The Blues & Billie Armstrong 6
WAVES UNDER STARLIGHT
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
The motor grumbled to a stop and the truck door closed with a thunk. I only had a few moments before he would make it up the walkway and through the front door.
Pop found me in my room, sitting cross-legged on the bed.
He didn’t say a word, just stood towering over me and waved his head toward the door. I walked ahead of him and he herded me out to the front yard. I climbed up into the cab of the pickup and sat on the passenger side. A busted sixpack of Oly sat between us on the bench seat. Pop started the engine, opened a beer, turned the truck around and drove up the little rise to the stop sign at Main Street just in time for me to see the yellow headlights of the black hearse as it passed by toward the cemetery.
Molly was riding in front, chin up, eyes ahead. I watched the polished coffin through the long side-window, framed by black curtains. The hearse was followed by the shiny Buick Electra, with my father’s stern profile in the window, Grandma Junia’s frosted beehive rising up on the driver’s side. I counted seventeen cars, headlights glowing like daystars. Pop turned on his own lights and pulled in behind, and we followed in silence to Lupoyoma Cemetery, a few miles north of town. He parked at the end of the long line of cars and turned off the motor, and the cab filled up with quiet hesitation.
I said, “Pop, why did it happen?”
He looked at me hard while considering the question. Then he looked away. “You never really know another person’s why, boy. Sometimes it’s hard enough to know your own.”
“But it was an accident, right? And an accident isn’t anyone’s fault.”
“I don’t know about that.” He stared through the windshield at the acres of gravestones. He grabbed a fresh beer, got out of the truck, stood with the door still open.
“I’ll stay here,” I said, eyes averted, tears beginning to spill onto my cheeks.
I heard him open the beer, then watched him hunt his way between the grassy graves, toward the circle of mourners, where he took his place beside Molly. I turned on the radio and listened to George Jones sing an old song about roses while my mother’s coffin was lowered into the red clay Lupoyoma ground.
On the way back, I rode in the middle between Pop and Molly. Pop turned the radio off and none of us spoke, and I expected that would remain the tone of the day—quiet and somber with hushed voices and downward eyes. This being my first experience with a death in the family, you’d think someone would’ve told me about the after-funeral party, although I don’t think the adults even told each other—no announcement, no invitations, they just knew. They didn’t even call it a party; they spoke of it later as a gathering or get-together or, more formally, as a reception. I thought those were for weddings.
Pop turned the pickup down Fourth Street, and there were already six or seven cars parked on our block. Multiple women paraded from car to house, carrying great tinfoil-covered platters held out in front of their breasts.
One woman balanced her offering and tried but failed to close her car door with a well-placed shove of her high-heeled foot. My father came to her rescue and relieved her of a large tray. Pop watched through the windshield as he parked the truck a little ways up the street. He took a breath, and it looked to me like he set his jaw for trouble. He jerked the door handle and swung the door open, but Molly reached across me and touched him on the arm, and he slowly closed the door. “I think we’ll be going home now,” she said and got out of the truck, stood on the curb and made room for me to get by.
Pop stared straight ahead.
Molly said, “You go on inside, Archer. And tell Laurette we’re not feeling up to it, okay?”
I jumped down from the truck and ran ahead, up the stairs and into the house, through the living room full of men drinking and into the yellow kitchen full of women talking of children and recipes.
The table was covered buffet-style with the oddest assortment of food: Pop’s enchiladas, Grandma Junia’s apple pie, Laurette’s fondue and breadsticks, one neighbor’s lasagna, another’s fried chicken legs, and various intimidating, inscrutable casseroles.
I grabbed a can of cream soda out of the fridge and went back to the living room, where men shook hands and poured liquor from an array of bottles lined up on top of the long Magnavox stereo cabinet. They smoked and sat and stood confidently in their suits and asked each other how business was. They spoke of Mays and McCovey and joked that the Giants were leading the division but would surely find a way to end up in fourth place where they belonged.
No one mentioned Pop and Molly. No one spoke of death. Or my mother.
Retreating to my bedroom, I laid down on top of the bedspread with the abstract pattern of overlapping circles in different shades of blue—it always reminded me of waves under starlight. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the sensation that I was backfloating in Lupoyoma Lake, staring up at the starry sky instead of the blank ceiling.
I fantasized that I would contract some strange and rare genetic condition that would accelerate the aging process of my body and mind. I would suddenly grow a wild forest of pubic hair and a bushy mustache. My voice would deepen to a baritone and I would wake up inches taller each day. Doc Meaney would have to be called in to treat my overwhelming growing pains, and I would be told there was no cure, that I would for all intents and purposes be a grown man in a matter of months.
And then I would begin to see through new eyes all the things I’d been told for so long I was too young to understand.
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 loved those "intimidating, inscrutable casseroles." But the last sentence is the best!
Man oh man, Roy. I was right there in the front seat of Pop’s pickup, watching the coffin through the window of the hearse rolling by.