Songs in Ordinary Time Page 5

  “Now there’s crud all over my toothbrush!” Norm complained.

  “Better than crud all over your teeth,” Alice yelled from the bathroom.

  The telephone was ringing.

  “I got it!” Norm hollered.

  “If it’s your father, I’m not here,” Marie yelled down.

  Benjy’s eyes never left the box as he chewed. He hadn’t told his mother about meeting his father. He never told her bad things. The news was on the radio. “Woodstock police warn that a group of door-to-door con artists were last seen…” The radio sputtered with static. Behind Benjy, the washing machine gurgled as it changed cycles. Now it began to suck and pump out its wash water. The floor vibrated and the lilacs trembled on the table and the cereal box teetered back and forth, so that Benjy had to hold on to it as he ate. The shaking stopped as the machine began to fill with water.

  “Benjy, pour the bleach in,” his mother yelled on her way downstairs.

  He got up and added the bleach, then slammed the lid down when he saw his sister’s bloodstained underpants. He sat back down and blinked at the cornflakes box, waiting for his mother’s attack.

  “And this just in,” the radio announcer said excitedly. “Last night the newly planted grass in the town park was torn to shreds by a pack of unidentified hoodlums who drove their cars and motorcycles up and down the paths. Department of Public Works head, Alderman Jarden Greene, assures us that most of the damage will be repaired in time for the season’s first band concert. Greene also says that as bandmaster he will not tolerate any of the hooliganism that spoiled last year’s…”

  From the other room came a tattoo of hollow thumps as his mother banged on the bathroom door. “What the hell are you doing in there?” she demanded. “I can’t be late again.” At the sound of her footsteps, Benjy closed his eyes, but she ran back upstairs.

  “Out of respect for one of its oldest members, tonight’s town council meeting has been postponed. Funeral services for Judge Clay…”

  Benjy looked up as Norm ran into the kitchen with his toothbrush clenched between his teeth. “Guess what!” He grinned, tucking his shirt into his pants. “Craig’s got a busted ankle. Last night a bunch of seniors went drinking up to the Flatts and they started pegging rocks off the pigman’s roof and then he started chasing them and Craig fell in the brook and ca-rack!” Norm chuckled. “No catcher for tomorrow’s game but me! Tell me there’s no God.” Norm laughed. He flipped his tie over his shoulder, then took the toothpaste from his pocket and started to brush his teeth over the kitchen sink.

  Behind the cornflakes box Benjy sighed, relieved that it hadn’t been his father calling.

  “Tell me there’s no such thing as Fate.” Norm glanced back with a foaming smile. “For every calamity there’s a great man! For the Civil War there was Lincoln!” After each declaration he spat into the sink, then brushed furiously. “For the Depression there was FDR! And now for the Atkinson-Saint Mary’s game, there’s Norman Fermoyle!” He looked back. “Weeb said they got no choice. They gotta play me!” He held his tie to his chest and bent to drink from the faucet. “Damn ants,” he muttered, splashing them down the drain. “I was at Weeb’s house one time and Mrs. Miller saw an ant on the windowsill, one little ant, and she went nuts. Meanwhile this dump’s headquarters for every ant in the state.”

  At this, Benjy’s tension erupted in a burst of laughter. Norm looked at him. “Jeez, you’re just like Weeb. You’ll laugh at anything!”

  Swallowing hard, Benjy blinked himself into somberness. Norm sat down and drummed his fingertips on the table. The washing machine gently swished and splashed. From the radio Johnny Mathis was singing “The Twelfth of Never.” A faraway look came over Norm’s face. “The minute I woke up I knew something was going to happen today. Something special, something…” He looked at Benjy. “Something that’d make a real difference. You know what I mean? You know how sometimes you just know? I mean, nobody’s gotta tell you. The minute the phone rang, I knew it was gonna be Weeb, and before he even said it, I knew he was gonna tell me I’d be playing tomorrow.” Norm sighed and shook his head in amazement.

  “But how does Weeb know for sure?” Benjy asked. Because of a fight in the first game, Coach Graber hadn’t let Norm in a game all season.

  “Where’ve you been?” Norm groaned in disgust. “He’s the manager!” He stood up and opened the back door. “’Course, if you’d play a little ball yourself instead of hiding in the house, watching TV all the time…Hey! Where the hell’s my glove?” He pointed up at the empty nail in the back hall. “I put it right there!”

  Benjy shrugged. “Maybe you left it at practice.”

  Norm’s eyes narrowed on him. “You didn’t take it, did you?”

  “No!” Benjy said.

  The rinse water drained out of the machine with a sucking groan. Paul Anka was singing “Lonely Boy.”

  “You did, didn’t you, you little thief.” Norm pounded the table. “You took my glove!”

  “No! Honest, Norm!”

  From the other room a door slammed, and then came his sister’s shrill cry as she ran upstairs in her robe. “I don’t see why we can’t have a shower like normal people!”

  “Because we’re not normal people!” their mother shouted from the bathroom. Upstairs, another door slammed.

  Norm leaned over the table. “I can tell you’re lying. You took it! Jesus Christ, Benjy,” he pleaded. “I gotta go! Tell me where it is!”

  “I didn’t take it!”

  Now Norm’s square jaw quivered and his handsome face twisted as he sprang at Benjy and, grabbing him by the collar, yanked him half out of the chair. “Today’s my big chance!” he panted. “I gotta have my glove!”

  “I don’t know where it is,” Benjy insisted. “Honest, Norm!”

  The washing machine clanged to a stop. Paul Anka’s voice wailed into the sudden silence. Outside, Klubocks’ dog began to bark.

  “Please, Benjy,” Norm begged. “You don’t know what this means to me.”

  “Maybe that guy last night took it,” he said, remembering Duvall’s hungry eyes coveting every object in the room.

  “What guy?” Norm asked.

  “The one in the garage.”

  “What do you mean?” Norm went to the back door and looked out at the garage. “I thought she took him to the depot.”

  “She did and then she took him back here.”

  “Why?” Norm asked, and Benjy shrugged. “You mean, he’s out there? That creep’s out in the garage?” Norm said in a high voice.

  Now the machine began to spin, its insides grinding, turning faster and faster and faster with the deafening, grating screech of metal on metal.

  His mother raced into the kitchen in her slip. At the corner of her mouth was a jagged red smear where the lipstick had jerked when the machine went berserk. “Damn that Renie!” she cried, trying to push in the dial that would turn off the washer, but it wouldn’t budge. The machine continued its spin cycle with such force now that it shimmied out from the wall toward the table. “Bastard,” she groaned, pushing every button. With an angry clang the machine lurched and rocked out even more. There was no stopping it. She began to beat it. She pounded the quaking lid with her fists. Her hair hung in her face. Feet braced, back arched, she put both hands on the machine, trying to wrest it back. It was all Renie’s fault, she groaned, her ex-brother-in-law who had sold her this piece of shit, secondhand because she couldn’t afford new, never could, nothing but junk that never worked and a car that was on its last legs and “bills, nothing but goddamn bills and nobody cares! Nobody in the whole goddamn world cares!”

  Alice came to the doorway pulling curlers from her hair. Norm yelled at his mother to stop it. With the machine still advancing, Benjy slid out of its way, out of everyone’s way, to put his bowl in the sink, where a clot of ants massed over the gravy on last night’s supper plates. He lifted the curtain from the window over the sink and saw Mr. Klubock in his white butcher’s
coveralls pause on his back steps and glance warily across at the Fermoyle house. Down in the driveway sat Klubocks’ dog, its head cocked curiously up at Benjy.

  “Get out of the way!” Norm bellowed, then reached behind the machine and yanked the cord from the outlet. Benjy turned off the radio and for a moment the only sound was Mr. Klubock’s car cruising down the street.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Norm cried. “Are you crazy?”

  His mother sagged against the refrigerator with her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving.

  Norm threw down the cord. “That’s all you had to do! That’s all!”

  At this her head whipped up. “That’s all? That’s all, huh?” She laughed a bitter teary laugh. “You think it’s so easy. You think everything’s so damn easy!”

  Benjy looked away from his brother’s familiar sneer.

  “Are you kidding?” Norm laughed. “In this nuthouse! With some bum sleeping in the garage! How the hell could anything be easy here?”

  Her eyes flashed. “Nuthouse? Is that what it is?” Pointing, she came toward Norm, teeth clenched. He stared down at her hand jabbing his chest. “Then get the hell out, if it’s such a nuthouse. Go live with your father! See how you like it in that nuthouse with your goddamn vicious aunt…”

  “Mom!” Alice kept saying. “Mom!”

  Sometimes Norm and their mother almost seemed to enjoy these battles, as if vying to see who could be sharper, more clever, more cruel.

  “…and her creep of a husband, and your crazy senile grandmother singing nursery rhymes all night long in her crib, and your no-good, spineless, drunken father not giving a damn if his own kids live or die,” she hissed with one last strike at Norm’s chest.

  He took her hand away and dropped it. “I’ll get out!” he said. “Gladly, but first you tell that little creep I want my glove!”

  She spun around to Benjy.

  “I don’t have his glove!” he said.

  She laughed, but there were tears in her eyes. “A dollar a week I’m paying for that glove. A dollar a week Mr. Briscoe takes out of my measly paycheck and you lost it?” she sobbed, shaking her head at Norm. “You’re so damn careless! Nothing means anything to you, does it? All you care about is you!”

  “It’s up there!” Alice cried, pointing to the top of the refrigerator. “Where you put it, Norm!”

  Norm started to say something. Instead he grabbed his glove and books and ran down the driveway.

  Marie Fermoyle’s jaw trembled, then set like a closing fist.

  From next door Jessie Klubock’s voice pealed like a glass bell through the warm spring morning. “Louis! Louis! You forgot to kiss Mommy goodbye!”

  Coach Graber’s whistle blew. Practice was over, and Norm’s heart leaped. It was official. Tomorrow he would catch in the biggest game of the year.

  “Wait up!” Weeb called. He was picking up the bases. Usually Norm helped, but today he followed his teammates off the field. He was the only sophomore on varsity. Weeb had been cut the first day, but he kept on showing up at all the tryouts and then the practices, so Coach Graber let him run for water and shag balls, and then he made him assistant manager.

  In Norm’s first game he had struck out with such force in his last swing that the bat had flown down the baseline as he spiraled into a foolish heap over the plate.

  “Asshole,” someone had muttered, and the next thing Norm knew, Graber was peeling him off the moaning bloody-nosed catcher by the seat of his pants. Ever since, Graber had hated his guts. He told everyone Norm was a hothead, a poor sport, a disgrace as a Catholic, and a lousy catcher. But that was all right, the rest of the guys liked him. And more important, they respected him. They never gave him the shit jobs like they did poor Weeb, he thought as he trailed the older players back to the locker room, his gait the same rolling heel-to-toe strut as theirs, his shirttail out, his cap low to his eyes and mean, his square younger face aglow in the lowering sun and the warmth of their camaraderie. And now as they trooped into the dark locker room he shivered with pleasure in the musky commingling of their hard-earned sweat and their rude talk as they lingered over the long, gouged benches.

  Weeb rushed in and stacked the bases in the corner. Always out of breath and erratic with energy, he ran up to Norm and squealed, “Jesus Christ, Norm, you did every fucking thing fucking perfect.” He pummeled Norm’s arm with a flurry of harmless jabs.

  “Hey Miller,” Billy Hendricks, the tall senior first baseman, came in and called out to Weeb. “Graber says you forgot the fucking first-aid kit.”

  “Shit. Shit,” Weeb muttered as he ran off.

  Norm looked around at his teammates’ grimy faces limned with sweat and their sun-reddened eyes, and a jolt went through him. Suddenly he understood why wars were fought and how it was with buddies willing to heave themselves onto bouncing hand grenades. In here it was Audie Murphy and John Wayne and Knute Rockne. In here was the most he’d ever seen of truth and goodness and fair play. In here boys were men and the Gipper was all there was of sorrow and courage and nobody gave a fuck if his father’d been drunk for the last two weeks and out of work for years. In here there was only unity and heroes, and the weak were never trampled, but goaded gently to strength.

  Weeb ran back inside with the first-aid kit and the canvas bat bag, which he dumped under the stairs. Talking all the way, he followed Norm to the toilet stalls, entering the one beside him. “Great practice, Norm! You’re really firing the ball to second! You must’ve blocked five pitches in the dirt! Jesus Christ, Norm, I never saw you do so good. I mean it!”

  In the privacy of the stall, Norm shook his head and grinned at the machine-gun rattle of the sudden laughter from the shower room, laughter he had practiced so often that now it was his laugh, too.

  Billy Hendricks’s voice rose over the laughter. “Hey Brady,” Hendricks hollered and then snapped his towel.

  “Cut it out!” Brady yelped.

  Norm smiled, knowing that Brady’s ass had just been stung by Billy’s wet towel. The towel snapped again.

  “You fucker, Hendricks!” Bobby Busco bellowed.

  In the next stall Weeb’s foot arched. Last week, when Hendricks snapped his towel at Weeb, he had burst into tears with the pain.

  “Hey Busco,” Hendricks shouted. “Tell ’em about Fermoyle’s old man hitting his little brother.”

  “Oh yah, I couldn’t believe it,” Busco yelled back. “The guy was so drunk.”

  “Shut up!” Brady hollered. “Norm’s—”

  “He’s gone,” Hendricks shouted. “And even if he wasn’t, he’s such an asshole. Tell ’em!”

  “I never saw anybody so far gone,” Busco shouted for everyone to hear. “The guy can barely stand up, and then Fermoyle’s kid brother comes along, and he’s smacking him and the kid’s crying, and then he takes off, so then we go over and we start shoving the asshole and saying, How come you did that….”

  Norm bit the inside of his cheek until it bled and then he flushed the toilet and held the handle down so Weeb wouldn’t hear him gag. As the last of the water swirled down the slimy bowl, he opened the door and he heard Weeb call weakly, “Don’t, Norm…”

  He wanted Busco, but all he could see through the steam was Billy Hendricks’s dripping-wet face and the meaty splat of his lips under his fist, but then Hendricks fell and for a minute he couldn’t find him in the sudden writhing steamy contortion of hairy legs and shriveled peckers, but now he had found him, was on him again, this time with both fists. He couldn’t breathe. Someone was choking him, pulling him by the throat over the slimy floor.

  It was Graber, Coach Graber dragging him, then dumping him against the bench where Weeb stood now, whimpering as he dabbed at his face with a towel, then jumped back with a gasp when Graber returned screaming, screaming at Norm like a woman. He grabbed his shirt, yanked him to his feet, then shoved him through the door on his hands and knees out into the dust. Graber opened the door once more to let a stricken-faced Weeb
out to his friend. The door opened again and he threw out Norm’s glove. As the door closed, Weeb hollered, “It wasn’t Norm’s fault.”

  The door opened again and Graber’s mouth opened, but before he could say a word Norm had picked up his beloved glove and flung it square and hard in the coach’s ashen face. Graber picked up the glove and ran to the railing and whipped it at Norm’s feet. “You’re done! You’re dead! You hear me?” Graber’s voice trembled down.

  Norm kicked aside the glove. “Fuck you, Graber,” he roared as Weeb grabbed the glove and tried to hustle him away.

  He was in the backyard hanging the dripping wash on the sagging clothesline. His mother had called from work with a list of chores to do before she got home. This was his last task. Now as he stuck clothespins on the corners of the towel, he glanced toward the large wooden box where Louie and his dog crouched so Mrs. Klubock wouldn’t see them over here. Louie was telling him about a second-grade girl who’d wet her pants in school today. This was a great fear of Louie’s. He was always talking about someone who’d wet their pants in front of everyone.

  “Where’s that guy?” Louie asked. “The one yesterday.” He looked toward the garage.

  “I don’t know,” Benjy said. “Took off, I guess.”

  “My mother saw him go in your house. She said nobody goes in your house,” Louie said.

  “Sure they do. Lots of people do.”

  “I never do,” Louie said.

  “You’re too young.” Benjy reached into the basket for Norm’s undershirt.

  “How old do I have to be?” Louie asked.

  “Ten.”

  “I can go in when I’m ten?” Louie looked pleased.

  “Yup,” Benjy said. He had run out of clothespins. He looked on the ground for some. Whatever fell in this yard stayed there. Next to the wooden box that the washing machine had come in three years ago was a bent aluminum lawn chair, its torn webbing shredded and embedded in the tall grass. A thin waxy slip of poison ivy was entwined around one of the legs.

  Along the dark eastern side of the house, where once there had been a split-rail fence, now two bleached posts were all that stood. The rest, poles and rails, were rotting somewhere beneath the bramble of honeysuckle and wild juniper of the advancing woods from which had already crept, dark and unnoticed, a fibrous vine thick as a rope, up the rusted drainspout, then up along the roof, its hairy tentacles rooted in the curled brittle shingles that flashed the crooked chimney. Next to the chimney, dangling from Benjy’s bedroom window with the tenuity of a tree’s last leaf, was a black shutter, the only one left on the house, its last touch of ornament.