Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  They pulled in front of a small gray ranch house that was almost hidden by the weeping willow in the front yard. “I’ll let you do most of the talking,” Omar told Norm as they got out of the car.

  “I’m going to get this all flubbed up,” Norm said.

  “All the better. I’ll let them think I’m checking on you from the company, and they’ll want you to do well. One more thing,” he said, with his hand on Norm’s shoulder. “This is very important. Always encourage them to pay by check.”

  “But—” Norm was nervous. He kept looking toward the house.

  “I know, I know. Cash seems best,” Omar said. “But they trust you more with checks and they’ll buy more if they’re not paying cash.”

  Benjy prayed hard as they disappeared behind the silvery sweep of the willow branches. He reminded God of their pact: whatever it took for his mother’s happiness would be all right.

  A few minutes later Omar hurried back to the car for the two bottles of liquid soap and the box of laundry detergent Norm had just sold. The woman was writing the check out right now. “She said Norm reminds her of her brother at that age.”

  “A check?” Benjy asked, pleased but hungry.

  “It’s okay,” Omar said, patting his breast pocket. “I just remembered my emergency gas money. I forgot I had it.”

  He hadn’t forgotten, Benjy thought. He’d just wanted them to get good and hungry.

  “Perk up!” Omar said, reaching in to tousle his hair. “Your brother’s a natural. I knew he would be!”

  Norm sold more soap at their next two stops. “What were you writing in the notebook for?” Norm asked as they pulled up to a roadhouse that advertised sandwiches and hamburgs. “It made me nervous. She kept looking at you and then I started looking at you.”

  “I know.” Omar laughed. “That was the whole purpose. To make her feel bad for you.”

  “She should’ve felt bad,” Norm said, walking inside with Omar. Benjy followed. “I couldn’t even remember the name of the soap!”

  “I know.” Omar laughed. “It was perfect. That’s why she ordered the extra cans of spray starch. To show me what a good job you were doing.”

  It was dark inside, cool and clammy. There were booths and a long bar, where Omar said they’d sit for faster service. Benjy looked around. They were the only customers here. Omar ordered hamburgs, a Coke for Benjy, and two beers.

  The bartender, a short bald man with thick glasses, asked Norm’s age.

  “Eighteen and gainfully employed,” Omar said. “I should know. I’ve been counting the days.”

  “Eighteen!” Norm whispered when the bartender pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. “You gotta be twenty-one.”

  “Not in New York,” Omar told him. “We’re just over the line.”

  Benjy couldn’t finish his hamburg. The meat tasted spoiled. The roll was mushy. His Coke was warm. The bar was sticky. The alcohol in the air turned his stomach. He couldn’t look at himself in the opposite mirror. Every time Norm reached for his mug, Benjy’s eyes darted to his hand. Beer suds glistened on Norm’s upper lip and his eyes were too shiny. Benjy wanted to feel happy, but everything had taken on this peculiar flatness.

  “Remember,” Omar was saying. “People’ll buy anything, if you sell it right.”

  “How come you kept calling me Charlie?” Norm asked Omar. They were still talking about their sales.

  “Well,” Omar said, leaning toward Norm. He looked both left and right. “You’ve got to protect yourself. There’s a lot of lonely women out there, a lot of crazy ones, too. Best just to keep a very low profile. If you know what I mean.”

  Norm nodded. He had finished his beer, but Omar had taken only a few sips of his.

  His mother had baked a ham for dinner. She flew around the kitchen waiting on them as they recounted each stop for her. Every now and again she would touch her flushed cheeks as if to check her temperature. She turned from the stove now to suggest that when Norm got his car running he could sell Presto on his own, on weekends and holidays.

  “And school vacations!” Omar added. “The boy’s a natural salesman.”

  “I got an idea,” Norm said, smirking for Benjy’s benefit. “Why don’t I just quit school and do it full-time if I’m so damn good.”

  While Benjy was relieved to see Norm’s sarcasm dissipating under the steady stream of Omar’s praise, he was a little hurt that Omar had none for him. In fact Omar hadn’t even mentioned the sale at the parsonage.

  “Well, now, there’s a thought,” Omar said with a hoist of his milk glass.

  “Don’t even think about it!” his mother gasped, eyes wide with feigned irritation.

  “I don’t know, Marie. I’ve never seen anything like it. Some people just have the gift, and Norm’s one of them. He’s a born salesman.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” she said, and Norm looked up quickly, but she was grinning at him.

  “Aw, people’ll buy anything,” he said with a shrug. “If you sell it right.”

  Benjy looked up, surprised that it would be Omar Duvall Norm would quote.

  “The thing is, you’ve got to have a real feel for people,” Omar said, cutting up his ham. “You have to listen to them. Some people are very, very lonely.”

  “And very, very gullible!” Norm laughed, cutting his meat.

  Benjy noted his brother’s protective hunch over the plate, with his elbows out and his darting eyes, like Omar’s, already coveting leftovers.

  “Don’t say that,” she said quickly. She kept watching him.

  “Well, it’s true,” Norm snorted. “I tell you, these ladies, they’ll buy anything. It’s sad, really. It’s like they’re all just waiting for someone to come along and be nice to them.”

  “Well, in a way that’s true,” Omar said with a wave of his fork. “A lot of these women have been very disappointed in their lives. They feel stuck and trapped and helpless. So that’s what you relate to. That’s what you let them see in you. It’s called empathy. But the trick is to let them think they’re helping you, the whole time you’re—”

  “Setting them up for the kill!” Norm called out.

  His mother put down her fork. She looked upset.

  Omar laughed. “Priming them for the sale is a nicer way of putting it, don’t you think?” He glanced at Marie. “Would there be any mustard? I don’t know when I’ve had ham like this. It’s out of this world.”

  She got the mustard from the refrigerator. The cap was stuck, so she began to tap it with the knife handle. When it still wouldn’t open she held it under hot running water. “Damn,” she muttered, trying it again. She banged the cap on the counter edge. “Damn it!”

  “Sit down, Mom. I’ll do it,” Benjy said, getting up to take the jar. Her hands were shaking.

  “Yes, it’s quite a thing to see,” Omar said as he scooped mustard onto his plate. “All he has to do is smile and he’s got the ladies eating right out of his hand.”

  “I’ve warned him about that, thinking that’s all it takes, just his good looks,” she said, staring at Norm.

  “Oh Jesus,” Norm groaned, rolling his eyes.

  “You know there’s a lot of people in some real messes that they didn’t do anything to deserve, and for you to sit there and belittle them like that—”

  “Mom!” Norm threw up his hands. “I didn’t say anything! I’m not belittling anyone! Who am I belittling?” He blinked. “You? You think I’m belittling you?” He tried to laugh. “I wouldn’t even try to sell you soap!”

  Benjy held his breath. She didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t have to tell Norm these things,” Omar chided with a look of surprise. Surely, he said, she knew better than anyone that her son was someone with substance, someone who had the eagerness, sincerity, and caring that are the traits of a great man. “Let’s give credit where credit’s due here, now, Mother,” Omar coaxed, patting her hand. He leaned forward and tried to get her to look at him. He
lowered his voice. “You don’t always have to be so tough on him.”

  She kept staring at the table. At first Benjy thought she was angry; then he realized she was trying not to cry.

  “She just thinks she’s tough,” Norm said with a nervous laugh.

  “Oh yah, well, you just better watch it, mister,” she said with the same nervous laugh, then blew her nose in her paper napkin.

  Sales were better the next day, and even better the following day. Norm and Omar had such a routine worked out now that it was obvious to Benjy he wasn’t needed. But he didn’t dare change a single factor of the equation. Omar had started giving Norm a few dollars of his own that he didn’t have to mention to his mother. At the end of every day, or route as Omar called it, they would stop for a beer. The fifth day was gray with showers. Norm had a cold and kept falling asleep in the car. By midafternoon, when they still hadn’t sold very much, Omar headed back to Atkinson.

  “Aren’t we going to stop?” Norm asked, disappointed.

  “Not with just five dollars in sales. We don’t deserve it,” Omar said.

  “Hey look!” Benjy said as they drove past the park. “There’s Joey!” Seldon sat on a bench surrounded by pigeons. They were eating the popcorn the old man threw at them from the grocery bags at his feet. “That’s funny!” he said, reminding Norm of Jarden Greene’s hatred of pigeons.

  “Yah,” Norm said, sighing. “That’s funny, all right.”

  Norm went to bed the minute they got home. Benjy was watching television. Omar and his mother were in the kitchen. A pot lid clinked up and down with boiling steam. There was the crackling smoky sputter of chicken frying in hot grease.

  “Fifteen dollars,” Omar sighed.

  “Well, that’s not too bad,” his mother assured him.

  Benjy looked up. He moved to the end of the couch, trying to listen. They were laughing now.

  “Stop that,” she giggled. “Stop that!”

  He knew by the sudden quiet that they were kissing. He tiptoed past the doorway and went upstairs to wake up Norm. His mother’s bedroom door was open. Omar’s clothes were mixed with hers in a pile on the chair. His new shoes were next to the bed. And hanging on the bedpost was his linen jacket damp from the rain. In the breast pocket there was Omar’s pen and one check. Helena B. Olson, it said with today’s date. It had been made out for fifty dollars. His mother was calling him to supper. “Wake up, wake up.” He kept shaking Norm. He asked him how much money they’d made today.

  “Five bucks,” Norm groaned, pulling the pillow over his head. “Jesus Christ, will you let me sleep?”

  “Was it a check?” Benjy whispered.

  “Yes, it was a check,” Norm snarled, looking out at him now.

  “Was her name Olson?”

  “Yah, Olson,” Norm said. “Why?”

  He told him that he’d just heard Omar tell their mother that they’d made fifteen dollars today.

  “He probably doesn’t want her to start panicking again, that’s all,” Norm said, and Benjy agreed with him. No sense in letting one slow day spoil her good mood. Yah, they both agreed. They’d just make it up tomorrow.

  He didn’t tell Norm that the check said fifty dollars. He couldn’t. He didn’t even want to think about it. But all through dinner and into the night, he heard Earlie’s voice, accusing Omar of changing them checks, changing them checks, changing them checks, the words chugging in his head like wheels, turning round and round and round, going someplace, heading somewhere, if he didn’t say something, say something, do something, do something, do something, but maybe not, maybe not. Maybe it was just that one bad day, that was all. Just that one bad day and he loved her so much he couldn’t bear to see her disappointed. That was it. That must be it. That had to be it.

  It was two in the morning and Howard was wide awake. He crept from bed dressed except for his shoes, which he carried as he tiptoed to the door. He had already taken a walk earlier tonight, which was why he no longer bothered putting on pajamas. Now when he couldn’t sleep he had to go out for long walks because Lucille complained about the creaking floorboards under his pacing feet. Yesterday she had told him he had to find another place to live. She didn’t think it looked right to have a single man and a single lady living in the same house, especially in her kind of business.

  The apartment was dark but for the weak flicker of the votive candle at the feet of the Infant of Prague, its yellow satin gown dim with dust. He had stopped going down to the Holy Articles Shoppe because of the way Lucille treated him there. “Don’t touch that!” she’d snap, watching him from her tall stool behind the register. Father Gannon had been right. Taking her to see Perda had been a mistake. Hoping to set things straight, he had asked her to the Kong Chow, where he and Jozia used to share a pupu platter and pork chop suey with white rice, and then afterward a fizzy pineapple drink with an umbrella stirrer in it that always made them giggly by the time they were breaking open their fortune cookies. But Lucille hated Chinese food. That’s easy, Father Gannon had said, just take her someplace else. But it wasn’t easy. Nothing ever was. The Kong Chow was the only restaurant he had ever been in.

  He missed Father Gannon terribly. In the days after his trouble over Alice Fermoyle, Father Gannon had spent a lot of time with him. Father Gannon had talked so much that Howard was having a hard time getting used to all this silence again. Father Gannon told him about his mother and his father. He told him about a boy named Radlette and some priests who said he stole the birthday money and all about the blankets he collected and the beautiful young woman asleep in bed with her dead baby and the Bishop with his pale-blue eyes and silver hair who said Father Gannon had to return to the hospital in the desert, only this time for a longer stay. But what Howard most liked hearing about was God and how kind He was. Father Gannon said God was not an angry old man in the heavens, who punished people for doing bad things. He said God was love, and so when we feel love inside us, what we were really feeling was God. Howard liked that idea and he thought about it all the time now. He had all this love for his sister and even for Lucille if she would only be nice. He loved God, and going to church, and praying with all the people. But no one ever loved him back. So what did that mean? Where was God? Why was He letting Jozia love the pigman more than her own brother? Soon all the old confusions between his head and his heart got so stirred up he had turned to Father Gannon and demanded to know why God let bad things happen. Father Gannon didn’t say anything right away. Then he admitted he didn’t know the answer to that. He said of all life’s mysteries that was the biggest mystery of all. Maybe bad things happened so God could test not just our strength and bravery, but how much love we could keep on giving.

  “That don’t seem fair,” he had blurted. “Not to the one that’s always having the bad things happen to him.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Father Gannon had said, and after that Howard felt bad that he’d made Father Gannon so sad and quiet for all the rest of the day.

  The night before Father Gannon left, he had taken Howard to dinner at the Kong Chow. He had ordered two pupu platters and three other dishes with names Howard couldn’t pronounce. Father Gannon had worn his collar, and all night long, people kept staring at them, and this pleased Howard. They were nibbling pineapple chunks off wooden toothpicks and sipping their fruity drinks when the waiter brought tea and fortune cookies. Howard broke open his and read his fortune: A vision brings great wisdom. He was disappointed. Jozia usually figured out the complicated ones. He felt bad remembering the times he’d accused her of acting like a know-it-all. He wished he could always just get simple ones, like Father Gannon’s: Good luck comes tonight.

  “How intriguing,” Father Gannon said, reading Howard’s fortune. He asked Howard if he’d ever had a vision, a strange experience, seen something he could not explain or understand. Only one time, Howard said, and he began to tell the secret, the terrible thing he had seen that night at the pig farm. It was a dead man, he whispered.
Or like a dead man, but swelling with rot and overgrown with vines. He explained how when he finally told Jozia she said he was going off the deep end because he was so scared of finally having to live his own life.

  “Well, that can happen,” Father Gannon had said, pouring them both more bitter black tea. “You see Grondine Carson as this badness, this foul thing that’s up there in the woods, waiting to consume you the way he’s consuming your sister.”

  The tiny cup trembled and tea dribbled down Howard’s chin. Consume, he kept thinking. Consume, such a scary word. Consume.

  “But it’s only your imagination, Howard. Don’t you see? It’s not real. It’s all your own fears. We all do it. Our brains play tricks on us, and if we’re not careful we see only what we want to see. And then we’re in a terrible mess.”

  He was walking along Main Street now, through the moonlight-spattered shadows, down the hill past the empty fairgrounds. Every Labor Day he and Jozia spent ten dollars each at the fair. It was the one day in the year when he felt rich. This year Jozia would probably go with Carson.

  As he walked he grew more lonely. The black sky was so awash with stars that they seemed to sway, sagging lower and lower overhead. He had not seen Jozia in days. Now that she had quit the Fermoyles’ there was nothing to come to town for anymore, not even to bring him the pigman’s leftovers. She loved the pigman more than him. Father Gannon had said Radlette’s father tried to scare him away. Radlette’s father told everyone the priest had kissed his son. A lie, said Father Gannon. But now Howard wasn’t so sure. The morning they took Father Gannon away, he had thrown his arms around Howard.

  “God loves us, Howard. No matter what happens, we have to remember that,” he had whispered, then kissed him on the lips. That memory and the stars and Father Gannon’s stories converged in his brain now like fireworks, the dazzling images bursting and receding one into the other, the dead baby’s glowing face, Perda grinning up at him from her leafy tomb, the bloated dead body in Perda’s hospital bed, and then Lucille asleep in his bed with the nude Infant of Prague suckling at her breast.