I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories Read online

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  I Am No One

  You Know

  STORIES

  to Robert and Peggy Boyers

  Contents

  Part One

  Curly Red

  In Hiding

  I’m Not Your Son, I Am No One You Know

  Aiding and Abetting

  Fugitive

  Me & Wolfie, 1979

  The Girl with the Blackened Eye

  Part Two

  Cumberland Breakdown

  Upholstery

  Wolf’s Head Lake

  Happiness

  Fire

  The Instructor

  Part Three

  The Skull: A Love Story

  The Deaths: An Elegy

  Jorie (& Jamie): A Deposition

  Mrs. Halifax and Rickie Swann: A Ballad

  Part Four

  Three Girls

  The Mutants

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Recent Story Collections by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Curly Red

  I WAS DADDY’S FAVORITE of his seven kids, but still he sent me into exile when I was thirteen and refused to speak to me for twenty-seven years, nor would he allow me to return to our house on Crescent Avenue, Perrysburg, New York, even when Grandma died (though he couldn’t keep me away from the funeral mass at St. Stephen’s and afterward the burial in the church cemetery, where I stood at a distance, crying) when I was twenty-two. Only in the final months of his life, when Daddy was weakened with emphysema and the anger leaked from him, was I allowed to return to help Mom sometimes. Because now Mom needed me. But it was never the same between us.

  Daddy was only seventy-three when he died, but he looked much older, ravaged. Always he’d driven himself hard, working (plumber, pipe fitter), drinking heavily, smoking, raging. He’d been involved all his working life with union politics. Feuds with employers, and with other union members and organizers. Every election, Daddy was in a fever for weeks. One of those men involved behind the scenes. “Delivering the Perrysburg labor vote.” A hard-muscled man with a roostery air of self-esteem, yet edgy, suspicious. Daddy was a local character, a known person. He’d been an amateur boxer, light heavyweight, in the U.S. Army (1950–52), and worked out at a downtown gym, had a punching bag and a heavy bag in the garage, sparred with my brothers, who could never, swift on their feet as they were, stay out of reach of his “dynamite” right cross. When I was living with relatives across town, in what I call my exile, I knew my father at a distance: caught glimpses of him on the street, saw his picture in the paper. Then things changed, younger men were coming up in the union, Daddy and his friends lost power, Daddy got sick, and one sickness led to another. By the time I was allowed back in the house on Crescent Avenue, Daddy was under hospice care, and he’d turned into an old man, shrunken by fifty pounds, furrows in his face like you’d make in a piecrust with a fork. I stared and stared. Was this my father? That face I knew to be ruddy-skinned, good-looking, now gaunt and strangely collapsed about the mouth. Even his shrewd eyes were smaller and shifting worriedly in their sockets as if he was thinking, Is it in the room with me yet?

  John Dellamora, who’d always been contemptuous of weakness in others and in himself, now dependent upon breathing oxygen through a nose piece. Watching me sidelong as I approached his bed bearing a bouquet of white carnations in my trembling hand.

  “Daddy? It’s Lili Rose…”

  When the hospice nurse took me aside and said, If there’s some bitterness between you and your father now’s the time to make it up, later will be too late, I said right away, “That’s up to my father, I think.” Everything was up to him. God damn if I’d say I was sorry when I was not sorry.

  I think Daddy knows me. Sometimes. Still he stiffens as if he’s afraid I might touch him, and moves his head in a tight little nod when I speak to him, though I can feel him staring at me, at my back, when I leave the room, and always I’m thinking he’s going to call me back in his old teasing voice—Hey Curly Red, c’mon! Let’s make it up.

  Curly Red. That name I haven’t heard from anyone’s lips in twenty-seven years.

  I’m waiting. I’m certain that hour will come.

  WE WERE MARIANA, and Rick, and Emily, and Leo, and Mario, and Johnny Jr., and Lili Rose. Daddy would stare at us in disgust, picking at his teeth with a silver toothpick. “Christ! Looks like a platoon.” He was proud of us and loved us, though. Most of the time.

  We lived in a large wood-frame house Daddy made sure was always painted and in good repair, front and back lawns mowed, sidewalk shoveled in winter. There was a tall red maple in front that turned fiery and splendid in October. Our house was at the dead end of Crescent Avenue, above the Niagara River. It was a steep dizzy drop to the riverbank. Cliffs on both sides were exposed shale that always looked wet, sharp. Beyond the dead end was a no-man’s-land of scrub trees and thistles and sumac that flamed up in early autumn, where young kids played. It was a dangerous playing area, if you lost your footing. The view of the river from our house was beautiful, I guess. A river you see every day, from the window of your own room, you take for granted until one day it’s gone from you. I cried a lot when I was sent away.

  But the river got into my dreams. Wide, and glittery like fish scales, always choppy like a living thing restless beneath its skin. Miles away the thunderous Falls like a nightmare. Always there was a wind, and in winter the air could freeze your eyelashes together in a few seconds. There was that morning in December you’d wake to see the river had frozen, turned to black ice.

  I had a happy childhood in that house. Nobody can take that from me.

  THIS CLIPPING FROM the Perrysburg Journal I saved until it was so dry it fell to pieces in my fingers. An obituary beneath a two-inch-high photo of a shyly smiling black boy with a gap between two prominent front teeth.

  Jadro Filer, 17. Resident of Bayside Street, Perrysburg. Varsity basketball at Perrysburg High School. Choir, Bible Baptist Church. Died in Perrysburg General Hospital, April 11, 1973, of severe head injuries following an attack early in the morning of April 9 by yet unidentified assailants as he was walking on Route 11. Survived by his mother, Ethel, his sisters, Louise and Ida, and his brothers, Tyrone, Medrick, and Herman. Services Monday at Bible Baptist Church.

  Always people would ask if I’d known Jadro Filer. No! Or any of his family. It was only after his death I came to know him. It was only after his death we came to be associated in some people’s minds. Jadro Filer, Lili Rose Dellamora.

  Not that it did any good for Jadro Filer, who was dead. And it was the worst thing that could have happened to me.

  WHEN WE WERE growing up my brothers were often in some kind of “trouble.” I had four older brothers. All except Johnny Jr., the closest to me in age, had quick tempers. It’s serious trouble I’m speaking of here. That time Leo and Mario got into their first “serious trouble” I was ten, and never knew what happened exactly. Nobody would tell me much. Mom kept saying, scolding, “Never mind!” The girl, Liza Deaver, was fifteen, with thick glasses, a splotched turtle face, a slow whiny insinuating manner of speech. She was as fattish and mature as a grown woman, in special-education class at Franklin Roosevelt Junior-Senior High School, where Leo, sixteen, was a sophomore and Mario, thirteen, was in eighth grade.

  No news item would appear in the Perrysburg Journal about Liza Deaver. Only minors were involved, and the victim so young.

  There were ten or eleven of them. They’d cajoled Liza into coming with them to Huron Park after school. T
hey’d tramped through the muddy playing fields, past the skeletal trellises of the municipal rose garden to the swimming-pool area, to the old stucco building where refreshments were sold in summer and where there were foul-smelling rest rooms, changing rooms. In the off-season the building was deserted, dead leaves blew about the cement walks. But the rest rooms were unlocked.

  The boys brought Liza into the men’s room.

  Questioned afterward by police, school officials, parents, the boys would claim, “Liza wanted to come with us.” “It was Liza’s idea.” “Liza said she’d done this before, with her brothers.” Liza would deny this, Liza’s parents would deny it, strenuously. Liza hadn’t been injured enough to require hospitalization, but her clothes had been torn, her nose bloodied, her body bruised and chafed. Still, the boys insisted it had been Liza’s idea. They’d been “nice” to her, they said. Witnesses would corroborate that they’d given her presents she’d eagerly accepted: a Mars bar, a plastic pearl necklace found in the trash, a perfumy deodorant. (Liza Deaver was notorious around school for her strong, horsey odor.) The boys’ fathers hired a single lawyer to represent their sons, a friend of Daddy’s retained by the AFL-CIO branch union to which Daddy belonged, and a public hearing in juvenile court was avoided.

  After the incident no one wanted to talk about it in our household, at least in my presence. Leo and Mario were subdued, respectful of our father, for weeks, like kicked dogs. They had 9:00 P.M. curfews; Leo wasn’t allowed to drive for six weeks. My mother said, incensed, “Those Deavers better get her fixed, that one. Before it’s too late.”

  I asked what “fixed” meant. It scared me to think that whatever the boys had done, Liza might need fixing, like a broken clock.

  Disdainfully my mother said, “Like a cat, spayed. So it can’t have kittens.”

  GROWING UP, we Dellamora kids knew that our daddy would die for us. We never had to be told. Of course the concept “to die for” was too extravagant to have occurred to us. Still, we knew.

  Our father had fought in Korea, years before I was born. He’d tease me, saying it was lucky the shrapnel hit him where it did, in the ass, not in his you-know-what, ’cause maybe Lili Rose wouldn’t have been born. (I knew this was a joke. But not very funny, to me.) Daddy was cited for heroism, saving several other soldiers, but he said he was twenty-three at the time—“Too stupid to know what I was doing.” None of us believed this. Daddy was one who thought you should die for your friends, your brothers, your family. No questions asked. He lent money to all the deadbeat relatives, including his own heavy-drinking father. He was always doing favors for guys in the union, for “up-and-coming” boxers and for “over-the-hill” boxers—sometimes the same man, after a few years’ interim. Daddy was fond of the cryptic remark Revenge is a dish best served cold, but we’d noticed how he was always making up with men he’d been feuding with.

  Another remark he liked, from the boxing world, was What goes around comes around. Meaning not just bad but good, too. The good you do will be returned to you. Eventually.

  IN APRIL 1973, when Jadro Filer was beaten unconscious and died, and the lawyer my father hired to defend Leo and Mario pleaded their case to prosecutors, the defense of impulsive, hot-headed boys didn’t work out so well for them, or for my cousin Walt and a neighborhood friend named Don Brinkhaus. And this time I was involved.

  Did I know Jadro Filer, or any of his family? Did I have Negro friends? (“Negro” was the polite, prescribed term.) There’d been a Negro girl in my fourth-grade class with the strange, beautiful name Skyla I’d been friends with, but not the kind of friend who invited you to her house, or vice versa. When Skyla dropped out of school I missed her, but never thought to ask where she’d gone.

  Nigger lover, I’d be called. A girl of thirteen.

  At this time Leo was nineteen, living in a walk-up apartment downtown and working for the plumbing contractor our daddy worked for; he’d been accepted into the union. (No Negroes belonged. This would come out later, the union thought unfairly, in the media coverage of the case.) Mario was sixteen, a sophomore in high school, big for his age, bored. Leo and Mario were together a lot, cruising in Mario’s car, drinking beer with guys mostly Leo’s age. Leo was discovering what Daddy called “fucking-real life.” He hated working full-time. His girlfriend had broken up with him because of his drinking and general evil temper. He pissed Daddy off saying he wished to hell the Vietnam War hadn’t ended so fast, he’d have liked to go over and “see what that shit was all about.”

  At Perrysburg High there’d be isolated incidents involving white and Negro boys, especially following Friday night sports events, but none of these had involved Jadro Filer. In 1971–72, his senior year at the school, Leo had known Jadro but there’d been no “bad blood” between them, he insisted. Mario would deny it, too. Certainly they were aware of Jadro on the basketball team, who hadn’t been? Perrysburg wasn’t a large school: fewer than five hundred students. Everybody knew everybody else, in some way. But whites and Negroes didn’t mix much. On sports teams and in the school band and chorus, in a few of the clubs, maybe. But not much.

  There wasn’t “mixed” dating. Just about never.

  Questioned by county prosecutors if they’d had any special reason to harass Jadro Filer, provoke him into a fight, Leo and the other boys said no. Had they attacked Jadro because he was a Negro?

  Repeatedly they denied this. Four white boys, a solitary black boy. But they weren’t racists, the attackers.

  They’d been drinking since about 10:00 P.M. We saw this guy walking by himself by the railroad track, cutting through a field and onto Route 11, it looked kind of weird, suspicious. We didn’t know who it was… Well, maybe they could see the boy was dark-skinned. Maybe one of them yelled out Nigger! Those skid marks in the gravel…Maybe Leo, who was driving, aimed the car at the kid just to scare him, to make him run. After that, things got confused.

  It had been approximately 12:15 A.M. on April 9, 1973, when Jadro Filer left his girlfriend’s house to walk back to his home, a ten-minute walk under ordinary circumstances, across the railroad embankment, along the highway shoulder past darkened gas stations, a Taco Bell, a McDonald’s. It was 12:50 A.M. when an emergency call was made reporting a badly beaten young man lying in a roadside ditch near a railroad culvert. (No other call was reported that night. But the following morning, when news of the beating began to spread through Perrysburg, an anonymous caller would report to police that he’d seen what appeared to be a new-model Buick in the vicinity of the attack scene, parked off the highway shortly after midnight. The caller, slowing, then accelerating to speed past, had an impression of four or five young white men “involved in some activity like fighting.” The caller would supply police with the first three digits of a car registered to Leo Dellamora.) By 12:50 A.M., however, Leo and Mario were back home. They’d dropped Walt and Don Brinkhaus off, and come directly to Crescent Avenue. At this time they hadn’t known, would claim they’d had no idea, that Jadro Filer had been beaten so badly he’d never regain consciousness. They were aroused, excited. Maybe a little panicked. I overheard them speaking together in low, urgent voices. I heard “nigger” several times repeated. I heard their nervous laughter. I hadn’t been asleep when they came home, and I’d noticed the time. And this was strange: no headlights sprang onto the wall of my bedroom, moving swiftly from one corner of the room to another as usual when someone turned into our driveway at night. Leo must have cut his headlights. Or he’d been driving without them.

  My room was downstairs, toward the rear of our house; my single window overlooked the driveway and, beyond that, the river. I’d had to share this room with Emily for years, and now I missed her. Always I’d wanted a room to myself in our crowded household, but now I was lonely a lot, especially at night. When Daddy was out, which was often, or my brothers, I’d wait for them to come home. I missed them! Patiently I’d watch for headlights to flash onto the walls. That night I was waiting for Leo to bring Mario ba
ck home, and I was hoping Leo would hang out awhile. In the kitchen, having a beer or two.

  Dad, Mom, and Johnny Jr. were sleeping upstairs. I left my room and entered the darkened kitchen, barefoot, to wait for Leo and Mario.

  The back kitchen door opened out into the garage. It was rarely locked. I opened it just a little and listened. Often I eavesdropped on my brothers. I was never caught, they took so little notice of me. Tonight I couldn’t hear clearly what my brothers were saying in the garage. I heard only lowered, isolated words, but one of them was “nigger.” I heard the outside faucet being turned on. My brothers were doing something with the hose? Washing the car? I peered through the crack and saw them squatting close together on the floor washing a baseball bat. This was Leo’s bat he carried in his car “for protection.” Leo and Mario had rolled up their sleeves to wash their hands and forearms, cursing as water sprang up out of the hose onto their clothing.

  I wanted to laugh, they looked so funny. They were only about ten feet away and unaware of me.

  Why didn’t I speak to them then? I would wonder. Any other night, I would have. Why not that night?

  Not for a long time would I learn that my brothers were deliberating what to do with the bat during these minutes. The murder weapon, it would one day be called. They weren’t thinking very clearly, but they knew they had to get rid of the bat, fast. They thought about throwing it into the river, of course—but what if it floated? Even weighed down, a wooden bat might somehow work loose and float. And the river would be the first place Perrysburg cops would look. Finally they decided to bury it somewhere on the riverbank, in the underbrush. A few hundred feet away from the house. There was a lot of litter on the riverbank; this seemed like a practical idea. I saw my brothers wrap the bat in a piece of burlap and I saw them leave the garage, but I couldn’t see them for more than a few seconds from my bedroom window. I was mystified. I had no idea what they were doing. I guessed they were drunk. Maybe it was some kind of joke.