Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
“Robyn, do you still believe in God?”
She took a breath of night air. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure anymore. But I wonder, if there’s no God, why do we feel guilt?”
I tried to stay up late to see Billie when she came home from work, to hear how it went for her on the first night of the big weekend, but I fell asleep sometime around midnight.
Just couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. And she wasn’t up yet when I got dressed and went off to work the next morning.
The Giants were playing a day game at Candlestick Park that Saturday, but I didn’t bring my radio to work, didn’t even turn on the shop radio. I did my job by numb rote, without my usual joy or even much awareness. In the pig room I carelessly dumped a full hellbox of type all at once into the already bubbling cauldron. A splash of molten lead burned a penny-sized hole in my forearm, cooked multiple layers of skin quickly while I watched but didn’t move, didn’t drop the hellbox, didn’t try to swipe the liquid away with my glove. I stood still and settled into the pain.
I poured the pigs, cleaned the back shop and offices, washed up, took the five clean copies of the latest edition off Grandma Junia’s counter and properly filed them in the morgue. I had time that day but didn’t search for the July 18, 1969 issue. I thought about it, sat down on the wooden stepstool at the far end of the narrow room, with the yellowing newspapers stacked high and close. I sketched out a systematic approach in my mind, but the task seemed daunting, overwhelming even, and more than that, unpromising.
All my life I’d put so much faith in this grand institution where the printed word was manufactured and archived, where the past was recorded and the future predicted, this factory of inky memory and promises, all of it so full of self assurance. Decades and decades of council proclamations, Rotary Club lunches, pear crop estimates, grand openings, coming attractions, births, engagements, weddings and funerals, restaurant ads, hardware ads, furniture ads and grocery ads, grapes and apples ten cents a pound. Fact after fact after fact. But, even if I located this new puzzle piece, what would it solve, what would it change? Does fact plus fact always equal truth?
I locked up the morgue and went to the broom closet, took my apron off and put it on its hook. I yanked the chain to turn on the light, closed the closet door, staying inside. I took down all the old pictures taped and tacked on the back of the door—the magazine centerfolds and telephoto tourist girls from Library Park, the Lupoyoma High cheerleaders, and all those stupid remarks in Hank’s sloppy all-caps scrawl. I ripped them off the door, crumpled them up and carried them behind the building where I dropped them into the incinerator.
The house on Fourth Street was empty yet again.
The parents were out for a boat ride in Old Man Terwilliger’s big Chris-Craft cabin cruiser (the three-piece tweed suit of watercraft). Another note from Darlene, another frozen dinner. Salisbury steak—the hamburger patty with better PR.
Waylaid at the Ferris Wheel the night before, I didn’t have time to explore the rest of the carnival, so after Salisbury steak and a change out of my work clothes, I slipped through the fence again, and this time, in full daylight, it was easy to follow Garfunkel’s instructions to walk along the fence line, around his van and all the other equipment.
A pair of local policemen were talking to Garfunkel as he stood at his control unit setting the next round of the Ferris wheel in motion. One of them seemed to glance over at me. There was no logic to it, but a jolt of panic turned into a tight little fist in my chest as if this cop, the sun flashing off his mirrored sunglasses, could see into my growing horde of secrets.
With the noise of the carnival, and keeping my distance, I didn’t hear what was said; I could only see Garfunkel shake his head no several times. The two cops each nodded, although one seemed stubbornly suspicious, then they ambled away.
My chest relaxed. I walked over all casual. “Hey Howie, what’s up?”
“Bunch of bullshit. Somebody broke into the record store last night. Right away the pigs start hassling carnies.”
The kiddie rides filled Third Street almost up to Main Street.
The Tea Cups, the Helicopters, the Carousel. Screaming kids, nervous mothers, impatient older siblings. The Music Box was closed, no one around. The big picture window where they usually displayed the hot-rod electric guitars was covered with bare plywood. Glass and splinters were swept into a pile on the concrete below. Across the white clapboard wall, at an uneven angle, spray-painted in all caps, the words COMMIE DRAFT DODGER. Bright orange.
I headed back down the street, passed the kiddie rides again and made a right at Parkview, the two blocks of street that ran along the front of Library Park. This is where the Lupoyoma Chamber of Commerce, in all its wisdom, had decided to place the main part of the carnival.
On one side of the street, kids were tumbling and screaming and losing their pocket change on the Rock-O-Plane. On the other side, the Carousel blared its circusy horror music. In the biting sunshine of late afternoon the colored lightbulbs blinked dully. Drifts of litter choked the gutters. A congealed grime of oil and dirt clung to the belts and gears of the motors. Gasoline fumes hovered near the ground like desert heat.
It all seemed like an old toy that was dirty and broken and out of style. Maybe it was the cops, maybe the Salisbury Steak, but I felt sick to my stomach. I turned around and walked back down the street, looped around the Ferris Wheel when Garfunkel wasn’t looking, and slipped through the fence into my own backyard.
Before my mother died, when I still went to church on Sundays, I remember Reverend Jameson once said Episcopalians don’t believe in Purgatory like the Catholics do—as an actual place where your soul goes when you die and stays until you’re purified of your sins. But, he said, just as some people speak casually of Hell on Earth when their lives are filled with misery, one might also speak of Purgatory on Earth—as a state of deep, sorrowful regret and guilt, which can only be relieved by facing and correcting the evils we have done. The good Reverend never said how long the process might take.
The good Reverend never said how long the process might take.
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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