Fiction
published in the Chicago Reader



 
 

Jeanella
by Paul Pekin

On the edge of my home town where the Baltimore and Ohio tracks run along the highway, finally intersecting it at an unguarded crossing, there used to be a lonely shack of a building that contained a rather famous tavern. It stood in the midst of a great swampy prairie that since has been subdivided and covered all over with respectable suburban houses. The people in them run their lawnmowers and raise their flags and polish their cars every sunny Saturday; not one in a hundred ever heard of the Poinsetta Lounge and the things that went on inside.

What went on, of course, was the whores.

Although this is not a whorehouse story, I feel obliged to start there. She was very nice. "Pete," she told me. "You don't want to be afraid. I can see you never done it." How could she not see? My heart beat so wildly it made my chest bounce. "You must have a big heart," she said, placing her finger exactly on my chest and letting it slowly drift down to more interesting places. If it had not been for her, I might still be a virgin.

But I was ashamed to go to her. I thought of my mother, my sister. I thought of my father. You know those jokes about boys meeting their dads in bordellos? My father was a man with a certain lust for life.

I would park in the shadows by the railroad embankment, set my friends on watch, and slink into sin. If my father came along, hat cocked on his Irish head, I meant to dive out a back window and escape. What made it bad was knowing he would take my whore. Of course he would, the others were all pigs with ratted hair and painted faces. I sensed them rotting with disease. He was a man of taste, like myself. He would choose Barbara.

My father has been dead six years now, peaceably dead, found one morning with his white hands folded and a smile on his unscathed lips. He was a strange sort of man who got away with things--and dying without pain was one of those things. It was he who found that job at the Southwest Publishing Company, my 16th birthday present. "Go see Art Wolf," he ordered. "Stop at the post office and send for a social security card." The candles were still smoking on my cake.

The Southwest Publishing Company and Weekly Star Times was a family owned business, long established and unhampered by competition. In those days it was run by three brothers, all men in their 40s who fought publicly for dominance. For the next three years my job was to devil, that is to sweep, empty the hellbox, wash presses, pour lead ingots for the lineotype machines, and shovel up dog shit. The brothers had a poor creature called Boy, once a shepherd, but now obese and nearsighted and careless about his bowels. For some reason they'd had him castrated; possibly this contributed to his decline. But, as sometimes happens in small towns, Boy was a celebrity. Every afternoon he'd be be around the corner and up the avenue at Aiken's Meat Market, shopping at the head of the line. Mr. Aiken, in bloody apron and white cap, would wait on him personally. "Vie gehts?" Boy would raise his ears and reply, "Auf!" "Here that?" Aiken would cry. "The dog speaks German!" If this were not enough, Aiken taught Boy adding and subtraction. Two and two? "Auf, auf, auf, auf." Six less three? "Auf, auf, auf." As long as Mr. Aiken held his hand in a secret way, the math came out perfect. The reward was a bone, sometimes an entire shank of beef. I would be sweeping up and find these remains reaching out from under the stock tables like skeletal arms. They seemed to point at me accusingly.

All the brothers found my troubles with Boy amusing, especially the middle brother, Isaac, my immediate boss. An immaculate fellow, this Isaac was. I can still see him standing by the presses surrounded by oil and ink, the sleeves of his starched shirt carefully rolled to the elbows. Whenever a pile of shit was found he would happily cry out. "All right, Peter! On the double mit the shubbal!" Dialect jokes were his specialty, usually about Jews and Niggers and Irishmen named Pat and Mike. All the brothers were jokers. "You better see a doctor," one brother would sneer. "I hear that big redhead at the Poinsetta has a chancre." "Oh, so that's what's wrong with your nose," the other would reply.

To tell the truth, I never did see a redhead, large or small at the Poinsetta. Or, thank God, a Wolf brother. It was awful to imagine one of them with Barbara. My Barbara who said I had a big heart. I would question her about issues that mattered. "Barbara, what's a chancre?" "Hush," she would reply. "Where do you learn such terrible words?" And she would close my mouth with hers. Funny, the guys at the pool hall claimed a whore would never kiss you, and Barbara did it all the time.

It was a friend who got me started on Jeanella. All of us have friends like Angelo Vincenti at one time or another in our lives, usually before intelligence sets in. Angelo was a tall pockmarked kid described by my father as "goofy." He was always on my doorstep, especially after I got the car. "But if you've only done it with a whore, you're still cherry," he insisted." A whore was not the real thing and, I have to admit, I gradually came to believe this was true. Ugly as he was, Angelo was at least making it with his little sister, although that, I suppose, was not the real thing either. "But . . . " said he, "it's a lot better than with a whore."

He kept talking of certain "hot" girls he knew, girls who lived on the edge of Markland, a neighboring town that could only be reached by car. Drunk one night, I gave in.

The next day I was still putting it together. The night had been dark, the car filled with bodies, my mind fogged. But there remained the memory of a girl, slim and lithe, who had gotten her tongue almost into my throat, who had shivered when I entered her, who had even whispered--I love you.

Or had I been the one who whispered that? I went through work in a trance, pouring molten lead on the floor, spilling the hellbox across the aisle, filling the soap container with sweeping compound. A real girl. What had she been like? I tried to remember. Dark, yes, short curly hair, flat childlike breasts with hot little nipples hard as pebbles. Beyond that, I was not certain I would recognize her should she walk through the door. Worse, her name was mixed in my head with some other name. I wanted to think of her as Jeanette Ellison, a name I remember today just as vividly as if it had belonged to an actually person.

That night I phoned Angelo and tried to quietly learn what I must know. My father was practising the piano, the same eight bar passage from Only a Paper Moon, over and over again. Repetition, he insisted, was the only way to learn. Angelo could hardly hear me. "Jeanette? Jeanette? I don't know no Jeanette." Also in the living room was my 12 year old sister, hiding behind a Nancy Drew mystery. I knew she was listening. And my mother, strolling by with a dish towel in her hands, remarked that young men who drank till they vomited on their own shoes should not be too surprised if they forgot the names of their companions. At last it was clarified that I was talking of Jeanella Richards. No, she did not have a phone, but if I wanted to drive out to her house, Angelo would be glad to ride along and give directions. And did I want to hear what her sister had done for him in the backseat?

As soon as we pulled in front of the house, a two-story frame covered with loose tar paper, well to the wrong side of the tracks in a town that itself was to the wrong side of the tracks, a feeling of dread caught hold in my heart. Only then did I remember some of the talk of the night before. Talk of a father who was in prison, a mother who dated coloreds, of sisters with illegitimate children.

When the door opened I almost failed to recognize Jeanella. She stood even with my chest, her dark hair uncombed and wooly, her lips painted a hard red. She was wearing a skirt and a dirty blouse and the obligatory bobby socks of the time. And a thin careful smile. My heart sank the rest of the way. Missing were her upper incisors.

Shock followed shock. One of the sisters was nursing a baby that smelled of piss and vomit and seemed to have something wrong with its head. All the furnishings of the house were tattered and stained and beyond repair. Roaches openly walked the walls. Angelo, without hesitation, sat next to the sister and closely watched her nurse her baby. "Why don't you take Jeanella for a ride?" he suggested. In the car Jeanella talked rapildly, nervously, of many things and of nothing, of her friends, of movie stars, of her school which I realized soon enough was still grammar school. A child! Fourteen, maybe less, and I almost 20! Had we really . . . had I really . . ?"

"I was sure drunk last night," I said. Or something to that effect. We parked on Grumman Road, a well-known lover's lane down along the sanitary canal. Anxiously, I watched for the police. "You said you loved me," she said. "Say it again. I know you don't mean it, but I like to hear it."

There was a moon looking through the windshield, a pure golden moon, round and clear. I put my arm around her and our faces came close. "Say it," she whispered. I said it. Her wiry little arms held me tight. Then it was as it had been the night before and I made love to her on the front seat of my old Chevy using all the tricks I had learned at the Poinsetta Lounge and I no longer cared about her age or her teeth or anything. Afterward, I lit a cigarette and we shared it, passing the stub back and forth until it was too tiny to hold. I was hoping she would say I was the first boy who had ever made her come the first who had given her real love.

"Gee," she said. "You oughta get a bigger car."

My family learned of Jeanella so quickly I had to wonder what else they knew of my private life. Secrets are not well kept in a small town. In a matter of days my sister was saying, "How's your girl friend, Petey? When's she gonna get some new teeth?" My parents pretended to be discreet. They who fought bloody war over every supper table actually sat and gossiped. It turned out they knew both parents and all the interesting history in uncanny detail. "He used to play guitar at Club Extra," my father would say. "Had a bad temper." And my mother, casting a sidelong glance at me, would reply, "Didn't he hang around with the Flynn woman?" "Oh God, yes," my father said, helping himself to the potatoes. "And every other woman he could interest in himself." They knew it all, the illegitmate children, the arrest, the lovers, which children had this father, which had another. Without ever saying why, my parents showed an endless fascination with the Richards.

There came a day when I was at work back in my cubicle pouring metal and thinking of Jeanella. If only she were not so young. If only she had front teeth. If only she did not have that terrible family. Then I heard Isaac. "Peter! On the dubbal, mit the shubbal!" All morning he had been having a hilarious time with his jokes, most of which had to do with shanty Irishmen, priests and nuns, and various lewd confession scenes. And now this. I walked the long aisle of the print shop cursing him, his protestant religion, the old dog, my father, and, for some curious reason, Angelo Vincenti.

Standing by the lockup stone was Santiago, our job pressman. "I'll kill him, I'll kill him," he was saying, and he had a way of saying things that made you believe. He was a young man, very passionate, with lustrous white teeth and hair as black as shoe polish. Arthur, the oldest brother, had hired him, much to the consternation of Isaac who hated any race darker than the Norse. "Those Mex's always carry knives," he had warned and sure enough, when I looked to see what had angered Santiago, he had a knife--an ink knife--and was using it to scrape something from his shoe. Boy, tail curled indifferently over his broad back, trotted down the aisle.

Isaac waited, grinning. "Get busy, Peter. Mit the shubbal! Boy's on his way to Aiken's for another load."

That did it. "No," I said. Isaac peered at me through his rimless spectacles. "No?"

I had not meant to go this far, but I heard myself go one. "I'll clean it up, but not after somebody steps in it. After they step in it, they clean it up themselves."

Santiago glowered. "I'll kill him, I'll kill him."

They could fire me on the spot. Priests, nuns and lewd confessions and now this. I stomped back to my metal room, a pleasant private spot and walked there. I could hear the brothers shouting in the pressroom. After a while Arthur, carefully stepping over the heaped-up lineotype slugs, arrived. As oldest brother, he was president of the company.

"Have a little patience," he said. "We're going to take care of this situation."

That same evening I learned the truth about my friend Angelo. For the first time he brought his sister to my house and we sat on the front steps drinking pop and talking. She was such a fresh clean looking kid--I saw at a glance that Angelo never had laid a finger on her, and might even kill the first guy who did. What had made him tell such an ugly demeaning lie? When they left, I was more depressed than a young man ought to be. I got into my car and headed for the Poinsetta Lounge.

It had been over a month. I wondered if Barbara would remember me. Strangely, I felt no desire, only a savage despair. Approaching the railroad crossing, I never saw the fast freight that came screaming out of the prairie. Suddenly the car was filled with light; then I cleared the tracks, lifted up by the rush of the passing train and sent along almost weightlessly, and all I could think of was how lovely it would have been if Angelo had been with me to share this.

The red Michelob sigh flickered above the Poinsetta. Parked beneath it was a green Nash couple, my father's car, or one very like it. I sailed into the lot, spun the wheel, and sailed right back to the road and why I did not land somewhere in the prairie with the frogs is something I mean to investigate when I reach the hereafter. It was my last visit to the Poinsetta. Ever.

Isaac greeted me the next day with stony silence. He would never forgive my rebellion. When a pile of dog shit was found by the lineotype, he cleaned it up himself, carefully rolling back his white sleeves. It was a very showy thing to see. In mid-afternoon, brother Arthur came to me and asked if my driver's license were valid. I was to take Boy to the vet's in the delivery van, there to have him put to sleep. And Santiago would come along in case I needed help.

The old dog looked almost youthful for a change, wagging his stout tail, snuffling at my hand. I thought this remarkable, for I had long won his distrust, dragging him stiff-legged to the scenes of his crimes, bending his head downward with all my strength in hope he might at least appreciate what he had done. Now he appeared to have foregotten these encounters.

With Santiago's help, Boy was loaded into the van and we set off for the vet's. We had not gone a dozen blocks before Santiago took a long slender knife from his pants pocket. "Let's cut his head off," he said. " Let's keep the money for ourselves."

Dr. Salvatore, the only veterinarian in town, kept his office in the dingy former living room of a converted residence on the south side. He was wizened Italian man who never took the Parodi cigar from his mouth while he worked. But he had cured our Trixie of the mange three times. "Ah, you got new dog," he said when we dragged poor Boy into his office. "You want him shot?" He did not mean shot, as with a gun, but shot, as for rabies or distemper. Boy, cowering on the floor, passed gas.

I explained the situation. "You cut his head off, hey doc?" Santiago suggested.

The old man insisted we bring Boy into his operating room and lift him upon a stainless steel table. While Santiago and I struggled to keep him there, Salvatore busied himself with a hypodermic syringe. 'No, no," I deep saying. "We don't want his shots. We want him put to sleep. To sleep! Santiago! can't you speak any Italian? Tell this man what we want."

In his brusque way, Dr. Salvatore straped a rubber thong around Boy's leg, drew back the piston on the syringe, and injected a vial of colorless fluid. As it happened, I was holding the old dog by the ears, staring into his deep dark eyes. Suddenly, and this is very difficult to explain--I felt the life drain from him, very swiftly, as if someone had pulled a plug. The eyes, without moving, simply ceased to focus on me, or on anything else. A stream of saliva ran from his mouth. It was over.

So Boy was gone and of course I felt I had killed him and so of course I must celebrate. That Saturday night we threw a party at Jeanella's house, Angelo and myself, Jeanella and her sisters, several of their slutty friends, and a few neighborhood punks. Also present was one of Jeanella's brothers home on leave from the navy, uniformed in white. He was a slender dark-haired boy my own age, almost pretty, but with young people today call an "attitude." I disliked him at once. Since the mother was out stepping--I knew all the details of that affair--we broke out the the liquor at once. There was vodka, gin, whiskey, rum, and plenty of pop and beer to mix it with. In those days we did things like mixing beer, wine, and whiskey into a single beverage just to see how it would taste. Five or six drinks, and it tasteded all right. More, and the world went underwater.

And that's where it was when the fight began.

Jeanella and I were on the couch, my hand beneath her blouse even though passion was rapidly getting out of the question. she kept driving her tongue into my mouth, mechanically, I suppose, when somebody came crashing down the front staircase, landing in the vestibule with such a thump several figurines, ugly things, literally leaped from the mantelpiece. "Make him let go, make him let go of my fucken arm!" someone shouted. We hurried to see one of the neighborhood kids and the brother locked in furious embrace and rolling about the vestibule. The brother had a death grip, pushing the kid's arm up behind his back, and nobody who saw his face could doubt he meant to break something. "Make him stop!" Jeanella screamed. "Make him stop."

One of the kid's friends threw himself into the struggle, rythmically slaming the brother's head against the steps. "Let go, let go, let go," he grunted. "He's killing me, he's killing my fucken arm," the first kid cried. "Stop him, stop him, can't you see he's crazy?" Jeanella screamed. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere babies were crying. I staggered into the kitchen and poured another drink. When I returned the second kid had ripped one of the posts out of the banister and was beating the brother over the head. Thunk, thunk. But he, the brother, would not give up his victim. There was a look of absolute dedication on his bloody face.

Angelo grabbed my elbow. "Let's get out of here. They just called the police."

I tried to comprehend the meaning of this. The house was filled with drunken teenagers and I--have I mentioned this--had paid for most of the booze. People were half naked. The kid with the banister post was beating tirelessly on the brother's head. The other kid, the one whose arm was getting twisted, was now crying, "He broke it, he broke it." Perhaps I only imagined them, but sirens sounded in all directions, converging.

We fled through the back door, down alleys and over vacant lots, and I did not return until dawn for my car. The neighborhood was quiet then, the sky, growing pink in the east, at peace.

I did not see Jeanella after that, at least not until that last time in the hospital. How to explain? School was starting and the idea of her in a row of eight graders began to occupy my mind. I must end this cheapening of myself, I resolved. So began a period when I avoided my friends and drank more than would be good for a Viking. Sometimes the telephone would ring and I would think, she has called me, the little bitch is calling me. But never was this true. I began to feel it was she who had quit me, not the other way around.

I was drunk that night in October when I came home to find my father at the piano, still picking his way through Paper Moon. "I want to talk to you," he said, not looking up from the keyboard. "Go into the kitchen and get yourself some coffee."

Wild thoughts ran through my head. Were we at last going to have our father and son talk? Was I now to learn of the birds and the bees and the reasons why young men must take cold showers? I waited with some anxiety. The house was quiet when my father sat down next to me. He put his hand on my forearm.

"Are you all right?"

Yes, I said. I was perfectly all right.

Very bluntly, very quietly, he then said, "A friend of yours is dead."

It had happened at the B&O crossing out by the Poinsetta Lounge. There had been six in the car and the brother, on weekend pass, had been driving.

Maybe I remember this wrong. My father actually seemed sad.

Four had died, including the brother. What I did not know until the next day was that Jeanella was one of those who had survived. My father had been confused, perhaps he thought I had been involved with one of the older sisters. I went to the hospital expecting to find one of them and found Jeanella instead. She was in a room with an old and hairless woman who slept irregularly through her open mouth. Jeanella, her face wrapped in bandages, was sitting up. A small radio played softly on her bed stand. "They're all dead," she said flatly. "I was awake all the time. It was Mickey's fault. He was driving crazy. LIsten, before you sit down, do something for me?"

I waited, fingering my visitor's pass.

"Downstairs, in the lunge. . . there's a Coke machine . . . get me one . . . and a straw."

Afterwards we sat and talked, talked about as much as we ever had, her quick little nervous voice emerging from the bandages. "I'm gonna have my face fixed," she said, her eyes glowing. "Ma is getting a lawyer and we're gonna make the railroad pay. I'm gonna get new teeth and everything."

I really meant to see her again, but somehow it never happened. She was out of the hospital so quickly, and then the family, what was left of it, moved away. According to my father, the railroad had settled out of court and the mother was off to California with the money.

Later that winter the Poinsetta Lounge was burned to the ground by an angry customer. No one was injured but the scandal ended several careers in local government. The Wolf brothers ran a photo of the ruins on the front page of the Star Times, ratherly cleverly captioned "Will be mised by Markland citizens." This jibe did nothing to improve relations between our towns.

So why tell the story and what's the point except that I did see Jeanella one more time, a good ten years later. The past, perhaps, doesn't come back to haunt us, but it very definitely stops in to say hello every now and then. So I was parked in one of those new shopping plazas, waiting for my wife, a sunny day, but crisp. Women of all kinds, but mostly good-looking well-kept suburban women were going by. Leaning against the car, I watched them, idly hungering, vaguely desiring, wishing I could capture the memory of one face, one form, and hold on to it forever. Of course I did not recognize Jeanella. She approached, pushing her child in a stroller, short, slender, somewhat raggedly dressed in blue jeans and a yellow sweater. As a stranger I studied her, half-aroused by something I could not identify.

"Pete! Don't you remember me?" Then she was with me, talking rapidly of places and people I had not thought of in years.

"Jeanette?" I said doubtfully. I almost said Jeanette Ellison.

"Jeanella," she corrected. She smiled and I saw that she now had all her teeth. "Surely you remember somebody you once said 'I love you' to.'"

And suddenly she was the Jeanella Richards I had once known, not realy changed after all. The teeth were fixed, but now there was an ugly scar that ran up into her hairline. All the railroad's money had been wasted by her mother, wasted on men, wasted on liquor, wasted on California. "I'm married now," she said, pointing at the baby. "Second time."

Part of me did not want to talk to her. Part of me thought of my wife, coming out of Goodman's with an armful of soft packages, and the long tedious explanations she would delight in teasing out of me. But the other part of me wanted to reach out to this stranger and if not embrace, at least touch.

"Do you know," she said. "I think of you a lot."

I must have seemed surprised.

"I really do 1" she laughed, and it struck me that I had no memory in me of her laughing like this, openly, happily. "I remember how I used to make you say, 'I love you.'"

I stood there thinking, I'm not sorry I said it. But my words stayed where they were, in my thoughts.

"Poor Pete," she said. "You were such a boy."

We talked a little longer and then her husband, a young man in a red nylon jacket, came by, He shook my hand pleasantly enough and said he was glad to meet me, but his eyes were fixed upon some spot across the parking lot. His mother, he reminded Jeanella, was waiting and they would have to get on.

I watched her walk away with her husband and her child. They had not gone a dozen steps when she stopped and turned, smiling hugely. 'Oh, Pete!" she cried, tapping a nail to one of her new front teeth. "How do you like them?"

the end