The Blues & Billie Armstrong 64
EITHER, OR
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
I look at these flickering memories behind my eyes, and they’re like jumpcuts from a movie of another person. A character I don’t know any better than any of the other characters—Billie, Hank, my own father and mother, J.R. Cole. I’ll never know why the boy in the movie does what he does in this scene. Even though I watch it over and over again.
It took most of the five-hour trip from Shelter Cove to finagle a media pass to the Federal Correctional Institution in the city of Dublin.
Valentine drove the Cadillac while I made a series of glitchy calls whenever my phone could muster a two-bar connection as we sped down Highway 101. As her attorney, Valentine could see Billie almost anytime she wanted. Not me. Fortunately, I’d once written something favorable about a gal who knew a gal whose girlfriend was the lieutenant who could sign off on inmate interviews; otherwise it could be two weeks of questionnaires and signatures to get in the place.
We arrived around four o’clock. FCI Dublin was nominally a low-security facility out at the edge of Bay Area suburbia in the long shadow of Mount Diablo. Still, it was a federal prison. I was ID’d, questioned, patted down, wanded, and made to empty my pockets like I was boarding an international flight.
We were told to follow Correctional Officer Gonzales, a giant in black uniform, various implements of control bulging his pockets and hanging off his belt. We fell in behind him, and he led us through a maze of hallways and buzzing doors, my field of vision reduced to his massive back, like driving behind a huge semi at night. He ushered us into a narrow and sunless cinderblock room that hoarded the cold like a tomb. A glass wall and a line of visiting booths down one side. Without a word, Gonzales directed us toward a pair of stainless steel stools at one of the booths. Then he pointed gravely toward the far wall where large stenciled lettering said KEEP HANDS VISIBLE AT ALL TIMES in all caps spray-painted in black on the white cinderblock. I took my hands out of my pockets and sat down.
Valentine took the stool next to me. Gonzales stood in the corner and stared directly at me, unremitting and unapologetic, hands folded at his waist. The fluorescent light tubes flickered overhead, and the light blared off the stainless steel and the white cinderblock. The room smelled brightly of disinfectant.
A door buzzed open on the other side of the glass and Billie walked in. Cliché orange jumpsuit, oversized and rumpled, with the sleeves and pantlegs turned up a fold. Her silvered curls somehow matching the brushed stainless steel furniture. She looked at Valentine, but Valentine’s eyes pointed at me, and Billie sat down across from me with a tentative smile.
She picked up the clunky black phone receiver, and I picked mine up and held it in a ready position. But neither of us spoke. The moment was still and full and well-lit, unlike the rush and dim of the meeting at Sonny’s bar. Face to face, not across the room from each other. A focused box of space, defined by the booth dividers and the frame around the glass. Yet another window between us, each seeing the other as if under a spotlight.
I searched her eyes, her face, the tilt of her head, the lines of her shoulders—for a report, for signs, for the story of all the weary years which I thought must be written there, as surely as they were written in the shadows and lines on my own face and the spidery veins in my eyes.
Then she laughed. And I laughed too.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I think that’s my line.”
“I know you didn’t want to be involved in this.”
“It’s okay. I want to help.”
It shamed me that she probably knew Valentine had to track me down in Shelter Cove with a subpoena. I wanted to blurt out, I’m an asshole. I’d rehearsed it in my head. But, deflecting as usual, I said, “I saw your paintings.”
She smiled. “I saw your video.”
She already knows I’m an asshole.
“I saw myself in the window.”
“It’s not realism,” she said. “It could be you, but maybe it’s another part of me. Maybe it’s both of us somehow.”
I nodded, and I remembered all the indefinite lines that made her forms seem less than solid, always in transition or transformation, border-crossing, mingling, becoming.
“I was a long time just trying to put the past to rest.”
“I get that,” I said. “I keep trying to drown it with words and bourbon. Hasn’t worked yet.”
There was a pause while neither of us found the courage to laugh.
Billie broke the silence. “Val said you had questions.”
“Oh, just a hundred or so,” I said, straining to keep the mood light, but Billie kept an even gaze on me, serious and attentive.
I said, “Maybe this is not the time,” and glanced in the direction of Valentine.
“Maybe not, but here we are.” Billie met her daughter’s eyes with the kind of calm resolve I could only envy. “Val, I know this has already been a lot for you. I’m sorry I had to hide so much for so long. I hope you can understand.”
Valentine had an oh-what-now question mark on her face. She seemed to guess we were headed into rooms she didn’t want to see.
I tried to be delicate. “Well, uh, I guess, you know… I’ve never been sure exactly what happened that night.”
“At Trey’s you mean?”
“No, not that night. The night you left… before you left… in my room.”
She sighed, looked down at the battered floor, spoke quietly. None of her old trademark windmilling of hands and arms, no waterfall of words like used to tumble out of her mouth. “I had to leave, Archer. I had to get out of that place. And I was so afraid I was gonna be pregnant… from what happened with Hank. The timing was right, wrong, whatever—the moon and all. And it happened to me before from a one-time thing—which got taken care of, but I don’t wanna talk about that… I had to leave and I only came to your room to say goodbye. But then… if I was pregnant by Hank, I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t even want to know, myself. Do you understand? I was afraid of what it would do to me to know my child came from that.” Now she lifted her eyes and looked steadily at Valentine. “I chose not to know,” she said. “Do you see?”
I saw that look I remembered, the one that said don’t dare judge me.
“Yes, I see now,” I said. “Thank you. All these years I’ve never even been sure it happened, much less why.”
Valentine’s face said, I can’t process this avalanche of shit all at once. She shook her head in confusion, frustration, overwhelm.
“Are you saying you two…”
Billie looked her steadily in the eye. “I hope you can understand.”
“Okay, I want to get this straight,” Valentine said. “A few months ago my mother was a beloved artist, wildly popular in a small community. Then I find out she’s actually a fugitive radical wanted for murder. Next she’s a victim of sexual assault who acted in self defense, and I am the child of that assault. But now you tell me the murdered rapist might not be my father after all, is that right? And this man here, this piss-poor excuse for a man I’ve been chasing all over the state, might be my biological father? Christ, I might prefer the dead rapist.”
“Valentine, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” Billie said.
“I don’t need Oscar Wilde right now, Mother. What I need is a paternity test.” There was a loaded moment of silence.
“Well, I won’t fight you on that now.” Billie said.
That possibility hung in the air while all three of us shifted and stretched and straightened our posture on the steel stools, an undeclared cease-fire.
I swept my eyes around the room. Imagining prison life for myself, I’d always had the romantic notion that I would study and meditate and condition my body with the discipline of a monk, then walk out with a mission like the Count of Monte Cristo or Malcolm X. But underneath I had the terrifying vision I would be beaten by masochistic guards and sodomized by gang leaders with shaved heads and tattooed eyelids.
Valentine took a deep breath to refocus, but her words still came in stabs. “Paternity test or not, what we really need to know right now, Mr. King, is what you’re prepared to tell the grand jury on Tuesday.”
Then the big guard’s radio barked and chattered in bursts of static and garbled talk. Billie leaned forward with her arms on the cold stainless steel counter that ran under the window. “We might not have much time,” she said, as if I should get to the point.
Gonzales answered his radio, “Copy that.” He looked at his watch.
I blurted out, “I was there, Billie.”
“Yes, you said that at Sonny’s bar. You were the eyes in the window,” Valentine said, impatient.
A loud buzz went off like a fire alarm on Billie’s side of the window and began to pulse in four-four time, braying like an out of tune saxophone.
Billie said, “Aw, shit! Lockdown.”
“No, not at the trailer,” I said. “In the alley that night. I followed you.”
The alarm vibrated the inside of my ears.
“Wrap it up!” Gonzales said.
“Archer, what are you trying to say?” Billie said.
I heard heavy boots pounding the hallway outside the room.
“Hank was still alive.”
The metal door on Billie’s side swung open and another officer came through, a bulldog of a woman with a clipboard.
“Armstrong! Now!” The bulldog barked and held the metal door open, waiting. Gonzales left the room, and the door on our side clunked and buzzed shut behind him. Valentine and I were locked in.
“I gotta go,” Billie said, and she stood up and scooted her stool backward with her foot.
“Wait! There’s something else,” I said.
Officer Bulldog wasn’t interested. She grabbed Billie’s arm and pulled her toward the metal door, stretching the phone cable to full length.
“What is it?” Billie said, but the phone slipped out of her hand. She looked back chin over shoulder as she was dragged through the doorway.
“I killed him,” I shouted into the phone, but it was too late. Billie couldn’t hear.
Valentine heard, though. And she stood up in a rush and backed away from me like I was on fire. She steadied herself against the far wall. “Oh my god,” she said, eyes wide.
The metal door stayed open on its own for a second, then began to swing shut. Billie disappeared into the line of orange bodies being herded down the hallway. The branging pulse of the alarm hammered in my head.
Valentine crossed the room in three steps. Her hand met my face like an exclamation mark. The woman slapped with Barry Bonds handspeed. My head jerked hard to the side and I dropped the phone. All her years of feeling abandoned tremored in her eyes and in her hand. She slapped me again, and I lost my balance and sprawled on the cold cement. The stool screeched across the floor as I went down. That tang of Pine-sol fumes hit me in the face. The alarm pounded on.
“You killed him? And then you kept your mouth shut while the whole world blamed her? She’s been running and hiding for forty years while you drink up the proceeds of your own arrogant bullshit? Mr. Truth-teller?”
I sat up with my legs spread out on the cement. The alarm finally stopped. The step and rustle of officers double-timing and the hiss and chirp of busy radios continued on the other side of the door. Valentine paced the length of the room, away toward the door, then back to me sitting on the floor. She stood looking down on me, my own karma delivery person.
“So, what you’re telling me now is you’re either my father, or you’re the man who killed my father. Jeez, maybe I don’t need a paternity test. Because, frankly, either way, fuck you.”
She began to sob. I pushed myself up off the floor and sat back on the stool. I hung my head and stared between my feet at odd stains left on the cement over the years, indelible blemishes of time in shapes like Rorschach inkblots. I saw spiders and dragons and boats on fire. She stepped closer and leaned over me. “Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you!” she said, and jabbed her index finger close to my face with rhythm. I looked up and saw mascara pouring down her cheeks.
The metal door buzzed and clunked and swung open, Officer Gonzales filled the doorway.
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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