Anna's Boy

By Richard A. Coffey

Anthony Wolff is a thirteen-year-old paperboy who feels marooned in childhood after two murders stupefy the adults of his town and put his life on hold. Anthony narrates a boy’s-eye-view of mayhem and harmony with poignant observations of a prosperous, post-war prairie town stunned by the savage murders of two boys. While the paperboys deliver news of a stalled police investigation, and the dazed community searches for explanation, a paralytic dread settles over the town like a fog. After his parents send their son away to the safety of a Quaker boarding school in Ohio, Anthony and his roommate Steve, a sophisticated fifteen-year-old, discover the skeletal remains of a former student and a connection between an illustrious alumnus of the school and the murders in Anthony’s town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard A. Coffey
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311916334

Richard A. Coffey

Richard A. Coffey lives in eastern Minnesota with his wife, Jeanne. Coffey has published two works of non-fiction: Bogtrotter (1982, 1996), The Skylane Pilot’s Companion (1996), and three works of fiction: Anna’s Boy (2014); The Ferryman’s Fee (2014); Threepenny Plum (2016).

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Anna's Boy

Richard A. Coffey

Copyright © 2015 Richard A. Coffey

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

1

I was a paperboy the summer that Jeremiah and Tommy were murdered. After that everything changed.

What I remember most about the summer of 1956 is how the boys' deaths put the rest of our lives on hold. I was caught with a lot of other kids in a maelstrom of hysteria in a town that was frightened witless about two murders that no one could comprehend. Before the summer was over I could see how fear made people crazy—and I can tell you that there's no worse time to grow up than when everyone around you is crazy.

After the boys had been killed, and before anyone knew who was responsible, there was a kind of bottomless feeling in our town, like everyone was treading water, waiting for something to happen, I guess. My parents and some others decided to get their kids into private schools, away from the uncertainty and the despair. While my parents and I were visiting schools, we stayed at a hotel that had a huge outdoor swimming pool. My mother and father were having martinis at a poolside table one night while I was swimming around by myself, underwater, trying to get to the bottom to touch the drain plate. I touched it, finally, and then sat there cross-legged, fighting the buoyancy until I thought my lungs were going to explode. At last, I ascended slowly, with satisfaction for my achievements, and when I broke water my parents were about ten feet away, talking and drinking. I gulped for air and pulled myself up on the ledge by their table.

I touched the bottom, I said, panting. My father looked down at me like I was some kind of sea creature that no one had ever seen before. Can't you see that your mother and I are talking? he asked. Then he gave me the look.

I slid back into the pool, quietly sinking, eyes wide, staring at my parents who blurred until I could no longer distinguish them from the watery whorls and ripples and pale blue vortices. Standing on the bottom of a pool, arms outstretched, fingers finning, cheeks puckered, holding the last air in the world with bubbles escaping, you wonder how long before someone notices the boy.

When you come up for air in the adult world, you're not looking for a hand to help you climb out of childhood or any crap like that. You're looking for someone who can see you and maybe just sit still for a few minutes and listen to you. Really listen. I mean, you wouldn't think that's important, but one day you're walking along, picking your nose, when all of a sudden everything about you seems all wrong. It really does. You feel like you're filled with ideas and dreams that are too exciting to be nurtured in the five-foot-five, skin-and-bone bag that you were given. And you have to wonder: if your body's not keeping up with you now, how will it ever serve the man you want to become?

You need someone to help you edit the furor of dreads and dreams because everything comes at you in a deluge of youthful privilege. I had it bad that summer. I knew one adult who treated me like we lived on the same planet, who wasn't shy about talking to me, and who could listen to me without laughing, but my family was afraid of him. I was ready to get out of the kiddy pool and have my day, but as it turned out I had to stay in the water for a while longer.

My mother said I should have talked to my father about these things. I didn't think so. The Challenge of Adolescence was on our bookshelf for years—underlined, for Christ's sake—just waiting for me to ask a question.

If you can't talk to your parents, people tell you to talk to a coach or a scout leader or a teacher or a minister. I think that's fine for kids who are comfortable with the authorities, but I'm not. I get pretty nervous when I am with an adult who wants to invest my angst in team achievement or teach me how to bake corn bread in a sun oven or help me ritualize the supernatural. I just want someone to listen to my ideas, someone who can see me as I am and tell me what they see. I think people are dying to see themselves through the eyes of other people. That's really all you ever need to know about yourself.

The thing is, when you turn twelve you're already starting to carry some heavy baggage, and you don't know where you got half of it. For instance, four years ago I lied to my mother. It was the first time that I knew I had done something that I would never be able to undo. I felt sick to my stomach, and I have not felt so deeply sad since. You hate yourself for deceiving the only person you ever loved. If you wonder why kids look so skinny and pimply and awful by the time they are fourteen, it's probably because they lie to their mothers.

Somehow the weight gets distributed so you hardly notice. By the time I was thirteen I was just another sun-bleached paperboy who spent the summer breaking in new Levis that must have weighed about twenty pounds and always turned your legs blue when you got sweaty—I had the cuffs rolled up to keep 'em out of the chain on my Schwinn. Adding to the comfort, my mother made me wear starchy short-sleeve shirts that scratched my tits after a couple of hours.

I come from a family, by the way, that doesn't say 'tits' unless you are talking about pigs and cows and stuff and you mean 'teats.' Even if you scratched the hell out of yours on starchy shirts, you'd have to say, Can't you wash my shirts, so it doesn't rub here?

I rode my Schwinn through the summer of 1956, hawking the latest news about Jeremiah, and then Tommy. And then, cognizant that my own life was about to change, I began to see myself, a little at a time, as if I were watching a photograph develop in a darkroom. Anyway, here's what happened last summer—and I'll probably mention the winter that followed because that's when the summer began to make sense.

I met the mechanic in June. He was living alone in a little house not far from the river. Jeremiah had disappeared in May and quite a few people, my father and mother included, were suspicious of the mechanic, believing him to be a gypsy. My mother probably led the campaign to have the man investigated because she had a terrific fear of gypsies that came from stories her mother had told her when she was a child. My friend Eugene's mother told him that gypsies kidnap children and sell them to Arabs.

I was told to stay away from the mechanic.

Jeremiah never got home after school. He was in one of my classes, but he was largely invisible; he played right field at recess and I played left, the deep left. Jeremiah's picture was in the newspaper for weeks; though I delivered news of Jeremiah, I didn't know him. Every time I handed a newspaper to someone they'd look at the picture and shake their heads. They'd ask me if I knew the poor boy and I would say, No, I didn't.

But wasn't he in your class?

And I would say, Yes, he was.

But you didn't know him?

No. God, I must have said that a thousand times.

Parents were frightened. They were not terrified speechless, like the Minneapolis papers said, because all they did was talk about Jeremiah. The newspaper printed posters of Jeremiah and the churches said everyone should pray for him. I didn't pray; I was a sort of casual Unitarian, which is not one of the praying religions anyway. But I felt bad for Jeremiah. I felt bad for his mom and dad, and I was really afraid that what had happened to Jeremiah was probably pretty bad.

Anyway, one night at a city meeting people were shouting. Mrs. Pruitt stood up and demanded that the police make an arrest before Jeremiah was sold to the Arabs and we'd never see him again. The next day the cops went down to Quarrytown and hauled the mechanic in for questioning. That turned out to be hilarious. Two cops picked up the mechanic in an old black and white Nash and then headed for city hall. On the way, they had a flat tire. The cops were standing around looking at the flat, trying to decide which of them was going to get his uniform dirty, when the mechanic said, Hell, I'm dressed for it. I'll get us rolling in ten minutes.

And he did. About an hour later the mechanic was having a smoke with the cops in their break room and they're all laughing and then they drove him home. Turns out the guy was not a gypsy after all, he was just a mechanic and a good storyteller. He didn't have a police record, but when they checked him out they discovered he had been a war hero and had some impressive medals. My mother and everyone in her bridge club said that the police must have missed something or fallen for one of his stories. It was well known among readers at Henri's Hair Salon that gypsies are good storytellers.

That was pretty much the end of it. Not for my mother and father, of course—and not for me either, as it turned out.

The mechanic had a mailbox out on the road about fifty feet from his house. That's where I stopped my bike every afternoon and rolled up his newspaper and stuck it into a tin tube that he had nailed to a post. He built everything himself, even his house, which had been wrecked in a flood long ago and was abandoned until he fixed it up. I was in it a few times and it wasn't bad. My mother and father and I live up on a hill, almost at the top, with our golden retriever, Sandy, in a new ranch house with redwood siding and cork floors that squeak when you walk around in bare feet.

I would never have met the mechanic if my father hadn't bought me a newspaper route the year before. One morning at breakfast my father said that I was old enough to take a paper route. I said I'd think about it. He nodded to my mother and when he came home that night he had bought a route for me, and he told me that I had an appointment to meet the circulation manager for instruction.

Most of the route was down in Quarrytown on the west end of our city, a kind of slummy place that grew out of an old limestone quarry where German immigrants had cut the stones that were used to build the town. My teacher, Mr. Williams, used to say that our town was born on an unnavigable river, nurtured on a barren hill, and saved by the Northern Pacific. My father said Mr. Williams was cynical. Our town, my father said, was built by skilled German stonecutters who chiseled a bustling economy out of a glacial moraine. I had to do quite a bit of encyclopedia reading to figure it out for myself, but I'm with my father on that one. Although Mr. Williams had a point: someone had to haul the stone to market, so in that respect the railroad saved the town. The old quarry was the size of about three football fields, situated on the west end where the river turns, and that was where my paper route began. That summer, there were old houses scattered around the quarry, and many apartments and tarpaper shacks too, and abandoned cars. I always saw kids smoking or drinking or making out in the green Hudson that still sits on blocks by the airport. You see a lot of stuff in Quarrytown.

Every morning at sunrise, Quarrytown people come out of the shadows along the river up to the highway and wait for the bus that takes them to the plastics plant. Almost everybody in town works at the Pik-Nik-Ware plant. They make synthetic things like plastic spoons and forks and cups. My father is the company's attorney, and he knows stuff about the people from Quarrytown, but he doesn't know any of them personally. Not really.

I would never tell him about this woman who is usually tipsy or something and always invites me inside while she is getting subscription money out of her purse, which she keeps on a chair in the bedroom at the other end of this hall where I stand around waiting with my collection book. The bedroom door is always open, and I can see her getting the money, bending over the bed and stuff. Then her blouse starts coming open or her robe slips off a shoulder. It takes her like five minutes to get her money out. Half the time I just look at the floor but sometimes I'll look up and she'll be standing with her legs showing or something, smiling at me. So one day Eugene decides to come along on my route for something to do. He's standing there with me in the hall, and we're watching the woman fumble with her housecoat. Eugene starts cracking up. He just can't stop laughing. And then she comes walking down the hall toward us, digging in her purse for the money, and the front of her robe is opening up and you can see damn near everything. Eugene can't hold it anymore, and he kinda barks when he laughs anyway, so he turns around and runs right out of the house. When I come out he's standing on the steps, bent over, pissing in his pants and laughing.

Well, she told me I didn't need to bring my friends around if they weren't going to be polite. I said I was sorry and she said, I know you are, honey. She always gives me a brand new dollar bill at Christmas. She's pretty nice that way.

One day the mechanic comes out when I stop at his mailbox. This was after the cops had talked to him about Jeremiah. I was standing, you know, straddling my Schwinn, trying to roll up the paper and hold the basket steady at the same time—I had eighty papers on the bike on Thursdays when they ran the grocery ads, and it was heavy, so it was always trying to tip over. Anyway, the guy walks up this plank path toward me, grinning, not saying anything but rolling a Lucky Strike in his fingers. He was always doing that. He'd roll the cigarette between his fingers before he put it in his mouth. Always Luckies, too.

I never saw him when he wasn't laughing or smiling, and he was always filthy. I didn't know then if he didn't take baths or if it was his job, but this greasy gray stuff was kind of ground into him like pepper. It was more like grease in the cracks of his skin—and he had thick skin that was always dark, and like I said, kind of gray. He had blue eyes, bright blue eyes that looked out at you from his dark leathery face. His hair was black and shiny, like he oiled it, and he kept it combed back. And he had beautiful white teeth. That was the thing you noticed when you talked to him. He looked like he had been someone else once.

So he's eyeing my bike that day, smoking, standing with his legs apart, bent over like a bird real close to the ground, and he reaches out and squeezes the front tire of my bike.

Needs some air, son, he says.

Handles better if it's a little flat, I say. I was pretty certain that I was right about that. He stands up straight and cocks his head and squints with a crooked smile. Cigarette held up, rolling it in his fingers.

Come on, he says.

No, it's true, I say. It feels better.

He looks at me like he believes me. I don't know any other grown-ups that look at me that way.

I'll tell you what, I'll try to prove it to you, he says. I'll fill it up with air, and I'll fix that fork—look at that, see how it bows out there? he asks as he points with the wet end of his Lucky. That's the reason your balance is off.

I shrug.

Won't take a minute, he says, and then he points his finger at me and gives me that 'stay put' look and runs down to his cabin.

I stand there holding up eighty papers, biting my lip. I'm starting to slide backward, so I climb off the Schwinn and drag the bag of papers out of the basket and lug it over to the dry grass. He comes running back up the board path.

Good man, he says, and he flips my Schwinn over with one hand and starts cranking on the hub nut with a wrench. He's got the wheel off and is straightening the fork when a cop car comes crawling up the road, real slow like he's trying to stay just ahead of the dust cloud that he's dragging behind him.

The cop is the young one, tall and skinny, and he's smoking. He gives me the same dirty look that all the kids get from him, and smiles through the grimy windshield at the mechanic, who nods and keeps working on the Schwinn's fork.

Paperboy had a breakdown? the cop asks me, getting out of the squad car. He's looking at me and pulling his gun belt up. He sees me looking at his pistol and then kind of jumps at me and laughs. Staying out of trouble, kid?

Yes, sir, I say, slightly backing away from the car, which smells like vomit. The cop puts on his cap and looks at me like I'm probably proof of life on Mars and then goes over to the mechanic and leans over my bicycle.

Schwinn is good, he says. Hard to beat 'em. Got a Phantom hanging in my garage for the boy when he can reach the pedals.

The mechanic pinches the Lucky Strike out of his mouth and flicks it down the road. No better way to peddle papers, that's for sure, he says, grinning at the cop.

The cop looks back at me and makes a face. I nod again. By the time you are thirteen you really know how to nod. The mechanic winks at me.

His name was Troutmann. Ernie Troutmann. He told me that he worked over at the airport down on the river bottoms, a mile or so from Quarrytown. None of us kids went down there much anymore because an old man chases you if he sees you looking at the airplanes. There's a World War II airplane parked in the grass all by itself, a prop job with two tails and two motors. There's a ladder sticking down from its belly, but none of us ever get close enough to crawl up for a look. The old guy lives in a trailer next to the hangar, and he'll come after you day or night. Eugene says he can probably smell kids. So we stay away. The airplane is called a Black Widow, but it's more a faded dark gray than black. The old guy is supposed to have been a mechanic during the war and worked on the Black Widow. All I know for sure is that he hates kids.

The airport had been an Army training field during the war, and it was still used by private airplanes. A few people in town had their own Piper Cubs and stuff and parked them inside some corrugated tin sheds left over from the war. Sometimes you'd see a two-motored airplane circling over the river, and it'd come down low and land at the airport. We'd go down and watch from the fence. Cars dripping fresh wash water would rush through the gate in a hurry to pick up passengers and then drive away. My father used to go down and meet customers who had flown in to visit the plant. It wasn't the kind of airport where you'd go if you wanted to go somewhere. You had to drive up to the Minneapolis airport for that.

Mr. Troutmann went to the airport every day. I asked him once what he did down there, and he said he wrenched on airplanes. He said that meant that he fixed 'em. I asked him if he'd ever get me into that Black Widow, and he just laughed. What'd you think you'd see in there?

I said I didn't know, maybe the guns. I'd sit in the pilot's seat. He said I was too short to see anything.

One day, when I'm hurrying because it's raining, he met me at his mailbox. How's the bike working?

I slip off the seat and straddle the Schwinn while I roll his paper. It's a lot better, I say. You were right. He's watching me roll the paper, and then he laughs, You going to hand me my paper or you going to put it in the tube?

I laugh, and I'm kind of embarrassed, but in a different way than with most people. Mr. Troutmann feels like a friend. He says I should call him Ernie.

You still want to see the Black Widow? he asks.

Shit, yeah! I say. You can swear around Ernie. If I said 'shit' around my father I'd get slapped, sent to my room without supper, and have to spend the rest of the week reading an Encyclopedia Britannica essay on civility. My father was always trying to get me to read stuff in the encyclopedia. If I ask him something simple like, If it's five o'clock here, what time is it in London? he'll just point at the encyclopedia—and then the next day he'd ask me what time it was in London. Anyway, Ernie laughed and told me to get permission from my parents and he'd be happy to give me a tour of the Black Widow.

So I bring it up at supper. My mother's the one you want to bring up stuff with if you want permission to do anything, so I bring it up with her. Ernie says he'll show me the Black Widow, I announce.

Ernie who? she asks.

Ernie Troutmann, he lives on my route.

Mr. Troutmann, to you, my mother says.

Troutmann? says my father as he looks up. He looks at my mother, and she looks at him.

Is that the…? my father asks my mother.

The gypsy, my mother says without making a sound. Kids read lips.

She turns to me. Your father and I will discuss it, she says, and wrinkles her nose.

What's wrong with Ern—Mr. Troutmann? I ask. I stop eating and push away from the table. My father gets this disgusted look on his face and says that I'm getting too old for posturing. I ask him what posturing means.

My father points to the bookshelf.

Why can't you just tell me?

He raises his chin and gives me the stone face. My mother touches my arm.

Would you like more applesauce? she asks.

What about the Black Widow? I reply.

We'll talk it over.

After my parents go to bed, they whisper about Ernie's invitation. My mother says that I am not to go to the airport alone, but the tour might be a good chance for my father and me to do something together. My father thinks we should paint the garage together. Then, just before midnight, I come out of the bathroom and press my ear to their bedroom door. I hear my father tell my mother he's going to drive me to the airport and tag along while Mr. Troutmann shows me through the Black Widow. I wouldn't get anywhere in life without my mother.

So the next Saturday we find Ernie in this huge hangar dressed in his grubby coveralls, walking toward us, grinning, extending his greasy hand to my father, who is wearing his weekend gabardines and a shiny pair of Dack shoes that he bought in Winnipeg. He extends his hand too, and though it's pretty old and cracked it looks like a porcelain vase compared to Ernie's grimy paw. It was one of those macho handshakes that you see at football games when the fathers are all excited. You could hear it. My father uttered a pleasantry, like he always does, mostly for the sonorous authority of which he was so proud—my mother called it his courtroom voice. Ernie countered silently with his blue eyes and a smile, flashing his brilliant white teeth.

Then Ernie turned to me with his hand hovering near, but not touching, my clean white shirt, and we walked out of the hangar and across the weedy concrete ramp into the shadow of the Black Widow. My father trailed along behind us, looking around with his usual critical eye. When I looked back once, he had his Ray-Bans on and was gazing upward at the bulbous nose of the Widow. To me he looked like a pilot just then, though he later explained that he was merely paying respects to the engineering of a beautiful machine that was produced too late to do much fighting.

Ernie