I noticed some folks had been reading this. It means a lot to me. The story haunts me from time to time. It's all fiction except my uncle Del did die in Florida and I didn't go to his funeral. But it wasn't Christmas so it doesn't matter.
This story has been with me since I was 20, so it means a lot to me.
The Pepperoni Cure-All
(This was written for a Junior Year in college Creative Writing Class.
I've worked on it some since. The ironic thing is that Dr. Ross
McDonald, the professor, said the thing about the duck and the State
Policeman 'didn't ring true'. In fact, that scene is the only thing that
is 'true'. I saw it happen when I was about the age of the protagonist
of the story. Really. Don't tell me 'irony' isn't everywhere all the
time.)
The
Pepperoni Cure-All
Everything
would have been alright, Richard
told himself, standing in the whispy, Christmas night snow, if
Luther hadn't danced with the duck. Then
he remembered telling himself earlier, everthing would have
been alright, if I hadn't sat on that rickety stool and talked to
Stacy. And before that,
everything would have been alright if Dom hadn't wrecked
his car trying to screw Jackie Martin.
And
it all led back, no matter how many times Richard went over it in his
memory, to his uncle. If Richard's uncle hadn't died like that, on
Christmas Eve in some immaculate Florida hospital....Yes, that's
it, Richard thought, if Uncle Dale hadn't died, everything
would have really, truly been alright.
***
(I
remember being five. I remember some things before that, but more
clearly than anything—my first, clearest memory—I remember being
five and running across a long green field in summer...running toward
Uncle Dale and letting him lift me up high and take away his hands
for just a moment, long enough to give the feeling, the illusion of
falling...falling-without-really-falling, because he tightened his
arms again and held me and I was looking down into his face, laughing
and him laughing an then, after falling another second or so, he spun
me around—a swirl of sky and field, green/blue/green/blue—an
rubbed my face with his rough, bearded face and it was like...it was
like nothing has been since.)
***
1
Father
and son sat in a darkened room—completely dark because no one had
turned on any lights since the call came. The call had come in
daylight, where there had been no need for light. So Vernon and
Richard sat in a dark room and Susan, Vernon's wife and Richard's
mother, was upstairs, where there was light, packing.
Vernon
was crying softly. Richard wished some lights were on, even if it
were only the lights on the white pine Christmas tree in the corner.
It was simply too dark. There needed to be some light for Richard to
tell his father that he was not going with him to Florida for Dale's
funeral.
Up
above their heads, father and son could hear Susan crossing the room,
walking fast, gathering clothes, knowing they must leave at dawn.
In
the darkness, Richard could smell the white pine and the lime
after-shave his father used. The lime was spoiled by the smell of
travel. Vernon had driven all night from Florida and arrived just in
time to discover that the brother he had left in that immaculate
hospital had died while he was driving across North Carolina.
As
soon as Vernon was in the door and had the news, he slumped in his
favorite chair. He had not moved for three hours. Now, he sat in
darkness, mourning his brother. He did not yet know Richard wasn't
going to the funeral. Vernon had simply assumed Richard would.
“You
know,” Vernon said to Richie and the darkness, “even if I had
known Dale was going to die before I got home...Even if I could have
known that, the ride back with George would have been worth it. We
talked, Richie, my older brother George and I talked...really
talked...for the first time in years, the first time ever, maybe.
About Dale and us growing up and lots of things. It was good, I don't
know if you understand, it was so good....”
If
the Christmas tree lights had been on, Richard would have seen his
father's wet face creased with reds and greens and blues. But there
was no light. Father and son sat in the dark and listened to the
foot-falls above them. Susan packing. She called down the stairs,
“Richie, will you pack for yourself or should I do it?”
Richard
was 19—27 days from 20—he was a college sophomore home for
Christmas break. And he had months ago decided, even before his father
and uncle George left for the first trip to Florida, that he was not
going to Dale's funeral. He simply was not going. And nothing could
make him, not even his father's soft, invisible tears in the
darkness. Not even his mother calling down the stairs. Nothing in
heaven or on earth would make him go to Florida for that sad,
meaningless ritual of putting his uncle Dale in the ground.
Vernon
blew his nose into an already soaked handkerchief. Richie sat in
darkness and wished that he could, by force of will, turn on a light.
Susan stood at the top of the stairs, waiting, and called
again--”Richard, did you hear me?”
It
was then that Richard said, out loud in the darkness, “I'm not
going, mother.”
After
that, Vernon rose from his chair and turned on a light to enlighten
the argument that did not good. Richard was not going.
***
(When
I was small, long before Uncle Dale sold his Esso station to Poppy
Erskin and moved to Florida to be near his daughter and her
family...sometimes he would eat lunch at our house. He would get up
from the table and tear a package of Red Man in half and put half of
it in his mouth and lay down on our couch for a nap. He always put
The Welch Daily News on
the couch beneath him to keep from getting car grease on the fabric.
I would watch him sleep and wonder if he swallowed the tobacco juice.
He never seemed to spit—whether he was asleep or awakek—and when
I asked him about it he told me he had pockets in his cheeks, just
like a squirrel and when I was older he'd take me hunting and we'd
kill some squirrels and he'd show me the pockets in their cheeks. But
he never did, because he knew I'd hate hunting and knew that he was
lying anyway. He simply swallowed the tobacco juice and didn't get
sick.)
***
2
They
left at dawn—Vernon and Susan and George—driving in Vernon's new
1966 black Ford Fairlaine 500.
Vernon
put his hand on Richard's shoulder and started to speak, but just
nodded and got in to drive the first 300 miles. Richard stood in the
dim cold for a long time after they were gone, just looking down the
street where they had driven. Then he went to the basement of their
house and banked the furnace with fresh coal. That had been his final
argument about staying home.
“Someone
has got to keep the finance going, Daddy,” he had said. “Or all
the pipes will freeze in the cold.”
Susan
had been involved by that time. “I've already asked Mr. Short
across the street. I'll give him and key and he can come in
whenever...”, she said.
Vernon
had raised his hand and she stopped talking. He looked directly into
his son's eyes as he spoke, “Richard will stay here and keep the
furnace going.”
That
is all he said. And his son felt deeply moved, profoundly close to
his father in those words.
After
the furnace was tended to, Richard went to his room and slept until
just past noon. He had no dreams and woke full of pain and not hungry
at all.
At
12/22 p.m., he turned on the Christmas tree lights and opened a
present from his mother's sister in Charleston. It was a brown
sweater with a darker brown corduroy front. He imagined it would
itch. He put it back in the box and crumbled the paper—red and
green with swirling snow flakes—to take to the basement and put in
the furnace when he gave it more coal.
As
he passed the kitchen phone, it rang. It was Mrs. Short from next
door. After pleasantries and sympathy, she said, “Delbert was going
to tend to your furnace, but then your mother called and asked if we
would look out for you instead.”
Richard
nodded, but even though he could see the short house's kitchen window
from his own, he knew she couldn't see him nod. So he said, “yes
m'am”.
“So...”
she said, very uncertainly, because Richard had always been a strange
and dreamy boy and she didn't know him very well, “I thought you
should come for Christmas dinner with us about 4 o'clock....”
“Thank
you Mrs. Short,” Richard said, as polite as could be, “but I
won't be eating a big dinner today. I want to be alone.”
There
was a long silence on the phone. Then Mrs. Short said, “I know how
upset you must be, Richard, but life goes on, you know, and you
really shouldn't miss a Christmas dinner.”
By
the time she finished talking, Richard knew that his mother's hand
was heavy in this concern. He said, as sincerely as he could, “if I
change my mind and need to eat, I'll sure be there Mrs. Short. But
don't expect me and don't wait on me. I really think I'll want to be
alone.”
After
hanging up, Richard went to his room and slept until almost four
o'clock.
***
(When
I was eight, Uncle Dale bought me a first baseman's mitt. I remember
how red my hand would get when we played catch on the railroad tracks
behind my house. The glove said “Ferris Fain” on it and though I
didn't know who he was, Uncle Dale told me he was 'a superior
fielder' and I could 'do worse' than have Ferris Fain's name on my
mitt. Every warm day we would toss until it was so dark that all you
could do was throw pop-ups and listen to the crickets singing down by
the creek behind the Short's house. I always wished my mitt had been
signed by Bill Skowren or Orlando Cepeda.)
***
3
George
Lucas had left his three year old Buick Electra for Richard to use.
Just past four o'clock, with 3 eggs he had boiled, a napkin and a
salt shaker, Richard went to the alley and sat in the Buick,
listening to sad country music—George Jones and Tammy Wynette—and
eating the eggs. When he was finished, he carefully folded the egg
shells into the napkin and sat in the car watching it grow dark.
He
looked over at the mountains behind the creek. There were no pine
trees on that particular mountain so everything was brown, turning
gray in the winter twilight. He tried to remember what happened to
his first baseman's mitt with Ferris Fain's name on it and remember
for the life of him. Near the top of the brown-turning-gray mountain,
he could see a strip mine where the trees and earth had been torn
away. He noticed how the earth was peeled away to reveal rounded
patterns of different colored rocks beneath. All the rocks, in that
light, were brown, turning gray.
Richard
wondered why he was so cold, even with the Buick's heater on high.
Then
it started to snow.
Back
in his house, he sat by the front window for a few hours, watching
the snow. The Christmas tree to his left was on as he sat by the
window and he counted the lights on the tree: first the red ones,
then the green, then the blue, then the white.
When
he finished counting, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Rich?”
“You,
Dom?”
“Yes,
I need help.”
“What?”
“Long
story, can you come and get me?”
“Talk
louder, Dom, I can hardly hear you.”
“Listen,
I'm at old man Barker's house on Peel Chestnut Mountain. I wrecked my
old man's car, dropped it in a hole on an off road. Do you know where
I mean, the Barker place?”
“Yes.”
“Come
and get me.”
Dominic
Rizzo was crazy. Richard knew that, even without Vernon's testimony
and his father was Dom's boss on the hoot-owl shift at French #2
mine. But Dom was his friend. So even though his Uncle Dale was dead
and cold in Florida, and even though the snow was sticking to the
road, and even though he hadn't checked the furnace since the
morning, Richard pulled out of the alley in his Uncle George's car to
go get Dom.
When
he got to old man Barker's place it was snowing like mad and Dom was
outside waiting. When Dom saw it was Richard, he ran back to the
house and brought out a girl, all bundled against the cold. She slid
into the middle of the front seat beside of Richard and Dom followed
her in.
“Let's
get the hell out of here,” Dom said. “I need a beer.”
Richard
searched his memory and found that the girl's name was Jackie Martin.
She was probably little more than fifteen and Dom should know better.
She had a lot of makeup and it was obvious she'd been crying. But
nobody was talking and Richard was driving so he drove to a roadside
cafe and pulled into the red dog parking lot. It was snowing so hard
that the Christmas lights around the windows of the cafe were eerie
and shimmering.
***
(Once,
two years before he died, Uncle Dale and his family were visiting
West Virginia. Uncle Dale was sitting in a lawn chair in our front
yard. It was autumn and the mountains were burning red and orange and
yellow. Uncle Dale's grandson, Marty, came around the corner of our
house, grinning like crazy, with his pant's pockets bulging. I asked
him what he had in his pockets and he nearly laughed as he told me,
“rocks!” His face was smeared with coal dirt. Uncle Dale put his
hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair, crossing his feet
in front of him. “There are no rocks in Florida,” he said to me.
I laughed. Then I remembered the only time I'd been to Florida, the
first time I'd seen the ocean. I remember standing on the beach,
looking out at a storm gathering on the horizon and almost crying out
with aching. The ocean was gray and ominous and I was 13 and it was
so big, so infinitely big, and I felt so infinitesimally small. I
remembered that and then Uncle Dale looked at me and said, once he
knew I was listening: “Really, I'm not kidding. There are no
rocks in Florida. Just sand. Not a single rock. I hate it. It's going
to kill me.”
***
4
Dom
bolted from the car and ran into the cafe through the snow. He almost
fell, slipping on the snow covered gravel. “God-damn!” Richard
heard him say. Jackie Martin was sniffing, rubbing her nose with a
balled up Kleenex.
“You
want to go in,” Richard asked.
“No,”
she said, between sniffs. “But you go on, just leave the motor on
so I'll be warm.”
“You're
sure?” He said.
“Sure,
I'm sure,” she said, with some anger.
Inside
the Monarch Cafe there were four red booths, two against the front
wall, one in the back corner and one in the middle of the room.
There were three pinball machines and a long bar with rickety stools
across the back wall. Dom was already on a stool, drinking a beer and
Richard noticed that Luther Barker, old man Barker's oldest son was
in the back booth with a large, black-haired woman who wore blood red
lipstick. She had enormous breasts and was laughing very hard.
Between them, on the table, was a duck—fat and white—with a
string around it's neck. The woman and Luther seemed to be laughing
at the duck.
Tammy
Wynette was singing a sad song from the jukebox about losing her
lover.
Richard
went straight to the bathroom. On the way he noticed there were cheap
Christmas ornaments hanging from the lights and all around the edges
of the room. There was an enormous bread company calendar hanging on
the men's room's door with a picture of pine trees and a snowy church
with the messages “Happy Holidays” and “Betsy Ross Means Good
Bread.”
The
bathroom smelled of cheap whiskey (out of bottles in brown paper bags
since only beer could be sold by the drink in West Virginia) and
stale urine. The walls were painted a dying-grass green. Above the
urinal there was a crude drawing of a naked woman, on her back with
her knees almost behind her ears. She was pushing a long, thin dildo
into her vagina. Beneath the picture, written with a much sharper
pencil, was the title: THE PEPERONI CURE-ALL.
As
Richard left the bathroom, he was thinking about the missing 'p' in
'pepperoni'. When he got back to the bar, Brenda Lee was singing
“Jingle-bell Rock” and two more people were there. There was a
tall State Policeman in a khaki jacket, too small and unzipped. He
was talking to Lou, the man who ran the Monarch Cafe. And Stacy Jame
Ebel, a high school classmate of Richard and Dom's was sitting beside
Dom drinking Miller High Life from a clear bottle.
Richard
sat beside Stacy and listened to Dom's story.
“God,
Jackie is tight,” he was saying, eyes already glazed from two
quickly drunk beers. “I must have tried to get into her six times
and she started yelling, 'it's too big, too big!' and crying like
crazy. I was so pissed I tried to turn around on that narrow road and
dropped my old man's car right into a hole. No way to get the damn
thing out tonight.”
Dom
motioned for another beer. He was grinning and saying, in a high
pitched voice to no one in particular, “it's too big! Too big!
Jesus!”
Lou
was moving toward the beer cooler but the State Policeman called him
back and whispered something in Lou's ear. They both laughed.
Stacy
James told Richard that he'd been fired from the shipyard in Newport
News where he made really good money and was now working at a can
factory in Baltimore. “Here's my job,” he said, shaking his head,
“I push a god-damned button and this big ass sheet of aluminum gets
cut in half and goes on down the belt. Down the line somewhere it
gets turned into cans. I don't know how.”
“Do
you like it?” Richard asked, trying to picture the sheets of
aluminum and the shiny cans at the other end of the line.
Stacy
sniffed, “it's a job,” he said. “I live in a rented room and
drink a lot of beer.” Stacy was pale and melancholy. He spun his
stool and looked right at Richard. His voice was beery. “How about
you, my man,” he said, “how's college?”
“Fine,”
Richard said. “Really fine. But my uncle died yesterday.”
Dom
glanced over, a Falstaff in a dark bottle half-way to his mouth,
poised. “Which one?” he asked.
“Uncle
Dale,” Richard told him. “The one in Florida.”
Dom
took a long swallow and stared at the bottle rings on the counter.
“Damn,” he said, “that's a shame.”
“He
used to run the Esso?” Stacy said, still looking into Richard's
eyes. Richard nodded. “One time I was in there at night,” Stacy
continued, “I don't remember why, and Gene Kelly's boy, the really
dark kid, was trying to borrow money from you uncle. What was his
name—big nigger—Potter, that was it. Anyway, your uncle told him
no and Potter pulled this big knife on him. I almost jumped over the
Coke machine when I saw that knife.” Stacy laughed, remembering.
“You'd
look good on a Coke machine,” Dom said. He got up and wandered over
to the silent jukebox and fed it two quarters. The machine whirled
and clicked and George Jones starts singing a fast, honky-tonk
sounding country song, a song about drinking and running around.
“Anyway,”
Stacy went on, leaning against the counter, speaking softly, “your
uncle got up, real calm like and something like, 'Potter, you're just
drunk, you don't want to do this,' and quicker than anything, Dale
took that knife away from that big nigger, twice your uncle's size,
and twisted Potter's arm behind him and threw him out into the road
before anyone besides me knew what was happening.”
Richard
leaned in, listening, but Stacy paused. He took an unfiltered Camel
from a pack on the counter and lit it with an aluminum lighter. As he
let the smoke out through his nose, he said, “next day your uncle
gave Potter a job pumping gas and washing cars.”
Richard
smiled, almost laughed and then almost wept.
“Wasn't
that the damnest thing?” Stacy asked in what seemed to be genuine
amazement.
Dom
had been standing, absent-mindedly in the middle of the room. Just
as Stacy finished his story, Dom yelled out, above the twanging steel
guitar of the record, “God-damn, look at this!”
Luther
Barker was up on the floor, dancing around the duck, holding its
string in one hand. The duck went in a circle as Luther danced around
and around, and the sting tightened on the duck's neck. Luther was
stumbling drunkenly as he danced and the woman in the booth laughed
so hard she was about to fall out of the booth. She put her elbows on
the table and tried to hold her head, but she rocked sideways with
laughter.
The
State Policeman, who Richard didn't recognize, shook his head with
disgust and started toward Luther. Richard saw it all in his mind
before any of it happened and there was nothing he could do. He
couldn't move a muscle. He was paralyzed on his stool. He tried to
close his eyes and look away. Dom was laughing now and Stacy was
laughing and the State Policeman was grabbing Luther by the shirt and
hitting him hard in the face with the back of his right hand. Once,
twice, three times he hit him and then let him go and Luther fell
backwards and struck his head on the edge of the table where the fat
woman held her head in her hands. Blood spurted from Luther's lip and
nose and suddenly no one was laughing. The duck staggered toward the
front door, choking, and vomited some green bile on the floor.
The
record had ended and everything was silent except for the whirling
and clicking of the jukebox, finding the next record. Richard was
suddenly free from his paralysis and ran across the room, bumping Dom
on the way, making him spill some beer.
“Hey,
watch it....”, Richard heard Dom yell after him, but the door of
the bathroom slammed shut and Richard threw up what was left of the
eggs into the toilet and gagged until his eyes watered.
When
he looked up, he saw the picture of 'the peperoni cure-all' and,
through tears of mourning and relief, all he could think of was
wishing he had a pencil so he could put in the missing 'p'. Through
the bathroom door, he could hear the State Policeman yelling
obscenities at Luther and a country singer whining, intentionally out
of tune, “I'm dreaming of a white Christmas...just like the ones I
used to know....”
***
(The
last time I saw my Uncle Dale, we were sitting on Uncle George's
porch and it was spring and we were arguing about religion. I can't
remember how it started but he was being stubborn and telling me that
anyone who hadn't accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior—including
Jews and Roman Catholics—was going to hell. I knew he didn't even
believe in hell, that he didn't believe in anything much, that he was
a comfortable agnostic. But he went on saying it, knowing it was
making me crazy. He sat there with his hands behind his head and his
legs stretched out and his feet crossed, like he always sat, being
stubborn and baiting me. I got mad and stormed off the porch. He
called out to me, “I'm going back to Florida tomorrow morning,
Richie, don't forget to write.” And even as mad as I was with him,
I had to laugh. We both knew we'd never written each other a letter
in our lives and never would. It was early Spring, I was home on
Spring break and it seemed to me he always planned his trips to West
Virginia around my breaks from college. The robins were digging in my
Uncle George's front yard. That October, Dale got sick and on
Christmas Eve he died.)
***
5
Dom
decided to have Stacy take him home, so Richard drove Jackie Martin
back alone. He hadn't tried to explain where Dom was since he knew
Jackie hadn't expected him back anyway. She nodded at Richard sadly
when he slid under the driver's steering wheel and said, “sure is
snowing hard.”
Richard
turned on the wipers. Ice was beginning to stick to the Buick's
windshield and he drove slowly, peering out a clear space surrounded
by gathering ice.
When
Richard stopped the car outside Jackie Martin's house, nothing
happened. She didn't open the door and get out. Instead, she sat,
stone still and stared at her hands.
After
a long while, Richard said, “Jackie, you're home.”
Nothing
much happened, even then. She stared at her hands and then looked out
the window. “Here's the truth,” she said, very softly, much more
like a mannered, mature woman than little more than a girl, “the
worst thing about this night is that you had to know about what
happened, how Dom and I were parking up on the mountain and....”
Her voice trailed off into silence.
Finally,
she looked at him, her large, over-made-up eyes, puffy from crying,
looked directly into his heart, his soul. “I'm so terribly sorry
your uncle died,” she said. “Mr. Barker told me while we were
waiting for you to come. I know how awful that has made your
Christmas—even more awful than mine.”
Jackie
leaned across and kissed Richard softly on the lips, her fingers
gently touching the back of his neck. Richard thought it was one of
the softest kisses he'd ever had.
“Thank
you,” he said. Then she got out and ran through the snow to her
house.
When
he parked the car in the alley behind his house, he noticed Jackie
had left a balled up Kleenex on the front seat. He took it with him
and as he stood in the alley he knew the snow would stop soon. It was
turning colder and the snow would stop. He tried to imagine his
parents and George taking turns driving through southern Georgia,
almost to the Florida state line. He walked to the front of the house
and noticed the only lights were the Christmas tree lights he'd left
on all day. They were green and red and blue and white. He smiled and
rubbed the last, dying flakes of snow from his face with Jackie's
Kleenex. He could smell her face powder on it.
As
he opened the front door, he shivered. It was cold inside and he
knew the furnace had gone out.
