The Blues & Billie Armstrong 18
BRIGHTER. LOUDER.
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
But now, as Billie and I reached the back door and started into the house, she gave me a streetwise smirk and said, “By the way… low blow my ass.”
Monday morning I woke in dusky half-light to Billie shaking my shoulder and shushing me at the same time, her round face mere inches away, eyes like wet jade.
I pulled back to lengthen the view and saw her red tousled hair and the extra-large black t-shirt that fit her like a nightgown, silkscreened with the Woodstock logo—a dove of peace perched on the neck of a guitar. It took me a few sleepy seconds to realize she had somehow opened the window between our rooms and climbed through.
That window had been locked and painted shut years before. I started to ask about it, but she put her hand over my mouth and whispered, “Don’t go to school today. Tell the parents you’re sick or something, but don’t go to school.”
She kept her hand over my mouth until I nodded okay, then she went back to the window, folded herself through and slid the bottom pane closed. I had no idea what her purpose was or why on earth I was prepared to go along. She already had a power over me which I did not fully comprehend.
My father’s rule was simple.
Unless you had a fever—or were actually in the hospital—you were going to school. Consequently, over the years I had developed and refined the Electric Heater Fever Simulation Method. The Electric Heater Fever Simulation Method required precise timing, made even more challenging in this case by the fact that it was springtime, not the dead of winter.
I pulled the heater out of my closet, plugged it in, turned it on high, and watched the wiry coils bloom orange as poppies. It was bigger than the proverbial breadbox, this heater, but not by much—only two feet tall. Obviously, you couldn’t handle it once it warmed up, so there I was, kneeling on the floor in my boxer shorts, with my butt in the air and my neck stretched down to catch the heat with my forehead. Finally, beads of sweat arose and even my eyeballs felt afire. I unplugged the heater, threw on my robe, and waited for my head to cool down from emergency-room to sick-note temperature.
I didn’t want my father or Darlene to see the heater or notice how warm my room was, I wanted to catch them in neutral territory—the kitchen. My timing was perfect. He was knocking back a final gulp of coffee, she was practically halfway out the front door. He saw I wasn’t dressed and said, “You’re running late, young man.”
I let my whole body droop and said, “I don’t feel good” in my best whiney voice, and I moved within Darlene’s reach. Her hand shot out in an involuntary mothering reflex and landed on my forehead. I held my breath—this was the moment of truth for the Electric Heater Fever Simulation Method.
“You’re burning up,” she said. “Get a glass of water and go back to bed. Tell Billie to find you some aspirin.”
Success! They were out the door two seconds later, and I was literally home free.
I headed straight for the dayroom and threw open the door without knocking.
Billie sat primly on the green chenille bedspread, still in her Woodstock t-shirt, hands uncharacteristically folded in her lap and a strange penitent look on her face.
She started talking in a rush and her hands jumped out of her lap and danced with the words. “Archer, I didn’t mean to snoop, I was just bored and I saw all those boxes in the closet marked Goodwill and I was just looking for old clothes to try on for fun maybe and then I saw this other box on the top shelf that looked really cool and I guess it was your mother’s and I probably shouldn’t have gone through it but I found something you maybe don’t want to see…”
“Jesus, what the hell are you talking about?”
She gave me a sympathetic wince and stood up, reached under the rollaway bed and slid out a big round box—a silver and gray striped hatbox made of smooth and sturdy cardboard, with red roses printed on the lid. Billie set the box on the unmade bed and stepped away as if the thing might explode.
Based on the look on her face I shook off a flutter of dread, and I stepped over and lifted the lid on the box. Inside was a navy blue felt hat with a round crown and a wide brim. A sprig of dried flowers was pinned to a silvery hatband that was sprinkled with blue polkadots.
“It’s only my mother’s old hat,” I said with a wave of relief. I lifted the hat from a layer of loosely crumpled newspaper used as packing material. When I held the hat in my hands I could see my mother alive. “She used to wear this when I was little,” I said. “We all went to the zoo in San Francisco one Easter. My mother and father, Grandma Junia, Laurette. I remember her there, on the carousel riding a giraffe, laughing in this hat.”
“It’s a beautiful hat,” Billie said. “But look under the paper.”
I set the hat down on the bed beside the box, pulled back the newspaper and saw that it was acting as a false bottom, and hidden underneath was a scattering of white envelopes, maybe two dozen, slightly wrinkled, previously opened, and each apparently containing a letter. I pulled them from the hatbox a few at a time and spread them out on the bed.
Now I understood Billie’s excitement. And her hesitation. “Did you read these?” I said, like an accusation.
“A little bit,” she said, cautiously measuring my reaction.
“I guess they’re love letters, aren’t they?”
“Well, yeah, but how did you know?”
The envelopes were all addressed to my mother’s maiden name, Evelyn Medina, in care of a Mrs. Watkins at the same unfamiliar address—1425 Rawson Road in Two Lakes—which matched the return address on the envelope I’d found in the pocket of her dress on the day she died. The envelopes from the hatbox were all from PFC J.R. Cole. Some of them were marked with a red and blue striped Air Mail border and a red dragon insignia under the word Vietnam in arched, Asian-style lettering.
Coming through the door I’d told myself I was done with the ghosts of this room. Now the back of my neck was slick with sweat as if I really was feverish. Billie’s presence—sketches tacked to the walls, paperback books stacked on the nightstand, various articles of clothing strewn on the floor and the psychedelic landscape in progress on the window—it all lay like a sticky film superimposed over the memory of my mother lying dead in the blue-flowered sundress on a rainy day in September.
One time, when I was ten or so, I was hunting crawdads with Timmy Bilderback along the banks of Bottlerock Creek. When I turned my head to duck under some low cottonwood branches, a mosquito somehow flew or dropped into my ear canal, then couldn’t find its way out. I began to hear its constant frantic buzzing as if it emanated from my own brain. Of course, Timmy thought this was funny as hell. My mother had to call Doc Meaney at home, and he met us at his office. By then the sound of the insect in my skull was raking my nerves like a saw blade on bone. It drove me to screaming tears until the kindly doctor extracted the tiny beast with a long worrisome pair of tweezers while my mother held my head down sideways on a cold steel table.
Now, the rollaway bed was littered with a debris field of the letters. I closed my eyes and saw the pink impression of my mother’s lips and heard the scratch-scratch from the hi-fi deep in my head. The hatbox, these new letters, this true motherlode of secrets, somehow made the first envelope more real, the pink lipstick brighter, the scratch-scratch louder.
I visualized the silver roll of duct tape my father kept in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I decided to put each envelope back in the box, double-seal it with the duct tape and stick it on a shelf in the garage behind the Christmas decorations and the old paint buckets. No, I would drop the whole box into the burn barrel in the backyard, drown it in charcoal lighter fluid and burn it all with the week’s trash.
I started out of the room without a word, dizzy and nauseated, thinking I would retrieve the envelope and the records from my room and add them to the hatbox and then to the flames.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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