My Name is Joe LaVoie Page 3

  “Fuckin’ hypocrite,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  The memory of that day—of that conversation, if you can call it that, between my father and me—makes me laugh out loud. Everybody in the van turns to look at me, even Ronnie, taking her eyes off the exit ramp she’s just turned on to. Elaine asks what’s funny.

  “I was thinking about my dad,” I say. “What I said to him once.”

  “What?” Ronnie says, her eyes back on the road, turning onto the street that will take us into the cemetery.

  “I called him a fuckin’ hypocrite,” I say. One of the boys laughs out loud.

  “Jack said that,” Ronnie says. “That’s what Bernard told me.”

  “I said it too,” I say.

  “What did he say?” Elaine asks me, meaning her grandfather. She was too young to have known the Old Man, born a year after he dropped dead in a Met Stadium men’s room, but she’s heard the stories.

  “Nothing,” I tell her. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me.” I laugh again, but I can tell that Elaine and the others can’t appreciate what’s funny about the story. You’d have to be there, as they say. They don’t know that I was eight at the time and wouldn’t have known a hypocrite from a hippopotamus.

  I decide it isn’t worth my breath to explain. It hardly ever is. Besides, the Crystal Lake gate is right in front of us.

  It’s windy today too, and it’s a cold, biting wind that pushes dead leaves and gum wrappers across the cemetery northwest to southeast, cutting across where we’re walking. When we get out of the van, Elaine bends over me and pulls the blanket up around my shoulders and then Ronnie bends down and fusses with what Elaine did and then Joe takes the handles of my chair and begins pushing me up the path, which rises and falls depending on where you’re going. I hear B.J. lighting a cigarette a few steps behind us.

  Cemeteries aren’t busy places on Thanksgiving. There isn’t anyone in sight except two black kids on bicycles a couple of paths over, watching us or more precisely watching Elaine in her purple jacket and tight jeans. Since Ronnie began bringing us up here a few years back we’ve more or less fallen into a routine, where we go first to our parents’ graves, then to Yvonne’s, then to Janine’s, then to Jack’s and Bernard’s. Because they didn’t die at the same time and because we didn’t own a family plot the graves are spread out, in different parts of the cemetery. It’s a big place, Crystal Lake, though not half as big as I remember it as a kid, so there’s a fair amount of walking. There’s also a lot of uneven terrain, like I say, so paying your respects to the dead LaVoies can tire you out even if you’re only along for the ride.

  This time of year most everything is blanketed by brown and yellow leaves. At our parents’ graves Ronnie pulls a whisk broom out of her coat pocket and clears the leaves and litter off the stones. Behind Ronnie the rest of us form a little semicircle leaning into the wind and the tumbling leaves. No one says a word—everyone just looks down at the identical markers.

  †

  MARGUERITE ANNA LA VOIE

  MOTHER

  1906–1955

  †

  JOHN MICHAEL LA VOIE

  FATHER

  1903–1970

  The stones are polished granite rectangles set in cement more or less flush with the ground. They were ordered and paid for by Ronnie and Eugene about five years ago to replace the original markers that were supplied by the county and looked like all the other county-supplied markers at Crystal Lake. I don’t know where the Old Man was or what he was doing when my mother died, only that he wasn’t at home and wasn’t working, and I was in prison and no one else was old enough to buy a gravestone or had the money if they were. What was left of the family was on what they called relief, and because of who we were in 1955 no one, not even Mother’s fine Christian friends at the All Saints Tabernacle of the Risen Christ, was willing to provide any serious money for a LaVoie memorial. Things weren’t much better when the Old Man dropped dead fifteen years later, at least as far as the money was concerned.

  “I can’t believe she just sat down in that park and froze to death,” Elaine whispers above and behind me.

  “Today I can,” says Joe, shivering and making the chair shiver a little too.

  For the record, Mother died on either the first or the second day of 1955, after wandering away from the county-funded nursing home where she’d been staying, not far from Powderhorn Park. Police found her body curled up in the snow under a picnic table, wearing only a housedress and mismatched carpet slippers. She had died, it was ruled, of exposure.

  I still find it hard to believe the Old Man dropped dead while relieving himself at the ballpark, but that’s only because the cops were looking for him at the time and no one thought it was possible that he was still in town. An inept, booze-addled, small-time hoodlum who, when he wasn’t in jail or the workhouse, ran errands and did odd jobs for Bunny Augustine, kingpin of the Upper Midwest’s dominant underworld organization. What he was doing and where he was staying at the time remain a mystery to this day, that is if anybody cares, which I’m sure they don’t.

  Ronnie says, as she always says, “Poor woman,” and makes the sign of the cross, although neither she nor Mother was Catholic. I’ve only seen her do that at the graves.

  At Yvonne’s grave another thirty yards up the same path no one says a word. Yvonne drowned in a few inches of water in a basement laundry tub five months after she was born in 1924, supposedly when Mother got distracted while bathing her. None of us was around when Yvonne was alive. Only Eugene, her twin, has any firsthand connection to her at all, but Eugene, being a baby when she died, remembers nothing. And Eugene isn’t present at the graves today.

  I don’t remember when I first understood that there had been another kid in the family—for all I know it was the day the Old Man hollered at me over Yvonne’s grave. I do remember being afraid to go into the basement laundry room, not only because of the centipedes and silverfish, but because I somehow knew that Yvonne had died in that deep concrete washtub. Although Jack and Bernard used to say the Old Man drowned the baby in the tub, I never believed it. Even so, it was a terrible thing to think about, drowning down there in the dark, among the bugs and God knows what else lurked in the dank shadows, and I remember having nightmares about it once I found out.

  Yvonne’s marker is the brick-sized stone it’s always been. Ronnie talks about replacing it like she replaced our parents’ stones, but it never gets done, maybe because Yvonne has never really existed for us, was only part of a story. We can look at Eugene and try to picture what his twin sister would look like at his age, sixty-seven, but Eugene is Eugene and nobody else, no matter how hard we wish he wasn’t, so that exercise isn’t much use. When all’s said and done, poor little Yvonne, born in March 1924 and dead a few months later, is nothing more than a faded name, another LaVoie that no one hardly remembers.

  Ronnie bends down with her whisk broom and shoos the dead leaves away from the stone, which seems the least we can do under the circumstances.

  Joe is pushing my chair toward Janine’s grave, which is another fifty yards past Yvonne’s, when I hear one of the black kids on the bicycles saying, “Who you be lookin’ for, lady?”

  I look over my shoulder and see the kids on the next path to our right, straddling their fat-tire bikes like a couple of cowboys on horses, in front of Elaine and B.J. The boy is speaking to Elaine and seeming to ignore B.J., which is hard to do because he is large and possibly dangerous. But Elaine is Ronnie’s daughter and not afraid to speak for herself. She says, “We aren’t looking for anyone. We know where we’re going.”

  The other boy says, “We be your guide if you can’t find a tomb you want.”

  Joe stops, turns toward the boys, and as he turns, turns my chair in their direction. Ronnie is behind us. Now we’re all looking at the boys, who don’t strike me as shy. One of them is tall and very thin, so black he’s purple, the color of an eggplant, his bare head shaved so it shines. The other one is shorter but just as thin, maybe thinner, with lighter skin and a full head of curly, reddish hair. Both are wearing team jackets like Elaine’s, one black and silver with a pirate on it, the other blue and silver with a five-pointed star. The tall one is wearing silver sunglasses. I’m amazed at the balls of these kids, thirteen or fourteen years old if that—no hesitation at all about stepping up and blocking the path of other people, even when the people they’re blocking are older and bigger and more numerous. Brazen was what the newspapers called us sometimes, but we were pussycats compared to these guys.

  “We don’t need no guide,” says B.J. “We been here before.”

  The other kid glances at B.J. and then says to Elaine, “You know a lot of people in these tombs, huh?”

  “Just family,” Elaine says.

  “How many?” the first kid says.

  “There are six altogether,” she says.

  I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

  The first boy squints at her. “Six,” he says. “How come they not in one place?”

  Elaine has finally had enough.

  “Excuse us,” she says and steps between the boys on their bikes. B.J., looking at first one, then the other, follows her. The boys look her over as she passes, the tall one lifting his silver shades, his eyes dropping to her tight jeans, but just stand there straddling their bikes.

  “We be your guides,” he says. “We know all the tombs.”

  Elaine and B.J. keep walking and say nothing. One path over, Joe exhales, turns the chair back in the direction of Janine’s grave, and pushes me up the rise. “Fuckin’ boogs,” I hear him mutter. “I’m keeping an eye on those shitbirds till we’re out of here.”

  I’ve had two black friends in my life—Jake M
acDill in Germany and Clarence Coover at the Cloud. Jake was laid back and mellow, with an easy smile and a deep voice that made me think of black coffee. C.C., who would’ve been about the same age as Jake, in his middle twenties, was something else, a smart, tightly wound, corner-cutting, don’t-turn-your-ofay-back-on-me kind of spade. I’m pretty sure he’d been extremely dangerous until he was shot in the spine by the owner of the liquor store he’d just robbed and cut. He’d come from a big, well-known family in St. Paul, the youngest son of a Baptist preacher, and must have been a holy terror the way people talked about him. He’d been at the Cloud since he was nineteen, sitting in his chair in the prison’s hospital wing for almost five years by the time I got there. I was scared of him because of what people said and because he was so different from Jake, the only other black guy I really knew until then, and I didn’t believe it when people said that he was scared of me.

  Then one day when they’d wheeled us to the same table for lunch he said, “You the boy that shot the cop, right?”

  I shook my head.

  He said, “You shot the other man too, that farmer you grabbed.”

  I wasn’t talking to anybody about anything at that time and I sure as hell wasn’t about to start confessing or denying things to some shine who’d stabbed a guy during a robbery, so I shook my head again and kept my mouth shut.

  But he looked me up and down with his yellow eyes and said, “Well, you up for shootin’ a cop, I guess you wouldn’t mind shootin’ a nigger too.”

  I didn’t know what exactly C.C. meant by that, but I was surprised by the way he said it, and without really thinking I heard myself saying, “I didn’t shoot anybody.”

  He looked at me again and shook his head. “Whatever you say, man,” he said, “that’s okay with me.”

  Several years later, just before I got my parole, Clarence said he was scared of me way before we sat together in the canteen. He said he figured I was criminally insane and murdered people for no good reason, even cops. He said he’d heard that the LaVoies were crazy from the parents on down, like those wild-ass hillbilly families in the mountains down South. I remember laughing when he said that and telling him that maybe he wasn’t too far off base, at least about the family.

  At Janine’s grave someone put plastic flowers in front of the big polished stone, bright red and yellow flowers that looked phonier than usual with the grass dead and out of color. Ronnie says that Eddie Devitt still makes a special trip up from Kansas City to visit Janine’s grave on her birthday in September. The flowers came from Eddie and say something both good and bad about the poor bastard another one of my several ex-brothers-in-law, the only one still alive and accounted for.

  It’s easier, now as always, to think about Eddie Devitt than it is to think about Janine. Janine is difficult to think about for a lot of reasons. She’s as difficult to think about alive as dead in fact, and not just for me either, although it’s maybe a little more difficult for me than for the others. I don’t know.

  Janine was next youngest after me, though there were five years between us, and after Janine there were only the twins. In a family with eight kids (the ninth, Yvonne, was already gone) it would have been easy for someone in Janine’s spot to get lost or at least overlooked, but that wouldn’t happen because Janine was what people called “exotic.” While the rest of us had blond or brown hair and pale complexions, Janine’s hair was dark brown, almost black, and she had what people called “olive” skin. And while our eyes were either blue or gray, Janine’s eyes were as dark as her hair.

  The Old Man said Janine looked like a Jew, which none of us kids had ever knowingly encountered on longfellow Avenue but which was a serious matter, since the Old Man was convinced, at least for a while, that Bunny Augustine and his gang, mostly Northside Jews, were out to get him. Bernard once told me that the Old Man actually thought that Janine wasn’t his, that her real father was in fact a Jew, maybe Bunny Augustine himself, though even when he was drunk out of his mind, the Old Man couldn’t possibly have believed it, and that the Old Man had slapped Mother around for it. Ronnie said she’d heard Mother call Janine “Black Irish, from John’s side,” but since the Old Man always called himself French Canadian, “Black Irish” didn’t make much sense to us either, though it might have helped explain to our ignorant, literal-minded satisfaction Janine’s dark hair, eyes, and skin.

  When she was little I don’t think anybody gave Janine much thought. None of us after Ronnie—by that I mean myself, Janine, and the twins—did much to call attention to ourselves, either because we were afraid of what would happen if we were noticed or because we never thought we could get a word in edgewise. Janine wasn’t as quiet as the twins, who nobody can remember saying anything for the first ten years or so of their lives, but she didn’t say much for a long time—she just watched the rest of us with those big black eyes from the far end of the dinner table or from the background somewhere, sometimes smiling, most times not. I don’t know if the Old Man ever called her a Jew girl to her face. I doubt if he paid her much attention at all. Besides, by the time Janine was old enough to really turn his head, the Old Man was either doing time or on the lam who knows where.

  It’s hard to believe, looking back like this, that Janine was somehow the cause of everything that happened in 1953. No one I’m aware of ever blamed her for what happened, and maybe what happened would have happened anyway, though I doubt it. Jack knew that Buddy Follmer had been fooling around with Ronnie. That made him mad, but it didn’t make him crazy. It was Follmer fooling around with Janine—no, not even that, just the thought of Follmer and Janine—that set Jack off, that set the whole train of events rolling toward disaster.

  But I don’t want to think about that part of the story now. Suffice it to say that Janine was different from the rest of us, that she was “exotic,” and that when she reached a certain age everybody noticed her, including her brothers.

  I’m trying to stop it right here, these thoughts about Janine, but now Ronnie is standing beside me, her hand on my shoulder, thinking the same thoughts. Ronnie was six years older than Janine, but it was Ronnie who took Janine under her wing, and at least while Janine was little Ronnie was more a mother to her than Mother was.

  I remember Janine following Ronnie around the house and the two of them coming home from Cianciolo’s grocery on Thirty-eighth Street, Janine wearing a kerchief on her head like Ronnie, and Janine helping carry what Ronnie had bought for supper that night. Even Cianciolo’s daughter, who was a year or two older, wasn’t as dark and exotic-looking as Janine, and the Cianciolos were honest-to-God Italian, which made them at least as dark as the Irish and the Jews. Anyway, wherever they went back then, it was always Janine tagging along after Ronnie and Ronnie making sure Janine got across the busy streets okay and that Janine got enough to eat. Later on, their relationship would change. Later on, the men who looked at Ronnie a certain way would look at Janine the same way, only more so, and things would never be the same. But they were sisters even in the worst of times, and I don’t think either one of them ever forgot that. And when Janine was killed, Ronnie was as devastated as the rest of us.

  Janine died on August 23, 1963, of multiple injuries suffered when the car she was riding in jumped a curb on Minnehaha Parkway and hit the concrete abutment of the Nicollet Avenue bridge in south Minneapolis. The car, a Corvette Stingray, belonged to her husband, but was driven by one Everett Dierking III, a forty-five-year-old husband and father of six from a prominent Minneapolis milling family, who was also killed. The car was reportedly traveling more than ninety miles per hour when it hit the bridge.

  Janine was twenty-six years old when she died, which was how old Jack was when he was killed, a coincidence that was not mentioned at the funeral that Eddie Devitt, her husband at the time, arranged for her at the highfalutin Episcopal church across the street from Lake of the Isles.

  Ronnie is obviously thinking what I’m thinking, because at that moment she says softly, “I never picture them the same age. Jack is always older, grown up or at least old enough to swear and stare and make people afraid. Janine—well, she’s just standing there with a Band-Aid on her skinned knee and that strange, sad look on her face.”