His stature, what there was
of it, was the cause of it all. From a meek and mild
beginning, barely making it into the world, to the inevitable and cataclysmic
end.
Banjo.
He was called Banjo, not because he was bow-legged (which he was and, at 5 feet
1 7/8 inches and stretching for all he was worth, quite pronounced); not
because most of his life he could play without a single lesson any instrument
that had strings and required picking or twanging (from balalaika to ukulele
and zither); not because a lost testicle at the start of puberty had driven his
voice two octaves up the scale, but because he was born of a blind mother,
named by his hard-drinking, puzzle-playing, acronym-bedeviled father, raised at
times of critical issues by a maiden aunt, all as Benjamin Arthur Norman
Jobleski. Banjo,
short for short.
His father, Joe Jobleski,
pipe wrapper of the old school, a man of fists and thrust jaw, sitting at his
favorite stool at the club, always remembered Banjo being born, how he came
weak and wimpy into this world, the runt of the litter, scrawny, red as a
tossed new penny, bony and near fleshless, fingers like Q Tips, toes like
firecrackers in the gutter on the morning of the Fifth, a chicken lobster, a
cull at the pound, and born of a blind woman who had not so sinned before.
"The smallest Jobleski
in two centuries," heÕd often said at the PAMVETS, an empty glass never in
front of him for long, where two of his older sons had already found similar
and lethal tastes. It was here where nights and weekends were spent away from
home, where the eyeless scourge that was his wife Mary could not penetrate the
leaden and stark sanctuary of peers.
"Came like a chip of
wood on that salty water, did Banjo," he had exclaimed to his constant
companion, Big Mike Shigalski. "Flushed out of the tube, riding the waves.
Maybe he can go out in a blaze of glory. Huh! Maybe! Maybe not! Not enough fuel
to light a lantern. A frigginÕ candle. Bless Mary, she canÕt see him. Held him
like a doll, though, crinkly, like crepe paper. Afraid heÕd break up right in
her hands. His arms so puny, his legs, sticks and twigs. I was scared of
holding him myself. Could lie like a pack of hamburger right in my palm. One of
those special four pound jobs, and half it fat at that."
Mike knew the way to get
additional rounds, how not to cut a night right in half, how Joe Jobleski
turned on his bar stool to look around the room any time one of his four other
sons or his daughter Aleksa were mentioned, always seeking approval, nodding in
a strange self-centered way, waiting for the odd clap on the back, the
soundless clap on the back, approbation, approval in the gesture, words held
back as though all in attendance
understood the non-speaker, the
back-slapper. It was not an emptiness about his friend that was most pronounced to
Mike, but the constant dread swirling about him, a threat swinging itself, a
pendulum cutting through the air. Trouble or pain waiting to
happen, sharp as a knife. The dark eyes under the mass of gray eyebrows,
the jaw set as stiff as an anvil back at the shop, did not allow much
expression on JoeÕs face. Stolid, rock-ribbed.
Stubborn might have been said of him, but never to his face.
Mike looked at the hulking
shoulders he knew were as powerful as his own, riding clean and confident like
bareback riders on bones that would never break this side of collision.
"CanÕt win them all,
Joe. You got yourself a handful of giants. The boysÕll
do you proud, you can bet on them, and Aleksa...well, no oneÕs ever going to
screw around with her, unless she wants them to, thatÕs for sure." A small
laugh was punctuation, an afterthought. "Paulie, heÕs going to be the best
fullback this town has seen since Marion Mottley. HeÕs got a ton of you in him,
Joe, a whole ton! ItÕll break out before you know it. And Andy looms like
Bronco, only a freshman at that, lots to learn. Coach says he can hardly wait
on him. Knees like triphammers. Puts his shoulders where they belong, squared
away, downfield all the time, a real North-South runner. No East-West shit for
him."
"Yah!" threw in
Joe, "and his baby brother wonÕt even be big enough to make the cheering
squad."
"You canÕt win them
all, Joe. You got to take something like this in stride. ItÕs not the end of
all things Polska."
He smiled a self-effacing
smile, felt himself pandering, thought light of it, stared at the neon of the
night light above the rear door blaring EXIT,
the ring of redness becoming once again, as it did nightly, a mushroom of red,
a blare of red that might otherwise be a trumpet of sound. He said,
"Shit!" under his breath as if a decision had been made, though he
knew heÕd go through the same torture time and time again, sucking up.
Joe had thought about those
things for a long time. Some days and evenings he would sit at the club, if
Mike wasnÕt around to engage him in useless conversation that always turned on
one thing, and think only of how he had been cheated of another robust son. They were his pride and joy, like
medallions he could wear at a minuteÕs notice, extensions of himself, his name
now and then in print. Christ! He could feel them in his backbone. And Banjo,
the tiny son, the aberration, the anomalous offspring, seeming never to leave
the hands of his blind and now utterly sexless mother for the better part of
five years, grew slowly and aching as the neighborhood target runt of all
runts. Banjo was persecuted, dawn to dusk, hounded, driven, plagued by all
those his age, and some even younger. Pinched. Kicked. Bitten. Cussed. Punched.
Knocked down. Back pockets ripped wide apart so that the seam of his pants would
snap and his drawers would show. No Jobleski ever came to his rescue. Never once. No Paulie or Mike or Andy or Stash. No
Aleksa either. They barely abided
him, not wanting to share any of his deformity. Touching surely was sharing.
And Aleksa, secretly, down in her stolid, unyielding body, in her man-looking
body, behind her deep eyes and Jobleski jaw, behind the air of nonchalance she
was able to evoke at will, hated her runty brother, and absolutely, positively
hated her mother for mixing up their places in her womb. She had thought, from
the early days when her breasts began to fill themselves, when strange things
happened within her and odd delights came sliding and slipping through her,
that her mother had placed her in the wrong niche in that dark cavern, on that
hidden sea, carried her in the wrong place, gave to her brother Banjo the body
that was supposed to be hers. "I hate the two of them!" she would
mouth deeply while in the shower, her lips curling her testament, her hands
finding secrets, sources of electricity, discovering that proportion and
graceful symmetry were not to be her choice attributes.
So Banjo grew, unwanted,
unloved, object of utter derision, nearly cast aside from the bosom of the
family, held only by the arms of his blind mother, her fingers touching,
measuring, finding in the dark silence some of the same pains that the rest of
the family found, and held by Aunt Stacy only when men of the house were away
or Banjo would slip over to her house for a visit, for cookies, to have her rub
his feet and little legs for hours on end, as if the chilblains worked in him.
Stories would fall from her red dialectal mouth until he fell sleep. Dreamed
about her red mouth, he did, how it was wet but vise-like the way it held the
bare tip of a cigarette for hours on end, dangling, bringing now and then of a
smile the final curve to her lips.
Plague is a word and a
condition that is long apart from us, long apart from Jobleski and the tenor of
their times. Except for Banjo. Somewhere in his sixth year, the runt, the
family failure, the blot on their fair horizon, tired of the pounding, tired of
the smashing, tired of the soreness almost a permanent part of his body, began
to hit back.
Oh, Lord! Banjo began to
kick. Began to punch. Began to stand against the armory that gathered in all
the other Jobleskis. He fought tooth and nail their fingers in his ribs, their
knocking-rapping fists on his skull, their aimless but aggregate punishment,
their name-calling and diatribes, the jokes about Tom Thumbs and little peckers
and dwarfs and pygmies and midgets and half-grown jockeys, the incredible
allusions to the blind woman who had carried and delivered him, the distances
they tried to put between themselves and him, the endless assault against kin.
More than once he believed
himself kinless, stray, urchin, orphan. But rising in his small and abject
frame, like it did in cubs or pups coming eventually of age, predators at
length at their appointed places, came courage and an ingenuity and a will to
survive that belied such territory.
Paulie: The first time you
put your dick in, kid, youÕre going to fall right through. Balls out youÕre
going, right on through. TheyÕll be looking for you for a month of Sundays and
nobody in high heaven will be able to find you. DonÕt let go, Banjo. DonÕt ever
let go the last cunt hair you grab onto because it might be the last lifesaver
youÕll ever know. If you go down that long tunnel, kid, youÕll never come back.
What the hell would we do without you? Why weÕd be frigginÕ lost. ThatÕs where
weÕd be. No more frigginÕ punching bag, no more little shit of shits to make
our days. You can count on that. WeÕd be lost without you. Can you imagine it,
the runt adrift on a cunt hair and never seen again!
A rock the size of a baseball
suddenly off PaulieÕs head. A knob just as big coming along
shortly thereafter. Another rock and another hit and Banjo escaping
under a fence, his route secret and sacred and plotted well in advance. HeÕd
show them a thing or two. HeÕd bust balls or die trying. Pursuit would be over
in minutes, he knew. They could never catch him, never go the places he went,
never put themselves through the smallest slot or
space where only light had gone before him. And under Aunt StacyÕs rear porch,
tight up against the decking, he slipped into and through the smallest fissure
of all, letting himself into a sanctuary of stone that no man had entered since
it was sealed for structural safety. A root cellar long passed over and
forgotten, buried under the addition of the wide screened porch. His
Shangri-La. His oasis. Twenty-one square feet of bliss and darkness.
When he slipped down to the
familiar floor, felt his secrets and collectibles, touched the skins of their
miniature bodies, inhaled their steep and lovely aromas he had refined with
sprays and perfumes stolen from innumerable sources, when in that darkness he
could almost see the eyes of each one of the dolls, he said his prayer, as if
it were an entry code, curse of passwords: When the time comes, when the whole
wide world knows the great Jobleski brothers are just doll collectors, theyÕll
shit their Jobleski pants from one end of town to the other. IÕll see to that.
IÕll show Ôem!
Andy: Let me settle it right
up front, kid. Something is out of whack here, way out of line, like the
milkman coming up the steps when he should have been going out with the
empties. Fell on the old dame on that frigginÕ couch and she never knew the
difference, milkman or drunk at pronginÕ, makes no
never mind to the blind except in the final counting. Could probably tell the
difference in your bone structure or fingerprints. If you ever get the red-eye,
why, weÕll know for damn sure! Christ, he used to look at me sometimes and I
thought he was going to set me on fire. Hated empties that were dirty,
cluttered with white sop and stinking with sour milk. Hated to stoop when any
one of us was within fifty feet of him, the lazy bastard! Hated every goddamn
one of us! Hated every Pollack this side of Warsaw, and them there just as
much. Just a shanty Irish bastard with the awful red eye who
you might be looking back on one good day like you owe him special. Rootstock from the grand island of eternal sotted
souls, and all that diminutive crap that goes with little people. For
thatÕs just what you are, one of the fuckinÕ little people only drunks own up
to!
AndyÕs creamy white, almost
delicate Ford hard-top, shiny, sun-catching, spit-polished like the elite in
military circles, chromed grille sole residue of a Packard nobody had seen in
thirty years, suddenly sitting on four flat tires, a dead chicken floating
above the front seat with his neck still twisted in that final knot, a slowly
running hose caught up by a rear window tight against the upper edge and yet
pouring a second cubic yard of water into that yawning cavern.
Stash: You were probably
adopted and she didnÕt have the heart to tell you, once you began to grow---or
not grow, fact is. Never told one of us either. Was her painkiller, you were,
her mighty small aspirin, killjoy, all in one. When you bleed, the bloodÕs not
the same. Take it from me!
StashÕs Ted Williams card,
the Splendid Splinter, Terrible Teddy, .406 and balls out for the batting title
like nobody else in the whole world would have dared, went in one hurry to
fifty pieces if one. Stan Musial and Red Schoendeinst, teammates, glued
together upside down as if they had been having fun in the back of the locker
room. Even in that pose, no longer of prime value. No longer pristine. No
longer neutral in the Polish community all around the Jobleskis, mores
forevermore different. Potato Man Yaz, Long Island YazÕs card split up the gut.
Whitey Ford, rookie card, face of a newborn, gutted dead center.
Aleksa: She cheated you and
she cheated me. You could have had these arms, these shoulders, these wrists
born for swinging, for driving balls to dead center on a line. I could have
been you and you could have been me, but no way was she going to do that, so
weÕre stuck, me here in this weight lifterÕs garb and you there in your pygmy
pants. WeÕre going to be locked up here forever and sheÕll have a last dream of
us as we might have been. If we count our blessings, weÕll be in the minus
column, and you know it as well as me. She played a rotten goddamn trick on us!
Run up on the flag pole,
standing like a singular white birch of lonely beauty in the front yard of the
Jobleskis house of odd additions and strange angles, for all the world to see
on the following morning, was just about every unmentionable AleksaÕs chest of
drawers would yield. Slapping in the breeze were assorted bras, black to flesh
colored, pockets turned out to the wind, stringed, wired, strapped, all making
as much noise as the underdrawers and panties and plain old fashioned snuggies
that lay straight out on the taut rope. Body messages. They talked on the wind.
They spilled secrets. Body remnants. Portions of her loose on
the world. Cups filling now and then with masses of
air. Bloomers for bare seconds stuffed with the shape of her
more-than-ample ass, all the odors gone, all the aromas tossed freely to clouds
and other spirits of the air, discolorations and other stains still hard in
some crotches.
Burning clean out of her
skin, cursing at the top of her lungs the language stolen from the backroom of
the PAMVETS, pounding up and down stairs and in and out of each room of the
house, she sought her runty brother. "IÕll kill that goddamn runt, that
little shit poke. IÕll kill the little bastard! If anyone gets in my way, he
gets it, too!"
Banjo, of course, had long
since departed, slipping out of the house just before 2 A.M. as quietly as he
had slipped into her room, rifling her secrets, and slipping just as
noiselessly into Aunt StacyÕs unknown sanctuary, hiding a pair of autographed
panties, Aleksa indeed would kill for, in a pocket of fieldstone.
Banjo thought about his loot
and his articles of revenge often enough, how to widen his collection, how to
strike the most deadly blow. But he always stayed away from the football
trophies of his brothers, a mass of gold and silver and mahogany wood adorned
with running backs and stretching ends and bruising tackles at deadly mission.
These mementos would, he knew, be the most fitting salute of all. None of his
family could ever approach his thoughts, his calculations, his
absolute deviltry. Every punch, every kick, every slap had its due. It was all
coming around again. What goes around comes around. It made him smile a small
smile. Disparity in life can be ennobled.
In the dark hideaway he
slept peacefully.
He slept there many times
over the next few years, there, or upstairs in the house with Aunt Stacy who
loved to have him over. She couldnÕt stand the others, even Aleksa, at least
not for very long. She found them too cruel and too boring and, in spite of
their obvious strengths, to be too weak at will. The first ally of Banjo would
have been this quiet woman who wore a little too much rouge, a lipstick perhaps
two shades too dark for her face, the clothes of a woman who had no one man to
live up to, to please, but delighted in many acquaintances.
That she loved Banjo was
important to her and to her blind sister. One was a springboard and one was a
sounding board, and at the core of their relationship they had made the puny
little boy becoming a puny little man the secret of their existence. They did
not live for each other, but for him. And when Mary died in her sleep one night
as Banjo was approaching his sixteenth birthday, him still plagued, still
persecuted, still a virgin and the lone one in the family, Aunt Stacy was
impetuously proud of his survival, all the facets of it. "That little man
of mine," she would say to herself, "will outlast all of them."
And in the periphery of her hearing, at the edges of her memory, all the
castigation and curses they had hurled down upon him came back to her with
incredulous clarity. Too often the broad-shouldered, big-armed, thick-skulled
hulks had centered their attacks on BanjoÕs male equipment: His dickÕs so small
any chickÕd say he had no visitation rights...even
after he had been there! DÕja
see the size of his balls? Like peas they are, or IT is, the last ball remaining from the master set. Pea-Ball is
what we shoulda called him, or Pea-Balls Minus One,
or Pendulum Without Affair, or Who Gives A Shit Anyway!
They had all laughed and
back-slapped and hoisted off another drink, and Stacy, in her cool aura, not
batting an eyelash over her rouged cheeks, managed a slow interior laugh and
said under her breath, "Watch your ass, Stash. Remember what happened last
time!"
Two days after Mary was
buried, Banjo sat in front of the library thinking about his mother, how
horrible the funeral had been, how much crap and derision was still tossed in
the air by the whole family, as if she had been a simple hired hand, a maid
servant, a ball of lint which had just blown through their lives. Her hands had
been soft and warm and the tears on her cheeks were forever pearl full of
special light, and none of them ever could tell him that his motherÕs eyes were
lifeless. The pearled tears were special, jewels theyÕd never seen, but he
would carry them always---heÕd even carry them in the growing and continually
fermenting hunger and desire to bring to his siblings the ultimate pain.
Inside the library he saw
the tall blonde sitting off in a corner. She had been there before, at the same
table, a little lax about how her dress rode up on her thighs, long and
valley-like, a summons, the mystery of her crotch seeming to call out to him.
He prayed she would not cross her legs, and took a seat with the surest tunnel
of vision possible. Black or purple panties, he decided. Black
or purple. His favorite colors. Now and forever.
Every so often a squeeze of one thigh or the other, or both in concert, and the
dark image would narrow, gap down, slink, like a wondrous eye winking at him.
Back to him came a choice reading and some author heÕd never remember, talking
about The Seven Cities of Cibola, or The Mound of Venus, or the graffiti heÕd
seen on a wall once, When you come right
down to it, guys, thereÕs nothing like cunt. He lay the Atlas of the whole
United Sates of America and all its territories over his lap to hide his
erection, and liked himself at that particular moment because heÕd never allow
any of his brothersÕ or fatherÕs aspersions about penis or testicle, or lack
of, or the small bunch of his ass to come back tauntingly upon him. He could
now cast them over the side as if he were throwing out an anchor in the middle
of the river.
Intent on that long vision,
driving his eyes past the faint barrier that lay at the end, purple or black it
didnÕt matter now, he flinched when her white thighs locked up completely, then
opened slowly, oh ever so slowly, like the drawbridge over the river when a
grand yacht was heading out to the lake. A pair of deep green-gray eyes was
staring at him. In his chest he caught more than an ounce of breath. The
erection might sound out a warning alarm. It came up so hard against, he
guessed, South Dakota. That made him smile, and that smile, South Dakota and
all, made its way across the room to the warmest reception this side of Aunt
Stacy. She didnÕt move her legs again. The thighs stayed white. Her look was
soft and appealing. His erection burned. The book in her hand was raised so
that he could see the title, DREAMS WE
DONÕT UNDERSTAND. A light went on at the back of his head and it brought
another dimension of smile to his face. A smile, a wider smile, came back to
him. He thought his pecker was going to explode; thereÕd be a Minuteman Missile
going up from one of the silos near Bismarck or Lincoln, whichever one of those
cities belonged in South Dakota. He could never remember. HeÕd never forget
this smile coming across the silence of the library, across the deep red rugs,
moving its aura on air already filled with aura. Nor would he ever forget the
most personal signature ever sent his way.
Outside, in ten minutes,
they found that their fathers had named each of them with some deviltry, or
rancor, for unknown reasons. Banjo was explained, and she was Eloise Abelard, a
joke of her fatherÕs, she was sure. "My mother cut him off at three months
of her pregnancy and I think it was his way of getting back at her with sarcasm
if nothing else. I donÕt think they ever slept together again, each going at
the other in their own way. I didnÕt like growing up."
"So here you are
talking to the smallest guy in the library, on the street, in the whole town
practically, maybe even this side of South Dakota." He looked at her with
clear eyes.
"WhatÕs that
mean?"
He told her. She laughed as
he had heard no one ever laugh, throaty, honest, without any crap or flip in
it, no phoniness, just plain laugh. It had fur on it.
It warmed him. He told her. She said that she had seen him before, had seen him
looking up her dress, had been warmed by it, flushed but warm.
"You have the whitest
thighs in the whole world. I can play anything with strings." His eyes
were so clear she could have been startled. She should have been startled.
Clarity is precious, she thought. So much in her life had not been clear, but
this was special. She had a vision of what his life must have been like. Pain
came on her. It was in his aura and she felt it. But he didnÕt bring any of it
to hurt her. He came at her clean and clear, out of crystal. The real pain was
disparate, separate.
"Your eyes say youÕll
never lie to me." Her hand was in his. "YouÕve music hands."
They saw each other just
about every other day, at the library, at the edge of the river, back on the
hill out behind the EvertÕs Florist Shop and flower gardens. He kept her away
from the Jobleskis. She kept him by her side. They had their intentions. She
was seventeen. He was sixteen. She was 5Õ 6ÕÕ. He was 5Õ1 & 7/8"
stretched out, proud, not minding his height for the first time, not sworn to
revenge, not filled with plans for coping and getting even for the constant
transgressions.
One day, just about at the
top of the hill after a slow meandering walk, a faint mist cutting across the
sunset, a bird calling uphill, smell of new grass making them heady, she took
his hand and put it on her breast. "IÕve been dying for you to touch
me," she said. "IÕve been practicing on myself, but itÕs not like
this. I like this. Here," she gestured, "go underneath. Touch my
nipple." She took his hand with her hand, fire must have been at it, and
slipped it inside her bra. "Be easy." Her lashes came down over her
eyes. Mouth open. Lips red as a forgotten sunset.
Moist. Shiny. A breath catching itself in her throat.
If she told an absolute outright lie heÕd believe her until the very end of the
world came throbbing under them.
"I love you, Eloise.Ó
She laughed a little laugh, her chin shaking lightly. "Maybe tomorrow
weÕll get to Louisiana."
Both of them laughed long
and loud, tears in their eyes. He saw his motherÕs tears on EloiseÕs cheeks.
True crystal. Gems. Life! He took his hand away from her risen nipple, which
had stayed against his palm as certain as a nail halfway through its job. The
bird called back up the hill waiting for an answer. Grass continued to be cut
somewhere over the hill. Any pain in the world he could stand. He had come this
far in life and it had all been worth it. Clear across the library again he saw
her white thighs. Perhaps he might tell Aunt Stacy about her. Maybe he
wouldnÕt. Maybe she was just for him forever. A bird answered. More cut grass
news came on the wind. Fuck Stash and Andy and Mike and Paulie! Even fuck
Aleksa! Fuck the old man!
Now, his world was
different.
A week later, all the
Jobleskis but Banjo at the Flag Day picnic in the PAMVETÕs grove beside the
river, Eloise and Banjo slipped through the back door of the house.
"TheyÕre all gone,
Benjy?" She looked around and felt the pain flowing about her. An old
wound rode about in the air, a cry. "Why did we come here, Benjy?"
"I wanted it to be here
because of my mother. You remind me of my mother. Your hands are so warm."
He took her down to the den. She saw shelves so heavy with trophies they made
her eyes blink. Gold and silver and stained wood and colored enamels and plastic
inserts and the family name repeated endlessly, and a great variety of athletes
in poses cast in cheap metal. None of them, she knew, were BenjyÕs. There would
be justice, she thought.
Laying back on the couch,
almost giddy, loving the daring he placed them in, the idea of sharing
consuming her, her legs out in front of her, longer than they had ever been,
she said, "Benjy, put your hand under my panties. Go easy. IÕll tell you
what I like. You tell me what you like." His fingers felt the thick hair,
then softness, then mystery, then depth, then more mystery, then a little knob
she introduced him to, then more moisture than he had dreamed. He kissed her
and her mouth opened like Ali BabaÕs cave. "WeÕre going to call this Going to Louisiana. But donÕt laugh and
donÕt stop what youÕre doing, and a little harder and a little faster if you
want, and if you like it."
And his mind was going to
explode and every pain he ever felt in his life was long gone and her legs
opened wider and he saw all that whiteness and his mouth was dry and he
couldnÕt swallow.
Then he heard the funny
sound, from another room, and raised a finger to his lips, and moved away from
her and slipped quietly from the room. The hand that clapped over his mouth,
the arm that squeezed his body as hard as a vise, the other hand that slammed
under his crotch and lifted him a
meek feather into the air, had to be a Jobleski arm. He could not see, but he
could smell a Jobleski. His voice was stuffed back into his mouth and he was
carried from the house. "Old Pea-Balls, youÕre going under cover." It
was Stash and a fist hit him on the side of the head. He was being carried over
one hip like a frigging rag doll. Hatred surged and seethed in him. The whole
coming scene ran through his mind in a mere second, then he was slammed into
the trunk of StashÕs car and the trunk door slammed down on top of him. Buzzing
ran through his head. Darkness clawed its way into his eyeballs. "You,
prick!" He screamed, "IÕll kill you. IÕll kill you, you rotten son of
a bitch!" But he didnÕt scream for long or hate for long or waste his time
for long because Eloise was out there with him. He had to get out.
Stash, with quickness,
perhaps expertness, had surprised Eloise. Had pinned her down on the couch
where her dress was still up over her hips. "So you were going to screw
the midget, huh? IÕll show you what a real piece is, honey baby. A real
piece." He tore her pants off in one stroke. "You scream and IÕll
kill that little shrimp. You got it? And youÕre going to do some other tricks,
too. Tricks I bet he never knew anything about."
"Please donÕt do
this." She didnÕt want to scream. His hand was down there in Louisiana and
a shudder went through her body. He began to explore slowly with that hand. His mouth came down over
hers, yawning and wet and full of booze residue. She didnÕt know what it was
but knew she would remember the smell of it all her life.
She didnÕt hear any sound.
She only felt the abrupt and violent shudder that went through her attacker.
Then he went limp on her, all his weight against her the way she had dreamed a
thousand times, a thousand touches, a thousand reaches in classrooms, at the
kitchen table, even in church. And Banjo stood over the two of them with a
baseball bat in his hand and the ugly echo of provoked flesh and bone still
sounding in the room.
They walked out of the
house, past the car with one rear door open and the back of the rear seat
pushed away from the clips that had held it in place. He did not say a word,
just kept moving her away from the house, and the hatred and the seething and
the mechanics of revenge fully operational in him.
That night, high on the
hill, after he had entered her at her request, after she had argued with him
for hours and moved his hands on her body and touched him as he had never been
touched, they made plans to leave town. TheyÕd go to a cousin of hers more than
two hundred miles away. TheyÕd never come back. TheyÕd be together forever.
Later, Banjo thought long
and hard down in his dark retreat, Aunt Stacy overhead telling company how much
she liked her sex and what parts she liked the most. He thought about Eloise
and then about a TV show on the wild dogs of Africa and how the runt of a
litter had been given the hardest time of all and had finally walked away and
died, the broad savanna flung out beyond the fallen body like space beyond a
star. The image crushed him. The sadness of it all came over him with an
extraordinary force, as whole episodes of his life came flooding back through
the tight quarters of the old root cellar. And out of the clear blue sky came a
vision of one of the old Minuteman missiles deployed across the north Central
States, their huge silos extending like inverted skyscrapers down into all of
Mother Earth, peckers screwing the old dame for all she was worth.
The clarity Eloise had seen
in his eyes was in his head; he saw everything he wanted to see, needed to see,
how all of it would come to pass. And on the Fourth of July to boot! In salute of everything grand and beautiful and majestic from sea
to shining sea.
Remaining out of sight while
any Jobleski was at home, he came back to the house on days only when it was
empty, all of them at work or at school or practice for one team or another. He
loosened the metal cover that had been placed over the old well in the back yard, the well Paulie had fallen into one day and would have
drowned if Aleksa had not screamed the alarm. Making trip after trip, he
lowered his special equipment and supplies into the well, cans and other
containers of every odd description, all without covers, supporting everything
by ropes from the flanged bar across the opening and just under the metal
cover. Working assiduously, without help from any quarter, much as his life had
been spent except for his mother and Aunt Stacy in the occasional breach, Banjo
Jobleski primed the engines of revenge.
They had all gone to the
PAMVETÕs grove for the Fourth of July picnic and beer blast, Joe the father,
stalwart daughter Aleksa and sons Paulie, Andy, Mike and Stash, still wearing
from a mysterious source the ugliest of bruises and swelling. He could have
been hit by a car or lightning. Nobody knew and Stash wasnÕt telling. Somehow,
most everybody who had known the Jobleskis over the years realized that inexplicable
causes and happenings could be attributed without failure to one Benjamin
Arthur Norman Jobleski, shrimp, midget, pygmy, dwarf, Peckerless,
Pea-Ball, Shit Poke, ad infinitum, though such attributes were not openly
discussed near Jobleski muscle.
So while the beer flowed and
prowess was being heaved on the air and broad backs were being clapped and
slapped and a hundred hands would be run up under a hundred skirts even before
dusk fell, Banjo came out of the vast savanna he had retreated to and went
about his work.
All the trophies, every last
one of them, collected from the den and sundry bedrooms and out of closets and
eventually from the cellar, like a rich vein had been found, were placed in the
living room. Every bra and pair of underpants that Aleksa owned, except those
that she was wearing at the picnic, were draped over and around the aggregate
trophies, as if a window decorator had been employed. Next came from hidden
places about the house every smashed instrument from which he had once extracted
music, the clutter of ruin, the remnants made by Jobleski boots, the denial of
dreams. Finally, deferring to age and for no other reason, the old manÕs
collection of anagrams and puzzles and acrostics and acronyms were placed
across the front of the exhibit. Banjo looked down at odd papers and read the
acronyms the old gent had come up with for a variety of causes: ROMEOÕs, for the older guys who gathered
each Tuesday morning for breakfast at SarahÕs Diner, Retired Old Men Eating Out; ABRACADABRA, still a mystery, but not
worth spending these last minutes on: BANJO
in letters as broad and stolid as any he had ever seen, now faded and
diminished on what was most likely the original paper, a memento of rancor
saved for history. He thought of his motherÕs tears and how heÕd never know the
full extent of her pain, because all her pain must have been much more than
his. After all, he had survived,
hadnÕt he?
Outside, leaving the house for the very last time in his life, he walked all around the edge of the building, another one of the large cans tipped on his hip. He used a number of them, tossing the empties and near empties down in the well, careful not to hit any of his hidden assets still hanging by ropes. He took another piece of rope from another full can and laid it out from the house and played the other end down into the depths of the well. The crude metal cover was put back on top of the well and bolted down, drawing down the four nuts with a ratchet wrench. The wrench gleamed its stainless steel brilliance on the rust-colored cover when he placed it perfunctorily on top. It was odd how the wrench caught in gleaming silver the last of the sun, as if it meant to hold on to the day for as long as it could. He hummed to himself. Memorialized. Memorable day. Fourth of July. Sea to shining sea. The Fat Lady singing. Sousa. Cohan. Kelley. Cagney. Connaughton Kate. Benjamin Arthur Norman Jobleski. The world, amen.
From a pod of dolls, as if
they were swimming atop one another in boxes, arms out, legs back, heads down,
he took one at a time those he had long collected and hung them in trees and
scattered them as shot residue on Jobleski ground for all the world to see;
Barbie dolls and cry baby dolls and Ken dolls and wetting dolls and sucking
dolls and balliky dolls, every one that had ever fallen under his hand for
reasons he never knew and only now fully understood. Then, cool and collected
and without any remorse at all, the tears gone, the pain gone, he knelt and
flipped a switch on a device he had rigged and walked off into the broad
savanna, off into that space beyond the star.
He was walking away from the
whole brood!
On his own two legs, and
walking away.
That other runt dog of the
TV had walked a short ways into that endless space and staggered and finally
fallen on his side. There had been no ceremony. No yapping. No sniffing or
final licks from any of the others. But he
was walking away, all the way across that broad savanna. The pearls on his
motherÕs cheeks came back to him abruptly, then disappeared
forever.
Benjy Jobleski and Eloise Abelard were two miles away, getting a ride from a salesman on his way to Harrisburg, when over the hill behind them, back toward town, a redness of fire filled the evening sky with a sudden clarity, and BanjoÕs wondrous collection of gasoline and cans and metals of every sort, and odd cases of shotgun shells and bullets and an uncounted number of stolen sticks of dynamite, and old powder wrappings and odd combustibles and exquisite fire and conflagration itself and dozens of the most special trophies of all that his brothers had been awarded, went absolutely haywire in his own Minuteman Missile silo and shot straight up from the precincts of hell.
© Tom Sheehan
Web site address: http://www.milspeak.org/TomHome2.htm
Bio: Tom SheehanÕs books are Epic Cures (IPPY Award winner) and Brief Cases, Short Spans, 2008 from Press 53; A Collection of Friends (Aldren nomination) and From the Quickening, 2009, from Pocol Press. His work is in new anthologies from Press 53, Home of the Brave, Stories in Uniform and Milspeak: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience.. He has 14 Pushcart nominations, three Million Writers nominations, Noted Stories for 2007 and 2008, the Georges Simenon Award for fiction, a story in the Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology for 2009 and a nomination for Best of the Web 2010. He served in Korea, 1951-52, with the 31st Infantry Regiment, and has published 13 books. He has appeared in 10 print issues of Ocean Magazine, has 126 cowboy stories on Rope and Wire Magazine, and many pieces on Troubadour 21 and recorded works on Qarrtsiluni. He and a committee of friends have co-edited and issued two books on their hometown of Saugus, MA, sold 3600 to date of 4500 printed (842 total pages in the two books) with color sections, text, timelines, nostalgia and history, all proceeds for Saugus High School graduates. He has signed a recent contract for The Collected Works of Tom Sheehan with Milspeak Publishers.