Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  “Are you all right?” he asked before she could say anything. “I saw what happened back there. I tried to tell you. I was inside, banging on the window. The truck was coming right at you,” he said, taking a step closer.

  She glanced warily back then, out at the street.

  “I couldn’t believe it was happening,” he said. “I kept banging. Did you hear me banging and banging like that?”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were a deep blue, the lashes dark and thick. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “Back at the station, the truck, it was going to hit you. It was awful. I thought something was going to happen to you.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she said, her face reddening.

  “What? Doing what?” The panic in his own voice stunned him. The last thing he wanted was to make her mad.

  “Why are you following me?”

  “I’m not. I was out, you know, walking. I’m always walking. I love walking,” he said, trying to be careful that his wobbling boots did not stumble on the frost-heaved sidewalk as he hurried alongside. “Sometimes our platoon, we used to march twenty or thirty miles a day.” He looked down at her. “You ever been in Texas?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Real wild country, lemme tell you. Tough men, real tough.” He wasn’t making sense, but all he had were words to tether what was slipping away. “My sergeant’s from there, his name’s John Henry Nickerson. He’s almost seven feet tall, with a tattoo of a horse galloping across his back, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on a human being and that’s the truth, more beautiful than some paintings, even. The horse has this long, streaming mane, and Nickerson can make the haunches ripple if he flexes a certain way.”

  Her eyes widened, and he could tell she was regarding him in a new light. He told her about his own tattoo, a full blue moon on his right shoulder blade.

  Something in her quick glance made the tattoo prickle like sore flesh rubbing against his shirt.

  “Yah, well, I wanted something original, you know. Not like hearts and roses and snakes. Especially snakes. Everybody’s got snakes, you know, circling up poles or twisted around hearts.”

  The sharpness of her gaze saddened him. The truth was that it had been bad chemistry between him and Nickerson right from the start, which still mystified him, because Nickerson had seemed like such a badass regular guy that he’d really thought all he had to do the first time Nickerson barked that ridiculous name, Travis Mooney, was to step forward and explain how really his name was Blue, which was what he’d been called all his life. “I hear Travis and I start looking all around, wondering where’s the idiot with a name like that,” he had said, still rigid at attention.

  “Is that a fact?” Nickerson had sighed through a hard smile.

  “Yes sir, that’s a fact. Sure is,” he’d said, flashing his most eager grin.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. In fact, I’ll be damned, hog-tied, and do-si-do’d now, Travis, but that’s your name now, don’t you see. That is your legal, U.S. government-issue, Marine Corps official and documented name. See? Right here, TRAVIS T. MOONEY. Travis T.” His hooded eyes rose over the clipboard. “Travesty, kinda says so much now, don’t it? For instance, it tells me that you are every bit a travesty of a man as you are of a soldier.”

  He’d had one week of soldiering, one week of Nickerson’s constant harassment, one fist-clenching, tongue-biting week of insult and humiliation, until that moment with the fly-buzzing noonday sun on his back and the salty sweat stinging his eyes when he had Nickerson pinned under him as he pummeled the sergeant’s face to raw flesh. For that he had served his nine months, and now here he was, not on leave at all, but dishonorably discharged and sent home in shame.

  She walked even faster now, as they got closer to the A+X.

  “Hey, what’s the big rush? You’ll be rid of me in a few minutes,” he said, noticing how she turned her head every time a car went by. She didn’t want to be seen with him.

  “It’s just that I hate it when he yells at me,” she said. “The other night he even pushed one of the girls.”

  She seemed so small, so fragile. If Coughlin touches her, he kept thinking. If he so much as brushes against her…He stopped and stared at her. “Look, if that…that”—he caught himself—“friggin’ creep ever so much as looks at you the wrong way, just let me know,” he said, pointing at her. “’Cause I’ll break him in two, I mean it. You just let me know,” he said, his voice cracking with the same wild surge of emotion he’d felt at the gas station.

  “Oh, yah, well, I guess I’d better get in there,” she said, looking confused. She hurried into the drive-in lot.

  “Just tell me,” he called, suddenly feeling foolish. It was a strange sensation to be standing here without his car or his bike, without anyone or anything to make him whole and solid, to keep him from stepping off the edge of the earth. As he headed back to the garage, he set each foot down heavily, as if to spike himself along the sidewalk.

  It was a hot starry night and even at eleven the lot was still jammed with cars. There hadn’t been any breaks, and now everyone was tired and irritable. Alice hadn’t minded the constant rushing and running, because the night had flown by without once having to consider what her encounter with Blue Mooney meant. She hadn’t understood half of what he said. He almost seemed to be warning her or threatening her. He gave her the creeps the way he stared and stood so close, and now all his talk about snakes and hearts was a lot more weird than she could stand.

  At eleven-thirty she had just taken her last order when Mooney’s car squealed into the lot and parked behind the office. She pushed her slip through the window at Carper. Mooney swaggered across the lot, nodding over that peculiar gun-fingered salute he made to people he knew.

  “Need a ride?” he asked, standing off to the side of the window.

  Thinking he was speaking to his cousin, she kept tallying her slip. One more order and she’d be done.

  Carper’s blocky head moved close to the glass. “Alice in Wonderland don’t speak to trash,” Carper said in his high thin voice. He laughed.

  Mooney touched her arm, and she jumped. “I just thought I’d check and see,” he said softly, hunching away from Carper. “You need a ride home?”

  “My brother’s coming,” she said, grateful that he actually was, so she wouldn’t have to be ducking behind trees and telephone poles again all the way home.

  Mooney slid something from his hip pocket and held it below the food-streaked steel counter so Carper couldn’t see it. “I got you this,” he said, but she refused to look down. She felt panicky. She was conscious of people watching from their cars. Carper giggled.

  “Here,” Mooney said, nudging her with it. “In case you didn’t get a chance to eat.”

  The Hershey bar with almonds was soft with the warmth of his pocket, of his body.

  “She’s gonna throw up!” Carper snickered.

  “Thank you,” she said, her eyes blurring with the heat of her red face.

  “Some late-night energy,” Mooney said, his square teeth flashing in a wide white grin.

  “That’s right,” she said weakly, “some energy.” She slipped the candy bar into her pocket and headed toward a car that was flashing its light for the bill.

  “That’s right, some energy,” Carper mimicked.

  “Shut up, blockhead,” Mooney growled. “Just shut up!”

  When her last car left, she ran in to use the bathroom before Norm came. She took the limp candy bar from her pocket and squeezed it, then dropped it into the trash. What was it about her that attracted such weird people? she wondered.

  Mooney liked this time best, with the floodlights out and all the waitresses gone. While Carper cleaned up the kitchen and bathrooms, he and Coughlin had a beer in the office. The thin frazzled man’s filthy mouth amused him.

  “How about you?” Coughlin asked, handing him his latest batch of dirty pictures. “Been getting much lately?”


  “Naw. Not really.” He cleared his throat. He didn’t like the way the pictures made him feel. He pretended to look through them, but he was thinking of Alice. Last night he had dreamed about her. They were in the back seat of his car, and his head was in her lap.

  “So what’s your problem?” Coughlin snickered.

  “I’m just here on leave, so I don’t have all that much time, you know.”

  “No!” Coughlin laughed with raised eyebrows. “I don’t know! Not for that, I don’t! Especially for that! Especially on leave. I mean if you can’t get it now, soldier boy, Jesus, you’re never gonna get it.”

  He tried to smile. He slid the pictures back into the envelope. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m not.”

  Coughlin set down his bottle and wet his lips until they glistened like his eyes. “You’re making a move on that Fermoyle chick, aren’t you?”

  “Who says?” His foot twisted back and forth on his boot heel. He pushed the pictures back to Coughlin, suddenly repulsed by them.

  “I seen the way you look at her. The girls, too, they seen it.”

  “I guess you’re all full of shit, then,” he said, getting up quickly before Coughlin’s tittery laugh made him lose his temper.

  “I guess so,” Coughlin snickered.

  The door opened, and he was grateful to see his cousin waddle into the messy room. “Here,” Anthology said, tossing a mangled Hershey bar onto the table. “Some sweets from your sweetie.”

  Howard Menka sat up in bed, blinking into the darkness. He had been dreaming the dream of the dead faces again. It was a warning, a sign of how much had changed. First the trips to see their cousin had ended. Now Jozia had stopped cooking his dinners. Instead, she brought him the pigman’s leavings, mushy packets of carrots in waxed paper or cold gray slabs of ketchup-smeared meat loaf. They covered the refrigerator shelves, green beans speckled with congealed butter, a stiff pork chop, a shriveled baked potato. She didn’t care if he ate any of it or not. It only mattered that she brought them home for him. He was losing weight. His belt fastened on the last hole now. He was losing his life, and his sister didn’t care.

  He got out of bed and tiptoed into their tiny parlor, which was little more than an alcove; its arched opening was just large enough for two easy chairs and the coffee table. On this narrow table was the statue of the pretty Infant of Prague in his yellow satin gown and high-necked white cape. The Infant’s delicate features glowed above the flickering red votive light. It saddened Howard to see Baby Jesus still wearing last month’s gown. Jozia used to change the Infant’s clothes weekly, choosing special outfits for the holy days of obligation and their favorite feast days. The last new gown she had bought from the store downstairs had been bright green for Saint Patrick’s Day. The white cape had been dotted with tiny green shamrocks and there had been gold piping down the front. It seemed that years had passed since March.

  Howard listened at Jozia’s door, but he couldn’t hear anything. Each night she got home later than the night before. In the morning he’d have to call her ten or twenty times before she finally answered, and then she could barely open her eyes. She was always too tired for early Mass, so he’d go alone. He’d sit in the last pew and cover his face, begging God to bring his sister to her senses and release her from the pigman’s spell.

  He squinted through the keyhole now, and a stream of cool air hit his eyeball. The bed was empty. It was three-thirty in the morning and she wasn’t home. “No!” he cried, hitting the door with his fist. His sister, the only human being he loved, had left him. “No! No! No!” Love had failed him. Prayers had failed. It was true, God did not listen to fools.

  Behind him the apartment door opened and Jozia rushed through the darkness. “What are you doing?” she cried, shaking him. “What’s wrong?” she demanded, one side of her hair straight up in the air, her puffy eyes wide and fearful.

  He let her hold him. She smelled different. She smelled of fried fish and something else, something he knew but had no name for.

  “It was a bad dream,” he said, and as he lay down, tears seeped from his eyes. Now he understood. The dreams of dying were about her. He began to tremble. Soon there would be a night when she did not come home at all.

  The next morning he didn’t go to Mass. He made a pot of strong coffee and waited for her to wake up. When she finally dragged herself to the table, he tried to explain his nightmares.

  “I tole you a million times, if I tole you once,” she said. “You wanna drink coffee all night long, then you gotta pay the sequences.”

  “No, no, it ain’t got nothing to do with coffee,” he insisted. “I been having these dreams no matter what. And every time I been waking up, shaking and sweating, thinking it’s me that’s dying. But now I know. It ain’t me. It’s you, Jozia. You’re the one. You’re dying on me!”

  She stood up and peered down at him. “Howard,” she said with chilling finality. “I’m thinking about moving.” For a moment she seemed about to cry. Instead she took a deep breath. “It’s time for us to be on our own now.” She blinked. “Don’t you think?”

  “No!”

  Father Gannon would not be put off a moment longer. He would meet with the Bishop this Saturday. Saturday was best because it was the one day he had no hospital or nursing-home visits. He had arranged with Father Krystecki to have one of his visiting curates hear afternoon confessions.

  The Monsignor poured more coffee into his cup. He picked up the paper and a faint smile parted his lips as he read the stock page. “Mrs. Arkaday!” he called. She poked her head out from the kitchen, and he asked for a pen and paper. “Eight and five-eighths, up a quarter,” he murmured, scribbling on the pad the moment she set it down. “Times seventy-five…” His mouth hung open as his breathing quickened. “At three and a quarter…” Glancing up, he caught Father Gannon’s anxious stare. “What is it, Father?” he asked, pointing with the pen. “Jelly? Coffee? More toast? You seem to be lingering.”

  “Please call me Joe,” he said.

  “Is that why you’re still here? We have to go over that old ground again?” The Monsignor sighed.

  “I just want to remind you that this is the Saturday I’m going up to see the Bishop.”

  The Monsignor leaned forward. “Why, Father Gannon? Why?”

  “It’s personal, Tom,” Father Gannon said. There was no reason for two men living together to address each other by titles.

  “Then I’m the one you should speak to,” the Monsignor said with reddening cheeks. “I’m your spiritual counselor, not Bishop O’Rourke, who, as I hardly have to tell you, is an extremely busy man.”

  “This is something I have to talk to the Bishop about.” He would be firm.

  The Monsignor laid down his pen. “Then it’s about me, isn’t it.”

  “No!” Father Gannon insisted. “Not at all, Tom. It’s me. It’s something I need to get straight with him.”

  There was a difficult silence before the Monsignor finally spoke. “Does it occur to you that while you’re devoting an entire day to yourself there are people here, people in this parish, who need you?”

  “Well, actually, I’m doing some of that in the process.” Pleased with his foresight, he smiled as he told of his arrangement with Mrs. Fermoyle to bring one of her children to see their father in the hospital.

  The blotches on the Monsignor’s cheeks deepened. “Why?” he asked in a guttural whisper that seemed to choke him. “What could possibly be the purpose?”

  “I thought it would be good for the family.”

  “For your information, Father Gannon, Marie and Sam Fermoyle are divorced. They are not a family,” the Monsignor said.

  “Well, the children,” Father Gannon said, groping. “And their mother, they need—”

  “This parish has plenty of good Catholic families that need your attention every bit as much. If not more,” the Monsignor added.

  The afternoon grew cloudy, with sharp gusts of wind that kept snatching
the water from the sprinkler and spraying it back at Howard as he weeded the flower beds. His wet shirt was plastered to his back. He knelt on the marble walk, weeding the snapdragons.

  The Monsignor was in the rectory, meeting with the Sodality executive committee. Mrs. Squireman’s deep voice droned through the open window above him. “And so next year the four bake sales will be held after all five Sunday Masses….”

  Across the street, Jozia had just hung bath mats and scatter rugs to dry on the Fermoyles’ porch railing. When he thought of her leaving him, his chest ached with this swallowed sob. The pigman was painting and wallpapering the guest room for her. They had already ordered her new bedroom “sweet,” she’d said at breakfast this morning and almost made him cry then. She would be a rent-paying tenant, she’d said, adding cryptically, “For now.” Whatever objection he’d raised, his sister had quelled it.

  “But it’s a sin!” he’d said.

  “Then everybody that rents a place ever’where is committing sins, is that what you’re saying?”

  “What about Mrs. LaChance?” he’d asked. “You even said you and her been like sisters.”

  “I’ll still be working there!”

  “But you can’t walk all that way to work.”

  “I’ll be coming in with Grondine ever’ morning.”

  “But what about me?”

  “You’ll be fine. I tole you, we got our own lives to live now.”

  “Maybe you got one to live, but I don’t,” he’d said, angry with her for the first time. He felt cheated, by the pigman mostly, but also in a way by Jozia.

  “Grondine says you can get a room a lot cheaper. He says three places he hauls from got rooms to let,” she had said without so much as a glance back as she crossed the street to the Fermoyle house.

  He looked up now, startled, as a shadow fell over him. It was Father Gannon, eating a large green apple. “Howard!” he called, gesturing with the apple. “You’re soaking wet.” Father Gannon ran over and turned off the sprinkler. “What’s that, some new gardening technique?” He laughed. “You work better wet?” He stepped closer. “Howard? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” He held out his hand. “Come here, Howard. Get up. Come on, now,” the priest said, helping him to his feet.