The Blues & Billie Armstrong 3
PINCH HITTER
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
I took the pink lipstick envelope to my room and hid it under the bed in the Keds shoebox with my baseball cards. I pulled on a jacket and my Giants cap and slipped out the back door into the whispering rain.
Our house stood at the bottom end of Fourth Street, half a block from where the pavement sloped right into Lupoyoma Lake.
On the other side of our backyard fence was the dirt parking lot of the Lupoyoma Yacht Club, which wasn’t quite as grand as it sounds and actually just a kitschy clubhouse for old Rotarians with old boats. But, beyond the Yacht Club, across Third Street, was the boundary of Library Park, a typical smalltown park with a couple square blocks of lawn populated by looming trees and wooden picnic tables. There was a dock with a diving board, a green cement tennis court, and the ivy-covered Lupoyoma County Carnegie Library.
A few summers before, I’d loosened one of the wide planks on our fence so it appeared to be solidly in place but could easily be set aside to open a shortcut to the park. Now I stepped through the gap, checking the Yacht Club parking lot for possible witnesses, my mind a tangle of shame and confusion and urgency, my breath quickened. I didn’t want anyone, especially my father, to know the truth—that I’d been in the house, seen her, and left. My father was the editor of the Lupoyoma Call & Record. He was an old-school, self-made newspaperman who curated facts for a living and had no patience for sugar on top. A man has to look life in the eyes, he liked to say. Death as well, I supposed.
And it started to dawn on me that I had possibly tampered with evidence by taking the envelope. I recognized this as the physical embodiment of what my father would call a lie by omission, but I had no intention of sharing the envelope with him or anyone else. Maybe I was protecting him, or my mother, or the rest of the family, or myself. Maybe I just wanted some piece of her all my own. Cowardly. Protective. Selfish. Bereft. All of that and more in an emotional blur, the colors run together like oil riding water.
I needed to slow down the drumming in my chest and stop the technicolor movie of the dayroom that was replaying in my head. And all the questions. The storm had emptied the park of citizens except the ducks who waddled around bickering over puddles that would soon disappear. I walked along the concrete promenade that ran the length of the park and listened to the hushing sound of the rain falling on the lake.
South of the park was the Weeping Willow Resort & Trailer Court, and I resolved to wait there to be found and notified of my mother’s death. The game room at the Weeping Willow was a regular hangout for me and my buddies. I figured that was where the adults would think to look for me if I was late coming home on a rainy day. My maternal grandparents owned the place, but they were always so busy running the restaurant and the rest of the resort that we kids were usually unsupervised in the game room. We’d play pinball, feed the jukebox, drink sodas and share cigarettes stolen from our parents. If there weren’t any older kids around to hog the pool table, we might shoot a game of eight-ball or cut-throat.
Timmy Bilderback and Joey Quarterman were already there, Timmy at the Pinch Hitter pinball game, Joey standing at the jukebox looking over the song selection.
“Hey Archer, got a quarter?”
I flipped him a coin. He dropped it in the machine and punched buttons. Three songs for two bits. Joey picked Daydream Believer by The Monkees, his favorite band. He had an autographed photo of Davey Jones on his bedroom wall, which he got by writing to the Official Monkees Fan Club. He moved aside and nodded for me to take my turn. Most of my favorites back then were Beatles songs, but all the tiny labels on the jukebox blurred together like when I was a little kid wearing my father’s bifocals. And I could still hear Sad Hours in my head—the echo of that strange lonely horn.
“You okay, man?” Joey must’ve caught the faraway look in my eyes.
I finally focused on the label for Penny Lane and punched in the number with Timmy now looking over my shoulder, encouraging me to “Pick a song already, dipshit.” Then he ragged on Joey that Davey Jones was a homo and the Monkees weren’t even a real band, and he punched in some Steppenwolf. I’d known Timmy since the second grade, but I didn’t know what he had on his walls—his parents were loud, unhappy drunks, and he never invited anyone inside.
I bought a can of Squirt from the coke machine, bummed a cigarette from Timmy and tried to act like I hadn’t gone home after school and found my mother dead in the dayroom. The cue ball was loose on the green felt of the pool table, and I slung it around with my hand trying to make bank shots while waiting for my turn at pinball. Steppenwolf roared on. Outside my head, the whole scene unfolded like a hundred other forgettable days at the Weeping Willow game room.
I was racking up points on the Pinch Hitter pinball machine, lost for the moment in the blinking lights and the bells and the bumps, when my Aunt Laurette appeared at the sliding glass door, peering in with her hands held up to form a tunnel around her eyes. Rainwater dripped down the door and blurred her face.
“It’s your aunt with the tits,” Timmy said. Even among twelve-year-old boys, Timmy Bilderback’s level of sexual energy was considered somewhat obsessive. Laurette King was actually my cousin once removed; I knew her mostly from holiday gatherings or as my occasional babysitter. According to Timmy, she was a “screamin’ hot piece,” and I admit I agreed, but I did so in secret, her being family and all. Mid to late twenties, trim but curvy, long dark hair ratted up on top, flame-blue eyeshadow. It’s fair to say she was the black sheep of the family thanks to a teenage marriage and divorce and some other hinted failings which I’d repeatedly been assured were none of my young business. As she entered the game room I looked up, and my last ball fell uncontested past my flippers. The game-over light flashed red.
She didn’t look like a hot piece right then, her eyes puffy, her face pale and slack. “Archer, there’s been an accident,” she said. I stared like an amateur actor who’s forgotten a line. The jukebox sang Penny Lane in the background. “You need to come with me,” Laurette said, and she took me by the hand and pulled me outside. The rain was falling hard again. “Come on!” she shouted, dragging me splashing across the wet black parking lot to the shelter of her Volkswagen Beetle.
We sat in the front seats with our dripping hair stuck to our heads. She put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. Rain covered the windows, swirling the outside world. She gripped the steering wheel so hard her fists trembled. She released her fingers carefully, as if they fought her, and she slammed the heels of both hands against the wheel. Mascara flooded down her face. She delivered the news, crying and nearly shouting over the din of rain against cheap metal. She said my mother had mixed up the nerve pills and the headache pills and the sleeping pills. Or somehow lost track and tripled her dosage. Or maybe she’d forgotten Doc Meaney’s advice not to mix her vodka with the pills. No one was sure. “A terrible accident.”
I didn’t know how I should pretend to react; I had no clear sense of what the expectations were. Doc Meaney, who was also the county coroner, had been to the house and ruled my mother’s death an accidental overdose.
I had to resist the urge to pour out the truth.
Earlier that summer Laurette had caught me stealing a couple Marlboros out of her purse. She’d made me light up in front of her, teased me about my cough and my inexperienced, effeminate hold on the cigarette. She gave me a mild lecture but never mentioned it to the other adults in the family. Still, I kept quiet about what I’d seen and heard in the dayroom. And what I’d taken.
My face must’ve looked blank, no tears came.
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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I love your entertaining if not completely factual take on the place where you grew up.