Loe raamatut: «Regina’s Song»

PRELUDE
Andante

Les Greenleaf and my dad, Ben Austin, had served in the same outfit during the Vietnam War, and twenty-five years later they could spend whole afternoons swapping war stories. They both grew up in Everett, a town thirty miles north of Seattle. And they both worked at the same place, since my dad was a sawyer at Greenleaf Sash and Door, Inc.

Aside from that, they couldn’t have been much more opposite. Les Greenleaf was a Catholic, a Republican, and a member of the National Association of Manufacturers. My dad was a Methodist, a Democrat, and a member of the AFL-CIO. Les Greenleaf had investments, and Ben Austin lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were on opposite sides of just about any fence you could think of.

“Buddyship,” though, tends to jump over all kinds of fences. I guess that when people are shooting at you, you get attached to the guy who’s covering your butt.

Back during the late sixties, staying out of the army and the war in ‘Nam had been every young man’s major goal in life. Rich kids could get a student deferment if they were smart enough to get into college, but working-class kids had to take their chances.

Les and my dad both graduated from high school in 1967. My dad promptly married pretty Pauline Baker, his high-school sweetheart and went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door.

Les Greenleaf enrolled in the University of Washington, joined a fraternity, and majored in parties. He flunked out at the end of his sophomore year.

My dad had evidently had a little spat with mom, and just to show her how independent he was, he enlisted in the army—something he might not have done if he’d been completely sober. He was, however, sober enough to sign on for only two years rather than the customary six.

As it turned out, Les Greenleaf was inducted on the same day, so they started out together. My mom had been pregnant—with me—during her little argument with dad, which might have explained why she’d been so grouchy.

Anyway, Ben and Les went off to war, and mom stayed home and sulked.

I was about a year and a half old when they got out of the army, and I was among the guests at the wedding of Mr. Lester Greenleaf and Miss Inga Wurzberger. I was the one who slept through the whole ceremony. Inga was obviously of German extraction—Bavarian, I think—and she’d been a sorority girl at U.W. while Les was concentrating on cutting classes. The wedding had taken place in a Catholic church, and I guess my dad had been a little uncomfortable about that—but buddyship prevailed.

Inga and my mom got along well together, and starting back when I was still a toddler, we often visited the Greenleafs in their fancy home in a posh district of Everett. Since I was absolutely adorable in those days, I was always the center of attention during those visits, and I thought that was sort of nice.

My time in the limelight came to an abrupt halt in 1977 when Inga blossomed and bore fruit—a pair of twin girls, Regina and Renata, who definitely outclassed me on the adorability front. As I remember, I was fairly sullen about the whole thing.

Regina and Renata were identical twins—so identical that not even Inga could tell them apart—and when they first started talking, it wasn’t English they were speaking. I’m told it’s not uncommon for twins to have a private language, but “twin-speak” is supposed to fade out before the pair get into kindergarten. Regina and Renata kept their private dialect fully operational all the way into high school.

There was a whacko social theory at that time to the effect that twins would grow up psychotic if they were dressed alike. Inga blithely ignored it and followed the ancient custom of putting the girls in identical dresses every morning, the sole difference being a red hair ribbon for Regina and a blue one for Renata. She carefully checked their little gold name bracelets every morning to be certain she wasn’t getting them mixed up. I think it was those hair ribbons that set the girls off on what the Greenleafs called the twin-game. Regina and Renata swapped ribbons three or four times a day, and as soon as they learned how to undo the clasps on their name bracelets, all hope of certainty went out the window.

Those two had all sorts of fun with that twin-game, but now when I think back, maybe they were trying to tell us something. The pretty little blond girls had no real sense of individual identity. I don’t think either one ever used the word “I.” It was always “we” with Regina and Renata. They’d even answer to either name.

That bugged their parents, but it didn’t particularly bother me. My solution to the “identification crisis” was to simply address them indiscriminately as Twinkie and to refer to them collectively as the Twinkie Twins. That made the girls a little grumpy right at first, but after a while it seemed to fit into their conception of themselves, and they stopped using their given names and began to address each other as either Twinkie or Twink—even when they were using their private language.

In a peculiar way, that got me included in their private group. Our families were close to begin with, and because I was seven years older than they were, the chubby, golden-haired twins looked upon me as a big brother. I had to tie their shoes, wipe their noses, and put the wheels back on their tricycles when they came off. Every time they broke something they’d assure each other that “Markie can fix it.” Every now and then, one of them would slip and say something to me in twin-speak, and they always seemed a little disappointed and even sad when I didn’t understand what they were saying.

As their official surrogate brother, I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the company of the Twinkie Twins, and I learned to ignore their cutesy-poo habit of whispering to each other, casting sly looks at me, and giggling. By the time I moved up into high-school—an event most adolescents view as something akin to a religious experience—I was more or less immune to their antics.

In May of my sophomore year, I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. My dad firmly advised me that the family car was not available, but he promised to check at the union hall for job opportunities for young fellows in need of a summer job. I wasn’t too hopeful, but he came home with an evil sort of grin on his face. “You’ve got a job at a sawmill, Mark,” he told me.

“No kidding?” I was a little startled.

“Nope. You go to work on the Monday after school lets out.”

“What am I going to be doing?”

“Pulling chain.”

“What’s ‘pulling chain’?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

I found out why I wouldn’t after I’d joined the union and reported to work. I also found out why there were always job openings in sawmills when the job involves the green chain. Sawmills convert logs from the woods into planks. After a green hemlock log has spent six or eight weeks in the millpond soaking up salt water, it gets very heavy, and it’s so waterlogged that it sends out a spray when it goes through the saw. The planks come slithering out of the mill on a wide bed of rollers called the green chain. They’re rough, covered with splinters, and almost as heavy as iron. “Pulling chain” involves hauling those rough-sawed planks off the rollers and stacking them in piles. It’s a moderately un-fun job. More-modern sawmills have machines that do the sorting, pulling, and stacking, but the sawmill where I worked that summer hadn’t changed very much since the 1920s, so we did things the old-fashioned way. I didn’t like the job very much, but I really, really wanted my own car, so I stuck it out.

I’d been an indifferent student at best up until then, but after the summer of ‘86, my attitude changed. There might just be a doctoral dissertation in psychology there—The Motivational Impact of the Green Chain maybe. I became a much more serious student after that summer, let me tell you.

Pulling chain did earn me enough money to buy my own car, of course, and that’s very important to red-blooded sixteen-year-olds, since it’s widely known in that group that “You ain’t nothin’ if you ain’t got wheels.” The Twinkie Twins weren’t very impressed by my not-very-shiny black ‘74 Dodge, but I didn’t buy it to impress them. They were only third graders and by definition unworthy of my attention. They were blond, still chubby with the remnants of baby fat, and they were at the tomboy stage of development.

Time rushed on in the endless noon of my adolescence, and it seemed that before I’d turned around twice, graduation day was staring me in the face. The gloomy prospect of pulling chain loomed in front of me, but good old Les Greenleaf stepped in at that point. I’m sure there was a certain amount of collusion involved when right after my high-school graduation an opening “just happened” to show up at the door factory, and my dad presented me with my reactivated union card. The Monday after graduation I went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door. I was now a worker. I even went to union meetings.

I think the highlight of my first year at the door factory came on the day when all the kids in Everett had to go back to school, but I didn’t. My delight lasted for almost a whole week. Then it gradually dawned on me that I actually missed going to school. That green-chain scare in the summer of my sophomore year had turned me into a semiserious student during my last two years at school, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. The door factory only filled forty hours a week, and my dad had our television set permanently locked on the sports channels. I’ve always been fairly certain that the world won’t come to an end if the Seattle Seahawks don’t make it into the Super Bowl. I took to reading to fill up the empty hours, and by the summer of 1990, I’d plowed my way through a sizable chunk of the Everett Public Library.

Just for kicks, I took an evening course at the local community college in the autumn quarter of that year, and I aced it. I was a little surprised at how easy it’d been.

I took another course during the winter quarter, and that one was even easier.

I latched on to a steady girlfriend at the community college that winter, and we both skipped the spring quarter. We broke up that summer, though, and I started taking courses as a sort of hobby. I didn’t really have any kind of academic goal; you might just say I was majoring in everything.

Wouldn’t Everything 101 be an interesting course title?

That went on for a couple years, and by then I’d racked up a fairly impressive number of credit hours. My dad didn’t say anything about my snooping around the edges of the world of learning, but he was keeping track of my progress.

There was another strong odor of collusion about what happened in late November of 1992. We’d been invited to the Greenleafs’ for Thanksgiving dinner, and after we’d all eaten too much, my dad and the boss got involved in a probably well-rehearsed discussion of an ongoing problem at the door factory. There were only four saws, and orders were starting to back up because each saw could only cut so much door stock in eight hours. This meant that the boss had to pay a lot of overtime, which was great for the sawyers right at first, but after it got to be a habit, there was a lot of grumbling about ten- or twelve-hour days. The solution was fairly simple. It’s called swing shift. One sawyer would have to work from four in the afternoon until half past midnight. There’d now be five sawyers instead of four, and the boss wouldn’t have to buy a new saw or pay overtime.

Guess who got elected for swing shift. And guess who’d now have all kinds of free time during the normal daytime hours at Everett Community College. And guess who was coerced into taking a full course load. And guess who was the only one in the room who didn’t know this was coming.

You guessed ‘er, Chester.

I think the Twinkie Twins got more entertainment out of this elaborate scam than anybody else did. They were high-school freshmen now, but they’d reverted to whispering in twin-speak, giving me those sickeningly cute smirks, and giggling.

I carried a full course load in both the winter and spring quarters in 1993, and that satisfied the requirements for graduation. It’d taken me four years to reach the point that a full-time student achieves in two, but I was now an Associate in Arts and Sciences—with honors, no less. And I had a major in English, but with a lot of those “everything” courses that didn’t apply.

I went through the cap and gown ceremony with the Austins and Greenleafs in the audience, and after the ceremony we all went back to Greenleaf Manor for another of those “let’s steer Mark in the right direction” sessions at which I was usually outnumbered six to one.

Inga Greenleaf led the assault. “What in the world were you thinking of, Mark?” she demanded, waving a copy of my transcript at me. “Your grades are very good, but half the courses you took weren’t even remotely connected to your major.”

“I didn’t have a major when I started, Inga,” I explained. “I was just browsing. It was only after a year or so that I finally settled on English.”

“There are some definite holes in this,” she told me, still brandishing my transcript. “I’ve checked with the University of Washington, and you’ll have to take a couple of courses this summer to fill in the gaps. Les has contacts with some local banks, and your grades are good enough to qualify you for a student loan.”

I threw a quick look at my dad. We’d already discussed that at some length. He shook his head slightly.

“I’m sorry, Inga,” I said flatly. “Let’s just forget that student loan business. Sooner or later, I’m going to have a mortgage on a house biting chunks out of my paychecks, and probably car payments as well—that ol’ Dodge can’t run forever. I’m not going to add a student loan on top of that. I won’t hand three-quarters of my paycheck to the Last National Bank to pay interest. I’ll look for a part-time job, but no jobbee, no schoolie, and that’s final.”

“Oh, goodie!” one of the twins said, clapping her hands together. “We get to keep him!”

“Shush, Twink,” her mother snapped. I don’t think she even realized that my Twinkie invention had crept into her vocabulary.

The boss was squinting at the far wall. “When you get right down to it, Mark, you’ve already got a part-time job.”

“It’s full-time, isn’t it?” I replied.

“Of course it is,” he replied sardonically. “A guy who works by the hour paces himself to make the job fit the time. If you bear down, I’ll bet you could finish up in four or five hours a night, and if it starts to pile up, you could clear away the leftovers on Saturday.”

“And if you’re really serious about getting an education, you can live at home and commute to the university,” my mom added. “Your dad and I can’t send you to Harvard, but we can give you a place to live and regular meals. That way, you won’t have to rent an apartment or buy groceries.”

“Our big brother’s going to get away from us after all,” one of the twins lamented in mock sorrow.

“Nothing lasts forever, Twink,” I told her.

“Who’s going to tie our little shoes?” the other twin said.

“Or glove our little hands?” the first girl added.

“You’ll both survive,” I told them. “Be brave and strong and true, and you’ll get by.”

They stuck their tongues out at me in perfect unison.

“This is going to crowd you, Mark,” Les warned me. “You won’t have very much free time. Don’t make the same mistake I made when I went there. I managed to party my way onto the flunk-out list in just two years.” “I’m not big on parties, boss,” I assured him. “Listening to a bunch of half-drunk guys ranting about who’s going to make it to the Rose Bowl doesn’t thrill me. We can give the university a try, I guess, and if it doesn’t work out—ah, well.”

I filled in the gaps on my transcript that summer, and on a bright September morning, I drove down to the University of Washington to register. After I’d plodded through all the bureaucratic nonsense, I wandered the beaten paths to knowledge for a while—long beaten paths, I might add, since the campus measures about a mile in every direction. I finally found Padelford Hall, home of the English Department. After I’d located my classrooms, I drove back to Everett to get to work.

I took a stab at the “full-bore” business the boss had mentioned, and I found that he was right. I cleared everything away in just under five hours. That made me feel better.

Classes began the following Monday, and my first class, American Literature, started at eight-thirty. There was a kind of stricken silence in the classroom when the instructor entered. “It’s Conrad!” I heard a strangled whisper just behind me.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” the white-haired professor said crisply. “Your regularly scheduled instructor has recently undergone coronary bypass surgery, so I’ll be filling in for him this quarter. For those of you who don’t recognize me, I’m Dr. Ralph Conrad.” He looked round the classroom. “We will now pause to give the more timid time to beat an orderly retreat.”

Now, that’s an unusual way to start a class. I thought he was just kidding around, so I laughed.

“Was it something I said?” he asked me with one raised eyebrow.

“You startled me a bit, sir,” I replied. “Sorry.”

“Perfectly all right, young man,” he said benignly. “Laughter’s good for the soul. Enjoy it while you can.”

I glanced around and saw that fully half the students were grabbing up their books and darting for the door.

Professor Conrad looked at those of us who’d remained. “Brave souls,” he murmured. Then he looked directly at me. “Still with us, young man?” he asked mildly.

His superior attitude was starting to irritate me. “I’m here to learn, Dr. Conrad,” I told him. “I didn’t come here to party or chase girls. You throw, and I’ll catch, and I’ll still be here when the dust settles.”

What a dumb thing that was to say! I soon discovered just how tough he really was. He crowded me, I’ll admit that, but I stuck it out. He was obviously an old-timer who believed in the aristocracy of talent. He despised the term “postmodern,” and he viewed computers as instruments of the devil.

He had his mellower moments, though—fond reminiscences about “the good old days” when the English Department resided in the hallowed, though rickety, Parrington Hall and he was taking graduate courses from legendary professors such as Ebey, Sophus Winther, and E. E. Bostetter.

I maintained my “you throw it and I’ll catch it” pose, and that seemed to earn me a certain grudging respect from the terror of the department. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I aced the course, but I did manage to squeeze an A out of Dr. Conrad.

I was a bit startled at the beginning of winter quarter when I discovered that I’d been assigned to a new faculty advisor—at his request.

Guess who that was.

“You’ve managed to arouse my curiosity, Mr. Austin,” Dr. Conrad explained, after I rather bluntly asked him why he’d taken the trouble. “Students who work their way through college tend to take career-oriented classes. What possessed you to major in English?”

I shrugged. “I like to read, and if I can get paid for it, so much the better.”

“You plan to teach, then?”

“Probably so—unless I decide to write the Great American Novel.”

“I’ve read your papers, Mr. Austin,” he said dryly. “You’ve got a long way to go if that’s your goal.”

“It beats the hell out of pulling chain, Dr. Conrad.”

“Pulling chain?”

I explained it, and he seemed just a bit awed. “Are you saying that people still do that sort of thing?”

“It’s called ‘working for a living.’ I came here because I don’t wanna do that no more.”

He winced at my double negative.

“Just kidding, boss,” I told him. And I don’t think anybody’d ever called him “boss” before, because he didn’t seem to know how to handle it.

By the end of winter quarter that year I’d pretty well settled into the routine of being a working student. There were times when I ran a little short on sleep, but I could usually catch up on weekends.

I finished up the spring quarter of ‘94 and spent the summer working at the door factory to build up a backlog of cash. Things had been a little tight a few times that year.

The Twinkie Twins were high-school juniors now, and they’d definitely blossomed. Their hair had grown blonder, it seemed—chemically modified, no doubt—and their eyes were an intense blue. They’d also developed some other attributes that attracted lots of attention from their male classmates.

Looking back, I’m sometimes puzzled by my lack of “those kinds of thoughts” about the twins. They were moderately gorgeous, after all—tall, blond, well built, and with strangely compelling eyes. It was probably their plurality that put me off. In my mind they were never individuals. I thought of them as “they,” but never “she.”

From what I heard, though, the young fellows at their high school didn’t have that problem, and the twins were very popular. The only complaint seemed to be that nobody could ever get one of them off by herself.

It was during my senior year at U.W. that I finally came face to face with Moby Dick. The opening line, “Call me Ishmael” and the climactic, “I only am escaped to tell thee” set off all sorts of bells in my head. Captain Ahab awed me. You don’t want to mess around with a guy who could say, “I’d smite the sun if it offended me.” And his obsessive need to avenge himself on the white whale put him in the same class with Hamlet and Othello.

Moby Dick has been plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I, though, and I didn’t really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he’d take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.

Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept borrowing Milton’s Paradise Regained from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.

Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. “I wouldn’t hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin,” he advised, “but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it.”

“Am I going for an MA, boss?” I asked him.

“You bet your bippie you are,” he told me bluntly.

“Bippie?”

“Isn’t it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?” he asked irritably.

I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable—an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college—a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn’t wind my watch very tight.

I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she’d been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn’t understand certain ugly truths. Her father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don’t want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about one thing. There are real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn’t have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn’t dare let anything get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he’ll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes.

This is very painful for me, so I’ll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those “kegger parties” on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I’m not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but that’s not really important. The kids built the customary bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them, and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for all they were worth. Along toward midnight, things started to get physical. There were a few drunken fights, and a fair number of boys and girls were slipping off into the darkness for assorted boy-girl entertainments. At that point Regina and Renata decided that it was time to leave. They slipped away from the party, hopped into their new Pontiac—a graduation present from their folks—and started back to Everett.

Regina, the dominant twin, probably drove. Renata had her driver’s license, but she almost never took the wheel. They took the usual shortcut that winds up through Forest Park. It was in the vicinity of the petting zoo where they had a flat tire.

As best the authorities were able to reconstruct what happened, Regina left the car and walked to the zoo to find a phone. Renata stayed with the Pontiac for a while, then went looking for her sister.

The next morning the twins were discovered near the zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death with something that wasn’t very sharp. The other twin was sitting beside the body with a look of total incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried to question her, she replied in a language that nobody could understand.

The authorities—assorted cops, detectives, the coroner, and so on—questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf extensively, but they didn’t learn much: the boss and the missus were shattered and even in the best of times, they couldn’t translate the girls’ private language—they couldn’t even tell the girls apart. So after the cops discovered that Regina was the dominant twin, they assumed that it’d been Regina who’d been murdered and Renata who’d gone bonkers.

But nobody could prove it. The footprints routinely taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the records at Everett General Hospital, and identical twins have identical DNA. Logic said that the dead girl was most likely Regina, but logic wasn’t good enough for filling out forms.

Les Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter listed as an “unidentified female” in official reports.

The surviving twin continued to answer all questions in twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the headshrinkers could wake up her mind. They had to fill out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily listed their surviving daughter as Renata—but they couldn’t prove it either.

The murder remained unsolved.

My folks and I attended the funeral, of course, but there was no sense of that “closure” social workers babble about, because we couldn’t be certain which girl we were burying.

We didn’t see very much of the boss at the door factory that summer. Before he’d lost his daughters, he’d usually come strolling through the yard a couple of times a day. After the funeral, he stayed pretty much holed up in his office.

In August of that year that I had an even more personal tragedy. My folks had visited the Greenleafs one Friday evening, and as they were on their way home, they encountered what the cops refer to as a “high-speed chase.” A local drunk who’d had his driver’s license revoked after repeated arrests for “driving while intoxicated” got himself all liquored up in a downtown bar, and the cops spotted his car wandering around on both sides of Colby Avenue, one of the main streets in Everett. When the lush heard the siren and saw the red light flashing behind him, he evidently remembered the judge’s warning when his license had been lifted. The prospect of twenty years in the slammer evidently scared the hell out of him, so he stomped on his gas pedal. The cops gave chase, of course, and it was estimated that the drunk was going about ninety when he ran a red light and plowed into my folks. All three of them died in the crash.

I was completely out of it for a week or so, and Les Greenleaf took over making the funeral arrangements, attending to legal matters, and dealing with a couple of insurance companies.