I Visit the County Courthouse
That night I dreamed it was me in jail, with a ball and chain around my ankle. My crime: mail fraud? Check-forging? Nope. Touching a stupid baseball player’s stupid glove. The prosecutor wore a “Hello My Name is ELWYN” sticker, and was going for a sentence of thirty-to-life.
I decided to pay a visit to Joe Viola. First thing after breakfast on Wednesday, I walked straight downtown to the county courthouse.
Asa Pike let me go on back to the jail cells—there are two—where my former best friend’s former hero sat on a bunk. Talk about a slump.
“Rough night?” I said. He was not looking too sharp in his black-and-white striped inmate uniform. His hair was bushy and dull as rust, and there was plenty of it to be seen, without the baseball cap. Thick stubble covered the lower half of his face, and the upper half drooped with the effects, I figured, of liquor, smoke, and shame.
He eyeballed me blearily. “You again,” he said. “This is your fault. You jinxed me. You’re bad luck. You put the stink on my glove and my life.”
Two peas in a pod, this guy and Winky Wheaton.
I thought about what Mrs. B-B had said about me and the jinx. “That’s not true,” I said. “You were in a slump before you ever set eyes on me, a day I regret for all its dashed hopes and—and disillusionment. For making all of my best friend’s faith in the game, faith in himself, and friendship with me, go up in smoke.”
“I’d like a smoke.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about! It’s your bad choices that lost you everything. I had nothing to do with it!”
He heaved a sigh. “Whaddaya want, another Sno-Cone?”
“I want you to own up to your responsibility,” I said, taking a seat on the folding chair provided by Mr. Pike.
“Responsibility?” He squinted as though he’d never heard of it.
“You’re a sports hero to my former best friend. My former best friend is now ruined for baseball. You did that. You put him on that corduroy couch.”
“What corduroy couch?”
“The one with his out-of-work father and the sour balls.”
“I really want a smoke,” he said.
And I really wanted something to say to Winky. Something to restore him to his real self! Something to make him like me again! “Winky Wheaton told me all the wonderful things about you,” I said to Joe Viola, ignoring his tone. “The things you’ve overcome. The hole in your heart!”
“It was a murmur. It went away by itself by the time I was five.”
“The selfless things you’ve done, then. It was like a poem. He told me that you have a heart of gold and the soul of a saint and can throw a changeup like the devil himself. Heck, even my own mother kept your baseball card in a heart-shaped frame, right beside the picture of the Pope! You don’t live up to any of it!” I declared.
Joe Viola groaned a little and rubbed his chest as if something he ate was beginning to disagree with him. He ran his big hand down over his face. Then he leaned forward on his cot, elbows on his knees, clasped his hands, and hung his head.
“It’s true,” said Joe Viola to the concrete floor.
I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. He might have said, “Itch shoe,” which made some sense. He was wearing prison slippers.
He lifted his gaze and stared at me.
“It’s true,” he said (again, I guess). “What he told you.”
“About the hole in your heart? Because you overcoming a disability like that really inspired—”
Joe Viola wheeled his big head to one side and the other like a bear winding up to rip my head off. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no—”
“All right already, I get it!” I shouted at the exact same time he shouted, “Not that part!”
We each took a moment to recover our dignity, me by keeping my eyes and fists squeezed shut. I don’t know why, but I started to tear up. Thinking of Winky being mad at me, and blaming me for everything. What did it matter if I wasn’t a jinx if Winky believed I was one? Winky just wasn’t being Winky anymore, and it was a little bit too much for me right now, on top of everything else. Just a little bit more than I could hack.
“I meant,” Joe said, not yelling (causing me to open my eyes and loosen my death grip), “I did do those things.” He pointed deliberately with one finger as if to a clipping in an imaginary newspaper on his lap. “Those things your pal told you I did, all poetic that way.”
I sniffed. “You visited the Saint Matilda’s Orphanage for Girls?”
He nodded while reaching for a roll of toilet paper.
“You know, I’m an orphan,” I told him. “My mother is dead.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said while he tore off a length of toilet paper.
“You helped out at the Saint Peter’s Mission Soup Kitchen?”
He nodded again and leaned to hand me the toilet paper through the bars.
“Soup is good,” I said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“You were a Big Brother to a boy who lived on the South Side, and that boy always got great seats and free hot dogs and beer nuts at Believers’—”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”
Joe Viola really has a problem with repeating himself. I blew my nose.
“Better?” he said.
“A little,” I said.
“Listen, Josephine,” he said. I looked up. “Right? It’s Josephine?” I nodded. “Listen. I wasn’t any saint. They made me do all that stuff. For publicity. Management made me up, and your pal fell for the pretty picture in the heart-shaped frame…” He flapped one hand weakly and worked his mouth in a way that wrapped hopelessness, disgust, self-loathing, and “go figure” all in one grimace.
His posture crumpled and his hands dropped to the mattress on either side of his lap, lifeless as two fillets of fish. “This is more like it,” he said gloomily, indicating with his eyes the cell, his prison get-up, his (possibly itchy) slippers. He did not look that great in stripes.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” I said.
He didn’t stir.
“That she doesn’t love you and that she left you and doesn’t want anything to do with you ever again as long as she lives—”
“All right all right all right all right!” he yelled, wicked lively all of a sudden. “All right,” he added, collapsing again over his knees. “Thank you.”
“Sorry.”
I really was sorry for him. Those stripes! They really drove home his situation. Big League star, sent down, disgraced, unloved and—felonious. And in those wide stripes of the prison uniform, he looked like poor old Charlie Brown after Lucy pulls that football out from under him. (Except for needing a shave.) Good grief, Joe Viola.
But still. Winky wasn’t wrong. “You did do all those things,” I said. I thought of Grandpa’s plaques. “You Are What You Do,” I said, quoting. Winky hadn’t any reason to give up on baseball on account of the House of Harmony Church going up in smoke.
But Joe Viola only shook his head. “Number 23 did those things. He was never me. This is me.”
He heaved a big sigh and leaned back onto his bunk and crossed an arm over his eyes. “Anyway, Tina does love me. She does. She just won’t marry me. She found out the hard way I’ve been married three times. Four if you count that tornado, Mandy.”
Mandy! On account of my mom’s stories, Mandy is a name that is close to my heart. I paid attention to what happened next.
Joe Viola pushed himself up onto his elbows and laughed the way people do when something’s more peculiar than funny. “Three weeks of wedded bliss and then the yelling started.” He sat all the way back up and rubbed his face. He shook his head and smiled a little, with one side of his mouth. And then he tenderly spoke that name again. “Mandy.”
“Mandy?”
“Mandy,” he said, mostly to himself.
There it was again. And my mind went straight back in time to my mom sitting on the edge of my bed and telling me a story. About a made-up girl who traveled widely and had lots of adventures.
“Mandy Mandolin.” I whispered it.
He looked my way then, as if remembering I was there beyond the prison bars. He smiled his little sideways smile. “What a nut she was.” He looked at his hands. “Oh, who knows. Maybe we coulda made it.”
I became aware of a thrumming sound. Crickets, lots of crickets, or maybe the sound of the blood rushing in my veins and pounding on my eardrums. Woozily, I licked my lips. My mouth had gone dry as Antarctica.
“What was Mandy’s last name?” I managed to squawk.
“Why do you wanna know?”
“JUST TELL ME!”
“Okay, okay! McGhee! It was McGhee!”
“McGhee? Are you sure it wasn’t McPheeeee?” McGhee was darn close to McPhee, Grandma Kaye’s clan.
“I’m telling you, the name was McGhee!”
Close enough! “Have you been to Atlantic City?”
“Everybody’s been to Atlantic City.”
“Wait there!” I said.
“Okay,” said Joe Viola. “Since you ask so nicely.”
Outside the county courthouse, I started walking slowly. I walked a little faster. Then I started to run.