Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
In the bottom of the fifth inning, the Dodgers pounded out six runs and I could feel the game, maybe the whole season, slipping out of reach. Not technically, not mathematically, but emotionally. The Dodgers didn’t score again, but they didn’t need to. Final score, eight-zero, leaving the Giants still mired deep in fifth place.
She managed to convince the parents she was sick, and she hardly came out of her room the next two days.
I saw her Monday morning, in the kitchen, barefoot, Woodstock t-shirt, puffy eyes and hair an orange bramble, pulling hot cherry Pop-Tarts out of the toaster, quickly dropping them on a plate.
I felt exposed and I figured she did too. I mumbled good morning, she only nodded. “Heard you’re sick,” I said, but like a question, and I guess I was hoping for some tiny sign that she wanted to talk.
She pretended to stifle a cough, looked at the plate in her hand. “Just a little bug,” she said. “I’ll be alright.” And she took her Pop-Tarts down the hallway.
I walked to school and timed my arrival so it would be too late to hang out with anyone. During first period, we had to pick study partners for the final two weeks of preparation for the big Constitution Test, one of the scariest things in the life of every eighth grader in the country. Ninety minutes, a hundred questions and a number two pencil between you and graduation, and beyond that the imagined paradise of high school. I caught Timmy and Joey both glancing my way, so I quickly asked the girl at the desk right in front of me—of all people, Robyn the horse artist.
Joey would’ve been an okay partner, but Timmy would be no help—there was a fair chance he wouldn’t pass the test, period. And right now I couldn’t look at him without seeing the back bedroom in Trey Morgan’s trailer. I wanted to punch him dead in the face, but without him knowing why.
Prepping for the Constitution Test with Robyn would be a handy excuse to avoid Timmy and Joey altogether for a couple weeks. Except at baseball. And, unfortunately, we had a game that very evening. The Paperboys vs. The Odd Fellows, round two.
This time the fearsome and unsmiling Craiger Robinson dominated our lineup. My first trip to the plate, he plunked me in the ribs. I jogged to first and stood on the bag rubbing my side while Craiger said, “Sorry, Archie, must’ve slipped out of my hand.”
It hurt pretty good but felt like justice, a little extra payback for the hidden ball trick. A little extra for everything else. Or maybe just smart strategy on Craiger’s part, because after that I struck out twice, flinching on every pitch, bailing out and taking wild swings. Coach Fish screaming old-school slang from the bench, “You’re stepping in the bucket, boy. Stop stepping in the damn bucket.”
We lost nine to one. During the fifth inning Timmy and Joey got in an all-out fistfight, supposedly over a pop fly that fell between them. Two runners scored while they rolled around in the grass behind the pitcher’s mound. Vic the pressman was umpiring. He ran out and pulled them both up to their feet and held them apart by their collars. “You get your big heads out of your little asses and play ball,” he said. Other players laughed, but I didn’t.
After the game, Timmy and Joey were still giving each other the stank-eye, all of our players long-faced, hanging our heads while Coach Fish blah-blahed about playing as a team.
Robyn brought in the scorebook and handed it to Coach. I hadn’t even noticed that Alice wasn’t in her usual spot in the bleachers scoring the game. Turned out Alice had resigned, quit the team, no explanation, and Robyn was a last-minute sub.
I ignored Timmy and Joey and left the field with Robyn. We walked together up Main Street in the soft light of the evening. Just a boy in his baseball uniform, glove on his hand, and a girl in a plain dress, schoolbooks hugged to her chest. We made plans to get together and study for the Constitution Test. She told me the student council had booked Nate’s band, Mellow Day, for the Eighth Grade Graduation Dance. I asked about her brother Ricky serving in Vietnam, and she said her family was worried they hadn’t heard from him in a while.
I’d never really talked with Robyn before and it felt good, but in a weird way that made me notice how alone I was feeling. I had so much to say that couldn’t be said. Not to my mother or father or Laurette, not Hank or Billie or Joey or Timmy. Or anyone else, including Robyn.
Because of the game, I was late for dinner, but Darlene had concocted some kind of hamburger stew and kept it on the stove. She plopped some into a bowl, asked if I’d talked to Billie that day, and I said she’d made Pop-Tarts in the morning but that’s all I knew.
“I’m worried about her,” Darlene said. “She’s hardly been out of her room and I bet those Pop-Tarts are all she’s had to eat today.”
“Oh, it’s just a summer cold,” my father said from the recliner. “Probably picked up whatever Archer had a while back.”
I forced down some of that stew and went to my room. The curtains were still drawn on the window between the rooms; night had fallen but no lamplight shone from her side. And not a sound.
The next day, same story, except I didn’t see Billie at all, even for Pop-Tarts in the morning.
I worked after school, came home in the evening, and Darlene gave me the sandwich she’d left in the fridge for Billie. She said Billie had forced down a few spoonfuls of leftover stew and gone back to bed already. Darlene and my father bickered briefly over whether Doc Meaney should be consulted. I went to my room and lay on the bedspread in the twilight gloom listening to the Giants lose yet another game.
Late into the night, the game long over, I lay propped up, staring at the silent curtained window, my runaway mind conjuring half-dreams of Billie’s lifeless body waiting in the bed on the other side of that wall. In these imaginings Billie wore my mother’s blue flowered sundress and I could hear the scratch-scratch of the hi-fi.
But on Wednesday I rushed home after school to check on her and found the curtain was pulled back and a slant of afternoon sunlight played on the painted window.
I went around and knocked on her door and got no answer. I took the chance to open the door and peek in, which I knew damn well she would not appreciate. She wasn’t there, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not so good.
I needed something to stop my brain from running in circles bouncing from one fear to the next like carnival bumper cars. I went to the closet and pulled a selection of 45s out of their hiding place in the hatbox. Mean Old World by Little Walter, Broken Heart by Memphis Minnie, You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had by Muddy Waters, and My Heavy Load, the Big Mama Thornton record Frankie had given me. I stacked them up on the record changer and turned the selector to play. I lay on the old corded rug, staring at the blank ceiling, letting the music seep into my body.
Sometimes you just want to hear a sad song. You want to sink into that sinking feeling in your heart, lower yourself into the cool thick mud of it, gritty and dark, dirty and soothing. You want someone else’s words to put shape to the feeling, someone else’s voice to echo your discontent, a slide guitar or harmonica to underline it. You want the blues. You need it. Turned up loud. The bass thrumming in the floor and rising up into your limbs
I listened to the records, maybe twenty minutes worth, then I carefully put them all back in the hatbox. I saw those three Goodwill boxes still stacked in the closet and I remembered how I’d forbidden Billie to go through them, and now for some reason it occurred to me that might’ve been a mistake. I opened the box on top of the stack and saw nothing but Butterick sewing patterns and pieces of fabric.
I set that box on the floor and opened the second box. And right on top was the blue flowered sundress in which my mother had left the world—folded neatly but still on a hanger and wrapped in a clear plastic bag like it had come back from the dry cleaners. But of course it hadn’t come from the cleaners—the plastic was branded in red type with the logo of the Jones & Jones Funeral Home.
In a horrible flash I imagined walking down Main Street and running into some strange woman wearing my mother’s dress. I didn’t think I could handle that. I folded up the dress, still in the plastic bag, and stuffed it into the hatbox along with everything else. Except the hat itself, which wouldn’t fit back in the box, so I put it on the shelf, reluctantly, and took the hatbox to my room and stashed it deep in my closet.
Then I stood out in the backyard with Hank’s old baseball bat, killing time and nervous energy by hitting apples over the fence. The apple tree had been ignored ever since my mother’s death, and the result was a collection of overripe fruit on the ground under its branches, of interest only to neighborhood yellowjackets and restless Little Leaguers.
I was still there around six o’clock when Billie came through the gap in the fence in her waitress uniform. “Hey,” was all she said. I faked a casual chin nod that she didn’t even see on her rush past me and into the house. Definitely the shortest conversation I would ever have with Billie Armstrong, but I thought it was a hopeful sign that she’d been to work. I left the bat leaning against the back stairs and followed her inside.
On her way through the kitchen, she told Darlene she’d eaten a hot dog at work, she was tired and just needed to lie down.
“Yes, you need your rest,” Darlene said. “Don’t do too much too soon. You’ll have a relapse.”
From behind the newspaper held up in front of his face, my father’s voice said, “You don’t want to miss any more work.”
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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