My Name is Joe LaVoie Read online

  “Talk to her, will you please?” he begged me in the dilapidated kitchen of the house that was falling down around us. “She always listened to family.” Well into his forties, Rossy was still big and blond, but he no longer seemed very powerful and he needed dental work. He wasn’t rich anymore either and, truth be told, probably never was—that had all been part of his lie.

  I liked Rossy and wanted to help him. I wanted to—and yet I didn’t. Something, maybe the booze, made me want to see Rossy suffer, miss out, be deprived of what he wanted most. Back in the old neighborhood I once walked in on Rossy fucking Ronnie on my parents’ bed. They knew I was there, but it didn’t matter. Their naked indifference to me was worse than the sex. The image came back to me at that moment. I sat there and watched him cry, yet I shook my head and said not one word that might give him comfort or hope. For a minute I thought he might use the gun he said he had in his car on me, then wait for the others to come back to the house and kill them, and for a minute I felt that wasn’t such a bad idea. Then I thought about the kids who had nothing to do with any of this but would pay the most anyway and decided that both of us sorry bastards should get the hell out of there right then.

  When Rossy finally left, I wrote Ronnie a note and called myself a taxi. It would cost a fortune for a ride all the way downtown, but when you got to go, you got to go. I had to go, so I went.

  It seems odd now, almost twenty years later, to think about Ronnie and the kids, and poor Rossy too, out there in that farmhouse, and how everything has changed since then.

  My life, it occurred to me the other day, can be broken down into more or less equal twenty-year parts almost like the sections of a book. The first part, not counting my three years in the Army, was spent on longfellow Avenue, everyone alive except baby Yvonne and living together under one roof, and ran until 1953. The second was spent, most of it anyway, at the Cloud, me a convicted cop-killer considered so great a threat to society that even without a functioning lower body I was twice denied parole—hell, I was denied the so-called privilege of attending the funerals of my mother, father, and little sister. The third began, as I’ve related, back on longfellow Avenue in 1975, continued for a short while at Ronnie’s place in the sticks, then proceeded to these present digs, in this shitty apartment, less than a city mile from where everything began.

  I sit here now, waiting for Ronnie and the kids to come for me in their van, to go up to the graves, then go to Ronnie’s current home for Thanksgiving dinner. you think you’d know a place inside and out if you lived there as long as I have—what now, more than fifteen years?—but the truth is I can’t describe the wallpaper in the kitchen. I’m here, most days, round the clock, day and night, but the only thing I can tell you for sure about the place is that it smells like the bacon and onions my neighbors across the hall eat three or four times a week and that the building belongs to Harold Victor Meslow, MPD retired.

  Meslow, you might remember if you’re old enough to remember me and my brothers, was the cop who the papers said tracked us down after we killed Patrolman Fredriksen. R.A. Walsh, the Minneapolis police chief at that time, got most of the press during the dragnet, but it was Meslow who got the credit in the end. People probably still believe it was Meslow who gunned us down in that swamp north of the city, though in fact Meslow only held the umbrella that kept the sleet out of the eyes of the shooter, whose name was James Finnegan. Meslow doesn’t like the umbrella story and probably wouldn’t mind if we forgot about Jimmy Finnegan altogether.

  Meslow retired from police work twenty years ago. He’d left the MPD in about 1960, when he didn’t get Walsh’s job when Walsh retired, and went out to some place in Colorado—Fort Collins, I think it was—where he finally secured a chief’s badge. When he retired from that job he came back here and settled down to manage the real estate he’d invested in when he was a Minneapolis cop. It wasn’t a lot, three or four small apartment buildings, but it gave him something to do while topping off his substantial pension. Supposedly he was still angry about the way his local law-enforcement career turned out and wanted something different to concentrate on.

  He stumbled across me going into the downtown YMCA two days after I left Ronnie’s farmhouse. It’s hard to believe it was an accident, the two of us bumping into each other that way after all those years, but I can’t explain it any other way. He looked pretty much the same as the last time I saw him, which was probably the last day of the trials, and so, I guess, did I. At any rate, we recognized each other right off the bat, and while I’d just as soon have kept going he reached out and caught one of the handles of my chair and said, “Jojo LaVoie, what’s the rush?”

  Nobody but family and the cops ever called me “Jojo,” which one of the girls might have started calling me when we were little, and I didn’t like it when the cops used it. I squinted up at him through my dark glasses—squinted up into that long, sad, wolf’s face of his—and said, “Detective fuckin’ Meslow.”

  He kind of maneuvered me off to the side, out of the way of the foot traffic there on Ninth Street, and asked me if this, meaning the Y, was the best I could do for a place to live. (He was pretty sure I wasn’t there to swim or play handball.) I said it was fine, and he said what’s the matter with the family, and I said the family was none of his damn business. He sighed and said, “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” I noticed he didn’t call me “Jojo” a second time, so I thought what the hell, what harm would it do, he and I didn’t have any business anymore, it was just the two of us private individuals, and one of us wouldn’t object to a cup of coffee that he didn’t have to pay for.

  We went into a coffee shop around the corner and Meslow told me he’d been out West (which I’d heard already, through the grapevine) and that he’d retired and was taking it easy nowadays. I said, “Same here,” and waited for him to grin at the joke, but he didn’t. He didn’t pay any attention to the chair either, once he’d helped maneuver my legs under the table.

  Meslow had always struck me as kind of odd for a cop, not at all like that fucker Buddy Follmer, not loud and mean and predatory, not a bully and not someone who’d take advantage of his situation. (At least that was my impression.) Meslow was quieter than most cops I’d come to know, more thoughtful and maybe a little smarter, and almost always wore a disappointed expression on that long face of his. He’d apparently never gotten married and didn’t socialize much with other cops either, so naturally he was known around the Courthouse, I’d heard, as the “Monk.” Not that I gave a shit about any of that. And not that it made me like the guy. As my brother Jack would say, a fuckin’ cop is a fuckin’ cop.

  Sitting there drinking coffee after all those years, Meslow asked me the obvious questions about life at the Cloud and what I planned to do now that I was out. Before I could make up something to say he said he had a place for me to live, in one of the buildings he owned, just off East Lake Street in the old neighborhood. He said he wouldn’t charge me rent. All he wanted was someone he knew on the premises—“someone to keep an eye on things,” is how he put it. There were three floors plus the basement, but there was an ancient elevator and he had a guy who did repairs, cut the grass, and shoveled the walk in the winter.

  “Why me?” I asked him, expecting some bullshit about giving a con a second chance, but all he said was, “Why not?” I thought, Okay, why not, and although it all seemed peculiar as hell I thought about Eugene in the house on longfellow, Ronnie out in the sticks, and the airless room upstairs at the Y, and figured I couldn’t do much worse. If anybody asked, I’d lie about the identity of my landlord.

  What Meslow really wanted out of the arrangement was obvious a long time ago, although nobody except the two of us seems to know or give a shit, and it’s turned out to be not such a bad deal for me. Neither Eugene nor Ronnie has ever asked who owns the building where I’ve been living the past fifteen years, and both seem happy that I’m living independently and managing to make ends meet on what I get every month
from Hiawatha County. (The county also sends a social worker once a week to check on my well-being and a “health-care aide” every day to help with my physical functions.) Meslow himself doesn’t come around all that often anymore, for that matter. He never says anything about it, of course, but I think he’s sick, maybe dying, because unless it’s my imagination, his face the last several months has been longer and grayer and sadder than usual. His eyes have a yellow cast to them, and he coughs more than he ought to. I wonder how I’ll feel when he’s gone.

  In January I’ll be sixty. My life is entering its fourth twenty-year interval, and I have to acknowledge that the third as well as the second has one way or another belonged to the son-of-a-bitch.

  One night not long ago I dreamed about him. He was pawing through the clothes in my father’s closet on longfellow. I was standing in the back of the closet, behind the Old Man’s sour-smelling suits and trousers, and although I couldn’t see Meslow’s face and was too young in the dream to know anything about him, I knew it was him. I woke up wondering if he had been a part of my life from the beginning.

  Ronnie’s van pulls up below my first-floor picture window and out hops her grown-up boys, B.J. and Joe. The B.J. stands for Bernard John, but nobody except my brother ever wanted to be called Bernard and nobody calls a kid Bernie nowadays so it’s been B.J. from the beginning. Joe is short for Joseph Michael, my first name and the first name of my youngest brother, one of the second set of twins. Naming the boys after LaVoies was as much Rossy’s idea as my sister’s, Rossy always preferring the LaVoies to the Grants, saying the LaVoies, for all their problems, were more of a family than the Grants were, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time but was another reason I liked the guy. At any rate, the boys are both spitting images of their old man, big and blond and powerfully put together. The women are wild about Joe especially, Ronnie says, even though he’s only seventeen. B.J., who’s twenty-four and for a while dated a Vikings cheerleader, currently lives with a very attractive divorced woman in her thirties, which says something about his appeal.

  The two of them are up the steps and in through the door I left open. I’m ready to go in my winter coat and blanket, my herringbone newsboy cap and dark glasses. After a kiss from each of them on my stubbly cheek, the boys roll me out the door and down the short ramp Meslow had built for me to the sidewalk. Ronnie’s van is a dark blue Ford Astro with black M.I.A. stickers on the bumpers. Without a word, the boys lift me into an open sliding door on the passenger side. Dead weight to myself, I must be light as a feather to my nephews, who handle me the way Rossy must have handled them when they were tykes.

  Ronnie sits behind the wheel, her head wrapped in a gauzy kerchief and her face all but hidden behind big round sunglasses. She turns in her seat and smiles at me, and then her own spitting image—her and Rossy’s twenty-year-old daughter, Elaine—blows me a kiss from the jump seat and for one split second I’m so happy I could cry.

  Gervais doesn’t go to the graves. He jokes that black people don’t like cemeteries, though I’m not sure it’s a joke. Anyway, he has no problem with Ronnie going up there and taking the Grant kids with her, Gervais having had some family of his own die early and violent deaths and is therefore sympathetic. (I don’t know the details.) Besides, today is Thanksgiving, and he doesn’t want to miss the football on TV.

  “Hungry?” Ronnie asks me over her shoulder as she points the van toward Cedar Avenue.

  “I can wait,” I tell her. The truth is, my stomach is on fire, and I don’t have much of an appetite.

  “You look great, Jojo,” Elaine, now sitting beside me on the back seat, says, lying through her teeth. She is blonde and blue-eyed like both Rossy and her mother, with Ronnie’s face and figure. Men look at Elaine the way men used to look at Ronnie, and, like Ronnie used to do, Elaine looks back. She’s wearing a purple-and-gold Vikings jacket, tight faded jeans, and scuffed cowboy boots.

  “Not as good as you do, kiddo,” I tell her, and she shows off the LaVoie dimples.

  There’s not much traffic on Thanksgiving—Gervais isn’t the only football fanatic planted in front of the television today. We head north on Cedar, cut through the ragged part of town people used to call Seven Corners, then get on the freeway heading toward Crystal Lake. Even in our part of the South Side, where there doesn’t ever seem to be much going on except the neighborhood getting shabbier and more dangerous, I see something new every time someone takes me out. When I was a kid and had just come home after almost three years in Europe, I remember walking around town thinking what a small, drab city it was, such a plain little burg compared to Paris and London and Rome, and then coming back after almost twenty years at the Cloud and thinking it was the biggest, loudest, scariest place I’d ever seen. Now the city seems plain again, but always changing and parts of it, like I say, getting more dangerous.

  Maybe that seems funny to those of you who remember us. For a couple of months in 1953 my brothers and I were the reason people were afraid in this city. We were the danger, or so people thought, like we were running around looking for people to hurt, preying on law-abiding citizens the way the gangs do today. There might have been a moment here and there when each of us considered ourselves dangerous, at least when provoked, but the fact is, except for those few brief moments, no one in the world was more afraid than the three of us, two of the three of us anyway. Fredriksen and O’Leary, the two guys we killed, were never any scareder than us LaVoies, I promise you.

  I can’t tell you why the family graves are at Crystal Lake, way up on the North Side, where none of the LaVoies ever lived unless it was before any of us knew or could remember. Maybe it was the only cemetery space available when my mother and father first needed it, for my oldest sister, Yvonne, who died in 1924 at the age of six months, or maybe it was the only spot they could afford. It’s a pretty place, full of mature oaks and evergreens and even a few of the big elm trees that survived the disease that took so many around town ten, fifteen years ago, and larger than you might expect a cemetery to be in the city. Maybe back in 1924 Crystal Lake was outside the city line, but I doubt it, because there are old houses all around it and the houses, some of them boarded up now, are city houses, not the kind you find in the suburbs. My sister Yvonne, as far as that goes, wasn’t the first person buried here. Crystal Lake was already old then, almost seventy years ago, judging by the dates on a lot of the tombstones.

  The Old Man used to take us up here when I was little. That was before Janine and the twins were around, but even so there were five of us kids and somewhere the Old Man would have gotten hold of a car and all of us except my mother would ride all the way up here to stand around Yvonne’s grave. At first it was something I liked to do, because we never went anywhere otherwise, not that I can remember, and in those days, before the freeway, it was a long, exciting ride. The Old Man didn’t own a car, but somehow, like I say, he managed to borrow or steal one somewhere, and if it wasn’t too hot that day and I didn’t get car sick I considered it an adventure.

  The huge elms were still here in large numbers, and it was like we had passed from the city into a forest—it always seemed shady and cool. I remember Ronnie holding my hand and the two of us running up the paths between the rows of graves and headstones and picking up sticks and chasing after toads and garter snakes. I didn’t pay much attention to Yvonne’s grave at first, Yvonne being only a name I’d heard, and probably didn’t understand that she had been my sister and Eugene’s twin. I guess, as far as that goes, I wouldn’t have known what a twin was in those days because I’d never had a chance to see Yvonne and Eugene together and because the second set, Michael and Marie, hadn’t been born yet.

  During one of those visits—it was a hot and windy summer day when I must have been about eight—I heard Jack say to Bernard, “Jesus Christ, listen to the Old Man carry on. You’d think she’d croaked this morning.” The words themselves didn’t mean as much to me as the way Jack said them. The words came out from betw
een clenched teeth and sounded like sparks from a machine. For the first time since we’d been coming up here I forgot about the toads and the snakes and looked over at the Old Man and, to my surprise, saw him down on one knee, his sweaty hat in one hand, the other hand a fist pressing against his forehead, the corners of his mouth jerked down like a sad clown’s, and him crying like a baby. There was a dusty gray stone about the size and shape of a brick in front of him and a little bouquet of yellow flowers lying against the stone.

  “Fuckin’ hypocrite,” Jack muttered. “He’s the one that shoulda drowned down there.”

  “Shit, he probably drowned her himself,” Bernard said, trying to sound as angry as Jack.

  Jack would have been about thirteen at the time, Bernard a year or so younger, but the anger in their voices, especially Jack’s, made them seem like grownups. I was so surprised—shocked really—that I started to cry. I didn’t know why I was crying, only that it had to do with the sound of my brothers’ voices. Ronnie must have gone off somewhere, because I was standing there by myself, and when I looked back at the Old Man I saw that he was looking at me now and wasn’t sobbing anymore.

  He stared at me and said, “What the hell are you blubbering about?” The way he looked at me, his face red and wet and angry now too, and the words so unexpected—he hardly ever spoke to me at all—confused and embarrassed me. Jack and Bernard had gone off a ways, and all of a sudden it seemed to be just the two of us, the Old Man and me, there at Yvonne’s tiny grave.

  I shook my head and tried to think of something to say, but nothing came out, and by the time I thought of something he had forgotten about me and was leaning forward over Yvonne’s gravestone, beginning to weep again.