite not, either, gave him her cheek. All that was over, she said into his neck. Rockin’ Joe called a lot of ballads in the last set, sang them for her alone, like no one else was in the room, no old fans, no young women, no couples dancing slow. He was as in love with Connie as ever. And despite the crowded room and the music all around him, Old Wally’s sweet sax, Angel’s deep bass, the Wonder Women singing backup, the Blues Machine was dead.

  The boy pounded down the steps, spun into the kitchen, flung Joe’s pants in his face. “She’s out like a tree stump,” he said. “You must have spronked her really, really well.”

  “I told you to chill on that stuff.” Joe pulled his pants on and followed Jesse out the back door, shoeless. The sun was hot through the cool air, perfect September evening. Time for school to begin, new starts of all kinds. The sky was clear as the kind of drunken high in which Joe would stare at something hard and seem to see it through a perfect tunnel of understanding. Time to quit all that. He stood and breathed, felt better, looking around: leaves already falling, dervish whirls in gusty breezes, grass too high on what should have been a lawn. A sweeping spruce tree rose sixty feet, perfect cone in front of the house, swaying with those breezes, creaking with them by the gravel road. The melancholy perfection of the place overcame Joe: cry for Tony! Cry for Connie! Cry for maybe everyone on this sad planet, where people come and go and only live so long. Cry and then hit the road, Joe thought. Back to New York. He’d better get his ass down to the club, he best. The show was over, it was done.

  “The pond’s back here,” Jesse called. “There’s no llama, though. I was l-lying.” He started off, but Joe stood transfixed by a hose coiled sloppily on the side of the two-kiln garage.

  “I got to get some kind of a drink here.” He put the nozzle to his lips, held the hose up high. A slight wash of warm, hose-flavored water fell into his mouth: not horrible. He swished and spat, held up another coil, another meager drink. Jesse helped him then, pulling the hose free and holding up coils. Not enough to wash up, but enough to get rid of the rotten taste of old Kool-Aid in his mouth.

  “Let’s boogie,” Jesse said, savoring the prehistoric phrase, something his old man would have said. He led Joe over potsherds and broken firebricks and several bent Barbie dolls to an old cart path that ran between two stone walls and two noble and gnarled rows of old maples, path and walls and trees separating two good fields. Connie had propped fractured and underfired vases and pitchers against the tree trunks and along the tops of the rocks, colorful and meaningful in the lowering day. The cart path needed clearing; saplings had begun to choke it, threatened the older trees. Plenty work here.

  “Now these are sugar maples,” said Rockin’ Joe Heath. “You can take the sap and make syrup and candy and stuff.”

  “My father used to say that, too, but he never did it.”

  “You boil it down, and boil it down.”

  Seriously: “How old are you?”

  “I’m forty-three. How old are you?”

  “Oh, fifteen, and that’s the thing. I’m going to college before too long, you know? I’m going to want to get out of here.” He looked at Joe significantly, then marched ahead. He stopped. “You play guitar? Or what?” He was back into his comedy routine, wiggling his arms, dancing ahead in the leaves, making faces.

  Joe laughed. “I’m a singer, and you stinking know it.”

  “I play guitar, but I like to write, too, and draw. And you stinking know it!”

  “You ought to think about being a comedian or an actor or something.”

  “Well, I’ve certainly got the looks for it!” Jesse tweaked his own cheeks, then ran ahead, darted through an opening in the wall, and disappeared.

  Joe shuffled behind him carefully, barefoot in the leaves, not quite warm enough, that hangover sweeping back in. The trees beside the cart path formed a tunnel that stretched straight ahead to a view of the sky over the top of a distant ridge. He remembered laughing in a car, in a back seat. Gator’s car, it was, the new goddamn guitarist. Connie was funny. Right. Connie was really funny, made everyone laugh when she wanted to, laughing straight up the long hill to the house. This was supposed to have been just a ride home for her, but Wally and Gator had pushed Rockin’ Joe out behind her in her driveway and peeled out, that old trick, like they were kids. And Joe thought he’d better thank the boys, except the one thing: now he was stuck.

  He and Connie had laughed it up in the driveway, ending up kissing like old times sitting on the back stoop under starlight, half-frozen. And it wasn’t like they had never made love before, or like they weren’t in love still. She must have been just as drunk as he was. In the house he’d played the piano and sung with her, and they had kissed on the bench and had a regular riot, and the bench fell over and they lay on the floor—right—no wonder the kid woke up. Joe felt rotten thinking of Jesse having to hear them. He remembered the pink dawn that was in all the windows when he and Connie finally got off the staircase and into her room. They never even took their shirts off. Right. She didn’t want her shirt off. Joe shuffled down the cart path in the leaves, the night coming clear in his mind, and older times, too, the gigs at the Jersey Shore, Connie’s new baby and her obsessive concern about appearing in her bikini—stretch marks—that would be fifteen years past. He remembered her before Jesse, too, and before Tony, remembered her at that first blues festival in Vermont. Then, unbidden thought, he remembered what the older musicians seemed like back then, bald guys trying to act like kids, trying to impress the kids, and only the other old bald guys liked them, and some of the girls of course. The best of the girls, come to think of it. Joe shook his head and shuffled in the leaves. Christ if he hadn’t just last week colored his graying hair with black, black rinse.

  At the break in the wall a lesser trail led downhill through long grass and brambles a couple hundred yards to the rippling pond, Jesse’s path through the fallen leaves plain enough. And there Jesse was, still goofily running, flailing his arms like a much younger kid, windmilling his arms and whooping his way to a wooden dock that had long since rotted and fallen into the water. A skin of bubbling, vile algae on the pond’s surface stretched out from the little beach that someone had made by clearing reeds and spreading sand. The only clear water was on the other side, no way to get to it through the reedy swamp that formed most of the pond’s shore. “Looks like I’m not going to get to swim,” Joe said.

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you go in.”

  “
Keep it. We didn’t even bring a towel.”

  “All right, then. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you fix the pump.” Jesse pointed to a tall doghouse of a building. “Unless it just needs to be primed. That’s what Carl always does. Then I’ll only give you a quarter. Oh. And we lost the key.”

  “Well, I can prime a pump all right.”

  After a long and silent gaze at the pond and at the trees and the hills and the streaky sky, Jesse watching him, Joe pushed his way through brambles to study the sturdy little pump house, built over what looked to be a hand-dug artesian well. The door was absurdly padlocked. Jesse ran up beside him, stood too close, a comic examination of the lock.

  Joe said, “We can just clobber it till it pops, easy enough. Could you maybe run and go get a couple of tools? Crescent wrench and a hammer? And some kind of bucket ? And a screwdriver. And maybe pliers?”

  Jesse made a loopy face of pretend concentration, rushed suddenly backwards through the brambles, then backwards up the path, looking intently at Joe, full-speed amazing backwards. Joe smiled, gave Jesse his laughter, pointed at him and laughed hard for him, laughed till the boy twirled twice at the stone wall and sprinted toward the house.

  Beautiful, beautiful land here. Joe held the padlock bright and cold in his hand, studied it for several long minutes, whiskey-induced particularity of vision, grew dizzy. Dizzy, dizzy, too much fun. He dropped the lock and stretched his arms to hold the little pump house, lay his bearded cheek on the rough warm shingles of its roof. His head swam. He was a fool, a waste, a has-been, a nothing, a drunk, a clown: Grecian Formula, fuck. He hadn’t been this sick from drinking for years. What was he thinking? What could he ever do for Connie? Up all night, the two of them, like twenty-five. Tequila after whiskey. And where did that big bag of oranges come from? He was someone Connie loved. She said so, at least that. He saw her over him, still wearing her black Harley Davidson T-shirt, her hair falling blonde into his face, leaving a tunnel in the dawn to her dark eyes. It was those dark eyes with the blonde hair that made her so lovely to him, he thought. It was those dark eyes with the blonde hair and the subtle laugh and the careful analytic conversation and her ability to feel and offer joy, and that undertow of honest sorrow. And for that many hours he’d felt something different from this darkness he walked around with, not even knowing he walked with it till now. Connie had done that for him in the past, too. But this kid Jesse. And Maggie and Harriet, little girls he had never met. Quite a package, Tony’s legacy. Joe held the pump house tighter to prop himself, twitched a couple of times and fell asleep.